Baby Love (31 page)

Doris doesn’t bother taking out her curlers this time. Not for that frizzy-haired hippie down the road who only bought one jar of moisturizer, and not even the twelve-ounce. She can just go the way she is, and when the woman offers her a cup of tea she will know enough to say no thank you.

“I’m just stepping out to make an Avon delivery,” she calls to Reg, who is rustling around in the den. “Back in a jiffy.”

“Take your time,” he says.

Doris may have been fooled, but Reg is not. He remembers the way his wife looked when she was expecting Jill and Timmy, knows the sound of a woman retching into the toilet bowl at dawn. Something’s different about Jill’s face too. She’s pregnant, all right.

He also figures where she must have gone today, why she came into the den last night and put her arms around his neck the way she hasn’t since she was about ten. She sat through two innings of the Red Sox game with him and didn’t even notice when Yaz hit a homer. Then she asked if he could give her twenty dollars, and please not to tell Mom.

His life hasn’t turned out anything like how he thought. He has a wife who says, “Zinnias? Can I eat zinnias?” and a son whose big dream is meeting Charo on a USO tour. The worst problem his daughter ever had in her life, she doesn’t tell him about. And no wonder. He’s a forty-five-year-old man who lies awake at night fantasizing about a moony girl who sits around all day listening to records. Made-up songs about tragedies that never really happened. Cutworms got her squash plants and she hasn’t even noticed.

It seems appropriate that a man in his situation should be taking down his .22-caliber rifle, loading it, so he can blow the brains out of a few blind animals that don’t weigh much more than hummingbirds.

There’s a flower bed in front of the Women’s Health Clinic—salvia, planted to form an O with a tail on it, that symbol for woman that Tara remembers from old Ben Casey reruns. One of the firemen is standing right in the middle of this flower bed, and some of the water from his hose is dripping down in the dirt, making mud. A nurse runs past him, carrying file folders and a typewriter. Another fireman staggers out the door of the building with a large black machine, a long tube attached. That must be what they hook you up to.

Tara stands just behind the police barricade. She knows she should probably be upset, but she isn’t. She feels a little like she did in Sterling Lewis’s father’s den that night, as he was easing her underpants down her legs. A little like when she was lying on the delivery table at the Concord Hospital watching Sunshine shoot out between her legs; a little like when Denver stood at the door of the Just-like-nu Shop, just before taking off for Georgia, and he reached his hand into her shirt and squeezed her breast in just the right way to make milk come out on his fingers. And he raised his hand to his mouth and licked it. Tara feels, now too, as if she’s floating about three feet off the ground, watching everything happen, bobbing along in a slow-moving brook maybe, heading toward open sea. Not like there’s anything to do about it; just being carried along. Like this is all a movie or a TV show. She isn’t thinking about what she will do next. She’s just waiting until she does it.

The firemen are shooting water into the flames now. There’s a police car out in front, with the blue light flashing. Two policemen are leading Mrs. Ramsay toward the cruiser—more like escorts to a ball than policemen. It looks as if Mrs. Ramsay might melt into the ground if they let go of her arms. She’s screaming something about having to feed her baby.

“Sure, sure,” says one of the policemen. A third officer has gone over to inspect Mrs. Ramsay’s car, parked cockeyed across the street. A doctor from the clinic is peering in the windows. He collects vintage Cadillacs.

“She’s right,” the policeman yells back to the others. “There is a baby in here.”

“I wouldn’t worry about feedings now if I were you,” says the doctor to Mrs. Ramsay. “That baby’s dead.”

P
AMPHLET (OPENED TO PAGE
one): “I Am Your Fetus. The moment I was conceived, the whole Universe shifted to make room for me. I am a pure and unsoiled entity, closer to God than I will ever be again. When I am born it will be like the birth of Jesus. For that one moment I will be holy. Please don’t flush me down the toilet.”

Carla wakes up feeling nauseated. Greg’s side of the bed is empty. She climbs down the ladder, heading for the bathroom. In the middle of the living room (Greg must have been up late, working on this) is the painting of Packers Falls. A tableau, he called it. The boys fishing, the naked girl and her baby. Above them all, walking over the bridge, is a mask-faced woman pushing a baby carriage. Not one of those umbrella strollers most people use. This is the kind of pram an English nanny would push through a park. And in the background, caught in the center of a whirlpool, there is a man with his mouth open and his arms in the air. He’s drowning.

