It was too small. Bean had bloomed late, Cordy early, both of them springing into their teenage bodies at the same time, and it did not fit her. The tiny pearl-sheen buttons gaped at the chest, the delicate sleeves strained when she reached her arms forward, the feminine collar choked her. Cordy ripped the dress off, stuffed it in the garbage can, mourned it bitterly for years afterward, lime on chapped lips.
But this baby, this would be hers forever. That sense of wonder kept her warm as she dressed, pulling her clothes on with a tender respect for the swell of her belly, as she floated out of the sterility of the office into the parking lot to Dan’s car. He’d wanted to drive her, but she’d insisted on going alone. A thrust of nausea hit her hard, and she braced herself, one hand on the car door. Swallowing the sick rush in her mouth, she turned and leaned against the warm metal.
There would be no more leaving now. No more drifting on the jetstream, no more picking up on a whim and skipping out on unpaid bills and unwanted lovers and unsatisfying jobs. This hand-me-down was staying. Forever.
Cordy’s eyes watered, and she wiped them with her shirt cuff, blinking into the sun. The edge of the car key pressed against her skin, a reassuring pain.
But she could go, couldn’t she?
She could leave right this minute, disappear into the darkness of the map, shudder into a new town, another new life. The promise of a full tank of gas and an empty future ached inside her.
No. She couldn’t. Because even in that new incarnation, she would still be carrying a baby inside her. She’d never be able to disappear again.
She drove back to Barnwell, through acres of waving sheaves, green in the water-swollen summer. She walked through the empty kitchen and dropped the keys on Dan’s desk in the back of the Beanery without stopping to say hello, and walked home, her hands resting on her stomach. Though it was neither physically possible nor technically true, she felt as though she had started the day with nothing to her name and ended it with something to call her own. When Dan came by after work, she was standing in the kitchen, punching down dough, and staring out the window at the sprinkler, which was spitting arcs of water into the dissolving sunlight.
Dan leaned against the counter, arms crossed, hair hobbit-thick on his arms. His voice was low, deep, and Cordy thought of the rumble a man’s voice made when her head rested on his chest. “What are you going to do?” Dan asked, leaning forward. Above his eyes, his eyebrows furrowed dark and wide.
The dough stretched warm and elastic in Cordy’s hands, and she rolled it between her fingers lovingly, turning it to cover the surface with shortening, painted white around the inside of the bowl. She pushed it back to the center of the stove, placed a wet towel over the top. “I’m going to have it,” Cordy said. “I’m going to have a baby.”
Dan nodded, pulled his eyes from Cordy, looked at the refrigerator, where for years we had hung art projects and homemade magnets and now was a repository for expired coupons, notes from Rose that no one ever read, and one set of Shakespearean magnetic poetry, which had currently been arranged into a number of lines, including, “Tongue tart lustily among knights,” and, “Kate resolv’d blush footed groves hey kissed.” (Authors: our father, the former, and Bean, the latter. Thought it would be the other way around, didn’t you?)
“When are you due?” he asked.
“Christmas,” she said. “Or thereabouts. You don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?” She looked up at him, eyes round and bright.
“Why would I think that?”
“I can’t afford a baby,” she said. “This wasn’t really part of the plan.”
“There’s a plan?” Dan asked, mock surprise. “No one ever tells me anything. Let me have a look at this plan.” He smacked his hand, open palm, on the stove top, and the bowl shuddered agreeably.
“Don’t be an ass,” Cordy said. “I’m like one of those women they make documentaries about. A burden on the state.” She looked gloomily at her hands, still sticky with dough, and went to the sink to wash them.
“Okay, let’s put the cart back behind the horse for a minute,” Dan said. “This is not the smartest decision you could make right now. But for you, it’s the right one. So you make your decision and you go with it, or you spend nine months wishing and washing back and forth over whether or not you’ve done someone wrong.”
“Right,” Cordy said, and her voice fell to a whisper again. She dried her hands on the dish towel and they slipped again to cover her stomach. Mine. Nothing had ever been hers. Nothing.
Bean had been surprised at how hard it had been to do something good. She and Aidan had brainstormed a dozen charities, but every one had been full up with volunteers for the next three months. Who knew?
When she’d finally gotten to the bottom of the list, to the house-building duty Aidan had initially suggested, she’d nearly been ready to lie and tell Aidan that they were full up, too. Working outside? In this heat?
But she was really in no position to go pissing God off any more than she was doing on a daily basis, and lying to a priest and cheating a charity out of volunteers was two strikes too close to being struck down by an avenging angel. So she made the call, and of course they were delighted to have them. Of course.
She borrowed some of Cordy’s clothes, which couldn’t have gotten any grungier if she’d skipped the manual labor and rolled directly in the dirt, limited her makeup to sunscreen, mascara, and lip gloss, and headed out to the site. She was sitting on the trunk of the car, swinging her legs and whistling, when Aidan arrived with a group of the volunteers from St. Mark’s.
They’d all carpooled. Shit. She should have thought of that. That was what good people did.
