As She Grows (33 page)

“Ya.”

“Know him pretty good?” “Ya, really well.”

“Like, you’re an old girlfriend or something?”

“Ya,” I say, excited. “I’m Snow.” I wait for his recognition, thinking he must have a message to pass on, or that Mark mentioned he was looking for me.

“Cool,” he says, opening the door. The sweet waft of marijuana drifts up my nose like the smell of home cooking. “Ya wanna chill?”

“Sure,” I say, walking into the living room, wanting more to just see the place than actually talk to the guy.

We sit on the couch, the same couch that was in the apartment when Mark was here. Actually, everything is the same. The stolen street signs, the flashing construction light in the corner, the cases of empties stacked up to the ceiling in the kitchen. The guy kicks his feet up on the coffee table and turns on the TV. I watch him as he lights a spliff. He’s probably about twenty. He’s okay looking, under all the hair. No zits or anything. But I couldn’t care less about him. I just want to be in the apartment. I want to pretend that Mark is going to come through the door any second. He passes me the joint and I take only two tokes, because of the baby.

“I’m pregnant,” I explain, pointing to my belly.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, as if he’s just noticed. “That’s okay.” He takes a few more deep drags and then butts it out. Then he reaches out to brush the hair away from my face and chills run down my spine to my crotch. He leans in and kisses me, and I kiss him back because even though I’m not into him, I like him needing me. The way I am. All ugly and fat. It feels good to just be wanted.

“Let’s go to your room,” I whisper, once I am able to get his tongue out of my mouth for just a second.

We can’t have sex the normal way because of my stomach, which is just fine with me because I don’t want to see his face. At first I keep my eyes open, trying to transport myself back in time. And for a while, I’m there, with Mark and the Sunshine Girls and Spliff’s black dog hair embedded in the rug. But then the guy starts ramming harder and jarring me forward, and I can’t ignore him any longer, so I close my eyes, imagining Mark’s face, and hold on tight to the corner of the mattress.

Standing in the doorway of the apartment, only minutes later, the guy gives me a dry little peck on the cheek goodbye. “Listen,” he says. “Mark took twenty bucks from me before he left.”

I immediately back up into the corridor, understanding the deal. “So, what the fuck does that have to do with me?”

“Well, you’re his ex, right?”

“Fuck you!” I yell, storming down the hall.

I pace the bus stop just outside Mark’s old apartment. It was dumb to come here, to wish Mark even cared. Especially since I know the ways he is. I know that if he could handle it, he’d be with me. I know that he’s worried about hurting me and the baby, that he thinks he’d be bad for us. I know because late at night, after he drank a lot, he used to lay his head on my chest, and I’d stroke his hair like he was this little boy. And he’d talk about how much he
hated his father and that if he ever saw him again, he’d fuckin’ kill him. And I know that when he said, “I’ll never do this to my own kid,” he meant it. And even though he hasn’t contacted me, I know he’s upset about not being with me and the baby. In his own way. In a way that makes him punch out a guy who bumps into him at a bar.

I catch the older ladies at the bus stop glaring at me, disgusted, as if I’m an open wound, oozing with sin. They try their hardest to make me lower my head in shame but instead I grab my pack of smokes and light one, sucking deep and hard until I get a buzzing head rush. Then I blow smoke directly at their loose-jawed faces and they mutter something about Jesus or God. I know they think I’m easy. Easy to pass judgement upon. And I wonder how many mistakes they’ve made in their lives. I wonder how big would their bellies be if they were forced to wear their sins on the outside of them.

On the bus, the boys my age look away from me, like they’re embarrassed, as if I had my period smeared all over white pants. I brush closely by them as I walk down the aisle, rub my poisoned stomach against their backs, and watch their shoulders tighten. I take a seat at the back, across from this older man who immediately looks me over like I’m a slut. Like I would screw anything in a second, given the chance. His eyes penetrate me, loose lips mumbling porn-talk. I smile, spread my legs a little, trace my tongue along my upper lip like I can’t wait to suck him off. I stroke my stomach, twirl my belly button like it’s a nipple, and he squirms in his seat, all hot and horny. Then I whisper to him and he leans in closer. “You disgust me,” I say real loud.

You used to dip and turn and swim in my stomach but now your kicks are purposeful underneath my ribs, as if you are trying to break out of me. As if you are done with what my body has to offer. I reach down and feel the outline of what I think is your foot, hard and buried, like under a thick blanket. You respond to my touch with more kicks, and I quickly pull my hand away, terrified of this conversation. Terrified that you will be disappointed with empty words and the resentful stroke of my finger.

I am given my final assignment for my parenting class in school. I have to make up a children’s book for my baby to read in the future. Some of the girls working on the project really like the idea and start planning their stories about girls who fight dragons or little boys who build spaceships. They spread the markers out on their desks and consider complex colour patterns to stimulate their children’s brains, like we read in the magazine article Miss Lucy gave us.

I move to the back of the room and stare out the window, my paper blank. I can’t think of a thing to write. Fairy tales are dumb lies about talking bears and skies falling and poison apples. Little boys can’t build spaceships and little girls can’t fight dragons that don’t even exist, so why make them believe they can? It’s like showing them this fantasy world and then snatching it away. False hope is the cruellest thing I can think of to give a kid.

