Baby Love

by Joyce Maynard

  She would like to have no history, or a very tragic one. Fugitive, war widow. Weatherman gone underground. Amnesia victim, hair dyed blond, only the roots to remind her maybe she used to be somebody else. As it is, there are few telephone calls, seldom a letter. But there’s her mother, of course, calling person-to-person from Seattle (as if there would be anyone else here to answer) to say please come home for a visit. I will send you a ticket. I would pay for a therapist. What did I do?

  Her life was ordinary. They lived in Connecticut then. (Seattle came later, after the divorce.) Her father sold Prudential, made the million-dollar club four straight years. Her mother belonged to the board of trustees of the Hartford Symphony. (And would hate the music Ann plays now.) There is also a younger sister, Carol, but she and Ann have never been close.

  Her father wanted to be a poet, talked about Wallace Stevens, quoted to Ann (when drunk) somebody’s line about children being hostages to fortune. She was his favorite, and blamed her mother for tying him down, making him get a regular job. She thought then he must have been, could have been, an important poet. She believed a person should be willing to give up absolutely everything in pursuit of his great dream. What else mattered? Not a house in Fairfield and symphony tickets every weekend, certainly. “You don’t understand what it’s like when you have children,” her mother said. “Everything changes.” (Mostly they just didn’t talk about this at all, but one night in Seattle, in her stepfather’s house, the month after the funeral, they did.) “I am not interested in your excuses,” Ann said. “I will never compromise, or force anyone I love to compromise either. I would rather just let them go.” (Which is just what she ended up doing, with Rupert. Of course it could be said that Rupert was the one who let go, but Ann knows she made it possible for him to do it. She loved him that much.)

  He was her freshman English teacher. When she fell in love with him, persuaded him to quit his job and move with her to Vermont, finally write full time the novel he’d been working on since 1968, she thought her father would be happy. Who should understand better the importance of freedom to pursue one’s work, with a loving and supportive person at one’s side? If Rupert was only three years younger than her father, so what. They would have more in common. They could even talk about the war.

  The three of them had dinner together in Cambridge. There was a too-loud jazz band playing in the restaurant and Ann’s father sat on Rupert’s bad side, so Rupert couldn’t hear much. When Ann suggested that her father show Rupert some of his old poems—started to recite one—her father said, “For God’s sake shut up,” and then looked surprised and upset, that he had talked to her that way. When he asked Rupert what he imagined the two of them would live on, up in Burlington, he sounded like her mother.

  He had a minor heart attack six months later. Ann was meaning to go see him and then he had the second one, and after that he never regained consciousness. When she drove down to Hartford the next day, for the funeral, and to clean out his apartment, the first thing she did was find his folder of poems, which she hadn’t looked at since high school. She realized they weren’t very good, but didn’t tell anybody this. Particularly her mother, when she went out to Washington State for a visit, at Christmas. She wanted to make her mother feel bad and guilty, and the trip was a success.

  But Rupert really was brilliant, and she knows that someday he will finish his novel, and imagines that there will be a character in it—not the main character, who is really Rupert—that resembles Ann. Sometimes she imagines the book will be dedicated to her. She is sure, anyway, that Rupert is living alone now. If he were going to live with anybody, it would be her.

  So what could she tell this therapist her mother wants her to visit? That she sacrificed her whole happiness, her life, practically, so the man she loves could be free, which is the truest kind of love there is, because you don’t do it to get anything back, and in fact, you do it even when the person wouldn’t do it for you. If knowing how to love like that is sick, Ann doesn’t want the cure. It is her one real and extraordinary talent.

