Pregnant Pause (5 page)

I hear someone crying, but the sun is so bright and it's shining right in my eyes, so it takes me a while before I can find the person. It's a girl, maybe ten or so, sitting on the ground and leaning up against the side of a tree. She's got long wavy hair that looks like someone just poured it all over her.

"Hey, you," I say, sounding annoyed, because I am. "Shouldn't you be in the dining hall?"

The girl starts, and she looks so frightened of me. She jumps to her feet and begins to scramble away.

I sure didn't expect that. I can't go around scaring the kids to death, or the Lothrops will have my neck in a noose.

"Oh, come on, don't run off," I call to her. "I'm not going to do anything to you. Come on, don't make me run after you. I'm pregnant."

The girl stops and turns around, but she doesn't come any closer. She hangs her head.

"So what's wrong? You homesick?" I remember the old bat and how I said I'd talk it out with a kid if she were homesick.

She shakes her head. "No, I just hate it here." She says this with a squeaky-donkey-braying kind of whine in her voice.

"Yeah, tell me about it."

The girl looks at me, her head tilted, and I recognize her from when I first arrived. She was the scared little rabbit I saw walking between a man and woman who looked like they were straight out of Hollywood. They looked rich and glossy, with shiny skin and dressy shoes and tight-fitting clothing accentuating their thin bodies. The way they glided along, staring out from behind their sunglasses, it looked as if they very much wanted everyone to know
they
did not belong in a place like this.

"This camp's the pits, ain't it?" I say.

She shrugs. "I don't know. I guess the camp isn't so bad. It's just some of the people." She whines again when she says the word "people."

"Yeah, well, look at it from my point of view." I take a couple of steps closer, and so does she. "I'm seven months pregnant, living with my husband in one of these cabins with no bathroom, and I've gotta go like a hundred times a night at least, and there's no kitchen, and no TV or cell phone or anything fun but an old-timey record player with old-timey records."

The girl steps a little closer and wipes at her eyes. She peers up at me through her mass of hair. "Don't you like to swim? When my mom was pregnant with my little sister, she swam every day."

"Yeah, swimming's okay, I guess, but I can't do that all day. I'm supposed to help teach some kind of dance class and work in the crafts hut, and I can't dance and I don't even know how to glue two pieces of paper together. Lam claims the counselors will teach me all I need to know, but whoever they are, they haven't ever met a challenge like me, I'm sure of it."

The girl gives me a shy smile, and I take several more steps toward her.

"Everybody knows how to glue paper," she says, still whining. Could this be how she always talks? I wanna smack her. I do. But, okay, I feel sorry for her, too—a little. She looks so timid and pathetic, with her slouching shoulders and the way she tries to hide behind all that hair.

"Yeah, well, I don't. My art teacher used to get so frustrated because I could never glue a strip of construction paper together so the end pieces were straight. I was supposed to make a circle and link it with another circle and another to make a chain—a paper chain. What the he—What are we supposed to do with a chain, huh?"

The girl laughs a quiet little laugh and walks right up close to me.

I put my arm around her shoulder, because that's what I'd have wanted someone to do for me. "I mean, really," I say.

She brushes the hair out of her eyes. "It's for decoration. To hang in your room, or on a Christmas tree. You're supposed to do it in different colors so it looks pretty."

I shrug. "Yeah, well..."

We're silent for a few seconds, and I stare out over the pine trees to the lake again. It looks so peaceful. I picture Lam and myself in a canoe together, just lazily going along, but then I see my belly and remember Lam's probably doing it with some girl, and my happy little dream bubble bursts.

"The girls in my cabin pick on me," the girl blurts out with a sob in her voice.

"Oh, yeah? How come?"

"'Cause I'm fat."

"Say what?" I can't help it; I laugh. "But everybody here is—uh—struggling with a weight problem."

"Yeah, but I've got fat cheeks. They call me Chubby Cheeks and CC."

I look closely at the girl, who is again hiding her face behind all her hair. I brush it out of her face and lift her chin to get a good look. She blinks at me with worried eyes.

