NORA Jane Whittington was going to have a baby. There was no getting around that. First Freddy Harwood talked her into taking out her Lippes Loop. “I don’t like the idea of a piece of copper stuck up your vagina,” he said. “I think you ought to get it out.”
“It’s not in my vagina. It’s in my womb. And it’s real small. I saw it before they put it in.”
“How small?” he said. “Let me see.” Nora Jane held up a thumb and forefinger and made a circle. “Like this,” she said. “About like this.”
“Hmmmmmmmm…” he said, and let it go at that. But the idea was planted. She kept thinking about the little piece of copper. How it resembled a mosquito coil. Like shrapnel, she thought. Like having some kind of weapon in me. Nora Jane had a very good imagination for things like that. Finally imagination won out over science and she called the obstetrician and made an appointment. There was really not much to it. She lay down on the table and squeezed her eyes shut and the doctor reached up inside her with a small cold instrument and the Lippes Loop came sliding out.
“Now what will you do?” the doctor said. “Would you like me to start you on the pill?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Let me think it over for a while.”
“Don’t wait too long,” he said. “You’re a healthy girl. It can happen very quickly.”
“All right,” she said. “I won’t.” She gathered up her things and drove on over to Freddy’s house to cook things in his gorgeous redwood kitchen.
“Now what will we do?” she said. “You think I ought to take the pill? Or what?” It was much later that evening. Nora Jane was sitting on the edge of the hot tub looking up at the banks of clouds passing before the moon. It was one of those paradisial San Francisco nights, flowers and pine trees, eucalyptus and white wine and Danish bread and brie.
Nora Jane’s legs were in the hot tub. Her back was to the breeze coming from the bay. She was wearing a red playsuit with a red and yellow scarf tied around her forehead like a flag. Freddy Harwood thought she was the most desirable thing he had ever seen in his whole life.
“We’ll think of something,” he said. He took off his Camp Pericles senior counselor camp shorts and lowered himself into the water. He was thirty-five years old and every summer he still packed his footlocker full of teeshirts and flashlight batteries and went off to the Adirondacks to be a counselor in his old camp. That’s how crazy he was. The rest of the year he ran a bookstore in Berkeley.
“What do you think we’ll think of?” she said, joining him in the water, sinking down until the ends of the scarf floated in the artificial waves. What they thought of lasted half the night and moved from the hot tub to den floor to the bedroom. Freddy Harwood thought it was the most meaningful evening he had spent since the night he lost his cherry to his mother’s best friend. Nora Jane didn’t think it was all that great. It lacked danger, that aphrodisiac, that sugar to end all sugars.
“We have to get married,” he told her in the morning. “You’ll have to marry me.” He walked around a ladder and picked up a kimono and pulled it on and tied the belt into a bowline. The ladder was the only furniture in the room except the bed they had been sleeping in. Freddy was in the process of turning his bedroom into a planetarium. He was putting the universe on the ceiling, little dots of heat-absorbing cotton that glowed in the night like stars. Each dot had to be measured with long paper measuring strips from the four corners of the room. It was taking a lot longer to put the universe on the ceiling than Freddy had thought it would. He turned his eyes to a spot he had reserved for Aldebaran. It was the summer sky he was re- creating, as seen from Minneapolis where the kits were made. “Yes,” he said, as if he were talking to himself. “We are going to have to get married.”
“I don’t want to get married,” she said. “I’m not in love with you.”
“You are in love with me. You just don’t know it yet.”
“I am not in love with you. I’ve never told you that I was. Besides, I wouldn’t want to change my name. Nora Harwood, how would that sound?”
“How could you make love to someone like last night if you didn’t love them? I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m weird or abnormal or something. But I know whether I’m in love with someone or not. Anyway, I like you better than anyone I’ve met in San Francisco. I’ve told you that.” She was getting dressed now, pulling a white cotton sweater over a green cotton skirt, starting to look even more marvelous than she did with no clothes on at all. Freddy sighed, gathered his forces, walked across the room and took her in his arms. “Do you want to have a priest? Or would you settle for a judge. I have this friend that’s a federal judge who would love to marry us.”
“I’m not marrying you, Freddy. Not for all the tea in China. Not even for your money and I want you to stop being in love with me. I want you to be my friend and have fun like we used to. Now listen, do you want me to give you back that car you gave me? I’ll give you back the car.”
“Please don’t give me back the car. All my life I wanted to give someone a blue convertible. Don’t ruin it by talking like that.”
“I’m sorry. That was mean of me. I knew better than to say that. I’ll keep that car forever. You know that. I might get buried in that car.” She gave him a kiss on his freckled chest, tied a green scarf around her hair, floated out of the house, got into the blue convertible and away she went, weaving in and out of the lanes of traffic, thinking about how hard it was to find out what you wanted in the world, much less what to do to get it.
It was either that night that fertilized one of Nora Jane Whittington’s wonderful, never to be replaced or duplicated as long as the species lasts, small, wet, murky, secret-bearing eggs. Or it was two nights later when she heard a love song coming out an open doorway and broke down and called Sandy Halter and he came and got her and they went off to a motel and made each other cry.
Sandy was the boy Nora Jane had lived with in New Orleans. She had come to California to be with him but there was a mix-up and he didn’t meet her plane. Then she found out he’d been seeing a girl named Pam. After that she couldn’t love him anymore. Nora Jane was very practical about love. She only loved people that loved her back. She never was sure what made her call up Sandy that night in Berkeley. First she dreamed about him. Then she passed a doorway and heard Bob Dylan singing. “Lay, lady, lay. Lay across my big brass bed.” The next thing she knew she was in a motel room making love and crying. Nora Jane was only practical about love most of the time. Part of the time she was just as dumb about it as everybody else in the world.
