it – I was a married woman, and shame wasn’t a factor. My period was three weeks late, and facts were facts.
Instead of the downstairs bathroom I shared with my brother, I used the guest bathroom upstairs. The guest bathroom felt one notch more medical, one notch less tinged by personal history – less accusatory, to be honest. And the olive fixtures and foil wallpaper patterned with brown bamboo looked swampy and dank when compared to the test’s scientific white-and-blue box. And there’s not much more to say, except that fifteen minutes later I was officially pregnant and I was late for math class.
“Jesus, Cheryl…”
“Jason, don’t curse. You can swear, but don’t curse.”
“Pregnant?”
I was quiet.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m late for math class. Aren’t you even happy?”
A student walked by, maybe en route to see the principal.
Jason squinted like he had dust in his eyes. “Yeah – well, of course – sure I am.”
I said, “Let’s talk about it at homeroom break.”
“I can’t. I’m helping Coach do setup for the Junior A team. I promised him ages ago. Lunchtime then. In the cafeteria.”
I kissed him on his forehead. It was soft, like antlers I’d once touched on a petting zoo buck. “Okay. I’ll see you there.”
He kissed me in return and I went to math class.
I was on the yearbook staff, so I can be precise here. Delbrook Senior Secondary is a school of 1,106 students located about a five-minute walk north of the Trans-Canada Highway, up the algae-green slope of Vancouver’s North Shore. It opened in the fall of 1962, and by 1988, my senior year, its graduates numbered about thirty-four thousand. During high school, most of them were nice enough kids who’d mow lawns and baby-sit and get drunk on Friday nights and maybe wreck a car or smash a fist through a basement wall, not even knowing why they’d done it, only that it had to happen. Most of them grew up in rectangular postwar homes that by 1988 were called tear-downs by the local real estate agents. Nice lots. Nice trees and vines. Nice views.
As far as I could tell, Jason and I were the only married students ever to have attended Delbrook. It wasn’t a neighborhood that married young. It was neither religious nor irreligious, although back in eleventh-grade English class I did a tally of the twenty-six students therein: five abortions, three dope dealers, two total sluts, and one perpetual juvenile delinquent. I think that’s what softened me up for conversion: I didn’t want to inhabit that kind of moral world. Was I a snob? Was I a hypocrite? And who was I to even judge? Truth be told, I wanted everything those kids had, but I wanted it by playing the game correctly. This meant legally and religiously and – this is the part that was maybe wrong – I wanted to outsmart the world. I had, and continue to have, a nagging suspicion that I used the system simply to get what I wanted. Religion included. Does that cancel out whatever goodness I might have inside me?
Jason was right: Miss Priss.
Math class was x’s and y’s and I felt trapped inside a repeating dream, staring at these two evil little letters who tormented me with their constant need to balance and be equal with each other. They should just get married and form a new letter together and put an end to all the nonsense. And then they should have kids.
I thought about my own child-to-be as I stared out the window, turning the pages only when I heard everybody else turn theirs. I saw fleeting images of breast-feeding, prams and difficult labor, my knowledge of motherhood being confined mostly to magazines and cartoons. I ignored Lauren Hanley, two rows over, who held a note in her hand that she obviously wanted me to read. Lauren was one of the few people left from my Youth Alive! group who would still speak to me after rumors began spreading that Jason and I were making it.
Carol Schraeger passed the note my way; it was a plea from Lauren to talk during homeroom break. We did, out by her locker. I know Lauren saw this meeting as being charged with drama, and my serenity must have bothered her.
“Everyone’s talking, Cheryl. Your reputation is being tarnished. You have to do something about it.”
Lauren was probably the key blabber, but I was a married woman, so why should I care? I said, “Let people say what they want, Lauren. I take comfort in knowing that my best friends are squelching any rumors from the start, right?”
She reddened. “But everyone knows your Chevette was parked at Jason’s all weekend while his parents were away in the Okanogan.”
“So?”
“So you guys could have been doing anything in there – not that you were – but imagine what it looked like.”
Truth was, Jason and I were doing everything in there that weekend, but I have to admit that for a moment or two I enjoyed watching Lauren squirm at my nonresponse. In any event, I was far too preoccupied to have any sort of conversation. I told Lauren I had to go to my homeroom and sequence some index cards for an oral presentation later that afternoon on early Canadian fur trappers, and I left.
In homeroom I sat at my desk and wrote over and over on my pale blue binder the words GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE/GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE. When this binder with these words was found, caked in my evaporating blood, people made a big fuss about it, and when my body is shortly lowered down into the planet, these same words will be felt-penned all over the surface of my white coffin. But all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still.
Stillness is what I have here now – wherever here is. I’m no longer a part of the world and I’m still not yet a part of what follows. I think there are others from the shooting here with me, but I can’t tell where. And for whatever it’s worth, I’m no longer pregnant, and I have no idea what that means. Where’s my baby? What happened to it? How can it just go away like that?
It’s quiet here – quiet like my parents’ house, and quiet in the way I wanted silence when writing on my binder. The only sounds I can hear are prayers and curses; they’re the only sounds with the power to cross over to where I am.
I can only hear the words of these prayers and curses – not the voice of the speaker. I’d like to hear from Jason and my family, but I’m unable to sift them out.
Dear God,
Remove the blood from the souls of these young men and women. Strip their memories of our human vileness. Return them to the Garden and make them babes, make them innocent. Erase their memories of today.
As I’m never going to be old, I’m glad that I never lost my sense of wonder about the world, although I have a hunch it would have happened pretty soon. I loved the world, its beauty and bigness as well as its smallness: the first thirty seconds of the Beatles’ “Lovely Rita”; pigeons sitting a fist apart on the light posts entering Stanley Park; huckleberries both bright orange and dusty blue the first week of June; powdered snow down to the middle gondola tower of Grouse Mountain by the third week of every October; grilled-cheese sandwiches and the sound of lovesick crows on the electrical lines each May. The world is a glorious place, and filled with so many unexpected moments that I’d get lumps in my throat, as though I were watching a bride walk down the aisle – moments as eternal and full of love as the lifting of veils, the saying of vows and the moment of the first wedded kiss.
The lunch hour bell rang and the hallways erupted into ordered hubbub. Normally I wouldn’t have gone to the cafeteria; I was part of the Out to Lunch Bunch – six girls from the Youth Alive! program. We’d go down to one of the fast-food places at the foot of the mountain for salad bar, fries and ice water. Our one rule was that every lunch we had to confess a sin to the group. I always made mine up: I’d stolen a blusher from the drugstore;