Ann could have a gem of a garden here. He could help. Show her how to pinch the tomato plants. Build supports for the pole beans and peas. Maybe bring over some fish heads to put in the corn hills. He’d plant a row of zinnias, to surprise her. Maybe build a scarecrow. He won’t mention it to Doris yet.
Ann hears the machine stop and looks out the kitchen window toward the field. Reg is pacing the length of the garden patch, heel to toe. He has hung his cap on one of the handles of his Rototiller and she can see the sun glinting on a round bald patch at the back of his head. He rubs the base of his spine. He looks tired. She takes one of the beers out of the refrigerator and slips on her sandals. She walks toward him.
Wanda and Melissa are having a picnic. The grinders and the Diet Pepsi in the bag are for Wanda, of course, not Melissa. But Wanda has put some grape Kool-Aid in Melissa’s bottle, for a special treat, and set her infant seat on the sand facing Green Lake so she can watch the older kids splashing around. She has put a bandanna over Melissa’s head—tied in the back like a gypsy’s so the bald patches won’t get burned. Now she’s rubbing suntan lotion over Melissa’s legs. Melissa likes this. She has opened her eyes, finally.
They’re going to have fun. Wanda looks around at the other mothers, watching what they do. The woman a couple of towels over from her, for instance. She’s probably ten years older than Wanda, but Wanda feels like the old one. This woman has three kids, plus the older boy has brought a friend. She has a homemade picnic in her cooler—roast chicken and bananas, little boxes of raisins and individually wrapped brownies. She has on a white bikini and her stomach is flat and tanned. A minute ago she was building sand castles with the little girl. Now she’s pulling the littlest boy around in the water, which is still very cold, but just bearable. Doesn’t she ever get tired?
Wanda is the only one on the whole beach that doesn’t have a bathing suit on. She’s wearing one of her maternity tops, no bra on account of the heat. The waistband of her cut-offs is too tight, so a roll of skin is pushed up over the edge and Wanda notices for the first time that the flesh on her upper arms is getting saggy too. She studies the woman in the white bikini, running out of the water, her breasts bouncing just a little, like on Charlie’s Angels, watches as the woman bends over her little boy with a fluffy blue towel. Wanda knows she will never have a rear end like that again.
A little kid, maybe three or four, rushes past, leaving a few drips from his watering can on Melissa’s leg. “Aku,” says Melissa. She always chews on her fist like this when she’s happy.
Wanda is thinking about last winter, when she was pregnant. Expecting, is how Mrs. Ramsay used to put it. Back when it seemed exciting to step on the scale and find out she’d gained another two pounds. Of course she loves Melissa more than anything in the world and she wouldn’t trade her for any other baby or even change the little red birthmark on her forehead. Of course having a real baby you can cuddle and wash and put outfits on is better than just imagining. But back in January it was like carrying around this fancy package, looking at it every day, wondering what’s inside. As long as you don’t open it you can always pretend it might be a diamond ring or the keys to a moped or something. Once you open it, there will always be a million things that won’t be inside, even if what’s there is what you wanted the most. You’ve got it. You just aren’t expecting anymore, that’s all.
Wanda wanted to be a skater. In the Olympics, in the Ice Capades, like Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill. Not Linda Fratianne, although Wanda watched her in the winter Olympics on TV and realizes that she is very good. Her triple toe loops and a couple of her double salchows were perfect, Dick Button said. She just isn’t a dancer the way Peggy Fleming is, in Wanda’s opinion. Of course people would laugh if she told them this—now especially—but Wanda thinks she could have been a better skater than Linda Fratianne, if she just had someone to show her the moves.
There was a thaw, back in January, when the temperature went up to fifty and all the snow melted. The crocuses even thought it was spring, started pushing through the dirt. Everybody was going around with no coats on, sitting outside Sal’s eating ice creams.
