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All We Knew But Couldn't Say

Page 3

by Joanne Vannicola


  When I got home from school, Sadie asked me to sneak her something to eat.

  I scampered up the stairs and into the kitchen. Mother was in the dining room making lasagna, rolling out the dough and cranking noodles through the metal machine, flour puffing into a cloud in the air, with the smell of tomato sauce and onions simmering on the stove in large lidded pots. Making lasagna just like nothing had happened.

  I was quiet at the dinner table and managed to tuck a piece of white crusty bread under my shirt. Lou and I stared at each other sideways while Diego and Mother ate quietly and my father scooped a heap of noodles and cheese into his mouth.

  Dad had little tenderness; nothing about him was soft, everything sharp, from his tongue to his fist. He seemed almost giant-sized, only he wasn’t round like my mother, just hard and mean, with a fake eye that never moved, frozen like his heart. Sometimes I liked to stare at his fake eye to see if it might magically move or follow me, but it never did.

  He ate his meal in silence, chewed his food, grunted and burped. I left when the meal was done, carried my dish to the sink, then disappeared. Sadie was on her bed staring at the wood-panelled wall in a trance, her lips slightly open as she breathed in and out, the only real sign that she was still inside herself. I wasn’t sure what it was that made people stare that way, if it was sadness, loneliness, or hunger. My mother had that look in her eyes sometimes, too. Usually, with Mother, it was when she didn’t think I was looking or when she ate too much.

  Mother always snuck food while she cooked. She ate bread lathered in butter or smothered in sauces, used fingers for forks, ate mouthfuls of cooked and baked goods and chocolates, and gulped cans of Pepsi to wash it all down, hand over mouth as she chewed and swallowed as if in a race, looking around before she would wipe food or sweat from her face with sighs and groans.

  That night, Sadie was screaming again. Dad hadn’t finished the beating. Smashing and bashing came from the basement, and Lou covered her head with a pillow while I got out and paced by her bedside.

  I paced back and forth on the spot, one foot to the next as if I were standing on hot stones, my breath shallow, my flannel Cookie Monster pyjamas wet with the sweat of panic. I started to cry. Lou lifted her blanket up to expose her face, inviting me into her bed and her arms.

  I crawled in and put my head on Lou’s pillow, facing her, and grabbed her arm. If there had been a way to hide inside of her, I would have done it. If she hadn’t curled around me like a mother bird, I would have spun away.

  I heard my mother’s voice outside the door asking us what was going on. I said I was thirsty and a minute later she was in our room with a glass of milk.

  “You should be asleep by now.” She held the glass for me while I drank.

  “Okay, Mommy.”

  “Good night.” She smiled after she kissed my cheek tenderly, like nothing was wrong.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I ran home after school and opened Sadie’s bedroom door, but she wasn’t there. Her bed was empty, her blankets strewn on the floor. I ran upstairs to find my mother.

  “Sadie went to school this morning and said some things she shouldn’t have. A social worker came by this afternoon to tell me that Sadie won’t be coming back.”

  I didn’t know what a social worker was, but to my child’s mind it wasn’t good. They stole my sister, just took her, and worse, my mother was acting as if she’d lost a glove or scarf. I couldn’t bear to stay near her, so I went to my room and started jumping from my bed to Lou’s bed, back and forth, while looking out of the window, hoping I might see Sadie, that it might be a mistake or a lie. Lou came in the room while I was frantically leaping.

  “They took her, Lou! She went to school and something happened and someone came here to talk to Mother and now Sadie is gone.”

  “Who took her?” Lou asked, running out of the room.

  I jumped off the bed, found a crayon, and furiously scribbled on some paper, and all I could think to do was scream all the obscenities Sadie had taught me. “Bastard. Cocksucker. Fuck face.”

  Lou came back in, without answers. The crayon dropped from my hand to the floor; Lou bent down to pick it up and replaced it in the Crayola box. “Do you want to push our beds together so we can make a giant bed?” she asked.

