As She Grows (18 page)

“Okay,” he says apologetically, patting the bench. “Sit down. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I don’t want to sit, but if I leave, it will look like he was right, so I plunk back down. We both silently stare out to the water. I clench my jaw and get all shaky. It’s as if my body wants to take off and run.

“My sister did that,” he says, nodding in the direction of my bandaged arm.

“Now what?” I ask, whipping my arm behind my back, pretending I have no idea what he is talking about.

“She covered it with Band-Aids too,” he continues. “I just couldn’t figure it out. She got lots of counselling and one day she just stopped. Just like that. And now, she’s totally fine.”

I am mortified. My private, bodily act exposed. As if a door were flung open and I were caught, pants to my ankles, wide-legged on a toilet. I cower away from him, trying to cover as much skin as possible with my towel. I feel like an idiot. He thinks I’m a little kid. He thinks I’m crazy. He has thought this all along about me. That’s why he’s been so nice. I feel compelled to explain myself. Give him a reason he can understand.

“My mother drowned,” I announce, figuring this will explain my actions. Maybe silence him.

“Whoa,” he exhales. “I’m sorry . . . I mean . . . that’s awful . . . I didn’t know . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“It was a long time ago.” I shrug my shoulders. We both sit there, silent. I extend my foot out into the small puddles on the deck and draw swirly shapes with my big toe. Greg just leans down, his hands clasped around either side his head, hair dangling around his face.

Finally he rises and turns to me, his eyes bright with enthusiasm. “You know, I can still teach you swimming. You don’t have to pay. We could meet when you want to, at the pool. It could just be casual. On a Saturday afternoon or something.”

“You don’t have to . . .”

“No.” He pats my towel-wrapped leg, though his hand isn’t flat, it’s in a fist, as if he doesn’t want me to get the wrong idea. “No, really, I’d like to.”

“Okay,” I agree, more to get rid of this moment than anything else. And he goes to the office to write down his phone number. When he turns his back, I jump to my feet, run to the change room, and throw my clothes on over my wet swimsuit. As I rush away from the building, I keep looking over my shoulder, worried that truth will catch up to me, and slip his number in my pocket.

Thoughts of you come to me, in quiet moments, in class or lying in bed. Moments when I feel you move inside me, like popping bubbles under my skin. Moments when I think,
I can actually do
this
.

I imagine myself pushing a stroller through a park. Bright-coloured leaves are crumpling under baby-carriage wheels. It’s a sunny Saturday morning and there are kids and dogs and squirrels raising curious heads. I point over to the big crows the size of cats and say, “That’s a crow,
caw, caw,
” and you smile up at me and gurgle-laugh. Other new mothers are chatting on the bench and older moms are in the playground extending safety-net arms for toddlers climbing plastic trees. When they see me, they come to peek into my carriage, oohing and ahhing at my little baby. People who used to scowl at my inflated belly now smile and compliment me, actually envious of something
I
have.

They look up at me and ask me your name, and I’m about to respond, only then I realize that the face they look into is not
mine but that of a woman in her late twenties. And I realize I am nowhere in this scene. This scene is not mine.

It belongs to this blonde woman with styled hair and perfect teeth and expensive skin. She’s wearing a nice suede jacket with a brown scarf and leather boots. I’ve seen her before, in Pampers commercials or formula ads in parenting magazines. She’s the kind of woman who never burps, and who prefers to use a condom because it’s least messy that way. She’s the kind of woman who is a good mother.

Jasmyn tells me she knows tons of girls who’ve had babies, even as young as fourteen, and they’re fine. She says you miss out on a lot, but once you have a little kid, it doesn’t seem to matter much. On a Sunday afternoon we shut our bedroom door, put the chair up against it, and I bring out my library books to show Jasmyn. We sit facing each other, cross-legged on her bed, and I turn the book upside down so she can see the pictures while she files her nails.

Jasmyn lowers her hands when I show her the diagrams of the growing baby. “I can’t believe that’s inside of you!”

“I know,” I say and point to more photographs of a fetus at one month, then two, then three.

“Look, it’s got little fingers,” she says, all excited, pointing to a drawing of a fetus supposedly in the womb. “How old is yours now?”

“I don’t know. About five months?”

She puts down her nail file and starts turning the pages, stopping at the picture of a four-month-old fetus in its amniotic sac. “Oh my God,” she says, stunned, “it’s like a little person already,” and she passes me the book. “Look!”

“I know,” I laugh, uncomfortable with her amazement, my smile fading fast. She puts the book down and lies back on her bed. I lie down beside her, flat out on my back, kicking the pile of books off with my feet.

“Show me it,” Jasmyn says, motioning to my stomach. I raise my bulky sweatshirt and reveal a bulging tummy, my belly button stretching wide. Jasmyn reaches out and places her hand on my skin. “That’s the weirdest thing,” she says.

