Marcy is terrified. “Do they love us?” she cries, knowing it’s a stupid, babyish question, humiliating herself and yet asking it again. “Do the worms love us?”
Jeanie snorts. “Are you out of your mind? We’ve just burned them. They hate our guts.”
A little later, because her devotion is undiminished but also to distract Jeanie from mixing more Keen’s hot mustard and water, Marcy brings Sonja’s precious tap-dance shoes into the kitchen and urges Jeanie to try them on. “They’re broken,” Jeanie says when she can’t get them to click. Marcy returns the shoes to the box that says “Private Property” and comes back into the kitchen with her piggy bank whose contents add up to five dollars and thirty-seven cents, her life savings. “It’s all for you,” she announces. “I present it unto you.”
“Don’t tell your father, okay?” Jeanie says, shaking out the coins.
With the money, Jeanie buys tomato-red nail polish and a Ouija board that zooms out the answers but is a bad speller.
This is July, when Marcy is still the person she has been all her life. She is crazy about Jeanie, but not yet swooning over her. This is before everything. Before Marcy is pregnant, although pregnancy is on her mind because her mother is pregnant. Sometime before Christmas her mother and Sonja will return from Vancouver with what Marcy imagines will be more or less an alive doll. Her dream! She understands that babies come from a seed given to the mother by the father, and so while her mother is away and it is her father who makes breakfast and supper, nothing goes into her mouth that she hasn’t first picked through for a seed that doesn’t match the others. A suspicious-looking seed. She is aware of the ignominy of unwed mothers, there being a home for unwed mothers at the end of the street
where if you climb the brick wall you sometimes catch a glimpse of them in their white maternity dresses, drifting around the back lawn like dandelion seeds.
It is not until the beginning of November that Marcy has her first talking-baby dream. When she wakes up, her ears still ringing, she can’t remember what the baby said. But was it loud!
The next afternoon while she is soaping Jeanie’s back she is suddenly inspired to let her hand slide under Jeanie’s arm and touch her bosom. She knows a hymn, “The Mothers of Salem,” in which Jesus says, “For I will receive them and hold them to my bosom,” and calling this hymn to mind as her hand circles closer and closer to Jeanie’s left breast provides not just absolution, not just permission, but encouragement. Jeanie pretends she doesn’t notice anything, whereas Marcy feels strips of velvety light coiling up and down her legs.
A few nights later she dreams that she is pregnant. In the morning she awakens to a pot belly and the inflation of the black, unknowable world. She climbs out of bed and uses her hand mirror to try to see in through her navel. She swallowed a seed, she thinks. Somehow she swallowed a darned seed! She presses her stomach with her fingers and feels a stem-like thing. An arm! In common with Sonja she has the idea that babies in the womb are like baby birds, their heads drooped back and their mouths wide open waiting for food to drop in. With a sense that it ought to be a snap, she resolves to let the baby wait until it starves to death.
For two days she eats nothing. Her father tries to bribe her with promises of money and Creamsicles but Marcy shakes her head. She says she’s the one who eats all the food that Jeanie wolfs down. “I’m stuffed,” she says. “Look,” she says, brazenly drawing her father’s attention to her pot belly.
On the third day she eats a slice of summer sausage and two crusts of bread. She squares this with herself by chewing until the food is a paste so that there is hardly anything left for the baby. Just as her mother craved liver and onions when she was pregnant, Marcy craved the slice of summer sausage. “I have cravings,” she thinks, a bit disturbed by such irrefutable evidence of her condition.
Nobody knows, not even Jeanie. Marcy is too ashamed. When she wakes up in the middle of the night her big anxiety is what if the baby doesn’t die? “Please let it die,” she prays. In her fervour she pulls her hair out in clumps. She makes deals with God. To be good. To be silent. She Scotch-tapes her lips together so that she can’t talk. She knows that she is too young to marry, and yet as an alternative to being an unwed mother she finds herself reflecting upon Dug, the boy Jeanie’s Ouija board said was going to be her husband. Except that Marcy doesn’t know any Dugs, not yet.
The dream that invariably wakes her up these nights is the talking-baby one. It’s not her baby, and it’s not her mother’s, either. If only when she woke up she could remember what the baby said, then she might know who it belonged to. She’s not certain but she thinks it’s a girl. On the way to and from school she searches for it in the bulrushes along the river. She is frightened of quicksand and won’t step where the earth is wet.
