Not a Fairytale

by Shaida Kazie Ali

  The following December they offer to send me on a crash course in teaching, but by then I have had enough of teaching, forever. Besides which, Jimmy has sold the family business for a huge profit and has embarked on a new computer venture involving the Internet. He’s suggested we move to the US for a while, says it’s better for his business, and I say, “Let’s go to Florida,” because I’m reading a novel set in Miami and the characters are always sweating, even in winter. Jimmy says Florida’s not the ideal American city for the business, but I tell him he can travel. I’m beginning to think that a long-distance relationship can only enhance one’s marriage – all those delectable reunions.

  Lessons

  We had to leave; she wouldn’t stop teaching us things. First it was potty-training, then bathing daily, then table manners. She made us chew a hundred times before swallowing; my middle sister couldn’t even count past seven. Next we had to ask for the slop politely instead of grunting or swearing, as my littlest sister was fond of doing. She forced forks into our trotters and we were only allowed to eat what we could get on to the fork. We began to lose weight: we were starving!

  She told us we should keep ourselves as clean and pretty as Cinderella. I know my limitations: I’m a pig, and I will never be beautiful. She told us we should be like Beauty with her head in a book all the time. She forced us to learn to read and write. I studied, and I coped, but it was difficult for my siblings, and I knew I had to take charge before things got worse for them. What was wrong with our mother? Why did she so care about what the other creatures thought of us?

  I packed up our possessions, mostly hand-me-downs, and my sisters trotted off after me. She’d left us no choice. We travelled far and wide, foraging for food in the forest or begging at castle doors. At night we slept in fields, my sisters piling their bodies on top of mine, making it impossible for me to breathe freely. There were men with straw and sticks who agreed to build us houses for free, but we were reluctant to accept their offers: they seemed too good to be true.

  Then one day we saw a sign in the window of a brick building. HELP WANTED. ENQUIRE WITHIN. He had heavy dark fur, and yellow eyes as hard as pebbles.

  My baby sister asked, “Don’t you eat pigs?”

  “No,” he said, “I’m Muslim.”

  He said that provided we could cook and keep the business clean, he would be happy to employ us all. We could live in one of the storerooms out back. We said we’d accept on a trial basis, and he agreed.

  He was often away (he never told us what he did), but the business flourished under our care. My middle sister cooked, my baby sister served the customers, and I looked after the books. Whenever he returned, he would praise our management skills. After a few years he gave us one of the restaurants in his new franchise and helped us to buy a home, where we lived happily ever after. Which goes to show: you can’t believe all the gossip you hear.

  Gated Living

  WE’VE BEEN IN SOUTH FLORIDA FOR A MONTH and I’m delighted with the weather and the place so far. Except when it comes to driving on the right-hand side of the road.

  Stay right. I can’t get the hang of this, dear God. The car seats nine people, designed for a huge family, but Jimmy thought it was the safest vehicle on the road. At least it’s automatic. And the windows are tinted for protection against the sun, so people can’t see me muttering to myself to stay right.

  Why did I decide to come out this early? I’m stuck in the early-morning high-school traffic, wondering why the hell these people give their sixteen-year-old children cars. Are they mad? No, just American.

  There’s a cop car ahead. I must try to look like I know what I’m doing. I do know what I’m doing; I just don’t know how to drive on the wrong side of the road. The air conditioner is on high, but I am drenched in sweat. Why am I afraid? This is simply a drive around the area, a practice run.

  We live in a neighbourhood of forty houses, all curved around a man-made lake so that the back yard of each opens up onto the water. Ours is a single-storey; Ma would be unimpressed. She thinks you’ve only arrived if you live in a house with stairs. Our houses are perfect and clean, with only slight variations in the colour schemes. We have identical mail boxes, at a cost of $350 each. In our front gardens there are pretty mini-palm trees. They arrive fully grown, automatic additions like the grass and the garage doors. We subscribe to the same gardening service and the same pool-cleaning service.

