“Your grip on reality appears to be getting loose,” Becker said. “Here you are, playing baby dolls in a shack in the bush, and meanwhile, there’s a real baby growing inside you, and you’re planning to go on a trip to God knows where, and once again, all you’re thinking of is yourself and nobody else.”
From that point on, the conversation degenerated into a childish shouting match that did neither of us much credit. If the baby had been out and about at that point, instead of being safely wrapped up in its placential duvet, I think we might have torn the poor thing to pieces, each tugging at a limb like toddlers fighting over a toy. While we were yelling at each other, I recalled that old King Solomon story, the one about the mothers fighting over a baby before King Solly suggests that it be chopped in half to let each person have a bit. If I had been there, I’m not sure that even then I’d have been willing to let go of my share.
Luckily, we had reached the dessert stage by that point, so I can’t say that dinner was ruined, although my stomach was distinctly unsettled by the time he stomped out, leaving half his apple pie uneaten on the plate. It didn’t go to waste, though. Moments later, I found myself finishing it off—after all, I was eating for two.
After Becker had gone, I found Lug-nut and Rosie curled up together on the bed in the lean-to bedroom, their ears laid back and their eyes wide, tails thumping in that “it wasn’t my fault” kind of way. I telescoped forward to a day when the kid would be present in body as well as spirit, a hearing, thinking person whose parents had just been shouting at each other. Becker and I argued a lot, there was no doubt about it, and while we always made up at some point afterwards, the process of disagreement was rarely conducted in a mature fashion. I knew how damaging that kind of atmosphere could be to a child—how small people naturally assume that the tempests raging in the household are of their own making, how they slip into the self-assigned role of scapegoat, of perpetrator. Heck, I read the newspapers, I know how it happens. Becker and I didn’t need to come to blows in order for the climate between us to reach the level designated “emotionally traumatic” by the authorities. Abusive, even. I curled up on the bed beside the dogs and stroked their fuzzy heads and spoke soothing words to them.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay, it didn’t have anything to do with you.” Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t say the same thing to the little fetus currently doing multiple-cell gymnastics in my belly. I placed my hand over the general area—which at thirteen weeks was already beginning to swell, a pleasant tightening, as if the muscles were binding together like some kind of protective armour. The argument I’d just had with Becker had everything to do with the baby—or at least we wouldn’t have had such a nasty one if the baby wasn’t a fact. If I married him, was that likely to change, or would we still grapple with control issues at every turn, bickering like children over every diaper change, every new tooth, every aspect of the process? If I were to capitulate and do what Becker wanted, tie the knot and move in with him, ditch the conference and concentrate on motherhood to the exclusion of all else, including my work and my independence, would that guarantee a healthy, well-adjusted child? Would the child’s mother then become a faceless wife, an acquiescent brood mare? Okay—I know that those are extreme notions, and quite unfair to Becker, but I’m only telling you what I was thinking. Chalk it up to hormones. The fact is that while I had decided to have the baby, I was determined to have it on my own terms, and my fight with Becker had finally clued me in to the hard fact that I couldn’t do the motherhood thing entirely by myself. There was one all-important factor that had only just registered. The baby itself. Himself? Herself? Whatever—no woman is an island. At least, no pregnant woman is. She’s an archipelago.
Whatever decisions I made in the next seven months had to be made with the understanding that for the next twenty years or so, my choices would be affecting two of us. Three, perhaps, if I loosened my hold on the reins enough to let the child’s father have a vote, but those choices could no longer affect just one person only. This hit me with such profound force that it took my breath away.
I patted my belly. “Sorry about all that,” I said to it. “I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, how ’bout another piece of pie?”
Before it could answer one way or another, the automatic baby, forgotten in the corner, started howling again. Sibling rivalry is a terrible thing.
