PANEL: DON’S SELF-LOATHING SPRINGS ONTO BLAKE’S NECK, SCRATCHING AND CHEWING. SELF-LOATHING’S BALLOON: EI-YAH! BLOOD AND SHREDDED THROAT FLESH FLY IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
Blake, fetal and panting. The dropped flashlight shines into the thick of the grass. Don could kick him. If he wanted.
The quiet. The quiet. The quiet.
PANEL: DON CLAPS HIS HANDS. DON’S BALLOON: OKAY! ENOUGH! SCAT! HIS SELF-LOATHING SKEEDADDLES, GLARING OVER ITS SPINY SHOULDER.
Probably a rat. A scurrying in the grass. Something humps off. Don sees it in the beam of light.
Neither of them speaks for several minutes.
The Maternity Suite
The Reluctant Grandmother
By dinner Betty was desperate, nerves bunched together like in that carnival game where you tug one of the hundred gathered strings to see what prize jumps. In this case, she was her own twitchy, jerky prize. She tossed the shrimp in the cream sauce then spooned it over the pasta butterflies. The pepper mill, cranked, made the same sound as her teeth.
Carey tucked in the moment Betty set his plate down. Anna only winced. “Ma,” she said. “I can’t eat this.”
“Why not?” Betty snapped.
“Because. Because—”
Betty was about to leave right then, stalk off in a fury and light up—to hell with them!—except that Carey beat her to it. He lurched from the table and bolted out of the room. Down the hall the bathroom door slammed, but they could still hear his toilet-amplified retching. She turned to Anna. “What’s the matter with Carey?”
“I’m going to have a baby!”
Instinctively, Betty pressed her hands to her own slack belly, a maternal salute. Eighteen months before, Pauline, her other daughter, had shown up unannounced after a year away in Mexico. When Betty opened the front door her uterus, completely docile since menopause, suddenly contracted. Yet it had taken her another full second to recognize Pauline on the step, tanned and eight months pregnant. Betty didn’t like to think a reproductive organ might have an intelligence of its own.
“Anna,” she said, tenderly she hoped. “How far along are you?”
“About eight weeks.” Anna put her face in her hands and began to sob.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m happy. I can’t stop crying, that’s all. I cry all day long.”
“That’s normal.” She meant hormones, though Anna had always been sentimental and easy to bring to tears. She took Anna’s plate to the counter and scraped the pasta back into the pot, realizing then that the shrimp was what must have put Anna off. The clump of cells inside her would be about that colour, size and shape.
Carey reappeared, still looking queasy. “I told her,” said Anna, holding out her hand to him. He glanced at Betty, turned bright crimson, looked away. Guilty, Betty thought, and laughed out loud. Nowadays they actually feel guilty for what they do to us.
“He didn’t know it would be like this,” said Anna.
“Like what?”
“Sick-making,” said Carey. “All my life if someone throws up, I throw up. I don’t know how much more I can take.”
“It’s normal,” Betty said again. She put a consoling arm around him, her favourite son-in-law—her only one.
Two years before, Betty’s husband, Robert, had rejoined the flock. Thursday afternoons the little Reverend would arrive looking every inch his denomination in corduroys and earnestness. He met Robert in his room, the one that used to be the den when Robert could climb stairs, actually got him out of bed and cross-legged on the floor seemingly by murmuring appeasements to his pain. The Light of Christ was a radiant presence in the room, Betty had learned listening outside the door. “Inhale. With every breath you are filled with Healing Light.” She brought in tea and Robert’s medication on a tray, marvelling because the little Reverend was so gay. During the height of the ordination controversy, Robert had referred to the United Church as “The Church of the Perverts.”
