Chapter Thirty-Two
Suella lie there in bed and remembered how she used to dread Monday mornings. Decades ago, the alarm clock would have awakened her by quarter til six and many days she would make a mad rush to fix her hair and makeup, get dressed and somehow still make it to breakfast before rushing out the door to get to work by eight.
Where she would get blasted by hung over bosses barking directives at her, pissed off that their sports teams lost over the weekend, depending on what time of the year it was. Female bosses were even worse. They had to deal with bosses over them plus husbands and children. Her headaches and stress got so bad she went to a doctor to deal with the pain and the doctor prescribed Midrin. She called them her “happy pills” and she would drop one whenever things got to be too much.
Nowadays she could sleep in if she wanted to. Most of the business managers and clients she worked with would schedule meetings for later in the afternoon or on different days of the week altogether. Perhaps they’d learned to loathe Mondays early in their careers also. Nathan was still sleeping soundly beside her. He’d never had to deal with the whole “Monday morning” concept in his whole life.
As she got the coffee and juice ready, she planned out her day to see Natalie. David was in school year round, she’d said during their conversations on the day they’d moved in. So anxious was he to start his career. Natalie would be home, most likely enjoying a leisurely Monday morning herself.
Nathan grumbled, still sleepy-eyed, as he wandered into the kitchen, bare-chested, wearing only an old pajama bottom. He was so ready for his coffee that he pulled the decanter aside and let the brewed fluid pour into his cup and then put the decanter back.
“So what’s on your agenda for today?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “Corny wants to talk to me about showing up for the I league.”
John Cornelius was a coach and one of Nathan’s longtime baseball friends and it took a moment for Suella to remember that “I” stood for “Instructional,” a league where 18-20 year old boy hopefuls learned how to pitch, bat, and field like major leaguers. “For the Dodgers?”
He shook his head. “Arizona. But he says they have a training camp out in the low desert somewhere. That’s where he wants me to go.”
“Are you going to do it?”
He laughed. “Maybe. I’m getting tired of golf. But what are you so interested in my extracurricular activities for? What’s on your plate?”
“I’m going over to see Natalie.”
His eyebrows rose. “Better call first, and give them some time to get their clothes on.”
She bumped against him playfully.
After a light breakfast, she put on sporty casual clothes. Since they lived only a couple of miles away, she decided that it was a beautiful enough morning for her to walk over there. On the way out the door she stopped off in Nathan’s study, where he’d sat down to put his reading glasses on and go over his investment reports. “Thank you for a beautiful weekend,” she said, lowering down onto his lap for a moment to hug and kiss him.
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
As Suella walked on the sidewalks in her neighborhood, she passed a couple of gardeners trimming lawns with buzzing weed-whackers as, on the street a few hybrids eerily floated past. In her youth she hated walking, especially alone because of the exhaust and the smog and cars filled with rowdy guys of various ages and stripes calling things out to her. On a Monday morning, it was too early for certain types of guys to be out tooling around. Even if they did see her, they’d probably think she was too old.
It was one reason she wore the visor and the dark glasses, even though the cloudy skies blotted out lots of suns’ rays that morning. As she walked along, she breathed in the fresh air, peppered with the scent of freshly cut grass and musky earth. A couple of blocks away she entered the commercial district where her daughter lived. The crisp scent of freshly baked bread emanated from a bakery on a street corner.
While she waited for the light to change, she heard an odd cawing sound. She knew that the walk signal often combined a loud chirp to alert pedestrians to the light change but this sound was more faint and lifelike. The sound seemed to be coming from above so she looked up just in time to see a couple of seagulls roosting on a streetlamp.
There were only a few more blocks including one where she remembered homeless people congregating during the depression. Nowadays the sidewalks looked too clean and fresh for them. Cameras and sensors everywhere would have alerted the police to their whereabouts anyway. California was still broken but she, along with several other friends she spoke with still said that in lots of ways it returned to the place they remembered from their youth. Would she have even dared to walk these few blocks during the late 90s or the depression? Of course not.
As she approached the building where Natalie lived, she chuckled. It did look like an old time factory, whether they’d made rubbers there or not. The atrium inside was always nice though. Suella strode to the guest screen and touched her daughter’s number. A moment later a girl’s weak voice came over the speaker: “Hello?”
“Hi hon. It’s mom. Want some company?”
Natalie took a few moments to respond. “Sure. I’ll buzz you up. Wait a second.”
Her signal un-clicked the glass sliding doors to the lobby so that Suella could enter the staircase for the second floor. She smiled in anticipation of seeing her daughter again, even if it had been only a few days since she’d last seen her.
The door swung open and revealed Natalie, still in summer pajamas, green-faced, with stringy hair and a miserable expression on her face.
Suella reached forward to take her into her arms and soothe her. “Oh my god, darling. What’s wrong?”
