I finally do see what she’s saying now, and even though I see how much it costs her to say it, I still don’t like the words.
“You don’t really get it at all, do you?” I say. “I don’t care what you did. I mean, of course I care, in the same way that I care about everything that happens to you, but I’m not sitting here judging you all the time. What kind of person do you think I am?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“You did what you did, and I did what I did. So we chose differently. We’re different people. Where’s the surprise there? We each did the best we could. We each did what we needed to do.”
Still she says nothing.
“Why does it always have to be like this?” I say. “Why does what one person does have to seem like some kind of judgment against other people? I don’t want to choose for everybody else,” I finally say. “It’s too much responsibility. Just for me. I just want the right to choose for me.”
And then I can’t take it anymore.
I go to Karin. I put my arms around the best girlfriend I have ever known in my whole life, and I hold her close. I will keep standing here for as long as it takes, until she remembers what this is like, until she hugs me back.
Week of April 29/Week 35
Now that it’s so close to the end, I am tired most of the time, and it doesn’t help that, unable to get comfortable anymore when I lie down, I’m having difficulty sleeping at night.
Into my weekend-morning sleepiness, my dad says he wants to go fishing with me.
“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” my mom says. “Do you really think it’s wise for her to be out in your leaky boat in her condition?”
“It’s not a leaky boat,” he says. “And besides, who knows when we’ll get another chance?”
Ever since I was small enough to be taken somewhere without needing a diaper bag, my dad has taken me fishing with him.
“Your mother hates fishing,” he would say. “And I see enough of other lawyers during the week and on the golf course. I don’t need to spend time in a small boat with them on the weekends as well.”
Family legend has it that the very first time my dad took me, all I had for a pole was an old bamboo stick with a string attached, and I wouldn’t even let my dad put a worm on the hook for me, never mind my putting the worm there myself.
I hated the way those worms looked, dangling there, harpooned by the point of the sharp hook. Somehow I didn’t mind the worms on my dad’s expensive pole; but I minded the worms on the end of my own bamboo stick very much indeed.
“At least put some bread on the end of the pole,” my dad would say, “give the fish something to go for.”
But I shook my head and spent that first day fishing just tossing the hook and line over my shoulder before casting it out to sea. I got so bored after a while with the whole exercise—or maybe my childish self thought that somehow what I was doing was fishing, that it was all somehow in that back and forth motion—that my dad would say my body just became a thing of continuous motion that day, with no breaks as I tossed that hook and line over my shoulder and flung it back out to sea, back and forth, repeatedly.
At one point, half-mesmerized by the motion, I was shocked to hear my dad yell, “Angel! Stop!” as I was about to cast my line again. “You’ve got a fish on the end of that thing!”
It was true.
Unlike the salamanders my dad had been fishing up all day long, I’d managed to pull an entire fish out of the sea.
“It’s kind of tiny,” I remember saying.
“Tiny?” my dad said. “That thing is four inches long! “
My dad always loved that story, would tell it to anyone who would listen, even if they’d heard it before.
‘Okay,” my mother said, after what must have been the tenth or twelfth time of him telling it. “She caught a fish.”
“But she did it without a hook!” my dad would say, holding his index fingers several inches apart, so far you could fit more than that puny fish between them. “It was four inches long!”
“Next year,” my dad says now, “we probably won’t be able to do this, what with the baby being here by then and all.”
And so my dad and I go fishing, for what may be the last time. But unlike the fishing trips of previous years, when my father would take me to places where he said all the best fish hung out—“You’re taking her across state lines “ my mother would say, “for a fish!”— my dad is worrying about straying too far with me in my current condition, and so we go to a local place instead.
“Hardly even worth hauling the boat out,” he mutters when we get there, as he unropes the boat from the roof of the car, sets it in the water.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I smile as he delicately hands me in. “You might catch a salamander or two out here.”
He rows us out a little ways, careful not to take me too far from shore.
“Worm for that hook?” my dad offers.
“That’s okay,” I say, taking up my pole. The pole I have now is much nicer than the bamboo pole I used to bring with me. This one has all the bells and whistles on it that any fisherperson could want. “I think I’ll just fish naked today.”
“You’ll probably catch a bigger one than I do,” he says, attaching a fancy lure to his own pole.
“Maybe,” I say, and shrug.
And then the shrug turns into something else.
“Ow!” I cry out, dropping my pole into the water as my body feels the full violent punch of that something else.
“Angel?” my dad says, dropping to his knees in front of me. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It was the baby,” I say, hand to my stomach, smiling through the pain at the sheer awe of it. “She kicked me … hard!”
“Are you okay?” he asks. I take my father’s hand, place it tentatively on my swollen belly.
“There,” I say. “Didyou feel that? She just did it again! “
At first he looks as though he’s unsure he wants to be doing this. Then: “Whoa!” he says. “She’s got some kick!”
