Baby Love

by Joyce Maynard

  Ann isn’t sure who she could make friends with in this town. The high school kids would think she was very old—the boy who sometimes carries her groceries out at the Grand Union has called her Ma’am. She can’t picture herself having tea with her neighbor the Avon lady, either. Even the women her age all seem to be married, with a couple of babies.

  She’ll get a job; that will help. She has not thought about a career in years because she assumed for so long that she would always live with Rupert and grow vegetables and make dollhouse furniture for Trina on vacations and have a baby of her own someday. Even after she left she was thinking: He will come rescue me soon. She still thinks that sometimes, but she must, in any case, be in good shape when he returns for her. She has to show him how well she’s doing. She will start watching the help-wanted ads today.

  And meanwhile she’ll have a wonderful garden so that in August she can invite Rupert to drive down for a picnic. She’ll wear her long antique dress with her blue-and-white-checked apron. She’ll have a basket full of flowers over her arm, and there will be a table set up in the middle of the field, with a vase full of zinnias and the blue enamel plates, and soup with squash blossoms floating in it.

  Maybe she’ll invite a Fresh Air child to come stay for the summer. A little girl, six years old, would be good. Estrella. Corazon. Juanita. Some name like that.

  She will be very small, very thin, when she gets off the bus. She will be carrying an A & P shopping bag, wearing plastic shoes. Her hair is black and straight, long bangs over large eyes. She will hesitate on the bottom step of the bus for a second, scanning the crowd. Ann comes forward, takes her hand. They will drive home very slowly because the little girl feels carsick from all those hours on the bus.

  She has never seen cows. They pull over at the side of the road to look. Then at a produce stand for some fresh-picked strawberries. She says is it O.K. to swallow the seeds?

  Ann shows her the waterfall. The little girl gasps, says this is how it looks in heaven. I’ll buy you a bathing suit, says Ann. I’ll teach you how to swim.

  They get up at sunrise every morning. Ann makes pancakes, and there is always fresh fruit on the table. A checkered cloth, maple syrup heated on the stove.

  Then they go down to the garden, hoe up weeds. The little girl says what if birds go to the bathroom on the lettuce? What if I eat a worm? Ann explains everything.

  They ride bikes. They hike up Mount Monadnock. I wish I lived here all the time, says the little girl. She’s not so skinny anymore. Ribs filled in.

  Every afternoon they jump in the falls. Dinner is salad from the garden, cheese, fruit, cookies they make together. The little girl tells about her mother at home, who beats her. I will protect you, says Ann (tucking a patchwork quilt under her chin, plugging in the night light). You’re safe now.

  What if she’s gone in the morning? And she has taken a pair of pierced earrings, all the best animals from Ann’s Steiff collection, smashed every Fiesta plate in the pantry. Trampled the beans, slashed the corn with a machete. There’s spray paint on the rosebud wallpaper. Ann doesn’t know Spanish, but she can guess what it says.

  Jill is lying in bed trying to decide if she can make it to the bathroom without throwing up in the hall. She can hear her father outside in the yard, whistling “California, Here I Come.” Her mother’s watching Phil Donahue. “I don’t want you to misconstrue my question,” Donahue says, “but doesn’t your wife think it’s even a little bit kinky when you put on her brassiere?” The house stinks of bacon.

  “What your viewers have got to understand, Phil,” says a husky voice coming from the den, “is that we should all relate to one another as people, not men or women or husbands or wives. My wife views me as an individual who happens to enjoy dressing in women’s clothing.”

  She’s going to puke, it’s just a question of where. There’s a bowl of jelly beans on the dresser. If she empties them out, she could take the bowl into the closet and do it there.

  “You up, Jill?” Doris calls. Because it’s a school vacation week, she has been letting her daughter sleep until ten-thirty. Later than that she can’t abide. She herself grew up on a farm, and she was milking cows by five o’clock. “I’ve got bacon and eggs ready.”

  “Coming, Mom,” says Jill. She’ll clean up later.

