Momma_Had_a

And her head popped off. My cousin Nile had spread himself out on the lawn, lethal as any chemical, and was decapitating dandelions with his thumbnail. Flicked sunheads spun haywire this way and that, ditsy blondes. Momma had a baby (pause) and her head popped off (flick). Another (flick) and another (flick). If the dandelions had been further along, he’d be blowing them bare, infesting everyone’s lawns with his wishes, banks of yellow gold erupting days later, the flower of his desire for biceps, for cool cash, maybe a call from the Leaf’s manager. (“Look, Keon’s injured. We need you.”) As far as nature was concerned, Nile was better than dogs’ hindquarters, pant legs, and wind put together. Restless in fields, unwashed, he went about her pollinating business like a pimp. I felt for Nile the same degree of relatedness one might feel for a nightcrawler—a cousinage that had more to do with inhabiting the same stretch of earth than sharing anything as intimate as genetic material. But, ten years old, with an undescended testicle, Nile was the love interest, take it or leave it.

Inside was estrogen city, all women, mostly related, the air fibrous with connection. Even the few who weren’t blood knew each other inside out, friends and neighbours who were practically sewn together, chain stitched with their knowledge and informed speculation about one another. Only one person stood on the edge of this dense familiarity like someone having an out-of-body experience—a woman who’d recently moved here from some smug Southern Ontario town and who appeared to have her jaw rusted shut. She was remembering, is all, lost to recollection. A younger sister who had succumbed to scarlet fever at the age of fifteen had arrived unbidden in her head and now after all these years rode there like a conquering whip-snapping queen in a chariot. Naturally, this gave her a somewhat self-absorbed expression.

The women were all packed into Auntie Viv’s living room for a last minute, hold-your-breath baby shower. Very last minute, time stretched tight as a drum over Mother’s huge belly. She was two weeks late and Auntie Viv thought this party might break the monotony, if not the water. Mother hoped not—her water that is—for she was beached on Viv’s newly upholstered chesterfield, formerly a spirit-lowering beige and brown tweed, now red and slick as an internal organ, enough colour and texture to make you giddy. Viv had put up bilious fleshy drapes to match, and Mother figured this show-off reason to be the real one for the shower, not her.

A fountain of dandelion heads spraying up outside, past the window, caught Mother’s attention. The Birth of Venus, she thought, although she had only ever seen a commercial version of that famous painting, a picture in a magazine advertising shampoo. Still, wouldn’t it be lovely, a freshwater baby rising out of the lake on a clamshell, dandelion heads flocking the feathery-soft air? So beautiful, so easy. Mother was terrified of dying in childbirth and understood her fear to be a restraining band, wide as a strop, holding her baby back. She entertained a morbid notion that already she had marked the baby, that it would be reticent and fearful all its life, and she prayed it would find a source of courage somewhere deep inside itself. If she lived, she resolved to call her baby Hero, boy or girl. If she died, Morrie would call it Stu if a boy, and Sue if a girl. That being the extent of it, Mother vowed to hold out at least until the naming formalities were concluded.

For her part, Auntie Viv was more than a little curious to see this baby, on account of Mother simultaneously losing her virginity and committing adultery scarcely hours into her marriage. She probably set some sort of record for the town, though it’s not the kind of accomplishment you’d want to print up. Might be printed on the baby’s face, mind you: Cousin Tony’s visage appearing clear and crisp as a photograph, reproductive values more conclusive than the Shroud of Turin. This notion tickled Auntie Viv, for she considered her sister-in-law to be simpy and shallow as a pool. Piously nice. Let Mother pretend otherwise, but marriage had corrupted her, the cracks were beginning to show. Auntie Viv smiled her fox smile and wrenched her push-up bra back into place. Damn thing was chomping on her ribs just like something invented by a man.

When you think that Viv had cooked up this shower idea only the day before, Mother was getting a pretty good haul. Not that she needed more sleepers in neuter green or yellow—no one willing to commit her firm opinions as to the baby’s sex in material terms—or teeny tiny vests (already outgrown) that made the whole assembly chant Awwwww when she held them up for ritual gift inspection and approval. And, since this was her fifth shower to date, she had enough fuzzy blankets and quilts at home to bury the kid alive. Most of those present had contributed plenty to the prospective infant, dearly hoping at this rate they weren’t going to have to fork out for its education, too.

