flash nonfic by jessica mccaughey
It’s Going to Be a Girl
She points to my belly, helmet-hard against the wooden edge of the table, that first time she asks.
“Do you know the sex?”
“It’s a girl!”
I say it with joy then, but that wanes the next six or eight or ten times she asks. I feel deeply, unfairly embarrassed for her and then ashamed of myself.
It’s a girl!
We are having a girl!
It’s a girl! We can’t wait.
It’s going to be a girl! We are so happy.
A girl!
Doing the math now, I estimate that she was 56 or 57 when we met, although she never would have admitted her age and not in a playful “a-lady-never-tells” kind of way. It was vanity. It was strategic, like the wedge clogs she wore to appear taller. Her perfect haircut. The dye job that never seemed to need retouching. She had what I thought of as a very exotic accent that I could not place when I first met her when I was 23. Despite our corporate setting, in her office alone with me, she would sometimes recite poetry she’d been forced to memorize during her childhood in South Africa. “Ode to a Nightingale.” “The Lady of Shalott.” “She Walks in Beauty.” Yeats. Blake.
I found her captivating. She jogged on the trails by our office and so I did, too. She kept NPR playing low most of the day in her office, and so I listened, too, although through headphones in my cubicle.
Still, despite her charm and her success in Brazil and Australia at the company’s outposts, she was flaky. She saved files without choosing a folder and could never find them again without my help. She could not keep track of her own calendar. Later this made it difficult, I think, to identify the decline.
It’s a girl!
We are having a girl!
It’s a girl! We can’t wait.
It’s going to be a girl! We are so happy.
A girl!
She asks again and again how many other children I have. (None.) She asks if she was at my wedding. (She was.) She asks to be reminded of my husband’s name. (Jay.)
It’s a girl!
We are having a girl!
It’s a girl! We can’t wait.
It’s going to be a girl! We are so happy.
A girl!
She once showed me a piece of pottery she found while walking the beach in a small Italian coastal town, beside the looming family home of a man she’d just met. The moment was so perfect she always wondered if perhaps he had planted the thick black and white shard there in the sand, one piece and then another for each girl he brought over. I hear about other men, but also the juice of mobola plums running down her chin as a girl in Durban. Her father’s pharmacy; the rap of coins on the counter a signal for condoms. She and her sister giggling as they pushed their way past the swinging door while her father helped customers.
It’s a girl!
We are having a girl!
It’s a girl! We can’t wait.
It’s going to be a girl! We are so happy.
A girl!
She and her husband move away to be closer to their daughter, to the beach. I send photos of the baby, 15 months old, then 19, then 24. Her husband responds to my emails. He tells me that my daughter is beautiful, and that his wife’s cognitive state has declined significantly since the last time I saw her. He asks her if she remembers me, my name, our friendship, and she answers, “Vaguely.” He urges me not to feel bad about this. He relays, as if it were a joke—and to him it must be both a joke he feels compelled to make and also a joke in the cosmic sense and still, of course, not a joke at all—that she asks him often if he is her husband.
It’s a girl!
We are having a girl!
It’s a girl! We can’t wait.
It’s going to be a girl! We are so happy.
A girl!
I answer at least two dozen times over the course of our dinner. Her delight never declines. Her sun-spotted hands clasp in front of her heart. Little girl names. The idea of such small shoes.
Jessica McCaughey’s work has appeared in Gulf Coast, The Fourth Genre, The Colorado Review, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Best American Travel Essays, and The Rumpus, among other publications. She teaches academic and professional writing at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and earned her MA in English, MFA in Creative Writing, and PhD in Writing and Rhetoric from George Mason University in Virginia.