"Matilda," she says, a half question, scratching her lower back with her free hand.

 "You’re not going to give it an art name," I tell her, making a Z with my neck, straining my x-ray vision to see the television through her raised legs. My mother looks up from her book and shakes her head.

 "A what?"

 "You know. An art name. Like Matilda or Rumer or Joaquin."

 "Those are movie star names, dumbass. There’s a big difference."

 "Watch your mouth," my mother says. Everything in the room looks yellow, jaundiced, under the light of the broken three-way bulb that now only shines at sixty watts.

 "There is a big difference between movie star names and art names," Grace continues. "Art names are more like Georgia and Roy."

 "And Pablo?"

 She rolls her eyes and turns back to the television. "You just don’t get it at all."

 "What about Moon Unit?"

 "Mom!"

 My mother does not look up.

 "What? Frank Zappa is an artist."

 "You don’t know anything," Grace snorts.

 "I know that if you name that kid Matilda everyone will call her Matty, or Tilly, and she’ll probably be extremely unpopular."

 "What are you talking about?"

 "Look at Dorothy-Ann Zybysko. Do you think she would have been as unpopular if her name was Sarah or Jenny?"

 "She had webbed toes!" Grace turns toward me, wiggling her toes like five worms surfacing from a bucket of live bait. "And wore blue eye shadow. And watched Deep Space Nine, like, religiously."

 "But do you think she would have done that stuff if her name wasn’t Dorothy-Ann?"

 "See, I don’t think it was the name, I think it was the toes," she says. I have given up trying to watch the TV now that her head is planted directly in the center of the screen, creating a halo of shifting pixels around her shiny brown hair.

 "I can’t believe you two are talking about her like this," my mother says, still not looking up from her book. My mother is an ardent opponent of talking about people behind their backs. She much prefers to do it directly to their faces.

 "But it’s true, mom," she says, leaning back on her hands. Her stomach barely pushes through the paisley-patterned t-shirt she has on, and I begin to wonder if she’s really pregnant at all. It should be more than this at six months. It should be obvious. But you can’t even see it, not really, the internal aquarium with its bug-eyed spectacle inside, its hands and feet webbed together like the trained otters at Sea World. She hasn’t even had to buy new clothes.

 "It doesn’t matter if it is true, it’s not nice. How would you like it if you knew people were sitting around in their living rooms talking about you?"

 "They are, mom."

 I knew a girl at college who did something like this. Except worse. Weirder.

 "Only because you let them."

 Her name was Becky Barnett. She sat by me in band, nice. She had pretty hair. Then one day she told everyone that her father was dead.

 "Whatever." She turns her attention back to me, and I open my eyes too wide, trying to look like I’m paying attention. "I could do like Mom and Dad did," she says, picking at a flake of loose skin on my ankle.

 "For what, what? How?"

 "Are you even listening to me?"

 "Yes. What are you talking about?"

 Everyone felt so bad for her, Becky Barnett. She sent out an e-mail to everyone in the band, letting them know. "Don’t tell my mother I’m taking it so hard," she wrote. "She’ll want to pull me out of school for sure."

 "I could do like Mom and Dad. Name the kid after a rock star."

 "Oh, no. No. Unacceptable."

 "What’s so wrong with it?" my mom asks. Apparently this was a brilliant idea in 1979, when she
decided to name me after Carly Simon. Grace got Grace Slick. I got the shaft.

"Nothing," I mutter and try to get a better view of the television. Grace’s head still blocks the center of the screen, but off to the side I can see Bill Cosby shilling something, Jell-O or Kodak. Then he walks into Grace’s ear and disappears from view.

  Becky was always saying things about how she and her dad—and she would quickly correct herself, her uncle—were doing this or that this weekend. We chalked it up to grief.

 "Who sings ‘Fire and Rain?’" Grace asks.

 "No, really, I want to know what’s wrong with it," my mother asks.

 "Nothing, it’s great, it’s a great idea."

 "Neil Young?"

 "Because you know what your father wanted to name you."

 "Is it Neil Young, Mom?" Grace leans toward my mother, affording me a better view of the television.

 "I know, Mom."

 "Geraldine."

 But three weeks later, her roommate told me that Becky’s mother and father had come up and taken them out to dinner.

"What about ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves?’"

 "That’s Cher," I tell her.

 "So I don’t want to hear anything else about your name."

 "I’m not naming my kid Cher," she tells me, wrinkling her nose with disgust.

