She Poured Out Her Heart (15 page)

Robbie came running back with his cars, and Bonnie did a good impersonation of yesterday's enthusiasm. She and Jane carried on a conversation punctuated by Robbie's instructions and demands. No, they had not yet told him about the b-a-b-y. They were waiting until it got a bit closer. Did they have names picked out yet? Still deciding. Grace was on the list, as were Sophie and Anna. Jane said that maybe she and Bonnie could go out and buy a few things for the new you-know. Pink things, girl things, so that she didn't have to wear all hand-me-downs, and Bonnie said sure, they could do that.

“You're being an awfully good sport,” Jane said, accusingly.

“I am. Sorry. I'll stop.”

“There's this whole commercial enterprise built up around pregnancy. You'll see. It's like the military industrial complex, but with babies.”

They went to Target and Babies R Us and then to a boutique store that felt, Bonnie said, like the inside of a decorated womb. Everything on
display was fuzzy and precious. They looked at baby dresses embroidered with ducks and with rosebuds, at petal collars and fairy wings, at tiny socks and bloomers and flower headbands. Robbie, confined to a stroller, had fallen asleep. “Just as well,” Bonnie said. “It's not his kind of store.” There were acres of pink, in tones of cameo, cherry blossom, flamingo; there were stripes and checks, frilled garments and sporty ones.

Jane bought two sleepers, one yellow, one with a pattern of pink sprigs, and a pink ruffled bubble dress. Bonnie insisted on buying accessories: lacy socks, a sun visor, and a pair of soft leather mary janes. “Thanks,” Jane said. “She's ready for a night on the town. That's really going to happen, isn't it? She'll be a teenager and she'll want to go out with horrid boys.”

She meant it to sound lighthearted and humorous, like something Bonnie would say, but it came out with too much force, as if she meant it, as if she planned on being one of those impossible mothers who made daughters' lives miserable. Maybe she was already a bad, an unnatural mother, she'd just managed to hide it so far. Then Robbie woke up and started fussing, and there was no time to decide what she'd meant or had not meant, except that of course you worried all the time that you were doing everything wrong.

Bonnie was staying for five days, and Jane had to admit, it was a help to have her there. Bonnie was always forgiving about household messes, or more likely, oblivious to such things, and so Jane didn't worry about the litter of toys or the wet towels hung up in the bathroom drying into deformed, cardboard wrinkles. Bonnie played with Robbie, with varying degrees of patience, true, but anything that soaked up some portion of his energy was a benefit. She ate what was put before her, she took her turn at washing dishes, she was as grounded and matter-of-fact as a box of dirt. Jane felt herself relaxing by inches. Eric might have gone about it wrong, asking Bonnie to come, but it hadn't been the wrong idea. Maybe she had been spending too much time alone, that is, without an
adult presence. Maybe her white room episodes were just some inexplicable, boo-hoo, hormonal weirdness. Anyway, it was now her fifth month. She was ready for things to get easier.

In the afternoons Robbie napped, while Jane and Bonnie sprawled in front of the television, watching ancient black and white movies, or soap operas with the volume turned down so they could make up the dialogue. (“It's no use, Axel. Ever since the accident, I only want to have sex with vampires.”) Bonnie retreated to the front porch to make phone calls to the man she said she was through with. Jane watched her bending over the phone, intent on her conversation, clutching at handfuls of her hair as she talked.

“Who is he anyway?” Jane asked, when Bonnie came back in, looking morose. “You never exactly said.”

“I met him through work.”

“A cop?”

“Please. I am so through with cops. I can't even watch
Law and Order
anymore.”

“So who? He's in mental health? No? He's not a client, is he? Bonnie!”

“Not technically,” Bonnie protested. “That would be unethical. He's more like, a friend of a client. We were both trying to get Hector into treatment. Now don't be judgmental. We didn't have much in common, but it was fun for a while. Don't. I know you think I'm an idiot.”

