He didn’t answer right away, he gave a soft sigh, and I had a quick, crazy moment of hope. I pictured him sitting at the kitchen table, his brow furrowed, weighing what I had said. I felt his love for me through the phone wires like an electric current, and I relaxed, resting a hand on my big belly. I knew exactly what the baby looked like now, I knew that it could hear, its lungs and heart and brain were fully developed, if it were born tomorrow, a month early, it could survive. It kicked against my hand; I could feel my stomach distend. A tiny foot, an elbow. This always made me smile. Baby, I thought absently. Baby baby little baby.
“Wynn, you’ve got to be sensible,” my father said finally. “Your mother knows what’s best for you. You have to believe that. When the time comes, you’ll decide. But I think it’s the only thing you can do.”
“What?” I asked. I gripped the receiver with both hands. “What is, Daddy?” I wanted to make him say it. “What is the only thing I can do?”
He hesitated.
“What?”
“Give it up,” he said. “Like all the other girls, Wynn. Just try to accept it, and when it’s all over you’ll get on with things and it will be as if this never happened.”
“Daddy.”
“We’ve talked about it enough,” he said. “I’m not going against your mother, and that’s final.”
From the living room I heard a scream of victory, then laughter. The smell of frying onions came up from the kitchen. My father and I sat listening to each other breathe for another minute or so, and then I hung up the phone.
• • •
In the evening of my second day in the hospital, I was dozing, my mother was leafing through a magazine, and the nurse stuck her head in and asked me if I was feeling well enough to see the baby. My mother raised her head in alarm, but I said, quickly, that I did, and painfully hoisted myself up against the pillows. The nurse wheeled in a tiny plastic crib and, smiling, placed the baby in my arms.
She was wrapped tightly in pink, asleep and unexpectedly heavy, a sturdy girl with a full head of dark hair. The baby I had imagined, the unimaginable baby: eight pounds, thirteen ounces, twenty-one inches long. A perfect little human. Dark eyelashes against her rosy cheek. Double chin. Fingernails like fragile bits of shell. A Cupid’s-bow mouth, red-lipped, drooling.
I couldn’t stop looking at her. I kissed her soft cheek, I rubbed my face against her fuzzy hair, wiped away the drool with a corner of the sheet, unwound the blanket and squeezed her tiny feet. My heart unlocked. Baby, baby. I forgot the nurse was there, and my mother, until she said, very gently, “You know—this is going to be all right, Wynn. Really. It is.”
Just then the baby opened her mouth and let out a sudden little contradictory cry that frightened me. The nurse reached out for her with a chuckle. “Sounds like feeding time,” she said, and wheeled the baby out the door in her cart.
When her cries died away, the room was full of an eerie silence. Out the window, the early spring darkness was falling. I saw lights go on in a building across the way.
“That was a mistake,” my mother said after a minute. “I don’t think that nurse could have known your situation.”
I sat without speaking, propped against the pillows. The baby’s reality had exhausted me: the smell of her, her tiny ragged nails, the fretful cry like some strange bird. But without her the room was empty. I stared out at the lights until I fell back to sleep.
The next day I signed some papers and filled out the form for the birth certificate. I named the baby Molly, after my mother. I couldn’t give her anything else; at least I could give her a name. Maybe her new parents would keep it. The nurse brought the baby in again, and I fed her with a bottle, but she dropped off to sleep almost immediately. I’m your mother, I whispered to her. She didn’t wake. My name is Wynn Tynan. I’m your mother. Remember me. Remember me. Looking at her, red and blank and helpless in my arms, I felt nothing but despair—that and the disquieting sensation that I had become someone else: literally, I was not Wynn Tynan any more.
My breasts were sore and swollen, bursting, but I was not allowed to nurse the baby. I was given a drug to suppress the milk. Mrs. Del Banco, the social worker from the Edna Quinlan Home, came to see me. The baby had just been brought in; she was sleeping in my arms.
Mrs. Del Banco said, “When you’re giving up your baby, Wynn, we find it’s better not to have too much contact with her. You’ve seen her, that’s enough.” She smiled at me sadly. “You have to let her go.”