“How can we make up?” she said, sitting up in the rented bed. “After what you did to me.”
“We can’t help making up. We love each other. I’ve got some big things going on, Nora Jane. I want you working with me. It’s real money this time. Big money.” He sat up beside her and put his hands on his knees. He looked wonderful. She had to admit that. He was as tan as an Indian and his hair was as blond as sunlight and his mind as faraway and unavailable as a star.
“Last night I dreamed about you,” she said. “That’s why I called you up. It was raining like crazy in my dream and we were back in New Orleans, on Magazine Street, looking out the window, and the trees were blowing all over the place, and I said, Sandy, there’s going to be a hurricane. Let’s turn on the radio. And you said, no, the best thing to do is go to the park and ride it out in a live oak tree. Then we went out onto the street. It was a dream, remember, and Webster Street and Henry Clay were under water and they were trying to get patients out of the Home for the Incurables. They were bringing them out on stretchers. It was awful. It was raining so hard. Then I got separated from you. I was standing in the door of the Webster Street Bar calling to you and no one was coming and the water was rising. It was a terrible dream. Then you were down the street with that girl. I guess it was her. She was blond and sort of fat and she was holding on to you. Pam, I guess it was Pam.”
“I haven’t seen Pam since all that happened. Pam doesn’t mean a thing to me. Pam’s nothing.”
“Then why was I dreaming about her?”
“Don’t ruin everything, Nora Jane. Let’s just love each other.”
“You want to make love to me some more? Well, do you?”
“No, right now I want a cigarette. Then I want to take you to this restaurant I like. I want to tell you about this outfit I’m working for. I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I have to take Mirium’s car back so I’ll take you with me and show you what’s going on.”
“I’ve been wondering what you were up to.”
“Just wait till you meet Mirium. She’s my boss. I’ve told her all about you. Now come on, let’s get dressed and get some dinner. I haven’t eaten all day.” Sandy had gotten out of bed and was putting on his clothes. White linen pants and a blue shirt with long full sleeves. He liked to dress up even more than Nora Jane did.
Sandy’s boss, Mirium Sallisaw, was forty-three years old. She lived in a house on a bluff overlooking the sea between Pacifica and Montara. It was a very expensive house she bought with money she made arranging trips to Mexico for people that wanted to cure cancer with Laetrile. The Laetrile market was drying up but Mirium wasn’t worried. She was getting into Interferon as fast as she could make the right connections. Interferon and Energy. Those were Mirium’s key words for 1983.
“Energy,” she was fond of saying. “Energy. That’s all. There’s nothing else.” She imagined herself as a little glowworm in a sea of dark branches, spreading light to the whole forest. She was using Sandy to keep her batteries charged. She liked to get in bed with him at night and charge up, then tell him her theories about energy and how he could have all the other women he wanted, because she, Mirium Sallisaw, was above human jealousy and didn’t care. Sandy was only twenty-two years old. He believed everything she told him. He even believed she was dying to meet Nora Jane. He thought of Mirium as this brilliant businesswoman who would jump at a chance to have someone as smart as Nora Jane help drive patients back and forth across the border.
Nora Jane and Sandy got to Mirium’s house late in the afternoon. They parked in the parking lot and walked across a lawn with Greek statues set here and there as if the decorator hadn’t been able to decide where they should go. Statues of muses faced the parking lot. Statues of heroes looked out upon the sea. Twin statues of cupid guarded the doorway.
Nora Jane and Sandy opened the door and stepped into the foyer. It was dark inside the house. All the drapes were closed. The only light came from recessed fixtures near the ceiling. A young man in a silk shirt and elegant pointed shoes came walking toward them. “Hello, Sandy,” he said. “Mother’s in the back. Go tell her you’re here.”
“This is Maurice,” Sandy said. “He’s Mirium’s son. He’s a genius, aren’t you, Maurice? Listen, did you give Mirium my message? Does she know Nora Jane’s coming?”
“We’ve got dinner reservations at Blanchard’s. They have fresh salmon. Mimi called. Do you like salmon?” he said to Nora Jane. “I worship it. It’s all I eat.”
“I’ve never given it much thought,” she said. “I don’t think much about what I eat.”
“Maurice takes chemistry courses at the college,” Sandy said. “Mirium’s making him into a chemist.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “That must be interesting.”
“Well, profitable. I’ll make some dough if I stick to it. Sandy, why don’t you go on back and tell her you’re here. She’s in the exercise room with Mimi. Tell her I’m getting hungry.” Sandy disappeared down a long hall.
Maurice took Nora Jane into a sunken living room with sofas arranged around a marble coffee table. There were oriental boxes on the table and something that looked like a fire extinguisher.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll play you some music. I’ve got a new tape some friends of mine made. It’s going to be big. Warner’s has it and Twentieth Century-Fox is interested. Million Bucks, that’s the name of the group. The leader’s name is Million Bills. No kidding, he had it changed. Listen to this.” Maurice pushed some buttons on the side of the marble table and the music came on, awful erratic music, a harp and a lot of electronic keyboards and guitars and synthesizers. The harp would play a few notes, then the electrical instruments would shout it down. “Pretty chemical, huh? Feel that energy? They’re going to be big.” He was staring off into the recessed light, one hand on the emerald embedded in his ear.
