Milk (7 page)

All skin is tender when nicked by a razor
. So my mother said in my dreams, after she died. She talked like that, never saying exactly what she meant, her face shaded by a straw gardening hat.

She wore white. A white dress with a sash—as though we lived at the turn of the century. And she floated around the garden with small, exact pruning shears.

Sometimes in my dreams she came back for a day and we went on a picnic, my mother, Dad, Corb and me, her in her white dress, us in regular clothes. She carried a wicker bassinet: Charlotte, whom my mother kept hidden under a blanket.

In other dreams she came at me with a knife. Smiling.
I've got a surprise for you
. The knife behind her back. My wrists itched and bled, from them grew knobs of wood, outside there was a field of corn.…

No one plays war better than me
click click. My made-up nursery rhyme.
No one plays war better than me
click-click.
On my belly in the dirt, toy rifle in my hands
click-click, click-click.
A war, somebody wants me dead
.

Consumed by fear, I don't tell anyone. Every time we have a drill at school, either for earthquakes in which we crawl under our desks, or for civil defense in which we all troop to the auditorium single file, I panic. My heart rocks against the walls of my chest, I can hardly breathe. Outwardly, I look the same as all the other kids, crouching under my desk with my skirt clutched against my thighs so the boys can't see my underwear, or in the auditorium, acting bored and restless along with everyone else, glancing casually at my brother Corb as I would a stranger. Inside of me, panic. Can't remember my name or address, can't distinguish my right hand from my left. I remember that my mother is dead, a refrain: my mother's dead, Charlotte's dead … but I can't remember anything about them. Nobody talks about them, not my father or my aunt or uncle or cousins, or my teachers, not even my brother. Nobody says suicide. My mother's dead, Charlotte's dead, mother's dead, Charlotte's dead.…

S
EVEN

I wake up sneezing, as I always do at the Alta Vista. Sneeze and sneeze again, dust motes swirling in the sunlight. I'm nauseated, too, so I reach for my saltines on the nightstand—I keep the box double-wrapped in plastic bags, old-lady-style. Fear of cockroaches and mice, though I have yet to see either here.

Half reclining, I eat saltines, a tip I got out of my one book on pregnancy so far, bought at Thrifty's. “Eat the saltines
before
getting out of bed; this will stabilize the stomach acids.” A book that's about twenty years out of date, even if this particular piece of advice seems to work. The rest of the book is about not gaining very much weight; disguising the weight you do gain; losing weight after the baby's born. Pictures of slim, smiling mothers holding infants so teeny they could fit inside the curl of their mothers' flip hairdos.

I bought the book, along with a standard paperback thesaurus, when I bought the sheets for this bed. I figured if I had to be here even one more night, it would be worth a new set of sheets. The existing sheets were threadbare and smelled of old people, ancient sex, body odor; the new set smells of air wicks, scented toilet paper. A floral print—the sheets have a white background, orange and blue and prune-colored flowers.

Throwing back the sheets, I run to the toilet. Dry heaves. Pregnancy, or guilt over last night? The baby's punishment for dining with a man other than the baby's father. But nothing happened, or so I tell the baby. Nothing really.

We kissed a long time in the car. I prevented Gregg's hands, and mine, from traveling any further. I said “no” a few times. “This is it, Gregg, for old time's sake. No more.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Well, I'm married, for one thing.”

He wrenched away from me.

“I wasn't going to tell you,” I say. All during dinner I kept my left hand in my lap like a well-mannered person, the foundation I dabbed on my finger a poor disguise. It was sort of a relief to tell him. “I'm thirty-five,” I said. “Did you think I'd been alone all these years?” I didn't bother mentioning I was married the last time I saw him, four years ago. “Anyway, I'm separated.”

“Since when?”

“A week.”

“One week?”

I nodded.

We began making out again. What else was there to do?

“I almost got married,” Gregg said suddenly, disengaging himself again.

“When?”

“Two years ago.”

“Since then, what?”

