Authors: Joan Thomas
“And you know,” Liz goes on, “if they are at all considering adoption, she needs to be exploring her options. These things aren’t arranged overnight.” She goes to the sink to rinse her sticky fingers. From the living room she hears the
boom-boom-boom
of the nightly
news theme. “I wish you’d talk to her about it, Aiden. It doesn’t do any good for me to go after her.”
“Okay,” he says. “Will do.”
The oven pings that it’s up to temperature. “It’s that damn ultrasound,” she says. “They’re the kiss of death to adoption programs. Once a girl sees the baby’s face, she’s smitten. This is something we talk about all the time at work.” She reaches for a towel and dries her hands. “And if Sylvie thinks she’s going to keep the baby … Well, there are a thousand things we should be doing.”
“If I could give you a piece of advice,” Aiden says finally. She turns in his direction, letting her face show how stony she suddenly feels. “Speak your heart with Sylvie. Instead of always telling her what you think she needs to hear.”
“Speak your heart?” Liz says. “
Speak your heart
?” She picks up the tray of chicken and slides it into the oven. “Well, seeing we’re turning this into a character issue, seeing that this problem is suddenly about
me
, Aiden, let me just make a small observation of my own: I doubt that Sylvie appreciates her father diving in to touch her belly for luck the instant she sets foot in the door.”
Liz’s quilting group meets that night and Aiden’s in bed when she comes in afterwards. She can tell from the way he’s lying that he’s not asleep. She strips off her clothes, drops them on the wicker chair, and crawls in. She’s washed her face and moisturized but she gave herself a holiday from flossing. The dog followed her upstairs. She lies for a minute listening to him settle down, his tags clicking. Aiden doesn’t move. You can share a bed when you’re fighting; you just have to maintain a scrupulous decorum. But why fight this one with Aiden? She rolls over and curls herself against his back. He has a T-shirt on to keep his shoulders warm, but his butt is bare and his cheeks feel cold.
“I get it,” she says. “You’re trying to make this seem normal.”
He reaches for her hand, pulls her arm tighter around him, weaves his fingers through hers. It’s a gesture she loves, like tying twine around the cocoon of their curled-up bodies. “Yup,” he says. “Like it was happening ten years from now.”
“I know, I know.”
The baseboard heater comes on with its electric hum. He turns a few degrees, resettles himself, and pulls her back into their lock. “It seems like just last year we were lying here and you were pregnant with Sylvie.”
“Not here. It was downstairs. We still had the waterbed.” So lovely, the waterbed, so
amniotic
. Night after night she floated on it, astonished by the thought of the baby floating inside her. She was the first person it had ever happened to. That’s what they say about women who make a drama out of being pregnant, but that’s how it felt. They’d set out to make a baby but they’d never really thought they were signing on for the whole marriage-and-family thing. It was as if they’d embarked on something unique to them. Why did they think they were so different? She presses on the question, and all she can see is them – the way they were in those years, blithe and brash and scoffing, as though they alone, out of the whole world, could hang on to that beautiful freedom forever.
“I’m not ready for this,” she says to Aiden. “I never really got the hang of the mom thing.”
“Come on, that’s not true. You were great. Look how you stayed home all that time with Sylvie.”
“I was working, Aiden.” The years she spent freelancing out of the house, writing grant applications and strat plans for non-profits – she’ll never forget what it was like, scrambling to get packages together for inflexible federal deadlines, files spilling from every
surface in the house, the phone ringing every two minutes, and a restless, curious, wilful child pawing at her knees. Sylvie would be up before dawn every morning without fail, sitting on the kitchen floor making an amulet out of alligator clips and twist ties and Cheerios and Scotch tape, singing, “The wise man rode a coconut, the sad man rode a horse” or some other bit of nonsense. Liz would take a sip of her coffee and lift her eyes to the microwave and see that it wasn’t even seven yet, and know that everything the day would offer her was already there in those untidy rooms.
Which must be why she fell in with the
GAP
mothers, that strange collection of throwbacks who sat by the hour in each other’s houses, drinking tea made from mint and chamomile they grew in their own borders, and trading lore – all the things counterculture women just knew, the insider tips about fenugreek and blessed thistle (
You haven’t ingested enough if you can’t smell it on your skin
). If Liz thought her paid employment would give her any cachet with that crew, or her witticisms regarding the things they were so earnest about, she was badly mistaken.
