Double Talk Page 7

  At the beginning of week three the doctors tell Violet they want to induce birth. They also want her to take part in a study, a drug trial. Violet is nervous about taking labour-inducing drugs but reasons it is for the greater good. She agrees to be their guinea pig. Checking into the hospital, she and Brian sit on the bed in a bare room for fourteen hours while Violet is administered yellow pills at regular intervals. They pass time by listening to Pat Metheny and early Van Morrison tapes. Brian holds her hand. They read Bernard Malamud short stories. Violet feels a few twinges, then nothing. Brian offers her his diagnosis: “concrete cervix.” It’s cold in the room. Exhausted she and Brian fall asleep only to be awakened a short time later by a posse of doctors who explain in hushed and urgent tones their concerns about her deteriorating womb. Violet signs some forms and she and Brian are whisked away to an operating theatre where, an hour later, her baby emerges, pink and sleeping, from a skylight in her stomach.

  Nothing in Violet’s life prepares her for Hurricane Lucy’s heartbroken cry. It begins that second night in the hospital. The ward nurse startles Violet from the best sleep of her life to say there is no consoling Baby Budd. “For the sake of the other babies in the nursery,” she says, “it would be better if baby stayed with mom.”

  Lucy cries all night. The next morning, she turns scarlet and contorts her body when the obstetrician pronounces her bonny and blithe. She cries in the taxi, prompting the taxi driver to confide that he is “some glad his six is all grown up and gone.” Safely home, Violet sits in the room she and Brian had so carefully decorated for their baby. Lucy cries when Violet shows her the sheep stencilled on the wall. She stops for a moment when placed under the black and white mobile, then screams all the louder. Violet rocks her in the wicker chair Brian found at the Salvation Army and carefully spray-painted sunflower yellow. Violet watches the shadows the Daisy Duck lampshade casts on the walls. She tries to feed her baby. She expresses milk onto her nipples and rubs them against her baby’s lips. She sings songs to her. She smiles at Lucy until her smile turns into a grimace. She thinks of Dr. Holly. With her thumbs, Violet gently applies pressure to her baby’s jaw. But the child will not latch on. Violet feels helpless. Aching breasts are nothing to the sight of that prim little mouth shut tight against the world, opening only to scream blue murder at having been born.

  Even when Lucy finally begins to feed with gusto, Violet worries. She searches her baby’s grey eyes for some hint of recognition, some sign that can be interpreted to mean that the child recognizes her mother. But none comes. Violet rocks her baby and stares at the wattle-like pattern the bamboo screen casts on the walls. Her feminist teachers were right, she thinks, she is locked away in a primitive hut. She knows the world of privilege she once knew is now off limits to her.

  One night Violet dreams of setting Lucy adrift on the Southside River, setting her adrift over undulating weeds, over submerged bicycles and shopping carts, over bags containing cat bones, setting her adrift in a swirl of dirty water, watching until she passes through the lock and out into the harbour. She awakes sobbing, with visions of that small and ominously silent crib setting out to cross the frigid North Atlantic. Brian is snoring loudly beside her. She feels otherworldly again, like an old animal self inside her is stirring, and it fills her with terror.

  Brian tries to help. He tells her it’s hormonal, which doesn’t help. From time to time he sticks his head in the door and asks if he can do anything to help. But he’s half-hearted about it, Violet thinks. It’s like he’s afraid or doesn’t really want to help at all. Violet knows she is being unfair to him, but some days she can’t help it. Worst of all, she thinks, are the days when he hovers over her, trying to find the humour in the situation, laughing manically whenever he comes up with a good one. “Wherever I go, lanugo!” he shouts, pointing to the thick covering of hair on Lucy’s arms and back.

