by Sadie Sumner
“When I was a child this all seemed so much more substantial.”
“I think you underestimate how secure your childhood was.” Monica looked at the small house, the brickwork painted white, with a deck along one side and double glazed windows. The trees had obviously grown since his childhood. Now they were huge, their summer green canopies another sign the neighborhood had gone up-market. He’d once told her his mother would take his chin in her hand and exhort him to look up as she told him the sky was always blue somewhere in the world.
“Are you grieving for her?” Gil asked.
Monica considered his question. “Yes. No. I’m not sure. We have…” she corrected herself, “…had so little in common.” She thought of Dotty’s hunger for love. As she aged and the men faded, Monica knew her mother wanted to be closer, but the damage was done over all the years of her childhood.
“I know she was all flaws and hedonism, but I think she wanted your absolution,” Gil said.
Monica shook her head. She would never be able to reconcile the mother she had with the mother she had so desperately wanted.
They drove on and Gil told her about the first time he’d ventured across the park with a new friend who wore short pants and white shirts when everyone in his world lived in t-shirts and jeans. His voice trembled slightly as he described the shiny floors of his new friend’s house, the way the light refracted from a chandelier in the hallway and how he’d wanted to capture it in some way. “Back at my house, I knew Mom would be waiting for me. She’d be sitting at our old Formica table beneath her shelf of cheap ornaments, smoking, while the grilled cheese turned cold and congealed on the kitchen counter.”
Part of Monica felt sad for him, for his world devoid of art or music or books. And part of her wanted the sense of security his descriptions of childhood always aroused in her.
The traffic across town was surprisingly light and they drove over the Lions Gate Bridge in silence. On one side huge tanker ships dotted the water, on the other a cruise ship, no doubt bound for Alaska, belched smoke as it glided past the giant piles of neon yellow sulphur powder. Monica had wondered about those piles since she was a small child. No matter how the city changed, the piles remained. Mitchell, her mother’s sometime lover and erstwhile leader of their group, had once explained the business model to her: buy cheap in the interior, stockpile on the waterfront to sell directly overseas. She remembered being fascinated, as much by his explanation of all the uses for sulphur as to the idea that a man who never seemed to work, except in their gardens, would know so much about the chemical business. Dog smelled less now but they kept the windows open and Monica shivered in the damp air. She had not seen Mitchell, or any of Dotty’s friends, in more than 20 years.
Four
They used Google maps to find the location, a muddy field along a graveled side road part way up Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver. Rufus was waiting for them with Puffy tucked into a black baby sling. Gil took out his camera and fiddled with his lenses. Monica’s heels sunk into the soft mud and she took Rufus’s arm and they started out. Across the field, a group of pensioners in flowing robes gathered in a circle, their gray hair long and loose in the autumn wind. It was much colder on the mountain and Monica pulled the suit jacket tight and wished she’d worn the camel overcoat.
Dotty’s friends had organized everything. She had wanted a quick ceremony at the undertaker’s chapel, but Mitchell called and convinced her to leave all the arrangements to them. Monica was sure they chose the desolate sweep of lower mountain field for energy lines and force fields they alone could perceive.
Gil caught up, camera slung over his shoulder. “Do you think we look strange to them?” He hauled on the dog’s lead and squatted down to straighten a small black bow tie tucked around the animal’s neck.
“Nice touch with the bow,” Rufus said, then lowered his voice. “Who are these people? I had no idea hippies were still a real thing?”
Gil punched his arm. “Hush,” he said, “they’re her secret family.”
Monica could barely look at Gil, everything she’d felt in the corners of her consciousness rushed at her, piling up inside, a dam of water in search of a spillway. The damp turned her hair into a pale meringue around her face. As she walked across the muddy field she could not remember why they’d married. Her breath was white in the cold air and she tried to pinpoint the actual day when she crossed over and let him be enough for her. Dog whined and snuffled around the field, unused to the smells of mountain wilderness.
The knot of aging hippies waited patiently for them. “I think I recognize everything they’re wearing,” Monica said to Rufus and she swung the bunch of carnations by their stems like a bat, a weapon.
