Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee
At breakfast, her mother set down plates of toast and poached eggs. Val’s stomach was unsettled, tightening and loosening every time she tried to swallow. As she choked her food back, Joan wandered into the kitchen, still in her nightgown.
“I’m starving,” she announced.
Meg nodded and pointed to her congealing egg.
With a mouth full of yolk and toast, Joan eyed Val from across the table. She swallowed loudly. “Have a good sleep?” she asked, a grin starting in the corners of her mouth.
Val sat up straight. “No, actually. A couple of rats in the attic woke me up.”
Joan stared sullenly out the window.
Val felt strangely rooted to her chair, listening to the sounds of her sister and mother chewing their breakfast. She kept her head down, eyes fixed on the scarred wooden table-top, at the crumbs that had, over the years, collected in the scratches and dents.
Joan stood up to bring her plate to the basin. On her way, she whispered to Val, “You have your own stupid plan to get out of here, I have mine. He’ll marry me, you’ll see.” And she flounced out, her almost-white, uncombed hair like a cloud in the morning sunlight.
That winter, the baby was born, squalling and slimy and wrinkled. Val stared at the child as he lay on Joan’s chest, clenching his fists and wailing. Joan’s eyes were closed and she was breathing through her mouth as Meg, with an old sheet, tried to clean up the blood and fluid slowly soaking into the girls’ mattress. Everything seemed wrong to Val: Joan’s skinny frame that had hardly appeared pregnant at all, the baby’s bluish skin that barely contained his small, birdlike bones, her mother’s tentativeness in telling Joan when to push and for how long.
As Meg wrung out a cloth in a basin by the window, Val
whispered to her, “I told you we should have gone to the hospital.”
Wet strands of hair clung to the sides of her mother’s face, and Val could see her body wilting as the exhaustion crept from feet to spine to neck.
“Better to keep it quiet,” her mother said. “That Lumby girl is a nurse, and then everyone around here would know.” She turned and looked Val directly in the face. “Do you think I don’t know how they talk about us? If word gets out that Joanie has a baby, those self-righteous women will start saying Warren is the father or that we’re making you girls part your legs for money. Maybe they’re even saying it already.”
And Val knew this was true, that eyes watched their every move and not just because of curiosity. She looked back toward her sister and realized no one had yet cut the umbilical cord. She picked up a pair of sewing scissors from the windowsill, took a deep breath, and stepped toward the bed.
When Val walked into the kitchen to fill a pail with hot water from the kettle, her father nodded at her and said, “You remember to tell your sister she’s to name that child Warren. I don’t usually ask for much, so it seems to me Joanie can humour me this one time.” And he stood up and walked out the back door, his work boots leaving behind a trail of dried mud, flecked with the mirrored remnants of fish scales.
Val cleaned the baby with warm water, poked her finger into his armpits and the creases around his thighs. Quiet for now, he stared at her with round, teddy-bear eyes, searching her face for, perhaps, something familiar. She thought she saw him reach for her as his tiny hand brushed the fabric of her grass-green dress. She knew he couldn’t possibly control
his arms, but she smiled anyway and wrapped him in an old flannel blanket. Drowsily, he fluttered his hands and fell asleep.
Joan lay on her side, her hands between her legs. She stared at the faded wallpaper beside the bed. The blood was mostly gone (only faint pink streaks remained on the wall and on the floor) and Meg had replaced the soiled sheets. Val tucked the baby into his basket by the window.
“Does he have to sleep in here?” Joan asked, the words coming out like groans.
“Where else is he going to sleep? In the henhouse?”
“Shut up, Val. You don’t know what it’s like.”
Val laughed. “No, you’re right; I don’t. Why don’t you tell me then?”
Joan traced a crack in the wall with her finger. “You’re talking so loudly, it hurts my head.”
Dropping her voice to a whisper, Val leaned closer to the bed. “Tell me: which one is the father? Or do you not remember?”
Joan rolled over to face her sister. “I know exactly who the father is, you stupid cow.”
“Really? Where is he, then?”
“Stop talking! I need to sleep. Leave me alone.”
