“When can I see you again?” she asked.
“Soon. Pretty soon.”
“I got the cast off last week.”
“Good. Don’t forget to take the arnica I gave you. It’ll help speed healing.”
“I will.”
“Hey,” he said, and his voice went lower, like he was telling her a secret. “I can’t wait to lick your pussy again.”
I almost dropped the phone. I knew exactly what he meant, because Mom’s boyfriends did that to her, sometimes right in the bed beside me. She had told me that’s what you do when you and a guy like each other. But I was pretty sure Papa Dick was only supposed to lick Grandma Jeanne’s pussy, not some other lady’s. I wondered if I should tell her—
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I spun around. Papa Dick was standing in the doorway, and his face looked madder than I’d ever seen it before. I dropped the phone onto the table with a clatter. He pointed at it.
“That is not a toy, young lady. How long have you been listening?”
“I—I just picked it up. I’m sorry . . .” I started to cry.
After a moment, Papa Dick walked over and put his arm around me. “It’s okay, Peanut. But don’t ever do that again, all right? Sometimes grown-ups have private things they need to talk about.”
I hugged him back, even though I didn’t really feel like it. I was confused. Papa Dick had always told me that private things weren’t allowed in our family and that trying to hide stuff was a sign of fear. I pulled away and looked at him. “Papa Dick. Won’t Grandma Jeanne be mad if you lick that lady’s pussy?”
He was silent for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he finally said, and then he gave me a little smile. “Your grandmother and I, we don’t have those kinds of expectations in our relationship.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means . . . that we’re not bound by society’s definition of marriage.”
I stared at him blankly.
“I have sex with other people if I want to,” he finally said.
“Oh. Grandma Jeanne too?”
He glanced away. “You’d have to ask her that.”
Grown-ups were sure weird, I thought. I’d never have sex with anyone when I grew up, because everyone knew that sex was the reason people got all screwed up. Maybe, I thought, that was why they called it screwing.
Chapter 4
2006
Halifax
If impatience was my weakness, resilience was my strength. Though Halifax may not have been my first choice of cities to call home, I began our life there with a fierce determination to make it work. Our new house, filled with character and bought ridiculously cheaply compared to anything in Vancouver’s overpriced market, made me feel both displaced and hopeful. In a burst of optimistic energy, I painted all the rooms in my favourite colours and watched them come to life as I placed my collected objects throughout the house. Wineglasses from Germany, serving dishes from Spain, tea towels from France. These items had survived countless moves, and I would too.
When I could no longer put it off, I got back to business. James and I shared a small office at the back of the house, where I sat on the floor printing shipping labels and laying out orders. I kept my eyes and my mind focused on my work rather than on my husband, knowing he resented the financial hole CeaSwim had sunk us into. When I finally decided to move my work into the living room, both of us seemed relieved.
And then there was Avery. All the time there was Avery, my beautiful, cherubic child with his pale ringlets, endlessly needing me. The pendulum of my day swung between caring for him and trying to work. Give him breakfast, pack some orders. Read him a few books, bill some clients. Get him interested in a toy, sew a sample. Take him to the playground, hit the post office on the way home to ship orders. Asking for help was almost more trouble than doing without, but sometimes I’d break down and do it anyway. “James,” I would call, my arms filled with orders while my phone rang and Avery cried. “Could you please take Avery?”
He would, and afterward, when I watched him return to his office and close the door between us, I wouldn’t scream. Instead I’d remind myself of what I had—Avery. The baby I’d so desperately wanted was mine, and that simply had to be enough.
I glanced at my watch as I typed, knowing my time to work was coming to an end. The text for my new brochure was due at the printers’ in a few days, but I’d find a way to finish it—just as I always did.
I heard Avery’s plastic bowl hit the kitchen floor with a clatter. I sighed, rose from my armchair in the living room and found him in his high chair with an oatmeal-smeared face.
“Ah? Ah?” he said, thrusting his sippy-cup at me.
“Hi, angel. Do you need a drink?”
