All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  “No, it’s okay. You can say what you like. I’m not offended.” Alice smiled.

  The room was brightly lit, cramped, and uncomfortable.

  “I don’t want to be here.” I meant it. “I just wanted to forget, to dance.”

  Alice calmly waited for me to say more.

  “I’m on my own. I’m all I’ve got and I can’t get locked up,” I said with tears beginning to fall.

  “I don’t want you to stay in the hospital if you feel like you are well enough to leave on your own, if you are not going to hurt yourself.”

  I didn’t say anything, just sat there and cried. After another long silence, I spoke. “My father beat me and my mother set it up. She wanted to watch.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I couldn’t help my sisters.”

  I was tired of carrying everything, siblings, memories, all cluttered up inside, stacked on top of each other, and I was beginning to leak, couldn’t stop myself from spilling. Memories passed through me and in me like a holy ghost after being fully dunked in deep water.

  “Do you want to tell me more?”

  I couldn’t talk about Clint, about sexual abuse, or what my mother did to me, to him. It was too much. I shook, tried to calculate the options of my situation, whether talking might convince Alice to change her mind about letting me out. I was afraid to say too much, wanted her to know I was functional, capable, even if I didn’t look it. In my head the words repeated themselves: My father was a monster. My mother was obsessed with me. She had sex with Clint. It’s my fault.

  “The show must go on,” I whispered to myself, the mantra I had practised for years. It eased my mind, kept me in the present, focused.

  “I wonder if you would be interested in seeing me privately? I have some spots available on a sliding scale,” Alice said.

  “What’s a sliding scale?” It sounded musical, like the G could slide down to the C chord.

  “Oh, it means that my fee runs up to sixty dollars an hour depending on what you can afford and there is a spot at the bottom end of the scale if you need.”

  “You mean, like five bucks?” I rubbed my eyes and face dry, needing a cigarette.

  She looked at me and said, “Sure, if that’s what you can afford to pay, then five dollars an hour will be just fine. But how about we start at no dollars an hour and see if you want to continue after a few sessions.”

  “Seriously. Is that for real?”

  “Yes, for real. Why don’t we start on Monday?” She handed me her card. “I’m going to sign the release form. You’re free to go, but I would like to set up an appointment today for next week, and if you are strong enough to go home, then you can. Is there someone you want me to call?”

  “No, I’ll be okay,” I said. “Umm … thanks, Alice, or Mrs. … I’m supposed to call you Alice?”

  “Yes, Alice is good.” She walked away and closed the door behind her.

  My head hurt, as if I needed to tape skin to my brain to hold it all in again. This talk thing could get tricky.

  But a doctor lesbian. Huh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “THE ROLE IS FOR a young, feisty girl … a boxer, a … tomboy.”

  “You mean a lesbian?” I asked my agent on the phone while she stumbled over the words. Suddenly, I couldn’t stop saying it, and if it were possible to turn all characters into lesbians, I would have. The Bionic Woman, definite lesbian. Linda Carter had to be, as far as I was concerned. All superhero women must have been lesbians. And my childhood idol, Jodie Foster, could be nothing but, in my mind, even if she wouldn’t say it.

  Lesbian, a beautiful word even though so many tossed it around like it was something dirty. Martha once said that the word lesbian was an ugly word, that she didn’t like it. I called her homophobic and she raged at me for suggesting she was.

  I liked belonging to something so edgy sounding and fiercely female. The word rolled off my tongue as I stared at myself in the mirror and looked for the lesbian, every time I said it with a newfound confidence, a word that so many despised and I adored, les-bi-an. Did I look like one? Would people notice something new in me, like with a haircut or a new outfit? A rite of passage?

  “Well, I don’t think the girl is gay.…” my agent said on the other end of the phone.

  “You mean lesbian.”

  “Anyway, she’s not that, and it’s with Carla Spencer, a great filmmaker, and I think if you got this part, it would be good for your career. You’d meet some new people, get out there. It’s at a new film school.”

  “For sure I’ll be there. Thanks,” I said and hung up the phone. I ran around my bachelor apartment looking for my pictures and resumé, pulled down my Murphy bed from the wall, and bounced on the mattress, did somersaults over the top of the bed, then pretended to box. Ha! Lesbian.

  The moment I saw the director, I instantly fell into stupid and the nerves kicked in. I convinced myself that she was a lesbian before I knew her, and I wanted to play this role, no matter the content. Carla had blue eyes and long dirty-blond hair and wore jeans. I was wearing jeans with the image of Jimmy Dean hand-painted down one of the legs, a black leather jacket, and a T-shirt that said Fuck you on it.

  “It takes balls walking in here with a shirt like that on,” the director said. She was smiling, her eyes familiar, like someone I had known before, or maybe it was the way she looked at me, as if she knew me. I was bold in my clothing choice but could find nothing to say with my numb tongue, a rush of heat moving up into my face.

  “Well, how about we start.”

  “Yeah … oh yeah … I’m ready,” I said after taking my place on my mark before the camera.

  “Oh, before we roll, can you box?”

