Love Invents Us

by Amy Bloom

  Love and desire slammed us into each other, giddy and harmlessly wild as bumper cars. We were separated only, and only occasionally, by my terror of pregnancy and Huddie’s inability to maintain an erection while wearing a condom, a combination that made both of us sneakily skillful and ashamed. My passion for him flooded up like white water, immediately drained away by anxiety whenever we took our clothes off. Standing in the gym locker room, surrounded by normal girls with normal desires and normal condom-wearing boyfriends, I was amazed to learn that they found, or said they found, the erect penis itself exciting. To me, it was a dull, treacherous companion to be greeted with warmth and secretly plotted against. Huddie’s penis was stupid, but Huddie was not. I had to seem so carried away by excitement that, apparently unawares, I would make Huddie come, maneuvering not to let him near me until he was done. And since we were both seventeen I had to do it a lot. To keep Huddie and his little friend distracted, I learned how to bow and stroke like the Perlman of penises; I could lick, nibble, or hum Huddie to orgasm from any position in no time. As soon as he was soft, I’d fondle him gently, my hand and his penis nuzzling as sweetly as two bunnies. As soon as he got hard again, I’d slide my fingers around the slick, ridged surface and hold tight, working steady as a piston, pumping his come against the backseat or onto the blanket we carried with us.

  One time, as we lay naked in the green depths of Wadsworth Park, his slim brown back formed one arc, the spray of his semen another, a dark and a white crescent against a background of thick ferns and the violet evening sky; I had to twist my two hands deep into our blanket to keep from leaping on top of him, holding that beautiful, bucking power inside me.

  The last sunlight came through the leaves overhead, and Huddie looked up from between my legs and flung himself forward, sliding between my wet thighs so quickly I couldn’t roll away, as I always did.

  “I want you to feel me,” he said, pressing down on me heavily, from chest to thigh. “Baby, please, just a little. Just the head, that’s all.”

  It was wonderful. Better than fingers or tongues, this perfectly shaped, perfectly smooth and full plum flesh, moving into me, moving me right to the edge of my skin.

  Leaning back for one wet, mindless moment, I felt his penis move forward, balanced with me on an inner fulcrum. Instantly I saw myself weeping in the girls’ room like poor Celia Sheehan, and I pushed at Huddie’s hips and slid him out of me, feeling the awful cool narrowness where he had been. He came on the blanket and cursed me and began to cry, fists to his eyes, like a little boy.

  “I don’t want to fight about this, I don’t want to fight with you. You want to, don’t you? I know you do. I know it. Can you take the pill or something? You know I’d take care of it if I could.”

  I did know. He spent a week wearing a condom, trying to get used to it. He put one on before he went to school and he wore it all night long, but at the first grip of latex, his penis softened into a scared purple curl cruelly swallowed by a big yellow dunce cap. “No condom, no sex” took care of my pregnancy fears, except for the ones about armed and fanged sperm, swimming and gnawing through my cotton underpants, but it drove Huddie crazy. He’d started having sex when he was fourteen and wasn’t planning on giving it up just three years later.

  Huddie dropped me off at the Planned Parenthood above the A&P, where I met with a series of enthusiastic, slightly disapproving women, happy to have the business, not at all pleased that I was it. I filled out forms and took off my clothes and handed the forms and a Dixie cup of urine to a woman who looked so much like Greta Stone I accidentally splashed her with half the contents. I held my breath during the internal exam and wondered how a woman could put cold metal into another woman without even flinching. The speculum clicked inside me, opening me up to the nurse’s eyes and fingers, not unkind, just saying “This is what you want? This is how it is.” The birth control counselor gave me a free first month’s supply of tiny yellow pills and a row of little pink ones to be taken during my period. I couldn’t remember anything she told me that wasn’t about killing sperm, and I didn’t listen to the part about side effects. Breast cancer and blood clots don’t mean much to teenage girls. Social ostracism and pregnancy were the only real disasters for us, and I had lived through one and was planning to outsmart the other.

