Chapter 20

As if the situation they were in didn’t present enough of a challenge, how they were trying to deal with that situation resulted in another hurdle, called selective hearing.

When Mai Li got back home it was about 7:30 and she was panting but she didn’t feel worn out. She had just run, letting her mind become empty, paying attention only to the pace and her heartbeat and her breathing. She had no idea how far she’d actually run and, as she walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the house, cooling down, she decided to get in the car and retrace her route to find out. It felt longer than five miles, but she wasn’t sure.

She went into the house to get her wallet and keys and found Bobby using a blue band to work on his chest and back. Unknown to Vicky, when she checked on him, the slight noise she’d made woke him up. By the time he got up she was gone and he couldn’t find Mai Li. So he had decided to work out.

“You’re supposed to do that with supervision,” she said, automatically.

“Where were you? I was worried about you.” Bobby said. She noticed he was sweating.

“How long have you been working out?”

He shrugged.

“I don’t know. I got up and Mom was gone and you were gone. I wasn’t hungry so I decided to work out.”

“You need to eat,” she said.

“I know, I know!” he barked. “I need to talk to you.”

“I know,” she said, softly. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“I have to marry you!” he blurted.

Multiple emotions flickered through Mai Li too quickly to catalog. She was so caught off guard that she just reacted and, like the reaction of many men during a movie where everyone else is shedding a tear, she laughed. It wasn’t a laugh of joy, or one caused by humor, but laughter is always interpreted that way. She got her emotions under control (meaning she stopped laughing) but when she spoke she was still off kilter.

“You don’t have to do anything,” she said. There was a harshness in her voice that Mai Li did not hear, but Bobby did. To be fair to Mai Li, she hadn’t intended it to sound harsh.

“Yes I do,” he said. “Parents should be married. A baby should have both a mother and a father.”

“I agree, but our situation is a little different than usual,” said Mai Li. “I’m not ready to get married, and neither are you.”

“But we have to get married!” groaned Bobby.

She sat on the floor beside him.

“I love you,” she said. “Things are all upset right now, but I know I love you. And I know you love me. Right now that’s enough for me. I don’t know what’s going to happen but we have plenty of time to figure out what to do. We don’t need to rush into something we might regret later.”

“But you’re going to keep the baby ... right?” His voice held a pleading note that made Mai Li’s heart ache.

“It’s not for sure that I’m even pregnant,” she said. “The doctor only said I might be pregnant. I have to go back for another test in two weeks, unless I have a period. That won’t be for another week or so. We won’t know until then whether I’m really pregnant or not.”

Bobby blinked. Everything he had thought about and agonized about since finding out the woman he loved was going to have his baby cracked and tilted, like a house of cards that was leaning, about to collapse. Mai Li saw it on his face and reached to touch his hand.

“Sweetheart, this isn’t the end of the world,” she said. “What we need to do is go on living, whatever happens. I want us to go on loving each other, whatever happens. This doesn’t have to change a whole lot right now. Just try to be patient and wait a couple of weeks until I go see the doctor again. Can you do that?”

“I have no idea,” he said, dully. “Everything is crazy right now.”

“I felt the same way last night,” she said. “This morning I feel much better. I had a good run but I need to go clock it with the car to find out how far I went. Will you go with me while I do that?”

“Sure,” he said.

Ten minutes later Bobby was sitting in the passenger seat, staring at nothing in particular.

“I think I turned left here,” muttered Mai Li as she turned a corner.

Ten more minutes later they were back home.

“Wow,” said Mai Li as she peered at the odometer on her dashboard. “Eight miles! And I wasn’t even really out of breath when I got finished.”

“That’s great,” said Bobby. He was trying to be supportive, but he felt like he was a ship, adrift at sea.

When they got back inside Mai Li made him eat something and then she tried to get him to study while she took a shower. He stared at the screen of his laptop for an hour but couldn’t concentrate.

Mai Li’s eight mile run had benefitted her, but it had another benefit, which was that Bobby was inspired – if that’s the right word –to see how long he could walk/jog in the therapy pool before he wore himself out. This particular session in the pool was very similar to what an alcoholic does when he is trying to blot out the world and dull the pain. It wasn’t that he was eager to exercise. Rather he was eager to be so exhausted that he could fall asleep.

