by Nicole Baart
I laughed a little too self-consciously and carefully moved past them into the kitchen. Maggie, the youngest Walker, was already setting out mixing bowls on the counter, and when she saw me, she gave a delighted squeal and mimed a long-distance hug. “Hey, Maggie,” I called, saluting her handiwork. “Got peas in your freezer?”
“Maybe California mixed veggies,” she offered. “Simon hates peas so much he says they can’t be in the same freezer as his peanut butter cup ice cream.”
I slid open the deep drawer beneath the fridge, and sure enough, there was a king-size bag of frostbitten vegetables—and they were only half gone. By the time Mrs. Walker and Grandma ambled into the kitchen, two stools were pulled up to the counter—one for sitting, one for the injured leg—and the lumpy bag was wrapped in a yellow gingham tea towel. I noted with some alarm that Grandma was indeed limping visibly.
“We’re going to start with cold,” I announced, pointing to the stools and looking away from her uneven hobble before I got too uneasy.
“What happened?” Maggie cooed. Her voice mimicked her mother’s concern so perfectly that I caught myself glancing furtively between the two. Mirror images. The younger was the shadow of her mother in the years before time had drawn painstaking lines through the skin around her mouth and eyes. It was a pretty sight.
“Nothing,” Grandma insisted firmly to Maggie’s softhearted question.
“She hurt her ankle,” Mrs. Walker corrected. She situated Grandma with my proffered bundle and pressed the angled coldness against her exposed skin.
“Cookies will make you feel better,” Maggie comforted. “We’re doing cutouts: snowflakes and the letter M.” She held up the cookie cutters as if just seeing them would prove to be restorative.
Grandma smiled at the ponytailed girl. “Snowflakes to encourage God and an M because …?”
A voice called out from the entryway, “Because Maggie has an admirer who calls her M&M. You know, Maggie Marie.” Mr. Walker entered the kitchen to the fanfare of steel-toed boots on black slate tiles.
“Jonathan!” Mrs. Walker scolded.
At the exact same time Maggie yelled, “Dad!”
“What?” he asked incredulously.
“You told her secret,” I clarified and, pointing down, added, “Boots.”
Mr. Walker looked from Maggie’s red face to the muddy work boots leaving drips of murky thaw on the floor. “Oh. Well, don’t let me interrupt you ladies.” He backed out of the kitchen with his tail between his legs.
We all giggled, remembering how in the early days of our get-togethers, Mr. Walker, Jacob, and Simon had wanted to be a part of the festivities. They had rapidly discarded that notion, resorting to the occasional whimper for leftover cookie crumbs or overdone cake corners.
When he was gone and we were alone in our familiarity, it was impossible not to say, “You have a boyfriend?” I didn’t mean to tease, but Maggie’s eyes hardened enough to let me know it was a touchy subject. I put my finger through the metal M lying in front of me and sent it spinning to her on the slick countertop. She purposefully stepped away from it and let it clang to the floor. “Come on,” I urged, unable to hide the glimmer in my eye at the thought of eight-year-old Maggie—old beyond her years and innocently oblivious—with a little tween boyfriend. “I bet he calls you M&M because you’re so sweet.” Wrong thing to say.
Maggie groaned and shot me the sort of chilling look that is made all the more icy because it is delivered with the pure and uncorrupted guile of a child. “Julia, you’re worse than Jacob and Simon. I expected more of you.”
I winced, though Grandma and Mrs. Walker laughed as if Maggie were only teasing. I could tell she planned to hold a grudge. A young grudge. The kind that is swift in duration but tough in spirit. She refused to look at me as she continued to pull ingredients out of the fridge.
“You can’t be mad at me,” I cajoled, taking a block of cream cheese from the small stack of refrigerator goods in her slender arms. “You’re supposed to tell me all about your boyfriends. Besides, we’re the young ones—me, you, and Emily.” I lowered my voice to a stage whisper, keeping it just loud enough for the older women to hear. “We gotta stick together.”
“Emily’s not here tonight,” Maggie said frostily. “And you are not a young one. You’re almost a mom.”
