The Progress of Love

outline of my breasts. He suffered from his burden of love. I, too, suffered. I bowed my shoulders; I had a chastened air. The passions are no light matter, was my message to MaryBeth. Guilt and misgiving and a glowering desire must be seen as my daily companions.
    Mr. Cryderman’s, as well. In my imagination, he grew bold. He fondled and whispered, then rebuked himself, groaned, became devout, and kissed my eyelids.
    What about the real Mr. Cryderman? Did all this make me tremble when I heard him at the door, lie in wait for him, hope for a sign? Not in the least. When he began to play his role in my imagination, he faded in reality. I no longer hoped for an interesting conversation, or even a nod in the direction of my existence. In my mind, I had improved his looks somewhat—given him a healthier color, rolled back his customary slight sneer to expose a gloomy tenderness. I avoided looking at him in the flesh, so that I would not have to change him all over again.
    MaryBeth probed for details but took no pleasure in any of this. She urged me never to surrender. “Couldn’t you tell Mrs. Cryderman on him?” she said.
    “It would kill her. She might die anyway when she has the baby.”
    “Would you get married if she did?”
    “I’m underage.”
    “He could wait. If he loves you like he says. He’d need somebody to look after the baby. Would he get all her money?”
    Mention of the baby made me think of something real, and unpleasant and embarrassing, that had happened recently at the Crydermans’. Mrs. Cryderman had called me to come and see the baby kicking her. She was lying on the sofa with her robe pulled up, a cushion covering the most private part of her. “There, see!” she cried, and I saw it, not a flutter on the surface but an underground shifting and rolling of the whole blotchy mound. Her navel stuck out like a cork ready to pop. My arms and forehead broke out in a sweat. I felt a hard ball of disgust pushing up in my throat. She laughed and the cushion fell off. I ran to the kitchen.
    “Jessie, what are you scared of? I don’t think one of them ever came out that way yet!”
    Two more scenes at the Crydermans’.
    Mr. Cryderman is home early. He and Mrs. Cryderman are together in the living room when I arrive after school. Mrs. Cryderman still keeps the curtains closed all day, though it’s spring outside, hot May weather. She says this is so nobody can look in and see the shape she’s in.
    I come in out of the hot, bright afternoon and find the incense burning in the stuffy, curtained room and the two pale Crydermans giggling and having drinks. He is sitting on the sofa with her feet in his lap.
    “Time to join the celebration!” says Mr. Cryderman. “It’s our farewell party! Our fare-thee-well party, Jessie. Farewell, begone, goodbye!”
    “Control yourself!” says Mrs. Cryderman, beating her bare heels against his legs. “We aren’t gone yet. We have to wait till the monstrous infant is born.”
    Drunk, I think. I had often seen them drinking, but up until now had not been able to spot any interesting alterations in behavior.
    “Eric is going to write his book,” says Mrs. Cryderman.
    “Eric is going to write his book,” says Mr. Cryderman, in a silly high-pitched voice.
    “You are!” says Mrs. Cryderman, drumming her heels some more. “And we are getting out of here the instant the monster is born.”
    “Is it really a monster?” says Mr. Cryderman. “Has it got two heads? Can we put it in the freak show and make a lot of money?”
    “We don’t need money.”
    “I do.”
    “I wish you’d cut that out. I don’t know if it’s got two heads, but it feels as if it’s got fifty feet. It frightened Jessie the other day.”
    She tells him how I ran.
    “You have to get used to these things, Jessie,” says Mr. Cryderman. “Girls in some parts of the world have a baby or two already by the time they’re your age. You can’t cheat Nature. Little brown girls, practically babies themselves, they’ve got babies.”
    “Oh, I’m sure,” says Mrs. Cryderman. “Jessie, be a lamb. You know what gin is, don’t you? Put a little gin in this glass and fill it up with orange juice, so I can get my vitamin C.”
    I take her glass. Mr. Cryderman tries to get up, but she holds him down until he says, “Cigarettes. I think they’re in the bedroom.”
    When he comes back from the bedroom, he enters the kitchen, not the living room. I’m at the sink, filling up the