They take a wax impression that very day. Then he numbs her and extracts her aching back tooth. She makes an appointment for the rest of the back extractions, and one after that, in another month, for her front extractions and dentures. She signs the contract for her installment plan.
“I think you’ve made the right decision, Mrs. Anderson. This whole process will be done before your pregnancy is well along. One less thing to worry about. And by the way, congratulations.”
“Thank you.” How strange that he is the first person beside herself to know. Easier that he’s a stranger. If it doesn’t last, she’ll report later that it was all about nothing. “And you know what they say,” he adds.
“No, what, Doctor?”
“Gain a child, lose a tooth.” He laughs. “I think you should prepare for a big family.”
***
They double-park outside Vera’s downtown apartment to collect her for a Sunday drive to Celia and Matt’s farm. Carl buzzes her intercom outside, and a couple of minutes later she emerges, letting herself into the backseat.
“It’s a hot one!” she exclaims.
“Almost a record,” Kay says. “Anyway, you look cool.”
Vera is an impeccable dresser, and always in the latest store-bought goods. Today she wears a sleeveless blue gingham shirtwaist, a straw sunhat, and carries a woven wicker purse. While Ernie built his trucking business, she worked in various department stores, rising to managerial positions. Now she doesn’t have to work, but has a part-time sales position at Meier & Frank, just to give herself something to do, she says.
“You, too,” Vera says, craning forward to see over the backseat. “Is that a new skirt? What a pretty print.”
“What’s new, sis?” Carl asks, steering the car across the lanes one-handed, his other dangling a cigarette out the window. They have all the windows down because of the hot day.
“Is this too much air on you back there?” Kay asks.
“No, it feels good. Nothing new. I took on more hours last week because they were short-handed and the store is air-conditioned. I wanted to live there.”
“Today’s a good day to be in country,” Kay says.
“Oh, I’m telling you. These sidewalks are baking downtown.”
“You should get yourself one of those window units for your apartment,” Carl says. “They’ve come way down in price.”
“That’s a thought.”
“Let me know. I can pick it up for you and put it in.”
Kay wonders how it would feel to buy anything you want, just like that, no calculating what’s left in the monthly budget or what big expenses lie ahead. When Ernie was alive, he and Vera never bothered with a house, just rented an apartment in whatever city they lived in—Detroit, then Indianapolis—but always, according to photos Kay had seen, a modern, spacious one. No children for some reason; Kay never felt she could pry and ask why. The two of them always had wonderful clothes and a new car. And now if Vera wants something like an air conditioner, presto.
They hum over the Hawthorne Bridge to the east side and out toward Clackamas. Carl and Vera trade family news—Matt’s latest lung X-ray, summer plans of the teenage nieces and nephews—and Kay looks out the window, contributing a concerned or appreciative murmur here and there. They’re not looking for her to join in. Gradually storefronts give way to open spaces—small farming plots and pastures where dairy cows graze. Celia and Matt live where Carl’s parents had bought land after old Chris got out of mining. Kay is not unfamiliar with farming life; her aunt Lena married a farmer with a large parcel of acreage in Illinois. But she’s come to understand what even a small piece of land means to Carl’s family—the parents having come over from Finland, the men in the family making their start in copper or coal mines. It was their life dream to own a little piece of America and grow whatever they wanted on it.
