Homeland and Other Stories (13 page)

“Maybe it would be good for Leon. A boy needs his dad.”

“Oh, Leon's a rock, like me,” says Annemarie. “It comes from
growing up alone. When I try to do any little thing for Leon he acts like I'm the creature from the swamp. I know he'd rather live with Buddy. He'll be out the door for good one of these days.”

“Well, you never know, it might work out with you and Buddy,” Kay Kay says brightly. “Maybe third time's a charm.”

“Oh, sure. Seems like guys want to roll through my life like the drive-in window. Probably me and Buddy'll end up going for divorce number three.” She pulls a paper napkin out of the holder and openly blows her nose.

“Why don't you take the afternoon off?” Kay Kay suggests. “Go home and take a nap. I'll call your boss for you, and tell him you've got afternoon sickness or something.”

Annemarie visibly shrugs off Kay Kay's concern. “Oh, I couldn't, he'd kill me. I'd better get on back.” Annemarie is assistant manager of a discount delivery service called “Yesterday!” and really holds the place together, though she denies it.

“Well, don't get down in the dumps,” says Kay Kay gently. “You've just got the baby blues.”

“If it's not one kind of blues it's another. I can't help it. Just the sound of the word ‘divorced' makes me feel like I'm dragging around a suitcase of dirty handkerchiefs.”

Kay Kay nods.

“The thing that gets me about Magda is, man or no man, it's all the same to her,” Annemarie explains, feeling the bitterness of this truth between her teeth like a sour apple. “When it comes to men, she doesn't even carry any luggage.”

The woman in the turquoise bracelets stops watching Annemarie and gets up to go to the restroom. The husband, whose back is turned, waits for the bill.

 

The telephone wakes Annemarie. It's not late, only a little past seven, the sun is still up, and she's confused. She must have
fallen asleep without meaning to. She is cut through with terror while she struggles to place where Leon is and remember whether he's been fed. Since his birth, falling asleep in the daytime has served up to Annemarie this momentary shock of guilt.

When she hears the voice on the phone and understands who it is, she stares at the receiver, thinking somehow that it's not her phone. She hasn't heard her mother's voice for such a long time.

“All I'm asking is for you to go with me to the clinic,” Magda is saying. “You don't have to look at the needle. You don't have to hold my hand.” She waits, but Annemarie is speechless. “You don't even have to talk to me. Just peck on the receiver: once if you'll go, twice if you won't.” Magda is trying to sound light-hearted, but Annemarie realizes with a strange satisfaction that she must be very afraid. She's going to have amniocentesis.

“Are you all right?” Magda asks. “You sound woozy.”

“Why wouldn't I be all right,” Annemarie snaps. She runs a hand through her hair, which is spiked with perspiration, and regains herself. “Why on earth are you even having it done, the amniowhatsis, if you think it's going to be so awful?”

“My doctor won't be my doctor anymore unless I have it. It's kind of a requirement for women my age.”

A yellow tabby cat walks over Annemarie's leg and jumps off the bed. Annemarie is constantly taking in strays, joking to Kay Kay that if Leon leaves her at least she won't be alone, she'll have the cats. She has eleven or twelve at the moment.

“Well, it's probably for the best,” Annemarie tells Magda, in the brisk voice she uses to let Magda know she is a citizen of the world, unlike some people. “It will ease your mind, anyway, to know the baby's okay.”

“Oh, I'm not going to look at the results,” Magda explains. “I told Dr. Lavinna I'd have it, and have the results sent over to his office, but I don't want to know. That was our compromise.”

“Why don't you want to know the results?” asks Annemarie. “You could even know if it was a boy or a girl. You could pick out a name.”

“As if it's such hard work to pick out an extra name,” says Magda, “that I should go have needles poked into me to save myself the trouble?”

“I just don't see why you wouldn't want to know.”

“People spend their whole lives with labels stuck on them, Annemarie. I just think it would be nice for this one to have nine months of being a plain human being.”

“Mother knows best,” sighs Annemarie, and she has the feeling she's always had, that she's sinking in a bog of mud. “You two should just talk,” Kay Kay sometimes insists, and Annemarie can't get across that it's like quicksand. It's like reasoning with the sand trap at a golf course. There is no beginning and no end to the conversation she needs to have with Magda, and she'd rather just steer clear.

