Difficult People

by Catriona Wright

  You wouldn’t believe how much the university is paying me. Couldn’t have gotten the fellowship money without my loyal subjects (objects?).

  Love,

  Vanessa

  Silently they walked to Christie station. On the way, Mike stopped Will and pointed to a sign hung in the window of a beauty parlour.

  Magic Perm - $60

  Half Magic Perm - $30

  “Does the half refer to the perm?”

  “How can you halve magic?”

  “Duh, aren’t we the perfect example?”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  Without jotting down the location, they carried on.

  Olivia and Chris

  Olivia’s firm stomach rested on her thighs, her forehead pressed against the mat, palms turned upwards, poised to receive the universe’s bounty. Balasana, child’s pose. “Breathe,” the instructor said, walking between the mats and exaggerating her own breath until it sounded like surf roaring against a rocky shore.

  Olivia inhaled the rich, mossy scent of sandalwood essence and sweat—no, she corrected herself, glow. They were glowing, all of them.

  “Breathe with intention as you push into downward dog.” A month ago the instructor had advised Olivia to visualize her breath flowing out through the open window, coasting across Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, cooling as it crossed the Atlantic and warming again as it gusted southward until finally it drifted through open lips and slid sweetly down an umbilical cord into her babies. Olivia tried but was distracted by the woman in front of her whose tattoo-garlanded arms shook with the exertion.

  “Good job, mommies. Three more seconds.”

  Olivia attempted to ground herself with self-talk: Through our yoga practice all of us are connecting to our unborn children who are growing strong in the wombs of the Gujarat women. All of us except for that woman whose ripe belly presses against her black top.

  Chris was the only one in the prenatal yoga class who was physically pregnant. But she didn’t mind. She liked being the most extreme person in the room. That’s what led her to become a surrogate in the first place. For Chris, surrogacy was a form of self-binding, a technique she’d read about in Psychology Today magazine. The idea was that people had multiple selves competing inside them, some of whom wanted destructive things, so when the good self was at the helm of the mind it made an executive decision to defy the other wayward selves. For example, the good self hid the video games in a weird place in the basement or it told its friends not to let it bum cigarettes no matter how much it begged. Or, in Chris’s case, it decided to rent out its uterus to a baby, forcing the other selves to stop boozing.

  At first Chris worked for a surrogacy agency, but they took too big a cut of her income, so she decided to work for herself. She hired someone to make her a website. Her profile picture showed her decked out in a housedress and frilly apron, red lips pulled into a campy smirk as she removed cinnamon buns from an oven. Within a week she was swamped with requests from the upwardly mobile. She was part of the local pregnancy movement, composed of Westerners who wanted to reduce their ecological footprints by using surrogacy services close to home. Local surrogates were more expensive than Indian and Guatemalan surrogates, but clients were willing to pay for the ethical capital, and to avoid travelling.

  During the final meditation, the students all lay on their sticky mats while the instructor closed the blinds and played a remix of whale music, a series of grunts, moans and squeals buoyed by an electronic reggae beat.

  “Take a moment to congratulate your body internally.”

  Chris’s body took this advice literally and tooted its own horn. Luckily the sound of the fart blended into a humpback’s screech, but the smell of rotting cabbage didn’t have a corresponding subterfuge and many women scrunched their noses, some going so far as to pinch them and fan their hands back and forth across their faces, as the instructor continued.

  “Imagine yourself back in the womb, safe and warm in the waters of the mother, life-giver.”

  More like gas-giver, Chris thought to herself. These women should try actually being pregnant and see if they can stop themselves from breaking wind every two minutes.

  “I want you all to give yourselves a pat on the back when you leave the studio today.” The instructor pressed the Stop button, cutting off a whale mid-Lamaze wheeze. “Good job. Namaste.”

  “Namaste,” said everyone.

  From her vantage point on the floor Chris could see all the pedicures and shapely calves headed for the change room. She was struggling to sit up when a hand shot into view.

