by Joan Thomas
When he comes back upstairs with a plate from the microwave and a glass of milk, Sylvie is sitting in the rocking chair in her terry robe, nursing the baby. Her face is swollen but her sobs have stilled.
“Terrific,” Aiden says to Maggie. “Thank you.”
“Oh, no worries,” she says, getting up off the bed. “Like they say, it takes a village.” She leans over and gives Sylvie a hug. “This was way too much, wasn’t it. I know you need quiet. You’re going to need lots of time to heal. And lots of support.” She’s talking tenderly into Sylvie’s face, nose to nose. “And we are here for you. You remember that, eh? We’re all just a phone call away.” At the door she stands for a minute, including Aiden in her reproving sympathy. “My numbers are there,” she says, nodding towards Sylvie’s desk. “Work, home, cell. Anytime, eh?” Then she’s gone.
The desk is cluttered with baby things, gifts. Aiden shoves them over and perches on it. He picks up a stuffed pig and turns it in his hands, keeping his eyes cast tactfully down, although Sylvie has a shawl draped over her shoulder. Below them, the music turns off. Liz said she would send everyone on their way. The silence is impressive. Maggie is right – it was too much. It’s as if Liz was desperately signalling to their friends, We are not at all ambivalent about this baby. And he’s ashamed of that pissing match in the hall. He waits for Sylvie to lift her head and meet his eyes, but she won’t.
“Did something happen, honey? Was it Noah?”
She shakes her head. “I’m just tired,” she says after a minute, in a little voice.
“Why didn’t you slip out? You could have come up here with the baby.”
“You guys were standing at the stairs.”
This is what he and Liz used to call ego disintegration time – they read it in a book. “It’s pretty overwhelming, I know,” he says. “But look at that baby. She’s fine now. It’s wonderful, the way you can meet her needs. And she meets yours too. You sit holding her like that and she warms your heart. Literally.”
“I wish I could lie in bed and feed her.”
“She’s a little young for that. And so are you. I know the way you sleep.”
“Dad, do you think she can see yet?”
“Sylvie. Honey. Of course she can see. Maybe you’re thinking of kittens.”
He watches her, shaken. She seems to be coping most of the time, and until now she’s been in reasonable spirits. But there have been troubling lapses. The name thing, for one. The whole week at the hospital, Sylvie refused to discuss the name, or she joked about it. Evo-Devo was a big contender. As luck would have it, he was alone with her the night a nurse brought the birth registration forms to the room. Sylvie scrawled something on the form and went back to eating her Jell-O. He picked it up and read it out.
“Whatever,” she said. “It’s rude, sticking a name on another human being. Especially when you don’t know what sort of person she’s going to be. When she’s old enough, she can name herself. There’s a culture that does that. I wish I could remember which one.”
“What does Noah think?”
“He doesn’t care.”
Liz hit the roof when he told her. Well, first she heard it as Fawn. “Fawn Phimister?” she said in disbelief.
“Yup.”
“You have got to be kidding. That’s the worst name I have ever heard, bar none.”
“Well, it’s a different generation,” Aiden said gamely. “I guess it sounds good to her.”
Liz had just come in from her meeting and was standing with her coat on. He beckoned for her to come and sit on the arm of his chair, but she stayed on her feet in the archway.
“Is it some sentimental reference to Bambi?”
“I doubt it. Bambi was before our time. Anyway, it’s not the baby deer. It’s F-A-U-N.”
“Faun Phimister.”
“Yup.”
“What’s the middle name?”
“No middle name. I’m not sure she took it seriously. She was kind of in a mood.”
“Oh, for god’s sake.” Liz leaned into the frame of the pocket doors and closed her eyes.
In fact they never use the name. They say Pumpkin, or Angel, or they just say “the baby.” Sylvie herself does not use it. “I am watching this girl like a hawk for postpartum depression,” Liz says to Aiden every day. Well, so is he.
The feeding is almost finished. It looks to Aiden as though the baby is drifting off. Sylvie lifts a finger and gently touches her cheek. That’s a good sign.
“Let me take her,” he says. “You need to eat your supper.”
“I have to burp her.”
