We’re watching when the baby sucks in his first breath. Even green Byron remembers to step forward and see, right at the end.
Tina is smiling against the pillow, holding the baby, able to talk again. She’s bossing Ashley, telling her where to find the fancy camera with the autofocus low light capable zoom lens. It’s engineered especially for taking photos of babies, and it cost as much as Tina’s first car.
Heather steps away from the bedside. She accosts the resident in the mucky latex gloves and vocalizes what we all know. “This was your first solo delivery, wasn’t it?”
The resident is grinning into her own chest, nodding.
Heather flings an arm around the woman’s shoulders, jostles her like another younger sister, and tells her, “Well, you did great.”
Kindness can be monstrous. It has power to devastate sometimes—now. We all look away as the new little doctor starts to cry.
In a restaurant half the city and half a month away from the Grey Nuns Hospital, Heather sits twisting an over-sized topaz ring around and around on the middle finger of her right hand. Maybe the ring isn’t over-sized. Maybe her hands are just too small. They’d look bigger if she’d grow her fingernails and get a manicure. She won’t. Painted, bulbous nails are a sign of squandered resources and failed feminism. That’s what Heather says.
She stops her twisting, looks at her wristwatch, and then at the four empty chairs at our table. So far, it’s just the two of us sitting in the posh restaurant where Tina has booked a table for six in the middle of the afternoon.
“Come on, girls,” Heather says.
I’m not impatient yet. Tina will be travelling with a two-week-old baby today, the perfect reason to be late. “You want me to try calling them again?” I offer anyway.
Heather waves her hand. “There’s no point. If Tina’s not answering, it probably means her kids have washed her phone for her again. That nanny of theirs is a sham.” She pushes her palms against the wintry static electricity of her hair, trying to get the flying yellow mass to stay behind her ears. She’s laughing. “Look at that table full of lawyers over there. Could they be any less happy?”
I glance at the dour faces bent over menus on the other side of the dining room. They do look miserable, and it makes me want to defend the sad lawyers against my monster-sister. “That one guy doesn’t seem too glum,” I say, nodding toward the youngest man at the table.
Heather huffs. “He’s not a lawyer. Look at him. He’s just the poor working stiff they dragged out here to hold their coats.”
But a nice place like this has a coat check. Whatever, I’ll let Heather malign the lawyers all she wants. It’s an oblique tactic of hers, meant to protect Ewan. That’s Heather’s husband. Ewan is always surrounded by lawyers. Most people assume he is one. It’s a trick of his elegant vocabulary and the way he wears a suit so well. He’s really a police officer.
“He is the deputy superintendent of police,” Heather would insist. “Don’t make it sound like he’s some constable with his knee in a drunk’s back, face down on Whyte Avenue.”
Whatever Ewan is, the media love him. He’s tall and smart and not afraid to stand in front of the crest mounted on the wall of the police station issuing official statements. “Integrity, courage, community”—those are the words on the crest. Ewan is a glorious caricature of all of them.
Reporters fix cameras and microphones on him while he speaks in sound bites about good and evil. And he doesn’t embellish with those dumb police words like “utilize” and “indicated” and “subsequently.” He talks in short Anglo-Saxon derived words, so people will understand, so they’ll trust.
None of our husbands is here today. This afternoon, at the restaurant, it will be me, my four sisters, one newborn baby, and—as proof of what a special occasion this is—our mother. We’re meeting for a baby shower luncheon. Our new-mom days of punch-bowl-party-game baby showers are long past, but we still celebrate together, quietly and bittersweetly. We meet in restaurants so none of us has to cook or clean up. Since Tina is the sister with the newborn this time, she has chosen the venue. It’s one of the elite, upscale places Martin takes her when he’s stuck in town.
Martin’s family—Tina’s family-in-law—are high society people with high society habits and tastes. This restaurant isn’t the kind of place Heather, Ashley, Meaghan, or I should know exists. But lunch here is more casual than Tina and Martin’s fancy dinner dates. None of the other patrons bother to deepen their scowls when Tina lumbers through the doors, still puffy with pregnancy fluid, an infant’s car-seat banging against her shin. It’s a classy car-seat, if there can be such a thing. She buys a brand new one for every baby. It’s easier than cleaning the old one.
