As She Grows

by Lesley Anne Cowan

The visitors’ room of Beverley House is lined with practical couches, probably donated by the guilty consciences of wealthy women who as teenagers disappeared to Nova Scotia with chubby stomachs and returned in time for summer vacation.

  There are four of us in the visitors’ room, each slouched on our own couch, cross-armed, and refusing to acknowledge each other’s presence. Only one of the other girls looks pregnant, the rest just look angry. The girl with teased black hair listens to her Discman and taps her lighter loudly on the wooden arm of the couch. It’s meant to annoy us, but I say nothing because I know that would be exactly what she wants. Instead I focus on the voices of the bubbly staff speaking baby talk and cheerleader chatter down the hall. Without even seeing their faces, I know what they’re like. Occasionally, one skips past the door, confirming my suspicions, dressed in overalls and a pink T-shirt. Their happiness seems inappropriate to me, like laughter at a funeral.

  Finally a youth worker walks into the room, her flabby body bulging out from under her T-shirt and jeans. You can’t even tell the difference between her rolls of fat and her tits. It’s disgusting. And I can’t stand the thought that I’m starting to look like that.

  “Hello. Well, I guess that’s everyone,” she says, smiling around the room, a clipboard jammed into one of the folds in her folds. She has short hair, no makeup, and an earring only in one ear.

  “We’ll just get started. Welcome to Beverley. My name’s Meg and I’m one of the youth workers here.” She sits in the chair off to the side. “We’ll start the tour here. This is our visiting room where the residents can receive guests, only two at a time and no shared visits. It can also be a nice quiet spot if you want to be on your own. I’ll tell you a bit about the house and then I’ll take you around the facilities.” She starts to tell us about the house and its history and how the home was started sixty years ago in Toronto, “but things were very different then.” Only I look in her direction, the rest of the girls continue staring at the floor. After a couple of minutes, she walks over to the black-haired girl and motions for her to turn off her Discman, which she does reluctantly, kissing her teeth.

  The worker goes through her routine, citing off privileges and rules and chores you do to earn money. She points to charts and chore boards and point systems. Speaks of curfews, goal setting, arts and crafts, and mandatory evening programs on health and fitness.

  “Mandatory?” the black-haired girl speaks up, her lip curled up to her nose in disgust.

  “Yes, mandatory,” the worker says firmly in that don’t fuck with me tone that we have all heard before.

  “Screw this,” the girl says, picking up her knapsack and storming out. She bumps her shoulder into the door frame when she leaves. Part of me walks out with her. Our eyes focus back on the worker as if nothing happened. We are all used to scenes like this.

  “It’s a voluntary program but it’s not for everyone. If you don’t like it, that’s okay. We’re just trying to offer help to those who want it,” and then she goes on, unaffected.

  Meg takes us through the old Victorian house, institutionalized with its thick fire doors, mesh wire pressed in glass, red-glowing exit signs, and sealed-up fireplaces. The house is much more impressive than my group home, with bright carpets, gold-framed paintings, wood trim, and huge velvet drapes. It’s like a movie set. I visualize women in nineteenth-century skirts and tightly wound hair, drinking tea from china teacups. And ghostly men with suspenders and tiny, round glasses strolling the hallways. I think about how these God-fearing people would shudder at the thought of stray teenage mothers, a hundred years later, living in their home. I think about the wife, who probably hid her underwear under a sheet on the clothesline and thought the word clitoris referred to some kind of buzzing insect.

  We poke our semi-curious heads into the kitchen, TV room, laundry, and dining room; watch the backs of residents as they leave the room, not wanting to be part of the sideshow. The bedrooms are functional and bare, as if you could spray them down with a hose for a fast clean in between girls.

  At the top of the stairs, Meg stands in front of a closed door and explains that the dorms are split into two sections, the pre-baby and post-baby sides. She holds her hand up to the stained wood. “We can’t go in here, due to confidentiality reasons and privacy. But this is where the new mothers are located.” I stare at her fingers, pressed against the door, just inches away from a world I don’t want to know.

