by Joan Thomas
“Course, peace-loving folks can’t actually drive into the southern U.S. these days.”
“What do you mean?”
“You got to cross states where carrying a gun is mandatory.”
“I don’t think that’s strictly true.”
“Oh, buddy, it’s true.” George casts Aiden a glance of pity for his naïveté. “And I’ve got no intention of packing heat.”
“George doesn’t have the greatest eye-hand coordination.” Patti’s eyes are gleaming as if there’s a story she’s dying to tell.
The colour in Sylvie’s face has gathered into a perfect crimson circle on each cheek and Noah is expressionlessly flexing his hands. Aiden gives up on any help from Liz. “You know,” he says, leaning forward, “maybe we should move on to the topic that’s brought us all together. Sylvie, Noah, this is a big thing you kids are facing and we’d like to sort out what we can do to give you some support.”
He gets to his feet and moves to lay another log on the fire. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” he says in his Monty Python voice as he passes Sylvie’s chair.
Oh, Dad, what would I do without you? she thinks. But it’s Noah’s face she’s yearning to see. Sparky, who last summer, when they were wading in the lake in the moonlight, fell recklessly backwards and pulled Sylvie onto him so they lay tangled up in the cold-warm water on a sandbar, one of his thighs angled across her stomach, and her joy oscillated out into the vast lake, and she said to herself, pressing her heels deeper in the dense sand and inventing a perfect word for it, This is love. She lays her hand on his shoulder and he hunches up his muscle. He’s trying to reassure her. Or maybe he’s going, Don’t touch me! Frightened, she pulls back her hand.
They ask all the things you’d expect them to ask. They are gentle and respectful and insistent. Or Maggie is – Maggie’s the one who does most of the talking. “Can I ask, Sylvie, when exactly you found out?” she begins.
SYLVIE: On Tuesday. You know – I talked to you right after.
MAGGIE: But you’re five months along? And you didn’t feel sick?
SYLVIE: No, I felt fine.
MAGGIE: You had no idea? When I was pregnant, I pretty much knew within a day or two. I just felt it. I felt my whole body gearing up in a really special way.
SYLVIE: Well, I didn’t. Not until this week.
GEORGE: I guess a quick trip to Doctor Morgenstern is out of the question?
SYLVIE: Morgentaler. Yes.
PATTI: He’s passed away, dear.
MAGGIE: Did your doctor say as much, Sylvie? Did you ask him?
NOAH: Her. Doctor Valdez is a woman.
SYLVIE: I can feel the baby moving. Now that I know what it is.
MAGGIE: Well, I guess it’s a faint hope, although maybe we should all try to keep the option open until after the ultrasound. But naturally we’re worried about the health of the baby under these circumstances. I hate to ask, Sylvie, but did you drink alcohol during the past five months?
GEORGE: We’ve all been there, kiddo. We all have a pretty good idea what goes on!
SYLVIE: I drank a little, but not too much. I was studying like crazy, because I want to get into botany field school this summer – it’s a third-year course. And I worked weekends at Stella’s. So I wasn’t partying. Plus Noah was away.
MAGGIE: Sylvie, do you have any idea how it happened? Noah tells me you were on the pill almost from the time you started seeing each other, and that you used other protection before that. What is the effectiveness rate supposed to be?
SYLVIE: The failure rate is between three and eight percent. I looked it up.
MAGGIE (frowning): I’m surprised it’s that high.
AIDEN: Liz, you probably know what that’s about.
LIZ: There’s a perfect use rate and a typical use rate. The perfect use rate is based on an actual failure of the pill. It’s extremely low – point three percent, actually – with most oral contraceptives. The typical use rate takes human error into account, such as times when the user forgets to take a pill. It can be as high as eight percent.
MAGGIE: And where would your use have fallen, Sylvie, between typical and perfect?
SYLVIE: Perfect.
She’s motionless now in the swivel chair. This baby has been bombarded with hormones every day, she wants to scream. Every day from the beginning. The way the mist thing in Safeway comes on and sprays the helpless vegetables. She’s started to imagine the baby’s dark eggplant shape, although really it’s only the size of a large pear. Liz could not resist showing her, that first night. About Liz’s contribution to this interrogation, her eagerness to talk about human error, Sylvie has nothing to say but “Typical.”
