The Lit Report (5 page)

—Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

When I first read
Pride and Prejudice
, I was only ten, so it's not surprising that I didn't immediately get the irony of that first sentence. I thought it simply meant that it was easy for a rich man to get a wife. Which, ironically, is perfectly true. I mean, all you have to do is look at a few magazines to know that there's nothing easier for a rich man. As easy as buying a Mercedes
SUV
or jetting off to a private resort on the Turks and Caicos for the weekend. If one wife doesn't work out, well, there's always another one—usually a younger one—coming down the pike. It took a few readings before I realized that
Pride and Prejudice
wasn't all about romance, although it's just as romantic as
Jane Eyre
, maybe more so. Anyway, after I figured out what irony was and wasn't (no thanks to you, Alanis Morissette), I really started
to appreciate
P & P
. I've tried to convince Ruth that Jane Austen wrote chick lit long before Bridget Jones came along, but the only similarity Ruth sees is that Colin Firth was in both movies. What she actually said was, “Why should I read about people with poles up their butts when I have you?” I shut her up by telling her that sarcasm is irony's redneck cousin. Well, at least I have a cousin, was her reply. Which is true and stupid and neither ironic or sarcastic. Strange as it sounds,
P & P
helped me understand why my dad left my mom and why he and Miki are together. He is Miki's good fortune and she is his, even though at first he was prejudiced against her because she was a rich doctor, and she was too proud to see that a scruffy singing nurse was just what she needed.

After I left Ruth's that Saturday, I took the bus over to my dad's and let myself in. I go and visit Dad every weekend. That's been the arrangement ever since he moved out when I was five. At first I went to his crappy little bachelor apartment a couple of blocks away, and then he moved to an equally crappy one-bedroom condo out near the hospital. Now I go to the five-bedroom art deco house he and Miki bought after they got together. I bet Miki made the down payment. A nurse—especially a child-support-paying nurse—wouldn't even be able to cover the payments on the garage. It's a beautiful house; every room but one has an ocean view. That one room is what they call the
decompression chamber. It's tiny and narrow and you reach it by going up a little staircase tucked in the corner of the front hall. It's sort of like being in a boat that never leaves the wharf. There's a big porthole instead of a window, and a built-in berth where you can read or sleep or stare out the window at an arbutus tree. It's always just the right temperature and there's no
TV
, no radio, no phone. There's even a
Do Not Disturb
sign to hang on the doorknob if you don't want to be called for meals or phone calls. No one is allowed to stay all night in the chamber—it's strictly for short-term use—and sometimes we fight over it (isn't that ironic?), but it's my favorite room in the house when I have things to think about. I planned to get in there soon.

I sleep over at my dad's every Friday and Saturday night. On Sunday morning my mom picks me up and we go to church, and then I go back to my dad's and we have brunch and he returns me to my mom's on Sunday night after dinner. Church attendance is non-negotiable. It's a complicated arrangement, but it's the only deal my mom would make. Take it or leave it. My dad took it. Every now and again Mom will ask me if I want to alter the arrangement, but since I don't, that's about the extent of our discussions. Mom starts stiffening up on Friday afternoon, and by the time my dad drops me off on Sunday, she looks like she's taken a bath in a vat of starch. She and my dad are polite to each other, but you can tell that, even after more than
ten years, just seeing him makes her feel shitty. She won't talk about him with me; she never has. Not a word. It's a bit creepy. Sometimes I think it might be easier if they weren't so civilized, if they yelled at each other and called each other
bitch
and
asshole
and stormed around the house throwing dishes and slamming doors. It makes me wonder if there ever was any passion between them, and if not, how I was conceived. Politely, I guess. May I touch? Yes, please, by all means. Thank you. You're welcome. Good night.

