Double Talk (9 page)

Later, Brian will tell Violet he knows the exact moment it happened: “During the omnibus showing of
Coronation Street,
” he says. “Remember that episode where Vera and Jack tie one on at the Rovers Return, and when they get home Vera is randy and Jack keeps giving her excuses. He doesn't want to do it. But Vera won't take no for an answer. She won't back off. Jack gets more and more cornered looking until finally he gets this resigned look on his face. He sits on the edge of the bed and carefully removes and folds his half-glasses. Like he doesn't want to see what he's about to get into. Jesus, it was just brilliant.”

Confirmation comes two weeks later when, perched over the toilet bowl, Violet pees on three different name-brand sticks, and all respond with a blue horizon.

Violet first feels her baby as a series of flutters and tickles. It freaks her out a little bit, but she soon decides she loves the feeling of the baby inside her. “You're so lucky,” her mother tells her when Violet reports no morning sickness. “Just like your Aunt Margaret. I on the other hand …” And she goes on to describe in great detail her martyrdom to the Goddess Nausea. She then tells Violet that all the time she was pregnant with her she had a bottle of Thalidomide on top of her dresser. “I don't know what stopped me from taking it,” she says.

Once the first trimester is over, Violet is full of energy again. It all starts to feel so simple, so natural to her. When she listens to other women trade war stories, she thinks they are exaggerating, that they are being unnecessarily negative. Some treat her like an invalid. “I feel fine. I'm just pregnant.” Most disturbing to her, though, are the old whiskery ones in plastic headscarves who stop her in the street to tell her that her life will never be the same. “I mean, come on,” she says to Nancy, “I'm not superstitious, or anything, but I find it a bit creepy. And they touch me. Complete strangers patting me on the arm or touching my belly and telling me that everything is going to be okay. Like there's something wrong.”

“But they mean no harm,” counsels Nancy. “Think of it as community outreach.”

By her third trimester Violet begins to wonder. Is it something about her face? She stares into the mirror, searching for any signs of weakness or deficiency, any sign that she's marked. There must be something wrong, she thinks. Why else would people work so hard to reassure her, keep telling her it will be a change for the better? Sometimes they make her feel angry. Just who are they to assume that her life has been in any way lacking? And to whom exactly are they talking? She develops a theory that these sages are not counselling her at all, but using her as a stand-in for some younger version of themselves, or for a daughter or granddaughter who will not listen.

Then, weirdly, in the final month, Violet develops a new axiom (#543): “The amount of baby I can feel at any one time — a head, a bum, an elbow — exists in direct proportion to the uncanny feelings that are beginning to engulf me with disturbing frequency.” Reading it a second time, she pencils a small question mark beside it, deciding that it needs more work. Still, some days she thinks that the life growing inside her is slowly revealing a counterpart in the exterior world, a world outside a world, one she has been deliberately blind to. When she confides her thoughts in Brian, he suggests that she may want to consider converting to Roman Catholicism.

By early September, Violet is being pummelled by knees and elbows. One night she is awakened by an uncomfortable weight on her pelvis. At her next gynaecological appointment she is told that her baby has somersaulted into a breach position, but will likely right itself again. She waits, but the baby stays put, content to kick its mother in the bladder and head-butt acid up into her throat.

Violet passes her due date. The phone rings twenty times a day. It is her mother or Nancy or Keppie or Amy or Devlin or Igor or Eva or the lady who lives across the road. And they all want to know the same thing. “Any movement yet? Any change?” Towards the end of the second week Brian unplugs the phone.

At the beginning of week three the doctors tell Violet they want to induce birth. They also want her to take part in a study, a drug trial. Violet is nervous about taking labour-inducing drugs but reasons it is for the greater good. She agrees to be their guinea pig. Checking into the hospital, she and Brian sit on the bed in a bare room for fourteen hours while Violet is administered yellow pills at regular intervals. They pass time by listening to Pat Metheny and early Van Morrison tapes. Brian holds her hand. They read Bernard Malamud short stories. Violet feels a few twinges, then nothing. Brian offers her his diagnosis: “concrete cervix.” It's cold in the room. Exhausted she and Brian fall asleep only to be awakened a short time later by a posse of doctors who explain in hushed and urgent tones their concerns about her deteriorating womb. Violet signs some forms and she and Brian are whisked away to an operating theatre where, an hour later, her baby emerges, pink and sleeping, from a skylight in her stomach.

