“I don’t think they could see past what she’s inherited from her father to see what she’s inherited from me.”
Kari frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, Tafadzwa’s African, so the baby is too. Well, half.”
The knots in Kari’s stomach, which had been aching since the plane ride, pulled tighter.
Seeing Kari’s face, Mary Jo wanted to kick herself. She had handled the whole thing so poorly, so secretively—who’d she think she was, the CIA?—and even though she knew her aunt was cool, to spring this on her now . . .
For an edge of a moment, Kari thought there was an earthquake, but then realized the seismic activity was coming from her kneecaps. She licked her lips—that dry internal wind was making everything arid again—as the image of a blond, blue-eyed baby disappeared like smoke.
“Well, what are we doing standing around here for?” she said finally. “Let’s go see her.”
AS SOON AS LARRY’S “OLD LADY,” Andrea (who was all of twenty-five, as far as Kari could tell), handed Kari the baby, she felt the mighty tower of clear and rational thought topple against the weight of the infant in her arms. She had to take her, had to raise her, had to be the one for whom the baby would eventually press her lips together and say “Mama.”
Mary Jo, Larry the lawyer, and Andrea had seated themselves on the couch draped with thin Indian fabric, sat with their hands in their laps, watching Kari rock the baby. Silence hung like the mist that had risen up in the bay, interrupted only by the creak of the rocking chair and the occasional jingle of the porch chimes when a breeze riffled through them.
The baby was beautiful. Her skin was the color of coffee when it’s made caramel by extra cream, her lips were full and well shaped, her hair—well, of course what little hair was there would grow.
Kari’s heart had hammered with such an intensity when she first held her that she was certain the noise would wake her, but the baby was a contented, sleeping bundle, and as it relaxed into her arms, so did the rhythm of Kari’s heart.
“Have you named her?” she asked quietly, tearing herself away from the baby’s face to look at Mary Jo.
Her niece shook her head. “We’ve just been calling her ‘baby.’ I wanted you to be able to name her.”
“Larry,” said Andrea, standing, “why don’t we take a nice little walk?”
“Sure,” said Larry, recognizing himself that it was time to make themselves scarce. “I could use a little exercise.”
The bead curtain that separated the kitchen from the living room rattled as they passed through it.
“Mary Jo, what about the father?” said Kari in a low voice. “What does he say about this?”
Sighing, Mary Jo pulled off the ratty poncho, and for the first time Kari saw the soft roundness of her niece’s stomach and breasts, so incongruous compared to her thin, bony frame.
“Aunt Kari, first of all, Taf assured me he was wearing a rubber. I know it’s hard to believe that I couldn’t tell, but we were both pretty stoned—”
“Do I really need to hear all this?”
Mary Jo shrugged. “I’m just telling the story, Aunt Kari. Now, do you want me to make it all nice and pretty, or do you want to tell me how it happened?”
Kari swallowed. “How it happened.”
Mary Jo nodded, her fingers playing with a necklace that looked like it was made out of twine. “I was only with him a couple of times—Taf was very popular with the ladies. I mean, I practically had to take a number. We always had a good time together—he always had great dope—but I never thought it was more than what it was. I mean, I didn’t love the guy or anything.”
“But what does he think about you giving the baby to me?”
Mary Jo laughed, or tried to. “First of all, he doesn’t know I had a baby, and second of all, he never will. He split about six months ago, back to Africa—Rhodesia, I think.” She shrugged. “And I only know that because I ran into a mutual friend at the Fillmore last spring.”
“Oh, Mary Jo,” said Kari, shocked at her blitheness.
“Aunt Kari, it was just a fling. A fling I got caught in. But I’m trying to make the best of it.”
The baby stirred in Kari’s arms, her eyelids fluttering, her mouth pursing.
“Have you . . . have you been nursing her?”
Mary Jo blushed, shaking her head. “I thought that might complicate things. I’ve been taking pills to dry up my milk.”
