The Heart Begins Here

by Jacqueline Dumas

  And once again, they didn’t get it. No way did Wanda want to be a boy. Whenever someone mistook her for one, she would scowl, I’m a girl, stupid. When she was older, in her twenties and even her thirties, shop clerks would follow her around the store because they suspected she was a shoplifting teenage boy. She still glowers whenever someone addresses her as Sir.

  Not long after the incident with the bat, Wanda began to have seizures, what were called fits in those days. She learned to recognize when one was coming on, but by then, it was usually too late. The prescient dread, the eerie familiar way her brain tingled, sizzling red and yellow like a newly-lit brush fire, the nausea, the moment of panic as she was about to lose control—all of this she remembered vividly. But of what ensued, of the seizure itself, she remembered nothing. In place of memory was a hole and a vague sense of loss.

  Other people, however, took great pleasure in describing to her exactly how she had dropped to the ground, convulsing and spluttering like a rabid dog. To this day, she gets upset if someone says to her, You must be crazy, or any variant thereof.

  One time, Wanda was lying on the ground, just coming to consciousness, and as she opened her eyes a boy spat in her face and barked insults at her. Moron! Spaz! Retard! Dumb DP!

  She continued to lie in confusion in the dust, lacking the physical strength and even the words to respond. She could’ve been an untouchable, except that the boy kicked her before he stalked off, a parting shot to the ribs with the steel toe of his boot.

  Because she could only ever remember the moments immediately preceding a fit, and not what might have triggered it, she would emerge with a sense of disconnectedness and otherworldliness. Entire weeks of her life were sucked into the void that had replaced her memory.

  But the memory loss had an upside to it, for as much as her sense of continuity was destroyed, so too was any awareness of the immediate, unpleasant past. Her mind became like a newborn baby’s, a clean slate on which to fashion the future her father demanded of her. The fresh opportunity buoyed her spirits. This time, she would make no mistakes. This time, she would do everything perfectly.

  The trouble was, the knowledge of how to proceed had vanished into the same hole in her head that had swallowed up her short-term memory. Wanda no longer had seizures, but she had retained the ability to forget recent history. Inconvenient facts seemed to disappear into the hole in her head.

  Wanda was a profound disappointment to her father, first as a girl and then as a failed boy. As a girl, she couldn’t sit still for two minutes. She played in the mud and got her clothes dirty. She dismembered her dolls. And she talked too loud. Later, as a stand-in teenage boy, she couldn’t seem to get the hang of anything technical or mechanical. Her father had always wanted a son to teach things to, but Wanda couldn’t fix the brakes on the tractor or change the oil in the pickup or even figure out something as simple as a leaky faucet. Even now, she had trouble hanging a picture straight—all because of the hole in her head.

  As an adult, she eventually learned to cook, but as a child on the farm, she resisted any kitchen chores, and her sisters grew to resent it. They were sure she was faking it when invariably she burned the roast or undercooked the chicken—after she had already refused to chop off its head. Her father had no problem with her lack of culinary skills. After all, his wife and other daughters could manage the cooking. But he couldn’t accept that any child of his lacked the guts to cut off a stupid chicken’s head.

  It wasn’t that Wanda was squeamish. It was just that she loved the animals, and tending to their needs was the one job she enjoyed and did well. She rose early to milk the cows so that their udders wouldn’t get sore, and when the cows were close to giving birth, she spent the night with them in the barn. But sleeping with the cows did not make up for her weakness in face of the chickens.

  In essence, she was too much boy for the boys and not boy enough for her father.

  If Wanda was a disappointment to her father, she was a despair to her mother. Although two more babies came after, it was Wanda’s birth that sent her mother into shock, a trauma from which she never fully recovered. She had fantasized about having a baby, had dreamt of it since she was ten. A baby would spend its nights in angelic sleep, and its days cooing contentedly from its crib while you went about your business.

  But the reality was nothing like the dream. A real baby demanded attention every minute of the day and night. It insisted on a diaper change, a feed or two in the middle of the night when you needed your sleep. It was jealous of your friends, of the TV show you were watching, of the magazine you were trying to read. It was even jealous of your wandering thoughts. If you happened to be thinking about something other than it, the baby would yowl to be picked up. A baby took over your whole life; it allowed you not a single solitary moment of peace and quiet.

  Five weeks after Wanda’s birth, her mother abruptly stopped nursing her, took a long drink of her own, and had more or less lingered in an alcoholic haze ever since.

  Wanda mothered the next babies as best she could, but she was better at tending the animals. Her younger sisters bonded with each other, but they never warmed to their older sister. Wanda, meanwhile, learned to act tough, and to not take shit from anyone, not even herself.

  Then, when she was in her mid-teens and experiencing the worst of her seizures, Wanda discovered books. Books contained the information she needed to build herself up, albeit from the outside. An entire life could be found in a book. Best of all, life in a book was unchangeable. It was, in itself, perfect. The more she read, the more she was persuaded that the characters in books were wiser and more reliable than the people in her real life.

  I HAD ALSO FOUND early solace in books, in the evidence of the existence of others who shared my anxieties, my aspirations, and, much more recently, my desires.

