Milk (22 page)

Nor are my feet immune. Last week my feet grew out of my shoes. I bought a pair of T-strap sandals, like Mary Jane shoes, but boats. Wide. My fingers swell up; I couldn't wear a wedding band if I wanted to. Maggie says to drink more water so wherever I go I'm accompanied by one of those jumbo plastic cups with the lid and straw attached. Drink more water. Her solution to everything.

She was the one who referred me to childbirth classes.

Last night at the second class, like the first, all I felt was big and old, compared to the other mothers. One appeared to be barely in her twenties and hardly showing, in a sleeveless sailor top I could swear was from Land's End, except they don't carry maternity. She looked as though she didn't
need
maternity, but her due date was a week ahead of mine. In the first class we'd gone all through that, introducing ourselves and telling our due dates. While I couldn't remember the other mothers' names, I'd memorized their due dates. August 21st was the one in the sailor top. And as August 21st clung to her husband's hand during the birth movie, I couldn't help comparing myself to her. Us to them. Apples and oranges. Her husband was clean-shaven, or maybe he hadn't started shaving; Gregg, at my side, hadn't shaved all week, I knew, the bristles grown so long they'd be feathery when later on in bed he would kiss me. August 21st's husband wore a polo shirt, naturally, a real one from Ralph Lauren, not one of the ripoffs. Gregg had on something leftover from college, surely. When I leaned over to take his hand, motivated primarily by August 21st holding
her
husband's hand—I wanted to know how it felt, this certainty—that you were going to be a mother and here by your side was the baby's father—when I took hold of Gregg's hand, I had to grant him an intoxicating bohemian sort of handsomeness, unlike August 21st's husband, probably a stockbroker (had he even graduated from college yet?).

As for last night's movie of a real birth, I couldn't watch. Only snippets.

Get a grip, I told myself. This was a baby's birth, a baby who now lived in the world somewhere, a child: from this I gathered hope, forcing my sleepy eyelids open in time for the baby sliding out, bloody and miraculous, cord pulsing and it was me birthing a baby, my mother birthing me.

I began to cry. I wasn't the only one. There was a roomful of us, no matter our age or how we came to be here, palpitating wombs and moist membranes, some of us with our breasts oozing in happy, leaky anticipation. We could drop our babies right there, we wanted them so much. “My,” the instructor said, “a lot of emotion in this room,” as we all burst into helpless, teary laughter. Even August 21st and her husband, both of whom had watched the movie dry-eyed and frightened; they glanced at me through damp eyes as Gregg held and rocked me.

T
WENTY
-O
NE

I'm still not ready to introduce Gregg to my family. This weekend would have been a great opportunity except that, as luck would have it, Gregg has to work.

So it's just Dad and me driving out to Palm Desert, to see Corb and Diane's new condo, bought on the spur. For the boys, they said, so the boys can experience a place less urban, but really I suspect the condo is for Corb and Diane. There is always that need in them for change on a small safe scale, by buying something new—a car, an appliance, a puppy, a computer. Maybe the things they buy don't make them any happier, but they don't make them unhappy, either. They aren't looking for happiness anyway; rather, they
are
happy, or believe themselves to be.

Their condo is blindingly white. Corb meets us in the parking lot, although Dad has dozed off in the car, and at first in the sun, the whiteness of the building, I can't see Corb's face. Then I do. He looks as though he's been in a fight. A black eye, stitches on his cheek.

“Corb, what happened?”

“I had a growth removed. Basal cell carcinoma—”

I hold my breath.

“It's not melanoma,” he says, “by any stretch. Doesn't metastasize, grows very slowly. It began as a cyst, looked like a pimple. Didn't hurt. I just went in to have it removed and—” He shrugs. “It's no big deal, Theo. Lots of people have this nowadays. Really.”

But one can never tell with Corb. I glance at Dad, who continues to sleep in air-conditioned comfort. The air conditioning I finally got fixed.

“How many stitches do you have?” I ask.

“Ten. Usually these things are smaller, but this one was on the big side.”

