The Unfinished Child (7 page)

Shelterbelt, she thought. There was no shelter here.

When Marie was twenty, the
year that Elizabeth started to go out with Ron, she gained ten pounds. Food had always been a great comfort to her. During the long, lazy, hot summer afternoons when Elizabeth was at the stables and Marie was left to wander on her own, she’d stroll over to the Dairy Dell and buy a large cup of soft chocolate ice cream, her surrogate friend all that summer. It came in a tall white Styrofoam cup, swirls of thick, cold chocolate coiled around and around and around in the cup and ending at the top with a delicate curlicue flip. She’d find a shady spot under a tree and slowly spoon the creamy coolness into her mouth. If she was patient, she could make the contents last up to half an hour.

She was drawn to sweets and salty things when she was a child, and to fats and breads when she got older. It was the romantic combination of being happily alone and feeding her extreme loneliness. There wasn’t really any other way to explain her need to eat. Betrayal was certainly a trigger.

She thought back to her earlier conversation.

“For God’s sake, Elizabeth, I slept with him!”

“I know,” Elizabeth apologized.

“No, you don’t!” Oh, she hurt. Her toes curled with the pain that tightened right up her spine.

“I’m sorry, Marie. He only phoned me a month ago.”

“
Only
a month ago? You waited an entire month to tell me?”

“No, no. I mean, you guys hadn’t been together for a while. You’d already broken up.”

“You mean
he’d
already broken up.
I
was still very much interested.” Marie was shaking with anger. She wanted to throw something, break something in two. She looked around her and shook her head. Elizabeth was smart to tell her in a public place. The university pizzeria was busy, as usual. And the music was getting louder as the evening progressed. Maybe she’d smash things when she got home. Maybe she’d clear her shelf above her dresser of nail polish and hair accessories with one big sweep of her arm.

“I didn’t want this to happen, Marie. You have to believe me.”

Marie nodded her head as if something had become suddenly clear and set her mouth in a firm line. “Yeah, un-hunh.”

“I’m telling the truth!”

A stain of resentment had spread out between them. They were both breathing heavily, as if they’d run up a steep hill.

They understood that this was a turning point in their relationship; what direction would they take?

Marie knew she had it in her power to ask Elizabeth to give Ron up. She could cause her friend great pain and then help her to get over it, just like Elizabeth had tried to help her to get over Ron in the first place. Before she decided she wanted him for herself.

What to do?

Her stomach felt empty. Should she take, or should she give?

“What a cliché,” she finally said, feigning indifference. “My best friend stealing my boyfriend.”

“You should know me well enough to know that I didn’t intentionally set out to hurt you. It just happened, okay? And I’m telling you about it because it matters to me that we stay friends. Do you think I wanted this to happen?”

“Well, you have hurt me, intentionally or not.”

The extra weight
gathered in her waistline and protruded in a soft roll over the top of her jeans.

She ate because Ron was now with her best friend.

She ate because Ron had seen her naked, and he’d fondled the cellulite on her thighs as if he’d discovered a rare artefact. And then shortly afterwards he’d stopped calling.

She ate because at night she dreamed of the two of them together and saw Ron removing Elizabeth’s clothes, one piece at a time, slowly and with immense delight.

She ate her way through the hurt until one day she didn’t need to eat over it anymore. The pain had passed, and she could talk to Elizabeth again without faking her affection. She could honestly wish them both well.

And she could meet the eyes of the man at the gym who’d been watching her. The one who showed up on alternate days, always at the same time. He wasn’t as tall as Ron, or as slender, but there was a take-charge quality about him that she admired. He moved from one workout machine to the next in fifteen-minute intervals like clockwork. And when he was done with the machines, he pulled on a lightweight black knee brace (the result of an old soccer injury, she would later learn) and did some laps around the track.

She started to run when he did, knowing that if he came up behind her he’d see the way her rump jiggled in her tight black workout pants. He’d know that she carried some weight on her bones, that she wasn’t some naturally thin woman. She was at the heaviest weight she’d ever been when he smiled at her after his run; if he thought she was attractive at that weight, then there was hope.