Meaghan comes ahead of her, holding the heavy wooden door as Tina passes.
“Ashley had better get here soon,” Tina says, falling into the seat of a chintz covered chair. She flips the sheepskin cover off her sleeping newborn. “I’ve got forty-five minutes before he starts screaming and chomping again—tops.”
I’m cooing at Tina’s wrinkly red baby. I hold my hair so it won’t drift down to tickle him awake. At his age, babies are anonymous enough that this little person looks like he could be one of my own. “I’ll take him if he’s bad,” I promise. “I’ll bundle him up and carry him right outside into the cold so he can sing for all the nice people walking down Jasper Avenue, if that’s the way he wants it.”
Tina smiles, slowly and sadly, with pale, unpainted lips and delicate post-partum melancholy. “Thank you, Suzanne.”
Ashley arrives soon after we’ve each ordered a drink. She sails into this stuffy dining room with that careless, airy prettiness of hers, like she’s flushed and windswept from a morning of surfing rather than from twenty minutes of looking for a parking space in cold, downtown streets.
Oh, and Mum has arrived too. She came along with Tina and Meaghan, walking in last, carrying a baby gift in a pastel paper bag with a satiny rope for a handle. Mum doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do anymore. We’re glad it suits her to be here with us now—at least, I hope everyone is glad.
We’re sick of talking about Tina’s new baby and our old babies. The newborn sleeps, strapped into his seat, under the tablecloth, while we talk about Meaghan’s wedding. It’s scheduled for a little less than a year from now, next March, when the city will be pitted with potholes and heaped in strata of grey, gritty snow.
“Lime green bridesmaid dresses?” Heather is saying. “Lime green, Meaghan? Seriously?”
The last time Meaghan was engaged, her bridesmaid dresses were coppery brown. I still have one hanging in my closet—brown as a not-so-subtle tribute to her old fiancé, an ecological sciences graduate student who specialized in soil analysis.
Ian—the man I’ve only just stopped thinking of as the “new” fiancé—works as a downtown corporate computer technician. And the dresses are now green.
“What? I’ve always loved bright greens. They’re my signature colours. And they’re just what we need for a spring wedding, right?” Meaghan’s voice is pitched slightly higher than usual. Heather and Meaghan sound like mother and daughter when they disagree. Mum never argues with Meaghan, so someone has to be able to get her to sound that way.
Heather is twelve years older than Meaghan. Large families can’t help but range widely through time. In the old days, people might have assumed Meaghan was actually Heather’s biological daughter raised discreetly as her sister. It’s not true. Heather didn’t start her period until four months after Meaghan was born. Everyone knows that. The fact is, if Meaghan was disingenuously raised as anyone’s baby sister, it was as Mum’s.
Heather fingers a lock of her own hair. “Green clothing brings out the green tones in my hair.”
“Your hair is not green.”
“All blond hair is a bit green. Check it out the next time I’m in fluorescent
lighting. You pretty brunettes can all pull off lime green well enough. But I still say the only one of us who’s going to look truly good in that dress is Suzanne, with those long legs.”
It may be true, but it’s burdensome. I try to crawl out from beneath it with, “Isn’t it funny how they call it lime green? I mean, have the colour-naming people ever seen a lime in real life? They’re dark green. They’re not really that light, yellowy green at all. And they can’t be talking about lime juice ‘cause that’s practically white. Right?”
Meaghan’s shoulders sag away from the chintz at her back. “The dresses are pretty. You’ll all look beautiful. That’s why I picked them for you.”
Ashley turns up her face and smiles. “I’ll wear whatever you want, Meags. It’s just one day.”
Tina is moving on from the controversy of the green dresses, pushing all of us along. She does it as a reflex—like someone on a bicycle about to tip over who knows in her muscles and in the lowest parts of her brain that forward movement is what’s needed to stay upright. Much of the peacekeeping in our family is no more than maintaining pace and momentum. No one stops for too long on anything awful. We propel ourselves forward with steady revolutions of patience and forgiveness, around and around, word by word. If we coast too far, we’ll fall to the ground.
