Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

  Ma is wearing a dress nipped in at the waist, the same dress she wore the night she met him. Even after a baby she was skinny. The dress looks white in the photo but she told me it was light blue. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in my shoe.

  Your father liked that rhyme, she said. She showed me how to write some characters—加拿大 for Jia-na-da, and 爱 for love. She knew the numbers up to twenty. She used to say, Can you imagine? You need three thousand characters to read a newspaper. The wedding photo was taken somewhere near Barton Street. There are steel mills behind, probably the old Dominion Foundries. Wispy snow blows around their ankles on the sidewalk like pretty little snake-ghosts. Ma’s face is not open like I imagined the face of a happy bride should be. She is turned from the camera, toward him, and her lips are not loose and smiling but tight.

  Why aren’t you holding hands?

  Wasn’t he good looking? she asked. He lined the walls of our place with brown parcel paper to make it cozier. It was like living inside a present. He was the first person I ever saw cook garlic. He used to tape newspaper on the walls around the stove to catch any splatter, and he always kept his shirt tucked in, even at home. The night before I got arrested I lit candles at dinner and he said it made him think of temples and spirits. I was going to tell him about being pregnant that night but I held back because I thought I’d buy something for a baby and leave it around and see if he guessed. I wanted to have some fun with it.

  She handed the photo to me and said, Us holding hands was not acceptable in those days. A lot of things were not acceptable then. I used to walk so my shoulder touched his through our coats.

  Ma got a job in the coffee shop at the Royal Connaught Hotel on the corner of King and John in Hamilton. She rented our basement apartment in a little clapboard house in a respectable neighbourhood on Mountain Brow from old Mrs. Rose and her grown-up daughter Lily whose young husband was killed in the war. Their shoes click-clicked above us every night and Ma used to make fun of them but we always had Sunday lunch together upstairs in their dining room. Lily called us the four dames and she taught me to play hearts. Ma was afraid Mrs. Rose would not rent to Henry, so she said he wasn’t around right now. During the war people did not ask too many questions. Better to marry and divorce. She had to beg a credit union to give her a bank account where she could cash her paycheques. Most banks wanted a husband or a father to sign for a girl’s account.

  Ma said, I was frantic when I first got out. I had no money and I needed to find work and a place to live and a way to take care of a baby. They did everything they could to make me give you up but I fought tooth and nail for you.

  She was long limbed and she painted her fingernails and toenails and lips all the same shade of red. She was so thin her own mother used to say, You look like a washboard. She smoked more than she ate and her cigarette butts were always smeared with red lipstick. I’m built lanky too. In anything scoop-necked you can see the bones on my chest and around my shoulders. I gave up trying to look sexy because you need flesh for that. My skin’s not as white as hers. Ma always said burnished and she meant it kindly. On her day off she put cotton balls between her toes and she twisted her hair into big spiky rollers. She smelled of stale smoke and Nivea cream. She tied a scarf printed with little Scottie dogs over her hair when she was setting it, and she balanced her burning cigarette on an ashtray shaped like a music note and she waved her fingers in the air to dry her polish quicker while her toes set. I got my height from her. Her hair was chestnut and she said it thinned out when she got pregnant but I think it probably thinned out when she was in the reformatory because they kept the girls hungry. The visiting doctors did experimental treatments on them for venereal disease and if any girl complained about waiting in line half-naked, or squirmed during the internal cauterizing, the matrons made her sit in a closet. Ma got locked in a closet for a full day because they forgot she was in there. I think that would thin out your hair. My hair is poker straight and black. When I was sixteen I permed it out big and wild and I’ve always kept it that way. Some people think it makes me look half black or something. I have large hands and large feet that go with my tallness and Ma said those hands must come from her mother’s side of the family who, way back, were big-boned Irish potato farmers.

  Before I was two, my father left a folded piece of paper with neat printing for Ma at the hotel:

  Dear Jenny,

  Life here too hard, I must go back. I never forget you.