A dust devil stirs. There aren't yards here, just open space. I keep looking at Corb's face. It appears smashed, as though somebody hit him, hard.

Most of the weekend I spend with Corb's boys, taking them to a Western history museum and then to the tram in Palm Springs. We go on hikes up the hill behind the condo, me trudging laboriously, yards behind my coltish nephews with their long bony legs and pale arms with clunky black digital watches—how did they grow so fast? Who are they now? A little uncomfortable around me, pre-adolescence, I think. If they were small, they would have crawled onto my lap and pointed, asked me why I was so fat; is there a baby in there, Aunty Tea-O? What they used to call me. Now that they know where babies come from, they keep their eyes strictly on my feet, my double-wide feet.

Once or twice Dad walks with us, reminiscing about what it was like here when he was a boy. Just desert and a couple of filling stations, and a lot of date farming. He has a knack for catching lizards, it turns out, which entertains the boys. One lizard, a horned toad, he keeps for a while, tying a string around its leg and attaching it to a tiny gold safety pin on his shirt, blotched with dark red spots, from the toad's eyes shooting blood, from fear.

Our last night there, Corb and I sit out on the tiny deck alone, trying to identify constellations. He's better at it than I, former Boy Scout that he is. All I know is the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper; the rest, to me, is confusion, not crabs, bulls, warriors and the like.

“Do you remember us finding our mother?” I ask Corb abruptly.

“The morning she died?” He slumps back into his deck chair.
Do we have to talk about this again?
No doubt he was hoping for a discussion of double-coupon bonds, or the varying capacities of laptop batteries. What I really mean to bring up is the subject of our mother's hospital records, but now doesn't seem the time. Besides, I'm thinking of us finding our mother that morning.

“Yeah,” Corb says. “I remember. Vaguely.”

“What do you remember?”

“We went in there and she was dead or close to it. Flat on her back. Blue. I remember the ambulance coming.”

“Where were we then? When the ambulance came?”

“In our rooms. Me in my room, you in yours.”

A door opens an inch. It's me peeking out. Alow narrow bed on wheels clanks by in a hurry, knocking into straight-backed chairs, walls; navigating the turns of our hallway I call The Woods. My mother is on the bed. I close the door, the last time I ever see her.

A scene from before the ambulance comes, before her body is discovered: A brother and sister go to wake up their mother. The girl is carrying something, flowers from the yard. They fall from her hands when she sees her mother's face. She and the boy race to the bed screaming, rock the woman side to side, like fighting over a heavy water raft. She's wearing white, her sheets are white, her skin is blue.

In this phantasm of stars, Corb and I seek out each other's hands in the dark, as we did all those years ago; before we were sent to our rooms and told to wait; standing by our father as he called an ambulance, we gripped each other's hands in terror.

Inside Diane switches on a light and in its sudden axis I study Corb's black eye and the stitches on his cheek, like secretive webbing, a veil.

On the road back to Pasadena, Dad reads the map, a familiar sight from childhood, except now he must read the map very close up and with a magnifying glass.

“Dad?”

“Hmm.”

“Dad, I need to talk to you.” A talk that is long overdue. Outside it is parched, cholla rushing by. “Dad?”

Reluctantly, he lays the map on the dashboard. “What is it, Theo?”

“Daddy, we haven't talked about the baby much, but it's time we should.”

His eyes dodge mine, flit now and then longingly to the map on the dashboard. “Oh,” he says. A puzzled oh, a worried oh.

“It's a good thing, Dad. I want the baby, obviously. I'm happy.” How come whenever I say this, particularly to my family, it sounds less true than it is? “You know Jackson and I are getting divorced.”

“So you've told me.” He says this distastefully.

“Dad?”

“Yes?” He looks at me, startled.

“I'm seeing somebody else, as apparently you were told by Mrs. Fracht.”

He fidgets.

“His name is Gregg. You'll meet him soon.” They met sixteen years ago, but never mind. I take a deep breath. “Gregg and I are moving in together after the baby's born.”

