MARGARET MACPHERSON
The station wagon is packed to the roof, the hatch barely closing. My husband Tom has cleaned the garage, something I’ve been after him to do for weeks, and now damaged sheets of drywall, a tricycle with two wheels, bits of scrap plastic, a cracked garden hose, an old bureau with no drawers, and my pram, my corduroy covered, hooded, huge, old-fashioned, sagging workhorse of a perambulator, are on their way to landfill.
“Want to come to the dump?” He rubs his gloved hands together in anticipation.
“You’ve got the pram.”
“Oh, that.” He steps toward me, torn between comforting and cajoling. “It’s done its time, Paula. It’s served us well. You know yourself, the springs are shot on one side.”
I feel like he’s talking about me. Springs shot. I haven’t had a period in eight months and the real thing that is shot is my temper. I’m either crying or I’m angry beyond reason. And now he’s tossing away something precious.
All of my babies have ridden in that buggy. All of them have slept in it, out in the backyard at the foot of the stoop, with nothing but the canopy of our broad-leafed elm between their sweet eggshell cheeks and the sloping afternoon sun. Natalie and Jen, the twins, used to stand on the rails and hang on while I’d wheel Will down the road. They loved riding shotgun like that, leaning forward into the hood of the thing like joint figureheads on a massive land yacht. It was my method of transportation for years. Before we splurged and bought our second car, all four of us would plow through the autumn leaves or the sludge of spring, the pram at the heart of our passage.
“But, I thought we might fix it.” My feeble protest is lost in the scrape and shuffle of the garage door swinging down to block my view of newly ordered garden tools and our six bicycles suspended from the ceiling by their steering posts. Even Will rides a two-wheeler now. Has done for, what, six years? How did they grow so fast? Where did the time go?
“We?” He smiles and slaps his leather-gloved hands together again, anxious to get underway. “We’re done with all this baby stuff and thank God. It couldn’t be soon enough for me. Come on, the dump closes early on holidays.”
It’s Thanksgiving Day, a day of rot and ruin, but at least the snow hasn’t come yet and the wooden Adirondack chairs seem to hunker down on the grass, obstinate and reluctant to be stored. The sunlight on their broad arms and deep, low-slung seats makes their primary colours glow, and with my sunflowers only slightly wilted and the hearty heads of marigolds still poking through the limp foliage of frost nipped tomato plants, I can almost imagine August.
“Paula. Paula? Hey, you coming or not?”
“What about the kids?”
“Allison will mind them. I’ll tell her we’re going.”
He swings back into the yard and tramps to the back door, hollering at our eldest daughter, who is half-heartedly practicing the piano. As soon as he moves through the door, the tortured music stops. They are consulting and both appear on the back landing.
Allison is thirteen and a half, a tall, slender child totally unaware of her own pony-tailed loveliness. She was my serious baby, shy even, and cautious about each new discovery. She was born late in our relationship and I was a cautious new mother despite having the experience of a career. Shades of that early reticence still lingers in her personality.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Forty-five minutes, an hour, tops.”
“Just keep an ear open and half an eye on them, Allie,” I say. “Cut up an apple for Will if he’s hungry. Natalie and Jen are playing ponies so they probably won’t even know we’re gone.”
“I don’t feel great.”
Tom ignores her. “Oh, come on, Al. You can give the piano a rest and get some fresh air. You guys have time for the park if you leave right away.”
“The park’s for babies. We’ll hang here.” She smiles reluctantly at her daddy.
“Thanks, kiddo,” he says, ruffling her hair. “Maybe we’ll even bring you back a treat from the dump.” He’s down the stairs in a second and doesn’t see her roll her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. It’s the fretting mother voice, not the rough-and-tumble cheer of her daddy. It’s the only voice I’ve got left these days. My mother voice has consumed all the others.
“Oh, nothing.” The screen door bangs and she’s gone. A trill from bass to treble is her flippant farewell to practicing. In my mind’s eye I watch this rush past the piano and see her flop onto the couch, reaching for her latest book. She’s taken to reading my novels — Laurence, Atwood, Drabble — because they last longer. I shake my head and climb into the car.
