Nietzsche writes, “I have learned to walk: since then I have learned to run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed to move.”
J. Virginia Morgan
The Maternal Return: An Anti-Memoir
Four
The first Halloween after Mama’s accident, Dad cut two eye-holes in the middle of an old sheet, secured it over Minnie’s head, and told her she was a ghost. He led her through the apartment building, floor by floor, trick-or-treating without going outside. We’d lived on Cooper Street since the beginning of the summer before grade ten, when the rented eleventh-floor apartment was supposed to be temporary, just until Dad and Mama found a house.
I was in the bathroom putting on makeup and washing it off again when my mother emerged from the former guest room, now her bedroom; in the mirror, I watched her walk away down the hall without turning to give me a glance. She was wearing her huge stained track suit and had a full pack on her back, a grocery bag in each hand. Her hair, fluffy from a recent washing, was shapeless, almost shoulder length, and needed a cut badly. I didn’t try to get her attention; I’d become almost accustomed to her indifference, her habit of showering twice a day and her steady, alarming weight loss. She hadn’t seemed to eat anything at all for the previous two months. All she did was exercise, read and shuffle through boxes in her room with the door closed.
When Dad and Minnie came back with a pillowcase full of candy, I was waiting in the living room, wearing an old slip over a pair of jeans and holding an unlit cigar in my hand. Minnie set to work sorting her loot into categories, and I put on my jacket, telling Dad as I left, “She went somewhere.”
I was out until two in the morning. I took off my shoes and jacket as quietly as I could and stepped softly through the living room, only to find Dad standing in the dark hallway. He had the stoic, pale look that comes when anger and shock have exhausted themselves, leaving a calm despair in their wake. “I just went to the diner after the dance,” I told him quickly, “with Reiko.”
“Agatha,” he said. “Can you come with me, please?”
My mother had left her bedroom door wide open. The boxes from her closet, which had contained all her mementos, journals and old clothes, were in the middle of the floor, empty. She hadn’t bothered taking my things or Minnie’s — a box with all our baby clothes and childhood drawings was undisturbed.
“Look at this,” said Dad. All our family photo albums were piled in the corner. He opened the top one. The once-full pages were patchy; it took me only a minute to see that my mother had removed every photograph of herself, leaving me as a baby on Oma Esther’s lap; me at three, at the wedding, leaning against Oma Esther’s arm; Tam-Tam and Dad; Minnie as a baby. Everything was there, our whole lives, only Mama was completely missing. Dad and I sat on the floor in silence, flipping through the albums, hoping she’d missed something. “She didn’t have to do this,” Dad said, head in his hands. Then we packed up everything that was left and put the boxes back in the closet. We were both in our own rooms when I heard my mother come back in the early morning, stepping lightly, her bags empty.
A week and a half afterwards, I was late for school, missing math, allegedly because Dad wanted company while his car was cleaned. Long, rubbery strips smacked the soaked windows and smeared the glass with soapy trails while Dad sipped his coffee and I blew steam across the surface of my cup. The carwash was a perfect place for Dad to talk to me; it would be dangerous to open the door. Mama used to do the same thing, save the worst for when we were in transit and I couldn’t escape. She’d described sexual intercourse on the way to ballet class when I was eight.
“Don’t tell Minnie we came here without her,” said Dad. He’d already dropped off my sister at first grade. The carwash always had a uniquely sedative effect on my sister, and Dad used to take her there often, not because the car was dirty, but because she was unmanageably hyper and it was the only way to calm her down. Minnie had changed; her frenetic energy had given way to a pensive shyness, but she still loved the carwash.
The car inched forward. “Your sister still gets so upset when I drop her off in the mornings,” Dad said.
“She’ll be okay,” I told him. “Don’t worry, Daddy Longlegs.” Dad’s limbs looked cramped in any car, even with the seat pushed back, and that’s what called up my childhood nickname for him. He smiled and relaxed slightly, grateful for this show of affection. “Nice hair,” I said. His usually scruffy hair and beard had been trimmed, so every hair on his head was exactly the same length.
