Читать книгу One Large Coffin to Go - H. Mel Malton - Страница 8

Stress and worry do not in and of themselves harm a developing baby, but if you are not taking proper care of yourself, it could potentially be harmful. If you are so stressed you are not eating properly, then you may not be able to supply all the nutrients baby needs to grow properly.

-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide

All the retailers in Kuskawa manage their holiday decorating themes according to the principle of persistent overload, and it had been Hallowe’en at the Cedar Falls FoodMart since they took the Thanksgiving turkeys down on October 9. On the 31st, my friend Ruth Glass and I were there, buying last-minute ice and Clamato juice for Rico’s Hallowe’en party. My friend Rico Amato runs an antique and collectibles place out on the Cedar Falls highway strip mall. The party was a new thing—Rico had in years past gone in drag to a local gay-friendly resort to howl at the Hallowe’en moon, but the place had gone belly up during a booming tourist summer (go figure), so this year he was having friends over.

“That cute Brent seems to be working out,” Ruth said, referring to Rico’s new roommate. We were wandering in the bakery aisle, whose shelves were bursting with jack-o-lantern cupcakes and bat-shaped cookies. Ruth brushed away a fake spider’s web, which was dangling from the “Scary Bargains” sign and tickling her nose. She was enjoying the quiet of being back home, I think. Ruth’s band, Shepherd’s Pie, had been on tour to the Maritimes to promote their fifth CD, Clear Cut Laundromat, and she looked tired.

“Well, they’ve only been sharing the place a month, and the Royal Doulton’s still in one piece, so that’s a good sign,” I said. “You think we need more candy?” I was hefting a big bag of miniature chocolate bars that I’d scooped from a bin marked “Last Chance, Mom and Dad!” I’d already seen one harried parent-type rush towards the bin, make a grab and rush away again, like a seed-frenzied sparrow at a backyard feeder. But I wasn’t thinking of trick-or-treaters, to tell you the truth. It was just that I wasn’t drinking or smoking, so dammit, my baby was gonna have to put up with a night o’ chocolate.

Ruth shot me a sympathetic grin. “We could always eat what’s left over,” she said and tossed the bag into our cart. Then she rolled her eyes at something she’d seen over my right shoulder and muttered “Incoming.” I turned around just in time to prepare myself. It was Donna-Lou Dermott, dressed like a chicken.

“Well, hey, girls, don’t you just looove Hallowe’en?” she said. She carried a wicker basket full of eggs—her own—(well, the ones from her hens, I should say) and was apparently on her delivery route. Her chicken suit was remarkably inventive. She’d wrapped herself in some kind of quilt batting and then she must have gone at it with a pair of scissors and a hairbrush, producing a tufted, feathery kind of toga. She wore an orange, cardboard beak on a piece of elastic, like an oxygen mask, pulling it down to speak so it hung like a wattle under her chin. Her face was painted bright yellow, and she wore a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

“I just ran this up on my Singer last night,” she said, “and I can’t tell you how many compliments I’ve had today.”

“Fowl and fair,” Ruth said, which only made Donna-Lou blink a bit.

“It’s nice to see you, Ruthie. Are you still writing your songs?” Donna-Lou said.

Ruth, who hasn’t been called Ruthie since high school, smiled gently, which is more than I would have managed. Shepherd’s Pie does about as well as any other popular Canadian folk band these days, which is to say that they’ve been profiled in Saturday Night and Maclean’s magazines, have won some Juno Awards and occasionally get some airplay on the CBC. “Ruthie” was a fairly big name in certain circles, but not, I guess, in Donna-Lou’s.

“Yep, still doing my thing,” Ruth answered. “Nice to see you, too, Donna-Lou. You still in the egg business?”

“Well, I should hope so,” she said, affronted. Her feathers sort of ruffled, and I took note, thinking I would give quilt batting a try as puppet-hair. It seemed to have a kinetic life of its own. “Somebody’s gotta keep food on the table,” Donna-Lou went on. “Otis decided to seed the back field with hemp this summer past, and got a good crop, too, but the government confisticated it for some reason, just before harvest, so we didn’t make no profit at all.”

