Fake Baby, by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
I just wanted to get better housing and instead I got a baby. Well, two babies. Two fake babies, to be precise.
The guy I was seeing and I went to tour this apartment sort of as a joke. Like we were playing being Serious-Member-of-Couple-One and Serious-Member-of-Couple-Two and we were thinking about property. About acquiring some property. Investing in it. Really putting something into it. Our backs, or our bank accounts, or a mortgage, or a baby. Anyway, that’s what they said the board was looking for. They kept asking if we were expecting.
The guy I was seeing didn’t get it at first. He thought they meant something to happen. Or visitors. Like, did we need a sitting room. Like, did we need an area to hold drinks. Little cups of champagne and that sort of thing.
But then I put my hand on my stomach and I grabbed the guy I was seeing’s hand and I put that over my stomach and I smiled in the most glowing sort of way I could muster and I said yes we’re expecting. Twins.
Look, I don’t know why I said twins. Twins don’t run in my family. Twins don’t run in the guy I was seeing’s family either. And I wasn’t pregnant at all, so how was I going to materialize two babies, let alone one. I figured I had nine months. I figured, two’s a good round figure. I figured, if I lied good and hard they wouldn’t figure me out.
The real estate people looked at us expectantly. We signed some papers. I told them we weren’t married because I needed to maintain my independence. But we were, of course, partners in life and love. I know, foul. They lapped it right up. We met all their expectations. Exceeded them even.
I’m not quite being honest when I call him this guy I was seeing. I mean, we’d been seeing each other for a while. Long enough to decide it wasn’t an absurd idea to move in together. I mean, we were twenty-five and neither of us had real jobs, so we figured we could make our salaries stretch further if we pooled them.
But then we realized all these places didn’t want Unserious-Unmarried-Member-of-Couple-One and Unserious-Unmarried-Member-of-Couple-Two to move in together. Cause Unserious-Unmarried-Members-of-Couples tend to become Unserious-Unmarried-Nonmembers-of-Couples pretty quick. And then what.
We put all our single cups and our sort of matching plates and our one lumpy mattress in a van together and drove it over to the nice apartment for couples who are expecting and we moved it all in. And our friends came over and said what a nice place. They said what the fuck. They said how’d you bozos land yourself such a nice place. This seems like a place for people with babies, they said. They said, do you have to have a baby to walk into a place like this. And we nodded and smiled and the guy I was seeing got this little smirk on his face and he said she’s expecting a baby. Two actually. And our friends got up and took shots and sat down and one spat his drink all over our new nice apartment for couples who are expecting’s floor so it got sticky.
And then they all calmed down for a second and one of our friends said wait why are you drinking and the guy I was seeing and I laughed so hard it felt for a second like there were babies in my stomach, but it was just cramping from the laughing, and I was just peeing a little bit because that happens sometimes when you laugh that hard. And our friends said fuck you guys and stuff like that.
And after a while we started meeting our neighbors and smiling. And half of them had little kids and the other half had big bellies. We started talking to them, doing little jokes with their kids. Talking about paint shades. Talking about cribs and school boards. And eventually I pretended to lose my babies.
But the weird thing was, after my twins were gone, something really bad started to happen. I mean something bad started happening between me and the guy I was seeing. Like, we weren’t seeing each other as much anymore. Like it was harder for us to look at each other anymore. And I’m not saying it was because the twins were gone, but I’m also not saying it’s not cause the twins were gone. I’m just saying after the twins were gone, we stopped having so much fun in our fancy apartment. It stopped feeling so fun how it was way nicer than all our friends’, except for that spot on the floor where it was sticky because of the spilled drink that neither of us did a good job cleaning up.
And a little while after that we packed up our single cups and our sort of matching plates, which we had less of by then, and I took the single lumpy mattress, and the guy I was seeing said he’d buy a new one online, like a real adult, like it was time to grow up, he said, with his head down, hands shoved in his pockets, as if he were wearing a baseball cap pulled down low, which he wasn’t, and we moved out of that apartment for the Serious-Members-of-Couples-who-were-expecting. And he was no longer the guy I was seeing because I stopped seeing him.
And I thought if I were to do it again, I would only say I was expecting one baby. I thought if I were to do it again, I would lower my expectations. If I were to do it again, one fake baby would be better to lose than two. But I also thought that having one fake baby was better than having no fake babies at all.
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Camden, where she has recently written about deer, hand models, and trees. She is the author of the poetry chapbook "DUH" (Bullshit Lit, 2022), and her work appears in Passages North, Hobart Pulp, Hot Pink Mag, and Yalobusha Review, among others. She can be followed @tall.spy (Instagram) and @tall__spy (Twitter) but she can never be caught.