Nothing in Violet's life prepares her for Hurricane Lucy's heartbroken cry. It begins that second night in the hospital. The ward nurse startles Violet from the best sleep of her life to say there is no consoling Baby Budd. “For the sake of the other babies in the nursery,” she says, “it would be better if baby stayed with mom.”

Lucy cries all night. The next morning, she turns scarlet and contorts her body when the obstetrician pronounces her bonny and blithe. She cries in the taxi, prompting the taxi driver to confide that he is “some glad his six is all grown up and gone.” Safely home, Violet sits in the room she and Brian had so carefully decorated for their baby. Lucy cries when Violet shows her the sheep stencilled on the wall. She stops for a moment when placed under the black and white mobile, then screams all the louder. Violet rocks her in the wicker chair Brian found at the Salvation Army and carefully spray-painted sunflower yellow. Violet watches the shadows the Daisy Duck lampshade casts on the walls. She tries to feed her baby. She expresses milk onto her nipples and rubs them against her baby's lips. She sings songs to her. She smiles at Lucy until her smile turns into a grimace. She thinks of Dr. Holly. With her thumbs, Violet gently applies pressure to her baby's jaw. But the child will not latch on. Violet feels helpless. Aching breasts are nothing to the sight of that prim little mouth shut tight against the world, opening only to scream blue murder at having been born.

Even when Lucy finally begins to feed with gusto, Violet worries. She searches her baby's grey eyes for some hint of recognition, some sign that can be interpreted to mean that the child recognizes her mother. But none comes. Violet rocks her baby and stares at the wattle-like pattern the bamboo screen casts on the walls. Her feminist teachers were right, she thinks, she is locked away in a primitive hut. She knows the world of privilege she once knew is now off limits to her.

One night Violet dreams of setting Lucy adrift on the Southside River, setting her adrift over undulating weeds, over submerged bicycles and shopping carts, over bags containing cat bones, setting her adrift in a swirl of dirty water, watching until she passes through the lock and out into the harbour. She awakes sobbing, with visions of that small and ominously silent crib setting out to cross the frigid North Atlantic. Brian is snoring loudly beside her. She feels otherworldly again, like an old animal self inside her is stirring, and it fills her with terror.

Brian tries to help. He tells her it's hormonal, which doesn't help. From time to time he sticks his head in the door and asks if he can do anything to help. But he's half-hearted about it, Violet thinks. It's like he's afraid or doesn't really want to help at all. Violet knows she is being unfair to him, but some days she can't help it. Worst of all, she thinks, are the days when he hovers over her, trying to find the humour in the situation, laughing manically whenever he comes up with a good one. “Wherever I go, lanugo!” he shouts, pointing to the thick covering of hair on Lucy's arms and back.

Violet's only comfort in those first months is Nancy. Her friend is non-judgemental. She gives Violet permission to speak her mind. Violet is often appalled at what she hears herself say, but is unable or unwilling to water it down or censor it. She confides her fears about Brian. She tells Nancy about the night she walked the floor with a screaming Lucy for three hours, with Brian following around behind them. “Like some kind of creeping Jesus,” she says. “He kept asking me if he could take the baby for a while. Finally, I couldn't take any more. I'd had enough. I handed Lucy to him and fell face first onto the bed. I pulled a pillow over my head. I was beyond exhausted. About to pass out, all I could hear was Brian singing nursery rhymes to Lucy in that stupid Elmer Fudd voice. Lucy was still going ballistic. I was so angry. Anyhow, I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I woke up and heard Brian shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Will you just shut up! Just shut the fuck up!' I jump out of bed, run downstairs at top speed. I'm in a complete panic. And there's Brian holding Lucy at arm's length, both of them red in the face. I mean, if I hadn't woken up who knows what might have happened?”

