Evelyn conjured her sister that night. She wondered if without knowing it that had been why she’d needed to be so close to Ruby, to sit on her bed, to smell the perfume she sprayed on her wrists and between her legs. Ruby had never confessed to the things she’d done with men, but Evelyn could infer it from her guarded diary entries, the smug looks her sister shot her some mornings, and maybe connecting with her that day had been preparation for now, when she said words so dirty she didn’t know they were inside her, when she climbed on top of Renard and growled like a dog, when she touched herself and moaned like she was possessed.
It was her imagination of how aroused he must have been that aroused her in return. By the time he was inside her, she was so slick, it didn’t hurt as much as she’d feared it might, and though she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out, she clung to him and begged him not to leave her.
Renard had been gone two months when Evelyn learned she was pregnant. She sat on the information as long as she could. She had been forced to share so much with her family for so long, considering such a supremely important matter in private replenished her. Otherwise, her house felt as if it might break under the weight of its own gloom: Her parents hadn’t spoken to each other much since Daddy and Mother’s disagreement about Renard; Ruby stopped eating once Andrew left; Brother stayed out; Mother prayed the Rosary; and Evelyn’s loneliness was fiercer than she’d ever known.
She filled her days with the same few questions, reshuffled so it seemed to her mind she was putting it to use. What was Renard doing over there in another continent? Was he safe? Would he return? When? Would he want her once he was back? And that last question slipped in not because of her new condition, which wasn’t altogether real to her, but because his absence had dulled time’s sharp edges. She felt as if the last few months had been years. Her feelings were the same, but she had scarcely left the house she’d lived in when they’d fallen in love. He wasn’t off on a European vacation, but surely there were peaks beneath the cloak of war too; there were new faces to learn and places to discover. In her most desperate and selfish times she wondered if he even thought about her.
Meanwhile, she barely had the stamina to check the mail, and all the energy she’d spent pouring into memorizations and recitations drained out of her. She found herself sleeping through classes, coming home to eat, then retiring to her room for more sleeping. She’d attempt to do her homework in the beginning, but after a few days of lapses there seemed to be so much of it, and the parts of her mind she might have used to tackle it before seemed bent or dull, no longer available for use.
Still, despite the vague knowledge that her life as she knew it was slipping away, she was surprised when the president called her into his office and asked her to take a leave of absence. Disrupted from a routine, but oddly not devastated, Evelyn still pretended to attend. She’d wake up in the morning at the same time as she always did and walk with Ruby until she arrived at her sister’s vocational school, then she’d turn at the next block—where she would have gone straight before to her own campus—and head over to the Sweet Tooth for apple pie. She physically craved ice cream, but something in her mind wouldn’t allow it, and she was grateful for that, afraid of what the memory of the smell might do to her insides. She had managed to avoid crying, and she wanted to keep it that way.
One day when she returned home at the time she would have if she were still a student, her brother passed her an envelope postmarked from France. She locked herself in the bathroom and tore it open before she could sit. She read the last paragraph first, knowing everything important about a beginning could be gleaned from its ending. Renard had signed it with the words, “Everything my heart could give.” Her legs gave way and she sank onto the bathroom floor. Once she had read it all the way through, she turned back to start over from the beginning.
He was fine, he said. And he’d heard that Andrew was too. He drove the same route every day, carrying gas, oil, and food between the beachhead and the city of Chartres, just outside Paris. They had met nice men, some of the nicest men he’d ever known, and he spent a lot of time with them, talking, playing cards, and bragging about their women. Everyone pretended they had each other beat, but several of the guys had taken him aside and told him he sure was a lucky nigger. He kept a picture she’d given him above his bed at night to make sure she was his first and last thought on both ends of the day. He didn’t know when he was coming home, but he’d know soon, and he’d write her when he did. “Don’t worry about anything, I’m safe, and I’m yours” was the last line, and Evelyn turned it over and over in her mind until she had drained it of all its magic.
The note not only fueled her love for Renard, it bred her confidence that when he returned they’d start their life together.
So she rubbed her stomach with cocoa butter not because it would prevent stretch marks, but because she wanted her child to know she’d been cooed over. She ate two portions of the breakfast sausage Ruby had forsaken. And she considered names like Sybil or Jacqueline, the latter the name of one of the girls at Dillard who without Evelyn present would surely finish first in their class.
In the months after Evelyn’s tiredness eased, her weight came upon her, and she snuck through Ruby’s clothes while she was at school. It didn’t take long for Ruby to notice. She’d smirk at dinner as Evelyn reached for another helping, or she’d pinch the flab of flesh hanging over the top of Evelyn’s panties. Evelyn expected her to press for the source of the change, but if she knew why Evelyn was growing, she didn’t say. And one day that same week, Evelyn walked up to her bed and found pants and skirts from Ruby’s closet folded in a neat pile.
There was still her mother to avoid though. Evelyn tried not to be in the house alone with her. If there were other people in the room, her mother would overlook her, but when it was just the two of them, the older woman had no choice but to notice how much mayonnaise Evelyn added to her sugar sandwiches, or how she answered questions about school too fast or too slow, Evelyn couldn’t be sure which.
Thursday afternoon, though, when Ruby was still at school and Brother was with the twins and Daddy was at work, Evelyn was so hungry she couldn’t bear to wait for her mother to finish her coffee before she did something about it.
She backed more than walked into the kitchen, never facing the table where her mother sat flipping through the news. When she made it to the giant jar of pig lips in the corner, she tried to make so little of a disturbance her mother wouldn’t lift her head, but when she finally managed the lid, and leaned the container over to fish for the biggest piece, the juice spilled onto her dress in a dark circle she couldn’t be bothered to wipe.
That was when her mother set the paper down and cleared her throat.
“Since when do you eat pickled pig lips?”
“I’ve always eaten them,” Evelyn said, turning toward her mother.
“No, that’s a dish I get for Ruby, not you.”