But it's April now so this isn't a solstice card. It's not homemade, either. It came from one of those stores where you can buy a personalized astrology chart for a baby gift. The paper is yellowed and smells of incense. Leon holds it to his nose, then turns it in his hands, not trying to decipher Magda's slanty handwriting but studying the ink drawing that runs around the border. Leon has curly black hair, like Magda's--and like Annemarie's would be, if she didn't continually crop it and bleach it and wax it into spikes. But Leon doesn't care who he looks like. He's entirely unconscious of himself as he sits there, ears sticking out, heels banging the stool at the kitchen counter. One of Annemarie's cats rubs the length of its spine along his green high-top sneaker.
"It looks like those paper dolls that come out all together, holding hands," he says. "Only they're fattish, like old ladies. Dancing."
"That's about what I'd decided," says Annemarie.
Leon hands the card back and heads for fresh air. The bang of the screen door is the closest she gets these days to a goodbye kiss.
Where, in a world where kids play with Masters of the Universe, has Leon encountered holding-hands paper dolls? This is what disturbs Annemarie. Her son is normal in every obvious way but has a freakish awareness of old-fashioned things. He collects things: old Coke bottles, license-plate slogans, anything. They'll be driving down Broadway and he'll call out "Illinois Land of Lincoln!" And he saves string. Annemarie found it in a ball, rolled into a sweatsock. It's as if some whole piece of Magda has come through to Leon without even touching her.
She reads the card and stares at the design, numb, trying to see what these little fat dancing women have to be happy about. She and her mother haven't spoken for months, although either one can see the other's mobile home when she steps out on the porch to shake the dust mop. Magda says she's willing to wait until Annemarie stops emitting negative energy toward her. In the meantime she sends cards.
Annemarie is suddenly stricken, as she often is, with the feeling she's about to be abandoned. Leon will take Magda's side. He'll think this new project of hers is great, and mine's awful. Magda always wins without looking like she was trying.
Annemarie stands at the kitchen sink staring out the window at her neighbors' porch, which is twined with queen's wreath and dusty honeysuckle, a stalwart oasis in the desert of the trailer court. A plaster Virgin Mary, painted in blue and rose and the type of cheap, shiny gold that chips easily, presides over the bar-becue pit, and three lawn chairs with faded webbing are drawn up close around it as if for some secret family ceremony. A wooden sign hanging from the porch awning proclaims that they are "The Navarretes" over there. Their grandson, who lives with them, made the sign in Boy Scouts. Ten years Annemarie has been trying to get out of this trailer court, and the people next door are so content with themselves they hang out a shingle.
Before she knows it she's crying, wiping her face with the backs of her dishpan hands. This is completely normal. All morning she sat by herself watching nothing in particular on TV, and cried when Luis and Maria got married on Sesame Street. It's the hormones. She hasn't told him yet, but she's going to have another child besides Leon. The big news in Magda's card is that she is going to have another child too, besides Annemarie.
When she tries to be reasonable--and she is trying at the moment, sitting in a Denny's with her best friend Kay Kay--Annemarie knows that mid-forties isn't too old to have boyfriends. But Magda doesn't seem mid-forties, she seems like Grandma Moses in moonstone earrings. She's the type who's proud about not having to go to the store for some little thing because she can rummage around in the kitchen drawers until she finds some other thing that will serve just as well. For her fifth birthday Annemarie screamed for a Bubble-Hairdo Barbie just because she knew there wouldn't be one in the kitchen drawer.
Annemarie's side of the story is that she had to fight her way out of a family that smelled like an old folks' home. Her father was devoted and funny, chasing her around the house after dinner in white paper-napkin masks with eye-holes, and he could fix anything on wheels, and then without warning he turned into a wheezing old man with taut-skinned hands rattling a bottle of pills. Then he was dead, leaving behind a medicinal pall that hung over Annemarie and followed her to school. They'd saved up just enough to move to Tucson, for his lungs, and the injustice of it stung her. He'd breathed the scorched desert air for a single autumn, and Annemarie had to go on breathing it one summer after another. In New Hampshire she'd had friends, as many as the trees had leaves, but they couldn't get back there now. Magda was vague and useless, no protection from poverty. Only fathers, it seemed, offered that particular safety. Magda reminded her that the Little Women were poor too, and for all practical purposes fatherless, but Annemarie didn't care. The March girls didn't have to live in a trailer court.