Then came the full moon and a cold snap. All of a sudden the thermometer went down to zero and stayed there. In two days Green Lake was glass, the way you almost never get it because there will usually be snow to mess up the surface or winds to make it all ripply. Wanda was eight months pregnant, feeling like she was carrying around a lead ball, sitting in front of the TV watching all those skaters spinning around on Lake Placid, wishing it was her. She just wanted to feel light and free again. She didn’t even care if people saw her walking down Route 9 at midnight with her stomach out to here and figure skates hanging over her shoulder, or that it was a mile walk, and still bitter cold, or that her skates were so tight, because she had this problem with fluid retention in her feet.
Nobody ever needed to show her how to do a figure eight. Also, Wanda made up some movements she never saw anybody else try. A half turn backward, then a half step forward, then a little turning jump—it’s hard to explain. There’s more to it than the feet anyway. Wanda likes to pretend, when she’s skating, that she’s a deaf person, and the way she moves her arms is like her sign language, instead of talking.
The woman in the white bathing suit has been swimming across the lake. (Her friend, in a red one-piece, is watching the kids.) She has been swimming for about ten minutes now, and she’s still not over to the other side. Last January Wanda, eight months pregnant, on her skates, made it across like an arrow. Then she threw her parka down on the ice, also her sweater, so all she had on, on top, was a short-sleeved T-shirt, and still she wasn’t cold. If she told someone like Sandy about that, Wanda’s sure they’d be shocked, say, “What if you fell? You could’ve hurt the baby.” But Wanda never falls when she’s skating, and knows if things were always how they were that night, she and Melissa would be safe.
Suddenly—this has never happened before—Melissa is laughing. The little boy with the watering can is back, sprinkling one of Melissa’s feet. “Want me to do your piggies?” he says.
“Aku,” says Melissa. “Ku, ku.”
“This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had … had …” He looks over at Wanda. She can’t help him. Her mother never told her nursery rhymes, that’s for sure.
He gives up, runs back to his towel. Melissa begins to make her little hurt-puppy noise.
“Be a good girl and I’ll take you in the water,” says Wanda. Melissa doesn’t pay any attention. Wanda looks around at the other mothers, wishes the little boy could come back. She never knows what she’s supposed to do at times like this. Melissa is not interested in the grape Kool-Aid.
“Mommy take you swimming,” says Wanda. She wades in, with Melissa, still whimpering, in her arms. Realizes, just as the water laps up over her waist, that when her shirt gets wet it’s going to stick to her breasts and she’ll look gross. The woman in the white bikini is standing a few feet away, tossing her son in the air, catching him, raising him high over her head again. Wanda thinks she’ll try that.
They’re in pretty deep. If Wanda didn’t catch Melissa she would just sink. She might sputter around for a minute—the bandanna would come off, float to the top—but that would be all. Everybody’s so busy watching their own kids, nobody would even notice.
I’m going nuts, Wanda thinks, catching hold of Melissa by both arms, tight. I am a terrible person.
Everybody must be looking at her now. What kind of a mother doesn’t even know how to make her own baby stop screaming? But what kind of a kid doesn’t appreciate a picnic at the beach? Wanda tries her best. Who wouldn’t go a little crazy, putting up with this racket?
One good swat and the baby’s quiet.
Only a minute ago Ron Guidry looked unhittable and now this. Long fly ball to center field, going going gone. See you later. Number ten for Jimmy Rice. Pandemonium in the stands.
“Way to
go, Rice,” says Mark, taking a large bite of his pig in a blanket. His dinner is sitting on a TV tray. The Red Sox have just taken over the lead.
“I don’t believe that guy,” he yells.
“Shh, honey,” says Sandy, coming over from the sink, where she’s washing the supper dishes. “You’ll wake the baby.”
Mark says nothing. Fred Lynn is up. Solid hit.
“Way to be,” Mark yells. Louder.
Sandy dries the bowl she used for dip. She sits down next to Mark, snuggles against his chest. She can remember watching him play basketball back in high school. She would be so nervous when he was going to make a foul shot, her hands got all wet. She was so proud when he scored.
“Remember that forward that used to play for Sanborn High?” says Sandy. “And he tried to pick me up that time, during the half?”
