Girl in Shades

by Allison Baggio

  “You’re right. Maybe I should thank him for it.”

  “He likes you, Maya. In his weird little way, he likes you.” She laid her head back down on bed, and held her book up with her straight arms. “New growths upspringing to that happier sky — which they who reach shall have no day to die.”

  “Stop reading that,” I said.

  “It’s just a matter of time now, Maya,” she told me, and I shook my head and covered my ears.

  “When it happens, remember that my soul will be free.”

  “But I need you,” I said. She smiled sadly.

  “Maya, I’m sorry that I slapped you the other day. It was wrong and I wanted you to know that.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Now, can you get me a paper, pen, and envelope from the house?” I went and got it for her. Father was hunched over the kitchen table reading papers.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “She wants paper. She wants to write something down.” I slid open a kitchen drawer and rifled my hands around.

  “Make her eat something,” he said.

  “Why don’t you go in yourself?” I asked and he told me that he was taking a break. I wondered when that became an option.

  When I got back outside, she was sniffing aromatherapy oil from one of the bottles lined up on her desk. She had an incense cone burning and the healing stones tucked into both her palms.

  “Is it helping?” She shrugged and took the paper and pen from my hand. She used slow strokes to carve out something on the page, something from her book. Then she folded the paper down as small as she could, put it in the envelope and handed it to me.

  “I want you to read this out loud at the very end.” Her quartz stone fell from her hand and created a hollow plunk off the leg of the chair. I picked it up, feeling her delicate warmth on my fingers and handed it back to her.

  “I will read it, Mother,” I said to appease her. And I heard her desperate sobs from inside her head.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Aunt Leah and I take a taxi from the Pearson Airport into the city, speeding on cement highways with only a pale yellow line for protection from those going the other way. Lined up along the road, tall, square buildings reflect sunshine from their mirrored windows and the occasional tree struggles to grow through the roadside dust.

  “Try to get some sleep if you want,” she says to me, leaning her round face against the window frame.

  “I’m okay.” I want to stay awake. I breathe in air through my mouth and get a throat full of gas fumes from the cracked window. The dark-skinned driver exits at Keele Street and we drive south, through a maze of closely lined houses and decrepit storefront signs for things like hair weaves, fresh fish, and Fine Ladies Fashions. We zoom past sidewalks crowded with people who all seem to be trying get places, fast — people with torn jeans and acid wash jackets, black ladies with high heels, men with moustaches and beards that drop down past their chins, mothers pushing shopping carts and dragging young children by the hand. All kinds.

  By the time we reach Aunt Leah’s apartment building, I have had it. The adrenaline from the flight, and reading my mother’s journal, has sapped the energy from me. We have to get the cab to pull into the alley behind the building so we can unload our stuff (just the picnic basket for me, plus my other suitcase that Aunt Leah carries with her own backpack); there are too many cars flying by out front to do it there. I can even hear a streetcar rattling by as I swing open my door and step out. November is warmer in this giant city. No snow on the ground. I can’t see my breath when I breathe. Just like a cool September day in Saskatoon. It’s like I’ve gone back in time.

  We struggle up one dusty flight of stairs into the plain hallway that holds the brown door that belongs to Aunt Leah.

  I stand clutching my picnic basket while Aunt Leah fumbles with the lock.

  “Usually sticks a bit, but I’ll get it eventually.” Her shoulder-length hair is pulled back with a black elastic and she has rolled up the sleeves of her jacket.

  The hallway is narrow, suffocating. Cooking smells float out of the cracks under each door and mix in the air around us: curry, fried beef, burnt toast, rotten lettuce.

  “Got it!” Leah says, pushing the door open with her hip. “This is it.”

  The first thing that hits me is the thick heat, plugging up my nostrils. The rooms of the apartment sit in a long row: kitchen to our left, dining room leads to the living room, past a bathroom to two tiny bedrooms. Each room is painted a different colour: red kitchen, orange dining room, yellow living room, green bathroom, blue for the first bedroom, a darker shade of blue for the final bedroom.

