Читать книгу Every Little Scrap and Wonder - Carla Funk - Страница 10

Where I Come From

THE WHOLE HOUSE sang with the voices of women—chatter in motion as they scurried from kitchen to dining room to living room and back to kitchen with napkins, dishes, glasses of fizzy punch, and laughter, at ease as they perched on stack stools, one pantyhosed leg crossed over the other. Aunts, great-aunts, grandmas, a great-grandma, cousins—first and second and third—abounded, as did the Bible-study and sewing-circle ladies from the church. A shriek and holler sounded by the stove, and there stood Aunt Mary with her white half-slip bunched around her ankles. Behind her, Auntie Margaret laughed and pointed. This was the standard family kitchen prank: sneak up, reach beneath a woman’s skirt, and pull down her undergarment. When the uncles tried it, spatulas slapped the air and wooden spoons flew, but when the women did it to each other, we all thought it was hilarious.

I’d come for the finger foods, the glass platters of marshmallow balls, fudge squares, antipasto on fancy crackers, dishes of olives and trays of meat, pinwheel sandwiches with Cheez Whiz and a slice of dill pickle rolled into the centre, and the huge watermelon my mother had decoratively knifed into a jagged basket filled with chunks of fruit.

I circled the table, the youngest of the guests except for the new baby, a pink swaddled lump that drew the women to hover over it with their oohs and oh buts. In the corner of the living room, amid a swag of pink crepe paper streamers and pink balloons, flanked by stacks of presents wrapped in various shades of pink, in a rocking chair plumped with pillows, sat my distant cousin Darlene, nursing her week-old daughter.

Because of the flannel receiving blanket draped over Darlene’s torso, I couldn’t see the baby, nor the breast. Always, the female body remained hidden. Beyond my own body and the occasional flesh-coloured blur of my mother as she darted from the bathroom to her bedroom, half-clad in a too-small towel, the most I’d spied of the female form was in the underwear section of the Sears catalogue, where women in pale girdles and brassieres smiled at something unseen, off camera, with their long-lashed mystery eyes.

It would be years before I’d hear the anatomically correct names for private body parts. For now, my mother referred to everything as a “peeter,” as in “what you pee with.” Everyone had a peeter, and you kept your peeter covered and quiet. You didn’t talk about your peeter, unless you had trouble with it. Then you went to your mother and said, “My peeter hurts,” and she handed you a tin of diaper-rash cream and said, “Here. Try this.”

With all the men named Peter whom I knew, the word and what it denoted became confusing. Great-Uncle Pete, my dad’s brother Peter, Peter Wiens, Peter Giesbrecht, Peter, Paul and Mary. I supposed they had peeters, too, but I couldn’t imagine them, even though I tried. When someone called out, “Peter!” at a family gathering, across any room, I held back my laugh, but barely, and tried not to look my brother in the eye for fear we’d both burst and be scolded, grounded, no Wonderful World of Disney tonight.

“Do you want to hold the baby?” said a voice behind me. Aunt Sharon, the new grandmother, shuffled me and my overflowing plate toward the rocking chair. “Sit down,” she said, and patted the sofa, took my food from me, and lifted the pink lump from Darlene.

I took the baby as I would an armload of firewood, like a log in a forklift’s grip, cradled.

“Be sure to hold her head,” said Darlene, her hands outstretched as if to steady me.

But I knew this baby rule, that they had soft and lolling heads, and if you didn’t hold them right, you’d snap their necks or make them brain damaged. This baby, the one mouthing the air with milk-lips, arched her back, clenched her fists near her cheeks, and stuttered out a cry.

“Are you pinching the baby?” said Aunt Sharon. She gave me a stern eye, hands on hips, then laughed.

“She’s just gassy,” said Darlene. The baby’s rear end rumbled against my forearm.

“You can have her back,” I said, and inched forward on the sofa cushion, but Darlene said, it’s okay, you can hold her for as long as you want. Just rub her back, said an aunt, pat her bum, hum to her, but hold her head, they said, her neck is weak, and put this blanket on your shoulder just in case she barfs.

THE NEXT DAY, on the bus ride home from school, I slid in beside my assigned seatmate, Tasha Penner. She was a year older, attended the public school up the road, and wasn’t forced to wear a navy-blue polyester jumper every day. But she, too, was Mennonite, so we knew we were probably related, somehow, way back on our fathers’ sides. Tasha was loud, large-limbed, the kind of girl my mother called “a handful,” and she was completely unafraid of the older boys who hissed names at us from the back of the bus and shot their spitballs through drinking straws when Mr. Jordan, the driver, wasn’t watching.

