Done. A few hairs sticking out the sides of the double-reinforced crotch panel, that was all. A single dot of blood. He turned her on her side and buried his face in her buttocks. That’s when the policemen broke down the door.
“All I can say is, you’d just better not come home with one of those strapless numbers,” says Doris. She still doesn’t understand why Jill wouldn’t want her to come along on the shopping trip. People have always said what a smart shopper Doris is.
“Believe me, you’ll be much more popular with the boys if you leave a little something to the imagination,” says Doris. She has suddenly noticed that her daughter’s filling out on top. Jill had better not have any ideas about some low-cut Raquel Welch number, that’s all.
“I’ll only look at the turtlenecked prom gowns, O.K.?” says Jill.
“You don’t need to get fresh with me, young lady. Don’t forget where that fifty dollars in your purse came from.”
“O.K., O.K.,” says Jill. She is heading for the door.
“Aren’t you even going to get something to eat?”
“I’ll stop somewhere on the way.” Jill puts her hand out for the car keys.
“I’ll never get over it,” says Doris. “It seems like only yesterday we were sending you off to first grade. I keep wondering, what happened to my little girl?”
Chapter 18
SANDY SAYS MRS. RAMSAY probably just went to some friend’s house with Melissa. Maybe she’s going through menopause or something. That’s supposed to make you act a little weird. Sandy says she has a friend with a car. They can ask Carla if she would just drive them around town, looking for an old green Cadillac. While they are at it they can look for Mark’s Valiant too. It’s seven-thirty. Carla is probably up by now.
Greg has to see Tara again. He can’t wait until noon, the way he said. He will go over to her house, explain that they have to talk. The truth is, that’s the one thing he doesn’t feel a need to do. But just having her in his car again, sitting beside him on the seat (what kind of hairdo will the baby wear today?) might make things clearer. Carla is still asleep. He will just leave a note.
Nothing good on the radio. Just a lot of stuff about that volcano that keeps erupting. In the local news, escaped mental patient, believed dangerous. Jill isn’t really paying attention.
She needs gas, pulls into Speedway. A man taps on her window; she rolls it down. “Five dollars’ worth of regular,” she says. Why is he barefoot?
“Say,” he says after he has put the nozzle in her tank. “There’s someone I’m trying to find. I wonder if you’d know where she lives.” He tells the name. “She lives alone,” he says.
“I think that’s the girl my father does odd jobs for,” Jill says. She gives him the directions and a five-dollar bill.
By the time the station attendant wakes up, Wayne is a half mile down the road.
Mark was so beat he slept right through past sunrise. It must be half-past eight now, and he’s sitting here in broad daylight with a girl he just met, wearing nothing but a seat cover. Val is curled up in the backseat with her arms crossed over her breasts. Asleep, she looks like a little kid.
At least his pants will be dry enough to put on now. He puts his feet in the legs and steps outside the car to pull them up. That’s what he’s doing—standing in the dirt with his pants around his ankles and his ass in the breeze—when he sees his wife coming down the road with their son in her arms.
At first Tara thought they were just stopping here so Mrs. Ramsay could drop off some of her pamphlets. It seemed unusual that an abortion clinic would agree to distribute a pamphlet called “I Am Your Fetus,” but she thought maybe it’s like the TV stations giving equal time to all the presidential candidates. She understood that something funny was going on when Mrs. Ramsay told her to walk up to the reception desk with Sunshine and then keel over on the floor, saying, “Get me a doctor.” The real reason she was willing to go up to the reception desk was because Melissa-Susan, out in the car, has been looking so strange, and when she said that to Mrs. Ramsay, said maybe they should stop by the hospital, ask if there was a pediatrician who could take a look at her, Mrs. Ramsay said, “All she needs is a good dose of my milk.”