“Not now, O.K.?” Ken Harrelson is reminiscing about Carl Yaztremski’s golden sixty-seven season. Mark lights up a thirty-five-cent cigar he has bought for the game. Sandy clears away his plate.
She should be glad. So many nights he wants to have sex and all she wants to do is go to sleep. While he’s doing it she’s thinking what will she make for his dinner tomorrow? did she remember to put Vaseline on Mark Junior’s bottom?
It’s not that she’s so horny tonight. She doesn’t even understand why, but she feels scared about something. She’s not sure if it has to do with the article she read today that said ages seventeen to twenty-four are the sexual prime of men. When their appetite’s the strongest. She’s not sure if it has to do with the look on Mark’s face when he saw Jill’s breasts last night, or Jill’s mentioning that she saw Mark outside Felsen’s this morning, when he said he was going straight to work. Jill saying he’s so sexy, your husband. Her mother, right in the middle of telling her about Pauline Fisher, looking up and saying, “If they aren’t getting it at home, you know, they start looking for it somewhere else.” Scrubbing Mark Junior in his blue plastic tub, being particularly careful with his little penis and his scrotum, on account of the rash. When she rubbed the soap around the rim of his foreskin he got an erection. Thinking I wish there wasn’t such a thing as sex. I wish there could just be hugging and kissing and having Christmas and going places like the Hopkinton fair. She’s scared of the things sex makes people do. It seems like something out of her control. It’s like having a gun in the house that’s loaded and you never know when somebody might pick it up and blow their brains out.
Bottom of the ninth, Yankees with one out. Sox ahead by one, but there are two men on base. The fans are going crazy. Reggie’s up next.
Sandy rises from the couch. It’s like she’s hypnotized. She walks over to the set. Not in front of it—she knows not to do that. Next to it. She unbuttons her black blouse and lays it on the floor beside her. She unzips her black velveteen pants and slides them down her legs. Pulls off her socks. What is she doing? What would those girls do that work in nightclubs? She turns around and wiggles her rear end, peeling down her panties partway. She faces him again and cups her hands under her breasts, does a jump from one of her old cheering routines. Then she takes her panties off and brings them to him, twirling them in one hand. She should have thought to wear newer ones. This pair is stretched out of shape from when she was pregnant.
She stands over him, lowering herself into a split. Not sure if she can still do it. He’s just staring ahead; partly at her, partly at the game. The cigar’s still in his mouth.
“Here comes the pitch,” the announcer is saying. “Burleson scoops it up, flips to second. Remy takes the throw, fires to first. Pretty double play.”
“Fuck me,” she says. She has never said the f word before.
“Perfect timing,” says Mark. The Red Sox win.
Chapter 7
MRS. RAMSAY HAS BOUGHT four skeins of two-ply pink Sport Yarn and taken out her number-five needles. Now she is casting on eighty-eight stitches. She is making another duck sweater.
Merv’s guest this afternoon is Susan Anton. Poor girl. Mrs. Ramsay knows (although Susan Anton is not talking about this) that she’s in love with Sylvester Stallone, who has left her. Of course, it is good that Sylvester—Sly, they call him that—has gone back to his wife, Sasha. And most important, their two sons. The youngest is just a year old. What kind of a father would leave a baby like that? He does not deserve to have a baby at all. If he and Sasha get married again and then they get divorced, Sasha had better get custody, that’s all. None of this Dustin Hoffman business. Babies belong with a woman. Not necessarily the mother, if she is a slut. But babies need the woman’s touch.
Tonight she called the mother and invited her and Baby for dinner tomorrow. She will serve cream of mushroom soup and she will make it with heavy cream, not milk. She will serve stuffed pork chops and rolls with butter and baked potatoes with sour cream and asparagus with cheese sauce and blueberry pie à la mode. The mother is going to get very fat; she will get sores on the inside of her thighs where they rub together. Her fingers will get so puffy she won’t be able to get off that class ring she wears. Fake emerald. They will have to cut it. If her son Dwight could see her now, he would wonder why he ever wanted to do those things with her. Although she has not heard from her son Dwight in a while.