My dad met Miki at the hospital a few years ago, and they got married last year on Maui. My mom let me go to the wedding, but only after my dad promised to take me to church on the one Sunday we were there. The whole thing was pretty cool—even the church part, which was simultaneously exotic (the choir wore really loud muumuus) and familiar (Say amen, somebody!). I discovered that singing “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” is tolerable when you're wearing a sundress and flip-flops and you know you're going to go surfing later and buy fresh papayas for lunch. My dad sang all the hymns and clapped and swayed as if he'd temporarily forgotten that he left my mother partly because she believed in what he called “a complete pile of horseshit.” I don't think Miki was overjoyed to suddenly be the stepmother of a teenage girl, but she's so busy it hardly makes any difference to either of us. If she's around, she hangs out with us, but sometimes I think she arranges
to work more weekends than she has to. We don't kid ourselves. I already have a perfectly good mother.

My dad had told me that Miki would be working, so I was surprised to see her red Mini Cooper in the driveway next to my dad's dark green Honda. Early in December, I had helped my dad put up the Christmas lights—tiny white ones—on the branches of the arbutus tree in the front yard. It was festive, yet understated.

“Hello,” I yelled as I dropped my pack on the slate tiles in the front hall. No reply. I slipped off my boots and wandered down to the kitchen. “Anybody home?” I snagged a banana out of the fruit bowl and continued my reconnaissance as I ate it. “Where are you guys?”

“Up here.” My dad's voice floated down from the top of the stairs. “Miki's not feeling well. I'll be down in a bit.”

“Okay,” I said. “Anything I can do? For Miki, I mean. Tea, juice...”

“Nope. I'm making risotto for dinner, so you could heat up some chicken stock if you like.”

I went back into the kitchen and rooted around in the cupboards until I found a box of chicken stock. As I poured it into a pot, my dad came downstairs with some dirty dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher. He gave me a quick one-armed hug, and I caught a whiff of his awful medicated dandruff shampoo and felt the rasp of his beard in my hair. My dad is scruffy, but my friends tell me he's
cute. I really wouldn't know. He has beautiful hands that he keeps soft with frequent applications of Jergens lotion (with aloe). He buffs his nails while we watch
TV
. He has a manicure every few months and he always wants me to come along, but that's just too weird. Even though he wears gloves and a mask to handle the preemies, he always wants his hands to be soft. He sings to the babies, the same songs he sang to me when I was little. His repertoire is entirely composed of songs with the word baby in the title. The babies (and probably a lot of nurses and new mothers) love him. He's always getting thank-you cards signed with tiny handprints.
Thanks for everything. You're the best. Dan and Sandy Jones and baby Georgia
. Miki met him when he was cooing “Come on, baby, light my fire” to a crack-addicted preemie. For better or worse, it's their song. He hired a Samoan band, complete with ukuleles and falsettos and a lot of tattoos, to sing it at their wedding. That and “Born to Be Wild,” which is so not Dad that even the band cracked up.

Dad plugged the kettle in and leaned against the marble countertop as he waited for the water to boil.

“So, Julia,” he said. “I need to talk to you...” His voice trailed off as he turned and opened the refrigerator and pulled out a hunk of fresh gingerroot. Ginger risotto? I hoped not.

“About what?” I said. He was acting weirder than usual, which was saying something. Had someone spotted me at
London Drugs buying the home pregnancy test? Had the library blown the whistle on my Internet searches?

He peeled the ginger and sliced it into thin disks, which he then tossed into the teapot. The kettle clicked off and he poured the hot water over the ginger. The kitchen smelled momentarily like Hawaii.

“Well, Miki's not really sick. I mean, she is, but not, you know,
sick
sick.” He scratched his stubble and a few flakes of skin floated to the floor. “The ginger tea is for the nausea. You know, the morning sickness, except it's more like morning, noon and night sickness.” He poured some tea into a cup and looked at me with a combination of pride and fear. “Miki's almost three months pregnant. You're going to be a big sister. We waited to tell you until we were sure everything was going to be okay. Miki's not that young and there are risks when you're older and...”

The poor guy. He'd probably been freaking out about telling me. Since he seemed to have forgotten that I wasn't seven anymore, I frowned and pouted for a while before I put him out of his misery. Long enough for him to babble on about not wanting to replace me and how I'd always be his baby and how there was no way they expected me to babysit all the time. Which was good news because extended babysitting didn't fit into my plans at all. It was kind of strange—the idea of my dad with a new baby—but he spends his days with babies and so does Miki, so it made
sense for them to have one of their own, although I hoped they'd forgo the masks and gloves when they brought the baby home.

