Baby Love

by Joyce Maynard

  “Hello, Ann.”

  She has to catch her breath. “Is this the exterminator?”

  Laughter. There is a lot of laughter on the other end of the line.

  “I’m the man from the newspaper. I got your note.”

  He got her number from Information, of course. She’s still gasping for breath.

  “I want to thank you,” he says. He has a deep voice, like a disk jockey. Only without the jokes. “I could tell right away you understand. You knew what I was talking about.”

  She’s going to tell him that note was a mistake. She’s glad he feels that way. But she didn’t mean to start anything. This is not her kind of thing. She was just in a strange mood.

  “And I think I understand quite a bit about you too,” he says. “For instance, I know that you’re in great pain.”

  She can’t say anything. She just stands there, holding the phone.

  “You’re all alone, aren’t you? And that’s such a waste. There was a man and he hurt you very badly. You think you will never get over it.”

  She had not given up hope, that’s why she gave her name. She keeps hoping that maybe there is a prince out there to rescue her. She was asking for this call.

  “I would never hurt you. I would never let anyone hurt you. I would keep you safe in a room. Safe in my arms. I would never let you go. You would never even have to buy sanitary napkins.”

  She screams. She drops the receiver and runs, with her hands over her face so it won’t get her. Another bat.

  Of course Charles is supposed to monitor all inmate calls. Forensics in particular. You have to make sure they don’t ask for weapons. You’re also supposed to be on the alert for statements indicating a suicidal mood. This is a little hard to determine. Most of the conversations he monitors are pretty depressing. At what point does depressed turn into suicidal? He is a little vague on that.

  Most of the time this job is boring. A lot of complaints that so-and-so is trying to kill me. They are putting something in my food. As soon as I get out of this place. That type of thing.

  Now Wayne, he provides some entertainment. Charles wishes he was that smart. Also that good-looking. The Burt Reynolds type.

  Charles has heard that Wayne kept this one woman hypnotized by his powers for three and a half years. A sexual slave, that’s what one of the other orderlies said. In the end he murdered her, and he was so smart he got off on insanity. There’s nothing insane about that guy. You should see him play chess. Three games at once.

  Here’s another example. Wayne needs barbiturates. Five, six pills a day. And he doesn’t have any money on the outside, and even if he did they wouldn’t give him more than a cigarette allowance. So what does he do? He finds himself a real muffin head, a doper, and tells him the uppers Charles sells are laced with a powder that makes you impotent. The guy won’t go near Charles now. Only buys from Wayne, at a one hundred percent markup. Wayne finances his habit on the profits.

  Now he’s making a phone call. Asked the operator to charge this to another number. Probably President Carter. Or Dr. McAlister, the head of the hospital. That’s the kind of thing Wayne does.

  Wayne’s side of the conversation sounds pretty average. Although he’s making his voice a little deeper than normal.

  Sanitary napkins. What was that about sanitary napkins?

  Donahue’s guest this afternoon is Dr. Benjamin Spock. Doris wishes it was tomorrow, when Marabel Morgan is scheduled to talk about how cooking can spice up a marriage. She would rather listen to a show about incest or sexual surrogates or elderly abuse even. These political guests are so boring.

  “Scientific evidence has shown that watching violence on film and television brutalizes everyone, children and adults alike,” says Dr. Spock. “Participation in war does the same thing.”

  She actually bought his book. Kept it on the shelf by the stove, right next to Betty Crocker, so it would always be handy. Tried to follow everything he said with Timmy and Jill. She could probably recite the chapter on toilet training. Then it turned out he was a leftist. Then he divorced his wife of thirty years and married some thirty-five-year-old divorcee. No wonder Jill is having problems now. That’s the last time Doris will believe what some book tells her, unless it’s the Bible. Although Marabel Morgan does make pretty good sense.

  Doris is worried about Jill. She has not got out of bed all day, except to go to the bathroom. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and she’s just lying there listening to the radio through an earphone. Doris almost wishes she could hear that Rod Stewart music blaring through the house, like normal. Jill’s room is so quiet it’s scary.