“Oh,” he says. “No.”

Theo living with yet another boyfriend—where's the shock? The lecture? The attempt to reconcile me with Jackson? I don't even bother to mention that Gregg and I might get married.

“About the baby, Dad.” I wait. Why doesn't he ever say anything? There is no joy, hardly any acknowledgment.

“I hope you're not doing this for me,” he says.

“What? What are you talking about?” I feel relief; this is familiar, the father I know—this ridiculous remark.

“A lot of parents,” he begins, “and I'm sorry to say I know some—pressure their children into having babies. So they can be grandparents. I hope
I
haven't—”

“Dad. Isn't it a little late to be talking about this?”

Another of his pet subjects, like husbands and wives being together every night of their lives. For years he told me he hoped I didn't feel any pressure, that it was fine with him, just fine, dandy, wonderful, if I didn't have children. There was nothing wrong with being childless. Nothing at all! He said it so many times Jackson and I suspected a different message—that if I conceived, he'd disapprove or, more accurately, worry. That
I
in particular should not have children. Something to do with my mother. I was too temperamental, too—what? You look like your mother, don't be like her: I'd wind up hospitalized, a suicide. Or perhaps he meant what he said, that he didn't want me to have children on his account. Absurd! Had the man ever given the slightest inkling, ever, that he wished to be a grandfather to my children? He pretty much ignored Corb's children, so why in the world would I get that impression?

“Do you think I'd have a baby just to please you?” I ask. “Under these conditions? Being separated from my husband? About to live with another man?”

“No, I just—”

I pull over to the side of the road.

“Do you think you ought to stop here?” He glances over his shoulder as though expecting a squadron of police cruisers.

“We're out in the middle of the desert, Dad. Parked on the shoulder of the highway. It's fine. It's legal.”

“Yes, but I wouldn't think it safe.”

“It's safe, Dad.”

“But a car could come out of nowhere—”

“It's flat, I can see for miles.”

“Come to think of it, I'm not sure it
is
legal. Do you think we ought to find a turnout?”

“Shut up! Shut up!” My belly is throbbing, the baby kicking excitedly; I'm trembling all over. “You can't say anything normal about this baby, you can't even say you're happy for me, just this business about pulling over—and, you hope I didn't get pregnant because of you. Are you trying to say you don't think I
can
be a mother? A good mother?” I grab my super sipper and drink from it; for once I am thirsty, dying of thirst.

“No, I—”

I bang the cup down. “Just because my own mother was unfit?”

“She was a good mother.”

“A good mother! What kind of good mother kills herself?” A sudden blast of wind rocks the car.

“To be fair—”

“Oh please, not the death certificate. How it says suicide but really it wasn't. A little error on the part of the coroner. How can you say that? Believe that? After all her attempts?” Little does Dad know I have a copy of the death certificate right here in my pocket, where I keep it always.

He folds his hands in his lap, doesn't even ask how I know this information about all her suicide attempts because certainly we've never discussed it.

“She was a mother who cared about you,” he says quietly. “In her own way.”

I'm trying to take this in, maybe it's even true, my heart loosening in my chest, a flower bud opening itself up to the sun, when he continues. “She cared about your clothes and your education, she left long notes for the sitter about your food and medicines.”

“Dad, I don't have a single good memory of her. Not one.”

He seems unfazed by this, nor does he contradict me at first.

A weak contradiction at best: “Well,” he says, “there were lots of times—”

“Lots of times
what
, Dad? Tell me. Tell me one single good memory. I don't have the memory, so you give it to me. You're my father, you were there. She was reading me a bedtime story, she held me in her arms; she played with me out in the yard—what? You must've seen something, a moment. Please, Dad. Please. Before you get really old and senile and forget for good.”

“Well.” There is a long pause. “She was very concerned about your schooling.”

“My
schooling?”
How could I be so foolish as to even hope? That if such a moment ever existed, my father might recall it. He doesn't know what I'm talking about and never has. “My schooling,” I say dully. I'll take anything I can get. “What about it.”