“Jogs?”
“He claims they bobble against his head and bang his scalp.”
Ian snorted, but all at once he felt old. In fact he was very likely the oldest person present. He looked down at the hand encircling his glass—the grainy skin on his knuckles, the gnarled veins in his forearm. How could he have assumed that old people were born that way? That age was an individual trait, like freckles or blond hair, that would never happen to him?
He was older now, he thought with a thud, than Danny had ever managed to become.
Rita was laughing at something Curt had said, unconsciously cradling the bulge of her baby as she leaned back against the bar. Daphne was humming along with the jukebox. “Madonna,” she broke off to tell Ian.
“Pardon?”
“ ‘Like a Prayer.’ ”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The song, Ian.”
“Oh.”
He took a gulp from his glass. (This seltzer smelled like wet dog.) “So anyhow,” he said to Daphne, “where did you and Curt meet?”
“At work,” she said.
Daphne had a job now at a place called Trips Unlimited. Ian said, “He’s a travel agent?”
“No, no, he came in to reserve a flight. By profession he’s an inventor.”
“An inventor.”
“He’s got this one invention: a Leaf Paw. This sort of claw-type contraption you hold in your left hand to scoop up the leaves you’re raking. We think it’s going to make him rich.”
Ian glanced over at Rita, hoping she’d heard. (They often considered the same things funny.) But Rita was staring fixedly across the room. He followed her eyes and saw a small, pretty girl in a Danzig T-shirt playing the Black Knight 2000 machine. An old friend, maybe? But when he turned back to ask, he realized Rita’s stare was unfocused. It was the glazed and inward stare of someone listening to faraway music. He said, “Rita?”
“Excuse me,” she said abruptly. She stood and made her way through the crowd, disappearing behind the door marked LADIES.
Ian and Daphne looked at each other. “Think I should go after her?” Daphne asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Well, she’s probably okay.”
Although he was nowhere near as confident as he sounded.
They fell silent. Even Curt seemed to know better than to try and make small talk. Now Ian noticed the noise in this place—the laughter and clinking glassware and the hubbub from the pinball machines, which whanged and burbled and barked instructions in metallic, hollow voices. Everyone was so carefree! Two stools over, a young woman with long hair as dark as Rita’s nonchalantly swung her pink-and-turquoise mountain-climbing shoes. A young man in a red jacket and a straight blond ponytail passed her one of the beers he’d just paid for. The jukebox had stopped playing, but some people in a booth were singing “Happy Birthday.”
Then Rita was back, white-faced. All three of them stood up. She told Ian, “I’m bleeding.”
He swallowed.
Curt was the first to react. He said, “I’ll get the check. You three head out to the car,” and he dropped a set of keys into Ian’s palm.
Ian had forgotten that they’d driven here in Curt’s Volvo. “Let’s go,” he said. He shepherded Rita toward the door. Daphne followed with their wraps. When they reached the sidewalk he stopped to help Rita into her jacket. She shook her head, but he could hear how her teeth were chattering. “Put it on,” he told her, and she submitted, allowing him to bully her arms into the sleeves.
Curt caught up with them as Ian was unlocking the car door. “Which hospital?” he asked, sliding behind the wheel, and he started the engine in one smooth motion. He drove as if he’d dealt with such crises often, swooping dexterously from lane to lane and barely slowing for red lights before proceeding through them. Meanwhile Ian held both of Rita’s hands in his. Her teeth were still chattering and he wondered if she was in shock.
At the Emergency Room entrance, Curt pulled up behind an ambulance. Ian hustled Rita out of the backseat and took her inside to a woman at a long green counter. “She’s bleeding,” he told the woman.
“How much?” she asked.
Instantly, he felt reassured. It appeared there were degrees to this; they shouldn’t automatically assume the worst. Rita said, “Not a whole lot.”
The woman called for a nurse, and Rita was led away while Ian stayed behind to fill out forms. Insurance company, date of birth … He answered hurriedly, scrawling across the dotted lines. When he was almost finished, Daphne and Curt came in from parking the car. “They’ve taken her somewhere,” he told them. He asked Daphne, “Do you know her mother’s maiden name?”