  And there’s no point going to Seattle for holidays either, or seeing her sister, getting her mother’s recipe for pie crust or going sailing in Puget Sound on her stepfather’s boat. Ann is sure those things would be enjoyable, that she could have a good time, but having a good time is not her goal anymore. She doesn’t want those kinds of good times to make her forget, either, what is real and important, which is her great love and her great loss. It’s out of kindness to her mother that Ann never gives an answer when her mother asks what she did to make her daughter never call and never write, never visit, or even send a picture of the house. Because the answer is, her mother has nothing to do with the life she leads now, is not important enough to Ann to be responsible for grief of the magnitude she is experiencing. Ann likes to feel that her life began that first day in Rupert’s class. Nothing in her history before then matters anymore.

  Chapter 9

  DORIS KNOWS WHAT IT must be. That mental problem where teenage girls go on diets and make themselves throw up. Donahue had a show about it.

  And Jill has been eating so little lately. She was never heavy, but now her cheeks are all sunk in. She is probably having trouble with her boyfriend.

  What to do about that bowl in the closet? If she empties it Jill will know. She doesn’t know what she would say to Jill. Better to leave it. Tonight she will make Jill’s favorite dinner. She’ll see to it that Jill eats. No daughter of hers is going to be mental.

  Carla was hoping to stop by the secondhand clothing shop Greg told her about, where he bought her the dress, but the sign says “Closed.” There’s an old school bus parked in the yard, with a lot of stuff tied to the roof. She hopes they aren’t going out of business.

  She should buy vitamins. Take care of herself. She thinks she will also get back into yoga. Nothing too strenuous—just to keep her body flexible.

  There’s a very pretty girl in the drugstore—she can’t be more than eighteen—holding a baby. She’s trying to carry the baby and three boxes of Pampers, which are on sale. One of the Pampers boxes keeps slipping and the baby has begun to cry.

  “Do you need a hand?” asks Carla. When this girl is my age, she’s thinking, her child will be nine or ten.

  “Could I,” says the girl. “I should’ve waited till my husband could pick these up, but I was afraid they’d be sold out. It’s such a good buy.”

  “I’ve got my car outside,” says Carla. “I’ll give you a lift home if you want.”

  The girl says that would be great.

  Her name is Sandy. She lives across from the Laundromat. Carla says she’s new in town, doesn’t know where that is.

  Sandy asks where Carla comes from. New York.

  Wow, she would love to see New York City. All the beautiful clothes. Are the women there really wearing those spandex pants and things? Has Carla ever been mugged?

  “Somebody broke into our loft once but we weren’t home. There were a lot of junkies in our neighborhood.”

  “I was going to take my senior class trip to New York City,” says Sandy. Only she didn’t graduate.

  “You probably didn’t miss much,” says Carla. “You never get the real feeling for a place on one of those trips.”

  That’s what Mark said. What he wanted to do most was get passes for Saturday Night Live or go to one of those rock music clubs. Their adviser got everybody tickets for Chapter Two.

  Sandy asks what Carla did in New York. She says she was an editor on a women’s magazine and now she’s trying to write a play. Her husband (she has been calling Greg that since they moved here) is an artist.

  “A magazine editor.” Sandy says that’s where she gets all her recipes. Also those magazines are very helpful when you’re raising a baby. Just today she cut out an article about exercises for babies to do to improve their coordination. She is wondering if Carla had anything to do with choosing the babies they use to model the baby clothes in those craft
sections. Carla has just been saying how cute Mark Junior is.

  They have reached Sandy’s apartment building. “Do you want to come upstairs for a cup of tea?” she asks. Carla says sure.

  There’s a plaque on the door with two robins putting their wings around each other and the words “Love Nest” underneath. Inside, the place is immaculate. Flower-print café curtains, an African violet on the windowsill, a prism hanging above. There’s a mug tree on the kitchen counter with two yellow mugs—“Mom” and “Dad.” A cookie jar shaped like a giant apple. A framed reproduction of Picasso’s Don Quixote and a piece of parchmentlike paper with a poem printed on it titled “Desiderata.” A portable stereo, about fifteen records, a few rubber baby toys in a basket on a hand-braided rug.

  Carla puts the Pampers boxes down beside the door and picks up the framed photograph of Mark and Sandy that’s propped on top of the TV set. “Your husband’s a good-looking man,” she says.

