As She Grows (27 page)

“But you’d think she’d take pleasure in telling you how I fucked up.”

“You’d think,” she says, obviously without realizing how cruel it was to agree with me. “So how are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I say. “You know, it was a surprise at first. But what can I do? I’m gonna have it, so I might as well make the best of it, right?” I hear myself saying the words but I can’t believe they’re actually coming from my mouth. I have no idea why I’m trying to sound like everything is so great.

“How pregnant are you?” I feel like Aunt Sharon can see straight through me, like she can see my top lip nervously twitching.

“About six months.”

“Jesus”—Aunt Sharon stops in her tracks—“that’s a long way.” She looks down and skeptically studies my stomach area under my sweatshirt. “You can’t be that big. You sure it’s in there?” she jokes.

I lift my shirt and expose my round stomach.

“Look at that!” Aunt Sharon exclaims, her hand immediately pressed againt my skin.

I tell her about my doctor’s appointment and the pregnancy homes that Staff is looking into. I tell her the baby might be Mark’s, but that I’m not really sure. I’d rather sound like a slut than get Mark in trouble.

“I went by your old house off Keele,” I say, just before we reach the group home.

“You did?” she asks, surprised.

“Yeah. It’s kind of gross.”

“Yes, it was.”

“You ever been back?” I ask.

“No,” Aunt Sharon says, smiling politely at me. “I left that place a long time ago.”

Now that I’m not hiding my pregnancy, I see that pregnant people are treated differently. It’s like you have this innocence about you, as if you’re a representative of Mother Nature herself. I figure it must be something instinctual, this communal need to protect those with child. Bus drivers wait until I sit down before pulling out from the stop. People open doors for me. The girls offer to do my laundry. Staff allows me to eat in between meals and skip my chores if I don’t feel up to working.

My stomach becomes our new household pet. On command, I pull up my sweatshirt to reveal my bulging tummy. The girls place their hands on my tight skin, cold palms cupping my belly in search of movement. They act all excited for me, but I’ve noticed that there are fewer condoms in the jar by the bathroom door.

“It’s so hard!” Mary says, pulling her hand back fast, her face half-disgusted, half-amazed.

“Feels like a lot of gas. I fart all the time,” I say. “I look like I’ve got a bowling ball in my stomach.”

“Yeah, but look at your tits,” Nicole says. “What I’d give for tits like that.”

They suggest names like Destiny, Electra, and Rain. They become instant experts on diet and suddenly recall their mothers’ secret recipes, like cucumbers on your swollen feet. Suddenly, they think they have the right to boss me around, ripping cookies and cigarettes right out of my hand. And of course, we have discussions about labour. Nicole tells me that after delivering the baby, her cousin shot out a chunk of flesh full of teeth and hair and little toenails. Tammy says her sister shit all over the delivery room. And Jasmyn’s friend’s friend almost died giving birth to a baby that nearly ripped her body in half. There is laughter about all this, mostly due to Tammy’s gruesome accompanying sound effects. I pretend to laugh along, but really my stomach churns and acid rises to my throat as I imagine my body snapping like a wishbone.

“Don’t worry,” Pat, who has two children of her own, says. “By the time you’re full-term, you’ll volunteer to get hit by a bus to get that baby out. Mother Nature takes care of everything, even fear.”

On weekend nights I watch thin bodies float carefree past me while my fat stomach anchors me to the couch. Jasmyn and Tracy suddenly become best friends and laugh at stupid inside jokes about guys they know. It seems like they intentionally have more fun when in my presence, but I know Jasmyn doesn’t really like Tracy. She couldn’t possibly, after all the bad stuff she has said about her.

My social life has become the Staff, because no one else wants to hang out with a pregnant girl who can’t party or smoke. To make me feel better, Staff buys me chocolate milk and cheddar cheese. My community time is reduced to playing Scrabble on Friday nights. I am strangely content doing this, staying in my pyjamas, as if life for me is now one continuous lazy Sunday afternoon after a very rough Saturday night.

The house sends me to take a tour of a pregnancy home right away. Beverley, it’s called. Apparently, my group home isn’t allowed to have me there after my seven-month date. “We’re not equipped,” says Pat, as if she were talking about electrical capacity.

“That’s okay,” I say. “I don’t really fit in anymore anyway.” Which is true. The more I’m forced to witness what I can’t do, the more I resent it.

The visitors’ room of Beverley House is lined with practical couches, probably donated by the guilty consciences of wealthy women who as teenagers disappeared to Nova Scotia with chubby stomachs and returned in time for summer vacation.

There are four of us in the visitors’ room, each slouched on our own couch, cross-armed, and refusing to acknowledge each other’s presence. Only one of the other girls looks pregnant, the rest just look angry. The girl with teased black hair listens to her Discman and taps her lighter loudly on the wooden arm of the couch. It’s meant to annoy us, but I say nothing because I know that would be exactly what she wants. Instead I focus on the voices of the bubbly staff speaking baby talk and cheerleader chatter down the hall. Without even seeing their faces, I know what they’re like. Occasionally, one skips past the door, confirming my suspicions, dressed in overalls and a pink T-shirt. Their happiness seems inappropriate to me, like laughter at a funeral.

Finally a youth worker walks into the room, her flabby body bulging out from under her T-shirt and jeans. You can’t even tell the difference between her rolls of fat and her tits. It’s disgusting. And I can’t stand the thought that I’m starting to look like that.