  Now Dr. Spock is talking about the need for men to share fully in housework and child care. Sure, and Doris and Jill will go out in the woods with chain saws and change the tires on the truck. Next thing you know, everyone will be in one bathroom together. She turns off the set.

  Peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches—Jill always liked those. Doris takes down a jar of Jif and gets out the bread. She will make up a tray. Bring Jill a cup of hot liquid Jell-O. That used to be her special treat when she was little and she had measles or something.

  “Honey?” Jill rolls over to face Doris. “I thought you might like a snack.”

  “Thanks,” says Jill. She doesn’t look at the tray. Her eyes are all red.

  Doris wishes she was better at mother-daughter talks. Like the mother on Family. Kristy McNichol tells her everything. What would Kate Lawrence say now?

  “Is it that time of the month?” says Doris.

  Jill begins to cry. That was not the right thing after all.

  “You know what I just realized?” says Doris. “I just realized your prom must be coming up. I was thinking, with my Avon money and all, we could go to the mall, shopping. Maybe get you a store-bought gown for a change.” What is she saying? The Avon money is for groceries. What with these prices.

  Jill brightens a little. “You mean you’d give me some money? Like fifty dollars?” She has lifted herself a few inches off the pillow.

  “Well, we could see how much they cost.”

  Jill says she already knows a place. She would need fifty dollars and she will have to borrow the car. She would rather go alone.

  Doris puts her hand, which was resting a little uncomfortably on Jill’s shoulder, back into her apron pocket. This didn’t turn out the way she meant. She has just offered her daughter fifty dollars that she can’t afford, and she doesn’t feel their relationship is any closer than before. She still doesn’t understand Jill’s mental problem. She will just have to hope that a new dress does the trick.

  Fifty dollars. Doris never spent so much on a dress in her whole life. These kids today, they’re spoiled.

  That Dr. Spock. It’s all his fault.

  For a minute there, Mrs. Ramsay thought she was going to die. I am going to have a seizure right here on the spot, she thought, and the only ones who could save me will be those two in the car, and I would rather die than sit in that car which is probably all wet from their disgusting sexual secretions. They will not even notice.

  But she did not die. In fact, she shot an entire roll of pictures, and they came out very well, if you can call it that. Mrs. Ramsay can hardly bear to look at them. That thing he did in her mouth, she has never heard of that. She does not know how she will look him in the eye, to give him the money. She hates to think of it, all the money from Harold’s model train collection, gone to a perverted young man for putting his organ in a girl’s mouth. She is just not going to think about it.

  The telephone rings. “Hello, Mrs. Ramsay? It’s Jill Johnson, I’m a friend of Wanda’s. Is she over there?”

  “No,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “She is not.”

  “Could you tell her I was looking for her? Tell her I got the money, and my appointment is tomorrow morning. She’ll understand.”

  “They must have forgotten, that’s all,” says Carla. She has put her arms around Sandy, who started crying aga
in when she went to cut a piece of cake. She didn’t bother to light the candles. Mark Junior, who missed his three o’clock nap so he’d be awake to greet his guests, is now asleep on the water bed.

  “Hats and everything” is all Carla can make out of what Sandy is saying. “I try so hard.”

  Carla hands Sandy the box with the panda. Sandy says Mark Junior will love it, when he wakes up.

  “I knew Jill was feeling sick,” says Sandy. But she doesn’t understand about Wanda and Tara.

  Of course Carla knows where Tara is.

  Tara is just stepping into her underpants. She pulls the orange dress over her head so that for a few seconds her face is covered, and there are just her arms wriggling into the sleeves. This frightens Sunshine. “It’s O.K.,” says Greg, into her ear. “Mommy’s right here.”

  “Thank you,” says Tara, reaching for the baby. She does not put her hair back into the bun. She goes to look at Greg’s picture.

  “This is just a study,” he says. “It’s going to be part of a much larger painting. Of some people at the falls. I’m going to put you and Sunshine on the rocks.”

