“When did you start all this?”
She shrugged. “Like, a month ago. Or a little more. After you moved here. Arley, come on. It’s no big wup. I just . . . you’re always thinking about Dillon, or writing to Dillon, or sending a package to Dillon—”
“He’s my husband, Ellie!”
“Well, I don’t have a husband! I’m fifteen years old!”
We sat there, quiet. We both looked out the window at the boys playing basketball in the playground.
“You were the one couldn’t wait to grow up, so we could get our own apartment and everything,” I said bitterly.
“I didn’t mean to really fucking go and do it,” Ellie snapped.
She drank down a whole glass of her airline wine. Then she started in on her favorite subject of all time: “I don’t want to fight, Arley. We’re still best friends, okay? Let’s not ruin this time we have together. We don’t get that much time. Now, I gotta know. Tell me once more exactly how it felt. When he stuck it in the first time, did it hurt right away? All at once?” I was a little grossed out by how fascinated she was. Still I remembered how I had felt the night before my wedding, quizzing Elena about every sexual thing I could think of. I tried to tell her as best I could. She finished the first little bottle of wine and pulled out another one. “I’m not driving!” she said brightly, and added, “No one’s going to know if you have one drink, Miss Goody Pure Married Sex Lady.”
I told her then about the baby. She about died.
I never saw a thing sober Elena up so fast. She even called Ricky Nevadas and told him not to come over, that there was an urgent personal situation. Damn, she kept saying. Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn. Arley, damn. Finally, she asked me, “Are you going to get rid of it?”
“Of course not. I’m married.”
“You can still get an abortion if you’re married.”
“I don’t know if you can or not,” I lied.
“You can.”
“Well, even if I can, I don’t want to. I want to have this baby. I mean, I guess I always wanted to have a baby. Maybe not this young. But maybe this is how it’s meant to be.”
“Are you scared?”
“Of what?”
“Of it hurting, for chrissakes.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, and . . . ?”
“I’m more scared of what happens after it’s born. Like, what do I do?”
“How to take care of it?”
“No. I have books about that. I mean, what do I do, to live? I don’t want to go on the state, and I don’t know where I can live, and even with good behavior, it’s going to be two years or something before Dillon even comes up for parole.”
“You’ll figure out something. Annie’ll help you.”
But there was more to it than that. What I was really, deep down worried about was what kind of mother I could possibly be—because if there was a gene for bad parenthood, I surely must have it, having had one parent who wasn’t ever there and one who didn’t want to be. I wished I could ask Mama if there’d been a time, even a short time, when she’d rejoiced over the thought of having me, when she couldn’t wait to see how I would look or what talents I might have. If I had known then about why Mama went traveling when she was a girl, why we got those names we got, I guess I wouldn’t have troubled myself looking for diamonds in a cereal box, for I would have understood that Cam and I and even Langtry were just means to an end. But maybe all babies are. What matters is what the end is.
From the dream I started having again just before Desi was born, the old dream about colored wagons, I assumed I was like all the teen mothers I read about in magazines. I thought having a baby would make me feel important and grown up, that it would transform my life into something more significant. That I was having a baby so that I’d have something to love that couldn’t leave me. Like a living teddy bear to dress up and play with.
All that was true, in a way. I didn’t ever have anything reliable to love in my life, not completely, until Dillon. But that love had already changed me totally, inside and out, giving me everything where I thought there was never going to be anything much. I had no idea about Annie and me, or getting to know Charley and Jeanine and all, or how anything that started out so far outside the only world you ever knew could come to be so much a part of the inside, in such a short time. And of all the things I didn’t reckon on being so important, I didn’t reckon most on Desi.
I thought that eventually Dillon and I would have a little place, maybe someday even own us a house the way his daddy had. And we would both have jobs. I thought that having a baby, though it would be hard for us to afford, would be exciting and fun and a living proof of our love. Desi was an idea to me, then, a nice idea, like in the poems I wrote about marriage and being a couple when I never knew anything about marriage except making love. How could I have imagined a baby as a person? And for all I knew about babies, how could I have expected that knowing a person who couldn’t even talk would teach me more about everything in the world than all the talking everybody else in my life had done all put together? And I certainly couldn’t imagine anything like that back that night, alone in the apartment with Elena, because even though I was sitting there telling her all about my worries and my big news—it was way bigger news than hers, after all, even though it sort of felt like something to be guilty about instead of celebrating—I was really thinking about how it would be to be the Bougainvillea Princess.
It just came to me, right then.
I could have been the Bougainvillea Princess myself. I could have even been the Primrose Princess. My mind just never included it until it was too late. I mean, I had all these ideas about having good speech and getting good grades and being an athlete, but I never had any dreams about just fun stuff. My mama never said I was a pretty princess who could dress all up in a tulip skirt and ride on a float so covered with buttermilk flowers it smelled like a pole boat floating down the river of heaven. She didn’t tell me, and you don’t know if you don’t know.
I wanted to bawl like a fool. Here I was, married to the handsomest man I ever saw and carrying his child and living with a good friend in a nice place, and I was mooning about never being able to be a flower princess. How could it be that I was growing up backward?
