Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
In “Beaching It,” an artist traveling on the summer circuit begins an affair with a rich, married local. In “Me and Paul,” a lonely traveler adopts an alter ego to help him impress a single mother. In “Bill,” a trip to a flea market highlights the essential differences between a man and his fiancée. Throughout this thoroughly entertaining read, Wingate’s sympathetic characterizations reveal both the hopefulness and the heartache behind our earnest but sometimes misguided attempts at intimacy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547053653 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2008 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW Andrea you might think she was just getting love handles, the way a man does when he gets fat. Growing out sideways in your first trimester, according to some old wives’ tale, is supposed to be a sign that you’re carrying one sex or the other. Neither of us could remember which one though.
“Can I listen?” I asked her, putting my ear above her navel, and she pushed it down a few inches. I closed my eyes and heard nothing but the ocean crashing in at us, which obliterated any sound our baby might have made. We were alone on a sandbar fifty yards from shore, and if the tide held we’d stay right there until I had to drive her to the airport.
“It doesn’t kick yet,” Andrea said. In German you call a baby it— das Kind, gender neutral. This is an official part of the language, unlike in English where we call a baby it only until we know better.
“I hear it. It says ‘Daddy, daddy!’” “American baby? I think it’s lower.” She slid up on the blanket to get my ear down by her bikini line, and I watched a few grains of sand fall into her navel. Maybe they’d still be there when her plane landed back in Munich. Maybe one of them would work its way inside her, and grow in our baby’s hand like a pearl. The wind swooped low and plucked Andrea’s straw hat off her face, and I jumped up to fetch it from the water. When I handed it back I kissed her the way a man ought to kiss his wife, though Andrea showed no sign whatsoever of wanting to be my wife.
“I’ll miss you.” She snugged the hat to her head. “I had a great time.” “I’ll miss you too. And your little friend.” I mock-pinched her belly and she checked her watch.
“We turn over, no?” Andrea was as punktlich and ordentlich as any stereotypical German you can imagine. Every fifteen minutes exactly we had to flip over, or roll on our sides like rotisserie chickens, to keep from getting too sunburned in any one spot—even though it was only March, and she’d barely see the sun again for months once she got home. She squeezed out sunscreen and rubbed it on my too-pale back. I felt like we were an old married couple, twenty years from now with our kid in college.
“Soon we go to the airport,” she said, her hair flopping sideways as she lay on her side. Ten weeks in Florida had made her blond almost to the roots.
“I hope it’s a safe flight.” “You know this flight. It’s a safe flight.” After that I didn’t feel like we were an old married couple anymore. I felt like we were strangers who could barely communicate, who had no business reproducing. In an hour I’d be driving her to the airport and wondering who the hell she really was. Holding her bags while she got her boarding pass, walking her solemnly to the security line. Giving her one last kiss before she put her purse and shoes through the X-ray machine and disappeared until the “someday” we promised to see each other again. She wanted to be pregnant awhile, maybe even have the baby, before she figured out what to do about us.
“We see what happens,” she always told me whenever I brought up the future. Which at least was consistent, since we’d never once planned anything. She’d been best friends with Bianca, the German girl I was dating last year, and on Christmas Eve in Munich she told me it was obvious to all their friends that Bianca and I didn’t really love each other. Two days later Bianca dumped me on the way to the airport. Four days after that Andrea called to say she’d been laid off and had time to travel, and had always wanted to see America. Could she start her vacation in Tampa? See the ocean? By Martin Luther King Day, she was sleeping in my bed. By Valentine’s Day, she was pregnant.
And through all this, nothing surprised her. Andrea never freaked out, never asked herself questions like “What do I really want?” or “Where’s my life going?” American questions, she called them. I wanted to surprise her just once, do something that would really drop her jaw. The closest I got was when I asked her to marry me and stay in Tampa, but that got me only wide eyes, a kiss on the cheek, and a sweet laugh. I didn’t ask again, though I thought about it hard as we broiled on the sandbar, an hour before she said goodbye.
“I’m getting fat,” I told her the next time we turned over.
