From where she sits on the veranda overlooking the narrow shoreline she can see a whole group of them, their stomachs stretched and shiny in the sun, waddling over deflated-looking dunes towards the water. She counts three, maybe four (with the fourth she can’t be certain). One of them looks as if she is about to burst. How can she be allowed out like that?
Val imagines the whole thing: the heaviest of the pregnant mothers leading her flock into the lake, the neckline of her bathing suit low enough to promise a dreadful sunburn, her sturdy calves and thighs and hips disappearing under the green water; she’d maybe turn onto her back, float out a bit, and forget herself, her belly protruding like an iceberg; maybe her eyes would close for a moment as if she were asleep.
And then her eyes would fly open, white and frantic, and she’d start wailing and thrashing her limbs. Like a shark attack.
“Don’t you want to go swimming?”
Val turns. After staring at the bright sun she only sees dark. She blinks a few times. Dave, her brother-in-law, emerges from the inside of the café in a pair of worn-down espadrilles, polka-dotted swim trunks, and a straw hat. He isn’t from here; he borrowed the hat from Val’s father. It doesn’t make sense because his home is in Richmond and there is no need to blend in with the men here. He and Val’s sister Rachel are only visiting. He will sunburn instantly too. Doesn’t have the Ginley skin.
Val never imagined Dave as the husband-type. Maybe she is too bent on disliking people. When her sister Rachel first introduced him to Val and her parents, he said he’d never met such a happy loving family, such warm and kind people. This baffled Val because she had always imagined her family as the depressed kind: her father has reread the same Westerns on the same recliner since the day he retired; her mother fixates on a recurring urinary tract infection. And both her parents go on about Val’s failed marriage. Dave is too energetic, too excited about the world; when he first met Val he asked her too many questions about her work at the library, pretending to be interested in Marion, Virginia.
He said: “It’s a beautiful town, isn’t it?”
And she said: “I’ve never heard someone describe it like that.”
“All the trees, the mountains, the little houses.” He must’ve not heard her.
“The population goes down every year,” she said. “Only the old people are staying.” She looked past him and into the kitchen. She and Dave were sitting in the living room, perpendicular to each other on the sectional couch. “Rachel might need help with dinner.”
He said fine, he understood, but he had just one more question. What was it about Marion?
//
Val is certain her sister will get divorced. After she met Dave she told Rachel as much: this is the type who will leave you for someone else, she had said, and don’t you think otherwise. He is just too happy. Only miserable people stay together.
Once her sister and Dave get divorced, Val will finally be able to say something to Rachel like: you don’t have to stay friends, or: you don’t have to remind yourself that you once loved him. You can move as far away from him as you want, you don’t have to stay in the same town, you don’t have to run into him at the supermarket. Val knows a thing or two about divorce.
\\
She frowns to shoo away remnants of the sun. Dave stands in front of her, feet pointing outwards, waiting to hear if she wants to get in the water. “I’ll stay in the shade,” Val says. “I don’t know if I’m meant to get any sort of exercise yet. Besides,” she wrinkles her nose, “better for my skin.” She thinks he’ll understand. Neither Dave nor Rachel have pressed her on her condition. If she keeps saying that she’s in a little pain, there’s still a bit of blood, they’ll believe her. If she says that the doctor said no exercise, they’ll believe her. She can remain inactive as long as she likes.
“Okay,” he says. He peers down in her canvas bag by her foot. “What are you reading?”
“Poetry.”
“Any good?”
She looks beyond him, eyeing the white reflections on the balloon-like stomachs across the sand. They should cover up. Such a large surface area for sunburning. “It’s pretty good.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to go swimming?” he asks.
She says yes, she is sure. Dave bows his head and steps down from the veranda onto the sand. Tufts of cattails line the rocky edges of either side of the beach; the sandy shore itself can’t be more than a hundred yards across. Beyond the rocks a few fishermen cast their lines. Beyond the fishermen the winding mountain road leads to and away from Hungry Mother State Park. Beyond the road there are dark pines and a flat periwinkle sky.
