Riding In Cars With Boys (7 page)

“Was he drinking?”

“A little.”

“Did they book him?”

“No.”

“The car?”

“Totaled.”

“Jesus Christ. What’s the matter with you kids? I ought to have his license taken away. Now, what’re you gonna do for a car?”

My mother came to pick me up, then it was her turn. “He’s gonna miss work,” she said. “What’re you going to do for money? I do what I can, but you know your father and me don’t have a pot to piss in. I don’t know, you kids think you can go around acting like teenagers.”

“We are teenagers.”

“You’re having a baby. You have responsibilities. What’s it going to be like when the baby’s born? How would you’ve felt if you lost it? You better smarten up.”

I leaned my head back on the seat and watched the streetlights disappear into the car roof and hummed not a song but a drone, like a bumble bee.

“What’s that?” my mother said.

I kept humming, and she never knew it was me.

Once I got home, I was afraid murderers and escapees from mental institutions were lurking by the windows, so I went directly to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the floor next to the toilet. I felt so lonely, I even confessed to myself that I wished I could’ve gone home with my mother. I hugged the bowl and yowled great sobs like opera.

Then the baby moved. It was the first time since the accident. My crying trembled to neutral.

Maybe I’d been lonely for the baby. I realized I’d been talking to her for months without thinking. Maybe I would’ve been sad if she died.

I went to a fortune-teller by the railroad tracks. Her trailer smelled of cat piss, and she was as wide as a Volkswagen. She sat me down and dealt some cards. She said I was having a girl, which I already knew, and that within five years I’d have two more children and move into a split-level house. My daughter’s name would begin with J.

I began making plans. My daughter would look just like me, and when she was born she’d have a round little baseball head covered with black hair. Her eyes would be big and brown. She was going to be my best friend and there’d be nothing in the world we wouldn’t talk about. I’d tell her every last detail about my life up to her birth and after. She’d definitely go to college, and I’d call her Nicole, after a schizophrenic on my favorite soap opera. Ray said if it was a boy, he wanted it named after him. I said, no way. I wasn’t naming our girl after me. We settled on Jason, after Jason McCord in
The Lawman,
and his middle name would be Michael, after my father.

LABOR started on a Sunday night in the middle of September. It was so hot that week that the neighborhood dogs had taken to roaming in packs in a flurry of heat madness. Cats dived under cars and into open cellar windows to escape them. One day I saw the dogs toss a doll in the air and rip it limb from limb, a cloud of white foam clinging to their coats. I was almost two weeks late, and if I didn’t deliver soon, I was planning to throw myself in the middle of that pack of mangy dogs and be done for.

We went for macaroni at my mother’s on Sunday, a ritual I’d missed maybe a half dozen times in my entire life, only this time I felt a pain after dinner while we were watching
The FBI
and eating lemon meringue pie, but I didn’t say anything. Raymond wanted to stay for the Sunday night movie, but I told him I didn’t feel too well and wanted to go home. As soon as we walked into our house, a slimy liquid drooled down the inside of my thigh. “Oooh, gross! Raymond!” I yelled. “I think I’m in labor.”

“You’re kidding,” he said.

We tossed my overnight bag into the backseat of our Chevelle (my father had found it for five hundred dollars and co-signed for the loan), and I suggested we take a ride once around the duck pond before we went to the hospital. The new Beatles song “Hey Jude” came on the radio.

“That’s it!” I said. “That’s what we’ll name her—June.” I’d misheard the lyrics.

Ray drummed his thumbs on the dashboard, jerked his chin in and out, and said, “Cool.”

I was scared to death in the labor room. First they shaved me, then they gave me an enema, then after I waddled out of the bathroom and back into the room, they laid me in a crib like a beached whale. Immediately, the nurse poked some fingers in. I was three fingers, the middle circle. Five fingers was the biggest. When you stretched that wide it was bingo, birth. The Puerto Rican women came in and left within half an hour, screaming,
“Mama! Mama! Mama!”

There was a pretty woman lying in the crib across from me. “Hi,” she said after the nurse left.

“Hi.”

“I’m Louise Baker. This is my first baby. You too?”

“Yeah. My name’s Beverly Bouchard.”

