The Mother Garden by Robin Romm Page B

mind, but today it irritates him.
    â€œHow’s it going?” he chirps. He sets the egg down on the coffee table. India shoots him a disapproving look. He shrugs off his raincoat and goes to the bedroom to lie down.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” she asks. At least she’s out of those pants. She’s wearing the stretchy yoga pants he likes, tight around her thighs and butt.
    â€œNothing,” he says. He doesn’t mean it to sound peevish—in fact, he’s just about to hold out his hands to her when she rolls her eyes and leaves.
    Uri knows how they got here. He’s not dim like his brother, who never seems to know why he’s fighting with his wife. Uri and India are fighting, and have been for weeks, because Uri said that he was tired of her excuses, that she was thirty-five years old and he was thirty-seven and if they wanted to have a baby—to have the two babies they’d agreed to when they got married—they needed to hop to it. India said he had to be patient. She wanted to finish her book. When he asked how long that would take, her nostrils flared, her voice soared to a very high pitch, and she accused him of lacking a critical kind of faith in her. Then Uri read part of the novel.
    â€œYou read it?” she gasped when he told her. “It’s a draft! It’s not ready for anyone to see!”
    The truth was, though he was nicer than this to her face, the novel was terrible. It was about two sisters after they lose their father. India’s father died a year before she started writing and versions of her childhood memories came whizzing from the mouths of ten-year-olds.
    The fight has since changed direction. India now claims that Uri isn’t responsible (for example, he left the barbecue out half the winter and now the little piece around the starter is rusted) and that the baby will require more selflessness than he anticipates.
    â€œYou couldn’t just leave a baby on the coffee table,” she says to him when she comes back in the bedroom.
    â€œReally?” he says.
    â€œIn fact,” she says, “you couldn’t just take a baby to work like that. It would cry.”
    â€œIt’s not a baby, India. It’s an egg.” She shoots him a withering look.
    â€œMaybe we should attach an alarm clock to it,” she says. “It could go off like every twenty minutes and you’d have to feed it through a tube coming out of your shirt.”
    â€œWhat’s this about?” Uri says, sitting up. “Do you not want to have kids?”
    â€œI want to have kids,” she says. “But I want to be sure you’re ready to be selfless. I don’t want to give over my entire life like Melody and Kim. I don’t want to stay at home watching my husband go out for beers with friends while I wipe green poo off my fingers and rub cream on my chapped nipples. I like my nipples. I like my life. And I want to finish my book.”
    When he first met India, she wore her dark curls trapped in thick braids, bound with silly plastic doodads. She drank vodka and cherry Coke at three in the afternoon. To celebrate their second anniversary, she made him a scavenger hunt. She painted small clues on little circles of paper, hid them around the neighborhood, and at the end seduced him in a grass field behind the supermarket. He thinks of her drinking her weekend coffee with vanilla ice cream floating in it, chattering about the movie reviews, the cold weather outside, her split ends. Despite her charms, it’s hard not to strangle her.
    For dinner India makes a frittata. He notices that she’s left a pile of eggshells in the sink. As he spears the frittata with his fork, he fights back the urge to say, “You couldn’t cook a real baby, India. A real baby would die.”

    That night as a peace offering, Uri rummages through the closet and finds a shoe box. He folds a couple of rags and then, in a particularly