Girl in Shades

by Allison Baggio

  My mother was reading and I was playing solitaire, my kings and queens laid out on the floor of the teepee. I had helped my mother into the house only once that morning, to use the toilet. The thinness of her body as she squatted on the toilet seat made me feel relieved when she settled back into the padding of her bed. We had all the flaps open, and two fans blowing summer air through the space. I brought her ice chips from the refrigerator, which she traced over the outline of her features to cool off.

  “Mother, what are you doing here?” My own mother said this when she saw hers standing at the opening of the teepee, her body framed by the outside world.

  “Marigold, I swear, it’s absolutely stagnant in here.” Grandmother McCann put her small brown suitcase down and immediately started to lift the window and door flaps back further and aim the fans in new directions.

  “What do you want?” Mother said, her words written on an imaginary white flag waving in front of her eyes.

  “And the décor is completely depressing. You couldn’t have dressed it up a bit?” Grandma McCann reached into her bag, took out a Bible and placed it on my mother’s small table. “That’s better,” she said, standing back to examine it.

  “Maya, this is your Grandmother McCann,” my mother said, and I looked at the old woman standing above me.

  “Well, of course she remembers me,” Grandma McCann said, reaching down to tap her index finger on my bare shoulder. “I helped look after her the first months of her life.”

  “We’ve been here more than ten years, Mother.”

  It was true. I hadn’t seen her since I was a baby and it was hard to be sure about that because I had no memory of it.

  “Whether you like it or not, I’m here for you now, Marigold. For both of you.” She sat down on the corner of the bed and put her hand on my mother’s stomach.

  “Who told you?” Mother said, shifting her mother’s hand.

  “There was an article in the Toronto Star, dear. About the people sleeping outside your home trying to help you. About your quest to save your unborn child. I booked my flight as soon as I heard.”

  “So it wasn’t enough to visit because I had cancer?” My mother was sitting up then, not yelling exactly, but speaking louder than she had all week. My father’s voice came in from just outside the door.

  “Everything all right in there, Marigold?”

  “It’s fine, Steven.”

  “Marigold, I never knew you had a sort of . . . what do they call it, sixth sense?”

  “I don’t, Mother. It was just a misunderstanding.”

  I turned to the wall and rolled my eyes. So she admits it, I thought.

  It was quiet then between us. Three generations creating a triangle on the ground — my mother, my grandmother (the woman my own mother would never become), and me (the young girl my little sister would never be able to grow into). I imagined her scratching at the inside of my mother’s stomach, trying to get out. Or taking really deep breaths to try to be ready in time. I decided to be the biggest one of us all.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Grandmother McCann,” I said as I shook her warm hand. “I have heard virtually nothing about you.”

  “She’s a cheeky one isn’t she, Marigold?”

  “Mother please . . . this is not the time.”

  “It is nice to make your acquaintance as well, Maya Devine.”

  She took her hand back, folded her arms, and wiped her fingers under her armpit.

  The heat turned so intense when my grandmother was visiting that we had to move my mother’s bed out of the teepee and into the open yard so she could catch some air. I slept beside her in the bed in my sleeping bag. Grandmother McCann protested for almost half an hour when she learned about mother sleeping outside. “For goodness’ sake, just come in the house, Marigold. You’re acting like a crazy woman,” she said, but my mother insisted and eventually Grandmother McCann settled into my own bed for the night.

  “Grandmother McCann doesn’t seem to like me very much,” I said to my mother when we had settled down for the night.

  “It’s not about you, really. She just has certain things she can’t get past.”

  “Like the fact that we moved to Saskatoon?”

  “We had to move, Maya. We needed a new start.”

  “But why?”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. People do the best they can, Maya. Just remember that. People do the best they can . . .” her voice faded out and I rested my head into the crook of her neck.

  While my mother wheezed in her slumber, I stared at the stars coating the sky. One particular star seemed to reach out to me. It wasn’t round like the others. No, it had points and was brighter than the rest. When I smiled at it, it swelled up, until it seemed to be sitting in the yard, almost touching me. I opened my eyes wider with excitement as its glow rippled warmth into my whole body, guiding me into sleep.

  “There is a young woman at the front door for you, Maya,” Grandmother McCann announced the next morning. I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom sink, examining the braids my grandmother had weaved on either side of my head after my shower.

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know, but she would like to speak to you.”

  I pounded down the stairs to see her standing at the front door, leaning onto one hip. Jackie. I hadn’t seen her since the day my mother’s teepee had been vandalized.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Where’s your new best friend Diane?”

  “Summer camp,” Jackie said. She was holding something wrap-ped in tin foil. “My mother asked me to bring you this. It’s a banana loaf.” I took the silver brick of cake in my hand and looked at her.

  “Why?”

  “As some sort of peace offering, I guess. I saw your mom on TV.” She was looking at the door frame above my head and fiddling with the jelly bracelets on her wrist. “And she, I mean I, realized that life was too short to be at odds with those whom we once called friends.” I stood, baffled by her strange language. I raised the loaf to my nose and took a sniff; it smelled good enough.

