Maybe Baby Read online

  Unable to locate his rifle in either his or Judy’s closet, Rusty spent the rest of the afternoon chasing the remaining snow from the yard with a small garden shovel and scooping it into his ice chest. When it was full, he squat-thrusted it, carried it with shaking elbows through the house and down the basement stairs to dump it into the empty Deepfreeze. All summer, he would have fresh snow.

  The next day, an April Saturday, he caught Judy as she was about to head to a cello lesson in the afternoon. “Come sit,” he said. She drew in her red lips, widened her small gray eyes. She was wearing pale blue pants and a ribbed coral sweater that accentuated her form. Rusty liked the whispery sound of her slacks as she made her way across the living room to the couch. He searched her face for some clue to how she might react to his news, but she wore the pert, concerned look she always wore. He had spent much of the morning preparing to tell her about Gretchen’s phone call and had almost confided in his neighbor Donald over the fence but had decided the risk was too great.

  Judy might not want the neighbors to know. She was sensitive to how she was viewed on the block, and attending the graduation parties and weddings and christenings of everyone else’s children in the neighborhood was hard for her, Rusty knew.

  “Gretchen called me yesterday at work,” Rusty began, pursing his lips. He leaned forward sharply over his knees and pressed his hands together, lining up his fingertips. He could hear Judy’s breath catch. Gretchen rarely called, never visited. It would seem strange to Judy that Gretchen had revealed her news to him.

  “Is she okay?”

  Rusty waited a moment before turning to face his wife, to offer his deferred lament. “She’s pregnant.”

  Judy’s irises floated in wide-open white space. After a few moments, her darkly lined lips bled into a shimmering smile. “A baby?” she whispered. Then, daring to raise her voice, “You’re not pulling my leg, Russ, a baby?”

  She stood up, drove her fists into the air with a cheer, then dropped back and threw her arms around Rusty, who was still anchored to the couch, studying his palms.

  “I don’t get it; you’ve known since yesterday, and you didn’t tell me? How did you sleep? How did you eat?” She put a hand to her chest and snapped her eyes shut.

  “We don’t even know who the father is.” Rusty turned, lacing his fingers over his knees.

  “I’m sure he’s very nice,” Judy cooed.

  “What’s to say he’s even involved?” Rusty snorted and looked down between his knees at his feet. They seemed huge to him at that moment, like great boats afloat on the carpet.

  “Well”—Judy lifted her hands as if she were supporting a giant bubble around her head—“she can certainly come here. We know a few things about raising a family.”

  Rusty pushed off from the couch and stood up, bringing a fist down on the TV. “I want no part of this.”

  “What?” Judy rose slowly to follow her husband into the kitchen. She intercepted him by the fridge, pressing her spine up against the metal handle.

  Rusty rolled his eyes and turned around in place. “Come on.” He was only half dressed for the day—in a T-shirt and navy sweats with Poupon U running down one leg, a souvenir from the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb.

  “We’ve got a grandchild coming into the world,” Judy sang, “who is going to need love and attention. What exactly are you telling me?”

  Rusty pressed his palms to his ears for a second and backed up until his thighs touched the set of barstools by the breakfast nook. “All I know is we had three, and look where they are!”

  There, he had said it. He waited before raising his eyes to see the blank look on Judy’s face. She was a small woman with freckled arms and very narrow feet. Once a year, as a surprise, he brought her home a pair of shoes—designer shoes, that’s what she liked. Her father had sold shoes—good shoes, down in Chicago—and if there was one thing that ran in her family, it was a hearty appreciation for Italian leather.

  Today she was wearing a pair of mauve pumps. By some stroke of fortune, he had found them in the trunk of a Dodge, brand new, still wrapped in tissue, even in her size. She had shrieked and flung her arms around his neck with delight, promising to wear them on special occasions. He wondered why she had them on now. She had on those mauve shoes and something strange in her hair. When she turned to the side, he caught a glimpse of something white, like a bandage, around her forehead.

