ink
a literary supplement
Fall 2001
Intellectual Folk (an excerpt)
By Amy Culberg
When Grace slept at Nana Margaret's, this was her bedtime story. Once they were babies with mothers and different fates.
"But what does that mean? Different fates?" Grace asked.
"Different than any one that you could imagine," Margaret told her granddaughter.
Margaret met Dean, Peter and Stephen's mothers in the unwed mothers' home that she had been sent to, just far enough away from her parents' house that she wouldn't bump into anyone they knew. Margaret felt bound to these girls' children. She could not save their mothers' lives because she hadn't wanted to. She knew that now. She was just so tired during the storm. She couldn't hold onto anything bigger than their babies. She probably would have dropped the babies in if she had known what was in store for her, her one sin compounding to four. The babies, now men-Dean, Peter and Stephen -were each born from a woman whose zest for life ended with their conception. Each mother secretly gave birth to a son only to run away after the birth. These were upper class girls, girls whose parents were ashamed of their pregnancies, but still concerned for the welfare of their girls and their unborn children. There were so many places for people with secrets. Each had a mother who got onto a boat in Gary, Indiana, like a deportee with the belief that Chicago, Illinois, was a different place than Gary, Indiana. And they were right. But that was so long ago.
The social worker/receptionist at the home taught them all the detachment they needed to become mothers who gave to their babies. "Do not even think of yourself as a mother," she told them. "That's someone else's baby that got dropped into the wrong belly. You carry it, but you don't keep it." The social worker/receptionist didn't get close to the girls. The education of motherhood was for a different motherhood, one of surrender, one of detachment.
Virginia's ranting had affected Margaret, Ronnie, and Joan the same way. They wanted to keep their babies. Not out of a new found love, but a new found justice. What had happened to them seemed wrong and suddenly permanent.
If someone were to pass this house in the woods, they would have thought they saw four angry Buddhas in the middle of a discussion, a fire burning through the night.
Justice and freedom kept them awake. The fact that they were not where their parents had sent them, that no one knew where they were, made them more alive.
"We owe them nothing when they cannot see us," Joan said. "Who were these people who sent their daughters away? Who were these people who took the children of young women and raised them as their own?"
"They made us slaves," said Virginia. "They sent me to give my baby to a white woman."
"They wanted to raise my daughter as an illiterate," said Joan. "Someone probably just wanted her to wait on them, blackmailing her with parentless-ness."
"They wanted my girl for prostitution," Ronnie said. "All anybody ever wanted the women in my family for was a roll in the hay."
"What about you, Margaret? What goes on in there?" Virginia asked, placing her hand over Margaret's hand. She could not remember the last time someone touched her so generously. The closest she had come to intimacy was prodding inside her for her baby.
"I thought we were in love, me and John. I mean, I didn't think it until after he disappeared, but he made my hair stand on end."
"Now you're talking," Ronnie said.
"But it's the same with the baby. I won't really believe one is in there till I see it. I feel like the rest of you are all beautiful and pregnant and you all know that there's a baby in there, but I don't."
"It's a hard thing to accept," said Joan. "None of us really believe it."
"After all I've been through," said Virginia, "There'd better be."
"I look at all of you. You're all so alive, so crazy. Any baby would be so proud of you, but I'm not suited for this. I don't know what I am suited for but I know it's not a baby."
Ronnie had her baby first, much to all of their surprise. They were certain that it would be Virginia with all her yoga and fry pan pounding. That baby liked it in there after all, they joked. Virginia's baby, as if to prove a point, came out next. "So I guess he didn't like the fry pan after all," they teased Virginia. When Joan's baby came out, Virginia ran over to the bookshelf and pulled a book down. "Let's see if it can read yet." Joan laughed and yet looked sicker than the other two after they gave birth. Margaret's labor lasted two hours and the women didn't joke, but thought that that baby better find its way out itself because Margaret didn't really believe that it was there. All boys, something none of them were prepared for. "Least they won't have babies," Virginia consoled.
When Ronnie's boyfriend left her, the third desertion that year, his sister helped arrange a boat for them to go to Chicago on. There was no real reason for them to worry about driving, even though none of them had licenses, but for some reason the boat seemed more discreet.
These three women and Margaret arrived that same night, babies wrapped in blankets, boarding the stolen boat. At first the water was calm. It was only a lake after all. Gary to Chicago is not across the ocean after all. Margaret thought about her decision to walk away from privilege. She thought about how her baby came out coughing and she looked at him still unconvinced. Virginia noticed and told her, "It's your baby all right."
"But he doesn't look like anyone."
"He looks like himself," Virginia told her. "You'd better name that child."
There are tornadoes in Iowa the way there are not tornadoes in Chicago. They usually just stopped in the Corn State, like that was their home, nuzzled up against something weak, and brought it down. About half way down the road where 80 East would one day be, making a clear path for the one day tar. They usually just curled into the long grass and rested, became something lesser than they had been in Iowa. But the day the girls left, the storm found them. The storm just wasn't finished yet. It wanted to keep on going. It traveled all the way across the not yet highway down the not yet 55 North and got off on the not yet Lake Shore Drive. LSD was still Lake Chicago then, begging to be, but still smelled like a swamp. It made Margaret think about cooking, that stench of onions around them. Chicago was near when the storm pushed them back, banging their small boat against waves higher than the wall they had to crawl over to get free from the home. The waves hissed at the girls and their babies, Dean, Stephen and Peter screaming in their terrified mothers' arms. Jack, instinctively, did not cry. It must be my sin that's making all this, Margaret thought, since I'm the only one who's not afraid. "Watch your daughter," Margaret said. She was speaking to Virginia's father, thinking he might be the one to reach at a time like this. It was true then, she thought, that Jack wasn't a baby, not if he only lived for a matter of weeks. She was right not to feel like a mother. No one would say cute baby, cause he'd be dead, a drowned something in the Lake. This water would kill them all.
