God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (10 page)

“There is nothing magical about a vagina.” It actually says that in the ad. All I can say is, with that attitude, it’s a good thing this guy invented this fake one, because I can tell you authoritatively the number of real ones he’s likely to have access to. He does go on, however, to add—although somewhat as an afterthought—that there is also nothing magical about a penis. Everything’s got a purpose, according to our authority here, and it’s all pretty cut and dried. He’s got the theory on what goes where and why, but we can’t help thinking he just hasn’t had much fun with it all. He points out that the penis is designed to sense pressure and friction; beyond that, its tactile abilities are somewhat limited. The penis is therefore “unable to distinguish whether it is in a vagina or a vaginal substitute.” It seems that the greatest tactile organ is the tongue, followed by the fingers. These two organs, it seems to me, can pretty much always tell where they are, what they’re doing, and with whom or what. If, for example, you put a screw in your mouth or hold it in your fingers, chances are excellent that you can tell without looking what you’ve got in either location. Put a screw on a penis, however, and it will be completely baffled—not a clue. So if the lights are off or the eyes are closed, the penis, according to this guy, will be happy just to be
somewhere,
and it won’t have the foggiest idea if it’s in the real thing or a fake.

In our experience, we have found that it often cannot tell if it’s in its home vagina, where it belongs, or has inadvertently wandered off into a neighbor’s. If your personal mate is of the wandering variety, this might be just the thing to keep him home; although why you’d want to is another, more important issue. How about a Vaginal Substitute as a nice parting gift? Best wishes for the future and all that. It always pays to be nice.

12

What to Do When the Rabbit Dies

 
I
know a lot of y’all are young and cute, which also puts you at childbearing age. Let me tell you, dear ones, nothing will tear asunder that young cuteness quite like pregnancy and child rearing. I kept a journal and wrote voluminous letters while I was frittering away my own young cuteness being pregnant. Somehow I knew these records would be useful in my lifelong mission to help others. (Actually, I wasn’t even young and cute then—I was thirty-five.)

FROM MY JOURNAL, JULY 1987.
Well, fine. Been married an hour and a half and I’m pregnant, thank you. Yes, it’s true, and I certainly hope you’re satisfied. The blessed event should be just in time to screw up any plans I had for Mardi Gras, not to mention everything else for the rest of my entire life. This is a fine mess.

This is one of those things I had anticipated reading about but never actually doing myself, you know. It’s the kind of thing that happens to other people, like an earthquake or the headline
FIEND SEIZES HATCHET, SLAYS SIX
or when your mother says, “Put that down, you’ll put your eye out.” Never do you actually believe that one day you’ll be wearing a patch where your eye used to be. Or airplanes. Not for a minute do I believe they fly. The thing weighs a billion pounds with all those lard-bucket people wedged up in it—here’s something flying soon? No, you just pile up in there and, somehow, magically, you end up in a different place, sometimes even where you want to be.

Well, I figured babies were sort of the same principle. I was the baby in my family, and the only other one I ever knew much about was my sister Judy’s son, Trevor—at thirty-something he’s so old now we are forced to tell people that he is our little brother so they don’t think we’re old enough to have raised him. He’s the only baby I’ve ever been around, and he just sort of turned up, or so it seemed to me, still a child myself when he was born. Who knew? Well, apparently plenty of people—but who believed them? I never thought this would happen to me.

The moment I conceived, I gained fifteen pounds—in my
back
. Seriously, I immediately got this back like a walrus. I am now gaining weight at the rate of eleven pounds an hour, and the doctor, witty guy—a good friend of mine actually, named Rascal Odom—is pleased to announce that the baby is the size of a golf ball, max. I am so pleased.

The mood swings are pretty entertaining, I must say. Judy warned me about these. She said at least ten times a month she would go totally berserk at something her bothersome husband, Ole Shep, did or said (such as walking in the room and saying, “Hello”), and she would then announce in no uncertain terms that she was not putting up with it anymore, whereupon she loaded up everything (we’re talking everything—dishes, linens, clothes, food, the works), piled it all in her car, and drove around for an hour—only to return, haul it back up three flights of stairs, and unpack it, awaiting the next provocation. [Judy was extremely young and way too energetic for her own good at the time; just reading about it wears her out today.] Well, no way am I packing up anything. No, the whole point of a mood swing is to inflict pain, fear, and/or consternation on your mate. Packing up stuff myself would seem ineffective toward that end. I prefer to stay put and say hideous things to the unsuspecting husband, Moon Pie. Trust me, no one ever had a mood swing while alone.

