How Happy to Be (21 page)

“Max, what is it?” She’s stroking my hair and I’m coming undone on the layers of pinkness, snotting them right up.

“Snot … dress!” I snorfle, and this makes me cry even harder.

Sunera smiles: “I hate this dress. I truly hate it. It’s pink.” She passes me a handful of dress. “Blow.”

I sit up, wiping my face on the pink, and then I take a deep breath and I tell her. I say it out loud for the first time.

“Pregnant.”

And then the second thing: “And I’m not totally sure who the father is.”

We sit quietly for a minute, me choking on the snotty dress. Finally, Sunera says, “You slut.” And I laugh, which I haven’t done in a long time.

She asks me what I’m going to do. I say the one thing I know for sure which is that I don’t know. She leans over, takes my hand in hers, and says, slowly and clearly, “I’ll help you out if you want to keep this baby, and if you want me to drive you to the clinic for an abortion, I’ll take you.” A strange thought comes to me: Sunera will be a good mother one day.

Monday mornings at university always brought a queue at the health centre, a long line of morning-after pill poppers, young women in Doc Martens with long johns peeking through jeans, or ponytailed jocks. I’ve taken those pills, twelve hours apart, because the condom broke or I couldn’t quite remember if the condom existed in the first place. I never got pregnant, somehow, despite my recklessness, and yet the girl who always used birth control, who was into double duty, backup, insurance (the condom never without the foam, the pill never without the condom, the diaphragm never without the jelly), is the girl who goes: ‘Oh my God,’ and you’re holding her hand in the bathroom over a little blue stick and then waiting in the waiting room to take her home after the operation, rubbing her back as she sleeps on her side. If it’s that arbitrary, then why bother? I’ve
thought that:
Why bother?
I’ve even said it:
We don’t need to. I’m safe
. Safety; the blunt edge of children’s scissors that can still poke your eye out.

One time, shouting in the corner of a bar, Sunera told me her story. She shouldn’t have been ovulating, but it was the night her boyfriend first said I love you, and she thinks she just laid an egg right there. Her body said, I’ll show you love, pal, ten days early. Stranger things have happened. It turned out Sunera and the guy didn’t have the same idea of love and she was twenty-two and just out of university, working her first big job and living back at home in the halfsewing room. Her mother went with her, demanded that she stand right next to the machine, a whirring globe dangling from a post. She body-blocked the machine so Sunera didn’t see anything when she looked except for her mom, frowning and nodding, frowning and nodding.

“Do you ever think about yours?”

Sunera shakes her head. “No, honestly, I don’t. I know there are people who think, Oh, it would be four now, it would be eight, but I never do. I know it was the right thing for me then.”

I look over at Sunera’s childhood bookshelf:
On the Road
beside
Alligator Pie
beside
Anne of Green Gables
.

“I think I never quite believed I could get pregnant,” I tell her. “I’ve gone this long.”

Sunera laughs, raises my hand to her lips for a little kiss. “Who knew you were human?” She gets up. “Let’s have some fun.”

She opens a small pot of henna, the colour of cedar stump flesh.

“Isn’t it just for brides?” I ask, as she tickles the top of my hands with a long thin brush, starting at the centre and working her way out – a nature documentary where everything is sped up and becoming – a vine gives way to bud, bud to petal, petal to blossom.

“Today it’s for friends,” she says.

The interior of the streetcar taking me back west is entirely covered with newspaper images: politicians shaking hands; a Tent City squatter peering out from a refrigerator box; rock stars squinty with guitar face. And alternating these front page images, in very fuzzy black and white, are some of
The Daily’s
esteemed columnists: the Loony Libertarian; the Crotchety Conservative; the Sultry Society Lady. And underneath a fringe of dark hair, eyes down as if ashamed, or on the cusp of fainting, me. The Celebrity Chick. The final frame of the car reads:
The Daily. Think It Over
.

A plug of a woman enters one stop after me, green hospital scrubs on short legs jutting out from a long black winter coat, slightly frayed at the cuffs, two plastic bags substituting for a purse. But for a pair of kids making out, the streetcar on this Sunday afternoon is nearly empty, and yet the woman in scrubs chooses to sit right next to me.