  And also, like Wanda, I had come from a drinking family.

  When I was a child, my drunken father would sometimes decide on the spur of the moment to take the family on a trip.

  “Mother, get the kids in the car,” he’d say.

  Then he’d go start the car, even in summer when it didn’t need warming up, and he’d sit outside gunning the engine while my mother rushed around closing windows and packing drinks and snacks and checking the stove and lights and making sure all six kids had gone to the bathroom before shooing us out the door. By the time she had finally managed to squeeze five of us into the back seat and one in front between her and my father, he would be in the driver’s seat smoking a cigarette and cursing at her for keeping him waiting.

  My father was a drunk, and not my mother, but both of Wanda’s were drinkers.

  Her mother drank every day, her father mostly on weekends. He died in his fifties after hitting his head on some rocks at someone’s cottage out at a lake in northern Saskatchewan. Or was it after falling down the basement stairs at home? Wanda wasn’t sure. Either way, rocks or cement floor, he was drunk when he fell, and he was still drunk the next morning when he died in hospital. That was how much booze he had guzzled.

  Wanda was the one to give the news to her mother.

  “How dare he!” her mother shouted. “What makes him think he can get off that easy!”

  At the time, she was already a patient in the same hospital, but on a different floor.

  The way Wanda remembers it, a week earlier, her father had broken his wife’s back in a no-holds-barred brawl that would probably have ended in the death of one of them then and there if he hadn’t fallen asleep first or if she had noticed the butcher knife on the kitchen counter.

  An ambulance picked up Wanda’s mother from the hospital and took her to the church so that she could attend her Charlie’s funeral. The attendants wheeled her up the aisle headfirst until she was lying next to the casket, open so she could get one last look at the bastard. Then they locked the wheels in place and went out for a smoke, leaving the coup
le side by side like effigies at the front of the church, one dead rigid and the other with the shakes and looking like death warmed over.

  Wanda and her two sisters sat together in the front pew, reunited for the first time since their paternal grandfather had died. As the eldest, Wanda was meant to read the eulogy, but her sister Danuta (the one right after her) insisted on doing it, and the other sister Sophia backed her up. Wanda hadn’t had a seizure in years, but her sisters were afraid that the stress of having to stand in front of everybody might induce one of those embarrassing fits from their youth, and god only knows how embarrassing everything already was, what with the snooty relatives there and all.

  Afterwards, the pallbearers pushed the casket outside, followed by Wanda wheeling her mother’s gurney and her two younger sisters. The rest of the relatives on both sides of the family streamed out after them. The snooty relatives went off to stand in the shade while the others shuffled around arguing about this and that and spitting in the dust. It was that kind of family. The ambulance attendants leaned against their gleaming white vehicle, flicking ashes and looking bored with the lot of them.

  Meanwhile, Wanda’s mother lay shivering in the hot sun, flat on her back and feeling ignored. She was coming out of a week of sweats and shakes and daytime nightmares so bad they had strapped her down. And now, she desperately needed a cigarette. But even more than a cigarette she needed a drink, and this was likely her best chance. But how to get one?

  She turned to Wanda, pleading with her yellow eyes.

  Wanda stared back at her mother, at her sparse hair—clumps of it missing here and there—at the blue veins pulsating under the papery skin, at the bloated drinker’s belly pushing up the thin blanket.

  Her mother was fifty-five, the age Wanda is now.

  Wanda turned and walked away.

  Her mother was furious. Here it was her husband who was dead and no one so much as had the fucking decency to pass her a fucking cigarette. Her Charlie may have been a no-good bastard, but at least he would’ve fucking got her a drink and a fucking cigarette.

  And then it hit her: Her Charlie was gone, gone and not coming back. He would never roll her another cigarette or pour her another drink, and she started to cry because now she really was alone. Her Charlie had left, just like he had threatened all those times, and the ambulance attendants were getting ready to shove her back into the ambulance and drive her back to the hospital and she was never going to get her drink.

  If only her Charlie had been there. He would’ve winked and stuck his hand in his jacket and, like a magician, pulled out a mickey and the two of them would’ve sneaked a drink together while everyone else was bitching at each other and not noticing. He would’ve helped her escape, would probably have rolled her home himself.

  And so, Wanda’s mother lay on her gurney in the middle of the arguing relatives and began to laugh at the sight of her and Charlie fleeing the scene, green hospital sheets flapping in the wind.

  At least this was what Wanda imagined as she watched her mother being lifted into the back of the ambulance, her mother laughing so hard the tears streamed down her face.

  MY FATHER ALSO DIED of drink. The autopsy report (routine because he died at someone’s house, my brother Bert’s) gave the cause of death as sudden cardiac arrest, but really, it was the booze that killed him. Like Wanda’s father, mine was a weekend drunk, and my mother his collusive victim.

  My parents did not seem to question the insolubility of their marriage vows. Nor did they question the dictum that children be kept in their place. My brothers and I were their chattels, theirs to do with as they pleased. Or rather, we were his children, just as our mother was his woman. He died leaving a wife who had learned to avoid the truth, and children who had learned to avoid him. His funeral was that of a man without any close friends, other than the bottle, his one true friend.

