Mockingbird

  “Sounds fair,” I said. My heart was finally beginning to catch up with the sense of what Angela was saying. To have help arrive unlooked for; to see a chance that I would be able to make a living at home: suddenly all the panic I had been suppressing seemed to clamp around my chest like iron bands. “I don’t wish to be beholden to you,” I said. “To you or anybody.”

  “I’m not giving you anything, moron. I said we would be partners. I happen to think you’re very smart. You know a lot about the markets, and about business, and about finance. I failed algebra in tenth grade. If you don’t think your skills are valuable, that’s your opinion. But you might at least be smart enough to shut up about it.” Angela laughed. “I cringe to imagine what you would be like at a job interview.”

  “I never had to do one. I was hired out of school by a friend of Momma’s.”

  “Figures. You know, I think I was dead right. Your big problem, Toni, is that you’ve never really failed big, so you can’t imagine picking yourself up off the ground afterwards.” She took a swig of iced tea and grinned. “Stick with me, kid, and I will personally guarantee you will fall flat on your face.”

  “Now that’s good to know.” I rubbed the sweat around my face a little more. I felt as if my body had been modelled out of margarine and was beginning to run in the heat.

  “I do have one nonnegotiable condition.” She put her tea down on the table.

  “Yes?” I said, waiting for my beautiful future to smash like a glass on the tile floor.

  Angela pulled at her sweat-sodden blouse. “We must put an air-conditioner in at least one room of this pile. I’ve got heat rash up to my boobs. This city is so sticky it makes my earwax turn liquid.”

  “Spare me the details. Air conditioning in the bedroom.”

  “Then it’s a deal. Podner.” She stuck out her hand and I shook it, giddy with relief and anticipation. “Are we going to topple the corporate world, then?”

  “Fixin’ to,” I said. “Fixin’ to directly.”

  And then, a moment later, I said, “Angela, you’d know if you were a repressed lesbian, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’m not.”

  I flushed. “I didn’t mean you you, I meant, you know, anybody.”

  “Why do I think you’ve been talking to Candy?” Angela popped an ice-cube into her mouth and gnawed on it, considering. “It seems like the sort of thing you would know.”

  “Good. That’s what I thought.”

  She ate the rest of her ice-cube. “Of course, maybe that’s what ‘repressed’ means. That you wouldn’t know. If you knew, it wouldn’t be repressed, would it?”

  “You think so?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Can we talk about something else now, Toni?”

  “I reckon,” I said.

  TWELVE

  After my night ride in the Muertomobile it seemed as if the Riders and I had become more comfortable with one another. Sometimes, after long hours of tracking futures on the brand new Omega Tradestation with Angela, I might smell Mr. Copper’s scent of dust and gasoline, but only faintly, like a memory, or a possibility of something to come.

  The great Joe DiMaggio once said that Houston has three seasons: summer, July, and August. Angela didn’t even know who Joe DiMaggio was, but she agreed with the assessment. She spent the better part of August draped around the a.c. unit she’d installed on the third floor. Now that she had experienced the brain-boiling heat and humidity of the endless Houston summer, she said, many things about our family suddenly made sense to her.

  We made close to eleven hundred dollars trading futures in August. Not a living, not for two women, but it was an encouraging start, particularly as commodities futures were not the only things on my mind. Mary Jo had named me the executor of her will, which meant I had to sell her house, new roof and all, and disperse her belongings. The water-stained copy of Little Black Sambo she had willed to me. I cried when I got it, and put it in the Widow’s cubby, I can’t say why.

  Then there was Candy’s wedding to prepare for, which meant dealing with Carlos and La Hag Gonzales, and of course with every day I got hotter and fatter and more pregnant. I wheezed and panted and grunted my way through the first three weeks in September with my head full of Deutsche Mark and canapés, wondering if I would ever find a husband, or even wear a belt again.

  The day before Candy’s wedding my underpants fell down.

