by Mark Sampson
“Rani, you really should stop talking.”
“No. You’re going to listen to me. Do you know when I started petitioning for this promotion?” she asked. “Five or six years ago, when you got married. I thought: well that’ll be it. That’ll be the end of our international hookups. I mean, I lived for those, Sharpe. I thought, What’s the point of being one airplane ride away from you, now? But … but I look at my parents, retired and living out their last days in India together, and I think …” There was another long stillness on the line. Was she crying? “… I think, I don’t want to die alone. I want to die with someone I can love. And I know that’s you. And maybe this cock-up you’ve caused, this body blow to your life over there, has created that opportunity. So I’m asking you, Sharpe. I’m putting myself out on a limb over here. I’m a middle-aged woman asking you to be with her.”
I had to make a joke. How could I not? “You’ve been watching Notting Hill again, haven’t you?”
“Shut up. Be serious. I’m asking. Come to India in the new year. Come be with me.”
“Rani, I — I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I did a quick prioritization in my mind. “I have a job here,” I said. “I have tenure at a major North American university.”
“Oh, Sharpe, you hate your job,” she replied. “You said as much to me, years ago. How did you put it? The gormless undergrads; the backbiting colleagues; the uptight, cynical grad students. You hate it all. I know you — you’d love nothing more than to give all that up and just write full time. And I’d be happy to offer you that chance. With this job, I can take care of us. And you — you can just lie around all day, reading books and writing.” And then she added, “You know, like your wife does now.”
“Rani, knock it off.”
“Hey — your words, not mine.”
“I never said that about Grace.”
“Oh, I suppose you didn’t,” she said. “I suppose I just inferred it from other stuff you told me in emails, about your set-up there. And from reading her column online.”
“Rani, I —” It had to be said. “I love Grace.”
“Do you? Then how come you’re calling me? And how come you went all week without hearing what you needed to hear, about the reaction to your slip being so wildly out of proportion? How come she didn’t — or wouldn’t — reassure you of that?”
“Rani …”
“I mean I know she’s, like, twenty years your junior —”
“Fourteen years —”
“— and I’m sure she’s cute as a button. But come on. When you first described her to me, and after I read a few of her columns, I thought — really? This is who the inimitable Philip Sharpe has ended up with? She’s what — thirty-six years old? — and she sounds like she’s still a child.”
That word triggered something in me, and I was about to speak, but Rani wasn’t quite done.
“Sharpe, I’m asking you. Walk away. Walk away from that mess you made in Toronto and come be with me.”
“Rani, I have a daughter,” I said sternly. “I have a daughter, now.” Actually, I thought, I have two daughters.
There was another stretch of silence on the line.
“Arrangements can be made,” she said, finally. “We could work something out. I mean,” and here she chuckled, “how long could the flight between Mumbai and Toronto be? Twenty, maybe twenty-five hours?”
“Rani, I’m going to go. I can’t even think about what you’re proposing right now.”
“Well, think about it,” she said. “Go get your apology to the world online, and then think about it. You know we’re very good together, Sharpe. We always were.”
“Goodbye, Rani.”
“Think about it.”
“Goodbye.”
And then I sat there with the extinguished cordless in my lap. I wouldn’t think about it. Nope. I wouldn’t. I had a daughter. I had two daughters. I wouldn’t think about it. I wouldn’t think about it at all.
Oh, but how could the rest of the day go, the rest of the evening, after that? Grace came home with the kids and we did not speak. Fury hung between us like a sheet. She announced to the house that she needed to get some writing done, and so settled in at her little alcove while I took the kids. Naomi and I escorted Simone over to her friend Sarah’s house, and then walked back, with me dutifully humouring the three-year-old’s unremitting queries. Why do trees have leaves, Daddy? When will chipmunks fly? Can I can I can I? Back home, I tried to get Naomi down for a nap, but she would not have it. We read some storybooks; we had a tea party in the living room. Would you like some ceeeem? Why, yes I would. Okay, but Piggy gets some furrrst. That is fine. While Naomi coloured in her colouring book on the kitchen floor (more dine’sores; always more dine’sores), I did a bit of prep for tomorrow’s brunch. I vivisected a cantaloupe; I mixed up a couple pitchers’ worth of pancake batter, saran-wrapping the tops and finding room for them in our fridge. At one point, I walked by Grace’s alcove and saw her screen, saw the little red bubbles along Facebook’s blue border. As the supper hour approached, Naomi and I went out to fetch Simone while Grace got up to throw some chicken tits on the George Foreman and make a salad. When we got home, I ventured a question. How did it go? The answer came back as predicted: in three hours, she had managed about a sentence and a half.
