This Is Happy

by Camilla Gibb

  I was trapped in this spiralling eddy. I needed a professional opinion. I tried to put all this into plain words.

  It’s a parasite, the social worker reassured me. All it needs is your blood.

  6

  Our friends would soon be back from sabbatical and reoccupying their house. There was a separate apartment in the basement and they told me I could stay there for as long as I wanted. It was kind and generous of them, but I couldn’t imagine another temporary situation, especially one where I was pregnant and alone in someone’s basement. Pride was also preventing me from returning to my mother’s house.

  I needed somewhere to live. I needed a structure around me. I needed to act quickly. I needed to buy a house that closed in a matter of weeks.

  In the dirty grey middle of winter, and in an inflated market, my real estate agent took me into the foyer of yet another dark, overpriced house in need of gutting. He tried to sell me on the possibilities he envisioned, and I burst into tears at the prospect of the work and the expense. I couldn’t even see straight. He put a box of tissues on top of the parking brake in his car and we carried on.

  We soon went east, over the river. I had lived in this end of the city years before. Running through it is a humble stretch of Vietnamese bakeries and restaurants where I’d been consuming bánh mì and pho for years. I put in an offer on the first house I saw—a semi-detached Victorian with a good feel. The house was in need of quite a lot of work, but I could see its potential. A child lived there; there was a crib in the back bedroom. A child belonged in this house.

  There was an intense bidding war that I fought because I needed to land somewhere I’d feel safe and comfortable as a single mother. I needed this house. We would live in this house and we would eat bánh mì and pho. At least this much I knew.

  I had two more months of winter to spend in the big lonely house. Afraid of the isolation of the bedroom, I slept on the couch downstairs. I’d lost ten pounds, one for each week of my pregnancy, but my belly was bloated and hard. Alice, the ancient cat in the house, would knead the bump before settling down to lie on my chest. She held on during the waves of sobbing, claws dug in for the ride.

  I hated the weekends most of all. I dreaded them. I had to distract myself with something other than the depressing task of gathering papers for the family lawyer I had engaged. I had to get out of this house. My literary agent suggested meeting in New York. I can do this, I thought. I have reasons for being in New York that have nothing to do with Anna.

  I got pulled aside for a manual body search as I was boarding the plane. I told the official I was pregnant, feeling protective of my stomach. It was the first time I’d told a stranger. I felt an embarrassed rush of pride as I said it.

  It was hard enough carrying around the knowledge that I was pregnant during the first trimester, but this was part of the story of Anna’s departure that I had not been able to share. Mutual friends knew Anna had left me, but not that I was pregnant. The risk of my miscarrying during those early weeks was just too high; sharing news that could end in another tragedy, heaping one loss on top of another, was too much to consider.

  It was easier, in fact, to tell a stranger.

  Two weeks after going to New York, I went to Boston alone. It was my birthday: forty-two. As long as I could keep moving, I knew I was still alive. I knew two people in Boston, neither of them well. I told both of them that I was pregnant. I bought a stretchy tie-dyed dress at American Apparel to accommodate the bump. It was no longer invisible to everyone but me.

  I took a taxi home from the airport. The sun was shining, it was suddenly spring, and I was hungry. I got out of the taxi on a busy street and went into a restaurant. I ordered a lot of food. In that moment I suddenly overcame a lifetime of being self-conscious about eating on my own in public. Because I wasn’t, in fact, on my own.

  7

  At twelve weeks, my best friend, Vibika, accompanied me to an obligatory genetic counselling appointment. We had known each other, by this point, for thirty-eight years. When we were four years old, my family moved in next door to hers. We had come from England. They had come from Italy by way of the U.S. the year before. Vibika’s father built a playhouse in their backyard, a stage in their basement. We were ponies and prisoners, ballet dancers and the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar. We charged admission to our largely unscripted performances and bought Doritos and Cokes and Mars Bars with the profits. We ran around barefoot and shirtless in the rain banging milk jugs together. Even our cats were friends.

  Our fun took place only at Vibika’s house, though. She and her sister were afraid of my father.

  After five years of best-friendship, things in our worlds began to wobble. First, Vibika’s parents split up. Less than a year later, so did mine. Hard to believe now, but ours were the only two divorced families I knew. We were ten, and school and our friends assumed more importance, as they would have anyway, but the need for a world beyond was amplified by the destabilizing changes at home.

  Vibika’s mother moved away on something of a spiritual quest. Ara came to live with us, but two years later he was gone. Then my brother went to live with my father. And Vibika’s mother developed cancer. She died in her early forties. Micah came back home after two years with my father and promptly dropped out of school. A year later, my father disappeared from our lives altogether, and sometime after that my mother and Vibika’s father both remarried. Despite our best efforts, they did not marry each other.

  We’ve remained friends, growing even closer over the years. Ours is perhaps the longest and most uncomplicated relationship either of us will ever have.

  I asked Vibika to come to the appointment because I couldn’t bear the thought of being there alone in a room full of nervously happy couples. I needed to be there with someone who loved me.