  During the tour, Meg draws our attention to the furnishings: the new TV or the spacious fridge that holds limitless cheese and yogurt. My eyes follow her pointing finger in the opposite direction, rest on things like the cleaning-duty list beside each entrance and the small orders taped to the sides of things: Don’t waste electricity and This window is to be closed at all times or No smoking in bedrooms.

  At the end of the tour, Meg gives us each a form where you have to write a paragraph saying why you want to be at Beverley House. “This will help us in evaluating your motivation for being here,” she says with a smile and passes out pens. I leave the paragraph section blank, fill out my name and address, and then hand it in before I leave.

  When I get home, Staff is waiting for me.

  “Well? Did you like it?” Miranda asks enthusiastically.

  “No.”

  “Will you go?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You could go back to your grandmother’s,” Pat says.

  I raise my arms in surrender, then take my seat in the office while Pat calls to arrange an intake meeting. Beverley House tells them that they’ll have a bed for me in a week.

  18

  Eric is the one who brings up Mitch’s name first. For some reason, he has chosen this as his first layer to peel. After he pours me some green tea, he gets right to the point. The tea thing is something he started a few weeks ago and there’s something about the hot liquid that makes the words seep effortlessly out of my mouth. We talk about the night I left Elsie’s place, about Mitch in my room and how Elsie didn’t kick him out.

  “I think he kissed me,” I say. “I don’t remember. I was sleeping, so I was pretty out of it, and all of sudden he was there, in my face.” The details are sketchy in my mind, but the feeling sends shivers down my spine. I put the cup to my mouth, burn my top lip, and then pull away. “Hot,” I explain, and then blow on the steamy liquid.

  “You may not want to remember,” Eric says. “And that’s okay, for now,” he adds.

  “It wasn’t that big of a deal. I mean, he didn’t molest me or anything. But still, it made me feel awful. And dirty. And gross.” I wrap my arms around myself, the thought of Mitch that night making me shudder.

  “Coming into your room at night and touching you is a big deal, Snow. It’s not always the extent of the action that’s damaging, it’s the utter violation. You trusted him.”

  I start slurping my tea cautiously and think a while. “But I don’t care so much about him,” I say. “He’s just a pervert. A total loser. It’s Elsie I’m most mad at.”

  “Elsie is your caregiver. You expected her to protect you from things like that.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” I say, amazed how he can sometimes put my thoughts so clearly. It’s as if he’s inside my head, collecting my messy ideas and ordering them into nice tidy sentences. “That’s exactly it.”

  Eric leans over and pours me some more tea out of this little Chinese ceramic teapot. “What can hurt most is the betrayal by the people who let it happen, or moreover, turn a blind eye,” he says. I wonder if it’s the tea that is making him talk in little fortune-cookie sentences.

  “I think that’s when I stopped caring,” I say, slurping my truth serum.“Stopped caring altogether about Elsie. I think that’s when something in me broke, for good.”

  That week I go for my first ultrasound. The hospital is cold and uninviting. White and blue lab coats flutter by me like wings too tired and disinterested to take flight. I sit in what isn’t even a waiting room, more like
an alcove off the hallway. Cold metal chairs with faded upholstery are set around a table full of boring magazines like Time and Reader’s Digest. There are three women seated, two of them look like they’re in their twenties and one appears about Elsie’s age. All of them glance at me when I arrive only to quickly look away, disinterested. I cough and try to look sick, so they think I’m there because I have cancer.

  A short, Filipino nurse comes around the corner. “Snow Cooke?” she asks, smiling at me, and I rise, catching the glares from the women sighing and shifting positions in their chairs. They were all here before me. “No one else with you?” she asks, looking behind me. I quickly shake my head.

  As we walk down the hall, the nurse compliments me on my lovely hair that I explain used to look really good with blonde highlight streaks. She talks about her daughter, about my age, who is playing in a soccer tournament next month. She makes me feel normal, not like a kid, and I surprise myself when I smile and laugh at her small jokes. Instead of taking me to the ultrasound room, she takes me to another waiting area, only this one is like one big shower room with individual curtained cubicles on either side of a narrow corridor.

