Baby Love

Baby Love by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Baby Love by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online
Authors: Joyce Maynard
of a ’66 Valiant parked in the clearing beside the town dump with the motor running, because it was March. They didn’t even have their diplomas, and they made a person. When she marveled at this to Mark he said she was nuts.
    She goes into their room, where Mark Junior is lying in the middle of the water bed with a stuffed platypus on one side of him and a plush panda bear Mark won at the Hopkinton fair, the September before the baby was born, on the other side, so he won’t roll off the bed. “I’m going to win you the biggest stuffed animal they’ve got,” Mark told her that day. He spent $4.75 at the skeet-shooting booth getting this panda, which was not the biggest stuffed animal they had, although it is pretty good-sized. Now the bear smells faintly of urine, but she doesn’t wash it because she thinks it’s probably just stuffed with sawdust and she worries that it might get wrecked. And she wants to always have a memento of that day at the fair, which was the best day she and Mark ever spent together. She was six months pregnant—big but not really awkward yet, more like the pregnant women you see in maternity shop ads than the way pregnant women really get to look. He was very proud and protective—kept his hand resting on the small of her back, just where she hurt, and bought her cotton candy, which they shared. He took her on the merry-go-round because most of the other rides were too rough, and she sat side-saddle on a green horse and he stood beside her and whispered “I love you” just as the ride was slowing down. They leaned on the railings by the boats and watched a young couple and their little girl, who looked about three, circling round and round very slowly, with each of the parents holding one of the little girl’s hands and not seeming to mind that it was a baby ride. Mark put his arms around her and said, “That’s going to be us soon.”
    Mark Junior sleeps on his stomach with his arms under his chest and his bottom sticking up in the air. His father sleeps absolutely flat on his back with his feet sticking straight out. Sometimes when she comes back to bed after the two o’clock feeding Sandy puts her head on Mark’s chest or strokes his cheek, which is still almost as smooth as the baby’s. He never wakes up but sometimes, in his sleep, he will say something like “Get back. It’s going to blow up,” or “Cylinder’s misfiring. Timing off.” She keeps hoping he’ll say something about her, but so far he never has.
    A knock at the door. Sandy forgot—Jill must be here for the maternity tops.
    She’s alone. “Virg dropped me off,” she says. “I told him you were giving me some stuff for prom decorations. He’ll be back in a half hour.”
    “I meant to iron these for you,” says Sandy, pulling a box out of the closet. She shakes out a jersey with “Baby” written on the front and an arrow pointing down.
    “Decent,” says Jill. “You think I’ll be showing soon?”
    “Let’s see what you look like.”
    Jill pulls her Erik Estrada T-shirt over her head and steps out of her jeans. She does not wear a bra. Her pants are bikinis that say “Tuesday” on one hip.
    “My boobs feel funny,” says Jill, inspecting one breast. “And I think I’m bigger.”
    Sandy cups a hand over Jill’s stomach, just above her pubic hair.
    “And last week in home ec I thought I was going to puke.”
    “You do look kind of swelled up here.”
    “I know just when it happened too. That day they let us out early, when Didi Hatfield spilled sulfur in the chem lab? And Virgil and me drove to Manchester because Bi-Rite had a sale on tires. And on the way home he said, ‘I feel like a quick one,’ and we pulled over right on 114 and he didn’t think he was ready yet but then they played ‘Tonight’s the Night’ on the radio. That part where Britt Eklund talks dirty in French always gets to him. Anyway, he was just going to pull out of me and then he said, ‘It’s too late.’

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