Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  ‘And how do you feel about that?’ the teacher asked Liz.

  ‘Like I might need to plan for a caesarean,’ Liz laughed.

  ‘That’s one way to think,’ the teacher mused, ‘although another is to remember that a big healthy baby boy will have the strength to help you, to support you, through natural birth. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?’

  Meg knew that most of the women in the circle had written out birth plans and had strong views on which would be the most suitable positions, on pain relief and on what they wanted to happen immediately post-partum. Meg had not written a plan, but she had read enough to know that considering a caesarean was something you didn’t do out loud in public. Meg had been over at her parents’ house during the week when it had come on television that a study had found women who had caesareans were less responsive to the sound of their own baby crying than women who had birthed naturally.

  ‘Honestly, who funds research like that?’ Meg’s mother had muttered. ‘Pathetic.’

  ‘Anyone?’ said their teacher.

  For Meg there was pregnancy, and there was holding a baby in her arms; the territory between was nothing but cloud and fog. But it seemed that this time Treasure had something to say. She leaned forward a little, her bare brown belly resting on her thighs, navel ring glowing dully against her skin. She spoke seriously, perhaps a little fervently.

  ‘I’m really committed to giving birth naturally. I want to have the full experience, even the pain.’

  The teacher smiled approvingly and Meg felt a ripple of consensus lap the circle, although she noticed it skipped over poor, silly Liz.

  ‘Let’s finish then, shall we, with our breathing?’ the teacher said. ‘Close your eyes now, and look deep within yourself. I want you to see your heart now. See it opening, opening up to your baby. Let your heart swallow your mind.’

  Meg watched Treasure’s eyelids fall closed over her inscrutable eyes, and wondered what it was that she saw. When her own eyes closed it was upon a vision of the blackness of space, an infinite expanse of swirling galaxies and distant planets and invisible dark matter, a universe of tugging gravities in which the weights and measures refused to resolve to her satisfaction.

  It had been part of the concept, when Meg and Justin started the nursery, to make it feel like a world unto itself. To this end, there were rendered walls covered with espaliered roses and fruit trees, canopies threaded with a leafy mix of grape and passionfruit vines, and—in places where permanent walls could not be built—there were high tea-tree screens and rows of potted conifers to keep out the visual aspects of the surrounding shops and roads, even if the noises of them slipped through.

  Meg had not so much as lifted a paintbrush or glued a frieze in the room that was to be their baby’s, but as she wandered up and down the planted aisles, between the herbs and seedlings and ground covers and natives, she began to imagine what it would be like to do the same with her baby in a sling across her front, or, later, in a pack upon her back. It was within the vegetable walls of the nursery, far more than within the rooms of her own home, that Meg felt the presence of a nesting instinct. Even so, Meg had never considered that the nursery was a place in which she felt territorial, exactly. Which is why it took her by surprise, the sudden surge of primal rage she felt on the day that she looked across the nursery and saw Treasure standing by the lettuce garden.

  Her face was shaded by a broad-brimmed raffia hat. Over her breasts she wore a narrow, white bandeau and beneath her great, swollen stomach, a flowing cheesecloth skirt. All of the rest of her was lightly bronzed flesh and deep golden hair that fell in a single thick plait down her spine. Over the crook of her elbow was a basket. In the basket was one of the Christmas lilies which Meg had planted out months ago in lovely glazed ceramic pots. Meg obscured herself, stepping sideways behind a screen threaded with calligraphic fronds of clematis. Still, she had a clear view of Treasure as she strolled around the slightly raked display garden with its sloping, russet-green tapestry of leaves. It was one of the romaine varieties that Treasure reached for, plucking a young, pale green leaf from its heart. And as Meg watched, feeling unaccountably violated, she ate it.

  ‘Probably she didn’t think of it as stealing,’ Cathie said.

  It was just after New Year by the time Meg had the opportunity to report back on the incident at the nursery and this time the café table had to accommodate Jen’s acid yellow pram as well as Cathie’s lime green one. Jen fiddled at the rim of her shirt with her baby’s tiny mouth and a nipple.

