Her mother told her to be an angel and hold the fort. She said if the baby should wake up, she could jiggle the pram a bit and he would probably go right back to sleep, she had just fed him, after all, or if that didn’t work she could push the pram back and forth, but she was not to try to pick him up on her own. Amy is not allowed to hold her baby brother except when she sits with him on the sofa and rocks him very carefully in her arms with her mother beside her. Amy thinks this is stupid, as she is sure she can easily hold her little brother without dropping him to the floor, after all.
Amy likes having the whole house, the big garden with all its bright orange, yellow, and purple flowers, with the bees hovering over them, the two dogs, but above all her baby brother, all to herself. She pretends she is the mommy, now, of the new baby boy, and she is the owner of all this vast space. She feels she is the one who has brought it all forth: the baby, the big English pram with the mosquito netting falling down around her baby’s face, and the big blond dogs, and even the river running in the distance. She has invented it all.
She gets down from the swing and struts around the garden in her Clark’s sandals, pretending to be Mommy. She deadheads a few flowers the way Mommy does and pulls out a weed. She thinks it’s probably a weed. She likes the way the cicadas scream again and again, like someone telling the same story over and over again. She likes the way the sun makes everything so very quiet and still at this hour of the morning before it gets too hot.
Amy’s mother, too, likes the silence in the sunlit garden, the warmth of the early-morning air on her face, as she drives fast down the driveway in the car. She has not left the house on her own since the birth of the baby, six weeks ago. In fact, she has not had a moment on her own since the birth of her baby. The baby has been constantly, or so it seems to her, on her breast, sucking at her flesh. Insatiable, a big insatiable boy, who seems never to have enough milk and wakes up almost as soon as she puts him down. Since the birth of the baby, Amy, too, follows her wherever she goes, thumb in her mouth, watching her with her dark brown acquisitive eyes. She even follows her into the bathroom and keeps asking her every five minutes if she loves her. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?
Amy was conceived so easily. Too easily, Stella thinks as she shifts gears. She remembers the awkward fumbling in the back of Mark’s car in the dark. It was the first time they had made love; the first time she had made love, if that is what it could be called. When she realized she was pregnant, she couldn’t believe it.
When she gave Mark the news, he said, “No problem, we’ll get married. My parents will be only too happy to let us take over the farm.” Neither of them was twenty years old yet. Stella left the university in Cape Town, where she was studying French, and they moved up north to Mark’s parents’ farm, near the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Stella finds the place very beautiful, and she likes to garden, but she sometimes suffers from the heat in the small house with its corrugated iron roof, and she misses her friends and family in Cape Town. Sometimes, when Mark comes back late at night, she finds the days long and lonely. After Amy’s birth, she had moments of depression when she kept miscarrying repeatedly, and her mother came and stayed with them for a while. A psychiatrist prescribed pills. Finally, this beautiful new baby was conceived. And now, for Mark’s birthday, the baby seems to be finally sleeping sweetly, soundly, replete.
Now she puts her sandaled foot on the accelerator, flying fast down the strip road, her tight skirt slipping up her thighs. She likes this comfortable elastic skirt which clings to her body, and which she wears with a blouse in the house. Unlike other women she knows, she was careful not to put on extra weight during her pregnancy. She is proud of her slim body, her long, lithe legs. She has got her figure back fast. She remembers being on holiday in Italy as a girl and someone calling out to her in the street: “Che belle gambe!”
With the window open, she feels the strong morning sun on her face, her legs. She turns on the radio and sings along with the old Beatles song that is playing: “Here Comes the Sun.” She feels buoyant, light-headed, young. Her body no longer aches. She’s a lucky young woman, she thinks, with her beautiful new baby boy — she had so wanted a boy, she is not sure why, but she did. She has a handsome, young, six-foot-two-tall husband who loves her and watches her as she moves around the kitchen in the morning and says, “You have the most beautiful legs in the world!”; and they have a huge game farm all to themselves. She has a bottle of Champagne in the refrigerator, and she decides that tonight, after they have eaten the cake, they will make love for the first time since the baby was born. Since the baby was born, Mark lies in the bed beside her and groans and keeps telling her he feels like a rocket about to take off.
She speeds fast going toward the co-op, which is not more than ten or a maximum of fifteen minutes away. She calculates: ten minutes there, five minutes to buy the baking powder, and ten minutes back to the house, not more than thirty minutes in all. What can possibly happen in thirty minutes? She knows Mark would die if he knew she had left Amy alone in the house, but she is certain Amy is perfectly safe with the two big dogs at her side. The good dogs would never allow anyone harmful near her children, she knows. They always set up a terrible racket if a stranger approaches, and the local people are frightened of the big dogs.
It is still quite early, not even ten o’clock yet. Amy knows how to tell the time on the big watch with the Mickey Mouse that her grandmother gave her for her birthday.
She gets down from the swing and walks over and peers at her baby brother in his pram, which was her pram when she was a baby, a long time ago. He is, everyone tells Amy, such a beautiful big baby boy. There is something about the way everyone says boy that Amy dislikes. Her mother says he’s the most beautiful baby boy ever, though he wakes her up again and again at night. Even her daddy says he’s the most beautiful baby boy ever. When her father says that, Amy has an urge to give the baby boy a little pinch on his pink arm.
Once, when her mother left the room for a moment, she did give him a little pinch, only a tiny little one, on his leg, but it made him scream very loudly, which surprised Amy. Amy had never heard such a loud scream. Her mother came running back into the room and picked him up. She thought he must have been bitten by an insect because there was a red mark on his skin. “Could it have been a spider?” her mother said and looked at Amy inquiringly.
Certainly he is pink and has her father’s dark hair. “A chip off the old block,” her mother says, looking at her baby and then at Amy’s father and laughing. Her mother looks very lovely when she laughs. The baby reminds Amy a little bit of the kittens, with his eyes shut so tightly like theirs. They had to drown the kittens, as there were too many of them. Thomas, who works in the garden three times a week, put them in a sack and dropped them into the river which runs at the bottom of their garden. Amy wonders how many babies are considered too many before they, too, are put in a sack and drowned in the river. If anyone had asked her opinion, she would have told them she preferred being the only one, but no one did.