Apple Babies
This was not Johnny Fratenelli’s first rodeo; he knew the housewives of Miami’s south side waited. He kicked past pink flamingos blown onto the walk, ignoring men on riding lawn mowers. As soon as the grass was tidy, they’d be gone. Onto tennis. Onto golf. He chose the block where every Wednesday after poker, barbeque smoke billowed up like question marks. Where women faithfully followed schedules: Wednesday manis, Thursday pedis. A root dye every three weeks.
Every three weeks: the same timeframe Julia Godfrey was oblivious to her roots, but instead, checked her ovulation calendar. Ghosts, she whispered mannequin-like from the window, palm pressing cool glass.
Johnny Fratenelli smelled like gardenias and sex. He stood just houses away from Julia, a tattoo swirled above his collarbone like a tease. He’d come to the south side with a dream and a fistful of fliers. The mailboxes were always hungry, for there was no satisfying the women on the south side. The Amazon packages came daily, like Christmas gifts. Johnny Fratenelli wore reptile-skinned shoes, too hot for a Miami day and not soft-soled like his dance shoes, yet smooth on the bottom, in case he needed to dance on concrete, or asphalt. In case he needed to dance to save his life. He chose this side of Miami because the ladies waited like dolls in airless display cases, collecting dust. They waited, but for what, or whom, they did not know.
Johnny Fratenelli thought he knew. Like dolls, he knew each had a secret key only he would find.
If Johnny had looked up, he might have sensed Julia, soft and immaterial as a whisper.
Outside, the sprinkler pulsed like the minute hand of a watch and Julia imagined two crosses planted where she’d buried her miscarriages, one after the other. Her husband, sure it wasn’t the right thing. In the night she’d gone outside with a garden trowel hoping for quiet, but the bass thump of a salsa club and a cop siren interrupted her ritual. Miami never slept.
She recalled her husband’s voice as he stood over her, as the soft masses rested like God’s mistake in the toilet bowl, like goldfish on clearance at the pet store. Perhaps cold porcelain was the perfect receptacle for her unborn twins. Babies which might have been happier going out to sea.
What had he said, her husband? She remembered his eyes, annoyed she was bleeding so much on thecarpet.
Julia unlatched the window. Sometimes breezes from the Keys blew sweet on her skin, from islands where she and Sam once swam naked in lapis waters. Before she had to be like everyone else. Before he stopped coming home on time.
There was the call from her mother-in-law. “Sometimes our best laid plans go down the drain,” she’d said. Had she realized the irony? That her twins had been in danger of being flushed?
Julia remembered the feel of them, like a skeletal universe compacted and covered in mucus. Her hands were soaked in amniotic slime as she fished out their alien bodies, small as apples. She had the thing from the doctors stuck on the fridge, showing how big the embryos were; a size-comparison chart complete with illustrations of grape, kumquat, fig, then apple. Her babies: the ones who came too early.
Blighted apples. But why?
Ghosts of children I never had. Of birthdays and frosted cakes they won’t eat with chubby fingers. Bubbles they won’t blow. Diapers I won’t change. Ghosts of getting ready for sweet-sixteen date nights. Of daughters’ hair I will never braid. Ghosts of children whose hurts I will never mend. Whose tears I will never wipe.
Outside a bird touched down on the burial spot of Clara and Bart. Sprinkler pipes delivered water to germinate amaryllis and crocus bulbs, but what Julia wanted most in life would never grow. The pipes burrowed through soil rich with nematodes and mycorrhizae; more fertile the deeper down you went. Fertile like Julia hoped she’d be when the ultrasound tech pressed a wand against the walls of her uterus.
The hospital gown was cold and she was all bones, but hope filled her as the wand passed through her dark matter to discover viable eggs in the folds of her blood-dense ovaries. Ones waiting to be fertilized in order to travel, like children leaving home for college. The ultrasound screen like an exploration into deep space. For years Julia had fixed her gaze with an astrophysicist’s eye into the most intimate spaces where she wished inestimable life might ignite like a supernova.
Julia didn’t even have the heat of mindless sex to help her forget. Her husband was always analyzing something. Crunching numbers. Always in his head and not in their bed. Or he was pushing her away. Was he gay? She lay next to him and prayed for someone else to come into her home to break up the monotony.
A child would remind her that life had meaning.
It had all started wrong, this marriage. She pictured their wedding: candles glowing from paper bags up the walk and how she worried the flames might catch the hems of her guests. How the roses were already dying. How the bishop frowned at the rock music and whiskey cheese.
Ghosts of how my wedding might have ended with you beside me instead of alone while you drove your parents to our place. Cleaning up, then going outside with the key and discovering the church doors locked behind me. It was a technicality of the key fob, but no one warned me. I was stranded outside, barefoot in my wedding dress on that cold night in November, holding two garbage bags: remnants of the party everyone was invited to but me. I took that sidewalk to my friend’s house because I was locked out and couldn’t reach you by phone on what should have been the best night of my life.
