Tom’s laugh is embarrassed.
“No, he is,” Sherry says seriously. “It’s really a hang-up for him. It’s really sad.”
“Sherry has a heart of gold,” Lou explains, standing and leaning forward so that Tom can reach his match to her cigarette. Somehow she’s across the wide table while he and Sherry are beside each other on a plush leather loveseat.
“Talk,” Sherry says to Tom. “I want to hear your accent.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Lou says, because Tom hates having his accent pointed out. But he smiles at Sherry and says that he’s more popular than Jesus Christ.
“Oh, remember?” Sherry cries. “That got the Beatles in so much shit, remember? God.” She turns to face Tom, a shift of position that deepens her cleavage. “I can’t believe it. It’s like having John Lennon right here in The Nineteenth Hole. I mean—,” she looks at Lou,“for you it must be like going to bed with John Lennon.”
Lou’s eyes are on Tom, whose eyes are on Sherry’s tits.
Sherry changes the subject to listing anyone she’s slept with who is vaguely well known: the guy who owns the Chevrolet dealership down the street, the guy who does the helicopter traffic reports on the radio. For the first time in months Lou feels spite. She hates the feeling, but she can’t keep it out. She wants to catch Tom’s eye, to make Sherry a joke between them, but he’s in a slack-jawed staring trance.
Eventually Lou can’t stand it. She gets up and heads straight for the bar. Like she owns the place, she goes around behind to the bottles and pours vermouth into a beer mug. The bartender stays facing the other way, talking to somebody. Lou has two gulps, refills the mug, then takes it back to the table. “Here,” she says, plunking the mug down in front of Tom, jolting him and Sherry out of intense conversation.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“Booze,” Lou says. “Free and contraband.” She sits on the arm of the loveseat.
Tom takes a sip, smiles and raises the glass, toasting the air between her and Sherry.
He has a mysterious smile on his face all the way home. Lou can’t get an acknowledgement out of him that Sherry is either cheap or stupid.
“I thought you were her friend,” he smiles, wagging his finger.
“I am!”
He doesn’t ask her to come into his house.
He doesn’t show up for school. She phones him. “He’s at school,” his mother says. The day after that he says,“You’re not my jailer,” when Lou demands to know where he was. Walking home, they don’t talk. Because she senses what is about to happen, she clings to his arm, which he holds so rigidly she feels sick with humiliation and loss. But she doesn’t let go. At the turnoff to his house he stops.
“Am I coming to your place?” she asks. She has to ask it.
He looks directly at her. “In some things,” he says,“you are absolutely innocent.”
“You fucking bastard,” she cries. She slaps his face and runs away, her head roaring with fury. She will shoot him.
She gets the gun and conducts a mad search of the bomb shelter for bullets. After forty-eight hours of dread, the truth is exhilarating. Except for revenge she feels as if she’s completely over him.
The bullets are nowhere to be found. Their fuck-up of a father probably only ever had one, and he shot his foot with it. Lou sits on one of the bunks and regards her thin, cold-reddened thighs and lets out a sob. Nothing seems more pathetic than her inability to kill.
Up in the house she calls Sherry, who denies sleeping with Tom, then confesses and apologizes all over the place, then says she had a lousy time, then says she wouldn’t do it again if she was paid to.
“You are my enemy,” Lou tells her coldly. She calls Tom, intending to tell him the same thing, but the first words out of her mouth are,“You’re not a fucking bastard.”
He says he is. He says it’s over.
“I don’t care about Sherry,” she lies.
“Sherry has nothing to do with it.” He lets out a long sigh. “Look, I just don’t love you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Every word of this conversation is a small death,” she says. “Enough small deaths constitute dying.”
“You cannot die,” he says.
She detects a ray of light. “I don’t want to,” she says, her voice cracking.
“Even though your body is cut into pieces,” he says, and she realizes he is quoting from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, “you will recover.”
“You fucking bastard!” she cries, slamming down the phone.