Earlier Rachel asked Val the same thing: as they were packing their beach totes, her sister busy shoving a change of clothes into a diaper bag, Rachel asked whether Val could swim yet in her condition, if the physical activity would be too much. Val knew she was perfectly able to swim. To run, to jump. But she said she wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” she had said, “since I’m still having a touch of spotting. It’s mostly rust-colored, now, like the last day of a period. Maybe it’s fine, I don’t know.”
Rachel had made a face. It was her effort at pity, though Val knew she was disgusted. Her sister had trouble with bodily things; the fact that she possessed a body herself, no less a female body, drove her mad: before she gave birth she’d said she had a vision that a monster was growing inside her, that she would give birth to a dog or cat or curled-up snake, and she couldn’t bear the idea of having to face what she’d made. Dave called Val from Rachel’s phone and begged her to calm his wife down. He said that Rachel wouldn’t stop talking about the stupid vision. So Val spoke to her sister on the phone and reminded her that visions and things were all bogus. Later, once Rachel had given birth to Henry, she was forced to remain in diapers following the delivery, and she could hardly stand the sight of herself. “Look at me,” she cried, gesturing to the towel-thick underwear, “look how disgusting this is. It’s worse than a snake.” She lifted her shirt and pinched the flabby layers of fat. “This will never go away.”
“Don’t worry,” Val had said, “I’m sure it’ll deflate over time.”
Rachel dropped her shirt. “How would you know?”
This was a fair question: how would Val know?
\\
A boy, just shy of three feet tall, emerges from the slip in the sliding café door with a popsicle in his hand. Red juice drips down his wrist. His legs and arms still retain the gentle padding of infants, skin like leavened dough, and his hair is sun-bleached and wispy. He surveys the shoreline. His gaze fixes on the pregnant women.
Val asks, “What do they have in there?”
The boy turns.
“Vee!” Red droplets fling onto her legs. He smiles and shows a row of neat baby teeth, square and even like floor tiles. “Vee,” he says again, “I missed you.”
“I missed you too, Henry.”
“Where were you?”
She says that she was right here. She never left Marion.
He wraps his arms around her neck and the cold popsicle juice runs between her shoulder blades. She inhales, refamiliarizing herself with a scent that is now mixed with spray-on sunscreen and the dry, dusty smell of sand, and asks him what he thinks of the beach. He still clings to her. If she holds her breath she can hear his heartbeat.
“The beach,” she says, gently pulling him away, “do you like it?”
He watches the pregnant women. The largest one has squatted down and rolls into a seated position, a book splayed across her thighs. She rubs sunscreen over her face.
“It’s busy,” he says.
“Very busy.” She leans closer. “What’re you looking at?”
He points at the pregnant women.
“What do they have in there?” she asks.
“Babies.”
After a pause she says yes, they have babies in there. She watches them. For a moment she wonders how it feels to grow something so large all by yourself. It must be nice. Like a sense of accomplishment.
\\
Dave’s father fell severely ill after Henry had turned one. Rachel had asked Val if she could stay with the boy for a few days while she flew out to join her husband at the hospital. Val hadn’t wanted to say yes. She had just finalized divorce proceedings from her husband and was determined to lie in bed for the coming weeks, curtains drawn, Styrofoam cups of Instant Noodles lining the bamboo settee and side table that her husband had purchased, testing how long she could go without washing or combing her hair. (The fancy shampoo and conditioner had been purchased by her husband.) She was a librarian at the public library. He was a personal injury lawyer. By the time her sister had called, she hadn’t showered for three-and-a-half days. Her first thought was that she would have to shave. Her armpit hair had developed into a thick, wiry layer, and in a few more days it would soften. As soon as she knew she’d have to leave the house, make herself presentable, remove the accumulation of body odor, she thought of the pink razor handle lying dormant on the lip of her bathtub.
Val had first asked if Dave’s father was okay. Rachel said she wasn’t sure, he was having heart attack-like symptoms. Then Val asked how long she would need to babysit.
“Just for a few days,” Rachel had said. “It would mean the world to Henry.”
