Now she wrote to say she was counting the days till his return. She’d made a calendar and taped it on the wall at her sister’s house, she said. Would he like her to have her hair up or down when she came to pick him up?
He couldn’t remember there ever being a moment when he’d asked her to be his girlfriend, or thought she was, but now it seemed that was what had happened, all by itself, like the way blueberry bushes catch the mold, or chickens know it’s time to head back into the coop at night, without anybody shooing them in that direction. It wasn’t like he had any better plan in mind, so why not?
She had been there at Fort Devens, the day he got off the plane. A little plumper than he remembered, thicker around the waist, but the good news had been, bigger on top too. He’d had a few times with girls in Saigon by now, and once, on leave, in Germany, but ever since getting those two letters from Mandy, he’d decided to wait till he got home. Hold on till it was her.
His grandmother had fixed up a place for him, in the back of her house, but with its own bathroom, and a mini refrigerator and a hot plate, so he could feel like he had his own apartment. This was where she drove him now. His grandmother was waiting. She looked a lot older than before. The television had been on when he came in the house—Let’s Make a Deal. The sound of all the people in the audience screaming had made him want to cover his ears.
Can we turn that off, Grandma? he said. But even that didn’t help. Down in the field, someone was running a mowing machine, and her wash must have gone on the spin cycle, and then there was the radio. The men in the barn were listening to a ball game. A roaring sound. He wasn’t even sure if everyone else heard it too, or if the noise was only in his head.
I fixed you some lunch, Frankie, she said. I figured you’d be hungry.
Give me a little time, Gram, he told her. I just want to lie down for a bit. Take a shower or something.
That was what he meant actually, but when they got to the room she’d set up for him—Mandy still holding on to his uniform, like the women on Let’s Make a Deal hanging on Monty Hall—she had locked the door behind them right away and pulled the blinds down.
Finally we get to do it, she said.
He wanted to tell her he was tired. He’d probably be more in the mood tomorrow, or even possibly a little later. But she was unbuttoning his jacket already. Then she was down on the floor, unlacing his boots. She had unbuttoned her shirt and un-fastened her bra, which turned out to be the kind that opened in the front, so now her breasts tumbled out, bigger than he remembered, her nipples large and dark.
She said, I bet you’ve been starved for this, right, baby? Or all you got was yellow girls? You probably forgot what it was like, American pussy?
He had worried that he might not even be able to get it up, but he did. She had seen to that.
You just lay back and enjoy, Mandy told him. I’ll do the work.
It was over in five minutes, maybe less. After, she had hopped up off the bed and checked her makeup. Of all the times to get a zit, she said.
It turned out she’d brought her clothes over. Underwear, deodorant, hot rollers, shampoo, Dippity-Do, even her nail kit. That night, when she came back to the room with him again, she had asked if he wanted to do it some more but when he said he was still a little tired from the plane and all, she didn’t push it.
I better warn you, she said. You were so excited this afternoon, I didn’t even think about making you wear a rubber. Here’s hoping it’s not that time of the month. My sister got knocked up the first time she and Jay did it. Which turned out to be a blessing naturally. That baby being her niece, Jaynelle.
A couple of weeks later, she told him she’d missed her period. A couple of days after that, she told him the test came back positive. Looks like you’re going to be a dad, she said. Her words, when she said this, had the air of a speech she’d practiced. In the car coming back from town maybe. She had bought a maternity top already. Baby on Board.
I guess you’d just been storing it all up so long, those sperms of yours were three times as powerful as regular, she said.
That was the word she’d used. Sperms.
Suddenly, as if they’d been waiting just offstage the whole time, ready for someone like Carol Merrill to wheel them out, there was all this baby gear: a Swing-o-Matic and a playpen, a changing table, a high chair, and more maternity tops, and pants with elastic waistbands, and cream for preventing stretch marks that she wanted him to apply to her belly, to make him feel more involved in the pregnancy, she told him.
She had a crib picked out from the Montgomery Ward catalog, and a stroller, and a crib mobile. She had a list of girls’ names she liked. If it was a boy, they’d name him after Frank, of course. Nearly everything she owned was already moved into the room at his grandmother’s—her clothes filling the closet, and all but one of the drawers, her poster of Ryan O’Neal tacked on the wall, the most handsome man in the world after him, she said. But now she was saying, maybe they could spread out a little, into the rest of the house, considering his grandmother was just one person, and old. That sewing room she had, for instance, would be perfect for the baby. They should get a TV with a bigger screen.
Only much later did this occur to him. By the time the thought entered his mind, they were married. Mandy was seven months pregnant at this point—the baby not due until sometime around Valentine’s Day, though their son had ended up being born in December. Frank was standing at the bathroom mirror, shaving, with all those toiletries she used lined up on the sink and on the shelf over the toilet. He was thinking about how many products women seemed to require—not his grandmother of course, but Mandy, definitely—before they could go out in the world. All the equipment that Mandy had brought over that first day he got home—her toiletries and makeup and hair care products, her creams and sprays, her eyelash curler and the bleach she used on her upper lip, the Nair for her legs, the panty liners and feminine hygiene deodorant.