  “What is that?” He squinted at her across the kitchen.

  “What is what?”

  “Around your forehead.”

  “It’s nothing.” Judy fluffed at her bangs.

  “What is it? Have you been hurt? It looks like gauze.” He stepped forward a few paces, put a hand on her arm. “A sweatband?”

  “Yes, a sweatband.” Her voice was curt. She drew her arms in close to her body, pulling away from his touch. “Menopause,” she spat. “You know, hot flashes. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

  He dropped his gaze to the floor. “Why are you wearing those shoes? I thought you had a cello lesson.”

  Judy dropped her hands and went over to the sink. She ran the tap and filled a tall glass, drank it quickly.

  “I mean it,” Rusty said. “Who is this cello teacher you put on high heels for? High heels to a cello lesson? Plus a sweatband?”

  “You can be such a frog brain,” Judy said, proffering up just one of the many belittling names she carried with her from gym class.

  “Yeah?” Rusty opened the fridge and pulled out a jar of grainy mustard.

  “Yes,” Judy called over her shoulder as she started for the living room. “You’re losing touch, that’s what. You’ve stopped noticing things.” She picked her purse up off the couch. Rusty followed her with his jar of mustard and a fork.

  In the hall, Judy swung around. “Want an example?”

  Rusty opened his arms on his way to his chair. He dropped himself down into its pleather expanse without so much as glancing at her, then fumbled around by the cooler for the remote.

  “A few months ago, burglars broke into the house,” Judy blurted out.

  “What?” Rusty craned his neck around to look at her standing in the doorway, her round white purse dangling from one arm on a thin strap, like a wheel of cheese on some sort of pulley.

  “Donald saw them come out of the side door from downstairs and shimmy along the side of the house.”

  “That sounds like hogwash.”

  “I swear that’s what he said. Two men, one with long dark hair and the other with a buzz cut.”

  “What?” Rusty’s voice rang with exasperation. “Well, why didn’t he call the police?”

  Judy frowned. “Celeste was on the phone long distance to her niece.”

  “Did they take anything?”

  Judy shook her head. “Not that I could tell. They went through Gretchen’s room. Her bed was all thrown around. On the floor, I found a man’s orange glove—the kind people wear hunting.”

  “Jesus.” Rusty sighed.

  “I’ve got to go,” Judy called.

  “Right.”

  Judy liked to think of herself as the rational side of the family. She felt things very deeply, but she did not let her emotions direct her. Where Rusty had spanked, she had tried to reason with her children. Where Rusty had highs and lows, she maintained elevation, picturing her mind as a kind of mental butte. She liked to think of things in geographical terms. When her nerves were out of whack, she envisioned a stream of serenity running the length of her arms and legs and forcibly fed it into numerous tributaries throughout her body in order to calm herself.

  In the car that Saturday, no such exercise seemed to work, perhaps because the two predominant emotions coursing through her were at odds. She was extremely excited about Gretchen’s news, but disappointed that Gretchen hadn’t personally contacted her. Instead of starting toward Milwaukee with her cello case, she took the exit toward Chicago, driving exactly four miles over the speed limit.

 
Judy had never been to Gretchen’s apartment. Having grown up in Skokie, she knew well enough how to get around the city, and she had a good idea where Gretchen lived, but it had never occurred to her to actually visit. She’d certainly never been invited to come down, and although she was sometimes curious about her daughter’s activities, she tried hard not to be a bother.

  By late afternoon, Judy found herself parked in front of Gretchen’s apartment on a quiet, oak-lined street flanked with redbrick two-flats. Along the walk, a mother in a long black coat pulled two small children in a red wagon. Two gray-haired men in dark wool sweaters sauntered arm in arm, walking a trio of pugs. They stopped midblock to look up into some Japanese maple trees that were just beginning to form buds—little sample-size lipsticks, like the ones Judy had once left on people’s coffee tables during her stint selling Avon.

