“I have to go to the washroom,” she says, sitting down on the toilet.
“You do that.”
The nurse comes in and sees the vomit.
“Oh, a little accident. Don’t worry, we’ll get that cleaned up. I’ve got your Nubain when you’re finished.
The drug doesn’t do much for Sarah and she’s in a state of panic. She orders the epidural. After a gut-wrenching two-hour wait of watching Sarah in agony, the anaesthesiologist finally comes and gives her the epidural. After this Sarah can’t walk, she’s numb from the waist down. But now she’s comfortable. When she lies back in bed, the muscles in her shoulders, neck and face relax. I relax, too. I didn’t realize how wound up I’d become. Watching Sarah go through that kind of pain, it was like hundreds of little strings were being pulled all over my body, making various parts of my body involuntarily contract. Women say men don’t understand the pain of childbirth. Maybe so. I’ll never know it, but I have a vivid imagination and a stockpile of empathy.
Before the epidural I’d been watching The Exorcist and suddenly the channel changed to The Sound of Music. Now it’s all birds and butterflies. Sarah is smiling. She asks me to pass her People magazine. I realize that I’m super hungry. It’s almost nine and we haven’t eaten anything since lunch. Sarah isn’t allowed to eat anything but clear fluids and Jell-O. They don’t want Sarah vomiting while she is anesthetized and choking to death on a cafeteria cheeseburger. “Listen babe, do you mind if I go grab a bite to eat?”
“Sure honey, just be a sweetie pie and get me a ginger ale before you go.”
My wife is five floors up, paralyzed from the waist down, about to birth out my first child and I’m staring at the cafeteria salad bar. Guilt hangs about my mind, a crooked shadow in my skull; I should be feeling more. This is a life-pivoting moment, but here I am, thinking about my stomach. Maybe I’ll be a rotten father? Profound thoughts or feelings about my situation aside, a man has to eat.
The mushrooms, the broccoli, the olives, the carrots, all the veggies for that matter, look like they have let out a collective sigh, and they each lie existentially defeated in small round beige containers surrounded by crushed ice. Blue cheese, French and Italian dressings languish to one side. I decide to skip the healthy choice for fear of being depressed. I move to the main food counter. A little gruff woman dressed in a white kitchen uniform and a hairnet barks that the daily special is cabbage rolls. She uncovers a rectangular silver tray containing their grey leafy bodies resting in a red sauce which I imagine should be tangy, but it’s probably as bland as paste.
“I think I’ll just get a cheeseburger,” I tell her. She seems pissed.
“Lettuce, onion, tomato, pickle?” she rattles at me at high speed.
“Yeah, sure, the works.”
“Fries?” she spits.
“Sure.”
“Gravy?” she yells.
“No thanks.” Jesus, what’s with this lady?
I watch as she fries a pre-cooked patty and places not just depressed veggies, but suicidal ones on my hamburger bun. The slice of tomato looks like it has reached the end. The crinkly fries have been under the heat lamp since 8 a.m., I’m sure. She passes me my platter and says, “Enjoy,” without a smile.
I don’t want to eat in front of Sarah, so I grab a seat and quickly try to wolf it down, worried too that I might be needed upstairs. The cheeseburger has a strange chemical taste to it, as do the fries. I pour ketchup over everything but it still tastes like what it is, bad hospital cafeteria food. I manage to eat half of it and give up. When I get back up to our room, Sarah is still reading her magazine.
“Hi honey, would you be a sweetie pie and get me some Jell-O and ginger ale?” she asks again.
For the next twelve hours we ride out the storm of labour. There’s a chair for me that unfolds into an uncomfortable makeshift bed. We both drift in and out, trying to sleep, trying to stay comfortable. But the excitement, the worry, keeps both of us up. Every once in a while I pull out the video camera and take some footage, noting the time and how many centimetres Sarah is dilated.
At 8:42 in the morning, Sarah’s reached ten centimetres – show time. The doctor comes into the room with several other people. I’m filming and holding Sarah’s hand.
“I’m scared,” Sarah repeats again to me.
