Photocopy

Here is another story i'm thinking about submitting. Tell me what you think, especially if you've read both my novel segments and this.


I know practically everything about Helena Mrotkus, including a lot of things she still has no idea that I know. But the way I look at it, it wasn't what I knew about Helena that landed me in the Northern Disctrict of California Federal Court, facing jail time. It was the things she found out about me. If only I could have been content to trace her through life, one transaction leading to another in an administrative pas de deux.
But I would make a lousy news camera operator, because I couldn't sit on my hands while Helena ruined herself any more than I could film a self immolation. I have always been the kind of person who has to help people.
And the more I learned about Helena, the closer I wanted to get to her. You can't get much closer than carrying someone's fetus in your own womb. Trust me.
Here are some things I know about Helena: She owes $45,000 on a variety of credit and store cards, and on a series of cooking videos she subscribed to at $19.95 a month. I long suspected she didn't watch all the videos that came by UPS with each waning moon. But the first time I got inside her house, I realized I had been unfairly jumping to conclusions: There was that month's video -- Fondues with Cheese, Chocolate or Meat -- sticking out of the VCR. Like Macky always says, that's what happens when we assume. It makes an ass of u and me.
Helena has been divorced once, and she is still married to a man who lives 2,600 miles away in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I assumed correctly that they are estranged, since her frequent flyer miles do not reflect trips to Pittsburgh International Airport. In fact Helena has not flown anywhere since 1996. Not much of a frequent flier after all.
Helena likes to go to the San Mateo Public library after it opens at noon on Sunday, and read magazines -- Elle, Women's World, even Teen People. She can't get enough of them and she checks out back issues to get her through the week.
Personally, I can’t read that kind of dreck. I had a subscription to Barbecue Cooking magazine, but that’s mainly for professional reasons. For the past four years, I have sold barbecue grills over the phone every afternoon and evening from 3 pm until 9. My boyfriend Macky took the University of Toronto’s alumni magazine, but that was just to flaunt the fact that he had attended college, while I never did. Of course, he never flaunted the fact that he left UT after four semesters to work on an Alaskan fishing boat. Macky shouldn’t be so haughty; I’m sure I learned more from reading books from the Redwood City library – and from that correspondence course I took in fluid dynamics – than he learned in those four semesters.
The first few calls for Helena were dismissed as random wrong numbers. We weren’t even sure they were all asking for the same person, because some of the callers had thick accents. But then we registered for a club card at Safeway, so we could take advantage of 2-for-1 specials. I know you're supposed to be suspicious of those club card schemes, because the stores record personal data about your brand of underarm deodorant. But I like to belong to a club. I would often try to guess what conclusions Safeway's marketing experts were drawing about me.
"Well," they would say, pointing a pool cue at a pie chart. "She's certainly a hobbyist. She's purchased Superglue twice in the past six months. And she must have quite a large home because her light bulb consumption is in the 99th percentile."
They would be wrong, on both counts. If I had any hobbies, I never would have gotten into all this trouble. We buy a lot of Superglue because Macky uses it for everything, from reattaching buttons to his jacket (I'm not much of a homemaker) to posting interesting newspaper pictures to the walls of our apartment. And we've both been known to indulge in a little glue sniffing in the wee post-work hours if there's nothing on TV. But that doesn't really use it up, that I know of.
And the light bulbs? Our studio apartment only has three lamps, but we used to stay up till dawn many nights after our calling shifts, playing Monopoly and talking about our childhoods. We weren't about to hang out in the dark.
But I digress. At Safeway, if you forget your card, they let you punch your phone number into a little machine instead. Whenever we punched in our phone number, the receipt read, "Thank you, HELENA MROTKUS!" Instead of “Thank you, INEZ CRADDEN AND MACKY GETZ!” Helena, we realized, was the name the wrong numbers always asked for.
"Thank you, Mrs. Mmm... " the clerk would start out, then falter. He had no idea how to say “Mroktkus,” and I couldn’t correct him, because I didn’t know how either. That was the first thing I wanted to find out, lest the Safeway clerks call my bluff and arrest me for falsely appropriating someone else's Club Card number. I might have gone to jail for that, instead of for the other business, if I hadn't done any research. Seriously, we were stealing: We got Helena's free ham at Easter as well as our own.
This is how I found out how to say “Mrotkus”: The next time someone called for her, I simply asked, "Helena who?" as if we had a half dozen or so Helenas of various ages lounging on the 5 by 5 patch of patio outside our apartment’s sliding glass door.
You know what? The M is silent. Now that is fascinating information. It got me thinking.
Then one night as I was almost finished working -- I could usually sell two or three grills every night; I was good at it because I'm difficult to embarrass -- I hit the button on the phone that usually starts a new call. But there was no dial tone. Instead a man started speaking before I could say anything.
"It's me. Listen, I'm only in town for the one night and I gotta pick up my canoe from you. Lori and me wanna take her kids on a camping trip and I can't let them down."
The voice paused and I wondered what to do.
"Hello! Are you there!" he shouted in my ear.
"Who is this?" I asked. I suspected this was a Helena call but I maintain that I was perfectly in the right to ask this. Having made my living on the telephone for several years, I knew that etiquette demands identifying oneself when placing a call.
