by Lisa Moore
MINA I got a phone call while I was in Ottawa at a swimming competition. They told me there was a call. I was watching through a big glass window, girls from all over Canada, diving into the pool. The way they entered the water with hardly a splash. My aunt told me I had to come home, I had to be on the next plane. I knew he’d died somewhere, probably drunk. That I’d never see him again.
EXT. COUNTRY ROAD - DUSK
An isolated trailer on cement blocks in the middle of a field of dead grass and snow. One window is lit, and we see a woman passing back and forth. A hungry dog trots across the lawn and disappears into the woods.
INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT
Mina is sniffing a line of coke on her vanity table. She stares at herself in the mirror. There is a vase of dried roses, the petals covered with dust. She touches the petals and a green spider drops on a thread. The bedroom door bursts open behind her and with it the noise of a loud party, laughter, techno music. Her husband waves a bottle at her and goes to the closet, grabs a tuxedo jacket, is telling her to hurry up, but we can’t hear him over the noise. She watches him in the mirror behind her. He shuts the door and the room is silent. She stands and puts on a long gold satin coat with a cream lining. She flaps it once, twice. The fabric falls over the lens and the screen goes gold.
We show Mina the video of my son’s birth. Her face is contorted, her fingers gripping her toes. She writhes.
Do you want us to stop?
She puts one hand over her eyes, and drags it down her face. For a moment I can see the pink of her under lids.
Keep going, she says.
The baby’s head. I see my own fingers — reaching between my legs trying to pull the skin of my vagina wider. The ring of fire, a friend told me later. All the burning.
I say, It hurts, it hurts.
Jason shot video only during the contractions. During the three minutes between contractions I was joyous. I made jokes. The room was full of laughter. Keith Jarrett playing on the stereo. The way he sighs, the piano bursting loudly into the room and dragging itself out like a big wave over stones. An ambulance attendant in training was invited to watch. He stood in the dim part of the room in a uniform, his hands clasped behind his back. The baby’s head emerges, the doctor lifts the cord away from the baby’s shoulders. Watching the video, I am amazed by the skill with which the doctor lifts the cord. Unhurried, like crowning a prince, a rite that requires a lifetime of devoted practice to perform simply.
There was a complication. The doctor’s voice off camera: We have an emergency.
Everything speeds up. The baby’s head is between my legs, the doctor’s hand tugging the cord out of the way, and a giant gush of blood.
Jason puts the video on pause. On the still TV screen the splashing of blood stands out around the baby’s neck like an Elizabethan collar.
That’s it, says Jason, his first second in the world, right there.
He presses play and the baby’s body comes out after the head and the blood flashes like a bullfighter’s cape twisting in the air. I wanted to ask everyone to leave the room. I remember suddenly the desire to be alone. I wanted to die alone, and it seemed I would die. But I didn’t want to offend the ambulance attendant by asking him to leave. He’d stood so straight and quiet, I can barely make him out of the dark in the video.
Everyone who reads John Steffler’s poem says, Wow. Or, Pretty powerful. Everyone knows what it means to want something with such intensity you crush it in your haste to have it. I felt a terrible vertigo during those moments while the blood poured out of me. As if I were falling from a great height, and I hit the hard bed with a jolt. Jason stopped shooting then. But in the next shot on the videotape we are fine. The baby is in my arms, and I am holding the receiving blanket open, I am touching his foot.
EXT. BASILICA - NIGHT
It’s midnight, New Year’s Eve. People have gathered on the steps of the basilica to watch the fireworks. I’m there with my eight-year-old and my new infant under my coat. The fireworks fall through the night like bright, spurting blood. Mina is standing beside me. Horns honk, cheering, party hats. Mina closes her eyes and the screen goes dark for a few seconds. Silence. We see an ultrasound of a fetus kicking against the dark, we see gushing champagne, then champagne bubbles falling through the night sky, the statue of the Virgin Mary in front of the basilica with a mantle of snow, her hand moves just slightly, a benediction, Mina’s husband grabs her and kisses her. The video of the birth seen previously plays in reverse, until the baby has disappeared, unwinding history.
