When I’m done unpacking, I stand, hands on hips, and sigh deeply at the huge cork-lined wall hovering before me. The empty space is intimidating. I search through my schoolbag to find something I can post. I tack up my A-plus math test, a portrait of me that Kevin drew, crumpled, and then whipped at my head in class, and a photo of me and Jasmyn, on the house bowling trip last month. Then I remember Mark’s drawing, the one of the angel, that I took and kept pressed in the calendar Staff gave me when I first arrived at the group home. I carefully pin this drawing in the centre of the wall, comforted by the angel eyes following me as I move around the room.
Karyn comes back about an hour later to see how I’m doing. I am sitting at my desk, doodling in the journal Eric gave me. She plops herself down at the bottom of my bed and tries to get a feel for me. I don’t like her. Her face bothers me. It’s homely and ugly. I decide I won’t give her a chance.
“So, how do you like the room?” she asks. I point to the Carmen sucks goat dick liquid-papered onto my cork wall as my answer. Karyn looks shocked, then embarrassed, and suggests I paint over it.
“So, how did you like Delcare?” she asks.
“Good,” I say, shrugging my shoulders.
“I hear you did well in school.”
“Sort of.”’
“What was your favourite subject?”
“Math.” I keep staring down at my journal, tracing the letters over and over again on the page.
“Math? Wow. You must be smart, then. I’m awful at math.”
“I’m okay.”
She gets up from the bed and saunters over to the corkboard. “Wow, you are good at math. Look at that! A plus.” I curse myself for putting that up. Make a mental note to take it down as soon as she leaves. “Who’s this, Snow?”
“Huh?” I turn to see the photo of me and Jasmyn held up close to Karyn’s face. “Oh, a friend from my group home.”
“Well, she’s very pretty. What’s her name?”
“Jasmyn.” I start to write the words FUCK OFF in big block letters in my book. I press hard with my pen, ripping through to the next page.
“Oh, wow! This drawing. This is unbelievable. This is absolutely amazing. Did you draw it?”
Now I turn my whole body to face her. She is staring at Mark’s drawing. I can see that she’s not faking it. That she really means what she says. I am remotely interested. “No. A friend did.”
“Well, your friend is very talented. Look at her eyes.”
“Ya, it’s my favourite,” I say, smiling slightly, which was a mistake because now she thinks we’re going to chat. She comes back to the corner of the bed and I drop my eyes back down to my page. There is uncomfortable silence and Karyn decides to fill it talking about herself. She tells me about all the new initiatives she’s been doing at the house, trying to set up a partnership with the daycare centre down the road and organize a fundraiser evening for new classroom computers. She tells me about her volunteer work in Africa building houses and the walkathon she did last week for breast cancer.
“Aren’t there people in Toronto who need houses?” I ask. She’s not like Miranda. Miranda does this job to help others. I can tell already that Karyn does it to help herself.
She smiles weakly and holds out her hands as if surrendering. “I’ll leave you alone for a bit. Dinner is downstairs at six, if you like.” I lie and tell her I’ve already eaten. I can’t stand the thought of walking into a roomful of hungry pregnant girls stuffing their faces with meat loaf and canned peas. I’d rather sit in my room and stare at the wall.
When she’s gone I lie down on the hard bed. The sheets smell of bleach. The plastic-wrapped mattress beneath me crinkles. Karyn explained they had a problem with bedbugs and it’s the only solution, but I think the plastic is really there to stop you from getting too comfortable, even in your dreams.
I don’t want to be here. I want to go back to the group home. I can’t be bothered with new rules, new staff, new residents, new shower pressure. I roll up my sleeve to examine the scars that snake across my skin like sticky tar on city roads. I will split open again, I warn the flaking seals.
My body is shaky. My heart races, and even though I haven’t had a cigarette in a while, I have this urge to inhale smoke. I shuffle down the hall, walking like a penguin, short little steps, feet slightly pointed outward. I follow the faint cigarette smell to the room at the back of the house where, Karyn says, “smoking is not encouraged.” I waddle in quickly, pretending I know exactly what I’m doing. There is only one other girl in the room, sitting on the couch by the window. Her foot is up on the cushion and she is picking at her toenails, her tongue sticking out from between her sliver-thin lips. She is pasty white and sickly thin.