I resisted the urge to correct her grammar. “Hemp? You sure it was the legal kind?” I said.

“Well, Otis said it was, but I kinda wonder about that, now. He didn’t get arrested or nothing, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Of course not, Donna-Lou.” I hadn’t seen anything in the Laingford Gazette about it, and if it had truly been marijuana in Otis Dermott’s field, you could be sure that the local press would have given it front page priority. On the other hand, maybe it had been the real stuff, and the government had snagged it and was storing it in the same place they stored the stuff they had grown themselves, in that government-sanctioned grow operation in a mine somewhere in Manitoba. Canadian lawmakers are kind of two-faced about the issue, having legalized the drug’s use for those who require it for medicinal purposes. They set up a highly efficient grow operation underground, a kind of hi-tech hydroponics farm, and rumour had it that the stuff they produced was so powerful, they were afraid to make it available to those who needed it. My theory was that they were stockpiling the stuff against the day when they finally legalized it and would start selling it at the provincial liquor and beer stores. “A six pack of Molson’s Ex and a pack of Doobies, please.” I can hardly wait.

“So, how’s the mother-to-be?” Donna-Lou said. “I see you’re porking up a bit already. That’s good, dear, but you mustn’t let your weight get away from you, or you’ll never be able to lose it after.” She reached out a rubber gloved hand and pinched my upper arm, like she was testing bread dough. I felt a growl start deep in my throat, unbidden and menacing. Donna-Lou sensed it and backed off. Chickens are naturally wary of dogs, they say, especially Rottweilers.

“Well, anyway—here you go—and Happy Hallowe’en,” she said, handing each of us a couple of foil-wrapped chocolate eggs before scuttling away.

“Left over from Easter, I’d wager,” Ruth said, poking at hers. “Celebration overlap.”

“Hey—chocolate is chocolate,” I said, unwrapping mine with undignified speed and popping it into my mouth. “A little stale, but perfectly palatable.”

Ruth’s eyes followed the retreating form of the chicken-lady as it disappeared into the canned vegetable section. “You know, forget the witches and ghosties and ghoulies—that has got to be the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Mmm-phmn,” I said, still chewing.

Rico and Brent lived in an apartment directly over Rico’s store, the Tiquery, and it was stuffed with pieces he couldn’t bear to part with, or perhaps simply couldn’t sell. There were two ponderous Victorian sideboards in polished veneer, a fat horse hair chesterfield with carved wooden lion’s feet, and dozens of those little occasional tables designed to feature one crocheted doily, a china shepherdess and not much else. For the party, Rico had put away the china figurines, and the little tables were cluttered with bowls full of munchies instead. I found myself grazing mindlessly, like my bovine cousins, stuffing candy corn, potato chips and chocolate-covered pretzels indiscriminately into my mouth.

If you have any more sugar, my girl, you’ll be bouncing off the walls in a minute, I heard my mother’s voice whisper in my inner ear. Oddly, my maternal ghost was not talking to me but was rather having a severe word with my Sprog, my private dolphin, who probably was experiencing a bit of a sugar high. Still, as far as I could determine from what Dr. Cass Wright had told me, the fetus, at thirteen weeks, was quite incapable of doing any wall-bouncing just yet. At this stage, the child would be about three inches long and weigh almost an ounce. She would have eyelids, fingernails and toenails, and a bit of spontaneous movement, but not enough to be breaking ornaments or pulling down pots of hot water on herself. Or himself, I guess, but if the ghost of my dead mother had chosen this moment, after more than twenty years of silence, to tune in from the ether, and had chosen to address my progeny as if it were female, then that was that. I had no doubt she knew her stuff. My mother had never, in my ten years of having known her, been wrong.

“It’s a girl, I think,” I muttered to Ruth, as we mixed up a couple of caesars in the kitchen—a virgin version for me and a hefty, vodka laced one for her.

“Do you want it to be?” she asked.

