Year of Lesser (23 page)

Johnny studies the grinning fool.

Godwin’s voice gets louder. “What? Where’ve you been? Out all night? Wow. You’re a father, Johnny Fehr. Wife tells me it was a girl. Blue eyes. Everything’s great. Good God, man. Home with you.”

But Godwin needn’t have offered this advice. Johnny’s already out the door. He’s gone, his Olds a black arrow carrying him back to the nest he left a day earlier, out on a mission that would eventually bring him, sullied and older, back to the bedside of Loraine, his lover, the mother of his child. And when he arrives, Loraine smiles a radiant and tired smile, lofty, and holds out the little prune for Johnny to see. “Here,” she says. “Ours.”

And Johnny takes that infant, and he weeps.

IN

On the May long weekend Loraine asks Johnny if he wants to move in. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, gnawing at a rib of celery. Loraine’s spinning her lettuce in the clothes washer; a tip she got from a cookbook:
If salad greens are wet and you need them right away, place in a clean pillowcase and spin dry on gentle cycle in your automatic washing machine for a few seconds. This hint is especially good to know if you are serving salad to a large crowd!
Johnny, Chris, and her, not a large crowd but the idea appeals to Loraine.

Johnny’s hard to read. He doesn’t speak, just nods. Strange, how the thrill of being near this man still touches at Loraine, like a warm breeze across the skin.

“I talked with Chris and he didn’t seem to be against it,” Loraine says. “He’s preoccupied these days. Melody still.”

“A woman’ll do that,” Johnny says.

Loraine swivels, hands on hips. “A woman’ll do that,” she mimics. She stops and for some reason remembers the morning after the birth. She asks, “You still mine?”

Johnny snorts, touches his ear, “Naww,” he says. He stands and backs her into him so Loraine can feel his belt buckle, the metal
pressing through her shirt. He touches the flab on her belly.

“Fat,” Loraine says.

“Ummm.”

“You’ll get less sleep, you know, sleeping with me.” She senses a certain direction in his thoughts and corrects him. “Rebecca, she’s up three, four times a night.”

“Oh.”

“So, you can fetch her. Bring her to me.”

The baby’s upstairs now. Sleeping. Really, her motivation for asking Johnny to move in is fear. She has felt, since the birth of Rebecca, a slipping away of this man, as if they all were on ice and playing Crack the Whip and Johnny was at the end, spinning wildly, going faster and faster. One of these days he’s going to lose his grip and fly away. She wants him close. Wants to hold him, tie him up.

“Silly,” he says now. “In the washer.”

“But see,” Loraine answers, holding up a leaf to his cheek, “perfect.” She smells his neck and vows that one of these days he will hear all about the birth. She will tell him everything.

It was a Tuesday morning and Loraine was thinking that this was the day the baby would come. Not that she’d been experiencing any unusual movements or pain or spotting. The baby had been quiet for several days, pressing down on her pelvic floor.

Lying in bed, listening to Johnny leave—he didn’t say goodbye to her which was surprising and disconcerting; even this lack of affection on his part struck Loraine as a sign—she thought she should call Claire just to make sure she stayed available that night. She didn’t call though and by noon had dismissed the notion of an early birth. Still three weeks left. Don’t be foolish, she cautioned herself.

Before supper she hung out in the barn with Chris. She counted flats and he delivered carts stacked with eggs. Chris was brooding,
silent. Later, while they lifted flats and counted, Loraine tried to talk to him.

“How’s school?”

“All right.”

“Homework tonight?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You still seeing Melody?”

Chris’s eyes went up to the ceiling. He attempted indifference but his face fell apart. He pushed his chin into his far shoulder and hid. His crying was quick and hard, his neck moving like a dog who was bolting food.

Loraine didn’t speak. Didn’t touch him. She kept counting, lost track, then started again. She would have liked to wring her hands. Pat his shoulder. See, she said to herself, didn’t I predict this?

She tried the obvious. “You broke up.”

Chris’s shoulders hunched and dropped. Loraine wanted to throttle Melody. Call her up right then, make her ears ring. Little princess.

“I don’t know,” Chris said. His face was less twisted now; a quick spurt of grief. He cradled an egg. “She won’t talk to me.”

“Won’t? You tried talking to her?”

“Aw, Mom, forget it. Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m only fifteen. It doesn’t matter shit.”

“Maybe she’s pregnant.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“It’s happened.”