When Mrs. Ramsay said that, it suddenly occurred to Tara that she might be more than just odd, that Wanda might not have been told about their vacation plans, that they might not really be headed for Disney World, or if they were, it might not be a good idea for Tara and Sunshine to come along. That business about passing through Jupiter, Florida, to say hello to her old friend Burt Reynolds—that was definitely not true. All this Tara understood. What she did not understand was that while she was trying to explain to the woman at the reception desk about Melissa’s funny green diarrhea, while the plump-looking girl sat on the Danish modern sofa reading Mademoiselle and those identical twin girls crawling around on the floor reached for their mother’s urine sample, while the boy in the leather jacket clicked away on his rosary beads and the doctor was saying, “I am not a pediatrician but if this is a real emergency”—while all this was happening, Mrs. Ramsay was sprinkling gasoline in the operating room and lighting a match. The first Tara heard of any such goings on was when the other nurse ran out, yelling, “Call the fire department. There’s a crazy woman trying to burn the building down.” There was so much confusion then that Tara just slipped away without anybody noticing.
Jill has chosen not to have an anesthetic. That way she can get out of here in two hours, be at Jordan Marsh by noon, stuff a prom gown in the shopping bag she brought along, drive home in time for work.
She’s lying on a paper-covered table waiting for the doctor to come. She’s wearing a white hospital gown, open at the back. The paper crackles when she shifts her buttocks. She slides one heel in the stirrups, remembers a pony ride she took once—her father holding the reins—at the Hopkinton fair. There’s a poster of koala bears taped to the ceiling. A Muzak version of “I Am the Walrus” drifts in from the hall. A nurse rushes through, setting out a row of metal implements. Get all your ingredients ready before you start, her mother says. The secret to good cooking.
“Doctor will be with you in a moment,” she says. She pats Jill on the foot. A new song comes on—heavily orchestrated Joni Mitchell. Jill closes her eyes.
She hears the door open again, the clatter of bottles, metal, hitting the floor, a crash. The reason she doesn’t open her eyes is, she doesn’t want to remember the doctor’s face, see it in her dreams. She especially doesn’t want to see what comes out when it’s over. She is going to think about the day she and Virgil went to Weirs beach and got tickets for the Water Slide. She is going to think about that until they’ve wheeled her out of this room and the worst of the cramps are over. Putting on her bikini now. Standing at the top of the slide, looking down, and the man punching her ticket. There’s water splashing against her back and she is shooting along the aqua tube. Chlorine in her eyes but she doesn’t mind. Gliding around a curve, speeding up, nearing the pool at the bottom and then hitting water. Up for air, Virgil beside her. One of her breasts has popped out of her bikini top, but no one else notices. “Lose a tit?” he says. They kiss.
Gasoline smell, a popping, crackling sound. Jill opens her eyes and sees a face she knows but can’t place. Redheaded woman throwing lit matches on the floor, somebody yelling, “Run.”
For a second she forgets where she is, and then she is down off the table, jumping over a burning spot, racing down the hall. Not until she’s out the door and standing on cool grass does she realize she left her best-broken-in pair of jeans on the chair inside, and the back of her hospital gown is flapping in the breeze.
“Gone,” says Mrs. Farley. “Forty-three dollars’ worth gone, if you want to know. She and the little bastard left sometime in the night. No note or anything.”
He will never find Tara, Greg knows. She would never come back to a place like this.
“You have any kids?” says Mrs. Farley, who did not take t
he time to put on her prosthetic brassiere before answering the door, so that her chest is not simply flat but actually caved in. “Take my advice,” she says. “Don’t.”
Doris doesn’t bother taking out her curlers this time. Not for that frizzy-haired hippie down the road who only bought one jar of moisturizer, and not even the twelve-ounce. She can just go the way she is, and when the woman offers her a cup of tea she will know enough to say no thank you.
“I’m just stepping out to make an Avon delivery,” she calls to Reg, who is rustling around in the den. “Back in a jiffy.”
“Take your time,” he says.
Doris may have been fooled, but Reg is not. He remembers the way his wife looked when she was expecting Jill and Timmy, knows the sound of a woman retching into the toilet bowl at dawn. Something’s different about Jill’s face too. She’s pregnant, all right.
He also figures where she must have gone today, why she came into the den last night and put her arms around his neck the way she hasn’t since she was about ten. She sat through two innings of the Red Sox game with him and didn’t even notice when Yaz hit a homer. Then she asked if he could give her twenty dollars, and please not to tell Mom.
