It was a Hallowe’en thing, although if Kuskawa society were a little less repressed, I imagine Rico would have enjoyed indulging in his hobby on a more regular basis. Brent made a great girl (if you overlooked the prominent Adam’s apple), and his makeup was perfect.
“What are you three up to in here?” Rico said. “Doing the cauldron thing? All hail Macbeth?”
“Hey, no fillet of a fenny snake jokes, please,” Theresa said. She tended to be a little sensitive around that time of year. It’s a religious season for her, after all, and Hallmark had co-opted it pretty thoroughly, which must have been as painful for her as Rudolph and Santa can be for devout Christians. “Polly was just being cynical about motherhood, is all.”
“I’m just grumpy because my choice of recreational substances has been severely limited,” I said, and it was quite true. One of the hardest things for a dedicated drinker and smoker is suddenly to be unable to indulge for reasons of altruism. I didn’t particularly want to give these things up—that was the problem. I resented that I had to and resented that my body appeared to agree.
“Hey—I’ve got a joke for you,” I said. “Three expectant mothers are sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, right? They’re all knitting little sweaters.”
Ruth snickered. “Ruth, that’s not the punchline,” I said.
“Sorry—carry on.”
“So the first mom reaches into her purse and takes out a pill bottle and pops a pill into her mouth and then continues knitting. The other two ask what she’s just taken. ‘Oh, it’s calcium,’ the mother says. ‘I want my baby to have good, strong bones.’ ” I was doing the sweet parody voice again. Ruth and Theresa were listening, but both looked wary for some reason, and I realized I was speaking a bit loudly, so I toned it down.
“So, the second mother does the same thing—puts down her knitting, reaches into her purse, pulls out a pill bottle, takes one, and then picks up the knitting again. Again, the other two ask her what she’s taking. ‘Oh, it’s iron,’ the woman says. ‘I want my baby to have strong, healthy blood.’
“Then the third mother puts down her knitting, right? She reaches into her purse and pulls out a bottle and takes a pill and puts it back and picks up her knitting again. ‘What are you taking?’ the other two ask. ‘Oh, it’s thalidomide,’ the mom says. ‘You see, I can’t knit arms.’ ”
There was a nasty little silence. Ruth and Theresa looked at each other and then back at me. Brent made a small snorting noise and left the room. Rico muttered “uh-oh” and followed him out, as if there were some sort of imminent girl-scene about to happen, and he didn’t want to witness it.
“That is such bad karma, I can’t even tell you,” Theresa said, finally.
“It’s only a joke, Terry. I think it’s funny,” I said.
“Never mind that it’s incredibly sick,” Theresa said, “but to hear it come out of your mouth, Polly—that’s really disturbing.”
“It is kind of in bad taste,” Ruth said.
“Oh, jeez, you guys,” I said. “If I wasn’t pregnant, you’d have howled. Of course, it’s in bad taste. The best jokes usually are. And I tell politically incorrect jokes all the time, remember? This is me, here. Me. You’re supposed to be able to bend the rules among friends, and that’s what we’ve always done. Why is everybody treating me like a badly behaved teenager all of a sudden?” And then, of course, I burst into tears. It must have been the chocolate.
“Sometimes I wonder if you lie awake at night, thinking up ways to piss me off,” Becker said, three days later. He had returned from Calgary and was up at the cabin for what I was hoping would be an intimate little dinner, just the two of us. I was preparing the kind of food one feeds to a person whom one wants to pamper. I felt guilty about having trampled all over his feelings by having waited so long to tell him about the baby. I felt bad about my stubborn intention of staying in the cabin. I hadn’t had a chance to show my sympathy about his father’s death—and I wanted to make him feel loved and appreciated. We may have been in disagreement about a few things, but I did care about him and about our relationship. I had made a splendid beef stroganoff, with sautéed baby vegetables and crusty homemade bread. To top it off, there was an apple pie to die for. I can be quite the Suzie Homemaker when I put my mind to it.
I had been nesting, in my own modest way, and as well as wanting to soothe Becker’s feelings, I wanted to persuade him that my home was a perfectly reasonable place to care for a newborn. It was a place in which I could whip up a wonderful meal. A cozy, homey cabin that may have lacked electricity and running water, but was still a haven of peace and domestic delight.
I had insulated the roof, for one thing, in a burst of energy following the news about the Canterbury Conference. There was a small crawl space between the ceiling of the cabin and the roof, which had previously been filled with a mixture of sawdust and mouse droppings. I’d cleaned it out and replaced it with RU2000 pink insulation—not a huge job, really, and Eddie had helped. I was hyper-aware of the fact that I appeared to be doing more physical activity than usual, the kind that normal people would consider inappropriate for a pregnant lady, but I didn’t regard it as a deliberate effort to piss anybody off. It was just that I was not interested in being treated like a china doll and wanted to remain as independent as possible, for as long as possible. Aunt Susan had uttered dire warnings about climbing up the ladder to get into the crawl space under the eaves, the kind of warnings that, if you heeded them, would render you completely useless, lying in bed and shivering with fright, not risking so much as a paper cut, in case it harmed the baby. So, against all advice, I’d insulated the roof, and the difference it made in terms of cabin-coziness was significant. I wanted Becker to take note of it and approve. I wanted him to change his mind. I needn’t have bothered.
“There’s still a small matter of hauling wood inside and keeping the stove going,” he said. “What happens if the fire goes out during the night, and it’s thirty below outside?”
“The baby will be sleeping with me,” I said. “It’s not as if it’s going to be stashed in a crib on the porch, Becker.”
“What if you roll over in the night and squish it?” Oh, please. I knew then that we were diametrically opposed in terms of the most basic child-rearing theories, and we probably always would be. I hauled out my binder full of the notes I’d taken over the past while—the results of my “baby research” at the library, some downloaded off the net, some taken from Dr. Spock, others from more modern sources. I flipped to the stuff relating to studies about the benefits of infants sleeping with their parents and read out a paragraph or two. It didn’t help much. The major problem was that he had experience already, and I didn’t. Therefore, every opinion he held carried more weight with him than any theory I’d found elsewhere.
“Anyway, Mark, the baby’s not due till the end of April. It’s hardly likely that we’ll have thirty below temperatures that late in the year.” And on and on it went.
What complicated the evening’s discourse was the fact that I was, as I had promised, babysitting Eddie’s automatic baby. I hadn’t planned it that way; in fact, I had forgotten all about it and invited Becker over with the assumption that it would be just me and him, and the dogs, of course. Eddie had sprung it on me that afternoon, lugging the carrier-seat it came with, plus a list of instructions and a diaper bag all the way up the hill, where I had been in the planning stages of a new puppet.
“Polly—hi,”
