Beyond Deserving (3 page)

Christine came in to talk. She had been quilting. Katie admired the intricate Texas pattern of the quilt on her bed. Her grandmother had made it. Christine said she herself had no talent for it—it was June who could sew however she liked, and Katie had taken after her—but Christine liked the feel of fabric in her hands, so she made quilts out of big squares, and tied them at the intersections. She was making one for Uncle Dayton, double-thick with batting because his circulation was bad.

June came home early and pulled a chair close to Katie's bed, like Katie was a patient in a nursing home. Her mother said she wanted to tell Katie about a time when Katie was an infant, and Christine had come over to help out. She said Katie had been terribly colicky and that she, her mother, had not managed well. One day she had slapped Katie quite hard while Christine was in the house. Christine didn't go home for a week. “And I went to bed,” June said. “When I got up a week later, I was sane again, and of course I was mortified. It is a very serious thing to hit a tiny baby. I certainly never did it again.” She stopped talking, and Katie waited for the moral. Her mother was full of admonitions. Maybe her mother meant to say she understood how Katie was feeling. Or she might be letting Katie know that one week was the limit. But Katie wanted to know how many times there had been when her mother might have hit her if there had not been the memory of that single harsh blow, struck too early.

Neither of them spoke for several moments, and Katie saw that her mother wasn't going to clear up any of Katie's questions if she didn't ask them. Katie wanted nothing from her mother that required the asking.

“You know I never liked Fisher,” her mother went on finally. Katie was expressionless. “It's not just that he came through her and collected you without a pause for courtesy—” Katie knew that was one of the reasons. “It's not that you haven't had a real home all these years, or that it was such a long time before the two of you married.”

Katie interrupted her mother. “What was it, exactly?”

June looked at her oddly, with what Katie decided was distaste. “It's that your relationship with Fish has done nothing to change you.”

“That's his responsibility?” Katie asked.

“I do think a good relationship helps you to grow up. Helps you to become a better you. Fisher doesn't seem to have been good for that. I assume the same is true the other way around.”

Katie thought of leaping, cat-like, in an arch, to scratch her mother's eyes out. “While you are here, I want you to think about it,” her mother said. Katie could feel her hands twitching.

“Think about Fisher's failure to mature me?”

“Think about what you want to be, and what you are.”

“You're incredible!” Katie spat. She was crazy to have come.

“No, I'm normal. Many straight people are perfectly normal.”

She didn't know that those categories were obsolete. Katie, who had risen stiffly from her pillows as her mother spoke, now fell back against them with a thud. Damn her! She struck the mattress with a fist. She had wondered what the price of her mother's hospitality would be. She had expected a little advice on mothering. But no, she was to consider alchemy. To be something she was not, when neither of them knew what she was.

5

The subject of marriage had come up when Katie and Fish had been together about a year. Not their marriage. His. She heard him talking to Winston about a girl in Bangkok, where he had spent four months. The two men were laughing about Fisher's “first wife.” Paper Lady, they called her, and Blossom Juice, and Dragon Wife. Her name was Chee Sum (Chum See? something like that). Katie tried to ignore the talk but couldn't get it off her mind. She confronted Fisher with it. He wouldn't tell her anything. He said there had been a girl in Bangkok, yes, but not a wife. There had also been the best restaurants in the world, he evaded, with fish caught that day, and peppers that put your eyes out. She wanted to know what was so funny about the girl. Fisher said she would never understand. She hadn't been there.

She pointed out that Winston hadn't been there, either. But Winston had been in the army, stationed in Japan. “Eyes up, eyes down,” Fisher laughed. “Forget it, Katie. It has nothing to do with you. Or with me, anymore.” She did try to forget, but his mother forwarded a letter to him that came from Bangkok. She came on him as he was reading it. She cornered Winston and demanded to know what he knew. Winston said there had been a civil ceremony of some sort, to save the girl's face. Her father wouldn't let her live at home anymore any other way. Fisher had spent a lot of time with the family. Her father owned a bus line in Bangkok and lived very well in a nice house on the outskirts of the city. Katie wanted to know where Fisher had met her. Winston said in a whorehouse. The girl wasn't herself a whore, but one of her friends was. Fish had once told a story about a whore who sat in a plate of mushrooms on a bar. That whore? Winston became edgy. “Shit, Katie, how would I know something like that?”

