The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  Eliza exhaled. Right; she remembered now. Sophie had told her that a friend might drop in. She felt so relieved she sat down on the bench in the entranceway, her coat still on. Maybe it was her boyfriend? But no. Two girls came down the unlit staircase, Sophie in front of her friend, who remained in the shadows. No, not in the shadows. The girl was black.

  Eliza had expected another white kid, Sophie’s height, with purple or green highlights in her hair. This young woman was tall, model-tall, and had a mass of braids caught up in one thick twisted rope. And pretty. Eliza flicked on the hall light. No, not pretty. She was beautiful.

  “Hey, Eliza, this is my friend Binta.”

  Binta smiled brilliantly and extended a long hand to shake Eliza’s, with an almost formal grace. “Hello, Eliza,” she said, thoroughly self-possessed. “Nice to meet you. Your boys are so sweet.” Binta’s fingers were warm.

  Eliza let them go. “Thank you. I hope they were well-behaved. Marcus can be a Tasmanian devil sometimes. How did it go, Sophie?”

  “They’re always good for me. Neither of them wanted to go to bed—”

  “So of course you let them stay up for an extra half an hour.”

  “That’s why they love me! Breakin’ the rules! They started watching the penguin movie again. Then we had them do some serious teeth brushing.”

  The girls put on their boots and coats; Sophie was wearing her little khaki jacket with the brass buttons, and Binta pulled a long copper-coloured coat out of the front hall closet. “Andrew has your money, Sophie, okay?”

  “Thanks, Eliza. Do you think he’ll mind driving us a little farther north? Actually, northwest. Little Jamaica. I’m sleeping over at Binta’s tonight.”

  “Does your mom know?”

  “Yeah.” The two girls exchanged a glance. “Yeah, she knows.”

  Eliza levelled her most serious gaze at Sophie. “You’re sure she knows where you’ll be?”

  “Of course! Andrew will see Binta’s house, too. Don’t worry, I swear to god we’re not going to some huge house party up the hill.”

  She looked from Sophie to Binta. “Girls, you know that parents are annoying only because we want to make sure you’re safe. Right?”

  Binta said, “Don’t worry. I have a brown belt in tae kwon do. And I’m six foot one.” She put her arm around Sophie’s shoulders. “I watch out for this one, too, believe me. Little people need protection.”

  Sophie pushed her away with a laugh. “Get outta here! I can take care of myself. Jeez.” She grinned at Eliza. “Don’t worry!”

  Binta added, “Seriously. My mom is waiting up for us. She’s probably playing solitaire on her iPad right now. She and my dad can’t fall asleep until I’m home.”

  “All right, go on.” Eliza held up her hands: no more explanation necessary. “Thank you for taking care of the boys.” A brown belt in tae kwon do?

  The front door opened, closed. Through the sidelight, she watched the girls go down the steps and turn to wave, the blonde foot soldier and the warrior princess. Eliza waited until the car turned the corner, then locked the door and went to look at her boys.

  10

  Eggs

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, WHEN SHE OPENED HER EYES, she realized what was wrong with her. Therapy wouldn’t be necessary. It was a mid-life crisis. She’d thought she was immune. How could she have a mid-life crisis when the middle of her life was so good?

  But in eight years, she would be fifty. The juice would dry up, along with the last of the rotten eggs. It was another brutal irony of nature. She had spent twenty-five years trying not to get pregnant. (Both her pregnancies, though celebrated, were accidental. When she had a screaming-with-colic newborn and a sick toddler of sixteen months, she used to think: this is all a mistake!) In her teens, through every month of her twenties, through the first half of her hard-working, hard-partying thirties, she had been desperate not to get pregnant. Fretful and sleepless in the early morning, she had peed on those damn sticks, bought condoms, tried different birth control pills (they all gave her migraines or made her fat and moody), submitted to the diaphragm, spermicides, jellies, even cramp-inducing cervical caps and IUDs, and suddenly—so suddenly—here she was, on Sunday morning in mid-January, flipping pancakes. She turned from the hot stove to consider the inhabitants of her small kingdom. The boys were upstairs watching cartoons and chatting during the commercials. Andrew was sitting at the kitchen table in front of a freshly opened newspaper. She knew, suddenly, what was missing. In a voice of undisguised yearning, she asked, “Darling, do you think we should have another baby?”

