Baby Love (7 page)

The TV set is on. It’s always on, even when there’s just a test pattern. The volume is turned up very loud, so that Jane Pauley, who’s interviewing a collector of antique dolls—a great hedge against inflation—seems to be yelling. She is not really yelling, but a number of people on the fifth floor are. Not the forensic patients so much—they are the most normal-acting ones. But across the hall, in the Manchester unit. There is a man who has been hitting his head against the door since Tuesday. There’s a kid who appears to have dropped too much acid, and now all he does is yell that Mick Jagger is trying to kill Karen Ann Quinlan. They are going to bomb the Bedford Groves Roller Rink on Memorial Day. His mother puts saltpeter in the food here. That’s why Bo Derek stopped visiting him.

So far today, Wayne has done sixty push-ups, taken a shower, shampooed his hair, shaved. (All this he must do under supervision. There are no doors in the bathroom—a person can’t even take a shit in private here. And of course they have to watch him with the razor in case he might want to murder someone or commit suicide.) He has asked Charles, the only orderly he will talk to, for one of his cigarettes. Only one, because this pack has to last until Sunday. He had to ask Charles to light the cigarette for him, naturally. No telling when he might try to set Mrs. Partlow’s girdle on fire.

Then he got his breakfast tray. Forensics do not go to the dining hall. Breakfast today was fried eggs and hash browns. He does not eat that junk. He is watching his cholesterol. Most people here let their bodies get wrecked. Even the young ones are soft. But Wayne, though he will be thirty-eight this June, is hard as a football player.

Today’s schedule is posted on the bulletin board outside the orderlies’ station. Ten o’clock: shop. Not too much you can build without a hammer and saw. Eleven-thirty: current events. There will be a quiz on the days of the week. About half the class will flunk.

Lunch at noon. Fridays they have fish sticks and cole slaw. One o’clock: visiting hours. No one will come to see Wayne, of course. Still, he likes to change his shirt, slick his hair back with a little water, take the
Union-Leader
out into the sunroom. He will hold the paper open in front of his face but he will not read anything except the cars for sale. He has spotted some great deals. And he likes listening to the visitors.

Artie LeFleur, for example, who is in here for shooting his wife in the leg. She did not report his doing this for three days and by that time her leg was infected. Now she comes to visit him with their two kids, Norman and Marcelle. She has an artificial leg, which Artie refers to as her prosthetic device. One time he sneaked her into the shower stall while Wayne stood guard and Norman and Marcelle played pick-up sticks with Mrs. Partlow. Artie was too nervous to do anything, but his wife showed him her stump, which he hadn’t seen before. You meet some weird people here.

Wayne picks up a magazine.
Woman’s Day
, September 1976. Tips from the World’s Most Expensive Beauty Spa. Why I Chose Sterilization. Help! My Hair Just Won’t Hold a Set. Five Fantastic Meat Loaves. Are We Trying to Solve Too Many Problems with Sex?

Not likely.

He gets up, thinks he will take a stroll down the hall. They still haven’t taken down the cardboard rabbits and chicks and the banner that says Happy Easter. Probably won’t until the Memorial Day decorations go up. Mrs. Partlow’s drawing of Snoopy, with the words “Five Steps to Mental Health” coming out of his mouth, has been there since 1978.

“Keep a disciplined schedule.”

“Do not dwell on the past.”

“Be outgoing. Make new friends.” (Artie LeFleur)

“Avoid idleness. Keep busy.”

“Think positive.”

Back to the sunroom. He picks up the New Hampshire
Times.
Wayne does not have much use for the articles, which are mostly about very homey, backwoodsy things like maple sugaring and how to make your own horseshoes, which all the young kids are into who move here from places like New York. He would just like to check out the cars in the classifieds.

Nothing very good. He skims the page for something else that might be interesting. He has never noticed the personals column before.

Some make no sense.

“
TO THE DANVILLE CAL. MONKEY BREEDERS.
I’ve gone bananas over your gift. My new little pal and I are real swingers. Love, Jim.”

“WOOD BUTCHER
: T
WO
years have gone by in a minute. I’ve got love enough for hours. Augusta.”

“CONCORD AREA WOMEN
looking for two articulate, radicalized women to vent anger with us. Call Claudia.”

