You do not think of the baby who is being born at a hospital in downtown Toronto. You do not think of the crib that might be on its way. You do not think of diapers or sleepers or receiving blankets, as you rest on the couch with one hand on your pulse.
It has become your habit, for the past week, to take your pulse every ten minutes. It is possible, you think, that you are exhibiting signs of an undiagnosed heart condition. Every night, you feel your heart pounding against the hard mattress, kicking madly, with lawless hysteria. You have begun to sleep, half sitting up, on a chair in the living room. Last night, you went to Swan Lake with your sister, and the woman sitting next to you had bad breath, like the pages of an old book, with a vein of stale garlic running through it. This smell and the overheated congestion of the theatre combined to make you terrified, halfway through the second act, that someone had planted a bomb in the basement of the Hummingbird Centre. As the swan dancers in their white sequinned tutus flooded the stage, aligning themselves with delicate precision as their paper-thin arms disappeared into the backlights, you mapped out the exit signs, you imagined grabbing your sister’s hand and guiding her through the screaming masses, through the hazards of fire and smoke. When you were on your way to the car after the ballet, stepping over deep puddles on the sidewalk, you wondered when neurosis stopped being occasional and started being necessary—no longer reckless and arbitrary, something you couldn’t get rid of, but a ritual you relied on, as essential to you as a child’s anticipation of her coming birthday.
In the letter you wrote to the agency, you and your husband described yourselves as a fun-loving couple whose idea of a perfect Saturday night was a barbecue, a few friends, and a display of fireworks.
“But I hate fireworks,” you said to your husband when he read you his draft. “So do you.”
“I’m trying to paint a picture of an all-American life. She’s a teenage girl. I’m sure that’s the kind of home she’ll want for her child. She doesn’t want to hear that you won’t let me talk to you on Saturday morning until you’ve read for an hour. She doesn’t want to hear that you think it’s sad that Leslie no longer takes lovers.”
“But who are these impossibly perky people?”
There’s nothing we like better than to take a walk with our dog Steve and go window-shopping on Queen Street, then finish off the morning with a picnic on the beach. We love to spend time in the kitchen experimenting with new recipes and inventing gourmet meals from visions culled in the furthest reaches of our imaginations. Have you ever tried Dal Makhani, a lentil delicacy from India, or Feijoada, Brazilian black bean and pork stew? Neither have we, but with our adventurous spirits, there’s nothing we won’t test once.
The letter began, “Dear Birthmother,” two words joined as one in the lexicon of adoption.
“It’s not accurate,” you told your husband. “You’ve tweaked everything so much that the whole thing feels like a lie.”
“Well, what would you have me say?”
What would you have him say? You should probably not describe yourself as someone who likes to feel she is always about to lose something.
You wanted to send the picture of your husband dangling you by your legs over the edge of the high deck at his parents’ cottage. Your husband wouldn’t allow it. He assembled an array of pictures, all thoughtfully posed but designed to look natural, selected to back up the letter’s view of you and your husband as the parents-next-door, the fun-loving, mutually respectful admirers of fireworks. Paddling in a canoe on Lake Kioshkokwi on a camping trip with friends in Algonquin Park. Jumping off a cliff hand-in-hand into the lake at a friend’s cottage. Sitting on your back deck under pots of hanging flowers with the dog at your feet. We are adventurous homebodies, these pictures said. Try to find more well-rounded people, they challenged. Your husband also included some playful choices, to show the kind of kidding around the baby would be lucky enough to be part of if you were chosen: your husband pretending to eat your wedding bouquet, you giving your husband a piggyback ride at a black-tie fundraiser. Each of these pictures, at the moment of its taking, was perfectly staged, and you barely recognize yourself in them. It is only in candid pictures that you look remotely like yourself. Your husband didn’t think it appropriate to send the kind of pictures where someone calls your name, and when you turn around, a camera flash pops.
“Why are you trying so hard to be subversive?” he said. “Can’t you just grow up?”
