Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story

by Barbara Gowdy

  “You know,” she said now, running a finger under her blackened eye, “this place is even nicer than the condo.”

  “We’re just thrilled with it,” Marion said.

  “I like it here,” Cory said. “I wouldn’t mind staying here forever.”

  She did, she did stay forever. At first it was going to be for two weeks. Just to get her out of the house, John rehired her in the shoe store, the plan being she’d save her wages to rent an apartment, but she didn’t last three days. Selling shoes was too much of a comedown after being a nightclub headliner, she said. John let that pass. He just wanted her out. He thought she was a slut and was ruining their love life. No more bubble baths, no more sex all over the house, which Marion missed, too, but neither of them had the heart to tell Cory to leave. She had nobody else. She had nothing. John gave her some money for clothes to apply for jobs in, but she spent it on a black leather motorcycle jacket and black leather pants, claiming she didn’t know how to dress like a hick. Waitressing at one of the town’s two bars seemed to be the obvious solution, except that they were country-and-western and she said country-and-western music made her puke. John thought he’d finally found the solution when the hydro worker who rented the apartment behind the Esso station moved out.

  “It’s yours,” he told Cory. “Rent-free until you get a job.”

  “Oh, great,” Cory said, tears welling in her eyes. “A hole in the middle of nowhere where I can get raped by every grease-ball in the county. Thanks a lot.” And she ran into her bedroom and slammed the door.

  Her insomnia had disappeared. She went to bed at nine or ten in the evening and slept until noon. Usually she was still in bed when Marion returned home from the pet store. She had long showers and watched TV and drove Marion’s car to the mall, where she pestered John for cigarette money. While Marion made supper, she smoked at the kitchen table and cut to shreds whoever she’d seen that day, either at the mall or on TV. It was like old times, except that once in a while she went after John or his sisters or Grace, and even though Marion understood that this was just Cory trying to get her goat, she was nevertheless hurt and couldn’t help rising to their defence, which was like throwing tin cans at a sharpshooter.

  With Grace and John’s sisters, her ruthlessness could take Marion’s breath away. With John, however, she showed some restraint. She allowed for the other side of the coin. Okay, she conceded, John was generous and handsome … a generous bullshitter, a handsome shrimp. One day she said, “I’ll bet he’s got one of those tuna-can cocks.”

  “He does not!” Marion said. “It’s perfectly normal.”

  “How would you know? Have you ever seen another cock?”

  “I’ve seen them on animals.”

  Cory burst out laughing. “Oh, right, you work in a pet store. Well, shit, I’m not saying that in a line-up of well-hung gerbils he couldn’t hold his own.”

  Marion was furious. “I’m talking about horses,” she said wildly.

  Silence. A forsythia branch tapped on the kitchen window.

  “You’re kidding,” Cory said conversationally.

  Not long after that the snow melted under the bushes, and the warm air blowing over the fields began to carry with it the smell of manure and mud. Cory started getting up earlier to sunbathe on the front lawn in her pink-sequined G-string and a tank top. “Owooo, Mama!” John howled at her on his way to or from the car. Suddenly he was always running off somewhere, never home long enough to worry about whether Cory was looking for a job. So Marion stopped worrying, too. In fact, with John away so much, she had to admit that she was grateful for Cory’s company.

  Cory joined her now on her shopping trips for red and black things. She was an enormous help. “John will hate that,” she’d say confidently, and Marion would pause and realize that Cory was right. After shopping they’d drive to the Bluebird Café for lunch. “On John,” as Cory would point out, ordering dessert and an Irish coffee. She was gaining weight, but Marion thought she could do with it. Her hair was growing back to its lovely peach colour. Her eyes had their old shiftiness. She seemed to be over Rick, and one afternoon Marion ventured to tell her as much.

  “Over him!” Cory said. “I hated that asshole from day one. You know, just because you live with some guy doesn’t mean you have to like him.”

  “It does as far as I’m concerned,” Marion said.

  “That’s you,” Cory said. She downed her glass of wine. She lit a cigarette and looked out the window. “Stupid people get everything they deserve,” she said fiercely. Marion assumed she was referring to Rick. “I have no pity for stupid people,” she said. “I can’t afford to.”

  Two days later, during one of the rare suppers that John was eating with them, Cory interrupted a story he was telling about a man with a quadruple-E shoe size and bunions the size of eggs. “I’m sorry, John,” she said, “but she’s going to have to know sooner or later.” And she looked at Marion and said, “I’m pregnant and John’s the father.”