  Your husband, Henry

  The people who condemned Ma lived scot-free—her father, the social worker, the police officer, the judge. But Ma got herself a respectable job in a good hotel, her own apartment and a bank account. We had one of the first televisions on the street. She always talked about being independent, as if it were some kind of specialized state not available to most women. Our neighbour Nan took care of me when I was a baby and Ma worked double shifts on weekends to pay her. Nan used to say, What’s one more? I don’t have any other way to get my own money, and she helped us a lot. I think she secretly envied Ma working. Her job was taking care of me and three sons, Mac, Eddie and Little Johnny, and her husband who was Big Johnny and worked shifts in the mills rolling steel. They had tin foil on the bedroom window so Johnny could sleep in the daytime and us kids had to keep quiet. Nan was the family Ma and I did not have. Little Johnny was a few years older than I was but I always seemed to be organizing him and Ma laughed and said, Just like a girl, trying to run things.

  Nan said, You’re lucky you got a girl.

  One time they were drinking instant coffee at Nan’s Arborite table when I heard Ma say, Getting married didn’t work for me. The deck’s stacked against a married woman.

  It’s not that bad, Jenny.

  I was hanging back by the counter and they hadn’t shooed me away so I asked, Hey, Nan, how’d you meet Big Johnny?

  They both looked around because they hadn’t noticed me I guess. Nan laughed and said, I grew up beside Johnny.

  Nan, will you do my Tarot?

  Not for you yet, she said. You’re too young. I’ll do your ma’s if she wants.

  I liked watching it and I hoped the High Priestess would come up because I liked the blue gown and the crescent moon at her feet.

  As she was laying out the cards I said, I hope you get the Priestess.

  Nan said in her low, mysterious voice that she always used for Tarot, You can’t control fate.

  Ma said, Get money for me. I want to start my own shop. I wanted admission to their grown-up women life. I played with the boys but they did not talk much. I hung around and listened because I never knew things about Ma like she wanted money and a shop. I thought she liked our life. Why didn’t she tell me what she wanted?

  Ma’s solution about a lot of things was to lock up her heart and keep her real self hidden. How many women have done that to protect their children? To make their own lives possible?

  Nan started turning over the cards and I said, Find out when my father’s coming back.

  I saw the look between them and I felt the moment ruined and I did not know why because we had been having fun. Ma said in her firm voice, He’s working in China, Katie. Don’t you worry, he’ll be back.

  After that Nan rushed and turned a few cards and saw lots of money in Ma’s future and then she said, Do me a favour, Katie, and go see what Little Johnny’s doing.

  There is a tone in women’s voices that stops their children pursuing. I was secure with Ma and Nan and I accepted their silences and diversions as the way things had to be. I liked living on Mountain Brow and I was good at school and I liked going to the big library with the wide stone steps downtown and meeting Ma at the Connaught and taking the bus home with her. When she tucked me in at night she said, Sometimes in the winter and sometimes in the fall, I sleep between the sheets with nothing on at all. I liked our cozy apartment and our Sunday lunches and card games with the dames upstairs and playing on the
street with the boys all through the long springs and summers and autumns of my growing-up years, free to do what I wanted, free to stay outside until the street lights came on.

  MAHSA

  Sister Devan called me out of class. Aunt threw a burqa over me before they rushed me into a car. Outside the sun was hot and bright and two little girls with yellow and blue ribbons in their hair walked hand in hand. Aunt’s words were crashing through me: Your parents are dead.

  They hid me for seven days in someone else’s apartment in an alcove where a maid usually slept until they knew that my Afghan uncles were gone. Aunt came each evening to visit. There was darkness and not sleeping. There was a jagged crack in the plaster near the window ledge. The glass pane was covered with a heavy blind. There was one coil in the narrow, mildew-smelling mattress that was different from the others and poked into my side until I organized my body around it. The sheets were coarse, not soft as on my bed at home. Aunt did not smell warm like Mor, and her feelings were thin as if they had been squeezed through cheesecloth.

  Where are their bodies?

  She said, They are gone.

  Where?

  Gora Qabaristan.

  I want to see.

  Mahsa, the graves are not marked.

  But isn’t that the Christian cemetery?

  Mahsa, we had to get them buried.

  No prayers. No goodbye. Nothing. How could Mor be buried there? Where would I live now? Who would love me?

