The Blondes (31 page)

Lying on my cot in the stock closet that night, I thought about my mother and everything she must have gone through to give birth to me—alone, or mostly alone. I thought about how tired I was every minute of every day, and how I had been weary from the moment I first found out about you. I thought about my own mom going through that fatigue, and the nausea, every second of every day for months for me, and how I never knew that and never respected her—and I wished now that I had. I wished I could take back every mean thing I’d ever retorted, every time I’d rolled my eyes or hadn’t listened.
Her hands would shake when she was counting money out to store clerks, as if she were afraid she would come up short. I remembered her hand when she touched the back of my head when I was a little girl. With the flat of her palm she used to stroke the hairs down behind my ears. She was always rubbing at me, like I was some kind of goddamn worry-bead, and at the time I thought she was trying to change me or make some adjustment to my appearance. Bills would pile up, unopened sometimes, because she couldn’t stand to look at them. I can recall her slapping them down on the kitchen table and then pushing them off to the side when we ate; I remember the smell of booze on her breath at night when she tucked me in. The men she dated always had cars; we never had one of our own. I learned to drive in random vehicles belonging to men my mom was dating. At the time I thought there were any number of reasons for the alcohol and for the men, but lying in detention with no window, no view to the world, I knew the truth: it was because raising a kid was hard, especially when you had no help from anyone. How she had suffered without anyone to tell. It was that—more than Karl, more than Grace—that I had been avoiding. It was this truth that scared the bejesus out of me.

The next day, Nurse Ben opened my file and began to pass me pale blue pamphlets about the stages of pregnancy I would go through. All of the women in the photos were beautiful. All were in their early thirties. All were trim, the
only fat on their bodies the round perfect hump at the abdomen. None of them had purple hair or shaved heads or Mohawks; none had tattoos or nose rings or Avril Lavigne eyeliner; none wore ugly vintage dresses or Birkenstock sandals or slutty super-stretch jeans or Chuck Taylors. They were all dressed in crisp office wear, or pastel T-shirts, or white flowing dresses. They were all being embraced from behind by clean-shaven men who looked like they’d stepped out of car commercials—men who were older than the women, sure, but not substantially so. They were all smiling. In one picture, the man’s hands were positioned to make a heart shape overtop of his wife’s bulging bare belly. I didn’t know anyone like these women and didn’t feel anything like them. Motherhood, I thought, should have a better PR campaign, one that was more inclusive.

Larissa had told me just after her son was born that being pregnant was the happiest time in her life. I sat there in front of Nurse Ben and waited to feel pastel, and crisp, and clean, and happy. The feeling didn’t come.

Ben passed me a blue-lined sheet of the diet and vitamins they were going to give me. I could see that he had written it out himself. I focused on the word
legumes
, its letters stitched together neatly, slanting as if Ben was a lefty trying his best to write clearly. I was no longer allowed to eat lunch meat from the caterer because of the chance of listeriosis. I was allowed my morning coffee, though, and I considered that a small wonder.

He asked me if I could read them, and I said, yes, I’m nearsighted.

“Do you want to see the pictures?”

I nodded dumbly and he passed me the ultrasound pictures. There were two images—not photographs, but images on regular paper as if they had been run off a Laser printer. Because I hadn’t seen the screen, at first I couldn’t identify you. I couldn’t tell my insides from your outsides. You were just a black-and-white blur, something colourless, made out of static.

“Here is the head. This little bright spot in the centre of the image is the heart.” Nurse Ben pointed to a blank spot.

Then he turned the file around and showed me that your heart rate had also been noted. He pointed at some measurements and said they were of your brain. He told me your heart rate was 146 beats per minute.

“What will it be?” I asked Nurse Ben, without looking up from the shapeless shape.

“It’s very early yet, but in this case the technician has noted that there is little doubt. Do you see the three parallel lines?” he asked, and I squinted. “They mean female.”

I REMEMBER THE DAY GRACE DECLARED
the majority of the fresh foods gone. She called me a porker, said I could really put it back now that I’d got over my nerves. She asked me if I was carrying a beluga calf in there, and told me she’d seen on some nature program that they’re born at nearly five feet and weigh as much as a full-grown man.

She pulled packaged hash browns from the freezer. “Now we’re fucking camping,” she declared. “It’s this and canned soup from here on in.” There was more food available than that, of course, but she was old and well-off, used to being a gourmet.

We didn’t talk about what I’d told her—about Karl not knowing about you. But I felt as though something had changed in Grace’s attitude toward me. She stood on a chair
and pulled down the ladder from the attic. I hadn’t known there was an attic before that. She went up there and eventually called to ask if I could help her. Her face appeared at the top of the ladder. She peered down.

“No, there’s no way,” she said. “If I pass it to you and you drop it, it’ll crush the baby.” She paused as if considering that, then said, “Okay, forget it. I’ve fucking got it.” She came back down the ladder and tugged something down after her, grunting, the muscles in her shoulders ridged beneath her sweater. I watched dumbly. She staggered on the last step and set a case down heavily on the floor. It turned out to contain an old sewing machine.

“Karl bought this for me—thought it was quaint. Antique crap. I wonder if it still fucking works. How the hell—?”

Grace scratched the lagoon-blue Formica table loading the machine onto it. I’m willing to bet Karl paid top dollar for the table, which was in pristine shape, but clearly Grace didn’t care or even notice what she’d done. She pretzelled and contorted her fingers, and eventually she had the machine threaded. She commanded me to take off my pants. She wrapped a tape measure around my bust, her thumb and forefinger holding it there, just over my nipple. She looped it again around my hips, and noted the measurement. Then all afternoon, she stitched and cursed, and by evening, she’d put new panels into half my clothes.

