Losing It

by Alan Cumyn

  As soon as she put down the receiver it rang, a huge jangle that made her leg jump. She snapped up the phone.

  “Julia?” she cried.

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  “Well,” Lenore said, “you’re not the only one in the world who has friends.”

  “Friends?” Julia said.

  “Yes,” Lenore said, proudly. The box was starting to dig into her back. Why couldn’t they give her some decent furniture? “I’m meeting lots of new friends,” she said. “Lots and lots.” She added, “Ever so many!” but Julia couldn’t keep up her end. “Are you there?” Lenore asked finally.

  Julia yawned and said sleepily, “Oh, I’m sorry! I had an itchy nose.”

  “Well,” Lenore said, “that means you’re going to kiss a fool!”

  “Does it?” Julia said absently. Then, “It’s time for bed, Mother. Time for sleep,” so gently, with so much tucked wool, it reminded Lenore of something, she could almost put her finger on it.

  2

  “My mother and Matthew hath murthered sleep,” Julia murmured, stretching to replace the phone. Bob had turned over, was huddled in a mass at the edge of the bed, a spare pillow wrapped around his ears. His hairy back was slightly exposed to the chill so Julia pulled the blanket up for him. But he recoiled at her touch as if expecting to be hit. He was muttering something in his sleep: fathom, farling, fucking? She couldn’t make it out.

  Matthew was asleep now too, though he was still latched on to her breast. He was almost two, felt enormous on her front, and she knew it was time to wean, well past time. He was too strong, suckled like a wolfhound, left Julia’s breasts wrung out and wrinkled, rubbed raw. And he had teeth now too. He knew, for the most part, not to bite, but would forget sometimes in his enthusiasm and send Julia howling. But how to say no to those sky-blue eyes, the drool and gleam, the way he’d quiver in the second or two it took to latch on? He drank like an addict, drained her of energy even while bloating himself stupid with satiation. Now they were both lying like addled lovers parted after the storm, Matthew too thick to move, Julia too fatigued.

  “Bob,” she said and kicked him gently on the back of the leg. He didn’t move. “Bob!” she said again, kicked him harder.

  “Feeling, foaming,” he mumbled, and turned over even further, was going to fall onto the floor in a second.

  “Bob, could you put Matthew back to bed? Please, honey?”

  “Huh,” he said, then flumped over the edge. She expected him to get up finally, take Matthew off her chest. But he stayed where he was, wedged between the wall and the bed, snoring, most of the blankets having gone with him in the collapse.

  Now it was cold. Julia struggled upright, held on to Matthew, swung her legs over the opposite side of the bed, stood up groggily. She carried Matthew into his room, fought to keep her balance as she leaned over the bed and put him down gently. Probably he needed a change, but she wasn’t going to bother. He was asleep, that was good enough. She tucked him in, started to tiptoe away, then returned and kissed him softly on his sweet hair.

  He opened his eyes and she nearly swore, but then they fluttered closed, soft as butterfly wings. Julia crept away.

  “Mama!” Matthew cried and she froze, held her breath. “Mama.”

  “Shhh, baby,” Julia whispered. She stood rooted.

  “Mama,” he said, but softly, dreamily. She didn’t reply but waited, counted off one hundred and twenty seconds until she could hear his breathing, deep and even. Then she took another step.

  “Mama!” he yelled and started to cry, a choking sob.

  Julia turned. “Matthew, no, it’s time for sleep!” she said. He was starting to stand in his bed, was holding out his arms and wailing as if he’d been abandoned in the dust with wild dogs circling. “It’s time for sleep! This is ridiculous! God, you’re exhausted, why don’t you sleep?”

  She took him in her arms, held him, swayed back and forth as he sobbed into her shoulder, his breath choking and strained. “Oh, you are wet, you are soaking,” she said in her soothing voice. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. There, there.” The crying subsided gradually into a low-gear, throbbing moan, and she carried him over to the changing table in the corner of the room. But as soon as she put him down he wailed again, as unnerving as a siren. “Shhh!” she said, picked him up again, clutched him.

