This Ain't Living

David McGlynn

Katherine comes home early on her last day of work. It’s Friday afternoon, late summer, and she’s beat. She falls to the couch, but it is too hot to lie there, so she’s up again, digging in the refrigerator for something to drink. She’s not ready to talk yet. I watch her move through the kitchen, her hair clumped together with heat at its ends, the back of her neck flushed red and hot. Even on hot days, all the windows open and the cooler on, the house smells like her lavender and her hairspray, her blouses taken hot from the dryer and shaken in air. I’m still a little surprised she comes back here every day. We have been married almost three months.

She has just left her job at the spina bifida clinic at the children’s hospital. Spina bifida kids come into the world with crooked backs and twisted legs, weak eyes and malfunctioning bowels. Many use a catheter to urinate, emptying their bladders through plastic tubes in the bathroom stalls of their schools. Sometimes other kids look under the doors or stand on the adjacent toilets to watch. The kids want to turn away to hide themselves, but they cannot. The stalls are small and many are in wheelchairs.

Clinic days, Fridays, are big affairs. Physicians race between exam rooms. There is a neurologist, a neurosurgeon, an orthopedist, a urologist, an ophthalmologist, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a dentist, a physical therapist, an occupational therapist, a wheelchair specialist, and a social worker. It takes a fulltime coordinator—Katherine until today—just to organize who goes where, when. The doctors are the easy part. The mothers are nervous, over-organized and meticulous down to the buttons. They are mothers who must pack their children off to school on wobbly legs, bundles of catheters inside their backpacks. The hospital serves a wide radius. Families drive from Nevada and southern Utah, Idaho, southern Montana, Wyoming, even parts of Colorado. Many families camp in RVs in the hospital parking lot, rows of them lined up and steaming with breakfast when Katherine pulls into work. Like a day at the races, nothing can be left to guesswork. Katherine ran the pit, kept the time.

She sits down on the kitchen floor in the path of the window-cooler. She cranes her neck and lets her hair catch the breeze. The cooler’s bottom is rusted and the rust has worked up into the pump, and the air it blows across the linoleum smells a little like rust. It also smells like shampoo, hers. Her coworkers baked a cake; the clinic director bought her lunch. Since she’s newly married, the office has not yet grown tired of innuendo, of hinting of how she might use the leftover cake. Spina bifida is caused by a lack of folic acid just prior to and following conception. Sex and green vegetables make a better pair than cake, she says. Forget frosting, healthy babies are made from salads, from broccoli and cabbage. We laugh. She’s feeling better. She’s beginning to realize that she’s free.

She quit her job to begin school again, a master’s degree in social work. For a while we hoped she could keep her job and go to school, but both are fulltime commitments. She’ll sit twenty hours a week in class, then work twenty more in a practicum, an unpaid field internship. She’ll study around that. Practicum days are Fridays, same as clinic. Her boss told her that if she wanted to stay, she needed to stay full time. It came down to either work or school. Looking down upon her as she lies back on the linoleum and stretches her arms above her head, I see in her the sign of that tingling sensation that your real life, the thing you are supposed to be doing, is about to begin. I felt the same thing when I crossed the desert from California to arrive here and begin graduate school. Katherine waffled, but I did not. I promised I could get us through if we lived cheaply.

I have lived cheaply all of my life, hoarding money away in a savings account while my friends used their birthday cash and lawn-mowing earnings to buy baseball cards and candy and videogames. As a teenager, I sometimes lent my mother money to help our family make it through until the next month. On my scant teaching stipend, I managed to finish my master’s, complete the coursework for my Ph.D., and to afford our wedding rings, even a modest honeymoon. I make about enough for half our rent and half our groceries. During the summer I worked as a camp counselor for young children with busy, rich parents, reading Dante’s Divine Comedy on a yellow school bus across the oven-baked Salt Lake Valley to the edge of the open ore-pit of the Kennecott Copper Mine.

Katherine bends back to sitting, stands up from the floor. "Let’s go eat." She tugs at the buttons of her blouse and lets the air blow through it.

"Where?"

"Someplace cold. I want to feel like winter. How long till it comes?"

