My phone calls, especially those from Dillon, which were collect, also drove Stuart nuts. Dillon got mad one time when he overheard Stuart say, “Excuse me, Arlington, but that is a collect call, and you’ve been on there seventeen minutes.”
“He got him a stopwatch?” Dillon asked.
“Shush,” I told him, but Stuart thought I was talking to him, and he sort of stomped off.
Annie came by in a minute.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “You can’t stay on too long, but don’t worry about Stuart. He doesn’t like guys in prison unless they’re serial killers on death row.”
I got off then, but I was sad, because Dillon and I had a lot to talk about. First, we talked about how the hell it had happened, after Dillon had assured me he was all drained out. “Must have been one super-sperm left,” Dillon told me. “We LeGrandes are bulls, they say. Didn’t my daddy have three sons?” We talked about other stuff, too. Whether I would get to come to see him more often. What we would name it if it was a boy (Ian, after Dillon’s father, whose name was John; Dillon thought “Ian” was Gaelic for “John,” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that “Sean” was what he really meant to say). He didn’t care what we would name it if it was a girl, except he sort of wanted to call it Kate after his mama. I said nix to that right away: maybe I was already getting crabby, but I didn’t want either of our mothers hanging their vibrations on our child. He didn’t fight me on it, that or his terrific idea that the baby and I should go live with his mama in exchange for me “helping her out.” I could see right off where that would go. Though I never imagined what would happen with Annie and me, I knew I trusted Annie more than I trusted anyone else right then, even Dillon, especially after I was pregnant. It was as if the seed inside me was like a weight that anchored me right down to the ground—if I were ever going to do anything flighty and irresponsible, I wasn’t going to do it anymore. Like, I had called right away and made a prenatal appointment; in fact, it was because the nurse called back when I was at work that Mama found out in the first place.
Dillon felt closer to me, he said. Because of that, the first few weeks were sort of like a dream of bliss. Even before I knew I was pregnant, we were both missing each other so badly, it almost felt like a pleasure. Dillon wrote me what is still my favorite poem of his, or maybe anybody’s.
What’s True
The hardest thing is to say what’s true. You
aren’t the first or the only, but girl, when I think
of how you came to me, how your long dark hair
fell across my face, your skin rippled under
my hands, water-soft and water-cool, I am washed
clean, like Jesus said, and it seems to me
that if this is all I ever have, it is enough.
It was so sad; I should have noticed then what he was thinking. I certainly knew him well enough. When I look back on the poem now, it’s all there, isn’t it? Just like he knew there wasn’t going to be more joy ahead for him and he was trying to get used to the idea that he’d already had the best time of his life.
Why didn’t I catch it? Because life was opening up more for me than it had before? Just as Dillon’s must have felt as though it was shrinking? It was all new. I had Dillon, and living at Annie’s was like being on vacation. Plus, I was excited about the baby. One time, Dillon even had to tell me to pay him a little attention on the phone and quit going on so much about the baby, the baby, the baby. He’d told me that they’d taken him out of the library because he was spending too much time working on other prisoners’ lawsuits for better food and stuff instead of putting the books away and cleaning up like he was supposed to. He got sent back to the laundry, but he said he liked that because a couple of times a week a supply truck would come with new sheets or detergent or other supplies and, while the door was open, he had what he called “a clear look at unobstructed air and sky, just like a picture in a frame.”
As for me, the more time went by, the more distracted I was by learning all about the baby. It seemed to be all I could write about to Dillon in my letters. “Our baby is now one and a half inches long,” I wrote him at the end of my second month, when nobody but Annie still knew. “It already has a heartbeat, though the doctor says I won’t be able to hear it for a few more weeks. I look exactly the same, maybe even thinner! Or maybe my weight’s just in different places. Guess I won’t be getting stretch marks. Except for on these really big boobs—actually not really big, but about like a normal girl would have, because I didn’t have too much there before!” It took a lot for me to write that, but that’s how husbands and wives talk to each other. I felt very . . . passionate during the early weeks of being pregnant, before I got sick. My lips were pink and swollen like a magazine model’s and my hair got even thicker, and curled a little for the first time in its life. Guys were always looking at me at work. I got asked out ten times (finally! Now, when I totally couldn’t!) and all I could think about at night was Dillon touching me. I would wake up sweating and shaking, and I’d know I’d been making love in my dreams. One of those nights when I couldn’t sleep, I wrote him a poem called “Wind.”
Wind
This love sucks at me
like the Texas wind
that wants my clothes
that unbraids
my hair. It plucks
here and there
with strong fingers
pulls at the cords
of my wrists til
like a harp they
ache and sing.
This love teases
unravels and loosens
til untucked
and love-struck
I open to you.
What I realized later, of course, was that all those “struck”s and “tuck”s sounded like . . . “fuck.” And so that probably wasn’t an entirely nice thing to do to Dillon, with him all alone there. He didn’t react very well to it. In fact, he got kind of ugly. “You showing those big boobs to anyone else, girl?” he asked me, and it purely irritated me.