  Matthew reached inside her nightie. She could see that his eyes weren’t really open, he wasn’t quite awake.

  “No!” she said. “No, mister, no way! You’ve had enough. You’ve already drained me for tonight.”

  “Yes, nubbies,” he said. Eyes closed but burrowing his face between her breasts, looking for the opening.

  “No nubbies. We’ve done nubbies. I’m going to change you and then you’re going back to sleep!”

  But he was relentless, all yearning hands and mouth. She tried to put him down on the changing table again but he squirmed and fought. He was too strong. She knew she could drop him if she wasn’t careful. So she retreated to the rocking chair by the dresser, pulled her nightie off her shoulder and let him have some more of her right side. “Careful, oh, gentle, sweetie. Don’t chew!”

  He calmed down. He wasn’t really hungry. This was just psychological. After a time his lips went glip glip in a funny little pseudo-drinking motion. He liked having his hands on her breast too, it seemed – to be in control, tilt her this way and that. Glip glip.

  Gently, with Matthew still attached, she reached around and pulled down his plastic outer lining, then expertly undid the two pins. The cotton diaper was soaking but the diaper pail was several feet away. She got up awkwardly, held Matthew with her left hand, and leaned back to balance him while she fought with the lid, then dropped the wet diaper into the pail. She could hear her mother’s voice – her old, sane, real voice – implanted in the back of her head. “No diaper service in my day. No disposables! I soaked them in vinegar and washed them in boiled water and hung them out on the line white as lilies. It’s no wonder you love me so much!” Julia could almost feel her mother’s fingers reaching for her sides – a teasing, pinching kind of tickle.

  “Matthew, honey, I have to wipe you,” she said, and moved to return him to the changing table. But he wouldn’t let go. He clamped his teeth around her nipple and she was forced to lean all the way over so he could still suckle while he lay flat. “Ow! Come on, let go!” she said and wiggled her finger between his lips and her skin. The vacuum was broken but his jaw stayed firm. “Matthew. Matthew!”

  He wouldn’t let go. She had to strain and twist to keep her breast positioned on top of him while she grabbed a fresh diaper, wrapped him up, fought the safety pins into place. It wasn’t snug but would have to do. She stood him up rudely. For a few seconds he was shocked into letting go of the nipple, too stunned even to cry. She took advantage and hustled him into a dry plastic lining, then just as he opened his mouth she plugged him onto the left breast so that his scream was muffled, went deep inside her.

  Back on the rocker, she pulled an old blanket around them, tried to tuck her cold feet underneath her, but it was a tight fit, uncomfortable, so she left them down. She closed her eyes and rocked and sang little snatches of nursery rhymes. “To market to market to buy a fat pig.” She had a funny memory of her mother deliberately mixing up the words of old songs.

  Hush little baby don’t you cry,

  Mommy’s gonna bake you a wishbird pie,

  And if that wishbird pie won’t chew,

  Mommy’s gonna make you a daydream stew.

  That Scrabble-champion gleam in her eye, always ready to score and total and find herself ahead. “Well, I don’t understand what the problem is,” her mother used to say, gazing over Julia’s shoulder at some wearisome bit of homework, the square of the lesser angle or the Diet of Wurms. “When I was in school it was just a question of remembering!” She gave parties for forty, she wrote the book-club newsletter for thirty-five years, she remembered exactly when you’d last worn
a particular sweater and what boy was a nuisance and what bill had been paid when and from what account. She knew the origins of weird words – ergotism, a disease in grasses that also means quibbling, arguing, wrangling. When was that? A year and a half ago at Christmas she’d brought that out to put Bob in his place. He was pontificating – about what? About the role of the artist in a world gone mad with materialism, something like that, and she’d cut right in with, “What an ergotist,” which had stopped him flat.

  “Egotist?” he said finally. “Don’t you mean?”

  But she insisted on ergotist, and she knew what it meant, and he didn’t. “A lifetime of crossword puzzles must be worth something,” she’d said.

