In choosing where the next meeting would be, why had they agreed to Slip’s idea (“Why don’t we just go in the order of where we’re sitting tonight?”), and why had Merit been sitting next to Faith?
Rubbing her lower abdomen, which was tightening up in an uncomfortable squeeze, she entertained the thought of calling the whole thing off, but then her plans were foiled by the ringing doorbell.
AUDREY STOOD rifling through the record collection, shaking her head.
“Merit, Merit, this golden strings elevator music crap has got to go. Don’t you have any Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk or even some Beatles?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Most of the records are Eric’s.”
“My God, even my parents have a hipper collection than this.”
“Audrey, can you save your review for the book?” asked Slip, kicking off her shoes and tucking her feet under her.
“Ah, yes,” said Audrey, turning away from the stereo, “the book. Well, it was a little too simplistic for me. I look for a little more character development in writing—if I want to know about hotels, I’ll just read a Holiday Inn brochure.”
“I thought it was interesting, learning how a hotel is run,” said Faith, helping herself to the package of Tareytons on the coffee table.
“Some books serve different purposes,” said Kari. “This wasn’t great literature, but it was a fun peek behind the scenes.”
“Yeah,” said Slip, “and besides, Audrey, Holiday Inn is a motel, not a hotel.”
Merit’s eager delight over how well the meeting was going was tempered by her nervousness that it could all suddenly change. No one had asked her to remix their drinks, yet (Eric teased her that her drinks tasted as if she measured liquor not in jiggers but in thimbles); even though Audrey hadn’t liked the book, no one had criticized her for choosing it, yet; her cake, even though competing against a dessert potluck, was being eaten and nobody had choked on its dryness, yet. There was only one area in which Merit’s confidence was not subject to evaporation, and that was in her housekeeping, which everyone complimented.
“Oh, I get it,” said Audrey, looking around the spare, spotless living room. “It’s part of the theme. Clean as a hotel room, right?”
Merit only smiled, not knowing if Audrey was teasing her or not.
The book discussion was lively and at one point—when Audrey told the story of getting locked out of her Paris hotel room on her honeymoon—hilarious, and Merit marveled at everyone’s willingness to disagree. Disagreement was always a symptom of mutiny in Merit’s childhood home, as well as her current one.
And it wasn’t just Slip and Audrey; Faith had opinions, Kari had opinions. The beauty of it was that no one seemed to resent anyone else for having them.
When Merit did speak, it was either to ask hostess questions or to agree with opinions already shared, and so the yelp that came out of her mouth struck the others as completely out of character.
“Sorry,” she said, her eyebrows furrowed into check marks above her brown eyes, “but that one really hurt.”
“You had a contraction?” asked Slip.
“I’ve been having them all night,” said Merit.
“How far apart?” asked Audrey.
“They’re not very regular,” said Merit, “but that one hurt like hell.”
“She’s in labor,” said Slip, recognizing immediately that when a woman who could barely say boo chose to curse, things were definitely happening.
“I don’t think so,” said Merit, taking a deep breath. “I’ve had them before—the doctor calls them Braxton-Hicks contractions.”
“False labor,” explained Kari the teacher.
“Is Eric at the hospital now?” asked Faith.
As Merit nodded, she grimaced, her palms pressed against the neat mound of her belly.
“Which is where you should be,” said Slip. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”
“But we’re not done talking about the book. . . .”
“Hotel can wait,” said Audrey, standing up and brushing apple cake crumbs off her pink capri pants. “Babies can’t.”
THEY ALL SAT in the waiting room paging through sticky back issues of Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal and reliving their own labor stories.
“Well, I had a C-section,” said Faith, “so of course I didn’t feel anything. Except when I woke up.”
“I was so drugged I wasn’t supposed to feel anything,” said Audrey, “but both my boys weighed almost ten pounds. Believe me, I felt plenty.”
“I’m not going to have any drugs the next time I have a baby,” said Slip, and she was about to launch into the benefits of natural childbirth when she caught sight of the look on Kari’s face. Her friend wore a pinched smile, the kind a mother wore when the teacher was telling her what a reprobate her kindergartner was; the kind a man wore when his proposal of marriage had just been turned down.
“Hey, who’s got a cigarette?” asked Slip, but there was no need for a subject change, as Dr. Iverson entered through the swinging doors, holding Merit by the arm.
“Braxton-Hicks contractions,” he announced. “Apparently Merit wants to get in a few practice innings before the real game.
“I’ll see you at home tonight,” he said, touching his wife’s face. “If they start up again, make a nice pot of tea and sit with your feet up.”
“Hubba hubba,” said Audrey, watching as the tall, dark doctor strode briskly through a swinging door. “Cancel my appointment with Dr. Kildare and put me on his examining table.”
“You’re a degenerate,” scolded Slip as the others laughed.
They were gathering up their purses when a nurse bolted through the door, and for a moment Merit thought she was going to be called back and told to hop onto the delivery table, as tests had showed she was in labor after all.