During dinner, we did not speak. Then came bath time. Then came PJs. Then came more storybooks after we sidled Naomi into bed. But oh God. Oh God, Naomi. Why tonight? Why? You went down so easily on Wednesday. Don’t you realize we’re hosting a very important brunch tomorrow? But no, no. One story would not do; nor three, nor five. A pee. Sippy cup of water. Another pee. Okay, okay, time for sleep. Right? Wrong. Wrong! This was the World Series, this was the Olympics of Not-Going-to-Sleep, and it was as if she had trained for it her whole life. Stop jumping on the bed and get under those sheets — right now! But no, no. Oh gawd — gawd ! Go to sleep, you little terrorist. If you get out of that bed one more time! Gawd! No, we ALREADY READ THAT ONE!
When a child refuses to sleep, it can make your evening feel like it’s trapped inside a very bad prose poem — all jarring transitions and fragmented narrative arcs.
At 9:10, she wandered downstairs clutching blankey and claiming a nightmare. I picked her up and put her back to bed. Another storybook.
9:45: Grace and I were reading in the living room when Naomi started roaring like a camel upstairs. Grace bounded out of her chair to go investigate.
10:50: We were in the ensuite flossing for bed when Naomi wandered in to our room (a HUGE no-no!) holding Constance by the throat in a kind of half nelson. Grace led her away just as the child began to roam a bit too close to Mummy’s “special drawer” in the bureau.
11:10: The sound of frantic tears from Naomi’s room. I got out of bed and went to her. I informed the child, in no uncertain terms, that she needed to go to sleep — right now. But she screamed at me that she wasn’t tired. Only, she pronounced it in her three-year-old’s way, putting stress on the wrong syllable: “I’m not tie-red!” she pleaded in despair. “I’m not TIE-RED!” Oh, Daddy, why are you being so obtuse on this point?
12:20: I got her down, finally. I thought then of slipping up to my office and dossing on the futon there, leaving the rest of the night to Grace. But no, no. I am a plugged-in dad, damn it.
1:00: Grace got up and went to her.
2:20: I got up and went to her.
4:05: Grace shook me awake. “Philip? Philip, you need to get up right now. Naomi has literally shit the bed.”
Oh God.
So there we were, in the pre-dawn hours (how long before our guests start arriving?), yanking sheets off and finding something to wipe those jaundiced smears of turd off the mattress. Simone, all cloudy-eyed from sleep, wandered in to the pestiferous stench of Naomi’s room and looked at us as if to say, What is wro
ng with you people?
Yes. A very good question, Simone. What is wrong with us? Whoever thought that procreation was a good idea? Maybe my dad was right all long. Why would any man choose to subject himself to family life? Why put ourselves through it? Why not just be blissfully alone, all the time? Do you know, Naomi? Tell me. Why do we put ourselves through this? Remind me again, my love — why are you even here?
The Midwife
I was at Stout when Grace went into labour. A February Friday in 2012, the sky a silver canopy, the air holding a belated bite of winter after an unusually warm season. As per my Friday routine, I had fled campus after whatever soul-sucking graduate seminar I’d been teaching that term to hide away in the bricky warmth of my local. I was halfway through my third pint of the gorgeous black beer that Phillip, the daytime barman, had pumped me after clearing my lunch plate — pulled-pork sandwich and a salad — when the pub’s land line rang. Phillip gave a Just-a-sec gesture and went to answer.
“Stout Irish Pub.”
He turned to me then, his eyes brightening, his lips curling into a grin. He extended the cordless. “It’s for you.”
