Y: A Novel

by Marjorie Celona

  She spent so long in the shower that the hot water ran out and she was left standing in the cold. Was she now a whore? It seemed so easy to slip into this new role, this new life. Had one careless act determined her future? Her skin was clean but her mouth tasted like metal and her eyes were heavy in their sockets. She kept pressing between her legs, surprised at how swollen and sore she was. She twisted a towel around her wet hair and rooted in her dresser for the flannel pajamas her mother had bought her for Valentine’s Day. She found them wadded in the back of a drawer and pressed them flat with her hands. They were pale pink with an alternating pattern of red hearts and little white dogs. She put them on, grabbed all her stuffed animals off the floor, and climbed into bed, the creatures surrounding her. This new whore of a woman was not her. She let herself cry then, horribly and hideously. This other woman was not her. Here she was, safe in her bed.

  She told her mother about the boys when she couldn’t deny anymore that she was pregnant. She winced and waited for her mother’s sharp words, but Jo took her hand instead. She rubbed the space where her daughter’s pinky finger should have been; it was a birth defect, something that Jo often apologized for, blaming it on the antinausea drugs she had taken.

  “This is my fault,” her mother said when Yula told her she was pregnant. “I haven’t looked after you.”

  She asked her mother about having an abortion, but Jo told her that her pregnancy was a sign—she believed in signs. Yula was bringing a new life into the house, and this would solve things, her mother said, this would make everything okay. They would raise the child together. “Let me be a mother to you both,” she said.

  Yula felt so damaged inside that she etched her mother’s words deep into her mind, where she would never forget them.

  The two held each other, and Jo sobbed in Yula’s arms and apologized for what a shitty mother she’d been.

  “You haven’t—Mom, please.” Yula held her mother and stroked the back of her head.

  “In my dreams I am a good mother.” Jo stood, wiped her eyes, and dried her hands on her jeans. “Your father and I. We have a toxic relationship. I know this. You know this. He knows it, too.”

  Yula knew that her parents had once loved each other deeply. But now they fought over everything. They fought so hard they forgot they had a daughter. They fought so hard that a month after Yula’s son, Eugene, was born, Quinn veered his motorcycle into an oncoming semi truck, just to scare Jo, just to shut her up—and when he pulled back into his lane, the tires slid out on the rain-soaked road and they swerved onto the shoulder of the highway, the motorcycle on its side. Both of them were dragged through the gravel for more than a hundred feet. After three days in the hospital, Jo was dead.

  At first, Quinn’s grief was visible only in small gestures: a sudden clumsiness, a dropped fork, the way he tripped on the top step as he walked to the front door. He lost thirty pounds in the weeks that followed. The blob of his belly no longer jutted over his pants; his shirts, suddenly, were all too big.

  The day they buried her mother, Yula found a suicide note on Quinn’s desk. It was just a few paragraphs written in pencil; it wasn’t finished. But there it was on his desk—there was the note. To Yula, it began. She shoved it into one of the desk drawers; she never read the whole thing. But there it was, always, somewhere, in her mind.

  At first, she hated her father. Hated him with a ferocity she had never before felt. She dreamed of killing him, of walking into the house with a shotgun and shooting a hole in his heart. She thought of feeding him rat poison. She thought one day she might walk up behind him with a belt and pull it around his neck. I’ll break every bone in your face, she said aloud as she did the dishes, and then pictured doing it—crushing his cheekbones with a cold sharp rock.

  And yet she found herself looking over at his house multiple times a day, stopping by to give him his mail, ask him if he needed anything, borrow a couple of eggs. Since Jo’s death, he’d let the house go, and more and more Yula’s anger turned to sadness. She couldn’t stand the thought of finding her father dead one day, surrounded by dirty dishes, unopened mail, stinking cartons of milk left on the counter, muddy footprints in and out of every room, the television left on and never turned off—blaring music videos while her father lay openmouthed and cold to the touch, face up on his bed. No, she wouldn’t let this happen. She would take care of her father.

