How Loveta Got Her Baby (15 page)

“Cecil, when you went into that little room, the sample room?”

“Oh Kiziah, please.”

“Was there anyone else there, Cecil, any other men getting their samples at the same time? Any chance of a mix-up?”

“God no, I was there alone. They had a latch on the door for God sake. A lock inside.”

“Were there any other jars? Sperm jars?”

“Empty ones lined up by the toilet. Empty ones on a ledge. Empty ones.”

“Cec, maybe, when you finished, I bet you put that little bottle with your sperm sample down somewhere.”

Cecil thought about what he'd done.

“That's true,” he said, “I had to put it up on the ledge, to do up my belt. So what?”

“Well maybe that's when the mix-up happened. You put yours down, you picked up someone else's, someone's full of dead sperms, duds, leftovers from before, cold as ice. No wonder they didn't move.”

Cecil was quiet. He thought about his wife, how much she wanted a baby.

“That's not impossible,” he said, “maybe that's not impossible. If they have no standards of cleanliness or scientific rigour, Kizie, if they have no fail-safe procedures, if they should be disbarred from the practice of medicine, that is possible.”

There you go. She could find the silver lining anywhere. That's why he'd fallen for her in the first place. Nothing got her down for long.

“There was a switch of sperm, Cecil,” she said.

He thought about the other two girls he'd had sex with before Kiziah. Neither of them ever got pregnant either. There were lots of times they could have too, times they got carried away and did not use condoms. They thought they were lucky then, not to have had a baby come along, mess up their lives.

“I mean they even switch real babies by accident sometimes. Let alone sperm. I read about it,” said Kiziah. “Missus So-and-So, down the steps of the hospital with her brand-new little baby, happy as a clam. Then three months later, the phone call comes. Bring that baby back, there's been a mix-up.”

Cecil said nothing. He knew the dead sperms under the microscope were his. The bottle he'd taken back to the doctor was warm at the bottom, the warmth surprised him, it came up through the palm of his hand and made him feel like an alien, like he didn't know much about anything at all. Particularly about himself.

“We'll go back, Cecil, we have to. Do it again. Make sure it's your jar this time, keep hold of it, don't ever put it down.”

“Okay,” he said.

But he knew he'd never go back to that place, never have another one of those tests, never masturbate in a closet, never hear that doctor and that nurse mock them both while he stood there, shamed.

“You know what they'll say to us, next time?”

“No, Cecil, what will they say?”

“They'll say ‘Take any kind of fruit you want, Mr. Buffett, grind it up in a Cuisinart, throw that mess of seeds into a pressure hose, a hundred million seeds fly out,' and then the nurse will say, ‘Oh and the tighter the landing space, the warmer the better,' and those two will look at each other and laugh and she'll throw her hair around. To hell with them.”

“All you need is one or two alive, I think, Cec. They can take those, pull them out and use them. There's test-tubes, they got their ways.”

Kiziah already felt better. Again she thought about the unlucky mothers who came down the stairs outside the hospital with the wrong baby. She thought about Cecil coming out of the sample room, smiling this time. She saw herself nine months later lying on her back in the delivery room, bright lights up above, and she squeezed Cecil's hand because of the pain coming through her in waves. Now there were different doctors, nice doctors with green masks hovering over her like they were the best friends she ever had. They didn't tell jokes, they cared for her. Sweat poured off her face and trickled down the side of her neck. She was born for this. So what, it hurts. “Push, push,” the nurse said, and then there was the baby coming out. “It's a boy! It's twins!” Who'd think of that? That didn't show on the ultrasound! How crazy is that? Then they held the two babies up by the feet, and gave them a smack on the bottom and they all started to cry, including Cecil. So much for the dead sperm, she whispered into his ear as he bent down to give her another kiss, what did those scientists know anyway?

She couldn't wait for it all to happen. That night she cozied up to Cecil who was lying there, quiet on his back. She moved herself up against him and wiggled back and forth against his hip.

“What am I?” she said.

“Beats me.”

“I'm an egg just out of the ovary. Grade A plus-plus.”

