Maybe Baby

by Tenaya Darlington

  At dinner Gretchen sat across from her mother, remarking to herself on Judy’s easygoing yet chatty edge. When had she become so bearable, even a little spunky? she wondered. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been around her parents someplace other than their sobering living room with the odious pheasant couch and the TV going full volume. Get them out of that clamshell, and they acted almost like human beings. It was amazing.

  To complete her party theme, Sunny served skewers of grilled baby vegetables, mixed baby greens, and baby loaves of corn bread. “Everything’s darling,” Judy cooed. “I’ve never had such delicious vegetarian food.”

  “Actually, it’s all vegan,” Sunny said, beaming. “Klaus can’t digest dairy. It makes his stomach bloat.”

  Rusty’s ears perked up. “Is that right?” It was the first time he had spoken.

  “Good Lord, when I met Klaus he ate any old thing he pleased and weighed about sixty pounds more, all gut. The first thing I did was get him on some Pro-Shape vitamins and a weight-loss plan.”

  “I feel great.” Klaus thrust his fork in the air and flashed his crocodile smile.

  Rusty leaned in on his forearms, listening intently. He cleared his throat. “Pro-Shape vitamins? You just pick those up at the store?”

  “Nope.” Sunny popped a tiny carrot between her lips and smiled coyly. She chewed slowly and deliberately, her eyes locked with Rusty’s. After a dramatic swallow, she said, in a voice that was stunningly casual, “Can I tell you something that will change your life?”

  “Mom.” Ray let his fork drop to his plate and put both hands squarely on the edge of the table. “If you start in with the sales shtick, I won’t forgive you.”

  Sunny looked hurt for a brief moment, then emitted a low laugh. “Don’t be silly. We’re having a nice dinner.” She leaned toward him. “Relax.”

  Ray flared his nostrils, something he was famously good at, and picked up his fork to stab a fingerling potato. Gretchen put a hand on his leg under the table.

  “I’m an independent contractor for Pro-Shape,” Sunny offered sweetly to Rusty. “I can tell you about it at a more convenient time.” She raised her glass and offered everyone around the table a festive smile.

  “That’d be great,” Rusty said, spearing a mini-ear of corn and giving it serious consideration.

  “I can honestly say that Pro-Shape saved my life,” Klaus offered.

  “He’s right,” Sunny couldn’t help but interject. “Before taking Pro-Shape, Klaus was lethargic and sedentary. But now”—she looked lovingly at Klaus—“he’s got so much stamina, and it’s all because of Pro-Shape smoothies. All you do is mix a little Pro-Shape with some ice and fruit juice, and, well, it’s even had an effect on our sex life.”

  Here Judy burst into seismic giggles. Ray stood up, throwing his napkin toward a centerpiece of miniature roses.

  “Oh, come on, Ray,” Gretchen whispered, tugging at his arm.

  “I’ve said all I’m going to say.” Sunny held up both her palms. “Honest, really.”

  Ray watched her carefully, then slowly sank back to his chair and resumed eating. He wasn’t seated for a minute, though, before Klaus, who had gotten up to pour another round of wine, bent down between Rusty and Judy with some Chablis and said, “I’ve even tried Viagra, and I tell you, this stuff whips the pants off it—plus you lose weight.”

  “Imagine, it’s like an aphrodisiac and a PowerBar all rolled into one,” Sunny whispered across the table, using the back of her hand.

  Ray was gone. He made no noise in leaving, no sound as he drew the screen door to the balcony across its track. Gretchen turned in her chair to watch him at the railing. The city was dark. She could barely make out his shape against the sky.

  “Ohhh,” Sunny moaned. “I’ve ruined everything.”

  “I’ll talk to him.” Gretchen pushed her chair back and prepared to hoist herself up.

  “It’s my fault.” Rusty stood and started for the balcony before anyone could protest.

  There was silence at the table. The black candles around the centerpiece flickered. Sunny just smiled apologetically. Judy twirled some beads around her neck and sipped from her wineglass thoughtfully. For the first time, Gretchen noticed, her mother wasn’t wearing bright red lipstick. Her lips looked mysteriously pale and supple, a little purplish in places from the wine, as if she had dabbed on a little black lipstick.