“You’re doing fine,” I tell her trying to channel the soothing voice our hippie prenatal instructor said I should be using.
“Okay, when you feel a contraction I want you to push for the duration of the contraction,” says the nurse.
Sarah pushes with each contraction. “I can’t do it,” she says.
“Yes you can,” the nurse reassures her.
“I can’t. I’m telling you I can’t”
“You can. You have to.”
“Aaagrrrrrraahhhhh!”
“Good, that’s it.”
“Aaahhhhherrga!”
“Good, good”
This continues for twenty minutes, and then I see the top of Sammy’s head appear, and then disappear in a kind of peek-a-boo game being played out with Sarah’s vagina. Then in one screaming giant push Sammy’s head pops out. It’s a light shade of purple. Her eyes are closed and she appears not to be breathing. I think, stillborn. Maybe she was strangled by the cord? I panic. I look around the room at the faces of the doctors and nurses. I scan them for any signs, a look of horror or panic on their faces, something to confirm my fear that yes, Sammy is dead. Nothing. Then Sarah performs yet another mighty push and Sammy’s shoulders come through. Then the rest of her seems to slip out. I see movement!
“She’s alive!” I yell. Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep, or our long struggle to have a child, but a furnace door opens inside me, a heat that radiates from my navel to my head and it comes out of my body as hot tears. Somebody asks me if I want to cut the cord. I do, first wiping my face on my shirt sleeves.
“Is she healthy?” Sarah asks, trying to see.
“She’s beautiful, baby, beautiful.”
“I did it,” Sarah says.
“Yes, yes you did, baby.”
I call my mother and she’s crazy excited. She tells me she’s on her way to the hospital to meet Sammy. Then I debate who to call next, my father or Sarah’s mother. I call Sarah’s mother, not really sure which is the lesser of two evils.
“Hello, Franklin residence,” says a cold voice. It’s Sarah’s mother.
“Hello Barbara, it’s me, Colin. Your granddaughter was just born.”
“Oh great. Everything went smoothly I take it?” she says with almost no enthusiasm in her voice, as if I just told her I replaced an air filter in her car.
“Fairly smoothly I guess you could say.”
“Do you still plan on naming the child Samantha?”
“Yes, but I think we’re going to call her Sammy.”
Silence.
“Hello?” I say.
“Yes Colin, I’ll be up in a couple of days as we discussed to help out.”
“Sounds good.”
“Give my best to Sarah.”
“Will do.”
“Goodbye Colin.”
“Bye, Barbara.” I hang up. What a bitch.
I call over to my father’s house. His wife answers. She tells me he left for the hospital a while ago. Just as I hang up I hear, “Hey Tiger.” My father hasn’t called me Tiger since I was eight. I spin around. “Dad?”
There’s my father, flowers in one hand and a box in the other. “Where’s that granddaughter of mine?” he asks, booze coming off his breath.
“How did you know to come to the hospital?”
“She was scheduled to have the induction yesterday, wasn’t she?”
“You remembered that?”
“Had it circled on the calendar. When there was no
answer at your place last night, I figure you must be in here. I came down this morning at six.”
“You’ve been here since six?”
“Brought a little something to nip on,” he says, pulling a silver flask from his pocket. “Want a nip?”
“No thanks.”
“Here you go,” he says passing me a box of cigars. “I put little pink bands around each of them. They’re Dominican. I took a couple for myself. They’re damn good. Pass ’em out to all your friends.”
“Gee, thanks Dad.”
“No problem, now let’s see this Sammy girl.” Despite the fact that my father has been drinking since six in the morning, he’s good company and leaves shortly after seeing Sarah and the baby. He says he’ll swing by tomorrow. As he leaves, I see my mother coming down the hallway with balloons and flowers and another stuffed creature – a yellow duck.
“Hi Mom.”
“Oh baby, give me a big hug!” she yells, wrapping herself around me.
“Where are they?” she asks.
“Follow me Mom, this way.”
Pushed Over the Edge
Sarah’s breasts are enormous. They were big before, but now they are triple-X porn-star boobs. She’s having a heck of a time trying to get Sammy to latch. Imagine trying to suck on a spring roll that was attached to the Goodyear Blimp – you get the idea? Sarah’s solution has been to dribble colostrum, the pre-milk, from her breasts into Sammy’s mouth, as if she were a baby bird.