  “Virgil brought you home at a respectable hour for once, I noticed.” (If she had come home five minutes sooner, Jill would have heard the deep sighs her father always makes when he has just climaxed.)

  “What was that big box I saw you taking up to your room?”

  “Just some stuff for prom decorations that Sandy gave me.” Jill was sure her mother would’ve been asleep.

  “I wish you wouldn’t hang around with that girl. Married and all. If you can call it that.”

  “She’s just fourteen months older than me.”

  “Not so old I wouldn’t take a belt to her if she were a child of mine.” Phil Donahue has just been joined by a woman who has taken hormones to grow facial hair. Reg is whistling “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

  “Will you look at that?” says Doris. “It takes all kinds.”

  Chapter 4

  HIS BACK HURTS SOME today, but Reg is feeling good. He has just come back from town with three flats of annuals. The flowers are Reg’s project. With grocery prices going the way they have been, Doris says, it doesn’t make sense to grow anything you can’t eat. But Reg loves the sight of a vase full of marigolds and ageratum. When they bloom, he’ll bring some down the road to the girl.

  He has a few hours yet before it’s time to till her garden. Looks like a good day to do some fishing. He gets his pole out of the shed, ties a couple of flies. It will be nice to sit in the sun by the falls anyway. He opens the kitchen door. “Think I’ll see what’s biting in the brook,” he calls to his wife. She’s watching her TV show and doesn’t hear him. Jill is standing over the kitchen sink eating a piece of unbuttered toast. “You’ve got to put some meat on your bones,” he says. “Or that boyfriend of yours is going to find somebody else.”

  Virgil likes to do it in a car. Naturally, sometimes the shift column gets in the way, or the seat belts. In winter it might feel a little chilly, even with the heater on. Also, you never know when some other car might pull up next to you. And one time Virgil’s former girlfriend Denise got her tit caught in the space between the horn and rim of the steering wheel. Accidents will happen.

  Still, in Virgil’s opinion, a car is the best place to do it. He’s even thinking about sending a letter to the Playboy Advisor, saying so. Listen, it’s like your own personal, compact mobile love chamber. Built-in sound system, control panel, panoramic view through the windshield if you want one, cigarette lighter always handy. Virgil even likes the way things get a little tight, a little cramped. Kind of cozy. He likes fucking in a thunderstorm, the sound of rain on the metal roof. Pulling over to the side of the road at night—right on the highway, for Christ’s sake—and hearing the cars whiz past while he’s pounding her, watching the lights loom up on the two of them, light a strip of one tit or maybe her ass and then fade out, leave them in blackness again. In addition to his eight-track tape deck, Virgil has the buttons on his radio dial all set, tuned to his four favorite stations, so he doesn’t even have to look up if all of a sudden he wants music. Just leave the key turned to Accessory and punch in.

  Sometimes he likes to fuck in the backseat for variety. A little more spacious, a little more homey. He has this great line for the backseat. “Let’s pretend we’re married, on our honeymoon, and this is a big canopy bed. Wouldn’t that be something.” Like a charm.

  Before his older brother got married, him and Virgil even shared the car a few times. Virg in the front seat, Buzz in the back, windows all steamed up. Most chicks wouldn’t go for that kind of number, of course. We are sharing a beautiful private moment, just the two of us, et cetera, et cetera. But there were those kind of scaggy twins that really got off on it.

  With Jill, V
irg has been working on some of the fine points. Pressing her bare ass up against the dashboard, where it says IMPALA, making her look like she’s branded. Driving around town when he picks her up after school, with his fly unzipped and his pecker out and Jill on the floor, jerking him off, never slowing down below forty-five. He has been thinking of maybe installing a bar in the back.

  But now she keeps talking about this pregnant business, and it’s one royal drag. A couple weeks ago, when they were over at Mark and Sandy’s for some beers, Jill took him into the bedroom and showed him Mark and Sandy’s water bed, made him sit down on it. Pretty wild, huh? Imagine no curfew. Imagine not having to get up and go home after. Imagine waking up together.

