Pregnant Pause Read online

  ***

  Now here I am, standing in front of the justice of the peace, trying really hard not to give birth right here on the courtroom floor, but really something feels like it's about to burst down below, and I'm trying to figure out if I really even love Lamont Lothrop—I mean, enough to live with him the rest of my life, forever and ever, amen. For two and a half years I thought I did. That's why we tried to run away together, that's why I climbed out of my bedroom window at three in the morning—to be with Lam, my soul mate, my prince of a guy, my knight in shining armor, only right now, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he looks more like a dude and nothing else.

  I hear something about husband and wife, and Lam leans over and kisses me—leans way over. He's six-two, and I'm five-two; he's a hundred and ninety-nine pounds, and I'm not quite ninety pounds (well, usually). He's all muscle, and I'm all bones. I don't know how this marriage is going to work, but I kiss him and shout, "Yahoo!" and my dried-up, laced-up, thin-lipped sister comes forward with her ramrod-straight, penny-loafered husband in tow and says, "Don't expect us to cheer about this, Eleanor."

  "I don't expect anything from you," I say, rubbing my belly, wishing I could put my feet up somewhere.

  Lam puts his arm around my shoulder and squeezes me, and I'm so proud of him for doing this in front of Sarah that I almost forgive him for showing up stoned.

  "Well, I think once you see how hard it is to take care of that baby, you'll give our offer another thought. It still stands. We'll take your baby. We'll raise it as our own. Won't we, Robby?"

  Robby, Sarah's husband, nods, but his sour expression tells me he doesn't want anything to do with anything coming from me, and that's another reason why I haven't agreed to Sarah taking the baby once it's born.

  "Yeah, well"—I rub my stomach some more, because it comforts me and maybe comforts the baby and it definitely annoys Sarah—"it's my baby, mine and Lam's, so we'll see."

  "Don't cut off your nose to spite your face," Robby says.

  "Yeah, okay, whatever that means," I say. He talks like that all the time. He says things like "Don't beat a dead horse," and "Don't kill the messenger," and "When pigs fly." I guess he's got to borrow someone else's expressions because his own don't amount to a hill of beans. Ha! Take that expression, Robby boy.

  My new mother-in-law comes forward to join us while my parents and Lam's dad talk over "future plans." I hear the words "cabin" and "when the baby comes," but then Mrs. Lothrop is speaking to me, so I turn my attention to her.

  "I guess some kind of congratulations are in order," she says, frowning, and I wonder what the hell I'm supposed to say to that. I look her up and down. She's tall, sturdy, and beautiful, in a rustic, country-woman sort of way, and she's got herself all dressed in black. Black pants, sleeveless black shirt, and black gardening clogs—you know, rubber clog things—a real funeral outfit, I figure.

  "I guess so." I sorta smile.

  "I'm so stoked, Ma," Lam says. "I can't believe I'm married."

  "No, none of us can believe it," she says, and her sarcasm goes right over Lam's head.

  He gives her a peck on the cheek. "Thanks for everything, Ma. I mean the cabin and furniture and junk."

  We all jabber for twenty more minutes or so, but then my parents have to go because they have to finish packing and cleaning. They leave me their car, a hunk-a-junk they named Rambo, bought cheap and well used, and only to last them the three years they'd be in the States. I'm grateful for it, though, because I can't drive Lam's stick-shift Jeep, and I need it for my days off from the camp. I'm grateful, too, for the baby stuff they bought—crib and car seat and baby carrier and stroller.

  Mom hugs me and kisses my cheek, and I see tears in her eyes. "I do love you, Elly," she says. "Anytime you want to join us, we'll get you a flight and take care of everything. Remember that."

  I nod and feel ashamed for the millionth time that I'm pregnant. Yeah, I admit it, I'm ashamed. I talk a good game and my big talk gets me into all kinds of messes, but I know I've been stupid, and I know, too, that most likely, after I've made my sister jealous long enough and she's suffered some as payback for always being better than I am, I'll give in and hand her the baby to raise.

  Dad pats my back and kisses the top of my head. "You're still my li'l gal," he says. "We're gonna miss you."