“I just wish you could meet somebody you might want to keep around.”

“I always do want to keep them around,” Bonnie protested. “At least at first. Well, not this one. He was more of a fling-ette. But listen, I'm so done. From now on I'm all chastity and good works. The Sisters of the Gutter Rose.”

“You shouldn't demean yourself, even as a joke,” Jane said. She was tired, she realized, of Bonnie being Bonnie. Her dumb moves that she talked wise about, her delight in her own bad behavior. Just as she was tired of being herself: poor, exhausted, neurasthenic Jane, needing to be jollied along, needing allowances made for her, like some beloved
but limited household pet. For both of them, identities that had been formed and sealed back when they'd first encountered each other.

Or no. Formed, but not sealed, because weren't there other possibilities, other Janes, or other Bonnies? Other paths they might have taken? There must be. She didn't believe in fate, or doom. She believed, halfheartedly, in coincidence, and even more so in accident. She had just happened to meet Eric, it wasn't the hand of God or anything. And one thing had led to another and here she was. She'd had some vague and shapeless regrets when she'd married, that sense of avenues now closed off to her, but she'd thought everyone must feel such things, and besides, she'd been convinced she was a slightly second-rate person, gawky, comical, slow, who might, with luck, fit into some ordinary life.

But perhaps she had chosen wrongly. Perhaps she was not ordinary, nor meant to be. Her strangeness somehow exceptional, powerful. A beckoning mystery, a life that would have nothing to do with her family and their claim on her, nothing to do with love, even. Only its own imperative, as when you moved a rock in a garden and beneath it found a growing thing, pale, curled, greedy for sunlight.

It confused her to be thinking this way. Did she have some prepartum depression craziness? Should she go back to Dr. Cohen and ask to be chemically sedated? Should she start reading St. Teresa of Avila?

Jane said, “Really, I know you're trying to be funny, but it comes across as defensive.”

“It is defensive.” Bonnie picked up the remote and cycled through the channels. “And disarming. People can't insult you if you beat them to it.”

“I wasn't insulting you.”

“But you worry about me. Thanks, Mom.”

Jane stayed silent. It seemed like the edge of some kind of argument, and she didn't want to blunder over it.

After a moment Bonnie said, “I'm good at my job because the crazies love me and I love them. I've found my niche. Feel free to disapprove.”

“It's not disapproval. But the way you live scares me.”

For whatever reason, this seemed to put Bonnie in a better mood. “You know the secret of our success? You and me? Neither one of us wants to be the other.” Just then Robbie woke up from his nap and started calling for her, and Jane didn't have to respond.

Eric was home for dinner that night. Jane fed Robbie early, and then the three adults sat on the back patio with drinks (iced tea for Jane, gin and tonics for Eric and Bonnie), while they grilled shrimp and corn and baked potatoes in foil and kept watch so Robbie would not upend the hot coals over himself. Bonnie was leaving the day after tomorrow and it was their last dinner together, since Eric had to cover for another resident tomorrow evening. Jane made a green salad and sliced a bowl of strawberries, and they set out plates on the picnic table under the thin early shade of a pecan tree. The air was mild and blue, the smells of smoke and cooking food were good smells. Her little boy was playing with a handful of grass he'd torn up, serious and charming. The baby inside her dreamed watery dreams. Here was ordinary life at its best, a pause in the round of worries and chores. Only a fool, or an unbalanced pregnant person, would consider turning her back on it.

Eric took the food off the grill and they filled their plates and everyone agreed it was a fine meal. Bonnie said it was nice they had a yard for the kid. Kids. Eric said yes, for sure they'd want that in their next place. The next place would be wherever they'd move for his fellowship in cardiology, a little more than a year from now.

“Would you go back to Evanston?” Bonnie asked. She was peeling shrimp and heaping up shells on her plate. “Or do you want to go farther out into the classier zip codes?”

“Evanston?” Jane said. “Why are you talking about Evanston?”