You acknowledged that it was a decent question. Since you were a little girl, you have felt that admitting how much you want something is the best way of ensuring that you don’t get it. It is with some satisfaction that you consider how right you were.
You don’t pray. Instead, you look up at a far point in the sky and say, Good job. You sure showed me.
YOUR HEART RATE is 107 beats per minute.
When it climbs to 115, you decide to take a cool shower. As you lather up the shampoo and massage it through your scalp, your hair starts coming out in small clumps of five or six hairs at a time. Long strands swirl around the drain. Your husband has bought you a Lact-Aid system and two herbal supplements, Fenugreek and Blessed Thistle, because he is hoping your body can learn to produce breast milk for the baby. Your mother encourages this. Even though you know that the antibodies in breast milk are good for a baby’s health, you do not feel entitled to put your breast in the mouth of a child who did not come from your body. It seems the ultimate perversion, a rank deception at its core: you as an earth mother. As you rub the water over your breasts, you look at the centre of your nipple. Both your mother and your husband have informed you that the milk comes from the whole nipple, like a sponge, not from a pinprick hole at the centre, as you had thought. Before you turn off the water, you use a thick white shower cream to moisturize because your skin is so dry it has started peeling. You do not ask what causes your hair and skin to shed. Your body cannot hold onto things. After two years of trying to have a baby, this is what you have come to understand.
It was at Stan’s first birthday party that you stopped finding new ways of saying no. You and your husband arrived early because you overestimated the amount of time it would take to get to Mississauga. Leslie was holding Stan, naked, in her arms when she opened the door. She held him up to you and your husband.
“Look,” she said. “His birthday suit.”
Pat came out from the kitchen and offered your husband a beer, and they went to the basement to watch a basketball game while you went upstairs with Leslie to get the baby dressed. You kept apologizing for being early and told Leslie that you would have gone to a coffee shop if you’d known the area better. Leslie was happy to have you, though, and all you could think about was how adaptable they were, and how privately irritated you would have been if someone had shown up early to a party at your house, how capable you would have been of maintaining that irritation all afternoon. The old Leslie would have been irritated too. She would have acted grandly put out and asked you to wait in the living room with a magazine until the designated time. But here was Leslie, showing you the mural she painted in Stan’s bedroom, an overgrown old tree inhabited by elves and chipmunks, a sky of bright birds overhead, fluffy white rabbits conversing in a blooming garden. Here was Leslie, asking you to choose Stan’s birthday clothes. Here she was, handing you her baby. As you held him, he looked up at you with his pale blue watery eyes and laughed as he touched your long twinkly earrings. You kissed the top of his soft bald head because Leslie was watching and you thought something was expected, and then kissed it again when she turned away. You asked yourself, What if?
Then Leslie came and took him so she could put his clothes on. You saw how his face changed when he looked at her, as though everything had just come together. He reached up both his hands and put them on her cheeks. “Mamama,” he said.
You do not think about this, as you wait for the phone to ring. You do not think of your husband out buying a crib, or your mother, who you know has secretl
y bought baby clothes even though you have forbidden preparation. You do not think of your husband’s body and how it curled itself around you when the news came about how poorly yours operated.
You thought you wanted interesting conversations forever.
Now all you want is to hear yourself say, Yes, blue. What else is blue?
THE PHONE RINGS and you leap to answer it.
It is your friend. He doesn’t call you much now that he knows you are interested in babies.
“I got your message. Congratulations in a way.”
“In a way?”
“In a way, meaning when you know you’re happy for someone but you’re not quite happy for them yet.”
You are silent.
“You’ll be so busy, who knows when I’ll see you again.”
“We will,” you say. “We’ll make time.”
You say this without conviction. It has had its time. Your husband may drink the milk left over in his bowl of cereal, he may get bored in bookstores, but you are still fascinated too. Your friend doesn’t understand this. He thinks that he is the one you think about. He doesn’t understand that it’s not really about him. Small deceits keep you feeling that you still belong to yourself.
“How will we make time?” he asks. “Soon you’ll be a mother.