  Judy took the key out of her Datsun and sat for a moment at the wheel, quietly observing. She was pleasantly surprised by the location, by how familial it seemed. The woman in the long black coat stopped the wagon so that her two children could get out and pet the pugs. From a door down the block, two other children came running out. There was something strange about them, Judy thought, craning her head over the dash to peer out at them through the fogging window, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what seemed different. They scampered about cheerily, squatting along the walk and holding open their palms for the pugs to lick. One child, the smallest of the group, toddled over to the base of a tree and picked up what looked to be a pinecone and tossed it into the street.

  Judy rubbed at the window with a glove, squinting. Was it a little girl or a little boy? Whatever it was, it was sweet—rosy cheeks, blond curls poking out from under its black knit hat and over the collar of the matching jacket. And that’s when it hit her: all of the children were dressed in black. Were they Amish? she wondered, probing her purse for her lipstick. The mother wasn’t wearing a bonnet, though her long coat was dark and tailored simply enough to lend her a stoic look. Yet she appeared modern when she turned around to lift her smallest—pushing aside the gray canvas satchel that rested on her hip, adjusting her squarish glasses. She tucked a strand of reddish hair into a loose bun at the base of her neck.

  Judy applied some red lipstick with the aid of the rearview mirror and didn’t think anything more about it. She snapped her purse closed and started up the walk toward her daughter’s apartment, smiling to herself at the sight of two small feeders suspended from wires over one of the front bay windows. Gretchen had always shared her father’s love of birds. Judy remembered the two of them heading out before dawn on the weekends to catch an eagle migration or to attend an Audubon walk. Judy had always used that time to clean, once in a while to practice a little cello in the basement or to stick her nose into an Agatha Christie.

  The building where Gretchen lived had a cement stoop with a single set of double doors that led into a spacious foyer. There was no buzzer, and there were no names above the mail slots, which read simply #1 and #2. She wasn’t sure what she had hoped to find. It was a Saturday afternoon, after all, and Gretchen might easily be gone—shopping downtown or grading papers at the library. Judy had never been quite clear where Gretchen taught—something to do with a community center, she thought, and wayward teens, teaching them to work out their problems through reading and writing poetry.

  Now Judy found herself standing rather nervously on the doormat in her pale blue raincoat, brushing imaginary dirt off of her good shoes and wondering why she hadn’t bothered to stop on the way for some flowers. She had been in such a rush that she’d barely remembered to grab a pack of bootees from her basement stash of gifts. What if Gretchen was feeling under the weather and didn’t want to see her? She might not like that Judy had come unannounced. After all, Gretchen had called her father—why Rusty? Why not her? What was Gretchen up to these days, anyway?

  Judy’s mind was suddenly a blur as she tried to conjure the daughter who might come to the door; she could only picture a young girl, fifteen, maybe sixteen, who used to come padding into the kitchen in her socks with binoculars around her neck. She saw a girl who ate only crustless bread for breakfast, preferably with butter and sugar, and who did not like toast, who liked only water with ice, who couldn’t stand the tartness of a tomato or vinaigrette though she would peel and section whole lemons to eat. She saw a girl of contradictions, and at one time, Judy had memorized these idiosyncrasies as mothers are apt to do, but now there was no present recollection of what Gretchen liked or whom she was friends with or even where she worked.

  It seemed frightening to her that her own daughter might be carrying a baby, someone whom Judy might somehow be forbidden from visiting. She shivered slightly, standing on the mat before Gretchen’s door, purse clutched so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. She cocked her ear, then touched the knob.

  “Up the step we go,” came a voice from behind. Judy turned and saw the mother from down the block opening the front door for her two children. “Nap time,” she was saying as she helped them up the step and into the foyer. “I don’t want any fussing.”

  “Gretchen’s at emergent yoga,” the woman called down a few moments later from the landing. Her head appeared briefly at the top of the stairs, her face colorless, her glasses still fogged. She seemed not quite human. “Give a knock though. Ray should be home.” She flashed a bright grin, then disappeared up the stairs again.

