As She Grows (31 page)

Once, about two years ago, Elsie told me she loved me. But she didn’t mean it, not really. It was in the afternoon sometime. I had walked in on her in the bathroom. She was naked in the tub, but there was no water in it, only powdery pink grains of bubble bath on the bottom. The radio was plugged in, above the sink. It was on some stupid classical music station.

“What are you doing?” I asked, disgusted at her nakedness.

“Having a bath.” She leaned back into the tub and closed her eyes. Made a motion with her hand as if she were swishing the water. I was too shocked to comment on the absurdity of this. Her body looked much older naked, her skin layered and breasts low. I quickly closed the door and she called my name.

“Snow?”

“Yeah?”

“Open the door.” I cautiously poked my head in. “I love you,” she said, for the first time I could ever remember.

“Me too,” I said without thinking. And shut the door.

I remember going to lie down on my bed and staring at the ceiling after that. My mind in a fog, no real thoughts coming through. I was unsure if she was tripping out or just being weird. Then I considered if it made a difference. It bothered me that I said
me too;
another obligatory phrase, like
sorry,
demanding a
response. Half an hour later, the door opened and Elsie came out, still naked, her head wrapped in a towel. She walked down the hall, bath crystals on her flabby bum as if she’d sat in pink sand.

“It’s all yours,” she said happily, and disappeared into the living room.

It’s Barb, Elsie’s worker, who calls me at Beverley after the hospital had called her. Elsie has fallen down the front stairs of her building. She has broken her arm, a few ribs, and fractured her skull. “It’s not an emergency—she was only in overnight—but I thought you’d want to know,” Barb says, but the concern in her voice tells me it was more than this. The thoughts run through my head: Was she wasted? Did she really just fall? Did she do this on purpose to get me to feel sorry for her? Was she pushed?

I ask the first question.

“Well, she wasn’t drunk. We know that, but the tests did indicate drugs in the system. Perhaps a mix of codeine and Valium, I’m not certain, I’d have to check her file.”

“Don’t bother,” I say, and then try to think of a way to end the call. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“Snow?” she says, trying to catch me before I hang up. “She wants you to call her. She told me to tell you.”

“Thanks,” I say, and quickly hang up.

Beverley House doesn’t like my decision to go see Elsie. They get all serious about it and call a meeting with Ms. Crawl on a Friday morning. I arrive at her office five minutes late, carrying a piece of toast with peanut butter in my hand. I am surprised to see they have gathered the troops. Barb, Ms. Crawl, and Karyn are all
circled around the table, thick yellow pads of paper in front of them. I plop down on the couch at the far end of the room with a heavy sigh.

“I’m just going for a night. What’s the big deal?” I say, after they tell me why we’re meeting. I look for a place to throw my crusts and resign myself to just resting them on the convenient shelf of my belly.

Staff tell me they’re concerned about me going. About the state I’m in now both physically and mentally. They think this might be too much for me.

“She’s my grandmother. Of course I’m going to go.” I surprise even myself with these words of devotion, but I don’t let on. Instead, I just allow my mouth to keep flapping. “I mean, I know she hasn’t been the greatest, but she’s”—the reluctant word falls from my mouth—“family.”

“I don’t understand,” Karyn says, her face scrunched up, as if she were trying to read between my lines. After all I’ve said to her about hating Elsie, I can’t blame her for not being able to figure me out. But there are some people you just have the right to love. There are some people you just have the right to hate. And sometimes I wonder if it’s all just the same emotion existing in a different state, like water and ice.

Barb leans in toward me, placing her clasped hands on the table. “We just don’t want you to think this is your obligation.”

“I don’t.”

She leans in farther. “We just don’t want to put you, and your baby, at risk.” And that’s when I realize it’s not about me. It’s about the fucking baby. They don’t care if I go back and screw up my life, they just want to make sure I don’t take the baby down with me.

“What do you think’s gonna happen?”

“Elsie’s not well.”

“I could have told you that,” I say.

“If she’s a danger to herself, she could be a danger to you, and the baby. We could arrange something else.”

I sigh deeply, start breathing heavily through my nostrils. My mouth clenched. I am getting tired of this scenario. Tired of total strangers who know nothing about me and Elsie’s life, sitting there passing judgement. As if their lives were perfect. As if they had a right to tell me what to do.

“I’m going,” I reaffirm. “You can’t stop me.”

Hours later, as I approach the apartment, I begin to consider turning back. I haven’t seen Elsie since the day I sat in her kitchen and she tried to explain about my mother. I stop at the parking lot to have a smoke and calm my shaking hands. Like a strong wind, the I-told-you-so of Staff presses at my back. To turn back now would require too much effort. Too much explanation. It amazes me how many things I do only because I’m told I’m not allowed to.

“Come to poison the invalid?” Elsie yells when she hears me come in the door. “Suffocate me in my sleep?” I know she is only half joking. She is lying on the couch in the living room, a half-says, and I beam like a
eaten bowl of chicken noodle soup on the coffee table in front of her. The bright white cast on her left arm looks too clean for the rest of her body.

The living room reeks of sweat and shit and mint. “What’s that stink?” I say as I approach the couch, holding my hand up to my nose.

“Oh, that’s the cream they gave me. Got nothing to do with my arm. Sandra, my nurse, just gave me it for rough skin. It’s peppermint, eh?” Sometimes I think Elsie actually likes going into the hospital. Like it’s a little spa for her, where she’s served tea in bed
and gets massages for her sore feet. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye, but then quickly raises her body off the couch: “Jesus Christ, you’re huge!”

