College boy. Impregnator.
Tara is going to shut her eyes, that’s all. She will run a bath for her and Sunshine, try to remember that song Denver and Kalima sang. “My only sunshine. You make me happy when times are blue. You’ll never know, dear.”
She unpins Sunshine’s diaper. Hardly damp at all. She lays Sun on the bathmat and locks the door. Then she pulls off her dress and pants. She holds Sunshine up against her bare skin, the way she did this morning, for the artist. She steps into the water, which is only lukewarm, the way the baby likes it. She sits down.
Sunshine’s body goes rigid when she hits the water, then relaxes gradually as Tara rubs her back. She lies belly-down on her mother’s stomach with her head resting on one of Tara’s breasts, an inch above the waterline. A few strands of her hair—the longest parts, at the back of her neck—are wet and clinging to her skin. Her head rolls to the side just enough that she gets a little water in her mouth. She sputters a little. Tara pats her on the back. She’s calm again, almost floating.
Tara has heard that newborn babies can actually swim. By the time they get to Sunshine’s age they’ve almost forgotten. Tara herself has never gone in the water deeper than her knees. She doesn’t even own a bathing suit. But they say if you tossed a newborn baby into the water it would swim. How did they ever find that out? Who would try?
Tara soaps up a washcloth. Sunshine is not really dirty, of course. She’s never anything but clean. Tara just likes washing her, checking every inch.
What is Tara’s favorite part? The delicate chin. Sunshine’s little shell ears. Kalima’s children, even the little boy, had pierced ears. Tara thinks Sun would look nice with little gold studs in her ears. But it’s her body, Tara decided. What if when she grew up she decided she didn’t want pierced ears, and it made her mad that I decided to do it without asking her? Like cutting someone’s hair off while they’re asleep. She will wait on the earrings.
Such a round belly Sunshine has. Tara feels proud that a baby fed on nothing but her milk could be so healthy. Her legs have these deep folds in the thighs where the skin is a shade lighter. So chubby the skin there never sees the light of day. That’s one of Tara’s favorite parts. Also the little monkey toes—long, almost like fingers. Sterling Lewis must have toes like that. Strange that she doesn’t even know. And the blue eyes—her mother’s right about that. Nothing else about Sterling Lewis was exceptional, but he had beautiful blue eyes.
“I am thinking tonight of my blue eyes, who is sailing far over the sea.” Line from one of the songs the artist played for her today. It was on a record by a whole family that performed together with guitars and banjos and even an Autoharp. What was the Autoharp player’s name? Maybelle. Mother Maybelle Carter. She played the Autoharp nothing like Tara’s old music teacher.
Imagine having a whole family that played instruments like that, knew all those songs. On Sunday afternoons, instead of ironing blouses with the television tuned to Bowling for Dollars or making up crazy letters to people, imagine sitting around the living room singing harmony.
When she asked the artist if he’d play that song again, the one about blue eyes, he said, “I’ll give you the record.”
“I don’t have a record player,” she said. “But I’m saving up for an Autoharp.”
He liked Sunshine. When she came out of the bathroom he was kissing her toes. “I was just looking,” he said, embarrassed.
“I can’t believe you had a baby,” he said. “You’re so small.”
She told him how they thought she’d need to have a Caesarean, but in the end she opened up.
He took out this book he had of African art. All these wood carvings of pregnant women, women with long dangling breasts, squatting women with babies coming out. Beautiful, huh?
She wanted to tell him her stomach looked like that too when she was pregnant. Stretched so tight her belly button popped out, and she had to keep a quarter taped over it. She would’ve liked to pose for him when she was pregnant.
“It’s the same expression a woman has on her face when she’s making love,” he said. He was looking at one of the African sculptures.
That was the one time Tara felt uncomfortable. She doesn’t know what expression that is. She doesn’t really know what it feels like to make love. Can’t imagine.
