hungry

When Lucy Wingfeather was small, she lived with her real mother, where she was kept, for a time, in the basement, on account of being bad. A puppy came to the basement one day, and Lucy reasoned that he must have been bad too. He came to her, to the place where she stayed in the corner with the blankets and old clothes. He was soft all over and warm and wiggly. His black fur was like velvet. Lucy wanted to hold him but he squirmed away, scratching her with his small sharp nails.

“Jesus!” she said. She clutched his rump but he squealed and scared her, so she let him go. He ran to the bottom of the stairs and started to cry. Too small to climb the stairs, he just stood at the bottom and whined. Lucy wondered why he didn’t like her.

“Shhhh,” Lucy hissed, but he didn’t pay any attention to her. She called to him in whispers. Lucy could tell the puppy didn’t know how bad it was to cry at the stairs like that. Lucy stayed in the corner. There was only one small window in the basement and it was by the stairs. The puppy could be seen in the light that came in through the window; he whined and looked up the stairs. Lucy, still mad at him for not staying with her, threw things at him to try to get him to quit.

After a while, the puppy figured out how to get up onto the first step. Once up, he couldn’t get down. He cried even more. Lucy wanted to go and help him but she was too afraid. A little while later, he made it up one more step, where he curled up and fell asleep.

Later, Lucy consoled herself with the thought that she tried to tell the puppy. Lucy knew bad things happened if you cried by the steps. Stupid puppy, she thought.

The puppy was still asleep on the second step when Lucy’s mother, with her heavy steps and hard-landing heels, was heard on the floor overhead, moving to the door at the top of the stairs. Lucy held her breath when her mother came thumping down the stairs. It only took one of those heavy heel strikes in the centre of the puppy’s back to break it. Puppy made a terrible noise.

“Jesus,” Lucy’s mother cried, surprised, crashing down the remaining two steps before she caught her balance. Still holding Lucy’s plate of supper in one hand, Lucy’s mother leaned over to examine the crushed puppy. “Stupid little bastard,” she said.

She set Lucy’s plate in the usual spot on the counter beside the stairs before turning to clomp back up, avoiding the puppy, which was making small, awful noises. Lucy was so afraid of the noises that she didn’t dare go near her supper plate. In the morning, when the sun came in through the little window, the noises had stopped and Lucy could see the still curve of soft black fur on the step.

After the strangers came to get Lucy out of the basement, Lucy was sent to a series of foster homes. The longest foster home stay was Lucy’s last one – she made it almost to the end of grade eight. On her first day at her last foster home, Billy, the real kid of the foster parents, took her into his parents’ bedroom and showed her a cupboard with piles and piles of porno magazines. “Look,” he said, flipping a magazine open and showing her pictures of two girls kissing. “What do you think of that?”

Lucy didn’t know what she thought about it but could tell Billy thought something about it, and he wanted some kind of reaction from her. By then, she’d learned a thing or two about when to give boys what they wanted and when not to.

“So?” she said, in the face of the dirty magazine. “Who cares about that?”

When his mother came in and caught them looking in the cupboard, the first words out of Billy’s mouth were, “She made me.”

By the time she was in grade eight, Lucy knew too well what Billy thought about the pictures in his dad’s magazines and how he expected her to respond.

The day she saw the group of boys from her grade eight class at the school playground, Lucy didn’t turn to go a different way. She wasn’t afraid of them. The opposite, in fact. Lucy had wanted to have a boyfriend since she was in grade seven. She sometimes dreamed so vividly that Davis Anderson, the most popular boy in grade eight, had asked her to “go out” with him that she had to remind herself that it wasn’t real when she woke up. She imagined how her life would be different if she got herself a boyfriend. A real boyfriend that is. Billy didn’t count.

The boys waited until she walked right into the playground and stood by the fort before they paid any attention to her. It was the school’s new playground and it was supposed to be some kind of a boat, although Lucy could never see the resemblance. It was officially named the “Friend Ship.” The boys were all in Lucy’s class except for the black-haired boy, who Lucy knew went to a different school. He laughed like an excited girl when he saw her standing there. One by one, the boys jumped off the fort and stood around her. There was Tremaine Sheppard, a yellow-skinned Métis boy with a long face and a lumpy nose, the black-haired boy with thick, dark-rimmed glasses whose name she didn’t know, and a French boy called Gilles with long hair that fell in his eyes, who got picked on because of his girl’s name. Normally, they all ignored her.