“Heck no, I just want it to be healthy,” I said in a sickly sweet parody voice, the kind that you hear on television commercials for disposable diapers. Theresa Morgan was with us, decked out in full witch regalia (she belongs to a coven that meets regularly at a spot by the rapids in Cedar Falls). Theresa used to be my Aunt Susan’s shop assistant at her co-op feed store and had recently taken the place over when Susan sold it. She was in the process of turning it into a vegetarian café, which we all hoped would be successful. The feed store had run into trouble after an American chain called Agri-Am opened up an enormous franchise a couple of doors down and undercut the co-op’s prices, luring all her business away. Theresa figured that nobody was likely to open a big-box veggie café in Laingford any time soon, so this was a relatively safe venture.

She had dropped in just for a while, as she was presiding over the Samhain ritual that year. Theresa wasn’t wearing a pointy hat, I might add, and didn’t carry a broom. She was dressed in a dark, flowing robe, with interesting symbols embroidered in silver around the waistline and hem, and her neck was festooned with things on strings—crystals and wooden ankhs and a sturdy silver half-moon. I had been invited to come along, but I’m not big on rituals of any description, having had my fill of that kind of stuff as a child-Catholic.

“You sound a little sarcastic, Polly,” Theresa said, pouring half a bottle of red wine into a beaker the size of a gravy boat. Rico and Brent came in at that point to top up their martini glasses. They were both in discreet drag, the kind where you can’t really tell, unless you look very closely. It was a Hallowe’en thing, although if Kuskawa society were a little less repressed, I imagine Rico would have enjoyed indulging in his hobby on a more regular basis. Brent made a great girl (if you overlooked the prominent Adam’s apple), and his makeup was perfect.

“What are you three up to in here?” Rico said. “Doing the cauldron thing? All hail Macbeth?”

“Hey, no fillet of a fenny snake jokes, please,” Theresa said. She tended to be a little sensitive around that time of year. It’s a religious season for her, after all, and Hallmark had co-opted it pretty thoroughly, which must have been as painful for her as Rudolph and Santa can be for devout Christians. “Polly was just being cynical about motherhood, is all.”

“I’m just grumpy because my choice of recreational substances has been severely limited,” I said, and it was quite true. One of the hardest things for a dedicated drinker and smoker is suddenly to be unable to indulge for reasons of altruism. I didn’t particularly want to give these things up—that was the problem. I resented that I had to and resented that my body appeared to agree.

“Hey—I’ve got a joke for you,” I said. “Three expectant mothers are sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, right? They’re all knitting little sweaters.”

Ruth snickered. “Ruth, that’s not the punchline,” I said.

“Sorry—carry on.”

“So the first mom reaches into her purse and takes out a pill bottle and pops a pill into her mouth and then continues knitting. The other two ask what she’s just taken. ‘Oh, it’s calcium,’ the mother says. ‘I want my baby to have good, strong bones.’ ” I was doing the sweet parody voice again. Ruth and Theresa were listening, but both looked wary for some reason, and I realized I was speaking a bit loudly, so I toned it down.

“So, the second mother does the same thing—puts down her knitting, reaches into her purse, pulls out a pill bottle, takes one, and then picks up the knitting again. Again, the other two ask her what she’s taking. ‘Oh, it’s iron,’ the woman says. ‘I want my baby to have strong, healthy blood.’

“Then the third mother puts down her knitting, right? She reaches into her purse and pulls out a bottle and takes a pill and puts it back and picks up her knitting again. ‘What are you taking?’ the other two ask. ‘Oh, it’s thalidomide,’ the mom says. ‘You see, I can’t knit arms.’ ”

There was a nasty little silence. Ruth and Theresa looked at each other and then back at me. Brent made a small snorting noise and left the room. Rico muttered “uh-oh” and followed him out, as if there were some sort of imminent girl-scene about to happen, and he didn’t want to witness it.

“That is such bad karma, I can’t even tell you,” Theresa said, finally.

“It’s only a joke, Terry. I think it’s funny,” I said.

“Never mind that it’s incredibly sick,” Theresa said, “but to hear it come out of your mouth, Polly—that’s really disturbing.”

