Country Feedback
May 2008
It's 1982 and I am six months pregnant. It's July, a hot one at that, and I have lost my ability to process heat. I have taken to wearing nothing but my maternity underwear and Dan's t-shirts, anything huge and cotton. On top of a wood stand against the pale green wall a TV with a rabbit ear antenna is turned on to the noon newscast and an eternally blond, tan anchorman is reminding us of record temperatures in the low nineties and saying that the drought will not break this week. It is only Wednesday and I resent him for this news. Rain would be welcome and I think that I would sit on the rickety wooden stairway that leads to our second floor apartment and allow it to drench me to the bone. Instead I have to contend with perching on the kitchen chair, its plastic upholstery sticking to my bare thighs, and leaning towards a box fan I have placed on the red kitchen table. I close my eyes and listen to the rest of the newscast then to the soap operas, and I can almost feel my body growing bigger, more taut, and its borders less distinguishable.
Dan comes home fifteen minutes after three, and I suddenly realize that I haven't brushed my teeth or my hair yet today. He still comes over to me, without a word, and kisses me on the mouth. I'm extremely aware of the texture of my teeth, the sweat on my upper lip, and my smell which is thick, salty. As he kisses me he puts his hands on my neck and this causes the necklace on which I wear my wedding ring to move under the t-shirt and the gold band hits my breasts softly. I had to take the ring off my hand when the heat wave began and my fingers swelled, so I only wore it for about two weeks and never got used to its sensation on my hand. I don't know if it will fit after the baby comes.
When I was younger I used to fantasize about getting married. It wasn't the wedding so much as buying a house and fixing it up with my fiancé that dominated my thoughts. I imagined the trips to the hardware store, heated debates about paint color and the style of handles for the cupboard doors, and long evenings spent in each other's arms discussing where we would buy the couch from- if we even wanted a couch when we could just have a loveseat sitting across from the fireplace. I saw us there, painting a kitchen (light blues and sunshine yellow), dressed in old t-shirts and I'm wearing white overalls that are just saturated in paint. We are playful and silly, knowing that we are about to embark on the most adult thing we could even imagine, and a paint fight breaks out. His arms end up around me and the sunshine is overwhelming and he kisses me and I'm certain that this happiness will last us all of our lives.
When Dan and I got married there was no new house. I moved into his apartment above the pizza place. It was decorated by his last girlfriend, a woman named Bethany who left him when she decided to try her luck modeling and acting somewhere out west. She eventually found out that anything over twenty-five was used-up and ugly to the men she auditioned for and the small town charm she thought she could get by on is something that is only present in characters on TV, those women being played by LA natives. I could have told her that from my own attempts at being something brighter and bigger than this hunk of small-town flesh, but she was gone before I came into the picture. Last anyone heard she was waiting tables in Nevada, and I wish her well. It'd be nice if someone got out of here whole and made something of their lives. Anyway, Bethany painted these walls- she was a fan of greens and beiges- and as a result I feel like an intruder on someone else's life. I stare at the walls, look at the holes that have yet to be filled in and painted over left behind from photographs and paintings that she took with her. I wonder how she decorated and what she looked like. She was a few years ahead of me in school, so I can't place a face to her name.
There is little to no hope for a big romantic wedding when you are planning said wedding only after finding out that you are pregnant by a man that you had only been seeing for a few months. Instead there are simply a lot of mothers yelling and fathers giving you cold, disappointed looks. You don't wear a big white gown to the courthouse. No one throws rice and there is no champagne. There is no first dance at the reception. Even though we are all aware that no one seems to wait for their wedding night anymore (at least none of my friends, most of which didn't wait until the end of high school even) there is always a hint of purity and innocence in weddings. Not ours.
We got married at the courthouse on the very last day of June, a Wednesday. Dan wore jeans and a blue button-up, collared, short-sleeved shirt, his go-to dress shirt that he also wore to our first date and under a sports coat at his grandfather's funeral that spring. I wore a maternity summer dress, light pink with flowers, that fell to my knees. My cousin Lyn and her husband Jeff witnessed, and the extent of our post-wedding celebration was a modest meal at a ten-dollar-a-plate restaurant one town over. It was at the dinner, picking at my chicken breast, the only thing on the menu that didn't sound disgusting to my newly picky stomach, that I realized how quickly my life had changed course and that I was now stuck in Orleans, Indiana. I felt small and angry and made of stone, and I ate my chicken slowly and quietly, only nodding in agreement when I had to- Lyn was telling me how happy I was going to be and how the fuss our families were making would blow over as soon as the baby arrived, all pink and wrinkled.
