few weeks back, he had a dream that Lucy Ewing was sucking his dick. I roll my eyes. No class, I think.
“Hey, can I ask you something, Sweetness?” Albie says. It nearly makes me puke, him calling me that. Who does he think we are? His icky parents?
“What?” I say, and Albie says he was just wondering if I would ever want to try something like that.
“Like what?”
“Sucking my dick. I bet it would really turn you on.”
I get up from the couch, turn off the TV, and tell him to go home. “And if you ever say something like that again to me, Albie Wignall, I’m going to tell your mother you said it, and don’t think I wouldn’t because I would.”
He says maybe I should just become a nun, and I say yeah, that’s a good idea, maybe I will, and he says I’m lucky someone like him even gives me a second look, and I say “Ha, that’s a laugh and a half!” and tell him again to go home. He gets up and, on his way out, slams the door so hard that he’s lucky my foster father isn’t home because he gets real mad when anyone slams things and he’d probably chase Albie all the way down the sidewalk.
The next night at Friendly’s, Albie is all apologies, saying how he respects me, he really, really does. “Let’s take a drive and clear the air after you get off work,” he suggests. I tell him no three different times. Then finally I say yes just to shut him up. And when my shift’s almost over, he gets up and says he’ll wait for me out in his car. When I go to wipe off the counter, I see that he’s left me this tip that’s dimes and nickels and quarters shaped like a heart. He probably thinks he’s being romantic, but all’s I think is that it’s pretty corny. Still, when I scoop it up and count it, it comes to two dollars and eighty cents, which is the most he’s ever left me, so I guess he really is sorry.
But guess where we end up. In a way, he can’t help it, I guess. I read in a magazine last week that, on an average, girls think about sex twice in an hour but for guys it’s seventeen times. This time, after he puts his thing inside of me and I can tell he’s getting ready, I tell him, “Pull it out! Pull it out!” and he says he can’t, it feels too good, and anyways, he doesn’t need to because he’s taken a pill that stops the girl from getting pregnant when the guy “nuts” inside of her. A pill that men take? Here’s how stupid I am: I believe him. So I let Albie have his orgasm inside of me—that night and the next two or three times after that. And then one day at work, I go up to two of the older waitresses, Ginny and Mary Beth, who are both in their thirties. Mary Beth is married and it’s common knowledge that Ginny “gets around” down at the Anchor Clanker where all the sailors go to drink and meet girls. I ask them if they’ve ever heard of this pill men take so that the woman doesn’t get pregnant. Instead of answering me, they just look at each other. Then they both start laughing, and I feel like the idiot I am. I’m three weeks late, which is why I asked them, and now I know why I am.
It’s Saturday, my day off—the day I’ve decided I’m going to tell Albie. I just wish he was in a better mood. He and Winona have just had one of their big fights, and in the car on the way over to Olympic Pizza, he’s saying stuff like how Winona’s “the wicked witch of the West” and his father’s “pussy whipped.” In the fifteen minutes since he picked me up, he’s told me three times already how much he hates his mother’s guts. It’s quiet at the pizza place. We take the booth by the window. Albie orders a toasted salami grinder with fried onions and peppers, plus a quart bottle of Dr Pepper. I order a small Sprite and three stuffed clams. I’ve felt sick to my stomach all week, but suddenly I’m hungry, even though I’m nervous. When our food comes, I tell myself that as soon as I finish my second stuffed clam, that’s when I’ll tell him I’m pregnant. By now I’m only half-listening to his complaints about his mother, but he gets my full attention when he says that sometimes he daydreams about her getting killed in a car accident or getting struck by lightning and dying. “Winona Wignall, R.I.P.,” he says. “I should be so lucky.”
It’s ignorance, that’s what it is. He has no idea how awful it is to have your mother die. “Don’t even say stuff like that,” I tell him.
“Why not?” he says. “It’s a free country.” He takes a huge bite out of his grinder. There’s a strand of shredded lettuce sticking out of the corner of his mouth and he’s so stupid, he doesn’t even realize it. “Maybe someday I’ll take out my hunting rifle and put me and my dad out of our misery.”
I get so mad when he says it that I kick him under the table. Not that it must hurt very much. All I’m wearing is sandals.
“What the fuck?” he says. “What’d you do that for?” And when I don’t answer him, he lifts up his leg and stomps down hard on the top of my foot with his big clodhopper work boot. The pain shoots all the way up my leg and puts tears in my eyes. For several seconds I can’t even catch my breath. I wait until the nausea passes.
Here’s how I tell him. I say, “That’s a nice way to treat the mother of your child, you asshole!” I didn’t want it to come out that way, but I have to admit that the look of fear on his big fat face is satisfying.
“What did you just say?” he asks. I put my arms tight across my chest and don’t answer him. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I nod without looking at him.
“By me?”
“Oh, no, Big Boy,” I say, real sarcastic. “It couldn’t be yours because you take that pill that doesn’t really exist. Remember?”
He tells me to stop fucking with him, and I tell him to pull that strand of lettuce out of his mouth because it looks disgusting.
“Are you having a kid or not?” he says, in this voice that’s loud enough that a customer who’s sitting at the counter swivels his stool around and looks at us. I’ve only eaten one of my stuffed clams, but I’ve lost my appetite and my foot’s throbbing, goddamn him. He better not have broken it if he knows what’s good for him. I get up from the booth and limp toward the door. I have first shift the next day, and it ought to be a whole lot of fun wearing my waitressing wedgies for five hours if my foot’s all black and blue and swollen. Albie follows me out of the restaurant and I scream it over my shoulder, “I’m not having a kid, you jerk! I’m having your kid! Deal with it!”
Albie’s scared to tell his parents, mostly his mother, so it’s me who finally has to call the meeting. “It’s urgent,” I tell Winona. The four of us are seated at the Wignalls’ kitchen table: Albie, his father, Winona, and me. There’s coffee mugs in front of each of us, and Winona’s put out a plate of Oreos that nobody’s touching. Winona doesn’t say much when she hears what we have to tell her, but her nostrils keep flaring and she’s teary-eyed. Then finally she says, “Big Boy, how could this have happened?”
Albie’s face is flushed and it doesn’t help that he’s got this naughty boy grin on his face. “The usual way,” he says. “Male plus female equals baby.”
Winona reaches over and backhands him. “Don’t you dare give me that wiseguy attitude at a time like this!” she yells. At first I think he might stomp on her foot or something, but Albie just reaches for the Oreos. Winona tells him he has to marry me now because it’s the only decent thing to do. “But I guess I better say good-bye to that beautiful church wedding that I’ve always dreamed about for my boy and his bride.” Those tears in her eyes are probably because the bride she’d been dreaming about is Althea, not me.
Albie makes the point, feebly, that he
