She paused at the bottom of the stairs. Listening, she heard nothing. No movement, no water running. “Ron?” she said. Her mind traveled somewhere— she knew not where— and as she returned, she still heard nothing. “Ron, it’s after eight.”
Back in the kitchen, rinsing her cup, it came to Marian how regularly she was alone with herself and how it was a state she had come to prefer. Overhead, the toilet flushed. Any minute Ron would clomp downstairs grumbling, and it also came to her that his arrivals had begun to interfere with her being alone with herself, rather than being small, filial fulfillments. Secretly pregnant, two plus months along, she let her belly touch over the rim of the sink before her. Mon petit bijou, her lips allowed in endearment to her secret child. A baby. A new person to grow up and be—a new person with a new life! Ron might go postal when he heard the news, but she didn’t care; the thrill it was giving her had to be the sweetest she had ever known.
He passed behind her, going to the coffeepot, and she sensed again the interruption of her private universe. Say something nice, she thought of her husband, as if to allow him a chance to redeem himself. But by the time she finished at the sink and turned his way, he had said nothing at all.
“Hey, good morning,” she said.
“Hey.”
He was reading their home-delivered Globe, and Marian, wondering yet again how to get him told of their impending addition, decided it was not the time, and moved toward the stairs. Always she said something of having to shower, get dressed, leave for work, but she decided here, in the superior and surreal status of herself as a mother-to-be, to say nothing at all.
“Hh—Marian,” she heard as she began climbing the stairs.
“Have to get dressed; I’m running late,” she said.
“Hh,” she heard and knew he hadn’t missed a word in whatever he was reading.
In the bathroom, getting naked as shower water heated, Marian took a look at her profile in the mirror. Not now, but one day in May she would resemble Demi Moore in Vanity Fair, one hand resting on her expanded belly. For now, there was but the merest sign at her midsection—well, no sign at all unless she imagined a vague expansion there. Ron. Maybe it would be fun to share nonsensical pregnancy thoughts with him, but it was also fun to leave him in the dark and keep them to herself. In truth, well, he wasn’t going to like having a baby. Why should he? He doesn’t like his job, doesn’t like who he is, is always out of sorts about money, and any threat of her not bringing in her share—however baseless such a threat might be (like her mother would refuse her maternity leave)—triggered his insecurity, his immature something. Face it; your husband’s not old enough to be a father, she thought with a snicker.
Maybe dear Jude from long ago, Marian considered, as she backed into the rush of warm water. As an only child, Jude, hey Jude, had been a make-believe friend with whom she shared confidences, sleepovers, backseats of cars, and it tickled her to think of resurrecting Jude as one with whom to share irreverent notes on what was happening. Her mother was in no way inept as a secret sharer, she’d have to admit, and it amazed her that the woman who read her like a book had yet to figure out what was going on. Soon enough, Marian thought—and all the more reason to get her told. But Ron first? Or her mother? A revealing question, wouldn’t you say, she imagined inquiring of Jude, aware that her every impulse thus far had gone not to telling Ron at all but to embracing her mother in celebration and squealing like a schoolgirl. I’m going to have a baby!
Marian turned off the water, hung back her head, and squeezed her hair. She laughed, as if Jude, close by, were holding a finger to her lips. Yeah, it’s not real funny, is it, Marian thought. If only it were.
As she stood drying herself, the bathroom door opened. Ron entered, and she said, “Do you mind?”
“Tinkle time … like to scope some flesh while I’m at it.”
Tell him right now, Marian said to herself. Get it over with. She caught him staring at her breasts and left the room. “We need separate bathrooms,” she said over her shoulder.
A moment later he was at the bedroom door where, slipping on panties, she turned the other way. “Separate bathrooms … you’re so spoiled,” he said.
She said nothing, proceeding to fix her bra.
“Working late tonight?” he said, lingering there.
“Don’t I always?”
“Can’t you ever get your own mother to give you better hours?”
“Why would she do that?”
“Yeah, she’d have to pay someone some real money.”
It was old banter between them, but, preoccupied, Marian let her end dangle. Ron enjoyed digging at her mother, more than she liked, though Marian had been the one to identify her job as a graduation gift she had never asked for, as indentured slavery, as security for life, her life. More than once, feeling frisky over drinks, she had raised her glass and recited, “Happy graduation. That’s the cash register, those are the customers, enjoy your life.”
