The Lit Report (6 page)

“You can ask her yourself,” Miki said. “She's coming over in about half an hour to give me a checkup. You can hang around if you like.” Miki got up and headed upstairs. “Call me when she gets here—or better yet, talk to her first and then call me. I'm gonna go lie down—I feel like crap.”

Dad rushed to help her back to bed, and I sat at the table, drinking ginger tea and formulating questions to ask Maria. By the time the doorbell rang, I had only thought of a few questions, but with any luck, Maria would be a talker. When I answered the door, the woman standing on the doorstep smiled and said, “Hi, Julia.”

I blinked. I'd heard stories about midwives—how they were all old Birkenstock-wearing hippies who made groovy
placenta stews after the babies were born and hadn't seen the inside of a hair salon since 1965. The woman standing on the front porch couldn't possibly be a midwife. For one thing, she was wearing stilettos; for another, she was Mark Grange's mother.

“Can I come in?” she said. “This bag's kinda heavy.” She had a big red leather bag slung over one shoulder, and she carried a Starbucks travel mug in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Her fingernails matched her bag.

“Sure, Mrs. Grange,” I mumbled as I stepped aside. Her stilettos clicked over the tile as she made her way to the kitchen. She looked at the pot of ginger tea and sniffed.

“She's still nauseous, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It's pretty bad.” I hesitated. “Um, Mrs. Grange...”

“Please, call me Maria—my last name isn't Grange anyway. It's Ramirez.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” She put her coffee and her phone on the table, kicked off her shoes and hefted the big bag onto a kitchen chair. Her feet were bare and her toenails were painted squid-ink blue. Ruth would approve. She hauled a coil-bound notebook, a blood-pressure cuff and a thing that looked like a walkie-talkie out of the bag and then took a sip of her drink.

“I'm always telling my clients to drink ginger tea but the stuff makes me gag.” She waved the travel mug at me.
“Full-fat, mondo caffeine, that's me. Don't tell Miki. She thinks this is chamomile tea.” She laughed and I could see the resemblance to Mark—wide smile, great teeth, dark curls, wicked gleam in big brown eyes.

“Um, Miki said it was okay for me to ask you a few questions before you do your checkup. She's really tired, and I've got this report for school...”

“Sure,” she said. “What do you need to know?”

“Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

—Louisa May Alcott,
Little Women

I don't remember how old I was when I first read
Little Women
, but I do remember that for years I begged my mother for a little sister. I conveniently disregarded the fact that she wasn't married, had no boyfriend, had never expressed a desire for another child and could not guarantee me a sister even if she wanted to. But I longed to be part of a big, warm, loving, noisy clan of females. I ended up with Ruth—the one-girl clan—and my own version of Jo's castles in the air. I even called my mother Marmee for a while, and I identified with all the sisters except Beth, the sappy one who dies. I still think of myself as a composite of the other three: ultra-responsible, kind Meg; selfish, spoiled Amy; smart tomboy Jo. Although I draw the line at ending up with a middle-aged German husband. I gave up on the
little sister thing a long time ago, but Ruth and I still build castles in the air. For years our castle has been a really funky (in a good way) two-bedroom apartment in a city far away. We work at fabulous, high-paying jobs and have fabulous, highly paid boyfriends who take us on fabulously expensive vacations and don't expect us to cook, commit or clean toilets. The details are vague and variable—sometimes we live in LA and work in the film industry; sometimes we live in New York and work in the fashion industry; sometimes we live in London and work in publishing—but Ruth always works in marketing, and I'm always writing, and we always have a red leather couch. We remain inseparable and childless. Well, at least we got one thing right.

