The Lit Report

by Sarah N. Harvey

  A sweet little guy. Mark Grange. Hard to imagine. The kid has a mouth on him like Tony Soprano on a bad day. His mother was pretty amazing, though. You could tell that Miki felt better just being around her. More relaxed. In control, but not in a bad way. They talked about due dates and shoe sales and vitamins and when Miki should stop working. Before Maria left she gave me her business card. On the back she had written the name of a book that she said would be good for my research. “Call me anytime,” she said. “Either of you. Anytime at all. My cell’s always on.”

  WHEN I GOT to school on Monday, Ruth was back at her desk, looking, if anything, thinner and paler than she had on Saturday. Maybe the pregnancy glow came later. So far neither Miki or Ruth showed any signs of phosphorescence or incandescence or whatever.

  “Glad to see you, Ruth,” said Mrs. Gregory. “Feeling better?”

  Ruth nodded and muttered, “Stomach flu sucks.” She glared at me as if I was somehow responsible for making her lie to a teacher. Ruth has been lying to teachers since the first day of kindergarten, when she told Miss Fredericks that both Jesus and the Virgin Mary had appeared to her in a grape popsicle. Mrs. Gregory had written the morning meditation on the board. It said: Ultimately, the problems and difficulties of life are all spiritual. We had two minutes to think about it and eight minutes to discuss it. Ruth leaned over and whispered, “Yeah, like getting drunk and knocked up is a spiritual problem.”

  “Ruth,” said Mrs. Gregory, “please meditate silently for a few moments and then share your thoughts with us.”

  We sat in silence for a minute or so, and then Ruth jumped to her feet, put her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room.

  I stood up to follow her. “I’ll go make sure she’s okay. Maybe take her to the office.”

  There are distinct advantages to cultivating an aura of responsibility. Mrs. Gregory just smiled at me and nodded and said, “Ruth is very lucky to have you for a friend, Julia.” She didn’t know the half of it.

  As I left the room, I could hear Rachel Greaves, who is a giant suckhole, saying that, like, war and world hunger were, like, spiritual problems because, like, if everyone just, like, followed Jesus it would all be, like, okay. It’s just as well I had to leave the room. I wondered if she’d, like, think a punch in the nose was a, like, spiritual problem.

  As I ran down the hall to the girls’ washroom, Mr. Dooley’s prayer for the safety of all those participating in the live nativity scene came over the PA. Last year the projectiles hurled from passing cars had been many and varied: a half-eaten Big Mac, a filthy SpongeBob SquarePants that landed on the Baby Jesus, and that old favorite, a flaming bag of shit.

  I found Ruth staring into the mirror over one of the sinks. Not putting on lip-gloss or repairing her mascara. Just staring.

  “I can’t do this,” she said.

  “You have to,” I said. “We decided. And anyway, I found out a lot of stuff yesterday from Maria—stuff that’ll help.”

  “Maria?”

  “Yeah—she’s Miki’s midwife.”

  “You told a midwife about me?” Ruth turned away from the mirror and grabbed my arm. “I thought we weren’t going to tell anyone. And what do you mean— Miki’s midwife?”

  “Calm down,” I said, pulling my arm away. “I didn’t tell anyone anything. Miki’s pregnant, she’s got a midwife and I asked her a few questions. That’s all. I said I was doing a report for school.”

  “You’re gonna be a big sister?” Ruth squealed. “That’s awesome. Why didn’t you tell me?” She gave me the kind of look that usually precedes something painful—like a head-lock or a really big hug. It could go either way. I was glad to have taken her mind off her nausea but not so glad to be about to pay the price.

  “I just found out on Saturday—and Miki’s really sick, just like you. Maria recommended ginger tea and saltine crackers, and I have to get a bunch of equipment and a notebook and...”

  “Whoa...back it up, sister,” said Ruth. “You mean there’s no, like, drug for this kinda shit? I hafta drink some fucking hippie tea and eat some lame crackers?”

  “It can’t hurt to try, can it?” I said.

  THE NEXT DAY she nibbled on a cracker and the day after that she sipped the tea that I brought in a Tim Hortons travel mug.

  “Tastes like piss,” she said. “Hippie piss.”