“Lucy Wingfeather,” said Tremaine in a mocking tone.

Even though they were in the same class at school, Lucy was surprised he knew her name. She tried to smile.

“Lucy Weirdfucker,” said Gilles, and the other boys laughed. Lucy noticed the black-haired boy’s nose was runny and he snuffled a lot trying to keep the snot inside.

When Tremaine stepped forward to take Lucy by the shoulders, she thought he was going to kiss her right there in front of the other boys and she began to close her eyes in anticipation of her first real kiss. Instead, Tremaine turned Lucy around so that her back was to him and he pulled her close and hugged her to his body. He held her tight to him and bent over at the waist, forcing her to bend too. His elbows dug into her sides while his hands slid up the front of her top to cup her loose breasts both at once. Lucy didn’t try to stop him. The hug felt good and she didn’t even so much mind his hands. The other boys laughed and encouraged him, and Lucy felt like she was a part of something. Tremaine held her like that for a moment before removing his hands from her shirt.

“Come on,” he said, and took her hand. He jumped onto the hanging bridge that led up to the fort, or “ship,” as it was supposed to be known, and Lucy followed. He lay down in a corner of the fort on the hard wooden boards and pulled Lucy down on top of him. They were partially hidden behind the short walls of the fort. Tremaine rolled over on top of Lucy and put his hand up her shirt again. This time he kissed her too, sending warmth spreading through her belly and tingling inside her chest. Lucy had never felt this before and she thought it might be what it felt like when you fell in love. He took her hand and pulled it down to make her feel his hardness through his jeans. She knew he wanted her to touch it, and so she undid his pants. He exhaled deeply when she reached inside his underwear. Right away, Lucy could see that being with Tremaine was different from Billy. For one thing, she liked that Tremaine kissed her and acted like they were doing something together. With Billy, it always seemed like he was making her do something that was just his idea. Billy never tried to kiss her. She wondered if kissing might be the thing that made people fall in love.

After he was finished, Lucy tried to hug him. She thought that Tremaine Sheppard, despite his lumpy nose, wasn’t entirely unattractive. Lucy just wouldn’t have picked him first, is all. Lucy consoled herself about her second-string boyfriend with the fact that he did have a silver front tooth and it made him look tough. She firmly told herself she was pleased that he was going to be her boyfriend now. Tremaine didn’t spend long before he did up his pants and whispered, “I’ll be right back.” He jumped off the fort from the top and she could hear the excited voices of the other boys as Tremaine joined them.

She waited and imagined that the other boys must think she was daring for what she did with Tremaine. They’d know Tremaine was now her boyfriend.

She heard him coming back up the hanging bridge and smiled expectantly. Instead of Tremaine, though, it was Gilles, the small French boy, who entered the fort. He came over and sat beside her on the wooden floor of the fort, slinging his arm around her neck. She let him do this, and soon he had his tongue deep in her mouth, his lips pressed so hard on hers that tears sprang to her eyes. This kissing wasn’t nice, she thought to herself. She wondered about Tremaine and then thought that this must be what he wanted her to do. She was determined to think of Tremaine as her boyfriend, and if he had sent Gilles up to the fort to do this, then she would go along with it. Maybe it was a test, she thought. She had heard stories about other girls, popular girls, doing things like this. This might be what it would take to get to be popular, she thought. So she let Gilles grind away on top of her while she daydreamed about how her newly enhanced status at school would feel the next day.

After Gilles, Lucy waited again for Tremaine. Instead, the black-haired boy came up to the fort. She didn’t want to kiss him, so she asked him his name.

“Greg,” he said, and she knew he was lying. She didn’t know why, but she knew it was something boys did.

He tried to kiss her again, and so she said, “Can I try on your glasses?”

He looked at her strangely, like he didn’t trust her. Lucy didn’t like that look. But then he took off his glasses and put them on her face, jabbing her ears with the arms. She couldn’t see through them and they made her dizzy. She reached up to take them off but he grabbed her hand and held it, took them off her with his other hand.

“My mom will kill me if they get broke,” he said, and giggled his high-pitched laugh.