I couldn’t be angry with a third grader, but her harsh reminder was a fist to the stomach.
“Maggie!” Mrs. Walker warned.
“What?” she threw back.
I shook my head at Mrs. Walker when Maggie wasn’t looking to let her know that I took no offense. Maggie and I were close—we had always been so—but my pregnancy had offended her sense of order, and though she still longed to love me, there was a roadblock set against me in the very fiber of her moral little being. She knew right from wrong, and I was an aberration in her ordered world. A beloved aberration. And I only made it worse by continuing to be nothing more offensive than myself. A growing self, but myself all the same. I threatened the illusion of black and white, right and wrong, maybe even good and evil. Maggie was having a bit of a time reconciling her world with me.
To make it up to her, and because it was all I knew to do, I did the jobs she hated. I softened the cream cheese in the microwave for fifteen seconds and then stirred the lumps to perfect smoothness with elbow grease and a fork. I cut parchment for the baking pans, measuring the edges dutifully so as not to waste a single inch of the gauzy paper. I put things away as we used them: vanilla and baking soda in the pantry, cream and butter in the refrigerator. I let Maggie crack the eggs and test little morsels of dough to see if we had added enough salt. Most of all, I did everything in my power to ignore the tingle in my back from a day of being on my feet. Though I longed to press the heels of my hands to the soft spot above my hips, I refused to do anything that would draw attention to the one thing that was beginning to drive a wedge between myself and the girl who was nothing less than a sister to me.
My efforts paid off, and Maggie had warmed up a bit by the time the first batch of cookies was cooling on wire racks. I was tinting the glossy frosting an icy blue for snowflake accents when she handed me the broken leg of a still-warm M and said, “You know, the M is for March. It’s almost March.”
“I know,” I affirmed, trying to keep my gaze blank.
She studied me, inspecting my expression for any trace of condescension. Though I didn’t mean to patronize her, I also didn’t believe her little alibi, and I quickly stuffed the bit of cookie in my mouth, grinning at her with my lips pressed tight together.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Maggie complained, punching me on the arm. But at least the earlier malice in her tone had been replaced with annoyance.
“Forgiven?” I whispered when she came to take the bowl of frosting from me.
Shooting me a sharp look to let me know I didn’t deserve it, she slowly conceded, “Yes, I suppose so. But stop changing.”
I stood rooted to the floor, utterly flummoxed, as she walked away. “Changing?” I repeated, watching her place the bowl in front of Grandma. “I’m not changing.”
Apparently there was more than a touch of suspicion in my voice because Mrs. Walker and Grandma exchanged looks. Maggie gave me a curt nod.
“What?” I demanded, starting to feel left out.
Maggie shrugged. Mrs. Walker looked at Grandma.
Grandma said, “Change is not a bad thing, Julia.”
I tried not to be hurt, but suddenly I felt like a conversation had taken place that I was not privy to. It was a deserted feeling. Sure, I was gaining a touch of weight, and morning sickness even now managed to make me a little cranky, but I was still the same old Julia that I had always been. There had been no fundamental shift, no transformation that I was even remotely aware of.
The whole thing smacked of an encounter I had in ninth grade with a boy who rode bus number eleven with me. Though we spoke seldom to never, he always took the seat in front of me and apparently
listened to private conversations between me and the irregular friends who shared my bench. One day after school, right before his stop, he leaned over the back of his seat and said, “You are the most multifaceted person I have ever met.” His voice was even, unemotional, and when the bus driver slid the door open and called his name, the boy smiled at me, not unkindly, and left. I watched his backpack bounce off the edge of each seat as he made his way to the front.
According to Dad, it was a beautiful thing to be multifaceted. When I carefully asked him that night what the word meant, he assured me that it alluded to unexplored qualities and a never-ending array of possibilities. “In fact,” he continued, his eyes glassy from chemotherapy but beginning to shine, “the very root of a diamond’s beauty lies in the number of cuts—of facets—that are painstakingly etched into the surface.”