“I can do that.”
He lays the warm little bundle on a towel over his shoulder and pats her back until she pukes up a teaspoon of hot milk. Then he changes her again, and Sylvie eats her warmed-up lasagna and drinks her milk and crawls into bed. It’s a piece of cake changing this baby, what with the Velcro tabs. She kicks her white legs vigorously at him. We’re fine, he tells himself. We’re all fine. The elms have died and the valleys in B.C. have all turned brown, but nature can still do perfection. He picks her up gently and walks her around the room, and she’s asleep by the time he lays her in the crib.
“Are you going to be all right, honey?” he asks, his hand on the light switch.
“Oh, who knows?” Sylvie says, but she manages a little smile.
Three o’clock. Sylvie sits up in bed and turns on the lamp and looks at the squalling baby in the bassinette. Her incision hurts like crazy and she feels hollowed out from all her crying. It’s cold in her room, so she pulls on her robe and sticks her feet in her slippers. She picks up the baby the way they taught her, as though her head is in danger of falling off, and moves carefully over to the rocking chair.
Bracing herself, she slides up her T-shirt and thrusts her left nipple at the baby’s mouth. The baby jerks her head as though Sylvie is tormenting her, but at the second try she grabs on, and Sylvie feels the shock that hits her every time, that her stretched and beat-up and sliced-open body should be used like this by another human being. Everybody takes it for granted. Her own body takes it for granted – her boobs, for example, which are big and hard as rocks. “She drinks it just like it’s the real thing,” she said to her dad at breakfast, and he looked startled and said, “Sylvie, honey, it is the real thing.” Apparently she’s no longer allowed to make jokes.
What freaks her out most is the baby’s eyes. Just now when the light came on, she didn’t as much as flinch. There’s never been any evidence that she can see – except, come to think of it, how scared she looked once when Sylvie bent over the bassinette. What Maggie said at the party explained that: the baby was mimicking Sylvie’s expression. Her eyes are half-open now, and Sylvie reaches over and turns off the lamp. In the dark the baby settles into her meal, sucking rhythmically, and an ache starts up in Sylvie’s abdomen, the way it always does when she nurses. Then she feels a light touch, as though a butterfly has landed on her. The baby has reached up and put a tiny hand on Sylvie’s breast, as if to comfort her. Warmth spreads through Sylvie’s body, and she bends her head, taking in the baby’s smell.
She’s just about to make the switch to her other breast when she hears footsteps on the stairs. The door opens all the way, letting in yellow light, and Liz is standing there in her blue silk robe. Sylvie clenches her toes in the sheepskin lining of her slippers.
“Why are you sitting in the dark?” Liz’s hand moves towards the light switch.
“Don’t!”
“Oh, okay.” Liz walks over to the bed and sits on the edge, where a few hours earlier Maggie sat talking in her soft voice. Her black shadow leans against the far wall.
“You don’t need to sit with me.”
“No, it’s all right. I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”
She’s brought the stale nasty smell of cigars into the room. Sylvie puts up her hand like an awning over the baby’s face, as though she can filter the air with her fingers.
“I’m sorry
tonight was so tough,” Liz says. “We should never have had that many people over, or let them stay so long. I don’t know what we were thinking.” The blue robe she’s wearing is the one thing she owns that Sylvie has always secretly loved. In the dim light she can see the red flowers and vines twining over it. “It’s so great to have you home. You know, honey, being with you during the delivery was pretty much the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in my adult life. I want to thank you for inviting me to be there.”
“Yeah, well, people about to have their stomachs cut open will say anything.”
Liz ignores this. She reaches across from the bed and touches the baby’s foot, and then she presses damp fingers onto Sylvie’s hand. Her robe sags open, showing the shallow channel between her breasts. “I have loved these past few weeks, Sylvie. It’s been so special being able to give you support. And tonight I’m scared we’re going to lose that. I couldn’t get to sleep just now. I guess it was seeing Krzysztof come in that brought back that whole terrible trip to Minneapolis.”
