Joseph was looking my way, eyebrows up. Asking if I was alright. I nodded, smiling.
Mac looked about, grasping for something else to say.
“I seen your sister hanging around with that one-armed guy. What the fuck is that about?” He looked thoughtful. “Always liked your sister. Red. Spitfire.” He looked behind him through the window again, where Officer Moore had been. “She knew how to party, your sister. You always seemed a little too much of a goody-goody.” His eyes hardened, and he lowered his voice. “I hate goody-goodies. Always makin’ decisions that aren’t theirs to make.” He lightened his tone, then, and put his hand on my shoulder. “You might think that you’re better than everyone here, Dirty Penny, but you are St. Maggie’s born and raised, just like the rest of us, so don’t get any ideas.” He squeezed my arm hard, and I took a step back.
I inhaled, trying to compose myself. “Mac, I gotta go. I was just on my way out. I’ll see you later, okay?”
He watched me like a milky-eyed old dog letting a rabbit get away. I waved at Joseph, heard the voice of the familiar radio host lending comfort to the Sunday sadness, and hurried outside.
16
The snow finally melted. At first in dribs and drabs, and then suddenly, St. Margaret’s thawed, and the streams and creeks and eves gushed with a racket that signaled awakening. Birds and stubborn crocuses, trees budding, the escarpment turning green all at once. The children in the daycare made crafts about baby animals and blossoms, “Spring Has Sprung!” in large letters, tacked in an arc on the walls I could see from my office.
* * *
I had started to appear pregnant, and as such, needed to let people know. Or at the very least, I figured I would tell enough people that word would roll downhill into the valleys of the town. The idea of attention made me nervous, but at least the gossips in town would be thinking of a baby—and not a fire.
I am carrying a baby for my sister, Hattie. She is unable to have children. There was something selfless and sisterly about this, something that spoke of enough love, devotion, and sweetness that if it weren’t for the fact that Hattie was unmarried, or the straight-up technical questions that people had, I would by and large have been left alone, if considered a bit of an oddball. Still, I was constantly robbed of my privacy and dignity while people thought nothing of touching my stomach or asking bold questions. Sally took to calling regularly and trying to set up coffee dates. I dodged her, unable to wrestle up the energy that friendship demanded. And meanwhile, I thought, Hattie was continuing on as she did: cutting hair and looking fresh-faced and happy all at once. Sure, people judged her, and certainly Jameson would eventually become the object of even more curiosity when it became clear who the “sperm donor” father had been.
But mostly I felt sorry for myself. I had chosen this path despite Hattie’s wishes, not because of them. Suddenly all manner of old friends, high-school teachers, elderly strangers, neighbors, customers and the parents of the daycare children offered tight smiles while asking after the baby. Why, what a surprise! I learned to perfect my own pious smile, emulating Saint Margaret herself, patiently explaining our “predicament,” and saying some version of, Without getting into the technical details, I’ll say that there are all kinds of medical miracles you can do now. People asked if this meant the baby was a “test-tube baby.” I laughed like this was the first time I’d heard this and quipped that I was looking less like a tube with every passing day.
And I was. As the days got longer and I opened my windows, as Joseph propped open the door to the shop in the late afternoon and turned on the rusty overhead fan, that tiny uterine plan grew into a threat, pushing out my concert T-shirts and giving me a most impressive set of cans, as Buddy would have said. Hattie had learned to keep her hands off my belly but she was becoming unhinged with excitement. She stared at my growing bump while talking to me, and had overhauled the house to prepare for the imminent arrival, which was still almost five months away.
My old room had become swathed in bright colors and filled with baby furniture and mobiles and enormous stuffed animals. They had taken our mother’s room. I hardly recognized the place, and for the first time since I had moved out, I felt a sense of longing. I moved about my family home with the recognition that there were different smells, different food being cooked, different music playing. There was a new family there now. Hattie and Jameson were a strong unit. Somewhere along the line, Hattie had let me go. And while this was what I had wanted all along, there was a real pang, a bitter sweetness that comes of feeling at once released and unneeded.
