Russell Banks - Continental Drift

For Elaine, of course, the baby was already an active member of the family and had been since late May, when she first felt him kick against her ribs from inside. But it’s often this way, that the mother and father regard the birth of their child as taking place at dates months apart, especially after the birth of the first child and almost always when the mother and the father have made their life together one thing and their lives apart different and separate things, which has been increasingly true of Bob and Elaine since Bob discovered Marguerite Dill and, more emphatically, since the robbery.

At eight-fifteen that night, Bob telephones Elaine from the store to say that he’ll be home late, he’s going out for a drink with the Budweiser salesman. Business is light tonight anyhow, it’s a Thursday, so he may even close the store a little early. He’ll be home before midnight, he assures her, while outside in the parking lot, Marguerite waits for him in her car, the motor running, windows open to the cool fall night, tape deck playing Isaac Hayes.

Elaine whines briefly and in a thin voice, but after all, Bob, unlike most husbands, always calls her when he’s going to be late, and he’s seldom late more than once a week, and besides, he has no other friends, and, she reasons, a man needs friends, especially a man who has become, as Bob has, such a loner. Go ahead, she tells him, and have a good time, she had planned on going to bed early anyhow, she wasn’t feeling too great today. She probably shouldn’t have tried to do all the housecleaning in one day. She’s already in bed, or at least on it, with her swollen feet up, her huge belly looming in front of her, her bulging slacks unzipped at the sides to ease her thick, soft flesh. Across from the bed on the dresser, the Sony jabbers in Spanish. She flicked it on just as the phone rang and hasn’t found her program yet.

At nine-oh-eight, she chuckles at one of Gary Coleman’s smart-aleck remarks on Diff’rent Strokes , feels the first, light contraction and suddenly turns serious, because she recognizes it immediately, does not for a second confuse it with indigestion or heartburn or just her imagination. Elaine knows her body, can read all its signals accurately, and she has been through this twice before and recently enough to have retained a clear, physical memory of it. She knows at once that she’s going to have her baby tonight. Picking up the phone next to the bed, she dials the liquor store, praying silently that her husband won’t have left yet.

The phone in the store rings an even dozen times, then stops. Bob is already at the Hundred Lakes Motel, smoking marijuana for the first time in his life. He mentioned to Marguerite the last time they were together like this that she might relax if she got drunk enough, and she suggested they get high together sometime. Did she mean marijuana? Grass?

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, yeah, why not smoke a little grass? It can’t hurt you, can it?”

She was surprised he’d never tried it, she even thought it was cute, or so she said, and she promised him she’d bring a couple of joints with her the next time they went out.

Now, in the darkness of the room (which she seems to prefer, though he just once would like to leave the lights on when they are naked, but he still can’t figure out how to propose it without sounding slightly perverse), Marguerite lights the joint and sucks the smoke into her lungs noisily and passes it to Bob.

He tries to hold it casually, almost drops it, quickly recovers and inhales deeply. He likes the sucking noise she makes when she smokes, likes the odor, likes the way his thoughts suddenly soften and liquefy. His skin feels crisp and tingly, but everything enclosed by his skin feels densely soft and warm. Like oatmeal, he thinks. He giggles and tells her what he was thinking.

“More like grits,” she says. “With gravy.”

“Pancakes with hot maple syrup,” he suggests.

She says, “No, more like hushpuppies. I feel like a hushpuppy.”

“Ah,” he exclaims, he has it now. “Corned beef and cabbage.”

She laughs a long time, or what seems like a long time. “Chitlins!”

“Yorkshire pudding, that’s it exactly!”

“Nope. It’s rice an’ field peas!”

“Baked beans … with molasses and salt pork.”

“Beaten biscuits. You ain’t never had no beaten biscuits, I bet. Sometime I got to make you some. With red gravy on ’em.”

“Boiled lobster!” Bob says he feels like a boiled lobster, red and hard on the outside, sweet and meaty on the inside. “Um-m-m,” he says, smacking his lips. “There’s nothing as good as that sweet, white, lobster meat sucked out of the hard, red claw and dipped in melted butter.”

They are silent for a few seconds, and then their hands touch, and they lie down beside one another and place mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet against mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet, and then he moves into her, swiftly and easily.

At nine thirty-five, Elaine’s water breaks. Too early, she thinks. Too soon. This is going to be a quick one, not like the others, and the contractions, now about five minutes apart, are heavy and deep, as if her uterus were a giant fist opening and closing. The pain is cold, not hot, and comes in waves, but it’s not as strong as when the others were born, she thinks, at least not as strong as she remembers. But they were big babies, and Emma was ten days late, and this baby is going to be early and probably small. Another girl, she decides. Oh, Jesus, not another girl, though it’ll be easier if it’s a girl. Easier and nicer. Except for Bob. Where the hell is he? The bastard. Oh, Bob, you bastard, where the hell are you? She grunts and turns to the phone and dials the number of her friend Ellen Skeeter, who, thank God, answers right away.

They shower together, and for the first time Bob sees Marguerite’s naked body, long, dark brown and shining, like polished sandalwood. He soaps her slick back and buttocks, rubs her shoulders and neck with one hand, her ass and the back of her thighs with the other, and when, like a strung bow, she arches backwards and spreads her thighs, he slides his hand into her from behind, one finger, then two, then three, and she gasps, leans forward and lays her weight against the tile wall of the shower, lets the warm water splash over her soapy back, gush between her buttocks and down his stiff, pumping arm. Shoving her ass against him, she drives his fingers deeper and deeper into her body, until her cunt is sucking at his hand, reaching for it and grabbing, letting go, then reaching and grabbing again, farther in each time, snapping and letting go, over and over, deeper and deeper, and then she’s swirling his thick fingers around inside her, twitching them, whirling her ass in wet circles, and soon she starts to moan, low and steady, and flailing one hand back around in search of his prick, finding it, she pulls away from his fingers and jams his prick in, and he grabs onto her thrashing hips and rides, rides, rides, while the water splashes warmly over their faces, shoulders, chests and bellies.

By ten-eighteen, when Elaine arrives at the emergency room of the Winter Haven Hospital and is met by her doctor, swiftly examined and rushed upstairs to a delivery room, she’s deeply into hard labor, and her cervix has dilated sufficiently that the doctor, a gaunt, red-eyed, rumpled Mississippian named Tucker Beacham, escorts her stretcher to obstetrics himself, in case he has to deliver the baby in the hallway. Ellen Skeeter, frightened and excited, joggles along behind the two, calling out to her friend, “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, honey, your chil’ren goin’ be fine. Soon’s I get you taken care of, honey, I’ll call home an’ tell Ronnie to stay right there at your place tonight. Ronnie’ll take good care of the chil’ren till Bob gets home, honey, an’ he’ll tell Bob everything, so don’t you fret, now.”