  But she drank it, and her desk was a mess of cracker crumbs. I knew she was feeling better because she rolled her eyes and snorted when I told her that I was working on a special prenatal diet and exercise regime for her.

  “Regime, huh? Sounds military. Right up your alley.” Ruth saluted me as she swept the cracker crumbs onto the floor.

  “At ease, recruit,” I said. Ruth giggled and snapped a hair elastic at my head.

  “So here’s the deal,” I continued. “You want to gain as little weight as possible and still have a healthy baby, right?”

  Ruth yawned and said, “I guess.”

  “So you have to eat right and exercise regularly.”

  She groaned. “How am I gonna do that without anyone noticing? I mean, everyone knows I never exercise, and I never eat healthy food. I thought the whole idea was to, like, act normal.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s the tricky part,” I admitted. “But what if I do it too? The whole diet and exercise thing, I mean. It just doesn’t seem fair to make you suffer alone. But when you think about it, who’s really going to notice? Your parents? You don’t eat with them anyway—not since Jonah left. And we’ll still go to Mickey D’s or DQ once in a while, just to keep up appearances—we just won’t eat what we buy. We’ll give it away to one of those guys who’s always asking for spare change. Boost the karma quotient a bit. I’ll tell my mom that you’re going on a diet and I’m trying to be supportive. She’ll love that. We’ll go to the gym and stuff. No one will care. Trust me.”

  “Yeah, right, “Ruth said as she scraped some black nail polish off her thumbnail. “I get fat and have a baby and you get skinny. Sounds fair. Wish I’d thought of that.”

  She was right—the whole thing sounded insane and more than a little unfair. But what else could we do? And besides, I didn’t want to be chubby, smart, reliable Julia anymore. I wanted to be a slimmer, hotter version of smart, reliable Julia. When Mark Grange had asked me when the baby was due, I’d laughed—not because it was funny, but because I didn’t want him to see how much it hurt. It hurt the same way it did when I was little and I was playing in Ruth’s backyard kiddie pool with Ruth’s brother. Ruth’s mother had a bunch of her church lady friends over and she pointed at me and said, “Oh look—it’s Jonah and the whale.” I couldn’t help it that Ruth was pregnant, and I would help her any way I could, but if I lost a few pounds in the process, what was wrong with that?

  EVERY YEAR IN the week before Christmas vacation started, Westland High did a ton of fundraising for one Christian charity or another. This year it was something to do with getting new computers for the school library and giving the old ones to a shelter downtown, which in my opinion was just a justification for spending a shitload of money on LCD screens and ergonomic keyboards and wireless Internet technology. I mean, all our online activity at school is monitored, lest we download porn or go into dubious chat rooms, so what’s the point? Anyway, there was the live nativity pageant, a carol concert, a cookie exchange and the annual teachers vs. students basketball game. The teachers were heavily favored to win this year due to their new coach, Brandy’s stepdad, a seven-foot-tall ex-college basketball coach from Georgia. Brandy’s mom met him on a Christian Internet dating site, and he moved here a few months ago. He’s a cool guy. I’ve thought of asking him if he has any friends back in Georgia who’d like to date my mom, but I’m not sure she’s ready for a giant black boyfriend. Stewart and Marshall had tried to get permission to put on a casino-night fundraiser— they called it Betting on Jesus—but it was, as they say, no dice. Also no roulette, no poker and definitely no blackjack. They had to be content with tak
ing bets on the game, and they did a booming business in the second-floor boys’ wash-room, third stall from the left.

  Any other year, Ruth would have been heckling Joseph and Mary, belting out lewd lyrics to the carols and running up and down the basketball court, pretending to be a Laker girl. This year she skipped the carol concert and confined her cheerleading activities to the occasional rude chant. She was kicked out after yelling,

  You might be good at teaching

  You might be good in class

  But when it comes to basketball

  We’re gonna kick your ass.