My grandmother, Albertha Pinkham, veteran of the four previous, knew enough to bring her gift in installments. So far, the oddly shaped packages wrapped in brown paper and stuck with adhesive contained wooden slats, spindles, rockers, and a seat. She promised to knock the rocking chair together and paint it once she had the squalling evidence in her large sliver-flecked hands. Albertha had ironed her linen dress for the first shower, gesture enough she felt, and now it was so wrinkled it might have been in pain. Gruesome. A sartorial senescence mimicking her own decline. She bowed her head and dropped a brief prayer into the creases along the lines of No stupid games, all right? And do You think we could get on with the show here? By show, she did not mean more teething rings and baby wipes, but contractions, a crescendo of them, sudden and strong, a muscular fanfare announcing the arrival of.… Glancing over at her child stranded on Viv’s hideous sofa, a giant’s collapsed kidney, she recognized that aura of fear, Mother’s stricken look, like that of an animal about to be clubbed. Albertha tacked a stern postscript onto her prayer: Remember, I go first. Don’t mess up. How far afield had those rumours about her daughter’s infidelity drifted? Divine punishment? Well really, grandbabies weren’t so thick on the ground around here that anyone, divine or otherwise, should gripe if one came swaddled in a story or two. What was life without embroidery? Coarse cotton, that’s all. Plain as unsullied paper, too plain for words.

Momma had a baby . . .

“What is that noise I keep hearing?”

“Nile, that lunk. Out on the grass.”

and her head popped off.

Death, you know, crashing the party, mute as a shadow falling through the window. The uninvited guest. Which isn’t exactly true, for my other grandmother, Gramma Young, had been issuing special invitations for years, beaming signals into the black depths of space, courting that one polygamous alien, violent lover, terminal seducer. Thus far she remained unrequited and a regular menace on the subject.

“My last shower,” she sighed, sailing this hoary news across the room.

As this foreboding announcement was the very one she had made at the other four showers, no one was buying it. Any prior sympathies aroused had already been slashed to the bone.

“Mine too. We’re all hoping that.”

“Pine. A rough pine box, nothin’ fancy for me.”

“Chin up, Gramma. This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Think, real soon there’ll be a new baby to cuddle.”

“I’ll never see it.”

“C’mon, none of that talk now.”

“New life comes into the world, old life’s booted out.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Auntie Viv, agreeably enough, seeing as she’d been sneaking swigs from one of the flower vases she kept topped up with gin. The longevity of Viv’s birthday roses always amazed Uncle Clyde, a phenomenon he could only attribute to some secret source of power generated by Viv herself.

“Tastes like soap,” said Gramma Young, chewing with athletic effort one of Batty Pock’s shortbread squares.

A message written in apologetic smiles, a kind of facial shorthand, flashed to Batty that said, Never mind her, the old coot.

Batty shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Whatever had happened to that soap powder, the cupful sitting on the counter when she’d been searching for the extra flour?

“Mother,” warned Aunt Faith, seizing any opportunity to pay Gramma back, coin for coin, for every admonishing word she’d received as a child. Faith was the snappy sister, my least favourite aunt. She had resentment the way some people have religion—visibly—she wore it like a prow. If feeling slighted, overworked, neglected, she would take her husband Earl apart molecule by molecule, then reassemble him, a lesser man. She was Nile’s mother, and he her son, and they fit together like a mathematical problem you could work on most of your life and never figure out.

Drop dead, Gramma was about to retort—she absolutely refused to let Faith have the last word—when, unaccountably, it was and she did. Drop dead. But a drop so slight, gentle as ash drifting down, it was as if a quieting finger had been placed lovingly on her heart to untrouble its agitated and relentless motion. Indeed, Gramma had cried wolf for so long that her death was as tame and friendly as a panting, tail-thumping companion lolling at her feet. I rest my case, her body finally said, and in such an understated, such a gracious and accomplished manner, that no one, not even she, noticed her passing. She sat very, very still, and said nothing further.

Minnie Evans screamed, a startled little product, but only because Nile had smushed his face up against the window. Give him six years and he might almost resemble James Dean, but presently, features flatly pressed into the glass, he could have easily passed for a package of plastic-wrapped chicken thighs from the Red & White.

An intuitive awareness of something amiss perhaps sparked the inevitable birthing stories. Ancient Mariners all, women trotted out their individual traumas, sparing Mother nothing in their recollections of stillbirths, hemorrhages, Caesarean sections, and marathon labours. Babies’ shrill kitten cries repeatedly stabbed the air, and gallons of lost, fictional, and phantom blood sloshed through the room.

