Authors: Joan Thomas
Early on, taking a hike to the top of the island, he stumbled – on a rough patch of concrete he’d never noticed before, halfway up the climb. Fucking concrete, poured for no purpose he could see, on a ledge where granite broke through the topsoil like a whale breaching. He roamed the island in a rage all afternoon, assaulted by the sight of the rocks along the waterfront that Rupert had painted white, and the flagpole from which Rupert used to fly the Stars and Stripes he’d bought on a celebrated retirement trip to
Chicken, Alaska, and the barbecue pad and the lawn grass and the toilet bowl installed in the lawn grass as a petunia planter, and the tin cans and beer bottles thrown into the bush behind the cabin.
After a supper of cold beans and bread, he sat on the rocks reading Gerard Manley Hopkins. His undefended dissertation was on Hopkins, and his
Oxford
opened on its own to “God’s Grandeur.” He’d bought the book as an undergraduate, and “God” was circled in ink and annotated in his younger, neater handwriting:
creative life force
eternal pulse of nature
Gaia?
Hopkins, of course, could use the word God straight-up. He’d been born Church of England, and then he’d jeopardized his prospects and broken his parents’ hearts by becoming a papist. The Catholic belief that God is in the material world, in the bread and wine: that’s why Hopkins had converted, because the symbolism appealed to the poet in him. He was sent to teach in the north of England, where the sheep were black with soot from the factory chimneys. He thought that if you paid enough attention you would see beyond that, you could see God. He swooned looking into a bluebell, and so he ate it as a Eucharist.
Sitting on the rocks in the failing western light, Aiden read the poem over and over. The last lines made his breath catch every time: “
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings
.”
The next day he got to work and felled the flagpole like a pine tree, sawing off the stump at its concrete base. After that he took a sledgehammer to the barbecue pad and broke up what he could. He pried up the whitewashed border stones and dismantled the aluminum filleting table his dad had screwed into the rock. Got
rid of the things that offended him most, that reeked of his dad, that
wore man’s smudge and shared man’s smell
– although of course all that was a conceit, the notion that Aiden (tramping the island in shoes assembled by indigent children on three continents) was fundamentally different, that he
deserved
to be there. The real estate deal had filled him with so much private satisfaction (
We own it – it will be here for us when the city burns
), but that was nonsense too, the idea that he, in his nanosecond of time, should have any meaningful claim to a piece of Precambrian rock five hundred million years old.
One time, after the light was scoured from the sky in the black west, he decided he wanted to see the whole night unroll. He carried a sleeping bag and pillow outside and made a nest on the lower ledge with its beautiful lichen, and there he lay while the sun dropped behind the fringe of spruce on the far bank and tiny stars began to prick through the green sky. He watched the water silver over, and then along the shoreline he saw the silver pucker into an arrowhead. A line of arrowheads – an otter, swimming with her young. When they were out of sight, he rolled onto his back and lay looking at the stars in their webs until he fell asleep. The temperature plunged during the night, and in the morning the dew woke him: his hair and his sleeping bag were drenched. It was astonishing being anointed like that by a perfectly cloudless, enamel-blue sky, and lying on that granite slab, he was stoned by wonder at the faithful rotation of the Earth and the perfection of a day washed with light by a sun that hadn’t even risen yet.
He’s still got the
Oxford
in his hands, and he opens it. In the warm light of a lamp with an amber shade, he turns his eyes to the poem.
His
poem, you might call it: he would acknowledge it as a kind of scripture. “Nature is never spent,” he reads aloud. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” But it’s an old poem,
an old consolation, and he finds that he doesn’t have the heart to read to the end.
S
ylvie was right to try to stay away from Liz: she caused her first-ever fight with Noah. Before Sylvie had a chance to tell him what had gone down with her parents, he called her.
“I was just talking to my mom. Did you decide to keep the baby?”
“What makes you think that?”
“That’s what your mother told my mother.”
“Oh god.” She held the phone away from her for a minute. “Did you? Did you tell your mother you’ve decided?” he was saying when she put it back to her ear.
“I got cornered, Noah. They were pushing me, pushing me, and it just kind of came out.”
“So you’re not really serious about it.”
