Baby Love (15 page)

“Not the songs she does now.” Ann explains that she has gotten very commercial. But she used to write some of the most beautiful songs. “Let me play you something,” she says.

She puts on “Tennessee Mountain Home. Life was as peaceful as a baby’s sigh.” It reminds him a little of his father’s farm, which has been made into a trailer park. Neither of them says anything during the song. Ann rocks in her chair. Reg tries to find a comfortable position for his legs in the basket seat and gives up. When the song is over he says, “That’s pretty.”

Ann asks if he has lived here long.

“All my life. So far.”

Does he ever think about leaving?

Well, he went overseas when he was in the service. There was a layover in Tokyo, three days. They had these bathhouses there with men and women all together. Nothing happens, you just get clean. A buddy took him to a teahouse where they had geisha girls. Very beautiful girls. They treat you like a king. He has never told his wife about that—she would think something went on. But they just drank tea. He brought back a tiny kimono for his daughter Jill (she was just a baby then) and a tea set for Doris. She hasn’t ever used it.

Why is he saying all this?

Leaving. No, he doesn’t suppose they will ever leave. Doris thinks traveling is a waste of good money.

He would like to ask Ann what about yourself? But he knows that would not be a good idea. “I was thinking we could get some mulch hay for the tomatoes,” he says. “With a garden like this that hasn’t been cultivated for a while, weeds can be a problem.”

She says that sounds like a good idea.

Just as he is leaving, he remembers the garden gloves. “You don’t want your hands to end up like mine,” he tells her. Then he says thanks for the beer.

After he has gone she walks down to the garden. There is a windmill turning slowly in the breeze. The wood-chopper swings his ax and lowers it. He swings again.

Because she chose this town as a good place to be invisible, Ann can’t imagine what it would be like to have grown up here, lived here always, walked down the street and have everybody say hello. Can’t take a step in this town that somebody isn’t watching, Reg told her. But here in the woods you can consume a quart of ice cream daily, stick your finger down your throat after every meal and no one will know. You can spend a night pacing up and down the driveway, sobbing. Watch every TV game show between nine and three-thirty for a month. Encase your entire naked body in tightly wound Saran Wrap (she did that the night the scale read 140, to sweat it off) and stay that way for two days straight. But no one knows these things, knows her name, even, or looks up when she passes.

She would like to have no history, or a very tragic one. Fugitive, war widow. Weatherman gone underground. Amnesia victim, hair dyed blond, only the roots to remind her maybe she used to be somebody else. As it is, there are few telephone calls, seldom a letter. But there’s her mother, of course, calling person-to-person from Seattle (as if there would be anyone else here to answer) to say please come home for a visit. I will send you a ticket. I would pay for a therapist. What did I do?

Her life was ordinary. They lived in Connecticut then. (Seattle came later, after the divorce.) Her father sold Prudential, made the million-dollar club four straight years. Her mother belonged to the board of trustees of the Hartford Symphony. (And would hate the music Ann plays now.) There is also a younger sister, Carol, but she and Ann have never been close.

Her father wanted to be a poet, talked about Wallace Stevens, quoted to Ann (when drunk) somebody’s line about children being hostages to fortune. She was his favorite, and blamed her mother for tying him down, making him get a regular job. She thought then he must have been, could have been, an important poet. She believed a person should be willing to give up absolutely everything in pursuit of his great dream. What else mattered? Not a house in Fairfield and symphony tickets every weekend, certainly. “You don’t understand what it’s like when you have children,” her mother said. “Everything changes.” (Mostly they just didn’t talk about this at all, but one night in Seattle, in her stepfather’s house, the month after the funeral, they did.) “I am not interested in your excuses,” Ann said. “I will never compromise, or force anyone I love to compromise either. I would rather just let them go.” (Which is just what she ended up doing, with Rupert. Of course it could be said that Rupert was the one who let go, but Ann knows she made it possible for him to do it. She loved him that much.)