  Underwear is designed to fit the normal human shape. But when you are pregnant you are not just fat, you are fat in a funny way. Your abdomen has, say, eight pounds of baby packed like tuna in ten pounds of seawater. Add one fetal cafeteria, also known as the placenta, and then stuff the whole mass into your womb. Now remind yourself that you are not fat. There is no extra flesh below the abdomen; at least there wasn’t on me. As a result, my belly had a steep undercurve. This proved too slippery a slope for my poor overstressed underwear to grasp. Despairing, their elastic weakened by my enormous girth, they gave up the struggle and plummeted to earth around my swollen ankles.

  I was standing in the checkout line at Whole Earth Foods at the time.

  It is extremely embarrassing to have your panties fall around your ankles in the middle of a busy grocery store. Even a hippie grocery store. With a sigh I shuffled forward and put my basket on the checkout counter and bent down. Bending down is a major operation when one is nine months pregnant, involving a lot of squatting, wheezing, and grunting. More squatting and puffing followed as I stepped out of my panties, left foot, then right, picked them up—no easy task—and stuffed them in my purse.

  Straightening, I found myself the object of the fascinated gaze of a middle-aged man with a greying ponytail ahead of me in the line. “What’s the matter?” I said with icy dignity. “Never seen a pregnant woman’s underwear fall down before?”

  Let me tell you about the ninth month of pregnancy. First, it is unbearably hot, especially in Houston in September. I lived like a bat, coming out only after sundown, spending the days wrapped around the new air conditioning unit. I couldn’t imagine why we’d never put one in before. It was a miracle. It was divine.

  When you are nine months pregnant, your bum hurts all the time, balanced by a dull remorseless ache in the small of your back, an ache that never leaves, and wakes you up eight to ten times every night.

  Although you are in severe danger of Bloating throughout pregnancy, you have only touched the swollen edge of Bloat until you come to the ninth month. Mid-pregnancy bloating is to the ninth month as a balloon is to the Goodyear Blimp. Everything bloats. Your breasts. Your bum. Your ankles. Your wrists. Your head bloats, making it ache all the time. Your fingers bloat, making you clumsy. It seems incredible that you could bloat, given how much the indigestion and heartburn suppress your desire to eat, but on the other hand, the ferocious constipation does its part in the swelling process. The constipation was the reason I had waddled out to Whole Earth Foods in the light of day to lay in whole-grain bread, lettuce, celery, bran, wheat germ, and more wheat germ. The writers of pregnancy books love wheat germ. They want you to bake, stir, sprinkle, and substitute it. I’m sure if you got them in private they would admit to rolling and smoking it too.

  In the ninth month of pregnancy your tummy feels itchy all the time and your belly button turns inside out.

  At six and seven months the G had been quite the acrobat, twisting and tumbling gracefully through the cavern of my womb. It was like having a gopher-sized synchronized swimmer performing in my body cavity, six shows daily with a matinee on weekends. In the eighth month, though, quarters had begun to get crowded. The G responded with admirable feistiness, hammering on all available walls, floors, and ceilings to inform me that she didn’t appreciate this loss of living space. In the ninth month, mercifully, there was no longer room for her to wind up for a big haymaker anymore. For a couple of weeks she squirmed and struggled.

  Finally, five days before she was due, the G pointed hers
elf head-down and dove to the very bottom of her little grotto, coming to rest like the good baby she was with her tiny head jammed against my cervix. The cervix, I learned, is a little dilating door that wheels open like the one at the beginning of James Bond movies.

  When the baby performs this maneuver, turning upside down and plastering herself head-first to your cervix, you call your doctor in a state of great excitement to say that the baby has “dropped.” Dropping is a mixed bag. It means that the many varieties of false labor may officially commence: Braxton-Hicks contractions, prodromal contractions—a whole gallery of different squeezing, clenching, flexing movements that range from the simply odd to the very uncomfortable, and all share the quality of advancing your labor not at all, so that you rush to your amused obstetrician only to be told you can expect days, weeks, or even years of this before Real Labor begins. Pain, it turns out, is not in and of itself significant. It’s just a bonus.