  I came back to the car, and Huddie watched as I ceremoniously swallowed the first of the yellow pills. He clapped and I laughed and stuck two fingers in his mouth, his sharp teeth against them, the slippery, warm insides of his lips around them.

  I don’t know how it worked for other girls. I know the nurse told me to wait thirty days, to use “alternate modes of contraception” while the yellow pills fooled my body into thinking that it was pregnant, blooming with all that I would have sold my soul, my real emerald ring, and Huddie’s car to avoid.

  I tried. We tried. We compromised, we had intercourse with every other body part, we made deals with God as each other’s juices ran down our chins, and we invited disaster every way we could, short of formally announcing that having acted like grown-ups, having done right, we were now entitled, goddammit, to have some big-time fun. On the twentieth day, Huddie and I cut study hall and went to his house. On his narrow bed, with the raw plywood headboard banging steadily into the faded yellow wallpaper, with me murmuring, “No, no, no” and clutching his hard wet back to me, pulling him right through me, until it amazed me to see any part of him still outside my skin, Huddie and I stopped trying to be grown up. After forty-five minutes, we melted down, panting and numb like long-distance runners.

  There was no time to shower, which didn’t bother us. We had never taken a shower together. Kids have nowhere to fuck and nowhere to shower. Only adults, cheating and careful, clean up afterwards. We jumped wet and proud into our jeans, and we left his room thick with our scent of damp, salty fur, two puppies playing in a marsh, a smell that dripped from Huddie onto me and the sheet beneath us and seeped back into our skins. Liquid as hot and thick as my own blood ran down my legs for the rest of the day, and I smiled every time I sat down and felt the rough seam of my jeans cut into me. You would have had to shoot us to keep us apart.

  By the weekend I knew I was pregnant. I remembered reading about girls my age who delivered and didn’t know they were pregnant until they went into labor. Did their parents really believe that? That these girls felt their breasts change into tender, painful eggs, hot as a fever, felt their bellies slope into firm, enveloping tents around tiny insistent strangers, threw up at the smell of spinach or bacon or coffee, and didn’t know? I knew.

  I didn’t want to worry Huddie and I didn’t want to lose him.

  I called Max.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said. “I think I’m pregnant.”

  Max said nothing. His breath was in my ear, thick and smoky; I heard him swallowing.

  “Why don’t we get you a test first? Just to make sure.” I heard the flick of his lighter. “Don’t worry, baby girl.” He didn’t say, It’s not my baby, although I knew he knew it wasn’t.

  “Okay. Rachel told me she had a test at Planned Parenthood.”

  “Who was the boy?” Max had never liked Rachel, and after I told her just a little about what went on, not mentioning the vibrator or the way he put me in the chair naked and just stared at me, she hated him. When we saw him in town, she’d glare at him and mutter, and once she scraped his car with her keys. “Huddie’s so cute,” she said. “He’s disgusting, Elizabeth. It’s sick. We should kill him.”

  “Zvi Carnofsky. Anyway, she wasn’t.”

  “Fine. Anyway, I didn’t mean Carnofsky. If you don’t want to go to Planned Parenthood, go see a friend of mine. Hilda Ringer. She’s a very good doctor, a lovely woman.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’d never made my own doctor’s appointment.

  “Do you want me to call for you?”

  “No, I can do it. What do I say? Do I say I’m pregnant?”

  “No, you ask to see Dr. Ringer and you say you
want a pregnancy test and that Mr. Stone suggested you call. I’ll take care of the bill.”

  “Will you come with me?” He wouldn’t. People would wonder why he was there with me, and it would cause trouble.

  “I don’t think so, baby girl. I think that would be pretty conspicuous. You go and I’ll pick you up afterwards. We can get a bite to eat and wait for the results.”

  “Never mind. I’ll go with Rache. I’ll go with someone. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. I won’t do anything conspicuous.” I slammed down the phone. I was furious until I remembered it wasn’t his baby.

