Authors: Joan Thomas
She catches him up on the news about her friends. “You should see Nathan,” she says. “He’s having his bones tattooed, one by one. With cool sayings. And he’s bleached his hair. Not blond or platinum – it’s grey! It looks awesome. He’s so slim and graceful. He looks just like a fairy – like the fairies that used to live at the end of the garden in children’s books. In England, I guess.”
“When I was young,
fairy
was a homophobic slur.”
“It still is,” she says, suddenly feeling sad. “And all the real fairies are gone. People talk about angels now, but they never talk about fairies. It’s like fairies have gone extinct.” She pulls a piece of crunchy tempeh out of a roll and nibbles on it. “Although sometimes I dream that extinction is just a myth. Maybe the dinosaurs are living in the mountains of Siberia. And the Tasmanian tiger and the black rhino and the golden toad.”
“You got that from Pee-wee Herman,” Aiden says. “There were dinos living in the walls of his house, with a door in the baseboard, like cartoon mice. Tiny, shrunken-down dinos living a middle-class life with kitchen cupboards and table lamps.”
She’s forgotten all about that. What weird things he remembers from her childhood! “Of course,” she says, “some of the dinosaurs did shrink down – the ones that evolved into birds. Have you ever seen a drawing of the transition species? There’s one in my
Evo-Devo textbook. It’s
so
funny-looking. It had feathers on its legs, like leg warmers, like it’s from the disco era.”
Her dad bends over his sushi tray. She’s afraid, judging from the attention he’s giving to mixing soy sauce into his wasabi, that he’s warming up to give her a lecture. “So,” he says, “what else is new in your life? Besides Nathan’s grey hair.”
She tells him she’s dropped out of the Fringe show.
“Well, the timing would have been tough for you.”
“It’s not just that,” Sylvie says. “We were having a really hard time coming up with an idea. We wanted to take on something
so
big, but you know, whatever we ended up doing would just make it seem small, or cheesy.”
“Your dramatic skills were not up to your subject?”
“Well, are anybody’s? Up to this subject, I mean. My friends actually think they can change things through a Fringe play. And I thought the same thing for a while. Art is bad that way. It gives you the illusion that you’ve been active. It’s better to put your energy into actually
doing
something.”
“You know, your mother is an activist. In a very practical way, in her work with
SERC
.”
So he
has
lured her here to preach at her. “You’re saying I should make Liz my role model?” she asks coldly.
“Something like that.”
“Please. I want to point out, Dad, that the way I behave has nothing to do with her. The fact that she works at
SERC
– in her twisted mind that makes my problem about
her
in some way. Like I got pregnant to try to get back at her.”
“What would you be trying to get back at her for?”
Sylvie can feel her cheeks warming. “I didn’t say I was. I said that’s what she was likely thinking.”
He looks at her thoughtfully for a long time, and then he says,
“I wonder if you’d like me to help you find someone you can talk things through with. A counsellor who’s not invested in the situation the way your parents are.”
“I don’t need a counsellor. Noah and I are talking it all through. We Skype. We were just talking about how we could raise our child so it’s part of the solution. You know, not part of the problem.”
“Well, that’s a very important conversation. But Sylvie, you’re not saying you’ve decided to raise this baby yourselves?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
“You’ve decided? You won’t be looking into adoption?”
“No, we won’t be looking into adoption.”
“And is Noah totally on board with this?”
“Of course.” She manages to hold his eyes without wavering, for what feels like forever.
“Well, then,” he says finally. “I’m going to ask you to come home so we can have a proper conversation with your mother.”
“All right,” Sylvie says. “I’ll come home.” Suddenly she’s terrified. “On Thursday. But Dad, will you tell her first?”
Two days later she walks home for supper. They’re quiet and trying to act normal. Her mother has made vegetarian lasagna and a Greek salad. She’s using the chafing dish with the candle under it to keep the lasagna warm. Her father has put Feist on the stereo – his idea of the sort of music Sylvie likes – and the table is set with a yellow tablecloth they bought on one of their trips. The room is like a movie set, Sylvie thinks. It’s for one of those films where each actor gets only his or her lines during the shoot and has no idea where the story is heading or what the other actors think is happening.