“Do you think Mark’ll marry you?” she asks, stretching her leg out and up against the wall. She reaches out for the classified section of the newspaper I have beside my bed and peruses the marks I’ve been making on one-bed-room-apartment ads.

“What, are you from the fifties? Marry me, ’cause I’m knocked up?”

“Well, whatever,” she says, mildly annoyed. “You know what I’m talking about—living together.”

“I don’t know. I was just looking to see what was out there,” I say, referring to the circled classifieds.“Maybe someday.” I pick at my nails and attempt to bite off a jagged edge. “After the baby is born. We’re still young, you know.”

“That’d be so cool. Fuck, I envy you. Your own place. We’d have some wicked parties, man, wicked.”

“Ya.” I smile. And even though we’re just talking, it feels good to say it. Even though we probably both know, deep down, that it’s not going to be like that.

Girls hate Jasmyn, call her a slut and cocksucker, but really, they’re just jealous. She plays to their envious eyes, giving scornful girls the finger as they scowl at her stepping into the passenger seat of
his
tinted-window car, a child’s shoes dangling from the rear-view
mirror. She comes home with new earrings, clothes, plastic nails; things that are given to her as if they are presents, not payments. She adds up her profits and replenishes her purse with condoms from the jar in the front hall. She prefers to be given things she can sell, keeping the money in a sock to save up for acting classes. The girls who call her a slut say she’ll suck cock for anything, and they’re probably right, but Jasmyn claims she won’t do it with just anyone.

“They’ve gotta be decent, you know what I mean?” she’d say and I’d nod my head, while definitions of
decent
would run through my mind. Clean fingernails? Kind to his mother? Someone who drops her off afterward?

Jasmyn’s world is large. She seems to know everyone. We hang out almost every day now, around the Dufferin Mall, chilling with whoever is around. And we can’t walk more than ten feet in our own neighbourhood without some man hissing or mumbling something perverted to her as we pass. Jasmyn walks down the street in her tight miniskirts and low-cut shirts like she’s a star, never tired of the attention, turning and smiling at all the right moments. Sometimes young women with little babies on their hips storm up to us, shake their fingers in Jasmyn’s face, and warn her to stay away from their men. And then all of a sudden Jasmyn will turn into this stranger I barely even recognize, get right up in the ladies’ faces and spew foul words.

“What would your man want with
that
if he could have this, bitch?” she says one day, shaking her ass in the air, just making the lady flip her lid. There is cursing back and forth and at some point the woman walks away, mostly because the kid on her hip is bawling and Jasmyn is acting so psychotic it’s obvious she won’t let it go. Still, Jasmyn’s voice trails behind the diminishing woman like a persistent thread, unravelling her confidence.

When she’s finally out of sight, Jasmyn starts laughing, like it’s all one big joke. She keeps going on about herself—“What would he want with that if he can have this”—over and over like she’s idling down. We stand in front of a store while she walks in circles, spitting on the ground, still staring in the direction of the disappeared woman. I’m embarrassed by her. Also annoyed, because I don’t think it’s right she gets together with other girls’ guys. I ignore her and stare into the window, unsure what to do because part of me thinks she’ll turn on me right there if I say anything. She starts going on a rant about those baby moms, those stupid bitches, thinking just because they get pregnant means they have some right over their men, pretending they don’t know their men are humping like stray dogs in back alleys. Whispering to small hands around their dicks:
Don’t you want my baby?

“I can’t help it if they’re stupid bitches. It’s not my problem they can’t control their men.”

I half listen to her and consider what excuse I can make up to leave since she’s rousing me all up and I can’t handle this now. Just when I’m about to go she turns to me and speaks in a soft voice, like she’s just now noticed I’m there.

“But your situation’s totally different. I mean, Mark loves you,” she says.

“What?” I dart an evil look at her. “I wasn’t even thinking that,” I say defensively, because I really wasn’t. I’m pissed that she would even think I’d associate myself with that world. And then I start to wonder that maybe this is what Jasmyn really does think of me. That I got pregnant on purpose to keep Mark. That here I was thinking how pathetic her life was when all along she’s probably thinking the same thing about me. And somehow, this realization, this mutual sense of superiority, changes everything between us. Because, really, the only way I could handle her was in knowing
that I was so much better. It just never occurred to me that she believed the same about me.

I manage to avoid Jasmyn for the next few days, which is surprisingly easy to do, considering we share a room. I turn out the light when I hear her coming up the stairs, I get up extra early, and after school I go to the mall. But I can’t avoid seeing her tonight. Every Wednesday night the group home has the creatively named Wednesday Night Group. Participation is compulsory and it’s one of the few times a week all the residents are sitting in a room together. Sometimes we just have house meetings, sometimes we discuss issues like homophobia or body image, and sometimes we have guest speakers. Whatever it is, at seven o’clock we gather in the TV room, sprawl out on couches and chairs and the floor. Since none of us will be going out tonight, we have our hair pulled back, track pants on, and we have zit-cream-dappled skin.