Projection

by Priscila Uppal

  After Michigan, we ended up in the countryside with the French-Canadian foster family, who were also well-meaning but baffled as to what to do, a grey-haired couple who baked us cakes and biscuits and taught us how to care for the rabbits and chickens in the barn and then how to deliver them to slaughter. After several months, my father joined us there, the town allowing us all to live together in the abandoned community centre—essentially a gymnasium, its colourful circles and court lines intact—a makeshift home with Styrofoam frames separating one room from another.

  Later that year we returned to our home in Ottawa and my father was able to sponsor two relatives to Canada: a young half-brother by a different mother who was more interested in driving a cab and marrying as quickly as possible and moving out to the west coast with barely a look back, and an older sister we all just called Auntie (I’ve never known her actual name), a tiny frail woman, the spinster of the family because of facial deformities incurred by smallpox, who learned basic English by watching soap operas like Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless, and Hockey Night in Canada (she developed a strange obsession with Zdeno Chára), and who fled back to India at any meagre invitation for months and months at a time. Not that I blame these relatives for seeking escape from us—they were out of their element, drowning in medical procedures and the odd behaviours of precocious but weird children old before their time. Our family was a curiosity to social workers, teachers, nurses, homecare workers, neighbours; like the Crazy Kitchen at the Science and Technology Museum, the furniture adjusted in size to appear as normal as possible but the floor slanted so that it was a struggle to get from one end to the other without succumbing to dizziness. Our family would never “belong.”

  Because you said I don’t ask you any questions, I have come up with a list of six essential questions for me to know. I would not have done this otherwise, but since you said it was okay for me to ask questions about you, I have made this list.

  Close-up

  A postcard: a blurred view of an amusement park swing ride across a purple background, a black silhouette of a girl on one of the chain swings in the foreground. On the reverse:

  Six basic questions for me

  (I have always loved you and Amerjit very much. I love you both!!)

  Did you ever love me? (when I was with you at home)

  How about Amerjit?

  Do you love me presently?

  Does Amerjit love me presently?

  Is this trip helping you to love me?

  Is this trip better or worse (ref: feelings) than you expected?

  For only the second time on this trip, tears gather at the corners of my eyes. The illusion that we were making any progress completely shatters. I am shocked. Speechless. The childish pleading reminds me of the photocopies of homemade holiday cards my mother sent me along with her “gift of truth” legal documents, cards I might have made with her hovering over me as in my memories: one of a pink flower and a heart speared with an arrow where I’ve written “I love you! Very much!” and another with the most rudimentary rabbit for Easter that says “I like you! also I love you! AND the bunny likes you too. And she is calling you to say ‘Hello I hope it’ll be a good day.’” My mother even wrote the dates on them: October 24, 1982, and April 4, 1982, the year she abandoned us. I never thought the cards were sent as a “gift of truth,” but, like the other documents, the mounting of a defence. The postcard questions assault me with their inappropriateness, the unleashing of an offensive.

  How can this woman demand declarations of love from the past and from the present? What kind of monster child would deny loving their parents when they were defenceless children? What kind of question is it whether Jit would love this woman “presently” when he doesn’t know her from a hole in the wall, when he wouldn’t even be able to recognize her voice?

  Phase two: a second postcard, the exact same image on the front, dated SP 17/4/03: Dear daughter Priscila: I travelled to Detroit and I came back to Brazil . . . without even a smile at me . . . to keep as a good memory!! And for 9 months you were inside my body! Your mother Theresa Catharina.

  Phase three, Phase four, Phase five: the remaining postcards attack, attack, attack, accusatory statements about how badly she has been treated and how her children ought to feel sorry for her and love her.

  I am reeling from the shock-and-awe onslaught, the blows hitting all kinds of sensory targets in my brain and body, but am determined to remain outwardly calm and collected. One of my excellent coping mechanisms revs into high gear. I learned long ago that breaking down, folding into a mess of tears and dysfunction, only gives the cause of your hurt more power. I recognize the benefits of releasing some of the pain in private, but I refuse to allow pain to overwhelm me. I always tell myself I have better things to do. Even if it’s meant that at various times in my life people have found my ability to control my emotions and function at a high level, regardless of pain, offensive. When your friends and colleagues are spending thousands of dollars on therapies and medications to help them work through their feelings about their relatively kind and supportive but imperfect parents, when you’re able to keep a woman like my mother at a relatively safe emotional distance so as to minimize damage, you come off as arrogant or smug at best, at worst a cold monster. On a basic level, people don’t want you to be able to cope. They want to pity you, feel sorry for you, have you turn your skin inside out for their view. I remember one of our friends, a psychiatrist in training, asking me once: Do you feel things like other people? I thought he was crazy. Do you read my work? I replied. I feel things just like other people (sometimes I think I feel them more authentically than other people), but I try to use those feelings to become a stronger person, to gain understanding of the world I live in. I love the Buddhist proverb Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. I wish I could show my mother how art exists, at its best, to help us heal our lives, not to mask them.

