Baby Love (12 page)

“Not now, O.K.?” Ken Harrelson is reminiscing about Carl Yaztremski’s golden sixty-seven season. Mark lights up a thirty-five-cent cigar he has bought for the game. Sandy clears away his plate.

She should be glad. So many nights he wants to have sex and all she wants to do is go to sleep. While he’s doing it she’s thinking what will she make for his dinner tomorrow? did she remember to put Vaseline on Mark Junior’s bottom?

It’s not that she’s so horny tonight. She doesn’t even understand why, but she feels scared about something. She’s not sure if it has to do with the article she read today that said ages seventeen to twenty-four are the sexual prime of men. When their appetite’s the strongest. She’s not sure if it has to do with the look on Mark’s face when he saw Jill’s breasts last night, or Jill’s mentioning that she saw Mark outside Felsen’s this morning, when he said he was going straight to work. Jill saying he’s so sexy, your husband. Her mother, right in the middle of telling her about Pauline Fisher, looking up and saying, “If they aren’t getting it at home, you know, they start looking for it somewhere else.” Scrubbing Mark Junior in his blue plastic tub, being particularly careful with his little penis and his scrotum, on account of the rash. When she rubbed the soap around the rim of his foreskin he got an erection. Thinking I wish there wasn’t such a thing as sex. I wish there could just be hugging and kissing and having Christmas and going places like the Hopkinton fair. She’s scared of the things sex makes people do. It seems like something out of her control. It’s like having a gun in the house that’s loaded and you never know when somebody might pick it up and blow their brains out.

Bottom of the ninth, Yankees with one out. Sox ahead by one, but there are two men on base. The fans are going crazy. Reggie’s up next.

Sandy rises from the couch. It’s like she’s hypnotized. She walks over to the set. Not in front of it—she knows not to do that. Next to it. She unbuttons her black blouse and lays it on the floor beside her. She unzips her black velveteen pants and slides them down her legs. Pulls off her socks. What is she doing? What would those girls do that work in nightclubs? She turns around and wiggles her rear end, peeling down her panties partway. She faces him again and cups her hands under her breasts, does a jump from one of her old cheering routines. Then she takes her panties off and brings them to him, twirling them in one hand. She should have thought to wear newer ones. This pair is stretched out of shape from when she was pregnant.

She stands over him, lowering herself into a split. Not sure if she can still do it. He’s just staring ahead; partly at her, partly at the game. The cigar’s still in his mouth.

“Here comes the pitch,” the announcer is saying. “Burleson scoops it up, flips to second. Remy takes the throw, fires to first. Pretty double play.”

“Fuck me,” she says. She has never said the
f
word before.

“Perfect timing,” says Mark. The Red Sox win.

M
RS.
R
AMSAY HAS BOUGHT
four skeins of two-ply pink Sport Yarn and taken out her number-five needles. Now she is casting on eighty-eight stitches. She is making another duck sweater.

Merv’s guest this afternoon is Susan Anton. Poor girl. Mrs. Ramsay knows (although Susan Anton is not talking about this) that she’s in love with Sylvester Stallone, who has left her. Of course, it is good that Sylvester—Sly, they call him that—has gone back to his wife, Sasha. And most important, their two sons. The youngest is just a year old. What kind of a father would leave a baby like that? He does not deserve to have a baby at all. If he and Sasha get married again and then they get divorced, Sasha had better get custody, that’s all. None of this Dustin Hoffman business. Babies belong with a woman. Not necessarily the mother, if she is a slut. But babies need the woman’s touch.

Tonight she called the mother and invited her and Baby for dinner tomorrow. She will serve cream of mushroom soup and she will make it with heavy cream, not milk. She will serve stuffed pork chops and rolls with butter and baked potatoes with sour cream and asparagus with cheese sauce and blueberry pie à la mode. The mother is going to get very fat; she will get sores on the inside of her thighs where they rub together. Her fingers will get so puffy she won’t be able to get off that class ring she wears. Fake emerald. They will have to cut it. If her son Dwight could see her now, he would wonder why he ever wanted to do those things with her. Although she has not heard from her son Dwight in a while.

