The Skin Beneath

by Nairne Holtz

  Sam leaves the counter to sit in a booth in Delia’s section. When Sam’s father spoke about Delia, Sam was nervous about the prospect of meeting her mother, but her jitters are being replaced by altogether more volatile emotions. How dare her mother not be dead, in jail, or in a mental institution! How can her mother just exist? How could she take up an entirely new life, discarding her kids the way, well, the way a snake does its skin? A translucent sheath left on the ground—that was what Sam was to her mother.

  Sam eavesdrops on Delia’s conversations. She doesn’t talk so much as exchange a sparkly patter of quips. Even after all these years, she has retained her British accent. An accent Sam hasn’t heard on television, a softer, flatter tone than the extremes of plummy period drama or Cockney tart. When she collects Sam’s order, Delia jokes about Sam’s tattoos, which are visible since she is wearing a tank top.

  Delia says, “At my age, love, that girl on your arm is going to be hanging off you.” With a rectangular, leopard-spotted nail, she points to Sam’s tattoo of Bettie Page.

  Sam is stunned. Delia is staring directly at her daughter with no idea they are related. At least Delia immediately recognized Sam as female.

  Delia holds her pen up to her notepad. “So what’ll it be?”

  “Coffee?” Ordering food is not why Sam is here. “Uh, coconut cream pie?”

  When Delia brings over the coffee and pie, Sam feels her heart box with her chest. She wants to say something to her mother but instead sips the weak coffee and spoons mounds of custard into her mouth. When Delia comes by a second time with a metal pitcher of ice water, Sam tries again. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Finally, in desperation, she reaches out and touches Delia’s wrist.

  Delia pauses, a questioning look on her face.

  Sam takes a deep breath. “I’m Samantha. Your daughter.”

  The water being poured in Sam’s glass overflows, spills onto the paper mat and the napkin Sam didn’t bother to put in her lap. Before she can point out what is happening, Delia jerks the water jug away.

  “You should have called first,” Delia says. With a squeak of her black rubber sneakers, she pivots away from Sam.

  Sam watches her walk to the back to take a cigarette break. Delia doesn’t return, not even when Sam has finished her food and goes up to the counter to pay the bill. Leaving a two dollar tip, Sam saunters out of the diner as if it is all the same to her that her mother, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a little kid, won’t talk to her.

  Just as Sam is about to hop onto a streetcar, she sees Delia jogging towards her. Sam steps back from the swarm of people crowding onto the car and allows Delia to lead them to a nearby bench. It’s a little damp from the rain, but they sit down anyway. Delia smells like a combination of hamburgers and hairspray. When she lights a cigarette, she extends her pack to Sam, who refuses with a wave of her hand.

  Delia says, “You don’t smoke. Smart girl.” In the restaurant, her starched, white uniform and perhaps a girdle reigned in her chunky frame, and she looked, if not smart, pulled together. Now her uniform is covered in wrinkles, her face is flushed, and rings of sweat have bloomed beneath her arms. The air around them is humid, taut with moisture as if the rain never happened.

  Delia peers at Sam. “Christ, you look like your father. I don’t know why I didn’t see it right away.”

  Sam pokes the ground with her foot. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Sam’s mouth flops open.

  Delia swings her legs, which are crossed at the ankle. “Your sister did the same thing to me. I’ve seen it on enough talk shows, people springing themselves on their biological mother. But your sister wasn’t interested in me. Didn’t want to meet her brothers. 1 have all the family I can take,’ is what she told me. She just wanted to dig up dirt on your father.” Delia takes a long drag of her cigarette. “So what do you want?”

  To hear more about that chat you had with Chloe, Sam thinks. Her family is a closed loop, which doesn’t include her mother, but that’s not Sam’s fault. “You never even went to my sister’s funeral.”

  A wariness comes into Delia’s eyes. “I was out of the country with my boys. Went back to England for the first time since I left.”

  Standing up, Sam begins to pace back and forth in front of her mother. Sam wants to put her mother on the stand, wants to cross-examine her. Excuse me, but why wasn’t this information brought to the attention of the jury earlier? Excuse me, but are you aware that your actions speak louder than your words? Her mother dumped her kids because her bastard husband made her. She was unable to get an earlier flight back to Toronto to go to Chloe’s funeral. Yeah, right.

