Baby Love (11 page)

Her parents had to get married. They don’t know she knows that, but she figured it out. First of all, her mother was always so vague about their wedding date. When she was little, Jill loved making greeting cards for every special occasion, even things like Arbor Day and Richard Nixon’s birthday. “So when is your anniversary?” she kept asking. “Sometime in the spring,” Doris said. “I’ve stopped keeping track.” And then Jill looked in the family Bible her uncle had, and sure enough, the date was just six months before Timmy’s birthday.

She can’t imagine her mother lying on pine needles with her knees apart, or in the backseat of some old jalopy, her father telling her (the way Virgil used to), “Honey, I have to or my dick could get petrified.” She was fourteen years old, and she actually believed him.

Her mother was probably asleep when it happened. She’s sure her mother never felt the way Jill does, which is very horny sometimes. Not just with Virg, but at all sorts of odd moments, like when one of the lifeguards at Green Lake threw her in the water one time after junior lifesaving class, and when her biology teacher showed this film strip about primates and explained what it means when a baboon’s rear end turns bright red. Sometimes she gets that way all by herself, even, lying in bed, thinking about Rod Stewart, pretending she’s his wife, Alana, or looking at the picture she has on her wall of John Travolta with his shirt unbuttoned and his mouth partway open.

Of course, once you’re married you aren’t supposed to think about those people anymore. And there will be lots of good things to make up for it, like all the wedding presents and taking showers together and not having any more curfews. Jill wonders if everybody’s penis looks like Virgil’s.

She feels sad for her father, that the only woman he ever got to screw was her mother. She thinks about that time last summer when Reg picked her and Wanda up at the beach and all they had on was their bikinis (Wanda was pregnant then, but not enough to show). They all had to squeeze in the front of the truck, along with some groceries he’d got, with Wanda in the middle. He had this look on his face.

Of course it will be wonderful having a little baby, Virgil Junior. Jill’s mother can take care of it sometimes.

If by any chance she isn’t pregnant after all, Jill is going to get some birth control pills. So what if they make her gain a few pounds?

She imagines that her tongue is in John Travolta’s mouth. She inhales when he exhales. They are breathing the same air.

Let me taste you, he says. Virgil would never do that, in a million years.

“We need more plastic straws and ketchup,” says Sal, tying on a fresh apron. Jill says she will be back in a second and opens the door to the kitchen.

Three meat patties on the griddle and a piece of apple pie in the microwave. Steam rising from the dishwasher. Toni Tennille singing “Do It to Me One More Time” on the radio. Jill pushes aside the box of coffee filters and reaches for her vial of pee.

There is a red ring on the paper, plain as a bull’s-eye.

At three o’clock the garden is finished. It was a slow job because the soil has not been cultivated for ten years at least and the weeds were pretty thick. Reg’s shirt is wet under the arms and there’s a damp V-shaped patch on his back. But he likes this kind of work. As he pushed the tiller, he was picturing eight rows of Golden Bantam corn. A row of yellow wax beans maybe, and a hill of Kentucky Wonder. Half a dozen Big Boy tomato plants, with marigolds and nasturtiums in between to keep the pests away. Watermelon.

He’s always had a touch with plants. People used to tell him he could never get good melons this far north, but he grew them the color of raspberries inside, so juicy you’d tie a towel around your neck or get soaked eating one.

His father was a farmer. They only had thirty acres—the Johnsons were always hard up—but it was good land, southern exposure, clear of stones. Reg used to take a blue ribbon at the 4-H booth in the Deerfield fair every September, for his corn.

By the time he married Doris—she was three months along with Timmy, they were both eighteen years old—his father was dead and the farm belonged to Reg.

Doris said sell the land, I don’t want to spend my whole life smelling cow manure. She signed him up to sell
World Book
encyclopedias, door to door. Bought him a suit. She loved it when he wore that suit.

But he’s no kind of salesman, and the only one who ever bought an encyclopedia was Reg himself. Doris said it would be a good thing to have, for the baby. Not that he ever saw Timmy open any volume except
R
, which Timmy and his friend Skipper used to look at all the time for Reproduction. That was about it.

