Pregnant Pause (7 page)

"Well..." He pauses and plows another forkful of oatmeal into his mouth. "Maybe the little ones can make sailboats to sail on the water. I've got all the materials laid out. And the older ones can learn knitting, or if they already know how, they can begin to make a scarf."

"That's simple?" Neither idea sounds simple to me.

"Very," Leonardo says.

"I can see it now. Eleanor and Leo rocking in rocking chairs, knitting away," Jen says. She laughs and nudges Lam. She made sure she sat down next to him—or more like on top of him. I'm sitting across from Lam, who's not saying much. He's staring down at his food, not eating a thing. I plan to grab his bowl of oatmeal after I finish mine. I've piled a whole mess of brown sugar, cinnamon, two-percent milk, and peanut butter on mine. I had left the peanut butter in the back of Lam's Jeep about a week ago, and I found it there this morning when I went to fetch my camp T-shirt that I'd also left back there. Everybody has to wear the WeightAway counselor shirt when they're on duty. Mine comes halfway down my thighs because it's a large so it will fit over my belly. I'm wearing it underneath my pumpkin dress so all you see are the short sleeves that come to my elbows. The MIL gave me bitch-eyes when I walked into the dining hall, but she didn't say anything, just kept following me with her squint till I got all the way to the kitchen door and disappeared from view. I was sweating like a horse under that gaze, but I just held my head high and kept on walking.

I stir my oatmeal and ignore Jen. I've decided to pretend she doesn't even exist. If she talks to me, I'll ignore her. If she talks to someone else, I'll interrupt her as if I'm not even hearing her. I hate people who are always trying to stir up trouble, and Jen is one of those kinds of people. She works down at the lake with Lam. This worries me because it's so obvious she likes him, but it's also obvious that Lam doesn't like her—I think.

I ignore her comment about me and Leo in rocking chairs knitting together, and so does everybody else, but that just makes her try harder.

"You better watch out, Lammy, or Leo's going to steal your wife away from you." She leans on Lam even more and talks into his ear, and I know her breath is tickling him. She's trying to turn him on. I see the way she rubs herself up against him.

Jen laughs. "By the looks of her, it shouldn't be too hard. Looks like she'll go with anyone who offers."

Lammy squirms away from Jen. He looks across the table at me and sees my eyes are filled with tears—so much for me ignoring the bitch. Lam stands up and climbs over the seat. Then, without saying anything, he grabs his bowl, comes around to stand behind me, kisses me on the head, and sets his bowl down next to mine. "I'm not hungry. You have this. For our baby."

I look up at Lam, and he leans way over and kisses me again. On the lips. "I'm the luckiest guy in the world," he says, looking right at Jen. "And you're not fit to sit at the same table as my wife." He touches me on the shoulder. I don't want the others to see how grateful I am, so I stare down at my food and jam some cereal into my mouth.

"I've gotta get ready for the testing. See you at lunch. Love you." He squeezes my shoulder and I whisper back, "Love you," because I can't say it any louder. I'm too choked up. Now I remember why I fell in love with Lam. When it's us against the world, he always makes sure we win.

***

I hate crafts. I
really
hate crafts. I try to learn how to knit, and Leonardo encourages me by saying that I should learn so I can knit a baby blanket or booties for the baby, but I can't do it. I've got ten fingers, and they're all pinkies as far as using them for any kind of craft goes. I'm useless teaching knitting or helping the kids with it, and they know it. Then the sailboats need glue, and the glue stinks so bad it makes my head hurt. I know it can't be good for the baby. Most of the morning I sit on the steps outside the crafts hut rubbing my head. And this is the easy stuff.

Mid-morning I see Banner walk up from the lake with a group of girls following her and whispering to each other. Banner doesn't see me because she's got her head down and her hair hanging in her face.

"Hi, there, Banner!" I call out. "That was a blast last night, huh?" I say this partly because I want to make sure she enjoyed herself, and partly to see if she plans to accuse me of molesting her. I don't know how I think I'm going to figure that out, but maybe her expression, if she looks at me, will give me some information.

Banner does look up. First she glances at the girls behind her, then she smiles at me and waves. "That was really fun," she says. "I'm glad you'll be teaching dance this summer. Maybe it will be fun for a change."