“It smells funny in here.”
“Roll down your window. We’ve got a date at the dump.”
Tom’s in a good mood. He likes order and he’s achieved some semblance of that in the garage. The smell proves it. So I roll down my window and settle back in the passenger seat. It’s a glorious autumn afternoon and getting out of the city lifts my spirits.
“Did you used to bring things back from the dump?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah. My dad was a great picker. I think it was the handyman in him. He’d bring stuff home that someone had tossed because they didn’t know how to fix it. Mostly electric gizmos, small fiddly stuff he’d tinker with in the basement.” Tom laughs. “I remember one winter he spent hours rebuilding this appliance that had an electric can opener on one side and an ice crusher on the other. Replaced the motor and everything. He must have got his wires crossed somewhere because when my mom went to open a can of soup the whole machine started shaking like crazy. Tomato soup sprayed all over the kitchen. She threw the darn thing out in the yard, she was so mad. An ice crusher, imagine. Just what we needed in January.”
I do imagine it. I see Tom and his brothers laughing madly while the gadget dances across the kitchen counter splattering thick red blobs of condensed soup across the frosted windows. I see Tom’s father’s face, amazed at his agitating creation. And I see his mother on her knees afterward, dishcloth in hand, cleaning the mess off the cupboard fronts, the fridge, the floor. The dishwater is the colour of blood.
When she opens the back door and heaves the piece of dump junk out the door, I applaud. I imagine its ridiculous weight sinking into a snow bank, disappearing for good. I feel sorry for Tom’s mother, a woman in a household of men.
My husband is a man in a household of women. His father used to bring things home from the dump. My husband takes things there. My things. My pram.
The afternoon I found out our fourth and final child would be a boy — the son we had barely dared to hope for — the twins were sleeping in the pram. All too familiar nausea had sent me to the doctor. He warned me I was too old. He told me to be satisfied with the three girls and I remember feeling slightly guilty looking at the twins slouched together in the belly of the buggy, all sweat and curls, plump little limbs entwined, exhausted from the fresh air and missed afternoon nap. They had just turned three and I had barely recovered from their toddler days. I was happy, all right, but it seemed a betrayal to the girls, as though they weren’t enough.
I tried to hide my pleasure at a boy, wanted to surprise Tom, but he guessed right away by the way my secret knowledge played on my mouth.
When Will came, Allison claimed him as her own. The twins were an indisputable unit who allowed an older sister into their play only when it suited them. But Will was wide open and ready to be loved. Allison spent hours playing with him, lugging him around the house, talking to him, dressing him up in her old clothes or the tattered cast-offs from the twins to further disguise his gender.
I let her take him out in the pram and they’d wheel around the block for hours, playing a game called Runaway Baby. She’d get the buggy up to speed and then let go, running alongside making faces at Will until the liberated pushcart came to a wallowing halt on the grassy boulevard. In her own way, she was practicing being a mommy and Will was her ideal guinea pig.
Will loved speed. He embraced danger right from the start. Clad in a drooping diaper and wispy floral blouse, he would transform innocent toys into weapons and make combat noises with his pouty, kissable mouth. Block towers would crash to the ground, helicopters were shot from the sky, ships would sink and vehicles were rendered wheel-less by the force of their fiery crashes. Will was my war baby.
He was also the one I least wanted to grow up. After Allison taught him how to tie his own shoes, he’d never let me help. He’d push me aside and I’d wait, exasperated, while he concentrated on making those two loops, that complicated cross-under of the bow. It would be so much quicker if he let me do it for him.
“You’re pissed off about the pram, aren’t you, Paula?”
Ah, perceptive Tom. So subtle, so delicate, so modern-man sensitive.
“No.”
“Yes, you are. I can tell. You’ve hardly said a word.”
“I was thinking about your mom, about the ice crusher.”
“Okay.” He swallows my lie because he doesn’t want a fight. Neither do I, but it’s there, anyway. A simmering thing I can’t articulate.
