Milk (9 page)

“Am I acting now?” I say.

“No.”

He leans into me so that over his shoulder I see John Lennon's head, the size of a coin.

N
INE

The next three nights I spend at Gregg's, lugging along my Powerbook and all my layouts, hoping to get some work done while Gregg's out playing.

But each night instead of working I fidget and wait for him, napping, fantasizing.

I almost forget I'm pregnant. I keep going back and forth with this, as if it's negotiable, not quite accepting it. I call Dr. Grimes' office to find out about my HIV test and while I'm on hold awaiting the results, I start counting how many men I've slept with, like other people count sheep, the men jumping over a fence without a backward glance.

“Mrs. Mapes?”

“Ms. Mapes,” I correct her.

“Your HIV test is negative.”

“Meaning I don't have HIV or AIDS.”

“That is correct.”

I don't say anything for such a long time that finally she inquires, “Will you be needing anything else, then, Ma'am?”

“No, I'm just—are you sure?”

“Your test results are negative. Would you like to speak with the nurse?”

No thanks, I tell her.

I call my brother. “Where have you been?” he asks. “I keep leaving messages at the Alta Vista.”

Next I call Dad who says more or less the same thing. “Just checking in,” I tell him brightly.

“Have you called Jackson?”

Jackson. I resist the very thought of him, but now, hearing his name, I can't help wondering what he's doing right now. Leaving the house to go teach? Classes have started up again. I imagine his worn canvas briefcase, if you can call it a briefcase. It's a simple canvas bag with a strap that goes over his shoulder and across his chest—an object for which I've always had a tender, almost sexual attachment. It's what men feel when they think of women's belongings, perhaps—shoes, clothing, lingerie. It makes them weak. That's what Jackson's bag does to me now.

“Theo, have you called Jackson yet?”

“I will, I promise.”

“I'm holding you to that.”

“Right. Bye, Dad.”

I hang up quickly, then call Aunt Lyla, having no idea what I'll say. I'm not sure why I'm calling exactly—something to do with having a baby and Aunt Lyla being my only living female relative, a last link to my mother.

“I'm just in town,” I say vaguely.

“Why don't you come over, dear.”

“Now?”

“For an early dinner, won't you? It'd be lovely to see you.” As if we'd been in touch all these years.

When I get there the back door's open, the alarm system switched off, as she said it would be. Aunt Lyla isn't in the kitchen, of course. Although she's expecting me, it's mid-afternoon so she must be resting upstairs, or bathing, dressing, preparing for the evening ahead. Meanwhile, dinner simmers, awaiting us, as if prepared by unseen hands. I check: sure enough there's a roast in the oven, a platter of slivered fruit in the fridge, sun tea out on the patio—a simple supper, which is not to say Aunt Lyla hasn't gone to a lot of trouble.

Aunt Lyla always went to a lot of trouble, meanwhile denying it. Parties especially. “We're casual tonight,” she would say, gesturing at a sideboard groaning with homemade potato salad and three-bean salad, breads and hoagie rolls gotten from some expensive out-of-the-way baker, various cheeses both common and imported, pâtés, crackers, chips (that somehow didn't resemble or taste like anything else served on the face of the earth); jello that wasn't
Jello
jello—but a gelatin made from scratch, delicate, lightly sweetened (delighting both children and adults alike) with fresh fruit and whipped cream folded in somehow, the whole mold upended and placed, without a dent or mar, on a ceramic cake plate, then marvelously cut into jiggling slices. And she served it to you personally, with a fancy-tined spatula, all the while telling you (again), “We're casual tonight. Just sandwiches and whatnot. Help yourself!” Glasses with the ice already in them, ice, incidentally that never seemed to melt; paper plates, yes, but paper
mâché
plates arranged inside wicker basket holders with little handles. The food tasted so delicious, you'd line up for seconds, even thirds. Aunt Lyla would insist on it. “Oh honestly,” she'd say, “it's a party! Don't be such a boy scout.” It was as if you'd never tasted a roast beef sandwich before, or salad, or iced tea; who knew it could be so heavenly? Nor would you be able to reproduce this meal on your own, either, although Aunt Lyla was more than glad to give you the recipes, typed out just for you on her own personalized recipe cards.

