“That’s my girl. You can do it, that’s my girl.” Where is Dixie? Carl is still at least an hour from getting home. Then Kay sees the first puppy slide from her in its glistening sac, looking just like the picture in the pamphlet the vet gave them. It’s not quite all the way out. Penny pants on her side, then lifts her head to regard it. She curls around to lick it, pulling at the sac with her teeth. She does know what to do. But the sac isn’t coming apart. Should Kay help? She watches Penny lick and tug at the sack a few more seconds. What if the baby can’t breathe? Gingerly she pinches at the sac herself, trying to tear it. Penny doesn’t seem to mind her hand there. The membrane is tougher than it looks. Penny is the one who finally snags it with her teeth, licking at the pup’s nose and mouth and clenched eyes.
It isn’t moving at all. Penny shudders, expelling it all the way, and goes at the licking with more gusto, getting the sac off completely, cleaning the face roughly. The pup opens its mouth, eyes clamped shut. “Penny, you did it! What a good girl, such a good girl!” Finally, Penny bites at the umbilical cord, even lifting the puppy off the ground by it while she has the cord between her teeth. Kay cups her hand under the pup in case it falls. The lifting causes its limbs to splay and it opens and closes its mouth several times, emitting a little needlelike cry. Penny succeeds in severing the cord and the puppy drops into Kay’s hand, wet and wriggling. It is fat and round with a snub face. The fiercely closed eyes make it seem as if it needs to keep the world at bay for the time being. It has a brown coat, lighter than Penny’s. “What a good mamma you are.” She places the puppy gently next to one of the teats. The baby burrows in and begins nursing. Penny gives it a couple more licks, then lays her head down.
They have a rest like that for about twenty minutes before Penny begins panting again. She wants to get up and turn around, so Kay pulls the puppy into the corner of the box and strokes it until Penny settles again. The second pup slides out all the way in one contraction, and Penny immediately begins licking it and tearing at its sac. She looks calm now, almost relaxed. Kay can see that Penny is in charge, so she merely tends the blind, clambering firstborn, keeping it out of the way while Penny goes about her business. Then two pups are both nestled in nursing, and Penny rests again. Dixie arrives. “Meat loaf in the oven and cornbread ready to put in! Later I’ll just open a can of beans, and—oh, Lord! It’s happened!”
“Happening. Two so far.”
“If only we can be so good at it,” Dixie says. “Look at those cuties!” When Penny begins panting again, Kay scoots the two puppies out of the way to the corner. Jimmy knocks and comes in, home from his job at the electric company. They watch the third puppy being born together, then Dixie says, “We’ll go, and I’ll put in the cornbread, and when Carl gets home we’ll bring dinner over.”
“You’re an angel, Dixie, thanks so much.”
They are a smoothly functioning team now, Kay and Penny, so when the fourth baby, the smallest so far, comes out of its sac, still and unbreathing, Kay is not worried. But Penny keeps licking and licking, and even when she bites through its umbilical cord, suspending it and giving it a little shake in the air first, the baby will not open its mouth. Kay massages its chest, she tries to pry open the mouth with her finger, and still nothing. She sees no mucus to clear from its nose. Finally, she has to acknowledge that no matter how much Penny licks and she massages, the tiny body is cooling off, not warming. Penny turns her head to lick the three that are squirming in to nurse. She is putting her energies with the living, resting up for the next wave. When the fifth one comes, robust and squirming, she has it all by herself, because Kay is on the edge of tears, still preoccupied with the stillborn. She’s laid it outside the box on an old cloth napkin, one with a gravy stain. The hearty, greedy puppies look slightly monstrous to her now with their incessant hunger. The puppy that never moved is delicate, almost translucent.
Carl comes in and puts down his lunch bucket and crouches beside them. His scent, like always after work, is tarry and mineral, a mix of sweat and the smoky soldering. Usually she can’t wait until he gets his work clothes off and himself into the shower, but today she leans against him and they sit like that for a while, his arm around her, his smell one with the pungent animal tang of the births. He gently wraps the cold puppy up in the napkin and places it out of the way. Kay can’t help but turn her attention back to the overpowering draw of the live, clambering puppies. She and Carl laugh together at their blind maneuvering. She likes how he keeps repositioning the smaller ones so they get their share of the milk. His touch with the babies is so light that she suddenly knows he’ll make a wonderful father.