  “It looks just like us,” says Tara. “Even my scar.”

  “I have a lot of work to do yet. If you can come again.”

  She’s free.

  The baby is so good. He thought babies were always crying.

  “She likes you.” Tara looks at Carla’s green tennis shoes, sitting next to the bed.

  “Did your girlfriend like the dress?” she asks.

  Greg feels as if he’s been caught shoplifting. “She thought it was great,” he says.

  Tara says she should get back. What time is it?

  She’s late. The party started two hours ago.

  He drives her there, very slowly, wishing the town were farther away. She has already disappeared into Sandy’s building when he realizes he forgot to pay her.

  Sandy has begun to feel a little better. Carla told her she never tasted such a moist devil’s food cake before. So often they’re dry. Mark Junior woke up and when he saw the bear he said something that sounded like “panda,” and even though Sandy knows that isn’t possible, Carla said, “He must be very precocious.”

  Carla wanted to hear all about Sandy’s pregnancy, which is something Sandy loves to talk about. That was such a happy time for her. She still believed then that all they needed for everything to be perfect was a baby.

  “I think I may be pregnant myself,” says Carla. This is not the same as telling that Avon woman. She really likes Sandy. Besides, this time it’s the truth.

  Sandy’s excited. In spite of what she knows now—that babies make things much more complicated, that they are bound to be the cause of fights and tears, that having one is like getting on a train, taking a long trip while your husband stays home (and who knows if you ever return?)—in spite of all that, Sandy’s always glad to hear about someone having a baby.

  It is at just this moment that she hears the knock at her door. “This is my friend Tara and her daughter, Sunshine,” she says. “Tara, this is Carla, who has just moved here from New York. Her husband’s an artist. She just told me she’s going to have a baby.”

  Carla sits there with the stuffed panda bear in her lap, and one bite of cake left that she has not swallowed. She knows it’s not important that this girl is wearing a very ugly synthetic orange dress, that she’s skinny, that when President Kennedy was assassinated, she wasn’t even born, that she has probably never heard of abstract expressionism. Those are the things that matter if you are like Carla and you weigh your decisions and plan your life and ask yourself, Does this make sense? Is this wise? None of these things matters when a person is standing naked in front of you and she’s that beautiful.

  Tara stands in the doorway holding Sunshine very tight, almost as if it’s her baby that is holding her up. She’s thinking about Kalima, rubbing her hands in circles over her enormous belly. She’s thinking about Denver, squatting on the floor between Kalima’s legs, bending over, giving her an open-mouthed kiss. Holding Mountain against his bare chest and saying, “A man never really knows what it is to love a woman until she’s had his child.” Tara had been telling herself the green tennis shoes didn’t matter, until she saw the person who wore them. Now she knows she will never see Greg again.

  These are the things Tara and Carla are thinking. What Sandy’s thinking, when the door opens again, and she sees Mark standing there with a bunch of ten-dollar bills in one hand and no pink champagne in the other, is that this is nothing like the birthday parties in the Kodak ads.

  Ann’s screaming doesn’t have Wayne worried. Loretta sometimes screamed too. One time the ropes were so tight one of her hands turned blue, but when he untied her she said, “No, please, I want it that way.” Women like pain. They like to be scared, like to cry. Keeps all those hormones from getting atrophied. Who does she want to be, Donna Reed? Erma Bombeck?

  She has a nice voice. Younger than he thought. Sounds like early twenties. He thought she’d be one of those old-maid first-grade teachers, getting closer to menopause, thinking if I don’t do something drastic soon the only kid I can have will be Mongoloid. What would make a girl in her early twenties feel so desperate she’d answer that ad?

  She could be paraplegic, of course. He met one of those once. Paralyzed from the neck down. Car wreck. Thirty-four years old and she lived with her mother. She still had a beautiful face, although the mother cut her hair way too short, almost a crew cut, for easy maintenance. She was hooked to a bag for urine, with a tube up her asshole for shit. Completely dead between the legs, of course. But what she could do with her tongue.