Val agreed to babysit. She doubted her presence would mean anything to Henry: she had no desire to speak more than a few words and couldn’t be bothered playing any sort of games. In all likelihood she’d slouch before the television and watch children’s cartoons. But she agreed to come.
Rachel and Dave lived in a beautiful colonial style house outside Richmond. She drove up from Marion that afternoon and listened to John Prine and John Denver and Johnny Cash on the way. A little bit of Bonnie Wright too. Traffic was bad.
Their house had one of those dark brick facades with painted gables and heavyset dormer windows along the attic. A lovely family home. When she arrived with her small suitcase and backpack she felt as if she were a cleaning lady or a hired house-sitter. (She could only guess because she’d never hired any sort of help.) There was a note left for her on the counter: “It has everything,” Rachel said as she flew through the hallways, grabbing various books and magazines and then toiletries from the bathroom, “laundry, cooking, Henry’s schedule, when to water the plants. Oh,” she emerged from the office, “and Henry’s favorite bedtime stories. He’ll ask you to read them three or four times, but you can always – well, it says everything in the note.”
Rachel spoke as if she had settled into everything: the new house, the new husband, the new child. It hadn’t taken long for her to get comfortable. As soon as the sisters’ fortunes had reversed, she threw herself into her new life as if she had been expecting it all along. As if she had forgotten all about Marion and her sister and her mother and father. She would ask Val questions like, “Are you doing a Christmas card this year?” and, “Do you think Newport or Martha’s Vineyard would be better for vacation?” Val didn’t know a thing about Shutterstock photos or New England. When she looked at the note she realized she didn’t know a thing about diaper rash cream or organic fruit snacks either.
Val then wondered if Dave’s father would have to die to pay for Rachel’s new life. The rest of the Ginleys were too indifferent to their lives to make good enough offerings. Their payment wouldn’t be worth much in the way of life. Someone else had to be sacrificed.
“Do you need help with anything?” Val asked. Henry was nowhere in sight.
There was a muffled response. Val was fairly certain that Rachel had said no.
\\
There are no waves at Hungry Mother: the lake sweeps flat and clean over the sand. The water is warm along the shoreline and only cool enough if you swim out far or dive deep. There is a diving board too, just beyond the buoy-roped fence. But mostly the swimmers stay near the shoreline.
There is no breeze to shoo away the humidity or to cool the sweat on your back or clear the air of that slightly sulfuric stench. That is what Val thinks about as she watches the three-and-a-half pregnant women: all the sweating, all the stink. On the chair she can feel her thighs sticking to the woven wicker. Henry finishes his popsicle and sits crisscross on the ground in front of her. The women on the beach are spreading sunscreen like cream cheese over their massive stomachs, sometimes flinging loose globs onto the sand, other times letting the thick lotion remain like markings on their skin. Val is relieved.
Val thinks about the misery of the summer heat, the stagnant air rising over the asphalt in the driveway at home, the mosquitoes sucking enough blood from your limbs to leave quarter-sized welts. Sweat bees and horseflies on the lake especially, and copperheads on the banks and hornet nests hidden in drybrush all up the hillside through the woods. And the humidity: even in the mountains, Virginia’s swamp breath creeps like one long belch over the foothills, settling low and sticky along Hungry Mother Lake. The humidity churns up sweat and resentment like a plague.
The second-largest pregnant woman unravels some foil wrappings from a cooler. Val sits forward in her chair. The woman begins biting into a piece of cake under the foil. She chews with her mouth open and laughs and talks with her friends. Another woman, the woman who may or may not be pregnant, waves at the cooler. The first woman hands her a foil wrapping. Soon all four of them are eating cake and laughing.
\\
Rachel is easily recognizable across the sand: dark, curly hair, wide hips, narrow shoulders. A grape-colored bathing suit that cuts her pear shape against the white dunes like a bloodstain. Her skin is tanned and freckled. Rachel inherited the Ginley skin better than Val.
