Unidentified Flying Objects

by Mandy Lange

When Sophie parked Daddy’s Mustang in front of St. Bernadette’s Maternity Home, I tried to find something funny to say about it. The house itself was a monstrosity of brown brick and dormer windows; its front door was shaded by a Gothic archway. March clouds refused to surrender to sunshine, and a bare tree stretched against the dull morning.

“It’s like Hill House,” I said, stretching my legs. “It’ll be cool to slip into madness.”

Sophie tapped another Lucky Strike on her painted lips. She’d attempted maternal speeches during the six-hour drive—are you sure about this; it’s not too late for me to convince your father—and I’d tuned her out, scanning the skies for planes, balloons, signs from Heaven. But the clouds were too thick.

“Sammy,” she said. Her voice was gravel, and her exaggerated lashes blinked at the belly peeking out of my coat. “It’s okay to be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” I said. I’d buried fear six years ago in the dirt above Mama’s pretty coffin. “I’m getting it done with, then going to college.”

“This is womanhood, Samantha.” Sophie lit up and took a drag, rolled her cover-girl shoulders. “There’s no ‘getting it done with.’ It’s the rest of your life.”

She placed her manicured hand on my freckled one. I pulled away.

“Two months and it’ll be like it never happened,” I said. I’d unconsciously moved my hand onto the swell of my stomach, and I quickly tucked it into my pocket.

Sophie flicked the butt out her window. “You sure you don’t want to talk about Gene?”

“Get some rest before you drive home,” I said, throwing open my door. Gene was a secret light, a lurch in my chest. Gene was none of Sophie’s business. “Your head’s going to roll off your shoulders and get stuck under the gas pedal.”

I shut my coat around my stomach and snatched my valise from the trunk. Ohio seemed much the same as Michigan—just as dreary, just as cold—but St. Bernadette’s was a safer distance from Daddy’s reputation.

Sophie leaned over the passenger seat.

“I’ll drive back the minute you call,” she shouted through the window. “Don’t go mad!”

“‘We’re all mad here,’ Sophie.” My smile felt untethered to my mood and the tightness of my throat. I left it suspended in the air behind me and dragged the valise inside.

#

St. Bernie’s was worse than haunted—it was pink. My eyes strained against clashes of rose, coral and salmon. Peony wallpaper. A bubblegum armchair. Tablecloths like washed-out blood.

A woman clomped across the wood floor. She introduced herself as Mrs. Delilah, the housemother. Trailing her were a cluster of pregnant women in loose sweaters, waddling like pitched tents on skinny-stilt legs.

“Why so much pink?” I said, by way of introduction. “I thought I’d see less of Aunt Flo for a while, but she’s everywhere!”

Mrs. Delilah frowned, her eyes so starless they looked black. Her gray hair was swirled on top of her head, in a style that reminded me of the wasp’s nest on my porch last summer. Gene had swatted it down with a bat. It struck me that it was a bad plan in the seconds before it crashed down, but by the time I opened my mouth to protest, it was already done. Gene ran like Bullet Bob to avoid the swarm. I got stung six times.

“It’s a comforting color,” Mrs. Delilah said sternly. “One that recalls our feminine duty to preserve a moral society.”

“All I feel is a feminine duty to drown myself in Pepto.”

The girls twitched. Mrs. Delilah’s glare was as direct as a pushpin through my skin.

“I won’t tolerate sass. Teenagers such as yourself may not deserve to be mothers now, but you can atone for your deviance by becoming a blessing to couples who have struggled to conceive since the Great War. Your mother—”

“Step-mother,” I corrected.

Mrs. Delilah’s dark eyes bulged, as if frustration was going to pop out of every orifice and spew more pink onto the floor.

“–assured me you are most eager to go to college. So you will comport yourself with dignity while you’re here, and when the baby is delivered, you can move on. Your roommate, Kitty, will show you your bed.”

A girl extracted herself from Mrs. Delilah’s colony and headed toward the wooden staircase. I lugged my valise up the steps after her.

