The Book of Ruth (27 page)

The quilt was a light blue pond with green and orange ducks swimming around the reeds. May said there wasn’t going to be one spot of pink in it. I didn’t do anything but lie on the couch in the living room while they stitched. Randall lent me his reel-to-reel tape recorder and Dee Dee got me blind tapes through the library. I had to call in sick to Trim ’N Tidy half the time because I was so hot and miserable. I lay on the couch listening to my favorite books by Charles Dickens, in particular that one called
Bleak House.
It’s about one million years long, and that’s hardly exaggerating. It has Esther in it, the heroine in literature I root for the most. I always felt so sorry for her because she had a very pure heart, and all the same there were people who treated her cruelly. I wished I could be some kind of magical wise person who was able to walk into books and change their course would slip in and be Esther’s long-lost sister, comfort little Jo before he died, tell Ada that loving Richard Carstone was a dead end, and finally, melt the ice out of Lady Dedlock’s heart and reunite her with Esther, and me, and then we’d both inherit her fortune.

May was bossy with me but I could laugh behind my pale sick face because I knew she was thinking about the baby. She said so sternly that I had to have vegetables, and she butchered two chickens and fried me their livers. They made my stomach do cartwheels so she fed the organs to Randall with chocolate cake on the side. We were all ready to be happy about something; it almost didn’t matter what. If we had had a dog that was going to have puppies May probably would have fried up livers for the bitch and sewed a quilt for the puppies to lie on. She had been waiting for something great in her life for a long time, ever since Matt left home and I met Ruby.

Finally, in September, I started feeling better. I woke up one morning and told Ruby I had to have a cheeseburger without delay. He ran and told May and she made me one lickety-split. She sprinkled olives on top and set me a place with the doily napkins. I had figured out how to be queen quite by accident. Everyone was concerned about me; if I picked up the laundry basket, say, both May and Dee Dee ordered me to put it down. They yelled in unison as if they were trying to sing a duet. I did exactly what they said. Even Ruby took the laundry himself and hung it on the line, never mind that he left it out in the rain and we didn’t have any clean underwear.

I love being pregnant, feeling like a big old elephant. Some girls hate the sensation, I know, but if you throw your shoulders back and let your belly lead you down the street, never fails, people smile going by. I love how suddenly everything tiny seems beautiful, the tiniest, thinnest blade of grass. You want to go out and put a fence around it, so no one will step on it. I like thinking about the drama going on in a mother’s body—for instance, Artie told me the fluid the baby grows in is the same as the salt water in the sea, exactly. That information gave me goose pimples and I felt glad knowing porpoises are my cousins. I could almost remember jumping up to get the fish out of my keeper’s hands. Although I’m a small person, during my first pregnancy Ruby said my stomach was as tremendous as them blown-up hot air balloons. When he walked with me in town he loved to watch people thinking I was a fat girl. He swelled and beamed, knowing that he was the one who did it to me.

The doctor at the clinic told us about classes at the hospital in Humphrey where nurses teach girls how to grin through labor. He said we ought to attend. I got up my nerve and asked May to write a check for twenty-five dollars, so we could go to class. She only scowled for a minute. There were ten other couples learning about babies also. I knew everyone was examining us in great detail. I felt their eyes piercing through the holes in my shoes and the tears in my socks. At the cleaners you don’t actually have to talk to the people; you say the same conversation all day long, like “Is it cold enough out there for you?” And then you tell them how much their clean clothes cost, and naturally at the end you say, “Have a nice day.” But in the childbirth class the couples were so different from us. We had to go around and say what our occupation was: ninety-nine percent were physical therapists and salesmen. One of the ladies worked on a newspaper writing stories. Ruby said right out that he was the can man in the grocery store parking lot; he sang it out, and I said quietly that I was the spotter at Trim ’N Tidy. Our teacher, Silvia, had to ask, “What did you say? Can you speak up?”

I could tell people were laughing at us, or commenting, “Oh brother,” under their breaths. We were right back in grade school again, saying the wrong answer, sounding dumb. The other mothers had blond hair, all of them—I’m not lying—nice and straight, and they dressed in pink maternity sweaters with initials on the front. Their plump soft faces made them all look like identical stuffed animals.