"Too long." The air outside is dry enough to make my nose bleed. The desert wind blows through the car windows as hot as a hairdryer. The Great Salt Lake has been shrinking all year. The salt marshes that surround it are stark and white, an alkaline flash against the sun that sets behind it. The wind smells of the brine shrimp frying in the heat on the exposed flats. We end up at a burger joint not far from the house. We sit inside against the windows and the air-conditioning vent. The ceiling is ringed with neon and the clock moves backward across an airbrushed picture of Elvis. We order two burgers, fries, two large Cokes.

On Monday, Katherine will begin nannying for one of the hospital physicians, watching over his two-year-old and his six-month-old twins, all girls. She’s been promised twelve dollars an hour. We sit in the restaurant with the placemat turned over, a crayon for a pen. I figure that if we each make a thousand a month, we’ll be okay. Half of that will go to our rent and utilities, the rest will buy food and gas and car insurance on the Jeep. There’s also the telephone, her textbooks, notebooks, an occasional odd-and-end. I don’t want to cut it too close. Katherine has made an appointment to see the doctor, the gynecologist, and the dentist one last time before giving up her insurance. I make a list of other things that will go too: movies and concerts and dinners out. "Enjoy the burger," I tell her. "It may be our last for awhile."

She shakes her finger at me, lifts her dark eyebrows. "Don’t think you’re the only one with discipline," she says. She laughs, kisses me, breathes ketchup and red onion into my mouth and ears. "Relax. There’s no need to turn Gandhi just yet."

But soon, there is. The nanny gig is not the money we hoped for. Instead of a thousand a month, it comes in just under six hundred. Some months, it is under four. The doctor’s wife sometimes calculates the hours wrong or multiplies by eleven instead of twelve. Katherine feels awkward handing the check back and asking her to rewrite it. The family travels a fair amount, which leaves whole weeks without pay. When the doctor and his wife travel alone, we stay with the girls. That pays better, but those weekends are infrequent and taxing because we have to study while the babies sleep and they all sleep at different times. To get extra cash, I coach swimming, teach swim lessons, and help medical students refine their personal statements for their residency applications. Katherine nannies for anyone who asks.

We could make it easier on ourselves by borrowing more in student loans. It’s tempting, but we resist. If we were medical students or law students or even business students, we could borrow seven ways to Sunday and rest assured of our ability to pay it all off with the fruits of a well-paid profession. But social work and writing are not well-paid professions. Our futures remain uncertain, and if we pile up debt now, we might spend the rest of our lives digging out of it. Everyone around us is in debt, most way over their heads. Half my friends and family keep credit cards afloat by paying only the minimums each month. They live in a world of excess, impeded by debts that will not go away.

So instead, we trim. We give up alcohol and going to bars. When my jeans rip, Katherine sews a patch over the hole. When my underwear wears thin, Katherine wears them to sleep in. Over the winter break, I coach extra workouts, housesit for a professor, read like a fiend. Katherine nannies in the morning and in the afternoon she ties a green apron around her chest and waist and drives out to a kitchen store where she has been hired on for the holidays. She’s on her feet until nearly nine, answering questions for the customers filling their credit cards with expensive Christmas presents, bread machines and commercial blenders, terra-cotta tea kettles unfit for boiling water, Japanese Ginsu knives sharp enough for surgery. Our Christmas presents for our family come from here, cheap trinkets made cheaper by her employee discount. For my mother, stepmother, mother-in-law, and sisters we buy nine-dollar aprons, fancy spatulas for grilling for the fathers, a book of cocktail recipes for my sister’s husband. The job is going well. Katherine hasn’t been paid yet, but the owner likes her and she likes working there. He sends her home with a box full of lemon-iced biscotti, the most extravagant thing we have seen in months. She says she will ask to stay on after the holidays, working on weekends and in the evenings when she is not in class or at practicum or nannying. We eat the biscotti with milk the night she brings them home. We add up our day’s wages and breathe our first sighs of relief since the summer.

The week before Christmas, a stack of cookbooks, an apron, two tins of Christmas sprinkles, a box of Altoids, and a meat thermometer are found in the back of the store, stuffed behind the shopping sacks. Katherine had been working back there earlier in the day. The owner believes she put those things there with the intent to steal. Nothing is missing as far as he can tell, but the store is filled with a million tiny things and it is not possible to keep up with everything. He searched her bag before he called her into his office, found it empty, but took the empty bag as a sign that she intended to fill it with store items. "Do you have a security camera?" Katherine asks. "It would show you I didn’t do it."

