Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  “Yes,” said the nurse. “You know the drill.”

  Dr. Brauner came into the room, looking like a banker: gray suit, white shirt, silver cuff links, spit-shined shoes. He had apparently just come in from the street. His hair was perfect. “Hello,” he said to Lily. “Und how do vee feel this morning?”

  “We feel fine,” Lily said.

  He was looking at her chart, along with the nurse. “Vee are ztill gaining a little too much veight.”

  “We’re not eating,” Lily said.

  He handed the chart back to the nurse. “I vill be back shortly.”

  When he was gone the nurse asked her to finish removing her clothing. Lily looked at the other woman’s name tag and saw that she was a medical student from the university hospital. “You’re going to be a doctor,” she said.

  The other woman smiled at her as if to say, “Evidently.” But she didn’t speak. She nodded, and went back to looking at the paperwork.

  “I really haven’t broken the diet. I don’t know where the extra weight is coming from.”

  “I think it’s coming from a baby,” said the other. “Then there’s no reason for him to scold me, is there.”

  4

  AFTER THE EXAMINATION, the medical student went out to get Tyler, while Dr. Brauner began to set up the sonogram. Tyler came into the room looking sheepish and ill at ease, and the doctor shook his hand, turning his back on Lily to do it. For an interval she saw just the broad back in the white coat, and heard the two men talking—Brauner congratulating the father and talking about all the babies he had brought into the world, and Tyler making sounds of polite appreciation. When they faced her, she felt exposed, though she had a sheet covering her legs. Her belly was uncovered, and the medical student had begun spreading the cold jellylike substance on it. Tyler stared for a second, then turned his attention to the little television screen. Dr. Brauner moved the flat-headed instrument along Lily’s belly until the image of the dark little chamber came clear in the screen, with its impossibly folded, faintly human shape.

  “Sings look very healthy,” Dr. Brauner said. He pointed out the hands and the head and the little eyes. “Very good.”

  “Jesus,” Tyler said, low. “God.”

  “If you find zis beautiful, you are probably not far from wrong,” said the doctor with a small, dry laugh.

  Outside in the heat, waiting for the elevator to take them to the roof, Tyler said, “Lily—” and then stopped.

  She turned to him. “What is it?”

  “That—that was just—that was strange. Actually seeing the—seeing the baby like that.”

  A moment later, he said, “Do you want to go through with this Lamaze thing?”

  “A part of me does, sure. But I’ll skip it now if you want to. It’s such a muggy day.”

  The elevator opened and they stepped in. “No,” he said. “We’d better go. It’ll just get back to everybody if we don’t.”

  “So?”

  He pushed the button for their floor and stepped back, leaning against the side and not looking at her. “I don’t know. We should go.”

  “But really,” she said. “So what if it gets back?”

  “I don’t want to hurt feelings.”

  “It’ll hurt feelings?”

  He made no answer. The elevator opened on a blast of heat, and they went out into the blinding light of noon, through the lines of heat rising from the black surface. The car was momentarily unusable, too hot to sit in. He started it and then stepped out and left it running, with the air conditioner on full blast.

  “Honey,” she said, “let’s skip the Lamaze and go somewhere and get an ice-cream sundae. I don’t have to go back to see Herr Himmler for two weeks.”

  His expression was faintly hangdog. It annoyed her unreasonably. “We should go to the meeting. It’s just a meeting,” he said.

  “Let’s not and say we did. If it gets back to the authorities, we’ll deal with it then.”

  He said nothing else. He looked out over the roofs of Oxford, hands in his pockets. The muscles of his jaw clenched, and then relaxed. He moved to the driver’s-side door of the car, got in behind the wheel, and waited for her. It took her some effort to get seated, and to get the door closed. The leather was still too hot to touch; it burned her legs, and she sat around and tried to lift them. For a few moments she was too busy trying to adjust herself out of discomfort to pay much attention to him, and it took a while to realize that he had spoken.