  Andrew choked on his orange juice, spraying a mouthful of it onto the editorial pages of the Toronto Star.

  After blowing his nose in the bathroom, he came back to the kitchen and put his arm around her from behind as she hovered over the frying pan with the flipper in her hand. “Eliza.” He kissed her neck. “Eliza, my love. Yesterday morning we had a long conversation about me getting a vasectomy. You know that I’m seriously thinking about it. Is that why you suddenly want to have another baby?” He squeezed her. She shrugged him off and carefully turned the pancakes. It was her mother’s recipe. The best pancakes in the world.

  He returned to the kitchen table and sat down. “All the reasons that I should get a vasectomy—reasons we have enumerated often—are the same reasons we should not have another baby.”

  “I just—I—oh, never mind,” she said. He blotted orange juice off the newspaper. They went through some variation of this drama almost every time she ovulated. After which she had PMS. He had come to think of PMS as grief for the lost egg. A few more years, he thought, will bring the peace of menopause. What was a year or two of hot flashes in comparison with these monthly hormonal surges and radical bouts of baby longing? The descent of the viable egg was an event of such moment in the house that Marcus knew what ovulation meant. Even Jake had a vague idea.

  He watched her back. She was wearing a bright blue T-shirt and a tight pair of yoga pants, half-dressed in mid-winter to his elbow-patch old-man sweater and plaid slippers. Her light brown hair was tucked up on top of her head, a sexy little bird nest with bobby pins; it wasn’t long enough for a proper chignon. From the back she looked twenty. From the front, to him, she also looked twenty, not that he had ever seen her at twenty, except in photographs. She was more beautiful than those old photos, that was certain. She was a curious mix—she had gravitas and confidence mixed with a propensity for the zany. There were old spirits and young spirits and she was the latter. Andrew had met her when she was thirty-three, a hyper-successful, frighteningly organized, cleavage-revealing dynamo. People in the restaurant business, he learned, have great stamina. To bed at two or three and up at eight or nine, six or seven days a week, because her place was downtown on Queen Street, close to the financial district.

  It was the sort of über-cool restaurant that he rarely bothered with. Martin had taken him there while he was on a promotional tour for one of his books. His older brother had flirted with Eliza, to no avail; Andrew loved how she had rebuffed him with frosty humour. A week later, after Martin left town, he went back. Then returned a week later. He didn’t always see her. He never quite figured out her schedule; sometimes she was acting as head chef, sometimes she moved around as a kind of queenly hostess, sometimes she seemed to do both. He went on Thursday and Sunday nights; she was always happy to see him if she was out in the restaurant. Then, occasionally, he could tell that she was waiting for him. He was seeing someone at the time, an attractive lawyer in her late thirties, who, on their fourth date, was suggesting baby names and speculating the worth of their shared real estate. He broke up with the lawyer a week after Eliza invited him to share a glass of wine. A month later, he asked her if she wanted to spend a few days with him in Istanbul. It was a quick, modern courtship, or an extremely old-fashioned one, depending on one’s point of view. She went with him to Turkey for ten days. It was the longest and most exotic vacation she had taken since she was twenty-
one and had cooked and slept her way around Italy and the Greek islands for a year and a half.

  Mixing food and sex at her restaurant seemed to happen a lot. Not with the patrons. With her front-of-house staff, usually dark, whip-like young men. She told him about these brief, offhand relationships in a brief, offhand way, making two things clear: that she had enjoyed them and that they were finished. He permitted himself a feeling he had never indulged in before: sexual pride. Yes, he took her away from all those raunchy boys. He swept her off her feet in a great, exotic city and returned her sex-dazed and in love with him. After Istanbul, he strode into the restaurant conscious of how tall he was, how good-looking, how well-cut his jacket, compared to those pipsqueaks in their torn jeans. The hipsters would either scatter like cockroaches or smile obsequiously and ask him what he wanted to drink.

