BOUNDARIES

“Hello.” The voice is faint, but Mags hears it distinctly. First she thinks it’s in her head. Then she realizes it’s coming from her uterus. It starts out sporadically, sometimes garbled, but as the days and weeks pass, it becomes clearer and clearer.

“Hello! I know you can hear me!”

Mags knew she was pregnant as soon as it happened, although she’d peed on six home pregnancy tests to be sure.

“How long you going to ignore me?” asks the baby at six weeks.

“As long as I can,” she says.

The baby, tired of being ignored, begins to sing. “Could be!” sings the baby. “Who knows? There’s something due any day; I will know right away, soon as it shows. It may come cannonballing down through the sky, gleam in its eye, bright as a rose!”

Impressed, Mags says, finally, “You get that from me, you know.”

Petro, who is probably her best friend (but does it count if they are no longer speaking?) and whom she’s always slept with when she felt like it, doesn’t know about the baby; she stops sleeping with him when she starts getting fat and doesn’t return his calls, although he continues to call once a week to see if she’s changed her mind. He is faithful and she is fickle, but what can she do about that? They met at the bookstore where she clerks. He bought her a sandwich from the café every day for a week before she would let him sit with her while she ate. And even then it was only because he had finally gotten it right: pastrami and roast beef on rye with extra mustard.

Mags’ father used to look like Santa Claus. He has a ruddy face and white hair and a big, bushy white beard. One time at the mall, when they were buying new school shoes for Mags and her brother, they were approached by an official-looking man who asked her father if he would consider stepping in as Santa Claus for a few weeks in December; the old Santa Claus had been hired for a television show.

“There can be more than one Santa?” said Mags.

“Told you, chump,” said her brother, Myles.

The man called a week later to tell Mags’ father that he had found another replacement, someone without a Greek accent. He apologized, saying it was amazing, the two men could be long-lost brothers, and then he thanked Mags’ father for his time by sending them some mall coupons which required spending money that Mags’ father did not have.

After his heart attack, he stopped eating red meat and started walking three miles every day. Now he looks like a skinny version of Santa Claus. He has always rested his hands on his belly but now that it is gone and his hands fall together in his lap.

“So, Magdalena,” says her father over lunch, at week eight. “So, you are having a baby.”

Mags, who hadn’t yet told him, says, “I don’t know yet. I haven’t decided.”

Mags loves ice cream, but it makes her fart. Once her belly starts to grow, she begins to eat as much of it as she can. She has ice cream every day, sometimes several times a day—big, heaping servings, and then whole cartons, thinking of how it will be better when she looks pregnant instead of just fat. She stops worrying about how much of it she’s eating and how it makes her fart, even though the baby tells her the dairy is just “too much” and requests that she switch to soy-based desserts.

Then the doctor tells Mags that one glass of red wine a night is better for the baby than being stressed. So she has that too, nightly, and most days she eats fried chicken and spaghetti and meatballs, her all-time favorites. Trusting that most American doctors are overly prudent, Mags drinks at least the one glass of red wine—for her heart—but sometimes it’s more like three or four.

Mags looks twenty-two, but she is thirty-four. There is a cluster of little black spots on her right iris that aren’t noticeable unless you’re very close. In the right light, she can look like a movie star with her sculpted, feminine features. But her teeth are a little too small and slightly crooked, with an off-center gap, preventing her from being a knockout, although people generally agree that she is nice to look at.

There are four holes in Mags’ right ear and two in her left ear. She stopped wearing earrings a long time ago, but the holes won’t close up. Her hair is black, stick-straight, and glossy, with bleached-white ends that whisper and crinkle like a taffeta skirt. She’s tall—long-limbed and lanky—and she’s never been fat before, so this whole pregnancy thing has really thrown her for a loop.

The main problem, though, is that Mags has difficulty making decisions under pressure. She’s not sure whether she wants a baby or not, and whether she should tell Petro, so until she can decide about that, she stops talking to him. It’s too late to not have the baby, but there’s always giving it away.

Mags thinks she might be braver, smarter, better, if she kept the baby, but she’s scared. The baby has become attached to Mags. It tells her it doesn’t want to be given away and promises to be good, which makes Mags mad. The baby is making things hard.

Magdalena Papahajapolous is Mags’ real name. She doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life. Two summers ago, she went to Reno with her father and won the largest sum ever paid out from a slot machine in the history of the casino. She had put four dollars worth of quarters, leftover from laundry, into the machine. It was the very last one in the roll that won the prize. There was an embarrassing photo of her in the Reno Gazette-Journal. After that, Mags quit her job as a bookstore clerk. Two weeks later, she went back. Now she is a bookstore clerk three days a week.

