Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  Rhea was for real. Katie acted like it was a surprise, but she had been thinking about a baby since the false alarm. She had been careless. When she found out, she told Ursula first. Ursula bit her lip and said, “I guess I’ll never have another one.” She already had two. Katie thought it wasn’t a very helpful thing to say. She had wanted a little reassurance. Even a hug would have been nice.

  The night Katie went into labor Fisher was drunk, and Katie, too embarrassed to call Ursula, took a taxi to the hospital. Fisher showed up early the next afternoon. The baby was bundled in a rolling crib by Katie’s bed, and Katie was reading Mother Jones. “A divorce would be awful,” Fisher said first thing. He hadn’t even taken a good look at the baby. “All those papers, and a judge. You’d have to do it without me.” Katie blinked. It took that long to figure him out. The marriage had meant more to him than to her. She had said she wanted to be married so he would know she didn’t mind having his baby. He had thought marriage was full of promises—and he had meant to make them! Now he felt guilty. He was laying their marriage out like a pig on an altar. And he was guilty. She couldn’t even depend on him for a ride. “Come on, look at her,” she told him, placid as a cow, ignoring his contrition and anxiety. She was not going to make a neat trade, conscience for baby. She wanted both. Besides, he did look at the baby, and he cried. Like any other father, he cried, and made promises neither of them would try to remember.

  6

  “I do love you,” she told him the next time he called. She had been at her mother’s two weeks. She didn’t have the courage to say she didn’t want to come back. She did love him, she didn’t want to go back. She could not explain it. She would write him about it. She would draw a line down the middle of a page. Write LOVE on one side, and THE REST OF IT on the other. Put it in an envelope and mail it. Hell, she could just put those titles down and he’d get the message. Getting divorced would be like that, all stamps and signatures and a great distance between them. She would stop talking to him. He would be humiliated. His worst doubts would be confirmed. He knew what he was really worth. He would go away from the people who knew them both, even Michael, and in a while she could go back if she wanted. She wanted Ursula to be her baby’s aunt. She thought it would make them closer. She would act like Fisher had never been there. If they talked about him, it would be like he was dead.

  Rhea lay propped in an infant seat on the dining room table. Sunlight streamed across the table and across her fat legs. Next to her seat, a big Tupperware bowl of rising dough glowed yellow. The wind was blowing across the bare landscape outside. A norther was due, but who could complain? The sun had been bright every day. When Katie’s mother came home for lunch, she opened the blinds in Katie’s room and pulled back the curtains. She didn’t like it that Katie wanted to be in the dark.

  One afternoon her mother brought home another baby girl about Rhea’s age. It was the child of a friend’s daughter. Katie, lying in bed, heard the strange baby’s cries. She went into the room and saw the two older women, each with a baby in her arms. The new baby was hungry. Katie’s breasts began to leak. Katie’s mother was trying to give a bottle to the infant. “Is she used to nursing?” Katie asked, taking the baby from her mother. Her mother said she thought the baby took milk both ways. “Usually my friend keeps her while her daughter works part-time, but she broke a tooth and had to go to the dentist. The little dear is all off-schedule,” she said.

  Katie took the baby over to the couch and undid her blouse to feed her. The baby took the nipple greedily. All Katie wanted to do was make the baby stop crying, but as the child sucked, Katie felt a wonderful sensation come over her. It was as if she lay in sunshine. She looked up contentedly, and saw her mother and her aunt staring at her. “Milk’s milk,” she said. It was amazing.

  That evening, as Rhea was sleeping, Katie went and sat by the crib for a long time, leaning her face against the slats and making long red marks on her forehead. She tried to see what was unique about her child. What made her Rhea and not some other baby. Fisher had asked her, “Do you think she looks like me? Like you?” He said he wished they had taken photographs. Katie said Rhea looked like a baby.