Her father eats his salad first and then his lasagna, cutting a careful, identical forkful for each bite. She tries to catch his eye to
tease him about this, but he won’t look. He’s wearing his Christmas cardigan. He is going to be absolutely silent through this dinner. He’s done this before at other important times, leaving her entirely to her mother’s mercy. Sylvie is almost twenty and has every right to make up her own mind. She doesn’t have to justify her decision to them. But as they eat she shares a bit of the vision that’s been growing in her for the past two days. She tells them that she’s quit her job at Stella’s so she can focus on getting ready.
Her mother interrupts. “What are you going to do for money?”
“I don’t really need anything at the moment.”
“Your phone?” Liz says nastily. “Well, we won’t dwell on that. It’s not the moment I’m talking about.”
So Sylvie tells them that she and Noah have discussed how they will raise their child, about the movement Noah mentioned – people who make a vow to own only one hundred things. She has a lot of passion for the subject, she discovers, but there is something so bogus about the way she is talking. She can hear it and she loathes it. It’s Liz, it’s having to deal with Liz that forces her into positions like this. If only she and Noah could face this problem on their own, without her parents spying on her every move, and jumping up to point an accusing finger the very second she hesitates, and throwing huge roadblocks in her way. She would manage, the way she managed through her entire teenage years; she would be
fine
.
Liz has stopped eating. She’s listening with a stunned expression. “Have you talked this over with Noah’s parents?” she asks. “With Maggie?”
“No.”
There’s a long silence.
“Well, if you really are sure, Sylvie,” Liz says then, “we have a lot of planning to do. Talking about the realities of the next
eighteen years. How you’ll support yourself and your baby. How you’ll manage with child care and finish your education and so on. How involved Noah will be. What role you expect us to play.”
She has the sort of voice you can
see
– it always reminds Sylvie of plastic rope snaking through the air. What a stupid mistake Sylvie’s made, coming over here today. She helps herself to more salad and points out that very few families today are the white-picket-fence kind with two hetero parents.
“I’m aware of that,” her mother says.
“And there are social programs to help single moms.”
“Yes. Well,” Liz says. Then she tells a long story about Noah’s mother, who spent years on welfare. In those days you had to go to an office every month to pick up your cheque, and Mary Magdalene would bring back terrible stories of the callousness she endured, the interrogations and the efforts to humiliate. But Liz soon drifts from how badly single mothers are treated to slagging off Noah’s mother. “We would have been happy to babysit,” Liz says, “but she always took Sparky with her. I suppose to maximize the drama.”
“You did babysit,” Sylvie says. “I remember the whole thing, and I doubt Noah’s forgotten.”
“I did on one occasion,” Liz says. “But in general Mary Magdalene made a point of taking her son to the welfare office. She would pass around homemade crackers to the other clients. Crackers, not cookies – spelt crackers, which are good for people with allergies. She set up activity centres in the corners of the waiting room for the kids. She wanted to be a lesson to the bureaucrats about people on welfare. How resourceful they are, how
noble
.”
By the end of this rant her voice is shaking with emotion. Sylvie feels a deep revulsion at the sight of her: her upper lip puckered like a drawstring bag, her thin, dyed hair, the taupe eyeshadow seeping into creases in her eyelids. She’s looking down into a forest
clearing where her mother leans against a picnic table in white capris – Liz, who lied and lied again to take them to that clearing, to spend the day with those strangers.
“Are you doing this on purpose?” Sylvie cries. “Trying to poison me against Mary Magdalene? Or are you just trying to make me feel shitty?”
Liz doesn’t answer. Sylvie can see her struggling to keep back tears, and her own chest is squeezed so tight she can hardly breathe. It’s like the day she went down the basement and found her mom there crying. Because she’d found Sylvie’s tampons and she had no idea Sylvie had started her period. “Oh, last summer I think it was,” Sylvie said. She said it airily, though her arms and legs were suddenly heavy as cement. From the victory she was feeling, the terror of victory – that one day she would take it too far.
