MAYA’S SISTER SPRAINED HER ankle tripping over one of her baby’s push toys and she had to stay in bed. Mr. Goldstein was at work and Mrs. Goldstein had a terrible cold. “I can’t go over there,” she said, sniffling. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
I asked if Debby’s husband could stay home from work and help her. He works in a gas station and changes shifts all the time, so sometimes he works at night and sometimes during the day.
Mrs. G. said that he had been staying home, but that his boss threatened to fire him if he didn’t come in that afternoon. Mrs. Goldstein was wringing her hands. “That girl!” she said. “You should have read her school compositions! You should have heard her play the Moonlight Sonata!”
“I’ll go, Mama,” Maya said.
Her mother stared at her. “You?”
“Me too,” I said. “I’ll go with Maya.”
“That’s right,” Maya said. “We can go over this afternoon after school and help Debby. Then tomorrow is Saturday and Papa can do it. By Sunday I’ll bet your cold will be better and—”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Goldstein said, and she blew her nose.
“Listen, Mama. We could be a big help to Debby, with all the stuff we learned in Home Ec. and everything.”
“But that terrible neighborhood,” Mrs. G. moaned.
“We’ll take a taxi,” Maya said.
“That’s right,” I said.
“And Papa can come get us tonight.”
We spoke so fast that her mother didn’t have time to think. “We-ell,” she said at last, and I knew that she would let us go. Of course I had to call the bank and get permission from Mother first. “I suppose it will be a good experience for you,” she said, but she sounded doubtful.
Debby and Howie lived in a really crummy building. There was no elevator and there was a bad smell as soon as you walked into the hall. They lived on the third floor and I wondered how she was able to get downstairs every day with two babies and all their equipment. There was writing all over the walls in the hallway. The usual stuff, like Kenny loves Michelle, Jeff H. was here, and Anita and Jerry forever. As usual the spelling was pretty bad too.
As we walked into the apartment, Howie was putting his jacket on, the one that says SUNOCO on the back and HOWIE on the front pocket, and he started out the door. “Thanks a lot, girls,” he said. “I gotta go. Debby’ll tell you where everything is. Okay?”
We could only nod, looking around us in wonder. The place was an awful mess. Much, much worse than our apartment looks, even right before the Weekly Cleaning. There was laundry on the sofa in the living room and toys everywhere. The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes and pots. It smelled so terrible in there that I had to hold my breath. The older baby was walking around the living room pushing a toy that had bells inside. His diaper was hanging down between his knees. But he looked happy enough, pushing that toy through all the junk as if it were a bulldozer. The other baby was in her crib in another room, screaming like a siren, and Maya went inside and picked her up.
I went into the bedroom, where Debby was lying in bed with her bad foot propped up on two pillows. She was still very pretty, but she looked all worn out, as if she never got any sleep. I asked her if I could bring her anything, and she only wanted a little ginger ale. When I went back into the living room, Maya was changing the baby’s diaper and she told me to watch the bottle that was heating on the stove.
I walked into the kitchen. “How do I know when it’s ready?” I asked.
“Test it,” she called back.
I didn’t have any idea what she meant. The kids I babysit for in our building are all much older. I took the bottle out of the pot and held it against my arm. It felt too hot, but I wondered if that was the plastic and not the milk inside. I turned the bottle upside down and tried to sprinkle a little on my arm, but the hole in the nipple was really big and the milk squirted out all over my shirt. I figured that I would just have to taste it.
In the living room the baby was screaming even harder, and Maya must have been patting her, because the screams came out funny, like the sounds you make when you talk and pound yourself on the chest at the same time. “Hurry up, Teddy,” Maya called. “She’s trying to eat her fingers.”
Maya sounded very nervous, and she was making me nervous too. I picked the bottle up and raised it over my head. Then I opened my mouth wide and turned the bottle upside down, aiming the nipple carefully. The milk came out in a fast stream and went right down my throat, so that I began to choke. But at least it seemed to be the right temperature, not too hot and not too cold. “I’m coming,” I said, when I could stop coughing.
“Here,” I said, in the living room, holding the bottle out to Maya.
“Here, yourself,” she answered, and she held the baby out to me. “I have to take care of Skippy before he tears this place apart.” Even as she said it, we saw that he was under a table, investigating an electric socket.