  Our neighbours are all white; I’m the only brown-skinned person around who isn’t an employee. I’m thinking of learning Spanish, because it’s becoming more and more embarrassing for me not to know it. Everyone thinks I’m playing white when I say, “No Spanish, just English. Inglés.” I’ve learnt to nod knowingly as the woman at the bakery chats to me in Spanish. I just point out the cookies I want and smile. She could be discussing her last operation – the blood, the gallstones in a jar – or her indulgence in bestiality, and all I do is smile and point and nod.

  Sometimes I walk around the neighbourhood, wave to the black security guard at the entrance to the neighbourhood. No one can get in or out without signing in, without going past him, but I can’t remember his name. There are security cameras lining the roads, for our protection. In the summer mornings, everything is still, quiet. It feels like I am on the set of a movie, without any dialogue.

  Pregnancy Cravings

  VISITING THE MAGIC KINGDOM, I BECOME A CHILD AGAIN, stepping into the life-size covers of my fairytale books. But something is missing. I find myself wishing I could share these Disney visits with a child. My child.

  I try to ignore the cliché of the ticking biological clock and redirect my energies into a postgraduate degree (the working title for my dissertation is “Gold is the Fairest of All: Colour and Materialism in Fairytales”), but nothing will curb my yearning for a baby. The problem is that I can’t get pregnant. The white-coated doctors in my adopted land of sour milk and stolen honey are still trying to figure out what’s wrong.

  Jimmy says we could always adopt, and tells me, “Don’t worry babe, I’ll be your baby forever.” Are all men idiots? I don’t want Jimmy to be my baby, I don’t want to call him my precious pumpkin pie, my snoopy, my cookie or, worse, Daddy, like those creepy middle-aged women with stiff hair who talk to their child-substitute poodles in little-girl voices and ask them to bring Daddy’s slippers.

  My life has become a battle, an internal struggle. I’m helping Jimmy with his tax – I have a flair for numbers; I think it’s got to do with having grown up in a babbie shop. (In fact, I strongly recommend that school-going children should be sent to work in a babbie shop: they’d never have problems with their multiplication timetables or general arithmetic, especially if they had a father like mine, who, if you messed up the change, would give you a fast klap to the head.) But all I can think about while I’m calculating Jimmy’s returns is being pregnant. Wearing multicoloured tents and gaining a hundred kilos. I want a baby!

  Jimmy does his best. He indulges in solitary pleasure in the bathroom, fantasising about me, he says, and I keep his tadpoles warm between my thighs while we drive to the hospital. They count his offerings and tell us Jimmy’s boys are too damned slow, and that there are too few of them.

  This starts us off on a round of endless hospital visits, with Jimmy squirting his DNA into test tube after test tube, and me, legs in stirrups, the undignified recipient of his lab-cleansed sperm. The romance of it all makes me want to weep.

  What a twist of fate. We’d always been so keen on not getting pregnant, arming ourselves with pills and rubber and implants, and now, sans contraception, nothing is happening! Always, regular as clockwork, blood on the toilet seat, every full moon for a year. Jimmy says it’s time to move on, it’s time to adopt, but it doesn’t feel right yet.

  One night Jimmy’s up watching American football, surely the most mind-numbing of all the dull sports men have developed, and I’m reading a book on spells – research – when it hits me.

  Six w
eeks later, I’m pregnant. Jimmy says there’s no way it was some flaky spell; it’s the trips to the hospital that have paid off. But I know better.

  Spell for a Baby Girl

  1 ovulation kit

  1 gold candle

  1 red candle

  1 silver candle

  ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  1 red rose in full bloom with thorns matches

  Once you have read and followed the directions on the ovulation kit, and you know it is your most fertile time, prepare each candle carefully. Massage the oil gently into each candle from base to wick.

  Next, arrange the three candles in a triangle. The top should be the red candle, the bottom left silver, and the bottom right gold. Prick your thumb with the thorn of the rose and squeeze three drops of blood onto the petals. Place the rose in the centre of the candle triangle.