  “Thank you, Jackie,” I said. She continued talking.

  “And that you don’t need me as your enemy because soon you won’t even have a mother or a brother or sister.”

  That was enough. I swung my arm over me and hurled the banana loaf at her head. It hit her above her left eyebrow and fell to the ground with a thud.

  “I told you before — just go away,” I screamed. “I don’t want to talk to anyone right now.”

  She put her hand to her face and slapped me with the other one.

  “You are a sucky loser! And your mother’s a freak!”

  I kicked her between the legs with a bare foot and she charged me, landing on top of me inside the door, swatting at my head.

  “What on earth is going on here?” Grandma McCann stood behind us, grabbed Jackie, and attempted to separate us. “Let up there, I’m an old woman.” Finally Jackie was on her feet, and Grandma McCann helped me up beside her.

  “She deserved it!” Jackie said.

  “No one deserves that kind of treatment, young lady. I suggest you run along home now and tell your mother what you have done. And have an extra long chat with Jesus before you go to sleep tonight. You better hope he’s going to forgive you for this.”

  Jackie turned and walked away, her yellow summer top ripped at the collar, her rolled up jean shorts sagging around the bottoms. “What was that about, Maya?” Grandma McCann asked when Jackie was gone.

  “She said mean things about Mother.”

  “Everyone is entitled to an opinion,” she said leaning down over the front step, unwrapping the silver package, and bringing it to her nose. “Ah, look, banana loaf.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “More for me then. Come, let’s take this out to your moth
er.” She put her hand on my shoulder and for some reason, I reached up to hold it. For some other reason, she looked down at me and smiled, making space so I could see her crooked teeth.

  Like the many well-wishers who had lit candles on the street in front of our house, Grandmother McCann had come with a miracle cure for my mother’s condition too. Prayer. And she forced her into it. Literally put her down on her knees beside her bed, opened the Bible, and asked her to read it out loud for us all to hear. It was just after lunch and the sun was heating up the outside of the teepee like a grey sidewalk.

  “Mother, I don’t want to pray. I feel too weak to be out of bed right now.”

  “Marigold, you are never too weak for Jesus. He lifts you up when you need him. Now come on, read, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want —’”

  “I’m serious, Eleanor. I don’t need this.”

  Grandma McCann closed the book. “What did you call me?”

  “Your name, Mother. I called you Eleanor, your name.”

  “Never call me that again. I will always be Mother to you.” She opened the Bible again. “Maybe you would like to pick the passage. Whatever you are drawn to.”

  “Mother reads the Bhagavad Gita instead,” I said then.

  “The what?”

  “Never mind. Never mind what I read. I read the Bible like you.”

  “Of course you do,” Grandma McCann said. She changed the subject by deciding that my mother needed to take a bath. “The water will cleanse her soul and get rid of the guilt that has been building up.”

  “What guilt might you be referring to?” my mother said in response.

  “That is between you and Jesus, Marigold.”

  We carried her into the bathroom and I started to unbutton her while Grandmother McCann ran the water into the tub. Tumbling water echoed through the hollow room.

  “Maya, I can undress myself,” she said. But her arms had trembled as she slipped them out from under her shirt and slid her cotton shorts down over her knees and onto the floor.

  “I’ll add some bubbles,” Grandma McCann said, pouring out a dusty pink bottle that had been stashed under the sink (my father had given it to me for Christmas when I was five). Soon, white lavender clouds filled the bathtub and my mother slipped her fragile bones between them and into the water.

  While she soaked, my grandmother and I talked.

  “So Maya, who was that girl this morning?”

  “We used to be friends.”

  “And you’re not anymore?”

  “She turned into a bitch.”

  “Language, Maya!”

  “Sorry, she turned into a really not nice person. She keeps intruding with Mother.”

  “Have you tried everything to make up with her?”

  “I don’t want us to make up.”

  “Maya, one thing you will learn in life. It is very important to have friends. People you can confide in.”

  “But I have Mother.” I looked down at the tub, shocked to see only bubbles. My mother’s face had slipped underneath.

  “Marigold!” my grandmother screamed, reaching underneath. My mother came up, gasping for air, slapping the water with her hands so it splashed up around us. We lifted her out of the tub, onto the pink bathmat, and wrapped her in a towel. Grandma McCann rubbed her shoulders while she shook. “There, there, Mari. You are going to be okay. You must have just fallen asleep is all.” And then I heard it, from inside my grandmother’s head: My poor baby girl. You have made such a mess of your life.

  I shunned her for the rest of the day.

  Death does funny things to people; for my grandmother, it seemed to make her busy. Over the next week (one of my mother’s last), she scrubbed the toilet several times a day, almost like she had forgotten it was already done. She did laundry the second the clothes hit the hamper, got groceries, and made my father and me dinner every night. It was after one of those dinners that she bought her ticket home. I was listening from the living room as Grandmother McCann sat with my father at the kitchen table. He was eating roast beef, mashed potatoes, and baby carrots. She had made it all for him. He was still wearing his tie, having just gotten in from work, and it was hanging untied around his neck like a skinny scarf. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring — that’s when I left the room and heard them talking:

  “Eleanor, I have to say this dinner is like nothing I have ever had,” my father said.

