Nora Jane (10 page)

“Yes,” Tam said. “Very different from China.”

“Who do you think it belongs to?” Nora Jane said again.

“It belong to you. You quit thinking about it for a while. Think one big grasshopper standing on leaf looking at you with
big eyes. Eyes made of jade. You sleep now. When Li come home I make us very special dinner to celebrate baby coming into
world. Li work on problem. Figure it out on calculator.”

“If it had blond hair I’d know it was Sandy’s. But black hair could be mine or Freddy’s. Well, mine’s blacker than his. And
curlier…”

“Go to sleep. Not going to be as simple as color of hair. Nothing simple in this world, Nora Jane.”

“Well, what am I going to do about all this?” she said sleepily. Tam’s fingers were pressing into the nerves at the base of
her neck. “What on earth am I going to do?”

“Not doing anything for now. For now going to sleep. When Li come home tonight he figure it out. Not so hard. We get it figured
out.” Tam’s fingers moved up into Nora Jane’s hair, massaging the old brain on the back of the head. Nora Jane and Lydia and
Tammili Whittington settled down and went to sleep.

“Fifty-five percent chance baby will be girl,” Li said, looking up from his calculations. “Forty-six percent chance baby is
fathered by Mr. Harwood. Fifty-four percent chance baby is fathered by Mr. Halter. Which one is smartest gentleman, Nora Jane?
Which one you wish it to be?”

“I don’t know. They’re smart in different ways.”

“Maybe it going to be two babies. Like Double Happiness Bun. One for each father.” Li laughed softly at his joke. Tam lowered
her head, ashamed of him. He had been saying many strange things since they came to California.

“You sure it going to be good idea to have this baby?” he said next.

“I guess so,” Nora Jane said. “I think it is.” She searched their faces trying to see what they wanted to hear but their faces
told her nothing. Tam was looking down at her hands. Li was playing with his pocket calculator.

“How you going to take care of this baby and go to your job?” he said.

“That’s nothing,” Nora Jane said. “I’ve already thought about that. It isn’t that complicated. People do it all the time.
They have these little schools for them. Day-care centers. I used to work in one the Sisters of Mercy had on Magazine Street.
I worked there in the summers. We had babies and little kids one and two years old. In the afternoons they would lie down
on their cots and we would sit by them and pat their backs while they went to sleep. It was the best job I ever had. The shades
would be drawn and the fan on and we’d be sitting by the cots patting them and you could hear their little breaths all over
the room. I used to pat this one little boy with red hair. His back would go up and down. I know all about little kids and
babies. I can have one if I want to.”

“Yes, you can,” Tam said. “You strong girl. Do anything you want to do.”

“You going to tell Mr. Harwood and Mr. Halter about this baby?” Li said.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t made up my mind about that.”

Then for two weeks Nora Jane kept her secret. She was good at keeping secrets. It came from being an only child. When Freddy
called she told him she couldn’t see him for a while. She hadn’t talked to Sandy since she called and told him where to pick
up Mirium’s car.

At night she slept alone with her secret. In the mornings she dressed and went down to the gallery where she worked and listened
to people talk about the paintings. She felt very strange, sleepy and secretive and full of insight. I think my vision is
getting better, she told herself, gazing off into the pastel hills. I am getting into destiny, she said to herself at night,
feeling the cool sheets against her legs. I am part of time, oceans and hurricanes and earthquakes and the history of man.
I am the aurora borealis and the stars. I am as crazy as I can be. I ought to call my mother.

* * *

Finally Freddy Harwood had had as much as he could stand. There was no way he was letting a girl he loved refuse to see him.
He waited fourteen days, counting them off, trying to get to twenty-one, which he thought was a reasonable number of days
to let a misunderstanding cool down. Only, what was the misunderstanding? What had he done but fall in love? He waited and
brooded.

On the fourteenth day he started off for work, then changed his mind and went over to his cousin Leah’s gallery where he had
gotten Nora Jane a job. The gallery was very posh. It didn’t even open until 11:00 in the morning. He got there about 1o:30
and went next door to Le Chocolat and bought a chocolate statue of Aphrodite and stood by the plate-glass windows holding
the box and watching for Nora Jane’s car. Finally he caught a glimpse of it in the far lane on Shattuck Boulevard heading
for the parking lot of the Safeway store. He ran out the door and down to the corner and stood by a parking meter on the boulevard.