  Chant the following words: “Sweet as rose may be, powerful as thorn, a healthy baby girl from me shall be born.” Picture your child’s spirit rising to meet your body, like the rose germinating in the earth’s rich soil before unfolding to the sky. When you are ready, snuff out the candles and place the rose under your mattress before making love. Remember to remove the rose the next day, because sleeping on a withered flower will make you grow old before your time.

  Manifestation

  I’M TWENTY-SIX WEEKS PREGNANT AND ALL I DO IS vomit and think of Ma and Salena and home, until I find myself packing my bags and booking a ticket to Cape Town at 3 am one humid morning.

  Jimmy thinks it’s sweet. I want to be near my mommy for the birth of my daughter. But I know it doesn’t make sense, that it’s purely hormonal. Ma only likes me now because I live far away from her and have a wealthy white husband. And Ma’s useless in a crisis. She says she can’t stand the sight of blood. I find this highly suspect. Any woman who says “I faint at the sight of blood” is talking utter crap. I mean, what about all that blood that flows out of your body every month for about forty years?

  Of course it makes sense for me to be near Salena. She knows all about babies, and she’s a natural-born mother. Ma made her look after me when she was barely ten. I often speak to Salena on the phone before I fall asleep, as her day is dawning. After these talks my dreams are filled with our imagined adventures together. I wonder if we would have been as close if I had stayed in Cape Town. Maybe the distance has forged a stronger friendship.

  Jimmy drops me off at the airport and we have a long lingering goodbye. We’ll be apart for six weeks, and I’m ambivalent about the absence. Part of me wants him to suffer the thrills of my half-hourly trips to the toilet, and another part of me is delighted to be free of his endless talk of foetal development. If he brings home another baby magazine with a happy smiling pregnant woman on the cover I may have to commit mariticide.

  As the plane takes off, the sun lights up the cabin, warming it. I feel like a biscuit in an oven, browning to perfection. A gingerbread girl. Is this what my baby feels like, cooking away inside of me? Suddenly the nausea that was supposed to stop at twelve weeks, according to those cheerful magazines, hits me. OH MY GOD. I vomit in my sick bag, and then in the bag of the unfortunate soul next to me, and finally I have used up all the bags in my row and the flight attendants have stopped smiling at me. I sleep for a while, until I’m woken up by the smell of airline food and I promptly throw up into the closest thing, my skirt.

  Then I’m in Cape Town, so jet-lagged and stinky that I barely recognise myself, let alone Salena, who has come with Ma to fetch me. I’m going to stay with her in her new home in Pinelands, near the hospital. It’s a good distance from Ma’s new Claremont townhouse. I’m not completely hormonally deranged. Me and Ma under one roof? Not a chance. We can chat on the phone.

  I sleep for two nights and days, waking up intermittently to pee and drink water and then, five minutes later, to throw it up. Salena’s guest toilet is really clean. Even under the brim. Her toilet could star in one of those advertisements for toilet cleaners – the “After” version.

  Salena looks different, and I’m picking up vibes between her and Zain. I start to wonder if I should rather have stayed in a hotel.

  Two weeks after my arrival in Cape Town, I begin to get excruciating back pains. I don’t want to bother Salena, so I haul myself off to the obstetrician she’s arranged for me. The OB-GYN looks about eleven years old and speaks with a heavy Afrikaans accent. She tells me that my back pain, excruciating as it is, is normal, and once she establishes it’s my first pregnancy, I am dismissed as being a hysterical first-time mommy. She tells me to go for physiotherapy.

  So, with my tail between my legs, I slink back to Salena’s. The pain terrorises me all night long. The next morning, after a handful of Panados, I make the appointment with the physiotherapist. Salena arranges for a neighbour to take me there, and the physiotherapist woman tells me I’d know if I was in labour. She proceeds to attach wires to my body, and while I think she plans on electrocuting me, it seems she’s only going to give me electrical jolts. They don’t work. I try to survive that night by rubbing my lower back against the wall and taking more Panado’s. Neither helps. In the middle of the night, Salena and an elderly Peanut Butter keep me company. Salena makes me toast and tea, and we play Snakes & Ladders. I lose, even though I cheat.

