Suitable Precautions (21 page)

“Try to relax, Mom,” I said. My mother was hiccupping quietly and plucking the petals out of a bouquet of daisies Richard Layton had sent her for her birthday. She was perfectly relaxed.

The cards had bad news. My mother turned the Ten of Swords. The picture was of a man with ten swords driven into his back. It signified pain and affliction. She also turned the Tower. The Tower meant any number of things, according to Mrs. Lyubitshka, but it usually meant destruction. Lastly, my mother turned the Death card, which was not difficult to interpret, even for a beginner.

I put the cards away in their velvet bag. I was starting to see that there were limits to what the cards could tell. I was also starting to wonder how Mrs. Lyubitshka made her money.

“I love you, Mom,” I said, by way of apology.

“I love you,” my mother said to her intravenous bag. “I love you,” she said to the pile of flowers on her meal tray. From there we sat silently and she destroyed more daisies.

Sherry came in with a bedpan; my mother told her that she loved her too.

“Isn't that sweet,” Sherry said. “Your mom is such a doll.” Sherry showed me the diamond ring on her finger and I agreed that it was very pretty.

My grandmother arrived to pick me up, and my mother clapped excitedly.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you.”

“Yes, Anna,” my grandmother said, smoothing her hair, “I know you do.”

“I love you, Mom. I'll see you next week,” I said, but my mother just stared at me and bit her lips. I waited for a moment more, but nothing came. I waited, for nothing, ashamed that I wanted her to just hurry up and die.

“I'm sorry, Dora,” my grandmother said.

“Oh,” I said, “it's okay.” As if we were talking about an overdue library book or a rental car with poor gas mileage. Something borrowed.

I FELL IN LOVE several times in my twenties, and several men also fell in love with me. It was quite wonderful if the man in question fit into both categories at once, though that happened less often than Mrs. Lyubitshka had led me to believe that it would, and it wasn't happening when I became pregnant.

His name was Henry and he already had a wife. Her name was Isabelle and she was in a coma from a car accident the year before. She and Henry had been driving back from his sister's wedding in Virginia. The sister had married a man who organized Civil War re-enactments.

“You knew it wasn't going to last,” Henry told me on our first date. “Kathleen looked so stupid in that hoop skirt.”

He and Isabelle had been making a holiday of the trip, stopping at little inns along the way. “We signed the guest registries under fake names and ordered champagne,” Henry said, a little embarrassed. “It was a sort of second honeymoon.” They had never had a first. Isabelle contracted food poisoning from the chicken kiev at their own wedding reception and they had cancelled the trip to Montreal at the last minute. She lost fifteen pounds in a week, and, according to Henry, she was a tiny woman to begin with.

Henry and I made love in the evenings after he got back from visiting Isabelle. He said there was new research to suggest that a person in a coma still heard and recognized the sound of her loved one's voice, but chattering on about his day made him uncomfortable when all that answered him was the whir of Isabelle's ventilator. Instead he read to her. Borges and Woolf seemed to be her favourites, though he was more partial to Americans, himself. Henry regularly shopped for new books for Isabelle, and I met him in this way, ringing up the sale of
Love in the Time of Cholera
. Afterwards I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn't read it. Henry had read everything, it seemed.

The thing I liked best about Henry was the sound of his heartbeat. He had a rather serious heart murmur, but falling asleep on his chest to the sound of that asymmetrical rhythm was oddly comforting. It gave the illusion of excitement and romance, which we both knew full well was not why we were together. I didn't tell him about the pregnancy, only that I thought we shouldn't see each other anymore. He agreed, delicately, and gave me a copy of
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
as a token of his affection, not because it had any special significance
for us, but because it was what he had with him at the time and he said he felt the need to give me something.

Having a baby is not as hard as people say it is. The idea of a child is easy to get used to, after a while, and the pain of birth is overplayed to the point of cliché in movies and television programs. It is difficult to be alone, but you can count on your body to do most of the work for you. There are other things you need to worry about. Mr. and Mrs. Stephanopolous are both dead, as are my grandparents, and it is difficult to think of my daughter growing up without knowing them. I have a close circle of friends, many of whom also have children. My daughter and I go to a lot of picnics and birthday parties. She is still young enough to sleep with me in the same bed, and I put pillows around the edge of the mattress so she won't fall in the night, though she hardly moves, she sleeps so soundly.

