by Mark Sampson
She manoeuvred the baby onto Grace’s heaving chest — skin to skin — and I brought over the blanket to cover them both. I petted Grace’s brow while the Midwife Sterne prepared the room for visitors. Before long, Sharon and Roland entered, the latter piggybacking a groggy, plucked-from-sleep Simone. They approached our bed — first as if it were a car-crash scene, then as if it were a banquet. Roland set Simone on her feet, and the child climbed in with us. “She’s really here!” she cried out. We all cuddled round this twitchy, burbling stranger — now sporting an adorable beanie cap — at my wife’s breast, and the camera phones came out. Meanwhile, the Indigo Girls sang on. Grace looked at me. “I think I’ve heard enough of that tune,” she said with a warped and weathered smile.
So I went to the bureau and took the iPod off repeat. Just as I was coming back, ready to climb in and rejoin my overjoyed family, the next track came on — “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” by Nirvana. The opening riff, followed by thunderous drumming, blared through the room. The six of us jolted. Roland gave out an Ack! Baby Naomi started to fuss. The women looked at me as if this egregious turn of events was my fault. I hustled back to the iPod and killed the song before Kurt Cobain’s angsty wailing could completely spoil the room’s atmosphere.
When I came back, Grace was already doing her first hand-off. She passed the baby to Simone, and she held the child carefully while the camera phones flashed and flashed. Then Sharon got a turn. Then — and I admit this stung me a little — the Midwife Sterne. I just stood there, watching as this (at best) stranger-turned-family-acquaintance mewed possessively at my baby. I don’t know if other men, other husbands, feel this way, but I sometimes think that when women turn the world into a gurgling aquarium of “feelings,” we get excluded. We get boxed out. We drift to the periphery of things. It was as if a Charlie Brown cloud had arrived abruptly above my head. This should have been a moment of unadulterated happiness for me, but I caught a sudden gust of hate as I looked upon these people. Why hate? What is wrong with me? In an instant, I was reminded of — and frightened by — how quickly my mood could blacken, and at the most inappropriate of times.
The Midwife Sterne, perhaps sensing this, turned to me. “Philip, come hold your daughter.”
So I took one fatherly step forward, and she handed me that tangle of limbs, that tiny fagot of life. She manoeuvred my arms where they needed to be, and then left me to it.
I looked down, and oh God.
Oh God.
Everything was forgiven. Surely I am the only human being in the history of human beings to experience this, right? To fall completely in love with another person in one, singular instant. She was perfect. She was perfect.
Then Naomi gave me a gift: she opened her eyes for the very first time. They were the deepest galaxies of blue, and already held that sly slant I would come to know. And I thought that whatever happened from here on in, however much I might fuck this up, whatever she might endure by having me as a father, at least we could say that I was the first person she ever laid eyes on.
She looked at me. And I looked at her.
Here I am now, her stare said. Entertain me.
Sunday, November 8
Where did that child get her energy?
Naomi had, as far as we could figure, slept all of two hours through the night — and yet possessed enough vim to jump around and scream on the living-room couch as Grace tried to coax her upstairs for a bath. It was unequivocal: our daughter stank, and with company arriving in less than an hour, we needed to deal with Naomi’s eye-watering night-bourne B.O. By “we” I, of course, mean Grace, as this was the morning’s grumpily agreed to division of labour. With puffy eyebags and the stooped posture of exhaustion, Grace took on the chore of dragging Naomi upstairs to our dysfunctional bathroom. The child resisted like an Occupy protester, now wedging herself between couch and coffee table and hollering, “No bath! No bath!” her screams echoing over the suck and grind of the vacuum cleaner that Simone shoved around the front entry, hoovering up tumbleweeds of cat hair and other assorted household crud. I, meanwhile, was blessedly alone in the kitchen, watching these proceedings through the archway as I did the last bit of prep on the bounty we would offer our — excuse me, Grace’s — guests for brunch.
“Naomi, enough!” I heard her plead. “I mean it! You need to come with me — right now!”
