Stork Raving Mad (2 page)

“Why amazement?”

“Because most people thought Generalissimo Franco had Mendoza shot back in the fifties.” He picked up my right foot and began massaging it.

I closed my eyes, the better to enjoy the foot rub. Carrying around an extra fifty or more pounds does a number on your arches.

“Apparently he just went to ground in Catalonia and kept a low profile for the last sixty years,” Michael added.

“Sixty years?” I echoed. “How old is he, anyway?”

“Nearly ninety. Which is why Ramon thought it was pretty safe to invite him to come to the opening night of the play. He just assumed the old guy would be flattered and send polite regrets. No one ever expected Mendoza to accept—and at the last possible moment. We’ve managed to scrape up some money
from the department to pay for his airfare, but even if we had enough to cover a hotel stay—”

“Every single hotel room in town is full of refugee students,” I said. “Plus every spare room in just about every private house. I’d have thought we were pretty full ourselves.”

“The students are going to rearrange themselves to free up a room,” Michael said.

Aha. That probably explained the earlier thumps and thuds, along with the dragging noises I could hear out in the hall. Michael switched to my left foot.

“We’re also going to swap a few of our drama students who aren’t in the play for a few more Spanish-speaking students,” he went on. “That way there will always be someone around to translate for Señor Mendoza. And the students will chauffeur him around and cook for him or take him out to eat—in fact, your grandfather’s promised to help as well. And if he’s in his eighties, how much trouble can Señor Mendoza be?”

I thought of pointing out that even though my grandfather was over ninety, he regularly stirred up quite a lot of trouble. Of course, trouble was a way of life for Dr. Montgomery Blake, world famous zoologist, gadfly environmentalist, and animal-welfare activist. Why was Grandfather offering to help entertain our guest, anyway? Did he consider the elderly playwright a kind of endangered species?

But I had to admit, Michael had done everything possible to make sure our potential houseguest wouldn’t cause me any work or stress.

“So it’s really all right if we host Señor Mendoza?” he asked.

“It’s fine. The more the merrier. Wait a minute—the play opens Friday and it’s already Wednesday. How soon is he arriving?”

Michael glanced at his watch.

“In about half an hour.”

Actually, the beat-up sedan carrying our latest guest pulled up just twenty minutes later, almost precisely at the stroke of ten. A slender, dark-haired young man of medium height stepped out. Ramon Soto—I recognized him from seeing some of the rehearsals. A pretty, dark-haired young woman sprang out of the front passenger seat and ran around to the driver’s side so that she and Soto almost bumped heads in their haste to open the left rear door and assist a bent, gnarled figure out of the car and up the steps.

I saw this from upstairs, where I was in the middle of getting dressed, which seemed to take longer every day.

I sat back down on the bed and resumed trying to put on my shoes in spite of the fact that I couldn’t see my feet—hadn’t seen them in months. My cousin Rose Noire bustled in, looking, as usual, like a New Age Madonna, thanks to her long, flowing, cotton-print dress and her frizzy mane of hair.

“Look what I found for you!” she said. She was holding out a two-foot parcel wrapped in a length of mud-brown stenciled cloth and tied at several points with bits of raffia.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Open it and see. Oh, wait—it might be too heavy for you.”

She set it down on the table and began unwrapping it herself. Ever since she’d learned of my pregnancy, Rose Noire had alternated between urging me to exercise, for the good of the babies, and deciding I was too fragile to lift anything heavier than a teacup. As she struggled with the bits of raffia, I gave thanks that she was in the latter mood at the moment.

“Ta da!” she exclaimed, lifting a large object out of the cloth. It looked like a statue of a heavily pregnant woman with the head of a hippopotamus.

“What is it?” I repeated.

“It’s Tawaret! The Egyptian goddess who protects women during pregnancy and childbirth.”

“She looks like a pregnant hippopotamus,” I said. “A very irritated pregnant hippopotamus.”

Rose Noire, to her credit, refrained from pointing out that at the moment I looked rather like a hippopotamus myself.

“She takes the form of a hippopotamus to protect young children from demons,” she said instead, as she handed me the statue.

Yes, even demons would probably avoid tangling with a goddess who looked like that.

