Alligator (4 page)

What’s wrong? he’d asked. She told him about the pregnancy, working her wedding ring off her finger as she spoke. She came out from behind the bar and went into the bathroom and he heard the toilet flush and she was out again without the ring. When she asked him to attend the birth he’d blushed deeply.

We’re friends, right? she’d asked. He said he would be honoured.

Beverly was attending the prenatal class alone, having broken up with her lover the weekend before discovering she was pregnant. She could not consider abortion; she had been overtaken, swiftly, with a passion for the idea of a baby. The pregnancy heightened her senses, gave her extra glow, softened her. She became more graceful and deliberate.

She’d told the father, a tepid Catholic lawyer who lived with his mother, over lunch, downtown.

He’d scrunched his napkin into a tight ball and raised his fist and released the napkin. They both watched it unscrunch on the table. The napkin opened like a flower blooming in a time-lapse film.

How could you let this happen? he’d hissed. What she’d imagined to be gentleness — his quiet, unassuming demeanour — had been complacency. Tepid, and given to petulance, she decided. She waited for what she knew was coming. She watched the thought light up his face with rude, desperate hope.

Are you sure it’s mine? he’d said. His voice was weak. Hardly a whisper.

She had thought to include him out of a sense of obligation. She was astonished and relieved to discover he was terrified about what she would demand.

David had made jokes throughout the prenatal classes, brought the barmaid tea during the break, waited while she took the first sip, consulted, and then trotted back to the cafeteria to get her more milk or sugar. He misted up while watching the videos of births, and rubbed the barmaid’s belly with vigour when the lights snapped back on, as if he couldn’t wait to get started.

Many of the men kept their eyes riveted to the floor, Beverly said, but David was watching intently, along with all the women. She found herself in the lineup behind him at the Tim Hortons counter one evening. They spoke about the rain and traffic and then Beverly’s eyes flew open from a kick in her belly — a look of undiluted awe spread over her face — and David fell in love for the first time in his life.

Your mother was so damn beautiful, he’d often said to Colleen. Colleen loved him with a loyalty that kept her from asking too many questions about her real father. They had met several times and he seemed elderly and foreign. She thought of it this way: David had chosen her.

COLLEEN

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a stomach virus going around Grade 1 just before Christmas when Colleen was six. While sitting in the shopping cart that was hooked into the wheelchair Colleen felt a mild altering taking place inside her. She could not have said what she was afraid of; the woman’s red rubber boots were too bright and childish.

Colleen’s stepfather died suddenly of an aneurysm when she was thirteen. At the funeral home she’d heard a man say, He went down like a ton of bricks. The death, when it came, was obdurate and biting; it just was.

The fear she felt in the mall on that day was magnified by the noise and a nascent fever. The Christmas bulbs were swaying, moved by a mysterious internal breeze near the rafters. When she remembers it, she feels the dangerous, oozing seepage, the disintegration of the membrane between adulthood and childhood.

She would soon know things she was too young to know. The woman in the wheelchair twisted her head around and shouted, For the loving honour of Christ. The green lights of her sweater cast a reflection of jiggling dots on her neck.

The engine of the trapped chair roared and there was a faint tinge of burning metal in the air. Colleen’s mother rattled her cart savagely, trying to knock the wheelchair free. Colleen was slammed to one side of the cart, her cheek pressed against the wire mesh, and she nearly fell out.

The crowd gathering around the wheelchair began to shout advice. A man in a tweed coat finally stepped forward and lifted Colleen free. Then with an easy move he disengaged the shopping cart.

The woman in the wheelchair shouted at Beverly, You are a piece of shit. She glared with a depthless hatred that, Colleen saw, had instantly diminished her mother.

Then the woman turned the wheelchair in a series of deft jolts and zoomed off down the aisle, swerving around customers and hitting the display of Aqua Velva, the uppermost boxes of which slid one after another to the floor with dull slow-motion plops until the entire tower seemed to bend in half and fall apart all over the aisle. The man in the tweed coat removed his glove and offered to shake Beverly’s hand.

You’re an absolute angel, Beverly said.