"It's Joe!" he shouted, as if the connection was bad. It wasn't. "Goddamn, can you hold a grudge or what? What do you want with a canoe in that little house of yours anyway? Where you got it, in the fish pond?"
"Joe who?" I asked, still well within my rights. Later, I would think of many, many other questions I wished I'd asked him, such as what in the heck was he doing back in California?
Joe breathed in and out a couple of times after I said that. His voice became much quieter.
"You really have to ask, Helena? What are you running, some kind of massage parlor in my grandma's old house? You got that many guys comin' in and out?"
I didn't answer. What could I say? I had no information -- yet -- about Helena Mrotkus’ current line of work.
"Joe Mrotkus, Helena, Joe Goddamned Mrotkus." He sounded like he might cry. Something moved inside my chest and I wanted to comfort him. Through my work, I'm quite accustomed to emotionally bonding with people whose faces I have never seen.
"Come by at 10," I said, not disguising my voice. How would I know what Helena sounded like?
"Helena? Is that you?"
"Yes," I said. Come on, what would you say?
"You sound different, girl." He was all sweetness now. I looked at Macky, his small head weighed down with large wireless headphones as he listened to Li'l Kim and superglued felt daisies over some holes he'd accidentally burned in the couch. This guy sounded like a real man, one who didn't do gay phone sex for a living and still wear Underoos.
I walked to the mirror above the sink and smoothed some of the frizz out of my hair, working around the phone headset. I wondered if I should pack an overnight bag, in case I wanted this Joe to sweep me off my feet and take me off into the wilderness with him. Of course, we'd stop by Helena's and pick up the canoe first.
"'K, I'll see you in an hour, then," Joe said, and, after pausing to see if I would say goodbye, hung up.
I realized, as he hung up, that I would never see Joe. Helena lived in a house somewhere, she had never lived here. We just got assigned her phone number.
I guess that's when the curiosity really started. I wanted to know if she still lived there -- if so, why did she change her number? Maybe she didn't want Joe calling her anymore? But that was the first time he'd called in the 6 months we'd had the number. What was going to happen when he went to that house? I hoped he wouldn’t get violent when she didn’t have the canoe ready. As far as I knew, he could drown her in that fish pond he mentioned.
If he did, it would be my fault. I realized – and I plan to bring this up in court – that I had a responsibility to find out if my conversation with Joe had any negative repercussions for this Helena Mrotkus. And even after everything that happened, I’m still glad I did, because I was soon to find out that Helena needed someone like me – a lot.
I went to bed long before dawn that night so I could take the bus to San Mateo County Courthouse in Redwood City before it closed the next day. It was guessing that since Helena had lived – or did live – in the 650 area code, Joe and Helena might have gotten married in San Mateo County. It took me about two hours to figure out where the bus stop was and which way the right bus was going, but all the effort paid off. I found a copy of Joe and Helena’s marriage certificate there and photocopied it.
Then I knew a lot: Helena’s maiden name was Martin, she was born in 1961. That made her 39, 10 years older than me. I wondered if the M was also silent in Martin, but I figured, probably not.
That photocopy was the first step toward the stone bench next to Helena’s fish pond, where I sat eight months later, watching a fat carp poke a hole in the blanket of algae with its marbled orange and white face. It reminded me of this recurring dream I had as a child, of Oscar the Grouch's pet worm Slimy crawling out of a hole in the sun-worn green carpeting on our back porch in Sacramento.
Helena and I were sitting on that bench the day she asked me to have her baby for her. She was smoking, and when I agreed, she threw the butt into the pond and stretched her arms out to hug me.
But I’m skipping ahead. In the weeks after finding Helena’s marriage certificate, I learned more that allowed me to assess whether or not she needed my help. From family court records, I learned that Helena's first husband, Reinhart Becker, had custody of her only child. A girl, Becky Becker, now in third grade. The records didn’t include a transcript of the proceedings, so I couldn’t find out why she didn’t have custody herself.
I suspected that it might be because she was in fragile health or psychiatricly deranged, but I couldn’t verify that. Damn it, but medical records are a tough nut to crack. I've tried impersonating her at several hospitals and on the phone with insurance carriers, but until I actually became a part of Helena’s medical records, I never saw so much as a vaccination card. If only Macky would have let me use the old Apple computer he rescued from the curb, because I've read in the paper that you can find out about peoples' medical records on the Internet. But maybe you have to be a hacker or something, I didn't read the whole article. And anyway Macky always said my negative energy would make his computer freeze up.
Not that Macky didn’t want me to learn more about Helena. In fact, he egged me on. He claims to be an aspiring screenwriter, although he's got such terrible penmanship that, what with several keys being missing from his computer keyboard, I don't see how he could write much of anything. But because Macky rarely ventured outside our studio apartment, except to ride his motorcycle up and down Highway 1 on sunny afternoons, I think he seized on the details I was learning about Helena’s life as possible source material. Yes, he can be that exploitative.
The day I came home from Redwood City with copies of the family court files, Macky was taking a bath in Calamine lotion. I mean he really filled the whole tub with that pink stuff. He was prone to allergic rashes. He took the papers from me and slapped a little calamine on the wall to hold them there for appraisal.
