Baby Love

by Joyce Maynard

  Veterinarian seeks assistant, weekday mornings. Must like all types of animals. Opening for an experienced beautician. Key punch operator. Librarian.

  Her glance shifts to the next column. Under personals there is a single item, “HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER.” Underneath, in smaller type: “Somewhere out there is one person who will know this is meant for her. The rest will be too frightened—say they want love, but opt for light conversation, gourmet food, new dance steps. I have only one thing to offer. Total passionate devotion. My heart.”

  A nut, a real nut. Ann turns back to the help wanteds.

  Sales route opened up. Good territory, great potential for advancement. Prestigious employer looking for vibrant personalities, career types. Meet exciting people. Unequaled retirement program. Fabulous benefits.

  Total passionate devotion.

  These ads are for losers, of course. Desperate lonely people. (As opposed to her? As opposed to vibrant personalities. Career types. Prestigious employers.)

  She thinks about the one night she spent in Rupert’s house, alone, after she came back from Florida, before she moved out. It was March but there was still a foot of snow on the ground. She had finished packing her clothes and taped up the carton of record albums. She put on her long flannel nightgown and stepped out on the front step. She was barefoot. Then she just started walking. Out behind Trina’s tree house, into the woods. She lay down in the snow. She remembers thinking, as she lay there: Anytime something happens in my life that hurts a lot, I can think about this and it won’t seem so hard. Someday when I’m having a baby I’ll come back to this moment. Nothing else will ever hurt so much.

  She never imagined she would kill herself. The reason is not, she thinks, because she was so unwilling to let go of her life. She was unwilling to end her total passionate devotion, and she is still unwilling. Whoever she may someday find, marry, have children with, she will always love Rupert. If she lives to be eighty, that will be so. Anybody can just die. She will walk around for sixty years, loving him, carrying around her broken heart. It’s the kind of thing most people wouldn’t understand. They think it only happens in Dolly Parton songs. Opt for light conversation, gourmet food. She has chosen total passionate devotion. The man who put this ad in the newspaper would understand.

  She doesn’t even hesitate then. She takes a three-by-five card out of her purse and addresses it with the post office box number from the ad. On the other side she writes: “This is one person who doesn’t think you’re crazy.” And puts her full name in the upper-left-hand corner, along with a return address. Just, she tells herself later, out of habit.

  When he lived in Boston, back in ’68, Wayne drove a cab for a couple of months. He kept a box of five-cent cigars in the front seat and when someone who looked like a good candidate got in, he’d hand them one through the change window and say, “My wife just gave birth to a son. Seven pounds eight ounces. Our first.” He could usually count on a two-dollar tip. Sometimes a five. Once, when his wife gave birth to twin daughters, a man gave him a twenty-dollar bill and told him to go buy a dozen roses.

  He reads his ad again and laughs. Strokes his biceps, which have never been in better shape. Maybe today his new Oxford English Dictionary will arrive—free introductory gift from the Book-of-the-Month Club, his fourth membership. He has also signed Dr. Poster up for a year’s subscription to True Confessions.

  The secret of Mrs. Ramsay’s pie is the filling. She grates a little lemon in with the blueberries. Also, she sprinkles tapioca on the bottom crust to thicken it. Today she will use double the sugar too.

  Phil Donahue is talking to Suzanne Somers. She’s reading some poetry she has written, about her son. It sounds as if Suzanne must be a very good mother. She is so moved, reciting one poem, that she has to stop for a second and start again. Mrs. Ramsay can almost forgive her for posing naked in Playboy. A lot of the women in Donahue’s studio audience are pretty shocked about that, but Suzanne explains that the pictures were taken a long time ago, when her son was a baby, and she had recently left her husband and she wasn’t a celebrity yet. “We had to get money or we’d starve,” she says.

  Mrs. Ramsay wonders if her hair is naturally that blond.

  It was not what Wanda needed today—an invitation to dinner over at Mrs. Ramsay’s. For one thing, she was planning to start a diet this morning. Now she might as well wait until tomorrow. Also, though Melissa seems better now, she has a purplish mark on her cheek. Wanda will put a little Erace on it and maybe some blush-on. If Mrs. Ramsay asks, she will explain about the changing table, how she fell.

