Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told

by Carol Shields

  Eventually, Black Mike, as Marilyn and Karen had dubbed him, gave my mother one too many black eyes. She told him she was leaving, and he began making threats: “You leave me and I’ll kill you. I’ll find you and kill you.”

  She did it anyway, though, waited till he was out one night, packed our bags and we left. Back East, to Toronto.

  This wordless slipping-off-in-the-night routine would continue to be our MO. We would leave Toronto two years later and head back to Vancouver in much the same way.

  Mom drank on and off, and as a result of one particularly bad bender, I spent my tenth birthday in foster care. From what I could see, this was just one more example of how loose lips could sink ships. My mother had made friends with big-mouthed strangers and somebody had told.

  Two months later, when I ran away from the foster home back to my mother, she was sober again. I switched schools for the third time that year, and we went back to smiling and patching up any cracks in the veneer. As far as the world was concerned, I’d never been in a foster home. To let that cat out of the bag meant a whole feline gang would follow. Therefore, my mother had no drinking problem, our income came from my father’s child support cheque, not welfare, and my parents had most definitely been wed. (Once, at a slumber party, I’d made the mistake of announcing what system buckers my mother and father were, never having been married. The look of horror around the Cheezie bowl changed my story fast). I kept our secrets, in part because it made escape easier. Vagueness allowed for a more seamless shape-shift.

  In my teens, I developed a taste for middle-to upper-middle-class families—two-parent, two-garage households, families with boats and summer cottages, swimming pools and electric lawn mowers. I became friends with a born-again Christian at school and joined her church, a place loaded to the rafters with families who were downright rich. Nothing soothed me quite like their yachts and spiral staircases. Around them, I felt clean, well-bred and expensive. I joined the youth choir. I went on camping and boat trips, got crushes on gentle Jesus-loving boys, the antithesis of my mother’s taste in men. I never could quite swallow the doctrine, the actual Christianity. And my compulsion to undermine Church authority drove me to tell a few kids I was a witch. Having never forgotten Marilyn and Karen, I invoked their names in times of stress and irreverence and, in the middle of Sunday morning services, drew what could only be considered impious symbols on my wrists.

  I couldn’t help but like the complexity of my new witchy Christian self. To add yet another layer, I became friends with Bonnie, the baddest good girl in the sanctuary. Using Bonnie’s ID, I started heading out with her on Saturday nights to Outlaws, a downtown nightclub. As far as my mother knew, I was just going to Bonnie’s for a sleepover. And I did sleep over at Bonnie’s. And my body did remain the temple I claimed it was: loath to become remotely like the secret I had at home, I refused to drink alcohol and clung to my virginity like a life raft.

  At twenty, Bonnie was four years older than I, perfectly legal and far less interested in discretion: she blabbed all over church about her drunken escapades, all of which happened the nights she was without me. Nonetheless, rumour had it that I frequently got so drunk that I had to be carried from bars. I was considered a “bad apple” by parents now.

  One night after Sunday evening service, Bonnie and I were hauled into the pastor’s study and interrogated. Bonnie protested that it had been she who had to be carried out, that I didn’t even drink. He said he would have us kicked out of the choir if we didn’t apologize before the congregation for our behaviour, adding that my mother would charge Bonnie with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I shook my head; my mother would never. The pastor flattened me, announcing that people from the church were over discussing the matter with her this very instant. I was speechless. He fingered one of his gold rings. “Is your mother an alcoholic?”

  No one in this place, my place, had ever uttered that word as though it pertained to my family or me. With one question, he had ripped the clean right off me. I started to cry, asking why he would say that. Apparently I’d given his past inquiries about my home life silly and vague answers that were, to his mind, consistent with those that children of alcoholics gave. I looked up at his photograph on the wall shaking hands with the pope, panicked and broke into sobs, nodding.

  I didn’t realize that he was being a Gotcha Wizard, that he knew nothing but rumours.

  When I got home that night, I launched into a tirade against the charges my mother was to file against Bonnie. This was the first she’d heard of my having been in a bar.

  But I quit the Church immediately. It was sullied.

  Not long afterwards, my mother was drinking again. Deciding to leave, I made arrangements with a school friend who had two parents, a garage and a car and moved in without explanation. It would be two weeks before my friend’s mother trapped me in a corner and asked me why I wouldn’t go home. I had to come clean. It was the first time. The relief was all but trampled by guilt, but saying it out loud bought me a respite. With financial help from the Children’s Aid, my friend’s family took care of me for three months. Mom saw my departure as her personal rock bottom. She detoxed that summer, rejoined AA and made a decision that whether I came home or not, she would stop drinking for good.

  I did come home, somewhat reluctantly, afraid things would go back to the way they were. As I started Grade 12, though, my mother was going to three AA meetings a week, new AA friends were often over for tea and my mother’s former self became known as “that crazy person.” Soon, she started counselling other new AA members. One, a former stripper, came by the apartment and saw the photographs of me that Mom had scattered around. She talked her into bringing the pictures to a modelling agency. The word “model” sounded like the shiniest, most expensive-looking thing of all. It spelled “escape.” I flew to Tokyo straight out of high school.