“Why isn’t he here, Joanie? Did you say something to make him mad? Did you drive him away?” Val wanted to slap Joan, take her by the shoulders and bang her blond head against the wall until she admitted she was wrong, that she had miscalculated her escape.
“He’s with his wife! He wouldn’t leave his good-for-nothing, lazy wife. Satisfied?” She sat up abruptly, thumped
her fist on the mattress and jumped to her feet, her arms out like she was ready to grab Val by the hair. Val was about to yell something back at her, sleeping baby or no, but Joan turned pale and her mouth twisted in a strange half-smile, half-grimace.
She wavered in place until Val caught her and helped her lie down. As she pulled the blankets up to cover Joan’s chest, her arm brushed her sister’s cheek. Red hot, like the rocks their father used to ring the firepit in the yard.
All that night, Meg sat by the side of the bed on one of the hard, wobbly kitchen chairs, wiping Joan’s face with a cool, damp cloth and murmuring that same story over and over again.
“The lights. You should have seen them,” she said softly. “Like a night sky, but so much brighter.”
For three days, Joan tossed in a fever, gripping the sides of her stomach with her long white hands. On the fourth day, Warren went to the neighbours’ to telephone the doctor, who examined Joan for ten minutes before taking her in his own car to the nearest hospital, a one-hour drive away. Meg, with Joan’s head in her lap, went with them and left Warren, Val and the baby home alone.
Val had been worrying over the baby all this time. When Joan, groggy from oversleep, tried to feed him, she cried that her breasts hurt too much, and no milk came out of her swollen, bright-red nipples. It wasn’t long before she stopped trying altogether, and she seemed to forget his existence entirely. It was up to Val to clean him and soothe him, to prepare the diluted cow’s milk every two hours and feed him.
He seemed all right for the first little while, and he often stared at Val with a contented look. Whenever Warren held
him, the baby screwed up his brow and scowled at his grandfather, fussing until Val cuddled him close to her chest and hummed a made-up song. Soon, she thought she could see his eyes searching the room for her, and she said to herself, “I’m the one he can trust. I understand him like nobody else.” When he was awake and quiet, she sometimes wet his scalp and spent a half hour gently arranging and rearranging the fine, dark hair, pretending that she was a barber with a tub of Brylcreem. And as he fell asleep in her lap, he pulled at her skirt and clutched it in his fist so tightly that she closed her eyes and slept with him in the chair by the kitchen window for as long as he needed.
But three days after Joan left for the hospital, he changed. He napped in irregular spurts and hardly seemed to notice Val at all. He began to spit up every drop of milk she fed him, coughing and choking until the front of his chest was sour and damp.
Still, she kept trying, and still, he couldn’t keep it down.
After five days, Joan and Meg hadn’t come back. The baby was yellow and listless, barely waking when Val tried to rouse him to eat. She and Warren stood at the side of his basket, staring at his small, peaked face.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.
Her father wiped his hands on the seat of his pants. “I can’t afford the doctor again. If I ask for another advance, the cannery will fire me. Every day that Joanie is in the hospital means more money.” He didn’t say,
It’s Joan or the baby
, but Val knew that, stripped down, this was the choice they were both making, even though it felt like no choice at all.
The next day, as Val was holding the baby, trying to tease his mouth open with the nipple on the bottle, he reached up with his shrivelled hands and looked past Val’s shoulder at something in the distance. She looked behind her and saw nothing except shadows on the bare wall, dust motes floating in a ray of sunshine. She held his little hands in hers and murmured, “You don’t have to be scared. Shhh.” After a few minutes, she even brushed the sleeve of her green dress against his cheek in the hope that he would grasp it like he always had before. But he didn’t seem to notice her at all and continued to hold his arms out stiffly. When Val began to worry they would never relax again, he sighed, dropped his hands and died, his life escaping like a whisper, the straight black hair on his head wavering slightly in the draft. Eventually Warren discovered them in the kitchen chair. He took the baby from a motionless Val, wrapped him gently in an old white sheet and carried him into the bush, where Val knew he would bury him.
For the rest of the afternoon and evening, she sat on the front stoop, but Joan and Meg didn’t come home. She thought,
There’s no hurry now
.
