If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go

by Judy Chicurel

  Ginger shrugged tiredly. “About an hour. Doc said it was like dropping kittens, and I told you what the nurse said, the bitch.”

  “So the labor took about an hour, and now you’re here—let’s make it two hours,” Liz said, checking her watch.

  “Yeah, about that,” Ginger said, sinking back against the pillows, her eyes closed.

  “And you come around, bugging her about mistakes?” Liz asked the woman. “What were you, waiting outside the delivery room?”

  The woman flushed over her stiff mouth up to her veiled eyes, but she still didn’t move off the bed. “My organization wants to help girls like—er—what did you say your name was?” She riffled through the papers she was holding, frowning, impatient.

  “You want to help her so much, you don’t even know her name?” Nanny asked. “I think it’s time for you to hit the road, Jackie.”

  “I don’t think—” the woman started, but we moved in on her, practically crushing her off the bed as we sat down.

  “Right. Don’t think,” Liz said. “Just make like an egg and beat it. Before we beat you.”

  In a flash, the woman was off the bed and out the door.

  “Thanks,” Ginger said, opening her eyes. “I thought she’d never leave. I mean, I told her I was giving the kid up, what more does she want?”

  “Screw her,” Liz said, lighting a cigarette. She handed it to Ginger. “How you feeling?”

  “You want anything, Ginge?” Nanny asked gently. “Something to eat? A Tab, maybe?”

  “Here’s some water,” I said, pouring from the pitcher on the side table into a plastic cup. I held it close to Ginger’s lips while she sipped, and put my other arm around her. She leaned against me. “Thanks,” she whispered, and closed her eyes again.

  On the way out of the hospital, we stopped to see the baby. He was in a glass cubicle, a big baby boy, fast asleep, like his mother had been when we left her.

  “He’s a bruiser,” Nanny said, peering through the glass. “You think he looks like anyone we know?”

  “He was just born, for chrissake,” Liz said. “They don’t look like anybody then, and the eyes change color after a few weeks.”

  Rumor had it that Allie D’Amore was the father; he and Ginger had been together on and off since eighth grade. But after they’d broken up the last time, she started hanging out with a lot of guys, and Allie wouldn’t even look at her when she came around Comanche Street, barefoot, wearing a man’s oversized white tee shirt that strained against her belly. Then he flipped out after doing some beat acid and now he was in a psych ward somewhere out on the Island and no one had seen him for weeks.

  “I’m glad she didn’t see him,” Nanny said. “The baby, I mean. She might have changed her mind and kept him.”

  “That might not have been such a bad thing,” Liz said. “Maybe then Miss Ginger would have to do something else besides get high and fuck the world.”

  “Don’t talk about her that way,” Nanny said, her hazel eyes huge with tears. She and Ginger had grown up together, when their families only came down to Elephant Beach for the summer and they used to buy cough syrup at Coffey’s Drugs and drink it to get high behind the old umbrella factory. Liz shrugged and lit a cigarette directly beneath the “No Smoking” sign in the hallway.

  Ginger told me she’d thought about keeping it, one night when we were going to the bathroom behind the dunes on the beach. That’s where all the girls had to go, since the public restrooms closed after six o’clock. We called it the Elephant Hole. She said she was afraid she’d be like her mother and her sisters, who’d all had babies out of wedlock. “It’s in the blood, Kate,” she said, zipping her jeans only halfway over her ballooning belly. “You can’t escape what’s in the blood.” I wondered if that was true. I thought of my own mother, the one who’d given me up for adoption. Did she decide one night, while zipping up her jeans at an Elephant Hole of her own? Had she been like Ginger, who never stopped getting high, or smoking, or any of the things you hear expectant mothers shouldn’t do? Though she did drink a lot of chocolate malteds at the counter at Eddy’s. “Good for the baby,” she’d say, patting her stomach, while Desi shook his head, ringing up the cash register.

