and not insignificantly, the cradle of the evening wherein we had engaged in unprotected sex. After you have fallen, go back to the garden, I guess.
“I have something for you, but you don’t need to open it now,” Becker said, as we were finishing a shared piece of chocolate cheesecake, which had been billed “death by decadence” on the menu. “It’s just a token thing. There’s lots I wanted to get, but I kept second-guessing myself, thinking you’d take it the wrong way.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “And thanks for saying so.” I was a bit surprised by this remark, actually, as Becker wasn’t usually so frank about his feelings. “We should have mentioned it earlier, I guess, and agreed not to exchange anything.” He seemed shocked by this and slightly annoyed.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I want to give you everything, not nothing.”
It sounded like soap opera dialogue; I couldn’t bear it, and I’m afraid I sighed out loud. I might even have rolled my eyes, showing my best sensitive and tactful side. I apologized at once.
“Did you know that every time you say or do something bitchy these days, you immediately chalk it up to hormones and being pregnant?” he said, in a dangerously light, conversational voice. “It’s really interesting. I can hardly wait to hear what kind of excuse you come up with after the baby’s born, and you’re back to normal.”
“I’m not sure what normal is,” I said, trying to match his tone. It came out sounding as brittle as the wine glass that he was holding, which looked ready to shatter in his white-knuckled grip. “I used to be a childless woman, and I’m not likely to return to that state any time soon.”
“You chose it, Polly.”
“I did. And I’m guessing that you’d probably have preferred me to make a different choice.”
He sat back, exasperated. “Of course not, that’s not fair. I just wish you’d include me a bit more, that’s all.”
“By moving in with you and marrying you, you mean.”
“Or by taking into account that I’m involved, at least.”
“You’re the one who’s going to Calgary for Christmas.” Ouch. That one just popped out by itself. I’d known about it since the summer, when Bryan had gone out west with his mother, and Becker had promised to visit and spend the holiday with them. I’d always accepted it and insisted that to me Christmas was no big deal, and Becker should by all means spend it with his son. Maybe it was the residue of the mall experience that made me suddenly want Becker to stay. Or made me pretend to want that. I don’t know—maybe I was just being bitchy, and the hormones had nothing to do with it.
Well, he got mad, and I don’t blame him. The rest of our spat-dance included all the requisite steps, from hissing at each other like snakes over the paying of the bill, through the sullen silence in the truck, treading the light fantastic over our mutually guilt ridden apologies just before we got to the farm, to the balm of the make-up kiss and hug, the shamefaced and hurried exchange of our meaningless parcels, and the fragile goodbye.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get back,” Becker said. It was snowing, the only snow we got, it turned out, until the night I left to catch a plane for England.
By the middle of January, I had, as Susan had predicted, expanded. I wasn’t as big as a house—more like a small cabin, as I still had three months to go before lift-off. I was having dreams by then of splitting apart like a burnt sausage, and my skin was so sensitive that I could feel the slightest shift in the air, as if the atmosphere around my body had grown hands. If you’ve been involved in this kind of show already, you know the drill. My ankles were thicker by the day, I had to pee every four minutes, and I felt physically co-opted for some purpose that had very little to do with me at all. One of the many books I’d acquired said “You don’t really have the baby, the baby has you.” Yep. Preparing for my trip to England helped to take my mind off my body, for which I was grateful.
The organizers of the conference had requested that I take along a couple of samples of my work, and it was a difficult decision, as I knew I couldn’t afford to take a great big pile of puppets with me. They’d asked me to do a marionette construction seminar, with an emphasis on methods for making and manipulating moving parts. I wanted to have some good pieces to use as examples, but most of my favourites had been sold. Still, one of my most inspired creations had been a puppet I’d made of a policeman (which bore a marked resemblance to Becker), and Constable Earlie Morrison, Becker’s partner, had it hanging in his bathroom. I knew I could borrow it back from him for a little while, and it wouldn’t take much to alter it for its debut on the Canterbury stage. It had originally been designed to conceal a little pop-up version of the male member, a functioning moving part, you might say—perfect for the seminar. The original extra piece had been omitted from the finished puppet, for reasons of delicacy on the part of the artist and the eventual owner, but it would be no trouble to mold a new one and attach it.
I had decided to use the month of January to construct a companion for the policeman puppet, and I would use these two in my seminar. They would both be reasonably lightweight—the heads being constructed out of a thin layer of air-dry clay over a papier mâché base, the arms and legs of carved wood, and the hands and feet of clay as well. I usually make puppet bodies out of a core of dowel (in order to have something to screw the joint-mechanisms into), pad them with quilting, then sew a canvas skin over top. Packed properly into a box, with lots of soft stuff wedged in the gaps, they wouldn’t come to any harm in transit, I figured. The policeman puppet had a beautifully made (if I do say so myself) little uniform, complete with hat, boots, belt and a teeny tiny gun—which I’d found in the dollar store in downtown Laingford.
The companion puppet turned out to be (pause as everybody says out loud that they saw this coming a mile away) a pregnant lady. I don’t go for subtlety in my work, you’ll have gathered. The thing is that I work with whatever is uppermost in my mind (it makes for in-the-moment creativity), and so the modelling of hands and head and feet was done in a fairly abstract way—I was merely making a female figure, and it wasn’t until I’d finished the lower leg and foot of my little person and noticed that the poor thing’s ankles were all puffy that I realized what I was doing. Too late to quit, by that time, as January was streaking by. While constructing the torso, I left a small, hollow space in the belly, about the size of a squashed navel orange. I lined it with red felt and put a soft, padded door on the front of it, held shut with a tiny brass catch from the hobby shop. This made perfect sense at the time. It meant, of course, that I would have to make a small pair of bloomers for the creature, in order to preserve what little dignity I’d left her, and I designed the costume she wore, a maternity tent, to lift easily. And needless to say, I then had to sculpt a baby. This one, at any rate, I would have complete control over. I planned to attach a string to its head.
Six
Babies resemble grandparents and great-grandparents because, just as there are many seeds hidden in the earth, so there are seeds hidden in mankind, which give us the features of our ancestors. That’s what they used to say.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
Why is it that passport photos always make you look criminally insane?” I was sitting in the Slug and Lettuce Pub (drinking soda pop, I might add) with my photographer friend Dimmy Cox. I contemplated my picture, the one I’d had taken at Shutterbug, the local photo shop, which now adorned my brand new passport. I looked sullen—no, worse than sullen—I looked like