Marie made sure to be at the gym when Barry was there. She smiled when he caught her eye. She made it clear that she was interested in talking with him. She laughed at his jokes. He picked up on her cues and asked her out for a drink. Oh, she’d been so lonely.

Later, when they had married and the children had come and her life seemed to be spinning out of control with the chaos of parenting, she scolded Barry as if he were her third child. He raised his voice too much with the children. He didn’t laugh with them enough. He needed to loosen up. He was out of the house all day—he didn’t have any excuse for being impatient.

But she did.

If he’d known her well enough then to read between the lines, he’d have known she was talking about herself.
She
was impatient.
She
didn’t laugh enough with the children.
She
needed to loosen up, not fatten up. Had he noticed that she’d put on weight?

In the early years, when the children were babies, there had been some winters when they hadn’t gone outside for days at a time because of cold snaps that had stubbornly parked over the city for weeks on end. And if she did go out, by the time she got all their winter gear on and was sweating herself, they would play outside for ten minutes and then cry to come inside again. Yes, there had been plenty of bad parenting moments. Teething. Diaper rashes. The constant squabbling between the siblings. Some days it seemed as if the walls had closed in and the world had simply shrunk to the size of her bathroom. She remembered grabbing one of the girls once and shaking her hard before throwing her on the bed. Blind rage. The kind where you stand outside of yourself and know full well that you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing but you just can’t stop.

And then a little child would sidle up beside her and say, “I’m sorry, Mommy,” as if her anger could disappear just like that. Oh, to be a child and move from emotions so rapidly! It took Marie time to let go of her anger. Sometimes a lot of time.

But she had worked hard to develop her patience. She did it for her children because she wanted to be a good mother. And she had gotten better. The work had paid off.

But she still had dreams sometimes. And she’d wake in a cold sweat because she knew she had it in her, the ability to abuse something that was less powerful than herself.

In her thirty-sixth year, when
Elizabeth had embryos inside her and was waiting to discover if one had eagerly put down roots, she walked into a downtown mall and passed a store that had baby clothes on sale. Dozens of matching sleepers and overalls hung from the ceiling on invisible wires. Primary colours screamed their existence. Elizabeth slowed as she passed a rack at the store’s entrance. She fingered a little pink sleeper that swung from a miniature hanger. It was plush and cozy. And such tiny feet on it! She pulled it from the rack and smiled at the little plastic strawberries used for buttons. Instinctively, she reached for her wallet and walked to the counter.

“Is it a gift?” the salesclerk asked as she wrapped the outfit in white tissue paper.

“No.”

The clerk smiled knowingly. “It’s your first, isn’t it? New mothers are always the shy ones.”

Elizabeth smiled. Her neck was hot and itchy. She left the store swiftly, the weight in the plastic bag as light as a bird.

At home she emptied a small drawer in the big wooden wardrobe and gently slid the sleeper inside. Its pink perfectness pleased her.

The following month, Elizabeth added a small crocheted tie-dyed hat and a white cotton undershirt that snapped at the crotch. Sometimes, if Ron went out at night, she would lay the clothes and hat out on the bed and busy herself by putting them in different positions.

Thus began her monthly ritual of buying something new and stashing it away. She shopped at different stores so she wouldn’t be recognized. Too soon, the sleepers began to pile up in the drawer. Did she have too many pink? Maybe she needed to add more blue sleepers. Or maybe twins were hovering somewhere on the outer edge of her aura, patiently waiting for her to get the right combination of colours. Or triplets! Two boys and a girl? Two girls and a boy? One of each? How was she to know? Hadn’t she read somewhere that children choose their parents? What more did she need to do to be chosen?

The sleepers piled up. After a few months, she realized she could not keep the baby clothes at home. It was bad luck, a reminder of her previous month’s failure. So she began to dispose of the sleepers in the dumpster behind her shop, where she and her staff threw the remains of flowers that were past their prime.