I say to Mina: Now, try to look as if you are about to alight.
Craving
Jessica laughs very loud and the candle flames lie down stretched and flat. She moves the candelabra in front of her husband.
She says, I like aggressive men.
I say, I like aggressive women.
She dips her spoon into the mushroom soup.
But this is delicious, she says.
Vermouth, I say. On the way back from the liquor store a plastic bag of fierce yellow slapped against my shin. I peeled it away, meat juice coursing in the wrinkles like a living beast. It clung just as viciously to a telephone pole when I let it go. There was a poster on the pole just above the bag, Jessica Connolly at Fat Cat’s. A band of men behind her. She looked resolute and charged, just like twenty years ago when the three of us would crush ourselves into a change room in the mall, forcing our bodies into the smallest-sized jeans we could find — she and Louise and I, twisting on the balls of our feet to see how our bums looked.
I like aggressive women too, she says.
That’s because we’re both aggressive.
I put my arm around Louise and squeeze her. I like you anyway, Lou, I say.
Jessica says, Oh, she’s passive aggressive.
She isn’t though, I say. Jessica pouts her lower lip, contemplating. We both concentrate on Louise’s sweetness for a moment. Louise reaches for the bread, her brow furrowed. She’s trying to think of something bad.
Lou’s so wonderful, though, Jessica says, giving up. I glance at my husband. The men don’t know each other. I should be drawing them into the conversation, but this is too heady. Jessica’s so thoroughly herself, the genuine article.
Louise says, Do you remember when our class used to go to church? I loved the feeling of the sleeve of someone’s blouse touching my arm. If they were unaware of it. Just brushing against my arm. Someone else’s sleeve.
Jessica says, I love my daughter.
She’s holding her spoon in the air. Jessica is far away, her eyes full of her daughter. She’s in the park or the delivery room — somewhere with a lot of light — and the child is vigorous, screaming or running. Jessica sent a picture at Christmas of the four of them. The boy resting his cheek on her bare shoulder. Her daughter trying to tear off a white sunhat.
I love my son too, she says, and dips the spoon. But my daughter is going to do things. She’ll get into a lot of trouble too. Jessica grins at her soup, proud and grim about the trouble her daughter’s going to cause.
I tell them a story about a Bulgarian woman that ends with the shout, No matter, I must have it!
I say, This should be our motto. We clink our wine glasses and shout, No matter, I must have it! But the men go on with their conversation at the other end of the table. They are talking music, the different qualities a variety of sound systems offer.
Then Jessica says, I’m going through flux right now. Her eyes flit to her husband. I slam my hand flat on the table, the wine glasses jiggle.
Stop it, I say.
Stop what? The flux?
I won’t have flux at the dinner table, I say.
Okay, she says, and she laughs, but it’s more of a sly chuckle. We are twelve again, in the bloating, compressed heat of the canvas camper in her parents’ driveway. She and
Louise are trying to convince me I have to come out now. One of her brothers noticed my new bra and made some remark. Sitting alone in the trailer, with my arms crossed so tight over my chest that the next morning my arm muscles are stiff and it hurts to pull a sweater over my head. Jessica full of worldly disgust. Louise obstinately refusing to make Jessica relent, which she could do with a single tilt of her chin. They are united in the desire to punish my vanity. They don’t have bras, but they have braces on their teeth, and that makes them a club.
Jessica says, Fine, if that’s the way you want it.
I start to cry, knowing it’s a gamble. Louise wavers but Jessica’s scorn fulminates into a full-blown denouncement. She won’t let me ruin all the fun. It’s sunny outside and the camper smells of her brother’s sports socks.
They wander off, their voices fading, Jessica’s ringing laugh the last sound, not a forced laugh, they have forgotten me. Then I listen to the wind through the maples, straining to hear my parents’ car coming for me.
