Maybe Baby Page 12

  There were no lights on in the house, except for in the kitchen. Her mother, dressed uncustomarily in all black, was pulling a roast from the oven. On the breakfast bar, next to steaming bowls of potatoes and carrots and hot rolls, there was a single place setting.

  “Where is everybody?” Gretchen looked around, peering through the gloom of the living room toward the empty recliner, the dark TV.

  “Oh my God, you scared me.” Judy stood up from the oven, holding a baster in one oven-mitted hand.

  She looked terrible, Gretchen thought. Her eyes were bloodshot; her red lipstick was drawn haphazardly around her lips, as if by a child. From her ears, two huge Halloween spider earrings dangled, caught in her hair. “Gretchy!” Judy sent up a shattering laugh, kneeing the oven door closed and lurching forward, her hands jammed into oven mitts that looked like reindeer. Little bells jangled from her thumbs as she crossed the floor to meet Gretchen in the kitchen doorway.

  “Are you for real?” Judy crowed, poking at Gretchen’s chest with the baster. Gretchen looked down and watched as a blob of meat juice spread into a little brown oval across the front of her dress. “Here she is in the actual flesh, folks,” Judy drawled, “just one of my phantom children, appearing for a limited time only.”

  “You’re drunk,” Gretchen said, smelling butterscotch.

  “I’m having dinner,” Judy said. “No one was available tonight but me.”

  “Why are you wearing all black?” Gretchen asked.

  Judy licked the tip of the baster and smiled agreeably. “Why do you think? I’m in mourning.”

  “For what?”

  Judy turned and sauntered shakily toward the silverware drawer. “Everything. My children. Your children. Nothing is right.”

  The fluorescent light over the sink flickered. Gretchen scanned the kitchen; all the appliances were wearing crocheted hats—the toaster in pale yellow, the blender in mint green. “Well, I had to put them on something.” Judy hiccupped, catching Gretchen’s glance. She strained a dish of peas.

  “Where’s Dad?” Gretchen asked, pulling the bedspread more tightly around her shoulders. “Where’s the band? Did you see Henry?”

  “I’ve never been really drunk before,” Judy was saying. “Do you realize that?”

  “Where’s Dad?” Gretchen asked again.

  “Questions, questions,” Judy slurred. “What about me? When am I going to get some answers?” She turned, holding the strainer. Water from the peas drizzled all over the floor.

  “Mom!” Gretchen started forward, clenching a reindeer.

  “I drive down to Chicago and you’re not there. You’ve disappeared!” Judy’s voice lilted into its highest register. “Next thing I know Ray’s here, then Henry shows up, then they all fly away.”

  “Mom.” Gretchen heard her voice come out with an unexpected note of reproach.

  “No one informs me of anything. Are you or aren’t you inviting me to this birth?”

  “What?” Gretchen jumped.

  “If Ray’s not there, someone has to be.”

  “Mom”—Gretchen coaxed her mother toward the sink —“Ray and I are just having a disagreement.”

  “Oh, one of those.” Judy nodded mockingly. “Well, get used to it. I’ve never been in a happy marriage, and I probably never will be. In fact, when I sober up —”

  “Mom.” Gretchen made a grab for the peas. “That’s not it. Ray and I have just been arguing. I haven’t been myself lately, and his mother is behaving badly.”

  “What’s this?” shrilled Judy, relinquishing the strainer and teetering toward a barstool. “The ape has family!”

  “I’ll choose to ignore that,” Gretchen said, dumping the peas into a shallow bowl.

  “Not that bowl!” Judy cried out. “That’s for the Jell-O!”

  “How was I supposed to know?” Gretchen jumped back.

  Judy lumbered forward and made a grab for the oven handle, narrowly missing it. “Oh,” she managed, her head lolling forward. “I feel sick.”

  “Mom, let me do that.” Gretchen pulled Judy away from the oven. “I’ll make sure the roast is done.”

  “You’re a vegetarian,” Judy whimpered.

  “Well, I can read a meat thermometer,” Gretchen said, resituating her mother on the barstool with her head between her knees. On the back of Judy’s neck was a faint smudge, a birthmark Gretchen had never known existed.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” Judy’s voice was muffled. “There’s some chilling.”

