Pillow Baby
The creek is thin and barely flowing and this is where Talia and I have babies. We sit next to each other on the bus but far away from each other in the classroom because we talk too much. We’re in the first grade and our teacher’s belly is sticking out round. She’s so pretty it hurts my eyeballs. After school, we waddle around the creek rubbing our stomachs and complaining of pain.
To have babies, one of us punches the other’s stomach until the pillow falls out from underneath our shirts. We tried metal bowl babies and basketball babies and bunched up towel babies, but none of them stayed up there as well as the pillow babies. The winner is whoever can hold onto the pillow baby longest. I don’t know why there has to be a winner and a loser at having a baby but Talia makes the rules. She’s so good at pretending. Sometimes when we play other games, I don’t pretend as hard as Talia and it hurts her badly. She asks me if the ship is traveling north or south according to my map and I say “I have a map?” not remembering there’s an invisible one in my hands. “You’re going to get us lost!” she says, then makes big eyes at my empty arms. So I stretch them out wide to see the heavy map. “Do you want us to be going north or south?” I whisper. She pinches me hard on the arm, like she’s saying JUST PICK ONE. But Talia never has to pinch me when we’re having babies. I’m never confused because I’m too busy liking how the pillow feels pressed against my stomach. This is the best I have ever pretended.
Mrs. Wild has boring dark circles under her eyes and boring stringy hair thrown on top of her head in a pile my mom would call a rat’s nest, but her belly makes her beautiful. I stare at it all day long. I barely hear her when she’s telling us about Pocahontas or how some letters are silent because her belly looks like a little room I could crawl inside. Her shirts stretch like a sheet of smooth fabric around her. Mrs. Wild’s belly grows a little each day in ways I don’t notice but then I do notice and this makes me feel smart. The other teachers are smart, too. They know to stay close to it. At recess, all the girl teachers go touch Mrs. Wild’s belly. They gather around the teachers’ bench sighing and saying how beautiful she is.
One time I touched it. I brushed my fingers against her belly button when she poured goldfish on my paper towel for snack time. She made a funny face, kind of squinted at me, so I said I was sorry all fast. But she took my hand and put it back, pressed her hand on top of mine on top of her belly. It was hard! Feeling it felt so special I didn’t wash my hands for the whole rest of the day, even after I’d gone to the bathroom. Later, Talia was jealous.
“What did the baby feel like?” she asked me. Talia stood with her hands on her hips looking like the queen of the creek bed.
“I didn’t feel it,” I said, thinking how I’d forgotten there was a baby in there.
“Well I’m gonna feel it tomorrow,” Talia says. “When she pulls the art smock over my head I’m gonna put my hands on her belly till I feel the baby.”
“But we have music tomorrow.”
“Oh. Then whenever we have art I’m going to try.”
I told Talia this was a good plan.
*
Now, Mrs. Wild’s belly is so big she can’t stand up for very long. I didn’t know it was heavy, too. Since she taught us how to tell time on a big clock with googly eyes, she asks the class to tell her if she’s ever been standing for more than twenty minutes. Only Talia and I remember. I raise my hand to remind her but sometimes Mrs. Wild has just asked a question so she’s looking for an answer when she points at me. I can tell by her face that she’s disappointed when I’m just telling her to sit down. But she says “Thank you, Agnes” and takes a seat anyways. Sometimes I want to scream I’M JUST TRYING TO TAKE CARE OF YOU.
Because Mrs. Wild sits all the time, Talia and I steal a rolly chair from Talia’s computer room to have ourselves a throne down by the creek. We take turns pushing each other to get it there. I get to ride first but I guess I’m having too much fun because our crazy neighbor JoAnn grips Talia’s arm with her long red nails when we pass by her driveway. She tells us we need to be careful, that office chairs aren’t a toy. I feel nervous but Talia looks at JoAnn dead in the eyes and asks who she thinks is playing. So now we can sit, too, when our bellies get heavy. The pillows we use are fluffy like a cloud but this is part of the pretending. Sometimes, I get down to the creek before Talia and sit in the rolly chair all by myself, patting my belly. I imagine all the girl teachers crossing the creek just to touch me.
*
Right before Mrs. Wild leaves to have the baby, she gives a little speech explaining how children are gifts from God. She’s wearing a long dress covered with oranges. She introduces us to a substitute with a flat stomach. Mrs. Larsen is thin and wears clackety heels and gives me nothing to look at. During lunch, Talia asks me if I feel like a gift from God. I tell her I don’t know. But Talia says she knows she is a gift from God because she can feel his love wherever she goes, even when she held her breath and sat on the bottom of the pool last summer. She says she could feel his love there and then, especially. I tell her this sounds nice but really all I’m thinking about is how I won’t be able to look at Mrs. Wild’s belly for three whole months and after that never again. I worry Mrs. Wild will look ugly with the most interesting part of her body gone. I worry she won’t be as loved.