After the blueberry pie Mrs. Ramsay will explain her plan to the mother. She will remove the eighteen hundred and twenty-six dollars from page 200 of Joy of Cooking. Mrs. Ramsay will put this money in the mother’s fat hands and take out the paper she typed, that she had notarized, that says the mother admits she is a slut and Mrs. Ramsay should take care of Baby from now on. After the mother signs it Mrs. Ramsay will tell her to leave and never come back. She is not worried that someday the mother might return like that mother in the Dustin Hoffman movie. She will do it with so many men that she will have lots more babies. She will get fatter and fatter. Before long she’ll be paying people to take them.
Mrs. Ramsay will not even go back to the mother’s apartment to get Baby’s things, although it is a shame to think of those beautiful sweaters. Never mind; she can make lots more.
She would like to find out more about that machine with the tubes you hook up to your nipples.
She will call the baby Susan.
The dress makes Carla look a little like the mother on Lassie. Greg had pictured her as more like one of those stark black-and-white Dorothea Lange photographs from the Depression, but Carla has attached a plastic pin of The Incredible Hulk to the collar. She likes the dress a lot. “This would have cost thirty dollars in SoHo,” she said.
For dinner they had snow peas and water chestnuts and shrimp with lobster sauce, made in the electric wok. They have almost finished a bottle of soave and now Greg is rolling a joint. From the kitchen Carla is telling him she will grow lots of basil this summer and make pesto sauce in the Cuisinart. Enough to freeze some and bring it back to New York in the fall. Greg does not say that he has been thinking he would like to stay on through the winter here, tell the Walker School to find another art teacher. He imagines Packers Falls encrusted with ice.
“Didn’t think I’d believe she was forty-two years old,” Carla is saying. “When the truth is, she looks fifty.” She has been telling him something about a woman who stopped by today selling makeup.
Carla does not mention that she told Doris Johnson she was pregnant.
“I didn’t think they even made hair spray anymore,” she says. He lets out his breath, watches the smoke disappear. He wonders how old that girl was at the secondhand store. Sixteen or seventeen probably. But nothing like his students in the city, with their punk outfits from Fiorucci and Caribbean tans. She was so pale.
He puts on an old Van Morrison album. Carla sits on the floor next to him with a plateful of Pepperidge Farm cookies. She puts her arms around his chest, under his shirt. He can feel her fingers moving along his ribs, his nipples, under his arms, inside the sleeves of his shirt. He knows they will make love tonight.
“What are you thinking abo
ut?” she says. She’s always asking him that, although his answer is almost always the same.
“Artworks.” The pale girl standing on the large flat rock at the base of the waterfall. An arc of milk shooting out of one breast.
“Hungry for your love,” Van Morrison is singing. “I love you in buckskin.”
“Do you ever think about a baby?” Carla asks.
He’s startled. He sees the blond-haired baby in the secondhand store. Wearing a little ribbon in her hair.
“Because I’ve been thinking about it,” says Carla. They have not talked about this for years.
Greg can’t picture Carla holding a baby. His brother’s kids visit them sometimes. They are five and seven and they love taking sips of Carla’s Tab and riding in the first subway car with Greg holding them up to look out the window. Carla always takes her collection of Japanese robot toys down off the shelf for them to look at. Last time Alex lost the little airplane that used to shoot out of Gojira’s stomach, and Greg could tell Carla was upset, although she said it was all right. Alex thinks Carla is terrific. “Not like other mothers,” he says. That’s true.
“I wonder what it would look like,” says Carla. She’s smoothing down his hair in the place where it sticks out. This always makes him feel like a little boy being cleaned up for church. He runs his hand through his hair to mess it up again.
“What would we do with a baby?” Greg asks. “I thought you didn’t want to be tied down.”
“I could get one of those backpacks they make. We could take it around with us.”
“A baby’s a big commitment,” he says. This is not the sort of comment he usually makes.
Baby Love Page 9
