by Joan Thomas
“If I could give you a piece of advice,” Aiden says finally. She turns in his direction, letting her face show how stony she suddenly feels. “Speak your heart with Sylvie. Instead of always telling her what you think she needs to hear.”
“Speak your heart?” Liz says. “Speak your heart?” She picks up the tray of chicken and slides it into the oven. “Well, seeing we’re turning this into a character issue, seeing that this problem is suddenly about me, Aiden, let me just make a small observation of my own: I doubt that Sylvie appreciates her father diving in to touch her belly for luck the instant she sets foot in the door.”
Liz’s quilting group meets that night and Aiden’s in bed when she comes in afterwards. She can tell from the way he’s lying that he’s not asleep. She strips off her clothes, drops them on the wicker chair, and crawls in. She’s washed her face and moisturized but she gave herself a holiday from flossing. The dog followed her upstairs. She lies for a minute listening to him settle down, his tags clicking. Aiden doesn’t move. You can share a bed when you’re fighting; you just have to maintain a scrupulous decorum. But why fight this one with Aiden? She rolls over and curls herself against his back. He has a T-shirt on to keep his shoulders warm, but his butt is bare and his cheeks feel cold.
“I get it,” she says. “You’re trying to make this seem normal.”
He reaches for her hand, pulls her arm tighter around him, weaves his fingers through hers. It’s a gesture she loves, like tying twine around the cocoon of their curled-up bodies. “Yup,” he says. “Like it was happening ten years from now.”
“I know, I know.”
The baseboard heater comes on with its electric hum. He turns a few degrees, resettles himself, and pulls her back into their lock. “It seems like just last year we were lying here and you were pregnant with Sylvie.”
“Not here. It was downstairs. We still had the waterbed.” So lovely, the waterbed, so amniotic. Night after night she floated on it, astonished by the thought of the baby floating inside her. She was the first person it had ever happened to. That’s what they say about women who make a drama out of being pregnant, but that’s how it felt. They’d set out to make a baby but they’d never really thought they were signing on for the whole marriage-and-family thing. It was as if they’d embarked on something unique to them. Why did they think they were so different? She presses on the question, and all she can see is them – the way they were in those years, blithe and brash and scoffing, as though they alone, out of the whole world, could hang on to that beautiful freedom forever.
“I’m not ready for this,” she says to Aiden. “I never really got the hang of the mom thing.”
“Come on, that’s not true. You were great. Look how you stayed home all that time with Sylvie.”
“I was working, Aiden.” The years she spent freelancing out of the house, writing grant applications and strat plans for non-profits – she’ll never forget what it was like, scrambling to get packages together for inflexible federal deadlines, files spilling from every surface in the house, the phone ringing every two minutes, and a restless, curious, wilful child pawing at her knees. Sylvie would be up before dawn every morning without fail, sitting on the kitchen floor making an amulet out of alligator clips and twist ties and Cheerios and Scotch tape, singing, “The wise man rode a coconut, the sad man rode a horse” or some other bit of nonsense. Liz would take a sip of her coffee and lift her eyes to the microwave and see that it wasn’t even seven yet, and know that everything the day would offer her was already there in those untidy rooms.
Which must be why she fell in with the GAP mothers, that strange collection of throwbacks who sat by the hour in each other’s houses, drinking tea made from mint and chamomile they grew in their own borders, and trading lore – all the things counterculture women just knew, the insider tips about fenugreek and blessed thistle (You haven’t ingested enough if you can’t smell it on your skin). If Liz thought her paid employment would give her any cachet with that crew, or her witticisms regarding the things they were so earnest about, she was badly mistaken.
One very hot day she invited them to sit outside, where there was a breeze and her pale pink monkshood was in bloom along the fence. She opened the back door to the beautiful deck she and Aiden had just put in, and in a flash someone named Ariel had scooped up her toddler. “Is that, uh, pressure-treated pine?” Ariel asked delicately. “I’d rather not sit out there with the kids, if you don’t mind. It’s known to contain arsenic.”