She couldn’t link the voice coming out of her phone to his actual face. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I am serious. I don’t really see any other way.”
Now no sound at all came from the phone.
“Noah, do you want your kid to grow up in a ten-room mansion in Lindenwoods? Do you want her driving an
SUV
when she’s sixteen?”
“Nobody will be driving
SUVS
when this kid is sixteen.”
“No, all right, but you see what I mean. It’s going to be hard, I know. But maybe we have a chance to do it right. With this baby. To show that it can be done.”
Again he didn’t respond.
“Noah,” she said. “Use your words.”
More silence.
“Fuck, Noah. I feel like shit when you don’t talk.”
She hung up and dropped her phone on the bed. In a minute it rang again. In that strange flat voice he said, “You’re just going to have to give me time.”
Well, they have time. Sylvie has the impression this pregnancy will never be over. Her stomach is huge and her belly button sticks out like the knot in a big balloon. But she’s going to classes and turning in her assignments; she’s sucking back kale smoothies and eating hummus sandwiches stacked with veggies. Her skin is clear, her hair crackles (“You’re a biosphere,” her friends all say, “a walking biosphere”), and she tries not to fret, because she knows Noah will come around.
While she’s waiting for that to happen, she makes her own plans for the first few months. She’ll buy a cradle at Value Village and she’ll keep the baby’s sleepers and diapers in a drawer of her dresser. If you’re breastfeeding, that’s all you need – a woman’s body is perfectly adapted to feed a baby on nothing. She knows her baby will be the most popular resident of Laurence Hall; her friends will be at the door night and day, begging to take her for walks. It would be unfair to Kajri to have a baby waking her up in the night, though, so she goes to the student housing office and puts her name on a list for a private room.
Laurence Hall does not currently allow children, that’s the biggest catch. Sylvie makes an appointment and goes in to speak to the dean. Dean Semple (his actual given name) is a funny guy who thinks the styles of his own university days are cool. “You got lucky,” she says. “Spikes are back.” He narrows his eyes but basically he likes her – she can say anything. He offers her two pieces of the Kit Kat he has open on his desk and tells her the board of regents is meeting in a few weeks. “But I’ve got to warn you,” Dean the Dean says, “it took them two years to reach a decision on Coke machines.”
Most students will sign anything you put under their noses, so Sylvie writes up a petition. She circulates the clipboard in the lecture theatre during her Evo-Devo class, which is huge. It comes back with two names and
Are you nuts?
written across the bottom. Sylvie slides the clipboard into her backpack. People secretly keep cats and dogs in apartments all the time, she thinks darkly. She’s not going to panic. Nothing in the universe can make her fall back into her mother’s vortex.
But the weeks are passing, so in desperation she takes her petition to the entrance of the university daycare centre. It’s late afternoon and the parents, mostly moms, are just arriving to pick up their kids. The first woman she approaches reads the petition and says, “Laurence Hall? Not sure why you’d want to do that.” She looks at Sylvie with a curious expression. Sylvie has no idea what she’s seeing or thinking, and she hates it, it’s like this woman has a strange power over her. She leans against a pillar of the daycare centre. Something is pressing inside her head, as if her brain is too big for her skull, crammed in and hurting. She bends down cautiously for her backpack, swings it on, and heads for Laurence Hall.
It’s dark when she wakes with a gasp to see Kajri by her bed with a Thermos mug of teabag chai.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay,” Sylvie says. “I need to get up.” When she reaches for the mug, she discovers that her fingers are swollen like sausages. She can hardly bend them. She puts down the mug and goes to the bathroom to pee. Her feet are puffy too, even the soles – they feel squishy to walk on.
“How are they going to get this thing out of me?” she says when she comes out of the bathroom.
Kajri gives a little shrug. “It’s been done before.” Her voice is matter-of-fact.
And then both their eyes go to the ghostly sonogram of the seven billionth baby hanging on the wall. Sylvie suddenly sees the true meaning of that picture: it’s not that her baby is exceptional, it’s that it isn’t.
Kajri is gone when Sylvie wakes up in the morning. Her headache is gone too, and the swelling in her hands and feet is down. She goes to her classes, and then at one o’clock she runs into Benedictor in Lockhart Hall. He’s on his way to visit a friend who has two tiny kids. “Can I come?” Sylvie asks. He’s surprised, but he says sure.
