Victory Over Japan (20 page)

“Start at the beginning. Tell story all over.
Leave out romance. We see if we figure something out. Tell story again.”

“Okay. I know I started menstruating about ten
days before I took the IUD out. I had to wait until I stopped bleeding. I used to bleed like a stuck pig when I had that thing. That's why I took
it out. So then I made love to Freddy that night. Then Sandy called me, or, no, I called him because I heard this Bob Dylan song. Anyway, I was glad to
see him until I met these people he's been living with. This woman that gives drugs to her own kid. But first I made love to him and we cried a
lot. I mean, it was really good making love to him. So I think it must be Sandy's. Don't you? What do you think?”

Tam came across the room and sat down on the bed and began to rub Nora Jane's back, moving her fingers down the vertebrae.
“We can make abortion with massage. Very easy. Not hurt body. Not cost anything. No one make you have this baby. You make up your mind. I do it
for you.”

“I couldn't do that. I was raised a Catholic. It isn't like being from China. Well, I don't
mind having it anyway. I thought about it all the way home from the doctor's. I mean, I don't have any brothers or sisters. My
father's dead and my mother's a drunk. So I don't care much anyway. I'll have someone kin to me. If it will be a girl.
It'll be all right if it's a girl and I can name her Lydia after my grandmother. She was my favorite person before she died. She had this
swing on her porch.” Nora Jane put her face deeper into the sheets, trying to feel sorry for herself. Tam's hands moved to her shoulders,
rubbing and stroking, caressing and loving. Nora Jane turned her head to the side. A breeze was blowing in the window. The curtains were billowing like
sails. Far out at sea she imagined a whale cub turning over inside its mother. “It will be all right if it's a girl and I can name it Lydia
for my grandmother.”

“Yes,” Tam said. “Very different from China.”

“Who do
you think it belongs to?” Nora Jane said again.

“It belong to you. You quit thinking about it for a while. Think one
big grasshopper standing on leaf looking at you with big eyes. Eyes made of jade. You sleep now. When Li come home I make us very special dinner to
celebrate baby coming into world. Li work on problem. Figure it out on calculator.”

“If it had blond hair I'd
know it was Sandy's. But black hair could be mine or Freddy's. Well, mine's blacker than his. And curlier…”

“Go to sleep. Not going to be as simple as color of hair. Nothing simple in this world, Nora Jane.”

“Well, what am I going to do about all this?” she said sleepily. Tam's fingers were pressing into the nerves at the
base of her neck. “What on earth am I going to do?”

“Not doing anything for now. For now going to sleep. When Li
come home tonight he figure it out. Not so hard. We get it figured out.” Tam's fingers moved up into Nora Jane's hair, massaging the
old brain on the back of the head. Nora Jane and Lydia and Tammili Whittington settled down and went to sleep.

“Fifty-five
percent chance baby will be girl,” Li said, looking up from his calculations. “Forty-six percent chance baby is fathered by Mr. Harwood.
Fifty-four percent chance baby is fathered by Mr. Halter. Which one is smartest gentleman, Nora Jane? Which one you wish it to be?”

“I don't know. They're smart in different ways.”

“Maybe it going to be two babies.
Like Double Happiness Bun. One for each father.” Li laughed softly at his joke. Tam lowered her head, ashamed of him. He had been saying many
strange things since they came to California.

“You sure it going to be good idea to have this baby?” he said next.

“I guess so,” Nora Jane said. “I think it is.” She searched their faces trying to see what they wanted to hear
but their faces told her nothing. Tam was looking down at her hands. Li was playing with his pocket calculator.

“How you
going to take care of this baby and go to your job?” he said.

“That's nothing,” Nora Jane said.
“I've already thought about that. It isn't that complicated. People do it all the time. They have these little schools for them. Day-
care centers. I used to work in one the Sisters of Mercy had on Magazine Street. I worked there in the summers. We had babies and little kids one and
two years old. In the afternoons they would lie down on their cots and we would sit by them and pat their backs while they went to sleep. It was the
best job I ever had. The shades would be drawn and the fan on and we'd be sitting by the cots patting them and you could hear their little breaths
all over the room. I used to pat this one little boy with red hair. His back would go up and down. I know all about little kids and babies. I can have
one if I want to.”