  Sam says, “Inconvenient isn’t the same as impossible.”

  Delia scowls, but Sam sees something else in her eyes— uncertainty. Delia covers it with bluster. “For crying out loud. You came all the way out here to ask me five years after the fact why I didn’t go to your sister’s funeral?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Who would I be going to the funeral for?”

  Sam stops in her tracks. It isn’t the answer she expects.

  Delia grunts, and Sam sits down again. They don’t speak. Across the street a backhoe is excavating a vacant lot, and a billboard displays pictures of the future townhouse units. Beyond the foundations of the houses lies murky, polluted Lake Ontario. Sam can’t see where the water ends. She can wade into the surf, chase the rendezvous point of sky and water, but she will never be able to reach it.

  Delia uses her cigarette to point to the billboard. “People are paying up to half a million dollars to live in those because they’re by the water. They’re also next to a sewage treatment plant. On a windy day, no one’s going to be sitting on their terrace, that’s for sure.” She wrinkles her nose.

  Sam says, “You could have said goodbye to Chloe, hello to me.” Her mother is a disappointment, or perhaps Sam is just disappointed because she feels so little—she can’t tell.

  Delia says, “I was too brassed off at your father. After I left I once asked him about seeing you girls, and he talked me out of it, said I wouldn’t be doing you any favours. He’s a convincing man, you know. But after I heard what Chloe done to herself, well, it didn’t sound as if he was in the running for parent-of-the-year. Mind, he would say your sister did what she did due to my genes; I’m the crazy one, after all. But there’s decent meds these days.”

  Sam wouldn’t know. The sound of a streetcar grinding as it changes direction makes them both glance up. Has she been a bit self-centered, getting into this stuff with her mother after all these years? Maybe, but she can’t bring herself to apologize. She settles for ratcheting down the drama. “You’re right, I do want something from you. I want to know about your conversation with my sister before she died; I think you owe me that at least. Did Chloe say anything to you about a political conspiracy she was investigating that had to do with the Gulf War?”

  The skin on Delia’s forehead puckers as she takes a moment to think about the question. “No, nothing like that. She just asked me about your dad. I asked her what she was doing with herself, and she told me she dropped out of university.” Curiousity appears in Delia’s eyes, which Sam notices are hazel. “Guess I should ask you the same question.”

  Her interest acts like a switch for Sam whose resentment and apathy is replaced by longing. But, with practiced nonchalance, Sam shrugs her shoulders. “I work in a restaurant. Same as you.” Since she plans to get another job in a restaurant as soon she gets back to Montreal, she doesn’t see any point in explaining she is currently unemployed. “I’m thinking about becoming a chef.” Even though she is saying this to impress Delia, Sam realizes, as she says it, that it’s true. Working in a kitchen is the first job Sam has liked.

  “Your father must be pleased.”

  Although she wants to say, “Aren’t you?”, Sam holds her tongue. Delia accepted her abdication of her role as a parent a long time ago.
What Sam does with her life is not Delia’s concern. The person who is having a hard time with this is Sam. She wants her mother to feel responsible for her or, failing that, to at least like her. Sam wants so much for Delia to like her—Sam always wants women to like her. Even though she isn’t sure whether she wants to have a relationship with her mother, she asks Delia if she can see her again.

  “If we don’t talk about the past,” Delia says. “I’ve never been one for fussing over the past. I made my mistakes and your father made his. But what’s done is done.” With her cigarette butt, she chars the wood of the bench. The butt falls from her hand onto the ground, rolls until it stops amidst gum wrappers and empty chip bags. Sam feels like picking up the butt with gloved hands and putting it into an evidence bag, something to prove Delia was here.

  When Sam gets back from meeting her mother, her father doesn’t ask her about it. For once, Sam is glad of his discretion. As she lounges around the living room, reading magazines, she decides to stay at her father’s house for another day or two. She wants to regress, to be taken care of, to be a child again in spite of the sorrow sewn into her childhood like a hidden pocket.

  Steven brings a tray of biscuits into the dining room and Sam sniffs the air. The biscuits have a peppery smell she can’t place. She asks, “What are they made of?”