If the artist hadn’t been married, she would’ve explained to him how she had to get Sunshine out of this house, her mother was giving out such bad vibrations. He would say, “You can come live here.” He would have built a railing around the sleeping loft, so they wouldn’t need to worry about Sunshine. They would put her crib beside the bed.
She would sleep beside him the very first night. Naked probably. She doesn’t even know what his body would look like. All she has seen is a couple of statues.
She would tell him that. He would say I understand, that’s all right. I used to be a teacher. He would explain everything he was doing. She would watch carefully so the next time she’d know. He would kiss her the way Denver kissed Kalima to make the baby come out faster. That must open you up. Then it probably won’t hurt so much, the way it did with Sterling Lewis. Is that why the African wood carving had that expression on her face? Does it always hurt?
“You’ll be tight as a virgin again when we’re done with this,” the intern said when he was stitching her up. Then he patted her bottom.
So tight you get a look on your face like the wood carving. Is that the point?
She is sure the artist would have known a very gentle way.
But his wife is going to have a baby. Soon it will be her looking like an African sculpture, and when he needs someone to nurse a baby for a picture he can ask her. He will kiss his own baby’s toes, and they will be toes that look like his. A year from now if you asked him, Remember that girl and her baby? he will say, What girl, what baby? The only baby that will matter will be his. Once you have your baby, nothing else matters.
Right now, for instance, Sandy may be upset about Mark coming home drunk. The artist and his wife (his friend? Why did he call her his friend?) may be having some kind of troubles. (He did not look at Tara as if she were a bowl of fruit in a still life. She’s sure of that.) Tara may be living in a house full of bad vibrations, with a mother who, at this moment, is banging on the bathroom door saying, “Nothing but grief, do you hear me?” But the main thing is, all of these people have their baby, or they’re going to have their baby. That makes everything else seem small.
Jill is going to have an abortion, Mrs. Ramsay said. Virgil must have said he doesn’t want to get married. Maybe her parents found out and got mad.
Her fetus is eight weeks, maybe nine weeks old now. Eyes forming. Hands, feet. Sexual organs. Its little heart has begun to beat, Mrs. Ramsay said.
“Damned children,” Mrs. Farley is saying. “I wish I’d had my hysterectomy seventeen years ago when it might have done me some good.”
I’m going to save Jill’s baby, Tara is thinking. That’s what matters now.
There is, for once, no need for Carla to ask Greg what he’s thinking. His drawing of the girl and her baby makes it pretty clear.
“How was the birthday party?” he says. He’s sitting with his back to the door, looking at the falls, when she comes in, carrying the bag with the stuffed seal inside.
“Most of the guests didn’t show up,” says Carla. “The girl’s husband came home drunk. Her baby slept through the whole thing.”
“ ‘Bright moments. Bright moments,’ ” Greg sings. It’s the lyric from a jazz song he loves. One entire side of an album with only those words, repeated over and over.
He doesn’t say anything about Tara modeling for him, and Carla doesn’t ask. She always thought if she saw him with that look on his face because of another woman, she would just take her clothes out of the drawers and pack up her dishes. Now it seems to her she was foolish to think it had to be all or nothing. She would rather be one of the women in the supermarket buying baby food than one o
f those young girls who can only take her hands off her boyfriend long enough to put a jar of artichoke hearts in their cart. That kind of passion never lasts anyway. Better go with the long-term investment. Carla will just wait this out.
It’s as if Melissa has a leak in her somewhere. She keeps draining. When Mark Junior has a bowel movement you can hear a muffled machine gun noise coming from his bottom, and when Sandy takes his diaper off there will usually be three hard pellets lying there, like eggs in a nest. There never seems to be a moment like that when Melissa moves her bowels. This funny streaky green liquid just keeps dribbling out her rear end, so she’s never really clean but never all that messy. Her body, in Sandy’s arms, feels like somebody let the air out. No muscle tone. She is the only baby Sandy’s ever seen that doesn’t curl her hand around your finger.
