Charles Baxter - The Feast of Love

Sometimes I’d get mad at him for leaving me behind here in this life on Earth, but that didn’t work either. It was counterkarmic. Okay, I admit it: I only pretend to know about karma. I read in this magazine about it and I made up the rest. I don’t even know what language it comes from. So there I was. All day I was baffled, and all night I was sweating and shivering. Only I wasn’t sick, unless you count being pregnant and abandoned as sick.

It’s funny what being pregnant does for you socially, though. People such as your parents, who couldn’t be bothered calling you up or saying that you were an interesting person, who were alienated from you, suddenly do start calling and showing up as if you were interesting all of a sudden. They found out my whereabouts from my sister and drove forty miles from their home downriver to see me. They brought cooked chicken on a tray.

On this Sunday, my mom came in dressed to the nines, wearing her church dress and plum-colored lipstick and some sort of hair thing tottering on her head, and carrying, like I said, the chicken, which she deposited on the kitchen counter. She shrieked when she saw me as if I was the surprise of the month. “You’re so grown up!” she said. Yes, I was. She planted a kiss on my face and put her hand on my tummy, which you could tell she was dying to do. Then she looked around at our apartment, Oscar’s and mine, and said it was cute, and she took my hand to look at my wedding ring, doing an ooh and an aaah five months late, long long long past the deadline when I could’ve used it, that admiration. She asked me where he had bought it, and I told her truthfully, at the jewelry counter. She nodded wisely.

My dad, Chester, was behind her. I don’t know if I love my mom, but I have loved my dad even when he was angry at me and was a misogynist when he said I was no good. I go back and forth about him.

He’s confused all the time about life and doesn’t pretend to know anything except his job — he works on the line at Ford — and how to fix household appliances and moving-parts things, and he knows sports. With my sister and me, and how to raise us, I think he took his orders from Geraldine, my mom. He would’ve been okay with sons, but with two daughters he was clueless and sweet and so generous it was a compulsion with him. Anyway he was standing there in the doorway as if I hadn’t invited him in, wearing his hat and cleaning his glasses with his shirt flap, very shy and embarrassed about his previous anger toward me. So I said, “Come on inside, Dad,” and he walked in, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, wearing his sheepish look. A sheepish look on a dad can bring you into a state of startled puzzlement. You could tell he was ashamed. Ashamed that he had once hypercursed me, but mostly ashamed that he had never met Oscar and had taken no interest in my life for the last year or two, because his wife had told him not to. He didn’t even look around at our little apartment. I guess he thought he didn’t have the right to look around. But I’m not squalid. Neither was our apartment. I couldn’t stand it, so I ran over to him and gave him a hug.

My dad smelled of grease and dime-store aftershave. Hugging him, you kind of collide with his stomach before you get to his face, but that was okay. My dad’s stomach is like the foyer to the rest of him.

That Sunday afternoon proceeded in a normal fashion until my mom asked if I had a picture of Oscar. I went to a drawer and pulled out his high school graduation photo, where he’s smiling in a smug way I never saw him smile, and his hair is watered down, and he’s basically pre-me, pre-Chloé, so he doesn’t look like himself, he doesn’t look transformed, except by the drugs he was using right about then. He was a little gaunt in those days, at least in the off-season, away from the track team, feeding his body with drugs. Later, Oscar in love went out of two dimensions into three or four. We made love in the fourth dimension, for example. But anyway this graduation portrait’s the only picture of him I have, except for one of him that Scooter took at our wedding, in which me and Oscar are kissing and Oscar’s got his hand planted on my tits, which I wasn’t going to show to my parents, the picture I mean, for safety’s sake.

“He looks very nice,” my mom said.

“Kinda thin,” my dad said.

No point in telling them about the drugs, so I said, “He’d just had flu.”

They nodded.

They spent the rest of the afternoon with me, making mature efforts to reconcile. We talked about boring stuff like my dad’s job, my mom’s job (she’s sort of a cashier-receptionist at a car dealership), and how the house was empty these days and if I wanted to move back, just before or after the baby was born, I could do that, and I could use the crib for my baby that they used for me. I almost said, “Thanks very much, that’s very sweet, but, you know, it’s too late for that,” but I didn’t, because they were trying to be solid and correct with me, turning over a new parental leaf, now that I was my own woman and not their little girl anymore. Besides, I wanted to show them how mature I’d gotten by not saying fuck all the time, a habit that’s hard to give up. That’s scary for parents. You have to be careful with parents once you’re grown up into mature adulthood. They get sensitive. Almost anything you say, you hurt their feelings. Their aging hearts get broken. They just crumple up. Besides, I was about to become one of them.

THERE WAS ONE OTHER CALL I was expecting, and sure enough, eventually it came. I was expecting it to come at about two in the morning, but the phone rang at seven at night, and I just knew it was him, I had known all day at work that it was going to be him, it was a little gift that Mrs. Maggaroulian had given me, knowing when my father-in-law the Bat would call me before he actually did. Maybe I knew these things because I was carrying his grandchild, but I don’t think that’s it. I think I picked it up from Mrs. Maggaroulian, what Weekly World News calls “precognition.”

After I was a full-fledged married woman, the Bat had stopped stalking me, and Oscar and me, we sort of forgot about him, just figured that he had retreated into his bat cave for a while until he decided to be decent. Oscar didn’t need anything from the house — he’d taken all his stuff out of there a long time ago — so we were what you would call out of touch with the Bat.

Anyway, the phone rang and I answered it.

“This is Mac Metzger,” the Bat said. “I thought I had better talk to you.”

“Oh, hi,” I said.

I waited for him to say something. Then he said, “Lot of water’s over the dam, ain’t it?”

“I guess so.” Then I asked, “Uh, water?”

He ignored the question. “I hear tell you’re in the family way.”

“Yes,” I said. “How’d you know?”

“Word gets around. Well, besides,” he said, “I guess I got some apologizing to do.”

“Apologizing? For stalking me?”

“No. On account of I was drinking so much, last time I saw you. Well, finally I quit it, praise God.”

“You did?” It seemed we were both doing New Year’s resolutions, without the New Year to help us out.

“Swore it off. Had to. The long arm of the law caught me falling down, you might say, and they were going to confiscate my truck and my license, so I had to go into this treatment group. I did it. I swore it off and I’m making amends. Hardest thing I ever managed to do.”

“You sound different.”

“Well, I am different. Ashamed of the way I acted. I don’t know what-all got into me. And besides I forgave you for all the stealing, you loaded down with my stuff. I didn’t care about that worldly goods anyway. It was castoffs. You could have had it, you being Oscar’s wife, if you’d asked.”