  For now, I hide my disappointment and soften my anger by concentrating on the exhibit. When I decided to make this trip I told myself I would go to discover as much as I can about who my mother is, whether I like her or not, so that I am not left wondering for another twenty years. In this respect, the trip is fulfilling my goals. I am seeing who she is. Whether I like her or not. And it’s true, I don’t like her, I can’t force myself to like her, but I must find a way to appreciate this “gift of truth” and plod on. Even if she’s incapable of knowing me.

  I turn away, silencing the postcards by shoving them into my purse.

  So . . . ?

  These women with their long, sour faces, mounting animals and wearing studded dog collars, seem a hundred times more tasteful than my mother. I imagine myself melting into the photographs, perhaps the one of a topless woman in a chain thong posing on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Or maybe I should attack one of Aleijadinho’s treasured sculptures? I want the security guards to handcuff me and send me back to Canada. But I can’t quit, because I want to meet the other members of the family. If I don’t do it now, I know I never will. It would not be fair of me to judge them in relation to her.

  Instead, I collect my voice: These questions are all about you.

  Yes, my mother nods enthusiastically, as if, like an improving student, I’ve finally come around to her way of thinking. That is what is important to me. Do you love me? This is an essential question. You told me I could ask anything I wanted about your life.

  My mother is shaking, I notice, but I don’t care. I don’t exist. To her my emotional life is only significant as it relates to her own feelings. If I were to bleed, I’d be bleeding for her. If I were to cry, I’d be crying about her. I repeat to myself the truth of my situation: I have no need for a mother. I have no need for a mother. I grew up just fine without one. I wouldn’t know what to do with one. I am not her daughter in any real sense. What can I say? I won’t be forced to admit love when I don’t feel love. That would be the worst sort of emotional blackmail. Treason.

  I d
on’t remember doing anything bad to you or Amerjit.

  Jit. His name is Jit, I sigh, a gut reaction—I’ve given up on altering her vocabulary, just as I’ve given up on altering her personality. I wish she would give up on altering mine. It doesn’t matter. You don’t remember. To know would only upset you.

  Do you . . . do you love me?

  In the Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis update of Freaky Friday, in one of the most touching scenes of the film, the daughter trapped in her mother’s body the day before her mother is set to remarry delivers a toast to welcome her new stepfather, something she has been loath to do since she is still grieving the death of her biological father three years earlier. She announces the family unit is now ready to make a little room. It’s a beautiful phrase, as if all love required of us was a slight crowding of chairs, a transfer of a bookshelf or bulky lamp to the basement, a holding of breath to endure a tight elevator squeeze. I wish. I wish it were so easy.

  My instinct is to burn the postcards, but I know I will take them back to the room and place them carefully inside an envelope stashed in my carry-on luggage. The postcards are evidence. Evidence my mother is a maniac. That I’ve been justified in not seeking her out all these years. That some mothers really need to be kept away from their children. Storytelling is by nature hyperbolic. Plus, for some stupid reason, people want to believe we should have good relationships with our family members, that a mother is a mother and a father is a father and you’re stuck with them, no matter what. I can already hear it: She didn’t really do that, did she? She wasn’t really so bad? But look, look here, I will reply. Look at these postcards. Who would hand this to one’s child?

  I don’t know you.

  Rage in my mother’s eyes. Pure, unadulterated rage.

  I can’t love someone I don’t know.

  Isn’t that the lesson of the body-switching genre: that true love and understanding can only come with empathy?

  She tries to snatch the postcards. I zip my purse, shelter it against my hip. My mother always has something between her teeth or on her lips—a speck of pepper, a flicker of mint, a lint fluff—she doesn’t register it until she checks in her lipstick mirror. I keep silent, as usual, as she walks briskly out the door, cookie crumbs on her chin, and wonder how can she walk through life so obliviously.

  I consider putting stamps on the cards and sending them home. But I already know the Brazilian postal service is seriously unreliable. The prettiest postcards are frequently confiscated by clerks and pinned up in the post offices. Those aware of the situation hide postcards in envelopes so the postal workers cannot see them. And I don’t want these cards stolen, or misplaced, or forgotten. They are my fortune cookie, my earthquake. They are the first real letters I’ve ever received from my mother. Therefore, for some stupid reason, I treasure them.

  Postcard of Essential Questions

  Postcard of Guilt

  8

  throw momma from the train

  Larry: A guy kills my wife, but he can’t even kill his own mother.

  Two men sweating in the middle of the blistering desert are informed by a third that someone is planning to build a city right where they’re standing. They both start laughing and can’t stop. They die laughing.