“Thanks a lot.”

“My God,” she says, staring at me, her jaw hanging open. “I just can’t believe it.”

“What did you think? It wouldn’t show?”

“Jesus,” she says, still stunned, “you’re enormous.”

“Get over it,” I snap. “What about you? You look like shit,” I say, moving in closer to her face. Her right cheek is puffy and swollen and a yellowish purple colour. Just beside her half-opened eye are four black stitches tied like little sloppy knots of thread. Without thinking, I reach out to touch them but Elsie pulls away.

“Well, I wasn’t planning no beauty contests.” She licks her dry lips. For a split second I feel bad for her, seeing her all broken like that.

“I’m only staying tonight,” I say, snapping myself out of this pitiful moment. I waddle into the kitchen to get to work. I open the cupboards that are mostly empty, except for a few cans of tomatoes, some old packages of chicken broth, and some spaghetti.

“What do you eat?” I yell, not expecting an answer.

“Got no energy to shop!” she yells from the living room. “All these painkillers, eh?”

Everything feels so normal. Like I never left. Like I’m not pregnant. Like that conversation outside the grocery store never happened. It’s as if I stepped back in time, drank some magical forget potion, and I’m back to the simple life of cleaning up after Elsie.

I decide to start with the kitchen, then the living room, then the bathroom and bedroom. I pile empties by the kitchen door and
use a spoon to scrape brown syrupy sludge from the bottoms of mugs. I mop the kitchen floor three times before it begins to look clean, and if I didn’t have a bowling ball for a stomach, I’d get on my hands and knees and scrub each square tile. In the bathroom, black algae surrounds the faucets and gobs of hardened green hork in the sink are almost impossible for me to scrape off, even with Elsie’s toothbrush. I almost gag at the collection of black pubic hairs under the toilet seat. I open the medicine cabinet and gasp at the mix of pill bottles, some even with other people’s names on them.

“Don’t touch any of that, eh!” Elsie yells out, her ears remarkably tuned to the dull chink-chink of pills in a plastic bottle. “I’ll know if you do!”

The bedroom is the last room to tackle. I figure it will be the easiest. I open the door and the waft of air clogs my throat. I stop breathing. It’s a familiar smell of sweat and booze and cheap cologne. It’s the smell of Mitch. I suddenly feel the need to escape. My heart thumps in my ears. I listen for voices, but only hear Elsie moving around in the kitchen, her feet shuffling on the linoleum. I tiptoe out and poke my head around the doorway.

“Is Mitch here?” I whisper.

Elsie jumps, startled by my voice. “No, he’s not.” “Was he?”

“Ya, he was. So what?”

I stand up close behind her, my feet firmly planted on the floor. I will not back down this time. I stare a hole in her back. “Are you fucking crazy? You been seeing him all this time?”

“Not now, Snow,” she says quietly, extinguishing my fire.

Surprised, I change my tone. “Is he coming back tonight?”

“No.”

“When, then?”

“Never.”

“Never coming back?” I say, doubtful.

“No.” Elsie keeps her back to me and turns on the tap. I see her shoulders drop, loose and deflated. And this makes me even more mad, like she wants me to feel sorry for her. Like she’s thinks she’s some martyr not letting him back into her life. I give her nothing.

“Whatever,” I say, not believing her. “His underwear is on the floor by the bed. Is he coming back for that?”

“No.”

“What do you want me to do with it then? It’s disgusting.”

“I don’t care.” Her voice is tired and annoyingly passive. She reaches out her good arm and plugs in the kettle. I want to shake her. Stir some fury out of her. I don’t know what to do with this stillness. I storm back into the bedroom and kick the underwear under the bed. I start to pick up other clothes from the floor but the anger rises in me as I see pieces of Mitch scattered around the room. His cheap watch on the bedside table. His worn shoes by the closet. His Playboy lighter on the dresser. I think of Mitch that night I left. And me in that very bed.

“What the fuck am I doing?” I say aloud to myself, Elsie’s bra dangling in my hand. “What the fuck am I doing?” I say again slowly, as if the words needed time to sink into a very dense brain. I whip the ratty beige bra across the room and dump the pile of clothes back onto the floor.

“I’m not staying,” I announce to Elsie, who is back on the couch, watching TV.

“Fine,” Elsie says, uncaring, reaching out for the TV converter and turning the volume up louder.

“I know why she left,” I say, waiting for a response, but Elsie doesn’t even acknowledge I have spoken. Her eyes remain fixed on the TV. “I know why she got pregnant,” I continue. “To get the
fuck away from you. You’re pathetic. You can’t even take care of yourself. You make everything around you . . .” As I speak she presses the volume button on the remote control, louder and louder and louder, till the TV is vibrating. Till I can’t even hear my own voice. I move in closer, stand in front of her, yelling as loud as I can, but she just stares through me, through my belly, as if I don’t even exist. Her face is like stone. I pick up the closest object to me, a stupid clay ashtray, and make like I’m going to throw it at her, just to get some kind of response. But she doesn’t flinch. And I’m so mad, I do it. I throw it at her, just above her head. It hits the wall and smashes soundlessly into pieces, ash settling in Elsie’s hair like black confetti.

Our Thursday night pregnancy group is tight now, with only the occasional new girl joining. We have our unofficial designated chairs, our preferred break time, and an understanding of who prefers the fudge cookies to the apple slices. Karyn hands out photocopies of pre-hospital checklists and hygiene tips. We learn about veins in our bums that can bulge to the size of grapes and discuss our fears of foot-long needles jabbed into our spines.