A Big Dose of Lucky Page 12

  Abby jerks around to look at me, her feet splashing up water.

  “Don’t use that word.” She laughs for one second. “You’re so…like, you don’t know anything, do you?” She swings her legs, kicking up more water. “It’s against the law, if that’s what you mean by bad. But if you mean are Judy and Preesha bad people…well, you’ve met them. What do you think?”

  “Sorry if I said the wrong thing. It’s all new to me. Pretend that I’ve been living in a cave for my whole life, like Mowgli. And now I’m meeting humans for the first time and you have to teach me everything.”

  “Who’s Mowgli?” she says.

  “From a book,” I tell her. “The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling, where the orphan boy is raised by a pack of wolves?”

  She looks blank.

  “That’s me,” I say. “No connection to the human world. Assume complete ignorance. Just tell me.”

  ABBY’S STORY

  She is still whispering, even though we’re at the end of a dock and there are boats chugging by and people calling to each other, not paying us a flicker of attention. Abby keeps kicking her feet out of the water, sending droplets into the air to catch the light like crystals.

  “It is considered a crime,” she says. “To be a girl who likes girls, you know, in a sexy way. Or a boy who likes boys.”

  I’m puzzling out why any lawmaker would care about who loves whom when I remember how the laws in some places, like the United States, are pretty firm about who you’re supposed to hate as well. Like all those news stories that Jumpin’ Joe showed me on the television in his room. Marches and speeches protesting laws that tell you to hate Negroes or go to war against people who look like Thiu.

  “Go on,” I say.

  Abby starts to tell me about her family.

  Judy and Preesha fell in love while they were both students at the University of Toronto, Judy training as a social worker and Preesha as a chemist.

  They lived a double life, acting like normal friends by day, going to classes, having part-time jobs. Just like all the other girls they met, they were thrilled that the war in Europe was over and that women were being encouraged to go to university.

  “But at night, they were, like, married.” Abby glances over, checking to see if I’m confused or grossed out. But I’m catching on.

  By this time Judy and Preesha shared a little apartment, but so did lots of girls, so nobody noticed and it was all fine.

  “The only big problem,” Abby says, “was Preesha’s family.” They didn’t mind that she was studying chemistry or that she planned to become a pharmacist. But they minded very much that she was not married yet.

  “Preesha’s father phoned Canada every week from Bombay, with the name of a new suitor.” It was the custom in India for parents to choose their children’s partners, just as Preesha’s grandparents had done for her mother and father.

  Preesha would spend an hour talking him out of arranging a marriage, reminding him that she needed to finish her studies. Better to concentrate on a career rather than be married so young.

  Abby brings her feet out of the water and wraps her arms around her knees. “Every week her mother would tell her, There is no such thing as a soul mate. Do not imagine that you should be waiting for that.”

  But Preesha and Judy had already found their soul mates. They were utterly happy, better friends than any other couple they knew. Except that they wanted a baby. That put them further into uncharted territory. How were they going to get a baby? They talked and talked. It became the only thing they talked about.

  “Are you adopted?” I ask her.

  Abby shakes her head. “You have to be married to adopt, so they couldn’t do that. Two women were never going to get a baby from an agency. Plus, they sort of wanted to have their own.”

  “So…one of them is your actual mother who gave birth to you?”

  “Yeah,” says Abby. “Guess which.”

  For some reason I think about their hair. Preesha’s shining swath and Judy’s tufty curls.

  “Judy?”

  She grins. “Good guess,” she says.

  SO HOW DO TWO MOMS ACTUALLY HAVE A BABY?

  “Judy and Preesha thought you might ask that.”

  Abby hops to her feet in one nimble motion. She puts a hand out to haul me up. “You’re invited to have supper at my place. They’ll tell you the rest. But don’t expect me to sit there and listen. It’s pretty gross.”

  UNINFORMED

  That’s what I am, I tell Abby. I explain about the minnows and the cavern. She laughs for about ten minutes.

  “Pretend I’m a Martian,” I say. “What do I need to know?”

