The Mathematician Cannot Create Things at Will, part 5

Selina woke up alone one Sunday in December. Graham had left early to prepare for a voice lesson that had been rescheduled from the previous week aand wouldn’t be back until after lunch. She got out of bed and put on the sweatpants that were lying on the floor in front of her. Hearing her roommate Sarah typing in her bedroom, they seemed to be the only two people in the suite, so Selina slid into Sarah’s room and sat on the bed.
“What’s up?” Sarah said as she continued typing.
Selina flopped over on her back. “I think I might be pregnant, Sarah.”
Sarah slid around in her chair and drew one knee up to her chin. “I thought you guys were using something?”
“We are, but… I don’t know.” She grabbed a handful of her sweatshirt and tugged at it, making a tent over her belly.
Sarah shook her head. “Selina, use your brain. You’re not pregnant, you’re just looking for a distraction from the momentous void that’s lying out there waiting for us in six months.” She paused to think and seemed to be sucking on her knee as a child might do absentmindedly for comfort. “Do you and Graham ever talk about what you two are going to do after graduation?”
“No, and it doesn’t matter,” Selina said. She pulled herself upright with a great effort, as though she were already seven or eight months pregnant. “I don’t care what I do. If Graham wants me along, I’ll do whatever he does. I know that sounds horrible, but that’s all I can say. I think he wants to take a year off, maybe get a band together, and then if that doesn’t work out, apply to graduate schools.” Somethng came up from her stomach that soured her mouth. “I don’t know, maybe I made up the part about the band. He doesn’t take it all that seriously. I still want to get a pregnancy test, though. Can I borrow your car to go get one?”
“I think they have them at the drugstore on the corner, don’t they?”
“They’re all out, I already checked,” Selina lied. “Please. I’ll buy you half a tank of gas.”
Sarah shrugged and dug into the pockets of a pair of pants at the foot of her bed. “Don’t park it in a handicapped spot like Joan did, okay?” she said and tossed Selina the keys.
In her room, Selina put on a bra under her sweatshirt and started to change into her jeans. She was looking forward to the chance to drive away from the campus and wondered if she could pick Graham up as he was walking home from the music department. He is so good, she thought. He will deal with this just fine. When they were married, she decided, she would stop wearing old T-shirts to bed and wear nightgowns. She imagined herself in a thin white cotton gown, sheer where it draped over her pregnant belly. Then she remembered what he had said to her at Thanksgiving and muttered to herself, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
She didn’t know why she had told Sarah she was pregnant because she knew it wasn’t true. She didn’t know why she was ready to lie to Graham about it, either, because she didn’t believe she needed to be pregnant for him to marry her. It was just that in her dreams she willed herself to be married to him and pregnant with his baby, while in her real life she couldn’t seem to will herself to stop dreaming. The fantasy had become more familiar, and certainly more welcome, than the prospects of her own life, and the details of it were too comforting to give up. She knew, for instance, exactly what their bedroom would be like if they were married. Late at night when she lay with him in her darkened dorm room, she could actually feel her hand skimming the carved bedpost of an antique four-poster bed.
She tried to force herself out of the fantasy by thinking about how absolutely unpregnant she was. She remembered a time when her tenth grade biology class gathered around a lab table to observe a 21-week-old fetus preserved in an enormous jar of formaldehyde. Most of it features were well formed, and she had wondered if it looked like its parents. Her teacher had refused to tell her where it had come from. If she ever thought she was having a miscarriage, she knew she would be sickened to death by the memory of what she’d seen in the jar. She would be lying on their cool bathroom tile with her head on Graham’s knees, listening to his breathing heavy and irregular because he would be crying, thinking of the jar and knowing that there was nothing she could do to keep the fetus inside her. He would squeeze her hand and say, “What can I do? What do you want me to do?”
Why don’t you just shoot me, she thought. You said it: I’m too intelligent to be doing this. She dropped the car keys on the floor and fell back on her bed.