Pregnant Pause

  I grab Banner's hands and shout, "Grab a partner. Bump bottoms with your partner!" The girls laugh. "Bump hips with your partner!"

  While the girls are bumping hips, I notice out of the corner of my eye the MIL slipping into the room. She stands just inside the door, folds her arms across her chest, and just watches. I feel my throat start to close up and my knees get to knocking again. What is she going to do to me? Now she knows I'm not teaching ballet. What a nightmare. What do I say next?

  The girls have stopped, and they're all staring at me, waiting for instructions. I start to speak, but nothing comes out. My mouth is dry. I clear my throat and try again.

  "Uh, pretend you're the wind and—uh—blow all over the room!" I shout. Off they fly, around the room, watching one another to see if they're doing "wind" right.

  "Pretend that you're snow falling gently, softly, shhh, shhh." The first song is over and the girls move like snow in the silence, on tiptoes, their arms in the air or held out to the side. One girl leaps, and then they all start leaping.

  The next song begins, and I call out, "You're horses now, leaping, prancing horses!"

  They love this, and I glance over to see if the MIL has noticed, but she's already left. I imagine the reaming I'm going to get after class and shudder. I turn back to the girls. Everyone is still leaping, everyone except for Banner, who is standing off to the side with her shoulders slumped and her hair in her face. At least the MIL isn't here to see this. I go over to her. "Come on, Banner—you'rehor ses."

  "I can't," she moans. "Not here. They'll laugh at me. My legs will jiggle, and they'll laugh at me."

  "But everybody's legs jiggle. It's okay. I won't let them laugh. So come on. Let's see some horses, or maybe the girls will start laughing at you because you're just standing here like a stick."

  That gets a rise out of her—but only a small, halfhearted one. She does a few tiny little leaps, barely-off-the-ground leaps, but at least I got her into the center of the room with the others, and nobody's laughing at her.

  The music changes to this slow, dragging tune. "Now you're crawling through mud," I call out, and everyone but Banner gets down on their bellies and pretends to be crawling through the mud. Banner just kind of squats, afraid to actually get on the floor on her belly like the others, so instead she looks like she's taking a dump in the middle of the floor, and really I can't blame them when the other girls laugh.

  "Hey, look at Banner!" one of the girls shouts. "She's got the trots!"

  I clap my hands and scowl. "All right, that's enough," I say to stop the laughter, but really, I'm proud of myself because although I'm laughing so hard inside, I manage to look stern enough that when I clap my hands, the girls actually stop laughing.

  By the end of the class, the girls are flushed and happy, and I'm exhausted. I watch them file out of the cabin, and then Ashley Wilson stops in front of me and stares at me with her beady little eyes for a few seconds. I stare back. No way is some snot-nosed fifth-grader going to outstare me.

  She tilts her head. "That wasn't real dancing," she says. "I take dance at home. I know how to really dance. That was just pretend dance."

  "Oh, yeah? Well, then, you don't have to come back until Haley does, now, do you? If the only dance you know how to do is plié and arabesque, then go ahead and do them. No one's forcing you to be here."

  Ashley Wilson shrugs. "Well, I'll think about it. It might be interesting to see what different stuff you'll do next time." She smiles this evil-child kind of smile and pushes open the door. She lets it slam behind her.

  Different stuff? I gave them all I had. That was absolutely all I could think of. I don't know what I'm going to do next time, but at least for one day, for this one class, it looks like a hit. I was a hit—with the girls.

  Chapter Eight

  I WAITED with my shoulders hiked up to my ears all day for someone to come tell me that the MIL wanted to see me, but nobody said anything about it. Did she approve of my class? Was she waiting until after dinner to speak to me? I didn't know. So I just waited.

  Lam wasn't at dinner, and neither was Jen. Lam said they had to stay down at the lake for the junior lifesaving course they were teaching—together. I didn't like the way Jen was always trying to get Lam to notice her and the way she still put me down every chance she got, which was whenever Lam wasn't around to hear her, but I was too busy myself and too tired to worry that much about them.

  By bedtime I still haven't heard anything from the MIL. At last I relax. I'm tired and I fall asleep before Lam returns from Junior Lifesaving.

