Stephen smiled at Ann. “Teachin’ me,” he said.
“That’s neat,” she said. The sides of her mouth felt very stiff and her throat ached. “Listen, Daddy, I just looked in to say hi on the way to Permanente, I’m supposed to have a check-up. No, look, I’ll just leave this in the kitchen and go out the gate there. It’s real good to see you, Daddy.”
“Got to go already,” he said.
“Yeah, I just wanted to say hi since I was over this way. Say hi to Ella for me. I’m sorry I missed her.” She had slipped her sandals back on; she took her empty glass into the kitchen, set it in the sink and ran water into it, came out again to her father standing on the brick path, bald to the sun. She put one foot up on the cement step to refasten the sandal. “My ankles were all swelled up,” she said. “Dr. Schell took me off salt. I can’t put salt on anything, not even eggs.”
“Yeah, they say we should all cut down on salt,” Stephen said.
“Yeah, that’s right.” After a pause Ann said, “Only this is because of being pregnant, that I have high blood pressure and this edema stuff. Unless I’m careful.” She looked at her father. He was looking across the lawn.
“You know, Daddy, even if the baby doesn’t have a father it can have a grandfather,” she said. She laughed, and blushed, feeling the red heat mask her face and tingle in her scalp.
“Yeah, well, sure,” he said, “I guess, you know,” and if he finished the sentence she did not understand it. “We all got to take care,” he said.
“Sure. Well, you take care too, Daddy,” she said. She came to him to kiss his cheek. She tasted the faint salt of his sweat on her lips as she went along the brick path to the gate next to the trash cans, and let herself out onto the sidewalk under a purple jacaranda in full flower, and fastened the gate behind her.
UNBREAKING
“My back itches.”
Ann reached out the garden fork and lightly raked its clawed tines down her brother’s spine.
“Not there. There.” He wrapped an arm round himself trying to show her the spot, his thick fingers with dirt-caked nails scrabbling in the air.
She hitched forward and scratched his back vigorously with her own fingertips. “That got it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I want some lemonade.”
“Uh-huh,” Todd said as she got up, whacking dirt off her bare knees. She had to bend at the knees, not at the waist, to reach them.
The yellow kitchen was hot and close like the inside of a room in a beehive, a cell full of yellow light, smelling of sweet wax, airless. A grub would love it. Ann mixed up instant lemonade, poured it over ice in tall plastic glasses, and carried them out, kicking the screen door shut behind her.
“Here you go, Todd.”
He straightened up kneeling and took the glass in his left hand without putting down the trowel in his right. He drank off half the lemonade and then stooped to dig again, still holding the glass.
“Put it down there,” Ann said, “by the bush.”
He put the glass down carefully on the weedy dirt, and went on digging.
“Hey that’s good!” Ann said, sucking at her lemonade, her mouth squirting saliva like a lawn sprinkler. She sat down on the grass with her head in the shade and her legs in the sun, and chewed ice slowly.
“You aren’t digging,” Todd said after a while.
“Nope.”
After a while she told him, “Drink your lemonade. The ice is all melting.”
He put down the trowel and picked up the glass. After drinking the lemonade he put the empty glass where it had been before.
“Hey, Ann,” he said, not digging, but kneeling there with his bare, thick, pale back to her.
“Hey, Todd.”
“Is Daddy coming home at Christmas?”
She tried for a moment to figure this one out. She was too sleepy. “No,” she said. “He isn’t coming home at all. You know that.”
“I thought at Christmas,” her brother said, barely audible.
“At Christmas he’ll be with his new wife, with Marie. That’s where he lives now, that’s where his home is, in Riverside.”
“I thought he might visit. At Christmas.”
“No. He won’t do that.”
Todd was silent. He picked up the trowel and laid it down again. Ann knew he was unsatisfied but she could not figure out what his problem was and did not want any problems. She got her back against the trunk of the camphor tree and sat feeling the sun on her legs and the prickling grass under them and a sweat-drop trickle down between her breasts and the baby move once softly deep in and over on the left side of the universe.
