Chapter 33
adelaide
And they believed that?”
I opened my eyes to find myself in the rocker in my bedroom. I’d forgotten Hope was there. I’d forgotten I was talking aloud. It seemed so real, like was I back in the past, just living it all over again.
I nodded. “Antibiotics and X-rays and all the things you take for granted now were brand-new back then, so discoveries about electrical impulses didn’t sound like too much of a stretch.
But then, no one expected Charlie to lie about a thing like that.
” I know I sure hadn’t. I hadn’t known Charlie was that imaginative.
“What did you use for padding?” Hope asked.
“An old quilt. I cut it up and made a small lump, and sewed tie strings to it. I added little pieces to it as the months went by, making it bigger. Lordy, but it was hot that summer! I was careful, but Becky walked in on me one morning as I was getting dressed. I turned away, flustered, but she’d already seen.
“‘What’s that?’ she’d asked, pointing.
“I tried to stay calm. ‘It’s a bumper for the baby. To keep it from getting hurt. Because the doctor said it’s sickly.’
“Becky ran to greet Charlie with the news when he got home. ‘Guess what, Daddy! Mama’s wearin’ a pad over the baby to keep him safe.’
“Charlie grabbed her. ‘Who else have you told this to?’
“‘No one,’ Becky had said.
“‘Well, be sure you don’t.’
“‘Why not, Daddy?’
“‘Because we don’t talk about undergarments.’
“But I reckon he felt that it was unlikely she’d keep quiet, because he made me go over to my mama’s house that night and casually mention I was wearing a pad to protect the baby from electrical impulses.
The next day, he went to Jackson to find a rental house.
He moved us there at the end of the week, and there we stayed for the next three months. ”
· · ·
That night, I dreamed of my mother. I’d been worrying about facing her in the afterlife. I didn’t know what she knew about the non-pregnancy.
“Oh, I knew something was wrong,” she said. In my dream, she was sitting on the back porch swing, pulling beans from a paper bag and snapping them into a red ceramic bowl. “You didn’t look a bit happy.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I couldn’t, dear; it wasn’t my place. That would have been meddling in your marriage, and folks just didn’t do that. But I knew you two were having problems.” Mother reached into the bag. “Truth is, I was afraid you’d been . . .” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “. . . raped.”
“Mother!”
“Well, you’d occasionally go off by yourself to places a woman shouldn’t go without an escort.
There were a couple of times you asked me to watch the children, then Mildred Pilcher told me she’d seen you at the lakefront, taking photos of pelicans or geese.
” She snapped a bean clean in half. “I was afraid the baby wasn’t Charlie’s. ”
Truth be told, a similar worry had crossed my mind.
“How do you know the baby is even yours?” I’d asked Charlie when we’d gotten back home from that fateful Easter dinner and the kids were down for a nap.
“I just do.”
“But if this woman slept with you, she might be sleeping with fifty other men, as well.”
“I could say the same thing about you.” Charlie had gone straight for the kitchen cabinet where I’d hidden the scotch, a thundercloud of a scowl darkening his face.
“You know me, Charlie. How well could you possibly know this woman?”
“How well did you know Joe? For all you know, he’s actually married.”
The words had shocked me. I’d stared at him for a moment. He was out of his head. When it came to Joe, he was crazy.
But in my dream, my mother calmly swung on the porch swing and pulled another bean from the bag. I reached in and took one, helping her. “It would have meant so much, Mother, if I could have talked to you about things.”
“I know, dear.” She carefully snapped the bean, her face a picture of peace and serenity. “But ladies didn’t talk about those things back then.”
I woke up covered in sweat. My mother’s beatific expression, her lack of remorse or regret, her apparent complete acceptance of whatever she’d done or not done . . . How could she feel that way about her mistakes, yet be so insistent I fix mine?
I guess it was because she was on the other side. I still had to struggle to get there.
I pushed down the covers and rolled over.
It wouldn’t be much longer—a couple of months, a year maybe—certainly no more than two or three.
Death was growing inside me like a baby waiting to be born.
I could feel it, getting stronger. Sometimes the hairpins in my bun vibrated with the knowledge like tuning forks.
I glanced at the alarm clock glowing on the bedside table.
Three thirty. There was still a lot of night left to get through.
I closed my eyes and tried to fall back asleep.
I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or not, but Mother’s voice seemed to come out of the air-conditioning vent.
“You need to clear everything up before you join us, sweetheart. Becky is counting on it.”
Becky—my beautiful, precious, brilliant Becky, taken from me far too soon. The daughter I’d loved more than life itself, yet never really had understood. I’d always thought that the secret about her real father was the reason there always seemed to be some distance, some friction, between us.
She and Charlie didn’t have that problem, not until she was older and determined to be a career woman.
To Charlie’s credit, he treated her just as well as he treated Eddie when she was little—better, actually.
Becky was smart as a whip and serious and hung on Charlie’s every word.
Eddie, however, was easily distracted and emotional, and Charlie had been harsher with him, trying to toughen him up.
I understood Eddie. I could always read him, always empathize with his emotions.
Becky and I, though, seemed to be on a different frequency.
Communicating with her was like trying to listen to a radio program and getting lots of static interference.
Was the secret about her conception somehow blocking us, or were we just ill-fitting personalities who couldn’t really tune in to each other’s hearts and minds?
Was it my fault? Or did some mothers and daughters, through no fault of their own, just never seem to be tuned to the same channel?