Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

“And that would be Maïté, right?”

  “How in the world do you know about Maïté?”

  Evie’s mouth sometimes shot off without her prior consent. Why had she felt the need to toss out this morsel now? She’d had it stored away for months, never meaning to bring it out into the light of day. She could read Moshe’s distress through her hands, his muscles clamping shut like security gates. She tried to massage away the damage she’d done. While she stroked she divulged her source, her journalistic scruples flying out the window.

  “Oh, you know Dany. He’s such a blabbermouth. Besides, that’s what you get for missing an Anti-Shabbos. Then everyone yaks about you. Don’t pretend you don’t know the risks.” She was a bit ill at ease with this blame-the-victim approach, but Moshe accepted that this was the way of things in their little community. The bylaws were unambiguous on that point.

  “Well, remind me never to skip again even though there’s nothing much left in my dull past that’s gossip-worthy. If that’s the best they could dredge up it must have been a slow night.”

  She could feel him starting to loosen up, so she pressed a bit further despite herself. “Can I just ask when it was?”

  “It’s been a while now that it’s over. Before I moved in here.”

  “What was she? I mean what did she do for a living?”

  “She was one of the thousands of unemployed actresses on the Plateau. They’re a dime a dozen. You know that.”

  “And what was it that went wrong?”

  She’d probed too far now, and with a ragged fingernail. “Look, I don’t really want to go into all that, Okay? This bed’s too small for three.” Moshe hesitated, and then kissed the tip of her nose to blunt the sharpness of his tone. He lay back down to remember what exactly had gone sour.

  What could he say to Evie, that they’d broken up over the clock? No, that wasn’t really the reason, although it seemed like it at the time. Everything always waited to blow until they were setting their alarm clocks for the next day. Maïté’s life took off as darkness fell, while he shared a schedule with the city’s garbagemen. They might as well have been living in different time zones. Moshe was lashed to his ovens by apron strings that she could never convince him to cut with the result that he was always too whooped to squire her around to her night-time haunts up on the Plateau. So she found someone else who would; someone who, if you saw him out on the street at five a.m., was more likely to be trailing home than heading out to work his shift. It was surprising, now that he mulled it over, that they’d been able to get together long enough to effect the break up, so rarely did they inhabit the same room awake. All their other problems, and they were too many to catalogue, somehow seemed subsidiary to the clock which took on Big Ben proportions in Moshe’s mind, its chimes tolling out the doom of their coupledom.

  “I’m sorry,” Evie said, interrupting his flashback. “I shouldn’t have asked. I was out of line.”

  “Forget it.” They had retreated to their respective sides of the bed, the first time since they’d started in on Evie’s game plan that the mattress had seen any distance between them.

  “And what about you?” Moshe asked after a spell. “Many guys?” He turned on his side to face her, propping up his head with his hand. “Even though I guess you reserve the right to remain silent since I was so stingy with the particulars.”

  “For me, not many either.”

  “Come on. Someone like you. I bet you had to beat them off with a stick.”

  “I’ll take you to the clinic tomorrow to have your eyes examined.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but I see fine.”

  “Well, however few or many there might have been, none of them was ever serious.”

  “Why not?”

  Fair’s fair. If Moshe preferred to keep the grisly details of his past liaisons to himself, so would she. Besides, why should she direct his attention to all the flaws in her nature that her exes had flung in her face on the way out the door? He’d find them out soon enough on his own, surely. That’s the way it had always gone. Evie’s men tended to be quick on their feet in the put-down department. They normally struck first, lighting into her while she was still stumbling to articulate in the precise terminology she favoured just how exactly they were duds. They always had the edge because they weren’t so hung up on phraseology.

  Maybe it would be different with Moshe, though. After all their Friday nights together, he’d seen into most of the corners of her personality and survived to tell the tale. Still, Evie saw no reason to itemize her defects just in case he happened to have blinked and missed any.