“Hey,” I say, walking in and sitting down.
“Hi.” She looks up at me for a moment, her eyes travelling my body from head to toe.
“Can I bum a smoke?” I haul my feet up onto the coffee table.
The girl reluctantly leans forward and tosses a package of Benson and Hedges. “Consider it a loan. I’m low.” I take a smoke and light it, deeply inhale, and tilt my neck back. “You new?” she asks me.
“Yup.”
“When are you having your kid?”
“About two months. You?” I ask, not even noticing a bulge in her stomach.
“Oh, no.” She leans over to put out her smoke in the ashtray. “I had mine already. A month ago. It was fine. Until the doctor decided to rip the placenta out of me, instead of waiting. Thought I’d die. You shouldn’t be smoking.”
I ignore her last comment. “Wha’d ya have?”
“A boy. I adopted him out. This great couple, you know, everything you wished you could have had, but didn’t.”
“Yeah,” I say, pretending I know exactly what she means. She returns to picking at her toenails, her face strained from heavy concentration. Her skin is so thin you can see the purple veins through her cheeks and temples. It gives me the shivers. “That must have been hard,” I add.
“Yeah, but, what could I do? Raise it?” She releases her foot and looks back up at me. “Who am I fucking kidding? Can’t even take care of myself. It would have been selfish to keep it.”
“Yeah,” I say again. I inhale once more and let my head float in its rush. To myself, I admit it. Admit the things I’ve considered. Like leaving my baby on a doorstep, in a basket, at some huge house in Rosedale. Or wrapping it in newspaper and dropping it off at a hospital. Or even just leaving it in a mall washroom or on a bus. But I know I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live my life, every day, knowing that she’s out there. Every day, walking down the street and not knowing if she’s that kid squeegeeing on the corner or bagging my groceries or serving me my Big Mac. I couldn’t handle her knowing that I gave her up, just like that, and I was going on with my life. As if I had just dumped a heavy load off my back and wiped my hands of the mess. I know what it’s like to have a mother who doesn’t want you. And I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
“So, if you already had your baby, then why are you still here?” I ask.
“Where am I going to go? I’m getting kicked out soon. They’re worried about me ‘cause I’m depressed or bipolar or whatever label they choose this month.” She shows me the underside of her arms, exposing hundreds of scars scattered all the way up to her shoulders. I am shocked when I see them, stunned that someone else does this. Seeing a freak like that do it only makes me wonder if I’m as weird as she is.
“Ouch,” I say sympathetically, and pull down my sleeves, making sure my own cuts are covered.
“It doesn’t hurt. Not even when I’m doing it,” she says, as if she’s all proud of herself. As if I’d be shocked or impressed to hear it. And I just don’t get that. I don’t get why anyone would want to announce to the world how crazy they are.
But is it so strange, really? Miranda goes to the gym when she’s angry and says she sweats it out. Sometimes, she says, she runs so hard on the treadmill, and her legs burn s
o bad, she starts crying invisible, sweaty tears. And Mark goes to his friend’s house and fights with a punching bag dangling by a chain from the basement ceiling till his knuckles are bloody and swollen. And Aunt Sharon shoves her mouth full of chips and pretzels until she bends over on the couch, gripping her exploding stomach. So, really, even normal people hurt themselves. I suppose how far you go just depends on how bad the monster is that’s living inside your skull.
The girl lights up another smoke, gestures to offer me another one, but I hold up my hand and pat my stomach, indicating I shouldn’t. She tells me her name is Sky, but her real name is Sara.