Holiday parties were the best: massive Easter egg hunts for the kids with the eggs hidden everywhere, anywhere—on the gutters of the roof, at the very tip top of the orange trees (how did she get them up there? … it had to be her, Uncle Morgan stayed out of such matters); or at Christmas, a tree that might as well have been in the White House, and Christmas stockings as long as your leg, brimming over with toys (you were never too old for toys!), each one selected with only you in mind. So different from our own father who filled our normal-sized, dull red stockings with practical items like scotch tape and soap and ballpoint pens, the price tags still affixed. This was after our mother died so we were old enough to know by then that it wasn't Santa Claus who packed stockings, but parents. Aunt Lyla was every bit as good as Santa Claus, though, if not better. At Christmas she and Uncle Morgan would even dress up, he as Santa Claus, and she not as Mrs. Claus but a saucy elf in short felt skirt rimmed with white fur (to show off her legs), matching cap, black boots with her trademark stiletto heels. Or maybe she
was
supposed to be Mrs. Claus—a young mod Mrs. Claus.

The deal was, at Christmas—as well as every other holiday—we'd spend the early part of the morning at our house, chomping at the bit to go to Aunt Lyla's. This was only after our mother died. Before she died we seldom went over there, especially not on holidays, and when we did go our father accompanied us. Our mother stayed home. She and Aunt Lyla didn't speak. They simply had little to say. They got on each other's nerves. They weren't close, or so went my father's explanation in later years, what bits he would tell me.

After fifteen minutes of pacing Aunt Lyla's kitchen, peeking in drawers, snitching cookies, I venture upstairs.

“Aunt Lyla?”

She emerges from her bedroom smoothing on hand lotion. “Oh there you are, dear. I was beginning to worry.”

She offers me her cheek, as though we saw each other yesterday rather than five years ago at my wedding, and says, “Don't you look fresh! So outdoorsy.”

Which means my attire is questionable. I glance down. Same old black jeans, my suede boots again (from which, thank God, I remembered to remove the dollop of spaghetti sauce), a raw silk tee shirt that I thought was hip but now seems faded and wrinkled. Grunge without any fashion sense. How I've always felt around Aunt Lyla. Graceless, orphaned, not at all pretty—older now, is all.

She
hasn't aged, not much. As light as my mother was dark, her hair golden—dyed, my father used to claim, shuddering. Aunt Lyla must be close to seventy-three, my mother's older sister by two years, yet she's as petite as a girl, nimble legs and a little pot belly. Her skin is smooth. Face lift, Retin-A or just good skin, which hopefully I'll inherit, although who knows what my mother's skin would've looked like, had she lived; dark, shadowed …

“Let's go downstairs where we can visit,” she says. I let her precede me, marveling at her stiletto heels. Will she never give those up? Barbie doll shoes, I thought as a child. Like Barbie, she had a million pairs, in every color, along with matching necklaces and earrings.

Not your mother's taste, my father would say pointedly.

It was Aunt Lyla's way of rebelling, I realized, once I grew older. Of the two sisters, she was considered the rebel. A jitter-bugger who secretly bought a car of her own and dropped out of college to marry Uncle Morgan, who was not considered wealthy or accomplished enough at the time.

As a teenager Aunt Lyla had been sent to the Arizona desert for allergies—hay fever, asthma, eczema so severe it left her with scars. There, it was rumored, she had a nervous breakdown over some boy, and developed a taste for drink, a taste she later was able to control and let subside, unlike my mother.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she says now, at the foot of the stairs, swaying a bit. Losing her balance from those heels? Or perhaps it's me who's swaying, pregnant and dizzy.

“A drink?” I hesitate, as I always do here.

“Gin and tonic. Coke. Wine. Coffee. Iced tea? What would you like?” Only five minutes and already she seems a tad impatient with me.

“Nothing, thanks.” I imagine my father clearing his throat expectantly. “Thank you,” I add. Having said this, I realize I'm actually dying of thirst. Water.

“I'll get it myself.”

“Get what, dear?”

“If I need a drink, I can always get it myself,” I say.

She rolls her eyes ever so slightly and sighs. “Whatever,” she says.

