The teachers herd us into a circle like we’re cattle, and we set out down the boarded sidewalks together — all except Chauncey, who has disappeared. The boards create a hollow echo under our feet when we walk, making us want to stamp harder. Heather and I do.
“Girls, please,” says Mr. Wigman, who is looking through a pile of notes and pamphlets. We all follow him inside one of the houses, but all forty of us cannot fit inside and they realize then that we will have to take two different paths around the town. Heather and I stay with Mr. Wigman, leaning over the rope barriers of every exhibit.
“Now, this is an example of a typical home in 1910,” Mr. Wigman says. “You can see that the table is set for dinner, which would probably have included something like bread and different meats.” He isn’t looking at his notes anymore and no one is really listening to him, which makes me feel bad.
“What’s that?” I yell out, pointing.
“Good question, Maya. Why, that looks like some sort of pump. They must have used it to pump water into the house.”
“They didn’t have taps?” says Brian Bellamy and I want to yell out, “Of course they didn’t have taps, and of course that is a pump to bring in water — I just asked to make Mr. Wigman feel better!”
We move from building to building. “This is the general store, look at all the different remedies.” Then, “This is the police station. Who would like to sit inside the cell while I close the door?” Heather is too scared, but I’m not. The cell makes me feel safe, black bars holding me in.
“These are the stables, where they used to keep the horses. Just look at the heavy leather saddles on the wall, so intricate, eh?” Still no one is listening, but we all nod anyway.
When we reach the fake schoolhouse, the one-room classroom from the 1900s, we find Chauncey. He has hopped over the rope barrier and wedged himself into one of the small desks. His cheeks are puffy, almost like he has been crying. He has a tiny blackboard in his hand and is drawing on it with a piece of chalk. Mr. Wigman pretends to see only the blackboard.
“See class, that is what they call a slate. In class you would write on that instead of paper, using chalk instead of a pencil.”
I can’t decide what is stranger, Mr. Wigman explaining things that we have seen every year since grade three (there are not that many different places to take field trips in Saskatoon) or Chauncey, stuck inside a tiny desk, pretending to be a student in 1910.
“Chauncey, what are you doing in there?” asks Heather.
“Just sitting. I’m sick of all this.”
Heather lifts her small jean leg over the rope and goes over to grab Chauncey by the arm. “C’mon, Chaunce, everyone is looking.”
“Who cares if they look?” Chauncey concentrates on his slate; he has drawn a sun on a straight-line horizon.
“Let’s move on!” Mr. Wigman says interrupting them. “You have free time from here on. We’ll meet back at the bus at three.”
The grade sevens file out of the classroom, except for Heather, Chauncey, and me.
“Take back what you said, Heather,” Chauncey says.
“Okay, I take it back.”
“But do you mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Totally.”
“C’mon, guys,” I say. “It’s not worth fighting over who can be my manager. I’m not exactly planning on doing anymore commercials.”
“But what if your dad finds you some?”
My dad? My father. The fact that he is still away and may never be coming back swings at my forehead and hits. I had forgotten for a bit. The dusty air of the old building feels instantly foreign within my nostrils. Strange. Unfamiliar. Like I am riding a time machine that only stops briefly in each place and takes away my memories when leaving for each new destination. Where am I now? Where is my father? Why would they make this fake town inside instead of outside?
“Maya, are you okay?” Heather asks. Chauncey has gotten up from the desk and they have both slid under the rope and are standing in front of me.
“Do you ever wonder what is really real?” I say. They both shake their heads no. I can’t tell them about my father. Not until I know for sure what’s happening — and what I’m going to do about it. Thinking about it too much gives me secret tears that I refuse to let loose.
By the gift shop there is a lady sleeping in a rocking chair. An old-fashioned lady made of paper or something. Her eyes are closed halfway and her head tilts towards the sky like she is trying to see while she naps on the porch. Like she is watching. Like she has no idea when it will be time to truly relax.
He comes back after all. Father. On Wednesday, and he’s carrying a pizza box when he walks through the door, only he’s holding it sideways under his arm instead of in the flat of his palm like he’s supposed to.
“There you are,” he says when he sees me. He’s tan. And he’s wearing a white linen shirt under his parka — I can see it poking out around his neck.
“Where else would I be, really?” I’m not looking at him when I say this but at the ceiling, at a tiny spot that needs repainting.
“At Mrs. Pretty’s!” he says, louder this time. There are red sparks springing out around his face. I have no idea what he is thinking, his voice is too loud. “I left you specific instructions, Maya. You were directed to go to Mrs. Pretty’s house.” He’s got a little vein pulsing on his temple like it might explode.
“Well, I didn’t go! Don’t pretend you care about me anymore. Not as much as Connie — dogface.”
“Maya, don’t say that about Connie. You like her, don’t you?” It’s like he’s begging when he says this.
“Just forget it. I hate you.”
“You don’t mean it,” he says as I go up the stairs. “After all I’ve done for you.” But I don’t come down.
