Baby Love

by Joyce Maynard

  “Whenever I’m with him/Something inside/Starts to burning/And I’m filled with desire. …”

  Virg is squeezing black paint out of a tube onto the window overlooking the falls. “Look at me, I’m creative,” he says. He has to talk very loud because of the music.

  “It’s like a heat wave/Burning in my heart. …”

  “Fuck you sucker,” he writes in acrylic.

  “Virg, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Don’t talk to me, man. I’m an artist.” He reaches for another tube that’s lying on the floor. Carla’s Koromex. He squeezes out a long stripe. Stuff smells awful.

  “Love is like a heat wave/Heat wave. …”

  “I’m splitting,” says Mark. He has never done anything like this before. Might as well take some albums, now that he’s here.

  “Crummy dope’s giving me a headache,” says Virg. “I’m out of here.” He tosses the bag of grass to Mark, who stuffs it into his pocket. Mark wonders if maybe he should neaten things up a little.

  They are just about to walk on home when Virg remembers his trout. Mark says he will wait at the edge of the road. “Hurry up,” he calls.

  Virgil clambers down the rocks. His head is splitting. Damn line slips out of his hand. He leans over the water to pick up the fish, puts one boot on a dead birch tree leaning over the brook. Mark sees the tree give under the weight, but it’s too late to do anything about it. His friend is in the water.

  Reg’s presents have left Ann feeling sad. It seems to her as if the people who are kind and loving to you are never the same ones you are kind and loving to. She has a neighbor whose hand trembles when she offers him a beer, and he brings her a windmill, and what is she doing? Thinking how she would lie down in front of a train for Rupert, who never even got it straight when her birthday was. And who does Rupert worry about? Trina, whose trip to Disney World should not be interrupted by Ann’s life being wrecked. As for Trina, the only person she might lie down on a train track for is Jaclyn Smith from Charlie’s Angels. Ann wonders if there is ever such a thing as two people both loving each other equally and being happy always. To her it feels as if misery is just built into love. Things aren’t meant to work out.

  She doesn’t usually fix her Kahlua drink this early in the day. (It’s a few minutes after two.) She’s just so low. She puts on a George Jones record. Nobody else, besides Dolly, can sound so totally hopeless. Then she takes out Rupert’s letters. They were written during the period when she was still unsure about leaving school and moving in with him, and it was Rupert who didn’t think he could live without her. It figures.

  She saves these letters for special occasions. She’s afraid if she reads them too often they’ll be used up. So she hasn’t taken them out in a month.

  “Take me,” says George Jones. “Take me to your darkest room/Close every window and bolt every door/The very first moment I heard your voice/I’d be in darkness no more.”

  She has gotten to the part in Rupert’s first letter where he says how he thought about her while he was having his root canal surgery, and the dentist said he had never seen such a stoic patient. “Just to think about you makes me grin,” he said.

  “Take me to your most barren desert,” George Jones sings.

  “You say we will end up making each other miserable,” he said. “How can that be? You make my gray old heart fly up.”

  She is crying by this time, of course. She gets up to pour another inch of Kahlua and begins to pace the floor, singing along with the record.

  “Take me, oh, take me to Siberia.” George Jones is practically moaning.

  The Just-like-nu Shop is closed, but Greg decided he will knock on the door anyway. He is just about to leave—he has waited a couple of minutes—when the mother opens the door.

  “What now?” There is a bloody dish towel draped over the banister behind her. What’s going on here? She has killed her daughter. Murdered the baby. He just stands there.

  “We’re closed.”

  “The girl” is all he can say. “The one with the baby.”

  “There’s plenty fit that description,” says the woman. “We have girls with babies crawling around all over the place here. They are reproducing faster than rabbits. Aren’t even housebroken.”

  “I’m looking for your daughter,” says Greg. “I might have a job for her.”

  “I bet.”

  He’s wondering if he should call the police.

  “Well, she doesn’t tell me much. But you can usually find her over by the Laundromat.”

  He doesn’t say good-bye. He just leaves.

