Actually, he has always assumed he would have kids. It suddenly occurs to him that he simply hasn’t been picturing himself having them with Carla. Not that he has thought about leaving her.
She got pregnant once, four months after they met. He had come home with a pair of mannequin legs he found in some trash outside a factory on West Twentieth Street. Carla was crying but when she told Greg he felt happy. This was before the teaching job and the only money they had was what they got from Carla’s women’s magazine, which wasn’t very much, and some house painting he did once in a while. Still, Greg had hugged Carla. Then he did a funny little dance around the apartment with the mannequin legs, holding them high, with his cheek against the mannequin’s flat, almost concave stomach. He was very surprised when she had said. “How are we ever going to pay for the abortion?” For that one minute he’d thought they were going to have the baby.
Now Carla’s kissing his eyelids. He strokes her spine, feeling her hipbones, moving his hand over her stomach, down inside her underpants. He’s remembering that first night—Carla in her expensive black suit. They hardly said a word to each other all night, except that afterwards he said, “I want to marry you.” She said, “You’re crazy, it’s too soon to say something like that.”
And it’s true, he probably wouldn’t say that to her now, seven years later, although he really meant it at the time. What Greg believes is that there’s one right time in the universe for things to happen, and if you hedge around, it passes. Carla always says, “I don’t like risks.” In Greg’s opinion, there’s no way to avoid them. It’s just a matter of whether you choose dangerous action or dangerous inaction. If Carla hadn’t tapped him on the shoulder when she did they would never have seen each other again, and if they hadn’t slept together that first night it might never have happened. And even though it was impractical, and a study conducted by her own magazine indicated that having a child in the first year puts undue stress on a relationship, their time to have a baby was six years ago.
His head is on her left breast, the one he likes best because he can hear her heart beating. Her breasts—though she is quite slim—are much larger than that girl’s he saw today. When she lies over him they almost bury his face. He lifts his head up a few inches, just looking at her. Her dress is open to the waist and her eyes are closed. He’s looking at her the way he would if she were one of the models they used to have at art school. Studying the perspective.
She pulls his head down so her nipple is in his mouth. “I feel like a mother,” she says.
It’s almost as if he’s standing about ten feet back; he can see the whole scene that precisely. Carla gripping the neck of his shirt so tight that when he takes it off tomorrow she’ll notice it has been stretched out of shape. The blue vein running along the underside of her breast. Two lemon nut cookies spilled onto the floor, where, in a minute, his shoe will crush them. Van Morrison singing “Put on your pretty summer dress. I want to make love to you, yes, yes.” The toilet draining. (They haven’t learned yet to jiggle the handle when they flush it.) Greg’s hand sliding Carla’s pants down her legs—a little black paint on his palm from the canvas he started today. His penis stiffening, pointing down toward her, following the movements of her hips without actually touching her yet, like one of those overhead microphones they use on Saturday Night Live that move back and forth between Gilda and Laraine. Lowering now, brushing against her pubic hair. Carla guiding his mouth to her other breast. Greg sinking down. Carla whispering, “I feel so soft and moist.” Greg focusing on a piece of a feather that is coming out of one of their floor pillows. Greg pushing down, inside her now. The record player clicking off. Water rushing over the falls.
What Greg sees now is the pale girl, standing on the rocks. She is wearing the dress he bought, unbuttoned, and there is milk shooting from both nipples, splashing on the rocks. Like that painting Origin of the Milky Way. It is at just this moment—just as he feels his semen rising, shooting out—that he realizes Carla did not get up to put in her diaphragm.
Jill and Virg are parked at their favorite spot, the miniature golf course next to Moonlight Acres, which won’t be open for another two weeks. Jill likes looking out the window at the little wooden windmill and the miniature bridge and the imitation brick schoolhouse, hole number five. Her favorite is the church, which is also a very difficult hole, although one time she got through it with just one stroke.
