The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  “You shit.”

  “Yeah, I am. One free shit.”

  She heard him loud and clear. This was her baby, not his, her problem, not his problem. But why? How could that be? How could he not want to take care of this responsibility? What did he mean? He wouldn’t marry her? She was pregnant. It was the right thing to do. People always did it. Didn’t they? If they didn’t, what else did they do? Have a baby not married? She’d never even heard of that. Had she? Yes. Once she had. Someone whispered it low and mean. They had a word for it. A bad word. Why, she wondered? She’d be the same Maggie. But pregnant, so not the same. Not really. She’d just wouldn’t be married, but the word for it would still be bad: she immediately thought they should change the word. Suddenly that word had something to do with this baby. And the baby had nothing to do with the word. The growing baby, the inside thing making her twist and turn like a top out of control, just seemed like a baby, but a baby she shouldn’t have. Should she? What if she did? The baby clung inside her like a globe of forbidden fruit: intoxicating. Real. Her own. What did this all have to do with Maggie? Everything. Everything to do with her. They should have been careful. He should’ve worn a condom. You dit, she thought. Insist. Always insist. But she hadn’t made him. And she was pregnant. Boy, was she ever. But she wasn’t a boy, but a girl. And girls get pregnant. So there they were. The three of them. Unmarried and pregnant.

  Joey stayed close to the car, away from her, as if she alone had caused him to ruin this particular life.

  “Joey, I didn’t want to get pregnant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You must be crazy if you think I wanted this. I don’t want to get married ever.”

  “Oh right. Girls don’t want that.”

  “You don’t know me, Joey. You just don’t.”

  “Well, I sure as heck didn’t want it.” But he didn’t think about what he did want. He didn’t remember the drowsy smell of orange blossoms that scented the groves those summer nights, or the smell of White Shoulders and leather seats, or the feel of downy skin and rumpled blouses and the unbelievably small brassiere he found so frustrating, and the pert nipples inside it, almost flush with her chest, provocative, his own. Or the foggy, wet windows, the yip of Southern coyotes, the bliss of summer nights.

  “You could have done something,” she scowled. “You know where babies come from too.”

  His words seemed harsh. Cruel, she thought, unable to resolve the idea she had about Joey with this unkind person that stood before her now. The person wanting to make a break for it. Escape. She’d had soft Joey thoughts, soft lips, soft kisses, back-seat thoughts that had turned her inside outside. Darn, she thought, wondering how it was that things were slipping away from her, and feeling estranged from herself, as if the heart that pounded against the inside of her ribcage belonged to someone else now. Not herself. Would that rib create another whole person? The small heart beating another escape?

  “Shit, Maggie. Shit.” He slammed his fist on the car again. “Let’s not fight. Look, I gotta go home now. We’ll think about it. Let’s just think.”

  “Thinking isn’t going to make this go away,” she stormed back.

  Maggie, no longer the same girl, didn’t know the right thing anymore. She’d assumed she always might know her own right thing. But she didn’t want to get married. And it hurt her that Joey didn’t want to get married either. She had assumed they might do the right thing. Is that what she really assumed? She wasn’t sure. And marriage was the right thing. Wasn’t it? It might be the right thing, she thought, but her assumptions were all wrong. How foolish she felt, being so right, and assuming all wrong. Not that she ever really wanted to be right, exactly; she just assumed a different kind of rightness, something she created within herself. But assuming rightness, even one’s own brand of right, doesn’t make right follow; wrong happens, as wrongly as it happened for her then. Yet he acted as wrongly as a boy could act, and as much as it hurt, his wrong made her know how right her sense of right might be.

