Excerpt: Others Like Me by Nicole Louie

Excerpted with permission from Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children. House of Anansi Press, 2024

Silent Pact

2002

He was a glassmaker; she was a seamstress. When they got married, he forbade her to work but continued working himself even after cutting parts of his fingers off making windows. Money was always short, so three children in, she expressed concerns that a fourth one would be the end of them, to which he replied, “We will have as many children as God wants us to.” The next time he tried to find his way into her body, she had stuffed it with pieces of fabric to stop his semen from reaching her womb. Grandma would tell me this and other such stories while we bonded over rolling her husband and son’s socks into perfect balls. Things weren’t that different from my previous house, after all. 

“Did you dream of becoming a mother?” I asked as I followed her to the “messy room” at the back of the house, filled with fabric rolls, sewing machines, and colourful threads.

“Dream? I don’t think I dreamed of becoming a mother. But that’s what women did back then. We were trained to get married and to run a house. The men paid for it. The babies were part of the package; that was it,” she said, pulling a pin from a square piece of cotton and placing it in the pincushion.

“But did you want to get married?”

“I wanted to make clothes. I was very good at it.”

“How did you learn to make them?” I asked, opening the ironing board.

“We were very poor, so I only studied until the fifth grade. After that, I had to help my parents make money. Your great-grandma taught me to sew when I was thirteen, and I started hemming trousers and fixing broken zips for some change. At sixteen, I made all my clothes, and my parents’ and siblings’ clothes too. Then I got a job in a boutique making clothes for rich people. The owner took a liking to me. She’d bring me fancy magazines and I’d copy the designs. She told me I had the gift of making dresses come true, wedding dresses especially. I loved making them! Many important women got married in dresses I made.”

“Really? How many did you make?” I said, reaching for another shirt in the ironing pile.

“Dozens. The last one was my own.” She stopped pressing the foot pedal for a second, raised the needle on the Overlock, and took a deep breath. Then she rubbed her green eyes behind her old glasses, looked at me, and said, “I have a picture of it. Do you want to see it?”

“Yes!”

She told me to get the “1950s” album from her wardrobe. There were more on the top shelf. All labelled by decade. I brought it to her. She flipped through a few pages and said, “There it is.” My mouth hung open at the sight of her. At twenty-one, she was a double for Ingrid Bergman. Her hair had been grey and fixed up with bobby pins for as long as I could remember. I had no idea she used to be blonde. And those waves! I had always wondered where my wavy hair came from. And the dress: the endless amount of ivory tulle on the skirt, the lace sleeves bejewelled with pearl beads, the matching tiara, and the elbow-length veil.

“My goodness, you look like a princess! You made all of that?”

“My boss gave me the materials as a wedding gift, but I made every inch of that dress. Now I’m here making napkins and bedsheets,” she said, her voice trailing off.

I put my arms around her. “That is a perfect wedding dress, and so are your napkins and bedsheets, Beth Louie. You should be proud of yourself.” She kissed my cheek. 

On Easter Day, while making fish pie, I asked what it was like to have children. She told me that with my dad, she felt she was being cleaved in half. The midwife wanted to use forceps, but she refused, and Dad eventually came out intact. She was mad at her mother for not telling her the first thing about giving birth and made her promise she would move in for the last month of her next pregnancy. With her second baby, a girl, she constantly felt like she had to poop. Her labour was mainly in the bathroom, with her mother kneeling next to her. Her third child, another girl, was born as she made the dough for a carrot cake. She barely felt a thing and only had time to squat and catch the baby between her legs.

“It’s different every time and for everyone,” she said with her head inside the fridge.

“Do you know how it was for my mother?”

“Yes. Much worse. But we don’t need to talk about that.”

“Why not?” I raised my eyes from the half-opened tuna can.

“Because you’re not pregnant.” She cracked two eggs into the blender.

“Why do I have to be already pregnant to know more about giving birth? What if I don’t want to go through it?”

“Nobody wants to go through it. Still, we do. Children are the glue of a marriage.”

“What if I also don’t want to get married?”

“Then you don’t need to know more about giving birth, do you?” She turned the blender on. 

“Jesus Christ, Grandma!” I roared, “Your mother told you nothing, my mother told me nothing, you don’t want to tell me more; what’s with the silent pact?”

“It’s not my story to tell.” She put the pie in the oven. 

“I get that. But it’s also my story; I was born that day, wasn’t I?”

“Let’s sit down,” she said, taking her apron off and walking to a chair. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” I nodded. Then she started speaking with a heaviness that wasn’t usually there. “Your mother’s pregnancy was high-risk. Doctors didn’t explain things to women then. They’d talk to your dad alone and say she had to rest. When she went into labour, it lasted for over a day. We took her to hospital twice, and twice they sent us back, saying she hadn’t dilated enough. The hospital was full. No space to wait there. The third time we went over, there was little time left to get you out, so …” she paused. “They cut her. A big cut from where you poop to where you pee. No anaesthetics.” I covered my mouth with my hand. “It was so deep that you were born with a cut on your hand.” I looked at the scar on my thumb.

She continued for a while: my mother developed sepsis and had to stay in hospital. When they visited her, they found her on a makeshift bed in the corridor, wearing only a hospital gown and shivering. They noticed bruises on her legs and tried to file a formal complaint against the hospital, only to be told that it was a hospital, not a hotel. One of the nurses told them she was horrified by how women were being treated there and that she wanted to help. They forced the hospital to discharge Mom. Grandma cared for her at home, and the nurse visited daily until she recovered.

My face had turned fiery red. My eyes were puffy. Grandma reached for my hand, caressed it, and continued, “Your mother was nineteen, Nicole. That’s you in three months. She fought for her life for weeks, and you had to learn very early on to survive without your mother as she could not nurse you. You were so small, almost premature. Your dad had to work during the day, so you stayed with us. I’d look after your mom, and Grandpa would look after you.”

A whistle came from the living room, followed by, “Beth, you’re going to scare the girl.”

I called my mother that night just to hear her voice.