You should know that I figured I would get out. I never had a clear plan as to how, but I just figured I would. Melissa Ross was headed somewhere and was going to be something. I felt this in the pit of my guts when since I was in high school, since I played Emily in Our Town. I even headed north to Chicago, but money runs out quick there, so I came home and lived with my parents for a while. Now I realize that every small town has a high school, every small town high school puts on Our Town because it's a cheap play with no props that everyone feels real sentimental about, and probably just about every girl that plays Emily thinks that she can make it. But there is not an Audrey Hepburn from every town in American- there is just one. And Melissa Ross, who thought that her dark hair and eyes and her pale skin would land her in movies alongside Richard Burton, is now Melissa Reynolds, a pregnant twenty-three year old who lives in the same small town she was born in, waits on tables at the same dinner she had her first dates in, and is having the baby of a man she hasn't even thought about loving yet.
With his entrance into the house packing and cleaning and preparing begins- a surprise trip has been announced, a very belated honeymoon. Dan thought it would get me out of the slump that I have found myself laying idly within in the time since I took his last name. I pack the only clothes I can fit in- overalls, t-shirts, and leggings. Lyn has told me that when the baby is hastening near that I'll get impulses to run all over the house with bleach and ammonia and get down on my knees scrubbing every inch of the kitchen floor, but even now, with three months to go still, simple chores like folding laundry and making the bed seem impossible. The extra weight now adds up to twenty-five pounds, and when I visit the grim faced gynecologist once a month, a trip that takes me nearly an hour, he looks at me as soon as he enters the room, stares at my ever expanding gut, and shakes his head slowly.
"You'll never lose all the baby weight if you keep gaining so much each month," he'll say before the nurse even leads me to the scale. Sometimes I hear this voice in the back of my head when I shop for groceries. I would pass up the ice cream for frozen yogurt but no matter how I eat the pounds add up, and I have taken to indifference. I almost hope I gain so much weight that I'll never resemble my pre-pregnancy body. I can still see the old me staring out when I look in the mirror, although the spark of hope and vitality is draining from my eyes. I have yet to see the glow that people talk about.
Our honeymoon trip begins with driving through the plains, over flat land to the soundtrack of a cassette tape carefully mixed by Dan. The sun is setting, the windows are down, and ecstatic for a long weekend spent in his car and motel rooms, he is talking about plans for his business, a tiny local grocery store, expansion of the frozen foods section and the possibility and logistics of a deli counter. Dan's voice is rising over the chords and clapping of "Jack and Diane" and I am staring at the clouds, pink, expansive, and lit from behind, with no trees, mountains or buildings to obscure their view. They look so solid that if I flipped the horizon upside down I could dig into the heavens and walk up to God and ask him to give me strength. Praying hasn't helped before and although I feel that it would be futile, I close my eyes as I imagine my body before the Lord, my feet on clouds that feel solid as marble, my skin warm as if I was standing before a fireplace. I can't quite make out God's face because my eyes are full of tears and I am pleading with him to tell me what to do with this child and with marriage. The baby kicks and the horizon flips. I am thrown from the clouds and am sitting in Dan's Ford Falcon again. It is the color of toothpaste, old, and there is a bit of rust on its doors. Because God did not have a chance to answer before I fell from the heavens into the cloth seats I dig through my skull and search for an answer myself.
When I place my hands on my stomach I can feel the baby with my fingertips. Sometimes with the more aggressive kicks you can see lumps, like a tumor moving and swelling in my guts. I try to see Dan's blond hair on a little girl playing quietly in a sandbox, digging in the sand with a bright red shovel, the sky lit intensely and the colors bright and primary, or a little boy with his large brown eyes and his freckles humming to himself while he colors with crayons. It is a failed attempt because as soon as the image is clear for just a second, it dissolves in my mind and all I can see is myself as a child, a mess of brown hair and crooked teeth jumping in mud and tormenting the girl next door who I always thought was prettier and sweeter than me and I was unsure whether I should kiss her or hit her as a reaction to that.