“Bianca,” he said, shaking his head when he saw her. “You look far too nice for this.” She looked down at her clothes, surprised, since a look in the mirror before she’d left had made her fairly sure she’d be yanked off the street to serve as an orphan understudy in a revival of Oliver! He tapped his fingers against the arm of her sunglasses. Her hand went protectively, covered the mother-of-pearl logo. Well, she could have gotten them on Canal Street. He didn’t know.
“I’m not afraid to get dirty,” she said, the oversized lenses hiding any flicker of insecurity. Pursed her lips, shook her hair. She held up her hands, free of nail polish. “Bring it on.”
Bean didn’t know any of the other volunteers there. The people she’d known from school had grown wings and flown, just like her, albeit with less spectacular crash landings. Her friends from the loud, beer-drenched parties, the tough, cruel-mouthed girls and the menacing, heavy-handed boys, had disappeared into the ether; moving, taking jobs—real jobs that paid less every week than those sunglasses had cost—or having children, becoming grown-ups before the thought of adulthood had ever crossed her mind.
But the others in the St. Mark’s group were nice, were kind, were welcoming. She knew some of them from the library, a young mother who came in with her children, the couple who had bought the hardware store and had donated supplies for today. Three professors, fresh-faced and newly anointed. And all of them, Bean found, were more useful than she was. We lived a life of the mind in our house, which was all well and good, but sometimes Bean wondered, back when the threat of The Bomb had hung above our heads like the Sword of Damocles, what would happen to us if the end did come? No one would need people like us. Poetry and art would be useless. We would need farmers, and carpenters, and scientists, and leaders. But not a disgraced adulteress of an office manager with a useless ability to quote Shakespeare and a budding knowledge of the Dewey decimal system.
For she could now, admittedly not with the panache of Mrs. Landrige, surely, take you easily and directly to the section you wanted, occasionally hone in on the exact book, pull it off the shelves and place it into your grateful hands, and then wave away your thanks carelessly. But here, put to fetching and carrying, she felt clumsy and in the way, arms spread awkwardly across plywood, rushing back and forth between the spit of
the saw and the noisy sting of hammers in her ears. Soon she was sweaty and tired and she knotted her hair in on itself and wiped off the mascara sweating its way down her cheeks and tried to forget who she really was and why she was really there.
At lunch, she sat in the shade next to the young mother from the library. “It’s so nice to meet someone my age,” the woman said. Amanda.
Bean started at that. She looked at Amanda, the tiny bouquet of wrinkles beside her eyes as she smiled, the bow of a frown line between her nose and her mouth, her hair messy, her hips widening. Were they the same age? Bean had grown so used to thinking of herself as a twentysomething, just another fabulous gal about town, living some glamorous roman-à-clef-to-be. When she was little she would calculate how old she would be at the millennium, and it had seemed so ancient, so far in the future that it could not possibly be connected to the girl she was at that time. But now, here she was, past that inconceivable age, even.
She folded in on herself and ate her sandwich silently as Amanda chattered on beside her, until it was, mercifully, time to go back to toting barges and lifting bales.
At the end of the day, Bean was sore and splintered, divested fully of makeup, hair gone wild (but alluringly so, she had checked in the windows of the roofer’s truck).
“How are you feeling?” Aidan asked. His hand rested on her back, Bean automatically straightened, her shoulder blades wings on her back, the same way she did whenever she saw an old woman hunchbacked with age.
“I’m beat,” Bean said, twisted her lips into a humble smile. “But I feel good. Like after a really good kickboxing class, but better.”
Aidan laughed. “Maybe we should consider selling it that way. Community service as physical fitness.”
“Franchises in strip malls with pictures of us holding out our enormous jeans.”
“Now that’s something to aspire to,” Aidan said. A few of the St. Mark’s workers flitted by. Aidan greeted them, a hand on the shoulder, the other in a firm handshake. He laughed, told Amanda he’d see her in church on Sunday. Amanda lingered for a moment, possibly hoping for an audience with Bean rather than with Aidan, but then she slipped off and they were alone again. “I’m glad you came,” Aidan said.
“Me too,” Bean said, and she half meant it. It was nice to find forgetfulness in something other than a bottle of wine or Edward’s bed.
“We can really do something with this young members group if everything is as successful as today. And you did a great job putting it together on short notice. Should we do it again in a couple of weeks?”
“How about next month?” Bean suggested. “I think people like to have their weekends. Not me, of course, as I am now officially a spinster librarian and must stay home with my cat and drink tea.”
“Really? That seems awfully unfair.”
Bean shrugged. “Them’s the rules. It’s in the manual.”
“Well, I guess we should hit the road. I’ve got to finish writing my sermon for tomorrow and it looks like everyone else is ready to go.”
“Ooh, Father Procrastination,” Bean said, nudging him gently as they walked toward her car.
“It’s not that. I just like it to be . . . fresh out of the mental oven.”
“Piping hot homilies.”
“Exactly. And you?”
“Home,” she said, but that was a lie.
Bean herself could not define the gravitational pull that drew her to Edward’s, only that it made her as sick inside as it delighted her.