  “Let me,” a woman said. The woman had curly, light brown hair cut into a bob and was wearing a turquoise sports bra and black shorts with matching turquoise racing stripes up the sides.

  Chris accepted the hand. Amazed by the ease with which the woman was able to hoist her, she nearly fell forward but the woman in turquoise steadied her.

  “Thanks,” Chris said, wrapping her hands around her incubating belly.

  “I’m Olivia.” She extended her hand and Chris shook it.

  “Chris.”

  Chris gulped down some water as she and Olivia headed over to the change room. She checked her phone and just as she suspected her inbox was crammed with text messages from Beth. “rem 2 take ur vitamin!” “drs appt on wed!” “hope u 2 r having a gr8 class!” Chris dutifully moved her thumbs around on the keypad. “thnks, see you wed!” The Blackberry, like the yoga class, was micromanaging disguised as a gift from Beth. The Blackberry was vintage and it cost a fortune every month. Most people could receive messages cognitively, but Chris had never had a system installed—one of the main reasons why she was so popular as a surrogate: lower risk of side effects.

  “Let me guess,” Olivia said as she peeled off her sports bra. “Your husband.”

  “No,” Chris said, trying not to stare at Olivia’s nipples, which were tiny, fawn-coloured and smooth unlike Chris’s pink saucers fringed with coarse hairs that she didn’t pluck, because why would she? “I’m a surrogate. It was the mom.”

  “How interesting.” Off came the short shorts, revealing not a single hair down there, same as all the other women in the change room. “We would’ve loved to hire a local, but we didn’t have enough…” Olivia rubbed her fingers together to indicate cash.

  “Right. Cool.” Chris turned to the wall and removed her tank top, surprised by her uncharacteristic modesty. What did this woman want? Normally none of the other women talked to her. While it was fine to hire a surrogate, it was still a tad unseemly to be a surrogate, and Chris wasn’t about to let someone test out pseudo-tolerant views on her. “Let me guess,” she said snidely. “Gujarat. Twins. One boy and one girl.”

  “Guilty!” Olivia said. “Boy, am I predictable or what?”

  “Um, well….” Chris, still facing the wall with its lotus-flower mural, pulled on a pair of wrinkled linen pants. “Don’t worry about it?”

  Just why aren’t I having my own baby? Olivia wondered, sipping on her matcha latte as she walked toward her loft apartment on King Street. No one with money gave birth anymore. Hadn’t she read a study just recently proclaiming that only 1 percent of university-educated couples were having their own babies now? But it was a moot point. Not only was she over forty, but she’d also had her first microprocessor installed in her brain a decade and a half ago, and the early models, as well as many of the new ones, were known to cause infertility. It was in that first epidemic of infertility that maternity leaves had all but disappeared from benefit packages, though they’d been drying up well before then. Now most of the people who Olivia worked or socialized with got their twins from Indian surrogates and their live-in nannies from the Philippines.

  The following week Beth drove Chris to class in her gleaming SUV hybrid.

  “You’re so lucky,” Beth said as she helped Chris st
ep down from the enormous leather seat. “What I wouldn’t give to be going to yoga instead of back to the office.”

  Chris knew this was bullshit. Beth loved being an investment banker; loved gripping the trapeze of the market as it swung ever more violently; loved the definitive clop of her pumps down Bay Street and the cleanliness of newly printed business cards; loved the briny taste of a dirty gin martini at the end of a long day; loved it all so fervently that Chris sometimes worried about the baby. Pregnancy was a crucial bonding time and what did it mean that most Western mothers never had this physical connection anymore? Would never feel their babies kick? But whenever Chris started thinking this way, she scolded herself. It was the damn hormones talking. No use getting maudlin over some imaginary connection.

  Still, sometimes Chris couldn’t conceal her annoyance with Beth. At the doctor’s last week, Beth had gasped, a nauseated expression on her face, when she saw Chris’s stomach, the bright red stretch marks streaking across her taut skin and the older ones that now glowed silver, all tangled in a mess of faded tiger lily and cherry blossom tattoos.