  Which turned out not to be true. All the cheering in the world couldn’t help the Westland Warriors; the teachers beat them 92–74. High fives and Praise the Lords all round on the teacher’s bench, with a few butt slaps for Coach Baylor. The Warriors muttered a lot about unfair coaching advantages. They didn’t seem to remember what Our Lord said about turning the other cheek. At least not the kind He was talking about. Apparently there was an unfortunate incident after the game at the live nativity scene— numerous young male cheeks were turned, and Mary almost had a coronary. The Three Wise Men took off after the offenders but were severely hampered by their long robes and the gifts they bore. The Warriors pulled up their shorts and scampered into Passmore Park, where they were later picked up for public drunkenness. Among those arrested was none other than Rick Greenway. One of Pastor Pete’s parishioners, who works at the police station, told us that when he asked Mary if she could pick the offenders out of a lineup, she said she’d never seen their faces, but she’d be able to recognize one of them by the distinctive pimples on his butt. She said they reminded her of the Big Dipper. I guess when you’re out in the cold holding a plastic Jesus while people drive by and throw things at you, you have a lot of time to look at the stars.

  I told my mom that I had done some serious praying, and I felt that Our Savior wanted me to spend the next few months purifying my body and abstaining from all unhealthy habits. And when I was finished purifying and abstaining, He wanted me to go on a spiritual retreat. What God-fearing mother wouldn’t want to hear that from her seventeen-year-old daughter? My mom nodded and continued working on a cross-stitched sampler pillow, which said, appropriately, Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden.

  I told my dad and Miki that I wanted to lose some weight, but they were so far gone into baby-land that they just nodded and smiled and asked me to go to the store for gelato. Apparently something called stracciatella gelato settled Miki’s stomach. Unfortunately both its price and its calorie count made it off-limits for Ruth and me. Ruth didn’t tell her parents anything—she never does. She has refused to eat with them since they sent Jonah away, so we put a cooler in her closet (she had sold her hope chest on eBay) and kept it stocked with healthy snacks. We cheated every now and again, and Ruth ate at my house a lot, under my mom’s approving eye. We walked everywhere—to school, downtown, to the movies, to the store.

  By Christmas Ruth’s nausea was gone, and we had both lost five pounds. Such is the power of the no-junk-food diet. We decided to relax the food rules a bit for Christmas, although we swore we’d go easy on the mashed potatoes and gravy. I usually have three Christmas dinners: one restaurant dinner on Christmas Eve with my dad and Miki and Ruth, followed by gift-opening; one traditional turkey dinner with my mother and Nana on Christmas Day (after more gift-opening and church); and dinner on Boxing Day at Ruth’s. Since Peggy claims to be too busy doing the Lord’s work to cook, we eat food donated by Pastor Pete’s loyal church ladies. Things like Mrs. Lowen’s Pizza Casserole, Mrs. Marpenny’s Bratwurst Soup and Mrs. Bingham’s Mexican Lasagna. I looked forward all year to Miss Chalfont’s Texas-Missouri Beer Bread, although this year I ate only two pieces instead of my usual five. There are never any salads (unless you count tomato aspic, which isn’t even food), and all vegetables are cooked beyond recognition. For dessert there was a gummy Sara Lee cheesecake. Ruth deigned to eat with her family, not because it was Christmas, but because Jonah was home for a week.

  Seated at the table in Peggy’s pristine dining room, the tacky nativity tree centerpiece lit up and playing “Silent Night,” the table groaning under the weight of the casserole dishes, we held hands as Pastor Pete prayed for the heathens, the sinners, the homosexuals, the Jews, the members of Metallica and Slayer, anyone associated with hip-hop, and the makers of Sex and the City. It was a long prayer. Jonah was sitting next to me, holding my left hand in his right. As Pastor Pete detailed the Lord’s plans to smite the evildoers at HBO, Jonah squeezed my hand. I turned my head slightly and opened my eyes long enough to see him wink at me before he bowed his head again. His hair had been buzzed off, military-style, but I remembered a particular dark damp curl that had caught on one of my rings. A few strands of his hair had come off in my hand. I have them still, in an envelope in my underwear drawer. I wondered what it would feel like to stroke his neck now. Fuzzy? Prickly? Cool? Pastor Pete’s prayer finally came to an end, and I snatched my hand away from Jonah’s before he could feel the sweat rising on my palm.