  ***

  I'm getting to know a lot of kids through the crafts hut, and they're always coming up to me between activities and before and after dinner, too. Some even follow me to the bathroom. The only place I can really get away from them is in my own cabin, or when I have my day off, which I spend in the library, because since I've been pregnant and quit all the drugs and drinking, hanging out with Matt and the guys the way Lam does on his day off isn't fun anymore. All they want to talk about is hunting and girls, and all I want to talk about is what it's like to be pregnant. Other counselors get the same day off that I do, but they're all old-timers here, and even though they invite me to join them, I can tell they don't want me dragging along. So all I do is drive Rambo around town for a while, just to feel my freedom, and then I sit in the library and read about being pregnant and what it's like to raise a kid.

  The third place I can get away from the campers is in the counselors' break hut, where we take breaks from our activities. Ziggy and I have the same break time.

  I told Ziggy that as long as he never sang to me, we could be friends, and it turns out I really like him, and he seems to like me, too. It just goes to show, my first impressions of people are always wrong.

  There's a juice machine and a snack machine in the hut, and a couch and a coffee table and some chairs. Ziggy buys me a snack, because he knows I don't get paid one red cent in this backwoods place. The ILs like to keep me powerless. They fig ure their ratty old cabin with the ratty old sofa and lumpy bed is payment enough for my pathetic assistant counselor services. Maybe they're right. Anyway, I like Ziggy. I like how he knows so much about music, and it's cool that he's in his second year at the Berklee College of Music, and that he plans to write the music, or "scores," as he calls them, for movies when he graduates.

  "Why would you teach music at a fat camp?" I asked him once. "I mean, wouldn't a music camp or something be better? Or maybe even just forming a band and performing in the summers or—or something else—anything else?"

  "I like it here," he said. "I like the time away from all the intensity at Berklee. I like how remote this place is, and besides, I used to be a camper here. I just want to give back. The Lothrops have always been good to me."

  That was a shock. The Lothrops, nice? Well, maybe Mr. Lothrop. Oh, okay, the MIL is great with the campers, too. I guess she just saves all her hate and venom for me, the girl who she thinks destroyed her son. And Ziggy used to go here? Big shock.

  "You mean you used to be fat?" I looked at his wiry self in his baggy jeans and his skinny arms poking out of his too-big WeightAway T-shirt, and I couldn't picture it.

  He nodded. "Yeah, a real doughnut. But I learned how to eat right and exercise, and it's at WeightAway that I got into music. They talk here a lot about finding your bliss and focusing on that instead of food. There was a great music teacher here—really cool guy. Here's where I got my start."

  I thought about finding my bliss. Is Lam my bliss? The thought depressed me for some reason. Maybe this baby I'm carrying will be my bliss. Is it okay to have people as your bliss? Somehow I didn't think so. I think I'm supposed to have some kind of skill, or talent, or gift, but if I have one, I haven't found it yet.

  I also like Ziggy because he's nice about the baby; he never asks questions, he just listens to me talk. A lot of the other counselors, especially the girls, and even the kids, are always either making snide remarks or
asking me stuff like is it a boy or a girl, or aren't you kind of young to have a baby, or are you going to keep it or give it up for adoption? First of all, I don't know if it's a boy or a girl. To tell the truth, I haven't gone to a doctor since the first visit, which my mom took me to, because like I said, I hate doctors. Every time I had an appointment, I'd cut out, just like it was a class at school. I just couldn't face all their poking around. I've got my prenatal vitamin pills, I'm off all the bad stuff, I've read lots of books on being pregnant, so I figure I'm good. In the olden days they didn't have all this ultrasound and crap, and those babies turned out fine; why shouldn't mine? The MIL's always checking up on me about it, too, so I lie and tell her I have doctor's appointments scheduled on my days off. Anyway, I don't need to know which sex it is. Am I going to give it to Sarah? I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do. I talk this over with Ziggy.

  "I lie awake at night, staring up at the rafters at the 'Carrie was here' message written in glow-in-the-dark marker while Lam snores next to me, trying to figure out what we should do with the baby," I tell him. "One night I think maybe we can handle it." I look at Ziggy and shrug. "That's when I've had a good day with the kids here. But then the next night I'm thinking, give it away. Get rid of it, and fast, because I'll stink as a mother. I don't want to be tied down—stuff like that. That's when I've had a bad day with the kids—or sometimes with Lam."

