Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

  Anyway, you rarely come up in our conversations, and as much as his mother would like to pry information out of me, she’s learned that when I say, “I don’t want to talk about it,” I really mean I don’t want to talk about it. Still, I’m always leery of Patsy—it’s so easy to get comfortable with her, I could find myself telling more than I want to.

  Maybe I’ll tell Beau and Bonnie about the woman you might have been, because who knows? In the right circumstances you could have been anyone or anything. Professor Primrose Reynolds. Senator Primrose Reynolds. Loving mother, devoted grandma. It could have happened . . . in the right circumstances.

  I’m sorry,

  Faith

  August 1968

  HOSTESS: KARI

  BOOK: Middlemarch by George Eliot

  REASON CHOSEN: “I wanted the first book I chose to be one they read in my mother’s book club.”

  “I hereby call the Freesia Court Book Club to order.”

  “What?” said Slip. “Who authorized you to give us a name? Especially a name that sounds like an old ladies’ garden club.”

  “I’m just trying it out,” said Audrey. “Nothing’s official.”

  “Who died and appointed you boss of the meeting anyway?”

  “Well, Slip,” said Audrey with a toss of her head, “our host seems otherwise occupied.”

  Kari made herself look up from the baby in her arms. “I’m sorry.” To Merit, she asked, “Is she hungry?”

  “Probably,” said Merit of the baby who was making noises that sounded vaguely like a language student practicing a vowel sound.

  “You’re hungry, aren’t you, Reni?” said Merit, and as she unbuttoned her blouse, the women watched her with eaglelike attention.

  “Maybe I’ll nurse with this next baby,” said Slip.

  Merit looked surprised. “You didn’t with your other two?”

  “I tried to with Flan, but it was such an ordeal. Really, it was as if I was torturing her—she’d scream and bawl. My doctor thought the problem was that I wasn’t producing enough milk.” Slip pulled at the darts of her seersucker blouse. “Another curse of being flat-chested—can’t make our milk quota.” She shrugged, but her eyes were sad. “After about a week I just gave up . . . and when Joe came along, I was too afraid to try again.”

  “My doctor told me I’d wear myself out if I tried to nurse the twins,” said Faith. She didn’t add that she had no intention of nursing anyway; that was something only the poor whites and Negroes back home did.

  The baby drew back for a moment and sighed so rapturously that the women laughed. A thin arc of milk splashed onto her cheek, and she bobbed her head as she turned back to the nipple.

  “Eric didn’t want me to nurse,” said Merit, so quietly that Kari asked, “What’d you say?”

  Merit caressed Reni’s perfectly round head with her hand. “I was saying Eric didn’t want me to nurse. It was our first big fight.”

  “Why didn’t he want you to nurse?” asked Slip.

  Merit tilted her head, looking at the baby in her arms. “Oh, he had a bunch of reasons. He said modern science has perfected the best formula for babies, and I said, “Well, modern science could have saved itself the trouble because the best formula is mother’s milk and it’s free.” And then he said that my breasts would lose their shape.”

  “And don’t you worry about that?” asked Audrey. “I thought about nursing, but I didn’t want to get all saggy.” She laughed. “I mean, I really enjoy my breasts—and so does Paul.”

  Merit shook her head. “So do babies—I mean, that’s really what they’re there for, isn’t it?”

  Slip and Kari exchanged looks; strong opinions were not something one associated with Merit.

  Her unwavering resolve had surprised Eric too, who usually had no trouble persuading his wife to his way of thinking.

  “You can hit me if you want,” Merit had said in the midst of their arguing, “but I am going to nurse my baby.”

  Eric had held his mouth in such a way that his lips turned white.

  “I only hit you that once,” he said, “and that was an accident.”

  Merit flinched, certain he was now going to demonstrate the difference between an accidental blow and a planned one, but instead Eric shook his head, his look of anger shifting slightly into one of disgust.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, “go ahead and nurse her. What the hell do I care?”