  I nod and feel queasy in my stomach. I can see they're so anxious to get going, to fly far, far away, and get back to feeding the bodies and souls of people who really need them. I want to say, "I need you, too. I need you, Mom and Dad. I just have a crappy way of telling you." But it's too late. When it comes to me and my timing, it's always too late. Too late to get an abortion, too late to say I'm sorry, too late to say I need you, and I'm scared, and I don't want to live in a cabin in the woods. It's just too late, or maybe too hard to admit that I don't want a husband and baby, and that I'm just so tired of being me.

  Chapter Two

  HERE'S what I hate about all the pregnancy books I've been reading. They're meant for perfect people who are going to have perfect babies and live perfect lives with their perfect husbands. Everything sounds so simple and orderly—even emergencies like miscarriages and preeclampsia and terrible stuff like C-sections and edema and having to stay in bed for the whole nine months. The writers make it sound like this calm, easily managed, well-behaved problem that we will all handle rationally. And I hate all the parenting magazines with the beautiful people and children on the covers, and all the bright toys and pretty living rooms and baby bedrooms in the photos inside. I'm thinking I'm going to put out a teen pregnancy magazine. Why not? And it will be real. Real people on the covers, and stories about how real people are dealing with being pregnant, and working and going to school, and parents and friends who are no longer there for you because you just don't fit in anymore, or they're too busy—and so are you, but in a different way—and how it feels to be left out of everything. Yeah, I really ought to start that one up. Right now, though, I'm making my way through the throng of fat kids who are moving into camp today, climbing the steep mountain slope thick with pine trees that leads to my humble new home, while Lam's in front of me telling me to hurry up because it's not just his wedding day, it's his graduation day, and he's anxious to get to the parties. All I'm anxious to do is to sit down. I notice kids hugging their pillows and their parents dragging trunks and staring at me as I huff it up the slope, and I can see their little minds working: Is she fat or is she pregnant? She looks pregnant. Am I/is my kid in the right place?

  The camp starts at the base of a mountain where there's a lake that smells like wet logs and ducks. Canoes are stacked on a rack at the edge of the water, two tall lifeguard chairs dug into the sand, a long dock with a ladder going down into the lake, and a rope with little plastic buoys marking off the shallow and deep parts. The dirt parking lot is down by the lake, and on the far side of the lake sit eight boys' cabins and four latrines dotted about the woods. The rest of the camp is tucked into the mountain itself, with the large red main cabin in the center, and the girls' cabins, latrines, activities huts, and the Lothrops' cabin/ office scattered in the woods on either side. From the parking lot, most of the buildings are hidden by the trees, and by the fact that they're all made of logs so they just look like part of the mountain. The climb to the cabins is steep and rocky, and black flies are nipping at my calves. I'm trying to swat at them and walk at the same time.

  "Come on, Eleanor," Lam calls to me, his voice sounding impatient. He's reached our cabin. It's set back a ways from the others and is slightly bigger, too. It once housed the older kids, but this camp now only goes up to age fifteen instead of nineteen, and the older kids have become the camp counselors. Even I'm supposed to be a counselor-in-training, or CIT, and I've got two jobs, one to help out in the crafts cabin, and the other to help out in a dance class. What I know about crafts can be said in one word—nothing! What I know about dance is next to nothing, but I had to fill out a CIT application just like any other c
ounselor here, and when it asked what training or experience I had and gave me a list to choose from, dance and crafts seemed like they might be the most fun. So I lied and said I had taken dance for six years. Really I had only had dance lessons for two, when I was six and seven. I also lied and said my mother and I did crafts all the time, because I thought the Lothrops might like me better if I said I did something homey like crafts with my mom. I mean, really, what was I thinking? Oh, and I had to have an interview, too, only it wasn't with Mr. and Mrs. Lothrop. Mrs. Lothrop was in some meeting in Boston, so it was with Mr. Lothrop and this crazy old bat of a lady with a witch's nest of wiry gray hair who sat in her wheelchair like it was a throne and who, it turned out, used to own and run this camp way back in the dark ages. I could tell by the way her evil black eyes squinted at me, she didn't believe a word I said about knowing how to dance and do crafts. She saw liar written all over me, and I knew it, but she didn't let on to Mr. Lothrop, and the only question she asked me was, "What would you do if a camper came up to you and told you she was homesick?"