  Another drawback of The Drop is that my poor bladder, which had been squashed down to something with the capacity of a couple of tablespoons, was abruptly crushed to the size of an M&M. I had already been waking up eight times a night with back pain and indigestion. Now I had to get up an extra four times to pee. I was fat, badly centered, and very clumsy, so it was no small task to roll myself groaning out of bed and trudge down three flights of stairs to the bathroom. One night early in September I slipped badly and fell down six stairs to the second-floor landing. When Daddy called sleepily to see if I was okay, I told him everything was fine, but actually my knees were banged and bruised and my heart was going a hundred miles an hour as I imagined what might have happened to the baby if I had fallen down a full flight of stairs. The pregnancy books say that falls rarely do any damage to the fetus, but I had seen Gone With The Wind, you bet.

  The next night I took a big saucepan upstairs and used it as a chamber pot. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone, but Angela was sleeping in Candy’s old bed, and quiet as I tried to be, dragging my pot out from beneath my bed and creeping out to use it on the balcony with the French doors closed behind me, I’m sure she had her guesses. Besides, one time I heard her snicker.

  On the plus side, when the baby Drops you get to breathe again. Thanks to the baby, I hadn’t drawn a really deep lungful of air in six weeks. When the G dropped, this brooding pressure moved suddenly lower in my body and I gasped, sucking in a great, liberating lungful of 96-degree supersaturated smog. It was glorious.

  By the day before Candy’s wedding the charms of breathing Houston air had begun to wane. I’d been having Braxton-Hicks contractions all morning. These are strange little clenching movements that wander around your uterus like sheet lightning playing around a cloud bank. One had just finished when my panties fell down.

  When I got home, still seething, Daddy helped me carry in the groceries from Whole Foods. “Think we should trade Bell?” I said, referring to Houston’s right fielder. I’d had the car radio on, listening to the Astros lose their eighth straight game. Three weeks ago they had had a two and a half game lead in their division, but now they were 4-14 in September, one game away from mathematical elimination.

  “Just don’t bat him cleanup. He makes some plays in the outfield and he’s got a hundred RBIs. Everyone would be talking about what a great year he had if he’d been batting sixth.”

  “I guess,” I said, waddling into the kitchen. “If I hear him ground into one more double play with men in scoring position, though…” I puffed and heaved a bag of vegetables up onto the counter.

  Angela and Candy were working on the wedding dress, Candy standing on a chair in the middle of the floor, Angela doing up her buttons at the back. “Don’t fidget,” Angela said. La Hag Gonzales had altered Momma’s wedding gown to fit Candy. She looked stunning. Braless, Candy’s breasts stayed high and firm. She rose from that white dress like a calla lily, her throat and shoulders silky smooth, her lovely face framed by her rich black hair. Damn her anyway.

  I looked for a casserole dish and a mixing bowl to start making a lasagna. Homemade food for the rehearsal dinner, of course, but there was no point serving Mexican to La Hag. Fidgeting, Candy turned her head to me and tried a smile. “Well, the day before the big day, eh?”

  “Probably not. The average first kid comes four to seven days after the due date.”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean the baby.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Stand straight!” Angela said. Candy looked away from me.

  Daddy came into the kitchen with the last bag of groceries and stood listening to the radio on the refrigerator. The Florida Marlins were batting in the seventh against one of the hapless middle relievers who had cost Houston their chance at the pennant. The lead-off man had walked. The Marlins played hit-and-run successfully, the man on first breaking to steal and the hitter punching a single to right field through the gap when the second baseman went to cover the bag. Men on first and third, nobody out. I dumped a tub of ricotta cheese into the mixing bowl and then stopped as another Braxton-Hicks crackled across the front of my uterus.

  “I’m worried about having the service over in Baytown,” Candy said. “If Iris comes close to us there’s going to be all kinds of flooding down there.” Hurricane Iris had been wandering our way for nearly a week. Hurricane-watching is a popular sport in Houston, although we only get hit every ten or fifteen years. Still, Iris looked very promising. Most hurricanes beat the tar out of a few Caribbean vacation resorts and then plow into Florida, or hit further up the East Coast in the Carolinas. Every now and then, though, a tropical storm like Iris will slide west of the Caribbean and pick up speed over the Gulf of Mexico.

