A series of ink-stained homemade screen-printing frames are stacked in one corner. Boards, canvasses, art journals, sketchbooks and papers of all dimensions litter the tables, lie scattered on the floor, are propped or tacked on walls, or hang from a laundry rack by large silver clips. Some pieces are finished, others are in progress; all are untouchable. Abstracts, most of them. Julia has a hard time telling when one is finished and when it’s not. Sketchbooks and art journals are filled with nude drawings. Women’s curves – breasts, hips, thighs, buttocks, shoulders, bellies. Julia imagines the satisfaction of moving the nub of the pencil just so to make the curve and shape of various human bodies.
Julia is not supposed to venture into the studio without an invitation. No one is, for that matter. One of the biggest mistakes the girlfriends make, Julia has noticed over her weeks living in Joe’s house, is to assume they’re welcome in the studio. Of course, many of them do gain access. Some of them arrive as nude models and leave as girlfriends. Sometimes it’s the other way around. It was shortly after Millie left that Julia started to go into the studio when Joe wasn’t home, and stand, just stand, in the centre of all that chaos. It felt like being in the eye of a storm.
Julia has all the windows open, but something about its north-facing position prevents the hot, dry breezes from infiltrating the house. In the heat, dust rises from the gravel driveway unprovoked, like morning mist from a pond. It’s the end of May 1986, and the city’s been gripped in a heat wave for most of the month.
Julia is eighteen years old and eight months pregnant. During the first two weeks of the heat wave, she lay in the backyard on the webbed lawn recliner she dragged from the basement, surrounded by the long grass, and roasted in the sun while Joe watched – or so she imagined – from his studio window. Her distended belly prevented her from rolling over and letting the sun reach the backs of her shoulders and legs. As a result, she is now as brown as a nut on the front and winter pale from behind. To make things worse, a heat rash has developed on the stretched skin of her belly and across her newly rounded buttocks. She complains often to Joe that she feels like an itchy banana loaf bloated with gas. She scratches welts like hieroglyphs onto her tight belly. Her mood shifts from resignation to irritation.
All through those first two weeks of May, Julia waited for a sign that Dominic, her new husband and Joe’s only child, was going to return. Dominic went to work on a Friday to pick up his cheque and never came back. Before he left to get that cheque, Julia had a bad feeling about it – Dominic and money didn’t mix well. In her experience, as soon as he got his hands on some cash, he’d start drinking. She knew she was right about that when his boss from the bakery started calling the house, looking for Dominic, who hadn’t shown up for work. She called his friends, who would only admit they’d seen Dominic around but never seemed to know where he was just then. For the last two weeks of May, Julia’s prevailing thought about Dominic was Fuck him, and she just got on with the job of waiting for her baby.
Once a week, Joe drives Julia to her doctor appointments. The doctor checks her blood pressure, menaces her about her weight, and tells Julia to rest with her feet up on a cushion at least six hours a day. About her rash, he tells her, unhelpfully, to try to keep cool.
Julia looks like a blown-up rubber glove, which is just one of the ways she describes herself these days. She spends a good deal of time thinking up metaphors for her state. She got the idea from a book of poetry that Millie left behind. The book has a poem by Sylvia Plath “a pregnancy riddle in nine syllables.” Julia likes its clever structure: nine lines, each line nine syllables long. A pregnant woman is likened to being an elephant, a house, a melon strolling on two tendrils, and a yeasty loaf. Julia loves the idea of the metaphors; now she doesn’t so much think them up on purpose as they come to her as random thoughts and images. The usual ones are quite obvious – a melon, swallowed a basketball, a beach ball, that sort of thing. Mostly, these bore her. She likes better the ones like an overstuffed red pepper, or trussed-up Christmas turkey, or a swollen treasure chest saturated and ready to burst. A sway-backed robin full of fat wet worms, she thinks. A puffy cloud with its dark, low-slung belly, ready to burst. She also likes the peevish tone in the poem about being “the means” – just the container for the thing that’s of real value. “A cow in calf” is how Plath puts it. Julia likes the edge this puts on things.
