Raising Rain

by Debbie Fuller Thomas

  Jude led her through the crowd to the kitchenette where an assortment of beer and hard liquor covered the counters. Jude reached up and briefly kissed one of the guys on the mouth. He said hello to Bebe and bent to kiss her, but she turned her face at the last moment and he grazed her cheek instead. He smelled like liquor and might have fallen over on her if she hadn’t planted her hand firmly on his chest.

  Jude handed Bebe a filled cup and shouted over the music, “Come on.” Bebe followed her out the back door onto the crowded rectangle of patio where the music was muted somewhat and she was introduced.

  “You remember Oz,” Jude said, and Bebe recognized him as the guy who’d asked her if she was going to the peace vigil. She hadn’t made it there. She acknowledged him and he made a move like he was trying to get up, but she raised her cup to him and crossed her arms across her chest the best that she could to discourage him.

  Just that afternoon, Bobby had taken her back to school after her Thanksgiving break, and she missed him already—especially in times like these. She had been so excited to go home for the long weekend and to see everyone, but once she got there, things were awkward. It was clear that her family still saw her as a child rather than a young woman, and expected her to fit back into her same role. To keep the peace, she’d played the part and said little of her school experiences. They hadn’t seemed particularly interested, anyway. When Bobby pulled up to drop her off in the front of the Victorian, she was relieved that there wasn’t a houseful of visitors at the time. She gave Bobby a hug good-bye, jumped out, and grabbed her suitcase from the backseat. She waved as he drove away and watched until his car was out of sight. She didn’t like keeping secrets from him, but they were necessary. If Bobby could see her now, she knew he would freak out.

  One of the guys at the party reminded her of someone from high school. He was clean-shaven and his hair curled around his collar. He gave her a rueful smile and lifted his eyebrows, like he wasn’t as wasted as some of them. He introduced himself as Dave. She leaned back against the glass patio door trying to be inconspicuous. Bebe didn’t know anyone, but that didn’t seem to matter, because just being Jude’s friend seemed to be enough for people. She watched the behavior of the others. One couple was making out on the couch, and when the guy got up and then returned with a refill, someone had taken his place. Bebe tried to hide her disgust. Did the girl even notice the difference?

  Jude hooked up with an older guy Bebe recognized as Jerry, and wandered off. Bebe overheard them making plans to protest the first draft lottery that was happening the next day. Bebe was left alone to entertain, or defend, herself.

  Bebe’s cup never got below half empty before someone refilled it. Between the drinks and the haze of pot, she was definitely feeling a buzz. She found a place to sit on the floor against the wall. She noticed that there was a room down the hall that had a lot of activity going on inside. She wondered what would happen if the cops came or whether they were as tolerant as the campus police. She sat for a long time, sipping her drink and not really talking to anyone, wondering if she could find her way home walking alone and whether it was safe. She could feel the alcohol unraveling her from the inside. The walls now pounded with “American Woman.” She personally wasn’t crazy about The Guess Who, but for some reason tonight the notes bounced around inside her, knocking loose her inhibitions.

  Dave, from the patio, came over and she made room for him beside her on the floor. His drink sloshed a little when he sat down and he apologized, sounding very sober.

  He pointed upward, indicating the music, and said in her ear, “You like them?”

  She shook her head. “Not especially.”

  “But you were singing along.”

  Bebe hadn’t realized it. She felt herself flush, if it was possible to be more flushed than the alcohol had made her feel already. “It’s compelling, you know?”

  Dave turned out to be visiting from UC Santa Cruz. They talked for a while about his major and his professors. He reminded her of one of the Cartwrights, the younger one, and she could feel herself warming to him by the minute. She ran her tongue around her lips and they felt numb. They sat with shoulders touching and she slowly rolled her head from side to side against the wall, enjoying the sensation of her hair sliding against the bumpy, crimped plaster.