  “Well, usually,” she said, “just when things are on the verge of getting serious with somebody, I start to fixate on some fatal character flaw that I’d let slide at the beginning. And eventually that bug, whatever it is, forces me to dump him.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, truly reprehensible stuff I’m talking about. He’d be a toothpick chewer or a gum cracker. Wear a pinkie ring. Something like that. What else could I do?”

  “Well at least I’m safe on that score.”

  “I never would have given you a tumble otherwise. A girl’s got to have standards.”

  They’d exposed enough of themselves. Better not to stir up the sediment of their respective pasts at this stage in the game. What would it gain? In silent agreement the two of them went back to what they did best. Everything else could wait.

  It was rough going at the office those first weeks. Luckily Evie hadn’t made any serious slip-ups yet, but it was only a matter of time. She couldn’t concentrate. All she wanted to do was shove her keyboard out of the way, pillow her head on her crossed arms and snooze. The only thing that stopped her was that she was a snorer, and big-time. When they were growing up Josh always mocked her for blasting like a locomotive at night, but she figured he was just trying to get her goat. Wasn’t it the prerogative of older brothers to torture the kid sister with bogus slurs? She wouldn’t fall for it. Evie was no sap. But later in life her boyfriends confirmed that Josh had it dead on with his Orient Express simile. Besides, how could she explain away her sudden narcoleptic tendencies? Nope, napping on the job was out.

  On top of being dog-tired she was wrung out. Even for rock-bottom grooming Evie had no energy. Her arms lacked the primal oomph to repeatedly hoist the curling iron the marathon distance from the dresser to her head for styling. Instead she gathered her hair up like table scraps. How could a fetus the size of a raspberry (she was reading all the books) sap her strength so disproportionately? Evie hadn’t been planning to announce the pregnancy before it showed, but the grapevine was buzzing overtime at the newspaper when she started to turn up at work in her new roadkill look.

  Over lunch Audrée sized up her colleague with motherly concern. “Evie, you can tell me if anything’s wrong. You know you can confide in me. I would never let on to anyone. It would be just between us.”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine. I’ve just got some things on my mind. That’s all.”

  Audrée was unconvinced, eyeballing Evie’s blouse that looked to have been dug up from the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper, and her face which was a coordinating shade of battleship grey. “Well, my lunch table is always open if you change your mind. Only a penny per consultation, cheaper than Lucy even. A steal.”

  Aaron was less circumspect. “You look like shit.” It was a measure of Evie’s meltdown that she walked away from his remark with no riposte. Her brain was too dulled from her sleep deprivation experiment. She would have taken a strop to it if only she could summon up some dregs of her old zip. The comment rankled, though. She reported it to Moshe that night after work while he was stocking her cupboards with the rice cakes and rusks that she craved. He nibbled on some melba toasts to keep her company. To him it was like eating picnic tables, but since they were all Evie could stomach he kept his own counsel.

&nb
sp; “I wouldn’t say you look like shit exactly.”

  “Gee, thanks for your support.”

  “Come on Evie. That didn’t come out like I meant. He stood behind her and kneaded the tightness out of her back. “But you do look, you know, kind of droopy. That’s good, though. You’re right on schedule according to chapter two. Excessive fatigue is perfectly normal in the first trimester.”

  Moshe had been keeping up on his side too. For the past few years his reading had run mostly to food books, but ever since Evie knocked at his door with a bottle of fizzy apple juice to announce liftoff he’d set aside The Chemistry of Gluten, not exactly a page-turner anyway, in favour of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. It was the same book Evie swore by and he wanted them to be on the same page.

  It struck him as a very complete tome. Moshe read it as attentively as if he were going to be quizzed on the content. His copy was already so dog-eared you would have sworn he was on to kid number three. He paid particular attention to the last chapter which dealt with pregnancy loss in all its heartbreaking manifestations. Every one, that is, except theirs; a surrogate mother giving her baby up to a woman who doesn’t have the slightest inkling that she should be out shopping for a layette. When it came down to practical advice that was the only chapter they really needed. This baby would be born whether they learned about Braxton-Hicks contractions or not. But Moshe never drew Evie’s attention to this gap in her chosen book’s coverage. He’d noticed she seldom read ahead. So in the meantime Moshe shared what he’d gleaned from the early pages and kept his fears to himself.

