“I thought it was a good love story,” said Merit (you’d never guess her second baby is due in a couple months—she barely even shows). “Love Story. He couldn’t have named it any better.”
“Oh, yes, he could have,” said Kari. “He could have named it Puke Story. Because that’s what I wanted to do after I read it.”
Oh, Mama, we have so much fun. We sat outside on lawn chairs drinking rum and Cokes, and Slip went inside to go to the bathroom, and when she came back she was walking on her hands and we all laughed like crazy. Kari said Slip should join the circus and Slip said that was a boat she just happened to miss in life and then I said, “Well, then, let’s bring the boat to you,” and now we’ve decided that on Labor Day we’ll all get together for a neighborhood circus. (Won’t the twins make cute little clowns?) Audrey said she wants to be the ringmaster—she says it’s a fantasy of hers to wear satin hot pants and crack a whip. Kari reminded her it’s a family affair.
I think how much good it would have done you to be in a book club, to talk about books (and everything else) with your friends, and then I remember that you didn’t have any friends. I’m sitting here, thinking hard, but not one single face comes to mind, not one single face of a friend of yours. Surely you must have had one friend, didn’t you, Mama? I am racking my brain, but all I see are thousands—okay, dozens—of boyfriends, and I’m sure you didn’t talk about cramps or feeding a picky child with them.
When I was about eight, I saw a report card of yours, Mama, I think it was from the seventh grade. I found it in MawMaw’s darning basket when I was looking for some thread, and when I showed it to her, she asked, “Now how’d that thing get in there?” I stood next to her as she took it out of the envelope. You know MawMaw had two expressions, sad or grim, and looking at your report card, she had this big smile on her face.
“Look at that,” she said, the cracked yellow nail of her pointer finger running down a column. “Four A’s and two B’s.”
“Is that good?” I asked.
“That’s very good,” said MawMaw. “Your mama was a smart little girl.”
“She was?” I asked, not used to having my grandmother say nice things about my mother.
“She taught herself to read,” said MawMaw, staring at that report card. “Weren’t but four years old and she taught her own self to read. Primrose always loved a good book.”
“She did?” I asked, thrilled because I did too, and that meant I shared something with my mother.
MawMaw looked at me then, and the smile on her face shrank until her face was hard and grim again. “Yuh. But then she found something she liked better than books: boys. And after that she found something she liked even more: booze.”
I wanted to talk more about the Mama who got four A’s and two B’s, but MawMaw had used up her conversation for the day. Well, almost all of it—she did have one piece of advice for me as she got up to do whatever joyless task summoned her.
“If you pick one thing to be in life,” she said, rubbing her lower back, which always seemed to be in need of rubbing, “pick not to be like your mama.”
I never thought of you as lonely, Mama—you were always making such a ruckus, but maybe that’s how you fought off your loneliness, by always making noise. If you’d just had one friend. . . . you might have been a different person if you’d just had one friend.
Erich Segal says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” So I guess you did love me, Mama, because I can’t remember you ever apologizing for anything and yet look at me, I can’t stop telling you how much I’m sorry.
Faith
October 1973
HOST: MERIT
BOOK CHOSEN: Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
REASON CHOSEN: “Because it’s bound to make hundreds of banned lists.”
The day before Pastor Mayes died of a heart attack, he called Merit to apologize for “my inadequacies as a father.”
Merit was rendered speechless for a moment by this extraordinary announcement. “Dad,” she said finally, “are you all right?”
Pastor Mayes laughed. “Feeling fine, Merit. Your mother and I just did our walk around the golf course, and now I’m sitting here in my office, going over my notes for tomorrow’s sermon.”
When words failed Merit again, Pastor Mayes gallantly stepped in.
“My sermon is about forgiveness—I must have given at least a thousand on that topic, wouldn’t you say? But this time something hit me, and I thought, for the first time, that I don’t need to talk about forgiveness, I need it. I thought, why was I always so hard on my own children?”
