Monday I Love You (10 page)

Dancing is good for the figure, I've heard. All I know is, it's strenuous. I collapsed in a chair, breathing hard, holding on to Buster, who didn't seem winded at all. Maybe because I'd done all the work.

“Almost time for bed,” I whispered, breathing into his soft little neck. He patted my cheek. He loves me. He thinks I'm beautiful. Babies are a good judge of people. Buster sees me as I really am. Every time he hugs me or laughs when I gum his little ears, he's telling me he loves me. Buster doesn't care if I wear a 38D bra. If I'm fat and ugly. He sees beyond all that.

The wind was rising, slamming against the trailer, wanting in. I hate it when the wind gets going. I put Buster in his high chair and got out his measuring spoons to keep him busy while I warmed his bottle. Doris says I don't have to bother to heat it, but I do anyway.

A couple of strong gusts of wind made the trailer sway. It must be like crossing the ocean in a storm, I thought. Lucky thing I don't get seasick. The worst thing about the wind is that it makes the trailer creak. Sometimes it sounds like a lot of people tiptoeing around. It's sort of creepy, all that creaking. I never told Doris how I felt, though. I don't like to be the scary type.

Buster just banged away on his tray with those measuring spoons. They're his favorite toy. Maybe I'll let him stay up later tonight, I thought. What difference would it make? He didn't have to get up in the morning. Besides, if he stayed up later, he'd sleep later.

I decided to make some cocoa. Sometimes Doris has marshmallows. I couldn't find any. She must've eaten them all. Doris pigs out a lot. When she's feeling blue and misses Kenny a lot, she pigs out on anything that's handy, she told me. It makes her feel better, but not for long. Lucky for Doris, she has the kind of metabolism that keeps her from ever gaining a pound. I would kill for a metabolism like Doris's.

The bottle was just about right. I tested the milk on the inside of my wrist, the way you're supposed to. I could probably get a job as a nanny if I wanted. The city paper we sometimes get on Sundays always has ads for nannies with driver's license and experience. And recent references. Lovely family with two children. Nonsmoker. Nobody, it seemed, wanted a smoker to look after their lovely family. Not that I blame them. Doris had a thing about smoking. The trailer was dotted with No Smoking signs. She didn't even bother with Please. Just No Smoking. Signs in her kitchen, her living room and in the bathroom, right over the toilet. She wasn't having Buster inhale any stale smoke into his little lungs.

Doris would give me a recent reference that'd knock your socks off. That I knew. She thought I was a first-class baby-sitter. Or I could be an au pair. Au pair means equal. An au pair lives with the family and is treated like a family member. I wouldn't mind that. But I doubt if anyone would hire me. On account of my appearance, mostly my shape. They always want someone neat and trim and attractive.

“Okay, time for eats.” I took Buster out of his high chair and sat on the couch with him. It was time for my favorite TV program. Two career girls have their own apartment, and one has a boyfriend who puts the moves on the other girl when the girl who's his girlfriend is out. It's fairly hilarious. If only they wouldn't play that canned laughter. I can't stand it. It's so phony.

When Buster really gets into his bottle, his eyes almost close and he rubs his forehead with his fist, as if he's thinking big, deep thoughts. It's the cutest thing, the way he does that.

Outside, something crashed against the house. I jumped and almost cried out in alarm, but caught myself in time. Buster's eyes flew open, and he let go of the nipple and started howling.

“It's all right, darling,” I said soothingly. “It's only the wind. Here you go.” And I put the bottle back into his mouth, and he settled down again. It must've been the garbage cans blowing around.

I checked the clock. Ten after eight. It felt later. Rain and wind meant there'd be a sea of mud tomorrow. Kenny and Doris kept saying they were going to plant grass seed so they'd have a lawn come spring, but they never got around to it. Doris had put down some planks to make a path up to the door that visitors could walk on without dragging mud in all over her orange carpet. She was making the last payment on that carpet next month, and it would be terrible if it was ruined before it was paid for.

On the TV screen, the girl who didn't have a boyfriend was answering the door in her underwear to the boyfriend of the other girl. Those girls were always running around in their underwear, it seemed. Well, I suppose if I looked the way they did, I'd run around in my underwear too.