  Andrew, with his university degrees and his international conferences, hailed from another world. He knew that, for Eliza, this was one of his best attributes. But he had others. He was trustworthy. While she was still learning how and when to say the reasonable thing, Andrew was naturally diplomatic. He had learned to accommodate his difficult mother, his bossy father and his complicated, flamboyant brother. In the small, competitive world of academia, Andrew was popular in a way that impressed Eliza, once she knew about the megalomaniacs, the territory-obsessed, the various fighters of the internecine battles in the department. He was charming, but also a good listener, a quality that she had rarely encountered in her lovers. Listening generously was a womanly art. But Andrew was extremely good at it. He enjoyed drawing people out.

  One late Sunday morning at his place on Olive Street, almost a year after that first glass of wine, she made him a strong cup of Greek coffee and talked at length about how bored she was with the restaurant business. She had no time to do anything else but work. “I can’t read! Never mind, you know, literary shit. Even magazine articles are too long. My brain is fried. I can’t even go to a movie. The restaurant is like a prison.”

  From the beginning of the relationship she had hinted that she was trying to figure out how to reinvent herself. She wasn’t afraid of reinventing; that was the thing. He admired her lack of fear. “Is there anything else you’d like to do, anything that attracts you the way restaurant work used to?”

  She’d stared out the window into a twiggy tangle of forsythia. “Flowers. I love flowers. You should have pruned that after it bloomed last year. It would be full of blossoms now if you had.” She was bossy. Most of the time, he didn’t mind.

  “What are you grinning at?” she asked. “If I hadn’t started cooking, I would have gone into plants. But I put myself through university by working in food. When school was over, food was still paying the bills. I’m not going back to school now, though. I have a mortgage to pay.” She owned a nice condo in a fancily renovated candy factory. “The restaurant business isn’t exactly retail the way the flower business is, but there’s enough crossing over. Both food and flowers are primal. That’s the psychological draw. Did you know that Toronto gets most of its roses from Ecuador?”

  “It sounds like you’ve been doing some research.”

  “I’m trying to figure out the numbers. Building a business is like doing a multi-layered moving jigsaw puzzle. Maybe that’s the problem. With Thalassa, I know exactly what to do. It’s starting to bore me.”

  “Why don’t you sell it?”

  “Because it’s the perfect time to sell! It’s popular, the economy’s good, people are spending money. But like everybody in the restaurant business, I’m a masochist. I’ll just burn out and sell at a loss during the next recession.”

  “If you really think that’s what could happen, then sell now.” He leaned across the table and kissed her. “Masochism doesn’t suit you.”

  She raised an eyebrow over their breakfast leftovers. “Is an innocent spanking considered masochistic?”

  “After two decades of being a well-behaved academic, you have turned me into a pervert in less than a year. What am I going to do with you?”

  “I’ll show you exactly what you can do with me,” she said. And she did. Soon after that talk about the primal nature of food and flowers, Eliza got pregnant.

  They married three months later. Two friends acted as witnesses at City Hall. That night she threw a huge private party at the restaurant. The next week, to the bewilderment of all but her closest colleagues, she announced that she had found a buyer for Thalassa.

  At five months pregnant, she started a summer job in a flower shop as an apprentice, helping out during the wedding season. She met Kiki there, and shared her ideas about opening a shop of her own, mostly to do high-end events and weddings. They had just got Fleur up and running when she got pregnant again. Marcus was only seven months old. She had cried to Andrew, “But I’m old! I’m one of those mothers who can’t get pregnant!” Yet she never mentioned an abortion; Marcus had too recently been in the womb himself. “The baby has to come, no matter what.” Those were the words of his beloved pro-choice feminist. He had always thought that she was as rational as he was. He needed a practical person; he was a mathematician. But when it came to babies, Eliza was like a shaman whose totem animal was an alpha wolf bitch. The puppies were everything.

