Any Day Now

by Denise Roig

  Then they are in a small room filled floor to ceiling with boxes of files and a woman sitting at a desk with more files on it. She is smiling, but Boris can see that she has smiled this smile thousands of times and that it means nothing.

  The woman, tall when she stands up, gestures to a single chair. Boris sinks into it with his Woman. The woman they followed stays to interpret. They go at his Woman with questions — all of which she has answered a hundred times already, on paper, in person, on the phone. Yes, she wants a girl, preferably under two, yes, she is unmarried, no, there is no boyfriend at home, yes, she understands that some of the children have problems — mild problems! the tall one reassures her, very mild! — and yes, she understands that if after meeting with the child, she doesn’t want to keep her, she is under no obligation to do so.

  Boris listens to it all with growing excitement. A baby! They are here for a baby! Why hasn’t he figured this out before?

  “He’s been living in the closet for too long,” I say.

  “Lesley,” says Luba. Her voice is surprisingly soft.

  “This is a story,” I say. “We don’t know how it will turn out.”

  The two women lead Boris and the Woman to what must be a music room. On a set of rickety shelves sit harmonicas and tiny horns. One large tambourine, a few of its metal cymbals missing, hangs on the streaked, beige wall. Sit, the women gesture to a round, unvacuumed rug.

  “I’ll sit here,” the Woman informs them and lowers herself onto a nursery-size stool. The orphanage women look at each other. And then two other women in white aprons and white babushkas come in from a side door, a miniature, red-haired girl walking pigeon-toed between them. She must have been crying seconds before because tears stand on her pale cheeks. But now she is smiling and she comes right up to Boris and the Woman, and lifts her arms to be picked up and the Woman and Boris lift her up, their arms joining together in this first embrace. Everyone in the room sighs a collective sigh, even the woman with the one-time-only smile. Even Boris, who is, after all, only a coat.

  “Not so Russian a story after all,” says Luba.

  Luba knows another story. Three years ago a woman went to Moscow and then to Yaroslavl in a borrowed coat. The woman sat in that same room and the same little girl came out: red-haired, pigeon-toed, tears on pale cheeks. But the little girl, Natasha, did not stop crying when the woman picked her up. She did not stop crying when the woman and Alexei struggled to get her into the car. In the hotel, the girl threw her plate and cup, the stuffed bear and all the dolls the woman had brought in her suitcase. They bounced off the linoleum, off the wallpaper. When the woman tried to hold the child, to rock her, the girl made hissing sounds. She screamed so loud into the evening that the manager of the hotel came to the door, ready to accuse the woman of terrible things. When he saw the child by herself in the centre of the room and yelling at no one, he shook his head and left. In the night something deeper than sadness took hold. The girl slammed her head against the wall, fought with the bed so hard a sheet tore. The woman lay perfectly still on the other bed, counting seconds that would, please God!, accumulate into minutes.

  In the morning, she and Alexei and Natasha went back to the orphanage. Natasha looked drugged, moaned when anyone touched her.

  “You kept her up all night playing,” the tall woman said when she saw them. “New parents always do. Don’t you know that children must sleep?”

  Now the woman wept. She called Luba in Montreal, waking her.

  “This happens,” Luba said. “Some children can’t handle the first separation from the orphanage. Imagine how you would feel! It’s normal.”

  “This is not normal,” said the woman.

  “Yes, yes,” said Luba. “It is. You will see.”

  Luba asked to speak to the orphanage woman, who’d begun to look at the woman from Canada as if she was a nightmare come true. Her voice went up, up on the phone. When she hung up she said, “Natasha had bad flu this winter. That is all. And now you break her heart.”

  “I want another child,” said the woman. “I have paid $20,000 for a child and I deserve one who is healthy.” This was true, all true and justified, but something went cold in the woman as she said this, even in that warm, old coat.

