Final Vinyl Days (7 page)

At three months, that magical time when you supposedly cross the threshold from morning sickness to a sudden burst of energy, the uterus slightly larger than an orange, we decided to take a vacation. The reason was
clear. It was freezing in Boston, not to mention the fact that everywhere we turned people were saying to us,
Your life is about to change, it will never ever be the same
. Like birthdays, weddings, funerals, it seemed important to mark this transition, to remind ourselves continuously that something was in fact happening. We chose the Virgin Islands as a way of feeling we had gone very far and yet not left the country. I just didn't feel I could be pregnant
and
in another country.

The first day of our trip was like a perfect dream. I lazed in the sun, calypso music playing down the beach, the warm clear water as blue as the sky. I listened to the birds and the steel drums while I ran through lists of names in my mind—names of relatives long deceased. The voice of the man who was trying to interest my husband in a time share wove in and out of my thoughts. He'd sat himself down in his shorts and Hawaiian shirt, canvas shoes with laces untied, smelling like Hawaiian Tropic and some kind of musky aftershave, and asked my husband if teenage girls were better looking than ever before these days or was it just him? I heard him tell my husband that he preferred younger women, always had. “Like that one, mmmmmmm, mmmmmmmm,” he said, his words oozing in such a way I half expected to see them like black oily leeches crawling off his tongue. I opened
one eye to his gleaming white teeth just in time to follow his look to a string bikini, oiled brown thighs too young for cellulite. I wanted to sit up and tell him that of course he
liked 'em young
, that any grown-up woman with any sense whatsoever wouldn't touch him. But the warmth of the sun and the distant drums, the hunch that even the very young woman who had just passed would not give this two-bit Peter Pan salesman the time of day seemed satisfaction enough. That and the fact that I had lifted his almost empty pack of Marlboros and hidden them deep in my beach bag. I listened to him pat his pockets and look all around. Let him have a little nicotine fit, get a grip on the libido. I devised a plan: I would get up in the middle of the night and tiptoe out onto our balcony. I would huddle off to one side and blow my smoke with the wind just as I had done through screened windows of a locked bathroom as a teenager. A little mouthwash, deodorant, hairspray, cologne. If no one saw me, if I didn't confess, it'd be like it never happened.

The next morning I woke to the sensation of wetness, startled out of sleep by recognition as I hurried to switch on the fluorescent light in the bathroom. It was real; I was bleeding. Slowly, carefully, I called out to my husband and lay on the cool tile floor. I felt detached, as
if I were in someone else's room, on someone else's vacation. I imagined a honeymoon couple, whirling and dancing, drunk and giddy, collapsing on the bed while the stark sunlight and still blue sea lay beyond the sliding-glass doors. Same place, same room, same toilet, different life. I lay there and questioned everything. Why did I buy the crib so early? Why did I smoke that Marlboro Man cigarette? I lay there wishing that we were home. I wanted the cracked broken black tiles of our own bathroom; I wanted our neighbor sitting with me on the front stoop, the smell of the Charles River, our pots without handles and the rickety three-legged couch I complained about every time I sat on it; I wanted normalcy. I said,
Let's make a deal
. Let me win this round and I will never ever again smoke. I will go on great missions and try not to gossip. But more than anything I solemnly swear to never again smoke.

It seemed to take forever, phone calls, a slow walk, the idle chatter and words of sympathy and well wishes from the time-share man, his gaze taking in the freshly raked beach. There was a boat ride, and then an ambulance that really was a station wagon with a light on top. There was an emergency room and then a closed door, a hall where pregnant women perched like hood ornaments on cheap aluminum stretchers, some crying out in labor, their wings spread in pain. They had no ultrasound; they had
no answers. I was thinking about the used car lot that was across the street from my grandmother's house when I was growing up. I thought about the little plastic flags strung across that lot and the way they whipped in the wind.
It's a Good Deal
the sign said, and whenever anyone commented on it, my grandmother simply leveled her eyes at the person with a solemn stare, as if to say, you better work hard to
make
it a good deal. I rolled past woman after woman. They looked lifeless; used and worn and tired.