She stares at my henna-ed hand and asks, “Going to a wedding?” There’s a foamy trace of Spanish in her voice.

“No, no,” I say. “I’m, uh …” I’m looking for the word. “Appropriating.”

She doesn’t respond, just reaches out a finger, cold and callused, traces the lines on my hands. I’m not big on public touching, but I don’t pull away because the way she’s moving her finger, it’s like she’s trying to pull something out of me, deep under the skin, and she’s staring and tracing, very still.

Quickly, quietly, as though we are old friends, she starts telling me a story, a fairy tale of sorts. I might repeat it one day in a dark room to help a child fall asleep. I have been rehearsing.

The woman is named Mercy and she is a nurse. This is the first true unbelievable fact. Mercy came from Guatemala. In the dirty wars her family was killed off, one by one. Twenty-five years ago, she hid in a shipping container in the hull of a liner. When the lights of San Diego came into view, someone tapped the container and she climbed out. Dozens of people dove into the harbour, swimming to safety; from a distance, they must have looked like luggage being tossed overboard.

It was arranged that she would hide in an empty truck travelling to British Columbia to bring lumber back to the United States, and she hid under a cot in the cab (they never check the cab, only the back), her clothes still wet, and crossed the border safely. She jumped out in Vancouver and took the American money she had sewn into a plastic bag in her bra and traded it for Canadian dollars. With that money, she bought a bus ticket to Toronto.

She learned English and went to night school, living in a basement with friends of relatives from home. People were
coming and going all the time, Guatemalans, El Salvadorians; the windowless basement was an unofficial shelter. She worked illegally in a hotel, cleaning uniforms and stained towels, until she made enough money to get a lawyer, and the lawyer got her papers. She had seen the piles of empty blankets in the basement, all that remained of those who had been tapped in raids at the restaurants or on the docks, people sent home, and she wasn’t going back. She would live above ground, legally, become Canadian.

Mercy studied medical books by flashlight. One of the comings and goings in that basement left her pregnant and she gave birth to a daughter the day after she took her entrance exams for nursing school. She named the daughter Maria.

With five hundred extra dollars a month from the government and a job cleaning offices at night in the Bay Street financial district, Mercy and Maria got a bachelor apartment in a sky-rise at St. Jamestown, a collection of towers with optimistic names: the Halifax, the Vancouver, the Montreal. St. Jamestown was built in the Seventies so swinging singles could live downtown and walk to work, but the white professionals only stayed a few months, edged out by groups of immigrants bringing their families one by one from far away, all to live together in apartments no bigger than a bus. The families – big, loud, always working – lived side by side with the gangs and junkies who wandered over from Regent Park. They stayed in St. Jamestown for years, and every single time she entered its teeming corridors, Mercy thought, St. James, brother of John, disciple of Jesus. On the swings in the
playgrounds sometimes Maria’s foot brushed syringes with the sole of her shoe as she went up, up, up.

Maria and Mercy’s neighbours were Somalian, Indian, Chinese, and the hallway walls were wet with steam from cooking. Maria’s favourite food, at three years old, was samosas.

Mercy became a nurse. She took Maria and they moved out of St. Jamestown, to a building at Yonge and Eglinton with a doorman who would check in on Maria while Mercy worked the night shift.

Maria was smarter than everyone else in her class. She grew tall and beautiful, with long black hair, and by fifteen, she had a job selling clothes at Club Monaco. She won a scholarship to university in the northeast United States. Mercy was terrified, but she let her go. They talked on the phone almost every night and Mercy sat alone at Maria’s graduation ceremony, delirious with what she had created.

Maria returned to Toronto and moved back into Mercy’s apartment. The two stayed up late, talking through the night. One evening Maria came home from her job working at an investment banking firm and said, ‘I’ve met someone.’ His name was Vikram and he was a banker too.

Mercy didn’t know what to make of this handsome young man who showed up at the apartment with daisies in his arms and scrubbed clean the chicken-stuck pots without being asked. She watched him watching her daughter. He never interrupted Maria. Many of his sentences began: “Maria thinks …” and “Maria said …” He beamed with pride. He brought Mercy mulligatawny when she was sick.