  “I’ve never seen a hurricane,” Angela said. “Would it be really dangerous?”

  “Not here,” Candy said. “We’re too far inland.”

  “It depends on what you mean by dangerous,” I said. “If you don’t think downed power lines or falling tree-limbs or flying glass or spinoff tornadoes or power outages are dangerous, why then, no, it shouldn’t be dangerous at all. You won’t drown, though a couple of kids will get eaten by flash floods in the bayous.”

  “Guess who worked in insurance?” Candy said.

  “One thing about living on the Canadian prairies, we never have any kind of natural disasters. Unless you count winter.” Angela did up the last button and handed Candy down from the chair. “Ta da!”

  Candy curtsied. She was breathtaking. “Do you think Momma would have liked it?” she said softly.

  “How the hell should I know?” My whole body felt heavy and hot. I was sweating like a pig and my breasts were starting to leak colostrum and I hadn’t gotten around to getting any breast pads yet. My back ached fiercely and my grotesque stomach bumped against the kitchen counter. When I went to plug in the mixer I had to lean until my back strained just to reach the electrical outlet in the wall. “Who knows what Momma would have said? Called you an angel? Asked where you got off wearing white on your wedding day? Told you not to sleep with a wetback? Given you a kiss and left lipstick on your lace? I don’t know.”

  “Don’t talk about your mother that way,” Daddy said.

  “No, on second thought I know exactly what she would have said. She would have told you how beautiful you were. And then she would have told me how beautiful you were.”

  “Don’t even bother, Daddy,” Candy said. “Toni’s determined to be hateful. Who knows why. Let’s see: she doesn’t drink like Momma. She doesn’t cry like Momma. She doesn’t make scenes like Momma.” I could just catch the faintest trace of Candy’s burnt-cinnamon smell from her fine black hair as she shook her head. “Maybe that’s why she’s so bitter, do you think? Because that’s one thing Momma could do, Toni. She could love people. And people loved her. But you! How many people do you think love you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m sorry if it bothers you that it’s me wearing this dress, not you. But you don’t need a gown to marry a turkey baster, do you?”

 
My heart seemed to slow, and the blood pushed painfully through the fat skin of my face.

  Angela grabbed Candy by the arm and pushed her toward the stairs. “Get out of here before you two say something worse.”

  Candy and I did not speak for the rest of the day, not through the long afternoon of cooking and not during the rehearsal dinner. Candy sat with Carlos’s family and laughed and drank too much red wine and would not look at me. When the party moved into the garden she went with it, entertaining our guests, while I stayed in the kitchen washing dishes. Daddy went upstairs early and lay down in his room. I could hear his TV on. Probably watching the Rangers game on Channel 51. He had been quiet and withdrawn all day.

  Angela’s reflection approached me in the window over the kitchen sink. “Can I do the washing for a while?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, kiddo. I’ve been pregnant, remember?” Angela leaned in and stripped the gloves off my hands. “You dry.”

  “Okay.” I pulled a chair over from the kitchen table and watched her work. As soon as I sat down I realized I wouldn’t be getting up in a hurry.

  Angela splashed into work. “Back hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hips?”

  “Yes.”

  “Headache?”

  “Big time.”

  “Taken any Tylenol?”

  “I’m not allowed. The doctor said not to take anything without her permission.”

  Angela looked at me. “Has this doctor ever been pregnant?”

  “Not that she’s mentioned.”

  “Take some Tylenol. They’re in my purse.”

  She scrubbed out the lasagna pan while I took the painkillers, thinking of the guy who had put strychnine in random bottles of Tylenol when I was in junior high school. Thinking of the bondage pictures in Candy’s magazines. Thinking of Mary Keith, who stepped off a building in Phoenix with her daughter in her arms.