Rations. This is where they are fifteen days before their first child’s due date. Fucking rations.
It’s an overcast, gray autumn late morning. More out of superstition than fear [at least, that’s what she tells herself], Natalie has turned the lights out in the house. With the bay window curtains drawn, the first floor is a cold galaxy of glowing blue, green, and red lights, mapping the constellation of appliances and power-hungry devices and gadgetry.
Paul texted fifty-seven minutes ago that he was almost inside the store but his phone was at 6 percent battery so he was going to shut it off to save the remaining juice for an emergency or if he needed to ask for Natalie’s “suggestions” [the scare quotes are his] once inside the supermarket. He is stubbornly proud of his tech frugality, insisting on not spending a dime to upgrade his many-generations-ago, cracked-screen phone that has the battery-life equivalent of a mayfly’s ephemeral life-span. Natalie cursed him and his phone with “Fuck your fucking shitty phone. I mean, hurry back, sweetie pie.” Paul signed off with “The dude in front of me pissed himself and doesn’t care. I wanna be him when I grow up. Make sure you don’t come down here. I’ll be home soon. Love you.”
Natalie closes the toilet lid and doesn’t flush, afraid of making too much noise. She washes her hands, dries them, then texts, “Are you inside now?” Her screen is filled with a list of blue dialogue bubbles of the repeated, unanswered message.
The radio announcer reiterates that if you are bitten or fear you’ve come in close contact with contaminated fluid, you are to immediately go to the nearest hospital.
Natalie considers driving to the supermarket. Maybe the sight of a thirty-four-year-old pregnant woman walking to the front of the ration line and dropping f-bombs on everyone and everything would get Paul in front of Piss Pants, into the store, and home sooner. Like now. She wanted to go with him earlier, but she knew her back, legs, joints, and every other traitorous part of her body couldn’t take standing in line with him for what they had assumed would be an hour, maybe two.
She’s mad at herself now, thinking she could’ve alternated standing in line and sitting in the car. Then again, who knows how far away Paul had to park, as his little trip to the mobbed grocery store is going on three hours.
She texts again, “Are you inside now?”
Her baby is on the move. Natalie imagines the kid rolling over to a preferred side. The baby always seems to lash out with a foot or readjust its position after she uses the bathroom. The deeply interior sensation remains as bizarre, reassuring, and somehow heartbreaking as it was the day she felt her first punches and kicks. She rubs her belly and whispers, “Why doesn’t he text me on someone else’s phone? What good is saving his battery if we have an emergency here and I can’t call him? Go ahead, say, ‘You’re fucking right, Mommy.’ Okay, don’t say that. Not for a couple of years anyway.”
Natalie hasn’t left the house in four days, not since her employer Stonehill College broke rank with the majority of other local colleges and closed its dorms, academic, and administrative buildings to students and employees, sending everyone home. That afternoon camped out at the kitchen table, Natalie answered Development Office emails and made phone calls to alumni who were not living in New England. Only four of the twenty-seven people she spoke to made modest donations to the school. The ones who didn’t hang up on her wanted to know what was going on in Massachusetts.
Natalie is jittery enough to pace the first floor. Her feet are swollen even though the prior day’s unusual heat and humidity broke overnight. Everything on or inside [thanks but no thanks, hemorrhoids, she thinks] her body is swelling or already in a state of maximum swollen. She fills a cup with water and sits on a wooden kitchen chair, its seat and back padded with flattened pillows, which are affectations to actual comfort.
The radio hosts read straight from the Massachusetts bylaws regarding quarantine and isolation.
Natalie sighs and releases her brown hair from a ponytail. It’s still wet from her shower earlier that morning. She reties her ponytail, careful to keep it loose. She plugs in her phone although the battery is almost fully charged, and then she hikes up her blue shirt-dress and sends a hand under the wide waistband of her leggings to scratch her belly. She should probably take off the leggings and let her skin breathe, but that would involve the considerable undertaking of standing, walking, bending, removing. She can’t deal with all the –ings right now.
Natalie opens the diary app on her phone, named Voyager. In her head she says the name of the app in French [Voyageur]; she says it that way to Paul when she wants to annoy him. She’s been using the app to keep a pregnancy journal. The app automatically syncs her notes, pictures, videos, and audio files to her Google Drive storage. During the first two trimesters, Natalie had been using the app every day and often more than once. She shared her posts with other first-time moms and caused an amused stir within that online community when instead of posting pictures of her weekly belly growth, she shared pictures of her feet accompanied by her own hilarious [at least she thought so] jokes about how quickly the twins were growing. Natalie slowed down using the app considerably in the third trimester and most of those entries devolved into a clinical listing of discomforts, the saga of the strange red pointillist dots appearing on the skin of her chest and face [including a regaling of her doctor’s shrug, and deadpan, “Probably nothing, but maybe Lupus.”], work grievances, and a litanylike reiterating of her fear that she’ll be pregnant forever. Over the last ten days, she has only mustered a few updates.
Natalie opts to record an audio entry, first marking it as private and not to be shared to those who follow her online: “Bonjour, Voyageur. C’est moi. Yeah. Fifteen days to go, give or take. What a terrible saying that is. Give or take. Say it fast and you can’t even understand it. Giveortake. Giveortake. I’m sitting alone in my dark house. Physical discomforts are legion, but not thinking about that so much because I’m utterly terrified. So I have that going for me. Wearing the same leggings for the fifth day in a row. I feel bad for them. They never asked for this. [Sigh] I should turn on a light. Or open the curtains. Let some gray in. Don’t know why I don’t. Fucking Paul. Turn on your goddamn—”
Her phone buzzes and a text from Paul bubbles onto the top of the screen. “Finally out. Bundles in the car. Be home in 5.”
She suppresses the urge to make fun of his actually typing the word “bundles.” Saying it is bad enough. She types, “Yay! Hurry. Be safe but hurry. Pleeeeze.”
She tells the smart speaker to turn down the volume until it’s inaudible. She wants to listen for Paul’s car. The empty house makes its empty-house sounds, the ones with frequencies attuned to imagination and worst-case scenarios. Natalie is careful to not make any of her own sounds. With her phone she checks online news and Twitter and none of it is good. She returns to Voyager and types a riff on her dad’s favorite saying: “A watched clock never boils.”