  Imagining those things is just what makes Virgil love his car. Getaway car, zero to sixty in seven seconds flat. Lay rubber, I’m out of here. No hanging around staring into her eyes.

  Chapter 5

  TARA WISHES SHE HAD a guitar. She would like to learn some songs she could sing to Sunshine. She would make up her own songs. It would take a long time to learn how to play the guitar, of course. What would be good is an Autoharp. The music teacher used to bring one to their class every week when Tara was in elementary school. All you had to do was push a button and it would make a chord. Every week somebody got a turn playing it, but Tara never did. The week it was supposed to be her turn they had a snow day and the next day they moved on to someone else. Tara wanted to remind the teacher, but she has always been shy.

  So she just hums to her baby. The only songs she can think of are “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Rock-a-Bye Baby” and “America.” There’s a song she heard on the radio she liked a lot—James Taylor and Carly Simon singing together. The only words she can remember are “devoted to you.” Tara thinks James and Carly are a perfect couple. They must know a million songs to sing for their kids.

  She’s sitting outside the Laundromat again, although she’s not doing the laundry this time. It’s just a good place to sit. Sunshine can watch the other babies and their mothers who pass by on the way to the post office and the Grand Union. The important thing is to get her out of the house. This morning Tara’s mother said, “When are you going to get rid of that baby?” Sunshine didn’t understand, of course. But Tara doesn’t want Sunshine picking up that kind of vibrations.

  A woman bends to admire her. Tara thinks her name is Mrs. Ramsay. She takes care of Wanda’s baby sometimes.

  “What’s your name?” she says. Tara’s not sure if she is speaking to Sunshine or to her. “Sunshine,” she answers. The woman seems to be talking to the baby.

  “You’re precious,” she says.

  “Thank you,” says Tara. Sunshine kicks her feet and smiles.

  “I have a granddaughter just your age,” says the woman. “I bet you’d like her. Her name is Melissa.”

  “I know her mother,” says Tara.

  “Oh, really,” says the woman. This is the first time she has addressed Tara. Tara notices that she’s wearing just one earring, shaped like a basket of plastic fruit.

  “I am surprised,” says the woman. “You do not seem like the same type of person.”

  Tara doesn’t know what to say.

  “I think it’s wonderful that you gave birth to this baby,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “So many young people are going to clinics where they kill babies.

  “Is this her natural color?” says Mrs. Ramsay. She examines Sunshine’s hair, which Tara has put into a tiny ponytail tied with a piece of yarn.

  Tara’s not sure what the woman means. “When she was first born her hair was almost black and it grew right down her forehead,” she says. There was also soft black down on Sunshine’s back and shoulders and a soft little furry tuft on each of her ears. When people saw her—Tara’s mother in particular—they seemed to think this was unattractive. Tara thought it was very cute, and she was sad when the black fuzz wore off. Probably from all those kisses. When Sunshine’s new hair grew in it was blond. She explains all this to Mrs. Ramsay. It’s the first time anyone has seemed so interested.

  “I tint mine,” says Mrs. Ramsay. Her hair is the color of Lucille Ball’s.

  Tara has begun to nurse Sunshine now. Mrs. Ramsay doesn’t seem like the kind that would mind.

  “I breast-fed my son too,” she says. “They did not encourage it back then. I heard one of the nurses talking about me. She called me the Cow. But I didn’t care. Why do you think God gave women that part of the body? He did not give women that part of the body so they could pose for pictures in magazines for men to read in the bathroom when they think their wife doesn’t know. That was not what He had in mind.”

  Tara is having her usual problem. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say. But Mrs. Ramsay seems to like her anyway. It’s nice having someone talk to you.

  “I wish my granddaughter could drink real breast milk,” she says. “I worry about it all the time. Her mother never listens to me. I read an article that said even a grandmother can breast-feed a baby. I could get my milk back, if I could just get Melissa to suck long enough to activate my glands. They make a machine with tubes now that you hook up to your own nipples so the baby gets bottled milk while she sucks, until your own milk comes in. They designed it for women that adopt babies because they can’t have their own. Of course, it is very hard for them to adopt babies now because so many of these girls are going to clinics where they have their babies killed instead of giving them to someone who could provide a wonderful home.