  “Sure … well, if you want me to, that is,” I smiled at her, then lifted my hands in the air and started to jump back and forth, jabbing my fists into the air like I had at home.

  She smiled back at me in a way that was too intimate for what we were doing. I couldn’t help but stare at her a second too long.

  “Camera’s rolling, so … anytime,” she said, clicking a pen with her thumb, waiting for me to begin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “I THINK I’M FALLING in love.”

  I sat on the floor in Alice’s office with cushions all around me. It was a small office with a desk, carpeted floor, two chairs, very little on the walls. I preferred to sit on the ground. I couldn’t fall far.

  Alice was the opposite of my mother. Never scrutinized my look or my body size, never expected anything of me. I tried to get her to dislike me or push me away, but she never did. Just kept that therapy gaze, eye contact that was impressive, never veered, freakish almost, like a plastic doll with eyes that never blinked.

  Alice smiled. “Tell me about her.” Her green earrings swinging beneath her lobes every time she moved or spoke was hypnotic.

  “Well, she’s a lot older than me. Actually, she’s my director for this film I’m doing.” I picked at the fraying material of my jeans over my knee, pulling the faded threads and making a larger hole while I spoke, my face turning red.

  “How much older?”

  “I don’t know … maybe fifteen years,” I said.

  I looked up to see Alice’s expression. Her smile disappeared briefly, though she almost immediately recovered her therapy face. But I did catch her initial reaction, that moment of disapproval.

  “Does she have feelings for you, too?”

  “I’m pretty sure. We spend a lot of time hanging out together after rehearsal and talking about our lives. We’ve been to this pub a couple of times and … I think she likes me, yeah.”

  She did, I knew. I couldn’t tell Alice that Carla would tenderly touch my hands or face and look at me longingly, dreamlike, misty. But I knew.

  “Do you think it’s okay for thirty-three-year-old men to date eighteen- or nineteen-year-old women? I know you like her, but do you think it’s a fair or an equal beginning?” Alice asked, her therapy
face firmly intact.

  “She doesn’t feel older.”

  “Have you ever dated an older person before?” Alice asked.

  The good thoughts were interrupted by a question I cared not to answer, or could not.

  “I’m going to ask you to think about this. Why do you think a thirty-three-year-old woman feels confident about dating an eighteen-year-old?”

  Don’t. Something stirred inside my body, another part of me that wanted me to be quiet. I wanted to tell her about my mother, but I couldn’t, as if that other part had a rope inside my belly pulling the door to my vocal chords shut so I couldn’t speak. But I did not want Carla to be compared to my mother. She was nothing like her. Carla wasn’t my mother, so I believed it was equitable because I was old enough and believed I was smart enough.

  I just didn’t know I wasn’t mature enough. There was a difference. I wanted love. I had wished for it my whole life and believed it had arrived. I was too young for Carla. Perhaps Carla knew it, but it wouldn’t stop what was about to occur between us. I had agency as a young adult, and there was no stopping the train.

  PART THREE

  What I Knew

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  2002 — Princess Margaret Hospital

  BEFORE I GO to the hospital for another talk, I need answers. We had moved Mother into an east-end apartment in Toronto soon after she arrived from BC, a beautiful place with large windows overlooking a ravine with trees, greenery, and birds.

  I go there now to find journals, notes, anything I can. Maybe I’ll find her birth certificate or old letters from when she was a teenager, pictures, things each of us tucks away in secret.

  My mother’s history is a mystery. She never spoke of her family, only said that they were very poor and that her mother frequently beat and punished her. Mother had to go to school with the nuns, who were apparently just as cruel. That’s all I was ever really told.

  I open the glass doors of the bookcases that hold hundreds of books on wooden shelves, including an old leather-bound Bible with a satin string for keeping track of the page. I open my mother’s Bible to the marked page and look at a couple of the headings in bold black print: THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE and ABRAHAM’S SEED AND SATAN. There are other books — books about Princess Diana, books by Stephen King, cookbooks, and even her own recipe book for the restaurant she had in BC. Inside her recipe book are a few placemats with her restaurant logo on them: “Homestead, home cooking.”

  I hold books by their spines and covers and dangle them upside down in an attempt to find hidden papers or pictures, as if magical memories might fall out and I’ll be able to see them. I go through rows and rows of books this way and disappointedly find nothing. When I open the closet in her office, I find dozens of laminated posters and pictures from my old shows going back to my childhood.

  Mother’s computer sits on her desk. I push the power button and wait for the green light. I notice a little red-and-gold-striped case with a handle and flip it open. Inside sit all the 45s from my childhood, from dance lessons, stuff my mother purchased about how to tap. I pull the 45s out — ABBA, Barbra Streisand, the Beatles, and, of course, Barry Manilow, favourites that I listened to on my plastic record player to under the porch when I was a child.

  I turn to the computer, the monitor bright with symbols and files.

  Perfect. I sit down in the soft chair and begin to search, clicking on icons until I find her work files. Boring. Then I open her email program and browse the trash folder, which hasn’t been erased from the hard drive. I start to read the emails in sequence and realize that I am reading messages from different men she met on a dating site.