“Maybe we could ask him to come at Christmas,” Todd said.
“Honey,” Ann said, “we can’t do that. He and Mama got divorced so he could marry Marie. Right? And he’ll have Christmas with her now. With Marie. And we’ll have our Christmas here like always. Right?” She waited for his nod. She was not sure she got one, but went on anyhow. “If you’re missing him a lot, Todd, we can write him and tell him that.”
“Maybe we could visit him.”
Oh, yeah, dandy. Hi Daddy, here’s your moron son and your unwed pregnant daughter on welfare, hi Marie! It struck her funny but not enough to laugh. “We can’t,” she said. “Hey, look. If you dig over to the end there, in front of the roses, we could put in those canna bulbs Mama got, too. They’d look real good there. They’ll be red, big red lilies.”
Todd picked up the trowel, and then laid it down again in the same place.
“After Christmas he has to come,” he said.
“What for? Why does he have to?”
“For the baby,” her brother said, very low and blurry
“Oh,” Ann said. “Oh, shit. OK. Well. Listen, Toddie. Look. I’m having the baby, right?”
“After Christmas.”
“Right. And it will be mine. Ours. You and Mama are going to help me bring it up. Right? And that’s all I need. All I want. All the baby wants. Just you and Mama. All right?” She waited for his nod. “You’re going to help me with the baby. Tell me when it cries. Play with it. Like that little girl at school, Sandy, that you help with. OK, Toddie?”
“Yeah. Sure,” her brother said in the voice he had sometimes, masculine and matter-of-fact, as if a man spoke through him from somewhere else. He knelt erect, his hands splayed on his bluejeaned thighs, his face and torso in shadow illuminated by the glare of sunlight on the grass. “But he’s an older parent,” he said.
He’s an ex-parent, Ann stopped herself from saying. “Right. So what?”
“Older parents often have Down children.”
“Older mothers do. Right. So?”
She looked at Todd’s round, heavy face, the sparse mustache at the ends of the upper lip, the dark eyes. He looked away.
“So your baby could be a Down baby,” he said.
“Sure, it could. But I’m not an older parent, honey.”
“But Daddy is.”
“Oh,” Ann said, and after a pause, “Right.” She hitched herself heavily into the shade, with her bare feet in the fresh dirt Todd had been digging up. “OK, listen, Todd. Daddy is your father. And my father. But not the baby’s father. Right?” No nod. “The baby has a different father. You don’t know the baby’s father. He doesn’t live here. He lives in Davis, where I was. And Daddy is—Daddy isn’t anything. He isn’t interested. He has a new family. A new wife. Maybe they’ll have a baby. They can be older parents. But they can’t have this baby. I’m having this baby. It’s our baby. It doesn’t have any father. It doesn’t have any grandfather. It’s got me and Mama and you. Right? You’re going to be its uncle. Did you know that? Will you be the baby’s Uncle Todd?”
“Yeah,” Todd said unhappily. “Sure.”
A couple of months ago when she was crying all the time she would have cried, but now the universe inside her surrounded her with distance, through which all emotions travelled so far to reach her that they became quiet and smooth, deep and soft, like the big unbreaking waves out in mid-ocean. Instead of crying she thought about crying, the salty ache. She picked up the three-tined garden fork and reached over, trying to scratch Todd’s head with it. He had shifted out of reach.
“Hey kids,” their mother said, the screen door banging behind her.
“Hey Ella,” Ann said.
“Hi Mama,” Todd said, turning away, bending to dig.
“Lemonade in the fridge,” Ann said.
“What are you doing? Planting those old bulbs? I dug them up I don’t know when, I bet they won’t grow now. The cannas ought to. Oh I’m so hot! It’s so hot downtown!” She came across the lawn in her high-heeled sandals, pantyhose, yellow cotton shirt dress, silk scarf, makeup, nail polish, sprayed set dyed hair, full secretarial uniform, complete armor. She bent over to kiss the top of her son’s head, and kicked the sole of Ann’s bare foot with the toe of her sandal. “Dirty children,” she said. “Oh! It’s so hot! I’m going to have a shower!” She went back across the lawn. The screen door banged. Ann imagined the soft folds released from under the girdle, the makeup sluiced away under warm spraying water running down over her first universe, that soft distance where she lived now, joined.
