Milk (19 page)

“He's got the midwife and the fix-it man a little confused,” Maggie explains.

Dylan touches the wrench to my belly. “First I wrench, then I plier. Then I hammer.”

“‘Atta boy, Dylan,” Maggie says. “You're going to be a great midwife.”

“Mommy, where my orange screwdriver?”

Dylan is almost three, Willy is one, and both are mostly unaffected by the absence of their father, Maggie's now officially ex-husband, Ed. Other than Saturday afternoons when he comes for the boys, they don't see him much. Dylan simply continues to pretend that Daddy is coming home soon—to this home, the new house, no matter what Maggie tells him. After work, he says. Daddy come home. After trip, Daddy come home, to new house.

Willy doesn't say anything about Ed, except “da.”

When I say Dylan's unaffected, I mean he's not affected in the ways you'd expect. He doesn't cry any more than usual, Maggie says; he isn't sleeping poorly or showing signs of aggression. Just a peculiar doggedness: he will search for a toy and search for it until he finds it. Start at one end of the house and work his way across.

A more definite sign is that he refused to think of me as anything but a boy or a man when we first moved in. “But you know Theo's a girl, Dylan, a woman. You've never said she was a boy before.”

“Where he living?” he asked, according to Maggie.

“In the little house out back, the pool house. Theo is a girl, Dylan. A woman. You know that. She's going to have a baby, in fact. Won't that be fun?”

“Why he not living here?”

“She
is
living here, but in the pool house.”

“Why he not living in this house?”

And so on. Maybe in his mind there had to be a father somewhere, a male figure where there wasn't one in our co-joined households, so he happened upon me. Maggie said he'd never mixed up gender before and regularly assigned girl or boy status to people, places, and things, but he was insistent about this.

“You stand up go pee,” he told me.

“No, Dylan. I sit down.”

“No! No! You stand up!” On the verge of tears. I looked to Maggie for assistance, who only said, “Never mind, Dylan honey. We can talk about it later.”

Even when Dylan happened to walk in on me sitting on the toilet one day, he wasn't convinced. “Sometime you sit down. You need go poop?”

“I'll explain later, Dylan. Would you mind if I went potty alone? Please?”

After some consideration, he backed out of the room. “You need private,” he said. “That all right.” He closed the door, without slamming it, but called out, as I knew he would, “You don't flush!”

“No, Dylan. I won't flush.”

I learned about this the day we moved in, when I went down the hall to use the bathroom.

“Um, Theo?” Maggie said. “Would you mind not flushing?”

“To save water, right? No problem.”

“It's partly that,” she said.

Dylan followed me down the hall, as if he had a bead on me. Green-yellow eyes like a cat's. He has freckles and sandy hair that stands up on end. While I was in the bathroom, he stood sentry right outside the door. “Mommy, he won't flush?”

“I told her not to, sweetie. It's okay. You can relax, I think.”

I could hear him breathing out there. “You done, man? Mommy, the man done?”

Automatically, without thinking, I flushed. Dylan broke into an instant wail. “He flushed! He flushed!”

“He's got this thing, you see. The flushing sound upsets him,” Maggie tried to explain. “Oh, never mind, Theo. In about two-and-a-half years, you'll understand.”

Dylan was sobbing, screaming on the floor. The ultimate betrayal.

It took a solid week for me to repair relations, and then I was his favorite person on the face of the earth. He followed me everywhere. The second he woke up at the crack of dawn, he tumbled out of his house and into mine, Willy trailing after him in a soggy diaper. “It morning time! Time to get up! Time to play! Get up get up get up man.”

Three days a week I drive my father to and from his Spanish Conversation class at Pasadena Community College. A favor he detests. His other eye has developed a cataract, which often happens in these cases. We found this out when he had a wreck shortly after he began driving again, following the operation on his first cataract. The police officer ordered him to get a physical and that's when the second cataract was diagnosed, since Dad himself wouldn't pay attention to the signs.

Every time I pick him up he sits in my car with his notebook on his knees and tells me next time he'll take the bus, thank you. “It'll pick me up a block away from the house, no reason not to.”