  “Jake, I’ve got a job for you.”

  Marilyn had dropped in at Sannoix with no prior warning, exhorting her husband’s secretary to summon him in from the floor; her visit was of a pressing nature. She cooled her heels in the reception area, checking out the bulletin board on the wall labelled danger. Pinned to the corkboard were close-ups of almonds and macadamias head-on and in profile, looking as if they belonged on a wanted poster at the post office. When Jake tarried too long in the factory for her liking, Marilyn made for the guts of the plant though she knew full well that such a move was a no go. The secretary barred Marilyn’s way, splaying herself out like human caution tape across the door. No outsiders entered the sterile area of the flight kitchen without the boss’s say-so. Not even Madame. Jake had his apparatchiks well-trained.

  Something was gnawing away at his wife, that much was clear to Jake as soon as he heard the page. Marilyn’s normal driving circuits seldom took in the arid industrial tract sheltered under the wingspread of Trudeau International where his plant ticked along in perfect symbiosis with the airport.

  “What, I don’t work enough to suit you? I need you to give me more to do?”

  “Come on Jake. This is no joke what I’m here asking you. It’s important. About your daughter. Have you seen her lately? Well, it may interest you to know that she looks like hell. She deigned to meet me to grab a quick lunch downtown today since I had to hand over Joshie’s keys, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I want you to convince her to make an appointment with Dr. Irwin. Maybe we’ll be lucky and she’ll listen if it’s you doing the suggesting. Me, forget it.”

  “You’re exaggerating, Mare.”

  “When have I ever been prone to exaggeration?” Jake let that one pass. “I’m telling you, she looked like something the cat dragged in.”

  “The kid probably just needs some sleep. Must be burning the candle at both ends. Nothing’s wrong with her. She’s healthy as a horse.”

  “Jake. I’m not dreaming this up. She was so pale you could see right through her. And she kept yawning like she couldn’t get enough air in her lungs.”

  “Maybe it’s a reaction to something she ate. You know how finicky her stomach can be. Remember how she used to blow? Wow! That kid had some range. Nobody in the family could outshoot her.”

  Marilyn wasn’t in the mood to put up with her husband’s reminiscences about Evie’s puking prowess. “Enough Jake. Listen to me. This has nothing to do with food. Her hair was barely combed. I’m not even sure it was washed. And she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her clothes were a rumpled-up mess. She looked like she didn’t care how she looked. That’s not like her and you know it. Remember how many hours she used to spend in front of the mirror? She had to be put together perfect before she’d so much as stick a toe out the front door.”

  “What are you trying to say? Our Evie’s on drugs suddenly?” He’d seen the public service ads on the busses.

  Marilyn was making no headway with her list of nebulous symptoms. She didn’t have all day. “Jake, she picked up the bill.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll talk to her.”

  The Anti-Shabbosites were forced to make a change of venue. For the first Friday in recorded memory Evie would be attending the event as a commoner with Moshe assuming the hosting headship. But by the time that night rolled around, Evie had ducked out of the proceedings entirely, too whomped from a week of work to make even a token appearance. Moshe delivered the trumped up excuse whose missish Victorian wording appealed to Evie’s literary sensibilities. She was indisposed, he reported, and hoped they’d move on, but her absence loomed over the table. Something major was up, not just your run of the mill cold or cramps which in any event had never held her back from presiding before.

  “Burnout maybe?” Dizzy proffered her theory over soup.

  “Nah, she doesn’t work that hard.” To this truism they all nodded.

  “Some sort of allergy?” ManU put in his two cents. “Maybe after all this time she’s allergic to us,” a suggestion which had its own logic.

  “Swine flu?” Dizzy posited. “They say our age group is the hardest hit.”

  “Then she’d be dead, not just dead tired. Besides, we went together to get our shots, so that’s out.”

