Milk by Emily Hammond

cut-out picture of John Lennon’s head taped to the front. This, if nothing else, makes me feel at home: how many nights I lay there sleepless staring at John Lennon, whose face you could just make out in the clock’s glow.
    â€œLast time you were living someplace different,” I say. A decent little bungalow in Altadena.
    â€œI was house-sitting.”
    His room doesn’t smell exactly. It does smell, but of Gregg, a sweet-sweaty odor I remember from college. I try to see the charm in this place, as he gives me a tour. More frayed linoleum in the living room that needs scrubbing, a mopping with bleach. A smelly can of cat food on the kitchen counter with the fork still in it. I count exactly seven pieces of furniture (nine including Gregg’s mattress and bureau): a dinette, a leather chair mostly robbed of its stuffing, an old TV with a wire hanger for an antenna, the beds of his roommates (musicians also, away on tour, Gregg says), and Gregg’s piano, a Yamaha shiny as obsidian, the only thing cared for in this house, a can of Pledge on top of it and next to that two stacks of score sheets, one for the opera he’s working on, he says, and the other a stack of various pop songs he’s written.
    â€œWill you excuse me?” I say. I go to the bathroom, sit on the john and bend over, holding my stomach, feeling wretched. It isn’t that Gregg is poor; poor is okay, I like poor, looking back on my choices in men. It’s rich men I don’t trust. But Gregg is living like a college student still, and he’s thirty-six, and I’ve just slept with him. I’m not simply here for the afternoon as I was four years ago, and this is Gregg, not a quickie one-night stand. This time I’ve made some kind of commitment, or a mistake; I can’t say why this has happened except that I love him. I must. Who understands love? People can change, I tell myself, and it’s just a place, a rental, for God’s sake, and it’s Gregg’s character that matters—but what sort of person would live here? I could pretend it’s a fixer-upper, although Gregg wouldn’t know which end of a hammer to use. But maybe he’s changed, maybe he tore up the linoleum himself and plans to refinish what’s underneath. Fat chance. What’s really different now as opposed to four years ago is that we’re four years older, and that I’m pregnant, looking for a nest to have my baby in. Why not admit it?
    Some nest.
    He seems a little anxious when I return, as though he’s guessed what I’m thinking. He’s always been sensitive on the subject on financial success or lack thereof. “I thought you were doing something,” he said.
    â€œSomething?”
    â€œYou know. We didn’t use anything. Last time you had a diaphragm.”
    â€œNot that we needed it.” We had changed our minds at the last minute. I changed my mind, and Gregg isn’t the pushy sort. As if doing everything but made me more virtuous. I brought my diaphragm all the way from Colorado, leaving the case for it there, in the medicine cabinet, so Jackson wouldn’t suspect. Actually what I did was put my old diaphragm in that case, because I feared he would check, and, being a man, he wouldn’t know the difference between the old and new. It’s not a happy memory. The sex part, yes, the subterfuge, no. Since I had the diaphragm, I felt compelled to use it—I mean, I wore it out to lunch, every so often catching a whiff of spermicidal jelly wafting up from under the tablecloth.
    â€œI don’t use a diaphragm anymore,” I say. On the drive over here, I nearly asked Gregg to stop for rubbers, old habit—an awareness I didn’t have my diaphragm and we should use something —all the years of pregnancy prevention.
    â€œYou’re on the pill?” he says.
    â€œCan we not talk about this?”
    â€œOr that shot? Or one of those deals they