You Are Not What We Expected

by Sidura Ludwig

  And she’ll say, “Stay away from me. I can’t bring disease back to my country!”

  Dayle is heading home soon to the Philippines for a vacation. She takes the threat of disease very seriously. While Puffer splashes around in the pool, Dayle stares at her smartphone where she is trying to Skype with her children. Her call keeps getting cut off. When she finally gives up, she tells Puffer to come out of the pool so she can show him the pictures her mother just texted through of her son, seven years old, wearing Puffer’s old Roots T-shirt. Dayle is allowed to take anything of Puffer’s that no longer fits him. And, of course, he goes through clothes fast because Puffer is Puffer. He climbs out of the pool and wraps his towel around his shoulders. It’s too small to wrap around his body. Instead, it’s like the cape of an overweight superhero. Pufferman. Dayle hands him the bowl of Cheezies and says, “Finish this.”

  When he was born, his parents called him Sean. But even then he was a fat baby. His brother, Jared, three years older, would pinch his bloated arms and call him Puffer, like some yellow toy duck that he could squeeze to make bubbles in the bath water. The nickname stuck. In the last year, it has been as if Puffer was attached to a helium machine. He has a face like a blowfish: round cheeks, inflated, pushing against his nostrils, puckering his lips. He wheezes when he breathes because of partially obstructed airways. He whistles when he blows air out of his mouth. That’s the sound he makes running to first at baseball, the air coming out of his kissy-face mouth in a high-pitched squeal, like a train in the distance, but never getting close enough to roar.

  The cuffs on his baseball jersey sleeves cut into his arms, which are spongy like hotdog buns. His stomach pulls on the fabric so that his team logo, a lion, gets all scrunched together when he sits down on the bench. The lion’s mouth closes; the eyes bunch up like they’re winking. It’s as if he’s folded that king of the jungle into an alley cat. Sometimes Puffer feels like the monster at the top of the food chain. The big toothy goon that swallows everything below it whole.

  His underwear wedges up his bum when he’s out on the field with his baseball team, waiting to catch a fly ball. Puffer’s dad does baseball. That’s part of the agreement. Jared is away with his best friend, Adam, at sleepover camp, so it’s just Dad and Puff on baseball nights. The team plays in the field beside the Jewish school that’s going to be torn down for townhouses. Puffer went to that school for a couple of years before his dad pulled him out because the tuition was bleeding him dry. And what was the point spending a half-day in class learning a language he was never going to use? When Puffer is up to bat, he thinks about smashing the ball sideways so that it sails up to one of the windows on the top floor, shatters the glass all over a teacher’s desk like a bomb. Like the first one to start tearing the place down. He fouls every ball when trying and strikes out. His underwear is stuck up the crack of his bum and he tugs at his shorts before sitting back down on the bench.

  In the car, on the way home, after the Lions have lost again, his dad says, “What’s with that weird dance you were doing out there, Puff?”

  Puffer shrugs, “Wedgies.”

  “Your undies too small? You telling me your mum can’t be arsed to buy you new undies?”

  Puffer blows air into his cheeks, wheezes it out slowly through his nose. His dad says arsed because these days he’s into watching gritty British crime dramas on Netflix. Puffer could have walked home from the field, but his dad brought the car and accompanying Puffer back to the house is part of the agreement. Puffer looks out the window at the back of the golf course where the chain-link fence meets the sidewalk up the hill. There are faded flyers and coffee cups along the boulevard. Blown up against the fence is an open, empty pizza box. Puffer says, “I’m hungry.”

  His dad says, “Lazy bitch,” and he grips the steering wheel while Puffer whistles through his teeth.

  “Don’t,” his dad says.

  “What? I’m breathing.”

  “Breathe quietly like the rest of us.”

  Puffer’s dad couldn’t be arsed to hide his cellphone a year ago when Puffer took it off the kitchen table to play Subway Surfers. That’s when the text came through of that woman’s boobs. Two weeks later, when his parents sat him and Jared down to talk divorce, they started by giving them both their own iPads. Their mum even said they could take them to school the next day.

