by Joan Thomas
“Which was pretty insulting to her.”
“Well, yeah. She’d had a kid with the guy. And she didn’t believe me in any case. She just kept gazing at me with concern and pity. And I know she spread it around. For months afterwards women would look at me earnestly and say, ‘So, how are you and Aiden doing?’ ”
Charlotte laughs. “God, she’s a piece of work.”
Liz drains her glass and reaches for the bottle. “She is. But you know, it’s weird. She can still make me feel inferior. Like, she’s let her hair go grey, and instead of thinking how old she looks, I kind of envy her. For daring to look old. For being more real. She affects everyone that way. Once, years ago, we were all trying to cram into a car to go somewhere and one of the women said, ‘Mary Magdalene can’t ride in the back – her aura’s too big.’ ”
“So is her aura still visible to the naked eye?”
“Not so much.”
“Maybe only the young can see it.”
“That’s it!” Liz cries. “It’s like a taste for cherry cola. Everybody grows out of that eventually.” But she’s not really convinced. Everyone adores Mary Magdalene. It’s the way she turns her warm eyes on you and sees you totally. That’s what Liz always shrank from, that stifling intimacy that could suck you in like quicksand.
“You know, I’m dying for a smoke,” Charlotte murmurs, and gets up to search for her purse.
They end up on the veranda, coats and boots on. And there, leaning against the railing and holding her cigarette high, Charlotte casually gets back to George. It’s clear to Liz why she made the effort to move their little party outside. Along with caring for Liz (she does care), she’s always been a gossip hound.
“Does Aiden know? About that sordid little neighbourhood drama?”
“Of course not.” Liz sticks her hands deep in her pockets. “You think Aiden doesn’t keep secrets from me?”
“You think he’s had affairs?”
“Affairs? Don’t be bourgeois.”
“He does kind of act like a free agent at parties.”
“Oh, I know. The cool way he swans around. Eat side by side but not from the same plate, yadda, yadda.” She thinks of a summer afternoon when two women driving a tiny vintage car rolled into the driveway. They were picking up Aiden for a three-week workshop, and they made a hilarious thing out of cramming his gear into the car. One of them was a long-haired Asian beauty, the other older and shaped like a penguin. The lively, congenial manner Aiden switched on for both of them – it seemed at the time a way of saying fuck you to Liz. She was on the veranda and he said as an afterthought, “Oh, this is Liz,” and she put it to herself that two could play that game. After they had driven away, she called Jenn’s mother and arranged for Sylvie to sleep over at Jenn’s, and then she dressed up and went to a party on the river.
A car creeps up the street, snowflakes swimming in the long shafts of its headlights. It turns the corner. Liz leans over the railing and looks out into the yard, trying to see the snow falling invisibly in the dark. Is anybody worth the gift of your desire? You look around a party and all the men are wonderful – effortlessly funny, and tall, with strong, tanned arms, golden hairs glinting on them – and you feel a bitter pang at the tiny portion of this buffet you will ever be able to partake of. And then the next night you look around at the same crowd and see a collection of bloodless wonders, fretting about mould in their basements. Both of these visions are deeply true.
“I’ll tell you Aiden’s dirty little secret,” she says to Char. “It’s how very, very straight he actually is.”
“But that’s not what you meant,” Charlotte says.
She’s not going to let it go. Liz is shivering. It is Aiden’s fault, she thinks. All of it. He taught me how to be. He drove me to it. But not in any way she can explain to Charlotte, especially drunk. She shoves her hands up her sleeves and feels the gooseflesh on her bare arms. “Well, for one thing,” she says, “he still smokes the odd joint and he won’t tell me who his dealer is. I think it might be Sylvie. Can you imagine, him colluding with her like that?” She hears her voice thicken, and out of nowhere she’s crying.
Charlotte steps towards her, turning her head to blow away a long trail of smoke. Then she grinds out her cigarette on a patch of ice on the railing, throws the stub into the spirea bushes, and puts her arms around Liz, reaching up to stroke her hair. It feels totally false. Off, like their conversation.