* * *
I had been getting phone calls at the apartment. The phone would ring out loud into my quiet space, putting me right away on edge.
“Hello?”
Heavy breathing.
“You bitch,” the voice slurred.
“Who is this?” But then I knew. “Mac?”
“Shut up. Just—keep your trap shut. I know you been talking. It’s gotta be you.”
“I don’t know what—” But the phone went dead.
There were a few of these calls, often in the middle of the night. I tried to calm him, while he reeled off names of people he thought I had told one thing or another. He sounded drunk, high, volatile, and paranoid. He was trouble, possibly more than I’d ever accounted for. He’d also come into the store a few more times. He never spoke to me but lurked in the aisles, watching me. I heard rumors of him being caught up in petty crimes, fights, and maybe worse.
Once he called and rambled, in a slurring stream of consciousness, about Buddy. “We used to do stuff together, y’know, and now I have nobody, no one like him. Y’know he beat up a guy in fifth grade who was pushing me around? He tell you that? Put his hands around the guy’s neck until the teacher came and tore him off, but that other guy never touched me again. He would do anything for a friend and I don’t have him anymore, Penny. And you don’ fuckin’ care, do ya. You don’ fuckin’ care.” I listened to him crying, and then, finally, the phone went dead.
I pushed thoughts of him out and away, focusing on the present, the future. Forward, always forward.
* * *
Hattie and Jameson invited me to dinner once a week. It was always a bit of a showy affair, an opportunity for Hattie to demonstrate how grown up she was. Jameson was a very good cook, no question, and Hattie shone as host. And so there we were, summer again. It was a different experience—enjoying the freshness and warmth of late nights outside of my family home with this duo—now that I was pregnant and sober, and now that it was no longer my home. My feelings for Jameson, which had stood just outside the thin door of love, were confused and mixed up. I almost hated being with him, I found it palpably painful. Certainly Jameson and Hattie picked up on my unhappiness and maybe they felt they were the agents of my hostility, and so they served me terrines and tarts and fruity concoctions, they hugged me and doted on me, and I acted the spoiled child, the secret between Jameson and me festering inside.
But only with them. At work, with coworkers and preschoolers, I was merry and keen to talk about the baby. The children were, in fact, among the only people I spoke to about it with any kind of honesty. These three-year-olds were wholly worthy of my confidence. I told them that I was going to give the baby to my sister, and their eyes widened like this was a fairy tale.
“Will the baby have two mommies?”
“No. My sister, Hattie, will be its mommy. I will be Aunt Penny.” I silently cherished the idea of being the faraway aunt. I had been planning my escape from St. Margaret’s, lying in the night while the baby rolled and kicked. I would think about where I would go, how far I could get.
“I have an Aunty Jenny, and she is really old. I think she is twenty-five or something.”
“My daddy has gray hair.”
“My grandma’s hair is all gray.”
“My grandpa has NO hair!”
Afternoons often passed with perfect, silly conversation, and no one asked me who the father was
, or how we did it, or if I would be sad, or anything like that. No one presumed to know how I would feel, or what I was having, or whether I was crazy or not. I realized I had surrounded myself, in this new life, with toddlers and senior citizens, and in this way was building a fortress around me. Only Hattie had found a loose board through which she could crawl into my mind.
One night after dinner at the house, while Jameson was doing the washing up, Hattie and I sat in the backyard. The sun was low in the sky, but it was warm. She had turned on the twinkling lights around the patio, and it was romantic and soft and lovely. There was a breeze and it lifted the hem of Hattie’s skirt. Her hair flew about her face, and she smiled at me, tucking it behind her ear.
“What a difference a year makes, hey?”
I nodded. “Indeed.”
“I can’t thank you enough, Penny.”
“We’re even, Hattie.”
She looked out across the garden. “I would do it all over again, Penny. You’re my sister. I love you more than anyone.” Her eyes found mine again. “If only I’d heard Mum … you probably never would have married Buddy had it not been for me. So yes, we’re even.”