Normally they would be making out right now in the backseat. Virgil would have a cassette in the tape player—Fleetwood Mac or The Cars or Donna Summer—and there would be beer in the cooler in the front, and some chips. What they usually do is, they make out for one side of a tape, but they don’t go all the way. Then they have a snack and sometimes they’ll do something weird like drive right through the middle of town with Jill wearing her shirt and her jacket, but bare-assed. Or Virg will put her bra on over his down vest and stuff it with Kleenex or something. Then they make out some more and Jill lets Virg go all the way. Then he drops her off at home. She’s supposed to be back by twelve-thirty, but she’s usually late.
Tonight when they got to their spot Jill explained that they had to talk. “I’m going to have a baby,” she said. Then she told him about the pregnancy test. “It’s ninety-seven percent accurate,” she said. “And besides, I know I am anyway.”
Virgil said, “Jesus Christ.” Then he did this thing he sometimes does, where he starts pulling hairs out of his scalp and looking at the root, although it’s really too dark in the car to see much. Then he cracked his knuckles. He said “Jesus Christ” again. Now he’s sort of slumped on the seat, leaning against the door. He’s staring in the direction of the miniature golf course, at the windmill, whose blades are turning very slowly in the breeze.
Jill was not expecting him to be pleased, but she thinks the least he could do is say something like “Are you feeling all right, honey?” On TV, when the wife tells the husband she’s expecting, he tells her to sit down and brings her a pillow. Then he holds her hand and kisses her very gently. He wants to know when it happened, when the baby is due. Jill would like to tell Virgil about how she had to throw up in her closet in the jelly bean bowl. And of course she wants to discuss her plans for the wedding. She wishes Virg would say something besides Jesus. He has just said it again.
“This morning I had to go into my closet to throw up and it got all over my clogs,” she says. Then she wishes she had said something different.
“I happen to know,” says Virgil, finally, “that I’m sterile. I had this disease in my balls when I was a kid and it killed all the sperm. My doctor told me.”
Jill is about to argue with this. Why, if he’s sterile, did he always pull out before he came? She has also never heard of people getting a disease in their balls. Why didn’t he ever mention this before? She’s about to raise these questions and then all of a sudden she thinks maybe she’s going to faint. Virgil is looking better. Jill feels sick.
“Sure is a bummer,” says Virgil. He starts the engine, even though they haven’t opened the chips yet. “Your mom’ll kill you.”
They’re silent for most of the ride home, except one time when Virg turns off the tape for a second so he can listen to the transmission. He thought he heard something funny, but then it went away.
When they get to her house Jill begins to cry. “I never did it with anybody else,” she says. She does not say this argumentatively. It’s just a statement. She understands now that she will not be a June bride, and probably won’t even have a date for the prom.
“See you,” he says as she gets out. He guns the motor so hard the tires screech.
Upstairs in their bedroom, Doris turns to Reg, who’s lying on his side thinking about the corn selections in the Burpee catalogue. “That boyfriend of Jill’s,” she says.
Tara is sitting by the front window of the Just-like-nu Shop working on Sunshine’s baby quilt when she sees the school bus pull up. The bus doesn’t usually stop here, not at
this hour of night, and not only that—she realizes this isn’t the regular town bus. There are paisley curtains in some of the windows and a rainbow over one of the wheels. Also, it’s a very old model. The license plates say Georgia.
A woman around twenty-five gets out. She’s wearing a long Mexican dress and a crocheted shawl. She must be nine months pregnant. Not until she’s almost at the door does Tara see there is a little girl with her, half wrapped up in the swirl of the woman’s skirt. The little girl is about four. She wears a halter top and a long white skirt that looks like a petticoat and sunglasses that have a white plastic Snoopy spanning the part that sits on the bridge of her nose.
Tara opens the door. “I guess you’re probably closed,” the woman says, tilting her head to see inside. The little girl chews on the fringe of her shawl.
“But we’re traveling through town and my daughter just wet her last pair of underpants. I was wondering if you sold them. We could probably use some other stuff too. I haven’t gotten to a Laundromat in a couple of weeks.”
“I guess you could take a look,” says Tara. Another little girl, about seven, and three little boys have now piled out of the bus.
