Lit (12 page)

T
he call comes on the ancient black rotary phone in the middle of the night at the Whitbreads’ Rhode Island beach house. Daddy’s dead. Five years after we’d refused both breathing apparatus and feeding tube, he’d gone on blinking.

He hadn’t wanted to die, which was contrary to all his stoic-sounding predictions about infirmity. On the back porch one night when I was home from college, he’d issued a long and drunken disquisition about how—if he became bedridden—I should never let some machine pump his lungs with air. He’d said, Don’t you let me linger.

Frogs were keeping time in air drenched with honeysuckle.

Your mama and sister won’t do this, but you do it. Get you a pillow and lay it over my face.

I sipped at my Lone Star beer, which he’d doctored with salt so it was akin to sea water.

Don’t you feel bad if I struggle.

I probably agreed just to get him to shut up. But whatever death he’d expected to slump into, he’d fought off.

On the dawn plane flying to Texas, I feel furious relief that he’s finally gone curling over me like a cold green wave, and in the backwash of that, icy shame. Wave after wave, I’m drenched and shamed that way till touch down on the tarmac between palms and razor grass.

Daddy’s dead. I no longer have to wander the corridors of corporate America feigning an expertise I in no way have, solely to pay for the bedpans and catheters and the slender white worms of gauze they pack into the bedsores on the backs of his heels as the bones try to cut their way free of flesh.

He’s dead. They nailed him in a box, and a long conveyor belt rolled him into a flaming oven even before my plane scraped down.

At the funeral home, I help up the steps my farm girl aunt, Daddy’s sister, who believes that in the final Rapture our graves will split and our bodies arise clothed in healthy flesh. She’s the only relative I felt kin to at a cellular level, and she holds out her shaking, bird-boned hand for me to steady herself, saying,
Take me to him
. Her milky blue eyes stare through gold-rimmed spectacles bought before Eisenhower.

Holding the one hand, I explain about the cremation, and her free hand—clutching a thin hankie imprinted with violets—flies to her gaping mouth, and she cries with an agony worthy of Job, You burnt my brother! (Ignorant, I was, till she cried out, of the trick Mother and Lecia had played on me by dispatching me to explain the cremation to Aunt Gladys.)

After the service at Mother’s house, I’m lowering to the table a bowl of mustard greens salty with hunks of fatback. Lecia asks, Where’s Warren? She’s upending a Tupperware carton of fried chicken onto a platter.

He’s gotta be in the bathroom, I figure.

Not long after that, my cousin Jim Ed—wearing, I believe, the same blazer from our granddaddy’s funeral when I was in sixth grade—asks, Where’s your good-looking husband? I’d like to shake his hand.

Jim Ed has retired from coaching football, and he talks about how Daddy had taught him to catch the pigskin two-handed.

My favorite cousin, Peggy Ruth, says, That man of yours oughta try these biscuits I brought.

I know—as my husband does not—that you thumb a hole in a cold biscuit and fill it with a stiff smidge of creamery butter and a lolly gob of cane syrup and bite down so your chin is not spared the squish. And I know that the maple syrup Yankees favor is a paltry stand-in for the burnt-sugar taste you squeeze from sugar cane, whose white inner pulp is sheathed inside purplish-brown bark I can peel with a pocketknife.

And where is Warren, anyway?

Outside, the hundred-degree air is sopping. But someone had seen him in jogging clothes, so I look up and down the road edged with bleached oyster shells. Under mimosa trees, I cross the neighbor’s yard, past the garage where I was raped as a child. I come to the culvert I had on the night of the assault imagined my blue corpse floating in (not because the neighbor boy who was the culprit might have thrown me there, but because part of me knew I was already over).

My silk blouse is wet at the pits, my pencil skirt at the waistband. I long to peel off my pantyhose. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I scan the landscape for Warren’s tall form: he’s nowhere. I’m not so much pissed that he’s vanished, just left town, which—given Mother’s penchant for flight—seems feasible even for Warren.

