Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  Meg moved towards Treasure, but before she had taken more than a few steps, Meg was found and claimed by Kathy of the formidable elbows, and Treasure had partnered with Angie.

  ‘Standing face to face, and take hold of each other by the forearms,’ the teacher said. ‘Look into your partner’s beautiful face and smile. That’s it. Now bend your knees and lean backwards. Trust your partner to support you as you feel that stretch coming into your legs. We’re going to need strong legs, ladies. Standing up can be a wonderful position for birthing.’

  Meg and Kathy took each other’s weight and eased into a crouch, bellies sliding down between their solidly planted thighs. Every action has an opposite and equal reaction, Meg thought, grateful now that it was Kathy and not Treasure who had the task of holding her by the forearms.

  ‘By now, you’ll feel some discomfort in your legs,’ the teacher said. ‘But all you need to do is take your mind away from that. There’s no need to get involved. Instead, I want you to focus on your inner sunflower. It’s very bright, very yellow. And it will be there to smile at you, all the way through your labour, if only you care to look for it.’

  This was an easy exercise for Meg. She liked sunflowers and the pain in her legs, if she was truthful, was not particularly bad.

  ‘So, now we’re saying thank you to our partners, and moving back into the circle. Thank you, ladies. I think we all know each other well enough now, don’t we, to have a little fun together? So, let’s all take our right hand and place it down here on the pubic bone, like so.’

  The teacher touched herself firmly between the legs, her womanly backside thrusting out behind her as she shaped her body into a half-squat. Her students made their bodies into timid copies.

  ‘And the left hand goes here, right down here, at the tailbone. Now, experiment with how it feels as you make a scooping movement with your pelvis. Stick your bum right out. That’s it. Like a big baboon bum. Now rotate forwards, like so. Bum out, scoop forwards. And again. Lovely.’

  Meg felt the class split itself in two. There were those who didn’t care that they looked ridiculous, and those like her who wished they didn’t care, but couldn’t help it. Meg glanced, as had become her habit, at Treasure. But Treasure was not, for the moment, being a baboon. Her hair had come loose and she was twisting its length, bundling it into an exquisitely messy knot at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Now, keeping up the scooping, we’re going to take a walk,’ the teacher said. ‘I call this the camel walk. Let’s go clockwise, shall we? Scoop. Scoop. That’s it! Beautiful! Don’t bump into each other, camels!’

  Meg wished she were one of the uninhibited camels humping their way in ungainly circles around the room, but all she could do was draw in the limits of her peripheral vision and try to console herself with the idea that nobody else was looking at her, just as she was looking at nobody else. This didn’t help very much. Her cheeks burned. By the time she was halfway through the first lap, the only thing standing between Meg and conscientious objection was the certain knowledge it was actually less mortifying just to get on with the business of being a camel than it was to draw attention to herself by stopping.

  Camel-wise, Meg approached the window side of the room, aware of the way her heavy footfalls caused little tremors in the floorboards beneath the carpet. The room was fairly dark and the window small but it was catching in full the morning sun, making a bright patch in Meg’s narrowed field of vision. She lurched towards the window, the sun so dazzling that it took a moment for Meg to register the form of a slender woman, standing, leaning up against the wall beside the window, the sole of one bare foot resting against the calf of her other leg.

  Was this allowed? Meg looked around for the teacher and found her, camel-walking in cheerful clockwise circles, swinging her pelvis on the fulcra of her thigh bones and Meg suspected that she was deliberately not noticing Treasure standing by the window. Without exactly deciding to, Meg took matters into her own hands.

  ‘Not joining us?’ she asked, smiling what she hoped was an inclusive smile.

  You might almost have said that Treasure shook her head, but she didn’t exactly: by way of a barely perceptible movement of her eyes and her neck, she made a tiny gesture of disinclination. And Meg, quite unreasonably, she knew, felt like slapping her flawless face.

  Over coffee, with sudden inspiration, Cathie said, ‘Oh, my God. Maybe she’s a surrogate? The way she dresses, there’s no shortage of money.’

