Baby Love by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page B

And that was just about ten days after my period. And you know the next song they played? That one Stevie Wonder does about his daughter, with the kid crying in the background. That’s when I knew. Boy, is my mom going to be pissed.”
    “Do you think you’ll get married?” Sandy asks.
    “Search me.”
    Jill is trying on a pair of white maternity pants. She examines the stretchy knit panel in the front, stuffing a pillow inside. She’s still naked on top. She begins walking around Sandy’s living room like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Sandy laughs, and Jill’s walk becomes more exaggerated. She rocks from side to side with her legs spread apart and her breasts bouncing. The door opens. Virgil and Mark stand there.
    Early evening is a hard time for Ann. If she has been in town, and she’s driving back, she can see the lights on in houses. Mothers fixing dinner. TV sets flickering. Babies sitting in high chairs, waving their spoons. She remembers evenings with Rupert, going down to the garden together to pick squash and peas and tomatoes for dinner. Turning on Lawrence Welk and dancing to that corny music. Sitting beside him while he read, making dirty pictures of the two of them that she would stick in the pages of his book.
    Late at night it’s better. Ann feels she is coming close to perfecting loneliness, putting together the most poignant evenings possible. There’s something almost delicious for her about the hours between 11 and 3 a.m.
    She turns out most of the lights, first of all, and lights the oil lamps. She may write a letter to Rupert, though she won’t finish it. She paces the floor, sipping Kahlua. She pours some bubblebath in the tub, turns on the water, very hot, and puts a little bamboo stool beside it with another glass of Kahlua and ice. She puts a stack of records on the stereo. She doesn’t care if this is bad for her records.
    She does not play rock music on these nights. Rock-and-roll reminds her of her college dorm, mixers when she stood by the wall all night, or exchanged SAT scores with some boy from Amherst. Even then these boys seemed young to her.
    Now she plays Tammy Wynette and George Jones: “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “Nothing Ever Hurt Me Half as Bad as Loving You.” She heard some organ music on a classical radio station once that made her cry. She called the station to ask what it was and got the record—the composer is Albinoni. It’s a very lonely piece of music and she plays it a lot.
    What she plays most are her Dolly Parton records. The old songs: “I Will Always Love You,” “On My Mind Again,” “Sometimes an Old Memory Gets in My Eye,” “If I Cross Your Mind,” “Lonely Comin’ Down,” “Living on Memories of You.” She also likes the duets Dolly Parton used to record with Porter Wagoner. She has studied very carefully their photographs on the covers of these albums. On one— Burning the Midnight Oil —there are two pictures, juxtaposed. One shows Dolly in a long red dress sitting in front of a fireplace reading a letter. An oil lamp is burning. In the other picture is Porter, wearing a flashy shirt, sitting in a black leather chair. The ashtray next to him is full of cigarette butts and he is pulling his hand through his blond pompadour. Tearing at his hair, really. Ann has spent nights like that.
    She thinks people completely miss the point when they focus on Dolly’s breasts all the time, and the crazy blond wigs. Ann is not fooled. She knows Dolly could not have written these songs, could not sing them this way, if she had not experienced real heartbreak. She knows that Dolly has been married since she was eighteen to a man named Carl Dean, who is in the asphalt-paving business. She wonders if Dolly Parton was actually in love with Porter Wagoner, with whom she never records duets anymore. Porter Wagoner is thinner than ever now. One seldom sees him, now that Dolly has gone off on her own.
    Last summer Dolly Parton came to