Eventually Magda went on dates. By that time Annemarie was sneaking Marlboros and fixing her hair and hanging around by the phone, and would have given her eye teeth for as many offers--but Magda threw them away. Even back then, she didn't get attached to men. She devoted herself instead to saving every rubber band and piece of string that entered their door. Magda does the things people used to do in other centuries, before it occurred to them to pay someone else to do them. Annemarie's friends think this is wonderful. Magda is so old-fashioned she's come back into style. And she's committed. She intends to leave her life savings, if any, to Save the Planet, and tells Annemarie she should be more concerned about the stewardship of the earth. Kay Kay thinks she ought to be the president. "You want to trade?" she routinely asks. "You want my mother?"
"What's wrong with your mother?" Annemarie wants to know.
"What's wrong with my mother," Kay Kay answers, shaking her head. Everybody thinks they've got a corner on the market, thinks Annemarie.
Kay Kay is five feet two and has green eyes and drives a locomotive for Southern Pacific. She's had the same lover, a rock 'n' roll singer named Connie Skylab, for as long as Annemarie has known her. Kay Kay and Connie take vacations that just amaze Annemarie: they'll go skiing, or hang-gliding, or wind-surfing down in Puerto Penasco. Annemarie often wishes she could do just one brave thing in her lifetime. Like hang-gliding.
"Okay, here you go," says Kay Kay. "For my birthday my mother sent me one of those fold-up things you carry in your purse for covering up the toilet seat. 'Honey, you're on the go so much,' she says to me. 'And besides there's AIDS to think about now.' The guys at work think I ought to have it bronzed."
"At least she didn't try to knit you a toilet-seat cover, like Magda would," says Annemarie. "She bought it at a store, right?"
"Number one," Kay Kay says, "I don't carry a purse when I'm driving a train. And number two, I don't know how to tell Ma this, but the bathrooms in those engines don't even have a seat."
Annemarie and Kay Kay are having lunch. Kay Kay spends her whole life in restaurants when she isn't driving a train. She says if you're going to pull down thirty-eight thousand a year, why cook?
"At least you had a normal childhood," Annemarie says, taking a mirror-compact out of her purse, confirming that she looks awful, and snapping it shut. "I was the only teenager in America that couldn't use hairspray because it's death to the ozone layer."
"I just don't see what's so terrible about Magda caring what happens to the world," Kay Kay says.
"It's morbid. All those war marches she goes on. How can you think all the time about nuclear winter wiping out life as we know it, and still go on making your car payments?"
Kay Kay smiles.
"She mainly just does it to remind me what a slug I am. I didn't turn out all gung-ho like she wanted me to."
"That's not true," Kay Kay says. "You're very responsible, in your way. I think Magda just wants a safe world for you and Leon. My mother couldn't care less if the world went to hell in a hand-basket, as long as her nail color was coordinated with her lipstick."
Annemarie can never make people see. She cradles her chin mournfully in her p
alms. Annemarie has surprisingly fair skin for a black-haired person, which she is in principle. That particular complexion, from Magda's side of the family, has dropped unaltered through the generations like a rock. They are fine-boned, too, with graceful necks and fingers that curve outward slightly at the tips. Annemarie has wished for awful things in her lifetime, even stubby fingers, something to set her apart.
"I got my first period," she tells Kay Kay, unable to drop the subject, "at this die-in she organized against the Vietnam War. I had horrible cramps and nobody paid any attention; they all thought I was just dying-in."
"And you're never going to forgive her," Kay Kay says. "You ought to have a T-shirt made up: 'I hate my mother because I got my first period at a die-in.'"
Annemarie attends to her salad, which she has no intention of eating. Two tables away, a woman in a western shirt and heavy turquoise jewelry is watching Annemarie in a maternal way over her husband's shoulder. "She just has to one-up me," says Annemarie. "Her due date is a month before mine."