  On Sundays, Yula took Eugene to Sooke on one of Quinn’s old dirt bikes and they had dipped cones from Dairy Queen or waffles at Mom’s Café, a little diner across from the community center. They waited in line for an hour sometimes, but it never mattered; it was part of the routine. Yula held Eugene on her hip until he got too big and then she fastened him to her overalls with a dog leash. Sometimes she gave him a bag of marshmallows to keep him occupied while they waited. He loved the big white gummy cubes. They were his favorite thing in the world. And then one day, while she and Eugene stood patiently in line, she saw Harrison, the man who would become my father. He was six feet tall, with deeply tanned skin and long hair a mixture of blond and white, like butterscotch ripple ice cream. He was large and strong looking, but there was a softness—a boyishness—to his face that made him look both naive and kind. He wore a muscle shirt and steel-toed boots into which he had stuffed his mud-caked jeans. His black eyes were shaped like almond slivers, his nose crooked from two ugly bar fights. The hair on his forearms glistened like white silk. My mother could not stop staring. He walked toward her with his eyes on Eugene.

  “You’ve got big bright eyes like your mother, don’t you,” Harrison said. He crouched and asked the boy if he could join them for breakfast. He was twenty-five; my mother, seventeen. He smelled like horses, like cheap cologne, like mint. He had a raspy voice and some kind of shiny gel in his hair. His arms shone like they’d been oiled.

  Over breakfast, Harrison told my mother that he’d moved to town to be closer to his brother, Dominic. Before that, he’d been living in a boarding house in Abbotsford. He didn’t need to tell her that he’d been in jail for most of his teens and early twenties; he had a look about him that Yula knew well. She knew the overly muscled forearms. She knew the poorly done tattoos. The way he looked around, guiltily, every time they ran out of things to say.

  “I’ve always been a castaway,” Harrison said to her. “Don’t know what to do with myself in the world.”

  Mom’s Café was crowded and they had to share their table with two construction workers, who eyed Harrison when they sat down. Yula held Eugene on her lap and fed him bits of waffles with her fingers. The construction workers leered at her breasts when she leaned over to grab the syrup, and when Harrison saw this he pounded his fist on the table, sent the cutlery to the floor. Eugene wailed, but Yula found herself oddly sexually aroused. The men left the café and Harrison followed them outside, told Yula he’d be back in a minute. When he returned, his knuckles were bleeding. He wiped the blood on his napkin and looked at her with sweet eyes.

  “You know them?” he said. His face hardened.

  “No—never—I don’t.” She saw it then for the first time: his paranoia, his violence, his possessiveness. She saw other things, too: his sudden loyalty, his need to be loved. She reached for his hand.

  Harrison never asked about Eugene’s real father, not even when he moved into the cabin with Yula. Somehow Yula knew that whatever Harrison and his brother did for a living wasn’t legal, but she knew it was better not to care. He was good to her son. One night she heard him telling Eugene that if they spent enough time together, they’d develop a likeness. He put his face next to Eugene’s in the mirror and widened his lips, and Eugene pursed his. Yula took a Polaroid of them this way, and it stayed on their fridge forever.

  III.

  on my fifth birthday, I am adopted by a woman with a daughter of her own. We live on a one-way street in a beige town house in Fernwood, within walking distance of downtown and a block from the big stone high school. Hand-painted “Slow Down!
” signs are stapled to the telephone poles, and a fat woman in a wheelchair sits outside her house all day shrieking at us. The fat woman is called a Block Parent, and we are supposed to run to her if we are ever in danger, but she is terrifying. Our town house is mashed together with six other town houses, all in a row, with a small parking lot in the back. There are no front or backyards here, no sidewalks even. Each floor of the town house is small. The rooms are tiny, with low ceilings, and warm. Every room smells like mushroom soup, except for the bathroom, which smells like Ivory soap.

  I have arrived with the following possessions: a backpack stuffed with two pairs of pants, two shirts, pajamas, a toothbrush, and seven pairs of underwear, one for each day of the week. I also have a big shoe box with me, which the social workers call my “treasure chest.” Inside, I keep the things I was found with: a Swiss Army Knife and a gray sweatshirt with thumbholes. I also have some photographs, taken in my various foster homes. I hide the treasure chest under the bed; I keep my clothes in the backpack, in case I have to leave again.

