Baby Love (24 page)

“Water boy maybe.” Jill is not wearing a bra. Reg notices that she has filled out, remembers what Doris’s breasts used to look like, high and full. He turns back to the game.

“What did you used to think you’d be, when you were growing up?” says Jill. Something about the way she sits, the casual spread of her thighs—all of a sudden he knows she’s not a virgin.

“I don’t know. In those days you didn’t have too many big ideas.”

“There must’ve been something.” Jill takes another long sip of his beer, licks the side of her mouth with her tongue.

“Farmer, I guess.”

“That was your whole dream?”

More: black soil, no rocks in it, plenty of earthworms. Southern exposure, maybe a pond, for irrigation. Berry patches. An asparagus bed.

“What about you?”

She says she would like to be a stewardess maybe. You get to fly free, see the world.

“Not that it’ll happen,” she says. The two of them are silent for a few innings.

“Daddy,” she says. “Do you believe there are things a person can do, that if they do them they go to hell?”

She’s sure it’s just temporary, momentary—the way every once in a while you’ll be writing a letter and forget how to spell some word like “said”—but all of a sudden Ann can’t remember what it was about Rupert that she loved. She has been grieving for so long all she can remember is grieving.

She knows some things they used to do, of course: going down to the garden at suppertime to pick vegetables for salad, setting up tray tables side by side facing the TV when they watched old movies, dancing the fox-trot Saturday nights when Lawrence Welk came on. Nothing very remarkable—nothing that would make a person, hearing about the two of them, think: Wow, what an incredibly beautiful relationship.

Actually, the awful memories are much clearer now: A drive to Massachusetts for Parents’ Day at Trina’s school, one of the teachers telling her after the fifth-graders’ production of
Pygmalion
, “You must be very proud of your little sister.” Smashing every one of his Early Girl tomatoes against the side of the house. Shutting herself in his closet after one of their fights, sitting on a pile of his shirts that had been building up for about three weeks, and that she kept meaning to wash, thinking he would open the door and put his arms around her, hearing him running the water instead, his spoon against the honey pot (making tea), and then the sound of typewriter keys. He just went about his business, and in the end she had to get up, open the door, squinting at the brightness of their room, go back to reading her magazine.

What does she want anyway? Rupert was always asking her that. “I need peace,” he said. “I’m too old for this kind of thing.”

Ann can’t imagine wanting peace more than anything. “If that’s how you feel, why don’t you just go live in a funeral parlor,” she told him. What Ann needs is a feeling in her chest sort of like the violin parts of a really sad country song. “Stand on My Own Two Knees,” or “She Should Belong to Me.” She needs someone who would make her throw herself into a snowbank. She can’t imagine being in love and not crying.

Her high school boyfriend, Jeff, for instance. She will never meet someone that nice again, and he was crazy about her too. He used to write these poems and arrange it so one of the secretaries in the principal’s office would deliver them to her in the middle of Latin class. He gave her great presents: a purple finch in a Mexican birdcage, a jasmine plant, a handmade Indian belt with her name spelled out in beads. He always had good ideas for things to do—roller skating, before it got so popular, a free introductory plane ride at a flight school. They had their portrait made by a computer, with their faces made into a pattern of X’s and O’s. He knew a dozen out-of-the-way places to go swimming—always had towels and a blanket in the trunk of his car. They weren’t eighteen yet, so he kept six-packs stashed in hiding places all through the woods, and even though they were never cold, and it wouldn’t have been that hard just to get somebody to buy for them, it was always exciting, digging up the beer.

But she always knew she would leave him. There was something about their relationship that just wasn’t momentous enough. She didn’t ache when he was gone or feel her hands getting damp when he came to pick her up. Sitting beside him in the front seat of his old Rambler, she might just as well have been curled up on the sofa at home, it was that comfortable. The closest they ever got to the kind of feelings people sing about on the radio was the night she told him she wanted to break up. They both cried. Ann could have stopped the tears a little sooner than she did, but she remembers thinking it felt sort of good.

