As She Grows

by Lesley Anne Cowan

  They look up at me and ask me your name, and I’m about to respond, only then I realize that the face they look into is not mine but that of a woman in her late twenties. And I realize I am nowhere in this scene. This scene is not mine.

  It belongs to this blonde woman with styled hair and perfect teeth and expensive skin. She’s wearing a nice suede jacket with a brown scarf and leather boots. I’ve seen her before, in Pampers commercials or formula ads in parenting magazines. She’s the kind of woman who never burps, and who prefers to use a condom because it’s least messy that way. She’s the kind of woman who is a good mother.

  Jasmyn tells me she knows tons of girls who’ve had babies, even as young as fourteen, and they’re fine. She says you miss out on a lot, but once you have a little kid, it doesn’t seem to matter much. On a Sunday afternoon we shut our bedroom door, put the chair up against it, and I bring out my library books to show Jasmyn. We sit facing each other, cross-legged on her bed, and I turn the book upside down so she can see the pictures while she files her nails.

  Jasmyn lowers her hands when I show her the diagrams of the growing baby. “I can’t believe that’s inside of you!”

  “I know,” I say and point to more photographs of a fetus at one month, then two, then three.

  “Look, it’s got little fingers,” she says, all excited, pointing to a drawing of a fetus supposedly in the womb. “How old is yours now?”

  “I don’t know. About five months?”

  She puts down her nail file and starts turning the pages, stopping at the picture of a four-month-old fetus in its amniotic sac. “Oh my God,” she says, stunned, “it’s like a little person already,” and she passes me the book. “Look!”

  “I know,” I laugh, uncomfortable with her amazement, my smile fading fast. She puts the book down and lies back on her bed. I lie down beside her, flat out on my back, kicking the pile of books off with my feet.

  “Show me it,” Jasmyn says, motioning to my stomach. I raise my bulky sweatshirt and reveal a bulging tummy, my belly button stretching wide. Jasmyn reaches out and places her hand on my skin. “That’s the weirdest thing,” she says.

  “Do you think Mark’ll marry you?” she asks, stretching her leg out and up against the wall. She reaches out for the classified section of the newspaper I have beside my bed and peruses the marks I’ve been making on one-bed-room-apartment ads.

  “What, are you from the fifties? Marry me, ’cause I’m knocked up?”

  “Well, whatever,” she says, mildly annoyed. “You know what I’m talking about—living together.”

  “I don’t know. I was just looking to see what was out there,” I say, referring to the circled classifieds.“Maybe someday.” I pick at my nails and attempt to bite off a jagged edge. “After the baby is born. We’re still young, you know.”

  “That’d be so cool. Fuck, I envy you. Your own place. We’d have some wicked parties, man, wicked.”

  “Ya.” I smile. And even though we’re just talking, it feels good to say it. Even though we probably both know, deep down, that it’s not going to be like that.

  Girls hate Jasmyn, call her a slut and cocksucker, but really, they’re just jealous. She plays to their envious eyes, giving scornful girls the finger as they scowl at her stepping into the passenger seat of his tinted-window car, a child’s shoes dangling from the rear-view mirror. She comes home with new earrings, clothes, plastic nails; things that are given to her as if they are presents, not payments. She adds up her profits and replenishes her purse with condoms from the jar in the front hall. She prefers to be given things she can sell, keeping the money in a sock to save up for acting classes. The girls who call her a slut say she’ll suck cock for anything, and they’re probably right, but Jasmyn claims she won’t do it with just anyone.

  “They’ve gotta be decent, you know what I mean?” she’d say and I’d nod my head, while definitions of decent would run through my mind. Clean fingernails? Kind to his mother? Someone who drops her off afterward?