  “Not since your own mother made it for you, I’m sure. How is Frances?”

  “Mom and Dad are fine. They retired out to PEI years ago. Well, you know that.”

  “I have a vague recollection, yes. And your younger sister . . . what was her name?”

  “Leah. Leah’s doing okay. She’s with them. Trying to decide between universities right now.”

  “Marvellous. I’m sure she’ll have a wonderful future.”

  Then the conversation turned to me. I heard it myself from the floor of the living room, tilting my head towards the kitchen to make sure I didn’t miss any (they thought I was with Mother in the backyard).

  “And Maya,” Grandmother McCann said. “Do you expect that Maya will be able to attend university some day?”

  “I don’t see why not, Eleanor, if she chooses to. Why?”

  “No reason, Steven. It’s just that, who knows what kind of genes she’s carrying around.”

  Silence from the kitchen. And then my father: “Eleanor, I would appreciate it if you would never make such a comment about my daughter again. You’re lucky we’re letting you near her at all.” (He spoke in a harsh whisper and she answered back in the same, which may be one of the reasons I was able to block the conversation out in later years. Like if it happens in a whisper, there might be more of a chance that it didn’t happen at all.)

  “Steven, I can assure you I meant no disrespect. You know I’m sorry for all that, I wasn’t in my right mind back then — the heartache I’ve carried. You certainly didn’t have to leave and make it worse.”

  A pause. My father is thinking that he hates this woman.

  “I can assure you, Maya will be fine. We’ve made sure of it.”

  “And have her looks posed any sort of problems in school?”

  “Excuse me, her looks?”

  “Yes, the coloured skin. That’s most definitely not from anyone in our family.”

  “No, Eleanor, her skin colour has not posed any problems. Thank you for your concern.” My father’s voice was getting louder, and I thought I heard a piece of cutlery drop onto his plate. I took a step back from where I knelt on the carpeting.

  “I know it’s uncomfortable, but I had to address it. After all, I told you from the beginning it would not be smooth sailing, raising that child.”

  “She is my child, Eleanor!” This was said very loudly, and was followed by my father’s plate crashing to the ground and bits of carrots and gravy flying around the room and into where I was in the living room. My father stormed out to the backyard and my grandmother stayed at the table. I walked in a few minutes later to find her dabbing the corner of her eyes with a Kleenex.

  “What’s wrong with Father?” I asked her.

  “He’s haunted by the past is all, Maya. As we all are. As you will be one day.” She crossed her thin legs at the ankle and showed her bravery by tucking a grey strand of hair behind her ear. I started to pick up the pieces of carrots that had flown from my father’s plate into the living room, placing them one by one into the palm of my hand.

  The back door opened and in came my mother, limping in on the arm of her husband.

  She walked to where Grandmother Eleanor sat on the couch, lifted and dropped her shoulders in one heavy breath and said: “Mother, I thank you for cutting through all your past misgivings about my family to come and be with me at the final stages of my illness. But I’m afraid I m
ust ask you to leave now. I will no doubt see you in heaven one day.”

  My grandmother cried real tears then, which she tried to soak up with the side of her hand. Her light was a very murky grey and close to her body. She started to whisper like a mother to her little girl: “But Marigold, I love you. You’re my daughter.” And when she said it, I saw splotches of pink around her face, which told me that she really meant it. I suppose she was just doing the best she could.

  I couldn’t get past the two words that had come from my mother’s mouth. Those two words that sounded so irreversible: final stages.

  The next night, Grandmother McCann took the red-eye flight back to Toronto. She left my father meals for four nights, arranged in Tupperware in the freezer.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Elijah takes me on the St. Clair streetcar down a street with tall trees and to his house. It’s a half-house, connected to another, ancient, brick, painted red with a wooden front porch in need of repair. We walk through the front door, and there behind the kitchen counter, is Mrs. Roughen: she’s dressed in a purple sweatshirt, her hair hanging limply on her shoulders, no jewellery.

  “Hi, Mrs. Roughen.” I slip off my worn penny loafers and hold my backpack close in front of my chest for protection.

  “Well, I never, in all my life . . . Maya! Let me look at you.”

  I just smile, trying to forget about how she used my mother in an attempt to become someone important, and trying to remember how sad she really was, and how she tried to listen when Mother needed someone to talk to.

  She comes out from behind the counter. Her hands are covered in flour but she puts them on my shoulders anyway. “A little skinny and you need a trim.” She holds my split ends up to the light. “But you look good, Maya. It’s great to see you.” Mrs. Roughen has tears in her eyes. She wraps her arms around me and hugs. “You remind me a lot of your mother,” she says from over my shoulder.

  “Okay, lay off, Mom. She’s not some sort of specimen,” Elijah says.