“What rubbish!” Betty had crowed. “Have you ever heard of self-control?”
Evidently not, for Pauline couldn’t even name the culprit who had knocked her up in Mexico. Betty, though, was of that stalwart generation that could hold its urine all day if it had to. If hunger needled her, she looked at her watch, decided when to eat and felt not a pang until that time. Even when Robert had crept across the ravine of decency that separated their twin beds, she never let go of the reins of her senses. She focused instead on the ingredients and steps for making bouillabaisse.
But at times in her life the flag behind her had changed from red to white—an unconditional surrender—in pregnancy and, later, when menopause vanquished her, just as cancer had Robert. With the little Reverend at his side, Robert had battled against his dying body, but his body had won. Now that he was gone, Betty carried on the struggle, faced the same surly foe, clad now not in the armour of disease but craving. She couldn’t even lay out a game of solitaire without a fight.
She closed the photo album, returned it to the shelf, left the den and climbed the stairs. Undressing for bed, she paused before the dresser mirror with her nightgown in her hand. The enemy’s other guise was age. Her breasts had flattened, skin sagged all over like a too-large garment.
“We are a will,” she said out loud, “dressed up in a body.”
The telephone rang. Naked, Betty crossed over to the bedside table where two red apples softened in the bowl. On the third ring, she slid her fingers under the phone and drew out the cigarette. The phone shrilled, a proxy. Ignoring it, she wandered the room, cigarette defiantly between her lips. She was searching, searching for the lighter she’d hidden.
The Expectant Mother
The professor was explaining something marvellous a little monk had done with sweet peas. Anna closed her eyes and pictured the flowers that scaled the fence in their yard every summer, a tangle of moth-winged blooms, some pink, others red or mauve or white. As a girl she believed Jesus made dawn rounds through the garden with a brush and palette, mixing paints with dew. Now, at twenty, that was the explanation she still preferred. Science was not saving her father. All it had done was disillusion her.
Someone poked her with a pencil. Starting, she turned to face the smirk of the person sitting next to her. He had a long neck prominently knobbed with an Adam’s apple and straight hair parted down the middle, neither blond nor brown but some sheenless shade between. “When it comes to genes,” he said, “Levi Strauss is still the man for me.”
“My father has cancer.” She began to cry and Carey to panic—something that would happen again and again until they were married, and after too.
“Do you want to talk?” he asked her. “Do you want to get out of here? Hey, let’s get out of here.” He stuffed his notebook into his army satchel and took her by the hand. Tripping and premature, their exit. The professor at the front of the hall droned on. Probably he was thinking his words were having no effect, but he was wrong, for instead of a veil she’d worn a wreath of sweet peas on her head. They were married in her parents’ backyard just weeks before her father died. Reverend Chalmer performed the ceremony, her father’s wish, not Anna’s. Also present were Carey’s mother from Nova Scotia, who turned out to be as awful as Carey had claimed, and a few of Anna’s high school friends. Pauline was in Mexico living loosely under the sun.
The reception afterward was at The Teahouse. “If only that woman weren’t so morose,” Betty had told Anna in the washroom as they reapplied their lipstick. She meant Carey’s mother. “You’d think she was paying.”
“If only Pauline had come,” said Anna, solely to remind her mother of the slight.
“That too.”
“If only Daddy would get better!”
“Stop it,” said Betty.
Her father hadn’t been able to give her away properly, but had waited in a wheelchair by the birdbath while Anna had walked the green aisle of the lawn alone. When he took her hand and squeezed, it was with the last of his strength.
“I wish we’d had a different minister.”
“Enough!” Betty shooed Anna out of the washroom, staying behind a few minutes herself—to smoke. Anna wasn’t fooled.
During pre-nuptial counselling Reverend Chalmer had seemed to suggest they shouldn’t marry. First, he’d insinuated that student loans would undo them. Couldn’t they wait until they’d finished school and were more financially stable?
“No,” was Anna’s flat reply.