After the blueberry pie Mrs. Ramsay will explain her plan to the mother. She will remove the eighteen hundred and twenty-six dollars from page 200 of
Joy of Cooking.
Mrs. Ramsay will put this money in the mother’s fat hands and take out the paper she typed, that she had notarized, that says the mother admits she is a slut and Mrs. Ramsay should take care of Baby from now on. After the mother signs it Mrs. Ramsay will tell her to leave and never come back. She is not worried that someday the mother might return like that mother in the Dustin Hoffman movie. She will do it with so many men that she will have lots more babies. She will get fatter and fatter. Before long she’ll be paying people to take them.

Mrs. Ramsay will not even go back to the mother’s apartment to get Baby’s things, although it is a shame to think of those beautiful sweaters. Never mind; she can make lots more.

She would like to find out more about that machine with the tubes you hook up to your nipples.

She will call the baby Susan.

The dress makes Carla look a little like the mother on
Lassie.
Greg had pictured her as more like one of those stark black-and-white Dorothea Lange photographs from the Depression, but Carla has attached a plastic pin of The Incredible Hulk to the collar. She likes the dress a lot. “This would have cost thirty dollars in SoHo,” she said.

For dinner they had snow peas and water chestnuts and shrimp with lobster sauce, made in the electric wok. They have almost finished a bottle of
soave
and now Greg is rolling a joint. From the kitchen Carla is telling him she will grow lots of basil this summer and make pesto sauce in the Cuisinart. Enough to freeze some and bring it back to New York in the fall. Greg does not say that he has been thinking he would like to stay on through the winter here, tell the Walker School to find another art teacher. He imagines Packers Falls encrusted with ice.

“Didn’t think I’d believe she was forty-two years old,” Carla is saying. “When the truth is, she looks fifty.” She has been telling him something about a woman who stopped by today selling makeup.

Carla does not mention that she told Doris Johnson she was pregnant.

“I didn’t think they even made hair spray anymore,” she says. He lets out his breath, watches the smoke disappear. He wonders how old that girl was at the secondhand store. Sixteen or seventeen probably. But nothing like his students in the city, with their punk outfits from Fiorucci and Caribbean tans. She was so pale.

He puts on an old Van Morrison album. Carla sits on the floor next to him with a plateful of Pepperidge Farm cookies. She puts her arms around his chest, under his shirt. He can feel her fingers moving along his ribs, his nipples, under his arms, inside the sleeves of his shirt. He knows they will make love tonight.

“What are you thinking about?” she says. She’s always asking him that, although his answer is almost always the same.

“Artworks.” The pale girl standing on the large flat rock at the base of the waterfall. An arc of milk shooting out of one breast.

“Hungry for your love,” Van Morrison is singing. “I love you in buckskin.”

“Do you ever think about a baby?” Carla asks.

He’s startled. He sees the blond-haired baby in the secondhand store. Wearing a little ribbon in her hair.

“Because I’ve been thinking about it,” says Carla. They have not talked about this for years.

Greg can’t picture Carla holding a baby. His brother’s kids visit them sometimes. They are five and seven and they love taking sips of Carla’s Tab and riding in the first subway car with Greg holding them up to look out the window. Carla always takes her collection of Japanese robot toys down off the shelf for them to look at. Last time Alex lost the little airplane that used to shoot out of Gojira’s stomach, and Greg could tell Carla was upset, although she said it was all right. Alex thinks Carla is terrific. “Not like other mothers,” he says. That’s true.

“I wonder what it would look like,” says Carla. She’s smoothing down his hair in the place where it sticks out. This always makes him feel like a little boy being cleaned up for church. He runs his hand through his hair to mess it up again.

“What would we do with a baby?” Greg asks. “I thought you didn’t want to be tied down.”

“I could get one of those backpacks they make. We could take it around with us.”

“A baby’s a big commitment,” he says. This is not the sort of comment he usually makes.

Actually, he has always assumed he would have kids. It suddenly occurs to him that he simply hasn’t been picturing himself having them with Carla. Not that he has thought about leaving her.