  Merit had had her baby right on schedule, but in the predawn hours of July 4, so her fear of labor didn’t have to compete with her fear of fireworks. She was thrilled not only to have given birth but to have survived it, and her postlabor euphoria was marred only by the look—was it disappointment or disgust?—she had seen on Eric’s face when he saw his hoped-for son was a girl. She tried to put that look out of her mind, but its memory had burned into her brain, and she knew that, like a scar, it would always be there.

  “Oh, well,” he had said with a jocular smile as he hoisted the beautiful and healthy eight-pound girl, “we’ll try again next year, right, Mere?”

  It was a fertile time for the book club; both Slip and Audrey were pregnant, and their due dates were only two weeks apart.

  “So you still do have a sex life, eh, Slip?”

  “I guess that’s obvious, Audrey. What I don’t have is your adolescent need to talk about it.”

  What no one knew—what Kari could hardly believe herself—was that her distraction that evening was caused not only by Merit’s baby, but by the incredible, mind-boggling news that she might soon be a mother too.

  It’s not a dream, she told herself. The next baby I hold might be mine.

  “Okay, you guys,” said Audrey, realizing that if any discussion was going to take place, she’d have to initiate it. (What in the hell was wrong with Kari, and why did she look so dazed?) “Are we going to stare at Merit’s boobs all night or are we going to talk about Middlemarch?” She lit a cigarette and waved out the match with a quick snap of her wrist. “Now, who wanted to take Dorothea aside and give her some free advice?”

  MARY JO SOBBED so hard she threw up.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” said Kari, putting her arm around her niece, who was slumped over, hands on her knees.

  “Oh, my God,” said the receptionist, “is she puking in my ficus?”

  “Could you get us a towel?” asked Kari.

  “Because I have had that ficus since it was a seedling, and I do not appreciate it being puked on—”

  “A wet towel,” snapped Kari. “Please!”

  After Mary Jo had cleaned herself up and Kari reassured the receptionist that her niece had only thrown up a little bit of liquid, and if anything, the plant would probably thrive with its new concentrate of nutrients, they followed Larry Rosenberg, a supposed lawyer (did he argue cases like that? wondered Kari, dressed as he was in an embroidered muslin shirt and embroidered bell-bottoms, his hair as long as Veronica Lake’s in her prime) into his unlawyerlike office. Psychedelic posters covered the cheap paneled walls, and a thin stream of smoke rose from a stick of incense burning in a tiny filigree pagoda.

  “Have a seat,” said the lawyer, motioning to the green vinyl beanbag chairs surrounding the low polished driftwood slab that served as his conference table.

  Seeing her aunt settle herself warily in the shifting chair, Mary Jo managed one of the few smiles Kari had seen since she had arrived.

  Kari couldn’t remember a stranger time in her life. Upon getting off the plane, she’d been met at the airport by her niece, who looked as if a shower, sleep, and general grooming were alien concepts.

  “Mary Jo,” Kari had said, feeling too much bone and too little flesh as she hugged the bedraggled girl, “what happened?”

  “I’ll tell you everything when we get to our appointment. But for now, let’s not talk; just hold my hand the way you did when you’d take me downtown and we’d window-shop at Dayton’s.”

  They had been silent on the shuttle bus ride to Sa
n Francisco (“It’ll get us there just as fast as a taxi and costs about a third as much,” said Mary Jo, and Kari was reminded of her niece’s innate practicality). Her head pressed against the smudged window, Mary Jo had gazed out at the square little houses perched on hills in Daly City while Kari cast surreptitious looks at her. What had happened to her? When she had called her aunt with the unbelievable news that Kari needed to fly out to California now, that she’d tell her the specifics when she got to San Francisco, that she had found a baby that needed adopting, Mary Jo had sounded, well, gleeful. But now, as Kari replayed the conversation in her head, maybe Mary Jo hadn’t sounded gleeful; maybe she had sounded manic. Had she been high? Was there a baby at all, or was this some elaborate, drug-addled plot to get her aunt out here? But for what reason? Kari played with the teardrop-shaped knob that fastened her purse, trying to ignore the pain that clenched her stomach. As soon as she’d heard the word adoption, all rationality had flown out of her head like a freed bird; sitting in a bus that smelled of cigarettes and Ben-Gay ointment, she’d wondered if what she was on was a wild-goose chase.