"So she had a kid with this Reinhart person. And she’s still legally married to that guy Joe who called you." He studied them, his uneven eyebrows moving slightly as he surveyed them top to bottom. "I sense a lot of passion in this woman. A tumultuous past. Do you think she still shops with her Safeway club card?"
I could see where he was going with this. "I think she does, because I got that 5% savings certificate last time I punched in our number, and they don't giver you those until you spend $350 in a month. We only spent, like, $75. You think Safeway would give us lists of what she bought?"
Macky tapped his temple, leaving a smudge of pink calamine on the short blond hairs there. "That's why I love you, Inez. You're right there with me. Can you imagine what we'd learn about this woman if we knew what she bought? This is my screenplay. She's living it. If we can just follow in her tracks, learn about the drama of her life, tweak it a little, add a car chase in the end..." he narrowed his eyes lazily and sank back until only his head was unsubmerged. A puff pastry on a pink plate.
"Inez, you're like a cat that just brought me a dead squirrel that turned out to be made of solid gold."
I peeled the photocopies off the wall and walked out. I felt Macky was being rather pushy. Tracing the sordid details of Helena's life had been my private pastime, like the advice column for troubled teens Macky published on the Internet.
But once I got over my huff, I reconsidered. Having Macky involved could be a good thing. I can be lazy sometimes. I might have let Helena's trail grow cold while I wasted my late evenings and dawns making latchhook rugs. But when Macky gets into something, he's driven. To keep the project mine, I would have to be a little bit more driven than him each day. I felt up to the challenge.
The entire month of May was a flurry of discovery for both of us, although I did most of the legwork and Macky mostly analyzed the results. In Macky’s movie, he told me later, that month would be the part where an upbeat rock song plays over a montage of us opening envelops, making phone calls, riding double on Macky’s motorcycle to the Registrar of Deeds or the local IRS bureau. We felt like we could accomplish anything.
We Superglued each new document to our kitchenette’s wall. We called the public library claiming to be Helena Mrotkus’ mother and demanded a list of what she had checked out in the past 6 months. Apparently they don't keep card holders' ages on file.
Safeway was very compliant. Apparently frugal old women ask for printed inventories of their monthly purchases all the time; so we began to receive periodic printouts by mail. Her purchases were easy to separate from ours:
Helena - Slimfast, Kool Menthols, fake crab meat.
Us - calamine, pot roast, Like-em-Sticks candy.
The mail-order company I worked for, headquartered in Plano, Texas, has vast databases of telephone numbers and addresses stretching from the nation's dusty innards to its windswept shores. I called my supervisor and told her I had an offline lead but needed the person's phone number and home address. She came up with Helena's home address and new (unlisted) phone number with a few taps on her keyboard. I’ve often dreamed of visiting the call center, I imagine there are banks of glowing control panels and rows of stylishly dressed managers wearing headsets; I’ve even heard tell of a cafeteria with a potato bar.
My manager even threw me this bone: Helena had purchased three items from other divisions of the company; one of them, a knockoff of the TopsyTail hair tool, she had never paid for. But she’d paid for the home food drying system and the clock.
Macky and I used our professional phone skills on the operators at the phone company and the Department of Motor Vehicles, and they rained bounty upon our mailbox. Actual copies of phone bills from Pacific Bell. We ran out of wall space and had to start gluing papers to the cupboard doors. Especially revealing papers – such as Becky Becker’s first year of grade school report cards, which were less than sparkling – we glued to the insides of the cupboard doors. Should anyone break into our home, we wanted Helena’s privacy to remain intact.
Now whenever someone called for Helena, we took their name and number, and sweetly said she'd call them back. This encouraged them to call again and leave more and more detailed messages. We changed our answering machine message from "Inez and Macky would have picked up the phone if they really wanted to talk to you" to a more cryptic "We're not home, please leave a detailed message and your phone number."
We learned that friends thought Helena should get out more after work (she was a nurse at a retirement home). One friend, Marianne, even suggested that the man Helena was dating, Frank, was not a real catch, and that Helena could do better. I longed to meet Frank and judge for myself. After all, unlike me, this Marianne might not have Helena’s best interests in mind.
Although Macky egged me on, I can't blame it all on him. I was not invulnerable to the thrill of the chase. It took bigger and bigger envelopes with more and more detailed information to satisfy me. And I liked taking a number in government waiting rooms such as the Social Security office; it made me feel like I was part of a public ceremony. I had never voted, except to bring back New Coke, and we lost that one.
In fact, I persevered after Macky dropped out. It got to be too much for him the day it occurred to me to fill out a change of address form for Helena, rerouting her mail to our apartment.
"Don't you realize you're giving the Feds your address?" he asked me. "You're going to the Big House." After that day, he never examined another document I brought home, and he refused to take Helena's mail out of our skinny metal letter box. He’d reach around her bills to pluck out his paycheck and the Fingerhut catalogs addressed to him. I didn't feel it was such a big deal because all we ever got was junk mail and bills. She must have picked up her paycheck each week at the Shadetree Care Facility where she worked.
"If they come for me, they'll come for you too," I told him one night as he took a break from his phone calls. "We're a household." I had received a rare piece of personal mail for Helena, a postcard from her mother in Florida, and he refused to look at it with me.