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Someone offered them a joint, but she said no and Dave passed on it. She felt elated and calm at the same time—a pleasant and strange combination. Dave was saying something to her and she turned dreamily to look at him. He smiled and got to his feet, taking her cup from her and pointing at his vacant spot beside her. She nodded, understanding. It seemed like a split-second later that he was sitting beside her again and she thought she must have blanked out. All she could think about was how handsome he was and how there were only the two of them connecting in this room full of strangers and how his cheeks had stubble. She reached her hand to his face and caressed it. She bent his head to her and kissed him deeply.

  They kissed awhile sitting on the floor, and drank. He tasted good, and Bebe had no idea how much time passed. Then he was helping her to her feet, and she felt the world spin around her. She leaned against his chest and a button on his shirt scratched her cheek. She felt his heart beating beneath it. Her stomach felt unstable. She carefully put one foot before the other, opened her eyes, and found they were walking down the hallway. She opened her eyes again and they were on a strange bed, with the sheets tangled in disarray. The sounds of the party were muffled and distant. Her head rolled side to side with the room spinning around her, and she tried to protest. When she opened her eyes again, she found the crumpled sheet pulled up to her bare shoulders, and he was gone.

  The next morning the fog rolled in, shrouding them in gray dampness and chilling them all to the bone. Bebe sipped her coffee by the windows, looking out into nothingness. The ocean sounded so much closer, so much deeper when you couldn’t see it, but you were at its mercy. Bebe turned away and asked Jude if she wanted to stay back when they went to the aquarium. She wouldn’t hear of it.

  They ate breakfast and dressed in layers for the morning’s activities.

  “You aren’t wearing those shoes, are you?” Mare asked Toni when she came out to join them in the kitchen.

  Toni turned her foot to the side and glanced at them. “Why not? What’s wrong with them?” Toni slathered on hand lotion from her purse and rubbed it in. The scent of spiced ginger filled the air.

  “They’re so impractical. You’re going to spend hours in those heels at the aquarium?”

  “I went all over Rome in these. I’m a pro.”

  Bebe felt a squall coming on. “Let’s go, girls. Move out.” She ushered them toward the door.

  Mare didn’t take the hint. “You really should check into vegan fashion, Toni.”

  Toni swung her huge, studded leather bag over her shoulder and cruised past her. “Mare, ‘vegan fashion’ is an oxymoron.”

  They loaded up Bebe’s car and drove slowly through the fog to Cannery Row. Bebe dropped Jude, Rain, and Toni off at the curb in front of the aquarium and Mare went with her to park the car. They avoided the line to purchase tickets that curled around the outside of the aquarium, and presented their tickets at the entrance.

  Mare picked up a brochure and perused the map as they walked along. “There’s a sea otter feeding at 10:30,” she said. “And another feeding at the kelp forest at 11:30.” She fell naturally into being their tour guide, leading them from exhibit to kelp forest to touch pool. A galaxy of sparkling anchovies spun silver over their heads in the Outer Bay. Bat rays glided over the bottom of the pool at the Sandy Shore, and jellies mesmerized them with their graceful, deadly dances. They spent hours enjoying the incredible, dangerous beauty, and dodging baby strollers and munchkins.

  Toni stopped to read about seahorses, and commented, “Look, I found the perfect male. He mates for life and gets pregnant instead of the female.”

  “I
think you were a seahorse in another life,” Mare answered.

  Rain came over to Bebe and touched her elbow. “Mom’s spent,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you all go ahead. I’ll stay back with her and catch up later.”

  Bebe glanced over to a bench where Jude sat with her eyes closed, looking drained. “I hate to leave you behind,” Bebe told Rain. “I’ll get a wheelchair.”

  From the bench, Jude said, “I never agreed to a wheelchair.”

  Rain gave Bebe a meaningful look. “Well, her hearing’s not gone.”

  Bebe lowered her voice. “I thought she agreed to a wheelchair. I would’ve booked something else if I’d known.”

  “Give me a moment and I’ll be good as new,” they heard Jude say weakly.

