“Don’t let Sandi run amuck.” Rachel brushed with a weary hand at a curl which promptly sprang back across her left eye.
My niece giggled, alert to the sound of an unfamiliar word, perhaps picturing mud pies and splashy puddles, and skipped down the walkway to the car.
“I’ll keep her on a tight leash,” I promised my sister.
Rachel nodded, patting her swollen stomach in the absent-minded manner of a woman coming to the end of her term, surprised afresh by her girth and yet, at the same time, reassured that the baby still moved within its dark, private place.
I could bear to watch no longer. “Stay off your feet while we’re gone. Rest, woman! That’s the whole point of this expedition.”
Tugging on the handle of the passenger door, Sandi’s dancing feet embodied the impatience of four years young with the tardiness of her elders. “Come on, Aunt Claire!”
My sister grasped my arm. “You all right? Not still brooding about—”
“I’m simply wondering what I’m going to feed the munchkin for lunch. That’s all that’s on my mind.” I forced a bright smile which wouldn’t have fooled Sandi and freed myself. “Got to run before she yanks the door off my car.”
Once we were on our way, Sandi chatted unself-consciously, her shrill, piping voice competing with the sounds of Saturday morning traffic until she discovered the radio scan button.
Vintage Motown, rock, rap, and country western, spurted out of the speakers until I switched off the radio. Realized that I preferred the discordant blare over treacle-thick silence.
Bored, my niece appropriated the sunglasses I’d placed on the dash after the sun disappeared behind a cloud.
Perching them on her snub nose, she demanded, “How do I look?”
Her pert tone and confidently uptilted chin proclaimed a conviction that she had been transformed into someone stunning and grown-up. The dark lenses dominated her features, concealing childishly rounded cheeks and huge brown eyes. Strangers frequently mistook Sandi for my own daughter on our frequent outings together. “How sweet! She has your eyes!”
Not today. Mine were red and swollen from crying; the glasses Sandi modeled had been useful earlier in disguising the puffiness when facing my sister.
“You look glamorous. Tres chic, mademoiselle!”
Sandi beamed and the glasses slipped off her nose and tumbled into her lap. I forced an answering smile, my shield of cheerful composure holed by pinpricks of pain.
But the release of tears must be denied until I was once more alone in my apartment, that cavern of loneliness haunted by angry voices and the ghost of a woman sobbing over a stained tablecloth and guttered candles. Party favors from an intimate supper turned into a dreadful parting repast.
“Stop wallowing in self-pity”, I chastised myself in disgust. “You’ll never be able to climb out of the mire if you continue to dwell on those memories...”
But Ken’s clipped voice overrode Sandi’s chirping song. “You’re an adult, Claire. I thought you always took precautions.”
Precautions? Instantly, I was back in the dining room chair facing Ken, the meal prepared with such tender anticipation churning in my stomach. My lover had chosen to accuse me of carelessness, his reaction peevish, as though I’d forgotten the mosquito repellant on a camping trip.
Candle flames cast unfriendly shadows across the cheekbones which my fingertips ached to caress. The food set on the neutral zone of the table which separated us had been prepared with love and nervous expectation. I’d left work three hours early to bake Ken’s favorite cherry dessert.
Reflected flames glowed in the eyes which locked onto mine like a target sight. I wondered briefly why I’d always regarded candlelight as romantic.
When Ken spoke again, his tone shifted to relief. “At least this isn’t a big deal.”
At my sharp, indrawn breath, he frowned in quick rebuke. “Unless you’re foolish enough to think about keeping it.”
I stiffened in involuntary protest of the pronoun. It? His casual tone might refer to a pencil rolled under the table or a quarter discovered on the sidewalk. Not our child. He was dismissing something forged on the white hot anvil of our love without a second thought.
“I didn’t want to consider adoption until we’d had a chance to talk about this—”
“Get rid of it. Now.” Ken’s voice was flat as the champagne in my glass.
I’d bought the champagne for a celebration, our celebration. My dinner companion raised his glass of wine and took a noisy sip, the omission of a toast deliberate and cruel. To us?
My mouth dried as the strong fingers which knew my pleasure zones so intimately gripped his glass in a stranglehold, betraying the tension he refused to allow into his voice.
I swallowed the lump formed from unshed tears. “What if I don’t?”
The slender stem of the glass snapped like a fragile bone and I recoiled from the sound. Ken moved his hand in an angry arc and the wine bottle he’d insisted on uncorking before dinner tipped over and passion red, blood red liquid flowed across my best linen tablecloth.
His temper escaped, mimicking the wine’s eager flight, spread out to engulf me. “We can’t put our lives on hold, Claire. Not when our relationship is based on freedom, the enjoyment of our sexuality—living life to the fullest! I refuse to be trapped into pushing a designer stroller around the mall.”