One very hot day she invited them to sit outside, where there was a breeze and her pale pink monkshood was in bloom along the fence. She opened the back door to the beautiful deck she and Aiden had just put in, and in a flash someone named Ariel had scooped up her toddler. “Is that, uh, pressure-treated pine?” Ariel asked delicately. “I’d rather not sit out there with the kids, if you don’t mind. It’s known to contain arsenic.”
So they met in the living room with the blinds down, the kids fretful and bored because their mothers (tactfully, while Liz was in the kitchen making the tea) had gone through the toy box and set out of reach everything interesting – the painted toys (for fear of lead) and the plastic toys (
PVCS
). There was Victoria, swollen and miserable and a week overdue, panting like a dog in the heat.
“My doctor wants me to come in tomorrow,” she said. “He wants to induce.”
A male doctor trying to fit her baby’s birth around his golf schedule! So Mary Magdalene, sitting like a queen in the Mission chair with someone else’s toddler contented on her lap, told the moving story of Sparky’s birth, how at thirty-seven weeks Sparky was breech, a complication for which every doctor in the city will sentence you to a Caesarean. But on the advice of her midwife, Mary Magdalene pressed ice to her solar plexus, where Sparky’s head was, and at the same time shone a thin but powerful flashlight up her vagina. Within a day Sparky had swum around to follow the light. Three weeks later he emerged in a victorious home birth.
Liz presses her forehead against Aiden’s shoulder. “Ask Maggie what kind of a mother I was,” she says. “I almost killed her kid once.”
“What are you talking about?”
So she finally tells him. About the time she looked after Sparky because he had a cold and Mary Magdalene had to go to the welfare office. “I pushed her to leave him with me. I was in a panic about a deadline and I figured he’d keep Sylvie occupied. But he was sick and he just wanted Sylvie to piss off and let him play with Lego. So she was at me, at me to take them outside. You know how she is – resisting her always costs more time and energy than giving in. So we ended up going to Vimy Ridge Park. They had those old swings with thick, heavy slabs of wood dangling from industrial chains. I pushed the kids for a while, and then I’m sitting on a bench, working through a set of notes with a highlighter, because I’m truly in a jam with that job, and they’re swinging high, pumping themselves. They’re facing in opposite directions so they can see each other, and then I look up and I see Sparky jump off his swing, and Sylvie’s swing comes up and clunks him right in the face. Oh, it was awful! It just happened in a second. By the time I got him
home he looked like a space alien – you could hardly see his eyes. When Maggie gets there, I’m icing his face like crazy. Of course she makes a
huge
deal of it.” Liz can still see her walking quickly up the polished hall of Urgent Care with Sparky riding on her hip, without a thank-you or a backward glance.
“Was his nose broken?”
“Well, yes. And he had a mild concussion, as well as two spectacular shiners. So of course it caused a sensation on the street. Mary Magdalene moved away right after. I think she was trying to get away from me.”
Aiden lets her hand go and reaches up to rearrange his pillow. “Is this why you were so freaked when you saw Maggie again? I doubt she even remembers.”
Liz rolls onto her back. He follows her, lays an arm across her breasts. She can smell his breath – toothpaste and garlic and something from a different register. Old age, possibly.
“Aiden,” she says. “Darling. You should be put on display in a glass case.”
“What do you mean?”
“For being such a naïf. A man could say, Very sorry, accidents happen. But a woman – oh my god!”
After he’s asleep, Liz lies gazing at the square of night sky framed by the skylight. It’s never blue or black. It’s the colour of bruises, Aiden always says. Or bile. It’s chartreuse, Liz insists.
Puce
. Although she doesn’t really know what colour puce is. She rolls to her side of the bed and then Mary Magdalene is standing on the street with her hand on Sparky’s shoulder, her hair long and full, like Cher’s. Sparky’s swelling has gone down but his face is still lurid. It’s Halloween. Exhausted by a round of contrite apologies, Liz attempts a joke. “Hey, Sparky, you could be a Ninja Turtle.” Mary Magdalene looks hard at Liz and says something absolutely
savage. Liz hears the words in her mind and they make her gasp, they flip her right out of bed. She sits on the edge, cradling her pillow. She hasn’t thought about that moment in years. Not because she forgot, no. Because she buried it deep, the way you bury radioactive waste.