“Hey, Denver,” the woman calls out from the front hall. “It looks like you might fit some of these shirts in here.” A tall, bearded man, about thirty, comes down the steps of the bus. Then a girl about Tara’s age, also pregnant, and a slightly older girl, carrying a baby. The baby has just spit up on the girl’s black velvet jacket. He isn’t wearing diapers, and his penis has not been circumcised.
“We don’t have too much underwear,” says Tara. “Most people like to buy it new.” She brings out a stack that has a couple of grayish bras, some men’s shorts and a few pairs of pants.
“These are great,” says the woman. She has picked out a red see-through pair. They are meant for a woman. “Look at these, Dakota. All we need is a couple of safety pins.”
“Can I get a pocketbook?” asks the smallest boy, who’s around four. The woman looks at the price tag on the patent leather bag he’s holding up. Seventy-five cents.
“I guess so.”
The man steps into a pair of work pants. The pregnant girl is unfolding baby undershirts. Another of the little boys stands in front of the try-on mirror, twisting up his face. Sunshine, lying on a mat on the floor, is waving her arms and making a noise that sounds like “tuna.” Tara knows that means she’s very excited.
“Traveling north?” says Tara to the woman.
“Just traveling,” the woman says. “We’re a spiritual community.”
“Aren’t you going to have your baby soon?”
The woman smiles broadly, circling her arms around her belly as if she’s carrying an apron full of fruit. She is slightly bucktoothed, but very beautiful. “I’m three centimeters dilated,” she says.
Tara never learned much about the stages of birth, but she knows this means the woman’s baby will be born soon.
“Do you know how to get to the hospital?”
“We won’t be going,” says the woman. “My man and I are midwives. We’re just on the lookout for a campground.”
“Hey, Kalima,” says one of the little boys to the pregnant woman. “Look at the baby.” He has noticed Sunshine, lying in the corner.
“Juicy kid,” Kalima says to Tara. “Yours?”
Tara nods.
Kalima lowers herself, bending at the knees instead of the spine, until she’s almost level with Sunshine. She swings her hair over Sunshine’s face and strikes one baby toe. The girl in the black velvet jacket and the pregnant girl gather around. “This is Boletus,” says the girl in black velvet, holding her baby under the arms and making him dance.
“Her name’s Sunshine,” says Tara.
“Fits,” says the man, who is also bending over now. Kalima begins to sing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when I feel blue.”
“I never heard that song,” says Tara. She would like to ask Kalima to write down the words. Sunshine is saying “tuna, tuna.”
Denver picks up Sunshine and dances around the store with her, still wearing the baggy pants over his jeans.
“How’d your birth go?” Kalima asks Tara.
“O.K., I guess. The stitches were the worst.”
Kalima looks sad. “At our farm in Georgia we never cut a woman, and they almost never tear. It’s all a matter of good juice and perineal massage.”
The little girl called Dakota has put on the red pants now. The seven-year-old is holding Boletus, bouncing him hard. Kalima sits down suddenly. “Denver, I’m getting a rush.”
Tara is frozen, watching them. The woman’s eyes are closed as she breathes in, lets the air out very slowly, breathes in again. The man breathes with her and so does the girl in the black velvet jacket. The seven-year-old girl is giving Kalima a back rub.
When it’s over, Denver kisses Kalima. They do this with their mouths open, and he also strokes her breasts. It almost looks as if they will start making love. Tara thinks they look very beautiful, squatting there on the floor together.
“Getting it on like that helps her dilate,” says the girl in black velvet. “Denver did it for me too, at my birthing. The real father wasn’t around.”
Tara asks the girl if her baby was born on the bus. The girl says they only travel like this once in a while, to give their birthing rap and to let people know about the farm. That’s how she found out.
“I was six months pregnant. Thought I’d give the baby up for adoption. The doctor said I was going to need a Caesarean. Denver came into the health food store where I was getting vitamins and said why don’t you come hear us tonight. So I did, mostly because he’s so cute. And when it was over I went home, packed one suitcase and got on the bus. Boletus was born naturally, back in Georgia on Buckminster Fuller’s birthday, the night of a full moon. Very juicy. The first thing he did was pee all over me. He took my tit right away. Man, could he suck.”
