What We Hold In Our Hands (2 page)

“Here.” I leaned across the empty plates, reclaimed the wipe, and carefully stroked the jam from his chin.

Cam spent most of his days in science labs, classes, or the library. When he could, he came home for lunch. He'd swoop up Alice and twirl her around. Or lift her onto his shoulders, galloping about the apartment, ducking at each doorway. As her head passed under the doorframe, her gleeful smile would shift to a brief worried suspension of breath, and I'd find myself holding my own breath, wondering if I'd been reflecting her worry, or if she'd caught mine.

Cam and I ate canned soup and grilled cheese while we watched the midday news, then reruns of
The Flintstones
. Our small table sat beside the kitchen, diagonally across from the television where Fred yelled for Wilma, who served up enormous slabs of ribs. Lulled by the cartoon's familiar sounds and images, we took turns opening blue-lidded jars and spooning strained carrots and pulverized chicken into Alice's eager mouth.

“I like it when you come home for lunch,” I told Cam.

“Me too.” He held out a finger for Alice to grab. His shaggy blond hair fanned out from walking through the wind. A too-small tan sweater stretched across his chest. Tiny holes had worn through the wool at the edge of the neckband and under the arms. When he smiled at Alice, his blue-grey eyes looked warm and tender like they used to when we were dating.

I draped my arms over Cam's shoulders, nuzzled his neck.

“That tickles, Janelle,” he said, shaking me off.

“Let's sit on the couch for a while before you have to go back.”

“What about Alice?”

“Alice is fine.” I lifted her from the high chair, washed her face and hands, and set her down on the carpet to crawl. “Come on, Cam,” I said.

He was standing, weight on the balls of his feet, staring out the big window as if ready to soar out and over the city. I reached my arms around his chest and squeezed. He lifted me so that my legs dangled.

“I wish you could spin me around like you do Alice.”

“Your feet would hit the window and the shelves.” He kissed me once on the lips before setting me down.

The way his eyes flitted past me, I could see his mind already clicking forward to the chemistry lab. I picked up Alice and held her close. She squirmed in my arms, reaching for Cam, who kissed her goodbye twice on each fat cheek.

When he left, she started to cry. She always cried when I went to my evening linguistics class or to work, but this was the first time she'd cried for Cam.

“Daddy will be back soon,” I said, rocking her, offering a breast, unaware that, in a few years, she'd cry even harder, clinging to me as I left her at nursery school, screaming for a father she wouldn't see for months at a time.

As she settled down to nurse, I watched an unfamiliar soap on
TV
. A man and woman were kissing. She broke free, asking, “What about Jake?” The scene cut to Jake in the hospital listening through a stethoscope to a young boy's heartbeat, his furrowed brow expressing concern.

Alice's lips released their suction on my nipple, which pointed upward about an inch from her sleeping face. After carrying her to the crib, I took out my linguistics books, sat at the table, and began the assigned exercises. It was easy to label each syllable with its phonetic symbol, each word with its syntactical function—easy and boring. I turned on the radio, fiddling with the stations, stopping the dial when I heard Donna Summers' “MacArthur Park.” I danced around the room, twirling and leaping like I used to in ballet, swaying and rocking during the slow parts. The song over, I stood by the window, heart pounding, and watched the people below until my breath and pulse slowed to normal.

I wondered what I'd be doing if I didn't have Alice, if Cam and I hadn't married. Would he and I be together? Would I have attended a different university? I'd planned to go to McGill to study English, improve my French, and write poetry in the coffee shops and delis of Montreal, to live on my own in practice for my dream of living and writing in a Paris
appartement
. But even having an apartment in a Toronto high-rise was exciting for Cam and me.

After a year, I still felt a thrill looking out the living-room window over the streets below. I'd place my hand on the cold glass, and peer at the scene through my fingers. An electric feeling would run down the back of my neck and along my arms. With this feeling came the thought that these must be someone else's fingers, that I must be living someone else's life, and somewhere out there was the person who was living mine—that woman in high-heeled boots striding up the sidewalk, flinging open a restaurant door, or that man ducking his head against the wind, backpack slung over one shoulder, ignoring the traffic as he crossed the street.

On my birthday, my parents came to town, sleeping overnight on the pullout couch they'd bought us when we'd moved in. My mother gave me a new china doll, the first in years. She had curly brown hair, blank startled blue eyes, and a lacy pink dress.

“Thanks, Mom.” I placed the doll on the shelf with the others.

“I thought she looked a bit like Alice.”

I couldn't see any resemblance. If Alice got hold of the doll, she'd soon be smashed, her dress torn.

“How are you and Cam doing?” my father asked.

“We're fine,” I said, thinking how I'd returned from work last Saturday to find Alice and Cam asleep on the couch, his head flung back while he snored gently, as if, even in his dreams, he was aware of her soft damp weight on his chest.

When Cam got home, my father patted him on the back, asking, “How's the old
U
of
T
?” My father, an alumnus, still thinks of those years before he became an accountant and married my mother, as the best of his life.

My mother simply nodded at Cam. She blamed him for taking me away, even though I would've gone farther east if I hadn't gotten pregnant and married him. When Cam and I separated two years later, her feelings about him changed. Like her, he became another person I had left behind.

Now, she sends Cam Christmas cards and calls him on his birthday. I've started to call him too. He's sweet and gruff with me, the coolness of many years gone from his voice. He tells me how Alice taught his sons to dive at their cottage on Lake Erie, how he sometimes cannot believe she's his daughter—she's so grown up, so sure of herself. She tells him about the play she's writing for her thesis, how she's learning to direct the student actors. She drags Cam and his wife to summer theatres, where, after half a lifetime of studied indifference to drama and literature, he admits to enjoying the plays.

