‘I Spy,’ says Anton.
‘What?’ I say.
‘That’s the game,’ he says.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘what do you spy?’ (And I know I sound angry, but he’s being so thick and thrilled and childish.)
‘I spy with my little eye,’ he says, ‘something that is … ’ He swivels his head around, searching. ‘Something that is ... ’
I witness an idea click firmly into place in his brain.
‘Something that is blue!’ His gaze has settled on the umbrella stand in the corner next to the radiator. He sits on his hands as if to stop them from pointing out his quarry.
I stand up, execute a half-assed pirouette, then make a show of scanning the zone, peering behind pictures and checking from floor to ceiling for clues. When I get to the umbrella stand I stop, do a quick once-over, then an exaggerated double take. Anton lets out a swift snort and begins to rock back and forth in anticipation. I pull out the umbrellas one by one.
‘Don’t open them,’ Anton whispers. ‘Bad luck.’
‘Hmm.’ I scratch my head and begin to examine the umbrellas individually. There is no blue on these brollies. None. Anton is about to pee, he’s so jazzed. I nudge the umbrella stand away from the wall and search its circumference for something, anything – a flicker or a shadow of navy or aquamarine. There is a spot of faded black on the rim of the stand. ‘This!’ I say, pointing.
‘No, no, no,’ he says. ‘Not blue!’
There is a bluish frame around a black-and-white photo of Taisie and Marco above the radiator. ‘This,’ I say, getting tired.
‘No!’ Anton cries, and leaps up from his seat.
‘I don’t know then,’ I say, wishing someone would knock on the door and end all of this frippery.
'It’s the umbrellas!’ Anton shouts. ‘The umbrellas!’
‘There is no blue on the umbrellas,’ I say, quietly but firmly.
‘No,’ says Anton, with a modicum of kindly condescension. ‘But the umbrellas are closed because the sky is blue. The sky is blue,’ he shouts, jumping up and down.
Which is exactly when my prayers are answered and someone knocks on the door then opens it without waiting for a response.
Despite Anton’s bewildering notion of the order of things, we become allies for the next hour or so, leading aunts and co-workers through into the living room, ferrying coats and shoes up to Taisie’s room, where we pile them into a messy mountain on the bed, which Anton monitors with increasing inquisitiveness.
Back downstairs, I make a production of loving the ladies, baiting them like a bullfighter, enclosing them in my dancer’s embrace, arching my eyebrows as I compliment them on their hairdos, laughing wickedly at how they have managed to avoid fashion faux pas, especially – especially – if they haven’t. Anton watches me, perched on the stairs, staring through the slats. After a while, he adds his own hip-hop moves from the sidelines, gives me little go-girl salutes with his very fine I Spy eyes.
Once the guests have all arrived, he helps me to settle them with drinks, carrying one in each vigilant hand. Taisie is wearing a tight white shift over a pair of hot pink leggings. Not at all wise, but bold, I’ll give her that. I know she was thinking virtuous, but not too. But, well, Taisie is big, even when she’s not pregnant, not fat but fleshy – present in the world in a way other women are not. The outfit is not ideal. Martine, one of Taisie’s high school friends who carefully retousles her long auburn hair after showering every morning, then hangs vintage forties dresses from her petite, right-angled frame, has cottoned on. She takes a punch glass from Anton, pats his head, then leans over to Jan – a nurse’s assistant from Taisie’s work with a semi-manageable drug habit – who is sitting on a cushion at her feet.
‘Bless her heart,’ Martine exclaims loudly. ‘Wearing white! And only twelve days before her due date!’
Anton, apparently sensitive to insincerity, whips around to face her, his eyes ablaze with mob-style loyalty. ‘Bitch!’ he says, and makes like a boxer with his head.
I hear someone whisper, ‘Trauma!’ into the air, as if it were a shared secret. Which I guess it is; it’s hard to sweep a double homicide under the carpet, much as we all (including me, my Self) might try.