Sylvie is not fooled either by Maggie’s gentle tone. The way she says Sylvie in every single sentence is patronizing. When she was a little girl, she loved Mary Magdalene, who once gave her a candle shaped like a pink flamingo and who used to make Jell-O cut-outs for the kids. Just before Noah left for Guelph she’d bugged him to take her to see his mom, so they stopped in at her shop on Corydon. Sylvie decided then that Maggie was not interesting or funny or especially smart, but she seemed honest and warm. She likely had good politics.
When Sylvie left the doctor’s on Evil Tuesday, Maggie was the first person she called. Not to tell her – not with the least intention of telling her – but to ask what flight Noah was coming in on, because it was desperately important for her to meet him. And Maggie wouldn’t tell her. She just said no. She said it was part of their Christmas ritual to pick up Noah (how could that be true when it was his first year away from home?) and that they were driving straight out of town afterwards to visit his grandmother in Calgary. Sylvie was in shock. She was standing at the corner of Ellice and Maryland and passing cars were throwing fans of muddy water at her. “I don’t know if Noah has given you a clear picture of how busy his Christmas will be,” Maggie was saying in her placid voice. “But I hope you two will have a chance to get together closer to New Year’s.”
That’s when Sylvie hung up on her and called Noah in Guelph. By then she was crying. He was in a car with a friend, taking their bottles to the Beer Store to get some cash for Christmas. It was stupid, stupid to call him at that point. Telling him over the phone would be so shitty they would never get over it, but of course when he heard her crying, he freaked out. So she told him about losing her botany paper on the computer and he suggested things she might do to get it back. She told him she’d try and that she had to hang up. She was so panicky that she didn’t ask him his flight time and number. Then she called Maggie back and said, “I have to meet Noah at the airport,” sobbing so hard she could hardly talk. Finally she just blurted out, “I’m pregnant,” and in a shocked and subdued voice Maggie gave her the flight information. And now Sylvie hates Maggie for the fact that she knew before Noah did, and for piling on all that extra shit.
They’ve lapsed into silence. Noah seems so much younger now than when I ran into him in August, Aiden thinks, watching him from his corner of the couch. Although there’s something meticulous about the guy – meticulous and inward – in the clean and pressed quality of his jeans and the Harry Potterish fall of his dark hair. Vehement about the whole situation, no doubt – you can see it in the tight way he moves and sits – but he’s got his mother’s composure, if not her expansive warmth. And Sylvie … Aiden has never felt prouder of his daughter. Tonight Sylvie isn’t crying. And in spite of her distress, she’s not tailoring what she says to what they want to hear. She’s poised, with her straight, perfect white teeth and her confident voice. She has an old-fashioned wave-of-the-future look about her, like the girls in Communist Youth League murals.
George heaps a cracker with tapenade and eats it with gusto. “What would that be?” he asks. “The black stuff.” No one answers. Caviar? he mouths to Patti. She shakes her head furtively.
Maggie sits with her face turned to the fire, its light picking up the rosy tones of her skin. She looks expectant, as though the poignant resolution
of this dilemma is just around the corner. But it’s obvious to Aiden that the meeting is foundering. Something concrete has to be put in place, promises made, a plan hammered out. No doubt if they were the kind of people things like this happen to, they’d know what that was.
It’s the tiny stepmother, with her thin blond ponytail, who rises to the occasion, murmuring a hope that Noah and Sylvie will go for a June wedding, by which time Sylvie will be able to fit into a lovely gown. Their disdain rises and washes over her. She feels it, tries to get a purchase on the rug with her dangling feet, then scrambles out of her chair, setting her wineglass on the coffee table, and turns fiercely on Noah. “I’m not exactly a stranger to this situation, you know. I was seventeen when I got pregnant with my son Troy. My boyfriend was just seventeen too, and he did the right thing by me. He dropped out of school and got a job pumping gas. We lived in a basement apartment on Arlington and it was bloody hard. We didn’t last forever, but that boy made sure my baby had a father. That boy did the right thing by me.”
