by Jean Hegland
Sitting beside Sally’s fountain, she wondered how her sister would respond if she were to offer to drive to Seattle herself, wondered how complicated it would be if she were to invite Jesse to live with them at the ranch for a while. But then she wondered if he were taking drugs, if he had joined some kind of gang, wondered what sort of threat he might be to Lucy.
Out on the lawn Lucy was staggering beneath the weight of her dizziness. Her arms outstretched as though the air could catch her, she toppled gleefully to the dusky grass. She lay there giggling for a second. But a moment later she began to scream, her scream soaring in the air like a siren as she leapt to her feet and stumbled desperately across the yard. Panic thickening in her veins, Anna leapt out of her chair. “What’s wrong?” she cried. “What happened, Lucy? What?”
“A bee, a bee, a bee,” Lucy shrieked, plunging her head into her mother’s abdomen. “A bee,” she cried, burrowing against her mother and staring in horror at the white welt rising on her hand while instant tears poured down her face. Sally ran inside for baking soda and Band Aids, and Anna gathered Lucy onto her lap, all her concerns about Jesse shoved aside by Lucy’s screams.
“It hurts,” Lucy whimpered, pressing herself closer. “It hurts.” And the summer Lucy was four, somehow even that was a pleasure, for Anna to be holding her crying daughter and comforting her, for her to inhale the smell of Lucy’s hot, damp head, to hug Lucy’s little body against her suddenly tender breasts and murmur words of love and solace and reassurance, secure in her knowledge that she could make things better, safe in her conviction that everything would be all right.
* * *
JAKE HAD BEEN SO MUCH FUN AT FIRST—AND FUNNY, TOO—ASKING everyone at the bar he took Cerise to that first night if they’d had their bowel movements in exactly the same tone as the nurse at Woodland Manor whose daily chore it was to poke her head into all the rooms, yelling that question for the benefit of the hard of hearing, and then charting their mumbled answers on her clipboard.
“Have you had your bm?” Jake asked the bartender, and the whole bar roared, and Cerise felt proud—and lucky, too—to have been asked out by someone who could make a roomful of people laugh.
The second time Jake spoke to her, she was mopping her way down the long south hall, oblivious to anything but her memory of Melody wrestling drunkenly with her ruined boots the night before. It was only when she paused to rinse her mop that she realized she was being watched. She looked up to see the house painter she’d talked to in the staff room, the tall one with the kid’s grin, leaning against the wall. His body seemed to make another wall perpendicular to the one she was mopping alongside, as though he were adding a private room for the two of them in that public place.
“I thought my job was bad,” he said when her work brought her to a standstill in front of him. “But maybe yours is worse.” His voice was low, as insinuating as though the two of them already shared some kind of secret.
“Why?” she asked stolidly, planting her mop and leaning on the handle while she waited for him to move out of her way.
“It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“They’re never finished, either—get to one end and then just start over again.” He grinned down at her, and added, “But at least they get breaks.”
“I get breaks,” Cerise answered staunchly, and he pounced. “When?”
It was nice to spend time with someone who wasn’t senile or dying. It was gratifying to have someone who could laugh about what went on in Woodland Manor without scorning what she did there all day. It was a respite to go with Jake to the bar after work instead of going home to Melody’s anger or her absence. And it was astonishing—like finding a diamond ring glittering in the street—to discover that someone liked her height, liked her long feet and thick breasts and the deep curves of her waist.
The first time Cerise brought Jake back to her apartment, she’d felt a guilty relief that Melody wasn’t home. Later, after they’d made love, she told him it was her first time. “The kid’s not yours?” he asked in puzzlement, and she had to explain, though her whole bare body grew hot and flushed, that what she meant was, it was the first time she’d liked sex, the first time she’d come.
Jake claimed condoms cramped his style, and though Cerise insisted on using an arsenal of creams and gels, before the day came for her appointment at the free clinic, it was too late to need the birth control pills she was going there to get. This time, she suspected right away that she was pregnant, and instead of calling LifeRight, she took the money Jake had given her to pay the cable bill and bought a home pregnancy test instead.
Working in the steamy bathroom after Melody left for school, Cerise read the directions the kit contained and then followed them as exactly as she could, balancing her equipment awkwardly on the rim of the sink. After she dipped the plastic wand into the little vial that contained her pee, she held her breath and dug her fingernails into her wrist, trying to will the tip of the wand to stay white. When, despite all her yearning, the pink line appeared, she whispered, “Shit,” and sank down on the closed toilet seat, the wand limp in her hand.
After his initial shock, Jake reacted to the news that he was going to be a father with surprising good humor. He said he hoped the baby would be a boy because he wanted someone to go fishing with, and he seemed pleased by the ability of his sperm to outwit all the traps Cerise had set for them. “Little guys slipped right on through,” he marveled proudly.
“It’s okay, darlin’,” he added, reaching for Cerise. “What’s one more baby in this whole mess? While we’re at it, let’s just see if I can give you twins.”