His life hasn’t turned out anything like how he thought. He has a wife who says, “Zinnias? Can I eat zinnias?” and a son whose big dream is meeting Charo on a USO tour. The worst problem his daughter ever had in her life, she doesn’t tell him about. And no wonder. He’s a forty-five-year-old man who lies awake at night fantasizing about a moony girl who sits around all day listening to records. Made-up songs about tragedies that never really happened. Cutworms got her squash plants and she hasn’t even noticed.
It seems appropriate that a man in his situation should be taking down his .22-caliber rifle, loading it, so he can blow the brains out of a few blind animals that don’t weigh much more than hummingbirds.
There’s a flower bed in front of the Women’s Health Clinic—salvia, planted to form an O with a tail on it, that symbol for woman that Tara remembers from old Ben Casey reruns. One of the firemen is standing right in the middle of this flower bed, and some of the water from his hose is dripping down in the dirt, making mud. A nurse runs past him, carrying file folders and a typewriter. Another fireman staggers out the door of the building with a large black machine, a long tube attached. That must be what they hook you up to.
Tara stands just behind the police barricade. She knows she should probably be upset, but she isn’t. She feels a little like she did in Sterling Lewis’s father’s den that night, as he was easing her underpants down her legs. A little like when she was lying on the delivery table at the Concord Hospital watching Sunshine shoot out between her legs; a little like when Denver stood at the door of the Just-like-nu Shop, just before taking off for Georgia, and he reached his hand into her shirt and squeezed her breast in just the right way to make milk come out on his fingers. And he raised his hand to his mouth and licked it. Tara feels, now too, as if she’s floating about three feet off the ground, watching everything happen, bobbing along in a slow-moving brook maybe, heading toward open sea. Not like there’s anything to do about it; just being carried along. Like this is all a movie or a TV show. She isn’t thinking about what she will do next. She’s just waiting until she does it.
The firemen are shooting water into the flames now. There’s a police car out in front, with the blue light flashing. Two policemen are leading Mrs. Ramsay toward the cruiser—more like escorts to a ball than policemen. It looks as if Mrs. Ramsay might melt into the ground if they let go of her arms. She’s screaming something about having to feed her baby.
“Sure, sure,” says one of the policemen. A third officer has gone over to inspect Mrs. Ramsay’s car, parked cockeyed across the street. A doctor from the clinic is peering in the windows. He collects vintage Cadillacs.
“She’s right,” the policeman yells back to the others. “There is a baby in here.”
“I wouldn’t worry about feedings now if I were you,” says the doctor to Mrs. Ramsay. “That baby’s dead.”
Chapter 19
PAMPHLET (OPENED TO PAGE one): “I Am Your Fetus. The moment I was conceived, the whole Universe shifted to make room for me. I am a pure and unsoiled entity, closer to God than I will ever be again. When I am born it will be like the birth of Jesus. For that one moment I will be holy. Please don’t flush me down the toilet.”
Carla wakes up feeling nauseated. Greg’s side of the bed is empty. She climbs down the ladder, heading for the bathroom. In the middle of the living room (Greg must have been up late, working on this) is the painting of Packers Falls. A tableau, he called it. The boys fishing, the naked girl and her baby. Above them all, walking over the bridge, is a mask-faced woman pushing a baby carriage. Not one of those umbrella strollers most people use. This is the kind of pram an English nanny would push through a park. And in the background, caught in the center of a whirlpool, there is a man with his mouth open and his arms in the air. He’s drowning.
Greg drives back to the cottage, gripping the wheel. He knows some things now. He will not be planting winter squash and pumpkins, for instance. He and Carla will be back in the city by the time they’d be ready to harvest. He should be hitting the Renaissance right about then, assuming Walker takes him back. They will find an apartment in a safer neighborhood and take natural childbirth classes. They will get married, have the wedding somewhere interesting and amusing, like on the Staten Island ferry. Just a few of their friends. Afterwards they’ll go back to the new apartment. Maybe Carla will make her couscous.
