Maybe Baby Page 7

  Judy sat stiffly on the edge of a leather cushion, staring at her tea, noticing that bits of leaves and even twigs were floating on the surface. It was as if Hael had boiled a little nest.

  “I hope you stay long enough to meet M64,” Hael was saying. “You’ll be charmed. He/ she is one helluva well-adjusted kid. Everyone says so.”

  “He/ she?” Judy raised her eyebrows.

  “We don’t say it anymore.” Hael frowned. “You know, that was just too far out.”

  Judy nodded. She noticed what looked to be a toy basket in the corner of the room, overflowing with amorphous foam shapes. So that’s how these people kept their kids from destroying their nice place. Their kids had no toys, nothing but Nerf.

  Hael caught Judy’s eye and danced over to the basket. “Aren’t these great?” She tossed a gray blob into the air, then a brown pyramid. “There’s a new toy manufacturer who is way into us.” Hael beamed. “We’ve contracted with them for all kinds of special games. We’ll finally be able to play Candy Land.” She threw her arms up with an enthusiastic flourish.

  “What’s the matter with Candy Land?” Judy asked.

  “Well, they’re doing an organic fruits version of it.” She smiled warmly, tossing a blob at Judy. “But the best part is that we’ve found a publisher to put out a gender-neutral Mother Goose.”

  “I don’t understand,” Judy said, drawing her sweater across her knees. “My children grew up with both Candy Land and Mother Goose. There’s nothing”—she shook her head fiercely—“nothing wrong with them that I can see.”

  “Mrs. Glide”—Hael sank to her knees on the wood floor and tucked her hair behind her ears gingerly—“it’s about footing. It’s about starting out in the universe with an open signal. Not everyone who lives here is as hard core as I am, but then”—her young face grew earnest, and she drew her neat eyebrows in a line—“I want my children to get a pure start in life—no false impressions, no dogma or pop culture. From the moment they were born, they were people.” She paused. “People,” she said again. “They aren’t complicated by gender or the expectations people string out for them. These are children who have never touched a Barbie, never seen an action figure. They’re happy just to play with something as simple as a paper sack.”

  Judy gathered her things onto her lap. “But it’s as if they’re cats,” she protested.

  “Exactly!” Hael’s voice was breathy with excitement. “We don’t give kittens gender-specific toys. It’s like that with the children we’re raising here—they are more like kittens than little girls and little boys.”

  Judy stood up, fingers at her temples. “I feel a bit dizzy with all this,” she said gently. “It might be best for me to go.”

  “I’ve scared you, haven’t I?”

  “No, no.” Judy clutched her purse.

  “I think we made some progress, though,” Hael said gravely. “Gretchen warned me you were very ingrained.”

  “What?” Judy shook her head as if she could erase what had just been said. Hael stepped forward and put a hand on Judy’s forearm. “You’re going to do very well. Remember, it’s just as hard for Gretchen and Ray to understand you as it is for you to understand them. Think of it that way.”

  “Is there a name for all of this?” Judy made a last-ditch attempt, her hand on the knob.

  Hael sighed. “This is an underground movement. At some point, Judy, sex won’t matter. Even names might be moot.”

  Judy stepped into the brightly lit hall, grateful for the click of the latch. On the doormat, two small sets of shoes—black clogs—were neatly lined up like four little stones.

  Chapter 5

  MORE BREAKING AND ENTERING

  Judy descended the steps from Hael’s apartment and gazed around the foyer. Her cheeks felt hot. She set her purse on a thin entryway table, rummaged for her lipstick, and applied it with a shaky grip. What had Gretchen meant that she, Judy, was ingrained? She had half a mind to leave her daughter a note. It seemed time to set things straight, time for Judy to make some demands and to get answers to her questions: Why, for example, had Gretchen called Rusty at work to announce she was pregnant? That was the big one. And there were other things, too. The unacknowledged bootees she had left on Gretchen’s welcome mat, Gretchen’s cold shoulder at the shower, and a general lack of contact that left Judy feeling empty and alone.