Merit felt the tears begin. “Oh, Dad.”
He laughed, again, a sound Merit didn’t associate with her father. “So, I wanted to know two things, Merit. One, will you forgive me for thinking your fear and obedience were more important than your love and respect?”
“Oh, Dad.” They were the only words Merit could formulate.
“And two, despite my inadequacies, did you turn out all right, Merit? Are you happy?”
Merit made a noise, in response to the question and a power kick by the baby inside her.
“Sorry, Dad, the baby just kicked me.”
Again, that warm, unfamiliar chuckle. “Two more months, is it? I bet Reni and Melody are excited.”
“Oh, they are, Dad, they—” A thought suddenly popped into Merit’s head. “Dad . . . why don’t you baptize this one?” She and Eric had had the girls baptized in the Episcopal Church, but this one, this one would be baptized by her newly repentant Lutheran father.
Pastor Mayes didn’t answer for a while, and when Merit heard a snuffle, she realized he was choked up.
“Dad.”
“That . . . ,” he said, his voice wavery, “that’d be an honor, Merit.”
There was silence on the phone again, but it was a friendly, unhurried silence, as if both parties were content to sit and think about what had just transpired.
“Oh, and Dad—yes, I am happy. Yes, things did turn out.”
It was more a half-truth than a lie; she was happy with her children, with her friends, and she didn’t want to, couldn’t burden her father with the weight of her marriage troubles.
“I’m glad, Merit. I love you.”
“I love you too, Dad,” and when she received the call the next day from her sister that he had keeled over just as he was pouring his morning coffee, amid her shock and grief was one grace note: that those had been her last words to him.
“Do you suppose he knew he was going to die?” she asked Eric, who had held her while she cried. “Do you suppose that’s why he called me to ask my forgiveness?”
“Merit, please,” he said in a voice of such bothered impatience that Merit immediately regretted the question, immediately felt childish and vulnerable on his lap. “You think he had a little premonition like your friend Audrey, who gets visits from dead people and can tell what’s going to happen before it does? Yeah, right. That’s a bunch of bullshit and you know it.”
Merit stiffened—occasionally she still made the mistake of telling her husband things, of sharing with him, and inevitably he used this information against her. Never again, she vowed to herself, will I think I can trust you.
Under the pretext of reaching for the tissue box on the coffee table, Merit slid off his lap, her teeth working furiously on the inside of her cheek.
“And no offense,” he said, smoothing the wrinkles on his pants, “I mean, I’m truly sorry the man is dead, but baptizing the baby? Eric the fourth will be baptized in the same church I was. What were you thinking, Merit?”
She yanked tissues out of the box as her throat swelled with the thickness of tears. I was thinking that it would be a really nice thing, she thought, biting the inside of her cheek harder until she tasted blood. I was thinking maybe it was my turn to choose where the baby got baptized. Sometimes I’m so silly, Eric—I forget that you don’t play fair, that you don’t take turns. I forget that you couldn’t car
e less about what matters to me. I forget that I don’t get what I need from you—and today I needed a little comfort. Isn’t that a stupid thing to want from my own husband on the day my father died? Well, I’m very sorry I’m so stupid!
THE MAIN REASON Merit didn’t get her hair cut for so long was that she didn’t want to give up her I-hate-Eric shrine. Where would she put the dirty tissues and Q-tips, the gnawed-on baby biscuits, the little notes, written on strips of paper as narrow as the ones found in fortune cookies, that said things like Go to hell where you belong, Eric or Dr. Eric Iverson is an incompetent quack in all areas or I wish you’d die, Eric.
Every time she rolled something up in her hair, she felt as if she’d won a small victory, felt as if she were a tiny East European country that for twenty-four hours, at least, had staved off the Iron Curtain from closing in on its borders.
She was never caught. She secured her French roll with enough bobby pins to arm a cat fight, and she always fixed her hair while Eric slept or after he’d left for work.