Like Millie, all of Joe’s girlfriends leave evidence of themselves in bits all over his house. The girlfriends come and go, and Joe makes no apology. When they decide that once and for all they’re really going to leave (“I mean it this time, goddamit”) Joe accepts their decision without comment. The things they leave behind become part of the clutter of the house – reading glasses, a cigarette lighter, a pair of sandals with dirty toe marks. Joe can walk past these items and never bat an eye, apparently not reminded of the person who once owned them. Or he might, as in the case of the book, pick it up and look at it for a moment, make a comment about the person who owned it. “Millie loved to read,” he’d said, flipping the pages of the poetry book before setting it down again in its spot. Then Julia had picked up the book and examined it.
“Children spoil everything,” had been Millie’s parting wisdom to Julia. Julia thought about this for a day or two and came to the reasonable conclusion that in some ways Millie was right, based on the rationale that Julia’s new husband, Dominic, was, more or less, a child, and Dominic did, in fact, have a tendency to spoil pretty much everything. So far, Dominic had ruined her life, got her pregnant, insisted on marrying her, and abandoned her after just three months. By the time Julia decided she agreed with Millie, Millie was long gone.
Dominic’s whereabouts are both a mystery and as predictable as pie. She’s certain he’s on a bender, she just doesn’t know where or with whom. If he were in trouble, whether with the law or hurt somehow, she’s sure she would be the first person he’d call.
Like the time he got drunk and walked into the supermarket in the middle of the five o’clock rush and liberated a rotisserie chicken from the spit where it turned endlessly round and round. He grabbed it in both palms and proceeded to run from the store with the steaming bird under his arm like a football. Three men chased him and managed to tackle him before he reached the store exit. Dominic put up such a fight that he required a beating from no less than seven grown men before the cops arrived and handcuffed him. He had to be treated in hospital for second and third degree burns to his hands from the hot chicken. Julia was the first person he’d called.
She was mad all the way to the hospital on the bus, but as soon as she’d seen him in the hospital gown, contrite, with his battered face and bandaged hands, she’d exclaimed, “Baby.” Then more tenderly, “What did they do to you?”
Dominic was charged with robbery and assault, to which he pled guilty simply to get the court dates over with. He apologized to the grocery store and the seven men, paid for the chicken, and completed eighty hours of community service, more work than Julia had ever known him to do. He even went to AA, where he met some new drinking buddies, as it turned out.
Julia doesn’t talk to Joe about Dominic or his whereabouts anymore. Joe always gets tetchy when she does. Julia thinks of herself as the kind of person who just wants to get along.
Julia sits in Joe’s big chair in the living room with the oscillating fan balanced on the ottoman, three inches from her face. Joe stands in the doorway and watches her.
“Want your chair?” she asks, putting a hand on the neck of the fan and preparing to move. She knows how much Joe likes his chair.
But he just shakes his head no and keeps watching her, smiling. Finally, he says, “Want to go sit in the Lincoln?”
He grabs his keys from the room divider at the front door, and they leave the stifling house. Julia tiptoes in her bare feet across the hot cement to the dark brown and tan Lincoln Continental, covered in the dust from the driveway. In the midday sun she casts a shadow as big as the Goodyear�
�� well, that’s a metaphor she can do without. Inside the Lincoln, with the engine running and the air conditioning on high, Julia sits cross-legged on the soft beige upholstery of the wide seat and flips down the sunshade to look in the vanity mirror. Sometimes, Julia cajoles Joe into a game of I Spy as they sit in the driveway, facing the fence and with the neighbour’s house to the right.
“I spy with my little eye something that is brown,” Julia says.
Joe sighs.
“Aw, come on,” Julia says.
“The fence,” says Joe.
“Nope.”
“The house,” he tries again, unenthused.
“Nope.”
“I give up,” he says, playing with the radio.
“No you don’t!”
“Okay, that cat,” says Joe, his eyes pointing to a neighbour’s cat picking its way over the gravel driveway in front of them.
“No. He wasn’t even there before,” Julia says in her “you’re being silly” voice.
“Ummm,” Joe says, not looking anymore but fiddling with the radio instead.
“Come on!” Julia encourages.
“Everything’s brown around here, now that you mention it,” Joe says, looking up. “The house, the fence, the grass, the Lincoln, the cats.” He pauses. “Damn, we live in a brown neighbourhood. It’s like the suburbs got shit on.”
