Mockingbird (13 page)

Did my baby care? No. My baby would want a place to sleep, food to eat. My baby would not be interested in my pride or my qualifications. And—let's be honest—I desperately did not want to be a stay-at-home mom. I knew, I knew deep inside me, that I could never risk my child in the care of a woman growing bored and lonely in her apartment. I did not dare leave my baby with a woman who might turn into Mary Keith or Elena Beauchamp.

And so what should have been easy became hard. I sweated blood over resumés and then threw them out afterwards. In my suddenly abundant leisure time I went to the library and read book after book on finding a job—and then failed to submit any applications. I started imaginary stock portfolios that made a 23 percent annualized return over the month I followed them and I didn't dare to invest a cent. In the same notebook I made hypothetical killings trading commodities futures but never called a broker.

I had been fired. I hated that.

Instead of daring to make more money, I started spending less. I felt my fingers crimping like claws around my pennies. Weeks went by in my parents' house. When I had moved back home, it had been clearly understood that I was staying only to help nurse Momma through her last illness. Now I couldn't think of giving up the free rent and looking for an apartment. I stopped going out to movies and then I stopped going out at all, staying home to eat crackers and watch the little green lizards creep across the tile floor and clamber up the white plaster walls.

The last three weeks of morning sickness were a calvary. I don't think I could have functioned at my job even if I still had one. I lay in bed and watched TV. I could not read the newspaper, as not a day seemed to go by without a Crushed Baby story. Locked Car Baby Dies of Heat Stroke. Baby Savaged by Pit Bull. Young Child Slain in Gun Mishap. Infant Twins Die in House Fire. Toddler Strangles on Playground Equipment. Abducted Child's Last Words—no, I cannot say them.

Do you know how many child abductions are perpetrated by strangers? One third of one percent. One in three hundred. We spend all this time streetproofing our children these days—but you know what? If you don't want your child abducted, don't get divorced. Because that's who steals children. Estranged husbands, bitter ex-wives, righteous in-laws. It's love that is the problem. Passion. Romance. In the movies and on TV we are constantly told that love, love, love is the thing that will make us happy, that it's the strongest force in the universe. But in the real world, love can eat you alive.

Read the headlines. Pay attention to the beating, the stalking, the stolen children, the shots fired in anger. Love is a wild magic and cannot be controlled. The next time you see a Just Married car with tin cans tied to the back, look at it with an actuary's eye and admit just once that sometimes the very worst case will come to happen.

My mother loved Angela. My mother loved me.

Better to have a child without a mate, the way I did, and eliminate one variable, one wild factor: the abusive husband or the divorce down the road, or the gentle man who to the shock of his neighbors comes home one day with a gun and—

My way is safer.

I lay in bed and watched TV. Not the news, of course: should a child die horribly anywhere on the globe, CNN's crack investigative staff was there to report it every half hour. Little boy drowned in a well in Maine. Six-year-olds used as slave labor in Madras sweatshops. Eleven-year-old girls contracting AIDS and fucked to death by tourists in Thai brothels.

But there is one safe haven on daytime TV, if you have cable: CNBC, the Business Channel. I recommend it. It's very soothing. Watching the business news is like watching a really complicated weather report. The Nikkei jumps, the S & P drops, lumber is unsettled in the wake of the latest NAFTA ruling on Canadian softwood. Trust me: if you can watch baseball, or follow Paris fashion trends, you can spend some deeply relaxing hours keeping up with the business world, and you might be better informed on where to stick your retirement money into the bargain.

Like baseball and fashion, business has players, some colorful, some stodgy. It has daily scores and won-lost columns. It has established teams like IBM and General Electric, as well as rising stars, jokesters, and cagey veterans. It even has baggy-eyed managers delivering the time-honored cliches: “This was the hardest decision I've had to make since I took this job, but we felt we had to do what was best for the ballclub/shareholders.”

I was completely hooked on CNBC by the time my morning sickness finally began to ease. A day came, not far into April, when I padded downstairs in my nightgown and found myself thinking how nice it would be to fry an egg for breakfast. I fried that egg like a clean-up hitter taking his home-run trot. I showered it with coarse black pepper until it looked like someone had dropped it in the sand, and then I added a shot of Pickapeppa hot sauce for good measure and wolfed it down, feeling my spirits lift.

