The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  Sam swallows the last of her beer and goes inside to call Romey. Even though she doesn’t work on Monday nights, she isn’t home or isn’t answering her phone. She’s not answering her cellphone either. As Sam opens her fridge to take out another bottle of beer, she imagines a tearful reunion with Romey, each of them protesting they were the unwitting cause of their separation. But Sam’s fantasy gets stuck in neutral, and she can’t seem to imagine a happy ending. She puts the beer back into the fridge, unopened and covered in wet patches from her sweaty hands.

  Sam decides to drive over to Romey’s apartment. If it is all over between them, Sam wants to know. Romey doesn’t answer the doorbell, but the front door, which is usually closed, opens in Sam’s palm. She goes up a flight of stairs and knocks on the inside door. When she hears someone groan, she steps inside to find Romey lying on her couch with her legs propped up on pillows. A hot water bottle peeks out from under her back. She is wearing white shorts and a pink blouse. She looks like a nice Italian girl; the pall of sex and glamour that has entranced Sam is gone. She is still attracted but feels as if she is seeing Romey’s ordinariness for the first time. When Sam reaches down to put her arms around Romey, she gasps and pushes Sam away.

  “Careful. I put my back out at work.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Romey makes a face. “I’ll be fine in a couple days—it’s just a muscle spasm. I have some Tylenol with codeine.”

  Sam takes out the sash she bought in Dearborn and gives it to Romey, who barely glances at it. She doesn’t seem to care one way or another that Sam is here, which is shattering, worse than fighting. Sam wants to ask, Don’t you like the sash? But instead she says nothing. Taking her cue from Romey, Sam acts as if everything between them is cool, nothing special but nothing terrible. Kneeling on the floor beside the couch, she recounts her weekend in Detroit. While being careful to minimize Amanda’s presence and role in the adventures, Sam describes the meeting with Cheryl and Bernie at the gun show and the encounter with Mark. Then Sam unbends her leg and peels off the bandage to display the tattoo of Pinhead.

  “Hellraiser,” Romey murmurs. “Scared the pants off me the first time I saw it.”

  A tiny fissure of friendliness, of the-way-they-were. Has Romey forgot how, aside from sex, they just plain like each other? Sam tapes the bandage back in place. “So, do you know anything about Raelian strippers selling chemical weapons to Iraq on behalf of the Hells Angels?”

  “No. Sounds kind of out of the Angels’ league if you ask me. The only thing I can tell you is it’s true the Raelians encourage their female members to bring in money by working in the sex trade and by selling dope. And selling drugs pretty much means getting involved with the Angels. Hey! Is it called the Ecdysis Conspiracy because of the Raelian dancers?”

  Romey has lost Sam. “Huh?”

  “Strippers used to be called ‘ecdysiasts.’ You know, because they shed their clothes.”

  Sam asks, “Am I the only person who has never heard of the word ‘ecdysis’?”

  Romey smiles, biting her lip. “I read it in a history of stripping.”

  “Oh. Do you think Omar knows anything?”

  Her smile dissolves. “He knows better than to talk about the Angels. He’s not stupid. He would never have hurt Chloe that way.” She lifts her hand into the air as if to block Sam. “He’s a good guy, he means well. If he thought it was going to be such a big deal, Omar never would have slept with me.” Romey’s faint Italian accent asserts itself. When she is tired, she can’t sound out a soft “th” without dropping the “h.”

  Sam sighs. Why is it that when someone says a person means well, it is always in conjunction with disaster? People who don’t mean to harm anyone often inflict the worst damage because of what they rouse in others: sympathy, loyalty, and rescue missions that are compromised before they begin. What would it take to make Romey see how dangerous her best friend was?

  Sam says, “Omar knew a gun killed my sister. My father told everyone she died of a drug overdose. I only found out recently how she died, and I didn’t tell him, and I didn’t tell you.”

  Romey waves this off with a hand. “What is this? You think Omar shot Chloe because he’s Arab? Everyone knows what violent, dangerous terrorists they are. Kind of like I’m Italian Mafiosi?”