  But whatever happens, she said to herself, looking again at her niece in her poncho with the matted fringe, I’m glad I’m here for Mary Jo, because obviously Mary Jo needs me.

  “Well, then,” said Larry the lawyer, settling into a beanbag chair himself, “how much have you told her?”

  Mary Jo shook her head, her blond hair falling over her face, obscuring it.

  “I was . . . I thought . . .” A sob rose, ending whatever revelation she had planned on offering.

  “Oh, dear,” said Kari, trying to get up to comfort her niece, but the chair seemed to have swallowed her up. Larry the lawyer, more practiced in the ways of maneuvering off a bag stuffed with beans, was at Mary Jo’s side in seconds, sitting on his haunches, stroking her hair (which needed a good washing), and telling her, “Everything’s okay, man, everything’s cool.”

  “Well, obviously everything is not cool,” said Kari. Just because she was a slow burner didn’t mean she didn’t have a boiling point. “Now, I would like some answers. I would like to know why my niece can’t seem to stop crying, why she called me and told me to come out here with little explanation except there was a baby available for adoption—since when has Mary Jo been in the adoption business?—and why I’m asking these questions of a lawyer who’s got dirty toenails. I shouldn’t even be seeing those, for crying out loud—lawyers should wear wing tips or brogans. And come to think of it, how do I even know you’re a lawyer? Where’s your law degree? There’s nothing on these walls but posters with pictures and words that look like they’re melting. And if I wanted to get a headache from incense, I’d have gone to a high mass!”

  Her aunt’s outburst was enough to stop Mary Jo from crying; this was tantamount to witnessing Old Faithful blow when you had no idea you were even in the vicinity of a geyser.

  Larry the lawyer scratched his beard and chuckled.

  “I’m not laughing at you,” he said, seeing the look of wounded fury in the woman’s eyes. “It’s just that my mother is as hung up about me wearing sandals in the office as you are.”

  “I’m not hung up,” Kari assured him. “I’m only—” She stopped, tears flooding her eyes. She didn’t know what she was, other than confused, anxious, worried, and tired.

  The beanbag chair Mary Jo was on made a squinching sound as she shifted her weight so that she was close enough to take Kari’s hand.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Kari. I should have told you right away what was going on, but I—” She looked at Larry the lawyer, whose beard scratching was increasing in pace. “Well, the thing of it is, I had a baby three days ago, and I want you to raise her.”

  Kari blinked and swallowed. It was as if a hot wind had raced through her body, drying out all her bodily fluids. Her mouth fell open, but no words followed.

  “For the longest time,” said Mary Jo as tears slid from her eyes, “I just sort of blocked everything out. I thought about getting an abortion, but I just never could seem to go down to the clinic. I know it sounds stupid, but it was easier for me to pretend I wasn’t pregnant . . . until I couldn’t pretend anymore.” She shook her head, not wanting to think about it.

  “You didn’t tell your parents?” asked Kari rhetorically, knowing that if she had, Kari would have heard about it.

  “How could I?” Mary Jo scoffed. “I’m their National Merit Scholar! Their dean’s list girl! I’m the one who got a full scholarship to Berkeley, remember?”

  Kari nodded, knowing how proud her brother and sister-in-law were of their bright, beautiful daughter, who had never given them a shred of trouble.

  “What about school?” asked Kari, so full of questions she found herself asking the ones that mattered to her least.

  “I hardly showed before summer break,” said Mary Jo. “Everyone thought I’d just put on a few pounds. I’ve spent the whole summer at Larry’s in Marin County—he was nice enough to put me up—and, well, when school starts in two weeks, I plan to be back. That is . . . if everything works out.”

  “Meaning if I take the baby?”

  As Mary Jo nodded, shivers coursed through Kari’s body.

  “What makes you think I will?”

  “Oh, Kari, because it would make everything just perfect! Everyone knows how much you’ve wanted a baby! And I can’t think of anyone who’d be a better mother!”

  Kari sank back in the beanbag chair as if the wind had been knocked out of her.