The bitter set of his mouth betrayed that this last hurtful thrust was intentional. We’d met at a shopping mall nearly six months earlier, exchanging names over fat, salty pretzels. He carried a shopping bag full of black socks with the aplomb of a diamond courier.
“I’m a fanatic about the quality of my socks.” Ken’s tongue flicked out to lick the salt from the dough’s yielding surface. “And my women.”
His smile was heart-stopping, darting into the inner core of my being and expanding until it left a void only his love-making could fill.
That smile was nowhere in evidence now and I resented his scornful reference to the site of our first meeting, a place that until tonight I still thought of as magical.
“This is our baby we’re discussing, not a bad spot in an apple to be dug out and thrown away!”
The candles sputtered in derisive response to my passion. Drops of wax burned like hot tears on the back of the hand I extended across the table to Ken.
“Touch me, darling,” I pleaded. “Hold me close again, tell me you love me. Tell me that everything will be all right.”
Instead, he pulled away, as if I’d jabbed him with my fork. “I can’t make love to a woman with a belly like a sack of potatoes. I don’t want a brat whining for attention. Make your choice, Claire. You can have the baby—or you can have me.”
* * * *
Once in the department store, Sandi had a difficult time choosing a toy. The visual testimony of my dilemma concealed again behind the dark glasses, I watched my niece sort through a selection of plastic balls.
“This one,” she said suddenly with the conviction of a mother hen picking out her chick form the scattered flock.
Her choice featured a design of floppy-eared puppies in a basket. As I made the proper appreciative comments, a woman pushing a stroller—a designer stroller—down the narrow aisle begged our pardon. We moved aside.
I caught myself patting the waistband of my shorts in an unconscious imitation of Rachel’s gesture and jerked my hand away as though the material had been threaded with red hot wires.
A nearby sign decorated with a tumbling clown pointed the way to the maternity clothes. A child hurried past bearing a golden-haired baby doll in her arms. To me, the air seemed suffocatingly thick. Cloying whiffs from the perfume counter mingled with the fresh, clean scent of the powder patted onto Sandi’s soft skin after her morning bath.
I couldn’t help my runaway thoughts. Yesterday, drained from hours of weeping, I had curled up in the closet which still contained an elusive hint of Ken’s cologne and reached a decision.
I wanted this baby. But without Ken, I would shrivel up like a plant denied the life-giving rays of the sun. He had been gone for less than two weeks and I already hated eating alone every night, dreaded facing the lonely expanse of the bed.
My lover’s ultimatum could be read in the jangling, hanger-filled emptiness of the closet, in his absence in the bed where we’d made what I thought was love every night.
I could see it in the absence of his shaving cream in the cabinet, and in three scribbled sentences on a note stuck to the refrigerator with a Huckleberry Hound magnet. “I want you, Claire. Just you. Call me if you want me.”
“I want you, Ken,” I whispered.
A tug on my hand brought me back to the present; I winced from the renewed assault of the kaleidoscopic displays and piped-in music on my strained nervous system.
“Let’s go to the park and play with my new ball,” Sandi suggested.
I’d promised to keep custody of my niece until at least five o’clock. Sandi, displaying the budding of exotic tastes, chose rum raisin from the flavor selection available in the frosted depths of the ice cream wagon parked in the shade of an ancient oak. After a few tentative licks, however, she proposed an exchange and I handed over my sensible strawberry cone.
The morning clouds had vanished and the sun beat down on my uncovered head. Black ants and lady bugs accepted the barrier of my sandal-clad feet as a detour through the grass. My legs were still slim, but I punished myself by picturing them puffy and blue-veined in the last stage of pregnancy.
Sand pranced up. After twenty minutes of energetic motion, the exposed flesh around the neckline of her sunsuit had turned bright pink and beads of perspiration darkened her hairline.
“Come sit with me,” I coaxed, moving into the shade.
She reluctantly collapsed onto the blanket I’d unearthed from the clutter of belongings in the trunk of my car and cradled the ball in her lap. Leaning against my shoulder, she began her favorite game, head tilted back to catch the first glimmer of a smile on my face.
“Honey, do you love me?”
The proper response came easily to my lips. “Honey, I love you, but I just can’t smile.”
She seemed pleased. Her small, quivering body generated the radiant heat of a furnace and I reached down to mop up the clear drops of perspiration that glimmered like crystal tears on her upturned face.
“Honey, do you love me?”
“Honey, I love you, but I just can’t smile.”
Again, “Honey, do you love me?”, this time injecting wistfulness into her tone while wrinkling her nose comically, a sun-pinked bunny sniffing a succulent lettuce leaf.