Still there’s something cute about her. Not the way she looks, for sure, with her old-looking gray face and that bright pink birthmark on her forehead and her large unmatched ears that stick straight out like handles. Sandy’s mother-in-law keeps telling her Mark Junior should go on a diet, he is so plump (and the number of fat cells a person grows in the first year of life is the number he will have forever), but Sandy would rather have a baby with a few extra pounds on him than one like Melissa, where you can feel every rib.
One funny thing is, she’s just three months old but she already has a tooth. And even her one tooth isn’t quite right. It’s coming in all slanted so it cuts into her bottom lip a little, which makes her look like she’s been in a fight and lost.
Still it feels sort of nice to cuddle her, especially considering the mood Sandy’s in, after the fight with Mark. And Mark Junior has never wanted too much hugging and kissing. He wants to keep moving. Even when he was a tiny baby he used to wrinkle up his nose and sneeze if you’d nuzzle up against him for too long. But Melissa seems happy just lying in Sandy’s arms. She isn’t smiling exactly (it’s almost like her muscles aren’t strung tight enough), but her eyes are open, and even though there’s a cloudy film over them, Sandy’s sure Melissa’s really looking at her. A few minutes ago, when Sandy set Mark Junior down on the floor with his Ivory Snow study board, and he started yelling, the way he always does, and waving his fist at the baby in the picture, Melissa made a little noise too, like she wanted to play. But then her eyelids dropped down again and this little trickle of drool came down her chin and she didn’t make any more noises. Like she remembered all of a sudden how tired she was.
Ann has begun to learn the bats’ timetable. During the day they mostly sleep, or at least rest. Then right around dusk they begin swooping down from the eaves, bumping around in the attic, crashing against the windows. Why they do this she doesn’t understand. The ones inside want to get out. The ones outside try to get in. The worst part is the sound of their toenails scraping against the panes.
They do that for about an hour and then they’re quiet again. Until about 1 a.m., when they begin to shriek. It’s two-thirty now and they have just stopped.
The odd thing is, Ann was almost calm, listening to them. Even though there must have been a hundred bats scratching against the attic walls, flapping against the windows. Even though her neighbor’s wife found her today in her neighbor’s arms. Even though that TV show about the blood spatters is the kind that usually gives her nightmares.
Now she’s sitting in her rocking chair with a glass of Kahlua, listening to Dolly Parton at full volume. She’s still wearing her bath towel, and she has covered her body with powder. She has one hand under the towel. She is watching Simon asleep on the floor. It looks as if he’s dreaming of chasing a weasel. Every minute or so he makes a little snorting noise and moves his legs as if he was running.
She should be upset by what that man said to her. She should have called her friend Patsy in Brattleboro and said, Can I come stay with you for a few days? She should have told him, If you ever call me again I will report you to the police.
But she is just sitting here, rocking. Thinking: Things will not just be this way forever. Something’s going to happen. It doesn’t even matter what.
Of course this wasn’t the first time that Val’s mother has grounded her. When she found out the sleep-over party at Casey’s house on Long Island was coed, and Casey was a boy, that was one time. When she came home early from the ballet because Baryshnikov wasn’t dancing that night after all, and she found Val fixing piña coladas with the special rum she brings back every New Year’s from Haiti, that was another. Also, when Val’s geometry teacher called to say, “I’m surprised you signed Val’s report card, with that F I gave her.” And Val’s mother said, “F—what F? I thought it was a B.” Val was grounded for two weeks for that, and she couldn’t even listen to records. Her mother threatened to have the phone in Val’s room disconnected too, but she never went through with it.
This time all that happened was Val said she’d be home by one, and then she didn’t get back until three. Well, just a little after. It’s hard finding a cab at that hour. Anyway, Val’s mother must be pretty dense to think she’d make it home by one, when the movie only started at midnight. It was called Eraserhead, about this guy whose head is shaped like an eraser. Much better than Rocky Horror Show. There was one girl in the audience who had smeared vomit all over her hair. People said it was vomit anyway. Val had a feeling maybe it was just that instant papier-mâché they used one time in art class.