Kalima has just finished another contraction. “You’re really steaming along on this one,” says Denver. He pulls Kalima’s skirt up around her knees, breaks open a paper packet containing a surgical glove, eases the glove over his hand and puts two fingers into her vagina. He doesn’t seem to notice anything else going on in the room: Dakota trying to put the red pants back on, with both legs in the same hole. The littlest boy (he’s called Stanley) tugging at one of Kalima’s breasts, saying “Milkie.” Boletus lying on his stomach a few inches away, trying to lift his head off the floor, looking a little drunk. Tara just standing there.
“Five centimeters,” he says. “Far out.”
Tara is trying to think what to do. It’s dark out now, and drizzling. The second shift at Sylvania will be out in a few hours, and then her mother will be home. Tara was supposed to have a whole stack of used Girl Scout uniforms ironed, ready to sell for next week, when all the Brownies fly up. She has not even started cooking dinner, and Sunshine needs a change. The young pregnant girl wants to know if they have any dried apricots.
Kalima, between contractions, smiles and rubs her hands on her belly in slow circular motions. “The baby has hiccups,” she says.
Tara thinks about when Sunshine was born. She did not want her mother to drive to the hospital (didn’t want her to know it was time, even), so she called her tenth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Koch, who had always liked her. Mrs. Koch sounded quite surprised. She had to get out of bed. In the car on the way to Concord, Tara had felt she should think of something to talk about. She asked how Moby Dick had turned out. She left school before they finished it. She wondered if the whale died.
Tara doesn’t remember much about the hospital. She didn’t want them to shave her but she was too embarrassed to say that, so they did. They also gave her an enema, which she didn’t think she needed because all she ate that day was one cup of Dannon’s coffee yogurt. She remembers a young married couple that came in while she was in labor. The man was carrying a painting of the ocean and a John De
nver album. The nurse explained that they were going to the special birthing room, which had a record player and homey furniture. Tara wished there could be music playing for her baby when it came out. She wondered how they found out about that room.
She was in labor for fifteen hours. The doctor said she was taking too long and hooked her up to an IV with a drug called Pitocin. After that it felt as if her insides were having convulsions. She did not think it could be good for the baby, being wrung out of her that way.
In the end they gave her Demerol, which didn’t keep her from hurting, just made her too drunk-feeling to do anything about it. Then they cut her. (Afterwards it occurred to her that no one except the doctor had ever seen her body the old way, and now no one ever would. With Sterling Lewis it had been just that one time, in the dark.) Then Sunshine shot out. One of the nurses said, “This one’s for the state, right?” The other one said, “No, the girl’s keeping it.” Tara could hear the doctor smacking Sunshine’s bottom, then a sort of sniffly crying. “She’ll be more alert when the Demerol wears off,” said the nurse.
“Hairy little devil,” said the doctor. Then he began to stitch.
Kalima has got down on all fours now. The oldest child—her name’s Jasmine—is stroking her hair and Stanley has agreed to nurse at the black velvet girl’s breast. Denver is pushing his palm hard against the base of Kalima’s spine. “It’s posterior,” he says. One of the little boys has fallen asleep in the seven-year-old’s lap. They all seem very relaxed.
“You could have the baby here,” says Tara.
“Incredible,” says the girl in black velvet, wincing a little because she isn’t used to nursing a child with a full set of teeth. “It was incredible vibrations that made us stop here.”
Dakota appears in the doorway with a handful of Mrs. Farley’s pansies, snapped off with about a half inch of stem on every blossom. She arranges them in Kalima’s thick golden hair, like a crown.
Eight-thirty. Sal has just put a fresh batch of doughnuts in the window. Ann decides on honey dip and orders coffee. She spreads her newspaper on the table of the corner booth and turns to the classifieds.
Baby Love Page 10