As if I’d have done that.
And it bugged me, how Dillon would bring everything about me right back around to himself.
Like when Annie started to bring me college catalogues that she had sitting around her office to motivate her other clients to go to school and make something of themselves. They were from everyplace—the University of Houston, Louisiana State, Georgia Tech, the University of Virginia. When I asked her to, Connie G. sent me some material about her corrective cosmetics courses, and I thought about that again, too. It would be pretty nice to be able to make a good living that way after the baby was born and Dillon and me were on our own. In one of the course pamphlets, there was even a little part about how some people used the skills you learned to do elaborate makeup for special effects in movies. When I wrote Dillon about that part, he was like, “Go, girl! We’ll head out to Hollywood and I’ll get a job as an actor! You can have me as your kept man until I get my big break!”
He could have done it, you know. He had the looks. But why did he just think of him, not us?
Maybe most men are that way, and think of themselves first off, because they’re raised by mamas who let them get away with anything, the way my mama did with Cam. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and they were raised so cold that they don’t think as much of themselves as they should, which makes them greedy, afraid they might miss something in their lives if they don’t push ahead of you in line. Not Charley, of course. Charley’s so sweet, he’s practically better than any girl to talk to. But Charley’s not your usual guy.
Then again, Dillon wasn’t totally wrong. It was like he could see through me, like he knew things were starting to take hold in my mind that didn’t have anything to do with him. I was ashamed of those things, and didn’t tell him, but I think he knew anyhow.
The first time it happened was when Annie and Stuart got these special-fare passes to go home to New York for one weekend, to celebrate their bein
g engaged. Annie got all flustered. She didn’t want me to stay alone, though I’d spent almost my whole life home alone already. When I finally convinced her I didn’t have to go with them (Stuart was pretty relieved, I can tell you that), she insisted I have Paula or Elena stay over. Annie likes Elena but thinks she’s wild, which she is, though not in a really bad way. Of course, anybody with good brains would think, hey, who could be a bad influence on a girl already had her first sex experience in a trailer at a prison? But Annie doesn’t think like that, bless her heart. Anyhow, she was on the phone with Mrs. Gutierrez, saying things like, Yes, I think she is completely trustworthy, but I don’t like to leave her in case of some kind of medical emergency. . . . Yes, I think they’d be better off at your house, but if you will check on them by phone, it’s only two nights; and finally, Mrs. G. agreed that Elena could stay with me at Annie and Stuart’s.
I started thinking, lying there half asleep, that what was so interesting to me about the phone conversation I overheard was that this was how it would be to have a full-time mother. A mother checking up on you and trying to keep you out of trouble. Here I was, fixing to be a mother myself, and finally having this fed-up-jeez-enough-already-don’t-treat-me-like-an-infant feeling that normal kids have all the time, and sort of liking it, and sort of regretting that I was already way past it. And it just hit me for part of a second: maybe I’d be better off if it was just my baby and me. Or just even me. I’m not going to tell you I ever considered giving Desi up for adoption, especially after I laid eyes on her. But it did strike me that the very reason I was getting taken care of by Annie—because of marrying Dillon—also sort of let me be a kid for the first time in my fourteen years of life.
I couldn’t wait to see Elena alone. Now that I lived in San Antonio, though we still talked on the phone all the time, I worked days at Taco Haven, because I wasn’t in school. And we didn’t get together as much at each other’s houses. I was pretty shy about my situation, pretty sure Mrs. G. would hate me. Elena was really happy for me about living at Annie’s and Annie teaching me at home—she just thought I had got fed up with being Mama’s slave and got the hell out. She was kind of like, all right, girl! Though she had asked me about sixty-four questions about Dillon’s and my sex, she had no idea about the baby.
I wanted to be alone with her to tell her.
The first big hurdle was getting Annie out the door. Two times, she asked me to show her where the extra house keys were. She asked me to show her the list of phone numbers. And then she was going to call up and get Jeanine to come over and check on us, when Stuart finally got all impatient and said, “For Christ’s sake, Anne. We’re going to miss the plane. . . .”
“I want to make sure she’s okay. . . .”
“Jesus. The kid’s been on her own practically all her life anyhow. You’re acting like she was raised at Miss Bennett’s Finishing School . . .”
I never heard Annie say one bad word to Stuart until that moment. But she turned to him, right in front of Elena, and she said, “You shut your mouth, Stuart.”
Stuart looked down and didn’t say a word.
But then he muttered, “Sorry, Arley. I’m sorry.” And Annie kissed me and they left.
Elena let out a big whoop. It turned out she had big news for me, too.
