Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [5]
What I was knitting was a layette. A layette was a set of baby garments you were supposed to dress the newborn baby in so it would be warm when it was brought home from the hospital. At the very least you needed to have two thumbless mittens, two stubby booties, a pair of leggings, a jacket, and a bonnet, to which you could add a knitted blanket if you had the patience, as well as a thing called a soaker. The soaker looked like a pair of shorts with pumpkin-shaped legs, like the ones in pictures of Sir Francis Drake. Cloth diapers and rubber baby pants were prone to leaks: that’s what the soaker was for. But I was not going to knit the soaker. I hadn’t yet got around to visualizing the fountains, the streams, the rivers of pee a baby was likely to produce.
The blanket was tempting – there was one with rabbits on it that I longed to create – but I knew I had to draw the line somewhere because I didn’t have all the time in the world. If I dawdled, the baby might arrive before I was ready for it and be forced to wear some sort of mismatched outfit put together out of hand-me-downs. I’d started on the leggings and the mittens, as being fairly simple – mostly alternate rows of knit and purl, with some ribbing thrown in. That way I could work up to the jacket, which was more complicated. I was saving the bonnet to the last: it was going to be my chef-d’oeuvre. It was to be ornamented with satin ribbons to tie under the baby’s chin – the possibilities of strangulation through ties like this had not yet been considered – and with huge ribbon rosettes that would stick out on either side of the baby’s face like small cabbages. Babies dressed in layettes, I knew from the pictures in the Beehive pattern book, were supposed to resemble confectionary – clean and sweet, delicious little cakelike bundles decorated with pastel icing.
The colour I’d chosen was white. It was the orthodox colour, though a few of the Beehive patterns were shown in an elfin pale green or a practical yellow. But white was best: after it was known whether the baby was a boy or a girl I could add the ribbons, blue or pink. I had a vision of how the entire set would look when finished – pristine, gleaming, admirable, a tribute to my own goodwill and kindness. I hadn’t yet realized it might also be a substitute for them.
I was knitting this layette because my mother was expecting. I avoided the word pregnant, as did others: pregnant was a blunt, bulgy, pendulous word, it weighed you down to think about it, whereas expecting suggested a dog with its ears pricked, listening briskly and with happy anticipation to an approaching footstep. My mother was old for such a thing: I’d gathered this by eavesdropping while she talked with her friends in the city, and from the worried wrinkles on the foreheads of the friends, and from their compressed lips and tiny shakes of the head, and from their Oh dear tone, and from my mother saying she would just have to make the best of it. I gathered that something might be wrong with the baby because of my mother’s age; but wrong how, exactly? I listened as much as I could, but I couldn’t make it out, and there was no one I could ask. Would it have no hands, would it have a little pinhead, would it be a moron? Moron was a term of abuse, at school. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but there were children you weren’t supposed to stare at on the street, because it wasn’t their fault, they had just been born that way.
I’d been told about the expectant state of my mother in May, by my father. It had made me very anxious, partly because I’d also been told that until my new baby brother or sister had arrived safely my mother would be in a dangerous condition. Something terrible might happen to her