We’re on the outskirts of the city now, near the oil refineries. On my side of the highway, farmland rolls in fields of yellow and brown. Those swaths that haven’t been harvested have been stooked. In a distant field, there’s only stubble on the ground and, just beyond, the next field has been ploughed in preparation for spring planting. The farmers are readying for winter, the long season of darkness and dormancy.
Turning toward Tom is like looking into a different picture. His face is framed by giant industrial oil and gas plants, a massive tangle of pipes and stacks connected by lines to huge domed holding tanks. The refineries cluster together, four or five separate complexes belching smoke and steam and flared gas into the winter-quickened air. There’s no down time here. Men work around the clock, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Tom worked the line for years until he got his ticket and moved up to management. Now he makes sure his guys keep production up, keep feeding the relentless processing system, the hungry maw of the machines.
“What do you want for supper tonight?”
He looks at me, puzzled. “I don’t care.”
“Well, someone has to care.”
I can’t believe my battleground is so small and domestic, so impossibly mundane. Tom doesn’t take the bait. He’s probably sorry he asked me to come.
We have to drive onto a large scale, which weighs our car before we arrive at the booth. A man in a blue uniform slides open the little glass window.
“Got any batteries, hazardous household goods, corrosives, or tires in there?” he asks.
“Nope. Couple of bicycle tires.”
“No problem. It’s a ten-dollar minimum per ton. Pay on your way out.”
He waves us through the gates and we roll toward a parking lot at the edge of a man-made gully. Tom backs in and we both get out of the car. Below are dumpsters with large mechanical arms attached. The arms crank up and fall every minute and a half, pulverizing the material cast into the dumpster. It’s efficient waste management. It’s impressive and both of us watch in silence as the heavy crushing arm smashes the items in the dumpster before a mechanical rake drags the garbage out of the way.
“Oh, my.”
Tom hands me his gloves and pops the hatch. We grab the garbage and start to throw it over the bank into the jaws of the crusher. I fling an old clothes line and some drywall board covered with chalk drawings from the children. Tom takes the bigger bits, the broken bureau and a rusted lawn chair, and heaves them over the side.
The pram, lodged at the back of the station wagon, is awkwardly compressed and we have to grab it on each side and pull the handle down to get it out of the car. We both struggle to get a grip low down and heave together, one on each side. The force of our release opens it up. The burgundy hood flops open, the compressed carriage spreads and for a moment it is full again, a baby buggy spinning its wheels in mid-air. It hangs suspended, beautiful and terrible, until it thuds to the bottom of the dumpster moments before the heavy arm descends. Although I close my eyes and look away, I hear the scream of metal upon metal and the yielding crunch of the frame. My pram is raked away.
“That’ll be ten bucks,” says the gatekeeper after our empty vehicle is re-weighed. We proceed in silence through the gates.
“Are you okay?”
The empty fields and the setting sun are no consolation and I am barely able to converse as we roll home. Why would he understand? How can I expect it of him? He no more cares for the pram than I care for the refinery. The refinery is relentless. It never stops. It is swallowing up all the farmland. Unproductive. Over. It’s all over.
The house is warm, lit from within, when we return. Tom parks the car in the garage with a swollen sense of accomplishment. I hurry in through the back door, anxious to get away from him, to see my children, still so young.
The twins rush up. “Mom, Mom. It’s Allison. Allison needs you.” There is excitement, almost panic, in their fluttering bird voices. “She’s in the bathroom and she won’t come out.”
I feel the weight of the day lift off and my feet become light as adrenaline rushes though my body. I hurry through the kitchen to the darkened hallway. There is a thin crack of light under the door.
“Allison? Allison, honey? Are you okay? Let me in. It’s Mommy.”
I touch the knob, expecting the door to be locked, but it turns in my hand. “Allison?”
She is sitting on the toilet. Her panties between her knees are stained a rusty burgundy. She looks up at me. And I stare back at her wide, expectant face but, for the life of me, I cannot speak.