“I want to do my
P
h.
D.
in Montreal,” Jackson said.

We were sipping coffee across from each other, while Alice banged my spoon against his
Collected Works of Milton
.

I started to daydream about living in Montreal with Jackson—the two of us strolling down tree-lined streets. Sometimes, Alice was there, running along beside us, pulling my hand to show me something in a shop window. Other times, it was just Jackson and me, bodies pressed together, eyes locked, oblivious to passersby. These fantasies became a secret addiction, a place I'd retreat whenever I felt lost or unhappy. If Cam arrived home when I was in the middle of one, or if Alice called me from her crib, I'd feel a stab of guilt over my eyes, would sometimes be blinded by it, unable to see clearly for moments afterward, staring up at Cam's distorted features or into Alice's blurry little face.

Looking back, I understand how wanting Jackson felt like a betrayal, not only of Alice and Cam, but also of myself. With my decision to give birth to Alice, instead of seeking an abortion, I'd appointed myself her champion, defending her right to exist in the face of pressure from our parents and friends, not to mention our own doubts and longings. In spite of all this opposition, or perhaps because of it, and thriving on it, I'd swooped down and saved Alice from non-existence. More than that, I'd grown her inside me and pushed her out into the world. But then came the hard part, the days and nights when I had to admit that I might not be up to the job, that the cape I'd donned might not be enough to separate me from the mothers I heard about on the news.

Afternoons in the café with Jackson helped me to cope. Daydreams helped too, by carving a space in the day where my stifled desires could take a few moments to stretch out and breathe.

In February, Jackson invited Cam and me to a party in his dorm.

“It'll be fun,” he said. “I'll get to see you shake loose.”

“We'll come if we can find a sitter,” I said, knowing that with such short notice I wouldn't be able to find anyone I'd trust to take care of Alice.

When I told Cam, he said, “You go, Janelle. I'll stay with Alice. Jackson's your friend anyway.”

“Okay, but I won't stay late.”

“Stay as late as you want. Alice will be asleep, and I'll be studying. Enjoy yourself.”

Cam pulled me to him and kissed me. He seemed to like the idea of my going out. I felt the familiar blinding pain seize my eyes.

But that night, I left Cam holding Alice and walked the few blocks to Jackson's dorm. Big, lazy snowflakes drifted down, but I felt warm in my winter coat and boots, comforted by the softness the snow lent the city, like blankets and pillows spread out on the street for a pyjama party. I stood outside Jackson's building for a while, gazing up as the flakes came faster. When I finally climbed the stairs to his room, my hair was wet with melt.

“Janelle.” Jackson's eyes were bright and startled. “I didn't think you were coming.” He took my coat, nodding and pacing, as if trying to remember where to put it.

“Sit down,” he said, finally dropping it onto the bed in the corner. “No one's here yet.”

Incense was burning on a shelf, Peter Gabriel playing on the turntable. I sank into a deep old armchair and stared at my feet in their grey woollen socks. Jackson, who sat cross-legged on the floor beside me with a bag of weed and some papers, started to roll a joint. I'd only smoked up once when I was in high school. Ellie used to call me a do-gooder, but when Cam and I were at one of his brother's parties a few weeks before graduation, Dan had given us a joint to share, saying, “This'll put you in the mood.” That night we forgot about the condom in Cam's back pocket, and Alice was conceived.

Jackson offered me a drag.

“No thanks.” I was determined not to go there again. “I'm nursing. The chemicals…”

“Sorry. Does it bother you if I smoke?”

“No. I like watching you.” I'd noticed how Jackson's eyes got mellow back when he used to smoke with Dan in Cam's garage. It occurred to me that I'd been watching Jackson for years.

He held the joint in one hand and rubbed my sock-covered toes with the other.

“What's the snow like?” he asked after a long fragrant exhalation.

“Like wet velvet on my face. Or cats' tongues without the scratchiness.”

“Let's go out and play in it.” He squeezed my toes.

“What about the party?”

“I'll leave the door open. Ross will be here any minute. He just went to buy beer.”

We walked to the park around the corner where we made snow angels and two giant snowballs from small ones we each rolled through the sticky snow. We scooped out the insides to make chairs, which we sat in, staring up at the sky.

“I feel like Gabriel Conroy watching the snow,” Jackson said. “Separated from everyone and everything, yet connected too, by this big white blanket.”

“Mmm,” I agreed.

I never did go to the party. Jackson and I just stood outside his building for a while.

“I'm tired. I'm going home,” I said, shivering in my snowy jeans.

He wrapped his arms around me. “I'm cold too,” he admitted, holding me there. I was aware only of the warmth of our two bodies inside their winter coats, and his scent, an unruly mix of cinnamon, sawdust, and marijuana.

We stood like that until two guys yelled, “Hey, Jacks, where's the party?

“Bye, Janelle,” Jackson called after me.

I took the long way home through the park where we'd played in the snow, and behind the big new library with its concrete ramp zigzagging up to the main floor. Then I passed the older university buildings, their stone ornaments shrouded with snow, the lamplight casting intricate patterns of light and dark, gold and grey onto their white lawns. I skirted Queen's Park full of shadowy trees, walked through Victoria College and under the archway onto St. Mary's Street, smiling at couples walking the snowy sidewalks and students tossing snowballs, but I didn't feel happy so much as grief-stricken and lost. Like Jackson, I felt alone too—cut off from the people I loved—but also bound up with them, carrying them everywhere.

When Alice was in grade school, she spent most of her summers with Cam. I'd write her long letters, marking the bottom of each page with rows of
X
's and
O
's, representing all the kisses and hugs I was unable to give her while she was away. The
X
's reminded me of the ones knitted into Jackson's old woollen sweater, how I used to stare at them when I was feeling too shy to look into his face.