“Well,” he said, “you inspired me. I really like it.” He pushed my bangs out of my eyes. “I like your hair down.” Dad had been surprised when he saw me the night before. He didn’t know I visited Tam-Tam at work once a week, usually just for half an hour after school. She was always obsessed with my hair and had finally dragged me upstairs to have it cut.
A set of small pipes blasted the car’s windows with hot water, pushing soap-froth to the edges and away. Kshhhhhh, Minnie would have said. “Well, Agatha,” Dad said. “You know I’ve been talking about adopting you. The papers are ready to go. I’m pretty pleased about that.” My glasses were steaming up, but I left them on. “It’s quite important that I’m recognized, legally, as your father, because things could get confusing.” He had one hand on the steering wheel and was looking straight ahead although the engine wasn’t on. “Your mother’s never going to be like she was. As Dr. Manning says, we all have to accept that.”
Soap and water blasted the windows, brushes closing us in, while Dad talked, backtracked and tried to explain, tapping his hand on the steering wheel, moving things around on the dashboard, and I thought of my mother. I didn’t know where she was — working out at whatever gym she frequented or shopping for clothes at newly discovered stores. I knew she’d started swimming; a chlorine-smelling black bathing suit had started appearing in the laundry. When I got home after school, she’d probably be back in her bedroom with the door closed, looking for more possessions to sell, throw in the canal, bury — or whatever she’d done with them.
The car was already spotless, and Dad had to speak up over the hot-air dryers by the time he managed to say, “Her name is Lara.” Then we were outside in the sun and I knew. Dad was in love with someone else. That’s what he said: “We’ve fallen in love.” We both slumped in our seats until someone banged on the window, startling us, and Dad fumbled in his wallet.
“Here.” I pulled a ten from the pocket of my jeans. “The absentminded professor thing gets a little tired sometimes.” Dad ignored me, took a twenty out of his jacket pocket and handed it to the attendant.
I concentrated on cleaning my glasses while Dad drove. When I looked at him with my bare eyes, his face was a blur of beard, eyes, skin. If there were tears in his eyes, I couldn’t see them. If his jaw was relaxed in self-assured indifference, I didn’t have to know about it.
“Will this . . . woman adopt me, too?” I asked. I thought I’d be the first person in the world to be adopted at the age of sixteen, related by blood to neither of my guardians, my real mother set loose, adrift.
“No,” said Dad, “of course not. Your mother will still be your mother. And I’ve always been your father. The adoption is just a legality.” I could tell he’d been waiting a long time to tell me all this, dreading it. “I love you and Minnie very much,” he added. “I know this is hard. Especially for you.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
Before he stopped in front of my school, Dad said, “I understand you’re angry right now. We’ll talk later when you’ve had time to think. Lara’s an easy person to like. Minnie gets along with her wonderfully.”
“You’ve already introduced her to Minnie?”
“It’s okay that you need to yell, I know this is hard to deal with. Yes, they met, but Minnie just thought Lara was a friend of mine. Probably thought she was one of my students.”
The effort to speak in a normal tone made my voice shake. “Is she one of
your students?” Dad pulled up next to the curb, and there was no one outside the school except one grade ten girl with limp black hair and a lumberjack jacket standing near the curb in the smoker’s corner. “No,” he said. “She’s not my student. She’s a lawyer, actually. Works in Gerry’s office.” Gerry, Dad’s cousin.
“Mama gets sick and you just find someone else?” I slammed the door and told him through the window, “Don’t drive away, Steven, my foot’s in front of your tire.”
“We’ll talk about this later.” Now that Dad had unburdened himself, he was all confidence and composure.
“Does Mama even know?”
