Luscious Lemon

by Heather Swain

  This time Eddie looks at me straight on. “I’m dead serious.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Why not, then?”

  “Because we don’t even know for sure.”

  “So what? Even if you’re not.”

  “This is all too much,” I say. “I can’t take it. I can barely keep up with life now, and you want to throw a kid and a wedding in the mix?”

  “Okay,” he says gently. “We’ll make things easy. Why don’t you just move in with me?”

  “And give up all this?” I say and motion grandly to my messy hovel.

  “This is no place for a baby,” Eddie scolds me.

  “There may be no baby,” I say. The teakettle in the kitchen starts to scream. “You left the water boiling,” I tell him.

  He sighs. “I love you, Lemon,” he says as he gets out of the bed. “Someday you’ll have to say yes.”

  I don’t know, I think as he leaves the room. Will I have to say yes? Why can’t I make a different choice in my life? Why can’t Eddie and I forever be lovers dedicated to good food? It’d be a hell of a lot easier that way. I suspect that I’m a much better chef than I’ll ever be a mother and a wife. So what if I sometimes daydream about a family? I also daydream about having a whole string of great restaurants. And just maybe those two dreams aren’t compatible. But the question comes back to me, what if I am pregnant?

  I lay on my back and stare at the ceiling with my hands crossed below my belly button. I close my eyes and concentrate like Eddie said. Should I know? Do I have that power? That insight, if I just want to know badly enough? I quiet myself. Breathe softly. Listen. The teakettle whistle dies as Eddie moves it off the burner. Then I hear him in the bathroom, peeing.

  I focus on myself. My breath, my rhythm. The feeling beneath my hands. Hello? I ask inside my head. I think I feel a tiny flutter in my gut. Like bubbles deep inside me. Like a fish far below the surface. Is that you? How would I know? Shouldn’t I know? If I can’t tell, does that mean that I’ll be a horrible mother? When did my mother know about me? Was she excited, or did she dread me?

  “Lemon,” Eddie calls from the bathroom.

  “Yeah.”

  He walks into the room, grinning wide, and holding the stick. “The line.” He holds it out to me. Tears fill his eyes. “The line is there.”

  I grab the stick from him and stare at the bold purple mark, announcing my pregnancy. “Oh, dear,” is all I can say.

  Eddie climbs onto the bed and folds me in a giant hug. “This is so great! So amazing! So completely fucking awesome!” He pulls the covers off of me, unwraps the towel from my body, and cups my belly in both hands, then shimmies down so that he can talk into my navel. “Attention, future child, this is your father speaking.”

  I put my hands into his hair and stare down at him. “Pregnant?” I whisper. “A baby?”

  “How’re you feeling?”

  I can’t answer. I have no idea how I feel. No idea what to think or do. I’m overwhelmed. Stunned.

  “Are you nauseous?”

  I study the ceiling. Concentrate on the tiny fissures in the plaster. There’s a stain up in the corner that looks vaguely like Jesus. What am I going to do? I ask the apparition.

  “Hey,” Eddie says. He peers closely at my eyes. “You okay? Are you freaked out?”

  I nod my head. Where have all my sentences gone?

  “Do you want to call someone? Your grandmother? Franny?”

  “No!” I say and sit up.

  “Why?”

  I lie back again. “I just need some time to get used to the idea. It’s so—sudden. I’m not sure what I want to do.”

  Eddie sits up on his knees. “Lemon,” he says seriously. “You don’t mean that you’d get rid of it.”

  Get rid of it? An abortion? When I was in Europe, I contemplated the same thing. In Vienna, my period went AWOL for two weeks. I convinced myself that my pills had failed. That the condom had leaked. That one of Herr Fink’s little Teutonic fuckers had slipped through and met up with my ripe twenty-year-old egg. I was scared too death and didn’t trust over-the-counter pregnancy tests, since I couldn’t even read the directions.

  I confessed this all to Franny while I was shut inside a coffee-shop toilet stall, retching up my morning bread and milky tea.

