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Cradle on the Water 2/6
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
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When Frank was making love to her, he liked to touch the sides of her breasts, moving upward, and if to lift Naomi up to the sky. She found she enjoyed the feeling, as if she might fly away any minute, arms spread, to some foreign country where she didn't speak the language and the natives peered at her with curious eyes. It was an itch sex just couldn't scratch; the travel bug biting the hometown girl.
(A joke. Three girls in a five-and-dime.
How can you avoid gettin' a baby?
If you've already a bun in the oven.
ha. ha.)
Frank, with his wide, funny hands, got the closest to soothing that irritated spot. Finally, she shuddered, and his nails dug just slightly into her soft flesh. Sitting back on her haunches, she rolled off of him and closed her eyes, letting the world drift back in around her. The radio warbled, so softly from the window sill, a sad song who's name she could not remember.
'I cry each time, I hear this sound...'
She said, laying with her cheek on the pillow and utterly without meaning to, "Your mom wants me to get an abortion."
"Guh," Frank murmured, having flopped over onto his belly. One eye peeked open from where his face was buried in a pile of sheets. "What did you say?"
"I _said_," Naomi sat up, watching her twin in the old vanity mirror do the same, "'Your mother wants me to get an abortion'."
"My mother?" the sheets swished with Frank's denial, "My attend-synogog-without-fail, pious, old-world, Jewish Mother? You've lost it."
Naomi rolled her eyes, standing moon-white naked in the middle of the creaking, almost empty attic. "I have not. Frank, she told me today. She said she'll take me into San Jose next week and have it done. Without telling my mother."
"Dude," Frank sputtered, "That's tripp'n."
"You're telling me!" she huffed, sitting back down on the bed to draw first her shocks, then her boots on.
"She wants to kill our--"
"Not _our_, Frank," Naomi was very diplomatic, "_my_. My baby. And no one knows if it's really killing, 'cause no one knows how self-aware fetuses are."
"But still, she thinks it's mine, too," he persisted, "You think so, too." He came up to kiss her neck, like an apologetic priest, while she twisted her hair back up into a sloppy bun.
"Frank, I wanted you to be the first because you've always been my best friend, but you certainly weren't the last."
"I know." He spat, offering her his pinky, "Friends forever?"
She spat and shook, "And then some." A sigh escaped her lips, "Besides, you've got your own problems."
"'Nam," Frank laid back down, almost like a child hiding. "Thanks for reminding me."
"Leave tonight," Naomi took his hands, insistent, "Hell, leave tomorrow or even next week. You still have some time before you have to report. Canada or Mexico, take your pick. You could get to either one pretty easily from here."
"I don't know," he sighed to the ceiling, "I mean... I don't want to go. I really don't-- I wake up at night with the shakes about it. But who'm I to think I'm all-fired special that I should get to skip out? It's not cool."
(God knows.)
"War is wrong," she said decisively, pulling her yellow-died dress over her head.
"Killing is, babe. In any context."
Briefly, she looked at him, but saw in his sleepy hazel eyes that he had meant nothing by it. Still, as window swung open and she sat with one leg over the sill, poised to reach for that high branch...
(God knows.)
Well, if you're so smart, God-- tell me what the hell I'm supposed to do!
#(#)#
Normally, she doesn't dream–not like most people do. When she dreams, it's all stillness, as if she is lying down inside her body, but if she rolled over, then her bones and flesh would stay right where they were. It would be her soul that moved, perhaps falling off the edge of the bed, into the space between the comforter and the peach-blossom wallpaper. Or sometimes, it's like the quiet of a museum, and she stands, motionless, as images are brought before her for careful study. But nothing ever _happens_.
Except tonight.
Tonight she is looking at her body, the lithe curves of it under the handmade quilt, how it rests in her single, maidenly bed. Too bad she's outgrown it. And now, she turns, and her bare feet are no longer touching the soft brown carpet; instead they seem to be touching nothing at all.
But the world, the world is around her, now! The sky is a just-after-the rain gray, wet leaves clustered on the grass and the wind rustles, whistles suggestively through the few brown sheaves still clinging to the trees. Yeah. But though she can smell the exit of the rain, see and hear the evidence of the wind, her naked toes don't feel the concrete path, she can't shiver with the cold. Turning slowly, she takes herself in as well as her surroundings–tall, aristocratic buildings flank her, more modern ones mixed amongst their ranks. Shivering despite of (because of?) her numbness, she feels small, dressed in her white silk nightgown, the one she privately thinks is so sexy, but is embarrassed to wear for any lovers. Without meaning to, she moves out of the structured shadows and down the path, to where the sign says–(don't look!)–and she can hear a fountain splash a little ways away. If it's raining again, she can't feel it, but she thinks it might be because the sign is all running together like watercolor and she leans forward and it says..
Rainier.
(Someday, you'll be sitting here in a battered brown station wagon, with your son
//son!?//
bouncing eagerly in the passenger seat, book-bag clutched like an eager lover. I'm alright, Mom, he'll say, so fresh faced, so like a cherub, blue eyes too bright to be any sky you've seen. I'll see you soon, this is so cool I can't fucking _wait_! And you don't correct him because you believe 'fuck' is just another word and if he wants to use it, well fine. And you'll kiss him on the cheek, his soft, still-baby skin cheek, and he'll walk towards the registrars office with barely a look back at you. You'll be thinking about the airport, and how you'll be going to Berlin for the fall season, not worried at all, until you see the sign, the sign your son will walk by a thousand times. Damn it all, you've read the name before, too, on his application papers, on his requests for scholarships and loans but---
But the sign says, 'Rainier'.
