Eating Crazy

I’m pretty positive Lee was the father. Lee was nothing special, just a farm hand who dropped out of the same high school I did. I slept with him because it felt good and because he was supposed to be leaving soon. It’s the best thing about the guys around here, that you can pretty much count on their leaving, unless they’re over twenty-five—then they might be hanging around, hoping you’ll try and corral them into forever just the two of you. I figured Lee was okay. He said he was going to be a Hollywood marine—meaning that he was going to boot camp in San Diego—and he was seventeen.

Eight years on the safe side, but he hung around for weeks anyway, calling me his sugarloaf.

“Sugarloaf,” he’d say. “My back could use some scrit-scratching about halfway up.”

I thought he was going to bore me right into my grave, even if he was a good heave of a man. He was a big guy, strong. Looked like he could’ve been built by John Deere, except for his hair, which was light-colored and fine as cornsilk, what there was of it. It was the kind of hair you can’t get on Christmas tree angels any more. He’d use special shampoo on it, and fluff it up with a fork while it was drying, and he wouldn’t wear a hat ever, even though it was February. Everybody thought that proved what a man he was, but he was just trying to keep it from going flat.

This was probably the most attractive man in town.

I would pull a hair or two out every now and then, hoping it would get him packing for Hollywood already. I’d tell him I wanted to stuff a pillow with them, for my underwear drawer.

“That’s sweet of you,” he’d say, “but it’s no way to get a man to stay.”

He couldn’t understand that even though I had nothing but a job as a waitress—no furniture, no family, nothing—I still might not have rescuing on my mind. I didn’t even get to do the dinner shift, he’d point out. But all I was looking for was entertainment. I was sick of the movies, and sick of drinking, and of clothes, and of eating crazy—which was all I’d done for about the whole year before I took up with men like him. I’d eat potato chips, hash browns, french fries, anything made out of potatoes one week, then food you had to break into the next—walnuts and coconuts, eggs, clams. It was kind of a hobby, something that made me feel like I was halfway alive.

I was sorry and sad when I got sick of it, and did nothing but sleep all the time after I quit.

Lee, when I told him about it, couldn’t understand what there was to be sad about. I was shampooing his hair in my bathroom sink as we talked.

“That’s sickness,” he said. “If you’d been my woman then, I’d have muzzled you.”

I rinsed out the shampoo and asked him if he’d ever thought to put conditioner in his hair.

“Never crossed my mind,” he said.

“Takes a couple of minutes,” I told him, “but you won’t believe the difference. You got time?”

“Sugarloaf, honey,” he said. “My time is yours.”

I got him to close his eyes, and poured some Nair on his head, working it in good with my fingers, and kind of massaging his scalp.

“Hope it works as good as it feels,” he said.

Later, when he saw himself bald as an eagle was the first time he got mad at me. He turned around from the mirror and slammed me in the face before he left, so that the room turned cartwheels and then crashed. When I came to, I realized he’d broke my nose.

That was a lonely time too.

I could’ve had the kid sucked out of me, but I didn’t want to. I was eating crazy again, and hoping for a girl.

I was going to name her Angela.

People were talking, and I liked it. When I started showing, everybody wanted to look and see just how big, and business picked up at the diner. I got put on the dinner shift, and once in a while would get a big sympathy tip, though sometimes I wouldn’t get any tip at all.

By the time the Reverend came to see me, I was having to tie shoelaces to the ends of my apron strings to make it go around my waist. He was almost as fat as me, with shiny little glasses that people said were real gold, and a squinty way of watching while I wiped the counter in front of him. He looked like he could see into my soul, and was counting up the dustballs there.

“The Lord will take just about anybody back,” he said.

I swept the crumbs in his black lap. There was a bread end lying next to the napkin holder, so I gave him that too.

But then I was an inch sorry. If I hadn’t done that with the crumbs and the bread end, I probably could’ve told him about the helicopter I read about—the one that fell into some pond. Reverends are supposed to listen to that kind of thing, and maybe he’d have listened to me. He’d have pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at me drippy while I told him that ever since I saw that in the paper, all I could think about was people swimming and getting chopped into pieces. That wasn’t in the article—all the helicopter did was crash. But I kept seeing it whenever I closed my eyes, even for a second, even if I just blinked, which I was trying not to do. Arms and legs, heads, hands. They weren’t supposed to be swimming there anyway, that was the thing. There was a big sign on the cliff right above them, saying so.

Anyway, I could’ve told him about that, and about how i was afraid my baby would be born with no nose. Or what if my milk went sour in me. If I could've reached that far, I would’ve leaned over the counter with my rag and wiped the crumbs off his lap.

But he stood up and brushed them off himself. The bread end had bounced off and was lying in the middle of the floor.

I had my baby to talk to anyway. We had a system. I’d ask her questions when we were in bed, trying to get to sleep. It was a hard time falling off, even though I was so flat tired all the time; my legs would get cramped up, and I’d be worrying about my teeth falling out, like I’d heard happened sometimes when you were pregnant. So there was always plenty of time for chewing the air. She would jab me on the left side for no, and on the right side for yes, and if she started flopping around, I knew she was getting bored with the conversation. She told me she didn’t want Lee or any other guy I’d ever met around any more than I did, and Jed plain gave her the creeps.

