Getting Waisted (4 page)

Peter shouted at me to swim to the boat. “Kick your legs. You can do it!” I saw him leaning forward, his arm outstretched. I kicked and paddled and moved toward him. He hauled me up and back into the boat. “See, you can swim; you just think too much about what you can’t do. It gets in the way. Sometimes you have to just
do
, that’s how you survive.” We headed back for the shore and for a while we didn’t speak. There was just the sound of the sails flapping against the wind. I was still shocked that I knew how to swim and I thought about what Peter had said. I somehow knew he wasn’t just talking about me.

3

A Fresh Start

Diet #3
All the Empress’s Cakes

Cost
My mother
’s hat and what little trust I ever had

Weight lost
None

Weight gained
Five pounds and counting

I came home from school
late one afternoon and found the front lawn filled with giant cardboard boxes; three of them were labeled: “Monica’s room.” The front door was wide open, and when I went in I was horrified to see that all our furniture was gone! I ran up the stairs to my room and it was completely empty. So was my mother’s room. I ran down the back stairs and banged into a lumbering hulk of a man in a brown uniform carrying one of my mother’s sewing machine tables. “What’s happening? Why are you taking that?” He just kept moving like a steam engine and I was scared, but those were our things, not his, so I gripped the bannister and looked up at him straight in his eyes. He saw I had no intention of stepping aside until he answered me, and I was costing him precious time. He blew outward, “I canny answer ya’ much Hen but I can tell ya’ it’s all going in the truck down to Greenock.” What was Greenock? Where was my mother? I ran back up the stairs and then down through every empty room until I found her in a back hallway closet, zipping up a heavy canvas bag filled with coats: her Persian, my duffel, and my brand-new shocking pink wool coat. She had a big red marking pen in her hand and on the bag she was writing “SHIP.”

I asked,“Mummy, what’s happening?”

She responded, “We are going to have a wonderful new life.” I liked my old life; nobody bothered with me and I did whatever I wanted. But we were moving—to Canada! My mother missed my sister, as it had been two years since we had seen her and Phil, and now they had a baby! Add that to all the time she didn’t have with her because of the war and now she was also a grandmother, so she was determined to make up for lost time. But I thought the real reason was because she was lonely. Her sidekick, Greta, had also moved to Canada with her husband and their son, who was just a few months older than I was. He was my pretend cousin, just like Greta was my pretend aunt. Whatever the reason, it was happening and we were moving. Suddenly I felt sick. I would be going to a new school. I was fat and now there would be new people to make fun of me. Overwhelmed and scared, I carried a whole pile of my baby toys, including the big doll on whom I had performed so many surgeries that she looked like the pictures from newsreels of wounded girls who somehow survived the war. I was dumping them all into a big garbage bin when I noticed a framed photograph sticking out from under a pile of rubbish. It was my mother and father’s wedding photo: a black-and-white picture of both of them all dressed up, holding hands because of the occasion but staring straight out, looking like strangers. I came to understand much later that nothing was that black and white. I took it out of the frame and folded it. I still have it. The crease down the middle separating them says so much.

An order of nuns bought our big house and were planning on turning it into a convent. I wondered if they knew my mother was Jewish. I was not sure what I was because my father belonged to the United Church of England, which made no sense to me because from everything I learned in school, the churches in England had never been united.

Everything we owned was piled high and loaded in the big moving truck. We were getting ready to leave when my father made an unannounced visit. He had heard about her plan and he was livid. I had never ever seen him like that, and I felt oddly proud when he blocked my mother’s path, “You will not take my daughter out of this country. I have rights and you mark my words she’s not going to any bloody damn Canada!” My mother was in a state of disbelief, she had no idea my father had it in him to raise his voice or to make any demands of her. He’d found his balls.

She could barely find her voice, and was somehow unable to direct any of it at him, so she said what she wanted to say to me, “Can you believe it? The mealworm suddenly grew a spine. Rights?
Aaacchh. . . .
” She hopped around stymied for a moment until she recovered her aplomb and could face him. “I apologize for . . . well, for . . . none of that matters. I think we should start over and we’ll be a family.” She took a breath. She knew that was exactly what he wanted. I had never lived with a mother and a father. I was excited because we’d be normal.

We took a huge ship to Canada called
The Empress of Scotland
. My mother and I shared a stateroom with a small porthole that looked out over a never-ending sea of huge black waves. My father had his own room and I guessed they were not starting their “new start” until we got there. We had been at sea for five days and all the grownups were seasick; there was a hurricane off the coast of Labrador turning the waves into giant mountains that made the ship go up really high on one end and then smash down onto the other, over and over, so that the swimming pool kept emptying and then filling up again but with less water each time. No one was allowed in the pool.

