Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  Copyright © 2014 Phyllis Rudin

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund.

  We are also grateful for the support received from an

  Anonymous Fund at The Calgary Foundation.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Rudin, Phyllis, author

  Evie, the baby and the wife : a novel / by Phyllis Rudin.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-134-0 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8635.U35E95 2014 C813’.6 C2014-905026-7

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: inanna.publications@inanna.ca Website: www.inanna.ca

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  To my parents, Harold and Florence Woll

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  EVIE WAS LOSING IT. She could still nail a target at a metre and a half, but in her prime she once zapped the kitchen door all the way from the living room sofa. Prone yet. The distance was verified by her brother Josh using the official tape measure, their father’s beloved Craftsman, at 2.2 metres. It was her personal best. Projectile vomiting was an underrated talent the siblings reckoned. It belonged up there in the pantheon of athleticism alongside power farting, Josh’s particular gift. As kids at the cottage they used to laze away rainy afternoons sketching out their own offshoot of the Special Olympics, one where every sport showcased competitors with wonky innards.

  Evie’s stomach had always been what her mother called delicate, though normally understatement wasn’t mum’s style. Its juices roiled wildly like a forgotten pot of oatmeal on the burner, eager for the slightest excuse to put on their Krakatoa imitation.

  Other kids could waste their time tinkling out Circus Parade on the piano; Evie’s intestinal party piece was always the show-stopper. Her mother was not amused. Marilyn shlepped Evie to every pediatrician up and down the slopes of Côte-des-Neiges Boulevard, trolling for a cure. She’d had it with wrapping her baby in a plastic tarp instead of a receiving blanket, a dank, fetid papoose as risky to jostle as an unexploded bomb. What she wanted was a baby like all the other babies, steady dribblers who expectorated more decorously, drop by drop like maple sap into a bucket, but instead she’d birthed a geyser. If only Evie were gushing Brent crude, the family would be fixed for life.

  In fact, there was a secret agenda hiding behind Marilyn’s skirts on these doctors’ visits. She was seeking medical reassurance that Evie’s barfing wasn’t strategic, a precocious volley in a mother-daughter turf war that the baby was clearly winning. Given that Evie’s belly had started rockin’ and rollin’ within days of her birth, the suspicion was clearly preposterous, but the notion was lodged like an ornery kimmel between the lobes of her mother’s flipped-out postpartum brain and refused to be dislodged.

  “Marilyn, honey. It’s just gas. She’s a bit on the young side to be as calculating as you make her out to be, don’t you think? Her tummy just needs time to get the kinks out. She’ll get over it.”

  “Jake, you don’t understand how it is between a girl and her mother. Behaviours like these, if you neglect them at the start, next thing you know they root themselves in.”

  “Mare, it’s not you. Get that into your head. It doesn’t matter which of us is holding her. When she’s fit to pop, she pops. Relax.”

  Relax. Ha! Jake knew that his wife’s subliminal censors had black-penciled the R-word and all its synonyms from her mental thesaurus before they ever met, but in the sleep-deprived state he shared democratically with the new mother, he flung the injunction out there as if it might actually deliver. A rookie mistake. Marilyn was only able to unclench after the doctors isolated actual physical triggers in Evie’s diet, which, once eliminated, stretched out the intervals between episodes and reduced their histrionic arc and reach.

  Yet there remained one trigger, though duly identified, that stubbornly refused to efface itself as Evie grew older. Its origin wasn’t dietary, but more environmental, or would you call it technological? In any event, it was trickier to control than food intake. Put Evie in a moving vehicle and she was toast. Ten minutes tops and the warm bile would start to puddle in her tongue’s back cup. There it copulated merrily with her über-feisty saliva to synthesize the jet propulsion formula for which she alone held the patent. That particular taste, gravy cut with Javex, tipped her off that an episode was imminent in the same way that an aura tapped a migraine sufferer on the shoulder to announce, “Hold tight, bud, it’s showtime.”

  Her mother and father prophesied that she’d outgrow this awkward tendency towards tossing her cookies in transit, but they took care never to specify a timeline so as not to be caught up in one of those parental fibs that eventually comes back to bite you in the tush. When asked by a sodden, sour-smelling Evie over the bathtub powerwash that followed yet another disastrous school field trip, “But when will it stop? When exactly?” they took their cue from the Prime Minister. They handled it like a date for troop withdrawal; a greased-pig date, a date endlessly malleable and move-offable. To give her parents their due, Evie’s problem did calm down a little over the years, even if it didn’t come easy to her. She had to work at it, stitching together a patchwork of feints and dodges that allowed her to tease out the distances over which she could travel with her belly in lockdown mode.

