It turned out the cost of these portraits was 88¢ for each person in the picture, meaning $1.76 for the two of them, and more if you order large prints. But Sandy only had about ten pictures of Mark Junior (she and Mark don’t own a camera), and none of those is good of her. She figured it would be worth the money, getting a professional to take the photograph. And if she ever got the name of a modeling agency for children in Boston, she could send them a print.
There were five backdrops to choose from: a mountain scene, the ocean, a forest, snow in a field and an orange sunset. Sandy wished she could have had more time to think about it, but there was a very long line of children and mothers waiting to have their pictures taken and the photographer was getting impatient. She chose the mountain scene because Mark said one time that he would like to go to Colorado.
She didn’t have enough time to get Mark Junior ready. He was so happy, the whole time they were waiting in line, and then when it was their time he started to cry. If she could have had a minute to do her choo-choo dance with him, she’s sure she could have got him to quiet down. But the photographer was rushing her, sticking a teddy bear in her son’s face, which only made him worse. When he snapped the pictures, Mark’s mouth was open and his face was all red. She didn’t realize until it was over that she hadn’t even taken her coat off.
But they’re going to have a nice dinner. She had to take off the white dress because Mark Junior peed on her during the photography session. But she has put on her black velveteen pants and a black blouse with nothing on underneath. After the baby’s asleep she will let Mark do whatever he wants.
Wanda wishes Melissa would cry. All morning, since Wanda hit her, she did nothing but sleep. Wanda has tried all her favorite things—taking Melissa downstairs to Rocky’s to look at the lights on the pinball machine, giving her a bath. She opens her eyes partway and then her head rolls over to one side and she’s asleep again. Now one of her eyes is a little puffed up and there’s a purple spot on her cheek and Wanda cannot keep her hand from shaking. This has only happened one other time, only the other time Melissa hollered very loud, instead of being quiet the way she is now.
She will say Melissa rolled off the changing table. That happened to Tara’s baby one time. It could happen to anyone.
Wanda goes downstairs. She could use a candy bar.
After he has bought the boards for his stretcher, Greg decides to look around Ashford. Not very much to see, really. He likes that. He has lived in the city all his life.
There’s a bowling alley. He’ll take Carla some night. Just like a regular all-American date. They can go out for hamburgers after, at the place he saw down the road. Moonlight Acres. Maybe play miniature golf.
The Grand Union supermarket. K-Mart. Webster’s Clothing, with a dusty mannequin in the window wearing an imitation-leather skirt and vest. A display of work boots. Clearance sale on long Johns.
A couple of antique shops, for the summer tourists, he figures. He already finds himself feeling vaguely superior to those people.
Just-like-nu Shop. Good Used Clothing. He sees a pretty faded cotton dress hanging outside. It looks like something from the forties. Carla’s type of outfit. He stops the car.
A woman comes out on the porch. Probably about forty and very thin, short brown hair, razor cut in the back. Her arms are folded across her chest. He says he’d like the dress. She looks a little surprised. “For your wife?”
“Girlfriend.” It’s the first time he has called Carla that.
“Only thing my husband ever bought me was a Waring blender and a hysterectomy,” she says. “Nicest thing he ever did was leave.”
She’s bringing out more clothes. A long double-knit lounge outfit in pink and orange paisley. A velour minidress. He says this is enough for now, gives the woman a dollar and two quarters.
He sees the girl in the back of the shop. She’s sitting on a wooden stool sipping a Coke. She has the same face as the older woman, and she is very thin too, but not stringy like the mother. Her shirt is pulled up over one breast and she is nursing a yellow-haired baby. He has never seen such white skin—even the baby is less fair. The girl does not notice Greg watching her. She is humming “On Top of Old Smokey.” She has a very pure soprano.
“Do yourself a favor and never have kids,” says the older woman. “They’ll cause you nothing but grief.”
The baby jerks away from the girl, and for a moment Greg can see her small white breast very plainly. A thin stream of milk shoots out from her nipple. She notices him looking then and pulls down her shirt. The baby makes a surprisingly loud burp. Greg reaches down for his bag.