As they got closer the group opened to reveal a plain pine box propped on kitchen chairs. Someone had stenciled their guru’s symbol along the sides of the coffin, all abstract breasts, and akimbo arms. An old cassette player sat beside a large photo of her mother. Long tangled hair framed her face, and her mouth was an O of surprise. Next to it was the photo Dotty kept beside her bed – her guru, corpulent and naked in oversized brown mala prayer beads with an almost smile to challenge and dismiss your judgment in one.
“I’m assuming the naked one is the guru?” Rufus asked in her ear. “Are these people seriously your family? All of them?” He tucked Puffy deeper into a black baby sling.
Monica pulled each heel from the ground, her balance disrupted, her mother dead, no longer a daughter. “I wonder what happened to the others?”
“There are more?” Rufus whispered, “and you never breathed a word?”
“I grew up in a dysfunctional, free-loving, anything goes sort-of-family. Okay?” She felt the rise of an old anger, the need to justify her unconventional upbringing.
Gil stood behind them. “Like a cult,” he said.
The group watched them calmly as they waited for Monica to come forward.
“Explains everything, right?” Gil’s laugh came out like a snort, and he reached for Monica’s hand. She pulled away and walked towards the nearest woman, wrapped in an old woven shawl. Instantly the entire group encircled her. They began to hum. Monica’s shoulders slumped as she gave into them and it felt like her blood flowed freely for the first time in years. If she collapsed now, she knew they would catch her and hold her aloft. Apart from Dotty, they were all the family she knew.
A man with sparse white hair tied in a ponytail hung back while everyone held and kissed Monica. He hugged Gil and smiled at Rufus. “Would you like a hug too?” he asked. Rufus nodded and smiled as Mitchell embraced him. Then Mitchell folded Monica into his arms. She turned her head slightly to avoid the smell that clung to his clothes before relaxing against the fringed vest he wore over a faded shirt. “How’s that eye?” he asked when they stood back to observe each other.
She touched the patch. “Okay. Mostly.”
Mitchell had been in the car, with Dotty driving, when it happened. The windows down as he’d passed her mother a joint and they’d gone down a bank, the car sliding along the wooded edge until a branch leaped into the back seat and pierced Monica’s eye. No one else was hurt, and yet somehow Monica thought of it as her fault, the one who ruined the vibe of the day.
“Your mother felt so guilty about that day. She never forgave herself,” Mitchell said, his denim bellbottoms covering his bare feet.
Monica wondered if he was talking about the same person. A few days earlier the doors of the rest home had closed behind her, trapping her in a white light so harsh it bleached the floral curtains. She had held the carnations by their damp stems and walked fast through the corridors to Dotty’s overheated room. The bed was empty. She heard her mother’s laugh drifting and ghostly in the stale air, a rising crescendo of sound, known to transform a room or surprise it into silence.
Monica followed the laughter to the day lounge. The sight of the patients sunk into their chairs at the start of another long day marooned her in the doorway. Animal Planet
played mute on the wall, and for a moment she stood transfixed by the sinuous Sri Lankan leopard as it sized up a snarling mugger crocodile. A man with an oxygen tube in his nose tapped out a silent time with two fingers in the air, counting down his days. Another dragged himself upright and yelled for quiet.
A nurse aid touched her arm, and Monica jumped. “I’ll find a vase for these. Your mom loves carnations. She’s having a restful day.”
Monica handed them over. She hated carnations, the pink mess of them, the sour smell of their two-day-old water that turned her stomach. She longed for tulips, for ranunculus, for flowers that held the memory of summer in their petals.
Her mother was slumped in a recliner with a blanket pulled up to her chin, the photo of her guru on her chest. Dotty’s gray hair was long and ragged, a flower child at the end of a hard summer. She struggled up and batted at Monica’s helping hand. The blanket fell away, and she was naked apart from her mala beads. Monica tucked the blanket back into place.