She stands up and pulls her robe off its hook and goes downstairs. The dog follows. In the living room she turns on the shell lamp. Let’s face it, she was floundering in those days, going slowly around the twist. They were on the cusp of making it, she and Aiden, but things were taking a long time to come together. He was always amused that she put up with that group. “But I get it,” he said. “People with a seamless view of the world are intimidating, even when they’re full of shit.”
Why
didn’t
she laugh in their faces? Because the
GAP
women had something she didn’t have. She remembers Mary Magdalene crouched on the kitchen floor beside Sparky, her warm face totally absorbed by what her son was saying. It was never hard for them. They were never frantic and bored. They were like women in love.
She pulls a quilt out of the press in the corner and curls up on the sofa. Aiden had a fire while she was out. Embers glow on the hearth, under the ash, like veins deep in the Earth. Just a few tiny nuggets of orange fire and soon (she knows from experience) the whole room will be rosy with their light. She fusses with the cushion under her cheek and then drops a hand down to dangle it in Max’s ruff. He’s happy to have a friend in the night, she can sense his doggy satisfaction. She nestles deeper into the couch and covers her face with her arm. Sleep, she orders, but nothing resembling sleep responds. After a few minutes she lowers her arm and looks into the room. In the dim light she makes out the curve of the Frank Lloyd Wright vase on the mantel and the art deco figurine standing up gracefully beside it.
Where do I go wrong? she asks the house.
It takes the house a minute to respond. In your haste, it says at last. You, Liz (the meticulous, painstaking craftsperson who made this quilt), you grab for things. Sometimes what you want is not what is best.
The edge of the quilt is tickling her face; she folds it over and readjusts the cushion. She stretches out her legs, measuring the luxurious length of the leather sofa with her body. Sirens race up Portage Avenue, screaming thinly in the distance, and then the furnace murmurs to life.
What do I do right? she asks the house.
You’re hasty, the house replies. Nobody can make a cake without breaking eggs.
S
ylvie gives herself a day off from classes and spends most of it in bed. She’s not sick but she has some strange physical symptoms, including a metallic taste in her mouth. When the building falls quiet, she falls back to sleep. Around noon she wakes up and fishes Kajri’s human physiology text out of the bed. It’s got a long chapter on the development of the
Homo sapiens
fetus, full of fibre-optic photos of babies in the womb. Through the fall, unaware, Sylvie harboured a tadpole, a fish, and a lizard. But now her baby is a mammal. It has lost its tail. It’s covered with hair. It has an alien’s face, with raspberry-coloured veins twining over its bulging forehead. It’s already equipped for its evolutionary task of overpopulating the planet – those little olive-shaped ovaries have fifty thousand eggs in them.
Sylvie can take this only in small doses. She drops the book to the floor, gets up, and eats two things of raspberry yogurt and a morning glory muffin from the windowsill. Her phone beeps.
HAPPY
MOUTH NOON TOMORROW
? Her dad is trying to lure her to his office with sushi. He’s done this before. She texts him back:
MAYBE
. He’s so sweet, although his wife is a witch and he’s completely under her thrall. There’s a word for him that few people know:
uxorious
. Sylvie learned it in first-year English when they read
Paradise Lost
. Adam the First Man was uxorious, and look what came of that.
She pulls her laptop over to the bed. She doesn’t check Facebook but she reads her Twitter feed and the usual blogs. They’re all about the climate summit, at which greedy nations showed their true values and less than nothing was accomplished. She drops the lid of her laptop, feeling sorry for all the activists who anguished for years about whether to get on a plane and fly halfway around the world to attend.
Then she gets up and tries on a bunch of clothes. Because suddenly, now that she knows what’s going on, none of them fit. Around the middle of the afternoon she calls in sick at Stella’s. It’s the evening manager who picks up and he’s pissy about it. “Believe me, you don’t want me there,” she says, trying to sound contagious or at the point of vomiting.