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Evie, the Baby and the Wife

Page 16

by Phyllis Rudin


  To Evie, these two crippling conditions intertwined constituted the ne plus ultra of torture stylings, the double helix from hell. If only she had the power to petition Torquemada for a change of method, she’d put in for evisceration. From where she stood it sounded easier to tolerate. During her few daily intervals when she was neither green around the gills nor catatonic, she marvelled that any woman on earth would consent to bear more than one child. Why wouldn’t she just call the Abloy guys out to the house while hubby was at work? It beggared understanding. Her mother had it backwards all these years. Evie twigged to it now. It wasn’t that you could take control of your uterus. Oh no. It took control of you. Evie’s womb grabbed her by the hair, yanked her head back and had its way with her. There were times when she genuinely wondered how she’d survive. She hauled herself home from work at the end of the day and collapsed into the first chair that presented itself. The bedroom, however tempting, might just as well have been at the North Pole.

  A nun stood opposite the chair in which Evie was slumped, surveying the living room proprietorially. She wore an old-style habit of the type that never cruised the streets of Montreal anymore, the full monty. The Sister’s cornet was a grand sculpted affair, its starched white wings extending from her skull like the fins of a ’59 Caddy. She made herself right at home once her inspection was complete. She kicked off her shoes, plunked herself down on Evie’s sofa, and propped her feet up on the coffee table to massage the matched pair of killer bunions that adorned her big toe.

  “So nu Evie? You’re thinking you might want to get rid of it, the little pisher cooking up in your hibachi down there?” She stared pointedly at Evie’s stomach region.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Evie, Evie, Evie. From me you can’t hide anything.”

  Evie was trying to make sense of her apparition. Just who was this home invader who looked like Sister Bertrille but talked like Tanta Freydl?

  “It’s a mitzvah you having a baby for that poor soul, that Amélie. A good girl. She hasn’t had an easy life. Her good-for-nothing husband shtupped every skirt with a pulse. Lucky thing he was pumping blanks. Well, maybe not so lucky for his wife. But anyway, you’d be doing an act of, oh what did your maman call it back when she made her fancy protest up at Parliament Hill?” She struggled though her senior moment until the fugitive expression popped out of its hidey-hole. ‘Guerrilla feminism.’ That’s what Marilyn used to say.”

  “You know my mother?” Here was a collision of cultures Evie had difficulty imagining considering her mother’s propensities.

  “Well, not personally, more by reputation, let’s say.”

  That her mother’s notoriety was such that it had managed to slip behind these cloistered walls stashed under a barrow-load of potatoes was beyond Evie’s comprehension. No girl really knows her own mother, but Evie seemed exceptionally clueless in this regard. She was reconsidering for the first time in her life her mother’s brush with activism when her visitor slipped in the zinger. “And that way the little matzo ball you’re carrying wouldn’t have to die.”

  The word Evie had been turning over in the boudoir of her mind lately was termination. It gave off only businesslike reverberations. It was a word that she felt she could act on, a bloodless, bureaucratic word. But not even to Moshe had she confessed her recent inclination, so how could this spectre, or figment or whatever she was, have weaselled its way into the private preserve of her brain?

  “Evie, bubeleh, it was your decision to bring this baby into the world. No one forced you to do it. The idea sprang into your pretty little kop and you acted on it. Fine. But if you change your mind now, it’s not like returning a sweater to the Bay.”

  “I’m scared.” The admission burst out before she had a chance to quarantine it.

  “About what?”

  Evie was embarrassed to continue. She was confiding in a ghost? But somehow she couldn’t restrain herself. The reading on her pressure gauge was perilously high. If she didn’t hurry up and perform a prophylactic venting she’d blow, her body parts splattering the length and breadth of Mile End.

  “The mechanics of it all, you know.”

  “At your age, no one ever explained to you how it all works?”

  “No, not that. Everything else. The secrecy, the paperwork, the handover.” An underscore of panic entered her voice. “How will I arrange it all? There’re no rules. What was I thinking?”