  Miranda, my new mom, is a cinnamon-colored woman who works as a Molly Maid and was once married to a man named Dell. Her bedroom is on the top floor of the town house, and I am prohibited from going up there, as is her daughter, Lydia-Rose. It is “off-limits,” she says. She “needs her space.” Lydia-Rose and I share a bedroom on the second floor, across from the living room, bathroom, and tiny kitchen, a beaded curtain hung in the doorway. A short flight of carpeted stairs leads down to the first-floor laundry room and front door.

  There are rules here: no staring, no chewing with my mouth open, no sugar before bed, no wasting food, no talking back. I can handle most of it, but I can’t stop staring. I want to stare at Miranda forever. I am fascinated with her. She wears her hair in a tight bun at the top of her head and has a big bright face, as if the moon itself had walked into the room. After work, she pads around the town house in Chinese slippers and a plaid housecoat. She makes us lentil soup, then slides an ice cube into each of our bowls until it cools.

  Each morning she wakes at five, showers, puts on her Molly Maid outfit (a pale-pink polo shirt with Molly Maid stitched over the left breast pocket, khaki pedal pushers, white tennis shoes), fusses with her impossible hair, and then makes breakfast. There is always something different: creamed honey on toast, boiled eggs, Cheerios, jam on toast; on Saturdays, dollar cakes with fake maple syrup. She teaches me her trick: she fills a saucepan with one or two inches of water, brings it to a boil, then adds spoonfuls of brown sugar until it is thick and golden. If we’re lucky, she stirs in a little butter at the end. This is something I will grow to despise—this cheapness—but for now I find it ingenious.

  Miranda’s real daughter, Lydia-Rose, looks just like her, with her big face and honey-brown skin. I’m told that she looks like her father, too: she is a tall, intimidating girl who wears his thin smile, and her lips curl up with every laugh. Her hair, thick and copper-colored, rests in a messy clump at the nape of her neck, a yellow crayon in the fold of her ear. She is six months older than I. She has long skinny legs and runs as though she were flying. Her face is fierce and determined; her eyes, impatient and keen.

  Miranda loves to play dress-up with us, give back-scratches and spend hours French-braiding our hair. She dresses us in shades of pink and purple, always matching, always bright. Although we never go to church, she tries to get me to believe in God. She says I only need to have faith the size of a mustard seed. This seems reasonable, doable, and so, for about an hour, I am a Christian.

  But the most exciting thing about this place is that Miranda has three cats and a rangy-looking dog. The cats’ names are Scratchie, Midnight, and Flipper. Scratchie and Flipper are from the same litter; Midnight is a stray. Flipper is a longhaired Siamese. He has ten toes on each paw, which is why he is named Flipper. Scratchie is tortoiseshell-colored and a fighter. He and Flipper are best friends. Midnight, the stray, is black with a white blaze. She is the only shorthaired cat among the herd.

  The dog’s name is Winkie and she is part fox terrier and part something else that has given her long, gangly legs that don’t work very well. We don’t know why. Miranda found her one day, soaking wet and whining, by the side of the road. She is mostly white, with a black saddle and a little brown head. She has big goofy eyes and the longest tongue in the history of tongues. She only harasses the cats if her legs are hurting her, and, for the most part, it’s a peaceable kingdom.

  Lydia-Rose and I aren’t so lucky. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to call Miranda, and so I start calling her Mom. Lydia-Rose drags me around the bedroom by my hair until I promise never to say it again, then she cries so hard that Miranda takes her to the forbidden upstairs bedroom and they don’t come down for hours.

  Once a month, a social worker comes by for a home visit to make sure I’m okay. Her name is Bobbie, and she’s a great big woman who wears long gypsy skirts and has leathery red skin from fake tanning. She and Miranda drink coffee in the kitchen and talk about me while I pretend not to listen. Am I adjusting? Am I sleeping? Am I still crying out in the night? Bobbie talks about the difficulties of raising a child with a “history,” one who might be “special needs.” She puts her hand on Miranda’s shoulder sometimes, as though she needs to be comforted. Later, she pads through the house, checking the smoke alarms and making sure there’s nothing poisonous lying around. She asks Miranda to put the Lysol on a higher shelf, “just in case.” Lastly, she comes into the living room and eases herself onto the floor, where she stares at me intensely and asks me questions about myself, about Lydia-Rose, about living with Miranda. I whisper that I am fine. I want to tell her that I think I really love Miranda, but I can’t yet find the courage.