It worked, too, though it took three hours to get him there. Mai Li wasn’t happy with him, either, warning him repeatedly that if he kept going he was going to set himself up to have a seizure. She couldn’t pull him out of the pool by herself, though, so all she could do was stay there and monitor him. She even got in the pool naked and tried to lure him out that way, but it didn’t work. His world didn’t make sense anymore. First she was pregnant and then she wasn’t. But what upset him the most was her outright and instant refusal to marry him. He knew he was too young to get married. He still couldn’t visualize himself as a husband. But her instant rejection of him (how he remembered it) cut to the bone. She had even laughed at the very idea of it.

That’s when his selective hearing began. He proposed and she laughed. He insisted and she said he wasn’t ready to get married. Then she said she that if they did get married, they’d be sorry for it later ... or something like that.

That’s where Bobby’s head was and Mai Li had no clue that he had basically murdered her comments and replaced them with look-alikes that didn’t look anything like her original intent.

Perhaps all of this could have been avoided had they made up a rule for their relationship, a rule that said something like, “If either of us says or does something that astonishes the other, then the astonished person automatically gets five minutes to think things over before he or she responds.” An example is one of them saying, suddenly, “Hey, let’s move to Borneo. I hear the cost of living there is very manageable.”

That’s not human nature, though. Fight or flight is human nature and that’s what frames our responses to unexpected or threatening situations.

Mai Li had handled things with flight, though she fled only as far as her bedroom and then eight miles of basically circle. Bobby handled it with fight, but all he could do was shadow box.

Bobby’s insistence to stay in the pool lasted through lunch. He finally got out about half past noon and was exhausted both emotionally and physically. Mai Li could get him to eat only a raw hot dog before he tumbled into bed. The previous night’s sleep had been of poor quality and he was still sleeping when Vicky got home that evening. She had worried all day and the first thing out of her mouth when she saw Mai Li was, “How are you?”

Mai Li had been alone in the quiet house for most of five hours by then and, of course, she had only thought about one thing. In one sense that had been good, because it allowed her to process and adapt to the situation slowly, without the normal distractions that fragment our thought processes about important events in our lives.

“I think I’m okay,” she replied. “Bobby wants to get married.”

“What?!” Vicky’s response was similar, in some ways, to what Mai Li’s had been, and that’s probably why Mai Li didn’t hear any censure in it.

“Yes. He said we have to get married. It was so sweet, but of course it’s ridiculous.”

“Hmmm.” Vicky hadn’t made a rule about five minutes to think, but that’s basically what she did, at that point. “Let me get showered and changed and we can talk about that,” she said.

Mai Li didn’t think there was anything to talk about, but she just shrugged.

“I have that pork roast we got the other day in the crock pot, along with some potatoes and carrots, but I’m not sure it’s done yet.”

“Okay,” said Vicky. “See you in a bit.”

While Vicky was gone Mai Li took a fork and tested the contents of the crockpot. The meat seemed tender but the potatoes were still a little too firm, in her opinion.

Vicky spent twenty minutes in her bedroom (as opposed to just five) and it gave her time to reflect on this new change in the household. When she returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table, she felt calm.

“What did you say when he proposed?” she asked.

“I said we didn’t have to get married, of course,” said Mai Li. She blinked. “He didn’t exactly propose. He kept saying we had to get married.”

“He was raised in a house where we taught him there wasn’t supposed to be sex before marriage,” said Vicky.

“Well that sure didn’t take,” said Mai Li, a little harshly.

“His situation changed rather radically,” said Vicky. “That’s why I wasn’t upset when you two ... um ... got attracted to each other. My point is, that’s probably what his mind went back to. He’s trying to do the right thing.”

“And that’s sweet, but neither of us is ready to get married.”

“Let’s put that aside for a minute,” said Vicky. “If there were no impediments to something like that life, would you want to marry him, or is that just off the table for you?”

“There are impediments, Vicky!” blurted Mai Li.

“Just answer the question,” said Vicky. “I know you’ve had time to think about this. I just want to know how you feel. It doesn’t matter which way you feel, just be honest. You either think marriage to Bobby Washington is attractive, or it’s not. You either love him that way or you don’t. I just want to know which it is.”