She closed her eyes and put her trembling hands over her ears and smoothed down her hair. She stood like that, eyes closed, hands on her head, while the ramifications of the woman’s rage beat against her.

And during the festive season, she whispered. Then her eyes opened and she was restored. She could make effortless recoveries. She could be dazzlingly bright after near collapse.

People have to watch where they’re going, she said.

I’m just trying to buy a microwave, the man blurted. I told my wife, whatever you want. But there’s not a single microwave to be found in the whole goddamn mall.

Of course everybody’s so fraught, Beverly said. She raised both her hands, asking the man to take in all the wreckage of Christmas. The man looked up and down the aisle. The scene made him draw back his lips from his teeth in a kind of parody of extreme merriment.

If I had my way there’d be no Christmas, the man said.

That’s exactly how I feel, why not some quiet, private celebration of life, Beverly said. This comment mystified the man.

I’m thinking about a dishwasher, he said shyly. That’s what I’ve got in my mind right now, but my wife said a microwave.

A dishwasher and a microwave amount to the same thing, Beverly announced.

A nice dishwasher, the man said.

Is she a stay-at-home mom? Beverly felt a mild disdain for women who gave up careers with the excuse of raising children when most normal people could do both, but she felt guilty about the opinion, and often claimed to be envious.

Never worked a day in her life, the man said proudly.

I’m telling you, a dishwasher.

She’d like a dishwasher, he said.

Imagine her face on Christmas morning.

Colleen wandered over to the Aqua Velva. She picked up a box, which was red with a print of holly leaves and had a clear plastic window on the front to show off the bottles inside. Each bottle of cologne was a different colour — turquoise, dark green, navy blue, and rust. Inside each bottle an oblong air bubble wobbled toward the lid. When she gave the box a shake the bubbles jiggled madly and burst into a thousand tiny bubbles and rushed toward the neck like foam and then slowly fizzled out to reform the single bubble. She tried to get the bubbles in each bottle to hang exactly in the centre of the glass. It was the perfect gift for David. One thing was for certain — he didn’t have it already. As far as she knew, he had never used cologne of any sort in his life.

Colleen had been promised the shopping trip for three weekends in a row, but something had come up on each occasion — her mother talked on the phone or studied a cookbook — and by the time her intense absorption with these tasks had worn off it would be too late to do anything. Colleen would try to catch her mother’s attention with a winning look. Sometimes she would whisper,
Mom
, reprimanding and pleading at once. But that only provoked; Beverly would hold up one finger and then turn her back on Colleen.

When she hung up the phone or snapped the book shut she would be awash with whatever world she had been dipping into, whatever had taken place there, and would seem to have no recollection of their plans. It was a delicate mood to negotiate — even a sigh might cost Colleen everything. She would have to take off her red coat and go back to colouring.

She went to bed each Sunday night, for three weekends in a row, overwhelmed with anxiety about getting David’s present before Christmas morning. Once, her mother slapped her calculator against the dining-room table and shouted, Didn’t I say I’ll get you there before Christmas? What did I say?

You said you’ll get me there.

And have I ever let you down? It was a question that stumped them both for a few moments.

Later, after putting Colleen to bed, her mother hesitated, standing at the door in the bar of light from the hall. She idly turned the doorknob a few times and the tongue made a clicking noise. It was an old house in downtown St. John’s. It had previously been a boarding house and when Colleen’s parents moved in all the bedroom doors had padlocks on the outside. A few had been kicked in and the splintery holes were badly repaired with plaster. David had found enough antique doors, over the years, to replace the cheap modern ones. Doors that needed to be stripped and planed and fitted with heavy glass knobs that looked like jewels.

I’ll get you there, now stop sulking, her mother said. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a baby. Then she closed the bedroom door and left Colleen in the chilly darkness. Colleen listened to her mother’s heels on the hardwood floor and then in the kitchen until she was overtaken by sleep.

The words
piece of shit
uttered by the woman in the wheelchair had brought Colleen’s nausea to the surface. She felt as if she had been sliced into a thousand limp pieces and was about to fall apart. Colleen had never heard adults speak to each other quite so honestly, had never seen her mother treated with anything less than strict attention or the sort of incidental admiration glamour inspires.

