We hopped into our new-to-us Jeep, stereo included, and headed for our weekly appointment with Dr. Lipstick, since Dr. Enchanté had been called out on an emergency. Chris sat next to me, hands clenched on his lap, endlessly tapping his foot. He still held a grudge against Dr. Lipstick. Her initial dire warning had set the tone for the last five months, and Chris was not ready to forgive her.
Dr. Lipstick’s heels clicked on the floor as she entered. Her black, knee-length pencil skirt was cinched at the waist with a thin belt, and a rosy silk blouse completed her outfit. She was shorter than I remembered and her hair was now brown. When she said hello, her lips pursed on the O, and the sheen of her gloss sparkled. Dr. Lipstick extended her hand and I took it. Her handshake was weaker than anticipated, and my firm grip seemed to take her by surprise. I leaned back, put my feet into the stirrups, and spread my legs, ripping away the noisy paper draped across my midsection and throwing it to the floor.
“You’re two centimeters dilated,” she said after a quick exam.
“What does that mean? Am I having this baby now?”
“It can take weeks for you to fully dilate. Since this is your first child, you will likely carry into October.”
“What?”
“Yeah, what?” Chris chimed in.
“After forty-two weeks we’ll induce. I’m just preparing you,” said the same woman who told me my baby would fall out and die before twenty-four weeks.
I heard my father’s voice in my head: “These Sherlocks know shit.”
It was obvious she’d had no idea how this pregnancy would go from the beginning, so why had she been so emphatic that I would lose my baby? And why was she casually adding three weeks to my sentence now? It reminded me of the doctor who told my father he was healthy at his checkup two weeks before he died. These physicians were not God, nor were they fortune-tellers. I rested my hand on my belly. This baby would come out on his terms, when he was good and ready, no matter what anybody said or did. That was how it had always been.
“Let’s get some manure,” Chris said as we left the office.
“What are you talking about?”
“You ever notice how your eyebrows go up to your hairline when you’re surprised?”
“Yeah, well, I live my life in a state of disbelief.”
“We need manure for the asparagus patch.”
“Okay, but let’s not go to the same place we tried to buy the door. I think I’ve been banned from there.”
“Yeah, I heard your picture’s hanging up in their employee lounge, with darts in it. But that’s not where I had in mind.”
We stopped at the shop and Chris told me to sit tight while he tended to a customer spewing obscenities because he couldn’t get his dead mower off his truck. Using only his brute strength, Chris pulled the machine down. The man offered him a five-dollar tip, but Chris shook his head no and disappeared from my sight line. A few minutes later there was a tug at the Jeep and I grabbed the dashboard as the whole car began rocking back and forth.
“What’s going on?” I asked as Chris hopped into the car.
“Hitched the trailer. Let’s go.”
Chris took me on a joyride through the countryside, taking the sharp turns quicker than I would have liked, especially with a trailer, and driving farther into the hills than I’d ever been. We were surrounded by fields, dotted with crumbling barns and abandoned homes. But it was quiet, and I could just see the first leaves on the trees changing to red.
The Jeep bounced up a rutted driveway flanked by brown dairy cows. “Why don’t they build these houses near the road?” I complained as we bumped along.
“Paradise is not built next to a highway,” he said as he rolled to a stop. “It must be nice living out here. Quieter.”
“Quieter than what? Death? Even the birds don’t fly out here.”
To the left was a collapsed chicken coop, and behind it a barn that had seen better days. The pitched roof was caved in and only speckles of red suggested that the building once had color. We pulled up to an old double-wide, and two Rottweilers came running out, circling the car.
A wiry older woman with a deep tan that suggested she spent most days outdoors appeared in the doorway. Her hair was tied back and covered with a thin net. “It’s okay, they won’t kill you,” she shouted as she called off Rocco and Peaches.
The midafternoon sun momentarily blinded me when I stepped out of the car. The dogs sniffed me and retreated.
“We need a load of manure. Can you do that for us?” Chris called.
“Sure thing,” the woman nodded and then, without another word, headed back into the house for a long time.