Five
Nearly every new parent feels exactly the same way you do. A baby changes everything, from your lifestyle to your schedule to your desire level. But you can get the old magic back with a little attention and some tricks from other parents who’ve been there.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
We were having the weirdest winter on record—ridiculously mild, with hardly any snow to speak of. Oh, we were blessed with a couple of inches of the white stuff at Christmas time, a kind of cosmetic icing that fell thick and wet and broke tree branches with its weight, but it disappeared under a warmish rain by New Year’s Day. In the second week of January we had a thaw (which was redundant, as there was nothing to melt) that made it feel like March, with blue skies, a lemon-yellow sun and enough warmth to fool the trees into setting leaf buds. George said he’d never seen anything like it, and the weather-gods must have arranged it in order to make things easy for me, pregnant and barefoot up in my cabin.
And truly, the lack of snow and mild temperatures did make it easy. It was quite cold enough to need the woodstove, of course, but there wasn’t that feeling of being in danger of freezing to death overnight. When the temperature drops to more than twenty below zero Celsius, some of us get that tight, back-of-the-throat fear that makes you stuff the wood box before bed, then worry all night that the wretched thing is going to overheat and fry you in your sleep. There was none of that—the red juice in my thermometer rarely fell below minus five Celsius. Because there was no snow, the travel along the hill path from cabin to farmhouse and driveway was no trouble at all, except that I found that my centre of balance had shifted. Walking on a slope, even a gentle one, with some recently gained frontal poundage put everything a tad off-kilter, which meant that when going downhill, I had to lean back very slightly, as if I were carrying a heavy basket of peaches.
A couple of days before Christmas, Becker took me out to dinner before hopping on a plane to Calgary to spend the weekend with his son, Bryan and his ex-wife, Catherine. He said he had stuff to do concerning his father’s estate, and initially, I felt no jealously about this. I hadn’t seen much of him since he’d returned from the funeral, anyway, as he was spending most of his time in Toronto on his airport security assignment.
We’d gotten together for meals and the occasional movie when he was in town, of course, but the distance between us was growing as quickly as my belly was, and we hadn’t made love since I’d told him about my pregnancy.
“I feel like you don’t want me near you any more,” he had said to me in early December. “It’s like you’ve got a part of me inside you now, and that’s all you want.” I could have replied with a similar remark—that I felt he didn’t want to touch me any more, now that my body was preoccupied with knitting together the cells of his progeny, but I didn’t say it. Anyway, I was frankly not interested in sex—so maybe it was my fault after all. The more remote we became, the less we talked about it.
George, Susan, Eddie and I would be celebrating the holiday together, as we had done since Eddie had come to live with Susan. We were all able to steer more or less clear of the Christmas imperative that makes some households vibrate with tinsel and tension from November 1 to December 25. I’d had trouble choosing a Christmas gift for Becker, though. I thought about a book to begin with—books are the best presents, in my view, but Becker wasn’t much of a reader, except for computer manuals and the occasional Stephen King horror novel. He kept a bunch of magazines and comic books in the rack in the bathroom, and Bryan’s room in his apartment (kept kid-like for w
hen the boy came to visit) boasted a small bookshelf full of Becker’s old childhood classics, but he really hadn’t acquired much in the way of reading material since he was a teenager. I wandered around the mall for a couple of days before Christmas, grinding my teeth at the ruthless, piped-in music blaring over the speakers, which I was convinced had a subliminal track running through it—”buy, buy, buy, you pathetic creatures, buy lotsa stuff to prove you love somebody.”
I found myself in the Big Chain Bookstore but couldn’t face actually spending the forty-odd bucks on the new Stephen King hardcover, which Becker might have read already, for all I knew. I checked out the health and family section and considered (for one very brief moment) giving him a copy of Father to Be, but I didn’t think he’d get the joke. I was feeling a bit dazed by then, the mall having worked its evil magic upon me, making me consider quite seriously the purchase of a package of shiny, seasonal decorations—the kind of thing you gaze at in surprise when you get home and say “I don’t remember buying that.” I was surrounded by junked-up, frantic, jingle-bell-frenzied moms and kids, and more than a little aware of the fact that soon I too would have to learn the balance of can-have and can’t-have. I’d have to learn the language of momhood: “Don’t touch that, you little brat, or Santa’s not gonna leave you nothing.”
