Baby Love Read Free Page B

wouldn’t leave it alone. “That was a waste of a dollar-fifty,” she said later in the day. “When there are so many things we need.”
    He came home one time (Mark Junior was born by now) and found her sitting around with her friends. They were all laughing in this high, hysterical way girls have when they get together. The minute he walked in they stopped.
    The baby looks nothing like him. “Are you sure you’re the father?” his brother-in-law said (kidding). More than one person has called Mark Junior Sandy’s clone.
    “Doesn’t Sandy know it’s more expensive to buy name brands?” his mother said one time when she stopped over with something for the baby. “The store brands taste just the same.” Also, she should defrost the refrigerator.
    “So how’s the new man in your wife’s life?” said his mother-in-law when he ran into her at the post office. Mark had to think for a minute before he understood what she meant.
    “Has she bought you an apron yet?” said Virgil. He and Jill dropped over one night on their way to a Bob Seger concert in Boston. Sandy was already asleep in their bed, with Mark Junior in her arms. The six-week period when they weren’t supposed to make love was over, but they still hadn’t done it. Virgil kept nuzzling his head against Jill, burrowing his face in her hair. They started to arm wrestle, and then he pinned her on the floor, kneeling down between her spread legs in tight jeans. Mark was afraid his face might be turning red, and went to get a cigarette.
    His sister called him an old married man. When he picked up his son the baby cried. People started asking when they were going to have another one.
    Sandy must have told Jill they weren’t doing it yet, because one day Virgil stopped him, said, “Must be getting pretty horny by now, huh?”
    She left him with the baby for an afternoon, when she went for her postpartum checkup and to be fitted for a diaphragm. When she came home, with her mother—her mother was in on this—the two of them started that high-pitched laughing again. Evidently Mark had put the baby’s diaper on wrong, though he couldn’t see what was so humorous about that.
    She still keeps the house very clean, though there are a few things she never remembers to do, like sponge off the part of the toilet underneath the seat, the part he uses. She’s also a terrible cook.
    And lately he has been thinking about sex more often, having these ideas that never occurred to him before. Things about tying her down, doing it standing up. Things that aren’t about her at all. If he told anyone they would lock him up.
    He hasn’t forgotten why he wanted to get married, how good it feels to wake up in the morning curled around her, the warm safe feeling of their bed, even when Mark Junior has soaked through his diapers in the night, and there’s a moist pissy spot under him. He liked buying an insurance policy and having Sandy’s name to write on the line that said Beneficiary. He likes going to Howard Johnson’s on Fish Fry Night—the three of them—and seeing the waitress come toward them with a high chair for his son. He still gets a kick out of saying “my wife,” “my family,” and tries to work them into the conversation when he can.
    But instead of making him feel more like a man, Sandy sometimes makes him feel like a little boy. Twice he has called her Mom by mistake. And one time, for a couple of seconds there, he couldn’t remember what his son’s name was.
    He just wishes he hadn’t been in such a rush. It’s like tearing down the highway to get to this party by seven-thirty, and then you get there and it’s really kind of boring, and you think: How am I supposed to fill the time between now and midnight? Because even though it’s not that great, you still don’t want to go home.

Chapter 2
    Because the weather has finally turned nice, Reg Johnson has taken his Rototiller out of the garage, and is turning over the soil so he can get