At least the Reverend could take credit for making a better smoker out of Betty. Standing on the patio after Anna and Carey had gone home, she inhaled with fervour, paused ecstatically, then blew a pillar of smoke above her head, all the way to heaven. A mid-July evening, warm, the garden climaxing in tufts and pouches, cups, bells, horns, spires, bristles, balls, stars. She unwound and turned on the hose, aiming the sprinkling nozzle low at the impatiens in the shaded bed along the fence. Her children forbade her to smoke. Cancer had mouldered away their father and now they began their visits with an inspection of her home, sniffing room to room, checking potted plants for butts, not letting her out of sight. Today Anna had found a disposable lighter in the liquor cabinet and, with a shriek, had thrown it on the living-room carpet. The very sight of the gaudy blue cylinder set off a Pavlovian response in Betty, her cravings worsening through the afternoon until nicotine stained everything, even Anna’s happy news. So crabbed by the time Anna blurted her announcement, Betty’s first thought had been a sour wondering what Carey and Anna would raise a child on. Anna had never finished her degree. Carey languished on some substitute list and when he taught, it was only English to refugees. How lucrative could that be?
Water pooled around the impatiens drooping from the day’s heat. Soon they would perk as Betty, her cigarette half smoked, was perking now. She tugged on the hose, raised and swung the nozzle around to the sunny wall of the house. The water, soaring above her in a parabola, caught the light and for a dazzling, prismatic moment became a sheen of rainbow against the white stucco wall. Mist hit her, pinging cold against her face and arms. Then a feeling, too, showered down, a tingling.
Joy for her daughter, at last.
The phone rang after midnight. Betty answered to a hiss: “You’re smoking, aren’t you?” Then Pauline’s real voice asked, “Did Anna tell you?”
“Yes.”
“She just wants a baby because I have Rebecca. She always has to have what I have.”
“That’s unkind,” Betty chided, though the very thought had crossed her own mind earlier, before she’d had that cigarette. She could hear the supposedly coveted Rebecca in the background, Rebecca or a siren, and wondered if Pauline ever put the child to bed or just let her cry herself to sleep behind the television.
Pauline was really calling, she said, to tell Betty about the dream she’d had the night before. “Me and Anna went to visit you in the hospital because you’d had a baby. Except when we got there, we found out you’d actually had a cat. The weird thing was the cat didn’t surprise us at all. We just wondered why it was full grown and not a kitten. Different gestation periods I guess. Nine months is probably way more time than you need for a kitten. Do you think I dreamed it because of Smitty?”
Smitty was Pauline’s grey and black six-toed tabby, a biter. Since Rebecca had started walking, Smitty had begun stalking. Betty had advised neutering. The world, in Betty’s opinion, would be a better place if everyone were neutered. “Have you taken him to the vet yet?” she asked.
“How’s this for a coincidence? The same day Anna announces she’s knocked up, Smitty gets his balls chopped off!”
Laughing, Betty said good night and hung up. She stared for a moment at the still-life arrangement on the bedside table: Nature morte avec téléphone et fruits. Anna had put the fruit bowl there so Betty could nibble away her late night cravings. Fruit of my womb, she thought, holding up a waxy red apple. In her other hand she held an orange.
Pauline was born tangled in umbilical cord and with her first shrill and indignant vocalization seemed to announce that she would never be tied up or down again. Then, as if anyone could have mistaken her meaning, she continued screaming for three months. It was a demand for love fiercer than Betty had ever imagined. Her nipples cracked from giving and Pauline drew her blood.
Anna was the quiet one, so placid she was cast as the Infant Jesus in the United Church nativity play where previously they had used a big bald doll. Pauline, three years old that Christmas, flossy in h
er lamb’s suit, clustered with the rest of the preschool flock around Anna in the manger. Betty and Robert could hear her crying “Meow,” while everyone else bleated. At home after the service, Pauline insisted Anna be put to bed in a box in the garage.
In later years, Anna graduated to playing Mary. Pauline had no further interest in Sunday school theatrics; the days and nights of her real life provided drama enough. Her preteen vocational aspiration was to be a bank robber. She shoplifted for practice and got caught. Robert, in charge of discipline, of disciplining Pauline, grounded her for a year. This didn’t stop the boys from coming. So skinny, shaggy and sullen, all wearing the same grey hooded sweatshirts as they filed down to the rumpus room, they reminded Betty of a chain gang. She strongly suspected Pauline had relinquished her virginity at thirteen, probably in their own basement, though she could never bring herself to ask. Whom could she blame for her daughter’s loss? She and Robert were decent people. They had faults, certainly; they played too much bridge, for example, but they had never modelled lust.
