Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  The escalation took him by surprise though it shouldn’t have. Ever since Evie’d been off work she’d been stuck on an overthinking jag in terms of the whole Delray initiative. It was an unproductive line of reflection since it was too late to close that barn door but she couldn’t stop herself from questioning every choice she’d made along the way, chewing herself out over every self-perceived mistake in an endless tormented loop. In the movies, Moshe thought, this was where the hero would slap the heroine in the face to snap her out of it and she’d thank him for it, but since he wasn’t the physical type, he went behind Evie’s back to enlist the aid of her dictionary to douse the flare-up.

  “You’re on the wrong track. I wouldn’t label your behaviour as ditzy, strictly speaking. I’d use a term like inventive, or avant-garde maybe. Besides, I don’t think a boy can be a ditz. Definitionally speaking I mean.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Her tone had downgraded to merely pouty. The word-y talk was starting to work its magic, but it could only go so far. Moshe took her hands between his own to rub away the last bit of distress that they held, “Amélie strikes me as pretty grounded. If Delray has his head in the clouds, she’ll anchor him.”

  “So you’re a nurture over nature guy?”

  “I pick and choose according to my mood,” Moshe said.

  “Me too. On the one hand I like to think that maybe nature will out and he’ll grow up to be like us in the end. We’re not so bad, I don’t think. As parental material goes.”

  “High praise indeed.”

  “On the other hand, things might go easier for him if he isn’t all that different from Amélie.”

  Moshe could sense her probing on her person for a phantom third hand to keep the topic rolling. He arrested her search. “Evie, we just have to accept that it’s something we’ll never know and move on.”

  “You’re right. I know you are. But Mosh, before we leave the subject of things we’ll never know, do you ever wonder what kind of mother she’ll be, Amélie? Not that I’m implying that she’ll be anything but a good mother. I don’t mean that. More her style of mothering. Laissez-faire, smothering, super strict. What do you figure?”

  He let himself be drawn in. “Laissez-faire? I think somehow no. If I had to guess, I’d say on the strict side, I suppose. No-nonsense. Fair. But it’s hard to pin down that kind of thing. There are probably as many styles out there as there are mothers. Take your mum as an example. How would you qualify her style of mothering?”

  “Mine? Easy. Ess, ess.”

  “Well,” Moshe said, “I think we can safely cross that style off our list.”

  Chapter 17

  EVIE DIDN’T COME BY HER HOSTESSING PROWESS via the milkman. Her mother’s parties were legendary; no event went unsung on her watch. And now Marilyn had an excuse to strip the bubble wrap off the punch bowl and spit polish the platters. The idea of a party only came to her gradually. At first she’d figured on bringing into town just those few Caravan alums who would be directly involved in Evie’s delivery, the medicos from the original group. But she caught herself thinking small and recalibrated. Here she had the perfect opportunity to parlay a minimalist gathering into a full-blown reunion of the core gang of seventeen. They were getting on, after all. At sixty, Marilyn was the youngest. When if not now?

  Her party planning juices started to burble in earnest. The only possible snafu she foresaw regarded the timing of the affair. It had to fit neatly around the baby’s arrival and go know when that would be. After communing with her calendar, Marilyn fixed on the Saturday night of the week preceding Evie’s due date. It was a safe-ish bet. The Troys were late for everything. Their tardiness was notorious in their circle. Any baby claiming that family’s horological lineage would surely be locked into the same pattern, unless of course the pokiness genes were recessive.

  A dinner party she pooh-poohed. Too pedestrian. A cocktail party ditto. This bash needed an angle to lend it some of Marilyn’s name-brand sizzle. She tossed and turned all night trying to come up with the perfect gimmick — she did all her best thinking asleep — and sure enough by morning she’d come up with it. A costume party. Marilyn threw on her robe and headed straight to the computer. Breakfast could wait. She sat down at the keyboard and composed an e-invitation that spelled out the sartorial regulations for the night. “Modern garb forbidden,” it began in bolded caps. “Come dressed as you were on Monday May 11, 1970.” The Caravanners were now of an age where details were starting to drop off the edges; the names of all those grandchildren, where they set down their glasses, why they walked into a room, but that date in May was incised on the brain of every last woman on the guest list. All of them recalled precisely what they were wearing on that particular spring afternoon forty years before, those housewives-off-to-a-bridge-luncheon costumes that allowed them to infiltrate Parliament disguised as cream puffs, those prissy getups that snookered the Hill commissionaires into dismissing them as harmless wee ladies come to observe their government in action. Oh, they remembered all right.