  “Thank you,” says Sandy.

  “How long have you been married?”

  Sandy says fourteen months. Actually, their first anniversary’s next month, but Sandy doesn’t want people to think they just got married because she was pregnant.

  “Having the baby right away—doesn’t it sometimes make you feel tied down?”

  Sandy puts the milk in a creamer and sets out the sugar bowl. “What would I be doing with my freedom anyway?” she says. She’s pouring apple juice into a Fred Flintstone bottle for the baby, who’s smiling and waving his arms.

  Carla has an image, then, of the roomful of men and women in her Szechuan cooking class, back in the city. Standing over their cutting boards, cleavers poised. Chopping bamboo shoots into the shape of evergreen trees, sculpting mushrooms. Freedom: That’s what she has been doing with hers.

  Frank Pineo, who runs Moonlight Acres, is standing over the deep fryer, trying to decide if he can leave the oil another couple of days without changing it. The clams have begun tasting a little funny. Well, he will just serve a little more tartar sauce on the side,

  “You said to come back this week and see about a job,” says the girl. She has a baby with her, in a stroller, but Frank can tell this one doesn’t have a husband. She’s plump, the way he likes them.

  “Uh huh.” He turns back to the griddle. Checks the pilot light. Let her work for this.

  “So I was wondering if there was an opening now.”

  He looks at his watch. He walks slowly to the other end of the counter and squeezes out a jumbo Softee Freeze cone, a Maraschino cherry on top. He looks back at the girl and licks it.

  “You think you could handle this machine?” he says.

  She says she is sure she could.

  “Looks kind of like a woman’s nipple, doesn’t it?” he says, holding out the cone.

  Wanda says she guesses so.

  “Yours look like that?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “When you’re really hot for it?”

  Wanda looks down at Melissa, slumped in her umbrella stroller. She is like an old man, all hunched over, with her head bobbing.

  “So are you really hot for it?” He puts one hand down the front of his pants. He is about forty and quite fat. “The job, I mean.”

  Wanda says she needs the money pretty badly.

  “One-eighty an hour,” he says. “Hairnet. White shoes. No free eats.”

  Wanda says fine.

  “You know what I always wanted to do?” he says, making a swirling motion on the ice cream with his tongue. “Lick this right off some chick’s fat tit.”

  The pork chops are all set to bake. The pie is cooling. Nothing left for Mrs. Ramsay to do but the vegetables. That can wait until they get here.

  She is working on that other baby’s duck sweater. The mother seemed like a nice girl. It will be important for Susan to have a friend her age. They will go to Benson’s Animal Farm and the Shriners Circus, when it comes to Manchester this summer.

  And to church, of course. That is the first thing, to get Baby baptized. Mrs. Ramsay will take her to prayer meeting and Bible study. They will pray together every night. Susan will need that, born so sinfully. But she will renounce her mother. Her father too. He has been a thankless son. Just last week was Mrs. Ramsay’s birthday. Did Dwight send a card? He used to write her such beautiful little poems and now he does not even send a card. It’s too late for him, he has gone to the devil. But she will have an angel for a daughter.

  Right after Boletus urinated in Mrs. Farley’s Alka-Seltzer (his mother never did get around to putting a diaper on him, and, by what Denver said was a really karmic coincidence, her glass was in direct line with his penis)—right after that was when Mrs. Farley told Dakota she was going to put her in the oven and have her for breakfast. Kalima had explained to Dakota that Tara’s mother was only making a funny joke, but since Kalima herself was munching on placenta when she said this, Dakota was not entirely convinced, and began to scream. Denver said this was not good for the introductory earth experience of the new baby, who had just been named Mountain, and took him outside. So he did not see Mrs. Farley pull the somewhat bloody monogrammed towel out from under Kalima, grab the patent leather pocketbook out of Stanley’s hands, point the blow dryer in his ear and say, surprisingly quietly, to Tara, “If these people are not out of here in two minutes I am going to spray this room full of Raid.” Which showed a pretty good understanding of the farm members’ priorities, because if there was anything that could get them to move fast, during a period that is supposed to be very mellow and laid back, it would be the introduction into the birthing atmosphere of a petroleum distillate product.

