A Big Storm Knocked It Over

by Laurie Colwin

  “And you pointed out how elegant I looked compared to all the other pregnant brides,” Edie said.

  “I don’t know why weddings make people feel this way,” Jane Louise said. “To Sven it’s just legal fucking, eventual obligations, and court fees.”

  “He’s an old war-horse at these things,” Edie said.

  “Well, it comes from a very deep place,” Jane Louise said. “Even though Dan looks kind of a twerp and Daphne has about a molecule of brain, they looked so pretty and they pressed all those buttons: hope, promise, new starts, and young love, and all that stuff.”

  “We’re too old for that stuff,” Edie said.

  “It’s true,” Jane Louise said. “We’re about struggle, dislocation, and marrying aliens, right?”

  “Well, we’re having babies,” Edie said. “We’re still young enough for that stuff.”

  “Barely,” said Jane Louise. “This whole thing was hardest on Teddy. He really suffered. I think it was really terrible for him when his father married Martine.”

  Teddy’s father had sent him a suit for that occasion. It had needed to be tailored, so he had been driven into town by his mother, who had dropped him off at the local tailoring shop while she went to browse in a bookshop. It was perfectly clear to Teddy, at age eight, that his mother could not bear to witness her son’s being fitted for this wedding suit. Teddy had stood, sweating with heat and embarrassment, as the tailor fussed and pinned.

  His mother’s awful feeling about this event—even though she had no use for Cornelius whatsoever—had burned into Teddy like acid on an etching plate. She had not wanted to burden him with these feelings, and as a result, he was almost sick with anger and dread.

  Teddy had not liked Martine. The sight of his father kissing this person upset him very much. He did not like her accent or the pitch of her voice, and he had not known what to say to her when she spoke to him. His boyish feelings had been in total chaos, and yet he had found himself at his father’s wedding standing beside him in a church he had never seen before. He had sat next to his father and Martine at the wedding lunch, and then had been driven home by his Uncle Charlie, his father’s brother. He was sick by the side of the road halfway home.

  He had been handed, pale and shaky, over to his mother, who put him straight to bed. The smell of his own house, the sight of his own room, his mother’s neutral, rather astringent scent, made his eyes swim.

  This was put down to too much excitement, cake, and champagne. He remembered dozing off in his bed. From his room he could hear his mother and uncle chatting pleasantly. This had soothed him and made him feel that something was almost right.

  Edie had heard this story before. It was a variant form of a story Mokie told of being invited to a wedding and being taken for a parking attendant.

  Daphne and Dan would have a big, leather-bound book of wedding photos. Jane Louise kept her small batch in a pine box, and Mokie and Edie had a few very nice pictures Teddy had taken the day of their wedding—the two of them holding hands, Edie in a blue smock, visibly pregnant, her fuzzy hair in a halo around her head, carrying the bouquet Jane Louise had given her. Jane Louise remembered the details of Daphne’s wedding: the pink and white jordan almonds in little pink baskets, the five-tiered cake on top of which stood a tiny plastic bride and groom. Weddings were definitely about destiny, for better or worse.

  Jane Louise fished a list out of her handbag.

  “We should get serious,” she said to Edie. “This layette business.”

  “It would be nice to know why it’s called that,” Edie said. “I think all babies should be dressed in black to show them off.”

  “Or white, if you have a darky,” Jane Louise said.

  “It is weird wondering how dark your offspring will be,” Edie said. “Of course, you don’t have this problem. But I may end up with a little chocolate baby.”

  “Or spotted,” Jane Louise said. “Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”

  “It would make it easier on Mommy and Daddy. They could tell everyone it has a disease,” Edie said.

  Jane Louise always wondered that Edie still called her parents Mommy and Daddy. These frightful people, who did not, in Jane Louise’s opinion, deserve to have such a nice daughter, had not taken the news of Edie’s pregnancy very well. It caught them off guard. They had spent so long denying that Mokie was anything more than Edie’s business partner that they had never given much thought to their strategy should he have proved to be anything more. Since they had not wanted to imagine such a circumstance, they had no presentation ready for it. On the bus Jane Louise and Edie tried to make one up.