“You’re telling me.” As the sensations caused from the kick subside, I realize something. “Shit!” I say. “The pole! “
And there it is in the water, my expensive pole with no worm on it, drifting farther and farther away from the boat.
But my dad doesn’t move.
“Aren’t you going to go after it?” I say.
“No,” he says, and shakes his head. “Angel?”
“What?”
“Have I told you lately how proud I am of you?”
I shake my head.
“I am more damned proud to be your father,” he says, “than I am of anything else I’ve ever done in my whole life.”
There is nothing adequate I can say in response to this, so I resort back to, “But what about the pole?”
“Oh, to hell with the pole,” my dad says, and smiles. “You only would have caught something bigger than me anyway.”
may
Week of May 6/Week 36
AT LAMAZE CLASS THERE IS ONE LESS COUPLE THAN WAS there the week before.
“The Carsons had a baby boy,” the instructor says. “Mother and John Junior are both doing just fine.”
After so many weeks of the group being together, it is strange to think of one of us already having gone through what is still to come for the rest of us, what I think of as going over to the other side.
The instructor takes us on a tour of the facilities. We see the maternity ward, the nursery, the labor and delivery rooms.
“When you come into the hospital,” she says, “ask if you can have room number one or room number two. These are our special labor rooms, but no one will offer them to you if you don’t ask, so ask. Of course, someone may already be using them—sometimes there’s a full house here—but it never hurts to ask.”
Then, so we will know what she’s talking about, she shows us room number one. It is different from the regular labor rooms. It
is much bigger, it is more prettily decorated with light floral wallpaper, and there is an oversize Jacuzzi in the corner.
“That Jacuzzi,” the instructor says, “is a wonderful thing.”
Danny leans in from the side to whisper in my ear. “I’ll bet,” he says with a grin. “I could have used one of those after a few of the games we had last season.”
Ever since the day I saw Ricky sit down next to Danny in the cafeteria, I have tried to tell him, repeatedly, that he doesn’t have to go through any of this with me.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, puzzled. “I want to do this with you.”
But I thought then, still think, he is doing this out of pity.
“Why the change?” he asked.
But I couldn’t tell him, and so he is still with me for this tour.
“That Jacuzzi”—the instructor speaks over Danny’s whisper now—“could save you during labor. I don’t mean save your life, but it could save you a lot of pain. It’s amazing how soothing our laboring mothers find it to sit in that tub between contractions.”
I think about the scene she is painting, envision my very pregnant and naked self sitting in that tub with Danny beside me. Rather than seeing me as a bathing beauty, he would see me as a bathing Buddha, and whatever else I might allow Danny to see, I would never let him see me like that.
As the instructor shows us the delivery table with the stirrups on the end of it, points out the uses of the various monitors in the room—machines to make sure the mother is okay, machines to make sure the baby is okay—I think about the missing Carsons and what still lies ahead, how close this all is now. Even though at moments it is still impossible to believe that an entire baby will come out from between my legs, often I feel as if I am on a train that has been stalled on top of the railroad tracks. But soon, very soon, the conductor will release the brake, the train will start speeding down the tracks, and there will be nothing to stop it.
“You look white,” Danny says. “Is everything okay?”
I tell him it’ll be fine, that I just need some air.
“Come on,” he says, taking my hand and leading me out of the hospital. “After all these weeks of classes, if we don’t know how to have this baby by now, we never will.”
Outside, the night is cool for early May, and something about that coolness makes me feel better, somehow clean again. Even though the evening is relatively early, the stars are strong and I see Orion twinkling overhead, the constellation I painted for the fifth-grade science fair.
“It’s funny,” I say, neck craned upward, “how that guy never changes.”
“Angel?” Danny recalls me to Earth.
I look at him and see that he looks nervous. Danny Stanton, nervous?
“What is it?” I say.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he says. “I’ve wanted to ask you for weeks: Will you go to the prom with me?”
“What?”
“Okay, forget I said anything. I knew maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. You’re probably going with someone else already. I probably should have asked you sooner.”
“But you’re going with Ricky D’Amico.”
“What?”
“I was there, that day in the cafeteria, when she asked you.”
“And did you hear me say yes?”
“No,” I say, “I left before you said that.”
“But I didn’t say yes.”
“You must have. I saw you. I saw you smile at her after she asked you.”
“But you didn’t hear me say yes, because I said no.”
“But that smile—“
“Was because I was so shocked. I laughed at her. It’s really too bad you didn’t stick around. If you had, then you would have been there to hear it when I said to her, after smiling of course, ‘What are you, nuts?’“
I think, in that moment, even if it makes me a small person, I would have liked to see the look on Ricky’s face when Danny said that. But then I think, No, he didn ‘t really say that to her… did he?
“No,” I say, “you didn’t really say that to her … did you?”