The first night at home goes fairly smoothly, I think. Sammy’s sleeping in our room in an antique bassinet beside our bed. Sarah slept in this thing when she was a baby, as did Barbara. Sammy sleeps for five hours straight. I don’t sleep well because Sarah’s perched like a gargoyle at the side of the bassinet, making sure that Sammy is breathing. I try to get her to relax, but she can’t. At 2 a.m. Sammy wakes up screaming. She has peed through her diaper. I get a cloth and change everything. I record the urination on a yellow card that the hospital gave us, which we have to give to our doctor in few days. Sarah then tries to feed her but can’t get the latch, so Sarah does the dribble. Sammy drinks down an ounce. “Want to try and burp her?” asks Sarah.
“Sure.”
She passes me Sammy and I balance her on my knee. I hold her bobble-head with thumb and index fingers, squishing her chubby cheeks, palm supporting her chest as I gently tap her on the back with the palm of my other hand. Sammy lets out a significant belch. Sarah and I smile.
“Isn’t she the cutest?” Sarah asks.
“Yeah, pretty cute.”
“I love you, Colin.”
“Love you too, baby.”
Sarah begins to cry.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Just tired and happy.”
“Me too,” I say, rocking Sammy in my arms. “Me too.”
Barbara arrives from Toronto the next day. I greet her at the door with Sammy in my arm. She peers at Sammy as if she were selecting which Rolex was the most expensive in the showcase.
“What do you think of your granddaughter?”
“Quite lovely.”
“Would you like to hold her?”
She looks at me like I’m offering her a haul off a crack pipe. “Uh, sure,” she says, taking Sammy into her arms. I swear I’ll never understand how this lady managed to raise children.
Sarah comes out of the washroom and sees her mother holding Sammy. “Oh Mom isn’t she adorable?” asks Sarah, flying to her mother’s side.
“Colin, would you mind getting my bags? They’re in the car,” Barbara says, extending her keys. Barbara doesn’t ask, she orders.
“Sure thing,” I say. As soon as I get outside a weight lifts; somebody has taken their foot off my chest. The mother-in-law tension has already begun. Barbara thinks Sarah could have done a whole lot better than marry a government bureaucrat wannabe writer. Barbara wishes I had aspired to be something to help her be socially triumphant during her gin rummy games with her affluent friends: my son-in-law is a brain surgeon or my son-in-law is a corporate lawyer.
Sarah told me that her father had met another woman, but before he could leave Barbara he died of cancer. Subsequently, there was no divorce scandal and the pristine veneer of country clubs and church socials remained firmly intact. Barbara’s been playing the role of grieving widow for over ten years now. What surprises me is that Sarah puts up with the charade of mourning. I wonder if I can sneak off to the bar for a drink?
I pop the trunk of Barbara’s Audi, grab all four bags, which are as heavy as Sarah’s childhood guilt. I drag the lot back inside and into the living room. In Sammy’s room I’ve set up a $250 cot – Barbara wouldn’t sleep on anything less according to Sarah.
“Oh, Colin, you brought everything in. You can put those two back,” orders Barbara, pointing at the two bigger bags.
“Oh, what are these for?” I ask.
“Those are my clothes, those two are gifts for Sarah and the baby.”
“Clothes? Don’t you want me to put them in your room?”
“Room?”
“Yeah, we got a cot set up in Sammy’s room for you.”
“Oh no, I’m staying at the Westin, dear.”
I put the bags back in the car. I wonder if I can return the cot? I’m fuming. Back inside, Barbara says, “Colin, would you be a dear and get me a few things at the store?”
“What do you need, Barb?”
Sarah can tell I’m pissed and is giving me the look of death.
“I need a bottle of Absolut vodka, cranberry juice, ice – unless you have lots in the freezer. And can you also get soda crackers and some good cheese.”
She pulls a hundred from her purse and remains seated, holding out the bill. I walk over and snatch the bill. Barbara reaches into her purse and pulls out a pack of menthol cigarettes.
