Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth

Author:Ainslie Hogarth [Hogarth, Ainslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

19

I wasn’t going to have more coolers till I knew for sure about Cal, but here I am again, cracking one open, sucking it down.

You’re only managing the preliminaries right now, Cal, early stages, sipping nutrients from your yolk sac and doing paperwork. Not the real labor yet of growing organs and developing brain cells. I’ll stop drinking coolers when I really miss my period, how’s that? When it’s a whole week late. I press a hand low on my stomach, get a sense from her that she thinks that’s okay, reasonable, then take a long swig from the cooler.

I can’t give you what you want.

Gelatin comes in thin, rectangular leaves, which I lay in a Tupperware container filled with cold water. They soak ten minutes, then I pour it all into a pot and heat it over the stove. I imagine I learned this from my mother, but I didn’t. I imagine it’s an old recipe passed from her mother to her to me, but really it came from The Book, of course.

I beat the salad dressing, mix it with the salmon, stir in the prepared gelatin, then pour all of the ingredients into my foot-long fish mold so they can mingle in the fridge for a while, become firm and delicious together. When Cal comes, I’ll show her how to use gelatin. I’ll give her my copy of Secrets of a Famous Chef and impart to her how important it is to only cook from This Book, my spells for a long and happy life like ours.

I open another cooler, dig the gummy bears out of the cupboard, and open The Book to the “Mother and Children” section, carefully compiled by leading authorities. Reading it helps me to not cry.

The baby’s growth and development require plenty of lime (I pull a green gummy bear from the bag), iron (I pull a red gummy bear from the bag), and phosphorus (a white gummy bear from the bag. I line them up in front of me and continue reading). If the mother doesn’t eat enough lime, iron, and phosphorus (I glance up at my army of nutrients), the supply will be taken from her own body, resulting in rapid decay of the teeth. Many infants are born with a tendency to rickets because of the faulty diet of the mother. (I quickly gobble up the gummy bears, rinse them from my mouth with a few big, healthy chugs of cooler, and set out three more.)

A healthy, full-blooded woman (That’s me!) should not be allowed to satisfy all her whims in her desire for harmful foods. Except there’s a grease splotch over the r in harmful so it looks like hamful, which makes me laugh, especially because I would say that I do crave particularly hamful foods, whatever that means. I finish off the cooler and find another one, a hard lemonade. Hard, hard lemonade for hard, hard people. Wooden dolls. Stone cherubs. That waiter figurine at Aunt Tony’s holding out a tray of business cards, all of them together at a party enjoying hard lemonade for hard people.

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