by Chris Cander
March 13, 1965
From the kitchen, Lidia could hear the creak of the screen door opening, then a knock on the door behind it. She put the lid back on the pot, rinsed her hands, and went to the living room. Before she opened the door, she took a deep breath and tried to calm her flared nerves. But when she saw Danny standing there with his hands buried in his pockets, and that broad smile he always had for her, she relaxed.
“Hi,” he said.
She reached out for his arm. “Come in. It’s cold. Dinner’s almost ready.”
He stepped into the warmth and looked around. “Nobody’s home?”
“Daddy took Eagan to Charleston to see a different doctor. He hasn’t … he hasn’t been feeling very well lately.”
“You sure you don’t want to go to the dance?” he asked, removing his coat and following her into the kitchen.
“I’m sure.”
“The whole school’s gonna be there.”
“I’d rather be with just you.”
“Me too,” he said, and caught her with a fast kiss as she moved past him. “How long you think they’ll be gone?”
She swatted him with a dishtowel. “Not long enough for that.”
“You can’t blame a guy for asking, can you?”
Since that first time, hovering inside his car somewhere between a river-rushed mountain and a starlit sky, they’d made love only three more times. Emboldened, Danny would have liked more opportunities to discover this new pleasure and improve their technique, but the last few times they’d had the opportunity, Lidia suffered from a certain nausea that made bending into strange backseat positions too uncomfortable to enjoy.
He walked over and took the dishtowel she’d slung over her shoulder, dragging it slowly down her chest with a wink. Balling it, he used it to lift the pot lid, which released a draft of steam. “That smells great.”
“Kielbasa,” she said. “Your favorite.” She’d cooked all the family’s meals since her mother died, but this was the first time she’d cooked for Danny. Lidia opened a drawer and pulled out her mother’s wedding silverware, then tore off two pieces of paper towel and folded them, precisely, into triangles — an arrangement that seemed slightly more formal than the plain rectangular one she usually made — then set them into two places at the small kitchen table.
“Did you talk to my mama or something?” He picked up a wooden spoon and bent into the mist to stir. “What else is in here?”
She laughed. “You don’t think I know how to make kielbasa? Let’s see. Potatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, beans, cabbage.” She counted them off on six fingers, squinting at the ceiling to remember. “Oh, and salt and pepper.” She took the spoon from him, then the pot lid. “Satisfied?”
“Completely.” He backed against the counter and heaved himself up.
From the refrigerator she pulled out a bottle of Budweiser, popped off the cap with the wall-mounted opener, and handed it to him. “Cheers,” she said.
“Where’s yours?”
She took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with tap water, then walked over and touched it to his bottle.
“You ain’t havin’ a beer with me? Nothing goes better with kielbasa stew.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Not tonight.”
He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes. “You feeling okay, Lid? No dance, no beer?” Sweeping his arm through the steam, he said. “You going to all this trouble.”
She put down her glass and walked over to where he sat, then stood between his legs and put her hands on his knees. “I have something to tell you,” she said in a voice both bold and hushed.
“Okay.”
The grandfather clock chimed the half hour in the front room; the steam rose from the pot of stew. He looked for the smile he expected on her face. Waited for her to say something. Anything.
He dropped his hands from around her neck to her arms, then to his lap, then, intuiting that he might need something to hold on to, to the edge of the counter.
“I’m pregnant.”
The words took a moment to travel from her mouth to his mind, a pop fly arching into a bright sky and then landing into a mitt with a solid thwack. He closed his eyes after he caught it and let out the breath he’d been holding.
When he opened his eyes again and found hers, wide and waiting, a smile crept up the edges of his mouth until his entire face was lifted. “What a relief,” he said.
She blinked at him and let her hands drop from his knees to her sides. “What?”
“I thought you were gonna break up with me or something!” He jumped off the counter in front of her and kissed her on the mouth. Then he held her by the shoulders and shouted, “Hell’s bells! We’re having a baby!” He picked her up and spun her around, then stopped abruptly with a stricken look. “Did I hurt you? Or it?”
