Baby Love (22 page)

That Dr. Spock. It’s all his fault.

For a minute there, Mrs. Ramsay thought she was going to die. I am going to have a seizure right here on the spot, she thought, and the only ones who could save me will be those two in the car, and I would rather die than sit in that car which is probably all wet from their disgusting sexual secretions. They will not even notice.

But she did not die. In fact, she shot an entire roll of pictures, and they came out very well, if you can call it that. Mrs. Ramsay can hardly bear to look at them. That thing he did in her mouth, she has never heard of that. She does not know how she will look him in the eye, to give him the money. She hates to think of it, all the money from Harold’s model train collection, gone to a perverted young man for putting his organ in a girl’s mouth. She is just not going to think about it.

The telephone rings. “Hello, Mrs. Ramsay? It’s Jill Johnson, I’m a friend of Wanda’s. Is she over there?”

“No,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “She is not.”

“Could you tell her I was looking for her? Tell her I got the money, and my appointment is tomorrow morning. She’ll understand.”

“They must have forgotten, that’s all,” says Carla. She has put her arms around Sandy, who started crying again when she went to cut a piece of cake. She didn’t bother to light the candles. Mark Junior, who missed his three o’clock nap so he’d be awake to greet his guests, is now asleep on the water bed.

“Hats and everything” is all Carla can make out of what Sandy is saying. “I try so hard.”

Carla hands Sandy the box with the panda. Sandy says Mark Junior will love it, when he wakes up.

“I knew Jill was feeling sick,” says Sandy. But she doesn’t understand about Wanda and Tara.

Of course Carla knows where Tara is.

Tara is just stepping into her underpants. She pulls the orange dress over her head so that for a few seconds her face is covered, and there are just her arms wriggling into the sleeves. This frightens Sunshine. “It’s O.K.,” says Greg, into her ear. “Mommy’s right here.”

“Thank you,” says Tara, reaching for the baby. She does not put her hair back into the bun. She goes to look at Greg’s picture.

“This is just a study,” he says. “It’s going to be part of a much larger painting. Of some people at the falls. I’m going to put you and Sunshine on the rocks.”

“It looks just like us,” says Tara. “Even my scar.”

“I have a lot of work to do yet. If you can come again.”

She’s free.

The baby is so good. He thought babies were always crying.

“She likes you.” Tara looks at Carla’s green tennis shoes, sitting next to the bed.

“Did your girlfriend like the dress?” she asks.

Greg feels as if he’s been caught shoplifting. “She thought it was great,” he says.

Tara says she should get back. What time is it?

She’s late. The party started two hours ago.

He drives her there, very slowly, wishing the town were farther away. She has already disappeared into Sandy’s building when he realizes he forgot to pay her.

Sandy has begun to feel a little better. Carla told her she never tasted such a moist devil’s food cake before. So often they’re dry. Mark Junior woke up and when he saw the bear he said something that sounded like “panda,” and even though Sandy knows that isn’t possible, Carla said, “He must be very precocious.”

Carla wanted to hear all about Sandy’s pregnancy, which is something Sandy loves to talk about. That was such a happy time for her. She still believed then that all they needed for everything to be perfect was a baby.

“I think I may be pregnant myself,” says Carla. This is not the same as telling that Avon woman. She really likes Sandy. Besides, this time it’s the truth.

Sandy’s excited. In spite of what she knows now—that babies make things much more complicated, that they are bound to be the cause of fights and tears, that having one is like getting on a train, taking a long trip while your husband stays home (and who knows if you ever return?)—in spite of all that, Sandy’s always glad to hear about someone having a baby.

It is at just this moment that she hears the knock at her door. “This is my friend Tara and her daughter, Sunshine,” she says. “Tara, this is Carla, who has just moved here from New York. Her husband’s an artist. She just told me she’s going to have a baby.”

Carla sits there with the stuffed panda bear in her lap, and one bite of cake left that she has not swallowed. She knows it’s not important that this girl is wearing a very ugly synthetic orange dress, that she’s skinny, that when President Kennedy was assassinated, she wasn’t even born, that she has probably never heard of abstract expressionism. Those are the things that matter if you are like Carla and you weigh your decisions and plan your life and ask yourself, Does this make sense? Is this wise? None of these things matters when a person is standing naked in front of you and she’s that beautiful.

