She stoppered the drain, turned on the cold water and watched the basin fill. Would it have smoothed things, she wondered, if she’d told all this to Reverend Chalmer? Maybe he would have liked her more if he had known how pious she could be. Looking back, she felt as though he had put a curse on them.
She picked the panties off the floor, bending almost an effort now, and tossed them in the basin. For a minute they floated on the surface of the water until, saturated, their own weight made them sink. White in the white porcelain, soon they settled under the water where the stain loosened and began to lift. It floated slowly upward, a single plume, like red smoke drifting.
The Suspecting Father
Carey’s worst memory was of his mother with a Q-Tip. In dreams his profound dread of it would magnify to her coming at him with a majorette’s baton, cotton tipped. For years and years he had stood it. He’d thought it was a ritual that went on in the home of every boy, that after your Sunday night bath your mother would come in and sit on the edge of the tub and, cringing with disgust, clean under your foreskin while you stood shivering on the bath mat. Then he started junior high school, all the naked boys crammed into one big shower stall. He was the only one born in Scotland. Unless you were born in Scotland, he discovered, you didn’t even have a foreskin.
He began to lock the door. “Carey?” she would call. “What are you doing in there, Carey?” She probably thought he was abusing himself. She’d always told him, “Carey, never abuse yourself,” and he was thrown into confusion. What would she call forcing a cotton swab into the hood of his penis? Hygiene, of course. She’d been a nurse until Carey’s father had brought her to Canada. Eventually she let him be, but ever after on a Sunday night she would leave the Q-Tip in a saucer on the vanity.
When the time came for him to go to university, he chose a school as far away as possible from his mother, went from one coast to the other. Every Sunday night she phoned and asked if he was meeting girls, which he was. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but what attracted women more than looks, he quickly learned, was a sense of humour, preferably self-deprecating, and a certain wistfulness. He would date them until that first sweet kiss, then abandon them and not return their perplexed calls. His mother never asked if he was keeping himself clean, but that was implied by the very time and day she phoned.
How, then, had he found himself married? Very quickly, it seemed now. Beside him in one of his classes had sat the same extraordinarily beautiful young woman day in and out. She didn’t seem to notice him, and at first he thought this was because she was used to being stared at, used to her attention being subtly and not so subtly sought. As the weeks went on, though, he decided she was simply preoccupied. When he finally spoke to her—what a windfall! She actually took him home.
It was to what he saw that afternoon that he let himself be married: an old house filled with plants and brimming ashtrays, half-finished games of solitaire, books, the coffee table stained in interlocking rings from years of G and Ts, radio chattering in the background, crossword puzzles, dust. Outside in her garden Betty, Anna’s mother, greeted them with a finger to her lips alongside a dangling cigarette. “Your father’s asleep.” He was taken into the den to see Robert on a hospital bed, wincing so nobly in his drugged dreams that Carey pictured his own father dying that way, though in reality he’d been killed in a mine accident, instantly, when Carey was an infant. Later a minister visited, just like a vicar in an English novel, and closed himself up with Robert. There was also a sister, he learned, but she was wayward. Wayward. How perfect!
He began to spend part of every day there. No coffee spoons with the family crest were polished for him. Instead, he was handed a book on composting and the latest issue of Maclean’s and told to read to Robert until he fell back asleep. Over dinner, Betty expounded her madcap take on world events, French cooking, and how she would try Robert’s morphine if she could only be certain she wouldn’t end up like some junkie mother in an O’Neill play. Completely sexless was Betty, always in pants, thick waisted with a muscular-looking hump of fat across her back—an ideal woman, Carey thought. He hoped Anna would turn out like that.
Anna was the one who proposed that they marry. She said, “It would mean so much to Daddy and we don’t know how much time he has left.” Maybe Carey thought he loved her. He certainly felt a surge of something for her when he introduced her to his mother and saw how absolutely she disapproved. At that point, two days before the wedding, he might have changed his mind, but he so badly wanted to defy and disappoint. Of course, in agreeing to marry Anna, it had also occurred to him that wherever he went with her he would be envied by other men, men who were once boys capering in the shower, pointing and laughing at his foreskin.
How quickly everything changed. The old man died, Betty withdrew and Anna’s sister reappeared, hugely pregnant. Anna’s sister, he had been led to understand, was quite a piece of work. What the hell was Anna then? Carey was soon to wonder.
Though Anna spent most of her time at her mother’s anyway, he tried to be home as little as possible. Happily inexperienced as a teacher, it took him hours to prepare his lessons. Afterward, he would go for coffee and read the paper at leisure and sometimes take in a movie too.
He was settling at a window table with the classified section when someone said hello. A man neatly dressed in a jacket and cords. At first Carey didn’t recognize, not without the collar, the man ultimately responsible for fucking up his life.
“And a hearty congratulations. I heard your news.” The Reverend switched the hand that held his paper cup, extending the right. When Carey took it, it felt small and exceedingly warm.
“May I join you?”