“Staff is pretty cool here. Oh, and you need to stock up on maxi-pads because you bleed like hell forever after.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I say sarcastically, but she thinks I’m being sincere. After a while, I realize she probably doesn’t have any friends because she starts making plans with me for the weekend, but I just don’t have the energy to be nice to her, even though she gave me the smoke, so I tell her I think I’m busy. And with barely a pause she starts talking about these crazy random things, like the milk seeping out from her tits and her grade two teacher’s Hyundai and the time she threw up on the roller coaster at Wonderland. I begin to get the feeling she’s sort of slow. Not really retarded, but almost, as if she’s got just a slight strain of retard in her blood.
“I gotta go back to my room,” I announce, not waiting for a break in her words because by now it’s quite obvious there won’t be one.
I’m in my room for only a few seconds, just enough time to get into bed, prop up some pillows, and open a book, when Sky appears at the door. I ignore her as she pokes about my dresser, lifting my deodorant and my lotions, inspecting the labels. I am hoping she’ll just leave, but after a few moments she moves closer toward me until she’s standing right beside my bed. I pretend I’m really into my book, move my lips a little to show I’m reading.
“Coming to dinner?” she asks.
“Not hungry,” I say, turning the page.
“That’s okay. I’m not eating much either. I’m on cleanup,” she says. “I can never eat much when I’m on cleanup.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I know I’ll be wiping all the plates into the garbage and the look of it, all that half-eaten food, will make me barf. I’ve done it before,” she says. “Who’s this?” In her hand is the framed picture of my mother. I rip it from her grasp and put it face down on the bed beside me.
“My mom,” I say, figuring there’s no point lying to Sky when she doesn’t really matter.
“As a kid?”
“No. As a fuckin’ midget. What do ya think?” I say, annoyed, and she starts to laugh, misinterpreting my sarcasm as just being funny.
Sky literally pulls me out of my bed to go to dinner, and I almost can’t believe it, but I don’t have the energy to fend her off. She thinks it’s funny, starts giggling hysterically, but I just think it’s psychotic and immature. We enter the dining room, located in the basement. It’s a bare, pale-pink room with six large round tables. The paper snowflakes on the windows, made by last year’s students, curl up at their edges as if cringing from the cold wind outside. Off to the side are a kitchen and serving area with deep metal trays of fish sticks, potatoes, and beans. A bunch of faces look at me for a second and then turn away, unimpressed. I grab a plate and follow Sky to the food.
“Hey, Sam,” she says to the middle-aged East Indian man behind the counter. He tips his baseball hat at her.
“He the cook?” I say, more to make conversation than anything else.
“Ya. And the repairman and the van driver and the painter and the plumber. Aren’t ya, Sam?” she asks, and I can tell by the way he politely smiles at her that he finds her annoying. “He does everything around here,” she continues. “Sam, Sam the handyman.”
We eat our dinner at a table with three other girls who all look about as pregnant as me. At the table next to us are the new mothers who only come to the school program during the day. Each girl either has a slobbering baby on her lap or a toddler in a high chair. Sky says they are mother snobs who think they are so much wiser than the girls who haven’t had their babies yet. They are allowed to be here after the delivery in order to help them get off to a good start. Some of them even have a couple of kids. Sky says the blonde girl is eighteen and pregnant with her third child. “It’s like an addiction,” Sky whispers to me. “She can’t stop popping them out.” She raises her finger to her temple and twirls it in the air—“Cuckoo!”
As I eat my dinner, I watch the next table of mothers. In the high chair beside the blonde girl is this perfect little baby and on her lap is a little boy, his face smeared with ketchup. Thing is, the girl looks perfectly happy. And what freaks me out even more is that she looks like she’s a really good mom. Thankfully, our table doesn’t talk about babies. We talk about movies and smoke brands and guys. No one mentions pregnancy, except for Lynn, the skinny girl with the sunken face who keeps counting her glasses of refilled milk aloud. “I’ve gotta drink six a day,” she says to me, gulps the last one down, and slams it on the table— “Ta-dah!”
“What do you want, applause?” Sky asks, wiping Lynn’s proud smile off her face.
“Fuck you,” Lynn replies, mildly irritated.
Sky faces Lynn, opens her mouth full of half-chewed food and spills it slowly in chunks out onto the plate.