  ‘No,’ said Meg. ‘I thought of that.’

  ‘You’re right. Too princessy,’ Cathie said. ‘I’d love to see her in labour. It’s not like you can just wander over to the window to have a rest from that.’

  Jen scooped a spoonful of soy milk froth off the top of her hot chocolate and put it in her mouth. Of the three of them, Jen was furthest along in her pregnancy and, when Meg thought of Jen’s future, she imagined kids with runny noses who were perpetually on homeopathic drops of some kind.

  Jen was possessed of the mild hypochondria that in Meg’s experience often went along with being a nurse. There was frequently a test result pending, or special exercises to be done. Jen was equally interested in other people’s complaints, though. To Meg she had recommended any number of Bach flower remedies, chiropractors and Bowen therapists, and Meg sometimes wondered what was wrong with her because she never really felt she needed anything more than a Panadol and an early night. Meg had Jen pegged as one of those gentle sing-song mothers: endlessly sympathetic, but all whispery and defeated in the face of a tantrum.

  What about herself, then? It was only fair, now, that Meg have a deprecating thought about herself, just to even things up. Well, she’d have a boy. That much was certain. Surely that’s what these walloping great hips were for: pushing out strapping, unexceptional, but reasonably compliant boys who would heft wheelbarrows around the nursery and help stack the back row of a rugby team. And what kind of mother would she be? She tried to summon a fault. Lazy? No, not really. Grumpy? Rarely. Boring? Yes, that was most likely it. She’d probably have boys with natures in the same undemonstrative ball park as Justin’s and she’d be the sort to insist on them kissing her goodbye when they were off to do things more interesting than be with her, and they’d do it, too, but only because they felt they should.

  ‘A one-night stand then?’ Cathie said. ‘Accidents can happen to anybody.’

  The waiter passed with a tray of drinks for another table and the rich smell of coffee made Meg’s lemon and ginger tea taste even more like the overpriced hot water that it was. Jen, still with the spoon in her mouth, said nothing.

  ‘But if it was just that, an accident, why wouldn’t she have an abortion?’ Meg said.

  ‘Maybe she’s Catholic.’

  Jen was saying nothing, but it was killing her and eventually Cathie noticed. Cathie leaned back in her chair and smiled. ‘Really?’ she said.

  The part of the hospital in which Jen worked was fertility.

  In some kind of put-on accent, Jen said, ‘I say nothing.’

  Cathie gave a little laugh but Meg was confused.

  ‘She’s a patient of Jen’s,’ Cathie explained,

  ‘Is she?’ Meg asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you that. I could lose my job.’

  ‘What are we talking here?’ said Cathie. ‘Artificial insemination? From someone she knows?’

  Sweeping back past them with an empty tray, the waiter asked, ‘Can I get you ladies anything else?’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ said Jen, shaking her head.

  ‘You’re saying donor sperm, then? The off-the-shelf stuff?’ Cathie asked.

  ‘Was I talking to you?’ said Jen.

  Meg only stared. Then she blinked, and Treasure’s colleague and her muscle-shirted youth, along with the poet and his guitar, fell away. If Treasure was Meg’s cardboard doll, then she was back to wearing nothing more than the white pants and singlet she came with. Meg had tried pinning to her every single thing she could imagine: lonelin
ess, desperation, bereavement. None felt right. The only thing she had almost managed to make stick was a vision of Treasure’s home: an apartment, small and somewhat gloomy, with nothing but a cactus on the kitchen windowsill and perhaps a tomato plant on the balcony if you were lucky.

  Spring turned to summer, and lettuce sales continued to flourish. Since the profit margin was so high, Justin asked Meg to keep up a rolling planting schedule, plucking out the older lettuces when they began to look shabby and settling fresh specimens into their places. Meg sent away for lettuce seed of yet more different kinds: varieties that you could sell to younger gardeners because they were old and authentic, and ones that you could sell to older gardeners because they were new and improved.

