Baby Help Read online

  No matter how annoyed I get with Irma at times, I have to admit she’s a really good gramma. She’s never too tired to play with Cheyenne.

  “Juice, Mommy,” Cheyenne says.

  I pull her high chair up close to the counter, where I can watch her, and give her a cup of apple juice. I fill the sink with hot sudsy water and wash Rudy’s and Jerry’s beer mugs, from last night. I blow dishwater bubbles for Cheyenne and finish Irma’s dinner dishes. Then I take the baby from her high chair, change her diaper, and wash her hands and face. After that, I gather up her toys and my books and take her into the living room where she can play while I do my homework.

  When Cheyenne’s in a good mood, like today, I can do home­work and watch her at the same time. But when she’s fussy, no way can I concentrate on anything but her. I don’t feel sorry for myself or anything. I love Cheyenne with all my heart. It’s just hard sometimes, being a mom so soon.

  Sometimes when I look out the window of the van on my way to get Cheyenne after school, I see other kids playing sports or practicing drill team routines, and I wonder how my life would be if I weren’t already a mother. The others seem so free, and for me, there’s never any let up of responsibility.

  It’s nearly six o’clock when I hear the rattle of Rudy’s loose and leaky muffler. I carry Cheyenne to the window. She laughs when she sees the battered gray Ford.

  “Daddy’s car!”

  We walk to the door to meet Rudy.

  “Hi, beautiful women,” he says, giving us each a peck on the cheek. I don’t smell beer.

  “Hey, Missy. Old Murphy wants me to work full-time on this new remodel job he just got. In two weeks, I should have some bad sounds in my car,” he says, smiling, giving me the thumbs up sign.

  “How about it, Baby,” he says, taking Cheyenne from my arms and holding her high over his head. “You and Daddy’ll go cruisin’ and blast out the oldies, huh?”

  Cheyenne smiles and a big glob of drool lands on Rudy’s forehead.

  “Thanks, Cheyenne,” Rudy says sarcastically, handing her back to me. But he smiles. I think we’re going to have a good evening.

  “Maybe you should get your muffler fixed before you put money into new speakers,” I say.

  “Nah. That muffler will last for a while. I want something I want for a change.”

  “What about school, if you start working full-time?” I ask.

  “Ah, shit, Melissa. It’s just that Independent Studies crap anyway. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But it’s a way to get a diploma,” I say.

  “I can learn more from Murphy. You and your diploma, any­way. You gonna be ashamed of me if I don’t get that piece of paper?”

  “No. It’s just that, well, later on you might need it.”

  “Then I’ll worry about that later on,” he says. “What’s for dinner?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t started it yet.”

  He gives me that look, like a cloud just settled on his face and a storm may be coming up. “How come you never have dinner ready for me when I get home?”

  “I never know what time you’ll be here.”

  “You could at least have stuff started.”

  “Yeah, well if I’d started anything last night it would have been burned to a crisp by the time you got home.”

  We could fight. I can feel it. I don’t want to, but it might happen. We look each other in the eye, then I look away. Rudy reaches out and touches my cheek, on the spot with the cover-up make-up.

  “Come on, Missy, let’s go to Domenico’s and get a big old pepperoni and cheese pizza.”

  “Pizza?” Cheyenne says.

  We both laugh. The cloud has lifted.

  I grab sweatshirts for me and the baby and we walk together to the car. Rudy starts to lift Cheyenne into the car seat.

  “Baby help! Baby help!” she says, pushing at him.

  “Okay, okay,” he says and puts her down.

  We stand and wait while she struggles to climb into the car, then into the car seat.

  “At this rate Domenico’s will be closed by the time we get there,” Rudy says, jiggling his keys. He’s not as impressed with Cheyenne’s determination as I am.

  At the restaurant we take a comer booth at the side, away from everyone else. Cheyenne likes to hang over the back of the booth and check out whoever is there and whatever they’re eat­ing. Sometimes she likes to sing the ABC song for them. Some people think it’s cute and some don’t. The comer booth is safest for us.