“Ugh,” the girl with long red hair squeals, “the afterbirth,” and we all start to laugh.
20
There is no escaping your baby here. My limbs and head withdraw beneath my belly like a turtle disappearing into its shell. I become this walking, talking stomach. Stray thoughts of mother or Elsie or Mark are lassoed back into discussions about nutrition or labour or finances. I hear their struggling whispers in my head, throats tight and bruised from the silencing ropes around their necks. They are not used to this restraint. Like me, they resent this unborn thought elbowing itself into their centre.
The house keeps us busy. In the evenings and on weekends we attend workshops on relationships and parenting. We learn new skills like CPR and balancing chequebooks and mushing carrots in a blender. We write resumés and research careers. Most girls immerse themselves in their projects, happy with this new focus and direction. No longer sluts or dropouts or punks. They welcome this new label: Mother. So pure and clean and untouchable. But then there are those like me, who sit on the edges of groups, reality pinning all illusions firmly to the ground.
Our Thursday night parenting group is compulsory. I am sitting in a circle of small metal chairs with twelve other girls, our bellies protruding like membership pins. We’re in the big empty room beside the kitchen in the basement, used for birthday parties and agency meetings. All six of the Beverley House girls are here, as well as some others I don’t know. Most of them look older than me, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and only one girl looks younger. They stare me down and whisper in each other’s ears like little grade school kids.
“So, Snow,” Karyn says to me at the beginning of our session, “why don’t you tell us why you’re here.”
“Because I’m pregnant,” I say, arousing laughter from the girls, the glares sliding off their faces like melting wax.
“Well, yes. We know that.” Karyn smiles and I’m disappointed that she isn’t fazed by my response. “But tell us why you chose to be here and not somewhere else. You don’t need to divulge anything personal if you don’t want to. But you’ll probably be surprised at how many of us here are in the same boat.”
I think for a moment. There are many reasons to have a baby. If you want to leave home, but you can’t afford it. If you want to have your man’s first child, so you have baby-mom rights over the other girls he fucks. If you want a baby to make you finally straighten out your screwed-up life. If you want to prove to your mother that you aren’t as useless as she says, that she’s the one with the problem. If you want your boyfriend to commit. If you w
ant someone to love you.
“I didn’t choose to be here. My group home made me come. And I don’t live with my mother because she’s dead.” I shrug my shoulders, indicating I’m done.
“I’m sure we are all sorry to hear that. And thank you for sharing something so personal and obviously painful.” Then Karyn turns to the group: “Let’s all tell Snow a little bit about ourselves.” She makes each girl speak for about a minute, about how they didn’t expect this to happen, about how it was a mistake. Despite what they say, in some ways, I know they’ve all planned this. In some ways, I think they all knew this would happen to them, sooner or later. The way rich kids just know they’ll probably have a car and a university degree by the time they’re twenty-five. I look around the room, listen to all these hopeless stories, and silently add mine to the list: If I put it off too long, I have no choice.
School for us pregnant girls is in the basement of the house. It’s a tiny room with a large centre table and lopsided bookcases. On the walls are student projects about parenting and tenant rights. The teacher, Miss Lucy, wears a wool sweater with zoo animals embroidered on it. She has white hair and a warm smile and is the kind of teacher you’d imagine instructing grade three children. “Where are the others?” I ask during my academic meeting, motioning to the empty room.
“Who?” She seems surprised at the question. “Oh, the students.” She waves her hand in the air, gesturing for me not to worry. “There are always doctor’s appointments, upset stomachs, counselling. Sometimes the room is packed, sometimes there is no one. Today is just one of those days. Three young women just graduated from high school here last week.”
She asks me questions about my last school, about past conflicts with teachers, about my courses. She is impressed with my half credit of grade ten advanced math. “I think this might be more relevant to your needs right now,” she says, sliding a parenting package across the table. “Most young women really like the course. You’ll still continue your other subjects, it’s just that this will be important as well. It’s worth a full credit.” I reach out to accept the bound photocopied pages and she gets up to leave.
As She Grows Page 19