I guessed Kitty was further along than me, due to her pronounced waddle. We passed a lounge, where The Mamas and the Papas lamented brown leaves and gray skies from a wooden radio on the shelf.

Kitty’s hair was limp and clumped, like fingers dangling over her face. I followed her into a bedroom at the end of the hallway. She climbed into one of the two iron-framed beds and pulled a floral comforter over her head like a shroud. Her convex shape resembled Mama’s old vanity in our attic. Sophie had tossed a sheet over it so Daddy didn’t have to see it and remember.

“You okay?” I ventured. “Not turning into a cockroach, are you? Or a cow? Like Nebuchadnezzar?”

She pushed the blankets back. “You’re odd.”

I shrugged. “Trying to lighten the mood.”

“Don’t.” Kitty’s nose was slightly off-center and her cheeks were sunken.

“Why?”

“You weren’t forced,” Kitty muttered. She studied the ceiling. “I can tell.”

“God, no! Well, my old man’s a cop and he made me go outta state, but I want to keep it secret—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Kitty couldn’t have been older than fourteen. Her skin was formica-smooth, but her voice betrayed cracks.

“I guess I wasn’t.” I plopped myself onto the bed across from her.

“It’s harder to carry every day,” Kitty whispered. I didn’t think she was talking about her baby.

We were silent after that. I leaned back and watched the bleak, blank ceiling, thinking about wasp nests and how to avoid getting stung.

#

Nobody seemed inclined to talk about the past or the future, and our present was a sort of whiplash. Most of us had come from other states to bear our shame away from people who knew or loved us. I’d been sent from Detroit, a city folding in on itself violently. Daddy had frozen up since he’d attended to the woman who’d immolated herself in the street last year, and the news of the horrors in Vietnam kindled unpleasant dreams about men ablaze, men dead.

Yet Mrs. Delilah insisted we worry about nothing except what was “best for the baby.” We worked with a visiting tutor, as most of us were expected to return to high school. We rested. We relaxed. The isolation should have been consoling, but it unnerved me.

“We’re like princesses in a castle,” Sheila, who had an enviably sleek bump and repainted her nails every day, remarked. Girls crowded around the wooden radio in the lounge while I watched out the window for stars and planes. “Waiting to be rescued by knights.”

I wasn’t a princess. I was the castle of stone.

The radio program compared the men in la Drang Valley, tall grass looming over their heads, to those of the Great War. “The same young-old faces, the same shattered landscape...”

My stomach began to itch, and the baby inside me lurched.

“How brave they are compared to those chickens dodging the draft,” Sheila commented. “Communism’s wicked. And what’s the point of America but to fight?”

“Those ‘chickens’ are people.” I scratched my stomach. “At the very least, they should get to cluck for themselves whether or not to go.”

Kitty squirmed on the paisley sofa. Her stomach was comically huge for her small body. It would’ve been amusing had we not all hunched with the same sorry posture.

“Ha! A real man would do his duty to protect his country! What kinda loser knocked you up?”

The itch grew more intense. “A spaceman,” I said.

In bed, I dug at my overtaxed skin, tearing away at the itch until blood caked under my nails. The baby twisted inside me, as if they, too, sought some relief.

#

Kitty went into labor just as I hit my last month. Her moans sounded like Mama’s, fighting the invisible demons that killed her. Mrs. Delilah hushed her repeatedly, commanded her to quit being dramatic while she pulled her downstairs and into the van.

While she was gone, we shoved our swollen feet into our Mary Janes and went to the cinema. It was a humid afternoon; we wove like a school of fish through the unfallen rain, happy to be out again, and where no one would recognize us.

We watched The Sound of Music. I gleefully shoveled burnt popcorn into my mouth, imagining Sophie attempting to yodel. I forgot I was stone and allowed myself to miss her.

We left the cinema like a flock of ducks, waddling through sticky streets.

“Hey!”

Across the street, a yellow-jacketed man hollered at us, egg carton in hand. He wound up like Sandy Koufax and hurled something through the air. It burst against my cheek, splitting my skin. I staggered back; the other girls bolted.