  All Judy wanted was connection, a way to be involved in the birth of her first grandchild. All things considered, Judy felt that she had been more than accepting, more than gracious. For goodness’ sake, Gretchen and Ray were having a baby, and they weren’t even married. Ordinarily, Judy would have had a few things to say about that. But had she ever intimated her disappointment? Had she uttered a single peep? She had taken the news in stride, tried her best to be lighthearted and cheerful on the phone and at the shower, reassuring everyone that she didn’t care about the sex of the child as long as it arrived healthy.

  Now here was Gretchen’s door—closed, and here was Judy standing again before the mat, feeling utterly unwelcome. Other families did not live this way. Other mothers and daughters commiserated over morning sickness, grew close during a pregnancy. She envied Celeste’s grandchildren, but more than the children themselves, Judy envied the hours Celeste spent with her pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law, poring over paint swatches for each nursery, tossing around names, knitting tiny white sweaters, swapping stories. Judy could only indulge in these fantasies alone.

  One rainy Sunday, she’d taken great relish in slipping off to the mall to stroll through the infant sleepwear, brushing through the racks of soft jumpers as if she were pushing her body through a fleecy car wash, cleansing and readying herself for grandmotherhood. But she had not been able to find a single black item of baby clothing, not even something gray or beige, and so she had ended up in the food court, feeling somber, with nothing to hold but a watery Orange Julius as she watched pairs of young mothers sip sodas together and push strollers piled high with raincoats.

  Judy wanted to be asked things. She wanted Gretchen to ask her about her own pregnancies. Now, she wasn’t even sure Gretchen would let her come to the hospital for the birth, and oh, how she wanted to be invited. She wanted to be at the birth badly, very badly, but she supposed no one would be allowed in the room, no one but the Chimp. The whole affair, from the black shower to Hael with her Nerf blobs, filled Judy with a sense of gloom. She wondered what she ought to do, and in wondering, she let her hand reach out and touch the doorknob before her.

  Without her giving it the slightest twist, the door unlatched and swung back, giving Judy a space of about six inches through which to peer. She could feel her heart pounding. She looked toward the stairs that led to Hael’s flat, then carefully put a hand on the doorjamb and let her foot rest on the threshold so that she was partially inside. Before her, she saw a line of shoes on a straw mat—some strappy sandals, a pair of clogs, some striped leg warmers in a wad. The room was spare, the walls white. There was a single cream-colored couch with one black oval pillow. She could see a blond wood table with two plain high-back chairs next to the bay window. The sun glared off the hardwood floors. The room smelled of fresh paint. There was not a single picture or poster on the wall, except for a large square painting placed just to the left of the couch: a gray background with a slightly darker gray orb, floating.

  Judy thought she might burst into sobs. Admittedly, she herself was no great decorator, but this—this was downright depressing. She glanced back into the foyer to make sure this wasn’t some sort of setup, then slipped noiselessly out of her shoes and closed the door quickly behind her. She was not going to intrude, just peek. She had come this far, and for her daughter’s safety, she reasoned, it was her motherly duty to look around.

  On stocking feet, Judy tiptoed past the couch to the set of French doors that opened onto the room at the back of the house. It, too, was empty except for a purple mat rolled in a corner and a boom box propped on a milk crate. Th
ere was a tape case resting on top, labeled only “Performance X.” Judy pursed her lips and put a hand on her chest to suppress a sigh. Was it possible Gretchen really lived here? Nothing suggested a trace of a feminine presence, no wreath, no scented candle, no lace around the windows.

  Judy closed the French doors and crept around the corner into a short hall that led to a small bathroom and two square bedrooms. She held her breath before poking her head through each doorway. The first bedroom was empty except for a rocker. The second held a low black dresser and a futon with a cream-colored spread. Maybe, she thought, Gretchen had not yet fully moved in. There was no crib, no changing table. What did Gretchen and Ray think—the baby would sleep with them?

  She stopped by the bathroom. Two black towels hanging from silver hooks. Two clear toothbrushes standing in a cup. A long black hair dangled from the side of the claw-foot tub. The medicine cabinet was the only thing Judy left untouched. Now that was their private business.