Meanwhile, throughout November and despite her baby worries, she is obsessed with giving Jeanie baths. After school, as soon as Jeanie arrives and lets them into the house, Marcy chirps, “How would you like a nice, relaxing soak in the tub?” In bed at night she has found that if she presses her palm between her legs she can bring on “the feeling,” just by thinking about washing Jeanie’s breasts. Not without guilt though. The suspicion that she is doing something wrong has entered the picture and loiters during the day in the creases of clothes and between the slats of the Venetian blinds in her classroom, and yet “the
feeling” itself, when it washes over her, is white and glorious, like heaven. Her ensuing prayers tend to cancel each other out. “Thank you, Jesus,” she says, heartfelt. “Thank you, dear Lord.” And just as heartfelt, “Please forgive me, Jesus.”
The night before her mother’s baby is born, Marcy’s baby dies. A sharp cramp wakes her from a dream about it dying. She goes into the bathroom and sits on the toilet because in her dream that was how it happened. She was on the toilet and the baby dropped out of her down there, still alive, a puny blue baby that could do the dog-paddle. Eventually it sunk but not before holding up one tiny finger, then two fingers, then—last chance—three fingers. When Marcy was sure that it had drowned she fished it out of the bowl and put it in a Pez dispenser for burial.
Her father is still up, listening to his “Mister Sandman” record. “Please turn on your magic beam,” Marcy softly sings along to quell an unnameable fear. “Bring me a, bring me a, bring me a—“ she sings where the record always sticks. She sits on the toilet for half an hour, in the dark. Finally she gets off and switches on the light to assure herself of her flat stomach. There is blue lint in her navel. Knowing it is only lint, she nevertheless picks it out and saves it to bury.
That following day, just when it doesn’t matter any more, she meets a Dug. He reminds her of her dream poodle, his tight, curly blond hair and brown, snappy eyes.
She
doesn’t make fun of his baggy Bermuda shorts. When the teacher says, “This is Doug Green all the way from London, England,” if he had been a poodle, Marcy would have held her flat palm under his nose and said, “Good boy.” She would like to bite his chubby legs.
At recess, intending flattery and consolation, she tells him he has ruby-red lips. He is alone beside the Elmer the Safety
Elephant flagpole. He says, “Don’t talk rubbish,” and proceeds to do a series of hectic, crab-like cartwheels. The kind of cartwheels they do in England, she supposes. She tells him she has a crown at her house (the
Queen for a Day
crown, although Marcy has been led to believe it’s her mother’s lost prom-queen crown, only recently discovered in the attic). She brags that her father once mailed the Queen of England six books and that the Queen phoned him to say thank you. (This is a dream, not a memory, induced by her belief that the words “Send her victorious” are actually “Send her six storybooks.”)
The boy says, “Watch this,” and stands on his head. His shorts riding up produce in her the sentiment that her field of prospective husbands is narrowing.
On the way home from school he runs up behind her and says, “You better watch out or I’ll kiss you,” then keeps running. She stands still as white flowers open in her head. Boys gallop by her, all of them wearing Davy Crockett coonskin hats, the first such hats she has seen not on TV, herds of boys with tails on their heads. She has to go to the bathroom. She crouches behind a cedar hedge, and while she is peeing remembers the Pez container in her pencil case. Next to where she has peed she digs a hole with a sharp stone and buries her baby, finishing up with the singing of “What Can Little Hands Do to Please the King of Heaven?”
By the time she arrives home Jeanie is already there, watching
Secret Storm.
Jeanie declines a bath, so Marcy brushes her hair instead. Almost in a trance Marcy runs the brush and her hand over Jeanie’s hair until Jeanie grunts and rolls onto her back. Marcy falls off her but climbs on again, astride her stomach. They look at each other, Marcy revelling in Jeanie’s eyes. She has heard her father refer to Jeanie’s eyes as beady, and she believes this to mean like jewels, sparkling.
“You know what?” Marcy says. Her throat aches. Her chest aches with a kind of bursting.
“What?” Jeanie says.
Marcy is suddenly inspired. “You better watch out!”
“Or what?” Jeanie asks in a sarcastic voice.