  What the hell? I didn't know. "I'd talk to her," I said.

  "Oh, would you?" she said back to me in this witch-like voice.

  "Yes, I would." I glared right at her.

  "And what would you say? How would you talk her out of her homesickness?"

  Was this a trick question? You can't talk someone out of being homesick. Believe me; I know. I was homesick for America for years and nobody ever talked me out of it, not even for a second.

  "I wouldn't talk her out of it," I said. "You can't do that. It doesn't work." I tried to think of what I would have wanted someone to do for me in Kenya, what would have made it better. "I would just let the camper know that I was her friend and that if she wanted to talk about being homesick for eight weeks straight that I'd be willing to listen to her. And if she wanted to talk about something else, I'd listen to that, too."

  My answer must have been okay, 'cause the old bat got this twinkle in her eye and nodded, and that was that. She let Mr. Lothrop do the rest of the interview while she conked out and snored and blew air out of the corner of her mouth throughout the rest of my interview. It was only later, when I told Lam about the old bat, that I found out she was Lam's grandmother and Mrs. Lothrop's mother, which explained a lot!

  So now Lam stands in the doorway of our cabin, and when I catch up to him, he asks, "Want me to carry you over the threshold?" I look at his face. He looks worried. I can tell when he's worried because this deep line forms down the center of his forehead, and that's what I see.

  "How about we just hold hands and go inside together."

  He smiles, and the line disappears. "Yeah, perfect."

  We hold hands, and he has to step inside before me a bit because no way can wide ol' me fit alongside his big self through the door at the exact same time.

  Once inside, he shouts, "Yow! I'm through with school forever. Forever!" Then he reaches around me and grabs me from under my ass and lifts me. I hold on to his neck for dear life, not thrilled that he had no oomph to lift me when it was about us being married but suddenly he's feeling like Superman 'cause he remembers he's a high school graduate. I'm jealous of him, too, because I still have another year to go before I graduate—if I'm able to go back to school in the fall. Lam's eighteen, and I think the truth of how I got myself pregnant is that I was so flattered that a guy two years older liked me, and I was so scared that I'd lose him, that I finally broke down and said yes to having sex with him, even though I had had a bad feeling about it. It was the first time I ever had sex, and he wore a condom, and still I got pregnant, which is just my luck. Of course my parents, his parents, my sister, and everyone in school think I'm a whore now. Like just because I did drugs and crap, they think I must have been going around having sex with everyone, too, so I was bound to get pregnant sometime. No need trying to tell anyone the truth. Who cares, anyway?

  "So, which party first?" Lam asks. "Matt's or Rolly's? I vote Matt's."

  "Come on, Lam," I say. "It's our wedding day. Here we are alone together, and we have this cabin, and we're in the woods. Wouldn't it be nice to just be cozy together and forget about the rest of the world for a while?"

  A bunch of kids yell, "Lake!" and there's a stampede outside our door as they run down the hill, past our cabin, and toward the lake.

  I make my way over to the couch that sits in the middle of the cabin and start backing myself down into it. I am so looking forward to getting off my feet. I've been real good about eating well and keeping my weight up because I read that teens that don't gain enough weight can have low-weight babies with birth defects. But now I'm too big and I get tired too easily.

  "If I stay, are we gonna have sex?" Lam asks.

  I stop in mid-sit and push myself back off the couch. I spread my arms out and glare down at my orange belly. "Do you think I could possibly want to make love? Give me a break." We haven't had sex in over two weeks, and I could see Lam was getting desperate about it, but I just can't do it anymore. I'm just too pregnant.

  Lam puts on his camo hunting cap with the moose emblem on the front, salutes me, and clicks the heels of his hunting boots together. "Well, then, I'm going to Matt's. He's got the party of the century going on, and I don't want to miss it. You're not coming?"