“Sweetheart,” said Dad, “we’ll talk about this as soon as I get home this evening. You’re a smart girl and I know you’ll be okay. I’m counting on you.” He backed away from my foot, pulled past me and away, waving reassuringly. I was surprised to find myself surprised, baffled that I never saw this coming. I’d always thought Mama was the one who didn’t love Steven enough. I had evidence. Hard, written evidence that Steven’s love for my mother was unyielding and blind. I was standing in the turning circle outside the school, my family crumbling, what was left of its shape finally giving way. The girl in the smoker’s corner ground her butt under the heel of one army boot. I knew who she was; she was famous for having fainted during a presentation, collapsing backwards, a half-smoked joint tumbling out of her pocket. She shrugged at me sympathetically.
*
I found everyone packed in the hallways. Every Remembrance Day, the whole school was organized grade by grade, class by class, two by two, and herded to the war memorial, a fifteen-minute walk away. Attendance was taken before and after, absence considered a crime against decency. I was looking for my homeroom half-heartedly when I spotted the back of Helena’s head and turned quickly away. I hurried to the pay phone at the end of the hallway; Dad answered his cell phone after three rings.
“How long have you been seeing this person?” I said. I thought of all our therapy sessions with Dr. Manning — Tam-Tam, Dad and I trying to bring Mama back so we could be a family again. “Were you planning this the whole time? Why did you pretend you wanted things to go back to normal if you were just going to dump us anyway? Steven! Hello?”
“I’m not dumping you, Agatha. I’ll be your father for the rest of your life. I want you to understand that.”
“How many other affairs have you had?” It occurred to me that Mama would no longer even care what he did. “You are the biggest hypocrite I’ve ever met.”
“All right. We’ll talk about this later. As much as you need to.”
I struggled for words and tried to imagine what Mama, the old Mama, would have said about Dad’s mistress. “Fuck you,” I said, on Mama’s behalf. “Cocksucker.” The word sounded idiotic coming out of my mouth. I hung up.
I put another quarter in the phone and dialled the number scrawled on my bus pass. Sundar was there, and barely awake. “You want to skip out on Remembrance Day?” He sounded surprisingly disapproving of my plan.
“I’ve got to get out of here. Can you come and get me?”
He described his car and said, “Okay, NAC parking lot.”
“Ms. Winter,” said Mr. Meyers, my history teacher, hand on my shoulder as I hung up. “Get back in line. No, wait.” He stepped around in front of me and, in a peculiarly intimate gesture, held me by the front of my fraying brown army jacket to pin a felt poppy in the general area of my heart. His round belly was an inch away from me, his collarbone level with my eyes. I’d been in his Canadian history class the year before and barely passed, though he gave me an A the year before that. I looked up at his face. “If you’d only focus,” he said, releasing me, clearly exasperated by the chaos of the day, “you’d be just fine.” Smiling noncommittally, I turned away with a strangely pleasurable thrill of paranoia. I’d suspected all year that the teachers discussed me in the staff room, mulling over my mother’s bizarre and tragic accident, an injury better suited to a television character than a real person. “Find your homeroom and make sure you’re marked present,” Mr. Meyers called after me. Instead, I walked to the far end of the hall and stood behind a particularly disorganized swarm of kids. The double-file lines were already dissolving into mayhem.
We walked, fifteen hundred of us, through a misty rain along the canal. I made myself invisible, avoiding teachers and people in my own grade, anyone who would recognize me. I could see my apartment building looming behind the high school. We lived a five-minute walk from school and from the canal. At first, I’d relished the temporary-ness, loved taking an elevator every morning and evening as much as Minnie did. Dad rode his bike to the university, and I could go for walks on Elgin Street in the evenings. My parents had planned to rent only until they found a house in the Glebe, but four months passed and then Mama had her accident. Then another year passed, and I knew that Dad had stopped even looking for another place to live. I’d thought he was waiting until Mama got better — potentially forever.