  She is just getting ready to leave—she’s heading over to Moonlight Acres to ask about that job—when she hears the knock at her door. Jill stands there in a pair of cut-offs and an Eagles T-shirt. Wanda notices for the first time that her waist is a little thicker than it used to be.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I need to get an abortion.”

  Tara has cleaned all the stuff off her bed, but Kalima prefers the floor. She’s down on all fours again and the breathing she does now is much faster than before. Her face is damp. Every couple of minutes, Jasmine wipes Kalima’s forehead with a diaper that has been soaking in ice water. Between contractions, everybody except Boletus gathers around her, singing “Amazing Grace” or “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.” Up until around midnight Kalima sang too, but now she just closes her eyes.

  It is 2 a.m. Sunshine and Boletus are asleep in Sunshine’s crib and Stanley is sitting on the floor, waving around Tara’s blow dryer, which he has turned on, saying, “Windy, windy.” Kalima has already checked to make sure it isn’t one of the models with asbestos.

  But now Denver explains she’s in transition, and she isn’t saying anything except chanting some words in another language between contractions. Denver examines her again. “Heat up a couple of towels on the stove,” he says to the black velvet girl. “She’s fully dilated.”

  Then he tells the pregnant girl to kneel down behind Kalima’s head and lift her up partway. He spreads the warm towels on the floor next to him. Kalima’s face is completely changed as she pushes. Denver makes the same face with her. Tara thinks it’s incredible, how tuned in to each other they all are.

  She’s sitting behind Denver, just trying not to get in the way. Kalima is so red and stretched, where the baby’s head is pushing out, that it looks as if the two halves of her will rip away from each other any second. The little patch of the baby’s head that shows, that was the size of a penny, is the size of a silver dollar now, and sort of wrinkled up and folded over on itself like a walnut meat. Denver tells Kalima to pant. “Come on,” he says, “blow out all the candles.”

  The baby’s head seems to inflate as it shoots out. Kalima pushes one more time—making a noise like someone on a TV show who has just been wounded. The rest of the baby pops out, corkscrewing as it comes. “Take a look at that dink,” says Denver. Then he puts the baby on Kalima’s stomach, with the cord still throbbing.

  The baby is making sounds like a puppy at Kalima’s breast now. Jasmine puts her head down next to him. Stanley kisses his bottom. “One more push for the placenta,” says Denver. He’s still squatting between Kalima’s knees, wearing the trousers he tried on the night before.

  The girl in black velvet takes some of the white creamy stuff that covers the baby’s skin and puts it on her face. “Want some vernix?” she calls to Tara. “It’s fantastic for your complexion.”

  Tara is in the bathroom, holding Dakota steady on the toilet seat because Dakota is afraid of getting flushed away. Dakota has wound a little piece of toilet paper around her neck, which is part of a game she made up called Prolapsed Umbilical Cord. The bathroom door is open, so Tara can see into the bedroom, where Denver has just lifted a large slippery red mass from between Kalima’s legs. Tara can also see into the hall, hear her mother’s footsteps on the stairs.

  “O.K., everybody,” says Denver. “Who wants sautéed afterbirth for break
fast?”

  “Guess what,” says Dakota to Mrs. Farley, as she comes toward them. “I pooped in the potty.”

  Reg is at the feed store when it opens. It’s too early for planting the tomatoes, of course, but he’s anxious to get the spinach and peas in the ground today. Work some nitrogen into the soil. Start some flats of peppers. He would also like to haul a few loads of manure over to the garden, from Jim Bunting’s farm. He has no time to waste.

  What kind of corn? Silver Queen. A late variety with truly great flavor and tenderness well worth waiting for. Risky if we get early frost, but worth a try.

  Country Gentleman. Sweet, pure white, slender kernels with tender skin. She might like that. Golden Cross is always good too. Honey and Cream. Early Sunglow. If he tills up another thirty feet or so he can plant two or three varieties.

  Beans. Doris is always after him to plant more beans. Why bother with all those other things when beans freeze so well, she says. Don’t pick them so young. Leave them longer on the plant, they’ll be bigger, we’ll get more meals out of them. All his wife wants to do is fill their stomachs, she doesn’t care how.