Now she saw there was something spoiled about her mother. With this one profoundly dirty phrase — piece of shit — everything had been laid bare. She threw up all over the front of her coat and her new boots and the glaring tiles of Wal-Mart. Her mother was down on her knee at once, unbuttoning the soiled coat and folding it into a tight knot with the shiny black lining on the outside. She took a tissue from her purse and wiped Colleen’s mouth and then her boots and then she stood.

Okay baby, let’s get the hell out of here, she said.

I’m getting Daddy a present, you promised.

Honey, you’re sick. We’ll have to come back later.

It was abominable. Her mother had nearly knocked a woman out of a wheelchair, and now they were leaving without a single purchase.

Look at the lineups, her mother said.

Colleen had a Christmas list crunched up in her pocket — it had taken hours to write in different crayons. David had helped her, his bristly silver hair tickling her cheek, the softness of his flannel shirt. How abruptly his giant hand spilled the crayons over the table and spread them. He was short and his eyes were wolf blue and he could take her onto his lap and cover her hand with his and they wrote the list together like that, his chin resting on the top of her head. She loved David with an intensity that had nothing in common with what she felt for her mother, which was a duller, more enduring, inevitable love.

A glaze of tears came to her eyes. When she cried it generally sent her mother into a short-lived fury that resulted in Colleen getting what she wanted. She hardly ever cried, and never on purpose. She hated it as much as her mother, but she was suddenly exhausted. Then, strangely, she was swept with a fury of her own. It felt new and disorienting.

You’re nothing but a piece of shit, she said evenly.

Colleen thought, Goddamn her. Nothing hurt more than her mother’s cold shoulder, mostly because it was involuntary. It was a dry-ice, burning kind of cold that required massive amounts of energy to ignore. Colleen was terrified and compelled by her mother’s anger. She was drawn, against her will, to be in the same room with her. Everything was amplified when her mother was in this mood; the squeak of the cupboard hinge was ultra-meaningful. The low rumble of the kettle starting to boil, building without hesitation to a sonic weltering until lifted off the heat, somehow expressed everything between them. It was best to stay out of the room but Colleen could not stay out of the room. She wanted the full blast of rage, but Beverly either guarded it vigilantly or was oblivious to it.

The elevator lifted and Colleen thought of the runny egg she’d had for breakfast, a spot of blood on the yolk, nastily red and glossy. The judge took one of the files from under his arm and, licking his finger, flicked through the pages until he found something. Then turned to her and stared.

You the bulldozers? he asked.

I’m the bulldozers, she said. The wattle that hung under his chin shook after he spoke.

If you were mine I’d have the snot beat out of you, the judge said. They rose to the fifth floor. The doors started to open and then half-closed and then opened and the judge started down the corridor and then turned on his heel.

I knew your father, young lady, he said. And let me tell you, he’s turning over in his grave.

On Christmas morning David had taken a long time with the present, shaking it next to his ear, pausing to register bewilderment, careful with the wrapping paper. Even at six years old, she could see that he was genuinely moved. He unscrewed each lid, sniffed, and then screwed it back on tightly and fitted each bottle back into the squeaky Styrofoam box.

This one smells like a walk in the woods, he said.

The cologne eventually made its way up to the cupboard under the sink in the guest bathroom, behind the pipes, containers of Comet, cleaning rags. It remained there, even after David died, the plastic window of the box covered in a fur of dust.

BEVERLY

B
EVERLY WATCHES THE
numbers over the elevator doors flick up and then down. The doors open again and close and her daughter is gone. Colleen will be scolded and made to feel small. She wills her daughter a spiny fortitude, even if she was incomprehensibly wrong. Let her stand up to the lawyers and social workers and Mr. Duffy of the tampered-with bulldozers. It had turned out — thank God — sugar doesn’t do much harm to an engine, but Mr. Duffy had worked up the sort of self-satisfying rage that requires a refined feminine cunning to mollify.