I spent a week sitting in bed or on a chaise on the balcony, the room littered with room service trays; the hotel had limited choices: conch chowder, conch fritters, conch omelet, conch conch. I could hear my husband down below, in my absence forced to hear more time-share news, to have young, supple bodies pointed out for his perusal, while I clicked a channel changer round and round hoping that all of a sudden I would find more than one station. Over and over they advertised a parade that had taken place the week before, people in bird suits, feathers and bells, marching. I lay in the bed and watched little yellow sugar birds fly up to suck the jelly packets I placed outside, the breakfast tray discarded on the dresser. The Kings Day Parade. The Kings Day Parade. It was a bad
Twilight Zone
. It was like the world had stopped suddenly and thrown everything askew.

Everyone has a story. Perfect strangers came up and told me the most horrible story they'd ever heard about pregnancy and childbirth. They would say, “I shouldn't be telling this to
you
,” and then proceed without ever pausing to draw a breath. I heard about the woman who miscarried after the three-month mark and about the woman who knew at seven months that her baby was dead but was asked to carry it into labor all the same. “Oh, sure,” people said. “It's common to bleed like that. Happens all the time. No real explanation.” Que será será. A miscarriage is just one that was never meant to be, you know, a genetic
mistake
. If you lose this one you can always have another. But look at it this way, you haven't lost it yet!
It ain't over till it's over. The fat lady ain't done singing
.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us
. Joseph Sever's voice quavered out the line as he leaned closer to me, all the while looking at my abdomen, now two months beyond the Twilight Zone scare. He insisted that I read aloud, anything I was reading, anything my husband was reading. We should be reading aloud all the time now. He had read an article about it, the words, the sounds traveling through the layers of clothes and skin, thick hard muscle to those miniature ears, lanugo-coated limbs gently swishing and bathing. “Who knows what's
for real,” Joseph said as he tipped his hat and once again reached for my grocery bag piled high with cigarette substitutes like licorice whips and Chunky Monkey ice cream, greasy Slim-Jim sausage sticks, the taste for which I thought I'd outgrown. “We know nothing of this world, this great universe,” he paused, hazel eyes squinting in thought as he waited for me to nod. “Take God, for example,” he said and laughed softly, “and which came first, knowledge or man's
need
for knowledge?” I motioned him on with his errand, his own marketing trip. It was our daily struggle, trying to help each other on the icy brick sidewalks. We argued who was more in need: an old man with a bad heart or a pregnant woman who would not believe that everything was really okay until she gave birth to, saw, held, heard a healthy infant.

I dreamed of my grandmother. She was naked and alone in a rubble of upturned graves. I squatted and cradled her in my arms, so happy to find her alive after all, forget the damp orange clay and what seemed like miniature ancient ruins. Forget the pale, shrouded family members wandering aimlessly in search of loved ones. (Was this Judgment Day?) And then I dreamed myself sleeping, my husband on his side, his face a comfort. My own head was inclined toward him. I wore the very gown I wore in
reality, and within the dream I woke to a chill, a cool draft that filled the room and I sat, startled, and turned on the lamp by the bed where, stuck to its base, was a little yellow Post-it note with the words,
I came to see if you believe
, written in a small deliberate hand. Yes, yes, I believe. I believe. I woke myself with this affirmation. I woke to discover that my husband was already up and in the shower, and that I wasn't entirely sure to what or to whom I had given this great affirmation of faith. I woke to the tiny buzzsaw, vibrating uterus, a pressed bladder, the dim gray light of day.

Early that summer—week twenty-eight, the time designated for a baby to be “legally viable”—Joseph and I went to see the swans being brought to the Public Garden pond. It was warm and we walked slowly, taking our time to point out to each other lovely panes of amethyst glass, the little catty-corner building that looks just like the drawing in
Make Way for Ducklings
, the bar that was the model for
Cheers
, crowds of people waiting in line to get inside and buy T-shirts.