I sat down on the sofa and took the screaming baby in my arms. She was all red in the face and her eyes were shut tight. She looked like the Duchess’s baby in those illustrations in my old Alice in Wonderland book. That baby turned into a pig. This one just acted like one. As soon as I put the bottle near her mouth, the crying stopped. It was like pushing a button to shut off the radio. She grabbed at the nipple, pulling it hard, and then she began to suck, making loud, greedy noises. “What a little pig,” I said, but it really felt very nice holding her close to me like that. She was so warm and soft. With one little hand she touched the bottle and with the other she kept patting me on the chest. Her fingernails were the tiniest things I had ever seen. Now that she had stopped crying, I saw that she was very pretty. Her skin was a delicate pink again instead of that angry red and the silky hair on her head tickled my nose when I bent over her. “Hey,” I said. “Hey there.”
She was sucking more slowly by then, and she looked very, very sleepy. Her eyelids fluttered open and shut until there was nothing left in the bottle but a lacy bunch of bubbles. I pulled the nipple out gently and sat the drowsy baby farther up in my arms. Out came this amazing sound, the kind of burp my Uncle Eddie might make after drinking beer. It was hard to believe that it came from that tiny, innocent-looking creature.
“Well, excuse me,” I said to her. But she was fast asleep now, her eyelashes like spider legs against her cheeks.
The boy was asleep too, in his crib, and Maya tiptoed in and took the baby from me. She put her in a folding carriage in a corner of the living room. We looked at each other, feeling very satisfied.
We went into the kitchen then and began to wash and dry the dishes in the sink, and we tried to decide what to make for supper. Debby kept saying not to fuss or anything, just to make a sandwich for her, but when we looked in the bread box there was only one slice of white bread and it wasn’t very soft. I tried to remember some of the things we made in Home Ec. This year we made brownies from scratch and in eighth grade we made something called Apple Delight. But I didn’t have the recipes, even if I could find the right ingredients.
Maya looked in the refrigerator and found about ten baby bottles filled with formula. Little piggy would be taken care of anyway. And there were jars of junior food for the boy. There wasn’t much else that looked interesting.
“Just make anything,” Debby called. “Howie is going to the supermarket tomorrow.”
There was some lettuce and two apples with brown spots, and a few eggs in a carton. There were some canned peaches and two bottles of ginger ale. Then Maya looked in the freezer section and found a chicken. It was frozen solid. I must have seen my mother cook a hundred chickens, but I couldn’t remember the first thing about it.
We looked around, but Debby didn’t seem to have any cookbooks. Maya went into the bedroom to ask for some instructions and found that Debby had fallen asleep too.
She came back and whispered, “We could just roast it in the oven.”
“Well, I guess so,” I said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Do you know how?”
“It can’t be too hard. I know my mother puts salt and paprika and stuff on hers to make it come out brown.”
“Why don’t you call your mother up and ask her?”
“Are you kidding? She’ll get hysterical. She’ll think we’ll burn the house down. Why don’t you call your mother?”
I looked at the clock. “Because she’s on her way home from the bank now. She must be in the subway.”
“Try your Aunt Marsha,” Maya suggested. But Aunt Marsha’s phone rang and rang and no one answered.
“It can’t be too hard,” Maya said again, looking in the cupboard for a roasting pan.
I found the salt and pepper and paprika, and I sprinkled them all over the chicken.
Maya lit the oven and we decided on a nice medium temperature. Then we put the chicken inside. In about ten minutes Maya opened the oven door.
“It’s not done yet,” I said.
“I know. I just wanted to look at it.”
It was so quiet in the house now, with everybody sleeping. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator and the clock ticking in the other room. All the street noises seemed far away, the way they do in a dream.
“It’s spooky in here,” Maya said.
“Yes.”
“Do you want to watch television?” We decided it would be all right if we kept the sound very low, so we went into the living room and watched a soap opera. Every once in a while the baby grunted in her sleep, but she didn’t wake up.
The soap opera took place in a hospital. Some girl had been in a coma for three months. She had been a witness to a bad automobile accident and everybody was waiting for her to come to and tell what happened. She just lay there without moving and I wondered how the actress playing the part managed to do that. If it were me, I’d get very restless. My nose would start itching or I’d want to laugh.
The girl’s mother and father sat near her bedside, watching her. Then the organ music started, and it got louder and scarier, so that you knew something was going to happen. Then the mother made this gasping noise and she said, “Jim!” “What is it, Helen?” the father said. “I—I think she moved. Her hand, Jim.” “Are you sure?” he asked. “Oh, I don’t know,” the mother said. “But if it’s so, our little girl ...” She started to cry and the camera showed the little girl’s face and she wasn’t moving at all. If you ask me, she looked dead. Then the picture faded and the commercial came on. It was one of Daddy’s, for a household cleanser, all about how it was the best cleanser in the world and made life easy for housewives.