But the nurse raced by them, one hand holding her white cap, her white sweater swooping out behind her shoulders like a cape.
“My gosh,” said Kari, “where’s the fire?”
“Robert Kennedy’s just been shot,” she said, turning her head, her stride unbroken.
They watched after her dumbly, and amid the gasps and cries, Audrey said the only understandable words: “Holy Mother of God.” A fluorescent tube inside the ceiling panel flickered and went out as if responding to the terrible news.
Merit’s belly was clenching hard, and for the first time she was grateful for her false contractions, because even though they hurt, they were not pushing her baby toward birth. She was already thinking like a mother and, wanting to protect her baby, did not want him to come out into the world at this moment in time. It was better that he stay inside her, where it was safe.
July 1968
HOSTESS: SLIP
BOOK: Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
REASON CHOSEN: “Because we white Americans don’t know diddly.”
Holy wet noodle, I am not a heat person. Heat brings the similarities between my hair and a Brillo pad all too close plus, unlike dewy Merit, I am not a delicate perspirer. It surprises me how much sweat my body produces; the volume of water is not at all consistent with my size.
Jersey City can be humid, but maybe Hudson River humidity is different from lake air humidity. Trust me, Minneapolis is muggy, muggy like you could grab a handful of air and wring it out like a washrag.
Anyway, heat makes me crabby, and with humidity added, I’m about as good-humored as Lizzie Borden with cramps. Factoring in my belief that the whole friggin’ world was coming to an end—well, even my own four-year-old daughter couldn’t stand to be around me. I’d yelled at her all morning over nonexistent infractions until finally she grabbed her Pokey Little Puppy book and plunged out the screen door in tears. But come on: even in temperate climates, how could any American citizen not be on the verge of insanity? First Martin Luther King Jr., then Bobby Kennedy. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with this stupid war (thank God I hadn’t heard any more enlistment/death wis
hes from Fred lately), now anyone who offered any hope of peace was getting mowed down on motel balconies and in hotel kitchens.
“Mommy, why did they shoot him?” Flannery had asked in April, sitting at the breakfast table as I read the paper with the awful picture of King’s friends pointing in the direction the shot had come from.
“Oh, Flan,” I said, “I don’t really know.”
She had asked the same question at the same breakfast table just a few weeks ago, when Kennedy was shot, and again I had no answer for her. Or the answer I had was one I didn’t want her to hear: Well, Flan, the world is full of truly evil people who want to make things truly awful for the rest of us. And now that you’ve been given that sobering dose of reality, how ’bout another pancake?
When I was little, my dad had Indian nicknames for all us kids. Mine was Warrior Bear.
That he hadn’t chosen some pretty, condescending name like Little Feather or Dancing Fawn was proof to me that he appreciated the person I was: strong, fierce, tough. It was only when I got to junior high and some idiots heckled me as I gave my student council president campaign speech that I realized there was a certain burden in being a Warrior Bear.
“They laughed at me when I said I thought we should overthrow the principal and rewrite the constitution!”
“Oh, Slip,” said my mom, holding out her arms. (I think it’s size more than age that prevents kids from climbing into their parents’ laps; because of my smallness, I let them take me in their arms up until the time I left for college.) “Slip, it’s asking a lot of ninth graders to overthrow the principal and rewrite the school constitution.”
“Not the school’s,” I said, “the American constitution. The one that says all men are created equal but doesn’t say a thing about women.”
My mother drew her lips in; I could tell she was trying hard not to laugh.
“That’s a pretty big task for junior high kids.”
“Mom, it’s the principle of the thing! Why should we bother with stupid things like whether or not there’s chocolate milk in the lunchroom when our own constitution says women aren’t created equal?”
I felt my mother’s chest rise in a sigh. “Slip, honey, it’s just a student council election.”
“Change has got to start somewhere,” I said, pushing myself off her lap.
I lost the election (and, I might add, the winner’s presidency was absolutely ineffectual—he couldn’t even get his chocolate milk initiative passed), but a Warrior Bear isn’t named that for nothing. I continued to battle for justice in high school (where injustice is king) and in college (I was part of the group of students who got Professor Lermond, the biggest woman-hater on campus, brought up for review, and I wrote a column for the Daily called “Proletarian’s Progress”). Being a wife and mother didn’t slow me down at all—it made me realize I have to work even harder for the sake of my kids—but man, these assassinations were making me wonder what a Warrior Bear can do in the midst of such craziness.
With the world on the brink of self-annihilation, I still had to host book club that night and was trying to find a dessert I could make without turning on the oven. But paging through the cookbook, the words blurred and all I saw were the faces of Coretta Scott King and Ethel Kennedy.
“Promise me you’ll never get shot,” I had said to Jerry when we sat on the couch watching the news after the kids had gone to bed. It wasn’t often I enjoyed my size, but I did when my big husband’s arm was around me.
“No one’s got much of a vendetta against meteorologists.”