I knew we were poor and strange against the people in our class. Sometimes I felt so sad for my baby. I didn’t want it to see the world, if it was going to find out about our oddness. I talked to it down in my stomach. I told it not to worry; we’d hide it away, we wouldn’t let other children taunt it. We’d chase bullies out of the yard and throw stones after them.

It always relieved me to get home, back with my Ruby, back up to our room. He played his music on his guitar with the radio and he’d say, “OK, baby, breathe in, breathe out, let’s practice you having a kid. Look at the speck on the wall and imagine all them magic nights we’ve had, breathe in one of them cleansing breaths, pant blow pant blow.”

One night he pretended he was the doctor giving me a Cesarean section. He strapped a flashlight bulb to his head and outlined my stomach with his fingernail. He told me, “I’m gonna open you up and get the kid out in no time flat. I got to fish in real quick before you wake up.” I laughed and squirmed and then he tore the rest of my clothes off. He whispered that he was going to keep me pregnant all the time because he liked my boobies to be the size of a cow’s bag.

Artie kept saying that I was the best worker and what was he to do when I had Oscar. I said, “Artie, you think I’m going to quit? How do you think I’m supposed to pay for our Oscar’s doctor bills if I’m not working?” Artie was good to me, as always, because he said when it was born he’d figure out a part-time schedule for both May and me.

Those nine months were serene. I worked, thinking about the baby every other minute. My mind wasn’t at Trim ’N Tidy; my mind was inside my stomach, with our child. We were swimming around together like goldfish circling in a bowl. I felt the world closing in on me. The space in front of me was getting smaller and smaller, until all I could see was my family, and the threesome we were to become. I told Daisy, when she came home from Peoria for a week, that I was with my baby constantly, and she looked at me as if I was cracked.

“You think you’re swimming inside your own stomach?” she said. “Maybe that baby is growing in your head and it’s going to swim down your nose.” She smirked at her joke. I didn’t tell her further thoughts about being a mother, but when I felt the baby I had to stop whatever I was doing, no matter who was present. I had to put down the steam iron and hold my stomach to feel the kicks. Ruby felt the movement too. We sat in bed and he put his ear against me to listen. “Baby,” he whispered, “it’s spooky in there, inside of you.”

We didn’t notice the winter coming on because we were preoccupied with ourselves. We didn’t mind how cold it was getting. The night of our anniversary Ruby brought home pizzas, with some coaching on the part of Dee Dee, and all of us sat in the kitchen talking about what we should name the baby. I never said out loud the name I wanted. I was keeping it secret. I went along with Ruby and May very agreeably. May bought a book from the store filled with names and she read them to us—it took her two hours just for the boys. The one she wanted was Josiah, but to me it sounded like those old men in the Bible who are always getting into trouble with God. Ruby liked the name Clover. He said it should be called Clover Reuben Dahl. May said if we named it that it would turn into a homo. I’ve never seen one that I know of, so I can’t tell if it’s a bad way to be. I said no way in a million years was our baby going to be called Clover, we might as well call it Wheat Groats or Quack Grass. After Ruby watched a
Bewitched
rerun one night he declared the baby was going to be christened Darren. I smiled at him and whispered, “You’re out of your gourd.”

I stopped working in December. I couldn’t get through the doors. I was waiting—all I could do was wait, staring at nothing, crying all of a sudden for no reason. I felt so large, as if there were a gigantic hen inside me scratching with its feet. I had dreams that our infant chicken burst out of my stomach. I woke up thinking there wasn’t anything left of my belly; there was eggshell scattered on the floor, a baby shaking its downy skin beside me.

I couldn’t get anything done at home. I was trying to paint the crib Dee Dee loaned us. I’d stand up to start a task and it always looked so tiresome I had to sit back down and stare at the open can of paint. Ruby and I watched TV. We watched the soap operas where people don’t have anything to do except fall in love with the wrong person. They wear so much hair spray not one piece of hair gets dislodged, even when they’re kissing each other’s bruised mouths. We didn’t do much else except play cards and get headaches from staring at kings and queens and spades.