E
ARLY IN FEBRUARY, WINTER FINALLY WHEELS in, two months late and defiant about it. It’s been touring the eastern U.S. seaboard, freaking out the Everglades and putting the kibosh on next year’s orange crop. Then off to Ontario, where it dropped sheets of black ice on the old streets of Kingston and flash-froze the tender roots of rhododendrons in Burlington. Now it’s hunkered down in its natural home, and on the eyebrow window of 385 Augusta, frost etchings sparkle in the sunlight.
Aiden’s in the basement, bundled up and hunched over the computer he uses as a BitTorrent box, and Liz is at the kitchen table, listening to the wind howl around the corners of the house. She’s thinking about Sylvie, who’s just made a quick trip home to pick up her scarf and mittens and a heap of Aiden’s plaid shirts as maternity wear. No time to talk, she said, opening the door to a wall of cold, black air and dashing out. Liz went back to the kitchen and made herself a mug of red tea, and there she’s been sitting since, her hands wrapped around the mug, brooding about the note she slipped into Sylvie’s backpack along with a Ziploc bag of homemade biscotti:
If you’re looking for a birth coach, I would
consider it an honour
. Let it go, she says to herself, turning the backs of her fingers to the warm ceramic wall of her mug. You asked, now let it go.
Then, as if an evil genie is taking her by the hand, she’s seeing her old boyfriend Denis Fontaine. She’s back to the cold winter day when she drove to the liquor store to pick him up after the whisky-tasting she’d given him as a Christmas present. He got into the car exuding alcohol from every pore, leaned his head against the passenger window, and said, “I have to tell you, I’m not in love with you.” This was before Aiden – just before. She’d lived for three years with Denis, a middle manager at Autopac, a good-looking guy but entirely without wit, and so anal he washed the dishes in the sink before he put them in the dishwasher. She’d spent those years trying to decide if she could squish herself down small enough to spend her life with him. And then that moment in the car.
Liz pulls the sleeves of her sweater over her hands. She takes a sip of tea and hitches her chair a few more inches from the cold kitchen wall. It’s Sunday night. Just three more performance assessments to go this week … and instantly she’s fretting about work. About Thursday, when she discovered that Cheryl Ogilvie had hidden out in a spare office during the strat-plan meeting (“I had work to do,” Cheryl said tartly). And Friday: the gust of laughter Liz heard in the hall on Friday, bitten off the instant she stepped around the corner.
The bottle of port Genevieve gave her at Christmas – I should have saved it, she thinks, I could use it tonight. Maybe I’ll bake something, just to warm the kitchen up.
By seven o’clock she has the dough for a big batch of chocolate hearts chilled and ready to go. She rolls a ball deftly between two pieces of waxed paper and starts to hand-cut the cookies, working fast, keeping her knife hand loose. A perfect symmetrical heart of
the cupid variety. One with a long, pointy bottom. Tasty valentines, each one unique. Maybe she’ll take them to work; no one else has this recipe. Mom would approve, she thinks. Although Mom would have used a cookie cutter: she’d want them all to be the same.
She was the last of a dying breed, Liz’s mom. Such a perfect cliché – mention the three-tier Royal Doulton cake stand stacked with pinwheel sandwiches and onion pickles, and people get the picture. As a twelve-year-old, Liz learned how to roll sponge cake on a linen tea towel to make a jelly roll. At seventeen she sewed her own winter coat, a houndstooth number with fabric-bound buttonholes – who knows how to make those anymore? All this prepared Liz for something, though not exactly the life she ended up having.
She pauses, blowing a stray hair off her face. Cuts a cookie with a fat left ventricle and thinks about hearts. Like your fist, they always say – that’s what your heart looks like. Years ago, when things were so bad with Sylvie (until they settled into it, you might say), she contemplated going to a counsellor. What stopped her was knowing the way therapists operate. A therapist would set out to tear down the beautiful structure she had managed to build of her life, though given less than ideal materials. That’s what they do; it’s their modus operandi. They strip away your ways of managing, ways that might be flawed and even duplicitous but are better than not managing at all. Things like baking cookies when office morale needs a little boost. You’re trying to get your staff to like you? a shrink would ask spitefully. With homemade cookies? Is that wise for a woman in management? In answer Liz points to the recipe, which, along with chocolate, includes three kinds of pepper – black, white, and cayenne. Sweetness with a bite, she says.