She cleaned the house for days afterward, starting at the attic and working her way down. She threw out everything that hadn’t been used in a year and scrubbed her way from room to room. Her father, for the first time, went to work clearing the bush around their house, cutting and slashing and digging in concentric circles for hours after his shift at the cannery. In the evenings, Val made dinner, usually potatoes and salt pork, with blackberry preserves from last summer for dessert. She and Warren said little; as he washed the
dishes, she swept the floor. Afterward, they went to their separate bedrooms and slept dreamlessly, their arms and legs and backs aching with work. In the morning, she found the trails of dried tears on her cheeks, but never remembered crying in the night.
When Joan and Meg returned, her sister appeared older and sharper, the lines on her face clearly defined—eye, jaw, cheek. She no longer looked like a doll, but like a tired, beaten woman whose body seemed on the verge of collapsing under its own meagre weight. Her eyes darted from left to right as she came up the front walk, until they rested on Val’s face.
“How are you? What happened?” Val held on to Joan’s elbow and guided her to a chair.
Meg stepped in behind them. “It was an infection, they said. Something she caught before she was pregnant.” She paused. “She won’t be able to have any more children.”
“I’m sorry,” Val said, her hand resting on Joan’s shoulder.
“Where’s the baby?” Joan asked. “Is he sleeping?”
Val tried to be gentle, tried to impart that he had died quickly and didn’t suffer, but Joan didn’t appear to be listening as she raked her fingers through her stick-straight hair. When Val finished, Meg was sitting on the floor in a corner of the living room, sobbing into her hands.
Joan stood up. “The doctors said he might not live without me. I half expected it.” She walked down the hall and into their bedroom, not bothering to close the door. Val could hear the springs in the mattress groan as she lay down.
THE CITY
1946
About two months later, Val started to dream again. One night, she saw herself dressed in a fine, floating white gown, standing at the edge of the river, overgrown bushes and trees behind her, blocking her view of the house. The surface of the water sparkled, catching light on the edges of waves. Val saw a salmon leap and twist in the air before disappearing again, its return to the river making barely a ripple.
She stepped onto a passing barge, a fantastic barge, decorated with blue velvet and painted paper lanterns. As she floated away, she could see past the bush and into the attic window, where Joan’s face was twisted, whether in pleasure or pain, she couldn’t tell. Joan’s eyes watched as the barge drifted downriver, as Val arranged her skirt to billow more gracefully in the breeze. Her lips moved and Val could swear that she was saying,
A curse, a curse
.
Then, a voice: “Across the river, Val. We have to get across that river.”
Val struggled to open her eyes, groped for the wall, something solid to bring her back to waking life. “Joanie?”
Joan’s back was resting against the headboard. She turned toward Val, who could just see her glimmering hair in the dark. “You remember your plan, don’t you? We have to get out of here, go across the river and get to Vancouver somehow. Val? Are you listening?”
Val sat up and shivered as the cold air hit her shoulders.
“I didn’t think you liked that idea.”
Joan shrugged. “I didn’t. But what else is there to do? Either we run, or we stay here and watch Mum and Dad crumple and die and dry up.” Her voice cracked a little and she paused, waiting, Val thought, for inconvenient feelings to evaporate. “Come on, Val. We’ve always done everything together.”
Val had a vision of her and Joan, high-kicking on a stage with a dapper man dressed in a top hat and black tails between them. How beautiful they would be in their sequined costumes, their high-heeled shoes, their curled and set hair. She wanted to hear new music. The only popular songs they heard were on Mr. Ladner’s radio when they went to buy supplies at his general store; that is, when they had enough money to buy anything at all. She wanted fast music, the kind that made you stand up and dance, by yourself or with a partner, it didn’t matter.
She knew that if they stayed, they would grow older and stranger, like a pair of mad and isolated witches. They would pace through the damp, silent rooms, each keeping her eyes averted for fear of seeing evidence of their own slow disintegration—liver spots, dark circles, caved cheeks—in the other’s face.
Val turned to her sister. “We’ll go. Tomorrow.”
They left a note for their parents, waiting until their mother had gone to the Ladners’ big square house, looking for some housekeeping work. Their father, whose industrious streak had fizzled, was still asleep, cocooned in his own particular cloud of stale beer and tobacco.