My favorite response to anything that takes me by surprise or in any way annoys me in my newly impregnated state is to say, in tones ranging from a piercing shriek to a pitiful whimper, complete with trembling lower lip: “I’m just going to have an abortion and run away!” I must confess that after the first five thousand times of saying it, it does seem to have lost some of its effectiveness. Now Moon Pie shrugs and says something irksomely rational like “Well, okay, but you still have to have a new transmission.” It sort of robs the moment.

Fortunately, I have not been afflicted with morning sickness. Actually, luck had very little to do with it. Not for anybody am I puking on a regular basis. I advised this baby if there was any unexplained nausea around here, I would know what to do about it. We understand each other perfectly and are thus managing to coexist peacefully in
my
body thus far.

What the name will be is a hot topic of conversation. A number of my friends want me to use the first letters of their first names to name the baby. If I do that, we’ll have JAWS Conner Browne. My diminutive friend, Cynthia Hewes, wants it to be Cynthia Hewes Conner Browne. Michael Rubenstein wants Michael Rubenstein Conner Browne. I kinda like Peabo. You don’t run across a Peabo just every day, now, do you? I had suggested it to Vivian White for her daughter, but she picked Mallory instead, so it’s still available.

Actually, this baby is not mine. I am only having it for some friends. The girls in my aerobics class wanted one. They’re all going to take turns keeping it. They swore they would.

One has to wonder about the people who keep saying to me how interesting they found all the changes in their bodies when they were pregnant. It is interesting in the same light that it would be interesting if you suddenly started to grow a tail, green scaly skin, and webbed feet. Yes, you would get up every morning and examine your body in the mirror and think to yourself, “My, my, isn’t that interesting?”

Everyone, even people you don’t know, beams at you and rubs your belly.

One bright spot in all this is the remarkable development taking place in my brassiere. One of the characteristics long associated with images of me is the sad state of affairs, tit-wise. Well, weep no more, honey chile. You sho’ is got some titties now!

FROM A LETTER TO MY SISTER, JUDY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1987.
Dear Judy, Thanks so much for withholding all useful information regarding pregnancy, since I am quite certain I’d have opted out if I’d had any idea! For one thing, I have discovered that the only people who can dress like otherwise normal adults during pregnancy are girls aged eight to eleven. This seems strangely incongruous to me, since it is generally frowned upon in polite society for women of such tender age to become pregnant. Why have the clothing manufacturers devoted so much time and energy to designing and producing fashions for such a relatively small (I would assume and certainly hope) population? I haven’t seen a pregnant eight-year-old in I don’t know when, but I can tell you, if you run across one, you can take her into any maternity store in Jackson, Mississippi, and dress her to the nines. The very largest-sized garments in every maternity store I’ve been in wouldn’t fit me if I weren’t pregnant and weighed one hundred pounds less. These are the tiniest little clothes I have ever seen. And the undersizing isn’t the only problem I’m having; the styling is absurd. Everything has a high neck, a Peter Pan collar, and three-quarter-length sleeves. What is the deal? If I could even fit in the stuff, which I can’t, I’d look like a giant fifth grader. For once in my life, I have a chest worthy of note and they want me to stuff it in a Peter Pan collar? Let’s have some decolletage. Let’s be cleaving while the cleaving’s good.

You remember my bosom buddy since the seventh grade, Rhonda Abel? She was in town last week from Colorado—she’s pregnant, too, and we discussed the pressing need to start gearing up for Momdom big time. We just don’t feel comfortable that we look the part. You have to understand, we have been planning this for years. We still have notes we wrote each other from the seventh grade on, complete with our own artistic renderings, on this very subject. We decided that it was time for her to go on and bleach her hair out, start growing a big hairy mole on her cheek and wearing polyester double-knit pantsuits. She recalled that our early lore required me to dye my own hair asphalt-black and wear rhinestone cat-eye glasses with a jeweled chain to hold them around my neck when I remove them. We decided that in order to be ready for action when her anticipated son, Sparkplug, and my own BoPeep are school-aged, we should have Suburban Mom Practice. We’re going to get up and go ride around in early-morning traffic with our hair in pink foam rollers, wearing chenille robes and fuzzy slippers. We think a cigarette flopping off the lower lip is absolutely mandatory for the look we are trying to achieve. We’re going to hunch up over the steering wheel and look real pissed off, and every few minutes, we’ll reach over and act like we’re beating the crap out of somebody in the backseat. You being a mom with many years’ experience on us, we would welcome any other pointers you might have to offer us.