In a way.”
You hang up on him.
YOU DO NOT THINK of your friend after you have hung up the phone. You do not think of your heart rate, its solo race in your chest. You do not think of the supplies your husband has been smuggling into the basement.
What you do think of, often, is the girl. The sandy-haired fifteen-year-old who is in labour in downtown Toronto, this girl who chose you based on a picture. Another picture from the Jamaican vacation, a picture where you are standing next to your husband against a background of deep-green ferns and wild ginger lilies and orchids, holding hands while your hair flashes with beaded braids you agreed to out of respect for the principle of getting into the spirit of things—the only picture where you look at all like yourself, in spite of the braids, because you seem to have forgotten, finally, that someone is looking at you. You do think of this girl, with lips so full they make you want to cry. You think about this world she knows intimately, a world of obstetrical wonder, a world you will never know, although you do sometimes classify your husband’s stare as gynecological as he leans in to kiss your forehead at night. You do think of her body, ripping open for you.
Your friends ask when you are bringing your baby home. You cringe at the word your. You feel you have no right, that this baby will lie with unresolved tenancy in your arms. For the past two years, you have not taken your eyes off women with strollers, women with fat stomachs, women who say “my daughter” and “my son” with heartbreaking carelessness, as if they are rhyming off brands of cereal. It has seemed to you that the world is filled with children who could be yours. And you’ve tried to ignore how the opposite is much more true: the world is filled with children who will never be yours. You do not know how to be one of these women, a woman who expects and claims, a woman who complains about lack of sleep and babies crying, a woman who knows the tenderness of possession that is not possession at all, but something much closer to a constant giving away.
Your heart rate is 105 beats per minute as you climb the stairs to your bedroom. On your bed is a package your mother mailed to you yesterday. It contains a paperback book of baby names and a yellowing letter you wrote to God as a child. She found it in the back of an old photograph album. The letter is unfinished—you wrote it the summer you were eight, and you abandoned it so you could go swimming in the lake. On the back of the letter is a picture you drew of you consulting with God in his pink throne. The letter has always made your mother laugh, because of your assumption, even then, that you would fail to make it into heaven.
You hear your husband pull up in the minivan, and you look out the window. He is pulling a tall, narrow cardboard box out of the back. He yanks too aggressively, the box gets stuck, and he lands on his bottom on the snowy grass. You climb into bed and unfold the letter.
Dear God,
When I am long dead and my dear children die, I hope you will let me visit my children in heaven. I will be 105. My son will be 97 and my daughter will be 93. I hope you will let me see them again so I can hug them. I will look different, but they will know I am their mother. They will be sitting on clouds and I will run when I see them.
A VERSIONof LOVELINESS
My grandmother called me a God person, meaning that I believed. Calling me a Christian wouldn’t have addressed the matter fully. Christians were people who applied themselves to tidy worship with a devotion that was respectful and appropriate, comfortingly institutionalized, driven by duty and habit and moderate affection. Their behaviour was in good taste. I was fifteen and thought that good taste was simply a lack of soulfulness. I had written a letter to the Pope professing that there was never a moment in which I did not spare a tender thought for him. I had read and reread Donne’s holy sonnets and highlighted the sections I found most applicable to my own situation. I sympathized with persecuted religious groups and was disappointed that my own religion was not in any such danger. I went to confession almost every day and made up sins when I felt I hadn’t committed enough to rouse the priest’s full attention. Christianity couldn’t cover what I wanted to get at. I was a God person; every moment of my day, every thought passing through my head, was bursting with hot piety, a fierce and panting awareness of God.
My grandmother was in most ways blasphemous. She outdid herself. She was quick to lay blame at God’s feet when she stubbed a toe or mistakenly added the wrong ingredient to a dish. When the sky opened in unforeseen showers, she looked heavenward and inquired why it was that He couldn’t resist the temptation to thwart her. Her tone was mild enough in these expressions of spiritual disappointment, but she did not hesitate to let Him know how she felt.