Natalie gently eased herself away to face her mother with downcast, sheepish eyes. “You may as well know. I’m pregnant.”
Ever since Jill had planted the notion in her mind weeks earlier, Suella had thought about how she would deal with the reality of it. Natalie, little more than a child herself was going to be a mother, making her a grandmother. Such a state of affairs should have made her mad (couldn’t she have waited, couldn’t she have used protection, and all of the other “couldn’ts”), but all she wanted to do right then was act.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she murmured, taking her daughter into her arms to comfort and soothe her. They stood there for just a moment, long enough for Suella to realize that Natalie was burning up, as if a cauldron burned inside of her. She quickly guided her over to a lacy, wrought iron daybed they were using as a sofa and eased her down toward a pile of pillows on it. Natalie slumped down against the pillows like a rag doll.
Suella sprinted off to the kitchen to reach for the white cabinets and start looking though them. The cabinet doors stuck when she tried to open them and wouldn’t close securely when she tried to push the door shut. All she could find were boxes and bags filled with cereal or rice, along with a few thin, smaller boxes. “Don’t you have any tea?”
“No, I don’t drink tea,” Natalie said.
“Well then, do you have any ginger ale?”
“No.”
Suella looked at the refrigerator before opening it, her back to Natalie. “Well then what are you doing for the nausea?” She had to come around the corner to look her daughter in the eye.
Natalie was wincing, but it appeared to be more emotional than painful, since her color had improved even as Suella had been attending to her. “Promise you won’t get mad and yell at me?”
“Why? What?”
“Seven up. I know you call it ‘liquid candy’ and that it was a New World Order plot to make American kids fat and stupid, but it’s the only thing that works.”
Suella returned to refrigerator and when she opened it found the inside shelves lined with green bio-smash bottles. She reached for one and inspected the label contents before goin
g any further. “Well at least you bought some with low Stevia,” she said, twisting off the cap. “Do you take it straight from the bottle or do you want a glass?”
“Better get me a tumbler,” she said. “As mikey as I’ve been, I’ll probably drop the bottle and make a huge mess.
“Mikey? You mean clumsy?”
“Yeah, mikey.”
Suella shook her head. Over the years she’d learned a whole new vocabulary from her daughter, and she knew if she used half of the words, her friends wouldn’t understand her. She found a bright pink tumbler in one of the other cabinets and poured the soda into it, wondering who was president the last time she’d done that. When she’d only poured the liquid halfway into the cup, the fizzy foam formed a head that filled up the rest of the cup. Gradually it dissolved, allowing her to pour the rest of the bottle into the tumbler.
She lowered the tumbler down Natalie, who suddenly looked like a four-year-old again, grasping the tumbler with both hands and tilting it at a deep angle to let the fluid pour into her throat.
“Slow down honey, you’re going to give yourself the hiccups.”
Natalie ignored her, finishing the tumbler filled with soda with one long, famished gulp. “Thanks, mom. I needed that.”
Suella patted her hand and allowed nurturing silence to wash over them for the next few moments. She realized that she still held the empty bottle in her other hand. “Do you have a pestle?”
Natalie pointed to the kitchen countertop. “It’s underneath the sink.”
Suella discovered an old-fashioned one that worked like an old-time pharmacist’s mortar and pestle. It featured a container and a crusher that looked like a hammer with a flat business end. She dropped the bottle in there, whacked it with a hammer until the remains crystallized with the layer of fine green sand at the bottom.
Once that was done, she returned to the living area to sit beside Natalie and comfort her further. “You don’t have a garden or a lawn. What do you do with the grind?”
“Sell it,” she said. She managed a weak smile for her.
They laughed together. She took her slender, smooth hand and took it between both of hers, as much to convey tenderness as to check whether the raging fever continued. “So how long have you known?”
She shrugged. “Ever since it happened, really.”
“Well, when was that?”
“About a week before you and dad came to pick me up from school.”
The notion puzzled Suella, who’d always thought of the school as an intense security facility, probably staffed with security guards and cameras around the clock. There would have been someone to stop them, wouldn’t there? Then she remembered how strong young love could be. There were closets, spaces beneath beds, bushy areas between buildings on campus, and the list went on and on. “So you think you could feel yourself conceive? Was it like an electric shock or something?” Suella, who had never been pregnant and never would be, was simply curious.
“No,” she said. “It was just a knowing. Like I knew it.”
“Well then, did you confirm it? I know you haven’t been to see Dr. Allende since earlier in the spring.”
“Uh…yeah. They have those home tests. Remember?”
“Oh yes. Do they still have it where you have to pee on a stick?”
Natalie rolled her eyes. “Mom, you are so oughts. That was back in the dark ages!”
“Oughts? What the hell is that?”