"Yeah, right," I say, and wave her away. I see the girls snickering behind her and notice that Banner must have sat down on a freshly painted bench somewhere because the back of her beige shorts has a forest green butt-print on it. I think to call her back, rescue her, but I don't, because half my mind is caught up with what she said: "I'm glad you're teaching dance." Maybe it was only some whiny little girl who said it, but I have to admit, it feels nice to kind of be wanted—or at least appreciated.

After lunch I ditch the crafts hut and just kind of hang out wherever—my cabin, the latrine, the woods—wherever I won't get caught. In the woods I hear kids singing the camp song that begins with the line, "I left my fat on a tired ol' log, a tired ol' log, a tired ol' log," and I laugh and think about the camp T-shirt with the eggplants with tape measures squeezing their waists. I figure this has to be the corniest place I've ever been. It really is the pits. I wonder if I can ditch working in the crafts hut and the dance hut all summer without getting caught, or, if not both, at least ditch the crafts. Dance has got to be better than knitting and gluing blocks of wood together. That is, as long as I don't have to wear a leotard.

Since I managed to skip out on doing crafts all afternoon, I'm in a decent mood when I get back to the cabin just before dinner. Lam is already there slouched down on the couch, and I go and snuggle up against him and study his face.

He looks tired. He's got bags under his eyes that look like they could hold a month's worth of laundry. He's pale, too, especially his lips. I remember my mother fainting once when I cut my leg really badly. She took one look at all the blood and her lips went white and she passed out.

"Are you okay?" I ask. "You look ill."

Lam shakes his head. "I had way too much to drink last night."

"Yeah, I know. The cabin and this couch still kind of smell like beer and vomit."

"I didn't smoke anything—or do anything—in case you're wondering." He shoves his bangs out of his face and looks at me. "I thought of you sitting here all by yourself because of the baby, and I didn't think it was fair, which I know is stupid because I did leave you here and run off and I did drink my ass off, but maybe that was the last time."

I climb onto Lam's lap and hook my hands around his neck. "That's what you say now 'cause you feel so sick. We'll see how you feel a week from now when you've forgotten the pain. Believe me, I know what it's like—remember?"

Lam nods. His hands are around my waist, or around where my waist used to be. "Yeah, but you just stopped everything cold turkey. I really admire that."

I shrug, but I'm pleased that he's proud of me. "I had to. For the baby. Once I realized the baby wasn't going anywhere—you know, like a miscarriage—I figured I'd better clean up my act. Besides, I got so sick it was hard to do anything for a while. That helped."

Lam nods, but I can tell he isn't really listening anymore. He has this faraway look in his eyes, and I wonder if he's thinking about some girl he might have fooled around with last night. When he said he didn't do anything, did he just mean drugs or did he mean girls, too? I'm afraid to ask. "You okay?" is all I can say.

"Yeah—no—I mean, I was just thinking." Lam shifts himself, uncrossing his legs on the coffee table, and I move off of him in case I'm too heavy.

"You were fine," he says, but I don't climb back on. I kneel on the couch, facing him with my butt resting on my heels. I wait for him to tell me how he messed up with some girl on our wedding night.

"It's just, well ... I was thinking that maybe we ought to consider keeping the baby." He blinks at me with his watery blue eyes. "It's ours, isn't it?"

"Well, yeah! But a baby? Are you sure?" I feel excited all of a sudden, because Lam's never really said he wanted the baby. He never said he didn't, either. He's just left it all up to me. So, I'm excited ... but scared, too.

"A baby is forever," I say, trying to think it through with him. "They grow up and all, but it gets even harder the older they get—and more expensive. But then again, we grow up, too, and we won't always be like this." I lift my chin and take in the cabin. "We'll get real jobs and make lots more money." I roll off my knees and turn around so I'm sitting next to Lam. I prop my feet on the table and take his hand in mine. "Wow, Lam. Are you sure?"

"No." He laughs. "No, I'm not sure. I guess—I guess I just want to consider it—really consider it. I don't want to just automatically hand the baby over."