The sisters really look nothing alike: Val keeps her hair cut short because she doesn’t like that the color can’t decide between brown or blonde. It’s a flat, in-between sort of color. It looks poor against her skin since she’s pale and will sunburn if she isn’t careful. Her short legs and long torso make her look as if she’d once been a swimmer, but she was never a swimmer. As she has gotten older her hips have narrowed and her stomach has rounded. Sometimes she worries she’s turning into a man.
Rachel walks through the side fence between the parking lot and the outdoor seating area at the café. She picks Henry up once she walks up the steps of the veranda and kisses him all over the face. He wriggles in his mother’s arms and whines.
“It’s so hot today,” Rachel says. “I’ve been in a meeting since eleven and I swear the air conditioning in the car isn’t working. I’m still not used to the constant phone calls. You’d think I’d be used to my new bosses by now.” She wipes her forehead. “God, it’s so hot.”
“It’s as hot as it always is,” Val says.
“We’ll just have to go swimming to cool off, won’t we?”
Val doesn’t say anything because she isn’t certain whether Rachel is speaking to her or Henry.
“Are you excited for the beach?” Rachel asks. She brushes Henry’s nose with her finger.
He nods.
“Are you excited to swim?”
He shrugs. He wriggles around in her arms.
“Doesn’t it look pretty?”
Rachel turns with Henry still on her hip so that they can face the beach. Henry mumbles something. Val guesses that he is still looking at the pregnant women. Their group of four has acquired a pair of men, maybe husbands. They are like growths on lumps of skin, emerging as if born from their wives, as if their entire existence relies on the existence of the pregnant women. They are slightly overweight and sunburned on their shoulders. Farther down from their encampment of strewn beach towels, Styrofoam coolers, woven beach bags, and crooked umbrellas, Dave unfolds rented beach chairs in the sand.
“Let’s go meet Dada,” Rachel says, bouncing Henry on her hip. She starts down the stairs. The precise outline of Rachel’s former physique, the body she had prior to giving birth, is clear: where the cellulite started forming along her thighs, where her skin pokes out from her bathing suit along her upper back, where her ankles merge with her calves. Rachel was very skinny in high school. She had detested the idea of ever gaining weight; in college Val suspected her sister of being anorexic. She watched Rachel get skinnier and skinnier while she herself grew fatter and fatter. Val gained nearly twenty pounds in college and, after years of dieting and exercise, found depression the most effective means at weight loss. Time has the opposite effect on either sister: it drains one and weighs down the other.
“Vee!”
Henry wails in his mother’s arms. He starts kicking and slapping the popsicle stick against his mother’s breastbone. Rachel stops in the sand and turns to look at her sister just so that she can offer a cold, silent gaze, something to cut the heat and humidity between them, as if to say, look at what you’ve done.
\\
Val likes the feeling of sand between her toes. Rachel doesn’t understand this because she says that your toes are only the start of it; the sand will get into your shorts and bathing suit and hair and ears and nose and mouth. Rachel wears water shoes so that she doesn’t have to feel the sand. Or the bottom of the lake. She’ll do anything to avoid the feeling of the sand or mud or anything dirty and low to the ground.
Val scrunches her toes in the sand. Rachel is out swimming laps along the inside of the buoy-lined fence. Her hips rotate back and forth in the water in a rhythmic way. Dave crouches down with Henry in the sand and works on a sandcastle, cheering Henry on, saying that he’s doing a wonderful job. Six or eight yards to the left the pregnant women chat and eat their cake and drink their Gatorades and sparkling waters and juice pouches. Their husbands are in the water. Val listens.
“You can’t let them nurse for longer than a year. It’s unnatural.”
“I heard six months.”
“I heard eighteen.”
“It’s all the same, don’t you see? It doesn’t really matter.”
“I don’t want it chewing on my nipples any longer than necessary.”
Val retrieves her poetry book from her bag. She already finished it but she’s thinking of rereading it. In the margins there are notes and check marks. Her husband left them there.
“Vee,” Henry says, waving a red bucket in the air, “come play!”
She smiles and shakes her head. “Not now,” she says. “In a little bit.”
