Mary Anne + 2 Many Babies

  “Sleeping?” I suggested.

  “I mean, what’s she doing here?”

  “Coming with us,” I answered. “We can’t leave her alone.”

  “Didn’t you get a baby-sitter?”

  I shook my head. “Dad and Sharon are going out. Dawn’s baby-sitting at the Braddocks’. I didn’t want to ask any of them to watch Sammie.”

  “Well, what about someone else? Claudia or someone?”

  “Oh, Logan. Can’t we just bring Sammie with us? We don’t have time to find a sitter now. We’ll miss the beginning of the movie.”

  “Bring an infant to the movie theater? No way.”

  But in the end, that was what we did.

  I checked Sammie to make sure the identifying marks on her shell still showed up. Then I added a large scrap of flannel to her basket, since our movie theater begins using the air-conditioning around the middle of March, in order to keep the temperature at a pretty steady 45° year-round.

  “When’s she due for her next feeding?” Logan asked me, as we stood on a line stretching down the sidewalk.

  “Right in the middle of the movie,” I answered. “But that’ll be okay. One of us will be holding her anyway.”

  “Yeah. One of us will.”

  Something in Logan’s tone of voice made me glance at him and wonder exactly how our evening was going to go. But just then the doors to the theater opened, and we filed inside along with the rest of the crowd. I grew busy juggling Sammie, my pocketbook, and the extra sweaters I’d brought along. I forgot what Logan had said. And how he’d said it.

  “Are you hungry?” Logan asked me, as we walked through the lobby.

  “Sort of. Are you?”

  “Starving. I didn’t eat dinner. What do you want?”

  “A small popcorn and a small diet Coke.”

  “Okay.” Logan stepped up to the counter and said to the woman, “One small popcorn, one giant popcorn, one small diet Coke, one large diet Coke, and a large box of Peanut M&M’s, please.”

  Well, not only did all that food cost a fortune, but the two of us couldn’t carry it. Not with Sammie and the sweaters. We had to get one of those cardboard boxes like you get on trains, and then sort of hobble into the theater and down a darkened aisle.

  “If we were really married and really on a budget,” I said to Logan, as we looked for seats, “we could probably have paid our electricity bill with the money we spent on food and movie tickets tonight.”

  “I know.”

  “Just think if we had to pay a baby-sitter, too.”

  “I guess you have to splurge sometime,” said Logan, but he looked as if he weren’t sure he meant that.

  The theater was becoming crowded. Even so, I whispered to Logan, “I think we’re going to need three seats tonight. We have so much stuff.”

  Luckily we found a row consisting of three empty seats. It was way over on the side of the theater, and kind of close to the front, but at least we’d found what we needed. I eased myself into the middle seat, and Logan sat on the aisle. I set Sammie in the third seat, the one by the wall. But she didn’t weigh enough to hold the seat down.

  It flipped back up, trapping Sammie and her basket between the seat and the seat back. “Yikes!” I cried.

  Logan saw what had happened, but he was holding that flimsy box full of spilly sodas and popcorn. He needed both hands to carry it. Even so, he nearly dropped it. “Mary Anne!” he hissed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said crossly. I dropped my armload of sweaters and grabbed the handle of Sammie’s basket with one hand and the seat with the other. I pushed the seat down and gingerly lifted the basket.

  Sammie was safe inside.

  “She’s okay,” I said to Logan.

  “I knew this wasn’t a good idea,” he replied. “Okay. Now hold Sammie.”

  “I can’t. I mean, I can’t hold her and the popcorn and the soda. Just a sec.” I pulled down the murderous seat again and placed the sweaters on it. “Do you want to give me your coat?” I asked Logan. (He actually likes the temperature in the movie theater.)

  Logan put the tray of food on the floor, took off his coat, handed it to me, and picked up the food. Then I placed Sammie on Logan’s coat, and he handed me my popcorn and soda. At last we were settled.

  “Excuse me, is that seat taken?”

  Logan and I glanced up. Standing at Logan’s elbow was a tall man in a suit. He was looking at Sammie’s seat with raised eyebrows.

  “Well,” said Logan.

  “Well,” I said.