“Well, I think she needs a bottle now,” Kari said as the baby began to softly whimper.
“Back in a flash,” said Mary Jo, returning a few minutes later with a warm bottle.
Smiling as the baby earnestly began working on the nipple, Kari asked, “Are you absolutely positive that if I take her, you’ll never want her back?”
“Auntie Kari,” said Mary Jo, sitting on the old steamer trunk that served as a coffee table, “I don’t want to be a mother now—I want to be a college student. I want to major in political science and maybe spend my senior year abroad. After that I want to travel even more, and then there’s always the possibility of going on to grad school and then . . . oh, Aunt Kari, maybe someday I’ll want to be a mother, but that day and that baby are far away!”
Color swarmed to her pale face, and Kari was struck by how hopeful and excited her niece looked. Mary Jo deserved to be hopeful and excited about her life, just as Kari deserved to be a mother. It was a realization as simple as that and one that made Kari say, “Did Larry bring the papers with him? Because I’d like to sign them now. That is, after I burp Julia.”
“Julia?” asked Mary Jo, tears filling her blue eyes.
“After my MorMor—my mother’s mother.”
“Julia,” whispered Mary Jo.
September 1968
HOSTESS: AUDREY
BOOK: On the Road by Jack Kerouac
REASON CHOSEN: “Because the first time I saw Kerouac’s picture on the dust jacket, I thought, Now, there’s one sexy-looking writer.”
At three months, I had already gained twenty-two pounds.
“Are you planning to keep up this rate of growth?” asked my obstetrician as he looked over my chart.
“You talk to me as if I were an annuity or something,” I said, not returning his benevolent doctor smile.
I was irritated by this man in whose hair I could see comb marks and whose earlobes were the longest—at least on a human being—I had ever seen.
Morning sickness wasn’t a part of my pregnancy, but general overall irritation was. My doctor’s dangling earlobes, the turgid garden watercolors that decorated his office (they had to have been painted by a relative or something—no one would hang those up because they liked them), the woman in the waiting room who wouldn’t give up the current Newsweek when it was obvious I wanted to read it—everything irritated me.
This included, believe it or not, sex.
“Can’t you at least fake it?” Paul asked the other night after a listless (okay, near-dead) performance by me in the sack.
“Paul, give me a break. I’m pregnant. I can’t be a sexual dynamo every single night.”
“Every single night,” he said, slapping his pillow into shape. “We didn’t have sex last night or the night before. It all starts adding up, Audrey.”
“Adding up to what?” I asked, my voice rising to a level a screech owl might find attractive. “What exactly are you saying, Paul?”
If his pillow were steak, it would have been pulverized into ground beef by now.
“I’m not saying anything. I just wish you could be a little more attentive to me.”
Attentive to me. The words were flies, late-bill notices, stockings with runs—tremendous irritants to my already bothered-beyond-belief self.
I hefted myself up against the headboard. “Hey, who’s the pregnant one here? Who should be waited on and pampered and asked at least a dozen times a day, ‘Is there anything I can get you, sweetheart?’ ”
“You’re right,” he said
finally. “I apologize. Now how about a nice back rub?”
“Ooh, that sounds great.”
I rolled over on my big stomach, anticipating his strong hands plying through the tight muscles of my back and shoulders. A minute or more passed.
I lifted my head. “Paul? The back rub?”
He turned to face me. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
He smiled, and I realized that he was expecting to get a back rub, not give one.
I smiled back, appreciating his little joke. “Too bad,” I said, offering a little joke of my own. “After the back rub, I was going to reward you with any sexual pleasure you requested, including certain acts that are still illegal in some states.”
To Paul’s credit, he laughed.
WHEN HE FOUND OUT I was Lloyd LeMoyne’s daughter, Paul’s eyes had widened and his whistle sounded like the one they use in cartoons when someone’s falling off a cliff.
“Geez, Audrey, I’ve been trying to get an internship there for the past two years.”
