Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  The MPs left their benches to get a better view of the tumult. Liberals, Tories and NDP-ers mingled on the non-partisan central green carpet, heads canted back as if they were out birding. All the chanting from above affected the Speaker’s style. “Wesume your seats, wesume your seats, wesume your seats,” but repetition as a rhetorical tool did nothing to increase his authority. None of the elected representative sat back down at his bidding. In the midst of all the ruckus, the House maintenance men materialized with chain cutters. A cheer from the floor greeted their arrival. All this attention was foreign to them. They were used to modest gratitude when they tweaked an office thermostat that was stuck on the sauna setting, but normally they operated under the radar of the Parliamentarians. They threw their shoulders back, marched across the floor with a we’ll-lick-’em gait, and mounted the stairs. Their enthusiasm soon faded. The protesters jiggled their legs and stomped their bound feet to hamper the chain crew’s progress. Applying tools to moving targets wasn’t the specialty of these men in grey overalls. The clogged drain traps and flickering fluorescents that were their stock in trade cooperated by being inert. Like surgeons they expected their patients to be safely anaesthetized before they made the first cut. It wasn’t cricket to move in with the scalpel while the crash victim was still flailing on the gurney. Oh, how they now longed for the cozy anonymity of the boiler room.

  God must have been listening to their prayers. Their shop steward, roused from his siesta, showed up in their wake and ordered his minions to cease and desist. Freeing radical nutcases wasn’t part of their job description. He signalled them with an arched eyebrow to drop their equipment where they stood, and to the man they obeyed. Tools littered the floor harum-scarum like the detritus of a thwarted jail-break. The exit command from his second brow was de trop. His workers were already scuttering downstairs as fast as their steel-toed boots would carry them. The Speaker was envious. He wished that he had someone higher up on the Parliamentary totem pole who would come along and shoo him out of there, but he was flying solo. Too bad he didn’t have a gavel like the Americans gave to their Speaker. Now they knew how to govern, those Amerikanskis. He could whack a head or two into line with one of those mothers. He considered the scene around him one last time. What the hell.

  “This sitting of the House is suspended.” No one heard him. His words were mashed to a pulp in all the tohu-bohu, but at least he’d done his duty. The history books wouldn’t be able to fault him there, presuming they’d swallow his uncorroborated version of the events. The Honourable Speaker turned his back on the Chamber, the orderly conduct of which he had sworn to maintain, and bolted the mayhem in search of a restorative Johnny Walker.

  The Commissionaires regarded each other. No way around it, this was their baby now. They picked the abandoned tools up off the floor and commenced to snippety-snip as if they were wielding secateurs to prune the rhododendrons. Their delicate manipulations made negligible headway until one of them landed three lucky chomps in a row, rousing his colleagues to put a bit more shoulder into the task, and in short order, schooled in the proper technique, they succeeded in unshackling the women. The guards herded the interlopers out through the front archway and led them well away from the building where they wiped their hands of them with the utmost relief. The girls were blinded by the explosion of camera flashes that greeted them. A bouquet of microphones blossomed in their faces.

  “Ladies, ladies. Look this way.”

  “Over here. Give us a group shot. Pull in tighter.”

  “Come on girls. Can’t you give us a smile? Tell the public about your Ottawa adventure.”

  “Ladies, I’m Erica Hart from CBC television. We’re doing a live feed, coast-to-coast.”

  The diminutive reporter had elbowed her way up to the front of the scrum. “Were you aware when you started your protest today that no Canadian Parliament has ever been brought down by a disturbance from the gallery? Not once in its 103-year history? Could you comment on that?” Erica’s parliamentary mole was pure gold.

  In fact they were unaware that their operation was Guinness worthy, but the girls refused to address any journalists until their full complement had reassembled and at the current count they were one body short. Marilyn was still thumping down the stairs from the gallery. The youngest member of their brigade had done an exemplary job with her chain. It would have taken the jaws-of-life to disconnect her. In desperation, the chief commissionaire took his Swiss army knife out of his pocket and with its midget Phillips head unscrewed her chair from the floor just to be rid of her. Let them deduct the damn seat from his pay if they wanted. It would be money well spent.

