Spring
There is a distinct season devoted to mud for those who live along dirt roads, Rebecca discovered. She improvised by making Jack’s snowsuit double as mud protection, and they started to venture out for walks in the woods again. At first, she only saw Gene from afar. Still in her bulky winter coat, she concealed the now noticeable roundness of her stomach.
The spring semester brought a flurry of activity for Brian as he tried to angle for a tenure-track position at the college and traveled to conferences for networking purposes in case that fell through. Generally a man of high anxiety, the uncertainty looming threw him into a blur of activity. At the same time he sped up, Rebecca began to feel the weight of a baby, the increased blood volume, increased appetite, and increased need for sleep.
The few friends she had found in the surrounding towns pitied her for the lack of help that Brian offered. Rebecca indulged them with stories of waking from an afternoon nap on the living room floor to Jack kicking her and bellowing, “Eat! Hungy! Eat!” One friend of convenience, Michelle, relished stories of people to pity.
A gossip hound, Michelle always had some tidbit about campus happenings to share. Usually, Rebecca listened with a carefully practiced air of indifference, but occasionally she could not conceal her investment in the story. She could not resist the rumors surrounding Stephanie, the literature professor of mystery and intrigue, and how she was going after married professors. Rebecca’s cheeks flushed. Her mind went through the many nights Brian came home late, the weekend work sessions on campus, the long weekends away. She could not account for his hours.
Despite her melodramatic portrayal, her days with Jack were pleasant; they both needed roughly the same number of snacks and naps, the latter of which she discovered they could often take together. Though Jack refused to sleep during the day in his own room, he could often be coaxed into her bed for a mind-numbing recitation of a book about construction vehicles. One of them would nod off, and the other was sure to follow, waking minutes or hours later to the untidy house bathed in late afternoon sun.
With Brian’s travel schedule picking up, Rebecca felt a nagging loneliness that she couldn’t quite place. She assumed it was the feeling of a life absent all ambition and accomplishment. All the same, she noticed that the stories and book recommendations she had stored away for Gene came back to her, and she wanted to share them. She found herself glancing toward his house more often. Though she would never have admitted it to herself, she took Jack for walks on the paths around the Harris house more often than not.
Beverly threw herself back into activity, rumbling down the road like the coming and going of the tide. Before Rebecca had a chance to do anything more than wave to Gene from afar, he appeared on her doorstep. Having awoken from a mid-afternoon nap with Jack, Rebecca wore loose sweatpants and a tank top, stretched over her growing middle. Unused to visitors, the knock on the door made her heart race and she felt self-conscious as if caught doing something she shouldn’t. Opening the door to find Gene, she was perplexed to see his familiar face in a place she hadn’t before.
“Hello!” she cried with an unconvincing attempt to sound carefree. She bit her lip thinking of her tousled hair, her unbecoming ensemble, her blatantly pregnant belly and swelling breasts exposed to a refined older man.
“Oh, hello, yes, just wanted to drop by with an advanced copy of my book. I thought I should provide evidence that all that chain-smoking was in the service of academic writing and not just an excuse.”
“Wow, thank you. That’s great!” replied Rebecca tritely, desperately trying to compose herself and think of something more dignified to say.
“Also, Beverly wants to have you over. I know we talked about it in the fall, but the time just got away from us. Now that we’re back, you and your husband should come over sometime.”
“And Jack?” Rebecca asked, her first thought being the impossibility of finding a babysitter and the unlikelihood that Brian would be willing to pay for one.
“Yes, and Jack,” Gene smiled amiably. “And, I see you’re having another. Congratulations! That’s wonderful.”
“Right, this,” laughed Rebecca gesturing to her torso so obviously transformed by pregnancy. In her self-consciousness, she tried to turn the conversation back to Gene, inquiring, “Do you have any kids?”
“No,” Gene said matter-of-factly. “Our one daughter died. Grandson, too. Cancer; car accident.”
Taken aback, Rebecca said, “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s the way it is sometimes. But, really, we’d love to have you over.”