At one point, she climbed up into the attic and threw down a box of musty fabric, most of it cowboy print. You’d be surprised how many different cowboy prints Karl had collected:
silhouettes of horses, prints of boots and guns, white-on-red polka dot, a pony print. She said they were for an abandoned project. I wonder what he’d thought he would do with them. She also found a box of old T-shirts and sweatshirts of Karl’s that she said I could wear. Men’s large is a surprisingly good look for me and the bump, aka you. The funny thing is, I never saw Karl wear a T-shirt or sweatshirt in the time that I knew him.

I reflected that in spite of Grace’s explosions of profanity, she seemed to be adept at everything. When I thanked her and asked if she’d ever made maternity clothes before, she said, around two pins held between her teeth, “Some things a woman just knows, and the rest is improvisation.”

I never learned to sew. When I ripped my jeans growing up, my mom would slap an iron-on patch over the tear. If she sewed on a button, it was hairy with thread. There were a lot of hairy buttons and patches that came loose again like snakes shedding their skins, but she never seemed to get better at these tasks. At the time, I’d blamed the beer. But maybe such skills just didn’t run in our blood. How my mom managed to cut hair so well, I don’t know. Then again, her clients at Head Start were mostly middle-aged women and students. Cheap cuts for people seeking a deal. She learned only one or maybe two new styles a year.

Grace told me to launder the clothes before I wore them. When I looked in the full-length mirror in the bathroom, I saw someone who was part old-me, wearing last year’s wardrobe, part Karl, and a big part you. I felt like a Mrs. Potato
Head doll stuck together by some indiscriminate three-year-old. I think I had gained an extra five pounds in my boobs alone, and they were never small to begin with. I didn’t recognize this weird physical amalgam. I certainly didn’t look like the women in the prenatal pamphlets that Nurse Ben gave me.

After my escape attempt, I was at the WEE for another six weeks, and during that time you grew fast. It was only a couple weeks after my first ultrasound that my belly popped out and began to look, if not like that basketball of August’s, at least slightly volleyball shaped. I could tell I was showing because sometimes women who didn’t know me, women from the other rooms, would apologize and let me use the toilets first. According to the pamphlets, by then your arms were almost as long as they will be when you are born, you’d developed bones; and by sixteen weeks, your eyes inside me could move. You got your fat, though hopefully you’ve inherited Karl’s fat and not my fat. You began to hear my blood move around you, my digestion. All these things happened and more, and yet as much as everything changed inside me, not much changed at all. I still felt exhausted, ugly, and uncertain.

Once or twice, I did get a pastel, happy feeling—the one that women like Larissa talked about. But when it came, it crept up on me almost like an attack. It must have been hormones. I would find myself sitting, dazed and euphoric. But I had no reason to feel happy and nothing to channel my
happiness into, so it felt as if it were not so much an actual emotion as a physical state. It was like being a little high, or drunk, or just plain sleepy. It came only now and again in a short surge. And like the nausea in the earlier days, it passed fairly quickly.

I filled out forms indicating where the Canadian government should forward my possessions when they were done with them. I chose Larissa’s address for stability. Before going to New York, I’d sublet my apartment in Toronto and I didn’t know how dependable the student I’d rented it to was, whether the rent would still be paid without my checking in, or even whether she’d still be there when I returned. I filled out forms, and followed my diet, and took my folic acid and calcium and B6, and slept an awful lot.

I couldn’t decide if it was ethically right that I hated August for standing in my way that night. He was, as the commanding officer had said, doing his job. But, right or wrong, through all the weeks that remained, I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him again. I noticed at some point that the basketball was gone from the post outside. I heard the men playing with it in the gym, thumping up and down on a break one afternoon, skidding in their boots on the finished floor. I wondered if school kids would one day attend that place, play in that gym, learn to read in room 3. I wondered whether they’d tell ghost stories to each other about the things that happened there long ago, or if they’d be a new generation, more innocent than mine, shielded somehow. If they will be … If you will be …

It was around then that news of the death of the singer Shelbee Brown hit. We knew of it almost immediately, although it was one of the few news items that reached us in that place. We knew because we heard the men’s reactions. We heard an exclamation echo through the hall: “What the fuck!”

Women stuck their heads out of doorways, and the men who would normally wave them back inside their classrooms had gathered around a single guy with an iPhone who muttered, “Jesus, not her. Not her!”

Two guys were looking over his shoulder while others pulled out their own devices and scrolled through them. Even the private from the library came out and said, without emotion, “What is it?”

August was there and he looked up and said, “Shelbee Brown died.”

The private, who was normally so expressionless, crept farther into the hall.

“She contracted it,” one of the men said. “Her family and managers kept it from the media, but she was down for days before expiring. That’s why they cancelled her last two shows saying ‘exhaustion.’ ”

“How? An attack?”

“Her hair,” one of the men said. “She always said it was part of her show. She kept it for the fans.”

“Fucking artist.”

“I saw her last July. Only music me and my lady could agree on.”

“The world just lost some prime pussy.”

“Shut it. I feel like somebody ripped my heart right outta my chest and you’re all, like, pussy this, pussy that.”

“She was something, man. I just can’t believe it.”

The men were depressed all week. We heard them talk-singing under their breath while they were standing guard,
Nobody feeds you like your mama, You may think they’re gonna, You may think they wanna, But no one will, no one will, Yeah, yeah, yeah
, lyrics that seemed deeper or sexier or more earnest when they came from the mouth of a woman with a big blonde bouffant and a skinny, overexposed, over-tattooed torso. I didn’t mourn her, but I knew her death was serious: the disease now had a publicist.