  Judy paused. She thought she heard the stairwell above the bathroom creak. She looked briefly behind the white blind covering the window. Nothing. No movement along the side of the house. The apartment was quiet, except for her heartbeat and somewhere a clock, ticking unseen. Still, her pulse quickened.

  She had to get out. It seemed suddenly imperative. She tiptoed back down the hall and was reaching for her shoes when something in front of the stove caught her eye. There was a pool of something on the gray tile. It looked like blood. She crept forward, a hand on her throat, her heart practically in her mouth, like something she could spit out. There, it was only wine, a pool of wine and shards of broken glass. She was careful to step around it. She thought, Who would run off without cleaning up a broken glass? Whoever had left before her certainly had been in a hurry.

  Overhead, Judy heard someone crossing the floor, a pair of little feet running. She slipped on her shoes and let herself out, heart still pounding, head spinning.

  This was their world, as strange as it seemed, she reminded herself. She would have to let them live it, just as she, Judy, had left her parents behind to move to Fort Cloud with Rusty—a marriage her father had cautioned her might cost her her life. Rusty, who had appeared so big and brash and bold—a kind of Marlon Brando—had been so different from her small-boned father, a genteel shoe salesman who had spent all his life holding women’s feet and protecting their arches with his hands, always manicured and set off by good dress shirts and cuff links.

  “Never marry a man who might crush you in bed,” her mother had advised. Rusty, her mother felt, was too much man. She would have preferred that her daughter marry someone more relaxed with a quiet intellect—a teacher, a pastor, the bachelor on the corner who worked for the Chicago Post.

  But Judy had been smitten with Rusty the first time she met him, on a dead-hot afternoon when she stopped on her way home from her father’s store into a bar with a good-size tree growing up through the floor. She had never been in a bar before, other than maybe a restaurant bar, but the door had been open, giving way to a cool, dark space. And there, on a barstool, she saw a man stirring a drink with his pinkie. When she approached, ducking under a tree limb to make her way toward him, he looked up at her, reached into his glass, and held out a single cube of ice for her tongue.

  She had taken it gratefully and pulled up a barstool by his side, noting his strong cologne, his big square hands. “A special drink for this one,” Rusty had called to the bartender. Then he’d leaned over to ask what her name was, and she—for the first time—had drawn a blank, which was how she knew she was in love.

  “You look like a tall glass of water.” He’d grinned, letting his gray-green eyes run the length of her. She was happy when her drink arrived, clear and cool with crushed cherries floating among the ice cubes. She’d taken a long sip from the straw, then excused herself to put on some lipstick in the ladies’ room—a new bright red tube that she’d been carrying in her purse for weeks in expectation of an occasion when she might need some added flair.

  It had started there—her life—in that moment, in that mirror, as she stood in the bar bathroom coloring her lips, her face flushed, her heart pounding almost visibly through her sleeveless blouse. She could feel the rush of the drink at her temples, and she knew almost by instinct that she would marry this man, that they would have at least two children, and that she would wear red lipstick, always, to remind herself that this was the way things were meant to be.

  As Judy left Gretchen’s building, closing the front door quietly behind her, she could hear the children upstairs giggling through the open windows. They looked down at her, and one waved happily, making Judy wonder if maybe she hadn’t been too harsh a judge. Maybe M16 and M64 would turn out all right. Eventually, they would grow up into men or women. The physical transformation would be obvious enough. Why rush the distinction? They were just children, after all, and who knew, maybe the M stood for something—other names, their future identities as Maxes or Maxines, Michaels or Michelles. They would get on just fine in life, even without all the accoutrements of a normal childhood.

  And when Gretchen had her baby in October, it would still be a baby—warm and small—and who cared if its name was off the wall or if Gretchen dressed it in dark clothes? The baby wouldn’t mind. It would be too young to dream of baseballs or ballet shoes. All those things would come in time. You could never predict what children might fancy. It would be a baby with a secret, and Judy, of all people, knew that secrets held mystery, held freedom.