  “What a lightweight,” she said and laughed. “You didn’t even drink that much last night.”

  “I think I might be pregnant,” I whispered from the floor.

  Franny was washing her hands. She turned off the tap and went so still and quiet that I could hear water slipping down the drain. I watched her shoes from under the stall door. “How?” she asked. “You aren’t even sleeping with anyone.”

  “I have been,” I said and hugged my knees close to my chest. I knew that Franny had been interested in Herr Fink. He flirted with every girl on the restaurant staff, and she confessed to me that she was smitten.

  Franny didn’t move for several seconds. “Who?” she asked.

  “Just some guy,” I lied, but Franny wasn’t stupid, and I hadn’t been careful. While she was stuck in the storage room, peeling potatoes with some old shell-shocked Nazi, I’d been moved up to be Herr Fink’s sous-chef. I didn’t even like him that much, but that didn’t stop me from screwing him in the walk-in. Or the bathroom. Or on the bar after everyone else had left for the night. As if I weren’t just one in a very long line of silly girl cooks and waitresses who’d had her legs wrapped around Finky’s loins. It was obvious, and Franny knew it.

  “Herr Fink?” she asked. I didn’t answer, but I imagined her face, horrified. I was afraid she would turn and walk away.

  “Please don’t leave me,” I begged her. Franny didn’t leave me then. As much as it must have outraged her, she took me to a clinic to find out that my period was merely late. Sitting in the cold metal chair in the waiting room after I got the news, I grinned at her sheepishly. But Franny stared at me with pure disgust, then she left, and I thought I’d never see her again.

  Now, as I look at Eddie, I see the sadness in his eyes at the thought of not having this child, and I realize there’s no reason not to. I’m thirty years old. I love Eddie. He’s right. We’d make decent parents, or at least no worse than anyone else. “No,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t get rid of it.”

  He smiles, relieved, and this makes me happy.

  “I just need to get used to the idea before I’ll be ready to tell other people.”

  Eddie grins at me and crawls down to the end of the bed. He takes my left foot in his hands and massages the tender pads beneath my toes. “It really turns me on knowing that you’re pregnant, knowing that I’m the daddy.” He kisses the bottom of my foot and rubs my Achilles tendon.

  “Who says you’re the daddy?” I ask.

  Eddie grabs my knees, which makes me squirm and laugh. “Who’s your daddy?” he demands as he slathers my bare skin with kisses. “Who’s your sugar daddy?”

  “You are!” I tell him in a fit of laughter. Then I bolt upright in bed because I know I’m going to barf again. “Oh, God,” I moan as I jump up and run toward the bathroom with my hand pressed over my mouth. Eddie is close behind.

  I toss the toilet lid open just in time to spew another round of frothy bile into the placid water. I come up and catch myself in the mirror. I’m puffy and pasty, red-eyed and disheveled. “Oh, Christ,” I say. “What’ve I gotten myself into?”

  Eddie stands in the doorway with his eyes squeezed shut. “You okay?” he asks, refusing to look.

  I rinse my mouth out and splash cold water on my face. “Yeah,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”

  He opens his eyes and looks at me with pity. “Poor thing,” he says and reaches to stroke my hair. “What can I get you? What can I do for you?”

  I laugh at his sudden desire to please me.

  “I should cancel my trip to Italy,” he tells me.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say on my way back to the bedroom. “It’s two months
away.” I flop down on the bed. “Not everything in our lives has to suddenly change.”

  He gets down on his knees beside me. “But I need to take care of you. I’ll be your slave for the next nine months.” Suddenly I feel better. And ravenous. “What do you want, my queen?” he asks, half joking.

  “If this were all there were to pregnancy, I could get used to it,” I say.

  He takes my hand. “You name it, I’ll do it. Anything.”

  “All right,” I say and try to think of something that I really want. “The first thing you can do is get me a doughnut.”

