Y: A Novel

by Marjorie Celona

  Moira is not home. Between the bars of my little bed, I watch him. I am three years old, my hair a big puff of white cotton, my eyes big and cloudy blue. He strips off his jacket and slowly peels off his shirt, which is caked with deep red blood. He drops it onto the carpet and walks toward me, lifts me into his arms, and sets me on his and Moira’s bed. He goes into the bathroom and returns with a wet towel and a tub of Vaseline, lies on his stomach, and tells me to rub the towel over his back as gently as I can. He finds the remote controls tangled in the sheets and turns on the television, presses Play on the VCR. I play with the blood on his back, running my little fingers down the sides of his spine. He puts a gob of Vaseline in my hands, and I smear it over the blood. I am bored and fidgety and so he makes a game out of it, asks me to draw circles and squares and letters and numbers in the pink gunk. Cat People is on the television. We watch it together while I rub his back, and when I wake up it is already morning.

  Not long after, Moira finds a deep blue bruise on my thigh. Julian confesses that he has trouble holding me. He says I wiggle out of his arms and drop like a stone. He says he prays for me to be still. At night, he tries to shake off the memory of his father beating his legs with a belt until they buckled and bled. He is a haunted man. He shudders every time I cry.

  “Will she ever stop?” he pleads. Moira sits at the edge of their big bed, her head in her hands. The guilt of her affair hangs between them. She will make it up to him, she says. She will make everything okay. What choice does she have? Despite the darkness she sees in him, she cannot imagine her life without him in it, without this solid, beautiful home.

  We begin playing a game she calls the Stillness. For every minute I sit still, I am rewarded with a cube of marble cheese. If I sit still for five minutes, I get a square of raspberry-flavored dark chocolate.

  “Concentrate, Shannon,” she says to me, tapping my knuckles with a wooden spoon when I break out of the Stillness and begin to move around. “Concentrate and I won’t have to hurt your little hand. I don’t want to hurt your little hand.”

  I want to tell her that Julian holds me so tightly that he hurts me, and that is the reason I move around, but I am afraid to say the words. I am not bad, I want to tell her, I am in pain.

  “I want you to practice the Stillness for seven minutes now. We’re going to work our way up to ten, okay?” She waves her spoon in the air like a magic wand.

  At a routine checkup, the family doctor finds purple thumbprints on my limbs. He takes Moira into his office and tells her to make sure she and Julian are gentle with me.

  “She’s a bit of a Jell-O jiggler,” Moira laughs, and the doctor does, too. Moira tells him it’s the staircase and my wobbly legs, the way I wrench myself out of Julian’s arms.

  “She’s a very special girl,” the doctor says to her. “Take best care of her.” He gives me a lion sticker on our way out, and when Moira and I get back in the car she turns to me and says if I can’t be still I’ll have to go and live with another family.

  The longest word in the Oxford English dictionary is floccinaucinihilipilification. It means “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.” This is the last thing Julian teaches me before I’m rushed out the door in the arms of a social worker, my little arm in the bright blue cast. One of my fingernails catches on the zipper of the lady’s coat, tears, and leaves a bloody trail. Moira stands in the doorway, her face pale. There is nothing in her eyes.

  In the backseat of the lady’s car is an old video game: Pac-Man. I play it, one-handed, with a boy who is older than me, and he says if I get the keys sticky he’ll sock me in the gut. The lady straps me so tightly into the car seat that I can barely breathe. She drives a wood-paneled station wagon and the beige seats are coated in plastic. It smells so strongly of vinyl that I throw up and the boy hits me when he sees what I have done.

  I am afraid of the dark. We are led by the hand down a carpeted staircase, and I can’t tell whether we’re in a church or somebody’s basement. Little wooden crosses dot the walls and everywhere I look there’s a Styrofoam cup with a lipstick smear. The room smells like Hamburger Helper. The man who’s holding my hand looks like Raffi, but he speaks in a gruff voice and there’s dirt under his nails. There are fifteen cots in rows of five and we each get a blanket and a small pillow. When he lets go of my hand, I ask him to stay, but my voice is too quiet and the room sucks the sound. Lights out, someone says and someone else says, I don’t want to be next to this stinky fucker, and someone else says, Shut it, and that’s that. The boy is in the cot next to mine. When my eyes adjust, I can see the whites of his. We watch each other, and when I reach out my hand he whispers, Baby, but takes it nonetheless. We fall asleep this way, and all night people come and go.

