Milk (14 page)

“She wasn't well, she, uh …” I'd heard this before: she was nervous, she wasn't happy, hospitals, psychiatrists, etc., etc. My father repeated the business about the word used on the death certificate; I was to pay it no mind, he said, but he thought I should know. It was my right to know
.

After I change my father's eye dressing, we drink tea by the fire, it actually being a cold enough night to have one.

“Did he drink beer out of the bottle?” my father asks in a hushed, guarded voice. I know at once he's talking about Jackson, but I say, nonetheless,
“What?”

“I know it's beside the point,” he says sheepishly.

“I'm relieved to hear that you at least know it's beside the point, Dad.”

“I was just wondering,” he says. “Did he?”

There's a note of envy in his tone as we sit here in the flickering glow sipping our tea.

“The answer to that question,” I say, “will go with me to the grave.”

He laughs and for a moment I enjoy his company. We could be old ladies together, at a tea party, and in fact my father is a wicked gossip, in style if not content, teasing you with what he knows, pretending he doesn't know a thing. A skill he inherited from his mother, who died before I was born. His most vivid memory of her, he has said, is of her wearing a silk dressing gown, laughing gaily into the phone, “Do you have any
dirt?”

This question, over the years, has become a kind of joke with us. “So, Dad,” I say now, “do you have any dirt?”

He tells me what he knows, all of it pretty tame stuff, some of it dated or rehashed: the business about Mrs. Beecham disliking her daughter-in-law at first because (my father stage-whispers as though shocked, for effect)
she's Mormon
, I've heard for a couple of years running now. That and how Mrs. Beecham's son chose to convert, which just about
killed
Mrs. Beecham, until she got used to the idea; and do you suppose they—meaning Mrs. Beecham's son and his wife—do they still wear long underwear? Mormons, that is. Or is that only before marriage? “But she's a lovely girl,” my father always concludes. “Did I tell you I met her?”

There are a few divorces to report (he winces at this, remembering no doubt that soon
I'll
be divorced); some houses in the neighborhood bought and sold, Asians moving in; a handful of marriages and babies born.

Babies born.

Dad finally asks what he couldn't bring himself to the other day. “When is—when is your—the—baby due?”

His brown eyes lighten to amber and I think the worst of it is over, he accepts my situation.

“Late September,” I answer.

“September. That's a good month, awfully hot though.”

We sit companionably for a while before he goes on with the dirt: a minister asked to leave for his political views; a financial scandal involving a bank, rather difficult and boring to follow; Mr. Marsden's teenage son suspected of—here Dad cups a hand to his mouth as though whispering into somebody's ear—
selling drugs
.

Such is my father's gossip. Innocent in content, relatively lacking in malice, but material
he
thinks of as censorious; and so, it animates him.

I could listen all night.

T
HIRTEEN

I don't see him at first, sitting with the old people in the day room of the Alta Vista. My bag holding my Powerbook slung over my shoulder, I start up the stairs toward my room.

“Theo?”

I almost keep going. “What are you doing here, Jackson?”

“I'm here for a conference.”

“A conference for
what?
”

“Theo, can we go somewhere?”

“I'm going to my room.”

“Can't we just talk?”

He's at the bottom of the stairs. In jeans, what he always wears, and a blue work shirt, which, for a change, is ironed. A half dozen pairs of rheumy eyes peer at us, to see what I'll say or do next.

“Oh all right. Come on.” I lead him upstairs to my room, a vague feeling of guilt, sneaking a boy into my room. Not a boy, my husband. My estranged husband.

At my door we're standing very close while I work the key into the lock, so close I could kiss the mole on Jackson's cheek; I can smell the soap on his body.

“How long have you been in town?” I ask, shouldering open the door, which sticks.

“A day and a half.”

“And Dad told you where to find me, right?”

He nods, following me inside.

I drop my bag and scurry over to the chair. A place I never sit ordinarily. Jackson stands in the center of the room, glancing around.

“I wish Dad would stop interfering,” I say. “Oh well, here you are. There's the bed. If you want to sit.”

