The Speed Queen (10 page)

That was exactly what it says it was for —obstructing justice. May was just when I was sentenced; I was actually arrested in December.

It was before Christmas. I'd gone to this Christmas party for everyone who worked at the Village Inn and this guy A.J. drove me home. I was late and forgot to call Lamont and when I got home he wasn't happy, half because I'd been drinking.

A.J. stayed outside in his car to make sure I got in okay, and Lamont didn't like the way I waved to him. I explained that he was a friend from work, but Lamont wouldn't let it drop. All I wanted to do was get in bed.

"He's just a good friend," I said.

"Now he's a good friend," he said. "How come I never heard of this good friend until tonight?" He said some other things he didn't mean, and I was too drunk to let them slide. It was silly, really.

"Look," I said, "can we talk about this tomorrow?"

"We're talking about this now," he said. When I walked past him into the bedroom, he pointed at my face and told me not to walk away.

I locked the door on him.

He was slapping it and yelling all kinds of stuff and I was yelling back sometimes —really unnecessary stuff, telling each other what kind of people we were, what was wrong with each other. We didn't really mean it. Finally he started kicking the door in. It was so cheap his foot came right through it, which of course he blamed on me. I just sat on the bed and laughed.

Someone downstairs called the cops. By the time they knocked on the door we were done fighting; we just weren't talking to each other.

The woman cop took me into the bedroom.

"We were just having a discussion," I said.

"Looks like a good one," she said, pointing her pen at the door.

"He didn't touch me," I said.

"You've had a little to drink tonight, is that right?"

"Not much," I said. "Two beers."

I gave her all the information. No, he'd never struck me before. No, he had no prior history of drug usage.

When we came out to the living room, Lamont had cuffs on.

"Thanks a lot, Marjorie," he said.

"He never touched me," I kept telling them, but the guy was steering him toward the door. I got in his way.

"I can't believe you'd do this to me," Lamont said. I was crying, my nose was running all over the place.

"Ma'am, step aside," the woman said. "Ma'am, I'm only going to tell you this once. I don't think you want to go to jail tonight."

I just wanted to kiss him, to tell him everything was all right between us.

"I'll come down and get you out," I said. "Okay?"

"That's it," the woman said, "you're gone."

She grabbed me by the shoulder, spun me around and pushed my face into the wall. Lamont was shouting now. The woman bent one arm up behind my back and snapped the cuff on. Before she could get my other wrist, Lamont bowled her over and all four of us were on the floor.

"Marjorie," Lamont called.

"I'm okay," I said, because I was then.

If you have the mug shot, you can see where she pushed me into the wall. Look how full my face is. We'd only just started snorting it. Look how young we look. That was December of '84. I was twenty then. It seems a lot longer.

That was one reason my mom wasn't talking to me when I was living with Rico. When we were drinking, we used to beat on each other. We used to throw things. The toaster, the remote —it was just crazy. One time when I was in the emergency room, they called my mom to come pick me up. Rico and me had been lighting over him seeing this other girl from his work, and I told my mom that was it, I was leaving him.

I was just mad, and when I calmed down I tried to explain to her why I was going back. She didn't even try to understand. She only saw that he hit me. We had this huge Fight, and she begged me not to go back to him. She said I was being stupid and that he'd kill me and all this other stuff, and finally she said that as long as I was with him she wasn't going to speak to me.

"Fine," I said, "I don't need this kind of stuff anyway."

And in the end she was wrong, that wasn't why we broke up at all. We broke up because Rico got in a bad accident one night in his old Grand Prix and didn't get hurt. It was raining and he was coming home from the Golden Corral. He was coming up Classen when this guy in an Imperial pulled out into his lane. Rico swerved to miss him and lost it and hit a telephone pole going sideways.

The Grand Prix was totaled. The steering column snapped off the headrest. Rico told me he woke up in the passenger seat. He didn't have his belt on or anything. There wasn't a cut on him, nothing. And right then and there he started to believe in Jesus.

