The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (20 page)
She looked around the store. I thought she was checking to see if anyone had heard her curse, but she seemed to be seeing something else. She pushed out a sigh. “Evelyn, I don’t think I can make it home without a cold, sweet drink.”
I giggled with puzzled relief as we walked down the street to the soda fountain.
We each had a float—an unusual extravagance for my mother. She sat opposite me in the booth, sipping from a straw like a girl while I tried to imagine her so in love with my daddy that she, like me, could not wait. High school girls tittered and whispered behind me in the next booth.
“Are you happy, Evelyn?” Her voice was low and serious.
“Yes, Momma. He makes me very happy.”
“And you’re sure about this. All of it?” She waved her hand at my waist. “This is what you wanted?”
I could only nod and blink my tears away.
“Well, that’s all I need to know.” She patted my hand.
I had stepped over into motherhood. I had joined the club.
We bought the white cloth, a cotton eyelet. For that afternoon it did not matter that there were other things I could not tell my mother. At last, there was one important thing I could tell her. Standing in line at the cash register, waiting for Ina to ring us up, we were like all the other women, ready to make out of patterns and whole cloth something new.
Days later, I stood on a footstool in Momma’s bedroom, turning slowly while she pinned the hem of my dress. Rita and Bertie joined us. My life had suddenly become interesting to them. They both had a crush on Adam, particularly Rita. Bertie would finish high school soon and had a beau who, though steady, did not seem like the marrying kind. My dress was too simple to truly sustain their interest, but they seemed reluctant to leave, as if afraid they might miss some secret bridal ritual. They began a primping marathon, brushing and grooming each other, considering their profiles and the fashion magazines they had bought for me.
Rita and Bertie wanted me to wear my hair in a style they had seen in a movie and were determined to demonstrate. Rita sat on the low bench of Momma’s dressing table while Bertie fumed at her fine, light hair. She winced each time Bertie swept her hair up. The more Rita whined, the harder Bertie brushed and pinned. I’d seen their tiffs countless times and knew the progress of them as if they were scripted.
I’d never been as close to them as they were to each other, but suddenly I realized that I never would be. My inner life had spun away from their world. I looked down at the top of Momma’s head. The three of them thought they knew what this marriage was to me, but they did not. They thought they knew Adam, but they did not.
“Hold your head still,” Bertie admonished.
Rita pressed her lips together, tears of frustration in her eyes.
I gazed at my flushed face in the mirror. Momma knelt before me, pulling the hem of my dress even on both sides and sliding the last straight pin through the cloth. I caught Rita’s reflection and tried to smile my encouragement, but she saw the tears in my eyes and took them as confirmation of the outrage she suffered at Bertie’s hands. Her face crumpled. Crying, she shoved Bertie away and dashed out of the room.
Momma glanced up at my face.
I blinked and tried not to cry.
Momma glared at Bertie. “You, too. Out and take those magazines with you. Apologize to your sister.”
“What’d I do?” Bertie sulked.
Momma shut the door behind her, then turned to me and smoothed my dress sleeves down over my arms. She handed me a handkerchief. “Evelyn, this is a big step, a big change. It’s normal to be a little rocky. But Adam has a good heart. I think you’re doing the right thing.”
In a gush of gratitude, I tried to laugh, but managed only a strangled snicker.
“Are you feeling bad in your stomach? You might try some soda crackers if you are.”
I wanted to tell her so badly, but how could I explain that I was afraid to have the babies of such an obviously robust and normal man? The truth seemed like a heavy weight then, and the lies were a gulf between Momma and me. Instead, I blew my nose, wiped my eyes, and took the dress off.
“Evelyn, it’s just the baby coming making you feel this way. Everything’ll be fine.” I laid my head on her shoulder and cried.
E
ven before we were actually married, the benefits of marriage were evident: gifts and help. Once we announced we were getting married and were going to live on the farm, everybody—particularly the men—began to take the farm seriously as a place to live.
First, Daddy had to be convinced that Adam really wanted to live on the farm. Daddy saw the mill as security, a place where a man could work his way up and get a good retirement, a life less dependent on local rainfall.