  “I’m almost eight months’ pregnant!” Gretchen gave a snort.

  “So you are.” Judy sat up, leaned her elbows on the counter, and cracked her neck. Her eyes swirled lazily in their sockets. She looked like someone else’s mother, Gretchen thought, someone’s mother on a miniseries.

  “Judy,” Gretchen said, then paused—it seemed so much easier to address her mother with a name rather than a title; maybe she would do this always—“I don’t want any family at the birth, and that’s not meant to make you feel bad. I don’t know what Ray told you, but it’s my birth, my body. I don’t want anyone at the hospital pressuring me.”

  “I’d like to get pregnant again,” Judy mused, crossing her legs deliberately and swiveling around on the stool. “I think I deserve another chance.”

  “Whoa,” Gretchen said, hoisting the roast.

  “Don’t worry.” Judy hiccupped. “There’s no chance of it.” She hiccupped again. “Menopause,” she added sullenly.

  “This is still way pink,” Gretchen said, jabbing the roast, crinkling her nose at the smell of it. She added, “Mom, it’s grotesque to cook this much meat. There’s no one here to eat it.”

  “Rub it in,” muttered Judy. She stared into space and joined her hands on the counter so that it looked like the reindeer were biting each other, or kissing.

  “Where’s Dad? Where’s Henry?” Gretchen maneuvered the roast back into the oven.

  “Banished,” Judy said quietly, looking down. “Everyone’s been banished.”

  Gretchen sighed and put a hand on the small of her back to balance her weight. The faucet dripped. A plane passed overhead, scraping against the sky—a deep purring sound. Gretchen looked hard at her mother, at the golden cast to her hair, at the spider earrings swinging along her jaw, at the red smear of lipstick around her mouth. How was it possible that this was her mother?

  “Here”—Gretchen went around Judy’s side with a paper towel—“you’ve got lipstick everywhere,” she said. “I don’t know why you put so much on.”

  “Do you see it?” Judy frowned, keeping her body still as Gretchen dunked the tip of the towel into a water glass before proceeding to wipe further. “Do you see it above my lip?”

  “See what?” Gretchen stepped back.

  “You don’t have to pretend,” Judy said. “You can tell me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Gretchen screwed up her face and leaned in closer. Her mother’s breath smelled sweet. Her eyes were glossy.

  “Enough,” Judy said with a wave of the reindeer. Her eyes welled up. She patted at her mouth, then stood up. “I’m too tired for this. Wake me up when the meat is done.”

  In the doorway to the hall, Judy paused and made a final attempt at maintaining balance. She turned in place and touched a hand to her chin. “You know what name I’ve always loved?” she asked, emitting a sad titter. She swayed in the doorway, her head tipped slightly back, her stained lips poised to whisper. “Virgil.” She nodded, looking up as if in thought. “I can’t say why. I just do.” And with that, Judy disappeared down the dark hall toward her room. Gretchen heard her door close; then the house was silent.

  She stood for a moment at the back window, watching the empty feeder, waiting for a bird to alight, for a pair of dark wings to break open the motionless setting of the backyard, where nothing—not even a lawn chair—cut across the clean sweep of dry grass. Just below the window, the bushes rustled. A cat crossed the lawn languidly, then slid
through the fence.

  Gretchen remembered the night she and Ray had broken into the house, jimmying the back latch with a hairpin just as she had done as a kid. They had moved through the rooms in the dusky light, touching nothing, looking at everything. How unfamiliar ordinary objects seemed without her parents moving among them. And to look through their rooms—to see her mother’s comb on the edge of the sink, her father’s heart pills laid out on the dresser—it was as if they had died. They seemed to be people she hardly knew. Was her mother reading mysteries? There had been a neat stack of paperbacks in a corner behind her bed. Gretchen had studied the magazines in the rack, squinting at the spines, wishing she had a flashlight, feeling like a burglar. McCalls, Family Circle, Redbook—and what was that?—a manual on gun safety. She’d frowned, stooping lower to make sure she’d read it correctly, then shrugged. Must have gotten mixed up with the magazines somehow, she’d thought.