  I nodded yes and we moved the night table that sat between our beds, then pushed them together to form a giant mattress. I curled into Lou while she held on to me. Her face was wet but I didn’t say anything. Neither of us spoke.

  Sadie was my foundation, even if it was Lou and I who found her food when she was hungry or tried to make her laugh when she was scared or lonely. She protected us. We were allies, the parts that made a whole, and Sadie was the biggest part; without her it was just Lou and I … and Diego, but he didn’t count. And we weren’t enough. It was Sadie who played the albums on the record player. Sadie who spoke up when we were too afraid, Sadie who made the big-girl decisions when we were on the bus or in the park, Sadie who held my hand when we crossed the street.

  No one from social services ever came to the house, or at least never came when I was there. No one spoke to me or to Lou, and I was glad. At the time I was afraid of being taken, too. Disappearing without a trace. The only lesson I learned from Sadie’s absence was to keep my mouth shut, to never tell on my parents, even when I was the victim.

  “Joanna, come now.” Dad came home from work with a mud-caked face, smelling of sawdust and grease, in his Kodiak boots, gloves, helmet, and soot-covered overalls with a weathered leather belt that held his hammer, screwdrivers, and nails. “Boots.”

  “Boots” meant I had to remove his boots.

  “We eat?” meant “When is supper going to be on the table?” Dad had other words, the words he used to call his girls — whore, bitch, cockroach.

  In the mornings my father would stand over the sink in freshly laundered coveralls that Mother would clean every night. He would open the mirrored medicine cabinet and pull out from the little shelf a case that held his glass eye. He would stretch his eyelid open with his fingers to expose the red veins and the gaping hole in his face, like invisible murky water at the bottom of a lake miraculously made visible. He would insert the glass eye, green eyeball perfectly centred. He’d lost his eye with one swift smash in the face with the forked part of a hammer at work. The one-eye shift never stopped fascinating me, the perfect focal point when looking at him.

  When we drove, sometimes he would veer too far to one side of the road and my mother would gasp and scream, “Are you trying to kill us?”

  He would giggle and we would giggle back. He thought dangerous driving was funny. One day he got into an accident and the car swerved and did complete circles in the snowy road until it landed in a ditch. I wasn’t in the car and no one was hurt, but when he saw me, he said, “You would have had so much fun. The car went two time circle and boom!”

  I could tell Mother thought he was an idiot. Kids know these things. Who talks about having fun in a car accident?

  “I swear if you could only get your brains examined,” Mother said under her breath while drying her hands with a kitchen towel by the stove. Dad smiled, bounced me on his leg, like a child himself, a child my own age delighting in spins and whirls and daredevil activities.

  He liked to tell the story of leaving Italy. He came over by ship when he was in his twenties: the big voyage of his life, leaving a small mountain village in Italy, a village with no schools after grade three, where children like my dad were sent away to farms to pull a mule and cart. He left this village in search of a better life, a paying job.

  “I sail for ten days! They take us to New York and we choose where to go. I go to Quebec.”

  The only time I witnessed Dad being gentle was in his garden, holding vegetables like they were newborn babies: zucchini, herbs, lettuce, onions, peppers, and rows and rows of tomatoes, his big fingers gently pulling the vegetables from the earth, from their roots and vines, transferring them to
baskets lined with towels. Those hands that had the capacity to rip limbs and break necks also had the capacity for such sweetness, tenderness, but I would never have known it unless I witnessed his love for his garden. And sometimes when he saw me watching him, he would soften.

  Maybe it was his own childhood brought to life, feeling like he was in the mountains of Italy, in the soil, digging through earth and leaves, producing such luscious fruits filled with colour and instant gratification. I liked to fantasize about Italy: I imagined it was warm and beautiful, like Sophia Loren. Dad always said the Italians made the best movies, but maybe it was just his mother tongue that made him feel at home.

