Mockingbird

by Sean Stewart

  Why? Why did I rush out and get pregnant? Um, I’m glad you asked me that. Um…

  Is it too clichéd to say that time was passing me by? From the moment Momma died I had felt time blowing past me like the gulf breeze. I had put off so many things, waiting for my life to be perfect. Marriage, kids, family.

  Or maybe—does this make sense?—I had been afraid to have a life while Momma was alive.

  I didn’t like to think about that too much.

  So here I was, carrying a baby of my own, and scared as a sinner in a revival tent. The doctor had promised me that sperm donors were screened for genetic problems, but what about subtle things—alcoholism, a curse in the family, dyslexia? What could you expect from a man who jerked off for money? What if he was the sort of guy who—

  No. No. I willed myself not to think about it. It was my baby. Nobody else’s. Only mine.

  It was ridiculous, I guess, to try and keep it a secret, but I did. I used up bereavement leave at work and then pleaded illness when the ultrasound frenzy heated up. I said not one word to Daddy or Candy. Unfortunately, having a sister who can see the future makes it hard to keep a secret. Two months after we buried Momma I asked Candy to help me do some shopping, but the moment I saw her in the mall I knew I was in trouble.

  I had asked her to meet me at the ice skating rink in the Galleria, Houston’s most expensive shopping district. Hordes of Japanese tourists and Saudi oil barons and rich trashy blondes in concubinage to assorted South American despots troop through the Galleria on a regular basis, looking for outrageously expensive merchandise in the same spirit that drives successful West German businessmen to go on safari in Africa and gun down bull elephants with automatic weaponry.

  Candy was sitting on a bench next to three teenagers lacing on skates. She was mad. “You’re pregnant!” she said, jabbing me in the chest with one accusing finger. Her black hair was done up tight behind her head, with a couple of wispy ringlets framing her face. “You think I need this right now? I have a wedding to plan, Toni. How am I supposed to fit you being pregnant into that?”

  “You finally proposed?”

  “Well, not yet,” she admitted. “I keep hoping Carlos will think of it himself.”

  “Candy!”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Anyway, I’ve already picked the date, September twenty-first. The autumn equinox. I had a friend do a chart for me and it’s got great signs.” She paused. “Are you okay? You sort of choked there.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Toni? Toni, don’t lie to me. What…” She hissed. “You’re due then, aren’t you?” She stood with her hands on her hips. “Oh, sure! Go into labor in the church. It has to be a church wedding, of course. La Hag will strangle herself if we aren’t married in a church. So what’s the date, Toni?”

  “The twentieth,” I said weakly. “But with first babies they’re usually a week late. Ten days even.”

  Candy eyed me coldly. Out of respect for the blue norther that had brought freezing temperatures to Houston that January weekend, she was wearing her version of cold weather gear: soft red leather ankle boots with a one-inch heel, jeans, a black tank top, and over that a bulky black leather bomber jacket with a Sacred Heart of Jesus embroidered over the left breast. The entire back of her coat was dominated by a huge head of Saint Jude, patron of lost causes, from which arrows of angel-light darted forth in every direction. Carlos was stitched on the shoulder with scarlet thread. “How are you going to help decorate the church, Toni?”

  I backed out of the skate-lacing area, pretending to spot something of interest in the dreadful Baubles & Bijoux across the atrium from us. Candy stalked after me. “You never even told me you were seeing anybody!”

  “Bad enough I should have a sex life. But to not tell you! Boy. What nerve.”

  “Damn right. You go so long between boyfriends, I’d like to give up hope. You could at least throw me some crumbs.”

  A pregnant woman waddled by and I stared at her tummy, mesmerized. “Even normal women get bowlegged,” I said. “What’s going to happen to me? Did you know your cartilage actually loosens when you’re pregnant? The ligaments and stuff get all wobbly so the baby can get through your pelvis without breaking your hip bones.”

  “Don’t be gross, Toni.”

  “Don’t blame me. I didn’t design the system. And did you see the flush on that woman’s cheeks? That’s the ‘glow’ people talk about. What it means is that her blood volume has gone up by about forty percent. If she’s hot now, what is it going to be like for me in August?”