“Come again,” says the woman in a flat voice. “I hope it fits.”
When he gets home he’s still thinking about that girl.
Sitting in the back of the shop, next to misses’ coats, Tara switches breasts. Sunshine has been sucking on the right side almost an hour, but Tara is in no rush to finish. This is her favorite thing in the world.
At the hospital they told her she wouldn’t be able to nurse her baby. Inverted nipples, nothing Sunshine could hold on to. The nurses put her on formula and sugar water without even asking, so when they brought Tara her daughter, the baby was already full, wouldn’t suck. “Forget it,” one of the nurses said. “Breast-feed a kid and you’re trapped. Can’t ever leave her with a sitter.” As if she’d want to.
At night, under the sheet, she worked on her nipples, pulling them, rolling the skin between her fingers. “Suck,” she whispered to Sunshine when they brought her in. “Please suck.” Sunshine would just sneeze every time Tara put her flat nipple up against the baby’s mouth.
On the third day her milk came in. She had a dream of being buried in the sand, woke to find her breasts huge and dripping, aching. Still Sunshine wouldn’t suck, and the milk seemed to solidify, as if there was gelatin inside. By nighttime her breasts were hard and lumpy. The nurses told her she’d better take the drugs soon, to make her dry up. No. Tara’s mother came to see her that night, after she closed the shop. “Jesus,” she said. “You look like you’re full of tumors.” Mrs. Farley has had (in addition to her hysterectomy) two radical mastectomies, and knows the look.
All that night she lay awake in her hospital bed, pulling on her nipples. At twelve, two and four, she could hear the woman in the next bed nursing her day-old son, whispering to him, big boy, take it easy, little man, go to it. The infant’s lips smacking, slurping. Just the sound, even somebody else’s baby, made Tara drip. Two wet spots on her nightgown.
The next morning her nipples stood out and Sunshine took hold, wouldn’t let go, gained two ounces. From then, that was where she lived, at Tara’s breasts. They didn’t stay big very long—two weeks maybe—but Tara knew from her book that size has nothing to do with how much milk you’ve got.
She has tasted it, squeezed a little out with her fingers, licked it off the corners of Sun’s mouth when she’s taking a break. It’s watery and sweet, very different from the formula Sandy and Wanda give their babies. My body makes milk, she thinks, over and over. She can’t get over it, that she can create something they sell at the Grand Union. Her body works.
Sandy has her son on a feeding schedule. A bottle every four hours, a pacifier in between. Wanda feeds Melissa when she cries. Tara just holds Sunshine always, and when Sun begins to root around in the fabric of her shirt, when she makes this little kissing sound, Tara gives her a breast. She has no idea (Sandy asked her this) how many ounces it all adds up to. Tara drinks two quarts of milk a day, never eats any chocolate or onions or potato chips or TV dinners, anything like that. She tries not to get upset, because when she does (when her mother talks about putting Sunshine up for adoption, for instance) she can feel her glands tightening up, feel the milk stop and the hard little lumps begin to form again. Tara just walks out of the room now, when her mother begins to talk like that. She’s not about to expose her milk to harmful vibrations.
She has read about milk banks—place
s where nursing mothers donate extra milk, expressed with a suction pump—for mothers who can’t breast-feed. If there were one of those milk banks around here, Tara would like to contribute. Everybody always said how skinny she was, how pale. Now she knows how powerful she is, really. She forgets, sometimes, that she doesn’t have milk actually coursing through her veins, pumping through her heart. That’s what it feels like. That could be why she’s so white.
Here is something wonderful. There is some kind of brain in her breasts that knows just when to open the dam, let the milk flow. It’s so sensitive that Tara can be flipping through a magazine and come to a Gerber’s ad or something, and her milk will begin to drip. One time when she was sitting by the Laundromat, some woman’s toddler got her hand caught in the door of the dryer and began to scream. And Tara’s breasts—both at once—shot out twin fountains. Sunshine was asleep in the laundry basket at the time, so there was no mouth to catch it, and the milk just dripped down the front of Tara’s shirt, some of it making a wet place on the sidewalk. Tara didn’t care if people saw her (as they often do) walking home with two round wet circles on the cloth over her breasts. She’s proud.