  The ride home was quieter. I was sitting in the backseat, smoking, listening to Rod Stewart belt out “Maggie May” on the radio, thinking about Luke. Conor said he was still hanging out in his bedroom, taking walks late at night, sitting up smoking when he should have been sleeping. Conor said he was quiet, still, more quiet than before he went away. Even when Ray Mackey, his best friend, came over to see him. “It was way weird, man,” Conor said. “I mean, Luke and Ray were like brothers, tighter than him and me, being the same age and all. I could tell Ray was, like, hurt, man. He pulled me aside after, asked me if Luke was like this with everyone since he got back.”

  I thought about Luke sitting by his window, staring out at the ocean, as if he was seeing new worlds across the water. I wanted him in this world. I wanted him in Elephant Beach, living with me in one of the bungalows that lined Comanche Street. I thought about standing in front of our bungalow, waiting for him to come home at night, rocking our daughter in the misty twilight until she slept. She would have eyes like mine and Luke’s, and honey-colored hair as silky fine as beach grass when it first starts growing, slender stalks that bend slightly in the wind. She would look like the best of us and grow up laughing. Her laugh would sound like silver bells when we lifted her in and out of the shallow waves at the shoreline.

  • • •

  Maggie Mayhew was having her baby at last. There would be no interference of relatives or hospitals where everything was white and sterile. Beth Fagan, Maggie’s best friend, was the midwife; she’d just completed her first year of nursing school. If the baby was a girl, they were naming it Joni; if it was a boy, Donovan.

  We were all crowded in front of the bungalow, inside the chain-link fence, where we could see the glow of white candles through the windows. It was after supper but still light out and everyone was milling around. It was what we did every night, but now there was a purpose. I searched the crowd of faces for Luke’s, but he wasn’t there.

  Inside the bungalow, Maggie let out a scream. “What are they, beating her with chains in there?” Mr. Connelly called over the fence. He was sitting on his front steps, drinking a Budweiser. You couldn’t hide anything on Comanche Street; the houses were so close together, the neighbors could hear every cough, every moan during the night. They often ended up in one another’s dreams by mistake.

  “Really, man,” Mitch said. “I mean, giving birth’s a trip all right, but it’s not like she’s in a fucking rice paddy in the middle of the Mekong Delta, for chrissake.”

  “Yeah, like you’d know what giving birth is like,” Liz said.

  Nanny banged out of the bungalow, slamming the screen door behind her. “Fuck it, I’m calling Aunt Francie,” she said, heading to the pay phone by the entrance to the beach.

  “I feel like we should go to church, light a candle,” Liz said.

  “Fuck that,” Billy Mackey said. He lit a match and held it high. “Here’s our church, man. Right here. It’s the church of life, man! Light your matches. Lift your matches to the sky for the baby.” He was so stoned his eyes looked like they were about to fall out of his face.

  Everyone took it up. It was a clear night, no wind coming off the ocean. The sunset fell in ribbons across the sky. Soon the air was filled with matchsticks and lighters; when the matches went out, we lit others to take their place. People held cigarettes to the sky until they glowed down to stubs.

  “It’s like a Dead concert, man,” Timmy Jones said, ecstatic. He was a real Dead Head and followed them around the country, hitchhiking to wherever they were playing.

  “No, man,” Billy said solemnly. “It’s like the concert of life.”

  Mrs. Connelly came out of h
er bungalow next door with a large plastic bag in her hand. She looked over at us, and then shook her head pityingly. “Assholes,” she said. She put the bag in the trash can near the fence, waddled back inside and slammed the door behind her.

  We heard the sirens come screaming up the street. Aunt Francie pulled up behind the ambulance in her silver Toyota. She didn’t look at us as she ran into the house behind the ambulance crew. Nanny followed her inside.

  Minutes later, everyone emerged. The medics carried Maggie on a stretcher, her eyes closed. Matty and Beth were on either side of her, and Beth was leaning down, whispering. Nanny came behind them, shaking her head. “No show, yet,” she said. Raven and Cha-Cha followed, with Aunt Francie bringing up the rear, beating them around their heads and shoulders with her handbag. “You were breathing with her?” she screamed, swatting at Raven. “What the hell were you going to do if she stopped breathing, stop with her?” She marched to the ambulance and jumped in back with Maggie, then looked out at her sons one last time, shaking her head. “If youse had two brains, you’d both be half-wits,” she said. The medic closed the doors and the ambulance raced up the block.