"We're not married," he'd say, looking over his wire-rimmed glasses as if he could truly dissociate himself from me with a mere whim of logic.
"But we have sex," I said, and he sighed as if he were a professor and I a particularly moronic student.
"Oh Inez, don’t be naive," he'd tell me, and touch the pound button on the phone, which would automatically put another horny mail on the other end of the phone line.
I decided it was time to visit Helena’s home. I wanted to see if she had noticed that her mail had stopped. For once, I was motivated by self interest: If she was about to alert the US Postal Inspection Service, I wanted to be prepared.
By this time I had already walked by Helena's house three times. It was a 30-minute ride away on the SamTrans bus system, which I was learning to use very well because of this whole caper. Her house was squat and white with a porch in front and white lace curtains in each window. A five-year-old black Acura Integra was parked in the driveway; I wrote down its license plate number. I had even rung her bell once, but she didn’t answer, even though her car was there.
One afternoon, while I was working, I thought of a way to ensure she was home the next time I dropped by. On company time, I dialed her number, getting up and pacing the kitchenette in my excitement.
She answered, her voice low from all those Menthol Kools but sweet and welcoming, as if she were expecting a call from a loved one. Probably Frank, I thought, feeling an unexpected stab of jealousy.
“Hello, I’m calling for Helena Mrotkus,” I said calmly, with a smile in my voice.
She ratcheted the sweetness in her voice up a notch. Apparently it wasn’t Frank she was expecting, because she didn’t sound disappointed at all when she cood, “This is Helena.”
I told her my real name, and that I was prepared to offer her a very unusual bargain price on a professional quality barbecue grill, including a free bonus set of tongs and hamburger flipper. When she didn’t interrupt me, I pressed on, telling her that this particular model was perfect for fun-loving singles who wanted to rekindle their social lives.
“Oh,” she said, with obvious disappointment in her voice. “I’m sorry, Miss Cradden, but I need to keep the line clear. I’m expecting a very important call.”
“I’ll keep this brief then,” I assured her, and ad-libbed: “I’m just calling to set up a demonstration appointment, in which I will actually grill you up a couple of hamburgers so you can taste the quality of home-grilled goodness yourself. What day is good for you?”
It was a deft maneuver, some of my best work, but at the same time I was kicking myself, because I had missed the chance to ask, casually, what kind of important call she was waiting for. The life I had sketched out for her didn’t include many important calls, unless her water heater sprung a leak or something.
But then she laid the proverbial golden squirrel in my lap.
“Well, this afternoon isn’t good, because I’m waiting for a social worker to come by. But they might come any afternoon this week. Could you come on a Saturday by any chance?”
An embarrassment of riches.
“A social work-er?” I asked, my usually silver tongue stumbling.
“Oh, I hope you don’t think I’m a child abuser or anything like that,” she laughed. As if we agreed to sell barbecue grills to only America’s finest families. “We’re planning on adopting a baby from Guatemala, and they have to make a home visit to make sure we’d be good parents.”
“Of course, a barbecue is one of those touches that makes any home seem welcoming,” I said, hopping up and down on the linoleum. I hadn’t felt so blessed since Warren Cordbank asked me to prom at Sacramento High, even though my mom didn’t let me go because all the dresses they were wearing that year were too skimpy.
“Gosh, I didn’t think of that,” Helena said. This woman so needed an influence like me in her life. “You think you could come by today?”
Thank god DataService Inc. had sent me my own deluxe model grill including the bonus utensils as an award for making the top 20% of the sales force last year. We’d never used it, since we usually stick to microwaved TV dinners or our Sunday pot roast. I dug into my jewelry box for $20 to take a taxi to San Mateo and back, and within two hours, I was ringing Helena’s bell. It was one of those chimes that goes “bum, bum, bum, bum, bung, bung, bung, bung.” It suited her, I thought: It showed how her yearning for the sublime battled her tragically common taste.
She smiled at me through the window on her white front door and opened it.
Of course I had seen pictures of her by then, but she had gone slightly downhill. She had wrinkles in her forehead, and her chin – which had always been weak – seemed half caved in. Her neck was fat. But her shoulder length, dyed-blonde hair was as bouncy as the Breck girl’s.
"Are you the social worker?" she asked.
I raised an eyebrow and looked at the grill standing next to me. Stay with me, Helena, I said in my mind.
She opened the door smoothly toward me, and I brushed Helena's cotton covered arm as I entered her home, the living room I had stood so near on several afternoons and late nights but never penetrated. I shivered slightly, and Helena looked at me, perhaps sensing that I was more excited than the occasion strictly called for.
I saw the fondue video protruding wantonly an inch from the VCR, and I realized that the collections of facts Superglued to my kitchen wall left a lot of details unpainted. I was enthralled.
Helena walked me through the kitchen – I would have guessed linoleum flooring, but it was real ceramic tile with glass-fronted cupboards – and into the back yard, where I stood face to face with the fish pond Joe had mentioned to me months before. Two dragonflies flirted above the pond’s fuzzy green surface. I had tried to see it when I stopped by her house before, but the white, peeling wooden fence around the yard was too high.
