Nope. Men swim with men and women swim with women because they’re all nude. When I stepped out of the locker room in a new blue bathing suit for my first lap swim, stretching goggles over my head, I thought all the ladies in the pool were wearing flesh-toned suits.
So tell me this: which is more embarrassing, swimming laps naked (and hoping you read the schedule carefully) or being the only person not swimming laps naked? I stood there pondering this in the echo-y room, some dumb-ass goggles stuck to my face, my giant stomach splashed by naked people, sucking in chlorinated air.
I haven’t been able to tell Ivo I’m pregnant. We still talk on the phone all the time but it just hasn’t come up. “What did you expect, Kris?” asks Tea, seeing me hang up again without having told him.
I sit at the kitchen table with her. “I thought he might mention baby booties. Or prenatal vitamins. Or his favorite fertility goddess—and then I could segue into it gracefully.”
Tea folds up the paper she’s reading and looks at me sadly. “Gracefully? Really? You thought you could do it gracefully?”
I shrug. “He’s always talking about something . . . producers and studios and stuff. Plus, I’m nervous. What if he fires us?” Tea giggles and I glare at her. “Don’t laugh at me!”
“Come here,” she says, smiling. “Let me fix your sweater. It’s buttoned wrong.” I look down, but I can’t see the buttons that’re hidden under my stomach. “It’s not your fault,” she says. “You’re just chubby.”
I lean over to let her button my sweater the right way. “Thank you,” I pout.
“You know what I think?” she says.
“What?”
“I think it’s none of his business.”
“Oh.” Duh-uh.
She’s serious. “Really. You don’t believe that people have to quit life when they have babies, right? So don’t imply that you do. Just make the record you want to make and be pregnant at the same time.”
Wow. That sounds easy. “Yeah! And Ivo’s so far away, he’ll never know . . .” I squint out the kitchen window, I try to imagine such an impossibly simple solution.
“Even if he flew over here, he’d just think you were a little fat kid like everybody else does.”
I look at her. “What?”
She shakes her head. “But he probably won’t fly over here.”
I like this. “You’re right. Pregnant ladies can make records, right? I bet they do it all the time.”
Tea looks at me. “If you can make a baby, you can make anything.”
♋ night driving
if you can
you see it home
“Elizabeth June,” says Betty luxuriously, flicking a sugar packet across the table at me. Then, fists in the air, she shrieks, “Touchdown!” The sugar packet glides off the edge of the table and topples to the floor.
“Oooh, so close,” I cackle. Reaching down to grab it, I notice other restaurant patrons staring. They always do that.
I called Betty when I got up this morning and told her I was taking the bus to the island because I felt it necessary to take the bus to the island. “I just need to,” I said. “Can we hang?”
“Are you homesick, sweetheart?” she asked.
“Not homesick, exactly. I just wanna go home.”
“Because you’re homesick.”
“Really?”
“Yes. We should meet at the Creamery for coffee,” she decided. “You can have decaf.”
And when I got to the Creamery, Betty was . . . I don’t know, she’s always just so Betty. She sets the scene and performs the play and means every minute of it. She’s pumped colors: engaging and engaged. “That’s a beautiful name,” I tell her. “Elizabeth June what?”
“Thornburg.”
“Thornburg?” I ask. “City of thorns?” I flick the sugar packet and it flies up onto her saucer.
She looks bemused. “ ‘City of thorns.’ I like that. School of hard knocks, city of thorns.” She gets dreamy for a second, then snaps back into paper football mode, grabbing the packet of sugar and sending it ricocheting off her empty water glass. Her glass tips into the salt shaker, knocking it over and scattering salt everywhere. Then the salt shaker spins across the table and slides into my lap. Paper football is a rough game. “I was born Elizabeth June and I kept Elizabeth June out of show biz. Betty Hutton was a caricature. Ask my husbands.”
