Degrees of Nakedness, page 1
DEGREES OF
NAKEDNESS
ALSO BY LISA MOORE
Open
Alligator
February
DEGREES OF
NAKEDNESS
STORIES
LISA MOORE
Copyright © 2002 Lisa Moore
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or
any other means without the permission of the publisher is
illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of
copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic
editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.
First published in 1995 by The Mercury Press
This edition published in 2004 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Ave., Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Moore, Lisa Lynne, 1964–
Degrees of nakedness / Lisa Moore. — New ed.
Short stories.
eISBN 978-0-88784-853-7
I. Title.
PS8576.O61444D44 2004 C813’.54 C2003-906930-3
Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
Cover photo: Laura Jane Petelko
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
Printed and bound in Canada
To Larry Mathews, for encouraging words
Nipple of Paradise
I expected some epiphany during the birth. Some way to order the material, some profound wisdom. It seems important to document exactly the way it went. In fact I would like to set the whole summer down in point form. Collect it, pin it. The birth, the affair, the postpartum-affair depression. Already I remember the summer in short-hand, distilled, made up of only a hundred or so specific images intermingled; meals, sex, nights on the fire escape, hours in the office, the birth, the affair. And by next summer I won’t even remember it that clearly. But for now it has reached the half-dissolved stage, the separate gestures of the summer exaggerated like the colour in Polaroid photographs.
After I found out that Cy had slept with Marie I sat on the fire escape with my foot on the railing, and a spider crawled over my foot, my toes tensed, each toe stretching away from the others. I could feel the spider make its web, lacing my toes together. It struck me that I had never felt anything so sharply before. That’s how a story should work. Like that Chinese ribbon dance. They turn off the lights so you can’t see the dancer. All you see are two long fluorescent ribbons, drawing in the dark, like the strokes of that summer. Or that guy Volker we met in Germany, did drawings with a pen flashlight inside a cave. A photographer Volker knew shot them with fast film. Volker was a shadow but he drew the outlines of men and women embracing. He said it took incredible concentration because he had only ten seconds to make the drawing. The result was a fury of limbs locked through each other, the lines themselves seared onto the walls of a cave, the condensation glittering like sweat.
Example: Hannah, Cy’s daughter, in her satin ballet costume, black with red sequins, lime green tulle, dragging herself up the staircase, howling like a wolf, “I got no one to play with, I got no one to play with,” hand over hand on the banister while the sky blisters with rain, while Cy and I make love in the bathroom. He’s soaking in this chemical blue bubble bath Hannah bought him for Christmas the first year I met him. It comes out of a plastic bottle shaped like a Havana nightclub dancer. The woman’s hat, a mountain of bananas, unscrews, and although the bubbles are turquoise, the bathroom stinks of synthetic bananas. We try to make love first on the side of the tub but it’s slippery from the steam, then on the toilet, and then one foot on the radiator, hiked up on the sink so I can see my own sunburnt face in the antique mirror we found in an abandoned house around the bay. The mirror is watery, my face wobbled with laughter because the position is so ridiculous, my legs bound by the pink maternity overalls wrapped around my knees and Hannah banging now on the bathroom door. Cy comes, and then both of us are completely still, him hugging me from behind. We look at each other’s faces in the mirror. His hand is on my belly and the baby kicks so hard that both our eyes widen at the same time. We answer Hannah in unison, “Just a second.” I haul up my overalls while Cy opens the door. “Jeez,” says Hannah and sits on the toilet to pee.
After the baby was born, and I was still drugged, I thought I felt her move again, inside me. I guess it was like when someone feels an itch in a missing limb. It was only a ghost of the way she felt inside me, and already I was forgetting what it had felt like to have her flutter in there, as if a million years had passed.
I didn’t really get the chance to read very much birthing literature. I’d collected it, seen a film of an Australian woman who gave birth in her own living room. Her next-door neighbour dropped over, made himself a cup of tea and ended up holding the mirror for her, between her legs. She wore an old T-shirt and moaned in an Australian accent. The baby was blue when it came out. Cy gritted his teeth while he watched.
Our Bodies, Ourselves says that some male partners seek other sexual partners during the pregnancy. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, Cy?”
We only got to one of the pre-natal classes. It happened to be the one on “Things that can go wrong.” The nurse started off by assuring everyone that in most cases nothing goes wrong, but that we had to go through this anyhow, just in case. She showed the suction cups the doctors sometimes use during natural births. They had pink cups and blue cups, the nurse told us, “… but as sure as shooting, if you used the pink cup you’d get a boy and vice versa. The funny thing about these cups is they seem to go in and out of fashion. You might notice a certain doctor using them for a couple of months and then it seems the cups stay in the cupboard for six months and nobody uses them. They don’t hurt the baby, of course, except they do sometimes come out with cone-shaped heads when the doctor uses the suction cups. In fact you have to be careful after you have the baby that you lay him on different sides every time you lay him down, otherwise his head will go flat. Actually, there’s a little community up the southern shore that’s into head sculpting. All of them have heads as flat as frying pans on one side.” And she snorted, “No, that’s only a joke.”
