“You have made a big mistake, Marigold,” my father said to her bald head. “This was totally unnecessary — you look ridiculous. Why would you do this to yourself?”
I wondered why she would do it too and what the neighbours, especially Mrs. Roughen, would say when they saw.
“I had to, Steven,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Then she ran to her bedroom and my father shouted out, “What have you got left now?” and went outside without turning around to face me.
Her hair was not the only thing my mother felt she had to give up. She told us she didn’t want to let cancer take anything away from her. So she was going to give it away instead.
“I am going to live in the backyard for the rest of the time,” she announced one Saturday afternoon in April. Jackie and I were playing in the kitchen sink. We were trying to float her little sister’s mermaid doll. I was teaching her that mermaids didn’t float, but in fact, they lived under the ocean.
“But how would they ever breathe under there?” Jackie said to me, the cuffs of her shirt soaked with water.
“They breathe because they believe they can breathe.” And then my mother walked in and made her announcement. My father was standing behind her, eyes rolled back like he was looking at the ceiling.
“I need some space to stay focused on what’s happening. This is a lot for a person to go through. I don’t need to be inside anymore.” When she said this, I felt my temples start to tighten and my fingers fold into fists.
“What do you mean you’re going to live outside?” I asked her.
“I bought an old teepee off of this man who sits in front of the Drug Mart on First Avenue. You father is going to help me set in up in the backyard.”
From Jackie’s head then, and only the second time I had heard someone’s thoughts, And I thought my mom was embarrassing. Maya’s mom is a weirdo.
“Be quiet, Jackie!” I said and snapped my head to look at her. She was concentrating on combing the mermaid’s aqua hair with a plastic comb.
“I didn’t say anything, Maya,” she said prissily, faking innocence.
At that moment, a ball of resentment, anger, and overall misery at the situation began to shake itself loose in my throat.
“What the hell is wrong with you!?” I screamed despite my desire to keep it inside.
“Excuse me?” my mother responded, her bald head cocked to one side and her lips pushed up towards her nose. “Where did that language come from, young lady?”
“You think this isn’t hard enough for me without you acting like a freak in front of my friends?!”
I wish now that I hadn’t said those words, as they appeared to hurt my mother, annoy my father, and help Jackie fully grasp how truly bizarre the situation was.
“Maya, take that back,” my father said.
“No.”
I ran upstairs to my room, slammed the door, and sobbed uncontrollably into a waiting pillow.
Pounding up the stairs two at a time, I had heard my mother speak again. “In case you didn’t notice, Steven, I raised her to be a strong girl. She’ll get through this.” I don’t know what Jackie was doing then. I felt bad for just leaving her with them, but there was no way I was going back out there.
After what seemed like a couple of hours, I emerged from my hole of self-pity with a hatred for my mother still swelling inside me. Jackie was gone but had left the sink full of mermaid water. I put both my hands in and spun them around to make two whirlpools that didn’t touch. Then I pulled the plug to drain the water. It sputtered and spat on its way down, and I wondered if there was anything alive being pulled down.
Evening light filtered through the kitchen window from the backyard. I followed it with my eyes and saw them. My father, on his hands and knees, fitting together thin wooden poles and my mother unfolding what looked like dirty grey tarps and smoothing them down on the grass. They didn’t notice me watching them — as though they were inside an aquarium, with me observing them. All I learned was that teepees are difficult to assemble, and some events made no sense at all.
My mother took the single mattress off my box spring for her outside bed, because it took up less space than a double. And to replace it, Father brought the queen-size bed from the guest room into my bedroom. As far as we knew, Aunt Leah (or anyone else) was not coming to stay any time soon. I liked my new big bed. I could stretch out from side to side if I wanted to and not just from top to bottom. And I never rolled off if I tossed and turned too much. I found it difficult to concentrate on sleep knowing my bald mother was dying by herself in the yard on my old single mattress with no box spring. (Father had propped it up against my bedroom wall.) Was a teepee tarp enough to keep the chill out? Couldn’t the mosquitoes get through the holes? The bugs were starting to get bad out there. These sorts of thoughts led to sleepless nights for me, which made me tired at school the next day. I didn’t mind though, because to walk around sleepy was almost like I wasn’t anywhere at all.
Jackie and I didn’t talk much at school anymore. I think my family scared her off. I think she thought I had become a bit too weird to associate with — especially with the next year being grade seven. I didn’t talk much to anyone. I concentrated most of the day on deciding whether I would sit with my mother when I got home or pretend she didn’t exist.
“Don’t you get lonely out here?” I asked her one night after deciding she needed me with her.
“You are never lonely when you have yourself,” she said with a pout to her lips, and I wanted to yell at her, “What about me, you freak! You have me. And your husband?” But she was my mother, my protector, the one who raised me. And she was sick, which made it even harder to say what I really felt.