  She says the minnows are called sperm and they come out of a man’s penis while it’s inside a woman’s vagina. She doesn’t blush or stammer when she says this. I do know the word vagina, even if the Sevens said cha-cha. We laughed our heads off sometimes, saying cha-cha. Abby is so casual, she might be advising me on how to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

  “Their friend Cyrus is a homosexual,” Abby says. “You know? A guy who gets with other guys?”

  I nod, as if yeah, I knew that.

  “Judy and Preesha talked about one of them maybe having sex with him. But what if it took more than once?” She squinches up her nose, like, eww. “It doesn’t always happen the first time! What if they had to do it five times? Or ten? That was even grosser than what they ended up doing, since neither of them had ever slept with a man. That would have been beyond beyond. Can you imagine?”

  I am so far from being able to imagine that I just make a noise.

  “They told me the truth when I was eleven,” says Abby. “But I already sorta kinda knew. From when I could talk, I called them by their names instead of, you know, Mommy or Mama. They couldn’t risk my calling the wrong person Mom.”

  A SUMMER EVENING

  If you were a bird perching in a poplar tree, or a raccoon on a branch, wishing for night to come along, you might be looking down at the garden behind Abby’s cottage, where two women are sitting in low-slung wooden chairs, each with a drink full of gently clinking ice cubes, waiting in the pale evening light to tell a story that will change the universe for the bewildered visitor who is coming around the corner of the house, tripping slightly on the crooked flagstone path.

  The visitor is me, Malou Gillis-about-to-be-somethingelse-not-even-within-the-realm-of-anticipation.

  IT’S A LITTLE AWKWARD

  Abby drags another chair across the lawn and makes me sit in it. She delivers a bottle of soda from the kitchen. It’s pale and fizzing, called 7-Up. Ha! Seven-up!

  Then she just stands there, ready to leave but not leaving.

  “I told her,” she says to Judy and Preesha. “About you guys meeting and stuff. And she wants to know more. Obviously. We got to the part where you couldn’t adopt.”

  “Well then.” Judy swirls her last ice cube around and around.

  Abby says, “I’m going to take a shower.”

  She pauses behind my chair and lets her fingers brush my shoulders, like she’s staying with me even though she’s going inside. Or that’s what I hope she’s doing.

  “We haven’t done this before,” says Judy. “Sat down and told the truth to someone’s face.”

  “How do we even start?” Preesha runs her fingers through her long hair.

  Judy slides the ice cube from her glass into her mouth. My own mouth puckers up, feeling how cold hers must be.

  Preesha laughs. “I guess I’ll go first while you melt the ice.”

  Judy grins, showing a glinting chunk between her teeth.

  “Yesterday,” Preesha begins, “when we saw you next to Abby—”

  Judy takes the ice cube out of her mouth and holds it between her thumb and finger while she interrupts. “You’ve got Abby’s eyes. We knew right away—”

  Then Preesha interrupts Judy, who pops the ice cube back into her mouth. My eyes bounce back and forth as they take turns so neatly
that I know this must be routine, this finishing of each other’s thoughts.

  “Abby told us that you’re looking for your mother,” says Preesha.

  “We don’t know her,” Judy slips in.

  “But we have something big to tell you, “ Preesha says.

  Judy spits the ice cube onto the grass and leans forward. “At first when we talked about it, we thought, wow, this is big, maybe too big for strangers to lay on you.”

  “But then”—Preesha again—“we realized we might be the only ones who know. We might be your only chance to learn about—”

  The soda is sweet, but the bubbles catch in my throat.

  “So we couldn’t not tell you,” says Judy. “Could we?”

  THE FIRST FICTION

  “I’d been working.” Preesha’s voice is more serious now, and quiet. “An assistant in a pharmacy, not yet finished my degree.” She braids a length of her hair while she talks. “I heard stories, things that gave me hope it would be possible to start a family with Judy.”

