The Romantic (21 page)

‘Yeah.”

“Who was she? A nurse?”

“No. She was just passing by when I noticed the blood gushing out. She took me to an infirmary but the nurse isn’t there on Saturdays, so she did everything herself. We never found out her name but my teacher thought she might be Judy LaMarsh.”

Judy LaMarsh is the only female politician I can think of, probably because I used to have a teacher named Miss LaMarsh. My father looks up. “No kidding?”

“She was ordering everyone around like she was a big wheel.”

“Dark hair? Glasses?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, what do you know?” He smiles. “I thought she’d left Parliament Hill but it’s possible she was back for some reason, visiting someone.”

I hadn’t intended to keep the lie going. On the plane, and even walking up our driveway, I was determined to tell the truth, right down to saying I wanted an abortion. And then I put my feet in his lap.

No, I broke before that: coming into the kitchen and seeing his Sunday dinner of warmed-up meat loaf, nothing else on the table except for the
Globe and Mail
cryptic crossword, a chewed pencil and his reading glasses, whose missing hinges he has replaced with twisted paperclips. That lonely
little scene. Added to which he’s wearing the ugly purple-and-green diamond-patterned sweater-vest I know he thinks my mother would approve of because he bought it out of the Eaton’s catalogue.

How do you drop a brick onto that house of cards? Oh, he’d turn himself inside out trying to be understanding and helpful; there’d be no lectures or demands. He’d probably even drive me to Buffalo if I said my mind was set on going. Afterwards, he’d brood, but not for long. In spite of everything, he’d believe himself to be blessed.

He goes to the bathroom and returns with the first-aid kit. As I watch him dab my blisters with a cotton ball soaked in iodine I feel an almost painful surge of love. He’s talking about Ottawa, a city I’ve never been to and can scarcely picture. He makes it easy, though, by phrasing his end of the conversation in such a way that all I have to do is agree: “Some people think it’s too staid, even for a capital city, too
institutional, too grey.”

“They have a point.”

“A shame you missed seeing parliament in session. I presume they at least let you in.”

“Yeah, we got in.”

When I’m cleaned up and rebandaged and my feet set back on the floor, he gives me a probing look that makes me wonder if, after all, he suspects something. Except I’ve had these looks from him before and never felt myself to be at their crux. Those other times I felt either that he was searching for my mother in me (a resemblance, a clue to her behaviour) or that my eyes, because they’re so much like his, had ricocheted him back to himself and his thoughts. Being
pregnant, however, I may now be radiating a quality he recognizes but can’t put his finger on. “What?” I say finally.

“Oh …” He shakes his head. “Nothing, nothing. Are you hungry?”

I tell him I ate on the plane and just want to go to bed. “I think I’m still fighting off the flu,” I say. “No—” leaning away as his hand reaches for my forehead,“I don’t have a temperature. I’m just a bit weak. I think I’d better play it safe, though, and stay home from school tomorrow.”

Near dawn I creep down to the kitchen, where he’ll be less likely to hear, and throw up in the sink. I then go back to sleep until Mrs. Carver sits on the edge of my bed, sometime around ten o’clock. She, too, gives me a probing look, her third in less than a week. But where my father seemed to be trying to locate something, I sense that Mrs. Carver is urging me to confess the thing she has already figured out. So I say,“The father isn’t Tim Todd. It’s Abel.”

She blinks.

“You thought it was Tim.”

“What do you …?” She touches the rim of her glasses. “What are you …?”

“You
know
I’m pregnant.”

Her mouth opens and shuts, opens and shuts.

“I’m pregnant,” I say. “I thought you knew.”

She shakes her head.

I sit up. “Then why do you keep looking at me like that?”

She comes to her feet.

“Just now. I wake up, and there you are looking at me.”

Her eyes circle. She clutches her chest. “I thought …” She gasps.

“Are you okay?”

“I thought … you … were on … on …”

“On what?”

“Drugs.”

“Drugs?
What
drugs?”

“Mrs. Sawchuk saw you.”

“Mrs. Sawchuk?”
—her friend, a middle-aged legal secretary who claims to have been covered in warts before rubbing herself with one of Mrs. Carver’s concoctions.

“You were with a …” She twirls her fingers down each side of her head to describe long, curly hair.

