Song for Maud
by Elliott Gish
Ella wants to have a baby. She tells Maddi this while they are both drunk, crushed together in the throes of awkward and slightly unsatisfying sex.
“A baby,” she whispers, her hand moving to cup the slight curve of Maddi’s stomach. “A little girl.”
Being rather distracted by the proceedings, Maddi chooses not to engage. Ella is drunk, and she says all kinds of things when she is drunk. Best not to respond. Best to let it lie.
#
A week later, Ella brings it up again when they are at dinner.
“I want to have a baby,” she says, three sips into her second glass of wine. Her cheeks are flushed but her gaze is sharp. Maddi can tell that while she is not entirely sober, she is not drunk, either. She casts her eyes about the restaurant for a distraction, finding none.
“Huh,” she says, hoping that she sounds as though she is calmly considering a sensible proposition, as though Ella has not just lobbed a hypothetical grenade into the middle of the table. “That’s…an idea, definitely.”
The light from the candles on the table make Ella’s eyes look black and wet, like midnight pools. When she smiles, the shadows on her face deepen slightly. “Imagine it,” she says. “A little girl with your hair, my eyes. How cute would that be?”
Obedient to a fault, Maddi pictures a toddling child with reddish curls and round, dark eyes. She is wearing corduroy overalls, clumsily chasing a butterfly through a field of wildflowers. It is, as advertised, extremely cute.
“Yeah,” she says, and then a friend at another table recognizes them and comes over to join them, and the night takes a different turn. Still, Maddi finds herself revisiting the image again and again as the hours pass, seeing that little girl in the field, running awkwardly after a fluttering target.
In bed that night, she says, “Do you mean it?”
Ella, now properly drunk and nearly asleep, murmurs, “Did I mean what?”
“What you said. You know. Having a baby.”
“Mm-hm,” Ella says, or probably says—the second syllable trails off into a ragged snore, and Maddi is left to lie on her back, staring at the ceiling. If she looks hard enough, she can imagine it as a field.
#
It’s not that people don’t have babies, obviously. Maddi knows a handful of people who have chosen to have children—her older brother, her least favourite coworker, her college roommate who used to sleep in the nude. Pregnancy announcements and photos of newborns have begun to trickle slowly into her social media feeds. Every now and again there will be a picture of a round, bare belly, its protruding navel a shocking declaration of fertility, that will stop her scrolling finger in its tracks for a second as she tries to figure out exactly which old classmate or friend-of-a-friend has decided to procreate. Babies happen. They just don’t happen much to people Maddi sees every day.
“That’s what’s so cool about it,” Ella says when Maddi brings up this point during another conversation about babies and the having thereof. “None of our friends have babies. We could be the first couple in our group to have a kid! We’d be trailblazers.”
That, Maddi must admit, is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that their friends are largely young gay professionals, childless by choice or by an unwillingness to work against the many odds stacked up against them, and that none of them seem likely to have babies any time soon.
They had not discussed the possibility of having children when they first met. Ella had never given any indication that she’d wanted them. Her lifestyle—their lifestyle, Ella would say, but really it is hers, her bar-hopping and her day-drinking and her experimentation with whatever drugs she can get her hands on, with Maddi riding along mostly as an observer—does not leave any room for raising children. This desire seems to have been magicked up out of nowhere, a sudden fall of rain from a clear blue sky. Is it because her thirtieth birthday is approaching? Is this what they mean when they talk about biological clocks?
They are the same age. Shouldn’t Maddi’s clock be ticking, too? If Ella wants this, shouldn’t she?
“I just worry that she would be lonely,” Maddi says. This is not, by any sally of the imagination, the only thing that she is worried about, but it is the first thing that comes to mind. Ella is an only child, and she has spoken many times of how alone she felt, how cheated she felt when she saw other children walking to school with brothers and sisters.
Ella lies down with her face pressed against Maddi’s belly, as though there is already something in there. A little fish, swimming.
“How could she be lonely?” she asks, her voice barely muffled. “She’d have us.”
#
“We could name her Ava,” Ella says. It has been so long since the last time they spoke of the possibility of having a child that Maddi stares at her for several seconds before she realizes what she is talking about. “Or Emmeline. Or Pearl. Something sweet and old-fashioned. I love old-fashioned names for little girls.”
