Instructions for Swingers

The wife is pregnant; this is a surprise. If there was more time, maybe I could figure out what it means, but right away she’s on me with a “Hi, it’s so nice to meet you.” We embrace like adult cousins meeting for the first time, then I step back and behold her green eyes and waves of brown hair, the art-market necklace that rests on her collarbone. Her belly could be a prosthesis, but would this make the situation better or worse? Because it is a situation, I’m understanding. This woman is clearly a different species of being. As she turns to Beau, they laugh, nervous and cute, before hugging. Her name is “Zoe.” She will name her baby Amethyst. She will give birth to a human gemstone.

Already, I have so many questions.

The husband, “Roger,” stands close like a barrier reef. Zoe pulled him from the sea and molded him into this long-torsoed human to protect her from storms. He draws me in and with a massive palm rubs a circle into my back, his wood-spice cologne already clinging to my shirt. My stomach tumbles. Maybe not. Maybe we shouldn’t. But now a wicker basket appears with a pile of poker chips inside, and we each take one like it’s the most natural thing a person could do. We place our phones in the basket. I try to catch Beau’s eye but he’s already checking out the house, his smile dialed up extra bright. 

“You have a beautiful place,” he says.

The Connors beam as they lead us through a sparsely furnished room where a sleek sofa faces a picture window, the view too dark to see. Roger stops near a series of framed photographs on the wall, black and whites of a lone house on a hill. “We stripped it down to 1930 and restored it from there,” he says. For an appropriate amount of time, we pretend to care. 

The grandfather clock in the corner reminds us that we’re ten minutes late because Beau couldn’t decide which shirt to wear, whether the red one was too aggressive, whether the brown one made him look like he should be out delivering packages. By the time we got in the car he’d settled on gray. He drove tensely as he went over the instructions I’d neglected to read because I’d decided it would be best to know as little as possible. 

“Tonight your name is Helen and you’re a librarian.” 

“You’re serious?”

“Don’t look at me. I can’t explain what other men want.”

“A librarian? The husband picked this?”

“Yes. Which you would know already if you—”

“Who chose the name?”

“I had to do it for you. You’re Helen Greene. With an ‘e.’”

“I hate it.” 

Beau’s laugh was choppy and high-pitched but somehow it matched his gray shirt and his tidy new haircut, the bad edges he’d trimmed off to mark the end of his fiftieth year of life. 

“What did the wife ask for?”

“An ‘easygoing yet confident idealist’. Go ahead. Guess my name.” 

“It’s two last names, isn’t it? Backwards-forwards mixy-matchy? Like … Warren Martin.”

“So close. Mitchell Owen.”

“We middle-aged librarian types are good at guessing things. It’s one of our many talents.”

“That’s the spirit.”

*   *   *   

The Connors’ dining room table is set for four: white dinnerware, hyper-bleached cloth napkins, a red dahlia floating in a bowl of water. Beau said the other couple would be like us, similar enough where it mattered, but I can’t come up with an equation that would make us equal. I can’t understand what variables in what order have led us here.

We eat slowly: grilled sockeye, mixed greens, red potatoes heavy on the dill. We chew each bite for longer than we need to and ask open-ended questions. We nod and say oh really? and isn’t that interesting? Roger’s voice is deep. His laugh is a sonic boom. Big Roger. Ha. He’s a pair of thick-framed glasses and dark hair gone nearly white, an untamable mane of it. I’m not sure about his face. He looks human. He has all the parts a person is supposed to have. He tells us he’s a corporate vice president who doesn’t fit the mold. Is he improvising or did Beau pick this for me? The anecdotes he tells us sound rehearsed, like he’s played this character before. Every so often he glances at his forearm and grabs his wrist. A missing watch, we learn. It belonged to his father and before that his father’s father, and in eighteen years he was hoping to pass it down to his own son.

Zoe rubs her belly bump. “It’ll turn up,” she promises. 

Beau agrees—“These things always do”—and everyone smiles like we’ve all just saved a child’s life.