Not since the baby carriage was hit by a car has Lou cried, and not since Rapunzel went through the fan belt has she cried in front of anyone. Rapunzel is the only time that Norma knows about. She sits on the edge of Lou’s bed and strokes Lou’s hair, down to her waist. Lou’s crying doesn’t sound like someone crying. If their mother is paying any attention, she’s going to think one of them has gone into labour or something. Halfway down Lou’s back, Norma spreads her fingers. They almost reach either side, that’s how thin Lou is. But Lou is as hard as a board. When Norma was small, for reassurance she liked to lay her hand on Lou’s hard, straight back. What Sandy liked to do was to lay her ear on an empty dinner plate.
“Bastard!” Lou cries. That’s all she’s said so far. Bastard, fucking bastard. Since their father isn’t home, it must be Tom. Norma finds herself a bit staggered to realize that Lou was probably sleeping with Tom, if she is this upset.
“I never trusted that guy,” Norma says passionately, which is true, though based entirely on the fact that his glasses are tinted. She looks at the bedside clock. A quarter to six and she hasn’t started dinner. “Dad’s going to be home soon,” she warns without much hope.
But in another minute the desperate, gasping cries stop, and Lou rolls over onto her back. “I’m nothing now,” she says. “I’ve got nobody.”
“You’ve got me,” Norma says. “And Sandy.” She pauses. “And Mom.” Lou’s hand drops on Norma’s thigh, and Norma feels the wrist for a pulse. The truth is, she knows what Lou means. Who would she be if Stella didn’t want to be her friend anymore? Oh, just the thought makes her light-headed!
“Am I alive?” Lou asks dully.
“As far as I can tell.” With her thumb and forefinger Norma encircles Lou’s tiny wrist. Measuring again. It has amazed her all her life that Lou is her sister.
After dinner Norma walks to Stella’s house. It’s warm for February, and windy. Norma finds herself overcome with happiness. How can she be happy when Lou has a broken heart? But she is. The wind carries her along, and she feels herself to be things she knows she is not—light as a feather, fascinating, unpredictable—and crossing the schoolyard, she just has to open her arms and run.
“Guess what?” Stella greets her at the door. “My parents are out.”
Stella also seems to be in a strange, high mood. Her hair is pinned up in big, spectacular loops, and she’s wearing white lipstick and slashes of rouge. She wants to do something crazy. “I know,” she says. “Let’s get drunk!”
Norma stares at her.
“Oh.” Stella looks crestfallen. “Don’t you want to?”
Norma can’t speak. She’s just thought of something she hasn’t thought about in years: that time she and Lou tied their mother with a skipping rope.
Before she recovers, Stella perks up and starts dragging her by the arm. “Okay, I have a better idea.”
They go into the living room, and Stella turns on the radio. “Let’s dance!” she cries.
Because the music is some old rock and roll song, they start to jive. Norma, who learned how from their mother, leads. Stella is all loose-limbed and clumsy. She smiles flirtatiously. At the beginning of the next song,“I’m a Believer,” she squeals and runs over to turn up the volume. Then she runs back and stands in front of Norma, shaking her long body like a mop.
“Come on!” she cries. “Shimmy!”
N
orma does a more moderate version. This wild Stella is overwhelming. Maybe she already is drunk. Pins fly from her hair, loosening loops that fall like ticker tape. Both of them laugh every time another pin flies out. Stella screams with laughter.
At the end of the song they collapse on the couch. Then Stella jumps right back up again, crying “Cherish!” She yanks Norma’s hand. “I love this song,” she cries.
It’s a slow dance. Norma tries to lead them in a box step. But Stella can’t follow and loses patience. “Let’s just dance normally,” she says, and moving closer she drops her head on Norma’s shoulder.
They keep their feet in one place and sway. Norma’s heart works like a piston, like a heart for both of them, where their breasts touch. When the song is over, news comes on, and Stella turns the dial, trying to find more music to dance to, then gives up and switches the radio off. Norma is still swept away. She lowers herself onto the edge of the couch.
“The Man I Love,” Stella reads from the TV Guide. “? nightclub singer is in love with a pianist who is in love with a society woman.’ Let’s watch that, okay?” Norma nods. Stella turns on the t?, drops a cushion onto Norma’s lap and curls up on the couch with her head on the cushion. “I always use my mom for a pillow,” she explains.
