Windfalls: A Novel (6 page)

“I’ve been busy,” she said, the dense mist of her words mingling with the strengthening light.

“Doing what?” Estelle persisted.

“Nothing, really,” Anna shrugged. “School stuff. Not much.” They entered the student commons. For once the wide brick courtyard was empty of people, and the sound of their footsteps echoed eerily between the surrounding buildings.

“Why—” Estelle began, but Anna interrupted her. “Have a good rehearsal,” she said, and darted away across the courtyard.

As she passed through the doors of the fine arts building, Anna inhaled the clay dust and varnish-scented air deep into her lungs. I’m home, she thought exultantly, passing the main office and heading down the echoing concrete stairs. It’s over now. I’m back. I made it through.

Inside her cubicle she went straight to the drawer that held her most recent photographs. She’d thought she would start the morning by matting a print or two, and then, if she felt up to it, she might work in the darkroom for a while. But when she set her new prints on the table, the photograph on the top of the pile was so empty and uninspired that she wondered how it could have gotten mixed in with her best work.

It was an image of a lace tablecloth she’d found in a secondhand store. Two months ago she’d hung the lace across the window of her attic room and then spent a weekend shooting it in every possible light. At the time, she’d loved how its broken folds draped between the aged window jambs, how the torn mass of it lay in a weary, graceful heap on the sill, and later, when she’d made that print, she’d been pleased by the tension she thought she’d caught between the exact froth of the handmade lace and the causal damage of time.
Every Thread a Web,
she’d planned to call it when she hung it in her graduate show. But this morning it seemed strained and mundane—an old tablecloth hanging awkwardly from a splintered window frame. Looking at it now, she saw only the vast distance between what she had hoped for and what she had achieved.

I was really off there for a while, she thought as she remembered back over the last six weeks, how scared and sad she’d been, how sick she’d felt. Hurriedly she began to flip through the rest of the pile, seeking to comfort herself with better examples of her work. But she couldn’t find a single print she liked. Every photograph was trite and amateurish and immature, its composition stiff, its tones muddy, its subject sentimental or clichéd. It made her feel hot and flushed to realize she had ever meant to show those prints to the world. It made her heart falter to think of all she had given for them. Standing in the empty hallway, she wondered, How could I have been so wrong?

S
YLVIA AND
J
ON WENT WITH
C
ERISE TO THE WELFARE OFFICE
. T
HEY
helped her gather the documents the caseworkers required, helped her fill out the forms to claim she was an independent minor, the forms to apply for food stamps and Medi-Cal and welfare. They took her to the clinic, where a gray-haired doctor twisted a speculum inside her and prodded her stomach and pressed the cold lozenge of his stethoscope against her breasts. They helped her find an apartment on the other side of Rossi, helped her move her clothes and her TV and the mattress from her bed while Rita was at work.

Cerise’s apartment consisted of four rooms lined up like train cars, a tiny living room in front, a stale bedroom in the rear, a dark slice of kitchen and a damp bathroom sandwiched in between. Sylvia helped her clean it, and Cerise cut pictures from magazines to decorate the walls—photos of flowers and baby animals and bright butterflies, and one strange picture with no color at all but the smooth curve of a silver river leading toward a wall of rugged mountains. There was something fierce and fearless about that picture that tugged at her, though when Sylvia asked her why she’d chosen it, Cerise shrugged shyly and answered, “I don’t know.”

At first, when she told Sam she was pregnant, he acted like a boy who’d been accused of hitting a baseball through a neighbor’s window, but later, when he realized that no one was going to make him pay for what he’d broken, he swaggered with a newfound sense of accomplishment and referred to Cerise’s swelling belly as “the kid.”

Jon and Sylvia said that Sam should marry her—for the baby’s sake, as well as for the sake of Cerise’s eternal soul. But it was hard for Cerise to think of a child’s welfare or even her own soul when there seemed to be no child, when it sometimes seemed more likely that she would give birth to a beach ball than a baby. She couldn’t imagine Sam as a father any more than she could imagine herself as a mother, or as Sam’s wife.

