Void joined her in front of the kitchen window at a cluster of four pottery-based garden gnomes, arranged as if conspiring. Each had bushy beards and rosy cheeks, and each could have fit in that bag perfectly. But only one had caught her eye. He was the only gnome wearing glasses, but most tellingly, he was unblemished by the sea air. He was new.
She picked it up, felt its weight, imagined the doctor in the clinic handing it to Ma, imagined it filling that white paper bag. This was definitely it. She had found the scarestork.
“What now?” Void said.
She knew what now. He followed her to the curb, and she held the gnome over the storm drain. She could feel its spiteful power radiating.
“It’s you that’s keeping me from having a brother. Go away.”
She tossed it into the gap and watched it fall from sight.
+ + +
Ma still wasn’t pregnant.
It was Beddy who swelled.
She was always chubby, but as the months drifted, she grew considerably bigger. The kids at school, alert as they are when it comes to physical change, noticed first. Fat Albert, they called her, using her last name against her. Chased her down the halls, singing the theme song.
She was despondent. The scarestork had cursed her by making her pregnant instead. She tried to remember how babies were made to see if there was some way out. Ma had said that babies were born in marshes as tadpoles, watched over by the storks. If one mistakenly grew into a frog, the storks would eat it. When a woman was going to have a baby, a stork would fly in from the marshes and bite her on the neck. Then she knew to start eating enough for the baby that was coming, and she would become pregnant with milk.
Beddy checked her neck in the mirror for bites and found none, but the other evidence was clear. A baby was coming if she didn’t do something. And she needed to do something. She wasn’t ready to be a mom. They seemed to be stuck doing things they didn’t want to, like making beds, making dinner, making complaints about how tired they were, making excuses why they couldn’t come to your school play where you were a dancing mushroom. Then there was the waiting. For the chicken to thaw or come out of the oven, for the man to call who was supposed to fix something in the house, for someone to drive them somewhere. They never used that time to play. They read newspapers, or stared out the window for surprisingly long stretches. The waiting seemed to be the worst part.
No, being a mom right now wasn’t for her.
She would have to starve the storks away.
Soon it was mostly Void who was eating. She brought him dinners barely touched, telling Ma she’d finish them in her room. Breakfasts were impossible to fib – Ma waited at the table for her to finish, and wouldn’t let her take her plate upstairs because she said there wasn’t time before the bus. Lunches were a cakewalk – she’d lay out all the items from her lunchbox on her desk, trade a few, eat none, then hide them in her pillow when she got home to throw out or put back later. But no matter how much he ate and she refused, they stayed their same sizes. Even when he demanded twice the amount. It made no sense.
“Don’t you ever get…fat?” she asked him when he was busy consuming two popsicles, one in each hand. The last word in a near whisper because Ma didn’t allow her to use it.
“No,” he said, tonguelessly sucking the red popsicle in his left.
“Don’t you ever get a tummy ache when you eat too much?”
“No,” he said, tonguelessly sucking the green popsicle in his right.
“What’s your secret? Where does the food go?”
“I don’t know.” He bit through the red popsicle toothlessly. “Where does it go in you?”
“To my hips, arms, legs, waist.” She thinks of that song. Head…shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes. “It’s not fair. The kids at school are ganging up on me. I told them I couldn’t help it, I’m pregnant, but that didn’t seem to help. They call me names.”
“Like what?”
“Like Fat Albert.”
“HAHAHAHA.”