‘Bitch!’ Anton says again, his hands like teapot handles on his hips. I whisk him away in a waltz, but not before he manages one more unintelligible expletive. Once out of the living room, Anton breaks away and escapes up the stairs. I think: Coat Mountain. I think: Go for it, kid.
Back in the centre of things, Taisie is lifting tissue paper gingerly out of a gift bag. That’s an issue with this new-style wrapping: you never know if what you pull out next will be the number-one prize or another bunch of decoy decoration. At the bottom of the bag someone has nestled a pair of soft leather booties with ladybugs embroidered on the toes.
‘Oh,’ says Taisie. She looks up from the boots, and her eyes are full of tears. ‘They’re really, really beautiful, aren’t they? Imagine. My baby will have feet.’
‘Oh yes,’ say the assembled ladies. They lift their plastic punch glasses in a toast.
Once Joe’s note said: Saddest comic strip character?
Later that night, Taisie and I watch a show on black-on-black violence in Toronto – black-on-black, it sounds like a new hybrid dance form to me, gumshoe man meets old school hip hop. That, or a hard-hitting investigative news show exposing corporate fraud, how business gangsters avoid taxes to stay out of the red.
‘Toronto the Not So Good,’ I say.
‘Why,’ says Taisie, gesturing at the screen, ‘does it still feel like they’re making a movie about a faraway place?’
‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘Never underestimate the power of the remote.’ I press the Mute button. ‘How was that?’ I say, waving at the pile of loot in the corner.
‘Good, it was good,’ she says, in a way I know implies the opposite.
On the TV, two men pretending to be computers exchange quips. Then a woman wearing angel wings strokes a man’s muscles. They are good muscles, I concede.
‘I miss Marco,’ says Taisie.
‘He’ll be here when you have the baby, right?’ I say, and it is entirely the wrong thing to say. Taisie and Marco are taking a break after nine years together, three of them married, although not the most recent ones.
‘I thought we’d be better married, then I thought it was marriage that wrecked it all, made it all too obvious and bourgeois. But I think we just wore each other out – and I don’t mean from fighting, I mean we knew each other until we couldn’t know each other anymore. We’re like smudged grooves on a record,’ she says to me, kneading the cushion next to her.
I give her a look that says she is taking the metaphor too far and she nods sadly. She knows.
‘You’re courageous,’ I say.
‘Like fucking hell,’ she says.
Strike two. I pick up the TV guide and pretend to be reading. Then I look over at Taisie. ‘Anton seems to be doing well,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I was trying to figure out whether he should be here for the birth. I was, well, I was thinking maybe you could be here with him, and if things get too intense, you guys could, I dunno, go out.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Okay. Will we need to, like, assist with anything or anything?’
‘No.’ She smiles indulgently and pats me on the knee. ‘My midwife will take care of things. Anton was pretty good tonight, no?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
When the guests were leaving, I found Anton crouched on the stairs. I could tell he was far, far into his Self. Joe was sometimes doing that, sinking down into himself, disappearing. But he was a grown person – so it often occurred to him to walk out the door. Usually he’d leave with a gun in his satchel, rusty, never loaded, an old .22 he found in the back of his
uncle’s oven. It was odd what he’d come back with: the smallish packs of Cheetos you get in vending machines, antique compacts made of pewter with leaping deer embossed on the front, the powder inside still solid, intact.
Last October, he took off for six days. The night before he left, he sat in the kitchen with his head in his hands. I could see his legs shaking under the table.
‘What’s wrong?’ I wheedled, and hated myself.
‘I’ve got the Chinese Jangles,’ he said, smiling.
‘Migraine?’
‘It’s when you think lewd and lascivious thoughts and your shoelaces come undone.’
He kissed me deep and walked out the door.
Joe came back six days later with a tiny, thumbnail-sized basket woven entirely of human hair. He pinched the fishing-wire loop at the top, lifted the lid and showed me the contents, an emptiness that could house a fly.
‘For the man who has absolutely nothing,’ he said.
