Crossings (16 page)

‘You'd better have a drink,' Ben says. So I do. I'm scared all of a sudden.

‘The test is positive,' he says. He has come straight from the gynecologist's office. ‘You're pregnant.'

I am pregnant. It hits me like the news of my father's death. I am pregnant. Dear god, how has this happened?

I think I cried. Yes. I cried. I was terrified. I was really pregnant. How had it happened, incredible. I had another drink.

Then I am in the car and Ben is taking me home.

‘You'll have to make all the arrangements,' he is saying. ‘It's your decision. It's a decision you have made of your own free will. That has to be understood.'

I am not saying anything, so he says it all again.

‘I want you to say it, Vicky. It's important that you realize this is your decision.'

‘This is my own decision.'

‘Made of your own free will.'

‘Made of my own free will.'

We pull up in front of the house. I see Mrs Flynn behind the curtains, watching my downfall. ‘It's of my own free will,' I say, ‘and I shall never forgive you.'

All right. I phone Jocelyn's boyfriend and he tells me to go to the White Spot at eleven-thirty Thursday morning. I drive to the White Spot on Thursday morning, and I sit for an hour in the car. Finally a man gets in on the passenger's side.

‘I can't do it for two weeks,' he says. ‘I've got my mother-in-law staying.'

‘That's too late,' I say. I want it over and done with. Now.

Ben takes me to a doctor's office. He has got the name from a drugstore. A doctor's office on East Hastings. Dr Weinstein. An old man with shaky hands. No, he doesn't do them himself. Dr Weinstein tells me to go to the corner of Commercial and Broadway at noon on Tuesday. He tells us some funny stories. ‘I've seen everything,' he says. He tells us about the girl who works in the bank. How she wrapped it up when it came, wrapped it up in tissue paper and ribbon and sent it to him through the mail. ‘I've seen everything,' he cackles.

I go to the corner of Commercial and Broadway on Tuesday at noon. I wait. A woman with red hair drives up in a Morris Minor and tells me to get in.

She drives around and around through back streets and alleys and finally we stop behind an old clapboard three-storey house. An old house, very Vancouver, remodelled into suites. We go up some wooden steps. The kitchen is very clean and scrubbed. The linoleum has maroon flowers. There are plastic roses in vases and little plaques on the wall, ‘Kissin' don't last Lovin' do.' No. That's not right. No. ‘Kissin' Don't Last Cookin' Do.' That's right. Doilies on the arms of the chesterfield. The chesterfield is in the kitchen.

I put $100 on the arm chair. No. There isn't an arm chair. I put it on the table. Oil cloth. Red and white with little baskets of flowers in the white squares. Yes. And a plastic container for paper napkins.

That's all it cost to murder my child. $100.

She had black hair and green eyes and very pale skin. Freckles. No acne. Very Irish.

We go into the bedroom and I take off my panties. There's a board on the bed, and under the board are newspapers. I get down on the board and spread my knees. The newspapers rustle.

‘Relax' says Agnes. Her name is Agnes and she has red hair. She is English, and on D-Day she celebrated with a Canadian soldier.

‘Relax, dearie.'

And there was no one to help her, so when she got TB—

‘Relax, dearie, I can't get it in.' She is holding a long orange tube and she has a stainless steal thing up my    It goes in and then she releases something and it forces the walls.    Stainless
steel
, I mean. Of course.

‘So when I got TB, I decided I would help other girls in trouble, you see.
Please
try to relax, honey.'

‘What happened to the baby?'

‘Oh she's quite grown-up now. Sixteen years old. She's at school. Right now. Please, honey.'

She is putting up the orange tube. ‘It's to let the air in, you see.'

And she gives up and says, ‘Look,' and turns her back to me, pulling her magenta sweater over her red hair and there, like a long cicatrix on her back, is where they took the lung out.