Julia felt her hand go to her belly. The babies would have been the size of cantaloupes. Her husband, unable to fill the gap, started sleeping in the guest room.
Ghosts of you. Of the feel of you next to me. Of your curly hair. I wanted our children to have your hair. Ghosts of my cheek pressed against yours. Of nights swimming off the Keys where the only thing we feared was the sea. Ghosts of women you now love more than me; women who would carry your sperm much better. Perfect homes for your sperm; perfect like Mandy’s house with photos of smiling kids on her white piano. Mandy who told me, “Chin up,” when I admitted to being depressed. Who said: “You can’t possibly have postpartum dear, you didn’t carry full-term!”
Julia went outside and walked to the edge of her yard. It was the time of low tide and something inscrutable had taken her spirit out to sea, leaving only the stinking dross of herself: broken shells, carapaces and seaweed. She wanted to stand there until the tide returned. Wanted to swim away, never to resurface. But what about the family photos on the wall? What about her stuff? What about their marriage vows? Her home, like a ghost ship beckoned.
“Come back,” it said. “You can be here on our ship. We never go anywhere, but we’ll keep you company.”
_____
Julia moved zombie-like to the mailbox, hoping for something besides bills from the fertility clinic. Her nails weren’t manicured like the neighbors. They had children hatched from eggs in voluptuous young ovaries. They had husbands who lustfully filled them nightly with warm explosions of vital sap. She knew they tumbled in bed having so much sex that babies were inevitable. Babies couldn’t be stopped because of the sheer excess and splendor of their lovemaking.
Just then, Dorothy’s husband, Ben, popped out of his front door. He wore slippers, hair on end. Night had swallowed Ben and Dorothy into an endless labyrinth of hot sex and surrender, then regurgitated them onto the asphalt drive just that morning.
“Morning, Jules!” Ben hollered, reaching for the newspaper.
Julia looked up and waved sheepishly. Her ovaries ached.
It was a wonder her neighbor’s houses still stood, what with all those unplanned-for children. She looked back at hers and noticed how tidy it was. How very sturdy. No reason to believe it would soon fall. Her husband meted out his affection as though a scientist measuring solutions. Two parts restraint, one part release. Always, at night it was this way, something large held back, something smaller given. He was always keeping score. She couldn’t let go. She was always in her head wondering if she were enough. She was never in their bed.
Julia pushed forward, opening the mailbox. Inside was a yellow flier. Yellow like a sunflower, like the hair of a Botticelli. Like flowers the spring they made love in a monastic village in Tuscany’s hills. Come to my Dance Academy, the words sang. Warm nights and Mediterranean breezes. Sangria and music.
Her fingers dialed. The voice answered gently — part sweetness and part melancholy. His accent wasn’t Italian, was it? Possibly French Caribbean or maybe Brazilian? She knew she was turning him into a saint. But didn’t she deserve something like Johnny to bring her back to life with music and a burst of passion?
“Hello? This is Julia Godfrey.” Her voice, once flat, lifted.
“Julia, how are you?”
“I’m calling about your class. I haven’t danced in so long,” Julia stopped when she heard an echo. She turned.
“I’m so happy you called,” the voice said and Julia spotted the figure across the street. Dark hair, wild and curly like Sam’s. Hair she could wind her fingers around before falling to sleep. Johnny Fratenelli was no longer an abstraction. Not as tall as she imagined and a little thinner, but he seemed to float all the same. His eyes meet Julia’s and he stepped towards her.
“Why did you stop dancing?”
It was her turn in the dance, but she waited. He walked with a bounce, gentle questions in his eyes, the way a dancer looks when waiting for a partner to shift. What if she didn’t know the step? Would he go away? The question suspended in the Floridian air: why did you stop dancing?
“I’m not sure I can even dance anymore,” she admitted. It would have been easier to say it from a distance, but he couldn’t be avoided now.
“Why you stop?” His breath was on her neck. “Senora?” His dark eyes and a scar in the shape of a fishhook down the right side of his nose. She could press her cheek to his but looked down at his shoes. They were scaled, as if made from something mythical, as if he wore relics from another kingdom. As though he were a Templar, or knight, having slayed a dragon then flayed its skin to make himself shoes. A knight come to save her with dancing.
If she took his hand, would they float together, like lovers in a Chagall painting, rising to taste the sun, lifting above the south of Miami? Would they ascend over palms and play in the thermals like mating birds then descend softly to land on sand?
“I lost my babies. Two; twins. They’re buried there… in our front yard…” The narrative of their burial twisted her tongue into the convenient lie again. Then, as if needing to support the lie, she walked to the patch of perfect grass. He would follow. They were dancing now. She knelt and pressed her palms to their graves, sensing the earth; its twinned heartbeat.
“Here,” she said, over the buzz of a far-off mower. Over birds landing on imaginary white crosses. Over heads of flowers in their beds whose ochre roots grasped white pipes. She’d told the others this story. Told so many she’d begun to believe.
