Valentine(76)

Karla tells us Diane’s daddy is in the navy and stationed in Germany, but we spend some time rolling silverware together and the lies fall away PDQ. It doesn’t matter who it was, she tells us, some boy from Midland.

What matters? Diane napped today and Karla got a hot shower before her shift. She shows us the Polaroid took that morning. Karla has russet-colored hair and eyes the color of sandstones. Constellations of freckles cover her nose, and her round cheeks mark her as still barely out of childhood. A black tank top shows off more freckles on her shoulders. The baby, dressed in head-to-toe pink, stares doe-eyed at the camera, her little cheek crushed against her mother’s. Four months old today, Karla tells us, her name means divine. She’s beautiful, we tell Karla, she looks just like you.

*

The women’s clinic in Santa Teresa is three hundred miles north, just across the border at Las Cruces, and back then Karla shared a car with her mom. She thought about taking it anyway, but even if she could get there, she would have to spend the night, and how would she explain this to her mother? And what if she were pulled over in one of those little towns between Odessa and El Paso? She had heard stories about those sheriffs, how they knew what girls were up to, when they spotted them driving down the interstate by themselves, how they made girls follow them back to the station and wait while their fathers were called. Game over.

At eight weeks, Karla drove over to the health-food store and bought tinctures of black cohosh and cotton root bark from a woman with frizzy hair and a muumuu so electric it ought to have come with a seizure warning. Put this in hot water and drink a lot of it, the woman said. Gallons. You ought to be peeing every ten minutes. If you run out, come back and get more.

Karla drank until she was bent in half with cramps. The tea tasted like dirt and mold, and when she puked and shit, her mother sprayed Lysol in the bathroom and asked what the hell she’d been eating. She went to band practice and wrote a paper on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In gym class, she stood with her arms at her sides while dodge balls hit her square in the belly until Coach Wilkins yelled at her to get the hell out of the way. In the locker room, she stared at the shower floor. Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink. And not a drop of blood anywhere, she thought. In bathroom stalls all over school, she studied wads of toilet paper and the crotch of her panties. But the pregnancy stuck. It stuck, it stuck, it stuck. My uterus is a painted ship, Karla thought, and I am waiting for the trade winds. Ten weeks, fifteen—and then she was at twenty and it was too late to pretend anymore.

The woman at the health-food store introduces herself as Alison and asks Karla if she’s breastfeeding. When Karla explains that the labor and delivery nurses didn’t think it was a good idea, since she needed to get a job ASAP, Alison gives her several joints and tells her to stay away from booze and crystal. It is fall now and Alison’s muumuus are the color of wildfires and whiskey. Coffee and weed is the best possible combination of drugs for a single mother, she tells Karla. Don’t let yourself get busted. Never share. Never tell anyone, not even your boyfriend—especially not him. Don’t buy paraphernalia. Instead, roll joints and tuck them in a pack of cigarettes, never in a plastic baggie.

You’re going to be fine, Alison says. Just don’t start thinking you’ve made all the big decisions you’re ever going to make.

Does Karla love her baby? Yes, fiercely. Diane’s got a big, strong name and a grin that could melt the devil’s heart. When they are alone together during the day, Karla hardly wants to set her down for a moment. But becoming a mom has taught Karla plenty of things. That she can get by with less sleep than she could ever have imagined. That it doesn’t take her long to be able to hear herself think at the end of a nine-hour shift, just a short detour through the desert on her way home from work and a little time looking at the stars. That you can love someone with all your heart and still wish she weren’t there.

We wish we had known you back then, a couple of us tell her later. We could have loaned you a little money if you were short. One of us would have driven you up to New Mexico. We wouldn’t have told any of the prayer warriors.

*

What do you call a single mother who has to be up early in the morning?

A sophomore.

*

When she gets home from work, Mrs. Sibley changes into a pair of sweats, clasps her granddaughter between her knees, and stares into her big blue eyes. Well then, Miss Diane, is this all there is to it? She feeds and bathes and rocks her granddaughter and holds her on her lap so they can watch Oral Roberts together.

Mrs. Sibley’s got a scrap of her late husband’s great-great-great granddaddy’s gray uniform framed and hanging in the hallway next to his daguerreotype, and a cedar chest full of pictures from the old family plantation, and she can’t for the life of her figure out how her family got from there to here in just a few generations—here being stuck in West Texas, trying to keep the dust out of your eyes and a roof over your head while Mexicans and feminists take over the world.

When Karla comes home from her shift, she stands in the dark behind her mother and child, watching the television’s blue light play across their sleeping faces. Time for bed, she says, and carries Diane to her crib. Karla loves her mama, but she worries that Mrs. Sibley’s fear and hatred will eventually kill her. What will happen to her mother when she and Diane are gone? After her mother and daughter are tucked in, Karla stands out in the backyard and smokes a joint and imagines a different story for herself, one where she tries a little harder to get to that clinic in Santa Teresa.