  Jasmyn’s world is large. She seems to know everyone. We hang out almost every day now, around the Dufferin Mall, chilling with whoever is around. And we can’t walk more than ten feet in our own neighbourhood without some man hissing or mumbling something perverted to her as we pass. Jasmyn walks down the street in her tight miniskirts and low-cut shirts like she’s a star, never tired of the attention, turning and smiling at all the right moments. Sometimes young women with little babies on their hips storm up to us, shake their fingers in Jasmyn’s face, and warn her to stay away from their men. And then all of a sudden Jasmyn will turn into this stranger I barely even recognize, get right up in the ladies’ faces and spew foul words.

  “What would your man want with that if he could have this, bitch?” she says one day, shaking her ass in the air, just making the lady flip her lid. There is cursing back and forth and at some point the woman walks away, mostly because the kid on her hip is bawling and Jasmyn is acting so psychotic it’s obvious she won’t let it go. Still, Jasmyn’s voice trails behind the diminishing woman like a persistent thread, unravelling her confidence.

  When she’s finally out of sight, Jasmyn starts laughing, like it’s all one big joke. She keeps going on about herself—“What would he want with that if he can have this”—over and over like she’s idling down. We stand in front of a store while she walks in circles, spitting on the ground, still staring in the direction of the disappeared woman. I’m embarrassed by her. Also annoyed, because I don’t think it’s right she gets together with other girls’ guys. I ignore her and stare into the window, unsure what to do because part of me thinks she’ll turn on me right there if I say anything. She starts going on a rant about those baby moms, those stupid bitches, thinking just because they get pregnant means they have some right over their men, pretending they don’t know their men are humping like stray dogs in back alleys. Whispering to small hands around their dicks: Don’t you want my baby?

  “I can’t help it if they’re stupid bitches. It’s not my problem they can’t control their men.”

  I half listen to her and consider what excuse I can make up to leave since she’s rousing me all up and I can’t handle this now. Just when I’m about to go she turns to me and speaks in a soft voice, like she’s just now noticed I’m there.

  “But your situation’s totally different. I mean, Mark loves you,” she says.

  “What?” I dart an evil look at her. “I wasn’t even thinking that,” I say defensively, because I really wasn’t. I’m pissed that she would even think I’d associate myself with that world. And then I start to wonder that maybe this is what Jasmyn really does think of me. That I got pregnant on purpose to keep Mark. That here I was thinking how pathetic her life was when all along she’s probably thinking the same thing about me. And somehow, this realization, this mutual sense of superiority, changes everything between us. Because, really, the only way I could handle her was in knowing that I was so much better. It just never occurred to me that she believed the same about me.

  I manage to avoid Jasmyn for the next few days, which is surprisingly easy to do, considering we share a room. I turn out the light when I hear her coming up the stairs, I get up extra early, and after school I go to the mall. But I can’t avoid seeing her tonight. Every Wednesday night the group home has the creatively named Wednesday Night Group. Participation is compulsory and it’s one of the few times a week all the residents are sitting in a room together. Sometimes we just have house meetings, sometimes we discuss issues like homophobia or body image, and sometimes we have guest speakers. Whatever it is, at seven o’clock we gather in the TV room, sprawl out on couches and chairs and the floor. Since none of us will be going out tonight, we have our hair pulled back, track pants on, and we have zit-cream-dappled skin.

  Tonight Pat, the house supervisor, starts off the meeting, making some announcements about the broken washing machine and the problem of rotting vegetables in the fridge. Then she turns, smiling to the colle
ge student youth worker: “Michelle is going to lead the group tonight. She’ll be talking about date rape and healthy relationships.” Michelle is a third-year college student and has been working at the house for about two months. She tries to act mature and tell us what to do, but she looks no older than us, and I can see the piercing holes that line her ears, so I don’t know who she thinks she’s kidding, pretending she’s all mature. None of us really listen to her because she doesn’t tell us off when we say something rude and at moments of tension she’ll crack a joke.

  Our eyes turn to Michelle who is in the corner, poring over her notes. She motions to Pat that she just needs a second and so Pat opens up the floor to concerns. We decide to change the bathroom air-freshener spray from flowery to citron spray, Tammy will be after Nicole on the morning shower schedule, and Thursday nights will now have TV sign-up.