I first met Jed in the bushes outside the clinic, which was two towns away, and where I had to go every couple of weeks to weigh in. He nabbed me on my second visit, when the bandages were off my nose, but when it was still winter out, though the calendar said almost spring. He was wearing a brown suit, with no coat, and it was snowing all over him.

He said he had to go back in pretty soon, but what he wanted to know was whether I was interested in selling my baby. The going rate was a thousand bucks.

“Provided the baby is Grade A,” he said. “That means Caucasian. By which I mean white.”

He had a long, horsey face, with fat lips, and he bared his teeth at me as if to say he’d pegged me for the kind of woman that would sleep with any color person. It made me mad. People around here are so dumb they think nigger men have hair on their things.

“I guess it’s got to be all human too,” I said, and walked off.

That wasn’t the end of it. He hounded me every time I got out of the clinic. It got to be semi-friendly, though I wasn’t going to sell my baby for no amount, like I kept telling him. He was somebody to chat with anyway, and he’d insisted on paying the doctor’s bills.

“There’s no obligation,” he told me. “All you’ve got to do is remember that there are women less fortunate than you, and that you can’t afford to keep the kid.”

He kept asking me for dates too, saying that he found big bellies appetizing.

Toward the end, I was talking to my baby more and more. All through August and September she was saying she was going to be born fine, and not look any more like Lee than she had to. She was getting enough to eat, so she wasn’t going to start chomping on my insides, like I sometimes thought she might if she got hungry enough.

I was swollen up like a water balloon, but happy, and part of me wanted things to stay just like they were. I liked knowing something was going to happen, and didn’t want the excitement to end up just pails of dirty diapers, stinking to make the neighbors complain.

She kept telling me everything was going to be all right. I wasn’t going to die giving birth to her, and there was going to be enough money for us to live okay. We were going to get it free, from welfare. She wasn’t going to cry all day long, because that would drive me crazy. But it was driving her crazy, being stuck in there with nothing to do. Waitressing was fun in comparison.

Once she got out, things were going to be fine. It wasn’t going to be boring; I wasn’t going to feel trapped blind, like a bat in some attic. Things would happen. Maybe she’d be born with something wrong. I’d read an article once about a baby who was born with a hole in her heart, so that the heart kept getting bigger and bigger, until it filled up her whole body. Not that I really wanted that to happen.

Or maybe I was going to sell her. I figured she’d be glad not to have to grow up in this podunk town. She’d have a maid, maybe, and a poodle—but in the back of her heart, she said, she’d still love me.

It turned out she was born with nothing much the matter with her. There was more the matter with me. When Jed came to see me I was blurry with pain and tiredness, and had bruises all over from the straps they’d used to keep me from thrashing around after they put me out. He came again three days later, to give me and the baby a ride home. I didn’t look at him once on the way.

“Seven hundred fifty dollars, if you’re interested,” he said as I got out of the car.

“I thought you said a thousand,” I said.

“That was for babies fresh from the factory,” he said. “The older they get, the less they’re worth.”

“So what?” I said. “I’m not selling anyway.” I got out of the car and left the door open so he’d have to slide over and shut it himself. I heard him still talking as I walked away. The baby was asleep in my arms.

“If you’re not selling, how come you didn’t put a name on her birth certificate,” he said. “I have the perfect customer lined up. There’s a father, and a mother, money, everything. They even have their own plane to come get her in.”

My heart never wanted to sell. That whole first day, I just mooned around with my baby, feeding her and watching her sleep. She made all kinds of noises—sneezing and grunting like a hog—and I knew from how much that bothered me that I loved her. I loved her even though her head was pointy, even though her skin bagged, even though she had this light fur all over her, which I hoped she was going to grow out of like she was supposed to. Her nose was off to one side, and she was bald as Lee when he left, with no eyebrows either. All she could do was sleep and cry. She wasn’t even good at crying—couldn’t get the tears out, just this noise—and all she could pee was a few drops at a time. It almost didn’t seem worth putting diapers on her, but I did anyway, because she was my kid.

A week later, though, I was ready to grind her up into dogfood. She’s gotten strong enough so that she didn’t have to sleep so much and could holler more. It wasn’t any better than waitressing. Worse, maybe, just running and running, with no coffee breaks, and not even a smile for a tip—nothing but complaints about the service. One day she turned yellow on me, driving me spastic with worry until I found out that was just what babies did on their way from purple to pink. Then she kept waking me up, going back to sleep as soon as I had the light on and my boob out. I would’ve dumped her in the pail with her own damned diapers, except that I wanted her to grow up to be something.

In the end, that was part of it. I wanted her to grow up not knowing what sidework was. I wanted her to be an actress, maybe—somebody people’d turn their TV on special just to see.