  "No, and I can't believe you'd just leave me here on our honeymoon night surrounded by a bunch of whiny kids and your parents and all those counselors. And, look around. We don't even have a TV or a refrigerator, so what am I supposed to do while you party?"

  Instead of easing myself onto the couch as I had started to do earlier, I just let myself go and fall back onto the sofa cushions. The two cushions on either side of me puff up with a gasp, then settle back down. Lam's parents had given us the couch, and Lam acts like they were just so generous, but all it is is a shredded, cat-clawed, brown and tan plaid box that scratches your skin if you have any exposed. I put my feet up on the coffee table, which is really the trunk I used for my years in Kenya. I've covered it over with a pretty flowered scarf, but Lam has already burned a cigarette hole in it—the butthead. I feel tears starting to well up, and I blink several times to hold them back.

  "Don't start acting like my ball and chain on our first day, El. Come on, I just graduated. No more school forever! Anyway, you love a good party. It'll do you good to get out and see the guys."

  I sniff and wipe a stupid tear away. "They've always been more your friends than mine, and anyway, what am I gonna do while everyone gets stoned? Just stand there and watch? I can't do anything, Lam. I can't do anything ever again. We're going to have a baby—a kid, a responsibility."

  "But not forever, right? You said we might give it to my parents, right? Or maybe your sister, right?" Lam edges toward the door. It's an old-fashioned latch-kind of door with no locks and so poorly sized for the opening that you can see the great outdoors through all the gaps. The cabin was built for summers, for young campers, not for pregnant girls, and not for year-round living.

  I swat at a fly, then let my arms flop onto my belly. "Yeah, well, we haven't exactly made our final decision on that, have we?" Then I look at Lam, already standing with the door open and his hand on the screen door, hot to get going. He looks so good, even with his doofus-looking, too-big-for-his-head hunting hat on. I think that's what I fell for, his looks. He's got big round blue eyes the color of chicory, which is the stuff that grows all around here along the roadside, and he's got a flush to his cheeks, and he's tall with a cute butt, and sandy blond hair with bangs that slant down into his eyes. I know girls will be all over him at the party, even if he does kind of have big ears. Shit, he'll probably screw one of them—on our wedding night.

  "Have you even thought about this baby?" I ask. "I mean, it's part yours. It's going to look like you and maybe talk like youand—"

  "Yeah, I've thought about it." He huffs and pushes open the screen door. It groans. He stands halfway in and halfway out and scratches his chest through his very fade
d, deer-skull T-shirt. He glances outside, then inside at me. "So, you comin' or what?"

  "I said no, already!" I pound the arm of the couch. "It's our wedding night, Lam. Don't you even love me? Why did you marry me?"

  Okay, never mind that I don't know how I feel about him. I need him to tell me he loves me. I need this really badly.

  "Yeah, I love you," he says. His voice softens. "You're pretty, Elly. Even seven months pregnant, you're so pretty. I mean, come on, half the guys in school were always after you. You're like this guy magnet."

  "Yeah," I say, still wanting to feel sorry for myself. "But all the girls hate me—and for no good reason."

  "Like I said, you're pretty—and you have this, I don't know, this cute way about you that guys like and girls are jealous of." Lam steps back into the cabin and tries again. "And—and—you look smart-pretty, too. Not like dumb-pretty—all boobs and bubbly-blonde pretty, but sexy-lawyer pretty. You know? 'Cause you're really smart. And, I—I like how your eyes have those golden flecks in the brown part and, uh, I like your hair in that ponytail thing you've always got, and I like how you pull the thingy out and shake out your hair and it's perfect, like you just brushed it. I like—I like your hair."

  I feel embarrassed now because I've let him go on so long with his compliments. I try to flick them off. "So you married me for my mousy brown lawyer-lady hair?"

  He rolls his eyes and shakes his head like he's just too fed up with me. "Come on, Elly, you know why I married you. You told your parents that I asked you to marry me. And anyway, we're pregnant. It's my duty. My parents made real sure I understood that." He raises his fist and sets it on the doorsill as though he needed it to prop him up. "A Lothrop always does his duty. A Lothrop always fixes his mistakes, and he always does the honorable thing."