After a minute Norma pulls out the pins holding Stella’s two remaining loops. Combing her fingers through Stella’s hair reminds her of Lou crying on the bed.
She combs Stella’s beautiful hair and curls it around her fingers. A couple of times Stella gets up—to go to the bathroom and to bring them Cokes and cookies—but she lies back down on Norma’s lap. Presently she falls asleep. Norma strokes her hair so lightly that it will seem like a breeze.
She feels suspended in a supreme and clairvoyant point in her life. She feels that she has crossed over every murky, base desire to get to here. The height of her life is now. She is having her turn now.
Soon it will be Stella’s turn. This thought comes gradually to Norma, partly inspired by the love triangle in the movie. Stella will get a boyfriend soon. Next year at university. But it’s okay. Only a couple of hours ago the idea of losing Stella was unbearable. Now it’s okay, because from the height of her life Norma can see that Stella getting a boyfriend is inevitable and overdue. Stella will get married and be happy forever. From beginning to end, Stella’s life will be perfect. Some lives are meant to be perfect. Obviously there have to be some lives against which the rest—her own life, Lou’s life—are measured.
Lou. If a phone was within reach, Norma would call Lou up right now. She would say … what would she say? Not “You’ve got me” again, although it’s what she wants to tell her, really meaning it now. No, she’d say something that sounds closer to the truth—the tenderness and amazement she felt, feeling the beat of blood in Lou’s tiny wrist.
Around the end of March it occurs to Lou that she hasn’t had a period in over a month. She’s not worried. The one time she isn’t certain that Tom pulled out is New Year’s Eve, and she’s had a period since then.
In the middle of April she urinates into an empty pickle jar and takes the bus to a drugstore that has a big, hand-painted window sign announcing “PREGNACY TESTS! RESULTS IN2 HOURS!” The misspelling of pregnancy and the exclamation marks suggest to her someone easy-going and grateful for business. Not that she gives a shit what an illiterate pharmacist thinks.
She waits the two hours in a restaurant, drinking coffee in the booth by the window. Every other passerby seems to be a mother with a baby or young children. Most of the babies are crying, and all the children that aren’t acting up look miserable. All the mothers that don’t look vindictive look tranquillized.
When she goes back to the drugstore, the pharmacist flips through a tray of cards and reads aloud last names: “Ferguson, Farquar, Feldman …” Are these all women having pregnancy tests? “Field,” he says finally. “Negative.”
“Oh,” Lou says. “Oh, shit.”
The pharmacist doesn’t look much older than she is, and his hair is long for a pharmacist, curling over his collar. “Negative,” he says, giving her the once-over,“is good news.”
She misses another period. Her breasts are swollen and attracting second glances, and in the morning she craves Twinkies so badly she skips school to go to the store and buy them.
“I’m obviously pregnant,” she tells herself. And yet she’s obviously not. Even if the urine test was wrong, and even if Tom didn’t always pull out soon enough, she can’t imagine her body letting that bastard’s sperm in. It’s not some romantic idea she entertains that babies have to be born of love. It’s that her insides seize up at the thought of him. It’s that thinking of him and Sherry together, she has brought up bile.
On the third of May she goes for another test. Having failed to find an empty or near-empty jar or small bottle, she has urinated into a whisky bottle. “Believe it or not I think this is the second today,” the pharmacist says, checking out the Canadian Club label.
She tests positive. It’s the young, long-haired pharmacist who gives her the news. He says positive is always a sure thing, and the reason she came up negative before was probably a combination of it being too early to tell and her urine being diluted.
She nods. Although there are people lined up behind her, she can’t move away. She stands there looking at the pharmacist, waiting for the entire textbook explanation of how she has come to this point in her life.
The pharmacist reaches for a pad and jots something down, then rips off the page, rolls it up and hands it to her like a joint.
“Give this guy a call,” he says quietly. “This guy’s cool.”