“You guys should totally have the wedding at the Hotel Macdonald,” is what Tina says.
It’s forward movement, but the direction is unfortunate. Someone makes a scoffing sound, quiet but audible to me. If Tina hears, she ignores it. “Wasn’t it nice when Martin and I had our wedding at the Hotel Macdonald?” she says. “We got all those great photos on the terrace with the view of the river valley in the background. And remember those gorgeous sculpted ceilings in the ballroom?”
“Sculpted ceilings are a bit out of our price range,” Meaghan says.
Ashley is laughing. “Remember the water-stained fibreglass tiles on the ceilings at my wedding reception?”
We’ve got to move on again.
“So what’s in the bag, Mum?” I ask.
“Hm? Oh, just some baby stuff,” is all Mum answers.
This is how she survives us—how our mother navigates the scary seismic energy of the family she’s borne. She’s not riding a complicated bicycle-built-for-five. Mum travels in a coracle, a tiny boat for one. She’s rowed herself out onto the horizon—alone and adrift, buoyed up by the swells of the sea, high above the epicentres cracking and crashing on the surface of the earth miles below. From her distance, she can barely read the expressions on our faces or hear much meaning in our voices. We could be laughing or crying. Out at sea, she doesn’t have to know.
I keep metaphors like these to myself or the girls will poke and laugh, telling each other how darling I am for never getting over that poetry contest I won back in high school.
I don’t need metaphors to describe how our father gets around. He travels alone too, in a big white diesel pickup truck, driving through snow or mud from gas well site to gas well site. His solitude is literal, unequivocal. Maybe that’s what makes it feel like it’s not about us, and we can let it pass without hurting ourselves on it. And maybe that’s not fair to Mum.
Heather leans into Tina. “How can you order the salmon and then not eat the roe that comes with it?”
Tina nudges her plate toward Heather. “This slimy black stuff? Help yourself.”
Meaghan fakes a gag as Heather jabs her fork into Tina’s meal. “Sick. It’s meant to be garnish. You don’t eat it.”
“Sure I do. What’s the matter with you guys? It’s caviar. Don’t think of them as fish embryos. Just imagine they’re puffy, slippery salt crystals that burst in your mouth.”
Tina laughs loudly enough to make the lawyers twitch over their table. “Yuck, Heather. You’re such a freak!”
“Freak? You’re the one who ordered it.” Heather bumps her shoulder against Tina’s arm, and they’re laughing and shoving each other over a plate of fish eggs.
Ashley pushes ahead. “So where does Ian want to have the reception?” she asks Meaghan. “I’ve seen him in that shiny purple dress shirt. He’s one of those—what did they used to call them?—one of those metrosexual guys. He must have an opinion on everything to do with the wedding planning.”
Meaghan gulps the food in her mouth. “Heh, yeah he does. It’s actually Ian’s mom who’s got the reception figured out. She has this cute little country church hall in mind. It’s got some traditional family significance.”
“Aw, that’s nice,” I say. “A place special to Ian’s mom.”
“Ian’s mom?” Ashley repeats. “Oh yeah. I forgot Meaghan’s getting a mother-in-law along with a husband.”
“A real live mother-in-law,” Tina echoes. “How weird is that?”
My married sisters look across the table at each other, passing over me as they exchange smug grins.
Tina knows exactly how weird it is. We all do. Mothers-in-law are usually an unavoidable part of married life, at least for people our age, but I am the only one of my sisters to actually have one. My sisters are not very classy about their orphan-in-law status. For no reason at all, they’ve got all the mother-in-law rancour of girlie twenty-first century Fred Flintstones. And here they go again, bragging about how they get to live through marriage without any mothers-in-law.
Still, my sisters must envy me sometimes—like when my Troy shuts down the dental clinic for a week and we fly off to our timeshare in Hawaii, just the two of us. Without any complaining, his mom comes into the city and stays with our kids while we’re gone. We leave her in charge of our progeny and everything we own without worrying about a thing.