\\
When Rachel had first left Val alone with Henry before leaving to join her husband and father-in-law, Val stood in the doorframe between the kitchen and living room, suddenly aware of how large the house was. If she looked around she got dizzy: her feet were much farther down than she thought they should be. The walls were slipping away from her. She was shrinking.
Val had felt this way when she was first dropped off at college. Alone in her dorm room, she squatted down, put her face in her hands, and held her breath. She had hoped the room would return to its normal size once she opened her eyes.
“Vee?”
She looked up. Her eyes stung because she had been rubbing them with her hands. She was squatting on the herringbone hardwood. Her calves were throbbing.
Henry tugged at her ponytail. When she looked at him he jumped back. He was still, like a startled cat. His eyes seemed far too large for his head, almost marshmallow sized. They were so round and glassy that she could see her scrunched-up face in the reflections.
“Vee?”
She rubbed her face because she knew it would be red. “Sorry,” she said. She asked if he was hungry.
He stared at her.
“I’m okay,” she said. She stood and blood rushed to her head.
Henry gripped her pantleg around the knee. He shook the fabric up and down.
“Vee,” he said.
\\
Val slowly slides the bucket away from the sand. Henry squeals in delight: a perfect turret remains, lined among a fleet of others. Dave sits back on the sand to the left of Val, sunglasses pulled low over his nose, watching the pair.
“You make the best ones, Vee,” Henry says.
“I don’t know if they’re as good as yours,” she says.
He picks up the bucket, runs to the water, and fills the bucket. When he returns he holds the bucket out. “For your hands,” he says.
“Thank you,” she says. He smiles, as if bashful, and watches as she takes the bucket and rinses the sand off. “You’re very thoughtful, Henry.”
Henry runs back down to the water, sits down, and watches his mother as she swims.
“He really loves you, you know,” Dave says.
She accidentally knocks the bucket over. The force of the water carves a hole in the side of one of the turrets. “He’s a great kid,” she says. She doesn’t look at Dave.
“You love him?”
“Of course I do.”
Sand shifts and flings onto her lap. He’s sitting closer to her now. “Rachel really loves you, you know that?”
“I do.”
“We know it’s been really hard on you. All the doctors, everything.”
“Yes,” she says, “it’s been difficult.”
“We all really love you.”
She doesn’t say anything. The smell in the air has changed and she wonders if it’s his breath or if the smell of the lake has changed.
\\
When Val told Rachel last summer that she wanted to undergo IVF, Rachel thought something terrible had happened to her sister. She asked whether everything was okay. “I didn’t think you liked children very much,” Rachel had said. “I always thought you didn’t want any of your own. Do you know how much work it is?”
“I like Henry.”
“Yes, but don’t you think this is a big decision?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a long time.” This was technically a lie.
“You have?”
“I always wanted kids. It never worked out while I was married. He didn’t want kids.”
“He wouldn’t have been a good father.”
“How would you know?”
“He wasn’t a good husband.”
“That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have been a good father.”
“Why are you defending him?”
“I miss having him around.”
“Even when he was sleeping with all those other women?”
\\
“Rachel wishes she could see you more often,” Dave says.
“Richmond isn’t far. She could drive down more often.”
“It’s tough with work and everything.” He waves to Rachel as she wades through the water towards the shore. “We think you would like Richmond.”
“What’s wrong with Marion?”
“You could get away from everything. You know, all the stress.”
She winces. “I like it here.”
\\
On the morning before her first IVF appointment, she received a call from Dave. She stared at the name on her phone screen for a while. She didn’t want to talk to him. Her mind had been running through lists of all the yoga positions and breathing strategies and special diets and vitamins she’d found on a website for pregnant women. It had been pleasant. For once she felt excited.
“Hello?”
“Val?”
“Dave.”
“Are you okay?” His voice was quick and high-pitched. Like a desperate child.
She pressed the phone between her ear and shoulder so that she could start doing the dishes. They had been sitting in the sink for two or three days. The special vitamins for pregnancy were expensive but she was the kind of person who wanted to do everything perfectly no matter the consequences.