Nora Jane couldn’t think of anything to say. She settled back into the sofa cushions. It was cool and dark in the room. The cushions she was leaning into were the softest things she had ever felt in her life. They felt alive, like some sort of hair. She reached her hands behind her. “What are these cushions?” she said. “What are they made of?”
“They’re Mirium’s old fur coats. She wanted drapes but there wasn’t enough.”
“They’re made of fur coats?”
“Yeah. Before that they were animals. Crazy, huh? Chemical? Look, if you want a joint they’re different kinds in those boxes. That red one’s Colombian and the blue one is some stuff we’re getting from Arkansas. Heavy. Really heavy. There’s gas in the canister if you’d rather have that. I quit doing it. Too sweet for me. I don’t like a sweet taste.”
“Could I have a glass of water,” she said. “It was a long drive.” She was sitting up, trying not to touch the cushions. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll get you some. Just a minute.” He had taken a tube of something out of his pocket and was applying it to his lips. “This is a new gloss. It’s dynamite. Mint and lemon mixed together. Wild!” Then, so quickly Nora Jane didn’t have time to resist, Maurice sat down beside her and put his mouth on hers. He was very strong for a boy who looked so thin and he was pressing her down into the fur pillows. Her mouth was full of the taste of mint and lemon and something tingly, like an anesthetic. For a moment she thought he was trying to kill her. “Get off of me,” she said. She pushed against him with all her might. He sat up and looked away. “I just wanted you to get the full effect.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen. Isn’t it a drag?”
“I don’t know. I’d never have guessed you were a day over four. Three or four.”
“I guess it’s my new stylist,” he said, as if he didn’t know what she meant. “I’ve got this woman in Marin. Marilee at Plato’s. It takes forever to get there. But it’s worth it. I mean, that woman understands hair….”
Sandy reappeared with a woman wearing gray slacks and a dark sweater. She looked as if she smiled about once a year. She held out her hand, keeping the other one on Sandy’s arm. “Well,” she said. “We’ve been hearing about you. Sandy’s told us all about your exploits together in New Orleans. He says you can do some impressive tricks with your voice. How about letting us hear some.”
“I don’t do tricks,” Nora Jane said. “I don’t even sing anymore.”
“Well, I guess that’s that. Did Sandy fill you in on the operation we’ve got going down here? It isn’t illegal, you know. But I don’t like our business mouthed around. Too many jealous people, if you know what I mean.”
“He told me some things…” Nora Jane looked at Sandy. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. He picked up one of the canisters and took out a joint and lit it and passed it to Maurice.
“We have dinner reservations in less than an hour,” Mirium said. “Let’s have some wine, then get going. I can’t stand to be late and lose our table. Maurice, try that buzzer. See if you can get someone in here.”
“These are sick people you send places,” Nora Jane said. “That you need a driver for?”
“Oh, honey, they’re worse than sick. These people are at the end. I mean, the end. We’re the last chance they’ve got.”
“They don’t care what it costs,” Sandy said. “They pay in cash.”
“So what does it do for them?” Nora Jane said. “Does it make them well?”
“It makes them happy,” Maurice said.
“It makes them better than they were,” Mirium said. “If they have faith. It won’t work without faith. Faith makes the energy start flowing. You see, honey, the real value of Laetrile is it gets the energy flowing. Right, Sandy?” She moved over beside him and took the joint from between his fingers. “Like good sex. It keeps the pipes open, if you know what I mean.” She put her hand on Sandy’s sleeves, caressing his sleeve.
“Do you have a powder room?” Nora Jane said. “A bathroom I mean.”
“There’s one in the foyer,” Mirium said. “Or you can go back to the bedroom.”
“The one in the foyer’s fine.” Nora Jane had started moving. She was up the steps from the sunken area. She was out of the room and into the hall. She was to the foyer. The keys are in the ignition, she was thinking. I saw him leave them there. And if they aren’t I’ll walk. But I am getting out of here. Then she was out the door and past the cupids and running along the paving stones to the parking lot. The Lincoln was right where Sandy had parked it. She got in and turned the key and the engine came on and she backed out and started driving. Down the steep rocky drive so fast she almost went over the side. She slowed down and turned onto the ocean road. Slow down, she told herself. You could run over someone. They can’t do anything to me. They can’t send the police after me. Not with all they have going on in there. All I have to do is drive this car. I don’t have to hurry and I don’t have to worry about a single thing. And I don’t have to think about Sandy. Imagine him doing it with that woman. Well, I should talk. I mean, I’ve been doing it with Freddy. But it isn’t the same thing. Well it isn’t.
She looked out toward the ocean, the Pacific Ocean lying dark green and wonderful in the evening sun. I’ll just think about the whales, she decided. I’ll concentrate on whales. Tam says they hear us thinking. She says they hear everything we do. Well, Chinese people are always saying things like that. I guess part of what they say is true. I mean they’re real old. They’ve been around so long.
It was dark when Nora Jane got to Freddy’s house. The front door was wide open. He was in the hot tub with the stereo blaring out country music. “Oh, I’m a good-hearted woman, in love with a good-timing man.” Waylon Jennings was filling the house with dumb country ideas.
“I’m drunk as a deer,” Freddy called out when he saw her. “The one I love won’t admit she loves me. Therefore I am becoming an alcoholic. One and one makes two. Cause and effect. Ask Nieman. He’ll tell you. He’s helping me. He’s right over there, passed out on the sofa. In his green suit. Wake him up. Ask him if I’m an alcoholic or not. He’ll tell you.” Freddy picked up a bottle of brandy from beside an art deco soap dish and waved it in the air. “Brandy. King of elixirs. The royal drink of the royal heads of France, and of me. Frederick Slazenger Harwood, lover of the cruel Louisiana voodoo queen. Voodooooed. I’ve been voodooooed. Vamped and rendered alcoholic.”