“Tramps!” the man called after them.

Blood and yolk drooled down my chin. I palmed it away, feet stuck to the sidewalk.

The man squared his shoulders at me. He hesitated, perhaps finding it difficult to look his prey in the eye. I stared, daring him. I wanted to yell, You should throw more than a couple eggs to break me, but it wasn’t true.

One fat raindrop splashed onto my nose. He dumped the carton onto the sidewalk and ran.

I hobbled back to St. Bernie’s, face stinging, back straining from the task of holding up my stomach. Despite the single drop, the sky refused to rain.

The girls whimpered around Mrs. Delilah, detailing what happened.

“It’s society’s response to your behavior,” she said sharply. “No more complaints. You’ll do the right thing going forward. Samantha, is that blood?”

“Just an egg-cident,” I said over the lump in my throat. Nobody laughed.

#

Two days later, I was stacking plates in the hutch when Kitty stepped through the foyer. At first, I thought she’d been rained on; everything about her drooped. A broad man hauled her to Mrs. Delilah’s office by the scruff.

She clutched something white in her hands—a tiny diaper.

“That’s not your size,” I said as she passed.

Kitty didn’t even look at me. “It’s all they would let me keep,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

#

I dreamed of UFOs, awash in orange and purple wind.

Gene and I were on the roof of the high school at dusk, my arms warm in the leather sleeves of his old letterman jacket. He had permission to be up here as a brand-new Airman; I’d broken the rules to be next to him. The notebook on his lap contained scribbles and notes: duration, location of sky, struck-out numbers. I’d just started my senior year, and there were no stretch marks on my waist.

“I see a UFO. A real one.” I drew in the autumn air and Gene’s Right Guard.

He swiveled his binoculars to the aircraft above. “That’s a cargo craft, you loon. Flying Boxcar,

maybe.”

“Sounds extraterrestrial to me.”

I picked up The Haunting, the book I’d brought along to occupy myself.

“Over there!” I cried.

“Where—?”

I hurled Shirley Jackson at his shoulder.

Gene tossed the binoculars aside, a grinning dimple in his cheek. He reached out to tickle my elbow. My shriek echoed through time.

“Don’t go abroad,” I said when my giggling subsided.

Gene sighed and closed his notebook. “UFOs aren’t flying saucers. It’s all just planes and satellites, you know.” He wrapped his hand around my elbow. “You can write to me.”

“As if I like you enough to expend the effort.”

“I have to go.” Gene’s green eyes darkened.

“You can object. Or defer—”

“I have nothing to give you if I don’t go.” Emotion swelled in a wave of heat when our skin touched. “And Sammy... there’s nobody else.”

The moment was astronomical, bigger than the dream. I tried to prolong it.

“Look!” I pointed beyond him. “It’s an Unidentified—”

Gene kissed me. For the first time since Mama died, I dug through the decimated worms and roots where I’d hidden my fears, and trusted them in Gene’s gentle hands.

“It could be a real one,” I whispered into the soft stubble on Gene’s cheek. I wept, which is how I remembered I was asleep.

Gene’s arms tightened around me before he faded away. “I think it is.”

#

Labor was a gradual slashing of scythes in the small of my back. It was wet, from blood or sweat or holy water or tears.

Mrs. Delilah shoved me into the Club Wagon, my feet bare, every bump in the road twisting the knives deeper.

In the hospital, the teal doctor and bleach-white nurses closed in, grabbing and growling and clamping metal jaws around my ankles.

I only laughed.

I laughed so hard I cried. I laughed so hard I screamed. I screamed for Mama, for Gene’s letterman jacket, for Sophie’s Lucky Strike scent. I screamed for the UFOs to abduct me and take me far, far away from the daggers in my back, from the pain that was too much to look at. And then the doctor shouted “Twilight sleep, now!” and a nurse yelled “There’s the head!” and emotions spattered like exploded eggs: joy, anger, shame, grief–

My laughter dried up all at once; my breathing slowed.