  Uncle came to my little room on the seventh night and Aunt stood behind him in the doorway. He said to me, You will live with us now.

  They had emptied my home and sold Abbu’s piano. The end of my old life. The beginning of a new life, unyielding and severe. The sisters offered me a scholarship and Aunt persuaded Uncle to keep me in school, to learn some skills that might make me useful later. Aunt told me that I was lucky. Being lucky with Abbu was finding a coin on the street and making a wish. Being lucky is not your parents murdered when you are thirteen.

  Grief is long. Vivid. Full of true and false memories, shreds like bits of lime inside a grater. Before my parents died, I roamed all over Saddar with my friends on our bikes and we played tennis and went to the Manhattan Soda Fountain for coloured iced milkshakes called Green Goddess and Hangman’s Blood. At night with Abbu, I walked in Old Clifton and we heard the wandering Sindhi minstrels playing the ektara and sometimes we walked from Kharadar, the Salt Gate, all the way to Mithadar, the Sweet Gate, where seawater mixed with fresh. Abbu liked to joke, Let’s go to the Sweet Gate today, Porcupine, and I will buy you sweets.

  Mor said, But that’s not what Mithadar means, John.

  Never mind, he said, putting his arms around her to say goodbye. Us Americans have got a nose for finding good things. I found you halfway around the world, didn’t I? Isn’t that right, Porcupine?

  Abbu taught me a rocky-bluesy version of “Kansas City” which he always said was his song but when he sang it he changed the words to “Karachi baby” to make us laugh. To my mind, this was how life was supposed to be, growing up between two people who loved each other. The last Christmas my parents were alive they took me to the famous ball at the Beach Luxury, fairy lights strung through the verandas and patios. Talismen with Norman D’Souza was playing in the 007 Cabaret and that night Abbu sat in with them. He said Norman’s voice was liquid soul. A Dutch band called Johnny Lion and the Jumping Jewels played down by the water. People danced and walked by the sea and the tide rose to flood the dark mangrove swamps. Everyone was dressed up, and Hindus and Moslems and Christians stayed awake all night listening to the music and eating fresh seafood and macaroon cake with almond icing.

  An only child watches adults with great attention trying to get clues about what life will be like, and whether it will be less solitary, because there is no other child to share what life is right now. This absorbed watching disappears, but in the moment of growing it feels of great importance. That night Abbu traced his finger along Mor’s blouse below her neck and said, Your collarbone is the place on earth I love most. He pulled me in and asked, Do you not think the collarbone is the loveliest shape? I asked Mor, Am I Moslem or Christian? I thought I was Moslem because Mor was and I always got a new gharara for Eid and at school the sisters sent me to study Islamiat to know the Holy Quran in Arabic. But our family spent more time with Parsis and Goans because Abbu loved their music and he was called an Englisher.

  Mor said, Our family is both.

  Abbu said, All religions say you must do unto others as you would have them do to you. This is what Mor and I think, Porcupine. Come play a duet with me, it’s Christmas!

  So we went to the piano and Abbu and I played “Deck the Halls.” I did not know what bausovolly was but I thought it must be Christian.

  KATHERINE

  I decked the girl at school who called me chink and ripped my blouse. The principal pushed through the circle of kids around us chanting, Fight! Fight! and pulled me off her. Before he sent me home he said, Katie, you’re fifteen. You’re too old for that. Fighting is very unladylike.

  He always liked Ma though she did not have a husband. He said Ma had exemplary community spirit because she volunteered in our school library every Monday afternoon on her day off.

  I said, I’m not fifteen for another month. Those girls said I don’t have a father.

  Everyone has a father. Anyway, you can’t fight. You get home, and I will call your mother.

  I kept on my torn blouse to show Ma the wrong done to me. Hours later, I heard her open the door at the top of the stairs and she came in carrying a paper bag of groceries like she always did on Wednesdays. She was also lugging in two long-playing records, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, and the new portable record player that we had been looking at in the Eaton’s catalogue for months. It was a Bakelite RCA Victor three-speed. It was light grey with a lid on hinges and a little clip to hold the arm in place. I said, Ma, it’s so expensive! She said in her light voice, What’s the use of money if you don’t spend it? You go get cleaned up. What’s this about fighting?