  “Planning a big garden this year, Reg?” Tom Murphy, who owns the feed store, knows Reg has only a small piece of land.

  “Going in on a plot with my neighbor.”

  Murphy looks puzzled. “What neighbor is that?”

  “Girl that moved into the Richards’ old place. Has a nice clear field with a southern exposure.”

  “Doris must be happy about that. What with food prices.”

  Reg says nothing. He’s looking at a little wooden windmill. When the blades turn they move a gear that makes a wooden figure of a man swing his ax, chopping a log. The man’s shirt is painted bright red, like the girl’s stove. Six ninety-five doesn’t seem so bad. A thing like that might keep the crows away.

  Murphy has already figured out the total when Reg goes back for one more item. Flower-print garden gloves in the smallest size.

  Mark and Virgil stand a little ways above Packers Falls, casting for trout. They’ve been here since 6 a.m., caught two, threw one back in the water. Mark is smoking a cigar. Virgil is just thinking. They are not talking much.

  “I heard the salmon are coming back,” says Mark. “Now that they cleaned up the river.”

  “Man, would I like to catch one of them.”

  “Crazy buggers. Swim upstream and bash their brains out.”

  Virg is not happy about Jill having a baby, of course. He sure doesn’t plan to get married like Mark. Still, he feels like a real man today. He would like to tell Mark what he said, about all his sperm being dead. That was a good one. The truth is, he’s got so many he could stock the brook.

  “Mark is thinking about last night. “I don’t like being on top,” Sandy said. “I feel like a boy.”

  He would like to know what it’s like with Jill.

  Chapter 8

  Greg sits at his worktable, looking out the window. There are two guys fishing in the brook. Ten years younger than he is, probably, but he will probably never learn to cast a line the way they do. He knows other things, of course. Floor plans of medieval cathedrals. The New York subway map. None of it seems all that vital.

  He’s using charcoal to sketch out the forms on his canvas for the picture of the falls. He puts in the stones, a dead birch leaning across the water, downstream, this house. It surprises him to see how realistic he’s making this one.

  Carla gets out of bed, comes down the ladder cautiously. “There’s coffee on the stove,” he calls to her, over the sound of running water.

  “I don’t feel like any,” she says. He looks up to see her standing behind him, wearing just her underpants. He has never seen her smile like that.

  Jill has eighty-two dollars. She would have more, but last week she bought the new Pink Floyd double album and a pair of those jeans they’ve been advertising on TV. Wanda says they charge you $135 at the Women’s Health Clinic in Concord if you go in the first trimester.

  Wanda has put out a plate of Mystic Mints and fixed them each a glass of Kool-Aid. She and Jill are sitting at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes. She feels like one of the characters on All My Children that’s always sitting around the kitchen table talking over her problems. She hasn’t felt this important since the day Melissa was born, and even then it only lasted half an hour. As soon as she was out of the delivery room no one gave a shit about her anymore. Now she’s saying, “We’ll figure out something.” It’s like back in school when some kid got leukemia and the class would have a big meeting and hold a car wash. They made her secretary of the fund-raising committee one time—when Dennis Coutreau’s house burned down and he needed plastic surgery for the burns. Her committee raised two hundred and thirty-eight dollars. The truth is, she has been wondering where she was going to get the money for this month’s rent. But now she puts her arm around Jill (who, it suddenly occurs to her, looks a lot like Laura on General Hospital) and says, again, “We’ll figure out something.”

  Doris likes listening to Hollywood Squares while she irons. That Paul Lynde is something else.

  The clothes these kids wear. The shirt she’s ironing now for Jill has a pair of fat red lips on the pocket, with a big red tongue sticking out. Sickening.

  The contestant is kissing the host. She must have won the Secret Square. Doris hasn’t been paying attention. She’s been thinking about Jill, thinking that she has not been looking well. This morning her skin looked practically green.

  Doris puts the tongue shirt on a hanger along with the three other blouses she has ironed and takes them upstairs. She’s just putting them on the rack in Jill’s closet when she sees it—a plastic bowl pushed in the corner behind the shoes, filled with vomit.