But with Johnny’s eyes warm in hers, Julia suddenly admitted what her husband had done. The terror of the afternoon. Chill of porcelain; tears making ripples in toilet water, where inside, they bobbed lifeless. She couldn’t fathom it. He towered over her as if she were bug he could squash. He always looked down on her, assuming he knew exactly what she needed. Without a word, he looked at her with pity, then pushed down the handle. She’d tried to stop him — really, she had!
“Why?” Julia cried, her palms opening as though some grace might drop in. If anyone needed grace, surely it was Julia, fingers lacing together elegantly, like a saint. Like the Virgin Mary’s hands of immaculate conception. She felt the painful tug of skin grown up around a Caesarean. “Why?” she asked again, burying her face in her hands. “They were my babies!”
My babies: the words. Johnny couldn’t move. Hadn’t he suffered losses too? Not so brutal, not so violent and bewildering, but losses, nonetheless. He felt as if someone opened a window and a wind blew in, so bracing, so unlike the life he’d been living in Miami — taking advantage of the rich who he assumed were impervious to hurt, until he met this woman, with her children buried under where he stood. He’d been spinning with her in her dizzying loss, so strangely musical and so utterly dark, that he buckled and knelt beside her.
This was the way the dance took him. He touched her soft shoulder and said nothing. He listened.
“They aren’t here.” Julia said finally, relief and anguish washing over her, her face wet. “My husband … he flushed them down the toilet, didn’t even give me a chance to say goodbye.”
Johnny’s eyes turned incredulous.
“What an asshole,” he said, sitting on his heels. Julia swayed, like the dance took a dark turn. She leaned into Johnny, stopping suddenly at the boundary of him on the grass and realizing there was an end to how much she’d have to suffer.
No one had called her husband an asshole. Not even herself. She didn’t even like the word. She’d cried for days after the miscarriage, yet he never apologized and still claimed it’d been for the best while she cooked him dinner. And then he stopped coming to dinner when she called him to eat. He stopped wanting her in bed except when he needed to get off. He had always been like this, hadn’t he? She could see it all so clearly now.
She exhaled, as if Johnny had given her permission to breathe for the first time since the miscarriage. As if he’d given her permission to take all of Sam’s money, buy a sailboat and go with Johnny to Argentina where they’d tango until he brought her back from the dead.
The front stoop of her home was still there, where Sam had taken to hobbling inside after work, climbing into the compact ship of their house like a ruined captain. He’d hurt his foot in tennis and was hanging onto a trekking pole for balance, too proud to wear crutches. He looked past her again just yesterday, like he’d been doing for months. He’d turned her into something with no voice; a thing inanimate. She was a mailbox. She was asphalt, grass trimmings, the chrome of his perfectly-polished bumper. She was sidewalk, clean of moss and free of children’s sidewalk chalk. She was the front stoop, with its neat Welcome mat and the elegant transom. She was everything he wanted her to be and nothing he didn’t. And that’s why he’d flushed. Because Sam didn’t want reminders of his botched attempt to be a father or of his own sterility.
It was his fault she had miscarried, Julia told herself. She let herself believe it.And she knew: staying married was a crime against her happiness.
_________
“The ocean listens,” her friend had said after the loss, the perfect friend in a crisis like this. From Wales, she was an alien in Miami, pale and with a lilting accent. There was magic in that — a Welsh girl telling you the ocean listened; and so it would.
“Johnny, I’m sorry…” Julia still knelt beside Johnny. She squeezed his hand, ending the dance. “I need to go.”
The ocean always listens. Johnny helped her stand and she broke free, moving towards the car. She slid in and turned the key, letting the wheel take her. Johnny knows, Julia thought. He hadn’t said anything, but she could sense it. He knows about grief. He wouldn’t have flushed them. At least we would have chosen that together. Why didn’t he talk to me first? My husband is an asshole, she admitted it over and over.
She was driving out to sea, where her babies had gone. Her car accelerated, winding up a hill. Gentle palms waved her to a favorite spot, where as a child she stood eating ice cream, her hand in her mother’s. If she left Sam, someday she could still bring a child here.
But a wild impulse made her pass the familiar beach and instead led her to an estuary where the city pumped treated sewage into the ocean; where waste from the south side went. Julia didn’t care, it was still beautiful and what’s more, she could be alone. She parked her car and jumped out, tiptoeing over tiny mollusks piled high. Bright moss from white stones. She remembered collecting beach glass here, and how her mom said the sea was wonderful because it softened the sharp edges.
A bird on the mudflats cried, protecting her young. Her husband hadn’t understood her grief, but the bird had. Two fat gulls swooped above the surf, as light as the ghosts of unborn infants. They dove down and flew so close, Julia could reach up and brush their soft underbellies with her fingertips as they passed. Maybe they thought she had breadcrumbs, or maybe they just wanted to say hello. Julia was unsure, but they twirled and flew into a tangerine sunset, one growing brighter by the minute until it took up the whole western sky.