Kay never knew Carl’s mother, but she knew her father-in-law for a couple of years before he died. He had a bushy moustache and spoke little English but seemed to approve of her. After Celia and Matt bought the farm from him, he took turns living with all the children, preferring Carl and Kay’s downtown apartment because it was a walk from the waterfront bars. More than once Carl had to go scoop him up off Skid Row and haul him home to the couch. Looking back, Kay doesn’t know how she stayed so patient with it all, perhaps because he was such a novel contrast to her minister father. In her father’s orbit, she was always the dark moon, the girl whom a man in the congregation once pronounced “unnatural,” after she was caught singing a popular song into the microphone of her hand for the entertainment of her cousins in the church parking lot. But she felt old Chris’s admiration for her neat housekeeping and trim appearance, and knew that he cared not a fig for her soul. When she refilled his coffee cup he’d level his hand in the air and say, “Dosh ’nuff,” giving her a little wink, as if they shared some secret. She had the feeling that if she weren’t his daughter-in-law he’d also be giving her a pat on the rump. But even that—if he ever did—she’d simply swat away with a finger scold. She understood that he thought Carl had made a catch, and that he appreciated her as a bringer of order and feminine influence. He found no faults and instead appeared hangdog before her in the morning, abashed at his own weakness. She held nothing against him.
She also liked his sober side, the essence of the man she guessed he’d been. He borrowed her typewriter and sat at her kitchen table with his reading glasses perched on his nose, tapping out two-fingered columns for the Finnish Socialist papers in Duluth and Astoria, adding in the umlauts with pencil. Carl told her that he signed himself “Old Man Mulino,” after the hamlet his farm was in, so it wasn’t much of an alias if federal agents wanted to track him down. She wanted to tell him that she, too, was a writer of sorts—just for herself so far, just scribbles on tablets and ideas for stories and articles, the thought that she might bring in a little money on the side—but they had no language in common, and her ideas were aimed at women’s magazines, so she thought they’d be of little interest to him.
The roads to Celia and Matt’s narrow until finally they turn in at the mailbox to a single dirt lane. They roll windows up against the dust and Carl bumps along slowly. First there are hugs to exchange, and Kay’s cake to exclaim over, the brothers clapping each other on the shoulders though most of them have seen each other within the last two weeks. From here it looks as if they are—some dozen of them assembled—a big, happy family. And they are, her in-laws. She waits, almost counting down, for the English to slide into Finnish. For the glances during conversation to stop including her. For her sisters-in-law to start the kitchen work without assigning her a job, and when she asks for one, to watch their faces flash puzzlement as they wrest their tongues back to English—“Oh, no, you’ve made this beautiful cake! Have a seat outside and enjoy yourself.” Outside the men are talking politics already, shouting at one another as if they are arguing, when in fact they’re in fervent accord. On the drives home she used to make Carl tell her what transpired so that next time she had at least an inkling of the current outrage. He didn’t like to tell her much. It caused quarrels and coldness between them until finally he said one night in exasperation, “Don’t you see that it’s better not to know what we’re saying? Then you can tell them, ‘How should I know, they always talk in Finn!’”
“Who’s them?” she retorted. “Who in the hell are they?”
He always wanted to drop it, but she’d gotten so angry at being kept out that she began to force herself to pay attention to things that had always bored her. She started reading what they wrote in the paper about the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Carl she married was a Democrat and a Sheet Metal Local 16 man, but there was another Carl before that, and there were more to the activities of the family as a whole, and in their circles people had been interrogated, deported, blacklisted, jailed.
She grew to understand why it might be convenient to be left
out of their politics. Carl’s own nephew recently lost a job teaching high school in Washington State because he was a CPUSA sympathizer—a “fellow traveler”—who wouldn’t name names. So it was just as well to be able to claim ignorance. That was one thing. But it was another to be excluded from women’s talk about recipes and berry crops and sewing projects.
Kay, told to go enjoy herself, meaning not to trouble them with her English-only ears, wanders down to Milk Creek, picking her way around the rocks and young birches on the banks. She sits for a while on a boulder, watching the bullet streaks of small trout. Just after they were married, Carl would take these walks with her, ignoring the teasing of his brothers when he preferred being with her to their circle of politics and beer. He’d drop a line in the water and she’d pack the trout he caught in wet newspaper, and they’d stroll back to present them to Celia.
