Baby Love (17 page)

“There she is,” says Sandy. “Talking to some guy.”

Carla comes to see.

As the house comes into view, Mark hears music. He doesn’t mean to look in any more windows, but there she is. Holding a wineglass and sort of hugging herself with the other hand. She’s barefoot, pacing back and forth, singing. Not in the quiet, mouthing way that most people do when they play records. She is belting it out like she’s giving a concert.

So loud she doesn’t hear his knock. Finally he has to put his head in the door and yell, “Excuse me.”

She jumps.

“Sorry to bother you,” he says. She turns down the music and puts her glass on the arm of a chair.

He explains about his friend. Can’t walk, no car. Afraid his ankle may be broken.

“Just a second,” she says. “I’ll put on my shoes.”

She screws the top back on the bottle and puts the ice cubes back in the freezer. Mark follows her out the door.

She turns her key in the ignition and opens the passenger door for him. He slides in.

“Nice little car,” he says. “Get good mileage?”

“We’ve got a problem with Jill,” says Doris. She and Reg are cleaning the creosote out of their stovepipe. It looks as if they won’t be burning any more wood until September.

Reg knows he’s supposed to ask, What do you mean? But if he waits she will just tell him.

“She’s depressed. She’s got mental problems. Doesn’t have any appetite.”

Reg had not noticed. He feels guilty and foolish. He’s a middle-aged man with a wife and teenaged daughter. He has no business spending all his time thinking about that girl down the road.

“What do you figure is the matter?” he asks.

“You know these teen years,” says Doris. “A girl gets a spot on her nose and she figures her life is over.”

“Why don’t I just take my girls out to the movies this evening?” says Reg. “Maybe Howard Johnson’s too. Make a night of it.”

“That would be nice,” says Doris.

Ann feels reckless. She’s a little bit drunk to begin with. She recognizes the passenger stretched out on her backseat, soaking wet and shivering, as the boy whose lovemaking she observed, right at this very spot, just two days before. The passenger in the seat beside her, she knows, recently experienced an erection while reading the current issue of
Rolling Stone
outside Felsen’s News. One of those Linda Ronstadt nuts probably.

They are neither of them at the George Jones stage of life—pining, suffering, feeling lonely and blue. These boys probably don’t go twenty-four hours without screwing some girl or other. They certainly don’t bring these girls windmills and garden gloves either. For them sex is simple and uncomplicated, like breathing and eating. If she could be like that she might feel more like a member of the human race. Nobody would be miserable. Nobody would love anybody.

Which would she choose? The one in the front seat—Mark—is more attractive. The one in the back, Virgil, looks wilder. He would probably like to have Led Zeppelin playing, for atmosphere. Of course he has that broken ankle.

She could drop him off and say to the other one, “Let’s go back to my place.” Or just drive someplace. He probably does it mostly in cars.

She’s standing at the edge of a waterfall. Might as well plunge. She has broken every bone in her body anyway.

Now is the moment, Mark thinks. Drop Virgil off at the medical center, then ask this girl do you have any plans? Of course she doesn’t.

As for himself, he went over the edge a couple of hours ago. He has now broken into some people’s house, stolen three albums, missed work. Soon he will also miss dinner, and his son’s bath time.

In a minute, Virgil is thinking, we will be at the medical center. Mark will say, “Think you can manage O.K.?” Then, while he’s stretched out on an examining table getting pictures taken of his bones, Mark will be parked by the side of the road somewhere, getting laid. He can just tell. Maybe they’ll even go back to her place, and they’ll do stuff like take a shower together. She probably knows how to give a massage. The doctor will be telling him, “Keep off that foot,” and Mark will be on top of her. Mark has the dope too. Virg will take two aspirins and there they’ll be, stoned out of their minds.

She pulls up in front of the emergency entrance and puts the car into neutral. Mark says, “Hey, man, think you can manage O.K.?” “Sure thing,” says Virgil. “I guess Sandy and the baby will be wondering what happened to you.” That’s all it takes.

There’s a plate of celery sticks stuffed with cream cheese and walnuts sitting on Mrs. Ramsay’s lazy Susan. She has also put out a bowl of party snacks made with Corn Chex and Wheat Chex and peanuts. “Have as much as you like, dear,” says Mrs. Ramsay. She’s not touching anything herself.