I heard Jameson turn on the tap through the open window. I took a drink and looked towards the house. “You’ve never said anything, have you?”
She followed my gaze. “Not a word. I couldn’t. It would ruin everything. Everything else.” The other secret, the one between Jameson and me, opened its eyes. I ignored it. Hattie pulled a beer bottle from a bucket of ice in the center of the table and popped off the cap. “I mean, there have definitely been times when I wanted to. It’s hard having this one secret between him and me.”
“Hattie. No fucking way. You can never. We agreed on this a long time ago.”
“I know, I know. I’m just being honest with you. I’m just saying it’s not easy. I’m not saying that I’ll say anything.”
“Well, God, I know how hard it is. But this has to be something we take to the grave. Otherwise all this can just be kissed goodbye.”
“Alright. Jesus. I’m just saying.” She was silent. “He would never betray us.”
“Oh my God. You told him!”
“No! No, of course not. But I want you to know. You can totally trust him.”
“That is not the point. I don’t trust anyone with this. It’s too big.”
Hattie shrugged. “I get it, okay, okay.”
I got up to leave and reached out my hand, and she hesitated, then placed her hand in mine. “I did not tell him, Penny.”
I squeezed it, keeping her eyes on mine. I love you, Hattie. Little Harriet. Sister of mine.
17
I was at Joseph’s house playing poker, eight months pregnant. It was finally cooling off after a hot and uncomfortable summer. The tension between Hattie and me had begun to lift with the change in weather. I carried a worry, though, that her love of Jameson would tempt her to tell him our secret. That she thought it was hers to tell simply complicated matters further. It was mine to keep, it was mine to never tell. But our secrets were now buried beneath secrets, and any one of them could topple them all.
And so I needed to keep Hattie close, to bring her back to me. I made a point of spending time with her, of faking myself into good moods. I smiled in her presence, thanked her, included her. I invited her to touch my enormous belly to feel the baby, who had begun to kick regularly. She pressed her face against me, spoke in hushed tones to my stretched skin. And I knew she loved that baby more than I could, more than I had allowed myself to even think of. I considered myself an ox, a carrier of precious cargo, and rarely in my waking hours did I let thoughts of the baby intrude on my day.
At night, though, I dreamt of all manner of freaks and prophetic infants: from a baby with the wet, slick hair of an otter, swimming from between my legs to a house of sticks and leaves, or rosy, bath-scrubbed beauties who would whisper terrible things into my ears, their breath sweet and their messages foul. And when the baby kicked, it startled me, physically insisting it was there.
I wasn’t sleeping well and this was exacerbated when people told me, strangers all, that I should get my sleep now. Ha ha. I felt like sitting on those people. My sheer girth made it virtually impossible, in the heat of my apartment—fans be damned—to fall into anything other than the kind of slumber where I was aware of sleep itself, fully cognizant of my turning over, my twitching, swollen feet. I did not feel that I was a radiant, beatific, and glowing force of motherhood, but rather a waterlogged, gargantuan grouch with a sore ass and frizzy hair. I couldn’t wait to eject the thing that was occupying my body with such wakeful determination.
Joseph and his cronies, however, noticed none of this; or at least, they were too kind to say so. They tripped over themselves to offer compliments, pulled out the chair for me at the card table, and throughout the game, offered to adjust the temperature, to get me drinks and food, pillows and blankets and all but volunteered to hand over all their money and carry me around on their backs. I indulged in their fatherly tendencies, and they indulged me. I loved the evenings I spent with them, especially when they settled down their fluttering and we began an earnest and competitive game. Sometimes in complete silence, other times there was so much swearing and laughing that I almost fell off my seat.
This night, Hank, one of the younger of Joseph’s friends, folded his poker hand and said to me, “I knew your mother in high school, you know.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, shocked that this had never come up before.
“No, I did.” He smiled. “I actually asked her out rather relentlessly for some time. She never did agree to go out with me.”