  Chris cringed when she had to confront the images on her belly. They were images that were connected to a time in her life she felt so faraway from that it felt like someone else’s life. As a teenager, she’d been straight edge—no intoxicants, no sex, no meat, no body modifications. She’d worn organic clothing and swigged green tea. Then at some point in college she’d become a raver, living the next few years with a glowstick in her mouth, a pacifier hung around her neck and a mind forever bursting with ecstasy. After this felt old, she’d become a punk—long after punk’s initial heyday. It was during this phase that she’d gotten inked and acquired an affinity for Jägermeister and bourbon. She never mentioned the former substance problems to prospective clients, who would, she assumed, have balked self-righteously, though Chris suspected them all of being addicted to antidepressants, painkillers and anti-anxiety meds themselves.

  “If you think my belly’s gross,” Chris said to Beth, “you won’t stand a chance during delivery.” It was funny, Chris realized, that in a way, pregnancy had returned her to her former teenage self. She was rigid about everything that went into or on her body. Sure, she wanted to control her negative impulses, but she also wanted to produce a superior product.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Beth said, staring blankly at the sonogram screen. “I think it’s all so beautiful.”

  Half-lotused on her mat, Olivia tried to stop herself from glancing at the door but that only made it harder. Would Chris make an appearance today? Olivia had always looked forward to these yoga classes, a welcome break from her job as a human resources manager, but over the past week the anticipation had become so acute that she’d been forced to take Valium to fall asleep.

  The instructor entered the room and Olivia’s heart sank. “Good afternoon, mommies,” she heard as she shut her eyes and pictured, for the millionth time that week, Chris’s pudgy back, the tendrils of green ink curling down her shoulder blades.

  When she opened her eyes she saw Chris hustling in, looking frazzled and huffing slightly. How far along was she? Olivia guessed that it was more or less the same as her surrogate in India. Olivia had received the latest ultrasound of the twins that morning. The clinic in Gujarat always used somewhat questionable music to accompany the rotating 3-d images (the sole criterion as far as Olivia could tell was the inclusion of the word baby) and today she’d listened to Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby, One More Time” as she stared at the babies with their toes and elbows squashed into each other’s ancient faces. Dutifully she’d sent the file to all her friends, who almost instantaneously posted responses about how much the little aliens—precious darlings, a voice within her admonished—looked like her.

  The class was uneventful except that Chris sat out the sun salutations. How Olivia had yearned to stroke her hair and rub her stomach. After meditation Olivia again rushed to help Chris stand up.

  Four years ago, after Chris had read the Psychology Today article but before she’d made up her mind to become a surrogate, Chris’s parents had invited her over for a twenty-second birthday dinner at their house, just the three of them. Wine wasn’t poured, but Chris came prepared and took frequent bathroom breaks to swig bourbon from a silver flask embossed with a circled A for anarchy. Post–”Happy Birthday,” Chris sucked butter cream icing off a candle, the wick’s sulfurous plume not yet fully extinguished. Her mother, a petite, bird-boned woman who barely crested five feet, grabbed the candle out of her mouth, so Chris grabbed another, but her mother removed that one, too. As a further precaution, her mother placed the deracinated candles on a plate at the other end of the table from Chris.

  “Mom,” Chris said.

  “Are you going to cut the cake, precious?” her father intervened.

  “Mom,” Chris said, louder this time. “What was it like being pregnant?”

  “It was wonderful.” Her mother closed her eyes and smiled. “I finally got to take up some space in the world.”

  At the time Chris had found this response vaguely pathetic, but once she’d become a surrogate, she wished she’d pressed her mother for further explanation. How could you possibly feel like a big shot with your head in the toilet? Didn’t the attention freak you out, your body a topic of public speculation? Did your feet swell? Did you wince when the sonographer applied cold gel to your belly? Were you scared? Did you crave pickle juice and vanilla extract? Did you wake up feeling clean every morning, purified by a night of flying dreams and orgasms?

