As She Grows (19 page)

Tonight Pat, the house supervisor, starts off the meeting, making some announcements about the broken washing machine and the problem of rotting vegetables in the fridge. Then she turns, smiling to the college student youth worker: “Michelle is going to lead the group tonight. She’ll be talking about date rape and healthy relationships.” Michelle is a third-year college student and has been working at the house for about two months. She tries to act mature and tell us what to do, but she looks no older than us, and I can see the piercing holes that line her ears, so I don’t know who she thinks she’s kidding, pretending she’s all mature. None of us really listen to her because she doesn’t tell us off when we say something rude and at moments of tension she’ll crack a joke.

Our eyes turn to Michelle who is in the corner, poring over her notes. She motions to Pat that she just needs a second and so Pat
opens up the floor to concerns. We decide to change the bathroom air-freshener spray from flowery to citron spray, Tammy will be after Nicole on the morning shower schedule, and Thursday nights will now have TV sign-up.

“Okay, guys!” Michelle claps her hands together, indicating she’s ready to start. “I’ve been really looking forward to this.” She sits positioned in her straight-backed chair, notebook on her lap. We listen attentively because we are all just grateful that it’s not one of the regular boring Staff leading the group. “I thought we’d start with a little game, just to get things going!” She speaks slowly and simply, as if we were in kindergarten. She explains that we’ll go around in a circle and we each have to contribute one word to an ongoing chain story. It sounds stupid, but once we start it becomes fun, even though Michelle’s fading perma-smile suggests it’s not what she had in mind.

“You . . .”

“Make . . .”

“Me . . .”

“Shit . . .”

“My . . .”

“Pants . . .”

“And . . .”

“Piss . . .”

“On . . .”

“My . . .”

“Cat.”

“Okay!” Michelle interrupts us. “That was really great. I can see we don’t really need an icebreaker, things seem to be flowing just fine.” She opens her file folder and, despite our groans, starts passing out copies of a magazine article on date rape. Her tone completely changes and she starts listing off facts and numbers
about relationship violence from the clipboard in front of her. We glance over to Pat to see if she’ll release us from this guinea pig experiment, but she keeps her head down, furiously writing in her notebook. I watch Michelle’s mouth, words loosely falling from her lips like soft fragrant petals:
violation, dishonoured, betrayal,
assault, genitalia
. She makes it all sound like poetry from another century.

It’s not difficult for us to discuss this topic. Michelle’s body pulls back one jagged crank at a time with each harsh word the girls hurl back at her:
pussy-fuck, cunt, cock
. Everyone has a story of a mother’s boyfriend or uncle. About guys’ houses they should not have gone to and cars they shouldn’t have gotten into. Or about having sex when they don’t really want to, just to get it over with, because the guy won’t let up. Tracy talks about going into a room at a party to make out with a guy she didn’t know only to have him put a gun to her head. And even Mute Mary talks about a neighbour taking naked photos of her when she was six, which makes us all quiet for a few seconds until Pat pipes up and says that she’d like to talk about that later, privately, with Mary. It makes my story of Mitch seem so insignificant, not even worth mentioning, really.

Only Tammy denies absolutely anything happening to her. She keeps saying after each story what she would have done instead, how it wouldn’t have happened to her. She keeps on at it, as if she’s on some moral high horse, like anyone had a choice. “I wouldn’t have gotten into the car with five strange guys . . . I wouldn’t have let my uncle get away with it . . . I would have bitten his dick off.”

We all ignore her, turn our heads to Michelle who corrects Tammy and tells her that it’s sometimes more complicated than that and we’re not here to make judgements. With only five
minutes left, Michelle attempts to summarize our points, with diminishing enthusiasm. Then she turns back to her notes and discusses how we could have made better choices. Finally, she puts down the papers and for the first time her voice sounds normal. She asks us why we didn’t lay charges. Why we didn’t tell our friends. Why we didn’t leave the next party when we saw the same guy again.

Nicole answers for us all: “We know what we should say, we know what to do, now. Only, it’s different when you’re actually in it. You don’t want to rat on the guy because you all hang out together. And if you get the guy in trouble, he’ll get you worse.”

“I would charge any guy who raped me,” Tammy persists. “I don’t care who he is.” She throws her feet up on the table and picks at the rubber soles with a pen.

“Shut the fuck up,” Jasmyn snaps at her. “It never happened to you ‘cause you spread your legs and invite them in.”

“Fuck you.” Tammy’s feet come slamming back down to the ground.

“You watch your mouth, you little fuckin’ cunt—”

“Sit on this, bitch!” Tammy sticks her middle finger up and thrusts it in Jasmyn’s direction.

“Stick it up your girlfriend’s pussy, you fuck—”

“Girls!” Pat yells for about the fifth time, though it’s the first time Tammy and Jasmyn seem to hear it. Normally, they’d keep going, but we all want the discussion to go on so they both back down, keeping it to a subtle evil stare to be dealt with later. In a strange way, I think it’s because Tammy is jealous. Jealous that she’s not one of us.

After the session, we all go upstairs to the kitchen and make popcorn. Tammy makes up some excuse that she has a headache and needs to lie down. None of us convinces her to stay, not
even Staff. The rest of us are all soft with each other. We say things like
excuse me
and
sorry
when pushing by, or compliment each other’s hairstyle or clothes. Jasmyn offers to braid Mute Mary’s hair and Tracy offers up her blue elastics. Michelle splurges for a pizza and for about three hours we act like real sisters.