He talked about maturity. They were only in their early twenties. Did they really know if they were—he searched a long time for the right word—compatible? Anna reddened. What was the Reverend getting at? He wasn’t married. What did he know? But in the end, he agreed to unite them, did it with pleasure, seemingly, as if his reservations were the petals that had been tossed as confetti. At dinner he even raised his glass to them. “If you ever have a need, come and see me,” Anna overheard him tell Carey.
“God give you love,” was his toast.
As soon as Robert died, Anna dropped out of university. A bride of less than a month, it should have been the happiest time of her life, but she couldn’t stop crying. She became like one of those mourners for hire, grieving for all concerned: for the stoical Betty, for Carey, who didn’t know Robert well enough to care, and for Pauline, who wasn’t even there. Carey was very patient with her during these months. When she woke crying in the night he would hold her. He understood her reluctance to begin marital relations, preoccupied as she was with Robert’s illness and then his passing. He said it was a relief to him.
Countless times during childhood Anna had envisioned a funeral, but it was always Pauline’s. In her imagination, she threw herself on the open casket, on top of Pauline as cold in death as she’d been in life. It wasn’t so much Pauline’s death that she wished for, as recognition for what she had suffered as her father’s favourite. And, of course, relief from Pauline’s bully presence, which Mexico had at least provided.
When she heard Pauline was back, though, Anna rushed right over with Carey. She wanted to show Carey to her. Confronted with her sister’s condition, Anna was scandalized and Pauline, sensing it, only flaunted her queen-sized self all the more. With her feet up on the coffee table, she commanded them with a fluttering hand: a cup of tea, a hot water bottle, her slippers off. When they were not scurrying back and forth to run her errands, two of them were required to heave her off the couch so she could go to the bathroom. Pauline had pulled a fast one on them all, Anna realized. Automatically she had earned the solicitude of everyone, despite how selfishly she’d behaved. It wasn’t fair. Pauline hadn’t even apologized for not coming back for the wedding. She hadn’t mentioned Robert once.
Then the unexpected happened. After almost two days of labour, Pauline produced nine pounds seven ounces of healthy baby girl. The family reunited around her hospital bed waiting for the nurse to fetch Rebecca, listening to the details of Pauline’s ordeal as she wolfed food off the meal tray. She claimed to be stitched from stem to stern. The white of one of her eyes had filled with blood. Pauline happened to glance up from her pudding cup as the nurse wheeled in the bassinet. A besotted smile bloomed on her face. She wouldn’t let any of them hold Rebecca. Clutching her tight, cooing feverishly, she consented only to opening the blanket that swaddled her so that they might get a better peek.
“Isn’t she a little dear!” cried Betty. Anna almost burst into tears. She thought she’d never seen anything as beautiful as those pursed, petal lips squeezed between pink rounds of cheek.
The next day, when Pauline came home, Anna and Carey went over to help out, as they did almost every day for the next six weeks. Betty was the only one with any experience but, as Carey pointed out, it was almost a quarter century out of date. He took on the job of reading aloud from the manual. Pauline slept between feedings. Betty and Anna, holding the baby in turns, couldn’t believe the change in Pauline. It was nothing short of a transformation. If
Pauline had turned to stone they would have been less surprised, because stone would have been in character.
Of course, it wasn’t just Pauline who had changed. The whole family had been brought together as they never had been before, not even when Robert was dying. Anna, who had always believed in miracles anyway, took this very much to heart.
In the three blocks that she’d walked from the naturopath, every passerby met her eye and smiled. Her hands in her pockets, she could feel the not so secret swell through the lining of her coat. The baby was fully formed inside her now, but only six inches long, its skin transparent, in her imagination radiant, like the little dove in the Van Eyck Annunciation.
She crossed the street to the deli. The naturopath had recommended she start massaging her perineum with olive oil, but as she stepped inside, goat bells clanking her entrance, the aroma made her instantly ravenous and she went straight over to the pastry case instead. Belly pressed into the glass, she gazed down at the trays of diamond-cut baklava, the little bales of shredded wheat sopped with honey. A man with a large nose and black Einstein hair came over. “Bea-u-ti-ful la-dy. How can I help you?”