At this, there was a chorus of guffaws and teasing about Hank’s height or weight or bank account. I let this sink in, the sugar sweetness of a memory that was not my own dissolving into the mental catalogue of my parents’ history. I looked at Hank in a new way and thought that he was probably quite handsome when he was younger. And in doing this, I realized how often I tried to peer into a face and imagine it in its youth. The truth was that Hank was handsome now and there was no reason to pity him into reverse. I wondered how often people tried to imagine if I was pretty when I wasn’t pregnant, feeling as I did like a swollen and stretched version of myself, waddling and groaning with every step.
“She was a knockout. But also,” he laughed, “she was stubborn as an old bull.”
“What do you mean?” I folded my own hand, realizing I couldn’t concentrate properly.
“Determined.”
“Determined to avoid Hank!” an Englishman named James quipped.
“In everything. She had a real belief in her convictions, Renatta did. A strong moral compass. Well, I mean not in a prudish way. She just knew what was right. Knew how to treat people.”
And there it was. I blanched and reached for my glass of punch that Joseph had brought me, finishing off the rest. Maybe, were she here, Mum would think I was without that compass, like I had lost it overboard in a storm and forged ahead, directionless. I imagined her peering at me, a disappointed look on her face. The thought of what she would have made of this mess often sent me spinning.
There was a screech of a chair as Henry, the tallest wisp of a man, moved into the kitchen. I heard him pouring me more to drink.
“Yeah, that was her, alright,” I managed.
“Sure. I mean, she was your mom, you would know better than anyone. She musta loved you and Harriet something fierce. And raising you all on her own after your dad skipped out, like she did.”
“I guess. Yeah.” I took the glass back from Henry gratefully, and he bowed back into his seat saying nothing. He picked his cigarette from the ashtray beside him and leaned away from me while drawing on it. He made that simple act look so gratifying and charming that I thought he could convince a whole generation to take up the habit.
“I remember this one time,” Hank went on, as Joseph gathered the pot towards himself, grinning, “a group of us were going sk
ating. We were playing hooky, you know, skipping out of class, to do it. It was thrilling, the truancy! And Renatta, your mom, she was game to do it, always up for a laugh. It really was one of those perfect days for skating: cold but no wind, sunny, still. The creek was just begging to be skated on.”
I watched him, imagining the creek, the kind of day: a chill, red-cheeked morning.
“And so when the bell rang, instead of going in, about four of us looped around behind the school with our skates over our shoulders. And there was this kid, Nicky was his name. Ugly little guy—pimples and stuff, you know. Spit when he spoke. We didn’t have much time for him, you know. But Nicky saw what we were doing, and asked if he could go with us. He said his house was on the way, he could go in and grab his skates.”
Hank licked his lips and began shuffling, dealing out a new hand. My cards lay in front of me, untouched. “And the rest of us, we said no way, forget it. We made up excuses, you know, like that the teachers would suspect something if there were too many of us gone, and stuff. But he knew, and we knew, that it was because he wasn’t popular enough, that we were put off by him. And I guess Renatta thought that was mean.” He laughed. “Well, obviously it was. And she told Nicky that not only was he welcome to come, but that she would accompany him to his house on the way. I mean, we were all shocked. Your mom, Penelope, she was a real attractive young lady. Any of us would have died if she’d talked to us like that, so nice and everything. And that was it. She and Nicky went ahead of the rest of us, and met us at the creek, where she spent the morning skating only with him. Made his day, I’d wager. Made the rest of us pretty jealous, too.” He heaved a sigh. “That’s what she was like. Big heart and no muss. Did not suffer fools.”
My stomach clenched and I smiled at Hank. I lost the next few hands, but made a comeback at the end of the night, whether on my own, or because of the generosity of my friends, I do not know.
I wished them all goodnight and wobbled upstairs, my hand on the stair railing. My room was quiet. I loved that space. Against Hattie’s wishes, I had firmly decided that I would have the baby in my apartment with a midwife. Hospitals, doctors, they were too close to the world of officials, law, and order. I would do this my way, then leave the rest to Hattie and Jameson.
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