Dan asks what I am thinking and I want to ask him what you are supposed to do when you can see the movements of your child and you can't envision yourself raising it? Our town is too small to leave it on a doorstep without everyone knowing it was me. Twenty-three year old women with husbands and money don't give babies up for adoption and I can't even jump off a building because none in our town are big enough to do anything but make me lose the baby and become the villain of the town for the rest of my life- and judging by the gossip handed down to me from my parents, for a few generations to come. I bite my tongue, a task I have become very good at as my stomach has grown. I tell him that I am thinking of how beautiful our car must be to any outside observers in houses and stores fronts along the road, a streaking turquoise blur against the pink sky. He places his hand on the thigh of my denim maternity overalls and rolls his head over to me, to assure me for the fiftieth time today that he loves me very much and that he is so happy to be starting a family with me. I mummer my agreement and stare out into the sky, hoping that soon God delivers an answer or a rainfall.
It has always struck me as odd how the secular fall back on God when asking the big questions, but never call on Him in the day to day. They don't whisper thanks when the sun rises and they don't wonder over Him as they wash their dishes on happy, uneventful days. And I always had thought that as a girl raised on churches and cartoons by backsliding Christians who fought over what TV shows to watch over microwave dinners, that I had disconnected myself as much as possible from the concept of God, that I never would turn into the kind of person who cried in their bed and asked Why? to Him. Pregnancy has changed more than my marital status and my dress size, it seems. The shame wells up in my guts when I realize that I have become the kind of person who blames and begs a God that she does not believe in on sunny days when she comes face to face with a hard reality in her life. My stomach, being full as it is with new life, does not need this extra weight.
Dan is thirty-one years old and he is not the kind of man who struggles with God while he drives down the road. He is very much the kind of man who dresses in the morning while humming, who works contentedly, who owns three pairs of pants that he rotates steadily, and who loves decidedly. He is the kind of man that spends his Saturdays digging in the garden and flirts with waitresses. He is the kind of man that is aware of the outside world but needs nothing more than what lays within the borders of Orleans. He lays his head on his pillow contentedly and falls asleep quickly, his hand on my stomach, and he sleeps solidly till six in the morning. He dresses and hums to the radio and leaves for work while I lay sick and heavy in the bed, making the mattress bow a bit under my weight, holding covers to my face and smelling them, soaking in their scent of laundry detergent, sex, and sweat.
Our destination is Norfolk where Dan had lived for a while when his father was young and in the Navy. This is the city where Dan watched his parents be young and in love and where his visions of love and marriage grew out of, and he wants to bring me here to complete a circle that he believes that our marriage and the bump in my stomach are completing. I'm simply excited to wade in the water surrounding the city and let my body escape the microwave weather I have been stuck in. I close my eyes sometimes and have visions of jumping off a cliff of rocks into cool water and letting it envelope me wholly, taking me in and rescuing me, in a very prodigal daughter of a Baptist family sense.
I get my chance quickly. We drive to Virginia Beach on the first morning, and I wade in the water in my shorts and a t-shirt. I wondered for a moment if my underwear matched closely enough for me to pass them off as a bathing suit, but I had figured that the sight of my big stomach would be a beacon to eyes that I didn't want to draw to us. Dan insisted to swim with me, and holds my hand as the water hits the edge of his cut off jeans and I navigate the pebbled bottom of the water, my toes carefully finding their grounding. When my stomach is fully engulfed by the water I stand still, and I remain this way for a while- still and facing the beach, watching children run and around, splashing, jumping and digging in the sand and their parents lounging, talking and kissing. Dan wraps his arms around me, and I turn around to embrace him. My head is ringing with the sound of laughter and I bury my head against his chest and listen to the steady thudding of his heart. I look up and study his face, the sturdiness of his jaw and the way the freckles have been thrown across his nose. Dan pulls my face close to his with his hands and before I close my eyes I just notice that the clouds I saw last night are thick and dark all of a sudden. Dan's lips cover mine and as I feel the pressure of them and the warmth of his tongue, as I feel the coolness of the water on my claves, as I hear the noise of families retreating from the beach, I start to imagine us as one of those families, one of many, a house on the road that is driven past, two people growing old and watching their children chase the dreams that we had already chased, lived, and surrendered. The image isn't as clear as the visions of my future that I had dreamt of as a teenager or as a child, but it is there and, at this moment at least, it does not frighten me. The rain starts quickly and softly and I feel the raindrops hitting me on the shoulders like hundreds of little kisses.
Copyright 2008 Jessa Marsh
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