Mouthing the Words (21 page)

Why aren’t you with the one you love?

“I’m comfortable. It’s nice. Pleasant. Uncomplicated. Easy.”

Oh
.

So it’s better to be comfortable. I will never be comfortable for someone. No one will ever want to be with me. I will never have a partner, because I am not comfortable. I am not comfort. I am not a soft pillow. I
am
not a daily talker. I rarely have the courage to pick up the phone. I am not reliable or consistent. I am moody, dark, introverted. I am liable to hear words that catapult me into space and make me an unpredictable dinner party guest. I say yes when I mean no and I have no intention. I do not rally, I do not get angry, I freeze, fly or swim instead. I do not always speak and sometimes I speak in tongues. I forget people. I have long conversations with people who think they are intimately engaged, but meanwhile I am digging a hole in some cave somewhere and discovering fire while they are talking. No one can ever be sure. I cannot be sure. I am in love right now in this room but I do not know where I will be when I am in the next room. I have a country. I have a home. I have a therapist and a best friend named Molly, but I feel like all I have is a lumpy futon beneath me and a heart breaking in the hands of a man who loves me. He is comfortable. I am not.

Golem Reversing

I FEEL LIKE
I have been run over by a truck. “Is this what real life feels like?” I ask Molly.

“Mmm, hmm,” she says. “Sucks, most of the time.”

“Well, why …”

“Oh, don’t go there again. Because when it doesn’t, it doesn’t, OK?”

“Why are
you
so grumpy?” I snap at her. “Have
you
had your heart trampled upon this week? Hmm?”

“Sorry, you know how much I hate flying. And I miss Sadie.”

“Me too. I’m really glad you came with me though, Molly.”

“Yeah, I am too. Really glad,” she says, smiling at me. “It’ll be OK, you know. You needed to do this. His eyes are clean. And so are you.”

We are water now. Clean water running though rusted lead pipes.

Later, she asks me, “What do you think of Scotty?”

“Who?”

“My little brother. You met him at the party,” she says.

“Oh, yeah. I dunno. He’s fine.”

“He’s into you,” she laughs.

“I don’t think so,” I shake my head.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Well, he’s got the same eyes as you, for starters,” I say.

“And like I said: What’s wrong with him?” she repeats.

“Seems just a little too incestuous,” I say.

“Fair enough.”

“And besides, I am in love with Patrick. I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.”

“Well, if you expect to stop loving him before you’re with anyone else, don’t hold your breath. It doesn’t work that way. I mean you keep on loving, it doesn’t go away.”

That idea is strange to me. People keep on loving? People keep on loving even if you are not there in their face every day to remind them? People keep on loving even if they no longer see you at all? People keep on loving even if they are loving someone else? Impossible: to believe you can be loved in absence when you don’t even know how it feels to be loved when you are there.

—

In here
, I tap my breastbone, hoping someone will knock back. I am trying to carry him with me, trying to do what Molly and Dr. N. have both tried to teach me. I think my way through it, with limited success, but then one day I turn on the tap and Patrick runs easily into the sink. He comes to be with me in this strange and wonderful way in my imaginary house full of women and animals. He fills my bath. He moves within my mirror. He watches me as I primp and preen for what turns out to be a disastrous date with Scotty. He follows me through the halls of my house when I return, mortified, from my date. From the series of bad dates I must have because I am not comfort.

—

When I pass my exams, Mary tells me they can convert the back room into an office. I am ecstatic. I call up Molly and she shrieks with joy. “Thelma, I’m coming over right now—put on your wings, girl.”

We fly across this city at night, diamond lights glittering beneath us. We sing and swoon in delicate moonlight, our heads softly lit, our hair shining. Our bellies graze against long meadow grasses and our bodies swim through raindrops, mouths first, coming up for air. Sadie plays our toes like piano keys and colours us in with crayons. Molly gives me a painting for my office—a naked woman in the grass falling Christ-like down a hillside. She is big-breasted, voluptuous, her head angled up toward the sky.

—

Heroin is lying on the couch when I come home, even smaller than she was the day before. She is the same woman, just as feisty, only she is shrinking. She is my golem reversing. She has made us stuffed eggplant for dinner, but all the dishes are on the floor because she is no longer tall enough to reach the sink.

Soon she will be a speck swimming in languid liquid comfort. Warm, loved and nestled against me in sleep.

“How was your day?” she asks me.

“Interesting,” I say slowly. “I was remembering the time you kicked in the door and tried to stop him—the time you bit his cheek so hard he started bleeding.”

“But that was you, Thelma. You were the one who bit him.”

“It was me?” I ask, confused.

“Certainly was. You’ve always been stronger than me.”

“Fuck,” I marvel. “Strong teeth. Strong mouth.”

“Your mouth,” she says.

Clench clench these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth. Of my body. In my house. My mouth? Chapped lips swollen and bloody? Dream dreaming wide and thunder? My mouth! My God! This is me speaking. Not mouthing. Not typing and twitching. Not writing a suicide note the length of a novel that will never be finished. I hear voices now but I know they are not the voices of fathers or lovers, or mothers or angels or demons, but the sounds of my own private wars echoing the battles of women before
me
and near me. No wonder I do not make people comfortable. I am a mirror. I have far too many things to say.

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks to the following for helping Thelma see the light of day: Beth Follett, Ravi Mirchandani, Vanessa Kerr, Jonathan Sissons, Suzanne Brandreth, Dean Cooke, Ellen Flanders, Zab, Kenneth Grey and the Toronto Women’s Bookstore. To my friends and family for their love and faith: Lorraine Segato, Sheila, Patrick and Edward Fennessy, Stanley Cole, Alex Gibb, Ted Colman, Lynne Fernie, Vibika and Lilly Bianchi, Anne Shepherd, Annie Sommers and Marnie Woodrow.

To Those who have offered their kind words and inspiration: Jeanette Winterson, Tomson Highway, Jane Rule, Jim Bartley, Martin Levin, Susan Cole, Martha Kanya-Forstner and Maya Mavjee.

About the Author

Camilla Gibb was born in London in 1968. She grew up and studied in Canada, before returning to England to do a DPhil in anthropology at Oxford. She lives in Toronto.