by Joni Rodgers
“Well, that’s easier said than done.”
“The kids are happy in school. It’s a good neighborhood.”
“If I could do it, I would, Kit. I don’t want them to have to move any more than you do, but dammit— Why do you have to make this be so hard?”
“Mel, look around you! I can’t sell this house now!”
“I’m not sure we have a choice, Kit!”
Kit knelt by the mixing pots on the other side of the room, her back to him.
“I didn’t know it was decided.” She stirred carefully at one of the pots. “That you weren’t coming back, I mean.”
“I didn’t get the impression I was invited.”
“Mama,” Mitzi came in the back door.
“Am I invited, Kit?”
“Mama, I’m itchy.”
“Sweetie,” Kit sighed, “run and play now. Daddy and I are talking.”
“And my head hurts. And I’m hot.”
“Well then, why don’t you loan Sarah one of your swimsuits, and you two can run in the sprinkler.”
“C’mere, Noodle.” Mel put his hand on Mitzi’s forehead. “Feels like she’s running a fever.”
“And look at all my ‘squito bites,” Mitzi complained, lifting her shirt to show them.
“Oh, terrific!” Mel groaned.
Kit counted sixteen chicken pox on her tummy alone.
please not another one please please please
Kit had to pee so bad she was praying.
Standing in line at the grocery store, somebody’s little knee bearing down on her bladder, she knew she couldn’t hold it much longer, no matter how hard she thigh-mastered her legs together.
no more price checks please please please
She and Kiki used to shut their eyes tight and mantra that same way when they turned the doorknob at the center of the Mystery Date game board.
“Please, don’t let it be the dud or the bowling geek,” they prayed, “please, oh, please, let it be the Dream, not the Dud!”
But Kit’s heart had always betrayed her. There was no use praying around it; God saw past her fervent petition, into a secret compartment of herself that wanted what she shouldn’t. You were supposed to want the beachboy or the preppie prom guy, so clean and good and wholesome. But Kit thought bowling might be kind of fun, and in the truth of truth, the dark of dark, under her covers and behind the privacy of the Mystery Door, Kit felt something for that dud. He was rumpled and rowdy looking, like someone she could talk to and tug on and lie down with. There was a lovably lazy sexuality about him, and the tickle of desire at the tip of Kit’s tailbone spoke a higher, deeper prayer than any lip service she paid to the instructions on the underside of the box lid. Kit knew, every time she twisted that knob, there must be something really wrong with her.
A man stepped in line behind her, his face obscured by two gigantic plastic packages of Luvs disposable diapers.
Kit tried to ignore the idea of him as long as she could, guiltily rearranging her cereal and jelly. But she could hear the wet baby crying somewhere in the city. The little diapers were blue. One size up from newborn. The waistband festooned with those cute little itty-bitty ... oh, hell!
“Why don’t you go on ahead?” Kit offered.
“Oh, really? Are you sure?”
“Sure. You’ve just got the diapers there and ...”
She indicated her own heaping cart.
To the trained eye, Kit’s cart told the story of a sick child: ginger ale, Jell-O, liquid Tylenol, and Resolve carpet cleaner. And a weary mother: half-pound bag of M&M’s, six-pack of Sharps nonalcoholic beer, and one of those truly nasty seventy-nine-cent pies with graham cracker dust on the bottom, a gluey layer of nondairy whipped topping above, and enough artificial flavoring frozen in between to mutate a pack of laboratory rats. Banana cream. Or maybe it was coconut. Same difference.
“Thanks,” the diaper man said and stepped past her. “That’s very sweet of you.”
Kit stepped back, shifting her weight, leafing through the aisle-side tabloids to distract herself from any thought of water.
“WORLD AS WE KNOW IT IS ENDING: TEXAS HOUSEWIFE RECEIVES SIGN FROM GOD”
“Price check on Dinty Moore beef stew,” the checkout girl enunciated into a handheld microphone.
Dang! A sign from God!
“Kit! Hi there!” It was Missy Priestly. PTO fund-raiser cochair. Amway distributor.