“Make one up,” Daphne said. She looked around at the faded green walls, the elderly black man half asleep on a molded plastic chair. “Not bad,” she said. “Usually this place is packed.”
How often did she come here, anyway? And Curt, standing behind her, said, “Lord, yes, there’ve been times I’ve waited six and seven hours.”
“Well, we might have a wait this evening, too,” Ian said. “Maybe you should both go home.”
“I’m staying,” Daphne told him.
“Yes, but,” Ian said. He slid the form across the counter to the woman. He said, “But, um, I’d really rather you go. To tell the truth.”
He could see she felt hurt. She said, “Oh.”
“I just want to … concentrate on this. All right?” he asked.
“I could concentrate too,” she said.
But Curt touched her sleeve and said, “Come on, Daph. I’m sure he’ll call as soon as he has anything to tell you.”
When he led her away, Ian felt overwhelmingly grateful. He felt he might even love the boy.
Rita lay on a stretcher in an enclosure formed by white curtains. No one had come to examine her yet, she said, but they’d phoned her doctor. She wore a withered blue hospital gown, and a white sheet covered her legs and rose gently over the mound of her stomach. Ian settled on a stool beside the stretcher. He picked up her hand, which felt warmer now and slightly moist. She curled her fingers tightly around his.
“Remember our wedding night?” she asked him.
“Yes, of course.”
“Remember in the hotel? I came out of the bathroom in my nightgown and you were sitting on the edge of the bed, touching two fingers to your forehead. I thought you were nervous about making love.”
“Well, I was,” he said.
“You were praying.”
“Well, that too.”
“You were shy about saying your bedtime prayers in front of me and so you pretended you were just sort of thinking.”
“I was worried I would look like one of those show-off Christians,” he said. “But still I wanted to, um, I felt I ought to—”
“Could you pray now?” she asked him.
“Now?”
“Could you pray for the baby?”
“Honey, I’ve been praying ever since we left the bar,” he said.
Really his prayers had been for Rita. He had fixed her firmly, fiercely to this planet and held her there with all his strength. But he had prayed not only for her health but for her happiness, and so in a sense he supposed you could say that he’d prayed for the baby as well.
She spent one night in the hospital but was released the following morning, still pregnant, with orders to lie flat until her due date. At first this seemed easy. She would do anything, she said, anything at all. She would stand on her head for two months, if it helped her hang onto this baby. But she had always been the athletic, go-getter type, and books didn’t interest her and TV made her restless. So every evening when Ian came home from work he found the radio blaring, and Rita on the telephone, and the kitchen bustling with women fixing tidbits to tempt her appetite as if she were a delicate invalid. Which, of course, she wasn’t. “I don’t care if it takes major surgery!” she’d be shouting into the phone. “You get those moldy old magazines away from her!” (She was talking to De
nnis or Lionel—one of her poor frazzled assistants.) Her hair flared rebelliously out of its braid and her shirtsleeves hiked up on her arms; nothing could induce her to spend the day in her bathrobe. And constantly she leapt to her feet on one pretext or another, while everybody cried, “Stop! Wait!” holding out their hands as if to catch the infant they imagined she would let drop.
Ian’s father, who kept mostly to the basement these days, told Ian this was all a result of a misstep in evolution. “Human beings should never have risen upright,” he said. “Now every pregnant woman has gravity working against her. Remember Claudia? Same thing happened to Claudia, back when she was expecting Franny.”
“That’s true, it did,” Ian said. He had forgotten. All at once he saw Lucy in her red bandanna with her hair hanging down her back. “Just, you know, a little bleeding …” she informed him in her quaint croak. Lucy had been pregnant herself at the time. She had been pregnant at her wedding, most likely, and only now did Ian stop to think how she must have felt going through those early weeks alone, hiding her symptoms from everyone, trying to figure out some way to manage.
“It won’t be real fancy,” she said.
And, “Twenty twenty-seven! Great God Almighty!”
She said, “Do you think Danny will mind?”