I LEARNED A
lot from Maria the day I discovered that I was finally going to be a sister. A lot that I didn't need to know—like how long a midwife has to train and why some women give birth under water—and a lot that I did—like the importance of good nutrition and regular checkups. Lucky for me, Maria liked to talk and Miki stayed upstairs for a long time. When she finally did come down, I got to stay in the room while Maria examined her, which wasn't as weird as it sounds, since it didn't involve as much nudity as a day at the beach. Maria got me to record Miki's weight and blood pressure in the spiral notebook. Then she got out
the walkie-talkie thing—she called it a Doppler—and we took turns listening to the baby's heartbeat, which was pretty amazing. I could hardly wait to tell Ruth. Miki gave me a little lecture about how much better Dopplers were than old-school fetoscopes, which couldn't pick up a heartbeat until around twenty weeks. If there was anything wrong with the baby, you knew so much sooner, which I guess is supposed to be a good thing. She seemed really happy that I was taking an interest, and I felt pretty bad that what she interpreted as interest was really just research. I mean, yeah, I was going to have a baby brother or sister, which was pretty cool—but I knew they didn't really need my help. And Ruth did. Miki and Dad had Maria, and each other and all the money and medical help they needed. Ruth had me. And I needed all the help I could get. I also needed a regular stethoscope (for listening to Ruth's heart), a Doppler and a blood-pressure cuff, at the very least. I had no idea how I was going to get them, but I knew I'd figure it out.

When she was packing all her stuff up, Maria said, “Marco used to come and help me with my ladies—when I couldn't afford a sitter. His job was to write the weights in the book. Just like you did today.” She reached out and patted my hand. “Don't look so shocked. My ladies loved him— lots of kids are at home births, watching their little brothers and sisters be born—so they didn't mind Marco at all.
He was such a sweet little guy. It's been a long time since he came out with me. Too long.”

A sweet little guy. Mark Grange. Hard to imagine. The kid has a mouth on him like Tony Soprano on a bad day. His mother was pretty amazing, though. You could tell that Miki felt better just being around her. More relaxed. In control, but not in a bad way. They talked about due dates and shoe sales and vitamins and when Miki should stop working. Before Maria left she gave me her business card. On the back she had written the name of a book that she said would be good for my research. “Call me anytime,” she said. “Either of you. Anytime at all. My cell's always on.”

WHEN I GOT
to school on Monday, Ruth was back at her desk, looking, if anything, thinner and paler than she had on Saturday. Maybe the pregnancy glow came later. So far neither Miki or Ruth showed any signs of phosphorescence or incandescence or whatever.

“Glad to see you, Ruth,” said Mrs. Gregory. “Feeling better?”

Ruth nodded and muttered, “Stomach flu sucks.” She glared at me as if I was somehow responsible for making her lie to a teacher. Ruth has been lying to teachers since the first day of kindergarten, when she told Miss Fredericks that both Jesus
and
the Virgin Mary had appeared to her
in a grape popsicle. Mrs. Gregory had written the morning meditation on the board. It said:
Ultimately, the problems and difficulties of life are all spiritual
. We had two minutes to think about it and eight minutes to discuss it. Ruth leaned over and whispered, “Yeah, like getting drunk and knocked up is a spiritual problem.”

“Ruth,” said Mrs. Gregory, “please meditate silently for a few moments and then share your thoughts with us.”

We sat in silence for a minute or so, and then Ruth jumped to her feet, put her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room.

I stood up to follow her. “I'll go make sure she's okay. Maybe take her to the office.”

There are distinct advantages to cultivating an aura of responsibility. Mrs. Gregory just smiled at me and nodded and said, “Ruth is very lucky to have you for a friend, Julia.” She didn't know the half of it.

As I left the room, I could hear Rachel Greaves, who is a giant suckhole, saying that, like, war and world hunger were, like, spiritual problems because, like, if everyone just, like, followed Jesus it would all be, like, okay. It's just as well I had to leave the room. I wondered if she'd, like, think a punch in the nose was a, like, spiritual problem.

As I ran down the hall to the girls' washroom, Mr. Dooley's prayer for the safety of all those participating in the live nativity scene came over the
PA
. Last year the projectiles
hurled from passing cars had been many and varied: a half-eaten Big Mac, a filthy SpongeBob SquarePants that landed on the Baby Jesus, and that old favorite, a flaming bag of shit.

I found Ruth staring into the mirror over one of the sinks. Not putting on lip-gloss or repairing her mascara. Just staring.

“I can't do this,” she said.

“You have to,” I said. “We decided. And anyway, I found out a lot of stuff yesterday from Maria—stuff that'll help.”

“Maria?”

“Yeah—she's Miki's midwife.”

“You told a midwife about me?” Ruth turned away from the mirror and grabbed my arm. “I thought we weren't going to tell anyone. And what do you mean— Miki's midwife?”

“Calm down,” I said, pulling my arm away. “I didn't tell anyone anything. Miki's pregnant, she's got a midwife and I asked her a few questions. That's all. I said I was doing a report for school.”