As if what he wrote might fall out, as if the piece of paper contains her one hope, which it does, she continues holding it the way he gave it to her. Suddenly she feels nine months pregnant. There is a baby inside of her, but what it feels like is a malignant tumour. She’s in shock at the thought that with every second it is replicating its cells.
A pay phone is in the restaurant, outside the washrooms. The abortionist’s name is Dr. Dickey. She pictures a homo. Twice she gets a busy signal, and then she is struck by a wave of nausea and has to go into the Ladies and sit on the toilet, her head between her knees.
How can she be pregnant? That bastard. She should tell him. Scare the shit out of him. At school he strides right past her. The only time he has even looked at her was last week. He was coming toward her, outside the cafeteria, and because he slowed down and shook his head, she was sure he was gathering the courage to finally speak to her. But when he was a few feet away, she knew that he was stoned, that’s all, that he hadn’t seen her yet. She went up to him, forcing him to stop. God knows what got into her, but she grabbed one of his hands, yanked it up and down a couple of times, as if she were cranking an engine, and called him an asshole. He looked worried and annoyed. A few hours later they passed in the hall again, and he threw her that mad-eyed, sideways glance you get from a dog in a hurry.
She should tell him. Watch him sweat. The idea grows on her and banishes her nausea. She leaves the cubicle. In the mirror above the sink she investigates her face. Somewhere she’s read that pregnancy is good for your complexion. She bets Tom would marry her, do the hypocritical thing. When they stole cigarettes (“liberated” them, he said) and had to get out of the store fast, he held the door open for ladies. An English gentleman bullshit revolutionary.
What if she married him? She steps back and stares at herself, imagining herself with white, milk-huge breasts, a little baby in her arms, and Tom compelled to love her.
She can see that. Yes, she would like that. She leaves the washroom and the restaurant. On the sidewalk she brushes against a man who growls,“Watch where you’re going!” The effect is like a hypnotist snapping his fingers. She hurries back into the restaurant and down to the phone. What’s happening, she tells herself, fishing in her pockets for the dime, is that her hormones are sending up tempting messages. Her hormones are trying to trick her.
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br /> The abortionist’s line is still busy.
“God fucking damn it,” she says, banging down the receiver. She regards her stomach. It looks twice as big as it did fifteen minutes ago. It looks evil, like a punishment. It looks like the great multiplication of her sorrows.
That Sandy doesn’t have the flu or swollen glands but is pregnant strikes her from out of nowhere and as the truth at last. There are other facts she could face. Two weeks ago she bled, and she’s never had an orgasm, which up until now she thought you had to, to conceive—she could go on believing that—but the minute the idea of a baby enters her mind, she knows that her body has been claimed. All she wants to do is cup her stomach. She goes home early from school to cup it in private.
The next morning she pees in a whisky bottle and takes it to a drugstore that she’s noticed from the bus on account of its big pregnancy-test sign. She isn’t uncertain, and she doesn’t need confirmation. She goes to the drugstore because she assumes that you’re supposed to. Then you go to a pediatrician. From here on in she is dedicated to doing what a mother-to-be is supposed to do.
Already she loves her baby so much! The first thing she intends to tell the pediatrician is, if you have to chose between the baby and me, let the baby live. Having it inside her feels exactly like a miracle, as if an angel touched her stomach and a baby began to grow.
She can hardly think of Dave being involved. Of course she’ll marry him now, but there’s no reason she has to tell him why right away. It’s hard to connect him, grunting and pumping and sweating on top of her, either with a baby or with herself. When she was a virgin, she didn’t know how that felt. Now she knows. Now, with a baby inside her, she feels clean through and through.
“Miss Jones?” the pharmacist says.
Sandy gave a false name. “Yes,” she says.
“Positive. You’re pregnant.”
“Yes, I know.” She stands there until it’s clear he’s not going to tell her anything else.
Except for lying on her bed with her hands on her stomach, she doesn’t want to do anything. The truth keeps overwhelming her. Her eyes fill, and she swears to God she’ll be a good mother. She’d like to tell Norma. After she has the pregnancy test, that night, she longs to climb into Norma’s bed like she used to and whisper the news.
Falling Angels Page 17