  Zihuatanejo

  Some Mexican music chimed underneath Maggie’s skull, resounding like some eternal echo. Why now? Why now, she thought, thinking the past away again. She lit a cigarette and sucked in Mexico. This is what she wanted, this here, this now. Business. Business. She hated business. But this was business. She knew that. Mexican business. Her father’s daughter. Her grandfather’s child. Inbred. Gambler extraordinaire. Nice. Gentle. Sweet. No way Jose. Not so sweet. Not so nice. Not so. Not so. Hard-nosed gambler. Snake eyes. A pair of Queens. Goddess. King high flush. Aces and eights. She’d learned it all early on. Gambling. Why did his gambling seem better than hers? She wondered that, and it annoyed her. It wasn’t, not really, not at all. But it was. She had health. He didn’t. That’s why his was better. And then, wouldn’t you know. The drama of it. Just like Dad. Maybe not. Maybe. Maybe not. This eternal recurrence recurring. Was it recurring? Did it. Prometheus, this family bound to mistake after another. Was everything in the family a mistake or only Maggie’s mistake? Oh sure. She’d made a mistake or two herself. Three or four thousand maybe. She knew that. She knew a lot, but not enough to answer any questions. A mystery. All of it. A mysterious journey. The mysteries rose like bright kites and disappeared: the off-white walls spun like small tops; two dark irises followed the white dot. Someone sang something. Who was that? Maggie’s heart singing, singing, a pool of humming fishes, a mariachi band? Daddy, Daddy. A lost moment. Just like Mom. She didn’t think so. Not ever would she be anyone else but this girl. The one right here. A simple mistake. Recurring as Maggie …

  No shelter from the storm …

  EMMA MORRISON, IN THE WAKE of her husband’s lost business, had the hope of all mothers for their children. She cherished those ideas in the midst of the trouble, kept the safe part of living for her daughter and her small son. Thunderstruck by Maggie’s pregnancy, she brought a bottle of quinine home, the prescription slipped to her by her very own doctor, purchased discreetly at the local pharmacy, and shoved the pills down her daughter for three days in an attempt to cause a miscarriage, but the pregnancy held amidst the vomiting, drug-induced attack. That a daughter should get pregnant so young seemed worse than a husband losing a business; more so, thought Emma, since the business was already gone. To have both disgraces in the house seemed unbearable, suffocating. What was the alternative? The quinine hadn’t helped. Joey was a child himself. It would be a wrong-headed marriage. And even so, she thought, would she let Maggie marry? The girl loved nothing besides books and music; although she knew the household skills Emma had taught her, Maggie had always been a restless child, full of herself. If she would only miscarry, hoping for the miracle of loss, not gain, for once in her life. The next day she coaxed the girl into horseback riding, something, anything to shake the child loose.

  Maggie rode the hills above Sunset Drive for five hours with only a side ache and nausea to show for the relentless ride. She had never thought of the pregnancy in terms of a child, only in terms of a nuisance to be addressed. And address it she did.

  Emma, still at work when the phone rang, picked up the phone nervously. The last two weeks had been an emotional nightmare, but now, now something different might happen. The small child of hope flurried into her consciousness as she answered. John said it was all arranged for that weekend, and, something inside Emma released, a terse, hard-held rightness that this wrong would re-establish. A simple tear fell. Her daughter would not be pregnant at so young an age. It was decided. She finished waiting on her customer, filled out a request for new electrical service, then went to the ladies room. She took some lipstick out of her purse, smeared it over her lips, pressing them together tightly, then watched as more tears welled in her eyes and skittered down her powdered-manicured cheeks. She grabbed a Kleenex and went into a toilet stall and sat down on the cover and sobbed.

  She couldn’t make her daughter marry. That seemed unthinkable. But what else. An illegitimate child? No. No. An abortion
. Illegal. Wrong-headed. Necessary. The word stuck in her throat like a knife, but John had a friend who had a friend who knew of someone in Tijuana. Already arranged. Already arranged. What if something goes wrong? What if? What if Maggie dies? What if someone finds out? What if they get arrested? What if there are complications? What if? Money, money, they need money, and she would find it somehow. What was the alternative? Anything, everything, nothing? How could this child be a mother? An illegitimate child was a stigma Emma did not want her daughter to own, and she didn’t want ownership either.

  Emma missed the prosperity the fifties offered because of the lost business, and now, she had no more capacity for struggle or loss. And Maggie, bright and pretty, could make something of her life. Emma was certain of that. But not with a child. She sniffed her tears and wiped her face and went back to work; her resolve set on the abortion, decided and willful.