If someone put me on the spot, maybe I could have guessed that Beau would dream up a therapist as his partner for the evening. When Zoe talks about her job, he nods enthusiastically. “Listening to people,” he says, “like, really listening—wow, what a skill.” Zoe offers him prayer hands in response, a long blink of her alarming eyes. Colored contacts, probably. Because Beau asked for green. He asked for a good listener and conversation by candlelight.

He asked for pregnant?

After forty minutes of trying to read between the lines, of trying to fit the obvious between lines that don’t exist, it’s my turn to talk. Except it isn’t me. It’s Helen Greene the punch line. Helen Greene the librarian who reads spicy books and organizes her fantasies by card catalog. Do one or two of them involve running my hands through Roger’s full head of hair and letting him throw me around like a mannequin? Maybe my eyes say yes. Maybe it’s the tilt of my head and my barely disguised statements. “The last twenty years have not been kind to libraries. The golden era of book lending is over and yes, it’s been a struggle, but we still have so much to offer. You’d be surprised.” 

By now we’re all on our second glass of sauvignon blanc, the last one we’re allowed. If I’d read the instructions I would have known this, but whatever. I’m on a roll now, talking about library spaces for children and literacy programs. “Summer reading book bingo,” I hear myself say. Roger’s mouth does something delicious. Beau looks pale. Zoe I avoid because maybe what I really want is to follow her to some back bedroom, curl up next to her kicking belly, and tell her why I hurt. 

*   *   *   

It sneaks up on you. History turns into tragedy and the husk of it stays with you. I realized this several years ago when my father died and I went back home and saw how much my mother missed him. The old trailer was where it had always been but two others had joined it, the group of them pushed into a rickety huddle like animals at a feeding trough. My mother introduced me to a couple who’d moved in when my father was sick: a skeletal woman with bottle-black hair and a man with a leg that hadn’t healed right after a break. He was “a godsend,” good with sheet metal and wiring and leaky roofs. They had a child with a sweet face and hair like straw and a couple of goats in a pen that looked like it wouldn’t survive the next storm.

“She’s a free spirit,” my mother said of the girl. “Like you used to be.” Then she told me about a woman who’d been by a few months earlier—a photographer or an author or something along those lines who’d interviewed them about “life and such,” then stood outside with her fancy camera and took picture after picture while the girl slept in the pen with the goats. Maybe I was supposed to be delighted. Maybe a free spirit would have been.

We weren’t there long before Beau needed some space and dragged a lawn chair away from the rest of us, then sat there sweating through his funeral suit while he looked up hikes on his phone. My mother said she’d heard panic attacks were hereditary, and I wasn’t sure if this was a warning or a consolation, if she suspected we’d been secretly trying for a baby. She patted my arm, soft like a mother does when she has more to say but has learned when to stop. 

At the hotel, Beau told me it wasn’t my fault she refused to move, that we’d offered her options and so had my sisters. She was tough, and she wasn’t alone, and we could still help from eight hundred miles away. I told him I was going to bring back my father’s old flower garden, the one he’d planted for the butterflies. Dig it out and start over. 

“It died because they stopped watering it. As soon as you leave it will die again.”

“That’s not the point.”

*   *   *   

At 8:30, after the dishes have been cleared, an alarm clock sounds out a gentle chime. Each person who wants to proceed with the evening will place their poker chip on the table. I look at Beau. There is still time for one of us to rescue the other, but instead we are anteing up to fuck.

What was it Beau told me in the car? “Healthy exploration of healthy desires leads to healthy growth.”

Growth of what, though?

His chip. My chip. We don’t turn back.

As he and Zoe stand, I notice the pink of his cheeks, his hot-necked embarrassment, and the way his eyes avoid me. His discomfort nudges me, makes me straighten my spine as they head off through a doorway and down a set of stairs. Fine. I’ll be healthy. I’ll be up for exploration and desire. I’ll be the gracefully aging librarian who organizes her sex toys by Dewey Decimal number and has a tattered copy of the Kama Sutra on her bedside table. Roger will be the Great Barrier Reef: hard but fragile and a couple of decades past his prime. When he laughs, his eye crescents disappear behind his dark-framed glasses. Big frames, big frame. Ha ha. 