So they met in the living room with the blinds down, the kids fretful and bored because their mothers (tactfully, while Liz was in the kitchen making the tea) had gone through the toy box and set out of reach everything interesting – the painted toys (for fear of lead) and the plastic toys (PVCS). There was Victoria, swollen and miserable and a week overdue, panting like a dog in the heat. “My doctor wants me to come in tomorrow,” she said. “He wants to induce.”
A male doctor trying to fit her baby’s birth around his golf schedule! So Mary Magdalene, sitting like a queen in the Mission chair with someone else’s toddler contented on her lap, told the moving story of Sparky’s birth, how at thirty-seven weeks Sparky was breech, a complication for which every doctor in the city will sentence you to a Caesarean. But on the advice of her midwife, Mary Magdalene pressed ice to her solar plexus, where Sparky’s head was, and at the same time shone a thin but powerful flashlight up her vagina. Within a day Sparky had swum around to follow the light. Three weeks later he emerged in a victorious home birth.
Liz presses her forehead against Aiden’s shoulder. “Ask Maggie what kind of a mother I was,” she says. “I almost killed her kid once.”
“What are you talking about?”
So she finally tells him. About the time she looked after Sparky because he had a cold and Mary Magdalene had to go to the welfare office. “I pushed her to leave him with me. I was in a panic about a deadline and I figured he’d keep Sylvie occupied. But he was sick and he just wanted Sylvie to piss off and let him play with Lego. So she was at me, at me to take them outside. You know how she is – resisting her always costs more time and energy than giving in. So we ended up going to Vimy Ridge Park. They had those old swings with thick, heavy slabs of wood dangling from industrial chains. I pushed the kids for a while, and then I’m sitting on a bench, working through a set of notes with a highlighter, because I’m truly in a jam with that job, and they’re swinging high, pumping themselves. They’re facing in opposite directions so they can see each other, and then I look up and I see Sparky jump off his swing, and Sylvie’s swing comes up and clunks him right in the face. Oh, it was awful! It just happened in a second. By the time I got him home he looked like a space alien – you could hardly see his eyes. When Maggie gets there, I’m icing his face like crazy. Of course she makes a huge deal of it.” Liz can still see her walking quickly up the polished hall of Urgent Care with Sparky riding on her hip, without a thank-you or a backward glance.
“Was his nose broken?”
“Well, yes. And he had a mild concussion, as well as two spectacular shiners. So of course it caused a sensation on the street. Mary Magdalene moved away right after. I think she was trying to get away from me.”
Aiden lets her hand go and reaches up to rearrange his pillow. “Is this why you were so freaked when you saw Maggie again? I doubt she even remembers.”
Liz rolls onto her back. He follows her, lays an arm across her breasts. She can smell his breath – toothpaste and garlic and something from a different register. Old age, possibly.
“Aiden,” she says. “Darling. You should be put on display in a glass case.”
“What do you mean?”
“For being such a naïf. A man could say, Very sorry, accidents happen. But a woman – oh my god!”
After he’s asleep, Liz lies gazing at the square of night sky framed by the skylight. It’s never blue or black. It’s the colour of bruises, Aiden always says. Or bile. It’s chartreuse, Liz
insists. Puce. Although she doesn’t really know what colour puce is. She rolls to her side of the bed and then Mary Magdalene is standing on the street with her hand on Sparky’s shoulder, her hair long and full, like Cher’s. Sparky’s swelling has gone down but his face is still lurid. It’s Halloween. Exhausted by a round of contrite apologies, Liz attempts a joke. “Hey, Sparky, you could be a Ninja Turtle.” Mary Magdalene looks hard at Liz and says something absolutely savage. Liz hears the words in her mind and they make her gasp, they flip her right out of bed. She sits on the edge, cradling her pillow. She hasn’t thought about that moment in years. Not because she forgot, no. Because she buried it deep, the way you bury radioactive waste.
She stands up and pulls her robe off its hook and goes downstairs. The dog follows. In the living room she turns on the shell lamp. Let’s face it, she was floundering in those days, going slowly around the twist. They were on the cusp of making it, she and Aiden, but things were taking a long time to come together. He was always amused that she put up with that group. “But I get it,” he said. “People with a seamless view of the world are intimidating, even when they’re full of shit.”