  “We had a master plan,” says Judy. “And it mostly worked. We came to Parry Sound that spring so Pree could finish her thesis in a quiet place. I got temporary work in a summer camp, helping out part-time. We thought the baby stuff would start when we got back to Toronto in the fall.”

  “But I was curious,” says Preesha. “I asked some very quiet questions and got hopeful answers from a doctor at St. Joe’s. It seemed that we could get started right here, right away. By accident we had landed in a good place. By the end of the summer, Judy was pregnant. We moved to a new house in Toronto. We told our new neighbors that Judy had been married to my brother, who was killed in a car accident just after she became pregnant. So we were both in mourning. That part was simple, my own family aside. No one gets too nosy with a widow.”

  I put my hand up, like I’m in a classroom. We seemed to have skipped over something crucial.

  “You want details, huh?” Judy looks at Preesha.

  “Maybe we should go inside.” Preesha tips her head toward the neighbor’s yard, where a stocky man is fumbling with charcoal briquettes and matches.

  “Right.” Judy stands up and collects the glasses and my soda bottle. “Let’s go.”

  ABBY’S MOM AND ABBY’S MOM FILL IN THE DETAILS

  They explain what boys do with their own selves to feel good. I want to plug my ears and hum really loudly. But I want to listen too. They say it plain, using words like rub and penis and ejaculate. The sperm can come out into a cup or a tissue or anyplace, not just into the cavern of a girl. When the man puts his sperm into a cup for a medical reason, it’s called a deposit. In a doctorly situation, the sperm goes from the cup to something like a—

  “Oh my god!” Abby comes into the kitchen with her head wrapped in a green towel, looking like an Ethiopian princess. “That shower was obviously not long enough!”

  Judy laughs and goes to the kitchen drawer to rummage through the utensils.

  “Judy, seriously. It’s gross.”

  “Aw, lighten up, sweetie,” says Preesha. “The girl needs to hear the simple facts.”

  “In so much detail?” Abby mutters.

  Yeah, I do. Every minute of this conversation is shining a brighter and brighter light on a whole cellar full of cobwebby shadows that I scarcely knew were there.

  Judy holds up a device like the one that Jumpin’ Joe used when he basted a turkey, a see-through plastic tube with a nozzle on one end and a bulbous rubber cap on the other. She squeezes the rubber end and dips the nozzle into the milk pitcher on the table. She stops squeezing. There’s a sucking noise and milk slurps up into the tube. She holds it at an angle over the sink and squeezes the rubber cap again. The milk shoots out and splashes onto the taps.

  “Bingo,” says Preesha.

  “That is SO GROSS!” says Abby. “Please stop!”

  Preesha is laughing so hard she has tears in her eyes.

  “Get the picture?” says Judy, smiling.

  “I am totally grossed out,” says Abby. “And so is Malou. Look at her face.”

  What does my face look like?

  “We decided,” Preesha tells me, “that we would both try. How fun would it be to each have a baby at the same time? The doctor used a medical version of the turkey baster, called a pipette. We lay side by side on these raised chair things—”

  “It was completely undignified,” Judy puts in. “We could hardly stop giggling. Legs up, you know, in sort of a—” She seems about to show me.

  “Don’t you dare demonstrate!” Abby pulls on Judy’s arm.

  Preesha is laughing again. “We lay there while he shot the stuff in, fresh from the source, so to speak.”

  “Oh my god!” Abby covers her ears.

  “We weren’t supposed to move for ten or fifteen minutes,” says Judy. “So we just held hands.” She smiles at Preesha, who nods.

  “Held hands while being immensely grateful for scientific enterprise.”

  They’re all watching me, waiting.

  I have only one question. “Who was the source?”

  TWELVE

  THE SOURCE

  The reason that Judy and Preesha knew they’d landed in the right place—entirely by chance—was that, after many discreet questions and two private interviews, they were informed by the kind and understanding doctor that not only could he help them, but he had a willing dark-skinned donor, a good match for Preesha. One of the interns was a Jamaican named Andy Bannerman. He’d already made deposits for another colored family in town, and he was happy to contribute to Judy and Preesha’s dream.