  The orphanage woman made her sit on her stool for nearly two hours, then brought in another girl. But this girl, though she was cute and smiling, was nearly six. “A girl under the age of two,” the woman had written on half a dozen different applications. In the afternoon, two more girls filed in: one seemed spacey; the other had a rash running from her ear into her cheek. Scabies, they said. Easy to treat, they said. Then why aren’t you treating it? the woman asked. Why are you making this someone else’s problem?

  I saw twenty little girls over the next two weeks, even a few boys at the end, when the director himself was called in. I sat on my stool and looked at each child and tried to imagine her in my world. And I couldn’t. I want a strong child, I told the director.

  In the end, the orphanage asked me to leave. The director called Luba and told her to give me my money back, at least the part that was meant to be a donation to Baby House #2. And he told her to never, ever send another Canadian to his orphanage. I didn’t really want a child, he said. I was shopping for perfection. I wanted guarantees. There are no guarantees for anything ever, he said. Not even in your rich, lucky Canada.

  I left Boris with another friend of Luba’s, came home and talked my head off — shrinks, social workers, my surprised friends. I went over my story so many times it was like Luba and her car story, Luba and her stove story. Most said it was about rejection. I’d been rejected by my father and then by my ex-husband. Blah, blah.

  Luba, I have to say, didn’t fly out of my life like a tiny, doomed helicopter. To her, troubled people were interesting people. Every now and then, I would say something about babies and she’d just say, “No.” That’s all. I came to know my place. Sometimes I dreamed about Yaroslavl, its domes, that room with the tambourine, those children, all those children.

  “I love kids,” I tell Luba. She’s buttoning up her coat now.

  “I know,” says Luba.

  “I want that story, the one with Boris.”

  “You are an optimist,” says Luba. “That is the difference between us.”

  “Oh, you Russians.”

  “What have I done?” says Luba, looking alarmed.

  “You wear your pessimism like…”

  “Like you wore that poor, deluded old coat?” Luba asks. “Or rather wore him out. Talk about Russian drama.”

  “I would like another chance,” I say.

  Luba waves to the counter boy for our cheque, though it’s clear we’re supposed to pay at the cash. “Are you ready?” she asks.

  “I am,” I say, because I so much want to be.

  Luba stands, stretches, reaches her arms up, and the movement itself gives me hope.

  After Quebec

  Good Men

  Mac and cheese. A dusty can of Chef Boyardee. What would those people know anyway? Alexandrine reached deeper into the Lazy Susan, catching her shoulder on the cabinet frame — Tabernuche! — and pulled out a heavy can of something sloshy. Stewed tomatoes. Was there an expiry date on these things? Well, if you don’t have money you can’t afford to be choosy.

  “Food for the poor!” she said again, louder than before, but Benoit, standing at the kitchen door, gazing out, six plastic bags at his feet, still said nothing. He looked positively beatific this morning. God-blessed man, spending his retirement cheque on after-dinner mints and sparkling cranberry juice. Just give them peanut butter and graham crackers, some Minute Rice, Alexandrine had urged him, but no, he said, it was their holiday, too.

  “My holiday is sizably reduced this year, thanks to you and your big bleeding heart,” Alexandrine had said.

  “Al,” he’d answered, his eyes uncomprehending and innocent in that new way. “Al, we enjoy an abundant Christmas every year. We’re blessed.”
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br />   So they went to Florida every January. So what? So did lots of people. Though not everyone stayed right on the beach, instead of one of those blocks-away condos. Theirs was a nice, clean place with a separate bedroom and fully equipped kitchen, even maid service if they wanted. And last Christmas, Benoit had given her that string of freshwater pearls, the one she’d mentioned a few times. He was good with the girls, too. Jacinthe had moved home last summer with little Joey for a month until she’d gotten another job, and he’d said, of course, where else is a daughter supposed to go? And when Chantal and Roger needed help with a down payment, all he’d said was, Get me my chequebook. He expected the three boys to mind for themselves more, but if someone needed help putting a deck up or to borrow the snow blower, well, he wouldn’t say no.