"I can see where you'd be upset," Kay Kay says, "but she didn't know. You didn't even tell me till a month ago. It's not like she grabbed some guy off the street and said, 'Quick, knock me up so I can steal my daughter's thunder.'"
Annemarie doesn't like to think about Magda having sex with some guy off the street. "She should have an abortion," she says. "Childbirth is unsafe at her age."
"Your mother can't part with the rubber band off the Sunday paper."
This is true. Annemarie picks off the alfalfa sprouts, which she didn't ask for in the first place. Magda used to make her wheat-germ sandwiches, knowing full well she despised sprouts and anything else that was recently a seed. Annemarie is crying now and there's no disguising it. She was still a kid when she had Leon, but this baby she'd intended to do on her own. With a man maybe, but not with her mother prancing around on center stage.
"Lots of women have babies in their forties," Kay Kay says. "Look at Goldie Hawn."
"Goldie Hawn isn't my mother. And she's married."
"Is the father that guy I met? Bartholomew?"
"The father is not in the picture. That's a quote. You know Magda and men; she's not going to let the grass grow under her bed."
Kay Kay is looking down at her plate, using her knife and fork in a serious way that shows all the tendons in her hands. Kay Kay generally argues with Annemarie only if she's putting herself down. When she starts in on Magda, Kay Kay mostly just listens.
"Ever since Daddy died she's never looked back," Annemarie says, blinking. Her contact lenses are foundering, like skaters on a flooded rink.
"And you think she ought to look back?"
"I don't know. Yeah." She dabs at her eyes, trying not to look at the woman with the turquoise bracelets. "It bothers me. Bartholomew's in love with her. Another guy wants to marry her. All these guys are telling her how beautiful she is. And look at me, it seems like every year I'm crying over another boyfriend gone west, not even counting Leon's dad." She takes a bite of lettuce and chews on empty calories. "I'm still driving the Pontiac I bought ten years ago, but I've gone through six boyfriends and a husband. Twice. I was married to Buddy twice."
"Well, look at it this way, at least you've got a good car," says Kay Kay.
"Now that this kid's on the way he's talking about going for marriage number three. Him and Leon are in cahoots, I think."
"You and Buddy again?"
"Buddy's settled down a lot," Annemarie insists. "I think I could get him to stay home more this time." Buddy wears braids like his idol, Willie Nelson, and drives a car with flames painted on the hood. When Annemarie says he has settled down, she means that whereas he used to try to avoid work in his father's lawnmower repair shop, now he owns it.
"Maybe it would be good for Leon. A boy needs his dad."
"Oh, Leon's a rock, like me," says Annemarie. "It comes from growing up alone. When I try to do any little thing for Leon he acts like I'm the creature from the swamp. I know he'd rather live with Buddy. He'll be out the door for good one of these days."
"Well, you never know, it might work out with you and Buddy," Kay Kay says brightly. "Maybe third time's a charm."
"Oh, sure. Seems like guys want to roll through my life like the drive-in window. Probably me and Buddy'll end up going for divorce number three." She pulls a paper napkin out of the holder and openly blows her nose.
"Why don't you take the afternoon off?" Kay Kay suggests. "Go home and take a nap. I'll call your boss for you, and tell him you've got afternoon sickness or something."
Annemarie visibly shrugs off Kay Kay's concern. "Oh, I couldn't, he'd kill me. I'd better get on back." Annemarie is assistant manager of a discount delivery service called "Yesterday!" and really holds the place together, though she denies it.
"Well, don't get down in the dumps," says Kay Kay gently. "You've just got the baby blues."
"If it's not one kind of blues it's another. I can't help it. Just the sound of the word 'divorced' makes me feel like I'm dragging around a suitcase of dirty handkerchiefs."
Kay Kay nods.
"The thing that gets me about Magda is, man or no man, it's all the same to her," Annemarie explains, feeling the bitterness of this truth between her teeth like a sour apple. "When it comes to men, she doesn't even carry any luggage."
The woman in the turquoise bracelets stops watching Annemarie and gets up to go to the restroom. The husband, whose back is turned, waits for the bill.
