Projection

by Priscila Uppal

  As my mother falls asleep, instantly, as soon as her head hits the couch pillow (and the snoring ensues), I recite possibly mistranslated poetry: Ask whichever star/who watches over the deserted hours/why she is so distant/why my voice never succeeds to reach her there. Who am I to this woman? Who is she is to me? Does she recognize our similarities? Our differing points of view and experiences? Am I her observer? Her audience? A figment of her imagination? While she sinks into her blue, a dimension which does her no further harm, I am like the lover Johana at the edge of the ocean dock, hoping Jacques will avert his gaze from the imaginary mermaids long enough to recognize her as the treasure she is, shouting: I’m here! I’m real! I exist!

  My Mother and Me at the Italian Restaurant

  3

  mommie dearest

  Greg Savitt: If you’re acting, you’re wasting your time. If you’re not, you’re wasting mine.

  *

  Christina Crawford: If she doesn’t like you, she can make you disappear.

  Today things take an inevitable bad turn.

  After breakfast at the hotel, my mother phones Soares to take us to the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, or the Bank of Brazil Cultural Center, for an art show I marked in one of the tourist catalogues I found at the airport.

  The building is stately and elegant, a bank established in 1901 that now houses exhibitions, and the friendly staff are all dressed like airline attendants in matching navy blue blazers and slacks and yellow scarves. Lights and shadows float across the entire architecture: the stairways, the towering green elevator doors (previously the safe doors with steel and brass handles and locks), the white walls and marble floors. The artist’s work, Claraluz by Regina Silveira, a well-known female Brazilian artist, a series of moving lights, is projected like a white silhouette cut-out cubist collage from the ground floor up. Her other work, Luna, comprises two airy white balls that resemble planets, roll very, very slowly toward and away from each other as minimalist trance electronic music plays in the background. I can’t help but feel sympathy with these two bodies as I observe the spheres approach and then repel each other. Contact is elusive and difficult and ambiguous and random.

  After exploring the show and the historic architecture, my mother and I settle into the institute’s gourmet restaurant, our chairs overlooking the section of light collage projected onto the stairwell. I was expecting a significant confrontation between us at some point, but I didn’t expect it to unfold quite this way.

  Like the actress Joan Crawford, the subject of the shocking tell-all accusatory memoir by her adopted daughter, Christine, that was turned into the infamous film Mommie Dearest (which single-handedly derailed Faye Dunaway’s acting career), my mother suffered a series of miscarriages. Five to Joan Crawford’s seven, I believe—my mother wanted a brood of children—nevertheless, she was successful at bringing two full pregnancies to term, whereas Joan resorted to adoption to fulfill her dreams of motherhood. I know my mother was proud of those pregnancies, and I have a vague memory of her telling me once that she wanted a daughter so badly, if she didn’t have one, she’d have to make one up.

  Did she do this after running away? I have an inkling that it is this imaginary daughter she has been escorting to the theatre, buying dresses for at the mall, reading placards to in art galleries, and sharing a tub of popcorn with at the movies. In only three short days, the intonations of her disappointment in the actual me are palpable. I don’t dress the way she’d hoped (too much black, too modern). I don’t speak the way she’d hoped (too analytical, too North American). I don’t approve of her the way she’d hoped (too reserved, too skeptical). If she returned to the airport and waved her hands at another twenty-eight-year-old woman with dark hair curled into a bun, would she be just as happy or happier hailing her a cab and driving about São Paulo together?

  As my mother clears her throat, I can tell she has prepared some lines for me today, a rehearsed speech. I wonder who wrote these words, and when.

  I have not left Brazil for twenty years. I did not leave the city of Brasilia for seventeen years because I was so traumatized.

  I do not expect this. I’m discovering I’m a terrible predictor of human behaviour when it comes to my mother. And that I could never write her dialogue. In that respect, she is an original. Her logic is utterly her own, and I have yet to figure out its fundamental principles. She abandoned us, forsaking a quadriplegic man to raise two kids on a flimsy pension and disability benefits, but she’s traumatized?

  What do you mean traumatized? Were you hospitalized?

  I ask this because before I arrived in Brazil my mother sent some baffling legal documents from the Republica Federativa do Brasil and the Supreme Court of Ontario by mail to Toronto, what she called in her emails “a gift of truth.” I could not make heads or tails of them. The ones from Brazil claimed my mother was placed “under serious specialized medical treatment” and then went on to state that she was awarded Brazilian custody of my brother and me. Some of the cultural implications in the document are also quite distressing: “It is clear from the proceedings that Petitioner [my mother], a person of high cultural level and fine sensibility was married to Defendant, a man of different origin and costumes [sic].” The documents she sent from the Supreme Court of Ontario clearly outline that my father obtained sole custody of his children “pursuant to an order of the Honourable Judge Doyle December 12, 1984.” My mother accuses my father and “some Canadian authorities” of “a silent conspiracy . . . to keep my children away from any contact with me!” She concludes: “Both Amerjit and Priscila are both slaves in a so-called ‘free’ country. . . . God will certainly do Justice one day to my defenseless, poor children!”

