by Terry Griggs
Albertha had gotten cornered by her cousin Barb, Tony’s mother, who kept saying, “I don’t understand it, I don’t know what got into him. Tony’s such a good boy.”
“Uh-huh.” Albertha was trying to listen to Barb with one ear and with the other catch those odd and enticingly incomplete snippets of conversation that were drifting her way.
“No guff, Ed, you got the greatest buns in town.”
“Worried, you see, that I’d grow hair on my palms if I kept at it.”
“He was never interested in girls. I used to say to him, Tony dear, you’ve got to get out and have some fun.”
“And then d’you know what the crazy fool did? Ran out into the cornfield and buggered the scarecrow.”
“What’s long and hard and full of seamen?”
“Come again?”
“A submarine!”
“Ah,” Albertha laughed. “Mind’s in the gutter.”
“Pardon me,” said Barb, whose son happened to be elevated far above the gutter. He was up in the hayloft, in fact, with Mother.
Mother and Cousin Tony were entwined and adrift on a soft quilted chorus of drunken elation that rose from the party below. They had easily, and without much remorse, divested themselves of their clothing, scruples, and conventional notions of proper wedding conduct.
“Something borrowed,” Tony whispered into Mother’s knotted stook of yellow hair. “Something blue,” he murmured, as he ran his tongue down her cheek, his burning hand over her breast, under her buttock. “Something old,” he gasped, heart beating furiously, as they both did and conceived “something new.”
Mother lay in Tony’s arms, glowing, as though curled around an ember embedded in the sweet deep complexity of family life. She was thinking of beds made and unmade and made again. She was thinking about apple pies and mittens hung to dry by the stove and the howling wind in the chimney as she waited in the early winter dark for Father to come home, the old truck clunking up the road. She was thinking of fidelity, a bolt of pure white linen unwinding year after year after year. And she was thinking, But oh, I like this better. Yes, I do.
“You’ve got it backwards,” she said.
“I do? Then turn around.”
“No, silly, I mean the rhyme. It goes, something old, something new, something borrowed.… ”
“Aw heck, I better get this thing right.”
And Cousin Tony started all over again, this time taking a slithering nosedive down to nuzzle and kiss mother’s delicate, unshod, and unclean feet.
Dissipated, weakened and aged, the wind muttered toothless imprecations around the barn, cussed softly in the eaves, and rattled the door ineffectually. It spun the weathervane listlessly and slid down the roof with a long, languid sigh. Night had begun to creep out of the furrows in the field, out of the shadowy clefts and recesses of the farm, with a slow hypnotic stealth. By the time it arrived in the orchard, drawing itself up to its full black height, the wind had vanished, having departed with a final skirling flourish through a curtain of air that now hung completely and serenely still.
Uncle Clyde threw open the door and Buckwheat appeared, a candy-coated apparition, wearing what was left of the wedding cake. As Clyde led him in, muttering under his breath, Lyle Sizer wandered over carrying a milk pail brimming with a rank, sludgy substance.
“Want some?” he said.
“What is it?” Clyde asked.
“I call it Cream of Bathroom Soup.”
“Yeah? That’s real nice. Why don’t you go stick your head in it.”
Continuing to mutter to himself, Clyde then tugged at an irritant long and stretchy that wound in and around his teeth. It turned out to be a chunk of elastic waistband from Billy Murphy’s edible underwear. “Holy hell,” he said, “more leftovers,” deciding right there and then to pack it in.
“Goodbye,” everyone was saying, “goodnight, goodnight,” as they staggered through the door arm in arm, Young Bobby hugging a tailless, nameless, one-eyed barn cat. Albertha and Auntie Viv and Billy Murphy snuck out together, a snickering conspiring covey intent on skinny-dipping in the duck pond with a full evening of pranks to follow.
Father wandered out with them and then strolled into the orchard, hoping to find Mother, since she’d been missing for some time.
“Sweetheart,” he called. “Honeybunch? Angel, where are you?”