"Oh, I get it. Girl, they're jealous. You're real pretty. Yeah, you've got big cheeks, maybe the biggest, fattest cheeks I've ever seen, but somehow they make you look pretty. Honest, they do. You wouldn't look half so pretty if you were all pale with your cheeks sunken in. You've got nice rosy cheeks, and big wide blue eyes, and guy-magnet hair. Oh, yeah, they're
so
jealous. Believe me, I know."

Behind us we hear the kids in the dining hall cheer about something.

I look at the girl, who's smiling now. She really is pretty. She's the kind of girl that looks like she's just made for being fat, like she was probably born that way. I mean, does everybody in the world have to be skinny? Aren't we all shapes and sizes, and isn't one size fat? I know, sacrilege, right? People say, "But what about their health?" and blah, blah, blah, but my great-great-grandmother Ethel is huge, and she's ninety-nine years old and healthy as a horse, so there. The day she gets skinny is the day she's too ill to eat, and that's what'll kill her.

"So, I'm Eleanor Crowe, but you can call me Elly. What's your name?"

"Banner Sorensen," she says.

What a name!

"They call me 'Banny-bananny with the big fat fanny' at school."

Poor kid. I can just see her parents thinking their girl is going to be someone famous where a name like Banner won't matter, but don't they realize she's got to grow up first? She's got to get to the age of thirty before "Banner" won't be a curse. Banny-fanny—what ahex.

"Well, Banner," I say, trying not to show how sorry I feel for her, "your counselor's probably freaking 'cause you're not at the table. Doesn't she know you're missing?"

Banner shakes her head. "I'm supposed to be at the nurse's cabin. I told her I wasn't feeling well, and she let me go. I had my chum with me, and she knows where I am."

"Your chum?"

"You know, my buddy. They call them chums here. Everyone's got a chum that you have to be with if you go anywhere away from the group." Banner hangs her head, and her hair spills forward off her shoulders, hiding her face again. "I got Ashley—Ashley Wilson, not Ashley Ryan. I hate her. She's the one who started it."

"Started it? Calling you Chubby Cheeks?"

Banner nods and hangs her head again. She tears at a fin gernail, which looks torn to the quick already. "She's not a real chum. I thought at least here, where everybody else is like me, I wouldn't get called any names. I hate the girls in my cabin."

"Well, we'll take care of her. Don't worry. She'll get hers. So come on, why don't we go hang out at my cabin till dinner's over? Would you like that?"

Banner lifts her head, and through her mass of hair I see her smile.

***

I open the door to the cabin and let Banner inside.

"Cool," she says, and her voice perks up. "It's like a house in here. Like a real house."

I look around and try to see it through her eyes: the four-poster bed made up in the corner with the empty bookshelf beside it, the couch and coffee table, the card table with the record player and the big moose head surrounded by all our junk. I don't know, maybe it looks more grown up in here than in her cabin with a bunch of bunk beds lining the walls, but still, it ain't pretty in here by a long shot.

Banner runs on tiptoe to the couch and sits down on it and rubs her hand on the scratchy armrest, and she has this look of awe on her face like it's made of rubies and satin.

"I'd love to live here."

"Believe me, no, you wouldn't."

"Yes, I would. I love the mountains and living in the woods. And swimming at the lake is my favorite thing to do in the whole world. I'd love to live here all by myself, in the dead of winter."

I go over to the record player that sits on top of the card table. "Sounds boring and lonely to me," I say.

"But I'd have a stack of books a mile high that I would read, and there would be deer and bears and moose and other animals to watch, and I'd skate on the lake and just sit and watch the snow fall during the day, and then watch all the stars at night. Have you noticed how big they are up here? And they twinkle. At home in New Jersey, the stars seem so far away, and they never twinkle." She crosses her ankles and leans back against the couch with a look of satisfaction, as if her living here were real.

"Yeah, I like to read, too," I say, while I look through the albums for something I recognize, but there's names here like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. They're vaguely familiar, but judging by the way they look on the covers—clean-cut and wearing suits with ties—I don't think it's my kind of music. Then I find a Christmas album called
Holly Jolly Christmas.
I laugh and turn to face Banner. "You want to pretend it's winter here?"