“If I scream like those ladies, shoot me, okay?”

“You think it’s gonna really hurt?”

“I’m sure it does, but it can’t hurt that much.”

“How long you been here?”

“About an hour. I haven’t seen a doctor yet. I go to the clinic.”

“So do I. I never saw you.”

“That place is the pits.” She pulled back her long blond hair and began making a braid. “I go to Central Connecticut College. I mean, I did. After I was six months, I quit. My boyfriend still goes there. I’ll probably go back after the baby.”

“What were you going to school for?”

“My major? Anthropology.”

I wasn’t sure I knew what that was, but I’d rather die than ask her. I noticed her legs weren’t shaved. I wished I’d seen her at the clinic. Everybody else spoke Spanish, and there never were enough folding chairs to go around. I’d had to wait a minimum of four hours every time, and if I’d met Louise there, we could’ve talked for whole mornings. By now we’d be good friends. But, probably, a person who went to college would think I was too stupid.

“Do you have medical insurance?” she asked.

“No. You?”

“Do you realize if you don’t marry, your boyfriend’s insurance won’t cover you? We refused to marry. We put our politics in action. Art and I believe it’s an archaic formality binding you together by law. My parents don’t even … oh boy. Here comes one.”

My pains had stopped altogether. I told the nurse. A doctor came in. He was young and handsome. His hands were slender and long. I’d never laid eyes on him before. “Hello,” he said. He looked at my chart. “Mrs. Bouchard, I hear your pains have stopped.”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to give you a little something to get them started again, speed things up.”

The nurse handed him a needle and he stuck it in my ass. Within ten minutes, I was in agony and there was no breather between contractions. The doctor came back and said, “Okay, Mrs. Bouchard, we’re moving right along. Now, I’m going to give you some Demerol to ease it up a bit.” He gave me another shot in the ass. Before I passed out, I had a hallucination. I saw the kitten I’d had when I was a kid. It was jumping up over and over again, trying to get in the crib with me.

I don’t know how long I was out before I awoke to Louise screaming, “Oh God, oh God, oh God. Ah ah ah ah
aaaahhhhhh!”

Sweat started raining from every pore of my body. When she stopped screaming, she saw me looking at her through the bars and said, “I’m sorry, but it hurts so much,” then she started crying.

I wished I could die.

Louise was long gone when the nurse rolled me onto my back, put my ankles in my hands, and told me to push. It was too humiliating. I kept thinking how even Jacqueline Kennedy must’ve held her ankles in the air and grunted like she was taking a shit. The next time the nurse appeared, she looked between my legs and started breathing heavily. “Okay, Mrs. Bouchard, I’d like you to stop pushing now. We’re paging your doctor. Don’t worry, everything’s fine.”

“I can’t help it,” I cried. “I have to.”

“Please, Mrs. Bouchard, try not to push,” she said as she wheeled my cot into the delivery room. I felt betrayed by every living mother. Why hadn’t they warned me?

“This is horrible.” I started crying. “Where’s the gas? Give me the gas,” I yelled. “Don’t I get gas?” The nurse strapped my knees into stirrups, then positioned a round mirror above to distract me. “Look, Mrs. Bouchard, look. You can see the head.” It was slimy green and protruding. I covered my eyes and yelled, “Take it away, I can’t stand it, I don’t want to!” Finally, an Oriental intern walked in. They clamped a gas mask on my face and it was over.

When I awoke, the nurse held a wrinkled, ugly red baby in a white cloth out to me. “Congratulations, Mrs. Bouchard, you have a healthy eight-and-a-half-pound baby boy.”

“Boy!” I screamed. His head was huge and shaped like a football. “What’s the matter with his head? He has blond hair!” The nurse blanched. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed. It was as though my daughter had died. The baby girl with the pretty round head who’d been hiccupping, rolling over, and kicking inside me—the daughter who’d been my best friend for months—had been a boy all along. What would I do with him? I didn’t even like boys anymore. He’d have army men and squirt guns and baseball cards and a penis. What would we talk about?

My mother brought me a strawberry milkshake and kissed me on the cheek, then sat down and settled her pocketbook on her lap. “So, how does it feel to be a mother?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“Hurt, huh?”

I bit my lips to keep from crying.

