This One Because of the Dead

by Laure Baudot

  Suzette was as beautiful as the Victorian house her parents rented. How could she not be? She had gorgeous parents, who doted on her in the way of parents destined to have only one child. Her father dressed her in handmade clothes. Almost every time I went to their house, a new outfit that Richard had bought — a dress or knitted cap or wool coat — was lying on the entrance table.

  Now she was wearing what looked like an antique cotton gown, with hand-crocheted lace edging the sleeves. The dress was too flimsy for the winter day, and I thought of putting her in a sweater, but I didn’t. Part of me thought it would be a punishment for Jackie, if her kid caught a cold. I guess I did resent her a bit. But then I felt guilty, and I hugged Suzette to give her warmth.

  Looking back, I shudder to think of how callous I was with the baby. When my kids were young I considered each babysitter carefully, trying to peer through each young girl’s professionalism to see if there was anything menacing underneath. But really, what can you tell from someone’s face?

  In the kitchen, I sat Suzette in her high chair and gave her the whites of two hard-boiled eggs and, for dessert, raspberries that I found in the fridge. She picked up each raspberry as if she were holding a jewel. “Hmmm,” she gurgled.

  “Hmmm.”

  While she ate, I rummaged through the fridge. There were the remains of a chocolate mousse cake; I took off a jigsaw piece that no one would miss. In the door was a bottle of carrot juice. Fresh juices are supposed to detoxify the body, so I poured out a glass and drank it.

  When I turned around, the baby had stained her dress. The bib I’d put on was totally impractical, a handmade woven piece given to Jackie by her mother, and raspberry juice had leaked around it. I wiped it, but a little was left behind, like a rose blossom.

  Suzette batted her spoon and looked at me.

  “Do you want to walk around the house?” I asked. We often played a game where we moved from room to room. Whenever one of us got bored, we moved on. This activity had a double purpose, for it both entertained her and gave me more chances to browse through the house and absorb its possessions. Once, while playing the game, I found a smooth, green bronze sculpture of a man. I touched it with the tip of my tongue.

  My parents are Buddhists, though since coming to Canada they’ve practised nothing. But back then I was tantalized by the religion, albeit the Western kind. In my mind, the kind of Buddhism my friends were infatuated with had nothing to do with what my parents had left behind, and I saw the Western version — which I learned from reading Whitman — as a way of helping me cope with the boredom of my studies, of life in general. My school friends gave me books which for the most part I skimmed. The result was that I didn’t have a very thorough understanding of the subject. I thought that being Buddhist meant that I was supposed to appreciate not just everything around me in totality, but also every object’s uniqueness: the thingness of a thing. What I didn’t know until several years later, after I attended a public lecture on Zen Buddhism, is that I was also supposed to be able to let go of stuff.

  In front of the living room fireplace was a low glass table. Suzette started taking rocks out of a ceramic bowl on a side table and bringing them over to the glass table, where she lined them up in a row. She took one at a time, which was all she could manage because she was crawling. I was admiring how evenly apart she was placing the rocks, when she bumped her head on the edge of the table and started yelling.

  I picked her up. “Let me see.”

  A blue egg rose on her forehead. What on earth would I tell Richard? I thought.

  Richard loved that baby. It was Richard who changed her because apparently Jackie hated bodily fluids and tended to throw up when faced with bowel movements. It was Richard who put her to bed. And it was Richard who had showed a flustered Jackie and me how to give Suzette a bottle, after reading how from a magazine. Jackie had responded tensely to Richard’s advice. “I read too,” she’d said to me in front of Richard, and I detected a low buzz of hysteria in her tone. “But those articles bore me so much after a while!”

  What on earth would I tell Richard? After an afternoon with me, Suzette was a mess. Egg was in her hair, and her dress was ruined, and now her forehead was bruised.

  I picked her up. “Bath time.”

  Suzette shimmered like a miniature Buddha in the bath. She slapped her hands on the water and laughed when I gave an exaggerated cry.

