SHELLEY A. LEEDAHL
Not a wink of sleep the night before, and now in this clinic with ancient Chatelaine and Parenting magazines littered about the waiting room, Flora fears she is regressing into metaphors. A trapdoor has opened. Her limbs are anchored by chains that could topple Douglas firs. When the nurse calls her, she may not be able to move. This morning she could not get out of bed. She had wanted to stay buried beneath the quilt and stare at the sea-coloured curtains. Forever. She counted to a hundred before she swung her feet to the floor.
She is going missing piece by piece, except for the ominous lump — nothing like a baby — growing in her belly. No one notices this simultaneous withering and expansion. Not Harp, nor her son, Barry, whom they only see on Sundays, and always with his goat-faced wife who never offers to clear the table or do dishes.
“Flora Rolheiser, the doctor will see you now.” Flora rises. The waiting room smells of urine.
“It’s exhaustion,” he says. She begins to explain but he talks over her, scribbling unintelligible words on his prescription pad. “I want to see you again in two weeks.”
She joins the queue at the pharmacy in the clinic’s basement. The man in front of her sports holes in the back of his neck, as if he’s been attacked with a fork. Flora’s turn. The pharmacist slides a bottle into a small white bag and folds the top over, then draws two fingers across the length of the fold. She does it again and Flora feels the tender spots behind her earlobes, beneath her pulse, where she and her siblings would press to torment each other as children.
In bed with Harp, she thinks that everything has something to do with blood. Her own menstrual blood didn’t make an appearance until the very last day of Grade 8. She recalls running the mile home with her report card, happy about progressing from junior high to high school, then feeling the low cramp and strange wetness in her panties. Four blocks to go. At home she locked the bathroom door and there it was: the rust-red evidence that meant life would never be the same again.
She was the last among her friends to get her period. In Miss Hoffman’s Grade 5 class at Jubilee School — a round school with classrooms orbiting the gymnasium — periods and pierced ears were the dual barometers of a girl’s popularity. It was difficult to determine which earned more respect. Some suffered the pinch of the stud gun at Darlene’s Hair Haven; others opted for the slower and messier home route — an older sister always willing and waiting with ice cubes, a potato, and a sewing needle. Flora coveted her week in the spotlight following Remembrance Day, 1974. Then the next set of virgin ears was sacrificed and someone else became the centre of the grade school universe.
The students — a Fortrel clad mélange of Donnas, Lindas, Cheryls, and Cindys — memorized states and capitals, wrote rhyming poems, and surrendered hours to Nancy Drew mysteries while twisting their gold studs or shepherd hooks and dabbing red, swollen lobes with hydrogen peroxide-soaked cotton balls. Disinfectant was the perfume of their youth, followed within the next few years by inexpensive cologne that smelled like a strawberry dessert. After the requisite number of weeks had passed, the girls euphorically graduated into real earrings. Flora’s first two real pairs: round lavender studs shaped like Smarties that she purchased for five dollars at Rexall Drugs, and her mother’s dangly crimson rhinestones that jingled when she shook her head.
As for menstruation, the girls took Midol for cramps, were excused from gym, and wore bulky sanitary napkins like their mothers did. The pads were held in place by a stretchy white belt that looked — Flora thinks about it now — confusing. The pad was like a mattress for Barbie dolls. Later, an adhesive strip would make the belts obsolete. Daring girls soon advanced to tampons — another type of graduation — but Flora took her sweet time.
Yes, everything has something to do with blood. And now that she has mostly dried up, there is new pain. A series of hard karate chops to her spleen. She stays folded until it passes, a caricature of an aged woman. Harp, beside her, is on his back. His foot is warm against hers. Soon he will be snoring. Something else to keep her awake. She rests both hands, priest-like, over the swelling. She lifts Harp’s soft, warm fingers and asks: “Can you feel it?”
He probes for three seconds. “No, Flora. Go to sleep.”
Easy for him. When did she last sleep through the night? She can’t recall, maybe during that time she was hooked on prescription sleeping pills. Little, blue, foul-tasting bullets. Oh, they knocked her out. Kept her purring right through the night-sweats that soaked her sheets and finally had Harp moving into the bed in the spare bedroom some nights. “Jesus, woman, you’re an inferno!” Didn’t she know it. But eventually she needed to take two pills, and then even two could no longer knock her out.
A bang against the window. She starts. Surely a bird. Or a bat? Earlier that evening, at dusk, she stood out front beneath the flamboyant elms while brown bats swooped toward her. Begun as a test of faith, this twilight ritual is now habit. The bats fascinate and terrify in equal parts, like standing at the edge of a hurricane, or losing control of a cantering horse. The boulevard reminds her of the inner city neighbourhood where she grew up in a large white-pillared home that didn’t belong to the street or the era. The ground sunk in graves around its perimeter. She and her brother set golf balls at one end of their parents’ sloping bedroom floor and watched them roll to the other side. And once, a sleepwalking girl with a face as pale as an envelope and waist-length yellow hair knocked on their door at three a.m. and fainted.