He was her freshman English teacher. When she fell in love with him, persuaded him to quit his job and move with her to Vermont, finally write full time the novel he’d been working on since 1968, she thought her father would be happy. Who should understand better the importance of freedom to pursue one’s work, with a loving and supportive person at one’s side? If Rupert was only three years younger than her father, so what. They would have more in common. They could even talk about the war.

The three of them had dinner together in Cambridge. There was a too-loud jazz band playing in the restaurant and Ann’s father sat on Rupert’s bad side, so Rupert couldn’t hear much. When Ann suggested that her father show Rupert some of his old poems—started to recite one—her father said, “For God’s sake shut up,” and then looked surprised and upset, that he had talked to her that way. When he asked Rupert what he imagined the two of them would live on, up in Burlington, he sounded like her mother.

He had a minor heart attack six months later. Ann was meaning to go see him and then he had the second one, and after that he never regained consciousness. When she drove down to Hartford the next day, for the funeral, and to clean out his apartment, the first thing she did was find his folder of poems, which she hadn’t looked at since high school. She realized they weren’t very good, but didn’t tell anybody this. Particularly her mother, when she went out to Washington State for a visit, at Christmas. She wanted to make her mother feel bad and guilty, and the trip was a success.

But Rupert really was brilliant, and she knows that someday he will finish his novel, and imagines that there will be a character in it—not the main character, who is really Rupert—that resembles Ann. Sometimes she imagines the book will be dedicated to her. She is sure, anyway, that Rupert is living alone now. If he were going to live with anybody, it would be her.

So what could she tell this therapist her mother wants her to visit? That she sacrificed her whole happiness, her life, practically, so the man she loves could be free, which is the truest kind of love there is, because you don’t do it to get anything back, and in fact, you do it even when the person wouldn’t do it for you. If knowing how to love like that is sick, Ann doesn’t want the cure. It is her one real and extraordinary talent.

And there’s no point going to Seattle for holidays either, or seeing her sister, getting her mother’s recipe for pie crust or going sailing in Puget Sound on her stepfather’s boat. Ann is sure those things would be enjoyable, that she could have a good time, but having a good time is not her goal anymore. She doesn’t want those kinds of good times to make her forget, either, what is real and important, which is her great love and her great loss. It’s out of kindness to her mother that Ann never gives an answer when her mother asks what she did to make her daughter never call and never write, never visit, or even send a picture of the house. Because the answer is, her mother has nothing to do with the life she leads now, is not important enough to Ann to be responsible for grief of the magnitude she is experiencing. Ann likes to feel that her life began that first day in Rupert’s class. Nothing in her history before then matters anymore.

D
ORIS KNOWS WHAT IT
must be. That mental problem where teenage girls go on diets and make themselves throw up. Donahue had a show about it.

And Jill has been eating so little lately. She was never heavy, but now her cheeks are all sunk in. She is probably having trouble with her boyfriend.

What to do about that bowl in the closet? If she empties it Jill will know. She doesn’t know what she would say to Jill. Better to leave it. Tonight she will make Jill’s favorite dinner. She’ll see to it that Jill eats. No daughter of hers is going to be mental.

Carla was hoping to stop by the secondhand clothing shop Greg told her about, where he bought her the dress, but the sign says “Closed.” There’s an old school bus parked in the yard, with a lot of stuff tied to the roof. She hopes they aren’t going out of business.

She should buy vitamins. Take care of herself. She thinks she will also get back into yoga. Nothing too strenuous—just to keep her body flexible.

There’s a very pretty girl in the drugstore—she can’t be more than eighteen—holding a baby. She’s trying to carry the baby and three boxes of Pampers, which are on sale. One of the Pampers boxes keeps slipping and the baby has begun to cry.

“Do you need a hand?” asks Carla. When this girl is my age, she’s thinking, her child will be nine or ten.

“Could I,” says the girl. “I should’ve waited till my husband could pick these up, but I was afraid they’d be sold out. It’s such a good buy.”

“I’ve got my car outside,” says Carla. “I’ll give you a lift home if you want.”

The girl says that would be great.

Her name is Sandy. She lives across from the Laundromat. Carla says she’s new in town, doesn’t know where that is.

Sandy asks where Carla comes from. New York.