In Brooklyn we don’t put shit on our vegetables. Intellectually, I knew that this was good for them, that this was how it was done and it was probably better than all the chemicals sprayed on the mass-produced vegetables I grew up eating. But I was still unnerved by the idea of spreading cow excrement on my food.
The roar of an engine interrupted my thoughts and a big yellow bulldozer made its way through the mud to our shiny Jeep. The woman was at the controls, pulling and pushing them, trying to manage the scooper. I instinctively backed away. She was, after all, hauling a big pile of shit. Then, with no discernible grace, she dumped a load of manure, half onto our trailer and half onto the ground.
“Who’s scooping that up?” I asked Chris.
“Try another load?” the woman shouted over the sound of the engine.
Chris gave a thumbs-up.
She disappeared and came back with more manure, this time dumping it directly on the trailer, which sank under the weight.
“Half of one more!” Chris called to her.
“How much manure do we need for our garden?” I said.
“It’ll be okay. Gotta spread it on nice and thick. Put your eyebrows down.” He reached out and smoothed my forehead.
The woman reappeared with a smaller load, shifted her gears, and began pouring it.
A loud bang caused me to stagger backward. I squatted low to the ground, covering my head with my hands. Looking to see where the gunfire was coming from, I grabbed onto Chris’s sleeve, trying to pull him down with me.
“It’s the tires.” He pulled me back up by the elbow to a standing position and pointed to the trailer, now resting on its rims.
The woman dismounted her dozer and came around to look at our wheels. “Gonna need to tow that,” she said, before walking off.
With the sun beating down and the strong smell of manure filling my nostrils, there was no denying that I was stuck on a shit farm in the middle of nowhere with three flat tires.
When she didn’t come back, I understood we were not going to be invited into her home to wait for the tow. I found an old tree stump in the shade and, with no small effort, fell back onto it in a seated position. Legs outstretched, I tilted my head hoping to catch a breeze, and looked toward the sky. The weather vane on top of the barn roof turned as the faintest breath of wind wound its way through the treetops. The eaves were brimming with chirping phoebes. There were birds out here after all. The tall grass swayed in the distance, each blade shimmering in the glow of the afternoon sun. Beyond the stench, the chipped paint, and the collapsed roof, there was a quiet beauty out here. Maybe this was paradise. I only had to give it a chance.
When I was small, I sat on my father’s lap and asked him why he had named me Aileen. “That was your mother’s choice,” he said. “I wanted to name you Jenny-Sue and move to the country.” I watched as a yellow moth landed on a patch of wildflowers and wondered if this was what my dad once had in mind. Maybe he’d pictured himself in a little country cottage, or maybe he would have preferred a great big house with a pool. But he was not a risk taker, and he hadn’t even tried to live the life he had dreamed about. He had been paralyzed by doubt and fear. Time and circumstance knocked him down, and he hadn’t had the ability to get back up until it was too late. He was delicate and complicated, and he cared so much more than I ever understood until now. He was my best friend, and I wanted him to be my hero. But he wasn’t a hero; he was utterly, forgivably human.
After I graduated college, my parents began traveling the world together, falling in love again. Just when my father began truly living for the first time in over twenty years, his life was cut short. So there on that tree stump, I vowed that I would not lose sight of my dreams. I promised my father that no matter what, I would always get back up, just as he had taught me.
Chris called one of his employees to bring tires for the trailer, but the guy showed up with the wrong size. Or they were the right size and he forgot to bring the appropriate tools. Honestly, I’d lost interest in the whole situation. We were going to have to leave the trailer there for now.
We unhitched it from the Jeep and just as we were about to pull away, the woman called out from her doorway, “You gotta pay for that manure.”
Chris took out a few bills.
“You’re paying her for manure you aren’t taking?”
“You want to argue with her?”
She pointed over at me with a long skinny finger. “Sugar pie, you look like you’re about to pop, just like them tires.” She cackled. “I got three of my own. Honey, it goes so fast.” I thought I saw the briefest hint of sadness overcome her as she looked off toward the barn where the phoebes had their nest.
As we pulled away, the faint odor of cow poop lingered on my clothes and in my hair. Somehow, it didn’t bother me so much.