  The man checked his watch. “The movie’s going to begin any minute now, and the theater is packed,” he pointed out.

  I thought about what might happen if I told the man the seat was occupied by an egg. The outcome didn’t look good.

  Logan must have been thinking the same thing, because he sighed and said, “No, it’s not taken.”

  I gave Logan back his coat, which he sat on.

  I put on one of the sweaters.

  I sat on the others.

  Then I put Sammie in my lap.

  “Logan,” I whispered as the lights began to dim, “I can’t hold Sammie and eat, too.” (My food was on the floor.)

  “Neither can I,” Logan replied. “Plus, I have more food than you do.”

  “All right. I’m going to put Sammie’s basket on the floor until I’m finished eating. She’ll be okay there.”

  “Shhh!” hissed the man on the other side of me. He was the first person I had ever met who wanted to pay attention to the cartoon about not littering in the theater, and buying fresh popcorn at the concession stand, and being able to locate the exits in case of fire.

  “Sorry,” I replied.

  “You can’t put Sammie on the floor!” Logan whispered loudly.

  “SHHH!”

  “Sorry.”

  I put Sammie on the floor anyway. “She’s right between my feet,” I said to Logan. “If anyone takes her basket, I’ll know about it.”

  “Excuse me,” said the man, “are you two going to talk through the entire movie, or just this first portion?”

  “Sorry,” I said again.

  But Logan said, “I think just this first portion.” Only he said it so softly the man didn’t hear him.

  The movie turned out to be really good. It was funny and exciting. I was glad for that. During the first half of the picture, Logan kept turning to me and grinning. He was relaxing. So was I.

  Except for my right foot. It had gone numb from being held in the same position for so long. Sammie or no Sammie, I had to shift my legs. So I did. Then I reached down to check on her. I felt around inside the basket.

  Sammie was gone.

  I gasped.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Logan.

  “Sammie’s not in the basket,” I said. My heart was pounding. Logan grabbed up the basket. Then he felt around inside it. “She must have fallen out!” he exclaimed, trying to whisper. “You let her fall out. You lost our daughter!”

  “I did not!”

  “You did too. I bet she’s rolling around in the aisle somewhere.”

  Logan was half right. Sammie was rolling around, but she wasn’t in the aisle. She was just under my seat. Except we didn’t discover that until after Logan had panicked and called over an usher to shine his flashlight on the floor. I thought the man in the third seat would kill us.

  When Sammie was nestled safely in her basket again, Logan said stiffly, “Maybe we should hard-boil her.” Then he tugged at my elbow. “Come on. We’re going now, Mary Anne.”

  “Fine,” I replied.

  “Good,” said the man.

  We carried our stuff to the lobby, threw away our trash, and struggled into our coats. Logan picked up Sammie’s basket.

  “I’m supposed to have her tonight!” I cried.

  “No way. You almost lost her,” said Logan. “Not that I really want to take care of her again. I’m always taking care of her.”

  “You mean you’re always
taking her. You never let me have her.”

  “Okay, then you take her tonight.”

  “Oh, no. You don’t trust me. You just said so.”

  Logan didn’t answer. He grabbed Sammie’s basket. Then he went off to call his parents for a ride home, and I called my dad, and Logan and I went off in a huff.

  On Tuesday night Mr. and Mrs. Pike went to Parents’ Night at Stoneybrook Elementary School. Imagine what the evening is like for them. Seven of their kids are students at the school: Claire in kindergarten, Margo in second grade, Nicky in third, Vanessa in fourth, and the triplets in fifth. No wonder they stay for the full three hours the school is open. (When I went to SES, my dad could do Parents’ Night in under an hour.)

  While the Pikes visited SES, Mal and Dawn sat for Mal’s younger brothers and sisters. Dawn left our house shortly after six-thirty. She left with her child, an egg named Skip. Skip lived in an empty Kleenex box, standard size. Dawn and her husband, this guy Aaron Albright, whom Dawn didn’t like very much, hadn’t fixed up the box except to line it with some paper towels to prevent Skip from injuring himself. (For the record, Dawn did not name Skip. Aaron did. Dawn said if she’d had her way, she would have named her son Douglas. She said Douglas is a good, strong name, and that Skip is what you’d name some little cartoon character, like maybe a young chicken wearing sneakers and a beanie.)

