Free Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt Page B

looked into the rear-view mirror and caught her glare.
    “Maybe they’re Mom’s,” Sasha said, her thin legs squirming beneath the skirt she hated wearing.
    “I don’t know,” I said and sped the car up a little, then rolled down my window, hoping the wind would shush my elder daughter.
    “Mom has never been there. I told her about Rick’s parents going. She said she wanted to go too.”
    “Maybe Fred …” I said, like a pitiable fool. Fred had rarely been in our car since he’d got his licence and saved up for his own run-down Toyota.
    “Mmmmph,” Charlotte grunted, and for a moment I hoped she would let the matter drop. “Why would Fred leave them in your back seat?”
    “I don’t know, Charlotte. Just stop this inane conversation,” I said, exploding now with the aggression of guilt. “You’ve barely said hello to me, and certainly haven’t thanked me for the fact that you don’t have to sit on a hot bus that takes three times as long to get home,” I was ranting. “And not a word about your day. What’s gotten into you?” I didn’t look in the rear-view as I turned right onto our concession road, but I knew that Charlotte’s face was full of loathing.
    I spent the rest of the day swallowing discomfort, wondering if Christine had dropped the matches in the back seat on purpose. I was on the verge of confessing everything to Anna that night, wanting to waylay Charlotte raising the topic, but she never said another word about it.
    Christine stayed awake each night after I left, she told me. Over and over again, she blamed me for the insomnia she said was aging her. And for her childlessness. After the hunger, the fumbling, the mad excavation to the centre of her, I would pull out and come somewhere on her body, in my hand or on the sheets. And each night after I left, she’d stay awake alone, aging with an empty womb.
    I was playing a perilous game with myself. With her.
    “I love my family,” I would say, toying with them, too.
    “Then what are you doing here wasting my time?” she finally asked one night.
    “Well, I love you too,” I said, believing in the cliché of the man I had become.
    “Go home,” she said, and thus it began: the slow attrition of pride and lust. She threatened never to see me again, telling me that at thirty-eight she was now too old to be playing this game. When I called the next day, wracked that she might now hate me, she had softened, and our routine of dinner, sex and songs began again, and at first seemed as spontaneous and erotic as in the beginning. But over the next few months I turned into an observer of myself, wondering how I had come to this, how I could have these conversations, or listen to this pathetic singing. I watched when we fucked, too, wanting someone else to see me, wanting to perform this for an audience, feeling my leg muscles swell, my arms bulge with effort that I wanted documented. I’d do my little show for myself, and then I’d pull out at the very last second.
    Charlotte is helping Anna make more piles. They are in our bedroom, and I have come to stand in the doorway to watch. Charlotte has delicately trimmed Anna’s hair to an ear-length bob, which will facilitate the clipping and shaving that will take place before they carve open her skull. This small act of vanity in the face of the operation’s brutality is something I believe is only possible among women: my daughter is anointing her mother’s body in preparation for its mutilation.
    “Look at this!” Charlotte yelps, coming across a plaid skirt in Anna’s closet. She hauls the skirt out and holds it up to her waist, drawing attention to its extravagant length and bulk. “Good grief, Mom, how could you?”
    Anna smiles and puts down the other clothes she has been sorting. She crosses the room to Charlotte. “Ah, I love this skirt; it’s so old,” she says, fondling the woollen pleats, and both Charlotte and I are drawn in by her perfect syntax.
    “You do?”