He’s not the prying kind, but he looks inside the kitchen, in case maybe something is wrong. The place looks different from when old Mrs. Richards lived here, that’s for sure. There’s a mobile made out of shells hanging over the sink. There’s a pan in the sink that has something burnt-looking in it—popcorn maybe. A cat is sitting on the counter eating butter off a plate. The stove has been painted bright red, but some of the paint has peeled off. There’s a bookcase inside the kitchen fireplace, made out of cinder blocks and boards, with records stacked on it. She must have a couple hundred records. His daughter Jill would like that.
Still no answer. He guesses he should go. Maybe he will just write a note, ask if she’d like her garden tilled. Looks like the house could use some paint too, and a gutter is falling off the roof. One thing at a time.
There’s a pad of yellow lined paper and a felt-tip pen, just inside the door. Shame to come all this way and not leave a note. He looks out to the field again—a perfect spot to grow corn. His own yard is too shady, and all granite besides. He dusts off his boots and steps into the house.
“Maybe you have forced yourself to forget what you and I felt,” it says on the yellow pad. “As for me, I would rather be in agony than numb.”
Two lines down the page: “I feel like an exile. I have lost your world, and can no longer enter what used to be mine.”
“I’m working hard, planning a garden, taking walks. I am thinking about adopting a Cambodian orphan. I have a dog named Simon. I think you would like this place. I hope you would be proud of me.”
“I would come back tomorrow if you wanted me.”
“I think my heart is broken.”
Reg didn’t mean to read these things. He puts the pad down. He will try another day. Doris will be waiting supper.
He hears a door slam on the porch, then, and a dog yipping. She is scooping dog chow into a blue ceramic dish.
“Reg Johnson from down the road,” he says, shifting his feet. “Thought with this old house and all, maybe you could use a man.” She’s still standing there, holding the dog dish. He is thinking: She’s not that much older than Jill.
“To help out,” he says. “I’m pretty handy.”
“Yes,” she says. “I guess I could.”
Doris is surprised—this being Tuesday—that Reg has worn his shorts to bed. This is how she knows he would like to have relations, and they do not usually have relations on Tuesdays on account of Rockford Files, which is his favorite show. She finds the show confusing—impossible to follow, if you’re also knitting—but she likes Jim Garner. He seems to have put on weight lately; in one of tonight’s chase scenes, she thought he might actually split his pants. But there’s no getting around it, Jim Garner is a very good-looking man. Kids today: her daughter Jill’s idea of a man is this Rod Stewart, who wears eyeliner and a girl’s hairdo. How could a young girl look at Jim Garner and not know that was a real man?
Doris has read that Jim Garner and his wife of twenty-three years, Lois, split up recently. What a shame. It doesn’t seem fair to Lois, who stood by him during the lean years, before Maverick. Raised his children. Some thanks.
Still, Garner is a very attractive man, and if they are going to have relations tonight, Doris will pretend that Reg is Jim Garner. In fact, Reg is built something like Jim Garner. Not so much hair, of course. But he’s also a big man.
What Reg is thinking about, as he slides the waistband of his shorts down his legs (he always waits until he is under the covers to do this), is that loose gutter. Tomorrow, when he goes back to the girl’s house to till her garden, he will mention the gutter. No need to charge her: it will be a simple job.
Her name is Ann. Looks like an Ann—quiet type. What’s she doing down there? What does she do at night? He wonders where her bedroom is. Downstairs probably—there would be no point heating the upstairs for just one person. That room in the front, most likely.
He imagines coming down her road very early one morning—3 or 4 a.m., the hour he leaves the house during hunting season, when he’s after his deer. He pictures himself in his red plaid shirt, with his gun over his shoulder, opening the front door. Scuffing the dirt off his boots on the front hall rug. Hanging his orange cap on a hook by the door, walking through the doorway to her bedroom. He would have to duck his head, the ceilings are so low.
She would be wearing a long white nightgown and her hair—why does she tie it back?—would be spread out on the pillow like an angel.
He would just stand there for a few minutes, watching her sleep, the way he used to go into Jill and Timmy’s room sometimes, when they were very little, just listening to them breathe. Then he would bend over and pull back the covers. He would see her nipples, pink under the nightgown, and her other hair, down below.