“ANDROGYNOUS MAN,
age 27, in open marriage, would like to meet female counterpart to share quality relationship. Interests include vegetarian dining, Judy Collins, solar energy, nonsmoking, intimacy, travel.”

“FARMER.
Shy, nice looking. Would like to meet serious woman into organic gardening and holistic medicine.”

These men are a bunch of losers. Wayne feels he has much more to offer. He imagines what he would write,
“INSATIABLE LOVER
in search of same,
THEY CALL ME CRAZY.
Give me a call,
SINGLE MAN.
Not into travel.”

Seriously. What does he have to lose? “Hey, Charles,” he says. “Can I have an envelope and a stamp?”

Ann wakes up feeling better than usual. She will have just half a grapefruit for breakfast this morning and she will not turn on the Phil Donahue show. She is going to be busy today.

Things to do. Buy shoes for jogging. Vacuum house. Buy seeds and fertilizer, rosebushes, clematis vine. Fabric for curtains. Do one hour of exercise. Get newspaper, start looking for job.

Ann washes her hair. It is really getting long. After she moved out of Rupert’s house—during one of those days when she was driving around looking at real estate and sleeping in motels—she took her nail clippers and really hacked herself up. She looked like the lead singer in a punk band. It was so terrible she had to do something, and there was nothing left to cut, so she bought some Nice’n Easy and dyed it red. After she’d been out in the sun for a few months it turned orange.

But now her hair touches her shoulders, and it’s brown again. She blows it dry, turning under the ends, so it looks very fluffy. She puts on a little blusher and some eyeliner. “I am not going to throw up today,” she says.

Today that man is coming to Rototill the vegetable garden. Reg. She will ask him to make some flower beds too. Maybe he can do something about the leak under the kitchen sink.

She has seen him in his yard, sawing up wood, and she remembers seeing a deer in his yard last fall. He was skinning it. She had to turn away. From the clothes she has seen hanging on their line—T-shirts with pictures of celebrities printed on the front—there must be a teen-aged daughter too. Sometimes she sees the wife bringing in the wash. She is a thin woman who wears curlers a lot. One time when Ann was walking past, the woman called out to her that she was the local Avon representative and would Ann be interested in any of their products. Ann said she guessed not. The woman said, “Just thought I’d ask,” as if this was what she’d expected.

Ann doesn’t know anybody in this town. The checkout girl at the Grand Union, of course. “You sure must like honey yogurt,” she said a while back, when Ann came in for the second time during a really bad day of eating. After that she was careful to buy her yogurt at different places.

She wishes she had a friend here. Sometimes she stops in at Sal’s for a doughnut and coffee. She does not really like coffee but she likes listening to the conversations of the people at Sal’s, especially the high school kids. Ann has been out of high school only four years, but she can’t remember what it was like being carefree and so unscarred. Her one big worry was getting into a good college. Her friends from those days will be graduating in a month or so. She hears from a few of them sometimes, but not much. Rupert never liked it when they called, and the one time when her friend Patsy came to visit was a disaster. Patsy brought a Talking Heads album and played it over and over, very loud. She was eating macrobiotic, trying to decide if it would be compromising her beliefs to take money from her parents for a trip to Japan that summer to study ceramics. The three of them went out to dinner together that night and Ann wore an outfit she had not worn since she moved in with Rupert—a green velvet jumpsuit with flat, Mary Jane-style Capezios. Rupert said, “You’re trying to make me look like a dirty old man,” and made a point of talking about how he was losing the hearing in one ear. Patsy did not visit them again.

Ann isn’t sure who she could make friends with in this town. The high school kids would think she was very old—the boy who sometimes carries her groceries out at the Grand Union has called her Ma’am. She can’t picture herself having tea with her neighbor the Avon lady, either. Even the women her age all seem to be married, with a couple of babies.

She’ll get a job; that will help. She has not thought about a career in years because she assumed for so long that she would always live with Rupert and grow vegetables and make dollhouse furniture for Trina on vacations and have a baby of her own someday. Even after she left she was thinking: He will come rescue me soon. She still thinks that sometimes, but she must, in any case, be in good shape when he returns for her. She has to show him how well she’s doing. She will start watching the help-wanted ads today.