“I got to hold a baby last night,” I said. “Newborn.”

Tasha hunched down in the seat and leaned in close. “You know how babies are born, right?” she said.

I nodded. I knew. “From bellies?”

I’d seen the swollen stomachs of my aunts and the ladies at church, standing with a hand pressed to the growing roundness or against the small of the back, their pregnant shapes belling out inside their vast dresses as they shuffled. And when the baby showed up, their bellies, like risen bread dough punched down, sagged back into place, hidden beneath generous folds of fabric.

“Nope,” Tasha said. “Not from bellies. My sister Candace just had a baby, and she had to push it out.” Here, Tasha thrust her face right close to mine, her breath hot and smelling like tuna sandwich. She whispered, the words coming out in rhythmic pulses: “She had to push it out her bum.”

Revelation in childhood comes in strange and unexpected ways, like a pair of metal scissors jammed blades-first in an electrical outlet—a shock, a spray of sparks, and a bright shudder that, for hours after, leaves the body abuzz.

“Her bum?” My voice came out thin, choked.

“You have to push a baby out of your butthole. You have to push really hard,” said Tasha. “Like when you have to go really big. You have to push even harder than that. Way harder.” She leaned back and nodded.

I tried to picture it. A woman on a toilet, and a baby easing out into the dirty flush and swirl. Then I tried to not picture it. Impossible, I thought. I’d held the newborn, Nicole. Her floppy pink head was bigger than an orange, bigger than a grapefruit, too big to fit.

“It’s true,” said Tasha. “That’s what my sister Candace had to do. She had to push Bradley out her bum.”

On that ride home, with the late-September sun cooking the bus to stuffiness and sticky vinyl seats, dressed in holy uniform like all the other Christian-school girls, suddenly carsick and sweltering in my polyester jumper, white knee socks, and Buster Brown shoes, I vowed I’d never have a baby, never let one grow inside my belly, and never push one out that hole.

“HOW WAS SCHOOL?” my mother asked. I set my orange Muppets lunch kit on the counter, opened it, took out the balled-up waxed paper, and chucked it in the trash.

“Fine.” I said. “How was I born?”

“How were you born?” My mother paused at the kitchen sink, her hands still dunked in the suds. “What do you mean, ‘how were you born’?”

“How did it happen?” I wanted to hear her side of the story, her version of events.

“Well,” she said. “I guess I went to the hospital. Your aunt Carol dropped me off. And then—well, then you were born.”

I waited for more details, but she gave up nothing.

“That’s it?” I said. “I was just born?”

“Then Dad drove back from bush camp and came to the hospital.”

This part of the story I knew well. My dad told it often, especially in the presence of dinner guests and at family gatherings.

“I looked through the window where all the babies were sleeping,” he’d say, “and I said to the nurse, ‘That one can’t be mine! She’s the ugliest one in the nursery!’” And then he’d laugh and laugh, and an uncle would say, “Is that right, Zusa?”—a play on my middle name, Sue, and the Low German word for sugar.

In the living room, I sat on the rug in front of the bookcase, pulled out the photo album with the red and black velvety flowers—my album—and opened to the first page of pictures. Me, pink-faced, fat, hairless, swaddled in a white blanket and lying on a pillow next to a vase of red carnations.

My mother stood over me. “Your father sent those flowers.”

In the next photograph, he sat on a dining room chair and held me on his lap, a box of Corn Flakes foregrounded on the table beside him, as if we were a Kellogg’s breakfast ad. More photographs of me blue-eyed and bald, smiling into space, chewing on a pink stuffed cat, grabbing at my brother’s face. But no further clues as to the birth. No pictures of my mother clutching her swollen stomach. None of her grimacing on a hospital bed. No toilet. Nothing to confirm or deny Tasha’s story.

My mother sat down on the couch and turned on the TV for the last half of The Young and the Restless. “What are you looking for?” she said.

In cartoons, a flapping stork dropped its bundle on a doorstep, through a bedroom window, or right into a crib—a fairy-tale joke, I understood, but why the secrecy, and why the lowered voices at the edge of the kitchen where all the pregnant aunts clustered together whenever the family gathered? They rubbed their bellies, fat with the knowledge of how we all arrived.