  We were seated in a room with five couples, everyone over thirty-five. This was not a celebration: the nurse leading the presentation was all doom and gloom. It was not enough that we’d managed to hold on to our pregnancies through the first trimester. Our risks for chromosomal abnormalities were daunting. Ninety per cent of a forty-year-old’s eggs are damaged in some way.

  We watched an ancient video where a woman gets the happy news of a positive pregnancy over the phone and calls her husband at work. A month later she is wearing a muumuu, agonizing over whether to have amniocentesis. Vibika, a television producer, couldn’t refrain from remarking on the crappy production values. Neither of us could get over the muumuu. Our laughter was disruptive. I realized the other people in the room must have assumed we were a couple. When I whispered this to Vibika, she said she couldn’t be more proud.

  The first test revealed minimal risk for Down’s and other chromosomal abnormalities. I felt proud of my baby, my little egg. He was stronger than me. He had a will to survive beyond my own.

  Vibika accompanied me to the later appointment for amniocentesis. She held my hand while that long needle went straight into my belly. The Saudi doctor told me my little egg was a girl. I asked her in Arabic whether she was sure. I had studied Arabic for years, but it was Ara who taught me the word for penis. The things that stay with us. The places they prove handy.

  I didn’t relay the results of the amniocentesis to Anna. My body, my business, I told myself, although I knew it was much more complicated than that.

  I wouldn’t be able to keep her at such a distance. The first thing my lawyer told me was that Anna had rights and responsibilities where this child was concerned. We’d conceived her together, in some respect, after all. Canadian law doesn’t care about the gender or biological ties of the parents to the child or how conception took place. It endorses the idea of two parents for the well-being of the child. Anna had rights if she wanted them, responsibilities whether she wanted them or not.

  But I had no idea what I wanted. I was paralyzed—all flaming feeling, no insight or calm or clarity. I was crying all the time, I was angry and afraid, I couldn’t write, and all I wanted w
as for Anna to come home, to say she had made a tragic mistake, to be the family we were supposed to be. I couldn’t conceive of any other configuration. No fantasy replaced the original—the only—idea. I didn’t want anything else. I had certainly never wanted to be a single parent.

  Vibika encouraged me to name the egg. She was trying to make her real, shift my attention, encourage the growth of a relationship between us. She was right to. Despite the growing evidence of the egg’s presence, I had remained in a state of largely suspended disbelief. I picked something without much thought or reason; a name that must have been in the air. The egg was now a girl with a pretty name.

  8

  The day of my move, an old Greek man sweeping the sidewalk in front of my new house waved hello and barked: “You the pregnant lady?”

  I nodded, feeling rather exposed.

  “Everything will be okay,” said the man, nodding his head and saluting me.

  I wanted, so desperately, to believe him.

  The week before Anna had announced it was over, a man had come to the door selling fish. Boxes of beautiful line-caught fish. I’d been thinking about spring, of the barbecues we would have with our friends once the weather got warmer. The house we had rented was an ideal place to entertain; it had a beautiful kitchen overlooking an architectural wonder of a backyard.

  I spent a fortune on a bag of line-caught sea bass fillets. I was planning into the future, our spring and summer ahead. I was thinking well beyond, in fact. I imagined life, all of it—the pleasure and pain, the indignity and the glory of it—shared.

  After Anna left, I couldn’t bear to see those fish in the freezer. I put the box in the freezer in the apartment in the basement. I could have thrown them out; I probably should have. If I were writing a novel or a screenplay, I would have me cooking all those fish and stuffing myself full of them in one sitting. And not tasting a thing. A tragicomedy.

  In real life I just put them out of sight. I left them behind, those hundreds of dollars’ worth of fish, when I moved out that morning. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my friends about the fish in their freezer. I never told anyone. The humiliation was too great. The naivety and blind optimism of the purchase.

  Everything Anna and I owned was now coming out of storage, the whole psychological mess of it coming here to my new house to be sorted through. Nine years of shared possessions, every single one of them with a story: worst of all, the photo albums.

  It would have been easier to just leave it all in a storage locker. Lives have been abandoned to storage lockers before. Instead, I carted all these painful mementoes of the past decade into a house that was more rundown than I remembered. It was dingy and depressing, in fact.

  Perhaps most houses feel like this when you move into them: stripped of furniture, the holes in the walls, the dust that hid behind furniture, the bare bulbs. All the things you failed to notice before made starkly obvious—the slope and creak of the floors, the vents that connect rooms, carrying sound, the flock wallpaper on the ceiling that has simply been painted over, the bubbling to the walls that reveals the framing of the lathe and plaster, the lack of closets.

  The next night, while I was alone with my boxes, one of my neighbours started a bonfire in his backyard. He was feeding two-by-fours into the fire. Sparks were flying upward into the trees. He pulled a karaoke machine on a dolly into his yard and his teenage kids cranked up the volume and played the bongos until midnight. It was a Sunday night in April, for Christ’s sake.