  Meg’s belly grew firmer and rounder, developing an unambiguous shape that made it quite safe for comment. Soon there was something cartoonish about its contours, especially from side-on; in the mirror in her nursery uniform, she had become Mr Greedy made green. She had read all about how people had the idea pregnant women were public property, and she knew she was supposed to feel offended and invaded when strangers reached out to touch her on the stomach, but the truth was that she quite liked it. It was only the same as people wanting to pat dogs in the street because the dogs in the street reminded them of the dogs they had at home, or because they just really liked dogs. Meg couldn’t see the harm in it really. Maybe there was some way in which she was strange, or wrong—perhaps she hadn’t read as far as the part that explained why—but when an elderly man set his bottle of citrus food down on the nursery counter, shaped his crooked hands to her belly and whispered, ‘Good on you, love’, she felt as if she had both given and received a blessing.

  ‘Are we finding out, or having a surprise?’ the sonographer asked Meg during a scan, pausing with her gluey handpiece on Meg’s stomach.

  ‘It won’t be much of a surprise,’ said Meg, cheerfully enough.

  ‘You think you know already?’ The sonographer arched an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes,’ said Meg. ‘That’s a boy in there.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how many people come in here certain that they know, and leave with a whole new paint scheme in mind.’

  For a split second, a little girl blossomed in Meg’s imagination. She had dark hair like Meg’s, and Justin’s long eyelashes, although Meg was realistic enough to give her a chunky torso and dimpled knees. But before long the sonographer, moving layer by layer in cross-section through the foetus, came upon the shape of testes and a penis. Meg’s baby girl burst like the bubble she always was.

  Nevertheless, these were good days and good enough that Meg was able to recognise them on their first pass, not even having to wait for hindsight. The more her belly grew, the greater was her sense of herself as a gigantic, benevolent bee, hovering fatly around the plants in the nursery, having the power to coax out their shoots and buds and runners. The depth of her hunger made food taste better and the rich smells of the nursery seemed to have opened out into new dimensions. The perfumes of the flowers were now so strong and complex that Meg came to truly understand wine critics’ use of the word ‘bouquet’. She could sniff the layers of meaning in loam and in sand, and found herself unscrewing the caps of seaweed fertiliser to drink in the marine stench, delving a hand into blood and bone fertiliser to stir up the rich, dark stink of life and death and rot and promise, although, even as she did so, it occurred to her that it was probably written down somewhere not to do that when you were pregnant.

  Soon, it was Meg’s birthday.

  ‘The last,’ her mother had said, ‘that will be all about you.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Justin’s mother. ‘We’ll always make sure it’s your special day, even when that gorgeous boy is here. Now sit down, love, and put your feet up. I’ll get you a cup of tea.’

  ‘I’m fine thanks. Really,’ said Meg, although if her own mother had not been there, she would have accepted, gratefully.

  Justin’s mother had given her a very special present: a gift voucher for a Sylvie Arlington photo shoot. There were Sylvie Arlingtons—huge, grainy close-ups of navels and nipples and mouths and hands and feet—in the maternity floor reception area of the private hospital through which Meg had taken a tour, and where she was booked for pre-natal classes. Justin’s mother had put a lot of money down on the voucher, enough for the deluxe package that included both pregnancy shots and mother-baby shots later on. Meg thought—and then gave herself a mental pinch for it—that a series of Sylvie Arlingtons would soundly trump Cathie’s photos.

  Cathie had shown the pictures to Meg at Jen’s baby shower. Jen, having decided against photographs, had bought a DIY kit and made a plaster belly-cast which had been the centrepiece at the shower tea, standing on a coffee table and reminding Meg of a Venus de Milo with even fewer extremities. Around the base, Jen had put out paints and oil pastels so her shower guests could cover the cast with flowers and benedictions. Her idea was that it would eventually be filled with plants and used as a courtyard feature.

  Meg leafed through Cathie’s pictures and made all the appropriate comments.