And what a bounty it was: Great collops of ham adorned with juicy wheels of pineapple; jugs of pancake batter ready for the griddle; sliced bagels ready for the toaster; Grace’s homemade scones; the vivisected cantaloupe. There was a pot of coffee for the coffee drinkers, tea for the tea drinkers, a pitcher each of Bloody Joseph and mimosa, complemented by a carton of straight-up OJ, in case it turned out to be one of those parties. Like Grace, I, too, was knackered beyond belief, and was dismayed that the two Collins’ worth of Bloody Joseph I had already consumed did not invigorate me. My eyelids were stones. My muscles ached. My mouth felt loose and gummy. As I went about setting our long dining-room table, I fantasized about ditching the party outright and stealing upstairs to flop cruciform onto our bed for the remainder of the day. I had never been this tired.
Indeed, I must have zoned out then, or fallen briefly asleep on my feet, because when I came back I was chopping fresh mint at the cutting board (for what, I have no idea) and Grace was hovering over me. Time had clearly passed, because she appeared presentable now — her henna-dyed hair damp and braided back in a ponytail, her face lightly dusted with makeup, a poppy pinned to her sweater. I must say, despite the lingering eyebags and brow crumpled by fatigue, she looked yummy — and I would have told her so, too, except she threw me a glare of utter contempt. At first I thought it was because of the mint I was wasting, but then she jabbed a finger toward the half-depleted jug of Bloody Joseph.
“Sorry, how many cocktails have you had this morning?”
I stared at the pitcher, a bit surprised, but then sneered at her. “Oh, fuck off,” I shot back, scraping the inexplicable mint into the compost. “I’m doing this for you.”
And so, brunch.
As mentioned, we were down to four couples — plus kiddies, for a total of seventeen people. The first to arrive was Grace’s best friend, the one she’d had tea with last Tuesday: Stacey Howard, corncob-blond authoress with two albums of gently wry short stories under her belt, towing along her tall, black, handsome, breadwinning cardiologist husband, Ian, and their three — there is no politically correct adjective to describe them — children, who were playmates with ours. I remained surprised that they were one of the families who hadn’t cancelled, since Stacey loathed me on principle and barely acknowledged my existence at the best of times. It was clear that my gaffe on the CBC still billowed in the firmament of her mind, because she once again refused to even look at me while making herself at home in my house. I nonetheless offered them something to drink. “Maybe a bit of coffee,” Ian said with an apologetic whisper, as if someone had died. The children, meanwhile, ran off noisily to play.
Next came the guest of honour — Jane Elton, along with her husband, Joel, whom I had never met. An impressive mound of a man (four hundred pounds if he was an ounce!), he was one of those people so obese that his earlobes jutted out perpendicular from his head, and an unkempt goatee sprouted out of the moonscape of his face. Both he and Jane had poppies pinned on their fall coats, and seeing them there, I once again felt the acute absence of the three I had already lost throughout the week. Joel wrapped a meaty hand around mine and shook it, but his eyes wouldn’t meet mine. So there you are, in the flesh, his expression seemed to say, the guy who thinks we should send business people to jail without a trial. “Sure, I’ll have a drink-drink,” he said when I offered him one, but Jane gave him a look over her oversized eyewear.
“Joel, honey, blood pressure.”
“Ah,” he replied. “Maybe just some orange juice, then.”
“And tea for me,”
Jane said.
When I brought their drinks, Jane touched my arm and asked, “How are you holding up, Philip?” It was the first time she had made reference to what had happened on Monday. Neither she nor any of my editors or publishers had written or called, choosing — perhaps wisely — to maintain radio silence until things blew over.
“It’s been a hell of a week,” I sighed. “We’re all just really, really tired.”
“Sorry to hear that,” she said with a solemn nod. I half-expected her to say more, to reassure me that as revolting as my slip was, as philosophically inconsistent with everything I had said and done and published up until now, she would still stand with me. But no. Jane seemed unwilling to raise the particulars of my gaffe while in my home. “And the book on Christianity?” she asked instead.
