We Are Water. Wally Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ to this girl, and you’re damn well going to meet them. And if by ‘other options’ you mean what I think you do, then shame on you!”

      “Yeah, but Mommy …,” Albie says. He turns from his mother to his father. “Daddy, what do you think?”

      Mr. Wignall looks back and forth between the two of them and takes his sweet time answering. “Your mother’s right,” he finally says. “You had your fun. Now you got to pay the piper.” At this meeting, I’m more or less being treated like I’m invisible. Why is that? I’m the one who’s pregnant. Don’t I count? What if I don’t want to marry him?

      But in another two weeks now, I will marry Albie, not because I want to but because he’s 50 percent responsible for the baby that’s growing inside of me. No, more than that—75 percent maybe, him and his imaginary men’s pill that stops women from getting pregnant.

      Albie doesn’t give me a ring; he gives me a hundred dollars and tells me to go down to Ogulnick’s Jewelers and pick out something I like. None of the diamond rings are anywhere near my price range, so I settle for this little ring with a garnet chip in it that’s really just a friendship ring, not an engagement ring. Winona says I shouldn’t wear it to work because my male customers will give me better tips if they don’t think I’m “spoken for.” Ha! Like that’s the reason she doesn’t want me wearing it, not because she’s embarrassed that Albie’s “knocked me up,” as he puts it.

      When I finally call my brother to tell him about my situation, Donald says I don’t even sound like I like this guy. What am I marrying him for?”

      “Because of the baby,” I tell him.

      “And that’s the only reason?”

      “Yeah. What other reason would there be?”

      But after I get off the phone, I start thinking about it, and if I really, really want to be honest with myself, I think I’m partly marrying Albie because, even after all these years—twelve of them now—I still miss my own mother as bad as ever. Maybe Winona isn’t perfect—ha! no maybe about it!—but in under seven months she’s going to be my baby’s grandmother, so she might soften toward me and maybe even start treating me like a daughter a little bit. Who knows? Maybe next Easter, I’ll get an Easter basket like Albie.

      My wedding dress is pastel orange with a matching headband. When Winona takes me shopping, she nixes my wearing white or wearing a veil, since Albie and I “jumped the gun” and conceived a child in sin. I have to oblige her because she’s paying for the dress, which she likes way more than I do. There’s no bridal shower, no fancy invitations. There’ll be no graduation this coming June for me, either; I dropped out of school when I started showing. No one from my foster family or my real family is coming to the wedding, not even Donald, who says he can’t in good conscience support this marriage. On Albie’s side, the only people who are coming are Albie’s parents—they’re going to be our witnesses—plus Winona’s mother, who’s always clacking her false teeth and telling me to call her by her first name, Bridey, and Mr. Wignall’s father, who has thick gray hair growing out of his ears and wears a hearing aid that’s always whistling. The only other person I wanted to invite is Priscilla from work. I’ve heard Winona tell Althea that she thinks Priscilla is “one of those girls who should have been born a boy,” by which she means, I think, that she’s a lesbian. Which she is. Priscilla’s not coming to my wedding, though, because I didn’t end up inviting her after Winona gave me this stupid excuse about how she doesn’t feel comfortable fraternizing with people who work under her. What she really meant, I’m pretty sure, is: no lesbians allowed. She’d probably croak if she knew about that afternoon when Priscilla drove me out to the place where she boards her horses, Lucky and Gal, and after we went horseback riding, we made out in the barn and her fingers gave me those “vaginal contractions” that it only dawned on me later was an orgasm—my first.

      Even though we’re going to get married to prove we’re not “trailer trash,” as Winona puts it, Albie keeps talking about me getting an abortion. One of the other guys at Midas Mufflers and his girlfriend had “a little complication they had to take care of” a while back, he says, and Albie’s got the name of their doctor. But I am not getting an abortion, no matter that it’s legal now and no matter how much he keeps bugging me about it.

      It doesn’t matter, though, because on the day we go to town hall for our marriage license they’re closed for lunch, and when we go back to Albie’s car to wait until one o’clock, I look down and there’s blood seeping through my white shorts. “Uh-oh,” I go.

      “Jesus, what now?” Albie says, and I just point.

      He drives me over to the emergency room and everyone there is real nice to me, real sensitive, even Albie. When I can’t stop crying and my little box of tissues runs out, he goes out to the nurses’ station and gets me a new box. And when we leave the hospital, he holds my hand on the way out to the car. Back at the Wignalls’, Winona holds out her arms and folds them around me and I cry against her shirt, partly because I’ve lost the baby and partly because this is the nicest she’s ever been to me. Don’t let go, I want to say. Please just keep holding me.

      But Winona does let go, and in the days that follow I am both sad about losing the baby and relieved that now I don’t have to marry Albie after all. It’s like when you’re playing Monopoly and you pick up a get-out-of-jail-free card. I decide to get out of Sterling. My foster family’s away at the lake for the weekend. I can pack and leave them a note—tell them I decided it’s time for me to move on now that I’m almost an adult. And I can just not show up for my next shift at Friendly’s. I’ll just disappear.

      I call Priscilla and she picks me up and drives us toward Hartford. On the way there, the car radio plays that Beatles song “Here Comes the Sun,” and she and I sing along with it. Little darling, I feel the ice is slowly melting … In the motel room we rent on the Berlin Turnpike, Priscilla and I make fun of Winona, eat pizza, and drink beer. We get drunk and crazy, jumping on the two double beds, flying past each other in opposite directions until I flop facedown on the mattress and realize I’m still a little sore from my miscarriage. It was a silly way for me to behave, especially since I was almost a married woman and a mother. But I’m not either one of those things now, and so what? I’ve been on a starvation diet as far as fun’s concerned, and being free from Albie has made me giddy. I know that it’s only for this one night. Priscilla has to get back to her horses and her job. And I have to not go back to Sterling, or to the stupid clod I almost married. I still feel sad about the baby, but in a way it was for the best. If it had lived, I probably would have never gotten free of Albie and his parents, and even if I did, my baby’s last name would be Wignall. And my name, too. Annie Wignall: yuck! “Do me a favor, will you?” I ask Priscilla. “The next time he comes into Friendly’s and you make him a sundae, spit on it.” She kisses me and says it’ll be her pleasure, and that she’ll spit in his “fucking Fribble,” too.

      Later, in the dark, Priscilla climbs into my bed and we start making out. She does the same kind of stuff she did to me that day in the horse barn and I like it and don’t even feel sore anymore. I do the same things to Priscilla, and I like doing that, too. But after we’re both finished, things get quiet. I can tell from her breathing that she’s fallen asleep and I get scared. Get up and go look out the window at the cars going by—the people inside them getting to wherever they’re going. And yeah, I’ve gotten away, but I have no idea where I’m going to. It’s like I’m a little girl again, in the backseat of that social worker’s car the day they came and got me. Drove me away from Daddy. I’m crying, looking out the back window at Kent, who’s running down the road after me. What Kent does to me is bad, but are these people bad, too? Where are they taking me? I don’t even care that my father’s СКАЧАТЬ