“Get out of there before you drown yourself. You shouldn’t be in there drunk. I think you’ve started living in that hot tub.”
“Not getting out until I shrivel. Ask Nieman. Go ahead, wake him up. Ask him. Going to shrivel up to a tree limb. Have myself shipped to the Smithsonian. Man goes back to tree. I can see the headlines.”
“I stole a car. It’s in the driveway.”
“Stay me with flagons,” he called out. “Comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love. Nieman, get up. Nora Jane stole a car. We have to turn her in. Why did you steal a car? I just gave you a car.” He pulled himself up on the edge of the hot tub. “Why on earth would you steal a car?”
So, first there was the night she spent with Freddy, then there was the night she spent with Sandy, then there was the night she stole the car. Then three weeks went by. Then five weeks went by and Nora Jane Whittington had not started menstruating and she was losing weight and kept falling asleep in the afternoon and the smell of cigarettes or bacon frying was worse than the smell of a chicken plucking plant. The egg had been hard at work.
A miracle, the sisters at the Academy of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus would have said. Chemistry, Maurice would say. Energy, Mirium Sallisaw would declare. This particular miraculous energetic piece of chemistry had split into two identical parts and they were attached now to the lining of Nora Jane’s womb, side by side, the size of snow peas, sending out for what they needed, water and pizza and sleep, rooms without smoke or bacon grease.
“Well, at least its name will start with an H,” Nora Jane said. She was talking to Tam Suyin, a Chinese mathematician’s wife who was her best friend and confidante in the house on Arch Street where she lived. It was a wonderful old Victorian house made of boards two feet wide. Lobelia and iris and Madonna lilies lined the sidewalk leading to the porch. Along the side poppies as red as blood bloomed among daisies and snapdragons. Fourteen people lived in the twelve bedrooms, sharing the kitchen and the living quarters.
Nora Jane had met Tam the night she moved in, in the middle of the night, after an earthquake. Tam and her husband Li had taught Nora Jane many things she would never have heard of in Louisiana. In return Nora Jane was helping them with their English grammar. Now, wherever they went in the world, the Suyins’ English would be colored by Nora Jane’s soft southern idioms.
“And it probably will have brown eyes,” she continued. “I mean, Sandy has blue eyes, or, I guess you could call them gray. But Freddy and I have brown eyes. That’s two out of three. Oh, Tam, what am I going to do? Would you just tell me that?” Nora Jane had just come back from the doctor. She walked across the room and lay down on the bed, her face between her hands.
“Start at the beginning. Tell story all over. Leave out romance. We see if we figure something out. Tell story again.”
“Okay. I know I started menstruating about ten days before I took the IUD out. I had to wait until I stopped bleeding. I used to bleed like a stuck pig when I had that thing. That’s why I took it out. So then I made love to Freddy that night. Then Sandy called me, or, no, I called him because I heard this Bob Dylan song. Anyway, I was glad to see him until I met these people he’s been living with. This woman that gives drugs to her own kid. But first I made love to him and we cried a lot. I mean, it was really good making love to him. So I think it must be Sandy’s. Don’t you? What do you think?”
Tam came across the room and sat down on the bed and began to rub Nora Jane’s back, moving her fingers down the vertebrae. “We can make abortion with massage. Very easy. Not hurt body. Not cost anything. No one make you have this baby. You make up your mind. I do it for you.”
“I couldn’t do that. I was raised a Catholic. It isn’t like being from China. Well, I don’t mind having it anyway. I thought about it all the way home from the doctor’s. I mean, I don’t have any brothers or sisters. My father’s dead and my mother’s a drunk. So I don’t care much anyway. I’ll have someone kin to me. If it will be a girl. It’ll be all right if it’s a girl and I can name her Lydia after my grandmother. She was my favorite person before she died. She had this swing on her porch.” Nora Jane put her face deeper into the sheets, trying to feel sorry for herself. Tam’s hands moved to her shoulders, rubbing and stroking, caressing and loving. Nora Jane turned her head to the side. A breeze was blowing in the window. The curtains were billowing like sails. Far out at sea she imagined a whale cub turning over inside its mother. “It will be all right if it’s a girl and I can name it Lydia for my grandmother.”
“Yes,” Tam said. “Very different from China.”
“Who do you think it belongs to?” Nora Jane said again.
“It belong to you. You quit thinking about it for a while. Think one big grasshopper standing on leaf looking at you with big eyes. Eyes made of jade. You sleep now. When Li come home I make us very special dinner to celebrate baby coming into world. Li work on problem. Figure it out on calculator.”
“If it had blond hair I’d know it was Sandy’s. But black hair could be mine or Freddy’s. Well, mine’s blacker than his. And curlier…”
“Go to sleep. Not going to be as simple as color of hair. Nothing simple in this world, Nora Jane.”
“Well, what am I going to do about all this?” she said sleepily. Tam’s fingers were pressing into the nerves at the base of her neck. “What on earth am I going to do?”
“Not doing anything for now. For now going to sleep. When Li come home tonight he figure it out. Not so hard. We get it figured out.” Tam’s fingers moved up into Nora Jane’s hair, massaging the old brain on the back of the head. Nora Jane and Lydia and Tammili Whittington settled down and went to sleep.
“Fifty-five percent chance baby will be girl,” Li said, looking up from his calculations. “Forty-six percent chance baby is fathered by Mr. Harwood. Fifty-four percent chance baby is fathered by Mr. Halter. Which one is smartest gentleman, Nora Jane? Which one you wish it to be?”