Copenhaver, Kronfeld, Schmitz & LeMoyne was the kind of law firm whose partners attended galas and openings and $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinners, then read about their attendance or saw their photographs in the Chicago papers the following day. Everyone from Arabian sheiks with American business holdings to theatrical producers and former presidents used the legal services of CKS&L.
And when Paul learned I was Joseph Rippa’s granddaughter, he had a fairly common response: “Holy shit.”
My grandfather, the love of my life as a child, was a mechanical engineer whose inventions have helped make the industrial world go round. He was also the guy who made sure I was never a poor little rich girl.
“Money’s just a ticket, Bella,” he used to tell me, “and it does let you into a lot of places and lets you do a lot of things—but it’s not as redeemable as people think it is. You’ve heard the saying that money can’t buy happiness?”
I nodded.
“Well, you also can’t use it to make someone love you or to buy a better personality.”
“So the lady you’re seeing would like you if you didn’t have any money?”
Poppie’s bristly eyebrows formed an awning over his eyes as he narrowed them. “What’s your mother been saying now?”
“That Miss Dermott’s a gold digger.”
He shrugged, and we laughed. My mother, his daughter, was never happy with his choice of companions.
“She probably is,” said Poppie, who’d never married after my grandmother died. “But she’s a good dancer and gets my jokes.” He stroked my hair. “And I’ll let you in on a little secret, Bella—money is a ticket for old men like me to pretend they’re not so old.”
So it hasn’t been easy for a guy like Paul—he’s the first one in his family to graduate from college, let alone law school—to be married to a girl like me. I know he likes being with such a prestigious firm as CKS&L, but I also know he resents me for not allowing him to prove he could have done just as well without being married to the daughter of the company’s boss (thank goodness Daddy’s in the Chicago office; at least he’s not under his physical shadow).
Paul’s still got that little boy, puffed-out-chest, show-off quality (“Watch me! Look what I can do!”), a quality I love and one that drew me to him. You’d think my parents would understand and respect his need to prove himself, but Lloyd and Delores LeMoyne are the type who think money is a ticket that can and should buy our devotion, sense of obligation, obedience, blah blah blah. For instance, they offered to buy us a house about three times the size of this one with a backyard that ran into our own private lake, for cripes’ sake, but Paul turned them down, wanting to buy what we could afford on his salary. I was thrilled by his strength of character, and by the reduction in square footage, which meant fewer rooms to keep clean.
“Life is like a bowl of spaghetti, Bella: it’s still good even when it’s all tangled up.”
This hokey but nevertheless true adage of my grandfather’s popped into my head while I sat in a church pew with Faith and Merit, watching Kari’s baby get baptized. Merit was holding Reni, who not only was a beautiful baby but knew how to behave in church—which was more than I could say for myself. I had forgotten to wear a slip under my wool dress, and the itching was driving me nuts. As I scratched myself yet again I thought of how church for me was like a wool dress without a slip—one big irritant that made me squirm.
It was the ceremony we were assembled for and not the pastor’s droning sermon that was making me reflective; I was pregnant; Merit had just had a baby; Slip, sitting in the front row with Kari, was pregnant; and Kari herself was about to offer up her new baby to God (if that’s what baptism was). As far as I knew, Faith wasn’t pregnant, but I stole a glance at her lap anyway, half expecting to see a slight bulge there. But no, Faith was flat-stomached in a way that has never been a part of my body structure.
I do feel birth is miraculous, but it’s my belief that to explain all the miracles of nature, someone—some being—had to be invented to take all the credit. Human beings like explanations, and God is a good explanation for unexplainable things.
I stared at the old woman ahead of me and the brown velvet hat she wore, wondering what decade she had dug it out of. Its shape was between a pillbox and a cloche, and a smattering of dried-up silk leaves and flowers hung tenaciously from one side. It was the first time I’d had a desire to weed a hat.
The words of the minister were an indistinguishable blur, and I remembered the time I had told my mother, “This is boring—why do we even have to go to church?”