  Once, her head slipped below the water. I have to admit that I didn’t take her out right away. By then she had become, to me, like all the other things in the house: just something to be admired. They didn’t always feel real. For a moment, I watched her. Her eyes were like pebbles at the bottom of a lake. On her head, soft tendrils of hair waved to and fro.

  Eventually, I picked her up and wrapped her in a towel. She tried to take a breath, which gurgled in her throat. When I saw that she was about to yell, I gave her pecks of kisses all over her face, which stopped her scream in its tracks.

  After I stopped babysitting for Richard and Jackie, I no longer watched films. Once, my husband took me to Éric Rohmer’s L’Amour l’après-midi, and afterward my face was wet. He said, “Well, this wasn’t supposed to make you unhappy.”

  Back when I knew Richard, watching movies was like reading issues of Vanity Fair, copies of which I kept under physics books in my bedroom closet, only to be taken out when my father was out of the house so I could admire the artfully placed necklines and hems, the sheerness of the silks. Reading magazines, watching movies: these were both a waste of time, and in our family, flitting away time was taboo. We counted hours by the work to be done in them.

  Like Richard, I was groomed to be one thing. My parents always expected me to be a doctor. I was a natural at chemistry, biology, physics, and I would eventually go to medical school. But, again like Richard, I always looked for the gaps in the path I was supposed to take.

  There is the machinery of living. Then there is everything outside life, everything involving pleasure.

  After the bath, bedtime. As usual, Suzette said nothing as I placed her on her stomach. She put her head to the side and kept her eyes open.

  The walls of her room were painted yellow, the light filtering through the cotton curtains the yellowish-grey of a late winter’s afternoon. On the wall was a single poster of some marionettes, with 15 Novembre 1990 and some other Italian words at the top. The mobile over the baby’s crib was a replica of a merry-go-round, with the horses spinning lazily to the tune of Brahms’s Lullaby. Suzette turned on her back and watched, her eyes blinking as she followed the horses twirling round and round.

  Downstairs, the phone rang. I backed up quietly, then ran down to the entranceway and answered on the fourth ring.

  “How is everything?” Richard asked.

  “Fine. She has a bit of a bruise. Bumped her head on the glass table.”

  “I’ve told Jackie we have to get a bumper pad.”

  “A bumper pad?”

  “You wrap it around the table like piping.”

  “Ah.” To belie the nervousness in my voice, because really, his daughter had nearly drowned, I said, “She loves bedtime!”

  I heard nothing.

  “The mobile,” I said. “The music.”

  “Very much,” he agreed.

  “Richard —”

  “Yes?”

  What else did I want to tell him? That the carousel above Suzette’s bed was amazing? That, along with the yellow walls and the light, it made the room and Suzette look charmed? That his whole life was fantastic? Perhaps he knew that already. For although he clearly wanted to pursue a career in film, he had never done so. He knew his family counted on him. He was responsible for his house and everything in it.

  “The food here is something,” Richard said. “I’m bringing you cake.”

  After peeking in on Suzette, who was sleeping, I went up to
the third floor, where Jackie and Richard retreated when things below got hectic. A master bedroom and an ensuite bathroom had been installed in what had been the hundred-year-old house’s attic. The bathroom was gorgeous. Heated tiles and an antique dresser gave it a blend of contemporary cool and ancient warmth. Above a clawed bathtub, a narrow glass shelf displayed perfume bottles and soap figurines of young boys playing lutes.

  I turned on the tap and poured in some lavender bubble bath. Even before the tub was full, I undressed and slipped into the water. I put foot mask cream on my feet. The lavender water lapping at my knees and my fingers rubbing my feet in small circles made it seem as if someone else were touching me.

  I stepped out of the bath and drained it, using a washcloth that was hanging on the edge of the tub to wipe off the ring of suds. I wrapped a towel under my armpits. For a moment I stood, and lavender steamed off my feet. For once, no one was trying to get into a bathroom I was in. No younger sister yelling and trying to fiddle with the lock.