“Maud,” Maddi says. She does not mean to say it; it comes out of her like a sneeze. Maud is her grandmother’s name. She has always liked it.
“Maud,” Ella repeats, rolling the single syllable around her mouth like a sweet. Her smile, blooming suddenly, is sweet as well. “I like that. Like a scullery maid.”
Maddi winces, because her grandmother had, in fact, worked as a maid for years. There are pictures of her in the family albums, neat and dull in a dark blue dress, her eyes small and very far away. As though she had been thinking of something better.
The next time she imagines the face of their imaginary daughter, it is her grandmother’s face that emerges from the mist of her features, Ella’s wine-dark eyes made small and wistful. Dreaming of something else.
She sees that small hand, stretching out across a great distance. She feels those chubby fingers grasping her own, and she cannot suppress a smile.
#
Ella talks about her more and more. Their daughter, she says, will obviously be smarter than other children, because Ella is smarter than other people, and it makes sense that those genes will be passed on. She will be musical, because Ella is musical. She will be quick and bright and ambitious. She will be special, because Ella is special.
“What about me?” Maddi asks, hating the little girl plaintiveness in her voice. She cannot help it. This is beginning to feel less like a collaboration and more like a one man show. “Will she be like me at all?”
Ella reaches up and strokes Maddi’s hair, those reddish curls of which she is so fond. That hair, she always says, is what drew her to Maddi in the first place. Without it, she might never have looked at her. “She will be kind like you,” she says. “She’ll have a big heart. She will love everyone.”
Strange. Maddi does not think of herself as someone who loves everyone—when she steps out of her body and looks herself over she sees a bit of a crank, a woman with curmudgeonly tendencies. But she loves Ella, and sometimes Ella thinks that she is everyone. Maybe that is what it is.
She pictures the little girl in her mind with Ella’s quick and clever steps, the strange nimbleness that makes her movements resemble those of a goat. She sees the gleam in the girl’s black eyes, like the gleam that sometimes comes to Ella’s when she is four drinks in and she reaches out to pinch the spare flesh of Maddi’s arm. It makes her flinch, as though the girl has popped out of thin air and hit her.
That night, as she brushes her teeth, she looks at her own face in the mirror. Her eyes scan slowly, searching intently for idiosyncrasies. What traits are there that might someday belong to their daughter? Will she inherit Maddi’s crooked bottom teeth, her wide nose, the worry lines that are starting to pucker her forehead? Will she bite at the skin on the sides of her fingers, frantically bounce her leg up and down when she is bored? Will she be short, like Ella, or tall, like Maddi?
She spits mint foam into the sink and realizes that she is using the word will, not would. As though Maud is no longer a hypothetical, but a certainty.
#
Maud. She becomes real to Maddi the more she thinks about her, and the more she thinks about her, the more Ella seems to bring her up.
They see blue curtains at a window and Ella says, “I bet her favourite colour will be blue.”
(Why blue, Maddi wonders? Why not green, or pink, or orange? But she knows why. Ella’s favourite colour is blue.)
They pass a dog pulling its owner along from the end of a leash and Ella says, “We could get her a dog. A husky, maybe. Or a collie.”
(Both dogs Ella had growing up. Maddi imagines the girl running through the meadow with a puppy bounding happily at her side, a mutt of no discernable breed, one ear up and the other flopping every which way as it keeps pace.)
A postcard arrives from a friend in Bali and Ella says, “We could take her on vacation. Somewhere warm. Disneyland.”
(Maddi hates warm places. She imagines their daughter in Reykjavik, tugging excitedly at her mothers’ hands as she runs towards a plume of smoke and steam. A volcano. Their daughter will love volcanos.)
At night Ella whispers in her ear about Maud, what she will like and dislike, how brilliant she will be and how beautiful. Maddi listens, nods in all the right places. Only once does she disagree, when Ella is talking fondly about the school plays that Maud will star in when she is old enough to audition. Annie, maybe, or The Wizard of Oz.
“I don’t picture her as an actor,” Maddi says. “More of a back-of-house girl. A set painter, maybe. Something behind the scenes.”
Ella is silent for a very long time. Because it is dark, Maddi cannot see her expression, but after the quiet stretches out into a thin and fragile thing, she knows that she has made a mistake.
