I found myself in the Big Chain Bookstore but couldn’t face actually spending the forty-odd bucks on the new Stephen King hardcover, which Becker might have read already, for all I knew. I checked out the health and family section and considered (for one very brief moment) giving him a copy of Father to Be, but I didn’t think he’d get the joke. I was feeling a bit dazed by then, the mall having worked its evil magic upon me, making me consider quite seriously the purchase of a package of shiny, seasonal decorations—the kind of thing you gaze at in surprise when you get home and say “I don’t remember buying that.” I was surrounded by junked-up, frantic, jingle-bell-frenzied moms and kids, and more than a little aware of the fact that soon I too would have to learn the balance of can-have and can’t-have. I’d have to learn the language of momhood: “Don’t touch that, you little brat, or Santa’s not gonna leave you nothing.”
As for Santa, I figure he must have a hell of a time trying to decide what, precisely, to give all the bazillions of little children who expect him to cough up the goods every year. It’s hard to buy for somebody about whom one knows little except their naughty-or-nice scores. I knew Becker’s, sort of, but I bet Santa had a better handle on him than I did, even though I was the one carrying his baby. I was still wearing Becker’s engagement ring on a chain around my neck, and I was so used to having it there that I barely noticed it any more. It had been a long time since I’d taken it off the chain and tried it out on my finger. Anyway, my fingers were too swollen (a pregnant lady thing) for it to fit by then.
The elegant kitchenware store had a lot of nice glass and pottery and culinary doo-hickeys, but I felt that if I gave him something like that, he would take it as an indication that I wanted to move in with him, or that I was thinking in domestic terms. Too much like a wedding gift, too much like an answer to the ring question.
I ended up getting him a CD, the latest Barenaked Ladies album (which was a safe bet, as he had one or two by the same band already in his truck) and a pair of locally-made leather moccasins. Yes, I know. One step up from a tie, but I was desperate.
When we finally got around to making that curiously formal exchange, he admitted to having had a hard time as well, when it came to choosing something to give me. He’d settled on a book—a For Better or Worse comics anthology, and a large box of expensive chocolates, which we both knew I would eat compulsively, all by myself, in about three hours.
We were doing this ritual, pre-Christmas dinner at the Mooseview Resort—a pricey place, and not insignificantly, the cradle of the evening wherein we had engaged in unprotected sex. After you have fallen, go back to the garden, I guess.
“I have something for you, but you don’t need to open it now,” Becker said, as we were finishing a shared piece of chocolate cheesecake, which had been billed “death by decadence” on the menu. “It’s just a token thing. There’s lots I wanted to get, but I kept second-guessing myself, thinking you’d take it the wrong way.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “And thanks for saying so.” I was a bit surprised by this remark, actually, as Becker wasn’t usually so frank about his feelings. “We should have mentioned it earlier, I guess, and agreed not to exchange anything.” He seemed shocked by this and slightly annoyed.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I want to give you everything, not nothing.”
It sounded like soap opera dialogue; I couldn’t bear it, and I’m afraid I sighed out loud. I might even have rolled my eyes, showing my best sensitive and tactful side. I apologized at once.
“Did you know that every time you say or do something bitchy these days, you immediately chalk it up to hormones and being pregnant?” he said, in a dangerously light, conversational voice. “It’s really interesting. I can hardly wait to hear what kind of excuse you come up with after the baby’s born, and you’re back to normal.”
“I’m not sure what normal is,” I said, trying to match his tone. It came out sounding as brittle as the wine glass that he was holding, which looked ready to shatter in his white-knuckled grip. “I used to be a childless woman, and I’m not likely to return to that state any time soon.”
“You chose it, Polly.”
“I did. And I’m guessing that you’d probably have preferred me to make a different choice.”
He sat back, exasperated. “Of course not, that’s not fair. I just wish you’d include me a bit more, that’s all.”
“By moving in with you and marrying you, you mean.”
“Or by taking into account that I’m involved, at least.”
“You’re the one who’s going to Calgary for Christmas.” Ouch. That one just popped out by itself. I’d known about it since the summer, when Bryan had gone out west with his mother, and Becker had promised to visit and spend the holiday with them. I’d always accepted it and insisted that to me Christmas was no big deal, and Becker should by all means spend it with his son. Maybe it was the residue of the mall experience that made me suddenly want Becker to stay. Or made me pretend to want that. I don’t know—maybe I was just being bitchy, and the hormones had nothing to do with it.
Well, he got mad, and I don’t blame him. The rest of our spat-dance included all the requisite steps, from hissing at each other like snakes over the paying of the bill, through the sullen silence in the truck, treading the light fantastic over our mutually guilt ridden apologies just before we got to the farm, to the balm of the make-up kiss and hug, the shamefaced and hurried exchange of our meaningless parcels, and the fragile goodbye.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get back,” Becker said. It was snowing, the only snow we got, it turned out, until the night I left to catch a plane for England.
By the middle of January, I had, as Susan had predicted, expanded. I wasn’t as big as a house—more like a small cabin, as I still had three months to go before lift-off. I was having dreams by then of splitting apart like a burnt sausage, and my skin was so sensitive that I could feel the slightest shift in the air, as if the atmosphere around my body had grown hands. If you’ve been involved in this kind of show already, you know the drill. My ankles were thicker by the day, I had to pee every four minutes, and I felt physically co-opted for some purpose that had very little to do with me at all. One of the many books I’d acquired said “You don’t really have the baby, the baby has you.” Yep. Preparing for my trip to England helped to take my mind off my body, for which I was grateful.
The organizers of the conference had requested that I take along a couple of samples of my work, and it was a difficult decision, as I knew I couldn’t afford to take a great big pile of puppets with me. They’d asked me to do a marionette construction seminar, with an emphasis on methods for making and manipulating moving parts. I wanted to have some good pieces to use as examples, but most of my favourites had been sold. Still, one of my most inspired creations had been a puppet I’d made of a policeman (which bore a marked resemblance to Becker), and Constable Earlie Morrison, Becker’s partner, had it hanging in his bathroom. I knew I could borrow it back from him for a little while, and it wouldn’t take much to alter it for its debut on the Canterbury stage. It had originally been designed to conceal a little pop-up version of the male member, a functioning moving part, you might say—perfect for the seminar. The original extra piece had been omitted from the finished puppet, for reasons of delicacy on the part of the artist and the eventual owner, but it would be no trouble to mold a new one and attach it.
I