Elizabeth Gilbert - Stern Men

“He’s got the biggest prick on this island; that’s for sure,” Kitty said.

Gloria kept painting, but Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. From upstairs came the sound of a baby crying.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Now you’ve done it,” Gloria said. “Now you’ve woken up the goddamn baby, Kitty.”

“It wasn’t me!” Kitty shouted, and the baby’s cry became a wail.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy repeated.

“God, that’s a loud baby,” Ruth said, and Gloria said, “No shit, Ruth.”

“I guess Opal’s home, then?”

“She came home a few days ago, Ruth. I guess she and Robin made up, so that’s good. They’re a family now, and they should be together. I think they’re both pretty mature. They’re both growing up real nice.”

“Truth is,” Gloria said, “her own family got sick of her and sent her back here.”

They heard footsteps upstairs and the cries diminished. Soon after, Opal came down, carrying the baby.

“You’re always so loud, Kitty,” Opal whined. “You always wake up my Eddie.”

Opal was Robin Pommeroy’s wife, a fact that was still a source of wonder to Ruth: fat, dopy, seventeen-year-old Robin Pommeroy had a wife. Opal was from Rockland, and she was seventeen, too. Her father owned a gas station there. Robin had met her on his trips to town when he was filling gas cans for his truck on the island. She was pretty enough (“A cute dirty little slut,” Angus Addams pronounced), with ash-blond hair worn in sloppy pigtails. This morning, she was wearing a housecoat and dingy slippers, and she shuffled her feet like an old woman. She was fatter than Ruth remembered, but Ruth hadn’t seen her since the previous summer. The baby was in a heavy diaper and was wearing one sock. He took his fingers out of his mouth and grabbed at the air.

“Oh, my God!” Ruth exclaimed. “He’s huge!”

“Hey, Ruth,” Opal said shyly.

“Hey, Opal. Your baby’s huge!”

“I didn’t know you were back from school, Ruth.”

“I’ve been back almost a month.”

“You happy to be back?”

“Sure I am.”

“Coming back to Fort Niles is like falling off a horse,” Kitty Pommeroy said. “You never forget how.”

Ruth ignored that. “Your baby’s enormous, Opal! Hey, there, Eddie! Hey, Eddie boy!”

“That’s right!” Kitty said. “He’s our great big baby boy! Aren’t you, Eddie? Aren’t you our great big boy?”

Opal stood Eddie down on the floor between her legs and gave him her two index fingers to hold. He tried to lock his knees and swayed like a drunk. His belly stuck out comically over his diaper, and his thighs were taut and plump. His arms seemed to be assembled in segments, and he had several chins. His chest was slick with drool.

“Oh, he’s so big!” Mrs. Pommeroy smiled widely. She knelt in front of Eddie and pinched his cheeks. “Who’s my great big boy? How big are you? How big is Eddie?”

Eddie, delighted, shouted, “Gah!”

“Oh, he’s big, all right,” Opal said, pleased. “I can’t hardly lift him anymore. Even Robin says Eddie’s getting too heavy to carry around. Robin says Eddie’d better learn to walk pretty soon, I guess.”

“Look who’s gonna be a great big fisherman!” Kitty said.

“I don’t think I ever saw such a big, healthy boy,” Gloria said. “Look at those legs. That boy’s going to be a football player for sure. Isn’t that the biggest baby you ever saw, Ruth?”

“That’s the biggest baby I ever saw,” Ruth agreed.

Opal blushed. “All the babies in my family are big. That’s what my mom says. And Robin was a big baby, too. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Pommeroy?”

“Oh, yes, Robin was a great big baby boy. But not as big as great big Mr. Eddie!” Mrs. Pommeroy tickled Eddie’s belly.

“Gah!” he shouted.

Opal said, “I can’t hardly feed him enough. You should see him at mealtimes. He eats more than I do! Yesterday he had five strips of bacon!”

“Oh, my God!” Ruth said. Bacon! She couldn’t stop staring at the kid. He didn’t look like any baby she had ever seen. He looked like a fat bald man, shrunken down to two feet high.

“He’s got a great big appetite, that’s why. Don’t you? Don’t you, you great big boy?” Gloria picked up Eddie with a grunt and covered his cheek with kisses. “Don’t you, chubby cheeks? You have a great big healthy appetite. Because you’re our little lumberjack, aren’t you? You’re our little football player, aren’t you? You’re the biggest little boy in the whole world.”

The baby squealed and kicked Gloria heftily. Opal reached out. “I’ll take him, Gloria. He’s got a ca-ca diaper.” She took Eddie and said, “I’ll go upstairs and clean him up. I’ll see you all later. See you later, Ruth.”

“See you later, Opal,” Ruth said.

“Bye-bye, big boy!” Kitty called, and waved bye-bye at Eddie.

“Bye-bye, you great big handsome boy!” Gloria called.

The Pommeroy sisters watched Opal head up the stairs, and they grinned and waved at Eddie until they lost sight of him. Then they heard Opal’s footsteps in the bedroom above and all stopped grinning at the same moment.

Gloria brushed off her hands, turned to her sisters, and said, sternly, “That baby’s too big.”

“She feeds him too much,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, frowning.

“Not good for his heart,” Kitty pronounced.

The women returned to their painting.

Kitty immediately started talking again about her husband, Len Thomas.

“Oh, yeah, he hits me, sure,” she said to Ruth. “But I’ll tell you something. He can’t give anything to me any worse than I can give anything back to him.”

“What?” Ruth said. “What’s she trying to say, Gloria?”

“Kitty’s trying to say Len can’t hit her any harder than she can hit him.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said with pride. “Kitty has a real good swing on her.”

“That’s right,” Kitty said. “I’ll put his head right through the fucking door if I feel like it.”

“And he’ll do the same to you, Kitty,” Ruth said. “Nice arrangement.”

“Nice marriage,” Gloria said.

“That’s right,” Kitty said, satisfied. “It is a nice marriage. Not like you’d know anything about that, Gloria. And nobody’s kicking anybody out of anybody’s house.”

“We’ll see,” Gloria said, real low.

Mrs. Pommeroy had been a romp as a young girl, but she’d quit drinking when Mr. Pommeroy drowned. Gloria had never been a romp. Kitty had been a romp as a young girl, too, but she’d kept at it. She was a lifetime boozer, a grunt, a dozzler. Kitty Pommeroy was the example of what Mrs. Pommeroy might have become if she had stayed on the bottle. Kitty had lived off-island for a while, back when she was younger. She’d worked in a herring-canning factory for years and years and saved up all her money to buy a fast convertible. And she’d had sex with dozens of men-or so Gloria reported. Kitty had had abortions, Gloria said, which was why Kitty couldn’t have babies now. After the explosion in the canning factory, Kitty Pommeroy returned to Fort Niles. She took up with Len Thomas, another prime drunk, and the two of them had been beating each other up ever since. Ruth couldn’t stand her Uncle Len.

“I have an idea, Kitty,” Ruth said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Why don’t you kill Uncle Len in his sleep some night?”

Gloria laughed, and Ruth continued, “Why don’t you club him to death, Kitty? I mean, before he does it to you. Get a jump on him.”

“Ruth!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed, but she was also laughing.

“Why not, Kitty? Why not bludgeon him?”

“Shut up, Ruth. You don’t know anything.”