Labor Day

by Joyce Maynard

  After they buried Fern, no further discussion took place concerning conception, pregnancy, or babies.

  Their friends had offered condolences, and made efforts to include them in the social life of the neighborhood, but now my mother learned not to attend neighborhood barbecues and school events. Someone was always pregnant. The supermarket was dangerous too. More maternity tops, and baby food, and babies in the shopping carts, the age that Fern would be, and toddlers, the age of the one before her, and four-year-olds, the age of the one they’d buried in the yard. Wherever you looked, pregnant women and babies, as if it was an epidemic.

  Pretty soon my mother understood: no place was safe anymore. Babies and the promise of babies were everywhere. Just opening your window, you might hear one crying. Once, lying in bed, she had been awakened by the faint cry of some neighborhood baby. It only lasted a few moments. The mother must have picked him up. Or the father did. But it was too late for sleep after that. My mother had lain there in the dark the rest of the night, going over it all again. The abortion. The miscarriages. The ultrasound. The foot pressing out under the fabric of her shirt. The twisted cord. The dot of blood. The tiny box of ashes they’d given her, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.

  After that morning, she knew, she was done going out in the world. She wasn’t interested in making love with her husband anymore, and giving birth to any more dead babies. She didn’t even care about dancing. The only safe place was home.

  CHAPTER 15

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE afternoon when my mother and Frank came in from painting. My mother was running a bath. Even though I was still mad at her, I called out to her, asking what was for lunch. Frank came in the room, not her.

  How about I fix us some chow? he said. Give your mother a chance to take it easy. She’s been working hard.

  Yeah, right, I thought. I heard you two in the night. Who made her work hard anyway?

  Upstairs, I could hear the sound of water running. Frank had stripped off his shirt, that had paint on it. He was bare-chested. His pants were loose around his hips, hanging low enough that the top of his bandage was visible, from where they’d cut out his appendix, but otherwise, he could have been a statue. Even though he was old, he had that type of chest where all the bones are held in with muscles. I thought again, the way I did when I met him, of how he was the type of person that you could picture as a skeleton, or lying on a table, getting dissected. All the parts of him were so clearly defined by muscle and bone, with no fat covering them. He didn’t look like a bodybuilder or a superhero or anything like that. He looked like the illustration in a biology book, for a page they’d label Man.

  I was thinking we could throw around the ball for a bit, he said. Me being sweaty already, I might as well get more so, and my ankle’s feeling strong enough to stand on for longer now. I want to see how your arm’s looking.

  This was difficult. I wanted him to know I felt mad, and left out, and that I was onto his tricks with my mother, if that’s what they were. But I couldn’t help liking him. I was also bored. On the television now, Jerry Lewis was standing at a microphone pretending to talk like a little kid to a girl who was standing next to him on the stage, with braces on her legs and a walker.

  What do you say, friends? Jerry Lewis was saying, in the fake little-kid voice. Doesn’t Angela deserve a chance like the rest of us? Get out your checkbooks.

  I had liked it when Frank played catch with me. I wasn’t expecting him to turn me into some kind of overnight jock, but it felt good throwing the ball back and forth, the thwack of it, when it landed in my glove. The rhythm we had going, him to me, me to him, him to me.

  I never realized it before, my mother had said, when she joined us, but playing catch is sort of like dancing. You have to tune in to the other person and focus totally on their moves, then adapt your own to the other person’s timing. Like when you’re out on the floor with your partner and the whole world is just the two of you, communicating perfectly even though no one says anything.

  When he threw me the ball, I didn’t think he was picturing having sex with her, or kissing that place on her neck where the mark was, or her lying naked upstairs in the bathtub, or any of the other things that went on at night in her bed. When we played catch, he was just thinking about playing catch.

  Either that, or he was hypnotizing me also. Maybe he was even trying to prepare me for the day, very soon, when I’d be living at my father’s house, and my father and Richard would be out there playing catch all the time, only unlike me, Richard could throw a curveball. He was preparing me for the future, when he and my mother would be gone.

  I guess not, I told him. I’m watching a show. Meaning the telethon.

  Frank’s eyes didn’t leave my face. Jerry Lewis didn’t exist. Just him and me, in that room.

  Listen, he said. If you’re worried I’m going to steal your mother, forget it. There would never be a day you aren’t numero uno in her book, and I would never try and change that. She’s always going to love you more than anything. I’d just like to be the person who takes care of her, for a change. I won’t try to be your dad. But I could be a friend.

  Here it came. Just what Eleanor warned me about. Now he was going to try and hypnotize me too. I could even feel how it worked, because part of me wanted to believe him. I had to drown out the words, so they wouldn’t seep into my brain.

  The girl was sitting on Jerry Lewis’s lap, talking about her puppy. A phone number was up on the screen. Down the block, I could hear voices from the Jervises’ aboveground pool. Blah blah blah, I told myself. Blahdy, blahdy, blah.

  I know I haven’t done a very good job up until now, he said. I made terrible mistakes. But if I ever got another chance somehow, I’d never stop working to make it right.

