Girl in Shades (4 page)

When she spoke, heads turned to look at me sitting just outside the circle. With their heads cocked to the side, the alcoholics sent me looks that mixed sympathy with relief — like I had just lost my first tooth and the blood was tripping down my chin. I smiled back at them without showing teeth and slumped down in my chair.

My mother never drank, but she told me she envied those who could forgive themselves for their mistakes. I was almost ten when I realized that drinking too much was actually a bad thing. I met my friend Jackie's alcoholic father in the kitchen, and with the reek of his breath and the madness in his eyes, I knew almost immediately.

The thing I hated doing the most with my mother was standing on street corners and handing out flyers she had made. This usually happened after she and Father had a fight, or she had cried after dinner for no reason at all. The flyers she made, about the size of postcards, were copied on every colour and had drawings of rainbows, lotus flowers, or smiles that my mother had sketched. Along the outsides or in the middle, my mother would write quotes from the
Bhagavad Gita
, her favourite book, a Hindu epic poem. It was part of the
Mahabharata
written thousands of years ago in India. She said she chose the parts she thought could help others, but I think now that they were the parts that made her seem like a better person for having chosen them, lines like “That which is can never cease to be; that which is not will not exist,” and “Abandoning desires which shake the mind — finds in his soul full comfort for his soul.”

I don't know if she believed the words or understood them, but she tried hard to pretend she did. When she put the papers in my hands, I would squint my eyes until the sentences were too fuzzy to read.

Our flyers confused people. Often they just stared blankly or refused to take one, especially if it was winter and a hand removed from pocket risked instant frostbite, but when they talked to us it was the worst. The conversation usually went something like this:

To my mother: “What are you doing?”

My mother: “Spreading a message of reaching God's love through the wise words of the
Bhagavad Gita
.”

[Pointing at me]: “And why is she with you?”

“My daughter is equally committed to a simple and self-aware existence. I think it is important that children be brought up in an environment of simplicity and surrender in order to find their authentic selves.”

I would study my feet, rolling my loafers or boots up on their sides, trying to fly out of my body.

And then they told us how they really felt with something like, “You are a freak and a child abuser.”

I couldn't understand what they meant by freak, or child abuser for that matter. At that time in my life, I beheld my mother with the eyes of an ant staring at the sun. Everywhere I looked, she was all I could see. And as far as I could tell, no child was being abused, especially not me.

My father represented a pebble in my mother's smoothly oiled wheel of forward motion. He talked to us very little, but sometimes, if he had a good day at work, he would sit me on his knee when he returned home and bump his leg up and down so I bounced. He said his knee was a horse and he was taking me on a big adventure where I was in charge of where we went. I choose to fly past camels in dusty deserts, jump off waterfalls, and stroll down the streets of Paris. He never argued with my choice of destination, he just smiled and said, “Well, Missy, I think that can be arranged.” My mother was never part of these journeys. She watched us from the other room as she read from one of her books, her face expressing a look of cautious concern. Though I loved my knee rides, they were rare, especially as I grew older and too big for him to bounce. “How about you just explain your adventure to me,” he would say then. After a while we didn't travel together at all.

My mother encouraged him to work as much as possible, telling him that I needed new clothes and that it would only get worse from here. The way she looked down when she passed him in the hallway and stayed busy in the kitchen until just after he left in the morning made me think that she preferred him out of the house anyway. My father appeased her by working long days and nights, calling home before bed to say he wouldn't be making it for dinner. He worked to provide for my mother, but most of the time my mother was too busy to notice.

And then there were her other times. When her spirit got sucked down into the ground and buried with her own hands. When she strayed even further from the essence of the inspirational messages she handed out. When she was asked by those around her, “What are we going to do about your lousy mood?” During those times, her silent meditations seemed to be conjuring spells that would make both my father and me disappear.

After her scans, the doctor told her the cancer had already spread to her liver and pancreas. He said she had between six months and a year to live.

I believe now that people will create their lives based on what you tell them. If you tell a kid he is stupid from when he is really young, well, when the time comes to prove himself on a test in school, his thoughts about being stupid will be just about all he can remember. Such is the case with Mother. My mother lacked faith in herself, unless someone reminded her she should have it. If that doctor had told her that she had cancer but chances were good she would last another sixty-four years on earth, she probably would have.

“I think people choose to be sad,” Aunt Leah said to me as I pulled my mother's clean underwear from the dryer. It was March Break, about a week after Mother's diagnosis. I said nothing then, but over the years I've thought of many comebacks that would have shut her up, including, “Well, why don't you choose to go home” and “Just like you choose to be ugly?”