“My daughter,” Ella says finally, “is not a set painter.”
So much venom in the words, as though responding to a deadly insult. Too late, Maddi remembers that Ella had been the star of all her school plays, right up until graduation.
Ella turns away, goes to sleep without another word. Maddi lies awake for a very long time, watching Maud run through the field. She stops once, looks behind her as though wondering why Maddi cannot keep up.
#
It is a matter of course that Maddi will be the one to bear the child. Ella takes it for granted, and so, as is usual, Maddi takes it for granted, too.
“I just couldn’t do it,” Ella says, placing a hand on her stomach and making a face. “To have something growing in there? Gross. And I’d get fat. I never want to be pregnant.”
It does not occur to Ella that Maddi might not want to be pregnant, either. It occurs to Maddi only in the smallest hours of the morning, when she wakes up bathed in sweat and panting too hard to catch her breath. Most of the time she is fine to let Ella rub her belly, to talk about how magical it will be to see it grow and know that their baby is in there. Their little girl.
“It’ll be expensive, is the thing,” Maddi says one night while she is doing the dishes. Ella, still finishing her wine at the kitchen table, shoots her a curious glance. “Inseminating, all that. It’s thousands of dollars, I read.”
“Inseminating?” Ella repeats the word as though she has never heard it before. One eyebrow raises, a lovely and skeptical arch.
“Yeah. You have to pay for the sperm, the equipment, all that. It usually doesn’t take the first time, either. You have to go back again and again. We’ll have to save up for a while.”
Ella laughs. It takes a moment for Maddi to realize that she is laughing at her.
“Why bother with all that?” she says. “I’ll just find some guy to fuck you.”
Some guy. Maddi lets her hands float in the greasy dishwater. It is no longer warm.
“Oh,” she says. Ella gets out of her chair and comes up behind her, her arms snaking around Maddi’s waist. She goes on tiptoes so her lips can reach Maddi’s ear. Maddi imagines a man that close, touching her, and can’t quite suppress a shudder.
“We’ll go to a bar,” Ella says, and she is whispering now, as though it is a lovely secret that the two of them are sharing. “I’ll pick him out. It’ll be easy. We’ll bring him back here, and I’ll watch. That way it’ll feel like I did it.”
She deposits a small, smacking kiss on the outer shell of Maddi’s ear, then leaves the room. The cutlery in the sink clinks and shifts, the sound of it muted by the water. The suds have disappeared. Maddi pulls the plug and watches the water pinwheel in a queasy spiral down the drain.
#
Somehow, the desire switches in Ella’s brain. She does not talk about Maud as much, never uses her name when she does. Instead, she talks about the process of procuring Maud, the plan she has concocted to get Maddi pregnant. The man—or men—who will come to their house to fuck her. It excites her, this plan. She likes to discuss the details.
“It won’t even take that long,” she says. They are on the couch, watching a movie, except that Ella has not been watching it at all. She has been talking. She has been drinking. She is still drinking. “You’ve never picked up a man, but I have. It’ll be so easy. Especially with two of us.”
Maddi swallows, tries to follow the action on the screen. The hero is trying to save someone. She cannot remember who.
“What if it doesn’t work?” she asks, although she already knows the answer. “The first time, I mean?”
“We’ll try again. As many times as it takes.” Ella reaches out and pats her knee, as though to comfort her. Don’t worry, that pat seems to say, I’ll get as many men in our bed as we need.
Maddi looks at their bed that night when they turn in, at their pearl-grey comforter and mountains of decorative pillows, and tries to imagine a man in it, on top of her. Imagines thick hands, holding her down.
That part is from Ella. She likes to talk about this hypothetical man pinning Maddi down, holding onto her so she can’t get up. Sometimes, after a few drinks, she starts talking about the way that she will help him, this man, the way she will grab onto Maddi’s wrists and pin them over her head, the way she will kneel on Maddi’s chest until she cannot breathe.
Sometimes, after these conversations, things happen that Maddi does not want to happen.
“I don’t want to,” she whispers, so quietly that she can barely hear herself. That makes it alright, in a way. If she cannot hear herself speak, it is as though she has said nothing at all.