“Oh, the book is fine,” I assured her. “I’ll still hit my deadline, no worries there.”
“That’s good,” she said. “No, that’s good.”
Grace insinuated herself. “Yes, it’s been a real challenge — having two writers in the house, trying to finish books — during all this craziness. I can’t speak for Philip, but I certainly feel that my boo —”
Our door popped open then, and a female face appeared around it. “Hell-ooo, Sharpe-Dalys,” sang the head of our last family to come, another close friend of Grace’s. Virginia Steinway was arguably Toronto’s best-known and most prolific mommy blogger: I read somewhere that she averaged five posts a day last year, despite having a litter of small children. The oldest three came loudly rushing into our house and went tearing up the stairs in search of their youthful brethren. “No running!” Virginia yelled, an instruction they duly ignored. The fourth, a finger-sucking newborn, dangled face-out in a Snugli strapped to the chest of Virginia’s silent, breadwinning husband, Ramon, a software engineer. He gave us all a single, wordless wave.
With everyone now arrived, we migrated to various positions on the ground floor. I donned one of Grace’s aprons and took up my place at the stove, where I decanted circles of pancake batter onto the now-heated griddle. Joel sat behind me, wedged into the kitchen table, his glass of orange juice looking very small in his hand, while Virginia and Ramon arranged the various food people had brought — fruit salads and muffins and such — onto the counter. “You can put that one in the fridge,” she ordered him, “and then give me the baby.” He obeyed, and she went off with the newborn to chat up Jane Elton, who stood alone in the living room admiring our overflowing bookshelves. Grace, Stacey, and Ian, meanwhile, formed themselves into a cozy threesome near Grace’s writing nook.
“Did you see what Felicity Sanders wrote in yesterday’s Globe?” Stacey asked.
“I know,” Grace replied. “And then she called whatshername a bitch on Twitter.”
I poured myself another Bloody Joseph and then offered some to Ramon, but he shook his head. “Got tea?” he asked, so I fetched him some. The three of us hung out silently there while the women, and Ian, gabbed and gossiped. “So, Joel,” I asked to break the quiet as I manoeuvred pancakes onto a cookie sheet, which in turn went into the oven to keep warm until the rest were ready, “what do you do for a living?”
What he did was security at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, which was pretty much what I imagined him doing. He must have intuited my lack of surprise, because he hastily pointed out that, despite the shift work and endless repetitiveness, it really was a fantastic job, unionized and all that, and one he had held for the last seventeen years. “Janey’s essentially self-employed, and her income is real feast or famine,” he said, “so it’s good that one of us has a steady paycheque coming in.” Ramon and I nodded, our shared plight.
I then made the mistake of asking Joel if he could remember how much his job had changed in the wake of 9/11. This precipitated a long, convoluted relaying of the minutiae of airport screening, of metal detectors and pat-downs, of liquid and gel allowances, of body scans. Ramon listened politely but I zoned out, shaking and flipping pancakes in the griddle, my exhaustion wanting to drag me to the centre of the Earth. As Joel droned on, my eyes and ears drifted once more to where Grace stood with Stacey and Ian. The girls seemed to have ended their “writing community” bashing and were now speaking to each other sotto voce, their heads leaned in at an intimate tilt. My ears burned and my stomach clenched, for I got it into my mind that they were now talking about me, about how uncomfortable it was to be here with so much animus over my gaffe still floating in the air, and how brave Grace was for not cancelling this brunch outright. Part of me wanted to go bounding over there to defend myself, though I knew that nothing I could say would confute Stacey’s low opinion of me.
But then Ian — tall, chiselled, perfect-teethed Nubian Adonis, Ian; he could’ve been in an Old Spice ad — whispered something, and the girls tittered. Once more the three of them leaned in conspiratorially, and I watched as my wife touched Ian’s muscular forearm with affection and said something that might have been, “I would certainly like to, believe me.” Then she turned and looked upon me at the stove — me, with grotesque comb-over and frilly apron, holding a batter-crusted spatula and looking half-asleep on my feet — and released a brief but pronounced shrug-sigh.
