“No!” cried Anna. “The baby’s coming!”
“That may be,” said the nurse, “but it’s not coming soon.”
“I won’t go home! I won’t!” She flopped sideways on the bed and curled up, hiding her face so it was hard to tell if she was crying or puffing through another contraction. The hospital gown stretched open between the ties and Pauline looked away with a smile. Anna was huge. It would take her years to shed that weight.
The nurse said, “You’ll be more comfortable at home.”
“We can go to Ma’s,” Pauline suggested.
“No!”
The nurse turned to Pauline. “I’ll get the resident to come and see her.”
As soon as she had gone, Anna asked plaintively, “Paulie? How bad is it going to get?”
“Awful,” Pauline chirped.
Anna reached for her hand and, embarrassed, Pauline gave it to her and let her squeeze it. Twenty minutes later the resident finally showed. He was not bad-looking, blond with wire-framed glasses, but Pauline decided—nobly, she thought—that this was not the time. He asked Anna to roll over onto her back and, with her permission, lifted the gown. He had brought a fetal heart monitor which he placed on one side of Anna’s belly. Immediately it broadcast her digestive rumblings across the room. He moved it around: more underwater churnings. Pauline was staring at the oddity of Anna’s navel, which had not popped but was instead a deep hole with no visible bottom. When she looked up, she saw the resident had fixed on her a look so sobering that she no longer found him remotely attractive.
“I have a phone call to make,” she announced, wresting her hand from Anna’s, hoping she didn’t sound too panicky. “I’ll be back.”
She walked quickly past the nursing station. She was thinking how, when she had first got back from Mexico, her mother had accused her of having no conscience. “Your father died without being able to tell you goodbye. Couldn’t you even have called?” Pauline had retorted, “There wasn’t a phone!” No one understood that it was out of respect for Robert that she’d stayed away.
She found the bathroom and, once inside, began to sob. Remorse gushed out of her—her!—former perpetrator of so many childhood atrocities, outlandish denier of them. She used to bury Anna’s dolls in the garden, marking the spot with a cross of sticks. As soon as Anna discovered one missing, she would run shrieking into the yard to find the grave and disinter it. Once, the night before school pictures, Pauline cut off one of Anna’s braids. Though Anna always went to Robert demanding justice, Pauline stubbornly refused to acknowledge her guilt. The golden snake of Anna’s braid in her own wastebasket, still Pauline wouldn’t confess. Yet she had done those things and, sobbing over the sink, she couldn’t shake the hideous feeling that she was also at fault for whatever had gone wrong with Anna’s baby, though it was a tragedy she would not have wished even on her worst enemy.
As soon as she had pulled herself together, she went to phone Betty. “Ma,” was all she managed to say. “Oh, Ma.”
“Has something happened?”
“Ma, it’s dead.”
Pauline had never known her mother to cry. What she heard now, once she finally managed to quiet herself, was a pause, a metallic rasp and click, an inhalation, then the quiet pop of the filter released.
“I better phone Carey.”
“Isn’t he there?” Betty exclaimed.
Pauline left a message for him at home. She looked in the phone book for the school where he worked, but none of the names sounded familiar. She went to the gift shop for more quarters, then called around until she found the right place. When she got back to the ward, she couldn’t find Anna’s cubicle. She looked in one, then the next, but behind every curtain a different woman was abandoning her breathing exercises. Frantic now, she returned to the nursing station just as the nurse who had done the internal examination rounded the corner.
“They’re taking your sister upstairs,” she said, gesturing down the corridor.
“What about the baby?” cried Pauline.
“What?”
“The baby!”
“Didn’t the resident speak with you?”
“No.”
“You’d better go with her.”
“Where are they taking her?”
“Up to Psychiatry. You can catch up. Go.”
Pauline ran. Turning at the end of the corridor, she saw a stretcher being wheeled into the elevator. She sprinted and stopped the door just in time. Anna was sobbing on the stretcher while the other people in the elevator, the orderly, a man on crutches, a couple bearing flowers, looked down at her with pity and concern.