  So they packed up the truck, paid for Dakota’s see-through red panties and Denver’s new bloodstained work pants, hugged Tara and Sunshine, said, “If you’re ever in Georgia,” and left.

  Now Mrs. Farley is setting up the ironing board, spilling the pile of Girl Scout uniforms onto the floor beside it, lighting a Kool. Tara can’t believe how quickly everything has gone from incredibly beautiful to incredibly awful. She has to get out of here.

  And not just to the Laundromat either. She knows now that very soon she is going to leave this town and never come back.

  Greg has been trying to paint the girl all morning. He wants her sitting on the flat rock at the base of the falls, nursing her baby. He can’t get the positions right. It just looks as if she’s holding a doll.

  He wishes she were sitting right there in front of him. How was it she held the baby? He feels a rush of love, thinking about her. Carla would say you can’t love someone you don’t know. But he loved her right away, didn’t he?

  Then the idea comes to him. Find that girl, hire her as a model. She will certainly be able to use the money.

  Carla has taken the VW, but he doesn’t care. He can walk into town.

  “Looks like someone’s moved in the house over there,” says Mark to Virgil. He has just observed Greg stepping out the door. The two of them watch him disappear down the road.

  “Most likely summer people, roughing it,” says Virgil. “They’re probably loaded.” He’s irked because the yard outside that house has always been one of his favorite spots to get laid. He goes toward the house.

  “Damn black flies,” says Mark.

  “Take a look at this,” Virg calls to him. He’s standing on a rock, staring in the window. From where he stands he can see Greg’s painting of the falls, with him and Mark in it. There sure wasn’t any girl sitting naked on any rock this morning though. What is she supposed to be holding, a bag of groceries?

  “That’s us, man,” says Virg. Mark has come over beside him. “Guy didn’t even ask permission.”

  “He must have a million albums,” says Mark. Also, a Marantz amplifier and a Technics turntable.

  “I bet he’s got dope,” says Virg. The door is open.

  “You’re crazy,” says Mark. He is thinking: What I would give for a stereo system like that. Virg has gone ahead on in.


  “Must be a chick living here too,” Virgil calls to him. He’s inside the house now, holding a pair of Carla’s black bikini pants. She has never broken the habit of leaving them on the floor, wherever it is she steps out of them.

  “I don’t believe it,” says Virgil. He is laughing almost hysterically. “They’ve got a picture of some guy’s prick and balls hanging on the wall. Some people are weird.”

  Mark hesitates, steps inside.

  “Cup of tea?” says Virgil in a sort of English accent. He’s holding the pot with feet on it. He has hung the black panties on the pouring spout.

  Mark is looking at the records. A six-record set of Buddy Holly. Yesterday and Today with the original banned photograph of the Beatles dressed as butchers. Every album Dylan ever made, including a bootleg copy of the Basement tapes. Two or three Brian Enos on an obscure label. The original master Audiophile version of Dark Side of the Moon. Graham Parker, The Roches, Elvis Costello, old Supremes. Everything’s here. He would like to get to know this guy and ask if he could come over and listen to albums sometime.

  Virgil has just found the marijuana in a wooden box with birds painted on the lid. Must be at least a pound. He can’t decide whether to roll a joint now or just take it for later. Might as well have some for the road.

  Mark has come to the Linda Ronstadts. They’re all here. That old album when Linda was kind of overweight—not fat, just nice and soft looking, sitting barefoot in some dirt next to a couple of pigs. A couple from back when she was with the Stone Ponies. It takes him a minute to figure out how to work the turntable. Suddenly the music blasts out. He didn’t know it would be so loud.