“Don’t say anything,” Bean said as Edward held the screen door back for her. He was smoking a cigar, the sour smell turning her stomach a little as she brushed past him. “I’ve been doing good all day, and I know I look like hell.”
“So you came by to do a little evil?” he asked, holding his cigar to his mouth and waggling it before he took another puff.
“I came by to take a little shower,” she said.
“And then?” he asked teasingly.
“Meet me upstairs in ten minutes and find out,” she said.
“You are a very bad apple,” he said, gesturing up the wide stairs to the second floor, and giving her a slap on the bottom with his free hand. There was blues playing on the stereo, and the newspaper was scattered around the living room. He’d adjusted so easily to the bachelor life, it was easy to forget that every time she was here, she burned away any good she could possibly do with a measly day of community service. His wife, his children, she wronged them all just with her presence. All the sermons we’d heard growing up, all the Bible storybooks we’d read until they fell apart, it had all been for nothing. It had occurred to Bean that she was ticking her way down the Ten Commandments, violating each one in an orderly fashion until there’d be nothing left of her soul but a tiny, torn shred, fluttering in the empty darkness inside her.
She walked toward the steps and turned back to look at Edward over her shoulder. He grew less handsome every time she saw him, she thought, his teeth still white, his hair still candidate-perfect, but his face distorted by alcohol and disappointment. But when he winked at her, toasting her with the tumbler in his hand, she winked back. And when she stood under the spray, washing away the sweat and the dirt of the day, and he joined her, she ignored her better judgment and let him dizzy away the cold, uncertain world and her new place in it. This was her life, then. Good on the outside, rotten on the inside. She was a bad apple, all right. Rotten to the core.
Our father was sitting at the kitchen table, reading his Riverside Shakespeare. Rose came in and sat down at one of the straight-backed chairs across from him. “Daddy,” she said, but he held up one finger, not taking his eyes from his book. This was his signal—just a moment, I’m reading. Rose rolled her eyes. It wasn’t like he didn’t know the ending, whichever play he was reading.
When he finished, he placed the book facedown on the table. Rose’s fingers itched to take it and mark his spot. “I need some advice.”
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,” he said with a self-satisfied little grin. Oh, Daddy, a Hamlet joke. How lovely. You shouldn’t have.
Rose forced an answering smile. “Thanks. But this is about work.”
“Ah. The lure of tenure,” he said. “What did Jonathan say?”
“He wants to stay in England. It’s ridiculous. Because then two years from now we’ll have to look again.”
“There are other universities. People move from college to college all the time.”
“You didn’t,” Rose said accusingly.
“No,” our father admitted. “But it was a different time. Vietnam left us with a glut of academics, and we were fortunate to find a space, especially at a school as prestigious as Barnwell. But you have options I never had. And you work in a field far less crowded than mine.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t take it.”
“I’m not saying anything other than pointing out, quite logically, my little mathematician, that there’s nothing forcing you to take it.”
“But what if I can’t get another job here?”
“Then you’ll go somewhere else.”
“I can’t leave you,” Rose said.
Our father beetled his brow. “And why not?”
Rose faltered. “Well, Mom. And Bean and Cordy are here now.”
“And none of these is your responsibility, Rose. No one ever asked you to care for us. I suppose it is your mother’s and my failing that we have allowed you to do so for so long. It’s always been your gift to care for others, but it’s a gift that’s come with a certain amount of sacrifice for you, whether you know it or not.”
Allowed. Rose had never thought of all the responsibility she had taken on as having been permitted by someone. It was something that she just had to do. At dinner in a near-empty Italian restaurant, Bean and Cordy playing hide-and-go-seek between the legs of deserted tables, their shrieks making the waiters jump as they carri
ed full platters to the table where our parents ate with their friends, Rose escorting them to the entryway and keeping them occupied with crayons and a long white strip of butcher paper. At a summer department picnic, Cordy tearing off her clothes to run through a sprinkler until her diaper was heavy with water, Rose, embarrassed by Cordy’s childish nudity, taking her inside to dry her off and put her back in her yellow seersucker dress, tying the bow neatly on her back. At the grocery store when our mother had forgotten to buy anything we could pack for lunch, Rose having learned where the grocery money was kept, in a jar by the sink, carefully picking out white bread and bologna so our sandwiches would look like those of every other child at the table (until we went to Coop, of course, where the kid next to us was more likely to have hummus than Campbell’s in his thermos). In the living room, Rose carefully knocking the ashes out of our father’s pipe as he slept peacefully in the chair. Truly, no one had ever asked her to do these things, but we had relied on her to do them, relied so heavily that it had never occurred to us how unfair to her it might be, how much she had begun to think of herself as the person who did those things.
But if she didn’t do those things—if she no longer took care of us—then who would she be? Who would Bean be if she dropped her beautiful mask? Who would Cordy be if she stepped up to the plate in her own life? Who would Rose be if she weren’t the responsible one anymore?
“You’re going over for a visit, right?”
Rose was surprised that our father had registered this fact. She’d announced her trip, written it on the family calendar in the kitchen, but she’d fully expected to have to remind everyone a dozen more times before she left. When had our father started paying attention to things?
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