  Evie’s procrastinating had caught up with her. So consumed was she by the baby solution she’d come up with that she pushed off any consideration of the inevitable fallout. But the time had come to face up to the fact that duck and cover wasn’t working.

  “You’re right. It’s not like a wire transfer. Ask your maman for help with having the baby and all that other stuff that’s worrying you.”

  “Are you crazy? Oh, excuse me, ma soeur,” Evie tried to retract her protocol gaffe. Her guest gave her an exculpatory wave. “I meant to say, with her track record on abortion?”

  “Didn’t you ever listen to her when she explained to you about her past? She’s not pro-abortion, she’s pro-choice. Boy are you tsedrait. If she knows that you want to give birth to the baby she’ll come on board. You heard it from me.”

  Evie and Josh never really had listened when their mother launched into her Abortion Caravan reminiscences. In fact they’d made it their life’s work not to listen. So her drop-in phantom was right. Evie was a trifle vague about the finer points of her mother’s philosophy, never having absorbed the story from cover to cover. It didn’t matter, though. This nun, however tuned-in to Marilyn’s psyche she thought she was, couldn’t understand better than Evie what made her mother tick.

  “Impossible. She’ll try to talk me out of it. Convince me she knows better, like always. I don’t have the strength to be lectured at right now.”

  “Give the woman a chance Eveleh. Would I lead you wrong?” Evie’s spook heaved herself up from the sofa, her intervention over. “This was my cell, you know. I like what you’ve done with it. The recessed lighting is very effective.”

  “Thank you, Soeur…?”

  “Marie de l’Eucharistie. Now think over what I said, maidel. Confide in maman. Well, I have to be off. Got any of those spinach knishes left from Friday for the road?”

  Chapter 15

  IN AN EPILATORY MISSTEP of epic proportions, Marilyn had her eyebrows reapplied mid-forehead back in the seventies when everybody was doing it. After the procedure, her bare brow bones jutted out like Gibraltar, purged of their reason to live, while her two perma-pencilled replacement brows, perfect circumflexes, lorded it over them from on high. The problem was that the arc of her new brows and their move to an upper storey gave Marilyn the appearance of looking down on the world. They changed her mien utterly and to no good effect. Marilyn’s face was now a mask of perpetual disapproval. Those brows had Evie and Josh confused the whole time they were growing up. They were convinced that no matter how stellar their report cards or immaculate their bedrooms, their mother’s gaze held a reproof. No doubt the kids of facelift parents suffered similar miscues. Poor Marilyn. She never understood why her relationship with her children was so fraught. But now here was Evie sitting at her kitchen table, reaching out to her. Marilyn listened coolly to the whole story.

  “We’ll have the baby at your father’s factory,” she said. “You can eat off the floor there. Most hospitals aren’t that sanitary. I’ll call Sarah to get her going on forging the birth certificate. I don’t know if she has any experience with Quebec documents. I don’t think so. But she still has contacts all over the country. And Arlene can tear herself away from her practice long enough to do the delivery. She’s semi-retired now anyway. I bet you Laura and Virginia will be willing to come along to assist. Everybody can stay at our place. We have plenty of room to put them up now that you and your brother are both out of the house.” She paused to con
sider any angles she might have missed. “Let me be the one to break it to your father. I think it’ll be easier coming from me.”

  Marilyn, she of the Humvee personality, was taking charge. Her Abortion Caravan comrades would come to her Evie’s rescue, of that she was absolutely sure. Alone among her Montreal friends, when Marilyn talked of a sisterhood she didn’t mean Hadassah.

  The tidal wave of maternal support overwhelmed Evie. Robust mothering she was accustomed to, but in every previous instance Marilyn had been trying to propel her in a direction she didn’t want to go. This was the first occasion, as far as she could recall, where her mother would be working the room on her behalf. Marilyn wiped away her daughter’s tears. “Don’t worry, my sweet girl. Don’t worry. Mummy will take care of everything. You just keep yourself healthy.”

