Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  When I got up from the chair, it was just to change a record, or twist my spine, or to nibble some of the food my neighbor, Mrs. Sally Dixon, brought me. Mrs. Dixon was eighteen years old; terribly shy. She always said, “This is Mrs. Dixon” when she knocked on the door, so I never called her Sally. I liked that she didn’t try to talk with me when she came—twice a week or so, all winter—to stock my cramped kitchen with cans and boxes. Before her visits, I always spent a lot of time on my appearance so she wouldn’t worry about the baby. Still, I could see her distress whenever she actually faced me, to accept my grocery lists, or my money, or my thanks.

  I wore socks usually, but no shoes, and, always—because it was the only covering that still fitted me—a cottony slip that had been my mom’s: blue, size sixteen. I normally had some sweaters on over the slip. I had one expensive lamb’s-wool cardigan. My hair was wrecked by pregnancy. It swelled in a cloud around my small face.

  •

  When Jackie arrived, he surprised me by being a pedestrian—by stepping out from behind a cluster of tourists on their way to the big church. I had expected him to drive up, in his West Virginia car.

  He gave me an impatient kiss and began scolding. “Aw, don’t tell me. You can’t be on the level. You couldn’t have stood outside here, waiting since four o’clock.”

  “I didn’t know if you could find my place,” I said.

  “Hell, I found it forty minutes ago. But they don’t want you to park your car in this city. I’ve been going up one way and down the other. Finally, I just got out, set the car loose, and told it, ‘Every man for himself.’ Is this your place here? Looks pretty good. You don’t look very good.”

  He frowned as if I shouldn’t have been in my own body.

  I led him inside, and he gave me more of the same. He took one look at the ratty magazines, the plates and glasses in unhealthy stacks, the empty jar of Nescafé, the slumping rows of record albums. He said, “I’m sorry, Eleanor, but I’m mad.”

  He stalked out the apartment door. I followed him down through the little lobby, with its tiled floor and round mirrors, to the Augusta’s front walkway. The sun had dimmed, and the temperature had dropped about ten degrees.

  Jackie scuffed his shoes on the cement a while, and then he went into a shallow park that was between the Augusta and her taller, newer neighbor, the Frontenac. He tapped a few trees. He had a cigarette.

  “That’s the scariest damn church I’ve ever seen!” he called to me.

  “It’s the National,” I said.

  “I know it. Of course. I’m going for my luggage, Eleanor, and then I want to start straightening up that mess in there. Are you going to stand around on the sidewalk, pregnant?”

  “I’ve got to be here in order to let you in,” I said. “The front door locks itself once I go through.”

  •

  When he got a few pieces of his luggage safely inside, some of the irritation went out of him. He put me in my chair, and gave me the cap from the thermos he had used on his road trip. The cap was full of still-warm cocoa that Mom, back home, had made for us.

  “Really,” Jackie said, as he pushed around the furniture. He yanked the vacuum cleaner from the closet, and bullied it over the rugs in the study and hall and in the old living room, which I had fixed up for the baby. I opened a Modern Library edition of Cousin Bette and pretended to read it.

  Jackie was in and out for the next few hours, until after dark. He reported to me every so often. “All right. There’s a good hardware just two blocks from here, and now we’ve got decent light bulbs, at least, and some emergency candles.

  “Get me up at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, Eleanor. I have to move my car from across the street, or I’ll never move it again, because the police’ll put a boot on it.

  “You do have an alarm clock? Because we’ll need it, and if you don’t, the hardware store’s open until six.

  “There’s a good pharmacy close. Closes at ten.”

  I heard him dragging open drawers, loading things into closets. “One more haul from the car,” he said.

  About nine that evening, he made his last trip in, with a purplish leather shaving kit that had been our father’s, and, under his left arm, a cardboard six-pack of drinking glasses. “Look here. They were selling these at that grocery for three bucks,” he said. “Tumblers.”