The telephone wakes Annemarie. It's not late, only a little past seven, the sun is still up, and she's confused. She must have fallen asleep without meaning to. She is cut through with terror while she struggles to place where Leon is and remember whether he's been fed. Since his birth, falling asleep in the daytime has served up to Annemarie this momentary shock of guilt.
When she hears the voice on the phone and understands who it is, she stares at the receiver, thinking somehow that it's not her phone. She hasn't heard her mother's voice for such a long time.
"All I'm asking is for you to go with me to the clinic," Magda is saying. "You don't have to look at the needle. You don't have to hold my hand." She waits, but Annemarie is speechless. "You don't even have to talk to me. Just peck on the receiver: once if you'll go, twice if you won't." Magda is trying to sound light-hearted, but Annemarie realizes with a strange satisfaction that she must be very afraid. She's going to have amniocentesis.
"Are you all right?" Magda asks. "You sound woozy."
"Why wouldn't I be all right," Annemarie snaps. She runs a hand through her hair, which is spiked with perspiration, and regains herself. "Why on earth are you even having it done, the amniowhatsis, if you think it's going to be so awful?"
"My doctor won't be my doctor anymore unless I have it. It's kind of a requirement for women my age."
A yellow tabby cat walks over Annemarie's leg and jumps off the bed. Annemarie is constantly taking in strays, joking to Kay Kay that if Leon leaves her at least she won't be alone, she'll have the cats. She has eleven or twelve at the moment.
"Well, it's probably for the best," Annemarie tells Magda, in the brisk voice she uses to let Magda know she is a citizen of the world, unlike some people. "It will ease your mind, anyway, to know the baby's okay."
"Oh, I'm not going to look at the results," Magda explains. "I told Dr. Lavinna I'd have it, and have the results sent over to his office, but I don't want to know. That was our compromise."
"Why don't you want to know the results?" asks Annemarie. "You could even know if it was a boy or a girl. You could pick out a name."
"As if it's such hard work to pick out an extra name," says Magda, "that I should go have needles poked into me to save myself the trouble?"
"I just don't see why you wouldn't want to know."
"People spend their whole lives with labels stuck on them, Annemarie. I just think it would be nice for this one to have nine months of being a plain human being."
"Mother knows best,"
sighs Annemarie, and she has the feeling she's always had, that she's sinking in a bog of mud. "You two should just talk," Kay Kay sometimes insists, and Annemarie can't get across that it's like quicksand. It's like reasoning with the sand trap at a golf course. There is no beginning and no end to the conversation she needs to have with Magda, and she'd rather just steer clear.
The following day, after work, Kay Kay comes over to help Annemarie get her evaporative cooler going for the summer. It's up on the roof of her mobile home. They have to climb up there with the vacuum cleaner and a long extension cord and clean out a winter's worth of dust and twigs and wayward insect parts. Then they will paint the bottom of the tank with tar, and install new pads, and check the water lines. Afterward, Kay Kay has promised she'll take Annemarie to the Dairy Queen for a milkshake. Kay Kay is looking after her friend in a carefully offhand way that Annemarie hasn't quite noticed.
It actually hasn't dawned on Annemarie that she's halfway through a pregnancy. She just doesn't think about what's going on in there, other than having some vague awareness that someone has moved in and is rearranging the furniture of her body. She's been thinking mostly about what pants she can still fit into. It was this way the first time, too. At six months she marched with Buddy down the aisle in an empire gown and seed-pearl tiara and no one suspected a thing, including, in her heart-of-hearts, Annemarie. Seven weeks later Leon sprang out of her body with his mouth open, already yelling, and neither one of them has ever quite gotten over the shock.
It's not that she doesn't want this baby, she tells Kay Kay; she didn't at first, but now she's decided. Leon has reached the age where he dodges her kisses like wild pitches over home plate, and she could use someone around to cuddle. "But there are so many things I have to get done, before I can have it," she says.
"Like what kind of things?" Kay Kay has a bandana tied around her head and is slapping the tar around energetically. She's used to dirty work. She says after you've driven a few hundred miles with your head out the window of a locomotive you don't just take a washcloth to your face, you have to wash your teeth.