Baby Love Read Free

about Rupert’s age, early fifties—said didn’t she want to consult her parents about this, hire someone to check out the roof and the sills. “Of course I’d like to make the sale,” he said, “but I’ve got a daughter about your age and I sure wouldn’t want her taking on something like this.” Ann had seen her mother only once in the two years since she left college and moved in with Rupert. She would have liked Rupert to see the house, know what she was doing, but she said no, I don’t want to consult anyone, and bought it with cash.
    This was a year and a half ago, when she was twenty. She thinks now that she does understand what it means to have a nervous breakdown. It’s not something that happens like a heart attack—nothing so dramatic as walking into the ocean and disappearing. For her it has meant sitting on this couch watching soap operas for eleven months, driving into town every day to buy yogurt and bananas and cheese and raisins and movie magazines and Dolly Parton records and Kahlua and a deluxe Golden Touch sewing machine she’ll never learn how to use, and a loom and a .35-millimeter camera and a ten-speed bike and begonia bulbs and grape vines. She buys plants and then never gets around to planting them. They sit in the wheelbarrow she bought, dropping leaves. Sooner or later they die, and it depresses her, seeing them every day on her way out to the car. So finally she takes them to the dump and then she buys more, and pretty soon they die too.
    Mark stands in front of the bathroom mirror holding an imaginary guitar. They’re playing the new Grateful Dead album on the radio without commercials and he’s pretending he’s the bass player. He is not wearing a shirt. He’s so involved in the fingering during this particular song that he doesn’t even see Sandy—who has just put the baby down for a nap—standing in the doorway watching him. “Hamburgers or tuna casserole?” she says.
    “Don’t you ever cook something different?” he asks her. “Roast beef or pot roast or something?”
    Sandy has in fact planned something different for dinner: harlequin parfaits, from a recipe she saw on the back of a Cool Whip package. She has bought candles and a bottle of Cella Lambrusco. This was supposed to be a surprise.
    “Roast beef costs a dollar eighty-nine a pound in case you didn’t notice,” she says. “Your fly’s unzipped. Gross.” He is not wearing shorts. He has plenty in the drawer, of course—ironed. He just likes the way it feels, wearing none.
    This isn’t what he thought it was like, being married.
    He has no idea when it was, the first time they met. Mark and Sandy were born in this town, their parents belong to the same church, they have simply always known each other. They were Mary and Joseph in the Congregational Christmas pageant one time, and lab partners, years later, in chemistry. Sandy had filled out by then: she was always cute, but around freshman year she also got a figure. Mark would think about lab session all week, worry because his hand trembled while he held the Bunsen burner, that he’d light the curled-under ends of her hair, which is honey blond.
    They started dating at the end of sophomore year. The first time they went all the way was a few days after Christmas, junior year. They were baby-sitting for Mark’s older sister Charlene, who has twins. She and Mark’s brother-in-law left four beers in the fridge for them. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Mark’s brother-in-law told Mark, at the door of his car just before they took off. Sandy was back in the house, waiting for one of the babies to burp.
    She didn’t hear him come back into the house. He had taken off his shoes so he wouldn’t track in snow. Came up behind her very quietly, and she was singing to the baby. She was only sixteen then, but already she looked like a mother.
    The truth is (Mark doesn’t like to think about this), Sandy has never turned Mark on as much as some