Degrees of Nakedness (2 page)

“How’s that?”

“He likes it lower than that.”

“Where’s Cy?” I asked.

“We’ll let Cy in when we’re ready,” the anaesthetist said.

When Cy came in he was wearing a mauve and blue flowered cap also. He kneeled next to me, holding my hand, smoothing my hair. “I can still feel my toes,” I said.

“It’s not your toes we’re operating on,” said the anaesthetist. “You will feel sensation, you’ll feel them cutting you, but no pain.”

I heard them pull the tray of instruments across the floor. Suddenly I was swept with fear and just as suddenly it was gone. I felt the knife pressing across my belly. Cy began to smooth my hair with more vigour until his stroke became so vigorous I had to stop him. There was a sucking noise.

“That was your water breaking,” said someone behind the curtain. The anaesthetist looked over the curtain,

“Black hair,” he said. “It’s a girl”

“Is she healthy?” I asked.

“Appears to be.”

The sense of relief was absolute. I had planned to write about the birth as soon as I found out I was pregnant. I figured the epiphany would come then, that I would be wiser at that moment, the moment of birth. But I was dumbfounded. It’s taken me two months to find that word dumbfounded but it struck me walking down the street yesterday. For the ten days I was in hospital I didn’t write a word. Not a letter or thankyou note. It took us a month and a half to figure out a name for her. I couldn’t find any significance, the birth wasn’t a symbol or metaphor, it just happened, a clean thing, a thing unto itself, a pure wordless thing. I was struck dumb.

They lay her on my chest. Her head was small as a fist. Green guck of some sort all over her hair. The anaesthetist put his hand over her closed eyes to block the light so she would open them. They were black and wet like those of a newborn kitten. We held her there while they sewed me up. Cy said he saw her in the mirror first, being passed from hand to hand. Then all the doctors shook Cy’s hand, congratulating him.

The nurses in the neo-natal unit said Cy was the best father they’d seen. They said, “She’ll have him wrapped around her little finger.”

There were four other women besides me at the breast feeding class they offer in the hospital. We all had self-righteous expressions. We had heard that only thirty percent of Newfoundland women breast feed. The nurse speaks without stopping for breath, “Now, girls, some of the dads might be uncomfortable with the breast feeding at first, but sure that’s only natural. You’ll find that when you climax while you’re having sex you’ll probably be squirting milk all over him. Just keep a towel handy, that’s all, and don’t worry about the public. Nobody cares unless you’re in the mall and you strip off down to the waist. Now, you know yourself, girls, you have to use a little common sense and girls, if you’re going to a cocktail party, double pad, because I’m telling you now, once you get a drop of wine in you it’s going to be like Churchill Falls and you’re going to have to go in the bathroom and wring out your cocktail dress.”

The nurse puts on an instructional video in which a fifty-year-old woman holds a stuffed doll to her blouse in the various different breast feeding positions. She holds it under one arm, the legs kicking behind. White letters appear on the screen: Football position. Then the video shows actual mothers, who look worn out, still in hospital johnny coats, close-ups on their breasts, which are swollen, blue-veined and mountainous next to the newborn babies. Breast feeding is a skill, the narrator tells us.

My baby was too small to suck from my nipple so we had to feed her pumped breast milk from a bottle. I had to pump every night. Fit the plastic cone over my swollen, rock-hard breast and flick the little lever that starts the pump. I’ve seen the pump that we use to get water from the well. This pump was the same size. A two thousand dollar machine. It makes a loud grinding noise. After three days I thought I was bonding with it. Cy sat with me while my milk squirted into the attached cup. I showed him the four ounce mark. “Look how much I got.”

“That’s great, Donna.”

In the long exhausted week after she was born, we went to the hospital cafeteria so Cy could smoke. It’s a small room with a few tables, tinfoil ashtrays, lit mostly by the lights in the snack machines. There were meals of macaroni and soup that could be heated in the microwave, all displayed in racks that rotated when you pushed a button. At ten at night we had the cafeteria to ourselves, except for a nurse who came in with a flattened piece of shiny paper. She put it in the microwave and watched it as if it were a TV, pulling over a rickety chair and resting her elbows on her knees, chin in hand. The microwave choked into action, the inside lit up and a red light played on the package until it expanded with bursting popcorn kernels into a round smooth ball that split in a line up the centre. When she left, Cy reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a small box.