Your Pregnant Baby Sister,
Jill

FROM A LETTER TO JUDY, JANUARY 26, 1988.
Dear Judy: By the time you read this (hopefully), BoPeep will have made her long-anticipated arrival. If she has not, Moon Pie will likely be found hacked into many dime-sized pieces and scattered along the interstate. Pregnant women tend to get a little testy as the Time draws nigh, don’t they? I have entered the confinement state of pregnancy—that’s when you lie on a bed in a dark room, propped at all angles by massive pillows, and at regular intervals stare into space, weep, and eat. This cycle is broken only when one makes a visit to the powder room to empty one’s bladder, which has by now apparently shrunk to the size of an underdeveloped acorn. Swelling is accomplished with no effort whatsoever on the part of the swellee.

I don’t leave the house except to go to the grocery store or the Dairy Queen, but I am easily recognized: I look like a cross between Aunt Jemima and the Michelin Man. Unclothed, I am a fugitive from
National Geographic
. My face looks like a reflection in a car fender or like it was painted originally on a small balloon that has now been inflated to its utmost capacity.

Everyone asks, “How much weight have you gained?” I’d say it is pretty much split on where the emphasis is put—some favor “How much
weight
have you gained?” while others lean more toward “How much weight
have
you gained?” with a few holdouts for “How much weight have you
gained?
” I profess no preference for any of them: They all piss me off in a really big way. I mean, like I would tell if I
knew!
I honestly don’t know. I get on the scales backward at the doctor’s office and refuse to look.

This started the first month when I hopped on and was told that I had already gained fifteen pounds and would be needing to get some kind of grip on the situation. I would weigh myself every time I went through the locker room at the Y, and it would fluctuate all day long, like six or seven pounds a whack. It was making me completely nuts and I decided that I would have an eating disorder after nine months of that mess. So next visit, I told the doctor that, being six feet tall, I didn’t think I was in any danger of going toxemic on him—worst case is I would be really fat—and that I was not willing to spend so much time fixated on my weight. Therefore I would be getting on the scales backward every month, and nobody was to be allowed either to tell me what I weighed or comment on it in any way. The good doctor Rascal gave me as stern a look as he could muster, being handicapped as he is by an advanced case of sweetness, and said that he wasn’t really very happy with that proposal. Whereupon I gave him a much sterner look (not being at all hampered with sweetness) and said that if I had to pick somebody to be unhappy for the next nine months—me or him—I could pretty much assure him that he was the hands-down winner.

I must say it has greatly improved my mood regarding doctor visits. Boy, does it make the other pregnant women mad, though. You know how they do you—they herd a bunch of you into one holding area with the scales and everybody has to get on there in front of everybody else. It’s not like anybody is a size two anymore, but when one contestant is not forced to confront her own excessive poundage and then listen to the subsequent lecture regarding same, well, it’s pretty fair breeding ground for revolt, let me tell you. They pounce on me every time: ”How come
you
get to get on there backwards? How come they never fuss at
you?
” And I just smile and say I have a special arrangement with the management. They scowl and mutter curses at me, but I am impervious.

What I confess I am not impervious to, however, is the feeling of dread that comes over me as I hear the nurse moving the weights across the bar on the scale behind my back, trying gamely to achieve balance and thus reveal the exact extent of my manifold sins in pounds. She
chink-chink-chinks
the little ones across to no avail and then slides that big honking one across the bottom—the one that measures in fifty-pound increments—and then she
chink-chink-chinks
a little more and then it’s back to heaving the big one over a little more, followed by even more
chink-chink-chinking
until she finally gets the Big Number. Lord, it must be big, too, because I am the size of the sun. At least they haven’t told me to weigh myself at the post office on my way in—yet. I figure I’ll check into the hospital and they’ll clock me at around 224 pre-baby and 240-something post-baby, if my luck continues in the same vein.