She said the last time she brought the forceps to a lecture one of the dads got upset, so this time she was only bringing a diagram. She held up the diagram for a moment without comment and then slid it behind the next diagram which was of a baby whose head was too big to fit through the pelvic hole. At the end of the session she got everyone to lie down on a mat and she played a relaxing tape. “Come on, now, dads, don’t be shy, down on the mats with the moms.” She turned the lights off so the room was black. Cy and I lay down on a gym mat and listened while a sultry female voice told us our toes, ankles, knees, hip joints and so on up the body were feeling feather light, as if all the tension of the day was leaving our bodies in waves. There was a soundtrack of waves and sitar music in the background. Beside me I could feel Cy’s shoulder shuddering in a silent fit of giggles.
I guess I should describe the woman Cy slept with, Marie. She was beautiful and unemployed all summer. Thick curly black hair, long suntanned legs. She didn’t believe in marriage. Not only did she never plan to marry but she didn’t acknowledge anyone else’s. She had a Marxist approach to the whole thing. “Love isn’t a commodity. A wife is a whore, only real whores are more honest about it and have more fun. Marriage is a business contract whereby women sell men exclusive sex rights, allowing the male to control the means of reproduction in exchange for financial security. Romantic love is a corrupt notion that leads ultimately to death by excruciating boredom. Besides, I can’t help how I feel about Cy.” And she winked at me.
Marie, the night I found out they had slept together: Cy has invited her to supper. She brings us chocolates wrapped in gold foil with miniature Rembrandt paintings printed on it. Rembrandt’s fat creamy wife. Cy is excited about the wrappers because he’s working on a thesis for an Art History degree. He collects everybody’s wrappers and begs Marie to eat the last chocolate. She laughs and tosses it at his chest. It bounces off and nearly hits the baby rocking in her cradle beside Cy’s chair.
The Party: we are having fondue. Cy spills the starter fluid and when he lights it the fondue pot bursts into flames. The table is full of flammable things we somehow hadn’t noticed before: dishtowels, the bottle of starter fluid, a yellow Styrofoam duck that Hannah’s art teacher made for parents who volunteered to wear it on their heads for a swim-a-thon for cancer. Cy and I are screaming at each other. Hannah comes into the kitchen and we both scream, “Get out of the kitchen” in unison. Marie promptly throws a dishtowel on the fondue pot. There are a few clouds of black smoke. She lifts the towel off, magician-like, and there are no more flames. We stare at the pot for a few seconds and the flames burst back to life. The heat reaches the neck of the duck, melting it so the duck’s beak opens angrily. Marie puts the cloth back on the pot and the fire goes out. Later in the evening, everybody is drunk and raucous except me, because I’m still pregnant. We have eaten all evening, asparagus, carrots, broccoli dipped in hot wine cheese fondue, chunks of pumpernickel. Someone has suggested I wear the Styrofoam duck on my head throughout the evening. I protested but everyone booed me. I don’t want to seem excruciatingly boring, so I wear it. Marie picks up an empty wine bottle and blows into it. It sounds eerie and hollow and for a minute it sobers everyone. Suddenly Marie’s chair collapses beneath her. In slow motion she reaches both her arms out to Cy. Their fingers grip for a second and she hits the floor. She is laughing so hard she’s in tears.
The Birth: She came a month and a half early. A thirtyweeker as they call them in the neo-natal nursery. It was a caesarean. We arrived at the hospital at one in the morning and entered the case room. The nurses’ station glowed like a spaceship because the lights in the hall were dimmed. The nurse looked at me with a raised eyebrow as if my street clothes were a faux pas. They took Cy and me to a room and smeared jelly over my belly and hooked me to monitors. The baby’s heart rate was scratched on a spewing paper in fine red ink. The doctor came and said I should be operated on right away but he had two caesareans ahead of me.
“Each of them will take a half hour or so and then we’ll do you.” They were back in exactly one hour. In the delivery room, everyone was masked and wearing paper hats covered with mauve and blue flowers. A giant convex mirror hung from the ceiling, but I had to be hunched up in a fetal position. The epidural was like freezing water dribbling down my spine. They put a blue curtain across my chest and gathered around the table which was uncomfortably narrow. The anaesthetist was at my head. He sat next to a large box with dials and monitors. There was a tube in my back in case something went wrong and he had to administer more anaesthetic. Somebody was shaving my pubic hair.
“How’s that?”
“He likes it lower than that.”
“Where’s Cy?” I asked.
“We’ll let Cy in when we’re ready,” the anaesthetist said.
When Cy came in he was wearing a mauve and blue flowered cap also. He kneeled next to me, holding my hand, smoothing my hair. “I can still feel my toes,” I said.
“It’s not your toes we’re operating on,” said the anaesthetist. “You will feel sensation, you’ll feel them cutting you, but no pain.”
I heard them pull the tray of instruments across the floor. Suddenly I was swept with fear and just as suddenly it was gone. I felt the knife pressing across my belly. Cy began to smooth my hair with more vigour until his stroke became so vigorous I had to stop him. There was a sucking noise.