It would get very cold here in the winter anyway.
Chapter 20
TARA THINKS ABOUT MELISSA’S clothes hanging, soon, on the racks at the Just-like-nu Shop (where Wanda got them in the first place), and other pregnant women fingering the terry cloth, checking to see if the snappers still work, washing them in Ivory and folding them away, ready for new babies. She thinks about Sunshine taking her first steps, saying apple, kitty, book, riding the school bus, going on a date, and Melissa frozen in everybody’s minds (if they remember her at all) at three and a half months, with a red mark on her forehead, and diarrhea. Crazily, she thinks about something she read once, that every girl baby is born with her complete lifetime supply of eggs tucked into tiny baby ovaries. And how Melissa’s will just stay there.
Wanda buying a child psychology book, showing Sandy and Tara a folder she keeps, of Ann Landers’s advice on child raising. Got to be firm, spare the rod and spoil the child. Saying, I won’t ever understand how you get a screaming baby to stop.
Tara thinks about Wanda’s stretch marks. How she will always have them. She thinks about Melissa, dead in Mrs. Ramsay’s car. The expression, leaving your mark.
Of course Tara cries. She also thinks about how lucky she is, that Sunshine is here and gurgling in her arms, that her toes curl, her fingernails grow, her face gets red and screws up when she cries, she wets. Of course she knows that Mrs. Ramsay won’t be driving south now, but also, she knows she doesn’t need Mrs. Ramsay to take care of her. She’s a mother, not a child. She can take care of things. All she needs to do now is get the two of them to Georgia, where the babies are safe.
A crowd has gathered by Mrs. Ramsay’s car now, and a lot of rumors are going around: that what they found inside was a six-month-old aborted fetus, that the mother was a nun, she took drugs, the baby was deformed, there was a whole roomful of others like this one in the clinic, in bottles. Some people are saying “Where?” Latecomers are pushing to get a better view.
Tara stands on the grass a few feet back, holding Sunshine very tight. She’s thinking about a time last fall, when she and Wanda were both pregnant and sitting on the steps by the Laundromat. One of the last warm days. Putting their hands on each other’s stomach to feel the kicks. A lump the size of a walnut sticking out very plainly under Wanda’s sweater. Melissa’s foot. Wanda talking about how their kids could be best friends, ride the school bus together.
> She remembers the first time she saw Melissa, a few days after Wanda brought her home from the hospital. Wanda must have put baby powder on Melissa’s red birthmark. She looked sort of dusty.
Also, her eyes were always getting stuck shut. She’d wake up and try to lift up her eyelids and there’d be this stuff caked on her short pale lashes, so she could only open her eyes partway. It turned out to be blocked tear ducts. The pediatrician said they’d clear up on their own by six months.
Tara pictures someone—Wanda?—picking the flecks of dried tears off Melissa’s lashes now, putting her in a final fresh diaper. Cloth?
She thinks about Wanda telling her one time (at the Laundromat again, only it was late winter now, and they had their babies, and wash to do) about an article she read, this woman that got paid $20,000 to have a baby for some woman that couldn’t have one. Nice woman, college education. Not that Wanda would ever give any baby of hers away. Still, it made you think. Having Melissa meant she had something worth $20,000. “I never had anything valuable before,” she said.
Because she can’t imagine what to do now, Jill is not doing anything. She’s just hanging around on the sidewalk watching the firemen reel in their hoses, watching the clinic nurses load equipment into somebody’s car. One of them walks past carrying a scale model of a pelvis. Another one is saying, “What are we supposed to do with ten cases of waterlogged maxi-pads?” Somebody has put a sheet over the dead baby. They’ve taken away the red-haired woman screaming something about syphilis.
“Have you got any pains?” Jill turns around to see Tara standing there, holding her baby and an airline flight bag. Small world.
“Because there’s this place in Georgia where they have all these midwives and babies. A spiritual community. Everything’s natural.” Tara unbuttons her shirt and guides Sunshine’s mouth onto her left nipple.
Baby Love Page 24