  The cat entered the yard again with something flapping between its jaws.

  “Well,” Gretchen said, looking down at her belly. She gave it a loving rub, then entered the kitchen, took a plate off a shelf, and spooned up some peas, some lukewarm mashed potatoes. In the oven, the roast was still sputtering.

  Out on the stoop of her parents’ house, Gretchen set the plate on her knees, taking in the evening sounds of her old neighborhood. She felt a combination of love and hate for the houses around her, for their cheap-looking pastel siding, their clumpy hedges and blocky lawns with American Turf & Beauty signs stabbed into the earth by each driveway. From down the block came the all-American thrump of a basketball resounding on concrete, behind it the distant revving of a scooter, and closer—the sound of men laughing.

  That was the problem with small towns; they had such singular sounds. They were so different from the assemblage of noise one heard in the city, where ringing phones, unwinding sirens, people screaming at all hours in all languages, and car alarms wailing through the night made up a kind of bearable scramble, an unpredictable yet comforting white noise. Towns were like pop songs—they were so dated; you tired of them too quickly. And yet their breezy cadences allowed you to pause for two seconds of nostalgia, to observe a moment of reverie.

  Something about the air tonight reminded Gretchen of the evenings her father had taken her out driving, back when she was thirteen or fourteen. He let her choose any car off his lot, then handed her the keys. It was all done in silence. Out on the back roads, the car would list dangerously close to the shoulders. She’d swerve back and forth over the center line as if it were a game. There would be no word from her father in the passenger seat, no admonishments, no barking orders. He sat perfectly erect, looking dead straight ahead, no seat belt on.

  There was only one time she made him cling to the door by slamming on her brakes—a deer had appeared suddenly in their path. He turned to her, face frozen with fear. “You drive now,” she whispered, preparing to relinquish the keys. No, he shook his head ferociously. Then he said a strange thing: “This is good for me.”

  How different her life had been then—those tests of her wits, those quasi suicide missions. From day to day, things had always seemed in limbo, the family always in flux. She’d sworn she’d never live like that again, yet here she was, nearing the brink of birth, sitting on the stoop of Seeley Street where the Chem-Lawn and the vinyl siding presented a perfect facade to a crumbling interior. Her mother drunk and cooking a roast. Her father off somewhere. How did one incorporate all of these things into a new life? How were children supposed to evolve if one had to keep introducing the past to the future? She wondered now, as she often had as of late, if she should follow her brothers’ course and sever all ties completely.

  “You have to,” Henry had advised, sitting her down for a pep talk in his tour bus. “They’re like anthrax.”

  “But a baby, it needs family,” she’d pressed. “It deserves that much, doesn’t it?”

  “You want a welcome wagon, I’ll give it a concert. Fans, man, that’s all you need. Fans.” Henry had run a hand across his mouth, then pointed his finger at her, making a cocking sound with the back of his teeth.

  The other couples in her neighborhood hadn’t offered much more in the way of guidance. Glyn and Hael had split off from their parents entirely, demanding to raise their children in a sphere of unbiased smiles and unremitting equality. They pursued their ideals like elk, more like hunters than parents of two small beings. Like the concepts of maleness and femaleness, the term “grandparent” simply did not exist as part of the household lexicon—not that it was forbidden, exactly, but as Hael had described in her second book, Parenting Without Sex: New Hope for Gender Equality and Children, certain false boundaries had to be erected in order to create space for exploring authenticity.

  “In their first years of life,” Hael had written, “it’s imperative that children be protected, not just from dangers in their environment like, say, hail and bathtubs, but also psychological elements: scorn, animosity” and something Hael termed Prefab Gender Pollutants, or PGPs. A PGP could be something as simple and amorphous as a stereotype, e.g., a mother taking it upon herself to bake all of the family’s birthday cakes (“fathers bake great birthday cakes, too!” Hael had written in parentheses) or something as obvious and concrete as a Barbie doll.