  AFTER CHRISTMAS I began my research in earnest. Ruth and I walked to the library almost every day; she read magazines while I filled a notebook with information about fetal development, nutrition and the importance of maintaining a positive attitude. I thought I could cope with the physical stuff—I hoped I could anyway—but the attitude? That was another story. Even though I tried to interest Ruth in what I was learning, she wanted nothing to do with it. It was as if I was the one who was pregnant and she was the one along for the ride. Total role reversal. Her biggest concern seemed to be that she wasn’t going to be able to show off her “bump,” as she called it. There would be no clingy tank tops or skimpy dresses for Ruth. Just increasingly baggy T-shirts, exercise pants and sweatshirts. I would dress the same way, for solidarity purposes, but after the baby came I hoped to be shopping for something clingy and/or revealing myself. After all, I was going to be somebody’s big sister—a role model, in fact. I had to look good.

  Six

  It was love at first sight.

  —Joseph Heller, Catch-22

  I’m not sure I believe in love at first sight. I mean, I first saw Jonah when I was five and he was seven, and Ruth was trying to bury him alive in the sandbox in their backyard. She was sitting on him, and he was howling, and his little snot-and-sand-encrusted face kept appearing out of the sand. I pulled Ruth off him and helped him up, and he ran into the house, screaming for his mother. Ruth was disgusted with me and kept on being disgusted with me over the years every time I defended Jonah against her. Maybe I have loved him from the beginning. Maybe it’s not even love. Catch-22 isn’t about romantic love anyway. It’s about war and what people will do to try to survive in combat. It’s about defying authority in creative ways and about not getting killed in the process. It’s about how wacky idealists like Ruth and born-again pragmatists like me are simultaneously brilliant and stupid. We were doing this insane thing—concealing Ruth’s bump—and hoping not to get killed, metaphorically speaking. And we were caught in a classic Catch-22: We would be equally crazy whether we told anybody what was going on or not. We were engaged in a war in which our main weapon was our ability to lie convincingly. Usually I don’t mind lying—I think of it as a legitimate creative exercise for a budding writer. But I hated lying to Jonah. Jonah is like the Texan in the army hospital in Catch 22: “good-natured, generous and likable.” Unlike the Texan, who no one could stand after three days, Jonah just gets better with time.

  We’d only had a couple of hours alone together over Christmas. My mom went out one evening, but she was gone long enough for me to determine that Jonah’s buzz cut was as soft as the acrylic-pile snowsuit I had when I was six. Boot camp also had some unforeseen benefits—all that enforced exercise had given Jonah an impressive six-pack and the stamina of a triathlete. He was still Jonah, though— smart, funny, thoughtful (he brought condoms but put them away when I said I wasn’t ready yet).


  “I got accepted to chef school in Vancouver, Julia,” he told me as we snuggled under my duvet and listened to Kind of Blue. I don’t really like Miles Davis, but I can tolerate him under certain circumstances. “I got a full scholarship. No one else knows. I start in September. I’ll be there two years and then, who knows—LA, maybe, or New York or London.”

  I had a sudden vision of Jonah in the funky two-bedroom apartment that Ruth and I dreamed of—his hair grown out, exhausted and exhilarated from a night in a hellishly hot kitchen. In my vision I had opened a bottle of red wine and was sitting on his lap while Ruth regaled us with tales about her latest movie promotion. Copies of my new novel were on the bookshelf...

  It didn’t surprise me at all that Jonah had his own grand plan or that he had already put it in motion. It did surprise me that I felt so forlorn. It wasn’t like I was his girlfriend or anything.

  “That’s awesome,” I said, smoothing out the duvet while I struggled to control the quaver in my voice. “When will you tell your parents?”

  He shrugged and rolled over onto his back, lacing his hands behind his head; his armpit hair was damp and curly and smelled faintly of stale deodorant. I ran my fingertips over his nose, lingering on the bump. Jonah’s nose had been broken a few times: once by Ruth (with a Tonka truck), once when he tried (unsuccessfully) to do a skateboard trick called a Bomb Drop and once when he plowed into a tree in his parents’ car. His nose is beautiful. As are his lips, which are both full (bottom) and chiseled (top). He smiles a lot, even though his teeth are crooked. There is also a small scar on his chin from when he fell into a rosebush when he was a toddler. I have memorized Jonah’s face like a poem.