If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (2 page)

babies

E
veryone was waiting for Maggie Mayhew’s baby to be born. It seemed as though she’d been pregnant forever; walking down the aisle of St. Timothy’s Church last winter, her belly already starting to swell under her paisley granny gown. She’d cradled against her breasts a bouquet of tall lilies, which left rust stains that never washed out of the bodice of her wedding dress. Now she was past due, and the fat joints that Matty, her husband, had rolled and saved to hand out instead of cigars had long been smoked.

“You’re so big, does that mean a boy?” Nanny asked when we stopped by on our way to the beach. Maggie was her cousin, a couple of years older than we were; she was already working as a secretary in Manhattan, at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue.

Maggie smiled. “That’s so sexist,” she said gently. “Girls can be big, too. Girls can do big things. My girl will.” She patted her belly, rippling with life underneath her peasant blouse.

“Someone should ask her if girls do such big fucking things why she sits in the house every night while Matty’s out with the boys,” Liz said later, when we were walking up the block to where the Buick Skylark her father had given her as a graduation present was parked. It was June,
and up and down Comanche Street, shuttered bungalows were being opened by families coming down from the city for the summer. “I wouldn’t put up with that shit.”

“He really loves her, though,” Nanny said. “You should have seen at the wedding, the minute the priest finished, Matty grabbed her and gave her this, like, earthshaking kiss. He wouldn’t let her go.”

“You think this home birth was her idea or Matty’s?” Liz said. “I think it was his. I think she’ll do anything he tells her to do.”

Maggie and Matty lived in a bungalow at the end of Comanche Street, with her brothers, Raven and Cha-Cha. At night, you’d see Matty and Raven walking to the beach to get high before heading out to the bars, huddled into their faded jean jackets against the late spring chill, while Maggie sat on the sagging steps of the bungalow, hands resting on the rising slope of her stomach.

“You should have heard Aunt Francie,” Nanny said. “She was over our house ranting the other day, saying she screamed until her lungs hurt that they had to go to the hospital, this was the twentieth century, for chrissake, but Maggie stood her ground for once, told her, ‘Ma, it’s my baby, I’ll have it however the hell I want.’ I don’t know if she’s really brave or just plain crazy.” Liz and I had grown up in Elephant Beach, but Nanny and all her cousins were originally city people, from Washington Heights, way up at the tip of Manhattan. Their parents had moved them to Long Island to escape the gangs and the drugs and other bad influences, but the kids had brought it all with them.

“Well, women did it for years,” Liz said. “Years and years. Of course, the attending physicians weren’t a bunch of stoned potheads and a speed freak. But I’ll tell you the truth, when my time comes, it’s gonna be, ‘Give me the drugs, man, give me the drugs.’”

I heard a crackling sound and blinked. Liz was snapping her fingers in front of my eyes. “Earth to Katie, earth to Katie,” she chanted. “Spacewoman, where are you?”

“Just thinking,” I said, and was saved by Mitch coming down the
street from the opposite direction, his bad leg stuttering behind his good one. He was singing “It’s All Over Now.” Mitch was a Stones freak; he played “Satisfaction” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on the jukebox at The Starlight Lounge about twenty times a night. He was carrying a paper bag from Eddy’s.

“Hiya, handsome,” Liz said, and we all waved and whistled.

Mitch laughed out loud. “Hey, little foxes,” he said, grinning broadly. He twirled his cane outward with a flourish and bowed from the waist, almost falling over but saving himself just in time. He blew us a kiss and kept walking down Comanche Street, singing.

“Man, what a waste of skin,” Liz said when he was past us.

“Guy loses his leg in Nam, gets the Purple Heart, you call him a waste of skin?” Nanny always got emotional about the war; her cousin, Sean, died in Vietnam just last year, and another cousin, Quinn, was in the army but so far hadn’t been out of Fort Worth, Texas.

“I’m not talking about his leg,” Liz said. “Please, what do you take me for? His leg I can deal with. But he’s, like, three sheets to the wind and it’s not even noon yet.”

“Which makes him so different from everyone else around here,” I said.

“Yeah, but we’re still young, we’ll outgrow it,” Liz said. “Mitch is, what, pushing thirty? That’s old to still be drinking your breakfast. But he’s so sexy, right? He reminds me of Clint Eastwood in that movie we saw last year, what was the name of it? Where he plays a Yankee soldier whose leg gets amputated—”

“The Beguiled,”
I said.