“My mother says that stuff stinks,” Maya said. I don’t think she knew that Daddy had written the commercial and I wasn’t going to tell her. I wished the show would continue. There were two more commercials and then we were back in the hospital again. It seemed as if nothing had happened, because the mother was still crying and the father was still standing there looking at the girl.
I thought they all wasted a lot of time doing nothing. In real life they would have called the doctor or something. And if I ever wrote those shows, I would give all of them happy endings. And books too. People who loved each other would always be together. None of the good people would ever die.
“If she really moved, Helen, it may mean the end of our long vigil.” “Oh, I know, Jim, I know,” the woman sobbed. “We can only pray.” “But it may mean the beginning of something else,” the father said. “You mean ...?” “Yes. If Mary Ellen’s testimony convicts Paul Barker ...”
“Who’s that?” Maya whispered.
“I don’t know. Somebody in the accident, I guess.”
“Look, look, Jim! I saw it again! She moved! She moved!”
Maya was standing up. She was practically inside the television set, trying to see better, but the picture was fading and it was the end of the episode. “What a lot of baloney,” Maya said. “I’m going to look at the chicken. It’s probably done by now anyway.”
I followed her into the kitchen and we opened the oven door. Sure enough, the chicken was starting to get brown.
“You see?” Maya said. “It wasn’t so hard, was it?” She cut the lettuce up into a bowl and sprinkled it with oil and vinegar. She took a carving set out of one of the drawers and then we shut the oven off and took the chicken out. “Hey, it really looks good,” she said. I had to agree. It even smelled pretty good too.
Maya put an apron on and she raised the big knife and fork dramatically. “We are going into surgery now, Mrs. Bronson,” she said to the chicken. “I don’t want you to be afraid, my dear. This won’t hurt a bit.” Then she held the chicken with the prongs of the fork and drove the knife inside. Blood spurted out all over the place. Maya shrieked and I thought she had cut herself. But the blood was coming from the chicken. “What’s the matter with it?” she yelled.
I looked over her shoulder and saw a little paper bag sticking out of the chicken. “The liver and all that other stuff is in there. You’re supposed to take it out first,” I said. “Before you cook the chicken.”
“But I couldn’t even see that stuff when it was frozen. And now it’s not done,” she moaned.
Then the telephone rang and it was Maya’s mother. She was very worried. She asked for everybody one at a time, as if we were keeping something terrible from her. “Is Skippy all right?” she wanted to know. “Is the baby all right? Is Debby all right?”
Maya kept saying yes to everything, yes yes, and she had her hand over her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at the chicken. “Everything is fine, Mama. Everything is wonderful.”
Mrs. Goldstein told us that Maya’s father would be there in about a half hour and she wanted to know if we had eaten supper.
Maya kept saying yes to everything.
I covered the chicken with some paper towels and put it in the garbage pail.
We could hear Skippy moving around in his crib. “What are we going to do?” I asked Maya.
“I don’t know.” She kept opening the refrigerator and shutting it again. Finally she took some eggs out. “You go get Skippy,” she said. “I’ll make something.”
Skippy was standing in his crib rattling the bars like a monkey in a cage. When he saw me, he put his thumb in his mouth.
“Poor little boy,” I said. “You don’t even know who I am.” But when I came closer to the crib, he decided I looked okay and held his arms up so he could be lifted out. Compared to the little girl, he felt heavy. “Look who’s here,” I said, carrying him into the kitchen.
Now we could hear sounds from Debby’s room, and then she called out, asking if everything was okay.
“Fine!” we said together.
“Fine, fine,” Skippy said to himself.
“Hey, he talks!” I said. “Say ‘Ted-dy.’ ” But he put his finger back in his mouth.
“What does this look like?” Maya asked, holding a tray up.
“Scrambled eggs,” I said, my stomach rumbling.
“Right!” She put the salad on the tray too, and a couple of the canned peaches, and she carried it all into the bedroom. I could hear Debby making a big fuss all the way in the kitchen. About what a great supper it was, and how terrific we were to help her out, and how she couldn’t have done without us.
Later on, when Howie came home from work and Mr. Goldstein came to get us, Maya whispered to me, “I think I’m going to be like Karen. I think I’m going to marry a millionaire.”
“Yes,” I said. “Me too.”
“I’ve never been so tired and hungry in my whole life. I’ll never forget that mess. I’ll never forget that stupid chicken as long as I live. Maybe I won’t ever get married.”
“I know,” I said. But I was remembering how nice it felt to hold the baby in my arms.