“I don’t know. They’re smart in different ways.”
“Maybe it going to be two babies. Like Double Happiness Bun. One for each father.” Li laughed softly at his joke. Tam lowered her head, ashamed of him. He had been saying many strange things since they came to California.
“You sure it going to be good idea to have this baby?” he said next.
“I guess so,” Nora Jane said. “I think it is.” She searched their faces trying to see what they wanted to hear but their faces told her nothing. Tam was looking down at her hands. Li was playing with his pocket calculator.
“How you going to take care of this baby and go to your job?” he said.
“That’s nothing,” Nora Jane said. “I’ve already thought about that. It isn’t that complicated. People do it all the time. They have these little schools for them. Day- care centers. I used to work in one the Sisters of Mercy had on Magazine Street. I worked there in the summers. We had babies and little kids one and two years old. In the afternoons they would lie down on their cots and we would sit by them and pat their backs while they went to sleep. It was the best job I ever had. The shades would be drawn and the fan on and we’d be sitting by the cots patting them and you could hear their little breaths all over the room. I used to pat this one little boy with red hair. His back would go up and down. I know all about little kids and babies. I can have one if I want to.”
“Yes, you can,” Tam said. “You strong girl. Do anything you want to do.”
“You going to tell Mr. Harwood and Mr. Halter about this baby?” Li said.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t made up my mind about that.”
Then for two weeks Nora Jane kept her secret. She was good at keeping secrets. It came from being an only child. When Freddy called she told him she couldn’t see him for a while. She hadn’t talked to Sandy since she called and told him where to pick up Mirium’s car.
At night she slept alone with her secret. In the mornings she dressed and went down to the gallery where she worked and listened to people talk about the paintings. She felt very strange, sleepy and secretive and full of insight. I think my vision is getting better, she told herself, gazing off into the pastel hills. I am getting into destiny, she said to herself at night, feeling the cool sheets against her legs. I am part of time, oceans and hurricanes and earthquakes and the history of man. I am the aurora borealis and the stars. I am as crazy as I can be. I ought to call my mother.
Finally Freddy Harwood had had as much as he could stand. There was no way he was letting a girl he loved refuse to see him. He waited fourteen days, counting them off, trying to get to twenty-one, which he thought was a reasonable number of days to let a misunderstanding cool down. Only, what was the misunderstanding? What had he done but fall in love? He waited and brooded.
On the fourteenth day he started off for work, then changed his mind and went over to his cousin Leah’s gallery where he had gotten Nora Jane a job. The gallery was very posh. It didn’t even open until 11:00 in the morning. He got there about 10:30 and went next door to Le Chocolat and bought a chocolate statue of Aphrodite and stood by the plate-glass windows holding the box and watching for Nora Jane’s car. Finally he caught a glimpse of it in the far lane on Shattuck Boulevard heading for the parking lot of the Safeway store. He ran out the door and down to the corner and stood by a parking meter on the boulevard.
She got out of the car and came walking over, not walking very fast. She was wearing a long white rayon shirt over black leotards, looking big-eyed and thin. “You look terrible,” he said, forgetting his pose, hurrying to meet her. “What have you been doing? Take this, it’s a chocolate statue I bought for you. What’s going on, N.J.? I want you to talk to me. Goddammit, we are going to talk.”
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said. She stepped up on the sidewalk. Traffic was going by on the street. Clouds were going by in the sky. “Oh, my God,” Freddy said.
“And I don’t know who the father is. It might be your baby. I don’t know if it is or not.” Her eyes were right on his. They were filling up with tears, a movie of tears, a brand-new fresh print of a movie of tears. They poured down her cheeks and onto her hands and the white cardboard box holding the chocolate Aphrodite. Some even fell on her shoes.
“So what,” Freddy said. “That’s not so bad. I mean, at least you don’t have cancer. When I saw you get out of the car I thought, leukemia, she’s got leukemia.”
“I don’t know who the father is,” she repeated. “There’s a forty-six percent chance it’s you.”
“Let’s get off this goddamn street,” he said. “Let’s go out to the park.”
“You aren’t mad? You aren’t going to kill me?”
“I haven’t had time to get mad. I’ve hardly had time to go into shock. Come on, N.J., let’s go out to the park and see the Buddha.”
“He has blue eyes, or gray eyes, I guess you’d call them. And you have brown eyes and I have brown eyes. So it isn’t going to do any good if it has brown eyes. Li said it’s more the time of month anyway because sperm can live several days. So I’ve been trying and trying to remember…”
“Let’s don’t talk about it anymore,” Freddy said. “Let’s talk less and think more.” They were in the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Freddy had called his cousin Leah and told her Nora Jane couldn’t come in to work and they had gone out to the park to see a jade Buddha he worshipped. “This all used to be free,” he said, as he did every time he brought her there. “The whole park. Even the planetarium. Even the cookies in the tea garden. My father used to bring me here.” They were standing in an arch between marble rooms.
“Let’s go look at the Buddha again before we leave,” Nora Jane said. “I’m getting as bad about that Buddha as you are.” They walked back into the room and up to the glass box that housed the Buddha. They walked slowly around the case looking at the Buddha from all angles. The hands outstretched on the knees, the huge ears, the spine, the ribs, the drape of the stole across the shoulder. Sakyumuni as an Ascetic. It was a piece of jade so luminous, so rounded and perfect and alive that just looking at it was sort of like being a Buddha.
“Wheeewwwwwwwww,” Nora Jane said. “How on earth did he make it?”