I got a sudden mental picture of me running around in my underwear, opening the door and finding somebody's boyfriend standing there, and I had to laugh. I mean, sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps you sane.

Buster pushed his bottle away. He'd had enough. He always lets you know right off. I put him on my shoulder and rubbed his back. He's perfectly able to burp without me burping him, but to tell the truth, I like the closeness of him on my shoulder, the smell of him against me. So I burp him whether he needs it or not.

After a while, he let out a burp so loud it startled him. He looked up into my face as if to say, “Did
you
do that?” He looked so comical I had to laugh.

“You're a character, Buster Brown,” I told him. Over the top of his head I watched the two girls sitting at the kitchen table in their underwear while the boyfriend cooked supper. Or maybe it was breakfast. Anyway, he wore a big white apron and a chef's hat, and he looked like a nerd.

Over the canned laughter, I heard a noise. Outside. Nothing much, nothing to get excited about. Sometimes raccoons got into the garbage. I turned off the sound and listened. It was only the wind and the rain battering the trailer. Maybe the wind would grab us up and whiz us to some magical place, like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. I wouldn't mind, but Doris might if she came back and found us and the trailer gone.

I settled back to watch the rest of the show, leaving the sound off. Sometimes it's fun to watch TV without sound. That way you can make up your own dialogue.

But there
was
a noise. Not raccoons, something else, something human. I was halfway up in a crouch, holding Buster to me, when I saw the door move. I know I locked it. I watched it move again. I felt my blood evaporate, my bones go cold. There was only me and Buster. Not even a dog. I reached the TV and turned up the sound very loud. I don't know why I did that—maybe to make it seem as if the room was full of people. A party was in progress.

I saw a foot wedged in the door's crack. A leg followed. If I screamed, who would hear? A person stood there. I didn't know if it was a man or a woman. The person wore a long, dark raincoat, almost touching the floor, with wide, wet shoulders and no belt. Dripping all over Doris's rug. The collar was turned up, so I couldn't see any face.

A sudden gust of wind pushed against the door, pushed the person farther into the room.

Buster pointed at the raincoat and said, “Man.” Clear as anything.

The person lifted a long, wet arm and flung back the upturned collar.

I held Buster so tightly he cried out.

“Well.” The raincoat's arm shoved against the door, closing it with a bang that made me jump.

“Hello, Miss Pretty,” a voice said.

It was me he meant. He was talking to me.

15

My father wanted a boy. In the worst way, my mother said.

“Then there you were, a little scrap of a baby with a big, pushed-in nose, and blue lips and bowlegged. Lord, you were the most bowlegged baby I ever laid eyes on. And he took one look at you and just turned his head away. You've no idea, Grace, what that did to me. A woman has a right to expect some appreciation, some praise, wouldn't you say. After giving birth. Some sign she's done a good job.”

I'd heard it all before. The good times and the bad. My parents' wedding picture showed them staring dead straight into the camera, arms entwined, eyes glossy with pride at being man and wife.

“He had such a merry heart, Grace,” my mother always sighed, remembering. “Now it's gone, all gone.”

I felt responsible. If I'd been a boy, maybe it wouldn't be all gone. Maybe my father's heart would still be merry. Once he told me he always wanted to be a clown. Even when he was a little boy, he said he wanted to make people laugh. Wanted to dress up in baggy pants and enormous, turned-up shoes and paint his face in a wild and extravagant way, bright reds and yellows and greens, then jump out of little cars with his shoes flapping, waving his arms and putting his face up close to the faces of the children who'd come to watch him be funny.

But like so many things, it hadn't worked out. My father had come to my mother's hometown and landed a job at Herrick's Men's Store. Formerly Herrick's Haberdashery. My mother said he was a proper dandy in those days, with the girls after him in droves.

“Oh my, yes, Mr. Herrick's business picked up considerably after your father went to work there,” she told me. “Mr. Herrick thought Father's Day was here to stay. There wasn't a father or an uncle or a brother who didn't need new shirts, ties, socks, and all the girls came to buy. Your father was the hit of the town.