Sal has been in the back room five minutes, taking inventory, and Jill is getting impatient because it’s time to check her pregnancy test. Tara came in for a Coke a few minutes ago and Sandy stopped by to find out what happened. Wanda has been in too, getting something out of the candy machine. One thing’s for sure—if Jill is pregnant, she will never get fat like that.
They will have a June wedding. She would like to have it in a church. She thinks of Virgil in the lavender tuxedo he wore when he took her to last year’s prom, with a ruffled shirt and cuff links. Sandy will be matron of honor and Ricky Edwards, whom she used to baby-sit for, can be ring bearer. Jill will carry sweetheart roses and baby’s breath.
They’ll get an apartment in the new development out by the lake, with wall-to-wall carpeting and color TV. She’ll work for another three months or so, to save up money for the layette. Sandy will probably give her a shower. Mark will give Virgil a bachelor party before the wedding too. The guys will tell jokes like the ones she has seen in Virgil’s copy of Playboy. She doesn’t mind.
She wishes Virgil would grow a beard. It would make him look older. Also his chin sort of blends into his neck more than it should. Unlike Mark’s, for instance. In Jill’s opinion, Mark is better looking than Erik Estrada.
She has only seen one naked man in her whole life. In June she will make a vow in the sight of God that she will never be with any other man ever. She wonders what it might be like with someone different. She thinks about the noises Donna Summer makes on that record “Love to Love You, Baby.” She can’t imagine making noises like that with Virgil. Sometimes she has heard her father, in the night. But her mother never makes a sound except afterwards, when she runs the water.
Jill and Virg will be nothing like Jill’s parents, of course. They’ll still smoke grass, go roller skating. Jill will do crazy things like draw a face on the tip of his penis with Magic Marker. They’ll let their kids stay up late if they want to, teach them the words to all the top forty songs. Sometimes—even though they have a double bed—they’ll still go down to Packers Falls and screw. Jill will never look like her mother. She would kill herself first.
But she knows Doris and Reg were not always the way they are now. She has seen pictures of her mother as a teenager—never pretty, but always grinning, in spite of her buckteeth, with curly blond hair that always looked a little out of control. There’s one picture of Doris and her two girlfriends dressed up like boys for Halloween. The other girls look pretty flat on top, but Doris was really busty in the picture, and she’s looking down at her chest, making this funny, surprised expression. Jill wonders what happened, because now Doris is all withered-up-looking on top, and the only expression she ever makes looks like a prune.
Jill has seen pictures of her father too, when he was just Virgil’s age. You couldn’t call him cute, like Mark or Virgil, but there’s something about him in those pictures—Jill feels a little funny admitting this—that’s very sexy. He never smiles and he always stands straight in front of the camera, looking like something important is going on. In most of the pictures he’s wearing a checked coat and a bow tie—always the same clothes—and the occasion is almost always Easter Sunday, with the family heading off to church. But there’s one (Jill’s favorite) of Reg wearing baggy work pants and a sleeveless undershirt, holding a giant pumpkin with a ribbon taped to it. First prize in the 4-H fair. When you look close you can read the names “Doris” and “Reginald” carved in the pumpkin, with a heart around them. When she was little Jill thought that was some type of magic pumpkin, like in Cinderella, but then her father explained that what you do is, when the pumpkin’s very little, just forming on the vine, you scratch the words in the skin, and by the time it’s ready to pick there’s a deep scar forming the letters. He wrote “Jill” on a baby acorn squash one time, but it got killed by frost before it was ready to eat.
Her parents had to get married. They don’t know she knows that, but she figured it out. First of all, her mother was always so vague about their wedding date. When she was little, Jill loved making greeting cards for every special occasion, even things like Arbor Day and Richard Nixon’s birthday. “So when is your anniversary?” she kept asking. “Sometime in the spring,” Doris said. “I’ve stopped keeping track.” And then Jill looked in the family Bible her uncle had, and sure enough, the date was just six months before Timmy’s birthday.