Julia laughs. “My eyes,” she says. “I was looking in the mirror.” She points to the sunshade. “And they’re not shit brown either,” she says, anticipating Joe’s next joke.
When Joe looks into her eyes, Julia tries to hold his gaze but can’t. She breaks off to look at the cat pacing back and forth along the side of the house in the shade.
Other times, when they’re both feeling restless, Joe drives Julia down to the Sally Ann, where he waits in the air-conditioned Lincoln while she forages the cheap bin for tiny sleepers. He smiles indulgently while she shows him each of her finds in the car afterwards.
One Saturday, they get up early and go to the farmer’s market together. Julia sits on a bench to rest and watches as Joe selects tomatoes from a vendor, a woman, whose look is rugged but pretty. Her long brown hair is tied back in a low ponytail. What is probably a very good figure is hidden beneath baggy cotton khakis and an oversized men’s button-down shirt. She wears these clothes, her hair, and her crafty look as if they don’t matter, as if she could wear a burlap bag and still look good. Joe talks to her as he strokes the tomatoes, smiling at her while he squeezes and lightly caresses the ripe fruit. She laughs at something he says, and he gently palms one of the tomatoes in his hand, rubbing the tight red skin with his ink-stained thumb.
Julia is sitting again in Joe’s chair in the living room when she hears the studio door open, then close. Giselle, the market vendor who is now Joe’s newest girlfriend, comes padding down the hall, wrapped in the sheet and carrying her clothes. She gives Julia a glance before tossing her clothes onto the couch. “Prickly bugger,” she says good-naturedly.
Julia doesn’t reply.
Giselle drops the sheet and Julia looks away, but not before noticing a large Africa-shaped purple-brown birthmark covering Giselle’s hip and extending around the swell of her right buttock. As Giselle dresses, Julia can feel Giselle looking at her.
Finally, Giselle speaks. “Is it Joe’s baby?” she asks, then adds, “Is that what a girl has to do to get his attention?”
This takes Julia by surprise. “I doubt it,” she says, then blushes when Giselle laughs deep and hard.
“You’re okay, kid,” Giselle says, and Julia is both flattered and annoyed by the reference.
Julia wonders what it must be like to go into that studio and strip naked in front of Joe. To be the object of such scrutiny. To maybe see your Africa-shaped birthmark, resting on the curve of a hip, revealed in one of his paintings.
One night, Julia is awakened by several voices long after midnight. She gets up and ventures to the kitchen for a glass of water. Joe has people in the living room, another man and two women. They’re all sitting on the floor around the coffee table, even Joe, whom Julia has never seen sit on the floor. Joe calls her into the living room, where he introduces her. Julia makes no attempt to remember the names. She smiles and says hello and gives a tiny, awkward wave. She’s suddenly self-conscious to be standing in front of strangers in her thin pyjamas. As she turns to return to her bedroom, she hears Joe say, “Isn’t she cute?”
Julia gives Joe a sharp look to see if he is, in fact, talking about her, or if she’s misunderstood. Joe grins like a thirteen year old and looks shyly from his friends to her with his beer-glazed eyes.
After Julia’s Friday doctor appointment, Joe gets Giselle to help him carry the couch to the basement. Julia follows with the loose cushions. Giselle and Joe return upstairs as Julia positions the cushions on the couch, and in that alone moment in the cool, damp basement, Julia has the sense of being abandoned. Relegated to the basement like some unwanted relative. She’s just about to start feeling sorry for herself when Joe and Giselle return, carrying Joe’s chair. They set it across from the couch. Later, with the coffee table between them and Julia stretched long with her feet up on the couch arm and Joe in his chair, they play rummy. Joe deals every hand so Julia can keep her feet up.
“You’re looking at me again,” Joe says, the cards shuffling neatly together under his thumbs.
“What? Me?” Had she been?
“You look and look,” he says. “What do you see?” He’s smiling. Teasing.
“Nothing,” she says, meaning something other than how it sounds. Joe laughs and shuffles the cards with his discoloured fingers.