  ‘Well, what else would you call it?’ Meg said.

  Meg remembered something that happened to her, when she was quite young, in the vegetable section of the supermarket. In those days there were scales—the ones with deep silver bowls and old-fashioned red-needled dials—hanging near the apples and pears so that customers could weigh their purchases. Meg’s mother had been busy looking at her list when Meg had absent-mindedly plucked a plump green grape, popped it into her mouth, and felt a pinch on her upper arm. It hurt. The perpetrator was a woman and she was bending down to Meg’s height wagging a finger in censure. She wore the supermarket’s cotton drill uniform and a badge upon her chest, but the most vivid thing in Meg’s memory was the way her bright lipstick bled into all the lines of her little arsehole of a mouth. It turned out to be a highly effective pinch. Meg was permanently put off theft. And grapes.

  ‘You know what they say about lettuce, though,’ Cathie said.

  But Meg had no idea what they said about lettuce.

  ‘You know: “Lettuce is a free food”,’ Cathie explained.

  ‘Says who?’ Meg asked.

  ‘Diet books,’ said Cathie. ‘When you’re dieting, lettuce and spinach are free. You can have as much as you want.’

  ‘No calories,’ said Jen. ‘No consequences.’

  Meg began to labour on a Sunday morning in mid-January and, within an hour of the serious onset of contractions, her inner sunflower had been torn out of the ground with cyclonic force. After a further half hour of clenching and wrenching and squeezing, she was prepared to admit that she had come in underprepared, that she had failed to grasp that pain could go up so far on the scale. But these were admissions of surpassing uselessness. There was nothing she could do, now, except hope to survive.

  Jackson Alexander Campbell—Jack for everyday—was born in the afternoon. The pain had been of tectonic magnitude, but then came the equal and opposite reaction, a swamping tide of passion for the child in her arms, for the man whose face was echoed so cleverly in the angle of the chin and the shape of the nose.

  ‘Hey, good work, Fat Guts,’ said Justin, although his voice was so tender that, had Meg chosen, she could easily have heard him differently.

  That evening, Meg’s mother came to the hospital to meet her grandson.

  ‘Did you . . . ?’ Meg began.

  Meg was tired and weepy by now and uncertain she could continue, and yet there was something she had to know. ‘Mum, did you feel this? Did you . . . love me this much?’

  Meg looked closely at her mother, and at the unkindnesses done to her face by the years of trying to hold it all perfectly together. The scoldings, the crossness, the indignation: they all showed. But, even so, they were not up to the task of hiding her wistfulness.

  ‘Hold on to that feeling, Meggie,’ her mother said. ‘Because it has to last you for a very, very long time.’

  That night, Meg slept only a little. The sheets on the hospital bed were over-starched and heavy, and the room was faintly lit from the green glow of tiny bulbs on the light sockets and call buttons. Meg was aware of pain—in her lower back, in her pelvis, in the torn but stitched-up skin of her vulva—and she could smell the strong animal scent of afterbirth coming from the pad wedged between her thighs. This night was the beginning of her new way of listening. In the semi-darkness, in the gaps between Justin’s snores, she sent her senses out into the room in search of the sighing sounds of a baby breathing,
while in the next room, another woman laboured.

  Early the next day Justin went off to work. Meg didn’t mind. She spent the morning in bed with Jack—wearing nothing but his tiny nappy—lying on her bare chest. Through her half-open door she saw the rolling stacks of breakfast trays come and go, caught glimpses of the doctors with their clipboards, watched the blue-shirted midwives towing their blood pressure machines from room to room. Late in the morning, there was animated talking at the reception desk that was just a short distance down the hallway from Meg’s room, but listen as she might in her new acute fashion, Meg could not work out what it was all about. The lunch trays came and went, and still there was low talking in the corridor. It was generating a low-frequency hum of wrongness, of drama. Meg held her healthy baby tight to her chest and wondered if there had been a stillbirth.

  ‘A baby’s been left,’ explained a midwife who came in to see to Meg.