Ella lets out a little hitching snore, turns over in her sleep. In Maddi’s head Maud frowns, looks up to a lowering sky. Her face is harder to picture now, as though someone has passed over her features with an eraser. Maddi tries to hold onto the details, the curls, the black eyes, the chubby fingers, but she can’t.
There are no more butterflies. It is going to rain.
#
The plan, such as it is, comes to fruition quite suddenly. They are at a pub after work—they came here for happy hour, which has turned into multiple hours, as it so often does when Ella wants to go for a drink—and a Tom Petty song is playing at tooth-aching volume on a speaker above Maddi’s head. She is about to suggest that they move tables when Ella looks up from her phone and grabs her hand, squeezing it tight enough to make the bones rub together. She has finished her third glass of wine, is halfway through her fourth. Maddi is still nursing her second pint.
“That one,” she says, and points. It is a very obvious point. Maddi feels embarrassed.
“That one what?” she says, and follows Ella’s finger. It is trembling slightly, as it always does after a few drinks. It points to a man sitting at the bar, tall and broad-shouldered. He wears his brown hair long and is studying his phone with such concentration that a deep groove has formed between his brows.
“Oh,” says Maddi, and Ella squeals.
“Isn’t he perfect? He looks like me, a little. The same hair. Same eyes. We’re matched and everything, he just has to figure out where I am.”
Matched? Maddi looks at the man’s phone, then at Ella’s phone. There is a picture on the screen of the man at the bar, floating serenely above a write-up. He likes dogs, apparently.
Ella had insisted that they come to this pub to drink, even though they have never been there before. Maddi hadn’t thought to question that. It is always easiest not to question Ella.
“Is that an app?” she asks, nodding at Ella’s screen. “Did you… Have you been looking for someone to…”
She cannot make herself say it, although she cannot help but picture it: hands, pinning her down. When Ella frowns in response, a little crease appears between her brows. Despite herself, Maddi is impressed. The man at the bar really does look like her.
“Well, yeah. This way it’s a sure thing. You can vet people more easily through the apps. Less fucking around that way.” She sees something in Maddi’s expression, and the crease deepens. “Look, it’ll be easy. All we have to do is bring him home. I showed him a picture. That one from Jason’s wedding, where your tits are kind of out. He’s okay with fucking you.”
This, Maddi knows, is meant to be a compliment. She tries as hard as she can to take it as such.
“This is a lot,” she says, and Ella shakes her head, reaches out to squeeze her again. Her wrist this time, her slender fingers encircling it like a bracelet. When she speaks, Maddi sees purplish flashes of her teeth, stained with wine.
“It’s fine,” she says. It had better be, her voice says. “I’m going to go talk to him. He has a car, so he can drive us back to our place. And then…”
Her hand moves from Maddi’s wrist, lands light as a kiss on her belly. What she is trying to say, Maddi knows, is and then we will have a baby. What she hears, clear as the screaming whistle of a train, is and then we will hold you down.
Ella kisses her cheek, hops out of her chair, makes her way to the bar. Maddi does not watch her go, but stares into her pint, watching the bubbles drift idly to the surface.
In the wheat-gold liquid she sees Maud, one last time. Scarcely more than an outline now, no more curls, no more black eyes, all those lovely details scrubbed away. She stands in her field again, one hand outstretched.
Then, slowly, she lowers it. Steps back into nothing and disappears, as though she never was.
“You weren’t real,” Maddi says, and the music blaring from the speaker over her head is almost loud enough to drown her out. Almost, but not quite. She looks up and sees Ella talking to the man at the bar, leaning so close her body almost touches his. She is baring her purpled teeth in a broad smile. Her hands are sketching stories in the air as she tells him of their plan. Her plan.
In a moment, they will both come back to the table. In a moment, Ella will hail a cab. In a moment…
Maddi’s purse is under her chair. She reaches under to grab it, slips it over her shoulder, and walks out of the pub, into the clammy chill of the night.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Elliott Gish is a writer and librarian from Nova Scotia. Her work has appeared in Grain Magazine, the New Quarterly, Dark Matter Magazine, the Dalhousie Review, and many others. Her debut novel, Grey Dog, appears in stores this spring. Elliott lives with her partner in Halifax, a city full of rain and ghosts. @Elliott_Gish on Twitter. @elliottgish on Instagram. elliottgishwrites.com