  That same afternoon, while Judy was in Chicago, Rusty began feeling stomach pains at work and drove home for an antacid. He unbuttoned his shirt and yanked at his tie in the bathroom while opening drawers and rifling through cupboards, then finally caught sight of himself in the mirror and was struck dumb. No wonder I feel sick, he thought as he studied his profile. His belly looked enormous, like a perfectly domed dinner roll. He turned to the left and to the right, frowning, then absentmindedly ran a hand across his chest and was struck by the rubberiness of his pecs. Once taut, they now drooped—there was definite droopage—they looked like water balloons, like molded custards. He stepped toward the tub, away from the mirror, hoping a few feet of distance would diminish the effect, but it did not. He had the body of a pregnant woman.

  This is disgusting, he thought. How have I let this happen? He buttoned his shirt back up and trudged next door to see if Celeste could spare him an antacid. Rusty could see Celeste through the front window of her house; she sat at her long walnut table working on a scrapbook. She had six grandchildren now, and that kept her busy, busy, busy, she liked to tell Rusty. That morning she’d waved to him on his way to work, her arms laden with udderlike purses that brimmed with scrapping supplies. “Off to my class at Scrappy-Do!” she’d called cheerfully.

  Now she looked up from the table and waved to Rusty through the screen door, beckoning him in. The living room had been redecorated since Rusty had last been to visit. The carpet was now deep blue, the sofas a sandy beige; a large seascape in a gilt frame hung over the mantel. From a boom box on the dining room table came the sounds of seagulls, waves hitting a beach.

  “Place looks nice,” Rusty said.

  “It’s my relaxation retreat.” Celeste beamed, skirting the table in a pair of yellow culottes, her short, frosted hair neatly curled like rows of shells. “All this scrappin’ makes me tense up in the shoulders, but I can’t help myself. I just love saving memories. I’m sure Judy will be the same when she has grandkids.” She caught herself and flashed Rusty an apologetic smile, nudging a stray curl at her nape into place.

  Rusty, still in the doorway, looked down at his stomach. “Celeste,” he said, then paused. He wanted to ask Celeste if she had noticed anything different about him, but there was no polite way to phrase it.

  She raised her neatly plucked eyebrows, tilting her head slowly on its narrow neck. “Yes?”

  “S-sour stomach,” he stammered. “You got anything?”

  “Su
re,” she gushed, looking relieved. She darted into the kitchen and returned with a bottle. “Rusty,” she said, touching his arm, “I’m sorry about this whole thing with Gretchen. I’m sure it’s hard.”

  Rusty nodded and gave Celeste a two-finger salute on the way out the door. In his gut, a sharp pang made its way through muscle. He took his tablets, then sprawled on the couch to read the Fort Cloud Independent, which had recently begun running a series of boxes containing bitesize statistics that usually weren’t very uplifting: number of deaths this year due to fumigants, number of mugged joggers from 1980 to 1989, number of robberies resulting in at least one death, percentage of children who die of dehydration. The boxes were intended to keep Fort Clouders up to date on the seriousness of the world, yet inspire them to be tireless in their pursuit of happiness.

  After chucking the paper in the trash, Rusty went downstairs to the Deepfreeze to fill his cooler with what was left of the snow. On his way past the old bedrooms—dimly lit, dust motes bobbing in the parts between curtains—he stepped in to study the window casings. It would be so easy for someone to pop out the screens and pry out the glass, slide right on in. He’d read a story once in a magazine about a group of homeless kids who had done just that and set up camp in a couple’s basement for several months, moving about the house undetected during the day while the homeowners were at work. The kids had survived by nibbling at the edges of things in the fridge, portioning out tiny bits of peanut butter, a single pickle, a handful of oyster crackers, taking nothing in quantity, disturbing nothing that might be counted, say, a container of yogurt or a can of soda. They skimmed off the couple’s toothpaste, used their shampoo, deodorant, toothbrushes.

  It all came down to a chocolate chip cookie and a strand of hair. Rusty remembered these two details perfectly—they still sent a shiver up his spine. The wife had baked cookies and allotted herself and her husband two a day while they were dieting. One night, she came home and counted out the cookie jar, only to discover there was an extra one missing, though her husband swore he hadn’t taken it. A huge row ensued, and the couple ended up sleeping in separate beds that night. The next morning, the wife stepped into the shower and noticed a longish dark hair by the drain. Both she and her husband were fair-haired. The story ended there.