I set the grill up on the grass, where it stood somewhat unevenly, and filled it with charcoal.
Fortunately, Helena wasn’t very interested in the grill’s automatic air uptake system. While I fried up the two hamburger patties I’d brought, still in their styrofoam and plastic wrapping from Safeway, it was easy to get Helena talking about more important things.
“So this Frank, what’s he like,” I asked, and then bit my tongue. Of course, she had never mentioned her boyfriend to me.
“Frank Jr.? He’s so cute,” she said, grinning, and pulled up a lawn chair to watch me work. “Of course we’ve only seen his picture so far but he’s got these huge brown eyes that just seem to say, ‘Are you my mommy?’”
Then a look of suspicion crossed her face, and I though of dropping the lighter fluid and running. She was onto me.
“You are the social worker, aren’t you? Gosh, how sneaky, you wanted to catch me off guard, huh? Well, I’m not worried, I’m gonna pass this home inspection thing. I been cleaning all morning.”
I laughed.
“Honestly, Miss Mrotkus,” I said, trying to act natural. “Since when do social workers know how to grill such lean, juicy burgers?” Actually, I was just getting ready to place the raw meat on the coals, so it wasn’t as cool a deflection as I’d hoped, but it seemed to work on her.
She laughed.
“Gosh, I’m so nervous. I’m sorry.” Then she started pouring it all out.
"Me and my boyfriend Frank just want to start fresh, raise a family, you know what I mean, Miss Cradden?" she opened the Diet Pepsi she’d carried out from the kitchen and lit a Kool Menthol.
“Sure, I understand. And please, call me Inez,” I said, fanning the coals and closing the lid to the grill. She jumped up and got me a Diet Pepsi too (Although I usually drink the sugared kind, I knew she didn’t have any so I didn’t complain.).
“You can’t have children of your own?” I asked.
“Yeah, I had to get a hysterectomy after I got cervical cancer six years ago. Did you know you can catch cancer from having sex?" She laughed as though she had just told a charming little vignette. “Cigarette?” she asked, and I politely declined. I could see what years of smoking had done to her skin. I wondered if I could get her to quit.
“And your boyfriend, he’s pretty anxious to be a father?” I asked, and flipped the burgers.
“I don’t think he really minds,” she said. “You wanna see Frank Jr.’s picture?”
She led me inside, and as I looked at the photo of a wide-awake infant, propped up in some kind of straw basket, I told her that “He doesn’t mind” was perhaps not the best answer should the social worker ask the same question I had just asked.
We ate the burgers I made with forks off plates (I had forgotten buns). They were ok, a little charred, but not bad considering that for all my intimacy with the benefits of this particular grill, I had never used one before.
I gave her some more common sense tips on what to tell the social worker. This is territory I know pretty well, since social workers visited my own home several times when I was growing up. It’s pretty easy to get them to go away without making any changes in your life if you give them the right answers, my mother quickly learned, and she trained me to give them.
“Don’t tell them you’ve been cleaning all morning,” I told her. “In fact, apologize for the mess, so they’ll think your home is usually even cleaner. And of course, you’ll need Frank to actually be here when they come."
“Oh yeah?” she asked. I was so glad I had come. Helena needed me more than I had ever realized.
When the shadow of her house made it too chilly to sit in the yard, we moved to her living room and sat in the deep, flower print couch with wooden arms. I thought of Joe’s grandmother, and asked casually if she rented this house.
“No,” she said. “My husband inherited it from his grandma. I know, this furniture’s kinda, like, old lady, huh?”
A cuckoo clock over the television chimed 7, and I realized that hours of barbecue selling time had slipped away from me. I was going to have to hustle home if I expected to sell one tonight at all.
I excused myself, took the check she had written for the barbecue grill (I gave it to her at a 10% discount, since it was technically second-hand), and gave her the number of the pager I had rented to take callbacks from state agencies. I urged her to page me if she thought of any other questions.
The bus passed by just as I walked toward the stop, and I had to wait another half hour for the next one. By the time I got home, I only had an hour to make calls. I didn't sell a grill that night, and Macky looked at me smugly as he took over the headset.
"What?" I asked, trying to cloak myself in the passion of discovery I'd felt earlier that evening.
"The first sign that you have a problem is when your habit starts to interfere with your work," he said. Then his face changed to a mask of coquettish flirtation. "Hi, Mister, my name's Danny, what's yours?" he asked into the headset.
The next day Helena paged me and I called back, my heart thundering in my ears. She wanted to know if I thought Frank should actually move in with her before the social worker’s visit. Without meeting him, I had already taken a dislike for Frank, and I didn’t want him to move in. But I had to be honest, so I told her, yes, that would definitely help.
Two days later, she paged again to tell me that the social worker still hadn’t showed up for the visit. She wondered if she should call Social Services to remind them that she was waiting.
The next time she paged, on Monday, I felt a little crowded, nagged.
"She's stalking me," I told Macky as I dialed her number. He snorted.
But this time, she had news, and that rekindled my interest. The social worker had visited that morning.