My friend Helen and I wheel our children around the neighbourhood in their strollers while they nap in the afternoons. We talk about our work. Helen is writing about highly realistic sex dolls.

“They started out as high-end mannequins, but after a while the manufacturer realized that there was probably money to be made from all the special requests, you know, for orifices,” Helen told me recently. “But it's not just about sex.”

She said that one man, a widower, ordered two dolls—one to look like his dead wife, and another, a teenager, to approximate the daughter he thought they might have had if his wife hadn't miscarried. The dolls were so lifelike that when he ran errands, the wife doll in the front seat and the daughter doll in the backseat, he had learned to place yellow sticky notes on their foreheads: I am a doll. Before that the
wife doll had once slipped out of her seat, slumping over the gearshift, and passersby had called an ambulance to free the woman they thought was dying in the black asphalt swelter of the supermarket parking lot.

I asked if she was serious.

“The paramedics suggested the sticky notes,” Helen said. She shrugged. “People are lonely.”

We walk until our babies start crying. My daughter's name is Mariana, after both her great-grandmother and grandmother, their names combined. She is old enough now to understand the difference between big and little, bad and good. Her favourite colour is red. She is allergic to penicillin. She is afraid of balloons. She has a doll, a red-nosed clown, and she cries if I take him away from her. I apologize by telling her I love her over and over and over again, by nibbling her ears like a dog. I have learned that there is no such thing as too much love.

Thank you to the editors of the following publications, in whose pages several of these stories originally appeared in slightly different form:

“The Party” in
The Fiddlehead
227 (Fredericton, 2006).

“Strange Pilgrims” in
The New Quarterly
109 (Waterloo, 2009).

“The Dead Dad Game” in
PRISM International
47.4 (Vancouver, 2009) and
The Journey Prize Stories 22
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010).

“Poses” in
10: Best Canadian Stories
(Ottawa: Oberon Press, 2010).

“Hurricane Season” in
Grain Magazine
35.4 (Saskatoon, 2008).

“Monkfish” at
www.joylandmagazine.com
(Toronto, 2009).

“Problem in the Hamburger Room” in
Canadian Notes & Queries
82 (Emeryville, 2011).

“Falling in Love” in
Room Magazine
30.4 (Vancouver, 2008).

“Tick” in
Hart House Review
17 (Toronto, 2008).

I am indebted to my many teachers and mentors, including Donald Hair, Alison Conway, J.M. Zezulka, J. Douglas Kneale, Tim Blackmore, Rosemary Sullivan, Michael Winter, and the indomitable Larry Garber. Thank you for your patience and your guidance.

This book would not have been possible without the generosity and friendship of my University of Toronto creative writing colleagues, especially Joseph William Frank and Daniel Scott Tysdal. Thank you for sharing your talent and your daring.

Thank you to Dan Wells and John Metcalf for making these stories a collection.

Thank you to Brenda Brooks for her wisdom and her fine-toothed comb.

Thank you to Kathleen Doukas for her friendship across years and oceans.

A special thank you to my dad, Ray, for his unflagging support and loose cannon tendencies, and to my family for their faith and encouragement.

Finally, the most important thank you is for Ian. Thank you for believing in me and in this book, and in our life together.

Laura Boudreau was born and raised in Toronto. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto's MA in English and Creative Writing program. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including
The New Quarterly
,
Grain
,
The Fiddlehead
,
10: Best Canadian Stories
, and
The Journey Prize Stories 22
. Her freelance journalism has been published in Canada, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

She currently works in the publishing department of a children's charity, and she lives with her husband in London, England.

Copyright © 2011, Laura Boudreau

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

 

Boudreau, Laura, 1983–

Suitable precautions / Laura Boudreau.

 

Short stories.

eISBN : 978-1-926-84559-3

 

I. Title.

 

PS8603.092675S85 2011 C813'.6 C2011-903436-0

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through The Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

 

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