At the beginning of her eighth month, Rae woke up one morning and decided that she wouldn’t go through with it after all. It wasn’t being pregnant, she had gotten used to that—the insomnia, the heartburn, the pressure on her bladder, the way she had to get down on her knees every time she wanted to pick her shoes up off the floor. It was the idea of labor that terrified her. Throughout her life there had been a conspiracy, and there was still a secret she’d never been told. Lately, women with small children had begun to smile at her for no reason at all. Rae had thought it was sympathy—she was so lumbering and huge—or a particularly sweet memory of the time when their own child was about to be born. Now she realized it was something more—a moment of compassion for the uninitiated, a spinning backward through time to their own innocence. No one had ever told Rae the truth about childbirth. Not her Lamaze instructor, not her doctor, not her own mother. No one had bothered to suggest to her just how much it might hurt.
She’d done the practical things—read child-care books, renewed her insurance coverage, interviewed day-care mothers, even gone to a parenting course at U.C.L.A., where she’d given a doll a bath in a plastic washtub and pretended to insert a thermometer to check for fever. Still, the idea of holding an infant in her arms scared her. She had never even changed a diaper. The one time when she had baby-sat, she’d been lost. She’d sat for a nine-month-old boy who lived down the block from her parents’ house, and he’d been asleep when she arrived. Rae was sixteen, and madly in love with Jessup, and she’d arranged for him to come over an hour after the child’s parents had gone to the movies. They were on the couch, kissing, when the baby woke up. There’d been no warning, no slow escalation of louder and louder cries—suddenly the baby was screaming his head off, as if he had been stuck with pins.
“Oh, shit,” Jessup had said. He sat up and threw his head back against the couch. “Why did I bother to come over here?”
Rae ran upstairs and peeked into the nursery. A nightlight gave off a purplish glow. From the doorway, Rae could see the baby standing up, holding on to the bars of his crib, screaming in a way that turned her blood cold. Rae stood there for a moment, then ran back downstairs. She found Jessup in the kitchen, looking through the refrigerator for a beer. When he saw Rae he was surprised.
“Why didn’t you shut him up?” Jessup asked.
“I don’t know how to,” Rae said.
Jessup found a six-pack. He took out a can and pulled off the tab. “Did you change his diaper?” he said.
Rae could feel the baby’s screams inside her skin. “I can’t,” she admitted. “I never did it before.”
“You can’t?” Jessup said. “You took this job and you don’t even know how to change a diaper?”
Rae looked away from him and shrugged.
“What about feeding him?”
“I don’t know how to,” Rae had said in a small voice.
“Jesus Christ, Rae,” Jessup said to her. “Don’t invite me to any more of your jobs, all right?”
He slammed his beer down on the counter, got a bottle of formula out of the refrigerator, warmed it, then left her there in tears. She felt absolutely desperate—the pitch of the baby’s cry had grown worse, and Rae imagined covering his mouth with her hand and shaking him until he stopped. But after a few minutes, the crying stopped, and Rae took off her shoes so she could creep back upstairs. By the time she got to the nursery, Jessup had changed the baby’s diaper and he was sitting in the rocking chair feeding the baby his bottle. Rae stood in the doorway and listened to the squeak of the rocking chair and the greedy sound of the baby’s swallowing. After a while she felt like an intruder, so she went back downstairs and sat on the couch.
Jessup came down after the baby was asleep. He got his beer, sat down next to Rae, and put his boots up on the coffee table.
“How did you do that?” Rae said to him.
“Do what?” Jessup said, as though he had never left her side.
They’d heard the key in the lock then, and Jessup had immediately leapt to his feet. He ran into the kitchen and was out the back door before the baby’s parents had set foot in the house. But they saw the open beer can on the coffee table and, to Rae’s great relief, they told her they’d see to it that she never baby-sat for anyone in the neighborhood ever again.
Afterward she tried to get Jessup to explain how he’d known what to do.
“I’ve got a couple of cousins,” Jessup had said with a shrug. “Every kid is the same—when they pee you change their diaper. Then you give them something to eat so they can pee again and you can change their diaper again. It’s no big deal.”
Still, there was one thing Rae couldn’t figure out—how Jessup had known to put the baby over his shoulder after he’d had his bottle, and gently rub his back until he fell asleep. Rae had been right there, standing in the doorway, but the room had been dark and there had been that purple, misleading glow of light, and after a while she guessed that she’d been seeing things. Maybe Jessup hadn’t been as gentle as she’d imagined. Maybe he hadn’t actually been humming, and she had also imagined the sound of a lullaby that was so sweet you knew you weren’t meant to overhear.
She was missing him more these days, she was even dreaming about him. She dreamed that she was out in the desert, late at night, when there wasn’t a soul around. The Oldsmobile was parked in a dusty field, and Rae sat on its hood, looking at the sky. She heard hoofbeats then, and she knew even before she saw it that it was one of Jessup’s horses, smaller than a pony, with a coat that was the same blue-black color as the night. The horse came up right alongside her, and Rae could tell that Jessup had sent him to her. She waited, and after a while the horse spoke to her and told her that Jessup was being held captive. They stood there in the dark and both of them began to cry. Their tears formed a pool, and when Rae bent to look she saw that there were silvery fish swimming in circles, shimmering in the dark water. And when Rae looked even closer she noticed that where each fish’s gills should be there was a tiny arm, and a hundred babies’ hands paddled in the water.