Jessica admired the characters of her Siamese cats, haughty and lascivious. She could suss out the swift-forming passions of the gang of boys we knew, and make them heel. She knew the circuit of their collective synaptic skittering and played it like pinball. She couldn’t be trusted with secrets, and we couldn’t keep them from her.
I ask her husband if he wants more soup. I won’t play a part in excluding him, though I’m sure everything is his fault.
He says, I don’t know what else is coming.
There’s dessert, says Louise. Lou wants to save him from the flux too. Save us all, because it’s a big wave that could make the panes in the French door explode and we’d be up to our necks with the soup bowls floating.
Then Louise’s boyfriend says, But pollution is a by-product of industry and we all want industry, so. He shrugs.
Lou catches my eye. She’s thinking, Remember the guy on the surfboard in Hawaii? I felt total abandon. An evanescing of self, my zest uncorked.
Yes, but if you had kept going, it wouldn’t have been abandon. He wouldn’t be a man swathed in the nimbus of an incandescent wave, muzzling the snarling lip of that bone crushing maw of ocean with a flexed calf muscle. He would be one of these guys at the table, half drunk and full of mild love.
There’s my husband, heavy-lidded, flushed. The first time I saw him my skin tingled with the nascent what-would-come. Shane Walker. Red suspenders tugging at his faded jeans. The best way to make a thing happen is to not want it. I didn’t want him so bad that he strode right over to the table and dropped down his books, Mexico in Crisis and The Marxist Revolution . He rubs his hands down the front of his faded jeans.
I read your sexy poem, he says.
A sheet of water falling from a canoe paddle like a torn wing. That’s the only line of the poem I remember. So much bald longing in a paddle stroke. A torn wing, big deal, yet Shane Walker is blushing. Then I decided — No matter, I must have it.
Jessica taps her spoon on the edge of her cup. She’s furious — why won’t I have flux at the dinner table? It’s only emotion, everything blows over. What am I afraid of? Let Louise have her beach boy.
I think, What if it wasn’t abandon? What if some part of Louise stays on a surfboard in Hawaii forever when this guy, who considers the politics of pollution, wants her. Would Jessica have Louise long eternally for something that never existed? It’s perverted. And what about Jessica? How long can this last, this brave refusal to compromise? There’s redemption in submission. If Jessica wants to strut her charisma I’ll stand aside, but in the end she’s wrong and I’m right.
Why does the end matter, shrieks Jessica, there is no end. She doesn’t say anything, of course, she’s gone to the bathroom. We’re only on the soup, there are several courses, whose idea was this, the plastic bag on my shin, her poster. Wouldn’t it be fun? How have we changed? I think, This may be the end.
She says, I’d rather die ignited than sated.
I realize now, totally zonked — Jessica has rolled three joints since she got here, I haven’t been stoned in years, it’s so pleasurable, so good, I can hardly collect the plates — that I have always believed the flaws of men are born of a stupidity for which they, men, can’t be held accountable. I recognize in a flash — I have balanced the sixth soup bowl, a spoon spins across the floor — that all my relations with men have been guided by this generous and condescending premise. I see now that the theory comes from the lack of courage required to face the truth, which is that men are pricks. They’re aware women like me exist, women who believe they have been shafted in terms of a moral spine, and these men welcome these women’s low estimation of themselves, and capitalize on it.
My neighbour, Allan, in the kitchen this afternoon while I was preparing for the dinner party. He was dropping off the flyers for the parent/teachers’ auction. It disturbs me that Allan has never flirted with me. He flings himself onto a kitchen chair, spoons white sugar over a piece of bread, which he folds and eats in three bites.
He says, Aren’t we all hungry?
I thought, Hungry for what? But I could remember a keening, an imminence. At certain hours it was strongest, at dawn riding my bike downhill, walking home from a bar at four in the morning.
I know I am, says Allan. I’m hungry.