Dixie’s hot dinner arrives and is arranged on their table, and Carl and Jimmy slap each other on the back, fathers to be. The three remaining puppies arrived hale and hungry, all seven now crowding in to feed. Penny lies exhausted, stretched long on her side. After dinner Carl buries the stillborn in the yard under the lilac tree. Kay lines Penny’s bed with fresh towels, and they move the whole operation to the bathroom, where there are no drafts and the door can keep them all in.
Kay has put the birthing towels to wash in hot water and Ivory Snow. She rinses her aching mouth in warm saline. She keeps her head down and the bathroom door locked as she scrubs her denture and partial with the special brush and paste, the puppies from their box piercing the air with their cries. She accidently looked once in the mirror at her reflection without teeth and will never, if she can help it, look again at the old woman’s mouth waiting for her there, its gaping darkness. She slips her denture back in and lifts her face to the glass. There she is again, young and smooth-skinned, with her bright, regulation smile, her unassailable new teeth that will never decay.
Now to get busy. She has puppies to keep track of and raise and find homes for, liver to buy and cook for Penny to help her stay strong in the face of those voracious appetites. Maybe Kay will be healed enough to chew tomorrow; the thought of liver actually sounds good. She’ll buy enough for the two of them, its bloody iron steeling them both for their maternity: the struggle, the holding on, the surrender.
EVERYDAY HAPPINESS
Portland, 1958
For the annual Christmas-card photograph Stevie wears a striped jacket and a white shirt and a tie that Vera bought him from Meier & Frank. Kay arranges a bowl of pinecones on the dining room table, then frames it with two Fostoria glass candleholders her brother Paul and his wife, Beulah, sent them for a wedding present. She situates Stevie behind her display, deciding that he should kneel on the chair to put him at the right height. The long taper candles aren’t lit yet; Stevie is so fidgety that that part worries her. He doesn’t have much patience for this, she knows, but she has only twelve shots on her roll of film and wants to get it right.
Paul’s two children are always posed in reverent positions on his Christmas cards, a Bible open before them or their hands folded and eyes lifted in prayer. They are dramatically lit. She shouldn’t compare her efforts to her brother’s; he runs a photography studio and his cards are professional. Her nieces on Carl’s side are almost teenagers now, with waved hair and pretty sweater sets. They pose nicely in front of fireplaces or snowmen or piles of wrapped presents. Her cousins send photo cards of their children, as do her roommates from Goshen College, and she tapes each new one inside the front door. All these holiday children are scrubbed and neat and are meant to be representatives of the happy homes they live in.
Stevie is also scrubbed and neat and so handsome in his clipped-on bow tie and fresh haircut. How grown-up he looks—no longer her little toddler or preschooler, but a big boy. He is about to start kindergarten in the fall.
“Mamma!” he pleads.
“I’m ready now. You’ve done such a good job, Stevie. I’m so proud of you.”
He beams at her, lifting his chin, and by chance his hands are spread on either side of the pinecone-and-candle arrangement, and though the candles aren’t lit yet, she raises her camera and snaps th
ree in a row. Then she lights the candles and tells him to stay back from them, and snaps a few more, though his eyes are now darting to the flames.
“Stevie, look at Mamma!” He does and she snaps and winds until the end of her roll. Fingers crossed.
“Can I play now?”
“Yes, after we hang up your clothes. We want them nice for Sunday school.” They just started going this year, although she left the Mennonites years ago and Carl has no religious past. She chose First Baptist, downtown, a beautiful stone church where the pastor is an educated man and the choir is large, some of the singers members of the Portland Opera. Carl goes along willingly enough. He enjoys the socializing, and contributes a nice comment from time to time when they talk about the plight of the poor, or other social ills. He looks good in his suits, always wearing them so easily. They never go out dancing like they used to, so she knows he looks forward to Sundays for the dressing-up.