Our mum is different. When our mum—the lady on the far side of the table picking all the mushrooms out of the wild mushroom linguini she’s ordered—comes across town to visit my house, she’s greeted as an honoured guest and met with freshly cleaned bathrooms, tense grandchildren, and the best food I can cook.
Troy’s mom, May, steps through the door of my house like a great, shining domestic angel from a 1960s marriage manual. She’s “The Fascinating Mother-in-law.” When we come home from our vacations, we find every item of Troy’s clothing that’s not still in his suitcase ironed and hanging in the closet. All the dishes have been taken out of the cupboards and washed by hand in scalding water because, as May says, mechanical dishwashers lack a proper human touch.
It sounds like I’m eulogizing my mother-in-law. She isn’t dead, but I am a bit blue about her lately. May is going to leave us again. She’ll be off on another one of her humanitarian service missions, cleaning teeth for poor people in Central America. She’ll be gone for most of the year.
Don’t misunderstand. Housekeeping and free goodies aren’t the only things I love about my mother-in-law. The rest is difficult to explain. I’m afraid it demands metaphors. May is a screen, a living partition separating me from the flawed mess of people all around me. My mother-in-law is an invisible wall—like the ones mimes pretend to stand behind, pressing their hands flat against it to make it real. And when I am seen through May’s wall, miming my part, I am perfect—my movements, my form, all of me. It’s perfection. I am not Sister Suzanne or Nurse Suzanne but Perfect Daughter-in-law Suzanne. May is the only person with the authority to call me that. And she did—spoke the words right into my ear as she hugged me goodbye one Christmas evening, ages ago.
None of my sisters is a daughter-in-law, perfect or otherwise. In this way, I am a singularity. I am one whole of something cherished by May rather than one fifth of something kept distant from my own mother. The math is tricky. I haven’t solved the problem through to its end. But in my guts I know that as long as I have May in my life, I have a part of myself that exists without flaws, or ambivalence, or peers.
I am a daughter-in-law: the perfect daughter-in-law. None of my sisters can say the same. Not even Meaghan can say it. Sure, s
he’s getting a living mother-in-law when she marries Ian, but perfection is not for everyone, especially not my sisters. There’s nothing wrong with that. Poll any large family and they’ll agree there can only be one sister recognized as the pretty one, or the smart one, or the crazy one. And there can be only one perfect sister. Our perfect sister has to be me. Don’t mistake this for bragging. It’s not an honour. I love it, but sometimes I hate it too. However I feel about it, I owe it to May. The sweetness, patience, compassion, decorum, fastidiousness—that’s not an inheritance from my mother. It came from somewhere else. It must have come from May—things I learned from her and through her. All of my perfection, it depends on my mother-in-law.
Maybe I’m wrong, and mothers-in-law are more scarce than I know. Maybe it’s not so strange that my sisters’ mothers-in-law have vanished.
Ashley’s husband, Durk, was born to a teenaged party-girl. Through a combination of headlong ignorance and wilful blindness, she didn’t know for sure she was pregnant until it was almost time for him to be born. Naturally, she partied long into her pregnancy. Durk copes fairly well with the disadvantages his mother chemically engineered into his brain. But sometimes, when he’s done some heavy self-medicating, and his clothes and hair are smelling particularly weedy, Durk will tell that story about being born in a public toilet during a high school football game. We all love Durk and want to believe him when he tells us anything, even this. But we can’t believe it until he tells the story sober, at least once.
Durk’s girl-mom swore she loved him. And she knew lots of nice teenaged moms who raised nice kids, so she figured it couldn’t be too hard. They lived together until something awful happened. No one knows for sure what it was. All we know is what we see on the tops of each of Durk’s hands. They’re marked with stiff, flat spots without any lines or pores on them—white scar tissue that won’t tan in the sun. They’re the same size and shape as those cigarette burns we’d find in the grimy broadloom carpets of the old motels we stayed in when we were taken on vacations as kids.
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