  In Canada, for the custody case, Jit and I were evaluated by psychiatrists and other doctors in the legal proceedings that ended with my father winning—seemingly by default, as my mother had “disappeared”—custody. I don’t remember much about that time, only cold wooden benches and rides with my father strapped into the OC Transpo disability van. It’s perhaps strange to be proud of a psychiatric report, but I must admit I am. The doctor writes of me: “Child exhibits extensive trauma. Child exhibits excellent coping mechanisms.” I’ve taken this as a mantra of my entire life. Traumatized, sure, whatever, no argument there. But I can cope on my own. No need for doctors or counsellors or meds. Except wine.

  We order lunch. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. A brush-off. But you started this, I think, and keep pushing. Day three: I want something more than discotheque shopping malls and Brazilian fruit and art exhibitions.

  You just said you were traumatized when you arrived here. Did you seek help?

  As if we are playing a game of chess, my mother pushes the salt and pepper shakers over to my side of the table. There were bites on my hands and I underwent many body examinations to show the beatings.

  The implication shocks me. Utterly shocks me. But I contain myself, sitting perfectly still, waiting. Her monologue is just getting started. Her bright lips twitch. Is it my imagination or does she seem to be seeking out her light?

  Social workers used to come to the house, don’t you remember? Because your father made you tell the schoolteachers that I chased you with knives. In the end, the social workers knew it was your father who was the violent one, not me. But what humiliation. Don’t you remember?

  Now it’s my turn. I lean back into my chair like a defence lawyer. I don’t remember. I don’t remember much about you.

  I know this will hurt her. And I want to hurt her for what she’s saying about my father—I want to defend him, a man who was also blessed with excellent coping mechanisms, I think, just not perfect ones. Unfortunately, regardless of his heroism, he wasn’t a superhero, he was a man. The statement is both true and false. I don’t remember much about my mother—my childhood memories of her are like damaged videotapes, lots of squiggly silver static over somewhat familiar images, inaudible speech, piercing noises, and stretches of blackness—but I
do remember some things, and I remember some very specific things that are extremely pertinent to this discussion.

  Childhood Montage

  I remember I was often afraid of her. That I was never able to predict her violent rages against me, my brother, and, most alarmingly, my sick father. I remember she once pinned my skinny brother on his back and proceeded to shove a dirty sock into his mouth and down his throat until he choked because he had forgotten to place the socks in his hamper. (Why are crazy mothers such sticklers for cleanliness—is it the lack of order in their own minds they are bemoaning? My favourite line in Mommie Dearest is, without a doubt, one uttered when Joan rages over a perceived blemish on her immaculate house: I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at the dirt.) She once held him underneath a burning shower because he complained the bath she had drawn was too cold. My own Mommie Dearest wire-hanger moment—the most famous scene in the movie, when drunk and manic Joan terrorizes the young Christine in the middle of the night, vandalizing her room as punishment for hanging her clothes on wire rather than wooden hangers (how a child would have the wherewithal to choose perplexes me), cited by critics as Faye Dunaway’s over-the-top acting Waterloo—was when my mother threw me down the stairs along with her Remington typewriter because I hadn’t asked permission to touch it. (Obviously, this did nothing to dissuade me from becoming a writer. In fact, I sometimes like to think that typewriter, tumbling down the stairs after me, imprinted itself on my bones.) Personally, I would like to defend Faye Dunaway for portraying Crawford in what was likely her actual narcissistic psychotic personality, something kept from the public and revealed only fully to her terrified children.

  But my worst memory, which repeats on a quick loop in my mind’s eye as my mother speaks to me over lunch, is my brother and I crouching in the thin doorway of the upper hallway, my father’s bed just in sight through the slit, as my mother screams at him and keeps slapping his face, then horrifically, incomprehensibly, grabs his urine bag from the side of the bed and shoves the tubing down his throat. I burst in and launch myself like a crazed monkey onto her back while my brother kicks her repeatedly in the shins. I yank at her pearl necklace and it comes apart in my hands, the beads scurrying across my father’s torso and adjustable bed, all over the brown carpet bedroom floor. See what you make the children do to me? I remember her shouting. They hate me! They hate me!

  She was right. By then, we hated her. Her mood swings. Her rages. The unhappiness she sprayed on every morning like a nauseating perfume. I spent many years hating her, even as I ransacked her abandoned wardrobes of clothes (which were so flashy and out of date I would turn them into Halloween costumes and, once, an outfit for a disco-themed gymnastics performance in phys. ed.), her makeup bags of Avon products (including two tubes of half-used red lipstick—I have always associated Avon with her), her papers (rejection slips, an odd collection of romantic cartoons featuring a naked couple with oversized heads acting out moments of domestic bliss under captions of “Love is . . . picking up his laundry when he’s too busy” and “Love is . . . telling her she’s as lovely as the day you were married,” and a personalized pad of paper “From the desk of Theresa Uppal” I’ve tucked away in my office but have never had the heart or the guts to use), and the photo albums. Even then my hatred outweighed curiosity. In fact, I think rummaging through her things was a coping mechanism (an excellent coping mechanism?), a concrete physical and mental outlet for the hatred. When the hatred was overtaken by ambivalence, I’m not sure. Perhaps I contented myself that it was an indication my own trauma was over? That I had reached stubborn if difficult adulthood?