We have wordplay. We have size matters. 

“Let me know when you’re ready,” he says.

I smile. “Show me your library.”

He leads me to a room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a chair, a bed, a window with red-and-orange curtains, sexy and slutty and planetary, like Venus and Mars. As we stand facing the books, he untucks his shirt and I feign interest in his World War I shelf, his World War II shelf, his Kesey and Salinger and Castaneda and other-men-of-a-certain-era shelf.

“I’m losing this room,” he laments. “The books are moving to the basement and these shelves won’t fit, so … Tomorrow they go. The baby’s room needs light.”

“Well, of course.”

He laughs. “So we can cover the window with blackout shades. For a baby that’s not even mine.”

“Oh.” There’s a strange taste in my mouth, a dizzy rush of confusion and adrenaline. “Oh, wow. I didn’t know.”

Roger dims the light and comes up behind me, massages my shoulders with his huge fingers and palms.

“We always take precautions, of course, but the father’s a stranger. Zoe says we don’t need to know his name—just think of him as a sperm donor.” He turns me around, brings our faces close. “But all of this responsibility. It gets to me. Like there’s not enough air to breathe. Like I’m trapped.”

“You hear stories all the time, though. Unexpected joy. Changed men. Maybe that’s who you’ll be.”

He touches my cheek, like I’m a doll or a daughter. “I don’t need eighteen years of that, not now.”

“You don’t have other kids?”

“No.”

“Neither do we. None at all.”

He nods, as if to say see?, as if I might appreciate the coincidence of it, his hands at my waist and exploring my sides, my arms, my shoulders, my hair. “You’re lucky,” he tells me. “You can do whatever you want. Nobody else’s success to worry about. Lately I’ve been thinking about—I don’t know—those shipping containers people turn into homes. That’s the kind of simplicity I want. Find an empty piece of land and just … live. All that time to sit and think.”

By now he’s laid me out on the bed. I stare into his face and, after a brief attempt to shape him into my dream man, I give up and close my eyes. 

And where is Helen Greene? Why can’t I find her?

*   *   *

There really was a book. Photographs of not only the goat girl but my mother, too, my father a few weeks before his death, the skeleton woman and the limping man. Notes from America, its many faces and the landscapes they inhabit. The yellow tinder cheatgrass, the crumble-brown earth. For a long while these unproductive plains had been deemed worthless but in the end it was the air itself that the power companies wanted, and so they offered a little money in exchange for looming turbines and fractured sunlight and the hollow sound of rotors slicing the air. As far as I could tell, the book’s thesis was something like not every run-down trailer is a meth lab, or maybe impoverished people have the biggest hearts. There was a picture of my mother standing next to her peeling mural with that wind-blasted look about her: Why would I leave? This place is a love story. I thought she was being dishonest about what she loved, but in every picture her smile was authentic and unconditional and alive.

A few years later I went back to help figure out her finances. The goats were gone and the girl was thirteen or fourteen and had a boyfriend who looked thirty-five. I tried not to scratch too far beneath the surface, because not every depth is dark and I wanted to keep believing that, and anyway, who was I to say anything? My mother was twisted into arthritic knots, but every day she sat in the sun, doubling down on her investment in the sky.

Swish-thump, swish-thump, swish-thump. 

“They have services in the city, Mom. They can help.”

Swish-thump, swish-thump, swish-thump.

“The city? Please. If you’re not going to listen to what I have to say, then leave.”

She’d been watering the new butterfly garden, though. This she kept.

*   *   * 

My mother would laugh if she could see me now. Unbuckling Roger’s belt, listening to him talk and talk as he adjusts his enormous body to fit mine, all breathy sentences and closed eyes.

I’m so glad I met you, Helen. I’m so glad you’re here.

Don’t you ever wish? Don’t you ever want?

