“Oh,” her mother said, deflating into the sofa cushions, a hand over her mouth. “Oh, oh, oh.”
“WHAT?” her father said. He was a tall, good-natured man with a heart condition, who spoke very loudly and was a little bit deaf. He’d been an artilleryman, when he was young, in the war.
“THEY’RE MARRIED, IKE,” Olivia’s mother said loudly back to him.
It took a moment to register. He stood there vacantly, looking at her, then cast an embarrassed glance at us before jamming his hands into his trouser pockets.
“Well,” he said softly, “no use crying over spilt milk.”
THEN WE WENT TO my parents’ house. My mother was at the kitchen table, in a very good mood, nibbling peanut brittle. My father was in the back bedroom, reading a magazine. The kitchen opened up to the den, and Olivia sat in there on the couch, her knees pressed together in terror.
I sat down opposite my mother at the table, under the bright bulb of the hanging lamp. I didn’t want to go through with it. But it was too late for that.
“I have to tell you something,” I said.
Her nibbling slowed. She could tell something was wrong.
“Olivia and I got married,” I said. I said it quietly. So quietly that Olivia and my younger brother, Mike, sitting on the sofa on the other side of the den, couldn’t hear it. Of course, Olivia knew what I was saying. She sat there and stared into something only she could see. I said to my mother, “We went over to Livingston and did it this afternoon.”
She said nothing for a moment, unable to swallow the brittle in her mouth. When she finally could, she whispered, “Is she pregnant?”
It was awful to look at her eyes just then. A sudden grief had filled them, laced with a terrible dread, a horror, really, as if I’d just told her that one of us, one of her children, had died.
I nodded.
She got up from the table and walked to the back of the house. I looked over at Olivia. She had closed her eyes and grabbed on to my little brother’s hand. He looked confused but not displeased to have Olivia holding his hand.
In a minute, as I was pacing in the living room, my father came in and asked me if what my mother had just told him was true. I nodded.
He didn’t say anything, looking as if he couldn’t comprehend it.
“What are you going to do?” he said.
“We have a place, an apartment over by East Mississippi,” I said. It’s what everyone called the asylum. “We’re going on over there, I guess.”
“How far along is she?”
“About five months, we think.”
“Damn,” he said. He shook his head, jingled the coins in his pocket. “Well, go on over there, then,” he said. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I have to go see about your mother. I think this is about to kill her.”
Olivia and I drove to our little apartment, mounted the rickety steps to the deck, and went inside. I turned on the big, chuffing fan, to pull out the stifling air. We sat down on the sofa, nothing but the engulfing huff of the fan for sound, the hot breeze searing our skin, beneath the bare bulb of the overhead light.
THE BARE BULB LIGHT was so harsh, I lit candles instead and set them on the coffee table. Olivia had brought over her old cat, Max, and he rubbed against my leg, hungry. I fed him, and checked the seedcake in the cage of her parakeet, Donald, who whistled and made as if to bite my finger. She’d left her pet rabbit, an old Easter gift, with her parents, because she’d never liked it, with its weird red eyes and bland personality. I think she felt guilty about it, though. I’d told her to leave them all, afraid the heat in the place would kill them during the day, but she couldn’t.
She’d been sitting on the sofa, that slightly stunned and day-dreamy look on her face I loved so much, and I’d taken heart. But then she seemed to come to, got up from the sofa, and began pacing up and down the little hallway from the living room to the bedroom and back. She took off her Keds and walked barefoot on her longish narrow feet, with the pretty toes I liked to roll between my fingers and call them her peanuts. She was crying quietly. At first I couldn’t tell. The place was so hot, before the fan had a chance to help out a bit, that we’d started sweating the moment we walked in, my T-shirt and Olivia’s peasant smock blotched with dampness, and our faces shone with perspiration. When I saw she was crying, I held her for a minute, but it was still too hot for that. I got her to sit at the kitchen table in front of the dormer window there for the breeze. I brought one of the candles in from the living room and set it beside the fridge, on the counter away from the window so it wouldn’t blow out.
There wasn’t much to eat, but there was a fat ripe tomato on the counter, and a new unopened jar of mayonnaise, and a loaf of white bread. I tore off a square of paper towel for a plate and made each of us a tomato sandwich, and got two beers from the fridge, all the while keeping an eye on Olivia to see if she was cheering up at all. We ate the sandwiches and sipped the beers, not talking. Olivia was still sniffling a little bit but she was coming around. When we’d eaten, I took her by the hand and led her to the living room, and put a record on our little record player, some easy stuff. Maybe it wasn’t the best choice. It was by that singer, Melanie, and when she sang “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” Olivia started sniffling again. I was holding on to her and shuffling us around in the old Teen Center slow dance, and she dug her chin into my collarbone and started to bawl.
“This isn’t what I wanted,” she said between sobs. “I wanted to go to college. I wanted to date lots of boys. I wanted to graduate and marry somebody successful and live in a big two-story house and have lots of children but not like this, and not in a shitty old attic that’s hot as an oven, and not even graduate from high school. And poor.” She punctuated her sentences with little bops of her fist against my other shoulder.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” she said, as if accusing.
“I do love you, though,” I said.
She drew in a big slow breath and let it out, still leaning against me.
“Oh, God,” she said. Then, “God, please forgive me.”
I said, “God doesn’t mind people having babies.”
“This isn’t funny,” she said, crying again.
“I mean it,” I said.
“Just stop.”
I shuffled us around for a minute, while she settled down.
“Well, wait and see,” I said. “I’m going to work hard, and build us a beautiful house — it’ll be like a mansion, to us anyway — and we’ll have beautiful children, starting with this one, and they’ll be so beautiful that people will hardly even recognize them as ordinary human beings, like a whole new amazingly beautiful and intelligent subspecies or something. Coltranians. Like you. And we’ll have dogs, and horses. A couple of fat, arrogant cats. And I’ll drive a cool Ford pickup, a good, solid, settled-down man, and you’ll have something like a Mercedes station wagon to haul around all the kids in style. And we’ll have a boat, if you want, and take it to the reservoir, and ski, and maybe even build a cabin beside my grandmother’s little lake up in the country, looking out over the water.”
Olivia gave a quietly derisive snort when I was done, but I could tell she was lightening up.
I said, “We’ve got all the time in the world. Look how young we are. Look how much time we have to try to get all the things we want.” I stepped back so I could look at her.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said.
She nodded, looked at me for a moment, then looked down again.
“Okay,” she said. The tears were there again, but quiet ones. They were tears of sadness, I thought, instead of fear. That was better, I hoped.