  On the back of the toilet seat, a cosmetic bag was wide open, as if Jackie had been in too much of a hurry to close it properly. A mascara stick had fallen out onto the floor; I picked it up and applied it. The black leaked onto my eyelids.

  Buried in the bag was a pair of rusty eyebrow tweezers. I brought them to my face in front of the mirror and considered. Superimposed on my olive forehead, tanned from the summer sun, the tweezers looked like a tiny spear. I plucked my eyebrows until a bare patch appeared between them. A few strands of hair were left on the tweezers, but I left them there and put the tweezers back where I found them.

  On a dresser in the bedroom were three photos. One was black-and-white, of a middle-aged lady in a pillbox hat who looked like Jackie. A second was a close-up of Suzette as a newborn, cocooned in a striped hospital blanket. The last was a silver-framed photograph of Richard holding the baby. In the photo Suzette was about four months old, wearing a white crocheted blanket, the folds of which looked like an angel’s drooping wings. Richard’s earlobes emerged like water drops from under a navy knitted hat. In the background was a grainy Ferris wheel, as if the photo were taken not only from a distance, but also in the rain.

  I opened Jackie’s closet. Her clothes were few, but expensive. I tried on one of her dresses: a wool-cotton blend printed with large crimson roses. The dress was too big for my frame, which was more boyish than curvy. Still, I felt regal and pictured myself as Richard’s wife, at one of the monthly receptions that they threw for visiting diplomats. Like Jackie, I would mill about. I would stop at each group of guests and chat about the latest political scandal. I would smile to ugly and good-looking men alike.

  The week before, I thought he was getting ready to leave her.

  I’d arrived when they were preparing for one of their parties. I was always hired for these events. Even though people would often mistake me for the kitchen help, I enjoyed being there, participating in the elegance of these evenings.

  As I was hanging my coat up in the hall closet, I heard their voices from the pantry off the kitchen.

  “Where are the sugary treats?” asked Richard.

  “There are none,” said Jackie. “Just savoury.”

  “What?” The plates he put down on the serving table clattered. Then he looked up and saw me. “Hello, Catherine.”

  I wonder if it was around this time that Jackie started feeling disappointed. She had everything she wanted, and it was a glamorous life. But perhaps the political conversations bored her. Perhaps the men were polite, but distant, their wives bitter and resenting their younger female counter-parts, the spouses who fit the image of the political wife more cleanly than they did. Jackie was young, but maybe she was starting to see that she would eventually become them, and she didn’t like it. I saw her looking in the mirror once, and, even though I couldn’t see a single line on her face, she said, “Crow’s feet.”

  These days, like her, I search for signs of aging, astonished that the mirror shows nothing, that others won’t see the decline I know is happening.

  Afterwards, Richard took me up to the spare room.

  “The guests are coming any minute,” said Jackie.

  Richard nodded and ushered me up anyways. I looked apologetically at Jackie as I went, hoping to soften the blow of her husband’s carelessness.

  Instead of turning on the VCR, he handed me a cassette. “I want you to see this,” he said. “L’Amour l’après-midi. In English, it’s Love in the Afternoon. Rohmer.” He kept his hand on the cassette. “It’s about a lawyer who suffers from boredom. The afternoons are hard for him. So each day, he meets a lover.” He paused. “After lunch is the hardest time.”

  “Why doesn’t he go home to his wife?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if, for the first time, he saw who he was talking to. I was seventeen years old, with pink-tinged hair that I had coloured in a moment of rebellion. I had flawless skin. I was not good looking, but I was young. I was a clean slate.

  “Because she is part of the bourgeoisie of course,” he said, half mockingly.

  I thought for a moment. “Why don’t you make movies, like you want to?”

  “Oh no.” He turned away and started sorting the tapes. I saw that I had been right: he couldn’t give up his life as it was, the life he loved.

