Dropped Threads 3

by Marjorie Anderson

  part four

  GIFTS BEYOND RECKONING

  The afternoon my aunt’s house burned down, she was upstairs, wearing an old pair of shorts and a worn blouse with the sleeves cut off. She was barefoot and had been cleaning house when she suddenly noticed large, quick flames about to encompass the room. She did not know, at the time, that the fire had started outside. She grabbed her toddler by the wrist and dragged him downstairs and out the front door. Fire trucks and police cars arrived; sirens were heard throughout the town, and people ran toward the scene. My aunt was distraught, but refused to leave. She stood in the middle of the road, in shock, and stared at murderous flames that raced within and from room to room, devouring everything she owned—every sheet and pillow and chair, her Sunday hat, her two good skirts, the rest of her wardrobe, the silverware she kept “for best,” even her jars of pickled beets. One of her sisters was phoned by a neighbour to come and collect the child. A rumour about no insurance was whispered, with some authority, through the crowd. My aunt was put in the back seat of a police car to keep her away from the heat and devastation, but as soon as the car door was shut she wriggled across the seat and out the other side. Her pots and pans continued to melt. Her other four sisters arrived and dragged her away. The roof fell in with an astonishing crash.

  I heard this story over and over during my childhood but, gradually, a second part was added on and this became the real story, the one that could make us laugh. It was the part about my aunt being driven to her parents’ farm, the home of my grandparents, several miles outside of town. My deaf grandmother, shocked at her daughter’s misfortune as well as her appearance, sat her down at the kitchen table, put the kettle on to make tea, and then disappeared upstairs. She came back down with a pair of pearl earrings and handed them to my aunt. It was all she could think of at the time. My aunt had nothing. No furniture, no food, not even a pair of shoes. But now she had a pair of pearl earrings. When this part of the story is told, along with the fire story, my mother and my aunts laugh until tears overflow from their eyes. I try to picture my grandmother, her concern and her instinct to help. I hear her voice, her oh so familiar, dulcet voice (a voice I managed to capture unwittingly on tape when my own children were toddlers). But everything else is drowned in the laughter of her five daughters. Even the aunt who lost everything she owned in the fire laughs until she cries.

  I am not sure how and when I began to understand that these voices, the caring voices of the women who were in the foreground of my childhood, are the important voices inside me today. As a writer, I can only say that I am thankful. Each voice can be called up individually across the shared experience of birth and life and now death, for one of my aunts has recently died. I drove my mother several hundred miles so that we could say goodbye. When it was time for us to return home, I turned back to look from the hospital doorway. My aunt was propped up in bed, frail but vibrant, her sisters and sisters-in-law grouped around her. They were telling stories. There was a good deal of laughter while, outside in the hall, there were also tears.

  The voice of my late deaf grandmother, no less influential, was absorbed by me in a different way. Deaf from the age of eighteen months, my grandmother married a hearing man. Together they raised eleven hearing children, five daughters and six sons, my mother being the eldest. Because my grandmother was an expert lip-reader, my language memories of her are largely visual. Her eyebrows are slightly raised; her steady brown eyes watch for the message on my lips. After a slight pause—for the moment of understanding—her quick and inimitable laugh is heard, and her kindness seen. If my grandmother happened to be worried or upset, she moved deeper into the silence of her internal world. At those times, she moved her lips as if talking to herself, but she turned aside so that no one could lip-read her. She twisted her wedding band around and around on her finger, a sure sign of distress. Or sat on a chair with one knee crossed over the other, her foot bobbing steadily.

  • • •

  I was a lurker, a watcher, a listener, beguiled by storytelling, enticed by the circle of laughter. And yet, after I began to attend school, all of this must have taken place during holidays—Easter or summer—because when I was four years old our family moved to a small village in rural Quebec, three hours by train from our much larger extended family in Ontario. My father and my uncles were present on many of these occasions, but it was the women who were my role models and they were the ones to whom I paid most attention. Still, I did not want to become these women—what young woman, after all, wants to turn into her mother? But at some level there was an awareness of being shaped by the collective of female voices. Voice and story. One story rolling into another. Teasing and laughter all around.