The prints that come back of Stevie in his striped jacket are mostly unusable—whether from Kay’s thumb edging in, or Stevie moving a fraction and causing a blur. But the first one, the angelic smile he flashed when she told him how proud she was of him—that is perfect, except for the candles being unlit. She uses it anyway, having no other choice, and unable to afford another processing fee when she has holiday groceries and presents to shop for. She volunteered to host Christmas Eve for Carl’s family again, and this weighs on her. Besides the cost, there is all the work. She wants everything to be perfect: linens starched and ironed, her house flawlessly clean, her kitchen filled with cookies and pies.
The relatives come with their bottles of brandy and wine, their own cookies and pies, an extra ham, some potatoes au gratin—the kitchen overflows. When she frets about the additions to her menu and where to put everything, Carl says to her, away from the others, “You gotta relax, Kay, no one cares if there are two potato dishes,” and makes her a whiskey sour. She finally sits, exhausted, feeling like the drink is causing her to float above the mess of details. She even says it, raising her glass with a gay little trill—“I’m flying!”—causing everyone to laugh and congratulate her. Vera is there in a smart burgundy wool suit, along with Celia and Matt, who drove in from the farm, and Werner and Sylvia, who are only stopping in before going over to their grown children’s family gathering, this year at Bill’s house. Sylvia is the sister-in-law she fears, because her housekeeping is spotless, and she keeps an unforgiving eye out for other people’s failings.
Hank, Carl’s baby brother, is there, wearing a natty plaid sport coat. He is the only man in the family who doesn’t work in the building trades—he teaches drama in high school and has lived for years with the same male roommate instead of getting married. Kay suspects Hank is a homosexual, but the family never discusses this. He is their baby brother and can do as he pleases. Kay likes him best, along with Vera. Those two—older sister and youngest brother—are the most worldly. They’ve been places and tell good stories. Hank has interesting hobbies like copper etching and calligraphy, and he gave Kay and Carl framed pieces of his artwork that she enjoys displaying in her home. He took in their cocker spaniel, Penny, when Stevie began crawling and the dog got too jealous, growling and baring her teeth at this new four-limbed animal sharing her floor. Now that Stevie is bigger, Hank brings Penny by for visits, and Kay sees that she’s become Hank’s child now, the way she was Kay and Carl’s when they were trying for so long to have a baby.
Hank has never once talked Finnish over her head like the others. He seems in silent sympathy with her outsider status in the family, flashing her a kind smile when she’s sitting through the clannish talk that so often excludes her, or rolling his eyes when Sylvia says in her clipped accent: “Did these cupcakes come from a mix? Sometimes a mix can be almost as good as from scratch.”
There is no room at the dining room table for them all and the spread of dishes too, so they sit in the living room with the Christmas tree, pulling chairs in from other rooms and balancing plates on knees. The orchestration of the evening has gotten away from her, but it’s fine. People are enjoying themselves, and she realizes she is, too. As her sisters-in-law help serve up dessert, Carl slips out to the garage to change into the Santa Claus suit he bought when Stevie was two. They didn’t have the money for it, but he insisted on getting it, and he’d been right. Kay admits how much joy it’s brought. He pulls the full white beard halfway up his face, and wears the Santa cap low, over his dark eyebrows. A pillow fills out the belly under the red jacket, and he wears round wire costume spectacles instead of his usual black horn-rims. They have no fireplace, so Stevie has been given to understand that in houses like theirs, Santa comes in through the front door.
Carl told Stevie that he had to do a quick errand at the store and would be right back.
“Don’t miss him again, Dad!” Stevie said. He has his plate of cookies ready, and is anxiously bouncing from uncle to aunt, knee to knee, asking, “When do you think he’ll come? Do you think he’ll know how to find our house? Does he ever forget?” He is badgering Hank when there is a sudden jingling of sleigh bells at the door.
“Let’s see who that is,” Hank says.
“Wait!” Stevie darts to the coffee table for his plate of cookies. He carries them with a nervous little wobble to the door, slipping his free hand into his uncle Hank’s.
Carl hams it up with his booming ho ho hos, and his gobbling of the cookies, crumbs lodging in the beard.