She’s about four foot ten, one of Santa’s ancient elves, and she’s standing right over Noah, scolding him. He pulls himself to his feet. Then he’s looming over her, and looking just as uncomfortable with that. “You knew what the right thing was,” he says when she pauses for breath. It’s not aggressive, the way he says it; it’s just a thoughtful observation.
“We did,” she protests, thrusting her wrinkled little face up at him. “Of course we did. And so do you.”
Maggie gets up and steps around the coffee table. “Listen, Patti, I know you mean well, but Noah is not seventeen and he will not be pumping gas – not now, not ever.” She turns to Liz and Aiden and says confidingly, “I should let you know the dilemma we’re facing with all this happening right now. Noah has been hoping to become part of a research team on Lake Malawi this summer. It’s a fabulous opportunity. One of his profs, Doctor Anish Chandak, is the lead, and Noah has every reason to believe he’ll be accepted into the project. This is not an experience we want to see him miss. He is a strong candidate for a doctoral fellowship to Stanford or UCB, and the Lake Malawi project would be a huge asset.”
“He is going,” Sylvie says. “He’s still going to Malawi. There’s no reason for him to change his plans. I’m not changing mine. I’m staying in school. I won’t know the exact due date until the ultrasound, but the doctor thinks the end of April, when exams are over, which is perfect. I still want to go to field school in the summer. It’s just an hour or so out of the city.”
“Field school?” Liz says. She gets to her feet too, for a better sightline into Sylvie’s mind. What she sees there is the baby swinging in a shawl from the low branch of a tree while Sylvie scrabbles in the dirt below.
Sylvie looks back at her mother defiantly. “There’s a daycare at the university. A good one.”
“But you’re going to move home.”
“No.”
“Oh god, darling, you have no idea.”
Maggie turns the full melting beauty of her eyes on Sylvie. “I know you’re really struggling right now to come to terms with this news. We all are. And it might be a few weeks before you and Noah are able to reach a decision. But we’re hoping you will explore the many options for adoption. You know, hundreds of families wait years for a baby. Families that would provide a dream home for this child. The timing is so bad for the two of you. It’s not just Noah’s education and future we’re thinking of. We’re thinking of yours too.”
Sylvie’s on her feet now too, and she rounds on Maggie. “There are lots of childless families all right. And there are millions of starving children in the world. Anyone who really wants a child can adopt one. Even here – there are lots and lots of homeless kids right here in Canada. They’re stuck in foster homes for their entire growing up, like dogs at the pound. People who say they want a baby and have been waiting years for one make me want to puke. I have no sympathy for them, none. They can’t get a baby because all they will accept is a perfect little newborn.” She pauses for breath. “Perfect,” she says, raking quotation marks around the word. “White.”
No one’s prepared to take this on. The two dads finally hoist themselves out of their chairs like the holdouts in a standing ovation. Standing momentarily in a silent circle, they hear the click of ice pellets against the black windows. Liz fixes her eyes on the Christmas tree, on the angel at the top – a tarty angel from the art gallery gift shop that says, Christmas is all just shtick to us, and Aiden, following the direction of her gaze, thinks of a book of Annunciation paintings he looked through once, left in a carrel at the library. The sky opening and the angel with its glorious, muscular wings dropping into a sunlit room where the Virgin sat reading or weaving or embroidering and seldom welcomed the interruption. And then a sort of horror seizes him, a sense of hope snatched away.
The dog’s had enough. He shakes himself, bones and collar tags rattling, and revolves once to wind things up. Sylvie drops back into her chair, her face sorrowful, and puts Aiden’s dark epiphany into words. “I really thought it could all end with me.”
4
There All Along
WHILE SYLVIE SLEEPS CHRISTMAS MORNING away, Aiden and Liz poke through the gifts under the tree. Liz decrees that Aiden can open one, and designates which. It’s a great little stovetop espresso maker. She froths milk with a handheld battery-powered device that looks like a sex toy and they drink lattes. It’s sunny out, and icicles drip from the eaves. The sun shows up how badly the windows need washing and how faded the loveseat is, makes plain the shameful amount of dog hair on the cushions and the slapdash ways of their new cleaner.