“Yeah! That’s the one,” Liz said. “You don’t think he looks like Clint? A Clint who’s fucked up most of the time? Those eyes, and he has the sexiest wrists—”

“‘Wrists?’” Nanny rolled her eyes. “What, are
you
three sheets to the wind?”

“I noticed it one night when I was standing next to him at the bar,”
Liz said. “He was lighting a cigarette, and I swear, if I wasn’t so into Cory—”

Nanny and I looked at each other. Cory McGill was Liz’s big love, but how he felt about her was another story.

I was glad that Mitch had come along, though, so I didn’t have to tell them I was thinking about Luke. Even my best friends didn’t know how I felt; I didn’t want it all over the earth before anything happened. His brother, Conor, said that Luke was not himself, that he stayed in his room all day and then went out late at night and must have walked the beach because the floor of his room was covered with sand. He slept most of the time, or gazed out the window, smoking. One night, Conor came home and found Luke sitting by the window. When he asked if something was wrong, Luke said, “Nothing, man, just happy to be home,” and told Conor to go to sleep. The windowsill had been filled with cigarette butts. His bags were still stacked by the closet door, waiting to be opened. “My brother’s messed up for sure, man,” Conor said worriedly. But I wasn’t overly concerned. Luke had just come back from a war, which was bound to make anyone act weird. Besides, real summer hadn’t started yet; it wasn’t even the end of June, and he had to come out sometime. At night, smoking my last cigarette in front of the mirror, I’d practice the things I would say when I saw him. Words that would make him take notice, wonder where I’d been all these years.

Then I thought about Maggie, of how peaceful she looked, sitting there on the steps, as though she didn’t want for anything in the world. I wondered how it would be to carry Luke’s baby inside me, to have that weight against my skin, beneath my heart.

•   •   •

G
od, can you believe it, we’re finally getting out of this dump?” Nanny said.

“Really,” I said, though walking the halls of Elephant Beach High
School made me feel like crying. I hadn’t loved school since I graduated from sixth grade, but every morning when my alarm clock went off at seven, at least I knew what to expect.

“I can already hear my mother, when they give out the awards and all that shit,” Liz said. “‘Look, Dick, none of Liz’s friends won the Regents scholarship. None of Liz’s friends were named Athlete of the Year.’”

We arrived at the main office and walked underneath the banner that stretched across the doorway and read “Best of Luck, Class of ’72.” Mrs. Cathaway was handing out boxes and crossing names off a sheet of yellow lined paper. “Here you go,” she said, handing Nanny the box that held her cap and gown. She ran a red pencil through Nanny’s name with a flourish.

“Gonna miss us, Mrs. Cathe—Cathaway?” Liz asked sweetly. We smothered our smiles; she’d almost slipped and called her Mrs. Catheter, which everyone called her behind her back. Mrs. Cathaway was the secretary to the principal, Dr. Steadman, and sat sentry outside his office like a guard dog. Whenever she said, “Dr. Steadman will see you now,” it always sounded as though you were getting an audience with God and should consider yourself blessed.

“Good luck, girls,” Mrs. Cathaway told us, then clamped her lips shut tight as a purse.

We left the office and walked down the hall to the South Wing bathroom, where all the Trunk kids hung out. It was in this very bathroom that Liz and I had first become friends. Nanny came later, when Liz started bringing me around and she saw that it was safe for us to be friends. It was back in the fall of our sophomore year, right before third period when Barbara Malone had started pulling the hair right out of my head because she thought her boyfriend had winked at me in study hall. Liz had jumped on Barbara’s back and rode her around the bathroom, threatening to dunk her in the toilet bowl if she didn’t leave me the fuck alone. I was surprised, because Liz and I had only ever spoken in the one class we had together, World History, or to bum cigarettes from each
other in the bathroom. I had no idea why she’d plucked me from the shadows to come to my defense. But I was excited when she extended the invitation to come hang out on Comanche Street. The Trunk was an exotic, forbidden place, older and rougher than other neighborhoods in town, where kids stood on street corners doing secret, forbidden things out in the open. Whenever we drove through there on the way back from my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn, I’d watch them from the windows of my parents’ car, wondering at the ease with which they slouched against the walls of the shabby bars and candy stores that lined the dark, narrow streets. I wanted that for myself. I wanted to feel sure of something that no one could take away from me. Besides, it was a lonely time for me; Marcel, my best friend since junior high school, wasn’t around much because of family troubles and I didn’t know where I belonged anymore.