Sylvie starts to rock herself in the chair (Fuck off, just fuck off, she breathes), but the smooth, sinuous rope of Liz’s voice keeps on winding, tightening around her. “And so I just want to say I really hope we can put it all behind us. The trip, the whole thing. Because I can’t help but feel that it changed things for us. You know, you were only ten or eleven. You don’t know what happened, and you don’t have any idea what it—”
Her voice comes out as a roar. “I know exactly what happened! I know exactly what it meant! But you know what else? I don’t give a shit. It has nothing to do with me. So fuck off. Just fuck right off about it. Live your own sick life and leave me out of it.”
Liz bends forward on the bed and the black shadow bends over her. Fuck off and play by yourself, loser, the faun whispers in admiration.
Sylvie has stopped rocking. She is hollow, she doesn’t feel a thing. Just fingers of cold air on her ribs…The baby, she thinks with a shudder. It’s still there, a weight along her arm. It’s not moving, its lips are slack around Sylvie’s nipple. “Oh god!” she shrieks, jerking it up in horror. The baby’s head flops and she starts to cry, and then her mother’s bending over her, talking in a low voice, lifting the screaming baby out of her arms.
10
Free Will
THE NEW MOM IS LEARNING TO DRIVE. HER PARENTS bombard her with arguments and she doesn’t have the energy to resist them. She walks into the licence bureau determined to blow the written test, but it’s ludicrously simple and she’s not smart enough to figure out how to get it wrong. So then she has her learner’s and she goes out practice driving with her dad while her mother minds the baby. “You’re a natural,” Aiden says as she zips down Osborne.
Women are in and out of the house all day – Wendy, Maggie, Genevieve, other women from SERC. They float in with arms full of useless consumer goods and croon over the baby and gush about her poop and the way she sleeps and nurses. And the new mom is doing just great too, after a few wobbles at the beginning. That’s what they all say, planting kisses on Sylvie’s cheek. She’s a plaything for Liz and her cronies (the old crones) and no one, not even her dad, gives a shit. No one gets what’s going on – that Sylvie’s been turned into the sort of person who drives a carbon-spewing car, for example – not one of them cares enough to intervene. No one gives a shit that she’s forced to live in the litter of Liz’s material excess, with piles of wet wipes and used Kleenex around her; that she’s constantly subjected to hypocrisy and ignorant opinions and the smell of frying bacon; that she has, in other words, totally vanished, leaving in her place the sort of person she and her friends have always despised – a pathetic teenager with shit for brains who worries about her weight and shape and checks her phone every half-hour to see if her boyfriend has texted her. Who sits in the upstairs bathroom devouring her mother’s Elle. Who filches bacon in a paper towel, standing in the kitchen toilet to eat it. A loser who watches reality television hour after hour. That’s to barricade herself from Liz, who rarely goes to work, and whose phony caretaking zeal infiltrates every room of the house, forcing Sylvie to close her door and sprawl on her bed watching What Not to Wear reruns, mostly for the moment when the victim (usually overweight and always desperate to be special or even outrageous) is led to a mirror to see her new demure, kitten-heeled self and begins to cry with happiness and relief. Sylvie watches hungrily, turning a deaf ear to the baby’s fussing, trying to figure out: is anything left of who these women were?
It’s still cold but it’s already June. Her girlfriends, everyone but Kajri, come over to the house to visit. They crowd into the hall and hug Sylvie, and their hair gives off the childhood smell of spring from their bike ride over. They hand her a baby outfit they found at Value Village. They sit in the living room and steal curious looks at Sylvie, and they pass the baby around and swoon over her. “She’s awesome,” they say.
“Yeah,” Sylvie says.
“Look at her eyelashes,” they say.
“I know,” Sylvie says.
Somehow, visiting Sylvie gets them talking about The Sims. “I had three kids,” Thea says. “I gave them free will, because it makes the game more interesting, and they drove me crazy.”
“What do you mean, free will?” someone asks.
“They could take snacks from the fridge, that sort of thing, but they didn’t really look after themselves. If you didn’t take them to the bathroom, they peed on the floor.”
“I know, it was gross,” Jenn says. “I couldn’t deal with it. But I loved that game for all the stuff you could buy and the way you could fix up your house. Let’s face it, it was like playing Barbie and Ken. But without the sex, ha ha!”