  All the rationality in the world couldn’t dissolve the mystery of making and carrying another life. The essential unknowability fascinated him during both her pregnancies, but lately, her passionate baby cravings just wore him out. The thought of sleepless nights filled him with existential weariness. He decided right there, sitting in front of his juice-soaked newspaper, that he would call Dr. Richmond on Monday and ask her to recommend someone to do the vasectomy. But he wouldn’t say anything to Eliza about that just yet.

  It was, after all, Sunday morning. The cream was whipped; he had done it with the whisk under her appraising blue-grey eye. A whole plateful of her delicious pancakes was warming in the oven and the Mexican organic blueberries sat in a green ceramic bowl on the table. The boys’ cartoon was almost over; in five minutes, they were going to charge down the stairs, howling for breakfast.

  In a nutshell: domestic bliss.

  She glanced over her shoulder, a peace-making smirk on her face. “I feel you looking. I hope you’re not thinking that my ass is getting saggy.”

  He shook his head. “Your ass is not getting saggy. You look like a twenty-year-old girl.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere, but I will not stand for outright lies.”

  “That’s truly what I was thinking. That somehow I married a youthful woman. A young soul.”

  “I’m Dorian Gray. You just haven’t found the nasty painting.”

  “No, you’re my Eliza. Eliza Keenan, lady of flowers.”

  She spun around and pointed the pancake flipper at him. “I think I should take advantage of this touching moment and remind you to move all those cans of paint on the third floor to the basement. Sometime today. And we should vacuum this weekend.”

  “How unromantic of you. I’m trying to woo you and you’re being a taskmaster.”

  “Someone has to be a taskmaster around here or we’d be living in a pigsty. You said you would do it last month.” He wished that they’d had proper sex the other night. Then she wouldn’t be complaining about what he did or didn’t do around the house.

  “Mom! Maaaaawm! Are the pancakes ready yet?” Marcus’s voice. The commotion began. Andrew rose to gather the newspapers from the table; a small cavalry came charging down the stairs. The room filled with the boys. After Eliza put the hot plate of pancakes on the dining-room table, she stood back and adored her children, the blur of boy flesh, shiny hair, Jake’s missing front teeth, Marcus gathering knives and forks into his hand. Jake began to describe the underwater monster from the cartoon, half-boy, half-fish.

  Feeling the intensity of her gaze on the boys, Andrew suspected her of conjuring the third child right then, who could soon be crawling somewhere on the floor, heading for the basement stairs, no dou
bt. Dr. Richmond, he thought. Head it off at the pass, the invisible third baby.

  But he was wrong. The baby had dispersed like a drop of blood in water. Eliza had stepped back into the present. She shook the oven mitt off her hand and picked up the bowl of whipped cream; the smell of it rose into her nose as she carried it to the table and the boys’ eyes grew round, gluttonous. They were fine beasts, her boys. She watched them indulgently as they each swiped a finger into the bowl of cream. This afternoon, she would take them tobogganing, up and down in the snow for an hour at least, under a sky that was blue, blue, blue, sun-struck, glittering. The sudden descent would be like flying. Or diving.

  11

  Spray

  SHE AND JANET STOOD BESIDE EACH OTHER IN THE showers, pulling off their bathing suits. Janet was talking, but Eliza heard nothing. She was waiting for the Amazon, who had done her lengths in the far lane, faster than everyone else.

  “Well?” Janet said, wringing out her bathing suit. “Don’t you think so?”

  Eliza dropped her head forward, shook it sideways, as though trying to get the ketchup out of a bottle. The water didn’t dislodge. “What? I have so much water in my ears.”

  “Isn’t sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house every second weekend too much? She’s only fifteen. I have no idea what they get up to over there.”

  “Oh, she seemed like a good kid. And a gorgeous girl. Like a model—”

  “You met Binta?”

  “She was at our house on Saturday night when Sophie was babysitting.”

  Janet said nothing, but scrubbed her shampooed head too hard.

  “Uh-oh,” Eliza said. “I hope it was all right that she went to Binta’s place that night? She told me that you knew where she was going.”

  “Yeah, she told me. I just didn’t know they were spending the whole evening together, too. Binta hardly ever comes over to our house. Do you think she was there for a long time?”