"I don’t like to reveal my security measures," the owner says. He looks at her across the desk in his office. He believes he has foiled her plans. The floor manager saw her working in the back, but she can’t say that she didn’t see Katherine put the items there. "She could have. I don’t know. I’m sorry," she says from behind the owner’s chair. The owner asks Katherine what she does in the world. She says she is working on her master’s in social work. "Before that, what did you do?"

"I was the clinic and outreach coordinator for the spina bifida clinic."

"The what?" He snaps it; the term "spina bifida" is foreign to him. Katherine wants to snap back, to tell him that her last job was a real job, a better job than this one, a job that paid enough for her to shop in this store without guilt for the money she spent. But she knows we need the money and she doesn’t want to get fired, so she explains spina bifida and the job she once performed in the clinic. "Well, I’ve never had a problem with my other employees," the owner says. "All signs point to you. Let’s go ahead and call it a night. We’ll mail you your check." On the way out, he puts his hand on her back, like a father, and says, "You really need to get some help for your problem."

Losing the job is not the end of it. Katherine’s dental insurance had ended two weeks before her health insurance, and her final appointment was not covered. The dentist’s office let it sit for months, but on the twentieth of December, the office calls and demands two hundred dollars or else they will put her into collection. The spring before we were married, a car in front of us slammed on its brakes in traffic, going up a hill, and the Jeep dented the bumper. Not badly dented, but dented nonetheless. The owner of the car left Utah for a while, but now she’s back and she wants her bumper fixed by New Year’s. We can’t afford the insurance premiums to go up, so we pay out of pocket. I look at what we have left to make it through Christmas and try not to panic.

But it’s Christmas, and we have made it this far. Katherine’s at the top of her class, perfect her first term. The doctor and his wife give us a gift certificate to an Italian restaurant in the back of a bookstore, a cozy little place with only ten tables, a fireplace, a courtyard filled with snow and twinkling blue lights. I wear a jacket and tie, and Katherine wears her cashmere sweater. We order shrimp ravioli and pumpkin risotto, skirt steak over linguini, two glasses of red wine. For two hours we touch noses across the tiny table, and we smile and laugh and talk about next Christmas and the Christmas after that, about my idea to run a marathon this summer, and the kids at the hospital, and we’re happy; there’s a snowstorm blowing in, and we agree we have it good. We’ve eaten; we’re someplace warm on a cold night. Many people, Katherine says, don’t have that much. Many people have it worse.

Our downstairs neighbors have it worse. A single mother and her son rent the basement of the house we live in. She’s two hundred pounds overweight and addicted to painkillers and sleeping pills. She collects disability and watches Little House on the Prairie most of the day. Her son is fruit of her former addiction to cocaine and heroin. He’s fourteen, fatherless and malnourished, a skinny little kid way too small for his age. He has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder so severely that his legs and hands twitch when he speaks. He gets night terrors. His medication could sedate his entire class. He hates the drugs, refuses to take them, and that makes him violent and short-tempered. I watched him destroy a juniper bush with a pocketknife. He broke into the neighbor’s house and stole a piggybank. He came into my kitchen while I was mowing the back lawn and stole a box of cereal and a jar of icing. In the early hours of the morning, we hear him banging on the ceilings and the walls with a two-by-four he whittled into a sword. Through the heating vents, we hear his mother call him a little fucker, a dickhead, a shit. We shout for him to stop, but it is no use. He is filled with too much rage.

Before his mother bought her van, she used to come to our door once a day to ask for a ride, sometimes to borrow money. Now she comes up only to tell me I am her brother in Christ and that I need to be a father figure to her son. "He’s no picnic," she says. He’s not, and she’s not either, and I feel for them both. It is a situation that makes me want to be a Christian to her but shows me that I cannot. I have no money to give her, and I have less patience with her son. The best we can do is to bake them cookies and fudge, pack them in a tin, and leave it on their doorstep.