So I left my pint half finished on the bar and went bounding out to Carlton and Parliament, over the scabby death traps of ice, and across the two blocks to 4 Metcalfe Street. I came in the house to find Grace mopping the front entry’s tiled floor.
“Oh, sweetie, I thought you were —”
“Just watch you step,” she said. “My water broke over there.”
We summoned the Midwife Sterne, announcing the labour via a text message. We then called Grace’s parents. Roland and Sharon, according to plan, would come over to intercept Simone when she got home from school and keep her entertained while we brought her baby sister into the world upstairs in our bedroom.
Yes, yes. This was to be a “home birth.” I had my reservations but Grace was adamant. She did not want a repeat from ten years earlier when she had given birth — three weeks before her due date — to Simone. She held near-perfect recall of the entire harrowing experience: Roland and Sharon absent due to an ill-timed conference for Roland’s work; Richguy, still smarting from the breakup, nowhere to be found; the hospital’s anonymizing assembly lines; the anomic cadre of nurses; the extraterrestrial lights; and, worst of all, the doctor’s cold, strange-smelling hands on her body. A birth canal was all I was to him, she would say later. He had been unsympathetic to her screams and anguishes, her loneliness, and insisted on treating Grace as exactly what she was: a piece of meat expelling another, smaller, piece of meat.
Well. Not this time. This time, she would be ensconced in the familiarity of her own nest, of her own home, of everything she had worked so hard to build for herself, and surrounded by those she loved most. I would be a doting accoucheur, doing everything I could to ensure that little Naomi Woolf Sharpe-Daly came into this world exactly as Grace had wanted.
Her parents arrived first. Roland and Sharon helped me get their panting, sweating daughter upstairs and propped on the bed, and stayed with her when the doorbell rang and I dashed back down to answer it. The Midwife Sterne — a soft, stocky woman with a gently freckled face and a bun of hair piled high on her head — made her coo coo cooing greeting as she came in the house and hugged me with the arm that wasn’t lugging her tote bag of birthing implements. I followed her wide, swaying rump up the stairs as she asked about contractions. “About four minutes apart,” I told her, and she replied with a cryptic “Ohh, ohh.”
She came in to the bedroom and took immediate charge, stripping off her winter wear and stating that we needed to initiate Grace’s “Birthing Plan” at once. She greeted my wife with smiley effusion and then took her blood pressure, ensuring to make lots of eye contact as she Velcroed and pumped. I, meanwhile, set the room to its planned mood: threw closed our bedroom window’s nacreous curtains; dimmed the lights; steered into position a framed photo of Simone on the bookshelf — Grace’s pre-chosen focal point for when the pain got really bad. The Midwife Sterne suggested that Roland and Sharon head back downstairs, since Simone was due home from school any minute. “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’ll be chances to visit in the coming hours.” When they were gone, she measured Grace’s cervix for the first time. “Three centimetres,” she reported. “Okay, honey, the real fun has just begun.”
Through her long, languorous breathing, Grace said, “Philip, the music?” and I replied with “Oh, right!” How could I forget? I went to the iPod in its speaker station on Grace’s bureau and deployed her “birthing playlist” — a curious bricolage of bands she had listened to in high school and university: Indigo Girls and Nirvana, Sarah Harmer and Hole, the Smiths and Alanis Morissette. The assemblage of songs was, artistically, a nonsensical mess, but it seemed to soothe her.
From the hallway stairs: “Mommy! Mommy!” A moment later, Simone came flouncing into the room and onto the bed.
“Hey, Baby,” Grace said, gasping and sweating. Sharon and Roland stood framed in the doorway.
“Is little Naomi really coming?” Simone asked.
Grace would’ve answered, except a tremendous contraction roared up within her then.
“Okay, maybe,” the Midwife Sterne cut in, “we could have a quick hello and a quick goodbye, and then you can head back downstairs with your grandparents. I’ll send Philip when she’s ready for another visit.”