The night and its more vocal residents, the crickets, cicadas, bullfrogs, and a baying hound, took up the unanswered plea and called, too, extemporizing and playing it for what it was worth, riddling the dark from every direction with a puzzled and troubled refrain. Where was she, they all wanted to know.
In response, and cutting through the insistent chirring and croaking and howling, came a sweetly melodic voice—although not Mother’s—that said, most arrestingly, “Listen, listen, listen to me.”
A mockingbird? A whippoorwill? A nightingale?
No, thought Father, it can’t be. But gazing up into the old apple tree that arched above his head, he spotted him, a morning-coated, buff-bellied virtuoso come from miles and miles away to shivaree the bride and groom. “I’ll be damned,” he said.” And he supposed he had the wind to thank for blowing the little foreigner so far off-course, for bringing them such a beautiful, golden-toned wedding gift.
Which is when he remembered Mother’s name, the name that had eluded him all afternoon, that had slipped quickly away whenever he came near to grasping it. Now suddenly it was there in his head, spilling out of his mouth, branching upward into the night as he called out to Mother again, loudly and in high excitement, because he needed to share with her the small miracle of this presence in the orchard, this blessing, this omen of healing happiness to come.
Momma Had a Baby
And her head popped off. My cousin Nile had spread himself out on the lawn, lethal as any chemical, and was decapitating dandelions with his thumbnail. Flicked sunheads spun haywire this way and that, ditsy blondes. Momma had a baby (pause) and her head popped off (flick). Another (flick) and another (flick). If the dandelions had been further along, he’d be blowing them bare, infesting everyone’s lawns with his wishes, banks of yellow gold erupting days later, the flower of his desire for biceps, for cool cash, maybe a call from the Leaf’s manager. (“Look, Keon’s injured. We need you.”) As far as nature was concerned, Nile was better than dogs’ hindquarters, pant legs, and wind put together. Restless in fields, unwashed, he went about her pollinating business like a pimp. I felt for Nile the same degree of relatedness one might feel for a nightcrawler—a cousinage that had more to do with inhabiting the same stretch of earth than sharing anything as intimate as genetic material. But, ten years old, with an undescended testicle, Nile was the love interest, take it or leave it.
Inside was estrogen city, all women, mostly related, the air fibrous with connection. Even the few who weren’t blood knew each other inside out, friends and neighbours who were practically sewn together, chain stitched with their knowledge and informed speculation about one another. Only one person stood on the edge of this dense familiarity like someone having an out-of-body experience—a woman who’d recently moved here from some smug Southern Ontario town and who appeared to have her jaw rusted shut. She was remembering, is all, lost to recollection. A younger sister who had succumbed to scarlet fever at the age of fifteen had arrived unbidden in her head and now after all these years rode there like a conquering whip-snapping queen in a chariot. Naturally, this gave her a somewhat self-absorbed expression.
The women were all packed into Auntie Viv’s living room for a last minute, hold-your-breath baby shower. Very last minute, time stretched tight as a drum over Mother’s huge belly. She was two weeks late and Auntie Viv thought this party might break the monotony, if not the water. Mother hoped not—her water that is—for she was beached on Viv’s newly upholstered chesterfield, formerly a spirit-lowering
beige and brown tweed, now red and slick as an internal organ, enough colour and texture to make you giddy. Viv had put up bilious fleshy drapes to match, and Mother figured this show-off reason to be the real one for the shower, not her.
A fountain of dandelion heads spraying up outside, past the window, caught Mother’s attention. The Birth of Venus, she thought, although she had only ever seen a commercial version of that famous painting, a picture in a magazine advertising shampoo. Still, wouldn’t it be lovely, a freshwater baby rising out of the lake on a clamshell, dandelion heads flocking the feathery-soft air? So beautiful, so easy. Mother was terrified of dying in childbirth and understood her fear to be a restraining band, wide as a strop, holding her baby back. She entertained a morbid notion that already she had marked the baby, that it would be reticent and fearful all its life, and she prayed it would find a source of courage somewhere deep inside itself. If she lived, she resolved to call her baby Hero, boy or girl. If she died, Morrie would call it Stu if a boy, and Sue if a girl. That being the extent of it, Mother vowed to hold out at least until the naming formalities were concluded.