  Ziggy listens and nods, resting his hand on my knee. He's always touching people, so I don't think anything of it. "I have a cousin who got pregnant young—well, at eighteen—but she didn't marry the guy, and she kept the baby. She's really struggling. She works three jobs and never sees the kid. The daycare people are pretty much raising her, but what can she do, you know?"

  "Daycare. I forgot about daycare. I don't want my kid in daycare. But I don't want to spend all my days changing diapers and feeding and taking care of the baby, either—I don't think."

  "You should move to Boston," Ziggy says, which sounds like a comment out of the blue, but then he explains. "There's just so much to do—so much culture. You could take your baby to the Museum of Fine Arts or the Museum of Science and go to outdoor concerts with it and poetry readings and walk with it along the Charles River."

  "Yeah," I say. "Yeah, that would be great. I'd like that, for sure."

  "I once thought I got a girl pregnant, but it was a false alarm," he says.

  "Really? No kidding?"

  "No kidding. So for a couple of weeks I was imagining doing all those things with her and the baby. When I found out she wasn't pregnant, I was glad but sad, too. Boston's a cool place to raise a kid. I'd love to show you Boston."

  "Sounds great," I say. Then we sit there not talking for a minute or so while Ziggy slurps his grape Fanta and I eat my peanut butter—cheese crackers. Then Ziggy reaches for my hand and squeezes it. "You'll figure your life out," he says. He smiles at me. We're sitting really close and looking right at each other and I think, He's cute, and this zinging feeling goes from our touch right to my stomach, and the baby kicks. I spring to my feet, which, my being almost eight months pregnant, is hard to do, but I do it. I'm nervous. I've got that scared-of-the-future thing hammering in my head all of a sudden. I back away from Ziggy.

  He jumps up. "You okay? Is it the baby? What's wrong?" He puts his arm around my shoulders, and there's that zinging thing again, and I make for the exit and knock into a couple of other counselors entering the hut. "Oh, sorry," I say, but I don't stop to see if they're okay. I run—sort of—up the hill to my cabin, and I get inside and slam the door behind me and fall against it. My heart is thumping in my chest, keeping time with the baby's kicking. I feel ill. I don't want to think about what just happened. Nothing happened. That's right; nothing hap pened, I tell myself. I'm emotional. I didn't kiss him or anything. But maybe I felt like it? Did I? Is that what I felt? I don't want to know. I push away from the door and cross the cabin to my bed and climb in. I check my watch. I have fifteen more minutes till dinnertime. I won't go. Lam won't be there, since he's teaching the lifesaving course, but Ziggy will be. No, I'll just lie still. I stare up at the rafters. There's the "Carrie was here" message and the "I lost fifteen pounds!" message, and the "If you're reading this, you're in my bunk" message. I read all the different messages left by campers from years past. They take my mind off of things, and I start to calm down. I hear the dinner bell, but I ignore it. I read more messages, and then before I know it I'm thinking of Ziggy and wondering what it would be like to kiss him. I mean, it would be okay. I'm not really married. Not really. We were pushed into this, so the marriage isn't real. So if I wanted to kiss Ziggy, if we became boyfriend and girlfriend, that would be okay, wouldn't it? Lam's been my only boyfriend. My whole world since I came back from Kenya has been about Lam. That can't be right. I should have more than one boyfriend before I settle down, shouldn't I? Would I be a bad person if I kissed him? I think of my parents, and I see their disappointed faces looking down on me from the rafters. They're shaking their heads. They're in Kenya saving the children, and I'm thinking about doing the nasty with Ziggy. Wait, no I'm not, just a kiss, just a simple kiss; that's all. Would kissing him hurt anything really? Kissing's not cheating. Sex is cheating. We just won't have sex.

  There's a knock on the door, and I sit up. I call "Come in" and feel my face grow hot with embarrassment, as if Ziggy were with me in the bed.