  “I got a divorce present!” Puffer told his friends, who crowded around him at recess to take turns on Minecraft. His throat hurt when he said it, and when the bell rang and everyone ran away, Puffer felt like he was underwater, like everyone was floating around him but he couldn’t hear them properly because of the current. They were floating out of his reach.

  In the two minutes it takes to get from the field to the house, Puffer’s father hits the steering wheel with his palm five times.

  “What the hell am I paying her for if she’s still dressing you in last year’s clothes? How many new shirts did she buy for herself last week? Eh? How about shoes?”

  Puffer wheezes like he’s running uphill, even though he’s not moving a muscle. He feels his cheeks going red-hot. His tongue becomes heavy and dry. His dad keeps asking questions and he can’t answer any of them.

  “How about her nails, eh Puff? She still keeping that appointment every Wednesday? Or the gym? She still seeing that trainer? The hell . . . am I paying for her to be some Barbie doll for some asshole investment banker?”

  Puffer gets out of the car in the driveway and he can’t swallow because of his sore throat. His dad gets out, slams his door, and runs up the steps by twos. He’s pounding on the front door while Puffer stays on the bottom step, turns his back to look up at the sky, the power lines down the hill leading toward the 407 highway, the sound of the electricity constantly buzzing, which Puffer has never noticed until now, when he’s looking for something, anything, else to focus on. He clenches his teeth and he breathes loudly to match the pitch of the electricity. It works. Behind him, his parents are having a brutal screaming match, but right there on the walkway, Puffer generates enough energy in his breathing to burn up each and every word his parents lob at each other. Puffer is an iPad game, zapping those insults as they hover above his head — sorry excuse for . . . asshole . . . my lawyer will . . . fuck you . . . and you . . . and you . . .

  Dayle has taken all of Puffer’s shirts. She has laid them on his bed, folded neatly, arms tucked behind. When Puffer comes into his room, she looks up and says, “Your mum order you the new clothes from Old Navy. Tell her you need the underwear.”

  Dayle has also taken out Puffer’s underwear. It looks so small when it’s piled one on top of the other like that. Puffer says, “Dayle, that’s gross.”

  Dayle says, “I wash them. With bleach.”

  Puffer climbs on his bed and crawls under his covers. Dayle tells him to take a shower, but Puffer puts his head under his pillow. Downstairs he can hear his mother crying on the phone . . . the HELL he thinks . . . humiliates me . . . I’M the mother . . . Make us move . . . Puffer tucks the ends of the pillow around his ears so that all he hears is his heart beating inside his head, or is it the sound of his arteries pumping the blood away from his face? Because that’s how he feels now, cold face, light-headed, like a wind howling inside him, a single, whistling wind on an empty street.

  Jared and his friend Adam went to camp for the whole summer. Adam lives with his grandmother and used to hang out with Jared at the Promenade Mall cinema, until he got caught stealing coins from the arcades. Adam said that his grandmother was sending him to camp because “the bitch doesn’t want me getting arrested.” His sister, Ava, plays on Puffer’s baseball team. She’s the only runner slower than Puff. Puffer knows Ava is keeping him from being a total and complete loser, and he likes her for that. But no, he is not going to invite her over to swim like his mother used to bug him to do. She used to say, “Be nice to her. Some kids have it a lot harder tha
n you do.” That is, until Dad and the boobs lady. Mum hasn’t mentioned Ava since.

  Puffer is sitting on one of the loungers by the pool with a camp letter from Jared. It says: Tell Mum Adam and I were nearly eaten by a bear. Seriously. Tell her a bear ate away at my arm and I’m using a branch as a prosthesis. Tell her I’m carrying a stump with my one hand in case the bear comes back again and gets at one of my legs. Tell her it’s like a freaking horror show here. They let the bears run wild.