On New Year’s Eve I didn’t celebrate. I was big and tired. I didn’t ever get rest because our baby always went on hikes at bedtime. It was training with those clubs that go up that stupid giant Mount Everest. Artie’s son climbs mountains—Artie always tells me how many people died on certain peaks, right when they were two inches from the top. At any rate, Ruby and I were asleep when suddenly I woke up. My side of the bed was soaked. I didn’t think I could have wet the bed; I hadn’t done that since I was nine. I knew that it was my water bag, busted. “Ruby,” I said, nudging him. “Wake up. We have to go to the hospital.”

He sat bolt upright. He didn’t have one piece of clothing on, and he said, “I’m ready.”

“You ain’t ready either,” I said, laughing. “You’re a nudey man.” He grinned at me in the dark. I could see that dazzling smile of his shining through the murky night.

We woke up May and explained that we were on our way to the hospital and she said, “I’m coming with.” She put her clothes on before we could ask if she meant it—her outfit had been folded neatly by her bed just for the occasion. So we three bundled into the car, it’s only two in the morning and ten below zero, and May said, “It’s colder than a witch’s tit in a copper bra.” We were all so frozen none of us laughed. What she said was true.

May couldn’t come into the labor room no matter how long she swore at the nurse just barely under her breath. She had to wait outside in the fathers’ lounge. She smoked about ten packs of cigarettes with Dee Dee, who lied to the nurses, telling them that she was Ruby’s mother. The nurses said they didn’t usually have both grandmothers there too, and I mumbled something about how I guessed we were different. Nothing much was happening so we played crazy eights. I beat Ruby each time; I could tell his brain wasn’t on Function. He was nervous about being in a hospital. He went out of the room each time the nurse came to check on my progress.

When the contractions got closer together they hooked me to a machine that measures the pains. Ruby watched it so he could see how miserable I felt.

“Baby,” he said, looking at the screen, “it’s a good thing them waves ain’t from your brain, they’d put you in the circus.”

I had to laugh over that one. Ruby was always cheering me up. He sat down in the chair and got out his carton of food he had brought with him. He was diving into the box of Wheaties when he looked up and said, “Hey, baby, remember to do all the breathing you learned about. You’re gonna do real good, I just know it.”

The husbands were supposed to say that to the wives. They were supposed to encourage them. He concentrated awfully hard when I said he had to throw ice water on my face. There were frown lines on his forehead. He wanted to do a perfect job. He said, “Ain’t I a great coach for you?”

I managed to say, “Yes, Ruby.” I was so glad he was my husband. I knew May was impressed that the fathers got to assist at the birth.

As the pains came stronger and closer together I kept asking myself, Is this actually happening to me? Aren’t I still the little girl who’s getting laughed at for not having a brassiere? Why aren’t I at the kitchen table while my daddy’s dumping ice cream on top of my head? All of a sudden it seemed that my life had gone so quickly.

I was in labor for sixteen hours. Ruby looked like a car wreck after eight. When I was having the contractions I remembered pulling the little lamb from the mother sheep, so long ago, and how she didn’t complain, although her eyeballs were in the back of her head. I thought about her and tried not to moan too loudly. I tried not to call out to God and the devil but their names came soaring from my mouth and then echoed around the room. I told the doctor I didn’t want to have a baby any more, that all I wanted was a shot in my thigh which would erase me. He said, “It won’t be long now.” I was glad I couldn’t see myself having a baby. I bet my face looked like a raisin somebody stepped on.

I kept trying to get Ruby’s attention so I could ask him if I was going to the ladies’ room all over the bed, but he had wandered off to the TV screen. I just knew the doctor was going to bawl me out for messing the sheets. Finally the doctor said again that it wouldn’t be long, and Ruby called out, “Come on, baby, let’s get this show on the road.” I pushed as if I had a Greyhound bus, deluxe coach, inside me, stuck between two snowbanks. The doctor counted to ten, repeatedly, while I screamed and groaned.

“I don’t have no energy,” I cried after forever, and the doctor said that the head was practically out, a few more good pushes was going to wrap it up.

I tried, I mustered my forces, I revved that bus’s engine and at last,
splam,
comes a slippery small package with white film all over it. Dr. Hanson caught it on the fly. Ruby looked over and said, “Hey, Doc, you’d be a great outfielder if you was younger.”