Why didn’t she laugh in their faces? Because the GAP women had something she didn’t have. She remembers Mary Magdalene crouched on the kitchen floor beside Sparky, her warm face totally absorbed by what her son was saying. It was never hard for them. They were never frantic and bored. They were like women in love.
She pulls a quilt out of the press in the corner and curls up on the sofa. Aiden had a fire while she was out. Embers glow on the hearth, under the ash, like veins deep in the Earth. Just a few tiny nuggets of orange fire and soon (she knows from experience) the whole room will be rosy with their light. She fusses with the cushion under her cheek and then drops a hand down to dangle it in Max’s ruff. He’s happy to have a friend in the night, she can sense his doggy satisfaction. She nestles deeper into the couch and covers her face with her arm. Sleep, she orders, but nothing resembling sleep responds. After a few minutes she lowers her arm and looks into the room. In the dim light she makes out the curve of the Frank Lloyd Wright vase on the mantel and the art deco figurine standing up gracefully beside it.
Where do I go wrong? she asks the house.
It takes the house a minute to respond. In your haste, it says at last. You, Liz (the meticulous, painstaking craftsperson who made this quilt), you grab for things. Sometimes what you want is not what is best.
The edge of the quilt is tickling her face; she folds it over and readjusts the cushion. She stretches out her legs, measuring the luxurious length of the leather sofa with her body. Sirens race up Portage Avenue, screaming thinly in the distance, and then the furnace murmurs to life.
What do I do right? she asks the house.
You’re hasty, the house replies. Nobody can make a cake without breaking eggs.
Sylvie gives herself a day off from classes and spends most of it in bed. She’s not sick but she has some strange physical symptoms, including a metallic taste in her mouth. When the building falls quiet, she falls back to sleep. Around noon she wakes up and fishes Kajri’s human physiology text out of the bed. It’s got a long chapter on the development of the Homo sapiens fetus, full of fibre-optic photos of babies in the womb. Through the fall, unaware, Sylvie harboured a tadpole, a fish, and a lizard. But now her baby is a mammal. It has lost its tail. It’s covered with hair. It has an alien’s face, with raspberry-coloured veins twining over its bulging forehead. It’s already equipped for its evolutionary task of overpopulating the planet – those little olive-shaped ovaries have fifty thousand eggs in them.
Sylvie can take this only in small doses. She drops the book to the floor, gets up, and eats two things of raspberry yogurt and a morning glory muffin from the windowsill. Her phone beeps. HAPPY MOUTH NOON TOMORROW? Her dad is trying to lure her to his office with sushi. He’s done this before. She texts him back: MAYBE. He’s so sweet, although his wife is a witch and he’s completely under her thrall. There’s a word for him that few people know: uxorious. Sylvie learned it in first-year English when they read Paradise Lost. Adam the First Man was uxorious, and look what came of that.
She pulls her laptop over to the bed. She doesn’t check Facebook but she reads her Twitter feed and the usual blogs. They’re all about the climate summit, at which greedy nations showed their true values and less than nothing was accomplished. She drops the lid of her laptop, feeling sorry for all the activists who anguished for years about whether to get on a plane and fly halfway around the world to attend.
Then she gets up and tries on a bunch of clothes. Because suddenly, now that she knows what’s going on, none of them fit. Around the middle of the afternoon she calls in sick at Stella’s. It’s the evening manager who picks up and he’s pissy about it. “Believe me, you don’t want me there,” she says, trying to sound contagious or at the point of vomiting.
She straightens up her bed and crawls back in. At Thanksgiving they lay curled in this bed for a whole afternoon, she and Noah, when Kajri had gone home and all the jocks from the dorm were out at some sporting event. Sylvie drew Noah an awesome sleeve tattoo with Sharpies and wouldn’t let him shower before he went home for turkey dinner. She expected to have a whole new stash of memories to draw from after Christmas, but the Christmas holiday was totally stolen from them. She saw him twice, not counting the airport run. Just twice – it’s unbelievable. And on New Year’s Eve, after she’d said no to three house parties so they could be alone, he invited Zach along, and they were both totally wasted by the time they picked Sylvie up. The whole night was a bust.