She's dead now. Agnes. I read about it in the newspapers. They got her in the end. She committed suicide. I wonder what happened to the daughter. I can't remember how to spell
daughter. Dauhgter? Daughter.
That's what it says in the dictionary. I don't believe it. It doesn't look right.

‘So I couldn't nurse any more. I'm a nurse by profession. I would have been, that is, if I hadn't got TB. Sweetie, you'll have to relax.'

And the tube goes in.

‘I've helped a lot of girls. But one time I quit. It was this girl. She said she was only two months gone. Her father was a professor, a real big shot. And her mother, she swore the girl was only two months gone. A big girl. You couldn't tell to look at her. Anyway—I wish you'd relax. We're almost finished—when it came out, it was seven months. I mean, it was
alive.
I was so
sick.
I mean, it was—Relax! Dammit. Honey, I can't do this if you keep clenching up on me like that.'

‘What did you do with it?'

‘I put it in this can? Like a big coffee can? With lye? And I gave it to the mother. I said, “Bury it.” I thought it was up to her, the way she lied to me. I couldn't do a case for six months. It really put me off. You married?'

‘Yes.'

‘I just wondered. You're not wearing a ring.'

‘No. I'm married. My husband's out of work.'

‘Yeah. It's really bad this time of year.'

And it's over.

‘Now you just go home and scrub the floors. Tonight you'll start to bleed a bit and then it'll all come out. Here, give me your number and I'll call you.'

Three weeks later and five tube insertions later, I am still doggedly pregnant.

‘I don't think your wife wants to lose this baby,' Agnes says to Ben. Now she is here, in our bedroom, looking at me doubtfully. ‘I think that's the trouble. She just don't want to lose it.'

I remember what I did in those three weeks. Between visits to Agnes. I wrote a new play. About a man and wife who go to Mexico. His name is Max and he goes to Mexico for his health, for the good of the sun. His wife, to keep herself busy, works as a volunteer in the village clinic. She meets a doctor. Max urges her to go to a bullfight with the doctor.

‘No. I should hate it,' she says. I don't remember her name.

‘My wife's a good woman,' Max says to the doctor. They sit in the long mauve nights playing canasta. ‘It's so difficult for her. A sick man for a husband.'

Ben takes me bowling. I refuse to scrub the floors.

‘She was above me, you see,' Max explains to the doctor. And the moths flutter against the lamp and die. ‘I wasn't her class.'

‘That's not true, Max,' says the wife. I could look it up, her name.

I sat and I went clackety-clack and Ben made the meals and washed the dishes. Everything was back to normal.

The wife goes to the bullfight. She likes it. She goes to bed with the doctor.

‘How brown you've become,' Max says to the wife. ‘It's the sun.'

Above my desk, pencilled in faintly (Mrs Flynn's wall, after all): ‘Endow thy thoughts with words that make them known.' I was a great believer in the responsible artist. The teleological principle in art.

‘How brown and strong you look. It has done you good, the sun.'

The doctor says, ‘There was a woman today. All cut to pieces. Her mouth and her eyes and her ears. Her
como se dice,
her nostrils?'

‘Ah the poor woman!' says the wife.

The doctor shrugs. ‘She had taken a lover. Her husband did it.' He puts down a card. ‘Yes, it is an important thing, to have a good woman for a wife.'

‘We are more civilized in our country,' says Max.

The tube hung down from my vulva. Nothing happened.

‘All right,' said Agnes. ‘Let's see what this does.' She kneels on my stomach. Back and forth she rolls, her knees like two terrible engines. She is very thin.

And I dream. Electric water. Neon blue. A mirror. Myself in the mirror. And in an instant, it shatters. Breaks into pieces like the world.

I wake. I go into the toilet and the blood comes. And into my hand, the baby.

You cannot tell of course if it would have had black hair and green eyes or pale skin with freckles. But it is a baby. You cannot tell if it would have been a daughter.

I wrapped it in some toilet paper. The pains are quite bad. It takes a long time for the afterbirth. I sit there on the toilet, holding the baby in the tissue paper.