My girl cousin, Amy, who had made a bow-hat out of an upturned tinfoil plate and the discarded gift bows, rose as if on a wave of this unsettling talk and placed it on Gramma Young’s head. Her festive and improvisational bit of haberdashery slipped, caught on a stiff curl and came to rest at a rakish and merry angle.

“She’s dead,” said the woman from the south, who, until this moment, had not uttered a single word.

At least she spent her embarrassed verbal fund wisely. It was to the point.

“Pardon?” someone asked.

“Good gravy! Look at Gramma Young.”

“My arse,” said Auntie Viv. “Stick a pin in her.”

“She’s only asleep.”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“Give her a nudge, Minnie.”

“Heavens,” said Albertha, reaching out to give Eve Young a wakening nudge, this other grandmother to whom she had rarely ever spoken, certainly nothing beyond courtesies. If you could call a grunt a courtesy. Truth was she didn’t have time for whiners, and now she realized, touch telling no lie, that Eve didn’t have time at all. It had withdrawn itself from her, its animating caress, its ticking breath.

They all shivered and stared at one another.

“I’ll call Glanville, why don’t I?” suggested Marion Goodwin, the undertaker’s wife. Marion usually managed to appall and fascinate in about equal measure. What was it like being married to the Gland Man? This question swam up from a depth and circled visibly close to the surface. Imagine his unearthly cold hands reaching for you in bed at night (sheets reeking of formaldehyde), hands fat and grub-white that only hours before had been palpating the internal organs of corpses, drawing blood out of bodies with the same ease and indifference that they drained Freshie out of coolers at community picnics.

Marion wrote poetry, verse boxes that never seemed to contain humans, but heavily featured dewdrops, sunsets, and an array of symbols inert as stone markers. These she published in the town paper. More embalmed mots, the editor would groan when he saw her approaching down the walk, clutching yet another torso-thick bundle of paper in her arms, that unnerving pink smile of hers indelibly printed on her face.

“Viv,” ordered Albertha, “call the ambulance.”

“Hey,” said Viv, as she sashayed out of the room. “Guess what? I’ve thought up a great name for a female comedy group.” She stuck her head back in to deliver the punch line. “Titters.”

An outbreak of giggles erupted and was quickly suppressed.

“Viv’s in shock,” someone said, kindly.

Someone else began to whimper, very quietly.

By this time Nile had taken off, pelting away like a hunted man. Soon he’d be tearing through fields, running and running, long grass singing past.

“It’s coming,” said Mother.

“So’s Christmas,” snapped Minnie Evans. A novice to the potency of sarcasm, she promptly fell apart, weeping buckets.

“What is, dear? The ambulance?”

“Already? Alec won’t set out on a run till he’s had a coffee and a smoke.”

“The baby,” Mother whispered. This a mumbled, prayer-faint revelation underlined by Alec’s keening flashing progress down Viv’s street.

“What baby?” demanded Aunt Faith.

Then a single dawning Oh! of recollection was all it took for everyone to fly into action. A dozen pair of hands rescued Mother from Viv’s sofa, bundled her into a shawl warm as a nest, and delivered her with midwifely solicitations and endearments to the ambulance revving its engine at the door.

One thing you have to say for it, the trip to the hospital was cost efficient. Not only did Mother, thrown headlong into wracking convulsive labour, have to share the ambulance with Gramma Young, cooling rapidly and inviting no intimacies, but Alec stopped at the Perdue’s place halfway there to pick up pie-padded Horace and wedge him in, too. Horace had swallowed his pencil stub while working on a crossword. “Women,” he confided to the male-grey upholstery into which his face was pressed. You had to wonder if that was the word he’d choked on filling in the puzzle, or whether he considered his emergency eclipsed by the usual female problems. Women, there was no escaping them.

And to prove it, I added my weight to the world. Nine pounds, fifteen ounces of pure solid self. Mere minutes after they wheeled Mother into the delivery room, some intern had me by the heels. Well. My first bat’s-eye-view of the situation was not consoling. The room swung muzzy, as though rubbed in grease. Mother lay bloody and limp, a brutalized body cast aside. Pain seared my backside (never trust a doctor), and I let go a river of sound, my tongue a flailing, undisciplined instrument. But I must have known even then, grabbing at the air—I had Albertha’s hands!—that the power would eventually be mine to carve that river into the precise and commanding language I needed. For the present, raw underspeech.

I said: Mother, don’t leave me. I said: Nile, get your balls in order, boy. Your Hero’s come to town.