  “Jesus Christ,” John said, dropping his knife onto the floor. A full confession.

  Marion watched him pick the knife up. The back of his neck was the colour of beetroot. “Why do I feel as if I already know this?” she asked, genuinely curious. She looked at her lifeline. It was long but forked.

  “Listen—” John said.

  “I’m not having an abortion and I’m not giving it up for adoption,” Cory said.

  John planted his hands flat on the table. “Okay—” he said. He took a deep breath.

  “No way I’m giving it up,” Cory said. “Not this time.”

  “Excuse me,” Marion said, pushing back her chair.

  “Hey!” John said. “Where are you going?” He followed her into the front hall. “Come on. Jesus. Where are you going?”

  “Let her go,” Cory said.

  Marion never laid eyes on him again. He phoned her at the farmhouse three times that night, but she wouldn’t talk to him. The next morning, while she lay on her old bed and wept, only letting herself really wail whenever the electric saw started up (Grace was having the kitchen renovated), her father and Grace drove to see him at his gas station. They told her nothing she hadn’t figured out. John was confused. He still loved her. He wanted to do the right thing by the baby.

  “How’s he know it’s his, that’s what I kept harping on,” Grace said.

  “It’s his,” Marion said. Hadn’t she foreseen John and Cory’s children?

  And yet she waited for him to knock the door down, to beg her to come back. When he phoned he said he loved her, then started crying and couldn’t speak. She hung up. One day she stayed on the line to ask, “Do you love Cory?”

  “Not … not … not …,” he said.

  She waited.

  “Not as much as you.”

  She dropped the phone and went into the bathroom and considered the bottle of codeine. It wasn’t worse than when her mother died. Her body didn’t have that thin, hollow sensation of being made of crêpe paper. And the pain wasn’t non-stop. There were hours at a time when she felt fine, even relieved. Compared to her mother dying it could feel like nothing, but it could also remind her of her mother dying. Force her—especially when she was falling asleep or just waking up—to see the piece of skin on the refrigerator and the skirts and blouses flattened in boxes for the Salvation Army. It was like being an alcoholic, and somebody gives you a drink.

  What helped was going into work six days a week. She sat with the beagle puppies in her lap and tried not to pray it was John every time the bell on the door announced a customer. When she finally let Mrs. Hodgson know what was wrong, Mrs. Hodgson said, “Here’s one that’ll cheer you up,” and told her about a woman who stole her best friend’s husband, moved into the marital house and a week later was fried to a crisp when the furnace exploded.

  Thereafter Mrs. Hodgson’s idea of lifting Marion’s spirits was reporting on any sightings of Cory in town. Cory was seen at the liquor store “loading up.�
�� At the drugstore buying a tube of lipstick with a hundred-dollar bill. One day Marion herself saw her. Cory walked in front of the car when Marion was stopped at a red light. She was wearing blue-jean shorts and Marion’s red-and-blue plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves and knotted under the tender swell of her belly.

  That evening Marion phoned John at the store, the first time she’d phoned him. She was crying. She didn’t know what she was going to say.

  But Cory answered. “Is that you, Marion?” she shouted after saying hello three times.

  Marion covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

  “Listen, Marion,” Cory shouted. “You know, it’s not as if he wasn’t fucking half the jail bait in town!”

  Suddenly another voice cried, “That’s a lie, and you know it!” It was Grace, on the extension. “You’re a liar and a home wrecker, that’s what you are!”

  Marion hung up. A few minutes later Grace came pounding down the stairs. “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said. “I was just about to dial out.” She was panting and her face was startlingly red. “Holy mackerel, is she ever a stinker.”

  “I want to go away,” Marion said. “I want to live somewhere else.”

  “Oh,” Grace said. They looked at each other. “Where?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Far enough from here that nobody will know who I am.”

  Grace pushed her glasses up her nose. “Well, I can’t say as I don’t know the feeling,” she said.

  The night before Sam leaves to have his operation, Marion dreams about somebody who starts out being her mother but seems to change into John. Marion is embracing this person, melting with love, when she discovers a hole in the small of his or her back. She sticks her hand in, reaches up and withdraws the heart. It pulses and half-rolls in her palm like a newly hatched bird. It is so exposed! She puts it in her mouth and tries to get it down her throat into her ribcage without scraping its delicate membrane or stopping its beat. It catches on something though, a tooth-like thing in the area of her vocal cords, and tears in half. She lets go of it and it just slips away. She starts to cry. She wakes up crying.