“I’ll keep visiting you, Mother,” I said. “You don’t have to sit out here all alone.”
She put her hand on my shoulder to say thank you. She was weakening, which was probably as much to do with her diet as preparing for the end. She ate mostly saltine crackers, and sometimes I brought her bowls of boiled vegetables — carrots, spinach, and broccoli — when she asked for them. Her arms were turning small like twigs and the bones in her cheeks growing pointier. When it was time for her to sip water from a blue plastic cup, her hand rose to her mouth in a slow motion that seemed to follow her everywhere.
Aside from the single mattress, my mother had one wooden chair that used to belong to our old dining room set, a TV stand she bought my father at a garage sale, and a scratchy wool mat she rested her feet on. The prairie sun and the moisture created from spring rain meant that she had to keep the hanging door of her teepee flap open instead of tied tight, but even this didn’t help with the suffocating heat. She wore only a white tank top with no bra and an elephant-print skirt that reached her knees.
She had one more thing beside her bed: two red milk crates that I had stolen from outside the cafeteria at Holy Cross High School and brought home for her to make a bookshelf. And on the bookshelf she put her copy of the Bhagavad Gita, cones of incense, her water cup, and a copy of the Bible — which her mother had given her right before I was born. It looked new and straight, like it had hardly been opened.
“I’ve figured it out, Maya,” she said. “They wrote the Bible only to keep people in line by scaring them with punishment. God is such a villain in there.” She pointed to the black book. “It’s like he’s ready to condemn anyone who makes the tiniest mistake.”
“Is it true we get punished for doing the wrong thing?” I asked her.
“If we do, I can see why he did this to me.”
Maybe she was mad at God. Or my grandmother, whom I had never met, for trying to make her read the Bible.
I remember hearing a phone call made by my father once when I had returned back to the house to sleep (sometimes I would curl up beside my mother on the single bed in the teepee, but on this particular night the howling wi
nd had been keeping me awake). My father’s end of the conversation went like this: “Eleanor, we can’t forgive what you tried to do, but I’m willing to put that aside now. She’s your daughter and she needs you. She’s sick.” He paused to listen and I clung to the wall around the corner. “I’m sorry you feel that way. She would have been happy to get a visit from you.” Stale air. “I know that your pension isn’t enough for a plane ticket. Forget it.”
My father hung up the phone without saying the words that would have made any mother run to be with her child: “She’s not going to make it.” I still don’t know why he hung on to those words. Maybe he didn’t want to say them himself. Or maybe he was scared my grandmother would actually come.
The next afternoon after that call, a plant arrived at our front door. It had waxy flat leaves and small white flowers that were wound up too tight to bloom. Around the green pot it came in was a pink ribbon, too thin to be satin, too coarse to be worth keeping. I took it out to my mother, but not before I peeled open the tiny envelope. On the card, with the words “Get Well” in the corner surrounded by a border of hearts, were six words written in all capitals (probably by an attentive floral shop worker): “Sorry to hear you are ill,” and underneath, the word “Mother.” My mother took the plant and read the card without smiling. She told me to put it on the grass outside the teepee, “So the sun can get at it better,” which I did. It stayed there for almost a week, until one morning I arrived to see the neighbour’s German Shepherd, Tonto, ripping its leaves from the broken pot.
Though she may have wished he would have, my father didn’t forget about my mother when she was out there — how could he with her teepee so obtrusive and only a few metres behind the house?
“Stinks in here” would usually be the first thing he’d say when he’d come in after work and sit down on the cracked wooden chair across from where my mother lounged on her mattress. In a low voice, low like approaching thunder, he would ask her how she was and if she needed anything.
She usually said no, she did not need anything from him. Except sometimes, she would ask for more saltines, which he would bring her. He would light a stick of her incense to cover the smell inside the teepee. Mother had stopped using deodorant or bathing much. I guess she didn’t see a point to it anymore. And she was going inside to the bathroom a lot, and spending a long time in there, which probably didn’t help the aroma coming off her body.
My mother spent most of the day lying down, resting. She said her back ached. Her lips were dry and when she smiled sometimes at my father, they stretched over her teeth like an animal skin drying in the sun.
To be polite, Mother asked Father about his job. She usually did this without looking at him. He would tell her how he thinks he found the next Heather Locklear, and that she wants him to represent her. Mother would say, “That’s nice,” and he would tell her how hard he was working to make sure that I had a good future, how important it was for him to move up the corporate ladder at the office. But from inside his head I once heard the truth: I honestly don’t give a shit about this job. Not with Mari like this. Who’s going to look after Maya?
Yeah, I thought, who’s going to look after me? But I couldn’t ask him out loud: he would know what I heard.
This mind-reading business was getting tricky.
When my father ran out of things to say, he would reach out and hold one of each of our hands, just until they became sweaty, and then go back into the house to take off his suit.
