Lydia decided that since Maurey was barefoot and pregnant in the snow, I should carry her into the Pierces’ yellow frame house.
“I can walk,” Maurey said.
“She can walk,” I said.
Lydia stayed firm. “We’ve done enough, I don’t want pneumonia added to the list.”
So I stood next to the car and Maurey slid over to where I could reach one arm under her knees and the other on her back. After she put her right hand around my neck, I counted three and jerk-curled her up. It was neat in that her back and legs where I touched them were naked. I hadn’t grabbed flesh in two weeks, so I immediately developed a stiffie and Maurey got the giggles.
“You can’t carry me.”
“Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
“You’re gonna drop me on my ass.”
I made a Cheetah sound. There’s a limit on how much tension kids can handle before they revert.
We staggered up the driveway in a lurch to the right a few steps, lurch to the left motion. Maurey tickled my ears.
“Quit fooling around and take her inside,” Lydia said.
“Who’s fooling around?”
At the door, Lydia didn’t volunteer any help, which made our entrance a Three Stooges routine. I cracked the screen with my right hand, twisted into the opening, then Maurey turned the knob and I backed into the door with a crash that caught Petey in the face.
Petey sat down hard and howled. I dropped Maurey’s feet maybe a tenth of a second before her back so at least we avoided the sprawl-on-the-floor thing. She looked down at my jeans and slapped me lightly on the stiffie.
“I told you no more of those.”
“I can’t control it.”
“You better learn.”
Petey held his face and screamed. “I’m half-dead, I’m half-dead.”
Coming through the door, Lydia observed the scene with her usual disdain. Telling us the truth had made her more superior than ever.
She said, “Shut up, little boy.”
Petey’s howl stopped like she’d cut it with a knife. He stared in disbelief.
“Get off the floor. You’re behaving like a child.”
“I am a child.”
“Don’t brag.”
Petey stood up, thought about bratting out on Lydia, but changed his mind and faced Maurey instead. “I’m not supposed to be alone all day.”
“You lived.” Maurey headed for the back of the house.
“Mama’s gonna get you when she comes home. Hey, you’re naked in back.”
Maurey turned. “So?”
“Mama’s gonna get you.”
“Fuck Mama.” Maurey smiled at us. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.”
Lydia beelined for the kitchen with a mesmerized Petey in her wake. She’d wanted to criticize Annabel’s homemaking ever since she heard about the recipe box full of alphabetized index cards. I figured she was in there making a cleanliness inspection, looking for cracks in Annabel’s Lysol defense system, and I didn’t really care to watch Lydia probe for character flaws. She does enough of that with me. But standing alone in the living room felt squirrelly, so I eventually followed on in.
Lydia was standing on a chair, running her fingertips across the tops of shelves. She looked at her hand and said, “How could a woman like this get knocked up?”
I’m sure Petey had never seen a grown-up stand on a chair—Annabel had stools. “Mama’s gonna be mad at you,” he said with no conviction. “She doesn’t like people touching her stuff.”
Lydia looked way down on Petey. “In the grand scheme of things, little boy, no one in the whole world cares what your mother likes or doesn’t like.” She stepped down, walked to the refrigerator, and glared inside. “Everything is dated in ink on little strips of masking tape, the leftovers are clearly labeled. I’d die before I’d live like this. Where’s the recipe file?”
I pointed to a flowered file box on the cabinet between a pair of crocheted oven mitts and a framed sampler that read, No matter where i sit my guests, they always like my kitchen best.
“Don’t touch that,” Petey yelped, too late.
Lydia dragged the chair back over from the shelves to the linoleum-topped kitchen table. She sat down and pulled out all the index cards. “Look at this—chipped beef and cheese, chocolate pie, Cindy’s mother’s venison casserole, cornbread, corn pudding—the woman is a maniac.”
Lydia divided the stack and shuffled cards like we were waiting to play crazy 8s. “This’ll screw her up more than the abortion.”