We both smiled wanly at the truth of Jerry’s statement, and as I watched the news clips of Robert Kennedy’s funeral train, I wondered how wives of men with dangerous jobs (of course, being a preacher or politician shouldn’t inherently be a dangerous job) managed to live any kind of normal life.
I tried to focus on some recipes under the inane heading “Light ’N’ Easy Treats” and swatted at a giant mutant fly that had managed to slip through the fortress of window and door screens. It must have gotten in when Flan went outside. Flan. My poor little girl who had a banshee for a mother.
With a glass of lemonade as a peace offering, I went into the backyard. It was even hotter outside, and as I walked to the big oak tree, I felt I was in the clutches of a big, hot, and sweaty hand.
“Flan, honey, look what I brought you,” I said, shading my eyes with one hand to look up at the roofless tree house I knew she was probably hiding out in.
The piece of canvas that served as a curtain was pushed aside, and Flannery’s strawberry-blond head (I’m forever grateful to Jerry for tempering the red genes I passed down with blond ones of his own) appeared in the cutout window.
“I’m not thirsty,” she said in a tone of haughty disgust, as if I were offering her a glass of sewer water to drink.
“Oh, come on, Flan. How can you not be thirsty in weather like this?”
“E-a-s-y.” My dear, precocious daughter thinks her strong feelings are emphasized when she spells them out. She disappeared back into the tree house.
I set the glass on the sidewalk and tugged at the damp neckline and hem of my sleeveless shell, hoping to get some stagnant air circulating.
“I could come up and visit you,” I said as a drip of salty sweat rolled over my upper lip.
“No thanks,” she said from inside the tree house. “I’m reading.”
Kicking my feet up, I sprang forward with my hands on the grass. I got my balance and began walking around the tree on my hands. Usually my kids can’t get enough of this little trick, but today Flan wasn’t interested in her mother’s acrobatics.
“All right,” I conceded, back on my feet. “But I’m taking the lemonade inside. Otherwise the flies or the ants will get it.”
My concentration on dessert ideas totally shot, I wandered into the living room and saw the book that I hadn’t quite finished (I prided myself on always finishing the book we were discussing) on the coffee table. I decided to join Flan up in that sun-baked tree house.
“Mommy,” said Flan in that delighted tone only children seem capable of when you surprise them, “are you going to read up here too?”
“Yup,” I said, crawling through the lopsided square that served as the tree house door. “So scoot your scooter over.”
Despite the heat and the mosquito attacks (why is it so satisfying slapping a biting mosquito into a bloody smear?), I felt a semblance of tranquility as I sat pressed against the rough wood, Soul on Ice balanced on my bare knees. Flannery sat in the exact position, and after ten minutes or so had passed we looked up at the same moment, taking a slight reprieve from the world we’d entered to check on the one in which we lived.
I winked at my daughter. “How’s the pokey little puppy doing?”
Flan blinked back. “He’s pretty pokey. How’s your book?”
I frowned. “Scary. And sad.”
“Anybody home?”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Trespassers.”
We both looked out of the window to see Faith at the back door.
“We’re up here,” I said, and as Faith looked up, a hand shielding the sun from her eyes, I asked her if she’d misplaced my son on the way over.
“Wade’s home today,” she explained. “He’s got the kids all running through the sprinkler. Flannery’s welcome to join them if she likes.”
Flan bit her lip. “Is that okay, Mommy? It is pretty hot up here.”
“Sure, honey. Run and get your suit on.”
Flannery scampered down the tree.
“I thought I’d come over and see if y’all needed any help for tonight,” said Faith, her head still tilted back, looking up at the massive tree. “Unless you’re planning to spend the afternoon up there?”
“Maybe I am,” I said. “And maybe you’d better come up here and join me.”
“Okay!” As she began to climb the slats nailed to the tree, she said, “I’ve never been in a tree house before.” She stood looking at the sma
ll rectangular room through the tree house door. “Hey, this is really neat.”
“Well, don’t just stand there gawking,” I said, moving over as Faith crawled through the door. “Come on in. But watch out for those acorns.”
Faith moved her foot to avoid the mound of nuts piled in the corner.
“Flan’s trying to catch a squirrel,” I explained, “and tame it. So she hoards acorns in here.”
“Has she had any luck?” asked Faith as she sat against a wall, facing me.
“With the squirrels? Nah, but she’s convinced all she needs is patience.”
I tossed an errant acorn into the pile, and it was as if a buzzer went off: playtime was over, the medication had worn off, and life had reared its big ugly head. Holy hepped-up emotions, all I could do was rest my forehead on my knees and start to cry.
“Slip?” said Faith. “Slip, what’s wrong?”
I kept crying into my folded arms.
“Would you like me to go?” asked Faith, and when I shook my head, she scuttled over to me, putting her arm around me. Like a child, I turned my head into her shoulder.
I don’t know how long I cried—all I knew was that it felt too good to stop, even though I was risking dehydration, adding pints of tears to my gallons of sweat.