Naomi is not well. Her womb is on the floor, a purple throb huddled inside yesterday’s newspaper. It is still steaming. This surprises me. Something that small and unused for so many years ought to be flat and icy. When it pulses the veins across its skin shudder and twitch, and each throb is like a hurried breath.
“A wandering womb,” Naomi whispers.
It must have fallen out sometime during the night. I’m suddenly jealous. Part of me wishes I had a womb of my own to lose.
Naomi goes into the bathroom. I hear grunting. Then retching. The toilet flushes. She doesn’t think I’m watching as she stands at the mirror and looks at her stomach. Without a womb the skin sags from her belly. She presses fingers against it, trying to feel her insides. She looks at me with this helpless face, as if to say everything is normal, only we both know it is not.
“Maybe it wandered in from the rain,” Naomi says. She goes to the window, tapping a finger against her front teeth.
We pull back the curtains and let in the sun. The womb scurries across the floor. It takes an hour to catch it. We wrap the womb in a towel and put it on the table. It is wet and leaky so we place it on a salad plate. I keep a fork at the ready. Just in case.
“It’s definitely yours,” I say.
“How can you tell?”
“It breathes like you. Can’t you tell? It’s asthmatic.”
We listen to the tufts of steam slip out the womb’s opening.
“What should we do?” Naomi wonders.
Our rental contract says nothing about fallen wombs. The library has no self-help books. We discuss what our instincts tell us to do, but Naomi’s body rejected her womb so maybe our instincts are all out of whack.
“We can’t get rid of it,” Naomi says. “My mother had a hysterectomy at my age, but I’m not ready.” She keeps rubbing her stomach until the skin is red.
“Maybe we should eat it,” I tell Naomi, half-joking. I slide the fork down to the other end of the table. “They do that in some primitive cultures you know.”
“That’s the placenta, you idiot.”
Naomi doesn’t seem to be taking this very well. It’s understandable. She’s lost a womb. That has to be difficult. I can’t pretend like I know how to empathize. It’s not like my vas deferens has ever slipped out like a stray noodle. Still, we need to keep our wits about us. We need to keep a sense of humor. This is not the time to panic.
“I never thought the body could be so cruel,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like the rest of my body knew I wasn’t using my womb and bam! it just chased it out for being a freeloader.”
We entertain other possibilities: we could donate it to a community college biology lab. Take it to a homeless shelter. Offer it as a house-warming gift. Boil it on the stovetop and use the fluids as a biofuel. None of these strike us as reasonable.
We decide to keep it, despite my reluctance.
We tell nobody. The neighbors knock on the door, but we peer from behind the curtains and give dismissive gestures with our hands. There are rumors that Naomi is deathly ill, that the man visiting her this time around—me—is keeping her a prisoner. The neighbors bring casseroles and fruit baskets. Who can blame them? We’re all voyeurs hoping to catch a glimpse of the misery of others.
Naomi worries this is a ruse, that in a few days they will come with pitchforks and torches and burn both her and the womb on a makeshift pyre. Secretly, I think she was expecting nursery gifts.
It is a difficult time of year to be losing wombs. There is a heat wave. It rains some, then the sun comes out and we’re smothered in humidity. We live in one of those old Victorian houses built well before the miracle of air conditioning. We open all the windows, but it’s useless. Without her womb Naomi experiences an increase in body heat. She sweats all the time, her body tricked into thinking it’s menopausal. The first night after we discovered the womb it slithered into the bedroom where Naomi was doing sit-ups on the floor. Me and the womb watched.
“I’ll be damned if I let that thing ruin my body,” she said.
I swaddled the womb inside a towel and held it close.
I suppose it’s not unexpected for things to slip away. Naomi lost her wedding ring. Just slipped right off her finger. Her husband did the same, slipping out the door when Naomi least expected it. I asked her why, after all these years, she still wore the ring and she shrugged and said some habits are difficult to break. That’s how we found the womb, searching for the ring under the furniture.
We lie on the floor fanning ourselves. We listen to the radio. We watch the womb. The man on the radio informs us this season has the highest rate of pregnancies.
“Asshole,” Naomi says, slightly off balance as she leaves through the doorway.
I watch the womb. It feels like the womb is watching me too.
