Homeland and Other Stories

  "Oh, I don't know." Annemarie sits back on her heels. The metal roof is too hot to touch, but the view from up there is interesting, almost like it's not where she lives. The mobile homes are arranged like shoeboxes along the main drive, with cars and motorbikes parked beside them, just so many toys in a sandbox. The shadows of things trail away everywhere in the same direction like long oil leaks across the gravel. The trailer court is called "Island Breezes," and like the names of most trailer courts, it's a joke. No swaying palm trees. In fact, there's no official vegetation at all except for cactus plants in straight, symmetrical rows along the drive, like some bizarre desert organized by a child.

  "Well, deciding what to do about Buddy, for instance," Annemarie says at last, after Kay Kay has clearly forgotten the question. "I need to figure that out first. And also what I'd do with a baby while I'm at work. I couldn't leave it with Magda, they'd all be down at the Air Force Base getting arrested to stop the cruise missiles."

  Kay Kay doesn't say anything. She wraps the tarred, spiky paintbrush in a plastic bag and begins to pry last year's cooler pads out of the frames. Annemarie is being an absentminded helper, staring into space, sometimes handing Kay Kay a screwdriver when she's asked for the pliers.

  With a horrible screeching of claws on metal, one of Annemarie's cats, Lone Ranger, has managed to get himself up to the roof in pursuit of a lizard. He's surprised to see the women up there; he freezes and then slinks away along the gutter. Lone Ranger is a problem cat. Annemarie buys him special food, anything to entice him, but he won't come inside and be pampered. He cowers and shrinks from love like a blast from the hose.

  "How long you think you'll take off work?" Kay Kay asks.

  "Take off?"

  "When the baby comes."

  "Oh, I don't know," Annemarie says, uneasily. She could endanger her job there if she doesn't give them some kind of advance notice. She's well aware, even when Kay Kay refrains from pointing it out, that she's responsible in a hit-or-miss way. Once, toward the end of their first marriage, Buddy totaled his car and she paid to have it repaired so he wouldn't leave her. The next weekend he drove to Reno with a woman who sold newspapers from a traffic island.

  Annemarie begins to unwrap the new cooler pads, which look like huge, flat sponges and smell like fresh sawdust. According to the label they're made of aspen, which Annemarie thought was a place where you go skiing and try to get a glimpse of Jack Nicholson. "You'd think they could make these things out of plastic," she says. "They'd last longer, and it wouldn't smell like a damn camping trip every time you turn on your cooler."

  "They have to absorb water, though," explains Kay Kay. "That's the whole point. When the fan blows through the wet pads it cools down the air."

  Annemarie is in the mood where she can't get particularly interested in the way things work. She holds two of the pads against herself like a hula skirt. "I could see these as a costume, couldn't you? For Connie?"

  "That's an idea," Kay Kay says, examining them thoughtfully. "Connie's allergic to grasses, but not wood fibers."

  Annemarie's bones ache to be known and loved this well. What she wouldn't give for someone to stand on a roof, halfway across the city, and say to some other person, "Annemarie's allergic to grasses, but not wood fibers."

  "I'll mention it," Kay Kay says. "The band might go for it." Connie Skylab and the Falling Debris are into outlandish looks. Connie performs one number, "My Mother's Teeth," dressed in a black plastic garbage bag and a necklace of sheep's molars. A line Annemarie remembers is: "My mother's teeth grow in my head, I'll eat my children's dreams when she is dead."

  Connie's mother is, in actual fact, dead. But neither she nor Kay Kay plans to produce any children. Annemarie thinks maybe that's how they can be so happy and bold. Their relationship is a sleek little boat of their own construction, untethered in either direction by the knotted ropes of motherhood, free to sail the open seas. Some people can manage it. Annemarie once met a happily married couple who made jewelry and traveled the nation in a dented microbus, selling their wares on street corners. They had no permanent address whatsoever, no traditions, no family. They told Annemarie they never celebrated holidays.

  And then on the other hand there are the Navarretes next door with their little nest of lawn chairs. They're happy too. Annemarie feels permanently disqualified from either camp, the old-fashioned family or the new. It's as if she somehow got left behind, missed every boat across the river, and now must watch happiness being acted out on the beach of a distant shore.