There is no God. Kit scrunched her thighs together.
“Missy, hi. How are you?” she mumbled, searching between the folds of her brain for excuses. Why hadn’t she returned Missy’s last seventeen phone calls? Why was she wearing Mel’s old cutoffs and a pair of terry cloth bedroom slippers? Kit figured she could plead pregnant on both counts.
“Well, I didn’t know you were expecting!” Missy cried. “I’m so excited for you!”
Missy’s stomach was very flat, and her hair was very large. Her groceries were in a small red basket: styling spritz, a wedge of Brie, a bottle of wine, and a skinny, square package of that tiny dark bread Kit had always wondered about. Who bought that tiny little bread? What did they do with it? Now she knew. Hapless dupes are forced to choke it down during multilevel marketing brainwashing sessions. It was probably infused with some kind of hallucinogenic drug that interacted with the low-budget, computer-animated videos. Kit tried to take her eyes off it. Tried to think of something to say.
“How’s Heather?” was what she finally came up with.
“Oh, fine. She’s doing great. How’s Mitzi?”
“Actually, she’s covered with chicken pox right now.”
“Oh, poor baby! How about Cooper?”
“All clear so far.”
“Whew!” Missy made a broad comic gesture across her brow. “One crisis at a time, please!” Kit managed a polite laugh. “And how’s umm... how’s Mel?”
“Fine. He’s fine.”
Kit could tell from the way Missy’s eyes dropped away. She knew.
There was a long, dry moment.
“Price check on Dinty Moore,” the girl repeated.
For some reason, she was standing there with the can in her hand instead of proceeding with the mountain of produce and dry goods still on the conveyor belt. It made Kit want to step up there and shake her.
“Honestly,” Missy whispered, eyeing the elderly lady at the head of the line, “why don’t we just stand here all night and quibble over every cent.”
The diaper man cleared his throat.
“Say, Kit,” Missy said in her sweetest tone, “I’ve got company corning in an hour...”
Poor suckers, Kit thought, missing the point.
“Do you s’pose—I mean, I just have these couple three items.”
Her softly pencilled eyebrows inflected upward.
“Oh...urn...”
Kit thought about mentioning that she had to go to the bathroom in the worst way, but Missy’s hair was so perfect, her basket so dainty.
“Why don’t you go ahead?” Kit backed away.
“Thank you so much!” Missy was already setting the divider in place, a plastic line of demarcation between her tiny square bread and the elderly lady’s plain lumpy loaves, leaving no room for the young daddy’s Luvs. “I owe you my life!”
“Sure,” Kit said. “No problem.”
Missy exclaimed something about the recipes in Woman’s
Day this month, pulled an issue from the rack, and engrossed herself in it.
Last in line again, Kit tried to refocus on the tabloids.
“MENOPAUSE MIRACLE HERB DISCOVERED IN RAINFOREST”
So what if she had a sick kid and a bladder that was about to explode? Missy had company coming. What’s more important—Brie or barf supplies? Missy deserved to go first. There was no garbage in the back of Missy’s car, no soap scum in her tub, no bloodstains on her panties from the time she realized too late it really was her period, not just that spicy pizza burger, and the dang Walgreen’s store closed
fifteen minutes ago. Missy’s hair was perfect. Missy’s children were healthy and quiet. Missy’s husband was probably at home right now. Probably because Missy never screwed around on him.
“BAT BOY DISCOVERED IN PENNSYLVANIA”
Missy prayed sincerely for a Dream Date life and got it, while Kit raged out of control, a magnet for duds and bowling geeks.
“NOSTRADAMUS PREDICTED DEATH OF ELVIS”
But maybe—and pregnancy is full of such epiphanies— maybe that didn’t mean God had forsaken her. Maybe that just meant God wanted her to learn to bowl. Maybe God wanted her to discover she had balls of her own.
