Earthly Possessions (15 page)

“To tell how to care for a child, silly.”

“Seems kind of pointless, if you ask me,” Jake said. “You know most of them girls will just put their kids out for adoption.”

“Sure, but they’re not the ones that take the course,” said Mindy. “They take Good Grooming.”

“Ah,” Jake said. He drove along a while. Some thought worked through his forehead. He took his foot off the gas pedal. “Wait,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Are you telling me you’re going to keep this kid?”

“Well, naturally.”

“Now, listen. I don’t think that’s such a very good idea.”

“Why … Jake? You’re not saying we should just …”

“We?”

Mindy turned and looked at me. I stared hard at a passing Shell station.

“What you getting at, Mindy?” Jake asked. “Are you trying to plan on us marrying, or something?”

“Of course I plan on it,” Mindy said. “Otherwise what did you drive all this way for? You must have cared a
little
bit, to come so far.”

“Well, I’m only human,” said Jake. “I mean, even when they hijack a plane, they let the kids go free. Even when they’re fighting for lifeboats, they put the kids in first.”

“Lifeboats? What? What’re you talking about?”

“I come to get a baby out of prison,” Jake said. “Ha! Some prison. Seems you told me a bald-faced lie.”

“It wasn’t a lie! How can you say that? Now listen here, Jake Simms,” Mindy said. “You’re not backing out of this. You come all this way, take me out of the Home, transport me to another state—and now you’re going to change your mind? No sir. We’re going to get married and have a little baby, and the prettiest home you ever heard of.”

“Not ever in a million, billion years,” said Jake.

“Why, we could stay right here in Florida, if you like. Get a little place near Oliver, wouldn’t that be nice? Really the climate would be better for the children,” she said, turning to me. “I mean, they won’t get so many colds and all, we won’t have to buy all those snowsuits. It’s cheaper. And I’ve always been a warm-weather person. I’ll make the house real summery, lots of bright colors, straw chairs, those ruffly white curtains with the tie-backs, you know the kind, what do you call them?”

“Priscillas,” I said.

“Priscillas. That’s what we’ll have. Priscillas. Everywhere but the living room; I think there we’ll have fiberglass drapes of some type. Gold, you know, or maybe avocado. Which would you rather, Jake. Gold?”

Jake stared straight ahead of him.

“Avocado?”

The scenery slid past us: used boat lots, real estate offices, praline shops. Everything looked untidy. If this was Florida I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t even like the way the sun shone here, so flat and white, burdening the tinny roofs of the roadside stands.

“Jake, I got this cramp again,” Mindy said in a small voice.

Jake didn’t so much as change expression. He just pulled over and stopped the car. From beneath the back seat, the cat gave a yowl. Jake got out and the two of us slid after him. We were on the edge of a shambling little town called Pariesto, according to the signs. Mindy had nowhere to walk but the littered gravel at the side of the road—white-hot, mica-laden, dazzling to the eyes. She stalked off anyway, very fast, with her hands joined under her stomach.

“Now, don’t you dare say I should go after her,” Jake told me.

I was surprised. “Me?” I said.

“Isn’t that what women do? ‘Oh, go after her, Jake. Go see if you can help.’ ”

“But—I haven’t opened my mouth,” I said. “You were about to.”

“I was not!”

Mindy stumbled in her little sandals. She went down on one knee.

“Go after her,” Jake told me.

I ran and caught up with her. By the time I arrived she was on her feet again. “Mindy?” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, brushing at her skirt. She kept her eyes lowered; her lashes were long and white, clumsily tipped with little blotches of mascara. “I’m supposed to just point my heels,” she said. “That’s what helps the cramps. If I just, like, jab my heels in the gravel, here …”

She stopped and looked up at me. “Charlotte,” she said, “it wasn’t a lie. Can’t you explain to him? He doesn’t understand. I mean, it really is a prison if you got no place else to go to. Isn’t it?”

“Well, naturally,” I said. “You want to turn around now?”

“I just don’t have any choice; he’ll have to go through with this,” she said, letting me lead her back. “It’s not any picnic for
me
, you know. Long about the fifth or sixth month, why, I got so mad and so tired of waiting for him I believe I just stopped loving him. I really believe I might not love him any more. But what else is there for me to do?”