“Oh relax, Monnie. Look around; we’re in a waiting room, what do they care?” She edged the blanket down to her waist. “Anyway behold your future.” She tried to throw her arms wide, but they wavered like the wings of a fledgling bird.
The doctor stopped by on his rounds. “You’re a unique patient, Miss Dorothy.” He took her hand, and she gave him a coquettish smile and glared at Monica in ‘I told you so’ triumph. He passed an envelope of x-rays to Monica. She already knew they showed cancer like filigrees of frost creeping over winter windows till there was almost no clear glass left. Dotty did not have the strength to make a cup of tea let alone walk, but she declared herself pain-free and loudly refused all medication.
When the doctor left, Monica took a magazine from her bag and showed her mother. A plus-size bride swathed in pale blue with hands on hips graced the cover. “I know it’s a terrible photo.” She hated the note of apology that crept into her voice. “It’s one of my wedding gowns, Mom.” The sense of needing Dotty’s approval caused her eyes to prickle. “Of course, the bride is the editor of the magazine,” she added.
Dotty blinked and coughed. Monica turned to the story. Behind the editor, Monica was kneeling down, pins in her mouth, looking like she’d deliberately sewn the woman into a too-tight gown. The eye patch stood out, like a stain on her face. “It’s nothing really, a puff piece. I traded it for the dress,” she said too quickly.
Dotty reached for the magazine and placed her thumb over her daughter’s slightly vague face. “They always want a dream wedding?” she said and lifted her thumb. Monica saw how the upper arches of her lips curved like the wings of a cartoon bird, her hair like fleece, and the patch looked ridiculous.
She wanted nothing more than gravitas, for a dark and brooding look that people took seriously. “Do you like the dress, Mom?”
The architecture of Dotty’s face had collapsed, her once full lips reduced to stitched lines, her mouth always moving, chewing the insides of her gums. “Could you say something nice, Mom, please?” Monica said it under her breath, but Dotty glanced sharply at her then looked around. “Where’s your baby?” she asked.
“I don’t have a baby, Mom.”
“You did have a baby. I remember it.”
Monica felt her heart speed up. She picked up the book Dotty had left open on the table. “Is Deepak Chopra still alive?"
“I don’t think it makes a difference. We’re all spirit after all.” Dotty wriggled herself higher in the chair. “Well, some of us are.” She flicked her hand to take in the room. “Have you seen how old these people are? They’re all dying. I can feel it.”
Monica looked around. The phantom baby with translucent skin and pale blonde hair sat in the lap of an ancient man as he snored loudly, his mouth wide open. Monica touched her eye patch, turned away then glanced back. The apparition peeked out from behind a recliner, unsteady on its feet. It waved a tiny hand, and Monica waved back before it disappeared.
Monica placed her hand over the patch and stared at her mother.
“Why are you doing that to your eye?” Dotty rasped.
“It’s my blind one, Mom.” She wanted Dotty to ask just once, how the prosthetic felt or if it hurt.
“I shouldn’t be here, you know that.” Dotty arranged her face to appeal to Monica’s guilt. “I should be living with you.”
Monica’s spare room had sat empty, devoid of furniture or even a curtain over the bare window, but her mother had never been invited to stay. Monica blamed Gil, and his insistence that Dotty wear clothes. But secretly she was relieved, saved from her mother’s incense, her endless lentil stews and bare bottom on her linen sofa. And the complaints she knew they would endure because their home was new, hemmed in by other identical townhouses, with stairs and tiles, internal car parks and wall-to-wall carpet in neutral colors. All the things Dotty hated.
Monica flicked through the magazine. The dog, she thought, I should have placed Dog in the frame. He would have improved the photos. She silently berated herself for not thinking of it earlier and for the $3000 dress given away for the cover of a second rate magazine.
“Monnie, are you listening to me?” Dotty coughed and the sound clacked in her chest as she scratched at the blanket “You should take Deepak’s personality quiz.” She gulped air like she’d just stopped crying. “You remember, you are either air, fire, or earth; Vata, Pitta, or Kapha.” She drummed her fingers on the cover of the book, animated now. “I’m Kapha.”