  Not only did being a model put me in the Thoroughbred category, it published photographs as proof. It didn’t matter that I had developed a new and particularly humiliating secret. Food had become my last thought at night and my first in the morning. Most days now involved a ritual of stuffing fresh soft rolls into my mouth in a frenzy, each one smothered in butter and honey, stuffing and stuffing, alternating bites with gulps of hot tea to keep my stomach contents somewhat liquid. I would cram in roll after roll until tears were streaming down my face, my tongue too numb and raw to taste or feel the thrill of the sweet and soft any more. Seconds after I reached this point, I would run to the washroom and ram my finger or a toothbrush down my throat, shaking and crying, determined to get it out of my stomach as fast as possible.

  After a couple years of this, I was falling apart—dark circles and broken blood vessels around my eyes. I would bruise if you looked at me wrong, and my throat had become so sensitive that ingesting almost anything could bring on a coughing fit. Ultimately, it was my fear and vanity that stopped the bulemia: if anyone found out, they would think I was a pig, putrid and ugly. Furthermore, I could just as easily get kicked out of my current shiny place for bad skin and bags as I could fat. I took to heavier exercise and vegetarianism instead. I carried envelopes of Sugar Twin in my purse wherever I went.

  In my mid to late twenties, a transformation began. I had always written in journals, scribbled poetry in notebooks, scrawled letters home to everyone and to no one in particular, all in the name of keeping my sanity. But somewhere in there, I started writing down snippets of truth in short bursts of narrative verse. It was different from the poetry I’d been writing before. Bits of memory and history—there wasn’t much vague about it. I couldn’t make up anything, and I couldn’t stop slapping it down on the page. Spilling my guts this new way was making me feel muscular. I felt hard and steely as opposed to scrawny and shiny, and I liked it.

  I quit modelling and took on three or four part-time jobs—cocktailing in a comedy club, catering weddings, giving out chocolates in department stores. I wrote hundreds of pages, truth until I w
as sick of it. I began to mix and match, make collages of fiction and fact. Then, using a combo of the two, I started what would be my first novel, determined to be as honest, emotionally, as I knew how. My mother—eighteen years sober and likely figuring I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting a book published—gave me her blessing. Other than Mom, I didn’t give a damn what anyone thought now.

  Then it happened. In the spring of 2000, Going Down Swinging was published. The media attention was beyond anything I’d expected, a barrage of television and radio, my picture in national and local newspapers and magazines. And I was afraid again. For me and my mother. No one knew where fact ended and fiction began, but still, I had told. And people would know that I’d lived through at least some of that world or I couldn’t have written it.

  A woman walks into Chapters one day to browse and sees a novel on the New Fiction shelf. On the cover is a kitten in a martini glass, and she can’t help reaching out to it. The author’s name pulls her eyebrows together. It can’t be. She flips the book over. The child’s eyes she remembers look back at her now, thirty years later. She grabs hold of the shelf to keep from falling.

  Later, a phone message: “Hi, my name is Karen. You might not remember me, but I used to know you when you were a little girl. Maybe three or four. My friend Marilyn used to call you Billie Badoodle. I was so happy to find you in the phone book. Every couple of years I would look, and this time you were there….”

  By the weekend, Marilyn has driven up from Oregon, where she lives now as an artist. When Karen opens her door, the two of them stand and look at me, smiles almost broader than their faces can hold. I don’t know who is who any more. All I can remember is the sense of them, the gorgeous warmth I felt being near. They’re both in their mid-fifties now, but a wild-haired hippie chick still vibrates through each of them into my bones as I try to hug thirty years’ worth in those first few moments.

  Soon we’re sitting eating cheese and croissants and slurping strong coffee at Karen’s heavy oak dining table, surrounded by simple but elegant art in a house bought through twenty years of selling real estate. She scratches the head of Rubio, the lanky Afghan sitting beside her chair, and tells me about the collie she got after I disappeared from their lives and how she named her Billie. I can feel tears coming, but I breathe through them and listen.

  They tell me again how surreal this feels, like magic. Thirty years ago, when doctors told my mother she’d be dead by Christmas if she didn’t knock off the drinking, Karen and Marilyn had considered kidnapping me, for fear I’d end up rattling around that house on Fourth Avenue alone with Black Mike the same way my child’s mind imagined that plate rattled around his head. When I disappeared they called everywhere, social services, Catholic Family Services—no one knew anything, or if they did, they weren’t telling.

  “I thought of you so often and how much I loved being with you,” I tell them, “but I remember being a brat sometimes, and I wasn’t sure if the feeling was mutual.”