He joined the service for a while—didn’t like being so far from the kids. When his tour of duty was over he took a job on a construction crew and left his farming to the one patch of their yard—thirty feet square—that got any kind of sun, and not much at that. He has always felt ashamed of the produce that comes out of the garden. Yellowish tomatoes, cauliflowers you have to cut hunks out of, where the cabbage moths have got to them. His son and daughter have never been interested in growing things. He would like them to know he can do better than that.

Ann could have a gem of a garden here. He could help. Show her how to pinch the tomato plants. Build supports for the pole beans and peas. Maybe bring over some fish heads to put in the corn hills. He’d plant a row of zinnias, to surprise her. Maybe build a scarecrow. He won’t mention it to Doris yet.

Ann hears the machine stop and looks out the kitchen window toward the field. Reg is pacing the length of the garden patch, heel to toe. He has hung his cap on one of the handles of his Rototiller and she can see the sun glinting on a round bald patch at the back of his head. He rubs the base of his spine. He looks tired. She takes one of the beers out of the refrigerator and slips on her sandals. She walks toward him.

Wanda and Melissa are having a picnic. The grinders and the Diet Pepsi in the bag are for Wanda, of course, not Melissa. But Wanda has put some grape Kool-Aid in Melissa’s bottle, for a special treat, and set her infant seat on the sand facing Green Lake so she can watch the older kids splashing around. She has put a bandanna over Melissa’s head—tied in the back like a gypsy’s so the bald patches won’t get burned. Now she’s rubbing suntan lotion over Melissa’s legs. Melissa likes this. She has opened her eyes, finally.

They’re going to have fun. Wanda looks around at the other mothers, watching what they do. The woman a couple of towels over from her, for instance. She’s probably ten years older than Wanda, but Wanda feels like the old one. This woman has three kids, plus the older boy has brought a friend. She has a homemade picnic in her cooler—roast chicken and bananas, little boxes of raisins and individually wrapped brownies. She has on a white bikini and her stomach is flat and tanned. A minute ago she was building sand castles with the little girl. Now she’s pulling the littlest boy around in the water, which is still very cold, but just bearable. Doesn’t she ever get tired?

Wanda is the only one on the whole beach that doesn’t have a bathing suit on. She’s wearing one of her maternity tops, no bra on account of the heat. The waistband of her cut-offs is too tight, so a roll of skin is pushed up over the edge and Wanda notices for the first time that the flesh on her upper arms is getting saggy too. She studies the woman in the white bikini, running out of the water, her breasts bouncing just a little, like on
Charlie’s Angels
, watches as the woman bends over her little boy with a fluffy blue towel. Wanda knows she will never have a rear end like that again.

A little kid, maybe three or four, rushes past, leaving a few drips from his watering can on Melissa’s leg. “Aku,” says Melissa. She always chews on her fist like this when she’s happy.

Wanda is thinking about last winter, when she was pregnant. Expecting, is how Mrs. Ramsay used to put it. Back when it seemed exciting to step on the scale and find out she’d gained another two pounds. Of course she loves Melissa more than anything in the world and she wouldn’t trade her for any other baby or even change the little red birthmark on her forehead. Of course having a real baby you can cuddle and wash and put outfits on is better than just imagining. But back in January it was like carrying around this fancy package, looking at it every day, wondering what’s inside. As long as you don’t open it you can always pretend it might be a diamond ring or the keys to a moped or something. Once you open it, there will always be a million things that won’t be inside, even if what’s there is what you wanted the most. You’ve got it. You just aren’t
expecting
anymore, that’s all.

Wanda wanted to be a skater. In the Olympics, in the Ice Capades, like Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill. Not Linda Fratianne, although Wanda watched her in the winter Olympics on TV and realizes that she is very good. Her triple toe loops and a couple of her double salchows were perfect, Dick Button said. She just isn’t a dancer the way Peggy Fleming is, in Wanda’s opinion. Of course people would laugh if she told them this—now especially—but Wanda thinks she could have been a better skater than Linda Fratianne, if she just had someone to show her the moves.

There was a thaw, back in January, when the temperature went up to fifty and all the snow melted. The crocuses even thought it was spring, started pushing through the dirt. Everybody was going around with no coats on, sitting outside Sal’s eating ice creams.