  A good man. But crazy, too. The crazy part was new. And it was keeping Alexandrine up nights. Of course, she could be thankful he wasn’t keeping her up at night the way he once did. Lovin’, he’d called it. I’m just lovin’ you, darlin’, words he must have gotten from some country song but which had jack shit to do with his panting and shoving. He’d told her decades and decades ago that sometime soon she’d come to want it as much as he did. Once, right after Mathieu, the youngest, was born, Alexandrine had felt flutters down there, little butterfly flutters almost like when the babies would begin to move, but down lower, down there. She hadn’t told Benoit, just felt it, surprised, embarrassed, and it hadn’t happened again.

  But with his new-found religion (though that wasn’t the right word because Benoit had always been a daily-mass kind of man) he wasn’t so interested. She didn’t miss it — how can you miss what you don’t like? — but it left a space in the nights somehow. She crocheted more now, watched those late-night guys more. Time had expanded. Golden years, what a crock o’ shit. Alexandrine talked to herself a lot like this: holy shit, crock o’ shit, jack shit, shit for brains. She didn’t use the f-word at least. But she did like those shit expressions. They helped. Lord, they helped.

  “Well, unless I make a separate, special trip to Big Y right now, which is not possible since I’m serving at mass today and you’re a greeter, in case you forgot, that’s it, finis!” and Alexandrine hauled herself from the inner sanctum of her kitchen cupboard, a dented box of Kraft Dinner in hand, to face the angel of light himself. Benoit smiled. “Oh, well,” he said.

  By the time they’d driven the seven blocks to St. Mary’s, he’d come up with another plan.“I’ll just drop you off…and look, there’s Hervé!” — a little man in a long, wool winter coat, a Sunday coat, a coat that marked him as first generation, waved at them from the church steps. “He’s always happy to help, a good greeter, too.” Alexandrine stared at Benoit as he talked faster, “I’ll run to Big Y, pick up a few extra items for the collection and be back in time for the Gospel.” He kept smiling at her, so bright.

  She’d learned over the years not to begin arguing straight off because then Benoit, in his agreeable way, dug his heels in deeper. Not just his heel, his whole friggin’ foot. Alexandrine waited. She breathed, deeply but not too dramatically.

  “I think we’ve bought enough food already. You have bought enough food,” she corrected herself. “This is not a competition, you know.”

  Hervé was walking toward them now and Benoit rolled down the window, letting in a gust that raised the top layer of her freshly sprayed hair.

  “Ça va?” said Hervé, coming close, bending to the window. “Freezing, eh?”

  “How’s Adèle?” asked Benoit.

  “Oh, you know,” said Hervé.

  “Give her our love,” said Benoit.

  “I’ll do that,” said Hervé.

  “Hervé?” said Benoit.

  “Quoi?” said Hervé, and it was all settled, so that Alexandrine found herself walking up the church steps with Hervé, her own badly balanced plastic bag dragging down the wrist of her fur coat.

  “Just a few more things,” Benoit had explained to Hervé before driving off. He would bring his six bags in when he came back. “So you don’t have to trouble yourself,” he told Alexandrine. He hadn’t even the decency to flash her the cute guilty grin that had so often greased his way.

  “That Benoit, heart of gold,” said Hervé, opening the church door for her.

  “Yeah?” said Alexandrine, trying to make it a statement and not a question, and thinking load of shit, crock of shit, pure and simple shit.

  The back wall of the church was stacked with so many bags that you could have set up a small Big Y right there. “Food for the poor!” said Alexandrine and plunked her bag down on top of a crate-size box. Someone had bought a half-dozen tins of those good, expensive Swedish butter cookies. “Look,” she said to Hervé. “Top quality!”

  First reading, second reading, Gospel reading, no Benoit. Father Bruce talked in his bad French about the spirit of the season. About giving and the spirit of giving and more friggin’ giving. Why hadn’t his parents spoken French to him at home? Alexandrine wondered, not for the first time. Unlike her parents who, bless their dear, departed, French-Canadian souls, never did quite get the hang of English, Father Bruce’s parents had been way too eager to get American. Look at the name they’d given him, though they still couldn’t say it without rolling the “r.”