“Suppose I want to keep her.”
The baby was hustled back to the nursery, and Mrs. Del Banco, my mother, and the social worker from the hospital assembled around my bed. “You’re sixteen years old, you have your whole life ahead of you, you’ve already signed the preliminary papers,” they said. None of these seemed like reason enough to give that baby to someone else, to let the milk in my breasts dry up, to go back to Dunster High as if nothing had happened.
Finally, the others left, and my mother and I were alone. “I don’t think I can do it,” I said. The sound of my voice surprised me: It was mechanical and sullen. I sounded like Suzanne. I couldn’t remember ever talking to my mother in quite that way. My stitches throbbed, my chest felt tight, my stomach knotted. “I don’t think I want to do it.”
It took my mother a minute to respond. She was standing at the window; her profile was stern and preoccupied. Please, I wanted to say. But I wasn’t sure what I was asking for. “I just don’t think it’s right,” I said when she didn’t speak. Was she listening? “It’s not right,” I said again. “It feels wrong to me.”
My mother turned her head in my direction. Her blue eyes were steady, and when she spoke her voice was very quiet and precise. “Daddy and I don’t want to hear this.”
“I named her after you,” I said.
She just looked at me. “Wynn.” She closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head. “We’ve been through this.”
“You said I could decide.”
“You know this is the only possible choice.”
“But why?”
“Do you mean aside from the fact that you’re sixteen years old and a junior in high school?” She looked very tall against the window. Her voice rose. “That the idea of raising a child at your age is complete madness? You have no idea what that entails!” She came over to the bed and sat down on a chair beside me. “Wynn, your whole life is ahead of you. You’ll have more children someday, when you’re ready. But for now—think of all the things you want to do! One more year and you’ll be in art school, you’ll be having such wonderful times, you’ll be learning so much. You’re an artist, Wynn. That’s so important—you know it is. I hope you haven’t forgotten how much you want that, how much you want to be a painter.”
No, I hadn’t forgotten. Nobody ever let me forget. In fact, a week or so before the baby was born I’d had a notification from the Maine Artists’ Association that two of my paintings would be included in their annual spring show; my art teacher at the high school had called to congratulate me. But an odd thing had happened while I was at Edna Quinlan. I stopped painting. I had brought paints and canvas, but, for some reason, when I picked up the brush, my mind refused to focus. What was there to paint? Why would anyone want to paint, of all things? I seemed unable to be pregnant and paint at the same time. In art class, while the other girls produced pale, drippy, dutiful watercolors from photographs, I ripped up paper and made collages. I took a fierce pleasure in their construction, tearing images from a stack of old magazines and pasting them to the posterboard my parents sent me—jagged hunks of paper in violent bursts of black and purple and red that produced dark, tangled designs pleasing to no one but me.
“Nothing has changed,” my mother said. “You’re still an artist. You’re a painter before anything else. Think about what that means.”
“I do think about it, I think about it all the time, and the whole thing just seems stupid and wrong,” I said again, stubbornly.
&n
bsp; “Then you’re not really thinking,” my mother said. “About what your life is about, what you want to do with it. You’re so young, Wynn—I know it’s hard for you to see it, but the decision you make today will color your whole life.” She stood up, leaned over and kissed my cheek. Then she patted it twice, as if I were asleep and it was time to wake up. “Listen to me. This is a serious moment. Don’t throw your life away. It’s the only one you get. I want you to promise me you’ll think this through—really think.” Her eyes were hard, glowing, her cheeks pink with conviction. Just looking at her made me tired. “Okay?” she asked. “Wynn?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, and turned my head away.
After she left, I lay there in my bed, my mother’s voice echoing in my head as the sleeping pill took hold. The television on the wall was mute, a gray blur of heads with moving mouths. You’re an artist, Wynn. You’re a painter. Words I had heard all my life. I don’t deny that they were powerful words, as much a part of my life as the cats and the Van Gogh posters and my father’s overalls. I fell asleep and dreamt that I was preparing a canvas for painting: stretching it, stapling, covering it with gesso. But I didn’t paint anything on it. In my dream, the canvas stayed white, pristine, empty.