  Sam’s mouth drops open. How can Romey have so much faith in him and so little faith in her? “For God’s sake Romey, Omar is a fucking criminal.”

  Romey picks up the hot water bottle and throws it across the room. Not at Sam but not too far from her either. “Are you trying to get me to tell you to fuck off for good?”

  Sam is stunned. “No.”

  With her hand, Romey gestures for Sam to come close. Sam stands up hesitantly—she isn’t sure if Romey wants to whisper in her ear or slap her face. Romey continues to urge Sam, who reluctantly bends down her head. Romey reaches up and grips Sam’s chin the way Italian mothers do. All five of Romey’s nails are long enough for Sam to feel them as they dig into her face.

  Romey says, “I’ve loved Omar for a long time; I haven’t loved you for very long.” She lets go of Sam whose skin continues to tingle.

  Sam says, “I guess you want me to leave now.”

  Small shake of Romey’s head. “I’d like you to make me some dinner. Sam, did anyone ever tell you that you take yourself way too seriously?”

  The next morning Sam collects a final paycheque from Le Lapin Blanc and makes arrangements to keep the rental car for another week. She and Romey spent the night in the same bed but didn’t fool around. Romey’s back rendered sex out of the question, but Sam isn’t sure anything would have happened if physical discomfort wasn’t the issue. They didn’t discuss the status of their relationship, retreating to what felt more like a truce than a reconciliation. Over coffee the next morning, Sam said she was going back to Toronto and then to New York to try and find out more about what Chloe was doing just before she died. Romey said, “This feels very deja vu. You know, before Chloe took off, she was talking about seeing her mom in Toronto.” Sam nearly spit out her coffee. Their mother? Sam hasn’t seen her mother since she abandoned her family.

  Sam drives west, leaving the island of Montreal. She puts the radio on, listens to traffic reports and inane chatter about sports, but her attention strays. Her mom. A woman Sam can barely recall, although she remembers missing her. When Sam walked the three blocks home from elementary school, she was always careful to step over the splinters in the concrete. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. A mother Sam wanted to protect for some reason. She remembers sitting on the couch with an afghan wrapped around her, watching cartoons on television while, beside her, her mother smoked. Sam felt not so much safe as marooned. She tries to visualize her mother but can’t. Memory is like a card deck in which someone has stolen all the face cards. But then another memory is dealt to Sam, a memory which was always there, but which she didn’t understand earlier: Chloe saying their mother tried to murder herself. Mom—the family cover-up. When Sam considers her family, her sister’s obsession with political conspiracy and assassination makes a strange kind of sense.

  When Sam arrives at her father’s house in Toronto, she discovers he and Steven aren’t home. She hasn’t told them she is coming. She doesn’t have a key to the house, so she climbs over a fence in the back lane and breaks into the garden. She is carrying a case of imported beer, which is a gift for her father, but she drinks one because she is thirsty. A second bottle tamps down emotions Sam can no longer sort into discrete classifications; her feelings are bunched together like clumps of wet laundry.

  She walks along the stone path through a garden drowning in greenery: a viridian, bat-like tamarack tree; lumpy chartreuse fruit dangling from a paw-paw tree; the dull sage of a mound of moss. The only contravention in colour are the lemon chrysanthemums with their heavy scent of earth and burning incense. Sam was raised in this nice middle-class home and has returned to discover the ta
bloid talk show episodes to which her family was not immune. They were just careful not to make a spectacle of themselves—that is, everyone except for Chloe. She displayed her emotions in the same offhand manner Romey exposes her body.

  The Japanese garden in the backyard, which favours serenity and containment over colour, was recently designed by Sam’s father. Kenneth O’Connor loves the formality, the austerity, and the rules involved in the creation of a Zen garden, which is intended to be a microcosm of the natural world: the pool sparkling with koi is a lake, the raked sand in front of Sam is an ocean, while the rock she sits on is a mountain. She swigs the last of a third beer and chucks the bottle onto the sand. Then she leans over to carve a message with her finger: “Sam was here.”