  “Okay, guys!” Michelle claps her hands together, indicating she’s ready to start. “I’ve been really looking forward to this.” She sits positioned in her straight-backed chair, notebook on her lap. We listen attentively because we are all just grateful that it’s not one of the regular boring Staff leading the group. “I thought we’d start with a little game, just to get things going!” She speaks slowly and simply, as if we were in kindergarten. She explains that we’ll go around in a circle and we each have to contribute one word to an ongoing chain story. It sounds stupid, but once we start it becomes fun, even though Michelle’s fading perma-smile suggests it’s not what she had in mind.

  “You . . .”

  “Make . . .”

  “Me . . .”

  “Shit . . .”

  “My . . .”

  “Pants . . .”

  “And . . .”

  “Piss . . .”

  “On . . .”

  “My . . .”

  “Cat.”

  “Okay!” Michelle interrupts us. “That was really great. I can see we don’t really need an icebreaker, things seem to be flowing just fine.” She opens her file folder and, despite our groans, starts passing out copies of a magazine article on date rape. Her tone completely changes and she starts listing off facts and numbers about relationship violence from the clipboard in front of her. We glance over to Pat to see if she’ll release us from this guinea pig experiment, but she keeps her head down, furiously writing in her notebook. I watch Michelle’s mouth, words loosely falling from her lips like soft fragrant petals: violation, dishonoured, betrayal, assault, genitalia. She makes it all sound like poetry from another century.

  It’s not difficult for us to discuss this topic. Michelle’s body pulls back one jagged crank at a time with each harsh word the girls hurl back at her: pussy-fuck, cunt, cock. Everyone has a story of a mother’s boyfriend or uncle. About guys’ houses they should not have gone to and cars they shouldn’t have gotten into. Or about having sex when they don’t really want to, just to get it over with, because the guy won’t let up. Tracy talks about going into a room at a party to make out with a guy she didn’t know only to have him put a gun to her head. And even Mute Mary talks about a neighbour taking naked photos of her when she was six, which makes us all quiet for a few seconds until Pat pipes up and says that she’d like to talk about that later, privately, with Mary. It makes my story of Mitch seem so insignificant, not even worth mentioning, really.

  Only Tammy denies absolutely anything happening to her. She keeps saying after each story what she would have done instead, how it wouldn’t have happened to her. She keeps on at it, as if she’s on some moral high horse, like anyone had a choice. “I wouldn’t have gotten into the car with five strange guys . . . I wouldn’t have let my uncle get away with it . . . I would have bitten his dick off.”

  We all ignore her, turn our heads to Michelle who corrects Tammy and tells her that it’s sometimes more complicated than that and we’re not here to make judgements. With only five minutes left, Michelle attempts to summarize our points, with diminishing enthusiasm. Then she turns back to her notes and discusses how we could have made better choices. Finally, she puts down the papers and for the first time her voice sounds normal. She asks us why we didn’t lay charges. Why we didn’t tell our friends. Why we didn’t leave the next party when we saw the same guy again.

  Nicole answers for us all: “We know what we should say, we know what to do, now. Only, it’s different when you’re actually in it. You don’t want to rat on the guy because you all hang out together. And if you get the guy in trouble, he’ll get you worse.”

  “I would charge any guy who raped me,” Tammy persists. “I don’t care who he is.” She throws her feet up on the table and picks at the rubber soles with a pen.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jasmyn snaps at her. “It never happened to you ‘cause you spread your legs and invite them in.”

  “Fuck you.” Tammy’s feet come slamming back down to the ground.

  “You watch your mouth, you little fuckin’ cunt—”

  “Sit on this, bitch!” Tammy sticks her middle finger up and thrusts it in Jasmyn’s direction.

