Homeland and Other Stories by Barbara Kingsolver

Author:Barbara Kingsolver
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

The telephone wakes Annemarie. It’s not late, only a little past seven, the sun is still up, and she’s confused. She must have fallen asleep without meaning to. She is cut through with terror while she struggles to place where Leon is and remember whether he’s been fed. Since his birth, falling asleep in the daytime has served up to Annemarie this momentary shock of guilt.

When she hears the voice on the phone and understands who it is, she stares at the receiver, thinking somehow that it’s not her phone. She hasn’t heard her mother’s voice for such a long time.

“All I’m asking is for you to go with me to the clinic,” Magda is saying. “You don’t have to look at the needle. You don’t have to hold my hand.” She waits, but Annemarie is speechless. “You don’t even have to talk to me. Just peck on the receiver: once if you’ll go, twice if you won’t.” Magda is trying to sound light-hearted, but Annemarie realizes with a strange satisfaction that she must be very afraid. She’s going to have amniocentesis.

“Are you all right?” Magda asks. “You sound woozy.”

“Why wouldn’t I be all right,” Annemarie snaps. She runs a hand through her hair, which is spiked with perspiration, and regains herself. “Why on earth are you even having it done, the amniowhatsis, if you think it’s going to be so awful?”

“My doctor won’t be my doctor anymore unless I have it. It’s kind of a requirement for women my age.”

A yellow tabby cat walks over Annemarie’s leg and jumps off the bed. Annemarie is constantly taking in strays, joking to Kay Kay that if Leon leaves her at least she won’t be alone, she’ll have the cats. She has eleven or twelve at the moment.

“Well, it’s probably for the best,” Annemarie tells Magda, in the brisk voice she uses to let Magda know she is a citizen of the world, unlike some people. “It will ease your mind, anyway, to know the baby’s okay.”

“Oh, I’m not going to look at the results,” Magda explains. “I told Dr. Lavinna I’d have it, and have the results sent over to his office, but I don’t want to know. That was our compromise.”

“Why don’t you want to know the results?” asks Annemarie. “You could even know if it was a boy or a girl. You could pick out a name.”

“As if it’s such hard work to pick out an extra name,” says Magda, “that I should go have needles poked into me to save myself the trouble?”

“I just don’t see why you wouldn’t want to know.”

“People spend their whole lives with labels stuck on them, Annemarie. I just think it would be nice for this one to have nine months of being a plain human being.”

“Mother knows best,” sighs Annemarie, and she has the feeling she’s always had, that she’s sinking in a bog of mud. “You two should just talk,” Kay Kay sometimes insists, and Annemarie can’t get across that it’s like quicksand.

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