THE TIGER
Ella had on her yellow sleeveless dress with the black patent belt and black jet costume earrings. She had sprayed her hair. “Who’s coming?” Ann asked from the couch.
“I told you yesterday. Stephen Sandies.” Ella clipped past on her high wedge-heeled sandals like a circus pony on stilts, leaving a faint wake of hairspray smell and perfume.
“What are you wearing?”
“My yellow dress from the boteek.”
“I mean perfume, dummy.”
“I can’t pronounce it,” Ella called from the kitchen.
“Jardins de Bagatelle.”
“That’s it. The bagatelle part is OK. I used to play bagatelle. But I just pointed and said, ‘That one.’ I was trying testers at Krim’s. Do you like it?”
“Yes. I stole some last night.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Ann raised a leg languidly and looked up along it as if sighting. She spread out her toes fanwise to make sights, closed them together, spread them. “Exercises, exercises, always do your exercises,” she chanted, raising the other leg. “Zhardang, zhardang it all to bagatelle.”
“What?”
“Nothing, Ma!”
Ella clipped back into the living room with a vase of red cannas. “I see London, I see France,” she observed.
“I’m exercising. When Stephen Sandman comes I’ll lie here and do breathing exercises, ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ah. Who is he?”
“Sandies. He’s in Accounting. I asked him to come in for a drink before we go out.”
“Go out where?”
“The new Vietnamese place. They only have a beer and wine license.”
“Is he nice? Stephen Sandpiper?”
“I don’t know him well,” Ella said primly. “That is, of course we’ve known each other at the office slightly for years. He and his wife were divorced a couple of years ago now.”
“Ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ah,” Ann said.
Ella stood back from the arrangement of cannas. “Do they look all right?”
“Terrific. What do you want to do about me? Shall I lie here showing my underpants and doing puppy breathing?”
“We’ll sit out on the patio, I thought.”
“Then the cannas are just for the walk-through.”
“And you’re very welcome to join us, dear.”
“We could impress this guy,” Ann said, sitting up and assuming half-lotus position. “I could put on an apron and be the maid. Do we have an apron? One of those little white cap things. I could serve the canapés. Canapé, Mr. Sandpuppy? Canopee, Mr. Sandpoopoo?”
“Oh, hush,” her mother said. “You’re silly. I hope it’ll be warm enough on the patio.” She clipped back to the kitchen.
“If you really want to impress him,” Ann called, “you’d better hide me.”
Ella appeared instantly in the doorway, her mouth drawn in, her small blue eyes burning like the lights on airfields. “I will not listen to you talk that way, Ann!”
“I meant, I’m such a slob, my panties show, I haven’t washed my hair, and look at the bottoms of my feet, God.”
Ella continued to glare for a moment, then turned and went back into the kitchen. Ann hauled herself out of half-lotus and onto her feet. She came to the kitchen doorway.
“I just thought maybe you’d rather be alone. You know.”
“I would like him to meet my daughter,” Ella said, fiercely mashing cream cheese.
“I’ll get dressed. You smell terrific. He’ll die, you know.” Ann snuffled around the base of her mother’s neck, the creamy, slightly freckled skin in which two soft, round creases appeared when she turned her head, weakly crying, “Don’t, don’t, it tickles!”
“Vamp,” Ann whispered hotly behind her mother’s ear.
“Stop!”
Ann went off to the bathroom and showered. Enjoying the sound and the steam and the sluicing of the hot water, she took a long time about it. As she came naked out into the hallway she heard a man’s voice and leaped back into the bathroom, pulling the door shut, then reopening it slightly to listen. They had got about as far as the cannas. She slipped out of the bathroom and down the hall to her room. She pulled on bikinis and the T-shirt dress that slithered pleasantly on her skin and embraced her rounded belly in forgiving shapelessness. She blowdried her hair on hot while she teased it with her fingers, put on lipstick and wiped it off, checked in the long mirror, and went sedate and barefoot down the hall, past the cannas, out onto the little flagged terrace.