It. The image that occasionally interrupted her sleep. Indistinct, but unsettling. She’d had just enough biology, theology, and instinct to worry about what was growing inside her. And more than a little guilt that she was incriminating not her brother, but the boy she truly loved.
“No,” she said. “We’re not hurt.” Then she smiled, shy, and offered the only compensation she could: “And it’s not an it. It’s a him, I’m sure of it.”
“A boy? Oh, Lid.”
“I didn’t know … how you’d feel about it. Us being so young. And you’re wanting to go on to college …”
He shook his head. “I decided that night,” he said, and raised his eyebrows to indicate the night he meant, “I ain’t going anywhere without you. Ever.”
She leaned into him, her cheek landing against his chest. Quietly, she began to cry tears that took her by surprise. Cried out of guilt and grief, happiness and hope. Cried for the loss of her mother and her innocence and her childhood. Cried, too, because she believed him when he said he’d never leave her.
He pushed her hair back off her face and held her at arm’s length while he calculated. “Did you know in six days it’ll be a year since the night we met at the Sugar Bowl?” Then, smacked with an idea, he let her go and moved around the kitchen, looking for something. He opened drawers and scanned the countertops. At the sight of the white trash can by the refrigerator, he said, “Ah!” and leaned down into it to retrieve something, which he wiped on his pants, then concealed in his fist.
Standing in front of her, he took her hand in his. Slowly, he dropped to one knee.
“Lidia Kielar, will you marry me?”
She nodded, fighting more tears.
Opening her hand, he placed into her palm the Budweiser bottle cap she’d pried off and thrown into the trash. “At least it’s round. And shiny.” He shrugged and she laughed.
“I love it.”
“I’ll get you a real one.”
“I like this fine.”
He smiled. “I’ll still get you a real one. So you will?”
“Yes,” she said. “I will.”
September 7, 1965
Lidia and Danny moved into his mother’s house after they were married that July, less than two weeks after she turned seventeen. Her young belly might have concealed the reason behind their hastiness early on, but now, mired in the deep wet heat of early September, it pushed as flagrantly forward as a late-summer sunflower seeking the sky. Not that modesty mattered with her best friend, Peggy, around. From a crowd of girls that Lidia hardly knew, Peggy had organized a combination bridal and baby shower the week before her wedding, which preempted any notion of secrecy. Of course, Danny’s mother, Geraldine, had known from the start.
With her husband gone and no other children, Geraldine had welcomed Lidia as though she were a daughter. She liked seeing Danny happy again, and liked Lidia for making him so. Yes, they were young, but she recognized that grateful, homecoming feeling that comes with finding a true match.
Growing up in Verra, Geraldine had been neither exceptionally pretty nor bright, but was smart enough to know that her options were limited. When s
he was just eighteen, she met the visiting distant cousin of her best girlfriend, a twenty-year-old recent engineering graduate from Rutgers. He was tall and so reed thin it stirred in her a heretofore-unexplored desire to bake. His feet were long and narrow and required a relationship with a personal cobbler. His hair was unkempt and his fly perpetually abandoned in the open position — thoughts of the dynamic loads of waves or traffic or air pressure took precedence over such banal considerations as personal hygiene or dress. But behind his glasses, his eyes were gentle and unflinching. They belonged to a man who would never stray, never yell, never leave. During their first date, he spoke to her of cantilevered beams, gusset plates and trusses, the miraculously strong and inexplicably beautiful structure of a dome (a Platonic shape of ideal perfection, he’d said with a sigh). She rested her chin in the cup of her palm and never took her eyes off his, and was actually fascinated to learn that the roof of Santa Maria del Fiore had been erected without a scaffold by Brunelleschi in 1420. He’d accepted a position with an engineering firm in New Jersey. Would she, had she, ever considered leaving West Virginia? They were pronounced Mr. and Mrs. William Pollock the following month, both of them disbelieving their extraordinary luck.