Adam pointed out that if Addie and I had been able to run the farm, surely he and I could do better. “Robert,” I overheard him say one day when they were out on the porch, “I promise you, if your daughter is ever close to going without anything, I’ll be down at the mill the next day looking for a steady income. I expect most of our money to come from the horses. Addie made some money with them, and I’ll do the same. Better, I hope. Evelyn and our children will not do without.”
“I’m glad to hear that, son. That’s good to know. You’ll have a family to support.”
They went straight into a discussion of how the farmhouse should be wired for electricity. An ice-box and indoor plumbing were also in the plans. Suddenly, everyone thought it was a pity that I had to go outside to relieve myself, that I washed my clothes in a tub, or lit a lantern at night. Before Adam, it seemed to everyone that we had just been two girls keeping house, waiting for a man to come along. If we had known he’d come with an ice-box and a washing machine, I’m sure we would have found one sooner.
T
he wedding was simple: the preacher at Momma’s house, the new white dress for me, and a borrowed suit for Adam. Then, after the ceremony, plenty of food set up on sawhorses and boards in Momma’s front yard under the oak tree. Mostly family and a few friends. Cole came with Eloise, now officially his fiancée. Freddie, Marge, and the Sunday-evening picking folks provided the music. Even my strange, aloof cousin Frank contributed by photographing the wedding. Everyone got fed, the men drank, and some of us danced.
Our honeymoon was as simple as our wedding. We got married on Saturday, left right after the wedding, and drove to my cousin Pauline’s place in Florida. Momma took a rare day off on Monday to take care of the chores and Joe took Tuesday.
Pauline had moved to Florida only months before and rented a cottage on Lake Swan, a large, spring-fed pond. The cottage was tiny, only two rooms and a porch.
When we arrived, Pauline announced that she would not interfere with our wedded bliss. She winked and was gone, off to stay with a friend. We were out in the middle of nowhere, miles from Gainesville where she worked. The lake, shallow with a pale, sandy bottom, was clear as drinking water.
We made love that night in the water under a gibbous moon, quietly, with as little motion as possible. “I think I can feel the baby in you. Our tadpole daughter.” He pulled me under as he climaxed, his sweet voice suddenly muffled and shimmering the water above us in the bright distortion of moon. We tumbled through the water, my hair floating around us, his face inches from mine, laughing bubbles.
Later, I stood shoulder-deep in the crystal water as he floated beside me, pale belly, rope of penis, long legs, and, below him, his shadow like an angel on the sand as he waved his arms. I put my hand on my belly, which was still flat, and asked myself the question every expectant mother asks: “Who is this child?” Then there was the other question that I dared not ask out loud: “
What
is this child?”
B
eing pregnant bonded me to Adam, as it can bond any woman to the father of her child. I wanted to give him a child. I wanted to have a part of him inside me in every sense. But my pregnancy also put us firmly on opposite sides of an experience. Addie and I had been the same. While I could commiserate with Joe’s wife, Mary, and with any other woman who had had a baby, for the first time what was happening to me could not be shared with A. in the same way
That Adam could exist the way he did was, for him, as it is for all of us, the first given, the absolute. He took his own existence for granted. But the impossibility of his existence, the guilt and isolation I felt in choosing him over my own kind and bearing his children, these were things I wanted to share with him but did not. What good could come from telling him I had these conflicts?
But in my sleep, I gave myself away.
During the fourth month of my pregnancy, the nightmares began. In each dream, I was with the baby in public. Happily, I showed off my new child and everyone admired her. But then I looked down and I saw that she was shapeless and faceless. In some dreams, I tried to hide her face from everyone and get away. Other nights, her shapelessness seemed to be my own craziness and no one else saw it. I tried to keep the nightmares to myself. But I would wake from them with Adam holding me, rocking and humming.
Once when Momma and I were alone in her kitchen, cleaning up after Sunday supper, I asked, “Did you have bad dreams when you were pregnant?”
“Most women do. Don’t let it worry you.”
“But these are real bad—really bad. They wake me up.” Then I told her one of the dreams.