  Violet’s only comfort in those first months is Nancy. Her friend is non-judgemental. She gives Violet permission to speak her mind. Violet is often appalled at what she hears herself say, but is unable or unwilling to water it down or censor it. She confides her fears about Brian. She tells Nancy about the night she walked the floor with a screaming Lucy for three hours, with Brian following around behind them. “Like some kind of creeping Jesus,” she says. “He kept asking me if he could take the baby for a while. Finally, I couldn’t take any more. I’d had enough. I handed Lucy to him and fell face first onto the bed. I pulled a pillow over my head. I was beyond exhausted. About to pass out, all I could hear was Brian singing nursery rhymes to Lucy in that stupid Elmer Fudd voice. Lucy was still going ballistic. I was so angry. Anyhow, I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I woke up and heard Brian shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Will you just shut up! Just shut the fuck up!’ I jump out of bed, run downstairs at top speed. I’m in a complete panic. And there’s Brian holding Lucy at arm’s length, both of them red in the face. I mean, if I hadn’t woken up who knows what might have happened?”

  Nancy nods in sympathy and reaches out to stroke Violet’s arm. She tells her it’s okay. But Violet can’t help noticing that her friend is trying hard to keep a straight face.

  Violet doesn’t want to see Nancy then for a while.

  And she doesn’t want to see Brian, unless he is being a practical help: carrying a basket of laundry, wiping up vomit, or stocking the fridge with groceries.

  And she certainly doesn’t want to see the goddamn bitch of a public health nurse either, that monstrosity in a floral pantsuit. When she first visits after Lucy is born, the nurse seems more interested in looking into their cupboards than giving Violet the information she needs. She rolls her eyes when Violet asks too many questions. Violet tells her that baby Lucy is inconsolable, that she often cries for hours. But the nurse just brushes her aside, says that some babies are just colicky. The nurse reminds Violet of the kind of forty-something divorcee she used to see on George Street, back in her drinking days. She imagines the nurse hitting Happy Hour every Friday and getting smashed on fruity cocktails. The nurse says the best thing Violet can do is to let little Lucy cry it out. “The sooner she learns who is boss, the better.” Violet can’t believe her ears. She imagines the nurse drunk and naked, shouting directions to some mutt she had dragged home from the bar. Desperate to make the woman understand, Violet tells her about the night they tried letting Lucy “cry it out.” How they had listened to Lucy scream for over an hour then abruptly stop. Violet says they raced into the nursery to find Lucy lying on her back, choking on vomit. “And the woman’s response to this?” Violet tells Nancy. “We should place her on her side, prop her up with pillows so she can’t roll over on her back!” Violet imagines placing that pillow over the nurse’s fat face.

  Colic: is there a more sinister euphemism? Violet wonders. Well, perhaps there is, she thinks: postpartum depression.

  It is coming on Christmas. Violet is sitting in the nursery when she feels a change. It is as though someone has suddenly removed a fine black net from in front of her eyes. She looks to the window to see if the curtain has blown back, but the window isn’t even open. She straightens her back and feels sensation returning in a way that makes her understand how absent it has been. She listens to the sounds of the outside world: cars changing gears as they descend the hill, someone hammering, a junco chirping. Downstairs, she can hear water running. She can hear Peter Gzowski’s anguished delivery on CBC Radio, and Brian’s footsteps as he mooches around. She has a craving to pick up the novel that she stopped reading three months earlier.

  Euphoria floods through her beaten flesh. She looks down at the sleeping bundle in her arms, says, “Hello, little one,” like she is saying it for the first time. She gazes at Lucy’s hot red cheeks, her perfect little lips, her eyes flickering gently under her wine-stained eyelids. She leans down and let the baby’s feathery hair tickle her nose. She gets drunk on the smell of her baby’s scalp: powder and sweat and something else impossibly clean and sweet. She l
ifts Lucy’s dimpled hand. Violet sees that the baby’s nails are far too long, curving over the tops of her fingers. So, very gently, she nibbles them. Lucy takes a deep breath and sighs, the last of her recent upset subsiding. Violet smiles at her and squeezes her fat leg, squeezes her fat diapered bum through her cotton sleeper. She knows everything is going to be all right. She just knows. Everything is going to be fine.