Later, I took a walk to the nursery and saw him, a little lump under a white blanket. I thought if it weren’t for his name on the bassinet, I wouldn’t even know he was mine.

My mother came back at the next visiting hour and brought my father and my sisters, Rose and Phyllis, with her. Ray’s mother came too, and so did three of my girlfriends. Everybody sat on my bed or the win dowsills. Rose sat on my father’s lap. When Ray came by after work, there was no place for him. He seemed like an outsider, and I felt sorry. He handed me a bunny with an ivy plant in its back, and the first opening he got, he rocked forward and back and said, “Hey, Bev, you know something? The song’s ‘Hey Jude,’ not ‘June.’”

Since the Beatles had been singing about a boy all along, maybe having a boy wouldn’t be too bad. Besides, if the fortune-teller had been wrong about the sex of my baby, then she was probably wrong about the other two kids and the split-level house, too. “Do you think we should name him Jude instead of Jason?” I asked Ray.

“I guess.”

“Jude?” my mother said. “What kind of a name’s that?”

I’d never heard of St. Jude or
Jude the Obscure,
and the name reminded me of Judas, Jesus’ traitor. I changed my mind. “Let’s call him Jason,” I said.

“Cool.” Ray dragged on his cigarette.

The next day, when Jason came to my room, he was soft and warm and smelled sweet like baby, but he moved his head like a dinosaur in a Japanese movie. I was scared of him. Then he got the hiccups after half an ounce of milk and started crying.

He was still crying when I gave him back to the nurse. “Only half an ounce?” she said.

“He got the hiccups,” I explained.

She shook her head as if to say, Stupid teenage mother.

The next time he came to my room, I made myself be braver. I shut the door, then took off his undershirt and memorized exactly how his diaper was pinned so I could duplicate it, then took it off too. I’d never seen an uncircumsised penis before. It looked like an elephant’s trunk. I kissed it. I nuzzled his stomach, his armpit, his neck. I put his whole foot in my mouth.

The day we left the hospital, I dressed Jason in a blue suit with a plastic Tweety Bird glued on the chest. Ray carried him to the car like he was a tank of nitroglycerin. At a traffic light, when I noticed his head being led around by his mouth, I stuck my finger in. He sucked on it.

My mother was at our house when we got there and it looked like she’d been there for weeks. For one thing, it was spic-and-span, and for another, she’d moved the kitchen table from kitty-corner to flush against the wall. She was sitting at it with a tray of pastries and a pot of coffee in front of her. “You have more room this way,” she said. I sat down and said, “Ma, look.” I stuck my finger in.

“Take that finger out of his mouth! Are you crazy?” she said.

“Why? He likes it.”

“You got germs on your hands. Everything that passes that baby’s lips has to be sterilized. Come on, Jason.” She held out her arms. I handed him over. “How you doin‘, little fella? What a big boy you are.” She pinched his cheeks. “How you doing? How you doing? How you doing?” she shouted at him, nodding her head every time, poking his chin with her finger. “Look at those fat cheeks. I could eat him up. Your mother’s tired, so your Mimi’s taking over, let her get her strength back. Isn’t that right?”

“Your
Mimi?”

“It’s cute, don’t you think?”

“I like it,” Ray said, taking off his jacket and sitting on the couch.

“Raymond, hang it up,” my mother said. “Your wife just had a baby, she can’t be picking up after you.”

“I think Mimi’s stupid.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“It sounds like a dog.”

“I like it. It’ll be easier to pronounce.”

I figured either she wanted to be called Mimi because she was only forty-five and embarrassed to be a grandmother or because Mimi sounded more like Mommy than Grandma did.

My mother came over for hours every single day. I hardly had to do anything, and when I did do something, she watched me like a hawk. “Watch out for his head, Beverly, don’t forget the soft spot. His neck isn’t strong yet, he could snap it…. Better put him on his stomach, he might spit up and suffocate if you lie him on his back.”

By the time she started bringing my fat aunt Alma with her, I’d had it. They perked a pot of coffee, broke open an Entenmann’s coffee cake and gave detailed infant histories of every one of their children. “Jerry was colicky, kept me up six months straight, but Willie, God bless‘m, slept eight hours the first night.”