  “What else would make her look sucked dry that? Mono maybe? Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Lupus, God forbid?” The quacks at the table chronicled all the wasting maladies suffered in their wider circle of acquaintance, an exercise that entertained them pleasantly all the way through dessert.

  “Maybe she’s pregnant.” Dany threw it out there over the apple crumble, provoking the biggest poof of laughter of the night.

  “Well, then it must have been by spontaneous combustion,” said Shira. “We all know she’s had nothing but downtime as far as guys go since that Steve last year.”

  “No, no. He wanted us to call him Stephen, remember? He was very adamant about that.”

  “You’re right. I stand corrected. Stephen with a ph, not a low-class v. What a stuffed shirt, that one.”

  “I don’t know. I kind of liked him,” Zach said.

  “I did too.” Dizzy backed him. “He was very well spoken.”

  “Presentable.”

  “Well off.”

  “Polite.”

  “Married.”

  “Well there was that. Remember how she found out?”

  “Yeah, that wasn’t pretty.”

  “Whatever. The real point,” Judy said, drilling down to the crux of the matter, “is that with him out of the picture, Evie has now officially worked her way through every last guy on the Island of Montreal who knows enough to say to whom instead of to who and there’s no one left for her to go out with. She’s doomed.”

  How was it that Moshe was always out of sync on the scuttlebutt? Here he was, though incognito, the deepest inside of all Evie insiders, but still he was blank on great swaths of her life that to everyone else were public knowledge. It only served to confirm to him that their intimacy was a temporary construction on the order of a kissing booth at a county fair, earmarked for dismantling at the end of the season.

  Dizzy was forced to tap her water glass with her knife to wrest the others’ attention away from the faithless Stephen. “Hey, hey, forget about the putz from Bountiful you guys. He’s dea
d and buried. Let’s keep our eyes on the ball. Now I’ve been thinking about what Dany said and it’s not as stupid as it sounds. Everything fits. Evie’s completely wiped out. I’m saying zonked. Right? And when we met at Myriade the other day she ordered decaf. Can you believe it? Decaf. There. It was so embarrassing.”

  “And last Friday night she didn’t drink any wine,” ManU volunteered, warming to the pregnancy postulate. “I noticed because I brought a really good bottle for a change, a Bordeaux worthy of Jean-Gabriel, olav hashalom. Not plonk. Has anyone ever seen her pass up on the vino before?”

  “She didn’t eat any of my carrot cholent,” added Judy, eager to pile on “She said that she was feeling queasy.”

  “We can’t count that as an official symptom, it makes me queasy too.”

  The table quieted. To the amateur diagnosticians’ own astonishment, the jigsaw puzzle of circumstantial evidence they were piecing together interlocked tight and clean. Their conclusion was incontrovertible. Dizzy declared Evie pregnant in absentia, and the chat shifted direction. They were eager to move on to provenance.

  Chapter 14

  THERE WAS AN UPSIDE to feeling like she’d been flattened by a log truck. It reassured Evie in a way, that when it came time to give this baby up, she’d be happy to part with the sadistic little bugger who had suctioned every last particle of energy from her body. Good riddance. She’d sleep for a month straight once it was all over.

  Now she’d gone and done it. The Evil Eye had been dozing at the controls but when his radar belatedly picked up on Evie’s unmotherly brainwaves he snapped back to attention. Soon that deb would look back on complete and utter exhaustion as a walk in the park. He toggled a switch and brought Evie’s ADD innards back from the gulag. The Upchuck Queen, as Josh had dubbed his sister in their youth, was restored to the throne.

  Evie started hurling like there was no tomorrow. She let rip like a fire hose aimed at a burning orphanage. If she didn’t grab at the towel rack for purchase, the recoil threatened to kayo her. And there was no predicting what would set her off or when. At least as a kid she could count on being able to keep the cork in as long as she wasn’t on wheels. There was a certain degree of comfort, back then, in understanding her tummy’s mindset. But now the episodes were random, capricious. She reviewed every step of her day, every food that crossed her lips, but she could extract no pattern. Her stomach was rogue and out of control.