Winston hated being put in the middle. Katie thought he owed her some loyalty because she had known him first. She had met him in the bar where she worked, and had introduced him to Fisher's circle of friends. But he was a
man
. He was Fisher's friend now. They drank togther. They went to Hood River and picked apples together. They did finish work on sleazy tract houses together. Sometimes they were drunk and hateful. Katie went back to waitressing, to have someplace to go at night. She was ashamed to tell Ursula how lonely she was.

“Listen, Winston, a girl takes it seriously, and with a ceremony!” Winston said the girl knew it was for show. Fisher wasn't one to make false promises. But the girl had gone to the Americans, and that was when she found out it really did amount to exactly nothing. A joke on her, whatever her father had believed. Somehow she had obtained Fisher's home address. It had taken her a year, but here was the letter. Katie didn't think a girl could have managed that unless there was a baby. Fisher tore the letter up in front of Katie. “She wants a free ride,” he said. “And didn't you?” Katie retorted.

Some days later—she and Fisher weren't speaking since the letter scene—Katie came home and found Fisher gone. That was the first time he went off like that, though not the last. Winston, who was now sober, was cleaning her kitchen. He had picked up all the little flimsy blue pieces of overseas letter paper, some of them stuck against the base of the cabinets, or under the stove.

“What are you trying to make up for?” she asked, but there was more affection than resentment in her voice. Winston said Fish had gone to B.C. to see friends, Nam buddies who had settled on Sechelt. Katie panicked. She begged Winston not to leave. He was uncomfortable. “I'm not asking you to sleep with me,” she said. Men had no idea what women were about. “I need company.”

They went out for hot Indian food, and washed it down with a lot of bitter beer. “I can't figure him out, I'll never understand him,” she complained over the dirty table. “He contradicts himself all the time. I wish I had known him before he was in the navy, so I would know what is him and what is them. So I would know if he might change, when it all wears off.”

Winston shook his head. “Man, I wouldn't count on that.” He took her home and stayed with her. Maybe he felt sorry, or thought he did owe her something. He tried to help her understand. “There were those who thought you laid low. Shadow grunts. Others said keep moving. Different schools of survival. Fish still hasn't figured out which way to stay alive.”

That was when Katie realized how deep she was in with Fisher. She only cared what he thought so she could please him. She had to find out with delicacy, like a man on patrol. Only they were on the same side! It wasn't sabotage she had in mind. It was love.

If they could invent fast shallow-draft boats just for the waters he had patrolled; if they could send out cutters on barrier patrols in monsoon weather, there could be this, there could be love where there had been none before for either of them. Neither spoke of their parents. They came out of nowhere, needy in the way rootless people are, for touching without grasping. There was, in all the world, only each other, but they had never said that. “Someday I'll have told you everything.” Fisher did say that, once when he was high. Later she asked him if he had ever been in love. He was drunk and slightly miserable. “Aw shit,” he told her, “love is like the fucking Delta, man. You look down from the air and it looks so easy and open. So sweet. Then you get down on it and it's so dense it chokes you.”

The next time the subject of marriage came up was four years later. She thought she was pregnant. Right away she said she would rather be married than not, though she didn't mean it as an ultimatum. Fish agreed as readily. They signed papers in front of a minister someone at Ursula's office had suggested. The minister, who was wearing purple beads on a gray turtleneck shirt, couldn't believe they didn't want him to say anything. “They even say things to launch boats,” he said. Katie held her breath, waiting for Fish to say something. He would wonder what a minister who combed his hair across his bald spot would know about ships. Katie rushed around to get the minister a glass of Cold Duck. It was flat. Fisher had opened it and taken a big swig that morning. It turned out Katie wasn't pregnant.

Rhea was for real. Katie acted like it was a surprise, but she had been thinking about a baby since the false alarm. She had been careless. When she found out, she told Ursula first. Ursula bit her lip and said, “I guess I'll never have another one.” She already had two. Katie thought it wasn't a very helpful thing to say. She had wanted a little reassurance. Even a hug would have been nice.