  She buries her face in the pillow so that Sam won’t hear. She wants her mother. She knows better, but year after year her heart goes on pumping out love as if all it knows is circulation, as if the beloved is right there in front of her to receive the love and purify it and send it back. She tries to envision her mother’s face, but she can’t. Instead she sees the heart she extracted in her dream. Then she sees an erect penis, a solid, ordinary thing, like a bird perch. Then a face—Sam’s face.

  He’s standing in the doorway. She can feel him there. She opens her eyes but it’s so dark it doesn’t make any difference. He sits on the bed and begins to stroke her hair and her back. His hand draws the grief into his own hand, draws it in, lets it go. When she finally calms down, he slips under the sheet and lies beside her. Her bare back just touches his bare chest. She doesn’t move away. She is so grateful for the solid, living length of him.

  Neither of them speaks. The room is pitch dark, and they breathe in unison. On her thigh his right hand rests lightly. His fingers are cool and not quite still. He keeps the nails on his right hand long for playing the guitar. It used to excite her to see that hand on her breast, the thumb and forefinger plucking her nipple into hardness.

  She has brought her own hand to her breast. She doesn’t fully realize it until she feels his fingers brushing her knuckles. Something just clears out of her mind, gives up. She turns over and kisses him on the mouth.

  He jerks his head back.

  “It’s all right,” she says, meaning that everything is. Meaning that her love is panoramic, racing like an ignited wick from the night of the wedding to this moment. She kisses him again. She pushes her tongue between his teeth. She licks his teeth, bites his bottom lip. She drops onto her back and pulls him on top of her.

  She keeps clinging to him as he sits up. She thinks he’s trying to get away. But he kneels between her legs and parts her labia with his fingers. Then he licks her there. It’s the first time this has been done to her. She assumes it’s preliminary. He keeps it up, though, soft, steady, devoted, cat-like licking until her body begins to loosen. Her joints unhinge. Her vulva breaks free and levitates, and her skin spreads like dough, a lovely, funny sensation, and then a disturbing one. And then she doesn’t care—she’d die to prolong it.

  Her orgasm is like a series of electric shocks. Her pelvis jolts and her vagina contracts almost painfully. “I love you,” Sam says urgently, as if he knows that she’s in new territory. “I love you, I love you,” over and over until she lies still.

  “Oh, my God,” she says then. “I love you,” she says. She hasn’t told him in five months. After a moment she says, “It’s you I love.” Under the circumstances that sounds more precise, more to the point. Tomorrow he is going into the hospital. Flying down to Boston by himself. Since she wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t even think about it, there was never any question of her going with him. Now, for the first time, she allows herself to wonder what will happen. She is still not ready for details, but she asks if the operation is dangerous.

  “Apparently not,” he says. “I mean, not life-threatening.”

  She turns to him and places her hand over his crotch. She knows he’s wearing underwear, which makes it easier.

  “Don’t!” he says, wrenching sideways.

  “No, let me,” she says, and puts her hand back. She presses her palm down and feels the springiness of his pubic hair. “It’s just like me,” she says, oddly relieved.

  He doesn’t move.

  “It’s you,” she says.

  “It is,” he says. “And it isn’t.” He takes her hand and holds it to his chest. Then he covers them both with the sheet.

  He is still holding her hand when she wakes up. His head is arched back and he’s snoring, a soft purring sound. It’s morning. There’s a band of grey light between the drapes, and another band flaring across the ceiling.

  If somebody were looking down on them, Marion thinks—if, for instance, her mother’s spirit was that clean, geometrical flare—they would seem like any other man and wife. They would seem content, she thinks. Peaceful, and lucky. Two people unacquainted with grief. They would seem like two happily married, perfectly normal people.

  If you enjoyed “Flesh of My Flesh” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.

  E-book: 9781443402484

  Print: 9780006475231

  About the Author

  BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

  Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

  Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.

  Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

  Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Gove
rnor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

  Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel, Helpless, was published by HarperCollins in 2007.

  She lives in Toronto.

  Also by Barbara Gowdy

  THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY

  FALLING ANGELS

  MISTER SANDMAN

  THE WHITE BONE

  THE ROMANTIC

  HELPLESS

  Copyright

  “Flesh of My Flesh” © 1992 by Barbara Gowdy.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  This short story was originally published in We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in print form in 2001, and in an ePub edition in 2011.

  Original epub edition (in We So Seldom Look on Love) April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4.