Her gaze was fixed on my mouth, her eyes alert for the smile that was the signal of victory and her cue to pounce for a free-for-all tickling assault.
“Honey, I love you—”
The remainder of the ritualistic reply stuck in my throat. I’d screamed the first part, those very words, at Ken’s back and had been answered by a door slam.
The sunglasses fell to the ground as I covered my face and wept, only dimly aware of Sandi’s hands clutching my elbow in distress.
“Aunt Claire, don’t cry! Don’t cry! We don’t have to play!”
I tried to look at her through burning, streaming eyes. Instead of her piquant features, however, I saw the eyes of my unborn babe staring imploringly back at me.
Ken or the unseen child? Choosing the baby meant being forever denied Ken’s caress, never again sipping coffee together while bathed in morning sunshine with the Sunday papers scattered across a bed rumpled from making love. Doing without Ken meant raising a child alone and pushing that designer stroller on solitary walks.
My heart was a stone, calcified in the moment of betrayal, of coming home to find no evidence that the man had ever inhabited my life except for the faint scent of cologne and his seed growing within me...
Sandi patted my shoulder with tender concern. “Aunt Claire, did you hurted yourself?”
I had loved and lost. I’d offered up my vulnerable soul for repudiation. I wiped at the tears with a corner of the blanket. “Yes, darling, I did.”
“When I fell down yesterday, Mommy kissed my sore knee and made it better.”
We stared at each other, aunt and niece. Supplicant and wise woman. The wind rustled the leaves of nearby trees, providing faint applause to the solemn, dramatic climax of the scene.
“Some hurts are too deep for kisses, Sandi,” I managed at last. “But a loving kiss always helps.”
She scrambled to her knees and kissed my damp cheek with a zestful smack. Giggled. “You taste salty, like a pretzel.”
Greek tragedy followed by a stand-up comic routine. The ending of a relationship begun over a pretzel had been sealed by a pretzel kiss. My lips shaped a feeble grin at the irony.
“You smiled! I win!”
Sandi tossed her ball into the air, sparking a wild game of soccer in which three other children and a cocker spaniel joined in. Watching the exuberant participants with envy, I longed for the ability to enter Sandi’s protected world, where a smile meant security and kisses healed all wounds.
If I closed my eyes, I could imagine Ken’s arms around me. But he couldn’t—wouldn’t—make love to a woman with a belly like a sack of potatoes.
A robin stalked past on fragile legs. I reflected on how the males of the animal world often deserted their mates during gestation. Honoring no commitment, they choose instead to live without responsibility while the female raises the young alone, defends her offspring with tooth and claw.
Although I still ached to feel Ken’s fingers entwined in my hair and nibble his skin again, the memory of that slammed door echoed in my head.
What if instead of pregnancy temporarily reshaping my body, an accident permanently scarred my face? Or my breasts—which Ken called “my beauties” and fondled like precious gems—were invaded by cancer cells? Would he pack his bags for departure while I lay helpless in a hospital bed?
A tune ran through my head, a ditty chanted when I was a child. Looking back, that singer had been breathtaking in her naiveté. Love and marriage don’t always go together like a horse and carriage. Without commitment, infatuation burns at passion’s white hot, fever pitch but when the inevitable cooling takes place, nothing lasting has been forged. Only ashes remain, dead, gray ashes.
I had never played Sandi’s game with Ken. Honey, do you love me? Yes, honey, I love you, but only on my terms...
The taste of ashes filled my mouth. Bitter, charred, dead. My relationship with Ken had existed only on a mundane physical plane; the spiritual heights of ecstasy had been attained only in my imagination.
Sandi squealed. The ball skimmed across the grass, leaving no permanent track or evidence of its passage.
“Let’s go home and help your mom fix dinner.”
On the way back to the car, I carried the blanket and Sandi clutched the carryall. She walked sedately by my side, the reclaimed, oversized sunglasses sliding down her nose, giving my little waif the jaunty air of a child starlet on an outing with her nanny.
A bed of tulips caught her hopscotch attention and she rushed over to examine the blossoms just beginning to unfold, their furled petals concealing the mystery of color.
“Can I pick one of these for Mommy?” Sandy asked, a chubby finger stroking a tightly curled bud.
I crouched, too, the breeze ruffling my hair, and faced the knowledge that the hollowness within me came not from Ken’s rejection, but from my futile desire to reclaim that which was irrevocably lost.
Ken made his decision. I must make mine.
My heart gave a funny little leap, like a lamb in springtime, and I kissed my niece’s flushed cheek. “The flower will bloom and become beautiful for everyone to enjoy if you let it grow, Sandi. Such things only get better with time.”
Behind us, the robin rose into the air with the promise of new life in the beat of its wings.
THE END