  “Stick it up your girlfriend’s pussy, you fuck—”

  “Girls!” Pat yells for about the fifth time, though it’s the first time Tammy and Jasmyn seem to hear it. Normally, they’d keep going, but we all want the discussion to go on so they both back down, keeping it to a subtle evil stare to be dealt with later. In a strange way, I think it’s because Tammy is jealous. Jealous that she’s not one of us.

  After the session, we all go upstairs to the kitchen and make popcorn. Tammy makes up some excuse that she has a headache and needs to lie down. None of us convinces her to stay, not even Staff. The rest of us are all soft with each other. We say things like excuse me and sorry when pushing by, or compliment each other’s hairstyle or clothes. Jasmyn offers to braid Mute Mary’s hair and Tracy offers up her blue elastics. Michelle splurges for a pizza and for about three hours we act like real sisters.

  I stopped going to see Eric regularly. I haven’t seen him for three weeks. Sometimes it’s because I’m doing something else and I just forget about the appointment. Other times I just make excuses because it’s pretty much useless now. There’s no point in dwelling on the past, now that I’m going to have a baby. Now that I have to focus on my future. Stirring up all that history only makes it hard to breathe and I’d rather let the idea of Elsie hover deep inside me like a stagnant black smoke. When I do go, at times, I feel like just coming clean. Before the word baby, sitting poised on the tip of my tongue, leaps between words. Or my fingers that play dangerously close to the edge of sleeve cuffs make a quick dash to reveal my scarred arms.

  “So you really hate her?” Eric asks. We are still on the endless subject of Elsie. And I have just finished one of my bitch sessions. It appears that Eric can’t stand to mix his topics. I imagine him dining alone at home, chair pulled tightly up to the table, napkin on lap. I imagine him separating his food groups, eating the meat before the vegetable, carefully monitoring the gravy for breakaway trails. That is, I assume he is alone. There’s never another person across the table when I picture him.

  “Yes, I hate her,” I respond, sounding surprised at his question. Then I think a little more about it. “Well, wait. It used to be a hate hate, but now it’s more like a I-can’t-stand-her hate. You know?”

  “Can you think of a time when you might see her differently? More positively?”

  “Well, I suppose if she was walking down the street, I might think she’s a good person,” I say. I’ll give her that. Strangers think she’s charming, nice even. “She just never should have been a mother,” I add thoughtfully.

  Eric nods his head in understanding. “Sometimes distance can be good. You can see Elsie not just as a caregiver, but as a person. You might be able to understand her.”

  “Why the hell should I have to understand her?” I snap at him. “I’m the kid. She should be the one understanding me.”

  He holds his hands up, surrendering. “You don’t have to understa
nd her.”

  We sit quietly for a few minutes. We have long pauses like this. And I’ve come to like them, but only here. Most people like to fill them with useless words, panicked at the edge of the silent hole. As if they would fall to their deaths if they didn’t quickly fill in the gap. But Eric likes these silences. He says they’re like mortar in brick walls, the thought between words. He says they make discussions substantial.

  “Did you like your parents when you were growing up?” I ask, skeptical.

  “Yes,” Eric answers, all serious, pulling a leg up to rest on his knee. He appears confident and ready to take on my challenge. “Yes, I did.”

  I shake my head and turn to look out the window.

  “Is that a bad thing? Liking your parents? Seems like you disapprove.”

  “No. It just explains a lot, that’s all,” I say.

  “Explains what?”

  “What you say. How you make it all sound so easy.”

  “Can I not be helpful to you if I haven’t gone through exactly what you’ve gone through?” Now I start to feel sorry for him, like he’s going to go home and cry, believing he can’t do his job. Because he is good at counselling, even though I don’t know why he’d want to waste his time helping screwed-up kids who treat him like crap.

  “Well, I suppose you can, a little. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  I think a bit. “Did you do drugs when you were my age?” “Yep.”

  “What kind?” I ask, sitting up in my chair. Now we are getting somewhere.