One thing she’d never had with her. He had learned this when her sister was over visiting, and she got up off the couch and said, Oops, my little friend just came to visit. You got a pad, Mandy?
In all the supplies she’d laid in, back before she took the test, there had been no sanitary napkins, no tampons. As if she knew all along she wasn’t going to need them for a while.
MY MOTHER AND FRANK WERE SITTING in the kitchen while he told her the story of his marriage. I sat at the table too, working on my puzzle book. At one point in the story—when Frank mentioned the part about American pussy—my mother had looked over at me, as if she suddenly remembered she had a son, but I was bent over a puzzle at the time, chewing on my pencil as if everything I cared about in life was on that page. Either she figured I wasn’t listening or she didn’t think I understood, or possibly she knew I did but didn’t care. And it was true, long before that day Frank came home from Pricemart with us, my mother used to tell me things that other people’s mothers never discussed. I knew about final disconnect notices from the phone company and PMS. I had heard the story of the man who would have raped her one time, when she was leaving her waitress job at the restaurant where she used to work in Boston before she met my father, only the cook had come out at just the right moment and stopped him, only then the cook had thought that meant she owed him something too.
These were the kinds of stories I was used to hearing. Frank’s wasn’t all that different. Just from the man’s perspective for a change. Which accounted for why I’d never heard that phrase before, American pussy.
Excuse my French, Frank had said, when he got to that part in the story. But this seemed to be for my mother’s benefit as much as mine.
Frank and his grandmother had sat outside in the waiting room, when Mandy went into the hospital. That’s how they did it in those days, he said.
I feel I let you down, Frankie, his grandmother had told him that day. Things happened so fast for you when you came home. I always wanted you to go to college. Have a little time to know
what you wanted before everything started happening.
It’s OK, Gram, he told her. He had just turned twenty-one years old. He was married to a woman who spent her afternoons watching television and talking on the phone to her sister about the lives of the characters on All My Children. After that first flurry of activity following his return from Vietnam, she had lost interest in sex, though he was hoping once the baby came along this might change. She had mentioned to him recently that if his grandmother would just subdivide the property and give them some of the land, they could put a trailer on it and maybe sell off another parcel to buy an RV. What kind of future was there in Christmas trees, anyway? Did he think she wanted to spend the rest of her life with a man who came home every night with sap on his hands?
Let’s face it, she said, most people would rather buy an artificial tree now anyways. Then they only pay the money once, and there’s no mess with all those needles falling down and jamming up the vacuum cleaner after.
Now he sat in the waiting room, outside where his wife was giving birth to their child, and suddenly he realized that in all the months he’d been home, this was the first time he had sat down alone with his grandmother. All this time, he’d been so busy with Mandy, the baby—getting married, going shopping for things.
You never really told me what it was like over there, his grandmother said, meaning in the jungle, with his platoon. All I know is pictures on the news and Life magazine.
It was pretty much what you’d expect, he told her. The usual. You know. War.
Your grandpa was the same way, she said. Any time I asked what happened in the Pacific, he’d want to talk about getting a new mower blade, or the chickens.
Early in the labor, they’d given Mandy the option of a spinal, and she was happy about that. Sometime that night, a nurse had come out holding their son.
All this time, they’d been so busy talking about the crib, the stroller, the car seat, the clothes, he’d almost forgotten there was going to be a baby at the end of it all. Now they were laying the blanket in his arms, with the warm, wriggling form of Francis Junior wrapped inside. A little hand reaching up through the fabric, with long, pink fingers and nails that already looked as if they needed trimming. Even before his face, it was his son’s hand Frank had seen, as if he were waving, or pleading.
He had a full head of hair—red, which was surprising—and a long body, a plastic clip still attached to the place where his navel would be, a tiny perfect penis, not yet snipped like his own, with surprisingly large and perfect balls. His ears looked like tiny shells. His eyes were open, and though the nurse said he couldn’t really focus yet, from his expression it appeared that he was looking straight at Frank.
Nothing bad had happened to him yet. So far, life was perfect for their son, though from this moment on, that would begin to change.
For some reason, the sight of the baby—his pale naked, defenseless body maybe—brought to Frank’s mind certain images from the last two years, villages his company had moved through, as they made their way into the jungle. Other children he didn’t want to think about. Hands reaching out to him, in other circumstances.
He was aware then of a roaring sound, and a high screeching noise. The floor-polishing machine, that was all, but hearing it, Frank had cupped one hand over Francis Junior’s shell ears.
Too loud, he said, and only after he spoke did he realize he was actually yelling, as if there were a gun battle going on instead of a floor waxing.
I’m sure you want to see your wife, the nurse told him. His wife. He had almost forgotten.
They led him into the delivery room. The nurse had taken the baby from him now, so his arms were free. He knew there was something he should be doing now—put them around her? Touch her cheek? Lay a cool cloth over her forehead? He stood there with his arms dangling, unable to move.
You did a good job, he said. He’s a real baby.
Now I can finally start getting back in shape, she said.