Lucy put her hand on the fly of his jeans, but he didn’t want her to do that either. Instead, he took his own thing out of his pants and then rolled on top of her and jabbed it between her legs. Lucy looked at the sky, clouding over, and waited for him to finish. She quelled a feeling of disappointment by thinking about how she would hug Tremaine when this was over.

After “Greg,” she waited for Tremaine to come back to the fort. It took a while before she realized that the boys had left the playground. It was getting dark. Lucy left the fort and walked home with the scent of the boys on her fingers and her clothes.

Seven months later, Lucy arrived at school after the bell but before the teacher. All the kids in the class were in their seats, talking loudly. Randy Rhode, who sat at the back, saw Lucy come in and he said, at full volume, “Look, I think Lucy’s pregnant.” This caused the other kids to laugh because Lucy’s belly was so big she could hardly manoeuvre into her desk anymore – of course she was pregnant. Lucy went to her seat, which was also at the back. “Everyone says it’s your brother did that to you,” Randy said. “Is it true?”

Lucy turned and looked into Randy’s face for a long time. Finally, he looked away. But Lucy wasn’t trying to shame Randy into looking away. She was trying to imagine what his words meant. Is that what people thought all along? she wondered. Do people really think that? Randy was talking about Billy, her foster parents’ “real” kid. Billy didn’t go to Lucy’s school. He went on the bus to some special school for smart kids. There was a word for those kids, but Lucy could never remember it – she just knew it wasn’t the same word as they used in Lucy’s school – “special ed.” Billy’s word was a better word than that.

Finally, she crossed her arms and put her head down on her desk and mumbled, “He ain’t my brother,” which was just stupid, she realized too late, because it was like she was saying it was true that Billy got her pregnant. If they didn’t say it before, they said it then, that Lucy was pregnant by her brother. “She lets her brother fuck her.” After that, things only got worse. Eventually, Lucy was expelled for fighting even though it wasn’t on school grounds. Lucy told herself it was okay, she was used to people making excuses to get rid of her, and so, Fuck them, she thought.

Lucy Wingfeather had her baby. Less than a day old, he lay in his Plexiglas bassinet beside Lucy’s bed in the hospital. A dimpled beige curtain provided the only privacy in the hot room with eight full beds. A woman who wore her paper hat like a disposable lid couldn’t bring the breakfast tray fast enough, as far as Lucy was concerned. Lucy scooped dry corn flakes to her lips at first with the spoon but then with her fingers. She chewed the flakes into clods and swallowed them in chunks. She guzzled the milk from the carton, a sweet white line running to her chin. She tore the two paper sugar packs open and poured them, one at a time, in small white cascades onto her tongue. She looked at the Plexiglas cot and thought, He sleeps a lot.

That afternoon, a nurse snuck in and caught Lucy lying back on her pillow with her eyes closed. The nurse plucked up Lucy Wingfeather’s baby just like that from his plastic space-alien bed. And Lucy, who wasn’t really asleep anyway, and who had never had anything of her own before in her life, sat up straight away and followed the nurse. “Where are you taking him?” she asked.

The nurse turned and blinked through thick lenses, unsmiling. “He needs a bath.”

“Not yet,” Lucy pleaded.

The nurse blinked again and said, “But you were asleep,” as if this was some kind of logic.

“No.” Lucy shook her head like a child. Lucy hadn’t been asleep. “Uh-uh.” Lucy stood with her arms out, waiting for her baby to be returned.

The slight tightening of the nurse’s lips told Lucy the power game was on. The nurse turned and walked away, the baby tucked firmly in the crook of one arm. “This baby needs a bath.”

Lucy, with leaky breasts and torn perineum, shuffled after the nurse. Lucy watched the nurse clip along the silent corridor, getting farther and farther ahead.

Finally, Lucy caught up to them in a small room, where she looked on helplessly as the nurse stripped the baby. With a dish of soapy water on hand, the nurse rubbed each fold of his newly hatched skin with a soapy cloth. The creases at the backs of his knees, his underarms, his groin. Nowhere was safe. The nurse worked silently and, it seemed to Lucy, angrily. The baby’s head and fine black hair were sudsed and scrubbed before she held him like a football under one arm and rinsed his head under the tap over a large industrial sink, where the falling water made a hollow metal echo. His face was scarlet from the screaming.

The nurse squeezed cream on his bum, diapered him, wrapped him like a tight twist of grease bannock and handed over a small alien that smelled like antiseptic and soap.