We come home from dinner to find her van in the center of the front lawn. The engine’s running, and she’s in the front seat. The dome light is on because the dash light is out. The steering wheel creases the center of her ballooned stomach. The headlights illuminate the path she cut across the snow trying to back out, our front kitchen windows splattered with ice and mud and dead grass. She tries to rev up and slam her way out, but it only bogs her farther down. She asks for my help. I take off my jacket and tie and push her out, enraged, yelling that the next time it snows, she damn well better park on the street.

Katherine goes inside and throws up. I find her lying on the bathroom floor, her skirt hiked above her knees.

Her sickness lasts the entire winter break, through Christmas Eve and Christmas morning and the heavy snow that falls for three days after. We make plans to snowshoe the Sunday after Christmas, but before we can go, Katherine gets sick again. She crawls to the sofa, shivers beneath a blanket. "You go," she says. "Enjoy the snow. I just need to rest a while." She waves me out the door with a limp wrist.

I drive up the canyon and then I shoe up the back side of a snowy Wasatch peak. I climb high enough to see the valley on one side and the Uinta Mountains on the other. Everything is white: the sky, the ground, the road, the Jeep. The snow is up to my waist. I feel clean, renewed. I run down the slope in big, moonwalker leaps, blissfully unaware of what’s beneath my feet.

Katherine is gone when I get back. I make a cup of tea to warm up. Snow is falling again and I worry where she went in sickness and without a car. I figured she trudged to the store for medicine, which worries me. After an hour, she’s still not home. I have no way to reach her. I shower, make another cup, and sit by the window. Finally I see her mother’s car pull up in front of the house. Katherine climbs out and kicks through the snow on the walk. "I felt better," she says. "So Mom came and we went for coffee."

"Oh," I say.

She goes into the bathroom with her purse. I hear the door shut. I hear the toilet flush. For a long time I hear nothing. Years ago Katherine suffered from bulimia. She can still make herself vomit in utter silence. For the four years we have been together, including the week of our honeymoon, I have watched the movements of her fork and mouth with a careful worry, unable to stop myself from reading her body for signs of an old woe. I stand by the door. I knock. "You okay in there?"

"I’m busy."

That does not satisfy me. I imagine her finger tickling the back of her throat, her body heaving and letting slide the small amounts of food she ate today.

"Just give me a minute," she says.

I lean against the wall opposite the door. When the door opens, her face is as white as the windowsill and her eyes are round and dark. I try to look past her to the toilet, but she blocks me by extending her arm. Between her body and mine is a pregnancy test, stained with two pink lines.

We look at one another, confused. She is on the pill. I ask if she missed one. She says she doesn’t think so. I look at the test box. It’s not a name brand. "In this case," I say, "we need to spend the money." We pull on our boots and gaiters, bundle up in our ski gear and hike through the hip-deep snow to the pharmacy. We talk to the pharmacist. He tells Katherine to stop the pill immediately. The hormones are not good for the fetus. I ask him, "Could the test have been a false positive?"

His silver hair is combed back over his head in straight glistening rows. He looks out of place in a Rite Aid. He belongs in an old-fashioned Woolworth’s, calling his customers by name, giving candy to their children, scooping out ice cream between prescriptions. It is nine o’clock at night, the night before New Year’s Eve, and I am on the verge of something that I cannot quite measure. Nostalgia is the balm of fear. There are just the three of us in the store; Christmas music plays soft and low over the PA system; all the red and green candy is marked down in big bins at the front. The pharmacist slaps a big hand over my shoulder and chuckles. "Not a chance."

Over the next months, as Katherine’s belly grows and our finances shrink, I return again and again to the time my father and I saw a family trying to shower at a gas station. A boy my age and a girl my sister’s age stood in their bathing suits beneath the water hose used to cool car radiators. Their mother beside them leaned earthward to massage shampoo through her long hair. Their Oldsmobile station wagon was full of clothes and cardboard boxes. A lot of people in Houston were out of work then, my father included. I can still see the fear in his face as he watched the family, stripped of even the dignity of bathing in private. I had seen plenty of homeless people wandering around downtown, half-lucid old men with unkempt beards and missing teeth waddling between doorways. This was the first family I had seen, and it showed me that poverty was often not the result of weakness, but of misfortune and often larger political machinations. Houstonians did not become collectively weak in the 1980s, rather the overseas oil markets sent the economy into a tailspin. I knew no man who worked harder than my father, yet the company he worked for had gone bankrupt. Eventually we recovered, but it took almost two more years, and by then my father had moved three states away with a woman who was not my mother.