That Thursday I went in for my fifteen-week ultrasound. I put on a blue clinic smock and lay on an examining table. This time at least it would only be an external. The technician pushed up the smock and pulled my panties halfway down my hips, exposing a thin fringe of pubic hair. Before getting pregnant I had always felt uncomfortable when doctors saw me naked, but the whole process of pregnancy, particularly if you get artificially inseminated, involves so much routine exposure you get a bit numb to it. My advice, by the way, is to have nurses or techs do the vaginal examinations. For some reason M.D.'s, even the women, seem not to understand the patient experience very well—the value of warming a speculum, for instance, before giving it the brisk medical shove.

My technician, Laquisha, was a young black woman with purple lipstick and bleached gold hair, worn wavy and flat to her head like a 1920s flapper. Over the years the nail-care cult has really taken hold among the black girls in Houston. Laquisha's nails were very fine, two inches long and indigo, with seven tiny silver stars on the index fingers, and a thin gold crescent moon on the nail of each thumb. Momma would have loved those claws. They passed, clicking like hard-shelled insects, across the face of Laquisha's machines and instruments.

She brought out a pot of pale blue lubricating slime and rubbed it over the bottom of my abdomen. It was lighter and less greasy than Vaseline, more like K-Y Jelly.

“Is the baby going to look all right, or will it be gross?”

Laquisha smoothed more slime on the bottom of my belly, grinning. “It's gonna look like a lima bean with a head.”

“A lima bean with a head?”

“Only it's blue.”

“How many do you get with extra toes or tails?”

“Hardly any. We had a mom come in with two heads, just las' week. But the baby was fine,” Laquisha said. She grinned wider and gave me a little poke in the tummy. “Do you b'lieve that?” She finished sliming me. “Don't be nervous, sugar. It's going to be fine.”

Usually I despise the way people talk to a pregnant woman as if she had the IQ of her fetus, but just then I was scared about what the ultrasound might show—terrified, really—and I could have hugged Laquisha for being so nice to me. She left and came back wheeling the ultrasound machine in front of her. She turned it on and the screen flashed for a moment and then went blank. “Do you want to know the sex of the child?”

“You can tell when they're this little? Gracious. Um, no. Don't tell me.”

“Some people like to know what kind of clothes to get, you know. What kind of name to think up.”

“No thank you,” I said. I realized I did not wish to see the future. My mother and the blessed Isaiah had not been made glad by prophecy, either one. Anyway, Candy would tell me the sex of the child soon enough, if I really needed to know.

“All right, then.” Laquisha pulled a paddle from the machine, pressed it to my abdomen, and began to rub it slowly across my belly.

Up on the screen I saw my child for the first time. “Oh,” I said. It was blue, digital readout blue, and its tiny arms and legs were pulled in. Its head was huge compared to its limbs. The image on the screen flashed and shivered as Laquisha moved the paddle around, as if I were seeing my child's reflection in a windblown pond.

“There—see that? That's the heart. Beating jus' fine. Two arms, two legs, one head, no tail. You sure you don't want to know the sex?”

“I'm sure,” I said.

It did not have a sex for me. That thing in my womb was not yet a baby, much less a child. That was a secret being hidden inside me, on a great voyage alone in its submarine world. What an epic there was unfolding within me! How strange that its heroic journey would be forgotten; that this tiny sexless voyager would disappear at the moment of birth, witched into a squalling, ignorant infant boy or girl, its memories of its mysterious beginnings falling away, away, away.

I found my eyes were wet.

Sail on, lima bean child. Sail on, hidden voyager.

Only when the ultrasound was over did I realize how much of the first trimester I had spent worrying that I might miscarry. That's another thing no one ever talks about, how common miscarriages are. Mary Jo miscarried five times, the last at twenty-six weeks, before she and her husband quit trying to have a brother for their baby Travis. It wasn't long after that their marriage broke up. Still, the majority of miscarriages occur in the first trimester, when the body discovers there is something wrong with the fetus and decides to scrap it and start over. I wasn't home safe yet, but I could breathe a little easier. The morning sickness had largely faded, and
the ultrasound showed no signs of abnormal development.