She got pregnant once, four months after they met. He had come home with a pair of mannequin legs he found in some trash outside a factory on West Twentieth Street. Carla was crying but when she told Greg he felt happy. This was before the teaching job and the only money they had was what they got from Carla’s women’s magazine, which wasn’t very much, and some house painting he did once in a while. Still, Greg had hugged Carla. Then he did a funny little dance around the apartment with the mannequin legs, holding them high, with his cheek against the mannequin’s flat, almost concave stomach. He was very surprised when she had said. “How are we ever going to pay for the abortion?” For that one minute he’d thought they were going to have the baby.

Now Carla’s kissing his eyelids. He strokes her spine, feeling her hipbones, moving his hand over her stomach, down inside her underpants. He’s remembering that first night—Carla in her expensive black suit. They hardly said a word to each other all night, except that afterwards he said, “I want to marry you.” She said, “You’re crazy, it’s too soon to say something like that.”

And it’s true, he probably wouldn’t say that to her now, seven years later, although he really meant it at the time. What Greg believes is that there’s one right time in the universe for things to happen, and if you hedge around, it passes. Carla always says, “I don’t like risks.” In Greg’s opinion, there’s no way to avoid them. It’s just a matter of whether you choose dangerous action or dangerous inaction. If Carla hadn’t tapped him on the shoulder when she did they would never have seen each other again, and if they hadn’t slept together that first night it might never have happened. And even though it was impractical, and a study conducted by her own magazine indicated that having a child in the first year puts undue stress on a relationship, their time to have a baby was six years ago.

His head is on her left breast, the one he likes best because he can hear her heart beating. Her breasts—though she is quite slim—are much larger than that girl’s he saw today. When she lies over him they almost bury his face. He lifts his head up a few inches, just looking at her. Her dress is open to the waist and her eyes are closed. He’s looking at her the way he would if she were one of the models they used to have at art school. Studying the perspective.

She pulls his head down so her nipple is in his mouth. “I feel like a mother,” she says.

It’s almost as if he’s standing about ten feet back; he can see the whole scene that precisely. Carla gripping the neck of his shirt so tight that when he takes it off tomorrow she’ll notice it has been stretched out of shape. The blue vein running along the underside of her breast. Two lemon nut cookies spilled onto the floor, where, in a minute, his shoe will crush them. Van Morrison singing “Put on your pretty summer dress. I want to make love to you, yes, yes.” The toilet draining. (They haven’t learned yet to jiggle the handle when they flush it.) Greg’s hand sliding Carla’s pants down her legs—a little black paint on his palm from the canvas he started today. His penis stiffening, pointing down toward her, following the movements of her hips without actually touching her yet, like one of those overhead microphones they use on
Saturday Night Live
that move back and forth between Gilda and Laraine. Lowering now, brushing against her pubic hair. Carla guiding his mouth to her other breast. Greg sinking down. Carla whispering, “I feel so soft and moist.” Greg focusing on a piece of a feather that is coming out of one of their floor pillows. Greg pushing down, inside her now. The record player clicking off. Water rushing over the falls.

What Greg sees now is the pale girl, standing on the rocks. She is wearing the dress he bought, unbuttoned, and there is milk shooting from both nipples, splashing on the rocks. Like that painting
Origin of the Milky Way.
It is at just this moment—just as he feels his semen rising, shooting out—that he realizes Carla did not get up to put in her diaphragm.

Jill and Virg are parked at their favorite spot, the miniature golf course next to Moonlight Acres, which won’t be open for another two weeks. Jill likes looking out the window at the little wooden windmill and the miniature bridge and the imitation brick schoolhouse, hole number five. Her favorite is the church, which is also a very difficult hole, although one time she got through it with just one stroke.

Normally they would be making out right now in the backseat. Virgil would have a cassette in the tape player—Fleetwood Mac or The Cars or Donna Summer—and there would be beer in the cooler in the front, and some chips. What they usually do is, they make out for one side of a tape, but they don’t go all the way. Then they have a snack and sometimes they’ll do something weird like drive right through the middle of town with Jill wearing her shirt and her jacket, but bare-assed. Or Virg will put her bra on over his down vest and stuff it with Kleenex or something. Then they make out some more and Jill lets Virg go all the way. Then he drops her off at home. She’s supposed to be back by twelve-thirty, but she’s usually late.