  Six Weeks

  For six quick weeks, you’ve been waiting to be discovered. Waiting to be confirmed. Living your small life, like some past criminal in the witness protection program. Going about your business. Hidden in the place where all your mother’s secrets lie. You know everything about her right down to her sacred DNA, but you will tell her nothing about yourself. What color will your eyes be? Your hair? Will you be tall and lanky like your daddy or short and compact like your mama? Will you have her temper or his sense of whimsy about the world? Whose nose will be yours? Doesn’t really matter anyway. Now that you are known, nothing much has changed for you. You go about your business, slowly forming.

  You are a quarter of an inch long. You could sit comfortably on your mother’s thumbnail. She could carry you between her toes like lint. You have buds for arms and legs, but you look like a tiny tadpole swimming deep inside her belly. An odd hunchbacked worm with a tail. Smaller than a pea.

  Neural tubes close, and your brain begins to fill your head. What thoughts can you have? What dreams and desires? Do you have memories from another life?

  Two tiny discs of pigment like shallow cups grace the sides of your not-yet-formed face. What will you see with those eyes? What will they give away? Will your mother know your lies, your hopes, your desperation someday?

  A string of pearls down your back will become your spine. Will you stand up for yourself? Bend over backward for others? Your heart is the size of a poppy seed and already beginning to beat. When will this heart fill with love? When will it break for the first time? How much sadness will you know?

  Chapter

  Six

  W hat time is it?” I sit up in bed and push my hair out of my eyes. Bright sunlight streams through the slats in the blinds. Eddie grumbles beside me as he rolls over and slings his arm around me. “Shit,” I say when I catch a glimpse of the red numbers on my digital clock. “It’s nearly eleven.” I shake him by the shoulder. “Wake up. We’re late.”

  “Late for what?” Eddie mumbles. He pulls me closer against him, but I wriggle away.

  “Trina’s welcome-home party at my grandmother’s.” I scramble out of bed, which makes my stomach pitch and roll.

  Eddie yawns. “I forgot about that.”

  “I tried to get out of it, but Grandma kept rescheduling it so that we’d have to come.” I kick a pile of clothes, looking for something presentable to wear. “She doesn’t force anyone else to come.”

  “Everyone else just goes,” Eddie says. “Besides, she wants to see you.”

  I hold up a pair of khaki pants that look like they’ve been living under my mattress for months. “She could come to the restaurant every once in a while.” I toss the pants aside.

  “It’s not like she’ll get time with you if she comes there. Lord knows I don’t,” Eddie complains.

  “So I should work less?” I snarl at him.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I can’t keep skipping shifts and expecting Franny and Ernesto to cover for me. Franny already resents the hours she works.”

  “Franny just likes having something to complain about.” Eddie stretches his arms overhead. “Anyway, it’s good we’re going to your grandmother’s. We haven’t seen your family for a while.”

  I sniff a tank top hanging on the closet door handle. It smells like bacon. A BLT with lots of mayonnaise and a juicy tomato sounds better than anything ever has in my entire life. I pull the tank over head and look for a skirt inside my closet.

  “I wish we could see my family more often,” Eddie says with an exaggerated sigh.

  I ignore him as I skim through hangers until I find an old grungy short jean skirt.

  “Mom keeps asking about scheduling a trip up here.”

  “This is a bad time,” I say as I struggle with the button of the skirt. “This can’t be too tight already,” I mumble.

  “When’s a good time?” Eddie asks.

  “I don’t know, Eddie. Not now. Okay?” I suck in my gut and try the button again. It closes, but the waistband cuts into my skin. “Jesus, I have nothing to wear!”

  “Put a rubber band around the button,” Eddie says.

  I look at him dumbly. “What are you talking about?”

  “Come here.” He picks up one of my hair bands from the nightstand and loops it through my buttonhole, then fastens it across the button. “There,” he says happily. The skirt fits perfectly.

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  “I saw my sister-in-law do it,” he says.

  “I think you’ve got other pregnant girls stashed around the city.”

  He grabs my hand and pulls me down to the bed again. “Yep, you’re just one of the masses carrying Kilby progeny.”