“Well, to begin with, it took twenty years. I mean, you don’t just turn something like that out overnight. He made it for his teacher, but the teacher died before it was finished.”
Nora Jane held her hands out to the light coming from the case, as if to catch some Buddha knowledge. “I could go see your friend Eli, the geneticist,” she said. “He could find out for me, couldn’t he? I mean he splices genes, it wouldn’t be anything to find out what blood type a baby had. How about that? I’ll call him up and ask him if there’s any way I can find out before it comes.”
“Oh, my God,” Freddy said. “Don’t go getting any ideas about Eli. Don’t go dragging my friends into this. Let’s just keep this under our hats. Let’s don’t go spreading this around.”
“I’m not keeping anything I do under my hat,” she said. She stepped back from him and folded her hands at her waist. Same old, same old stuff, she thought. “You just go on home, Freddy,” she said. “I’ll take BART. I don’t want to talk to you anymore today. I was doing just fine until you showed up with that chocolate statue. I’ve never been ashamed of anything I’ve done in my life and I’m not about to start being ashamed now.” She was backing up, heading for the door. “So go on. Go on and leave me alone. I mean it. I really mean it.”
“How about me?” he called after her retreating back. “What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to feel? What if I don’t want to be alone? What if I need someone to talk to?” She held her hands up in the air with the palms turned toward the ceiling. Then she walked on off without turning around.
***
Several days later Nora Jane was at the gallery. It was late in July. Almost a year since she had robbed the bar in New Orleans and flown off to California to be with Sandy. So much had happened in that time. Sometimes she felt like a different person. Other times she felt like the same old Nora Jane. That morning while she was dressing for work she had looked at her body for a long time in the mirror, turning this way and that to see what was happening. Her body was beginning to have a new configuration, strange volumes like a Titian she admired in one of Leah’s art books.
It was cool in the gallery, too cool for Nora Jane’s sleeveless summer dress. Just right for the three-piece suit on the man standing beside her. They were standing before one of Nora Jane’s favorite paintings. The man was making notes on a pad and saying things to the gallery owner that made Nora Jane want to sock him in the face.
“What is the source of light, dear heart? I can’t review this show, Leah. This stuff’s so old-fashioned. It’s so obvious, for God’s sake. Absolutely no restraint. I can’t believe you got me over here for this. I think you’re going all soppy on me.”
“Oh, come on,” Leah said. “Give it a chance, Ambrose. Put the pad away and just look.”
“I can’t look, angel. I have a trained eye.” Nora Jane sighed. Then she moved over to the side of the canvas and held the edge of the frame in her hand. It was a painting of a kimono being lifted from the sea by a dozen seagulls. A white kimono with purple flowers being lifted from a green sea. The gulls were carrying it in their beaks, each gull in a different pose. Below the painting was a card with lines from a book.
“On some undressed bodies the burns made patterns…and on the skin of some women…the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos….”
Hiroshima, by John Hersey
“Hummmmmmmm…” Nora Jane said. “The source of light? This is a painting, not a light bulb. There’s plenty of light. Every one of those doves is a painting all by itself. I bet it took a million hours just to paint those doves. This is a wonderful painting. This is one of the most meaningful paintings I ever saw. Anybody that doesn’t know this painting is wonderful isn’t fit to judge a beauty contest at a beach, much less a rock of art, I mean, a work of art.”
“Leah,” the man said. “Who is this child?”
“I used to work here,” she said. “But now I’m quitting. I’m going home. I’m going to have a baby and I don’t want it floating around inside me listening to people say nasty things about other people’s paintings. You can’t tell what they hear. They don’t know what all they can hear.”
“A baby,” Leah said. She moved back as though she was afraid some of it might spill on her gray silk blouse. “My cousin Freddy’s baby?”
“I don’t know,” Nora Jane said. “It’s just a baby. I don’t know whose it is.”
I’m doing things too fast, she thought. She was driving aimlessly down University Avenue, headed for a bridge. I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face. I’m burning my bridges behind me. I’ll call my mother and tell her where I am. Yeah, and then she’ll just get drunker than ever and call me up all the time like she used to at the Mushroom Cloud. Never mind that. I’ll get a job at a day-care center. That’s what I’ll do. This place is full of rich people. I bet they have great ones out here. I’ll go find the best one they have and get a job in it. Then I’ll be all set when she comes. Well, at least I can still think straight. Thank God for that. Maybe I’ll drive out to Bodega Bay and spend the day by the ocean. I’ll get a notebook and write down everything I have to do and make all my plans. Then tomorrow I’ll go and apply for jobs at day-care centers. I wonder what they pay. Not much I bet. Who cares? I’ll live on whatever they pay me. That’s one thing Sandy taught me. You don’t have to do what they want you to if you don’t have to have their stuff. It was worth living with him just to learn that. I’ve got everything I need. It’s a wonderful day. I loved saying that stuff to that man, that Ambrose whatever his name is. I’ll bet he’s thinking about it right this minute. YOU AREN’T FIT TO JUDGE A BEAUTY CONTEST AT THE BEACH MUCH LESS A WORK OF ART. That was good, that was really good. I bet he won’t forget me saying that. I bet no one’s said anything to him in years except what he wants to hear.
Nora Jane turned on the radio, made a left at a stoplight and drove out onto the Richmond-San Rafael bridge. She had the top down on the convertible. The radio was turned up good and loud. Some lawyers down in Texas were saying the best place to store nuclear waste would be the salt flats in Mexico. Nora Jane was driving along, listening to the lawyers, thinking about the ocean, thinking how nice it would be to sit and watch the waves come in. Thinking about what she’d stop and get to eat. I have to remember to eat, she was thinking. I have to get lots of protein and stuff to make her bones thick.