  “They’re painted the colours of the Chakra centres,” Aunt Leah says. “Cool, eh? We needed another room for violet so I just made violet curtains.” She walks to the living room window and grabs a purple piece of fabric draped in front.

  I shrug and put my basket and paper bag on the floor by the midnight blue couch.

  Footsteps from the darker blue bedroom, and a tiny woman walks barefoot across the hardwood towards us, tentatively.

  “Buffy! We’re back.” The woman, who is wearing plastic glasses, square and dark and blocked at the sides, smiles and raises one thin arm in the air to wave. She must be under five feet tall (much shorter than me, I think I’m almost five-six) and her arms jut out of her shoulders like twigs. I know I could clasp my fingers around one of her biceps if I tried. She is wearing a tank top and running shorts with a stripe down the side. Her legs are dotted with bruises and red splotches. Around her ankle is a black tattoo with the words I see with my heart. (I have to tilt my head to see the word “heart” because it is written on the back of her ankle.) Her red hair is pulled back with a scrunchie and the skin on her face seems translucent, like you can see blue blood flowing through veins.

  “Maya, this is my roommate, Buffy.”

  “Hi Maya,” Buffy says and extends her fingers so they hang in the air near my face. I reach out to grab them.

  “Hi.”

  “Maya will be staying with us while her father gets himself sorted out.”

  “Nice,” Buffy says. Her head is turned towards the living room window, which looks out at a brick wall.

  “Why is it so hot in here?”

  “Something’s wonky with the AC in this building,” Buffy says. “You’ll get used to it, just have to dress skimpy.” Buffy and Aunt Leah laugh together as Aunt Leah removes her jacket, polka dot blouse, and pants and throws them both on the floor. She sits down in only her underwear and bra.

  “This is the best thing about having a blind roommate,” Aunt Leah says. “You can walk around naked all the time.”

  They laugh again together. Aunt Leah’s giggles fade out before Buffy’s.

  “Leah, you kill me!” Buffy says, tracing her fingertips on the wall as she walks into the kitchen.

  When Buffy is fiddling with things in the sink, Aunt Leah looks at me. “So kid, I’m afraid you’ll have to take the couch.” She rubs her hands over the velvet beside her naked thigh. “It’s actually quite comfortable once you’re used to not stretching out too much.”

  I swallow, heat, and feel my eyes filling up.

  “Hey kid, what’s wrong?” She pulls me down beside her.

  “Nothing. It’s just that I miss stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “My house, my friends, Mother, Father.”

  “You can’t focus on that right now, Maya. It will only make you sad.” She tucks a strand of my dark hair behind my ear. “Besides, you only just got here.”

  “Toronto smells,” I say.

  “I’ll give you that. Toronto does smell in some places, but I promise you that there are a lot of perfectly fragrant places to visit, and we’re going to find them all, right?”

  “Okay.”

 
“You’ll see, it’ll be great.”

  “Aunt Leah, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you ever hear anything about my mother and an Indian man?”

  “No, of course not. What are you talking about?” She stands up.

  “Before she married Father, about her getting together with him and having . . . sex.” I whisper the word “sex” because I think it is one of the first times I have said it out loud. I wouldn’t even know the word at all if it wasn’t for Mother and the seminar she took me to at the library when I was seven: “Putting the Lust Back in Your Sex Life.”

  “Maya, I have no idea what you are talking about.” Aunt Leah looks back and forth several times turning her head. “I don’t know where you would have gotten such a crazy idea, and really, I don’t think you should be talking that way about your mother. I mean, she’s only been gone a year. Let her rest in peace. She deserves that.”

  “Sorry I asked.”

  “And yuck, as if your mother would degrade herself with some sort of sordid affair and have sex with someone she didn’t even love.”