For her part, Auntie Viv was more than a little curious to see this baby, on account of Mother simultaneously losing her virginity and committing adultery scarcely hours into her marriage. She probably set some sort of record for the town, though it’s not the kind of accomplishment you’d want to print up. Might be printed on the baby’s face, mind you: Cousin Tony’s visage appearing clear and crisp as a photograph, reproductive values more conclusive than the Shroud of Turin. This notion tickled Auntie Viv, for she considered her sister-in-law to be simpy and shallow as a pool. Piously nice. Let Mother pretend otherwise, but marriage had corrupted her, the cracks were beginning to show. Auntie Viv smiled her fox smile and wrenched her push-up bra back into place. Damn thing was chomping on her ribs just like something invented by a man.
When you think that Viv had cooked up this shower idea only the day before, Mother was getting a pretty good haul. Not that she needed more sleepers in neuter green or yellow—no one willing to commit her firm opinions as to the baby’s sex in material terms—or teeny tiny vests (already outgrown) that made the whole assembly chant Awwwww when she held them up for ritual gift inspection and approval. And, since this was her fifth shower to date, she had enough fuzzy blankets and quilts at home to bury the kid alive. Most of those present had contributed plenty to the prospective infant, dearly hoping at this rate they weren’t going to have to fork out for its education, too.
My grandmother, Albertha Pinkham, veteran of the four previous, knew enough to bring her gift in installments. So far, the oddly shaped packages wrapped in brown paper and stuck with adhesive contained wooden slats, spindles, rockers, and a seat. She promised to knock the rocking chair together and paint it once she had the squalling evidence in her large sliver-flecked hands. Albertha had ironed her linen dress for the first shower, gesture enough she felt, and now it was so wrinkled it might have been in pain. Gruesome. A sartorial senescence mimicking her own decline. She bowed her head and dropped a brief prayer into the creases along the lines of No stupid games, all right? And do You think we could get on with the show here? By show, she did not mean more teething rings and baby wipes, but contractions, a crescendo of them, sudden and strong, a muscular fanfare announcing the arrival of.… Glancing over at her child stranded on Viv’s hideous sofa, a giant’s collapsed kidney, she recognized that aura of fear, Mother’s stricken look, like that of an animal about to be clubbed. Albertha tacked a stern postscript onto her prayer: Remember, I go first. Don’t mess up. How far afield had those rumours about her daughter’s infidelity drifted? Divine punishment? Well really, grandbabies weren’t so thick on the ground around here that anyone, divine or otherwise, should gripe if one came swaddled in a story or two. What was life without embroidery? Coarse cotton, that’s all. Plain as unsullied paper, too plain for words.
Momma had a baby . . .
“What is that noise I keep hearing?”
“Nile, that lunk. Out on the grass.”
and her head popped off.
Death, you know, crashing the party, mute as a shadow falling through the window. The uninvited guest. Which isn’t exactly true, for my other grandmother, Gramma Young, had been issuing special invitations for years, beaming signals into the black depths of space, courting that one polygamous alien, violent lover, terminal seducer. Thus far she remained unrequited and a regular menace on the subject.
“My last shower,” she sighed, sailing this hoary news across the room.
As this foreboding announcement was the very one she had made at the other four showers, no one was buying it. Any prior sympathies aroused had already been slashed to the bone.
“Mine too. We’re all hoping that.”
“Pine. A rough pine box, nothin’ fancy for me.”
“Chin up, Gramma. This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Think, real soon there’ll be a new baby to cuddle.”
“I’ll never see it.”
“C’mon, none of that talk now.”
“New life comes into the world, old life’s booted out.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Auntie Viv, agreeably enough, seeing as she’d been sneaking swigs from one of the flower vases she kept topped up with gin. The longevity of Viv’s birthday roses always amazed Uncle Clyde, a phenomenon he could only attribute to some secret source of power generated by Viv herself.