  Arlene turned to Erica Hart once Marilyn had limped up to assume her rightful place alongside the others. She was still tethered to her chair. It adorned the walkway beside her like a clubbed seal.

  “It was not our goal to shut down Parliament, but to rouse it to action. We are demonstrating here today to draw the country’s eyes to a national disgrace; to show the citizens of Canada that our government, through its gross neglect, has been complicit in the death and mutilation of thousands of women by forcing them to seek out underground abortions. We have crossed this country of ours and taken in the voices of its women at every stop we made. It is their message that we are delivering. Our government’s treatment of females as a disposable sub-class has to stop now.”

  “But why are you targeting this government, the very one that decriminalized abortions performed in hospital?” Erica Hart had done her homework.

  “The Therapeutic Abortion Committee plan that the Liberal government put in place is an insult to the women of Canada. The law is so narrowly defined that the number of legitimately needy women who benefit from it is infinitesimal. The government gave us the Therapeutic Abortion Committees, patted us on our heads, and expected us to go back to our kitchens, bake cookies, and shut up. But we won’t be gagged any longer. On this day, May 11, 1970, we declare war on the government of Canada. Unless Prime Minister Trudeau agrees to legalize all…”

  The Peace Tower clock started to chime three o’clock. At the sound Arlene cut off her oration mid-flow. She turned her back on the CBC reporter and craned her neck to look up at the Tower. Her fellow House ejectees turned and jacked up their heads in sync, shading their eyes. In no time, the thousands of protesters followed suit until everyone on the lawn shared an air-show posture.

  “Erica, Erica, can you fill us in on what’s happening?” Back at the Toronto anchor desk Andrew Peterson was looking at a dead shot of the Tower against a backdrop of blue sky. Those Ottawa clucks called this news?

  “I can’t figure it out, Andrew. Nothing’s going on up there that I can see. No wait. Wait. There seems to be some activity on the parapet that surrounds the flagpole. Three people. No, correct that, four. Women it looks like from here, if I’m not mistaken. They’re lined up, carrying something across their shoulders.”

  “Are you able to make out what it is from your vantage point, Erica? If they overpowered the guards to get up there, could it be a hostage? Or a body?”

  “I don’t know Andrew. They’ve set it down. It’s out of sight now. But judging by the sheer size of the thing, I don’t think it could be a person.”

  “Can you see what they’re doing now?”

  “They’re working on the flag, I think. Yes. It’s starting to go down. It could be,” Erica hypothesized on the fly, “that they’re planning on lowering it to half-mast as a way of honouring Canadian women who have died from abortions. That would be entirely in line with their principles.” But the flag didn’t stop at the pole’s midpoint. It continued its descent all the way to the bottom where the flag detail unlatched it altogether and jettisoned it over the side. It drifted down till it sheathed one of the gargoyles that poked showily out from the Peace Tower at a viagran right angle. The heads of the perpetrators ducked out of sight for a few minutes while the cameras remained fixed
on the denuded pole.

  “Andrew, there they are again. Can you see them? They’re hoisting a new flag of some kind up the pole. Something enormous from the look of it. That must be what they were carrying earlier.”

  The Caravanners high atop Parliament were heave-ho-ing on the halyard with all their might until their flag reached the top, but once it did, it hung limply in the still air, its folds hugging the pole like a sleeping bat on a downspout. This was a kink the girls hadn’t foreseen. For all their meticulous preparations, for all their consideration of every eventuality, they hadn’t accounted for the weather. The impotent flag-bearers stood at the base of the pole, cursing the elements, or lack of them, until a sympathetic wind kicked up out of the west and unfurled the new standard full-length against the sky.

  “Its shape is very unusual, Erica. What significance do you attach to it?” Erica stewed internally. To think they gave that lamebrain the anchor spot over her.

  “It’s a uterus, Andrew. No doubt about it.”