But now I knew: he was waiting until he could move in with some other woman. Clenching my cold fingers into my sleeves, I thought of the letter I’d found after we moved — the letter my biological father sent after Dad married Mama. As always, I felt sick thinking about that letter. I had no idea where it was, what had happened to it. But I remembered every word of it, and everything it implied. This is what people did; they fell in love and made promises, had children, and then just dropped everything. And then it didn’t matter, because there was always someone else.
As the damp teenaged herd approached the National Arts Centre parking lot, I was relieved to see a grey station wagon exactly where we’d agreed, near the stage doors. Sundar was wearing a black tuque, watching the torrent of kids walk by. We’d only met once before, and I realized this was the first time we’d seen each other in normal clothes; he didn’t look the way I’d expected. I wondered if I looked as plain and disappointing to him as he did to me, and I considered moving into the midst of the crowd heading to the war memorial. I took one step away from Sundar, then changed my mind. Checking for teachers, I ran to the car and climbed inside. Putting my head down so no one could see me through the windshield, I brushed Sundar’s faded-jean hip with my shoulder. “Did anyone see me get in?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.” He was wearing a thick grey wool sweater. “No one’s looking at us. That’s Erin.” There was a girl stretched out on the back seat. A floppy tuque covered her forehead and most of her eyes, and she had a ring through the middle of her full bottom lip, under which she’d somehow applied lipstick. She was wearing baggy black pants and Converse shoes, and her jacket was open over a thin yellow T-shirt with blue writing on it. I couldn’t tell if her eyes were open under the hat’s rim, even when she said, “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Agatha,” said Sundar, starting the engine.
“Agatha,” said Erin. “This is fucking weird. It’s like we’re kidnapping you or something.”
“I know,” said Sundar. “Like we’re harbouring an underage runaway or something.”
“Nice hair,” said Erin.
“This girl at my grandmother’s hair salon does it for free,” I told her through the crack between the front seats, my disappointment over not being alone with Sundar fading fast. He had dirt under his nails and smelled like sweaty wool.
Erin stretched in the backseat, plump belly and fully visible breasts replacing her face in my line of vision. A huge plastic wallet chain hung from her pocket. I sat up straight and saw that we’d stopped at a crosswalk on Laurier Street. Helena’s homeroom class was crossing the street in front of us and none of the students looked at the car; it was like watching them through a one-way mirror. Helena crossed last, by herself, partnerless. In a yellow rain slicker, she clenched her fists so the sleeves hung over her hands. Her newly short hair was dark and damp against her head. As she passed, she turned as though someone had said her name, looked right at me through the windshield and froze. S
he looked more like Snow White than ever, pale with black eyes. I ducked down again. “Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.” I didn’t need to see Helena, damp and duped and prettily wretched. Her face made people imagine a depth that wasn’t there; boys fell in love with her at first sight and slipped poems into her locker, slipped hands into her clothes.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Sundar, “just move along, stunned missy.” Humming to himself, he drove away from the long trail of my classmates, the first of them already at the war memorial. Not one of them or us was thinking about war.
I’d known Sundar for eleven days, since he first appeared as a fairy godmother, transforming me into something beautiful among the plastic food-court tables at the mall. I knew Reiko from math class — she sat beside me and liked to draw cartoon animals with sarcastic speech bubbles between my theorems. She rebelled with rare grace even when buying acid in the food court. She was dressed as a tabby cat, all in tight clothes, with ears on a fuzzy headband and whiskers painted on her cheeks. She’d stuck a Band-Aid on the toe of her black boot. We drank vodka out of a Coke bottle in front of the closed fast-food stands. My fairy godmother was sitting beside Reiko’s dreadlocked drug dealer on a yellow plastic seat, army-booted feet on the yellow plastic table.
“This is Diesel,” said Reiko, “and Sundar.”
Curly black hair full of sparkles, eyelids peacock blue, Sundar pressed his wand’s flat, yellow-sparkled star against the middle of my chest and asked me to share my cigar. We smoked it out in the bus shelter while Reiko haggled.
Cricket in a Fist Page 12