Dad was reflective and maybe even a little romantic, but though I wanted to find solace in his definition, I simply felt misunderstood. I didn’t like the idea of some bus boy reading things inside me that I could not see inside myself. Who could possibly know me better than me? I was indignant.
And now to be told that I was changing? “I haven’t changed a bit,” I muttered more to myself than anyone else.
“Well,” Mrs. Walker began definitively, “teasing Maggie about her little boyfriend—”
“Mom!”
“—is hardly an indicator of deep, personal change, Julia. But—” she caught my eye—“you are different these days.”
I tried not to be hypersensitive as I weighed her words for a moment. Finally I asked, “Good different or bad different?”
“Different different,” Maggie clarified.
I tossed up my hands in defeat.
Grandma and Mrs. Walker laughed and looked up from piping icing in dainty designs around the edges of our snowflakes.
“Don’t be defensive; there’s no reason to be,” Grandma chided me gently. “Your life has changed a lot in the past …” She paused, thinking. “Well, your life has been full of changes for a long time now, hasn’t it? Of course you are going to grow—”
“And change,” Mrs. Walker quickly added.
“And change—hopefully every day of your life.”
I couldn’t help snorting at such platitudes as I studied them all skeptically. But there was no harm intended in their words, and though I didn’t understand and didn’t particularly like being some sort of social experiment for their personal dissection and group discussion, I decided to let it go. “Whatever,” I said noncommittally and almost kicked myself because it sounded so stupid. Two days at Value Foods and already I had been reduced to conversational assassination. Such a lifeless, quenching word. I had effectively axed any potential of continuing on in this particular vein. And I had actually hoped to gain a little clarity.
But though I never got the answers I hoped for, everyone made a point of keeping the mood light for the rest of the evening. We quizzed Maggie on her vocabulary words and lamented the fact that Emily had chosen to go to a friend’s house instead of joining us for the night. Granted, she was studying for a major test in world history, but we missed her nonetheless.
Mr. Walker’s help was enlisted to drive Grandma and me home, partly so that we didn’t have to make our way in the dark again and partly because Grandma’s ankle was a fetching shade of plum. The ice hadn’t helped much.
“I’ll keep it elevated,” Grandma promised Mrs. Walker as she helped us into the already warmed up Ford F-150.
“Call a doctor tomorrow, okay?” Mrs. Walker grabbed my arm as I walked past. “Make sure your grandmother calls a doctor tomorrow. Better yet, you call for her.”
I raised my hand in pledge. “I promise. I’ll be the very first call into the clinic.”
“It’s not broken!” Grandma chimed in from the cab of Mr. Walker’s truck. “It’s just a twist!”
Mrs. Walker nodded gravely at Grandma, then gave me a quick hug and whispered, “Take care of her. I think we take her for granted sometimes. She’s not as young as she used to be.”
A fact I was well aware of.
I thought of stability as we drove slowly home. Constancy, reliability, a firm foundation that could not be shaken by death or new life or a twisted ankle. A modest, ordinary, day-to-day existence with problems of no greater significance than what to make for supper. God, I prayed, if You’re listening to this pregnant checkout girl, if my still, small voice can be heard above Mr. Walker’s booming laugh and the roar of his oversize engine, grant me a little stability in my life.
Change is overrated.
Small World
HEARTBURN WAS JUST one of the many small assaults my body was forced to combat and catalog like little red flags of what was to come as my pregnancy progressed. Who knew something as innocent as tomato sauce on a pizza or the few random chocolate chips in one of Grandma’s oatmeal cookies could set off a gastrointestinal crusade of nearly epic proportions? I felt like an old woman as my body rebelled, and though I tried to fight off each battle with copious amounts of chalk-flavored Tums, once or twice a week the fire slowly climbing my throat forced me out of bed and into an upright position, where my chances of choking on the insidious sulfur were at least minimally reduced.