  Candy made a face. “Where did you learn all this stuff?”

  “Baby books.”

  “Of course.” She looked at me. “You didn’t even buy them, did you? You took them out of the library.”

  “There’s no point in spending money on books you can use for free. What? What! Look, I refuse to be embarrassed about something so stupid.”

  Candy laughed. “Then refuse to blush.”

  A stroller went by. “Is there a baby convention in town or something?” I muttered. I caught Candy grinning at me. “What is your problem, anyway?”

  “Congratulations.” Candy hugged me and kissed me once on each cheek. I hugged her back, wondering what it would feel like to do this when I had a belly the size of a watermelon.

  “How many weeks are you?”

  “Five today.”

  “Wow, Toni. How do you feel? Are you happy about it?”

  “I don’t know.” The Saturday afternoon crowd had arrived in earnest. Purses jingled, shopping bags rattled, change clattered on counters, children cried and parents shushed them, customers complained and clerks flattered. “Have you ever read a book about being pregnant?” I said. “Do you know how many times you see the word ‘bloat’? Bloat, bloating, bloated. ‘In the eighth month, you may experience further bloating, along with hot flashes, more frequent urination, hair loss, and difficulty breathing.’”

  “Hair loss? Omigod.”

  “Swear to God, Candy, it’s like being a Hiroshima survivor.”

  (A quick memory of Momma, bald from radiation, the skin on her neck shaking. Forget it. Forget it.)

  Another young mom came by pushing a stroller. The hapless baby inside looked like something made from plastic and crushed velour. It had the most amazingly black eyes, peering up from under a ridiculous fluffy cap. I felt my own eyes get damp and my throat constrict. Quickly I turned away. “Anyway, I want to buy some clothes. That’s where you fit in.”

  Candy snorted. “You need my help to buy a few smocks? Don’t get anything tight around the tummy. After that, you have your choice: flowered granola tent dresses, or navy jumpsuits with big bellies.”

  “I don’t mean maternity clothes. I want pretty clothes. Sexy clothes.”

  “You? Why?”

  I closed my eyes. “Someday, Candy, I’m going to push you in front of a bus, and you won’t even know what you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  “It just so happens I want to look good, for once. Accept it as a miracle from God and shut up, okay? Put your mind to the problem. And I don’t mean I want to look…‘professional,’ either. I want to look attractive. The books all say two parents have an easier time than one. So if I can pick up a dad for this kid, so much the better.”

  She looked at me, shocked. “But the baby has a father. It’s Bill junior’s, isn’t it?”

  “What!”

  “But Toni—Toni, I dreamed him playing with the baby! That’s how I knew you were pregnant. You and him, and you were still a little fat, you know, from the pregnancy, and he was with you out in the garden. Playing with the baby.”

  “Bill junior? Are you sure? Omigod.”

  “You mean it isn’t his baby?”

  I shook my head. “I got artificially inseminated.”

  “What!”

  Another baby came by: this time a skinned-rabbit-looking kid in a Snugli. He had on the most incredibly cute little checked tam
-o’-shanter. The mom’s back was to me as she walked past, so I could stare as much as I wanted at the little goggle-eyed alien wobbling on her shoulder. I must have smiled, because the baby smiled back and then burped up a teaspoonful of white slime, just for me.

  I tore my eyes away. “It makes perfect sense. I want to have a baby. But if I try to wait for a good father first, I might run out of time before Mr. Right comes along. If I get the baby first, then even if I never find a suitable guy, I’ve still got a family.” I trailed off as I saw Candy staring at me. “Half a loaf is better than none, right?”

  “You’ve gone crazy,” Candy said. “The shock of Momma’s death has thrown you into a midlife crisis.”

  “I’m not crazy, I’m an actuary. It’s different. This makes perfect sense.”

  Candy began to smile. “What’s really cool about it is, you genuinely think you’re being reasonable. When in fact you’re bent as a three-dollar bill.”