  She was shutting down even then but they didn’t know it. They’d all thought it was just the peculiarities of age. After Julia’s father had died, her mother had settled into her routines, her toast and tea for breakfast, walking to Pullman’s, to the bank, to Lilian’s for her hair on Tuesdays. Things were coming apart, in hindsight it was obvious, but four months ago she was still driving – to the library, to bridge club, to the dry cleaner’s. The living-room table was a disaster: papers piled in odd clumps sorted according to no decipherable order, bills mixed with garage-sale flyers and strange articles carefully clipped, obituaries and wedding announcements of people her mother had never known, ads for weight loss and used cars, unopened letters, and of course her messages scrawled on scraps of paper that she’d forget about then rediscover. “Left in cheesecloth,” she’d read, squinting, and turn to Julia. “What does that mean? Why did I write that?”

  Looking to Julia for the answer, increasingly for every answer, for who it was who called and what he was asking for, and where the insurance papers went, and what had happened to the damn radio that was always in her kitchen, thirty-one years on the same shelf, the brown one with the silver knobs and honest grease, perpetually set to the classical-music station.

  The phone rang. Matthew started awake but Julia cuddled him, pulled the blanket up by his ears to deaden the noise. It rang and rang. She’s being looked after, Julia thought. She’s safe, she can’t hurt herself, she’s already called twice since midnight.

  It kept ringing. Why didn’t the answering machine cut in? Matthew must have switched it off again, the way he liked to play with any button within reach. After a while Julia started to count, let it go to thirty before she finally got up. Then it stopped, of course. So she put Matthew in his bed and this time he took, but now she was wide awake. She walked back into her bedroom and stared at the naked bed, the shadowed, blanketed lump of husband on the floor. She found her robe, stuffed her aching cold feet into a pair of woollen socks, shuffled downstairs. It was 4:38 by the microwave clock. She turned on the overhead light – oh, she thought, I hate the way this kitchen looks. It was so dingy. The floor especially was a disaster. Layer upon layer of linoleum, cracked, dirty, falling apart. She hadn’t decided on a colour. The floor guy was coming tomorrow – today – and she still hadn’t decided. She didn’t want to think about it.

  She hadn’t written anything for months, could hardly remember the last time she’d had what felt like an original thought. “Telling It Slant: The Indirections of Emily Dickinson.” That was her last paper, returned in the mail months ago, and now she could only remember Dickinson in snippets, as if encountered in an almost forgotten dream of a time when ideas, when words on a page, seemed to be at the centre of what the world was about. The onset of motherhood had wiped out most of that, the old concerns lost in the midst of the extreme physical changes, the sleep deprivation, the all-consuming drain of nursing and attending her son. It was just a phase – she knew it, everyone said – but at the moment she couldn’t believe it with any conviction. Her own mother never gave in to motherhood like this. Julia remembered as a little girl lying stiff and alert in bed in the middle of the afternoon, tucked in to within an inch of her life, while her mother shut the door, and the click click of her heels went down the hall, nap time inviolable. She remembered her mother so often buried in a book, irritable at any interruption, with her cigarette (oh how she hated to quit later on) and her coffee cup stained with lipstick and her invisible shield of defence: you are the child, you play over there, and I am here, we will each amuse ourselves.

  How Julia swore she would never be like that with her own child.

  She plugged in the kettle now, waited, poured herself a cup of tea. She took a blanket from the sofa in the living room – there were blankets everywhere now, thanks to Matthew – and sat in the darkness, gazed out at the street. All the quiet houses. Someone had a light on down the road, upstairs. But all the rest of the houses were dark and the street was deserted. A white cat slunk across the lawn two houses over, disappeared into a hedge. Julia sipped her tea. She had an odd memory, just fell into it, of watching Bob in the classroom. He had a beard then, was animated the way that he gets, was wearing a black shirt with a dark tie and had taken off his jacket, was pacing as he talked, flinging his hands this way and that. She’d written page after page of notes but now she stopped, or rather she kept writing but lost track of what it was.