We walked along the strip of gravel, wading through cellophane bags and candy wrappers. Jake had got back in the car to wait for us, I saw. He was sitting in the passenger seat, with his head bowed low and buried in his hands.

From Pariesto on, Mindy did the driving. She said it helped her foot cramps. I sat in my usual place, and Jake moved to the
middle. Although it was hot now, he kept his jacket on and his collar up, as if for protection. The wind ruffled his hair into loose damp curls and turned my face stiff and salty. Only Mindy, working on her own peculiar little thermostat, seemed comfortable. She kept her elbows out and her chin up, and drove at a fast, smooth pace that gradually raised her spirits. Before long, she was humming. Then she started singing. She sang “Love Will Keep Us Together.” When her accelerator foot began beating in rhythm, Jake said, “You want to cool it a little?” But the rest of the time he let her do as she pleased. He slid down in his seat, with his arms folded across his chest and his head tilted back. I would have said he was asleep, if I hadn’t looked closely and seen the gray slits of his eyes.

Late in the afternoon, in a town I didn’t catch the name of, we stopped at a Woolworth’s. Mindy wanted to get a glass of milk at the soda fountain. She said she had to have at least a quart a day. “Yeah, well,” Jake said, “but the way I figure it, we’re not but a couple of hours from Perth. Can’t you hold out till then?”

“It’s not for me, it’s for the baby,” Mindy told him. “If it was for me I could hold out forever. I hate milk. You coming?”

She stepped from the car in a swirl of pink, and we followed her into Woolworth’s. This was an
old
Woolworth’s, with creaky dark floors and a smell of popcorn. There were counters full of Spray-Net, eyelash curlers, harlequin reading glasses, and mustard-seed pendants—objects I thought had vanished long ago. Mindy got waylaid by a salt-and-pepper set shaped like kerosene lanterns, and stopped to buy it. I expected Jake to hurry her but he didn’t. He just stood there with his hands in his pockets, his face slack and lifeless, gazing at a Batman comic on the floor. Then we went on to the soda fountain where Mindy ordered her milk. “Ugh,” she said when it came. “It’s so white. It’s so thick.” The waitress took offense and flounced off, slapping things with a dishrag as she went. “Well, this is for
your
sake, Elton,” Mindy said, and she patted
her stomach and started drinking, one sip at a time. “We’re naming him for Elton John,” she told me. Jake studied a picture of a gray milkshake and a pink plastic hot dog from the forties. I flipped through someone’s cast-off newspaper hunting “Peanuts,” but even after I found it it didn’t make me laugh.

When we got back to the street, we were blinded for a moment. Everything was so hot and bright, and a herd of strange, long-legged motorcycles built like praying mantises was glittering past. Jake wiped his face on his sleeve. “Next time, remind me to get a air-conditioned car,” he told me. “This one here will be a hundred and fifty degrees inside.”

As if he had sounded some alarm, Mindy cried, “Oh, no!” and started running.

“What’d I say?” Jake asked me.

I shrugged.

Mindy was tugging at the car doors—first the chained ones, then the others. She fell down out of sight. When we came around to the driver’s side she was on the floor in back, reaching under both seats, patting the dusty carpeting. “Plymouth? Plymouth?”

“We left the windows open,” I told Jake.

“You left
yours
open,” she said, straightening up. A smudge of dirt crossed the bridge of her nose, and her hair was fraying out of its ponytails. “I closed mine up tight as a bubble, do you think I’d forget a thing like that?”

“Oh, Mindy, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m certain we can—”

“Shoot, he’d have died of heat anyway if we’d have shut all the windows,” Jake said. “You can’t blame Charlotte here.”

“I blame you both. I blame the two of you. You didn’t neither one of you want him along anyhow. Plymouth? Oh, what’ll he do now? In this town he’s never laid eyes on before? Why, he might not even have caught on he was going anyplace, buried beneath the seat like he was. What must he be thinking now, coming out the window to find everything’s different?”

“Why, Mindy,” Jake said, “I just know he’ll be all—”

“You don’t know a blasted thing,” she told him. “Now I want you and her to go hunt that cat and be quick about it, you hear?”

She slapped the pavement with her sandal. A pale blue vein stood out along her neck. Jake’s mouth dropped. “Mindy?” he said. “What’s got into you?”

But she wouldn’t answer.

“You’ve changed, Mindy. You’ve turned real mean and hard, seems like.”