  “Cheddar and caraway.” Steven peers at her over the square frames of the microsized glasses he has begun wearing instead of contact lenses due to a small cataract in his left eye. “Be careful. They’re hot.” He lifts the biscuits onto a plate with a spatula.

  Sam says, “Did I tell you guys I’m thinking of becoming a chef?”

  Her father glances up from the paper. “You are? Really?”

  “Really.”

  “If you learn French working in Montreal, you could go to France. The best culinary schools are in Paris,” Steven says.

  Sam grabs a biscuit, scalding her fingers. Ignoring the disapproving jiggle of Steven’s head, Sam drops the biscuit back onto the plate. If Sam studies cooking at a community college, Steven and her father will make her feel fourth-rate. Her interest in a career, her excitement about food, is irrelevant if she isn’t willing to strive to be at the top of her field.

  Sam wants to stomp out of the room as if she were a kid, which is how Steven treats her. Their roles are mechanical, a key fitting into a lock. When Chloe died, Sam stopped trying to be friends with Steven. She emerged from the theatre wings, an understudy who took up her sister’s role of punishing him, but Sam no longer knows why she bothers. She doesn’t need his or her father’s approval to do what she wants with her life. While she isn’t sure about Steven, Sam knows her father loves her.

  The next day Sam goes to see Tory’s mother who still lives around the corner. Sam wants to get Tory’s phone number. Scrambling for insights, Sam has decided to call her sister’s one-time best friend and ask her for her opinion as to whether Chloe’s death could have been murder or suicide.

  Walking across Mrs. Sharp’s lawn, Sam’s feet are suddenly wet. She didn’t notice the sprinklers, which she guesses go on automatically. While Mrs. Sharp’s neighbours have adopted an eco-friendly ethos and are allowing their lawns to brown, Tory’s mom keeps hers the colour of fresh limes.

  Mrs. Sharp is a tiny woman in her late fifties with a face like a wrinkled apple—a granny doll in the making. She was always rather proper, but when she opens her front door she is wearing a lavender jogging suit with Top-Siders. She must be retired, Sam thinks. Like Sam’s father and Steven, she taught for a living. Working in the public school system, she made her way up to the position of high-school principal. She married and divorced twice. Tory is one of several siblings, the product of a “blended” family that Sam and Chloe once envied. Television shows about big families such as the Brady Bunch and Eight Is Enough, which glossed over the economic realities of hand-me-down clothing and after-school jobs, convinced Sam and Chloe they were missing out by just having each other.

  Leading Sam to the den, Mrs. Sharp says, “I’ll just go get us some snacks.” Sam sits down on a plush, pink loveseat, which faces a widescreen television. Mrs. Sharp is watching the show where friends and neighbours take turns redecorating each other’s spare rooms. What is it called? Invading Spaces? As far as Sam can tell, the show isn’t about picking up interior decorating tips; it is about the voyeuristic schadenfreude of watching someone try not to freak out after they have been publicly humiliated.

  Mrs. Sharp reappears carrying a platter, which she sets on the large glass coffee table that is crammed between the loveseat and the television. The platter holds chips, blocks of cheese, carrot sticks, and dip. Mrs. Sharp sits down beside Sam, who moves the food so it is positioned between them.

  “Oh no, hon, I’m on a diet,” Mrs. Sharp says with a delicate shudder. Clicking the television off with a remote, she asks Sam what she is doing with herself these days.

  “Living in Montreal.”

  There is a pause as Mrs. Sharp waits, face quivering expectantly, for Sam to add details about a great job or internship or graduate school. Sam can hardly say she just quit a minimum-wage job as a dishwasher to pursue an ongoing obsession with her sister’s death, so she blurts out the purpose of her visit. “I want to get in touch with Tory.”

  Mrs. Sharp squints as if the sun is in her eyes, but all light has been banished from the room by drawn beige drapes stretching from ceiling to floor. “Tory’s married now, although she’s kept her own name. She has a daughter. She lives on a farm about an hour and a half outside of the city. She and her husband aren’t Amish, but they live like it. They don’t use pesticides.”

  “You mean they’re organic farmers?”