“Dad, no. What if you trip on the curb or don't see a car coming? I really don't mind, Dad. While you're at class, I get my errands done.” I get his errands done as well, his grocery shopping too.

When I drop Dad off out in front of PCC and wait till he's safely inside the building, I'm like a mother dropping off her child. He wobbles away carrying his notebook with his homework. I try to picture him inside. What he says in class. Does he talk? I imagine he might, in stumbling Spanish, try to join in—which breaks my heart. Is it pregnancy that makes me so touched by him? He who has caused me so much difficulty?

The nights Gregg isn't working, I drive up, park around back in the carport, and walk inside. The door's never locked, although this is a crummy neighborhood. Usually Gregg is watching TV or doodling at the piano, and stands up suddenly when he sees me, stubbing out his cigarette, as if surprised. As if I just happen to be in the neighborhood, dropping by on a whim.

Since he mostly works nights, we can't leave too much to chance. We talk on the phone:

“So what are you up to?” I say.

“Tonight we've got a bar mitzvah, tomorrow a studio session—both should be over around eleven.”

“Meaning you'll be home around midnight?”

“About. Earlier if I'm lucky. The night after, Tuesday, I don't have to work.”

“Free all night?”

“Unless something comes up.”

Often something does. Whenever I visit, Gregg turns off the ringer on the phone, letting the answering machine take the calls, which come all night. The next morning he plays back the messages. “Gregg—Dan. High school reunion, Monday the 26th, eight o'clock, set up at seven—the Bonaventure, downtown. Cocktail party, Tuesday the 27th, set up at five—1620 Jacon Way in Pacific Palisades. Formal.” “Gregg—Andy. Session at After-hours Recording, Friday the 29th, nine. Same place next night, Afterhours, same time, nine.”

Occasionally I go with him to weddings or cocktail parties. Gregg plays in five or six different bands and combos, jazz, classical, rock; sometimes he plays alone and sings, standards like “Witchcraft,” “Lonely Avenue,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” He knows more songs than anyone, the result of working everywhere over the years—Caribbean cruise ships, Alaskan bars, Southwestern desert towns. As a teenager during summer vacations he worked a string of pizza parlors across the Midwest, banging out polka tunes such as “Beer Barrel Polka” and “I Don't Want Her, You Can Have Her, She's Too Fat for Me.”

Now he drives a dented blue station wagon that only gets eight miles to the gallon, but he needs the space for his electric piano and can't afford to trade up just yet to something nicer, like a van, or even a better station wagon.

But things are improving for him economically. He's sold a few songs lately and has even been in a couple of music videos as part of a session band, a kind of musician “extra.” In one he showed me he wore a black shirt, dark glasses, his hair slicked back—he looked terrific. He's gussied up his rental house, too, on my say-so, and kicked out his traveling musician roommates who were never around much anyway. No more dirty dishes in the sink or cans of cat food with the forks still in them; no longer does the bathroom resemble a gas station's. Together we've torn up the old linoleum throughout the house and put down carpeting. He's even bought a decent couch.

“We could get married,” I said a couple of weeks ago, experimentally. “Then we'd have two incomes. But not until the baby's older,” I add under my breath. We rarely talk about the baby.

Gregg shifted in the bed beside me. “Theo, you're already married.”

“What, is bigamy a problem for you?”

Silence.

“Not funny,” I said, “huh.”

While at Gregg's, I try not to think of it, my marriage or my pregnancy, now in its twenty-seventh week; the ligaments in my belly stretch, my skin itches.

“Do you think we should get married?” Gregg asked the other night after we made love. It was dark and quiet in his room, except for the hum and glow of his old clock radio, John Lennon's head taped to its front.

“I guess we could,” I said. “Later on maybe.” After my divorce, I meant. After the baby's born.

“Okay,” he said, holding me loosely in his arms. “It's settled then.”

Maybe not the most romantic proposal but, as Gregg said, it was settled. Decided. Actually I've talked to a lawyer on the phone, Maggie's lawyer as a matter of fact, who says getting a divorce should be a snap in my case, provided I establish residency in California. The house in Stonewall Creek is not in my name, she pointed out, so Jackson and I have no community property to divide, other than our Blazer. Furthermore, she added, (I swear I could
hear
her smiling, crisply), I gather there are no children? “No,” I said, rubbing my belly frantically as if I could make it speak for me and tell the truth.