Greg drives back to the cottage, gripping the wheel. He knows some things now. He will not be planting winter squash and pumpkins, for instance. He and Carla will be back in the city by the time they’d be ready to harvest. He should be hitting the Renaissance right about then, assuming Walker takes him back. They will find an apartment in a safer neighborhood and take natural childbirth classes. They will get married, have the wedding somewhere interesting and amusing, like on the Staten Island ferry. Just a few of their friends. Afterwards they’ll go back to the new apartment. Maybe Carla will make her couscous.

It would get very cold here in the winter anyway.

T
ARA THINKS ABOUT
M
ELISSA’S
clothes hanging, soon, on the racks at the Just-like-nu Shop (where Wanda got them in the first place), and other pregnant women fingering the terry cloth, checking to see if the snappers still work, washing them in Ivory and folding them away, ready for new babies. She thinks about Sunshine taking her first steps, saying apple, kitty, book, riding the school bus, going on a date, and Melissa frozen in everybody’s minds (if they remember her at all) at three and a half months, with a red mark on her forehead, and diarrhea. Crazily, she thinks about something she read once, that every girl baby is born with her complete lifetime supply of eggs tucked into tiny baby ovaries. And how Melissa’s will just stay there.

Wanda buying a child psychology book, showing Sandy and Tara a folder she keeps, of Ann Landers’s advice on child raising. Got to be firm, spare the rod and spoil the child. Saying, I won’t ever understand how you get a screaming baby to stop.

Tara thinks about Wanda’s stretch marks. How she will always have them. She thinks about Melissa, dead in Mrs. Ramsay’s car. The expression,
leaving your mark.

Of course Tara cries. She also thinks about how lucky she is, that Sunshine is here and gurgling in her arms, that her toes curl, her fingernails grow, her face gets red and screws up when she cries, she wets. Of course she knows that Mrs. Ramsay won’t be driving south now, but also, she knows she doesn’t need Mrs. Ramsay to take care of her. She’s a mother, not a child. She can take care of things. All she needs to do now is get the two of them to Georgia, where the babies are safe.

A crowd has gathered by Mrs. Ramsay’s car now, and a lot of rumors are going around: that what they found inside was a six-month-old aborted fetus, that the mother was a nun, she took drugs, the baby was deformed, there was a whole roomful of others like this one in the clinic, in bottles. Some people are saying “Where?” Latecomers are pushing to get a better view.

Tara stands on the grass a few feet back, holding Sunshine very tight. She’s thinking about a time last fall, when she and Wanda were both pregnant and sitting on the steps by the Laundromat. One of the last warm days. Putting their hands on each other’s stomach to feel the kicks. A lump the size of a walnut sticking out very plainly under Wanda’s sweater. Melissa’s foot. Wanda talking about how their kids could be best friends, ride the school bus together.

She remembers the first time she saw Melissa, a few days after Wanda brought her home from the hospital. Wanda must have put baby powder on Melissa’s red birthmark. She looked sort of dusty.

Also, her eyes were always getting stuck shut. She’d wake up and try to lift up her eyelids and there’d be this stuff caked on her short pale lashes, so she could only open her eyes partway. It turned out to be blocked tear ducts. The pediatrician said they’d clear up on their own by six months.

Tara pictures someone—Wanda?—picking the flecks of dried tears off Melissa’s lashes now, putting her in a final fresh diaper. Cloth?

She thinks about Wanda telling her one time (at the Laundromat again, only it was late winter now, and they had their babies, and wash to do) about an article she read, this woman that got paid $20,000 to have a baby for some woman that couldn’t have one. Nice woman, college education. Not that Wanda would ever give any baby of hers away. Still, it made you think. Having Melissa meant she had something worth $20,000. “I never had anything valuable before,” she said.