  When everything was put away, we went to inspect the room I had arranged for the baby. It was a green and yellow place, though I was banking on a girl. There were two pieces of Bambi furniture, and gowns and outfits still in gift boxes, and Fisher Price toys some relatives had sent. I had hung up an Animaland poster, and strung a fruit and flowers mobile over the crib. On the floor, there was a fierce, icy-looking polish that Jackie had produced with mop and wax.

  “Tonight, I’m going to sleep like the dead,” he said.

  “Me, too. I’ve had it,” I said.

  I went to the dining room—a windowless nook at one end of the kitchen. I had had the movers wedge my tall bed into this area. It had been a lifelong habit of mine to sleep near the center of activity in a house. I wouldn’t have felt safe in the back bedroom.

  I was thirty-six—old for a first baby, I know. In nine months, I had gained forty pounds, and I’d been trying to cut back in the last weeks. I had a dream that first night Jackie was there. Apples, pears, and squash rolled by. I saw a table laid with a roast, glazed carrots, salty potatoes. A voice told me, “Eleanor! Eat these.”

  Jackie was up, drinking coffee and scrambling eggs, in what seemed to be the middle of the night. I lay on my back, in bed, in a little bit of pain. I watched him, framed by the kitchen portal, as he hunted for utensils, checked plates and glasses for stains, and chatted out loud. Every few minutes his panicky activity would stop, and he would stand and seem to dissolve into himself.

  “I forgot what I was going to say,” he whispered.

  “What?” I said.

  “Do you want to wake up? It’s seven-thirty. I’ve got to go move my car. Oh, don’t tell me it’s raining.”

  “Probably. It’s been so nice. We had weather in the high sixties. On one day, we—”

  “Before you go on, I want to tell you this.” Jackie had some coffee and then stepped out of the kitchen and sat at the foot of my bed. “When it’s time for us to go, and you’re ready for the baby, you should already have packed your nightwear, and so forth. You know—toothbrush, robe, slippers. Stay awake, Eleanor. I want to tell you this, and then I’ve got to get my car moved.”

  “O.K., I’m listening,” I said. “I think today I’d like to sit on a bench outside and watch the rain.”

  “Smart,” Jackie said.

  I rose, yawning and stretching, and waddled to the record player. “I wish you’d have let me sleep,” I said. “I haven’t had dream sleep in about four weeks. The place looks nice, Jackie. Thank you a lot for cleaning.”

  “What do you want for breakfast? Tell me fast,” he said. “Got to get sliding.”

  “Nothing,” I said. I went to the shelf in the closet and got out a lap blanket.

  “Well, if you don’t eat, and you’re not sleeping, you’ll have a terrible baby. I’m here to make sure you take care of yourself.”

  “Look at me,” I said, heading for my three-legged chair. “Could you lie down and sleep comfortably, do you think? Or eat? Imagine a big pointy rock turning in your stomach. Roaring up your throat.”

  “Hmph,” Jackie said.

  He was shaking his raincoat, getting ready to put it on.

  •

  Jackie had his own disappointments. On the drive to D.C., he had got tar all over the flanks and bumpers of his new car. He had, he said, a mean sore throat. But his real depression came from the fact that he had somehow failed his comprehensive exams in clinical psychology at Marshall University. So, as a result, they weren’t giving him his degree.

  “Mom pressured me into coming here and nursemaiding you,” he said. “She thought it was a way out for
both of us.”

  We were in the study. Jackie was combing through the Washington Post for something to read. For Jackie, a newspaper had always meant more physical exercise than actual reading. He read standing, with the paper held high, and at his spread arms’ length. He would rush through a section, his arms closing and opening, the paper beating like big wings. Whenever he paused, it was just long enough to cock his head and brood a few seconds over some column or picture, before his arms snapped again, and he moved ahead. He used the little intervals, when the paper was closed and his fingers were pinching off a new page, to raise his chin and stretch his neck—as if he were fighting a headache. He brushed through the financial section, discarded it, and started on the editorials.

  “What’s in there? Nothing?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  •

  That was typical of Jackie—and of me. We weren’t learners, really. We had spent our lives rushing through everything: music albums, books—though never a whole book from start to finish. We took in whatever we thought we could turn into conversation, from TV shows, movies. The only reason we liked to know a thing was so we’d have something to yammer about—not that we had anyone to share our talk with.