  Marilyn’s party dress code was inspired. Sixteen RSVPs zipped into her inbox before the day was out. The invitation sent all her old companions chugging up their attic steps to dig up the outfits that they had wrapped in tissue paper and sani-boxed the way other women preserved their wedding gowns. They shook them out and held them up by the windows to assess the damage the years had wrought. All in all the clothing had weathered the interval in decent enough shape, creased and faded maybe, but then so were they. A trip to the seamstress to let the side-seams out a bit and they’d be good to go.

  Jake worked at the airport. He was accustomed to the thunder of low-flying planes overhead. But the din of seventeen women tarting themselves up in his second floor bedrooms outgunned those 747s easy. He was thankful he’d been assigned to kitchen duty so he wouldn’t have to witness the chaos upstairs, where he would be in any event unwelcome. Marilyn shielded Jake from all the tumult with intent. She didn’t want him entertaining any second thoughts about his decision to let her Caravan cohort loose on his factory. True, they were professional women now, and grannies most of them, but somehow tonight, with forty mental years shed, these babes were gearing up to par-ty. Oh yeah.

  “Are those jalapeños I smell frying? And onions?” Arlene was powdering her nose in front of the mirror in Evie’s old bedroom, but she retracted her puff to free up her nostrils for a verificatory sniff. Sure enough, they recognized that vaguely flatulent aroma of her old nemesis. Chili. The other girls’ slowpoke noses took a few more seconds but once they nailed it they hooted over Marilyn’s crock-pot homage to all the church basement suppers their succession of hosts had simmered up for them as they wended their way across the country. Back then it had seemed as though an epidemic of chili was overtaking the country in lock step with the Caravan. Chili of one variation or another glopped into their bowls every blessed night as predictably as Oliver’s gruel, and occasionally, when their meals were split between two different towns, it sneaked in a guest appearance at lunchtime too. Only at breakfast could they count on being spared. By the time they reached Ottawa most of them had OD’d on the dish that looked like vomitus and stank like Tijuana. But tonight, by washing it down with massive lashings of beer, even those girls who’d sworn that they’d never be able to look another kidney bean in the face for the rest of their lives found that Jake’s Chili Vegetariano slid down just fine.

  Evie wasn’t in attendance, though she’d been invited. Her absence was calculated. She worried that the get-together had the potential to turn too liquid, and if it did, she didn’t want to be on hand to witness her personal medical team playing chug-a-lug. It was a good call. Even though no breathalyzer would have deemed them drunk, all the other euphemisms applied. They were loose, they were happy, they were relaxed. These girls knew how to party and they knew how to protest.

  Marilyn, May 1970

>   It didn’t matter how often she watched them. The ragtag skits her comrades put on in all the cities and hamlets en route moved Marilyn to tears every time. Her assignment as prop manager prevented her from assuming a role onstage, freeing her to sit in the audience and blub. But even if Marilyn wasn’t included among the dramatis personae, her contribution to the pantomimes was critical. It was up to her to acquire the gear the actors needed for their performances and to position it according to the script demands.

  Most of the props had been easy to round up, purchased at one sweep through Canadian Tire for under twenty bucks. No fuss no muss. Marilyn rolled her cart purposefully down the housewares aisle where she helped herself to some shish-kabob skewers and kitchen shears. She caught sight of her actions in the store’s overhead anti-theft mirrors. The reflection was all innocence, a prettyish young housewife in a car coat stocking up on equipment for the evening’s barbecue. A security guard monitoring the mirrors would never imagine that instead of threading the skewers with marinated chicken cubes and pineapple chunks she was planning on going home and sticking one of them up her snatch in the upstairs bathroom where she would subsequently bleed to death on the octagonal tiles. An honest mistake on his part. Marilyn herself was new to the underbelly of innocuous objects, but she was learning fast. In fact, as a solidarity move, she was maintaining a personal boycott against the sharp and pointy. Irrational maybe, but Marilyn had found religion and was carving out her own level of observance. For the rest of her life, Marilyn would shun ballpoint pens, stiletto heels, and carrots. Such was the zeal of the convert.

