“Mom,” says the boy in a tone of warning.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I can’t let it go. Silly, isn’t it?” The woman pauses, but only for the time it takes to sigh. “I know there was a rift between you and Edith. But it shouldn’t matter now, should it, after all these years?”
“Ask Edith.”
“Edith is gone, Miss Smart. I’m sorry. She died many years ago now.”
MILLER, EDITH (née Smart). Of New Arran, Ontario, where she lived on the Miller family farm, known as “The Flats,” from the time of her marriage to Carson Miller at age seventeen until her death as an old woman, long plagued by ill health. May she rest with her brothers and sisters in peace.
THE WOMAN ISN’T DONE, even with Edith buried. She tells me, as if I don’t know: “You weren’t at the funeral. Your sister came to the reception afterward—uncommonly friendly, she was, but my mother didn’t trust it. Mama said there was no love lost between Edith and her Smart sisters.”
“Half-sisters.” I gut out the words, but the woman doesn’t hear me. She is slowing down, now that she’s poured out what she means to say, drifting as she remembers out loud. Nancy’s her name, so she says. I mouth it to try to keep it with me. “For your sister Edith’s funeral, my mother and I filled the church hall with flowers from Edith’s own garden,” Nancy says. “Edith was a great gardener in her old age.”
Edith, a great gardener! My mouth opens in steady, pounding revolt. Pshaw. There’s my proof. You must be speaking of another Edith, not my sister. Edith was no gardener. Edith never coaxed a living thing from the soil under this house.
I THINK I KNOW at the moment of conception: I feel a pinch, like a sleeve snagging on a branch, the thread pulling loose, the story unravelling. Too late.
Oh! No.
Over me, I can make out the vaguest contours of Johnny’s face in the room that’s gone dark since we began. Our silence amidst our movements is mutual, choked, giddy. I do not mean to cry out.
“Are you quite fine?” His concern fills me to bursting. I pull his face down into my neck, so he won’t see. I don’t answer him otherwise. We breathe together and I am glad. I am foolish in my joy.
Already Johnny grunts and presses upright. Already he flips over and jackknifes his body, leaps to his feet, dressing quickly in the dark. He laughs as he stumbles into his pant leg, hopping across the wood boards of the floor, nearly toppling.
“Hush! Johnny! The girls will hear you.”
“I thought they were out.”
“That was hours ago. I’m sure I heard them come in.”
But all of this is beside the point. What am I to do? Already the bedsheets are cooling where his body has been. Already I feel a regret I can’t express, even to myself. I know—I do not love him as much as I should. Desire is not love. It cools as soon as it is slaked.
We are the sum of our actions, and of our inactions, yes, that is easy enough to understand. What comes harder is finding ourselves the sum of our emotions, which flicker, altered by experience, by the things we cannot bear to tell ourselves, by the trouble we accrue, the flattening and tamping down as we learn how not to be hurt. As we learn protection and the easiest means of protection.
I am not ready for Johnny to leave the room.
But he goes to the door, and unlocks it. Returns and bends over me for the briefest kiss, as if this will cure me. I roll onto my side, away from him, but he seems not to notice, and away he goes. I hear him thumping down the stairs.
I hear voices in the kitchen, below, rising as lightly as a swirl of fallen leaves caught in an up current. He’s staying. He isn’t going home yet. He’s in the kitchen, where he’s found the girls. He’s laughing with Glad, who loves to laugh.
I am the furthest thing from laughter, a sour sombreness preventing me from rising and cleaning myself and dressing and jauntily wandering down the stairs to join them. I think, What is wrong with me?
I decide: this is a mistake I’ll only make once.
What can Johnny say in protest? Nothing to persuade me again.
I TAKE MYSELF to visit Tattie, the woman who is not George’s wife, the mother of his children, and the secret he’s asked me to keep from the rest of our family. I knock on their door during the day, guessing George will not be there, and he is not.
“Tattie,” I say, without much in the way of pleasantries. “How does it feel to be . . . with child?”