 "You asked."

 "If you hate your name so much, you can go get it legally changed. See if I care."

 "Mom, Jesus, I’m just saying I don’t think it’s that great of an idea! It’s not like you were feeding us cleanser or anything."

 "I kind of like Neil Young," Grace muses, her chin jutting forward.

 "That was James Taylor," I tell her.

 "You could change your name to Ingrid Ingrate."

 "What was James Taylor?"

 "Who sang ‘Fire and Rain.’ I’m not going to change my name."

 "Hey, that almost rhymed."

 "Or Whiny Whinington."

 "Okay, that’s just dumb, Mom."

 "No, it was Neil Young," Grace says. She looks around the room as if she’s going to find something, perhaps in the fern stand or the rack of old craft magazines, that will legitimize this statement.

 "So now I’m dumb."

 "Nobody said you were dumb."

 "How about ‘Anticipation?’"

 "Carly Simon."

 "What?" My mother very rarely uses my middle name.

 "I wasn’t talking to you."

 "So then that one’s already taken?" Grace harumphs into her chest, one hand traveling over the maybe-baby.

 "You did so say I was dumb."

 "What does Neil Young sing?"

 "’Helpless.’"

 "So now I’m dumb and helpless?"

 "This is bullshit." I stalk off to my room, leaving my sister and my mother frozen in tableau in the yellow light of the sixty watt bulb.

 "I was only kidding," my mother calls after me. To my sister: "it was a joke."

 No more of a joke than me sitting here on my ass if my sister’s not even really pregnant.
 

 "That’s just stupid." I can hear Jimmy’s unshaven chin grazing the receiver has he talked, holding the phone between meaty jaw and shoulder, as he always does when he thinks a phone call is too unimportant to waste a free hand on it.

 "No. You don’t understand it."

 "Carly, open the door!"

 "Is that your mom?" he asks.

 "Yes. But listen—"

 "Jesus, it must suck to live at home."

 I sigh, ignoring my mother’s pounding on the door. "It does. Especially—"

 "I think I’m going to apply for off-campus housing next year," he says absently. "Dorm life is too constricting."

 "I don’t even want to hear it."

 "Would you open the door, please?"

 "No!"

 "Anyway. Your sister is pregnant."

 "I don’t think she is, Jimmy!" I stage whisper it into the phone, knowing my mother is probably standing outside my door with a cup or a Whisper 2000. "I mean, she was like laying on it before."

 "On what?"

 "Her stomach."

 "Babies don’t come from stomachs."

 "Oh, Jesus Christ, Jimmy, I was under the impression that they were in there somewhere behind the stomach."

 "Didn’t you ever take sex ed?"

 "Yeah, but I obviously didn’t pay as close attention as you did. Anyway. She’s not even showing. It’s been five months. You can’t even tell."

 "You can’t tell with a lot of girls. Remember that poli sci adjunct last year? She lost weight during her pregnancy."
 
"She wasn’t pregnant, asshole, she had uterine cancer."

 "Well." I could hear it in what he didn’t say: it’s almost the same.

 "The pregnant girl in my intro to business class showed after like three months."

 "Why would she do something like that, though?"

 "Attention."

 "Oh, please. Attention. Couldn’t she just fake a suicide or something?"

 "How exactly does one fake a suicide, Jimmy?"

 "Or some other illness, then. I mean, come on. Haven’t you seen the ultrasounds?"

 "No. She always makes me just drop her off at the doctor’s. She says she doesn’t like the idea of
me sitting in the lobby while they’re rooting around in there."

 "I guess she should have thought of that when her boyfriend was rooting around in there, huh?" He always laughs at his own jokes.

 "Are you going to open this door, or what?" The pounding scares the crap out of me. I thought she had left already.

 "In a minute!"

 "Why would she need attention?"

 "Who knows? She always likes to be the center of attention. She always is the center of attention."

 "Then why would she need to do something stupid like this?"

 "Maybe she’s just messed up."

 "What are you going to do if she is?"

 "Come back to school. I can’t stand it here anymore."

 "They’re not going to let you come back to school," Jimmy scoffs. "A crazy sister is even worse than a pregnant sister. They’re going to need all the help they can get, man."

 "Thanks, Jimmy."

 "Later." I hate the way he ends phone conversations. He does it consciously. He changes his greetings and dismissals every few weeks. I guess I like it better now that he’s dropped "masturbator" off the end of it. But it’s still pretty lame.