Second Place Fiction Prize
by Mary M. Bartek
It started with a phone call from Allyson on a weekday evening. Strange. She doesn’t call often, not even on Saturdays when it’s cheaper. And usually her calls come when I’m due to send a check. Sometimes they come right after. A little money is a good reminder that not everybody can just waltz out East to graduate school. Of course, technically, it’s her dead father’s money that’s paying her bills. Leroy, my ex-, wasn’t much in the way of either husband or father. However, he did have the good grace to keep paying his insurance the whole time his liver was dying. I appreciate that.
But this call came nowhere near check time, not before or after. And right away Allyson sounded different, not all confident and worldly-wise like she usually does. I know she dresses like other girls her age, but when we talk on the phone, I always picture her in a business suit- gray or something, with matching shoes. Sometimes even with a briefcase.
In spite of what I perceived to be a strain in her voice, there seemed to be no reason for her call. After chatting a while, I got impatient. “So,” I said, “what’s on your mind?”
“I can’t call just to call?” Allyson said, defensive right away as always. We might both speak English, but somehow my best-intentioned words always sound like some nasty language to her ears.
“Sure you can,” I say. I bite my tongue so as not to add, “But you never do.”
“Well, I guess I do have something to tell you,” she said, still sounding a little snippy and matter-of-fact. “I’m pregnant.”
I’d dreaded hearing those words from her since she was fifteen. Getting pregnant was like the plague among the girls she went to high school with, a disease that one girl caught, then a bunch of others would catch. Allyson turned out to be immune to it while she lived here, thank God, mostly because she had these grandiose ideas about wanting an education. So why in heaven’s name did this happen now?
“So,” I asked, trying to be modern and not get hysterical, “what do you plan to do? You didn’t call to say you’re getting married, did you?”
Wrong thing to say. So much for trying to be modern.
“No, Mother,” she said, “I am not getting married.” I’m guessing she had to wipe her phone dry after the way she said “not.”
“What are you going to do then?” I asked.
“I’m going to carry this child, then I’m going to give it up for adoption,” she said. “I just thought you should know.”
I was stuck for an answer again. I knew enough not to say, “Congratulations,” and I wasn’t sure how she’d react to, “I’m sorry.”
I guess I paused too long because she said, “OK, then. As I said, I thought you should know. I’ll talk to you again soon.” And hung up.
I sat there for a minute. The phone was in one hand. The other hand was cradled over my stomach like I was the one who had something in there.
The call from Allyson was such a lousy thing that I almost forgot I was already upset. My best girlfriend Joann and I were planning to leave town for a long weekend. It’s not the kind of thing we generally do, and it was only going to work this time because we both whined at our jobs until we got a Friday and a Monday off. My cousin Patsy was going to let us stay on the pullout sofa in her family’s basement, so the trip wasn’t going to cost much. Just us two girls for the weekend, we had been saying for weeks. How wild and crazy. But Joann called Tuesday to say she was leaving town right away. Her mother was sick, maybe dying this time. Even though Joann has spent all of her last two years’ vacation time showing up whenever her mother might die, she was gone again without a backward glance. I still had Friday and Monday off and, while I’m not that crazy about my cousin Patsy or her family, I figured, “What the hell,” and took off alone.
I had some time to think about things, mostly Allyson, while I was away. What if she decided that she really did want this baby and it was too late after she put it up for adoption? What if this was the only child that my brainy─though rather careless─daughter would ever bear? As I considered Allyson and motherhood, I had to admit that the two images didn’t blend real well. I, for one, had not been ready to be a mother at her age, although I became one. That got me to thinking what a better mother I would have been if I knew then what I know now. Maybe this baby was a way for me to get it right, a second chance to make good in the world.
I came home from that weekend thinking less about Allyson’s problem, and more about my future and her child.
There wasn’t much small talk leading up to my big announcement when I called Allyson the day I got back. “I’ve been thinking about it real hard,” I told her. “I could bring up the baby instead of giving it to a stranger.”
“I can’t ask you to do that,” Allyson said. “This baby is my problem, not yours.”
My daughter was never easy to have an argument with. That is, she was never easy to win an argument with. Since she left home, it’s that much harder. But I gave it my best shot.
“Your dad left me a little money, too, you know,” I said. Of course, if she knew how little, this statement wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans. “I could take off work for a while. Taking care of a child would be good for me.”
“I’m not sure I’ll want a relationship with the baby,” she said. “It would be better just to sever ties from the start.”
“It would be up to you how much you’d see the child,” I said. “I can take care of a baby myself, in case you don’t remember.”
We went back and forth like that for quite some time, racking up a hell of a long distance bill. But after a while, I could tell that she was coming around to my way of thinking. “It’s still a long way off, Mom, but I guess it’s a possibility.”
When I hung up, there was my hand, resting on my belly again.
***
It’s hard to explain why I chose not to let Joann in on my secret. We’re best friends, as I said, and we are not in the habit of lying to one another. If I buy a blouse on sale and ask her if it’s too revealing for a decent 44-year-old woman to wear, she’ll be honest with me. “How decent does this particular 44-year-old woman want to look?” she asked me the last time, smiling. “Are we talking school marm or barmaid?” She can say stuff like that and get away with it.
But somehow, in the weeks it took until she got back from her mother’s (No, she didn’t die, but she did have a minor stroke this time), my idea about the baby was so fixed in my head, it didn’t feel like I was making something up, not even to Joann.