  ‘Left?’

  ‘The mother didn’t want it,’ the midwife said with a sniff of contempt. ‘It’s thrown us all a bit. They get this sort of thing quite often over at the public hospital, but we’re not really used to it here.’

  Meg wanted to wash and that was a good enough reason to haul herself painfully out of bed. She would take Jack to the nursery and ask the midwives there to watch him for half an hour while she showered. Meg’s mother had told her how, back in her day, the babies spent the better part of their time with the staff in the Roseneath nursery so that the mothers might recuperate after the birth, but Meg was unsure which was pathetic and which was not: these modern mothers wanting their babies in their rooms with them all the day and night, or those old-fashioned mothers who’d been allowed to rest.

  Meg wheeled Jack in his plastic crib to the nursery. Only one of the cribs there was occupied. Two midwives stood beside it. According to their badges they were called Cyn and Sue, and Meg could tell from the way they dropped their voices in response to her presence that they knew they ought to be discreet. The baby in the crib was quite small compared with Jack. She slept upon her back, elbows bent, tiny fists framing her petite face, and the sight of her Cupid’s bow lips and of the fine curlicues of damp, dark-gold hair against her skull was more than just the last piece of Meg’s jigsaw puzzle. It was the key to a picture Meg had been looking at upside down, or slantwise, or in some other wrong way.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Meg offered, and it was enough for the midwives to decide that the mother had forfeited all right to discretion.

  Cyn said, ‘The mother held her for a minute, had a good look at her, then just passed her back to Sue and said, “You can take her away now, thank you.”’

  ‘I’ve seen it happen that mothers don’t want to hold their babies right away,’ Sue said. ‘So I took the baby to the nursery and we looked after her here for a few hours to let Mum sleep off the birth. But, next thing you know, she’s up and packed her suitcase—you know, one of those little air-hostessy numbers—and checked herself out. Said she wasn’t taking the baby and if there were any forms to sign we could just send them on.’

  The baby girl opened her newborn-blue eyes and made a thin cry.

  ‘I’ll fix her some formula,’ said Cyn. ‘Poor wee thing.’

  ‘Does she have a name?’ Meg asked.

  ‘No name,’ Sue said.

  ‘We should give her one,’ said Cyn.

  Meg reached out and touched the baby’s cheek with one of her irretrievably dirt-stained gardener’s fingers.

  ‘You could call her Lettuce,’ Meg said.

  ‘Lettuce?’

  ‘Why Lettuce?’

  Because lettuce is a free food, Meg thought, although she only shrugged.

  ‘Just cos,’ said a male obstetrician, who was at the nursery desk making notes on a patient’s chart, and who hadn’t appeared to be listening.

  ‘You’re terrible,’ said Cyn.

  ‘I think it suits her, actually,’ said Sue.

  The baby girl wore a pale green gro-suit out of the nursery’s emergency clothing stash and under the bright hospital lights it was casting a tint up under her chin the way a buttercup does on a sunny day.

  ‘Lettuce she is then,’ said Sue, and she wrote it in uppercase letters on the small square of whiteboard above the crib.

  In the evenings of all the years in which her boys were growing up, it was Meg’s habit to step outside just before dinner into the kitchen garden with a pair of snips and the big red enamel colander. She would slide the heavy glass doors closed on the noise and demands inside, and—for just a few moments—be among her plants. The beds were rimmed with nicely greyed timber sleepers and Meg liked the way there was no particular order to the plantings of nasturtium, rosemary, chives, sweetpea and lettuce. In the evening cool, while harvesting herbs and salad leaves, she would often think of little Lettuce’s face, and wonder whatever became of her.