“Barb, you can’t smoke around the baby,” I tell her.
She looks to Sarah.
“Mom, really, you’ll have to go outside.”
Barbara sighs and says, “Fine,” and puts the package back in her handbag. Barbara reminds me of Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate.
When I get back, I fix drinks for Barbara and me, and then move on to dinner. I’m making Sarah her favourite, spaghetti and meatballs. I mix the ground beef with an egg, breadcrumbs, freshly grated parmesan cheese and parsley. I hand-roll forty tiny meatballs, which I’m frying when the doorbell rings. Sarah is trying to breastfeed and Barbara is outside smoking. I run to the door. It’s the public health nurse. She asks how things are going. I tell her fine, but explain that Sammy’s having trouble latching. She jumps in and immediately helps Sarah get repositioned. The doorbell rings again. Barbara’s locked herself out. The phone rings. I run and answer it. It’s my mother, asking how it’s going. I tell her it’s busy and whisper that Barbara is driving me nuts. She tells me that Great Uncle Lester died the other day at ninety-two. I haven’t seen Uncle Lester since I was six. I interrupt her and ask if I can call her back. I put the phone down and it immediately rings again. “Hello?”
“Is this Colin MacDonald?”
“Yes?”
“I’m calling to…”
“No thanks,” I say slamming down the phone.
The smoke alarm goes off. The fucking meatballs! I run to the kitchen, which is full of smoke. Sammy is screaming. I pull the pan off the stove and throw it into the sink, open the window, grab a chair and stand on it to pull out the battery from the alarm. Barbara waltzes into the kitchen waving the air, coughing ever so slightly and looks at the charred marbles in the sink. “Well that’s not very good now, is it? Maybe we should do take-out. Do you know any Thai places that deliver?” asks Barbara.
After dinner I clean up all the tinfoil trays and wash the dishes. Sarah comes up to me and says, “Why don’t you take th
e laptop and go out for a bit, do some writing? You haven’t written in several days.”
“Are you sure? You going to be okay looking after Sammy?”
“I’ll be fine, my mother is here.”
“Yeah, big help.”
“Be nice.”
“Call me if there is any problem?”
“Sure. Where are you going, Starbucks?”
“Yep,” I say, unplugging the laptop.
“Heading out?” Barbara asks, looking up from the couch over the top of Vogue.
“Yeah, going to do a little writing down at the coffee shop.”
“Oh, so you’re still trying to do that, are you? What’s it called, The Ice Cube?”
“The Cube People. I finished it two Christmases ago.”
“Oh, well good for you, Colin. Any luck getting it published?”
“Not yet, but one publisher asked to see the whole thing.”
“Well, that’s encouraging isn’t it? Who’s Maggie Woodland published with? She’s written science fiction.”
“Cold Bird Press.”
“Have you tried them?”
“No.”
Barbara doesn’t say anything, just leaves it hanging. Sarah walks up behind me carrying Sammy.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” I say. I kiss Sarah and a sleeping Sammy on the top of her little head. I go out the door.
Hungry Hole: Chapter 11
When Ryan opened the door, he saw Gillian’s face, but it was much older, wrinkled. The hair was grey and she was wearing bifocals. “Hello Heidi,” said Ryan, concealing the ball-peen hammer in his hand behind his right leg.
“I’ve been so worried, where’s Gillian?”
“She’s right upstairs. I don’t know what happened. She came home early from work complaining she wasn’t feeling well and then she wanted me to call you. She wanted to see you. She seems to have a low-grade fever. Maybe you can convince her to go to the hospital.”
“Yes of course,” said Ryan’s mother-in-law as she stepped into the hallway and headed up the stairs.
When she’d reached the third step, Ryan swung the hammer, striking her in the back of head. Her arms shot out to the sides as if she’d been crucified. Ryan dodged her body as it fell backwards. When she landed, she twitched and convulsed. She shook all over, then became still. Her mouth and eyes were wide open. Ryan pulled her by the feet toward the basement. Her head bounced on the steps on the way down.
The Cube People Page 11