“Ah!” He nodded, his blond curls bouncing. I lifted him from his seat, and he followed me as I headed for the fridge. Half water, half apple juice. I handed the cup back to him, and he crumpled onto the floor in a heap of tears.
“What is it, honey?” I asked, though I already knew. He hurled the cup across the room and thrashed his feet on the floor. “You wanted to help pour the juice. Mommy’s sorry. Here, can we do it again?” I retrieved the cup, unscrewed the lid and dumped the contents back into the juice bottle.
“No!” he screamed, flailing his arms and legs. “No no no!”
My cell phone was ringing. I grabbed it off the counter and glanced down at the number. A 416 area code—one of the stores that carried my swimwear line in Ontario. Shit. We had arranged this phone call yesterday. I thought of trying to stick Avery on my boob, which usually worked to calm him down, but one look at his furious face told me all bets were off. I ducked into the bathroom and closed the door, knowing he would be on me in seconds.
“Cea speaking,” I said quickly.
“Cea? It’s Jennifer at Oasis Swimwear.”
“Hi, Jennifer. Like I said in my email yesterday, I’m so sorry your shipment hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve had a few challenges with my factory—” Avery was pounding on the door now, screaming at the top of his lungs. I raised my voice. “Sorry about the noise, I’m just—anyway, I can promise your shipment will be at your store within two weeks. Will that suffice?” There was a beat of silence, quickly filled in by a loud wail from Avery. “I’ll give you a ten-percent discount,” I added hastily.
“All right,” I thought she said, though I could barely hear her over the noise. “. . . tell you the truth . . . only because your line sold so well last season . . . cancelling the order . . . over a month late now.”
“Yes, and again, I truly appreciate your understanding. I’ll send you an email the minute your order leaves my supply warehouse.” I hung up quickly, took a deep breath and opened the door to tend to my son. His red face was streaked with snot and tears, and his matted hair stood out from his head. I picked up his sobbing body and wrapped my arms around him, then looked down at my watch and sighed: ten fifteen. I had a whole day of this ahead of me.
Though it was painful to admit, CeaSwim had become a monster I could barely manage. I’d made the mistake of thinking I could start small and grow slowly, but after a year of receiving poor quality samples from Canadian factories, I realized I was in the wrong country for manufacturing swimwear. James and I decided to buy the equipment, at a much bigger investment than we had anticipated, so that I could sew the samples myself. My first collection had received a boost when I was offered a spot at a Golden Globes swag party. At this celebrity goody-grab, emerging companies were invited to give their products away at their own expense in the hopes that celebrities would wear and get photographed in them. After two stars were snapped in my suits, I hired an L.A. publicist to keep up the momentum. She indeed had, landing my bikinis in every magazine from In Touch to InStyle and on nearly every starlet’s body in Hollywood, but at a great price. Though orders were being placed and customers were happy, the amount of money coming in wasn’t nearly a match for the amount going out. Trying
to run a business together while keeping our marriage healthy had proven an impossibility, and though I was willing to take the blame for it, doing so did nothing to mend the current situation. I felt like a lone person at the bottom of a deep well with no ladder, no tools and a time bomb ticking away on the ground beside me.
And all the time, there was Avery. “Shh,” I said to him as his small, heaving back began to settle. “Shh, my sweetheart. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
My eyes filled with tears. More than anything in the world, I wished someone would say those same words to me.
On Avery’s first night home from the hospital after he was born, he’d screamed his lungs out for seven hours straight. I spent the night pacing, rocking, patting and trying to feed him, interspersed with trying to sit down with him in my arms so I could rest for a few minutes. Everything I’d read about newborns told me they slept for a huge portion of each day, so I kept looking down at him and thinking that this couldn’t be happening, that a newborn couldn’t possibly stay awake this long, but stay awake he did.