Where I came from began with that first damp patch of Genesis earth, God scooping and sculpting that dirt to make a creature, then blowing his breath into it to turn it human. But that origin was bound to another story that had bloomed in my mind, one of babies floating around in Heaven like balloons without strings, waiting to be born. All it took was a husband and a wife to say, “We’re having a baby,” and somehow—and this had been the mystery until now—somehow, God plucked a floating baby from the air and fired it down through the clouds, the way we chucked stuffed animals down Grandma’s laundry chute. Out the baby came, into the arms of its mother, but first, the pushing. Oh, the pushing.

“Did you have to—” the words stuck. “Push me out?”

My mother cough-sniffed, muted the TV, and looked over at me and the open album. “Push you out?” A series of other noises sputtered forth—pffft, chk, uhf—and finally, “Well, yes, I—I guess I did—push you out. And then you were born. Do you want some cookies and a glass of milk?”

NO PHOTO SHOWED her pregnant. In one, she stood in a white dress at the front of Gospel Chapel, clutching a bouquet of roses, her long brown hair beneath a gauzy veil, my dad beside her in his skinny black suit and thick black-rimmed glasses, his thinning hair slicked back, ducktailed. When I flipped the page, she stood next to him again, this time in a purple flowered dress, my brother balanced between them on the shiny chrome bumper of my dad’s new logging truck. But mostly, my mother stood outside the frame. When I asked where were the ones of her round belly, the ones with me inside, she’d say that the Amish don’t like to have their picture taken, as if she still held her ancestors’ view that posing for a photograph meant pride swelled in the soul.

“Besides,” she said, “I was the one taking all the pictures.”

I wondered if this was her cover for never having carried me at all, if she wasn’t telling me the true story. That I came from somewhere else. Someone else. Even though Mrs. Bergen had never been pregnant, she and Mr. Bergen showed up at church one Sunday with a baby in their arms—a girl they named Elizabeth, born from a different mother who lived in Manitoba and who didn’t want to keep her, and so they adopted her. On the sanctuary bulletin board beside the staircase to the nursery, Elizabeth’s photograph, along with her name and birthday written in fancy black script on a pink card, were thumbtacked to the cradle roll, which announced all the fellowship’s new babies.

My name, too, had been listed on a pink card, and my arrival announced like good news. My mother had carried me into the sanctuary, been swarmed by the women who wanted to get a look, to peel back the folds of the blanket and see my fat pink cheeks. Before me, it had been my mother, swaddled in her own mother’s arms. And before her, my grandmother, pink and small and bundled. Back and back we went, my mother, her mother, and the grandmothers long dead, tethered by the same cord strung beneath a sky that stretched from river valley to canyon to coast to plains, replicating and aglow across a continent and ocean, back into the dust and stars, back into the holding pen of Heaven, where another one waited to swing down on the line, come sliding into the doorway of the world, her body, my body, and whoever came next.

“See?” my mother said. “Here’s one of me holding you.” She pointed to a picture of me on her lap in the rocking chair, my brother squished in beside her on the seat, fighting for space. My cheeks flushed, my eyes wide and shining red, stunned by the camera flash. And looking down at me with an almost smile, my mother, green-eyed, younger, her shoulder-length brown hair pulled back from her face.

While I studied the picture, she headed back to the sink full of dishes and the pots simmering on the stove. The hunch gnawed deep, a question mark, a pang.

“Come, have something to eat,” my mother called from the kitchen.

There was more to the story, more that I wasn’t being told. I turned the pages and saw myself in miniature—pale and fuzz-headed, lying in a crib with that pink stuffed cat in my grip, chewing on a squeaky toy, cruising in the walker, sucking on a bottle, crawling on the linoleum in pursuit of my brother. In photo after photo, I repeated like an echo, starting small but growing, the way the belly grew and swelled. I’d come from far away, all the parts of me composed from other parts, like hand-me-downs turned into scraps and ready for the sewing. My eyes the same blue as my grandma’s mother, my hair the colour of my Tante Nite’s, my turquoise veins bright as my dad’s on the sallow skin beneath his shirtsleeves. If I really looked, I saw it—where I’d come from, who carried me here. At the table waited my place, the food laid out for me, my glass already poured full.