  Carla and Sandy are on their second pot of tea. Sandy’s telling Carla about the time Mark Junior got constipated and she stuck a little chip of soap up his rear end. Carla seems to be very interested in pregnancy and babies.

  “After that it just popped right out,” she says.

  “Didn’t you feel scared in the beginning?” Carla asks. “A baby’s so tiny. I’d be afraid I’d break it.”

  Sandy says she is always scared of something happening to Mark Junior. “I never had so much to lose before,” she says.

  She tells Carla her terrible dream. In this dream she’s making love with Mark and she hears a knock at the door. Mark says never mind, they’ll go away. He keeps kissing her, stroking her, rocking back and forth on top of her, and the knocking keeps on getting louder. Finally Mark is done and she gets up, wraps her robe around herself and opens the door. There’s a little bundle on the doormat. She says, “Oh, look, a birthday present for the baby,” and bends to pick it up. It’s not wrapped in paper, it is bound up, sort of like bandages. She unwinds yards and yards of fabric. It seems to go on forever. Then she sees her son’s face. She unwinds the cloth faster and faster, until he is lying there stiff and naked in her arms. He is cold as stone.

  Virgil sits at the edge of the water, cursing. Shit, why did he leave his car back home? Why did he have to go back for that puny fish. Now he’s soaking wet and frozen and it feels like his ankle’s broken. Twenty feet away, on the window of the summer people’s house, he can read the words “Fuck you sucker,” backward. The guy is bound to come home soon. Virg can’t even stand up.

  “I think there’s another house up the road,” says Mark. “I’ll go for help.” He will say they were fishing, that’s all.

  He stashes the albums under some leaves and heads up the hill.

  Tara watches the man walk along Main Street, knowing she has seen him someplace. He has a face like a statue in an art book. She also likes the way he walks. His back is very straight. He doesn’t bounce exactly, but he looks sort of determined. Tara doesn’t walk anything like that.

  “This will probably sound odd.” He has stopped right in front of her, outside the Laundromat. Denver and Kalima would say it was karmic.

  “My name is Greg. I’ve been looking for you.”

  She tosses her hair the way she has seen Wanda and Jill do when a boy talks to them. Not that anyone like this has ever talked to them.

  He’s an artist. He wants to paint her. Also Sunshine. He mentions something about paying her, but she doesn’t even concentrate on that. She just knows without having to think about it that he’s going to rescue her.

  He says if it’s O.K. with her, then he’ll pick the two of them up tomorrow here at the Laundromat, around noon.

  She tells him her name. “Like in Gone with the Wind.”

  After he leaves she remembers where she saw him, remembers he was buying a dress for his girlfriend. This doesn’t bother her one bit.

  Carla wants to know about breast-feeding. Did Sandy try it? Why did she choose the bottle instead?

  “Mark didn’t like the idea,” says Sandy. “He said my chest was his.” She wishes she hadn’t told that. Now she’s embarrassed.

  “A friend of mine is doing it though,” she adds. “Her baby’s about the same age as Mark Junior.” She glances out the window, thinking she will point Tara out if she’s at her usual spo
t by the Laundromat.

  “There she is,” says Sandy. “Talking to some guy.”

  Carla comes to see.

  As the house comes into view, Mark hears music. He doesn’t mean to look in any more windows, but there she is. Holding a wineglass and sort of hugging herself with the other hand. She’s barefoot, pacing back and forth, singing. Not in the quiet, mouthing way that most people do when they play records. She is belting it out like she’s giving a concert.

  So loud she doesn’t hear his knock. Finally he has to put his head in the door and yell, “Excuse me.”

  She jumps.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he says. She turns down the music and puts her glass on the arm of a chair.

  He explains about his friend. Can’t walk, no car. Afraid his ankle may be broken.

  “Just a second,” she says. “I’ll put on my shoes.”

  She screws the top back on the bottle and puts the ice cubes back in the freezer. Mark follows her out the door.

  She turns her key in the ignition and opens the passenger door for him. He slides in.

  “Nice little car,” he says. “Get good mileage?”