  When Bobbie leaves, Miranda holds my hand and asks if there’s anything she can do to make me feel happy. She agrees to paint the bedroom pink when she next gets paid, and when I ask for a neon-pink bedspread, she buys dye and throws an old white one in the washing machine. When Lydia-Rose protests and accuses me of getting special treatment, I hear Miranda whisper to her that “at least she wasn’t rattled by such a stark beginning.” She expects her daughter to be fair, to be kind, to be nice to me.

  “Bleeder!” Lydia-Rose shrieks. It is six in the morning, a few weeks after I arrived, and she is in the twin bed across from me. She clutches her bloody nose and falls out of bed onto the floor, hitting her head on the edge of the bed frame. The cats stampede out of the room, outraged. I clutch my new pink bedspread and wait for further violence. But this is just the way Lydia-Rose is: everything with her is physical. When she’s angry or sad, she pushes or punches me and then her nose bleeds—huge rushes of blood that last an hour. She holds her head back while Miranda wads the Kleenex and presses it hard against her nose. Miranda tells me that Lydia-Rose has bled everywhere: the mall, the church, the grocery store. Concrete, tile bathrooms, hardwood floor—each surface absorbing the blood in a different way, the carpet in our bedroom forever stained.

  Once it stops, Miranda tames her daughter’s hair with a bristle brush and forces it into two long braids, the elastics ready to burst. Flipper and Scratchie groom each other on the floor, and Winkie is asleep on my bed, on top of my feet.

  At breakfast, Miranda talks and we fidget. The phone is busted and two guys from the phone company are busy ripping up the walls, drilling, pulling phone lines out of little cardboard boxes and then slinging them all over the house, creating a kind of spiderweb of white wires that beep and fizzle and spurt when they walk by. The men have some kind of thing attached to their pants that makes these little lines crazy.

  “When we lived on Saltspring,” Miranda begins over the noise of staple guns and all the beeping, “we were chased by a white bull. Lydia-Rose’s father and I were in our old minivan. We were going to visit friends and the drive was very long.”

  “What was I doing?” asks Lydia-Rose. Her voice is impatient, a whinny. I push my Froot Loops around, roll the soggy ones into balls with my f
ingers, and stack them like snowmen. Occasionally I reach down and put one into Winkie’s mouth.

  Miranda folds her hands in her lap. “You were napping in the backseat, sweetie.” She tries to salt her eggs but the salt is clumpy from moisture and won’t come out. She tries to work the pepper mill but it’s stuck, too. “Your father spotted the bull first, coming from the middle of a field—who knows what the bull was thinking, maybe that our white van was a little girl bull, I don’t know! His head was the width of this table, Lydia-Rose. No lie.”

  “There are no ‘little girl bulls,’ Mom,” Lydia-Rose says. “You mean a cow.”

  Miranda’s face reddens. Lydia-Rose kicks me in the shin and I kick back. The table rocks. It’s painted orange and flimsy, something found at a garage sale. I put a spoonful of Froot Loops in my mouth and let them sit there. Midnight jumps on the breakfast table and Miranda swoops her off.

  “Did Daddy gun it?” Lydia-Rose grins.

  “We left the bull in a dust cloud,” Miranda replies.

  After we’ve cleared the dishes and the men have fixed our telephone, we spend the morning sorting through bags of clothes. Miranda has a consignment business on the side. Women come around on weekends and look through the dresses, the freshly pressed shirts, the old shoes. Miranda kneels in front of one of the bags and tosses shoes over her shoulder. Lydia-Rose finds a black beret and sets it at a jaunty angle on my head. Then she pinches my earlobe until I wince, but I know by now not to complain to Miranda—if I tell on her, the next time she’ll pinch harder. Instead, earlobes hot and ringing, I paw through a pile of clothing as though I were digging a hole. I hold up a leather miniskirt and smirk.