Wednesday, Joe goes out in the Lincoln with Giselle. Restless, bored, tired of waiting, Julia finds herself again in Joe’s studio. She picks up the sheet, examines the stains, tries to imagine the events that led to those stains. The word ravage comes to mind. It seems the right word, in connection with Joe. Julia wonders what it’s like to be ravaged by Joe. By anyone, for that matter. Her experience is limited to Dominic and one boyfriend before that. She can’t reconcile the thought of either boy with the word ravage.
She watches herself in the long mirror. Her back arches to support her enormous belly. She tosses the sheet on the divan and slowly begins to unbutton her top. She lets it drop. The room is quiet, and the buttons click on the wood floor. She slides her shorts down her belly to reveal stretched skin, full and ripe, red with rash. She really does resemble a piece of red fruit at its peak, ready to be consumed. The act of removing her shorts feels purposeful and conscious and, if she were going to stop, now would be the time. Instead, she steps out of her shorts and kicks them across the floor. Julia continues to undress until she’s standing in the centre of Joe’s studio, naked and swollen. She examines herself in the mirror, cups her breasts, tries to make a provocative face. She turns sideways to examine her profile, her belly distended from just under her breasts to the tops of her thighs, so much greater than she had ever imagined possible. She caresses her belly with her two palms from the sides to the centre and back again. Julia picks up the sheet and wraps it around her like a towel, the way she’s seen the models do. She clutches it to her chest, feigning modesty. She drops the sheet, revealing her full-on nudity to herself in the mirror. She wonders what Joe would see if she were his model. She wonders what he would draw.
Later that night, Julia falls asleep on the couch in the basement after a card game with Joe, and when she wakes up she’s already in active labour. She takes a bath, prepared by her birth classes and the books she’s read, for as much as a thirty-hour labour. But only a couple of hours later, the contractions are so fierce that Julia is swearing like a dirty old man. No matter how she tries to sit, stand or lie, she can find no way to make it bearable, so Joe puts her in the Lincoln to go to the hospital. On the ride there, she half-stands in the backseat, and at the peak of every contraction, she begs to be killed.
For a single moment after the baby is born, Julia has
the notion that no one else has ever done anything so amazing. In an instant, she knows she will name the boy Joseph after the patron saint of the Métis, and she will call him Little Joe. She imagines telling Joe the baby’s name and pictures his reaction, but then everything unravels quickly. Baby Joe can’t breathe right, and he’s whisked away, but not before Julia catches a glimpse of his tiny blue legs.
“He’s an angel,” the nurse says hours later, when she places the still bundle in Julia’s lap. “He tried. He was a fighter,” the nurse says, shaking her head sadly.
He wanted to stay with me, Julia thinks. She doesn’t know what to do, wishes Dominic were here to see this. It’s his baby too, she thinks.
“Go ahead, unwrap him. You take all the time you need.”
The nurse leaves the room, and Julia overhears another nurse in the hallway say, “Babies die all the time.”
Several days later, Joe picks up Julia at the hospital.
“I can’t believe we’re going home without him,” she says to Joe as they drive.
Joe seems preoccupied and doesn’t answer.
“Babies die all the time.” Julia tries repeating the nurse’s comment, which has played itself over in her head since she heard it, providing a curious kind of comfort.
Julia enters the house feeling like a stranger. She sets the unused baby carseat in the living room and then meanders around the house, restless, unsure what she should do. Nothing in her eighteen years has prepared her for the hollowness that follows coming home empty-handed. She spends days wandering the house in her bare feet and pyjamas. In her room, in secret, she sometimes holds one of the tiny sleepers to her body, in the position she might hold a baby, and hugs it tightly to herself, stroking the soft fabric until she finally gives up, unsatisfied.
Days turn into weeks, and eventually she packs the baby things into boxes and takes them to the basement. Sometimes, Joe tries to talk to her, even tries a couple of times to make her laugh, but mostly he’s quiet. She has the sense he’s gauging his tone to hers. Once, she catches him on the phone in the kitchen, and when he sees her, his end of the conversation becomes artificial. She wonders if he’s talking to Dominic, if Dominic even knows. She doesn’t want to be the only one who’s grieving. She starts drinking coffee again and smokes Joe’s cigarettes one after the other.
Just Pretending Page 5