Tilt: A Novel

by Emma Pattee

So here we are, thirty-seven weeks pregnant, at IKEA.

And IKEA. On a weekday. Dear god. Another reminder that I’m officially unimportant. Only the old people and college students and bartenders shop for furniture on a Monday. And of course the other pregnant ladies. Milling in the crib section like hungry alligators.

Here’s my first memory of your father. He’s standing onstage during rehearsal. I’m in the audience, but I’m not an audience member. I’m the playwright. We’re young, painfully naive, and taking this more seriously than we’ve ever taken anything in our lives. I thought this play, my play, would change everything, though in hindsight it wasn’t anything special: a solid two hours of a girl dropping out of art school (based not that loosely on me), realizing that she doesn’t need a man. I know, big surprise. And this is 2011. This is like seventeenth-wave feminism.

Without a phone, I’m like an animal without legs. You have to understand about people my age that we got phones before we had sex, we got phones before we got credit cards, before we started therapy, before we started drinking beer and coffee and two-for-one margaritas at the shitty bar down the street. I learned to drive by following the glowing blue arrow wherever it took me.

tagged along. Because of the free donuts and coffee but also because it was a Saturday and it seemed easier to go than to admit that I had nothing better to do, that I did not have a creative project for which I needed to research mannerisms. I did not have a group of girlfriends who met for a weekly brunch. I did not have a mother to go grocery shopping with. I was always looking for some way to spend a Saturday, all those Saturdays collecting in dusty piles around the house. I was constantly tripping over a Saturday that had no purpose and belonged to nobody.

When it’s his turn, he takes a breath and kind of shakes his head, like he’s having a profound thought. Your father lives for a room of strangers to fall in love with him. He lives to be the man he is in a room full of strangers. Oh, here we go.

One theme is that Annie and Dom view the world differently

You can’t imagine anything worse? I want to ask him. Really? Like maybe being the person who has to go through the pain? You don’t think that’s just a little bit worse? But this is your father’s moment. I see that now. I’m just a prop, and props don’t speak. He wraps it all up by saying how the only thing that gives him any solace is that I’m the strongest, most kick-ass lady he knows. That’s exactly how he says it: most kick-ass lady. And all the soon-to-be-mommies smile at him, like what a guy, and all the soon-to-be-daddies glare at him, like why didn’t I think to say that?

A babymoon. Baby moon. The last trip before your whole life gets put in a blender and explodes all over the walls of your house. At least that’s the way people make it sound.

And I suppose I should be grateful: that he’s not into hunting or video games, that he’s not spending hours every day watching porn (though it would be a kind of relief to find out that he’s watching porn instead of what he is doing: hour after hour scanning Backstage and Playbill for new auditions, or workshopping new monologues or taking classes on animal exercises and sense memory. At least porn is a fantasy that everyone understands is a fantasy. Not the dream your father is chasing, which he thinks is his but will never be his).