“We don’t sleep together any more.”

“Really.” Loraine was pleased. In fact, the idea that Chris would no longer spend time with Melody filled Loraine with hope. The girl was both sweet and cold, as if all that religion she’d suffered had split her heart in half: one side sunny, the other full of gloom. “Since when?” she asked.

Chris watched her, no answer. His look was curious. Sometimes when Loraine caught him staring like this at her she felt her son was far away,
perhaps in another house across the way from hers, and he was staring with binoculars out a window, searching for her. She was uncomfortable then, acutely aware of her own body and of what she was wearing, of how she sat, and the way her chest rose as she breathed. Loraine shivered now, lifted a hand. Chris’s eyes widened and dropped.

“You’re young,” Loraine said, heaving herself from the stool.

“That’s what
I
just said,” Chris responded. He turned away. Loraine, walking back to the house, wondered if it was possible for a son to lust after his mother. Funny thought. Sick.

Loraine’s water broke in the kitchen. She was experiencing what she thought was a minor tightening of the uterus; a Braxton Hicks, she thought, they’d been playing with her all week. But then, with a whoosh, just as she was sinking her hands into hot water, a massive contraction clawed at her, forcing her elbows to the counter and wobbling her knees. She gasped, moaned, closed her eyes, and breathed through her mouth, fire dancing along the spine of her belly. Then, somewhere below her, there was a faint pop: a cupful of warm water had been poured between Loraine’s thighs. “Oh shit,” she said. She put her hand inside her panties, pulled it away wet, and eyed her fingers. The liquid was clear. “Good,” she said. She straightened and looked at the clock. Seven. Chris was still in the barn.

Loraine panicked slightly, aware of how quickly she laboured, of her distance from the hospital. She resented—it was like a slight stitch in her side—Johnny’s absence. And then as another contraction bent her earthward she understood that she would have this baby alone. Johnny would be off meandering the countryside, chatting it up with farmers and their wives, sipping tenderly at bitter coffee while she, Loraine, braced herself for the passage of their baby.

She moaned lightly, thinking how like the wind she sounded. Finally, at rest, she picked up the phone. The Godwins didn’t answer. Loraine,
breathing loudly, tried the neighbours further west, the Loepkys. No answer. She would have to call 911. Her body was folding back into itself. According to the clock the contractions were coming every three minutes. Too fast. Too furious. Through the kitchen window she could see Chris walking across the yard to the house. She closed her eyes, her cheeks expanded. Chris was behind her, standing in the doorway. “I’m having the baby.” She was talking into her breasts.

“No,” he said. “It’s not time.”

“I’m having it now,” Loraine said. She checked the clock. “My water broke already,” she announced. “I tried Mrs. Godwin and Mrs. Loepky. No answer. I’m going to go upstairs. You listen for me, meanwhile try to call Claire and tell her. Ask her if she can come here.”

“Here?” Chris was circling Loraine, pulling at his fingers.

“I’m not driving anywhere,” Loraine said. “St. Pierre, the closest, is too far.” She lurched left, moaned, and lassoed her son’s neck. She yanked him close and laid her face on his neck. One of her fists burrowed into and pulled at his hair. In the distance, like a dull echo, Loraine heard, “Mom, that hurts.”

She leaned hard into Chris’s body. He stumbled, then held her. “Like that,” she said, and it was oddly comforting to smell the boy, to inhale him. She felt safe. Finally Loraine straightened and let out old air.

“I’m scaring you,” she said.

Chris shook his head. Loraine left him by the phone and made her way up the stairs to the bedroom. She took off her clothes, methodically, ecstatically: blouse, sweatpants, bra, panties, socks. She went to the bathroom and stood there naked, muttering her way through another contraction. In the mirror, when she opened her eyes at one point, she observed the shape of her belly as it squeezed the baby downwards: the roundness disappeared and her stomach shuddered into a misshapen oval, like a rubber ball pressed between two large hands.

She ran a hot bath and sank into the water. Chris appeared at the door, hesitant, eyes slipping sideways towards the wall, saying that Claire was on her way. She would also call Dr. Pitt.

“Fine,” Loraine murmured. “Get a pitcher, would you? Don’t be shy.”

The boy reappeared and Loraine, arms propped at the edge of the tub, advised him to pour bathwater over her stomach during the contractions. She had read about this in one of those books, about it making you relax.