“It isn’t good having no fat.” Andrea knew this definitively because she was a nutritional nurse. She spoke about food the way a Prussian general might speak about his troops—efficiency, maximization of benefits, prevention of loss. She had a poor professional opinion of my favorite restaurants, and found me new ones. “Too-skinny people can’t fight diseases.” “Thank you, Doktor Andrea.” “I would be a very good doctor,” she declared, settling down on her beelly.
“Isn’t that bad for the baby? Laying like that?” “You worry too much about the baby. I like some here, please.” She patted herself on theeeee small of the back, so I knelt beside her and rubbed the sunscreen on, sliding my hand under her waistband and tickling her tailbone. That’s how things started the night I got her pregnant, and I wanted to do it all over again—knowing it this time, planning it.
“Danny, we’re in public.” Andrea tried to swat my hand away.
“What public? We’re fifty yards from anybody.” She clucked her tongue three times and pointed to the other end of the sandbar, where a mother and daughter emerged from the water. The mom had on a blue one-piece racing suit, with thighs as big as a bike racer’s bulging out of it. Her daughter was a preschool blur of pink and ponytails. They looked at us briefly, not waving, then kept walking. Probably locals, who knew just how far out you can walk if the tide’s right.
“Maybe I am like her one day,” Andrea said.
“Don’t let your legs get so big. Please.” “I mean maybe I have a daughter like her one day.” She turned over on her back even though our fifteen minutes hadn’t elapsed. “I wish I could be in Germany now, then I have sun on my breast.” “It’s breasts in English, two of them.” “Danke.” She smacked me a kiss.
“Bitte.” I blew one back. “But in Germany you won’t have sun until July.” “Ha!” Andrea playfully snarled up her nose at me. I rolled over too, and watched the super-athlete mom walk through the water with her daughter. There was no husband in sight—maybe that’s what Andrea meant when she said she’d be like that woman someday. After all, I might not be there the first time she took our baby to the beach, and I could hear them talking in German about why daddy lived so far away. I listened hard to their imaginary conversation, hoping to learn something, but the German got too fast for me. Our baby was a girl at first, like the kid in the water, then a boy. It kept flipping, never settled.
“I’m doing it.” Andrea slipped off her bikini top. “It’s only one hour. They can arrest me into jail.” This time I didn’t correct her English. I resisted the temptation to give myself one last look at her topless torso by pretending I was on a German beach where nobody bothered noticing such things, then by digging my hand underneath me to poke around for sand dollars. Andrea saw me doing it and dug her hand in too, the way I taught her on her first day in America, and when her arm slipped in past her elbow I got a real sick feeling that she was going back to Germany to have an abortion without telling me. That would explain how casual she was about being pregnant. Her arm in the sand turned into the arm of some doctor, reaching inside her and ripping out our baby. Not even looking at it, just throwing it into the garbage. It would end up in a dump or in some filthy river where catfish and eels fought over it and tore it to pieces.
“I’ve got one.” Andrea bit her lower lip.
“Get under it, let it fall into your hand.” She nodded, grunted, and pulled her arm out with a little sand dollar balanced on her palm. It looked beige, not bleached white like the ones you find on the surface, but it was obviously too stiff to be alive. She hopped up and pranced ahead to rinse it off in the ocean.
“A good memory for the baby, no?” “A Tampa sand dollar for a baby born in Munich. Makes sense, I guess.” “Give it good luck.” Andrea kissed the top of my head and put the sand dollar in front of my mouth. I whispered, Let me know you under my breath, like the sand dollar was our baby instead. Then I kissed it.
“I hope I’m there to see it born.” “I hope too.” Andrea stepped back. “It’s a terrible thing if you aren’t there.” “So why not marry me and make sure?” “Because I want to see how you are with the baby. I said this.” “If I’m good with the baby, will you marry me?” “Yes. I don’t think it was a question.” Andrea tucked the sand dollar into her waistband and sat down. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself, though before then I couldn’t even tell she’d gotten excited. I didn’t know her moods, had no idea how it would feel to live with her. No idea if we’d even be attracted to each other once we had a kid to take care of, or if we lived in Germany instead of America. I didn’t know anything about Andrea, really, but I was less scared of marrying her than of being a deadbeat dad. I didn’t want to fall in love with some American girl two years down the road and have to tell her about my kid in another country. And if I didn’t get to watch Andrea’s belly grow, then who knows how much I’d feel like flying over to watch that baby come out? It’d be like somebody else’s kid without the whole nine months of watching.
