Their grandfather touched Ian’s arm shyly. Ian was trying to get the grin off his face.
They started walking again. Agatha asked all about the wedding, and Doug described how Rita admired his baby-food-jar system for sorting screws. But Daphne strolled next to Stuart in silence.
She was thinking about the dream she had dreamed at Thanksgiving. It wasn’t so much a dream as a feeling — a wash of intense, deep, perfect love. She had awakened and thought, For whom? and realized it was Ian. But it was Ian back in her childhood, when he had seemed the most magnificent person on earth. She hadn’t noticed till then how pale and flawed her love had grown since. It had made her want to weep for him, and that was why, at breakfast that day, she had said she hadn’t dreamed any dreams at all.
10. Recovering from the Hearts-of-Palm Flu
She asked if he thought he might ever want children and he said, “Oh, well, maybe sometime.” She asked how long he figured they should wait and he said, “A few years, maybe? I don’t know.”
They’d been married just four months, by then. He could see his answer came as a disappointment.
But why should they rush to change things? Their lives were perfect. Simply watching her — simply sitting at the kitchen table watching her knead a loaf of bread-filled him with contentment. Her hands were so capable, and she moved with such economy. When she wiped her floury palms on the seat of her jeans, he was struck with admiration for her naturalness.
“I had been wondering about sooner,” she told him.
“Well, no need to decide this instant,” he said.
He watched her oil a baking pan, working her long, tanned fingers deftly into the corners, and he thought of a teacher he had had in seventh grade. Mrs. Arnett, her name was. Mrs. Arnett had once been his ideal woman — soft curves and sweet perfume and ivory skin. He had found any number of reasons to bicycle past her house. Her front bow window, which was curtained off day and night by cream-colored draperies, had displayed a single, pale blue urn, and somehow that urn had come to represent all his fantasies about marriage. He had imagined Mrs. Arnett greeting her husband at the door each evening, wearing not the bermudas or dull slacks his mother wore but a swirly dress the same shade of blue as the urn; and she would kiss Mr. Arnett full on the lips and lead him inside. Everything would be so focused. No distractions: no TV blaring or telephone ringing or neighbors stopping by.
Certainly no children.
You couldn’t say Ian and Rita lived that way, even now. They were still in the house on Waverly Street — partly a matter of economics, partly to keep his father company. (Daphne had a place of her own now.) His father still occupied the master bedroom, and Rita’s widowed mother was forever dropping by, and Rita’s various aunts and cousins and a whole battalion of woman friends sat permanently around the kitchen table waiting for her to pour coffee. Where would children fit into all this?
“Next birthday, I’ll be thirty,” Rita told him.
“Thirty’s young,” Ian said.
Next birthday, Ian would be forty-two.
Forty-two seemed way too old to be thinking of babies.
At the wood shop, one of the workers had a daughter smaller than his own granddaughters. He was on his second wife, a manicurist named LaRue, and LaRue had told him it wasn’t fair to deprive her of a family just because he had already had the joy of one. He had reported every detail of their arguments on the subject; and next he’d discussed the pregnancy, which seemed so new and exciting to LaRue and so old to Butch, and finally the baby herself, who cried every evening and interrupted dinner and caused LaRue to smell continually of spit-up milk. Now the baby was two and sometimes came along with her mother to give Butch a ride home after work. She would toddle through the shavings, crowing, and hold out her little arms until he set aside his plane and picked her up. “Ain’t she a doll?” he asked the others. “Ain’t she a living doll?” But the sight of his grizzled cheek next to that flower-petal face was disturbing, somehow, and Ian always turned away, smiling falsely, and grew very busy with his tools.
Ian and Rita went to church on foot that next Sunday because the weather was so fine. Besides, Ian liked the ceremony of it: the two of them holding hands as they walked and calling out greetings to various neighbors working in their yards. Rita wore a dress (or at least, a long black T-shirt that hit her above the knees), because she’d grown up at Alameda Baptist and considered jeans unsuitable for church. Her braid was wound in a knot at the nape of her neck. Ian couldn’t help noticing the unusually attractive way her hair grew, hugging her temples closely and swooping down over her ears in ripples.
“Did I tell you Mary-Clay went in for her ultrasound?” she asked. “Her doctor said she’s having twins.”
“Twins! Good grief,” he said. A shadow fell over him.
“Two little girls, her doctor thinks. Mary-Clay is just tickled to bits. Girls are easier than boys, she says.”
“Rita,” Ian said, “neither is easy.”
She glanced at him. He hadn’t meant to sound so emphatic.
“At least,” he said, “not according to my limited experience.”
They turned onto York Road. Ahead they could see a cluster of worshipers standing in front of the church, enjoying their last few moments of sunshine before they stepped inside. Rita said, “Well, now that you mention it, your experience was limited. Those children weren’t your own. You weren’t even solely responsible for them!”
“Right,” Ian told her. “I had both my parents helping, and still it wasn’t easy. A lot of it was just plain boring. Just providing a warm body, just being there; anyone could have done it. And then other parts were terrifying. Kids get into so much! They start to matter so much. Some days I felt like a fireman or a lifeguard or something — all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.”
Rita gathered a breath, but by then they’d reached the others. Sister Myra said, “Why, hello, you two!” and kissed them both, even Ian. She had never kissed Ian before he was married. Marriage changed things a good deal, he had learned.
They were the church’s only newlyweds at the moment, and almost the only ones ever. Their wedding had taken place at Alameda Baptist, but most of Second Chance had attended and Reverend Emmett had helped officiate, even donning one of Alameda’s flowing black pastoral robes so when he raised his arms to pray he had resembled a skinny Stealth bomber. Now they were passed from hand to hand like babies in an old folks’ home, with Rita saying those just-right things that women somehow know to say. “Brother Kenneth, how’s that sciatica? Why, Sister Denise! You’ve gone and lightened your hair.” Ian was impressed, but also disconcerted. This never seemed to be his Rita, who spent her weekdays bluntly informing customers that most of their lifelong treasures belonged in the nearest landfill.
They went inside and took two seats halfway up the aisle. Sister Nell was passing out hymn pamphlets. When Ian opened his he found the top corner of each page torn off as if gnawed by a mouse, and he smiled to himself and looked around for Daphne. (She must have some kind of deficiency, Agatha always said, to eat paper the way she did.) But he didn’t see her. The fact was that she attended less and less, now that she lived downtown. Just about all you could count on her for was Good Works on Saturday mornings.
Rita was talking with her neighbor on the other side, Brother Kenneth’s son Johnny, who used to be a little pipsqueak of a boy but now was studying for the ministry. Sometimes lately he had assisted with the services. Today, though, Reverend Emmett rose alone to deliver the opening prayer. Rita faced forward obediently and bowed her head, but Ian sensed she wasn’t listening. She failed to straighten when Reverend Emmett said, “Amen,” and she chewed a thumbnail edgily during the Bible reading. Ian reached over and captured her hand and tucked it into his, and she relaxed against him.