Another time she dreamed that she and Jessup were making love, and when she woke she missed him more than ever, and all that morning she was weak in the knees, as though she had just come from her lover’s bed. Missing Jessup was bad enough, what made it worse was that everyone around Rae was so distant and preoccupied. Freddy Contina didn’t even go home any more. He worked till midnight and slept in his office, and he still couldn’t figure out why no theater would release the films he’d brought back from Europe. Rae couldn’t talk to him, and she couldn’t talk to Richard any more either. Something was so wrong with Richard you could feel it just by touching his hand. When he knelt down beside Rae in Lamaze class his unhappiness interrupted Rae’s concentration, and she often lost count of how many breaths she had taken. After class, as they walked out to the parking lot together, Rae always felt as if she were alone. She tried to talk to Richard about Lila, but he refused. “Don’t even think about her,” he told Rae. “Don’t be concerned.” But Rae couldn’t help it, she was concerned. And sometimes, late at night, Rae wondered if she might have to pay for the sorrow on Lila’s face when she walked in and saw them in the living room, a look that made Rae think of the way she used to look at Jessup when she knew he was about to go somewhere and leave her all alone.
She still couldn’t quite believe Jessup wasn’t coming back. She began to actively try to erase him from her mind. She took all his old clothes to a mission downtown and filled out a change-of-address card for him at the post office. She no longer ran to the window when she heard something that sounded like his footsteps; on the anniversary of the day he’d first kissed her she went to the Chinese take-out place around the corner and ordered everything he hated: shrimp with black bean sauce, spicy eggplant, mysterious flavored chicken.
On a Sunday early in March, when she had nearly managed to forget him, Rae got out of the shower and heard a knock at the door. She just stood there with a
towel wrapped around her head. For a moment, right before she threw on her bathrobe and answered the door, she felt a surge of heat near her heart. She knew exactly who she wanted it to be out there in the courtyard, and after she opened the door and saw that it was only Jessup’s partner, Hal, she was so disappointed it showed.
Hal had been out there for a while, trying to summon up the nerve to knock. He had brought her carnations which had been dipped in red dye, and the flowers made it impossible for Rae to turn him away. She made him some coffee, then went into the bathroom and got dressed. When she came back to the kitchen he was still stirring his coffee, and he seemed much more interested in the way Rae arranged the carnations than he did in having something to drink. She sat down across from him at the table and watched him carefully.
“Jessup didn’t send you here, did he?” Rae asked. “Maybe he wanted you to see if I was all right or if I needed anything.”
“Jessup?” Hal said, confused.
Rae put her elbows on the table and tried to smile. “I didn’t think so,” she said.
“I guess I just feel guilty,” Hal said. “If he had told me about you I would have never asked him to come in on the ranch with me. To tell you the truth, I’m sorry I did ask him.” Hal took a sip of his coffee and shook his head. “That goddamned Jessup. Whenever he runs out of something—like dishes or clean clothes—he acts so damned surprised, like there’s an unlimited supply of everything. I’m telling you—no one can live with him.”
“I did,” Rae said.
“Well, you were in love with him,” Hal said. He spooned more sugar into his coffee. Then, as if something had suddenly dawned on him, he said, “Don’t tell me you still are?”
“If you’re here because you think you broke us up, forget it,” Rae said.
“I’d just like to help you out,” Hal said.
He wasn’t looking at her, so Rae could study him all she wanted. “Why?” she finally asked.
He seemed genuinely surprised by her question, and it took a while before he answered.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Rae said.
“I could come visit you once in a while and take care of things,” Hal said. “Maybe I just feel like doing something for you.”
Rae promised him she’d think about it, and when there was a knock on her door the following Sunday, she didn’t have any expectations. She knew exactly who it was. She let him carry the laundry downstairs and change the oil in the Oldsmobile, but it just made things worse. And when she walked him out to the pickup he and Jessup had bought, Rae felt a rush of desire. The truck was red, and Rae was certain that Jessup had been the one who’d chosen the color. She sounded sincere when she thanked Hal for all his help, but all she could think about was Jessup, sitting at the counter of the Dunkin’ Donuts in Barstow, watching that waitress, Paulette, from the corner of his eye.
Later, when she got into bed, Rae could tell she would have nightmares. She thought she would dream about the men in her life: Jessup would turn his back on her; Hal would knock at her window, waking her from a sound sleep; Richard would drive to the wrong hospital, leaving her waiting at the admitting desk, in labor and all alone. But that night Rae dreamed of Lila, and when she woke she was frightened the way she had been as a little girl, when she cried in her sleep and wanted her mother and no one else would do. Night after night Rae dreamed of Lila: she had a fever that could not be broken until Lila appeared; she was lost in a garden, and even though she could see Lila’s house in the distance, every path led right back to the same locust grove. When she had been plagued by bad dreams as a child, Carolyn had taught her some tricks to chase them away. On the nights she felt she might have nightmares she was to wash her hair with lemon juice, and take some sewing or embroidery to bed, to work on just before she fell asleep. But now when she rinsed her hair the lemon juice always smelled bitter, and every time she picked up the embroidery needle she bought at the drugstore, she stuck her finger and drew blood.