Joseph talked about how Gwendolyn always saved old bread to scatter for the birds. We sat on a bench in the shadiest spot we could find, the ground in front of us littered with soggy bread that the overfed, fat ducks were ignoring. I told him about the Peabody Hotel in Memphis
and how as a child I had been taken there to see the ducks marching from their penthouse to the elevator and down and across the lobby to the pool. I told how I had looked around that lobby and marveled at the people staying there, this fine hotel with its rugs and chandeliers and fountains. I was with a church group, one in a busload of kids stopping here and there to sing for other congregations. It was supposed to be an honor (not to mention an educational experience) to get to go on that trip, but I spent the whole time reading
Richie Rich
comic books and wishing myself home. It was the summer before Martin Luther King was shot. It was when Elvis still walked the rooms of Graceland in the wee hours of the morning. It was when my sister was practicing to be a junior high cheerleader, and my grandmother was still walking the rows of her garden.

With the arrival of the swans (they had been staying across the street at the Ritz), Joseph cleared his throat and began reciting.
Upon the brimming water among the stones are nine and fifty swans
. He paused and laughed, added. “Or what about two swans?” But with Yeats's “wild swans” he had once again opened his favorite topic, which led eventually, as the crowd began to thin—baby strollers pushed away, children led to visit the row of bronze ducklings, couples folding up their picnic blankets—to Eliot
and one of his all time favorites, “Journey of the Magi,” which led him to “The Gift of the Magi” and then into his own Christmas story, one I'd heard on several other occasions.
Christmas with Gwendolyn
. The picture of Gwendolyn I always conjured up in my mind had the look of a Gibson Girl, even though I knew that she wore her straight gray hair cut close with bangs and that the waist of her dark wool coat hit high around her short, thick middle. He kept a photograph on top of his dresser: Joseph and Gwendolyn in 1945, standing on a busy sidewalk, each cradling a shopping bag, his face filled out in a way I'd never see.

“It was just the two of us,” he began as he often did, pausing with the unspoken question—one I never asked—about whether or not they had ever wanted a child. His close attention to my own growth, his comments on my coloring and my hair, seemed answer enough. He described their Christmas Eve, the rushing home from work in the mid-afternoon to find the other waiting on the stoop—her with a black wool scarf wrapped around her head and tied beneath her chin, him with a gray fedora he felt certain she was about to replace that very night. He said that when he looked back it seemed like it always snowed right on cue.
Let there be snow
. Inside, their windows fogged up with the cold, the lights they strung
glowed as they pulled old boxes from the closets, tied red velvet around the cats' necks. They waited until dark, and then they walked down to the waterfront, the freezing wind forcing them to walk huddled together like Siamese twins. They listened, ready to stop at the sound of carolers, church bells, paused and looked up into windows to see lights and children and greenery.
The city was never more beautiful
.

They ate in a small dark restaurant at a table by the window. First they ordered bourbons (hers with a lot of water), and then they spent the first hour just talking over the year behind them. Oh, there were those years when the plans went awry, when one or the other was upset about this or that, work or a sick family member; there was that year when, for reasons he didn't feel it necessary to discuss, they were farther apart than they had ever been, complete strangers coming and going for a period of three months. They feared that they would lose each other. That there would be no forgiveness. He said this part quietly, nodded a slight nod as if to say
you must understand what I'm saying
. “That was the worst Christmas,” he said quietly. “Really the only bad Christmas.” He laughed then and looked at my abdomen, gestured to it as if speaking to the child. “Trust me. We were better people once it was all over. We made it.” We watched the
swans circling, necks arched proudly as they didn't even acknowledge the various breads and cracker crumbs tossed out onto the water. “In my mind the Christmas,
the
Christmas is the way I've described it. Our dinner, talking over us. Our life and our future.”

On all of those Christmas eves, it seemed they were the only people out. Others had rushed home to family gatherings but neither of them had relatives close by. They were alone with each other. The best part of it all was that they always got the very best tree left at the Faneuil Hall lot for just three dollars. (It had gotten up to ten by the time Gwendolyn died.) Then they dragged the tree home and decorated with common little items, things they already had. Paper chains cut from glossy magazine pages, tinfoil stars, spools of thread, her jewelry, his neckties, fishing gear, chess pieces tied off in twine. “We had a glorious time,” he said. “Brandy and poetry and her crazy ornaments until the sun, that cold winter light, came through the window.”