“Your hands are so rough,” she says, in that sleepy voice children have when you get them up in the middle of the night because you’ve got a long drive ahead, to the grandparents’.
“I know,” he says. He worked on a construction crew before his back gave out on him.
He leans his gun against the bed and bends to unlace his shoes. “Let me do it,” she says. She sits up slowly and kneels at his feet. When she bends to untie the knots he can see the tops of her breasts. They’re the kind that tilt up.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I have to take this off you.”
“I know,” she says, and stands in front of him, absolutely still, while he rips the long white gown from the lace at her neck to the hem. It falls to the floor. She’s white as a birch.
Then he picks her up and carries her out to the field, the spot where corn would grow so well. He lays her down on a patch of moss and kisses her flat stomach just above where the hair starts. He lowers himself very slowly down over her. He is hard as the butt of a rifle. “Yes,” she cries, as if she’s wounded. “Shoot through to my heart. My heart is broken.”
“Are you finished?” Doris asks him. “Can I get up now and wash?”
Her curlers have left little ridges on his cheek.
The baby’s mother has left a can of Enfamil in the diaper bag and a pink terry-cloth sleeper suit, but Mrs. Ramsay does not need these items. As soon as Wanda leaves (she seems to be getting fatter and fatter), Mrs. Ramsay takes down the little jar of Blueberry Buckle that she picked up at the Grand Union last Tuesday. She props Melissa on the sofa next to her, supported by three crocheted pillows. She takes out the yellow duck sweater she has just finished, unties the ugly little sneakers the mother put on and replaces them with yellow booties. “How about some Blueberry Buckle?” she asks conversationally.
“Let’s see what we have tonight,” she says, opening TV Week to Thursday. “Mork & Mindy. ‘Mork picks a fight with Mindy and she tosses him out of the apartment. Mork: Robin Williams. Mindy: Pam Dawber.’ That sounds good.
“Now, at eight-thirty we have a choice. We have Benson, comedy. That’s the show with the Negro and the little girl. Also Family Feud, game. I never cared for that one. And Dick Cavett. He is a strange man, Dick Cavett. Short.
“Nine p.m. ‘Julia Child prepares a dinner that won’t strain the pocketbook.’ We can surely use that. ‘Julia suggests stuffed hen, fresh asparagus and salad.’ Mmm. Sounds good.
“But we also have Quincy and Barney Miller and Hagen. That’s a new show. Hagen is Chad Everett. He used to be on Medical Center, before you were born. That was a good show.
“Ten o’clock, Rockford Files. 20/20, newsmagazine. Dick Cavett again. And I see Johnny has Suzanne Pleshette on tonight. It looks as if we’re going to be busy.”
Melissa has tipped over on her side, so that one of the crocheted pillows covers part of her face. She is making soft snorting sounds. Mrs. Ramsay has just remembered the little hat she made the other night during High Plains Drifter. There was a violent movie for you. She would never let Baby see a show like that.
“What are you doing lying down?” she says. “Don’t you like Mork?” She sits the baby back up against the pil
lows and ties the hat under her chin. Then a bib. She does not intend to get Blueberry Buckle on the duck sweater.
“I don’t want to upset you,” she tells Baby. “But I do not think your mother is up to any good tonight. She is running around with m-e-n.” A little trickle of pureed blueberry is dribbling out one side of Melissa’s mouth. She has not had solid food before, and doesn’t know how to swallow it. Mrs. Ramsay sticks another spoonful into her mouth.
“That is how you got here in the first place,” says Mrs. Ramsay. Mork has just walked into a closet and stood on his head.
“She spread her legs. She made terrible noises in the night. They thought I was asleep, but I heard them. She enjoyed it. She did it over and over again. She is a slut.”
Now Bill Cosby is on, eating chocolate pudding. The Negros are everywhere.
“Don’t worry,” she tells Melissa, who looks as if she has a blue beard. There’s Blueberry Buckle all over the duck sweater now, in spite of the bib. “You are coming to live with me soon.”
Mark did not finish his harlequin parfait. After three beers (he didn’t want the Cella Lambrusco either) he told Sandy, “I’m going for a drive.” Most likely he has gone to Rocky’s to play pinball. He will probably spend five dollars tonight on those stupid machines and the jukebox. Jill said when she was in there last Saturday he played “Blue Bayou” three times in a row.