“Yes, you can,” Tam said. “You strong girl. Do anything you want to do.”

“You going to tell Mr. Harwood and Mr. Halter about this baby?” Li said.

“I don't
know,” she answered. “I haven't made up my mind about that.”

Then for two weeks Nora Jane kept her secret.
She was good at keeping secrets. It came from being an only child. When Freddy called she told him she couldn't see him for a while. She
hadn't talked to Sandy since she called and told him where to pick up Mirium's car.

At night she slept alone with her
secret. In the mornings she dressed and went down to the gallery where she worked and listened to people talk about the paintings. She felt very
strange, sleepy and secretive and full of insight. I think my vision is getting better, she told herself, gazing off into the pastel hills. I am getting
into destiny, she said to herself at night, feeling the cool sheets against her legs. I am part of time, oceans and hurricanes and earthquakes and the
history of man. I am the aurora borealis and the stars. I am as crazy as I can be. I ought to call my mother.

Finally Freddy
Harwood had had as much as he could stand. There was no way he was letting a girl he loved refuse to see him. He waited fourteen days, counting them
off, trying to get to twenty-one, which he thought was a reasonable number of days to let a misunderstanding cool down. Only, what was the
misunderstanding? What had he done but fall in love? He waited and brooded.

On the fourteenth day he started off for work, then
changed his mind and went over to his cousin Leah's gallery where he had gotten Nora Jane a job. The gallery was very posh. It didn't even
open until 11:00 in the morning. He got there about 10:30 and went next door to Le Chocolat and bought a chocolate statue of Aphrodite and stood by the
plate-glass windows holding the box and watching for Nora Jane's car. Finally he caught a glimpse of it in the far lane on Shattuck Boulevard
heading for the parking lot of the Safeway store. He ran out the door and down to the corner and stood by a parking meter on the boulevard.

She got out of the car and came walking over, not walking very fast. She was wearing a long white rayon shirt over black leotards,
looking big-eyed and thin. “You look terrible,” he said, forgetting his pose, hurrying to meet her. “What have you been doing? Take
this, it's a chocolate statue I bought for you. What's going on, N.J.? I want you to talk to me. Goddammit, we are going to talk.”

“I'm going to have a baby,” she said. She stepped up on the sidewalk. Traffic was going by on the street. Clouds
were going by in the sky. “Oh, my God,” Freddy said.

“And I don't know who the father is. It might be your
baby. I don't know if it is or not.” Her eyes were right on his. They were filling up with tears, a movie of tears, a brand-new fresh print
of a movie of tears. They poured down her cheeks and onto her hands and the white cardboard box holding the chocolate Aphrodite. Some even fell on her
shoes.

“So what,” Freddy said. “That's not so bad. I mean, at least you don't have cancer. When I saw
you get out of the car I thought, leukemia, she's got leukemia.”

“I don't know who the father is,”
she repeated. “There's a forty-six percent chance it's you.”

“Let's get off this goddamn
street,” he said. “Let's go out to the park.”

“You aren't mad? You aren't going to kill
me?”

“I haven't had time to get mad. I've hardly had time to go into shock. Come on, N.J., let's go
out to the park and see the Buddha.”

“He has blue eyes, or gray eyes, I guess you'd call them. And you have
brown eyes and I have brown eyes. So it isn't going to do any good if it has brown eyes. Li said it's more the time of month anyway because
sperm can live several days. So I've been trying and trying to remember…”

“Let's don't talk
about it anymore,” Freddy said. “Let's talk less and think more.” They were in the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Freddy
had called his cousin Leah and told her Nora Jane couldn't come in to work and they had gone out to the park to see a jade Buddha he worshipped.
“This all used to be free,” he said, as he did every time he brought her there. “The whole park. Even the planetarium. Even the
cookies in the tea garden. My father used to bring me here.” They were standing in an arch between marble rooms.

