More in Anger (21 page)

It was Laurel who told Tom on the phone, from Victoria, that Viv was pregnant. That night he came into her bedroom and she kept her eyes on the floor, on the white linoleum with gold streaks running through it. Her old sock doll, Stuffy, was in her arms, and she was curled up on her side. Her father stood silently beside her bed—her bed where, when she was a little girl, he had checked her stomach for gastrointestinal upset, where he had put his hand on her forehead to check for fever. What was the matter with her now? What
was
she now? Child, or woman?

“Vivien?”

“Yes, Daddy?” She focused on her curtains and matching blue quilt with the big white and yellow daisies.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes.”

He sat down on the edge of her bed. “What are we going to do about you?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you want to get married?”

“No.”

“Well,” he said, “that's one good thing.” There was a long silence and then he kissed her on the forehead and left. She heard him repeat it as he walked down the empty hall, and down the stairs into the empty living room, and up the other side into the empty dining room.
Well, that's
one
good thing.
She heard him fixing himself a drink, and then another a short while later. And another.
That's
one
good thing, now, isn't it?

Pearl came to the United Church home in Burnaby just once, right before she left on her extended trip to Portugal. Viv didn't want to see her, didn't want her to come, wanted to be left alone. You have a visitor, Mrs. Lansdowne had said, without telling her who it was. It didn't occur to her that it might be her mother until she saw her gloves on the chair inside the door. They had met in a small consultation room, were in closer proximity than they had been in years. Pearl was businesslike and matter-of-fact. She said that she didn't have much time, but she felt it was important for her to come and see Vivien. She felt it was her duty to counsel abortion. It was legal now. She did not try to touch her daughter. Viv braced her body and her mind and stared stonily at the floor, did not look at her mother, did not answer her. Pearl stood up, pulled on her gloves and left. “I hate you,” Viv whispered at the door.

Through the long months of the pregnancy, she distanced herself from her body as it changed, and she became so removed she barely saw it growing, barely felt and did not acknowledge the baby forming and moving inside her. She lay on her bed in her room thinking, thinking, staring out the window, reading
Agatha Christie, smoking, waiting for Barry to come and pick her up and take her out of here, out of this place, take her home to his place. She avoided herself, her body, until all those months later labour began and she was jolted violently back into herself as the assault on her began, as the baby demanded to be born.

She had never held a baby before she held him, fresh from her body, handed him by a young nurse who hadn't known not to bring her baby to her. She was amazed and mystified as she held him in her arms for those few minutes. That terrifying, blinding, red and black pain and now this baby. This
baby
. And what happened next? What was going to happen to her next? He made her afraid. She didn't want to be a mother. She couldn't be a mother. What did she know about babies or having babies? Nothing. What did she know about herself? Nothing. He had to be given up, she told Barry. He had to be given away to parents who wanted a baby, were ready for a baby.

She began dressing to leave the hospital, and as she took off the green gown she moved gingerly, her lower parts still sore and loose. Her fleshy belly felt like porridge. Her breasts, aching, were bound. She wanted to go home. Only that: to go home. But she couldn't get on her clothes. Her shirt wouldn't button. She couldn't get on her jeans. What was wrong? What had happened? How could she not be how she thought she was?

Vancouver B.C.

April 1973

Dear Vivien,

I am not going to mince words with you. What an absolute monster you have been. Don't tell me you didn't
cook up all that rotten scene with the pregnancy on purpose, to twist the knife just as cruelly as you could. The fact that you caused your own self to suffer as well just happened. You weren't thinking, or simply didn't know ahead of time, that Life occasionally deals out a little retributive justice.

Dear heaven. That I gave so much thought to child-rearing and education, and yet still produced four such worthless human beings. What oh what has become of motherhood, that I could try to make something of it, something really great, and end up in a basement room too tired to prepare a decent meal for myself. To heck with the crew of you. It's all out for myself from here on, and any regard from me to you will be earned by you.

Yours, your once-loving mother.

P.S. I'm slowly making my way, once again, through
David Copperfield
. I can't believe such cruelty to children. It seems to me you four had such an idyllic childhood. It did not prepare you for life.

The log cabin was five miles from the Radium Hot Springs junction, nestled in the woods at the end of a dirt lane. She had hitchhiked across the province, having asked Barry to take her to the highway, to leave her there with her duffle bag, and unhappily he did. Phone me, he said. Call me collect, he said. But she didn't. She wanted as far away from her life as she could get, and she wasn't going back. Ever.

Inside the cabin there was a wooden kitchen table, two chairs and a stool, futon couch, wood stove, cupboards with spoons for handles, and a sleeping loft upstairs. Everything painted powder blue. The cold running water came from a stream behind the cabin.

Viv worked nights in the lounge of the hotel where the trucker had let her out, at the junction of the highways. Seemed as good a place as any to try to find work, and she did, taking that as a sign. She learned on the job to make highballs, tequila sunrises, dirty mothers, worked up to the fizzes, sours, margaritas. And Scotch with one ice cube, no mix. Viv's new man, Paul Hancock, drank the Scotch, when he could afford it. Double shots of Johnny Walker Red, or Chivas.