  “Let’s get a breath,” Jackie said. “Can you walk? The walls are closing in on me.”

  We walked toward downtown. There was still some orangeish sun on the buildings, but the stores and cars were burning lights. In a chained-off, empty parking lot, beside a closed gas station, some rangy black men were playing basketball. One man, bearded and in a wool cap, dodged around two defenders and sprang and fired a shot at the brick wall of the gas station.

  “They don’t have a basket,” Jackie said. “There’s your metaphor for urban blight.”

  “This isn’t really the blighted part of town,” I said. “Those guys are probably ambassadors from the Zimbabwe Embassy.”

  “Probably,” Jackie said, but he looked a little surprised. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Normally when people ask if they can ask, I say no. But go ahead,” I said.

  “Well, Eleanor, what do you intend to do?”

  I tapped my stomach. “When this is over, I’m going to crash-diet, drink real tea for a change, and I thought I’d hunt up a filing job, or maybe be a salesgirl at Saks.”

  “The point is, it’s not going to be over,” Jackie said. “Not at the hospital. Not for at least twenty years is this going to be over, and that’s if you get most of the breaks. It makes my head swim. It’ll probably never be over.”

  “Tell me something new,” I said.

  A jogger went by, hurdling some traffic cones, and started a couple of dogs barking. I was ready, right then, to have the baby. I wasn’t sure of the date, and didn’t want to be. I might have been overdue. The one night with Phil had been in early June.

  “You’re going to run very quickly through the rest of Dad’s money, especially in this rook-joint city. I was just wondering how you plan to live? It’s supposed to cost something like nine hundred thousand dollars to raise a kid these days.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I said.

  “Not you,” Jackie said. “Phil! Doesn’t Phil ever say anything?”

  “All the time,” I said. “He says he’ll do everything a human being can possibly do.”

  Jackie hissed and gestured at the buildings around us with both arms. “Oh, Eleanor, think!” he said. “Where is he?”

  •

  Phil was eleven years younger than I, and we’d been engaged to be married, had lived together for a long time before I broke things off. But we never were very close. Phil carried our courtship and cohabitation as he carried most every situation—with a lot of bluster and bluff. He had a broad, heavy accent that, for all I know, was faked. He said his sentences had “reverse spin.” He was incapable of talking to people, it seemed, without moving toward them and actually taking them in his hands, or roping an arm over their shoulders, or, at least, resting a finger on their lapels. Constantly, and toward no end that I could see, he lied. If asked where he was from, he would say, “Originally? Pensacola,” or, “All over. I’m an Army brat.”

  The one last time, in early June, happened after a pool party in Woodbury Hills, in Wheeling. I hadn’t seen Phil for months, but I asked him to drive me to West Virginia for my mom’s birthday. He was entertaining enough on the long, nervous trip across Maryland and Pennsylvania. He told me a lot of—I’m sure—lies about his tour of duty in Vietnam, to keep my mind off the big hills and the sixteen-wheelers that blew around us. At a rest stop in New Stanton he bought me a souvenir paper booklet about Amish cooking. He had raised a dark beard, which worked a wonder for his face, giving him a strong, sharp chin where he had had none, and setting off his black eyes.

  The pool party we went to was given by the Zigglers: twins, who were classmates of Jackie’s at Marshall U. They were beautiful lean girls, each with a fat brown braid that went between her shoulders. On the party day, their tan skin was oiled, and they wore matching orange bandeau bikinis and pearl earbobs.

  I never removed the long blue football jersey I was wearing, but sunned my legs from a lounger, and watched Phil doing laps in the pool. His arms pointed in easy arcs, and his legs pounded the water without throwing up much splash.

  He sat with me for a moment as he toweled off his hair and beard. He called to Jackie, “Hey, champ! Going to get yourself wet today?”

  Jackie hadn’t even brought a swimsuit. He was down on the Zigglers’ lawn, where he had cornered a collie dog. He seemed to be holding the dog back with both arms, talking intently to it while he ruffled its ears and scratched the back of its neck.

