Annabel - Kathleen Winter [6]
“If I didn’t say anything to him,” Jacinta sometimes told Joan and Eliza, “I think he could go a whole year without speaking to anyone but his dogs.” She said this, though she felt disloyal, when she got caught up in the women’s derisive talk about husbands in general. And because they knew things like this about him, Joan and Eliza had an air about them, one Treadway could detect, of faint amusement towards him, and he could not tolerate them in the house, so when he was home, they hardly ever came. But because she had more gravity than they did, and because she did nothing for herself and everything for Jacinta and the baby, Thomasina was able to stay the eight days without Treadway’s disapproval, even though it meant the only time he had alone with his wife was the half-hour before sleep.
“Everything all right?” he asked Jacinta on the eighth day, his huge, comforting paw heating her belly down into her skin, her fat, her womb and ovarian tubes and ovaries, down into the small of her back. She did not tell her friends about his calm heat, or about the deep trust she had in his ability to create a secure home. There were a lot of instabilities in Eliza’s home. Her husband drank, and she was forever falling in love with someone — this year it was her children’s new geography teacher, a man ten years younger than Eliza, who had come from Vermont and lived in an apartment in the local wildlife officer’s basement. Eliza’s infatuations were always one-sided, but they powered her in a way her real life did not, and as a result her own house always felt uninhabited by her, and her children and husband walked around lost in it. Joan was less susceptible to falling in love, but her husband was not. All of Croydon Harbour knew he had an Innu wife in the interior, and that while Joan had no children, his other wife had three daughters and a son.
“Everything’s perfect.” Jacinta never lied to Treadway. He ate steel-cut oatmeal every morning for breakfast, with salt on it. His underclothes were of ewe’s wool. When they made love, she climaxed every time, and when she did, he knew. If she were bone tired he stroked her forehead and her hair until she fell asleep. If he did anything that irked her, like drape filthy socks on the bedspread, she asked him not to do it and he did not mind. She agreed with him about Eliza’s impractical sandals but disagreed with him about the Emperor tulips. “It won’t hurt Harold Martin,” she said, “to pile and cut his wood at the bottom of the fence so she can get some enjoyment,” and Treadway did not argue with her or take it as an insult against husbands.
But about their own newborn baby, Jacinta did lie.
Siamese twins had been on the news, joined so tightly at the skull doctors the world over had despaired, and the mother — Jacinta had watched her on television — had loved those babies, and had decided, fiercely, that it didn’t matter if they were joined. She would bring them both up in the world just like that, no matter what, and Jacinta had not felt sorry for her. She knew better than to feel sorry for anyone. It was one of the things she had learned. Feeling sorry for a person was no help to them at all. People should get on with things. Privately she thought the woman would come to her senses one day and allow the babies to die.
But when you are the mother, you take it in stride. You take albino hair in stride, when you are the mother. When you are the mother, not someone watching that mother, you take odd-coloured eyes in stride. You take a missing hand in stride, and the same with Down syndrome, and spina bifida, and water on the brain. You would take wings in stride, or one lung outside the body, or a missing tongue. The penis and the one little testicle and the labia and vagina were like this for Jacinta. Baby Wayne slept in his cradle under his green quilt and white blanket. His black belly button stuck out, and Jacinta cleaned it with an alcohol swab, waiting for it to fall off. She played with his little red feet, and felt close to him when he crammed her breast in his