  “Hey, Dayle,” Puffer says. They are sitting out by the pool again. Dayle wears oversized sunglasses. Puffer’s legs are turning red, like the neck of a smoked pig. Dayle looks up from her phone and Puffer says, “He was eaten by a bear.”

  Dayle doesn’t laugh. She says, “No bear would eat your brother. Too sour.”

  But Puffer is still laughing. He’s thinking of what his mum will say when he tells her. He’s already embellishing the story in his head — The camp wrote to me. It was his dying wish. The other counsellors watched him being devoured and he begged them — tell my little brother that I love him! Tell him that he’s awesome. Pufferman’s my superhero.

  Dayle stands up. She raises her phone toward the sky like a metal detector and she turns around, like there is a beam somewhere she’s trying to catch. She says, “The Wi-Fi sucks out here.” When she’s rotated twice with nothing, she turns to Puffer and says, “You wait here for me.”

  But Puffer is hardly listening. He’s working on the bear story that grows bigger and bigger in his imagination. He’s thinking about something to do with hitchhiking. All good horror stories start with hitchhiking. His brother in his lumberjack shirt and his cargo shorts, his thumb stuck out near the highway because he’s running away from camp. He’s trying to come home to spend the summer with Puffer by the pool, the two of them making up bear stories about their parents. She falls into the bear’s den at the zoo. The bear eats everything but her fingers because of the chemicals from her manicure.

  Puffer can hear Dayle in the kitchen on her smartphone, talking quickly in Tagalog. Puffer doesn’t know any Tagalog, but he can tell she’s arguing with her husband. Probably something about their kid, how she’s sacrificing everything to give him the best chance in life. Do you want to switch places? Do you want to come babysit this overweight, whistling boy? You tell your son to come talk to his mother. You tell him how much I’m doing.

  Puffer stands up to go back in the water. He jumps off the diving board and sinks to the bottom of the pool. He watches for Dayle’s wavy shadow when she comes racing out to see what’s happened to him, listens for her frantic call, the lilt in her voice like a doorbell — Puff . . . Er? His chest begins to hurt, and he hears the blood whooshing by his ears. There’s a whistle in that too, like a leak in a valve, like a trickle of something being left behind. Puffer closes his eyes because they are starting to sting, and he’s trying hard not to float up. He fills his cheeks with air and then swallows it back in sips. But that does nothing to quell the panic in his chest, that feeling that he will never be found and no one will care. It’s like he’s one of those stupid blowfish shrinking so that he can lie on the bottom of the ocean completely undetected until he chooses to puff out. That element of spikey surprise.

  And then there’s a whoosh, a current of water pushing against him, a tiny hand grabbing him by the elbow, rushing him up from the underneath. His eyes are still closed when they break the surface of the water, but Puffer can’t help his mouth opening, the way his lungs expand and contract as he gasps for air. The sound of him sobbing like a million balloons deflating.

  “You try to kill me?” Dayle’s saying. She’s yelling. She is also gasping for air in big, heavy gulps. “You try to get me fired?”

  But she doesn’t leave him. She leads him to the shallow end, where they stand together up against the wall. Puffer slips an elbow up onto the deck, lays his heavy head on his arms, and cries while Dayle rubs his back. She tells him, “You big boy now. Okay? No more hide-and-seek. You always tell me where you are.”

  You Are Not

  What We Expected

  Rina looked over at her husband, Shalom, sitting on the couch beside his mother. He wouldn’t look up. He fingered the fringes of his tzitzit, wrapping them around his forefinger until the skin on the tip turned purple. His name meant peace, as well as hello and goodbye. Rina thought, He’s never known whether he is coming or going.

  “I have nowhere to go,” Rina whispered. She heard how foreign she sounded, had always sounded, since moving into this suburban home in Thornhill four years ago, into this family that had been Canadian for three generations. When she moved here from Melbourne, she brought containers of Milo chocolate powder, Vegemite, and Rs that make the ends of her words sound as if they are left open, unfinished. Cah instead of car. Weh instead of where.