  “They could say that Mokie raped you and then decided to be a man about it,” Jane Louise said.

  “They could say that this is the consequence of anthropological research,” Edie said.

  “Or that you are part of a widespread do-good movement that believes passionately in miscegenation as the answer to world peace,” Jane Louise said.

  “Oh, that’s very good,” Edie said. “They’d love that.”

  “Sven refers to your impending as ‘the project in black and white,’” Jane Louise said.

  “How stylish!” Edie said. “Mokie feels we should have a black-and-white party when it’s born—you know, date-and-nut bread with cream cheese, marble cake, black-and-white sundaes, Irish coffee.”

  “Yik,” said Jane Louise.

  “Or little plates of mashed potatoes with black caviar. Or truffles and egg whites.”

  “What do they say, do you think?”

  “They lower their voices and say what a wonderful person Mokie is and that they pray life won’t be awful for us as an interracial couple, and how they back us one hundred percent. And we will look nice at all those racial harmony events they go to. I mean, it’ll show how brave they are that their daughter went the distance.”

  Jane Louise eyed her friend. She had never heard Edie, who was so careful and muted about her family, speak this way. Edie’s wide hazel eyes were awash.

  “Come along, Miss Edith,” Jane Louise said. “It’ll be okay.”

  Tears slid down Edie’s cheeks. “Oh, Janey. They’re so horrid. Mokie suffers this stuff so silently. He’s so cheerful and stoical, but he’s sort of like Teddy. Being down is pretty far down for him. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s pretty awful when it does. It’s very depressing to see your parents not love your loved one.”

  “Charlie and my mother weren’t so thrilled with Teddy, as you recall,” Jane Louise said. “At Daphne’s wedding I had a long think about Nora’s wedding years ago. I was her bridesmaid only because I was her sister and she had to have me, but she didn’t really want to, and for about ten years afterward my father complained that he was still paying off the debt. It was the year before you and I met at college. You should have seen it—all this stuff dragged out to impress the Benitez-Cohens, and they probably never thought much about us anyway because we didn’t have any money. But Jaime! He has tons of money, he makes tons of money, they have that enormous house in San Francisco, and tons of famous people to be friends with and genius children, and Jaime gets his name in the paper all the time, and Nora gives parties that get reviewed! What are we compared with that?”

  “Dust,” Edie said. “Sand. Cobwebs.”

  “Yes,” Jane Louise said sadly. “Why are people’s families so horrible? And here we are, just about to start our own. Do you suppose these fetuses will someday not be able to stand us?”

  “Oh, doubtless,” Edie said. “But they’ll have each other.”

  “Sven’s children adore him,” Jane Louise said. “Maybe our children will adore us because we’ll be good, and if even a totally inadequate parent like Sven, who’d probably put the arm on his daughter if it were legal, can get love, maybe we will, too.”

  “Yes, Sven is a beacon of hope,” Edie said. “Such a swine and such devoted children, although perhaps little Piers will turn out to be a serial killer with thighbones hidden under the floor
boards. Here’s our stop.”

  They entered a place called Bubby’s Baby World. It was like entering a museum full of the cultural artifacts of another culture: rockers, strollers, things to hang a baby in, buntings, stretchies, tiny garments of every description, plus dozens of varieties of bottles, hotplates, warmers for baby food, tiny forks and spoons, some with oddly shaped handles, nightlights in the shape of ducks, lambs, cats, and moons. Rattles filled with plastic stars or beans. Objects that could be grasped by a tiny fist and made to whirl in different colors. Baby strollers, some with hoods, some with little umbrellas suspended from springs. Side carriers, Snuglis, crib blankets and sheets. One side of the store was devoted to cribs, in colonial, art deco, and rustic style. Cribs that looked as if handmade by Shaker craftspeople. Cribs with flowers handpainted on them. White, pink, and blue cribs, and cribs in natural and stained wood. The sight of this made Jane Louise’s and Edie’s heads spin.

  In back of the clothing counter was a small old man.

  “Hello, girls!” he called out cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

  “Layettes,” said Jane Louise.