  I am placed in a home the next day, the sixth child in a four-bed home. I share the bottom bunk with a smelly girl who wets the bed. None of us belongs to anyone. The woman who runs the house calls me Samantha, and for a while I think that’s my name. I teach the smelly girl to pee in the tub with me before bed, and from then on we are friends. Her mother died while giving birth. The girl plays with my hair at night, and this is what I remember most of all, the feel of her soft nails on my scalp while the other children cry in the bunk above us.

  II.

  the man in the back of the car is my father. His brother is at the wheel and my mother is in the passenger seat, her hand on her belly. Her water has broken and seeps into the seat, moving in ribbons down her thighs and through the thick, rough cotton of her oil-stained coveralls. My father’s brother is driving a rusty red ’63 Mercury Meteor, white hardtop, with red leather bench seats. The body is so dented it looks like someone beat it with a bat. The heater doesn’t work, and my father grabs the Mexican blanket that covers the ripped-up backseat and tucks it around my mother’s shaking shoulders. The odometer doesn’t work either, and my father’s brother judges his speed by feel. He likes to drive fast. He once took a corner so quickly that the passenger door sprung open, loosened from its hinges.

  Here they are, in this rattletrap classic car on the night I am born: my father, Harrison; his brother, Dominic; and my mother, Yula. The sun has gone down, and the leather seats are damp and slick from the cold. Yula’s belly is so big that for the past month she has been wearing a pair of my father’s grimy coveralls. The material is rough on her skin. Her teeth chatter, and she shrieks when Dominic hits a pothole. The car lurches and shakes as they make their way down Mount Finlayson. Yula presses her feet into the floor to keep from falling forward; the road is steep and the car has no seat belts. She feels warm tears forming in her eyes and fights to stop them. She has to stay focused. There is no time for emotion. Dominic presses the accelerator as far as it will go and the car hiccups into gear, then shoots forward. Yula watches him out of the corner of her eye. The car is dark; the electrical system doesn’t illuminate the dash and on this part of the road there are no streetlights. But she can see the outline of his face. Dominic is a hideous man with a shaved head—in all ways larger and uglier than Harrison. He has tried to sleep with her twice. He feels her eyes on his face and turns his head toward her, parts his mouth, and she sees the thick pink of his tongue rolling over his teeth. His breath is as strong and sweet as bourbon.

  There is another passenger in this car: my half brother, Eugene. Swaddled out of sight in the trunk. My mother prays for the car to go faster. She has been able to manage her contractions up until this point but feels a sudden deep pain radiate from within her abdomen and swarm into her belly and around to her back. Her underpants are soaked and she squirms in the seat to get away from the awful cold wetness. My father puts his hands on her shoulders and holds her gently. Her body shakes and she vomits down the front of her coveralls and Dominic, disgusted, floors the accelerator. The wind rushes past them and my mother slams into the passenger door as the car speeds down the treacherous road that runs like a serpent through this cold dark night.

  Five days before she give
s birth to me, my mother kneels at the edge of a flower bed, pulling weeds. It is late summer and she is eighteen, seven and a half months pregnant. Her father, Quinn, sits in a deck chair, wearing mirrored sunglasses and smoking a pipe. He has a round, chubby face, a white beard that hugs the lower part of his chin like a stirrup, and a nose that hooks downward. He shouts at Yula’s son, Eugene, as the little boy runs back and forth, in and around the flower beds. Eugene loves to chase the neighbor’s wayward chickens or follow the lawn mower when Harrison snakes and edges it over the grass.

  My parents, Yula and Harrison, live together, with my half brother, Eugene, in a pine cabin on a property adjacent to Goldstream Provincial Park, about twenty minutes up the Malahat, off Finlayson Arm Road. Two homes face each other on the property, Mount Finlayson looming behind them: a flat-roofed, cedar-sided structure with floor-to-ceiling windows, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and the hard lines and glass of modernism, the interior walls lined with timber beams to remind them that they were in the woods, of the woods—this is the home of my grandfather Quinn, a retired fisherman and amateur cartoonist, his left arm useless and disfigured from a horrific motorcycle crash; and Harrison and Yula’s home, about fifty feet toward the stream, a small cabin made of lodgepole pine, the roof covered on the north side with thick green moss.