“What’s going on?” Pauline demanded.
Anna only sobbed louder.
“Tell me what is going on!”
“They won’t let me have my baby!”
Pauline reached out. Anna’s belly yielded passively to the jab. “Oh you!” Pauline cried, fingers sinking into fat. She brisked her knuckles hard across Anna’s forehead.
“Ow!” shrieked Anna, bringing up her hands.
“Hey, hey!” said the man on crutches. The orderly tried to grab Pauline’s arm, but she got one last noogie in before the elevator door opened and she burst out. Nearly colliding with a wheelchair, she flew off down the hall, light on her feet—unlike Anna! She skipped to dodge a cart. “Whoops!”
The taste of sorry had completely left her mouth.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to—
the gifted Ingrid MacDonald for the graphic,
Allison Matichuck, Zsuzsi Gartner, Annabel Lyon, Louise Young, Morna McLeod, and Helen Soderholm, who read early drafts and did not mince words,
Denes Devenyi and Michael Wilson, who generously lent me stories that, though recognizable here, are no longer about them,
Patrick Crean, John Metcalf and Jackie Kaiser for their enthusiasm and support,
the Adderson and Sweeney families for everything,
Patrick and Bruce for the love.
Contents
2004
1983
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
2004
1984
Acknowledgements
2004
Last night I had one of those dreams again. Nothing happened, nothing ever does—no central dramatic event. Usually I’m so busy puzzling over some vague inconsistency, some hint that I’m actually asleep, that I hardly notice the drifts of dread settling all around me. This time I found myself downtown at midday, or so it seemed from the quality of the light, the eyesmacking noonishness, though the empty streets contradicted it. I came to Eaton’s, which is Sears now. (This was what I was puzzling over, not the eerie lack of traffic, the bizarre absence of pedestrians, but Was Eaton’s back in business? Since when?) I pushed open the glass door and wandered around for a bit. Cosmetics. Women’s Shoes. Soon I began to feel uneasy. Sick. Something wasn’t right. Where was everyone? Well, in the shelters obviously, I realized just as the shrill whine of the approaching missile became audible.
The slap of the newspaper landing on the front porch woke me. These early-rising immigrants who fling the news on our city streets, they’re unsung heroes in a way. How many innocent sleepers have they saved from annihilation? I should leave ours a card. I thought of this after my perfectly timed rescue, when I couldn’t get back to sleep because of Joe making glottal sounds. Eventually I must have slept because the alarm went off, reset by Joe, who has to be at the hospital early. This time I got up well before the apocalypse.
Our front door mat reads “Go Away.” Lying on the joke, helplessly bound by elastics, was the very paper that had saved me. I carried it to the kitchen, poured the coffee, sat at the table. It had snowed in the night. No. Spring had come. Spring was right outside the window. Filling the frame, our snow-white magnolia, peaking. I thought of The Cherry Orchard, all of us re
ading it on the front porch while we swilled plonk. The truth is every spring when the trees bloom I think about Chekhov and everything that happened, how Pascal betrayed my friend Sonia and she him in turn. We wanted to get rid of all the bombs, but look what happened. It was partly my fault, that bad, bad decision that we took. Only this year it all came together because, when I peeled the rubber bands off the Vancouver Sun and laid it flat on the table, Sonia was staring up at me. Not a recent picture, but Sonia when I knew her all those years ago.
The shock of seeing her again, the dis-ease of the dream. The inevitable self-loathing. Pete’s picture was below hers. It took me a moment to notice him. As soon as I did, I turned the paper over. It was a funny thing to do, a token of respect, like covering the face of the dead. Except both of them are still alive.
But what about the boy? Whatever happened to him?