  Two days later, on Saturday, Annemarie pulls on sweat pants and a T-shirt, starts up her Pontiac--scattering cats in every direction--and drives a hundred feet to pick up Magda and take her to the clinic. There just wasn't any reasonable way out.

  The sun is reflected so brightly off the road it's like driving on a mirage. The ground is as barren as some planet where it rains once per century. It has been an unusually dry spring, though it doesn't much matter here in Island Breezes, where the lawns are made of gravel. Some people, deeply missing the Midwest, have spray-painted their gravel green.

  Magda's yard is naturally the exception. It's planted with many things, including clumps of aloe vera, which she claims heals burns, and most recently, a little hand-painted sign with a blue dove that explains to all and sundry passersby that you can't hug your kids with nuclear arms. When Annemarie drives up, Magda's standing out on the wooden steps in one of her loose India-print cotton dresses, and looks cool. Annemarie is envious. Magda's ordinary wardrobe will carry her right through the ninth month.

  Magda's hair brushes her shoulders like a lace curtain as she gets into the car, and she seems flushed and excited, though perhaps it's nerves. She fishes around in her enormous woven bag and pulls out a bottle of green shampoo. "I thought you might like to try this. It has an extract of nettles. I know to you that probably sounds awful, but it's really good; it can repair damaged hair shafts."

  Annemarie beeps impatiently at some kids playing kickball in the drive near the front entrance. "Magda, can we please not start right in immediately on my hair? Can we at least say, 'How do you do' and 'Fine thank you' before we start in on my hair?"

  "Sorry."

  "Believe it or not, I actually want my hair to look like something dead beside the road. It's the style now."

  Magda looks around behind the seat for the seat belt and buckles it up. She refrains from saying anything about Annemarie's seat belt. They literally don't speak again until they get where they're going.

  At the clinic they find themselves listening to a lecture on AIDS prevention. Apparently it's a mandatory part of the services here. Before Magda's amniocentesis they need to sit with the other patients and learn about nonoxynol-number-9 spermicide and the proper application of a condom.

  "You want to leave a little room at the end, like this," says the nurse, who's wearing jeans and red sneakers. She rolls the condom carefully onto a plastic banana. All the other people in the room look fourteen, and there are some giggles. Their mothers probably go around saying that they and their daughters are "close," and have no idea they're here today getting birth control and what not.

  Finally Magda gets to see the doctor, but it's a more complicated procedure than Annemarie expected: first they have to take a sonogram, to make sure that when they stick in the needle they won't poke the baby.

  "Even if that did happen," the doctor explains, "the fetus will usually just move out of the way." Annemarie is floored to imagine a five-month-old fetus fending for itself. She tries to think of what's inside her as being an actual baby, or a baby-to-be, but can't. She hasn't even felt it move yet.

  The doctor rubs Magda's belly with Vaseline and then places against it something that looks like a Ping-Pong paddle wired for sound. She frowns at the TV screen, concentrating, and then points. "Look, there, you can see the head."

  Magda and Annemarie watch a black-and-white screen where meaningless shadows move around each other like iridescent in
k blots. Suddenly they can make out one main shadow, fish-shaped with a big head, like Casper the Friendly Ghost.

  "The bladder's full," the doctor says. "See that little clear spot? That's a good sign, it means the kidneys are working. Oops, there it went."

  "There what went?" asks Magda.

  "The bladder. It voided." She looks closely at the screen, smiling. "You know, I can't promise you but I think what you've got here..."

  "Don't tell me," Magda says. "If you're going to tell me if it's a boy or a girl, I don't want to know."

  "I do," says Annemarie. "Tell me."

  "Is that okay with you?" the doctor asks Magda, and Magda shrugs. "Close your eyes, then," she tells Magda. She holds up two glass tubes with rubber stoppers, one pink and the other blue-green. She nods at the pink one.

  Annemarie smiles. "Okay, all clear," she tells Magda. "My lips are sealed."

  "That's the face, right there," the doctor says, pointing out the eyes. "It has one fist in its mouth; that's very common at this stage. Can you see it?"

  They can see it. The other fist, the left one, is raised up alongside its huge head like the Black Panther salute. Magda is transfixed. Annemarie can see the flickering light of the screen reflected in her eyes, and she understands for the first time that what they are looking at here is not a plan or a plot, it has nothing to do with herself. It's Magda's future.