  “How many waiting rooms are there?” I whine, my gut starting to hurt from a swelling bladder. It’s like Alice in Wonderland and those endless little doors Alice had to face. Only, she had the good fortune to be tripping out on drugs at the time. At least, that’s what Jasmyn says. The curtains ripple as I pass the little stalls. I see naked bums and bare feet and the tops of women’s heads. The nurse stops at one of the stalls at the end of the row, pulls aside the curtain, and patiently explains how I should tie the blue paper gown. I panic, thinking of my scars, and tell her I want to leave my shirt on. She smiles, says there should be no problem, and pushes me into my pen.

  I sit half naked on a tiny bench, clutching my belongings. I feel like I’m in jail. I am told not to go to the washroom just before the ultrasound, but after about half an hour, I think I’m going to piss my pants. I rock back and forth until finally I have to shove my fist at my crotch, pushing hard to keep it all in. I stick my head out, every once in a while, trying to spot a nurse, but they whisk by in the distance, avoiding eye contact. I get so angry, just being left like that, behind these cheap yellow curtains. And I can’t say anything because there’s something about being barefoot and naked under these stupid paper gowns that makes you feel totally powerless. Just as I’m about to bolt to the washroom, a different nurse whips back my curtain.

  I follow her into a dark concrete room that has nothing in it but a stool, a machine, and a bed. I lie on the cold table, waiting for her to adjust the equipment. It’s so bare and sterile in there. I figure this is what it must feel like to be in the centre of bone.

  The nurse rubs cool gel on my skin, gentle and smooth. Then she draws the cold scope over my slippery stomach. I tell her I’d like to know the sex. “I guess you’re done with surprises,” she says, gesturing to my stomach, and I’m unsure if she’s being sarcastic or cruel because she doesn’t smile. I stare closely at her eyes, looking for signs of terror as she reads the monitor. I start to worry when I see her brow crease and her head shake while she moves the scope back over curves of my stomach. I want to ask if everything is okay, but I don’t. Because I don’t want to know if it’s not.

  After about fifteen minutes, she finally says, “You thought of a name for your little girl?” A smile cracks her dry face.

  “A girl? You sure?”

  “Yep.” She turns the screen so that it’s now facing me. “She was a little shy at first, but there she is.” It’s not a fixed picture, like in the books. Instead, it’s a shadowy, liquid image.

  “There’s nothing dangling down, caught in some shadow?” I ask, hopeful, staring at the fluid darkness. A boy would be so much easier than a girl.

  “Nope. It’s a girl all right. See here—that’s the spine, see it? Those little lines?” She uses her pencil to point to white, jagged, sharp bones, like the backs of dinosaurs. I see them and an amazed smile sneaks to my mouth. But then the nurse starts outlining a huge alien head, a dark eye socket, a pulsing heart, and kicking legs, and I can’t see anything she’s describing. All I see is dark and light shadow. She points out its tiny knuckles, one, two, three, four . . .

  “Oh, there they are!” I exclaim, pretending they’re crystal clear. Not wanting her to know that I can’t even see my own baby. Then, I lie back down, resting my head on the pillow, while she prints out a picture for me to take home. My first duty of motherhood and I’ve already failed.

  “So, any names?” she asks, wiping off my belly with a paper towel. But now I wish she’d go back to being a cold miserable bitch because I don’t want to talk.

  “Something plain,” I answer. “Like Beth or Susan. Something that won’t make her believe she’s more than she is.”

  I have to sit in the waiting room for a while before the woman behind the counter calls my name.

  “Six months, sixteen days,” she announces. “Everything looks good.”

  I smile faintly. “Thanks,” I say, turning to leave. It’s not like it’s a surprise, but hearing someone confirm it makes it sound so calculated. Strange how the only times I ever hear people break time down into weeks is when they’re pregnant or dying.

  I find myself standing in doorways a lot lately, or beside solid, weighty furniture like a desk or table, something I could quickly duck under. As if at any second my surroundings will collapse around me. This is where I am when I say goodbye to everyone. In a doorway. My back pressed up against the frame, my hands clenching wood, fingers red and orange from the chips at my little party. I smile one last time to faces that I will soon no longer recall.