  “We’ve got a problem with Jill,” says Doris. She and Reg are cleaning the creosote out of their stovepipe. It looks as if they won’t be burning any more wood until September.

  Reg knows he’s supposed to ask, What do you mean? But if he waits she will just tell him.

  “She’s depressed. She’s got mental problems. Doesn’t have any appetite.”

  Reg had not noticed. He feels guilty and foolish. He’s a middle-aged man with a wife and teenaged daughter. He has no business spending all his time thinking about that girl down the road.

  “What do you figure is the matter?” he asks.

  “You know these teen years,” says Doris. “A girl gets a spot on her nose and she figures her life is over.”

  “Why don’t I just take my girls out to the movies this evening?” says Reg. “Maybe Howard Johnson’s too. Make a night of it.”

  “That would be nice,” says Doris.

  Ann feels reckless. She’s a little bit drunk to begin with. She recognizes the passenger stretched out on her backseat, soaking wet and shivering, as the boy whose lovemaking she observed, right at this very spot, just two days before. The passenger in the seat beside her, she knows, recently experienced an erection while reading the current issue of Rolling Stone outside Felsen’s News. One of those Linda Ronstadt nuts probably.

  They are neither of them at the George Jones stage of life—pining, suffering, feeling lonely and blue. These boys probably don’t go twenty-four hours without screwing some girl or other. They certainly don’t bring these girls windmills and garden gloves either. For them sex is simple and uncomplicated, like breathing and eating. If she could be like that she might feel more like a member of the human race. Nobody would be miserable. Nobody would love anybody.

  Which would she choose? The one in the front seat—Mark—is more attractive. The one in the back, Virgil, looks wilder. He would probably like to have Led Zeppelin playing, for atmosphere. Of course he has that broken ankle.

  She could drop him off and say to the other one, “Let’s go back to my place.” Or just drive someplace. He probably does it mostly in cars.

  She’s standing at the edge of a waterfall. Might as well plunge. She has broken every bone in her body anyway.

  Now is the moment, Mark thinks. Drop Virgil off at the medical center, then ask this girl do you have any plans? Of course she doesn’t.

  As for himself, he went over the edge a couple of hours ago. He has now broken into some people’s house, stolen three albums, missed work. Soon he will also miss dinner, and his son’s bath time.

  In a minute, Virgil is thinking, we will be at the medical center. Mark will say, “Think you can manage O.K.?” Then, while he’s stretched out on an examining table getting pictures taken of his bones, Mark will be parked by the side of the road somewhere, getting laid. He can just tell. Maybe they’ll even go back to her place, and they’ll do stuff like take a shower together. She probably knows how to give a massage. The doctor will be telling him, “Keep off that foot,” and Mark will be on top of her. Mark has the dope too. Virg will take two aspirins and there they’ll be, stoned out of their minds.

  She pulls up in front of the emergency entrance and puts the car into neutral. Mark says, “Hey, man, think you can manage O.K.?” “Sure thing,” says Virgil. “I guess Sandy and the baby will be wondering what happened to you.” That’s all it takes.

  There’s a plate of celery sticks stuffed with cream cheese and walnuts sitting on Mrs. Ramsay’s lazy Susan. She has also put out a bowl of party snacks made with Corn Chex and Wheat Chex and peanuts. “Have as much as you like, dear,” says Mrs. Ramsay. She’s not touching anything herself.

  Wanda is not really hungry tonight, after all that Softee Freeze Mr. Pineo gave her. Melissa had some too. He put it on his finger and she licked it off. He thought that was funny. “Why don’t we just take off Baby’s hat and sweater?” says Mrs. Ramsay. “It’s so warm tonight.”

  Wanda doesn’t want to remove the hat, on account of Melissa’s bruise. “I think she has a cold,” says Wanda. “I’d better just leave this stuff on.”

  “I once knew a woman whose baby got caught in the rain without a hat on,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “The next morning when she went to get it, that baby was dead.”

  That’s terrible.