  The word abortion was never spoken in those years. It was whispered and hushed about and quieted. It was rarely spoken out loud. It was like a silent vowel. Or a word one had to look up in the dictionary. Abortion was not part of everyday vocabulary: Roe had not yet met Wade. Not even an idiomatic expression. People didn’t think it. But John Morrison knew about choice: because he had made a poor one, he had no intention of letting his daughter make another.

  Maggie hadn’t argued when her mother and father told her about the abortion. She simply dressed in loose clothes early that Saturday morning and curled into the back seat of the old Packard. Joey came too, as some sort of token of decency. She didn’t mention the way her womb felt, the odd sensation pumping inside her, the feeling that she was no longer alone, the unmistakable throb, like her heart had slipped between her hips, no longer caged in her ribs, as if all her energy existed now within her womb, directing her body in ways she had never imagined. And the little feelings growing bigger and bigger. A drifty feeling taking her to a place she’d never known, as if a breeze of sudden fancy caught her on its wings, and then as suddenly brought her back to earth. And her imagination was so caught in the shame she had brought to her family, it could not imagine what might happen with this child growing inside her, this baby embryo, this something that seemed all her own, yet not. She could not imagine herself as a mother, but her body spoke another language, a language of something deeper, strong, instinctual, yet, the stigma of the pregnancy was potent, but the other language was loud and present. She could face neither, not the language or the stigma. The matter was decided. Surely it would be better not to be pregnant: she knew this in a conventional and strong language. She thought that as she curled in the car next to the stranger, Joey Mendoza, who stared out at the landscape without saying a word, all the way from Redlands to Tijuana.

  They got lost in the crowded town of Tijuana, finally finding the way to a small, cluttered street across the street from a large open park. The room inside the small building seemed large, and Maggie felt small in it, the dark walls, of a strange dream; she heard voices from outside in a language she did not understand, and the laughter spun round and round in her brain like music from a Mexican carousel.

  “Put your feet in the stirrups.” The tall brown man made an awkward gesture. He moved one leg, while she placed her other foot in the metal stirrup. He didn’t seem like a doctor at all.

  Another man moved a mask down over her face. The rubber settled against her cheek.

  “Breathe slowly,” he said, “but don’t move your legs once I start.” She breathed in the gas. A vision of a donkey pulling a cart rose in her mind, as if her mother and father had climbed into the dark dream, into the rickety wooden cart, outside in the streets of Tijuana and smiled into a nervous pose. Their faces shattered like glass and dissolved.

  She breathed more gas, fixing her eyes on the ceiling.

  “Don’t move. Don’t move or you will die,” someone’s voice roared.

  Maggie pressed her eyes shut; it seemed as if she thought hard enough she could imagine herself back home in her very own bed. She breathed the gas. She felt giddy. Surely it was just a bad dream. A stupid nightmare. Guilt for finally doing it. The last of the girls in the class of ’65. The last period, the last boobs, the last bra, the last fuck. She started to giggle. Then the intense pain.

  The carousel of donkeys stopped. A donkey brayed into the hollow of her skull, the creature rose, the shaggy ears growing wing-like, pulsing into a dark-winged butterfly. The butterfly slipped down between her spread legs.

  She heard the voice again. “Don’t move. Don’t move or you will die,” but the voice was far off and she was not sure it was talking to her. The vision of the butterfly welled from her legs, its wings churning the air, circling above her, as it rose higher and higher, grasped now in its spindly legs, the image of a child clutching a doll. The doll spilled into a rainbow of dark color as the creature disappeared in the slender gash scarring the ceiling.

  Zihuatanejo

  She sat down on the rock wall where the iguana had crossed into the field. The man and the burro had turned around and had come back down the street: they walked in front of her, smelling dusty. Two children played up the street, and she wondered what they were playing. How do they pass time? They would never pin the tail on the donkey. The donkey’s no toy. No game here. Would they spin the bottle? Yes, she thought so. What if they spun the donkey? She’d been waiting too long, her mind softening, turning squishy and humid. Spin the donkey? What kind of game was that? She stretched her legs out because she was feeling crampy from waiting. She pulled on the orange rind and put some in her mouth. When she bit against it, a squirt came from the pores, like zits, squishing orange smell in her mouth.