  “I didn’t hear you,” she said.

  He waited a beat. Then: “When was the last time you called home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well—maybe this—maybe my family means more to me than yours does to you, but my mother made this appointment for us and I think we should keep it.”

  “All right.” She gazed at him.

  “Well,” he said. “You made that sarcastic remark about the authorities.”

  “I was teasing. It was a joke. We’ll go to the fucking Lamaze class.”

  They went down Old Taylor Road, and at the sharp right curve where the Faulkner house was, the tires squealed. Several people standing out in the sun, in the yard, tourists, turned to stare after the speeding car.

  5

  THE CLASS was meeting in a little white house down from Old Taylor Grocery, which was a restaurant. The house was set back off the road under a tall oak draped in kudzu. The oak provided cool shade. They crossed the root-broken ground to the sidewalk. He put a hand on her arm, and she put her head on his shoulder. “Forgive me?” she said.

  “Nothing to forgive,” he told her.

  The windows of the little house were curtained, the shades half drawn, the whole facade suggesting a countenance with lidded eyes. Inside, a small round woman with features that made Lily think of those tiny heavy-furred, snub-nosed dogs, greeted them. She was the leader, and said her name, which Lily didn’t catch, and had to ask for again. She said it again, but then a small dog, exactly like the ones Lily had thought of upon first seeing the woman, barked from the hallway, and once more the name was lost. Lily nodded as if she’d heard, and walked with Tyler holding her arm into the living room, preceded by the dog. As they stood in the room, the dog jumped at them and continued to bark.

  “Nelly! Down!” the woman said, apologizing and smiling with that snub-nosed face, her eyes disappearing into the flesh around them, two small arcs of mascara. It came to Lily that she now knew the dog’s name, but not the woman’s. There were two other couples in the room, seated on blankets that had been spread out on the floor. The sofa and coffee table had been moved aside. Lily realized, the instant the woman asked her about it, that she had forgotten to bring a blanket with her.

  “We have extra blankets,” the woman said, turning in a tight, confused circle, one hand up to her head. “Now let me see.” She hurried out of the room and down the corridor. The other couples sat staring.

  Tyler said, “Hello.”

  The responses came back in a confusion of voices. The other men were both older than Tyler. One wore a waxed handlebar mustache that appeared false, as if it were attached by some glue above his lips. He had a sallow, pitted face and a wattle below his chin. He looked fifty. The other appeared rather ordinary in comparison, in his early forties perhaps, with large gray eyes and thinning hair, wearing wire-frame glasses and a white shirt with a pen holder in the pocket. He offered his hand to Tyler and said his name was Marty. The man with the mustache introduced himself by his last name: “Johnson.” He took Tyler’s hand and Lily saw the cords of muscle in his forearms, under thick blond hair. He sat back down and regarded her, looking directly at her middle as though she were goods or equipment. It made her feel naked. His wife was a willowy dark-haired woman with black eyes and a heart-shaped face, no more than thirty years old. She stared, too.

  The other man was speaking to Tyler about this being his fourth time. This man’s wife was very dark-skinned, with olive-shaped eyes, and when she spoke it wa
s with an indeterminate accent. Lily thought she must be from some tropical country, but then as the blanket was brought and Tyler spread it out, she heard this woman tell Johnson’s thin wife that she was from Alaska. Johnson’s wife wore a sweatshirt with an arrow pointing to the bulge where her baby was. She folded her thin arms over this bulge, and talked about how she had always wanted to go to Alaska to live among the Eskimos.

  “Really,” said Marty’s wife, without much interest.

  At last they were all seated, and the woman with the snub nose introduced herself again. Lois. “Let’s just go around the room and introduce ourselves.”

  Johnson spoke first, after clearing his throat to make clear his intention to begin. “We’re here because Janice dragged me here.” He indicated his wife. “This is Janice.”

  She laughed, clearly working at appreciating his attempt to be witty. Gazing at him, she said her name again, then nodded at him and said, “This is Tommy.”