As Rose Noire swooped down to help with my shoes she chattered with enthusiasm about Tawaret’s powers, her importance, and even her marital history. Apparently, after first marrying Apep, the god of evil, then Sobek, the crocodile god, she became the concubine of Set, who must have been more important, since Rose Noire didn’t bother to explain who he was. And I didn’t dare ask, for fear of setting her off again. It was
like listening to someone talk about characters in a soap opera I didn’t watch.

“Do you need anything else?” she asked.

I started guiltily. I’d been turning the statue around to study it and not liking what I saw. Tawaret was stout, with pendulous breasts, a bulging abdomen, frowning brows, and an open-mouthed snarl that revealed a large collection of sharp teeth. Her figure probably did resemble mine at the moment, but her expression reminded me of my Great Aunt Flo, who was so fond of telling me about ghastly things that had happened to women friends during childbirth and pregnancy. Not a happy association.

Perhaps my fleeting impulse to drop the statue showed on my face.

“I’ll just put her here where you and she can get acquainted,” Rose Noire said. She took Tawaret back and cleared a space for her on the dresser—which wasn’t an easy task. In addition to Michael’s and my relatively modest collection of grooming supplies, the dresser already held a large collection of pregnancy-related books, CDs, videos, statues, charms, amulets, herbs, organic stretch-mark creams, aromatherapy vials, and other gewgaws—most of them courtesy of Rose Noire, who seemed a great deal more enthusiastic about the whole pregnancy process than I was.

Of course, she wasn’t living through it.

“Meg?”

I looked up to see Rose Noire frowning slightly at me. I was zoning out again.

“Do I look presentable?” I asked. “I don’t want to embarrass anyone when I go downstairs to welcome our latest guest.”

Rose Noire tweaked, tugged, and patted bits of hair and clothing that had looked perfectly fine to me, then nodded her approval and flitted off.

On my way out of the bedroom, I waddled over to the dresser and grabbed Tawaret. Even after five minutes’ acquaintance, I’d decided she wasn’t someone I wanted to share our bedroom with. I’d find a place downstairs to stash her. Correction: display her. If Rose Noire objected, I could say I wanted everyone to benefit from her demon-chasing powers.

When I reached the front hall I could hear torrents of Spanish outside. I peeked out one of the front windows and saw Michael, my grandfather, Rose Noire, and several of the students chatting with Señor Mendoza. Why were they keeping him out in the cold? Not waiting for me, I hoped.

I glanced around the front hall and winced. It was almost completely filled with the coatracks and coat trees we’d brought in for the students, and the chairs we’d moved out of the dining room when we turned it into another temporary bedroom. When you added in the half a dozen bushel baskets we’d set out for gloves, boots, and scarves, what had once been a gracious foyer now resembled the entrance to a thrift shop.

And now the students had decided to turn the dining room into Señor Mendoza’s room, on the theory that our geriatric guest might not be able to make it to the second story. These days I wasn’t too keen on going up and down stairs myself. When we bought our three-story Victorian house, Michael
and I had been charmed by the twelve-foot ceilings on the ground floor, but now I was all too conscious of the twelve-foot stairway.

Half a dozen students swarmed in and out of the dining room, clearing out the sleeping bags, suitcases, knapsacks, and other paraphernalia and hauling most of it upstairs. That accounted for the thumps and thuds. Another two students were assembling a bed frame in one corner.

“Make way!” I heard someone shout behind me. “Mattress coming through!” I lumbered out of the way as nimbly as I could, which wasn’t very—these days I had the maneuverability and turning radius of an aircraft carrier.

“Oh, sorry, Mrs. Waterston,” said one of the students carrying the mattress. “We didn’t see it was you.”

“No problem,” I said. “Could someone do me a small favor?”

Three students leaped to my side. I handed Tawaret to a willowy redhead almost as tall as my five foot ten. I was fairly sure her name was Alice, but given how bad my short-term memory was at the moment, I decided to avoid testing that theory.

“Could you take this and put it on one of the shelves in the library?”

“What is it?”

“Good luck statue,” I said. “Scares away demons.”

“Awesome,” Probable Alice said, and she disappeared with Tawaret under one arm.

“That would scare away anything,” said a blond student whose name escaped me.

“Yes, and I have no intention of letting it scare Woodward and Bernstein,” I said, patting my stomach.