But when Cerise told Melody that she was pregnant, it was as though Melody were the furious mother, and Cerise were once again the wayward girl. “How could you do it?” Melody stormed, and when Cerise answered with a rare attempt at wit, “In the regular way, I guess,” Melody snapped, “That’s disgusting.”
“You’re going to have a little sister or brother,” Cerise said. “It’ll be nice. We’ll get a bigger place. You can have your own room. We’ll be a family.”
“I don’t want a family,” Melody answered. And then she said the thing that wrenched Cerise’s heart, “Whatever happened to just you and I?”
Jake the Fake, Melody called him, Jake the Snake, and Jake the Jerk, and all of Cerise’s attempts to gather them into a family were like trying to sweep up the skittery ball of mercury left after someone dropped a thermometer at work. But despite that, and despite the morning sickness that made her have to puke into the toilets as she cleaned them, a part of her was happy to be pregnant. This time she could trace the swell of her stomach and imagine the baby hiding inside. This time, her pregnancy seemed like a second chance, like an opportunity to get it right, to be again the good mother she’d been when Melody was young, instead of the woman who had somehow ended up raising a bitter stranger.
When her water broke, she was cleaning the dining room after lunch. She hadn’t expected the baby to arrive for another few days at least, and she stopped to mop the puddle from the floor before she wheeled her cart to the storage room, punched out, and called Jake and the doctor.
This time, she wasn’t scared during her labor, wasn’t drugged and whimpering as she had been when Melody was born. Abashed by Cerise’s intensity and by the doctor’s authority, Jake fed Cerise chipped ice and rubbed her back, and this time, when the hurt threatened to rip her apart, she managed to fix her thoughts on the coming baby, to remember what all her work was for. She recognized when it was time to push, and she rode the waves of her final contractions like a surfer.
“Come on, baby,” she cried as she bore down with a thousand muscles she had only just discovered. “Come on, come on!” she yelled, as though she and Jake were alone in the apartment with the bedroom door closed. At the moment when she was the widest, she reached down and shoved the doctor’s latex-gloved hands away, thrust her own hands betwee
n her thighs. To a rising chorus of protests, she bore down one last time, her whole self taut and straining as she pushed the crowning head into her hands, pushed again and felt the hard slither of shoulders, and then pushed one final time and caught her baby herself, guiding its slippery body out of hers, laughing as she lifted it up and laid it, hot and wet and whimpering, against her chest.
She crinked her neck to peer down into its puffy, stunned face, and all her pain vanished. Lying in the hospital bed with her legs still splayed, she had the odd sensation that everything was ascending—the room, the building, Jake and the baby—everything rising up to soar among the stars, even as the doctor stitched, the nurses scolded, and Jake slipped out to have a smoke.
But before Travis was six months old, the job Jake was on finished up. “Don’t worry, darlin’,” he said, when he gave Cerise the news that he’d been laid off. “There’s always something that needs a coat of paint.”
But either the building boom had begun to sag or Jake’s luck had soured, because he couldn’t seem to get hired anywhere. He took to spending his days at the bar with his laid-off buddies, all of them celebrating their enforced vacations by drinking their unemployment checks and commiserating about the fucked-up state of everything—especially bosses, the government, and women.
Jake and Cerise’s schedules didn’t mesh too well once Jake lost his job. After the bar closed, it was too late for him to stop by the apartment very often, what with Melody and Travis hopefully asleep and Cerise tired out by getting up with Travis in the night. Sometimes Jake would come over in the afternoon, after he was up and before much else was going on, and sometimes when he did, Melody would be at school and Travis would be napping and Cerise and Jake would make love. Afterward he could be so tender it brought tears to both their eyes, when he told Cerise she deserved a better man than he was, and claimed he wasn’t worthy of her love.
But other times he was too hungover for sweet talk, or so pissed at how the world worked that he was ready to slam walls, and when Cerise tried to shush and humor him and beg him not to wake the baby, he called her a bitch and raised his fist, held it trembling in the air between them before he turned and slammed out the door.
With Jake out of a job, when her maternity disability payments ran out, Cerise had to decide between going back on welfare or giving almost half of her paycheck to someone else to watch Travis while she worked. As much as she hated welfare, she couldn’t bear the thought of being away from Travis all day long, so she applied again for AFDC.
“What the fuck?” Jake demanded when he found out that Cerise had named him as Travis’s father on the Statement of Facts form. “What the fuck did you do that for?”
It was not the afternoon she would have chosen to tell him if she could have helped it. His face looked pale and greasy, and he smelled as though he were sweating alcohol.
She explained, “They won’t give us any aid unless I say who his father is.”
“And what business of the state’s is that? Seems like they might leave it up to you, where you get your jism from.”
“It’s a new rule,” said Cerise, glad that Melody wasn’t there to hear how he was talking. “To try to make sure the dads help out with child support.”
“Haven’t I been helping, every bit I can?”
“Sure you have,” Cerise answered swiftly. “But with you—you know—I mean, it’s just not quite enough. Besides,” she added wistfully, “I thought you were proud to be his dad.”
“So now I’m going to have to send child support to the fucking goddamn state of California. Well, that just gravels my ass no end, you goddamn bitch.”