Liz moves away. “Oh, there’s more to it,” she says to Charlotte. Her voice is portentous. God, she’s drunk!
“What more?”
Liz shakes her head. Now it seems she’s laughing. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” she hears herself say.
After a two-day visit, Charlotte flies back to Vancouver. Aiden sits downstairs long after Liz has gone to bed. The house is so quiet. He remembers this waiting sensation from Liz’s pregnancy – a sense that all the real action is interior. He pours himself three fingers of Glendronach and reads the film reviews and cartoons in the latest New Yorker, the radio on low and tuned to a French station. It’s a jazz program; he likes it for the host’s sexy voice, the way her confiding chat washes meaninglessly over him. “Peenk Floyd,” he hears her say at one point.
Around one o’clock he turns on the TV. The U.S. public broadcaster is playing a doc about evangelicals holding something called a “Last Days” convention. Well-dressed white Americans sit around tables in a hotel ballroom, talking complacently about apocalyptic indicators like hundred-pound hailstones and carnage in the Middle East. One of the main interview subjects is a fiftyish blonde, a Republican wife type. “People believe the world will last forever, but God has other plans,” she says. “All the floods, the tornadoes, the famines – I’m actually happy when I hear about them on the news. Because these are signs that Jesus is on his way. It’s exciting to be the generation God has chosen to live out the End Times. I’m excited. Are you excited?” This is directed at the unseen interviewer. They cut to a crane shot of the red-carpeted ballroom, and Aiden flicks off the TV.
Who is he to sneer? Every Saturday morning when he was a kid, he knocked on doors for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He went with his mother and her friend Helen, wearing a clip-on bowtie, his hair plastered to the side with a comb and water. He was the only one of the kids his mother dragged to the Kingdom Hall and proselytizing door to door. Their beat was Wolseley, as it happened, where Aiden and Liz live now. They walked down from the other side of Portage Avenue, badly dressed emissaries from the wrong side of the tracks, carrying urgent news of the end of the world to happy breakfasting families.
The house creaks in the cold: he’s hearing the iron gears of things slowing down. He gets up and goes to the bookshelf and pulls out his battered copy of The New Oxford Book of English Verse. The summer his MIFT program started, when he went to Otter Lake as sole owner for the first time, he wanted a solitary retreat. And he vowed not to run the generator. No radio, no music, no books except his Oxford. He’d just done a lot of emotional work at the group therapy intensive – it was almost a spiritual experience – and he had the idea that he’d paddle up to the dock and a more fully realized self would be waiting for him there, somebody who could live in silent harmony with nature for two weeks.
Early on, taking a hike to the top of the island, he stumbled – on a rough patch of concrete he’d never noticed before, halfway up the climb. Fucking concrete, poured for no purpose he could see, on a ledge where granite broke through the topsoil like a whale breaching. He roamed the island in a rage all afternoon, assaulted by the sight of the rocks along the waterfront that Rupert had painted white, and the flagpole from which Rupert used to fly the Stars and Stripes he’d bought on a celebrated retirement trip to Chicken, Alaska, and the barbecue pad and the lawn grass and the toilet bowl installed in the lawn grass as a petunia planter, and the tin cans and beer bottles thrown into the bush behind the cabin.
After a supper of cold beans and bread, he sat on the roc
ks reading Gerard Manley Hopkins. His undefended dissertation was on Hopkins, and his Oxford opened on its own to “God’s Grandeur.” He’d bought the book as an undergraduate, and “God” was circled in ink and annotated in his younger, neater handwriting:
creative life force
eternal pulse of nature
Gaia?
Hopkins, of course, could use the word God straight-up. He’d been born Church of England, and then he’d jeopardized his prospects and broken his parents’ hearts by becoming a papist. The Catholic belief that God is in the material world, in the bread and wine: that’s why Hopkins had converted, because the symbolism appealed to the poet in him. He was sent to teach in the north of England, where the sheep were black with soot from the factory chimneys. He thought that if you paid enough attention you would see beyond that, you could see God. He swooned looking into a bluebell, and so he ate it as a Eucharist.