Petey’s wide eyes never left Lydia’s hands as she shuffled. “What’s a bortion?”
“Dirty oven, kid. Like when meatloaf splatters and you have to scrape out the grease.” Lydia thinks she’s so cute sometimes.
“My mama’s oven is never dirty.”
“Was today.”
Maurey appeared at the door wearing jeans and a black sweater with her hair pulled back in a barrette. She carried a leather-looking suitcase in her right hand and a tan overnight bag in her left. A stuffed bear poked out of her right armpit.
Petey tattled. “The lady touched Mama’s stuff.”
Maurey looked at Lydia. “Let’s go.”
“You’re not supposed to leave me alone after dark. I might get in trouble.”
“Mom will be along in a couple hours. Meantime, burn up the house if you feel like it.”
I felt sorry for the kid. All his limits had been shot down and he looked ready to cry. Since Lydia and Maurey were being ugly, I opted for nice. “She’s kidding. Don’t really burn the house up.”
“But I’ll be alone.”
“Go watch Rocky the Flying Squirrel.”
Petey slammed both hands on the table. “Rocky’s not on on Saturday afternoon, stupid.”
Lydia telephoned Hank, who brought over a couple of frozen pizzas—sausage with mushroom and Canadian bacon. It was odd, like zap, Maurey was part of the family and always had been. She helped me wash the dishes without being asked. Hank took out the trash. Lydia painted her toenails black.
After supper we all four hung out in the living room, doing whatever we would have done anyway even if Maurey hadn’t bumped into her mom at an abortion clinic. I sat in the elk-gut chair with Alice in my lap, reading The Once and Future King and Tom Swift and His Deep-Sea Hydrodrome. Maurey brought a pillow from our bedroom and sat on it with her back against the couch. Her book was The Capture of the Golden Stallion by Rutherford G. Montgomery. Unlike me, Maurey actually made progress in her reading. I sat staring at the same page—96—in both my books, trying to understand sentences with migratory words.
Lydia perched on her feet on the couch, flipping through a New Yorker, while next to her Hank watched “Gunsmoke.”
“Miss Kitty is frigid,” Lydia said.
“She’s just white, all white women look frigid.”
“She’s frigid.”
Our bedroom—had a creepy ring to it. I’d never shared a room with anyone. At the manor house I had four bedrooms I thought of as mine. What hacked me off and made the words swim was that no one ever discussed anything. When we drove onto the GroVont Highway, Maurey had said, “Swing by my place and I’ll pick up some clothes.”
Then we came home and she asked me which drawers were hers. The stuffed bear lay propped against the headboard, so I figured she was sleeping in the bed, but where was I sleeping? Why hadn’t anyone said, “Mind if I stay at your house tonight?” “What’s Buddy going to do?” “Gee, Maurey, would you like to live in my room?” “I think maybe I’ll have the baby after all.”
Instead we washed the dishes, left them to dry in the drain-board, went in the living room and plopped down for the evening. Maurey said, “I’m getting a pillow from our bedroom. Want anything while I’m up?”
“No.”
At 10:30 I went out to the kitchen for Lydia’s Gilbey’s and she went to the bathroom for Valium.
“Hold out your hands,” Lydia said.
Maurey, Hank, and I held out our hands so Lydia could shake a little yellow pill into each one. She said to Maurey, “We don’t do this every night, understand, but today was special.”
“A day I won’t forget,” Maurey said.
The three of us shared a Dr Pepper to wash down our Valiums while Lydia knocked hers off with a shot of gin.
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she said.
Hank said, “Sleep with your mouth shut or your spirit will fly around the world and might not be back for your awakening.”
Maurey went to the bathroom and I put on my pajamas, then sat in the chair in front of my typewriter. By pressing down on all the keys at once I made them stick together up by the ribbon. A few fell back, but if I really slammed down on a key it usually stuck in the bunch. I got every one but three—Q, ;, and 9—jammed.
