My mother picked me up from the front of the hospital. When I shut the passenger door, she said: you look like you’ve been through the wars all right. I told her that if childbirth was anything like that pelvic exam I was surprised the human race had survived this long. She laughed and touched my hair. Poor Frances, she said. What will we do with you?
When I got home I fell asleep on the sofa until the afternoon. My mother had left me a note saying she had gone into work and to let her know if I needed anything. I was feeling well enough by then to walk around without hunching over and to make myself some instant coffee and toast. I buttered the toast thickly and ate it in small, slow bites. Then I showered until I felt really clean and padded back to my room wrapped in towels. I sat on the bed, water running from my hair down onto my back, and cried. It was okay to cry because nobody could see me, and I would never tell anyone about it.
By the time I was finished, I was very cold. The tips of my fingers had started to turn a creepy whitish-grey colour. I towelled my skin off properly and blow-dried my hair until it crackled. Then I reached for the soft part on the inside of my left elbow and pinched it so tightly between my thumbnail and forefinger that I tore the skin open. That was it. It was over then. It was all going to be okay.
19
My mother came home early from work that afternoon and fixed some cold chicken while I sat at the table drinking tea. She seemed a little cool with me while preparing the food and didn’t really speak until we both sat down to eat.
So you’re not pregnant, she said.
No.
You didn’t seem so sure about that last night.
Well, the test is pretty definitive, I said.
She gave a funny little smile and picked up the salt shaker. Carefully she applied a small amount of salt to her chicken and replaced the shaker beside the pepper grinder.
You didn’t tell me you were seeing anyone, she said.
Who says I’m seeing someone?
It’s not that friend of yours you went on holiday with. The handsome guy, the actor.
I swallowed some tea calmly, but I was no longer hungry for the food.
You know his wife was the one who invited us on the holiday, I said.
I don’t hear much about him any more. You used to mention his name a lot.
And yet for some reason you don’t seem to be able to remember it.
She laughed out loud then. She said, I remember it, it’s Nick something. Nick Conway. Nice-looking guy. I actually saw him on TV one night, I think I put it on the Sky Plus for you.
That was very thoughtful of you, mother.
Well, I wouldn’t like to think it has anything to do with him.
I said the food was nice, and that I appreciated her fixing it for me.
Do you hear me talking to you, Frances? she said.
I don’t feel up to this, I really don’t.
We finished the meal in silence. I went upstairs afterwards and looked at my arm in the mirror, where I’d pinched it. It was red and a little swollen and when I touched it, it stung.
*
I stayed at home for the next few days, lying around and reading. I had a lot of academic reading I could have been doing in advance of the college term, but instead what I started reading was the gospels. For some reason my mother had left a small leather-bound copy of the New Testament on the bookshelf in my room, sandwiched between Emma and an anthology of early American writing. I read online that you were supposed to start with Mark and then read the other gospels in this order: Matthew, then John, then Luke. I got through Mark pretty quickly. It was divided up into very small parts which made it easy to read, and I noted down interesting passages in a red notebook. Jesus didn’t talk very much during Mark’s gospel, which made me more interested in reading the others.
I’d hated religion as a child. My mother had taken me to Mass every Sunday until I was fourteen, but she didn’t believe in God and treated Mass as a social ritual in advance of which she made me wash my hair. Still, I came at the Bible from the perspective that Jesus was probably philosophically sound. As it turned out I found a lot of what he said cryptic and even disagreeable. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him, I didn’t like that, though I also wasn’t sure I fully understood it. In Matthew there was a passage where the Pharisees were asking Jesus about marriage, which I was reading at eight or nine in the evening, while my mother was looking at the papers. Jesus said that in marriage, man and wife are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate. I felt pretty low when I read that. I put away the Bible, but it didn’t help.
The day after the hospital I’d received an email from Nick.
hey. sorry about how i acted on the phone last night. i was just afraid someone had seen your name come up on the screen and it would become a thing. anyway no one saw and i told them it was my mother calling (let’s not get too psychological about that). i did notice you sounded weird though. is everything ok?
ps everyone tells me that i’ve been in a bad mood since you left. also evelyn thinks i’m ‘pining’ for you, which is awkward.
I read it many times but didn’t reply. The next morning the letter from the hospital arrived, scheduling the ultrasound for some time in November. I thought it seemed like a long time to wait, but my mother said that was public health care for you. But they don’t know what’s wrong with me, I said. She told me that if it was anything serious they never would have discharged me. I didn’t know about that. Anyway I filled out my prescription for the pill and started taking it.
I called my father a couple of times, but he didn’t pick up the phone or return my calls. My mother suggested I could ‘drop by’ his house, on the other side of town. I said I was still feeling ill and that I didn’t want to walk over for nothing, since he wasn’t answering his phone. In response she just said: he’s your father. It was like some kind of mantric prayer with her. I let the issue go. He wasn’t in touch.
My mother hated the way I talked about my father, like he was just another normal person rather than my distinguished personal benefactor, or a minor celebrity. This irritation was directed toward me, but it was also a symptom of her disappointment that my father had failed to earn the respect she wanted me to give him. I knew she’d had to sleep with her purse tucked inside her pillowcase when they were married. I’d found her crying the time he fell asleep on the stairs in his underwear. I saw him lying there, gigantic and pink, his head cradled in one of his arms. He was snoring like it was the best sleep of his life. She couldn’t understand that I didn’t love him. You must love him, she told me when I was sixteen. He’s your father.
Who says I have to love him? I said.
Well, I want to believe you’re the kind of person who loves her own parents.
Believe what you want.