The prospect of the same thing happening to us scares me. Though we live in a state famous for its love of babies and pregnant women, where families still begin right out of high school and continue to grow even after the oldest children have left home to start their own families, fatherhood scares me too. I don’t know how we’ll make it. I close ranks harder than ever. Our lives become governed by a thousand small economies. We pilfer the coupon inserts from our neighbors’ recycling bins rather than pay for the Sunday paper. I shower at the pool to cut down on water, leave my wet towels to dry over the shower rod rather than use the dryer. I stuff great handfuls of sugar packets stolen from coffee carts down inside my pockets, put them in a jar in the kitchen. Anything that can go back to the store goes. I return six-packs of soda and packages of unopened food to the grocery store. I return my instructor copies of books to the Barnes and Noble, and on Friday nights Katherine and I wander around the shelves, read magazines and What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and use our store credit for dessert at the Starbucks.

Despite my best efforts, I seem unable to stay ahead. The doctor’s family moves away and leaves Katherine without a steady income. She works every odd job she can, substitute teaching and office temping and, for two weekends, passing out juice samples at a grocery store. Her spring practicum requires her to have a cell phone, and the agency promises to pay for the phone and her gas, but it never does. A wedding, a funeral, and a parking ticket written exactly sixty seconds after the meter expired all cost us money we don’t have.

Once a week I dream about money, about our bank account reduced to nothing, a credit-card bill that debits even the oxygen in my lungs, bills I cannot afford to pay. I used to fall to sleep dreaming about surfing and sex and traveling, of surreal images of myself seated at a small table in a small café near a window while the street ambles past. Now I dream about the things I swore I would never want: healthy paychecks, economical hatchback gas-electric hybrid cars, a little house where the baby can sleep in peace and warmth. I wake up startled and worried, sometimes unsure of where I am. I walk around the house, pee, sit by the front window, read the Psalms, pray in the dark. On my way back to bed, I find Katherine curled up in an old quilt on the floor near the heater vent. For reasons I do not understand, the warm air across her face soothes her nausea. I scoop her up, carry her back to bed. I wrap myself around her, my arms and legs. I am afraid to be alone.

Katherine and the baby qualify for Medicaid. When I look up the maximum allowable income for a family of three, I see a number I wish I made. The Medicaid caseworker sends us across town to apply for a "nutrition program" for women, infants, and children. I don’t know what the program is, but given the fluctuations in Katherine’s diet and her struggles over food, I think it must be a good idea. We go to a clinic and wait for our name to be called in a large room filled with the homeless, the mentally handicapped, the undocumented, the poor. Babies crawl across the dirty floor in black-kneed pajamas, their filthy hands in and out of their mouths, their faculties of speech and mobility delayed by poverty, by hunger. Katherine used to see these children in the emergency room when she worked there. Much of her desire to become a social worker is predicated upon her desire to protect the health of these children. And here we are.

We are led into a room where a woman measures Katherine’s weight and height, pricks her finger, touches the sides of her belly. A second woman leads us into a second room, and we are given pamphlets on healthy eating during pregnancy and a recipe book for cooking beans. She circles the pictures of the vegetables, tells Katherine to eat all she can to prevent diseases like spina bifida. "Ever heard of that?" she asks.

Katherine nods her head. She works to hold her eyes fixed straight, away from mine. The woman presses a button on her keyboard and out of her printer spits a sheet of food stamps. "These will buy milk and cheese, beans and juice," the woman says.

"No vegetables?"

"Just beans. Green vegetables are too costly for the program to cover. So is peanut butter."