  Dawn and Skip arrived at Mallory’s just as Mr. and Mrs. Pike were getting ready to leave. Mal was trying to involve the triplets in helping her clean up the kitchen after dinner.

  “Washing dishes is girls’ work,” Dawn heard Adam say.

  “Adam,” Mal replied, “there is no such thing as girls’ work. But if there were, it would be called women’s work.”

  “There is too girls’ work,” said Adam.

  “Is there boys’ work?” Mal asked him.

  “Sure.”

  “What is it?”

  “Shoveling snow.”

  “I can do that,” said Mal.

  “Mowing lawns.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Cleaning gutters.”

  “I can do that.”

  Adam turned away from his sister, looking pained. He couldn’t win the argument, and he knew it. Luckily, when he turned around, he found a distraction. Dawn and the Kleenex box.

  “Hi, everybody,” said Dawn.

  The youngest kids were still sitting at the kitchen table, dawdling over dishes of ice cream. Vanessa was sitting there, too, but a pad of paper lay in front of her. She was scribbling on it, probably composing a new poem. Mal was at the sink, and the triplets were hovering around the doorway, trying to escape the cleanup process.

  Adam spotted Skip’s box immediately. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “What’s what?” answered Dawn, which only goes to show how accustomed my friends and I had grown to lugging around mixing bowls and Kleenex boxes and stuff.

  “That box,” said Adam.

  “Yeah, what is it? It’s too small to be a Kid-Kit,” added Margo.

  “Oh, it’s Skip, my egg,” said Dawn wearily. “I’m supposed to pretend he’s my baby. You know, feed him and everything.”

  “Feed an egg?” asked Jordan.

  “Well, not really.” Dawn described the Modern Living experiment with a little help from Mallory.

  The Pike kids were so interested that they barely noticed when their parents left for the elementary school. “ ’Bye,” they called vaguely.

  “Dawn? How long will you be married to Aaron?” asked Vanessa.

  “Hey, is your name Dawn Albright now?” Claire wanted to know.

  “Yeah, do we have to call you Mrs. Albright?” Nicky giggled.

  “Oh, I hope not,” said Dawn, but she was smiling. “Even if we had really, really, really gotten married, I wouldn’t have changed my name. I like my name. I will always be Dawn Schafer.”

  Byron was looking into the Kleenex box for about the ninety-fifth time. “Your baby is naked,” he commented.

  “Yeah, he isn’t even wearing a diaper,” chimed Vanessa.

  “I wish I were married and had an egg-baby,” said Margo.

  “Me, too,” said Vanessa. She looked hopefully at Byron.

  Byron sighed. “Okay. I’ll be your husband,” he said. “But only for tonight.”

  “Who will be my husband?” asked Margo.

  “Not me,” said Adam defiantly. “I am never, ever getting married.”

  “Jordan?” said Margo.

  “Oh, all right.”

  Surprisingly, Nicky agreed to be Claire’s husband.

  “Okay, let’s adopt babies!” cried Vanessa.

  “Adopt them from where?” asked Mal, even though she thought she knew what the answer would be.

  “From the refrigerator, of course.” Vanessa removed a partially empty carton of eggs from the bottom shelf of the fridge. She set it on the table and opened the lid carefully. “Aw, aren’t they sweet?” she said.

  “It’s the egg nursery,” added Nicky.

  “Hey, there are enough here for each couple to adopt two children,” Byron pointed out. “And Mom will still have one left over for tomorrow. Mal, can we? Adopt the eggs, I mean?”

  “I suppose so,” Mallory replied.

  A bunch of hands reached for the carton. They were stopped in midair by Jordan. “Wait! Where are you going to put them? We better fix up rooms or something for them.”

  “My children are not going to live in any Kleenex box,” said Margo. “My children are going to live in a house. Come on, Jordan.” Margo took two eggs and led her brother to the rec room, where she succeeded in talking him into fixing up the dollhouse for their children.

  Meanwhile, Vanessa and Byron arranged their eggs in a shopping bag, and Claire and Nicky put theirs in eggcups.

  “That’s what eggcups are for,” said Claire.