“It is kind of in bad taste,” Ruth said.

“Oh, jeez, you guys,” I said. “If I wasn’t pregnant, you’d have howled. Of course, it’s in bad taste. The best jokes usually are. And I tell politically incorrect jokes all the time, remember? This is me, here. Me. You’re supposed to be able to bend the rules among friends, and that’s what we’ve always done. Why is everybody treating me like a badly behaved teenager all of a sudden?” And then, of course, I burst into tears. It must have been the chocolate.

“Sometimes I wonder if you lie awake at night, thinking up ways to piss me off,” Becker said, three days later. He had returned from Calgary and was up at the cabin for what I was hoping would be an intimate little dinner, just the two of us. I was preparing the kind of food one feeds to a person whom one wants to pamper. I felt guilty about having trampled all over his feelings by having waited so long to tell him about the baby. I felt bad about my stubborn intention of staying in the cabin. I hadn’t had a chance to show my sympathy about his father’s death—and I wanted to make him feel loved and appreciated. We may have been in disagreement about a few things, but I did care about him and about our relationship. I had made a splendid beef stroganoff, with sautéed baby vegetables and crusty homemade bread. To top it off, there was an apple pie to die for. I can be quite the Suzie Homemaker when I put my mind to it.

I had been nesting, in my own modest way, and as well as wanting to soothe Becker’s feelings, I wanted to persuade him that my home was a perfectly reasonable place to care for a newborn. It was a place in which I could whip up a wonderful meal. A cozy, homey cabin that may have lacked electricity and running water, but was still a haven of peace and domestic delight.

I had insulated the roof, for one thing, in a burst of energy following the news about the Canterbury Conference. There was a small crawl space between the ceiling of the cabin and the roof, which had previously been filled with a mixture of sawdust and mouse droppings. I’d cleaned it out and replaced it with RU2000 pink insulation—not a huge job, really, and Eddie had helped. I was hyper-aware of the fact that I appeared to be doing more physical activity than usual, the kind that normal people would consider inappropriate for a pregnant lady, but I didn’t regard it as a deliberate effort to piss anybody off. It was just that I was not interested in being treated like a china doll and wanted to remain as independent as possible, for as long as possible. Aunt Susan had uttered dire warnings about climbing up the ladder to get into the crawl space under the eaves, the kind of warnings that, if you heeded them, would render you completely useless, lying in bed and shivering with fright, not risking so much as a paper cut, in case it harmed the baby. So, against all advice, I’d insulated the roof, and the difference it made in terms of cabin-coziness was significant. I wanted Becker to take note of it and approve. I wanted him to change his mind. I needn’t have bothered.

“There’s still a small matter of hauling wood inside and keeping the stove going,” he said. “What happens if the fire goes out during the night, and it’s thirty below outside?”

“The baby will be sleeping with me,” I said. “It’s not as if it’s going to be stashed in a crib on the porch, Becker.”

“What if you roll over in the night and squish it?” Oh, please. I knew then that we were diametrically opposed in terms of the most basic child-rearing theories, and we probably always would be. I hauled out my binder full of the notes I’d taken over the past while—the results of my “baby research” at the library, some downloaded off the net, some taken from Dr. Spock, others from more modern sources. I flipped to the stuff relating to studies about the benefits of infants sleeping with their parents and read out a paragraph or two. It didn’t help much. The major problem was that he had experience already, and I didn’t. Therefore, every opinion he held carried more weight with him than any theory I’d found elsewhere.

“Anyway, Mark, the baby’s not due till the end of April. It’s hardly likely that we’ll have thirty below temperatures that late in the year.” And on and on it went.

What complicated the evening’s discourse was the fact that I was, as I had promised, babysitting Eddie’s automatic baby. I hadn’t planned it that way; in fact, I had forgotten all about it and invited Becker over with the assumption that it would be just me and him, and the dogs, of course. Eddie had sprung it on me that afternoon, lugging the carrier-seat it came with, plus a list of instructions and a diaper bag all the way up the hill, where I had been in the planning stages of a new puppet.

