Straight No Chaser

Genius

"shannon, you're so funny." i get this one a lot. actually, it normally goes more like, oh my god, shannon, you're so funny. and it doesn't mean anything, because i don't trust your sense of humor, if you think i'm funny. and in fact i don't trust your opinion in general, honestly, if you overuse the phrase oh my god, which is really just a socially acceptable way of placing undue emphasis on every microscopic thing. my humor, if you can call it that, is mannish, stunted, heavily reliant on slapstick and scatalogy. i curse too much; people for some reason think that's funny. sometimes i get antsy and i drink, say, nine cups of coffee, can't control myself, behave badly. funny funny funny. people, my friends, laugh the hardest when i'm imploding. yeah. every "fuck" is a little implosion. not to be taken lightly, though they invariably are. it's funny that a privileged little white girl in a black girl's body could feel anything but privileged and terminally happy. i'm so funny.

"shannon, you're so smart." no, i'm the luckiest stupid person alive. right place, right time, every place and every time for twenty years and seven months. elementary school: prolific reader, good ideas, spotty grades because i could only manage to pay attention for maybe twenty minutes a day. middle school: standardized test wizard, socially retarded. high school: bad at EVERYTHING, good grades in the classes i cared about, because i cared about them; elsewhere, death. now: insanely, ridiculously, pathetically and consistently stupid. i have been making the same two mistakes for the better part of three years. i am theoretically good at everything but i choke in the clutch. i recognize patterns and i repeat them. i write well because i think in straight lines. comma, period.

"shannon, you're such a good listener." sorry, what did you say? i was busy tuning you out and nodding at all the right times.

"shannon, you're so loving." this is true, and i wouldn't wish it on anybody. i don't want to love anybody. it's an ugly muscle spasm that no relaxant can control. it's an achilles heel forever exposed because i always wear flip-flops. i love marcus more every time he (accidentally) hurts me, and in quantities that increase proportionate to the extent of the hurt. i went back and added "(accidentally)" because that's my instinct, to defend his honor at the expense of my common sense. i hold his head in my lap and spell hexes in his hair, passive-aggressively getting him back for tying my life in knots. i hate idealistic love and i embrace disgusting realism. i let people get away with everything because look at me, i'm a sapling, i bend and bend and bend but don't snap, and i'd rather see anyone else happy than see myself middling. aaron hopes my uterus is big enough to bear all these babies i'm promising to everyone. i hope it is, because if it's not, i'll do it anyway, and bleed to death.

"shannon, you're so thin." I DON'T EAT ANYTHING. i don't eat ANYTHING. i eat tofu and sprouts, rabbit food, and i enjoy them, but it's not good genes, and it's not a miracle, and i'm sure i will be perfectly OBESE eventually when i cave and start eating hot dogs again, thank you very much.

whew. that was fun. now i'm going to eat some oatmeal with my silver spoon, read about how everyone's life is worse than mine and thank god, like i do every day, that i live in solitude atop this pedestal, rather than down on the filthy nasty ground with the rest of the proletariat. i bet i spelled that wrong. watch my identity slither out of my ears. which, by the way, are perfect, two of my few actually perfect features, and i'm not being sarcastic.

**********

He likes to make her blush. He knows what she said about Antarctica, week four, day three, when they sat by the ocean and played the "what would you do" game. He knows if she had to obliterate a continent, wipe it clean from the map, Antarctica would go first, no hesitations. He knows that's half the reason she likes Wal-mart so much. Weapons of mass destruction, down there in the bottom somewhere. An endless supply.

She likes to keep things neat. He likes to make her blush.

*

"Ahoy," she says sleepily, waking to the feel of his fingertips drumming on her belly.