  In the master bedroom, there was a queen-sized bed pushed up to the wall. The sheets were embossed with Jackie’s initials. I took off Jackie’s dress and slipped between the sheets. After a minute, I put my hands under, too.

  It was as I was touching myself that Richard walked in. Once he saw me, he looked away, and then at the floor, at the nest of his wife’s dress.

  He stared out the window, from which you could see one of the maples, its branches bare save for a few patches of snow. “Please,” he said. “Get up.”

  If I got up I would be naked in front of him, so I stayed where I was.

  He backed up. “Jackie’s still at the party. She was having fun.” His voice was half pleading. I’d like to think that he was offering me an apology.

  The next week, I went to their house as usual.

  Jackie opened the door and stared at me. She had a steeliness that I hadn’t seen before. Where before she may have been intimidated by me, now she definitely was not.

  “Hello, Catherine.”

  I wondered why she wasn’t opening the door further to welcome me in, and tried to see beyond her, inside the house. Richard was nowhere in sight, though he must have been home.

  I smiled and waited for her to let me in.

  “I have bad news,” she said. “The office has cut our budget.”

  I nodded. I still thought she was going to let me in.

  “We can’t pay you anymore.”

  I stared. She waited. I heard Suzette’s babbling from the house.

  “Suzette has a cold,” she explained. “I wouldn’t want you to get sick.”

  “What about Saturday?” I asked.

  “We really can’t afford you,” she said. But then she blinked, and a tear appeared on one of her lashes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t forget Suzette’s first babysitter.”

  For six months, I was furious at Richard. And even after the anger disappeared, I was left with an aching under my ribs. The soreness was located in the place where Suzette’s stomach used to press against mine. I missed Suzette. Mostly, I missed holding her. I had not realized until then that I loved her.

  Years after I’d stopped thinking of them, my father called. Richard had left his wife, he said, and Jackie was accusing Richard of abusing their child. In order to obtain part custody of the child, Richard needed a letter from me. Ideally, I would testify that I had never seen Richard act inappropriately toward Suzette. “I don’t think Richard will win,” said my father, “but your opinion will be respected.”

  By then I was no longer preoccupied with the
thingness of things. I had abandoned this interest and instead embraced the chaos of daily life. I was in love with my first child. When she was born, I told myself that I would kill anyone who might wish to harm her.

  So I wrote the letter. I thought to myself, what can you really know about someone? But I didn’t think he was guilty.

  I wrote that, after his outings with Jackie, Richard mounted the stairs two by two to check on his daughter. That although Richard didn’t cook, he cleaned up. That I saw him, spotted with diamonds of refracted light coming through the window, holding Suzette and whispering, to her, passages from L’Amour l’après-midi.

  Luck

  When Noreen compliments Alison on her cake, Alison smiles a tiny, hardwood canoe of a smile at odds with her pudgy, optimistic face, a face that used to look on the world as if it were one long drink of water. I recognize this smile from the days before I had Archana, back when people told me that losing my pregnancies was for the best.

  “It’s from a mix,” says Alison.

  “Still,” adds Sophie, the only blonde one here and the most level-headed.

  We’re comforting Alison because although the rest of our kids have been moving around for a while, Alison’s son Malcolm can’t even turn over by himself yet. We’ve been trying to tone down talk of our babies’ milestones, but despite our best efforts and innate Canadian politeness, the subject of our babies’ progress keeps resurfacing.

  The five of us meet every two weeks at one another’s houses, to talk about baby problems, brag about our kids, and alleviate the boredom of being new parents. Today, we’re spread out on an Ikea carpet and navy-blue, plush armchairs. A cherry-wood coffee table, which has been pushed against the wall, displays a single plastic sippy cup and some primary-coloured bibs. Cups of coffee are lined up on the chimney mantelpiece. Toys are scattered on the floor. We call one of these toys — a transparent plastic bowl with a long handle — the popcorn maker. When it’s pushed, small marbles fly up inside the dome in a burst of blossoming “fireworks.”