Uh, no . . . I replace the salt shaker, then line up the sugar packet and flick it onto her lap. “And Judy Garland’s name was Gum?”
“Well, not chewing gum, dear. And it was a surname. Parents don’t name their little girls gum.” Betty flicks the sugar packet with an overly light touch. It moves about two inches.
We stare at it. “You want a do-over?” I ask.
“Do you mind?”
“Be my guest. What about . . . Cary Grant?”
She eyes the packet suspiciously, then lines up her shot like a pool shark and delivers a perfect touchdown, smooth and controlled all the way across the table. “Yes!” she shouts throatily. “Archibald Leach.”
“No. You made that up!”
Betty looks offended. “I most certainly did not. Cary Grant is a lovely man and a dear friend.”
“You mean Archibald Leach is a lovely man and a dear friend.”
“Yes. I imagine Cary Grant is a caricature, too.” Old Hollywood is still very real to her, more real than this coffee shop, I bet. Whether she’s loving it or hating it, it’s not far away or gone. “He suffers from manic depression, too, Krissy.” She says this as if he and I share a common hobby.
I grab the sugar packet and tear it open. “So . . . Elizabeth and Archibald are real people,” I say. “And Gum was real?”
“Yes. And Betty and Cary and Judy were shiny packages.”
“On purpose pretend?”
“On purpose pretend.”
“Personas?”
She nods. “Personas.”
I hold up the sugar packet. “This?” then stir it into my coffee.
“In a way,” she answers.
I stare into the swirling coffee. So we’re hating Hollywood today. “Shiny packages are easy for people to understand and swallow.”
When I look up, Betty is smiling, her eyes shining. “Aren’t movies wonderful?” she sighs.
What? We’re liking Hollywood today? “Are they?”
“Beautiful people living beautiful lives . . .”
“For seven bucks? They’re just pretending. I’d rather watch real people living real lives for free.”
Betty twists her mouth up thoughtfully. “Real people don’t buy their own hype as often, it’s true. But real people could never be that beautiful; reality wouldn’t allow it.”
“Those faces aren’t beautiful, Betty. They’re just feature-free.”
Her mouth drops. “Oh, Krissy, of course—you don’t know! Cary Grant is just a name to you!” She reseats herself on the leather bench to introduce a new idea. “The movies they made when movies were great were hyperreal,” she says slowly and carefully. “They created a reality that should have been.” She waits for this statement to make an impression. My face is probably blank, though, because she gets suddenly brisk. “I’ll give you a list of movies you have to see.”
“I’d like that.”
She takes a tiny pad of paper and a pencil out of her purse, but instead of writing down any movie titles, she leans over the table. “How’re you feeling?” she asks pointedly. Betty has a very businesslike attitude toward my pregnancy. She doesn’t seem to think of me as a teenager any more than I think of her as an old lady; she just sees us as humans moving through time, bumping up against each life phase in turn.
“Great. Fat. Like a superhero, and my superpower is stomach.”
She laughs. “The first movie you need to see is The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.”
“What’s that?”
“One of my movies,” she says, writing it down on the notepad. “Watch it; it’s good. I think y
ou can rent it at the video store. It’s about an unwed mother.”
So listen to this: Betty turns out to have been an actual movie star. Dude told me this—reluctantly because he didn’t want me to be weirded out. I was kind of disappointed. I wanted Betty’s world to be Betty’s world, not dumb ol’ Hollywood. But no, she really was on the cover of Time magazine and everything else. She made blockbuster movies and had her own TV show. The movie stars she talks about were her friends, and Mr. DeMille really did shoot close-ups of Betty’s lovely face. Her invisible fans used to be visible, and she probably had a butler, too. Which is all really weird, but at least I can rent one of her movies.
The waitress appears with a coffeepot and asks us if we want any more coffee. We both decline. Betty declines by hiding her face and whispering “No, thank you.” I guess she thought the waitress was gonna ask her for an autograph. “How’s Boston, Krissy? You okay?” she asks when the waitress leaves. “Do you feel like a grown-up there?”
