"The years that are gone seem like dreams-if one might go on sleeping and dreaming-but to wake up and find-oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life." The Awakening -- Kate Chopin

It started in bed. It always starts in bed. I close my eyes and the memory comes vividly, with the late afternoon sun forcing through the blinds and onto our bare arms and stomachs and faces. We were each half-nude, still so young and shy and new at this, and the image plays across the window like a film. D. starts playing with my hair, pulling little strands into my eyes and tying the rest into a tight knotted ponytail behind me. "I swear I'm not a fag," he says, and I laugh. But there's that sting of worry again. If I left him now it would break him. So I don't.

We are both twenty-five now, but I feel closer to forty. Despite the heat, it feels so good to be out of that house and away from the smell of plastic and burnt meals. This summer they have been calling the humidity "oppressive," but out here it doesn't feel that way. I hold my long fingers up to the air conditioning vents and speed through yellow lights, taking turns so quickly I have to forget who I am to control the car. I don't think I have driven at all since she was born, and never so dangerously. D. would freak. I rev the engine at reds like I am some sexually frustrated teenage boy with a fresh new license.

Frozen vegetables, frozen pizza, frozen precooked family dinners. I catch my reflection in the glass case and pause, surprised at how young I look, despite these new lines, the dark rings beneath my eyes. I push the cart through every aisle, savoring each minute away from screams and sticky surfaces, and fight not to think of the unavoidable moment coming soon when D. will walk up behind me in the kitchen and put his long arms around me, pulling me into him as if I fit right there, pressed up against his chest like that, as if I am some missing piece and he has been a fraction of himself all day. I bite my lip unconsciously and slip the ring into the front pocket of my jeans.

*

The first few hours of being around kids always made me this smiling, renewed, more at peace version of myself. The perfect swirl of profundity and distinct sincerity is amusing and astounding. But after a few hours the shine wears off, and we are both sticky and sweating, musical toys are screaming in my ears, the T.V. is counting counting counting and I feel brain-dead and cynical and tired. The littered living room and the Blue's Clues tapes on the floor, rewound four five six times. She is colicky and unhappy whenever she's not asleep, and stays that way until D. comes home.

I like to sit back on the couch and breathe for a moment. Ten times, in and out, deep, slow, clearing, meditative. Nothing changes. It was probably different when Buddha did it on a mountain in Tibet someplace, on a clear day before machinery and air pollution and cartoons existed. I breathe in through my nose and try to separate myself from the hot smell of this house, which before children smelled like apricots in the morning and wine at night. There is this metallic taste in my mouth all the time now and I wonder if that is one of the signs for brain tumors.

The glossy tiled supermarket floor responds to the fluorescent lights with an angry glare. Every time the doors slide open and shut more humid outside air is swept in. Ring, open, whoosh, again, again, again. A woman about ten years older than me ignores her boisterous young son, staring absently at rows of packaged red meat while he yanks on her sleeve with all his tiny strength.

I feel like I am suffocating all the time now. Lately I start and kick while falling asleep, or I wake late in the night and pull off my shirt to sleep half naked, convinced something is choking me. There is a weight on my chest. The claustrophobia of it all. These nights he touches my arm lightly, as if asking a question, but the effort only makes me recoil, it makes this invisible thing press down harder. Sometimes I go to the bathroom to splash water on my face and step on the hard corner of a pop-up book D's parents sent her. "Fuck!" I say too loudly. I want to throw it out the window, despite how much she loves it. A wave of guilt assaults me. Shit. I kick the book into a corner and stumble back into bed.

*

I pull the list from my back pocket - sugar, milk, carrots, formula, paper towels. He wrote it out for me this morning with an air of resentment, sighing too often and watching me out of the corner of his eye. He kissed me on the cheek before leaving, "It'll feel good to get out of the house." I nodded stiffly, "I'll leave her with Janie next door." There was an awkward pause. "Yeah, okay," he said supportively, a hand lingering on my lower back, as if pushing me towards something in front of us.

They said I could work from home, which gave me new hope for my chances at domesticity. But there was colic, and constant interruption, and then his mother got sick. We couldn't survive and pay for daycare, and he didn't want to do it that way. I wasn't bringing in any of the money anyhow. I became this machine that changed diapers and waited for him to come home, handed her off and climbed into bed, mumbling something about a migraine. I spent most of the day staring at the empty spaces in the sky, feeling stalled.

I remember when I told D.

In bed again, this time in underwear and thin t-shirts, sweating through the hard mattress. My head on his stomach, the soft glow of television light. Cheap ring on my finger now, exhausted eyes, the chipped paint on the apartment walls. His voice interrupting the movie. I don't mind anymore. I'm not interested. I'm staring out the window, like always. Rain pouring, leaking, he still hasn't fixed it. I asked if the landlord would let us have a cat, but he said probably not, and he said he was allergic anyway, and "I thought you didn't like cats?"

I put a hand on my stomach. I am late this month and for two weeks I think I am pregnant. I tell him out of pure boredom. He doesn't say anything for a moment, and then kisses my cheek and starts talking - about how wonderful it was, about having a real family, about doing things differently from his own family. Funny, he so distinctly points out how opposite of a father he intended to be just as I notice how much he looks like his father now: shaved head, glazed eyes of the first few beers, a bottle in his hand - rough hands, calloused and cut.

I remind him it is only a possibility and say "I'm tired", fall into our squeaking mattress. He wants to fuck and I can't say how much I don't, and haven't, for so long. His small dick inside me. I can't sleep, the rain so loud. He passes out almost immediately. I stare at the ceiling and think, I hope to fucking God I'm not pregnant. I can't stay here any longer. But he's my family now. He's my family and I don't love him.

*

I stand back by the garden section, touching lilies and oleanders we can't afford in vases she would want to touch and break. Little broken pieces to clean up, dirt embedded in the carpet, flowers mashed under her feet. I watch the lines that bend around corners, the chaos of it - angry mothers at the registers, wild little boys pulling down whole shelves of candy at once, teenage cashiers looking tortured. I just stand and watch; I can't choose a line. I stare helplessly, my throat burning. A couple in their twenties in front of me murmurs, watching one of the boys scream and stomp and rip People magazines apart, "Some people just aren't meant to be parents."

The plastic bags are cutting lines into my palms as I load them into the backseat. My car drags along with the traffic, threading through neighborhoods I used to love in college. I worry briefly that the meat will spoil in this heat. Finally we reach the highway, where I can speed and really move, and you can sense the relief from all the other drivers. Seven more exits to home.

It hits me with a wave the moment I see the signs directing traffic towards the city. Suddenly my heart wants to burst, it is almost frightening. Six exits. The idea finally fights its way to the foreground, and it makes sense. The way she doesn't cry with D., the way he looks at me and now only sees her, how everything would be better. The simple excision of me from that house, solving everything. Snip. She was born with the umbilical cord knotted and the sight of it made me sob for three hours. "It happens sometimes, Lisa," D. said, touching my forehead, looking confused and half angry.

The heat seems to come off of me like removing a steel dress. Four exits, three. I move into the next lane and I can hear one of the bags tip over in the back, and sugar and milk slide out onto the floor. One exit. Enough fuel to disappear. The city's river on the other side of the highway streams and swims and feeds the ocean. I see myself swimming, and I absorb that thought before wandering back to the child-proof cabinets filled with organized cleaning products, our neighbors' meticulously cut lawns, and the sound of our lawn mower once a month. I see my reflection in the rearview mirror, self-contained like a Polaroid. I slowly push off my shoes, one after the other, and drive the rest of the way barefoot.