Naomi doesn’t want to visit a specialist. She doesn’t want to leave the house. What if there are other desertions? Her tits have been sagging for years. One of her molars is loose. I’m due for a prostate exam. We have weak hearts, decentered all too often.
“No,” she says. “When a womb falls out there are consequences. It’s best to ride this out on our own.”
Naomi does not sleep. She sits on the sofa all night with a butterfly net and a fork. She is on one side of the room and I am on the other. This is the problem with Naomi and me. Her problems are always foreign. Most couples fight about whose turn it is to do the dishes, or which church they should attend. With Naomi it has never been that easy. What’s the problem, babe? My womb. It fell out. Classic Naomi.
“Do you think I’m being punished?” she asks after we’ve been with the womb two weeks.
I’m quiet, unsure how to answer.
“What have you done to deserve this?” I ask.
She lists a few of her sins: she used to read pornographic romance novels to comatose widows at the nursing home. As a substitute teacher she confiscated the necklaces from all the girls in the German club and wore them every night hoping to dream their dreams. Her husband wanted a baby and she refused. When she worked at the suicide hotline she deliberately did not answer the phone. She is convinced that everybody’s time comes—sooner or later, the sins add up and, in a heartbeat, something terrible and inexplicable just happens. Early in the morning we awake to the sound of the womb bleating. We take turns massaging its misshapen edges. Sometimes I press too hard and can feel the knotted middle. It makes me hungry. The bleats get more agonizing. It keeps us awake all night. Naomi tries to feed it: used tampons, condoms, anti-birthing ointments sucked from her fingertips. Nothing satisfies it. After a few days the womb looks engorged, the frayed hairs twitching. It expels little coughs and spews pink gruel on the floor. The bleats continue, like church bells. We can’t seem to figure out what the womb wants.
“What if it wants to be pregnant?” Naomi says.
We’ve had this conversation before. We agreed not to have children. With children, there is no guaranteed investment return on the future. You might give birth to a cardiologist, a Don Juan who likes to break hearts, or a lunatic who prefers to eat them. It’s a roll of the dice. We agreed not to do that. We can’t tempt nature.
I’m very firm with Naomi. “I’m not the man you’re looking for.”
“Men are useless,” she says.
When Naomi is asleep I unknot the twists and folds of the womb. I lay them on the floor and watch them try to find each other. They’re like caterpillars. They stink of little boy feet. We tried cleaning the womb in the sink but this only made the stench worse. When I’ve kneaded it back together it limps and flops around. It’s terrified of the sunlight. I tried to take it outside for some exercise, let it roll around in the grass, but it suctioned itself to the floor and bleated like it was going to the slaughterhouse. I use a cigarette to singe the womb’s underbelly and there is a high-pitch squeal, almost like something real.
I tell Naomi, “We should kill it, before it gets too aware of itself.”
Naomi says we’re not medically trained for that sort of thing. “Besides, we don’t have a permit for its disposal.”
“Just don’t get too attached to it,” I say.
I remind her we have to be careful about how we handle this. We could not in good conscience give the womb false hope. It’s not like we planned on adopting it and enrolling it in preschool.
I’m the only one to notice the balance between them has shifted. When I first met Naomi she was a quiet woman with curves in all the right places. She was shy, but when she wanted to she could startle sunlight with her laughter. Lately, she has been thinning. I noticed it while she undressed the other night. Her bellybutton was larger than I remembered, and the skin around it had sunk into itself like a doughnut hole. The womb, however, is fatter, slightly engorged—it takes both hands to carry it. One morning, after she had swaddled the womb, I could tell the balance between them was different. Before it was like holding a papaya or mango. Now, and this is what does not make sense, when Naomi holds the womb it not only makes her appear smaller, but it is as if the womb is holding her.
She even walks around the house with an awkward tilt. She holds her breath for minutes at a time but does not pass out. She bumps into furniture. The emptiness of living without a womb is taking its toll on her, but she pretends as if nothing is wrong.
One afternoon, Naomi squats over the womb. It howls as she gets close. It doesn’t want to go back. She tries to jump on it, but it scuttles away. She screams, she cries, she begs. The womb stares back at her, slightly befuddled.