And meanwhile she’ll have a wonderful garden so that in August she can invite Rupert to drive down for a picnic. She’ll wear her long antique dress with her blue-and-white-checked apron. She’ll have a basket full of flowers over her arm, and there will be a table set up in the middle of the field, with a vase full of zinnias and the blue enamel plates, and soup with squash blossoms floating in it.

Maybe she’ll invite a Fresh Air child to come stay for the summer. A little girl, six years old, would be good. Estrella. Corazon. Juanita. Some name like that.

She will be very small, very thin, when she gets off the bus. She will be carrying an A & P shopping bag, wearing plastic shoes. Her hair is black and straight, long bangs over large eyes. She will hesitate on the bottom step of the bus for a second, scanning the crowd. Ann comes forward, takes her hand. They will drive home very slowly because the little girl feels carsick from all those hours on the bus.

She has never seen cows. They pull over at the side of the road to look. Then at a produce stand for some fresh-picked strawberries. She says is it O.K. to swallow the seeds?

Ann shows her the waterfall. The little girl gasps, says this is how it looks in heaven. I’ll buy you a bathing suit, says Ann. I’ll teach you how to swim.

They get up at sunrise every morning. Ann makes pancakes, and there is always fresh fruit on the table. A checkered cloth, maple syrup heated on the stove.

Then they go down to the garden, hoe up weeds. The little girl says what if birds go to the bathroom on the lettuce? What if I eat a worm? Ann explains everything.

They ride bikes. They hike up Mount Monadnock. I wish I lived here all the time, says the little girl. She’s not so skinny anymore. Ribs filled in.

Every afternoon they jump in the falls. Dinner is salad from the garden, cheese, fruit, cookies they make together. The little girl tells about her mother at home, who beats her. I will protect you, says Ann (tucking a patchwork quilt under her chin, plugging in the night light). You’re safe now.

What if she’s gone in the morning? And she has taken a pair of pierced earrings, all the best animals from Ann’s Steiff collection, smashed every Fiesta plate in the pantry. Trampled the beans, slashed the corn with a machete. There’s spray paint on the rosebud wallpaper. Ann doesn’t know Spanish, but she can guess what it says.

Jill is lying in bed trying to decide if she can make it to the bathroom without throwing up in the hall. She can hear her father outside in the yard, whistling “California, Here I Come.” Her mother’s watching Phil Donahue. “I don’t want you to misconstrue my question,” Donahue says, “but doesn’t your wife think it’s even a little bit kinky when you put on her brassiere?” The house stinks of bacon.

“What your viewers have got to understand, Phil,” says a husky voice coming from the den, “is that we should all relate to one another as people, not men or women or husbands or wives. My wife views me as an individual who happens to enjoy dressing in women’s clothing.”

She’s going to puke, it’s just a question of where. There’s a bowl of jelly beans on the dresser. If she empties them out, she could take the bowl into the closet and do it there.

“You up, Jill?” Doris calls. Because it’s a school vacation week, she has been letting her daughter sleep until ten-thirty. Later than that she can’t abide. She herself grew up on a farm, and she was milking cows by five o’clock. “I’ve got bacon and eggs ready.”

“Coming, Mom,” says Jill. She’ll clean up later.

“Virgil brought you home at a respectable hour for once, I noticed.” (If she had come home five minutes sooner, Jill would have heard the deep sighs her father always makes when he has just climaxed.)

“What was that big box I saw you taking up to your room?”

“Just some stuff for prom decorations that Sandy gave me.” Jill was sure her mother would’ve been asleep.

“I wish you wouldn’t hang around with that girl. Married and all. If you can call it that.”

“She’s just fourteen months older than me.”

“Not so old I wouldn’t take a belt to her if she were a child of mine.” Phil Donahue has just been joined by a woman who has taken hormones to grow facial hair. Reg is whistling “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

“Will you look at that?” says Doris. “It takes all kinds.”

H
IS BACK HURTS SOME
today, but Reg is feeling good. He has just come back from town with three flats of annuals. The flowers are Reg’s project. With grocery prices going the way they have been, Doris says, it doesn’t make sense to grow anything you can’t eat. But Reg loves the sight of a vase full of marigolds and ageratum. When they bloom, he’ll bring some down the road to the girl.