  The pain is intolerable, and this time Salena calls an ambulance. I feel like a fraud. I keep telling her the doctor said I was a melodramatic first-time mother, and that I should just grin and bear it. But Salena will hear none of it.

  I am pushed into an examination room by the ambulance attendant and Salena goes into the waiting room. A nurse begins to examine me, and I am hooked up to a machine. This one spews out paper and beeps contentedly. The nurse is wearing a pale green uniform, and she smiles all the time. I like her. She says, “Mommy, you’re definitely in labour.”

  My heart stops. I know, because I can’t hear the machine beeping.

  “Okay,” I agree, albeit reluctantly. “Bring on the drugs.”

  “You’re nine centimetres dilated,” she tells me. “Just one more centimetre and baby will be ready. It’s too late for drugs.” Now there’s something Jimmy’s pregnancy magazines never mentioned – I thought it was never too late for drugs.

  The nurse is serene and explains the procedure to me with gentle words. She stands on my left, cradles my head with her right hand, and cups my left leg under my knee with her left arm. But the baby, who has been letting me know for two weeks that she wants to be born, is pissed off. The monitors start beeping angrily. Baby’s cord is around her neck. A doctor I have never seen before arrives. He chats to me but I can’t hear a word. I see a silvery needle in his hand and notice his manicured nails. Then, casually, like he’s using kitchen scissors to cut the skin off a breast of chicken, he slices my vagina open. My brain reminds me that Jimmy’s magazines called this an episiotomy. What a lyrical word for such an ugly deed. Out pops my child, and they slip her into my left armpit where she nestles in a spot that appears to have been designed with her in mind.

  She looks at me vaguely and then, with more interest, at the play of light and shadow on the ceiling made by the cars driving past the window. She makes soundless noises with her mouth. She has no eyebrows, like Ma. Salena comes in, kisses my wet cheeks and whispers the azan in my daughter’s right ear, before the nurse whisks her away. For a moment it feels like they have taken my left arm too.

  I phone Jimmy as he’s sitting down to a supper of home-delivered pizza, my favourite pregnancy meal. The line’s bad, our voices echo and bounce against each other. But when he finally understands, his near-silent sniffs are more valuable to me than the most extravagant of his gifts.

  Later I get to see her, my baby, Nazma, my star-child. She has a tube up her nose, other tubes are hooked up to her, machines are beeping, but she sleeps as if she invented the act. I cannot believe that outside of this room, this ward, this hospital, there is a spinning earth, with all its joys and horrors, because my world lies
in an incubator.

  Dreams of Sleep

  I FANTASISE ABOUT SLEEP THE WAY MEN ARE SUPPOSED to think about sex all the time. I crave a night of uninterrupted sleep the way I craved chocolate before my period when I was a teenager. I long for my body to be mine, not to wake up ten times a night to feel little demanding hands clawing at my breasts for sustenance.

  Since Nazma’s birth I can’t remember sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time. She’s supposed to be sleeping through the night, according to her doctor and the baby magazines Jimmy still buys. But she doesn’t read the magazines so she doesn’t know she’s falling short of her milestones. Often she screeches hysterically, ear-piercingly, for what seems to be no particular reason. She’s not hungry, she’s not wet, she’s not cold. There is no obvious source to her despair.

  Sometimes I dance with her, sometimes I coo lullabies. Sometimes I fantasise about placing a soft feathery pillow over her dewy skin, her eyes like open flowers, and just holding it there until she sleeps for a hundred years.

  I’m an unnatural mother. I’ve never heard other moms wishing their children away. Maybe I’m becoming Ma.

  When I’m close to despair I break into Jimmy’s snores and he is instantly alert and inexplicably upbeat. He hugs her close to his chest and strolls around the room like he was born to the task. If only he could lactate. I leave them to it and find the dark smoothness of the couch and the comforting undemanding bodies of my cats Lily and Raven. All too soon it is time for another feed, and I force my gritty eyes as far open as they can go.