She hugs her pillow, trying to call him up. It’s the parts of his body that have nothing to do with sex that move her most – his neat ears, his bony ankles, and the slight widening of his nose where it was broken when he was little (something she never comments on, because she doesn’t want to remind him that it was her fault). Last summer, when they met after twelve or thirteen years of not seeing each other, he was naked. It was night out on Lake Winnipeg, and he was caught in a spotlight, balancing on the gunnels of a canoe with his arms out. He dove into the water the instant the light hit him, but not before a vivid picture had etched itself permanently in Sylvie’s mind.
They were out at a diving rock at Zach’s cabin, which was close to the research station at Presley Point. They – five girls counting Sylvie and Thea – had driven out late and found an empty A-frame cabin all lit up. They could hear the guys out at the rock. Jenn wanted to swim out. “Don’t be stupid,” Thea said. “You’ll drown and take us down with you.” In the boathouse they found an old rowboat with oars in its locks. They waded in and drew it out and stepped into it off the dock. Creaking their way across the lake, they were laughing softly because they knew the guys would be skinny-dipping. Sylvie had a very special feeling that night, because she had just broken up with her Neanderthal boyfriend Seth. She was herself again, but more than herself: her new, experienced, single self.
Thea was carrying a great big flashlight. When they got close, she shone it at the rock and spotlighted this new guy. Up on the gunnels of his canoe, he looked like Leonardo da Vinci’s man in a wheel. Not perfect in some muscle-bound way, just neat (neater and younger than the Da Vinci man), well-proportioned, his penis drooping from the hair on his abdomen in the normal, beautiful way. Like a representation of Homo sapiens (masc.) at this stage of evolutionary history. The light hit him, and everybody shouted and laughed and he dove neatly into the water. In a flash, Sylvie pulled off her T-shirt and shorts and bra and panties and rolled out of the rowboat. She was clumsy rolling out – she almost tipped the boat – and she heard Thea and Jenn scream as she fell sideways into the cool water. When she surfaced, she lay on her back and looked up at the Big Dipper pouring stars into the lake, aware of the new guy treading water close by in the darkness.
Eventually everybody stripped and jumped in, and they fooled around in the water for a long time. The guy with the canoe was the on
ly actual stranger, but they were all shy with each other. They’d been friends since junior high but most of them had never seen each other naked. Zach’s golden lab was there, and they threw an orange ball and he swam after it like a fool. They started to play keep-away. Sylvie caught the ball deftly in one hand – and it wasn’t a ball at all, it was a little stuffed animal, wet and yucky, a cheap Kmart toy a kid had left in the bottom of the boat.
She threw it at the new guy (Canoe, they called him), high, so he had to jump out of the water up to his waist to catch it. He caught it easily and threw it back at her and she tried to puzzle out the mystery of where she had seen and loved him before. He looked like an actor she knew (that’s what she figured at first), so crazy familiar, the straight, dark line of his eyebrows, the way he tossed his hair back as he levitated in the water to throw the orange toy, as if this were a moment on a DVD she had watched over and over.
He’d beached his canoe on the rock. Later, when she had her shorts and T-shirt on and her damp panties and bra scrunched into a pocket, she went up to him and said, “I’ll be your bowsman.”
“I’ve only got one paddle,” he said, but she stepped in anyway as he slid the canoe into the water. Two of her friends tried to clamber in and he pried their hands off the gunnels. He wasn’t laughing; he was deadly serious. Sylvie knelt in the bow and they slid silently towards the empty cabin with its blazing lights. He paddled on the left the whole way – he had a perfect J-stroke – and she sat like a queen on a barge, the water slipping coolly past her dangling fingers. There was no moon, only the darkness spangled above them and the water brooding below. She can’t pinpoint the moment she realized. It was just a knowing that grew in her, like the trees materializing from the dark as the canoe glided closer to shore.
Dawn was streaking the sky when they carried the canoe to the boathouse. They took it in the back door, walking up the rickety steps and onto a narrow ledge of rotting timbers, shuffling along carefully in the perfect darkness. Halfway in he stopped and fed the canoe forward, crouching to lay it gently on the black water. She couldn’t see him, she could only sense his movements. Then he stood up and she felt his hand around her wrist.