  Ray? Judy thought, frowning. She didn’t remember Gretchen ever mentioning a Ray. Once she had met a Jeff, a tall, lumbering freckled boy who had bad breath and a Boston accent. She had met a Corey, who was dark-eyed and brainy and wore a wallet on a thick silver chain. She’d heard about a Seth, who was Jewish—a fleeting Passover love—and on the day of her graduation, Gretchen had hung from the neck of a blue-haired comic-book character named Jackson, whose sketches, she insisted, were brilliant—made of nothing but cigarette ash.

  Behind the door to Gretchen’s apartment, there was movement. A chair slid against a bare floor. Then came the sound of the television. Judy scratched a freckle on her wrist and tried not to appear anxious in case she was secretly being watched. A few seconds later, the noise from the TV was overlaid with music—Handel, she recognized, a favorite of hers. She raised her eyebrows. “At least whoever it is has good taste,” she murmured. Then, from behind the door, she heard what she could only guess was a vacuum cleaner, deep and droning.

  What? Judy thought. And after that came a strange, arrhythmic thumping, as if someone were dancing amid all the ruckus.

  She thought to knock, then decided to walk around the back of the house. Whoever was making such a racket wasn’t very considerate of neighbors, especially neighbors with two young children. She certainly didn’t want to be in the way if there was a row.

  It was twilight now. She skirted some budding shrubs, making her way to the backyard. There was an overturned wheelbarrow back there and, in an area of pea gravel, a large air-conditioning unit. Judy stepped gingerly onto the wheelbarrow, then onto the air conditioner, which brought her at chin level with the windowsill.

  “Oh!” Judy exclaimed, her breath catching. She blinked furiously, covering her mouth. The room was white and furnitureless, separated from the rest of the apartment by a set of French doors. A torchère lamp in one corner offered a warm yellow glow, which illuminated a small color TV propped on a barstool in the middle of the room. A man in a scoop-neck purple unitard leaped through the air, a great mast of thick dark hair sailing out behind him, his muscular arms flapping. From somewhere out of sight, Handel played on. Judy could see an upright vacuum unattended in the hall. She crouched and focused her eyes on the television. It was some sort of nature program. She thought she could discern the muffled voice of David Attenborough.

  “Well, at least we’ll have that in common,” Rusty grumbled later when Judy, flush with excitement and horror, burst through the front door of her own home and confessed to Rusty all she had seen.

 
“He was so hairy,” she kept saying as she cracked eggs for a quick omelet supper. “I’ve never seen such a hairy chest, and the way he was leaping around the room in nothing but a unitard, well, it was grotesque.”

  “Sounds like he’s got a chimp complex,” Rusty offered flatly.

  “That’s it exactly,” Judy said, stopping to wipe her hands on a dish towel. “He was very animal.”

  “The chimp,” Rusty hooted. “Isn’t that just fabulous? Hello, everyone, meet our future son-in-law, the Chimp.”

  “No,” Judy said suddenly, her voice pitching into a squeal. “No, we can’t call him that.” She paused, looking down into a glass dish of eggs, the raw yolks suspended like individual planets, like great glowing Jupiters. “I’m sure,” she said softly, “I’m sure he’s very nice.”

  Chapter 3

  THE SHOWER

  Throughout the next two months, as the June-blooming perennials began to flower in the yard—great sprays of hardy phlox and spidery clumps of columbine—Judy grew restless whenever she saw new mothers with babies. Since Judy’s initial visit to Chicago, there had been a series of phone calls during which Gretchen remained coy about her plans and Judy tried chattering on brightly, until the frayed cord that bound mother to daughter and daughter to mother grew taut, then snapped. Trouble began when Judy suggested a shower. It was against what they stood for, was how Gretchen put it. She accused her mother of contributing to a patriarchal state, of imposing oppressive stereotypes upon something that was yet unborn.

  The scene ended in a dial tone, Judy bawling at the little phone table Rusty had built her from old hubcaps, Gretchen standing exhilarated in her kitchen.