After an awkward exchange of parting words, Rebecca closed the door and let out a sigh. She flipped open the book to find an inscription. He had signed it simply, For RM—with affection, Gene.
Weeks went by before they ventured up to the Harris’s pristine yard for a late lunch on wooden patio furniture that had been weathered by the harsh elements. By then, early May, there were days that were unseasonably warm, a foretaste of summer. The day of the lunch was one such day, still tickling the air with a cool breeze but hot in the direct sun.
The lunch was pleasant enough. Beverly served Salad Niçoise with the precision of a professional hostess. She maintained her reserve but spoke more warmly than Rebecca had remembered and put them at ease. Perhaps too much at ease. When the subject of more children arose, Brian announced to all assembled that if Rebecca intended to have more children, “they’d have to be from another man.” For Rebecca, the incongruity of his comment and the well-dressed, salad-eating party felt like a slap. Unfazed, Beverly carried on conducting the afternoon calmly, taking Jack out in the garden after everyone finished eating to show him deer tracks and caterpillars.
Ordinarily, Rebecca did not like the way she looked when pregnant, her cheeks and arms growing puffy with added fat stores, her features become less defined. But dressing for the luncheon she had known herself to be beautiful. A light linen dress framed her feminine form. With months more of the pregnancy ahead of her, she was attractively round but not stretched to capacity. Her cheeks, so prone to blushing, were a delicate rose color.
They had found out in early spring that the baby was a girl. Brian took the afternoon off to come to the ultrasound with her, and Michelle offered to watch Jack. As so often was the case with their rare moments alone together, Brian was distracted planning out a paper he needed to finish for a conference. He wanted to wait until birth to find out the baby’s gender, somehow finding that more poetic, but Rebecca was insistent. “I thought you wanted everything natural,” Brian said in an exasperated tone. “What could be more natural than that?”
As often happened with everything related to the children, Rebecca won out. In the ultrasound room when they received the news, their eyes met and they smiled genuinely. The surprise left a radiance between them that carried an assurance that their little world was well. The feeling of unity was soon shattered by the agonizingly long wait to see a midwife before a long drive home to an overtired toddler. But for that moment, they had shared an excitement to meet their daughter.
A similar excitement animated Rebecca as she talked with Gene in the backyard, pulling her sweater off under the glare of the mid-afternoon sun. Brian and Rebecca carried the dishes into the house while Beverly entertained Jack and Gene, like many men of his age group, sat, accustomed to being waited on. Brian became enthralled with a weighty bookshelf bearing Gene’s most recent reading and lingered in the house examining. As Rebecca made her way back to the table, she was surprised when Gene sprang to his feet, extending a hand to touch her bare arm, his eyes meeting hers with an urgency and intensity.
“You look beautiful,” was all he said, but his hand conveyed an electricity that stunned her. Afterward, she reassured herself that he did nothing inappropriate and she crossed no boundaries. Yet, that single gesture of a hand on her arm, touch in a New England milieu of privacy and reserve, signaled more than she cared to admit.
In the moment, she had mumbled clumsily, “Thank you,” and turned the conversation back to the Wallace Stegner novel they had both read that winter. But there was a part of her that shriveled when Brian rejoined them, butting into the conversation. Rebecca’s loneliness and uncertainty had momentarily found reprieve, leaving her craving a feeling of assurance like those that had come with the life growing within her, a certain knowledge that all would be well.
This was a craving that stayed with Rebecca, especially after Brian dismissed the Harrises as nice enough but not in a position to help with his career, as if this were the only standard of friendship. Rebecca went back to her quiet life but with a subtle sense of her profound loneliness, a desire for human closeness newly disclosed to her. She could not have put into words what Gene was to her; indeed, he wasn’t anything. Just a neighbor, a kindly man old enough to be her father. And yet, with his hand on her arm and his eyes searching hers, he had been to Rebecca a person whose admiration she reveled in.
Oblivious to any change, Brian doggedly pursued a more stable station for the coming academic term. Rebecca put away their winter things and braced herself for another season within a season in that part of the world: black fly season.
To be continued.
