Salt Fish
My mother, bless her wooden heart, loves my daughter Allie.
I write those words the straight, blue lines of my notebook. At times like this I need to see words on paper so that I feel their effects. Ma is coming for a visit today. There’s a young woman in the bed across from me. She’s sobbing into her pillowcase. Her name is Emily and she is 17 years-old. A short while she and her boyfriend were kissing. Necking, really. Slurping and sucking “eating watermelon” my friend Stella would say. We call her Tres Stella, you know, like the cheese. Anyway, Emily’s now bawling and I wish she would stop. Her boyfriend, a slovenly-looking thing with greasy hair and dirty jeans, must have said something hurtful to her before he left.
Or, maybe her parents set her off. She was on the phone a little while ago begging for them to forgive her, to love her. And she’s been crying since, so that must be it.
I may have to ask one of the nurses to sedate her. I can’t have a roommate going off like a mad cow. When the heck am I supposed to grieve?
+++
Em and I are on four west—the maternity floor of Lapsley General Hospital.
Last night, I lay here staring at blank diary pages waiting for someone to tell me the news. Although, I knew what they would tell me because I overheard one ER nurse tell the other one as if it were nothing, as if she were sharing hospital gossip on an otherwise uneventful midnight shift. Her voice walked down the corridor ahead of her crepe-soled shoes, caught itself in the privacy curtains, and rattled the metal rings. Bed 14C: test results were positive.
Second-hand news.
Later, an intern with movie star looks and a curious sniffle tenderly held my hand while his boss probes my uterus for clues. This was my fifth internal exam. I had not let as many hands touch me down there to get into this mess in the first place. I kept my eyes on the ceiling the whole time and wondered why there weren’t more women in white coats? I could barely tolerate these sympathetic head nods. They didn’t know me, didn’t know that I was happy to have been pregnant. That Joey and I were excited about having a baby. Or, Joey would have been if he hadn’t gone fishing last week and drowned.
“Don’t you guys take notes?” I ask. My barking voice collapses in the stillness under water stained ceiling tiles and I think this is not without irony.
The movie star’s boss gives me the medical jargon: fetus, fallopian tube, extraction.
What really happened is that a baby girl I later name Elizabeth, half-journeyed her way to my uterus, made her home wall of a fallopian tube. She was three weeks old.
+++
A doctor surrounded by a semi-circle of white lab coats makes his early morning rounds. The coats huddle together, shifting, tentative. They seem embarrassed but anxious to glimpse at my pelvic wreckage.
Emily moans away the morning. It reminds me of the chemo patient in Post-Op I roomed with last night, a balloon slung over metal bars filled with blood and urine; the swirling colours remind me of a fancy cocktail I had once at a wedding—a Tequila Sunrise, without the fun.
My new roomie arrives fashionably late. I have been wheeled in a semi-private room with most of the comforts of home. I have a bed, a television set, and some magazines. Gael Mae Brown strolls in. She actually walks into the room. And the first thing I notice is how old she is. She must be at least 40. This is weird because she insists that I call her “Maisee.” Maisy, like the character from the children’s books. She claims to be an author, tells me she writes “trashy, drugstore paperbacks.” I do a pretty good job of not acting impressed.
Gael Mae Brown wears a proper British accent and a scar from breastbone to pubic bone.
I know this because she flashes me when she tells me I am lucky to have a “bikini cut”. I look elsewhere else. I have a hard time blaming luck for my circumstances.
When mother drops by I avoid introducing her to Gael-Mae, I know what she’ll say about her. But Maisee marches right up to Ma and introduces herself. She tells Ma what a brave daughter she has.
“That’s some tart,” Ma sniffs, after Maise skips off for “a fag or two.”
I try to defend my roommate, try to keep the peace, but Ma’s having none of that. I take my pills.
“A ‘dusting and cleaning?’ Is that what she told you? Well, I can bet my bottom dollar that woman has had more abortions that you’ve had one-night stands.” She punctuates her assertion by crossing her arms. A common stance for Ma.
A familiar feeling washes over me, but I push it away. The fast-acting drugs help. I think of the bumps and bruises of my childhood, of the namecalling, and late nights. And I think of my daughter.
+++
Maisee and I wait for our bodies to repair themselves. We get bored and make up a game. We battle to create the worst poetic line to describe our depression and sadness. I think Gael Mae has it worse, so I let her go first.
“Age before beauty,” I say and see that I’ve inherited Ma’s cutting humour.
“I am entrenched in a fearless donnybrook of pain and loneliness,” says Maisee and I think she might be showing off a bit and making fun of me by using words she knows I will not understand. It serves me right for taking a shot at her looks.
Before I get my chance, Maisee pops out another one.
“Medication restricts the number of dark days, but not the murkiness of them,” she says. Maybe she really is a writer. She’s fast, that’s for sure.
“I’m teetering on the edge of sanity, clinging to reality,” I counter.
“Drowning in the darkness.” Gael’s line is cheap because I know she’s stolen that from a book, I can tell. But I stay quiet. Her boyfriend just ditched her for his wife, so I don’t say anything else.
A nurse interrupts our game. I am thankful for the time to call my daughter Allie.
It’s 3:45 p.m. and she’ll be home from school. But first, there’s an argument about homework and about Ma sending her to school with peanut-butter sandwiches, a clear violation of the school’s peanut allergy policy. My mother says I am like a teenager asserting my “minimum wage convictions.” Whatever that means. Sometimes she talks in circles. But I don’t care. Not today.
Allie’s voice stays in my head long after it moves through the telephone into my ear. Later, I write a few words in my journal that I am sure Maisee Gael Mae can’t one-up me on: Joy closes around my solitary gloom.