“That must have been Abel. Where? Where did she see us?” But there could only have been the one place, and I answer for her. “At Bloor and Yonge.”

“In a park. You were smoking.”

“So?”

“A pipe.”

I find this entire turn of events incredible. “What would Mrs. Sawchuk know about that?”

“It was last June.”

“And she only just
told
you?”

“When I told her about the … the vomiting.”

“Well, for
Mrs. Sawchuk’s
information, smoking marijuana doesn’t make you throw up. You can tell her everything’s okay. I’m not a drug addict. I’m pregnant, that’s all. And I’m going to have an abortion.”

I start crying.

Mrs. Carver sits back on the bed and puts her arms around me. “Shh, shh, shh, shh,” she whispers. She extracts a wad of Kleenex from her sleeve and I blow my nose.

“I don’t know anything about babies,” I say. “I never babysat one. I’ve never even held one.”

She rubs my arm. “Are you sure?”

“I had a test. At the drug store.”

“How far along?”

“Two months.”

“Does Abel …?”

“No. And I’m not telling him, either.”

She points at the wall adjoining my father’s study.

“No, no, he has no idea.” I sink back against the headboard. “There’s a doctor in Buffalo. He doesn’t charge very much.”

She waves her hands. She doesn’t want to hear this.

“I’m getting rid of it,” I say warningly.

“I’ll do it!”

“Get rid of it?”

She nods. She looks alarmingly zealous.

“You’ll
operate
on me?”

“No! No!” Waving her hands again.

“How?”

“There’s a tea.”

A tea, it turns out, that she gave to her daughter, Stella, eleven years ago when Stella was pregnant out of wedlock. This is stunning news. Happily married Stella, whose childish voice asking over the long-distance crackle,“May I please speak to Mrs. Carver?” has led me to picture an even tinier, more nervous version of her mother. “Is it painful?” I ask, thinking that Stella’s nervousness may have begun
after
whatever the tea put her through.

Mrs. Carver shrugs. You get cramps (she digs her fists
into her stomach) but you can control them by swallowing a spoonful of cod-liver oil every morning and by taking hot baths.

“How often do I take it?”

She holds up four fingers.

“Every four days? Every four hours. At night, too? How long before it starts to work?”

“Until you bleed.”

I sigh. “Okay, well, what does it taste like?”

“Bitter. Bad.”

“What’s in it?”

A disapproving look. She never tells anyone her ingredients.

So either I find my way to Buffalo and let a professional crackpot tug the baby out with tweezers (or whatever he does) but at least get the whole thing over with quickly, or I stay here and kill the baby slowly, with a secret potion that allows me to imagine I’m having a miscarriage and that, because of the cramps and the bitter, bad taste, offers a kind of penance.

Specifically, it tastes like horseradish and rotten eggs. And the cramps are constant, and she should have told me about the dizzy spells and sudden, clanging headaches. Walking, I fix my eyes on a spot in the middle distance so that I don’t stagger. Alice tries to take my arm, but I shake her off, she’s only drawing more attention to me, and I have the feeling that half the school must think I’m stoned. Alice thinks I miscarried on the flight out to Vancouver and am now in the throes of after-effects. (When it came down to it, I
couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.) “I hogged the washroom for at least an hour,” I said. “The stewardess kept knocking on the door and asking if everything was all right.”

‘You poor thing,” Alice says,“to have to go through it all by yourself.”

“God was with me.”

“I know you’re being sarcastic. But He
was.
He
is.”

In the evenings, in the kitchen of her apartment, Mrs. Carver brews enough tea to see me through the next day. We use a duo-Thermos method. When I get home from school I give her my empty Thermos, she replaces it with a full one. I then soak in a scalding bath, which not only eases the cramps but also, apparently, irritates the baby, or “it” as Mrs. Carver counsels we should say so that I don’t start forging a bond. Meanwhile, she prepares a douche meant to further irritate “it.” By the time I’ve finished my bath, the douche is in a miniature turkey baster on my bedside table, and I lie back and squirt into myself the warm, coffee-coloured, tar-smelling liquid, then stay there a while, keeping my legs raised. Afterwards, if I can muster the energy, I go down to the basement and skip rope. The whole point is to make “it” feel unwelcome. You can’t kill it this way but you can drive it to suicide.