Nursing ruins your boobs, she said. She knew from seeing what her sister looked like, after seven months of Jaynelle hanging off her. Anyway, if they used bottles, Frank could help out with the feedings, which he did. At night, when the baby cried, it was Frank who rose to heat the formula and sat with the baby in the dark, on the sofa in his gram’s kitchen, holding his son and watching as his mouth worked the nipple, and after, walked him around the room, rubbing his back, waiting for the burp. Sometimes, even after that, he stayed up, walking through the rooms of the house with the baby. He liked it there, just the two of them.
Sometimes he talked to his son. If Mandy had heard the things he said to Frank Junior, she would have called him mental, but alone in the night, he could explain about bass fishing, and pruning trees, and the time, when he was fourteen or fifteen, that his grandfather had taken him out to where the pumpkins were just starting to form on the vine, and told him he could carve anything he wanted in one. With his grandpa’s pocketknife he’d carved the initials of a girl he liked—Pamela Wood, her initials, along with his. He had planned to give her the pumpkin by Halloween time, but when October came, she was going steady with some guy on the basketball team.
He talked to Frank Junior in the night about getting his first car, and how you needed to be sure to check the oil, which he had forgotten, which was how he came to burn up the engine on that one, though his grandpa forgave him for that.
One night, when they’d been walking around like this for hours, he told Frank Junior about the accident. How he’d sat in the backseat of the station wagon, listening to the sound of his mother moaning, unable to do anything. He told Frank Junior about the village they’d been to—him and what was left of his platoon at that point—where this buddy of his from Tennessee who had a grenade go off next to his head had gone crazy. The woman in the hut. The little girl on the mat next to her. These were things he had never talked about before, but that night he told them to his son.
Mandy liked putting the baby in outfits and taking him for walks at the mall. They had their portrait taken at Sears, in front of a scene of a field with mountains in back. Frank with his arm on Mandy’s shoulder, Mandy with Frank Junior propped in front of her, his red hair combed into a single curl. Frank was worried that the flashbulb could hurt his eyes, but Mandy had laughed at that.
You’re not going to raise him to be a pansy, are you? she said. Boys need to toughen up.
Almost the moment she came home from the hospital she’d wanted to get out of the house. I’m going crazy, she said, sitting around here all the time with your grandmother, hearing her stories about the old days.
So Frank took her out to dinner—an Italian place, with wine and a candle on the table where the wax burned down in rainbow colors, covering the bottle they’d stuck it in, but the spaghetti tasted like Chef Boyardee. When he got the bill, Frank had thought about how, for this much money, he could have rustled up something really nice at home. His gram’s lasagna was better.
And he worried about leaving Frank Junior with his grandmother. She’d had a stroke the year before, just a small one, but the doctor said there was a fair chance it might happen again. Suppose it did, when she was watching the baby.
So mostly Frank stayed home, nights, with Frank Junior, so Mandy could go out with her sister or her girlfriends. She had found a job now—at a Wendy’s that had opened up out by the highway.
One time, when they were at the mall, a couple had walked by. The woman was pregnant, looking like she had a few months to go. The man had an arm around her shoulders. They both looked young, the age of Frank and Mandy, not that he felt young anymore. But this guy had a certain kind of good looks that red-haired men possess on occasion. Not completely unlike Ryan O’Neal, though with the beginnings of a belly forming.
When the couple came within view, Frank had seen Mandy’s body stiffen, and her eyes follow the man.
You know him?
Just someone that comes into the restaurant sometimes.
; Then she started bowling. Then it was bingo too. Then it was drinks with her sister, and more phone calls, and one time, when he’d come in from the barn earlier than normal, he’d heard her laughing on the phone, a sound in her voice he’d never heard when she talked to him.
One night when she was supposed to be at bowling, he’d left the baby with his grandmother and drove the truck to Moonlight Lanes. The women’s league doesn’t play on Tuesdays, the guy told him. You must have your nights mixed up.
He drove to the Wagon Wheel out by the highway then, and when her car wasn’t in the parking lot there, he tried Harlow’s. She sat in a corner booth. Some guy in a Phillies shirt with a hand on her knee.
We aren’t discussing this here, he said. This is for home.
He drove back in the truck and waited, but she didn’t come home that night, or the next night either. Francis Junior seemed to be fine without her was the truth, and Frank was thinking, if she would just leave him the baby, everything would be OK. Day three, sometime near suppertime, she finally pulled up in front of the house. One look at her, one look at Frank, his grandmother had said, “I’ll take the baby.” From upstairs, he could hear her murmuring to Francis Junior. His gram was running water in the tub.
Mandy was leaving. She had met a real man, she said. Someone to take her out of here. What kind of future did he think he was making for them here, him and his Christmas trees?
I never told you before, because I didn’t want to hurt you, she said. But all those times I acted like I was having a good time in bed. I wasn’t.
There was more, no need for a recap. The main thing was, she didn’t love him, never had. She just felt sorry for him, off in the war and everything, knowing there would be nobody to welcome him home except for a senile old woman growing pumpkins.
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