Feed The Baby Of Love Page 5

  "Naw," said Jack. "When the card says take a break, we take a break. You can finish your turn when we get back."

  In the kitchen, Douglas was nuking some lasagna.

  "It doesn't have that revolting cottage cheese this time, does it?" Raymond was asking when Rainie came in.

  "It's ricotta cheese," said Douglas.

  "Oh, excuse me, ricotta cheese."

  "And I made the second pan without it, just for you."

  "Oh, I have to wait for the second pan, eh?"

  "Wait for it or wear it," said Douglas.

  Rainie pitched in and helped, but she noticed that none of them seemed to expect her to do the dishes. They cleaned up after themselves right along, so that the kitchen never got disgusting. They weren't really little boys after all.

  The lasagna was pretty good, though of course the microwave heated it unevenly so that half of it was burning hot and the other half was cold. She carried her plate into the family room, where most of them were eating.

  "They'll call them `the oughts,'" Grandpa was saying.

  "They'll call what `the oughts?'" asked Rainie.

  "The first ten years of the next century. You know, `ought-one,' `ought-two.' When I was a kid people still remembered the oughts, and people always talked about them that way. `Back in ought-five.' Like that."

  "Yeah, but back then they still used the word ought for zero, too," said Douglas. "Nobody'd even know what it meant today."

  "People won't use ought even if they ought to," said Tom. Several of the men near him dipped a finger into whatever they were drinking and flicked a little of the liquid onto Tom, who bowed his head graciously.

  "What about zero?" said Raymond. "Just call the first two decades `the zeroes' and `the teens.'"

  "People aren't going to say `zero-five,'" said Douglas. "Besides, zero has such a negative connotation. `Last year was a real zero.'"

  "Aren't there any other words for zero?" asked Rainie.

  "I've got it!" said Tom. "The zips! Zip-one, zip-two, zip-three."

  "That's it!" cried Raymond.

  Douglas tried it out. "`Back in zip-nine, when Junior got his Ph.D.' That works pretty well. It has style."

  "`I know what's happening, you young whippersnapper,'" said Cecil, putting on an old man's voice. "`I remember the nineties! I didn't grow up in the zips, like you.'"

  "This is great!" said Tom. "Let's write to our Congressman and get it made into a law. The next decade will be called `the zips!'"

  "Don't make it a law, or they'll find a way to tax it," said Raymond.

  "Fine with me," said Tom, "if I get a percentage for having thought of it."

  Rainie noticed when Grandpa got up, set his plate down, and stepped outside. Probably going for a smoke, thought Rainie. And now that she thought of smoking, she wanted to. And now that she wanted to, she found herself getting up without a second thought. It was cold outside, she knew, and her coat wasn't that warm, but she needed to get out there.

  And not just for the cigarette. In fact, when she got outside and looked into her purse, she realized that she didn't have any cigarettes. When had she stopped carrying them? How long had she not even noticed that she didn't have any?

  "Nasty habit," said Grandpa.

  She turned. He was sitting on the porch swing. Not smoking.

  "I thought you came out here to smoke," said Rainie.

  "Naw," he said. "I just got to thinking about the people I knew who remembered the oughts, and I liked thinking about them, and so I came out here so I could hold the thought without getting distracted."

  "Well, I didn't mean to disturb you."

  "No problem," said Grandpa. "I'm old enough that my thoughts aren't very complicated anymore. I get hold of one, it just goes around and around until it bumps into a dead brain cell and then I just stand there and wonder what I was thinking about."

  "You're not so old," said Rainie. "You hold your own with those young men in there."

  "I am so old. And they aren't all that young anymore, either."

  He was right. This was definitely a party of middle-aged men. Rainie thought back to the beginning of her career and remembered that in those days, people in their forties seemed so powerful. They were the Establishment, the ones to be rebelled against. But now that she was in her forties herself she understood that if anything middle- aged people were less powerful than the young. They had less chance of changing anything. They seemed to fit into the world, not because they had made the world the way it was or because they even particularly liked it, but because they had to fit in so they could keep their jobs and feed their families. That's what I never understood when I was young, thought Rainie. I knew it with my head, but not with my heart -- that pressure of feeding a family.

