Baby Love Read Free Page A

other girls, though she’s the only one he ever loved. When he would lie in bed alone and think about fucking he would picture one of the cheap girls in school, like Candy Patenaude, who didn’t wear underpants, or Joyce Munson, who’s pretty ugly. “Mouth like a cunt,” one of the guys on the basketball team used to say.
    But that time upstairs in his sister’s house, with the Christmas tree lights blinking and the smell of fried chicken still in the air, some stupid TV show droning down in the family room— Price Is Right , it sounded like—and Sandy’s off-key voice singing “Hush little baby, don’t say a word,” it was almost like they were married, and that was their bedroom across the hall with the chenille spread all smoothed out and the big jar of Vaseline next to it on the nightstand, the two pairs of slippers lined up on the floor. It was almost like that was their wedding picture, not his sister’s, on the bureau, and the twins were theirs. Mark got this tremendous hard-on, just thinking about it, and when Sandy laid the baby down and turned around, he sort of fell into her arms.
    Even then he can’t say he was so anxious to go all the way exactly, he just knew he had to. It was like a responsibility, part of being a family man, and it went with those beers in the refrigerator, the eagle-design bedspread and the file box on the kitchen counter, filled with proof-of-purchase panels from cereal boxes. After it was over he was a little surprised there wasn’t more to it. Later he bought a copy of The Hite Report to find out how many times a month most people did it. And when he and Sandy have done it three times in a week he sometimes feels like he has been let off the hook, knowing he can take a few nights off if he feels like it, or not take a few nights off, and be above average.
    He always knew they’d be married sometime, though he wasn’t expecting Sandy to get pregnant when she did, in spring of junior year. He didn’t like his mother thinking Sandy was fast, thinking that was the only reason they got married. He wished he could’ve taken his diploma, taken the two-year auto mechanics course at the Manchester Technical Institute. He wished they could have had a real wedding like his sister’s, with Sandy in the long white gown.
    But other than that, he was happy enough about the baby. He loved doing all that stuff like putting his head against her stomach and feeling it kick and making lists of names. (He told Sandy if it’s a boy what about George, for your father, but of course he was secretly happy when she said no, Mark Junior.) He loved fixing up their apartment. (Sandy has a touch, and could be an interior decorator, in his opinion, except of course she wants to stay home with the baby.) He didn’t mind how big her stomach got, even when they couldn’t make love anymore, by the ninth month. It was worth it, to walk down the street with his hand pressed against the small of her back and have everybody know he was the reason she had this enormous belly sticking out a full foot and a half in front, those (briefly) enormous breasts.
    She made felt Christmas stockings with their names stitched in sequins. (She left the baby’s blank because he wouldn’t be born for another week.) Christmas morning she gave Mark a Swiss Army knife and a box of White Owl cigars to hand out after the baby was born, and a vest she’d made from a kit, orange and green crochet. He wore it to Christmas dinner at her folks’, to please her.
    He gave her a kitten, which got run over by a car three weeks later. He also gave her a pressure cooker, which his mother said was one of the five most important ingredients to a good marriage, and a pink lacy nightgown to take with her to the hospital, and for a joke, a copy of Playgirl magazine with a bookmarker in the page where the foldout was. She didn’t understand it was supposed to be a joke and said, “Why would I want to look at that?” And even then she