Exchanging romantic résumés, reluctantly, resentfully. You'd think we might've covered this during dinner, but instead I strung Gregg along with stories about my job. Funny stuff. Not the writing part—boring—but the photo shoots I travel to several times a year. The boxes and hangers and bags full of clothes, the little girls in makeup made to look like they aren't wearing any, the confusion and chaos, babies pooping at critical moments. Stage mothers. The hot white lights and the backdrops, the occasional lamb or puppy brought in as a prop, and the sounds: big voices instructing little people, big voices trying not to yell, little voices whimpering so as not to burst into tears. While I spoke, I tried very hard not to get lost in Gregg's face and eyes. His eyebrows, though, have always gotten to me the most, arched and quizzical, as though he's engaged in solving an endless sexual riddle. In comparison, Jackson's face is grainy, dry, lined, what people called rugged. It wasn't always so. Too many years at Stonewall Creek, he would say, sun, wind, erosion. I know: it's happening to my face too.

“Gregg, so what about after your engagement?” I'd had to do that periodically through the night, prompt him. Was he hard of hearing from playing too many clubs, or merely preoccupied?

“Since my engagement,” Gregg said. “Not much, some dates here and there. It's been pretty lonely.” He fitted his arms around my waist. “You're free now, Theo.”

“Not quite.” I left it at that. My belly gurgled, as if to underscore the point.

So much for the saltines. My eyes run. I fight the heaves, the gagging.
No one played war better than me
click-click
when I was a child. On my belly in the dirt, toy rifle in my hands
, click-click, click-click,
a war, somebody wants me dead
. I kneel before the toilet, lift the seat; I haven't vomited in years. Over and over again goes my made-up nursery rhyme:
No one played war better than me
click-click, a not-unfamiliar sensation of my head being pushed down toward the toilet bowl by an unseen hand.…

My mother. I remember what today is: the anniversary of her death, her suicide. The day I dread each year because I feel so keenly the echo of her suicide, a small death inside myself, as though every year a portion of me turns black and dies—a finger, a toe, part of an arm or leg.

But it's time to think differently now. The baby, if there is a baby, is counting on me, as I once counted on
her
. I need to see a doctor.

Dr. Grimes is a man's man. Solid mass in a white coat, hairy hands, with a style that's meant to inspire men onward in battle. Dr. Grimes—what an appalling name for an obstetrician; maybe it keeps patients away. In any case he is able to fit me into his schedule today, whereas the wait at every other doctor's office is weeks.

I'm swathed in white sheets. A nurse stands at attention.

On go the rubber gloves,
snap!

His fingers up me, I try to get away—as much as one can when one's feet are in stirrups.

“Settle down, now, settle down.” He softens his manner, like a dairy farmer soothing a cow, fingers twisting this way and that. “Hold on there, no reason to jump off the table.”

He withdraws his fingers, tears off the gloves, palpates my abdomen as though searching for lumps in a pillow.

“Ow!”

“Know what, missy?”

“What,” I say wearily.

“As your urine test indicates, I'd say there's a bun in the oven.”

“Really? You can feel it?” So he speaks in clichés. So what? I forgive everything. “How far along am I?”

“Eight weeks or so. Of course, we'd have to do an ultrasound to be exact. No need for that—you seem healthy and strapping.” Back to cow talk.

I'm allowed to sit up.

“When's my due date?” Due date: that such words even refer to me, to a
baby …

“Late September.” Dr. Grimes checks a round sort of calendar with a dial on it. “How's the twenty-fifth suit you?”

“That'd be fine. Great!” As if the date is for brunch, a social engagement.

“See you in a month, Mrs. Mapes.”

I'm too thrilled to correct him.

“Maybe next time we'll get a heartbeat,” he adds.

“Pardon?”

“The baby's heartbeat.”

“You can hear it?”

“You bet.” He offers a hairy hand—for me to shake, I realize a moment too late. He claps me on the back instead, vigorously. “Congratulations,” he says.

I'm half-expecting cigars to be produced, passed all around. Big fat stogies. Then I remember all the men I've slept with. “Before you go, Dr. Grimes, I was wondering.”

“Yes?”

I swallow. “Do you do HIV tests here?”

“Sure, Missy.” He's so casual, you'd think I'd asked for a tongue depressor as a souvenir.