  I wasn’t happy that I had to wait three more weeks for the abortion, but the counselor at Planned Parenthood told me what I wanted to hear and held my hand when she promised me no pain, “just a little cramping.” She made it sound like going to the dentist, which was what I wanted. She smiled at Huddie and looked gravely at me and handed us a pile of educational booklets with cheerful stick-figure men and women making sensible and healthy decisions. I dropped them in the trash on the way to Huddie’s car. I said it was no big deal and Huddie said it was, and we fought about things that were too big for us until we got to the park, where we lay beneath hundred-year-old oak trees and said, We might as well.

  Hear Me

  Thanks to Mrs. Hill and her daughter, I knew as much about cholesterol levels and heart disease as any elderly cardiac patient. I made casseroles with a skim-milk white sauce from a recipe I found in an American Heart Association pamphlet, and skinless chicken breast with tomatoes and mushrooms sautéed in a half teaspoon of olive oil. Sometimes I substituted turkey for chicken and potatoes for tomatoes. The pork rinds were long gone, as were the palm readings. Now we were serious; Mrs. Hill was seriously ill and I seriously loved her.

  Mrs. Hill was having a pretty good day. Her skin was its normal coffee color, not overcast with greyish yellow tones, and we had spent some up time before her nap, clowning around while the radio played a tribute to the Supremes. Mrs. Hill and I could do all the appropriate hand gestures for every song, and we agreed that Diana Ross was too skinny and bossy for her own good. We preferred Flo Ballard, who looked a little like Vivian, or even Cindy Birdsong, who was obviously dumb as a tree but good-natured.

  I was skinning the chicken breast and then I was not.

  Huddie made his deliveries and found me curled up on the floor, my cheek on the red and grey speckled linoleum, my hands pressed to my belly.

  “Are you okay? Liz, sweet, I’ll take you to the clinic. Elizabeth?” I could hear him and I could smell him and the pain was not so bad but I couldn’t speak. A cold rising river closed in on me, running through me, carrying only me and my baby—all of a sudden my baby, wrapped in my arms. Naked, swept over sharp, half-hidden rocks, stones scraping my feet, icy grey sprays chilling our cheeks, stiffening her soft body, pulling her fine hair with rough fingers.

  My baby is dying, I thought, and I pounded on the floor, terrifying Huddie. The blood had begun to seep through my jeans. I reached inside my underpants and looked at my red-streaked palms. I crawled to the bathroom, and he pulled off my jeans and my underpants and sat at my feet, crying for me.

  Cry for her, I thought, and I told him to leave me alone. He looked at my smeared hands and legs, my bared teeth, the bits of blood drying in my black hair, and he sat down outside the bathroom door and waited.

  I sat and sat, feeling clumps of blood and tissue sucked out of my bright veins, pulled out of my young body, into nothing, leaving nothing. I would be old when this was over, a shell scoured clean by the waves. Huddie would be young and I would be old, as tired as Mrs. Hill. Just lay me down next to my little baby, leave us be. I’m sorry, baby, I will never think of having an abortion ever again, no matter what, I’m sorry, God, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby. The cramps were almost gone, just the smallest waves now.

  I asked Huddie to bring me a pair of his jeans and to take a box of sanitary napkins from his father’s store. I stood up to wash myself off quietly, amazed that my banging and crying hadn’t woken Mrs. Hill. I didn’t recognize my own face, smudged with bad Halloween makeup, my hair twisted into dry red tips, my cheeks chalk grey. I looked away, down into the toilet bowl, and fell back on my knees, my spine broken one more time. Little curl, little baby bud, floating in our blood. I couldn’t go outside in only my spattered T-shirt, and I couldn’t flush the toilet. I would never flush my baby away.

  Huddie came back, and I finished washing myself and put on his faded jeans, smelling of Huddie and the industrial detergent Mr. Lester used on everything. We started cleaning up the mess, Huddie wet-wiping the kitchen floor, me tackling the bathroom. Then I took a jar from Mrs. Hill’s kitchen collection. A little six-ounce jelly jar was all I needed. I went back into the bathroom.

  “I’ve got to bury the baby.”

  Huddie looked at me, too kind, or too scared, to argue.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  I wanted to go to Wadsworth Park, but I couldn’t leave Mrs. Hill. I wanted not to abandon anyone ever again. I wanted to be good.

