Four girls shake their heads, knowing so little about the pregnant body, about American history, about life after pregnancy when stares of wonder turn to pity, disgust.
One mentions the tenderness of her breasts as she lifts off the ground. Words slip from lips; the current gently eddies. The girl in the air is joined by two others, floating, balloons. They glow, lanterns above, more and more girls still, until the last one, full of grace, so round, leaves her tiptoes and lifts off the linoleum. In the air, the girls dip and reel. One turns giddy somersaults. Weightless, swimming. “Woo,” she might say. “That feels good.” Big as stars. Beautiful as a poisoned sunset and just as far out of reach.
“Anybody’s gums bleeding?” one asks.
“When I brush my teeth.”
“What about your ankles?”
“Take a look.” Five others breaststroke over to Liz’s feet. “Like elephants’!”
More giggling.
“Nothing’s the way I expected it would be,” one girl says. “It’s like, you know, when you’re talking on the phone and suddenly you can’t remember a word? You wait for the word to come, feeling it on your tongue. Yeah. I feel this little life, little death floating nearby. I just can’t say it yet.”
“Yeah,” the others answer. “Sure. Sure thing.”
“And this part”—Annie spreads her arms, the wonder, the weightlessness—“is the weirdest part of all.”
“Except for growing a tiny human inside your body.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty weird, too.”
“Anyone else still puking?”
A door slams down the hallway. Milkweed seeds in hoopskirts, the girls fall back to the ground.
“No. But French fries are still the only thing I can really eat.”
*
Eventually my non-boyfriend calls. His tanker’s come in. He says he’d like to see me.
Caplan’s been gone awhile now, so I collect my things. I’ve done my duty. I finger the nameplate on Caplan’s desk, hoping it will still be there in the morning. He doesn’t deserve to lose his job. It’s not his fault alone. Adolescent girls can be hard to understand. They are like an uncontacted tribe of humans. And maybe they should remain that way. Maybe we should collect all the adolescent girls in America and send them out to sea together. Eventually the rest of us would miss them so much we’d try harder to understand why they are the way they are and why we think such awful things about them. We’d realize how scared and wrong we’d been to think girls are made only of light things.
I head down to the water to meet my sailor. At the edge of the wharf I’m terribly small under the twilight sky, next to this much industry. For one moment I turn back. I wonder, What if the pregnant girls followed me here? What if they flowed behind me, streams, beautiful daughters, rivers making their way to the sea? And what if the flood of girls doesn’t stop at the water’s edge as I have? What if the girls, with the help of several strong longshoremen, load themselves onto an armada of waiting tankers, barges, ships, and tugs? What if they leave us? Poor King George without his colonies. What if they leave the land barren? I imagine the girls waving goodbye, trailing streamers, scarves, a few tears. Not just the thirteen, but all of them, all girls, everywhere. Hundreds, thousands, millions of girls. And what if I don’t stop them? What if the Coast Guard does nothing to guard the coast? What if I even patted the hulls on their way out into the gulf because I’m not sure we deserve girls yet? “Take care,” I might say. “See you.”
“When?” A fifteen-, maybe sixteen-year-old, would want to know.
I’d shrug. Who can say how long it will be before the rest of us understand girls? Deserve them? How long until it is safe.
“Okay,” she’ll say. “Okay.” She isn’t scared of anything. She’s off to populate new lands, a redo.
It’s terribly quiet by the water, and in the quiet it’s awful to know what it would sound like if, or once, the girls, our girls, leave us. Once they all harden up into non-girls.
Which really is just foolish thinking. It’s only quiet because the girls are home having dinner with their families, watching television in order to learn the popular ways of love.
My not-really boyfriend arrives with a sixer. He’s been in for hours, he says, nearly loaded. Clearly, this is a booty call. With the beer in hand we steal down the ladder onto the tanker. I’ve been here before, or on others just like this one. Big as hell and half of Texas. The ships seem too large to be man-made. Each step disorients me, because if men didn’t build them, what did? Monsters? Magicians? I just don’t know.
He wraps one arm around my shoulders. He’s greasy. That’s fine, comes with the job, a tankerman skilled in handling natural resources. We drink on the deck, kissing, fooling around, tiny things. Then we drink some more, stare out to sea.
“I can’t stop thinking about those girls,” I say.
“You can’t protect them.”
“Why not?”
“Well, what are you protecting them from? Boys?”
“No.”
“Then what?” He drives his thumb into his chin. “They’re not special. They’re girls. They’re not pure.” He rubs his head, scratches the grime there.
I tuck my knees, cross my ankles. “I know.”
He keeps on. “They’re doing the strongest thing they can think of. Murder, death—that’s easy. Birth? Not easy.” The loading ship gurgles. He pats my back. Sometimes he’s smart. “Your girls are just taking a nine-month dip into the infinite. They’ll be back in PE before graduation rolls around.” He lifts his bottle of beer and tips it to me. “Sounds like she’s just about full. Let me go check on the load and then we can get out of here. ’Kay? Half hour tops, ’kay?”
“Where are we going?” I ask, but he’s already gone and I already know. My bed, fast as we both can get there. Thank god.
There’s a rainbow in a puddle on deck. Oil or gas. Pink and blue and green shining in the pier lights. I stamp my foot in the puddle. I haven’t eaten since breakfast. Half an hour? Unlikely. It’ll take him longer than that to finish. I decide to acquaint myself with the galley.
Belowdecks I unlatch cabinets, poke around. I find a sailor’s small photo album. Pictures of siblings, some children on a green, green yard. I find a letter from home about painting pinecones with peanut butter and birdseed. I find some chocolate and English muffins. I turn to toast the muffins, and when I turn round again, a coastie, dripping wet and barefoot, is standing in the open hatchway. His stubble has some red in it, but he’s not tall, not threatening. He’s the sort of man a girl will look at and think, That’s cute, that’s some mother’s son. A good kid. His eyes are open wide, as if he’s been listening to ghost stories.
“You scared me. I thought everyone was gone,” I say. He’s drenched. “You need a towel?”
“Thank you.” He comes into the kitchen.
I find a stack of clean dish towels in a small hutch. “What were you doing? Swimming?”
“I fell in.”
“Tonight? In the dark?”
He nods.
“Holy cow. That’s scary.”
He buries his face in a dry towel.