Miraculously James slept through the whole episode. When he popped his head into the nursery the next morning to check on us, a feeling of panic like none I’d ever experienced welled up inside my chest. What had I done? How could I possibly have thought this was going to be easy? And if this was to be my son’s temperament—much like mine had been as a baby—how would I ever survive? I thought about a story my mother had once told me. By the time I was about six months old, she’d figured out that she could manage my constant crying by smoking copious amounts of pot, but on one occasion even that hadn’t helped. While I was screaming and writhing on the floor, she happened to look in the mirror. A green serpent emerged from the top of her head, looked her in the eye and invited her to lose her mind. Thankfully she’d declined, but after my first night as a mother, I could well understand what had driven her to such a vision.
After I told James about my night, he’d smiled at me. “See? You’re a great mother already,” he said, and that was it. Though I hadn’t addressed it consciously, I realized that I’d been harbouring doubts about my ability to parent because of my mother’s failings, and that my husband’s validation was exactly what I’d been looking for. He thought I was a good mother, and now I would work even harder and sacrifice whatever was necessary to make sure he maintained that opinion.
As it turned out, Avery wasn’t as difficult as I’d been—if the legend was to be believed—but he was nowhere near easy. My son’s constant want and need of me filled me with new emotions—overflowing joy, resentful exhaustion, and guilt that I couldn’t devote my every moment to his well-being. Running a business with a toddler in my lap was close to impossible, but, as so many times before in my life, my missing gauge for what constituted acceptable and manageable levels of stress caused me to question my own judgment. At least you have a mother who loves you. So many people have it worse than you, Mom used to say to me when I was little. This statement had done more to form my opinion about my rights to my own feelings than anything else from my childhood. As long as I had love, I shouldn’t expect anything more. And James loved me, right? He told me he did, and I knew he loved his son.
But my ability to cope was slipping. I’d actually gotten so desperate that I’d hired an assistant to come in a couple of times a week, but as wonderful as she was, her help just scratched the surface of the many tasks that needed to be done. I still ended my days feeling overwhelmed and dreading whatever the next morning held for me. I’d once convinced myself that I could be everything—full-time mother, dynamic career woman, efficient housewife who brought home the groceries and cooked the meals and kept the house clean—and now I was paying the price for it. I thought about my revelation from years before—that the only way I could be with a man was to create and embody the person that both of us needed me to be—and I realized that once more I had painted myself into a corner.
One evening at dinner, I opened my mouth to begin our usual careful exchange of pleasantries—how was your day, did I tell you about the cute thing Avery did—and found I simply couldn’t do it. I closed my mouth again and returned to my lasagna. I’d ended the afternoon in tears with a sea of unfilled orders and unpaid bills scattered around me, watching as the clock ticked my deadlines down while Avery screamed to be picked up. As always I’d managed to pull myself together, get Avery calmed down and dinner on the table by the time my husband got home, because he never seemed to be around for the moments that truly tested my sanity. I knew I couldn’t continue like this, but the words I needed to say stuck in my throat. And when I noticed the sun streaming through the dining room’s stained glass window, filling the room with beautifully coloured light, I almost swallowed them completely. I had a pretty house to live in, food on the table and a husband who hadn’t abandoned me. What right did I have to anything more? I cleared my throat.
“James, listen. I know you’ve been helping with the photography for the new brochure, and that’s been so great. And Lisa taking care of the billing and sales calls is giving me more time to focus on the new collection. But . . . I think I need more help. With Avery, I mean, or with CeaSwim. I just don’t think I can do both anymore.”
“Really?” He looked genuinely surprised. Maybe he was, I thought. Maybe I’d become so adept at concealing my overwhelmed state that even my own husband was unaware of it. “But you’re doing such a great job!”
I shook my head. “No, I’m not. Not at all, actually. I’ve got so much work to do, and Avery . . .”
James set his glass on the table. “Avery . . . yes. Well, I guess we can see about getting someone in. We could probably manage once or twice a week.”
I nodded. This was the best I could have hoped for. “Thank you,” I said, and immediately regretted it, because this was another thing. It seemed that throughout my life, I was always the one saying thank you or I’m sorry, which further enforced that I was the one failing.