“Tastes like soap,” said Gramma Young, chewing with athletic effort one of Batty Pock’s shortbread squares.
A message written in apologetic smiles, a kind of facial shorthand, flashed to Batty that said, Never mind her, the old coot.
Batty shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Whatever had happened to that soap powder, the cupful sitting on the counter when she’d been searching for the extra flour?
“Mother,” warned Aunt Faith, seizing any opportunity to pay Gramma back, coin for coin, for every admonishing word she’d received as a child. Faith was the snappy sister, my least favourite aunt. She had resentment the way some people have religion—visibly—she wore it like a prow. If feeling slighted, overworked, neglected, she would take her husband Earl apart molecule by molecule, then reassemble him, a lesser man. She was Nile’s mother, and he her son, and they fit together like a mathematical problem you could work on most of your life and never figure out.
Drop dead, Gramma was about to retort—she absolutely refused to let Faith have the last word—when, unaccountably, it was and she did. Drop dead. But a drop so slight, gentle as ash drifting down, it was as if a quieting finger had been placed lovingly on her heart to untrouble its agitated and relentless motion. Indeed, Gramma had cried wolf for so long that her death was as tame and friendly as a panting, tail-thumping companion lolling at her feet. I rest my case, her body finally said, and in such an understated, such a gracious and accomplished manner, that no one, not even she, noticed her passing. She sat very, very still, and said nothing further.
Minnie Evans screamed, a startled little product, but only because Nile had smushed his face up against the window. Give him six years and he might almost resemble James Dean, but presently, features flatly pressed into the glass, he could have easily passed for a package of plastic-wrapped chicken thighs from the Red & White.
An intuitive awareness of something amiss perhaps sparked the inevitable birthing stories. Ancient Mariners all, women trotted out their individual traumas, sparing Mother nothing in their recollections of stillbirths, hemorrhages, Caesarean sections, and marathon labours. Babies’ shrill kitten cries repeatedly stabbed the air, and gallons of lost, fictional, and phantom blood sloshed through the room.
My girl cousin, Amy, who had made a bow-hat out of an upturned tinfoil plate and the discarded gift bows, rose as if on a wave of this unsettling talk and placed it on Gramma Young’s head. Her festive and improvisational bit of haberdashery slipped, caught
on a stiff curl and came to rest at a rakish and merry angle.
“She’s dead,” said the woman from the south, who, until this moment, had not uttered a single word.
At least she spent her embarrassed verbal fund wisely. It was to the point.
“Pardon?” someone asked.
“What?”
“Good gravy! Look at Gramma Young.”
“My arse,” said Auntie Viv. “Stick a pin in her.”
“Oh my God.”
“She’s only asleep.”
“Faking it.”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“Give her a nudge, Minnie.”
“Not me.”
“Heavens,” said Albertha, reaching out to give Eve Young a wakening nudge, this other grandmother to whom she had rarely ever spoken, certainly nothing beyond courtesies. If you could call a grunt a courtesy. Truth was she didn’t have time for whiners, and now she realized, touch telling no lie, that Eve didn’t have time at all. It had withdrawn itself from her, its animating caress, its ticking breath.
They all shivered and stared at one another.
“I’ll call Glanville, why don’t I?” suggested Marion Goodwin, the undertaker’s wife. Marion usually managed to appall and fascinate in about equal measure. What was it like being married to the Gland Man? This question swam up from a depth and circled visibly close to the surface. Imagine his unearthly cold hands reaching for you in bed at night (sheets reeking of formaldehyde), hands fat and grub-white that only hours before had been palpating the internal organs of corpses, drawing blood out of bodies with the same ease and indifference that they drained Freshie out of coolers at community picnics.
Marion wrote poetry, verse boxes that never seemed to contain humans, but heavily featured dewdrops, sunsets, and an array of symbols inert as stone markers. These she published in the town paper. More embalmed mots, the editor would groan when he saw her approaching down the walk, clutching yet another torso-thick bundle of paper in her arms, that unnerving pink smile of hers indelibly printed on her face.