It was a dark night and she couldn't see his face so she lifted herself up to look.

“Let's wait the three nights,” he said, “give me a chance. That's what the doctor said.”

“Let's do it now too. For fun.”

“Kiziah.”

“Cecil?”

“Kizie, I'm tired out. I'm sampled out. There's a limit to what I can do.”

He turned away from her. There was a cold spot on her shoulders where the sheets pulled away.

All those spermatozoa, they couldn't have been born dead, they couldn't have been lifeless from the word go. Something happened, something sucked the living spirit out of them, something beat them down, flattened them out, grew the two heads, the two tails, caused the slow or sudden death that made them useless. Maybe he had his limits, Cecil, maybe he was tired and worn out and disappointed but there were no limits for her, for Kiziah Buffett. She'd have her baby no matter what. She was on a mission. She fell asleep with that in mind.

Two days later she almost made a mistake. She was in the Honda Civic, alone, and she nearly got killed on the highway. There she was, she had the accelerator put to the floor, all the weight of her hip and her leg on it, pushing hard. Nothing much happened. There was no acceleration. No roar like a tiger from the engine, her body wasn't drilled back into the upholstery. In fact, she was hung out to dry in the passing lane, with fog closing down in front, zero visibility, the truck beside her full-blast full of steel rods whipping up spray all over her windshield. So she had a quick choice to make: keep this up and get killed, or pull back. She put on the brakes and backed off just in time because a cement mixer came by the other way. She could have been a bug on the grill.

“Useless car, not really safe,” she said that night to Cecil.

And what did he say? “It's good on gas. You need to learn self-control.”

“I could have got killed, Cecil. It's got no guts, no get up and go. No safety reserve.”

“It's a great car, it's good on gas, it has re-sale value. You should never have tried to pass under those conditions. You have to learn.”

That was all he said, and it was obvious to her that he did not see, in his mind's eye, his wife, Kiziah, out there in that car, the car gasping in the passing lane, the cement mixer coming her way, disguised by fog, ready to kill her. He didn't have the imagination to see it and feel it, to vibrate with it the way she did.

So she said, and she knew she shouldn't, “Cecil, day after tomorrow's the day for the next sperm count. You got to go for that.”

He walked out of the room and didn't say a thing. They always talked things out before. She followed him.

“I can drive you there first thing,” she said.

“Kiziah, I love you but I am never going back to that place, ever. I am not going to do it.”

She could hardly breathe.

“Jesus, Cecil, I'd lie down naked in front of City Hall for a chance for a baby.”

“Well go ahead, just let me know if you do, I don't want to be there.”

He walked out the door. The Honda started up and drove away. It was true, she thought, you didn't need much acceleration here on Empire Avenue, there was not much of a hill, not much traffic. Puttering around in the Honda was okay most of the time.

She went upstairs and took her temperature. There was the little spike that showed ovulation. No surprise, she was like clockwork, day thirteen or fourteen of every cycle, pop out came the egg. She could have had a hundred babies by now, with the right sperm. Like the doctor said, her body was A plus-plus. She looked at herself in the mirror.

Go for it.

That evening, after a dinner of turkey with dressing and a pie she made herself, she said, “Cecil, I might stay out later than usual tonight.”

“The card group?”

“Mary Lou's.”

“Sure, honey, go ahead, I got this book to read. Oh, by the way, I made arrangements, I'm trading in the Honda.”

“You are?”

“I figured it out, the gas isn't that great after all.”

“No?”

“No. A Mustang, that's what we're going to have. By tomorrow”.

“More pep in one of those, right?”

“That's putting it lightly. It's like a rocket. Pass anything, anywhere. The gas is surprisingly good too. That's why I thought, I might as well.”

She went over to him and sat on the arm of his chair. She bent down and kissed the side of his neck.

“This A plus-plus body of mine, and thus this body of yours, too, Cecil, is, according to scientific measurements, ovulating right now. Time to test out those sperm of yours under ideal conditions. All we need is one little guy, you know, not a hundred million.”