Anna pointed through the glass. “Two pieces.”
“Two?” He winked. “For me and for you?”
“For me and my husband.”
“Husband?” The knife snatched up, he aimed at his heart, abruptly detouring into the pastry case and, with the tip, sliding the baklava into a paper envelope.
Anna hesitated. “Maybe another for the bus.”
He tucked a third piece in. “An even number is better. Why not four?”
“All right.” She was just so hungry all the time. Taking the envelope from him, she asked, “Where’s your olive oil?”
“Ah! I will take you to the olive grove myself.” He came out from behind the counter and swaggered on ahead, apron strings tied in a droopy bow over the empty seat of his pants. Down an aisle of coffee and grape leaves she followed, past red-eyed olives suspended in vinegar and black olives in an open vat. The oil was displayed across three shelves—yellow, gold, amber, green.
“This is best. This is for you.” He reached for a small bottle, the deepest of the greens, and placed it in her hands. “This is extra virgin.”
“What happened to me,” Pauline told Anna, “was every time I sneezed, I peed. A line appeared from here to here. The linea negra, right? Also, I felt happy. I realized I’d never been happy in all my life.”
It didn’t occur to Anna to ask the reason for her sister’s chronic unhappiness. All she wondered was why she didn’t have a line down her own belly like Pauline had had. Before she could ask what exactly it had looked like, Pauline sat up from where she’d been stretched out on the couch licking honey off her fingers. “Where’s Rebecca? Rebecca!”
The little girl came teetering around the corner, all pink gums and wide-spaced teeth. Anna didn’t like her toddler smile or cob-web hair, or the ugly red scratches on her arms and face. She’d been such a perfect baby; it was a pity. Looking elsewhere instead, Anna noticed the cat. Striped, broad in the paw, it was the reason Pauline had come over unannounced and eaten the last piece of baklava, the one Anna was saving for Carey: she was here to dump it on them. Pupils dilated, fixed blackly on the child, it was inching forward, low against the carpet.
Uh-oh, Anna thought.
It joggled side to side then darted, reared up and boxed Rebecca twice. Rebecca stood there stunned. “Smitty!” Pauline screamed, setting off the child. “Fuck you, Smitty!” She turned accusingly to Anna. “You see why you’ve got to take him?”
“But what about when our baby comes?”
“By then Rebecca will be old enough to bash him back. Hush, baby. Hush.” She scooped up the sobbing child and began to bounce her—roughly, Anna thought.
Anna went to the bedroom, returning a moment later with the manual. Pauline was trying to wipe Rebecca’s face with her sweatshirt sleeve, streaking a slug-trail of mucus along it, Rebecca still wailing. “Enough!” Pauline thunked her down. Rebecca followed Pauline back to the couch, frantic arms stretched out. “What do you want? You want a tittie?” Swinging her onto her knee, she runched up her sweatshirt; a breast came tumbling out.
“It says here somewhere,” said Anna, scanning the index, “that I should stay away from cats. I could catch something.”
“That’s only if you mess around with the litter box. Carey can change the litter box. Where is Carey?”
“He’ll be home soon. He got a three-month contract, did I tell you?” She was searching the columns for litter box.
“Do your breasts hurt?” asked Pauline.
Anna looked up. “Did yours?”
“They throbbed.”
“They hurt a little,” she said, patting herself.
By the time Carey came home, Rebecca had fallen asleep nursing, her wispy head thrown back on Pauline’s thigh, air percolating through blocked nostrils. “Ah!” he said when he saw the child. He leaned over her, stage-whispering, “Becky. Little Beck-Beck. Who’s your papa? Who’s your daddy? It’s all right. You can tell me.”
Pauline laughed. Carey was allowed to joke like this but when Anna or their mother asked, Pauline flipped. She’d probably slept with a lot of Mexicans—Anna shuddered at the thought—except Rebecca was so colourless, it seemed an unlikely paternity. The little girl looked as if she were kept in a closet half the time.