I used to crave something, but what was it? Approval? It was bigger than the whole world approving, bigger than anything language could hog-tie. It compelled my every action, even eating a bran muffin I could tremble with excitement, thinking something might happen now, right now.
Allan certainly looks hungry, all shoulders and elbows splayed over the table.
I say, I can’t help you , Allan.
I wasn’t certain I’d spoken out loud. When I said / can’t help you , I meant, I wish you wanted me, and even, I’d like to climb on the kitchen table with you — but I didn’t say that, thankfully. What I said was terrible enough, I can’t help you . I had been unaware, until that moment, that I wished to be desired by Allan.
He says, But I don’t want you to help me.
Why wouldn’t he want me too? If he is so damn hungry?
Louise: Why don’t we unleash a primal battle screech, our friend is in flux for fuck’s sake.
I think, Oh yes, it would be great to be Jessica. Let’s all be Jessica, ready to burst into flame over an unpaid parking ticket. Ready, anyway, to sleep with the window washer who lowers himself to her office window on rope and pulley, blue overalls and cap, his powerful arms cutting slices of clarity through the soapy blur.
Fabulous, says Jessica.
We are very drunk now, it seems. Or I am, not used to smoking, but Jessica has a bristling fixity. She flicks her wrist to look at her watch. I have to go downtown, she says.
But it’s our dinner party. We haven’t seen each other. We don’t know how we’ve changed.
Her husband says, I’ll come with you.
Jessica says, You have to relieve the babysitter.
I think, It’s too late. I didn’t do my part. I have forsaken the promises of our adolescence; hiding near the warm tires of parked cars while playing spotlight at dusk, holding still while curling irons burn our scalps, splashes of silver raining from the disco balls in the parish hall, mashed banana emollients, face scrubs with twigs and bits of apricot, ears pierced with an ice cube and sewing needle, and the disquieting loss of a belief in God. The saturated aura, a kinetic field of blue light, that surrounded a silent phone while we willed it to ring. Our periods. Dusk, all by itself, dusk, walking home from school after a volleyball game and the light withdrawing from the pavement. I look at my husband, I try to feel dissatisfied but I can’t, he’s a beautiful man.
Jessica’s husband wants her to give him money for the babysitter but she won’t. She’s angry he didn’t take c
are of it himself. The chink of a wine glass on the marble fireplace. Louise’s boyfriend rises from his chair and sways a little, he moves across the room and pats Jessica on the head.
Patronizing bitch, he says.
Jessica grins. She unfurls a peel of giggles tinny as a dropped roll of tinfoil bouncing across the kitchen tiles. She picks up her leather jacket and fires up the zipper. She grabs me by the shoulders, presses me into her big breasts. Then she holds me at arm’s length.
You, she says, haven’t changed a bit.
She moves to Louise, lifts her from the couch also by the shoulders, gives her a big hug.
She kisses her husband on both cheeks and hands him forty bucks.
She says, I love you, even at this moment.
She says to Louise’s boyfriend, You, I’m not hugging.
She opens the French door and the window panes rattle.
Thank you so much, it was lovely.
The front door slams behind her. We each sit up a little, adjusting our posture, the draft from the front door sobering. Outside the dining-room window, we can hear her platform heels slapping the sidewalk, she has broken into a trot.
Natural Parents
Lyle and Anna hardly speak on the way to the Ivanys’ dinner party. At a red light on Empire, Anna asks him what he thinks the Ivanys will serve. Lyle says he doesn’t know.
They drive past the graveyard. There’s a group gathered in the dark, huddled near a canopy covering an open and empty grave. A woman on the edge of the group holds a fat bunch of yellow roses wrapped in plastic, the blossoms hanging down toward the mud. Anna can’t think what they’re doing in the graveyard at night. The roses are vibrant against the woman’s black coat. They look like they’re floating. An angel grave marker near the chainlink fence of the graveyard has snow on her wings and in her eye sockets, on her bottom lip. The chainlink is furred over with snow too. The woman with the roses speaks to the man beside her. He tilts an ear toward her.