Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  Maybe the baby couldn’t hear what his father was saying, Moshe knew that Delray’s ears weren’t fully wired up to the generator yet, but he was confident that the missives he was sending his son’s way were being taken in one way or another and stored in some remote depository of his brain until the proper trigger, sometime off in the future, tickled them out of dormancy. Only very occasionally did Evie chip in. “Tell him not to feel like a failure if he can’t climb the rope, even if he can’t climb the knotted rope.”

  “You don’t want to tell him yourself?” Moshe asked gently, trying to coax Evie into taking a direct part in the conversation, but as always she demurred, happy to let Moshe serve as their communal mouthpiece. The way she saw it, there was no need for her to speak to Delray. The baby had intravenous access to her every thought. Unfortunately the flow was reciprocal. In the middle of the night, in the quiet of her bedroom, she could hear Delray sticking it to her. “You’re giving me away? You’re handing me off with a crib blanket and a cashier’s cheque hidden in my diaper? What kind of mother ARE you?”

  All Evie could do in her own defence was recount to him the child-proofed version of the saga of Jean-Gabriel and Amélie, including her role, as if it were a bedtime story. Some nights she had to tell it over and over again until he quieted down and fell asleep, and she could never change the wording from one time to the next because he didn’t like that. Once she had him safely bedded down, Evie spent the rest of the night praying that he’d eventually understand that giving him up was its own act of love.

  And they wondered why she was tired.

  Chapter 16

  “OUR EVIE’S HAVING HER BABY at the factory? My factory?” In the space of a nanosecond Jake’s complexion ratcheted down the colour chart from ruddy to putty. Marilyn tried to arrest the descent before it landed splat on dead white.

  “Stay cool honey. Calm down.”

  So far, all had been going according to plan. Jake predictably reared up at various points along the way. “She’s pregnant?” “We don’t know who the father is?” “Our first grandchild, maybe our only chance at one ever, and she’s giving it away?” At those spikes in the conversation his wife just grabbed him by the reins, patted his flanks reassuringly, and eased him back down until he eventually fell in step at her side in a gentle trot. It’s not like she hadn’t done it before. But now she’d reached the point in the account where it could all hit the fan. Though Marilyn esteemed herself a gold medal meddler, coming between a man and his livelihood was an exceptionally risky move to attempt. She couldn’t just steamroller along and hope he’d kowtow to her best judgment. Even a man like Jake had his limits. His pristine factory was going to be contaminated. Blood. Fluids. All manner of shmutz. If she didn’t know better, she could easily come to the conclusion that this birthing incursion onto his de-germified turf pained him more than the fact that his daughter had gone and knocked herself up on behalf of some stranger.

  Jake racked his brain for a respectable out. “Don’t you need, you know, machines, monitors? High tech stuff?”

  “Arlene’ll be doing the delivery. She’s brought so many thousands of babies into the world in her time she can do it standing on her head. Besides, Evie wants her to do it midwife-style. Not high tech. Mellow, she says.”

  “If that’s the case, then can’t she just do it at our house? Or over at her place?”

  “What are we Jake, savages? Don’t we want our Evie to have all the advantages of an antiseptic environment?” Marilyn paused, hoping he’d come round to the foregone conclusion without having to be pushed too hard. She essayed a gentle repetitive noodge in the right direction. “Well, don’t we?” And just that quickly he signed off. She’d feared worse.

  Jake pushed his Barcalounger back to a 45º angle, the optimal tilt for mulling. Therein he digested the state of affairs slowly and methodically, as was his wont. The Troy women had to act out. It was in their blood. In a surge of benevolence he hoped Evie would give birth to a boy. It would be a blessing to the future parents, whoever the hell they were.

  “Is she doing everything, Evie?” Now that Jake had reached the acceptance stage, he edged forward in his thinking.

  “What everything?”

  “Screening, vitamins, all that stuff? What do I know anymore, it’s been so long. Lamaze? Whatever needs to be done.”