She remembered Pauline showing her an advertisement in Teen. “What’s Tampax?” She was only ten at the time, too young, Betty thought, to know how tedious her fate would be. “I wish,” Betty had answered, “you wouldn’t read those magazines.”
So perhaps her own prudishness had contributed to Pauline’s preternatural curiosity. She vowed to do better by Anna. “Inside a woman’s body is a nest,” she told her, and from Anna’s perplexed look Betty knew she was thinking of twigs and grass and tangled bits of string.
“It’s made of blood.”
Anna’s bottom lip began to quiver. “I know! Pauline told me, but I hoped it wasn’t true!”
Anna being prettier than Pauline, taller and fair, Betty had expected from her an even longer line of convict suitors. They never came. On Friday nights Anna went to the library with her girlfriends. She joined a swim club and spent every weekend at the pool or painting watercolour pictures of butterflies and flowers in her room. Into adolescence she sailed on gentle breezes. When she was fourteen, she woke up screaming.
Robert drove. Betty sat in the back seat with Anna’s head, damp with sweat, cradled in her lap, Anna moaning and panting and clutching her abdomen.
In a curtained-off corner of the emergency room, Betty helped a nurse strip Anna and get her into the flimsy gown. She hadn’t meant to look at her daughter’s naked body, but glimpsed, in spite of herself, pubic hair and a white tympanum of belly, round and taut. The doctor, when he finally appeared, kneaded Anna pitilessly where her pain was. “How old are you?” he asked and when Anna answered through gritted teeth, he glanced at Betty. “Could she be pregnant?”
Anna wailed.
“Now, now,” he said. “These things happen. Let me have a look.”
It was what Betty had always feared, of course, but from Pauline. Her ashamed face in her hands, she heard their bustling preparations: the snap of a rubber glove, a scraping chair, then an odd “Oh!” from the doctor, repeated by the whispered-to nurse. She looked up to see Anna’s feet in the stirrups. The doctor had vanished. The nurse, smiling, said, “Don’t worry. She’ll be fine,” and hurried out leaving Betty alone with Anna. If only Robert were here, Betty thought, though she was also relieved he wasn’t. It was a female crisis. His proper place was behind the steering wheel, and now in the waiting room; Robert instinctively understood this. Still, she could have used him to raise Cain with the staff.
Leaning over Anna, Betty asked her coldly, “Who did this to you?” but Anna only whimpered and shook her head. Betty recalled an article in one of Pauline’s magazines. It usually happened to skinny girls like Anna, or girls disguised by fat—either way, it didn’t show—girls, good and confused, who had no idea what sex was. Had some boy asked her to close her eyes, insisting it was his finger? Or worse, some grown-up lech? A teacher?
“You should tell me things!”
“What things?” Anna sobbed.
Suddenly the narrow space at the end of the bed accommodated a crowd—the nurse and doctor, interns, and Dr. So-and-so, barely introduced, from Ob-Gyn. They opened Anna’s legs like a textbook and immediately began to thrill. The gynecologist said something about a “membrane” and someone else pointed out the “bulge.” These words together offended Betty, as did the faces gaping, via the speculum, in her daughter’s deepest, most private place. Behind the curtains like this, she was reminded of a freak-show tent or a travelling brothel in the desert. She jerked the sheet down over Anna’s spread legs.
“What is going on?”
It was the farthest thing from a baby. Rare, but not serious: an imperforated hymen. Menstrual blood had been accumulating inside Anna for months.
Betty walked beside the stretcher as it coursed the antiseptic halls. No one could be purer than Anna, she was thinking. They could operate, puncture her with their instruments, but never penetrate her innocence. This was the kind of romantic nonsense she could entertain during a crisis. Afterward, she wouldn’t even remember thinking it.