Is that fanny? He started to believe Jesus was looking out for him that night and he started to read the Bible. Before he came to bed he'd get down on his knees and pray. Sunday he'd get dressed up and go to church alone, and I'd just watch him. We fought about it. I thought he'd gone crazy. That's what it's like, it completely changes you and nobody who hasn't been through it understands. I didn't. One Sunday when he was in church, I packed up my things and left. That's when I moved in with Joy and Garlyn. I didn't tell my mom I'd left. I was still waiting for her to call me.

I didn't do anything while I was pregnant with Gainey, no booze, no drugs, not even cigarettes. Maybe a drag here and there, that was it. All of a sudden I couldn't stand the taste of them.

All I did was eat. I drank whole gallons of milk. My belly button popped when I was just six months. We'd go to Beverly's Pancake Kitchen for Sunday brunch; walking in it was like Jack Sprat and his wife. Lamont would order the short stack while I'd have the chicken-in-the-rough and a Black Cow followed by a slice of 7-Up pie, and he wouldn't say a word.

I was worried that my drinking might do something to the baby, that my body was already too messed up from the speed. The first time I went to the doctor I was afraid she'd see the tracks on my arms. The pamphlets she gave me didn't help. I kept seeing pictures of babies with just skin where their eyes were supposed to go. I remembered those calves in the sideshow tent with six or seven legs. I'd have these dreams where the doctor pulled something that looked like a starfish out of me. I'd wake up screaming and Lamont would hold me.

He was so sweet, putting up with me. We had a water bed, and I couldn't get out of it by myself, so he'd help me. I couldn't get up from the couch without him giving me a hand. Anything I wanted, he'd get for me.

"You want something?" he'd say. "What do you need?"

When I first found out, I was worried. I wasn't sure Lamont wanted kids. We'd never really talked about it, and I didn't know,

with him being a foster kid. I didn't tell him the day I did the test. The plus turned pink and I threw the little plastic case into the sink so hard that it cracked. I waited until Friday, when we both got paid, and I made him a nice steak and a baked potato. I put a tablecloth on and made sure I looked good.

When I called him in from the TV, he stopped and looked at the table.

"What's the occasion?" he said.

"Nothing," I said, but he was looking at me like something was wrong, and I couldn't help it, I started to cry. I pushed past him into the bedroom and slammed the door.

"Marjorie!" he called. "What's wrong?"

"What do you think is wrong?" I said. "I'm pregnant."

I could hear his work boots on the floor in the hall but he didn't say anything. I lay there across the bed, waiting.

"Well?" I shouted. "Are we going to kill it?"

"That's up to you," he said.

"It's not up to me. It's yours too."

"Do you want to have it?" he said.

"What do you want to do?"

"Let me in," he said, and I got up and unlocked the door.

He laid down and put his arms around me and I knew we'd be okay.

Every night he rubbed my back, and when I couldn't get to sleep he'd stay up and talk with me. Sometimes I'd cry. My hormones were going all over.

"Are you happy?" I'd ask. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," he said.

And I was terrible to him. When I was crying and he asked me if I was all right, I screamed at him. I said he cared more about his car than he did about me. I took all the books I could find out of the library and made him look at the pictures. It was easy for him, I said; it only took guys five minutes to have a baby.

I was scared because I didn't know what it was going to be like. My mom was talking to me again because of it; she tried to tell me I'd know what to do when the time came. I didn't believe her.

"I know it hurts," I said, "but what does it hurt like?"

"I don't know," my mom said. "It's not the kind of pain you remember."

"Is it like a sharp pain that goes away or a dull pain that just stays there and grows?"

"Stop working yourself up," she said. "It's a natural process. Your body will know what to do. Just be thankful you've got my hips."

I know it was supposed to help, but all I could picture was my pelvis snapping like a wishbone.

Everything she said scared me. First I'd feel my water break and run hot down my legs. Between then and the delivery I had to worry about infection. Sometimes the baby could get sideways or strangle on its own cord. Sometimes when the head didn't crown right they had to cut you. And then there was the whole C-section thing. In the diagram they made it look like opening one of those little cereals you eat right in the box.

"Don't worry," my mom said. "There's nothing you can do about it anyway."