Tattie nurses her littlest. She says, “Are you worried, then?”
It is not a question that needs reply.
She says, “Does he love you enough to marry you?”
“I just need to know how it feels,” I say.
Tattie laughs a little, wryly. “You’ll be tired like you’d like to die, and”—she touches her breast with her free hand—“you’ll hurt, and maybe some pains here”—she presses her stomach—“and it won’t be long before you start swelling up. And then you’ll know and so will everyone else.”
“Is it the boy from the photos in the newspaper?” she asks me after a pause. “Handsome. Does he love you?”
“Yes,” I say. “I think so.”
“Then you’ll want him to ask you to marry him.”
I nod. I haven’t thought of how to do that, but I see she’s right—it won’t be up to me to do the asking, my job is to maneuver him into the position to do so.
A tiny crack of fear opens, somewhere in the back of my mind. I can’t do this.
Tattie is watching me. I can see her doubt.
“Not every man is like your brother,” she says proudly, and I recognize with surprise that she is complimenting George on his fidelity. George, my brother, who keeps her and the children in this sagging row house, who lives at the racetrack, who drinks steadily when he has the chance, and sleeps steadily when he does not. George, who’s never offered her the protection of marriage, who swears up and down that love is all that matters—when it’s clear, to me, that he’s holding out, hedging his bets, like he always has, like he always will.
“He owned up to what’s his,” she says. “Every night, he comes home to us.”
I try to smile in return, but it is a struggle. The truth is, I am a terrible actress—stiff, unnatural—even after my training, or perhaps my training is to blame. Enunciate! Smile with your eyes! Be emphatic! What good are these tools of the trade against Tattie’s pretty face, sallow and anemic, her wild gypsy hair? She wears no wedding ring, and my mother and father have never heard of her existence, but she seems to believe she has enough—as much as she deserves, or even more. I see why I’ve wanted to come here. I see that I cannot be like Tattie.
“Well,” I say, “it’s probably nothing. Just a bit of a flu.”
She nods. The kettle comes to a boil and steam fills the little room. “Could you get that, please?” She is occupied by the infant at her breast.
I pour boiling water over black leaves, steeped many times over, in a cracked teapot. We drink the weak stew unsweetened, and we do not speak of my trouble again. So I count her among those who do not know.
SHE IS MY BEST FRIEND; still, I don’t tell Glad.
I haul myself out of the water and sit down, hard, on the slick tiles, my head between my knees at the edge of the pool. Glad swims close, pulls herself up by her elbows, and clambers to my side. She kneels and pets my wet hair. “Are you all right?”
This is November, late into the month that I’ve always loved least, nagging and spindled and dull, pressed for light and colour. There is nothing to do in November but wait.
I think: I’m dying. I’m dying or I’m pregnant, one or the other, and I don’t even care which.
“Are you okay?”
“Dizzy,” I mumble, although dizzy is the least of it. I am sick, through and through, all the way to my bones.
Glad gets me towelled off and changed. She gets me home to our apartment, and tucked into my bed. She boils water for tea, but brews it too weak. I’m feeling better and do not complain.
When Johnny comes hurrying up the stairs, banging open the door to my bedroom, I’ve heard his approach and I pretend to be asleep under blankets pulled high.
“She’s got the flu, she’s resting,” I hear Glad tell him. She is just a little bit out of breath. Protective. She leads him out of my dark room.
Olive brings me broth. For three days, I lie in my bed. I can’t think what else to do, too unwell to escape the apartment and run against the bitter wind and shrinking light. Bone-crushing weariness washes over me in cycles, so that I feel briefly better and allow myself to consider the possibility that I’ve guessed wrong, only to be swung back toward sickness, made worse by the feeling of certainty. This is what is happening. This is going to be my story.
I gag into my pillow.