Oh, reader! Just imagine the thoughts that went corkscrewing through my imagination then, what the three of them — the three of them! — would get up to, the unspeakable venery, the shadowy midday indulgences with blinds pulled, if only I wasn’t in the picture. Grace’s every treacherous fantasy danced before my eyes. A smell of burning filled my nostrils then, and I turned with the spatula to raise up the pancakes, saw that their underbellies had gone black as a starless night. I flapjacked them onto the cookie sheet anyway, and poured more batter-patties onto the griddle. I then transferred the last of the Bloody Joseph into my Collins glass. Downing the contents in two large gulps, I then went to the kitchen table, to the jug of untouched mimosa. I filled my glass, not caring about the film of tomato juice that clung there.
“— want kids?” Ramon was asking Joel.
“Nah. I mean, yeah. I do. I did. But, you know.” Joel shrugged. I noticed for the first time his loud, stertorous breathing — no doubt a by-product of his obesity, each lungful a Darth Vader snore, even while awake. “It’s fine. Janey wanted to concentrate on her career. And we can’t really afford them now, anyway. We moved back downtown last year — you know, for her work; all the publishers are down here anyway — and it’s bloody expensive, let me tell ya.”
“God, your commute must be a killer,” Ramon said.
“Oh, it’s a real killer. But you know,” and he twisted that goatee into his best happy-wife-happy-life smile, “you make adjustments.”
Never had I wanted so much to beat a person to death with a frying pan. And I might have, too, except Naomi — small, inexhaustible Naomi — came sliding into the kitchen then and hugged me around my aproned legs. “Daddy, I’m honngry. Can I have a strawwwwwwberrrrry?”
Fuck, pancakes take forever.
I was pretty much out on my feet by this point (Naomi’s sleepless night becoming mythic inside my addled brain) and trapped in a delirium of rage that felt sourceless. I was again reminded of how uncomfortable everyone seemed around me, as if my slip and its fallout had placed a cloak of unapproachability around my shoulders. Indeed, I was alone in the kitchen now, finishing up the last of the pancakes as the party reshuffled itself. The children had streamed back downstairs, and Stacey and Virginia were now attempting to lead them in a game of charades. Meanwhile, Ramon, Joel, and Ian began transporting food onto our dining-room table and arranging it with modern-husband industriousness. This left Grace to do what she had been waiting to do all along — buttonhole Jane Elton near her writing alcove and bring up, once again, the topic of her new children’s book.
Ah, yes, Grace. My rage was not so sourceless. I watched as she, nervous and awkward, leaned her bum against the back of her writing chair as Jane st
ood at her desk. I could see Grace struggling to create a contrivance in which she would ask Jane if she was interested in reading the manuscript, and perhaps representing her. It was all very cryptic and casual at first, but then Grace just went for it. I watched with no small delight as Jane gave her that wonderfully neutral literary agent’s smile — no teeth, just the slightest upward squeeze of her cheek muscles — as she waited for her to finish.
Grace explained how far along she was, and how much more time she might need to finish — nine months, maybe a year at most. She then went on to describe the plot of “Sally and the Kitchen Sink,” such as it was. Jane’s dispassionate face expressed volumes, at least to me. It spoke the unspoken words that I had seen Jane unspeak to dozens of writers at dozens of parties: Tell me something I haven’t heard before. Because if you can tell me something, anything, I haven’t heard before, I might just get to eat.
“Anyway,” Grace said, showing hints of deflation, “it’s sort of Judy Blume meets Karen Sampstra.”
“Oh, I represent Karen,” Jane said, suddenly cheery. “A great writer. And a great mum. Did you know she has five kids?” She sent her thumb flipping over the small stack of Grace’s manuscript pages. “And she still cranks out about three of these a year for me.”
And then I could see it in Grace’s profile — the abrupt onset of despair. She tried to hide it behind a hostess’s pleasant facade, but it conspired with the enervation from our night with Naomi to wink out the small candle of hope she still held for this party. I could tell Grace was reaching for words, looking to speak before Jane did again. And failed.