"No! No, me, either," I say. I take Lam's hand and place it on my belly and smile, and for a second I feel good—happy and safe and comforted—but then in a flash I feel anxious, and I don't know why, exactly. "What happened at that party?" I ask, figuring that the uneasy feeling has something to do with the party.

Lam shrugs, and I hold my breath, waiting for the bomb. If he tells me he had sex with someone else, there's no way I'm going to even consider keeping the baby.

"I don't know," he says. "All the guys were there, you know, except you, and we were just sitting around drinking, but I wasn't drunk yet, and I looked over at John Runyun and Bill Hoover, and that group, and they just looked so, I don't know, so together. I thought how they're all doing something with their lives. They've got plans, college and jobs and all that, and then I looked at us, and none of us had any plans, really. And look at you and me." He squeezes my hand and bounces it on his thigh. "We just kind of fell into this. We just kind of fall into everything. We don't know what we're doing—do we? Every year I work at this camp. I work for my parents. I want to get away, have my own life. I'm tired of this. Man, I'm so tired of it. Like you said, I could get paid real money if I worked somewhere else. I'm tired of being under my parents' constant watch. I'm eighteen. I'm grown-up. We need a plan, Elly. We don't have a plan, that's our problem. We need goals, a future—a future away from here."

"Yeah, goals," I say. "I like the sound of that, but I don't know what I want to do with my life. I've never had any vision of my future, the way my sister has. She's always known she wanted to be a businesswoman of some kind, and to get married and have kids. And her wedding? She'd been planning that thing since the day she was born." I draw my hand away from Lam and bite on my fingernail. "I don't know what I want. I want to be happy, I guess, but how do you go about being happy? You can't plan happiness, can you?"

"No, but you can go after a dream. Going after dreams seems to make people happy. We just have to figure out what our dreams are."

"But can we go after a dream and keep this baby? Can we do both?"

Lam puts his arm around my shoulder, and he smells like the lake. "I don't know. Maybe not. I was just kind of thinking of what it would be like to take our kids hunting, you know, give them their first rifle, help them nail their first buck. And I can teach them to swim. They can watch me swim and dive and stuff."

"Yeah," I say, and I nod, but inside I find myself thinking,
But I'm only sixteen.
A family? Me? Us? I'm not even sure I want to be married. I'm not sure I want my kids to learn how to hunt. How many moose heads do I really want staring down at me from some wall? Shouldn't they be learning more important things? And if so, what are the important things? Am I smart enough to know? Could I ever become a good parent? I'm not sure. I'm not sure of anything. I'm only sixteen.

I'M RELIEVED when we get really busy over the next week or so and Lam and I don't have any real time to talk more about our future. The future has always scared me. I can't see into the future the way other people do. Other people will say things like, "The party is going to be so great," or "I know you're going to learn a lot from that class," and I want to ask, "How do you know?" Do they really know? Am I the only one in the world who doesn't know? What if I die before I get to that class? Then how educational will it be? Am I the only person who thinks like this? I think I started drinking and getting into drugs just to have something to do to keep my mind off the future. Will I graduate from high school? Will the baby be all right? Will Lam and I stay married? I'm afraid to ask, and I'm afraid to step into the future to find out the answers. I want to throw my hands in front of my eyes and just peek at the future from between my fingers. The present has always seemed so much more than I can handle, and anything else has always been too much.

There are all these books and TV shows that talk about being in the present, and how staying in the present will keep us happy, but I don't think so. I stay in the present because I'm afraid. I hate my past, or at least I hate myself in my past, because I've always been kind of a pain in the butt, and thinking about myself makes me unhappy, and I'm afraid of the future, so yeah, I stay present, but it's out of fear, and that fear never goes away. I don't know what's coming along in my life, but if my past is any clue, it won't be pretty—that's about as much of the future as I can predict. So what fun is that?

***

Leo hauls my ass over to the crafts hut every day, and he watches me to make sure I don't ditch it like I did the first day. "I need you here to help."

"But I don't know what the hell I'm doin'," I say. "I'm worse at crafts than the kids, and the glue stinks."

"Look," Leo says. "They don't need you to know how to do stuff. They just need your attention. You think you can do that? Think you can pay a little attention to someone besides yourself?" His scrubbed little face turns pink with anger.