“Of course, in those days he had rosy cheeks and a sweet little mustache, and he wore a tattersall vest with his grandfather's gold watch chain across his chest. He was a proper dude then, all right. Had to shave twice a day, too, so his whiskers wouldn't bruise a lady's cheek.”

This was my mother talking. I was afraid to breathe, afraid any disturbance, however small, might turn her off in mid-sentence. I wanted to hear the unbelievable circumstances of my father's youth.

“Did his whiskers ever bruise your cheek?” I had to ask, thinking this a most romantic notion. She laughed and said, “Use your imagination.”

I didn't need to be told to do that; my imagination had been working overtime for some years. My imagination, set into action, left almost no stone unturned. I didn't even have to close my eyes to imagine myself a princess, living in an enchanted castle, wearing sparkly red shoes and a white satin gown.

Or a movie star with a flawless complexion and a turned-up nose whose specialty was tap dancing and love scenes. I hate those love scenes where they open their mouths and slobber all over each other. That's not my idea of kissing. I think a kiss should be a tender, gentle thing. I'm not talking sex here, I'm talking kissing. They're not necessarily the same thing. Although I know one sometimes leads to another. But not always. Just because you kiss someone doesn't mean you have to leap into bed with him.

I read in the paper about a survey somebody took asking kids about their attitudes toward sex and stuff. The survey reported fifty percent of the boys surveyed wanted their wives to be virgins. And forty percent of the same group of boys said they'd already had sex. That's cutting it kind of close, I figure. Where are all those virgins supposed to come from anyway?

Nobody's ever surveyed me about anything. The Nielsen report, which keeps tabs on who watches what TV programs, has never called me to find out what I'm watching. Plenty of times I've been ready for them to call, sitting there by the telephone with my answer ready. I don't know who those Nielsen bozos call. But not me, that's for sure.

And nobody has ever surveyed me in regard to sexual practices. Half the time I think those answers are phonies, that the kids who answer the questions live in a dream world and make up the sex stuff because they're afraid to tell the truth, which is far less interesting than the lies they make up. What do I know? Probably those surveyors take one look at me and figure I'm not the kind of person who
has
any sexual practices. Probably they survey Ashley and those pals of hers at the drop of a hat. Probably Ashley's had sex since she was in sixth grade. I wouldn't put it past her.

It's none of my business what Ashley does. I try to shove her out of my thoughts. What do I care what she does? Or thinks. But she's always there. It kills me that I can't get rid of her. I dreamed of her last night. In my dream, Ashley and I were walking down the street, talking, laughing, arm in arm. We were friends. Then all of a sudden, Ashley began tearing at my clothes, ripping them off me. I put my arms around myself, trying to shield myself, but when Ashley was through and I stood there, out in the open, shivering, naked, unable to move, to speak, Ashley's friends gathered around, laughing, pointing at me. I can't describe the feeling. Out of nowhere, then, Ms. Govoni showed up and she wrapped a big blanket around me.

When I woke up, my face was wet. I don't remember crying, but my face was definitely wet. It was very real, that dream. Most dreams I forget soon after they've happened. I wish I could forget this one. But it won't go away. I wish I could hurt Ashley the way she's hurt me.

If someone ever does kiss me, I hope it will be gentle and full of meaning.

I figure as long as I look the way I do, I'm safe.

16

“That yours?” He pointed at Buster, who was drooling all over my shirt.

“No,” I said, still in a state of shock at seeing him there, at what he'd said, what he'd called me. “I'm the baby-sitter.”

He stayed put by the door. “Can I use the phone?” he said. “My car's broken down out on the highway.” From where I was, across the room, his eyes looked black. “You got someplace I can hang this where it'll drip dry? It's soaked. Really blowing out there.”

“I guess you can hang it in the bathroom so it won't get the rug all wet,” I said. “Doris is very particular about her rug. It's brand-new.” I got a hanger and handed it to him. Up close I could see it wasn't actually a raincoat, it was more of a tarp, the kind you put over a car in bad weather if you don't have a garage.