Inspired by Faith, who was always experimenting with her hair (she had just gotten her hair styled in a cute boy cut), the time came when Merit was willing to suffer any consequences that might come from bringing her hair into the twentieth century, and so while the girls played at Kari’s, she went to a beauty salon with a picture she had torn out of a magazine and asked the hair stylist, “Can you do that?”
The stylist could, and Merit practically skipped out of the salon, she felt so modern and free, so happy with her shag.
Eric slapped her face when he saw her; she expected as much.
“You better tell me that’s a wig!” said Eric, after—not before—he slapped her.
“I’m sorry you don’t like it,” said Merit, holding her burning cheek.
“You bet I don’t like it,” he said, grabbing a handful of her hair. “Who do you think you are, Hanoi Jane?”
“Eric, please,” said Merit, holding her head at an awkward angle. “Please, you’re hurting me.”
She knew, of course, that that was his objective, but her pleading words always came out anyway.
He loosened his grip on her hair and pushed against her head so that she stumbled forward a few feet, catching herself on the edge of the kitchen sink. “You better get used to staying inside,” he said, “because you’re not going anywhere until that grows out.”
“Daddy!” Melody squealed as he burst through the swinging door and into the dining room where she and her sister were playing. “Daddy, look at the fort me and Reni built!”
Her heart pounding, Merit stood behind the swinging door and pushed it open a crack, wondering, as she did every day, how Eric was going to react to the girls.
“Oh, Melody,” he said, and Merit watched as he knelt down, taking the little girl in his arms. “That is just about the best fort I have ever seen.”
“You mean it, Daddy?” asked Reni, her head appearing from a gap in the blankets that hung over the table.
“Do I mean it? Of course I mean it. I have never seen a better fort in all my life.”
“Thanks, Daddy!” said Reni, scrambling out from under the table, but as happened so often, she had miscalculated the staying power of her father’s affections and just as she got to him, he was standing up, shedding Melody.
“It’s a good fort,” he said, walking to the staircase, leaving Reni staring after him. “Even though it’s really only a blanket over a table.”
Merit waited for a moment until she heard water in the pipes—Eric always took a shower when he got home from work—and then, as she had done countless times, she went to her girls to pick up the pieces of their heart, which their father had broken.
“Anybody up for a tea party?” she said, kneeling down (not an easy thing in her ninth month of pregnancy).
Reni and Melody pushed aside the blanket to see their mother and the tray of cookies and milk she had brought.
“Oh, yes!” said Reni.
“Oh, yes!” echoed her sister.
Merit pushed the tray under the table and then, with considerably more effort, pushed herself in. And for a half hour they were happy, sheltered under the heavy walnut dining-room table draped with blankets, eating Fig Newtons and drinking milk out of little china cups.
ALL OF THE ANGRY HOUSEWIVES loved her hair.
“You look like a completely different woman!” said Kari.
“Yeah,” said Audrey, “you don’t look like your mother-in-law anymore!”
“I feel . . . different,” admitted Merit. “Lighter somehow.” She rubbed her billowing stomach. “As if that’s possible in this condition.”
“When’s your due date again?” asked Faith.
“Three weeks from yesterday,” said Merit, a grimace twisting her lovely features.
“Hey,” said Slip, “we’re not going to have to drive you to the hospital like we did before, are we?”
Merit shook her head as sweat beaded above her upper lip.
“It’s these stupid Braxton-Hicks again. You’d think I’d get to go through at least one pregnancy without them.” She fanned her face. “So,” she said brightly, “what did everyone think about the zipless you-know-what?”
Audrey laughed. “Did you get the edited version, Merit? Because my copy very clearly stated ‘zipless fuck.’ ”
“You shouldn’t scold someone because they don’t feel comfortable using the same words you do,” said Kari.
“I’m not scolding her,” said Audrey, helping herself to a lemon bar. “I’m teasing her.”