“Why not have it here?” I said. “I have a job, we can—” “Free hospital, I told you. And my family is there. Here I have only you.” A hundred yards in front of us, the super-athlete woman stood in the ocean up to her chin and perched her daughter on her shoulders. She’d reached the edge of a shelf, and if she took another step they’d both be in over their heads. I’d done that a thousand times, hanging out at the edge on my tiptoes to tempt fate before I headed back to safety. Once in awhile a wave knocked the woman back a bit and they both went under, but they always came up whooping. I wanted to do that with my own kid, right there on that same shelf, and I almost gave Andrea an ultimatum: marry me and stay here or I’ll never see the baby, never come live with you, never give that kid any pieces of its father except the pictures you already have.
“Ich hab dich Lieb,” I said instead. I could only tell her I loved her in German.
“Ich auch. Please don’t ask me to marry you now. I go too soon.” I nodded and looked back at the mother and child in front of us. They bobbed, disappeared in the water, then came up without a whoop this time. Something was different—Andrea and I both sat up. The next time they bobbed, we didn’t see them come up.
“Go!” Andrea pushed my shoulder and I raced to where I saw them last. If I saved that woman and her kid, then maybe Andrea would know I’d be okay with our baby and decide to stay. It felt like a test from the universe, to see if I was fit to be a dad, and when the sandbar ended I dove in and started swimming like hell to prove I was. But when I got to where the mother and daughter should have been, I couldn’t see anybody. It wasn’t a test, I wouldn’t pass it, I’d never marry Andrea, I’d never see my baby. I dove past the shelf with my eyes open, flailing around for an arm or leg, until a rip tide started to grab me.
I guess I could have let the rip pull me out to where that woman and her kid were, so I could really try saving them. But there was no use dying for a stranger—especially since I’d have a kid of my own to stay alive for in another eight months—so I chickened out and fought the rip and got back onto the shelf the second I could. I tried, is what I’d tell people if that mother and daughter drowned. And I’d be the only one who’d ever have to know I didn’t.
Then I saw Andrea halfway down the sandbar, waving and pointing. The mother and daughter were safe fifty yards downshore, way beyond where I ever could have reached them in time. Either the rip tide dropped them there, or mom’s big thighs pulled them through it. She paddled back to shore and didn’t look back to let us know they were safe, didn’t even acknowledge that I went in after them. Andrea, who glared at the mom looking twice as pissed off as I’d ever seen her, put on her bikini top while I swam back to our spot.
“I tell you. I never will do that with our baby.” “Thank you.” I fell to my knees, breathing heavy and finally winded from all that swimming. All I wanted to do was find where that baby was in Andrea’s belly and kiss her there, as if das Kind could kiss me back through her skin. Then she’d know I wasn’t afraid to need her—that’s one word we never used with each other, a word I’d forgotten how to say in German. I had to know it somewhere in my head, it just escaped me. Hilfen? Haben? No. But the word wouldn’t come, so I just gave Andrea’s belly a few little pecks to say goodbye.
At the airport we had a nice last kiss and finally said we loved each other in English. Whenever the conversation petered out one of us would bitch about that woman with the big thighs, and act superior. We’d never be that way with our own kid, we kept saying, like the kid was some kind of theory instead of a living thing in the middle of Andrea. My whole drive home I thought about the German word for need, going through the whole alphabet in my head ten times over while I tried to find it. But it still wouldn’t come, and I didn’t have a German dictionary at home anymore. Didn’t have any friends who I could ask, either. So I filed the question away, told myself I’d ask Andrea when she called to say that she’d landed safe, like she promised she would no matter what time of day it was here.
But you can’t ask a question like that without going into the whole story, without explaining why you need to know. Without saying I need you too soon, the way some people say I love you too soon, and maybe screwing up everything.
Table of Contents
Contents Foreword by Amy Hempel viiBeaching It 1 Me and Paul 17 The Balkan House 33 Inside the Hole 49 A Story about Two Prisoners 60 Meeting Grace 64 Faster 74 Dig for Dollars 89 Bill 97 Three a.m. Ambulance Driver 118 Knuckles 125 Our Last Garage Sale 142 In Flagstaff 154 acknowledgments 189