“Because that’s what good families do,” had been my mother’s answer. Not for the first time, I’d yearned to be a member of a bad family.
I scratched my itchy thigh with a claw of curled-up fingers and looked up to see Faith’s mouth pursed—in amusement or impatience, I couldn’t tell. She was dressed in wool too—a rust dress that looked very autumnal and harvesty—but apparently she hadn’t forgotten her slip, because I had not seen her scratch or squirm once. Furrowing my brow, in an effort to concentrate, I looked at Kari.
I had hardly expected the new mother to come to book club last week, but not only had she come, she’d read the book.
“I thought you’d be all worn out from two A.M. feedings,” I said, taking Julia in my arms.
“I thought I would be too,” said Kari, taking off her raincoat, “but honestly, I can’t remember the last time I’ve had this much energy. I’ve read three other books beside this one since Julia came, plus I repapered my bathroom.”
“She also sewed Flannery’s costume for Halloween,” said Slip. “Five and a half weeks before Halloween, and Flan’s already got her costume—that’s a first.”
“That sort of behavior could make you very unpopular with your peers,” I said. “Are you on something?”
“I’m high on motherhood,” said Kari, laughing, and really, she had that glow they usually ascribe to brides.
What I had come to love about book club (besides the fabulous desserts and free liquor) was how in hearing so many opinions about the same book, your own opinion expanded, as if you’d read the book several times instead of just once. Only Merit had yet to offer an opinion that made me think, Wow, I never thought of that, and if we’d been some mean and petty sorority forced to blackball anyone, it would’ve been her. Fortunately, we could leave the meanness and pettiness to the sororities (where it rightfully belonged); we were a more egalitarian group. And truthfully, I liked Merit, even if I didn’t think she was much of a reader (or a cook—whatever she brought to the potlucks I had learned to ignore). She brought eagerness to the group, which was a notch up from our own enthusiasm—we were all happy to belong, but Merit seemed thrilled, the way Bryan is when Davey has friends over and includes him in their big-boy play. For whatever reasons, Merit seemed to really need this club.
Another thing I really loved (did I mention the brownies we demanded Kari always bring, and the booze?) was th
at our discussions never followed a single tack. One sentence could lead to a discussion of a whole new topic, which then would branch into another one. For instance, I was talking about how On the Road had inspired me and Jane Wellhaven (the smartest girl in my English lit class—besides me) to hitchhike to Florida during spring break. We’d both told our parents separate lies, and they probably would never have found out if Jane hadn’t called hers tearfully to ask for train fare home, as all our money had been stolen in a truck stop outside Chattanooga, Tennessee.
We’d been the opposite of dharma bums on that train back to Chicago—two rich girls who relied on their parents’ money instead of their wits—and we sulked in the club car, fugitives from the fugitive world.
It was only when we’d gotten into the dining car and ordered two big steaks that we began to think that maybe we were less the opposite of hip than victims done in by a misogynist society.
“Sure,” I’d said, spearing a big bloody piece of meat with my fork, “it’d be easy to hit the road if the road weren’t so full of degenerates.”
“Exactly,” Jane had said. “I guess we’re lucky to get off with just a little theft. It could have been a lot worse.”
“When you’re a girl and you’re hitchhiking, every ride is a potential rapist.”
Jane had nodded and licked a spot of sour cream off her upper lip. “You think Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassady ever had to worry about that? No.”
“So that’s what I did the first time I read it,” I told the book club. “This time I wasn’t inspired so much to hit the road as to wonder about the one I’m on now.”
“What do you mean?” asked Merit in her awed-child way.
“I mean,” I said, trying not to let the irritation show in my voice, “that it made me wonder what I’d be doing if I hadn’t married and had kids.”
“Gosh, I’m scared to even think about that,” said Merit, rubbing her arms as if she were cold.
“So you’re saying,” said Slip, “that the novel reminded you of the poem.” She looked around to see if any of us were following her and then said, “On the Road . . . ‘The Road Not Taken.’ ”
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