“SCIENTISTS PROVE FORGIVENESS CURES CANCER”
Kit laughed out loud. Was that the cancer that mutates your cells or the one that consumes your spirit? And were they talking about the forgiver or the forgiven? Kit had given up any hope of being the latter. The former, she’d never really thought about. To be the forgiver, one would have to feel wronged, and to be wronged, one would have to be something other than nothing, and Kit hadn’t seen herself as that for quite some time.
Forgive me, she experimented, starting with herself. I forgive you.
It felt like opening the warm kitchen door on the dark backyard.
Forgive me... forgive me... I forgive you ...
God and the world and the dud at the door; her mother and Missy and Neeva and Mel.
“Ma’am?” A girl in a blue checker’s smock touched the back of Kit’s elbow. “I can take you on express.”
Missy turned with a pained expression. The diaper man was just telling the other girl that no, he didn’t mind waiting while she changed her register tape.
“I have more than ten items,” Kit confessed.
“It’s not like we use a calculator,” the girl shrugged and tugged the cart over to a neighboring aisle.
Absolution lifted Kit’s shoulder blades, strengthened her legs, stung her eyes wet like a nun’s kindness. There even seemed to be a little less pressure on her bladder.
“Any coupons?” asked the priestess, skimming the final item across the scanner.
She was brown-skinned and small with a billion beautiful braids. She looked to be about half as old as Kit and a month or so further along. Probably about to deliver any day. And even though she offered the box of Kleenex with a shy smile, she must have thought it was pretty pathetic, how Kit was crying right there in the middle of the store.
Mel and Mitzi were both asleep on the couch in the corner of the dining room when Kit got home. He was holding The Paper Bag Princess open in his lap, and she was slumped over the crook of his arm.
Within three days of the first fever, the chicken pox were everywhere on her, including the insides of her mouth, nose, ears, and vagina. Even with the Tylenol-Codeine Kit had gotten from the pediatrician, Mitzi was miserable, and between her needs and the throw-up laundry and Mrs. Lu’s neighbor’s sister’s guest bedroom ensemble that still had to be finished, Kit had hardly been able to lie down in the last seventy-two hours. She bent to kiss Mitzi’s hot forehead and smelled the faint aroma of oatmeal bath.
“Mel?” Kit touched his shoulder.
“Huh... mmm... Guess we dozed off.”
“Try not to wake her,” Kit whispered, but Mitzi was already stirring.
“Mama, I don’t feel good,” she whimpered. “My throat hurts.”
“I know, Sesame Seed. Do you think a Popsicle would help?”
Mitzi didn’t look like she had a great deal of confidence in the healing power of Popsicles, but Mel went and got it, and she accepted it, propped up with pillows on the cool sheet Kit spread over the couch cushions. Kit turned on the radio for her and went back to the kitchen to put away the rest of the groceries. She heard Mel at the door behind her and was just about to say thanks for stopping by when he stepped over and put his arms around her, and that made her realize how bone-weary tired and lonely she was, and that made her throat close up so she couldn’t say anything at all.
She was grateful when he didn’t talk either, but simply stayed there, letting her rest heavily against him.
“Well,” he finally said. “I’m gonna be late.”
“Maybe you could tell them you had to take three hitchhiking nuns back to their convent on the San Jacinto.”
“Yeah,” Mel laughed. “Something tells me they wouldn’t buy that one any better than your mother did. Seems to me, she busted my balls pretty good that time.”
“I remember. But you came back.”
“Yeah.”
“Mel,” Kit took his hand, “would you be insulted if—if I said I forgive you?”
“No,” he said after a moment.
“Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive me?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been trying to—to think about things and...” He looked at the floor for another long moment, but then he nodded slightly. “Yeah, Kit. I forgive you.”
She turned back to the counter where she’d started packing a lunch for him to take to the hangar, but he took the knife out of her hands and sliced the sandwiches himself while she poured coffee into his thermos. He packed it all into his cooler, and then he opened the door, shedding warm kitchen light onto the dark of the backyard.
“So ...” Mel stared toward the swing set until Kit touched his hand.
‘“Night, Mel.”
‘“Night, Kit.”
He leaned over and kissed the top of her head, then pushed past the screen door.