After a few nights, the drops of blood that had fallen as Rae tried to work her embroidery formed the shape of a heart on her sheets, and she knew that if things kept on this way there would be only bad luck. But even when she willed herself not to have any dreams during the few hours each night that she slept, it wasn’t enough. She did not expect Lila to agree to be at the baby’s birth, but she might at least get her blessing. And so one evening, when she had cooked dinner but could not eat, Rae got into her car, and she drove without stopping to Three Sisters Street.
Richard’s Volkswagen wasn’t in the driveway, and that made Rae hesitate. But he was rarely there any more. Whenever he couldn’t find a good excuse to work overtime he went and parked in the lot behind the liquor store. He didn’t bother to go in and buy something to drink. He just parked and listened to the radio and avoided going home. When he did finally come home, Lila always knew. She froze the instant his car turned the corner, she could feel his weight as he came up the brick path to the door. It was not as difficult as she had thought it would be to live in the same house with someone and have nothing to do with him. If she and Richard met accidentally, in the hallway or the kitchen, Lila lowered her eyes and silently counted to a hundred, and by that time Richard had usually left the room. Every time Richard came into the house, and before he fell asleep on the couch, Lila made certain to keep the dresser drawer where her daughter slept closed. But as soon as she could she opened the drawer and picked up her baby, and sometimes, when she felt particularly brave, she took her outside and they sat together underneath the lemon tree.
The evening that Rae came to see her, Lila was sitting in the chair in her bedroom, rocking her daughter to sleep. She could feel someone walk up the brick path, and she knew it wasn’t Richard. She got up and carefully put her daughter back in the drawer and covered her with a silk scarf that was so soft it slipped through your fingers. Then she put on her robe and went into the living room. She stood close to the wall, beside the drapes, and she lifted a fold of material so that she could look outside.
Rae’s weight made her walk off-balance, and when she came up the porch steps she held on to the banister. Lately, she had developed a fear of falling, and she took each step gingerly, her left arm circling her belly protectively. Lila could almost see inside Rae to the baby she was carrying. Its eyes were closed, but it was moving its fingers, making a fist, then letting go. Already it had eyelashes, fingernails, a cap of soft down on its head. Beside this baby Lila’s own child grew more ghostly, and Lila could tell, just thinking about Rae’s baby sapped her child’s strength: in the dresser drawer her daughter was right now struggling for breath.
When Rae rang the bell, Lila stood behind the drapes and hid. Rae waited on the porch for longer than Lila had expected—nearly fifteen minutes. When she’d been there long enough to feel foolish, Rae turned and walked back to her parked car. Lila stood with her back against the wall; she wiped her eyes with the hem of the drapes. And later, when Lila summoned up the courage to pull back the drapes and look outside, there wasn’t one single sign that anyone had come to see her, and no one who wasn’t looking carefully would have noticed that there were at least a dozen new buds on the rosebushes at the front door, and that each and every one of them was blood red.
Hal and Rae had spent an entire morning shopping for a crib, going from one baby store to another. As the morning wore on, Rae began to feel more and more defeated. Everything was so expensive, so foreign. There were things she had never seen before—crib bumpers, walkers, infant seats with buckles and bells. All morning the baby had been pushing against her ribs, and when Hal asked her if she liked a particular crib, Rae turned on him.
“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” she said before she stomped away. The pressure inside her grew worse then, and she wound up sitting on the floor, knees pulled up, hands shaking. She didn’t know if she liked the crib or not because she didn’t know what there was to like about it. In the end, she j
ust pointed a finger at a wooden crib that didn’t look any different from the rest and said she would take it.
As Hal loaded the crib into the rear of the pickup, Rae practiced her deep breathing in the parking lot. On the way home she was certain that if Hal said one word to her she would jump out of the moving truck. He wouldn’t let her help him carry the crib across the courtyard, and once he had managed to get it inside they were both amazed by how much room it took up. They stood there watching it, hypnotized. Finally, Hal cleared his throat.
“That’s some crib,” he said appraisingly.
“I guess so,” Rae said.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and ran one hand through her hair.
“I must be crazy,” she said.
“I’ll tell you what’s crazy,” Hal said. “We’re making money. It’s especially hard to believe because it was all Jessup’s idea—we started advertising in Variety and in the Times. Go on and guess what the birthday present for kids in Beverly Hills is these days.”
Rae looked up at him.
“Our horses,” Hal said. “We deliver them wearing birthday hats.”
Hal reached for his wallet and carefully peeled off ten hundred-dollar bills. He placed them at the foot of the bed.
“Don’t do this,” Rae warned him. “Don’t you feel sorry for me.”
“I’m not,” Hal swore. “Listen, this is Jessup’s money—only he doesn’t know it.”
“Really?” Rae said, interested.
“I’m in charge of the finances,” Hal told her.
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