"Oh, Inez, it was terrible. It was like I was under investigation. They looked in my closets, and half the stuff in there belongs to Joe’s dead grandma, and they were like, what are all these syringes for, and I was like, my estranged husband’s dead grandma had diabetes, and they wrote that down. They said it was bad that I'm separated but not divorced," she sighed, and I almost sighed with her. All the information I had so painstakingly sleuthed out, I realized, she would have told me if I had just rang her doorbell sooner and caught her home.
Next time I want to find out everything there is to know about a stranger, I thought, I’ll pose as a social worker.
I began to think of Helena in the evening after I had finished work, while Macky made his calls. In our comparitively pastoral pre-Helena life, I had usually cleaned our studio during those hours, thinking of strategies for outwitting Macky in Scrabble. But with Helena in my life, Macky seemed too, well, small, weighing 120 pounds as he did. The cuffs at the bottoms of his jeans had seemed adorably 6th-grade for years but now they made him seem freakish to me, a shrunken man sitting in normal peoples' furniture and trying to pass as one of us. Helena, on the other hand, was a head taller than me, and plump.
The next afternoon I called Helena without being paged.
"I was meaning to page you," she said, sounding sad.
"Could I come over again?" I asked, and an hour later we were sitting in swivel stools at her breakfast bar, drinking Diet Pepsi. It was a thrill to see those cans I'd seen tallied up on our Safeway Club Card. She never waited until cases were on sale. She bought a 12 pack each week.
Helena had failed her home inspection. Frank Jr. would not be leaving Guatemala for San Mateo, at least not to live with her.
She folded her hands over the top of her can and rested her chin on it. I put my hand on her head, like I was petting a dog, and she seemed comforted by that, although I have never been good at conveying sisterly affection. I am an only child.
I told Macky about it the next morning as we lay in bed, our shins touching under the sheet. Even though he was purportedly out of the Helena thing, he had some advice. I should offer to have a baby for her. I had often told him I wanted a baby, and he had always shied away from the responsibility of becoming a father with lame excuses like, where would we fit a crib in this 14-by-14 foot apartment?
At first I thought his suggestion was going too far. It was just like him to want to meddle with what was already perfect. He couldn't just buy a picnic table and set it out on the patio, like a normal person would. He had to improve upon it, Superglue a lazy Susan to its center, weight its hollow legs with gravel.
But later I started thinking that improving upon Helena would benefit me. It would let me into her life in a way I'd been unable to attain so far.
Before I offered to have a baby for her, I wanted to meet Frank, to make sure he’d be a fit father. I told Helena to arrange it – these days she responded to my suggestions pretty well. I told her we should all go to the San Francisco Zoo, where I knew there would be tons of children. Then I could observe Frank’s rapport with them.
He met us at the zoo entrance. He had already bought tickets, a good sign, I thought. He had watery blue eyes and he had done an uneven job shaving himself. A thin yellow mustache sat above his lip.
He didn’t seem to notice much unless things were pointed out to him.
“Oh, look at that cute little Chinese boy tapping on the glass,” I said in the reptile house, and he obediently gave the child a once-over.
He seemed nice enough, smiled when I smiled, but there wasn’t much personality to him, and even less brains. Still, I felt OK with him parenting a child with Helena. To be honest, I didn’t mind him being in Helena’s life because he was obviously lousy competition for her time and attention. Helena enjoyed talking with me much more; we spoke on the phone every day at this point. She even taught me to play bridge, a skill I expect to help me pass the days should I in fact go to prison.
Helena asked about my home once or twice, and I told her I lived alone in a residence hotel in South San Francisco. It was one of my poorer lies, since I'm not sure South San Francisco, or “The Industrial City,” as it is nicknamed, has such establishments. But neither Helena nor Frank are as smart as me, so it seemed to work.
The idea of surrogate motherhood came up as if accidentally one night at a bridge game between Frank, myself, Helena and Leonard, a friend from Frank’s Bridge for Recovering Alcoholics Club. I mentioned that I had seen a 20/20 special about women who carried babies for other women.
“You know that broad in the club, Mary? She had her friend do that,” Leonard volunteered. “She could have kids and everything, but she didn’t want to pass on the alcoholic gene. Then her friend got knocked up by accident, so Mary offered to take the kid of her hands.”
Frank listened dutifully as if Leonard were delivering the latest news from the Gaza Strip, something that had nothing to do with him. But I saw Helena thinking hard.
“That’s not usually the way it works,” she said. “I was reading up on it. You can get your own fertilized egg implanted in someone else’s womb.”
I stared at her, smiling. I had had no idea that my subtle mentions of surrogate motherhood had already started working on her. But now it was clear we were on the same wavelength.
I made sure the subject of children kept coming up, just to keep it fresh in her mind. Perhaps I was cruel. Instead of letting her desire for a kid dry up and blow away -- she sometimes went a week or two without mentioning it -- I'd invite her places I knew we'd see children, like afternoon showings of Disney movies. I got Frank to treat the three of us to a Giants game at Candlestick Park on family day, when kids under 12 got in free. I clipped an article from Ladies' Home Journal about miraculous late life pregnancies and post-vasectomy babies.
“I’m getting anxious to get started, but she hasn’t asked me,” I told Macky in bed the afternoon after the baseball game. At the time, I thought Macky was being unusually gracious not to complain about me going to all this fun stuff without him. Usually he wants a piece of everything I do. I should have known better.