  “Your mother would never have done that,” says Mrs. Ramsay to Sunshine, who is curled against Tara’s left breast, her eyes three-quarters closed.

  She’s right. Tara doesn’t even like thinking about it. From the moment she went all the way with Sterling Lewis, she was hoping this would happen. It is the first time in her whole life she has had someone that loves her.

  “What is your favorite color?” Mrs. Ramsay asks Sunshine. “I will knit you a duck sweater.”

  “Pink,” says Tara. Speaking this way—as if she was Sunshine—does not even seem strange to her. Tara herself likes blue the best, but Sunshine has a different personality, and she thinks Sunshine would like pink.

  “Then I will make you a pink duck sweater,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “And booties to match.”

  Greg has been up since six. He has primed the pump—they’ve got water now, which tastes better than Perrier—and there’s a good fire going in the wood stove. The day is warm enough that they could do without, but he’s pleased to have mastered the system of dampers. The stove is black, a design of horses and trees and two woodsmen cast in the sides and a Norwegian saying cast in the front. He will have to find out what it means.

  Now he’s setting up his work space. He has brought several cartons of drawings with him from New York, and he’s looking through them. One box is all abstracts. It’s full of bull’s-eyes and paintings that look like electrocardiograms.

  He has a box full of drawings of bears. They’re pretty realistic drawings, although the things the bears are doing aren’t things bears actually do. There’s a bear stuck in a subway turnstile, a bear studying a picture in a gallery, another making love with a beautiful young woman who resembles Greg’s old girlfriend. Greg has saved these drawings through five moves, though they are like nothing else he has done.

  Lately his work has been abstract again, and three-dimensional. Before they left New York he was working on very small, tight assemblages of sticks and nails and string. The last gallery owner to look at his slides called them “hostile.”

  But now, looking out the window at the falls, he’s thinking about a different sort of piece. He would like to paint these falls, very large. He thinks he will put figures in the new painting. Not precisely representational ones, but not bears either. Right now, for instance, there is a man in an Ashford bowling jacket standing down on the rocks, fly casting. He would like to get some cadmium red for the jacket and put the man in his painting. He will put himself in the picture too, and Carla. He’
s not sure yet what they will be doing.

  Carla is still asleep. Naked, he realizes with surprise. Her body has become so familiar that the sight of Carla there seems no different to him from the sight of her in her houndstooth jacket, hanging on to a subway strap or standing at a corner waiting for the light to change.

  He reaches for the car keys—realizes there’s no reason, up here, why he can’t leave them in the ignition—and heads out the door. Probably the man out on the rocks can tell him where there’s a lumberyard to buy the boards for a stretcher.

  Ann buys the paper, reads it in the car outside Felsen’s News. She’s not sure what sort of job she has in mind, but nothing advertised (machinist, clerical worker, aide for senior citizen’s home) seems possible.

  She takes her laundry out of the backseat, carries her basket across Main Street. She recognizes the girl sitting on the steps by the Laundromat, talking to a red-haired woman. That girl is here nearly every morning. Ann wonders if the baby is her sister or her daughter. The girl puts the baby on her breast. She’s the mother then. Ann puts her wash into the machine and goes to Sal’s for a doughnut, then back to her car to wait for the laundry. Might as well see what Ann Landers has to say.

  Melissa wakes at five-thirty these days. After Wanda changes her, they watch Sunrise Semester while Melissa has her bottle, and then they watch a rerun of Leave It to Beaver. (Beaver and Larry got sent to dancing school this morning, and had to wear gloves.) Wanda likes this show. She wishes she had a brother like Wally. In particular, she wishes she had parents like Ward and June. They’re strict, of course, but understanding. Ward has long talks with Beaver, in the den. June leaves a plate of chocolate chip cookies waiting for Beaver on the kitchen table when he comes home from school. Wanda will bake chocolate chip cookies for Melissa when she’s older.