When Annie and Stuart were gone, she got right down to it. First, she said, she was going to sleep with Ricky Nevadas. The very next night, right there, in Annie’s apartment. We were going to throw a party. Ricky Nevadas was eighteen—it seemed like every girl around Avalon or even San Antonio had to get Ricky out of her system at some point or another—and he was going to get some of his friends to come, and one of them who was twenty-one was going to get a keg of beer. . . . I stopped that talk right there. First of all, it would have been a fine way to thank Annie and Stuart, by having an underage drinking party in their house. Second of all, it was aces up we’d get caught. “Ellie, they are lawyers,” I told her. Elena didn’t know that if you have even one felony conviction, you can never practice law, and that if you get one after that, you could get disbarred. I started telling her off—didn’t she even remember that night at Eric Dorey’s? What was she thinking? She finally backed off the party idea, but she still thought it was only fair that she could have Ricky over so they could be alone.
I didn’t have much ground to stand on there.
“You did it, after all,” Elena said.
“I’m married,” I answered. “And you don’t even love Ricky.”
“I love him that way.”
“Elena, every girl in South Texas loves him that way. What about you weren’t going to give it away until you were sure, and all that? What if you get pregnant?” She still wasn’t convinced. Then I asked her what was I supposed to do while they were bouncing away in the bedroom? Watch the TGIF sitcoms? She couldn’t think of an answer to that. “It’s not fair, though,” she pouted. “At this rate, I’m going to be a virgin when I’m a senior.”
We were hungry, so we threw out all the chicken liver pâté and hummus and other junk Annie had left for me, and made a big mess of frijoles and rice, with lots of Cholula sauce. Finally, Elena perked up and asked if I could guess her other surprise. I tried a couple of things: Her mama was going to take her to see her relatives in Puerto Rico. No. She was going to get a car next year. No. She was going to go out for freshman attendant on prom court.
“Close,” Elena said. “But better. One more guess.” She’d brought a couple of those little airline bottles of wine she stole out of her father’s workshop, and she offered me some, but I wouldn’t take any. I was getting aggravated, so she just burst out with it: Last Saturday, with nobody, not her mother or father or me or anybody knowing, she had gone down to the fairgrounds and tried out for Flower Princess for the Fiesta de San Antonio in June. There were three hundred girls there, some of them already in college. And she was picked! One of only seven girls!
I screamed. I couldn’t believe it.
When you grow up here, you think the fiesta princesses are like movie stars or something. They’re always in the newspaper or passing out roses in Dalton’s the Saturday before Mother’s Day or giving trophies to college boys in big football games and stuff. On the first day of the fiesta (which is this superhuge thing, like a giant carnival, for a whole week), each one of the princesses got her own float; each float is a different color, and her dress and the flowers and everything match. I don’t know who paid for everything, I guess the town did, though I know Mr. G. pretended to go nutty after he found out that the girl’s family had to buy the dress (he was actually very proud; for years afterward, Gracie G. would call the arrangement of Elena’s princess pictures on the living room wall the “Shrine of Santa Maria de Vaca”). On the last night of the festival, all the princesses were guests of honor at this big ball; Elena said I could come as one of her sisters.
Elena was going to be the Bougainvillea Princess, the red one. “That was always my favorite one!” I said, and I really did mean it. Of course you’d immediately like something involving your best friend the best, although I had always sort of favored the Primrose Princess, because when I was little, I thought her big yellow skirt looked like Cinderella’s.
Elena smiled a tiny secret smile, not at all braggy. “It’s so cool,” she said. “I still can’t believe it.”
“When did you find out?”
“Last night! When Annie was on the phone with my mom, we already knew! And I was, like, dying to tell you!”
“What did you have to do to get it?”
“Well, I just had to walk around in different clothes—a dress, and jeans with some cowboy boots . . .”
“How do you know how to do it?”
“You just pick up this pamphlet at the . . . well, all over the place. You can get them at the museum.”
This didn’t sound like the Elena I knew. “What were you doing at the museum, El? Putting the T-rex together?”
“No.”
“Wha
t?”
“I was there with Brin Dennison.”
“Oh,” I said. “She’s nice.” She really was nice. And really popular. She could sing and dance. Brin’d been Juliet and Marian the Librarian in the school shows, and she was only a sophomore. What was Elena doing hanging around with a sophomore? And that kind of sophomore? I loved Elena, but she wasn’t the drama club kind of person. Then I got another surprise.
“I’m in variety show with her,” Elena said. “I . . . tried out. And I got in the Stevie Nicks number and the West Side Story number. Brin is in both of those too. So we’re together.”
“Doing what?”
“Dancing.”
“You can dance?”
“Arley, you know I can dance.”
“I mean, I know you can dance. I didn’t know you could dance dance.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’m so hot at it. But I can move. And you know, I gotta do something other than go to the mall and Taco Haven. By myself. I guess all your studying and being on track and everything rubbed off on me. You were a good influence.” Well, I could have said something then—like, what kind of influence had she been on me? Here I was, the pregnant ex–track star. But I couldn’t say anything. I just felt so bad.
At least I wasn’t just paranoid; it really was what I’d been afraid of. Brin Dennison was her new best friend. I knew Elena wouldn’t admit it, but that was purely what she was saying. Brin was closer to her than me now, and it had happened, like, that fast. It was like Mrs. G. said: everything happened in dog years. I swallowed hard so I wouldn’t cry.