“The nurturing one by any chance?” Monica took moisturizer from her oversized handbag and creamed her mother’s hand, pressing gently into her palms as she massaged the finely veined skin. From her earliest memory novels were banned as too frivolous. Instead, her mother read to her from Your Erroneous Zone, I’m Okay-You’re Okay or The Power of Positive Thinking, the books stacked beside her bed like talismans to ward off the reality of their lives. Monica smiled at the idea of Dotty pressing her latest must-read onto each new lover like instructional manuals for a successful relationship.
Her mother’s voice dropped to a strained whisper. “Of course I’m the nurturing one,” she said and slipped deeper into the recliner. “But you’re more Pitta. Or actually, I think, Vata. You’re more ice than fire.” She fondled her mala beads with her free hand.
“I can be nurturing too. You know, we have a dog now.” She knew she sounded childish, but the words caught her, and she swallowed hard to stave off tears. Dotty squinted as if to say, ‘I would know about your dog if you took me home,’ and Monica felt the familiar wedge of guilt in her chest. And in that moment she wanted a baby, a real one, so badly her arms ached.
“I blame Mr. Squirt,” Dotty said.
“I don't think you can blame Mr. Squirt for everything, Mom.” She wanted to add ‘for everything you hate about me,’ but instead, she sighed. “Given I’ve never met him.” She imagined a tall man with dark curly hair, willowy and gentle. She was sure she had inherited his curls and her mother’s coloring. As a young teen, she would conjure him in the dark of her tiny bedroom, and he would sing to her, his voice like Kurt Cobain, till yet another party downstairs petered out at dawn. “You know, you always promised you'd tell me about him.”
Monica continued to stroke the moisturizer into her mother’s hand. Dotty held up her spare thumb and finger. “A small you know what. Left me stone cold.” She screwed her face into a pained smile. “You really should take Deepak’s personality quiz, dear. It’s so very insightful.” Dotty sank deeper into her recliner, her fingers in Monica’s hand as thin and fragile as daffodil stems.
Five
Surrounded by Dotty’s friends, Monica stood in the cold wind and tried not to cry. A raw emotion grated at her throat. Despite her embarrassment, the tears came anyway. She cried for Dotty. And she cried for the sheer beauty of these faded people, for their lives spent dancing in the optimism of sunlight. Now the men were twig-thin, sucked dry of energy. The women had taken aging harder, their faces ruined by the midday sun, by the rigo
r of winters in snow-covered cabins, their bright dresses washed fine as gauze. Panic flooded her, an urgency for everything she had not achieved, every stillborn idea, every passion ignored. And she wanted a baby, like a drumbeat that would not cease. She tried to hold in her distress, to transform the emotion into a hiccup, a laugh, into anything other than tears. But they kept coming.
Mitchell held her tightly while the women gathered around. He wiped her cheeks with his grubby handkerchief. “Every time I visited her, she just wanted to talk about you.”
Monica could not imagine her mother even uttering her name. She shivered and found her self-control. “I need to ask you something.” She looked directly into his lined face. A small crystal that hung from one ear caught the light. “Are you my father?”
“I wondered if you would ever ask me that.” Mitchell pulled the ends of his white hair to tighten the ponytail. “You’re asking if I’m Mr. Squirt? Ha. I wish.” The lines in his face deepened. “I always wanted to be. Well, not the squirt part, but the ‘your father’ part.” He touched her curly hair. “No curls in my family darling.” He took Monica’s hands into his own. “Sadly she went to the other side for a while, your mother, the dark side.”
The group moved back, and Monica gazed at the coffin. “What do you mean?” She stood on the balls of her feet to avoid the suck of the wet ground.
“A man in a suit.” The group continued to hum, enclosing them all in the warm sound. Monica always assumed her father was within their group; her whole childhood spent looking into their faces, trying to find her likeness. “She refused to tell us anything, except for the squirt part. But then, she made fun of anything she couldn’t control. She was so proud of you, though.”