She tried to stay understanding as long as she could, but finally it got to where whenever he came over, they spent their time together sniping at each other like angry siblings, each of them blaming the other for all their troubles. Even so, she cried when he left Rossi in hopes of getting in on all the new construction going on down south. Before he left, he claimed he would come back and marry her as soon as he got a job. But later, when he called, he said that work was so spotty he couldn’t even afford a place to stay, that he had to crash at friends’ houses or sleep at the work site in his car. He was never able to send either her or the state much of the child support he owed, but occasionally he called her late at night, when the bars were closed and the phone rates were the best, and talking to him on the phone, she sometimes thought that missing him was nicer than being with him had been.
When Travis was twenty months old, Cerise received a letter with her AFDC check saying that the whole welfare program was being revised and informing her of the date and time of her appointment with the eligibility worker who would explain her situation to her and outline her options. During her appointment, Cerise sat on the chair in front of the eligibility worker’s desk and struggled to contain Travis on her lap while the eligibility worker explained that the state understood that Cerise would rather be a productive member of society than waste her life on welfare, and as a consequence, she only had twenty-four months of benefits left.
“But in twenty-four months he still won’t be old enough for kindy-garden,” said Cerise, grabbing Travis’s hands before he snatched her file off the eligibility worker’s desk.
“You’ll need to find a job,” the eligibility worker said, speaking as distinctly as though she thought Cerise were deaf.
“I had a job, before I had him. But I can’t pay for his day care with what I could make at work,” Cerise answered.
“There are programs,” the worker explained, “to train you for a higher-paying job. The state can help with your expenses. But you have to hurry and apply, before the grant runs out.”
“Oh.”
“What do you want to study?”
“I never finished high school,” Cerise said, trying to interest Travis in one of the weary toys she’d brought from home.
“Something in computers or food service? How about child care or office management?”
“Maybe child care?” Cerise said, prying a letter opener out of Travis’s fingers. “That way I could keep him with me when I went to work.”
“Maybe,” the worker said dryly. “But right now the important thing is to get you working at all.”
The only welfare-approved program for training child-care workers that would still accept Cerise for summer quarter was at a community college just south of San Francisco. At first the thought of moving seemed impossible, but the counselor at the community college was so reassuring and her eligibility worker was so unyielding that Cerise filled out the forms and made the phone calls and found the documents to get herself in. She called collect to Rita in Florida and asked to borrow money, though she knew she could not ask again in some greater emergency.
“If you would only get married,” Rita said before she agreed to make the loan, “none of this would be necessary.”
“Travis’s dad got laid off.”
“So find someone else.”
“I’ll try,” Cerise lied. “But right now I need that child-care certificate, or we’ll end up on the streets.”
She called Jake and asked him to come back and help them move, though she dreaded the sting she would feel when she saw him again.
But even so the hardest part of moving was Melody.
“There’s no way I’ll leave my friends,” Melody announced when Cerise told her what she was planning. Melody was in the bathroom, where every day she spent a longer time with the brushes and creams and cosmetics she kept stashed among Travis’s plastic ducks and bags of diapers, and Cerise was in the front room, hunched on the toy-strewn sofa with the community college course catalog in her lap, marking and remarking the classes she’d have to take, as though by memorizing their section numbers and the times they met, she might have a better chance of passing them. “You’ll make new friends,” she called to Melody. “I’ve got to get this certificate.”
“Why can’t you just go back to Woodland Manor?” Melody asked.
“Then stay on welfare till Trav starts school, like you did with me.”
“I can’t. The rules changed. You think I want to leave Travis with someone else all day?”
“I’ll watch Travie while you work,” Melody said, emerging from the bathroom in a leather miniskirt and a velvet halter top. She’d grown her hair out blond again, and with her perfect makeup and her lean legs, she looked as remote and gorgeous as the model Cerise had once dreamed she’d be. Only now Melody’s beauty reminded Cerise of a loaded gun—as much a danger to the person who possessed it as to anyone else.
When Melody bent and swung Travis up out of the pile of toys where he’d been enshrined, Cerise caught a glimpse of black silk panties beneath the supple hem of her skirt. More and more of the clothes that Melody wore were ones Cerise hadn’t bought for her. Suede jackets, designer jeans, and sequined shirts, they were clothes that Melody said she’d borrowed, said were gifts or hand-me-downs from friends Cerise had never heard of.
Melody said, “We’d have fun, wouldn’t we, Travie?” and Travis burst into a chortle of joy as she swooped him toward the ceiling.
Cerise asked, “Where did you get that skirt?”
“Oh, this,” Melody said, glancing down at it and then setting Travis back on the floor and shrugging. “Justine gave it to me. She said she was tired of it.”
“You sure?” Cerise asked.
“What do you mean, am I sure?” Melody snapped. “Like I wouldn’t know if my own friend gave me a skirt?”
“I just want you to be sure,” said Cerise doggedly.
Coolly Melody changed the subject. “So I’ll watch Travie for you, and you can go back to work.”