  In my grandmother’s kitchen, ongoing language was visible. Words were shapes—written into the air, or spilled from a pair of lips, or outlined by the speaker’s hands. Because of my grandmother’s deafness, even the youngest grandchild took part in the “acting out of language.” When I recollect what seem to be the crowded scenes of my childhood, the aunts always have something in their hands: a spatula, a tea towel, a dishcloth, a rag. They are wiping—small children’s faces, sticky fingers, the countertop, the heavy oilcloth on the table after a meal. There are children between their knees, iodine is being painted on scraped shins, burrs are brushed from someone’s hair, buttons are being buttoned. But my aunts were equally at home with a wrench in their hands, or a screwdriver, a hammer. They could take apart a house and put it back together—and one of them did. They knew how to farm, how to pitch hay, how to saw steaks off a frozen side of beef, or raise turkeys. It seemed to me that my aunts could do anything they set their minds to. What I could not have articulated at the time was that I was watching and learning strength.

  My mother and my aunts did not seem to take themselves seriously. At least, not publicly. One of five children, I had already learned that you had to laugh if you wanted to survive. Survival was more complicated as the family group became larger. If you could not laugh at yourself, you could be hooted out of a room. Every one of us, girls and boys, knew that. I also knew that life was not easy for the adults in my life—my parents, my aunts, my uncles. As children they had lived through difficult years during the Depression. After they married and began to raise children, they had crises and responsibilities to deal with. Still, it was impossible to be dreary in that family. As we spread out, stories crisscrossed the widening space and connected us back. Stories were ravelled and unravelled just as surely as porridge was made, dresses were sewed, shirts were ironed and children patched up and comforted, skills that every one of the women could carry out with expertise.

  How else, except by being with my mother, my grandmother and my aunts, would I have learned that the best way to measure a bolt of cloth is from nose-tip to fingertip, stretching your arm horizontally to one side? “It’s a yard,” my mother said. “A yardstick measure. As long as you don’t turn your head.” (It didn’t matter that I had questions about the length of a person’s arm, or that I would never learn to sew; I was more interested in the stories.) How else would I have heard of the jilted boyfriend who loved one of my aunts and never recovered after she married another man. Fifty years later, when he met her in the street, his lips shaped the silent words “I love you,” because he remembered that she could lip-read. His wife was beside him and none the wiser, as the two walked past. How else would I have heard the expression that someone was wandering aimlessly, “like a buck in a rainstorm.” Buck? I thought—or did she say duck? I didn’t ask. Or the story of WeeWee the fish who died in his goldfish bowl and was floating belly-up, only to be revived because my aunt raced to the rescue and gave him a few drops of brandy with an eyedropper. And how WeeWee died again and again, surviving for another twenty-five years because he was sure to be revived by an eyedropper dose of brandy dripped into his bowl.

  How else would I have learned about the hobos of the thirties when my mother was a child, men who made their way up the lon
g and dusty lane from the rail yards and were never denied a meal at my grandparents’ farm. My grandfather was absent during the week, because his work allowed him to be home only on weekends, but food was passed by his daughters through the doorway to the hungry men who sat outside in the shade while they ate. Or the story of my grandmother, trying to think up a special dessert for her children and serving peach halves in pink Depression-glass nappies that had been purchased at Woolworth’s, five cents apiece. In the hollow of each peach half she added a half teaspoon of my grandfather’s rum (while he was away) and a dollop of whipped cream. Money was scarce but milk and cream were in abundance on the farm, Depression or no.

  Throughout my own childhood, if a visitor (or an entire family) arrived unexpectedly around mealtime—at my parents’ home, or the homes of my grandparents or my aunts—an extra plate was laid, whether or not there was enough food. If there was not, the main course was shared and, to compensate, extra slices of bread and butter were heaped onto the platter in the centre of the table.