  The prop master hung a left down the cleaning products aisle and pulled some supersized containers of drain cleaner and bleach off the shelves, adding them to the kitchen gadgets that were clanking about in the bottom of her basket. The knitting needles she required had already been supplied gratis, courtesy of Abie’s of Montreal, sparing her a trip to the yarn-goods aisle. A quick zip over to the toy department for a plastic stethoscope and assorted sundries and she’d be ready for the checkout line.

  The Abortion Caravan troupe had a limited, summer stock repertoire, but its audiences didn’t come out expecting Fiddler on the Roof. Its morality plays cut to the chase. Marilyn’s favourite, if you could call it that, was the one starring Arlene in the role of the desperate teen. Arlene begs the doctor on bended knee for an abortion, emoting her little heart out as if she were Lillian Gish. One look at her bare feet and shabby attire and the doctor boots her out of his office. In sweeps Martha dressed to kill, clearly bent on the same procedure. She opens her purse and fans out hundred dollar bills like a winning bridge hand. The doctor pockets the cash and leads Madame by the hand into his examining room to check out his curettes. On her way out of the doctor’s office, all smiles, she steps neatly over the teenager’s body so inconsiderately splayed out across the threshold, blocking her way. Curtain.

  These skits primed the pump for the public meetings that hitched onto their coattails. The women in the audience, emboldened by the Caravan theatricals that echoed their own experiences, stood up and spilled out stories they had never before dared to share; stories that fuelled and fanned Marilyn’s nightmares. Every tale was harrowing, but one in particular burrowed into her heart, therein to take up lodgings for the rest of her life.

  They were gathered in a Saskatoon school gym that night. A willowy young woman rose from the bleachers when Arlene opened the floor to the turnout. “My younger sister Jesse committed suicide,” she began. “Four years ago. I was the one who found her. She was hanging from a beam in the garage. I went to get my bike and there she was. No note. Nothing. But I knew she killed herself rather than tell our parents that she was pregnant. She couldn’t make herself say it to them. I begged her to. She wouldn’t. She was only sixteen. A top student. She wasn’t wild. She wasn’t a bad girl. Just the opposite. Maybe it’s hard for all of you here to believe in this day and age, but she only half-understood what was happening. Sex-ed, what kind of joke was that? And words like contraception, abortion. A foreign language to us. She asked me to help her, but I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell her where to go. I didn’t have a clue. What kind of sister was I? I should have told our parents myself. That’s what I should have done.” She paused to collect herself in the stone silence of the hall, righting her shoulders and straightening her flowered blouse that must have concealed a back stripped down to the bloody sinews after so many years of self-flagellation. “Our family. It’s ruined. Nothing can change that. I saw your poster, so I’m here now. I don’t want this to have to happen to one more girl.”

  Jesse’s ignorance was not at all difficult for Marilyn to comprehend, in fact. She herself used to be one of those girls, colossally innocent, a reproductive dummkopf. How old was Marilyn before she understood that drinking from the same Coke bottle after a boy had already touched it to his lips wouldn’t make her pregnant? No degree of unknowingness could shock her. Her heart grieved for Jesse who would have been her exact age had she lived. A girl like Jesse, Marilyn might have shared a hall locker with her or studied for geometry tests beside her in the school library. Marilyn could see her so clearly she could have reached out and touched her. In that chilly Saskatchewan gymnasium, Marilyn co-opted Jesse as her sister, the dedicatee in invisible ink of all of her future Caravan endeavors.

  Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Sudbury. At every stop they came out to testify; women who would never be able to bear children, their insides cut to shreds by backstreet boys, women infected by instruments so dirty they wouldn’t have used them for garden tools, women berated, bullied, blackmailed, women reviewed by the TACs and branded by them as SLUTs. Marilyn listened to them day in day out, but no matter how often their stories repeated themselves, never did she become inured to their outpourings.