We were sitting on my porch and I was listening to her talk about her mother and how one minute she seemed really and truly ill, but the next she was just being a pain like always. Joann had been doing most of the talking, so she was the first one thirsty. She stood up and said, “I’m going to grab myself a beer. You want one?”
And that’s when I said it. Just as straightforward and honest as if it were the truth, I said, “I can’t drink beer any more.” She just looked at me. It’s not like we’re a couple of lushes or something, but a beer in the evening a couple of times a week is our routine. “I’m pregnant,” I said.
Joann forgot all about the beer and dropped to the porch chair, lucky to have it under her.
“Since when?” she asked. “With who?”
“Since you didn’t go away with me for the weekend, that’s when,” I told her. “You know how we planned to let our hair down when we got there. Well,” and I admit, I almost giggled when I said this, “I let it down enough for both of us.”
Joann sat still as a stone for a second, then leapt up off the chair as if she suddenly remembered it was hot. Throwing her arms around me she said, “Mary Ann, are you all right?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling oddly calm in the midst of this very big lie. “I feel fine,” I said, and it was true.
If, in your mid-forties, you ever decide to pretend you’re pregnant, I’m betting it will be just as simple for you as it was for me. After all, who doesn’t have just a bit of a pooch in the belly at our age? Calling Ally occasionally kept me up with what was going on with her pregnancy when I needed a reminder. For instance, I remember as plain as if it were yesterday that feeling of butterflies in my lower belly, but I couldn’t remember how early it came. ‘Quickening,’ they call it. When I was pregnant with Ally, it was the end of denial and the beginning of trying to think like a mother. Up until that time, I had told myself that a couple of missed periods and a positive pregnancy test could be chalked up to God trying to scare me into not having sex any more with Leroy, a man who clearly was not cut out to be a father. But once the little flutters started, I grew up in a hurry. Leroy wasn’t an ideal choice, but he was the one who got himself elected to the job. I tried to make the best of it for quite a few years.
With legitimate plans for a new arrival, I found myself in the aisles at
Wal-Mart so often they should have been paying me. I felt a little cheated that you could buy such nicer things now than they had when I had been pregnant – baby things and mom-to-be, too. I tried not to go too crazy buying maternity clothes, but I spent a long time studying them. The jeans that snapped bigger as the Mom’s belly grew were one item I did buy. I figured I could wear them from now on until the baby came to live with me.
I admit I did feel guilty deceiving Joann as my “pregnancy” progressed. I had to sew my bellies myself, expanding them every few weeks. It helped that maternity clothes tend to be loose, but I still had to lie more than I wanted to. For one thing, I had to make up this huge lie about how the only really weird symptom I had during this pregnancy was that it bothered me to be touched. That kept Joann from trying to stroke my expanding waistline or from giving me a hug. I also told her that I was seeing an obstetrician in the next town, someone who was supposed to be good with the kinds of risks an older woman’s pregnancy might create. The appointment times I made up were at times when Joann was at work so she never had the chance to volunteer to come along.
Allyson, meanwhile, sounded a little better than usual when she called, though that was no more often than before. Her body was stretching in interesting ways, she reported, and it was sort of fun to watch. Better yet, she had met someone. Roger. Of course, she didn’t think this was “the one.” There was no such thing, she reminded me. But he was nice, and he was making this time easier for her than it might have been.
“It won’t be long now,” I told her. “You bring the baby here as soon as you’re ready.”
“We’ll have to wait and see, Mom,” she said.
“It will be fine,” I told her. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
In the last few weeks, I reveled in the inconvenience of my cumbersome body. Lowering myself to a chair bottom first became the natural thing to do once again. In that ninth month, I imagined that my ankles were swelling. Of course, they might just have come along for the ride with the rest of my body. Sitting with my feet up, fanning myself with a magazine and eating potato chips had become my favorite pastime. The new white crib and yellow-checked layette were ready. I was ready. All I needed now was for the phone to ring.
It was a few days after Allyson’s due date when the phone finally did ring. First babies come when they want to, the wives’ tale says, so I wasn’t worried. I guess I should have been.
“Hello, Mom,” I heard Allyson say over the phone one Saturday morning. “I just wanted to let you know it’s over.”
My heart did its own butterfly dance. “You’ve had the baby?” I asked. My eyes were already getting teary. “When can you bring her?”
“It was a boy,” she said, “but that’s what I wanted to talk with you about.” She paused for a minute, then started again. “Roger and I decided it would be better if the baby were adopted by a couple. They could make a real family. You wouldn’t have to be so inconvenienced. Besides,” she added, “I don’t think I could have stood it, knowing that my baby was with you, but not knowing if I wanted to be its mother.”
“But Allyson,” I said, panic making it hard to get the words out, “I want the baby. I want to raise him as my own.”
“That’s not possible, Mom,” she said, in a voice that put her back in the business suit and matching shoes. “I had the baby a week ago. The papers have been signed. The baby is with his new parents now.”
I don’t know what else either of us said, but, once again, as I hung up, my arm was wound tightly around my middle.
It’s a widely known fact that older mothers have more difficulties in their pregnancies, and so Joann was sorry for me, but probably not surprised, when I told her that I lost the baby. Already, she’s asked me how much longer I think I’ll be bedridden. In truth, I can’t even begin to guess.
The pain of this loss is huge, I tell her. And that’s no lie.