  Felipe drove up in a ratty VW bug and came to a stop right in front of her. She opened the door and got in the car. She thought about throwing the orange away, but she still wanted it, so she slipped it in her vest pocket: she could feel the glove of fruit resting in her lap. I need more money, he said. Right, she said. So do I. He looked at her like she was a real pain in the ass. She knew this. She looked out the window. Men thought these things about her. She didn’t know why. She didn’t like men right then, and wondered if that would ever change. She couldn’t imagine. In general, they were just an annoyance. She thought this about Felipe. He already annoyed her. More money. In her dreams. So, he said, someone didn’t get paid. My uncle, my uncle didn’t get paid. So it’s not my problem, she said, it’s your problem. He put the pressure on, but she couldn’t let him know. She couldn’t let him know she’d pay anything she had and more to come. She couldn’t let him know.

  She lit another cigarette. This Felipe guy was doing all right, she thought—for himself. It’s not that she’d ever trusted him, so she wasn’t devastated or anything. She would never trust him; that would hurt, trust is personal.

  The Volkswagen rumbled down the road, and her blouse, the green one with pink roses, blew against her. The car was just like Hank’s bug, even the same white-rust colour. She thought about Hank and riding with him in the car.

  She took a long drag and blew smoke in the hot air. She looked out the window, and suddenly felt like Hank was with her, slipping his hand over her knee, squeezing it, running his hand under her dress, brushing his fingers over her thigh, higher, making her breath catch, making her shift in her seat, now, years later, remembering. Do you remember how we met? Hank nibbled her earlobe of memories. Of course I do, she answered. I’d been waiting to meet you, he said. No you hadn’t, she said. You never saw me before that night. Yes, I had, he insisted. When? When was that? The smoke felt good in her lungs and she thought he was wrong. They argued about anything. She thought about it very hard. She remembered how it was. Hank was wrong. She was sure of it.

  All together now …

  CHAPTER 3

  Devore, California 1969

  HENRY ‘HANK’ HARDIMAN STOOD ON a crumbling cement patio watching the car pull up the dirt road. He looked like part of this California landscape, a yucca, perhaps, lean and straight, with a toss of
shaggy hair. Behind him the dry hills ran up the side of the canyon wall, and towards the north, the crevasse that carried water during the raging storms cracked from the dry heat, and the stones and pebbles held the afternoon California heat. Devore, a remote outpost of San Bernardino, had few residents, among them now, Hank Hardiman, and his new girl, Maggie, driving up the long and winding road; Maggie liked Hank from the minute she’d laid eyes on him, three months ago to the day, but today, he wasn’t wearing his well-worn Levis, but cotton drawstring pants pulled at the waist. The wind slapped against the cotton making him seem kite-like, as if he would rise and tumble out of sight. The wind, a constant force in the canyon, tousled his head of longish sandy hair. There seemed an unpredictability about Hank that appealed to her beyond words, beyond convention: he was a new language, a different dialect. He evoked possibility. And she’d felt that possibility that day in Big Bear three months ago.

  She drove the car along the gravely driveway below the house and made the steep turn up to the parking area where she pulled the 1955 maroon Chevy next to Hank’s old Ford truck. The house seemed to be intent on returning to nature; the plaster cracked like the dry Devore earth, the parched wood of the small porch, split from the sun, the roof, like dry tinder. Yet the red-headed finches that nested in the eaves of the porch, twittered here and there, and a meadowlark called its melody from a barbed wired fence. The heavy air of afternoon heat, much hotter than the crisp air of Big Bear, but this old house seemed her destiny somehow; it felt familiar, rugged, and likeable.

  The breeze scratched across the sagebrush as she got out of the car and took in the bleak scenery: a strange scenario, she thought, wistfully, the rumbled-down house, the sagebrush. A tumbleweed twirled across the gravel drive, a twisting bramble of thorns. She’d never dreamed of living in those fancy Redlands houses anyway; she’d only wondered about them, profoundly, and somehow this scratch of dirt seemed as unique as she felt herself. And by then, after Big Bear, she seemed almost grown into something not quite like her other selves, more grown, grown away from the family and town that she grew in, and, now, some other kind of growth, a sentence, gangly, unruly, different, some sort of dissociation from that Redlands girl. And the Redlands girl smiled a sweet smile at the man waving to her and seemed to know something different about herself already.