  “Of course she is. She’s following her doctor’s orders to the letter. Don’t you have faith in your daughter to have good sense about something as important as this?” Mrs. High-and-Mighty was only able to deliver this zetz in good conscience because she had already elicited satisfactory responses from Evie to the self-same questions. Marilyn was still keeping the deal she’d made with herself at the beginning, to hold back on a wholesale inquisition, but she sneaked in a few baby enquiries from time to time nonetheless and Evie obliged her with replies just fulsome enough to silence her for a decent spell.

  “You’re going to go for prenatal classes, aren’t you?” she’d asked Evie.

  “Don’t worry. I’m all signed up. We’ve been to a few sessions already.”

  “Who’s we?” Marilyn hoped that with these two words that offered themselves up ever so naturally in the conversation daddy’s mask would slip, revealing his secret identity, but no such luck. Evie kept her partner’s face as securely shrouded as Igor Gouzenko’s.

  “You know my friends from the building? The ones I have Shabbos dinner with? One or another of them goes with me every week. They take turns. They’ve been a terrific help in all this.”

  “Aren’t you embarrassed to show up every time with somebody else when the others are all couples? They don’t look at you funny?”

  “No, I just told them the first night when we were all introducing ourselves to each other that my husband is off doing humanitarian work in Guatemala.”

  Evie wasn’t a born liar. Evasion was more her style; tap dancing around the truth, but somehow she’d whipped this Latino smoke screen out of thin air for her mother so that Moshe could retain his silent partner status. The parents-to-be were both adherents of the loose lips school of thinking.

  But, of course, it was Moshe and Moshe alone who accompanied Evie to all the classes and huffed and panted at her side. It was Moshe who watched the video of a delivery along with her and shielded her eyes from the episiotomy scene, and it was Moshe’s back that supplied resistance to hers when the mommies rolled out the mats to do their pressure exercises against daddy. The two of them had even gone on the tour of the hospital delivery room with their classmates though for all the relevance it had to Evie’s particular birthing venue they might just as well have toured a Chips Ahoy plant.

  For every doctor’s appointment, for every bloodletting, scan, and weigh-in it was Moshe who sat beside her, providing Evie with the second set of ears she craved for the subsequent kitchen table rehashes. When it came time to watch Delray’s heartbeat on the screen Moshe was right there, and he took home from the matinée his own souvenir glossy. Even though he would have liked to magnet it to his fridge like Evie had done, that position was too public, so he hid it away in his bedroom in an androgynous yellow frame since they had agreed beforehand not to pose the S-question of the ultrasound technician. At times they regretted their decision. On the not so infrequent nights when their curiosity got the better of them, Moshe would unstick the picture from Evie’s refrigerator door, bring it over to the couch, and hold it up between them. They turned it this way and that, but for all their scrutiny the sooty moonscape offered up no clues to their untrained eyes. The word on the street, though, bolstered the parents’ inkling. All the black-clad nonnas in the fruiterie who stopped Evie to apply a caliper gaze to her bulge were in accord. Since she carried samovar style, a boy they decreed it would be.

  The full-length mirror was just one more instrument of pregnancy torture as far as Evie was concerned. Used to be she didn’t mind checking herself out
in it mornings, stripped down. Maybe she wasn’t what you’d call a beauty, but on a good day she could turn a head or two. Ancient history.

  The new Evie was a bloater. Her skin could barely contain her. Her ankles puffed out like cinnamon buns. As for her other body parts, they had their own tales of abuse to report to the monitoring agency. Her cheeks and nose had darkened until they looked like they’d been brushed with an egg-wash, and her pupik, an innie under the ancien régime, now protruded from her belly like a coconut macaroon. Evie chalked it up to poor planning. It must have been because she’d mated with a baker that she looked as if she’d been popped into an oven at 350. If she’d wanted to bloom in pregnancy she should have hooked up with a florist.

