Baby Love (25 page)

He stares at her as if he is remembering the way she looked with her shirt off, bouncing around his living room doing her pregnant dance.

He is still studying sugar packets. “ ‘Seventeen ninety-three. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, reviving Southern slavery.’ I always wondered why they made such a big deal about the cotton gin,” he says. “Far out.”

“I’ll be back when you’re ready,” says Jill. She has just seen Virgil come in and she wants to be busy. He sits down on the stool next to Mark’s. He’s carrying a cane.

Jill puts some more coffee in the filter and checks her reflection in the stainless steel of the machine. “Blue Bayou” clicks on again.

“You want to sign my cast?” says Virgil. Jill isn’t sure who he’s saying this to. She hands him a menu, even though she knows what he will get. He always gets a cheeseburger.

“So you want to?” He taps her shoulder with the cane. As if everything’s like normal.

Jill is not even going to ask how he hurt his ankle, which isn’t in a cast at all, just an Ace bandage. Jill puts out a knife and fork. “How’s Sandy and the baby?” she says to Mark.

“Just one happy little family,” he says.

“What happened to the rest of the dope?” Virgil says. He’s talking to Mark now.

“Smoked it. I want a doughnut. With jelly in the middle. What do you call that kind?”

“A jelly doughnut. Coffee?”

Virgil says there was twice that much in the bag.

“Well, man, it’s gone.” Mark goes over to the jukebox, chooses the same song again. Someone at the other end of the counter makes a booing noise.

“So what time do you get off?” Virgil says to Jill.

“None of your business,” she says. Now, if Mark asked her to go for a drive that might be different. It would be adultery, of course, like on
Dallas.
He is so cute. Jill tosses her hair so the highlights show. But Mark is walking toward the door and doesn’t even leave a tip.

“Come on, how about it?” says Virgil.

Sperm virus, Jill is thinking. One hundred and thirty-five dollars down the tubes, and I am going to have to figure out how to get a fifty-dollar prom gown to show my mother without spending fifty dollars. She sweeps her sponge across Virgil’s end of the counter as if he’s invisible.

J
OHNNY
C
ARSON HAS JUST
signed a new three-year contract with NBC for five million dollars a year. Doris read about it in the paper. That is a good topic.

“Johnny isn’t leaving the show after all,” she says. Reg is lying in bed next to her, but she knows he isn’t asleep. The monologue has just ended.

“That’s good,” says Reg. He doesn’t open his eyes.

“You can be sure
his
wife doesn’t spend her time looking for Red Dot Specials at the Grand Union,” she says. Reg is silent.

“Ed must be relieved. If Johnny had gone, he’d be out on the street.”

Reg says that’s true.

“Although of course he’d still have those Budweiser commercials.”

“Right.”

“Will you look at Jim Garner?” she says. That is Johnny’s first guest. “Is he ever looking terrible. I guess he’s depressed on account of his divorce.” Over the years, Johnny and Ed have also left their old wives for younger women, Doris knows.

Johnny asks Jim why he quit
Rockford Files.
Jim says he just couldn’t keep up with the physical demands anymore. He might do another series sometime if it didn’t call for so much running.

Johnny asks Jim how his golf game is coming. “Not so good,” says Jim. “Used to be a lot better when I was younger.”

“We are none of us getting any younger, Jim,” says Doris. Reg reaches to turn off the light on his side.

“Hitting the hay?” says Doris. “Well, I guess I will too.” She gets up to turn off the set and goes to the bathroom.

No curlers tonight. A squirt of the new Avon fragrance, Foxfire.

She pulls back the covers. She puts her hand on his chest, stroking his hair. Marabel Morgan would want her to say something about how manly he is. “You have a manly chest,” she says.

He’s pretty tired, he says.

She lets her nightgown ride up so her rear end rubs against his leg. She puts his hand on her thigh. She has never been this forward.

She’s found the opening in his shorts. She puts her hand inside. Nothing happening.

“Just let your inhibitions run wild,” she whispers. She heard that on one of Jill’s Rod Stewart records.

Slowly she can feel his penis stiffening. He lifts himself up and lowers himself down on top of her. She spreads her legs.