  Or maybe I did know it, and hated what it did to people. To my parents. Maybe that's why my marriages didn't last and I never had any babies. Because I never wanted to be forty.

  Surprise. I'm past forty anyway, and lonely to boot.

  "I've got a question I want you to answer," she said to Grandpa. "Straight, no jokes."

  "I knew you'd get around to asking."

  "Oh, really?" she said. "Since you're so knowledgeable, do you happen to know what the question is?"

  "Maybe." Grandpa got up and walked near her and leaned against the porch railing, whistling. The breath came out of his mouth in a continuous little puff of vapor.

  He looked unbearably smug, and Rainie longed to take him down just a notch. "OK, what did I want to know?"

  "You want to know why I called you a ghost."

  That was exactly what she wanted to ask, but she couldn't stand to admit that he was right. "That wasn't my question, but as long as you bring it up, why did you say that? If it was a joke I didn't get it. You hurt my feelings."

  "I said it because it's true. You're just haunting us. We can see you, but we can't touch you in any way."

  "I have been touched in a hundred places since I came here."

  "You got nothing at risk here, Ida Johnson," said Grandpa. "You don't care."

  Rainie thought of Minnie. Of Douglas and his kids. "You're wrong, Grandpa Spaulding. I care very much."

  "You care with your heart, maybe, but not with your soul. You care with those feelings that come and go like breezes, nothing that's going to last. You're playing with house money here. No matter how it comes out, you can't lose. You're going to come away from Harmony Illinois with more than you brought here."

  "Maybe so," said Rainie. "Is that a crime?"

  "No ma'am. Just a discovery. Something I noticed about you and I didn't think you'd noticed about yourself."

  "Well ain't you clever, Grandpa." She smiled when she said it, so he'd know she was teasing him, not really being snide. But it hurt her feelings all over again, mostly because she could see now that he was right. How could anything she did here be real, after all, when nobody even knew her right name? In a way Ida Johnson was her right name -- it was her mother's name, anyway, and didn't Douglas Spaulding have the same name as his father? Didn't he give the same name to his son? Why couldn't she use her mother's name? How was that a lie, really, when you looked at it the right way? "Ain't you clever. You found out my secret. Grandpa Spaulding, Gray Detective. Sees a strange woman in his parlor one November evening and all at once he knows everything there is to know about her."

  Grandpa waited a moment before answering. And his answer wasn't really an answer. More like he just let slip whatever her words made him think of. "My brother Tom and I did that one summer. Kept a list of Discoveries and Revelations. Like noticing that you were a ghost."

  Every time he said it, it stung her deeper. Still, she tried to keep her protest playful-sounding. "When you prick me, do I not bleed?"

  He ignored her. "We made another list, too. Rites and Ceremonies. All the things we always did every year, we wrote them down, too, when we did them that summer. First stinkbug we stepped on. First harvest of dandelions."

  "They got
chemicals to kill the dandelions now," said Rainie.

  "Stinkbugs too, for that matter," said Grandpa. "Very convenient."

  Rainie looked through the window. "They're settling back down to play the game in there."

  "Go on back in then, if you want. Haunt whoever you want. Us mortals can't determine your itinerary."

  She was tired of his sniping at her. But it didn't make her angry. It just made her sad. As if she had lost something and she couldn't even remember what it was. "Don't be mean to me," she said softly.

  "Why shouldn't I?" he answered. "I see you setting up to do some harm to my family, Ida Johnson or whoever you are."

  It couldn't be that Rainie was doing something to tip everybody off how much she was attracted to Douglas Spaulding, to the idea of him. It had to be that people around here were just naturally suspicious. "Do you say that to every stranger in town, or just the women?"

  "You're one hungry woman, Ida Johnson," said Grandpa, cheerfully enough.

  "Maybe I haven't been getting my vitamins."

  "You can get pretty malnourished on a diet of stolen food."