I laugh. “I don’t know. What’s a grown-up feel like?”
Betty smiles. “Well, do you still buy your underwear at the grocery store?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then maybe you are grown-up!” She giggles.
“No. I still wear my grocery store underwear, so I don’t need to buy any more.”
Betty laughs hysterically, then wipes her eyes. “I don’t guess I ever grew up either. And I so wanted to. It was a dream I believed would come true. I had this image of me and my husband—”
“Which one?”
She thinks. “Not any particular one. Just ‘Husband’ with a capital ‘H.’
And we’d have a nice house and children, but my image was mainly just . . . sitting on a couch together.”
“Your dream was to sit on a couch?”
Betty looks at me accusingly. “Your dream is to live in a van!” Touché. “We’d sit on the couch because everything else was okay. It was an image of peace.”
“Oh.” I try to take a sip of coffee, but the cup’s empty. “I get that.”
Betty’s looking wistful. I hate it when she looks wistful. “I think you did better than sitting on a couch, though.” I tell her. “I bet you have ‘peace’ wrapped up in your adventure somewhere.”
“I have had an adventure,” she sighs. She doesn’t sound happy about her adventure. “Krissy, how’re your reviews?”
“They’re good. They’re positive, I mean. But they call us ‘alternative’ rock. We think it’s disparaging.” She nods. “I mean, alternative to what, real rock?” I take a deep breath; I don’t want her to be disappointed in me. “And most of them call me crazy.”
“I was afraid of that,” she says. “Did you tell them you hear songs?”
“I told some people. I gotta get better at lying, I guess.”
Betty looks away for almost a minute. I sit listening to the clattering restaurant noise while she thinks. “Sweetheart, I know the way you play music is real,” she says, “but to others, it may look like a caricature. That’s why they don’t always treat us like real people.” Show-biz advice. I take a napkin out of the dispenser and fold it into a tiny triangle, then shoot it into her lap. “You don’t have a persona, so you can’t keep yourself somewhere else.”
“Maybe I should get one. I could be Assumpta Tang. Or Pretty Dirt. Or Gum Two. Or Betty Hutton Two: ‘The Revenge of Betty.’ ”
She picks up the napkin and places it on the table. “It’s a handy safety net! A one-dimensional one, maybe, but people create them for a reason.” Carefully, she balances the napkin football under her index finger and lines up her shot. “Personalities are more reliable, of course, even though they seem to be . . . processes. Processes of building up and tearing down. Construction and destruction.”
What a cool thing to say. “I hope you know how smart you are.”
“I know how smart I am. I hope you know how smart I am.” She raises her eyebrows reproachfully. “And if you have a minute of trouble, you will call me before it becomes two minutes of trouble.” She says this like a hypnotist, as if she’s making it so.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Betty tears off the tiny sheet of paper with The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek written on it, pushes it across the table at me and drops a five-dollar bill next to it. Then she kisses me on the forehead and, pulling on her coat, walks out the door.
♋ elizabeth june
god left you here, too
“Reject Beach” is what they call the poor people’s side of this beach. The rich people hang out behind the rocks, near the country club, where we can’t see them.
My brother and I build drip castle after drip castle in “crabtown,” where the tide pools are. Waves and crabs destroy them instantly.
We love the dripping and the castles and the crabs and the waves, the building up and the tearing down.
♋ crabtown
lost my head on reject beach
lost my heart
After Betty leaves, I race to the bookstore next door. I hunger for book-stores now; up-to-date pregnancy information is something researchers actually do share with us laymen. I can’t afford to buy any books, though, so I stand in the pregnancy section reading as many as I can as fast as I can. My biggest health concern right now is cigarette smoke. The clubs we play are very smoky; fans in the front row actually blow smoke directly at me because it looks cool in the lights.