Mags bites her nails and chews on the splintered skin at the ends of her fingers.

She is always late.

She is afraid of traveling.

Things that Mags has shoplifted: eye shadow, gum and a box cutter.

She rides her bike everywhere and lives by herself in a one-room apartment.

Mags thinks that kissing with tongue is disgusting; she has an aversion to saliva, even her own. “It’s slimy,” she explains to the baby. “I can’t do snot, either. You better not be a snotty baby.”

The baby is silent.

“I don’t know how to talk to you,” she says.

“That makes two of us,” says the baby.

At week twelve, the baby tells Mags that it’s time to tell Petro.

“You’ve had time to adjust,” it says, and then offers, “We can do it together.”

“No. Absolutely not,” says Mags.

Mags’ father doesn’t approve of Petro, but he would if Petro asked Mags to marry him. She thinks about what it would be like to marry Petro, but it is laughable. When they first met, he told her he thought she was very fashionable. She thought this was charming, since he so clearly believed it, and she so clearly was not. He is shorter than her by eight inches, and Mags doesn’t like the way things line up in bed. She also doesn’t like how he needs to touch her all the time, even in sleep—a single toe pressing up against the back of her calf, or more. He is always encroaching. During the day, he wears tube socks.

She figures that he must have grown tired of saying the same things every week to her answering machine, because now he calls and reads passages from the books he’s reading. Usually it’s the beginning of a chapter. He reads until the machine beeps. Sometimes he calls back if the machine cuts him off in the middle of a good part. Mags has thought about talking to Petro, but she likes these new messages; she’s learning a lot about local history and the Civil War and endangered species. Luckily, she has a very old answering machine, the kind with tapes, and by week twenty-five, she has a freezer bag full of tapes. When she runs out, she joins her father for his morning walk and they pick up more at the electronics store on the way home.

“Magdalena,” says her father, “why all these tapes? Why don’t you just pick up the phone? Don’t you want to know what happens to those rodents?”

The baby talks to Mags about all kinds of things. The baby and Mags argue about politics, the environment, music. It knows more than Mags about almost everything. She is always asking the baby to tell her knock-knock jokes; the baby is really good at them.

For months, Mags and the baby argue about the merits of veganism.

“Jesus Christ,” says the baby one night, interrupting its own explanation of plant-based protein, “are you eating a steak right now?”

Mags and the baby have great conversations when they’re drunk. The drunker the baby gets, the more articulate it becomes. Mags finds this remarkable. “You get that one from me, too,” she says.

One night, the baby convinces Mags to “go green.” She agrees to this, although she doesn’t know what the hell the baby is talking about. “I like green,” she says.

Mags asks the baby if it thinks she should become a lesbian, and the baby guffaws, tells her people don’t just “become” lesbians”. But after a moment, it agrees that she should consider it. “Why not,” says the baby. And then, after another pause: “No. You would be a lousy lesbian.”

Mags tells the baby that she used to be called Maggie, and when she was a little girl she had a babysitter named Aggie who had saggy boobs. That the kids at the high school Aggie went to called her “Baggy Aggie.” So, she says, I told everyone to stop calling me Maggie and start calling me Mags.

“But your breasts aren’t baggy,” says the baby.

At week twenty, Mags decides to treat herself to a nice dinner. She can’t stop eating, and she’s sick of eating on the couch by herself, so she waddles down to the Italian café down the street. She orders a glass of wine from the waiter, who takes her order and disappears. Then the manager of the restaurant comes to her table and tells her that he cannot legally serve alcohol to a visibly pregnant woman. Mags tells the restaurant manager that she isn’t pregnant and then throws a glass of water in his face.

“Your water broke,” she says.

The baby laughs. “Good one,” it says.

Mags’ mother died when she was born. Her brother, Myles, is two years older than her. Their father made her bathe with Myles until they were both far too old for it, just to save on the water bill. They would sit there with washcloths in their laps, ignoring each other until it was time to get out. One time, Myles told Mags that she killed their mom when she was born. That night, Mags snuck into his room while he was sleeping and tried to stab him in the heart with a pencil. But he was sleeping with his hands laid across his chest like a corpse, like a vampire. The tip of the pencil broke off under his skin. When they see each other now, he’s always dangling his hand in front of her, flaunting that faded gray lump.