  That was it. The last straw. She didn't have to put up with any more accusations. "I'm done talking with you, old man." She meant to make a dramatic exit from the porch, but the door to the parlor wouldn't open.

  "That door's painted shut," he said helpfully. "You want the other one." He pointed around to the far side of the bay window, where the door she had come out of was open a crack. The noises of the men at the table surged and faded like waves on the shore.

  She took two steps toward that door, stalking, angry, and then realized that Grandpa was laughing. For a moment she wanted to slap him, to stop him from thinking he was so irresistibly wise, judging her the way adults always did. But she didn't slap him. Instead she plunked back down on the swing beside him and laughed right along.

  Finally they both stopped laughing; even the silent gusts of laughter settled down; even the lingering smiles faded. It was cold, just sitting there, not talking, not even swinging.

  "What was your question, anyway?" he asked out of nowhere.

  For a moment she couldn't think what he was talking about. Then she remembered that she had denied that he was right when he guessed her question. "Oh, nothing," she said.

  "It was important enough for you to come out here into the cold, wasn't it? Might as well ask me, cause here I am, and next week you can't be sure, I'm seventy-four going on seventy-five."

  She still couldn't bring herself to admit that he had been right. Or rather, she couldn't admit that she had lied about it. "It was a silly question."

  He said nothing. Just waited.

  And as he waited, a question did come to her. "Your grandson, Dougie, he said that there were some things that nobody in town knew, and one of them was his father's middle name."

  Grandpa Spaulding sighed.

  "You can tell me," said Rainie. "After all, I'm a ghost."

  "Douglas has never forgiven me for naming him the way I did. And sometimes I'm sorry I did it to him. How was I supposed to know that the name would turn trendy -- as a girl's name? To me it was a boy's name, still is, a name full of sweat and sneakers and flies buzzing and jumping into the lake off a swing and almost drowning. A name that means open windows and hot fast crickets chirping in the sultry night."

  "Summer," she said. A murmur. A whisper. A sweet memory on a cold night like this.

  "That's right," he said. "I named him Douglas Summer Spaulding."

  She nodded, thinking that Summer was the kind of name a sentimental, narcissistic fourteen-year-old girl would choose for herself. "You're lucky he didn't sue you when he came of age."

  "I explained it to him. The way I explained it to my wife. I wanted to name him for something perfect, a dream to hold onto, or at least to wish for, to try for."

  "You don't have to try for summer," said Rainie. "You just have to have the guy come and service the air conditioner."

  "You don't believe that," he said, looking appalled.

  "Oh, aren't ghosts allowed to tease old eccentrics?"

  "I didn't name him for just any old summer, you know. I named him for one summer in particular. The summer of 1928, to be exact, the perfect summer. Twelve years old. Living in Grandpa's and Grandma's boarding house with my brother Tom. I knew it was perfect even at the time, not just thinking back on it. That summer was the place where God lived, the place where he filled my heart with love, the moment, the long exquisite twelve-week moment when I discovered that I was alive and that I liked it. The next summer Grandpa was dead, and the next year the Depression was under way and I had to work all summer to help put food on the table. I wasn't a kid anymore after summer 1928."

  "But you were still alive," Rainie said.

  "Not really," said Grandpa. "I remembered being alive, but I was coasting. Summer of '28 was like I had me a bike at the top of Culligan Hill and from up there I could see so far -- I could see past the edge of every horizon. All so beautiful, spread out in front of me like Grandma's supper table, strange-looking and sweet-smelling and bound to be delicious. And so I got on the bike and I pushed off and never had to touch the pedals at all, I just coasted and coasted and coasted."

  "Still coasting?" asked Rainie. "Never got to the supper table?"

  "When you get down there and see things close, it isn't a supper table anymore, Rainie. It turns out to be the kitchen, and you aren't there to eat, you're there to fix the meal for other people. Grandma's kitchen was the strangest place. Nothing was anywhere that made sense. Sugar in every place except the canister marked sugar. Onions out on the counter and the knives never put away and the spices wherever Grandma last set them down. Chaos. But oh, Rainie, that old lady could cook. She had miracles in her fingers."

  "What about you? Could you cook?"