We could, Helen. You and me. All we need is toothbrushes and sleeping bags and my brother’s old Volkswagen bus. It has a sunroof. A star-roof. 

When we get there we’ll know. We’ll plant torches in the soil and let the coyotes howl.

Helen. You’ll come with me. Helen.

Driving until the roads go narrow, until the wind comes tearing down the hills and rolling across the plains. His hair lifts and spreads and he takes off his glasses and calls you babe. No possessions but a bed and a pile of Persian rugs that he peels off one by one and spreads on the floor after you arrive. Dried mud on his boots and the way he takes the rugs outside and smacks them with a broom, and the way you watch him and watch him as the dust rises and settles on your arms, and this is all you’ve ever wanted. The sky makes you younger and the coyotes make you horny and he orders up another shipping container, one that is filled with books, and he asks you to organize them, to surprise him, to pick three. 

Every week you pick three.

Read to me, Helen. 

We fuck like this, with his dream in our heads, some mutant version of my childhood. Or maybe this is my parents back when they were heady and raw, in search of bright hawk skies and the busy whish of grass, the hard, lustful plains.

*   *   *   

One Friday afternoon when I was seven or eight my father came home from work with a truckload of paint cans. It seemed like fifty but maybe it was closer to ten. He unloaded them with a grin and stacked them up next to our front steps. The way my mother said his name sounded sure and brave, like if she weren’t our mother she’d be an explorer out somewhere inventing new birds and trees. On tiptoe, she hugged him, and I saw the soft arches of her feet. My father carried the cans two in each hand like it was nothing at all. He slid a flathead screwdriver under a metal lip and pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled, pulled until the first lid came off, then moved on to the next lid and the next. Near his feet was a pile of broken lath. He gestured for each of us to take a piece and stir, which we did, slow and careful, until the pigment rose up and swirled the paint awake. Pale yellow like butter. Violet like violets. Orangey red like almost-ripe tomatoes. Did my father pick these colors? Did my mother give him a list? 

She wore loose shirts over shorts, maybe maternity clothes she’d never given up or baby-doll dresses that were even older, that she’d worn during her long-ago summers of love, with nothing else but leg. There was something pent up in the way she held her paintbrush while she decided which color to try, a silent growl that she released with the first tomato-red swipe over rust-red rust.

I remember us filling in the grass along the bottom—my sisters and me—while my mother worked above us, the narrow brushes we used and the way she told us to look at the real grass for inspiration. It was the first time I’d ever painted and she told me “Yes, just like that.” I remember her snapdragons and irises and jewelweed and the broken-spined book of American wildflowers that sat next to her as she worked. The weeks she spent dazed and forgetful and too focused to eat. 

She was not done yet, not done yet, not done, until all at once she was and the front side of our home was a field perpetually in bloom, a blue sky throbbing with sun. You could see it from the road. That painted place. Cars slowed down as they passed because it was wonderful, yes, although the mural on the back side I loved even more: a forest, wild and tangled and dark with leaf but also touched by light, there and there and there: the promise of a way through. 

This was the same year my father packed the three of us girls into the cab of his pickup truck and drove out to an empty field, pulled over and pointed out at the dirt, where a flush of green had risen from the brown, like someone had shaken a thousand tiny leaves off a tree.

“Is that going to be a forest?” one of us asked.

“Not even close. Just big enough to dump a million seeds back into the dirt before dying. Then they wait until the right combination of rain and warm comes along and it happens all over again. Imagine that.”

“It’s pretty,” one of us said.

*   *   *   

It occurred to me later how much that paint must have cost. How impractical it was to open all those cans at once, to say nothing as the wind kicked up dust and rained it down. 

*   *   *   

My mother says people who have extra to give are the ones with the quick births, the easy babies. You’re rewarded with exactly the number of children you deserve. Family comes to you, it is you, and it happens because there’s enough love to go around. I never talked to her about the heartbeats Beau and I never heard and the ones we lost or imagined. Like a galloping horse, the websites said. The BBT thermometer and my little notebook next to the bed. Even after I’d argued against my mother’s gospel in my head, after I’d looked up the statistics and placed myself in good and strong company, it was easier to say nothing—and then, later, when we decided to stop trying, to tell her it wasn’t for us.

