Pregnant??

Seagate, New York

June 21, 1956: 6:17 P.M.

Exhausted after this long day, wanting to be alone with her thoughts, for the first time ever Marsha was glad Mitchell had duty and she would be alone.

Spitting foam into the sink, rinsing her mouth with a palm-full of water, wiping her hands and face, standing back, looking at her reflection in the mirror...

Yes, she did look as she’d looked yesterday and the day before yesterday...

But yet she knew something was different!  Oh, there wasn’t a hint, or even the hint of a hint but, be it wishful thinking, she was sure she’d actually felt the force of Mitchell’s ejaculation last night, and Marsha knew!  After last night, she knew!

Unhooking her brassiere and stepping out of her panties, she carried them to the clothes hamper in the closet.

Passing the large mirror atop the dresser, stopping, Marsha stood looking at her nude body from forward, then, turning to the side, looked at herself in profile. Turning full forward again, lifting her breasts from beneath, Wonder what they’ll look like when they begin to grow? I’ll enjoy that: being big busted... or bigger busted.  Mitchie sure will. Bringing her hands tightly down the sides of her body,  pushing her fists into her straight waste, making sharp indentations and, as she had almost every day since she was mature enough to realize, thought, If only I had hips! Smiling, thinking, Now it doesn’t matter! Further wondering how she might look later, in a few weeks, in a few months. Turning sideways, pushing her stomach outward from inside, Marsha caused only the slightest protrusion.

Certainly not in Mitchell’s, but in Marsha’s hypercritical eyes she had small, sagging breasts and her buttocks were nothing more that a double-sided bulge on her back-side. Her hard stomach was deeply concave with an “outie” navel that she thought of as “ugly as hell”, that her husband always told her was “cute as a button”... Whatever “cute as a button” meant.

Always regular with her “period” except, of all times, when they’d been married, the second time, the, in the eyes of God’ time. Looking at a calendar, There’s thirty-one days this month. My period should begin,  calculating,  about the twenty-eighth. Further thinking, If I’m not bleeding by the fourth of July, she decided, I’ll tell Mitchell he’s going to be a daddy.  But, Where’s the money going to come from if I am pregnant and they want me to quit working after I start to show?  Coming up with the only plausible answer, “Mother”!

Attempting to make up for the years of her daughter’s childhood, Rhea had been as attentive to Marsha as possible, since the wedding, via “long distance”, of course.

I think she’ll do it. Marsha thought, After all, keeping my mouth shut all those years has got to be good for something! And to her way of thinking, in a very small way it had, because...

                              *

Bedsides the large, plush wedding that Rhea had all but insisted on making, the two-and-a-half carat, pear-shaped diamond engagement ring Marsha wore most certainly did not come from Mitchell’s saving account, because he didn’t have a savings account and even if he had, a “two-and-a-half-carat-diamond”? Also, Rhea paid for a one carat diamond ring that Marsha had given Mitchell as an engagement present. To say nothing of the five thousand, one hundred, sixty dollars they had received as wedding gifts, that Rhea was holding for safe-keeping that was earmarked as a down-payment on a house when Mitchell is discharged and he and Marsha return to Chicago, minus, of course, the one thousand dollars they’d taken to cover expenses when they left for New York.

                          *

Moving from the mirror, turning the television on – planning on eating the corned-beef sandwich she’d bought “to go” at the Kosher delicatessen across the street from the Bensonhurst subway station in bed while watching television – taking the cushions from the sofa, thinking of the newly-found relationship between herself and her mother, Yeah, she thought sadly, guess keeping my mouth shut all those years has been good for something after all, And...

As Marsha had every day since she was old enough to realize, she wondered why, among her many friends and acquaintances, why, so far as she knew, was she the only person who’s mother was a... whore.