1983
I’m not from Vancouver. I came in 1982 to attend the University of British Columbia and, until I met Joe, I didn’t know anyone who had been born here. Everyone in the group was from elsewhere, Sonia from up north, 100 Mile House, Pete from Toronto, Belinda—Isis!—from somewhere in Nova Scotia. I don’t remember where Carla or Timo were from. Pascal had escaped the same small town in Saskatchewan that Dieter had grown up in, Esterhazy, which turned out not to be a coincidence after all. I’d fled too—a strip-malled neighbourhood of Edmonton where I’d been miserable for no good reason other than there always has to be someone to pick on and it’s usually the smart, socially awkward person with the funny last name, skulking the hallways, binder raised up like a shield. Me.
During my first year at university I stayed with my father’s sister, my aunt Eva, who manned her stove in a suburb to the east of Vancouver, cooking through cases of dented cans and frostbitten cuts of meat, by the vat, as though against some desperate contingency. Every day I had to travel all the way across town to the city’s western point, the UBC campus, a three-bus journey. The commute took an hour and a half or more each way, I explained the following summer to my father, who had wanted me to go to university at home in the first place and now didn’t want to pay for me to live in residence. “Read on the bus,” he said. “I get sick,” I lied. In fact, I’d grown so accustomed to the trip I never looked out the window any more, not even to check if my stop was coming up, somehow always feeling for the cord and ringing the bell at just the right moment even while absorbed in the evolution of Doric-order proportions or the impact of the Crimean War on modern warfare. I just wanted to be closer to campus and to get away from my aunt, who seemed more and more an embodiment of all I was destined to become, lonely and eccentric and obsessively cheap. By the end of the summer, I succeeded. I convinced my father that my grade point average was in jeopardy despite the fact that, hitherto, everything I handed in came back scarletted with the letter A.
When I returned to Vancouver in the fall to begin my second year, I stayed with my aunt again while I looked for somewhere closer, the very next day taking the long, familiar bus ride and spending the morning at the Student Housing Office making calls. I had come too late. The inexpensive basement rooms with a hot plate and a bathroom sink to serve all washing functions had been snapped up. The idea of a shared house unnerved me, but I made a few calls anyway only to discover that the cheaper of these had been taken as well. Although I had a full scholarship, it covered only tuition. An apartment was out of the question.
My preferred place to study the previous year had been in the stacks under the old stone Main Library. I went there again after my disappointing morning, descending to the remotest and deepest parts of the bunker-like levels where the obscurest, bookiest-smelling tomes were stored. The carrels were tucked away singly wherever there was a bit of space. Under the glare of the fluorescents, the books emitted their wise scent. (I imagined print powdering off the pages, that I was breathing knowledge.) I found the Russian books and selected one at random. Cyrillic seemed vaguely runic. Latin letters were sprinkled in but the cases were mixed. R was backward. I should have been looking in the classified ads for a room but for the moment I felt so perfectly alone and happy.
Afterward I went to the Student Union Building to buy a cookie, a detour that entirely changed my fate. I actually went for a newspaper, then, overcome by temptation, got in line at the cookie kiosk, hiding behind the paper the way I used to hide behind my binder, like some cartoon Cold War spy. A new study had just come out of MIT predicting that more than 50 percent of Canadians would be immediately killed in the event of a nuclear war. The pretrial hearing of the Squamish Five, a local terrorist group, had begun. The Great Lakes were an acidic broth. All of it reminded me why I never paid attention to the news. The line moved forward, bringing me closer to a bulletin board next to where the coffee was accoutred. Rides. Used textbooks. Accommodations. I stepped away, losing my place, drawn by a notice with a fringe of phone numbers on the bottom.
A man answered immediately, like he’d been poised by the phone. “Did you hang up on me a second ago?”
“No,” I said.
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m phoning about the room,” I said. “Is there a good time to come and see it?”
I could almost hear him shrug. “Come right now.” Then he hung up, forcing me to dig in my change purse for another dime.
“What!”
“I need the address,” I whimpered.
