Mouthing the Words (17 page)

“They’re only trying to be kind,” I defend.

“Sure. But food offerings aren’t going to erase a history of starvation.”

“It’s temporary.”

“OK. But till when. And to what end? How does this actually help you?”

“I know it’s frustrating. But it probably gives me a certain amount of safety and comfort.”

“Is it really comforting? To be patronized, treated like a child or someone mentally ill? There is no room here for a life that is any different.”

“What do you suggest?”

“You move out. Get a place with me.”

“With what resources?”

“Jesus, Thelma, you get a job. You do what other people do. You know—a life?”

“But I’m terrified.”

“I know, Thel. I’ll help you. I’ll go to work with you and be charming and hyperefficient and you can have the rest of the time for not feeling like a grown-up.”

—

I am surprised to find Corinna and Warren expressing some kind of relief. Warren says, “Well, this really is a
positive
step forward,” and Corinna seizes the opportunity to consider off-loading her chipped, mismatched plates.

I have a job. I am articling four days a week at a firm downtown and studying during the rest of the week. It’s a small practice partnered by four robust women, with whom I came absolutely clean about my troubles. I did what Heroin said: Tell them this is where you come from, this is where you are, this is where you could go. They said straight out: This is what we want from you, this is how we can help you, and this is how we can’t help you. It is all a question of sorting out and compartmentalizing. Knowing when and where I can splash in the bath and holler.

November first is moving day. I have told Warren and Corinna that I don’t need their help. Heroin still has her horse, after all, and believe me, that stallion could haul a planet. Corinna is packing a big cardboard box with odds and ends. I am grateful to her, although I don’t feel any compelling need for a lettuce drier without a lid, a single oven mitt or a rusty cheese grater. I stop her at the small Persian rug, though.

“Mum, you love that rug,” I say.

“I want you to have it, Thelma,” she says.

“But it’s yours. It’s … you.”

“What? You don’t want anything of me in your new place?” she says, a little hurt.

“That’s not it, Mum. I just want things to be simple at first. And then I’ll decide how I want to decorate.”

She is pulling away. I want to tap my chest and say “in here,” but I know she wouldn’t get it. I feel sorry for her then. She is starting to look old to me.

Thelma Takes up Room

HERE IS MY
tiny house. A white room with blue linen curtains that I have made myself. A hardwood floor that I have just sanded and revarnished, and black and white linoleum floors in the little closets called the kitchen and the bathroom. There is a tiny postage stamp of a balcony on which I can sit on a wicker chair and look down on Heroin’s horse grazing in the back yard while she is away at work being charming and hyperefficient.

When Heroin comes home from work we have a glass of red wine on the balcony and she tells me about her day. She looks different now, and I’m not used to her talking this much. I think she has a bit of a crush on Mary, one of the partners in the practice, because she’s mumbling a lot of Mary this and Mary that and staring off into space. “You’re not even listening, Thelma!” she yells. But I am lost in my own reverie
about
a remarkable woman: wondering how I can be growing so much taller. Hoping I can outgrow this man called boyfriend.

“You know, I’m reading this case history,” Heroin blathers on, despite my lack of attention. “And I’m saying to Mary, Well, legally she can’t really deny access, and she says to me, Just take a minute to see if you can try and imagine how she might feel.”

“Yeah,” I nod, imagining myself as a poisonous undercooked pork chop served up on a man-sized platter.

“What about you, Thel?” she asks. “What about your day?”

“Painted an excellent picture. Flushed the rest of the drugs.”

“That’s great, Thelma,” she says, pausing. “You know, you really ought to try coming in to work with me.” She doesn’t want me to miss it. She thinks it will do me a world of good and she is tired of having to be the charming and efficient one all the time. “You can still be a dreamy spacecake on your lunch break,” she assures me. “You could even make your collages in the back room, you know.”

Every day I am more willing. I am becoming increasingly curious about the world beyond my imagination. There is a code for living, which is constructed strangely, and perhaps there are maps and schedules to guide people through it. People appear to
do
it effortlessly; they have cracked the code unknowingly and they act as if the rhythm of living is their own. I don’t know yet where their imaginary friends live. Not in offices, that’s for sure.