“Hello. Well, I guess that’s everyone,” she says, smiling around the room, a clipboard jammed into one of the folds in her folds. She has short hair, no makeup, and an earring only in one ear.

“We’ll just get started. Welcome to Beverley. My name’s Meg and I’m one of the youth workers here.” She sits in the chair off to the side. “We’ll start the tour here. This is our visiting room where the residents can receive guests, only two at a time and no shared visits. It can also be a nice quiet spot if you want to be on your own. I’ll tell you a bit about the house and then I’ll take you around the facilities.” She starts to tell us about the house and its history and how the home was started sixty years ago in Toronto, “but things were very different then.” Only I look in her direction, the rest of the girls continue staring at the floor. After a couple of minutes, she walks over to the black-haired girl and motions for her to turn off her Discman, which she does reluctantly, kissing her teeth.

The worker goes through her routine, citing off privileges and rules and chores you do to earn money. She points to charts and chore boards and point systems. Speaks of curfews, goal setting, arts and crafts, and mandatory evening programs on health and fitness.

“Mandatory?” the black-haired girl speaks up, her lip curled up to her nose in disgust.

“Yes, mandatory,” the worker says firmly in that
don’t fuck with
me
tone that we have all heard before.

“Screw this,” the girl says, picking up her knapsack and storming out. She bumps her shoulder into the door frame when she leaves. Part of me walks out with her. Our eyes focus back on the worker as if nothing happened. We are all used to scenes like this.

“It’s a voluntary program but it’s not for everyone. If you don’t like it, that’s okay. We’re just trying to offer help to those who want it,” and then she goes on, unaffected.

Meg takes us through the old Victorian house, institutionalized with its thick fire doors, mesh wire pressed in glass, red-glowing exit signs, and sealed-up fireplaces. The house is much more impressive than my group home, with bright carpets, gold-framed paintings, wood trim, and huge velvet drapes. It’s like a movie set. I visualize women in nineteenth-century skirts and tightly wound hair, drinking tea from china teacups. And ghostly men with suspenders and tiny, round glasses strolling the hallways. I think about how these God-fearing people would shudder at the thought of stray teenage mothers, a hundred years later, living in their home. I think about the wife, who probably hid her underwear under a sheet on the clothesline and thought the word
clitoris
referred to some kind of buzzing insect.

We poke our semi-curious heads into the kitchen, TV room, laundry, and dining room; watch the backs of residents as they leave the room, not wanting to be part of the sideshow. The bedrooms are functional and bare, as if you could spray them down with a hose for a fast clean in between girls.

At the top of the stairs, Meg stands in front of a closed door and explains that the dorms are split into two sections, the pre-baby and post-baby sides. She holds her hand up to the stained wood. “We can’t go in here, due to confidentiality reasons and privacy. But this is where the new mothers are located.” I stare at her fingers, pressed against the door, just inches away from a world I don’t want to know.

During the tour, Meg draws our attention to the furnishings: the new TV or the spacious fridge that holds limitless cheese and yogurt. My eyes follow her pointing finger in the opposite direction, rest on things like the cleaning-duty list beside each entrance and the small orders taped to the sides of things:
Don’t waste electricity
and
This window is to be closed at all times
or
No smoking in bedrooms.

At the end of the tour, Meg gives us each a form where you have to write a paragraph saying why you want to be at Beverley House. “This will help us in evaluating your motivation for being here,” she says with a smile and passes out pens. I leave the paragraph section blank, fill out my name and address, and then hand it in before I leave.

When I get home, Staff is waiting for me.

“Well? Did you like it?” Miranda asks enthusiastically.

“No.”

“Will you go?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“You could go back to your grandmother’s,” Pat says.

I raise my arms in surrender, then take my seat in the office while Pat calls to arrange an intake meeting. Beverley House tells them that they’ll have a bed for me in a week.

Eric is the one who brings up Mitch’s name first. For some reason, he has chosen this as his first layer to peel. After he pours me some green tea, he gets right to the point. The tea thing is something he started a few weeks ago and there’s something about the hot liquid that makes the words seep effortlessly out of my mouth. We talk about the night I left Elsie’s place, about Mitch in my room and how Elsie didn’t kick him out.

“I think he kissed me,” I say. “I don’t remember. I was sleeping, so I was pretty out of it, and all of sudden he was there, in my face.” The details are sketchy in my mind, but the feeling sends shivers down my spine. I put the cup to my mouth, burn my top lip, and then pull away. “Hot,” I explain, and then blow on the steamy liquid.

“You may not want to remember,” Eric says. “And that’s okay, for now,” he adds.

“It wasn’t that big of a deal. I mean, he didn’t molest me or anything. But still, it made me feel awful. And dirty. And gross.”
I wrap my arms around myself, the thought of Mitch that night making me shudder.

“Coming into your room at night and touching you is a big deal, Snow. It’s not always the extent of the action that’s damaging, it’s the utter violation. You trusted him.”

I start slurping my tea cautiously and think a while. “But I don’t care so much about him,” I say. “He’s just a pervert. A total loser. It’s Elsie I’m most mad at.”

“Elsie is your caregiver. You expected her to protect you from things like that.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” I say, amazed how he can sometimes put my thoughts so clearly. It’s as if he’s inside my head, collecting my messy ideas and ordering them into nice tidy sentences. “That’s exactly it.”