  “Get a shovel from the garage. We can go into the woods behind the church.”

  “Behind the church?”

  Well, it wasn’t my church. I didn’t care. There were tall pines and soft ferns and no one there on a Thursday afternoon.

  “Get a shovel, okay?” All I wanted was the sweet clean smell of pine and a safe place for my baby.

  Well into the woods we dug a deep, fast hole, Huddie sweating through his shirt in the afternoon sun. We laid the jelly jar down, wrapped in plastic, wrapped again in tinfoil, and we covered it up and smoothed out the dirt.

  “We ought to tamp it down more. So it’s solid,” he said, not looking at me. And we stamped on it with our sneakers and threw pine boughs and decomposing leaves over the space.

  When Mrs. Hill woke up, I was sleeping on the couch, my feet in Huddie’s lap. He wouldn’t leave, even though he had other deliveries to make.

  Mrs. Hill, who couldn’t remember the day of the week or whether or not she’d eaten, looked at my face, at the sheets of newspaper I’d put under me to protect her ugly blue brocade couch, at Huddie’s hand on my leg, and knew.

  “That you, Horace Lester? You delivered my groceries already, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Huddie said, not moving.

  I don’t think my mother knew Huddie existed. Huddie’s father knew there was someone, but he didn’t know it was me. Huddie delivered to Mrs. Hill once a week, but I didn’t think Mrs. Hill had ever caught a glimpse of us together. I was the one who was blind, thinking we were invisible. Huddie and I sat there, watching our fates juggled by a crabby old lady with bad eyesight and severe self-righteousness.

  The doorbell rang, and I could hear Mr. Lester’s rough voice calling for Mrs. Hill. She shuffled off to the door and he bowled in past her, his round face hard and black, his leather apron shiny and tight over his big chest.

  “Horace, you are planning on finishing your deliveries, aren’t you? I’ve been looking for you for the last hour. Miz Hill, do you need any more of Horace?”

  “No, Gus, I don’t. I do appreciate his coming by and all. It’s a big help.”

  Huddie had taken his hand off my leg at the sound of his father’s voice, and I had thought of jumping up, but we stayed on the couch, frozen, committed. I wondered if we were all going to pretend I wasn’t there. Mr. Lester’s eyes were red pin dots in his black, pitted face, and I wondered how anyone so butt-end ugly could have produced someone as perfectly formed as Huddie.

  “You know Elizabeth Taube, the girl that helps me out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, don’t you?” Mrs. Hill sounded like my mother at a bridge party, gracious and wary and ready.

  “No,” said Mr. Lester, clearly knowing, right then, who I was. “Sorry to have barged in, but I do need my boy back at the store. Horace?”

  Huddie rose like a six-foot puppet, and I saw Mr. Lester’s big hands come down on his shoulders. I winc
ed, and Huddie made two fists and put them in his pockets.

  “Say good-bye,” whispered Mrs. Hill.

  “What for? He didn’t even say hello to me.” I was not showing off my good manners for Mr. Lester.

  “To Horace, say good-bye to Horace.”

  “Good-bye,” I called out in confusion, and I saw the gold-brown tips of his fingers waving, his left thumb and forefinger forming the letter L, for Love, for Liz, as he walked beneath the kitchen window, picking up his bike. I knew he’d heard me.

  Mrs. Hill fell into her recliner as I sank back on the couch, keeping my muddy sneakers propped up on more newspaper. She looked at the clock and picked up the phone. I was amazed to hear her tell my mother that I seemed a little unwell, that I was welcome to spend the night, and that she would enjoy my company. Her voice was smooth and bright and almost accentless, and I wondered how she turned it on and off.

  Mrs. Hill shut her eyes.

  “I said say good-bye because he’ll be going away. Gus has family in Alabama. You see Horace again this year, pigs’ll be flyin’.”

  Mrs. Hill couldn’t palm-read worth a damn, and her predictions about the weather were completely cockeyed, but she was right about this. I didn’t see Huddie again for seven years.

  PART TWO