She can’t imagine her mother lying on pine needles with her knees apart, or in the backseat of some old jalopy, her father telling her (the way Virgil used to), “Honey, I have to or my dick could get petrified.” She was fourteen years old, and she actually believed him.
Her mother was probably asleep when it happened. She’s sure her mother never felt the way Jill does, which is very horny sometimes. Not just with Virg, but at all sorts of odd moments, like when one of the lifeguards at Green Lake threw her in the water one time after junior lifesaving class, and when her biology teacher showed this film strip about primates and explained what it means when a baboon’s rear end turns bright red. Sometimes she gets that way all by herself, even, lying in bed, thinking about Rod Stewart, pretending she’s his wife, Alana, or looking at the picture she has on her wall of John Travolta with his shirt unbuttoned and his mouth partway open.
Of course, once you’re married you aren’t supposed to think about those people anymore. And there will be lots of good things to make up for it, like all the wedding presents and taking showers together and not having any more curfews. Jill wonders if everybody’s penis looks like Virgil’s.
She feels sad for her father, that the only woman he ever got to screw was her mother. She thinks about that time last summer when Reg picked her and Wanda up at the beach and all they had on was their bikinis (Wanda was pregnant then, but not enough to show). They all had to squeeze in the front of the truck, along with some groceries he’d got, with Wanda in the middle. He had this look on his face.
Of course it will be wonderful having a little baby, Virgil Junior. Jill’s mother can take care of it sometimes.
If by any chance she isn’t pregnant after all, Jill is going to get some birth control pills. So what if they make her gain a few pounds?
She imagines that her tongue is in John Travolta’s mouth. She inhales when he exhales. They are breathing the same air.
Let me taste you, he says. Virgil would never do that, in a million years.
“We need more plastic straws and ketchup,” says Sal, tying on a fresh apron. Jill says she will be back in a second and opens the door to the kitchen.
Three meat patties on the griddle and a piece of apple pie in the microwave. Steam rising from the dishwasher. Toni Tennille singing “Do It to Me One More Time” on the radio. Jill pushes aside the box of coffee filters and reaches for her vial of pee.
There is a red ring
on the paper, plain as a bull’s-eye.
At three o’clock the garden is finished. It was a slow job because the soil has not been cultivated for ten years at least and the weeds were pretty thick. Reg’s shirt is wet under the arms and there’s a damp V-shaped patch on his back. But he likes this kind of work. As he pushed the tiller, he was picturing eight rows of Golden Bantam corn. A row of yellow wax beans maybe, and a hill of Kentucky Wonder. Half a dozen Big Boy tomato plants, with marigolds and nasturtiums in between to keep the pests away. Watermelon.
He’s always had a touch with plants. People used to tell him he could never get good melons this far north, but he grew them the color of raspberries inside, so juicy you’d tie a towel around your neck or get soaked eating one.
His father was a farmer. They only had thirty acres—the Johnsons were always hard up—but it was good land, southern exposure, clear of stones. Reg used to take a blue ribbon at the 4-H booth in the Deerfield fair every September, for his corn.
By the time he married Doris—she was three months along with Timmy, they were both eighteen years old—his father was dead and the farm belonged to Reg.
Doris said sell the land, I don’t want to spend my whole life smelling cow manure. She signed him up to sell World Book encyclopedias, door to door. Bought him a suit. She loved it when he wore that suit.
But he’s no kind of salesman, and the only one who ever bought an encyclopedia was Reg himself. Doris said it would be a good thing to have, for the baby. Not that he ever saw Timmy open any volume except R, which Timmy and his friend Skipper used to look at all the time for Reproduction. That was about it.
He joined the service for a while—didn’t like being so far from the kids. When his tour of duty was over he took a job on a construction crew and left his farming to the one patch of their yard—thirty feet square—that got any kind of sun, and not much at that. He has always felt ashamed of the produce that comes out of the garden. Yellowish tomatoes, cauliflowers you have to cut hunks out of, where the cabbage moths have got to them. His son and daughter have never been interested in growing things. He would like them to know he can do better than that.
Baby Love Page 8