Because she can’t imagine what to do now, Jill is not doing anything. She’s just hanging around on the sidewalk watching the firemen reel in their hoses, watching the clinic nurses load equipment into somebody’s car. One of them walks past carrying a scale model of a pelvis. Another one is saying, “What are we supposed to do with ten cases of waterlogged maxi-pads?” Somebody has put a sheet over the dead baby. They’ve taken away the red-haired woman screaming something about syphilis.

“Have you got any pains?” Jill turns around to see Tara standing there, holding her baby and an airline flight bag. Small world.

“Because there’s this place in Georgia where they have all these midwives and babies. A spiritual community. Everything’s natural.” Tara unbuttons her shirt and guides Sunshine’s mouth onto her left nipple.

“I was just thinking, we could go there together.”

Jill stares past Tara for a second. They are putting the baby’s body in an ambulance. What looks like an empty bureau drawer is just sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. A woman bends to examine it—you can see her trying to decide if it’s worth lugging home—and then moves on.

“They have this man there named Denver that kisses you while your baby’s coming out, so it won’t hurt.”

And Virgil thinks he’s so cool, with his three alternate positions and that pair of jockey shorts that says “Home of the Whopper.” Imagine what they do in a commune.

“They grow all their own food, no chemicals. At Christmas they make this giant fruitcake and there’s a candlelight ceremony that lasts until sunrise. Everybody singing. The babies there hardly ever get colds.”

What if she just never went home? Her father would call the hospitals, drive around all night in his pickup, looking for her. All her mother would worry about is the car.

When the baby’s born she will send a letter. Just a postcard maybe: You have a grandson. He looks like you, Daddy—bald.

And then one morning her mother turns on the Phil Donahue show. She doesn’t even look up from her ironing until Donahue says here’s our other guest, an unwed mother from a spiritual community in Georgia, and it’s Jill. Forget about strapless dresses: hers is unbuttoned to the waist and wide open. She’s nursing her baby on national television.

“What did your parents do wrong?” says a woman in the studio audience. (Those women on Donahue are always worrying about how to keep their kids from turning into drug addicts and lesbians.)

“My dad’s O.K.,” she will say. “My mother was a real tight-ass.”

“Why do you think you had such an easy labor?” Donahue asks her.

French kissing.

“They have this bus they drive around in,” Tara’s saying now. “And they’re always singing.” She has taken a wraparound Indian skirt out of the flight bag for Jill to put on over the hospital gown. She has set Sunshine down on the grass, and one of Mrs. Ramsay’s pamphlets lies beside her, with the pages flapping.

“So,” says Tara. “You want to come?”

Jill thinks about her father for a second—imagines that she’s sitting on his lap again and he’s telling her not to worry, he’ll make everything O.K., she’ll always be his little girl. Then she thinks about her mother.

“We could take my car,” says Jill. Nobody even sees them go.

Val is always a wreck in the morning. She’s not used to waking up this early, and certainly not the way she had to wake up just now. One minute she’s asleep in the guy’s car, having this terrific dream that they made her lead singer of Pink Floyd, and the next thing she knows, the guy is practically throwing her out of the car and saying, “I’ve got to split, man.” And there’s this little kid screaming his head off, and two chicks, one fat and one thin, getting into the front seat. No good morning or anything. And now she’s out in the middle of nowhere with her tits bare and the heel broken off one of her sandals—starving, among other things.

There is something sticking up through the leaves over by the water. She goes to look. Wild! A Jackson Browne album and two old Beatles. That’s one good thing anyway.

So she does what she always does when she can’t think of anything else. She sits down and reads the liner notes.

Greg is just rounding the last curve when he sees the girl sitting there. Skinny back, tiny bare breasts. She’s holding something but it’s not the baby. A book maybe, or a picture.

In another second of course he knows it’s not Tara after all. This girl is nothing like Tara. He parks the car, gets out. She looks up, tilts her head sideways for a moment, then comes toward him. She makes no effort to cover herself.

“Mr. Hansen?” she says. “Don’t you know who I am? It’s Valerie from art class. Remember, I did that oil painting of my foot for spring term? This is so cosmic.”

Even before her house comes into view, Wayne can smell the lilacs. The scent is almost too sweet, like having your face pressed tight up against some old grandma’s bosom at Christmastime. But it’s nice hearing birds for a change. And it will be good to put his feet on that grass, after twenty miles of gravel.