  Quinn built the cabin for Yula when Eugene was born—she was only sixteen years old—laid sod and a gravel path to connect the two homes, and planted rosebushes and rhododendrons. But everything else that surrounds them is wild: giant black cottonwoods and red alder; the stream rank with dead chum or shimmering with their silver bodies rushing to spawn; six-hundred-year-old Douglas fir. Tourists poke their heads onto the property if they get lost or take a wrong turn on a trail, and the neighbor’s dog, Beater, scares the shit out of them with his low growl. Beater’s owner runs a grow-op. Their other neighbors, Joel and Edwin, have a scrap yard, and their eleven-acre property is covered with rusted-out tractors and cars. But who can see it. Out here, who can even see the sky.

  “Yula.” Quinn coughs and shakes his one good arm at my half brother. “Get the kid out of my roses.”

  On good days, Quinn and Eugene regard each other as pieces of strange furniture brought in by Yula to add further clutter to the house. Eugene likens his grandfather to a bookshelf put in front of a window, blocking all light, and Quinn thinks the boy is like a footstool pushed carelessly to the center of the room, a booby trap, something to trip over and skin one’s knee. Whirling around them like a dishcloth after dust is Yula, who serves them soup and wonders why her father and son can’t see each other as she sees them.

  Today, Eugene is collecting sow bugs. He scoops four, five, six of them into a mason jar with his little hands and shakes them softly. He wears overalls and red gum boots and no shirt. His black hair is slicked behind his ears. While Yula pulls up weeds and throws them into a pile behind her, Eugene runs to the edge of the property, ducks underneath one of the rhododendron bushes, and smears the messy dead flowers into the ground with his feet.

  Quinn fiddles with his pipe and looks at the sky. The Snowbirds fly over the two houses, headed toward Dallas Road for some civic celebration. The jets are so loud that he covers his ears. He taps his foot against the metal rail of the chair, raises his good hand, and traces one of the contrails with his finger. A bottle of sleeping pills rests in his pocket, a suicide letter addressed to Yula waiting in an envelope on his desk.

  My grandfather Quinn. How did he get here? In the early sixties, he hopped a freight train west in search of romance and adventure and ended up on a fishing boat, catching shellfish, salmon, and halibut off the coast of Vancouver Island. He lived at the YMCA in Victoria for a few months and then met my grandmother, a woman named Jo, who let him live in an Airstream trailer at the edge of her property, not far from where my parents’ pine cabin stands now. Jo and Quinn liked to talk about writing; they both liked James Thurber. Quinn’s dream was to publish cartoons in The New Yorker one day. They read to each other in the evenings on the porch. They went for long hikes through the forest, and when the trail was wide enough they held hands. Sometimes the view of Mount Finlayson was so stunning that it was impossible to have a proper conversation. One or both of them would become mesmerized by the landscape and whatever point being made was lost. Eventually, Jo sold the Airstream trailer and Quinn moved into the house.

  My grandmother Jo was a small woman—barely five feet tall—bone thin with a long, elegant neck, her head held slightly forward. She wore her coffee-brown hair cut bluntly at the chin, and her heavy-lidded eyes burned with intelligence. She had inherited the property years ago and lived on it, alone, until Quinn came along. She was a peculiar woman, difficult to classify—Egyptian, people thought, upon first seeing her. In the mornings, she ran a comb through her hair brusquely and walked through the forest in a man’s flannel work shirt and corduroy pants, rolled to just above her hiking boots, a travel mug of coffee steaming in her hand. She had one close friend, Luella, but aside from her and Quinn, she seemed to want nothing much to do with the world or its people. “I don’t fit in,” she said, “except out here.”

  She was fierce, quick to anger, her temper terrifying and unpredictable, her words deeply damaging when she wanted them to be. Because she had almost no need for people, she had no trouble hurting them. It seemed to enlarge her, to give her strength. Quinn told her she had “poison blood.” Sometimes she got so angry she frothed at the mouth.