The night Katie went into labor Fisher was drunk, and Katie, too embarrassed to call Ursula, took a taxi to the hospital. Fisher showed up early the next afternoon. The baby was bundled in a rolling crib by Katie's bed, and Katie was reading
Mother Jones
. “A divorce would be awful,” Fisher said first thing. He hadn't even taken a good look at the baby. “All those papers, and a judge. You'd have to do it without me.” Katie blinked. It took that long to figure him out. The marriage had meant more to him than to her. She had said she wanted to be married so he would know she didn't mind having his baby. He had thought marriage was full of promises—and he had meant to make them! Now he felt guilty. He was laying their marriage out like a pig on an altar. And he
was
guilty. She couldn't even depend on him for a ride. “Come on, look at her,” she told him, placid as a cow, ignoring his contrition and anxiety. She was not going to make a neat trade, conscience for baby. She wanted both. Besides, he did look at the baby, and he cried. Like any other father, he cried, and made promises neither of them would try to remember.

6

“I do love you,” she told him the next time he called. She had been at her mother's two weeks. She didn't have the courage to say she didn't want to come back. She did love him, she didn't want to go back. She could not explain it. She would write him about it. She would draw a line down the middle of a page. Write LOVE on one side, and THE REST OF IT on the other. Put it in an envelope and mail it. Hell, she could just put those titles down and he'd get the message. Getting divorced would be like that, all stamps and signatures and a great distance between them. She would stop talking to him. He would be humiliated. His worst doubts would be confirmed. He knew what he was really worth. He would go away from the people who knew them both, even Michael, and in a while she could go back if she wanted. She wanted Ursula to be her baby's aunt. She thought it would make them closer. She would act like Fisher had never been there. If they talked about him, it would be like he was dead.

Rhea lay propped in an infant seat on the dining room table. Sunlight streamed across the table and across her fat legs. Next to her seat, a big Tupperware bowl of rising dough glowed yellow. The wind was blowing across the bare landscape outside. A norther was due, but who could complain? The sun had been bright every day. When Katie's mother came home for lunch, she opened the blinds in Katie's room and pulled back the curtains. She didn't like it that Katie wanted to be in the dark.

One afternoon her mother brought home another baby girl about Rhea's age. It was the child of a friend's daughter. Katie, lying in bed, heard the strange baby's cries. She went into the room and saw the two older women, each with a baby in her arms. The new baby was hungry. Katie's breasts began to leak. Katie's mother was trying to give a bottle to the infant. “Is she used to nursing?” Katie asked, taking the baby from her mother. Her mother said she thought the baby took milk both ways. “Usually my friend keeps her while her daughter works part-time, but she broke a tooth and had to go to the dentist. The little dear is all off-schedule,” she said.

Katie took the baby over to the couch and undid her blouse to feed her. The baby took the nipple greedily. All Katie wanted to do was make the baby stop crying, but as the child sucked, Katie felt a wonderful sensation come over her. It was as if she lay in sunshine. She looked up contentedly, and saw her mother and her aunt staring at her. “Milk's milk,” she said. It was amazing.

That evening, as Rhea was sleeping, Katie went and sat by the crib for a long time, leaning her face against the slats and making long red marks on her forehead. She tried to see what was unique about her child. What made her Rhea and not some other baby. Fisher had asked her, “Do you think she looks like me? Like you?” He said he wished they had taken photographs. Katie said Rhea looked like a baby.

In the morning, Katie woke to a terrible taut pain in her breasts. The front of her nightgown was soaked. She looked out the window. It was late morning. No one had waked her to feed Rhea. She went into the kitchen and found her mother giving the baby a bottle. She had gouged a bigger hole in the nipple, and was giving Rhea a pasty cereal. Katie saw, on the counter, a cereal box and a case of formula. It was that easy. The oozing cereal ran down Rhea's chin and over the front of her bib. Katie turned away and poured herself a cup of coffee. She poured the cream carelessly, the cup was too full. The kitchen was noisy and bright; things hummed and clicked and bubbled. Katie bent over to slurp from the cup.