“Yes!” he says. “I mean, yes, I said no to her. And, yes, I told her she was nuts.”
“That probably wasn’t your most gallant moment,” I say.
“Yeah, well.”
I screw up my courage. “And now you’re asking me,” I say.
“I know I should have asked sooner,” Danny says, “but Todd told me he heard someone else say Joshua Carr asked you, and it was a while before I learned from Karin that you said no to him.”
Bless Karin.
Danny cranes his own neck up at the night sky, hands deep in his pockets as he studies Orion.
“In a way,” he says, “it really is cool the way that, no matter what else changes, he’s always just right there like that.”
“Danny?” I reach out and place my hand on his shoulder.
He looks down at me.
“Yes?” he says.
“Ask me again.”
He takes a deep breath. “Angel, would you go to the prom with me?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Week of May 13/Week 37
“Are you there, God? Its me, Angel. “
When I was younger, I read that Judy Blume book that all the girls read, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret , the book about the girl who is trying to find her religious place in the world while worrying about when she’ll get her first period.
I am thinking of that book, of being that young again, as I open the journal Danny gave me and start to write.
I know that some people, certainly Kelly Bergstrom and John Paul Johnson of the Students 4 Life club, think I am doing this because of something having to do with religion.
But I don’t think that’s necessarily so, or at least not in the way they think it is.
My family has never been very religious. Oh, sure, we go to church sometimes on the holidays, but it has never been something we discuss very much at home. I do remember thinking, though, when I was very young, that whatever religion our household was must be the right religion, because it was what we thought, and that people who thought differently must have it wrong somehow. Then, one holiday when our whole family was here, I realized that even within our small group of people we don’t agree on it. I don’t recall the exact specifics, but as listened to Aunt Stacey and Dad debate about heaven, the thought suddenly flashed into my head: Every single person in this room, every single person on the face of the planet, thinks they have the answer and that theirs is the most correct answer. Well, I remember thinking, they can’t all be right.
So here is what I think now: I think that God isn’t something that exists in some place called heaven. God is something that lives in each human being. God is the choices that live inside us. At any given moment we can move toward the better place in us, or further away from it. And every time we choose for the better, we move closer to God.
That’s my belief, anyway.
My mother is surprised when I tell her I am going to the prom.
“Why would you want to put yourself through that?” she asks, and I know she is thinking of what people will say if I go. Maybe she is worrying that I’ll be hurt. But then I realize that she must be thinking that I’m planning on going alone, like I did to the Valentine’s Day dance, and that I will be hurt again, maybe even worse than before.
“Danny asked me to go with him,” I tell her.
“He did ?”
“But I can go shopping for a dress myself,” I say. “Really. It’s okay.”
I see her make a decision.
“No,” she says, with force. “No daughter of mine is going shopping for her prom dress all by herself. This is one of the moments of your life I’ve been waiting for. We’re going to find you the best prom dress ever, and then I’m going to make an appointment with my hairdresser for you to have your hair done that day. I don’t want
you going to one of those quick-cuts places you’re always going to.”
But after her high-energy good intentions, once we get to the mall, my mother is a little deflated, because of course we can’t get my dress from one of the places displaying gowns in their windows in tiny sizes, where everyone else will get theirs.
We have to get my gown at the maternity store.
“Somehow,” she says ruefully, rifling through the oversize evening wear in Mommy Heaven, “this wasn’t how I expected this to be.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, sounding even to my own ears like the oldest person in the world, “almost nothing ever is.”
I see my mom’s head snap up as she looks at me over the top of the rack. I think she is going to yell at me for my bad attitude, when suddenly she starts to laugh.
“What?” I say.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, sobering. “You know, there have been things about this I didn’t understand in the beginning. Sometimes I still don’t understand quite how we got here. All I know is, I love you.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I say. “I think I did know that. But it’s always nice to hear.”
Week of May 20/Week 38
The doorbell rings and a moment later I hear my dad say, “Danny. You look great. Just a second. I’ll go get her.”
I hear my dad’s tread on the stairs, and he walks into my room just as my mother is brushing a stray hair out of my face. They both stand behind me as I look at my reflection in the full-length mirror hanging on the back of my closet door.
I’m not sure what they see, but I see a girl in a red halter-back ankle-length dress with low heels so she won’t trip over them tonight. I see a girl with pretty makeup, with red lipstick and her hair pulled back, tiny gold stars and glitter decorating her dark hair. I see a girl who is enormously pregnant and realize that, whatever else I will be tonight, I will be the only girl at my senior prom who is fully nine months pregnant.
And that is okay.
“Doesn’t she look beautiful?” my mom says.
“You stole my words,” my dad says.
I make my way carefully down the stairs as Danny waits at the bottom. Standing there in his black tux, white flowers for me in his hands, he is the handsomest thing I have ever seen.
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