Carey pressed Rebecca’s nose, blinked at his finger and wiped it on his sweater, then went to change out of his teaching clothes. He liked children, Anna knew he did. Even her mother had said he would make a good father. “He’s wonderful with Pauline’s bastard,” were her words.
“Are you staying for supper?” Anna asked Pauline.
In the bedroom, Carey screamed a second before Smitty came tearing out. Pauline got to her feet, Rebecca flopping in her arms. “No,” she said. “We better go.”
Carey said he didn’t know what hit him, or, more precisely, what had seized his Achilles tendon and sunk in its teeth. It was a surprising reaction because usually when Carey was angry he just hunkered down and refused to speak.
“First you spring a baby on me and now this kamikaze cat!”
“Why?” Anna cried in renewed torment. “Why don’t you want the baby?”
Carey punched the wall, hard enough that he winced.
“People are starting to wonder!” she told him.
“Wonder what?”
“Why you aren’t helping!”
“What people?” he screamed.
“Ma! She thought it was strange you weren’t there to paint the nursery!”
Carey sneered. “That’s not a nursery. That’s a room in a bordello.”
It was where she ran to, where she always went now when they had a fight. Her back against the wall, she slid down it then collapsed onto her side, sobbing, but with gulping pauses in between so she could hear Carey’s approaching steps. After a few minutes she rolled over onto her back, her sobs directed outward instead of muffled by the carpet. Soon she was whimpering instead of crying, but gave that up eventually and just lay there on the floor in the empty room watching the walls pulse all around her.
The door pushed open and Smitty came padding in. Thrumming, he rubbed the whole smooth length of himself across her wet face.
“Carey?” she called, picking fur out of her mouth. “Carey?”
At least he still went with her to their childbirth classes. He enjoyed them because, out of all the husbands, he was the only comedian. During the first class, Judy, the instructor, had passed around a pink plush fetus held by Velcro inside a cloth uterus.
“This is a good model because, like us, it’s three-dimensional and soft.”
“And in winter,” Carey added, “it doubles as a toque!” He tore out the fetus and popped the uterus on his head, cracking up the class.
When a worried woman asked, “What if we lose our baby?” Carey had piped up with the suggestion that she pin her phone numb
er to its diaper. Everyone laughed again. They didn’t know how things were at home. They thought he was funny all the time.
Tonight, as Anna lay on the blue vinyl exercise mat to do the breathing exercises, a nervous fluttering began inside her, like small wings beating back and forth. She grabbed Carey’s hand. The room was full of people. He couldn’t very well pull away this time.
“There.” She pressed his hand to her belly. “Do you feel it?”
From the relaxation tape: surf, plainting gulls, the low murmur of rain, a foghorn’s hollow echo. Were there any sadder sounds in the world? The men were all kneeling beside their wives, rubbing the women’s temples in the slow and gentle circles Judy had taught. But Carey just stared down at Anna, on his face an indeterminate expression, more than one feeling, none very nice.
When they had put away the mats, Judy said, “Let’s talk about sex. After all, that’s how you got into this mess in the first place.”
Everyone turned to Carey, waiting for the wisecrack.
That night Anna stepped gingerly out of her panties, looked down and knew at once she’d have to start to pray again. She should have started sooner. She hoped it wasn’t too late.
This was something nobody knew about, not even her mother or Carey, certainly not Pauline. As a girl she used to build altars, then collect butts from the ashtrays, amassing the stale tobacco threads to burn on them. Sometimes her ceremonies included a live beetle crucified on a pin and slaps she would give herself. Also, she had to refrain from unclean thoughts and picture everything perfect and neat. Before bed each night she would open the bible at random and memorize the line under her finger no matter what little sense it made, which was where she had got the notion of thoughts being clean or unclean in the first place. If she did all these things, then her prayers would be answered. She won two swim meets this way and didn’t get warts, despite Pauline holding her down and noogying her infected knuckles all over Anna’s face. It was through prayer, too, that she had been able to delay getting her first period by two years. All the other girls had started by age twelve, but Anna had been fourteen.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 16