Anton managed a few weak goodbyes from his stairway perch, but rallied when he saw Martine buckling her brown Mary Janes. ‘Thank you for your generosity,’ he said, and I adored him for stumbling upon Irony at such a young, smooth-skinned age. Martine turned for a moment to flick a strand of hair from her eye. Then she waved at Anton, her lips curving into a small, orderly smile on her pretty, atrocious face.
Taisie shifts around so her legs are draped across my lap. ‘Feet,’ she says. Then, ‘What else is on?’
‘Oooh,’ I say, flipping through channels with one hand and massaging her instep with another, ‘Vain or Insane?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, yes.’
I’ve done it, I crow to my Self. I’ve made her feel better. But my Self just smirks like a mother until I swat him away. On the screen a woman forced to live without mirrors for the two weeks it took to cinch and overhaul her body is about to experience The Reveal. She is wearing a black velvet kerchief around her eyes, a red satin evening gown and very shiny shoes, precarious shoes. Behind her a team of stylists has assembled the way magpies gather, proprietorially, around something discarded and gleaming. The woman waits in front of the mirror, which is shrouded in black satin. One of the stylists breaks from the flock to lead a small girl in party clothes and a man with frizzy hair and a forlorn gait into the room. The man is a forklift operator in a small town in the southern U.S. He loved her fine the way she was.
‘So,’ says Taisie. ‘What about Joe?’
‘He would have been interested in this,’ I say.
‘In what?’ she says.
She’s teasing me. She knows he never watched TV. But for some reason I can’t bring myself to say the word pregnancy; it feels almost obscene in its adult ramifications. When I was a child there was always a sort of shimmery scrim between myself and adulthood, until one day – shazam! – I found myself tiptoeing like an alien amongst the enemy, wondering when they would see past the permanent, shoddy disguise.
‘No,’ I say, pointing to her belly, ‘that. And also,’ I add, looking down into my lap, ‘I keep remembering things I forgot.’
‘Like?’ she says.
‘Well. Like this one time we’re hiking in the woods on Bowen Island and we don’t see a soul, not even a deer, until we get to the salmon run and this incredible family appears from across the bridge. It was a mother and three daughters – the blondest, tiniest things I’d ever seen, so they made delicate little Joe look like this hairy gorilla Amazon, and I looked like I’d just rolled out of some tree trunk where I’d been surviving on roots and berries. That’s how luminous they were, and how spare, as if everything about them was there for a specific, superior reason.’
‘I know people like that,’ says Taisie grimly.
‘“Hello,’’ said the woman, only she said it with no tentativeness whatsoever, like she was making an important list, and Hello was the last thing on it. Her girls stood next to her, a row of pretty chickadees, each a head shorter than the last, and also said Hello. They had rich, clipped accents, and when Joe asked, they said they were from South Africa, and the woman leaned back slightly, placing her hand like a cup under her belly. Which is when I noticed she was pregnant.’
‘Pregnant, eh?’ says Taisie, and pokes me.
‘“Congratulations,” I said. “When are you due?” And immediately I regretted it, since something inside me was certain that due could not be the right word. “Three months,” I could hear her saying through the bustle of my thoughts. “I’m quite small, but I have small babies, easy births.” And I was still thinking due was for library books and hydro bills, and wishing I could get these things to stop trotting across my mind. But then it occurred to me that South Africa was where all those penguins washed up, so I crouched down low to look into the face of one of the chickadees and asked her if she knew of any tarred, tuxedoed waddlers washing up on her shores. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Mother and I took care of one. It was quite arduous washing all that oil from its feathers, quite a number of them died.” “Yes, a shame,” said the mother. “That was right after our neighbour was shot.”’
‘Jesus,’ says Taisie.
‘I know,’ I say.
On the TV, the assistants have wheeled out the contestant’s ninety-two-year-old grandmother. They introduce her and the audience erupts into raucous applause. A couple of people even hoot.