  Jaboolah, kazoolah, banana.

  Ravioli. Stromboli. Holey moley.

  I also know it takes time, he said. Look at me. All I’ve had these last eighteen years was time. The one good thing, it gives a person the opportunity to think.

  He stood there with the paint scraper. He was wearing a pair of old pants my mother had found in the basement, from a Halloween costume she made me a few years earlier, where I’d dressed up as a clown. The pants must have belonged to a very fat person; they’d been way too big for me, which was the point, but on Frank they only came to the middle of his calves, and he was holding them up with a piece of rope. He had the same shirt on from when we met him—the one that said Vinnie—and no shoes. He looked like a clown himself, actually, just not the funny kind. This was the person I could hear kissing my mother on the other side of the wall every night. I felt bad for her. Bad for him also. Bad for myself the most. I had always wanted to be in a real family and here I was, in a family of losers.

  Now he put his hand on my shoulder. A big, worn hand. I had heard my mother saying to him, through the wall at night, I’ll put some lotion on your skin.

  Your skin’s so smooth, he said. I feel ashamed to touch you.

  Now he was talking to me, though in a different voice. We don’t have to play ball, either. I could just make us something to eat. Sit out on the back step. It might be cooler there.

  My dad’s picking me up later, I said.

  And I know what you and my mother will do the minute I’m out the door.

  From upstairs I could hear my mother, calling through the bathroom door. Can you bring me a towel, Frank?

  He got up then. He turned to face me, with a look on his face like he might have had when Mandy answered his question about who the real father of the baby was, except this time he wasn’t going to push anyone or knock them so hard their head broke. He had told me he was a patient man now. Patient enough to wait for his opportunity, hold out whole years for the moment when he’d finally found himself in a hospital bed, next to a second-story window without bars on it. His plan might take a while, but he had put it into motion.

  Now he was lifting a bath towel from the stack of laundry on top of the machin
e, raising it to his face, smelling it, as if he wanted to make sure it was good enough for her skin. Now he was climbing the stairs. Now I heard the door opening. Now he would be standing next to the tub where my mother lay. Naked.

  Back at the library, Eleanor had written down her phone number at her father’s house. I’ll be there all weekend, she’d told me. Unless my dad gets some idea to take me to the movies or something. Knowing him he probably still thinks I’d consider The Care Bears movie a thrill.

  I dialed the number. If her father answered, I’d hang up.

  But she did. I was hoping you’d call, she said. What kind of a girl said something like that?

  Want to talk? I said.

  CHAPTER 16

  THAT AFTERNOON, THE TEMPERATURE reached ninety-five. The air had a heaviness to it. Up and down the street, people were watering their lawns. Not us. Our grass was dead already.

  The paper that morning featured an article about gypsy moths and an interview with a woman who had started a campaign to institute the policy of school uniforms at public school, on the theory that they would cut down on peer pressure and inappropriate clothing on the part of teenagers. Young people should be thinking about their math homework at school, she said. Not some girl’s legs sticking out from under a miniskirt.

  It wouldn’t matter if they put the girls in uniforms, I wanted to tell her. You didn’t think about their clothes. You thought about what was under them. Rachel McCann could be wearing saddle shoes and a kilt down to her ankles. I’d still be picturing her breasts.

  Eleanor was so thin, it was difficult picturing her body. It had been hard to get an idea about her chest, because she’d been wearing a bulky sweatshirt at the library. (A sweatshirt. In the middle of a heat wave.)

  Still, I thought about what she’d look like with her glasses off. I pictured her taking the elastic band off her braid, her hair hanging loose on her shoulders. Her chest, naked, if we were pressed against each other, probably wouldn’t feel all that different from mine. The picture came to me of the two of us, lining our nipples up so they touched each other, as if that might make an electrical connection. We were about the same height. All the places on our bodies could match up, except for the one, where we’d be different.

  There is a theory that girls develop eating disorders as a way of avoiding their sexuality, she had told me. Certain psychologists believe that if a person has an eating disorder, that’s their way of trying to hold on to their childhood, because they’re scared of what the next phase would be like. You don’t get your period if you’re very thin, for instance. I know most people wouldn’t tell a boy that kind of thing, but I think people should always be honest when they talk to each other. Like, if my mother needed to be alone with her boyfriend, she could have just told me. I would have gone over to my friend’s house for a sleepover or something, instead of having to move halfway across the country so they could have sex.

  On the phone that afternoon, she asked what kind of music I liked. She liked this singer called Sid Vicious, and the Beastie Boys. She thought Jim Morrison was the coolest person ever. Someday, she wanted to go to Paris and visit his grave.

  I figured I should know who Jim Morrison was, so I didn’t say anything. All we had at my house was my mother’s cassette player that had an AM radio. Mostly I only knew the music she listened to: Frank Sinatra ballads and the original sound track to Guys and Dolls and a Joni Mitchell album called Blue and a man I didn’t know the name of, with a very low sleepy voice. He had this one song she used to play over and over again. There was a line in it: And you know that she’s half crazy but that’s why you want to be there.