A part of me feels ashamed leaving the clinic with the food stamps, but more of me feels guilty. I feel like I have duped the state government into thinking we’re hungry. Haven’t I, as an American, always taken my food for granted? But as we walk around the grocery store, it begins to dawn on me that we really are hungry. We have come to the point at which we must decide which foods we need the most, which we can afford, which we can do without. Katherine puts Wheat Thins back on the shelf in order to buy enough yogurt and lunchmeat. We deny ourselves afternoon snacks for sake of the three main meals. We’re hungry in other ways too. We’re hungry for stability. As soon as one month is settled, we worry about the next. We hunger for movies and a pizza, a six-pack of beer and clothes to cover Katherine’s rapidly expanding stomach.

Katherine hands me a coupon for a free package of pasta and a tube of ground beef. "See if you can find these," she says. I look down at the pictures of the food the store is giving away and I feel like I have won the lottery. I wander the aisles, collect the pasta, the beef, then turn down the baby aisle. For the last months I have walked this aisle with a strange sense of belonging, two whole shelves of strange things about to fill my house. Now I feel staggered by the costs of babies. I always expected cribs and car seats and strollers and glider-chairs to be expensive. Those price tags do not surprise me. It’s the diapers that get me, how quickly infants go through them, how few come in a pack. The way I figure it, diapers alone run about twelve dollars a week, twenty if you buy the fancy brands. Then there are wipes and rash-creams, powder, special body washes and no-tears shampoos, lotions, oils, bottles, nipples, reduced-dosage cold medicines. I stop and stand back from the diapers, no-name pasta in one hand, no-name ground beef in the other, and I feel the full weight and grief of the hunger I have been trying not to admit. In the diapers I see not the miracle of childbearing, but an extravagance I cannot afford. And I am tortured by these thoughts.

The downstairs neighbors finally move out and leave behind a trail of wreckage. There are deep ruts in the lawn from the tires of the van, little specks of broken glass on the driveway and back porch from the nights the boy pounded on the storm doors with a broom-handle, then with his fists, then with his forehead. Scraps of paper and bottle caps and slivers of wood from their punished furniture fly out of the back of the pickup truck that hauls away the last of the loads. When the truck turns out of sight, we go down inside the basement and discover the source of the smell that has infected our house all winter. Food is smeared against the walls and baseboards, ground and stamped into the carpet; soda has been spilled and not cleaned up and has hardened in the circle where it landed. In the corner by the heater, a milk stain has soured and turned almost solid; it looks like a shovel could scoop it up. There are old fast-food wrappers and salsa and ketchup packets ripped open and oozing and stuffed behind the washer and the dryer. The fridge has turned an organic, lake-bottom green. The ceilings and the walls are filled with holes from a year’s worth of rages. The boy’s bedroom, tucked far back in the corner of the house, smells so overwhelmingly like urine that Katherine runs back up to the clear air with her hands clasped over her mouth. I wonder how anyone could live in such a smell.

The landlady considers selling. She wants me to sign an agreement to move out if the house sells to someone who decides not to rent it. Then she decides to fix it up and try renting it one more time. The carpet comes up and so does the linoleum. The fridge, the ceiling, the drywall, the faucets, the baseboards are all carted away. Cleaners come in and scrub the entire basement with undiluted pine cleanser, a smell so strong that even through the floors it makes us both sick. We open our windows to the night to let the air out, pile blankets on the bed and sleep with our bodies touching.

For the next month, the echo of saws and drills rattles the dishes in the cabinet and the glass top of the coffee table. Sawdust collects in little piles around the base of the heater vents. When it is finished, everything is new. The place is the nicest I have seen it. "It looks good," I tell the landlady. "The workmen did a nice job."

She’s in her seventies, a big white head of hair atop a big chest and disproportionately small legs. She asks us about the baby, pats Katherine’s tummy, tells us she loves us. She apologizes for renting the place to bad tenants and promises not to do it again. "Oh yeah," she says, sliding it in, "the utilities went up again, so we’re going to need to raise your rates." We pay our utilities with our rent, all in one check. When I first moved into the house with a roommate it seemed like a good deal. When Katherine and I re-signed the lease before we were married, the utilities went up fifty dollars. When I point this out, she says, "I know, son, but they went up again. You can call the utility companies if you don’t believe me." The rates went up in January and now it is March and she wants me to pay twenty-five more per month, retroactively from the first of the year.