But the rest of it was that I felt dead in the head. I loved her, and knew she’d grow up to love me, but I could see it was going to kill me to be so bored. Who knew what I was going to do for entertainment once she was gone, but at least there was a possibility of something. A new kind of eating crazy, maybe, or some new job. Something interesting, fun—something that seemed like what living should be. I didn’t want my life tied off like my baby’s belly-button. Not that she wasn’t making me happy in a way, but the kind of happy I felt was an unexcited kind—the way cows feel when you let them nose at the cornfields after a harvest.

Then Jed came to visit, with the papers. I told him to come back the next day.

That evening, I went out for a walk. The baby was asleep. I put her all the way in the corner of my bed, and piled my clothes around her for a fence, so she wouldn’t roll out onto the floor. Not that she was likely to, seeing as how she couldn’t even lift up her own head, but I wanted to make sure.

For a while, I just walked around without seeing anything, my heart hurting. Then I headed down toward the river, which was beet-red from what was left of the sun. Standing there, I saw two huge, huge birds. They were headed downstream, following the line of the river, and I could’ve sworn they were eagles. It was hard to tell, since they were way up in the air, but trying to figure out whether they were or not made me think of Lee, and I laughed. I laughed like I’d just washed his hair off all over again, and like it hadn’t hurt when he hit me. I could imagine the look on the Reverend’s face when he heard I’d sold my baby, and that made me laugh too. Even as I stood there, though, I was afraid something had happened to her. I could imagine her crying—I could see fire, with smoke sitting like a big gray rat in front of my apartment door.

I signed the next morning.

“Her new parents are already here to get her,” Jed told me, handing me a big manilla envelope full of cash. “I knew you wouldn’t keep her.”

I took it. The bills were all just loose, not in bundles, and there were different kinds—tens, twenties, hundreds. I’d never seen a hundred before, and was looking at one, thinking what I’d do with it, when he put his arms out for the baby. I held on to her until he finally reached across and took her from me. She cried for a minute, and then went back to sleep.

I couldn’t believe she could sleep in anybody’s arms but mine.

“Don’t deposit it all at once,” he told me. “And don’t feel bad. You’re doing the Christian thing.”

When he left, I put the envelope under my bed, and then I started crying. For days, all I did was cry and sleep, cry and sleep like I was Angela, a baby to the world. I cried so much my eyes were sore with it, and the salt ate cracks in my cheeks. The nights were the worst. I’d talk to her like she was still there, put my pillow on my belly and hold it.

It was the first time in my life that I was lonely for a particular person.

Then I slept with Jed, to find out how Angela was doing. I had to take him down the throat, as I was too sore to swing it more southern.

It was another day before I could get myself out of the bathtub, and the only way I could was to think about what I was going to do with the money. I figured I’d buy a car with it, and go places, I didn’t know where.

I took the envelope out and spread the money all over my bed, laying the bills so that the tens were in one row, the twenties in another, and so on. The money took up the whole bed. Then l gathered it into piles, counting as I went along.

Six hundred and twenty dollars.

I couldn’t believe it. I lay the money out again and did the whole thing over. It came out the same.

Part of me wanted to go crawling back into the bathtub, but another part wanted just to skewer Jed’s balls—and it felt good, in a way, to be feeling something that wasn’t just tears and dimness. I could feel my noodle coming back on, and suddenly realized how much I needed somebody I could complain to. Life being what it was, I needed somebody who’d side with me.

I got a map of New Jersey, and went down to the bus station.

When I first got on the bus, I was happy again. I watched the sun jump in the door every time we stopped, and thought about how I was going to get Angela back. It was fun, like being in the movies: I was going to steal her. Not that I wouldn’t have bought her back if I could, but I figured the people who took her would want at least the amount they shelled out, and that was sure to be more than what Jed gave me. Plus there was the bus fare. Stealing her wouldn’t be that hard, anyway. All I had to do was find out what people in Ho-Ho-Kus had airplanes—there couldn’t be that many—and then get a job babysitting for the family. Once the lady was out the door, I’d call a taxi.

In the afternoon, when it clouded over, I was still feeling pretty prime. Every time we stopped, I’d open my window and look out. It was beautiful, fall. The trees had all gone yellow and orange, but with no sun, they weren’t out to grab your eyeballs the way they usually were, and bulby black clouds were bobbing across the whole length of the sky.

But then it was evening, and there was nothing to see. I flipped on my reading lamp and spread my map out on my lap. It looked like an afghan, with some sea horse for decoration. Finding Ho-Ho-Kus, which was up in the nostril, I wondered if stealing Angela was really what I wanted to be doing. New Jersey was supposed to be the Garden State—maybe it’d be a nice place to live, all flowers and everything. Maybe I’d just live there, and spy on her instead. It would be like stealing her bit by bit, instead of all at once. That way something would always be going on.

The only thing was that Angela would think that I was some beetle-brain, following her around.

I crumbled my map up into a ball, and stuck it under my shirt, on top of my belly. Then I took my sweater and a bag of potato chips, and put them with the map. The lady across the aisle started looking at me funny, but I didn’t stare her down, or say or do anything to her. I just turned out my reading lamp and then plain sat there in the dark like an old stuffed cabbage, wishing my mind wasn’t still hungry for something it wasn’t going to get.