Naomi reads in books that wombs respond favorably to Near Eastern spice-blends, so she eats Indian food all day but the womb is still frightened of her. When she does get her hands on it she tries insertion techniques taught to her by the adult video store clerk—the free-standing Murphy, the Russian Eagle Eye—but the womb slips out of her fingers. It’s no use, I try to tell her: the womb knows better. It’s not going to be another thing inside a thing.
We find a jellied discharge on the windowsill. I look at the womb. Naomi thinks it is suicidal, but I know it is trying to escape. She comes home the next day with a crib. She comes home with boards and nails and a hammer. The windows are sealed, the cupboards are fastened shut. Everything is baby-proofed. But the womb is clever. It finds a way out of the crib and falls down the stairs. It bleats and bleats.
I tell Naomi maybe it’s time to take a trip to the hospital. Maybe we need a second opinion. She refuses. She says they’ll slice up the womb and study it in a petri dish and she will be strapped into stirrups and probed to see if she is the next phase in human evolution.
“Is that what you want? Do you want to turn me into an alien? Do you want me to turn into Darwin’s final proof?”
I hold Naomi. She cries. The womb bleats. We sit there in the hallway, the three of us holding each other. I don’t know what I want. All I know is I don’t have the instinct for this sort of living.
But Naomi won’t deny her instincts. She is determined to be a mother. She doesn’t understand the womb has out-grown us. It knows better than we do. The balance can’t be restored. Despite all our reasoning, despite all our trappings, the womb escapes more and more. It scurries along the floor with tremendous speed. Other times it leaps. I use the broom to swat it away from the windows.
Then Naomi forgets to close the front door and the womb gets three blocks down the road, almost to the edge of the wood. We wrestle the womb onto the neighbor’s lawn. The children on bicycles see us and scream for their mothers. A gardener tries to help, but when he sees the womb he is caught between fascination and repulsion. His hands move for his hedge clippers. We run.
Naomi complains of feeling light. She is always hungry. At meals she licks her plate clean and finishes my leftovers. Then she searches the cupboards. She eats and eats, trying to fill the void left by the womb. Now that it’s clear the womb is not going back, Naomi worries she might float away. I tell her she’s paranoid, but she says she’s read Hippocrates and Aretaeus.
“The womb is altogether erratic,” she quotes from the library book. “It knows only the logic of the animal.”
“You’re not an animal,” I say.
“Look at me,” Naomi says. “I haven’t gone farther than the end of the street in a month. I’m nesting. How long until I float away?”
In bed Naomi is mean. I used to like that: a little grit, a little meanness. This is something different. She doesn’t want to kiss and rejects all my attempts at foreplay. This is all I want, she says. Just dick.
I give her what she wants because I thought I could help her. I thought maybe if we did it enough my dick would fall off and that would make us whole—two Humpty Dumpties trying to fill the void of all our broken pieces.
I was gentle. I worried about hurting her. Soon I’m not enough. She brings home strange men. Fat men. They lock the door. I never see the same man go in there twice. I try to make her meals and bring her flowers—anything to satisfy her urges. Nothing works. Just dick.
The womb dries out. We do our best, but we’re not parents. There are no more pools of fluid blotching the hardwood. The womb lies around all day pulsing in languid rhythms. Naomi pulls off brittle crusts of womb-skin and rubs them between her fingers into flakes. She massages the womb with Vaseline until it glistens. She cradles it. She sings it lullabies. No matter how much she tries to keep it moist the womb dries out.
What Naomi doesn’t understand is that the womb doesn’t want to be held. It wants to grow something. It wants to bring life.
One morning, while Naomi sleeps, I squeeze inside the womb. It is difficult at first, but as I’m swallowed I can see the womb regain its color and its skin turn from scaly to moist. Once inside, curled in a fetal position, I take my needle and thread and stitch the womb closed.
It’s dark and warm. There is a relaxing absence of space. I tell myself it’s better this way. Naomi deserves better. We need to change. We need to be different people to make this work. It’s not enough to cohabit. Marriage is not enough. It’s not enough for one of us to be made from the rib of another. We need to know each other inside and out. We need someone to spoil our dark, secret places. I’ll wait here until the time is right. And when she least expects it, I’ll crawl out into Naomi’s arms, into the anonymous glow of Wednesday, and we can start over.