Doris, my son’s new caregiver, was an angel with a face like the Wicked Witch of the West. The few teeth she had left were sharp and pointy, her hair was patchy and thin and Avery immediately adored her. While the two of them hit the playground or read stories, I’d set Lisa up with a few tasks and then spend the day putting out fires. Supply warehouse? Ha! If only Jennifer at Oasis Swimwear knew the truth. My supply warehouse was my basement floor, strewn with boxes of product labelled by number. My order centre was my laptop and printer. My packing company was my own two hands, stuffing suits into boxes stuck with ink-jet labels. My shipper was my local post office or UPS store. My pattern maker, fabric and trim sourcer, sample sewer, label creator, bookkeeper, graphic designer, catalogue and website copywriter, market researcher, trade show organizer and set decorator, sales rep, even model—yep, all me. And very occasionally, I got to do the actual thing that had attracted me to the whole idea of starting a swimwear line in the first place: design swimsuits.
One day I was sorting through a pile of suits when I had an epiphany. I started a swimwear company because I wasn’t allowed to wear a swimsuit as a child. Of course—it made so much sense. The life I’d chosen was as polarized from my family’s as could be, and I’d always considered that to be one of my greatest successes. So what else was I subconsciously doing to sabotage myself in the name of proving something to my family?
I flipped over an order form and started writing. I was taught that city life is evil / I’ve lived in Paris, New York, L.A., etc. The Persons hated consumerism / I’ve got credit card debt from too much stuff. Papa Dick believed that houses own people / I have a mortgage. My grandparents rejected relationship expectations / I’m basically staying married for my son. My family hid nothing from each other or me / I haven’t told a single person the truth about my past.
I sat back on my heels and stared at the list. The facts were right there: the one thing I had in common with my family was that we had all tried to escape what we felt trapped us—for them, society’s value
s, and for me, their values. But what had started out as a positive, ambitious drive to break away from their ways had turned into a settled life of mediocrity. All I’d wanted to do after modelling was write my memoir, and I’d been too afraid—of people’s reactions, of my shame, of my rusty writing skills. And now I was going through life without knowing what drove me, where I’d gone wrong, or how my family had influenced me. But it occurred to me now that maybe, by honouring my long-held dream, I could finally figure out what I was all about.
A few days before my thirty-seventh birthday, I got a call from Mom. Papa Dick was gone, she told me tearfully, dead one year after his cancer diagnosis. Since childhood my perception of my grandfather had changed—he’d gone from hero to opinionated narcissist—but that didn’t mean I’d stopped loving him in my own distant way. As I gripped the phone, I reflected on how wrong his death was on so many levels. With his daily practice of yoga and absolute avoidance of pollutants, preservatives and sugar, his cancer diagnosis seemed like the ultimate injustice. At age seventy-eight, he hadn’t even made it to the national average male life expectancy. But considering he’d chosen to fight his disease with herbs and hope—the same method my mother was currently using—it probably wasn’t surprising.
“He was so wonderful,” Mom kept saying to me. “The most wonderful man I’ve ever met.”
I sat in an uncomfortable silence, fighting my usual involuntary urge to fill it with words of agreement. I wouldn’t give my mother the peace of thinking that the man who had practically washed his hands of me after I left his wilderness utopia had bewitched me into holding a high opinion of him. After I put the phone down, I willed myself to feel something other than the numbness that had overcome me. I thought about the last time I’d talked to him, about a month ago. In his final years, he’d moved out of the tipis into a remote cabin and had even allowed his partner to put in a telephone line. When I called him that day, I knew it was probably the last time we’d talk. I wanted it to be a memorable exchange, but we didn’t really have much to say to each other. He talked about the view from his window, and I told him about our move to Halifax and Avery’s new words. Nothing very interesting or revealing was exchanged, yet it occurred to me that I’d probably remember this conversation for much longer than some of importance.
Nearly Normal Page 6
