Mrs. Wakefield tilted the teapot and the liquid flowed out, dark as stout. “No. No men, thank you.”
“Ah, but such a waste, a strong fine-bodied woman like you.”
“Lita,” said Mr. Roma, “you are getting drunk.”
“Then so are you.”
“You will be an old wino.”
“A wino. Hear that, will you?” She rocked back and forth with indignation, and some of the wine in her glass splashed on her wrists. “Me, an old wino,” she said, sucking at her wrists. “All I said was, she will have a good year. All I said . . .”
“What makes a good year, Carmelita?” Mrs. Wakefield asked.
“Him.” Carmelita pointed with her thumb at her husband. “Roma. When he is not insulting me.”
Mr. Roma grinned self-consciously and reached across the table to pat the back of her hand, still sticky with wine. “That’s no answer.”
“It is for me. You and Luisa, my baby.” She turned to beam at Luisa, who looked back at her with undisguised exasperation. “Isn’t she pretty, my little one? And clever. Clever like
her poppa. Me, I’m a lucky one, eh?”
“Very lucky,” Mrs. Wakefield said. The wine had not affected her, and she felt like someone who’d arrived late at a gay party, a little aloof and disapproving.
“You will be lucky, too. Here, drink up. We will see what the leaves say this time. We will make sure.”
Mrs. Wakefield drained her cup and left her fortune stranded on the sides.
“Now turn it around three times and make a wish.”
“I wish . . .”
“No, you must not tell! Wish only to yourself.”
“I can’t think of a wish anyway.”
“Not any?”
“Only impossible ones.”
Carmelita took the cup out of her hands and gazed into it with bleary earnestness. “I see children. A great many children, and they all belong to you. Hoh, you don’t believe me? See them for yourself.”
The specks of children on the bottom of the cup, larger than the money, smaller than the dark men. “Tea leaves,” Mrs. Wakefield said harshly. “Such a fraud. I feel cheated.”
She thought of the old gypsy she’d visited when she was Jessie’s age—“This child will have a long and happy life.” She felt cheated, but she would have liked to go on cheating herself: Bring out the cards, Carmelita. Produce your crystal ball, your divining rod, your Geiger counter. Interpret the atoms. Read me the stars.
But the game was over. Abruptly, Carmelita got up and carried the cups to the sink and dropped their fortunes down the drain.
“A cheat,” she muttered. “No, no. It is not me who cheats you. You hoard yourself like a miser. You give nothing and take nothing. What a waste!”
“Hush,” said Mr. Roma. “Lita.”
Mrs. Wakefield stopped him with a gesture. “Let her talk. Let her say what she wants to.”
“Carmelita does not mean to be critical. She is upset because she loves you and would like you to have a rich life, a husband, many children.”
She felt herself disintegrating under the pressure of their pity. “What a fool I am to come back here and listen to your talk,” she cried. “What do you expect me to do—go out and buy me a man so I can have a child? Another child like Billy?”
“Like Jessie,” Mr. Roma said. “A little girl, as pretty as you.”
“Such a cruel thing to say to me.”
Mr. Roma didn’t deny it. He merely looked patient, as if he couldn’t expect her to understand that cruelty was sometimes necessary. “We must all start over again. These eight years have been like a recess from living, now we must go back, you see? Carmelita and I will open a restaurant. We are afraid of failure, of course, but we are excited by the possibility of success. You, too, must learn to believe in possibilities. The little girl like Jessie—she doesn’t exist yet, but she might some day.”
She thought of the day she’d seen the dugong on the rock, and of the later time when she was struggling up through the billows of ether. She had a purpose in her mind but the ether clouded it; she couldn’t remember . . .
“It’s a boy, Mrs. Wakefield.”
A boy. That was the purpose. “A boy,” she whispered. “Is he—all right? Are his—his legs and arms and eyes—everything all right?”
“Everything’s just dandy.”
“Where’s—John?”
“Mr. Wakefield’s just outside, busy thinking up names. He said you were expecting a girl.”
“Both . . . Either.”
The girls, Miranda, Linda, Harriet, Jane. The boys, William, Eric, Paul, David, Peter.
“I’ve got a name,” she whispered. “William.”
“That’s nice. A good sound name.”
“Billy for when he’s—he’s little.”
“Sure.” A pause. “Some of them sure do a lot of gabbing when they’re half under. Take over, will you, Hilda? My arms are tired.”
New hands pressed hard on her lower abdomen, and a new voice, Hilda’s, answered her question:
“You can see Billy later on, when you’re feeling better.”
She didn’t see him that day or the next. The unused milk was pumped out of her breasts and they were bandaged very tight, like the feet of Chinese girl babies, to render them useless.
She smothered her anxiety in questions:
“What color are his eyes, John?”
“Blue. Quite light.”
“Which one of us does he look like?”
“Neither.”
“I’d like him to look like you.”
“No one can really tell yet.”
They could tell, of course, immediately. But they didn’t tell her for four days, and then no words were used. She held Billy against her dry breasts. He looked like every other Mongolian idiot that she had seen, except that he was her own.