She thinks that’s what happened. But memory is a shapeshifter. That one might be from a movie. Years later, when she was telling the sleepwalker story to amuse Barry, she wondered if the blonde teen was also the one who scalded another girl with boiling water. The one who led them through the funeral home window to see a withered baby, small as a pound of butter. Perhaps these things did not happen at all.
Harp snores. She gives his back a gentle push and the snoring subsides. The clock ticks in the front room.
Harp says she’s losing it. He says it’s “The Change.” An archaic expression. Witchy. A week ago he found her in the garden, the moon a chalk-smudge between lilacs. “Only the Italians know what to do with pears,” she said. He peeled her fingers one by one off the shovel she was driving into the hearts of her hostas.
Weeks pass and she journeys a province away. She’s never gone off alone — not once. She stares out the bus window into the fields of dirt-blown snow and skidoo tracks.
Banff. She thinks the water here will taste like rust, then takes a drink and there it is: rust. She fears it will make her sick. Sicker. She has no idea what the pills are supposed to do, but they have had zero effect on whatever is growing inside her. Why didn’t the doctor give her something for that? Below the curve of her belly she cannot see her shoes. Sit-ups, the doctor advises.
Harp will find her note. She has left the hotel phone number. He will call soon. She has walked down the avenue of restaurants and expensive shops, has seen a fist-sized jawbreaker in a candy store for sixteen dollars, and has stared at the looming white-coned mountains until her eyes burned. She has watched the winter river, still open in spots, writhing and surrealistic. She has made a wide berth around three full-grown elk relaxing in the snow. Like the indifferent young girls working in the shops, they had paid her no attention.
She is not hungry for food. She is hungry for something she can’t articulate. Has her existence mattered at all, to anyone? She doesn’t know. She stops in front of a restaurant; in the end, one must eat, even without appetite.
“Are you waiting for anyone?”
She swallows. A Japanese couple in Norwegian sweaters — she had seen them unloading snowboards from their Subaru earlier — look sympathetically at her. She thinks they might invite her to join them. If they do, she will politely thank them, but say no.
She addresses the waitress’s forehead. “Cockroaches can hold their breath for forty minutes. Did you know that?” Oh, why did she say that?
After the meal she returns to her room on Banff Avenue and lies down, still wearing her boots. She undoes the single pair of pants she can still fit into. Lycra. Ingenious. She can keep up a modicum of fashion. She shimmies the pants down over her soft flesh, spreads her fingers and lets them roam across her spongy skin — pushing, defining, measuring. Her cells multiply beneath her fingers. A kind of magic, like the hypnotist’s show she saw as a teen, her own sister turned into a robot. One hypnotized man had tripped while under, and she remembers the blood on the floor where his head hit, the terrible sound of bone meeting concrete.
Everything has something to do with blood.
Her sister had been her parents’ favourite. Older, more confident. Louder. You knew when she was in a room. Flora was the mouse; consequently, there were things she never got as a girl, things she wanted badly. A marionette. A blue dress that would bell around her legs when she spun. Sea-monkeys. You could order them from comic books, sprinkle the colourful crystals into jars of water and watch them grow. She had a friend who had a collection of snow globes. She had a friend who had won a slab of chocolate as big as a tabletop.
Flora closes her eyes and sees colours. Swirling. Monkey shapes.
When she wakes, shivering, the clock on the nightstand says two a.m. Harp hasn’t called. She has come this long way and walked too much, and if she doesn’t turn up the heat she will catch a cold. Jesus, woman.
Streetlights illuminate the wall and the bottom half of the bed. She pulls the curtain back an inch. Young people loiter in the hotel parking lot, smoking and laughing. One boy crushes a beer can with his boot.
Flora steps from the window. She fiddles with the heating system until the fan pushes out a dusty smell and masks the noise outside. She has always been calmed by the sound of forced air. As a girl she ate her Alpha-Bits while sitting directly on the register, the hot air puffing the nightgown around her knees. Back then she often thought about being a woman. She thought about kissing boys in cars or during slow songs at school dances. She thought about being called Sweetheart, or Baby. Now she feels she may die without ever having been loved.
She feels for the here-and-now nightgown in the small suitcase. She slips off her clothes, and there it is: her tumour, grown bigger in the last few hours, she is certain. She sits on the edge of the bed and muses. Her very cells acting out. Growing like a brand new planet.