  Wind chimes clamour and a breeze tickles the back of Sam’s scalp. She stands up, takes a step onto grass trimmed in the same style she has barbers cut the sides of her hair: immaculate and down to the stubble. Hair as tidy as this bloody garden. She’s her father’s daughter but doesn’t want to be. Reaching down, she yanks out a stone and props it at a different angle, vertical rather than horizontal. She extracts another stone, shifts its position. Around the garden she goes, rearranging the rocks like pawns on a chessboard, checkmate to her father the implacable queen.

  “Samantha.” Draped in dusk Sam’s father watches her. A light goes on in the back window, and Sam sees Steven moving about in the kitchen. “What are you doing?”

  Sam waits for her father to yell about the garden but he doesn’t say a word. She aligns her mouth into a sneer. “Destroying your Feng Shui.”

  Sam’s father raises an eyebrow, a gesture Sam realizes she imitates. “If you meet the Buddha on the road, you must kill him.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Her father gives Sam a faint superior smile. “It’s a Zen koan. It means ‘do not cling blindly to the rules.’ Context always needs to be taken into account.” He sits down on a bamboo chair and pats its mate. “Why don’t you sit down and explain the context in which you’re getting soused and making my garden inharmonious?”

  Before joining him in the other chair, Sam grabs another beer from the case, opens it and drinks half of it. She says, “I’m sick of your need-to-know-basis. How come Mom took off? What happened?”

  Her father bends down to root out a dandelion from between a crack in the stones. The dandelion has gone to seed, and her father blows on the silky cobwebs, an unexpectedly whimsical gesture for him. He leans back in his chair. “Okay. Where do you want me to start?”

  “Why did you get married if you’re gay?”

  Her father sighs. “I got married because I didn’t want to be a homosexual—I wanted to be a father, a husband.”

  So Stonewall hadn’t had an immediate impact on his life. Well, she knew that. “How did you meet?”

  A look somewhere between a grin and a grimace crosses her father’s face. He says, “I met Delia at a gay bar actually. I was in my first year of university, and she was working under the table as a shampoo girl at a downtown hair salon. She liked to go dancing at the clubs with the hairdressers she worked with. I suppose you would call her a ‘fag hag.’ She was good fun then, and she seemed to accept me. She was on a visa from England, and she had this terrific accent. I sometimes wonder if I hadn’t been such an Anglophile, would we have ever gotten together? Our class differences would have been more apparent to me if she had been from around here.” He pauses to allow Sam to digest the information. None of it is surprising, but it is the first time her father has talked to her about being gay, rather than simply alluding to it. He doesn’t go to Pride, he’s never joined a gay choir or gay fathers’ group, and he’s never discussed her lesbianism. The only thing gay about her father, other than the Danish furniture and the garden, is Steven.

  Her father takes a beer from the case Sam left on the ground, and uses a handful of his sweater to open the bottle. After he takes a sip, he continues his story. “What can I say? The marriage was a disaster. After Chloe was born, Delia quit working. I was pretty absorbed with my dissertation so I didn’t realize at first she was depressed. She pulled herself out of it, but after you were born, she had another postpartum depression that just flattened her. I came home one day to find an ambulance in front of the house we were renting. Chloe was at a friend’s house, and Delia had locked you into a bedroom, gone into the bathroom, and slit her wrists. She probably would have succeeded in what she was attempting if you hadn’t been screaming at the top of your lungs through an open window, which attracted the attention of a neighbour.”

  Does Sam know this? While she can’t remember what he is describing, it isn’t shocking to her. On some level, she does remember—the same way Dyna knew her father raped her without remembering the details. Knowledge and memory are often entwined in a conspiracy, where pain is covered up and plausible deniability is always an option. Sam doesn’t realize she’s crying until she wipes her nose on her arm, and her father reaches into the pocket of his Bermuda shorts and hands her a tissue. She wipes her eyes, blows her nose, and tells him she’s sorry she messed up his garden.