Tara stands in the doorway holding Sunshine very tight, almost as if it’s her baby that is holding her up. She’s thinking about Kalima, rubbing her hands in circles over her enormous belly. She’s thinking about Denver, squatting on the floor between Kalima’s legs, bending over, giving her an open-mouthed kiss. Holding Mountain against his bare chest and saying, “A man never really knows what it is to love a woman until she’s had his child.” Tara had been telling herself the green tennis shoes didn’t matter, until she saw the person who wore them. Now she knows she will never see Greg again.

These are the things Tara and Carla are thinking. What Sandy’s thinking, when the door opens again, and she sees Mark standing there with a bunch of ten-dollar bills in one hand and no pink champagne in the other, is that this is nothing like the birthday parties in the Kodak ads.

Ann’s screaming doesn’t have Wayne worried. Loretta sometimes screamed too. One time the ropes were so tight one of her hands turned blue, but when he untied her she said, “No, please, I want it that way.” Women like pain. They like to be scared, like to cry. Keeps all those hormones from getting atrophied. Who does she want to be, Donna Reed? Erma Bombeck?

She has a nice voice. Younger than he thought. Sounds like early twenties. He thought she’d be one of those old-maid first-grade teachers, getting closer to menopause, thinking if I don’t do something drastic soon the only kid I can have will be Mongoloid. What would make a girl in her early twenties feel so desperate she’d answer that ad?

She could be paraplegic, of course. He met one of those once. Paralyzed from the neck down. Car wreck. Thirty-four years old and she lived with her mother. She still had a beautiful face, although the mother cut her hair way too short, almost a crew cut, for easy maintenance. She was hooked to a bag for urine, with a tube up her asshole for shit. Completely dead between the legs, of course. But what she could do with her tongue.

Wayne does not think Ann is a paraplegic though. For one thing, she was out of breath like she’d been running. That could just be from trying to pick up the telephone with some weird combination of limbs like her foot and her elbow, of course. But he thinks she was running.

She was outside. RFD address, she lives in the country. Probably planting a vegetable garden. All the young kids who move here from Massachusetts and New Jersey want gardens. Organic, naturally.

She’s not a virgin. He can always tell a virgin by the voice. Something tense and squeaky. This one has had a man, but not lately, and she needs one bad.

Cher looked good when she was pregnant. Who else? Marisa Berenson. Goldie Hawn got fat. That actress on
Eight Is Enough
—they kept her on the show and just pretended her character was pregnant too. She looked puffy and awful and even though she has had her baby now, Jill can tell—from the loose tenty dress she was wearing when she went on Mike Douglas last week—that she doesn’t have her shape back yet. Sandy has lent her a book—
Nine Glorious Months.
Jill looks through the table of contents. There’s a section on vomiting, a section called Nipple Secretion. Varicose Veins and the Importance of Support Hose. Should You Wear a Maternity Girdle? The Frequent Urination Problem. Flatulence. Hemorrhoids. The Mask of Pregnancy. (What’s that? Jill looks up that section. In the later months red splotches sometimes appear on the face, but they are usually temporary.)

Retardation. Dwarfism. Siamese Twins. Spinabifida. Ancephalic Monsters. Fetal Death.

There’s a section of pictures taken during one woman’s delivery. Sandy must have looked at these photographs a lot, from the way the plates are so worn, with spots that look like Coke spills. The woman is lying on a delivery table with her legs spread apart and her feet stuck in the stirrups. Her stomach is so big it blocks out her face. Her boobs are really big too, but not hard and sticking up like the stomach. They droop over the sides of her body like a couple of beanbags where all the beans are down at one end. Her nipples—instead of being neat and buttonlike, the way Jill’s are—have been stretched to the size of sand dollars. It’s hard to look at her vagina, the skin is bulging so tight over the baby’s head.

Jill feels like she’s about to throw up again. She reaches for the bowl under her bed. When she’s finished she goes to her bureau to get a peppermint Life Saver, but the taste is never really gone from her mouth.

It’s like the baby knows he’s in danger. And he keeps wanting to remind her he’s here. It’s like he’s got to get nine months’ worth of wriggling around packed into a couple of hours, because he knows tomorrow he’ll be gone.