Instead, I stuck out my bottom lip and nodded as she squatted beside me over her thick calves. Her short hair had recently been permed and hair-sprayed and her eyelids were coated with blue shadow. By then it was no big deal for me to see colour around people and that day, Aunt Leah's was orange. Citrus swirls of light danced around her head and bounced off her shoulders as she insisted on continuing, “At some point, you have to make a choice: do I get out of bed today or do I stay in and feel sorry for myself? If you choose not to get up, there must be something you are getting out of it.” I just stared at her. “I mean, it must be satisfying some part of you.” I looked away and she said, “I hope you will always make the right choice, Maya.”

“I'll try,” I said, tilting my head and rolling my eyes. I carried the laundry basket on my bony hip to the kitchen, then dumped the clothes onto the table to fold.

My grandmother had flown Leah in from PEI for an extended weekend. They probably remembered how my father complained about taking time off work the last time Mother wouldn't get out of bed. And since my grandparents couldn't make the trip by car or plane because of my grandfather's heart condition and my grandmother's allegiance to him, they could never be there themselves. Aunt Leah was often around to help us out when my mother had periods of sadness. But this time was different. This time everyone knew that her sadness was permanent.

My aunt's twenty-year-old mentality meant she felt a duty to lecture me with her own faulty revelations. She was also trying to decide whether to go to university the following fall — which seems so petty now in light of the news we had just received.

I worked hard while my mother slept, which I secretly resented, especially after considering the idea that people can make a choice not to be sad if they want to badly enough. I was starting to think that my mother didn't have much of an idea at all of what she wanted to do next, and that's why she stayed in bed hoping everything would go away.

When the dishes were done and the cobwebs had been dusted off my mother's bud vases, I sat on the floor of the living room and flipped through her books. I had taken out some of her old novels from university:
The Mysteries of Udolpho
by Ann Radcliffe,
A Simple Story
by Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Wollstonecraft's
Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman
, and the copy of
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen. Each one had my mother's neat handwriting in the top right corner of the first page, her old name traced out in faded pencil:
Marigold McCann
. Together the books represented random snippets of who she was, a blueprint of her life that I would turn to for comfort throughout my own.

“What'cha reading?” Leah asked that afternoon while more laundry was churning.

“Nothing,” I said. A lie, of course.

“Mind if I listen to some music?” She plunked her ghetto blaster down on the shag carpet in front of me. Before I could answer she had turned it on. A synthesized rock beat rose from the metal box, and a male voice began to punch out words through what sounded like puckered lips. I was instantly transfixed by the sound of him.

I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can, so I can . . .

“It's Corey Hart,” she said as the music played. I nodded. Something fresh bubbled up inside me.

While she's deceiving me

She cuts my security

Has she got control of me . . .

“He's good!” I said, putting down the book. “Where did you get this?”

“At the music store. Duh!” she said, moving her padded hips. “You've never heard of Corey Hart? Where have you been, under a rock?” I bobbed my head slightly to the music, which made Aunt Leah laugh. “The kid has some taste after all,” she said, clearing a path through the books on the floor and grabbing me by both hands to dance.

“I have style,” I said, swivelling my hips and flipping my hair upside down quickly to give it body.

“Nice moves, kid,” Aunt Leah said. “Take a look at the tape, he's totally hot!” She handed me the cover, which I took and peered at. I danced beside her, a stiff, awkward sort of dance, with the picture of Corey in my hand and my butt swaying provocatively. I danced to a song I had never heard. For a moment, I forgot to remember what I needed to do to be happy and instead I just was.

That is, until she screamed.

My mother, from the top of the stairs. It sounded like rusty nails and scratched on my spine.

“Shut up down there!” The words melded together in a high pitched cry that stunned me. I turned my head to see her leaning on the banister beside the top step. She was naked from the waist down except for her underwear, and her tangled hair hung loose around her face, the long slant of her nose creating the impression of a witch on the prowl. Like the other times, it was apparent that the sweetness I tried to find in her was gone entirely, that she had been tossed into an evil pit that would take her weeks to climb out of.

“Sorry, Mother,” I said. Aunt Leah shrank down onto the couch and pressed stop on the tape player. She had the look on her face of being stuck between two fat ladies on the bus, and we sat in silence for almost ten minutes after.

When we felt it was safe to move again, I continued reading my mother's books and Aunt Leah skimmed through a Dalhousie University course calendar. She rarely stopped to read any of the course descriptions but instead seemed to be studying the posed pictures of students around campus (I could see them over her shoulder). Each fake student beamed at the camera, looking like they might lose consciousness at any moment, high on the fumes from their new textbooks. Though these pictures were meant to motivate prospective students, Aunt Leah's face remained somber.