I have seen this coming and a week ago I asked my neighbors how much they pay for their utilities. The family next door occupies the whole house; they have two kids and they run a business out of the basement. They say their total bill is just slightly over a hundred. They keep the house warm enough that even in winter they walk around in shorts. I crank down our thermostat each morning when we leave and each night when we sleep. I tell the landlady that the basement was occupied all day and I often saw the doors and windows left open during winter. "I don’t think they bathed much," the landlady says. "There were only two of them." There are only two of us and I shower at the pool. The landlady changes the subject to her recent hernia surgery. Then she changes back and tells us that she thinks we are "getting a pretty good deal" on our house. "This is the most exclusive neighborhood in the entire city," she says. The country club is a few blocks south, and there are some expensive homes over there, but our street is postwar cookie-cutter, small houses all built together in 1949. The couple on the other side of our house taught high school for fifty years. The man across the street is an alcoholic. I fight the landlady hard about it because twenty-five dollars is the last of our margin. And I can smell a scam. She had to pay three grand to renovate the basement and because we’re locked into our rent, she wants to use the utilities to recuperate it. With the extra dough, she can make back the costs of renovating in eighteen months. She says she is worried about her finances because she is on a fixed income. She has owned the house outright for more than thirty years, so her fixed income includes the entirety of our rent, the downstairs rent, her husband’s pension, and their social security. With their fixed income, they recently bought property in Saint George, Utah, and Star Valley, Wyoming, and a new motor home to shuttle between the two.

The landlady stomps her foot on the new linoleum. "Well, only increasing by twenty-five dollars a month is generous. Maybe you should cut back on a few things. If that doesn’t work, you can move out too. I know plenty of people who would pay a lot more for a place as nice as this."

On the last day of April, I watch our bank account drop below a hundred dollars, and Katherine picks me up crying. I ask if she has seen our account. She hasn’t. She’s been to the baby store and has seen the crib bedding that she wants. It’s the choice of celebrities, plush-thick and soft in just the way she imagined a baby’s bed. "I shouldn’t have even gone in there," she says. "That was my first mistake. My second mistake was imagining what it would be like."

She is crying so hard that she can barely drive. She nearly hits a car making a left turn in front of us, sending my hands to the dashboard, then to the roll-bar welded to the frame. "Jesus!" I yell.

"Oh please," she says, blubbering.

Broke and pregnant, we have become slaves to the patchwork visions of the mothers and fathers who precede us. Our friends have been generous with their hand-me-downs, and we love them for it, but these are not the things we imagined for our child, not our visions. When pregnancy was brand new and strange to us, we consoled ourselves by walking around the baby stores and watching the procession of fat, expectant women and milk-drunk infants slung against their mothers’ chests. Katherine would touch the tiny clothes and hold them against her chest and feel filled with mystery. Slowly, even that vision has been eroded by the reality of what has come to us by the grace of others. To be down to a hundred dollars and not accept whatever is offered would be more than rude; it would be irresponsible. So Katherine surrendered her vision for her child in sadness but without complaint when clothes, a stroller, a car seat, a rocking chair all came to us from our family and friends. Even when the girl she had hoped for turned during the ultrasound and showed us his penis.

For now, though, I can’t see any of this. By the time we get home, I am frazzled by her crying and the almost-accident. I tell her, "Don’t hold so tightly to the idea. They’re just sheets."

My words send her to the bedroom, the pillow. "They’re not just sheets. The baby should have some things his mother picks out. He shouldn’t have to be carted around in everyone else’s old stuff. That’s no way to start out in life."

"There are worse ways," I say.

"Look," she says, "the bedding is soft and light and so baby. It is like my wedding dress. It makes the whole thing. You don’t want it to, but it does anyway."

"Sheets are like your wedding dress? Sheets?"

Her cries are inconsolable. "They’re not just sheets. They’re everything. It’s everything."

"I’m sorry," I say. I try to go to her, to wrap my arms around her.

Katherine pushes me away. "I need some time," she says.

There is nothing else I can do but go for a run. I’m really more of a swimmer, but I have given myself the task of running a marathon before the baby comes. From the distance of winter it seemed like a good idea, a spiritual pain I could relish like I relish the pain of long swims. Running four days a week shows me I am wrong. I’m strongest in the shoulders and back; I have a low heart-rate; I like to be barefoot; I don’t like to be hot. Running is hot and it requires shoes. My feet turn outward, an asset in the water but the cause of sore knees and aching hips on the road. And Salt Lake is not a flat place. I either run uphill or down. If I run down, I have to run back up. All I do, it seems, is climb one hill after another.