  “Plus, now they’re dressed,” added Nicky. (Each eggcup was in the shape of a pair of crossed legs wearing blue pants. On the feet were polka-dotted socks and big red clown shoes.)

  “We better dress our babies,” said Vanessa. “I don’t want them to go around naked, like Skip.”

  “How are we going to dress them?” asked Byron. “I’m not sewing anything. I’ll be these eggs’ father, but not their tailor.”

  “Oh, we don’t have time to sew clothes,” Vanessa replied. “We’ll just color their outfits on with crayons.” She retrieved a box of crayons from a shelf in the rec room. “Here we go.” Vanessa aimed a yellow crayon at one egg. “A nice bright shirt for you…. Hey, this hardly shows up at all.” Vanessa pressed down harder.

  The egg broke.

  “Oh! Oh, no! I’ve killed him!” shrieked Vanessa. “I’ve killed little — I’ve killed poor little, um, little —”

  “We didn’t even name him,” said Byron sadly. “Poor egg.”

  “Poor, poor nameless killed egg,” added Vanessa. She was holding the yellow crayon in one hand and the broken egg in the other. The yolk was sliming through her fingers and dripping onto the floor.

  Dawn and Mallory both rushed forward — not to comfort Vanessa, but to cup their hands under the egg goo in an attempt to catch it.

  “You stay here,” Mal said to Dawn. “I’ll go for the paper towels.”

  “The paper towels?!” wailed Vanessa. “Is that all you care about? The rug? Our egg has just been in a terrible accident. If I were in a terrible accident, would you run around trying to clean up my blood, or would you —”

  “Vanessa! For heaven’s sake, it’s an egg,” Mal reminded her.

  “And you’ve only known the egg for a couple of minutes,” said Dawn.

  “I had grown attached,” Vanessa replied stiffly.

  Mal didn’t answer. She ran off, then returned with a roll of paper towels and a plastic garbage bag (degradable). While she and Dawn cleaned up the accident, Vanessa watched sadly. She looked around the rec room at Margo and Jordan, who were putting their eggs to bed in the dollhouse, and at Nick
y and Claire, who had loaded their eggs (in the cups) into a doll’s stroller and were taking them on a walk to the garage door. Then she looked at Byron, who was lowering their remaining son into the paper bag.

  “Mallory, may we please have that last egg?” she asked in a small voice.

  “What — the one in the refrigerator?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we won’t have any eggs.” (Mallory had a sneaking suspicion that a few more accidents might occur.)

  “But … but …” Vanessa’s lower lip trembled. “My baby!”

  “Maybe you should let her have it,” Dawn whispered to Mal.

  Mal sighed. “Okay. I don’t think one egg is worth all this trouble.” She turned to her sister. “Vanessa, you can have the egg.”

  “Oh, thank you! We’ll be really careful this time, won’t we, Byron? We won’t try to dress either egg. They can be naked.”

  “Hey, you guys!” called Nicky. “We’re taking our eggs out to dinner at a restaurant. Want to come with us?”

  “Sure,” agreed the other kids. And before long, the Pikes had returned to the kitchen and arranged the eggs around the table.

  Nicky stood to the side, a dish towel over one arm. “Here are the specials du jour,” he announced. “Eggs over easy, eggs Benedict, egg salad —”

  “Nicky!” cried Claire and Margo.

  Mal and Dawn began to laugh. The Pike kids could make anything fun.

  “I want a divorce.”

  “Excuse me?” said Mrs. Boyden.

  “I want to divorce Miles.”

  It was Shawna Riverson who was speaking, and she wasn’t kidding. Our Modern Living class had just gotten under way, and I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be a typical class. What was typical about a class in which the students got married and had to care for egg-babies?

  When we had settled ourselves at our desks that morning, Mrs. Boyden had moved in front of her desk. Usually she sits behind it in a teacher-y sort of way. But on that day, she was wearing jeans and a casual top, and she perched herself on her desk.

  “Okay, kids, let’s talk,” she had said. “Tell me how you’re doing as couples. Tell me how each of you is doing as half of a couple.”

  That was when Shawna had said she wanted a divorce.

  “Shawna? What’s going on?” asked Mrs. Boyden.