One afternoon, she stepped out into the back alley with a small pail of flower clippings and stems. It was early July. Dark clouds snagged in the high branches of the old elms on the side avenue. She had already lifted her pail into the air, where it hovered over the garbage inside, when she heard some muttering and paused, afraid that someone might be lying inside the garbage bin. But the noise came from the other side. Elizabeth stared over the bin’s lip and saw the man foraging through a pile of garbage on the ground that he’d removed from the dumpster. He droned to himself, a steady humming that never changed pitch. His long black hair was matted together in greasy clumps. His running shoes, once white, were a dull grey without laces. They were at least two sizes too big for his feet, and they gaped open and flapped as he moved methodically around the navy metal dumpster.

The shop door swung closed loudly behind her and the man looked up, caught in the act. The whites of his eyes were the brightest spot on his face. Held in his filthy, scavenging hands was a tiny pink sleeper, its toes hanging empty and lifeless. Elizabeth’s stomach heaved. “Get the hell out of here!” she yelled. Her body shook with the intensity of her rage. The man dropped the sleeper and took off. She quickly retrieved it and held it tightly to her chest. I’m losing my mind, she thought. Mascara ran down her face in a thin black trail.

Marie busied herself making a
new recipe for tuna salad from the cookbook Frances had given to her for Christmas. It seemed to be the easiest recipe in the book. Too many of them called for ingredients she had never heard of before. Umeboshi paste, hijike, tempeh, seitan. Even if she knew what these ingredients were, she had no idea where to find them.

“I know you guys aren’t vegetarians,” Frances had said when Marie opened the gift, “but it’s got some fish recipes in it.” Marie hadn’t had the heart to say she was hoping to get another
Best of Bridge
, something with some traditional meat recipes in it, or perhaps some new ideas for how to jazz up meat loaf or pork chops. Curry wasn’t really to her taste. “Cinnamon, dill, celery, slivered almonds . . .” It would be satisfying to tell Frances she’d made something from the book.

Nicole and Sophia pulled all the ingredients from the cupboards to make Elizabeth’s favourite cookies. Already the countertop was coated in a light dusting of flour. The girls bumped against her as they raced to the refrigerator for a carton of eggs. Marie swallowed a wave of irritation. It was hard to watch her kids make such a mess. They rarely put things back where they found them, despite her constant reminders.

She watched them crack two eggs into the mixing bowl. Then they got their fingers in there and began pulling out the stray shells. It was too late to ask if they’d washed their hands. Marie bit her tongue when Sophia aimed the mouth of a full bottle of vanilla into a tiny measuring spoon. Miraculously she didn’t spill a drop.

Her stomach growled and she remembered she hadn’t eaten anything besides the crackers that morning in bed. Despite her hunger, she could think of nothing that would sit safely in her stomach.

The tuna rested in a stainless steel bowl on the counter. Accompanying the acrid scent of fish was the tinny smell of the empty cans that had recently housed the fish. Marie swallowed hard and breathed deeply through her mouth. Fish. She wouldn’t be able to escape the smell now. She hated this stage of pregnancy, when every scent was magnified a thousand times over. Even if she went upstairs and shut herself in the bathroom, the room farthest from the kitchen, the smell of tuna would find her there.

Tiny wisps of snow fell from the tree branches outside the kitchen window, dropping to the tree’s base, where a flock of sparrows had left their forked tracks. Marie stared out at the shimmering snow’s surface and reminded herself that it was still minus thirty outside; it was hard to reconcile the abundance of sunshine with such frigid temperatures.

The doorbell rang promptly at noon. “She’s here,” Sophia shouted, trying to get to the door before Nicole. They yanked it open and pulled Elizabeth, laughing, into the house.

“What are you doing home? Isn’t today a school day?” she asked.

“A pipe burst,” Nicole replied. “And it flooded the whole school!”

“We made your favourite cookies,” Sophia interrupted.

“
Sophia!
” Nicole whined. “It was supposed to be a surprise!”

“Oh, but I
am
surprised,” Elizabeth said, diffusing the situation. “I’m surprised you’re home
and
I’m surprised you made my favourite cookies. Chocolate chip walnut, right?”