He hesitates, then does, as I wait for him to say something about this room, the Alta Vista. He doesn't, just keeps looking. His eyes flit from my belly—does he know? did Dad tell him? has he guessed?—to my face. Then I remember Gregg's leather jacket, hung over the back of my chair. I ended up with it after I saw him last, a couple of days ago when I decided I just had to see him. I drove over there at seven a.m., sliding into bed with him, making love all day until he had to work that night.

“Which conference?” I say to Jackson.

“What?”

“You said you were here for a conference.” I can't stop smelling Gregg's jacket, the rich leather scent, how it hung on me the other night, too big, comforting—just as you'd expect to feel, wearing your boyfriend's jacket.

“The Organization of American Historians, downtown, at the Bonaventure.”

His eyes go from my face to my chair. I know him well enough to know he won't say anything about the jacket, but he's noted it, he's trying to figure it out.

“How did you get to Pasadena?” I ask.

“I rented a car.”

“Oh.”

The faucet drips in the bathroom, accentuating the starts and stops of our conversation. I've asked at the front desk to have it fixed, to no avail. Nights I muffle it with a washcloth, to soak up the sound.

“All this time and you've only called me once,” Jackson says. “Why?”

“I know it was wrong and I can't explain it. I'm sorry.”

“So why do I get the feeling there's something you want to tell me?”

“You're right,” I say with several deep breaths. “I should've told you this on the phone the other week, but … I'm pregnant. I was pregnant when I left. Maybe I left you
because
I was pregnant.”

He stands up from the bed—bounces, really. He looks so happy I'm afraid he's going to embrace me. He smiles, frowns, then looks totally dismayed. “Wow. Shit. How far along are you?” he asks.

“Almost to the end of the first trimester.”

“Shit. I don't know what to say.” Now he's really staring at my belly. “I can see it now, see that your belly is bigger. You look different all over. You look so beautiful. I'm so happy, and so pissed you didn't tell me sooner, and pissed you left me. God damn it, you didn't even tell me where you were going! You wouldn't call, except that once. I slept by the phone waiting …” He stops, gazing at me. “This is amazing, amazing news.”

“Nothing is different between us, Jackson. My feelings about you haven't changed. I'm not coming back to you.” This sounds like such a prepared speech but I say it because he looks too hopeful, as if this—my pregnancy—is the very news he's been waiting for.

“When is it due?” he says.

“September 25th.”

“Wow. Would you mind if we went out?”

“Where?”

“Out for some air? Some lunch?” His eyes are on my belly again.

“What would you say if I moved here?” Jackson asks once we're walking up El Molino, under swaying palms. “If, say, I got a job out here.”

“You've got a job. In Colorado. You
love
Colorado.”

“If I got a different job. Out here. If one of the jobs I'm interviewing for over the next couple of days hired me.”

“I'd say you were crazy. Why would you leave Colorado?”

“To be near you. To be near the baby.”

I have to smile: Jackson is such a sap. “Did you just come up with this idea? Now that you know I'm pregnant?”

“I've been mulling it over ever since you left.”

“But why? You know we're not getting back together.”

“Well, then, I'll move out here for the baby.”

“My baby.”

“Mine too.”

“But mostly mine,” I say. “I'm carrying it. Listen—are you going to do anything weird? Like hire a lawyer and try to take this baby from me?”

“No. I'm just thinking of moving out here, that's all. If I can get a job.”

At Charleyville, several blocks from the Alta Vista, we join a line of business types, women with brick red lipstick and ruddy men who seem to have just this minute finished shaving. It's a cafeteria, but a hip one, and when we get to the cash register there's an awkward moment of Jackson reaching into his pocket for his wallet and me digging through my purse for mine. Dutch treat, our backs turned away from each other.

When we get to our table the first thing I notice is that on Jackson's tray is a beer. At least I think it's a beer. It's a brown bottle facing away from me so that I can't see the label. A beer, what else could it be? Everything in the room suddenly seems too bright, too keen-looking.