But that was just the beginning of what was happening to me.
Did Dillon feel it, far away in his cell in Block C in Solamente River? Did he wake up all restless and wonder where was his wife, his Arley, in her dreams if not in her body? Did he feel he was losing me, that he would have to win me crazy like if he couldn’t hold me with his love? No, I don’t think he really did. But I can’t deny that I was changing. During those months I was pregnant with Desi, I wasn’t just growing fat as a heifer; I was growing, growing, growing in my mind. Annie was making me grow, challenging me. Now I look back, you’d best believe I’m glad I felt uncertain about so much. It might have made the things that happened easier to bear, in the sense of my being prepared. It was probably my destiny turning over another card is all.
But I still worry. I still wonder.
The fiesta was in June, so I was pretty far along pregnant. I wrote Dillon all about the fiesta. Elena hadn’t had anything to eat but fruit smoothies for five days. She wanted to lose five pounds. “And she’s already thin!” I wrote Dillon. “I’m going to look so fat and ugly next to the other girls.” I thought that might hurt his feelings, though, him having been the one who got me this way, so I added that most people, including guys, seemed to notice me a lot more, and hardly any of them could tell I was pregnant.
I guess that was stupid. Maybe I did want to make him a little jealous.
In the weeks leading up to the fiesta, a couple of really big things had happened to me. I took my GED, and I passed. Annie was so excited she sprang this big surprise on me: she took me to New York. That was the second big thing.
Now, how can I tell this? I hadn’t ever even seen the airport. In fact, all I knew of even Texas was
Galveston, and the part of Dallas you could see from watching the football game on TV. From our valley, where Avalon was, the whole world was like a medieval map with just Florence and China, or whatever, on it and then all these other big shapes and drawings of waves and sea monsters. I was on a map with only three points: my house; San Antonio, where Annie’s and school and work were; and Solamente River, where Dillon was, where I’d said my marriage words and left my blood on a fold-up couch covered with yellow and red fabric, in a trailer next to a field stitched all around by a fence topped with razor-sharp steel ribbon.
I don’t think I slept for two hours the whole three days I was in New York. Annie couldn’t keep me inside her girlfriend Penny’s apartment on Twenty-third Street. I wanted to go outside before it was even light and walk around, see all the groceries, with their big bins of flowers and fruit, opening up, the people walking dogs, hear the endless rhythm of horns honking that never died away, even in the middle of the night. Then we stayed at Annie’s sister’s house, and I met her two boys, both littler than me. Annie and I took the train with Rachael to the city to see Carousel. It was the most beautiful night of my life.
I think Annie chose that show not because she got a good deal on the tickets but because of Billy Bigelow being a bad boy who hit the girl he loved and left her pregnant when he died. I think she wanted me to see similarities, and I did—but I’ll tell you, I wanted her to see similarities too. And I think she did. I think she saw how you can be helpless not to love somebody. At the end, when Billy came to see his little girl graduating, I cried so hard Rachael and Annie thought I was going to be sick, and they wanted me to go right home. But I wanted to go to the restaurant they promised me, and have a cream tea, and when they said I was getting hysterical, it made me get even more that way. “I want to see stuff!” I cried out. “This is my last chance!”
“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” Rachael told me gently.
“I don’t think any goddamn thing on earth could be bigger than my stomach!” I yelled back, and then I felt terrible, and Annie did too. Embarrassed by this Texas hick kid she brought to show her family, like I was some kind of bigeyed thing in a box from Peru. She started shaking her head at me, but Rachael smoothed it all over.
“Annie, she’s got the jits is all,” Rachael said. “It feels so strange when you’re that pregnant . . . You feel like you’re drowning in your own body.” She got the cream tea packaged all up in a big box, and we took it home and ate it sitting on Rachael’s deck, and Rachael told me how it would feel to be on my own at college and how there was plenty of what she called “federal money” for girls with babies who were smart. “I don’t mean the babies have to be smart,” she said. “That’s not a requirement.” When I told Rachael that I was pretty sure I couldn’t make it outside Texas, she reassured me. “You can grow up ignorant about the world even if your father is a rich doctor from New York, Arley. People from up here don’t have any special corner on being smart; they just act like they do.”
That’s how nice she was to me, a stranger, just because Annie loved me.
Coming home was a time for me to be lost and gone in thought. At night, I would feel like I wanted to cry, and I’d pray for my mind to fold up like one of those little origami pocketbooks and stay down nice and flat and tight the way it used to be. But it was all over the place, thinking about New York and junior college and maybe running track again—because Mary Slaney was even better, after she had her baby, and so was Jackie Joyner-Kersee—and hoping the baby would be a girl instead of the son Dillon wanted so bad. For the first time, as I covered pages of that beautiful recycled paper with poems and ideas for Dillon, I felt as though I was lying to him: that even though I kept saying it, he wasn’t the only dream in the world for me, like I was for him. I still loved him, that was never a question, but I didn’t think I could explain the changes in me that weren’t obvious to the eye until we got some real time together.
