Pregnant Pause (12 page)

"And how do you think you'll be as a parent? How can you think you can parent a child when you can't even handle this?" the MIL says, and the FIL shushes her.

"All right, now. I think that's enough. We're getting off the track," he says.

"No, I don't think we are. You know she's not ready. She's too young. That baby is going to need a lot better care than she can give it." She turns her angry glare back on me. "You know you're not going to be able to keep that baby, and I'm—"

"Hey!" I shout out, interrupting her. Then I'm embarrassed, and I quiet down. "Whatever Lam and I decide to do with this baby," I say, "it won't be to give it to you. You've had it in for me the minute we met 'cause you hate that I'm stealing your precious one-and-only son away from you. You're not even willing to give me a chance. You charged me with breaking and entering last year, probably thinking that would get rid of me, but here I am. And I had to serve time in juvie for that, when you
knew
Lam had told me to come over. He'd just forgotten to leave the basement door open for me and he fell asleep"—more like passed out, but I don't say this—"and so I broke in."

"And you broke the law. When you break the law, you pay for it; it's that simple," she says.

"Okay, well, I paid for it already, but every time we meet, it seems like you're still making me pay for it."

"I've just been trying to make it really clear that you're not ready to parent a child, and the fact that every time we meet you've gotten yourself into a fresh heap of trouble proves my point."

"Maybe it does, but it doesn't make me want to give this baby away to you, that's for sure. Anyway, if you hate me so much, why do you even want this baby?"

The MIL looks as if I had just slapped her in the face. She goes really white, and I remember what Lam once told me about how much his parents had wanted to have another child, and how their first child, a girl, was born with some kind of brain damage and lived less than a year. "They've never gotten over her death. And they've always hovered over me like I'm the Hope Diamond," Lam had said. "Maybe if they had another kid, they'd cut me some slack."

I look at the MIL, and I can see the pain in her face. She shrinks before my eyes, this big country woman. Suddenly she's meek and small, and when she speaks, her voice is tiny and soft. She doesn't look at me but at the cat. "I want this child to have a chance. The first years of a child's life are so important. I know Lam isn't ready. He won't be there for you, Eleanor."

"Then why did you even want us to get married?"

She looks at me, and her eyes flash. "Because
you
insisted on keeping the baby, and your parents were leaving the country! I wanted you to marry so that I could keep an eye on things—make sure the baby gets a good start in life. At least I know with us, the baby'll have that good start."

"Yeah? Well, you can try being nicer to me. That might be a good start."

The MIL glares at me, and she's grown back to her full size. "It's not about being nice. This isn't a tea party we're holding here. We're trying to run a camp. It's about you following the rules and getting some discipline. How can you expect to discipline a child and gain their respect if you have none yourself?" She pounds the table with each word of the last sentence.

"Okay, okay, both of you." The FIL holds up his hands like he's surrendering. "You two could go at it all night, I'm sure, but we need to get our sleep, and I bet Eleanor does, too." He reaches over and pats the MIL's arm, and the woman slips her hands into her lap. The MIL keeps quiet, but she doesn't stop glaring at me. Neither does Rufus.

"Eleanor, it's not all your fault," the FIL says. "You're inexperienced as a counselor, that's all. We know that."

I didn't expect that. I want to run over and hug the dude, but I don't, of course.

"We pretty much threw you to the lions, but we were in a bind and we hoped you could handle it. I know a lot of the campers like you and even respect you. As I've said, we've had good reports from Leo, and even Ziggy and Gren, and some of the campers. You've been doing a good job on the whole."

I feel embarrassed by the unexpected compliment, and I lower my head and rub my belly for something to do.

"The problem is, we try very hard to help these children with their weight problems, and often the weight is just the tip of the iceberg. They have low self-esteem and problems at home and in school that they're trying to deal with, and they use food to cope. We can't call them names like pig or cow. We can't call them
any
names."

I look at the FIL. "Yeah, I know. It won't ever happen again."

"You'd better believe it," the MIL says, bugging her eyes out at me. "We expect you to apologize to Ashley Wilson in front of the rest of the girls. Maybe, just maybe, she won't go crying to her parents about this. But name-calling amounts to verbal abuse, and we can't have it—
ever.
Do you understand?"

The lecture sounded so much better coming from the FIL. I nod my head and say nothing. I figure saying nothing is best when I'm dealing with the MIL. I need to just let all her hot wind blow right over me.