When I go out into the front room, I am still carrying it. ‘It's over.'

‘Are you sure?'

Yes.

And he takes the tissue paper parcel. And he takes the scalpel. The one he uses for the silk-screen. And he goes into the other room. Down two steps. Up two steps. He is in the bedroom now. He is there a long time. A long time. Then the toilet flushes.

That didn't happen. That. The scalpel. It did not happen.

Yes. It did. It happened. It happened.

Ben said it was only right for me to pay the $100.

Listen. I am going to tell you now the most fantastic thing I ever did in my whole life.

You ready for a joke? I am ready for a joke myself.

One night, about two weeks later, Ben is working on his silk-screen.

There he is, working away with the scalpel, the same scalpel, and I go into the shower and I have a good scrub. I douche myself out. I've stopped bleeding.

I put on the green nightgown he bought me that first summer, eight years before. I come into the kitchen and I say, ‘Ben? You promised.'

I said you'd get a kick out of it. Lovely. My god. I mean, you've got to hand it to me. I don't know what you've got to hand to me, but whatever it is, you've got to.

So. Benjamin Ferris poked it in one last time. Without a safe. Without consulting the little calendar. Without a norform. He did it. Yes he did. Back and forth he went like a little man. Brave as brave. And ooops, here he comes, and he's out and running all over the sheet.

‘I can't, I can't,' he says.

Along about four a.m. I get a doozer of an attack.

‘Are you wheezy?'

I nod.

I hear him out in the kitchen, busily running water, opening the fridge, putting the needle and the syringe into the poached egg pan. My word, doesn't he sound happy, puttering away in there. I hear the squeak of the vial as he pushes it in.

And in he comes, prick at the ready, poised to plunge.

‘I'd rather do it myself,' I say.

‘But you get air in,' Ben says.

Yes.

And and and.

Actually, Ben does very well once he gets away from me. He phones me one day in May and he says, ‘I'm going to Mexico again.' He is off to build giant sculptures on the northern plains. Peace messages to flying saucers.

‘But Ben,' I say, ‘isn't that a bit loony?'

‘Everything is,' says Ben, ‘if you look at it the right way.'

He is going with three women and one teenage boy. They are to be his assistants. ‘So if you want to divorce me, you'd better do it now. Because I'm never coming back. Her name's Rosa Manson and she's a poet.'

I trot off to the lawyer's the next day, and in three weeks I'm divorced.

 

I AM HOME from Bowen Island and the professor. Brown and glistening from the sun and the salt. In my white and brown dress with no back.

And there he is. Mik. Sitting at the dining room table. I can see him from the window, as I stand on the porch. I grin. He grins. He's playing chess with Paul.

So we all play chess. Mik beats Paul. I beat Paul. I play Mik. Mik beats me. But I say, ‘Give me another chance.'

They've been drinking beer. Paul goes out and gets a twenty-six of something. Mik pours me a glass and I drink it down.

‘I'm going to beat you,' I say. Mik fills my glass again.

And we play. On and on. I don't see Paul going. I finally win. I've gone beyond drunkenness, into a mad sobriety of vision. I win. Checkmate.

I stand up. The room does a rather peculiar thing. It moves. I am flat on my face on the floor. Dead drunk.

I throw up all over the floor. ‘You let me win.'

Mik is mopping up the mess. ‘No. You won.'

‘You let me.' If he says yes, I'll kill him.

‘No. You won.'

I'm on the sofa. Somehow. Yeeach. Mik comes in with a     With a fried egg sandwich! Whoops.

‘Eat it. It's the best thing.'

Arrgh.

So he eats it himself. Right in front of me. How can he? I stink to high heaven.

Edna says to me of a lover: ‘He held my head when I was sick, and I thought I'd love him forever.'

I think of Mik eating that fried egg sandwich. A foot away from the ghastly mess of my stomach. That has to be love.