  Evie was growing time-lapse style, the layers of fat accreting as if she were a candlewick God was dipping and redipping in tallow now that he’d gone off modelling with clay. In response to her unaccustomed bulk, Evie’s hip bones rejigged themselves and their new configuration had her walking like she’d forgotten that she’d left Trigger back at the stable. Apropos, you couldn’t even say that her legs were fully operational as tools of locomotion. They still carried her between the bedroom and the bathroom and the kitchen, but at distances outside the demarcation of that triangle they balked. This trickledown effect of Evie’s girth put a crimp in her well-laid plans, rendering her housebound far earlier in the pregnancy than she’d anticipated.

  The mother-to-be clocked off on leave from the newspaper and settled in to wait for Delray to make his appearance. She hoped that her hasty departure from work would scupper the surprise shower she’d overheard was in the works. There were no secrets in Cubicle Land. It was the etiquette that had her stumped. What do you do with all the presents when you have no baby to show for your efforts at the end of the nine months? Not even, kaynahorah, a dead baby for which at least there were rules. Emily Post didn’t have a chapter that applied to Evie’s particular situation. She’d checked. In a pinch, she figured she could extrapolate from the advice on how to dispose of the wedding gifts when a marriage was called off at the last minute, but Evie was just as happy not having to deal with this eventuality. Didn’t she have enough on her plate?

  Not that there was any assurance that the home front would be any more of a shower-free zone than the office. None of the Anti-Shabbosites was aware of Evie’s plan to farm out this baby. Her friends naturally presumed she’d be keeping it, otherwise why wouldn’t she have patronized the clinic down on Jeanne-Mance Street that Judy’s pristine southern hemisphere could personally vouch for? No other explanation made sense. So far though, the subject had yet to be broached directly and Moshe hadn’t picked up any outside rumblings. The forecast looked clear.

  It was a relief to Evie that she no longer had to appear in public draped in so many metres of fabric that she felt like a yurt. Moshe tried to convince her to step outside on his arm to breathe in some fresh air. It wasn’t healthy for Delray to be cooped up inside all day and her crampy legs could do with a bit of stretching, but Evie was having none of it. Overinflated as she was, she saw herself as a grotesque. She refused even the shortest of excursions that Moshe proposed, to the shaded bench in the park just one street over where she feared to be mistaken for an installation. No, she and the couch were sticking together for the duration.

  Isolation wasn’t a problem. Anti-Shabbosites from the distaff side popped by in a steady stream providing Evie with goodies and gossip and lotions.

  “This bag balm is great. You’re gonna love it,” Dizzy assured her. “It prevents stretch marks and moisturizes like nobody’s business. Guaranteed. My customers all swear by it.”

  “You can’t prevent stretch marks.” Evie corrected her friend’s deceptive sales pitch. “Once you have them, you have them for life.”

  “You know what I mean. Make them less visible. For lots of guys stretch marks are a turnoff. You can’t be too careful.”

  “Funnily enough,” Evie paused to resettle the Quonset hut of her belly, “guys are the least of my issues right now.” Still, Evie scrutinized the fine print on the container. She’d always been a serious label analyzer by virtue of her no-nut childhood, but since Delray moved in she’d become downright obsessive.

  “It says here that it’s meant for veterinary usage only.”

  “You can ignore that. Trust me. Just go ahead and slather it on your stomach. While you’re at it you can put it on your heels, your elbows, anywhere it’s dry or scaly. Why do you insist on reading all that disclaimer stuff anyway? You know if you ever read all the possible side effects listed on the brochures that come with your pill bottles, you’d never take anything and drop over dead probably.”

  Evie was unrelenting. “It says here it’s meant for udders.”

  “Look, I use it all the time on rough skin. And not just me. Millions of women can’t be wrong. Why else would the stuff come in such a cutesy little tin? Explain me that. You think the farmers buy it that way for Bossy’s sore tits?”

  “You really use it yourself.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You use it instead of all the other stuff from the cosmetics counter.”

  “On my hair even, when it’s sun parched.”

  “And you never noticed any negative side effects?”

  “Mooo.”