Stephen Sandies, wearing a cool grey canvas sports coat and white shirt without tie, stood up and gave her a firm handshake. His smile was white but not too. Dark hair greying nicely. Trim, tan, fit, around fifty, stern mouth but not pursy, everything under control. Cool, but not sweating to keep cool. Would do. Good going, Ma, pour on the Zhardang de Big Hotel! Ann winked at her mother, who recrossed her ankles and said, “I forgot the lemonade, dear, if that’s what you want? It’s in the icebox.” Ella was the last person in the Western Industrial Hegemony who said icebox, or canapé, or crossed her legs at the ankles. When Ann returned with a glass of lemonade, Stephen was talking. She sat down in a white webbed chair. Quietly, like a good girl. She sipped. They were on their second margaritas. Stephen’s voice was soft, with a kind of burring or slight huskiness in it, very sexy, a kind voice. Drink your lemonade now like a good girl and slope off. Slope off where? The belly telly in the bedroom? Shit. Forget it. Hang on, it’s been a nice day. Keep playing tag in Bagatelle Gardens. Can’t catch me. What was he saying about his son?
“Well,” he said, and fetched a sigh. Fetched it from deep inside, a long haul. He looked up at Ella with the wry, dry grin appropriate to the question, “Do you really want to hear all this?”
She’s supposed to say no?
“Yes,” Ella said.
“Well, it’s a long, dull story, really. Legal battles are dull. Not like Hollywood courtroom scenes. To put it as briefly as possible, when Marie and I separated I was so angry and so . . . bewildered, really, that I agreed to several arrangements too hastily. To put it briefly, I’ve been forced to the conclusion that she’s not fit to bring up my son. So we’re into the classic custody battle. I’d rather, frankly, that she didn’t even have visiting rights, but I’ll compromise if I have to. Judges favor the mother, of course. But I intend to win. A
nd I will. My lawyers are very good. If only the process were faster. It’s very painful to me to wait through the delays and procedures. Every day he’s with her will have to be undone. It’s as if it were a disease for which there is a cure, and I have the cure. But they won’t let me have him to begin the cure.” Wow. So much conviction, and so quiet. So certain. Ann studied his face briefly sidelong. Handsome, stern, kind, sad, like God. Was he possibly very very very conceited? Was he possibly right?
“Is it—Is she drinking?” Ella hazarded, sounding weak, and setting down her glass.
“Not to the point of alcoholism,” Stephen replied in his gently measured way. He looked down into his margarita-slush. “You know, I don’t like to say these things. We were married for eleven years. There were good times.”
“Oh, yes,” Ella murmured pathetically, squirming with the pain his understatement concealed. But why didn’t he squirm?
“But,” he said. “Well. Far be it from me! God knows. No job, but a credit card—Where my child-support payments go I don’t know. Three schools for Todd in two years. Disorder, bohemianism—but if that were all—it isn’t that. It’s the exposure of my child to immorality.”
Ann was terrified. She had not expected this. Debt, dirt, disorder, OK, but immorality—her child would be exposed, exposed to immorality. Naked, soft, helpless, exposed. She would expose it by giving birth to it. By being its mother she would expose it to the dirt, the disorder, the immorality of a woman’s life, her life. Its father would come from Riverside with a court order on clean, white paper. It would be taken from her, taken into custody. She would never see it. No visiting rights. No birth rights. It would be stillborn, it would die of immorality even before she could expose it.
Ella’s mouth was drawn in, her eyes cast down. Stephen had just said a word to her that explained all. And Ann had not been listening. Had the word been “woman”?
“You see why I can’t leave the boy there,” Stephen said, and though not squirming he was in pain, no doubt of it, his hand tight on the arm of the chair.
The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume 1: Where on Earth Page 29