  Rain rolled her eyes. She seemed annoyed and a bit drained herself.

  Bebe gave her an affectionate look. “You’re tired. Go on by yourself for a while. I’ll stay.”

  Rain looked over her shoulder at Jude, hesitating.

  “Shoo,” Bebe ordered, and turned to join Jude at the bench without giving Rain a chance to argue. Bebe slipped in quietly beside Jude and sat watching people go by. They sat in comfortable silence until Bebe wondered if Jude had fallen asleep, or if she even realized that Bebe was there. Jude sighed deeply and spoke.

  “I know why you brought me here. You’re not fooling anyone, you know.”

  Bebe sensed she was being set up. “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you really think your God created all of this? You think there was intelligent design behind these creatures, especially that one with the three-inch teeth and lights on its head? What’s the point?”

  “Yes, I do believe God created this,” she said, wondering where Jude was going with it. “And while I don’t get the point, I see the logic behind the light-thingy on its head. It lives in the dark. I think having a lightthingy would come in handy.” Then she added under her breath, “Most of my life has been spent in the dark.”

  Jude looked over and frowned at her. “I remember having this discussion over twenty years ago. You haven’t grown up yet?”

  “Over thirty years ago,” Bebe corrected her. “And if you call growing ‘up’ growing ‘cynical,’ then, no, I haven’t.”

  “I’m amazed that you’re still as naïve as you were back then.” Jude sank back against the wall and closed her eyes again.

  Bebe chuckled grimly. “You couldn’t exactly call me naïve after living with you for four years.”

  “Six years,” Jude corrected her, hiking her eyebrows without opening her eyes. “Well, I did something right, then.”

  Bebe watched a child go by hugging a stuffed otter, talking to a woman who appeared to be her grandmother. This stage was next on the horizon for her and Neil, and even though Jude wasn’t the grandmotherly type, she would be cheated of the opportunity.

  Jude continued with her eyes closed. “I suppose religion could come in handy. Some women would enjoy having the handy excuse of being under a man’s thumb. A sort of divine ‘get out of jail free’ card.”

  “Jude, God is the most equality-minded person I know. He has always held me fully accountable for my own actions. Luckily, He’s also a very forgiving type.”

  “If you’ve been so enlightened since college, how can you still believe the same way about God?”

  Bebe considered. “I wouldn’t say I believe exactly the same way as I did then. I think I had a basic understanding about God back then, but I didn’t have a mature one.”

  “So what’s mature about believing that there’s intelligence in the universe?”

  “Believing in a Creator makes more sense than believing it was a random act, or just dumb luck that everything fits together so well.”

  Jude’s eyes flew open. “War, poverty, violence. Things have definitely not fit together well so far.”

  “In all fairness, those things have been man’s doing. Why blame Him?”

  Jude said with quiet ferocity, “Because She could fix it, if She wanted to.”

  It dawned on Bebe that Jude was referring to her illness, and Bebe had no easy answers. She felt an overwhelming sadness. The fact that Jude mentioned God at all revealed that she was thinking in spiritual terms, perhaps wrestling with long-held doubts and grasping for meaning in her life.

  Jude continued. “We work hard. We strive for sixty, seventy years, and then what? We get slapped down. Our bodies fail us. That’s not intelligence, that’s waste. It’s cruelty.”

  Her words fell heavily upon them and they sank under the weight of them. The urge to encourage Jude came naturally, but Bebe didn’t truly know what Jude was going through and didn’t want to insult her with trite, pat answers.

  All she could do was to be honest with her. “I don’t understand it all either, Jude,” she said. “But I do know there is truth that I don’t understand, and that I still believe.”

  Jude turned to look directly at her. “Such as?”

  Bebe decided to be transparent. “Sometimes God lets us go through heartbreaking stuff, but He goes through it with us to make it bearable. And sometimes He even heals.” She braced herself for Jude’s cynicism.