  Afterward they have to go straight to the park to pick up Leon from softball practice. It's hot, and Annemarie drives distractedly, worrying about Leon because they're late. She talked him into joining the league in the first place; he'd just as soon stay home and collect baseball cards. But now she worries that he'll get hit with a ball, or kidnapped by some pervert that hangs around in the park waiting for the one little boy whose mother's late. She hits the brakes at a crosswalk to let three women pass safely through the traffic, walking with their thin brown arms so close together they could be holding hands. They're apparently three generations of a family: the grandmother is draped elaborately in a sari, the mother is in pink slacks, and the daughter wears a bleached denim miniskirt. But from the back they could be triplets. Three long braids, woven as thin and tight as ropes, bounce placidly against their backs as they walk away from the stopped cars.

  "Was it as bad as you thought it would be?" Annemarie asks Magda. It's awkward to be speaking after all this time, so suddenly, and really for no good reason.

  "It was worse."

  "I liked the sonogram," Annemarie says. "I liked seeing it, didn't you?"

  "Yes, but not the other part. I hate doctors and needles and that whole thing. Doctors treat women like a disease in progress."

  That's Magda, Annemarie thinks. You never know what's going to come out of her mouth next. Annemarie thinks the doctor was just about as nice as possible. But in fairness to Magda, the needle was unbelievably long. It made her skin draw up into goose pimples just to watch. Magda seems worn out from the experience.

  Annemarie rolls down the window to signal a left turn at the intersection. Her blinkers don't work, but at least the air conditioning still does. In the summer when her mobile home heats up like a toaster oven, the car is Annemarie's refuge. Sometimes she'll drive across town on invented, insignificant errands, singing along with Annie Lennox on the radio and living for the moment in a small, safe, perfectly cooled place.

  "I'd have this baby at home if I could," says Magda.

  "Why can't you?"

  "Too old," she says, complacently. "I talked to the midwife program but they risked me out."

  The sun seems horribly bright. Annemarie thinks she's read something about pregnancy making your eyes sensitive to light. "Was it an awful shock, when you found out?" she asks Magda.

  "About the midwives?"

  "No. About the pregnancy."

  Magda looks at her as if she's dropped from another planet.

  "What's the matter?" asks Annemarie.

  "I've been trying my whole life to have more babies. You knew that, that I'd been trying."

  "No. I didn't. Just lately?"

  "No, Annemarie, not just lately, forever. The whole time with your father we kept trying, but the drugs he took for the cancer knocked out his sperms. The doctor told us they were still alive, but were too confused to make a baby."

  Annemarie tries not to smile. "Too confused?"

  "That's what he said."

  "And you've kept on ever since then?" she asks.

  "I kept hoping, but I'd about given up. I feel like this baby is a gift."

  Annemarie thinks of one of the customers at Yesterday! who sent relatives a Christmas fruitcake that somehow got lost; it arrived two and a half years later on the twelfth of July. Magda's baby is like the fruitcake, she thinks, and she shakes her head and laughs.

  "What's so funny?"

  "Nothing. I just can't believe you wanted a bunch of kids. You never said so. I thought even having just me got in your way."

  "Got in my way?"

  "Well, yeah. Because you were so young. I thought that's why you weren't mad when Buddy and I had to get married, because you'd done the same thing. I always figured my middle name ought to have been Whoops."

  Magda looks strangely at Annemarie again. "I had to douche with vinegar to get pregnant with you," she says.

  They've reached the park, and Leon is waiting with his bat slung over his shoulder like a dangerous character. "The other kids' moms already came ten hours ago," he says when he gets into the car. He doesn't seem at all surprised to see Magda and Annemarie in the same vehicle.

  "We got held up," Annemarie says. "Sorry, Leon."

  Leon stares out the window for a good while. "Leon's a stupid name," he says, eventually. This is a complaint of his these days.

  "There have been a lot of important Leons in history," Annemarie says.

  "Like who?"

  She considers this. "Leon Russell," she says. "He's a rock and roll singer."

  "Leon Trotsky," says Magda.

  Annemarie has heard all about Leon Trotsky in her time, and Rosa Luxemburg, and Mother Jones.