"Just come right out and volunteer," Macky told me, and I sighed.
"I'm too retiring," I told him, and he laughed.
Two days later, she popped the question.
We sat there on the bench, looking at the pond. It was August, and the water was starting to stink. She proposed the plan: She would pay me $10,000 (a paltry sum compared to most, according to my research, but I kept quiet). I would have sex with Frank and conceive a child, which I would hand over to her.
I told her I’d be happy to take on this self-sacrificing deed; anything to help her and Frank fulfill their dream. But I was annoyed; apparently Frank’s friend Leonard’s story had confused her.
“But what about having your egg implanted in my womb?” I asked.
“It seems so expensive,” she said. “I never told you this, but I have kind of a lot of debts.”
As if I didn’t know.
“Couldn’t Frank help pay for it?” I asked. Didn’t he get a settlement for that accident he had in the Marines?
Frank had gone to the Persian Gulf with the Marines, where another soldier had, as a joke, blown up a camel that was standing two yards away from Frank. The blast had made Frank mostly deaf in one ear, and he had gotten an honorable discharge and a financial settlement for it.
“Huh,” Helena said. Poor dear, she didn’t have the head for planning that I do.
"Do I still have eggs?" She asked. “I had a hysterectomy." I savored the irony that she turned to me for this intimate information. She asked the right person: I was the world’s foremost expert on Helena Mrotkus.
"Yes,” I told her, drawing on the medical research I’d done at the college library. “You have immature eggs sitting in your ovaries, waiting for release, but they have nowhere to go. A doctor can stimulate one of those eggs to maturity, remove it, artificially inseminate it, then implant it in my womb.”
We saw a doctor. I sat in the examining room with her. I read her file when the doctor was out of the room. The hysterectomy. And oh, an allergy to penicillin, good heavens, I'd never have guessed. The eczema I knew about.
The doctor saw no problem with the plan I’d mapped out. I had a physical exam, which checked out fine, and made appointments for the removal of several eggs from Helena. That went fine, and soon the clinic had several little proto-Frank Juniors swimming around in vitro, which, I explained magnamiously to the parents-to-be, means in glass. It was my turn to go under the knife.
The night before the implantation day, Macky wanted to do it with me so they would accidentally get our baby instead of theirs.
"It would be like our mole on the inside, forever," he said, grinning. He was joking, although it wasn’t a half-bad suggestion. Still, I wanted her baby in me.
I almost peed my pants when Macky surprised me by showing up at the doctor’s office in San Jose the day of the procedure. I had not told him the doctor's name or the name of the medical park. I literally wouldn't have been surprised if I had peed my pants, because I'd been instructed to show up with a full bladder to aid the ultrasound imaging involved in the procedure, and then we had to sit in the waiting room for about 15 minutes before we went in.
Macky just walked in with his five-foot swagger, grinned at me and then hugged Helena. I looked at him thunderstruck. Words wouldn't come. What the hell was he doing? Why did Helena seem to know him?
The doctor called my name and I stood up.
"Oh, so this is Inez," he said warmly, as if just noticing me.
"Yes, she's our knight in shining armor," Helena said, all smiles, and followed me toward the receptionist, who was holding the door open.
Macky, I realized, had been playing double agent. For who knows how long, he’d been hanging out with Helena too, pretending he didn’t know me. I wanted to kill him. I had looked forward to this day for weeks, and now it was ruined.
"I'm sorry," the receptionist said to Macky, "but only the parents and the surrogate will be able to come in."
"Yeah, see you at home, Macky," I said, glaring at him, and escaped into the office. I glanced back through the receptionist's window and saw that his face had colored, his chicken pox scars standing out in white against pink skin. His little hands were balled into fists.
Helena looked at me, perplexed, as we stood behind a fuzzy beige screen and I removed my clothes.
"You know Macky?" she asked.
I guess Macky expected me to go along with him, pretend I didn’t know him. Fuck that, I thought.
"He's my boyfriend," I said casually. "He never mentioned me?" I put on the white, backless paper gown they'd given me.
Helena looked confused but we didn't have time to talk anymore. The doctor came in, a plump woman with short blond hair, and took my temperature, my pulse, and made me put my feet in the stirrups. As it turned out, there was no “going under the knife” involved. The procedure was, as advertised, only mildly uncomfortable, as if I was receiving a pap smear or pulling out a few eyelashes.
During the procedure the doctor and I focused all of our attention on the ultrasound machine that displayed my vagina, cervix and uterus in sepia tones. It was pleasantly intimate. Since I don't have health insurance, I considered asking her to give me a once over while I was here and naked inside and out. But before I knew it, she was patting my knee in a motherly way and telling me I could hop down and empty my bladder.
On the way out to the hallway bathroom I saw Frank leaning against the wall. I realized I had been alone with the doctor in the examination room.
I left the bathroom door cracked and asked, as I peed copiously, "Where's Helena?" My bare feet were cold on the tile.
"She left," Frank said. "I don't really get it. Maybe she's having second thoughts about this whole thing." Suddenly I remembered Macky's jack-in-the-box appearance at the office, his goading grin. He couldn't bear to think that I, too, had intellectual capabilities, had built this empire of knowledge about a person and could reign over it like a duchess. He had to step in and show that he was the smart one, not me.