  The farewell party is a rare occasion, most girls are discharged or just AWOL. The chips in plastic bowls, a glass jar of Smarties, large bottles of Sprite and Coke, and Miranda’s homemade squares. There is a present on the table and a card that all the girls signed. Inside the box is a blue baby blanket and an ugly nursing bra with a sticky note that says “For yer leaky tits.”

  The girls each take turns, lean down and say goodbye to my stomach. I don’t know if it’s my pregnancy or what, but the girls all cry and wish me luck. It’s all very fake and perfect, as if we’re performing one of the role-plays from our “relationship” class, simulating the proper way to resolve conflicts or communicate our needs. Staff stands to the side, like proud parents watching their children bond.

  Jasmyn is the last to say goodbye. She doesn’t lean down to my stomach like the others, but instead gives me a hug. “Call me, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Miranda grabs my bag, hurrying our moment along. “We better go,” she says, whisking past Jasmyn. Miranda’s never liked us being friends. When she can, she sticks her thorny body between us.

  The group-home van clunks across the city to the east end. Miranda’s body looks tiny in the large driver’s seat. She throws on her oversized square baseball cap that she says just seems to feel right when she’s driving this “beast.” The radio is broken and so she insists on singing old country tunes that she somehow knows all the words to. She is trying to lighten the mood, encouraging me to sing along, but I stay quiet, leaning my head on my arm, resting out the window. The light posts pass like measured countdowns to another life. It strikes me that soon everything will be different. Tomorrow I will wake up in a new house. And Miranda won’t be yanking my tired body out of bed. And Jasmyn won’t be playing her annoying loud music. And I won’t go down for breakfast to listen to Tammy annoying the hell out of me with her lies about what she did last night. Even the things I hate most, like sick routine and weekly chores, all of a sudden don’t seem so bad.

  “You know,” Miranda says, breaking my sad little nostalgia session, “I shouldn’t say this, but in a way I’m glad you’re leaving.” I turn to her, surprised she can say something so mean. She keeps her eyes fixed on the road. “I mean, I’ll miss you tons, but you’re not like these gi
rls.” She pulls the wheel hard to make a right-hand turn. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  I don’t say anything but her words make me smile. It’s a Miranda compliment, strange and honest. And I remember how when I first came to the group home, I didn’t belong. How I saw all the girls as losers on a fast road to nowhere. I laugh to myself, thinking about the first time I met Jasmyn and how I thought we were so different. But then the smile starts to slip from my lips as I realize that somewhere along the way I stopped feeling like I didn’t belong. At some point, I saw them differently and I actually wanted to belong. And until now, I thought I did.

  19

  When I arrive at Beverley House, home for pregnant girls, Karyn, the youth worker at my intake meeting, shows me to my room. She wears overalls, a tank top, and thick wool socks with Birkenstocks. Tiny seashells and small blue feathers hang from a piece of leather around her neck. I follow her down the hall, fixated on her long brown hair, swaying limply about her waist like a horse’s stringy tail. Without looking back at me, she asks me how far along I am.

  “Almost seven months,” I answer, not interested in conversation. She picks up on my cue and, after showing me how my window opens, leaves me to unpack my things. The room is as I remember from the house tour. A bed, a desk, a dresser, a sink, a yellow rug, and a white-tiled floor. I think of my old room at the group home and wonder who will be sleeping in my bed tonight, resting her head on my pillow. Who will wake in the middle of the night, comforted by Jasmyn’s breathing.

  I hang some shirts up in the closet, put a few pairs of pants in the dresser, and line my shampoos and body lotions up on the window ledge. On the dresser by the door, I put the photograph of my mother, now in a frame Miranda gave me. On the little table beside my bed, I prop two pictures of Mark up against the alarm clock. One is of him lying on the grass in the park with a panting Spliff lying across his chest. The other is a close-up of just his face, and if you tilt it just slightly, lip prints from my goodnight kisses show.