A couple of months after she moved out of Rupert’s house—during one of her worst eating bouts—she went to Nashville. She just got in the car and started driving, sleeping at the sleaziest motels she could find along the way, living on piña coladas and Rice Krispies. Ann thought of her trip as a kind of pilgrimage to the Heartbreak and Misery Capital of the nation. She made no effort to be friendly with the desk clerk at the Hall of Fame Motel or the other tourists on the sightseeing bus that took her past Webb Pierce’s guitar-shaped swimming pool and the ASCAP fountain. She bought a pair of blue cowboy boots and seventy-five dollars’ worth of records at Ernest Tubb’s music store. She slept until noon most days, bought food at a grocery store on the highway and brought it back to her room, ate with the TV on, or the radio tuned to country, which was all you could get anyway. At night she’d take a cab to one of the clubs along Music Alley, stay till closing and take another cab back to the Hall of Fame.

On the fourth night she went to the Possum Holler because George Jones was singing that night. One of the country music magazines she’d bought and read in her room said George was drinking himself to death. He’d lost about thirty pounds, looked eighty years old. Ann—though she never loses weight when she feels like that—believed she understood.

Partly because of all the piña coladas she had that night, her memory of what happened is fuzzy. She was sitting listening to the music, sipping her drink. She remembers the look of George Jones’s neck—stringy and tense, with his head thrown back like a man at the guillotine. She remembers him introducing a woman in the front row as his girlfriend, giving her a long, wet kiss in front of everyone, people whistling, and one man yelling, “Where’s Tammy tonight, George?” Over in one corner two men got into a fight and somebody threw them out. Then she felt a hand reach over from the next table and touch hers, a very large hand wrap around hers, that was so cold. The odd thing was, she didn’t even turn her head to see who was doing this. She kept staring straight ahead. But she didn’t push the hand away.

Their hands stayed that way for about six songs. At one point Ann got something in her eye and wanted to brush it out, but she would have had to use the hand he was holding so she just blinked a lot instead. When she was finished with her piña colada the barmaid brought her another, and when Ann said, “I didn’t order that,” the woman explained it came from the man at the next table.

That’s when she turned to look at him. An Indian, nearly seven feet tall, not fat but enormous. He wore his hair in a braid down his back and he was dressed in black leather. There were two men sitting with him, ordinary-looking men, ordinary size, and they were all acting as if there was nothing odd about this Indian carrying on a conversation while his left hand was stretched out and resting on the next table, holding on to the right hand of a total stranger.

He turned his head toward her very slowly, in such a way that his chin remained perfectly parallel to the floor the whole time. Then he turned back to his friends. He did not let go of her hand.

After the third drink she thought she would go. She remembered a boy she knew once in college explaining to her about this way a person could shake hands, with the middle finger touching the other person’s palm in this certain way that meant you wanted to make love. She did not put her middle finger in that position, but she thought about Helen Keller, experiencing her whole life, practically, with her hands. She felt a little like that, as if about ninety things had happened between her and the Indian without either of them saying one word. She thought it would be appropriate, leaving, to just take her hand away and put it back in her pocket and not say good-bye. But she was not all that surprised, when she got outside, to feel him looming behind her. “I’m Randy Burning Tree,” he said. “I will drive you home.”

He had a white Cadillac with leather seats and a tape player, quadraphonic sound. When he clicked on the tape she realized—without having heard him say anything but those two sentences—that this was him singing. The top of his head touched the interior roof of the car.

She has told herself that all she meant was to get a ride back to the motel. All those cabs and drinks, she was almost out of money. But when they got to the motel and he kissed her, she kissed him back.

“I will walk you to the door,” he said. It took him a minute getting out of the car, he was so big.

When they got to the door of the elevator, Ann said, “Well, good-bye.”

“I will take you to your room,” he said, just as the elevator door opened, and he stepped in.

She thinks that was the moment when she stopped feeling drunk and dreamy and began to feel scared. He stopped the door from closing with his foot. Black cowboy boots.

She pushed number four. Not her floor. Her hand in her pocket was fingering the key to room 207.