Sometimes she tried to pray about it, like Sylvia and Jon had said she should. But the answers that popped into her mind when she tried to address her thoughts to God and seek His guidance never seemed to be the ones that Sylvia and Jon would approve, which made Cerise think that she was doing something wrong, that her prayers were missing God entirely, like when she misdialed a phone number and a stranger answered by mistake.

She had received special permission from the principal to return to her high school when it began in the fall. Although the teachers showed their disapproval of her condition by pretending she did not exist, for once the other kids clustered around her in the halls, awed and envious and a little scared because she had her own apartment, because she had so obviously had sex. They all vied to touch her stomach and offer their suggestions for baby names. But later, when she quit attending classes because she had grown too tired to try to study and too large to fit in any of the desks, none of the schoolkids ever came to visit her.

For days she sat in her apartment with the television on and waited dully for whatever was going to happen next. She liked the thought of a baby like a living doll she could dress and kiss and hold, but she had never changed a baby’s diaper or fixed a baby’s bottle. She couldn’t remember ever having held a baby, though now she tried to pay close attention to the babies on TV. The TV babies advertised tires and laundry soaps and paper towels. They brought sitcom families back together, and wailed from the depths of their cribs at funny times, and all those babies seemed more real than the baby that was supposedly inside her, giving her heartburn and hemorrhoids and bruising her ribs with its kicks.

The kids at school had debated names, which ones were cute and which were cool, and Rita, who had relented enough to take an interest in what name her grandchild was given, had a list of her own picked out. But Nicole or Scott, Tanya or Zachary or Jason—it was hard for Cerise to imagine any of those people inside her. Occasionally she draped a newborn-size sleeper across her bulging uterus, and it seemed both too small to fit something human, and too large to clothe anything that could ever be gotten out of her.

At night, lying alone on her single mattress, she would sometimes lift her T-shirt, crane her neck so that she could stare down at her stomach, and try to imagine what it was that she contained. Sylvia had told her that already she and her baby shared a sacred bond, but when Cerise tried to beam her thoughts through her bloated belly to the baby, she felt like Captain Kirk, attempting to contact an alien spaceship that might not even exist.

When she became so big she couldn’t stand to have Sam on top of her, grinding away between her legs and squashing her belly until she felt she might burst like a water balloon, he suggested that there were other ways they could do it. But she was too uncomfortable and too embarrassed by her bulk to submit to trying anything new. And it wasn’t long after that that Sam let slip he was seeing another girl. He made sure Cerise knew how the other girl begged Sam to do all the things to her that Cerise refused. She knew how Sam’s confession was supposed to make her feel, and when she realized she didn’t care how much that other girl wanted to have her twat sucked, didn’t care that the other girl loved to slurp Sam’s thing as though it were a double-dip cone on a sweltering day, a part of her felt as though she had failed at something yet again.

When Cerise was nine months pregnant, Jon and Sylvia moved away.

“It’s God’s will,” Sylvia said, smiling sorrowfully from her seat on Cerise’s sofa. “We’ll miss all our dear friends here, but the Lord has challenged Jon with a new work in Chicago.”

Jon grinned at Cerise and patted Sylvia’s hand. “You let us know the minute that baby comes.”

Cerise turned to Sylvia, “But you said you’d help me, when—you know—it’s being born.”

“Of course I’ll help you,” Sylvia answered staunchly. “We’ll both help you, with our prayers.” And when Cerise looked stricken, she added, “Even if we stayed here, I couldn’t actually be with you in the delivery room. Cerise, you have to believe that God will never give you more pain than you can bear. Besides, if things get to be a little much, you can always ask the doctor to give you an epidural.”

Epidurals were a wonderful new procedure, Sylvia told her, that let a woman pray or even watch TV while her baby was being born. But when, after hours of an agony Cerise had never imagined existed, she timidly asked for hers, the nurse glanced at her chart and said, “Sorry, sweetheart. You’re Medi-Cal. The state won’t pay for epidurals for Medi-Cals. Epidurals are for ladies with insurance.”