“If I said yes and married him now everyone would think it was to get his money!” Mai Li yipped. “You might even think that. In fact, some people might think I let him get me pregnant just so I could set that up!”

“I’ve already told you I don’t think that’s what happened,” said Vicky, calmly. “I’ve also said that what other people think isn’t relevant right now. That’s a sinking ship you need to get off of. You still haven’t answered the question.”

Mai Li paced. She put her hands on her hips as if she wanted to slide them down into her back pockets, but the shorts she was wearing didn’t have pockets. Vicky let her pace, sitting placidly while she watched. Her own emotions were elevated, but she tried to remain calm and look unruffled. If Mai Li just didn’t want to marry Bobby, then basically their relationship was over. That’s the way Bobby would look at it. He was so young and everything to the young in the world was black and white. Mai Li was young, too, for that matter, and might not see all the options she had. Vicky remembered marrying Roger. She had thought she loved him, but she hadn’t learned what love really was until more than a year into the marriage. And then it had changed as they aged. Love isn’t something static and defined. A successful marriage requires the spouses to fall in love with each other over and over again as each of them changes. That’s what had broken down when Bobby got hurt. Roger couldn’t love the woman she changed into and vice versa, so the marriage failed.

Vicky knew that this could go sideways in a number of ways. It was already sideways, for that matter. But she couldn’t force Mai Li into doing anything, one way or the other. So she waited.

“I don’t know,” Mai Li finally said. She kept pacing and Vicky kept waiting. Her own silence urged Mai Li to keep talking. People dislike silence. That’s one reason waiting rooms feel so tense. People want to fill the silence but, at the same time, they don’t want to talk to strangers.

“I never thought about marriage,” said Mai Li. “Well, I did, but I thought it would be years from now.”

She stopped.

“It’s like if I was at college and somebody came up to me and said, ‘You want to be an astronaut? We’re recruiting astronauts and we think you’d be great at it.’ When I was little I used to dream about doing that but it’s just ridiculous! I can’t be an astronaut! I don’t know how! And even if I did, it would mean going into outer space! A lot can go wrong in outer space. You can die out there!”

“We’re not talking about going up in a rocket,” said Vicky.

“I know that,” groaned Mai Li, “but that’s how it feels. It’s just ridiculous. I can’t do that because I don’t know how to do that!”

“But do you want to do that?” Vicky pressed.

“Well of course it would be nice,” moaned the girl. “Bobby is so sweet and his work ethic is tremendous. He’s smart and he’s very loving. Who wouldn’t want to marry a guy like that?”

Vicky felt some relief for the first time since arriving home from work. While she was in the shower she had thought about having Mai Li as a daughter-in-law. That concept had not seemed foreign at all. Of course there would be huge challenges if that happened, but the notion didn’t create any unhappiness or angst in her.

Still, she remained silent. Mai Li needed to get to that same point, where the idea of marriage wasn’t so foreign that it created an insurmountable barrier to moving forward.

“But he’s so young!” groaned Mai Li. “And I’m so young!” Finally she stopped pacing and plopped down in a chair.

“True,” Vicky agreed. “Then again, a lot of young people get married and it turns out fine. Yes, it’s daunting, but it can work. The first step, though, is deciding what you need and what you want. I’m not trying to affect your decision one way or the other, but things like this require decisions. All I care about is how you feel. I’m pretty sure we both know how Bobby feels.”

“Vicky, I’ve only known him for fifty days. I added it up and I’ve been here exactly fifty days! That’s less than two months!”

“Well, I suppose that’s true,” said Vicky. “But a lot has happened in those fifty days. I’ve only known you for fifty days and I can’t even begin to tell you how glad I am you came into our lives. I don’t know anything about your background, or lots of intimate details about you, but I know what kind of person you are and I like the kind of person you are. My opinion is...” She stopped. She had decided not to try to sway things one direction or the other. Now she had to bite her tongue.

The silence lasted maybe fifteen seconds.

“What?” asked Mai Li. “What is your opinion?”

“My opinion is that you have to make these decisions,” said Vicky. “You and Bobby need to make these decisions. I’ll support you either way.”

“You’d support us getting married?” Mai Li squeaked.

This staying neutral stuff was getting very difficult, Vicky thought.