“Because of the Northwestern fellowship, duh.” Eric gave her a good-natured elbow check.

“What about it?”

“I think it'll work out. Though, you know, nothing's a sure thing.”

Bonnie said, “False modesty, Eric. So unbecoming. You know they'll take you.”

“When did you decide this?”

“Come on, honey, we talked about it. We decided. You thought it'd be good to go back to Chicago. Of course it wouldn't be until next May or June. You said you didn't want to spend another whole summer here if you didn't have to.”

“No, when did we talk about it?”

They thought she was joking, and then they did not. A pause or hitch in the air around the table, although Eric and Bonnie kept on buttering corn and peeling shrimp. Eric said, “Oh, I don't know. Three, maybe four weeks ago? I forget where we were.”

“I must have been tired,” Jane said. She shook her head, smiled. Humorous.

“We were probably in bed. You weren't talking in your sleep, were you?”

“No, you're right. Of course we talked about it. Another summer in Hotlanta. Killer.” They were going back to Chicago. She could not for the life of her remember Eric bringing it up. “Robbie, don't put grass in your mouth, sweetie.” Chicago was fine, she guessed.

It wasn't like she'd wanted to live somewhere else instead. But what condition had she been in, that she'd discussed and agreed to it without memory? What else was wrong with her?

The next morning she said to Bonnie, “I think I'm losing my mind.”

“Come on.”

“I mean it. I space out. I don't remember things. Like last night.”

“OK, that. It was a lapse. Is it a pregnancy thing? Part of your brain goes on maternity leave?”

“It didn't happen with Robbie. I felt tired and sick a lot, but I wasn't . . .” Jane tried to say exactly what she was. “In another world,” she offered.

“You space out,” Bonnie suggested.

“Way out.”

Bonnie rubbed at her eyes with the heel of one hand. “I've been having some eye problems. I guess it's from computers. Or age. Do you feel old yet? There's times I feel like, if I was a package of hamburger in somebody's fridge? I'd get thrown out. Well whatever you are, you don't seem deranged or anything. Maybe it's just the mind-body connection. Your body's on this amazing ride, I mean I can't even imagine what that's like, pregnant, and your mind's trying to follow along. Like, your body's a speedboat and your mind is on water skis.”

That made Jane yelp with laughter, and Robbie came running up to see what that alarming sound was, his mother laughing out loud, because when had he heard such a thing? Then Jane had to leave off laughing and speak soothingly to him.

When Bonnie left the following day, insisting once again on taking a cab, they hugged and promised each other to do better at keeping in touch, and they were both genuinely sorry to be parting but also relieved, since they'd had such long practice at mutual exasperation. Although neither of them wanted to be the other, there might be times at which a part of themselves might have wanted to try on some portion of the other, the same as when they'd been roommates and had borrowed each other's clothes.

Eric started a period of intensive shifts at the hospital, and it was easy for he and Jane not to talk much. Without Bonnie they felt a sense of diminishment, as if with a guest they had been more cheerful, animated, loving, in ways that were not really false but had required some effort. Why did people get married seeking a way out of loneliness? There was nothing lonelier than two married people in a room together, she knew that now.

And yet she would have said she had a good marriage, and she thought Eric would have said the same. Good not precisely the same as happy,
although there were times when they were happy. Both of them fighting the same fight, doing their best to shore up the enterprise.

What did couples do if they didn't have children? What else was worth the enormity of effort?

H
ere is how it began: In her sixth month, Jane was fixing Robbie's lunch, trying to make his tuna sandwich look the way he liked it, a tidy square in the center of an otherwise bare plate. No garnishes, nothing protruding from the edge of the bread. Any stray bit of lettuce or celery was an excuse for a food tantrum. Eventually he would be old enough and hungry enough that he could be told to stop fooling around and eat. But for now it was easiest to do things his way, and hope that he would not be entirely and permanently spoiled.