  A couple of years before his death, my father had joined the Knights of Columbus, perhaps to reconnect with his religious roots, or perhaps as a belated stab at male camaraderie. Unlike other men of his generation, he had missed the bonding opportunities of the Second World War, having been designated unfit to serve.

  He must’ve been the youngest member of his chapter. At the funeral, seven old men in musty uniforms and scraggly plumed hats stood at doddering attention in facing rows, providing a sort of geriatric guard of honour that managed to hold their fake swords up long enough to form a canopy through which the casket could be wheeled.

  Apart from the wobbly knights, the mourners comprised the following: A few old women from the church’s Ladies Auxiliary; a pair of wigged nuns in starched white blouses, navy skirts, and sensible shoes who probably attended all the Saturday funerals; my five younger brothers with their assorted wives and children; me; and the star of the funeral, our mother.

  After some incense and sprinkling of holy water and Latin chanting, the priest praised a generic family man and his productive thirty-five-year marriage with its eight children (the first two of whom, twin girls, had died soon after birth), as if the measure of a good man was his ability to snag a woman, hang on to her, and keep her pregnant.

  I skipped Communion, the only one of the siblings to do so. Fortified with a few pre-service drinks, I sat in respectful silence at the back of the church as the others lined up to receive the body and blood of Christ. At least that’s how I remember it.

  Bert, however, reprimanded me afterwards for arriving late and drunker than a skunk. He accused me of weaving my way up the aisle to the front pew where I then sat smirking and hiccuping throughout the service, thus embarrassing him and the rest of the family, especially our mother. (My brothers were always defending her.)

  At the graveyard, everyone milled around uncertain what to do next, except for our mother, who frantically hunted around for Who’s in charge here. The lid of the casket was nailed shut, and she had given explicit instructions that it be left open. She had imagined her own funeral often enough to know what she wanted.

  Bert finally located a thin, scowly workman who clumsily pried open the lid with a crowbar, and our mother regained her composure.

  With no lid on the coffin, the exposed corpse immediately became the inescapable focus of everyone’s attention. And poised above it, she exuded an importance and self-assurance that had been denied her while her husband was alive. She had starred as The Bride and several times appeared as The Mother of the Groom, but this was her ultimate role: The Widow, with her husband’s death the final and defining moment of her life, eclipsing even her own inevitable death.

  As for me, my father’s all-too-present body brought back my worst childhood fears. Any second now, he was going to sit up and guffaw at how another of his cruel pranks had taken us all in. Gottcha!

  I made a furtive sign of the cross.

  Even my brother Bert, who is a year younger than me but now considers himself (by virtue of his gender) to be head of the family, and who phones every few months to give me a talking-to about my too-public lifestyle (Can’t I think about the rest of the family once in a while?), even my brother Bert was unnerved.

  “You go first,” he mumbled, pushing me forward and momentarily relinquishing his new-found status. “You’re the oldest.”

  There was no escape: My mother would not budge until each of her children had filed past the open casket. She sucked in dignified breaths as we shuffled by in turn to contemplate the waxen face and sausage fingers of the body that had contained our father. His sunken, usually flushed cheeks shone candle-white in the bright sunshine, and what had been a strong chin looked unimposing and weak. His nose poked up long and pointy like Pinocchio’s.

  The duty of the progeny now fulfilled, the priest intoned a few prayers, and to general relief, the coffin was nailed shut again by the thin scowly man. My five brothers and an uncle carried it to the edge of a freshly dug hole in the ground.

  “Marguer
ite, come here beside me,” instructed my mother. She clutched my wrist and pulled me close, and the two of us, mother and daughter, stood as one at the foot of the grave as a squeaky pulley lowered the coffin into the ground. The priest supplemented the squeaks with more prayers, and my mother bent down, scooped up a handful of cold earth, and tossed it on the coffin just as it hit bottom.

  The nightmarish farce over, I extricated myself and started to walk away.

  But no, it wasn’t over. My mother reached out and grabbed my sleeve, yanking me back to the graveside. My instinctive resistance all but sent us both stumbling into the grave after my father, like one of his sick Halloween jokes. It was the priest who caught hold of us and kept us in this world.

  AND NOW, DESPITE WANDA’S betrayal, it was these childhood sorrows, these shared Halloween nightmares, that had me staring into the dark Hawaiian night, still unconvinced that Wanda and I were finished.

  How had we arrived at such a point? Bonded in face of a hostile world only to be caught up in a banal breakup scenario?

  13.

  SIX-THIRTY A.M. I WAS BACK on the lanai, Wanda out on another of her so-called picture-taking excursions.

  The phone rang. I jumped. I had given the hotel number to only Trish and Carmen. Was Carmen calling to report that a publisher was threatening some sort of drastic action?

  But no, it was my mother.

  “Finally,” she said. “What a time. I phoned that bookstore of yours to find out where you’re staying, but it’s like pulling teeth to get any information out of that Mexican girl of yours.”

  “She’s from Chile.”

  “Mexico, Chile, what’s the difference? Your own mother and she wouldn’t give me the number. I finally had to pretend it was an emergency.”