  Those pearls, like shiny white bullets, fly through my mind. And I feel the hot pangs of loss and grief and anger, and yes, hatred, once again, on behalf of my father, who had suffered so much already in his treacherous body, and whose humiliation at being forced by his wife to drink his own piss should trump any humiliation at being questioned by well-meaning public social workers.

  I remember the social workers too. Either skinny young people with buggy eyes and bursting energy, clipboards in hand and the newest child welfare criteria on their lips, or overweight older women with receding hairlines and hoarse voices, who frequently forgot the times of appointments or our names. But I don’t remember telling any of them my mother chased us with knives. I do remember unwrapping my lunch—a crumpled bag of Oreo cookies—and the astonished expression on the social worker’s face when I calmly explained that no, there was nothing else besides the cookies because my mother said she was tired of us coming home with only half our lunch finished and so we could pack our own. I have zero memories of my mother cooking—I can’t name a signature dish or family recipe she might have lovingly prepared for us after school or on special occasions, though I’m sure she must have cooked on a daily basis. When she left, I remember cooking for my brother and me from a “Junior Cookbook” I was quite fond of, and heating up frozen dishes for my father, but I’ve never had a talent for cooking, and I avoid it now as much as possible. I resent all those chicken dinners and pastas and pork chops I laboured over in our kitchen, which were greeted with little enthusiasm or gratitude. My mother hasn’t made a motion toward the kitchen cupboards of our flat. Perhaps cooking, like sleeping, is also a waste of time.

  When I came to Detroit or Chicago, I can’t remember. . . . You wouldn’t even speak to me.

  The more baffling enigma: my mother’s memory. She can remember the colour of every purse she’s owned for the last decade, but she can’t remember the city where she attempted a kidnapping.

  I was a child. We were scared.

  I had many lawyers—very expensive—working on bringing you both here. The case was in all the newspapers and television. Brazilians signed petitions. So you could join your mother and leave that house. (I’ve since tried to verify these phantom petitions and media clippings, but my research has not turned up any evidence for her claims.)

  My father raised me, I remind her. I don’t want her comparing herself favourably to the man who actually devoted all his scant resources to our survival. My father and I have our problems—my father is one of the strongest and therefore one of the most difficult men I’ve ever met—but they are ours and I’m offended by her insinuations and her assumptions about his facility as a parent, especially when she wasn’t there as a witness. Many people, including me, believe if you can’t have two loving parents, you can succeed with one good one, and although my father was not properly equipped to provide a stable environment for his children, he did instill in us valuable work habits, fundamental charitable values, the ability to cope with crisis, and an unquenchable desire to live and succeed. I do not wish to hear anything bad about him.

  He knows what he did and one day he will answer for it.

  She is pointing and waving her index finger at me, laying down the law. Things are getting out of control. While I don’t believe my father was physically violent toward her—I have no memory of this, only of defending my father against my mother, and if he did lash out, she would have had the ability to overpower him—I don’t need to convince her of this. Is she mentally ill? Delusional? Enraged she couldn’t extradite us to Brazil? I sense my mother, patiently waiting for so long for her opportunity to speak, her time in the spotlight with her daughter as her active audience, has been stewing in the past, gradually cracking under the pressure. The storms in her brain are seeking a place to land. I must now be on tornado watch.

  I need to calm her. Other customers overhearing bits and pieces of our conversation are now openly gawking at us arguing in a foreign language. If you do not want me to judge you, you cannot judge him either. I will not judge either of you.

  This, of course, is a lie. I do judge them. No one with an analytical mind can help it, even if I’m coming to realize that my mother’s life may be as sad and tragic as my father’s. High hopes, sickness, debility, arrested time. Their life trajectories are, in fact, parallel. Like lit fuses of dynamite.

  All I
can tell you is my own experience, I continue. And my experience is that after Detroit—it was Detroit, not Chicago—you never contacted us again.

  Right at the table my mother starts crying, wiping her eyes by pinching her napkin between her fingers and pressing it against her lids. Is she trying to protect her makeup? I think so. Her loud voice cracks with the tears.

  I did not mean to upset you, I whisper, embarrassed I’m part of a scene, in English no less, unfolding in a public place. This, too, is probably a lie. Not that I enjoy watching her cry. I don’t like watching anyone cry. Period. I’m not embarrassed by it, it’s that tears are usually an indication of a loss of control, and loss of control, for me, is always unnerving, even if I’m able to comfort the sufferer. And for some reason it’s even more upsetting when a fat woman cries—as if no bulk is enough to counter the pain. But I’m also irritated at her refusal to face the truth of the past or the present. Why has she still not asked me anything about my own life? Where I’ve travelled. What my PhD is about. If I’ve been diagnosed with an illness. If I’ve ever been in love.