  Hael’s chapter “No More Sex in the Kitchen” provided a list of tips on how to declutter one’s home of gender-based cultural indicators, from canceling magazines to removing packaging that depicted, say, a woman washing windows. “Even yogurt containers in pastel cartons are subtly encoded to attract the female eye with supple, low-cal slogans,” Hael pointed out. “Of course, you have to decide where to draw the line. Just remember: Your child’s world is only as solid as the one you create. Whom do you want to run their life? You or Yoplait?” The last item on Hael’s list had suggested decluttering of a different kind: “Limit time with un-like-minded entities, including extended family.”

  Hael explained that raising a child in a gender-neutral home required diligence and a commitment from the surrounding community. Insulating oneself, at least for the first few years of a child’s life, was no different from the actions of a pair of birds building a nest in a high tree. If either parent abandoned the nest and gave in to the pressures of society, it would become more of a struggle for all in the community to sustain their promise. And having aunts and uncles around who looked on with scorn made everyone uncomfortable, especially the children.

  For Gretchen, this had hardly been an issue during the first few months of her pregnancy. She was only occasionally in touch with Henry when he sent her a new CD, and Carson had long ago stopped sending her birthday cards, so what little contact she had with her family rested on her parents, both of whom had been withdrawn for so long that they seemed hardly to exist in their physical bodies. Keeping them at a distance had never been the issue; in fact, they seemed more comfortable that way, to live free of confrontations with their children.

  But Ray was different. He saw confrontation as a must. How else could there be evolution? Since they joined the community of gender-neutral parents just over a year ago, he took it upon himself to incorporate their core philosophies into his every movement, from his art to his weekly talks with his mother who lived in Florida. And therein was the problem. Whereas Gretchen was hell-bent on laboring in private, Ray was all for extending a family invitation to the birth. At the very least, they should be invited to the hospital, where special doctors and nurses were familiar with the ground rules of this new way of parenting—one obstetrician had even considered joining the group as a full-time member.

  After a few glasses of wine one evening, Ray confided in Gretchen that his mother insisted on coming, and that he’d finally agreed on the grounds that it was part of her continuing education and that the birth itself was a live performance. Ah, the fury. “I’m not going to let this birth turn into some sort of night class.” Gretchen glowered at him across the kitchen. “If you want to make
this into some sort of arty statement, then take it to the stage for your own show. As for me, I’m hoping for as few lights as possible and an audience of two or three—the doctor, me, and this baby. If you can’t accept that, then you shouldn’t come at all.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ray said, his eyes warm with wine and laughter. He’d moved across the counter to put his arm around her. She’d ducked and stood crossly in the center of the floor, tapping a clog.

  “Call her,” she demanded. “Tell her.”

  “Gretchen, she’s my mother.”

  “You are a wimp,” Gretchen said, pronouncing the words slowly.

  Ray flinched.

  “Wimp,” Gretchen said again.

  “We’re in this together,” Ray said firmly. “We’re pregnant.”

  “Wimmmmp.” Gretchen let it out slowly, like a low call.

  “Please don’t say that again.” Ray set his teeth.

  “Really?” Gretchen had raised her eyebrows. “You don’t think that caving in to your mother’s demands is wimpy? You don’t think it’s a form of faltering on our values?”

  She locked eyes with him. He adjusted his head scarf, took another sip of wine.

  “I’ve had a full day of practice; I’d like to discuss this tomorrow,” he said curtly, folding his arms.

  “I don’t think I’ll be here tomorrow.” With that, Gretchen plucked her car keys from the hook, stuffed a change of clothes in her shoulder bag, and left the house. “Wimp,” she called before closing the front door on her way out. On her way down the sidewalk, she heard the sound of breaking glass through the open window.

  She had been glad for the concert ticket from her brother. She had been even happier still to pull up to his tour bus in the parking lot behind the club and find him alone inside, leaning against the plush red seats, his boot propped on a chrome rail as he studied his face in a mirror. He applied ash and black lipstick.

  “This Ray guy, he sounds a little wacky,” Henry said when Gretchen told him about their fight. “Listen, you can ride with us as long as you want.” Henry’s eyes, usually bloodshot and sullen, lit up. “We could start a spin-off,” he gibed. “The Niece/Nephew of Carson Glide.”