52 Stories

story by kpbstevens

Papasan Chair

They were still calling her Sarah, then.  It was before she started painting her toenails gold, before she got the three piercings in her left ear, before she developed her taste for gold jewelry and sequined t-shirts.  Her brown hair was still long.  It was thick and would tangle.  She wore knit Norwegian sweaters.  She kept this look because it had attracted Tom, back when he was quitting the football team and hanging out with the hippies and deadbeats, her friends, driving around at night with a case of Busch in the back seat, smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, listening to Jane’s Addiction.  Tom had worn braided bracelets and dashiki shirts and let his hair grow long.  He had tried to grow a beard, but she made him shave so that his tight, strong looking skin wasn’t smudged by scraggly hairs.

They had graduated from high school and started OSU together, with all of Tom’s old friends - boyhood friends, still loyal despite his abandonment of sports and his insistence on being a hippie.  They didn’t want to pledge frats, they didn’t want to go to football games, they liked hanging out in a dirty off-campus house that a few of them rented, drinking beer on the porch, pretending that they could play guitar, reading small books of poetry and philosophy as if reveling in the contrast between their meaty fists and the daintiness of the paperbacks.  Sarah, as she was then, befriended their girlfriends.

When she became pregnant, it was one of these girlfriends whom she told first.  Tessa, another girl from Ascalon, Darren Engerall’s girlfriend.  She hadn’t really known Tessa before they started college.  In high school, Tessa had been one of the Christian kids for the first few years.  She had met with other Christians in the atrium before school started and held hands with them and said a prayer for the day.  Sarah had watched Tessa change during their junior year.  She had been in that car accident, when she ran her car into a light post in the school parking lot and walked into the school office, disoriented and bleeding, and become instantly famous.  She had put the car in forward when she had meant to go in reverse.  There had been no drinking involved, no drugs, of course.  It was such an innocent accident, compared to the kids who got drunk and swerved off the road and ended up dead or in comas and became the reasons for school assemblies about the dangers of drinking and driving.  But somehow it changed Tessa.  She started dating Darren, who at that time was a basketball star.  She stopped praying in the atrium.  She became someone whom Sarah thought she might like, and then she did like her, and then she was sitting on the porch, telling her that Tom had gotten her pregnant.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Sarah said, “I suppose I should just get an abortion.”

She’d expected Tessa to resist this, but Tessa just said, “Does Tom know?”

“I haven’t told him yet.  He’d be…well, I don’t know how he’d be.”

“I think he should be part of any decision.  It’s his baby, too, you know.”

Sarah frowned over the word ‘baby.’  She had three younger brothers and sisters, one from her mother’s second marriage, still just a baby himself.  She didn’t want a baby.  She wanted to think of the thing inside of her as something else, as a growth, maybe, a benign tumor.

Tessa went with her to tell Tom about it.  They sat on the mattress on the floor of Tom and Sarah’s bedroom.  Tom leaned back against the wall.  He looked surprised and fragile, his eyes darting from face to face, unsure of why he was being confronted by the two of them together.

“Tessa’s just here for moral support,” Sarah said.

“Okay,” Tom said.

“It’s just that I have this baby thing, and I didn’t know how to talk to you about it.”

“What do you mean, baby thing?”

“You know, a baby.”

“You’re pregnant?”

“That’s what she’s trying to say,” Tessa told him.

He stared at Sarah, and the muscles of his face seemed to slacken.  “A baby,” he said, in a wondering voice.

“Right, and I don’t know what to do about it,” Sarah said.

“But, a baby.  I’m going to be a father.”  Sarah stared at him as a big, clumsy tear ran down his cheek.  Then he was up on his knees and crawling to her across the mattress.  He had lifted a hand and was stroking the hair away from her temples.  “Sarah, Sarah Thibauld, you’ll marry me, right?”

Tessa gave an embarrassed laugh and turned her head away, towards the window.  But when she turned back her eyes were shining and Sarah could tell that she was happy.  And so she married Tom Whin when she was nineteen years old, and had her baby when she had just turned twenty.  She would sit in a ratty old papasan chair by the living room window and nurse as the boys played guitar on the porch and the girlfriends wandered through, carrying books and going to class.  She tried to read everything that they read, when she wasn’t too tired, when it didn’t seem that the small, milky mouth of the baby and the damp, sweet odor of his skin was all there was in the world.  Tessa was taking a class on Indian literature, and Sarah read her books, gradually changing her name to Sari, not for any good reason, but because it would make people pause when they were talking to her, and try to adjust their mouths to the new name.  All those old friends, those people she’d watched all of her life, walking into and out of the house and stumbling over her name as they paused to say hello to her.

Tags: /pregnancy /OSU /teen pregnancy /marriage /motherhood