  “I go by my last name,” Johnson said. “Preceded by Mister.” He went on to say, with a strange, significant glance at their hostess that while they had been waiting for the class to begin, they had gotten onto the subject of politics. In the tone of someone conducting a meeting, he announced that he had worked very hard for the election of Michael Dukakis. He had been quite disappointed in the election of somebody like George Bush to the lofty office of president, and he knew he did not look like a person who would vote Democratic, but there it was.

  “Oh, Tommy,” said his wife, “you don’t have to tell everybody our business.”

  “Well, we were talking about it, for God’s sake. Don’t correct me all the time.”

  “Well,” Lois said. “So you’re Tommy Johnson, and you’re Janice. Is this your first time doing Lamaze?”

  “If you mean is this my first child, it’s the first one I know about.” Johnson looked at the others with a smug gleam, evidently waiting for them to appreciate the humor.

  “This is our fourth,” Marty quickly reiterated. Then he indicated his wife. “And this is my wife, Lucinda. I guess we should say whether or not we voted Democratic last fall.”

  “Hello, everyone,” Lucinda said. “In case you’re wondering about it, we did. Nobody in my family’s ever voted Republican.”

  “Lucinda,” Johnson said, after clearing his throat again, “are you an Eskimo?”

  She seemed mildly embarrassed and confused. “My mother’s Italian and my father’s Irish.”

  “So you’re not an Eskimo.” He pronounced it Es-kee-mo, with an emphasis on the second syllable. “You said Italian-Irish. I just wanted to know if being from Alaska and all, if you’re Eskimo. You have some kind of accent.”

  “No,” she said. “Not Eskimo. My mother’s Italian. I speak both languages.”

  “Really, well, that’s a wonderful advantage,” said Lois. “And now let’s move to our next couple.”

  Tyler said his name and Lily’s. Johnson stared at Lily again, as did his wife.

  “And is this your first?” asked Lois.

  “Our first. Yes.”

  “And what brings you to us?”

  “A friend of my mother recommended you,” Tyler said.

  “Has she used the Lamaze method?”

  “I wouldn’t know, actually. My mother’s Millicent Galatierre.”

  “Oh, of course. Forgive me, I should’ve remembered.” She turned to Lily. “And you’re the young writer whose father is a famous actor.”

  “Well,” Lily said. “Not exactly, no.” She could not quite take it in that Millicent had described her in this way. And she could tell from the look on Tyler’s face that it was rather a surprise to him as well.

  “No?” Lois said. “But, I—which part of that is a no?”

  “I bet all of it,” said Johnson, nudging his wife roughly and then laughing to himself. There was something almost prissy about the laugh, coming from the pit of his throat and kept in by the backs of the four fingers of his right hand.

  “All of it is a no,” Lily said. “Right. That’s exactly right. I’m probably not a writer, and my father is not famous. He was in a couple of movies. Years ago.”

  The others showed interest now. Johnson’s wife leaned forward slightly and asked what the titles were, and Marty’s wife asked Tyler if Lily would sign an autograph.

  Johnson cleared his throat again and said, “So what is this Lamaze going to be then?”

  But the others hadn’t heard him. Tyler was trying to explain that Lily’s father was a professional actor with a steady job at a professional theater in Washington. Lois had begun to rummage around in a box of supplies she kept within reach. She pulled out a baby doll, a small towel, a book, and a plastic model, side view, of the uterus and the birth canal. “Well,” she said. “I do think we should get started.”

  “I think we should all talk about what we do,” Johnson said. “Get to know each other a little bit.” His voice rose on this last, carrying with it an insistence that it be heard. The others stopped. “We don’t know anything about each other yet. For instance, talking about authors, I happen to be an author. Everybody’s making a fuss over Miss—I didn’t catch your name, there, girlie.”

  Lily couldn’t bring herself to utter a sound.

  “Her name’s Lily,” said Lois.

