Parents, Chapter 4 ~ Tumbling Tumbleweed

For three years, Liseli Luenford had been resigned to the fact that she would never again be able to conceive a child.  So it came as a shock to realize that she had finally gotten pregnant, after all.  With help, of course, from Russ.

For three years, they had been getting laid well and often, without the protection of condoms, pills, or other safeguards against procreation, and logically they should have several small children by now.  But the wounds inflicted by Alisiya had gone deep, and without being able to explain just exactly how she knew, Liseli had known that she was a barren woman.  The poison, the violence that her own body had been forced to work against her and the small life she had been carrying, had scarred her inside, in so many ways.  She imagined what she looked like inside, and in her mind she saw a charred, burned, scorched wasteland where no life could ever hope to grow again.  In her more creative moods, she had imagined the odd tumbleweed tumbling across the wasteland, blown by an acrid wind that swirled and eddied around her heart and womb and useless reproductive organs.

Russ never brought up the subject of children, preventive measures or otherwise.  For all Liseli knew, he might not even understand that sex did, in fact, have a purpose other than making him really happy.  They had never discussed it.  Most likely he just assumed she was on the pill or patch, or rubbed baby-be-gone ointment on her stomach every day as part of her morning routine, or whatever it was that women did, and he didn’t think it was up to him to question her on the matter.

She knew, full well, that she was being unfair, but that had never stopped her from thinking ungenerous thoughts about her true love before, and she had no plans for letting it stop her in the future.  The emptiness inside was starting to get to her, and Russ’s blithe unconcern about that fact rankled her.  She did love him, very much, but she had realized that there were some things he just didn’t get without being told.  Often, without having it spelled out to him.  And this was something she couldn’t just spell out, because she could not, or would not, tell him why she knew she could not have children.

Besides that, it wasn’t that she really wanted children just yet.  She was, after all, a college student, an unmarried woman, a part time waitress at a small café, and the girlfriend of an unemployed man who frequented pawn shops, antique stores, and businesses of ill repute, who would give him cash for things without asking where he’d gotten them.

Someday, though, she would want children.  And grandchildren.  Life would be lonely without them, even if they were a lot of work, money, stress, pain, and aggravation.  To call them the key to immortality was cliché and selfish, but it was true.  When you died it would be nice to leave behind a legacy.  But even before all that, Liseli rather liked the idea of having daughters and sons, and she thought Russ would make a very good sort of father, big kid that he was.  So many kids had rotten fathers and grew up warped because of it, but hers would have one who would dote on them (Russ would be a doter, there was no question) and he could, in fact, beat up other kids’ dads.  It was a shame, a terrible shame, to know that she could never give Russ kids.  Kids would suit him.

And they would suit her.

Having children would give her a chance to prove that she could be a much better mother than her mother had been, or would ever be.  She would keep her children safe and make sure they felt secure and knew they were loved.  Sure, they would probably hate her when they were teenagers, as all good American teenagers did, but they’d get over it and would grow closer to her as adults and ask for her advice with their own children.  It was something Liseli thought about when she thought about the tumbleweeds and the acrid wind, and Russ scratching his head and raising his eyebrows in wonder as reproduction was explained to him.

It was something she thought about often.

For three years.

There weren’t many wedding chapels in Wisconsin.  Not like Las Vegas, anyway.  Most people who got married in Wisconsin did it in church, because it was just that kind of state.  But getting married in church often entailed going through pre-marital counseling with the officiating pastor, and Russ and Liseli would not ever, at any stage in their lives, go through counseling of any kind.  When you have been to worlds most people didn’t know existed, have met gods, Gates, and other psychotic beings, and also spilled blood with your own hands, you generally avoid shrinks, pastors, and anyone else interested in talking to you about your beliefs, feelings, and reasons for doing the things you do.

Getting married in a courthouse was categorically cold and unromantic, in Liseli’s opinion.  So that pretty much left a wedding chapel or an unofficial exchange of vows in the park, performed with God and a handful of birds and squirrels as their witnesses.  So they looked up wedding chapels, or rather, Liseli looked up wedding chapels while Russ looked into renting a suit.

In his life, the most formal attire he’d ever worn had been a green polo shirt with a yellow collar and red embroidery that said “Fayette Pets,” and was rounded off by a blue pin that said “Russ.”  He’d worked at Fayette Pets briefly during high school, like he’d worked briefly at the supermarket, the gas station on the north side, the florists, and the music store.  After high school had come a disastrous bout with a construction company, and the greasy but fateful stint at the Burger House.

He liked to think that there weren’t many places in Fayette where he hadn’t worked.

He’d enjoyed the florists and the music store the most.  He’d been a delivery boy for the florist, which meant going around giving people (ofttimes pretty young women) flowers, and making them happy.  It didn’t really matter that the flowers weren’t from him, it had been a pleasant job, and he’d felt bad when it ended because his sister wouldn’t let him use her car anymore and, unable to afford his own at the time, he’d had to give it up.  It wasn’t that the florists required him to have his own transportation (they actually had a van) but the shop was located on the other side of town and was a good hike from his house.

