American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,63

of the kids laughing as they fool around on the baseball field, she hates the cheery neon lights and the waves of hello, and she hates the painted people on the town’s sign who stare at the antenna on the mesa with eyes full of hope. She hates them all for having a happiness that is denied to her, because they don’t know, do they? They don’t know what the world is like outside Wink. Those people in the film don’t know that their dreams will come to nothing. They don’t know how things really are, how they will be.

But Mona knows. She knows too well.

Mona’s last name wasn’t always Bright. Once, only a few years ago—though it feels like a lifetime now—when she was on her fourth year with the Houston PD, she happened to meet a state trooper named Dale Loudon, a brick wall of a man who had large, sad eyes and a soft, slow way of speaking that charmed Mona’s hardened (or so she thought) heart. Dale liked old movies, mowing his grass, and making fly-fishing lures, though he was a terrible fly-fisherman himself. He was kind, he was attentive, he was, more or less, thoughtful; in other words, he was everything Mona had missed out on so far in her life. And the fact that he had a dick like a plantain certainly didn’t hurt his case.

They got married when Mona was thirty-two, and she was, to her suspicious disbelief, quite happy. The quiet, dull domesticity Dale offered appealed to her, resonated with her. She had never known you could live like that, so relaxed, just simply there. There was something perfect about the Sunday mornings when they would lie in bed lazing away the day. It was like some kind of wonderful exotic drug—but then, it would be, because never in her life had Mona ever had a home like that. A real home.

She was pregnant four months into the marriage. It was not something either of them had intended, yet she couldn’t ever call it an accident. Because Mona was, despite all logic, quite thrilled at the news, which was not something one would expect. Honestly, no one could ever hear the question “Would you like for your body to play host to a whole person, and, upon painful extraction of that person, would you allow every waking and even unwaking moment of the next years or decades of your life to bend at the whims of a tiny, tyrannical, larval human, to the complete devastation of your financial and social life?” and respond in the positive. Let alone Mona Bright, she of the fierce right hook, cold grimace (which she picked up from her father), and deadeye shot (for Mona had been far and away the best shot in her graduating class—something else she had learned from her father).

But Mona did. When she saw the tiny pink plus sign on the white stick, something inside her opened up, unfolded its limbs, and stretched its palms toward sunlight. She could not articulate it, but it felt like she now had a chance to make things right, even though she was never entirely sure what had been wrong. (Besides, a tiny voice always reminded her, absolutely everything.)

She soon found herself buying all sorts of ridiculous shit for the nursery: carpets and drapes and a crib and bedding (all vetted by the most scrupulous baby magazines, which suddenly seemed terribly wise) and onesies and hats that would only ever be worn about twice before the little thing’s head grew too big. Most of these items were a gender-neutral yellow, because Mona could never get her head around this binary blue/pink bullshit. She also refused to learn the baby’s gender, because that would just ruin all the damn fun, wouldn’t it?

Dale bought her similarly ridiculous maternity shit. Slippers. Body pillows. A foot massager for her swollen ankles. He even bought her a pink maternity dress. A pink one, because, bless his heart, Dale could never get his own head around Mona’s problems with the blue/pink situation. But the thing was, Mona had worn it. Even though it made her look like a deflating balloon or a piece of goddamn chewing gum, she’d worn it. And she hadn’t cared. The second she saw the tiny dancing shrimp-person displayed on the screens at the ob-gyn, none of that niggling stuff could ever bother her again.

If anything bothered her, it was the whole family process—and there was a process.