So I take a book with a black-and-white photo of a baby on it off the shelf and turn to a chapter called “Pregnancy in the Workplace.” I figure there’s no way I’ll be able to use any of the information in it—they always say weird shit like, “Keep carrot sticks in your desk drawer”—but this particular book says: “Request fans that blow smoke away from you.” I’m not kidding; that’s what it says. For a minute I think the book is speaking directly to me. You can request different fans?
When I realize they mean fans, not fans, I close the book and replace it. I’ll just keep some goddamn carrot sticks in my guitar case.
Leaving the bookstore, I think, I’m still homesick.
On the sidewalk in the cold, I stare at a pay phone for a second and then, on a whim, call my mother and ask her if she has time to take a walk with me before I catch the bus back to Boston. “Ooo . . . yes,” she says. “Let’s go freeze our butts off.” So I sit on the curb and wait for her to pick me up and drive to the beach. We both love winter beaches—windswept and clean. It’s goddamn freezing, but winter is a beach’s secret.
When Crane pulls up, smiling, I notice for the first time ever that she looks a lot like me. I drew thousands of crayon pictures of her when I was little in which she looked like an enormous queen: diamonds and lace, shining hair and sparkling eyes, crooked stars floating around her. I always drew myself as a little stick with a baseball cap, in the background. I had no idea we looked alike.
We drive in silence because the evening is so pristine and perfect. When we get to the beach and climb out of the car, though, shrieking wind blasts our faces. We both squeal, laughing. She wraps a scarf around her face and reaches over to put my fur collar up around mine. Then we lean into the wind to fight our way toward the surf.
The water is dark. Wild and foamy. “Only a few more months,” she calls through her scarf, patting the baby through my coat.
The pink and orange sunset, shot with deep blue, is like every other sunset that’s ever been since my grandmother held Crane and Crane held me and this baby here came to life. And like every other sunset that’s ever been, it’s shockingly beautiful: a snowball on fire, the flames spreading across a field of dove-gray and navy. “Look at that!” I say, stopping to look up. Yet another miraculous miracle. So clean and full. I miss this.
“It’s un-freakin’-believable!” she shouts over the combined roar of ocean and wind. “Takes your breath away!” I nod, grinning. “I can’t believe,” she yells, “the magic that happens every single day!” Crane puts an arm over my shoulder and a hand on my stomach, her smiling
eyes crinkling over her scarf.
♋ buzz
my limes make a baby healthy and wise
i cut lemons and lemons and limes
I can’t believe I have to spend money on food now. It’s expensive stuff. Especially the good kind of food. A hundred grams of protein a day. Do you know how much food that is? And how much money? I would so flunk foraging. All I wanna eat is lemons and limes and grapefruit, for some reason, and there’s no pregnancy book that says that’d be okay.
So after swimming naked laps, I stomp through the snow to Bread and Circus, the straw-scented health food store here, and hang with the braided and bearded to read labels and compare unit prices and protein grams and RDA equivalents. Gotta get vitamin E in me somehow (helpful hint: it’s impossible), plus all the B’s (and they have to be balanced), C and its cofactors the bioflavonoids, iron (but not too much! and never with vitamin E, which you can’t get anyway!), balanced amino acids (there’re unbalanced ones?), vitamin A (note: the wrong kind is dangerous. Also, too little is dangerous—oh yeah, and too much), omega 3’s for essential fatty acids, calcium (lead-free! and only with D and magnesium!), trace minerals, acidophilus, enzymes, and did you know there was a vitamin K? Aaack.
And then there are the don’ts: no caffeine, alcohol, preservatives, artificial sweeteners or colors, molds, palm oil, refined sugar, refined flour, pesticides, herbs, spices, seafood, raw food, deli food, smoked food, saturated fats, hydrogenated fats, tap water, corn syrup, painkillers, antibiotics, cough medicine, cold medicine, any medicine, potential allergens or carcinogens . . . it’s exhausting.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 25