“I got you something.”

It was a bottle of moisturizing cream. I had run out but I’d
told Cy not to get any because we couldn’t afford it. Tears came to my eyes.

Cy said, “Ah, for Jesus’ sake, Donna.”

“Well, I’m tired, Cy, I’m just plain tired.”

I guess it was somewhere during that week he slept with Marie. I found out because of the baby monitor. We got this monitor, you put one piece in the baby’s cradle and the other you carry around with you. It’s so sensitive you can hear the baby breathe or hiccup. It took a little getting used to. Sometimes it would pick up the voices of children playing on the street, the sound garbled and static as if the baby had been invaded by aliens who were using her as a vehicle to relay a message. Once, at midnight, Cy and I were sitting at the living room table, having a cup of coffee, watching the couples coming up from the Ship Inn, when there was a loud crash over the monitor. Both of us froze for a second and then ran up the stairs, two at a time. In her room, everything was still. The bassinet was in the centre of the table where we had left it. Cy looked out the window. Somebody on the street had slammed a car door.

The night Marie came over for supper Cy took her up to the bedroom to see the baby. He forgot the monitor was on.

He said, “Listen, Marie, what happened, if Donna knew about it, it would really hurt her, I mean I really had a good time, but I think it was a sort of solitary thing.”

His voice was soft and without static. It was as if he were standing behind me, telling me about it. I went out on the fire escape with my cup of coffee, put my feet up on the banister.

I had been so weak the whole time I was in hospital. The baby was the smallest baby in the neo-natal nursery. I was okay when Cy was with me, but when I had to go into the nursery by myself I was convinced they were going to tell me something terrible. They have huge stainless steel sinks with digital clocks that tell you how many seconds you’ve been scrubbing. While I washed up to the elbow, I would convince myself not to start crying. Once I went in, and they said, “Now, Mrs. Sheppard, I better tell you this before you see your baby, there’s nothing to worry about, but she stopped breathing for a minute or so. That’s common with premature babies, one of the nurses noticed she was a little dusky-coloured and picked her up and she was fine. But we’ve got a monitor on her now and I just wanted to mention it to you before you saw her, so you’d know there was nothing to worry about.”

I phoned Cy and he said he’d be up right away. I stood in the bathroom of my hospital room looking in the mirror, smoothing moisturizing cream over my face. When Cy got there he held me in his arms for a long time. When visiting hours were over, he went home and phoned me. They had wheeled a patient into my room who had just given birth, so I couldn’t talk, I could only listen.

Cy read to me from a history book about Christopher Columbus. Columbus wrote to Ferdinand that he had sighted cyclops and mermaids who were not as beautiful as previously reported, in fact quite mannish. They believed back then that the garden of Paradise was on Earth. That the world was pearshaped, and the garden of Eden a protuberance on the top, like
a woman’s nipple. When Columbus found South America, he knew he had come to land because fresh water was mixing with sea water and whales played there. He thought that fresh water flowed from the nipple of Paradise. When I woke up, the telephone receiver was buzzing the dial tone in my ear.

Out on the fire escape, the fog coming up from the harbour penetrated my clothes and a spider crawled over my foot. Cy came out, and I said to him, “Cy, how do I know you won’t leave me?”

He said, “You don’t know, Donna. I love you fiercely right now, that’s the best I can offer.”

I thought about that artist, Volker, we’d visited in Germany. He had taken Cy and me into his painting studio and showed us paintings for two hours. Suddenly, he said, “Come here, Cyril, I will show you something.” He grabbed Cy’s thumb and dipped it into a can of gold pigment, powdered gold. Cy held up his gilded thumb. It looked as if a fragment of an ancient statue were somehow attached to Cy’s living hand. It made me think of Hansel and Gretel, how the witch said, Show me your thumb so I can see if you’re fattened up, and Hansel held out a chicken bone. Buying precious time. It made me think that love is made of isolated flashes and they are what we crave. It was getting dark outside Volker’s studio and Cy’s thumb glowed like something precious, timeless.