  The door opens and it's Ziggy, and my whole body flushes. He steps just inside the cabin and stops. "I was sent to find out if you're okay. Are you sick? Do I need to get the nurse or anything? Do you need me to find Lam?"

  I shake my head. "No, I'm fine. I just felt tired, just really tired. So—so I came in here to lie down."

  His worried expression relaxes. "Then can I bring you a plate of food? It's brown rice and bean burritos, a meal you actually like."

  He remembers I like the brown rice and burritos. I wonder if Lam knows that. Does he know what my favorite foods are? Do I know his? Do I even know his favorite color? No. What does it matter? I love Lam. He loves me. I just miss him. We hardly see each other anymore. Ziggy is just a substitute; that's all. Forget about all that kissing-Ziggy nonsense. I get off the bed and stretch. "No need. I'll go up to the dining hall. I wouldn't want to deprive the MIL of my presence, would I?"

  Ziggy laughs. He's the only one who knows I call my mother-in-law the MIL. "MIL, like a millstone around my neck," I told him once, and he had laughed.

  I wave him away. "You go on and I'll be right there. I've just gotta do something first."

  "Are you sure?" Ziggy takes a few steps closer, and I worry he's going to touch me again.

  "Yes! Yes, I'm sure. Go on." I wave him away again, and he turns and leaves.

  When he's gone, I let out my breath. I shake my head. I've got to be more careful. What was I thinking? I love Lam and he loves me and we're married and we're going to have a baby and maybe keep the baby and everything's going to be great, just really great, just really, really great.

  Chapter Nine

  SINCE THE LIFESAVING course runs past the dinner hour, Lam gets his dinner later and so he gets to our cabin late, too. Two or three nights a week he has night duty, where he takes a two-hour shift of guarding the camp to make sure the boys stay on their side of the lake and the girls stay on theirs. I thought it was supposed to be only once a week, but Lam says since he's been in the doghouse with his parents because of us getting married and being pregnant and all, that he's doing extra duty to make it up to them.

  All the male counselors except Lam sleep on the other side of the lake with the boys, but since Lam is married he's in the cabin with me on the girls' side. The girls love him, and one time they made him an honorary girl and put makeup on him and dressed him up like a girl, stuffing oranges in a bra and all, and he loved it. I watched the sweet way he let these campers fix his hair and makeup and the way he pranced for them once he was all done up, swinging a purse on his arm and everything, and I thought that h
e would make such a great father. He's patient. He would be patient with our children. I'm not patient, and I'm not patient tonight while I wait for him to finish his dinner and come home to the cabin. I need to be with him. I need to talk to him. I want to tell him what happened with Ziggy—or what didn't happen, but what might have happened. I kind of wish I could call my sister and ask her advice, and this shocks me, because since when did I ever want her advice? Maybe I shouldn't tell Lam anything, but then I think he should know. We should be honest. If our marriage is going to be worth anything, then we should be honest. Anyway, I didn't do anything with Ziggy. I just thought about it. I just lusted in my heart. Isn't that what it's called? That's allowed, isn't it?

  Like I said, I have no patience, so I'm about to jump out of my skin by the time Lam gets to the cabin. As usual, he looks tired.

  Most nights he comes in, shakes his head, and says, "Man, I'm tired." Then before he can even pull off his shorts, he falls into bed and goes right to sleep.

  He won't let me tell his parents how tired he is, but I'm kind of worried. He's lost weight and he has these dark bags under his eyes all the time. He hates waking up in the morning, and it takes lots of pushing and pulling from me to get him going.

  Tonight I cut him off before he gives me his "I'm too tired to speak" speech. "Lam, we have to talk," I say.

  He lets out this long sigh. "Now? I'm just so tired. What about? Can't we talk in the morning?"

  "No, because you're even more tired in the morning. I really think you should tell your parents how you're feeling, you know? You shouldn't be this tired all the time."

  Lam waves my comments away and shuffles over to the bed. He falls onto it face first and rolls over. "So what do you want to talk about? The baby? I'm thinking we should give it to my parents. I think that's the right thing to do." He puts his hands behind his head and closes his eyes as though saying, "End of discussion," when that's not even the discussion I'm wanting to have—but since he brought it up...