“Just in case,” I joke to the nurse as she draws my blood.

She doesn't smile, as if my requesting this test makes a positive result more likely.

“I mean, I would hate … I just couldn't … It's not that I think I … but what if?” God, I sound like my father, stammering away about some point of etiquette. “I just couldn't live with myself,” I say. “Doing that to a baby.”

“We get more requests than you think,” she says, tight-lipped. “And we're starting to insist on it ourselves. Standard procedure. Hold this, please.” A cotton ball.

I bend my arm at the elbow to keep the cotton in place, trying to imagine cradling a baby in my arms. Have I ever even held one before? I keep picturing a doll, or a swaddle of blankets with nothing inside, only air.

I wish Jackson were here. Not Jackson; Gregg. Somebody. Who? My mother?

I'm shuttled into a different room where another one of Dr. Grime's nurses carries in an armload of booklets and charts. “Now,” she says. She's delicate, pale, girlish—speaks with a touch of a lisp. “This is the diet Dr. Grimes wants you to follow.”

She passes it to me across the table.

“Aa-nn-d,” (she draws this out with a little flourish), “your prescription for maternal vitamins as well as iron pills. And this is a chart you might like. It shows the fetus at different stages, see? Here's eight weeks, where you are now.”

I feel rather queasy. “Kind of resembles escargot, don't you think?”

She gives me a strange look.

“Things do seem to improve from there,” I add, studying the chart.

Now that pregnancy is a certainty, I feel sicker than ever, my womb and bloodstream and breasts pulsing with hormones. Pain between my legs and in my uterus, as if already it's expanding; pin-like shooting pains up and down my limbs, leaving me too warm, then chilled—is this normal?

To celebrate, I go out for a late breakfast, nearly gagging at the sight of anyone else's yellow-bellied soft-boiled eggs sopped up by white toast, parsley on the side. I'd wanted a diner with homemade blueberry muffins, bowls of Special K in whole milk, sausage, but Denny's is all I could find, smelling of eggs and paper napkins.

I order a mixture of side dishes, going over the menu aloud with the waitress. “Potatoes? No. No. But I will have an English muffin, no butter. Wait. Butter on the side. And an egg, but hard-boiled—do you have any that are cold? No orange juice. Do you have strawberries? Plain, not mixed in with other fruits. Never mind, then, I'll have melon, but cantaloupe, not honeydew. And ice water, please. No, no tea.
No
coffee.”

I used to adore coffee, as recently as last week.

After breakfast I feel so much better, luscious in fact, juicy and full. My breasts are about to burst from my bra, and I want to tear off my clothes and lie on a bed naked; make love. Gregg comes to mind, not the father of this child, dimming my lust for a moment. Ah, my body says, who cares. Copulate with everyone. Offer your breasts to everyone and, really, I'd like to: unbutton my blouse and bare them to passersby, men, women, children. As if the milk is flowing already.

E
IGHT

I hate to think of myself as one of those people who holds up a dusty old relationship to the light and, fantastically, unrealistically, deems it the best. But I am. It was. I think. Anyway, here I am in this club at Gregg's invitation, watching his band play; a romantic fool to the end, silly old groupie, sipping my seltzer made to look like a cocktail: ice cubes, fizz, lime.

When I first saw Gregg some sixteen years ago, he was standing in line at freshman orientation, tall and slim, dark hair down to his shoulders, parted in the middle, wire-rimmed glasses.

I didn't go up to him. But I decided right then and there I would meet him, be with him in some forever sense.

It was months before we did meet, though. Smoking dope in somebody's room, we sat on the floor together—for some reason people never sat on chairs or beds—the two of us dealing out Tarot cards and not talking, just laughing and laughing.

He walked me back to my dorm and while we didn't kiss, our hands brushed, our elbows bumped, and something had been decided.

Now between sets, Gregg lights up a cigarette and I nearly gag. Me? Gagging at the smell of smoke? Pregnancy: how quickly this baby has set up housekeeping inside me, all my vices swept away. Baby's rules, not mine.

“You still smoke?” I say to Gregg, trying to keep my voice light, even. He didn't smoke last night.