The two times Annie drove me to Solamente River while I was pregnant, Dillon and I didn’t hardly talk at all. He just rolled his hands and his mouth over me as best we could in a room full of derelicts and girl derelicts doing the same thing, him trying to hold back, but rubbing my breasts with his wrists while he held my face and kissed me. I wasn’t comfortable with the whole scene. I was very conscious of him, physically, but a part of me was sitting back inside, high up on the hill of my motherhood, watching Dillon and me panting and smooching in that dirty room and thinking, No, no. Just like Annie was thinking. I could almost feel her, those times, out there in the foyer, smacking her gum and checking her watch. She didn’t like Dillon and Dillon didn’t like her. He called her my “jailer,” because she had so many things for me to do on the weekends, when I wasn’t working: going with Charley to pick out plants for the house, shopping for furniture for Azalea Road, listening to lectures and parenthood classes given by the people at Jeanine’s agency who counseled the pregnant girls who were giving up their babies for adoption—all of which interfered with seeing Dillon. In six months, I could have another conjugal visit, and I sort of pinned my hopes on that, knowing that if Dillon and I were really together, our love would fall into place again. Meanwhile, I talked and wrote to him about my everyday life, and about hoping for my apartment.
Getting a place of my own, even if it was just a room in a rooming house, was starting to be this huge thing. After his one client got the poke and was buried, Stuart was really depressed. He was applying for jobs in Florida and in New York, and he kept asking Annie if she was applying for jobs, too, but she wasn’t doing anything I could see. It was obviously not a time for a couple to have to put up with the stress and responsibility of another person around the house. So Annie and Jeanine started talking about me having one of those little one-bedrooms they give the birth mothers who are working with the agency.
Jeanine is really a character. She has what Annie calls a generous interpretation of things. Jeanine would say, “I mean, there are circumstances under which you would consider an adoption plan for the baby, right?” And I’d answer, Yeah, like if I got hit by a bus, but she would put her finger to her lips and go on, “So, technically, you are one of those people who could be served by this available subsidized housing.” We all knew it was just for the short term, anyhow. No matter what the far-off future would hold, Annie was going to move into Azalea Road sooner or later, at least for a while. A couple of times, I asked her, if she was going to go off to another job in another state, why did she keep making so many improvements on the house, and her eyes all filled up with tears. “Sometimes, I think I want to stay here, at least for now,” she said.
Annie and Stuart were supposed to get married, by summer at the latest, but I didn’t know if Annie was going to go through with it. Busy as I was with work and studying, I couldn’t pretend I was comfortable with the idea that Annie would leave. When she would talk about these fantasies about us living at Azalea Road and my going to college, I really liked that. It was getting so when I thought of the future, I thought of Annie and my child instead of my husband.
Dillon probably wasn’t too happy that I didn’t write so much about our love but about other things: like about the leatherbound set of books Annie got me for my fifteenth birthday, her favorites when she was a girl, like To Kill a Mockingbird and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, all stories about girls in tough circumstances. Maybe it felt to him like I was bragging. Or maybe it made him think that his gift to me, his poem about his cell and the agony of not being free, wasn’t much compared with those books. I had told him I loved the poem, that it was beautiful, but scary. But then I babbled right on about the cactus garden in a big pottery bowl painted with moons and stars that I got from Charley.
I remember I wrote, “Maybe we’ll have it in our house someday. If cactus live that long.”
And then I got the phone call from Mama.
Dillon would have never known about it, except we were having our weekly talk at the time. We hadn’t be
en on but about five minutes when all of a sudden this operator broke in and said, “Got an emergency call for y’all from Rita B. Mowbray.”
Well, I thought, sure enough, Cam’s dead in a car wreck, otherwise why would she call me? But I said to Dillon, “Bet she can’t live without me being her maid.”
Dillon said, real quick, “Well, honey, maybe you should go on and live at home until the baby comes. I think you ought to be with your own. Blood is blood.” It seemed strange to me at the time, but afterward I realized that he just wanted to get me away from Annie.
I told him, “Okay, honey, I guess I’ll think about it.”
The operator said, “Y’all going to hang up or not?”
So we did.
And Mama came on. “Arley,” she said. “I need you to come on out here.”
“Come home?” I asked her. “Why?”
“Just you come on out here . . .” It sounded like she was covering the phone for a moment; “. . . on Wednesday. For supper.”
“Supper?”
Mama laughed. “Yeah, girl, supper.” Then she hung up. Wasn’t but a minute we talked, and I thought, well, there went my phone call with Dillon for the whole week . . . for nothing.
But it wasn’t just for that week, though I couldn’t have known that then. I didn’t know that the days ahead would be so busy, with the festival coming and all, that, for the first time, I’d forget to write Dillon.
He’d never get a letter from me again.
That time he ignored me, at the beginning, when he wouldn’t write me, I almost went crazy. Did he go crazy, waiting, too? Did he have time to listen to unsaid things, meanings underneath words, and decide that they were telling him to act? Do those things go out, over the wind or the telephone wires, on their own special frequency, between people whose ears are tuned to the slightest change in one another? Dillon had always believed in signs.