She has this memory of careening wildly in the elevator, pushing buttons, lurching to a stop, stepping out, stepping in, like that character in
The French Connection
who keeps getting in and out of subway cars trying to lose two killers. It couldn’t have been that way exactly—elevators are never that fast—but she does remember knocking on some doors that weren’t hers, reaching her hand out to push
L
, his hand stopping her.

At room 207 finally. Key in the lock, opening the door, thinking for a second: I was crazy, imagining things, he only wanted to make sure I was all right. Inside the room then, facing him as he stood in the threshold, like the ending of a kind of date she hasn’t had since high school, where you say thank you, I had a lovely time, and close the door.

Only then his huge leg was in the doorway so she couldn’t close it. Then it wasn’t only his leg. Then he was ripping off her panty hose, pushing the country music magazines and the bag from Ernest Tubb’s off the bed and there were Rice Krispies everywhere (she could hear the crunch as he pushed her down) and he had unzipped the black leather pants, and there was an enormous erect penis in her face.

She remembers only one thing after that. When it was over, and she was just lying there, he walked over to the mirror and took out his contact lenses. He wet them with spit and put them back in his eyes and then he left.

When she was home again and her period didn’t come, she thought she might be pregnant, thought about having an enormous Indian baby and not knowing what tribe it belonged to. A couple of days later she woke up covered with blood and knew that once again nothing was going to change.

Of course now Wanda can’t ask Mrs. Ramsay to watch Melissa while she works at Moonlight Acres. It’s a little embarrassing to ask Sandy, since she didn’t show up at the birthday party. Wanda is just going to explain that Melissa wasn’t feeling well. Which is true.

She’s standing at their door, Sandy and Mark’s. Looking at the sign that says “Love Nest,” thinking: Sandy’s so lucky. Ronnie Spaulding has asked Wanda out two times now. But she has a feeling he may just be using her. She can’t picture her and Ronnie living in an apartment together with a Love Nest sign on the door.

Low voices inside. The radio playing. Somebody turns it up suddenly, so it’s really loud. “I will if I want to.” “You’re so immature I feel like I have two babies to look after.” “Well, then maybe you’ll be happy to get rid of me.”

They must not hear her knocking.

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Sandy.

Mark saying something about Alaska. Her parents. Want me to be just like them. Live a little. Stuck.

Wanda is about to go when the door opens. It’s Mark, leaving. Sandy stands behind him with the baby in her arms.

“Well, it looks like the Mothers Club is all set for a meeting,” he says. “I’d just be in the way. What do I know?” He’s out of there.

Sandy and Wanda face each other, not saying anything. Mark Junior is saying tuna, tuna, tuna.

Wanda can’t think of anything, except that if she doesn’t leave now she will be late for her first night on the job. “I was wondering if you could watch Melissa,” she says. “She’ll probably just sleep.”

J
ILL DOESN’T UNDERSTAND HOW
it can be that after throwing up four times a day for a solid week (everything except the Saltines), when she put on her uniform to go to work, it was tight. Even her mother noticed, said thank goodness you’re finally putting a few pounds back on. Well, tomorrow at this time the whole mess will be over with. She wonders if you go right back to normal after an abortion or if your body still thinks it’s pregnant for a while. The woman from the clinic she talked to on the phone today told her she’d have bad cramps for a few hours, and bleeding like a normal period. “No intercourse for two weeks afterwards,” she said. Well, Jill is in no mood anyway. Virgil can stick it in a tree as far as she’s concerned.

Mark comes in, alone. Jill is going to make some excuse about missing Sandy’s party, but then she sees he’s too stoned to care. He puts a quarter in the jukebox, selects “Blue Bayou.” He sits at the counter, spins around several times on the stool, the way little kids do. He takes a packet out of the sugar dispenser and studies what’s written on the back. Sal got these sugars cheap—ten gross—because they were printed up for the Bicentennial.

“ ‘August 17, 1807. Robert Fulton left New York City on the first practical steamboat trip. Arrived Albany in thirty-two hours,’ ” he says. Jill smiles.

“Do you know what you want?” she says. She hands Mark a menu.