“Let's go look at the Buddha again before we leave,” Nora Jane said. “I'm getting as bad about that Buddha
as you are.” They walked back into the room and up to the glass box that housed the Buddha. They walked slowly around the case looking at the
Buddha from all angles. The hands outstretched on the knees, the huge ears, the spine, the ribs, the drape of the stole across the shoulder. Sakyumuni
as an Ascetic. It was a piece of jade so luminous, so rounded and perfect and alive that just looking at it was sort of like being a Buddha.

“Wheeewwwwwwwww,” Nora Jane said. “How on earth did he make it?”

“Well, to begin with,
it took twenty years. I mean, you don't just turn something like that out overnight. He made it for his teacher, but the teacher died before it
was finished.”

Nora Jane held her hands out to the light coming from the case, as if to catch some Buddha knowledge. “I
could go see your friend Eli, the geneticist,” she said. “He could find out for me, couldn't he? I mean he splices genes, it
wouldn't be anything to find out what blood type a baby had. How about that? I'll call him up and ask him if there's any way I can
find out before it comes.”

“Oh, my God,” Freddy said. “Don't go getting any ideas about Eli.
Don't go dragging my friends into this. Let's just keep this under our hats. Let's don't go spreading this around.”

“I'm not keeping anything I do under my hat,” she said. She stepped back from him and folded her hands at her waist.
Same old, same old stuff, she thought. “You just go on home, Freddy,” she said. “I'll take BART. I don't want to talk to
you anymore today. I was doing just fine until you showed up with that chocolate statue. I've never been ashamed of anything I've done in my
life and I'm not about to start being ashamed now.” She was backing up, heading for the door. “So go on. Go on and leave me alone. I
mean it. I really mean it.”

“How about me?” he called after her retreating back. “What am I supposed to do?
How am I supposed to feel? What if I don't want to be alone? What if I need someone to talk to?” She held her hands up in the air with the
palms turned toward the ceiling. Then she walked on off without turning around.

***

Several days later Nora Jane
was at the gallery. It was late in July. Almost a year since she had robbed the bar in New Orleans and flown off to California to be with Sandy. So much
had happened in that time. Sometimes she felt like a different person. Other times she felt like the same old Nora Jane. That morning while she was
dressing for work she had looked at her body for a long time in the mirror, turning this way and that to see what was happening. Her body was beginning
to have a new configuration, strange volumes like a Titian she admired in one of Leah's art books.

It was cool in the
gallery, too cool for Nora Jane's sleeveless summer dress. Just right for the three-piece suit on the man standing beside her. They were standing
before one of Nora Jane's favorite paintings. The man was making notes on a pad and saying things to the gallery owner that made Nora Jane want to
sock him in the face.

“What is the source of light, dear heart? I can't review this show, Leah. This stuff's so
old-fashioned. It's so obvious, for God's sake. Absolutely no restraint. I can't believe you got me over here for this. I think
you're going all soppy on me.”

“Oh, come on,” Leah said. “Give it a chance, Ambrose. Put the pad away
and just look.”

“I can't look, angel. I have a trained eye.” Nora Jane sighed. Then she moved over to the
side of the canvas and held the edge of the frame in her hand. It was a painting of a kimono being lifted from the sea by a dozen seagulls. A white
kimono with purple flowers being lifted from a green sea. The gulls were carrying it in their beaks, each gull in a different pose. Below the painting
was a card with lines from a book.

“On some undressed bodies the burns made
patterns…and on the skin of some women…the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos….”

Hiroshima
, by John Hersey

“Hummmmmmmm…” Nora Jane said. “The source of light?
This is a painting, not a light bulb. There's plenty of light. Every one of those doves is a painting all by itself. I bet it took a million hours
just to paint those doves. This is a wonderful painting. This is one of the most meaningful paintings I ever saw. Anybody that doesn't know this
painting is wonderful isn't fit to judge a beauty contest at a beach, much less a rock of art, I mean, a work of art.”

“Leah,” the man said. “Who is this child?”