The Mother-in-Law(26)
After dinner that night I went to the communal area, which was filled with pregnant girls on brown vinyl couches, watching the television or staring at novels. At one table a girl sat painting another girl’s nails a pretty, pale pink that reminded me of Cynthia’s nails.
“May I sit here?” I asked a blond girl on the couch, who was in her pajamas and slippers, her hair pinned up in rollers. She was chatting to the girls on her right and she slid along without looking up.
The couch was startlingly uncomfortable, but as I wasn’t sure I could physically stand again, I didn’t bother trying to move. All around the room, girls were pinned to their seats by their enormous watermelon-shaped bellies. I counted seventeen girls, seventeen watermelons. Pamela was the only one who didn’t sit. She stood by the bookshelves to the right of the television, ostensibly choosing a book, but mostly fidgeting. She was one of those types that couldn’t sit still, I’d noticed. She was jittery, anxious. It was distracting.
The blond girl—Laurel, I found out—talked quietly to the two girls on her right. As I eavesdropped, I found out that this was her second time at Orchard House. She’d been here two years earlier, when she was just sixteen. Funnily enough, rather than people finding this startling and horrifying—as I did—she was treated as a celebrity of sorts, and regarded as the fountain of all knowledge about Orchard House. As I listened, conversation drifted from the terrible food, to Matron’s crush on Arthur, the gardener, to Laurel’s suspicion that one of the girls was pregnant with her own brother’s baby. The banter, inane as it was, reminded me of conversations with my own friends, and made me feel lonely and comforted in equal parts.
At ten minutes to ten, Matron appeared. “Ten minutes until lights out, girls!” Matron had a trill voice that pierced the air and knocked any sense of normalcy out of the room. “Come on, now. Don’t dillydally.”
She disappeared, and the girls dutifully shuffled their hips to the edge of the couch, ready to hoist themselves to standing. I found out, via the girl’s grumbling, that the lights did indeed go out at ten P.M., and if you weren’t in your room, you had to find your way back there in pitch darkness.
“Ten minutes until lights out,” Matron said again. “Don’t dillydally.”
We all glanced at the door again.
“If you dillydally I won’t be able to dillydally with Arthur after lights out.”
Matron was nowhere to be seen. A slow giggle broke out across the room as everyone glanced around. I noticed Pamela’s back was to us.
“Pamela?” Laurel cried, delighted. “Was that you?”
Pamela bent over, fiddling with the spine of a book, pretending not to hear. If she was doing the impersonation, no one could deny that it was spot-on.
“Oh, Arthur, stop that!” came Matron’s voice again. “Oh, go on then. Don’t stop.”
The laugh broke into a fever-pitched chortle.
“Just take me into your shed and I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“What are you girls still doing in here?”
The voice was louder now, more shrill. Our heads swung toward the doorway where Matron—actual Matron—stood, hands on hips.
“Didn’t I tell you not to dillydally?”
“Right away, Matron,” Pamela said and she was the first one to exit the room.
Our bellies grew. We weren’t told much about what was coming. We guessed when our babies were due by the size of our bellies. In public, we talked about our pregnancies insofar as they affected our bodies: “My bladder is the size of a walnut,” or “I can hardly walk up this flight of stairs,” but we didn’t talk about the “babies,” as such. No one told us not to, we just didn’t . . . a natural form of self-protection perhaps. I avoided making friendships, which was surprisingly easy when you were forbidden to talk about who you were and where you came from. In any case, I’d never been much good at small talk.
During the day, Pamela didn’t talk to me at all. I tried to teach her things, as Matron had asked. How to speak nicely. How to sew. But each time I tried, she just stared at me or rolled her eyes or muttered under her breath. Once, as I was showing her how to hold cutlery properly, she picked up a fork and threw it across the room. The problem, I realized, was that Pamela was damaged. I wasn’t sure how to teach her not to be damaged.
Pamela’s impersonations became a nightly ritual. She could ‘do’ almost anyone—Dr. Humbert, the obstetrician with the bushy moustache who came by once a week to take our blood pressure; Arthur, the gardener and Matron’s love-interest; any of the girls. She was a master at finding people’s quirks, the tiniest detail that brought the impersonation to life. Every evening, she stood by the bookshelves and we waited. It was my solace, these few minutes of giggles each day. It didn’t occur to me until later that it might be a comfort for her too. A few minutes of being someone else.
One night, when I’d been at Orchard House nearly a month, she impersonated me.
“Oh, yes, I’m Diana, I know how to use cutlery and talk posh.”
Everyone giggled. Even me. Perhaps it was her tone that made it funny rather than mean-spirited. Or maybe it was because it was the first time she’d acknowledged me at all. A part of me was glad to realize that someone in here knew I existed.
One night, as we gathered in the communal area, someone noticed Mary wasn’t there.