  He looked at her blankly.

  "When you stopped coasting and found out that life was a kitchen."

  "Oh." He remembered the stream of the conversation. "No," he said, chuckling. "No ma'am, I was no chef. But I didn't have to do it alone. Didn't get married till I got back from the war, twenty-nine years old in 1945, I still got the mud of Italy under my fingernails and believe me, I've scrubbed them plenty, but there was my Marjory, and she gave me three children and the second one was a boy and I named him Douglas after myself and then I named him for the most perfect thing I ever knew, I named him for a dream ..."

  "For a ghost," said Rainie.

  He looked at her so sadly. "For the opposite of a ghost, you poor child."

  Douglas opened the parlor door and leaned out into the night. "Aren't you two smart enough to come in out of the cold?"

  "One of us is," said Grandpa, but he didn't move.

  "We're starting up," said Douglas, "and it's still your turn, Ida."

  "Coming," said Rainie, getting up.

  Douglas slipped back inside.

  She helped Grandpa Spaulding out of the swing. "Don't get me wrong," he said, patting her back as she led the way to the door. "I like you. You're really something."

  "Mmm," said Rainie.

  "And if I can feel that way about you when you're pretending to be something you're not, think how much I'd like you if you actually told the truth about something."

  She came through the door blushing, with anger and with embarrassment and with that thrill of fear -- was she found out? Did Grandpa Spaulding somehow know who she really was?

  Maybe he did. Without knowing the name Rainie Pinyon, maybe he knew exactly who she was anyway.

  "Whose turn is it?" asked Tommy.

  "Ida's," somebody said.

  "What is she, an emu?"

  "No, human. Look, she's a human."

  "How did she get so far without us noticing?"

  "Not to worry!" cried Douglas Summer Spaulding. He raised a red-lettered card over his head. "For the good of the whole -- Release the Pigs!"

  The others gave a rousing cheer.

  "Give me my good karma
," said Douglas. Then he grinned sheepishly in Rainie's face. "You have only five life-pennies and there are seven piglets and the pig-path is only three dots long, so I sincerely hope with all my heart that your karmic balance is of a sort to send you to heaven, because, dear lady, the porkers from purgatory are going to eat your shorts."

  "Heaven?" said Rainie. "Not likely."

  But she popped every one of the pigs before they got to her. It was like she couldn't roll anything but ones and twos.

  "Grandpa's right," said Tommy. "She really is a ghost! The pigs went right through her!"

  Then she rolled eighteen, three sixes, and it was enough to win.

  "Supreme god!" Tommy cried. "She has effed the ineffable!"

  "What's her karmic balance?"

  She flipped over the karma cards. Three evils and one good, but the good was a ten and the evils were all low numbers and they balanced exactly.

  "Zero counts as good," said Douglas. "How could anyone have supposed otherwise? So I bet I come in second with a balance of nine on the good side."

  They all tallied and Grandpa finished last, his karmic balance a negative fifty.

  "That's the most evil I ever saw in all the years we've been feeding the baby," said Tommy. He switched to a midwestern white man's version of black dialect. "Grandpa, you bad."

  Grandpa caught Rainie's eye and winked. "It's the truth."

  They all stayed around and helped finish off the refreshments and clean up from dinner, talking and laughing. Tom was the first to go. "If you're coming with me, Ida, the time is now."

  "Already?" She shouldn't have said that, but she really did hate to go. It was the best night she'd had in months. Years.

  "Sorry," he said. "But I've got to scrape some moles off people's faces first thing tomorrow, and I have to be bright-eyed and bushy- tailed or I accidentally take off noses and ears and people get so testy with me when I do that."

  "That's fine, I really don't mind going."

  "No, you go on ahead, Tom," said Douglas. "Somebody else can take her home."

  "I can," said Raymond.

  "Me too," said Jack. "Right on my way."

  They all knew where she was living, of course. It made her smile. Whether I knew them or not, they cared enough about me to notice where I lived. Smalltown nosiness could be ugly if you looked at it one way, but kind of sweet and comforting if you looked at it another way entirely.