*
While Mrs. Wild is away, Talia and I have a baby almost every day. I wear my big sleep shirts down to the creek so that there’s room for more than one pillow. Towards the end, Mrs. Wild said that the baby had broken her brain. She was still making us worksheets and explaining how clouds work and cutting out little leaf decorations to put on the classroom door, so I didn’t really believe her, but this is what she said so I say it now, too. I put my hands on my arched back and walk around the creek saying all the things pretending-me forgot because of the baby, like to do laundry and cook dinner and take out the trash. I sigh between listing all these things, like I’m saying IT’S A REAL SHAME THIS BABY IS BREAKING MY BRAIN. But Talia starts having her babies fast. She doesn’t waddle around too long before she clutches her stomach and demands to be punched. If I’m not ready to punch her yet, she’ll start climbing trees with the pillow still up her shirt, like she’s forgotten it’s there. I get nervous she’s getting bored, trying to go quickly like that. There’s a little more water in the creek this time of year which means we could catch frogs instead of having babies.
*
The day before Mrs. Wild is supposed to get back, the substitute puts on lipstick and tells us to be on our best behavior for a very special visitor. The principal comes in while we say the pledge and I’m disappointed because she’s not that special of a visitor. She’s got spiky hair and big glasses. The principal shuts the door behind her all quiet, like she doesn’t want to disturb our pledging allegiance to America and liberty and justice. She mouths hello to some of us, then tiptoes to Mrs. Wild’s stool. When we finish the justice part, the principal twists the top of her walkie talkie, claps her hands together, and says she knows we’re all very excited for Mrs. Wild to come back but that she needs to tell us something important, something for big kids.
“Now we all know Mrs. Wild went away to have her baby,” the principal says. “And every baby is special. No two babies are the same! So, Mrs. Wild’s baby is special too. But this baby wasn’t breathing very well when he was born, so—”
Now the principal looks out the window, even though Mrs. Larsen’s always telling us there’s nothing to see out there.
“Well he was born asleep,” she says. “Which is an awful thing.”
Mateo in the front row asks why Mrs. Wild doesn’t just wake the baby up but the principle says it’s not like that, not like that at all.
“I know she can’t wait to start teaching you all again,” the principle says.
At this Mrs. Larsen closes her eyes.
“But I want you all to be extra good tomorrow. And please, please, please do not ask Mrs. Wild about her baby, since that will make her very sad. Of course, she should feel sad right now, she can feel however she wants to feel, but we want to help her have a nice, happy day if we can. Now let’s all do a big hug, yes?”
The principal walks to the middle of the carpet time square and outstretches her arms. We do a big group hug even though we don’t really know her. I’m on the innermost layer and my face gets squished into her bedazzled belt.
*
On the bus ride home, Talia can’t stop crying about Mrs. Wild’s angel baby. That’s what she calls it since we all know the baby is in heaven now. She sniffles into a tissue covered with cartoon dogs. Something about the way she holds onto that tissue makes her look all grown up, like a little woman. Something about her sadness. I’m not crying when Talia offers me a tissue, but two fat tears well up when she puts one in my hands. Now that Mrs. Wild’s baby is dead, Talia might never want to play our game again. I begin to miss how the pillow makes me feel. Talia talks about tiny-winged babies flying away with God but I think about the earth and this bus and how good it feels to be the shape of Mrs. Wild and I know our tears are different.
“Do you think the baby even had one day to live before it died?” Talia asks.
“I bet it had at least one day,” I say.
“But what if it died before it was born?”
“How would that happen?”
“I don’t know. My mom said my aunt had a lot of babies die before they were born.”
“That’s not possible,” I say. “You aren’t alive until you’ve been born so you can’t die before then.”
“I feel like it makes it worse if the baby got to live a whole day but only one of them,” Talia says.
I agree this makes it worse.
*
I’m wrong about Talia. She wants to go to the creek the second we climb off the bus, without even getting her sleep shirt from home. When we get down there, she shoves the pillow up her school shirt and doesn’t waddle around at all before asking me to punch her. Since she’s so sad, I punch her immediately. But when the pillow falls out, it’s like the game has just started. Talia brushes the dirt off the already-stained pillow case and begins to rock the pillow back and forth in her arms. She stares down at it with a big smile and starts talking in a high-pitched voice. She asks the pillow “What should we name you?” and wanders across the creek to show it a slug. She’s back to pretending something I don’t understand.
I sit down on the rocks with my pillow still up my shirt and watch my friend. I think about what I’ll say to Mrs. Wild when she tells me good morning the next day. I think about all the pillow babies I’ve had and how I let them all fall out of me and roll into the creek bed, where no real baby should go. I’ll tell her my babies die all the time. Yes, I’ll tell her they’re barely out one second before they drown in a no-water creek, with no idea they’re even alive, ‘cause that’s not the point of the game. When my backside starts to ache, I pull the pillow out from underneath my shirt. I sit on it and feel much more comfortable.
Morgan Canaan is a writer from Richmond, Virginia. Her work has been awarded the Mary Steinbeck Dekker Award in Fiction.