"Behold," he commands, helping her into a sitting position. "I'm a genius," he says, showing her the contraption. "It shoots stuff," he informs her, demonstrating. A pebble flies, zing, from the rubbery tether stretched tight across the prongs of the stick, flies not in an arc but in a quick, straight line, striking the highest branches of a nearby tree. A coconut wiggles and falls, lands in the sand with an almost musical splat. "Now that's sexy," he says pensively, hands on hips, staring at it.

She frowns, dizzy, thinking.

"You can go back to sleep," he says now, suddenly shy. "I just wanted to, you know." He leans over to kiss her cheek, shoves his free hand in his pocket and walks off carrying his slingshot.

She doesn't go back to sleep. She stands and staggers to the spring, nauseous and blurry-eyed.

*

She's proud of him, she really is. She thinks he might have been an inventor in another life, the frequency and intensity of his ideas suggest as such, ideas that work and ones that don't, but each one as carefully thought-out as any that reach the U.S. patent office, she's sure.

She used to have good ideas too. Back home, she used to get bored easily, entertain herself by coming up with impossible situations, purely for the enjoyment of reasoning her way out of them. She thought about islands a lot. She imagined it'd be easy to escape a desert island. Some thick wood, the sinew from some tame woodland creatures, and bang, a raft. And if that didn't work, a giant piece of metal, to reflect the sun's rays, catch the attention of passing planes. And with that and a thousand other possibilities exhausted, just sit back and enjoy the solitude, she figured. Sit contemplating in the sand. Write and draw endlessly.

She had similar idealist views on childbearing. Husband, she figured. Doctors. Vitamins, god damn it. Finally, an excuse to gain some weight.

Why isn't she gaining weight?

She's got this, she's got this belly, this perpetually increasing desire to sit down. She doubts she's any heavier, though, but that's not fair, she's been choking down the birds, eating fruit and bizarre island ruffage (Aaron makes salads now, using everything that isn't poison ivy), skipping the seafood because she's deathly afraid of the mercury. But she's still tiny; she sees her reflection in the spring and cringes, and Aaron says he can't tell at all, from behind. He thinks that's a compliment.

She wants growth, she wants movement. She likes it very much, when the cords in Aaron's throat buzz against her skin, familiarizing their creation with the cadence of his speech, but she wants response, she wants sound.

Pregnancy is too quiet.

*

Some of these good ideas used to be hers. Not her job, anymore. She carries the child, he furnishes their expansive but confined world with sophisticated hand-crafted technology.

He heard the coconut too, when it fell. But he had the idea, and she didn't.

*

They are lined up in a row, sixteen of them, halved and hollowed and ordered by size, balanced and tied onto a thin slat of bark. He's shirtless when she comes to sit by the fire, his face is dirty, and in the dark he looks like a witch doctor about to perform a ritual on his collection of shrunken heads.

"She needs music," he says, cupping the coconuts at the end of the row, the two smallest. "She's going to be brilliant, babe. We just have to help her get there. And we've got to work with what we have."

(Funny, how he's transitioned from referring to the baby in masculine terms--"Son grow up strong"--to this, always she, reminding Shannon just how unfair it is not to know. She always expected to know, by now.)

He cracks his knuckles and takes hold of a thick stick. "She listening?" he asks, dead serious.

She rubs gently. Listen, she commands without speaking.

He raps the largest coconut with his stick. It's been ages, but she recognizes the clear, uncomplicated vibration of middle C.

He raps the next, C sharp, and the next, a beautifully flat D. Her heart leaps.

"Xylophone," he says, unnecessarily, taking her hand. "She's going to be a genius."

*

She has to laugh, watching him dance as she raps out the melody to "Land of 1,000 Dances." Watching him writhe to "Stairway to Heaven." Watching the light bulb appear, bright and glowing over his head, watching him run off and return with a bottle full of multicolored Tums. He shakes, they rattle, music and laughter roll out onto the waves.

*

After she falls asleep, he curls up beside her, touches their miraculous curve, sings softly, something he hasn't performed in ages, something he misses. Shannon sleeps on, but something stirs, just noticeably, beneath his hand.