As for Santa, I figure he must have a hell of a time trying to decide what, precisely, to give all the bazillions of little children who expect him to cough up the goods every year. It’s hard to buy for somebody about whom one knows little except their naughty-or-nice scores. I knew Becker’s, sort of, but I bet Santa had a better handle on him than I did, even though I was the one carrying his baby. I was still wearing Becker’s engagement ring on a chain around my neck, and I was so used to having it there that I barely noticed it any more. It had been a long time since I’d taken it off the chain and tried it out on my finger. Anyway, my fingers were too swollen (a pregnant lady thing) for it to fit by then.
The elegant kitchenware store had a lot of nice glass and pottery and culinary doo-hickeys, but I felt that if I gave him something like that, he would take it as an indication that I wanted to move in with him, or that I was thinking in domestic terms. Too much like a wedding gift, too much like an answer to the ring question.
I ended up getting him a CD, the latest Barenaked Ladies album (which was a safe bet, as he had one or two by the same band already in his truck) and a pair of locally-made leather moccasins. Yes, I know. One step up from a tie, but I was desperate.
When we finally got around to making that curiously formal exchange, he admitted to having had a hard time as well, when it came to choosing something to give me. He’d settled on a book—a For Better or Worse comics anthology, and a large box of expensive chocolates, which we both knew I would eat compulsively, all by myself, in about three hours.
We were doing this ritual, pre-Christmas dinner at the Mooseview Resort—a pricey place, and not insignificantly, the cradle of the evening wherein we had engaged in unprotected sex. After you have fallen, go back to the garden, I guess.
“I have something for you, but you don’t need to open it now,” Becker said, as we were finishing a shared piece of chocolate cheesecake, which had been billed “death by decadence” on the menu. “It’s just a token thing. There’s lots I wanted to get, but I kept second-guessing myself, thinking you’d take it the wrong way.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “And thanks for saying so.” I was a bit surprised by this remark, actually, as Becker wasn’t usually so frank about his feelings. “We should have mentioned it earlier, I guess, and agreed not to exchange anything.” He seemed shocked by this and slightly annoyed.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I want to give you everything, not nothing.”
It sounded like soap opera dialogue; I couldn’t bear it, and I’m afraid I sighed out loud. I might even have rolled my eyes, showing my best sensitive and tactful side. I apologized at once.
“Did you know that every time you say or do something bitchy these days, you immediately chalk it up to hormones and being pregnant?” he said, in a dangerously light, conversational voice. “It’s really interesting. I can hardly wait to hear what kind of excuse you come up with after the baby’s born, and you’re back to normal.”
“I’m not sure what normal is,” I said, trying to match his tone. It came out sounding as brittle as the wine glass that he was holding, which looked ready to shatter in his white-knuckled grip. “I used to be a childless woman, and I’m not likely to return to that state any time soon.”
“You chose it, Polly.”
“I did. And I’m guessing that you’d probably have preferred me to make a different choice.”
He sat back, exasperated. “Of course not, that’s not fair. I just wish you’d include me a bit more, that’s all.”
“By moving in with you and marrying you, you mean.”
“Or by taking into account that I’m involved, at least.”
“You’re the one who’s going to Calgary for Christmas.” Ouch. That one just popped out by itself. I’d known about it since the summer, when Bryan had gone out west with his mother, and Becker had promised to visit and spend the holiday with them. I’d always accepted it and insisted that to me Christmas was no big deal, and Becker should by all means spend it with his son. Maybe it was the residue of the mall experience that made me suddenly want Becker to stay. Or made me pretend to want that. I don’t know—maybe I was just being bitchy, and the hormones had nothing to do with it.