  “Congratulations,” the little man said. “Now, what would you like?”

  “Well, cotton baby clothes,” Edie said.

  The man peered up at her. “This we don’t sell,” he said.

  “Really?” said Jane Louise.

  “Listen,” the little man said. “Here we have only flame-retardant materials. You know, if you would take a piece of cotton and hold it up to a seventy-five-watt bulb, in one hour that piece of cloth would be on fire.”

  “I promise you,” Jane Louise said, “I have no intention of holding my baby up to a seventy-five-watt light bulb for even half an hour. It never entered my mind.”

  “You’d be surprised,” the man said.

  “I would be stunned,” Jane Louise said. “But you have cotton undershirts or whatever you call them, don’t you?”

  “These we have.” He gave the girls a long look to assess their ages. “Boys or girls?” he asked.

  “We don’t know,” Edie said.

  “Most of my ladies know,” the man said. “It saves so much time and worry. It takes the guesswork out.”

  “We didn’t ask,” Jane Louise said. “So we thought we’d just try to get black or brown or gray infant clothes.”

  The man looked at her if she were insane.

  “Those they don’t make,” he said kindly. “And you mustn’t ever dye anything for a baby, because the baby could chew on something, and dyed fabric is poison.”

  “We hadn’t thought of that,” said Jane Louise.

  “You’d be surprised,” the man said. “What about white or yellow?”

  “That sounds right for any gentler,” Edie said.

  “Somehow,” the man said, “I don’t feel you girls are taking this very seriously.”

  “We are,” Jane Louise said. “After all, we’re pregnant.”

  “Besides yellow, white, pink, and blue, don’t you have any colors?” Edie asked.

  “Babies just need to be warm, they don’t need colors,” the man said. “Have a baby shower, and your friends will give you fancy. Here we have basic. Do you have a list?”

  Jane Louise and Edie looked at each other. Neither had a list nor any idea what they were supposed to have besides undershirts, which, they had been told, were the most important item of baby wear.

  “We don’t know,” Jane Louise said. “What do they need? High socks? Kilts? Earmuffs?”

  “Ach! You girls are teasing me,” the man said. “All young ladies are born with this knowledge.”

  “We’re not young,” Jane Louise said. “We might have been born with it, but we outgrew it.”

  “We’ll just put ourselves in your hands,” Edie said.

  On the way home it began to sleet. Jane Louise and Edie hunched together on the bus surrounded by large shopping bags.

  “Didn’t it sort of creep you out when he said, ‘Now all you need is the baby’?” Jane Louise said.

  “The whole thing is so totally weird,” Edie said. “Won’t it just be a hoot and a half when we take the boys this weekend to pick out cribs? I liked that Shaker-looking one.”

  “I did, too, but it costs a fortune,” Jane Louise said.

  “Did it?” Edie said. “I didn’t even look.”

  “We both better start looking at prices, Miss Edith. We’re going to be moms, and neither of us has a bean. Did I tell you about that lady and her shoes?”

  “Tell,” Edie said.

  “I was browsing around in the bookstore the other day at lunchtime. This woman came in wearing a heather maternity smock and a violet cape,” Jane Louise said. “She looked as if she was about to deliver on the counter. She was wearing the most gorgeous shoes I have ever seen. Kind of that lawbook dark tan calf, very plain, low heel. I asked her where she got them, and she said they came from Andrew Paulsen. That place is extremely pricey. I’ve never been in it, but I said to myself, ‘I’m pregnant, and I want those shoes.’ So I nosed over and there they were. I looked at the price tag and realized that my days of buying shoes like that were over, what with school tuition and like that.”

  “School tuition for the unborn,” Edie said. “Well, it’s like chatting with Mrs. Teagarden. When she was pregnant, she had everything made for her and got this cabinetmaker in Maine to make the crib, and imported the nanny from Ireland, and had the room stenciled, and got one of those machines that sounds like the mother’s heartbeat.”

  “A machine that sounds like the mother’s heartbeat,” Jane Louise said musingly. “I thought that was called the mother.”