After a while, Kay leaves her boulder and walks back past the small fields with their neat rows of beans, spent strawberry plants, and the blueberries with netting over them to keep the birds off. She pauses to eat a few late-ripening raspberries off the bushes that have already been picked through. Sometimes she consciously pushes the length of these rambles until she knows they’ll be sitting down to the outside meal so she can startle them with her reappearance in the yard—solitary and aloof. Carl might have begun looking around for her, but the others will have forgotten she exists, and she wants them to reckon with her apartness when she comes back. She means to cause the beat of awkwardness, and hopes they will take some blame upon themselves, though she has begun to think they are too simple for that. She believes they care nothing about their relationship to her, content to absolve any responsibility they have toward it by labeling her “strange” or “standoffish.” She knows they knew Carl’s women before her, probably liked them more, and who can say if some of the sisters might even keep in touch with that Fanny woman, who lives in Portland. She’s gathered they had a spell of being angry with him for leaving Fanny the way he did and taking up with Kay. Since she’s buried the whole episode of his deceit while courting her, forbidden him to mention the ex-“wives” (common law, she reminds herself), she has no way of finding out.
She plucks some sweet grass to take into the barn for the cow. She pats its head, holding the grass while its rubbery mouth munches it up. After she placates the mother she turns her attention to the calf, scratching its neck and delighting in its infant features. At Aunt Lena’s farm, she and her cousins loved to loaf in the barn and trade confidences in the hayloft. Sometimes the girls would be called to the house to shell peas or shuck corn. In the kitchen, she’d find her mother, who would smooth her hair or give her a spatula to lick, and there would always be the weave of the women’s voices to take her in. All she wants is that simple feeling of belonging.
The calf is so sweet on its little stick legs. It looks at her with immense liquid brown eyes. You and I, she thinks. Here alone, happy like this. On other days, she’d escaped to the barn to have a cry. But today she is serene. This must be what a card player feels like with a winning hand. She is certainly pregnant: twelve weeks now, and Dr. Schirmer confirmed it. There is a child within her that she knows in a wordless, animal way is going to stay. Her body is changing daily. Dr. Schirmer gave her a book about what is to come that she keeps underneath the Bible in her nightstand. Everything is happening to her exactly as it describes and exactly on schedule. This knowledge grants her a power and superiority over all of them back in the yard. Even Carl doesn’t know yet, because she doesn’t want him to tell his family without her, or in Finnish, which would be the same as without her. Perhaps she will announce it today when they are all together, cutting her cake. It is her fact, her choice when to share it, and they have no choice but to be spectators. Her child will be their kin, so its mother, whether they want it or not, will be, too, a fact they will have to swallow. Like Vera, Celia never had children. They just never came, Celia said once, looking away. These two sisters, the ones Carl is closest to, must now take her in.
Next summer she will be occupied wherever she goes with her baby—diapering it, feeding it. She will graciously accept help; she will freely allow her relatives to hold her infant. She knows that whenever—he? She pictures a boy—cries, her baby will be happy in no arms but hers. I’ll take him back now, she’ll say calmly, and the sisters will be forced to hand him over. And Kay will finally feel her center, her belonging. Already she’s not lonely anymore. She doubts she will ever be lonely again.
***
On the first night with her new teeth, she wakes in the dark suffused with pain and the taste of blood and thinks, I’m losing it; the baby is leaving me. Then she wakes all the way and realizes that the pain and the blood are in her mouth. She was dreaming that she was climbing a stairway and at every landing, women were trying to thrust their babies into her arms. She kept pressing on, shaking her head, avoiding their gaze; the women were ugly and misshapen and she was afraid of them. She didn’t want their babies. She was going to climb to the top and find her own.
It’s too early to get up, only 4:30 by the nightstand clock with the green-glowing numbers. She’ll do her first saline rinse in another hour. She’s used to these from the back extractions a few weeks ago, used to her Cream of Wheat breakfasts and custard lunches and cream of tomato soup suppers. Now it’s almost all done, just another few days until she is at least superficially healed, and the raw sockets can take their time beneath the denture to fill into solid gum.