  The engorged Caravan closed in on the capital. Some of the extra vehicles they accumulated en route didn’t belong to the committed. Ever since that incident in Thunder Bay, OPP squad cars took it upon themselves to ride shotgun. The Caravan had buffeted skirmishes aplenty with tail-gating anti-abortion militants who shouted down their message and sabotaged their meetings, but until that night they had never descended to violence. The bloody punchout erupted in the audience after a brief oral preamble. Of all the subjects the girls had covered to prepare themselves for potential misadventures their odyssey might throw their way, they’d never touched on refereeing, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered, Marilyn supposed. Even Arlene with her swim team shoulders couldn’t have prised those two apart.

  One of the officers who arrived on the scene informed Arlene, who had an I’m-in-charge look about her, that for the remainder of their journey through his province, they would benefit from a police chaperone.

  “Thank you constable,” Arlene said, “but you don’t have to babysit us. It’s all over. Just a dustup. We can look after ourselves. This just sprang up too fast, before we had a chance to get a handle on it. Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”

  “Ma’am, trust me on this. It’s not just a question of the odd punch being thrown or your tires being slashed. Before all this is settled, people are going to get hurt, maybe killed. I don’t want it to be one of you. You ladies will be babysat.”

  This wasn’t Marilyn’s first time in Ottawa. She’d been to the capital before on a school trip, a yawn from start to finish. It was one of those pedagogical jaunts promoted as an end-of-the-school-year treat, but the teachers at her high school were clearly a bit hazy on the difference between reward and punishment. The expedition was a monumental shlep. Maybe Ottawa was the country’s seat of government, but it was a hick burg with nothing much to redeem it as far as she could see. Everything was so fusty, the Parliament buildings, the MP who shook their hands, their box lunches. And the debate they watched from the gallery over some bill to amend an amendment to an amendment; even shul wasn’t that mind-numbing.

  But today when the Caravan swung into tow
n like a cocky new sheriff and the verdigris towers loomed into view, she approached Parliament Block with a new sense of participation, of ownership. Finally she got it. This is what Monsieur Coulomb had been trying to drill into their resistant skulls in Civics class. She, Marilyn Henkin from Côte Saint-Luc, had a genuine role to play in the governmental process. Well, to be completely accurate it was a role at one remove. The other girls would be doing all the negotiating after all, the girls from the Vancouver inner circle who had set the Caravan in motion, but still they would be funneling Marilyn’s inchoate thoughts. And look who they’d be talking to. Marilyn could hardly believe it. It was all arranged. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau himself would be at the table.

  Now Pierre had it in his power to redeem Marilyn’s view of politicians, and she was in good company. When Trudeau stepped out from behind the wheel of his sexy little two-seater, his signature black cape swinging, a rose in his lapel, all the women in the country swooned over the Elvis of world leaders. He was both Canadian and cool, two words that before his time had never been caught canoodling. Pierre was forging a new prime ministerial model that Marilyn could get behind. He was a modern guy.

  Before the girls on the Caravan undertook to inject some political smarts into her, all Marilyn really knew about Trudeau’s activities was that he was dating Barbra Streisand, but the fact that he was squiring around a Broadway diva didn’t cut any ice with them. They’d informed their protégée early on in the trek that it was her Ottawa heartthrob who was the very author of their discontent, the Frankenstein who’d unleashed the Therapeutic Abortion Committees on the country in 1969, him and no other. Pierre was committed to the TAC system. It was his baby. Let Marilyn ruminate on that for a while. So she did.

  Maybe Marilyn’s reasoning was faulty, she still distrusted her fledgling analytical skills, but the way she saw it Trudeau had tried to do some good. Before he came into the picture, abortion in any way shape or form had been illegal. Period. She’d been coached on the history. For a hundred years it was either do-it-yourself or be-done-to. Some choice. Leap into acid or leap into flames. But then Trudeau stepped up to the plate. He ushered a bill through Parliament that allowed women to have a safe hospital abortion if a Therapeutic Abortion Committee deemed them needy. Okay, so the committee system was flawed. Even worse than flawed she was prepared to admit, it was downright stinko. But in her eyes, after a century of nuthin’, Trudeau had made one small step for womankind and for that she gave him credit. Not full credit, but maybe a C+. The girls, though, they red-inked a D- across his bill and considered themselves generous. To them he was the wuss who had the authority but hadn’t gone far enough. Marilyn couldn’t help but notice that no one ever went far enough to suit them. On any subject. It was part of their lefty charm.