The First Bad Man: A Novel by July Miranda

Author:July, Miranda [July, Miranda]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2015-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

HER SHAPE SHOULD HAVE LENT itself to a fertile appearance, but it was her biggish chin that I noticed now, and her burly way of moving. Together with the swollen stomach it created a peculiar picture, almost freakish. The more pregnant she became, the less like a woman she was. When we were out in public I tried to see if other people flinched or did a double take. But apparently I was the only one who could see this.

“ ‘Week seventeen,’ ” I read, “ ‘This week your baby develops body fat (join the club!) and his or her own unique set of fingerprints.’ ” It was hard to tell if she was listening. “So, make fat and fingerprints this week,” I summarized. She pulled a snail off the coffee table and handed it to me. I dropped it into the covered bucket by the front door; Rick was collecting them.

“ ‘Your baby weighs five point nine ounces and is about the size of an onion.’ ”

“Just say ‘the baby,’ not ‘your baby.’ ”

“The baby is the size of an onion. Do you want me to read ‘A Tip from Our Readers’?”

She shrugged.

“ ‘A Tip from Our Readers: No need to splurge on maternity wear, just borrow your husband’s button-down shirts!’ ”

She looked down at her stomach. It looked like a beer belly peeking out under her tank top.

“I have a shirt you could borrow.”

Clee followed me to my closet. The clothes were all clean but collectively they had an oily, intimate smell that I had never noticed before. She began sliding hangers around. Suddenly she pulled out a long green corduroy dress and held it up.

“It’s the lesbo dress,” she said.

The dress I’d worn on the date with Mark Kwon, Kate’s dad. She’d found it awfully quickly. It was long sleeved with tiny buttons running the whole length of it, from the edge of the calf-skimming skirt to the high collar. Thirty or forty buttons.

“It probably still fits you.”

“I don’t think so.” An older, blue-blooded woman with white hair and real pearl earrings could have been elegant in it. Anyone younger or poorer would look like a soldier from one of those countries where women hold automatic weapons. I pulled out my pin-striped men’s shirt. She took it into the bathroom with her but when she came out she was still wearing her tank top.

“It’s not my style,” she said, handing it back.

“Does it feel natural to you?” I asked. “To be pregnant?”

“It is natural,” she said. “It’s the medical establishment that makes it unnatural.”

Her friend Kelly had given birth at home in a bathtub. Same with her friend Desia. There was a whole group of girls in Ojai who had put their babies up for adoption through a Christian organization called Philomena Family Services. All of them home-birthed with midwives.

“But here, in LA, the hospitals are really good, so you don’t need to do that.”

“You don’t need to tell me what I don’t need to do,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

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