When I woke early the next morning to the sound of babies crying in the nursery down the hall, it was clear to me that the battle was lost. The thin, helpless wails of all those hungry infants made me profoundly depressed. One of them was mine: what could I do for her? I was sixteen years old. I knew nothing. My baby deserved better. They were right. What I wanted was absurd.
When the social worker came in, I signed the final papers, not letting myself think about anything but going home, seeing Marietta, applying to art schools, wearing normal clothes. My mother hugged me, beaming—triumphant—her face full of love and approval. The next day I was presented with a brief “non-identifying profile” of the adoptive parents—blue-collar, Midwestern, decent—and then I drove home with my mother.
“Look! It’s spring!” she said as we drove up Route 95. She pointed out the window. “You know how you love spring. The snow is practically gone. And look at the trees.” Dutifully, I looked. The dark branches were blurred with a fuzz of yellow-green. Snow lurked in hard brown piles along the roadside, but the pavement was black where it was melting. The sky threatened rain. “Isn’t it wonderful, sweetie? Life does go on, you know.”
“I can’t talk about it, Mom,” I said. I kept my voice even, I didn’t cry.
“Wynn—”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“You know it was the only possible decision.”
I said, “There’s a difference between that and the right decision.”
“Wynn—”
“I don’t want to talk about it!”
My mother gave a small, angry sigh and tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. I turned on the radio and thought about my baby, wrapped in her pink blanket, driving away in a car with people I would never know or see. I kept that image in my mind, my baby daughter on the lap of some strange thrilled woman, sitting beside a man who kept looking at them, smiling, full of the new joy of parenthood.
All the way home, I cut myself with that picture the way Darcy cut herself with her little blade.
Question Two
What Made You Happy?
I didn’t get to know Patrick Foss until I had been in art school for almost two semesters. But I was aware of him—a tall, haunted-looking boy, always in a hurry. I remember how he used to stride down the halls of the school as if they were country roads, his hair falling on his forehead and the sleeves of his ancient black sweater so short that a couple of inches of bony wrist protruded. And I remember once, when I happened to be in an elevator with him, how startling his eyes were: light golden brown, intense and preoccupied beneath his heavy dark brows. Our eyes met, but he didn’t seem to see me; he looked as if he were engaged in some fierce internal struggle, some life-or-death dilemma that rendered virtually invisible the shabby old elevator and the tall, awkward girl leaning against the wall opposite him.
I didn’t know then that Patrick Foss was what I was searching for. But right from the beginning, I knew he was important.
• • •
I had returned to Dunster High after Easter, just in time for the Junior Prom. You’ve made the right decision. Everyone said it, kept saying it. My parents, and Mrs. Diamond my art teacher, and Miss Morgan my English teacher, who made me do a report on War and Peace. And Marietta, who was horrified that I’d even considered keeping the baby. “Are you crazy?” she said. “You’re a kid! You can’t be somebody’s mother!”
My parents were convinced that time would work its magic and my unfortunate trauma would be smoothed over, and they were always looking for signs that this was happening. “You really should go to the prom,” my mother said. “It would do you good to get out and have some fun.” The prom rapidly became a symbol: If I went, it would be a sign that I was my old self.
Unexpectedly, Mark Erling followed me to my locker one day and asked me to be his date for the prom. The sight of his blond hair and conciliatory smile sickened me. Barely civil, I said no thanks.
Marietta was going with Keith, who offered to get me a date, but I was in no mood for a dance. Dunster High was an alien planet. I would have rather put on a hair shirt than a prom gown.