  The shouts from the ground were deafening when the crowd saw the knitted ensign flying defiantly over Parliament. Marilyn stared up proudly. All the girls had done their bit on it of course, but the giant red maple leaf rib-stitched in the centre of the womb was her own expert handiwork. How long would it be allowed to wave, she wondered, before security broke through the barricaded door to the flag platform and yanked it down without ceremony as if it were just some muffler with a hormone disorder? And what would become of the flag that had come to life in the girls’ hands, the flag they had worked on night after night all across the country in anticipation of this very moment, the flag whose progression, in Marilyn’s mind, tracked her awakening to the world around her? If she had her druthers, it would come to its final resting place in a museum, duly labelled and explicated behind a protective pane of glass, like the Magna Carta. Then, the way her daydream spun it, she could pay a visit to the exhibit someday with her daughter who would laugh and roll her eyes to hear her mother reminisce about a time in the not-so-distant past when women didn’t have property rights to their own bodies and telephones had dials. Marilyn treated herself to the vision for a minute or so, but then she redrafted it to jibe with reality. In all likelihood their flag would end up dumped out back in the Parliamentary garbage along with the shepherd’s pie that had outlived its cafeteria shelf life.

  For now, though, she stood on the grass with her sisters and soaked up the tintamarre that their precious flag inspired. The women crowding in on her from all sides whooped and howled, they sobbed and sang. Marilyn basked in the close-knit cacophony for a time, but the exhaustion and exhilaration of the past few days caught up with her then and there. She didn’t faint but her mind temporarily checked into a spa and let itself blank out for a spell. She might have spent a few welcome out-of-body hours decompressing in a mud wrap if it weren’t for one woman’s piercing shriek. The pitch of that particular screech pressed buttons Marilyn didn’t even know she had. It pulled its fingernails down the blackboard of her soul. That single scream perforated her eardrum with its intensity, and once it succeeded in popping a hole, barged in to her body through the aperture, grabbed Marilyn’s very core in its fist, and shook her back to consciousness. It delivered its message in no uncertain terms. “Snap out of it toots. Your presence is required.”

  Evie’s screams were by now so overamped that they had the factory’s ceiling baffles quivering. Delray had made the executive decision to arrive early, plunk in the middle of Marilyn’s party, forcing the revellers to decamp to Jake’s PDQ so they could guide Evie’s baby into the world. Marilyn stood helplessly by, watching her daughter writhe on the rented hospital bed. The grandmother-to-be had no practical role to play now that it was D-Day. Her job title in the jury-rigged delivery room was Official Fretter. To this position she applied all her pent-up energy even though she knew it to be busy work. She had absolute faith in Arlene and Laura to get the job done. Evie wasn’t so sure. For a woman about to give birth she was more than normally discombobulated. She looked up at the doctor palpating her abdomen. No reassuring white coat; she was suited out and pillboxed like Jackie Kennedy. And as for the bouffant, bespectacled, and be-chinned nurse who was taking her pulse, Evie could have sworn she was Dame Edna.

  On top of being held captive in some crossover costume drama, here she’d penetrated the secret batcave of her father’s factory for the very first time in her life. Evie’d never gone to work with her dad. Most of her schoolmates, the offspring of accountants, shmatte mavens, university professors, and lawyers, were intimate with their fathers’ workspaces. On ped days their dads parked them at a free desk and put them to work stapling syllabi or boxing sweaters. Not Evie. She’d never made it beyond her father’s outer office. It was too much sanitizing trouble according to her dad who was anal about such matters. So the sight of all the assembly lines, rollers, and clamps that manipulated the in-flight snacks was new and threatening to Evie in her vulnerable state. If she didn’t watch out for her Delray, they might grab him, seal him in foil, and slip him into a galley cart with the pretzels and chips to be served up in the airspace between Montreal and Toronto. She had to remain vigilant. Laura glanced meaningfully over at Arlene. Mummy’s pulse was racing.