Sea Urchin

W
e were alone on the island, at your parents’ cottage. Oil lamps at night, the darkness collapsing like a tent. The day before I left, during supper, my mother and I couldn’t look each other in the eye. I watched her try to jerk a speared beet off her fork. A hard cube, brilliant magenta drops splatting the white plate. Shortly after my father died I left her to go to art school. I had been home two weeks and I was leaving again for Georgian Bay. But she let me go.

An island in Georgian Bay. Forty-five minutes in a speedboat away from the next community. Hundreds of islands. We flew stand-by from Newfoundland and in between flights I went into the airport washroom and stood looking at my face. Looking to see if I was pretty. Mesmerized. Was I pretty at all? When I came out we had missed the connecting flight.

What were you doing? you said. What were you doing in the bathroom?

You were chopping wood. I drank six beers, fast, then ate a bowl of popcorn coated with half a block of melted cheddar. I stumbled out of the cottage. Fell onto the sand at the beach and screamed your name. Over and over. It was just us on the island. Nude half the time. Shouting your name, sending it lurching through the pines.

You took me to a cliff and told me to jump. It was a long way down. I took off my glasses, and handed them to you. The water was a hard bed of shiny dimes. It hurt the bottoms of my feet. Under the surface, the cliff was gouged away, a dark mouth. I imagined it was dense with eels.

My father died just before I met you. His hair had turned grey when he was about your age, eighteen. It had been blondish-red before that, he told me. All the photographs of him before eighteen are hand-tinted, so I don’t know what shade of red, but he had the complexion of a redhead. He sunburned easily and when he drank or became emotional, his skin would break out in red blotches, quickly, like the wind blowing a field of poppies all in the same direction. I imagine his hair turning grey overnight. He might have gotten out of bed, looked in the mirror and been startled out of his wits. Wondered what it could possibly mean. Maybe I imagine that his hair turned grey overnight rather than gradually, because he died overnight, without any symptom or warning.

My father’s brother, Uncle Lloyd, died this year.

My mother and I gripped each other in the parking lot of the funeral home. It was icy and for several minutes we couldn’t gain any ground. We just clung to each other. She said, Why
would a man like Lloyd get to live so much longer than your father?

There was one wreath from the Salvation Army on the coffin. The metal trees with shelves for flowers at the head and foot were empty. A man slept in the armchair. The bottoms of his brown creased pants were salt crusted, his legs crossed. He wore sneakers, one of the Velcro flaps hanging loose, and one foot nodding, stroking time.

Mom and I went close to the casket. Uncle Lloyd didn’t look the way I remembered him. I thought I’d see my father’s face, because the brothers all looked alike, but I was disappointed. There was nothing familiar. His nose was slightly squashed to one side, as if they’d closed the lid on it. I checked inside the satin roof to see if there might be a smudge of face powder, but the frills were clean and white. I almost touched the nose to push it back into place. Lloyd’s eyelashes were light and in this way, at least, he resembled my father. For an instant I was overcome by the belief that a nerve in his eyelid had twitched.

The last time I saw Lloyd was in Barbados, when I was a child. He’d come on vacation with us. That was before he’d begun drinking. Dad stepped on a sea urchin. The long needles were driven deep into his foot, touching bone. They cracked off. Within seconds, his foot was swollen and red. A janitor at the hospital told my father the only cure was to pour heated wax over the foot. That would draw the needles out. He propped his leg on a pillow, both hands gripping his shin. Lloyd wiped the sand from Dad’s foot and spread the melted wax
with a piece of cardboard. I don’t know where my mother was. Dad’s face twisted with pain. The heat of the wax drew the inch-long needles out. The smell of salt water and hot paraffin. I remembered this when Mom called to tell me Lloyd had died. My father has been dead eleven years and I’m still discovering lost pieces of him.

You’re unravelling fast, too. First love. When you cross my mind you’re like a composite drawing a police artist makes from the testimony of witnesses. I rarely think of you.

Your mother left condoms in a pile on your bed next to your airline ticket. A few pamphlets.

Your mother and father were brand new for me. For one thing, the house you lived in was rented. Property was bourgeois, your mother said. They were joking, but they were the only parents I knew who didn’t own their house or want to. They had art. Blue wine goblets, antiques. You could see a line down the side of the glass where two halves of the mould had been joined, but each glass was different. Wine at supper. Home-made salad dressing instead of Kraft.