Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Bea fought the urge to slap him. It had come on suddenly, bearing down like a train, scattering her intentions. She took the boy by the shoulders, tried to make him still. “I’m trying to help you,” she said. “You can’t just go sticking things inside you!”

His eyes were his mother’s: blue and plain, their odd opacity suggesting self-sufficiency. He had stopped writhing and looked at Bea not with gratitude, as she must have fantasized, or terror, as she feared, but worse, with what appeared to be forgiveness: he seemed to know, in a child’s crude way of knowing, that Bea had no idea what she was doing, and that she was ashamed.

Bea was pulled back by Adeline, who growled softly in her ear, “Let him be.” She tried not to look anywhere but the rug: its mute, whorling repetition. She felt the neat dents Adeline’s fingers had left in her arm, like little egg cups. Jack had quieted as soon as his mother took Bea’s place. The piano was quiet, too.

Slowly, willing herself insect small, Bea made her way back to the love seat. She could recover, she told herself. Her cousins would pretend they had seen nothing of what happened, just as they had always pretended. She hated the idea of any of them pitying her. And she couldn’t leave the party now, in defeat. She didn’t want to leave. All that waited for her up in her room was the listless, half-finished speech she’d been writing for Josiah Story and the latest issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly, which Lillian had brought on her last visit. Why did the Quarterly still come to her parents’ house? Bea threw it out every time Lillian gave it to her, but then, always, she wound up creeping up on the trash bin, fishing it out, and reading it all in one sitting, a forbidden, painful sweet, all those cheerful mothers and acceptably brave career women with their polite little boasts, their references to jokes Bea had not been in on.

She smoothed her skirt and briefly closed her eyes, thinking this might be the moment for her to give Brigitte the locket she had found upstairs on the hallway floor a few days ago. The locket was engraved BH and held a tiny photograph of Julian in one side, while the other, empty, presumably waited for a picture of the baby. Bea could return it to Brigitte now, a public demonstration of just how fine she was: untroubled by the thing with the boy, not even jealous of Brigitte. Here she was, returning her locket! Bea opened her eyes, feeling almost calm, only to see Brigitte’s hand in its slow caress, her huge, hard stomach resting in her lap. Bea had not touched her stomach when she was pregnant. It had not seemed like hers to touch. It was like a moon that had attached itself to her, unreachable even in its closeness. She tried to ignore it, but even then it changed everything, reduced her world to black and white, then and now, now and after, later, when? Toward the end, when it was as big as Brigitte’s, she could see, even through her dress — she never looked at it bare — the baby’s parts jumping and jabbing. Despite her determination not to, she felt the baby wriggling. Once she felt what must have been hiccups. Bea hadn’t told even Vera what that felt like, those gentle astonishing taps: Hello. Hello! She went for a walk so as not to notice, but all she could do was notice; she was shrunk to sensation, as if her eyes, her ears, her breath itself, had been replaced by a baby’s hiccups. Now she watched Brigitte’s stomach for signs of movement. The glow that had followed Bea, then entered her, had grown painfully bright. She felt herself drifting toward its other face: not what was still possible but all she had lost.

Jack was crying again. He had his mother by the hands, blocking her efforts to free the dolphin. Adeline sang to him calmly but her dress was dark at the armpits, her face purple with strain. Oakes said something about baseball. Julian started to play again, “Frère Jacques” now, for the child. “Ow!” shouted Jack. Adeline, straddling him, had managed to pin his hands down with her knees and was doubled over, her face next to his. Her plan was unclear. Would she yank the dolphin out with her teeth?

Her mouth opened. But instead of grabbing the dolphin she closed the boy’s jaw, planted her mouth over his open nostril, and blew. Out came the dolphin in her other hand.

Brigitte gasped, and clapped. “ Le bébé! ” The boy began to sob. Adeline held him, and Oakes finally shut up. Julian returned to the prelude, broke through the beginning, moved on to where the melody opened up, the high G-sharps piercing and delicate at once, his eyes locked on Brigitte, who stood and moved toward him. Bea could not help but watch: Brigitte’s stomach rising, her weighty swagger as she made her way across the room. Trapped on the love seat next to Rose, Bea waited for their good-night kiss. Instead, Brigitte fell into Julian’s lap, pressed her back into his chest, lifted her face, closed her eyes, and cried (a girlish, private cry they all heard): “ Un bébé! ” And Julian, instead of looking embarrassed or tumbling off the bench at the bulk of her, did the most shocking thing. He reached around Brigitte, stroked her snail, and said back to her, with great tenderness, “ Un bébé. ”

Rose leaned close to Bea’s ear. “She does look like a whale, don’t you think?”

Bea looked to Ira, a pit rising in her throat. She knew he must be awake now — the shouting, Bea’s need, would have roused him. But he lay still, eyes closed. He wouldn’t rescue her from the despair that swelled inside her at the sight of that stomach, those hands, the odd pietà Adeline and Jack made on the floor, Rose’s whispered insult echoing Bea’s own smothered rage. She remembered huddling with Julian in the attic when they were still children, and inseparable, always hiding together—“little phantoms,” the adults called them — and how she wished then that he was her brother, so she could have him near her all the time, how his smell, and his warm skin, seemed more familiar even than her own. Now his slender hands cupped Brigitte’s vast stomach and Bea considered her options (attempting detachment, considering herself consider), to scream or to leave, and settled on a groan, hoping it would come out more quietly than it did.

Everyone stared. Bea didn’t look up but she could feel them staring — she heard their thoughts traveling the room like arrows. Poor cousin Bea. What’s wrong now?

The abrupt silence was punctured by the whistle buoy’s wail.

“Play a song, Bea?” Julian’s voice was kind — clearly he meant to help her — and Brigitte started playing a staccato “Yankee Doodle,” as if to help her further. But they had made everything worse. Bea could not play.

“Come,” Brigitte said. “A song of the freedom!”

“Independence,” Rose corrected. “Oft confused, but not the same.”

“The freedom of the dolphin!” Oakes cried. “It’s brilliant!”

“Go on, Bea.” Ira spoke gently. Even Ira was in on it now, though he knew the piano for Bea was like alcohol for others, her desire for it verging on lust, disease. She had kept herself from it for so long that she couldn’t imagine touching a key now without losing control.

She couldn’t play. And she couldn’t sit here with her fear flayed, her heart shrinking, as everyone shouted at her. So she stood. And with a jovial, almost peppy wave — hammering this, hammering that, mashing back tears, seeing double — she walked out. “Good night, everyone, I’ve work to do, well done, Adeline, hurrah! Goodnightgoodnightgoodnight!”

• • •

Brigitte’s bony rump cut off circulation to Julian’s leg. Her playing was awful, and very loud. She had no shame! He was crazy for her. He loved that she sat there with her stomach knocking against the piano, banging out patriotic songs she barely understood. He worried a bit, too, at how little she had changed. Even her body, apart from her stomach, was exactly the same, long and lean, like a deer’s. You could look at a girl like Adeline and see that she made a natural, good mother. But Brigitte might be more like Vera, always pulled to do something else, an unstoppable wind. Julian feared she might have the baby and forget about it, go off to paint or brew tea or knead clay or dance by herself in front of the mirror the way she liked to do, and just forget.