Wow, she would love to see New York City. All the beautiful clothes. Are the women there really wearing those spandex pants and things? Has Carla ever been mugged?

“Somebody broke into our loft once but we weren’t home. There were a lot of junkies in our neighborhood.”

“I was going to take my senior class trip to New York City,” says Sandy. Only she didn’t graduate.

“You probably didn’t miss much,” says Carla. “You never get the real feeling for a place on one of those trips.”

That’s what Mark said. What he wanted to do most was get passes for
Saturday Night Live
or go to one of those rock music clubs. Their adviser got everybody tickets for
Chapter Two.

Sandy asks what Carla did in New York. She says she was an editor on a women’s magazine and now she’s trying to write a play. Her husband (she has been calling Greg that since they moved here) is an artist.

“A magazine editor.” Sandy says that’s where she gets all her recipes. Also those magazines are very helpful when you’re raising a baby. Just today she cut out an article about exercises for babies to do to improve their coordination. She is wondering if Carla had anything to do with choosing the babies they use to model the baby clothes in those craft sections. Carla has just been saying how cute Mark Junior is.

They have reached Sandy’s apartment building. “Do you want to come upstairs for a cup of tea?” she asks. Carla says sure.

There’s a plaque on the door with two robins putting their wings around each other and the words “Love Nest” underneath. Inside, the place is immaculate. Flower-print café curtains, an African violet on the windowsill, a prism hanging above. There’s a mug tree on the kitchen counter with two yellow mugs—“Mom” and “Dad.” A cookie jar shaped like a giant apple. A framed reproduction of Picasso’s
Don Quixote
and a piece of parchmentlike paper with a poem printed on it titled “Desiderata.” A portable stereo, about fifteen records, a few rubber baby toys in a basket on a hand-braided rug.

Carla puts the Pampers boxes down beside the door and picks up the framed photograph of Mark and Sandy that’s propped on top of the TV set. “Your husband’s a good-looking man,” she says.

“Thank you,” says Sandy.

“How long have you been married?”

Sandy says fourteen months. Actually, their first anniversary’s next month, but Sandy doesn’t want people to think they just got married because she was pregnant.

“Having the baby right away—doesn’t it sometimes make you feel tied down?”

Sandy puts the milk in a creamer and sets out the sugar bowl. “What would I be doing with my freedom anyway?” she says. She’s pouring apple juice into a Fred Flintstone bottle for the baby, who’s smiling and waving his arms.

Carla has an image, then, of the roomful of men and women in her Szechuan cooking class, back in the city. Standing over their cutting boards, cleavers poised. Chopping bamboo shoots into the shape of evergreen trees, sculpting mushrooms. Freedom: That’s what she has been doing with hers.

Frank Pineo, who runs Moonlight Acres, is standing over the deep fryer, trying to decide if he can leave the oil another couple of days without changing it. The clams have begun tasting a little funny. Well, he will just serve a little more tartar sauce on the side,

“You said to come back this week and see about a job,” says the girl. She has a baby with her, in a stroller, but Frank can tell this one doesn’t have a husband. She’s plump, the way he likes them.

“Uh huh.” He turns back to the griddle. Checks the pilot light. Let her work for this.

“So I was wondering if there was an opening now.”

He looks at his watch. He walks slowly to the other end of the counter and squeezes out a jumbo Softee Freeze cone, a Maraschino cherry on top. He looks back at the girl and licks it.

“You think you could handle this machine?” he says.

She says she is sure she could.

“Looks kind of like a woman’s nipple, doesn’t it?” he says, holding out the cone.

Wanda says she guesses so.

“Yours look like that?”

She doesn’t say anything.

“When you’re really hot for it?”

Wanda looks down at Melissa, slumped in her umbrella stroller. She is like an old man, all hunched over, with her head bobbing.

“So are you really hot for it?” He puts one hand down the front of his pants. He is about forty and quite fat. “The job, I mean.”

Wanda says she needs the money pretty badly.

“One-eighty an hour,” he says. “Hairnet. White shoes. No free eats.”

Wanda says fine.