“That was your water breaking,” said someone behind the curtain. The anaesthetist looked over the curtain,
“Black hair,” he said. “It’s a girl”
“Is she healthy?” I asked.
“Appears to be.”
The sense of relief was absolute. I had planned to write about the birth as soon as I found out I was pregnant. I figured the epiphany would come then, that I would be wiser at that moment, the moment of birth. But I was dumbfounded. It’s taken me two months to find that word dumbfounded but it struck me walking down the street yesterday. For the ten days I was in hospital I didn’t write a word. Not a letter or thankyou note. It took us a month and a half to figure out a name for her. I couldn’t find any significance, the birth wasn’t a symbol or metaphor, it just happened, a clean thing, a thing unto itself, a pure wordless thing. I was struck dumb.
They lay her on my chest. Her head was small as a fist. Green guck of some sort all over her hair. The anaesthetist put his hand over her closed eyes to block the light so she would open them. They were black and wet like those of a newborn kitten. We held her there while they sewed me up. Cy said he saw her in the mirror first, being passed from hand to hand. Then all the doctors shook Cy’s hand, congratulating him.
The nurses in the neo-natal unit said Cy was the best father they’d seen. They said, “She’ll have him wrapped around her little finger.”
There were four other women besides me at the breast feeding class they offer in the hospital. We all had self-righteous expressions. We had heard that only thirty percent of Newfoundland women breast feed. The nurse speaks without stopping for breath, “Now, girls, some of the dads might be uncomfortable with the breast feeding at first, but sure that’s only natural. You’ll find that when you climax while you’re having sex you’ll probably be squirting milk all over him. Just keep a towel handy, that’s all, and don’t worry about the public. Nobody cares unless you’re in the mall and you strip off down to the waist. Now, you know yourself, girls, you have to use a little common sense and girls, if you’re going to a cocktail party, double pad, because I’m telling you now, once you get a drop of wine in you it’s going to be like Churchill Falls and you’re going to have to go in the bathroom and wring out your cocktail dress.”
The nurse puts on an instructional video in which a fifty-year-old woman holds a stuffed doll to her blouse in the various different breast feeding positions. She holds it under one arm, the legs kicking behind. White letters appear on the screen: Football position. Then the video shows actual mothers, who look worn out, still in hospital johnny coats, close-ups on their breasts, which are swollen, blue-veined and mountainous next to the newborn babies. Breast feeding is a skill, the narrator tells us.
My baby was too small to suck from my nipple so we had to feed her pumped breast milk from a bottle. I had to pump every night. Fit the plastic cone over my swollen, rock-hard breast and flick the little lever that starts the pump. I’ve seen the pump that we use to get water from the well. This pump was the same size. A two thousand dollar machine. It makes a loud grinding noise. After three days I thought I was bonding with it. Cy sat with me while my milk squirted into the attached cup. I showed him the four ounce mark. “Look how much I got.”
“That’s great, Donna.”
In the long exhausted week after she was born, we went to the hospital cafeteria so Cy could smoke. It’s a small room with a few tables, tinfoil ashtrays, lit mostly by the lights in the snack machines. There were meals of macaroni and soup that could be heated in the microwave, all displayed in racks that rotated when you pushed a button. At ten at night we had the cafeteria to ourselves, except for a nurse who came in with a flattened piece of shiny paper. She put it in the microwave and watched it as if it were a TV, pulling over a rickety chair and resting her elbows on her knees, chin in hand. The microwave choked into action, the inside lit up and a red light played on the package until it expanded with bursting popcorn kernels into a round smooth ball that split in a line up the centre. When she left, Cy reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a small box.
“I got you something.”
It was a bottle of moisturizing cream. I had run out but I’d told Cy not to get any because we couldn’t afford it. Tears came to my eyes.
Cy said, “Ah, for Jesus’ sake, Donna.”
“Well, I’m tired, Cy, I’m just plain tired.”
I guess it was somewhere during that week he slept with Marie. I found out because of the baby monitor. We got this monitor, you put one piece in the baby’s cradle and the other you carry around with you. It’s so sensitive you can hear the baby breathe or hiccup. It took a little getting used to. Sometimes it would pick up the voices of children playing on the street, the sound garbled and static as if the baby had been invaded by aliens who were using her as a vehicle to relay a message. Once, at midnight, Cy and I were sitting at the living room table, having a cup of coffee, watching the couples coming up from the Ship Inn, when there was a loud crash over the monitor. Both of us froze for a second and then ran up the stairs, two at a time. In her room, everything was still. The bassinet was in the centre of the table where we had left it. Cy looked out the window. Somebody on the street had slammed a car door.
The night Marie came over for supper Cy took her up to the bedroom to see the baby. He forgot the monitor was on.
He said, “Listen, Marie, what happened, if Donna knew about it, it would really hurt her, I mean I really had a good time, but I think it was a sort of solitary thing.”
His voice was soft and without static. It was as if he were standing behind me, telling me about it. I went out on the fire escape with my cup of coffee, put my feet up on the banister.