  The generosity of spirit that surrounded me in childhood helped to shape my optimism and endowed me with hope. The adults of my world—especially my aunts and uncles—bestowed love and laughter, gifts beyond reckoning. The intimate and loving voices of the women helped me to find my own voice—as a woman, a parent, a writer. And though our large family is now widely scattered while generations continue to be added, and though my grandparents, four of my uncles and one of my aunts have died, the early voices still demand to be considered and heard. They are as surely inside me as an arrow is inside a compass. I could no more remove them than I could remove my own genetic code.

  JANUARY 7, 2003. VANCOUVER WOMEN’S HOSPITAL

  It’s 2 a.m. and I’m finally in labour. My husband, Wayne, lies on a foldout cot beside me while I toss and turn, nauseous and feverish from the prostaglandin suppositories placed in my vagina every four hours since ten o’clock yesterday morning. The contractions started rapidly, but for the last few hours there haven’t been any. My body seems to have shut down. The night nurse fusses about, attempting to find a vein for an IV. Maybe I’ll be the first woman ever for whom the hormones won’t work. Perhaps they will have to cut the baby out of me.

  DECEMBER 13, 2002

  The first time we see our baby, she or he appears on the grainy screen of the ultrasound monitor in profile, one hand raised as if in welcome or dismissal. I want to peer closer, but am afraid to. The results of a routine test of my blood showed an abnormally high level of certain hormones associated with genetic disorders. Although they assure me that the test is renowned for yielding many false alarms, all I can think about is that this serene-seeming creature may be fatally damaged.

  Later that day, while a long silver needle plunges into my uterus to sample my amniotic fluid, Wayne holds my feet and I try not to jerk as the pierced muscles go into spasm. The doctor performing the procedure is holding an ultrasound wand steady against my belly, enabling us to see the baby’s echo once again. Our child is curled up like a hibernating mole in a corner of my womb.

  CHRISTMAS 2002

  The two-week waiting period for the amniocentesis results coincides with the Christmas holiday. After some debate, we decide to spend it with Wayne’s family in the Okanagan. It seems like a better bet than sitting at home.

  Yet there is no escape.

  On Christmas Day we sit in Wayne’s parents’ sunny living room listening to an old recording of seasonal favourites, opening bag after bag of tiny sleepers, pastel crib linens and hand-knitted booties so small my thumb can barely fit in them. Everyone knows there might be a problem with the pregnancy, but once in motion the gift-giving train is hard to halt. Behind my cheerful exterior a sudden thought sears me: What will I do with all this if the baby dies?

  DECEMBER 28, 2002

  We’re back home and the phone is ringing. My husband hovers, helpless, in the doorway while I grip the receiver so hard it squeaks. To disguise my pregnant state I’m wearing jeans zipped up tight, the straining top button lengthened with a rubber band.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s trisomy-18,” the midwife says matter-of-factly, and then, “It’s a girl.”

  I bend over, cradling my belly, as if I’ve been kicked in the stomach.

  The following day, the medical genetics counsellor at the hospital shows us pictures of trisomy-18 babies and lists our daughter’s likely abnormalities: severe mental retardation, heart problems, liver problems, intestinal problems … most fetuses with this abnormality are lost to miscarriage. The odds are against even those that survive to birth: 90 percent die in the first month of life.

  “But aren’t there some babies who survive to adulthood?” I ask, hoping my child might somehow be the exception.

  “No,” the counsellor answers. “There aren’t.”

  Our child’s fate hangs over us like a heavy, metallic cloud. We know what we must do but not how to say it, the word “terminate” unspoken between us, with its kinship to the term “exterminate.”

  “If you decide not to continue with the pregnancy you have two choices,” our doctor tells us. “A late-term abortion under general anaesthetic, or induced labour.”