Getting under the sheets and waiting didn’t feel like the thing to do. She might have me planned for the couch, or maybe she thought we’d sleep with our heads at different ends. It wasn’t a day to take anything for granted.
Maurey came in wearing a white flannel nightgown. She’d brushed her hair and looked thirteen and beautiful. On account of the pregnancy, her breasts were growing by the day.
She folded the clothes she had been wearing and put them on the dresser. “Which side of the bed do you sleep on?”
I looked at the bed. It had a sky blue spread with thin white lines running lengthwise. “I never thought about it. I just sleep.”
“Can I have the outside? Lately, I pee and throw up at strange times of night.”
“Sure.” I turned back the blankets and got in. We’d been together in my bed plenty of times, but I always knew what was going to happen before. “Can I see where the man shaved you?”
Maurey pulled her white nightie up above her hips and looked down at herself. Her crotch was a fold in a flat area at the top of a gentle rise. The distance from her navel to the fold was farther than I’d imagined, like one belly above the belly button and one belly below it. You couldn’t tell she’d ever had hair there.
“Weird, huh?” Maurey said.
“I don’t know, it looks okay.” I reached out to touch it, but she dropped her nightie.
“No touching.”
“I just wanted to feel the stub.”
“You thought you could get me wet and I’d do something I told you I wouldn’t do.”
“Maurey, I’m surprised you think that.”
“Here’s the rules. No kissing and no touching the spot. If you try to kiss me it will ruin everything.”
I’d been afraid those were the rules. Maybe after the Valium kicked in she would change her mind.
Maurey slid under the covers next to me. We lay on our backs with our shoulders almost together, only I couldn’t see her face because the bear was between our heads.
We listened to each other breathe. In the kitchen, the refrigerator kicked on, and with a mew Alice jumped on the bed and settled between us at knee level.
“She finally seems weaned,” Maurey said.
“Are we going to keep the baby?”
Her back flinched. “I’m not thinking about that tonight.”
“What’s your dad going to say about you living here?”
“I’m not thinking about anything tonight, okay, Sam. Don’t ask me any more questions.”
Nobody said anything for a long time. The front of my forehead started to wooze out with the familiar approach-of-Valium feeling.
Maurey giggled.
“What?” I asked.
“I can sleep with you but I don’t know if I can sleep with those pajamas.”
I’m feeling touching togetherness and she’s laughing at my sleep wear. “What’s wrong with my pajamas?”
“They’re paisley.”
“Grandma Callahan bought them for me.”
“Don’t they give you nightmares?”
She was beginning to sound like Lydia. “Do you want me to get up and change them?”
“I’d sleep better if you did.”
I crawled over Maurey and went to the closet and dug out a pair of pajamas the same color as a pack of Doublemint chewing gum. They were meant for summertime and the bottoms were short, which showed my knees. Maurey stared at the ceiling while I undressed and dressed. I know because I took a peek when I was naked to see if she cared and she didn’t.
After I changed I crawled across and settled in on my back again. Alice turned around twice to arrange herself. Maurey moved the bear from between us. She rolled over on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, and stared at me.
“Do you think you can keep from kissing me or touching the spot?”
“I think so.”
“You better be sure.”
“Okay, I’m sure,” I said, even though I wasn’t.
“Will you hold me then.”
That surprised me. I hadn’t learned to separate affection from sex yet. I put my right arm under her and my left arm over her and she curled up with both hands balled into fists between our chests. Her hair was up against my nose.
Maurey mumbled. “I’m so tired. I’ve never been so tired in my life.”
Something large and heavy crashed in Lydia’s room. Maurey’s head came up an inch off my pillow. “What was that?”
“The grown-ups.”
Her head went back down. “I wanted to watch the ten-thirty pint thing. You’ve told me so much about it.”
“It’s no big deal. Go to sleep now.”