We saw what was happening to the climate, the planet, the future.

We were being responsible.

We could afford a better house. We could continue kayaking and ziplining and backcountry skiing. There would be more time for adventure and hobbies, for me to paint watercolors of seascapes and mountains and sell them at local art festivals.

Any of these. All of these.

*   *   *   

“It’s not your fault,” Beau told me, so many times. 

What I heard was You didn’t try hard enough. You gave up too soon.

*   *   *   

“Roger,” covered up now in a navy-blue robe, gathers his clothes. He leaves the lights on dim and in a formal voice gives me directions to the bathroom down the hall. “Feel free to use a washcloth, but no showers, please.” At 10:30, as arranged, I’ll meet Beau at the front door. “Remember to grab your phones on the way out,” Roger says, without looking back.

After I dress, a clock on the bookshelf tells me there’s a little time to kill, so I sit in the chair and let its soft and attentive seat lift me up in all the best places. With barely a push, it glides and glides as though to confirm my weightlessness. After a thousand days of it’s good, we’re good, my heart holds nothing heavy. “The happiness curve sweeps upward from here,” Beau told me recently. 

But what if my mother is right and my heart holds nothing at all?

I push the dimmer switch to bright and notice boxes leaning against the wall. The top one has a picture of a crib on it. Don’t look. But I do. I wonder where the dresser and the changing table will go, what the little tubs of creams will smell like, if a nightlight will throw stars onto the ceiling when the room is dark, if the baby will be born the same week the cherry trees bloom. 

Metal shines up from the floor: a silver watchband half-hidden by cardboard. It’s old and solid and feels good in my hand. I tuck it into my sleeve and pull the fabric closed in my palm.

*   *   *   

On the car ride home, the silence stretches a few miles into a hundred. Five minutes, ten minutes. At a stop light, Beau rubs his eyes. “Wow. I’m really tired.”

“She gave you a workout, huh? Even in her condition.”

A dramatic exhale, a hand on my thigh. “I hope it was enjoyable for you. That’s all I’ll say now. Can we talk about it later?”

My birthday gift to him is silence. I have his neat-edged profile to look at, the city lights glittering behind him, more than when we moved here almost twenty-five years ago. This is growth, I guess. This is fifty. Something about realigning expectations, letting go of the angst, becoming who we are as we prepare to be old. After stumbling through the evening with no instruction booklet I can only guess that the point of it was resilience. Or closure, sure. One of those words that means less each time you say it. 

As we pull into our driveway, the floodlights snap on. We unbuckle our seat belts and look out at the garage.

“I wish you’d put the ‘e’ on the first name,” I say, finally.

“What?”

“Helene. Instead of Helen.”

He half-laughs. “Okay. You got it. Helene.”

Beau, with his triathlons and his kitesurfing and his charm. Beau, with his I have an idea. What if we tried …? Beau, who cares but is not careful. 

Tomorrow or the next day or the one after that we’ll have a conversation. He’ll explain that tonight was no big deal, it meant nothing. He was curious, is all, and isn’t exploration the best way to understand who we are? Then he’ll offer up some metaphor about mountain climbing or space and remind me of a night a few years ago when we were tipsy and barefoot on a Bahamian beach and I told him I was done. No more wishing and what-if-ing. I said the word out loud and let it sound foreign and bleak. Motherhood Motherhood Motherhood. I pretended to spit on the ground and Beau laughed and rubbed my back and told me he was glad. Our feet were close in the cooling sand. “Don’t blame yourself,” he said, in a whispery voice that made me shiver like the breeze or a ghost would. A response so strange and stale that I could only hear its opposite.

“Helene Grenier,” I say, now, “wears a man’s oversized watch.” 

I like the heft of it. I like that its band is so large both my wrists could fit inside. 