  Aunt Leah barks out a fake cough, stands up, and jerks like she’s stretching a kink from her neck. I watch her go back into the light blue bedroom, thinking for some reason how strange it is that I’ve never known her to have a boyfriend of her own — except Corey Hart, if he counts — and from what I can hear from inside her head, she could probably use a nice boy around to call her beautiful once in a while.

  Later we eat dinner together, Aunt Leah, Buffy, and I, at a round card table with a plastic red-checkered tablecloth. The purple around Buffy’s head seems to be mixing with the red around Aunt Leah’s, but I wonder whether they are both just reflections from the walls and curtains.

  Buffy was the one to cook, which I find amazing because she can’t even see which temperature the stove is at, or which is even the right knob.

  Buffy made spaghetti with marinara sauce, which we all slurp up. Specs of red sauce land on Buffy’s black glasses as she inhales the strings of pasta. Finally, Aunt Leah speaks: “Buffy used to be a Corey Hart fan too. Tell her, Buffy.”

  “He’s got a gorgeous voice, don’t you think, Maya?”

  “We had a bit of a falling out,” I say.

  “My tastes have changed, too. I’m more into Madonna now

  . . . and Whitney Houston. I like country and western as well, even though it’s supposedly this incredibly uncool thing. Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton — they got the emotion, man. Love it!” As she talks, Buffy’s head tilts towards the ceiling and her fork flings mushroom bits around the table.

  “Buffy is a photography student,” Aunt Leah says and I look at her as if to say, “How?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Maya,” Buffy says. “How on earth does a blind girl take photography? I don’t blame you for thinking that, because if I didn’t know it could be done, I probably would wonder myself. Lord knows I doubted the idea at first. But who am I to mess with my inner voice?”

  “How do you do it?” I say, my words slipping out slowly. She howls with high-pitched laughter; the sounds coming out seem bigger than her whole body. Aunt Leah smiles and slurps in spaghetti.

  “Good question, Maya. Very good question. The answer is, I don’t see it, I experience it. I can capture beauty by smelling, touching, feeling, sensing. It really is better than someone seeing something, categorizing it, naming it, analyzing it. I skip all that part and simply feel what there is to feel — a tree, a bird, a meadow, a bowl of bananas, whatever. I snap it and let other people do the analyzing. It’s my way of letting people see what I see.”

  “But how do you work all the technical parts and focusing and stuff?”

  “Practice, my dear, lots of practice and memorization. Lord knows I had to work hard to convince York to even let me into the program.”

  “She took that!” Aunt Leah says this with her mouth still full, pointing to a black and white photo framed on the wall above the sink in the kitchen.

  It’s a picture of an old man, his eyes hidden under wrinkles, a single tear sitting in a groove on his cheek.

  “It’s my grandfather. That was taken only a few days before he died of prostate cancer.”

  “My mother died from cancer too. Of the cervix.”

  “Cancer gets so many of us. All that guilt and resentment eating us up.”

  “Maya’s mother had no guilt.” Aunt Leah says this with way too much emphasis. “Her death almost made her a Canadian celebrity. She had so many people trying to help her.”

  “She had a baby growing inside when she was dying,” I say to Buffy, though I’m not sure why.

  Buffy takes off her dark glasses and puts them on the table. She reaches over and grabs my hands.

  I look into her dead eyes — unsteady eyes that wobble.

  “Maya, I am sending you strength through my fingertips. Wait for it.”

  We sit in silence. Aunt Leah chewing, Buffy sending, and me waiting.

  Aunt Leah leaves at around 10:00 for her job. She wears heels, a blue shirt that rests off her shoulders, and a black skirt that only reaches her thighs. Her hair is down and hair-sprayed and her face is caked in makeup.

  “I’m a perfume girl at the Bay,” she says when I ask. “You know, spraying people when they walk by or giving them little cards of Poison or Gloria Vanderbilt. I have to get dressed up because the better I look, the more people will like the perfume.”