  “You can stay in your suite. We would never leave you homeless,” the mother-in-law continued. She held Shalom’s hand, as if this was hard for him to say. Except he said nothing. Rina realized that the couch cushion he was sitting on had a chocolate handprint hidden on the underside. She had turned it a few weeks back after their eighteen-month-old daughter, Sarah, had got into the mother-in-law’s chocolates.

  “Shalom will move back into his room,” the mother-in-law said. “You can stay until you find your feet. Of course, Sarah will be looked after. But you are not what we expected.”

  * * *

  The morning after her mother-in-law delivered the separation, Rina could not stop shaking. When she arrived to drop Sarah at the home daycare before her shift, Bryna said, “You look really pale. Are you alright?”

  Bryna had six children of her own and was ten years older than Rina. As Bryna reached for Sarah, three toddlers behind her started fighting over a riding toy in the living room, which had been blocked off by a pet gate. One leaned over to bite the girl who was currently holding the handlebar of the plastic bike made to look like a police motorcycle. The house smelled like Pine-Sol and sour milk. Rina backed away as Sarah started crying. Before she could answer, Bryna had already closed the front door, was scolding the biting child loudly enough that Rina could still hear her.

  “In this house, we share!”

  Rina was still shaking during her shift at the kosher Second Cup and she spilled the hot chocolate on her hand. When she yelped, Priscilla turned from the cash, said, “Run it under cold water before you blister.”

  Rina rinsed her hand under the water and waved to Priscilla, who tsked. Priscilla was from the Philippines and doing courses at night to update her nursing qualifications. She’d been on a constant climb since entering the country and first living in someone’s dank basement, folding their laundry, making chicken cutlets and steamed vegetables for their kids for dinner. On her breaks, Priscilla read from her textbooks and wrote practice exams. She’d told Rina, “My husband and kids will come next year. We will finally be together.”

  Rina took deep breaths and held a paper cup under the hot chocolate machine. An elderly man with a tremor, a regular customer, had ordered it and was waiting in one of the plush seats. She added cold milk to cool the drink down and she felt a pinch in her throat at never having thought to do that before. Priscilla would have. She was good at thinking ahead. Rina wouldn’t look at her shift mate. If she did, she might not be able to stop herself from screaming at the sensation of falling while Priscilla kept moving higher.

  Rina’s mother-in-law had long argued for them to hire a live-in nanny for Sarah.

  “You could go back to school,” she’d presented to Rina. “And the girl could also clean while the baby sleeps. Your shifts would cover the cost. You aren’t paying rent.”

  These were the signs Rina had not considered until now.

  How she’d argued that night in the basement with Shalom, who, of course, took his mother’s side. “They are very generous. This would be a way for us to give back.”

  “We ne
ed to save for our own place!”

  “Then you need to help out more upstairs. She notices that. She says you hide out down here and you never let her be with the baby.”

  It’s because I don’t want to be erased! Rina wanted to yell, but didn’t.

  How she felt a tingling in her fingers when she watched her mother-in-law holding the baby, cooing at her, “Who’s Bubby’s girl?”

  How her mother-in-law would turn her back to Rina so that Sarah wouldn’t reach for her. It didn’t take long for the baby to be distracted by the mother-in-law’s chunky silver bracelets, her long, beaded necklaces. And the mother-in-law would say to Rina without turning around, “You can leave us alone. We’re good.”

  That tingling in her fingers, in her toes, crawling up her flesh, made Rina feel as if she were disintegrating without Sarah. Because of course they were good without her. She’d known for a long time that if she walked out of the house right then, no one would try to chase her down. Her mother-in-law would have stood at the window with Sarah, waving.

  At night, Rina let Sarah fall asleep next to her. Sarah had dried banana in her hair from lunch. Rina had made a mental note to bathe her in the morning, but the thought was as fleeting as a daydream, as concrete as her plan to call a taxi, grab her daughter, and run to the airport. Her sister in Israel had been texting her all day. Even now, her phone buzzed on the floor beside her bed.

  You have rights.