A Sense of the Infinite

I saw on a bench in front of a gift shop.

A family with four kids wandered past me. The kids had those huge lollipops they sell to tourists, the kind you only ever see in cartoons. They had just unwrapped their lollipops and were trying to figure out the best strategy for consuming them. The thing is, though, it’s impossible to get your mouth around them, and if you just lick the surface you can’t get the full flavor. I watched the kids bringing the lollipops to their faces at different angles, realizing the dimensions were all wrong to get a good lick, looking confused but still determined, as if they couldn’t believe that these enormous pink and blue things that looked so tantalizing were basically impossible to enjoy. You have to smash them into pieces to be able to suck on them at all, but kids are never willing to do that. Besides, once you do break off a piece, you realize how bad and headachey it tastes, and you don’t want to eat it anymore.

When I got too cold from sitting, I went to the Unbelievable! Museum.

The museum is in a white house, with a white painted sign out front, and a replica of a barrel that someone had used to go over the waterfall in the 1920s. You can climb into the barrel and have your picture taken with your head sticking out the top. I have six or seven pictures of myself in this barrel at different ages, always gri

Inside the museum, there’s a goat with two heads and a wax figure of a woman with six fingers on both hands, as well as her delicate pink six-fingered gloves with pearl buttons up the side. There’s a rat king, which is when a nest of rats gets their tails tangled up in a knot and can’t get untangled again. They die like that, a writhing mass of rats, and eventually get discovered and stuck in curiosity museums. But the strangest thing in the collection is the lithopedion.

At first it looks like a fossil or rock; not a big deal compared to a two-headed goat. But if you read the typed yellow card, you discover that it is actually a rock-baby retrieved from the stomach of a seventy-year-old woman. Lithopedions are exceptionally rare. They happen when a baby starts to grow in the wrong place, and the body builds a shield of calcium around it. Medieval records of lithopedions tell stories of women who knew they were pregnant but “the baby never came out,” and eventually they forgot about it and went on with their lives.

Maybe, I thought to myself, if I was lucky, the same thing would happen to me. My body would quietly digest the bundle of cells inside it, or it would fossilize them and turn them to stone. In fifty years, I would feel a pain in my stomach, and doctors would extract a pebble the size of aquarium gravel.

Do you know what this is, ma’am? they would say, holding it up with tweezers, and I would shake my head in bewilderment. No, I have no idea.

“The museum is closing,” said the girl at the counter.

I took my winter jacket from the coat hook and walked out.

41

I DIDN’T FEEL LIKE GOING HOME.

I drove past the Java Bean where kids from my school were eating maple donuts, and the No Frills where Mom was working. The McDonald’s PlayPlace looked like a strange tumor growing out of the side of the building. It snaked around bulbously while little kids clambered around inside it.

I drove past the go-kart track where my cousin Max works in the summer, and the K-Mart with the French fry truck outside.

Finally I went to the Botanical Gardens and parked in the empty lot.

The Botanical Gardens stay open year-round, although there are no flowers in winter. You can walk around the frozen grounds, gazing at the red berries on the winter trees and the topiary unicorn glittering with frost. The ice-cream shop is closed but Jeanette Fielding is still in her office, filling out order forms for next year’s Dixie cups and waffle cones.

The orchid house was empty. Not a single purple face to peep at, no nodding pink things on stems.

I remembered the first time Mom took me to the Gardens. How we spent all afternoon singing to the ducks in the pond and talking to flowers. How dizzy sweet the cosmos, how giggling and jesterly the jacaranda. How the whole garden became a many-tendriled friend I swam through under the sunshine.

Cold air was blowing through the broken pane of greenhouse glass.

I sat on the ground and took out my phone.

I supposed I had better tell Oliver.

42

I CALLED OLIVER’S NUMBER. THE GIRL who answered sang, “This is Loreen, Alaskan booty queen.”

If it wasn’t my life, I would have laughed.

43

LOREEN, ALASKAN BOOTY QUEEN, SOUNDED drunk.

“I need to talk to Oliver,” I said.

“Who’s this?” she drawled suspiciously.

I paused, but couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with my name. “This is A

Loreen didn’t like the sound of that.

“Why?” she said. “What’s your business?”

“Pregnancy.”

She said she’d get him straightaway.

44

WHEN OLIVER CAME ON THE PHONE he was drunk too. It was noisy in the background: thrashing rock music and a sports game on TV. I wondered where he was. It was too early in the day for a bar, and Oliver was underage. Maybe Alaska was just loud.

“A

“Hey-hey,” I echoed back.

“Whuss going on?”

Was there a snowstorm over there? Sound of howling winds and rattling flagpoles. Maybe he was on the crab boat, although I didn’t see how that was possible cell service–wise, or how Loreen, Alaskan Booty Queen, fit into the picture. Maybe she was the skipper.

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

“No you’re not.”

“Is she pregnant?” A screech from Loreen.

And Oliver: “It’s just some chick from home starting drama.”

Loreen: “Are you lying to me?”

Oliver: “Loreen!”

Slamming door. A roar from the TV. Someone must have scored a touchdown.

A few seconds later, Oliver came back on the phone.

“That was real uncool, A

“You did.”

“We used protection.”

“Not the whole time.”

Horrified silence. Terrifying possibilities invoked.

“Oliver?” I said. “Oliver.”

On TV, the cheering continued. They must be passing out free burritos in the stadium, dropping them out of a plane. Oliver stayed quiet for so long I thought he had passed out. I was about to hang up when he spoke suddenly.

“You can do whatever you want,” Oliver said, “but I’m not coming back.”

I kicked an empty flowerpot with my snow boot. “I’m not asking you to come back.”

“Then why’d you call?”

It was my turn to go silent. The words dropped out of my grasp like an armful of library books. Why had I called? Why had I gone to the forest and the curiosity museum? Why had I done any of the things I had done that strange, cold day?

“I just thought you would want to know,” I stammered, and hung up the phone.