  Cathie had a sister who owned a good camera and had done a year at art school, but part of the problem was that Cathie had roped her husband into the shoot. Although he’d done all the things he was told—like reaching around his wife’s belly and making his forefingers and thumbs into a heart shape around her navel—he hadn’t been able to get rid of the embarrassed look on his face. Then there was a series of shots in which Cathie was alone and lying naked on the sheet-covered couch, a swathe of faux fur emphasising her nearly full-term belly, a slightly lewd look on her face. Meg noticed the little flaws in the shots, like the light switch in the top corner of the frame, and the triangle of couch fabric that showed where the sheet wasn’t pulled up quite properly. But these weren’t the only thing—or even the main thing—that was wrong with the photos. The real issue, Meg thought, was that you could see how each of the pictures was meant to have looked, but not one of them actually did.

  Not long after her birthday, Meg rang the number on the voucher and made an appointment to meet with Sylvie Arlington’s assistant. She was a slight young woman with statement spectacles and she showed Meg through the studio—a white room with huge casement windows and heritage floorboards, beyond which was a formal garden—before sitting her down in a study furnished with nothing but a desk, a chair and a screen. The assistant brought Meg a cup of herbal tea and set going a slide show of images in order for Meg to get a sense of her options.

  Most of the images were black and white, or sepia-toned, although some of them had accents in baby pink, lemon and blue. Meg supposed it was easy to make babies look like models, but Arlington had caught all of the women at their best, too. She clearly knew all the clever ways of showing women’s bodies without making them uncomfortable about their nakedness. There were diaphanous wraps and carefully crossed legs, arms over nipples.

  And then there she was. Treasure. On the screen. There were several shots of her and in none of them was there even a scrap of chiffon. She stood utterly naked in the studio, looking down at her pregnant belly, her hair completely loose and falling down her back. Arlington had shot the full, lithe length of her from the side, from the front, from behind. As frame replaced frame, Treasure moved relatively little. She lifted one knee so that her toe was on pointe, clasped her hands together behind her buttocks, arched her back. And then she was gone, replaced on the screen by a gap-toothed woman who had elected, possibly unwisely, to be photographed with a garland of daisies in her hair.

  When the assistant returned, Meg did make an appointment with Sylvie, for new publicity shots for the nursery. No matter the extent of Sylvie Arlington’s skill, Meg knew there was nevertheless a fathomless divide between a sow’s ear purse and one made out of true silk. She just hadn’t worked out quite how she was going to tell Justin’s mother.

  Before long, the songs being piped through the supermarkets and shopping centres were all ab
out a baby and a birth and Meg, while standing in queues, found that people with shopping baskets full of tinsel and gift-wrap would smile at her kindly. And knowingly. Just you wait.

  In the nursery it was the season for small pots of mistletoe, for tub-bound conifers and for the poor old poinsettias that would brighten the Christmas table and then most likely get binned with the shredded remains of the bon-bons.

  The yoga school was winding up for the break and this would be the last of their classes. Already, the circle was somewhat diminished: Libby had been the first among them to give birth, closely followed by Mel, and then Jo. By the end of the exercises the women were sheeny with sweat and they lolled on the fraying carpet like so many gestating seals.

  ‘Well, beautiful blossoming ladies, have you any final thoughts to share with each other today?’ the teacher asked.

  Meg watched the women shift about in response to their teacher’s question, postures opening up or closing down, introverts and extroverts silently declaring themselves. It was something Meg and Treasure had in common that they never said anything during these opportunities for open discussion.

  ‘I wasn’t going to find out, but at the last scan I couldn’t help myself. I’m having a girl,’ said Kathy.

  ‘I had a text from Jen this morning,’ Cathie announced. ‘She’s almost certain she’s in labour.’

  ‘My sister’s just found out that she’s pregnant, too,’ said Angie.

  ‘My baby’s going to be early. We’re trying to work out what to do if we go into labour on the same day,’ said Lou, gripping Georgie’s hand tightly.

  ‘My doctor told me my baby is going to be big. Apparently, he’s going to be very big,’ said Liz, although the fear on her face was nothing more than the delighted terror of a child outside a house of horrors. Meg, like all the others—except Cathie—had no way of knowing precisely how much fear was required, but she knew it was more than this.