She has finished the bottle of wine and wishes there was more. She turns on the TV, but it’s just Mork making dumb faces. She turns it off. She takes out the scrapbook her mother gave her when Mark Junior was born—“The Golden Days.” She has already filled in the pages concerning the baby’s birth, of course. Weight: six pounds twelve ounces. Height: twenty inches. Eyes: blue. First activities: wets on his father, curls hand around mother’s finger. Major events of Birth Day: Author of Born Free found dead, believed to have been mauled by a lion.
She tries to think of some new things she can write in the book. Mark Junior has been sucking on his fist a lot lately. She thinks he may be getting a tooth. His father gave him a sip of beer yesterday, out of a spoon. Mark Junior screwed up his face and sneezed. Much funnier than any TV character. Why do people sit around watching TV when they could be watching real babies? Sandy can’t think of anything bigger or more important, except maybe finding a cure for cancer, than having babies. She still cannot get over the fact that she and Mark made a person. Just two teen-agers in the backseat of a ’66 Valiant parked in the clearing beside the town dump with the motor running, because it was March. They didn’t even have their diplomas, and they made a person. When she marveled at this to Mark he said she was nuts.
She goes into their room, where Mark Junior is lying in the middle of the water bed with a stuffed platypus on one side of him and a plush panda bear Mark won at the Hopkinton fair, the September before the baby was born, on the other side, so he won’t roll off the bed. “I’m going to win you the biggest stuffed animal they’ve got,” Mark told her that day. He spent $4.75 at the skeet-shooting booth getting this panda, which was not the biggest stuffed animal they had, although it is pretty good-sized. Now the bear smells faintly of urine, but she doesn’t wash it because she thinks it’s probably just stuffed with sawdust and she worries that it might get wrecked. And she wants to always have a memento of that day at the fair, which was the best day she and Mark ever spent together. She was six months pregnant—big but not really awkward yet, more like the pregnant women you see in maternity shop ads than the way pregnant women really get to look. He was very proud and protective—kept his hand resting on the small of her back, just where she hurt, and bought her cotton candy, which they shared. He took her on the merry-go-round because most of the other rides were too rough, and she sat side-saddle on a green horse and he stood beside her and whispered “I love you” just as the ride was slowing down. They leaned on the railings by the boats and watched a young couple and their little girl, who looked about three, circling round and round very slowly, with each of the parents holding one of the little girl’s hands and not seeming to mind that it was a baby ride. Mark put his arms around her and said, “That’s going to be us soon.”
Mark Junior sleeps on his stomach with his arms under his chest and his bottom sticking up in the air. His father sleeps absolutely flat on his back with his feet sticking straight out. Sometimes when she comes back to bed after the two o’clock feeding Sandy puts her head on Mark’s chest or strokes his cheek, which is still almost as smooth as the baby’s. He never wakes up but sometimes, in his sleep, he will say something like “Get back. It’s going to blow up,” or “Cylinder’s misfiring. Timing off.” She keeps hoping he’ll say something about her, but so far he never has.
A knock at the door. Sandy forgot—Jill must be here for the maternity tops.
She’s alone. “Virg dropped me off,” she says. “I told him you were giving me some stuff for prom decorations. He’ll be back in a half hour.”
“I meant to iron these for you,” says Sandy, pulling a box out of the closet. She shakes out a jersey with “Baby” written on the front and an arrow pointing down.
“Decent,” says Jill. “You think I’ll be showing soon?”
“Let’s see what you look like.”
Jill pulls her Erik Estrada T-shirt over her head and steps out of her jeans. She does not wear a bra. Her pants are bikinis that say “Tuesday” on one hip.
“My boobs feel funny,” says Jill, inspecting one breast. “And I think I’m bigger.”
Sandy cups a hand over Jill’s stomach, just above her pubic hair.
“And last week in home ec I thought I was going to puke.”
“You do look kind of swelled up here.”