“It’s hard to start over,” Mr. Roma said. “But you must learn to want things again. Not wanting anything is like being dead.”
“I do want things—to be comfortable, well-fed, healthy . . .”
“That’s no more than any animal wants.”
I want other things, too, she thought. A child like Jessie, a man like Mark. She said instead, “What will you do if the restaurant fails?”
“Borrow some money and start again.”
“You can always call on me.”
“I would prefer not to borrow from any friend.”
“A friend,” she repeated. “Is that how you think of me?”
“You are our good friend,” Mr. Roma said gravely. “We have shared many things together.”
Many things, she thought. Many sunsets, many tides; the storms, and the dry years. But in the end they were not friends as he thought. She saw now that theirs had been a friendship of environment. Passing, on a city street, he would be only a colored handyman with a Mexican wife, and she a stranger looking for something she had lost.
Since the day in the hospital when she first held Billy in her arms she had always been searching, without knowing it, for the whole and happy baby whose place Billy had taken. It was this baby which had grown inside her womb. Her belly swelled with it, her breasts ripened; its gentle movements were sweet and mysterious. This, this one was her baby, not the impostor, Billy.
Holding the impostor against her breast, she had screamed in silence and despair: He’s not mine! They’ve made a mistake. They’ve mixed the babies up, it often happens, they’ve given me the wrong one!
He was hers, though, and after the first terrible moment of denial she grew to love him. But she never forgot the other baby, the one who had lived inside her womb; the child like Jessie.
The door of Jessie’s room was half-open, and Mrs. Wakefield spoke softly into the darkness:
“Are you awake,
Jessie?”
“Sure.”
“It’s getting late.”
Jessie sighed. Adults were always telling her, in a rather accusing way, that it was getting late, as if they held her personally responsible for the passage of time. “I know. I got my watch under my pillow. I’m pretending it’s a cricket.”
Mrs. Wakefield sat on the edge of the bed, and held one of Jessie’s hands between her own. Jessie’s palms were rough with callouses, like a laborer’s.
“I used to pretend things like that, too, when I was a little girl.”
It astonished Jessie that Mrs. Wakefield and Carmelita and her mother had once been little girls, and her father a little boy. She knew it was true, but she couldn’t visualize them whittled down to half-size and getting into mischief and acquiring warts.
“Did you get warts?”
“Sometimes.”
“Were they charmed away?”
“No. But there was an old Gypsy woman living in our town who charmed things away and told fortunes.”
“How?”
“By looking at your hands.”
“Did she tell yours?”
“Yes.”
“Did it come true?”
“I don’t know yet,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “Part of it came true, I guess.”
“I wish I could have mine told. Can you do it?”
“No.”
“You could try,” Jessie said hopefully. “You could just guess.”
“It’s awfully late.”
“Well, I didn’t make it late.”
“That’s right, you didn’t,” Mrs. Wakefield said, smiling. She switched on the lamp, and sat down on the bed again with Jessie’s hand upturned in her own.
“My hands aren’t really dirty,” Jessie explained. “That’s only left-over dirt that got stuck in my callouses and won’t come out. To hear my mother talk you’d think I liked being dirty, which isn’t true.”
The sound of the surf in the room was very faint, a distant threat.
“This is the busiest little hand I’ve ever seen,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “Busy hands can’t help having some left-over dirt. And look, aren’t you lucky?—you’ve got your initial written right in your skin. See the J right here?”
Sure enough, if you looked terribly hard, you could see a long skinny J with an X on top.
“What does the X mean?”
“Let me think. It could be a kiss, couldn’t it? A kiss for Jessie. That’s lucky, too. I’m sure it means that you will be loved.”
“Who by?”
“By the ones you love.”
“Just parents and aunts and things like that?”
“Oh no, everyone. Everyone you love will love you.”
“Animals, too?”
“Animals, too.”
Jessie nodded. “That’s nice. Can you see what I’m going to be when I grow up?”
“No, no, I really can’t.”
“Maybe if I gave you a hint you could see? I’m going to be an A. T.”
“A. T. No. I don’t . . .”
“It stands for animal trainer. Now can you see?”
“Why, of course!” Mrs. Wakefield exclaimed. “I should have noticed it before. The T’s just as plain as day.”
It was, too. An enormous T that stood, unmistakably, for Trainer. No A could be found, but that was unimportant.
“Well, that’s settled,” Jessie said, rather relieved at having her choice of profession confirmed, written, in fact, right into her skin so that her parents could never argue about it and want her to be something terribly common and dull like a pianist or a writer. “Can you see what kind of animals?”
“Well, no. I really can’t.”
“That’s all right. I expect it’ll be all kinds anyway, starting with little ones and ending up with elephants and eagles.”
Mrs. Wakefield laughed. “You’re a funny girl, Jessie. How will you train an eagle?”
“I’ll get him when he’s a baby and look after him and feed him so he’ll know I’m his friend. Then I can teach him to carry things, like my dolls.”
“You won’t have dolls then. You’ll be a woman.”