Eventually, we call Lecia’s house, and her housekeeper says she let Warren in to shower. He didn’t have a car to drive back to my mother’s so he stayed on. Hours later, when we come in, he’s on the sofa alongside the basketball playoffs with the remote in his hand.

(Did we fight about this? I can’t dredge it up. I’d started to mistrust what I wanted, since my therapy at the time involved sifting reasonable wants from the nutty ones rearing up from the past.)

On the plane, Warren and I fly back in a silence that I’ve learned to copy from him, and since birth offsets the agony of death like nothing else, I carry in me the feverish craving of a woman wanting to lodge some luminescent bubble of baby in my middle.

I take his hand to ask if we can start trying.

We’re not really in a financial position yet, he says. Maybe if I wind up taking over the curatorship in a year or two.

He pushes his glasses up his nose and fetches his book from the seat pocket, but I push on, saying, I’m teaching part-time now—a better schedule for a baby. The editing stuff I can do at night.

We haven’t even started saving for a house yet.

Why can’t your dad help us with a down payment? I ask.

Warren looks out the plane window at the arctic of floofy clouds.

I mean, he could take it from whatever you’ll inherit, no?

I doubt I’ll inherit anything, he says. There are six children. Just drop it, Mare.

I can’t accept the fact that Warren’s family ethos reflects Andrew Carnegie’s old saw about how inherited money has to be held back at the risk of withering ambition, but I sit in silence.

The plane flies on, carrying us in its hull. Warren stares off into the distance the rich enter when talk of money comes up.

But a woman whose third eye has begun to stare at some invisible baby is incapable of dropping the subject. So at the Labor Day clambake in the Rhode Island beach house—itself four times the size of what I grew up in—after intermittent nagging from me, Warren walks up to the white wicker chair containing his father and asks the old
man about helping us when I get pregnant. Only on the drive home will Warren even say aloud that the talk took place. But any details about it stay sealed in that head of his.

He’ll help us, Warren says.

The car passes a long stretch of beach roses in bloom.

How? I say.

I don’t want to go into it. It’s private.

I’m your wife, I say.

At a stoplight before the freeway, he puts the car in park and stares at me, saying, You got what you wanted. Now get off my back.

(Don’t think he spoke to me this way often. He didn’t, which is why—unfairly—it sticks.)

At that instant, I stop drinking cold turkey. I don’t remember it being hard. In fact, it’s the last easy quit I’d have. I give up liquor and cigarettes to purify myself for the baby taking cherubic shape in my head long before my body gets to it.

In some ways, I believe conception will be hard for me.
One of God’s little prototypes
, Hunter Thompson once said of some ne’er-do-well pal—
never even considered for mass production
. I pore over books about getting knocked up as if it weren’t standard order for every creature from cat to cockroach. Warren knows I’m logging my morning temperature, a sharp rise being a sign that you’ve dropped an egg into the chute. The first slightly overheated morning, it so happens that Hurricane Gloria has ripped down the phone lines on our block and shut down the library. Warren takes the bus home early like a man summoned to battle, and a month later, I miss my period.

Already? he says, staring at me across the huge steaks I’ve splurged on, the half-empty bottle of nonalcoholic wine.

You’re not excited, I say.

He considers the burgundy fizz in the glass. Tastes like grape syrup.

Not about the wine, you bonehead, I say. About the bun in the oven.

Baby Otis? Warren says. It’s great.

Pouring him more nonalcoholic wine, I say, You’re upset. You’re not excited.

He stares across the candlelit table.

No, he says. I mean, yes. It’s just…

I’ve Ziploc-bagged the telltale pregnancy thermometer and stuck it in a vase between us, tying it with a ribbon like a daisy. He touches it with a finger as if it might be hot, saying, How reliable is this? I mean, should you go to the doctor or something?

Despite his slight remove, I think what a perfect dad he’ll make, tempered as he is by gentleness. He once quoted to me Henry James’s three rules: Be kind, be kind, be kind. I’ve observed him with his sister’s kids, patiently tossing the whiffle ball underhand. They climb into his lap for stories.