The shot the nurse injected like a consolation prize into the heparin lock on Cerise’s wrist didn’t make the pain go away. Instead it made Cerise forget she had ever felt any other way. She lost herself in the doze between contractions and then woke time after time to a bewildering savagery of hurt whose source she could not remember. Hours after the pain had squeezed her into the furthest corner of herself, a new nurse came to her bed and said, “Let’s give you another check.”

She twisted a gloved hand inside Cerise and gazed up at the ceiling as though she were listening to far-off music. Then she said, “Looks like you’re finally ready. We’ll go ahead and move you to delivery.”

They made Cerise skooch from her bed to a gurney, rolled her down the hall to a room filled with bright lights and machines, and then had her crawl from the gurney onto a bed so high and narrow she wondered if she would fall off it and break on the floor like Humpty Dumpty.

“Are you going to cut me open?” she asked when she saw all the gleaming equipment. But the nurse answered, “No such luck. You gotta do this one the hard way, all by yourself.”

Then the room was filled with people all staring at a monitor like a TV screen on which a blue light traced out mountains. At first they told her she could push when she felt like it, but when it became clear she didn’t feel like pushing, they began insisting that she push while they all gazed at the screen where the mountains grew and fell, and yelled “Now—push! Push!”

She wanted to please them, but she was too tired and too confused about what it meant to push—push what with what? Besides, she knew if she pushed anything very hard, she would push herself apart, and even though she wanted to die, she didn’t want to have to endure more pain to do it. They brought something to help pull the baby out of her, and when she saw what looked like a giant copy of Rita’s salad tongs and realized that they were meant to fit inside her, she was certain that she would be disemboweled and that whatever was stuck inside her would be torn apart, but by that time she had almost ceased to care.

When they finally laid the baby in her arms, Cerise’s first thought was that she’d done something wrong. Inside its flannel swaddling its face was so squashed and raw and broken-looking that it reminded her more of the photographs in Sylvia’s brochures than any of the round-eyed babies she’d studied on TV. Gingerly she touched the bruises on its temples, gently traced the impossible softness of its mottled cheek, and when it did not scream an objection, she laid her open palm against its chest, felt it breathe beneath her hand. It whimpered a little, its eyes wide and unfocused. She bent to sniff it, inhaled the smell of the inside of her which the baby had brought with it into the world, and a sudden greedy passion swelled up in her.

The nurse looked at her sharply. “Don’t you even care what sex it is?”

“Sure,” Cerise said shyly, staring at the baby’s puffy face. “I guess.”

“It’s a girl,” the nurse answered almost angrily.

“A girl,” Cerise echoed, gazing.

A moment later the nurse whisked the baby away, and Cerise raised her eyes to look around the room. She saw the doctor in his green scrubs bending between her legs as he stitched her back together down there, saw the other nurses wadding up bedding and fussing over the machines, and she realized with a start that all those people had once been babies, too. Someone had had to keep the doctor alive, had had to feed and clean and clothe him, and that person had also been borne and cared for by someone else. The nurses had once been little girls. She imagined the hands that now uncoupled cords and tugged sheets into place making mud pies and dressing dolls.

“How are you going to feed?” the doctor asked, peering into her crotch as he drew the needle up and gave a little tug.

She cast a bewildered look at the nicest nurse, who suggested, “Bottle or breast?”

Rita had said that nursing would make her fat, and before Sam left, he’d once observed that only cows made milk. Besides, she felt too shy to say the word
breast
out loud in that roomful of near-strangers. Instead she whispered, “Bottle?” and everyone nodded as if she’d just got the right answer on a test.

Later, while her baby slept in the nursery, Cerise ate the gray mashed potatoes and wooden roast beef from her supper tray and placed a long-distance call to the LifeRight office in Chicago. But the stranger who answered said that Sylvia and Jon were out at a rescue. She ate her watery apple crisp and called the fort in Texas where Sam was in his third week of basic training. When the corporal asked whom he should say was calling, Cerise answered, “Just tell him it’s a six-pound baby girl,” and hung up before the corporal could ask anything more.