  “Joanna, come, come.” He waved me over to where he stood in fresh soil. “Hold basket.… See, see the big tomato?” he said, holding up a large, ripe orange-red tomato, dimpled and round. “Take a bite, taste!”

  I sank my mouth into the tomato, its juice dripping down my cheeks. He laughed and took a big bite, ate almost the whole thing, smiling, a magical moment I wished I could preserve like his tomato sauce and bottled wines in his cellar. But those moments were fractional, minutes out of years. His love for his garden was filled with warmth and wonder, but not for the vulnerability and expressions of his own children.

  One day I ran into the garden with his shaving cream. I had fished it out of the medicine cabinet to create scientific experiments in the grass. I left the shaving cream outside, forgetting it until he stormed into the dining room and lifted me from my chair. He threw me into the kitchen, where I crashed into the fridge and fell to the ground. Then he kicked me with his steel-toed boots until he had no steam left in him and all the screams had been beaten out of me. I crawled on the floor like a slinking cat to get away and hid under my bed in the farthest unreachable corner, trembling. Lou found me. I saw Lou’s curly red hair, her thick glasses pushing against her cheeks, and her big toothy grin as she lay on the ground to look under the bed.

  Lou tucked her long hair behind her ear and began to sing. I eventually joined in until we got lost in music, making up songs. It helped me forget the panic.

  “Gonna throw Papa into the sea when I’m big an’ he can’t see. Gonna throw Mama from a speeding train, oooo oooo oooo oooo.”

  Lou taught me to harmonize while we laughed and sang about killing our parents.

  A few afternoons later, I was in the yard playing in the sprinkler. I ran inside to change, skipping past my mother’s bedroom door on the way to mine. It was the middle of the day under a blazing sun, and Mother was lying down, moving around and breathing heavily, naked. She lifted the top sheet from her body when she saw me staring at her through the open door. She looked at me and caressed the side of the bed where my father usually slept, gestured for me. My heart was beating faster than normal, ahead of my mother’s emptiness that tried to pull me in toward her bed like a magnet, as if she might swallow me whole and stop my heart from beating all together.

  “Come lay down with Mommy. I’m lonely,” she said.

  “No, I don’t want to lie down with you.”

  “I’m lonely,” she said again and patted the empty side of the bed.

  “No.” I ran down the hall and out the door, letting it slam behind me, my heart pounding.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS 1976, and Montreal was hosting the Winter Olympics. People were arriving in the city by car, bus, train, and plane. Every night, newscasts reported on our athletes and the entertainment, and I was going to be part of it. I was almost chosen as the singer for the Olympic song, was the first runner-up, a source of severe disappointment for my mother. But I didn’t care much, because I was dancing in the opening ceremony. That was good enough for me.

  “How come you didn’t dance when you were a girl?” I asked my mother, who clearly loved dance and could dance in spite of her 350 pounds. We were in her bedroom, talking about the Olympic show.

  She turned away from me and stood in front of her dresser mirror, wearing a big white bra. Her breasts were propped up by her belly, which was round and popped out beyond her breasts. She wore underwear, and her pink dress covered in large green flowers was on the bed. She sprinkled baby powder all over her skin, rubbing it in.

  “Because your grandmother wouldn’t let me dance,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  She wouldn’t answer at all and just ignored me. She had the blank look in her eyes, like I wasn’t there. This was the mother that scared me most, the one with the dead eyes.

  “Come here.”

  I walked toward her slowly, reluctantly. She put her arms around me to keep me there. I didn’t want to be held or touched. I wanted to get out of the room, but she sat down at the edge of her bed and held me between her legs, rubbing me up and down my back. I was trapped. Above her bed was a painting of a ballerina on pointe, one leg up in the air, in a white tutu. I stared at her frozen in place above the bed and imagined being onstage with her, spinning, turning, and leaping into colours on the wall.

  There were noises from outside. I could hear the other kids playing, running, and yelling. I pictured them in their homes with their families, playing board games or reading books. My mother was holding me hostage, squeezing me with her thighs. I understood there was something wrong with this and also that no one was going to rescue me.