And then his friend isn’t home; only the guy’s wife is there in their tiny apartment on Carlton. Her name is Asnaku, she’s twenty-six and beautiful, and she has incredible micro braids. She makes them lunch, a spicy lentil dish that they eat with injera. One of her babies is sleeping on its tummy in a mesh playpen, and Benedictor sits comfortably at the kitchen table holding the other.
“So, what’s the secret to being a good mom?” Sylvie asks, reaching over to run her fingertips along the baby’s plump arm. The baby looks at her out of the corner of his amazing eyes – he’s flirting with her. What she wants to know from Asnaku is how you raise a baby with very little, the way people do in much of Africa, but she can’t think of a tactful way to ask this.
Afterwards she calls Noah to tell him about it. When he picks up, he sounds okay, and she is terribly relieved. “The most important thing, she says, is to carry your baby all the time. Tie it to your body with a big piece of cloth. Parents in North America always drag their babies around in car seats, and the baby never feels the warmth of the mother’s body.”
“So does she tie both her kids into a carrying cloth?”
“No!” Sylvie laughs. “It’s nuts – she gives me this advice, but actually she has all sorts of plastic shit. Mobiles and swings and Jolly Jumpers. She grew up in a refugee camp in Kenya and it makes her happy to be able to buy that kind of stuff. But it doesn’t mean we have to do it that way.”
We
, she hears herself say. She can’t see how he’s reacting because he’s on his cell. She can hear a crowd in the background, as if he’s standing in a hallway. Will he be a part of the baby’s first summer? He hasn’t heard whether he got into the Lake Malawi project. She feels so sad about never seeing him. She felt especially bad in the first prenatal class, where all but one of the other women had their partner there. “I really miss you,” she says.
“I miss you too,” he says politely. “But I’ve got to go, my lab is starting. I’ll try to call tomorrow.”
Well, they have never been part of each other’s university life. He stayed in Guelph for reading week. He said he would come home but he’s so against flying that Sylvie told him not to. He won’t come now until his exams are over and the baby is due.
Not that Sylvie is really into the prenatal classes. In the first class, after they had all introduced themselves, they were asked to do a matching exercise to learn the correct names for reproductive body parts. Sylvie left at the juice-and-cookies break and skipped the next few weeks. She goes back when they’re scheduled to start the breathing exercises, because Kajri says her mother says the breathing is the most important part.
Thea ends up coming as her coach. The mothers lie on mats with their coaches sitting cross-legged at their heads. Sylvie lowers herself slowly because bright pinpricks of stars sparkle around the edges of her vision when she moves fast. She’s beside Dahlia, the only other mother who doesn’t have her partner with her. She is only twenty but she already has a two-year-old at home. Dahlia is
clutching a stuffed cloth doll dressed in camouflage gear. When she sees Sylvie looking at the doll, she passes it over.
“Sylvie, meet my husband, Lance. Lance got me through the last delivery and he’s going to get me through this one.”
“Hi, Lance,” Sylvie says. “Wow.” She looks closely into his silk-screened face and then steals a glance at Thea, holding Lance so Thea can see the white stuffing leaking out of a hole in his thigh.
“You’ve never seen these before?” Dahlia says. “You’re kidding! They’re called Hug-a-Hero dolls. I got this one made in the mall in Fargo. You take in a picture of your guy on a flash drive and they screen it onto the face. My daughter loves it. But I said to her, ‘Tonight you’ll have to cuddle with Buster Bear because Mommy needs her hero.’ ”
Dahlia has fine natural blond hair clipped back with aqua plastic barrettes. She has gentle eyes of the palest green. She and Sylvie are lying with their faces six inches apart, keeping their voices low because the teacher is talking.
“You should get one,” Dahlia whispers. “It was $29.99, but that includes the uniform, and they have, like, army, navy, air. Although the uniforms are American.”
Sylvie passes Lance back, ashamed of her unkindness. The real Lance may be overseas, or he may already have been killed. “My boyfriend’s a student,” she says softly. “He’s doing his master’s at the University of Guelph.”