“Polly—hi,” he had called in a singsong voice which I knew meant a favour was about to be asked. He had a wrestling tournament that night, he said, and I had no reason to disbelieve him. Eddie was doing well with his wrestling, getting advice and coaching from Constable Earlie Morrison, Becker’s partner. Earlie had been a pro wrestler once upon a time and was now a kind of big brother to him. A wrestling tournament, with all its out-of-town testosterone blown in on a visit, would not be a wise milieu for a baby doll, however significant the Family Studies unit might be on Eddie’s educational vector. I’d said I would look after the creature for the evening, provided he came and picked it up again after he got home.

The instructions were simple. If the doll cried, I was to pick it up and walk with it. If it was wet (it had some sort of computerized pee-release inside its belly, apparently), I was to change it, and at certain times I was to give it a bottle of formula. The computer would be able to analyze what was put inside it—there was a powdered mixture of stuff I was supposed to prepare and administer four times throughout the evening. Eddie told me that some of the guys had fed the baby beer. The computer took note of the fact, and the Family Studies teacher had not been amused.

“No weird stuff, okay, Polly?” Eddie said, quite seriously. “I need this credit to graduate.”

“I promise I won’t feed your baby beer,” I’d said.

“And be careful when you pick it up—support its head, I mean. My buddy Grant got nailed for child abuse that way.”

“I promise I won’t shake it senseless,” I’d said. However, the creature proved itself to have rotten timing, and later in the evening I could have shaken its little microchips loose, if my temper had won.

Needless to say, Becker was not thrilled when I told him about my plans to travel to the U.K. in February to go to the conference. In fact, he went kind of postal.

Most of his distress, it appeared, came from the fact that I was preparing to board an airplane. Becker had received a new assignment upon his return from Calgary, a kind of secondment from his regular duties with the OPP, and though he was vague and mysterious about the details, I gathered it had something to do with airport security. The September 11 th terrorist attacks were still fresh in everyone’s minds, and Becker wasn’t the only person who was voicing a mistrust of air travel. I knew that the airlines were reeling with the shock of the thing and that the numbers of people flying anywhere at all were alarmingly low. Everybody knew that governments worldwide were stepping up airport security measures in the wake of the tragedy, and Becker apparently had some background in the field, previous to his career as a provincial police officer, which led to his new assignment. “Research and Development”, he called it, funded by the Canadian government. He wouldn’t say much more than that.

“I know about these things, Polly,” he said. “You have no idea how easy it is for people to board an airplane with weapons, explosives, you name it. You couldn’t pay me to board a plane at the moment, and I’m sure as hell not going to let you do it either. Especially when you’re carrying my baby.” My Baby. Not Our Baby. Sigh.

“But if you’re working to improve security, you’d think that you, of all people, would have more confidence in the whole thing than the average person, not less.”

“That shows how much you know,” he said. “You’re not going, Polly.”

“Wanna bet?”

It was at that point, of course, that the wretched automatic baby started howling. I’d stashed it in the bedroom at the back, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t have to explain it to Becker, who, I knew, would not regard it with delight.

“What the fuck is that?” he said. I explained as succinctly as I could as I went to get it. It would not shut up. Becker’s face darkened. “You need this?” he said. “Like you want to practice dealing with a screaming baby? Polly, I have been there—I know what this is like. I don’t need reminding.”

“I don’t have this thing here to remind you of anything,” I said. “This is a favour for Eddie.”

“And how does it feel?” he said. He was looking at me with profound curiosity.

“You just have to walk it,” I said. “It will stop soon.” It didn’t. So I went through the drill, referring to the printed instructions the thing had come with. I changed it. It still screamed. I heated up some water on the propane stove and mixed up its formula and tested it for temperature against my wrist the way the pamphlet said and stuck the bottle into the pursed, plastic mouth, and it was only then that the horrible recorded shrieks were silenced.