  “Lily,” said Johnson, “that’s right.” It was as if he had sought the name in a lesson he was teaching and now that the name had been spoken, he was satisfied. “You’ve been getting all excited over Lily for being what I’d call an incipient author, and here I am a published author.”

  “No kidding,” Marty’s wife said.

  Johnson sat there nodding with outsized gratification. “Published two books.”

  “He has,” said his young wife.

  “What are they?” Tyler asked him.

  “They’re, what you call it, history books.”

  “What history?”

  Johnson actually affected a yawn. “I used to be a member of the Klan. That’s Klan spelled with a K.”

  “Who published these books?” Marty’s wife asked, with an edge of a challenge in her voice.

  “I did,” Johnson said.

  “So they’re privately published,” said Lily.

  “It was a regular New York publisher seeking authors,” Johnson’s wife said. “I got it out of a magazine.”

  “I did some bad things when I was young,” Johnson told them importantly, folding his arms and nodding as if to accept their appreciation of the change he had made in himself.

  Lily began to laugh. It rose up in her like a coughing spell, and she couldn’t keep it down. She put her hands over her face and pretended to be coughing, but when she looked through her fingers at Johnson, she saw anger. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

  “Maybe you got a problem with meeting a real author. Have you ever published anything?”

  “No,” Lily said, “I haven’t. Not a scrap.”

  “Well, then,” said Janice. “What makes you call yourself an author?”

  “I—I don’t.” Lily couldn’t stop laughing. It worked its way up from the narrow column inside her body, and wouldn’t be quelled by anything. She held her hands over her mouth and it forced its way out, a helpless giggling. And looking at Johnson and his wife, feeling their eyes on her when she was not looking at them, only made it worse.

  “I think we should move on to talk about the class now,” Lois nervously said.

  “I don’t know if I want to be in a class with somebody like that,” said Janice, indicating Lily.

  “I can’t—can’t—oh—can’t help it,” Lily said. “I don’t mean—a-any—anything by it, really.”

  Tyler said, “She gets like that. It’s the pregnancy.” Then he, too, began to laugh.

  “What the hell,” Johnson said. “Couple of hyenas or something.”

  “Really,” said Tyler. “I’m—I’m s-sure it’s got nothing—nothing to do with you at all—not at all.”


  “Can’t we all please get down to talking about the class?” Marty said, looking from one to the other of them.

  But Lily was unable to curb her hysteria, and it became dizzying, so that she had to excuse herself and ask where the bathroom was. She made her way out of the room, and closed the bathroom door behind herself, then stood in that heavily perfume-scented space, still laughing. Finally she ran water, and, filling her hands, laved it over her face. Her mascara was coming down her cheeks, and she worked to get it off. The fact that she was wearing it at all was a concession to Sheri. Tyler knocked at the door. “Are you all right?” and she heard the mirth still in his voice. She couldn’t wait to get outside and be alone with him.

  After another minute, she opened the door and padded with him to the small living room. The others were all staring. Without sitting down on the blanket, she informed them that she wished to go home. She kept her eyes averted from Mr. Johnson and his mustache. “I have a headache,” she said. “I’m so sorry I disrupted everything.” Tyler took her arm and the two of them went together out into the end-of-summer heat, to the car. “My God,” she said, laughing hysterically again, “do you—do you b-believe that?”

  They got into the car and he started it, turned and backed out of the driveway, the tires making that small squealing sound on the asphalt, then gunned the engine as they pulled away.

  “It’s like a getaway car,” she said. “Perfect—my God. Step on it.”

  “That was embarrassing,” he said, still laughing. But there was something in his face. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

  She gained control of herself, and looked out at the passing countryside. She saw hills burned by the sun, a shade of combustible brown. Yet it was all steaming in the humidity. When she turned to him again he was still smiling, but there was that something shadowed in his eyes. “Me, too,” she told him. “God. That’s going to make a great story for dinner.”

  “Yes, but—now what’ll we do about the class?”