  “She didn’t intend to be around all that much,” Edie said. “What with entertaining and all. She asked me if I intended to nurse and told me that she had actually managed to locate a wet nurse, but it didn’t work out at the last minute.”

  “And did she find a dairymaid and an alchemist, too?”

  “She finds them. Now she’s planning a Christmas party. She said to me: ‘I don’t know what I want for Christmas. I have everything.’ I said, ‘What about a large cashmere shawl?’ and she said, ‘Oh, I have drawers full of them.’”

  “She can send one over to me,” Jane Louise said. “I wonder what her wedding was like.”

  “She told me,” Edie said. “Winter fantasy. Small children dressed as cherubs.”

  “And a cake in the shape of a large pile of thousand-dollar bills,” Jane Louise said. “I have nothing.”

  “Well, the thing about the Teagardens is they have to be themselves, whereas we get to be us.”

  “How swell,” Jane Louise said. “And when we’re dead we will be reconciled to it.”

  CHAPTER 27

  As the winter began, Jane Louise became amazed at the form her body was taking. She and Edie discussed it endlessly. They felt they looked slightly ridiculous, like cranes carrying bowling balls. Every other part of them remained skinny while they bulged, spherelike, in front. Teddy and Mokie seemed to be transfixed. Their lank, fleet wives, who were so precise in matters relating to style, were suddenly slightly fuzzy and off balance.

  Around Teddy, Jane Louise realized that she was paying a kind of deference to what she felt was his solemn awe at her condition. How much the idea of fatherhood meant to him humbled her, and her anxiety, which floated freely at the best of times now, took a definite bent: Supposing the baby she produced was not right in some way? Supposing she was incapable of producing a nice, straight child with all its faculties intact?

  Sven, as ever, was helpful in this matter. Glancing at her round belly he said: “I don’t think any baby produced by you would be particularly straight.”

  “Thank you, Sven,” said Jane Louise. “Now be a good person and bugger off.”

  “How charming you’ll look with a little wriggling baby in your arms,” Sven said. “They go with everything, you know, like a string of pearls.”

  “Thank you, Sven,” said Jane Louis
e. “Now be a good person and buzz off.”

  “Birth,” said Sven. “What a thrill.”

  “For you but not for me,” Jane Louise said.

  “Oh, you’ll love it, Janey,” Sven said. “I know your sort. You’re in this life for the highs.”

  “I’m not too keen on pain,” Jane Louise said, wondering how Sven knew this about her.

  “Oh, pain,” Sven said dismissively. “It’s one of the big deals.”

  “And the others?”

  “Sex, death, birth. Who could ask for anything more?” Sven said.

  “I could,” Jane Louise said. “Glamour, economic security, home ownership, freedom from anxiety, a lizard belt. Shall I go on?”

  “Niceties,” Sven said. “Just wait.”

  Jane Louise had always wondered if Sven was the sort of man to want to witness what she and Edie called “the birth event.” It turned out he was and had. It seemed to her that he would very much like to witness her birth event, although, she pointed out to Sven, this would be a little hard to explain. It seemed to her that he saw aspects of the birth event that had not previously occurred to her, and he attempted to point these out whenever he had a spare minute.

  “Everything is not related to pure eroticism,” she said.

  “Everything I’m interested in is related to pure eroticism,” Sven said.

  “Listen,” said Jane Louise. “I’m a busy woman. I’ve got Hugh Oswald-Murphy and Erna coming in in half an hour to talk about design. Can you believe it? This book gets delayed every ten minutes, I get put on hold every time I design a page, and this guy wants to come in and talk about type. I ask you.”

  “He’s a lush.”

  “How nice for me,” Jane Louise said.

  “He’s a blowhard,” Sven said. “He’s one of those Brit types who has been so enchanted by the sound of his own voice for so long that he goes around bleating like a sheep and expecting everyone to fall to their knees at his every utterance.”

  “Wonderful,” said Jane Louise. “Just my type.”

  “Erna schlepps him around like a battered suitcase,” Sven said. “He looks like he’s coming to pieces. He has one of those wrecked-boy faces those alcoholic Brits have. All yearning and wide-eyed and full of despair.”