When the dentist inserted her new denture for the first time yesterday, she had immediately admired her numb new smile, and when she got home, she couldn’t stop checking her reflection in the mirror. She was without a doubt different; it definitely would become her to smile more now. When Carl got home and saw her, he kept looking, too, though the Novocaine was worn off by then and she felt less like smiling. The perfect regularity of her new teeth has taken the last vestige of Midwestern hayseed out of her. The fact that she has morning sickness and a swollen mouth and isn’t eating makes her look pale, yes, but also very slim, willowy slim, and she admires her full-length reflection as well as her mouth. There is the slightest, slightest bump, but her weight loss makes it visible to no one but her, and to Carl if he runs his hand over her belly. He’ll be fifty when his first child is born, and he tiptoes around her with amazed joy. She had asked him if there was ever a birth with those other ones, this was important information to know before she signed on to a life with him, and he said no, not a live birth. It was with the first one. A stillbirth. So that was that, and Dr. Schirmer will not let that happen to her.
“My doctor’s threatening to put me in the hospital if I don’t start eating,” she tells Dixie on another of their mornings in the backyard.
“You will,” Dixie says, “as soon as your mouth feels better. The nausea passes. Look at me, how I’m eating all the time now. I’m getting as big as a horse.”
“You look beautiful,” Kay says. “You’re perfect.”
Dixie rolls her eyes. “A perfect horse.”
Dixie isn’t in maternity clothes yet, but she has already sewed herself several smocks with broad collars. For now, she’s still wearing Jimmy’s shirts and an elastic extender placket in her pants.
“There’s a nip in the air this morning,” Kay says. “Pretty soon we’ll need to sit inside.”
Penny is curled up on her ankles, a warm weight on her skin beneath the hem of her capris. Mugs keeps circling hopefully, waiting for Penny to hop off and chase him.
“She’s different today. Look, she has no interest in him at all. I think she’s close,” Kay says.
“Do you know what to do?”
“Carl says she’ll know what to do. I just hope he’s home when it happens.”
But Penny begins acting restless that noon. She keeps circling the house, sniffing in corners. They set up a large box in the kitchen with old towels in it, the front of the box cut low enough for Penny to step in and o
ut, but high enough to keep new puppies in. To keep her from settling in another room, Kay whistles her to the box and puts some tiny pieces of roast beef there on a saucer. Penny ignores them and steps out of the box again, nosing her way to the carpet in the living room, going behind the armchair, emerging to sniff between the sofa and the desk, circling back to the dining room under the table. Kay calls Dixie on the telephone. “I need you,” she says.
Finally, Penny picks her spot, in the corner of the living room next to the bookcase. Kay drags the box there, and together she and Dixie scoot the bookcase a few inches toward it so the box fits snugly in the corner. Kay spreads an old blanket on the floor, tucking it under the edge of the box so no carpet is exposed.
“Who are we to tell her where to have them?” Kay asks.
“Well, they’re not going to give us a choice,” Dixie says. “Anyway, I want to be dead asleep when it happens. When I wake up they can put the baby in my arms.”
Penny curls up in her box, every once in a while standing up to circle in place and lie down again uneasily. Kay makes a fresh pot of coffee and she and Dixie leaf through magazines, chatting about the pictures. Kay has no concentration to read, and is on her tenth cigarette of the day.
Dixie rises and says, “I’m going to go home and put together a meat loaf; I’ll make enough for you and Carl, too, so don’t worry about your own dinner. I’ll put it on a low oven and be back as soon as I can.”
Kay sits and strokes Penny, who is shivering. Kay murmurs to her and tries to cover her, but Penny stands and shakes it off, nosing the towels in the box, pushing them into a nest the way she wants them. No sooner does she lie down again than she lets out a sharp cry, the kind she’d make if you accidentally stepped on her paw. She stands and turns a fretful circle, whining. Then she leaks fluid. She lies down again, whining and panting, still shivering.
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