  In the morning, Katie woke to a terrible taut pain in her breasts. The front of her nightgown was soaked. She looked out the window. It was late morning. No one had waked her to feed Rhea. She went into the kitchen and found her mother giving the baby a bottle. She had gouged a bigger hole in the nipple, and was giving Rhea a pasty cereal. Katie saw, on the counter, a cereal box and a case of formula. It was that easy. The oozing cereal ran down Rhea’s chin and over the front of her bib. Katie turned away and poured herself a cup of coffee. She poured the cream carelessly, the cup was too full. The kitchen was noisy and bright; things hummed and clicked and bubbled. Katie bent over to slurp from the cup.

  Her mother came into Katie’s room after lunch. The window was still dark. Her mother raised the blinds brusquely and stood at the foot of the bed facing Katie. The sky had turned the gray of a boat hull, and it was getting cold.

  “I’ll keep Rhea if you want,” her mother said. Katie had been expecting a comment about the weather. “I’m not very old, I’m healthy, money’s not a problem. I’m not desperate for someone else to take care of, I don’t think it’s a neurotic impulse. I think I’m thinking of the baby, though I must say a child is a sweet commitment in the early years.”

  Katie said nothing. Her scalp was on fire. An hour later her mother came back. “If you do leave the child, it has to be something legal, a guardianship. I won’t take her for a while, and love her the way I would, and then have you come through on your way to Timbuktu and take her away.” Katie looked at her mother with open, sullen hatred. “Think about it,” her mother said gently. “For the baby’s sake?”

  The next morning, Katie was up and dressed by eight. Christine fluttered around her, pouring coffee for her, but her mother acted as though nothing were different. A day like other days. June was sitting on a chair by the kitchen table with the baby on her lap. “I bought a portable playpen for the shop,” she said, more to Christine than to Katie. “I thought Rhea would enjoy being around people.” Katie said maybe she could help. She heard how stupid that sounded. “I don’t mean with Rhea. I mean with the shop.”

  “This wouldn’t be a good week,” June said. “Maybe next week. I’d enjoy showing you the store. I have a couple of women who sew up a few of my designs, did I ever tell you?” She stood up and handed Rhea to Katie. “So now she’s been fed,” she said, and went to get dressed. Katie dangled the baby over one arm and carried her coffee in the other hand, and went into the other room. It seemed a baby wasn’t much trouble, if there weren’t other things to take your attention.

  Uncle Dayton was in his place in the recliner. He was dressed in aged gabardine pants and a plaid shirt. “Morning there!” he bellowed. Katie didn’t know if he could tell who had entered the room. All the vision he had was enough to see objects as blocks against the light. “Bring me that little one to pet,” he said, and when Katie did, he was surprised. “So it’s you this morning, is it?” he said. Katie saw how long the days would be, if she started them all so early.

  7

  The buddy with the houseboat was part Indian. He and Fisher were in the Rung Sat in ’66. It was like being in a fraternity. The buddy’s name was Jake. They had called him Kneebone in the navy. Fisher called him that when they got tight, and Jake gave a war whoop. He was Blackfeet, raised a long way from the sea. They threw stories back and forth. One was about another Indian, a Crow named Charlie-Bird-in-Ground. He had had his balls cut off and stuffed in his mouth, in a whorehouse in Saigon. “That was the war,” Fisher and Jake said. They talked about it like pranks remembered from high school. Good old Charlie No-Balls.

  There was a picture of Jake on the wall of his houseboat. He was wearing a headband made from torn black pajamas, and he was holding a submachine gun. His hair hung long and silky, as if he had had a shower and then put b
ack on his dirty clothes. He looked a lot more Indian in the photograph than he did now. He was standing on a sampan. He had a smart-ass expression that didn’t much resemble him now; except when he was drunk, he was soft-spoken, and never looked at you straight on. But he must have had some of those feelings still, or he must have remembered them, or wanted them, because there was the picture. And there was a Montana Indian on a houseboat in Sausalito.