“Everybody’s scared when a baby’s coming, Evelyn. That’s normal. But all you can do is take it easy and let Nature do the rest.”
Suddenly, her ignorance irritated me. I shook my head. “You can’t understand. You can’t!”
I saw the hurt in her face as she paused before starting to speak. I held up my hand to interrupt her, but my own words backed up in my throat. Nothing came out of my open mouth. The puzzled expression on her face as I left the room reminded me of the faces in my dreams.
The week after I told Momma my bad dreams, she insisted on taking me to Dr. Hanks, who delivered most of the babies in Clarion then. I knew she was trying to reassure me, but it didn’t help. He talked about what I should eat, what work I should do. Everybody assumed that I’d be having the baby at the hospital, of course. Only backwoods or desperately poor women still had their babies at home. To have sought any alternative then would have been seen as a kind of insanity. But in a hospital, I would be asleep and alone when the baby came out, as helpless as I was in my dreams. I didn’t want others to be the first to see her. I was afraid of what they might do if she looked like her daddy had when I first saw him.
By the time I neared my seventh month, I was irrational with worry. Women then referred to the deep anesthesia of hospital labor as the “twilight sleep.” The phrase seemed ominous to me and I became convinced they would kill my baby or spirit her away before I woke, then tell me she had been born dead in order to spare me having to see her or raise a deformed child.
I woke in a sweat one night with Adam holding me. “Tell me about it,” he whispered. And, finally, I told him about the dreams and my fears.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I chose. I chose to do this.”
Then I realized he might not remember much of those first few days. I turned on the light and got out the picture that Frank had left, the one of the Japanese girl burned in the bombing. I had put it away, deep in the small drawers of the wardrobe.
“Do you remember this?” I asked. “Do you remember your skin being a different color and looking like this?” I traced my finger along the burnt shoulder of the woman.
Adam moaned, low and awful. “I remember this picture. I know I was different from you, but I don’t remember being like this. I never saw myself. I only saw you. Even when I looked in a mirror, I saw you.” He drew me to him and pressed his face against my big belly.
After a while, he got up and pulled the covers up tight around me. “Go back to sleep. No more nightmares. Let me think about this.” Despite the chilly night, he went outside and sat in one of the front-porch rockers. I listened to its rhythmic squeaking as I fell back asleep.
Hours later, I woke to the sound of the truck pulling away. I leapt up out of bed. My first thought was that he had left me because I was so afraid of having his baby. But the bedroom remained undisturbed. He hadn’t taken any clothes. The photograph still lay on the bed where we had left it. I found a note on the kitchen table: “I’ll be back in an hour, two at the most.—Love, Adam.” The morning’s milk sat in the ice-box. Outside, the chickens were happy, scratching in the coop.
Soon, he returned with a solution. I wouldn’t need to go to the hospital, he told me. A week later, we went to Pearl’s barbeque shack. He waited outside while Pearl took me into the back room to meet the midwife Adam had arranged the morning he went off alone. “This is Granny Paynes,” Pearl introduced us. “P-a-y-n-e-s,” she spelled it out after a quick glimpse at me, then left the two of us alone.
Granny Paynes was a thin, very old black woman, but she rose quickly and stood erect. She shooed two little boys out into the backyard and turned on a bare-bulb light that hung in the middle of the room. She sat down on the only chair, next to a gigantic old wood stove. She observed me a moment, expressionless. The room smelled of sweat, hickory, and sorghum syrup. The warmth and sweetness made me drowsy.
“Take off your coat and come over here.” She motioned and spat tobacco juice into a cup, then sat the cup back down next to the stove. Her deep voice sounded much younger than she appeared. “Stand up straight and lift up your shirt,” she said.
I complied.
“Now”—she looked up at me as her strong hands worked around my belly—“why you want a colored granny woman to help get your baby into this world instead of going to the hospital in Charlotte like all the other white women?”
I’d never had a colored person touch me that intimately, but her hands felt strong, sure, and, like her voice, young. “I’m scared of hospitals,” I told her. She had turned her head sideways, as if listening to my belly, as she studied my face. Her brown irises had a faint ring of pale blue around them.