  Down on his knees, Reg is patting the soil over the last row of spinach. He has also planted three rows of Little Marvel peas and one of sugar snaps. With luck they’ll be ready by the Fourth of July.

  He puts his hoe in the shed. Then he will just stop by the house to give Ann the gloves. Let the little wooden windmill be a surprise, when she goes down to look at the garden.

  She’s standing there at the porch holding a Miller. “I thought you’d be thirsty,” she says. She’s wearing a blue dress that’s much too big. It’s an old woman’s dress. In some ways she doesn’t seem like a young person at all.

  He says a beer would hit the spot and sits down. The chair is wicker, hanging by a chain from a beam on the ceiling. He feels as if he’s sitting inside an egg. She sits across from him in an old Boston rocker. She is not drinking beer herself.

  “This hits the spot,” he says. Did he already tell her that?

  “It must be hard work, breaking up all those weeds.”

  He says he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he wasn’t working hard. Those six months he had to lie in bed, after he hurt his back, nearly killed him. Listening to Doris’s shows and to her talking to her friends on the phone about all the doctor bills.

  She is looking for a job, she tells him. It’s hard being cooped up in the house all day.

  “It sounds like you’re a music lover,” he says. He could hear the records she was playing way down in the field.

  She asks what kind of music he likes.

  “Some of the stuff my daughter Jill plays,” he tells her, “makes my hair fall out. I didn’t used to be this bald.”

  She laughs. He’s surprised. He never tells jokes.

  “My idea of good music is the Mills Brothers and the Glenn Miller orchestra. They were way before your time.”

  She says she likes Glenn Miller too.

  “Peggy Lee. There’s a voice.”

  She asks if he ever listens to Dolly Parton. He says he’s not that familiar with her. He thinks he’s heard a song she does on the radio.

  “Not the songs she does now.” Ann explains that she has gotten very commercial. But she used to write some of the most beautiful songs. “Let me play you something,” she says.

&n
bsp; She puts on “Tennessee Mountain Home. Life was as peaceful as a baby’s sigh.” It reminds him a little of his father’s farm, which has been made into a trailer park. Neither of them says anything during the song. Ann rocks in her chair. Reg tries to find a comfortable position for his legs in the basket seat and gives up. When the song is over he says, “That’s pretty.”

  Ann asks if he has lived here long.

  “All my life. So far.”

  Does he ever think about leaving?

  Well, he went overseas when he was in the service. There was a layover in Tokyo, three days. They had these bathhouses there with men and women all together. Nothing happens, you just get clean. A buddy took him to a teahouse where they had geisha girls. Very beautiful girls. They treat you like a king. He has never told his wife about that—she would think something went on. But they just drank tea. He brought back a tiny kimono for his daughter Jill (she was just a baby then) and a tea set for Doris. She hasn’t ever used it.

  Why is he saying all this?

  Leaving. No, he doesn’t suppose they will ever leave. Doris thinks traveling is a waste of good money.

  He would like to ask Ann what about yourself? But he knows that would not be a good idea. “I was thinking we could get some mulch hay for the tomatoes,” he says. “With a garden like this that hasn’t been cultivated for a while, weeds can be a problem.”

  She says that sounds like a good idea.

  Just as he is leaving, he remembers the garden gloves. “You don’t want your hands to end up like mine,” he tells her. Then he says thanks for the beer.

  After he has gone she walks down to the garden. There is a windmill turning slowly in the breeze. The wood-chopper swings his ax and lowers it. He swings again.

  Because she chose this town as a good place to be invisible, Ann can’t imagine what it would be like to have grown up here, lived here always, walked down the street and have everybody say hello. Can’t take a step in this town that somebody isn’t watching, Reg told her. But here in the woods you can consume a quart of ice cream daily, stick your finger down your throat after every meal and no one will know. You can spend a night pacing up and down the driveway, sobbing. Watch every TV game show between nine and three-thirty for a month. Encase your entire naked body in tightly wound Saran Wrap (she did that the night the scale read 140, to sweat it off) and stay that way for two days straight. But no one knows these things, knows her name, even, or looks up when she passes.