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I am on a storm tossed cruise ship on the high seas, and I am struggling to keep upright as I lurch down the aisle of what seems to be a grand dining room. I am dressed in a 1920s sailor suit which is a little too big for me, and I’m about to get married to the captain. The wedding guests are holding on to each other for support, but there are only a few of them, and I know instinctively that a lot of passengers have abandoned ship already. I wonder why I haven’t.
The captain, in a white dress uniform, has his back to me and appears to be steering, looking out of a large porthole at the end of the room. Through the porthole I can see waves that are miles high—it looks like we’re going through a mountain range. Oddly, I’m not seasick. I stumble and drop my bouquet, a cunningly arranged bunch of carrots, and I hear the band leader call out to his musicians to “keep on playing, chaps.”
When I get to the end of the room, the captain turns around with a big smile on his face. He is very short. It is Bryan. He reaches out his hand towards me and at the same moment, I see the iceberg looming up in the porthole behind his head. The band strikes up the theme song to the movie Titanic. I wake up just before impact with Celine Dion’s wretched, saccharine bellow reverberating in my brain.
As I swigged my first coffee of the day, I congratulated my subconscious for its lack of subtlety. In my sleeping state, at least, marriage to Becker spelled certain disaster. I lit a cigarette and looked at the list of pros and cons I’d written out (albeit in a somewhat chemically-altered state) the night before. The Pro list went like this:
REASONS TO MARRY MARK BECKER
The Con list was longer:
REASONS NOT TO MARRY MARK BECKER
All in all, the Con list was more compelling than the Pro list. Aunt Susan had taught me to make lists like that when I was faced with a major decision. I considered telling her about Becker’s proposal and showing her the list, but I wasn’t sure what her reaction would be. A year previously I would have put money on her saying “Marry that policeman? You’ve got to be kidding!”, but now I wasn’t so sure. She seemed to be more concerned with my security and my future than she used to be. I guessed she was feeling her age.
The thing is that for me, an attachment has always been something to be choked down, a cocktail of conflicting desires with the sweetest taste to be found in the dregs.
The weaving together, the knitting of affections, has always been a challenge, a complicated obstacle course of cause and effect, clash and compromise. It isn’t that I set myself up for failure; I’ve always built my domestic constructions to last. They’re robust, towering things cemented together with plans for the future and constant reassurances of fidelity. My partners have trusted me, always. I don’t trust myself, ever. Discontent gathers like saliva, making whatever is good taste bitter. The biggest rush of all is cutting loose.
I loved the idea of loving Becker, but that’s as far as I was willing to go. I knew that marrying him wouldn’t work, and if I was going to hurt him by saying no, at least that was better than going along with it and then screwing up after the deed was done.
I burned both lists and resolved to give Becker’s ring back, with a grateful, loving and gentle “thanks but no thanks.”
Robin arrived on the dot of nine, apple juice bottle (still warm) in hand. She was pale and alone.
“Eddie’s working this morning,” she said. Eddie worked in the bakery at Watson’s General Store in Laingford. I wondered suddenly whether David Kane would try to headhunt him for the Kountry Pantree.
“So, let’s do the test,” I said, trying to be cheerful. After having come to my decision about Becker, I felt a little melancholy, as if I’d just buried something or someone I cared about.
The pregnancy test included a couple of plastic swizzle sticks with little pill-sized orbs embedded in a mesh cage at the bottom. Sort of like a Q-tip with a candy at the end. There were two of them, and the accompanying literature explained that this was a two-for-one deal, in case you wanted a second opinion.
The instructions were extremely simple but written in such a way that made it obvious the manufacturers assumed that the question of yes or no was a joyful one.
“If the ball turns blue,” the pamphlet said, “congratulations! See your physician right away to confirm the results!” It didn’t say “Better luck next time” with reference to the ball not turning blue.
“Oh, God, I hope it doesn’t turn blue,” Robin said.
“Me too,” I said. “Now, what it says we have to do is put the swizzle stick here into this little test tube, with a slug of your apple juice. You do that part, okay?” I watched her perform the experiment with shaking hands.
“We’ve got to wait for five minutes then put the stick into the other test tube with the stuff in this other bottle. Then we wait another ten minutes and then we’ll know. If it turns blue, we’ll figure out what to do next.”
I put my watch on the table so that we could both observe the minutes ticking by.
“We were careful, you know,” Robin said.
“So Eddie said,” I said.