Carey hastened to make room on the tiny tabletop even as he screamed No, no, no in his head. The Reverend set down his coffee and, taking off his jacket, folded it neatly over the back of the chair. He fingered his shirt cuffs unhurriedly before sitting down and carefully removing the plastic lid on his cup. All the while Carey felt the same fidgety dread he had back in prenuptial counselling when it had seemed to take the Reverend forever to formulate what he was going to say—mingled now with fury. Then Carey remembered what the Reverend had said: the Reverend, bless his heart, had tried to warn him.
“Betty says you’re all very excited. It’s March, right?”
“What?”
“When the baby comes. Your life is about to change forever. What a wonderful thing. And remember, we still do christenings.”
“Can I ask your advice about something, Reverend?”
“Please,” he said. “And please call me Brian.”
“Brian. It’s about a friend of mine. He’s in a—well, it’s a similar situation, but it’s not me. I mean—” Carey snapped his biscotti in half. “I met him at the childbirth class we’re taking. His wife is pregnant too.”
Reverend Chalmer, Brian, leaned back in the chair, listening.
“The thing is, his wife is going to have a baby, but the baby isn’t his.”
The Reverend’s delicate brows jerked upward.
“The baby isn’t his,” Carey said again.
“You mean his wife had relations with another man and became pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“How does he know this?”
“What?”
“How does he know the baby isn’t his? Even if his wife had relations with another man, the baby could still be your friend’s.”
“It isn’t. They weren’t—” He took a sip of coffee. “They weren’t having relations. That’s what he told me.”
“Oh,” said the Reverend, sounding pained. He looked out the window.
“What should he do?”
“There’s a child involved. I advise forgiveness.”
Carey bristled. “But she did this and now she acts like nothing is the matter! She won’t even admit to it!”
The Reverend appeared to stall between a shake of his head and a nod. “It’s a difficult situation, I agree, but I s
till recommend forgiveness for the sake of the child. And counselling, of course.”
“Don’t you do annulments anymore?” Carey asked, sarcastic.
“That’s the Catholics.” The Reverend opened his hands. “There’s divorce.”
One night Carey screamed so long and loud at Anna that a blood vessel exploded in his nose. A gory bib down his sweater front, he pinched his nostrils and threw his head back and let Anna lead him to the bathroom. While he sat on the tub’s edge, she washed the sticky blood off his face and neck. “Why?” he begged her, grabbing the hand that held the cloth. “Why did you do this to me?”
“I didn’t do anything. You were the one yelling.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’ll never forgive you, you know.”
“It’s just a nosebleed,” Anna tsked.
He wondered then, he seriously wondered, if she was even right in the head.
When he ran into the Reverend earlier that week, he’d been about to search the classifieds for an apartment. What had stopped him from doing so before was shame. He was so ashamed. If he left Anna, people would ask her why. Betty would certainly ask, and Pauline. One question would lead to another and before long everyone would know that their marriage had remained unconsummated. He would be blamed, of course. The man always was. As Anna’s condition grew more obvious, the situation became intolerable; the taunt, in effect, was worse now than his shame. He couldn’t live with Anna another minute. After the Reverend left Starbucks, though, Carey didn’t pick up the paper again. He drank his coffee reflecting on what the Reverend had said.
The next day he told his students, half in pantomime, that his wife was pregnant. He thought it might help him if he admitted to it, but their jubilant congratulations only embarrassed him and he immediately wished he hadn’t. Worse, a few days later he came in and found a large, flattish, rectangular box covering the whole desktop. Crowding around, they insisted that he open it. “For your will be born baby,” read the card.
“Oh, fuck,” Carey groaned and they understood because swear words are the first words everybody learns.
He tore off the paper. Inside was a crib. He could barely stammer thank you. So moved was he by their generosity that he took on their inarticulacy. Most of them had arrived here penniless from the desperate places they had fled. They were a Bosnian couple, several Kurds from Iraq, a six-foot Sudanese, three Afghan women in head scarves, a Burmese, and a stunned little Sri Lankan girl with a bindi and only one pronoun. Their own children had fallen asleep to the lullaby of war, but for their teacher’s child they wished something safe, new and white with a vinyl-covered mattress and bars the regulation distance apart. Humbled as well as touched, Carey tried to think of something he might have done and felt proud of, but he couldn’t see past how he’d been torturing Anna. He’d always thought of himself as a nice guy. Everyone did. Maybe the Reverend was right. Maybe it was time to turn the other cheek. He didn’t think the marriage could be saved, but at least he might salvage his dignity.
He was careful entering the apartment when he came in that afternoon. “Anna?” he called, to no reply. But where lurked Smitty? In what corner crouched the striped and splay-foot beast? Carey slid the box along the carpeted hall, peering in each doorway before he passed it. In the bathroom, the litter box brimmed with abstract figurines of desiccated shit, but the deceivingly unforked tail was nowhere to be seen.
In the nursery, he took all the pieces out of the box, was staring perplexedly at the instruction sheet and the little plastic bag of bolts when the phone rang. He answered in the bedroom. It was Pauline, his sister-in-law. Instantly, Carey became ticky and nervous. Pauline had his number, he was certain—maybe Anna had given it to her! She had his number, and now she was calling him.