  Instead Chris pushed her chair back and made her way to the candles.

  “Am I cutting the cake then?” her father said, the knife’s blade already half-hidden in the white icing.

  “But what you have to understand, honey,” Chris’s mother said as she watched Chris lick a candle, “is that in those days pregnancy was associated with motherhood. Nowadays people would stare, and not in a good way.”

  All through class, Chris had been aware of Olivia’s bright blue eyes gawking at her, peering through her legs or over her shoulder as she expertly contorted her body through all the poses. Maybe she’s interested in hiring me for a third kid, Chris thought. Then: I bet she’ll have the cutest babies, with springy hair like hers. But even if Olivia did just want to hire Chris, it didn’t explain her attentiveness, her hand held out to Chris before Chris even registered that she needed help getting up.

  “I think you’re leaking,” Olivia told her back in the change room.

  Chris looked down to see twin puddles darkening her shirt. “Damn. And I wore the extra thick sports bra, too.”

  “Is it breast milk?” Olivia’s voice grew hushed.

  “Yeah,” Chris said. “What else?”

  “What do you do with it?” Olivia asked as she stripped. Did Chris imagine the slight gyration of Olivia’s hips as she pulled her shorts down?

  “What?”

  “Yeah, what do you do with it?”

  “Oh.” Chris took off her own shirt before realizing that she was exposing her stomach. “I sell it to the parents. If there’s extra I’ll sell some to other parents, too. Oh, and when they need it I sell some to this restaurant. Apparently breast milk ice cream is the next big thing. They pay out their ass for the stuff.” Chris hadn’t spoken this much to anyone, let alone a stranger, in ages. She lived by herself, she couldn’t hang out with her old friends because they were always bombed and she only spoke to her family on special occasions.

  “Which restaurants?” Olivia didn’t look disgusted with Chris’s stomach; in fact, Chris could only describe her expression as aroused, her tiny flower mouth slightly open and her gaze intent.

  It was such a pleasantly foreign sensation to be stared at in this way that Chris opted to change right there in front of her, peeling off her bra, nipple hair be damned. She dabbed the thick milk away with her balled up tank top. “Have you
heard of Anthony’s?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Chris extracted a different bra especially designed for lactating women from her bag, snapped it closed and pulled on the same black sweater, made of 100 percent natural fibres, as the week before. “I sold a couple litres to them last week. They’re going to infuse it with vanilla beans or saffron or whatever, churn it into ice cream and sell it for thirty bucks a scoop. It’s kind of silly, but yeah, it pays the bills, you know?”

  “Wow, that’s so interesting,” Olivia said, buttoning up her navy blazer. “You live such an interesting life. I admire that.”

  The last gleaming button securely buttoned, suddenly Olivia seemed indistinguishable from all the other women who were busy clanging their lockers shut and turning their microprocessors back on, their eyes glazing over as they reviewed their messages. Once more, Chris felt like she’d been had. Here she was talking candidly about selling her breast milk to some high-powered woman. It was ridiculous. It was like a cow telling raunchy jokes to a farmer—no, the CEO of a dairy company—and allowing herself to believe that the CEO was laughing with the cow, not at her. For the first time in months, Chris craved the candied fizzle of a bourbon and Coke. She had to leave. Her compulsion for escape couldn’t be slowed by politeness, and without saying goodbye, she booted it, her swinging gym bag nearly felling two ladies as she stormed out of the change room.

  Not even Chris’s abrupt exit could stifle Olivia’s elation at having spoken to her for so long, listened to her husky voice, seen her stomach with its gorgeous tributaries of stretch marks. And of course, there had been the revelation about selling the breast milk. Although she’d pretended otherwise, Olivia did in fact know Anthony’s very well. It was where her husband Michael had proposed over fifteen years ago, right after he’d been made partner. That was probably why he didn’t find it suspicious when she suggested they go there that night.