  Then I open one she sent to a man that says, “Here is a picture of me taken only a few years ago. I know I am a bit younger in it, but it’s one of my best shots and I thought you might like it.” The message is signed “Lisa.” I scroll down to look at the picture, and there it is taking up the whole screen, a picture taken of me when I was thirteen, a headshot from my first photo session with Martha. I stand up and pace while I stare at the image. I can’t fucking believe this. How could she?

  I sit back down and keep clicking and reading. I come to another image of me, a different shot from the same photo session, but this time her name is Janet and she claims she is twenty-three years old.

  I stand up and walk back to the closet to look through boxes and letters. I find divorce papers and newspaper clippings, old black-and-white photos. I open a large wooden drawer that holds dozens of envelopes and photograph albums and pull them all out. Everything is strewn on the carpet. I dump out an envelope and there are black-and-white baby pictures of Lou, Sadie, Diego, and me. Then I dump another envelope and stop.

  I put my hand over my mouth. There are grainy coloured photographs of my mother and one of Clint back in our old apartment, and another laminated photo of him on a wooden board. I throw it on the floor. The phone rings. I jump up, startled. It rings and rings and I run out of the room looking for something in her kitchen to drink, anything, a beer, liquor, anything, but there is nothing. I walk back into the office and look at the computer screen with the picture of me, sent to her twenty-something-year-old boyfriend and the other men. Fuck. She is still doing this, still, in her sixties. How could she use my image in this way, a picture of her thirteen-year-old daughter to attract men?

  It’s time. I need to know a few things. I leave the apartment as fast as I can and make my way to the hospital.

  It is quiet on the ward. There aren’t many visitors when the sun is up. I go to her room, determined to challenge her, to make her tell me the truth. I reach her door and halt. She doesn’t see me. She’s sitting up in her bed with her food tray in front of her, her fingers delicately playing the keys of an invisible piano while her head sways back and forth to a tune only she can hear.

  I walk in and her fingers fall away from her tray. Her face widens into a smile, and I know she is losing her grip. I lunge right in about Martha and Clint. I don’t want to lose my resolve. “You need to tell me what happened when I was a teenager.”

  “What?”

  “What did you and Martha talk about? What happened that night?”

  She looks at me as if she does not know the night in question. Perhaps she doesn’t.

  “The night of the accident.”

  The smile on my mother’s face quickly vanishes. “I told Martha everything and she betrayed me. She poisoned your head,” Mother says, straightening her back with a small burst of energy.

  The nurses walk by and stare into the room. I wait for them to pass before I answer. “She did not. God, what are you talking about?” I stand near her bed, intent on getting answers.

  “Nothing … just forget it. Did you come all the way here to jump on me?”

  “No, don’t do that!” I want her to stop. She always changes the subject or looks away.

  “She knew! She knew, okay?” Mother picks up her plastic cup to take a sip of water, stalling.

  “And?”

  “And, and, AND. You think she was so perfect. Martha, Martha, Martha!” Mother says loudly, suddenly repeating everything in threes.

  “I know what happened the night Clint went to your apartment.”

  “No, you do not!” She points her finger at me, then puts her cup down.

  But I was at her apartment. The blood hadn’t even been properly washed from the wall that night. It was Clint’s blood. She and Martha both lied, and she is still lying now.

  Mom coughs in her bed, pulls her water cup back to her lips. I wait, then continue. “Martha told me things about what happened. So did Steffin and —”

  “But you were sick, throwing up and not eating, or killing yourself —”

  “Stop it! Stop doing that. Stop trivializing my life.” Her carefully chosen words are meant to diminish, phrases she throws around: starving, killing yourself. Deflection. I choke back rage and the urge to scream at the top of my lungs. I stare at my shoes, the floor, anywher
e but at her. It hasn’t taken much for her to make me feel like a five-year-old again and I don’t want her to see the child in me.

  “Stop doing what?” she asks back, as if she doesn’t know.

  “Belittling me. This isn’t about my eating. Why can’t you just answer the fucking question?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. Yes, Martha, then. Martha wasn’t what you think,” Mother says.

  I don’t think much of Martha. “I need you to tell me the truth. I need to know what happened with Clint.” There is no time left, Mother. You are dying. Speak. “What did you do to him?”

  She looks at me like she’s thinking How dare you ask such a thing? Indignant, her eyes lock onto mine. The room seems to get smaller, windows covered, ceiling low, little space between my mother’s bed and me.

  “What happened between you and Clint, Mom?” I meet her gaze and hold it without flinching.

  “I loved him,” she says with a pointed finger, as if there is something wrong with me for even asking, as she once again tries to shut the conversation down. That finger threat with those eyes often got me to clam up when I was young, the just you wait ’til your father gets home look.

  “Is that what you call it?” My voice shakes ever so slightly.

  “I loved him.”

  “He was a teenager. He was my boyfriend, a kid.”

  “I never touched him, or you.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “Is that what this is about?” she asks, surprised, changing the subject. “Is this why you haven’t seen me in all these years?”

  Is she kidding? Yes, partly. Isn’t it a good enough reason? I think molesting your child’s adolescent boyfriend qualifies. If only it were just that.