“I’m fine.”
There was a pause. She could hear an odd creaking and scuffing, and then a crash. She imagined their screen door opening and closing.
“I was worried about you.”
She scrubbed dried marinara sauce from a bowl. “Why,” she said, not lifting her voice to form a question.
“Your sister hasn’t heard from you.”
“I know. But why are you worried?”
\\
Rachel passes plastic baggies of sandwiches. “Peanut butter and fluff or bologna and cheese,” she says. Henry is playing in the sand and says he isn’t hungry. Val asks for the bologna. She can taste it before she opens the bag.
Rachel sits on the right of Val and asks her how she’s doing. Dave sits on the left and leans closer. Both look at her and she feels like she has become a toddler, as if she is their second child.
“I’m fine.”
“No pain?”
“Nothing bad.”
“You would say it if you were in pain, wouldn’t you?” Dave asks.
Val looks at him. “Does anybody?”
\\
She had woken in the middle of the night to a cramping in her stomach. She thought if she sat up, stretched out, maybe drank some water, the cramping would go away, but as soon as she moved it worsened. It was a twisting pain that never settled anywhere. Instead the pain moved about her stomach and pelvis like a monster slouching back and forth, lying in wait. She decided to turn the lamp light on, but she felt the blood before she could see it: shifting just to the left, reaching for the beaded chain, she could feel the wetness beneath her thighs.
She called her sister. It was hot in her bedroom even though the air conditioning was running. When her sister arrived at her house Val apologized for being so sweaty. Rachel hadn’t seemed to hear her: she was mesmerized by the sight of all the blood.
“I’ve never seen so much blood before,” she had said.
At the hospital, the doctor said he was very sorry for her loss. Val was sitting upright and unblinking in the bed and thought about how itchy they made the hospital gowns. Rachel was out in the hall, talking on the phone.
Once more the doctor said he was sorry for her loss. Val looked at him. She found it very difficult to say thank you because she was confused by the idea of it all: she had lost something, something that belonged to her. She hardly felt anything at all. She felt the same as she had before.
The doctor said that she could go home if she wanted because everything had passed. They would give her some medication to help with the pain. Sometimes they had to keep the patients overnight, but that only happened if something remained behind. “Does that often happen?” Val had asked. “Not as often as you would think,” the doctor had said. “The body’s very good at this sort of thing. Efficient.”
\\
“She’s always working,” Dave says. He has already finished two peanut butter and fluff sandwiches. Rachel is walking down the beach towards the cattails. Her cellphone is pressed between her ear and her shoulder.
“It’s a new job,” Val says. “She’s probably nervous, that’s all.”
“It’s not that new. She hardly has time for Henry anymore.”
Val doesn’t say anything. She folds her book on her lap and looks through her bag for her water bottle.
“She gets home so late,” Dave says. “Always working. Sometimes I think she’ll never come home.”
Val takes a long drink and watches Henry over the edge of the bottle. When he looks up from his toys, she waves her hand, but he isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at her lap.
She looks down. Dave’s hand hovers over her thigh, just along the edge of her shorts where they’ve ridden up slightly. He moves his hand and she sees that he’s gripping a napkin.
“Sorry,” he says, “I flung a little peanut butter on your leg.”
When she looks up she looks past him. “It’s okay,” she says. She watches the pregnant women. One of them, the most pregnant one, stands, surveys the beach, and looks right at Val. Val wants to hold her gaze, but the woman keeps turning her head, looking around without really seeing anything.
Dave speaks while he chews. “This stuff gets all melted in the heat, you know?”
Val says yes, she knows.
The rest of the pregnant women are gathering their towels and tote bags and coolers and making their way up the beach. A few crumpled foil wrappings remain in the sand where they had been sitting. Val can tell they aren’t from Marion, that they are just passing through, maybe taking a long break during a road trip or visiting in-laws or dying great-aunts. If they drive for five or six hours they’ll find a real beach and they won’t remember anything about Hungry Mother. They’ll leave and forget all about it.
2025