Back in her room, wide awake, a knot in her throat, Lucy Wingfeather examined her baby. She sniffed his head, his ears, the folds in his neck. All of it was gone: the smell of her body, the hot, peppery scent of birth, the metallic ping of blood. None of it lingered.

Finally, she found a small streak of dried blood behind one ear. But it wasn’t enough. She put the baby in his bucket and let him cry.

Lucy Wingfeather was sent home.

The social worker, whose name was Joni, had helped her find an apartment. It was one of the few close to the rent allowance rate. She only had to take a bit from her food money to make up the difference. Lucy found little brown bugs in the cupboards. The bugs seemed to like the dry cheese in the noodles and found ways to burrow into the packages. Lucy couldn’t really blame them.

Joni came to do a home visit and asked the same question she’d asked before. “Who is the baby’s father?”

Lucy knew what the social worker wanted. She wanted the welfare to pay less for the baby because Lucy was supposed to file for child support from the father. Lucy did what she normally did with this social worker – she started to cry. It usually worked. The social worker seemed to think that the memory of the baby’s father was so painful that the mere mention of it made her cry.

“Oh, Lucy,” Joni said and slid over on the couch to put a consoling arm around Lucy’s shoulders. Joni fished a tissue out of her purse and handed it over. “Lucy,” she said in a sympathetic voice, “honey, you’ve got to put your burden down. Aren’t you tired of carrying it all by yourself yet?”

When it became apparent that Lucy didn’t have an answer about the baby’s father, Joni prepared to leave.

“You’re leaking,” Joni said. Lucy looked down to see her thin white t-shirt soaked with warm milk. Lucy didn’t like the way the nurse had insisted on binding her chest in the hospital when she chose not to breastfeed, so she’d taken the binding off almost immediately after coming home. As a result, she spent most of the day soaked with her own milk.

“That’s okay,” Lucy said, “it makes me smell sweet.”

Joni was gone and the baby was crying again. To Lucy, it seemed a lonely sound in the empty apartment. Lucy turned the volume on the television louder and tried to think what to do. The basement came to mind, but Lucy was in an apartment and there was no basement. Well, there was, she thought, but it had other apartments in it and a laundry room with coin-operated machines that never worked.

She had learnt a brandy trick from a foster mom who took in all the babies – brandy in the baby’s milk made it sleep. She had no brandy or anything like it – she wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol, even if she had the money. Besides, she was out of baby milk anyway.

Instead, she left the baby lying on the couch and took his soother to the kitchen where she dipped its wet end into the sugar bag. The white granules coated it like a thin crust of jewels. Returning to the living room, she plopped on the couch beside the baby and put the soother to his lips. Instantly his cries stopped. His eyes went wide and he sucked hungrily at the rubber end. Lucy ran a finger over his head, feeling the dark hair, as soft as fur. He watched her with intensity. Pop. The soother burst from his lips as if he’d purposely pushed it out. They both waited, each scrutinizing the other for a dumb moment, and then the baby twisted up his face and released a loud wail. Lucy went to the kitchen to retrieve the sugar bag, brought it back to the couch. She dipped the wet end in again and watched as the baby greedily took it. Over and over again, Lucy and the baby repeated the ritual until finally his eyes glazed over and he fell asleep.

Lucy snapped off the TV. In the silence, the image of one rural foster home came to mind – a farm, and the dry, lazy heat she associated with her summer there. Lucy lay down beside her baby and fell asleep. She dreamed of fresh butter, sliding down her throat. She woke to the afternoon sunshine filtering through the thin curtains.

The baby’s small black-capped head squirmed beside her, but he wasn’t crying. He turned his head and smacked his lips, rooting. His fist found its way to his mouth for a moment before jerking out of reach again. Then Lucy Wingfeather’s baby found Lucy’s breast with his tiny bow mouth and he sucked on the damp fabric of her t-shirt. Lucy lifted her shirt and the baby latched on. Both their eyes widened with surprise. Lucy felt the baby’s sharp tug on her breast. He stared into her eyes like a hypnotist, refusing to release her. She watched him, eyes dark and serious as he rhythmically suckled, taking what he needed. Gradually, he dared to close his eyes. She longed to tell someone, but there was no one to tell.

Afterward, Lucy held the baby to her face, where she inhaled the scent of her own milky whisper on his breath.