‘You know,’ says Taisie, ‘I never used to get it, the applause for old people. I thought: So what? They’re old! It’s not really a talent or a special accomplishment, not really. And, I mean, it’s a bit condescending too – isn’t it? – clapping for the wrinklies?’
I nod and wait.
‘But last year I went to see this bluegrass singer, and she said she was the youngest of fourteen children, and then she dedicated a song to her momma. She said, “This one goes out to my momma, who is ninety-one years old.” And I thought: Fuck me, ninety-one years old, fourteen children, what the woman has seen, right? And I got it, I really got it, and I clapped extra hard, so my palms bounced right off each other ... ’
I give her knee a little squeeze.
‘Just living,’ she begins, then continues quietly, ‘it can be an accomplishment, can’t it?’
I toast her with an imaginary champagne flute.
The woman of the hour is about to see her new Self for the first time. The room is hushed as the black satin is whisked away from the mirror. The camera pans over the crowd and settles on the reflected image. For a moment the woman stands perfectly still. Then she doubles over as if someone has punched her in the stomach. Which, in a way, somebody has. I read an article about this writer in her seventies who said that in her head she was stuck at age thirty-eight, no matter what tale the mirror told. Well, Self, I say, I’m not sure we’re there yet, at our sticking point. But it’s possible it’s close. It’s possible it’s very, very close.
‘Tell me again why we like this show,’ I say to Taisie. But Taisie is in Snoozeville, her eyelids almost completely lowered on the world, her chin bobbing against her chest as she inhales and exhales for two.
I rest my hands on her feet and finish the story. ‘Then,’ I tell sleeping Taisie, ‘the woman turned back to Joe, and I realized they had been talking about the travails of childbirth, because the next thing she said was, “In Africa, the blacks in the fields will simply stop whatever they are doing and push out their babies then and there, in a squat, strap them to their backs and go on working. Just like that.” The woman placed her hand on the head of the oldest girl and sighed. “It’s lovely here, but quiet, so polite,” she said. “Even the trees are polite.”’
I close my eyes. ‘Taisie,’ I whisper. ‘I wanted to talk to Joe about the strange beauty of those children, the ruthlessness of the mother, the way in my head the correct words kept feeling so wrong, but on the way back home we got distracted by some teenagers in big pants makin
g out up on the observation deck, and then the hump of a whale breaching in the distance. We started arguing about what we wanted for dinner.’
Once: How can anybody be their own best friend?
The next day, Taisie goes into labour. The beginnings are much less dramatic than I anticipated. She glares and holds up an index finger prohibitively when I ask what I can do. There is nothing I can do. There are processes, once set in motion, that do not heed preset human choreography. I find this causes me some small relief. I phone Marco, who arrives in mere minutes, a vinyl overnight bag clutched in one hand.
‘How far apart?’ he says, still breathing heavily from his journey.
‘Um,’ I say, ‘enough time for her to wipe down the countertops and take out the garbage.’
‘Ten minutes,’ Taisie says. ‘My housewifely skills have improved.’
Marco takes her in his arms. ‘Ready,’ he says. ‘I’ll call the midwife.’
She nods, although I know her well enough to see the skittering incredulity behind her eyes.
‘I’ll take Anton for a walk,’ I say. ‘Do you need anything?’
‘No,’ says Marco, suddenly manly and in charge, ‘a walk is a good idea.’
I think I would like to trip him by mistake, can imagine the length of him sprawled over the kitchen tile.
‘The baby’s on the way out, or in,’ I tell Anton, momentarily confused.
‘Uh-huh,’ he says. ‘Let’s go to the zoo.’
He means the low-rent zoo in the park. Peacocks with their runway walks, thug-like buffaloes and – my favourites – mountain goats looking to head-butt each other when they’re not looking to the horizon.
We tour the animals for half an hour, then stop to buy hot dogs from a friendly vendor. Anton confides that he would like to be a hot-dog seller when he grows up if the pilot thing doesn’t work out.
‘Joe would have liked you,’ I tell him.
‘Who’s Joe?’ he says.
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