  “Candy, I’m thirty years old. Maybe you can get a husband in New York if you’re thirty. But here, I’m an old maid. And not an especially pretty one. It’s time to play the odds.” I made for the Galleria Directory in front of the stairs. “Bill junior? Are you positive? Maybe it was an ordinary dream that didn’t mean anything.”

  “Fat chance. Mind you,” Candy added, “it wasn’t like I knew you were married. I don’t remember a ring or anything. I saw you and him and the baby, and I assumed…”

  “Maybe he was just visiting over business.”

  Candy shrugged. “You looked pretty friendly to me. Pretty happy.” Which was no big surprise; as you remember, all Candy ever saw in the future were happy things. Apparently a time would come next fall when I would be tickled pink to be sitting there in the garden with Bill junior handling my baby. But at the moment all I could think of was his ugly mouth and damp handshake.

  Candy shrugged “Quién sabe? Well, it’s a good omen. Someone like you could do a hell of a lot worse.” I stopped dead and Candy bumped into me. “Ow. What did I say?”

  We reached the store directory. I looked at my dumpy reflection leaning out of the dark glass toward me. Round head, round face, stocky limbs. The nicest thing you can say about my face is that it’s “amiable.” And that’s only in my rare good moods. High-school gym teachers looking to praise me used words like “dogged.” In softball, I played catcher. In track—no, let’s not even talk about track. I always walked with my head down, looking at the floor, which was just as well, as I had a tendency to trip over things. Unkind classmates had told me I was bowlegged. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Harris, used to fuss at me for “stumping” and “trudging” and “clomping.” I was the only woman wearing Doc Martens in the Rice Mathematics Department, and this was years after they weren’t cool anymore.

  I considered trudging over Candy’s toes by accident. Or stumping on them. Or clomping. Unfortunately, I needed her. “Okay, fairy godmother. Make me beautiful.” I scanned the directory of stores. “Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.”

  “Okay, Cinderella.” Candy started up the stairs, then looked back over her shoulder. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Toni, but I can’t honestly promise Prince Charming, okay?”

  “Prince Breathing will do.”

  “Gotcha.”

  She led me into the strange regions of the Galleria’s third floor. I have to say I felt stupid to be there. First, because I had always despised the kind of women who spent all their time hanging out in the Galleria trying on glamorous clothes. Second, because I was afraid the glamorous clothes weren’t going to look good on me. Go figure.

  “Help! We’ve crashed on the Planet of the Babies,” I murmured as we left the stairs. There were babies in strollers, babies in backpacks, babies in Snuglis on their fathers’ chests. Babies tucked into Mom’s tummy, waiting to come out. A snot-nosed toddler gimballed by, dragging a crying sister behind him like a teddy bear. If the kids weren’t crying or peeing or drooling or actually throwing up, their noses were running, or a sort of thin cottage-cheeselike substance was hiccuping from their tiny mouths. “I never realized how damp children are.”

  “Buy permanent press,” Candy said.

  “Hey—Versace,” I said, stopping in front of a shop window. “I’ve heard of this guy, haven’t I?” The mannequins were all incredibly thin and had this Italian arrogance to them and sported clothes that looked like what Jackie O. would have worn if she had been a streetwalker: pleated stirrup-pants, or little sleeveless lemon-yellow dresses that came a third of the way down their thighs, or tall leather boots in black and white checks.

  Candy winced. “You could never wear this stuff.”

  “Why not?”

  “Toni!” She waved at the models. “You, you’ve got, oh…too many knees or something. Trust me on this.”

  “Too many knees?”

  “Here. Definitely more your speed,” she said, stopping in front of the Gap.

  “Candy, you’re patronizing me. No. No! I told you. I want something new. Something different. Something with some style, not just…”

  Candy tried to smile. Candy with the great tits and the little waist and the ass men would pay to slap with a Ping-Pong paddle. “Toni…let’s keep the training wheels on for a bit, okay?”

  Unlike Candy, whose figure you could appreciate from the front, I only had contours when viewed in profile: a little slope forward on top, a little shelf down on the bottom. In the middle, only a dictionary would call what I had a “waist.” “All my parts function,” I said. “What’s this fascination with topology, anyway? If I had a great pair of breasts stuck to my elbows, would that be a turn-on?”