He kissed her. He slipped his hand under her sweater. They went upstairs to the bedroom and took off all their clothes. They were in a hurry, so full of desire they were. He fell on top of her and entered her and she felt him come in spasms.

“I think we did it, Cecil.”

He was still breathing fast.

“I know we did, I know we did.”

She wrapped her legs up and around him, holding him inside.

“Stay in me,” she said. “Remember this date.”

An hour later, she kissed Cecil again and went out the door for Mary Lou's. But she didn't go there, she stopped the Civic just before the corner of Empire Avenue and Rennie's Mill Road and pulled out her cellphone.

“Mary Lou? Kiziah. I won't make it tonight after all. Cecil's sick, I'm staying home. Call Cindy, she'll pitch in. Okay? Sorry.”

Then she drove to Duckworth Street and found a parking spot. She walked down the short steps to George Street. It was ten o'clock by then and the bars were hopping. She walked into one of them, any one would do. She could move on if she had to. She stood at the bar and had one drink and a second one, ten minutes later. Screwdrivers. That's what she always had at Mary Lou's. She felt nervous, almost the same as she did in the passing lane with the fog and the cement truck coming her way. But this time she kept her foot down on the gas.

“One more of these here screwdrivers, please.”

The man three down from her? About the same build as Cecil, maybe five years younger, by himself. He looked at her. He raised his glass.

Was this bad for babies, all these drinks of alcohol, these screwdrivers? Don't think so. Julia's baby was perfect. Julia said she was loaded the night it happened to her. Couldn't remember a damn thing. What's she got now? A lifetime of love.

The man down the bar came over to her. He touched her shoulder carefully and said something. She couldn't make it out for some reason, the noise, the music, the chatter, harsh laughter all around them. Get it over, Kiziah.

She put her hand on the young stranger's arm, moved her lips up by his ear.

“Barb,” she shouted, “that's my name.”

That was her name for the baby, if it was a girl. Barbara.

Again he said something, again she couldn't hear him.

Undeterred, caution to the wind, she shouted again.

“You know out the Battery, past the old guns?”

He looked at her, he nodded. He must have heard her. He bent to her.

“I know that spot,” he said. “Why?”

She was getting used to the noise. His voice came through now.

“There's a nice patch of grass out there, if you're game,” she said.

So that's how Kiziah Buffett got her baby. Sure, she loved her husband. In fact she loved him so much she took off her rose- coloured glasses, took off her clothes from the waist down and laid back in the wet grass past the old guns. And she never told anybody, never told Cecil, never told Barbara, blotted it out of her mind, and who's going to condemn her for that?

No one, not me, that's for sure.

the
             
steamer
     

SHORTLY AFTER CLYDE'S
twin sister, that sweet girl, Meta Maud Grandy, left town for Halifax, Aaron Stoodley began to send her letters. He was in love with her but he didn't know it. He thought he just wanted to talk. As for her, she never gave Aaron Stoodley a thought even when the letters started to roll in. That was because she never got a single one. Each and every letter was steamed open, read and tucked away by the man she'd moved in with. His name was Harold Butts, and he made seventy dollars an hour as a deep-sea diver, and that was more dollars per hour than all the Grandys, put together, ever got. Maybe that turned Meta Maud's head a bit. He was a good-looking guy, Harold Butts, and when he pulled off his wetsuit he had hair all over his chest. Not like Aaron, who was skinny as a rabbit. Aaron did not write long letters but there was something in them anyway that bothered Harold Butts.

Dear Meta Maud
, Aaron wrote the first time.
Things are good
here for the most part. Every day I walk up and down Barter's Hill.
Clyde's doing okay at the bakery so far, I think.

Aaron.

The deep-sea diver steamed open that letter with the kettle on low. Meta Maud was asleep upstairs. What could he have thought? That's no love letter, he must have said to himself. Who's this Aaron Stoodley anyway? After Harold Butts read it through five times, he sealed up the envelope again using a glue jar and a flat wooden stick that came from a popsicle. Then he went down to the basement, turned on the light, and he put Aaron Stoodley's first letter away in the dark, deep down inside the oldest diving bag he had. She'd never look there in a million years, she wasn't the curious type.