  By the time she reached her twenties and was faced with a daily commute of an hour each way, Evie had finally defanged her digestive dybbuk. She discovered that as long as she didn’t try to read while she was bussing it, she could manage to travel dry. Just. It was a sacrifice. So many hours shot. So many novels left untasted. So many authors left unsampled. Evie’s world turned on words. The collision of adjective and noun sparked frissons at her very core that none of her feckless boyfriends was ever able to match. Those klutzes needed GPS to home in on the right spot. Even when she provided them with generous hands-on guidance in the darkness of her bedroom, the rendezvous inevitably proved to be a letdown. She always felt more like she was teaching them cursive. A socko metaphor and she would have been putty in their hands, but guys didn’t seem to think along those lines in Evie’s experience.

  What choice did she have but to make a virtue out of necessity? At least her inability to
read while heading to work and back allowed her the leisure to study the denizens of public transit on the STM’s superannuated fleet. She transformed the bus into her personal Petri dish on which she performed top-level research. All her life, Evie’d been in the market for a writer. No other profession packed the same creative wallop to her way of thinking. On her daily bus rides she was on a constant lookout for clues, hoping to ferret out among her fellow passengers Mr. Write. She even had a recurring dream in which she hooked up with a wordsmith. The two of them grabbed their passports, hopped a plane, and set up a love nest in the faraway Republic of Letters where her better half toiled away on his bildungsroman.

  The dream had elements that ticked her off, not that she had any control over it. The tableau was classic greenhorn. There she was, the wifey bringing in a few pennies minding the counter of the candy store so that hubby could sequester himself in the back room with his manuscript, his nib flying across the pages. Awake, Evie considered herself a feminist, but asleep her subconscious begged to differ. It inevitably cast her in the role of baleboosteh, the little homemaker who clips the toenails of the great man. Someday she and her analyst would go to town on her Yiddishe mama dreamscape, but for the time being she just accepted it as part of the armature of her nights.

  So far her scheme hadn’t panned out. She was still facing the world solo. Engineering a meeting with an author turned out to be no easy business. Writing was a solitary craft. The successful ones never poked their noses out of their apartments. Only the scribblers were plentiful, out gallivanting instead of locked up in their garrets doing battle with their muses. They yakked more about writing than actually getting down to it. Evie had to face facts. A Mordecai Richler wasn’t about to board her bus at the corner of Sherbrooke and King Edward. She was forced to lower her sights a few notches and settle for a reader.

  Back when she still lived with her parents, Evie was stuck taking the 105, your classic loser bus. The NDG line didn’t proffer up many male readers of the type she was on the prowl for, its ridership split between the geriatric and the pubescent, missing out on the vast middle range that constituted Evie’s target demographic. Sure, there was some reading going on. It wasn’t a totally illiterate bus route. The retirees scanned their supermarket flyers and the Villa girls highlighted their school notes so relentlessly that barely a word escaped untinted. The odd time Evie did spy a prospect on the 105 with a novel cracked open, she always managed to find him deficient in some readerly way. Evie had zero tolerance for the slow, deliberate readers, the ones who moved their heads back and forth across the page as if they were nibbling an ear of corn at the company picnic. Ditto the lip synchers and the finger followers. She stacked them like cordwood on her reject pile across the garden-variety type drip who wore his bus pass on a string around his neck like a schoolboy sent off to day camp by mummy.

  But things looked up at Decarie when she transferred to the 24. Now that was a far superior bus for her purposes, a bus that by rights should have been drawn by a plumed horse. Its pince-nez route cut straight through turreted Westmount, past the townlet’s lawn bowling club, its cenotaph, and its two silenced cannons that in their glory days used to honour Queen Victoria with a birthday fusillade. From Westmount the bus trundled back into Montreal proper, letting off passengers in front of the Ritz and the Musée des Beaux-Arts before it reached the turnaround at the centre of town where its nosebag of oats was refilled. You could always count on someone riding the stately old 24 to be reading a newspaper with small dense print, one of those castrato newspapers that had cut loose any meaningful sports section. Usually it was Le Devoir, a serious-minded daily whose motto libre de penser translated freely into the importance of being earnest, but the pink-tinged pages of the Financial Times had their own set of adherents. Why had the London publishers chosen that sickish salmonella colour to begin with, Evie wondered, out of all the possible swatches presented to them? Was it some remnant of wartime rationing? Evie’s mind bustled happily along once she boarded the 24, her synapses sizzling, roused from their 105 induced stupor.

  So varied was the collection of reading matter on this, the Bloomsbury of city buses, that Evie might just as well have been sitting in the main hall of the city library. She took in the stapled journal offprints, the conference proceedings, and the slick artsy mags with the avidity of an industrial shredder. And all those scholarly monographs with their conga line subtitles, subtitles so rambling and word heavy that the poor little colons could scarcely bear their weight. If invited, Evie would have graciously stepped in to lend them a hand. The reading men of the 24 were either pinstriped for the downtown office towers or backpacked and crepe-soled for the faculty offices at McGill. Both categories were brimming with potential and Evie scrutinized them boldly. Her eyeballs glommed onto the likely candidates like a pair of RCMP high beams.