He called her “V” and she thought he was a god the way he handled her body and made her come. He knew her better than anyone ever had. After two weeks of dating—of fucking, and drinking—he had parked his dented black truck in front of the cabin, and dumped his tools and clothes in a big heap on the painted kitchen floor, where they stayed until she shoved them under the table. Paul was an older man—twenty-seven—and short and strong and fat, with sharp blue eyes that penetrated her being and thrilled her. He took charge of her. And look what he'd done for her with that tongue and those fingers. “You like that, V, don't you?” he whispered. “Answer me. Don't you, V?”

For her nineteenth birthday, he gave her a tab of acid and the promise of a bottle of wine he'd have to borrow her car to go into town to buy because his truck was running on fumes. Be right back, he said, and she stayed outside in the warm night until
she started getting off and then she went back inside the cabin and sat on a kitchen chair. At first it was fun, laughing her head off, watching everything that began to move, watching the fabulous living beadwork adorning the cupboard doors making and remaking itself in exquisite patterns, and staring at the light blue log walls of the cabin, watching them thicken and thin as they breathed with her, in and out.

She glanced over to the brick-and-board bookshelf and saw the present her mother had sent from Ecuador. She was teaching at some college in Quito. Good riddance. Good absence. Viv tried to eye the gift, still wrapped, neutrally, but she was suspicious. What nasty surprise might it contain? She stared at the package for a long while before she decided to try to open it. Would it make her bigger, or smaller, this present? She figured out how to get her fingers to undo the pale pink ribbon—real ribbon, all satiny-soft and smooth—and she lifted the lid from a small cardboard box. Inside, wrapped in white tissue paper, were two antique cameo brooches. The larger one had the profile of a Greek goddess on it, a goddess whose skin was pure white against the light brown of the shell, her hair abundant and finely carved, a half-moon crown on her head, the cameo itself framed in plain pinkish gold. The profile on the smaller one was less ornate, the Victorian woman's skin creamy, the shell pinky, and the frame was not gold. Before she could make her fracturing mind think clearly, Viv loved them both. One in each of her fists, she warmed their cool shell faces and their hard metal edges. Then she put them down on the table and opened the envelope and the little flowered card. Her mother had written in her
neat and careful handwriting that the cameos had belonged to Gramma Opal, and now they were to be Viv's. “With love from your mother on your nineteenth birthday.”

Love from your mother.
Viv hesitated, couldn't form thoughts. Love? From her mother? She needed to be careful. Why
really
was her mother giving her these? Her mind did a starburst and she couldn't figure it out. She began thinking about her Gramma Opal and how these had been hers, and a kaleidoscope of memories followed. Her grandmother hugging her as they sat together on the bed in their flannelette nighties. Gramma Opal taking out her hairpins, her long braids falling down her back like ropes. Vivien helping her unplait her braids and watching the tresses slither off her grandmother's shoulders the way trouble ought to, too. Viv wrapped her arms around herself, rocked gently. She could have stayed in her grandmother's arms forever. (All her life this craving to be held, just held.) And now Gramma Opal was dead, had been dead a long time, and she had died alone, and lonely, with no one to hold her, and Viv had not thought about her until now. She began to weep, then sob with sorrow, with remorse, and then, briefly, for herself and her own loneliness.

Time passed and she managed to pin the smaller brooch on the collar of her jean jacket, even though it kept melting. She wore the jacket with the cameo for the rest of the night as she sat by the window on the wooden-runged chair, waiting for Paul to come back. As the rainy dawn came, she finished coming down, endured the stark, ugly, depressing part of the acid stone. Paul hadn't come back.

O Life. How quickly she became the woman in a hurtin' song like the ones she had sung as a kid wandering up and down
the driveway. Hopeless and helpless—that was her, all right.
Ow–ow-owwwwwww
howled the coyotes to the vast and glittering dark sky,
ow-owww
she howled when Paul hit her. His slaps and shoves became punches and kicks. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and one thing she had learned since moving to the Valley was about karma, and karma was about getting what you deserved, and she didn't need to be told that this was payback time for treating Barry so badly. For dumping him and buggering off. She deserved this.

At least she knew where Paul was when he left her in the truck listening to eight-track tapes of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. He was inside a cabin on the lake, or a chalet at the ski hill, talking to people about renos. He'd make them a deck, pour concrete, build a fence, a kennel for their dog, make a stained glass lamp for their dining room table. Anything that paid he said he could do, and then figured out how to do it.

He'd let her come along for the ride and then tell her to be a good girl and “Sit. Stay,” which he thought was so funny. He slammed the truck door and left her, would forget about her for hours. “Hey, leave me some smokes,” she said, and he tossed half a deck of Player's Plain at her through the open window. She wondered if the people inside knew she was out there and, if they did, what they thought of that, what he had told them. She wrapped herself in an old quilt and woke up freezing when Paul staggered out into the grey dawn still half pissed and hung over.

She was lucky if he got drunk and passed out somewhere else, or if he drank so fast he passed out before something pissed him off and he came after her. Some nights he pinned her on the bed with his strong, fat body and took his fat hand and pushed the
fleshy heel of his palm against her nose as if he were going to crush it flat to her head, his fat fingers pressing hard against her cheekbones. In the dark of night, curled against his fat back, often drunk herself, she wondered why she stayed. Why did it feel right to be treated like shit? Why did she find some weird sort of comfort in it? At first it had been so exciting. That she—she!—was able to evoke such a powerful response.