“Or
I’ll kiss you!” Marcy cries to her own enthralled disbelief.
Jeanie tries to heave her off, but Marcy drops forward and clings with her wiry arms and legs. “Jeanie!” she cries, earnest now, her entire body chiming with joyful noise. “I love you so much!”
T
o the four of them baby Joan was what the new car was until Gordon smashed it into a tree. They often stood together in a group and just looked at her. They ran their hands over her body and strove to find words worthy enough and took her for spins around the block to show her off. At the very thought of her they laughed. They had their picture taken with her.
To the four of them baby Joan was what the sales brochure had
said
the new car was. Glamour plus. A supreme thrill, and a joy, and a blessing.
Now that they were back home Doris’s apprehension about her was gone. Now that they were away from those senile Dearness crackpots was how she saw it. (
Just like the nuts that fall, I’m a little cracked, that’s all!
were her theme lyrics for the whole bunch of them.) Strangely, she felt redeemed when she was holding Joan, as if Joan were the miraculous flowering of her own illicit sex.
Sonja felt redeemed all of the time. Those days of shame back when she’d first learned she was pregnant out of wedlock were no longer even a memory, let alone an unpleasant one, and any time Yours crossed her mind, after she had shuddered at the recollection of his nostrils, she thought almost fondly, “What a character.” Without him there would be no Joan, there wasn’t any getting around that. And the way he had pounced on her and got it over and done with in no time, that struck her as pretty smart now, like a doctor slipping the needle into your arm when your mouth is open for the thermometer. She never
did see his penis, so it wasn’t as if she had nightmares about it, although she’d had two weird dreams about green hammers—going into Ted’s Cigar Store and all they were selling was green hammers, and a dream about her father having green hammers for arms.
There’d been a hammer with a chipped green handle lying in a nail box on Yours’s windowsill. When she felt something pushing between her legs, it happened so suddenly and the thing was so solid she thought he was trying to stick the hammer handle up her. With his hand over her mouth she couldn’t cry out. The blood on the fingers of his other hand, which he showed to her while she was still pinned down, was from splinters, she thought. What’s more she thought it was
his
blood.
She
wasn’t hurt. She hardly felt a thing. “Serves you right,” she said as soon as his hand left her mouth. She was embarrassed to have been touched down there, she was scared to death because he was obviously a mental case after all, but even when he zipped himself back up she didn’t catch on. She had to see the unbloodied hammer still lying in the nail box before another possibility struck her.
“Did we go all the way?” she asked.
He patted down her skirt and brushed a coil of hair out of her eyes. “We sure did,” he said, smiling as if remembering a wonderful, romantic time.
“We did?”
His eyes emptied. “You give a fella the come hither, what do you expect?”
It was like missing the last bus. It was like losing her wallet. And she knew, she
knew
that she was pregnant. Yes, there it was—already!—another, faster heartbeat behind her own. Yours got up and left the room and she just sat there, listening to her two hearts. When he came back he had a facecloth. For her, she thought, but he used it to wipe the blood on the chesterfield. He asked if she could name the four blood groups.
They had met for the first and last time less than an hour before, at the Swan Restaurant next door to where her father worked. She had gone downtown for a polio shot and to bring her father a manuscript he’d left at home, since his office was in the same building as the doctor’s. “Gin Alley” the manuscript was called. On the bus she opened it to read the recipes but it was a story about a man named Ratface.
“Potboiler means
trash,”
her father said when she asked why he was always going on about how his company published nothing except cookbooks. “Private-eye novels, shoot-’em-up hoodlum novels.” He spoke nicely but he looked at her as if he couldn’t believe how stupid she was, and suddenly she craved apple pie à la mode. And then she remembered that she was next door to where they had the best apple pie she had ever tasted! Her father smiled and said, “Oh, I get it, you were pulling my leg.” With his finger he wiped away the saliva at the corner of her mouth.
It was a Thursday morning. Phys. ed., math, chemistry—all her worst subjects were on Thursday morning. So she was in no hurry. She ordered two pieces of pie and a glass of chocolate milk, using up her whole allowance. She was just digging in when a huge man with nostrils the size of quarters sat beside her at the counter and extended a pack of Lucky Strikes. “No, thank you,” she said, “I don’t smoke,” and he said in a Southern accent, “I’m with you a hundred percent, stunts your growth.”