“They could have sex. My couple had sex.” This is Ashley, lounging on the couch with her feet on the coffee table. She starts in on the story but Thea talks over her in her big voice.
“I got rid of my kids.”
“How? The game won’t let you do it.”
“There’s ways posted online. If you don’t clean their hamster cage, the hamster will get an infection and bite them and they’ll die.”
“Or you can put them in the swimming pool and take out the ladder,” Jenn says. “That’s what I did.”
“You drowned them?”
“Yup. One by one. They flailed around for a long time before their little arms finally sank under the water. It was kind of thrilling, in an evil way.”
And then embarrassment covers all their faces, it suddenly clicks with them how insensitive this is. So they jump into another round of elaborate compliments about the baby in the bassinette – Sylvie’s surprisingly real baby, who’s lying there dozing with her eyelids half closed and flickering.
It’s the week botany field school starts, the week Noah would have left for Malawi. But instead of flying off to Africa he’s living in a cabin an hour north, monitoring algae growth. He comes into the city on his days off and sits in the living room with Sylvie for an hour, holding the baby when she suggests it. He is a simulacrum of his old self, too, wooden and quiet. Her mother is causing this, glancing through the archway at every opportunity to see how they’re getting along. Or the baby is, with her talent for transformation. When other people are around, she’s a white doll, perfect and serene, but the second she and Sylvie are alone, she morphs into a furious imp, squalling waah waah waah waah, her eyes fixed glassily on nothing.
Sylvie tries to tell Noah about it. “Well, she’s growing fast,” he says, “and you’re her food source.” It’s a fact that she’s hungry every hour of the night and day; she’s got the ravenous appetite of all invasive species. With her rough little tongue she’s worn the skin off Sylvie’s nipples, not that this deters her. Once Sylvie has a tiny white foot in her hand when the baby grabs onto her sore tit like a barracuda, and she digs her fingernails into the sole of it as a warning. Liz hears the ruckus and comes up the stairs. She takes the baby and Sylvie lies face down on the bed.
“It’
s hard to settle an infant who is this worked up,” she says, walking back and forth, patting the baby’s back. “Noah needs to take his daughter on his days off. To give you some respite.”
“Is Noah going to breastfeed her?” Sylvie asks after a minute.
“Oh, it’s true,” Liz says with a sigh. “There’s always that.” The baby’s calmed down by then and she hands her back and waits until she starts to feed. Then she forces Sylvie to look at her. “My point is this: you have to work out a more formal agreement with Noah. If you don’t want me and Maggie interfering, you have to work it out yourselves. Or we will step in.”
She will die if she does not get away from this woman. She will die if she doesn’t find someone who sees what’s going on and cares. Noah won’t be on the boat until August; he’s at the research station, where he just has to take readings every six hours. She texts him: CAN WE COME AND SEE YOU? and he answers, SATURDAY?
She goes to find Liz. “Thea’s willing to drive me up on Saturday morning,” she says. “We’ll come back Monday.”
Liz looks at her suspiciously. “You plan to take the baby?”
Well, duh!
Sylvie extends this phase of the operation until Friday, and then she goes sadly into the kitchen with the baby over her shoulder and announces that Thea was going to borrow her dad’s car for the weekend, but now she can’t. So can they take Liz’s?
Liz, intent on frying mushrooms, acts at first as though she didn’t hear. Then she dials down the gas, stooping to peer at the flame as though the knob won’t do its job without her supervision. Finally she turns to Sylvie. “You need to spend time together,” she says. “I know that.”
“So can we have the car?”
“We?”
“Thea and me. Thea will drive. She’s had her licence since she was sixteen. You’d only have to use the bus on Monday.”
“And Thea will stay for the whole weekend to help you out?”
“Yes.” Sylvie doesn’t react to this insult. She can see all the issues roiling around in Liz’s mind: a safe crib for baby; contraception after baby is born; when wild animals attack. “Mom,” she finally says, “I’m not asking you whether I can go. I’m an adult, I’m going. I’m just asking if we can take your car or if you prefer that I hitchhike with the baby.”