Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“Are all of your designs vices?”

“If you can’t do, dress. Have I taught you nothing, VoVo?” I looked at her stomach. Lucy had never been pregnant for longer than four months before, but this time she hadn’t intercepted nature. My own mother had told people she was expecting even though she wasn’t showing. You don’t look like your about to give birth, people would tell her, and she’d respond that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. She and my father took me from a woman at the airport, and when they told a waitress that night I was their new baby, the entire restaurant clapped for the family that had been created through sheer will. Their dreams hadn’t been withheld by biology, so why should mine?

“Well don’t just stand there staring,” Lucy said. “Sit down and take a good look.” She sat me on a recliner and lifted her shirt up. Wiggling the teddy side to side like a can-can dancer, she made a little diagonal kick, then pushed her butt out and put her hands on her hips for a silhouette view. Her stomach looked like what I’d imagined as a child would happen if you swallowed a watermelon seed. “Well?” she asked. “What do you think? Am I everything you expected?”

“More,” I answered. I hadn’t seen her in some time.

“When you’re young, you think you know everything,” she said. “I always thought I needed a boob job, and all I really needed was a bun in the oven out of wedlock. Do you see these puppies?” She pushed the dead weight she was carrying through her chest up towards her neck.

“It’s difficult not to since you’re wearing lingerie, Lucy.”

“Oh VoVo, pregnancy is science fucking fiction. Listen to me! A person growing inside of me!”

“It’s not fiction. It’s just science.”

“Like I’ve been implanted!”

“With sperm,” I said. “That’s the science part.”

“I’m making a life for somebody else,” she said. “It’s more than most people have ever done for me. It’s more than I could ever have done for myself. It’s a goddamned miracle.”

“I’m happy for you,” I said, though the unanswered question on my mind was who had made her into a science exhibition.

“But VoVo are you happy with me? From me? Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s rain”

“Does the father know?”

“Nice girls should be seen and not heard,” she purred, suddenly all clasped hands and crossed knees, winking and folding into a false position of demureness.

“And I suppose nice girls finish three trimesters?” I said. She set her mouth flat. “The father’s not my business anyway,” I added quickly. The body was hers. The bodies were hers. “You don’t have to say who.”

“The father remains to be seen,” Lucy answered. She bit into a candy bar and wiped chocolate finger smears on the chair upholstery. “It’s narrowed down obviously. But you know, one day in a couple of the years when the baby looks like something more than a fat suit, I’ll be running after it playing tag and it will glance back at me and I’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s that fucker Sean.’ Or ‘Sweet Jesus, isn’t he just the spitting image of that bastard Albert!’ Like love. I’ll know it when I see it.”

I thought of my mother telling her little girl, you could be anyone. “You dated a guy named Albert?”

“It’s the law of paradox, VoVo. Shrimpy name, big cucumber.”

“But still a bastard or a fucker?”

“What do you want from me?” Lucy asked. “Do you know where we live? We are so into nowhere, we aren’t even in the sticks. We’re in the stick. We’re sticking, we’re stuck, we’re left to fuck goddamned slim pickings. And anyway, don’t you know the phrase for love is ‘falling in?’”

Falling could be like hiccups. Once you started it was hard to stop, and the only way you could quit mopping the ice was not to think about it. You had to breathe deep, scare yourself out of it, think about the right next thing. Otherwise you ended up in a pattern of failure and your year was done. And wasn’t this conversation just a series of hiccups? I breathed deep. I tried to figure what the right thing to do was. Here was a girl between a bastard and a fucker, and I was going to ask her for money? I told Lucy she could munch my arm if she wanted.

“Sweet VoVo,” she said. “I’m just a belly full of hormones right now, and my cooch hasn’t been getting any wear at all lately. Don’t mind me.”

“What can I do?”

“You can’t. It’s illegal for cousins in every state above the Mason-Dixon line.” She winked.

“There’s got to be something.”

“Invent alcoholic non-alcohol. Invent smokeless smokes. Invent fat-free pregnancy.”

“Anything else?”

“Tell me a story that will get my mind out of the gutter. I’m an insatiable single mom. It’s a social service I’m owed.”

“What kind of story?” I watched Lucy unwrap a chocolate.

“Inspirational. I want the good stuff.”

“Alright,” I said. “Well, there was this time a couple of years ago, you might have seen the reports on TV: Hate Crime is Ice Cold. I remember that headline because my friend Ryan was its recipient. One night he was skating and he stayed late to use the weight room. When he was leaving, he whistled at the Zamboni guy like he always did. But this time was not like before. The guy and a rink janitor followed him to the parking lot, grabbed him, and beat him with a wrench. He was back at the rink practicing the next day, still trying his triples with a black eye. They showed the videos on TV.”

“I’m sorry, do we speak the same language VoVo? I said ‘inspirational,’ not ‘horrible.’”

“But it is inspirational. He bounced back.” I rolled Lucy’s chocolate wrapper into a small silver ball between my fingers.

“Next!” Lucy said.

Suddenly, from the kitchen came stumbling sounds, silverware falling on ceramic, and the flatulent groan of chair legs moving across the floor. We heard my Aunt Janine, Lucy’s mother, sputtering.

“Saved by the bell, kitten,” Lucy said. “Sounds like Gram Crackers needs to go beddy-bye now. That’s what I’m gonna tell the kid to call her: Gram Crackers. Nutty old cunt.”

“What’s the kid going to call you?”

“Madonna.” Lucy pushed the martini glass tent of her teddy up out of the seat and waddled out of the living room. “You know, there are people who think I’ll be an unfit mother,” she called out as she walked into the kitchen. “But the truth is I’ve always been a mother — to my mother!”

It was what I never wanted to do: to mother. To hurt when a child hurt, to take teeth from beneath pillows, to waddle with the weight of life — it was expecting alright, expecting the worst. I loved Lucy, and I didn’t want to be at all like her. I looked at my watch. Mo would be coming to pick me up in fifteen minutes. I was, as always, but also especially, running out of time.

By the time she returned from putting Aunt Janine to bed, I had made my decision and was thinking about the oddity of the phrase, how it sounded as though the mind was imagined or embellished.

“Now where were we? Oh yes, you were going to tell me a story. And let me add something else: make it juicy.”

“Actually, can we put the stories on hold? There’s something I was hoping I could ask you.” I drummed my fingernails on my thigh so that my nervous hands couldn’t be heard.

“Shoot, tiger.”

“Could I borrow sixty bucks?” I focused on one of the little martini glasses on Lucy’s teddy.

“Hot date?” She sucked hard on her soda straw, crossed her eyes, then shuddered in what I could only imagine was miming an orgasm.

“No.”

“You can tell me the hot gossip, VoVo. Remember, I’m an insatiable single mother.”