  “But isn’t the Bay closed at night?” I ask.

  “It’s a midnight extravaganza,” Aunt Leah says like I should have known. “It happens a lot and only the real committed ones get to work. All night, everything is on sale, including perfume, which means I am going to be really busy. Better get my squirting finger ready.” She points her index finger and bends it three times like it is doing push-ups. She does it with a solemn face, like her finger is out to get her.

  As far as I can tell, Aunt Leah never figured out what she wanted to take in university.

  “So make yourself comfortable, Maya. I’ll be home before you know it. And tomorrow we can go shopping.”

  “Whatever,” I say, hugging a pillow on the couch. A lamp rattles from the streetcar passing outside.

  When she leaves I notice there is no television, and I almost chase her through the hall and down the front steps of the apartment building to tell her but decide that it can wait.

  When the apartment is dark for the first time, I wake to hear Buffy’s voice swelling up through the blackness. The words sound as if they are being spoken from the end of a long copper tunnel, sentences jagged and illogical. Lying still in my couch-bed, I soon realize that the incoherent sounds I hear are not from her mouth, but are her thoughts, her mind, echoing out from inside her head.

  They must be the dialogue of her dreams.

  I have never heard someone’s thoughts when they were sleeping. Maybe it is because the apartment is so small, and Buffy is in her bed just down the hall. Either way, her internal wisdom comforts me.

  “Resistance shatters” are the first words I hear. And then, “Nature lives in silent moments. Touch the ground. Try to feel the sky, because it is you. Eat vegetables whenever you can.”

  When I focus on them, Buffy’s words drown out my own worries regarding my mother’s notebook (which is stuffed under the velvet couch until I am ready to read the rest) and the other upsetting things that circulate themselves through my mind: my mother’s face when they closed her coffin, my father crying, ladies surrounding a teepee with candles, Elijah scowling at his mother, being sick in an empty house.

  Buffy’s mind continues to ramble incoherently. “Peace out, peace in, peace everywhere. Always wipe from front to back.” Eventually, the rhythm of the strange syllables soothes me into sleep.

  Leah comes back at 3 a.m. I can tell by the clock
on the bookcase. I close my eyes when she shuts the door and pretend to be sleeping while she slinks across the floor to her bedroom.

  I don’t smell any perfume.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  November 29, 1972

  The last two days I have spent in bed. Thinking, crying, swearing. I can’t bear to smell myself — primordial rot — I need to take a shower before maggots start growing in my armpits. I’m completely tattered.

  He’s gone. Amar. He took me and now he’s gone.

  What an incredible phony he was. But I liked him. Loved him?

  I am thinking (as I lie here) about how good it felt when I fell asleep in his arms. On that tacky sofa inside that cabin. It’s embarrassing now to think, but I imagined us falling asleep like that forever. Except in a nicer room — a master bedroom. He was so smart. Maybe too smart: he figured out how to trick me into getting close to him, naked in the snow. Into thinking he wasn’t just a stripped down, fancy-talking Casanova.

  I miss him.

  I have spoken to Steven once on the phone. Yesterday. I told him nothing was wrong and that I have merely come down with a flu-type thing that has confined me to my bed. And that no, I do not want any company because I am afraid I may be contagious. And what I have, he doesn’t want to catch.

  He wants to talk. About the other night when we were supposed to go to Roland’s together. About the hours I went missing. About my mother crying when she answered the phone. I told him that talk was overrated. That I’ll talk to him when I’m ready.

  November 30, 1972

  They both showed up in my bedroom last night, Amar in my dream when I was napping, feeding me grapes from his fingertips, and Steven, in the flesh, standing at the end of my bed after walking right into my house and slamming the door to my bedroom open. He has nerve, I tell you.

  What’s going on? he asked. His eyes were wide and intense, like he was trying to trap me inside them.