THE ILs finally dismiss me and tell me to go back to the cabin. When I get there, Ashley Wilson is waiting for me on my bed.

"Where's Gren?" I ask. "Is she in the back?"

"Gone," Ashley Wilson says, not looking up at me. "I was supposed to wait here for you."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry about what I said tonight. I didn't mean it." I raise my voice. "You girls all hear that? I didn't mean what I said to Ashley Wilson. I just lost my temper. It was all my fault, and I'm sorry, and Ashley Wilson is a smart and pretty girl."

"You left out nice," someone calls back, and some of the others giggle.

"She's strong willed," I say. "And that's a good thing. A strong will can get you far in life, as long as you make good de cisions, too." I add this because I'm thinking of myself. My dad says I'm strong willed but I'm always making the wrong decisions about stuff, so it cancels out any good. My strong will makes me hold on to all the wrong things. I think of Lam, and the baby, and I wonder if they're just two more things I'm holding on to merely because I'm too stubborn and strong willed to let go.

"We should all have strong wills like Ashley Wilson and not be such followers. Be your own person; that's what I say."

I look at Ashley and feel my baby kick. It knows I'm afraid to say what I'm about to say because I'm afraid Ashley won't do it, but I take a deep breath and say it, anyway. "Now, would you please apologize to Banner."

Ashley Wilson stares blankly at me a few seconds, and I feel this rush of adrenaline as I try to think what to do next, but then she calls out, "Yeah. Sorry, Banny," and I just leave it. I figure it's the best I'll get out of her tonight.

"Will you read us a story?" a girl, maybe Banner, asks out of the blue.

"What? You're all supposed to be asleep." I walk into the main part of the cabin with Ashley. "It's late. Maybe tomorrow night."

"Please," Ashley Wilson says, and she looks at me with this sweet expression that I'm not sure I trust.

"Well—okay," I say. "But maybe I'll just
tell
you a story so I don't have to turn on a light." I'm hoping if I please Ashley Wilson a little, she won't go crying to her parents about what happened. I'm also hoping that this isn't the start of some camp-long emotional blackmail scheme on her part.

I tell Ashley to get into her bed, and she actually does it. Then I drag a chair into the center of the cabin and tell the story of how Lam and I met.

"Any of you ever heard of base jumping?" I begin. Nobody has. "Well, base jumping is when you jump off of a super-high building, or a cliff, or a really high bridge or something, with kind of like a parachute on. It's really, really dangerous, so don't any of you ever try it."

"Did you try it?" one of the girls asks, and I think it's the other Ashley in the cabin.

"Yeah, but only because I was too stupid to know how dangerous it was, and because I've always gotta try something at least once."

"How many times did you try base jumping?" someone asks.

"Oh, I don't know, a few, I guess, but I stopped the night I saw a jumper break his back. What a bloody mess he was. Now he's crippled for life. So don't any of you try it, unless you've got a death wish.

"So okay, there's this big kind of festival in West Virginia, where once a year you can legally jump off this huge bridge, and I decided I just had to go there and give it a try. Only I didn't have a driver's license because I was only fourteen, and I knew my parents wouldn't let me just take off for West Virginia to go base jumping, so I advertised on Craigslist for a ride. And just so you know, if your parents won't let you do something, they're right; you shouldn't do it. I learned that the hard way."

Actually, I'm still trying to learn that one, because I hate that my parents are always right about everything and that I'm always making the wrong choices, but I don't tell them this.

"If you've got to sneak around, then you know it's wrong, and wrong is wrong is wrong, and it will only hurt you and everyone around you," I add, because I know the ILs would like that I said this, and also because it's what my parents are always telling me.

"Yes, Mother," Ashley Wilson whines, and the other girls laugh.

"Yeah, well, anyway," I continue, "Lam answered my ad, only he said he didn't have a car. He said he could drive me, but I had to provide the car. Kind of kooky, I know, but it was the only offer I got, so I accepted."

"You mean you rode to West Virginia with a complete stranger? That's crazy! You're not supposed to do that. You could get raped!" Stephanie Berry says, and everyone agrees, including me, even though at the time it had never occurred to me.

"So where did you find a car?" Banner asks.

"My parents' garage, where else?"

This gets a laugh.