  On Monday morning a contractor arrived with his crew to tear out my kitchen. An electrician started in on the job of pulling out all the old knob-and-tube wiring, which needed replacing. I hadn’t even been in this house for forty-eight hours and already it was being dismantled around me. There was suddenly no kitchen. In fact, the entire back wall of the house was gone, replaced by a tarp—a little too reminiscent of my father’s farmhouse—and the rains of April were lashing down. There were holes in every other wall and ceiling. Plaster was falling down and drywall dust filled the air. Addressing one problem revealed several others—termites and mould and damp.

  I was confined to a single habitable room and living on Vietnamese takeout. The heating ducts were being rerouted when the temperature suddenly dropped, so I pulled my mattress into the hallway, wedging it between the banister and the wall, and slept behind the plastic sheet sealing off the front room of the house.

  This was where I was lying when my baby started to make her presence known, startling me with the lightest of touches, as if she was swiping a paintbrush across the inside my belly. She was real. This was real. What the fuck was I doing? This was no way for us to live. The next day, I packed up my shame, stubbornness, reluctance, and went to stay at my mother and stepfather’s house.

  The last time I had stayed there for any length of time was in the first few weeks after I’d returned from England fourteen years ago. I was profoundly depressed then, though doing my best not to show it. There was a surreality to being back in that house, a collapse in time—as if I had never been married, as if I had never been happy—as if I was, in fact, just fourteen, fourteen and pregnant, single and ashamed and afraid and depressed and sleeping in the bed I had always slept in, my stepfather cooking dinner every night.

  I returned to the east end every day in order to remind myself this was not the case, that I was an adult, owner of a house currently under renovation, not an adolescent cliché. I had lights and furniture and appliances and cabinetry to buy. I made sixteen trips to Ikea in two months. When the electrical work was done, I moved back into my house so that I could sand and sweep and paint.

  It would have been nice—more than nice—if someone had been doing this with me. Nice, too, if someone had made me a cup of tea, made a midnight run for Swiss cheese or cooked me lentils, the two things I craved. It would have been nice to have been taken out for dinner, to have had someone help take out the garbage, clean the house, share the changes in my body, talk to my belly, feel her move, notice her hiccup, accompany me to prenatal classes, tell me I was beautiful, keep me company during sleepless nights, prop me up with pillows, love me and tell me so, ask me about my fears, reassure me that everything would be okay, have doubts with, be scared with, be reassured by me, a me made strong by this belly. It would have been so much more than nice.

  A pregnant body is an animal body, a body within a body, a secrets-in-public body, a sexy body, a threatening body, a woman’s body, a fighting, growing body, an alien and impossible body. It is impossible not to notice, and yet I was completely unseen by the person I loved, the only person who really mattered.

  I was feeling isolated and invisible, yet suddenly burning with a second-trimester desire that no one had ever warned me about. Not What to Expect When You’re Expecting, not my midwife, not Tamzin, certainly not my mother and none of my few friends who’d had children. Perhaps it was supposed to be a shared secret, some primal bonding between you and the person with whom you had conceived while the fetus was becoming a child. Perhaps this was the closest you could get to sharing a pregnancy.

  I shamelessly begged someone I’d always had a thing for to fuck me. That someone did me the honour of obliging. It was the roughest and most powerful sex of my life: fearless and life giving. It restored life to a body creating a body. I existed, for a brief moment, as a pregnant woman in intimate relationship to another person. And then I shut down, retreating inward. My baby was taking over; she felt bigger than me now. I had to marshal all my strength in order to take care of her.

  9

  A friend introduced me to a pregnant woman in my new neighbourhood—a doctor who had chosen to have a baby on her own. She had prepared a spreadsheet of things that needed to be done in the countdown to her baby’s arrival. I was thoroughly intimidated by her enthusiasm and togetherness; I was miserable and completely unprepared. I suppose there’s a burden of expected cheerfulness imposed on every pregnant woman, but I was utterly incapable of even faking it.

>   The egg, meanwhile, dropped her paintbrush for some more vigorous activity. I watched with equal parts fascination and horror as my stomach turned into a wave. She was swimming, and every time she reached the end of the pool she did that flip turn that I had never mastered. She was so robust, such a kicker, that if she was still for any length of time, I worried. Rather than calling the midwife, I got into the bath. She didn’t respond to music or a cup of juice, but she liked the sound of running water. I ran the hot tap until it was cold.

  I will teach her how to swim. It was my first independent thought of who we would be to each other in the real world, in the world outside my body.

  I signed us up for aquafit and began to search for a prenatal class for single women. I found only one in the city that wasn’t for teenagers, but it welcomed only women who were single by choice, not as a consequence of death or divorce. Because this was supposed to be a time of celebration. There’s no place for your grief and loneliness here!

  Vibika and another friend, Heidi, agreed to accompany me to the prenatal classes offered at my midwifery clinic. Surely there would be feminists and lesbians and unmarrieds and oddballs in a class offered by a midwifery clinic. But midwifery had perhaps become more mainstream than I had realized: the other women in the class all came accompanied by largely silent husbands.

  The women were impatient with the instructor’s agenda, and right away they hijacked it with detailed questions about delivery—whether they could have a water birth, whether there were dimmers in the delivery rooms, whether they could play music, whether they could eat during labour. They were decorating the rooms for themselves, programming their playlists, hoping to create the perfect environment for this life-altering moment.