“You know, you could have taken the battery out,” Becker said sardonically. He had been watching me with an odd smile on his face, and he hadn’t offered to help. Not that there was much he could have done, I suppose, but he could have offered to hold it while I was making its formula stuff. It shrieked louder if you put it down. But no—he just sat there with his arms crossed, watching me.

“If I’d done that, Eddie would flunk his course,” I said. “I told him I’d look after it.”

“Your grip on reality appears to be getting loose,” Becker said. “Here you are, playing baby dolls in a shack in the bush, and meanwhile, there’s a real baby growing inside you, and you’re planning to go on a trip to God knows where, and once again, all you’re thinking of is yourself and nobody else.”

From that point on, the conversation degenerated into a childish shouting match that did neither of us much credit. If the baby had been out and about at that point, instead of being safely wrapped up in its placential duvet, I think we might have torn the poor thing to pieces, each tugging at a limb like toddlers fighting over a toy. While we were yelling at each other, I recalled that old King Solomon story, the one about the mothers fighting over a baby before King Solly suggests that it be chopped in half to let each person have a bit. If I had been there, I’m not sure that even then I’d have been willing to let go of my share.

Luckily, we had reached the dessert stage by that point, so I can’t say that dinner was ruined, although my stomach was distinctly unsettled by the time he stomped out, leaving half his apple pie uneaten on the plate. It didn’t go to waste, though. Moments later, I found myself finishing it off—after all, I was eating for two.

After Becker had gone, I found Lug-nut and Rosie curled up together on the bed in the lean-to bedroom, their ears laid back and their eyes wide, tails thumping in that “it wasn’t my fault” kind of way. I telescoped forward to a day when the kid would be present in body as well as spirit, a hearing, thinking person whose parents had just been shouting at each other. Becker and I argued a lot, there was no doubt about it, and while we always made up at some point afterwards, the process of disagreement was rarely conducted in a mature fashion. I knew how damaging that kind of atmosphere could be to a child—how small people naturally assume that the tempests raging in the household are of their own making, how they slip into the self-assigned role of scapegoat, of perpetrator. Heck, I read the newspapers, I know how it happens. Becker and I didn’t need to come to blows in order for the climate between us to reach the level designated “emotionally traumatic” by the authorities. Abusive, even. I curled up on the bed beside the dogs and stroked their fuzzy heads and spoke soothing words to them.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay, it didn’t have anything to do with you.” Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t say the same thing to the little fetus currently doing multiple-cell gymnastics in my belly. I placed my hand over the general area—which at thirteen weeks was already beginning to swell, a pleasant tightening, as if the muscles were binding together like some kind of protective armour. The argument I’d just had with Becker had everything to do with the baby—or at least we wouldn’t have had such a nasty one if the baby wasn’t a fact. If I married him, was that likely to change, or would we still grapple with control issues at every turn, bickering like children over every diaper change, every new tooth, every aspect of the process? If I were to capitulate and do what Becker wanted, tie the knot and move in with him, ditch the conference and concentrate on motherhood to the exclusion of all else, including my work and my independence, would that guarantee a healthy, well-adjusted child? Would the child’s mother then become a faceless wife, an acquiescent brood mare? Okay—I know that those are extreme notions, and quite unfair to Becker, but I’m only telling you what I was thinking. Chalk it up to hormones. The fact is that while I had decided to have the baby, I was determined to have it on my own terms, and my fight with Becker had finally clued me in to the hard fact that I couldn’t do the motherhood thing entirely by myself. There was one all-important factor that had only just registered. The baby itself. Himself? Herself? Whatever—no woman is an island. At least, no pregnant woman is. She’s an archipelago.

Whatever decisions I made in the next seven months had to be made with the understanding that for the next twenty years or so, my choices would be affecting two of us. Three, perhaps, if I loosened my hold on the reins enough to let the child’s father have a vote, but those choices could no longer affect just one person only. This hit me with such profound force that it took my breath away.

I patted my belly. “Sorry about all that,” I said to it. “I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, how ’bout another piece of pie?”

Before it could answer one way or another, the automatic baby, forgotten in the corner, started howling again. Sibling rivalry is a terrible thing.