Filled with new strength and resolution, I determined to go over to Mary Jo's house. She had been pressing me to come for weeks, no doubt to inspect the state of her leaky roof. I had been so stressed out I couldn't face dealing with someone else's problems, but now I decided to stop shirking.

I didn't just love Mary Jo the way you love, but avoid, your more eccentric relatives.
I owed her.
She had rescued me and Candy a ton of times when Momma was on the rampage, or when she and Daddy were fighting. Just as important, she had taken care of Momma when nobody at our house could.

But beyond that, Mary Jo was the first woman to tell me some hard truths about what real life was like. When I was fifteen years old, just before I went out on one of my early dates, Mary Jo came over to visit. She said she'd heard my boyfriend had a driver's license and was going to pick me up. When I confirmed this, she took a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and pressed it into my hand. “What's this for?” I said.

“Cab fare,” she said. I started to say I wouldn't need it, but Mary Jo held one finger across her lips to shush me. “Toni, every woman needs her own cash,” she said. She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, lit it, and gave me a long, considering look over her first drag. “I'm going to tell you something now, but you have to promise not to tell Travis.” Travis was her son. I promised. “Chester and I hadn't been together three years when I knew I wanted to leave him,” Mary Jo said.

I was shocked. I never guessed she was unhappy with Chester. When the split came, I assumed she had been devastated.

“But I couldn't leave him. I was afraid to. I was at home with Travis, and Chester made all the money. If I'd had money of my own, I would have gone. I would have had a happier life. Instead I stayed with that man, miserable every day, until he left me. Then I got my job at Sears. It's not a good job. I didn't go to college, I didn't have a lot of work experience, because I stayed home and let Chester make the money. Are you paying attention, hon?”

I nodded. She wrapped my hand around that twenty and gave it a good squeeze. “Don't do like I did, Toni. Don't think you're being greedy. If you want to find true love in this life, you make sure you have your own cash on hand. You got that?”

To make a long story short, I used that twenty-dollar bill.

When Mary Jo told me her story it was as if a grown-up had pushed back a curtain and let me look at real life for the first time. I was deeply touched that she would talk so honestly about her weakness and her failures. I felt I owed it to her not to waste her unhappiness by ignoring her advice. In college I despised the artsy girls whose idea of romance was living in a fashionably appointed garret and who thought that caring about a good income represented the death of the soul. Mary Jo taught me that making money wasn't frivolous. It wasn't something I did because I wanted a new car or a fancy stereo. It was about freedom and independence and love.

I drove straight from my ultrasound appointment to Mary Jo's house. She only lived ten blocks from us, but they were the wrong ten blocks. The charming, quirky houses of affluent Montrose faded into a neighborhood of small bungalows all built during World War II, long before insulation or central air conditioning made it to East Texas. Houston is essentially built over a swamp, which plays havoc with our houses. The soil is so liquid that septic tanks, pipes, and other buried conduits tend to float up out of the ground and must be periodically whacked back down again. Foundations in Houston are a nightmare; every house on Mary Jo's block had been re-levelled at least once.

I parked along the curb behind a Chevy pickup with a rifle rack visible through the back window and a commandos for christ bumper sticker on the tailgate.

I saw the Commandos at a summer camp once in my teenage years, a bunch of muscle-bound guys in combat fatigues who smash bricks with karate chops and do powerlifting demonstrations to magnify the glory of Jesus. Most of the other kids thought it was a bit weird to seek Christ by breaking cinderblocks with your head, but growing up with Momma as I had, I did not feel in any position to call the kettle black.

The paint was peeling on Mary Jo's house and a grass fungus had killed much of the lawn. The rest was pitted with fire-ant hills. Worse yet, I could see at once that the roof was beginning to sink like the back of a spavined mare. My spirits fell. I had been hoping Mary Jo was fussing at nothing.

I opened the screen door and knocked. “Mary Jo? It's me.”

“That's what you think.” A flurry of small noises came from inside; I thought of startled rats bolting for cover. The chain lock clinked and rattled. Moments later the door opened and there was Mary Jo's pale white face and ringed eyes glowering at me from the interior gloom. “Get in, honey, you're letting all the cool out.”