At the end of her first trimester Anna asked Betty to come and help her paint the room that would be the nursery. No more than a glorified closet, up to now it had been their study. Betty took the pictures off the walls. They folded up the trestle desk, moved it and the blue plastic Ikea chair into the bedroom, then set to clearing the bookshelves of the pregnancy guides and all the texts that were the evidence of Anna’s flighty university career: psychology, anthropology, art history. Lugging an armload into the bedroom, Betty paused to read the title on the first huge volume and wondered how anyone could be so wordy on the irrelevant subject of Flemish painting.
In the tiny kitchen she made tea. Anna staggered through, a tower of books in her arms, strands of blond hair escaping from her ponytail—glowing, Betty had to admit. She looked like the Madonna on the cover of the textbook. “You’d better be careful,” she warned. “Let’s take a break.”
“How did you feel when you were pregnant with me, Ma?”
Betty passed her a mug of tea. “I don’t remember.”
“How can you not remember?”
“We didn’t make a fuss like you.”
“Who’s making a fuss?”
“You and Pauline. Back then you’d be as big as a house and no one would pass comment.”
“Daddy wasn’t with you, I guess.”
“In the delivery room?” Betty snorted. “Certainly not. The only good thing about men in delivery rooms is a declining birth rate.”
“Oh, Ma!”
Overpopulation had been one of Betty and Robert’s “topics.” On this very subject they’d spent many a pleasurable evening agreeing with each other in outraged tones. Betty told Anna, “Only in developed countries is the birth rate dropping. Only in developed countries are men looking where they shouldn’t. Why would you want Carey to see you like that?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Ach!” Betty set down her mug, exasperated. All Pauline and Anna talked about now, lounging in Betty’s backyard and sipping endless blender drinks, was the glory of nausea and stretch marks. Rebecca, meanwhile, the product of Pauline’s nine months of masochistic indulgence, toddled unsupervised through the flower beds eating dirt. What Betty was thankful for at least: they finally had something in common. It used to be that whenever they got near one another, Pauline would drop a rose and run. If Anna so much as looked the wrong way at Pauline, Pauline would fly at her shrieking “Noogie!” and grate her knuckles mercilessly across Anna’s skull. This, even after they had both finished high school and ought to have been comporting themselves like adults. Now, finally, after all these years, they seemed like sisters.
Anna asked, accusing, “Did you smoke?”
“Yes, I smoked. Nobody told us not to.”
“I might have been damaged, you know.”
“Well, you weren’t.” Betty drained her mug and stood. “Okay. Let’s paint.”
In the little room, Anna knelt to pry open one of the c
ans with a screwdriver.
“Is Carey working today?” Betty asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Why isn’t he helping?”
“He’s not very useful,” said Anna with a sigh.
Why marry then, thought Betty, if not to have a live-in painter, plumber and small appliance repairman? But she didn’t say it; a blade had appeared on her tongue the second Anna mentioned smoking. She did love Carey, just not as much as cigarettes.
The lid popped off the can. “Is that the colour you want?” asked Betty, dubious.
Anna stirred the paint then tipped the can and let it pour, a rich, warm stream, into the rolling tray. “I think it’s going to be a girl.”
Betty said, “I’d call that red.”
That night she went through the photo albums but could only find one picture of herself pregnant. Black-and-white, it showed her and Pauline hand in hand against a backdrop of shadowy trees, her body half turned away from Pauline, face to the camera. Visible in profile under her cotton sundress was the bulge of Anna. Where had she got that dress? She couldn’t remember ever being so feminine. Burly, energetic, she had spent most of her youth in trousers, like a girl in one of those old Workers’ Party posters with a pole over her shoulder and a huge red flag unfurling behind.
With Pauline she squabbled endlessly over feminism. According to Pauline, every problem a woman faced was the fault of men. Her own hypocritical consorting with the oppressor she rationalized away with semantics. Pauline did not say “men”; she said “the patriarchy.” Naturally, no one epitomized the patriarchy for Pauline more than poor Robert, who was only fulfilling his responsibilities. Betty felt sorry for men today, she really did. How confused they must be!
“Bladder infections,” Pauline gave as an example. Busy tending selflessly to the needs of others, women neglected to take the time to void.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 15