“Is that really what you’re going to call them?” the blonde asked. From the look on her face, I deduced she didn’t approve.

“No,” I said. “But we haven’t settled on names yet because we’ve chosen not to know the gender. My doctor refers to them as P and non-P, for presenting and non-presenting.”

“Presenting what?” she asked.

“Presenting is doctor talk for positioned to come out first,” I said.

“Whoa, you mean even in the womb, one of the kids is destined to be the younger?” she asked. “Who knew?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not betting on it. Non-P is pretty stubborn, and I wouldn’t put it past him or her to thrash around and shove P out of the way. And as you can see, P and non-P are pretty impersonal, so we usually refer to them by whatever nicknames come to mind at the moment.”

“Like Woodward and Bernstein,” the blonde said.

“Or Tom and Jerry,” I said. “Thelma and Louise. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

“Cool,” she said. Did she really think so, or was she only humoring her favorite professor’s boring wife?

“How about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?” she asked.

“Good one,” I said. “I’ll spring it on Michael later.”

She beamed. Actually, we’d already used that one, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

I’d been maneuvering through the swarms of students toward the front door as we spoke. I almost tripped over Spike,
our dog, who still hadn’t figured out that in my present condition, I couldn’t even see my own feet, much less an eight-and-a-half-pound fur ball dancing around them. Or maybe he was doing it deliberately. Spike had been known to bite the hand that fed him, so why should I be surprised if he tried to trip the owner of that hand?

“Someone get Spike out of the way,” I said as I waddled over to the doorway to greet our guest. Or maybe I should drag Mendoza inside—why were they keeping an elderly visitor standing on the front porch so long? Did they want him to get pneumonia?

Just then the door opened with a burst of arctic air, and Señor Mendoza limped in, leaning heavily on a walking stick and bundled in a thick overcoat that was clearly intended for a much taller man—the hem dragged along the floor behind him. He was about five foot four, though he might have been taller if he weren’t so stooped. He had a wild mane of white hair, a ragged white beard, and an irrepressible twinkle in his eyes.

He also reeked of tobacco, which probably explained what he’d been doing outside—having one last smoke before entering the house.

“Welcome to America!” he exclaimed, waving his stick in the air. “I am Ignacio Mendoza! Happy to meet you!”

Michael followed Señor Mendoza in, helped him out of the overcoat and hung it on one of the coatracks, all the while making conversation in rapid-fire Spanish.

I gazed at my husband in envy. At the moment, I could think
of two Spanish words—
adiós
and
arriba
. Neither of them seemed even slightly apropos, so I worked on smiling in a welcoming fashion.

Then I recognized another phrase—
mi esposa
. Michael must be introducing me. I held out my hand.

Señor Mendoza lunged forward, grasped my hand, and thumped my belly several times.

The twins resented it. Someone should explain to strangers that it was rude to tickle babies before they were born.

“Sorry,” I said, wrestling my hand free and taking a step back. “But Butch and Sundance aren’t up to shaking hands yet.”

Actually, Butch might be trying to—he was squirming around with great enthusiasm. Sundance merely began the steady, rhythmic kicking he resorted to whenever Butch annoyed him. Why couldn’t they wait until they were out in the world before beginning their sibling squabbles?

Michael stepped up and treated Señor Mendoza to a few more paragraphs of Spanish. I hoped he was explaining that while he was happy to welcome such a distinguished guest to his humble home, the guest should damn well keep his hands off the lady of the house. Whatever he said made Señor Mendoza beam at me with great approval.

“Meg!” my grandfather said, as he burst through the door with another blast of cold air. “This is going to be such fun. Nacio’s going to make paella. And he’s brought his guitar—did you know he’s an expert flamenco player?”

Nacio? Must be Mendoza’s nickname. Short for Ignacio, I
supposed. Were they old friends or had they hit it off instantly? Either way, it was cause for alarm, given my grandfather’s penchant for trouble.

And then the other part of his statement hit me: paella. A dish that normally contained copious amounts of seafood. No one in my family ever remembered my allergy to crustaceans and shellfish, so why should I expect them to believe that ever since I’d become pregnant, the mere smell nauseated me? I’d be avoiding the kitchen for a while.