“You haven’t got a fever, so that’s good.” Olive sits on the side of my bed, home from work, and wearing her smeared apron scented of chocolate. The smell makes me gag. She strokes my cheek. I think she is trying to be reassuring. But she is our mother’s daughter too, and when I turn to look at her—directly at her—I tell her with my eyes, and she reads my diagnosis. No, I haven’t got a fever, have I, Olive.
“Oh, Aggie.”
We hold hands. She does not ask me what I am going to do. She is our mother’s daughter. She waits instead for me to tell her what I am going to do.
I push my way out from under the unwashed blankets. “I haven’t talked to him,” I say, standing and wandering about the room, feeling caged, mildly frantic, weakly reaching for the cool plaster wall.
“You need to eat more, drink more. You’ll feel better.”
“I’m getting dressed, and I’m coming downstairs,” I say.
Unfortunately it is Glad’s night to cook: fried fatty slices of ham served with onions, slightly burnt.
I am surprised to find Johnny at our table too. He is waiting, holding out his plate with an expectant look on his face. Glad stands at the stove wearing a pink polka-dotted apron trimmed with frills. She does not look quite exactly like herself, though I can’t say precisely why not. I have the sensation that I’ve stumbled onto an illicit scene, even though everyone is fully clothed and Olive has come down before me, and sits at the table too, waiting her turn.
Glad serves Johnny first, stabbing a dry hank of ham out of the pan and scooping blackened onions on top.
“Sit,” she orders me, and she pours me a glass of thick milk, which I manage with some effort to work down. But I can’t for the life of me swallow even one bite of ham and onions. The mere act of cutting the fraying meat has me sweating and gritting my teeth. The milk is churning a sour froth in my gut, and the smell and sight of the pale pink flesh coming apart under my knife and fork triggers a gag, and another, and I stand abruptly. Without excuse, I run from the room.
I can hear that I’ve been followed. I flush the toilet, grateful for indoor plumbing. I rinse my mouth. I lean my head against the door. I don’t want to go out there. I don’t want to talk to him. But he is waiting for me, I know.
I open the door.
“Johnny?” I whisper.
His arms are crossed and he leans with one shoulder against the wall. I can’t read his posture, nor his face. I want to see concern, tenderness, but that is not what I see. I see idle interest, vague disgust. He shouldn’t have followed me. I’m angry that he has stood outside the door, spying, intruding on the private sounds of my sickness. I stalk past him to the bedroom and sit on the edge of my bed, my hands loose in my lap. They’re shaking and I let them lie there on my lap, one wrist on either knee, palms facing up while I stare down with a sense of distance, as if I am removed from my own body.
Johnny takes his time walking down the hallway. He knows, I think, when he closes the door and stands with his back against the long mirror. I see no dainty way to wrest open the conversation, and so I plunge directly in, as if into frigid water that arrests my breath.
“I might be . . . I am . . . I think. Having your baby.” I look at my shaking hands, not at him. I can’t bear the sight of his reaction, yet I can’t bear not knowing. I glance up at him with those words splashed into the air—having your baby—feeling shy, hot, humiliated, infuriated, and he does not deny that this might be so. “It’s my fault,” I offer because I feel that I should, that he expects it of me. I hope to catch his eye now that I’ve found it in me to look at him. I’m braver. The cold is bracing, but it won’t kill me. I turn my hands to grip my legs, wrapping the knee bones, unconsciously pulling myself into a protective hunch.
I’m ever so slightly reassured to see that the news has stirred him up.
But he won’t look at me, and can’t seem to take it in, moving restlessly around the room. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t know! It’s never happened to me before.”
“What are you going to do?”
I have no idea. For once in my life, I want him to tell me. No, I want him to say, with absolute hope and kindness and ardour: Here is what we are going to do. Maybe he could shout it. Would that be too much to ask? He could lift me in his arms, swing me in an elated embrace. Why doesn’t he? He could win me over and have me for good, if he tried even a little bit. Instead he paces the room, avoiding my eye. He plucks items from off my dressing table and stares at them. He goes and lays his fist against the windowpane, staring out across the street, his shoulders tight, the back of his neck shaved to short bristles. All the hope goes out of me.