  Late that night, after Cheyenne is sound asleep in her crib and Rudy and I are stretched out in bed, he turns to me and puts his arms around me.

  “Now that I’ll be making more money, let’s go to Vegas and get married,” he whispers. “How about next month?”

  Getting married is something we’ve talked about doing since before the baby was born, but for some reason we never get around to it.

  “Things will be better when we’re married because then I’ll know you’re mine for sure,” Rudy says.

  “Okay,” I say, thinking of how Melissa Anne Whitman looked written out next to my Peer Counseling notes, how pretty the W was. “I’ll be eighteen next month,” I remind him.

  “Let’s do it on your birthday. That’d be a great birthday present wouldn’t it? And then I’d only have to worry about remember­ing one special day instead of two,” he laughs.

  “The 27th,” I say.

  “The 27th it is. I love you, Missy. I don’t ever want to hurt you.”

  I feel tears welling in my eyes. I know he doesn’t want to hurt me, it’s just that he gets carried away sometimes, espe­cially if he’s been drinking.

  Rudy is the first person in the world ever to really care about me. Even after three years, he still gets worried if I’m not home right on time. And if he has to work on a Saturday, when I’m home from school, he calls me during his lunch time and break times, too, just to see what I’m doing.

  I don’t always like having to stay home all day just to answer his calls, but then I think how when I lived with my mom I could be gone for days before she’d even notice. Finally, with Rudy and Cheyenne, I’m important to somebody. I hold him close, feeling his heart beat against mine.

  “Let’s pretend to make another baby,” he whispers.

  “I’m on the pill, remember?” I whisper back.

  “It’s just pretend,” he says, kissing me long and gentle, being the Rudy I love with all my heart, the Rudy I wish would never change. I slip my nightgown over my head as Rudy strips off his T-shirt and boxers.

  “I love your skin against mine,” I whisper.

  Rudy groans softly, moving his hands to the places only he has ever touched. Quietly, quickly, intensely, we make love. After, when we’re lying relaxed in each other’s arms I ask Rudy if he thinks there’s such a thing as rape in marriage.

  “God, you ask the strangest things,” he says, groggy. “Where’d you come up with that idea, anyway?”

  “We have this guest speaker in Peer Counseling this week. It’s one of the questions I copied from the board for homework.”

  “No way,” he says, in his sleepy voice. “One of the reasons a guy gets married is so he can have sex whenever he wants. How could that be rape?”

  “But what if the wife doesn’t want to?”

  “It’s part of the bargain,” he says. “When you get married you belong to each other.”

  “I think it can be rape even if the people are married,” I say.

  “That’s your trouble. You think too much,” he says. Then I hear his deep, steady breathing and know that he’s asleep.

  I walk into the Peer Counseling room and take a seat next to Leticia. Even though I am kind of a loner, Leticia and I talk sometimes. She’s super friendly, and talkative, so I don’t feel so shy with her. Sometimes we eat lunch together. She even in­vited me to a party at her house once, but Rudy didn’t want to go and he doesn’t like me to go anywhere without him.

  �
��Which questions did you write about?” she asks.

  I open my notebook and read them to her.

  “Yeah, I chose that one about are you more likely to be raped by a stranger or an acquaintance. I thought stranger, but my mom thought acquaintance. I guess we’ll find out today . . .What did you say for the one about being raped if you’re married?”

  “At first I thought no, because that’s what my boyfriend thinks. But when I talked with the girls from Teen Moms this morning, they said yes, even if people are married it’s still rape if a hus­band forces his wife to have sex against her will.”

  “So what did you put?”

  “I put both answers, because I couldn’t decide,” I say.

  Leticia laughs. “This is the only class on campus where you can get away with that. I doubt that old Horton takes two an­swers for a math problem—Ah, the answer is x = 1,272. Or else it’s x = 8,523. Wouldn’t he flip his cookies?”