It took fifteen minutes to get to the house, which was in Kits, one lot in from the corner, on a street otherwise lined with genteel homes. Next door was a knee-high garden statue of a black man in livery holding up a lamp, as though to illuminate the adjacent eyesore. I walked past the Reliant patchworked with political bumper stickers parked in front—Extinction is Forever. One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. Impeach Reagan—and up the path that cut through a steppe of unmown grass, climbed to the wide, crowded porch—bicycle, wearily flowered chesterfield, cardboard placards with their messages turned to the wall—and knocked on the rainbow on the door, knocked several times until at last a young man appeared, shirtless, but wearing a kerchief on his head. The year before, fishing for a major, I had cast my net wide over many subjects, among them Art History. Only now did I understand what the professor had been saying about beauty and its relationship to proportion.
He looked right at me, unblinking, in a way I was unused to. “I phoned,” I said and he smiled. To show me he was capable of it, I thought, or to show off the investment (which was patently wrong, I would find out). In their perfect even rows, his teeth glowed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Look.” I stepped into the vestibule and, since he was barefoot, stooped to remove my shoes. By the time I straightened, he was gone.
To the right was a set of French doors, each pane painted with a dove or a rainbow or some other optimistic symbol. I kept thinking about the fifteen minutes. How my life would open up if I were living just fifteen minutes from campus. I poked my head in the living room. Shag carpet, beanbag chair, posters. A fireplace extruding paper garbage. On its hearth stood a statue identical to the one in the next-door garden except for the sign taped to the lamp: It’s payback time!!! Instead of curtains, a poncho was nailed to the window frame. Then I started because someone was sleeping on the chesterfield, lying on his back with a beret over his face. I ducked right out.
Bathroom: chipped, claw-foot tub, tinkling toilet. The cover of the tank was broken, half of it missing, the workings exposed. It embarrassed me to see someone else’s plumbing. Above it hung a poster buckled with damp. Is Your Bathroom Breeding Bolsheviks?
I peeked in the bedroom at the end of the hall and, seeing it looked well lived in—there were stuffed animals on the bed—returned to the vestibule with its battered mahogany wainscotting and went up the stairs. None of the three bedrooms on the upper floor was empty either. All had bare fir floors and plank and plastic milk crate shelves. The front-facing room, the largest, had a view of the mountains and the ubi
quitous Rorschach Che painted on one wall. The middle room was an ascetic’s cell with a pitted green foamie for a bed, the end room a postered shrine to Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, reeking of incense. I went back downstairs to the kitchen, which also smelled but of a more complex synthesis—ripe compost, burnt garlic, beans on the soak—so different from the cabbage and mothball overtones at my aunt’s. It was untidy too. Dirty, in fact. I glanced at my socks with their dust and crumb adherents. The fifteen minutes more than made up for it.
The shirtless one was outside on the deck smoking, leaning against the railing, his back to me. I could make out each distinct vertebra. They seemed decorative. When I tapped on the window, he waved me out through a door beside which a rubber Ronald Reagan mask hung on a nail. Out there in the overgrown yard the decorous history of the house still showed in the unpruned roses in their unmade beds and the old pear tree scabbed with lichen. The garage though, slouching and moss-covered, was practically in ruins.
“Which room is available?” I asked.
He exhaled his acrid smoke and pointed up to the window of the O’Keeffe/Kahlo room.
“I’d like to take it.”
“You have to come for an interview. There’s a sign-up sheet.” He threw the cigarette over the deck railing and led me back inside where a loose-leaf page lay on the kitchen table, three names and phone numbers already written on it. I felt sick and made my writing neater than the others’, only realizing after the fact that it would probably work against me.
“Jane,” he read off the paper before flashing his teeth again. “How do you say your last name?”
Most of the rooms that were advertised in the newspaper and still available were almost as far away as my aunt’s, near Fraser Street or Knight. I went to look at a few only to leave undecided and anxious that someone else would get the place if I took too long to make up my mind. Then someone called “from the Trutch house,” she said, though the house I’d seen was actually on one of the numbered east-west streets. Trutch was the cross street. She told me to come at six-thirty.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 19