  I have been warned that Brasilia, the capital of Brazil since April 21, 1960, when it was changed from Rio de Janeiro, built purposefully in the middle of the desert and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, is very dry and very, very hot; many transplanted Brazilians have trouble adjusting to the new climate. I can’t wait—São Paulo to Brasilia please! Step on it! Not a moment too soon!

  You do everything quickly, my mother points out as she meticulously covers every item in her suitcase with a plastic bag. The only two things I do fast is read and write. But I also remember her confessing that she has never known what to do with her hands, and that my father was always asking her to control her hands. Taking her sweet time packing gives her something useful to do with those hands.

  As we drag our luggage down the lobby hallway, with my mother wearing the same orange outfit she wore to greet me at the airport—perhaps this is her “travelling ensemble,” the way mine is my loose-fitting black jumpsuit—she rips a piece of paper, a message for another guest in the hotel left by accident on her bag. Now the clerk will be made to pay for his carelessness, she says smugly, as if she has executed an extremely ethical act. I am horrified, imagining the unknowing guest who won’t receive the message my mother has destroyed.

  Maybe she’d be somebody you’d like to kill, I hear, the voice of Danny DeVito arguing with Billy Crystal about swapping murders—Crystal’s ex-wife for Danny’s mother—in Throw Momma from the Train. I can’t help it—I love this movie. Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal at their best. Now that I’m a published writer and a professor of English and creative writing, Billy Crystal’s Larry, a writer with writer’s block teaching the craft to a group of misfits and losers, is even funnier. And Owen. What a perfect name for a boy with a mother complex! Owen loves his momma.

  Owen’s momma is grotesque to the nth degree: physically, emotionally, spiritually. Played by ghoulish Anne Ramsey in her most famous film role, even her voice assaults; spit flies with every hoarse syllable. Relentlessly, she demands Owen perform disgusting tasks, such as removing her earwax, and is constantly belittling him and smacking him upside the head. Owen retreats into an imaginative world of matricide revenge fantasies. After seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Owen has an epiphany and approaches Larry to murder his mother in return for him killing Larry’s ex-wife. I’ve been thinking about Owen’s momma a lot lately and the taboos associated with matricide in such myths as Orestes and in the horror films Carrie and Psycho. Maybe she’d be somebody you’d like to kill.

  I used to wonder, often, if my mother was dead. My brother tells people she’s dead—it’s easier than explaining our family history to acquaintances, business associates, or first dates. I’ve even considered over the years whether or not I wish her dead. Or, if informed of her death, whether I would cry or feel more than indifference to her passing. I know as a child, when I was afraid of her rages, I cursed her and hoped she’d die. But children wish their parents dead all the time—not understanding death as permanent, desiring only temporary relief. Over the last week in São Paulo, there have been many moments when I would have welcomed a mute button, a trap door, a panic room, or a teleportation machine. I confess I might also have envisioned a coffin.

  The humour in Throw Momma from the Train stems not only from the usually repressed desires to kill one’s mother or an ex-lover, but also from the psychological reality that these beings are spiritually unkillable: not with pillows, poisons, knives, axes, or high-speed vehicles. The two bumbling would-be murderers botch suffocation, falling down stairs, death by trumpet (Owen’s momma wakes to screech out one of the most bizarre lines in cinema: What a dream I was having! Louis Armstrong was trying to kill me!), and throwing the overweight beast off a train. The movie is a comedy, I would argue, not only because no one actually dies, but because both men manage to turn their pain and trauma into creativity; they publish books—Larry, his new best-selling novel called Throw Mamma from the Train, and Owen, a pop-up book simply titled Momma, Owen, and Owen’s Friend Larry.

  I’ll admit that one of the things keeping me by my mother’s side at this point is the fact that I’d like to write about her. I can hold my disappointment in check if there’s a purpose to enduring the torture. I can withstand the knowledge that my mother has no interest in her daughter, in me, if I’m permitted a window into her psychology. I can even calm my nerves, wary of shared DNA, if I can pinpoint how my mother turned her real life into a fantasy. I’m willing to endure her for a book for all the other children of disastrous, neglectful, and narcissistic parents, who beat themselves up for not being able to alter their gazes, not being able to create the love that would salvage the past, turn it into the turbulent backstory of a triumphant comedy. For those
out there who reunite with lost mothers and fathers, dreams of reconciliation packed tenderly in their carry-ons, who land to the horrific discovery that they were better off without these parents, better off with the deep and searing pain of lost love they learned to live with day after day instead of this irredeemable pain of hopeless reunion. The problem with most books and movies about family reunions is that they share the same arc: strained family relations that through forced contact and conflict result in newfound understanding, acceptance, and love. The same predictable, unrealistic arc. While I’ve loved art my entire life, art doesn’t always prepare you for life. I suspect the vast majority of prodigal sons and daughters end up sorely mistaken and disappointed with their homecomings. My book will be for them: my people. No book, no daughter. The truth is ugly. For both of us. And I can’t throw her off the airplane.