She was just past the first long curve of the bridge when it happened. The long roller coaster of a bridge swayed like the body of a snake, making a hissing sound that turned into thunder. The sound rolled across the bay. Then the sound stopped. Then a long time went by. The car seemed to be made of water. The bridge of water. Nora Jane’s arms of water. Still, she seemed to know what to do. She turned off the ignition. She reached behind her and pulled down the shoulder harness and put it on.
The bridge moved again. Longer, slower, like a long cold dream. The little blue convertible swerved to the side, rubbing up against a station wagon. The bumper grated and slid, grated and slid. Then everything was still. Everything stopped happening. The islands in the bay were still in their places. Angel Island and Morris Island and the Brothers and the Sisters and the sad face of Alcatraz. An oil tank had burst on Morris Island and a shiny black river was pouring down a hill. Nora Jane watched it pour, then turned and looked into the station wagon.
A woman was at the wheel. Four or five small children were jumping up and down on the seats, screaming and crying. “Do not move from a place of safety,” the radio was saying. “The aftershocks could begin at any moment. Stay where you are. If you have an emergency call 751-1000. Please do not call to get information. We are keeping you informed. Repeat. Do not move from a place of safety. The worst shock has passed. If you are with injured parties call 751-1000.” I think I’m in a place of safety, Nora Jane thought.
The children were screaming in the station wagon. They were screaming their heads off. I have to go and see if they’re hurt, she thought. But what if a shock comes while I’m going from here to there? I’ll fall off the bridge. I’ll fall into the sea. “The Golden Gate is standing. The approaches are gone to the Bay Bridge and the Richmond–San Rafael. There is no danger of either bridge collapsing. Repeat, there is no danger of either bridge collapsing. Please do not move from a place of safety. If you are with injured parties call 751-1000. Do not call to get information. Repeat…”
That’s too many children for one woman. What if they’re hurt? Their arms might be broken. I smashed in her side. I have to go over there and help her. I have to do it. Oh, shit. Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Womb, oh, my womb, what about my womb…? Nora Jane was out of the car and making her way around the hood to the staton wagon. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death…. She reached the door handle of the back seat and opened the door and slid in. The children stopped their screaming. Five small faces and one large one turned her way. “I came to help,” she said. “Are any of them hurt? Are they injured?”
“Thank God you’re here,” the woman said. “My radio doesn’t work. What’s happening? What’s going on?”
“It’s a big one. Almost a seven. The approaches to this bridge are gone. Are the children all right? Are any of them hurt?”
“I don’t think so. We’re a car pool. For swimming lessons. I think they’re all right. Are you all right?” she said, turning to the children. “I think they’re just screaming.” None of them was screaming now but one small boy was whining. “Ohhhhhhhh…” he was saying very low and sad.
“Well now I’m here,” Nora Jane said. “They’ll come get us in boats. They’ll come as soon as they can.”
“I’m a doctor’s wife. My husband’s Doctor Johnson, the plastic surgeon. I should know what to do but he never told me. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” Nora Jane said. She set the little whining boy on her lap and put her arm around a little girl in a yellow bathing suit. “Listen, we’re all right. They’ll come and get us. The bridge isn’t going to fall. You did all right. You knew to stop the car.”
“I’m scared,” the little girl in the yellow suit said. “I want to go home. I want to go where my momma is.”
“It’s all right,” Nora Jane said. She pulled the child down beside her and kissed her on the face. “You smell so nice,” she said. “Your hair smells like a yellow crayon. Have you been coloring today?”
“I was coloring,” the whining boy said. “I was coloring a Big Bird book. I want to go home too. I want to go home right now. I’m afraid to be here. I don’t like it here.”
“He’s afraid of everything,” the little girl said. “He’s my brother. He’s afraid of the dark and he’s afraid of frogs.” “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he cried out, louder than ever. “See,” the girl said. “If you just say frog he starts crying.”
“Celeste, please don’t make him cry,” the plastic surgeon’s wife said. “I’m Madge Johnson,” she went on. “That’s Donald and Celeste, they belong to the Connerts that live next door and that’s Lindsey in the back and this is Starr and Alexander up here with me. They’re mine. Lindsey, are you all right? See if she’s all right, would you?”
Nora Jane looked into the back of the station wagon. Lindsey was curled up with a striped beach towel over her head. She was sucking her thumb. She was so still that for a moment Nora Jane wasn’t sure she was breathing. “Are you all right?” she said, laying her hand on the child’s shoulder. “Lindsey, are you okay?”
The child lifted her head about an inch off the floor and shook it from side to side. “You can get up here with us,” Nora Jane said. “You don’t have to stay back there all alone.”
“She wants to be there,” Celeste said. “She’s a baby. She sucks her thumb.”
“I want to go home now,” Donald said, starting to whine again. “I want to go see my momma. I want you to drive the car and take me home.”
“We can’t drive it right now,” Madge said. “We have to wait for the men to come get us. We have to be good and stay still and in a little while they’ll come and get us and take us home in boats. Won’t that be nice? They’ll be here as soon as they can. They’ll be here before we know it.”
“I want to go home now,” Donald said. “I want to go home and I’m hungry. I want something to eat.”
“Shut up, Donald,” Celeste said.
“How old are they?” Nora Jane said.
“They’re five, except Lindsey and Alexander, they’re four. I wish we could hear your radio. I wish we could hear what’s going on.”
