I Want to Have Your Baby
Olivia’s mother, Phyllis, was hosting a party for women from the club, with a special guest who promised to identify what colors they should be featuring in their wardrobes.
It turned out you were either a winter, a spring, a summer, or an autumn.
If you didn’t know which, and favored the wrong colors, you might just have to throw out your whole wardrobe and replace it with another one.
Overhearing her explaining this to one of the women at the club while I was waiting for Jilly to get out of her tennis lesson, I felt a sudden surprising wave of missing my mother.
For all the ways she disappointed me, I could just hear the deep belly laugh that would come out of her if she heard this concept of what the woman called “finding your season.”
In earlier days, Regina wouldn’t have been caught dead at such an event either, but she’d decided to attend, probably as part of her campaign to project to Forrest and everyone else at the club the appearance that she was a regular person.
As an added incentive, Phyllis had promised there’d be a bouncy house for the kids.
Hayward said he was too old for bouncy houses, but agreed to go, probably because Olivia would be there, which meant he might catch a glimpse of Olivia and her friends bouncing.
I knew what part of their bodies he’d be eyeing.
With the family occupied by the Color Me Fashionable party, I was left free to head to the tennis courts. It had been three days since I’d had the chance to work with Jonathan, and it was too late in the afternoon for a lesson. But I could still hit against the backboard.
I must have been hitting for over two hours. One of the night bulbs meant to light the court was out, making it difficult to see the ball. Anyone else would have called it a day by this point, but I couldn’t stop.
Due to the darkness, I was missing a lot of shots. To retrieve my ball after one of these, I had to step off the court into a thicket of bushes, and beyond those, trees and brush at the far end of the tennis court.
This was when I heard their voices. I knew right away who it was.
Earlier that evening, when I headed to the court, I had no intention of carrying out one of my reconnaissance missions, so I didn’t have my Polaroid camera with me.
But I did have my little notebook in my pocket.
Also a pencil. I had developed the habit of bringing these along with me at times when I hit balls by myself, to write down how many I’d hit and how long I’d managed to keep the ball in play.
Now I took out the notebook, ready to transcribe what I heard.
“I can’t bear it when Kyle touches me now,” Brenda said. “It makes me physically ill.”
“Oh, baby.” This was Forrest. Then silence for a moment. I couldn’t see, but the two of them were kissing, no doubt.
“I have to leave him. I don’t even care if he takes Pumpkin. I want a divorce.”
“I know, I know. But it’s complicated.”
“What’s complicated?” she said. “I love you. You love me. I think about you all the time. We want to be together. It’s simple.”
I was crouched in the bushes with my notebook on my knees, writing down what they said as fast as I could. It was hard to keep up.
“It’s not that easy for me,” Forrest told her. “There’s the children. I have to put them first.”
“I love kids,” she said.
They were quiet for a minute. More kissing probably. Then came Brenda again: “I want to have your baby.”
From where I sat on the dirt, scribbling with the little pencil I’d picked up at mini golf, I shook my head. In case it wasn’t bad enough that Forrest was having an affair, he was having one with a woman who talked like every sappy song I’d ever heard on the radio. Brenda was a pinhead.
“It’s going to work out fine,” she said. “Your kids love you so much, they wouldn’t blame you for seeking your happiness.”
“I know my kids would love you too,” he told her. “In a perfect world, we’d be together, and have half a dozen more of them, and they’d all look like you. But I have to think about Regina.”
“Regina?” She sounded surprised. She’d forgotten that part, evidently.
“I don’t think she could manage without me. And you know, if I left her, I’d be broke. You should have a man who can take care of you.”
“I don’t care about money. I just want you.”
“And I want you too, baby,” he said. “But I need to think about my wife. Regina and I have a lot of history between us.”
“We can make our own history.” Brenda again.
Crouched in the bushes, I mouthed the words, Blah, blah, blah. The dialogue was as bad as what Jilly came up with for her American Girl dolls.
After that, Forrest and Brenda didn’t talk anymore.
I heard a lot of sighing and panting, followed by rustling of leaves, the sound both of them made, as if they’d just climbed the stairs of the Empire State Building and now were near the top.
She cried out. So did he. Every now and then one of them said, “Oh, baby.” That was about it.
All this time I’d been trying to catch the two of them together this way, but now that I had, I just wanted to get away. Only, if I got up to go, they’d hear me. And there was my racquet, leaned against the backboard. I couldn’t leave it there. So I sat in the bushes instead, writing it all down.
Then Forrest spoke again, but he sounded different this time. His voice was serious now.
“You need to understand that my wife is a mentally fragile person,” he said. “She tried to kill herself once.”
Then came Brenda’s response. Her voice took on a different tone as she spoke the words. No more soft, whispery endearments. She was all business now.
“When you think about it, maybe it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if she did it.”
“Did it?” he said. “Did what?”
“If Regina did kill herself.”