  The gentlemen commuters on Evie’s routes couldn’t help but feel themselves passing through her full-body scanner. Their antennae sensed her sitting at the controls with her clipboard, tsk-tsking over their IQs, slamming their literary fetishes, and disparaging the over-abundance of lint hiding out in their belly buttons. Who was this tootsie to be judge and jury? At the terminus cafe the fellows got together over espressos and cooked up a little counter-audit of their own. All the evidence, though circumstantial, was stacked against her. In Evie they observed a young woman so vacuous that she couldn’t even rouse herself to open up a copy of Métro, the free rag foisted on all passengers as they boarded the bus, and it was front-to-back pictures anyway. Nor, they noticed, did she bother to occupy herself with any of the other normal commuter pastimes like sudoku or crosswords. Even the dunderhead circle-the-letters game seemed beyond her ken. She wasn’t on her cell, which translated to them as friendless, and the absence of an iPod signalled a totally flat EKG. The alarm should have been sounding and the ER nurses tearing in with the paddles. When you came right down to it, Evie was the solitary person on the bus not involved in some extra-vehicular activity. Even the driver was texting.

  Evie counterattacked by trying at least to look like an intello. Her glasses, though non-corrective, were horn-rimmedly serious Sartrean spectacles. The canvas bag she slung over her shoulder bore the abstruse slogan of a scholarly conference Josh had attended in London. He’d been too pressed that trip even to stop at the airport gift shop to pick his sister up some of the Heathrow kitsch she’d put in for, so he handed over the conferee’s tote bag as a sop. It now formed a permanent component of Evie’s I-am-egghead-hear-me-roar getup. Her asymmetrical haircut was meant to convey serious but with flair, a split-level attempt to signal come hither to the poets while not spooking the academics. Maybe it had been a mistake. She feared that it might come off as indecisive. Or maybe not. She did what little she could under imperfect circumstances.

  She was in a word profession now, a paying one, although it had taken her a while to find her niche. At first Evie’d gone the fiction road, inspired by movies like My Brilliant Career. It all seemed so simple up there on the big screen at the AMC. The heroine, inevitably a beleaguered nanny, feels the urge to try her hand at writing, a clear displacement tactic to hold her back from drowning the hellions in her charge like a redundant litter of kittens. She pens her opus at night by the light of a penny candle, wraps the sole extant copy in butcher paper and twine, and entrusts her precious cargo to a leaky mail packet for delivery to the publishing house of her choice. Bingo! Next thing she knows, it’s in print. True, there do intervene a few obligatory scenes of faux narrative tension where our authoress hangs over the front gate, scanning the horizon for the postman, but essentially no potholes rut the path between the creative process and the Kindle. This storyline didn’t in any way reflect Evie’s own novelistic efforts. The rubber band that girded her bundle of rejection letters had snapped in resentment over the excessive territory she expected it to span. It was only a rubber band after all, not the equator.

  Next up she tried s
tudying law, suckered in by the prospect of all that Latin. Ad hominem, ipse dixit, mens rea, you’d need a tongue mounted on ball bearings to get through the working day. Perfect. But it didn’t take her long to discover that her law school colleagues didn’t get off on the ablative absolute. Their lingua franca turned out not to be Latin but Gelt. She dropped out of McGill’s Faculty of Law, the bruised victim of an occupational fling gone sour. Evie was getting desperate. How many word professions were there left to try now that the tweeters had shat on capitalization and beat up on spelling like it was a drunk in the gutter?

  Journalism came to her rescue. Armed with her freshly minted MFA, Evie was hired to work the graveyard shift at the Gazette, a designation that referred not to her hours but her position. She researched obituaries for celebrities not yet dead, and then wrote up the notices when they croaked shortly after. Newbie that she was, they didn’t yet trust her to pen the bigwig obits, the Deborah Kerrs and the Claude Levi-Strausses. Not even the major Canadian obits. Evie was assigned the mid-level deaths, like the Saskatoon scientist who’d invented the hinge that allowed the Canadarm to extend and flex so it could pick the Shuttle’s nose out in space; the person at one remove from celebrity, or maybe two or three.

  Evie’s editors had a system. They didn’t have her start in on any biographical research speculatively, simply on the basis of a luminary’s advanced age. Most fossils were nowhere near ready to kick off, running on the fuel of ancient grievances that wasn’t about to dry up any time soon. Malcontents hung on forever. No, usually the higher-ups in her wing of cubicles, those paparazzi of doom, relied on a network of sniffer dogs to scent out notables who were in extremis, wherever on the age spectrum they happened to be parked. Her bosses’ record was spot on. Once they gave Evie the green light to begin the legwork on a prospect, he keeled over obligingly within weeks. She felt like the Angel of Death, but hey, it paid the bills. The Gazette gig allowed her to move out of her parents’ basement flat, freeing her from domestic bondage.