  Let’s set up the record player.

  We plugged it in and she let me choose the first record to play, and I put on Frank Sinatra, and I could tell she was pleased. We admired it for a long time and talked about the different speeds because the boys next door had 45s and we promised to clip down the arm so it would not slip and ruin the needle. We speculated on the possibility of a long enough extension cord to take it up the stairs and outside on the front porch. Its portability was intriguing. Then Ma went into the kitchen and she unpacked the milk and bread and said, So, I hear you were fighting because the girls said you don’t have a father.

  I said, They called me names.

  She opened up a tin of Heinz Boston Baked Beans and put some Wonder Bread in the toaster. She dumped the beans into a saucepan and warmed them up on the stove. With her back to me she said, I know what they said. Listen, Katie, I loved your father and it never mattered to me where he was from. When I got pregnant with you I was not married. I was put in a reformatory. But there is nothing wrong with having a baby and don’t ever let anyone tell you there is. They arrested me for nothing.

  She turned around and looked at me and said, As soon as I was out, your father and I got married, but he had to go back to China. There wasn’t enough work here. A lot of people wouldn’t hire a Chinese. How’s that for fair?

  She put beans and toast on our plates and sat down with me. She said, You tell the girls at school to mind their own beeswax. You are better than any of them. Let’s eat.

  I was drawing on the table with my fingernail and I did not feel better than the other girls. I did not want to know that my mother was arrested, and that she got pregnant with me without being married. Even I knew that was shameful. I wondered for the first time what people thought about us. We lived in a basement and she was the only woman I knew who had to work full-time, except my teachers who did not count because they were all Miss.

 
I asked, How long were you in there?

  Katie, it’s water under the bridge. It was unfair. Let it go.

  When I did not pick up my fork to eat she said, No matter what you think, you have a respectable home and that is more than what was done for me.

  She was still wearing her heavy, white-polished waitress shoes and there were big dark smudges under her eyes. There was a cut-glass feeling in her voice and I thought she must have done something wrong and because of her I felt diminished. She’d spent all that money on the record player I’d been wanting but it was not a happy day. My ma had been arrested. That was not respectable.

  The next day I said to Nan, I hate Ma.

  Nan said, Don’t you talk like that. She works hard for you.

  She’s a waitress.

  Katie, that’s enough. What’s got into you?

  She never finished high school.

  She didn’t have the chance. I didn’t either. You keep in school and do better.

  Ma and Nan began to seem insignificant to me. Wasting their time drinking coffee. Sitting with cards and cigarettes. Most women were insignificant.

  I dreaded the moment Ma woke up in the morning. I’d be reading and I’d hear the snap of a match, smell the whiff of a fresh day’s smoke as she rolled over to suck on her first cigarette. I waited for her first cough, for her to call out, Katie, put the kettle on. I never wondered if there was any dread of the day for her.

  Nan told Ma she wanted to take a job in a drugstore in the summer now that her boys were working and I was too old to watch. Ma said she couldn’t leave me to my own devices and told me I’d be coming to the hotel with her. Every morning she sent me to Harold Kudlets’ talent booking office on the eighth floor with a western sandwich and strong coffee. He booked musicians all over town, the Flamingo Lounge, the Golden Rail, the Armouries. I’d hand him the sandwich and he’d say, Thank you, Mrs. Goodnow, and I’d say, That’s not me, that’s my mother, which made him laugh. He let me read on his couch even when the musicians scraped and dragged themselves in. I liked their battered instrument cases and hats, their pants with black satin stripes, their narrow ties. They smelled of colognes and sweat and they always seemed smaller in person than on stage. Harold used to let me listen to their acts when Ma worked nights. I heard Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington and Jack Teagarden and Bobby Hackett. I liked a funny young guy called Ronnie Hawkins. He wore a snappy black suit and he did backflips on stage and a camel walk. A big bearded man called Garth played organ in his band which sounded good. Ronnie always had a sweet smile and patted the couch to come sit beside him but Harold looked up from his stacks of posters and contracts and said, She’s tall for her age, Ronnie, you let her be.