  Mrs. Sharp grips the television remote, her eyes spraying disapproval like a shower of metal sparks. “They use horses to plough the fields and even travel sometimes by horse and buggy. They plan to home-school their daughter. But can you guess what the great irony of their lives is?”

  Like the teacher she was, Mrs. Sharp awaits Sam’s response.

  “No, Mrs. Sharp, I can’t.”

  “They’re economically dependant on the world of technology they oppose. Tory went to school to study dance but wound up taking computer courses. Now she works as a freelance web designer. She does her grocery shopping by horse and carriage, but she has all the latest, fancy-dancy computer equipment. Can you imagine that?” Mrs. Sharp rises from the loveseat, leaving the room in a quick tempo of steps. She soon returns with a pink piece of floral-scented paper, which has Tory’s name, address, and phone number scribbled on it. Sam thanks her, then sticks around to eat some of the snack food. The tension produced by bringing up Tory gradually lessens, and Sam leaves with chips and cookies wrapped in tinfoil. She always gets along with people’s mothers, makes an extra effort in the hope they might be a mother to her, rub maternal care onto her like moisturizer on dry skin.

  On Friday morning Sam drives to the country, exiting off the highway onto a back road where a row of townhouses have sprung up in a field. Last night she called Tory and told her she wanted to talk about Chloe. Tory insisted they meet in person the next day. As if a visit was Sam’s idea, Tory added, “Your timing’s good. My husband’s buying some equipment tomorrow.” When Sam was younger, she was bossed around by Tory, who acts as if their relationship is the same. Driving to the farm, Sam wonders why Tory refused to talk about Chloe over the phone. When Sam told her father where she was going, he forgot she had a rental car and offered to let her borrow his and Steven’s car, a red Neon with a sunroof and all the right accessories—air conditioning and a compact disc player with more bass than they will ever use. The two of them can afford a larger vehicle, but Sam’s father likes to buy new cars. If there is a mechanical failure, he wants the problem to be covered by a warranty. Her father is a control freak. The only reason he lets Sam use his car is because he taught her how to drive. He tried to teach Chloe to drive, but the lessons were so fraught she paid for a driving course. D
ad wouldn’t let Chloe do more than put her feet on the pedals while he steered and operated the gearshift. Was there any activity Dad and Chloe enjoyed doing together? Ah, yes. The two of them liked buying antiques. On Sunday afternoons, they went to garage sales and flea markets to paw through old furniture. He coached her on periods and styles, taught her how to recognize different types of wood and assess the value of a piece. Sam thinks of the antique furniture she inherited from Chloe, her expensive taste. Romey and Omar both thought Chloe would have clawed her way back to the middle class, and they may be right. Does Romey have these concerns about Sam? She has no idea because Romey never shares her insecurities. Their relationship is passion squared while knowledge and understanding of each other are a smaller quantity, a square root.

  Sam checks her directions—she’s almost at the farm. An old tobacco-curing shed with worn and broken boards stands in the middle of a field. This was once tobacco country, but most of the current crops are soybeans. Farming is so anachronistic, yet the business is rife with change. Finding the correct address, Sam steers the car up a long and bumpy driveway. A flock of giant birds with cable-thin legs and stomachs the size of bowling balls run alongside her car. Sam wonders what they are until she notices a handmade wooden sign nailed to a tree advertising “Emus for Sale.” A field on the other side of the road is filled with tiny spruce and pine trees being grown for the Christmas season. Tory and her husband run a rather eclectic agricultural enterprise—an impression exacerbated when Sam gets out of the car, and Tory hands her a bucket.

  “You’re late,” she says. “You can pick blueberries with us.” Tory shared with Chloe a brusqueness, which is unvarnished by time. Tory’s goth style, however, has mutated to hippy: her frizzy hair is no longer a testing ground for Manic Panic hair dye but is back to her original shade of well-brewed tea. Her scarves have been discarded, and her droopy, black clothing has been exchanged for a droopy, red skirt and a white T-shirt with the logo “No Logo” printed on the front. She is still thin but two vertical lines indent her forehead, just above each of her eyebrows. A slender girl of about three or four stands at her side. Tory attempts to flatten a stray curl of hair springing from the girl’s head. “This is my daughter, Pagan.”