Merit drew in her breath as a vise grip squeezed her belly.
“Excuse me,” she said, hoisting herself off the chair. “Keep talking—I just have to run to the bathroom.”
In the bathroom off the kitchen, she splashed cool water on her face.
“You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine,” she whispered to her red and sweaty reflection. Thinking a little exercise might help her, she decided to go to the basement and check on the kids.
Jody Hammond, the neighborhood baby-sitter, was reading a Seventeen magazine on the couch in the basement rec room while the children ran amok. The bigger boys were chasing the bigger girls, inhibited somewhat by the younger children trying to keep up. Only Beau sat quietly, next to Jody, reading Curious George.
“Hi, Mommy!” said Melody, racing into the laundry room.
“Everything okay down here?” asked Merit—more a rhetorical question, as she could see by the flushed, happy faces of the kids streaking by her that of course everything was fine.
Jody nodded, but her gratuitous teenage smile was interrupted by a look of genuine concern. “Mrs. Iverson, are you all right?”
“I just get these fake contractions,” she said, gasping as another one seized her uterus.
“Should I get someone?” asked Jody, and Merit almost smiled, seeing Beau mimic exactly the concerned look on the baby-sitter’s face.
“No, no, I’m fine.” She mustered a sally-forth smile, and when she got to the enclosed staircase, she grabbed hold of the handrail as if it were a tow rope.
Halfway up the stairs, a contraction squeezed her with such force that she nearly toppled backward.
She stood paralyzed, willing the pain away, but the will of her body paid no attention to the will of her mind.
“Just get to the top of the stairs,” she whispered, and like a mountain climber heeding the advice of her Sherpa, she obeyed—each step another thousand feet, until she was at the top. But no celebration awaited her; instead she knew deeply and clearly that she was going to split wide open.
When she staggered into the kitchen, Faith, who had been getting ice cubes, gasped.
“My gosh, Merit, are you sure you’re not in labor?”
“I—oh, no, I—oh, God!”
“Oh, dear,” said Faith, and even as fear was upon her like a storm, she knew Merit did not need to hear the panic she felt. “You’re fine, Merit,” she said inanely but calmly.
&nbs
p; “No, I’m not!” Merit’s voice careened into a squeal. “God, the baby’s coming!” She paced the kitchen erratically before pushing through the swinging door.
Sounding like the Paul Revere of obstetrics, Faith chased after her, announcing, “The baby is coming! The baby is coming!”
The three women sprung out of their seats like a rehearsed act.
“Let’s get her in the car,” said Slip.
“There’s—there’s no time!” said Merit as a gush of water spilled out of her.
“Oh, my God, her water broke,” said Audrey, dropping her lit cigarette into a martini glass.
“You don’t think you can make it to the car?” asked Kari, and when Merit moaned, shaking her head, she said, “Bring her here to the recliner. Faith, call the ambulance!”
Part of the prayer she had recited as a child came into Merit’s head in a paraphrased version, if I should die before I break, as she spread her legs and, with her hands at her crotch, cried, “It’s . . . I can feel its head!”
“Well, push it back in!” said Slip, and then, realizing what she’d said, she amended, “No, no, don’t do that.” She looked wild-eyed at the other women. “Help me get her onto the chair!”
Three pairs of hands helped ease Merit onto the recliner, and then Audrey unbuttoned Merit’s skirt and tried to pull down her underpants.
“Can you put your legs together for a minute, honey?”
Moaning, Merit brought her knees together long enough for Audrey to yank down her underpants.
“It’s crowning! The baby’s head is crowning! Someone boil some water!”
“Should I call the ambulance first or—” asked Faith.
“Call the ambulance,” said Slip, “I’ll boil the water.”
Merit lifted herself up in the chair as her moan heightened in pitch to a scream.
“It’s going to be all right,” said Kari. “You’re going to have your baby here, but it’s going to be all right.”
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