“Yes, maybe I have,” she said, “But it’s you that helped cause it, Jake Simms. I didn’t go and do it all alone.”

They looked at each other. They were so still I could hear them breathing.

Then Jake said, “Well, the … cat, I guess I better hunt the cat. You coming, Charlotte?”

“All right,” I said.

We started up the sidewalk, leaving Mindy behind in case the cat returned on his own. We stooped to peer under each parked car for Plymouth’s lantern eyes. “Does he know his name, do you think?” I asked Jake.

“Everything’s gathering in on me,” he said.

I took his arm. We passed a few more cars, but didn’t glance under them. We came to the end of the block and stood still, gazing into a travel agent’s window to our left. “Now there is a sport I just never have tried,” he said finally. He was looking at a skiing poster. “You ever skied?”

“Not even once,” I said. “I always wanted to, though.”

“You reckon it’s dangerous?”

“Well, a little, maybe.”

“I got a feeling I’d be good at it,” he told me. “I know that sounds conceited.”

“Maybe we should have gone north instead of south,” I said.

“Someplace cold.”

“Someplace with clear, cold air.”

“Well,” Jake said, sighing.

“Well.”

Then I had a thought. “Listen,” I said. “What if someone’s picked Plymouth up?”

“Picked him up?”

“I mean, he could be miles away from here by now. He could be half a county over.”

“That’s so,” Jake said. “Why, sure. He could be anywhere! And glad to get there, too. It’s no use hunting further.”

We separated and walked back to the car. Mindy was leaning against the door. At this distance she seemed older, less hopeful. She was staring at her feet, and from the way she slumped I guessed she had one of those late-pregnancy backaches. I don’t think she had really expected that we would find her cat. She barely raised her eyes when we came up. “Now, Mindy—” Jake began, but she shooed his words away wearily and straightened, hoisting her belly with both hands. “We might as well get going,” she said.

We settled in our familiar places. Mine seemed worn to the shape of my body by now. I knew exactly where to put my feet so as not to tip over the cup of melted ice on the floor. Jake laid his arm across the back of Mindy’s seat. “That cat wasn’t happy with us anyhow,” he told her. “This way is better. Don’t you think?”

Mindy didn’t answer. She set her jaw, frowned straight ahead, and went into reverse. We hit a car parked a full space behind us. Jake removed his arm. “All right, you’re doing just fine there,” he said. “Now you want to go forward, I believe. Give this guy here a signal to let him know you’re coming.”

Mindy unrolled her window and trailed one hand out like a limp, used ribbon. The car drifted into the street, went through a yellow light, proceeded several blocks in an aimless, haphazard manner. Jake shifted his weight. “Uh, Mindy—” he said.

We arrived at a striped sawhorse, set square across the street. Two policemen guarded it with their arms folded, their backs to us. They had a beefy, stubborn way of standing. Holsters and radios and official-looking cases dangled from their belts, all the same grainy black leather. “Lord God,” said Jake. At the last minute, Mindy stopped the car. “Go around,” Jake told her. “Back up. Run them down. Make a U-turn.”

“Huh?” said Mindy.

“You can’t do that,” I said to Jake, “it’s a one-way street. Sit still and enjoy the parade.”

“Parade?”

A white-and-gold drum major pranced across our windshield, pronging the air with his silver baton. Brassy music bleated behind him. “Oh,
parade,”
said Jake.

Mindy started crying. The two of us looked over at her.

“Mindy?” Jake said.

“It’s all arranged against me!” she wailed. “Nothing will ever come out like I have dreamed! We’ll
never
get to Florida!”

She bent her head to the steering wheel, both arms circling it. She cried out loud, like a child. But we could only hear her during pauses in “King of the Road,” which was bearing down on us from someplace to the west. “Mindy, what
is
it?” Jake asked her. “You feel all right?”

She shook her head.

“You don’t have pains or nothing.”

“I have pains all over,” she said. Her voice was muffled, hollow as a bell. “I’m only young! I can’t do this all by myself!”

Jake reached over and cut off the ignition. The car shuddered and died. “King of the Road” had won, it seemed. It sailed above everything. The band strutted by us, high school kids, skinny little Adam’s-appled boys and sweaty girls. But Mindy’s head was still on the steering wheel, and Jake was turned in my direction as if he expected something from me. He said, “Charlotte, can’t you help me here?”