“I’m sacking her,” Liz says. “I didn’t want to tell her just before Christmas, but that woman is gone.”
“And then what?”
“Do you think I’m stupid? I’ve got a line on somebody else.”
The Christmas lights are cold and wan; there’s a dry, minuscule rustle of needles falling when the dog brushes against the tree. You’re supposed to feel wonder, having a living tree in the house, but really it’s a dead tree, after ten days on the road and three weeks wrapped in netting and stacked in a lot. Some of these trees are spray-painted green.
Maybe some music would help, Aiden thinks. A madrigal, or something baroque. No “Silent Night” in this house, it’s a rule. He gets up and pokes his starter wand under the split logs in the fireplace, which are set up as a classic tepee. Earlier he tucked two blocks of sawdust and paraffin wax inside the tepee. Because he’s a lazy sonofabitch. He wouldn’t do that on the island. On the island he does it right. Except when he skis in, of course, and a fire feels like a matter of life or death.
Ten o’clock and Sylvie’s still sleeping. He’s hardly had a chance to talk to her since the Calhoun/Oliphants were over. After they left, she headed straight for the basement. “Cripes!” Aiden called after her. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” She was not drawn back by the pathetic repetition of his little witticism, and he had to get up and go to the head of the stairs and call her.
When she dragged herself back to stand in the archway, he told her how proud he’d been of her throughout the meeting, the way she’d held her own.
But she turned on him in fury. “I’m not taking money,” she said (just at the end they had talked in general terms about finances). “I’m not letting Noah give me money. It’s not his fault.”
“Honey,” Aiden said, “we’re not talking fault here. You have to take it. He has to give it. It’s what he has to do.” He tried to lead her over to the couch but she stood adamantly in the archway, her face fierce.
“It’s not his money. He has no money. It’s his mother’s money.”
“Well, that’s his situation right now,” Aiden said. “He has to deal with that. God knows, you’ll have enough to deal with.”
She’d already turned away when Liz spoke. “Sylvie, you knew Noah’s mother was Mary Magdalene. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because,”
she called from halfway down the stairs, “this is not about you.”
Aiden didn’t dare look in Liz’s direction. “She doesn’t give an inch, that girl,” he said. “You know, daughters have to work hard to separate from their mothers. You were probably just the same.”
“Who knows?” she said. Not giving an inch.
This morning she’s got her hair pulled loosely into a ponytail. You can see the grey it’s shot with for a quarter-inch along her hairline. She’s been in a state for two days, since the meeting with Noah’s family. He recalls her standing by the mantel, poised to go for drinks – they were exchanging basic biographical details at the time, acknowledging each other’s right to know – and he figured she was dreading the planned parenthood conversation, so he said, hoping it would be the last word on the subject, “Lucky Liz works downtown, in the Exchange District. But I’m way out on Portage Avenue, close to Assiniboine Park.”
But in a voice you could only describe as savage, Liz spurned the gesture. “We may as well have our little joke and get it over with,” she said. “I’m the executive director of the Sexuality Education Resource Centre – SERC. We call it the circus. You probably know it as Planned Parenthood.” Then she turned a dreadful parody of a smile on Maggie: “So! What can I get you to drink?”
Technically they’ve had lots of time to talk in the past two days, but he’s an experienced husband; he’s biding his time. He gets up again, pulls open the CD drawer, and picks out a Telemann, Tafelmusik. It was a standard in Christmases past, when there were wolves in Wales and Sylvie was up at five o’clock in the muffling silence of the eternal snows to check that Santa’s glass of milk had been drained and his cookie eaten. When out-of-town cousins slept over and a row of striped stockings hung from the mantel. There’s just one now, and it’s a silky cowboy boot, purple.
“That’s her stocking?” He stands by the music system with the silver disc in his fingers. “Where the hell did it come from?”