On the upside, however, the music store had had an opening shortly after, and they were only a half hour’s walk from his house and a mere fifteen minutes from school.  He’d loved the music store.  Just being surrounded by guitars, pianos, drums, and other musical instruments was a joy.  He liked the sheet music too, even though he couldn’t have read it to save his life.  The store owner gave various music lessons in an adjoining room to the store, and he’d listened to the muffled sound of many a session over the span of a few months.  He liked to think it had made him a better guitarist than just his father’s short instruction and the help of the radio could offer.

He’d lost that job when the store closed and the space in the strip mall it had occupied was filled by a poor, misguided tattoo artist who soon learned that tattoos were not in great demand in Fayette.  He wasn’t sure who’d filled the room after that.  He didn’t care because by then he had dropped out of school and was learning just how much a job really could suck.

There was nothing about his near two year employment with the Hinker Brothers Construction Agency that he remembered fondly.  Between the dirt, noise, physical exertion, and loud, bullying co-workers, he had been really very miserable.  Then came the cataclysmic bang with which his employment ended, when he deconstructed a garage with the aide of a bulldozer that went forward when he hoped it would go in reverse.  He should not have been driving the bulldozer in the first place, but there had been a new foreman that day who didn’t realized that Russ was not trained in the art of bulldozer operation and ordered him to move it from one spot to other.  In order to save his ass, the foreman fired Russ before the last sad board of the would-be garage frame crashed unceremoniously to ground.

The Burger House came next, only because he went there after being fired, to drown his sorrows in a Choco Icey, and saw Liseli behind the counter, and wanted her.  He didn’t allowed himself to think of it in such bald terms at the time, but he had most definitely wanted her from the moment he’d clapped eyes on her.

After his employment at the Burger House ended (for quite possibly the strangest reason to date) he didn’t reenter the working world.  He didn’t have any plans to.

At first it was because he had plans to be gone for unspecified lengths of time, exploring the possibilities the existence of Gates and Otherworlds presented.  And then it was because those possibilities proved to be very lucrative.

The money Adayzjia gave him and Liseli when they left Alisiya had given him the idea.  If the riches of one otherworld was enough to buy them a car, an apartment, and a college education for Liseli, then little bits of otherwordly treasure would do nicely to buy groceries, gas, and other essentials.  And, it had been much easier to steal things than do things to earn the gratitude and patronage of rich rulers.  Earning Adayzjia’s gratitude had taken a helluva lot of blood, sweat, and tears.  There were no locks or barriers that Russ couldn’t undo with criminal ease, so one thing led to another, and he became a wanted man in more exotic locales than he’d ever dreamed of visiting a mere three years ago.

Now that he’d promised Liseli he would give that up, he knew that he’d have to reenter the honest working world.  Russ didn’t want to steal anything in his homeworld.  Doing it in other worlds had made him feel a bit like Indiana Jones, but doing it here would just make him an ordinary criminal.  A thief.  It was a bad thing to steal in your homeworld.  He didn’t know why he thought it was okay to do it in otherworlds, he just did.  It was, in fact, an unspoken rule amongst the few Keys he had met in his travels.  You did not shit in your own back yard.  He’d met a Key or two that he did not like — they did things in otherworlds that he would feel dirty doing on the moon, much less his homeworld.

(Though, technically, the moon was in his homeworld.)

Regardless, some Keys took the “if it’s not your homeworld it doesn’t count” rule a little too much to heart.  The fact was that murder was murder and rape was rape and pillaging was pillaging, no matter where you were from and where you were doing it.

Russ just didn’t care to think of what he did as “pillaging,” per se.

In the days since he made his promise to Liseli, Russ’s conscience pricked him constantly.  Because he could not do what he’d been doing in his homeworld, he knew he probably shouldn’t have been doing it in otherworlds.  The more practical reason for earning an honest living, though, was simply that if he was caught and became a wanted man in his homeworld, Liseli wouldn’t be too happy about them having to hoof it to another.  He was giving up his get out of jail free card.  He had to behave himself.

He didn’t want to get a job, of course.  But he’d gotten the job at the grocery store, “temporarily,” before looking for a “real” job, because Liseli wanted him to.  And now, all of a sudden, he was going to be a father.  A father and a husband.  The husband part wasn’t that daunting, because he didn’t see how it could be that different from being a boyfriend who shared an apartment and a bed with his significant other.  But being a father.  That was fucking huge.  He didn’t even know where to start.  Well, he should probably start with not saying “fuck” so much.

He wasn’t sure about these things, but he was fairly certain that you couldn’t raise a child on the combined pay of a grocery stork clerk and a waitress.  Children were raised on less, of course, but it was a well known fact that poverty made children grow up to be criminals and murders.  Look at him, after all.  He’d been raised in what he would describe as mild poverty, and he’d turned into a murderer, a thief, and a guy who said fuck a lot.

Liseli would be getting her English degree eventually, but even after three years he wasn’t sure exactly what a person did with an English degree.  He was too afraid to ask Liseli, because he knew that was the sort of question that could come across as combative.  But he secretly wished she’d decided to major in something a little more practical, like medicine or law or computers.