“I could reach out the front window and turn it back on, I guess. I hate to walk over there again. Until I’m sure the aftershocks are over. Look, roll down that window and see if you can reach in and turn the radio on. You don’t have to turn on the ignition. Thank God the top’s down. I almost didn’t put it down.”
Madge wiggled through the window and turned on the radio in the convertible. “In other news, actor David Niven died today at his home in Switzerland. The internationally famous actor succumbed to a long battle with Gehrig’s disease. He was seventy-three…. Now for an update on earthquake damage. The department of geology at the University of California at Berkeley says—oh, just a minute, here’s a late report on the bridges. Anyone caught on the Bay Bridge or the Richmond-San Rafael bridge please stay in your cars until help arrives. The Coast Guard is on its way. Repeat, Coast Guard rescue boats are on their way. The danger is past. Please stay in your cars until help arrives. Do not move from a place of safety. The lighthouse on East Brother has fallen into the sea….”
“I want to go home now,” Donald was starting up again. Lindsey rose up in the back and joined him. “I want my momma,” she was crying. “I want to go to my house.”
“Come sit up here with us,” Nora Jane said. “Come sit with Celeste and Donald and me. You better turn that radio off now,” she said to Madge. “It’s just scaring them. It’s not going to tell us anything we don’t already know.”
“I don’t want to come up there,” Lindsey cried, stuffing the towel into her mouth with her thumb, talking through a little hole that was all she had left for breath. She was crying, big tears were running down the front of her suit. Madge climbed out the window again and turned off the radio.
“You’re a big baby,” Celeste said to Lindsey. “You’re just crying to get attention.”
“Shut up, Celeste,” Madge said. “Please don’t say things to them.”
“I want to go to my house,” Donald said. “I want you to drive the car right now.”
“ALL RIGHT,” Nora Jane said. “NOW ALL OF YOU SHUT UP A MINUTE. I want you all to shut up and quit crying and listen to me. This is an emergency. When you have an emergency everybody has to stick together and act right. We can’t go anywhere right now. We have to wait to be rescued. So, if you’ll be quiet and act like big people I will sing to you. I happen to be a wonderful singer. Okay, you want me to sing? Well, do you?”
“I want you to,” Donald said, and cuddled closer.
“Me too,” Celeste said, and sat up very properly, getting ready to listen.
“I want you to,” Lindsey said, then closed her mouth down over her thumb. Starr and Alexander cuddled up against Madge. Then, for the first time since she had been in California, Nora Jane sang in public. She had been the despair of the sisters at the Academy of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus because she would never use her voice for the glory of God or stay after school and practice with the choir. All Nora Jane had ever used her voice for was to memorize phonograph albums in case there was a war and all the stereos were blown up.
Now, in honor of the emergency, she took out her miraculous voice and her wonderful memory and began to sing long-playing albums to the children. She sang Walt Disney and Jesus Christ Superstar and Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones and threw in some Broadway musicals for Madge’s benefit. She finished up with a wonderful song about a little boy named Christopher Robin going to watch the changing of the guards with his nanny. “They’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace. Christopher Robin went down with Alice.”
The children were entranced. When she stopped, they clapped their hands and yelled for more.
“I’ve never heard anyone sing like that in my whole life,” Madge said. “You should be on the stage.”
“I know,” Nora Jane said. “Everyone always says that.”
“Sing some more,” Donald said. “Sing about backwards land again.”
“Sing more,” Alexander said. It was the first time he had said a word since Nora Jane got in the car. “Sing more.”
“In a minute,” she said. “Let me catch my breath. I’m starving, aren’t you? I’ll tell you one thing, the minute we get off this bridge I’m going somewhere and get something to eat. I’m going to eat like a pig.”
“So am I,” Celeste said. “I’m going to eat like a pig, oink, oink.”
“I’m going to eat like a pig,” Donald said. “Oink, oink.”
“Oink, oink,” said Alexander in a small voice.
“Oink, oink,” said Starr.
“Oink, oink,” said Lindsey through her thumb.
“There’s a seagull,” Nora Jane said. “Look out there. They’re lighting on the bridge. That must mean it’s all right now. They only sit on safe places.”
“How do they know?” Celeste said. “How do they know which place is safe?”
“The whales tell them,” Nora Jane said. “They ask the whales.”
“How do the whales know?” Celeste insisted. “Who tells the whales? Whales can’t talk to seagulls.” Celeste was really a very questionable little girl to have around if you were pregnant. But Nora Jane was saved explaining whales because a man in a yellow slicker appeared on the edge of the bridge, climbing a ladder. He threw a leg over the railing and started toward the car. Another man was right behind him. “Here they come,” Alexander said. “They’re coming. Oink, oink, oink.”
“Here they come,” Celeste screamed at the top of her lungs. She climbed up on Nora Jane’s stomach and stuck her head out the window, yelling to the Coast Guard. “Here we are. Oink, oink. Here we are.”
What is that? Tammili Whittington wondered. She was the responsible one of the pair. Shark butting Momma’s stomach? Typhoon at sea? Tree on fire? Running from tiger? Someone standing on us? Hummmmmmmmmm, she decided and turned a fin into a hand, four fingers and a thumb.
Here they come, Nora Jane was thinking, moving Celeste’s feet to the side. Here come the rescuers. Hooray for everything. Hooray for my fellow men.
“Oh, my God,” Madge said, starting to cry. “Here they are. They’ve come to save us.”
“Oink, oink,” Celeste was screaming out the window. “Oink, oink, we’re over here. Come and save us. And hurry up because we’re hungry.”