Then came the full moon and a cold snap. All of a sudden the thermometer went down to zero and stayed there. In two days Green Lake was glass, the way you almost never get it because there will usually be snow to mess up the surface or winds to make it all ripply. Wanda was eight months pregnant, feeling like she was carrying around a lead ball, sitting in front of the TV watching all those skaters spinning around on Lake Placid, wishing it was her. She just wanted to feel light and free again. She didn’t even care if people saw her walking down Route 9 at midnight with her stomach out to here and figure skates hanging over her shoulder, or that it was a mile walk, and still bitter cold, or that her skates were so tight, because she had this problem with fluid retention in her feet.

Nobody ever needed to show her how to do a figure eight. Also, Wanda made up some movements she never saw anybody else try. A half turn backward, then a half step forward, then a little turning jump—it’s hard to explain. There’s more to it than the feet anyway. Wanda likes to pretend, when she’s skating, that she’s a deaf person, and the way she moves her arms is like her sign language, instead of talking.

The woman in the white bathing suit has been swimming across the lake. (Her friend, in a red one-piece, is watching the kids.) She has been swimming for about ten minutes now, and she’s still not over to the other side. Last January Wanda, eight months pregnant, on her skates, made it across like an arrow. Then she threw her parka down on the ice, also her sweater, so all she had on, on top, was a short-sleeved T-shirt, and still she wasn’t cold. If she told someone like Sandy about that, Wanda’s sure they’d be shocked, say, “What if you fell? You could’ve hurt the baby.” But Wanda never falls when she’s skating, and knows if things were always how they were that night, she and Melissa would be safe.

Suddenly—this has never happened before—Melissa is laughing. The little boy with the watering can is back, sprinkling one of Melissa’s feet. “Want me to do your piggies?” he says.

“Aku,” says Melissa. “Ku, ku.”

“This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had … had …” He looks over at Wanda. She can’t help him. Her mother never told her nursery rhymes, that’s for sure.

He gives up, runs back to his towel. Melissa begins to make her little hurt-puppy noise.

“Be a good girl and I’ll take you in the water,” says Wanda. Melissa doesn’t pay any attention. Wanda looks around at the other mothers, wishes the little boy could come back. She never knows what she’s supposed to do at times like this. Melissa is not interested in the grape Kool-Aid.

“Mommy take you swimming,” says Wanda. She wades in, with Melissa, still whimpering, in her arms. Realizes, just as the water laps up over her waist, that when her shirt gets wet it’s going to stick to her breasts and she’ll look gross. The woman in the white bikini is standing a few feet away, tossing her son in the air, catching him, raising him high over her head again. Wanda thinks she’ll try that.

They’re in pretty deep. If Wanda didn’t catch Melissa she would just sink. She might sputter around for a minute—the bandanna would come off, float to the top—but that would be all. Everybody’s so busy watching their own kids, nobody would even notice.

I’m going nuts, Wanda thinks, catching hold of Melissa by both arms, tight. I am a terrible person.

Everybody must be looking at her now. What kind of a mother doesn’t even know how to make her own baby stop screaming? But what kind of a kid doesn’t appreciate a picnic at the beach? Wanda tries her best. Who wouldn’t go a little crazy, putting up with this racket?

One good swat and the baby’s quiet.

Only a minute ago Ron Guidry looked unhittable and now this. Long fly ball to center field, going going gone. See you later. Number ten for Jimmy Rice. Pandemonium in the stands.

“Way to go, Rice,” says Mark, taking a large bite of his pig in a blanket. His dinner is sitting on a TV tray. The Red Sox have just taken over the lead.

“I don’t believe that guy,” he yells.

“Shh, honey,” says Sandy, coming over from the sink, where she’s washing the supper dishes. “You’ll wake the baby.”

Mark says nothing. Fred Lynn is up. Solid hit.

“Way to be,” Mark yells. Louder.

Sandy dries the bowl she used for dip. She sits down next to Mark, snuggles against his chest. She can remember watching him play basketball back in high school. She would be so nervous when he was going to make a foul shot, her hands got all wet. She was so proud when he scored.

“Remember that forward that used to play for Sanborn High?” says Sandy. “And he tried to pick me up that time, during the half?”