Maria loved Vikram’s family. She came home from his parents’ house in Richmond Hill, a bedroom community of subdivisions known for little except the city’s best Chinese food, with all kinds of stories about small cousins and old aunties. Maria cracked Mercy up with her tales of meddling visitors from southern India who used the bathroom tub to soak fresh stems of curry leaves smuggled into Canada.

Mercy was often alone. She took extra shifts to fill the time that she used to spend with Maria. She steeled herself for the inevitable, and when Vikram arrived one day while Maria was at work, Mercy knew why. She couldn’t say anything but yes, of course, though a small poisoned part of her wanted to slap him and lock the door. I have had so much change already, Mercy thought, feeling sorry for herself. I can’t take any more change.

But she did. She took it when she sat up that night with Maria, who couldn’t stop laughing, mockingly dangling her hand in front of Mercy’s face and saying, “So anything new with youooo?” The engagement ring sent off sparks.

The day before the wedding, Mercy drove Maria to Richmond Hill. The house was small and identical to the houses around it, and Mercy couldn’t imagine how all those people Maria had described could fit. When the door opened, she saw how they did it: everyone was touching, small arms around big legs, skin hip to hip. Vikram’s mother, Kaly, grabbed Mercy and put her in a place of prominence, high on a chair by the fireplace. Kaly explained that this wasn’t a traditional Mendhi party, because Maria wasn’t Indian, and Kaly said, happily: ‘We get to be more than Indian now!’

As the girls painted each other’s hands and sang, Kaly told Mercy about her work as a counsellor in a high school, and slowly, Mercy’s anxiety floated away. She loved to be feted. When Maria’s hands were perfectly embroidered, she kneeled before her mother and her mama-ji, displaying her wrists and fingers, which looked like they were blooming. The women cried a little.

Maria had asked if Mercy wanted a Catholic wedding and Mercy guffawed. There would be two weddings. A Hindu wedding and a secular wedding. The morning of the Hindu wedding, Mercy was at Kaly’s house stringing up rows of purple orchids while Kaly hummed and braided her youngest’s hair.

Vikram and Maria rented bicycles at a sporting goods store near Mercy’s apartment. They wanted to cycle to the waterfront and spend some time together.
Alone
, said Maria on the phone to her mother, but she laughed as she said it.

Following Yonge Street southbound, sound is hemmed in by an overpass; on a bike, it is like travelling through a tube of white noise beneath the earth.

Maria had her hands over her ears and watched Vikram go across first. He looked back at her and shouted something. She made a face:
I can’t hear you
. She moved forward and then a car turning right onto the expressway ramp plucked her bicycle up, a circus elephant grabbing a toy with its trunk. Maria flew through the air, landed directly in the centre of the very same crosswalk she’d been negotiating. The light turned red. All the cars stopped. It was so polite: no beeping, no bumpers touching, motionless.

Vikram dropped his bicycle and ran back toward Maria. Just before he reached her, the light turned green and one car – a blue SUV – surged forward, pushing him several feet until it stopped suddenly. This all happened in the tail end of a second, it seemed: people opened their car doors and went forward to look at Vikram and Maria. They were bodies now.

Kaly took the call. She turned to stare at Mercy, laughing in her high chair. Mercy felt something, a door had flung open and shadow flooded in, and she turned slowly, thinking, Don’t look. It’s better not to look. But she did, and the look she saw on Kaly’s face was one she recognized from years in the hospital, a look like the smell of rubber gloves and disinfectant. All my life has come out of me, said Kaly’s face. All my life has ended.

On the drive to the same hospital where Mercy worked, chauffeured by a nephew, the women said nothing.

The day-shift nurses were clustered in admissions when the two mothers entered. “Mercy …,” said the head nurse softly. Mercy began to scream. Kaly patted her on the back, and went to see her son.

That night, Mercy returned to the apartment and pulled the blinds. She told the doorman not to let anyone up to see her. He piled flowers outside her door and removed them when they began to rot. When Vikram could walk, he came over, opening the door with Maria’s key. He found Mercy lying in bed and he turned on the light. She saw that his face had changed: a small petal of pale scar tissue was stamped in the centre of his right cheek. His other eye was wet, open but closed. He leaned on a cane, like an old man.