She got out of the car and came walking over, not walking very fast. She was wearing a long white rayon shirt over black leotards,
looking big-eyed and thin. “You look terrible,” he said, forgetting his pose, hurrying to meet her. “What have you been doing?
Take this, it’s a chocolate statue I bought for you. What’s going on, N.J.? I want you to talk to me. Goddammit, we are going
to talk.”

“I’m going to have a baby,” she said. She stepped up on the sidewalk. Traffic was going by on the street. Clouds were going
by in the sky. “Oh, my God,” Freddy said.

“And I don’t know who the father is. It might be your baby. I don’t know if it is or not.” Her eyes were right on his. They
were filling up with tears, a movie of tears, a brand-new fresh print of a movie of tears. They poured down her cheeks and
onto her hands and the white cardboard box holding the chocolate Aphrodite. Some even fell on her shoes.

“So what,” Freddy said. “That’s not so bad. I mean, at least you don’t have cancer. When I saw you get out of the car I thought,
leukemia, she’s got leukemia.”

“I don’t know who the father is,” she repeated. “There’s a forty-six percent chance it’s you.”

“Let’s get off this goddamn street,” he said. “Let’s go out to the park.”

“You aren’t mad? You aren’t going to kill me?”

“I haven’t had time to get mad. I’ve hardly had time to go into shock. Come on, N.J., let’s go out to the park and see the
Buddha.”

“He has blue eyes, or gray eyes, I guess you’d call them. And you have brown eyes and I have brown eyes. So it isn’t going
to do any good if it has brown eyes. Li said it’s more the time of month anyway because sperm can live several days. So I’ve
been trying and trying to remember…”

“Let’s don’t talk about it anymore,” Freddy said. “Let’s talk less and think more.” They were in the De Young Museum in Golden
Gate Park. Freddy had called his cousin Leah and told her Nora Jane couldn’t come in to work and they had gone out to the
park to see a jade Buddha he worshipped. “This all used to be free,” he said, as he did every time he brought her there. “The
whole park. Even the planetarium. Even the cookies in the tea garden. My father used to bring me here.” They were standing
in an arch between marble rooms.

“Let’s go look at the Buddha again before we leave,” Nora Jane said. “I’m getting as bad about that Buddha as you are.” They
walked back into the room and up to the glass box that housed the Buddha. They walked slowly around the case looking at the
Buddha from all angles. The hands outstretched on the knees, the huge ears, the spine,the ribs, the drape of the stole across
the shoulder. Sakyumuni as an Ascetic. It was a piece of jade so luminous, so rounded and perfect and alive that just looking
at it was sort of like being a Buddha.

“Wheeewwwwwwwww,” Nora Jane said. “How on earth did he make it?”

“Well, to begin with, it took twenty years. I mean, you don’t just turn something like that out overnight. He made it for
his teacher, but the teacher died before it was finished.”

Nora Jane held her hands out to the light coming from the case, as if to catch some Buddha knowledge. “I could go see your
friend Eli, the geneticist,” she said. “He could find out for me, couldn’t he? I mean he splices genes, it wouldn’t be anything
to find out what blood type a baby had. How about that? I’ll call him up and ask him if there’s any way I can find out before
it comes.”

“Oh, my God,” Freddy said. “Don’t go getting any ideas about Eli. Don’t go dragging my friends into this. Let’s just keep
this under our hats. Let’s don’t go spreading this around.”

“I’m not keeping anything I do under my hat,” she said. She stepped back from him and folded her hands at her waist. Same
old, same old stuff, she thought. “You just go on home, Freddy,” she said. “I’ll take BART. I don’t want to talk to you anymore
today. I was doing just fine until you showed up with that chocolate statue. I’ve never been ashamed of anything I’ve done
in my life and I’m not about to start being ashamed now.” She was backing up, heading for the door. “So go on. Go on and leave
me alone. I mean it. I really mean it.”

“How about me?” he called after her retreating back. “What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to feel? What if I don’t
want to be alone? What if I need someone to talk to?” She held her hands up in the air with the palms turned toward the ceiling.
Then she walked on off without turning around.