My father eats the entire pizza himself and doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. Before I fall asleep, I decide it’s me who is not talking to him. I’m giving him the silent treatment. And if I could stop myself from hearing his stupid thoughts, I wouldn’t have to deal with him at all.
Chapter Eleven
It’s a miracle that an egg was even released at this stage of the game. This is what I heard my father think, and that’s how I knew it was true. My mother never wanted to acknowledge the pregnancy, though. Maybe she was pretending herself that it wasn’t real — like her own thoughts had some sort of power over how things really were. I hated her for not caring about the baby. That here was this tiny thing growing inside her, and she couldn’t even bother to try and get healthy again.
Mrs. Roughen returned to our house several times in the weeks that followed her first visit. She didn’t bring Elijah, which I was kind of glad about. Each time, she wanted more information from my mother about her future, which my mother made up, using it as a chance to say everything on her mind.
“Trudie, you have to stop being such a fake ass,” she told her, to which Mrs. Roughen only nodded like a jackhammer. “You need to shift your attention off of superficial things like your makeup and handbags. Your demise will come from your own ego.”
This wasn’t true at all. If my mother really could read Mrs. Roughen’s mind, she would know that all she thought about was her estranged husband, her son, and her hatred of herself.
Mrs. Roughen stopped wearing makeup entirely and instead let her wrinkles leave the house unfilled and her eyelids, unpainted.
It infuriated me that my mother was wasting her time with this game when she had more important things to worry about. Soon Mrs. Roughen started bringing other ladies she knew to talk with my mother: Mrs. Parchewski, Mrs. Bell, Mrs. Pretty — one by one they all traipsed in through my front door, removed their shoes, and followed Mrs. Roughen out to my mother’s teepee. Sometimes they would suck in their lips and shake their heads at me when they passed, th
inking, Poor, poor girl, she’s going to have to live without a mother.
When I saw these ladies, I would go up to my room to read Archie comics, simple tales of Betty and Veronica chasing a red-headed guy, while Jughead laughs about it. I had no interest in anything these ladies were thinking or what my mother was saying to them. But I did see from my bedroom window that they usually emerged hours later with tear marks on their faces and tissues wadded up in their fists.
I had entered a sort of dream world. Some mornings I would wake up and for the first instant I would forget what was going on. “Time for another day,” I would think in the seconds before I remembered. Until it slapped me in the face. My mother would soon be gone and I would be left alone with my father and maybe a baby to look after.
A week into the last month of school I saw Elijah in the hallway for the first time since the shed. He didn’t acknowledge me, not really. He only tipped his flat chin down slightly when I passed, and I looked the other way. Right behind him, dressed in cut-off jean shorts and a shirt that showed her belly button, was Jackie. Her lips shone with pink gloss and she had her thin arm linked with Diane’s. Diane — her new best friend. Jackie and Diane only smirked at me as they walked past, but I heard what Jackie whispered.
“I know her mom is dying and all, but it doesn’t mean I have to like her.” I stopped and turned, clutching my books to my chest.
“If you have something to say, why don’t you say it to my face,” I said this like Joan Collins would say it on Dynasty, loud with a hint of superiority.
“I have nothing to say to you,” Jackie said without turning back. She said it not to be cruel but as a statement, like she was saying, “I have finished my dinner.”
“Stop being such a bitch!” A male voice — Elijah. Elijah talking to Jackie, not me. Jackie’s face flushed when she saw that a boy in grade eight had spoken to her.
“Let’s just take a moment and think about who the real bitch is here,” she said.
“Why don’t you leave her the fuck alone?” Elijah was wearing a different Duran Duran T-shirt, and he had combed out his spikes into one mess of brown on top of his head.
“Gladly,” said Jackie. “I don’t want anything to do with her, to tell you the truth.” Beside her, Diane was frozen, probably worried about what kind of social suicide she had gotten herself into by taking Jackie on as a friend. They took long, proud steps away from Elijah together, their arms interlaced.
“What a bunch of losers,” Elijah said to me when they had turned the corner. He smiled, then winked at me, and I watched as he turned sharply and disappeared into the boys’ washroom.
Besides the times that Jackie and I exchanged subtle jabs in the hallway, I didn’t really talk to anyone at school when I was there. Why bother, really?
My only conversations were with my mother at home in the evenings when the “ladies” weren’t over and she convinced me to sit with her instead. And so we would sit. I would tell her about my days at school, and she would tell me about how her joints seemed to be stiffening up, her saliva drying up. And that would make me feel sorry for her despite all the things she said and did. She was my mother. Sometimes she would stroke my hair, like when I was little.
We didn’t talk about the baby.
Occasionally, if I was in the right mood, I lit candles for her. It seemed like a positive thing to do, to see the light from the flame reflecting around us, creating shadows of my mother and me. My favourite times were when it rained. Water pounded the canvas of the teepee like an army coming to protect us. It came in waves, gathering intensity and then diminishing like it had a plan all along. I learned then the power that liquid had to create a symphony that smelled like grass and flowers and all the goodness of the earth rolled into one breath.