  I poke him in the ribs. “Get up,” I say. “We’re going to be so late.”

  Eddie wraps his arms around my waist and hugs me. “Let’s tell people today.”

  “No way!”

  “They’ll figure it out sooner or later.”

  “The later the better,” I tell him.

  He lifts my scraggly hair off my neck and kisses the warm skin below my hairline. It would be so nice to skip out on everything today and stay in bed with him.

  “So, when can my parents come?” he asks.

  I squirm around to face him. “Shit, Eddie. I can’t deal with trying to make your mother like me with everything else going on.”

  “My mother does like you,” he insists.

  “Yeah, right. And carrying your bastard child will only endear me to her more.”

  He lets go of me and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. “She’ll get used to the idea,” he says with a laugh.

  I get up and check myself in the mirror. My clothes are wrinkled and crumpled. The blue streaks in my hair are fading. I won’t be able to color it again until after the baby comes. I’ll have to go back to my natural blond. The picture of motherhood. Will I start wearing flowered dresses and carrying a sensible handbag, too? Will Eddie’s mother deem me appropriate then?

  “If you don’t pick a date for my parents to come,” Eddie says from the doorway, “then I’m picking one, and you’ll have to live with it.”

  “I’ll be out of town,” I tell him.

  “We’ll follow you,” he says.

  “Get ready, so we can leave,” I say.

  “I’m serious,” he warns.

  “So am I,” I tell him. “If we’re any later, my grandmother will kill us.”

  As soon as we open the door to my grandmother’s house, I hear laughter bubbling out from the kitchen. My aunts all have the same laugh in different tones and octaves, so that they harmonize nicely when they crack up. I wonder where my mom’s laugh fit into the scales they create. Do they notice that some half tone is missing?

  “It was Fat Faye’s little brother,” Mary is saying as we walk down the hall.

  “Deanie Wayne Rauch,” adds Adele.

  “Fat Faye loved Elvis,” Joy says.

  “Thought the King himself was going to take her away from that horrible old house,” says Gladys.

  Mary says, “Their apartment was filthy.”

  “They didn’t have a cent to their names,” says my grandmother. “They were so poor that Mrs. Rauch made her Thanksgiving turkey out of meatloaf.”

  “Shaped it just like a real bird,” Mary confirms.

  “Didn’t let a thing go to waste,�
� says Grandma.

  “If you spilled Kool-Aid on the table, Deanie Wayne would suck it up,” says Aunt Adele. We walk into the kitchen just as she presses her lips against the table and makes a loud sucking noise. The rest of my aunts laugh in a perfect chorus.

  “Hi, everybody,” I say from the kitchen doorway. “Sorry we’re late.”

  “Look who it is!” Joy notices us first. Then everyone turns to greet us with warm and hearty hellos.

  Eddie slings his arm around my shoulders and beams. He loves the attention my family lavishes on us much more than I do. It’s always made me a little squirmy, as if I’m “special” in the pathetic sense and need more notice than anyone else.

  “Great to see y’all!” Eddie booms, then takes a breath, as if preparing to say something more. I elbow him in the ribs, afraid he’s going to blurt out our news in a fit of masculine pride among so many fecund women. “Ow,” he mutters and rubs his side. I grin insipidly at everyone.

  My grandmother rises from the table. “What’d you bring?” she asks.

  I hand her one of Makiko’s fig tarts, hoping it will make up for our tardiness. She peaks beneath the plastic wrap and looks pleased. “Sorry we’re late,” I say again, then pass around pecks on the cheeks to my aunts and cousins.

  I see the back of Trina’s head, turned around to talk to one of our other cousins behind her. She is the only other blond in the family, but hers comes from peroxide. Dark roots give her away. She struggles a bit to turn around in her chair, and then I see why. A firm round belly sticks out from beneath a tight Harley-Davidson tank top. Her hand fits snugly on the thigh of a weathered guy in a matching shirt sitting beside her. He looks at least ten years older than I am. I stare at both of them, completely dumbfounded. This is not what I had expected.