“My primary concern is for the health and happiness of my son,” she said. “You’re an integral part of that, so I also have to think about your happiness and heath. I can’t make either of you happy or healthy. All I can do is try to support both of you and hope it all turns out well.”

“I don’t think getting married would turn out well,” moaned Mai Li. “Where would we live? How would we support ourselves? It would be very hard. How could Bobby go to college if we were married? What if we had fights? What if we ended up hating each other?”

“All marriages have problems,” said Vicky. “Love is what gets you past the speed bumps in a marriage. Do you love him?”

“Yes I love him,” whined Mai Li. “But is that enough?”

“If you have help, and don’t have to do it alone, then maybe it is enough,” said Vicky, softly.

“I’m confused,” said Mai Li. “It sounds like you actually think getting married is a good idea!”

“What I think is that both of you are in a situation where you need to support each other. I’m not suggesting anybody should get married tomorrow. All I’m saying is that I don’t think the idea of it is as ridiculous as you do. I think you both need to think about this and talk about it and examine it. Then you can make a decision that’s best for both of you. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I don’t want to think about it,” groaned Mai Li. “It’s too hard to think about it. I might be pregnant and that’s enough to fill my plate completely.”

“You’re not alone in that, either,” said Vicky. “I’m here to support you. Bobby’s here to support you, too, though I have to admit he might not be a lot of help. But he loves you and having that kind of moral support can be very valuable.”

“How did all this happen?” groaned Mai Li.

“Oh, I know the answer to that,” said Vicky. “You fell in love. Falling in love always turns the world on its head, and you with it.”

When Bobby woke up, he was hungry and he followed his nose to the kitchen, where the crock pot was still simmering. His mother was sitting at the table with Mai Li’s laptop, looking at the screen and using her finger on the mouse pad. She looked up when he came in.

“Hi, Sweetheart,” she said. “Good nap?”

“Yeah. Where’s Mai Li?”

“She’s taking her nap. She said she ran extra-long today. She’s had a lot on her mind, lately, too, and I think it wore her down.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“She told me you talked about getting married,” said Vicky, trying to keep her voice neutral and calm.

“Yeah, but she laughed at the idea.”

“What?”

“She laughed. Then she said it was ridiculous. She doesn’t want to get married.”

“That’s not how she sounded when we talked about it,” said Vicky.

“What?” He seemed more alert.

“Well, yes, she did discount it as a workable idea, at first, but she didn’t think it was funny. Quite the opposite. She understands the seriousness of something like that.”

“She’s right,” he sighed. “It’s a stupid idea.”

“Why do you think it’s stupid?”

Now it was Bobby who laughed. When he went to lie down on his bed he had tried to think of how he could talk Mai Li into getting married. Then he had tried to imagine being married and, now that his mania about their baby needing two parents had calmed, the enormity of that concept soaked in. He thought about some of the same things Mai Li had.

“You just laughed,” his mother pointed out. “Why did you laugh?”

“Because she’s right,” he said. “I don’t have a job and she won’t be able to work after she has the baby. Not only do I not know anything about being a father, I don’t know anything about being a husband, either. It would be a disaster.”

“But you laughed. Does it seem funny to you?”

“No.”

“Then why did you laugh?”

“I don’t know,” he groaned. “It just happened.”

“Maybe that’s why she laughed, too,” said Vicky.

“And anyway, she said she might not be pregnant after all. She said she has to go back and take another test.”

“And if she’s not pregnant does that change how you feel about all this?”

Bobby stood. His stomach growled.

“Don’t answer that right away. You sit and think about it while I get you something to eat,” said his mother.

Vicky got up and got a plate. She scooped pork and vegetables out of the crock pot onto the plate. She pulled a fork out of the drawer and put the repast down in front of him. She made him eat for two or three minutes.

“So, what are you thinking?” she finally asked.

“I’m eighteen,” he said.

“I know that,” she said.

“I’m just a kid.”

“That’s not true at all,” said Vicky. “Yes, biologically you’re that age, and yes, maybe in your brain you still feel younger than that, but you’ve been through tons more than most eighteen-year-old young men have. You’ve had to grow up more and faster than most fifteen-year-olds. You’ve worked hard and gotten better. When was your last seizure?”

“I had a little one yesterday,” he said. “Nothing yet, today, which kind of amazes me.”

“When was your last grand mal seizure?”

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