  Why Evie had decided to confide in her of all people, Marilyn couldn’t fathom. There was certainly no genetic predisposition for it. Marilyn had hardly been so up-front with her own parents in her radical days of yore. She’d simply cut and run, the donkey kick of tsuris she’d hammered them with on her way out the door just so much collateral damage. A wave of regret washed over her. She made up her mind to go visit her mother up at the Waldorf that very afternoon to apologize. So maybe making amends forty years after the fact was a bit on the tardy side, but she figured there was no statute of limitations on mea culpas.

  Evie tried to pull herself together. She’d lost the veneer of self-possession she liked to maintain in front of her mother, her Halloween costume of adulthood slipping off her shoulders and falling to the floor. “You really know forgers?” she asked.

  “How do you think we got the passes that let us past the guards and into the Parliamentary gallery all those years ago?”

  The RCMP Security Service had a rap sheet on Marilyn as long as her arm. Evie would have known as much if she had ever once tuned in to her mother’s Abortion Caravan recital, but contrary to her time-honoured pattern, Marilyn decided not to rebuke her daughter for her habit of inattention. She didn’t want to raise any hackles at this delicate juncture. Nor would she pose any prying questions though they were piling up within her as they rolled off the assembly line, begging for egress. This rapprochement with Evie was too fragile and she didn’t want to risk shattering it with an ill-considered remark. She even self-censored the million dollar paternity question. It would all come out in the wash she supposed. She need only be patient. For now, she’d concentrate on rounding up the old gang and getting them on board for one last post-parliamentary bamboozle in the service of a good cause.

  Even the baby seemed to calm down now that Marilyn was at the helm, wreaking less havoc on its mother with each passing day. Moshe, who had thus far been spared the pleasure of meeting the redoubtable Marilyn, dared to suggest that this reprieve was in fact attributable to Evie entering her second trimester, that placid eye-of-the-storm era of pregnancy. What to Expect spelled it all out. Evie let Moshe go ahead and think what he pleased. She knew the truth of the matter.

  Delray was thriving according to the ob/gyn. It was Moshe who insisted upon giving the baby a name-in-progress, plucked out of his head in honour of his delayed vacation. Before he’d imposed the moniker, Evie referred to the baby as it or the fetus, which lacked a certain warmth in his mind. Moshe came from a demonstrative family. At his house, a return from the trenches or from the grocery store called for a greeting of equal amplitude. According to family lore, Moshe only topped six feet because his diminutive parents squeezed him so emphatically when he was growing up that he shot up like toothpaste from the tube. It was only natural that with his gushy upbringing he’d choose to lavish as much love as possible on Delray, even if the baby was only theirs in escrow.

  Every evening after Evie came home from work Moshe dropped by to lend her a hand. He generally found her just inside her door, wedging off her shoes. This project she attacked even before she’d shucked her carryall off her shoulder or removed her coat. It superseded in urgency every other activity. Once she freed herself, she stared down in despair at the pair of rugby balls that had yet again latched onto her legs down where her feet used to hang out. The switcheroo occurred every afternoon at work when she wasn’t paying attention. One minute she had the slim little tootsies she’d come to know and love, perfect seven-and-a-halfs, and next thing she knew, poof. They’d been snatched and shipped off in a container car for resale in Russia and she was left with cheapo knockoffs sized for a sasquatch.

  Secretly, Moshe was impressed by their circumference. Evie never did anything half-way. But he wisely stayed mum on the subject while he puttered around her apartment making himself useful, encouraging her to stretch out on the sofa to let the culpable juices redistribute themselves. He propped her feet up with pillows and settled her comfortably in while he whipped up a dinner from the ingredients on this week’s tolerated list. Once he had it at the simmer, he went back to the living room to attend to Evie in his usual way, shimmying down her trousers to bare the porthole through which he delivered his nightly talk to Delray. It was a choppy narrative, a stream of consciousness stew of genealogy, fatherly advice, and unadulterated schmaltz depending on his mood, but it always began with his signature line. “Once upon a time Moshe and Evie decided that they wanted a baby to love.” He’d never intended it to be picked up for serialization the first time he spoke into Evie’s tummy to their son, for they sensed that she was carrying a boy, but Evie fell under the spell of his tale and demanded that he carry on.