I stepped back into the hall and looked at Frank, his wispy yellow mustache, his spacey blue eyes. He must not have picked up on the little scene between Macky and me. He really didn't seem to understand why Helena left. I put my hand on my stomach, and imagined all three spawn of Mister Nothing nestled into the thick red carpeting of my womb. I wondered how many of them would stay put.
Strangely, I didn’t wonder too much about where Helena had gone now. All the curiosity felt washed out of me, as if I’d had a strong mental enema. It must be the embryos, I thought. It felt like someone had added the last piece to me at last.
I didn't even wonder, too much, whether Macky and Helena had been sleeping together. I doubted it. Macky’s not the most passionate of men, although he had been a real pal to me in the five years we’d lived together.
But now, if Helena's baby was really inside me, I told myself, I could give a fuck about Macky. Stupid little Canadian.
"It worked, didn't it?" I asked Frank. He looked at me blankly. "I'm pregnant now?" I asked. I looked around the recovery room, noticing that everything looked different through the eyes of a pregnant woman.
"Uh, I dunno, I guess we're supposed to ask the doctor," he said It was painfully obvious that Helena had talked him into this thing. And I guessed I talked Helena into it.
The doctor had already zipped off, probably to wend a flexible tube of animalcules into someone elses' womb. A nurse gave me a ton of shots and told me to rest for two days, to call if I had any bleeding, and to come back in two weeks for a pregnancy test and an ultrasound.
By the time the pregnancy was medically confirmed, I was in jail and in the newspapers. The fact that I was pregnant was part of the articles. That embarrassed me, because I had always been such a private person. I refused to speak with reporters. I refused to speak with my mother, who called, confused, as soon as she heard about it on the television news.
Macky was in our apartment when Frank dropped me off there, but he left the next day, while I lay in bed resting, and returned an hour later, with Helena. Helena in our studio apartment! I watched from bed, feeling simultaneously powerless and regal, like the queen of an ant colony, as he showed her the kitchenette wall plastered with the evidence of her life, the cupboards covered with credit card bills and letters from creditors, the pile of unopened mail I'd let slide lately. She looked at me with shock and confusion as I lay, propped up on pillows, and tried to think of something to say. Seeing her reaction was certainly interesting; I'd wondered over the last few months what she would say if she knew. The answer, it turns out, was that she would say nothing.
Helena called the police from our phone, but she's not very articulate, so it took her awhile to get the point across that a crime had been committed, albeit a drawn-out and ambiguous one. When police arrived the next evening, they brought postal inspectors, who asked me about a thousand questions. Then the police clicked handcuffs onto my wrists, because I was under arrest for mail fraud. Helena wanted to press charges on me for becoming impregnated with her child under false pretenses, but the cops said they didn’t think there was a statute for that one. And anyway, no one knew yet if I was actually pregnant.
On our last night together, before the police took me away the next day, Macky made his sex calls and bustled about the apartment as if it were a normal night. He occasionally tossed a clever comment my way, or told me about something he'd heard on the radio recently. At 4:15 am, when the patio curtains took on the gray glow that announced the end of the night, I asked him what the hell he'd been doing with Helena.
"Lots of things," he said, smiling. "Giving her advice. Taking her places on my motorcycle when I knew you were going over there. I met her about a month before you ever laid eyes on her," he said, and his smile broadened. “I drove by while she washing her car one Sunday, and I offered her a ride. She took it.”
"But why?" I asked. He snorted.
"Why did you make friends with her? Why do you want to have her kid? Actually, I have a legitimate reason for my interest, unlike you. I'm researching a screenplay."
“I was helping her!” I said. “I think we should all do some volunteer work, it would make this world a better place.”
He guffawed.
"You should thank me. Who do you think told her she should get a surrogate? You think she thought of that herself? Helena's not exactly the sharpest crayon in the box, Inez, in case you haven't noticed. She needs a little prompting here, a gentle suggestion there. For example, I may suggest she sue you and try to stop you from carrying through with this supposed pregnancy," he stopped and rolled back on his heels, enjoying the effect on me.
Acting on Macky’s advice, she tried that. Fortunately, her lawyer told her there’s no legal precedent for forcing someone else to get an abortion. But throughout my criminal trial, Macky has been sitting at the table with Helena and her lawyer. She’s in Macky's little pocket, and it’s pathetic. The poor woman.
I, on the other hand, sit at my table with my court appointed lawyer, wearing street clothes in demure colors and an unassailable look on my face. Of course, I was released on a bail bond. I’m staying, ironically, in a residence hotel in South San Francisco, from which I still make my sales calls after court adjourns each day.
Yesterday, Macky testified about what a good friend he had been to Helena throughout this thing, and how he had had no idea that I had been illegally receiving her mail and prying into her personal records. His short legs dangled like a Muppet’s from the high wooden witness’s chair. From time to time, my hand strayed to my abdomen to feel how it had hardened into a protective wall. Macky still thought he could come out a winner in this thing. As if he could get pregnant, and have a core of Helena's essence radiating from inside him like a cesium chip. As if he would ever have the liberty to consider, like I am right now, whether to change his mind when the time comes and keep that squalling package of genetic information for himself.