Today I work my way down through the poplar-canopied streets of expensive homes that border the Salt Lake Country Club. I follow the west side of the golf course, divided from me by a chain-link fence, dip beneath the freeway, and head south along a busy road where there is a bike lane to run in. The last two days have seen rain, snow in the mountains. The peaks of Mount Olympus are streaked white against an iron-colored sky. The cold wind bites my bare thighs and neck and hands. I head south for four more miles, turn west and drop down to Highland Drive and wind back up into the neighborhoods where the absence of traffic leaves me free to look at the brickwork and the blooming tulips. But looking is dangerous too, because it makes me start to want, and my wanting is painful. It is as painful as the want for sex, for touch, for food. I run by my favorite house, a little blue and white cottage that looks small from the front, but from the side stretches back into a grove of cypress trees and drops into a ravine where there is a garden, a stepped rock wall filled with flowers, a wrought-iron bench between two shady pines, and a wet patch of lawn at the bottom out of reach from any van. I look upon the house with a longing not unlike the longing I felt the night I watched Katherine unfasten the tiny hooks on the back of her wedding gown.

I am past the house and starting my climb. I am listening to music. The light is almost exhausted and the temperature is dropping. I fold my hands inside my sleeves, zip the collar on my long johns and do all I can to not walk. My ankles are stiff, and I can think of little else besides dinner and getting warm. My hunger is fierce. I have been out for well over an hour, and hunger is deep inside my chest and belly and in the back of my throat. I am burning for food and for rest. I have two miles to go.

The music changes, and on comes "This Ain’t Living" by G. Love and Special Sauce. The music is up tempo and groovy, a rap beat and rap lyrics over a bluesy, jazzy sound, a trumpet and a piano and a guitar. It’s a sound to which I always felt I could not belong: East Coast, Philadelphia, blacktop basketball courts and subways, a world away from my western upbringing. But I also never expected to belong to hunger. And the song is about hunger, about people hungrier than I, but about my hunger too. So when it comes on, I turn into it, grit my teeth and hump up. I’m at the bottom of my last and steepest climb, a ball-breaker. G. Love calls out:

Don’t tell me about no game
Cause that is a man
And his family
Revolution family
Look at the family
Dig the family
They’re living the wrong way
Can’t get nothing
Don’t get nothing all they wanted was
Something like a job—mercy mercy....

My ankles throb, my arches crack, and I am climbing past a wide, white colonial, two cars parked on its circular driveway. The smell of the dinner cooking inside the kitchen hits me in the face and overwhelms me. But somehow the music moves me, helps to push me up the hill. I lose myself in the beat, in the thump-thump, thump-thump of the pain I am unable to articulate to myself. It’s not even words I’m hearing, just that thump, and it is a sound more intelligible than my entire winter of discontent. I pick up my knees and chug, working hard now, emptying my last reserves. The wind rushes through me, cold and wet from the canyon, strong enough that it pitches me into the road. I tuck my head to cut through it. I hold out my hands. I feel myself lift. I am all surface, no inside, transparent as a leaf. I get ahead of the wind and the wind pushes me up as I approach the top. I try to keep rising as G. Love sings I keep rising, but at the top I can go no farther. I double over and spit and gasp and dry heave. I have nothing in my stomach to lose. Acid leaves the corners of my mouth in thin, yellow streams. I walk in slow circles clutching my stomach. I hold my hand to the streetlamp and I see a muted flash, a light passing through my skin.

I find Katherine in the tub when I get home. She’s big and round and naked, the water unable to surmount her belly or her breasts. Our son is less than a season away. He kicks against her skin, little bounces that ripple the water, his first exertions against the world. She touches the rise of his foot and smiles. I peel off my shoes and socks, my top and my shorts. I am red from scalp to toes. I can feel my pulse in my fingertips. She bends her knees to make room for me. I reach for her belly as I sink my foot and watch as water spills over the side of the tub.