I stopped going to see Eric regularly. I haven’t seen him for three weeks. Sometimes it’s because I’m doing something else and I just forget about the appointment. Other times I just make excuses because it’s pretty much useless now. There’s no point in dwelling on the past, now that I’m going to have a baby. Now that I have to focus on my future. Stirring up all that history only makes it hard to breathe and I’d rather let the idea of Elsie hover deep inside me like a stagnant black smoke. When I do go, at times, I feel like just coming clean. Before the word
baby,
sitting poised on the tip of my tongue, leaps between words. Or my fingers that play dangerously close to the edge of sleeve cuffs make a quick dash to reveal my scarred arms.

“So you really hate her?” Eric asks. We are still on the endless subject of Elsie. And I have just finished one of my bitch sessions. It appears that Eric can’t stand to mix his topics. I imagine him dining alone at home, chair pulled tightly up to the table, napkin on lap. I imagine him separating his food groups, eating the meat before the vegetable, carefully monitoring the gravy for breakaway trails. That is, I assume he is alone. There’s never another person across the table when I picture him.

“Yes, I hate her,” I respond, sounding surprised at his question. Then I think a little more about it. “Well, wait. It used to be a
hate
hate, but now it’s more like a
I-can’t-stand-her
hate. You know?”

“Can you think of a time when you might see her differently? More positively?”

“Well, I suppose if she was walking down the street, I might think she’s a good person,” I say. I’ll give her that. Strangers think she’s charming, nice even. “She just never should have been a mother,” I add thoughtfully.

Eric nods his head in understanding. “Sometimes distance can be good. You can see Elsie not just as a caregiver, but as a person. You might be able to understand her.”

“Why the hell should I have to understand
her
?” I snap at him. “I’m the kid. She should be the one understanding me.”

He holds his hands up, surrendering. “You don’t have to understand her.”

We sit quietly for a few minutes. We have long pauses like this. And I’ve come to like them, but only here. Most people like to fill them with useless words, panicked at the edge of the silent hole. As if they would fall to their deaths if they didn’t quickly fill in the gap. But Eric likes these silences. He says they’re like mortar in brick walls, the thought between words. He says they make discussions substantial.

“Did you like your parents when you were growing up?” I ask, skeptical.

“Yes,” Eric answers, all serious, pulling a leg up to rest on his knee. He appears confident and ready to take on my challenge. “Yes, I did.”

I shake my head and turn to look out the window.

“Is that a bad thing? Liking your parents? Seems like you disapprove.”

“No. It just explains a lot, that’s all,” I say.

“Explains what?”

“What you say. How you make it all sound so easy.”

“Can I not be helpful to you if I haven’t gone through exactly what you’ve gone through?” Now I start to feel sorry for him, like he’s going to go home and cry, believing he can’t do his job. Because he is good at counselling, even though I don’t know why he’d want to waste his time helping screwed-up kids who treat him like crap.

“Well, I suppose you can, a little. It depends.”

“On what?”

I think a bit. “Did you do drugs when you were my age?” “Yep.”

“What kind?” I ask, sitting up in my chair. Now we are getting somewhere.

“Marijuana. Hash, maybe a few times. I was older than you, though. About eighteen. I had long hair, tight jeans, you know, a rocker. I didn’t do it all the time, only the odd weekend. At parties, maybe.” This makes me laugh. I can’t imagine Eric all drugged up.

“Steal?”

“Yep. Once from Shoppers Drug Mart. I was thirteen. I took a pen and a Mars bar.”

“Ooh!” I say. “Call the cops!”

“Felt guilty about it for years.”

I think a few more seconds. “Ever hit a girl?”

Eric’s face becomes serious now. “Never.”

“Come on, never?” I am smiling a knowing smile, trying to coax him to the truth.

“Nope.”

“No way. Not even if you’re fighting and she hits you? Like you’re hitting back. Not that hard, more like a punch in the arm or something?”

“No,” he says. “I would never touch a girl like that.”

I slam back into my chair, the fun over. I only half believe him. Because every guy has a limit, a moment when he just can’t put up with it anymore. I don’t know one guy who doesn’t. I don’t know one girl who hasn’t found it. And it’s so hypocritical, Eric demanding I spill open each week, but him only willing to go so far. And maybe it’s not intentional, but I know he’s lying. How nice it must be to get paid to judge and not be judged.

“What happened? You’re angry now,” he says.

“No,” I protest.

“You think that’s normal? Hitting a girl? Has that happened to you?”

“Me and everyone I know.”

“Whoa. I have to be clear about this, Snow. It’s not normal. Even if it’s a punch in the arm. Are you talking about Mark?”

I shoot him a quick sharp look. “No. We just play fight,” I say. “Someone else.” Then I follow it up with “a long time ago,” just to make sure he drops it.

“Okay. Well, if it’s ever anything more, I’m here to talk. Just talk.”

“Yep.” I am disappointed in Eric. Disappointed he won’t make the effort to strip away his own layers of truth: the truth you tell, the truth you whisper, and then the truth that’s buried so deep even your own ears don’t hear it.

I get a message that Greg called. Miranda is interested, or rather, prying. She wants to know who this Greg guy is. She thinks he sounds old.

“I haven’t heard you mention a Greg before,” she asks suspiciously. As if she knew the name of every person I have ever talked to.

I immediately begin to worry. Greg knows too much. It’s too risky that he speak to Miranda.