  While Evie was harbouring doubts about her medical crew, Marilyn was suffering comparable misgivings about this Moshe character who had shown up with her daughter. She checked the guy out, gangling, unprepossessing. A flyweight. He probably didn’t have the nerve to refuse Evie his help when his turn came up in the prenatal rotation schedule she’d set up with her friends. Evie would snap him like a twig when the final contractions started to kick in. But in fairness to the shlemiel, he never left her side. For a guy who was only there because he’d drawn the short straw, he clung to Evie’s hand, wiped her brow, and fed her ice chips as if he were the genuine article. Her Evie had accumulated a good reliable stable of friends in that crazy church she lived in, Marilyn had to admit. You could do worse.

  The factory was empty of employees. Usually the outfit ran 24/7. It was a living breathing mechanism as Jake liked to point out to his family. He frequently invoked the human body as a metaphor for his beloved operation whose various components mimicked, in his mind, the essential functions of the body’s main organs. They pumped, they transported, they cleansed, they reproduced. But when Jake got word while he was ladelling up the chili that Evie’s water had broken, he pulled the plug on the whole shebang without a hic of hesitation. He phoned in to his night supervisor at the plant and instructed him to announce through the PA that it was a Jewish holiday he’d lost track of and everyone on site should take off tout de suite and stay home for the next two days to boot. Jake’s employees loved the Jewish calendar sprinkled as it was with all those holidays whose gargly phonemes only the boss could pronounce but translated into a paid day off. As directed, they hotfooted it out of the factory, not wanting to offend the God of the Jews who was a vengeful God as everyone knew.

  The workers’ absence left plenty of floor space free for the rest of the Caravanners, the girls extraneous to the delivery. They weren’t meant to be on hand according to the master plan, but they’d held a quick confab in Marilyn’s dining room while the others were heading off to the factory and decided to go along for the ride to lend support and send out positive vibes. Weren’t they a team? They seated themselves away from the action, in the shadow of a stilled cookie conveyor, where they softly sang their old campfire songs, Arlene and Laura’s spiritual doo-wop girls.

  Considering it was a first birth, things were zipping along according to Dr. Arlene. Evie was grateful to hear it. She wasn’t sure she could tolerate another chorus of Kumbaya. A contraction took hold of her. She strained against the bed as if one of her father’s compressors were trying to squish her into a packageable rectangle. Laura lifted up the hem of the patient’s gown and took a few subterranean measurements. Evie was dilated to the max. She could pop a pilates bal
l out from between her crooked legs. Any time now.

  Delray got the message. He’d been living la vida loca in utero but the time had arrived for him to play the shit disturber on a grander stage. He did a few farewell back flips in his private pool and was about to go careering down the water slide full speed, revelling in his last bit of freedom. Delray was no dummy. He knew he was heading out into a world of no-no’s, a repressive regime of seat belts, door-gates, and training wheels. This would be the last time he’d be allowed to undertake a manoeuvre as risky as this one minus a helmet and shin guards and he was determined to make the most of the opportunity. He floored it and headed down the birth canal. Photo radar would clock him in the red zone.

  Evie had a contraction that ate all her previous contractions alive. Jake could kiss the security deposit on the rental bed goodbye. Evie’s nails were furrowing the mattress as if she were tilling the soil for spring wheat. Her screaming was audible as far away as Vermont. Moshe, who had been whispering discreetly into her ear until now, was forced to yell out to her to be heard above her own wails. “Remember the pain, remember the pain,” he shouted at the top of his lungs. It was a stupid thing to say, he knew, but worth a try. Moshe didn’t believe for one minute that Evie would be able to coolly give up the newborn Delray once she saw him in the flesh just because she’d already run him through the postage meter for Amélie’s address, whatever she claimed to the contrary. So he tried a new tack in his birth-coach chants. Enough of the daddy doggerel they’d taught him in prenatal class. He’d keep Evie focused on the negative. Maybe it would help her get past the rupture if he could encourage the agony of the birth to stay alive in her mind.

  Evie raised her sodden head from the pillow and turned her Uzi on Moshe, spraying him head to toe with her spleen. “Shut up with that ‘remember the pain’ crap. Shut up! What are you, crazy?” she shrieked. Her pitch could shatter glass. “If I remember the pain then I’ll never be able to have OUR baby when the time comes.”