Sitting on the rocks in the failing western light, Aiden read the poem over and over. The last lines made his breath catch every time: “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
The next day he got to work and felled the flagpole like a pine tree, sawing off the stump at its concrete base. After that he took a sledgehammer to the barbecue pad and broke up what he could. He pried up the whitewashed border stones and dismantled the aluminum filleting table his dad had screwed into the rock. Got rid of the things that offended him most, that reeked of his dad, that wore man’s smudge and shared man’s smell – although of course all that was a conceit, the notion that Aiden (tramping the island in shoes assembled by indigent children on three continents) was fundamentally different, that he deserved to be there. The real estate deal had filled him with so much private satisfaction (We own it – it will be here for us when the city burns), but that was nonsense too, the idea that he, in his nanosecond of time, should have any meaningful claim to a piece of Precambrian rock five hundred million years old.
One time, after the light was scoured from the sky in the black west, he decided he wanted to see the whole night unroll. He carried a sleeping bag and pillow outside and made a nest on the lower ledge with its beautiful lichen, and there he lay while the sun dropped behind the fringe of spruce on the far bank and tiny stars began to prick through the green sky. He watched the water silver over, and then along the shoreline he saw the silver pucker into an arrowhead. A line of arrowheads – an otter, swimming with her young. When they were out of sight, he rolled onto his back and lay looking at the stars in their webs until he fell asleep. The temperature plunged during the night, and in the morning the dew woke him: his hair and his sleeping bag were drenched. It was astonishing being anointed like that by a perfectly cloudless, enamel-blue sky, and lying on that granite slab, he was stoned by wonder at the faithful rotation of the Earth and the perfection of a day washed with light by a sun that hadn’t even risen yet.
He’s still got the Oxford in his hands, and he opens it. In the warm light of a lamp with an amber shade, he turns his eyes to the poem. His poem, you might call it: he would acknowledge it as a kind of scripture. “Nature is never spent,” he reads aloud. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” But it’s an old poem, an old consolation, and he finds that he doesn’t have the heart to read to the end.
Sylvie was right to try to stay away from Liz: she caused her first-ever fight with Noah. Before Sylvie had a chance to tell him what had gone down with her parents, he called her.
“I was just talking to my mom. Did you decide to keep the baby?”
“What makes you think that?”
“That’s what your mother told my mother.”
“Oh god.” She held the phone away from her for a minute. “Did you? Did you tell your mother you’ve decided?” he was saying when she put it back to her ear.
“I got cornered, Noah. They were pushing me, pushing me, and it just kind of came out.”
“So you’re not really serious about it.”
She couldn’t link the voice coming out of her phone to his actual face. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I am serious. I don’t really see any other way.”
Now no sound at all came from the phone.
“Noah, do you want your kid to grow up in a ten-room mansion in Lindenwoods? Do you want her driving an SUV when she’s sixteen?”
“Nobody will be driving SUVS when this kid is sixteen.”
“No, all right, but you see what I mean. It’s going to be hard, I know. But maybe we have a chance to do it right. With this baby. To show that it can be done.”
Again he didn’t respond.
“Noah,” she said. “Use your words.”
More silence.
“Fuck, Noah. I feel like shit when you don’t talk.”
She hung up and dropped her phone on the bed. In a minute it rang again. In that strange flat voice he said, “You’re just going to have to give me time.”
Well, they have time. Sylvie has the impression this pregnancy will never be over. Her stomach is huge and her belly button sticks out like the knot in a big balloon. But she’s going to classes and turning in her assignments; she’s sucking back kale smoothies and eating hummus sandwiches stacked with veggies. Her skin is clear, her hair crackles (“You’re a biosphere,” her friends all say, “a walking biosphere”), and she tries not to fret, because she knows Noah will come around.