  Brenda Ziggler joined us. She looked pleasantly harassed by her hostess duties. She was streaming water, and there were wet highlights left on her torso and nice legs.

  “Here’s a guy who looks capable of building a grill fire for us,” she said to Phil.

  “Hey, I’m a guest,” he said.

  “Well, we can all just go hungry, I guess,” Brenda said. “I don’t know where anything is,” Phil said as he stroked his beard.

  “Follow me,” Brenda said, and Phil went along.

  He was still excited, I could tell, on the ride back to my mom’s house that evening. And though I knew that the glow he had, and the involuntary smile, were from being with the Zigglers and not me, just the same, he was something. I didn’t even mind his built-up tennis shoes, or the silver saint on a chain around his neck.

  In Mom’s driveway, he sat on the hood of his car and spun his keys with one finger. When he spoke to me, I noticed a sweet grape Life Saver staining his tongue.

  Jackie, who had been sullen in the back seat for the ride, went into the house alone. Phil and I decided to scare up a bar and get drunk.

  I explained this whole episode to Jackie, a month or so later, over the phone.

  “Fine,” he said lifelessly.

  “Okay. But it’s a fact.”

  I heard him cough and clear his throat. “You don’t stay pregnant at thirty-six,” he said. He was in his typical bad mood, just off from interning at the County Mental Health Center. “A place,” he once told me, “in what you might call a ghetto, uglier than any bowling alley, where they’ve never heard of air-conditioning.”

  He said how my baby could be born an idiot because of my age. “Not to mention who its father is,” he said. He talked about postpartum depression and what it had done to our grandma.

  I waited until he was through, and then I put down the telephone and went into my kitchen and kicked a utility pipe that was ticking there. When I came back, I said, “You can go to hell, Jackie. Let me speak to Mom.”

  •

  Phil appeared one evening, two days before I went into labor. He had a small rocking chair and four cardboard boxes—“cases,” he called them—of baby food in the trunk of his car. He improvised and said he had been away for a while, in Chicago, helping some brother-in-law set up a construct
ion firm.

  I let him inspect the baby’s room, and then we toured the rest of the place. It was the first time Phil had been inside the Augusta, and he told me, in a critical tone, that he approved. He spotted Jackie, who was on the floor by the TV, shelling peanuts and watching Wonder Woman.

  “Say, champ,” Phil said. “Or is it Doctor Champ now?”

  Jackie snapped a peanut and swore. He looked hurt when he turned back to Wonder Woman, and after a bit he pulled himself off the floor and retreated to the kitchen.

  We heard him running the electric mixer for the next twenty minutes, and then I detected a cake baking. I excused myself and peeked in on Jackie. He was up on the counter, furiously thrashing a wooden spoon around a bowl of cake frosting that was pressed between his thighs.

  “Will you please be willing to eat some of this?” he said.

  I went back to the study, where the TV was still on, its picture rolling and flashing. Phil had gone out to his car and brought in a gray metal box from which he emptied two checkbooks, a ledger tablet, a sawed-down pencil, and some stock certificates. He was in my three-legged chair.

  “Let’s see,” I said, but he waved me off. He put the pencil lengthwise in his mouth, and shuffled his papers for a while before he spoke.

  I stuck on an old record by Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross.

  “Man, good!” Jackie yelled from the kitchen.

  Phil said, “Turn it down, will you, princess?”

  He pressed forward in the chair, but couldn’t seem to get started at what he wanted to say. He directed his small eyes at me and smiled without separating his lips. He beat his ledger tablet against his leg.

  I said, “This is about the future, right?”

  “Indeed,” he said.

  He began slowly, but then he got a little wound up. He talked about schools, coaches, music lessons—flute or piano? He was wondering aloud about a dental insurance plan when Jackie came in carrying a plate of cake and a coffee cup, which he had pushed against his stomach. He was watching the coffee, moving one step at a time. He got seated on the rug and looked at Phil, who had kept on talking, and was now nodding at Jackie.