  She places Lucy in the bassinet, props her on her side with pillows, and goes downstairs. Brian is in the kitchen, cleaning the breakfast dishes. He is wearing the Tweety Bird apron and the orange rubber gloves. One of the things she has always loved about Brian is his willingness to take on his share of the housework. If anything, she thinks, once the painting and home repair jobs have been added it, he does more than his share.

  Violet remembers how supportive he was during the pregnancy: how he refused to sleep in the spare bedroom, even though she snored every night as loudly as a lawn-mower; how he was a willing participant in all the prenatal classes. She remembers how he blanched when the midwife, by way of illustrating the size of the baby’s head relative to the cervix before dilation, held up a small turnip and a Cheerio. He was so sweet to her in the last trimester, rubbing coco butter on her belly and telling her daily how beautiful she was and how much he loved her. In the last weeks of pregnancy he always wanted her to spoon with him, his back against her enormous belly so he could feel it when the baby kicked or turned. And best of all, his desire for her did not diminish. They made love often and passionately, right up to the last few days. Then Lucy was born and he just disappeared.

  Violet understands now that he didn’t disappear. He was there all the time. She just couldn’t see him.

  She stands behind her husband in the kitchen and listens to him singing along in his tone-deaf way with Fats Waller, “God help me but your feet’s too big.” She loves how he is too shy to sing in front of anyone but her. She loves him. Then Brian turns and looks at her. And the expression on his face is almost enough to break her heart. She sees how unsure of himself he has become. He seems hesitant even to speak. Violet walks across the linoleum, arms held out wide, and hugs him. He half-hugs her back.

  “What’s this?” he says.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for the way I have treated you over the last few months. It’s been so hard. I love you, you know.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Violet thinks he is looking at her a little sceptically. She feels a small flare of anger, but reminds herself he has a right to be circumspect. He shrugs, throws her a lifeline: “You were depressed.”

  And just then, right on cue, Lucy starts to howl.

  “Your turn,” Violet says. “I’m going to shower and then I’m going for a walk. You can try her on some formula if she gets hungry.”

  “I thought you threw it out.” Brian is referring to a fight they had a month earlier, when he’d shown up drunk with a box of formula and insisted it was time they gave it a try.

  “It’s in the laundry room, on the top shelf.” Violet says.

  Violet knows she is still depressed, depressed but on the rebound. Standing under the shower’s twitching jets, she has a picture in her mind of crushed blades of grass beginning, with jerky movements, to right themselves. She feels at once a sense of reckless optimism and generosity.

  Lucy is still crying next door in the nursery as Violet dries herself and dresses. Brian is doing his best to distract Lucy with his Donald Duck impression. Lucy stops for a few seconds each time he does it. A few seconds later she is shrieking again.

  Violet sneaks down the stairs and puts on her coat. Stepping out the front door into the salt air, she feels loose, like her limbs are not properly screwed on. Too many months in the house, she thinks. She feels as though she has come through something important, though, if asked, she would not be able to say what exactly. Her mood is such that all of the ordinary sights of the Christmas season strike her as being poignant: the tatty Christmas decorations on the downtown streets; the office workers running around on their lunch-hours buying presents; the teenagers who need nothing but still stare longingly into shop windows; the bearded drunk on Water Street who asks her for eighty-three cents. She gives him a dollar-fifty. She is Scrooge, a month early.

  It is warm for December, warm enough that she can smell the harbour’s sewage bubble when she crosses the road at the bottom of Cochrane Street. She decides to walk through the Battery and up Signal Hill. Breast feeding Lucy has made her lose a lot of her pregnancy weight, but she still avoids looking at herself in a full-length mirror.

  She walks quickly, concentrating on physical sensations: muscle sliding warmly over muscle; vein throb; haemorrhoid itch and sting. Yoga has taught her that the way to the mind is through the body. She makes a promise to herself to enrol in yoga class again. She passes through the Battery, without encountering any dogs. She is afraid of dogs. She passes the one-time fishermen’s houses, now owned by artists, and the silvery wharves, now kept up as a tourist attraction. She passes Chain Rock, the one-time anchor point for a submarine net. She looks across at Fort Amherst, at the lighthouse and at the concrete bunkers. Feels a sudden craving for a cigarette. Only four years since their wedding and already it seems a lifetime ago.

