Everybody Has Everything - By Katrina Onstad Page 0,8

had called her “ma’am” the other day.

But Ana knew also how she looked through the window: “good for her age.” Attempting a moment of private flipness, she thought: My body has not been ruined by childbirth. She savoured it, then abandoned the thought as too cruel.

Ana turned her head to a flattering angle, but when she glanced sideways, the man had already walked on. All she could see was concrete, and an old oak tree that threw moving shadows across the line of parked cars.

The baby was in a blue checked sling across Sarah’s body like something worn by a contestant in a beauty pageant.

“Hands-free,” Sarah joked, waving her glass of wine. The baby nursed covertly. Only the extra crescent of Sarah’s pale chest peeking out of the sling confirmed to everyone in the room that there was a naked breast close by, and a mouth upon it. Each discomfort provoked by this was unique to its owner.

It had grown late, but Ana did not want them to leave. These dinners, which Sarah and Marcus protested over in the beginning, had become regular Friday night gatherings, always at Ana and James’s house, with the excuse that they were all working together to break Sarah’s maternal isolation. Sarah complained about the “mommy circuit,” as she called it. She liked to mock the neighbourhood mothers with their fear of strangling stroller straps and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and uneducational toys. They bored her. She described a kind of narrowing that happens to women when they have children, a trivializing. Ana listened, rapt, to the traveller returned with her tales. She had a colleague, Elspeth, with secret children. She hid them away from the men in the firm, like Jews in attics. Occasionally she confided in Ana, usually when complaining about the nannies.

But the mothers Sarah knew existed entirely in public. They met in the daylight in coffee shops and at drop-in centres, speaking of nothing but their children. They had left their jobs and were shrinking, hunkering down, backing into their stalls. At first, during these litanies, James cast concerned glances at Ana that she could feel, though she refused to meet his eye.

“I like it,” she told him later. “Sarah knows about us. I like that she doesn’t treat me like an outsider.” And so he was relieved to be able to enjoy it, too, this refracted life that might have been theirs (that might still be theirs, she reminded herself).

Tonight, Marcus and James were talking about Jesus. James had recently finished a segment for his show about a new church that gathered in movie theatres downtown. James was bulimic when in possession of fresh information; as soon as it came in, it had to come out.

“Jesus is back in vogue. These kids relate to Jesus like he’s straight out of Japanese anime.”

“Yes, but at the end of the day, you have to see it as completely fictional, right? You can enjoy the fairy tale, but it’s sad, isn’t it, to see grown people subscribing?” asked Marcus, in his question mark-inflected way. James’s own sentences were stubby and leached of doubt.

“And dangerous,” added Sarah. “I had a horrible incident in my class just before the baby. I was hugely pregnant and I actually told a student: ‘You can wear your hijab in here, but know that it changes nothing about your fate.’ ”

“Wow,” said Ana. James laughed, slapping his knee.

“I was so hormonal!” said Sarah. “But this girl is impudent, truly. She’s a total bitch. She makes fun of nerds.”

“Is she popular?” asked Ana. These were the only terms through which she could understand high school: popular and unpopular. When her mother had settled them down long enough, Ana had often been popular, and guilty for it.

Sarah didn’t answer, because James had moved in to the space. “Diehard secularism is just as dangerous as institutionalized religion.” Ana knew this speech. “Secularism becomes religious, then you have Stalinism, all the iconography of religious faith in a secular package.”

“What are you saying?” Marcus was smiling, always smiling. This placidity was broken only by a small, angry scar below his lower lip in the shape of check-mark, a hint of past violence. He seemed to take great pleasure in James, which surprised Ana, and was a relief to her, too. James’s verbal girth had become less appealing to people over the years. Ana didn’t say this to Sarah. She didn’t want to draw attention to her petty worries. She was sure that the smallness