  When Yula was born, Quinn gave up fishing. Every time a fish looked at him with its silver eyes, he thought of his new beautiful baby. He’d throw the fish back in the ocean and sometimes, he said, they’d lie there, floating like buoys. Too dumb to swim away. When he told this story to Yula, he would get on the floor, roll on his back, and stare at the ceiling like a corpse. “I’m a fish, I’m a fish,” he’d say.

  Jo hated it when he told the fish story, especially when he pretended to be one.

  “Your father is a buffoon,” she told her daughter, loud enough for Quinn to hear. “Don’t marry someone you love. Love makes you stupid, like his stupid fish.”

  At night Yula’s ears burned with insults and her mother’s shrill voice banged around in her head, so loud that she often sat up in bed, expecting Jo to be in the doorway, ready for another one-sided battle. When she saw that her mother wasn’t there, that no one was there, she rehearsed all the horrible things she could say back. But what could she ever say to hurt this woman as much as this woman hurt her? She did not want to hurt anyone in this awful way.

  Her mother wasn’t always cruel. After a fight, she showered Yula with gifts, stuffed animals and expensive clothing, and sometimes, when she was feeling lonely or Quinn was angry with her, she’d climb into bed with Yula, stroke the insides of her ears, tell her she loved her more than anything else in the world. It was these moments that Yula lived for.

  When the fights between her parents got violent or threatened to, Yula stood between them, arms outstretched. She pried Quinn off her mother. She jumped on his back and knocked him to the ground. She ran out of the house and into the woods, and neither Quinn nor Jo noticed until she returned hours later, knees scraped and shivering. She memorized every creak in the stairway, every squeak of the floorboards, until she could float through the house as undetected as a ghost.

  One night, when she was fifteen, she snuck out of the house and met a group of her friends down the road; together they drove to a warehouse in the industrial part of town. She wore a pink-and-white mini dress that she’d stolen from Value Village and knee-high lace-up Doc Marten boots. The main room of the warehouse was lit by strobe lights, and a couple of DJs blasted techno on turntables at the back. It was so loud that the bass shook the floor. Behind the bathrooms was a room lit by a single red lightbulb. Yula wandered into the room and let herself be kissed by two tall boys, beautiful to her dilated eyes. They ran their hands over her body and she kissed them back, massaged their shoulders, let them put their
fingers in her mouth. One stood in front of her and the other behind; she spun between them, let them lick the sweat from her neck. In the morning, when the party was over, she sat in the back of an old Toyota Celica and kissed one of the boys while the other drove them into Chinatown, where he lived above a record store in Fan Tan Alley. She lost her virginity to both of them that morning, and it was a perfect and beautiful act, she remembered thinking at the time, these two young boys adoring her body, taking breaks to pass a joint between them, sips of whisky, long drags off cigarettes, until the late afternoon. Later, they sat in a café and ate wonton soup, egg foo yong, chow mein, and lemon chicken. One of them drove her home. She hid in her bed for the rest of the day, waiting for the drugs to wear off so she could sleep. Her mother came in during the afternoon and brought her a cup of tea. She nibbled at a cookie. Her stomach was as tight as a fist.

  The next day, she couldn’t remember either of the boys’ names. It hurt to pee. She crouched over the toilet and looked at the bruises on her thighs. Her vagina was swollen to almost twice its size. She bit her lip while she peed, grasped the edge of the counter for support and clenched her pelvic muscles to stop the urine because it burned. She let it trickle out of her for what felt like an hour. She dabbed at her labia and the toilet paper came back dotted with bright flecks of blood. Her ribs ached and it hurt to breathe; her buttocks were red from being slapped. She stared at her naked body in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Was this what men did to women? Her breasts were covered in blue bruises where the men had bit her. Her mouth was as dry as ash. She found herself sobbing and hated herself for doing so. No one had forced her to do this, and yet here she was, with a dark and ugly secret to carry around. She shut her eyes and tried to erase the evening from her mind. She wrapped a towel around her body and stuffed her underwear and the pink-and-white dress into the washing machine, everything reeking of sex and cigarette smoke.