  “For how long?” she asked, the awful memory of Bettina being taken away from her rearing up.

  “Forever,” said Larry the lawyer. “That’s where I come in. Mary Jo told me what happened to you before, Mrs. Nelson. The adoption papers I’ve prepared ensure that upon your signature, the baby is irrevocably yours.”

  “But what if you wanted her back?” Kari asked her niece. Hearing the utter poignancy in her voice, Larry the lawyer felt his heart thump in his chest.

  “I would never do that to you,” said Mary Jo. “Look, I could have had this baby and given her up for adoption here and no one would ever have been the wiser. But as soon as she was born—and only until she was born did it all seem real—I had my answer: give her to Aunt Kari. Out of all the people in the world who want to be a mother, I know you’d be the best one.”

  “Oh, Mary Jo,” said Kari, “what if you change your mind? Not now, but next year or the next?”

  Mary Jo shook her head. “I won’t, Aunt Kari. You’ve got to trust me on that. And by signing the papers, I give up all legal claim. Forever.”

  Larry the lawyer stood up and took something out of a file cabinet drawer.

  “My law degree,” he said, handing the framed document to Kari. “So you might have confidence in my ability to prepare a binding legal document.”

  Kari read the fancy calligraphy that stated Larry Rosenberg was a graduate, summa cum laude, of Stanford Law School.

  “I’m not saying this guarantees I’m not an idiot,” said Larry the lawyer, “but I give you my word: I’m not.”

  “What about your parents?” asked Kari, turning to her niece. “Why would they agree to let me raise their grandchild?”

  “You’re right—they wouldn’t. And that’s why we’re not going to tell them.”

  The hot wind leached the saliva from her mouth.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Mary Jo continued. “How can we not tell them? But that’s part of the deal. If you take the baby, my parents are never to know it’s mine. Believe me, it’s a lot less complicated this way.”

  Kari swallowed. “But . . . but Anders is my brother. And Sally and I are good friends. How can I keep something like this from them?”

  A hardness settled on Mary Jo’s small, fine features. “You can if you want the baby.”

  Kari pushed herself up—how could anyone think, sitting on that ridiculous mushy chair—and went to the window, pushing aside a plant that hung in a macramé holder. It swung l
ike a pendulum, and one of its leaves drifted like a molted feather to the floor. Hoping to stop her trembling, Kari hugged her arms to her chest and watched the traffic below on Grant Street. It was absurd—there she was in the middle of Chinatown, in a law office that was decorated in Early Beanbag and reeked of incense, and she had just been offered the one thing she wanted most in the whole world: a baby.

  She watched an old woman dressed in a white tunic and short, baggy pants navigate the streets on a rickety bicycle, its basket stuffed with vegetables. Two men stepped out of a restaurant, toothpicks jabbed between their teeth. A man in an apron stood behind a grocery window that displayed plucked chickens hanging from the ceiling like bizarre light fixtures. Finally she turned around.

  “You do realize I’m forty years old? That means I’ll be sixty when she’s twenty.”

  “And eighty when she’s forty,” said Mary Jo with a shrug. “They’re just numbers.”

  Kari raised an eyebrow. This was coming from someone of the generation who didn’t trust anyone over the age of thirty?

  “Well, what if something happens to me?”

  Larry the lawyer stopped scratching his beard. “I’m sure you’ll have the foresight to make arrangements for whatever contingency occurs.”

  Kari offered a wan smile. “That’s the first lawyerish thing you’ve said all day.”

  Larry smiled back. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Where’s the baby now?” asked Kari, feeling the enthusiasm rise in her like effervescence.

  “Up at the house,” said Larry. “My old lady’s watching her.”

  “Well, then,” said Kari, “what are we waiting for? Let’s go see this baby girl.”

  “Oh, Aunt Kari!” said Mary Jo, embracing her.

  “Wait a second,” said Kari, drawing back, holding her niece by the elbows. “I haven’t said yes yet. What if I did and your parents guessed where she came from? What if the baby looks just like you?”

  Mary Jo, her beautiful, spirited niece, offered Kari a smile of such radiance that Kari automatically smiled back.