  Judy caught Gretchen’s eye and fingered her upper lip self-consciously.

  “Is he always this touchy?” Sunny pushed her plate away and leaned her elbows on the table.

  Gretchen frowned. “He’s been rehearsing a lot,” she said. “The show he’s putting on in a few weeks has him feeling really pressed for time, especially with the baby.”

  “I think he’s gestating his own little pet peeve,” said Sunny, reaching for the champagne bottle. She lifted it over the mini-roses and sipped delicately but noisily from the nipple.

  Gretchen looked over at her father’s plate and noticed he had hardly eaten a thing. She stabbed at his baby greens and ate them hungrily.

  “Dammit!” Sunny’s hand crashed to the table suddenly. “I knew I forgot something.”

  Gretchen jumped. “Jeez, Sunny,” she said, rubbing her belly.

  Only Judy seemed not to notice. She rested her chin in her hand. “I like wine,” she said to nobody. “I didn’t used to.”

  “I meant to pack Ray’s baby pictures,” Sunny said, offering a melt-away smile. She put a hand over her mouth and said to Gretchen, “He was soooo cute, soooo hairy. Like a little gorilla, really. I mean, it was unbelievable, the hair.” She clapped a hand to her chest. “Of course, it all fell out later, but I couldn’t give him the name I’d picked out. Not with all that hair—no way.”

  Gretchen tried not to appear shaken. “I didn’t know babies could be covered in hair.”

  “Most aren’t,” hooted Sunny, “but your Ray there, he looked like a little baboon.” Sunny broke into a fit of giggles. Rusty stepped up to the screen from the balcony and looked in at the table to see what was going on, then turned away. Klaus just sat and smiled, working a toothpick over his teeth.

  “Well, my goodness,” Sunny went on, “I was all set to call him Abe, you know, but of course I couldn’t, I was afraid, you know, that people would take one look at him and call him ‘Ape.’”

  “Oh, goodness,” murmured Judy absentmindedly, pressing at her upper lip with the tips of her fingers.

  Gretchen closed her eyes briefly, wincing as the baby kicked.

  “The nurses, well, they’d never seen anything like it. I mean, it was like he came out in a little costume, hair from head to toe.” Sunny gestured with her hands, gushing giggles, then, sensing Gretchen’s discomfort, changed the subject. “Do you and Ray have names picked out, or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “We have a name in mind,” Gretchen said.

  “Alex or Chris would work,” offered Judy, cocking her head across the table, suddenly alert. “But I suppose you’ve thought of those since they work both ways. I had a Jamie in one of my classes—she was a girl. And there was a boy once named Kelly.”

  “Mother, I didn’t know you were giving this so much consideration.”

  Judy blushed. “I have a pretty good baby book.”

  “How about we clear these plates and have some cake,” Sunny chirped, standing up. She rolled her eyes at Gretchen as if to commiserate about Judy’s names, then started loading her arm with dishes.

  “Don’t forget, Judy,” Sunny called over her shoulder. “We’re going to share birth stories over dessert.”

  Between courses, Gretchen took the opportunity to rejoin Ray while Rusty used the bathroom. She sidled up to him by the railing and looked out over the city. “Feel,” she said, putting a hand on her belly. “It’s really at it in there.”

  “It’s probably trying to stomach the present company.” Ray rolled his eyes and tossed a glance over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

&nb
sp; “They’re trying,” Gretchen said. “This is a really nice party.”

  “I don’t want any of them at the birth,” Ray said, looking out. “I think we should go with your original plan.”

  “Lighten up.” Gretchen rubbed his shoulder. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Those dresses, the food—my mother makes a mockery out of everything.” Ray pressed his fingertips into his temples and exhaled deeply. “And her stupid sales pitches. She’s got to act out an infomercial anytime she’s got company.”

  “Ray, everyone’s got their thing,” Gretchen urged him softly. “Look at us, we’ve got ours, too. I’d say everyone’s doing pretty well, considering what we’ve asked them to be a part of.”

  “You watch,” Ray said, fuming. “My mother will show up while you’re in labor and recruit for Amway in the waiting room.”