When I think back on her reading that calendar, it makes me wish her parents had sent her to university. It wasn't fair that just because she was her parents' afterthought they didn't support her financially like they did my father. I don't think that school is necessary for everyone, but I could tell that day that deep down she wanted nothing more than to be one of the shiny students on those pages.

My father returned from work by seven, a deluxe pizza greasing through the box onto his white shirt. He let the front door shut slowly so the click would not wake my mother or inform her of his presence. He knew it was simpler if he just stayed out of my mother's way entirely, which is why he may have been working that day, a Saturday. He transmitted his messages to her through me.

“Maya, take these slices up to your mother,” he said, lifting two pieces from the box onto a white plate. “No matter how she tries to convince you, tell her she has to eat. Her body needs the strength to try and fight this.”

“Okay,” I said, taking the plate. I liked to think that my father had a plan that was so intricate he didn't take the time to explain it to me.

“Leah, would you mind pouring some fruit punch for Marigold?”

“Sure, Steve,” Leah said, hopping off the countertop. We worked together like we were part of a complicated sting, the goal being to appease my mother and make her seem well again.

As I passed my father with the plate and fruit punch balancing on an oak tray laid across my arms, he put his hand on my head.

“Hang in there, Maya.” I smiled at him for saying it. It reminded me that my real mother was not missing, only hidden behind some sort of mysterious monster who was sure to leave if we ignored him. Or fed him pizza.

Step to step I balanced the tray, held my breath, and told my own stomach to stop punching me from inside. There was no time to be hungry.

“Mother?” I said from outside the door. “I'm coming in now.” I opened the door and was smacked by the smell of sweat and moisture. My stomach tightened with nausea at the odour. I had smelled it before and as much as I wanted to help her then, I couldn't get over the thought circling in my head, that my mother was choosing this. That if she cared about me at all, she would choose to get up, try to get well and be my mother again.

“Maya? Maya is that you?” I could tell from the crackle in her voice that she had been crying. “Maya, I am sorry to do this to you — you deserve better than this.”

“I just want you to be happy again,” I said. I felt my way through the dark, put the tray down on her bedside table, and swallowed down tears loitering in my throat.

“I know,” she said. Red swam around her head, intensified by the black air. Red interspersed with green streaks, a tortured mosaic emanating above her. Swirling, diving, festering. I would have thought the confused colours were a masterpiece if I hadn't seen them before. “I promise I will make it up to you, Maya,” she said as I handed her a slice of pizza. She sat up a bit and as my eyes adjusted I could see that she was wearing the top she wore to the temple: purple cotton with tiny lilies, scooped neckline, and a small bow on the collar. Her bare legs scissored out from the ruffled sheets.

“Let's open the drapes a little.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” she said quietly, which gave me hope, but then her voice got louder and more accusing. “What are you looking at?”

She could see me following the colour above her head in the dark.

“Nothing.”

“Keep your mind in reality, Maya. Look at me!”

“I'm looking at you.”

“Good. Now leave, please.”

In the kitchen later, Aunt Leah and I nibbled on pizza crust while my father tried to repair a broken burner on the stovetop.

“Must be tough, eh, kid?” Aunt Leah asked, pepperoni stuck between the tiny gap in her two front teeth.

“What must be tough?”

“Living with her.”

“No, actually, it's not hard at all. It's very easy because she's my mother and I love her.” I stormed to the other side of the kitchen with my arms crossed at the elbows. Without turning my head, I delivered the final jab, “Don't you know that people do the best they can?!” The words had originally been from my mother's mouth, on a day she had called my father an asshole for missing her dinner of shepherd's pie. The day my father had just sighed, closed his eyes for a minute, and taken a chug of milk right out of the carton before going upstairs to sleep. She told me then that she had only reacted the best she knew how at that particular moment. And as Leah and I sat in the kitchen that day and my mother rotted away in her darkness, she was doing it again.

That night, when I heard my mom's sniffles from her darkened bedroom, I stole Leah's cassette and dreamed about what it would be like to have Corey Hart as my own boyfriend. I studied the curves of his face with a flashlight under my sheets and wrote out the details of our entire wedding on a piece of foolscap:

Outside ceremony so we can smell cedar and grass.

Small gathering of close friends and family.

No veil, only flowers in my hair.

Bare feet.

I would relegate Aunt Leah to helping the caterers in the kitchen. My father would walk me down a grassy aisle with rose petals, and Corey would be waiting at the end with shiny skin, professionally greased hair, and a black pair of sunglasses — the kind where you can't see the person's eyes. I wouldn't need to see his eyes because I would know they were beaming with love for me.

You've got it made with the guy in shades, oh no.

And my mother, my mother would sit in the front row, wearing a flowing white gown, with the sun tickling the smile spread across her tranquil face.