Free Appropriate Place by Lise Bissonnette

wasn’t too painful but he did say something very bad: “The mass is significant.
You may have been pregnant longer than we estimated.”
    If he was right, the child was yours.
    It was the accident I’d tried for months to bring on. I’d given up the
iud, I’d even bought a soft jersey dress, brick red, a designer model, which I wore
too often, for the pleasure of letting my stomach become familiar with its fullness.
At the slightest nausea at my desk in the National Assembly, where I often felt that
way for various reasons, I would track a bubble rising from my entrails to my head,
it bore your son — I never doubted that it would have been a boy, complicated like
you but with dark brown eyes like mine because, according to Mendelian law, the gene
for brown eyes is dominant. But the tests delivered from pharmacy to pharmacy to
Madeleine, who was in on it, were always negative. My red dress, which in fact you
didn’t like, was sterile.
    Why did I have sex with a stranger after the brief official trip to
Italy that I’d extended by three days on the Adriatic for myself ? I was able to
tell Madeleine that the weeks had been long without you, that I was exasperated, or
desperate, that finally, away from home, I had worked up the courage to anger you by
taking the stupidest risk, to sneer at your intelligence, your wisdom and its laws.
No, that’s not true, you had nothing to do with it. The man was there for the
taking, he was smooth, easy, hot, he made me laugh for forty-eight hours, took me
dancing on the sand, humming his song. I have a nomadic body, I always have, you
knew that too before you took me, and when I drink I can have the mind of a shop
girl who sees herself whirling on the beach with a handsome dark-haired man in the
setting sun.
    That was why, when a nurse sat me in a deep armchair, wrapped in a warm
sheet, and suggested that I rest as she stroked my hand for a moment, I whirled
again. I had plenty of sobs, the kind that she, a nice girl with beautiful teeth and
golden hair, would soothe again and again, all day long. Mine welled up from nowhere
or from my shoulders, a little higher than my heart in any case. I saw myself as the
very image of infinite desolation because a thread of blood would be soaked up by
the white gauze that parted my legs, what a pity. Madeleine brought me back to the
house. My absence was shorter than for a case of bronchitis, the whole thing was
uncomplicated.
    You came by day after day, for a few minutes or an hour. I’d rarely
seen you so often. We engaged in idle chitchat, you kept asking if I needed
anything, as if chocolate or tea or a newspaper could make the late afternoons pass.
The evening when you decided to rock me, with all the lights out, to murmur that I
must get over the black spider dwelling in me, I thought you were about to take me
back and that life would be more beautiful, because more solemn than before, like in
the song about the lovers, those whose bodies are exultant yet who know that they’re
together in a bedroom without a cradle.
    The time had come to be more beautiful than before, and under your
fingers I was, you left very late, for once. And never came back.
    But I am certainly more beautiful than before. There’s light in my
little head that has chosen to come here to be illuminated, as if it were a clinic
where they kindly extirpate waste matter from you before it builds up.
    What I know is that you didn’t leave because of the boy on the shore of
the Adriatic. At the moment when I was dancing with him, you were starting to look
at other women less innocently and to acquire from me some lightness that may have
led you afterwards to the bed of some laughing woman or other. Nor did you leave
because of the child, that ball of shadow that disappeared at an age when it’s still
possible to have two fathers. You left because I’d lied to you about my desires and
the reasons for the red dress, and