Several days later Nora Jane was at the gallery. It was late in July. Almost a year since she had robbed the bar in New Orleans
and flown off to California to be with Sandy. So much had happened in that time. Sometimes she felt like a different person.
Other times she felt like the same old Nora Jane. That morning while she was dressing for work she had looked at her body
for a long time in the mirror, turning this way and that to see what was happening. Her body was beginning to have a new configuration,
strange volumes like a Titian she admired in one of Leah’s art books.

It was cool in the gallery, too cool for Nora Jane’s sleeveless summer dress. Just right for the three-piece suit on the man
standing beside her. They were standing before one of Nora Jane’s favorite paintings. The man was making notes on a pad and
saying things to the gallery owner that made Nora Jane want to sock him in the face.

“What is the source of light, dear heart? I can’t review this show, Leah. This stuff’s so old-fashioned. It’s so obvious,
for God’s sake. Absolutely no restraint. I can’t believe you got me over here for this. I think you’re going all soppy on
me.”

“Oh, come on,” Leah said. “Give it a chance, Ambrose. Put the pad away and just look.”

“I can’t look, angel. I have a trained eye.” Nora Jane sighed. Then she moved over to the side of the canvas and held the
edge of the frame in her hand. It was a painting of a kimono being lifted from the sea by a dozen seagulls. A white kimono
with purple flowers being lifted from a green sea. The gulls were carrying it in their beaks, each gull in a different pose.
Below the painting was a card with lines from a book.

On some undressed bodies the burns made patterns …and on the skin of some women… the shapes of flowers they had had on their
kimonos….

Hiroshima, by John Hersey

“Hummmmmmmm…” Nora Jane said. “The source of light? This is a painting, not a lightbulb. There’s plenty of light. Every one
of those doves is a painting all by itself. I bet it took a million hours just to paint those doves. This is a wonderful painting.
This is one of the most meaningful paintings I ever saw. Anybody that doesn’t know this painting is wonderful isn’t fit to
judge a beauty contest at a beach, much less a rock of art, I mean, a work of art.”

“Leah,” the man said. “Who is this child?”

“I used to work here,” she said. “But now I’m quitting. I’m going home. I’m going to have a baby and I don’t want it floating
around inside me listening to people say nasty things about other people’s paintings. You can’t tell what they hear. They
don’t know what all they can hear.”

“A baby,” Leah said. She moved back as though she was afraid some of it might spill on her gray silk blouse. “My cousin Freddy’s
baby?”

“I don’t know,” Nora Jane said. “It’s just a baby. I don’t know whose it is.”

I’m doing things too fast, she thought. She was driving aimlessly down University Avenue, headed for a bridge. I’m cutting
off my nose to spite my face. I’m burning my bridges behind me. I’ll call my mother and tell her where I am. Yeah, and then
she’ll just get drunker than ever and call me up all the time like she used to at The Mushroom Cloud. Never mind that. I’ll
get a job at a day-care center. That’s what I’ll do. This place is full of rich people. I bet they have great ones out here.
I’ll go find the best one they have and get a job in it. Then I’ll be all set when she comes. Well, at least I can still think
straight. Thank God for that. Maybe I’ll drive out to Bodega Bay and spend the day by the ocean. I’ll get a notebook and write
down everything I have to do and make all my plans. Then tomorrow I’ll go and apply for jobs at day-care centers. I wonder
what they pay. Not much I bet. Who cares? I’ll live on whatever they pay me. That’s one thing Sandy taught me. You don’t have
to do what they want you to if you don’t have to have their stuff. It was worth living with him just to learn that. I’ve got
everything I need. It’s a wonderful day. I loved saying that stuff to that man, that Ambrose whatever his name is. I’ll bet
he’s thinking about it right this minute. YOU AREN’T FIT TO JUDGE A BEAUTY CONTEST AT THE BEACH MUCH LESS A WORK OF ART. That was good, that was really good. I bet he won’t forget me saying that. I bet no one’s said anything to him in years
except what he wants to hear.

Nora Jane turned on the radio, made a left at a stoplight and drove out onto the Richmond—San Rafael bridge. She had the top
down on the convertible. The radio was turned up good and loud. Some lawyers down in Texas were saying the best place to store
nuclear waste would be the salt flats in Mexico. Nora Jane was driving along, listening to the lawyers, thinking about the
ocean, thinking how nice it would be to sit and watch the waves come in. Thinking about what she’d stop and get to eat. I
have to remember to eat, she was thinking. I have to get lots of protein and stuff to make her bones thick.