“Shit,” Nanny said, looking at herself in the smeared mirror. The blue graduation gown was billowing around her like a tent. “You could fit two of me in here, it’s so friggin’ big. Ginger could have worn this and no one would’ve ever suspected she was pregnant.”

“She wasn’t going to graduate, baby or no baby,” Liz said, stuffing her gown carelessly back into the box. “She cut out so much in junior year that when she came up to withdraw, they didn’t even have her name on the list, man. They didn’t even know who she
was
.”

Nanny was tearing the cellophane off a fresh pack of Marlboros. “What do you think?” she asked. “One for the road? I mean, what are they gonna do three days before graduation, suspend us?”

“Suspend us, right,” Liz said, taking out her own pack. “You think they want us back here next year?”

“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” I said, lighting up. I looked around at the puke-green walls and faded green-and-black tiles. Would I miss this? Any of it?

Nanny started to say something, but Liz held up her hand for silence. She closed the door to the bathroom, then turned back to us. “I got
something to tell you guys and I don’t want any interruptions,” she said. “And you have to swear on your mother’s life you won’t breathe a word to anyone, ever. No shit.”

Nanny and I nodded, trying to keep our faces straight. It was Liz who had the big mouth; she couldn’t keep a secret to save her life.

Liz sat back down on the edge of the sink, lit a cigarette. The smoke streamed into the filtered sunlight coming through the window. She smiled in a way I’d never seen her smile before.

“Me and Cory did it last night,” she said.

We looked at her. In the mirror I could see Nanny’s eyes bugging out. Cory McGill was a couple years older than us and worked at Liz’s father’s dealership on Merrick Road, where Liz was working for the summer. They did a lot of wisecracking at work and had made out a couple of times in the parking lot when Liz’s father wasn’t around, but he’d never even asked her out.

“So, you mean, like—”

“Yep,” Liz said, nodding smugly. “That’s exactly what I mean.” She leaned back against the tiles and closed her eyes, smiling.

“But when?” I asked. “How did it—”

She opened her eyes and turned toward us, waving her cigarette like a wand. “I went to work yesterday, right, and I looked really hot even though I can’t wear halters and shit because of my father, and I had on my new Maidenform, the off-white one with the cream lace. So we were kidding around, and he kept looking for excuses to get close to me, you know, hanging around the reception desk, the kitchen whenever I went in to make fresh coffee, like that. You know Thursday’s our late night, we close at nine thirty, so he comes up to me, he says, ‘I’m taking the Dodge out for a test run up Sunrise Highway, you wanna come for the ride?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure,’ he never asked me to come out on a run before, right? In the Dodge Challenger, forest green, my lucky color. So I’m like, there, man, I’m totally psyched.

“So we barely pull out of the lot and he turns into a friggin’ octopus,
he’s like all over me at the red lights, and then all of a sudden he pulls up behind this boarded-up White Castle on Sunrise Highway, and he says, ‘Let’s get in back.’ So now we’re in the backseat, and it’s getting, it’s getting really hot, I mean, like the windows are fogging, and I tell him, I say, ‘Cory, Cory, man, I’m a virgin,’ and he says, ‘Liz, I swear on my mother’s life I’ll handle you with kid gloves. I’ll make it the most beautiful night of your life,’ and then it’s, like, it all happened at once, man. Like, everything.”

“You are blowing my freakin’ mind,” Nanny said.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What about your father? Where was he?”

Liz made a face. “Thursday night’s his poker night, he lets Cory close up,” she said. “Where’d you think he was, man? In the car with us?” She laughed. “Not that it would matter, you know he never pays me any attention.”

“What did it feel like?” Nanny whispered.

Liz leaned forward. “I don’t know where all the hearts and flowers and violins come in,” she whispered back. “All that bullshit they tell you. Because it hurt like hell. I was in brutal, brutal pain, it’s like I got welts and bruises all up and down my back, on my ass.”

“What about—I mean, did you use something? Did he—”