Miss Lucy comes by my desk when there’s ten minutes left in class and tells me that I have to have a plot outline before I leave the room. I roll my eyes and reluctantly pick up my pen. I write about a little girl who receives a puppy for Christmas, but the landlord of the apartment her family lives in doesn’t allow dogs. So they hide it for about a month, until one day the puppy runs out the door when the little girl comes home from school. The puppy runs right into the landlord’s feet. At first, the little girl and her mother, who is now standing in the doorway, think the landlord is going to yell and kick the dog. But then he reaches down, picks up the pup, and starts patting it. And at the end, the puppy bites the man’s toupee off of his head, and they all start laughing and the landlord makes the little girl promise to not tell anyone about his hair and he’ll let her keep the dog. I add the toupee part because I know Miss Lucy’s husband has a toupee and she might think it’s funny. All in all, I know the story sucks, but I hand in the paper and head off for lunch.

In the afternoon our class of six young women are forced to sit through Ms. Crawl’s boring pictures of her vacation in Scotland because Miss Lucy has a dentist appointment. Ms. Crawl says it’s important for us to broaden our horizons and see other parts of the world so that our children don’t grow up to be naive and ignorant. We sit around the centre table in the classroom as she flips the pages of her photo album and gives us boring details
on stone circles and castles. She tries to sound smart, dropping names and dates all over the place, but really, what’s most interesting about the photos is seeing Ms. Crawl wearing jeans and posing in front of mountains and lakes. It’s strange because she seems out of place in nature.

“What’s this?” I ask, speaking for the first time. I am pointing to a picture of a gravestone with a bouquet of purple and yellow flowers in front of it.

“Oh, that’s nothing important,” she says dismissively, lifting the corner to turn.

“It’s a grave,” I say, holding my hand down on the page.

“Right,” she says, releasing the corner and surrendering to my persistence. “That’s Betty Corrigal,” Ms. Crawl explains. “Well, that’s not Betty, it’s her gravestone, obviously. It’s in Orkney. Right here.” She uses her sharp pencil tip to point to the place on the opened atlas. “On a tiny island called Hoy.”

I lean in closer to look at the photo. “Who was she?” The girls on either side of me, who at first showed no interest, now move in closer to the photo album.

Ms. Crawl pulls her chair up to the table. You can tell she’s excited to have our full attention, for once. “Well, this local man told me about it and then I looked it up at the library when I returned home. I was biking along the road, in the middle of nowhere, among rolling hills of peat, it was just charming. And I saw this man just off to the side of the road at this gravestone. He was placing these lovely flowers down, so I stopped and we chatted. He had this wonderful Scottish accent and he told me about Betty.”

“Was she his daughter?” Tawnya asks.

“No. Betty died a long time ago, in the nineteenth century. But he puts flowers on her grave every month. A few locals do.”

“Why would they, if they didn’t know her?” I ask.

“She fell in love with a sailor, and after he left for sea, she found out she was pregnant . . .” Miss Crawl hesitates for a moment, as if she’s unsure she should continue.

“Go on,” I say, now intrigued even more.

“And she was so devastated, because illegitimate children were a sin back then, not like now. The poor girl hung herself.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yes. Terrible. Remember, it was quite unacceptable then to have a baby out of wedlock,” she says, trying to make the story into some history lesson.

“What else?” Lynn, the girl sitting beside me, asks.

“The people had to bury her, but because she killed herself, they couldn’t bury her in consecrated—that means ‘holy’— ground, so they buried her on the boundary between the two parishes.”

“That’s so sad,” Tawnya sighs.

“Yes, it’s very sad. Her body was buried in peat and so it remained preserved. But peat isn’t like dirt, and her body kept rising up through it, to the surface. The man on the side of the road said that soldiers from the Second World War, during trench-digging training, would get drunk at night and go in search of Betty’s body. Apparently, the rope was still around her neck.”

A couple of us hold our hands up to our necks, feeling our own vulnerable throats. A door down the hall slams shut and we all jump in our seats and then burst out laughing due to our own edginess.

Ms. Crawl continues with her ghostly tale. “The problem was, she kept rising up. And they tried different things to keep her down, but nothing worked because of the peat. So finally they
rigged something up to keep her in the ground, and this local guy, who had made himself some false fibreglass teeth, offered to make her a headstone.” Her hand points to the photo: “This headstone.” “That’s perfect,” I say, leaning back in my chair and clapping my hands together.

“What’s perfect?” Ms. Crawl asks, confused.

“The story. It’s a perfect story,” I answer.

All through dinner that night I compose my children’s book in my head. I stay up late writing it, even sketching some pencil drawings of Betty in the grave. At the beginning of the book she has flesh, but then as the story goes on she changes to bone. Some of the pictures look a little too scary for a kid, so I put in some flowers and bunny rabbits around the edges, and some yellow stars in the sky at night. The next day I hand in my book, pictures and all.

When I get it back, Miss Lucy tells me that it’s a highly inappropriate topic for a child and gives me an F or the opportunity to redo the assignment. I tell her I like it the way it is and that I won’t change it, thank you very much, which makes her just shake her head and return to her pencil sharpening.

Aunt Sharon comes to visit about one month before my due date. She meets me in the visitors’ room. When I walk in, Ms. Crawl and Aunt Sharon are whispering.

“Oh, hi, Snow,”Ms. Crawl says, not realizing I had walked into the room.“I was just telling Sharon about the hospital plans.” She smiles and puts her bony, crow-like fingers on my shoulder, as if she were this loving person. I cringe and make a face to Aunt Sharon.