That was the problem, I wanted to say; I felt helpless. I was getting bigger and bigger and the time was going by so slowly. We'd picked names and I'd had a shower and we'd bought a crib. We did the amnio and it was okay; it was a boy, so we started calling my belly Gainey. It was summer and uncomfortable. Now just standing hurt. It got to the point where Lamont and me had to stop making love. I flipped the calendar and there was my due date circled in red. It was like now, I was just waiting for this thing to happen to me. It was coming and there was nothing I could do.

And for everyone else it wasn't a big deal. My doctor, my mom — they'd all been through it before, they knew everything that was going to happen, but that didn't tell me how it was going to feel.

I'd cry and Lamont would tell me everything was going to be all right, but I could tell he was scared too. I said he didn't have to be in the delivery' room and then in the middle of the night one night I changed my mind and made him promise.

My doctor got my due date wrong by two weeks. It was supposed to be July 4th, which we thought was neat, but it turned out to be the 19th. We were ready to go that whole time, we had a bag packed and everything. When I finally went into labor we were relieved.

It was right after dinner on the 18th. We had take-out from Johnny's Char-broiler. I was on the couch watching something and my stomach just started to cramp. It was like I had to go so bad but I couldn't. Your muscle hurts like a charley horse; the best thing is not to fight it but that's your instinct. It hits you and then goes away, but you know it's coming around again. Lamont called my doctor. My water hadn't broken so she said not to come in until my contractions were seven to ten minutes apart. Lamont took his watch off to time them.

We watched TV until midnight, and they were still twenty minutes apart.

"You should get some rest," I told Lamont, but he said he was okay. He was drinking my diet Pepsis and smoking up a storm. I could barely stand the smell.

The late movie was Alien. Lamont clicked it over to Letterman.

We were sitting there about ten minutes later when the backs of my thighs felt wet. I looked down and the couch was soaked. I kept apologizing while Lamont called.

He'd backed the Roadrunner into its spot so we could take off. He put two towels down on my seat and helped me in. He started the engine and flicked on the lights, released the emergency brake and rolled out of the lot. It was like a robbery; we hardly said anything. I'd never seen him take Choctaw so slowly. There was nobody out, but he was careful to signal, and careful of his mirrors.

The doctor wasn't there yet, and the nurse made us wait in a room with another woman who was crying between contractions. They hooked me up to a machine to measure mine. The lines looked like earthquakes. I tried to relax, but every time one hit I'd clench my stomach like I could stop it.

"You're doing great," Lamont said.

"How many minutes was that?" I said.

"Fifteen?"

"No," I said. "That's wrong."

The other woman was crying.

"Be quiet!" I said.

Finally the doctor showed up. When she pushed her hands into my belly, she yawned coffee breath right in my face.

"I can give you something for the pain," she said.

"I don't want any drugs," I said, partly afraid she'd see my tracks.

Two hours later, I was pleading with her for a shot.

"I thought you wanted it to be natural," Lamont reminded me.

"Didn't you hear what I just said?" I screamed. "Now give me the shot."

He came back in this stupid blue mask and I laughed at him. A contraction caught me by surprise and I started to cry. The doctor checked to see how dilated I was; her fingers searched and it hurt. The orderlies came and moved me onto a gurney and clapped the rails up.

The doctor was wearing blue too, and there was a tent of it around my legs. There was a mirror I could look in but I didn't. I still didn't know what to do, and I said so.

"You're okay." the doctor said. "I just need you to keep pressing down. Dad, can you get that arm? Okay, here we go."

I was too tired to push, and then I held my breath and tried. The lights made me sweat but I was still cold.

A little more," she said, like I wasn't trying.

"Come on," she said. "You can do it, Mom."

I gritted my teeth and said some unnecessary things.

"There," she said. "Great. Okay. You're all done. You can relax now."

"You did it," Lamont was saying. He had my hand.

"I think you're going to be very happy," the doctor said.

It was okay, I thought, I could die now. There was nothing left of me.

The nurse brought Gainey to me in a blue blanket and put him on my chest.

He was moving his little hands. His eyes were closed but his mouth was open like a baby bird's. He had hair, he even had tiny eyebrows.

"Well, look at you," I said. "So you're the one who's been causing all this trouble."