  “We couldn’t get enough of you.” And we laugh and hold hands tighter and get weepy, the hair on our arms prickling every so often at the shock of us, here like this again, smiling for real and feeling in love.

  There is fabric art hanging from the ceiling of my apartment now, two long strips of silk, dark and light green, dropping separately and doubling back to twist round each other again. It’s called Billie and Me, a piece from Marilyn’s last gallery show.

  It’s the irony of it that kills me—keeping my secrets all those years for fear of losing people, and it was the telling that found them.

  One Step

  Forward

  Shirley A. Serviss

  I was surprised and touched when my stepson’s mother invited me to pose for a family photograph at his Grade 12 graduation. I joined Greg, his mother and stepfather, his half sister—my daughter—and his father, from whom I was separated. It was a healing end to many years of acrimony.

  “Will you step to one side, Shirley? You’re in Denise’s face,” the photographer requested. Greg’s mother and I began to laugh. “What else is new?” she quipped. “Let’s not even go there,” I responded.

  I was in my early thirties and wanted desperately to have a child when I became involved with a separated, twice-married man with a two-year-old son. A man who loved his son enough to take on the role as primary caregiver seemed like good father material. I was seduced by his dedication: leaving work on time night after night to pick up his son from daycare and put a home-cooked meal on the table. I was seduced by a small, blond, blue-eyed boy climbing into bed between us in the mornings for “sandwich hugs.” I was seduced by an image of a stable family life, like the one I had known as a child, in contrast to my single life following a divorce from a childless open marriage.

  Greg was four by the time I moved in with his father, into the house his mother had once lived in and to which she still had a key. Our bedroom was furnished with the suite my partner had given his second wife as a graduation present (as she was to remind us later); our china and crystal was his half of the settings they had chosen when first married. Our chesterfield suite had been chosen by his first wife—a woman I never met, but who contributed more baggage than merely the beige loveseats that managed to outlast all three of his marriages. My partner always claimed these possessions were too expensive to replace; they were costly, indeed.

  The symbolism of the house, the furniture, the crystal and china would not strike me until much later. My immediate concern was the preschooler who lived with us more than half the time and whose care had suddenly become my responsibility. When I dropped Greg at his daycare on the way to my office, he would dash in ahead of me and slam the door in my face. Suspecting the problem, I inquired one morning, “What would you say if someone asked you who I am?” He replied without hesitation, “I would say that you are nobody.”

  When we later explained to him that I was his stepmother, his reaction was one of relief. “Just like Cinderella,” he sighed. At least he had a context for me—whether or not it was a positive one.

  I had no better an understanding of the role of stepmother; what I did was try to be a mother. I read bedtime stories, made Rice Krispies squares and sewed on buttons. It wasn’t long before I was the one making sure Greg was enrolled for swimming and soccer and earning Cub badges. One of my more misguided efforts was organizing Greg’s birthday parties.

  I would spend an inordinate amount of time finding prizes for ice fishing down the laundry chute and inventing life-size board games to play in the basement; his mother would breeze in with an ice-cream cake she’d picked up at Dairy Queen. The cake, of course, would be what Greg would mention as the highlight of the party when I tucked him into bed that night.

  Greg already had a mother. He would quickly correct anyone who mistook my identity. Mother’s Days came and went, usually without recognition for the role I played in my stepson’s life. (Although I was both saddened and touched when he showed up at the doorstep on his bicycle one year with some wilted flowers he had evidently been hiding for me.)

  Our daughter was born when Greg was five. He was delighted to have a baby sister, his father was thrilled to have a daughter and I was relieved to be a “real mother” at last. My partner and I had still not married. There were too many times when I wanted to jump into my car and drive away from a life over which I seemed to have little control. In addition to his scheduled periods with us, Greg came to spend weekends or stay with us whenever his mother didn’t have time to take care of him or had other plans; my time commitments and my plans were largely immaterial.

  Once my daughter was born, I abandoned any fantasy I had of raising a child alone. She screamed for most of her first six months of life, and I was extremely grateful for her father’s support when he came home from work. I thought that having a child of my own would make me happy; I discovered that as much as I loved her, she was not a solution to my angst. I had, however, waited a long time for this much-wanted child a
nd couldn’t imagine having someone else raise her, so chose to maintain my freelance writing business from home. Clients were understanding when I breast-fed her at meetings or changed her diapers on boardroom tables. I found I was adept at typing with one hand. I could work once I got her to sleep at night or while she played at my feet during the day.

  Prior to my daughter’s second birthday, her father and I decided to marry and buy a house together. I found it discomfiting to have Greg’s mother drop in on some pretext or another at any time, or to have her feel free to go through the house looking for something he had left behind. I thought that legitimizing our relationship and having a home in joint title would change the power imbalance. Surely a wife’s needs and feelings would matter more than an ex-wife’s. Surely a wife would have the right to be considered a bona fide stepparent who could attend parent-teacher meetings. Surely I would have some say over who could and could not enter a house to which I held joint title.