  It is a pretty funny idea. But in this class the actual answers aren’t as important as showing that we’ve thought about the questions. I wish more of my classes were like Peer Coun­seling.

  Ms. Woods checks attendance while Paula gets started dis­cussing yesterday’s questions. It is much more likely that a per­son will be raped, or murdered for that matter, by someone they know than by someone they don’t know. And, she tells us, any time a person is forced to have sex against their will, it is rape. Married or not. “And rape has very little to do with sex and a whole lot to do with violence,” she says.

  “Where I work at the Rape Hotline,” Paula continues, “we’ve found that rape and other kinds of abuse often go together. Many rapists have been abused as children and also, for some reason, many children who have been abused are also raped some time in their lives . . . So, how do you define abuse?”

  As in the discussion yesterday, everyone yells out answers while Paula races to write them on the board. Being hit, kicked, shoved, ridiculed, put down, made fun of, are some of the things students come up with.

  “My dad is always putting me down—saying I’m lazy, I’ll never amount to anything—stuff like that. Does that mean I’m an abused child?” Tony asks. “Can I sue my dad?”

  “You can try,” Paula says, “but you’d probably need plenty of money for lawyers if you take that approach.”

  Most of the students laugh, including Tony, but Paula goes on, all serious.

  “I don’t know how extreme your case is,” she says to Tony. “But I do know that the chances are great that a few of you, maybe several, are right now living under abusive conditions—conditions that not only cause you great difficulty now, but will cause you difficulty for years to come. And some of that abuse is physical, and some is emotional, and it’s all painful and damaging. And if you’re in a situation where someone is telling you day after day that you are no good, that you are worthless, you are in an abusive situation and you need help with it.”

  The room is absolutely quiet now, as if no one is even breath­ing. I wonder if it’s true that several of us are being abused. I wonder how many secrets are in this room?

  “I think maybe the little boy who lives next door to me is being abused,” Leticia says. “His mom yells at him all the time. He’s really skinny, and he won’t even talk to me, like he’s afraid of me.”

  “I’m afraid of you, too,” Josh says, and again there is laugh­ter, and the mood lifts.

  Paula passes out sheets with the names and numbers of hotlines to call if you suspect someone is being abused, or if you need help yourself. She talks about our responsibility to protect children who have no way of protecting themselves.

  “I’m gonna call this hotline as soon as I get home,” Leticia says. “Anonymous reporting. Right?”

  “Some are anonymous and some you have to leave your name with.”

  “I’ll start out anonymous,” Leticia says.

  We get a flier from a safe house for battered women. Besides their phone number there are two lists. “NO ONE DESERVES ABUSE” is the first one. It includes physical abuse, put downs, verbal abuse, having possessions damaged, interference with comings and goings, being harassed and spied on, being stalked, and being isolated.

  The second list is titled “YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO” and it lists: Be treated with respect; be heard; say no; come and go as you please; have a support system; have friends and be so­cial; have privacy and space of your own; maintain a separate identity.

  I tuck the flier in my notebook and wonder about all I’ve heard today. I mean, I know hitting and kicking is abuse. Rudy doesn’t do that very often, though. And the thing about having privacy and a space of my own, how does anyone have privacy with four people sharing a small two-bedroom house? The right to have friends and be social? I think about Sean, and the friend­ship I’ve lost.

  On Wednesday Cheyenne has a fever so I stay home from school with her. Sometimes Irma helps out at times like these, but she had to be at work early this morning. It is impossible to do any schoolwork or housework with Cheyenne so fussy. I hold her and rock her and watch a talk show. It’s about this famous hockey player who beat his wife to death. Well, he hasn’t been convicted yet, but it’s only obvious. They’re comparing it to the O. J. Simpson case, where there was this history of abuse which kept getting a little worse and a little worse, until the wife ended up dead.