  Fisher studied the picture a moment and named a place: Can Tho or Ham Lo. Katie couldn’t make it out. “Right,” Jake, a.k.a. Kneebone, laughed. “When we got through, there wasn’t a leaf left on a bush. We shaved the fucking shoreline, man.” Fisher laughed too. “Three hundred junks a day. All mine were little guys with nets, scared shitless. You got all the cargo.” Jake flicked the picture with his fingernail. “I could smell Charlie in their fish sauce.”

  “God, Fish,” Katie whispered when they were in their sleeping bags, inches away from the couple’s bunk. “I don’t even know what you two are talking about, and it scares me. Even when it’s over now.” She could see Fisher’s face in the glare of lights from a nearby disco, bouncing off the window above her head. The look Fisher gave her was the look you’d give a cat on your lap just before you put it off. “Don’t try,” he told her. “It was boring, and wet, and hot. You couldn’t understand. Wait for the movie version.” His voice cracked, as if he were talking over a radio. Across a paddy, maybe, or around a bend.

  8

  Fisher sweated all night, every night. He woke smelling sour and stale. All his shirts were wet in big circles under the arms. For a long time Katie changed the sheets every day, but it got to be too much. She lay on a dry place on her side of the bed. The cook at work said it sounded like diabetes. Katie nagged and nagged until Fisher went to see a doctor. He came home thoroughly peeved. The doctor learned that he was a carpenter, and he said, “Well, don’t laborers expect to sweat?” There hadn’t been a blood test. The cook said there should have been a glucose tolerance test. Ursula said Michael said his and Fisher’s dad had something, maybe it was diabetes. Katie wept in frustration. “Don’t you know?!” she yelled at Michael. Ursula shrugged. Michael wasn’t unlike Fisher in many ways, she said. Fisher wouldn’t discuss it, ever again.

  He dreamed. Sometimes he groaned, or cried out, in his sleep. It didn’t seem to wake him, only her. The dreams went on, year after year. She told him about them. “You should talk,” he said, “the way you twitch in your sleep.” He made an excuse of it, to take her from behind. “Go on, wiggle around and get your little ass in my face.” Clearly, he wasn’t going to discuss what was going on with him. She knew her own dreams drew from his, but she knew his were the real nightmares. The groans were too deep to ignore. She learned to sleep over them, like street noise, but she knew they were there, and she worried. The sweating didn’t go away, either. Sometimes, to prove to herself that she loved him, she drew close to him, her thighs recoiling as they touched the cool, clammy space between his body and hers, where he had soaked the sheets.

  But there were nights, dark, rich nights, plum and apricot, grapes and nougat nights, when they met and slid and plunged in the juice and acid sweetness. He lay sleeping, and when the sea of her chest was dry, she wiped her finger across the top, above the nipples, and licked it, to taste the salt he had left there. The bed was pungent with the smells they had made. There was no word for this. Love. Hate. Need. She lacked a word; it needed six, eight syllables, rolling consonants, resonance. A Russian word might do. A Bolshevik word, she thought, though she didn’t know what that meant. She needed a word rich and thick enough to name what there was between them, some word complex enough, and sad, if spoken aloud.

  He did wake up once and tell her he had dreamed he was firing into a tangle of thick green vines, and suddenly a bunch of gooks fell from everywhere, silently, like blossoms off a tree in a light wind. He saw that she was one of them, a body rising and folding over before him into the slime. She thought it a loving thing, his telling her, but once he had done so, he shut her out. He seemed to hate her for knowing about the dream. Sometimes he would lie in the dark with his eyes open, staring at her until she was the one to turn away. He wouldn’t tell her anything else. “I tell it to my lady,” he mocked, holding up a half gallon of burgundy and settling down for a night on the couch.