That evening while he and Rita were playing Scrabble, he rose and wandered over to Lucy’s framed photo above the piano. Daphne had hung it there some time ago, but he’d hardly glanced at it since. He lifted it from its hook and held it level in both hands. “I’ll trade you two of my vowels for one consonant,” Rita said, but Ian went on frowning at Lucy’s small, bright face.
Of course, she struck him as preposterously young. That was only to be expected. And everything about her was so dated. That leggy look of the sixties! That childish, Christopher Robin stance grown women used to affect, with their feet planted wide apart and their bare knees braced! She resembled a little tepee on stilts. A paper parasol from a cocktail glass. One of those tiny, peaked Japanese mushrooms with the thready stems.
He was noticing this to gain some distance. Surely he was able to see her clearly now. Wasn’t he? Surely he had the perspective, at last, to understand what Lucy’s meaning had been in his life.
But Rita said, “Okay, three of my vowels. For one lousy consonant. You drive a hard bargain, you devil.”
And Ian replaced the picture on its hook, no wiser.
This was going to be the first Christmas of their marriage and Rita had big plans. She sent Daphne on mysterious errands with shopping lists and whispered instructions. She phoned Thomas in New York and Agatha in L.A., making sure they were coming. She drew up a guest list for Christmas dinner: Mrs. Jordan and the foreigners and her mother and Curt. Ian had once mentioned how the Bedloes’ holiday meals used to be all hors d’oeuvres, and she decided to revive the practice even though it meant cooking from the living room. For days she lay on the couch with a breadboard across her lap, rolling pinwheels and stamping out fancy shapes of biscuit dough and mincing herbs that Doug obligingly toted back and forth for her. Ian worried she was overdoing, but at least it kept her entertained.
Christmas fell on a Monday that year. Thomas arrived in time for church on Sunday morning, and Daphne met them there, carrying her knapsack because she’d be sleeping over. Agatha and Stuart flew in that afternoon. For the family supper on Christmas Eve they had black-eyed peas and rice. Everybody was puzzled by this (they usually had oyster stew), but Rita explained that black-eyed peas were an ancient custom. Something to do with luck, she said—good luck for the coming year. Almost immediately a sort of click of recognition traveled around the table. Coming year? Then wasn’t that New Year’s Eve? They sent each other secret glances and then applied themselves to their food, smiling. Rita didn’t notice a thing. Ian did, though, and he was touched by his family’s tact. Lately he’d started valuing such qualities. He had begun to see the importance of manners and gracious gestures; he thought now that his mother’s staunch sprightliness had been braver than he had appreciated in his youth. (Last summer, laid up for a week with a wrenched back, he had suddenly wondered how Bee had endured the chronic pain of her arthritis all those years. He suspected that had taken a good deal more strength than the brief, flashy acts of valor you see in the movies.)
“To the cook!” Thomas said, raising his water glass, and they all said, “To Rita!” Rita grinned and raised her own glass. Probably for decades of Christmas Eves to come the Bedloes would be loyally eating black-eyed peas and rice.
It was afterward, in front of the fire, that Thomas announced his engagement. “You two won’t be the newest newlyweds anymore,” he told Ian. This wasn’t exactly a shock—he’d been dating the same girl for some time now—but they had been hoping he would get over her. They all felt she bossed him around too much. (He kept falling for these managerial types who didn’t have any softness to them; they might as well be business partners, Daphne had once complained.) Still, the women hugged him and Doug said, “What do you know!” and Ian suggested they call Angie and welcome her to the family. So they did, lining up in the hall to tell her more or less the same thing in several different ways. While Ian was waiting his turn at the phone he had a sudden memory of Danny presenting Lucy in this very spot. What was it he had said? “I’d like you to meet the woman who’s changed my life,” he had said, and then as now the family had received the news with the most resolute show of pleasure.