  “Ray.” Gretchen cocked her head to the side. “Was it true you were born looking like a little baboon?” She giggled and tugged his ear. “I wish you’d grow your hair out again. I liked it all over me in bed.”

  Ray sighed and gave her forehead a kiss. Gretchen closed her eyes and felt a surge of love—not just for Ray but for all of them. Tipsy Judy. Sulky Rusty. Nutty Sunny. Even Crocodile Klaus. She felt grateful for all of them, for their idiosyncratic affection, for their disparate moods and their unpredictable natures that, in some unspoken way, allowed her to explore her newfangled identity as partner to Ray, as mother to the yet unborn Baby X.

  Who would it be, this little masterpiece conceived in that dark winter room below her parents’ footsteps nine months earlier, there in that pink-ruffled setting that had once been her pod, her shell, a sort of ongoing womb?

  Now she was an igloo. Now she contained all of it, was its house, its rind, its reigning mind. But very shortly—indeed, any second—it would free itself and become someone else, a separate venture, its own capsule of stars, a legion of cells grafted to the core of the universe. It would be so small and yet so staggeringly large. It would be, Gretchen thought, perfect.

  And in that moment, under the portentous glint of Pluto and above the lapping shore of Lake Michigan bathed in city lights, Gretchen’s water broke.

  Chapter 12

  IN THE WAITING ROOM

  In the hospital waiting room, two sets of future grandparents sat watching the nightly news, Judy and Sunny, in their muumuus, listlessly flipping through magazines, Rusty and Klaus sitting stiffly with their hands on their knees. Gretchen and Ray had been admitted to a birthing room, and Ray had given explicit instructions that no one should come near.

  At eleven, she was four centimeters dilated, and the heads of the late-night talk show hosts appeared—giant faces that filled the screen with their own self-important laughter. Rusty shifted his weight in the utilitarian chair, trying to find a comfortable way to lean on the wooden armrests. “Still can’t beat Carson,” he offered to no one in particular.

  Judy looked over at him and drew her brows into a line. Rusty saw the flicker in her eye, not of the TV’s reflection but of the name he had uttered for the first time in fifteen years. Something in his belly sent a searing pain down into his groin. He shifted his weight to the other side of his chair and closed his eyes.

  “Johnny Carson?” barked Sunny. “I don’t think I ever missed a Carson show, except when I was meditating.”

  Rusty kept his eyes closed. He was both remembering and trying not to remember. In his mind, he traveled back to the night Carson was born. How enthralled he’d been at the sight of his second son, the bright eyes, the small fists. The birth of his first son had been something of a blur; he’d been all nerves. But Carson’s birth had elicited an immediate, visceral reaction. He wept on and off for hours, then went home and slept alone, feeling so lucky, so endowed with life. Two sons—who could ask for more? An only child himself, he was touched deeply about bringing a second child into the world.

  It made him love Judy more, even like himself more. To be part of such creation struck him as staggering, and for a while there, he wanted nothing more. He worked extra hard to insure the future of his family, sold more cars, spruced up the lot that once belonged to his father, and donated a Pinto to a raffle for the hospital on Carson’s first birthday.

  As his young sons became boys, he seemed unable to take his eyes off them. They were a part of him and they were growing, and through them he saw himself coming into the world for a second time. It was a bold thing, a heavy thing, to regard your sons in this way and then to observe as they turned into people so unlike you. If they had been female, it would have been different, he supposed, but with his boys, he expected to see a mirror image. He expected them to take an interest in all the things he loved—fixing cars, hunting, rejoicing in the hot curve of a baseball in summer.

  But of course, it wasn’t so. Henry cried out for a baby guitar from the first instant he could talk, and Carson stared enthralled from his crib when Judy would sit in his room at night and sew, singing softly to him from her neat red lips. It was Judy that Carson admired. Rusty had looked on and known a kind of jealousy—the way Carson curled up in Judy’s lap, the way he sucked his thumb and twisted a lock of her hair around his finger at night, the way he studied her earrings, fascinated by anything sparkly. But when he’d wanted to dress up in Judy’s shoes, try on her lipstick, Rusty had insisted it stop there. It was too much like watching himself do those things, like seeing his own feet jammed into Judy’s small shoes, and for no other reason than pride, those things offended him deeply.