I don't believe Aunt Lyla ever meant to be critical of me, or even that she disliked me. She simply didn't know what to do with me or how to talk to me. I was a foreign, exotic, exasperating species—her sister's daughter. The sister she hadn't been close to; just that fact alone seemed a strike against me. She'd tried to win me over after my mother's death, failed, and lost interest in me. I made her uncomfortable. I was too quiet, nervous, sensitive, secretive; a nut case in the making, perhaps. Or perhaps she resented me. That because my mother had died I expected her, my aunt, my mother's sister, to take her place. Or else it was that ultimately I wouldn't let her. I rejected her—or she rejected me. In any event we rubbed each other the wrong way, and early on a chill set in.

We're here on the living room couch with the iced tea Aunt Lyla insisted on fetching me after all.

“How are Susan and Daniel?” I ask. Her children, my cousins with whom I'd never been close. They were twins, Corb's age, and as straight as the stripes on their Oxford shirts. One lives on the east coast, the other in Chicago.

“Just fine, dear. They were here for the holidays and both brought their children. Charming!”
Charming
—this might mean their visit truly was charming, or it might mean Susan and Daniel and all their kids running all over the house was anything but.

“How's that husband of yours?” Aunt Lyla asks now. We're side by side on the couch where she's brought me to chat. To “catch up,” as she says. Already she's gotten up once to check the roast, and another time to answer the phone, clattering away in her high heels, cigarette in her mouth. She still chain-smokes, never an entire cigarette, and empties ashtrays constantly so there's practically no stench. (When I was younger and smoked myself, no sooner would I rest my lit cigarette in the ashtray than Aunt Lyla would sweep it up, throw the contents into the garbage disposal, wash the ashtray and dry it and return it to its location, all the while insisting I have a seat so we could “visit.”) “He certainly is handsome,” she says.

Aunt Lyla smiles winsomely, as though trying to pry some kind of confession out of me. A confession of what?

“Is he a professor now?” she asks.

A professor is the last thing Jackson would be. He claims to have almost no ambition; I think of his canvas bag again, how it rests against his hip, and I swallow painfully, then reach for my iced tea, grateful for it. The way Aunt Lyla gazes at me, I realize she's waiting for an answer, waiting, in fact, for me to say my husband's name that she can't recall. It's been five years since the wedding, after all, and we've had no contact since.

“Jackson and I are separated, Aunt Lyla.”

“Why—” She doesn't appear much surprised. That I ever got married to begin with is the surprise. “Theo! I'm so sorry, dear.” She tries to give me a little hug and just as quickly we break apart, by instinct.

“What will you do?” she inquires, lighting another cigarette, fidgeting. I can tell she wants to check the roast again, or empty out the ashtray. “I suppose that's why you're in town, I must admit I wondered.”

Not only in town, but here, seeking pity from Aunt Lyla who is glad to serve it up along with dinner and drinks, pity offered from the vaguely smug height of raising children who Turned Out Well, unlike her sister's children, twisted and wretched, blighted, well, what can you expect?—stunted by their mother's act of you-know-what-starts-with-an-S.… and damn it, I start to cry in front of her, blubbering on about the night I left Jackson and how the car wouldn't start, but I wouldn't go inside and ask him for help, nor would he offer it—then, finally, the engine turned over and I drove to town, arranged a ride to the airport, and left the Blazer on a side street, which seemed such a cold thing to do, no phone call to Jackson about the car or the fact that I was fleeing to California. How I couldn't stop myself from acting out this role of the injured party. But injured about what? I'm dabbing at my eyes with a tissue; Aunt Lyla doesn't like people to go on too long about their problems.

“Well,” Aunt Lyla says, patting my arm, somewhat stiffly, I think, “whatever happened between you two, I'm sure it can be resolved. If the love is there.”

“You have no idea,” I say. Nor do I. I still can't put into one sentence, or even two or three, what exactly went wrong between us, aside from Jackson's drinking. What my part in it is.

“Have you tried marriage counseling, dear?”

I almost laugh. There is something about the way people who've never been in therapy ask that question—gingerly, as though trying out a brand-new foreign phrase. For I am sure Aunt Lyla has never considered therapy for herself; therapy is for people like me, the lost, the wounded.