  Violet walks with a sense of imminence, certain in her movements though still unsure of her destination. Joni Mitchell’s “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” is playing on her Walkman as she begins to ascend the one-hundred-and-one wooden steps to Cabot Tower. A phrase keeps entering her head: Baby Time. She can even visualize it: Baby Time™, followed by that little trademark symbol. But it’s not until she stands on the summit of Signal Hill and looks out on the great expanse of ocean that she begins to understand. Mother Ocean. It is simple really, she thinks, she and Brian need to get on Baby Time™. She understands. This is what all of those smug young mothers and fur-top-ankle-boot wearing grannies were trying to tell her while she was pregnant. She reconsiders, decides they were angels, after all, and not the gargoyles she thought they were. She decides that to be a good mother she has only to live in a child-centred world. She needs only to stop being selfish. Violet wonders if she can turn this thought into an axiom.

  Flushed with her new insight, Violet thinks about her best friend. Nancy knew instinctively how to mother. It is the reason Lucy is always better behaved for her. Violet knows Nancy will never look at her screaming baby and wonder if there is something wrong with it, mentally, something that eluded detection at birth. Nancy will not listen at the black hole of her screaming infant’s throat and hear in it an existential complaint, a questioning about why she has been taken from non-existence and brought to live in such a hostile place. Nancy will never doubt her baby’s trust in her. She will not think that her baby is judging her, finding her utterly inadequate. Nancy doesn’t think this way, Violet knows, because she was raised by a mother who cherished her.

  “We mother as we have been mothered,” she will later tell Nancy. “Simple as that.” Violet’s mother promised to come during the final few weeks of her daughter’s pregnancy. She promised to stay with her until after the baby was born. But at the last minute she called to cancel, telling Violet that her dad had a heart episode: “But no need for you to worry, dear,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it will be okay.” It turned out that she was right; he had simply suffered palpitations while playing the back nine with a group of government ministers. His cardiologist friends couldn’t pin-point the exact cause of his event but thought it might have been dehydration. Violet guesses her dad hadn’t cut his coffee with enough scotch before teeing off that morning.

  Her mother and father said they would visit as soon as the baby was born, but reneged on that promise, too. They blamed their absence on Auntie Val, her mother’s friend since childhood. They said she was in crisis over the failure of her fourth marriage. Violet’s mother said that Val came home early one morning from underwater aerobics class to find Brent, her husband of two years, applying anti-wrin
kle cream to a young man of Cuban origin.

  It is always something with her parents, Violet thinks. She and Brian had seen them only twice in the four years since their wedding. And both times they had had to travel to B.C.

  Violet arrives home from her walk around Signal Hill to find Brian gazing blissfully at Lucy, who is lying bundled up and fast asleep at one end of the couch. Brian is holding a bottle of formula, two-thirds empty, on his lap.

  “She took a bottle for me,” he said, his face flushed. “It was amazing. She just sucked away on it and stared up at me with the most intense gaze. Wow. It felt like she was looking right into me.”

  “No crying?”

  “Not a peep.”

  “How long has she been down?”

  “Ten minutes, maybe.”

  Violet is pleasantly surprised, though a bit peeved. Good for you, Brian, she wants to say. Good for you and poor me, because my breasts are full of milk. She knows it will be at least an hour before Lucy wakes up. Just the thought of having to wait that long makes her ache. Suddenly uncomfortable, she brings her hands up underneath her breasts to shift their weight and immediately feels her milk let down. It takes only seconds for it to soak through her nursing pads.

  Slack-jawed, Brian points to the dark stain spreading down the front of Violet’s blouse. The look on his face reminds Violet of the first time they tried to do it after Lucy was born. Violet didn’t want to be on top, but it was the only way she felt comfortable. “God, I felt self-conscious enough about the extra pounds, the stretch marks,” she told Nancy, “without my breast deciding to spring a leak. Brought a whole new meaning to the word cowgirl, let me tell you.”