A few seconds pass before Beau comprehends. “Wait, is that …? You stole Roger’s watch?”

“I found it on the floor between some boxes.”

He shakes his head, presses his fingers to his forehead. “No. We have to go back. No, you can’t do that. You can’t just—”

“Roger thinks it’s lost. He’ll never know.”

“Weren’t you listening? It belonged to his grandfather.” 

I turn away and push the car door open, because I’m not interested in learning about propriety or family heirlooms or in hearing Beau insist that somewhere in our wedding vows I promised not to steal.

To paraphrase my mother, the universe rewards you with exactly what you deserve. 

*   *   *   

In our three-bedroom house, the space where I paint is also a guest room. After we stopped planning for a nursery, I found some oblique symbolism in reclaiming it with scenes of non-human life. A heart on overdrive is meant to create, and so I took a vacation from work and went after one of the walls. Maybe I thought I was channeling my mother, that art is the same as blood, but my forest came out neat and nice and not like hers at all. I couldn’t describe what was missing, only that it felt like the trees had been put there by some logging company after they’d taken the good ones away. A few months later I painted over it, went back to blank walls, back to my little watercolors of shorebirds and sunsets that sold the best at art fairs. 

The bed in here is comfortable. The ceiling is good for staring, for worrying about a million nameless things and then channeling my restlessness into ideas that are off-kilter and momentarily brilliant and carry me into sleep. Tonight, though, with the watch on my stomach, I contemplate the men who wore it through history. Their height and their heavy footsteps and their tough love and books and mistresses. The weight of their wealth and their misdeeds. Midlife crises, silver-clad wrists. Generations of this.

By 1:10 a.m. the truth settles in, the significance of what has happened tonight. Beau is unsatisfied. Beau has other plans. He’ll tell me “It’s nothing personal” and then he’ll divorce me. A change of heart, a change of mind. A new start with a woman who can give him his own baby gemstone.

At 1:38 I’m begging him to stay.

At 2:13 I’m letting him go, and by 2:20 I’ve adopted a rescue dog and moved to a seaside town and I’m riding the happiness curve as high as it goes.

At 3:43 we’re in couples therapy.

She stole a watch.

I needed that watch.

But why?

For the next couple of hours I work out an answer: something about breaking cycles or intercepting love or inter-generational retribution. It’s in my paintings—not the ones suburban moms buy to spruce up their kitchens but the ones Beau calls desolate. The dried-out earth, the empty land, miles of cracks in heart-stopping patterns. Dormancy, I call the series, which is a little on the nose, but why not? Imagine the rain, the warmth, the leaves breaking through, flashing their cotyledon green. A field germinating awake, once in a human lifetime. But is this even right? I always thought that the perfect conditions never arrived again, but what if what really happened was we never went back to look? Could we have forgotten? Could we have stopped caring? Could it be that my father was joking, or that there was no such field, no such plant, no such miracle? 

Without it, though, what else do I have?

*   *   *   

Always, with the first blue glow of dawn, the worry starts to fade. After a few deep breaths I’ve cleared out all thoughts of divorce. We’re good. It’s good. Beau and I will talk. We know how to even things out. We know how to keep going. 

I rub the watch face and remember my father at the end of his life, the way he said, “I guess things didn’t work out the way we thought they would,” and my mother’s rebuttal as she held back tears: “What do you mean? The sun is still shining, isn’t it?” Then she went outside and sat in her fading chair, that day and every day after, through the hot and the cold and the swish-thump, swish-thump, swish-thump. Her face tells me there’s nothing more to wait for, but in my head I mix the colors anyway: rain plus warmth plus love makes a hopeful shade of green. It’s morning now and I’ve never been this awake before. Patient brush, patient hand, ready for life to erupt. 

K.L. ANDERSON

K.L. Anderson is an ecologist, wetland scientist, and technical editor. Her debut novel But First You Need a Plan was awarded the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize. She lives in Seattle with her husband, her son, a dog, and a cat. Find her on Threads @klandersonland.