Just as he opened the door of his truck, Kit thought she heard him whistling.
Mitzi was asleep, the Popsicle melting on the front of her nightshirt like an ice cube on the sidewalk.
Kit tossed the wooden stick in the bedside bucket and pulled Mitzi’s shirt off over her head, gathering her in the sheet. She pulled the chain to drop the ceiling fan to low speed and settled in the rocking chair. Mitzi whimpered again and tucked her flushed cheek against Kit’s neck, her forehead hot and damp, her breathing hoarse and congested. Kit drew the digital thermometer from her pocket and eased it under Mitzi’s arm. It finally peeped and flashed a digital 202.7.
Opening the sheet, Kit used one corner to wipe the sweat away from Mitzi’s temple and from her own chest, and then she held her baby, draped across her lap like the Pieta.
Even dotted with chicken pox, Mitzi’s body was pale and beautiful in the moonlight, a reflection of Kit’s own long legs and square shoulders. But she had Mel’s temple, his jaw, and— heaven help her—his nose. She was the marriage, the joining of them, the undivorcible bond between Kit and this man she would always love, if for no other reason than the fact that only he could have given her this gift, this particular projection of her self and his that tickled Kit’s curiosity and enticed her toward the future every morning like a giggling, grimy-faced Pied Piper.
“Nnn ...,” Mitzi stirred.
“Mama’s here.”
“My chicken pops are itchy.”
“I know, Peppermint. Try not to scratch, though. Try not to think about it. Shhhh ...” she blew across Mitzi’s chest and drew the sheet around her. “Close your eyes.”
“Will you finish telling me the story?”
“You’ve heard it six hundred times,” Kit sighed. “What if I put on a tape? What about ‘Baby Beluga’?”
“You left out the part with the powerful sleep.”
“I think you need a powerful sleep,” Kit nuzzled her scaly cheek.
“And she was sleeping, and she couldn’t wake up ...”
“And Eros came,” Kit relented, “and he took her in his arms and kissed her.”
“Was it a magic kiss?”
“All kisses are magic.”
“And she woke up?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And he gave her a cup of androja?”
“Ambrosia. And she drank it, and she became immortal.”
“Which means she was a goddess instead of a plain old human being.”
“That’s right,” Kit smile
d.
“But where was he all that time, Mama?”
“I don’t know. His mother’s house, I guess.”
“But he came back.”
“Yes.” Kit closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the rocking chair. “He forgave her. And she forgave him.”
“And they lived happily ever after.”
“Sure,” Kit said out loud, and to herself, Why not?
“Did she have the baby?”
“I guess so.”
“Did she have a boy or a girl?”
“I don’t know, Puddin’ Pop, I don’t remember.” She carried Mitzi over and settled her on the couch. “Now. How ‘bout that ‘Baby Beluga’?”
“No,” Mitzi stretched out and curled in like a baby bird. “Let’s hear Aunt Kiki again.”
Kit dropped a rough copy of Kiki’s project into the tape deck and sank back on the couch with Mitzi’s feet in her lap. She felt herself drowsing before the music came on.
At first, there was only Kiki, standing alone on the dark empty stage.
“Hushabye, don’t you cry, go to sleep my little baby...
When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little ponies.”
It wasn’t the voice that had combined with Kit’s to blow the grandstands back. The strength hadn’t diminished, but the innocence of Kiki’s bright pink mouth was gone and all of the stridency with it, replaced by a richer inflection, a caressing of each phrase that brought a woman’s face forward from the painted expressions, a woman’s body from beneath the armor of snapping sequins. And when the music came up from behind and put its arms around her, she opened like a magnolia.
“Blacks and bays, dapples and grays...”
Kit closed her eyes and rocked as Kiki’s invisible world went gliding by on a carousel of wondering why, trying too hard, falling in love. Yellow tub toys, a bright red knock-knock joke, the deep purple mysteries of Bubble Man, and high green ideals of the tree fort.
And just at the periphery of it all flashed the faintest glow of gold lamé.
Heart that has become my heart,