The days are short and the deepness of night is already out there, beyond the glass. I can’t see another way.
“I’m going home,” I announce suddenly, with what passes for conviction. “I need to see my mother.” Still, he doesn’t turn.
Nor does he prevent me.
And suddenly it becomes too late for whatever might have been, whatever might have come to me, and to us, if only he would kneel before me and put his head in my lap, and say—but, no, I shall stop myself from going on in this way. Because that is not what happens.
This is the way it goes, instead.
Johnny turns from the window, says, “That sounds good. Your mother must miss you.” As if we are now talking only about a visit.
“She does miss me, yes,” I say.
“Let me help. Let me pay for your train ticket.” He comes nearer, his fingertips tucked into the palms of his hands. It’s a habit he has. His fingernails and the grooves of his fingerprints are stained black and oily from his work with automobile engines. As if I mind. How will he get to medical school? Oddly—with sadness—I think of this even as we’re saying good-bye.
“That is very kind,” I tell him, of his offer to purchase a ticket, “but no, thank you.”
“I insist.”
“So do I.” My blood rising, my spirit. “So do I, Johnny!”
He stands in silence. We could turn the ship, yet, couldn’t we? There’s still time. Silent before me, head dropping to chest. Quietly he says, “Write me, won’t you, Aggie?”
And he goes, like that, quietly, shutting the door behind himself with care and caution. I would like to say that tears are shed, teeth gnashed, passion stirred, but instead I sit frozen, my eyes hooked on the thin line at the bottom of the door where the electric light from the hallway shines under. My room is quite dark. It is lit only by the pale yellow glow that rises up from the streetlights below, fogged and haloed.
I do not protest.
And there is no returning to this room or this moment, nor will there be, ever again.
OLIVE ACCOMPANIES ME home for Christmas, early. She tells Mother as soon as we catch a private moment together, because I can’t bring myself to. It is just the three of us. I stand silent, teeth gritted, staring out the kitchen window at our snowed-in fields, at Cora stalking grimly to the barn in her grey mittens, carrying a basket to collect the morning’s eggs.
“I thought there was something peaky about you,” Mother says. She is as level as Johnny’s prairie. She does not fall into imagining the worst for me. She brings me to the Gran
ny Room, and lays me on the bed, and palpates my abdomen through the silky fabric of my dress. She tells me I am about three months on, and what would I like to do?
I would like to undo what’s happened. Or, I would like Johnny to come for me. Both, I think.
She waits. When I do not reply, my mother says that a young woman in my situation has options, not many, just a few. “You could birth the baby, and we could find a home for it, or you might miscarry and the baby will come too early.” She does not say that she will help bring on a miscarriage. She does not say that I might keep the baby.
I can’t think clearly.
“There is not a great deal of time to wait,” she says. “When the early months have passed, the baby is quite settled and will grow regardless. Do you understand?”
“I thought Johnny . . .” I falter.
“Does he know?”
I nod and look at her helplessly. How many versions of this old story has my mother listened to, without judgement, and though never foolish herself? Now here is a question for which I would love the answer, and failed to ask when given the chance: Why does my mother choose to help foolish girls?
“I’m sorry, Mother,” I tell her and her face goes soft and her eyes fill with tears, for me, and she strokes my face. “I know.”
She knows her help can only encompass so much, and after that I’ll be on my own, as you are, if you are brave enough to know it—though I could put that differently, I suppose. I could say you’re on your own, as you are, if you’re stubborn enough to know it.
“Let me help,” my mother says.
Here it is, told plain and thin. I’m become a girl in the Granny Room.
I RETURN TO TORONTO in the spring, coming the same way I’d gone: by train.
Johnny is waiting for me at the station. Glad too. They stand near each other—not too near—but she looks at him and he at her, only a glance, brief as lightning, as the train shudders to a stop. They cannot know that I am watching them. It is like intercepting enemy code. Their seriousness, their silence, their unity as they wait for me is frightening. I know, instantly.
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