Natalie laughed, shaking her head. “Oughts! You know, someone stuck behind the times, like they’re still in twenty ought one or twenty ought two. You know! When computer and television screens were big, huge boxes.”
“So, sue me, I’m a walking antagonism. So you took the test and it was confirmed, right?”
“Yeah. The chicken clucked.”
“What?”
Natalie laughed. “They have this holo of a chicken clucking and dropping an egg. I mean, if it’s positive. If you are.”
Suella raised her eyebrows. “Well at least they don’t have a rabbit getting shot or something?”
For a moment, Natalie looked at her as though she had three heads. “What?”
Suella waved a hand in dismissal. “Whatever. Anyway, we have to call Dr. Allende. I can beam her up there, can’t I?” She pointed to a screen on the wall near the door. To get the whole process in motion, she pulled her Idial out of her purse.
“Mom, can’t we go audio instead? I look like shit!”
Suella turned to her. “Two things. One, you don’t look as bad as you think you do, and two, audio sucks.” To her it sucked so much that she couldn’t remember the last time she had a regular conversation with someone on a regular phone.
“Can I at least do something with my hair before you beam her on there?”
“Yeah.”
Natalie disappeared into the bathroom for a moment while Suella ran a quick search and found Dr. Allende. It was still fairly early on a Monday morning. She hoped the doctor wouldn’t be in a procedure just yet. By the time the office environment spilled onto the screen Natalie had returned to the room with her hair loosely braided on one side and wearing a nice, buttoned-down blouse.
A bland, non-descript receptionist with pulled-back brown hair and wearing a white coat looked back at them. “This is Lifewind,” she said. “How can I help you Mrs. Worthy?”
Suella stood while Natalie sat down on the daybed again. While she spoke she gestured to her daughter, feeling as if she was a college teacher drawing attention to slide images on a screen. “We’re in Natalie’s new apartment,” she said. “And we have some urgent news for Dr. Allende.”
She didn’t spill the beans right away, since she wanted there to be some back and forth before she dropped the salvo that would pry Dr. Allende away from whatever she was doing, to come talk to them.
“What is the news?” the receptionist asked.
Natalie spoke for the both of them: “I’m pregnant.”
For a moment, the receptionist simply went silent. Then she seemed to realize the gravity of what had just been said and her mouth formed a small “o.” “Well, she’s in a conference, but I’ll tell her immediately.”
The receptionist walked away, leaving them to stare at the screen images of cabinets and potted plants in the distance. It reminded Suella of an old joke: there was really no way for businesses to place callers on video hold, which was why so many offices were reluctant to use it. Back in the day, 800 number lines would use cheesy, recorded music to enliven the phone line when a caller was on hold. Couldn’t modern day businesses pipe in a few minutes of a video, someone telling jokes, maybe?
Dr. Allende stumbled onto the screen a short while later. Her mouth was opened slightly, her skin was pale and her eyes wide. It appeared that she’d literally run from whatever she was doing to get to the phone line. On her end she must have leaned into the lens because her image took up most of the screen. “Mrs. Worthy? Natalie? Is this true?”
In unison, Natalie and her mother said “Yes.”
Dr. Allende swallowed and took a deep breath immediately. “Are you sure? It’s impossible.”
They looked at each other. Natalie responded. “Well, the chicken clucked.”
The doctor’s mouth formed a straight line and her expression went blank. Suella imagined that she must give the same face whenever someone with advanced cirrhosis of the liver says they only drink two glasses of wine a day. “Hon, those things are not one hundred percent reliable. And if it is true, then we’re going to need to run some other tests. I know your annual isn’t for a few moments, but…”
“We’ll be there as soon as possible,” Suella said, interrupting her. “Just let us know when and where.”
Dr. Allende looked up, toward the upper left quadrant of whatever screen she was working on. The first two fingers of her left hand traced in the air, which Suella knew meant she was checking something in
another window on her end. “Can you make it to the Center tomorrow?”
“Of course.” Though tomorrow would be busy, she was almost sure that a slot line connected her neighborhood with the low desert, enabling her to catch up on a few things as the car sped them toward the center. If not, she could get Nathan to drive.
Natalie, knowing that she might have trouble keeping down certain kinds of foods, had bought several broth mixes and dehydrated dinners. With some hot water and stirring, they sat down to a lunch of turkey broth with vegetables and rice. Their video call to Dr. Allende made Suella think of something. It had been forever since she’d shared a nice tea with Jillian. That afternoon seemed as good a time as any.
Hours later, Jillian, who had taken to wearing flowing, glistening afghans for afternoon loungewear said “I can’t believe it. I was right.”
Suella took a sip of tea before continuing. “The doctor doesn’t seem to think it’s possible.”
Jillian leaned forward and her eyes took on that compassionate quality which always meant she was about to say something serious. “Suella, we know Natalie has a soul. She started menstruating before her tenth birthday. I think it’s possible.”