The doctor held up something shriveled and slimy. I barely had time to register the syringe, to think, That’s why Mrs. Delilah picked pink, before I was asleep.

#

I brushed my fingertips against the rough walls of the hospital corridor, certain I was a ghost.

When my nurse took off for a smoke, remarking that the Twilight could monitor me for her, I’d rose from my bed. I was off-balance, not quite attached to the ground, as if gravity hadn’t kicked in yet. I wandered past aids and nurses, scribbling under their white caps. I floated to the end of a hallway, where a rectangle window revealed rows of white bassinets.

The room smelled like talcum powder. Some babies wailed, others slept. I wove through the bassinet frames, wondering if it was possible to recognize someone I’d never met.

It was.

The baby crooked one eye open, squinting at the light breaking through the window blinds. I did not know if they were a boy or a girl, and I didn’t care.

They were mine.

I yearned to run my finger down their smooth cheek, but I hesitated. This infant belonged to happier times. To a faultless mother. To a living father. To a world that was whole, not crumbling.

I picked them up anyway.

The child turned its warm head toward my breast as I nestled them into the crook of my arm, where Gene would tickle me when I mouthed off.

Sophie had been right. There was no getting on with this.

This was the rest of my life.

#

I dropped the pen onto the large wooden desk and folded my arms, pressing my thumbs to the insides of my elbows.

“I can’t sign,” I said.

“This is immature.” Mrs. Delilah barely leashed the attack in her voice. “You are being controlled by emotion. That same madness that got you into this business. You know your child deserves a proper family. You can’t give her that, because–”

“Her father died,” I said, gripping my elbows harder. I was so sore, so tired. “Before he even knew.”

I glanced at the adoption papers, one word looming above the rest: surrender. I wanted to succumb to the moment, to bury myself between Mama and Gene, to be everything and nothing at all.

“What will you do?” Mrs. Delilah’s voice was venom. “You’ve shown no special skill or aptitude here. Who will pay for the baby? How will you find a husband? What man wants to raise another man’s—”

The office door blew open. There, in a haze of cigarette smoke, stood Sophie. She rushed to me without a word. Held my head to her shoulder.

“I’m here,” she said. “Whatever you want to do, Sammy girl, I’m here.”

I crumbled against her, shakily inhaling her earthy-sweet smell. Sophie was more princess than castle, but there was strength in her firm embrace. My legs steadied.

“I want to see her,” I said.

#

The foster home was ornately decorated, with pitched roofs and a gallant, golden cupola. A well-tended thatch of tulips and bluebells shyly yielded to their blooms beside the entrance.

“It’s ‘the garden of memory,’” I murmured. “And the ‘palace of dreams.’”

Sophie glanced at me but said nothing. Mrs. Delilah sighed. If either of them had read Adventures in Wonderland, they didn’t let on.

Sister Margie greeted us with a gap-toothed, almost alien smile. Margie led us into an open room with a dozen large cribs, crucifix bouncing on her chest.

“Take whatever time you need,” Margie said.

Sophie waited in the doorway. My baby slept in a white jumper, legs and arms curled up to her sides, chewing her fist like she was uncertain.

I picked her up. I told her about Gene, about Sophie. About The Sound of Music. I confessed I didn’t know what to be, but whatever it was, I’d carry her with me.

For the first and final time, I kissed her head.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, “to be scared.”

Sophie held my hand while we walked to the atrium, where Mrs. Delilah held out a clipboard. Her hair nest sagged.

I scribbled my name on three lines, and it was done.

Mrs. Delilah’s eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them when she took the clipboard from me; they were soil brown.

The sun had emerged by the time I lowered myself into the Mustang, limbs straining and tender, as if they only vaguely recalled their purpose. Even sitting hurt.

“It’ll get easier to move,” Sophie said as the Mustang grumbled to life. “But you have to push through the ache a bit.”

We sped north, into a future that was both too big and too small. My forehead rested against the passenger window, and before I closed my eyes, I was aware of a blip in the distance, the slightest flicker of bright against blue.

It was likely a plane or satellite, but I recognized it as hope. It was real.