“I know just when it happened too. That day they let us out early, when Didi Hatfield spilled sulfur in the chem lab? And Virgil and me drove to Manchester because Bi-Rite had a sale on tires. And on the way home he said, ‘I feel like a quick one,’ and we pulled over right on 114 and he didn’t think he was ready yet but then they played ‘Tonight’s the Night’ on the radio. That part where Britt Eklund talks dirty in French always gets to him. Anyway, he was just going to pull out of me and then he said, ‘It’s too late.’ And that was just about ten days after my period. And you know the next song they played? That one Stevie Wonder does about his daughter, with the kid crying in the background. That’s when I knew. Boy, is my mom going to be pissed.”
“Do you think you’ll get married?” Sandy asks.
“Search me.”
Jill is trying on a pair of white maternity pants. She examines the stretchy knit panel in the front, stuffing a pillow inside. She’s still naked on top. She begins walking around Sandy’s living room like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Sandy laughs, and Jill’s walk becomes more exaggerated. She rocks from side to side with her legs spread apart and her breasts bouncing. The door opens. Virgil and Mark stand there.
Early evening is a hard time for Ann. If she has been in town, and she’s driving back, she can see the lights on in houses. Mothers fixing dinner. TV sets flickering. Babies sitting in high chairs, waving their spoons. She remembers evenings with Rupert, going down to the garden together to pick squash and peas and tomatoes for dinner. Turning on Lawrence Welk and dancing to that corny music. Sitting beside him while he read, making dirty pictures of the two of them that she would stick in the pages of his book.
Late at night it’s better. Ann feels she is coming close to perfecting loneliness, putting together the most poignant evenings possible. There’s something almost delicious for her about the hours between 11 and 3 a.m.
She turns out most of the lights, first of all, and lights the oil lamps. She may write a letter to Rupert, though she won’t finish it. She paces the floor, sipping Kahlua. She pours some bubblebath in the tub, turns on the water, very hot, and puts a little bamboo stool beside it with another glass of Kahlua and ice. She puts a stack of records on the stereo. She doesn’t care if this is bad for her records.
> She does not play rock music on these nights. Rock-and-roll reminds her of her college dorm, mixers when she stood by the wall all night, or exchanged SAT scores with some boy from Amherst. Even then these boys seemed young to her.
Now she plays Tammy Wynette and George Jones: “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “Nothing Ever Hurt Me Half as Bad as Loving You.” She heard some organ music on a classical radio station once that made her cry. She called the station to ask what it was and got the record—the composer is Albinoni. It’s a very lonely piece of music and she plays it a lot.
What she plays most are her Dolly Parton records. The old songs: “I Will Always Love You,” “On My Mind Again,” “Sometimes an Old Memory Gets in My Eye,” “If I Cross Your Mind,” “Lonely Comin’ Down,” “Living on Memories of You.” She also likes the duets Dolly Parton used to record with Porter Wagoner. She has studied very carefully their photographs on the covers of these albums. On one—Burning the Midnight Oil—there are two pictures, juxtaposed. One shows Dolly in a long red dress sitting in front of a fireplace reading a letter. An oil lamp is burning. In the other picture is Porter, wearing a flashy shirt, sitting in a black leather chair. The ashtray next to him is full of cigarette butts and he is pulling his hand through his blond pompadour. Tearing at his hair, really. Ann has spent nights like that.
She thinks people completely miss the point when they focus on Dolly’s breasts all the time, and the crazy blond wigs. Ann is not fooled. She knows Dolly could not have written these songs, could not sing them this way, if she had not experienced real heartbreak. She knows that Dolly has been married since she was eighteen to a man named Carl Dean, who is in the asphalt-paving business. She wonders if Dolly Parton was actually in love with Porter Wagoner, with whom she never records duets anymore. Porter Wagoner is thinner than ever now. One seldom sees him, now that Dolly has gone off on her own.
Last summer Dolly Parton came to Hanover to sing at Dartmouth. Ann drove an hour and a half to see her. She is singing more upbeat songs these days, trying for a broader appeal. She herself makes jokes about her bust—needing a fire department to put out the flames when she tries burning her bra. Her backup band nearly drowns out the guitar on “Coat of Many Colors.” She doesn’t even sing most of the old songs anymore. But Ann feels she understands: Dolly has made a decision to go on with her life, even though it means leaving the best part of herself behind. She will smile and make jokes, even if her heart is broken. She will be a bigger star than ever, and almost no one will ever know the real truth.
Baby Love Page 4