 

The following day, after work, Kay Kay comes over to help Annemarie get her evaporative cooler going for the summer. It's up on the roof of her mobile home. They have to climb up there with the vacuum cleaner and a long extension cord and clean out a winter's worth of dust and twigs and wayward insect parts. Then they will paint the bottom of the tank with tar, and install new pads, and check the water lines. Afterward, Kay Kay has promised she'll take Annemarie to the Dairy Queen for a milkshake. Kay Kay is looking after her friend in a carefully offhand way that Annemarie hasn't quite noticed.

It actually hasn't dawned on Annemarie that she's halfway through a pregnancy. She just doesn't think about what's going on in there, other than having some vague awareness that someone has moved in and is rearranging the furniture of her body.
She's been thinking mostly about what pants she can still fit into. It was this way the first time, too. At six months she marched with Buddy down the aisle in an empire gown and seed-pearl tiara and no one suspected a thing, including, in her heart-of-hearts, Annemarie. Seven weeks later Leon sprang out of her body with his mouth open, already yelling, and neither one of them has ever quite gotten over the shock.

It's not that she doesn't want this baby, she tells Kay Kay; she didn't at first, but now she's decided. Leon has reached the age where he dodges her kisses like wild pitches over home plate, and she could use someone around to cuddle. “But there are so many things I have to get done, before I can have it,” she says.

“Like what kind of things?” Kay Kay has a bandana tied around her head and is slapping the tar around energetically. She's used to dirty work. She says after you've driven a few hundred miles with your head out the window of a locomotive you don't just take a washcloth to your face, you have to wash your
teeth
.

“Oh, I don't know.” Annemarie sits back on her heels. The metal roof is too hot to touch, but the view from up there is interesting, almost like it's not where she lives. The mobile homes are arranged like shoeboxes along the main drive, with cars and motorbikes parked beside them, just so many toys in a sandbox. The shadows of things trail away everywhere in the same direction like long oil leaks across the gravel. The trailer court is called “Island Breezes,” and like the names of most trailer courts, it's a joke. No swaying palm trees. In fact, there's no official vegetation at all except for cactus plants in straight, symmetrical rows along the drive, like some bizarre desert organized by a child.

“Well, deciding what to do about Buddy, for instance,” Annemarie says at last, after Kay Kay has clearly forgotten the question. “I need to figure that out first. And also what I'd do
with a baby while I'm at work. I couldn't leave it with Magda, they'd all be down at the Air Force Base getting arrested to stop the cruise missiles.”

Kay Kay doesn't say anything. She wraps the tarred, spiky paintbrush in a plastic bag and begins to pry last year's cooler pads out of the frames. Annemarie is being an absentminded helper, staring into space, sometimes handing Kay Kay a screwdriver when she's asked for the pliers.

With a horrible screeching of claws on metal, one of Annemarie's cats, Lone Ranger, has managed to get himself up to the roof in pursuit of a lizard. He's surprised to see the women up there; he freezes and then slinks away along the gutter. Lone Ranger is a problem cat. Annemarie buys him special food, anything to entice him, but he won't come inside and be pampered. He cowers and shrinks from love like a blast from the hose.

“How long you think you'll take off work?” Kay Kay asks.

“Take off?”

“When the baby comes.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Annemarie says, uneasily. She could endanger her job there if she doesn't give them some kind of advance notice. She's well aware, even when Kay Kay refrains from pointing it out, that she's responsible in a hit-or-miss way. Once, toward the end of their first marriage, Buddy totaled his car and she paid to have it repaired so he wouldn't leave her. The next weekend he drove to Reno with a woman who sold newspapers from a traffic island.

Annemarie begins to unwrap the new cooler pads, which look like huge, flat sponges and smell like fresh sawdust. According to the label they're made of aspen, which Annemarie thought was a place where you go skiing and try to get a glimpse of Jack Nicholson. “You'd think they could make these things out of plastic,” she says. “They'd last longer, and it wouldn't smell like a damn camping trip every time you turn on your cooler.”