  We opt for plan A. It seems the most painless: I’ll be asleep and won’t have to go through pointless pain. And although we’ve been told that seeing, even naming, our child will help us to grieve her loss, neither of us can imagine doing that. Rather than providing solace, the pastel pink hospital pamphlets with their reverential tone provoke in me an irrational rage: to hell with hospital bracelets and miniature nightgowns! If this is the end, let it be quick and clinical. I refuse to obscure this loss with sentiment, with angel wings and teddy bear smiles.

  JANUARY 6, 2003

  I’ve changed my mind. Lying in bed last night, I recalled the day, two months ago, when my daughter seemed to speak to me. Walking on the beach in the rain, I heard a little voice from inside say clearly I’m a girl and I’m okay. These words now seem like a cruel joke, but then again, perhaps they aren’t—perhaps she is okay with her condition. And if she is, then I must be. I am, after all, this child’s mother. Having made the unthinkable decision to end her life, the least I can do is to allow death to happen in the most natural, dignified way possible. Perhaps, in fact, this is what motherhood requires of me—not to deny her, but to stay present with her through this dark passage.

  My husband and I switch to plan B.

  Now, the house feels strangely expectant, the congratulations cards I received when I spread my good news still displayed on the living-room bookshelf. Wayne and I get out our daughter’s ultrasound snapshot, light a tiny beeswax candle in front of it, and attempt to say goodbye. But how to say goodbye to someone who hasn’t arrived?

  JANUARY 7, 2003

  At 5 a.m. the grief of my loss twists me up in it like a tornado, carrying me away for a while. After crying for over an hour, I feel the contractions start up again, and now, at 8 a.m., the baby is ready to be pushed out.

  “Try sitting on the toilet,” suggests the day nurse, a sturdy Irishwoman who has seen many women through this procedure. She helps me up from my bed, places a plastic bowl inside the toilet seat, and I sit down. I feel something weighty pressing against the lips of my vagina, then in one slippery motion my baby comes out.

  “It’s happened,” I yell, unable to actually name it. The nurse hastens back into the bathroom, bends down between my legs and cuts the umbilical cord. I get up hurriedly, aware of something red floating in the bowl.

  I just gave birth! Back in bed, I deliver a tiny placenta. For an instant I feel like a real mother. Then the nurse passes my tiny daughter to me, laid out on a folded sheet. Dead.

  Wayne nestles up close. “She’s beautiful,” he says.

  Together we examine her minute body, marvelling over every inch. At 20 weeks, her skin is so thin you can see the veins and arteries beneath it. A bloodless umbilical cord bejewels her tummy. Her eyes are sealed shut. She looks stran
gely peaceful. And although her tiny ears and elfin features—the classic characteristics of trisomy-18 babies—confirm what the test results predicted, to us she is perfect, a wonder of vulnerability, blessed with the long, lean legs of my husband, her whole length a cooling presence barely bigger than my outstretched hand.

  When the nurse asks if she can take her away for a few minutes, it’s hard to let go. In one brief moment our daughter has charmed us completely: a being tender with newness, reminiscent of an exposed human heart.

  When she comes back, the nurse has dressed her in a tiny woollen cap and pink nightgown. Although intended to acknowledge our baby’s realness, this dressing up does not bring comfort; the minuscule clothes seem only to diminish her. Her body, fragile to begin with, without firm skin or fat, is not the body of a living full-term child but something more mysterious, something as soft as a chamois glove.

  Oh, Grace, I say, stroking her torso tenderly. This is the name we have chosen for her—or rather she has chosen for herself. It arrived in me unexpectedly one afternoon this past week, while I was sitting, crying, at the kitchen table. You chose well, I say to her.

  Eventually we’re asked if we’re ready to leave. Time is advancing, and there are questions to answer. Would we like an autopsy? Should the hospital mortuary arrange cremation, or will we? Throughout the process of letting go—the showering and dressing, the signing of papers, the choosing of a box, painted by volunteers, in which to store our baby’s keepsakes—it’s her name, Grace, that holds me together: hopeful, respectable and slightly old-fashioned, like a cameo brooch or a pearl pin.