  She’s touched your perfect body with her mind, he sang. You couldn’t call it singing exactly. More like chanting. I figured Eleanor might like this singer if I could remember his name but I couldn’t.

  You know, the usual, I told her, when she asked about the music.

  I never like the usual, she said. Not the usual anything.

  She had asked me if I had a bike. I did, but it was meant for an eight-year-old and had a flat tire and we didn’t have a pump. She didn’t have a bike, but she could borrow her father’s. He was off playing golf or something. Here was a person who said he didn’t have money to send his daughter to the best school in the universe and he spent fifty dollars every weekend, hitting a ball around and trying to get it in the hole.

  I could come over to your house, she said.

  That might not be the greatest idea, I told her. My mother and the man were keeping a low profile. Fred.

  We could meet up in town, she said. We could go out for coffee.

  I didn’t tell her that I didn’t drink coffee. I said that sounded good. This was in the days before they had places like Starbucks, but there was a diner called Noni’s, where they had individual booths, and every booth had a box installed next to it, where you could flip through all the different songs on their jukebox. Mostly country, but there might be something she’d like. Some very sad song, where the person sounded depressed.

  It was a twenty-minute walk to town. When I left, my mother and Frank were still upstairs in the bathroom. He must have been drying her off, or putting lotion on her skin. I just want to take care of your mother , he’d said. That’s what he called it.

  I left them a note to say I’d be back in time for when my dad came by. I’m meeting up with a friend, I said. That would make my mother happy.

  Eleanor was in a booth already when I got to the diner. She’d changed out of her shorts, and her hair was down loose the way I’d pictured it, though in real life it turned out to be sort of straight and spiky, not curly the way I’d imagined it. She had makeup on—purplish lipstick and a line around her eyes that made them look even bigger than they were. She had black nail polish on her fingernails, but they were bitten down, which was an odd combination.

  She said, I told my dad I was getting together with a boy. He started giving me this lecture about being careful, like I was going to jump in bed with you or something.

  It’s funny how parents are always giving you these talks about sex, like that’s all that goes on in our lives. When they’re probably just projecting their own obsessions, she said.

  She poured a Sweet’N Low into her coffee. Then two more. My dad doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he wishes he did, she told me. He could probably be attractive if he’d lose weight. Too bad he and your mom didn’t get together before this Fred person showed up. You could have been my stepbrother. Of course then if we got married, it would be kind of like incest.

  My mother doesn’t normally date, I told her. What happened with this guy was a fluke situation.

  We sat there for a minute, not saying anything. She put another five or six packets of Sweet’N Low in her coffee. I tried to think up a topic.

  Can you believe about the escaped convict? she said. My dad was talking about it with our next-door neighbor who’s a state trooper. I guess the police have this theory that he might still be in the area because they’ve had all these roadblocks up on account of the holiday weekend, and they figure they would have spotted him if he tried to get out of town. Of course he could have hidden in someone’s trunk or something like that, but they think he might be holed up someplace till he recuperates from his injuries. They’re pretty sure he must have broken his leg, at least, when he jumped out the window.

  Even if he’s around, I said, he might not be so bad. He’s probably just trying to mind his own business.

  Even now, as bad as I felt about him stealing my mom, it was uncomfortable hearing someone talk about Frank like he was a terrible person. In a funny way, even though I’d started wishing he’d just disappear, I couldn’t really blame him for wanting to get together with my mother. All the things he was doing with her were what I wished I could do with some girl myself.

  I don’t know why people are so worked up, I said. He probably isn’t dangerous.

  I guess you don’t read the paper, she said. They had an interv
iew in it, with the sister of the woman he killed. Not only that, but he killed his own baby.

  Sometimes there’s more of a story than they put in the newspaper, I said. I would have liked to explain to her about Mandy laughing at Frank, and how she’d tricked him to marry her and think Francis Junior was his son when really he wasn’t, even though he ended up loving him just as much anyway. Only I couldn’t say these things, so I just sat there, flipping through the pages on the jukebox remote, looking for some song that might set the mood.

  Some cashier over at Pricemart saw him. She called up the hotline, after she saw his picture. He was with some woman and a kid. Hostages most likely. She was hoping to get the reward, but just seeing him wasn’t enough. It’s the first interesting thing that happened in this town since my mother exiled me here.

  I know where he is, I told her. My house.

  After I paid the bill—mine and hers—we walked outside the diner, and over to the video store. There was this movie she said I should see called Bonnie and Clyde, about a criminal who kidnaps a beautiful woman and gets her to start robbing banks with him. Unlike Patty Hearst, Bonnie wasn’t rich, but she was restless and bored, same as my mother must have been at the point Frank came along, she said, and like my mother she hadn’t had any sex in a long time probably. And Clyde had all this charisma, same as the man in the Patty Hearst situation.

  Warren Beatty, she said. Now he’s pretty old, but back when they made the movie he was the handsomest man ever. My mother said that even in real life he had that charisma type of effect on people. He was always getting women in Hollywood to sleep with him even if they knew he was sleeping with other people too. They couldn’t help it.