Page 20 of Slanting Towards the Sea

EIGHTEEN

THERE WERE brIEF PERIODS of contentment in those first few years after Vlaho and I moved back home from college, when I would get a substitute teacher gig at one of the schools and we’d live the semblance of a normal life for a while.

Early in the morning, we’d dance around one another in our miniature apartment, getting ready for work, and when my morning shift ended, I’d go to the bank and we’d have lunch together in the cafeteria, talking quietly under the clamor of his coworkers.

At night, a satisfying exhaustion would come over me, my throat achy from talking too much and too loud in the classroom and breathing in the dry, seborrheic school air, but it was the exalting type of tiredness, one with a purpose, and I would curl up on the couch next to my husband, and he would massage my feet, sore from standing in front of the blackboard all day.

He too, satisfied in the way he wouldn’t be in the periods when only he worked, not because he resented the fact I wasn’t bringing in any money, but because he wanted me to have what he had too.

But those moments of satisfaction were rare, and more often than not, our lives cleaved apart.

He had somewhere to be every day. He had colleagues, fulfilling work, and I spent endless days cooped up in our ridiculously small apartment, the feeling of life slipping through my fingers both numbing and dizzying.

One foggy November day, four years into this ordeal and after another one of my job applications had been rejected, Vlaho and I sat in our kitchen eating breaded fried chicken and Swiss chard.

He asked me if I wanted to talk about it, and I found I couldn’t speak.

I looked at him over the scanty lunch I’d made for us, feeling sure he would have rather eaten in the cafeteria with his cheerful colleagues than at home with his silent, depressing wife.

It struck me that this was only one of the many concessions he was making for me.

I hung off his neck like a boulder, making his life miserable when it didn’t have to be.

I realized all this mid-bite, and I couldn’t say anything, and he must have seen something—terror, pain, whatever it was I was displaying—in my eyes, because he put the fork down and got up.

“Get your jacket,” he said in a determined tone he rarely used.

And I was so unmoored, so lost, that I stood and did as he instructed.

Vlaho drove us to Billiard Bar, and we drank beers, and there was rock music playing and laughter and raucousness all around us, and it reminded me of the night we’d met.

He hadn’t changed a lot over the eight years we’d spent together, his face only a touch more defined now that he was twenty-eight.

That same incandescence illuminated him from within, and it touched the same nameless place inside me as it had back then.

We talked about inconsequential things for a while, his mother’s new car, my brother’s upcoming wedding, the new album that one of our favorite bands had released, and it seemed to me that this was his point. This was why he’d brought me there, to prove that we were still here.

The alcohol slowed my blood. We started touching again, the way we used to, the way we hadn’t for a while. My fingertip on the soft skin between his thumb and forefinger as he held his glass. His hand cupping my knee under the table. A brush of his knuckles against my cheek as I talked.

“We don’t have to choose this life,” he said, his accent heavy after the third beer.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“This whole concept. The way our parents’ generation did it. Eight-to-four jobs. Saving up to buy an apartment with a loan that will kill us for decades. Working for a wage that’s not enough, just to earn a pension that’s not livable.”

“Oh yeah? And what would we do instead?”

He shrugged. “Go to Tarifa or something.”

“Tarifa?”

“Spain,” he said. “Near the Gibraltar Strait.”

I scoffed. How weirdly specific and unusual a destination, a place I’d never heard of. It made the conversation even more bizarre. “What’s in Tarifa?”

“Sailing,” he said, then he straightened up and added in a more deliberate tone, “Freedom.”

We launched into a conversation, as if we were truly considering it, even though it was ridiculous.

Croatia hadn’t joined the European Union yet, and we couldn’t just pick up and go wherever we wanted.

There were visas and work permits to be considered.

There were all kinds of obstacles, most likely insurmountable, because people would be leaving this country en masse if it were that easy.

But I let Vlaho paint an image for me, of beaches stretching as far as the eye could see, wind sweeping through the sand, cold cervezas at nightfall, crowded tapas bars, and us, making love late at night, relaxed, untethered.

He would learn sailing, he said, and become an instructor.

Maybe over time we would buy a used sailboat and live on it.

I could do whatever I wanted, maybe own a seashell gallery?

I chuckled, imagining what my parents would say if I told them I sold seashells for a living.

But Vlaho didn’t smile back, and I felt odd suddenly, like there was more being communicated than my brain was wired to grasp. It zigzagged around us, this unsaid thing, like a gnat I couldn’t catch.

“I mean, is this what we wanted?” he said. “Me, working all day to bring home barely more than an average cashier? You, not even able to get a job? Relying on our parents to help us with bills just so we can pretend we’re independent. Is this really it ?”

He didn’t have to explain what “it” meant. I knew. It ached in my bones, burned in my blood. It was the place where all my striving went. Where all of it went unanswered.

“All I’m saying is, we could blow off the script,” he said, and I leaned on my clasped hands, and truly imagined him this time: tanned, breeze tousling his hair, bleached white at the ends by the relentless sun, hanging off the side of a boat as the sails catch the wind.

I could see him, so unlike him, but so much more like him at the same time, undomesticated, and the image filled me with longing for this version of Vlaho I had never met.

We drained our glasses and got up to leave.

We exited the bar, the smell of cigarette smoke that clung to our skin and clothes even more striking against the crisp winter air.

Vlaho turned me toward him and said, “All I want is for you to be happy.” He rubbed my upper arms and corrected himself. “All I want is what we already have.”

