Labor Day

by Joyce Maynard

  Just in case your parents’ divorce didn’t screw up your personality enough already, Eleanor said, this boyfriend business will probably leave you with major neurosis. For your sake, I hope you’ll make a lot of money in the future, to pay for all the therapy you’ll need.

  As she spoke she was chewing on her braid, which might have been her substitute for food, it occurred to me. She had gotten up from the leather chair now so she was standing in front of me in the reading room, which made it possible for me to see that she was even skinnier than I might have imagined. She had also taken off her glasses, which revealed dark circles under her eyes. In one way, she looked really old, but also like a little girl.

  I see only one hope for you, she said. I’m not saying to kill him or anything. But you need to find a way to get him out of your world.

  I don’t know if that’s possible, I said.

  Look at it this way, Hank, she said. (Hank? I had no idea where she got that.) Either you get rid of him. Or he gets rid of you. Which one is it going to be?

  BACK AT THE HOUSE, FRANK AND my mother were getting ready to paint the storm windows. I wouldn’t have thought this would be the kind of job two people who were about to leave the country forever would be interested in, but maybe she was thinking she’d sell our place to get money for the farmhouse on Prince Edward Island. In case what she had in the bank wasn’t enough. She’d want our place here looking nice.

  Hey, buddy. You got back just in the nick of time, Frank said. Want to help scrape these with me?

  My mother was standing next to him. She had on a pair of overalls she always used when she was working in the garden, back when we had one, with her hair tied back in a bandana. They had all our storm windows out, and a paint scraper, and some sandpaper.

  What do you think? she said. I’ve had this paint sitting around for a couple of years now. Frank said the three of us could knock out this job in no time if we all pitched in.

  I wanted to paint with them. It looked like they were having fun. She had brought the radio outside, and they were doing some kind of Labor Day weekend countdown of hits. The song on at the moment was Olivia Newton-John, doing that number from Grease about summer love. My mother was holding the scraper like it was a microphone, pretending to be Olivia Newton-John.

  I’m busy, I said.

  A hurt look came over her face.

  I thought it would be a fun project for us to do together, she said. You can fill us in on what you learned at the library.

  I learned that my mother had been brainwashed. That the inside of her brain, if we could see it now, under the influence of sex, would resemble a fried egg. That her only hope lay in my getting rid of Frank. I didn’t say these things but I thought them.

  Frank had put a hand on my shoulder now. I remembered the other time he’d done that, the first day I met him—how he’d told me he needed my help. Looking in his eyes, I had believed I could trust him.

  I think you should help your mother here, son, he said.

  Not angry, but firmer than I’d heard out of him before. Here it came, the thing Eleanor had warned me about. Him taking charge. Now I rode in the backseat. Soon I wouldn’t be in the car at all.

  You’re not my boss, I said. You’re not my dad.

  He withdrew his hand, as if he’d touched hot metal. Or dry ice.

  It’s OK, Frank, my mother said. We can take care of the job, just the two of us.

  I went inside and turned on the television, loud. The U.S. Open tennis match was on, not that I cared who won. One channel up, baseball. Then some infomercial for women who wanted to trim down their thighs. I didn’t care that my mother and Frank would hear me watching the show—same as I heard them, through the wall in my bedroom—or that when I was finished eating my sandwich, I left the plate and my empty milk glass out on the table, instead of putting my dishes in the dishwasher the way I normally would.

  I drifted over to check on Joe, still lying on the floor of his cage, panting in the heat. I got a spray bottle and rinsed it out, squirted water on his fur to cool him off, then squirted some on me.

  I lay on the couch, watching the infomercial and flipping through the book I’d brought home, Mysterious Maritimes: Land of Dreams. I picked up the newspaper and studied the headline again. Reward offered. Ten thousand dollars.

  Remove him, Eleanor said. Get him out of your world.

  I thought about a dirt bike. A video camera. A paintball gun.

  I remembered a catalog I read on the plane, coming home from Disney with my father and Marjorie, filled with all kinds of amazing things to buy that you never knew existed before, like a hoverboard and a popcorn machine to put in your own home and a clock that showed what time it was in cities all over the world and a machine that turned your bathtub into a Jacuzzi and solar-powered tiki lights and a pair of what looked like rocks, only they were really outdoor stereo speakers, made from fiberglass, for neighborhood cookouts and parties. With ten thousand dollars, a person could buy every single thing in the catalog, except for the items that weren’t interesting anyway.

  After they took Frank away, my mother would be sad, but she’d get over it and eventually realize it was for her own good that I did it.

  CHAPTER 14

  YOU PROBABLY WONDER WHY YOU don’t have a brother or sister, my mother said one time. This was during one of our meals together, where she liked to bring up topics to talk about while we ate our frozen dinners. I was around nine years old at the time, and I had never wondered why I didn’t have a brother or sister, but I nodded anyway, understanding, even then, that this was a subject she wanted to explore with me.

  I always planned on having at least two children, preferably more, she said. Having you was the first thing I did, other than dancing, where I felt I really knew what I was doing.

  Six months after you were born, she said, I missed my period.