“You're gonna be a big sister?” Ruth squealed. “That's awesome. Why didn't you tell me?” She gave me the kind of look that usually precedes something painful—like a head-lock or a really big hug. It could go either way. I was glad to have taken her mind off her nausea but not so glad to be about to pay the price.

“I just found out on Saturday—and Miki's really sick, just like you. Maria recommended ginger tea and saltine crackers, and I have to get a bunch of equipment and a notebook and...”

“Whoa...back it up, sister,” said Ruth. “You mean there's no, like, drug for this kinda shit? I hafta drink some fucking hippie tea and eat some lame crackers?”

“It can't hurt to try, can it?” I said.

THE NEXT DAY
she nibbled on a cracker and the day after that she sipped the tea that I brought in a Tim Hortons travel mug.

“Tastes like piss,” she said. “Hippie piss.”

But she drank it, and her desk was a mess of cracker crumbs. I knew she was feeling better because she rolled her eyes and snorted when I told her that I was working on a special prenatal diet and exercise regime for her.

“Regime, huh? Sounds military. Right up your alley.” Ruth saluted me as she swept the cracker crumbs onto the floor.

“At ease, recruit,” I said. Ruth giggled and snapped a hair elastic at my head.

“So here's the deal,” I continued. “You want to gain as little weight as possible and still have a healthy baby, right?”

Ruth yawned and said, “I guess.”

“So you have to eat right and exercise regularly.”

She groaned. “How am I gonna do that without anyone noticing? I mean, everyone knows I never exercise, and I never eat healthy food. I thought the whole idea was to, like, act normal.”

“Well, yeah, that's the tricky part,” I admitted. “But what if I do it too? The whole diet and exercise thing, I mean. It just doesn't seem fair to make you suffer alone. But when you think about it, who's really going to notice? Your parents? You don't eat with them anyway—not since Jonah left. And we'll still go to Mickey D's or DQ once in a while, just to keep up appearances—we just won't eat what we buy. We'll give it away to one of those guys who's always asking for spare change. Boost the karma quotient a bit. I'll tell my mom that you're going on a diet and I'm trying to be supportive. She'll love that. We'll go to the gym and stuff. No one will care. Trust me.”

“Yeah, right, “Ruth said as she scraped some black nail polish off her thumbnail. “I get fat and have a baby and you get skinny. Sounds fair. Wish I'd thought of that.”

She was right—the whole thing sounded insane and more than a little unfair. But what else could we do? And besides, I didn't want to be chubby, smart, reliable Julia anymore. I wanted to be a slimmer, hotter version of smart, reliable Julia. When Mark Grange had asked me when the baby was due, I'd laughed—not because it was funny, but
because I didn't want him to see how much it hurt. It hurt the same way it did when I was little and I was playing in Ruth's backyard kiddie pool with Ruth's brother. Ruth's mother had a bunch of her church lady friends over and she pointed at me and said, “Oh look—it's Jonah and the whale.” I couldn't help it that Ruth was pregnant, and I would help her any way I could, but if I lost a few pounds in the process, what was wrong with that?

EVERY YEAR IN
the week before Christmas vacation started, Westland High did a ton of fundraising for one Christian charity or another. This year it was something to do with getting new computers for the school library and giving the old ones to a shelter downtown, which in my opinion was just a justification for spending a shitload of money on
LCD
screens and ergonomic keyboards and wireless Internet technology. I mean, all our online activity at school is monitored, lest we download porn or go into dubious chat rooms, so what's the point? Anyway, there was the live nativity pageant, a carol concert, a cookie exchange and the annual teachers vs. students basketball game. The teachers were heavily favored to win this year due to their new coach, Brandy's stepdad, a seven-foot-tall ex-college basketball coach from Georgia. Brandy's mom met him on a Christian Internet dating site, and he moved here a few months ago. He's a cool guy.
I've thought of asking him if he has any friends back in Georgia who'd like to date my mom, but I'm not sure she's ready for a giant black boyfriend. Stewart and Marshall had tried to get permission to put on a casino-night fundraiser— they called it Betting on Jesus—but it was, as they say, no dice. Also no roulette, no poker and definitely no blackjack. They had to be content with taking bets on the game, and they did a booming business in the second-floor boys' wash-room, third stall from the left.