My father brought it for her — the pregnancy test. He left it on the back of the toilet, waiting for one of the few times in the day she went inside the house to relieve herself. I saw it there. I even picked up the box and spun it around, holding it with fingers on each side. Pregnancy, accuracy, hold in urine stream, wait for results.
“Put that down!” my father yelled when he saw me holding it.
“What is it for?”
“That, my dear, is none of your business. And you should not concern yourself with something that is none of your business. Put it back and leave.”
“But I have to go.”
“Yes, get out.”
“No, I have to use the toilet.”
“Use it and get to school. You’re going to be late.”
“Already am.” I said shutting the door.
I didn’t go to school that day. When I heard my father’s car drive away, I sat in my room waiting for my mother to come in. I pulled the bathroom door open when she was still tying up her sheet.
“Well?” I asked her.
“Well what, Maya?”
“What does it say? The test.”
“It’s negative, of course.” And with that I knew that it was positive. Her body was making a baby. I knew, because after she told me it was negative, I heard for the first time, as clear as if she had spoken it, a thought from my mother’s head: Another baby. Shit. Another mistake.
I bit my lip.
“Let’s get you back out to the teepee,” I said putting my small hand on her arm and feeling the bones jut out from her elbow. Were new bones growing? Or were they the same old bones sticking out more. She pushed me away and inched by me with her elbows buried in her hands.
That night I dreamed about having a sister. She had red curly hair and cheeks that puffed out when she laughed. In the dream, my sister and I sat in a garden. I was the age I was, eleven, and she seemed to be about five, only she was small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. She was resting on the fleshy part of my thumb and we were looking at a white flower growing out of a pile of rocks. I reached out to pick the flower, but she stopped me.
“Be gentle,” she squeaked as the petals fell. “If you grab it, you won’t have any flower left.”
Then she began to cry — huge tears that created a thin stream in front of her in the grass. And her face began to change. Her skin turned from ivory to rotting and began to fall off, until she was just a tiny skeleton on my open hand. A skeleton that started to crackle and crumble until it turned to ash and the wind blew it away. Then it was me that was crying, in the dream and in the bed where I slept.
“Maya, Maya.” My father shook me by the shoulder, bringing me back to what was; I looked at him and chose to close my eyes again. I learned the next day that I had let out a scream that even my mother had heard from the backyard. I told them I dreamed that I was late for school and when I finally got there everyone was dead.
It took me two full days to realize it: when my mother died, my baby sister might go with her. I decided that since my mother was pretending she didn’t exist, it was up to me to try to help them both. I didn’t want to lose a mother, or a sister. Maybe this would be what would inspire my mother to hang on.
I went to the library at school and cracked open dusty health books looking only for one answer — how long does a baby have to be inside before it can live outside? I found what I needed in a blue copy of the Reader’s Digest Family Health Guide and Medical Encyclopedia. Under “pregnancy” it read:
“The condition of having a baby developing inside the body. Normally, pregnancy begins with the implantation of a fertilized egg cell on the inside wall of the uterus and ends, after about 280 days, with the birth of an infant. Given special care, survival is possible if the baby is born anytime after about twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy.”
I knew that twenty-eight weeks meant seven months and that my mother might not make it that long, if there was any truth to what the doctor had told us. My younger sister didn’t stand a chance.
When I got home that night, I wanted to yell at her to get to a hospital, take
some drugs, start taking care of herself, for frig’s sake. Start caring about something!
Instead, I wimped out and asked her to promise she would never leave me.
“I don’t want to leave you, Maya.”
“Are you sure?” I crossed my arms across my chest.
“Yes, Maya, you are my daughter. I will try to stay here.” She was sticking out her bottom lip just a little when she said it and wringing her hands like she had a secret.
But I knew the truth as well as I knew the pattern of blue veins in the folds of my own arms.
Mother spent more time sleeping in the mornings, her tiny knees pulled up to her gaunt chest. She rocked back and forth like a baby in her own mother’s arms. Eventually, when Mrs. Roughen came to the door, Mother would say she was too weak to see her. Once my father and I were eating salads with my mother in her teepee, balancing our plates on our knees, when my mother clutched her belly with both hands and arched her back.
“Your mother’s going to be sick, take her outside,” my father said and I tried to remember the moment he started talking about her like she wasn’t there. Like her tiny body was thinning into a memory — a memory that used to be his wife. I grabbed her by her arm (my fingers could touch round) and tugged. She cried, “Ouch!” and I winced. Did I want to prove that she could still feel?
She tiptoed on her knees until she reached the grass outside, where she leaned over and emptied her stomach into the green blades. Father and I looked right through one another. I crinkled my face and attempted to jump inside his head — the more I tried, the louder the silence buzzed between us. Instead, I scanned the teepee and spotted a laminated card face up on the small table beside the bed — a faded picture of Jesus on the cross, his hands and heart dripping with blood — had someone brought it for her? And on the floor, a small fern with tiny vines and peaked leaves, wet from watering, trying to reach out and kiss the ground. Beside the chair where my father sat, a tub of Vaseline which my mother had been spreading on her dry lips, trying to bring the moisture back.
Girl in Shades Page 9