  Wayne does not think Ann is a paraplegic though. For one thing, she was out of breath like she’d been running. That could just be from trying to pick up the telephone with some weird combination of limbs like her foot and her elbow, of course. But he thinks she was running.

  She was outside. RFD address, she lives in the country. Probably planting a vegetable garden. All the young kids who move here from Massachusetts and New Jersey want gardens. Organic, naturally.

  She’s not a virgin. He can always tell a virgin by the voice. Something tense and squeaky. This one has had a man, but not lately, and she needs one bad.

  Cher looked good when she was pregnant. Who else? Marisa Berenson. Goldie Hawn got fat. That actress on Eight Is Enough—they kept her on the show and just pretended her character was pregnant too. She looked puffy and awful and even though she has had her baby now, Jill can tell—from the loose tenty dress she was wearing when she went on Mike Douglas last week—that she doesn’t have her shape back yet. Sandy has lent her a book—Nine Glorious Months. Jill looks through the table of contents. There’s a section on vomiting, a section called Nipple Secretion. Varicose Veins and the Importance of Support Hose. Should You Wear a Maternity Girdle? The Frequent Urination Problem. Flatulence. Hemorrhoids. The Mask of Pregnancy. (What’s that? Jill looks up that section. In the later months red splotches sometimes appear on the face, but they are usually temporary.)

  Retardation. Dwarfism. Siamese Twins. Spinabifida. Ancephalic Monsters. Fetal Death.

  There’s a section of pictures taken during one woman’s delivery. Sandy must have looked at these photographs a lot, from the way the plates are so worn, with spots that look like Coke spills. The woman is lying on a delivery table with her legs spread apart and her feet stuck in the stirrups. Her stomach is so big it blocks out her face. Her boobs are really big too, but not hard and sticking up like the stomach. They droop over the sides of her body like a couple of beanbags where all the beans are down at one end. Her nipples—instead of being neat and buttonlike, the way Jill’s are—have been stretched to the size of sand dollars. It’s hard to look at her vagina, the skin is bulging so tight over the baby’s head.

  Jill feels like she’s about to throw up again. She reaches for the bowl under her bed. When she’s finished she goes to her bureau to get a peppermint Life Saver, but the taste i
s never really gone from her mouth.

  It’s like the baby knows he’s in danger. And he keeps wanting to remind her he’s here. It’s like he’s got to get nine months’ worth of wriggling around packed into a couple of hours, because he knows tomorrow he’ll be gone.

  All Tara wants to do now is go to her house, up the stairs to her room, and close the door. She just wants to be alone with Sunshine so she can think about today. She will go over everything that happened, very slowly. Then when it’s over she won’t think about him anymore. She will take down the atlas and study the map of the United States, plan her trip. There’s absolutely no reason to stay now.

  She has almost reached the house when she sees Mrs. Ramsay standing there underneath the sign that says Just-like-nu Shop—Good Used Clothing. She hopes maybe Mrs. Ramsay’s just waiting to cross the street. But she stands there with a big shoulder bag over one arm.

  “It’s finished,” says Mrs. Ramsay.

  What is she talking about?

  Mrs. Ramsay’s rummaging in the shoulder bag now. Yarn and knitting markers spill onto the sidewalk. She does not appear to notice.

  “The pink duck sweater. It is just your color.” She holds the sweater out to Sunshine, who doesn’t know how to take an object out of a person’s hand yet.

  Tara says the sweater is adorable. Mrs. Ramsay must be a very good knitter. (Although there’s one place, on the left-hand duck, where the stitches go crazy. The orange beak extends clear out to the buttonholes.)

  “I didn’t want you to be cold. These spring evenings get chilly.”

  Tara says she’s sure Sunshine will get a lot of use out of the sweater.

  “Now I want to talk to your mother,” says Mrs. Ramsay.

  “She’s probably in the house,” says Tara.

  “Not your mother,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “Baby’s mother. You. I need to talk to you.”

  “Sure.” This is the last thing Tara wants to be doing.