All Tara wants to do now is go to her house, up the stairs to her room, and close the door. She just wants to be alone with Sunshine so she can think about today. She will go over everything that happened, very slowly. Then when it’s over she won’t think about him anymore. She will take down the atlas and study the map of the United States, plan her trip. There’s absolutely no reason to stay now.

She has almost reached the house when she sees Mrs. Ramsay standing there underneath the sign that says Just-like-nu Shop—Good Used Clothing. She hopes maybe Mrs. Ramsay’s just waiting to cross the street. But she stands there with a big shoulder bag over one arm.

“It’s finished,” says Mrs. Ramsay.

What is she talking about?

Mrs. Ramsay’s rummaging in the shoulder bag now. Yarn and knitting markers spill onto the sidewalk. She does not appear to notice.

“The pink duck sweater. It is just your color.” She holds the sweater out to Sunshine, who doesn’t know how to take an object out of a person’s hand yet.

Tara says the sweater is adorable. Mrs. Ramsay must be a very good knitter. (Although there’s one place, on the left-hand duck, where the stitches go crazy. The orange beak extends clear out to the buttonholes.)

“I didn’t want you to be cold. These spring evenings get chilly.”

Tara says she’s sure Sunshine will get a lot of use out of the sweater.

“Now I want to talk to your mother,” says Mrs. Ramsay.

“She’s probably in the house,” says Tara.

“Not
your
mother,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “Baby’s mother. You. I need to talk to you.”

“Sure.” This is the last thing Tara wants to be doing.

“It’s very important. We must have privacy.”

Tara says they could come inside. The shop is closed. They can talk there. She leads Mrs. Ramsay in.

“I see you carry very fine-quality merchandise,” says Mrs. Ramsay. She is inspecting a pair of used men’s work boots.

Tara says thank you.

“Now here is something I like.” A purple jumpsuit with a zipper down the front. Two dollars and fifty cents.

“Would you like to try it on?” says Tara.

“No. I already have one like that.”

What are they doing here? “Is there something in particular you want?”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “I want to save a child’s life. I want to keep a girl from murdering her baby.”

What does she mean?

“I happen to know. Your friend Jill has a baby inside of her. I don’t need to tell you why. And she is planning to kill it. She is going to a clinic where they murder babies. Your friend Wanda thought I would pay for it. That will be the day.”

She has taken a dog-eared pamphlet from her shoulder bag. She opens the book to a page with a bookmark in it. She reads out loud, so loud that Tara worries her mother might hear.

“ ‘Second lunar month. The embryo’s nest is now well covered with tissues and roots. The embryo feeds through a primitive umbilical cord and the little body floats in the amniotic sac. Currents of gelatinous cells modify and specialize into the nose and ears, the arms, elbows, fingers, legs, knees, feet and toes. The internal organs are getting ready to function. The embryo is covered with a thin layer of tissue and a transparent layer of skin. The body is one inch long. The heart has begun to beat.’ ”

Tara doesn’t say anything.

“Sex organs. It even has sex organs,” says Mrs. Ramsay. “Doesn’t that mean anything to your friend?”

Tara is still silent. She’s staring down at the spot on the floor were Kalima began her labor. She’s thinking about something Denver told her, that one time when he was giving a woman a prenatal exam, a few weeks before her due date, and he put his fingers through her cervix to feel if the head was engaged, he felt a tiny hand curl around his finger, through the sac. She’s remembering the day, just around this time last year, when she first felt that fluttering in her stomach. She was three months pregnant then.

“What am I supposed to do about it?” says Tara. The thought of a baby dying has almost made her cry.

“Stop her,” says Mrs. Ramsay, waving her knitting needle through thin air as though it’s a wand.

Reg did not even have to think what to do; there was no question. When he heard Ann’s scream he came running from the attic, and when he saw her standing there with that look on her face he put his arms around her and kept them there. Not just loose and friendly, the way he puts his arms around Doris’s sister when they drive to Worcester for a visit. He wrapped himself around her like a tourniquet. Because it’s like she was bleeding.

Ever since he met her he has been picturing in his head what he would do, if he had the courage or the foolishness. Now, after all those hours—down in the garden, up in the attic, lying in bed next to Doris, inhaling her Dippity-Do—it’s all unplanned. She has leaned her head on his chest and he is stroking her hair. He had just about forgotten what a woman’s hair feels like without hairspray on it. Ann’s hair doesn’t smell like anything besides hair.