Up until the other night, though, my future with Gregg was a subject he and I generally avoided—that and the word ‘love.' We didn't define our relationship or say what we meant to each other; we didn't even declare the topic off-limits. Which probably has something to do with why we still don't discuss my pregnancy.

The thing is, I can picture marrying Gregg, our life together. We'd buy a house, an old bungalow in Pasadena or something closer to the coast, though we'd have to borrow from my father—everything is so expensive, five times what it is in Colorado. Practical matters aside, Gregg would have a room for composing music; me, an office. A king-sized bed in our bedroom with a dozen down pillows, 200-count cotton sheets with violets trailing across. Casement windows that open out into a courtyard with cactus, gardenia, white lilies, a magnolia tree with leathery petals, enormous seed pods like drumsticks …

Only one little problem. The baby. I try to picture a nursery—can't. Try to picture living in the house with Jackson instead—can't. Try to picture living there alone with the baby—can't. I close my eyes and try harder. Picture living in a house with Gregg and the baby. Next to the music room and my office is the baby's nursery, a white gauzy room with a wicker rocker, filmy curtains, a crib. Myself in a pinstriped bathrobe, lace lapels—no. Wrong detail. A robe of one hundred percent cotton velour. Yes. And the baby, ah, the baby; sweet round head dozing at my breast, sweet little sleepy fingers.…

A feeling of déjà vu: I once wrote copy for such a scene, for a catalog. Pima cotton baby blanket, the silkiest cotton there is; crib sheets of English flannel; a lamb's wool pad; a mobile with a music box made in Germany. All stuff I can't afford anyway.

“Gregg,” I ask him one night in bed, “remember that woman you almost married?” We haven't seen each other in days, he's been working so much. “Your fiancée. What was her name again?”

“Marcy.”

“What was she like?” I ask.

“Well, uhm.” Character assessments, talking in general, is not Gregg's strong suit. “She was nice, I guess.”

Nice, my father's favorite word, although on Gregg's lips it doesn't convey a whole value system as much as it does vagueness. That is one aspect of Jackson's character I miss—how the man could talk. We'd stay up all night talking about people we knew or had known, verbally dismantling their psyches like other people take apart cars.

“What do you mean, Gregg—nice?”

“Well, she was … smart.”

Now he sounds wistful, which I like even less.

“What did she do?”

“She's an accountant.”

“You're kidding.” I actually snort.

“What's wrong with that?”

“I just can't picture you with an accountant.” A part of me feels insulted—she should've been an artist or something sexier, a dancer or a cabaret singer. Red hair. Juicy lips. Marcy I imagined to be wearing a taupey 50-50 suit, no hips or bust, sensible shoes. Figuring out their monthly expenses on a solar calculator while trailing after Gregg, straightening up, setting to rights pillows she'd needle-pointed herself—hard little thrifty pillows with sayings like “A penny saved is a penny earned” and “Only fools part with their money.”

I can't decide whether Marcy was quiet and dull but sweet, or no-nonsense and as organized as drill sergeant. “But what was she
like
?” I pester Gregg.

He sighs. “I don't know. She was … pretty.”

I imagine a cute turned-up nose; sharp, white, rodent teeth.

Gregg can see I'm still not satisfied. “What does it matter, Theo? I haven't heard from her in two years! What do you have to be jealous about, it's not like she's in the picture anymore—like your ex. If it's anyone with something to worry about, it's me.”

Jackson: he's always with us, annoyingly, even if his actual name doesn't come up. “I've spoken to a lawyer,” I say. “A divorce lawyer. She's sending me some forms to fill out.”

“So how long until you get the divorce?”

“She didn't really say. I'm just curious,” I say, turning the subject back to Gregg and his old girlfriend. “Whether you loved her, for instance.”

“Marcy? Look, will you quit asking me about her?” He flushes, as if I were angling for details about their sex life. Not that I wouldn't. At the beginning of my marriage with Jackson we talked about that stuff all the time, discussing old flames and what they did or did not do in bed. Maybe it even turned us on.