  Still, folks liked Father Bruce, liked him in spite of his faulty French, his stooping to the level of some of the parish young people just so they’d get involved. He actually liked that rap music, he said. He listened to people, tried to give them what they wanted, like this French mass because he knew some of the mémés and pépés still loved all the seigneurs and Bon Dieus. Another good man. The world was full of good men and their good intentions.

  She kept checking for Benoit, but it wasn’t until the offertory that she heard the back doors of the church creak. There was Benoit struggling to keep them open while he shoved through a box the size of a small appliance. She watched as Denis and François-Xavier, Hervé’s grown sons, jumped up to help him. They made noise back there. Something clunked and Alexandrine heard plastic bags being disturbed.

  “Well, look who’s among us,” said Father Bruce from the altar, switching into English — he could do French only if it was written down and rehearsed — and raising his arm toward the back of the church. Everyone in the Advent-packed pews turned to behold a small man holding a large box.

  “What do you have there, Benoit?” boomed Father Bruce into his mic.

  “A toaster oven,” said Benoit.

  “And who is it for?” asked Father Bruce.

  “For someone who might need it, Father,” said Benoit, his voice getting surprisingly loud and sure. Hervé’s boys hovered, on stand-by.

  “Well, my dear brothers and sisters, what can I say?” asked Father Bruce. “I could talk all season about the need for us to share our wealth, our good fortune, our abundance, but it wouldn’t have half the impact of seeing our own Benoit Lachance standing there with that box of love in his hands. Benoit, my good friend, you are living out the words of Isaiah… ‘If you give your bread to the hungry, and relief to the oppressed, your light will rise in the darkness, and your shadows become like noon.’”

  “I could have died,” Alexandrine informed Benoit on the ride home.

  “Ah, Al,” he sad. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do,” she said. “Oh, I really do.”

  “I was there in the Big Y, Al, all that food, and I thought, people need a way to cook that food. So I walked over to BJ’s. They were on special. It wasn’t expensive. It was cheaper than the toaster oven I bought you last year.”

  “This has gotten way out of hand,” said Alexandrine.

  “I bought three,” said Benoit. “I thought I’d give one to the homeless shelter and one to the Midnight Mission. You know, Father Gilbert’s place.”

  “You need help,” said Alexandrine.

  Benoit didn’t defend himself, but after a suitable, respectful pause began singing under his breath. She knew that
idiot song.

  Bonjour le maître et la maitresse,

  Et tous les gens de la maison,

  Nous acquittons, cela nous presse,

  Notre devoir de la saison.

  Une fois l’an, c’est raisonable,

  Ce n’est pas trop.

  En ces temps de la bonne table

  Du bon fricot…

  That Guignolée shit! Pierre Lafleur had roped Benoit into it last Christmas. Some old custom from the old country, the country their parents had left behind forty years ago. Le Québec, La belle province. And for what? So they could go around like fools, singing off-key, ringing doorbells, dressed in Santa suits, asking neighbours for handouts so they could give it to some poor Puerto Ricans. Nobody had helped their families when they’d come south, leaving family farms to start a new life in the U.S. of A., building up these little western Massachusetts mill towns with their nice, big, Catholic families. No, they came, got jobs, worked their asses off, never asked for shit. Somebody should clue those black people and P.R.s in. Because they clearly had no clue about hard work. And face it, no clue when it was time to stop doing it and provide for the babies they already had.

  “La Guignolée is a beautiful tradition,” Benoit had tried to explain last Christmas, after giving up on her coming out with them. “We need to think about the needy, Al. Especially at this blessed time of year.”

  C’est raisonable. Ce n’est pas trop. It wasn’t reasonable and it was too much. God didn’t want people to go overboard. He wanted them to be good, yes, but not driving-their-wives-crazy good. He wanted them to be moderate, though Alexandrine couldn’t at the moment think of any of the old catechism that actually came out and said this. Moderation sounded more like a Protestant kind of idea. And les Protestants, as her mother always said, they didn’t know much.