  Some kids that age might not have known what their mother was talking about, if she said something along those lines. But I had lived with my mother long enough, I knew all about this. And plenty more.

  I was always perfectly regular, from the day I began to menstruate, she told me. So I knew immediately what that meant. I didn’t need any confirmation from a doctor.

  But your father didn’t want another baby so soon. He said we didn’t have the money, and anyway, it bothered him how much of my time went into taking care of you, when he wanted attention for himself. Your father persuaded me to have the abortion, she said. I never wanted to do it. To me, any baby, even if it didn’t come at the most convenient time, was a gift. I told your father then, it was a dangerous thing to start playing God. Waiting for things to be perfect, because they never would be.

  Your father had taken me to a clinic. I had gone into the little room alone, while your father sat outside. I put on a paper gown and climbed up on the table, put my feet in the stirrups. Not the kind they have on a horse, Henry, she said.

  They turned on a machine, and a noise started, like a generator, or a very large garbage disposal. She lay there, listening, while the machine kept going. The nurse said something to her but she couldn’t hear, the machine was so loud. When it was over, they let her rest on a cot in a different room for a couple of hours, next to a couple of other women who had also had abortions that morning. When she came out, my father was there, though he had left in the middle, to do some shopping, she said. On the drive home she had not cried, but she stared out the window most of the way, and when he asked her, finally, what was it like? she couldn’t say anything.

  From the moment I had the abortion, all I wanted was to get pregnant again and have the baby this time, my mother told me. You know what I mean?

  I didn’t, but I nodded. To me, it made no sense that first she went through all that effort not to have a baby and the next thing you knew, she wanted one. This might be what my father meant when he asked me if I thought she was crazy.

  But finally he went along with it. Just to get her off his back, h
e said. And for a while there, my mother was just so happy. I was just two years old at this point, which meant she was still very busy taking care of me, but though she knew women who complained about morning sickness and soreness in their breasts, or feeling tired all the time, my mother loved every single thing about being pregnant.

  Somewhere near the end of her first trimester—when the fetus would have been (she knew, from her daily study of the First Nine Months of Life book) about the size of a lima bean—she had woken with a new and awful cramping feeling in her belly, and blood on the sheets. By midafternoon, she had gone through three sanitary napkins and the blood was still flowing.

  Three sanitary napkins is a lot, Henry, she told me. I didn’t know what a sanitary napkin was, but I nodded.

  Her doctor, examining her, had told her it was not that unusual to miscarry and there was no reason to suppose she’d have any problems the next time. She was young. Her body looked healthy. They could try again soon.

  She got pregnant again a few months later, though this time she decided to hold off wearing her maternity clothes until she was further along. She still told a few friends (this was in the days when she had friends). She also told me, though I had no memory of this. I would have been not quite three years old by this point.

  Just at the end of the first trimester, again, she had begun to bleed. Sitting on the toilet—to pee, she thought—she felt something slip out of her. Looking into the toilet she’d seen what looked like a blood clot and knew she wasn’t pregnant anymore. What was a person supposed to do? Flush?

  After a minute of standing there, she had knelt on the floor and scooped her hand into the water. She carried the blood clot thing out into the yard and, with her fingers, tried to dig a hole, but because of the absence of topsoil, she could barely scrape the surface.

  This would have been your baby brother or sister, she said.

  Buried, in the backyard of the house where my father and Marjorie lived, I gathered. Though I was still thinking about the close call of almost flushing it down the toilet.

  By the third time she got pregnant again, not so long after, she no longer expected things to go well, and they didn’t. This time the miscarriage had come even earlier—before the two-month mark even—and she had never even felt morning sickness, which had been the first bad sign.

  Now I knew God was punishing me, she said. We had been given a wonderful gift, with you, and a wonderful gift six months after your birth, and because of our own foolishness, supposing we could pick our moment to become parents, as if we were choosing when to go dancing—I knew now we might never again have the chance.

  But the fourth try had seemed so much more promising. I loved it that I felt sick, she said. And then my breasts started filling out, right around the six-week mark when they were supposed to, and I was over the moon.

  Don’t you remember me taking you with me to the doctor that time? she said. And he showed you the ultrasound, and I said Look, there’s your baby brother? Because tiny as it was we thought we could see a penis.

  No, I said. I didn’t remember that. There was so much to remember, sometimes the best thing was to forget.

  When they had looked at the ultrasound that first time, and the doctor said everything looked good, my mother had asked him to look again, to be sure. When a few weeks later she had registered an odd feeling in her belly, she had first supposed it was the same old story unfolding again, before she realized no, this was a different one. She put her hand on her stomach and felt a strange and thrilling little ripple, like a fish passing under water, deep below the surface. She had put my hand on her belly then, so I could feel it too. My baby brother was swimming.

  Then she was just so happy. We had a bad time for a while there, she had explained to me, as the two of us lay on my bed, reading my Curious George book.

  But it’s over now. This is the one that’s going to be OK. I took having children for granted before. Whatever we get from here on, I’ll be grateful for.