She nods and clasps her hands together in her lap. "Sure!"

"Okay. Here goes something." I put the record on and set the needle in the first groove, and out comes "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree."

"Come on," I say. "I need the practice. Let's dance."

She eases herself off the couch, looking uncertain, and comes out to the center of the room, where I'm already dancing. She giggles and wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. "You look funny dancing with your stomach big like that."

I grab her arms and twirl her around. She giggles again, and the two of us dance together.

She likes the twirling thing, so we do that a lot, and then we do some line-dancing stuff and just fool around, swinging and kicking and jumping, and I can tell she's having a great time, and so am I. If dance class could be like this, it wouldn't be half so bad to teach it. The entire album is full of fast, happy Christmas music, and we go through the whole thing, both sides, sometimes singing along when we know the song.

As the last song is dying down, we hear a siren outside, and it sounds kind of close. "What's that for?" I ask. "Are they calling everybody to the main cabin or something?" Lam's parents had given me a camp booklet with all the rules and camp business in it that I was supposed to read because I had skipped out on the sure-to-be-boring counselors' assembly by pretending that I had a doctor's appointment, but I hadn't finished reading it yet. The siren had to mean something big, like it's time for one of their camp-wide weight-loss pep talks they're supposed to give every day. Only I thought those were held in the morning. The two of us go to the door and step outside. We see people running around, coming in and out of the woods beyond the cabins, and I see Ziggy, and he's yelling something that I can't make out. Then I look out over the trees to the bottom of the hill at the parking lot, and I see a police car, and its lights are flashing. I'm about to say something when it hits me what everybody is saying, and it hits Banner at the same time, because she cries out, "It's me! They're all looking for me! Oh-oh. We're in so much trouble."

Before I can stop her, she jumps off the wooden steps and calls out, "Here I am. I'm here. Here I am."

OKAY, TROUBLE ISN'T the word for it. I'm standing in Lam's parents' cabin after "lights out," getting an earful about how if I had read the rulebook, I would know that I'm never to have a camper alone with me in the cabin.

"Do you understand the worry and trouble you put us through? Do you realize the trouble you could be in if she decides to tell somebody you molested her?" Mrs. Lothrop asks.

"Wait a minute. Molested?" I fall backward and hit the doorframe. Are they freakin' kidding me?

"Yes! Molested.
M-O-L-E-S-T-E-D.
" Mrs. Lothrop spells it out. She's pacing, and her large, capable feet sound like blocks of wood being smacked together.

"Why would she do that? I didn't touch her—well hardly, but not like that! Give me a break!"

Mrs. Lothrop's face is so red hot I don't know why I don't see smoke rising off her head. Oh, wait—maybe I do.

"I just can't get over how stupid, how completely stupid and inconsiderate you were to take her to your cabin. You should have taken her right back to the dining hall. And
your
cabin of all places. From now on, no camper is allowed in that cabin, even if he or she is with a chum. It's unwholesome."

Right. I want to give the lady a whole shitload of unwholesome, but she's my new MIL—mother-in-law—so I bite down on my lower lip till I practically draw blood and say nothing. Meanwhile, Lam's screwing some bimbo at a party and will come home plastered and then some, maybe throw up or pass out right in full view of all the campers, but all he'll get is a "Clean yourself up before you come to work, will you my dearest, sweetest, most precious, darling perfection?"

How is it some parents can be so completely blind to their children's faults? Just because Lam is their one and only, they dote on him like he's God Almighty himself.

Mr. Lothrop, my FIL, looks too tired to say anything, so he just glares to show he's with her—the MIL. Lam has told me all about the first-night-of-camp after-dinner speech, so I know the FIL has spent the last couple of hours yammering to all the campers gathered in the main lodge about the rules—fifty rules that start with "Don't ever..." and a hundred that start with "You better not..." and another fifty of "If we ever catch you..." Then he talks about all the fun everybody is going to have, which to me seems to be a total contradiction of all the rules of starvation and exercise and "You're dead if you..." warnings, but who am I to say?

Finally they dismiss me, but not before the MIL calls me back from the doorway. "And Eleanor," she says, and I look back, "don't ever wear that dress again."