Octuplets

Bethany Anne Montgomery has decided, at a very young age, that when she grows up she’ll live in a big white house and have eight babies. Allatonce. She knows it’s important to decide important things at a very young age. It shows character, determination, and what Bethany Anne’s mother calls moxie.

Bethany Anne is determined to grow into a person with lots of moxie, and octuplets.

She likes the sound of it, “octuplets,” like an exotic egg dish, and of course having eight babies all at once made you instantly famous. Lots of kids at Bethany Anne’s school want to be famous when they grow up. They want to be famous actresses or famous football players, but Bethany Anne’s mother informs her that fame is an impractical career choice. If she wants to find a nice man with means and live a nice life in the suburbs she ought to go to dental school, or become an allergist. There’s a lot of money in allergies these days.

“Allergies are gross,” Bethany Anne complains. She wipes her runny nose across her sleeve.

“You need to be able to support yourself after the divorce.” Her mother unloads box dinners from a plastic bag and stacks them neatly in the freezer, like bricking up a wall. “Especially if you’re going to have octuplets.” Mrs. Stevens-Montgomery believes in the value of supporting her daughter’s dreams. Someone has to. That cheating baboon Mr. Montgomery isn’t going to do it. All the same, practicality is paramount.

“If you become a doctor, you’ll get to wear a nice long white coat to work. You look lovely in white.”

“Thank you.” Bethany Anne sneezes.

A boy at school tells Bethany that girls can’t be doctors, not even allergists, especially if they have eight babies all at once. “The age of the supermom is over,” he says.

The boy’s name is Sebastian, which sounds like a prince from Arabia or somewhere, but he’s short and red-headed with freckles all over, even on his hands.

Bethany Anne looks at the hands. She says, “What do you know? You can’t even eat peanuts.”

“Women have learned they can’t really have it all,” he retorts. “It’s all over CNN.”

“I could kill you with a peanut,” she tells him. She kicks the leg of her chair with her tennis shoe.

“That’s true,” he admits. “But then you’d go to jail and you’d never be an allergist or have any babies at all. You’d be featured on Deadly Women and everyone would hate you.”  Sebastian has a lot of moxie. He spits it at her with every word.

The rubber of Bethany Anne’s shoe sole bounces off the metal chair leg. “I’d wait till you were sleeping and I’d put a peanut up your nose.”

After school, Sebastian pushes Bethany into a puddle and mud seeps into her tennis shoe so it isn’t white anymore. Her mother won’t like that.

“I’m no feminist,” her mother says, “but that boy is a tool of patriarchal oppression.” Sometimes her mother talks this way. Confusingly.

Bethany Anne crosses her feet at the ankles. It’s ladylike, and it hides her secret muddied shoe.

“You’ll be whatever you want to be,” her mother says. She sounds angry, like if Bethany Anne doesn’t become exactly what she wants to be, she’ll be punished. Her mother points a knife when she talks. She uses it to pierce the tops of the TV dinners before they go into the microwave. Three minutes. That’s how long it takes between choosing and having.

Bethany is eight years old and maybe that’s why she can’t stop thinking in octuples.  Her therapist says it’s because she’s an only child and a victim of divorce. She craves a secure social network made up of people who have no choice but to love her. Children can’t divorce by signing papers in separate rooms like parents can.

The therapist makes wide, dramatic arm motions as she talks, like she’s conducting a symphony with her pen for a baton. “You fear abandonment due to the trauma of your father’s leaving during one of the most vulnerable times in your childhood thus far—kindergarten, wherein the child leaves the home for the first time and begins his or her indoctrination into the society at large.”

“He left my mother,” Bethany corrects. “It wasn’t my fault. They both still love me very, very much.”

“Of course, of course.” The therapists holds the end of the pen to her chin and nods seriously.

Tonight’s dinner is special, which means it takes a long time and Bethany has to stay out of the kitchen so her mother doesn’t pull her hair out. Her mother has invited a guest. The guest is a man but Bethany’s mother calls him a gentleman. Whenever he comes over she cooks a big piece of beef and laughs at things that aren’t funny.

Bethany and her mother and the gentleman eat in the dining room on the clinking white plates her mother calls china, and dinner feels like a country far away. Bethany Anne wishes she could eat in her own secret country. She’d like to take her dinner plate and disappear under the table, where she could listen to her mother and the gentleman invisibly, the tablecloth floating around her like a giant’s skirt.

The gentleman isn’t allergic to peanuts or anything else. He has a strong constitution he says, and laughs when Bethany Anne asks if it’s like the United States’ constitution, which Mrs. Gonzales told them about in school. “I’m healthy as a horse,” he says, which doesn’t answer the question at all.

The gentleman asks Bethany what she wants to be when she grows up. Bethany tells him she wants to live in a big white house with a little white fence and have eight babies. Allatonce. And a poodle named Curly Sue.

The gentleman squishes up his eyes so they wrinkle at the corners. “But what do you want to be?” he says. “Not what you want to have, but what you want to do.”

Bethany doesn’t understand the question. What you do depends on what you have. If she has eight babies allatonce, she thinks, there will be plenty to do.