My father thinks I’m suffering from menstrual complications and heartbreak. Mrs. Carver, uneasy about my telling an outright lie, said I should just steer clear of him, but I knew he wouldn’t be put off. He’s always on the lookout for a burst appendix, and here I am reeling from room to room, obsessively kneading the heels of my hands down my
stomach (because why can’t I just
push
it out?). Nothing other than the (for him) mortifying subject of my period could have curtailed his craving to take my temperature. The supposed Dear John letter from Abel had him retreating even further. No questions, no indirect prying, only his big commiserating eyes falling on me at supper, trailing after me when we pass in the hall so that at these times my thoughts, affected by his presumption, teeter toward Abel, and beyond that, to a baby in a crib. Just for a split second, though, and then the cramps call me back.

The cramps keep me from sleeping more than two or three hours a night. In my dreams I’m covered in fur, my teeth are falling out. I have a recurring dream that instead of miscarrying I give birth to dozens of tiny babies who already talk in complete sentences but they’re no bigger than mice and they’re shrinking by the hour. I lose them in the cracks of our hardwood floor. I bundle them in winter clothes, line them up in a toboggan and send them down a steep hill. Chattering, they all go flying off. I paw madly through the snow and peer at pieces of grit, wondering,“Is that one?” The love and terror I feel in this dream vanish the instant I wake up. “I’m shaking,” I think with dull surprise. “I’m crying.”

Toward the end of the Richters’ first summer in Greenwoods, I start to feel more relaxed at their house, enough so that if I need to use the bathroom I don’t go directly there and hurry back to the kitchen. I take my time. With an eye to one day living here, I look at things.

Outside the kitchen door, on the far wall, are sixteen framed black-and-white photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Richter’s relatives. Four rows, four photographs per row, every frame the same size and of the same dark wood, and the relatives more or less the same size as well, making for an impression of apartment-building windows and the residents all standing there looking out. Because they look so serious I assume, before being told otherwise, that they are from Mr. Richter’s side of the family. But more than half are from hers. All of them, his and hers, were either femmes fatales or artists of some sort, and many died sensationally. From her chair in the kitchen Mrs. Richter can see the wall, and one of the times I lingered there, she called out names and biographies:

“That one. No, top row. There. That is my mother, Greta. The same name as me. She had eight proposals of marriage. And there is my aunt Freda, sitting. You should have heard her sing, like a flute, but so sad. My father, he was always saying, ‘Freda could make a stone cry.’ She married
a Frenchman and went to live in Marseilles. He had all this money and these houses but he was a bad man and gave her a disease you are too young to know about. She died a lunatic. That one? That is Mr. Richter’s great-uncle Otto. He wrote the story for an opera. What do I mean, Abel?”

“Libretto,” Abel says. “It’s the same in English.”

“Libretto! You know. The words they sing. He wrote for fifteen years. Then the man he showed it to, the man who would make the show, he put his own name on it and took all the money. Poor Uncle Otto, he had no legs by this time, you can’t tell in the picture. He lost them in the First War. Then one day in the Second War this furniture falls on him—”

“A dresser,” Abel says.

“A big high dresser. The Allies were bombing the city, and crash, bang. So that is how he died.”

Farther along the wall is an oil painting of a shepherd and his sheep on a dirt road bowered by two enormous trees. It’s either dusk or dawn, the murky edges of the picture about to close in on the golden centre where the little group has halted. The shepherd, who is turned away, holds out his staff in a braced posture. Something down the road has startied him. What? Every time I look at the picture all my cravings and expectations and vague dreads blend into a hypnotic pining to find out what it is the shepherd has seen. If only he would turn around, I’d know. By the look on his face, I’d know.

When I turn around, I’m facing Abel’s room. After tearing myself away from the painting I usually stand in the doorway for a few moments and let myself be depressed by
this shrine to his superior talent, intelligence and tidiness. For a small room it has a lot of excess furniture—two bookshelves, an upholstered wingback chair, an easel. On the wall beside the bed is a map of the world, and on the ceiling a map of the stars. The rest of the walls are papered in tacked-up paintings and drawings. Of insects and reptiles mostly, a few ferns and airplanes. All done by him. I couldn’t believe it when he told me that; I thought his father or some other adult must have been the artist.