I had made a new best friend named Hannah and we were the only two left who could walk around. She was from Montreal and she was tall and skinny and wore a bra. I wished I looked like her but I didn’t; I was flat and fat, but together we were a “10.” Hannah was wild and supremely confident, unlike me, and she dragged me into the nearly empty, big, beautiful ballroom that had tables laden with amazing cakes, desserts, and piles of crystal bowls to fill with whatever one wanted. The sailors and even the captain danced with Hannah. I sat watching as she was twirled around and around, her head thrown back in total euphoria. I filled a plate with a sponge cake, fruit, and whipped cream trifle. It was delicious and distracted me from the unfairness—I was a good dancer, too! Just then our eyes met and I waved, pretending to be happy, and then Hannah pulled me up to dance. I loved her.

We dressed up every night as if we were movie stars with servants and no one ever said we had eaten enough sweets or fizzy drinks or that it was time for us to go to bed. One night, Hannah and I climbed into a lifeboat and I brought a whole chocolate cake that I asked for and got; Hannah brought wine. We told each other everything, all our secrets, promising we would be best friends forever and together we wished that our magical voyage would never end.

Feeling more than a little bit tipsy, we climbed out of our hiding place and Hannah pushed me in the direction of the empty bar, somehow knowing the staff was bored with no one to serve and that they would be only too happy to be entertained by a pair of twelve-year-olds. I was nervous about going into the forbidden bar, and to stall I insisted we stop by my cabin first and get hats from my mother’s hatboxes in order to pass as more mature.

Pumped and primped, we brazenly stepped into the bar. I was wearing a chinchilla hat with feathers while Hannah wore a red, large-brimmed one with black ostrich feathers and matching lipstick. When we climbed onto the leather barstools I felt instantly more sophisticated. The bartenders mixed up frothy pink, nonalcoholic drinks with umbrellas in them, then switched to green ones with pineapple spears and maraschino cherries. We were enthralled by their stories of the parties passengers had on the high seas, but those were no match for what the crew got up to when everyone else was sleeping or throwing up on the rough crossings.

After an hour or so, with still no appearances from any of the passengers, the bartenders, Paolo and Reuben, our new friends, told us to follow them to the main deck where they rolled out four luggage carts with fast-moving metal wheels. We all lay on our stomachs, kicking off with our feet as we raced each other, careening all over the highly varnished wood deck, laughing crazily, banging into railings and into each other like bumper cars. It all came to a sudden stop when one of the more stern-faced officers stepped out of a stairwell and glared at all of us but mostly at Paolo and Reuben.

It was our last night, as we were to land in Quebec City the next day and I was going on to Toronto by train. For the first time on our voyage, the boat stopped rocking against the high waves. Everything had suddenly become very calm; the water was black and shiny and very still, and a million stars appeared as if orchestrated. We heard doors opening as the passengers, feeling better, began to arrive on the deck in droves, but the captain invited
us
to go up on the bridge. “Watch the horizon, lassies.” A great mountain of blue white ice appeared out of nowhere, then another and another—icebergs! They were the mountains of the sea.

It was awe-inspiring but all of a sudden I felt strange as if my stomach flip-flopped and then turned upside down, and I felt my mouth tighten. The captain noticed my discomfort, “You don’t have to be scared Lassie, I never get over the sight of them.” Suddenly there was a deep, deep low rumbling sound and I was sure we had hit one and that we were going to sink.
“Oh God!”
I threw up all over the captain’s shiny black shoes; Hannah looked at me and I could see her move away from me. She was embarrassed. A steward began wiping the deck; another put a blanket around me and led me away.

When I woke up in our cabin it was morning and weirdly quiet, but my head was throbbing. The engines had stopped and I relished the silence, but then I realized my mother and all our bags were gone. We were here, in Canada! The decks were jammed with people and porters running in every direction. I had to find Hannah, we hadn’t said good-bye and I didn’t have her address. I saw my mother and father leaning over the railing searching for my sister Gerda and her husband Phil. I confronted my mother about leaving me in the cabin even though we had landed. She shook her head impatiently, explaining she didn’t want to miss a good viewing spot and it wasn’t as if I could get lost on a boat. I had stopped listening when I saw Hannah and her parents walking down the gangway. I shouted her name but she didn’t hear me. Panicking, I bellowed her name at the top of my lungs; “HANNAH!” She still didn’t hear me and then I realized, she didn’t want to hear me. But she was my best friend! Oh my God! She was wearing my mother’s red hat, its ostrich plume swaying as she walked.