  Her father nods. “It’s okay.” He studies the label of his beer bottle for a moment before meeting her eyes. “The hospital treating your mother alerted Children’s Aid who opened a case file on us. I think Delia expected me to be sympathetic, but I was furious. For years, I had been trying to complete a Ph.D. while doing most of the work of looking after you two. I basically sent her packing by threatening to have her committed. She hadn’t worked in some years, or been much of a mother, so off she went. When Chloe died, I began to doubt what I did. You see, I never questioned why your mother was willing to marry a man she knew to be gay or why she didn’t seem to mind that we rarely had sex. In a profound way, I never knew Delia. I was just grateful to her for marrying me because it permitted me to hide from my sexuality. Then I stopped being grateful. I used her suicide attempt to get rid of her, although I didn’t see it that way at the time, or even later, when Chloe was in Montreal and accused me of having deprived her of a mother. Now I understand, and I feel guilty. But I’m used to guilt. It’s a legacy of homosexuality, or at any rate, it used to be.”

  Sam covers her face with her hands. She, too, feels guilty—it is stitched into her skin, a permanent tattoo, but her reasons are different from her father’s. Bad things happened to Chloe, so it is only fair they happen to Sam. Something bad is waiting for her because it is only fair that everything between two sisters be shared, be equal. Their father’s love for instance. Peeking through her fingers at her father, Sam asks, “Did you love Chloe?”

  Her father gazes at a spot in front of him as if Chloe’s ghost were floating in the air. “While there were times I didn’t like her, I always loved her. I loved her very, very much.”

  Sam is relieved to hear this. She wanted to believe her father loved Chloe, but, in the face of Chloe’s disbelief, Sam was never sure. “Chloe had a way of pissing people off. I think someone might have killed her.”

  “I just told you that your mother had depression and tried to commit suicide. What makes you think Chloe didn’t do the same thing, with the difference being you weren’t around to scream?”

  Sam doesn’t argue—her father will never believe Chloe’s death was anything but suicide. He can’t see it is equally possible Delia’s suicide attempt was a reason for Chloe not to kill herself. She was eight years old when her mother went away, old enough to remember her, to miss her, to understand the impact of what Delia had almost done. There is also the promise Chloe made Sam, the time Chloe said, “Don’t you know I’d never leave you?”

  Sam says, “Just before she died, Chloe talked about seeing our mother.”

  Her father sips his beer. “Yes, I know. Chloe did go to see her. I suppose you’d like to meet her, too? I’m still in touch with Delia.”

  In the outside world, crickets hum, neighbourhood kids splash in a backyard pool, and bass thumps from car speakers. Sam hears
it all, yet it feels so far away. Her mother, a woman who didn’t even bother going to her daughter’s funeral. But Sam will go see her because Chloe did. Sam is trying on her sister’s life, wearing it like another skin. A skin which, like a snake’s, is too tight, isn’t malleable. But Sam can’t slide out of it.

  The next day Sam takes the streetcar to the east end to see her mother. Her father turns out to know quite a lot about her mother’s life. She remarried a man whose wife died in a car accident, leaving behind two sons whom Delia adopted and raised. As a result of the same accident, Delia’s husband is on disability. Working as a waitress at an east end diner, Delia supports her new family.

  Rain spatters the windows of the streetcar, but the shower ends by the time Sam reaches the restaurant where Delia works. The diner is old-fashioned but not retro. A counter with stools runs along one wall of the long, narrow interior while booths upholstered in Naugahyde line the other three sides. The walls are decorated with sports pennants, framed black and white photographs of Lake Ontario in the ‘40s, and, oddly, Christmas tinsel. Sam takes a careful look around; her father thought Delia worked a regular Monday-to-Friday schedule, but shifts often change in the restaurant business. Fortunately the waitresses have little plaques with their names pinned to their white uniform, so she is able to identify Delia, who doesn’t look anything like her daughters. She could have been an incubator for Dad, creating offspring marked with his genetic traits. It is hard to believe she is the same age as Sam’s father. His youthful appeal can be glimpsed through the creases on his face, but the rough lines jerking from Delia’s nose to the corners of her mouth offer no such tunnel in time. Short, broad, and chesty, she reminds Sam of a maidenhead on the prow of a ship. Only her hair and makeup evoke the young woman Sam’s father described as a “fag hag.” Even though it is daytime, she is wearing three shades of eyeshadow, and her hair is trimmed into a short, chic tulip shape. Perhaps she still hangs out with the same hairdressers.