  Then her labor had begun, and they set the suitcase in the car that had been packed so long ago—way back before she had the first miscarriage. Her labor had been long, but the fetal monitor had indicated a healthy heartbeat from the baby, right up until those last terrible minutes, and then suddenly they were wheeling my mother into the operating room and sending my father away. Then they were cutting her open.

  Hearing this story then, at age nine, I had asked her where I was when this was happening. A friend of mine was taking care of you, she said. Not Evelyn. This was before Evelyn. Back in those days, my mother had normal people for friends.

  When it was over, she could never remember much of what happened in the room that day, though she remembered hearing the words, A girl. Not a boy after all. A girl. But something was wrong with their voices, delivering the news. They should have sounded happy. For a moment she thought that must be the problem. Maybe the nurse thought she’d be disappointed it wasn’t a son. Then she saw the nurse’s face, and knew, even before she heard the words. It was something else.

  Give me my baby, she had called out, but no one answered. She could see the top of the doctor’s green cap, moving in hushed silence on the other side of the curtain, stitching her up. Then they must have given her some drug because soon after that she went to sleep for a long time. She did remember my father coming into the room. The important thing is you’re OK, he said, though that didn’t feel important at all, then, or for a long time after.

  After she woke up—not right away, but soon—they had wheeled her into a room where their baby was—Fern, named for her mother, who had died so long before. Fern lay in a bassinette, like a regular baby, and she was wrapped in a pink flannel blanket. The nurses had put a diaper on her—the only one she’d ever wear.

  One of the nurses set my baby sister in my mother’s arms. My father was there too, in a chair next to her. They got to be alone in the room for a few minutes—long enough to fold back the blanket and study the tiny, bluish body. My mother had traced her fingers over every rib, the freshly tied knot of skin forming a belly button where the umbilical cord had been that nourished her all those months—and betrayed her, in the end, with that one fatal twist that cut off her oxygen. My mother took Fern’s hands in hers and studied the fingernails, considered whose hands she had inherited. (My father’s it seemed. Those same long fingers that might have inspired them to get her piano lessons later.)

  She unfolded Fern’s legs—no sign of the kicking she’d loved to follow, those last couple of months, so strong that sometimes she could even make out the outline of a foot, pressing against her belly from inside, making a bump. (Look, Henry, she had called to me. Didn’t I remember that part? How I’d watched the person we thought was my brother moving under the skin of her belly, like a kitten under the blankets of a bed.)

  She had peeled back Fern’s diaper then. Knowing this was her one and only chance, she needed to see everything.

  There was the small, once-pink cleft of her vagina. A dot of blood there that the doctor would explain later was not uncommon in newborn baby girls—result of hormones passing from mother to child—though when they’d seen it, they drew in their breath.

  My mother memorized her face in the space of those few minutes, knowing how many times over the years she would think back on this time, and what she would give then (anything) to hold this baby again as she did now.

  Her eyes were closed. She had long, surprisingly dark lashes (even darker looking against the blue-white of her skin). Her nose was not the button some babies have, but more of a miniature adult nose, with a strong, straight bridge and two tiny, perfectly formed nostrils, drawing no breath. Her mouth a flower. A tiny cleft in her chin, my father’s, again, though her jawline seemed to belong to my mother’s side of the family.

  There was one blue vein visible, beneath the skin, traversing the area between her jaw and down her small, limp neck. My mother traced it all the way along her body.

  I was like a
river guide, she said, pointing out to some traveler the route to follow. The vein was still visible as my mother’s finger made its way along Fern’s chest, and toward the spot where, just below the thin, almost translucent skin, a tiny heart whose rhythms she had felt inside her all this time now rested still as stone.

  All this she described to me, as if it was a story she knew so well she was not so much telling it as reciting it, though very likely I was the only person she’d ever told it to.

  After a while, a nurse had come back in the room and lifted Fern out of my mother’s arms. My father pushed the wheelchair back to the room. In the hall, they had passed a couple heading toward the elevator with a new baby and a bouquet of helium balloons, and a woman with a hospital gown billowing over her huge belly—in the early stages of labor. Just like herself, less than eighteen hours earlier, this pregnant woman paced the hall, filling the time between those early and irregularly spaced contractions. Seeing her, my mother said, a crazy thought had come to her. Give me another chance. I’ll do it right next time. This was the first time, but hardly the last, that the sight of a pregnant woman had taken my mother to a place of so much anger and grief that simply breathing had felt impossible. There would be pregnant women everywhere now. More than there ever used to be was how it seemed.

  As they made their way across the parking lot to their car, my father had bent over the chair, as if he was shielding my mother from a gale force wind. It will be better once we get home, Adele, he told her.

  It wasn’t really, though by the time he brought her back to the house—the house he lived in now with Marjorie, and the baby girl he and Marjorie had together later, who lived—he had cleared out the nursery, packed up the boxes of baby clothes and newborn Pampers (some of them purchased three years earlier), and dismantled the crib.

  After the first miscarriage, and the second, my parents had talked about trying again. Even after the third—though a sense of dread had taken hold in them—they still met with the doctor and marked the calendar with the dates of my mother’s periods and notations for her fertile times.