Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

2 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Sally Bellerose
the Pill. She’s all for condoms too, but would never use the word in
front of the grandchildren. “But the Pill wasn’t around then. Anyway,
I would have listened to them.” Mom nods toward the kitchen as if the
crew from the Vatican is in there, tripping over their robes while they
frost Jane’s cake.
“The Pill.” Jacob, one of Jane’s eighteen-year-old twins, elongates
the words as if he’s announcing a horror film. Like Mom, he directs
this phrase at his sister. Cora has a boyfriend who is not present. There
is, no doubt, a juicy tangential story here, but, thankfully, I haven’t
heard it, so I can’t interject it into the main tale, which as a reminder
is Mom’s alleged attempt at suicide during her pregnancy with baby
sister Jane.
You might wonder about Jane’s emotional health. How does a
person who has grown up hearing, often on the very day of her birth,
that she is the result of an extremely unwanted pregnancy, manage
to reach adulthood with her self-esteem intact? Not to worry. Jane is
Mom’s favorite. Jane is the baby. She’s a sweet woman, nicer than any
of her siblings. She’s pretty much everyone’s favorite.
It’s Jane who says, “Tell the story so we can cut the cake,” when
Mom wanders too far afield with a commentary on the muumuu as
maternity wear in the fifties.
A good call on Jane’s part because Dad is drifting off to sleep in
his overstuffed armchair.
Our sister Kathy pats his leg. “Mom needs you to help her tell the
Mueller Bridge story, Dad.”
His memory often holds up for old stories, the older the better.
“It’s Jane’s birthday,” he informs Kathy. “Ah, your mother was a
mess. What can you do when a woman gets something like that in her
head?”
“I was mad at you,” Mom says.
Dad shrugs, grinning, rotating his head, playing the room. “I
wasn’t too thrilled with her either.”
“Did you know where he was taking you, Gram?” My son, Brian
asks. I, for one, listen carefully for this year’s answer.
“Oh, I kept saying, ‘I can’t take it. I’m going to jump off the bridge
if I have to have another one.’ We said things like that in those days.
How many times did I tell you kids, ‘I’m going to kill you if I find out
you’ve been stealing apples again,’ or ‘I’ll crack your heads together?’
That was another one we used to say. Nobody thought anything about
saying something like that back then.”