  He was playing to her. She knew it suddenly, it sent heat straight through her – her professor, twice her age! He was pacing and gesticulating, weaving his stories the way he had all term, looking everywhere but at her. But now she knew, it all made sense: the personal notes, the long chats in his office, the lunch they’d had that time when they were supposed to be talking about her project but instead he’d asked her all about her family, her other courses. Suddenly it all made sense. He was performing for her, had worn the black shirt for her, was going to chat with her at the end of the class about something. She didn’t know what it would be. Some little thing. He always did it. After ignoring her the whole period, just as she was leaving he’d say, “Oh, Julia,” and then the little thing would come out. The book he’d brought for her. The article he thought she should read. The poem he’d forgotten to bring last time, here it was. The little thing he wanted to mention.

  And there he was in Julia’s memory, talking away, and it was like it was happening again, she flushed just thinking of it. Because he looked at her at precisely that moment. She knew and then he looked and everything stopped. For the first time in ages, it seemed, he looked at her in the class and surely everyone else knew then too, it might as well have been announced. They were locked in this lover’s gaze, she couldn’t turn away, didn’t want to, was thrilled through and through.

  Then the bell went and he swivelled suddenly, gaped at the clock, this exaggerated, funny expression. “Already?” Everyone laughed. They stood and gathered their books and Bob finished the story, whatever it was, wrapped it up in another sentence or two while Julia stared at the floor, her face burning. She could barely breathe, felt trembly and out of control. She didn’t want to go but her feet moved her towards the door. Bob was talking to a couple of the students who had cornered him, were asking him about something. He couldn’t see her go but her feet were taking her, not slowly either. Some boy asked her something. She could hear the words clearly but didn’t reply. She was listening too hard for something else.

  “Oh, Julia!”

  Bob’s voice, across the classroom.

  “Julia! Could you wait just a second?”

  Stopping everything. Everyone looking once again.

  “I have a little thing,” he said, and smiled, and that was the day she knew.

  3

  Bob’s special package arrived in the mail in a plain brown padded envelope. The mailman handed it to Bob on the porch along with a water bill, a postcard from one of Bob’s ex-students written in the south of France, a flyer for discount muffler inspections, and a free pouch of shampoo called Lumio. The mailman was shorter than Bob but younger and carried himself straighter, and made a habit of looking each of his householders in the eye as he said, “Good morning.” Bob looked him right back but made a funny noise in his throat – “ghnihhr” – when he realiz
ed what had finally arrived.

  “A bit cool today,” the mailman said. It was grey and many of the chimneys in the neighbourhood were showing smoke for the first time that fall. But the mailman was in walking shorts and had worked up a sweat. His face glistened and Bob thought, How can he still be so fat? Walking like this every day.

  “Hope you finish before the rain,” Bob said, holding the special package and the discount muffler inspection in just the same way, as if all pieces of mail were created equal. He allowed himself a quick glance. The company logo, Lighthouse, was discreetly stamped on the top left, and the package was addressed to R. Sterling.

  “Anything?” Julia asked when Bob stepped back into the house, an old, solid, respectable home that Bob had bought with his first wife, Stephanie, when he’d landed tenure. He had loved the solemn bearing of it then, but it was dark on sombre days. The windows were original, with diamond-shaped panes set in lead. Bob was stiff from the night of bad sleep. He turned back into the hall and suffered a moment’s awareness of how closed-in the place made him feel. Though Julia had managed her best with it before the baby – she’d done over the living room and had had a wall taken out upstairs to open up the master bedroom – it reeked of Stephanie still. Her mirror in the hall, her wallpaper with the iris pattern in the den, her hand-stencilled border linking room to room.

  “I’m just about off,” Bob said. His briefcase was right there in the hall beside his packed bag and he knelt to click it open quickly and put his package inside. But his fingers fumbled with the combination. Calm down, he thought, and he tried to breathe deeply. He put the package and the rest of the mail on the oak floor to give the lock his proper attention. But Matthew erupted from the kitchen pulling a thumpy plastic elephant that scattered the mail.

  “Shit!” Bob roared and the boy flooded into tears, ran back to Julia, who hugged him quickly, smoothed his brown curls.