  She began to have more vivid dreams of her own. They were black and crisscrossed with lights. They were damp, sticky dreams, in terrible places. She never knew what was going on. She woke disoriented. Sometimes she cried. He asked her what the hell was going on, and she said that it might just be fallout from his dreams; they had grown so big in him that they had crawled over into her. “What a dumb cunt thing to say,” he said. She agreed, yes, yes, her lips slick with tears. Maybe she didn’t have any right to his pain, but they were working on a decade together. There they were, two bodies side by side, wet and dry. Was it so strange that, after so long a time, she should start to share his night terror? She didn’t ask for the dreams. She had never had patience with dreams, hers or anyone’s, but these dreams—maybe she did welcome them. It was aggressive of her to walk into his secret place and steal from him. One night she woke with cold fright and called to him. “I don’t know what I’m dreaming. Help me,” she begged. He got out of bed and wouldn’t sleep with her for days after. “Surrealistic dildo,” he said, carrying the best blankets off the bed.

  9

  She found Uncle Dayton’s company surprisingly agreeable. She spent most of the days with him. His face had two expressions, and he slid back and forth between them. Sometimes he was benign, listening to the baby gurgle, or to game shows on television. Because his hearing was poor, he had a radio that turned to the television stations. He put both the television and the radio on loud. Katie asked why he turned the television on at all since he couldn’t see it. “If you only listen,” he said, “you’ve only got half of what’s going on.” After that, if she was in the room, she would describe to him what was happening. She would tell him about the clothes people wore, and how the winners jumped up and down. This pleased him very much. At other times, Dayton sat in absolute silence, vulnerability sliding down over him like a fog. His paper skin looked ready to split. “He’s scared he won’t live to see ninety,” Christine explained. Katie couldn’t tell what that meant, so she asked her mother. “He’s scared of facing payments due on his living,” her mother said. Katie was fascinated. Here was this old, old man in a chair, so thin she could have lifted him easily. “What did he ever do?” she wanted to know, but her mother tightened her lips to a slit. “Remember it’s your own history you’re making,” she finally said. “Look after that.”

  Katie watched her mother with Dayton. Spoon by spoon June fed the old man, catching the occasional dribble of broth before it ran off his chin. Her voice cooed while her face remained hard and resentful. Katie supposed she would never know what history her mother and her old uncle shared. Katie suddenly doubted all the kind things she had ever seen her mother do. She swore she would never act like that, as though she were generous when she was not.

  Katie asked her mother if she had a boyfriend. Both of them smiled at the silly word. “A friend?” Katie amended. “Why yes, I do,” her mother said. He was a surgeon. “Can I meet him?” Katie asked. Her mother said she felt their hands were full. “I promise I’ll behave,” Katie said lightly. So her mother invited the surgeon to dinner. He was pleasant, and Katie saw that they liked one another very much. She saw something else. On the doctor’s face she saw something she had not seen in a long while, the ripe open look of desire. She could not bear it; she left the table.

  She went to her mother’s store. A blouse caught her eye. It was of Chinese-red silk. Her mother insisted that Katie take it. Katie wore it as a nightshirt, with bikini panties. She thought she might look like a Chinese whore, and she wished Fisher could see her.

  10

  She had been in Texas a little over two months when she saw the dream clearly,
and could recall it. She had been trying all along to find herself in it. It came clear when she realized that she was there, but not visible. She had to look at the dream from the inside.

  She dreamed of hibiscus flowers drifting like foam on water. She dreamed of shoals disappearing and reappearing. She dreamed of land underwater. She had grown up on the vast yellow plains of West Texas, and her brown-water dreams frightened her. There had been a woman from Mesquite whose husband had fallen from a derrick on a clear night. Afterward, the woman had had a healer’s hands. People came to her from all over. Katie heard her mother talking about it, and begged to go.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” her mother said, “and it’s wrong to gawk.” But Katie had longed to see the woman. To see sick people rise. Now, remembering the healer, she wished for her, even if only by dream. If the woman had touched her, so long ago, this terrible seed inside her, this thing Fisher had touched and set to bloom, might have withered and made her wholly another person. The thing was the pink of the hibiscus, but it was poison. It was love.

  A sampan drifted toward a clearing. Fisher was there waiting. She could turn, back into the brush, but she could not take the child, because she did not know what was there. She could move out into the clearing, toward Fisher, trusting him not to be tired or angry, not to panic, not to fire. She could not do that with the child between them.