Chapter Eight
In May she wrapped a bedsheet around her body — queen-size with tiny flowers barely pink and blue. It used to be on her bed inside the house. She laid it flopped over her shoulder, down a bit and around her waist. I watched her put it on the first time. After taking off her clothes and before wrapping the sheet around her, she stood naked in front of me, her nipples hard with the dampness of the teepee, her pubic hair dark and matted between her legs. I tried not to stare, but my mother’s nakedness never became comfortable for me.
“Put these in the garbage, Maya. No use for them anymore.” She handed me her clothes: a white tank top, a black T-shirt, and a pair of white jogging pants my father used to wear when he ran around the block.
I did as she said and when I returned to her shelter, she was wrapping the sheet around herself. I still wonder: had my father been the one to fetch it from the linen closet and deliver it to her?
“Yes, this will do just fine,” she said with the sheet in place, but I had my doubts. The faded pattern on the thin fabric made her look like a tacky monk. And who wore a sheet anyway?
She stopped wearing shoes around that month as well. She ventured into the house to use the toilet in her bare feet, her toes fitting between the green blades on the way, moist from the dew left at sunrise or golden dry from the afternoon sun.
“Do you want your shoes, Mari?” my father had asked more than once, and she always responded in the same way.
“I like the feel of the grass on my feet, Steven. Do you have a problem with that?”
Maybe she was just over wearing shoes by that point.
My father spent most of his time engrossed in his work, or in the TV, or in the scary headlines that he studied from the daily paper.
“Maya, can you believe that banana-chin Mulroney is actually our prime minister?” he would say as he read, trying to suck me in to a political world that seemed more like made-up stories to me. “Look out, Canada, with this guy.”
Instead of worrying about politics, I occupied myself by combing through my own thoughts. It was hard to see through them. I thought about things that an eleven-year-old shouldn’t have to, like: Where will my mother go when she dies? Will my father cry? Will he take down the teepee or will he let me move my own pillows and blankets out there to be close to her?
Mother never answered my questions. Not directly. Instead, she would point me to some random passage in the Bhagavad Gita. While I held the slim book in my hands, she would nod in a knowing way with her lips tucked in.
“Maya, things will take care of themselves. At least you’re not Arjuna. You could be facing a battle with all your friends and family members. Krishna helped him out, and it all turned out okay.”
I’ve since learned that in the further episodes of the Mahabharata, Arjuna and his entire family get killed because Krishna convinced him to fight, but at the time I agreed with her. I supposed it could be worse.
That night I dreamed that I was Arjuna, on a golden chariot heading out to fight against my own family — brothers and sisters I never had. Around me, the girls from school, Mr. Wigman, my father, all shouting at me and telling me to get down, that it was dangerous up there. But I heard the booming voice in my ear and kept riding, waking up before I hit anything frightening.
A Sunday morning. My father awoke to see it first. He came into my room. I remember looking up to see him standing over me like an ancient oak.
“Maya, I need your help outside. It’s your mother’s teepee.” Wrinkles traced out from the corners of his eyes, creating a maze in his skin. I followed him into the yard to see the paint — red, bold, and thick on the outside of my mother’s teepee.
“Freak Inside,” written in a childish way that made me think it must have been some kids on the street. Egg yolk dripped from the letters like yellow blood, oozing its way down to the grass and settling around broken white eggshells. The door flap was ripped as well, like someone was trying to get in and gave up halfway.
“We can sew that back in place,” my father said, pointing to the flap, his voice hovering in the still air before dropping to the ground. He ran his open palm across the words, so that they smeared into a red blob. He only spoke one word: “Insensitive.”
Inside the teepee, my mother still slept.
When she woke up, we didn’t tell her what had happened. Instead my father occupied her in conversation about the weather and the bills and hi
s boss. My mother nodded and tried to smile while he spoke. I scrubbed the red blob and egg yolks with soapy water from a green bucket until I thought my arm would detach, and I looked through the ripped entrance every few minutes to check on them. He held my mother’s hand and cradled her head with his bicep. She seemed comfortable — that is, assuming she knew where she was at all (it took her a while to get moving in the mornings). Eventually she had to go inside to use the toilet. By then, I was almost finished scrubbing and hid the bucket and rags behind a bush when she walked by.
“Good morning, Mother.” She nodded weakly and hobbled past me. I don’t think she even noticed the rip in the door. And if she did, she had passed the point of caring.
Jackie came over because I asked her to. By that afternoon, I was longing to escape to some sort of fantasy world that we created — a play we wrote and acted ourselves, a dance we created to something off of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. Only when she arrived, Jackie didn’t want to play with me. She wanted only to sit in the backyard and talk about my mother.
“Why does she stay in there?”
“She likes it.”
“Why?”
“She’s going to die.”
“Are you sad?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid she will haunt you?”
“No.”
Girl in Shades Page 6