The hours passed. The curtained window grew dark. The room filled with strange hormonal scents. At one point, Grace and I climbed atop the bed and waltzed awkwardly to “Basement Apartment.” At another point, during one of their visits, her parents and Simone brought up the rolling pin that had belonged to Grace’s grandmother — a profoundly sentimental object that Grace turned to in her baking — and I used it to massage her aching back to the knuckle-dragging rhythms of “Lithium.”
Around hour five or six, Grace’s cervix dilated to seven centimetres, and the Midwife Sterne let out another cluck of concern. “Okay, honey,” she said, “things get more painful from here on in. This is where you get to be your bravest.” As if to confirm it, a debilitating contraction squeezed Grace then, and I clutched her hand as she coiled forward and gave out a loud, weepy scream. This happened right in the middle of “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls, and when Grace emerged from her pain she looked at me with desperate eyes and said, “Philip, play that song again!”
The Midwife Sterne and I shrugged at each other and I got up to hit the BACK button on the iPod before returning to bed. A moment later another contraction slammed into Grace, worse than before. “… closer I am to fi-iine,” she sang along tunelessly as she came out the other side of it, then looked at me again. “Christsake, just put that song on repeat, would you.”
I did what I was told. And so, for the next three hours, we listened to “Closer to Fine” over and over — and over — again. We listened to it as Grace bore down on the picture of Simone on the bookshelf, a cherubic reminder of what awaited her at the other end of this pain. We listened to it when the real Simone popped by, now in her jammies, for one last visit before Roland and Sharon put her to bed. “We’ll wake you after the baby comes,” Grace promised from her sweating delirium, then kissed her goodbye. The song played as Grace declared the need for a crap, but was too weak to get out of bed. The Midwife Sterne handed me a bedpan, which I tucked under Grace’s backside, and then our marriage achieved a whole new level of intimacy. “… closer I am to fi-iine,” Grace serenaded me as I took the turd-filled pan away to the bathroom.
Somehow, finally, we attained ten centimetres. “Here we go,” beamed the Midwife Sterne, and made warm, joyful eye contact with my wife. “Grace, honey, this is where Baby Naomi needs the best of what you’ve got.” So she began to push, and the real pain came then, pain that rose and curled and frothed like a Bondi Beach wave, and I encouraged Grace to get up onto the surfboard of her breathing and ride each crest all the way to the shore. �
�… closer I am to fi-iine,” she sang weakly between each spasm.
And then another sensation came. Grace would describe it later as like vomitous urges emanating from the wrong end of her body. A sense of inevitability, of achieving the point of no return. Like vomiting. Or like an orgasm. Yes, there was a certain orgasmic quality to my wife’s screams then, and I stood by like a hapless wittol as some imaginary paramour ravished her there on our bed. The Midwife Sterne snapped me from this absurd anxiety when her face rose over the top of Grace’s knee and glowed like the moon. “Philip, do you want to come see this?”
I did. I went around Grace’s spread legs and looked. Her perineum had inflated like a balloon, like it might give itself an episiotomy. I stared into Grace’s great labial yawn and saw what looked like a shiny, oversized walnut appear there. I mistook it for the grooves of a brain. Good God! I thought. My baby’s born without a skull! But no. It was merely the arrangement of tiny black hairs atop her wet mauve head. “One more push!” the Midwife Sterne yelled. Grace obliged, and her vagina spread like a smile. Naomi emerged then in a great gush of water, her umbilical cord slung over her shoulder like the strap of a satchel. The Midwife Sterne moved it out of the way as she pulled the baby free.
Naomi was greyish-purple — the colour of a good blueberry crumble — and I briefly panicked. Oh no, she’s dead! I nearly hollered aloud. But the Midwife Sterne bopped her on the butt and wiped the vernix from her face, and the baby gave out a loud, lusty cry. The Midwife Sterne set her on Grace’s stomach. Time — and the placenta — passed in due course. Our madam went to her tote bag to fetch a pair of scissors. “Do you want to do the honours?” she asked, and passed them to me. The umbilical cord was slipperier than I imagined, and I fumbled with it. “Don’t snip it gently,” she said. “Give it a good, decisive shear.” And that did the trick.