  Outside was where I felt most free, where birds and creatures crawled, hid, and flew. I wanted to be like them, to lift myself higher on the strength of my own muscles, to reach the sky and leave behind what was human.

  When she let me go, I ran to my climbing tree in the yard, stood on its strong roots, and wrapped my arms around it as its bark caressed my cheek. The grooves reminded me of elephants with their deep wrinkles and curves. I felt love in the wild, soothed, as if the trees were like angels or gods. Maybe their branches were the arms of gods that cradled us when we climbed up into them to be held.

  Climbing as high as my body could take me, I closed my eyes to see if I could balance on a thin branch. I felt alone, and in fact, I was. Sadie was gone, and no one spoke of her. I couldn’t understand it, because I thought of her often. In my fort under the porch, I had special stones and toys that reminded me of her. I created a kind of altar to her. I missed her, and there was almost nothing left of her in our house, only an oil painting of her face from her confirmation, which hung in our living room like a photograph over a coffin.

  I tried to avoid my dad as much as possible, and Diego was never home — always off playing football and being a teenager with his friends. As was Lou. They both drank, smoked pot, listened to Pink Floyd and Zeppelin, and tried to stay as far away from home as they could. When they were home, they huddled in the basement, getting high or pushing me out. Teenagers were their own breed, it seemed, and no one wanted an eight-year-old sibling around.

  And Lou was starting to hate me.

  Every time Mother spoke it was about me: about my dancing, my singing, my acting. “Joanne is dancing in the Olympic show.”

  Lou was justifiably resentful.

  The jealousy between Lou and me grew into a living, breathing entity. She often screamed at me to “get the fuck away.” Sometimes her threats turned into actions and I couldn’t defend myself. I knew why: my mother loved me more than she loved Lou, she always had. I had figured out how to be what Mother wanted, how to please her, how to make her love me or what I thought was love: dancing, being close to her. Yes, Mom. No, Mom. Thank you, Mom. I can do it, Mom. I’ll be a star, Mother, if …

  When I auditioned for Sesame Street, I thought I’d hit the big time, though I was only eight years old. Make-believe was my great escape from reality. It was the only reality that I would come to love, the only true place where all of me could be present and free. I could back-talk, move, scream, laugh, and cry without any fear of violence. I could give full expression to my emotions.

  Mother coached me on the way to the audition.

  “And how do you
present yourself when you greet the men who will hire you?”

  “I say ‘Hi, I’m Joanne, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.’”

  Mother fixed my shirt, then licked her fingers and smoothed my hair.

  “Am I going to see Oscar, Ernie, and Bert?”

  “I don’t know. Remember, stand tall.”

  We walked through the doors, where a man with a beard and moustache met us. He ushered Mother to a chair in the lobby and gestured for her to sit.

  Inside the booth were two men. It looked like the inside of a spaceship, with tall glass walls and buttons and speakers and filmstrips in big round cans. I was in a studio with carpeted ceilings and floors and big leather couches. Headphones and large microphones hung above me or stood in stands, and there was a screen that seemed as big as a movie-theatre screen. A large image of Big Bird and Oscar appeared before my eyes. I had only ever seen them on a small television set. This truly was magic. If Mother’s dream for me included Big Bird, recording studios, stages, and Olympic ceremonies, I would gladly make the magical world my dream, too. And I did. I was hired and would be working for Sesame Street. My first booked gig.

  A few days after the audition, I was getting ready for school and walked by the washroom. Mother sat on the toilet with the door open, naked. I stopped. She didn’t close the door, which was in easy reach from the seat. She didn’t say anything, just stared at me. There was no toilet paper so she grabbed a towel that hung from the rack, wiped herself with it, and widened her legs with her woman parts exposed, her eyes empty, like a dead person.

  After running out of the house with my shoes in my hand, I stopped at the end of the block where I was supposed to wait for the yellow bus to take me to my grade-two class. Instead, I started to walk.

 

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