On Christmas morning they opened their presents—most of Ian’s and Rita’s relating to babies—and then cleared away the gift wrap and started getting ready for the dinner guests. Rita directed from an armchair Ian had dragged into the dining room, except that she kept jumping up to do things herself. Finally Agatha put Stuart in charge of diverting her. “Show her your card tricks, Stu,” she said. “Oh, please, no,” Rita groaned. Ian and his father fitted all the leaves into the table, and the women added last-minute touches to the dishes Rita had prepared. Everyone was entranced to find nothing but hors d’oeuvres. “Look! Artichokes,” Doug pointed out. “Look at this, kids, my favorite: Chesapeake crab spread. It’s just like the old days.” Rita beamed. Stuart told her, “Pick a card. Any card. Come on, Rita, pay attention.”
The current foreigners’ names were Manny, Mike, and Buck. They were the first to arrive—they always showed up on the dot, not familiar with Baltimore ways—and Mrs. Jordan followed, bearing one of her sumptuous black fruitcakes with the frosting you had to crack through with a chisel. Then Bobbeen appeared with an old-fashioned crank-style ice cream freezer, fully loaded and ready for the ice, and last came Curt, looking as if he’d just that minute rolled out of bed. Those who were guests had to have the hors d’oeuvres explained for them—all but Mrs. Jordan, of course, who’d been through this year after year. Mrs. Jordan said, “Why, you’ve even made Bee’s hearts-of-palm dish!” And later, once they’d taken their seats and Doug had offered the blessing, she said, “Rita, if Ian’s mother could see what you’ve done here she would be so pleased.”
“Remember the first time we tasted hearts of palm?” Agatha asked Thomas.
“Was that when we had the flu?”
“No, no, this was before. You were really little, and Daphne was just a baby. I don’t think she got to try them. But you and I were crazy about them; we polished off the platter. It wasn’t till five or six years later we had that flu.”
“Ugh! Worst flu of my life,” Thomas said.
“Mine too. I couldn’t eat a bite for days. But finally I called out, ‘Ian, I’m hungry!’ Remember, Ian? You were flat on your back—”
“I was sick?” Ian asked.
“Everyone was, even Grandma and Grandpa. You said, ‘Hungry for what?’ And I thought and thought, and the only thing that came to me was hearts of palm.”
“So then we all wanted hearts of palm,” Thomas told him. “They just sounded so good, even though I’d forgotten them and Daphne’d never had them. We said, ‘Please, Ian, won’t you plea
se bring us hearts of—’ ”
“I don’t remember this,” Ian said.
“So you got up and tottered downstairs, holding onto the banister—”
“Put your coat on over your pajamas, stepped into somebody’s boots—”
“Drove all the way to the grocery store and brought back hearts of palm.”
“I don’t remember any of it,” Ian said.
They regarded him fondly—all but the foreigners, who were giving the hors d’oeuvres their single-minded attention. “My hero!” Rita told him.
“I said, ‘Ian, thank you,’ ” Agatha went on, “and you said, ‘Thank you. Until you mentioned them,’ you said, ‘I didn’t realize that’s what I’d been wanting all along myself.’ ”
Stuart said, “Maybe they contained some trace element your bodies knew they needed.”
“Well, whatever,” Curt said, “these here taste mighty good. You should go into the catering business, Rita.”
“Oh, I believe I’ve got enough to do for the next little bit,” she told him. And she patted her abdomen, which Ian’s borrowed shirt could barely cover.
Daphne said, “Have you heard? After this baby’s born, Rita and I are planning to be partners. Half the time I’ll do clutter counseling while she stays home with the baby, half the time I’ll stay with the baby while she does clutter counseling.”
Ian raised his eyebrows. He knew Rita had been considering various strategies, but she hadn’t mentioned Daphne. He said, “What about Trips Unlimited?”
“That’s not really working out,” Daphne told him. “It’s too personal.”
“A travel agency is personal?”
“Mr. X and Mrs. Y book two flights to Paris and one hotel room, say, and I can’t let on I’ve noticed. Or they cheat on their expense accounts with first-class reservations to—”
No one suggested that this new job would surely be even more personal—that she seemed to search out the personal. Finally Curt said, “Well, if you ever get tired of clutter counseling you could always become a scribe.”
“Scribe?” Daphne asked, perking up.