In her room, with the door closed, Mrs. Farley is typing. She says some of the words out loud as she thinks of them. “Don’t you even wonder what it looks like? Well, I’m going to tell you. It looks more like my daughter than your son. But my daughter does not have blue eyes. I have never trusted a person with blue eyes.”

College boy. Impregnator.

Tara is going to shut her eyes, that’s all. She will run a bath for her and Sunshine, try to remember that song Denver and Kalima sang. “My only sunshine. You make me happy when times are blue. You’ll never know, dear.”

She unpins Sunshine’s diaper. Hardly damp at all. She lays Sun on the bathmat and locks the door. Then she pulls off her dress and pants. She holds Sunshine up against her bare skin, the way she did this morning, for the artist. She steps into the water, which is only lukewarm, the way the baby likes it. She sits down.

Sunshine’s body goes rigid when she hits the water, then relaxes gradually as Tara rubs her back. She lies belly-down on her mother’s stomach with her head resting on one of Tara’s breasts, an inch above the waterline. A few strands of her hair—the longest parts, at the back of her neck—are wet and clinging to her skin. Her head rolls to the side just enough that she gets a little water in her mouth. She sputters a little. Tara pats her on the back. She’s calm again, almost floating.

Tara has heard that newborn babies can actually swim. By the time they get to Sunshine’s age they’ve almost forgotten. Tara herself has never gone in the water deeper than her knees. She doesn’t even own a bathing suit. But they say if you tossed a newborn baby into the water it would swim. How did they ever find that out? Who would try?

Tara soaps up a washcloth. Sunshine is not really dirty, of course. She’s never anything but clean. Tara just likes washing her, checking every inch.

What is Tara’s favorite part? The delicate chin. Sunshine’s little shell ears. Kalima’s children, even the little boy, had pierced ears. Tara thinks Sun would look nice with little gold studs in her ears. But it’s her body, Tara decided. What if when she grew up she decided she didn’t want pierced ears, and it made her mad that I decided to do it without asking her? Like cutting someone’s hair off while they’re asleep. She will wait on the earrings.

Such a round belly Sunshine has. Tara feels proud that a baby fed on nothing but her milk could be so healthy. Her legs have these deep folds in the thighs where the skin is a shade lighter. So chubby the skin there never sees the light of day. That’s one of Tara’s favorite parts. Also the little monkey toes—long, almost like fingers. Sterling Lewis must have toes like that. Strange that she doesn’t even know. And the blue eyes—her mother’s right about that. Nothing else about Sterling Lewis was exceptional, but he had beautiful blue eyes.

“I am thinking tonight of my blue eyes, who is sailing far over the sea.” Line from one of the songs the artist played for her today. It was on a record by a whole family that performed together with guitars and banjos and even an Autoharp. What was the Autoharp player’s name? Maybelle. Mother Maybelle Carter. She played the Autoharp nothing like Tara’s old music teacher.

Imagine having a whole family that played instruments like that, knew all those songs. On Sunday afternoons, instead of ironing blouses with the television tuned to
Bowling for Dollars
or making up crazy letters to people, imagine sitting around the living room singing harmony.

When she asked the artist if he’d play that song again, the one about blue eyes, he said, “I’ll give you the record.”

“I don’t have a record player,” she said. “But I’m saving up for an Autoharp.”

He liked Sunshine. When she came out of the bathroom he was kissing her toes. “I was just looking,” he said, embarrassed.

“I can’t believe you had a baby,” he said. “You’re so small.”

She told him how they thought she’d need to have a Caesarean, but in the end she opened up.

He took out this book he had of African art. All these wood carvings of pregnant women, women with long dangling breasts, squatting women with babies coming out. Beautiful, huh?

She wanted to tell him her stomach looked like that too when she was pregnant. Stretched so tight her belly button popped out, and she had to keep a quarter taped over it. She would’ve liked to pose for him when she was pregnant.

“It’s the same expression a woman has on her face when she’s making love,” he said. He was looking at one of the African sculptures.

That was the one time Tara felt uncomfortable. She doesn’t know what expression that is. She doesn’t really know what it feels like to make love. Can’t imagine.

If the artist hadn’t been married, she would’ve explained to him how she had to get Sunshine out of this house, her mother was giving out such bad vibrations. He would say, “You can come live here.” He would have built a railing around the sleeping loft, so they wouldn’t need to worry about Sunshine. They would put her crib beside the bed.