While she’s waiting for that to happen, she makes her own plans for the first few months. She’ll buy a cradle at Value Village and she’ll keep the baby’s sleepers and diapers in a drawer of her dresser. If you’re breastfeeding, that’s all you need – a woman’s body is perfectly adapted to feed a baby on nothing. She knows her baby will be the most popular resident of Laurence Hall; her friends will be at the door night and day, begging to take her for walks. It would be unfair to Kajri to have a baby waking her up in the night, though, so she goes to the student housing office and puts her name on a list for a private room.
Laurence Hall does not currently allow children, that’s the biggest catch. Sylvie makes an appointment and goes in to speak to the dean. Dean Semple (his actual given name) is a funny guy who thinks the styles of his own university days are cool. “You got lucky,” she says. “Spikes are back.” He narrows his eyes but basically he likes her – she can say anything. He offers her two pieces of the Kit Kat he has open on his desk and tells her the board of regents is meeting in a few weeks. “But I’ve got to warn you,” Dean the Dean says, “it took them two years to reach a decision on Coke machines.”
Most students will sign anything you put under their noses, so Sylvie writes up a petition. She circulates the clipboard in the lecture theatre during her Evo-Devo class, which is huge. It comes back with two names and Are you nuts? written across the bottom. Sylvie slides the clipboard into her backpack. People secretly keep cats and dogs in apartments all the time, she thinks darkly. She’s not going to panic. Nothing in the universe can make her fall back into her mother’s vortex.
But the weeks are passing, so in desperation she takes her petition to the entrance of the university daycare centre. It’s late afternoon and the parents, mostly moms, are just arriving to pick up their kids. The first woman she approaches reads the petition and says, “Laurence Hall? Not sure why you’d want to do that.” She looks at Sylvie with a curious expression. Sylvie has no idea what she’s seeing or thinking, and she hates it, it’s like this woman has a strange power over her. She leans against a pillar of the daycare centre. Something is pressing inside her head, as if her brain is too big for her skull, crammed in and hurting. She bends down cautiously for her backpack, swings it on, and heads for Laurence Hall.
It’s dark when she wakes with a gasp to see Kajri by her bed with a Thermos mug of teabag chai.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay,” Sylvie says. “I need to get up.” When she reaches for the mug, she discovers that her fingers are swollen like sa
usages. She can hardly bend them. She puts down the mug and goes to the bathroom to pee. Her feet are puffy too, even the soles – they feel squishy to walk on.
“How are they going to get this thing out of me?” she says when she comes out of the bathroom.
Kajri gives a little shrug. “It’s been done before.” Her voice is matter-of-fact.
And then both their eyes go to the ghostly sonogram of the seven billionth baby hanging on the wall. Sylvie suddenly sees the true meaning of that picture: it’s not that her baby is exceptional, it’s that it isn’t.
Kajri is gone when Sylvie wakes up in the morning. Her headache is gone too, and the swelling in her hands and feet is down. She goes to her classes, and then at one o’clock she runs into Benedictor in Lockhart Hall. He’s on his way to visit a friend who has two tiny kids. “Can I come?” Sylvie asks. He’s surprised, but he says sure.
And then his friend isn’t home; only the guy’s wife is there in their tiny apartment on Carlton. Her name is Asnaku, she’s twenty-six and beautiful, and she has incredible micro braids. She makes them lunch, a spicy lentil dish that they eat with injera. One of her babies is sleeping on its tummy in a mesh playpen, and Benedictor sits comfortably at the kitchen table holding the other.
“So, what’s the secret to being a good mom?” Sylvie asks, reaching over to run her fingertips along the baby’s plump arm. The baby looks at her out of the corner of his amazing eyes – he’s flirting with her. What she wants to know from Asnaku is how you raise a baby with very little, the way people do in much of Africa, but she can’t think of a tactful way to ask this.
Afterwards she calls Noah to tell him about it. When he picks up, he sounds okay, and she is terribly relieved. “The most important thing, she says, is to carry your baby all the time. Tie it to your body with a big piece of cloth. Parents in North America always drag their babies around in car seats, and the baby never feels the warmth of the mother’s body.”