He said, “Anna’s not here. I think she’s at your mother’s.”
“She is. I’m here too, and I just found out that she hasn’t had an ultrasound.” There was a pause in which Carey assumed he was to offer an explanation for this outrageous omission. With none forthcoming, Pauline went on. “I mean, she’s seven months pregnant and she hasn’t had an ultrasound.”
“She goes to a naturopath.”
“That’s what I just found out. A naturopath? Give me a break. You could have a baby with two heads. You realize that, don’t you? Do you want a baby with two heads?”
“No,” said Carey, sitting down on the bed. That would be a dead giveaway. Nervously, he began tweaking at his glans through the fabric of his pants.
“Well?” Pauline demanded.
“Who’s the father?” Carey blurted.
“Why do you all keep asking me that? It isn’t funny anymore.”
He hung up. Everything had changed colour in the room, the walls washed with a rosy hue as if he were squeezing a bulb that pumped blood to his eyes, tinting his vision. Then the overhead projector in his mind switched on and the little Sri Lankan girl in his class appeared before him stained, not red, but with the cosmetic yellow dye she sometimes used. His whole fist filled up, plenty rising out the top too, so there was nothing the matter with him physically.
First Anna’s belly came home, then, a full moment later, the rest of her. She was rubbing the small of her back and smiling to herself. When she saw him there, she looked taken aback. Carey, who made a point of never acknowledging the martyr-like pleasure she took in her discomfort, said nothing by way of greeting, merely continued planning his next day’s lesson on the coffee table.
“Maybe I’ll take a bath before dinner,” she told him.
She had to lumber past the nursery on her way to the bathroom but didn’t look in. Carey heard the tub filling and the porcelain squeak complainingly as she lowered her bulk in. He went to turn on the nursery light, pausing in the hall. The water swished and plashed in rhythm, then Anna’s voice started up, resonant in the echo chamber of the bathroom, sounding like more than one singer, like two overlapping in the slow round of a lullaby. For a long time he stood transfixed.
The sound of scratching brought him to and he stepped away from the bathroom door. He followed it to the source: the bottom cupboard in the kitchen where Anna kept the canned goods. Smitty. He grazed his fingernails across the wood.
From inside, a frenzied tearing.
When Anna called to him, he went right away, found her in the nursery clutching a towel that would barely close around her. She gestured to the assembled crib sitting alone in the middle of the room. “Did you do this?”
He took all the credit. “Yes.”
“Oh, Carey,” she sighed.
Seeing she was about to cry, Carey opened up his arms. Then Anna let out a little shriek as something gushed from between her thickened legs. Instantly, the carpet sopped it up, but they both stood blinking down at the lily pad of wetness.
“Was that pee?” Carey asked.
“Archie gets up at seven-thirty.” He pointed to the picture strip thrown against the wall by the overhead projector. “He takes a shower. He eats breakfast. He reads the paper.” It was the kind of day Carey would have liked to have himself, the kind of life—in black-and-white, in present habitual, securely routine, devoid of surprises. “At eight-thirty, he drives to work. He starts work at nine o’clock.” At no point in Archie’s day did his wife’s waters break because, unlike Carey, Archie didn’t have a cartoon marriage.
A knock on the classroom door. Carey opened it to the security guard handing him a note. Anna had gone to the hospital. He folded the paper in half and, slipping it in his shirt pocket, resumed teaching.
“At noon, he eats lunch in the cafeteria.”
At noon, Carey went downstairs and ate his sandwich in the staff room.
In the afternoon, the security guard came back with a note that this time asked him to phone the hospital. “It’s an emergency.”
His students were still barely able to chorus back the mundane events of Archie’s day. Carey told the security guard, rather shortly, “I’m in the middle of a lesson.”
Two blocks from school, he passed a bus stop and saw from the corner of his eye the little Sri Lankan girl waiting. “What would Archie do?” he asked himself as he looped around the block. Archie’s inky hair never moved. He was entirely composed of lines. Archie, an affable smile penned across his face, would offer her a ride.
When he pulled up, it took the girl a moment to notice it was her teacher leaning across the passenger seat to open the door. “Rajeswary!” he called. Shyly, she came over jingling the little bells on the anklets she wore above her Nikes, giggling helplessly.
“Your bus no coming,” she sang.
“My bus,” Carey corrected. “Where do you live? I’ll drive you home.” He patted the seat and grinned right at her bindi. “What’s your address?”
She told him, painstakingly chanting it as he’d taught her.
“Do you live with your parents?” Carey asked as they drove off.
Her huge uncomprehending eyes turned to him.
“Your mother and your father.”
“Oh,” she said, frowning. “Your mother dead.”
He received this news with a giddy, “What?” His mother dead?
“War,” said Rajeswary. “Your mother dead.”
Disappointment. For several minutes he drove in sour silence, eastward, past muffler shops and dollar stores and produce markets. Finally the girl spoke again. “Your baby?”
“My baby?” he said in a mocking tone. “My baby?”
“My baby!” she shrieked, embarrassed. He had sunk into a funk she couldn’t understand. “Your happy,” she told him.
“Am I?” he shouted at her.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 17