And your heart is in your throat.)
Within her dream, Naomi Sandburg frowns; faltering, uncertain. The sign, or her vision, seems to have cleared, and she can read the word clearly, the golden curve of the 'r'. The panic falls away and she thinks, 'oh, is that all.'
The sound of the fountain is louder.
She walks a little further– no conscious destination, just meandering, waiting for what she will be presented with next. After a while, the path slopes down a hill, towards another cluster of buildings, and she can see the decorative fountain, students clustered around to–
No.
There's an ambulance parked haphazardly, half in the street and half on the sidewalk; she can see the medics clustered just off to one side. Someone says, very loudly, 'NO!', with a voice of pain like she's never heard before. Suddenly, she is running, down the hill, stumbling a little, which doesn't hurt at all. At the bottom, she's breathing hard, though; words come from a voice and the voice comes from the mouth of the man just lifting his from the victim's.
"Come on, Chief."
"It's too late!" says someone in the crowd, but their faces are shadowed when Naomi flickers her glance up.
"No!" The man is holding on tight, his knuckles white as the bone underneath his skin; he holds on like he doesn't know or remember _why_ he won't let go, only that he shouldn't. "This isn't over!" And soft, so soft, his mouth doesn't seem to move at all, he says a name Naomi hears, but a second later can not remember. Then, louder, "Come on, Sandburg!"
Startled, she takes a step back, suspended in a world defined by three of her senses. She feels the division between herself and the scene like a pane of glass so perfectly crafted; translucent, but unable to give.
It's a chant now, the tone going out of the man's voice with desperation; "Sandburg, Sandburg, _please_. Come on! Sandburg!"
"What do you want!?" Naomi cries, angry, frustrated, feeling this man's sadness as it tumbles away from him in waves. Not just sadness, but a loss of life, as if there was something so vital, so precious, that he could not store it within himself. As if is he who is dying, or perhaps already dead. Though it is the first time she has spoken in the dream, the blinding flash of his focused gaze stuns her. She herself is transparent–he doesn't see her, no, but in a way he does.
The dream sees her, this dream that she is in, through his eyes, and it says, "Don't do this to me, Sandburg."
She opens her mouth to protest, to deny or question, but in one instant she is abruptly able to feel, the cold, the pain, water closing around
(flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood)
until breathing is just a dream and that's death, which comes not for one person, but for both the man and the body he cradles with such tender, persuasive love; as if to say, "come back, please come back".
And Naomi wakes up coughing in the middle of the night.
#(#)#
Coming awake was startling and strange, as if she had just been unceremoniously shoved back into a jumble of flesh and bones–a puppet–and expected to use the limbs, to pull the strings. In the darkness, she couldn't see the pink, child-princess clock sitting on her dresser, but the air tasted like something after midnight, and the moon's pale curve shone through the branches and her window to make intimidating shadows on the floor. Down the hall, her parents would be sleeping side by side, laid out like corpses, not touching. Naomi breathed out, as loudly as she dared, simply to ground herself in the here and now. Scrambling out of her sheets with lanky un-grace, she came to rest herself on the window seat, fingers curled against the window pane.
("Don't do this to me, Sandburg!"
A shadow from the crowd, "It's too late.")
All at once, she rose up on her knees, drawing the glass casement down, so that the night world was open to her. Leaning out the window, she could see across the lawn to the room where Frank slept, disturbed by his own dreams of tickets reading "Hanoi" and "Saigon". For the first time, she was really aware that there was a little little _thing_ inside of her, curled up, and thing that would be a baby with a few more months work. A tiny human with five fingers on each hand (God willing), and two little arms, and eyes and a mouth and Why, he/she would be everything in miniature, so perfectly crafted, a thumbnail of who he or
(He. You shall have a boy-child and his name will be
--Don't leave me, Blair!–
She heard it and she didn't. It hurt her ears.)
would be. Naomi wavered desperately against the glass, feeling sick. Pushing out further into the cool night air, the strap of her nightgown fell off her shoulder, and she suddenly laughed to think how she must look–breasts heavy and naked and pale in the summer moonlight. And and looking up, there was an apple suspended near her mouth, a breath or so away. The summer's last, a left over, so ripe and round and red that it could not be healthy, and in the night colors it was violet and full like a heart.
(My dear, your skin so pale as snow. Sweetheart, have an apple, sweet like your heart. Take it from my old, boney hands.)
Annoyance flickered in Naomi's breast, along with disquiet, and she drew back into the safety of her room, drawing her knees up protectively.
(Killing is wrong, in any form, babe.)
(It's not even my choice!)
So clearly, she could see the look on Dolores eye's, that copper-gilded protectiveness, like a woman with her sword raised high towards the dawn. And also, the man, weeping without tears, foundering, calling for Sandburg (who?) to take it back, to make it Not So.
("I won't let anyone hurt my.. //ruthie, blair, beloved, guide//.. not even you.")
Suspended between some middle-of-the-night point in time and dawn, Naomi curled up on the window sill, and fell into the sort of dreams she was all too accustomed to.