Lake Michigan can sometimes be an ocean. Virginia was afraid of Margaret then, seeing that she was unafraid. The other mothers held onto their babies so tightly that their arms numbed and the water clung to the boat from underneath and shook them. As they headed deeper into the storm, held captive by her sins, she could not imagine that storms did not happen because of people. The boat dipped into the water and that did not wake her from her calm. The other mothers held onto the sides of the boat, knuckles white, a baby clenched with one arm to each of their chests. Perhaps that was why they got tired first. Margaret did not hold on tightly to the boat or the child, yet she remained in the center of the boat as if anchored to it. Each girl lost her ability to hold on. Mother by mother began to slip into the ocean, like death improvising into the life scene. There is so much life being lost here, Margaret thought, barely holding onto Jack, naming him as she spoke it. Why should they hold on? Margaret thought. What had life given them as women? Shame? Children? Why hold on? They were not convinced enough to live, she decided later. Yes, Virginia was right to fear her. Margaret would be the only girl who lived. One by one, the storm held Lake Michigan in her arms, each woman becoming less convinced of the words that kept her awake at the fire, of her determination for a fresh start. Only their hope of death increased and as they let the water gripped them, they passed their babies to whomever was left. It was not their job to choose whether the babies should give up. They could not take their sons with them. The girls' knees softened, lifting their feet off of the bottom of the boat. The water, their new home, carried their fertile young bodies into the Lake.
It was her steadiness that saved her strength. She barely held out her arms at all when the babies were passed to her. It was Virginia who told the others of this coolness she saw in Margaret. "She'll live," she told the others. "She'll live because she doesn't care." A gust ripped off and threw the small engine across the water as if it were as light as a skipping rock. Margaret did not feel like their savior nor did the mothers feel she was. Handing their baby to Margaret was like tying their baby to an anchor, which stayed above the surface of the water, not beneath. Margaret noticed only the weight, that she had become a woman whose one sin had compounded to four. She rocked the babies only by instinct, not desire. Stunned, with the three orphaned boys on her lap, she remained nothing but consistent and the storm eventually just gave up on her and went home. Her own son, Jack, couldn't get to the nipple, the other babies greedy in their will to live. With each sip, they grew a little more. Jack used his new gums to make a hole in her breast, tightening around skin, crying for the milk to come out, but getting blood. She did not lead him to the nipple. Her lap was a nest, each baby grabbing for her breast until she succumbed to feeding all the boys. Each sucked until he slept and there was quiet then. Each morning that she awoke she noticed that the orphans had grown but not Jack. The storm had been over for days but the boat just sat in one place, caught on something beneath the water. She did not know if they were closer to Gary, Indiana or to Chicago, whether they were people moving from a place or back to a place. She had almost forgotten that there was anybody else in the world.
Once he found the nipple, Jack stopped drinking any more than he needed to survive. He was tired of this game of sharing his mother while the orphan boys stole the milk as if she was not giving it to them already. They sucked until she bled and when she noticed their rapid growth she tried to stop feeding them, but there were too many of them. In a week they were as large as eight-year old boys. The boat moved at its own will. Margaret had not the will or the time to learn how to drive a boat. The small boat tossed about in the water and the boys continued to grow. Jack stayed small. He seemed even smaller compared to the boys whose legs seemed to shoot out from the hips. Jack took small sips as the others guzzled, arms stretching along the side of the boat. Margaret's coolness helped her imagine it all as part of a world she did not yet know. "I'm young, what do I know?" She spoke aloud. Jack looked up at his mother. Seldom did she look back. She expected to hear a crack as the boys continued to grow. She did not know whether they would grow up to be as large as giants and carry her to shore or if soon their tired bones would start to break realizing the perversion of time.
But in two weeks they had not grown to giants or shattered into pieces. Fueled milk filled with responsibility for so much life poisoned the boys with life. The potion fooled the boys' young bodies into believing life was happening all at once. They grew and they grew until the babies became men. They were as large as full-grown men with faces aging with their bodies. They still looked at her like babies, only interested in her milk and her affection. Jack was still an actual baby, only two weeks old and she had to remind herself that the men were not much older than Jack. They spoke with words that she used while talking to them, baby words, the way one would imagine speaking to babies. And they spoke to her like she was a baby, this being the only language that they knew. She started using larger words. She started speaking to all of them, including Jack, the way one would speak to an adult.
When the boat finally found land, just pushed ashore, like the gods were saying get off, it seemed to onlookers that these could not be her sons but other passengers from the shipwreck. Any one of them could have been her husband so she did not look like a widow or an unwed mother. Only Margaret knew of this mistake of the gods. She would have preferred shame to this. Time got lost on water, and the boys were men before they had even been children. What did they know? She wondered.
When the five were taken off together, no one thought it was strange that survivors of a wreck should be so intimate. They were all carried off together, Grace's father the only one who was still a baby.
They doctors and nurses would not know why it was that even after the men were nursed back to health, rehydrated, and fed like heroes that none could walk for more than a second or so. Hydration had to be entered slowly into the men for each started to drown if the water entered him too quickly. They also had legs only for the Lake and had great difficulty standing on the land. This is why Grace's Nana Margaret pulled these men behind her in a wheelbarrow. "They were as small as Frenchmen thank god," She told Grace. But it was such an appendage, such a permanent part of her that no one thought it strange. And this last part of the story is the only one to wonder about. People are not so kind.
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