  Moshe traced the various branches of the Benshimols around the world for the baby’s edification, using his finger as a pointer and Evie’s swell as his globe. His own parents had opted for the well-worn pipeline that started out in Morocco and debouched in Israel where they fully intended to settle permanently. Not so the remaining relatives. Free thinkers. When they left Safi behind for good and all, they tried out more far-flung destinations, Montreal, Caracas, Durban, London. Uncle Daniel ended up in Yokohama, God alone knows why.

  But the Benshimols were a close-knit family, and eventually the separation started to wear on them. They began an epistolary campaign that kept the post offices on five continents in business, each cluster of relatives trying to persuade the others of the superiority of its chosen city, hoping to prod them into repacking their chattel and making one last move so that they could all be reunited. Moshe’s parents didn’t have much to offer to promote the case of Tel Aviv. Forced military service for their beloved nieces and nephews? They didn’t waste their ink. Inexplicably, it was Montreal that won out. Years later Moshe’s father showed him the Montreal letters, written by his brother André, the poet, so-called, who’d self-servingly elided the whole subject of winter.

  And so it came to pass that the Benshimols installed themselves en bloc in Montreal. They pulled up their delicate roots that had been coddled for generations in the toasty subsoil of North Africa to transplant them into the Quebec permafrost, and against all laws of agronomy, they took.

  Evie eavesdropped on Moshe’s belly button monologues and wondered what it must be like to come from such a tight family, a family that so yearned for togetherness that its members crossed oceans as if they were puddles to recreate the mishpocheh without borders that they had grown up with. And from his telling, the aunts and uncles sounded so loving. Their worst crime, she heard in a later installment, was that they pinched your cheeks with excessive zeal.

  Maybe Moshe was just uncritical by nature or was romanticizing his childhood for the benefit of Delray’s tender ears, but could it be that his family was genuinely so affectionate, so easygoing? Evie considered the hard evidence, what she herself had witnessed outside the boundaries of story time. Moshe was the only one of the Anti- Shabbosites who didn’t gripe about living near family. His mother was gone now, but he had dinner with his father and sisters every week, and willingly from what she could gather. Evie’s relationship with her own family, by which she meant her m
other, who steered the Troy ship of state, was less bumpy now than it had ever been, but still she thought it the norm that there be tension between parents and kids. It was a fact of life. How was it that Moshe’s family sounded like the Huxtables but in Hebrew?

  “Okay, Delray,” he said, “Listen up. Don’t forget when you’re crossing the street to look out for cars turning right on red. It’s against the law in Montreal, but sometimes drivers from out of town don’t know and still do it, so be extra careful at corners. Got it?”

  “Why are you wasting your breath on advice that Amélie’s sure to deliver? I grant you that she won’t be likely to give him your designated hitter speech, at least not with the same passion, but I’m pretty sure she’ll warn him not to run out between cars or chase a ball into the street.”

  “I know, I know, but I can’t help myself.” Now that he’d started, there were so many more lessons Moshe wanted to download into his baby’s noggin while it was still at a stage where it was willing to play sponge to pearls of parental wisdom. Nine months wouldn’t be nearly enough time. Tonight he’d only managed to cover multiplying with zeros, the passé composé, and that hollow thump you should hear when you tap a perfectly baked bread on its bottom in the oven. He’d shaped his lips into a tight round O and flicked his fingers against the kettle drum of his cheek to simulate the exact sound. Moshe was trying to confer to Delray, simultaneously, the full battery of leg-up tips that would vault him over the stumbling blocks of growing up and a lifetime’s supply of fatherly affection. It was an ambitious program.

 

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