“It was just that the condom came off once, eh? We were so scared. It got stuck inside me, and he had to pull it out. I guess it leaked. It was so gross.”
“Are you using anything else? Spermicidal foam or anything?” I felt like Doctor Ruth and suppressed the urge to speak in a German accent.
“What’s that?”
“It’s like hair mousse. You spray it in and then if the condom breaks or comes off, the foam kills those little sperms dead like bug spray.”
“Eeew.”
“Look, Robin, the whole sex thing is ‘eeew’ if you look at it that way. You have to protect yourself, though. Eddie—and yes, I know he cares about you a lot—but Eddie isn’t the one who would have to deal with pregnancy directly if it happened. You would.”
“He loves me.”
“I know he does, honey, but being a parent is hard work. It’s for life. Have you thought about what you’ll do if this swizzle stick turns blue?”
“Yeah, I guess. There are some girls at school who had babies.”
“Are they still at school?”
“One is. She’s a friend of mine. Tanya. Her Mom takes care of Tyler when she’s at school. And I’ve met her for coffee downtown a couple of times. Tyler’s really cute, and Tanya really loves him.”
“I bet she grew up really fast, though.”
“Oh, yeah. She can’t go out with us any more, and she wears sweats all the time now. She used to be this really hot dresser, you know? Now she doesn’t even wear her nose ring any more.”
“Would your Mom help take care of your baby, if you had one?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. She works full-time.”
“I see. So you would probably have to find a daycare space and the money to pay for it,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess, if I stayed in school.”
“Do you have plans to go to university or anything?”
“Well, I’m in Grade Twelve now. I wanted to take international business. I don’t know now, though.” I thought of Linda Kirschnick at the Real Estate office and her promise of a career in physics. The five minutes were up, and we transferred the swizzle stick from the pee solution into the test tube with the clear solution that came with the kit. Now we had to wait for another ten minutes.
“Let’s get a breath of air,” I said. Robin and I did a circuit of the cabin while Lug-nut and Rosie gambolled about, bringing us sticks to throw. It was one of those golden mornings when the sky was a heartbreaking blue and the birds were twittering like demented opera singers.
“Did you ever think of having kids?” Robin asked me.
“Well, I’ve thought about it, Robin, but I’m not the maternal type. The noise drives me crazy, and I honestly don’t like being around babies. I’m always afraid I’m going to drop them.”
“Really? I just love them. I do a lot of babysitting, eh?”
“Good for you. But I think that having one of your own is a bit different. You can’t, you know, go home at the end of the evening.”
“Yeah, there’s this one little guy, Adam, who’s a real handful. I charge extra when I go there.”
“Think of how his mother must feel.”
We went back inside. I’d put the test tube out of the way on top of the ice box.
“You look,” Robin said. “I can’t. I’m too scared. Is it blue?”
I looked. I held the test tube and swizzle stick up to the light and shook it a couple of times.
“Robin,” I said, “the little ball-thing is as white as it was when we put it in. According to the whatever-it-is company, you’re not pregnant.” I held her while she cried.
Robin had not wanted to use the back-up second-opinion stick. “No way I want to go through that again,” she said. She said she thought that her period might have been late because she’d been dieting lately.
“I actually feel that I could get my period tonight, you know? I sort of feel heavy down there.” She left, beaming, after having promised to visit her doctor to get a prescription for the pill. Maybe after this scare, she and Eddie would be more careful. If I had my way, kids would be kept segregated until they were thirty.
I poured the contents of the apple juice bottle out on the ground and threw the test stuff in my bathroom cabinet, then fed the dogs and prepared to head out. I was supposed to meet the members of the Weird Kuskawa Art group at noon in town, because the show was now being advertised in the Laingford Gazette, which meant it had to happen. We had planned it to coincide with the Bath Tub Bash on Saturday, to take advantage of the crowds. With the new Kountry Pantree cow deadline, I was in crunch time, but that was for later. For the time being, it was still a figment of my imagination, like Robin’s baby had been. I also had to get in touch with Becker, so I could tell him about my decision while causing him the minimum of pain. I was feeling full, pressured to complete too many tasks in too short a period of time. Never mind that I thought Vic Watson had been murdered in his bed at the Laingford Hospital and agreed with Becker that constable Morrison, distracted by the charms of Constable Marie Lefevbre, might make a botch of it. Whatever happened to the back-to-the-land puppet-maker thing I’d dedicated my life to? How did it all get so complicated?