“A-hole,” says the baby every time they see Myles at her father’s house.

The first time Mags got drunk was at Christmas dinner with her father, with Myles away at college. Her father talked about her mother, his eyes shining, saying she’d been so pretty that she had one suitor coming in the front door while another went out the back door.

“And she picked me,” he said. “Me.”

Mags goes to her father’s house for dinner. In the bathroom, she hears her father talking to someone else, a man. When she cracks open the door, she can hear Petro thanking her father. She shuts the door and locks it. First her father asks her to come out, and then Petro asks her. Her father leaves and then it is just Petro. Mags and the baby don’t come out until Petro is gone. She makes two plates without speaking to her father and then walks home.

Mags has slept with nineteen men and two women. Boyfriends and other men she has slept with have told her that she has a very nice natural smell. One time, when she was a cocktail waitress, the drummer in a band whose lead singer used to be famous hit on her. He was number twelve. At least five men have been in love with Mags, including Petro. Although most people consider her to be a very kind person, and people like to be around Mags, she doesn’t have any close friends. Mags has thought about pursuing friendships, but people are complicated and friendships can be uncomfortable.

When Mags’ due date comes and goes, the doctor tells her that they’ll have to induce if the baby is any later than two weeks.

“Hear that?” says Mags, once they leave the doctor’s office. “They’re gonna come in after you.”

“Listen,” the baby says. “I don’t give a shit. Let them come in. I’m staying in here as long as possible. It’s good for my development.”

“The doctor says you’ll get too big.”

“Doctor says, doctor says,” says the baby. “Let’s have a drink.”

The baby loves movie musicals, so Mags has been watching a lot of them lately, especially because she is so big she can no longer ride her bike and so tired she can barely do anything but sit on the couch and eat. Last week, they watched West Side Story; the baby had insisted, saying, “I can’t believe you’ve never seen this,” and then it sang along, every single line, with perfect pitch. Or at least the baby told her it was perfect pitch. She had to agree, it sounded pretty good. “I’m a tenor,” said the baby, “like Tony.” The baby also insisted that they watch La Bohéme before Rent, which is the only one she wanted to see in the first place. The baby gets upset when she falls asleep and starts kicking her. “Oh, for Chrissakes,” says Mags.

The doctor’s office is sterile and white. Mags has hemorrhoids; she shifts back and forth on the paper-covered seat.

“Is it cold in here?” she asks the baby.

“You better name me soon, or they’ll call me something ridiculous. ‘Baby Papahajapolous,’” says the baby, in a mocking falsetto. The baby is getting a little theatrical, even for Mags’ tastes.

“You’ve never had to make up your mind about anything, have you?” asks the baby.

Mags doesn’t respond.

“I asked you a question, Maggie.”

“You are not allowed to call me that.”

“See?” says the baby. “Now you remember how important names are.”

“Fine. Choose it yourself, then.”

The nurse walks in.

“Hello, dear. How are we feeling today?”

“One of us is feeling ornery,” says Mags, pointing at her belly. The baby kicks her.

“Oh dear,” says the nurse. “Well, have you decided what you’re going to name the little one yet?”

“Zeus,” says the baby.

“Zeus?” says Mags.

“Isn’t that interesting,” says the nurse.

“No, not Zeus.” Mags looks down at her belly and points one finger toward the ceiling and slices the air with it. “Absolutely not. I take it back—you don’t get a say, you little shit.”

“Alrighty,” says the nurse, her rubber soles squeaking as they carry her out the door.

Mags decides it’s time to tell Petro. “There’s one condition,” she tells the baby, “you can’t say anything when he’s here.”

The baby is elated. “Papa!” it cries. Then to Mags: “I give you my word.”

When she opens the door, Petro says, “You’re huge.”

“Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m pregnant.”

She cuts up a banana over the top of a bowl of chocolate ice cream. They share it.

“It’s soy,” she says.

“It’s different,” he says. “I like it.”

When Petro puts the banana peel in the garbage, she makes him take it out and put it in the compost.

“I’m green now,” she says.

On the couch, looking at Petro, who seems shorter than she remembers, Mags has never felt so huge. Her hands are stacked in a neat pile on her lap. He is sitting next to her, propped up with one leg underneath him so that his face almost reaches hers.

“Okay,” Mags says, “just get in there and move around a bit.”

“This is weird,” says the baby.

“Boundaries!” it screams. The baby kicks Mags as hard as it can.

And then, relenting, it says, “Okay! Truce! I’ll come out!”

By N. A. Jong