  Sometimes Meg thought of Treasure, too. That was usually in the supermarket. It was the mirrors that did it, the ones at the back of the cabinets that were there to enhance the apparent abundance of the fruits and the vegetables, to multiply the fish fillets on their ice beds and to pick up the appetising sheen on the roast chooks. Meg would be bagging a parsnip when she’d look up and catch sight of herself, face bare of lipstick or mascara, hair shoved back in a rough ponytail, snot trails on the shoulder of her nursery vest. And those other mirrors: women all around with nappy boxes taking up three quarters of their trolley space, scouring the backs of packets for may contain traces of nuts, yelling ‘Put that back, please’, ‘No running, please’, ‘Please stop yanking on the trolley’. It was something that Meg had not known until she had children, how easily please can be made to stand in for for fuck’s sake.

  Of course, Treasure wouldn’t have to do any of this. Nothing would force her to trudge the biscuit aisle the way Meg did, with Jack hanging off the side of the trolley and Will still small enough, just, to sit on the fold-out seat shoving fat handfuls of sultanas into his endlessly open mouth. Each week Meg threw into her trolley two big bags full of small packs of Tiny Teddies, even though Choice magazine once named them as the worst of a bad bunch of kiddy snacks, and even though the amount of packaging this purchase entailed was a crime. Small packs of Tiny Teddies were currency with which you could buy silence in five-minute grabs. Meg pushed her trolley past the Venetians, the Kingstons and the Caramel Crowns. The Orange Slices reminded her that some people could get away with it, but a quick glance at her girth in the gratuitously placed mirror on the pillar in the middle of the aisle told her, as if she didn’t already know, that she was not one of them.

  At Meg’s local supermarket, the magazine aisle was also the toy aisle, so while the boys ogled the Matchbox cars and the action figures, Meg could linger for a moment. She never so much as touched the gossip magazines which she knew to be more full of crap and worse for you than Tim Tams, but she saw, without exactly reading, their headlines. Always there was a baby bump and an amazing post-baby body and twins! and a miracle conception. She hankered after a Gourmet Traveller or even a Better Homes and Gardens, but they weren’t on the list.

  Once, and only ever once, Meg caught a glimpse of Treasure. Meg was driving through the city and had stopped at some traffic lights, and there she was, sitting on a high stool at the bench seat in the window of a café. Visible beneath the bench was the soft leather of a pair of tan high-heeled boots. Above it were dark blonde curls falling onto the frilled collar of a houndstooth trench coat. Meg could easily imagine how, in the middle, the belt of the coat would cinch a perfectly retracted waist. But it wasn’t any of those things that made Meg turn the radio news up louder and clutch the steering wheel harder. It was the solitary coffee and the leisurely newspaper spread out upon the countertop.

  ‘Mummy!’ Jack bellowed from the backseat. ‘Mu-u-um. Mum!’

  Meg ignored him, even though she knew that in so doing she was probably cauterising yet another square millimetre of a heart whose hardness she would one day gr
ieve.

  ‘Mummamummamummamummamumma,’ babbled Will, sitting next to him.

  She imagined her future self reaching back through time to slap her own cheek and say, “Turn around and speak to your sons”, but even by way of this trick she could conjure up nothing in her heart to share.

  ‘Mum!’ yelled Jack. ‘Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum!’

  ‘Mummamummamumma!’

  ‘Why you cry, Mummy?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Why you cry, Mummy? Talk to me, Mummy! Mummy! MUMMY!’

  cottage

  The man and the woman together made the decision to walk their children into the woods, just as together they made the children. So why does she always get the blame?

  WHEN HENRY BEGAN childcare he developed the habit—in the mornings while his mother Nina was dressing—of filling his pockets with such small items as he could find about the house. Then, when it was time to leave, Nina, already buttoned into her coat, would kneel down on the threshold to divest him of his treasures.

  There was a morning when she unpocketed a miniature Batmobile, three marbles, a biro and four toy soldiers, along with some other, less expected items: a safety pin, a thumb drive, a plectrum and a tampon. Nina blushed at the thought as she shoved the tampon in her coat pocket, although not fast enough.

  ‘What’s that thing, Mummy?’

  But it was 7.45 and there wasn’t time. Not even for obfuscation.

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  Henry widened his pale eyes, shook his head solemnly, and Nina sighed.

  ‘There’s a rule, remember? No home toys allowed.’

  Nina was telling the truth about this.