I swallow Heroin in order to gain strength. I’m not going to work in her clothes, though. She’s all tweed suits and sensible shoes. I am much more quirky, a little out of place in a law office, undoubtedly, but if I’m going to really do it, I’m going to do it in my own shoes. Boots, actually, chunky and black, which I wear with a long black tunic over a starched, white, oversized shirt and black leggings. I wear big lashes of black liquid liner and carry a black rubber knapsack. And I am into hats. I wear an orange, black and gold cap today and clip my hair back.

“What a great hat,” Mary comments, not recognizing my total image overhaul, as she plops down a stack of manilla file folders on my desk. “Briefs on all our same-sex custody cases,” she says. “All husbands seeking custody after their wives have either left them for women or come out as lesbian after they were separated or divorced. This one’s completely different, though,” she says, referring to her latest case. “This could be huge.” She looks a little too hungry and I find it disarming.

I am diving head first into the research for this case. It is the murky and contested terrain of two mothers, a landscape I traverse with some sense of the familiar. Lovers who have lost their love for each other but share
the
love for the child they have raised together. The child is not the biological child of either woman, but it is legally H’s child, since only one woman is officially recognized as a mother in this province. M, however, has been the one who has acted as primary caregiver, giving up her job so she could be at home raising the baby Sadie.

H and M are ferocious. Tearing chunks out of each other in their accusations. Using the secrets shared in some earlier place of trust to malign each other, each condemning the other as a less suitable mother. H is resurrecting painful details about M’s psychiatric history, which, unfortunately for our client, is admissible testimony. We have a file bulging with letters in support of M. Her present is watertight, but her past is leaking and threatening to drown who she is today and who she is in relation to this child.

I know about drowning. I am barely floating myself. Every day I take a measurement of the water level and sometimes I have to wear heels just to keep my head above it. I am managing and I am not quite sure how, because I feel like a fraud with two-thirds of my body under water.

I am to record M’s version of her psychiatric past. She comes into the office, obviously drained from the events of recent weeks, but nevertheless striking and elegant. She is tall and thin with cropped black hair and grey eyes framed by long, thick lashes. She wears big chunks of silver, a short black skirt and a
houndstooth
jacket, and her skin is luminescent, her lips and eyelids dusted with silver powder. I am somewhat intimidated but I have the strength and presence of Heroin within me to keep me focused. She looks familiar to me.

I offer her a cup of coffee, which she takes black, and we sit informally, her at one end of the green leather couch and me in the armchair with a pad of paper on my lap. I am listening to her story, about having been bulimic and depressed. It is too familiar to break my heart, told in a language I know too well, so it disturbs me less than it probably should. Heroin has to stifle my natural inclination to confide in her. To splutter out, “Hey, I’ve been in hospital, too.” To tell her about Dr. N. To ask her whether she’s ever lived in a cave. Heroin tells me to shut up. Dr. N. is more gentle, reminding me: This is her story. This is not your story. Remember not to collapse yourself into her narrative or appropriate it as your own.

“I just need to get the facts straight first,” I say with affected professional calm. “Will you give me the dates and the reasons or diagnoses attached to your hospitalizations?”

“Yes, of course,” she says without any apparent discomfort, and begins to speak.

Molly
. This is Molly, who wheeled herself and her IV past me and had been an unusual friend to me in a time and a place where I didn’t know myself or anyone else. That was Molly, and this confident and calm
woman
before me is Molly, and the only resemblance is the dead in the grey of her eyes.

“Molly?” I say, looking up from my pad of paper.

“Yes?” she asks, not understanding the reason for the shift in my tone of voice.

“Molly, I’m Thelma. Thelma Barley. From the hospital? 1987?” She looks at me as if she is flipping through a rolodex in her head. “Maybe you wouldn’t remember,” I offer. “Dr. Walker? Purple vomit?” I prompt.

“Oh my God,” she says with some confusion. “But you don’t look anything like Thelma Barley.”

“Well, no. I wasn’t well then. Maybe I wasn’t even Thelma Barley then.”