"This is another thing you should never, ever do. It isn't cool, okay? Never take something that doesn't belong to you."

"Yes, Mother," all the girls say at the same time. Then they all laugh.

"Yeah, well, it's not so funny when you end up in juvie for stealing a car, okay?"

"You were in juvie?" I don't know who asks me that.

"Yeah, and believe me, that's one place you don't want to ever end up. It will scare the hair off your head. There are some girls in there that would just as soon kill you as look at you. You take a carton of milk they wanted, and they'll try to knife you for it, and don't think they don't all know how to make weapons out of anything there, 'cause they do—shoelaces, shoes, a shirt, a plastic fork or spoon, whatever." I shake my head. "But that's another story. Back to stealing my parents' car. You see, it was an old 1949 Volvo. My parents never drove it. My dad just liked to work on it now and then. When we lived in Kenya, he had to leave it here in the States and he could never work on it, but when we moved back—"

"You lived in Africa? How long? Did you see any giraffes? Did you go on safari?" The questions come from all over. I was thinking I would tell them a story and they'd be so bored they'd all fall asleep, but the more I talk, the more excited they get. It makes me feel like I've led an interesting life.

It seems like it takes me hours to tell them how Lam and I stole my parents' car and drove down to West Virginia, and how the car kept breaking down, so by the time we got to the bridge, the festival was over, but we jumped, anyway—a day late—and got put in jail for the night and fined a thousand dollars each, and my parents had thought I had been kidnapped or something, until they found the missing car, and how Lam and I had so much fun on that trip, and how we both base-jumped together, holding hands, and how we just instantly hit it off, and how by the time we returned home to the police and our parents waiting for us, we were madly, deeply in love.

"Did your parents really have you put in juvie for stealing their car? Their own child?" Ashley Wilson asks when I finish the story.

"Yeah, but not that first time. The first time I took their car they just grounded me, but the second time I took it to go—well, never mind where I took it. The second time I took it, they called the police and said I stole it, and I got put in juvie, and it was the smartest thing they ever did."

"Why?" Everyone wants to know.

"Because when you break the law, you should pay the price. Breaking rules hurts a lot of people, not just yourself."

Okay, so I'm only just learning this bit of advice, and basically I stole this line from the ILs' lecture to me earlier, but still, better late than never.

"You should pay the price, otherwise ... otherwise you'll just keep breaking the rules until you get into even worse trouble, the kind of trouble you can't ever get out of," I add—this only just occurring to me.

"Like getting pregnant when you're only a teenager," Ashley Wilson says, only she's not snarky when she says it; she sounds kind of sorry for me.

"Yeah, exactly," I say. I rub my belly, and my baby kicks me, as if to say, "Yeah, thanks a lot, Mom."

MY BEDTIME stories are very popular with the girls in my cabin, and I don't have any problems with them getting ready for bed anymore. Even Ashley Wilson is less of a pill, so that's going well, and surprisingly so is my dance class. It's always the same group of girls who come, so there are only about fifteen of them, but we have fun. Right now I've got them making up dances about how they feel about being overweight, and even though the songs they've chosen are sad and their stories are sad, they seem to be having lots of fun making up the dances and performing them for each other. Several of the girls have asked me if they can perform their dances for the whole camp. That gave me the idea of having a talent show, and I've even asked the ILs about it. They said they'd discuss it and let me know. So that's good, and my dulcimer is coming along so-so. But Lam and I aren't speaking. I'm not sure why, except that I'm never around and neither is he, and when we do meet, kind of by accident, he's just like, "Hi, how's it going? How's the baby?" And I'm like, "Yeah, going fine. Baby's fine. Getting close to delivery time, though." When I say this last bit, Lam just nods and stares down at his feet. Then after a few seconds he says bye, and we just go on our way, and I'm left kind of worrying about us and the baby. I've done nothing to prepare myself for this delivery. I don't want to think about it. I'm praying for some kind of miracle where maybe I just pass out and the baby comes out of me, and then I just get up and walk away and everything's fine, no pain, no mess, and off I go. I have those few things my mom got me before she left—the car seat and crib—but I don't have diapers or baby bottles, and since all of my friends are guys, they aren't about to throw me a shower or anything. Still, I figure, just in case Lam and I do decide to keep this baby, I should have something prepared, but the longer I put off thinking about it, the more I think giving it up is for the best. It all just wasn't meant to be.