“RP’s Babies”
I seem to be sharing a house with Roseanne P. She is very pregnant but she also already has at least two other children. I am with one of those, a particularly unappealing little baby with a wrinkly face and a tendency to biting. I scold her and make her behave herself. That said, I’ve been mindlessly aggressive towards Roseanne, blocking the door as she was coming through and thumping her belly. I can’t understand why I would have done such a thing, especially to an expectant mother, and Roseanne is complaining vociferously. I realise that that endangered her baby and now I put a hand on her tummy to feel that everything is all right.
Roseanne is folding a cotton kiddy sheet, one I used to have for my kids, a hand-me-down that comes with a set of associations. She is showing her a stain on it from where a visiting child threw up on it. I think it wrong that she’s teaching such young children to talk behind people’s backs. This reminds me of how vain and superficial she is and I look again at the baby’s face, surprised to see that she’s not at all attractive, despite her parents’ good looks. I wonder how that genetic mix came about;
Note: IRL, Roseanne was, for me at least, an unusually vain person (as was the person who handed down the baby sheet). Blond and blue eyed, she used to boast that she had chosen her husband for his superior good looks and intelligence and that she felt intelligent, beautiful people had a duty to have more children. She ended up having 5 or 6. She was one of those people who always gave me the impression that her friendship was based on her ideas of your social acceptability and not much else. I always took her lightly because she was considerably younger than me.
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