We went home that night and undressed each other with care, and lay down together, and when he was about to enter me, we didn’t stop like we usually did, and he didn’t reach for protection.

Instead, his eyes bored into mine, and we were agreeing to blow off the script, perhaps in a different way than we had talked about earlier that night.

“I am happy,” I said to him as we were moving together.

“Right here, with you. I don’t care if I never get a stupid job. This is all I need.”

But it wasn’t entirely true, though I didn’t know it back then. Having him was not enough. And I often wondered in the years that followed, if it would have made a difference had we gone to Tarifa. Or if we’d still have cleaved apart, like we did because we stayed.

Six months later, I lay on an ob-gyn’s chair, legs in stirrups, a probe stuck in my vagina, the faint smell of alcohol and latex saturating the air. The gynecologist, a woman in her fifties with a flushed face, moved the probe around, her eyes glued to the screen.

My uterus, a dance of light and shadows on the monitor, came and went from view.

As much as I tried, I couldn’t make out its contours, so I focused on the vase of pink tulips on the doctor’s desk across the room.

Their long stems, delicate petals, the subtle way they made the room less clinical.

And inside their flower heads, even though I couldn’t see them, their own reproductive organs, the gynoecium; a pistil consisting of an ovary, a style, and a stigma.

The conversation about Tarifa had sealed the decision without us ever discussing it.

Maybe it wouldn’t be the perfect order of things (get a steady job, access to maternal benefits, then get pregnant), but we didn’t care about the order of things anymore.

That night he hadn’t used a condom, and the next day, I’d taken myself off the pill.

All those years of using double, even triple protection, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t gotten pregnant when we so much as touched.

But six months, and here I was. I had read on the internet that it was normal for it to take up to a year to conceive, but after getting off the pill, my periods were turning out to be anything but regular.

This didn’t worry me, I’d had irregular, light periods before getting on the pill, and when I’d asked my family doctor about it, he saw no cause for concern.

“You’re thin and athletic,” he’d said. “It’s normal. ”

But now that we were trying, the impatience had gotten the best of me. In six months, I’d only had two cycles. If it could take up to a year for women who were regular, it might take me five, and I wasn’t willing to wait. I’d done enough waiting by then.

The doctor finally looked at me, pulling the rod out. “Alrighty then. We’re done here. Why don’t you get dressed and we’ll talk.” Her tone was breezy enough, but her eyes carried a note of something that made my navel pull inward.

I closed myself in the small dressing cabin in the corner of the room, attuned to the sounds on the other side of the door. Out there, the doctor whispered a few instructions to the nurse, who then closed the door behind her as she left the room.

I pulled my panties up with shaking hands, and came out to sit on the chair across from her. She didn’t acknowledge me until she finished typing, using only her two forefingers. Then she faced me. “All right. Was this your first time getting a transvaginal ultrasound?”

I nodded.

“Ivona, there’s no easy way to say this. You have a condition called uterine hypoplasia.” She paused, and I thought, Okay, that doesn’t sound that bad. Not like cancer.

“That means your uterus is underdeveloped,” the doctor clarified, and I could see I was in trouble by the intense way she was observing me.

She proceeded to explain what the condition meant.

That there were different levels of severity, but I happened to have an extremely rare type that’s also among the most severe.

That this was the reason my periods were light and infrequent in the first place, and that being on the pill had masked the symptoms until now.

That my uterus was too stunted to carry a pregnancy.

That I would not be able to have biological children of my own.

Her words bounced off me as if I were a tree trunk. The doctor put her hand on mine. Her fingertips were so hot she almost burned a hole through me. I focused on the tulips, as mute and stumped as me.

“But there is treatment, right? A surgery, something we can do?”

The doctor’s eyes softened. The same note in them as when she’d told me to dress.

Only now I could interpret what it meant.

Pity. “Surgery is an option in some hypoplasia cases. Unfortunately,” she sighed, “your particular case isn’t compatible with surgical repair.

” She turned to the computer screen and began typing again.

“I’ll send you to do some more tests. MRI.

HSG. That should give us a clearer picture. ”

“So there might still be a chance that—”

The doctor shook her head, resolute. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up, Ivona. I truly am very sorry.”

Outside on the street, a perfect Dalmatian spring day.

Warm sun in the deep-blue sky, a gentle breeze, blackbirds and swallows singing in the branches of freshly leafed trees.

But my mind twisted and corrupted the image until it turned ugly.

The broken asphalt, the overflowing garbage cans.

Cars double-parked on the pavement, blocking the way for a mother with a stroller.

A mother. A child.

I reached for my phone, then stared at its dark screen.

I wanted to call Mom. Funny how this impulse always stayed with me no matter what, this conviction that she could make things better if only I asked.

As if I were a four-year-old with a scraped knee, crying Mommy, Mommy, make this better , and her kissing it would fix me right up.

But she couldn’t make this better, no one could.

She’d likely make it worse, her catastrophizing as instant and consuming as a sandstorm.

I could see myself offering this burden up for inspection, and her taking it, making it her own.

I wasn’t ready to hear any of it, I couldn’t bear to comfort her over my loss.

And I couldn’t call Vlaho either. How could I break it to him over the phone that we would never conceive a child of our own? How could I tell him that he’d married a woman who not only couldn’t find a job, but who didn’t even have a functioning womb?

A thought impaled me, so acute it almost brought me to my knees: What will become of us?

I stood there, in front of my ob-gyn’s building, on that incongruently beautiful May day, and I knew in my gut, in the marrow of my bones, that I was once again alone.