  “There was this other child, she used to play with Dwight sometimes when they were still toddlers. Her mother gave her milk in a glass bottle. One day the baby tripped on a toy car, holding that bottle. Glass shattered all over her face. She had to have nine operations. Today her face is covered with scars. No one ever asks her out on a date.”

  “Wow,” says Wanda. “Jeez.”

  “That’s nothing. There was this woman who took drugs while she was pregnant. Her baby was born without any face. Eyes, nose, mouth, nothing. She has to wear a little knitted mask all the time. Have some more of this party mix. It will just go to waste otherwise.

  “There was this man in Russia. A truckdriver, forty years old. He started feeling sick. Like there was something pressing against his chest is the way he put it.

  “So they performed exploratory surgery. Inside his left lung they found the petrified forty-year-old fetus of his twin brother. This embryo had hair on his head, eyes. There was supple fatty tissue around its waist. It had one tooth.”

  Mrs. Ramsay is not looking into Wanda’s eyes as she speaks. She is watching Wanda’s mouth, chewing on a stuffed celery stick. Wanda is feeling slightly sick to her stomach, and wishes she hadn’t started eating this celery stick, but she has started now, and can’t very well spit it out. These things take forever to chew.

  “And here is the amazing thing. The reason this man started feeling pain all of a sudden was, this fetus had begun to grow.”

  Mrs. Ramsay goes to check the pork chops. “We’ll just leave you little fellows another ten minutes,” she says, returning to her seat.

  “So,” she says. “I hope you had a very lovely evening with that young man of yours.”

  Wanda says it’s nothing serious.

  “Oh, come on now,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “I saw that glow in his eyes when he dropped you off.”

  What was she doing looking out the window? How could she see in the car? What glow?

  “It must be hard for a lovely young person like yourself, having to take care of a baby all the time. Sometimes you must get very impatient.”

  Mrs. Ramsay has seen the bruise. Wanda will have to work it into the conversation about how Melissa fell.

  Mrs. Ramsay is ladling soup into Wanda’s bowl. Wanda gets up to put Melissa in her infant seat and hangs a string of wooden beads around her neck. Melissa looks like all she wants to do is sleep.

  “And money must be a big problem.” She passes Wanda a roll.

  Wanda says she got a job today. Moonlight Acres. If Mr
s. Ramsay would be willing to watch Melissa for her.

  “Don’t think about us,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “We’ll be fine.”

  Wanda’s shift is six to midnight. Melissa usually sleeps through most of that time anyway.

  “Now here’s something fascinating,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “I heard about this woman whose tubes were blocked. Her eggs couldn’t get down from her ovaries to be fertilized? In the picture she seemed quite obese, I don’t know if that was the problem.

  “Well, she had this friend. I guess you could say the friend was a loner. Never married. In fact, she was a virgin.

  “The friend said she’d have a baby for the other woman, the obese one, using the husband’s sperm. Of course it would be adultery if they actually had intercourse. So they went to a doctor to get artificial insemination. The doctor wouldn’t do it.”

  Mrs. Ramsay says the chops are ready. Also, have a baked potato and some asparagus. That’s not enough cheese sauce. Take some more.

  “So here’s what they did. They got some books out of the library and read up on artificial insemination. They figured out just when her eggs would be released and got some sperm.

  “Then they put his sperm into a syringe and injected it into the friend. The virgin. And she got pregnant. And now they have the baby and it thinks the obese woman is the mother and the friend lives with them. They’re a very happy family.”

  “Wow,” says Wanda. She adds that the chops are very good.

  “Have more.” Mrs. Ramsay has scraped the cheese sauce off her asparagus. She gets up and turns on the TV set, which faces the dinner table.

  “I just love these Muppets, don’t you?” she says. Kermit is saying that Diana Ross is this week’s guest host. More Negroes.

  “I met one of your young friends yesterday,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “She was sitting with her baby outside the Laundromat.”

  “Oh,” says Wanda. “Tara.”

  “Her baby was sucking on her breast. It was a very beautiful sight. That’s what motherhood is all about.”