Still, he thought guiltily, he couldn’t be relying on Liseli to earn all the money.  She, as the mother, should be focusing more on taking care of the baby (the most helpless kind of being that could exist, therefore one that needed a lot of taking care of) than going off to work 40 hours a week.  He, as the father, should be keeping the family in Gerber and diapers and strollers and Little Tyke toys.

He didn’t think these roles were at all sexist or outdated, just as he didn’t find pregnancy and breast feeding to be particularly sexist so much as something that women were undeniably better at than men.

Liseli, he was sure, probably was expecting him to be a horribly incompetent and dangerous father, and he really couldn’t picture her being able to concentrate on her job while their child was in his care.  In fact, what he could picture, with frightening clarity, was himself being the cause of an infant fatality.  Babies were so fragile.  He’d probably handle it too roughly, and accidentally shake it or drop it or heat up bottled breast milk (he knew there was such a thing and it terrified him) in the microwave too hot so that he literally burned his child to death from the inside.  Then the police would lead him away in handcuffs, Liseli would hate him forever, and he’d be forced to commit honorable suicide in his cell.

He needed a real job.

He thought about this at length while he was at the clothing store, looking at suits and prices.  He was, it was true, going to be a husband before his first child came screaming into the world, but the whole fatherhood thing was considerably more important than wearing a nice suit.  He looked at the cheapest suit for rent and wondered how many little baby sized pajamas could be bought with the same amount of money.  Liseli was not there, which both gratified and worried him.  On the one hand, it meant she trusted him to get himself a suit.  On the other, he could not gage just how important it was to her that he wear a suit for their wedding.

In the end, he left the haberdashery empty handed and went to Baby Planet and bought some pajamas (onesies was actually, he discovered, the technical name for them) and bibs and bonnets, in assorted sizes to match their baby’s growth spurts.  The plan was to arrive home armed with a visual display of how smart he was to forgo the suit.

If the girl working the register at aisle 2 thought it strange that a very young man was buying baby clothes all by himself, she didn’t have to ask about it, because he couldn’t help himself from grinning and informing her, “I’m going to have a baby.”

She raised her eyebrow.

“Well, not me,” he amended.  “My girlfriend.  Er, fiancée.  Wife, actually.  She’s my fiancée right now but she’ll be my wife by the time the baby comes.  It’s due in June.  She, actually.  I say ‘it’ but Liseli is pretty sure it’s — she’s — a girl.  She has some voodoo woman’s intuition about it.  But you probably know about that kind of thing better than me.  Or . . . do you have kids?  No, I’m sorry, I’m not, like, being nosy.  I didn’t mean to anyway.  You just looked like you had kids.  In a good way, I mean.”

“I’m seventeen,” she said.  “I don’t have kids.”

Russ was about to point out that lots of seventeen-year-olds had kids, but he summoned up a mental image of himself riveting a metal plate over his mouth, and that kept him silent.  He just signed the receipt she pushed at him over the counter, and only uttered a single, “Thanks” when she handed him his bags of oneises and bibsies and bonnetsies, and said have a nice day, and congratulations by the way.

He rarely suffered diarrhea of the mouth; usually he was monosyllabic around young women.  But somehow sharing the news made him giddy and he found it hard to stop once he got started.  He was just glad Liseli hadn’t been there, because she would have murdered him messily.  Not only had he rambled on at the helpless checkout girl, he’d revealed that he and Liseli had conceived out of wedlock.

He’d discovered recently that doing it in wedlock was very important to her.  God only knew why.  But it was.  And you just didn’t fuck up things that were important to Liseli.  Getting married before she started to show would fix the embarrassment, but it didn’t do much good if he went around proclaiming their marriage of necessity to everyone he met.  Not that it was a marriage of necessity, but he wasn’t stupid (not entirely) and he knew how it must look to strangers.  It would look like they were getting married just because of the baby.

Personally, he didn’t give a fuck what strangers thought about their sex lives and whether they made babies in or out of wedlock or what they chose to do about it afterwards.

But Liseli did.

When Liseli saw the baby clothes, she just shook her head.  She told Russ that she was planning on a surprise baby shower being thrown for her.  She didn’t really have any friends, but her mother and sister would buy her things, and Russ’s mother and sister would be invited.  He seriously doubted his mother would show up, but it would be perversely like Kyla to lavish a too-expensive gift on Liseli so that every time he looked at it he’d have to think of her and know that she could afford better things for his child than he could.

Regardless of the particulars, Liseli told him that stuff like this was something she was not expecting them to have to pay for.  She did agree, to his relief, that the suit money could indeed be spent on smarter, more practical things, and he got her blessing to wear something cheap and semi-casual, as long as it was new and clean.  She returned the baby things to Baby Planet herself, and was completely unaware that the teenage girl who gave her her refund was smirking because the father of her as yet un-showing child had made a lasting impression. 

Russ was good at leaving an impression.  He was not as good at always making it a good impression.