“What took you so long?” I finally said, and Dad, I'm ashamed to say, burst into tears and grabbed me and hugged me and danced me around the kitchen, singing “Baby Love” like Diana Ross on steroids. When he finally stopped, I handed him a square of paper towel and said, as nonchalantly as possible, “So, ginger tea is good for nausea?”

If he thought it was an odd question, he didn't say so. He just nodded and grinned idiotically and ran upstairs and dragged Miki out of bed and down to the kitchen. I have to say—she looked like shit on a stick. Way worse than Ruth. Miki's usual style is what Nana calls “tucked.” She dresses in crisp white shirts and tailored suits—very expensive shirts and suits. She wears funky Fluevog shoes, multiple silver bangles and Venetian glass bead necklaces. Her black hair is short and spiky—sort of like the rest of her; her lips are full and red, her eyelashes thick and black, her skin white and unlined. Snow White with a stethoscope. Her bedside manner is as brisk as my father's is mellow, but she has her share of fans. On this day her hair was matted and sticking to her head, and she was wearing fuzzy pink slippers, old yoga pants and my dad's ancient gray
UBC
sweatshirt. Her face was the color of a pistachio and her lips were chapped.

“Hey, Julia,” she said. “I take it he told you.”

“It's great, Miki,” I said, wondering if a hug was in order and then deciding against it. Why start now? “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled as she took the cup of tea from my dad and lowered herself into a chair at the table. “Sorry to be so...lame. It's just that I wasn't ready for this.” She bent her head over her teacup, but not before I saw a tear trickle down her pale cheek. Now that was something I hadn't seen before. “I've tried everything—ten meals a day, crackers at midnight, gallons of ginger tea. Nothing works. What if I'm one of those women who are nauseated for their entire pregnancy?” She looked up at my dad, who sat down beside her and took her hands in his.

“Maria said that was really rare, didn't she?”

“Yeah,” Miki said. “Rare but not unheard of.”

“Who's Maria?” I asked. All the nausea talk was starting to make me feel ill.

“Our midwife,” Miki said. “We're having the baby at home.”

“If we can,” added my dad.

Miki shot him a look over her mug that gave me a pretty good idea of where their baby was going to be born.

“Barring major complications,” Miki continued, “we're having a home birth. Maria is the best midwife in town, and I'm healthy and strong and well-informed. It shouldn't be
a problem. I hate hospitals. We'll set everything up in the guest room—and, hey, I've got the best neonatal nurse and doctor around.” She smiled at my dad, and I could see that she hadn't brushed her teeth for a while. There was a poppy seed stuck between her front teeth.

And since when did Miki hate hospitals? She practically lived on the wards, making life and death decisions on a daily basis and scaring the crap out of most of the staff. I thought she would love the idea of having her baby in a sterile environment where she could order people around, but apparently I'd misjudged her. She wanted to order people around in the comfort of her own home.

“When's the baby due?” I asked.

“Mid-June,” my dad said.

“June fifteenth, to be exact,” Miki said. If the baby knew what was good for it, it would arrive on schedule. Might as well start out on the right foot—punctuality is a big deal with Miki. Which is odd, since most of her little patients arrive really early.

I did some quick calculations in my head; Miki's baby was due six weeks before Ruth's, which could be useful. I sat down at the table and my dad offered me a mug of ginger tea. Out of solidarity, I tried some. It wasn't as bad as I expected, especially after I stirred in a couple of spoonfuls of honey, and I made a mental note to buy some gingerroot for Ruth. And some crackers.

“So, do you think I could interview Maria for a school project I'm doing on modern women in the workforce?” I asked. “I really want to talk to someone with a kind of alternative job. Everybody else is doing, like, bankers or lawyers. A midwife would be really cool.” I wasn't exactly lying. I really did have to do a report for Social Studies. It wasn't exactly on women in the workforce—more like on why women shouldn't be in the workforce—but Miki and Dad didn't need to know that. With any luck, they'd put me in touch with this Maria person, and she could give me the lowdown on home birth. Maybe I could even convince Miki and Dad to let me assist at the delivery—although, to be honest, the idea kind of creeped me out.