  “You know so much about heartbreak and healing,” Jude said, her words dripping with sarcasm.

  Bebe felt anger smolder inside her and she fought it. Looking Jude in the eye, she said, pointedly but without malice, “You have no idea what I’ve lived with over the last thirty years. Sometimes the healing isn’t physical.”

  “Listen, my girl. Your wounds are positively oozing.”

  January 13, 1970

  “Here’s the number.” Jude shoved a piece of notebook paper at her. “He’s down on Washington. Just don’t tell anybody you got it from me.”

  Bebe looked at the phone number. “What’s his name?”

  “Don’t know. It’s safer that way.”

  “But how much does it cost?”

  Jude tilted her head, thinking. “About two hundred dollars, I think. You’ll have to ask.”

  Bebe sat down heavily on the kitchen chair.

  “You have the money, don’t you?”

  Bebe had it tucked away in savings to pay for expenses for the semester. She would have to ask for more hours at the alumni office where she worked between classes. “Yeah, I can swing it. I’ll have to.”

  Jude tucked her shirt down into her tight hip-huggers. Bebe noticed Jude’s smooth, flat belly, suddenly felt aware of her own small bulge that would soon dictate the need for looser blouses, if she didn’t call the number. She had to swallow down the nausea that began every morning when she woke up and stayed with her until she crawled into bed at night.

  “But how safe is it?” Bebe asked. “I’m . . . I’m just not sure.”

  “It’s safe. Miranda had one and was back in class the next day. Nothing to it. It’s every woman’s right of passage to have an abortion. Joan and Suzanne were pretty impressed when I told them you wanted the number.” Jude paused and lifted her head. “It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

  Bebe looked away. “But maybe if I hadn’t, you know, had so much to drink—”

  “That guy purely took advantage of you.”

  Bebe wondered at this turnabout. At any other time, Jude would have said Bebe was free to make her own choices about sexuality, but now that there were consequences, she conveniently blamed it all on him. Clearly, taking advantage of her was wrong, but Bebe owed it to herself to keep from ending up in a vulnerable position. She rubbed her forehead and pressed her fingers into her temple.

  Bebe thought about the Women’s Center. She had gone to a meeting there once. A consciousness-raising session. There was no facilitator. The students sat around, braless and barefoot, bashing men or sharing their experiences of sexual abuses. Many of them had been abandoned by dads and it appeared that talking about the past was cathartic. But some weren’t satisfied with being considered equal to men, and it was obvious from their comments that they felt women were superior. Bebe h
adn’t fit into any of those categories, and never went back.

  Joan and Suzanne at the Women’s Center were adamant that she had every right to make decisions about her body. It wasn’t a baby, they said, it was a fetus, one pushed on her against her will. Although she knew she wasn’t ready to be a mother, something inside her whispered that it was wrong. But if her parents found out about the pregnancy, they might disown her, or force her to come home in disgrace and give up college altogether. If she took care of the problem here, there was no reason for them to ever know and they wouldn’t be hurt. She could take the rest of her life to deal with it herself.

  Jude paused from gathering her papers and books, and looked at Bebe. “What, are you chickening out? You want to go back to Podunk and be Suzy Homemaker for the rest of your life? Give up college? Become your mother?”

  “No.” Bebe shook her head. “I can’t.”

  Jude shrugged like it was no big deal. “So, call him.”

  “Jude, have you . . .”

  Jude dug in her purse for her keys. “Have I what?”

  Bebe held up the phone number. “Ever called him?”

  Jude slipped her purse over her shoulder, and Bebe saw fading hickeys on her neck when she pulled her hair clear of the strap. “I never let myself get that wasted.”

  When Bebe called for an appointment, the doctor wanted to know who referred her. She told him the Women’s Center without giving him Joan’s or Suzanne’s names. He seemed satisfied. His instructions were to show up at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning and not to eat anything after midnight, just in case. She didn’t ask, “in case of what?” She could bring someone with her, if she wanted.