  Everyone on Comanche Street applauded as the ambulance pulled away. Once it turned the corner, we all started drifting toward the lounge at The Starlight Hotel. I thought of Maggie, so sure she would have a daughter. I thought about Luke, staring out his bedroom window, looking sad enough to cry. You had to be prepared for anything in this life. I wanted him to stay here, but if he couldn’t, then I would go with him. Maybe we would live in the mountains for a while. Maybe our baby would be born in the mountains. The beach had been my life, but I was growing tired of Comanche Street, the drinking, the drugs, everyone falling asleep in the sand with lit cigarettes between their fingers. Waiting for something to happen, night after night.

  I decided that if he wanted to, Luke and I would leave Elephant Beach together. We would find a cabin at the foot of a mountain and at night we would sit by the firelight. Our daughter would lie at our feet, swaddled in a brightly colored quilt, and the sound of her laughter would run over us like a clear, bright stream.

  THREE

  sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll

  On those summer nights, after I finished my shift at the A&P and showered, I would look in the bathroom mirror and it seemed to me that my eyes had never been brighter, my hair never shinier, my tan never more even. My peasant shirts hung perfectly off my shoulders and my jeans settled on my hips as though they lived there. Even my teeth seemed straighter. I looked exactly as I had always wanted to look, and sometimes I’d close my eyes and feel so good about it I knew I could never tell anyone because they’d think I was too crazy to live.

  On those nights, while I was getting ready to walk down to Comanche Street, my mother would lean against the doorjamb of the bathroom, watching me put on my mascara, smelling my perfume. Her eyes would narrow and her lips would purse into a thin, pinched line. I wouldn’t say anything, but my hands would start shaking a little, so that the mascara brush would slip and smear my eyelid closer to the brow. I’d reach across the sink to tear off a piece of toilet paper, dab it with cold water, and wipe my eyelid until the black stain disappeared. Then I’d steady my hand so that the brush washed lightly over my lashes, careful not to leave clumps.

  “Again?” my mother would say from the doorway. And then we were off. She always started out as though trying to be reasonable, but once I heard the sharpness edging into her voice, I moved faster and sometimes I wasn’t really listening at all and other times I ran out of the house with her voice chasing me, like a wayward knife, stopping short of the front door only so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. What she said was never the same yet always the same, usually about hanging around street corners, how she’d driven past Comanche Street on her way home from Top Banana, the discount vegetable store, and saw them all standing in front of Eddy’s, my God that hair! Those clothes! They looked like a bunch of circus freaks. No wonder I had failed Regents geometry and now look, I’d gotten accepted only to Carver Community College, how did I expect to get up in the world? Here we lived on a tree-lined street with a lawn instead of farther down the Trunk where there was only sky and concrete and people living lives that were going nowhere. By the end of June, she was lamenting the prom, or the fact that I hadn’t had one. “I always wanted to have a daughter,” she said, “so that on prom night I could watch her walking down the stairs to meet her date and put on her corsage and then wait up so that when she came home, we could have tea together and she’d tell me all about it.” But we didn’t have a staircase, our house was all on one level, and the senior class at Elephant Beach High School had voted not to have a prom; we’d voted instead to have a camping trip at Tully State Park, but in the end nobody signed up because there would be too many chaperones and mosquitoes.

  On the Friday night that Luke was finally supposed to come out to the lounge at The Starlight Hotel, my mother never said a word. She just kept watching me until I turned out the light in the bathroom and brushed past her on my way to the front door, mumbling good-bye, waiting for her to say something, to start screaming that I was wasting time, why couldn’t I just give myself a chance, that these years would never come back, why couldn’t I understand that? It was always hard to tell with my mother. When she wasn’t yelling at me about something, I longed for her touch, for the way she would sit on my bed some nights, holding my hand, talking in the darkness as though we were the closest of friends; telling me how badly she’d wanted a daughter, how thrilled she was when they received the call from the adoption agency, how the day they’d brought me home from St. Joseph’s had been the happiest day of her life. At those times, I thought she loved me more than anyone, even my father and brother. But then it would start all over again, that hectic, hazardous edge in her voice that made my throat tighten, that had me feeling so relieved when I shut the door behind me and walked out into the night, where anything could happen.