“How do I know when?” he asked. He was kneeling beside the tub, head bowed.

“You’ll know,” Loraine gasped.

Chris dipped and poured, dipped and poured. Loraine dug her nails into his free wrist. “I wanna push,” she said.

“Shouldn’t you?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She felt again with her hand on the other side of the hill and said, “I don’t know if I’m fully dilated.” She paused, wiped at her face with a washcloth, and said, “You’re a brave boy, Chris. You’ll help me do this, won’t you?”

“Sure,” Chris said. He was afraid.

Loraine, after several more hard contractions, wanted to exit the tub. “To the bed,” she said, taking Chris’s arm. Between the contractions, when the baby was like a sliver fluttering just above her body, she seemed clear-headed and hopeful. Her manner was even jokesy, as if she and Chris were lovers come together for an afternoon tryst.

“I’m sorry about all this,” she said to Chris, tipping a hand at her body and then back at him. “I guess I should cover up but I can’t stand the feel of cloth on my skin. Good education for you,” she grinned, and the grin seared down into a grimace.

She attempted lying on her side on the bed. “This,” she said, her mouth full of the rough grain of the bedspread, “is too uncomfortable.” Next, she stood, her hands turned inward, pressing down onto the dresser. She directed Chris to stand behind and support her. “Your arms here,” she said, and brought his biceps under her own arms and locked his hands at her chest, just above the gap between her breasts. He held her then and she groaned and ground downwards. For some reason, she wanted to be good at this, to be full of grace. This was a test, she thought,
and if she passed, she would have a long and beautiful life. Her baby would be healthy. Johnny would stay with her.

Though Chris was not touching her now, she could sense him behind her. He carried on his body the odour of ten thousand chickens, of all those eggs. An egg had a scent which reminded Loraine of the bottom of a china teacup. Chris’s fingers were smooth at the tips, the heels of his hands had minute ridges, so imperceptible as to be only discovered by microscope. To Loraine’s mind, these ridges were like deep gouges. They pressed her skin, heightened her pain, distracted her. During the last flow she pushed Chris back so that he stumbled. Loraine fell to her hands and knees, the knot of her hanging low. She howled.

It was only later, perhaps the next morning, that she recalled that pushing-off moment as if Chris were land and she the boat. And she remembered too the texture of the rug like hot wax on her knees, her black panties crumpled on the floor, three holes—how odd, and, Oh, yes, she thought, for two legs and a waist. Mine. She saw, stuck in the matting of the rug just at the edge of the box spring, a toothpick, and remembered a time long ago when her husband still lived, and they had eaten pasta and salad on the bedroom floor and Jim chewed a toothpick and later they had made love on the rug, which was a novelty for Jim. Still, he said, he preferred the bed. Loraine, a week after the birth, thought of that toothpick and crawled over the floor looking for that shard of wood. But she did not find it.

Chris was hurt. He sat on the bed and observed his mother as she lifted her head and looked behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said. She could say no more. Chris’s feelings were unimportant now. “I’m going to start pushing,” Loraine said. “You’ll have to catch the baby.”

Loraine knelt by the bed, her head on the mattress. She directed Chris to take up a position behind her. “Don’t be frightened,” she said again. “Look at me as a machine.”

Chris nodded, all obedience. Loraine, during the next drawing together of her uterus, cried out as she sometimes did when she was with Johnny, only this cry was harder to understand; it grew from some place that she could not call her own and when she spit it out the walls shuddered and she cared not a bit that she was pouting her rear end at her son’s face and bellowing at the ceiling.

The knot loosened. It always did. One of the women at Claire’s party had suggested to Loraine, “When you’re having this baby, imagine yourself floating on water, travelling from one place to another. See it as a passage.”

Loraine couldn’t quite manage this image. Instead, her body felt as if it were a tangle of rope that, in order to be freed, required a certain trick. She sensed that she had little say in this process. Her body was being turned inside out and she was flagging, weary.

She reached down between her legs and touched. She held her air and her head swelled. Chris called to her from the far shore. And then quickly the baby was born and with the tearing of her body Loraine sensed that she had both lost and found something. She looked back over her shoulder. Chris was holding the child as if it were a precious glass vase. Loraine pushed herself off the bed. Delicately, slowly, she lifted her left leg up and over the baby’s head and lowered herself to the floor. She sat, legs spread, and, “Oh my,” she said. “Oh my sweet sweet thing.”