  These neighbourly visits were necessarily more constrained than in the old days what with so many half-truths to keep properly aligned in Evie’s mind, so many wildfires to stomp out. It was only with Moshe, her co-respondent, that she could let down her guard.

  “You’ll have a lot of time on your hands once Delray’s born and gone, Mosh. What’ll you do with yourself?”

  Moshe was in the midst of painting each of Evie’s toenails a different colour. His job was a tad sloppy. He didn’t know from cotton balls. He thought that maybe he should tape them off, like when you’re painting crown moulding, but lacking any procedural guidance from their owner, he went ahead and did them free hand. Evie wouldn’t complain even if he did make a hash of it. She couldn’t reach them herself to do the job; she couldn’t even see them.

  “I don’t know. I hardly remember how I used to spend my time before all of this.”

  He didn’t tell her the truth—that he never wanted the pregnancy to end. Evie could keep right on ballooning until she dwarfed the Orange Julep. It wouldn’t bother him. He wanted their intimacy, however artificial, to go on forever, but Delray’s arrival would mark the end of their cozy domesticity. They weren’t living together, strictly speaking, but Moshe had established a bit of an outpost at Evie’s place the more sedentary she’d become. It was daddy who did all the nesting in this pregnancy. But soon Moshe would have to unpartner himself, unfather himself, and generally unmoor himself from everything that mattered in his life.

  “What about you?” he asked back, hoping for a hint that Evie might be harbouring comparable inclinations.

  “Pick up on my old life, I guess. Put all this behind me.”

  No way could he wring any comfort out of that reply. Moshe’s position in her old life was discretely measurable, across the dinner table and one seat over where the place card read Challah Man. And that’s where he’d wind up again. Moshe knew himself. It was his very goodness that had snagged him this gig, but goodness didn’t work to his advantage in the long haul. In his experience, women liked a trace of the no-goodnik to jazz things up a bit, but there were no dark corners to his character that would lend him a bit of broody interest.

  “You really don’t think all this will leave any dent on you? That you’ll just be able to walk away?”

  “I guess my hormones will have a word to say about that. But in the end I have to walk away, Mosh. Otherwise what was it all for?”

  Moshe had a healthy male respect for hormones. He’d already observed their random abuse of power over the pregnant Evie, and he dreaded the postpartum havoc they might wreak. Si
nce day one he’d been trying to steer her onto the subject of the immediate aftermath, to get her to open up. He feared that if she didn’t talk it out now, down the road he’d be dealing with a postnatal train wreck, but as she often did, Evie flipped the conversational focus over to papa, hoping to stave off that discussion for a while longer.

  “You’ve been a good father, you know?”

  “Come on, I haven’t had to do any heavy lifting. That all comes later.”

  “Don’t demean yourself. You’ve done plenty.”

  Moshe blew on her toes to avoid facing her compliment head on. “Thanks,” he said, then looked back up at her. “To be honest, it does worry me sometimes that Delray probably won’t have a father while he’s growing up, no man there to lean on, but I guess Amélie will figure it out.”

  Moshe had the makings of the best kind of father in Evie’s estimation, a motherly father. What a waste that he wouldn’t have the chance to take his blossoming paternal skills out for a spin with Delray once he was born.

  “You know what I worry about?” she asked him.

  “Tell me.”

  “Promise not to laugh?”

  “Promise.”

  She didn’t continue until she’d checked out the set of his face, hoping to size up the sincerity of his oath. “Well … it’s that he’ll inherit my ditz genes.”

  Moshe was relieved that it was a low-level worry that she chose to pull out of her over-stocked pantry this time around, easily counterable with a bunt, or so he thought.

  “You’re no ditz. And I qualify as an expert here. Have you ever met my sister Dina?”

  “See, I knew it. You’re not taking me seriously. And I trusted you to. But I am a ditz. More than that. An idiot, an imbecile. Demented. Call it what you want. It’s all the same. Someone who’d come up with a wacko scheme like this? I deserve to be put away and have them throw away the key. And what do you do? You deny it. Maybe it’s your head that needs to be examined, not mine.”