She would sleep beside him the very first night. Naked probably. She doesn’t even know what his body would look like. All she has seen is a couple of statues.

She would tell him that. He would say I understand, that’s all right. I used to be a teacher. He would explain everything he was doing. She would watch carefully so the next time she’d know. He would kiss her the way Denver kissed Kalima to make the baby come out faster. That must open you up. Then it probably won’t hurt so much, the way it did with Sterling Lewis. Is that why the African wood carving had that expression on her face? Does it always hurt?

“You’ll be tight as a virgin again when we’re done with this,” the intern said when he was stitching her up. Then he patted her bottom.

So tight you get a look on your face like the wood carving. Is that the point?

She is sure the artist would have known a very gentle way.

But his wife is going to have a baby. Soon it will be her looking like an African sculpture, and when he needs someone to nurse a baby for a picture he can ask her. He will kiss his own baby’s toes, and they will be toes that look like his. A year from now if you asked him, Remember that girl and her baby? he will say, What girl, what baby? The only baby that will matter will be his. Once you have your baby, nothing else matters.

Right now, for instance, Sandy may be upset about Mark coming home drunk. The artist and his wife (his friend? Why did he call her his friend?) may be having some kind of troubles. (He did not look at Tara as if she were a bowl of fruit in a still life. She’s sure of that.) Tara may be living in a house full of bad vibrations, with a mother who, at this moment, is banging on the bathroom door saying, “Nothing but grief, do you hear me?” But the main thing is, all of these people have their baby, or they’re going to have their baby. That makes everything else seem small.

Jill is going to have an abortion, Mrs. Ramsay said. Virgil must have said he doesn’t want to get married. Maybe her parents found out and got mad.

Her fetus is eight weeks, maybe nine weeks old now. Eyes forming. Hands, feet. Sexual organs. Its little heart has begun to beat, Mrs. Ramsay said.

“Damned children,” Mrs. Farley is saying. “I wish I’d had my hysterectomy seventeen years ago when it might have done me some good.”

I’m going to save Jill’s baby, Tara is thinking. That’s what matters now.

There is, for once, no need for Carla to ask Greg what he’s thinking. His drawing of the girl and her baby makes it pretty clear.

“How was the birthday party?” he says. He’s sitting with his back to the door, looking at the falls, when she comes in, carrying the bag with the stuffed seal inside.

“Most of the guests didn’t show up,” says Carla. “The girl’s husband came home drunk. Her baby slept through the whole thing.”

“ ‘Bright moments. Bright moments,’ ” Greg sings. It’s the lyric from a jazz song he loves. One entire side of an album with only those words, repeated over and over.

He doesn’t say anything about Tara modeling for him, and Carla doesn’t ask. She always thought if she saw him with that look on his face because of another woman, she would just take her clothes out of the drawers and pack up her dishes. Now it seems to her she was foolish to think it had to be all or nothing. She would rather be one of the women in the supermarket buying baby food than one of those young girls who can only take her hands off her boyfriend long enough to put a jar of artichoke hearts in their cart. That kind of passion never lasts anyway. Better go with the long-term investment. Carla will just wait this out.

It’s as if Melissa has a leak in her somewhere. She keeps draining. When Mark Junior has a bowel movement you can hear a muffled machine gun noise coming from his bottom, and when Sandy takes his diaper off there will usually be three hard pellets lying there, like eggs in a nest. There never seems to be a moment like that when Melissa moves her bowels. This funny streaky green liquid just keeps dribbling out her rear end, so she’s never really clean but never all that messy. Her body, in Sandy’s arms, feels like somebody let the air out. No muscle tone. She is the only baby Sandy’s ever seen that doesn’t curl her hand around your finger.

Still there’s something cute about her. Not the way she looks, for sure, with her old-looking gray face and that bright pink birthmark on her forehead and her large unmatched ears that stick straight out like handles. Sandy’s mother-in-law keeps telling her Mark Junior should go on a diet, he is so plump (and the number of fat cells a person grows in the first year of life is the number he will have forever), but Sandy would rather have a baby with a few extra pounds on him than one like Melissa, where you can feel every rib.