We Are Water. Wally Lamb
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“I should be so lucky.”
It’s ignorance, that’s what it is. He has no idea how awful it is to have your mother die. “Don’t even say stuff like that,” I tell him.
“Why not?” he says. “It’s a free country.” He takes a huge bite out of his grinder. There’s a strand of shredded lettuce sticking out of the corner of his mouth and he’s so stupid, he doesn’t even realize it. “Maybe someday I’ll take out my hunting rifle and put me and my dad out of our misery.”
I get so mad when he says it that I kick him under the table. Not that it must hurt very much. All I’m wearing is sandals.
“What the fuck?” he says. “What’d you do that for?” And when I don’t answer him, he lifts up his leg and stomps down hard on the top of my foot with his big clodhopper work boot. The pain shoots all the way up my leg and puts tears in my eyes. For several seconds I can’t even catch my breath. I wait until the nausea passes.
Here’s how I tell him. I say, “That’s a nice way to treat the mother of your child, you asshole!” I didn’t want it to come out that way, but I have to admit that the look of fear on his big fat face is satisfying.
“What did you just say?” he asks. I put my arms tight across my chest and don’t answer him. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I nod without looking at him.
“By me?”
“Oh, no, Big Boy,” I say, real sarcastic. “It couldn’t be yours because you take that pill that doesn’t really exist. Remember?”
He tells me to stop fucking with him, and I tell him to pull that strand of lettuce out of his mouth because it looks disgusting.
“Are you having a kid or not?” he says, in this voice that’s loud enough that a customer who’s sitting at the counter swivels his stool around and looks at us. I’ve only eaten one of my stuffed clams, but I’ve lost my appetite and my foot’s throbbing, goddamn him. He better not have broken it if he knows what’s good for him. I get up from the booth and limp toward the door. I have first shift the next day, and it ought to be a whole lot of fun wearing my waitressing wedgies for five hours if my foot’s all black and blue and swollen. Albie follows me out of the restaurant and I scream it over my shoulder, “I’m not having a kid, you jerk! I’m having your kid! Deal with it!”
Albie’s scared to tell his parents, mostly his mother, so it’s me who finally has to call the meeting. “It’s urgent,” I tell Winona. The four of us are seated at the Wignalls’ kitchen table: Albie, his father, Winona, and me. There’s coffee mugs in front of each of us, and Winona’s put out a plate of Oreos that nobody’s touching. Winona doesn’t say much when she hears what we have to tell her, but her nostrils keep flaring and she’s teary-eyed. Then finally she says, “Big Boy, how could this have happened?”
Albie’s face is flushed and it doesn’t help that he’s got this naughty boy grin on his face. “The usual way,” he says. “Male plus female equals baby.”
Winona reaches over and backhands him. “Don’t you dare give me that wiseguy attitude at a time like this!” she yells. At first I think he might stomp on her foot or something, but Albie just reaches for the Oreos. Winona tells him he has to marry me now because it’s the only decent thing to do. “But I guess I better say good-bye to that beautiful church wedding that I’ve always dreamed about for my boy and his bride.” Those tears in her eyes are probably because the bride she’d been dreaming about is Althea, not me.
Albie makes the point, feebly, that he and I have other options.
“Like what?” Winona demands, and when he doesn’t answer her, she slams her coffee mug down against the table and says, “Just what do you think we are, Albert Wignall? Trailer trash? You’ve got obligations to this girl, and you’re damn well going to meet them. And if by ‘other options’ you mean what I think you do, then shame on you!”
“Yeah, but Mommy …,” Albie says. He turns from his mother to his father. “Daddy, what do you think?”
Mr. Wignall looks back and forth between the two of them and takes his sweet time answering. “Your mother’s right,” he finally says. “You had your fun. Now you got to pay the piper.” At this meeting, I’m more or less being treated like I’m invisible. Why is that? I’m the one who’s pregnant. Don’t I count? What if I don’t want to marry him?
But in another two weeks now, I will marry Albie, not because I want to but because he’s 50 percent responsible for the baby that’s growing inside of me. No, more than that—75 percent maybe, him and his imaginary men’s pill that stops women from getting pregnant.
Albie doesn’t give me a ring; he gives me a hundred dollars and tells me to go down to Ogulnick’s Jewelers and pick out something I like. None of the diamond rings are anywhere near my price range, so I settle for this little ring with a garnet chip in it that’s really just a friendship ring, not an engagement ring. Winona says I shouldn’t wear it to work because my male customers will give me better tips if they don’t think I’m “spoken for.” Ha! Like that’s the reason she doesn’t want me wearing it, not because she’s embarrassed that Albie’s “knocked me up,” as he puts it.
When I finally call my brother to tell him about my situation, Donald says I don’t even sound like I like this guy. What am I marrying him for?”
“Because of the baby,” I tell him.
“And that’s the only reason?”
“Yeah. What other reason would there be?”
But after I get off the phone, I start thinking about it, and if I really, really want to be honest with myself, I think I’m partly marrying Albie because, even after all these years—twelve of them now—I still miss my own mother as bad as ever. Maybe Winona isn’t perfect—ha! no maybe about it!—but in under seven months she’s going to be my baby’s grandmother, so she might soften toward me and maybe even start treating me like a daughter a little bit. Who knows? Maybe next Easter, I’ll get an Easter basket like Albie.
My wedding dress is pastel orange with a matching headband. When Winona takes me shopping, she nixes my wearing white or wearing a veil, since Albie and I “jumped the gun” and conceived a child in sin. I have to oblige her because she’s paying for the dress, which she likes way more than I do. There’s no bridal shower, no fancy invitations. There’ll be no graduation this coming June for me, either; I dropped out of school when I started showing. No one from my foster family or my real family is coming to the wedding, not even Donald, who says he can’t in good conscience support this marriage. On Albie’s side, the only people who are coming are Albie’s parents—they’re going to be our witnesses—plus Winona’s mother, who’s always clacking her false teeth and telling me to call her by her first name, Bridey, and Mr. Wignall’s father, who has thick gray hair growing out of his ears and wears a hearing aid that’s always whistling. The only other person I wanted to invite is Priscilla from work. I’ve heard Winona tell Althea that she thinks Priscilla is “one of those girls who should have been born a boy,” by which she means, I think, that she’s a lesbian. Which she is. Priscilla’s not coming to my wedding, though, because I didn’t end up inviting her after Winona gave me this stupid excuse about how she doesn’t feel comfortable fraternizing with people who work under her. What she really meant, I’m pretty sure, is: no lesbians allowed. She’d probably croak if she knew about that afternoon when Priscilla drove me out to the place where she boards her horses, Lucky and Gal, and after we went horseback riding, we made out in the barn and her fingers gave me those “vaginal contractions” that it only dawned on me later was an orgasm—my first.
Even though we’re going to get married to prove we’re not “trailer trash,” as Winona puts it, Albie keeps talking about me getting an abortion. One of the other guys at Midas Mufflers and his girlfriend had “a little complication they had to take care of” a