  On that Thursday night, though, when I reached the door, I heard only silence behind me. My brother was out playing stickball with the neighborhood boys and my father was still at work. I turned back and saw my mother standing in the archway of our living room, watching me leave. Her eyes were smudged with sadness. “You look so pretty,” was all she said, and then she turned away, as if the sight of me was more than she could bear.

  • • •

  It was barely July, still the earliest thrush of summer, and ever since graduation, hands had been coming at me like a swarm of three-headed flies; arms hooking around me, tugging at the fringes of my suede belt, trying to lure me for a walk on the beach, or to sit on the abandoned lifeguard chair, where everyone went to ball. Boys I’d gone to school with, known forever, groping, sniffing, sliding around me, everyone high on acid or THC, thinking I was just as stoned as they were and it would be easy. Another time, I might have been more moved by the attention, because it had taken me so long to be accepted, not having gone to St. Timothy’s Grammar like everyone else and my father wasn’t a cop or a carpenter or a fireman; he wore a suit and tie to work and had gone to college. It had taken ages for me to belong, until shouts of greeting would go up when I approached Comanche Street, until I’d walk into Eddy’s and Desi would point to me and say, “Wait here, Liz and them went up to Coffey’s Drugs and then they’re picking you up to go to the church bazaar.” At night, when I walked down the block of close-knit bungalows, past freckle-faced children playing stickball in the street and mothers standing inside their chain-link fences smoking after-dishes cigarettes, and men sitting on their stoops, scratching, belching, watching the sunset, at the end of the block I’d see the crowd milling around the entrance to the beach, hear the catcalls, the dogs barking, see ten-speeds flying, surfboards leaning against the seawall, cigarettes glowing like fireflies in the dusky heat, and my heart would beat harder, faster inside me, and I’d think to myself: These are my people.

  But thi
s summer, I didn’t care about any of those boys, even the older ones who tried paying for my egg creams at Eddy’s and buying me whiskey sours at the lounge at The Starlight Hotel. All that mattered was that Luke was home, and after years of watching him from street corners and car windows he was finally going to come to me, and I wanted to be alert, awake when it happened. After all these years of silent worship, I wanted to be ready.

  On the way, walking down to Comanche Street, I passed the Brennans’ house, where my best friend, Marcel, used to live. Now she was living up on Cape Cod with her husband, James, trying to figure out if she still loved him. I thought about stopping in briefly, asking Claudine, her mother, for a quick reading; nothing dramatic, just a seven-card shuffle, where I’d ask a question, and then Claudine would lay the cards in a semicircle on the kitchen table and tell me what I could expect when I finally saw Luke that night. But there really wasn’t any such thing as a quick visit to the Brennans’, even with Marcel gone, and I was supposed to pick Nanny up at her house by seven o’clock and it was already ten minutes after. So I hurried past, hoping Claudine hadn’t been looking out the window and seen me hesitate. Part of me didn’t want to know what the cards had to say. Now that Luke was back for real, it was up to me to find my fortune.

  • • •

  Nanny signaled me to step outside. We were in the lounge at The Starlight Hotel and I didn’t want to step outside, because Luke was finally here and I wanted to be wherever he was. When he walked into the lounge with Ray and Raven and Cha-Cha, it was like he was some kind of celebrity. “El Exigente,” Billy said, bowing in front of him, handing him a cold one. Christa Cutler, another of Nanny’s city cousins who no one liked because she thought who the hell she was, shimmied over and threw her arms around Luke, kissed him on the lips.

  Luke’s honey-colored hair was longer, shaggier, cut ragged across his forehead. His eyes looked tired and he was thinner than before he’d gone away and had lost his surfing muscles. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt over a white tee shirt and faded jeans and flip-flops. He was wearing what pretty much everyone wore but he looked more beautiful than anyone else. I was wondering whether I should go over and throw my arms around him and kiss him longer than Christa had. I was watching myself in my mind’s eye, wondering if my breath smelled good enough to do it. But right then Nanny came over and tugged at my arm and said, “Katie, man, come on, come out to the alley with me. I have to talk to you. I need to talk to you.”