Grandma was long in bed late one night while I flipped through television stations with an uncharacteristically robotic intensity: flip, flip, flip, flip—the even tone of a metronome. And while the rhythmic flashes and incessant drone tried on more than one occasion to lull me back to sleep, the dip of my head if I drifted off even a little was enough to remind me of why my warm, rumpled bed was an immediate and loathed enemy. I stayed rooted in my chair as the QVC, ESPN, and countless reruns of Friends made quick, colorful appearances across the screen of Grandma’s aging Magnavox. But somewhere amid the color and clutter, my seemingly dozing consciousness finally picked out a disquietingly familiar scene. My fingers stopped.
Commanding most of the screen was a white-haired man in predictable khaki-colored safari wear. He sported more pockets and zippers than I could count, and the betraying flatness of each confirmed that any need he had in this morbidly exotic African wasteland would be met by the substantial crew he had toted along. I doubted he even carried his own ChapStick. Not that I judged him. He was more than earnest in his pleas for help, desperate even, and it was at once beautiful and unsettling to observe how keenly his heart broke for the people gathered around him. But who could pay attention to him? She was there, standing a little behind and beside her khaki-clad savior.
Her eyes were deep and lovely and sad—they looked at once unexpectedly warm and disquietingly fathomless. But the almond-eyed beauty stopped at her sweeping lashes. The rest of her face was worn and beaten, tracked with lines and carved by hollows that proclaimed a life of hardship I could scarcely begin to grasp. Torn clothes draped her fragile frame like an ill-fitting costume on some child playing dress-up. A shoulder peeked out here. A wrist there. I could see the delicate bones of her collar and the beginning of brittle ribs curving in to her achingly straight spine.
She stood tall—erect and unexpected among the many children gathered around—maybe even a little proud, as if to proclaim in the face of her scars: I am a survivor. But I didn’t believe her. Splayed wide in protective defense, her fingers pressing the tattered fabric as if white knuckles alone could shield and save, her hand both sheltered and exposed the arc of her pregnant belly. The baby would be born soon if the desperate lay of her hand was any indication.
And while the paternal benefactor assured me that I could change her life for a mere dollar a day—enough to feed, clothe, and even educate her—I wasn’t moved to reach for my checkbook. She didn’t want a handout, and I didn’t want a long-distance balm for my battered conscience. Money was not enough. Nor was a new dress, a goat to provide milk, or even a clean hospital in which to have her baby.
Sitting in the rectangle of dim light cast by the television, warmed by hot dry air from the groaning furnace and s
atisfied with a meal that would surely be nothing less than a feast for her wasted frame, I just wanted to hold her. I would gently touch my fingers to the back of her head so she’d lay her cheek on my shoulder. I would stroke her matted hair and shush her as if she were my child although she was likely much older than me. I would whisper, “It’s okay. Everything is going to be all right.” And though she wouldn’t speak a word of English, she would know because I could see in her eyes that it was what she was dying to hear.
I would say, “You are not alone.”
Since my Sunday school days, I have seen more pictures of women like her than I could ever begin to tally. And while I’d feel stabs of guilt followed quickly by an indescribable and unlikely fear, it was impossible for me to relate to those bone-thin children and desperate mothers when I was a little girl. What did we have in common? I ate three square meals a day and snuck Pringles in between—Oreos if I was lucky and Dad had felt indulgent at the grocery store. But tonight, with the look in her eyes matching the anxious pounding of my heart, she was my neighbor—my sister. If I wanted to, I could reach out and touch her weathered fingers. We inhabited the same space.
Of course, I realize that the vast oceans and sweeping continents of our stunningly fashioned earth span tens of thousands of square miles that I could never in all my life hope to explore. I have been taught that there are species of plants and animals that have been formed for nothing more than the pleasure of God as the human eye will never be blessed with the opportunity to perceive their beauty. I know there are corners of creation that remain as pure and untouched as a patch of newly fallen snow in the hollow of a tree where no one could ever hope to run a finger across its glistening splendor. I appreciate the fact that the world is a very big place indeed. I am little more than a gnat in the scope of such enormity. But she has caused me to believe that the world is a very small place. Ghana to Galapagos, India to my own pastoral Iowa, we are all the same. We all want the same thing. Don’t we?