“God, I’m tired.”
Maurey’s hair smelled good as she slept. I listened to her breathe, thinking about how alive she was and our baby was still alive. I wondered about the crash from Lydia’s room. It had sounded like a chest of drawers being dropped from several feet above the floor. Tom Swift’s hydrodrome was nothing but a diving bell on legs. I could have written a better book. I would someday. I’d write a science fiction book about Indians—Hank on the planet Jupiter.
Pretty soon my right arm went dead as Otis’s leg. Then the Valium took hold and I finally went under.
The next morning I showered with cold water. We had a two-person water heater which knocked like someone wanted out whenever you turned a hot tap. I woke to the sound of it knocking, went in the kitchen to make coffee, and while I was there, Hank came out of the bathroom and Maurey went in.
Hank’s eye was swollen and a flesh-colored Band-Aid—not his flesh color—covered the bridge of his nose. My guess would have been king-hell pool cue across the face, but Lydia didn’t own a pool cue.
He walked into the kitchen and grunted.
I pointed to the coffeepot.
“What was in the pill she passed out?” Hank asked.
“Valium, sort of a tranquilizer-sleeping pill.”
He poured a cup, put in cream, and stirred with a Bic pen. “Caused me trouble.”
I had to pee so I knocked on the bathroom door and went in. Maurey was behind the shower curtain where I couldn’t see anything but a blur.
“Don’t you knock?” she asked.
“I knocked.”
“Knock louder.” The shower went off and Maurey’s hand reached out for a towel. The problem was that I still peed a mainstream with a 90-degree-angle shooter, which I’d adapted to by holding my left hand off to the side there. The pee ran down my fingers into the toilet, I washed my hands well before leaving the can, and no one was the wiser. Only Maurey was the wiser when she stepped from the shower, toweled armpits to thighs, and caught me peeing into my hand.
“You’re pissing on yourself.”
“No, I’m not. I’m shy and hiding dick from you.”
“You’re pissing into your palm.”
“Don’t be a squirrel, Maurey.”
“The kid who catches his own pee calls me a squirrel?”
Lydia pushed through the door in the same wraparound towel getup as Maurey. She had creases on her face and exhausted-looking hair.
Maurey wanted to tell the world. “Sam pees in his hand.”
“All men piss on themselves and shit on women. Get out, both of you.”
“It’s my turn.”
“Out.”
Didn’t take a lot of brains to connect last night’s crash, Hank’s Band-Aid, and Lydia’s mood. Maurey and I went to our room and shut the door.
She unwrapped the towel and sat on the edge of the bed with her head bent over, drying her hair. “Lydia’s unhappy about something.”
“We better eat breakfast at the White Deck.”
I couldn’t get over how completely nonmodest she was about being naked in front of me. She wasn’t flirty or shy or anything—like we’d been raised since birth getting dressed together. Guys in a locker room are more body-spooked than Maurey was around me.
I sat in the typing chair watching her. Her rib cage was a lot lighter than mine. The smallpox vaccination bump on her arm was smaller. She twisted the towel around her head in a maneuver males can’t do and looked at me. “What are you staring at?”
“You don’t look pregnant.”
Maurey stood up facing the mirror. From my chair, I saw her real front and her front in the mirror. Pushmi and Pullyu seemed to be staring at her behind, like when the eyes in a painting follow you around.
Maurey reached out and touched her womb area in the mirror. “My boobs hurt, my feet are swollen, I’m nauseous and pee all the time, my mom had an abortion yesterday.”
“That’s true.”
So I took a cold shower and we escaped to the White Deck. We left an ugly silence in the kitchen. Hank stared at the floor and sipped coffee. Lydia stared at Hank and smoked cigarettes. Maurey and I could no more have stayed in that house than we could have taken back yesterday.
First thing, right off, the instant Dot walked up to the table, Maurey blabbed, “Sam pees in his hand.”
