Chapter 21
CHAPTER 21
Bernie
Maura sets about cleaning up like a whirlwind. I offer to help, but she won’t let me lift a finger. Soon, except for Elizabeth’s pants drying, the kitchen is as good as new. Keeping the house tidy seems immensely important to her. I imagine cleaning is how she fills most of her days.
She makes a pot of tea and joins me at the table once more. Alice reaches for my cup every so often, and it’s a balancing act not to spill hot tea on her chubby, giddy legs.
“Can I ask you something?” Maura says, tucking the legs of her chair under the table with a shrill squeak as if she needs to get closer to me to whisper. “Does it hurt?”
“Does what hurt?”
Maura inhales and holds her breath for a moment before she manages to puff it back out and say, “Bringing life into the world.”
“The birth, you mean?”
Her eyes widen as if I’ve said something blasphemous. “I… I…”
“Didn’t nobody ever tell you about this stuff? Your ma? A big sister?”
“Oh goodness no, my ma isn’t a talker. And I’ve no sisters.”
“So who told you about the birds and the bees, then?”
“No one. I just sort of worked it out over the years.” Maura closes her eyes and shakes her head and when she opens them again, I see a flash of confusion and fear and I think, Despite all her money, I wouldn’t swap shoes with her for all the tea in China .
“I thought I was dying,” she says, and a subtle quiver creeps into her voice. “When I bled for the first time, I really thought that was it for me. I was twelve or thirteen, I think. Certainly no more. I was in school when it started. Sister Dymphna, the principal, asked me and one of the other girls to go outside to the bathroom and cut up some old newspapers. The toilet roll was for the nuns only. We were cutting the newspapers into squares, just like sheets of toilet roll, when the pain in my stomach hit. I thought it was a bug at first. My brother was sick the week before, and my da. I can still see the stain on my underwear now as clear as day. I sat there thinking my insides were falling out. I knew bleeding from the inside was bad. I remembered seeing my friend’s da cough blood into his hand once. He was dead a few months later. I thought it’d be the same. I thought I’d done something terrible and the devil was out to get me. I stuffed my pants full of newspaper, went back to my classroom, and waited to die. But then, in a few days, it stopped. And the next month it came again. And so on and so on. Until I finally realized that it’s just something that happens. When I was older, sixteen or seventeen maybe, I asked my ma why she never told me. She hit me over the back of the head with a tea towel and told me if she heard me talking like that again she’d wash my mouth out with soap and water.”
“Jesus,” I say, unable to find better words.
“Like I said, my ma’s not a talker.”
“I have four sisters,” I say. “We talk a lot.”
Her envy is palpable.
“I don’t see them as much as I’d like to,” I add.
She swallows again. This time there’s no tart to choke down but the lump seems to get stuck regardless.
“I’ve learned a thing or two since then. How babies are made, for one thing,” she says.
I smile. I don’t doubt that was the first thing her new husband taught her.
“Christy says having babies is what women do,” she says. “It’s what their bodies are made to do.”
“Doctors.” I roll my eyes. “You can be the smartest man in the room, but you will never understand what it’s like to push new life into this world.”
“Christy doesn’t know about the baby yet,” she says. “I wanted to wait until I knew for sure. I didn’t want to get his hopes up.”
“Doesn’t he know your monthlies are missing?”
“God no. Why would I tell him that?”
“Dan’s no doctor,” I say, laughing at the thought of it, “but he knows as soon as my monthlies are gone that we’re having another baby. It’s just nature.”
“Christy and I don’t talk about things like that.”
“And you don’t talk to your ma ’bout it neither.”
“No.”
“Who do you talk to?”
“Nobody. It’s not really something you talk about, is it?”
“We’re talking about it now, aren’t we?”
Maura takes a deep breath and observes me.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Forget I said anything.”
“You and me are going to be friends,” I tell her, as matter-of-fact as if I’m saying birds fly or fish swim. “And we’re going to talk about all sorts, all the time. Because that’s what friends do. It’s what women should do, eh?”
I take her hand and give it a gentle squeeze.
“Friends,” she says. “I’d like that.”