  As his boys grew bigger, Rusty felt himself grow smaller, pulling away. He retreated from Judy, though it wasn’t her fault the children didn’t take after him. There were nights when he felt like an outsider when he moved through the house, hearing the music behind Henry’s door, watching Carson bent over his latch hook on the floor. Rusty would leave the house, sit in his car, sometimes even start it up on the pretense of leaving for good. Instead he usually stopped over to see if Donald wanted to take a drive, and as the car careened out of town, he would confess, “I feel like an alien. There are days I do not, cannot, love my children anymore.”

  “Bah,” Donald would always say. “It’s just the age.”

  Rusty had nodded, had waited for the phase to pass as the moon phased in and out of wholeness and slivers, but, give or take a day here and there, he felt only disappointment. Sometimes when he drank a few beers, he thought back to that early morning in Philadelphia when he found the stranger at his table eating breakfast. Rusty would hear him apologize, see him reach for the picture of his little son. “Someday, you could be in my shoes, man,” the stranger had said, “with no idea why your life has slipped away from you.”

  “Impossible,” Rusty had fired back, insulted.

  It had cursed him, Rusty decided. He still carried the little boy’s picture in his wallet, folded twice and tucked deep in a leathery corner—once a memento, now a reminder.

  “I’m heading out,” Rusty said now, addressing the other faces in the flickering light of the waiting room.

  “Now?” Judy asked. It was the first time in two weeks that she had spoken to him directly with any gentleness in her voice.

  Rusty turned and paused to try to think of something clever to say, but after a few moments passed, all he said was “I need some rest.”

  It wasn’t true—he wasn’t the least bit tired, but sitting in the waiting room, chewing on his thoughts was only making him sink deeper into a place where he knew he did not want to touch bottom. He started for the door and, beyond it, the dull glow of the hallway.

  “Wait!” It was Sunny who caught his arm. She dug down into her purse and thrust a small white bottle into his fist. “Here are some of those vitamins.”

  Rusty nodded in thanks. In the hall the lights were dim. Women in various shades of blue scrubs passed him like fast-moving weather patterns. He thought he could hear Gretchen cry out from behind a heavy wooden door marked 1224, and he felt gripped for a moment, but then lu
mbered on.

  He had no feelings about the baby on the way, not that he didn’t want to feel something. He simply couldn’t. Other than the weird rumblings in his stomach, he felt as dead as a bird. His heart felt as cold as the Deepfreeze in the basement. He hoped Judy would stay on for a few days in Chicago so that he could have the house to himself. He’d had visions of secretly moving out, of packing up his things and disappearing, maybe even selling his car lot—one of Donald’s sons-in-law had expressed interest. It was time, and Judy would be glad to see him go. He only wished there was something he could offer her, some small gesture to compensate for the brute he’d been, and still was.

  “I’m too wired to sleep,” Judy confided to Sunny in the waiting room. In a dark corner, Klaus had shoved two chairs together and was snoring softly. The TV was mute. The one torchère lamp emitted an unrelenting buzz and a moonish halo. A nurse popped her head in to let them know there was fresh coffee in the kitchenette.

  “Is there any word on Gretchen and Ray in twelve twenty-four?” demanded Sunny. “We’re the future grandmothers.”

  “Afraid not. They’ve still got a ways to go.” The nurse flashed them a gap-toothed smile and left.

  Sunny crossed her legs and leaned over the armrest. She whispered, “Klaus thinks he may know their doctor from a conference. He thinks we can probably find out the sex.”

  Judy flinched. It had never occurred to her to attempt anything so sneaky. All these months she had been trying to prepare herself mentally to handle the great question of this child’s mystery organs—the things she would say to the neighbors, the subtle machinations that would be required to hide not just the matter of the sex from them but the fact that there was any issue at all. It had caused her months of consternation. She had even considered telling everyone it was a girl, just to make it easier, and of course there was a fifty-fifty chance it would be. The only problem was that if down the road it were revealed that the child was a boy, she’d have some explaining to do.