How would she feel if I said, “Maurey’s got a shaved thing.”
Dot did the usual spontaneous gale of laughter. “Jimmy does too. He’s like a garden hose with a nail hole on one side and a drip off the bottom.”
“I don’t drip off the bottom.”
“Good for you, Sam.”
Maurey wanted embarrassment and wasn’t getting any. “Peeing on yourself is nothing to be proud of.”
There’s not an actress in the world who could fake Dot’s laugh. If someone made a 45 of her laughing I’d buy it and play it every morning.
“All men pee on themselves,” Dot said. “That’s why toilets have the sandwich seat that they lift and never put down. Gives them a bigger target.”
She poured us coffee and we went to work with the sugar and cream. A fly landed on top of the sugar dispenser and Maurey tried catching it and missed. “My dad doesn’t pee on himself.”
“They all do,” I said, even though I hadn’t known up until Dot said so. I never watched anyone urinate. “Even John Wayne pees on his fingers.”
“John Wayne never peed on himself.”
I tried to remember John Wayne movies while the fly made another attack on the sugar. It crawled up under the flap and down into the glass a little. Maurey grabbed the dispenser and shook it hard. We watched the fly buzz around above his sea of sugar, totally disoriented. I went into an empathetic fantasy where I was the fly who only wanted sugar, but when I got it someone trapped me in glass and shook me to smithereens.
“John Wayne doesn’t pee at all,” Dot said. She didn’t seem disturbed by the fly in her sugar shaker.
Maurey thumped it down. “Everyone pees.”
Dot reached over and with her thumb held open the top flap. We watched the fly walk around inside, waiting for him to stumble on the escape door. I couldn’t figure where the fly came from in the first place. It was twenty degrees outside. He—or his ancestors—must have spent the whole winter in the White Deck.
Dot said, “John Wayne’s made I bet fifty movies, and have you ever seen him take a leak once?”
The fly found the hole and escaped. I felt like I’d survived a trauma. “I never saw anyone in a movie take a leak.”
“Don’t you wish life was like the movies,” Maurey said.
She ordered cinnamon toast and I had pancakes. Cinnamon toast and coffee wasn’t the thing for our future child, but we hadn’t reached the stage where I could nag, “Think about the baby, dear.”
When Dot brought out the plates, she raised an eyebrow and looked at Maurey. “Well?”
“No.”
Dot’s face lit like the sun. “You didn’t go through with it?”
“No.”
“I’m so happy.”
Maurey sprinkled extra sugar on her toast. “You never told me you’d be happy if I chickened out.”
Dot slid into the booth next to me and patted my hand. “Honey, ever’one says, ‘Do what you think best, it’s your body,’ but they’re all pulling for you to keep the baby, they’re pleased when you do.”
“Why is that?”
“That’s the way the world is. Life is neater than anything else.”
For all her grins and giggles, Dot was a deep thinker too. Life is neater than anything else. I could hardly wait to find some paper and write that down.
“So, are you going to keep the baby?” Dot asked.
Funny how virtual strangers can ask about things that would be personal coming from loved ones. Maurey wouldn’t give me an answer to that question, but to Dot she shrugged both shoulders and said, “I guess so.”
Made me happy. “Yippee.”
Maurey swung in the booth. “You’re happy I’m going through with it?”
“Sure, I’m ready to be a father.”
“Sam, you’ll turn fourteen after it’s born.”
“I’m ready.”
“And you’ve never lived in a small town. Things are liable to get ugly around here come summer.”
Dot nodded in agreement.
“I don’t care.”
“If my boyfriend doesn’t break your legs, my dad probably will.”
I paused a moment on that one. “You still have a boyfriend?”
“Whose jacket am I wearing?”
“You could give it back?”
“No.”
We zipped into intense eye lock until Dot got nervous and slid from the booth. “I’ll leave you young parents to yourselves.”
“What about me?” I asked.
“We’re friends.”