Wanda is not really hungry tonight, after all that Softee Freeze Mr. Pineo gave her. Melissa had some too. He put it on his finger and she licked it off. He thought that was funny. “Why don’t we just take off Baby’s hat and sweater?” says Mrs. Ramsay. “It’s so warm tonight.”

Wanda doesn’t want to remove the hat, on account of Melissa’s bruise. “I think she has a cold,” says Wanda. “I’d better just leave this stuff on.”

“I once knew a woman whose baby got caught in the rain without a hat on,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “The next morning when she went to get it, that baby was dead.”

That’s terrible.

“There was this other child, she used to play with Dwight sometimes when they were still toddlers. Her mother gave her milk in a glass bottle. One day the baby tripped on a toy car, holding that bottle. Glass shattered all over her face. She had to have nine operations. Today her face is covered with scars. No one ever asks her out on a date.”

“Wow,” says Wanda. “Jeez.”

“That’s nothing. There was this woman who took drugs while she was pregnant. Her baby was born without any face. Eyes, nose, mouth, nothing. She has to wear a little knitted mask all the time. Have some more of this party mix. It will just go to waste otherwise.

“There was this man in Russia. A truckdriver, forty years old. He started feeling sick. Like there was something pressing against his chest is the way he put it.

“So they performed exploratory surgery. Inside his left lung they found the petrified forty-year-old fetus of his twin brother. This embryo had hair on his head, eyes. There was supple fatty tissue around its waist. It had one tooth.”

Mrs. Ramsay is not looking into Wanda’s eyes as she speaks. She is watching Wanda’s mouth, chewing on a stuffed celery stick. Wanda is feeling slightly sick to her stomach, and wishes she hadn’t started eating this celery stick, but she has started now, and can’t very well spit it out. These things take forever to chew.

“And here is the amazing thing. The reason this man started feeling pain all of a sudden was, this fetus had begun to grow.”

Mrs. Ramsay goes to check the pork chops. “We’ll just leave you little fellows another ten minutes,” she says, returning to her seat.

“So,” she says. “I hope you had a very lovely evening with that young man of yours.”

Wanda says it’s nothing serious.

“Oh, come on now,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “I saw that glow in his eyes when he dropped you off.”

What was she doing looking out the window? How could she see in the car? What glow?

“It must be hard for a lovely young person like yourself, having to take care of a baby all the time. Sometimes you must get very impatient.”

Mrs. Ramsay has seen the bruise. Wanda will have to work it into the conversation about how Melissa fell.

Mrs. Ramsay is ladling soup into Wanda’s bowl. Wanda gets up to put Melissa in her infant seat and hangs a string of wooden beads around her neck. Melissa looks like all she wants to do is sleep.

“And money must be a big problem.” She passes Wanda a roll.

Wanda says she got a job today. Moonlight Acres. If Mrs. Ramsay would be willing to watch Melissa for her.

“Don’t think about us,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “We’ll be fine.”

Wanda’s shift is six to midnight. Melissa usually sleeps through most of that time anyway.

“Now here’s something fascinating,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “I heard about this woman whose tubes were blocked. Her eggs couldn’t get down from her ovaries to be fertilized? In the picture she seemed quite obese, I don’t know if that was the problem.

“Well, she had this friend. I guess you could say the friend was a loner. Never married. In fact, she was a virgin.

“The friend said she’d have a baby for the other woman, the obese one, using the husband’s sperm. Of course it would be adultery if they actually had intercourse. So they went to a doctor to get artificial insemination. The doctor wouldn’t do it.”

Mrs. Ramsay says the chops are ready. Also, have a baked potato and some asparagus. That’s not enough cheese sauce. Take some more.

“So here’s what they did. They got some books out of the library and read up on artificial insemination. They figured out just when her eggs would be released and got some sperm.

“Then they put his sperm into a syringe and injected it into the friend. The virgin. And she got pregnant. And now they have the baby and it thinks the obese woman is the mother and the friend lives with them. They’re a very happy family.”

“Wow,” says Wanda. She adds that the chops are very good.

“Have more.” Mrs. Ramsay has scraped the cheese sauce off her asparagus. She gets up and turns on the TV set, which faces the dinner table.