But few men—no matter how tenderhearted—go so gaga over the unborn as an inseminated woman will. At night I read one baby book after another, and most spare weekend hours I spend pawing through garage sales for cast-off cribs and baby clothes. And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.

At Christmas, his father says he knew I was pregnant when I said no to wine, and many toasts are drunk to my health and the baby’s. My mother-in-law promises to ante up all the baby clothes and linens, and Mr. Whitbread says he’ll cover my half of the rent. But driving home, Warren’s silence fills the car.

What is it? I say.

Nothing, he says. It’s nothing.

You’re looking at me so sternly, I say. And truly staring at him, I see in his green eyes that some metal doors seemed to have slid shut.

Buckle your seat belt, he says. You need to start wearing a seat belt.

The car continues down the snowy and narrowing road.

I eat: french fries with gravy. Liver with greasy heaps of onions. Dried strawberries smudged with gorgonzola cheese, crackers slathered with fig jam. Stepping on the scale, I hear my doctor admonish that I’ll gain fifty pounds if I don’t slow down, but I couldn’t care less. How proud I feel shoving that giant globe of a belly through the subway turnstile.

But the more heft I have, the more elusive Warren seems to become, the more transparent, retreating into a void I stare into, studying him while he reads, repeatedly poking my head into his office the weekends he works.

Maybe he’s having an affair, Mother says. That’s how some guys react to fatherhood.

Mother! I say. Warren’s not like that.

Has he started drinking more? she asks, adding, His daddy could sure put it away.

Not everybody’s a sot, I say. More than two drinks and Warren gets pukey.

One night he leaves a message not to hold dinner, he won’t be home till ten. The car pulls into the garage, and he finds me sitting on the back steps.

Where were you? I say, reaching for the stair railing to pull myself up, belly first.

He unfolds from the hatchback, arms laden with books. School, he says.

What school? I say. For what? (Had we really not discussed this? Surely we did, but I don’t recall it that way.)

I told you I was starting school for my master’s. It’s paid for through work.

I thought next fall, after the baby came, I say.

You shouldn’t be out here without a coat, he says.

Don’t you think it’s bad timing? I say.

You’re one to talk, he says, gesturing to my belly.

Can you at least not take summer classes? The baby’ll come in June.

He sighs. Maybe this year. But I want to get it over with.

During the week, he leaves at eight in the morning, and three nights a week, he gets in after ten. Weekends, he always seems to be working on papers or that literary magazine he cofounded.

Lying next to him, my body swells as if hooked to a bicycle pump, and with each inch of girth, he floats further, and I began slowly to shift my gaze away from his back. I start to stare inward to the pearlescent mystery I’m carrying. Some nights I tell myself the birth will bring Warren back to me.

(And maybe—in his version of events—he’d report that I’d studied baby books with a Talmudic intensity, hardly reading anymore the poetry he was devoted to. The bigger I got, the lower my IQ, I swear. It’s not politic to say so, but hey. Maybe Warren was telling himself the birth would bring me back to him.)

One day, as I meticulously fold and refold minuscule T-shirts and onesies in the trance of the deeply unprepared, the phone rings. And a woman’s voice says the sentence I’ve been waiting to hear for so long, I’m almost deaf to it. So obsessed am I with the upcoming birth that she has to repeat it several times.

I said that we’d like to publish your book of poems.

Okay, I say, having become a farm animal at this point. With the phone to my ear, I slide the top off a box of chocolates my sister sent and start poking them in search of caramel.

What do you mean,
Okay?
the editor says. We’d like to publish your book next year.

That’s good, I say, poking as one piece gushes white goop, so I pass over it.

You don’t sound very excited, she says.

I’m having a baby, I say dreamily. And truly the notion of a book has grown misty.

Right this second?

Soon, I say. At that instant, my fingernail punctures chocolate and hits caramel. What does she need from me? The names of anybody dumb enough to blurb it. A dust-jacket photo laying around.

I chew my caramel, satisfied as a brood sow in a mud wallow. Neither good nor ill can reach me.