When Danny and Lidia came to Geraldine with the news of their engagement and the impending birth of a child, she recovered quickly from her mild surprise. Then she spent a weekend clearing the attic room of boxes and cobwebs and dust, heaving her own mother’s things out of trunks, shaking them out, and examining them piece by piece, wondering at the disintegrating memories that could’ve belonged to anyone — the christening gowns and baby shoes and unfettered locks of hair. Neither she nor her parents had been good storytellers, and so the things they carried stayed unnamed. But shouldn’t there be some binding tie? A sense of place and purpose? Something to wend one generation unto the other? With a grandchild of her own on the way, she resolved to give their family a sense of tradition.
That balmy July, Geraldine cleared the space in her home and her heart, and on her son’s wedding night, she unveiled the attic bedroom that she hoped was comfortable enough to keep them. Just before she left for a three-day trip to visit her aunt in Ohio, she pressed a newly cut key into her daughter-in-law’s hand.
Lidia wished her father had been as gracious, but he took the news like he would a slap. Rearing back, then angry. Hadn’t he raised her better than that? Now what would he do? Upon whom would he now rely to look after home and hearth, as she had done since Anna died? And who would be home to care for her brother?
Her brother.
Her child’s father.
For Lidia, the next few months passed slowly. It wasn’t being swollen to the immobile size of a fat tick in summer, or the incessant cravings, or the way her meals repeated on her that wrenched Lidia into torment.
It was the dreams.
They began in her sixth month, as she lay nightly next to her husband, who slept the deep, uncomplicated sleep of the tranquil unenlightened, unaware of Lidia’s restlessness. She held his hand and forced herself to imagine a happy ever after in which her child would be loved by the father and family upon whom she’d shamefully bestowed it. Sometimes, out of desperation, she prayed.
But when she finally fell asleep, a child-insect swelled in her dreams, six-legged and blood-feeding, spreading typhus from her abdomen into her mind. She and the baby both growing feeble-minded like her brother. Worse.
Then one night in early September, a voice thundered in her sleep. It was an unfamiliar one, a deep whisper that came from everywhere at once. It could’ve been her father’s, or God’s. It might even have been that of her brother, Eagan, impossibly lucid.
Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.
A quick, seizing pang. She awoke in a sweat.
Lidia reached out and grasped Danny’s arm, but he groaned in his sleep and turned his back to her, still unaccustomed to sharing his childhood bed.
She gripped the warm spot of sheet he’d abandoned. After a minute or so, another freehold vise overtook her insides. No internal distress had ever measured up against this pain.
“Danny,” she whispered into the dark.
No response, just deep, even breathing beside her. Outside, a windstorm howled through the maples. She took a deep breath and blinked, drowsy, at the white grid of the ceiling. It must have been a dream.
Another grip. Lidia felt like she was being squeezed from one dream into another. From childhood into old age. Her eyes grew wide and took in the entire length of ceiling, stunningly bright in the dark, until the vise released her again.
The next time, she yelled outright: “No!” She grabbed her belly and pushed against the pain. Danny shot upright.
“What’sa matter?”
Lidia pressed harder against her belly and pushed her head against the pillow, closing her eyes tight. It was only early September. She was two weeks early — or six weeks early, according to the lie she’d told. Geraldine had said it would be the end of October before the baby came.
“Mama!” Danny yelled toward the door. “Mama!”
“No,” hissed Lidia. She felt Danny lean over her, smelled his sour, pre-morning breath, and turned her face away. “No,” she whispered. “It’s too soon.”
But who was she to be disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous?
“Mama!”
Geraldine appeared at the doorway, her gray hair rolled and tied in rags, clutching her chenille robe at her throat. “What? What is it?”
From the far edge of the bed, Danny pointed, wide-eyed, at his swollen, writhing bride. Geraldine rushed in.