  This psychologist is saying that for men who hit their wives, or their lovers, murder is a short step away. I turn off the TV and pour a small bottle of juice for Cheyenne. The doctor said the more liquids the better. She sucks at the bottle, listlessly, her usually dancing eyes glazed with fever. God, it scares me when she’s sick. I don’t ever want her to be hurting, or in danger. I hold her warm body close and rock her gently. I sing her favor­ite song to her, “The Circle of Life,” from “The Lion King.” She has a tape of that music and she plays it so often I’ve memo­rized the words.

  She falls asleep in my arms, but I continue holding her and rocking her, watching her. In three more weeks Rudy and I are supposed to be going to Las Vegas to get married, but I’m not sure. I keep thinking about that abuse stuff. I’ve never thought about “abuse” or being “battered.” I’ve just thought, Rudy got mad and lost his temper. But abuse, battered, those words sound so extreme. Of course, when he hits me it feels extreme.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The first time Rudy ever hit me was just a few months after we’d started being together. He’s three years older than I am, so he was eighteen and I was fifteen. I think that time, when we first loved each other, was maybe the happiest time in my life. I was totally inexperienced with boys—not very pretty—and with my Kmart wardrobe, I didn’t expect to ever have a boy­friend. But Rudy saw me one day, standing in the rain, waiting for a bus. He offered me a ride. I never take rides with strangers, but I was so cold and wet, and he was so cute, I got in his car, and that was the beginning of it all.

  But back to the first day he hit me, I was at the comer, wait­ing for the bus again, when Sean came running up to me. I hadn’t seen him since Santa Anita closed its season the previous spring.

  “Hey, Melissa,” he said, “you look great. How’ve you been?”

  “Good,” I said with a smile, thinking of Rudy. “Really good. How about you?”

  “Oh, you know, same old stuff. Listen, I’ve got to go for a job interview, but I really want to talk to you and get caught up. Here’s my new phone number. Give me a call tonight, can you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I want you to hear all about my boyfriend, and I want to know everything you’ve been doing since I saw you last.” It felt so good to be talking to Sean again. I hadn’t seen him since his mom got a steady job at the Los Angeles Convention Center and quit working the horse race circuit.

  We were just saying good-bye when Rudy came driving past. He made a big U-turn in the middle of the street and stopped in front of where we were talking. He reached over and pushed open the door and told me to get in.

>   “This is Sean,” I said, starting to introduce them, but Rudy pulled me into the car and peeled away before I could even fin­ish my sentence.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, thinking maybe there was some emergency or something, he was in such a hurry.

  “What do you think is wrong?” he sneered.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Don’t act all innocent with me!”

  He pulled the car to the curb, slamming on the brakes.

  “What’s wrong?” I yelled. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  He swung his right hand from the steering wheel to my face in an instant. He hit hard, with the back of his hand. I was stunned.

  “Don’t you ever let me see you talking to no guy on no street comer like you’re nothing but a slut.”

  “That was Sean, my friend from a long time ago,” I said, crying, holding my hand over my smarting cheek.

  “Yeah, well I’m your friend now. Not Sean, nobody else but me.”

  I was so hurt, my cheek, yes, but more, deep inside me. For the first time in my life I had felt loved and secure with Rudy, and in one quick blow he’d shattered those feelings.

  “I’m taking you home,” he’d said that day. “I’ve got to go to work, but you just stay at your house until I get there later to­night. You got it?”

  I nodded.

  “What did he give you?” he said.

  “Nothing. We were just talking!”

  “He gave you something. I saw him hand you something!”

  “He just gave me his phone number,” I said, taking the piece of paper from my pocket and waving it in front of him. He grabbed it from my hand, tore it into pieces, and threw it out the window.

  “You wanna talk to someone on the phone, call me,” he said. “Only me.”

  Once home, I washed my face and put ice on my cheek. When my mom came in from work and asked me what happened, I told her I’d tripped and fallen against a light pole. She just shrugged.

  When Rudy came over that evening he asked if I would please go get a bite to eat with him. I had thought we were through, but when I saw the pleading look on his face I followed him to the car. We picked up a couple of burritos and drove back to his house.