The real pisser about being grounded at this particular moment is her friend Zoe’s parents are flying out to L.A. this weekend and Zoe has finally figured out where her father keeps his video cassette of Story of O. She’s going to have a party with all the coolest guys, and it will probably turn into an orgy. Zoe has been on a diet for a week, in case they play strip poker.
Of course there’s nothing to stop Val from going anyway. Her mother (who’s out shopping at the moment) doesn’t have her chained up or anything. She could just take off after therapy or something. Only she’d have to come home sometime (her records are here, among other things). And when she did, the shit would really hit the fan. No point going through the entire summer with no clothing allowance, all because of a party. If she’s going to have to make do with her old horrible bikini, at least she should have a really fantastic time first.
Too much stress. One of these days she is going to get an ulcer, and will her mother ever be sorry. Val could use a vacation. Someplace where there aren’t any hassles.
That’s when it hits her: she’ll go visit her art teacher, Mr. Hansen. Greg. She even has his new address in New Hampshire printed in the back of her yearbook, because the Walker School believes in fostering ongoing student-teacher relationships. They keep telling you: don’t lose touch. Let us know how things are going. Well, she will do better than that. Zoe won’t believe it when Val tells her. And Mr. Hansen is very cute.
So what she does is, she empties a bottle of aspirin into the toilet and flushes them down, leaves the empty bottle in her mother’s medicine chest, where she is sure to go for it when she finds Val gone. Nothing too obvious—just enough to leave her feeling worried.
Then she takes eighty dollars out of the blue Tupper-ware box her mother keeps in the freezer. She stuffs the money in her overnight case, along with a couple of tops and her diaphragm and her curling iron (she’s growing out her bangs, and they’re at that impossible length). She changes her shirt three times, also takes off her jeans when she decides not to wear underpants. Then she locks up the apartment, lurches past the doorman (in case her mother talks to him later and says, “Did you notice anything about my daughter?”) and hails a cab. She gets out at the Ninety-second Street entrance to the FDR Drive. Slings her overnight bag over her shoulder (regretting having chosen the one with YSL printed all over it) and sticks out her thumb.
It is a little after midnight when the idea comes to him. It’s always like this, with Wayne’s best plans. He will just be lying on his bed or sitting looking out the window and then a voice inside his head tells
him exactly what to do. “Wayne,” says the voice, “that woman in the toll booth is meant to be yours.” “Wayne, that baby inside her has to go.” “Wayne, there is a girl named Ann sitting alone in a house and she is just waiting for you. Now I am going to tell you how to get there.” It must have been this way for Joan of Arc. Maybe David Berkowitz too.
He slips on his paper slippers. (Regrettable that he has no regular shoes. He will go barefoot before he puts on those Hush Puppies Charles wears.) He pulls his T-shirt over his head, checks his hair in the mirror. There’s nothing he needs to take, except the picture of Loretta.
Charles sits at the orderlies’ station, eating cheese puffs and a Twinkie. There is a biography of Bruce Springsteen open on the table, but Charles is not reading. Wayne guesses he is probably stoned. So much the better.
“Nice evening,” says Wayne. Charles drops his cheese puff.
“Catching up on your reading, I see,” says Wayne.
Charles says Bruce Springsteen comes from my same town in New Jersey. He’s older though. You know you aren’t supposed to be out on the ward this time of night.
“You know what you aren’t supposed to be doing?” says Wayne. He can hear that young kid down the hall, banging his head against the wall again.
Charles says, “Huh?” He relaxes a little. Now Wayne’s going to give one of his health food lectures about how cheese puffs just pollute your body, tell him do you know what the inside of your large intestine must look like?
“I’m talking about pills,” says Wayne. “I’m talking about all those little red pills in that lunchbox of yours. Wondering what Dr. McAlister would say.”
Charles sags back in his chair. There is no point trying to fight whatever is coming now. He will simply sit here and wait to see what Wayne has in mind. More free dope probably. Well, Charles will not even wait for Wayne to ask. He reaches into his pocket.
Baby Love Page 20