Well, he got mad, and I don’t blame him. The rest of our spat-dance included all the requisite steps, from hissing at each other like snakes over the paying of the bill, through the sullen silence in the truck, treading the light fantastic over our mutually guilt ridden apologies just before we got to the farm, to the balm of the make-up kiss and hug, the shamefaced and hurried exchange of our meaningless parcels, and the fragile goodbye.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get back,” Becker said. It was snowing, the only snow we got, it turned out, until the night I left to catch a plane for England.
By the middle of January, I had, as Susan had predicted, expanded. I wasn’t as big as a house—more like a small cabin, as I still had three months to go before lift-off. I was having dreams by then of splitting apart like a burnt sausage, and my skin was so sensitive that I could feel the slightest shift in the air, as if the atmosphere around my body had grown hands. If you’ve been involved in this kind of show already, you know the drill. My ankles were thicker by the day, I had to pee every four minutes, and I felt physically co-opted for some purpose that had very little to do with me at all. One of the many books I’d acquired said “You don’t really have the baby, the baby has you.” Yep. Preparing for my trip to England helped to take my mind off my body, for which I was grateful.
The organizers of the conference had requested that I take along a couple of samples of my work, and it was a difficult decision, as I knew I couldn’t afford to take a great big pile of puppets with me. They’d asked me to do a marionette construction seminar, with an emphasis on methods for making and manipulating moving parts. I wanted to have some good pieces to use as examples, but most of my favourites had been sold. Still, one of my most inspired creations had been a puppet I’d made of a policeman (which bore a marked resemblance to Becker), and Constable Earlie Morrison, Becker’s partner, had it hanging in his bathroom. I knew I could borrow it back from him for a little while, and it wouldn’t take much to alter it for its debut on the Canterbury stage. It had originally been designed to conceal a little pop-up version of the male member, a functioning moving part, you might say—perfect for the seminar. The original extra piece had been omitted from the finished puppet, for reasons of delicacy on the part of the artist and the eventual owner, but it would be no trouble to mold a new one and attach it.
I had decided to use the month of January to construct a companion for the policeman puppet, and I would use th
ese two in my seminar. They would both be reasonably lightweight—the heads being constructed out of a thin layer of air-dry clay over a papier mâché base, the arms and legs of carved wood, and the hands and feet of clay as well. I usually make puppet bodies out of a core of dowel (in order to have something to screw the joint-mechanisms into), pad them with quilting, then sew a canvas skin over top. Packed properly into a box, with lots of soft stuff wedged in the gaps, they wouldn’t come to any harm in transit, I figured. The policeman puppet had a beautifully made (if I do say so myself) little uniform, complete with hat, boots, belt and a teeny tiny gun—which I’d found in the dollar store in downtown Laingford.
The companion puppet turned out to be (pause as everybody says out loud that they saw this coming a mile away) a pregnant lady. I don’t go for subtlety in my work, you’ll have gathered. The thing is that I work with whatever is uppermost in my mind (it makes for in-the-moment creativity), and so the modelling of hands and head and feet was done in a fairly abstract way—I was merely making a female figure, and it wasn’t until I’d finished the lower leg and foot of my little person and noticed that the poor thing’s ankles were all puffy that I realized what I was doing. Too late to quit, by that time, as January was streaking by. While constructing the torso, I left a small, hollow space in the belly, about the size of a squashed navel orange. I lined it with red felt and put a soft, padded door on the front of it, held shut with a tiny brass catch from the hobby shop. This made perfect sense at the time. It meant, of course, that I would have to make a small pair of bloomers for the creature, in order to preserve what little dignity I’d left her, and I designed the costume she wore, a maternity tent, to lift easily. And needless to say, I then had to sculpt a baby. This one, at any rate, I would have complete control over. I planned to attach a string to its head.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 80