  “Such a nice guy!” Judy says. “And so cute.”

  “We liked him right away,” Preesha says. “Judy’s right, he was very handsome, but what won us over was that he did not flinch for one second knowing we were lesbians. He just wanted to help.”

  They both received deposits from Andy Bannerman. They figured they were doubling their chances. If they both got pregnant, they’d produce half siblings.

  But only Judy got pregnant. She had a beautiful brown baby.

  The baby was Abby.

  All I can think is, Andy Bannerman is my dad.

  THE MOMENT HAS COME

  “Abby says you have something like proof that there were others,” says Judy.

  I show them the list. They see their names and Robert MacIntyre’s signature.

  “Wow,” says Preesha. “MacIntyre is the guy who delivered Abby.”

  “Far out.” Judy points to the initials A.B. at the top.

  “What do you think?” I say. “There are only two names we haven’t identified.”

  “Looks like you narrowed it down,” says Abby. “One of them must be your mother.”

  Malou Connor or Malou Thomas?

  “Abby?” says Preesha. “You’ve finally found yourself a sister.”

  “You really think so?” she says.

  But I don’t have to ask.

  JUDY DRIVES ME TO THE HOSTEL AGAIN

  “It’s hard on Abby sometimes,” Judy explains. “Pree and me, we have each other. We’ve been through it all. But until now, Abby has never been able to tell anyone the real story. She’s living a pretend life every time she leaves the house. She grew up with a whole fake biography. We couldn’t risk telling a child the facts that could land us in jail. When she finally learned the truth, she had double reason to be pissed off. We were lesbians and we’d lied to her.”

  I climb out of the Beetle and wave goodbye. I wish for a second that I were sitting on the bench outside Mrs. Hazelton’s cottage. Then I wonder, Why am I wishing that? Do I think she might somehow explain any better what Judy and Preesha have already explained? I try to imagine her face if I were telling her, dear old upright Mrs. H, about boys rubbing themselves to fill cups with minnows to shoot into the cavern and come up with a baby. What would Joe say? Even Joe, with all his traveling and knowledge about the world—I bet he’s never in his whole life heard the things I heard today.

 
So what does it mean anyway? All of us girls, the Seven and the younger ones too, we were raised and fed and sheltered in the Home without the teeniest inkling of anything else. The worst thing that ever happened to me was a stupid boy stepping on a box of Kotex and calling me ugly names. Two weeks into the world and look what strangeness I’ve uncovered, certainly not intending to. I just wanted to know my mother’s name! Which is not yet confirmed, by the way.

  But I do know who my father was.

  Is?

  There’s no reason to assume he’s dead, is there?

  I get the shivers. My father is probably alive! What if my mother is too?

  Dorm B is pitch dark except for the ribbon of light from the hallway, but I know my way across the floor just fine. When I sit on Bed 3, the mattress sighs. I will never be able to sleep.

  Someone’s in the bed next to mine, breathing quietly. If only it were Cady, always ready to whisper after lights-out.

  Are you kidding me? she’d say. An artificially inseminated, biracial, lesbian couple? Did you just walk into one of those science-fiction novels you like so much?

  HALF-BREED

  There’s this writer named Isaac Asimov who has written a million stories about crazy stuff that hasn’t really happened, but he sticks in a scientific twist so the reader is almost convinced that it’s all possible. In this one story, there’s an orphan named Max who is a Tweenie, which is the race that everyone despises and belittles, like Negro people in the real world. A scientist rescues him from a gang of bullies after Max runs away from the orphanage. Max says that anything is better than being in a home, even the unknown world outside it. Max turns out to be a whiz at science, and he identifies the secret of atomic power, along with a load of other wondrous discoveries, but no one gives him credit for his genius because he’s a Tweenie. People don’t even notice him, past the fact that he’s a Tweenie. He’s dismissible and invisible. Just like me. First thing you notice about me is that I’m brown. For most people that’s where it stops.