“I just love these Muppets, don’t you?” she says. Kermit is saying that Diana Ross is this week’s guest host. More Negroes.

“I met one of your young friends yesterday,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “She was sitting with her baby outside the Laundromat.”

“Oh,” says Wanda. “Tara.”

“Her baby was sucking on her breast. It was a very beautiful sight. That’s what motherhood is all about.”

Wanda is going to say that she didn’t breast-feed because someone told her that would ruin her boobs. But they’re ruined anyway.

“But it is a shame to see a beautiful young person like that having to take care of a baby. She should be out having a good time. She could go dancing.”

Wanda is thinking about Jill, sitting in her apartment eating a Mystic Mint and looking at her stomach. “It isn’t even the size of my thumbnail,” she said. “It isn’t even as big as those planarians we cut up in biology.”

“And money is such a problem,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “How can a young girl possibly come up with the money?” In a minute she will take down
Joy of Cooking.

Why didn’t Wanda think of it before? She can ask Mrs. Ramsay. She is sure Mrs. Ramsay would want to help Jill.

“Do you think you could lend me a hundred dollars?” says Wanda.

So easy. Mrs. Ramsay opens the cookbook to page 200, takes out a hundred-dollar bill. “Here is the paper,” she says. “There is more money too. Just sign here.”

Right underneath where it says “… agree to give up all rights as Mother and admit that I am a slut.”

What is going on anyway?

On the TV screen, Fozzie Bear has just asked Diana Ross what you get when you make a soft drink out of acorns. Oaka Cola. Wocka wocka wocka.

C
ARLA GETS HOME BEFORE
Greg. The first thing she sees is a dead fish lying on the doorstep. The door open. Her teapot lying on the floor. Contraceptive cream smeared on the window. “Fuck you sucker.” She screams.

Ann stops at the Grand Union for some honey yogurt and more popcorn. She knows what she will do tonight.

Then she goes home. Turns on the TV set, heats some oil in a pan, melts the butter. By the time the popcorn has popped she will have finished two cups of yogurt. She will save the other one for after, to help her throw up.

She goes to the pantry for the popping corn, reaches up to the top shelf for a bowl. There is a rustling, a little high-pitched cheeping sound and then a frantic fluttering overhead. For a second she thinks there must have been birds nesting here. But it’s bats. At least a dozen.

“Let’s talk some more about Loretta,” says Dr. Poster. “About what you said last week. How she was just asking for it.”

Wayne stretches his arms and folds them behind his head, as if he’s lying on a beach someplace. This is a trick, of course, designed to get his guard down. Dr. Poster is trying to look as if he agrees that Loretta deserved what happened to her, so Wayne will admit that he did in fact make those teeth marks on her buttocks. But he knows that Dr. Poster could never understand a woman like Loretta, or what it means to have something such as he and Loretta had. Dr. Poster probably makes love to his wife for three minutes every Saturday night. Weekdays they talk about how their stocks are doing and whose turn it is to pick up the kids. Comment on what nice tender steak this is.

Loretta understood. She knew she belonged to him. She knew she wasn’t supposed to talk to anybody else, wasn’t supposed to leave their apartment. She was supposed to wait there for him, on her mattress with her cunt ready. Thinking about how it was going to be. That was the deal. He made it worth her while, when he came to her. She was the one who broke the rules.

First she wanted to go to the supermarket. Said he never bought the right kind of oranges. Said he never took advantage of the sales. Didn’t like the clothes he bought for her. Said I don’t use sanitary napkins, I use Tampax.

Then she wanted a TV. Said how am I supposed to know what’s going on in the world? You didn’t even tell me Nixon resigned.

What does a person need to know that sort of stuff for, he would like to know. What is more important than the kind of love they had?

Then she wanted that baby. There was not supposed to be any baby. He brought her those pills every day. Even kept track of her cycle on the calendar.

She tricked him. Didn’t even tell him. Didn’t she know, when you have something like they had, she wouldn’t have to tell him. He knew her body that well. Even before she missed her period he could tell there was something in her body that wasn’t supposed to be there.

When he realized what had happened, first he thought he would kill himself. That would have been easier for him.

But how could he do that to her? She would never manage. She didn’t even know Ed Sullivan died.