“These cookies are delicious! You’re the nicest little boy I’ve met tonight!”
Stevie is wordless with stage fright. When Santa sits down and invites him onto his lap to discuss whether he’s been good this year, he finds his tongue. Maybe it’s because the lap feels nice and familiar, but Stevie relaxes into it and tells how he helped his mother with the garden last summer, and how when she folds laundry he matches his own socks, and how when she needs him to play quietly because she has a headache, he makes the motor sounds for his Matchbox cars very softly.
Santa looks astonished at this paragon of virtue before him. “Is all this true, Mother?” he asks.
“Absolutely all of it, Santa,” she says.
“Well, then! Ho ho ho!” Santa says, reaching for his pillowcase. Kay stocked it earlier with a couple of wrapped presents and some dime-store novelties.
“Can I open them now?”
Mother and Santa nod in unison, and Kay thinks, whoops, Santa just gave a very Dad-like nod, but Stevie doesn’t notice and tears the paper off: a drum, a set of Lincoln Logs, and another Matchbox car.
“Mom, it matches ours!” Stevie cries, holding up the tiny Chevy Bel Air in their very own two-tone yellow and white.
“My goodness, Santa, how did you know?” she asks.
“I didn’t!” Santa says, provoking a laugh from the family. “But those elves of mine, they pay attention to detail.”
Santa has to go; he’s got a lot of stops. When Carl steps back into the house as himself, Stevie flings himself into his father’s arms. “Daddy, he came and you weren’t here!” Stevie moans.
“Not again! Let’s see what you’ve got there.” They examine the presents, opening up the tin of Lincoln Logs and spilling them onto the floor to see what can be made. Kay is topping off the evening with an eggnog and brandy, and doesn’t mind that the sisters are in her kitchen packaging the leftovers up, not knowing where anything goes. It doesn’t bother her that the wrapping paper hasn’t been picked up from the floor, or that there is a piece of pie crust under one of the chairs that will soon be ground under someone’s heel.
She is enjoying watching her husband and son. This is Carl at his best. He is explaining to Stevie what makes a corner joint strong, and Stevie is hanging on his every word. She feels that because of Carl, the house around her will never fall. The physical house, that is; she’s the one who gets them by week to week on his unsteady income. But when he comes home on a payday and tucks the bills from his cashed check under her dressin
g table lamp, she knows they’ll be all right for the next little bit. Paydays are for celebrating. She’ll be fresh out of a bath and changed into a nice blouse and slacks, unwinding her hair from the curlers and brushing it into a lovely dark cloud. When he is in the shower she’ll reline her lipstick and have Stevie change into a fresh shirt and trousers. Over dinner at Waddles, with the lights of Jantzen Beach twinkling outside the window, they’ll sip cocktails and Stevie a Roy Rogers while they look over the menus they know by heart.
At the end of the Christmas Eve party Carl carries Stevie to bed; they let him play until he conked out by his Lincoln Logs, the homey buzz of voices around him. In the morning, she’ll watch them unwrap the father-son shirts she sewed in matching plaid flannel; maybe they’ll wear them to Christmas dinner tomorrow at her brother Russell’s.
“I think you need to carry me to bed too,” Kay says sleepily.
“I can do that, ma’am,” Carl says, and bends down to lift her off the couch.
“No, just kidding!” she says, kicking her feet. “You’ll hurt your back, and we can’t afford to have you out of work!”
That moment is punctured, but he jollies her along, and she is still a little tipsy, and he maneuvers her to bed and pulls off her shoes, and begins removing other things, and she lets him go ahead.
“Remember,” she warns. She has told him no more children. She thought she’d want three or four until she had such a long spell of baby blues after Stevie was born, and lots of time when she never thought she’d make it through the sleepless nights and the circled days when the bills were due. She thinks she has enough spunk to do right by this one boy. She wouldn’t be able to stand herself if she only did half-right by two.
He is trying to get romantic—kissing her neck, her ear—but she’s really sleepy and would rather just drift off. She’ll let him do what he wants, but she’s inside her own thoughts. Everything went so well tonight. The family really enjoyed themselves and were, she has to admit, very nice to her, very warm.
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