Jessie squinted thoughtfully. She couldn’t visualize the grown up and doll-less woman she would be any more than she could visualize the little girl Mrs. Wakefield had been. Time, to Jessie, was malleable. It could be bent and twisted so that she could be a grown woman who trained eagles but still played with her dolls and lived with her parents, and looked the same as she did now except for size.
“I certainly have a nice fortune to look forward to,” she said. “And you didn’t have to guess at all, did you?”
“No, it’s all here, in your hand. It says—it says, this child will have a long and happy life.”
The words had picked up echoes through the years, and it was these echoes that Jessie heard, with the sharp intuitive hearing of a child. They were sad words, no matter what they said; they struck mournful bells in her ears.
“But it doesn’t really say that,” Jessie protested.
“Don’t you want it to?”
“No.” She couldn’t explain about the sad words to Mrs. Wakefield; she only knew she didn’t want them in her fortune. “You were just guessing then, I bet.”
“I was just guessing.”
“Then I don’t have to count it. I’ll count the Animal Trainer and the part about being loved.” She took her hand away and hid it under the blanket, as if she was afraid that Mrs. Wakefield would read it too far. Too far and too sad.
Yawning, she lay down. The mournful bells faded, and the watch-cricket began to chirp again under her pillow, quite loudly, so she couldn’t be sure that she heard Mrs. Wakefield whisper:
“Good night, Jessie. Good night, my baby.”
She felt Mrs. Wakefield’s lips touch her forehead, cool and dry as moths. Jessie murmured, “I love you about ninth-best in the world.”
“Thank you, darling.”
The light clicked, the dark fell from the ceiling and leaped from the walls.
Good night, my baby. She stepped into the hall and closed the door, and turning, she faced Evelyn. She was half a head taller than Evelyn, but she felt, if only for a moment, unarmed and helpless.
She lowered the lids over her naked eyes.
“I was—was just saying good night to your daughter.” She emphasized the last words slightly as if to reassure Evelyn that Jessie still belonged to her, and that she, Mrs. Wakefield, had only borrowed her for awhile.
“She should have been asleep ages ago,” Evelyn said.
“She was awake when I went in. I didn’t wake her up.”
“I didn’t think you had, naturally.”
Unspoken words hung between them, like poised knives ready to fall.
You want my husband and child.
Yes.
You lost yours, now you must have mine.
Yes. I can’t wait for a child like Jessie or a man like Mark. I want your husband and your child.
Evelyn said, “If there’s anything you’d like, just ask for it.”
“There’s nothing, thank you.”
“Mark’s downstairs having a nightcap. Why don’t you join him?”
“That’s very kind of you, but I was just going to read in bed.”
“Well, good night.” I hate and fear you, Mrs. Wakefield.
“Good night.” I’ll fight you, Mrs. Banner.
“See you in the morning,” Evelyn said brightly.
14
Toward morning the sea lion moved inshore and cried.
Mark woke at the first sound as if he had been unconsciously waiting for the signal. It wasn’t morning yet, but the darkness was greying, and the air in the room felt heavy with moisture.
He pulled asid
e the drapes and saw that the fog had come in during the night. It floated in wisps through the window, but over the sea it hung thick, smothering the new day and muffling the solitary cry of the sea lion. The sound worried him. It seemed to be a cry for help, and he wondered whether the sea lion was wounded or whether it was looking for its lost young or a straying mate.
Putting on his robe he went out through the French door to the narrow platform built along the second story of the house. The platform served both as a sundeck and as a protection from the heat for the lower rooms. No one used it as a sundeck because one of the arms of the live oak tree had reached out and grown over it, dropping its prickly leaves and stony little acorns at the insistence of the wind. But it was a pleasant place to read in the afternoons or to smoke a final cigarette before going to bed.
The old tree was quiet in the fog, biding its time. It would outlive the drought, defeat the wind, drink the fog. It would not rust, like the iron railing of the deck which was wet to Mark’s touch and blistered with rust from the fogs of other years.
The cry of the sea lion hung in the air, trapped in the mist. Mark tried to visualize the sea lion, but the only image his mind evoked was the image of Mrs. Wakefield submerging, coming up, and submerging again with a flick of her black fins.
In the flare of the match Mark’s face was melancholy. Somewhere in the invisible sea something alive needed help, something with a heartbeat as strong as his own, and blood as rich. He felt a sense of pity and of kinship with the sea lion that he had never experienced before.
A door opened and shut.
“Mr. Banner?”
He turned, almost expecting to see her wearing her face glass and the grotesque duck’s-feet, with her wet hair streaming behind her like eel grass. She came toward him, her head brushing against the overhanging branch of the oak tree. An acorn fell like a stone, and the leaves rustled resentment.
“You heard it, too?” she said hesitantly.
“Yes. It woke me up.”
“It is a real sea lion then. I thought—Mr. Roma said that . . . Well, it doesn’t matter now, except I’m glad it’s real.”
She leaned against the railing, a yard or more distant from him. But the fog was as intimate as a sheet, wrapping them together against the outside world. He could hear every breath she took, and every rustle of silk under the polo coat she had belted tight around her.
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