  "Trotsky was an important socialist who disagreed with Stalin's methodology," Magda explains. "Stalin was the kingpin at the time, so Trotsky had to run for his life to Mexico."

  "This all happened decades ago, I might add," Annemarie says, glancing at Leon in the rearview mirror.

  "He was killed by his trusted secretary," Magda continues. "With an axe in the head."

  "Magda, please. You think he'll like his name better if he knows many famous Leons have been axed?"

  "I'm telling him my girlhood memories. I'm trying to be a good grandmother."

  "Your girlhood memories? What, were you there?"

  "Of course not, it happened in Mexico, before I was born. But it affected me. I read about it when I was a teenager, and I cried. My father said, 'Oh, I remember seeing that headline in the paper and thinking, What, Trotsky's dead? Hal Trotsky, first baseman for the Cleveland Indians?'"

  "Live Free or Die, New Hampshire!" shouts Leon at an approaching car.

  Magda says, "Annemarie's father came from New Hampshire."

  Annemarie runs a stop sign.

  It isn't clear to her what's happened. There is a crunch of metal and glass, and some white thing plowing like a torpedo into the left side of the Pontiac, and they spin around, seeing the same view pass by again and again. Then Annemarie is lying across Magda with her mouth open and her head out the window on the passenger's side. Magda's arms are tight around her chest. The window has vanished, and there is a feeling like sand trickling through Annemarie's hair. After a minute she realizes that a sound is coming out of her mouth. It's a scream. She closes her mouth and it stops.

  With some effort she unbuckles Magda's seat belt and pulls the door handle and they more or less tumble out together onto the ground. It strikes Annemarie, for no good reason, that Magda isn't a very big person. She's Annemarie's own size, if not smaller. The sun is unbelievably bright. There's no oth
er traffic. A woman gets out of the white car with the New Hampshire plates, brushing her beige skirt in a businesslike way and straightening her hair. Oddly, she has on stockings but no shoes. She looks at the front end of her car, which resembles a metal cauliflower, and then at the two women hugging each other on the ground.

  "There was a stop sign," she says. Her voice is clear as a song in the strange silence. A series of rapid clicks emanates from the underside of one of the cars, then stops.

  "I guess I missed it," Annemarie says.

  "Are you okay?" the woman asks. She looks hard at Annemarie's face. Annemarie puts her hand on her head, and it feels wet.

  "I'm fine," she and Magda say at the same time.

  "You're bleeding," the woman says to Annemarie. She looks down at herself, and then carefully unbuttons her white blouse and holds it out to Annemarie. "You'd better let me tie this around your head," she says. "Then I'll go call the police."

  "All right," says Annemarie. She pries apart Magda's fingers, which seem to be stuck, and they pull each other up. The woman pulls the blouse across Annemarie's bleeding forehead and knots the silk sleeves tightly at the nape of her neck. She does this while standing behind Annemarie in her stocking feet and brassiere, with Magda looking on, and somehow it has the feeling of some ordinary female ritual.

  "Oh, God," says Annemarie. She looks at the Pontiac and sits back down on the ground. The back doors of the car are standing wide open, and Leon is gone. "My son," she says. The child inside her flips and arches its spine in a graceful, hungry movement, like a dolphin leaping for a fish held out by its tail.

  "Is that him?" the woman asks, pointing to the far side of the intersection. Leon is there, sitting cross-legged on a mound of dirt. On one side of him there is a jagged pile of broken cement. On the other side is a stack of concrete pipes. Leon looks at his mother and grandmother, and laughs.

  Annemarie can't stop sobbing in the back of the ambulance. She knows that what she's feeling would sound foolish put into words: that there's no point in living once you understand that at any moment you could die.

  She and Magda are strapped elaborately onto boards, so they can't turn their heads even to look at each other. Magda says over and over again, "Leon's okay. You're okay. We're all okay." Out the window Annemarie can only see things that are high up: telephone wires, clouds, an airplane full of people who have no idea how near they could be to death. Daily there are reports of midair collisions barely averted. When the ambulance turns a corner she can see the permanent landmark of the Catalina Mountains standing over the city. In a saddle between two dark peaks a storm cloud spreads out like a fan, and Annemarie sees how easily it could grow into something else, tragically roiling up into itself, veined with blinding light: a mushroom cloud.