“They have to absorb water, though,” explains Kay Kay. “That's the whole point. When the fan blows through the wet pads it cools down the air.”

Annemarie is in the mood where she can't get particularly interested in the way things work. She holds two of the pads against herself like a hula skirt. “I could see these as a costume, couldn't you? For Connie?”

“That's an idea,” Kay Kay says, examining them thoughtfully. “Connie's allergic to grasses, but not wood fibers.”

Annemarie's bones ache to be known and loved this well. What she wouldn't give for someone to stand on a roof, halfway across the city, and say to some other person, “Annemarie's allergic to grasses, but not wood fibers.”

“I'll mention it,” Kay Kay says. “The band might go for it.” Connie Skylab and the Falling Debris are into outlandish looks. Connie performs one number, “My Mother's Teeth,” dressed in a black plastic garbage bag and a necklace of sheep's molars. A line Annemarie remembers is: “My mother's teeth grow in my head, I'll eat my children's dreams when she is dead.”

Connie's mother is, in actual fact, dead. But neither she nor Kay Kay plans to produce any children. Annemarie thinks maybe that's how they can be so happy and bold. Their relationship is a sleek little boat of their own construction, untethered in either direction by the knotted ropes of motherhood, free to sail the open seas. Some people can manage it. Annemarie once met a happily married couple who made jewelry and traveled the nation in a dented microbus, selling their wares on street corners. They had no permanent address whatsoever, no traditions, no family. They told Annemarie they never celebrated holidays.

And then on the other hand there are the Navarretes next door with their little nest of lawn chairs. They're happy too. Annemarie feels permanently disqualified from either camp, the
old-fashioned family or the new. It's as if she somehow got left behind, missed every boat across the river, and now must watch happiness being acted out on the beach of a distant shore.

 

Two days later, on Saturday, Annemarie pulls on sweat pants and a T-shirt, starts up her Pontiac—scattering cats in every direction—and drives a hundred feet to pick up Magda and take her to the clinic. There just wasn't any reasonable way out.

The sun is reflected so brightly off the road it's like driving on a mirage. The ground is as barren as some planet where it rains once per century. It has been an unusually dry spring, though it doesn't much matter here in Island Breezes, where the lawns are made of gravel. Some people, deeply missing the Midwest, have spray-painted their gravel green.

Magda's yard is naturally the exception. It's planted with many things, including clumps of aloe vera, which she claims heals burns, and most recently, a little hand-painted sign with a blue dove that explains to all and sundry passersby that you can't hug your kids with nuclear arms. When Annemarie drives up, Magda's standing out on the wooden steps in one of her loose India-print cotton dresses, and looks cool. Annemarie is envious. Magda's ordinary wardrobe will carry her right through the ninth month.

Magda's hair brushes her shoulders like a lace curtain as she gets into the car, and she seems flushed and excited, though perhaps it's nerves. She fishes around in her enormous woven bag and pulls out a bottle of green shampoo. “I thought you might like to try this. It has an extract of nettles. I know to you that probably sounds awful, but it's really good; it can repair damaged hair shafts.”

Annemarie beeps impatiently at some kids playing kickball
in the drive near the front entrance. “Magda, can we please not start right in
immediately
on my hair? Can we at least say, ‘How do you do' and ‘Fine thank you' before we start in on my hair?”

“Sorry.”

“Believe it or not, I actually
want
my hair to look like something dead beside the road. It's the style now.”

Magda looks around behind the seat for the seat belt and buckles it up. She refrains from saying anything about Annemarie's seat belt. They literally don't speak again until they get where they're going.

At the clinic they find themselves listening to a lecture on AIDS prevention. Apparently it's a mandatory part of the services here. Before Magda's amniocentesis they need to sit with the other patients and learn about nonoxynol-number-9 spermicide and the proper application of a condom.

“You want to leave a little room at the end, like this,” says the nurse, who's wearing jeans and red sneakers. She rolls the condom carefully onto a plastic banana. All the other people in the room look fourteen, and there are some giggles. Their mothers probably go around saying that they and their daughters are “close,” and have no idea they're here today getting birth control and what not.