“Lidia, sweetheart. You’re having contractions?”
From within a moan, Lidia nodded. She’d asked Geraldine once how she would know when her time had come, and Geraldine had smiled and patted her hand and said, “You’ll know.” But how, she’d insisted. What does it feel like? Geraldine had turned toward the window, through which she could see her son hammering away at the teeter-totter he was building out of scrap wood. “It feels like the worst and best pain you could ever imagine. There’s nothing to compare it to, because there’s nothing else like it. Nothing at all.”
When she’d gone into town one afternoon to meet Peggy for a Coke at the Sugar Bowl, she told her what Geraldine had said. Peggy shook her head and with her straw still between her teeth, said, “Oh no thanks. Not me. My cousin Mabel told me it was absolutely horrid. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Lid, but you’re in for some serious what-for. If and when I ever have to push some watermelon out — and I mean if — I want the ether right off. Mabel says it starts bad and ends worse.” Then she laughed, prematurely rueful. “And that’s just the beginning.”
Now as she lay twisted in the sheets, Lidia wondered how much worse it would get. Not that it mattered. She wouldn’t let herself be anesthetized against it. Regardless of the pain, she would stay awake and alert until the end. She refused the possibility of being the last to know what came out of her.
“Sweetheart, do you know how fast they’re coming?” Geraldine’s hand on her forehead was tender and cool. Lidia felt the mattress sink next to her with her mother-in-law’s generous weight. She shook her head.
“Danny, honey, get me your grandfather’s watch. We need to time the contractions.” He bolted out of the room, grateful for a job, and returned with it an instant later.
Geraldine turned on the lamp and used Lidia’s expression to time the intervals. Two minutes, almost exactly, between the closed-eyed winces. “You’re going fast,” she said. “Danny, call Doctor Bartlett. We don’t have time to get Lidia to him. He needs to come here.” The tone of her voice had changed, revealing a metallic hint of alarm that sent Danny rushing off without even saying goodbye, but then was calm again for Lidia.
“The doctor will be here soon, sweetheart,” Geraldine said. “Just keep breathing.”
Lidia refused offers of water and walking and anything else Geraldine could think to give. Minute
s that felt like hours passed. The languid moon had moved across the window and was gone again. The sheets were tangled and damp. There was no time for the doctor.
Lidia repeated to herself: The best pain. The best pain ever.
“He must have something to tell the world,” Geraldine said with a smile. “Don’t worry, everything will be fine.” But there was a crop of sweat on her brow.
Lidia only cringed. “I need to push,” she whispered.
Geraldine lifted the sheet that draped Lidia’s lower half. Long ago, Geraldine had nearly completed her nurse’s training when she found out she was pregnant with Danny. She’d wanted to become a midwife. This, as it turned out, was to be her only chance. She guided Lidia’s hands to her knees and told her to hold them. When her face contorted with the next contraction, Geraldine said, “Push!”
Lidia did and Geraldine pressed on her belly. “Breathe!” Lidia let out a whoof at the end, and let her head fall back. She felt something leap in her belly.
“Doctor Bartlett will be here soon. He’ll give you something for the pain.”
Lidia shook her head. “I don’t want anything.”
“There’s no shame in it, sweetheart. No reason to suffer unnecessarily.”
Lidia opened her eyes and caught Geraldine’s. Her face was soft and straight and kind. That’s when she knew this child would be welcome whatever it was, human or insect, or something in between.
She took a fierce breath and grasped her knees again and bore down. Geraldine whispered, “Push, Lidia, push.”
This went on for minutes, days, years, lifetimes. Excruciating pain. Cymbals and pounding and lightning and thunder. Dark clouds and black night and sleet. Every contraction made her feel as if she were ripping, slow-motion, into shreds. She was grateful that there was no doctor, no Danny to watch this graceless evisceration. This was between herself and God. And Geraldine.