I was rustling in the drawer next to the sink for tape. Mama wanted tape to fasten the note on the baby. It was dark and I could see Al’s head and shoulders against the bright windshield when the van slowed. I grabbed the sink edge to balance as we pulled off into popping gravel. Al doused the lights.
“Oly, is your mama ready?” His voice was close to me.
“Just about, Papa.”
“Tell her to be quick. We don’t want to stop for more than one minute and I’m going to make just one pass through town, so we’ve got to spot the place and decide fast. Tell her.”
I had the roll of tape in my fist. I shut the drawer and headed for the crack of light showing at the edge of the sliding door to Mama’s room at the end of the van.
She was sitting on the bed with the baby’s cardboard box beside her. She looked up at me as I whispered Papa’s message. She nodded and reached out a red-gloved hand for the tape. We were moving again. She tore off tape and neatly plastered the note to the flap of the box. Tears ran quietly down her cheeks. There was a crackle from the paper in the box. The baby was moving slightly. Mama’s eyebrows peaked in a tent above her nose as she looked at me through her red eyes.
“He might wake,” she whispered wetly. “He’s been asleep almost three hours. He’ll be hungry.” Her voice squeaked out through the whisper. “Tell Papa we have to wait till I can feed him. Tell him to park somewhere.” A push in her eyes sent me back, feeling my way toward the cockpit, with tears coming out of my own eyes. As I reached for the support bar behind Papa, the van reeled beneath me and we were turning right beneath a streetlight into the purple shadows of a three-island, twelve-pump gas station with its “CLOSED — open again 6 A.M.” sign large and pale in the window of the office. On the wall of the office, a tire with a clock in its center hung numbly, with one hand drooping to 12:35.
“Papa,” I started to say, as he lurched up from the seat and swung toward me.
“Gangway, Oly,” he snapped as he pushed past me, a wave of heat and cigar smoke and father flesh moving away toward the open door of the bedroom. Arty smiled at me from the passenger seat. He reared his head back, baring his teeth to show me his excitement.
“No, Al!” came Lil’s voice from the bedroom.
“Quick, Lil, get a move on!” and I could see Papa bending over the visible corner of the big bed, reaching.
“Al, I’ve got to feed him! He’s awake!”
But Papa was pulling and the cardboard box slid toward him with Mama’s long red gloves attached to it.
“Lily, there isn’t time!”
A thin, monotonous siren wailed from the box as Al lifted it and the reaching red gloves towed Mama along in her limp robe. Papa came through the door toward us and put the box down on the floor next to the side door as Mama rushed behind him, with the light from the bedroom door shining through her pale hair. Papa opened the side door and peered out, and Mama hit the light switch as she leaned over the box. Her pink robe and red-gloved hands dove toward the wadded papers that filled the box around the baby.
Papa said, “Hand it to me, Lily,” as he stepped down to the pavement and turned around to see, as Arty saw, and I saw, Lily tilting oddly, her head against the door frame, her robe spreading open around her, her whipped-cream hair jerking out in thick snakes that tried to escape from her head in all directions. We heard the ping of hairpins hitting the window, the floor, the wall, and Mama’s gasp and muffled shriek as she lifted off the floor and floated, lying on the air while her thick-strapped brassière stretched away from her with an ugly, ripping sound, and her feet, in pale lavender socks, stretched wobbling toward the light in the ceiling, and her hair fell in coils over her face. “Mama! Lil! Mama!” we all howled, as her huge blue-veined breasts burst through the brassière and she dove into the cardboard box, falling with her breasts in the box as her arms waved and her head lifted against the pull from the box and her white legs twitched and crawled on the floor beneath the rucked and flapping robe and one lavender sock rumpled its way off her foot.
Then Al was on his knees in the doorway, stroking her head and saying, “Sweet shit, Lily,” through her soft sobbing. Arty grunted, his head craned around the back of the seat. His eyes overran his wide face. I sat on the floor against the cupboard with my mouth and eyes open, and Elly and Iphy sat up in their bunk with bewildered eyes and wide befuddled mouths saying, “Mama,” in a drawn-out complaint. A painful, thin whine came out of my own nose and only one voice was silent, only one of all the Binewskis was not adding to the noise, and that was the paper-padded morsel in the box, who was invisible except for one tiny hand opening and closing in a tangled strand of Lil’s white hair. The baby was not crying anymore. When, for an instant, we were all silent together, we could hear the chuckling smack of his lips at the bruised brown nipple.
It was a minute or two before Lily could sneak an arm into the box and lift the baby up to her as she collapsed onto the floor, and sat with her feet mixing with my feet. One fat arm and the fuzzy knot of head buried in her breast were all that showed of the baby outside his cone of blanket. Al crawled in and sat on the floor beside her.
“What happened?” he asked.
She looked at him with her eyes so wide open that the whites showed all the way around her wobbling blue irises. She laughed shakily. “I guess he wanted to nurse.” She looked down at the little rumpled face and Al stared at a hairpin on the floor in front of him.
The twins, groggy in their bunk, and Arty with his chin propped on the back of his seat, and I, slumped in the corner, sat gawking as Mama’s tired face slowly developed a swelling over her right eyebrow where she’d banged her head on the wall when she dove into the box. She shifted slightly to get more comfortable and her robe slid away from her knees. They were scraped raw, with beads of blood swelling out through the pores.
“Are you saying,” Al stretched out a hand and carefully picked up the hairpin, “that the baby did that? Hoisted you up like that?”
Mama’s eyes snapped with anger. “I told you he was hungry!”
The tiny fist, like a spider on a sand dune, clenched and opened and clenched against Mama’s breast. The suckling sound went on.
Papa was staring at that hand. His lower jaw looked oddly soft and slack beneath his mustache. He got slowly up on his knees and picked up two more hairpins. He found another pin on the windowsill and stood up, looking at the hairpins in his hand. Mama concentrated on the small face at her breast. She seemed calm, forgetful of the tears and the ragged, dangling remains of the brassière.
“Well,” Papa cleared his throat, “we need to think a little bit, Lily. I’m going to drive on up the road. We’ll find a rest stop and pull over for the night.” Mama nodded peaceably.
The twins went back to sleep and I crawled into my cupboard and Arty humped his way into his bunk and Mama and the baby went back into the bedroom. Al drove in the dark until he came to a pulloff surrounded by high black firs. Arty and I stayed awake for a long time listening to Papa and Mama in their bedroom. Papa cleaned and dressed Mama’s knees and put a cold pack on her thick blue eyebrow bruise. He put the sleeping baby into the crib beside their big bed, and they sat watching together and saw the thin flannel blanket curl slowly up in a twisted bundle and then push toward the headboard of the crib, where it lay twitching and scrubbing back and forth all by itself while the baby slept. Arty and I both heard Papa say, “He moves things. He moves things.” We heard Mama start to cry again softly when Papa said, “He’s a keeper, darling. He’s the finest thing we’ve done! He’s fantastic!”
Things were quiet after that, except for what the dark trees were doing among themselves outside. “Poor Arty,” I thought. “He’ll be miserable.”