Nancy nods in sympathy and reaches out to stroke Violet's arm. She tells her it's okay. But Violet can't help noticing that her friend is trying hard to keep a straight face.

Violet doesn't want to see Nancy then for a while.

And she doesn't want to see Brian, unless he is being a practical help: carrying a basket of laundry, wiping up vomit, or stocking the fridge with groceries.

And she certainly doesn't want to see the goddamn bitch of a public health nurse either, that monstrosity in a floral pantsuit. When she first visits after Lucy is born, the nurse seems more interested in looking into their cupboards than giving Violet the information she needs. She rolls her eyes when Violet asks too many questions. Violet tells her that baby Lucy is inconsolable, that she often cries for hours. But the nurse just brushes her aside, says that some babies are just colicky. The nurse reminds Violet of the kind of forty-something divorcee she used to see on George Street, back in her drinking days. She imagines the nurse hitting Happy Hour every Friday and getting smashed on fruity cocktails. The nurse says the best thing Violet can do is to let little Lucy cry it out. “The sooner she learns who is boss, the better.” Violet can't believe her ears. She imagines the nurse drunk and naked, shouting directions to some mutt she had dragged home from the bar. Desperate to make the woman understand, Violet tells her about the night they tried letting Lucy “cry it out.” How they had listened to Lucy scream for over an hour then abruptly stop. Violet says they raced into the nursery to find Lucy lying on her back, choking on vomit. “And the woman's response to this?” Violet tells Nancy. “We should place her on her side, prop her up with pillows so she can't roll over on her back!” Violet imagines placing that pillow over the nurse's fat face.

Colic: is there a more sinister euphemism? Violet wonders. Well, perhaps there is, she thinks: postpartum depression.

It is coming on Christmas. Violet is sitting in the nursery when she feels a change. It is as though someone has suddenly removed a fine black net from in front of her eyes. She looks to the window to see if the curtain has blown back, but the window isn't even open. She straightens her back and feels sensation returning in a way that makes her understand how absent it has been. She listens to the sounds of the outside world: cars changing gears as they descend the hill, someone hammering, a junco chirping. Downstairs, she can hear water running. She can hear Peter Gzowski's anguished delivery on CBC Radio, and Brian's footsteps as he mooches around. She has a craving to pick up the novel that she stopped reading three months earlier.

Euphoria floods through her beaten flesh. She looks down at the sleeping bundle in her arms, says, “Hello, little one,” like she is saying it for the first time. She gazes at Lucy's hot red cheeks, her perfect little lips, her eyes flickering gently under her wine-stained eyelids. She leans down and let the baby's feathery hair tickle her nose. She gets drunk on the smell of her baby's scalp: powder and sweat and something else impossibly clean and sweet. She lifts Lucy's dimpled hand. Violet sees that the baby's nails are far too long, curving over the tops of her fingers. So, very gently, she nibbles them. Lucy takes a deep breath and sighs, the last of her recent upset subsiding. Violet smiles at her and squeezes her fat leg, squeezes her fat diapered bum through her cotton sleeper. She knows everything is going to be all right. She just knows. Everything is going to be fine.

She places Lucy in the bassinet, props her on her side with pillows, and goes downstairs. Brian is in the kitchen, cleaning the breakfast dishes. He is wearing the Tweety Bird apron and the orange rubber gloves. One of the things she has always loved about Brian is his willingness to take on his share of the housework. If anything, she thinks, once the painting and home repair jobs have been added it, he does more than his share.

Violet remembers how supportive he was during the pregnancy: how he refused to sleep in the spare bedroom, even though she snored every night as loudly as a lawn-mower; how he was a willing participant in all the prenatal classes. She remembers how he blanched when the midwife, by way of illustrating the size of the baby's head relative to the cervix before dilation, held up a small turnip and a Cheerio. He was so sweet to her in the last trimester, rubbing coco butter on her belly and telling her daily how beautiful she was and how much he loved her. In the last weeks of pregnancy he always wanted her to spoon with him, his back against her enormous belly so he could feel it when the baby kicked or turned. And best of all, his desire for her did not diminish. They made love often and passionately, right up to the last few days. Then Lucy was born and he just disappeared.