  “What?”

  When I told Momma I didn’t care about makeup or hairstyles or what dress I was going to wear, she used to say to me, “Honey, I’ve been pretty and I’ve been ugly, and ugly’s worse.” Another one was, “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean down to the bone.”

  I stared through the Gap window at racks of sensible cotton pants and comfortable casual sweaters and cheeky girl-next-door vests of the sort you wore to spruce up that old blouse you were getting tired of. “Oh, Candy. It’s so…me.”

  My sister regarded me. “You’re a mess, aren’t you?”

  “I know,” I said humbly. “When did I get to be an old maid? You know, lately I’ve been having this fantasy. I’m at a party, like an office Christmas party. All of a sudden, across the room, I see a man.”

  “I know the fantasy. He sees you. Your eyes lock.”

  “And I know, I know at that instant, it’s…it’s…it’s Mr. Anybody!”

  Candy sighed. “You’re not making me look forward to turning thirty. Okay. Are you really sure about this style thing? You’re in the Galleria. Style is going to cost.”

  “Let it. I want to spend money. You know what Time magazine rated the best job in America? Actuary. Most money for the least risk. And by God I spent seven years with no life, taking my damn exams, and now I’m making some money and I deserve to spend it. I deserve to.”

  Candy grinned. “You sound just like Momma.”

  “Don’t ever say that.”

  “You do, you do, you do,” she said, making a face. “Nyeah nyeah. Okay, then: thumbs down on the Gap. Keep walking.”

  The next store was full of lingerie. Gorgeous cantaloupe-breasted models in black underwire bras gave us their best sultry looks from seven-foot-tall posters. “Victoria’s Secret Supporters,” I said, reading the display. “What are those?”

  “Girdles,” Candy said briefly. “Come here.”

  I joined her at the next shop entrance. “Bebe?”

  “They’re out of San Francisco. And I guarantee you can spend some money here.”

  She was right. I left the store forty minutes later and six hundred dollars poorer, but in possession of the most beautiful jacket in the world. It had the New China look, small square shoulders and tailored at the waist and it was made of this incredible stuff called silk shantung that shimmered and
changed color when you looked at it because all the warp threads were brilliant gold-green, while the weft ones were sapphire blue. That’s what the sales clerk said, anyway, and she said that silk shantung was in all the magazines, and that this season you could wear it over a casual blouse for lunch or at work, and then throw it over a dress for the classiest evening wear. It was beautiful stuff, soft to the touch, and also textured with little knots and tufts of this sea-foam thread. I loved it. I also got a pair of slacks to go with it, and then we sailed off to a shoe store to buy a pair of pumps in peau de soie—I made the clerk spell it for me—which is French for “silk shoes” and I loved everything I bought very, very much, as I had not ever allowed myself to love clothes before.

  Momma was dead. I didn’t have to be the plain one anymore.

  “I feel this incredible energy these days,” I told Candy as she led me to the Starbucks coffee joint at the end of the floor. “This freedom. As if I had spent my whole life holding back my natural strength, and finally it’s come bursting out like…like a kinked hose when you straighten it.”

  She laughed at me. “Splash!”

  “Exactly! I used to drag myself out of bed after eight and a half hours of sleep. Now I’m staying up until one every night.” I had moved back into my parents’ house for the last six months of mother’s illness and was sleeping once more in the bedroom Candy and I had shared as girls. I had pulled up the blinds on every window because I couldn’t bear to miss a minute of daylight, and by six-thirty every morning I was sitting on the balcony watching the garden resolve out of the darkness, developing like a Polaroid from a mass of humped shadows into trees and monkey grass and palm fronds and ferns, and every now and then the cobalt flash of a bluejay.

  I slept less and I ate less. After years of turning down cheesecake in public and sneaking to the Empire Café for a furtive eclair, I didn’t even want dessert. “Half the time I was eating, it was like a bribe, this way of killing time, of dulling my spirit.”