Bethany’s mother laughs. “She wants to be an allergist.”

The gentleman looks at Bethany, like maybe he doesn’t think girls can be doctors either, but he just says, “Huh. Is that so?”

“Yes.” Bethany kicks the table leg with the new brown shoes her mother got her to replace the muddy white ones. “I want to save the world from peanuts.” She sneezes.

After dinner, Bethany Anne lies on her bed and watches a Daddy long-legs spider walk along the wall. If she hits the wall with her fist, the spider vibrates like a plucked guitar string.

Spiders have eight legs, octuples of legs, and the girl spiders can lay hundreds of eggs that wake up and turn into baby spiders. Allatonce.

It’s lonely sharing her room with just one Daddy long-legs with no babies or anything, but Bethany has been told to stay in her room and be a good girl until the gentleman goes home. Outside the door, Bethany Anne can hear her mother laughing, but inside the Daddy long-legs just stands there with all his eight feet on the wall, not making a web or anything. She hits her fist on the wall and watches Daddy dance.

On Friday they do show and tell at school. Mrs. Gonzales calls it their fifteen minutes of fame even though they only get five minutes apiece. Isabella Smith brings in her pet rat Cinderella and a pile of her pink, squirming babies. Cinderella had quintuplets, which means five babies at once, but then she ate one and now there’s only four.

All the girls and some of the boys in the class squeal ewwww, but Isabella says it’s just a part of nature. The mother eats the babies she can’t take care of. It’s too bad she can’t be on TV and get free Gerber’s baby formula for a year, Bethany thinks. Nature is gross, and Bethany Anne Montgomery is glad she isn’t a part of it.

When it’s Bethany’s turn, she shows everyone the daddy long-legs from her bedroom. She caught him in a shoe box so he could have a house of his own, but there’s nothing in it except a little web in the corner he made for himself. Bethany calls the spider Daddy for short and tells everyone about how spiders can have hundreds of babies allatonce so they never have to be lonely.

Sebastian raises his hand and Mrs. Gonzales calls on him even though it’s Bethany’s fifteen minutes of fame and she ought to be in charge. He says lots of spiders eat their babies too. He says they have no emotional connection to their offspring and Bethany’s anthropomorphism is evidence of her own emotional distress. No one is interested in Daddy. The other kids all look at Sebastian. He sounds just like Bethany’s therapist. She hates him.

Bethany stands at the front of the class with her shoebox, while the other kids try to figure out what Sebastian is talking about. Her face is hot. She is burning up from the inside and the fire’s almost made it to her mouth. “Shut up!” she yells, even though no one is talking. When everyone turns toward her again, she repeats it. “Shut up.” The sides of the shoe box crush between her hands. She can’t seem to say anything else, even though no one understands. No one gets the wonderful thing about octuplets, seven other people just like you, made out of the very same cells.

Mrs. Gonzales pats her on the shoulder. She says Bethany’s spider is very interesting and thanks her for bringing it in. She says to make sure the lid on the shoebox is secure and pushes on it with both palms. Bethany puts the box on the floor under her desk where it’s dark and warm and safe. She closes her eyes and imagines she’s under the desk with Daddy, in a little shoebox house just for her, like the diorama she made of her bedroom last year. But Mrs. Gonzales says “Miss Montgomery, please settle down and pay attention,” so she can’t be under the desk even in her imagination. Bethany takes deep breaths like her therapist told her to do when she’s upset and imagines the breaths are what moxie is made of.

Sometimes Bethany’s mother says that everyone is born alone and everyone dies alone. She said that a lot after Bethany’s father went away. Bethany was there too, so she wasn’t really alone, but she said it anyway. But Bethany’s mother forgot about octuplets. They weren’t born alone for sure and maybe they wouldn’t die alone either. They were born famous and everyone knew who they were and where they were, all of them, together.

At home, Bethany’s mother crushes cardboard boxes with pictures of dinners they’ve already eaten and stacks the plastic trays for recycling. She can’t believe Isabella’s mother would let her bring a baby-eating rat in to show and tell. “It’s lurid, like reality TV.” She shudders. “That woman has no taste,” she says.

Bethany doesn’t tell her about Daddy. She imagines her mother and Isabella Smith’s mother screaming and pulling each other’s hair out.

“I don’t know if I want to have eight babies allatonce anymore. And I don’t want to be an allergist either. I don’t know what I want.” Bethany sits in a squishy chair in her therapist’s office, but she’d like to crawl under the table and look at people’s shoes like she did when she was little and her mother and father would have guests for dinner, even though the only person there is the therapist and her shoes are matte black with a stumpy heel. That was a long time ago, before Bethany learned about octuplets and moxie. Before her father went away and the only guest they ever had was the gentleman. It’s good to be under a table, Bethany thinks. It’s good to have a layer of hard wood over your head where nothing can get you. But that’s something only babies are allowed to do, and Bethany has to grow up.

The therapist sighs. “It’s the human condition,” she says. She takes off her glasses and looks at them, then puts them back on and looks through them again. She doesn’t say anything else.

Bethany Anne doesn’t crawl under the table because her therapist would have a field day with that.