“You've hardly touched your sandwich,” Jackson says. “Don't you like it?”

“Not really.”

“You spent so much time ordering it.” He mimics. “‘Sourdough bread, toasted light, wait, not toasted. Mayonnaise—no, no mayonnaise.
No mayonnaise.
' Ah, my Theo. Were you always so picky?”

“I'm not your Theo.” That he doesn't know me like this, pregnant and picky, only widens the gulf between us: it becomes easier not to think of this baby as his. “As for your seeing the baby when the time comes, I don't know how I feel about that.”

“Oh, you don't,” he says, glaring at me. The glare turns sad, self-pitying: so misunderstood. His gloomy midwestern look, I used to call it. Dark blue eyes, pale skin, as though internally he's clouding up, raw and cold, about to storm. A storm he will weather stoically, alone.

We sit without speaking for a while, then he excuses himself to use the restroom.

Now the agony.

Do I look at his bottle to verify it's beer? I scan the restaurant for the bathrooms, to see if he's coming, then I tip the bottle toward me. Root beer. God damn it. Great. I'm glad for him and furious with myself for checking up on him—and annoyed with Jackson, incredibly, as if this were
his
fault.

Guiltily, I search the room for him again. I don't want him knowing I gave into this … this snooping. No different really than sticking my arm into wet trash and counting up the empties.

“So which schools are you interviewing with?” I ask when Jackson rejoins me at the table, pretending I'm not in any way invested in his answer.

“Orange Coast College, Saddleback College, Santa Ana College, Costa Mesa Junior College.”

Jackson's dusty old dissertation that sat in the corner of our living room the first four years of our marriage: now and then he'd take it out, only to pronounce it shit, and kick it back into the corner again. Then last year he suddenly finished it, in a month, on a dare from me.

“Those are all junior colleges,” I say.

“Yep.”

“You're not interviewing any other places? Any schools up North, say.”

“I don't want to live up North, I want to live here.”

“But Jackson, why? You know we're not going to get back together.”

“I'm not sure I want to be back together,” he says.

“You don't?”

“I'll settle for being friends, Theo. We don't even have to be friends. Just let me see the baby now and then. Think you can handle that?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

I shrug, watching him drink his root beer. “Did you really quit drinking?”

“Yes.”

I could get lost in those blue eyes of his, and I have; his eyes that have lied to me so many times, not maliciously—he told me what he wished were true, that lies might become the truth. Cheap alchemy. I wonder what it's like to not trust your own eyes when you look in a mirror, what it's like to hate yourself. What did my mother feel, looking in a mirror? I can't say I feel any differently about myself.

I get up to leave and kiss him on the cheek. “Jackson, I'm sorry I tried to dissuade you from moving out here. It's none of my business now anyway, what you do.”

Why did I ever think my moving out here would solve anything?

F
OURTEEN

The next day I'm at the Burbank airport early, to complete arrangements for buying the Chevy Cavalier I've been driving around, broken air conditioning and all. I need a car and I just can't deal with shopping right now, and on the dashboard is a sticker: “Would you like to buy this car? Call 681-4358.”

After I buy the car, it's one foot in front of the other, down the hallway to my gate. Lay suitcase, purse and Powerbook down on the conveyer belt of the x-ray machine, out the gate door to the runway, hot noisy wind. View of the mountains, dry and brown, but clear. Middle of February and it still hasn't rained. Drought. Should be raining cats and dogs, as it did when we were children and couldn't walk to school. Mothers in plastic coats and hats driving carpools, shooing children in and out of doors telling them to hurry, hurry—not my mother; everyone else's. Tropical storms that lasted for days. This February it's desert sunny, eerily pleasant and dry, as it might be, one can't help thinking, after a quick blast of radiation.

Clunk, clunk, clunk, up the metal steps to the plane, then down the aisle to my seat. Sink into seat, close eyes, wait until plane is well in flight before starting up my Powerbook. Open folder for next assignment: Boomer Toys.