“Oh my God,” she repeats, attempting to reconcile two dramatically different worlds.

“It’s OK,” I say, reaching out to squeeze her hands folded in her lap.

“It’s just that I was so mean to you that day you were leaving,” she says.

“I understand it now,” I say, reassuringly. “I really do.”

—

“Oh my God, delicious,” Molly says, sliding a piece of fish into her mouth. We’re having lunch.

“It’s so good to see you enjoying food.”

“Yeah, well, it took time,” she says, casting her eyes downward. “You too, huh?”

I nod. “I had a real problem putting things in my mouth.”

“Yeah, I know what that’s about.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Molly covers her mouth for a minute and then smiles. “Recognize me now?” she beams.

“Ugh, Molly. That’s awful!” I shudder at the site of her toothless gums, her dentures cupped in her outstretched hand.

“It’s pretty gross, isn’t it?” she laughs sarcastically.

“It’s disgusting!” I can’t resist shrieking.

She sticks her teeth back in and says, “Talk to me about mouths. I ruined my fucking teeth. I’ve been known to pop out my teeth at parties if some man dares suggest I just haven’t met the right man.”
Go on and kiss me, big boy
, she mouths.

As we leave, she tells me that she is proud of me. “Look at you, Thelma,” she says. “You’re a lawyer, you look great, you sound great.”

“You think so?” I ask, surprised. “Gee, thanks. I’m not actually a lawyer yet, I still have my bar exams to get through at the end of this year. And to be honest, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing most of the time.”

“That’s OK,” she says. “Nobody really does. You’d be surprised.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“If you want it enough …” She trails off.

“What is it?”

“It’s my baby,” she sighs. “You can’t imagine how the
thought
of losing her breaks my heart. I promised Sadie I would never leave. I promised this child that I would never leave and now I have to fight for my life to keep her.”

“What’s Harriet’s motivation?” I ask her.

“It’s complicated. Harriet is very intelligent, very driven, very career-oriented. I admire her ambition, and we’ve been able to live really well, and I’ve had the privilege of staying home with Sadie, but for her, having a child is like earning some kind of Girl Guide badge. She doesn’t admit this, but I really think having a child, like having a middle-class home and a cottage, represents ‘normal’ for her and she desperately wants to be normal. She really doesn’t want to be a lesbian. She’s not out. Her colleagues actually think Sadie is her biological child—she renders me absolutely invisible even though I’m the one doing all the parenting. For all I know she probably tells them Molly is Sadie’s daycare supervisor.”

“Do you think she’s jealous of your relationship with Sadie?” I ask her.

“Oh, there’s no question that she’s jealous. She’s jealous of the relationship, but she’s not jealous of the work involved in developing and sustaining that relationship.”

“So how would you characterize her as a mother?” I ask, slipping out my notepad.

“Distant, preoccupied. Unstable.”

“Unstable is precisely the word she is levelling against you.”

“Harriet has had a string of lovers since our breakup.”

“And you?” I ask, although I am little embarrassed at having to.

“Me? No. God. I’ve been far too concerned with this whole thing,” she says.

“And Harriet isn’t concerned?”

“She’s concerned about one thing. Being adored. Publicly, privately. She doesn’t want this to escalate because it could be publicized, but if she doesn’t fight it, how is she suddenly going to explain the fact that she only sees her daughter on alternate weekends now.”

“So either way she risks being outed.”

“Yeah, and you know I understand it. I have always respected her wish for privacy, but it sickens me that she is using Sadie to protect herself,” Molly says, shaking her head.

I have known a mother to give her child away, surrender her in the extreme, cook the meal for which her daughter is destined to be dessert. In order to save herself, her face, her version of the world, Corinna colluded in submitting to the swollen penis of the Devil. Molly is another mother, less bound, and more willing to fight. “How far are you prepared to take this?” I ask her.

“Whatever the distance,” she’s says with determination.

“But you know all this stuff about your psychological history will get dredged up and picked apart in court. Once you have mental illness stamped on your forehead, virtually everything you do will be seen in court as pathologically motivated somehow.”