My mother ran into Neil’s mother in the supermarket, and Mrs. Hauser told her that Neil wanted to ask me. I told her that there was no one I could stand to go with, certainly not Neil Hauser who had long, greasy hair and drank too much. I said I was still too fat and wouldn’t be caught dead in a prom gown. I said I felt overwhelmed in Spanish and Intermediate Algebra and I needed to spend the time studying. My mother had an answer for everything: You look great, Neil is sweet, you’re doing fine, blah blah. I tried a joke. “Don’t you know that proms are decadent and evil? Symbols of the outmoded and destructive patriarchal values to which our corrupt society is irrevocably wedded?” My father chuckled nervously. My mother laughed, then pursed her lips and frowned, but she finally dropped the subject.
Home, unpregnant, I had begun painting again; it was what I was used to, what I did. There was my studio, my easel, the painting I’d been working on when I left for Great-Aunt Sarah’s. Putting paint on canvas gave me something to think about. When I showed Mrs. Diamond my first painting, a portrait of Marietta I did from a photograph, she was silent a moment. Then she put her arm around my shoulders. “There’s no doubt you’ve lost something, Wynn,” she said. “But maybe you’ve gained something as well.”
“What?” I asked her, my heart in my throat.
She considered for a moment, squinting at Marietta’s red hair and green sweater. “Hmm,” she said. “I’m not sure what to call it. A kind of detachment, maybe. A stepping back from your subject.”
“Is that good?”
Mrs. Diamond smiled. “Up to a point,” she said. “It’s okay. Before, you were too close sometimes, too involved. Just don’t let it get out of control.”
I became obsessed with people’s faces. I took my sketch pad everywhere, drawing them on the school bus, in the library, in class and then, back in my studio, putting their faces into paintings. For a long time it was only people, as I looked at their faces and transferred what I saw to canvas, who could bring me back from the dark place I had been, and make me feel connected to the world again.
• • •
It was hard for me to be at home with my parents, and I sometimes got off the school bus in the middle of town and sat in a booth at the West Dunster Diner, drinking coffee and doing my homework or drawing. I became friendly with Tina, the waitress; I made a pencil portrait of her and she bought it for ten dollars and a piece of banana cream pie. I used to sit there until I knew I’d better get home for dinner or my father would come out in his truck looking for me.
Everything was turned upside down. I hated the walk down Brewster Road, the walk I’d loved all my life, and t
he smug coziness of the little house at the end of it, as colorful and neat as an illustration in a children’s book—and as unreal. My parents were always waiting—anxiously, I could tell. They greeted me with a kind of rehearsed joviality, encouraging me to talk about my day, trying urgently, pathetically, to hang on to the old way of life, clinging to the old jokes and rituals.
When I was in a good mood, I knew that they were decent but fallible people who loved me, and who had done their best. But most of the time that spring and summer I felt I had never really seen my parents before, as if my pregnancy and its aftermath had removed from my consciousness some protective coating that had been there since my childhood. Now I could step back and, with my new, raw vision, watch my mother and my father as if they were people in a play, a sour satire of the American family. Cast of characters: the ambitious, dominating woman, her weak and worshipful husband, the child they valued because she fulfilled their dreams. By the end of the last act, all their filthy secrets are exposed, their ignorance and their blind spots, and the cruelties they perpetrated in the name of love and kindness.
My aloofness wasn’t something we discussed, any more than we’d discussed how I felt about the baby. Once my mother asked me if I was okay, was there anything bothering me, and it was all I could do not to run screaming to my room and slam the door. Instead I said, with a civilized little smile, “The famous pressures of junior year, Mom,” and she smiled back as I knew she would—a smile that said: I know perfectly well how angry and resentful you are, but thank you for not talking about it, and one of these days you’ll get over it and everything will be just fine.
I escaped to Marietta’s house as often as I could. We studied together, played intense games of Scrabble, watched TV. There were plenty of times when she deserted Keith so she could be with me, and I was grateful to her. If it weren’t for Marietta, I never would have survived the end of junior year at Dunster High. She had fielded awkward inquiries during my absence and helped cover for me when I returned chubby and morose. She spread the word around school that I was pining for my Princeton boyfriend, that things weren’t going well with him, that I was depressed about it and mad at the world and everybody should leave me alone and respect my bad mood.
Five Questions Page 5