Proceeding to dress, Marian wished Ron would just go away. When he did not, when he remained about the doorway, a harder thought crossed her mind: she had no wish to tell him what was happening because she did not want him as the father of her child.
“I have to hurry,” she said aside.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said and finally retreated downstairs.
It’s true, she thought: her one, deep-seated problem with having a baby was an awareness of Ron being locked in as husband and father. Not wanting him may have been grossly unfair—he was the father—but he was also the one who personified grossness, immaturity, who appeared doomed to being unable ever to grow up. What if the baby were a girl? Marian thought. Dear God, what if it was a boy and Ron indoctrinated him to car repair, and the two of them compelled her to live in a world of rusting hulks in the yard?
At last, giving Ron a good-bye kiss on the cheek and stepping into the unusual autumn air, Marian’s thoughts ran to her father, as they nearly always did on some perception of sky, breeze, or water. They were the forces with which her father lived as a lobsterman, and though she had spent but one summer working with him on the boat, their presence remained indelible. And now, of course, as if she did not have enough on her mind, she knew that her father was sick in some way and knew, too, that she needed to take some action, call or visit, or raise questions with her mother. There had been his cornhusk, wheezing cough the last time she spoke to him—she called every couple of weeks; he never called her—and only yesterday, entering the Weathervane for lunch, Debbie Savan, from high school, exiting, had said, “How’s your dad? I saw him at the clinic.”
Fine as far as she knew, Marian had thought, and a moment later, recalling his cough, began worrying, then knowing that something was wrong with her father. What clinic?
Hey Jude, help me out here, will you? she imagined saying. She had bent into the driver’s seat, and in new awareness of her belly being near the steering wheel, it came to her that she had to get people told or the evidence would rise like dough and tell on itself. That and her father. And Ron. Jude, what good are you if you can’t help a person erase a few problems?
As she backed around, yet another lingering problem touched Marian’s mind: the old charge of being spoiled. She’d heard it many times, felt guilt over it often, and, every time it surfaced, wanted to call time out and declare that the charge was not quite fair. So a person happened to be born other than poor, or came into the world with modest advantages; did it mean a person wasn’t subject to fears and frustrations like anyone else? Jude, tell me you understand, she imagined adding, while Jude, not unlike any friend she had ever had, elected for the moment to be occupied with something outside her window. When you started complaining about advantages, distractions along the road always had a way of capturing your audience.
Why did so many things have to be so troublesome? Marian wondered. All on top of having a baby, and here, all at once, coming to the fore: guilt over her father. Responsibility had her in its grip—he was her father—and was refusing to leave her alone. She had to talk to him on the phone, call his doctor, speak to her mother. If something were wrong, would anyone in the world be more likely than her father to deny it, even to himself?
Turning onto the highway, speeding up, then slowing down, it also occurred to Marian that her car—a ragtop Miata, the real graduation gift from her mother and Virgil—was too zippy and sporty and wasn’t her anymore. Like her fear for her father’s health and her wish to make up with him, everything seemed to extend from her condition. Her life was becoming an emotional, maternal bubble, threatening more each day toward popping.
Was it the baby, she wondered, catching herself straying toward the center line, or was she herself coming of age? She imagined her mother and Virgil grinning, noting that something like the latter might be the case. She could also see her mother taking it all too seriously, getting her aside and asking if she couldn’t try a little harder to be more personable, more upbeat—did she see how good it was for business, how each customer was an individual friendship to be formed, how customers might come back for years, might send their children and grandchildren back forty years from now? Did she know that hardly fifty years ago old Leon Bean himself had had but a family enterprise given to high customer satisfaction? Did she see how simple it all could be? Didn’t it just make her blood run to see what could be done if you put your mind to it?
Yeah, right, it made her blood run, Marian thought.
The sorry truth, she feared—following around the Kittery traffic circle—was that she wasn’t cut out for commerce at all. Her mother had but vaguely minded her not studying marketing and sales in college—the acquisition of the degree itself had been key to her mother—and for her part Marian rationalized that she would grow into business, while, in fact, now more than ever, she’d rather sit on a dock on a lovely day like this and commune with Virginia Woolf or Annie Dillard, or a book of poems, than crow over record sales of holiday goblets. She knew it made her more like her father, for whom the quiet independence of fishing was everything; it wasn’t something she’d readily say to her mother, but she knew it was true.