She did pray, though, so she resisted wholeheartedly my charge of sacrilege. Her prayers were diligent and orderly. Every morning, she prayed for her family’s health and general well-being, and she let it be known that help was welcome as we strove to overcome our deficiencies. She placed extra emphasis on me, that I might learn to be less argumentative. At the end, she arrived at herself and confessed to her own shortcomings, then asked for the things she needed. She prayed aloud, so that she would hear her own requests—she did not want to lose track and be unreasonable. On the edge of her night table, she pasted yellow sticky notes to remind herself about who needed special prayers in any given week: her daughter, who had encountered an enemy at work; her sister, who was plagued by her sciatic nerve; her neighbour, who had given birth to an illegitimate child. All of us she prayed for with concern and enthusiasm. Later, she would check in on the status of our problems, monitor for improvements. When reports were positive, she said to me, “See? I told you he’s listening. I can feel him all around me.”
It was in these prayers where her blasphemy revealed itself most flagrantly. I threatened that she was on her way to purgatory, at best.
“They say that one day in purgatory feels like fifty, Nana,” I said. “That can’t be what you want.”
“Who’s this ‘they’?” she asked.
I thought about that and told her the priests. (Although I thought about God nearly constantly, it was not then in my nature to think about what exactly it was that I believed, and where those beliefs came from.)
“How could they know?” she said.
My sister and I spent most afternoons after school at our grandparents’ house that spring because our parents were divorcing. It was not fighting that drove us from our own house, but an eerie new peace. Our father was sleeping on a futon in the screened-in porch and working until ten o’clock every night. Our mother was at the beginning of a bitter love affair. They were rarely home, and when they were, their polite conversations about the contents of the refrigerator, the current events covered in the newsp
aper, the meeting with their lawyers—these people who, three months before, could yell for an hour over which of them had put the dishes in the dishwasher without first cleaning off the food—announced how fully they had disowned each other. Their terrible civility testified to what an irrelevant thing our family had become. So we went to our grandparents’ house, where there was no shortage of noise.
My sister read novels inside while I helped in the garden. My grandmother liked a wild and overgrown garden, a haphazard country look that actually required much maintenance. When I arrived there from school, the garden tools would be neatly laid out for me on a tattered old quilt, and I went straight to work. For fifteen years, my grandmother had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis so severe that no movement was without pain. She loved a garden but could no longer have any part in its creation. Because her hands were swollen and creaky, and her bent fingers slanted diagonally away from her knuckles, she could not hold a spade, or exert any kind of force. As I worked, she sat on a yellow lawn chair, her legs elevated to reduce the pressure on her knees and feet, and she identified which were weeds and which were plants, for I could not tell the difference. She often seemed irritated by the slow rate at which I worked, but she was also used to having other people do physical work for her. Sometimes she looked restless, as if she might get up and take over, but she never did. I enjoyed the gardening. Unlike my sister, I had no interest in reading. I was often offended by what I felt was the lack of morality in novels. I liked a book with good moral examples, books populated by rigorous people who were not conflicted, who did not lie, and who were at least religiously inclined. I also liked a book to provide a moral at the end. As a result, I rarely read for pleasure. I pictured my sister inside, happily absorbed, and I pounded at the soil as hard as I could with the spade.
My grandmother was a tall woman with a neat silver bob and a frail elegance, and even then, at eighty, she was erratically fashionable. She might wear long, high-waisted white linen pants and a flowing violet blouse or a long dress covered in green apples. Because she had to protect herself from the sun, she covered herself with loose, bright fabrics, with the exception of her face, which was always shielded with a hat. And because it had rarely seen sun, her skin was remarkably pale and smooth. With her fair and pretty bearing, it was easy to think that all her life had been easy. She didn’t look like someone who would be stoical, but she certainly was. Occasionally, she got up from her lawn chair and took a turn around the garden, inspecting its different corners for weeds, or leaning down to smell a flower. When she walked, she used a cane and had a slight limp that seemed not feeble, but graceful and aristocratic.
The Virgin Spy Page 6