Mouthing the Words (6 page)

Dad buys a tree. He buries its base in a mountain of nuts—brazil nuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds, and calls it Christmas on a desert island. He thinks it’s very clever but I just feel terribly terribly sad and I am trying my hardest not to cry. There are so many nuts and we won’t eat them all so it seems like a waste and they don’t even look pretty there, all different colours of brown on the grey carpet.

Nothing feels right and I am walking through this empty house trying not to cry, watching my feet, trying to walk straight lines across the carpet but the lines become blurry with my tears welling up. Willy is crying because he wants to go home and Dad seems to be crying for the same reason. He is sitting on a cardboard box with his forehead cupped in his hand, staring at
the
ice cubes in the bottom of his glass, tears flooding down his cheeks, saying he misses my mother. We all want to go home.

On Christmas day he gives us each a canvas bag with
I
♥
NY
written on it. I have to ask what
NY
means and I am mortified by the big red heart because I know it means love. Inside is all this stuff, all this debris from my father’s nomadic life. Paper and pens from trade shows and diminutive packages with tiny soaps and shampoos and toothbrushes from hotels and little plastic magic tricks wrapped in shrink wrap and short pieces of metal bound together in clever ways – brain teasers to be untangled. All this is thrown together and swimming in the bottom of bags with embarrassing red hearts.

We give Dad the cards we made at school, which I had tried to make envelopes for and Mum had folded into frayed blue towels. We call Mum at lunch time and I am trying hard to be brave, telling her “Yeah, we are having a good time. We went to a beach where there were crabs and Willy found a little seahorse.” We had traipsed the north shore of Long Island that morning looking for treasures in the sand. We wore windbreakers and there were no people but we found surprises in the sand and wrapped them in sheets of toilet paper, which Dad carried in the pocket of his blue parka.

Later we ate turkey with salty bluish gravy and mashed potatoes in a truck stop full of old people
hacking
through the mucus in their thick lungs. Dad called me a hoyden and I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it. Then he asked Willy, “What are you planning on doing with your life?” Willy said maybe he’d learn how to ride a skateboard, but Dad got angry and said, “But how do you bloody well plan on supporting yourself, you idiot?” And then he was calling the waitress to fill his glass again, the ice cubes going clink clink against the backdrop of his sniffing.

We carried our canvas bags to school for the rest of the year, carried them so the hearts didn’t face out, but carried them with curious pride nonetheless. I was proud because it meant I had a father. But the bound bits of metal that I could never untangle left me unsettled.

—

Mum started going out at night with her friend Pam from the office. We’d never known Mum to have a friend and never known anyone like Pam, and we’d certainly never known our mother to smear on thick silver-blue eyeshadow and wear silver slingbacks and go out dancing or to the theatre. Mum was getting “liberated” while Dad was getting drunk and sad, and it didn’t seem altogether fair to me because Dad was all by himself on a business trip and Mum was here with us.

“I’m thirty-five years old, for Christ’s sake!” she screamed at me between applications of liquid liner.
“I’m
not dead yet. Why the hell can’t I have a social life, too?”

Too? Who else had a social life
?

“But what time will you be home?” I asked pleadingly when she and Pam were sashaying out the door.

“Relax, honey,” Pam said. “Your mom’s got a right to party just like anyone else,” giving me an affectionate tweak on the cheek.

I liked Pam although my father would have said she was a flake. She was definitely cool, while my mother was still serving as an apprentice. Pam wore bell-bottomed jeans and Indian cotton shirts and smelled like cinnamon. Everything about her seemed to jingle when she moved. She had big brown breasts, which she liked to flash at me for shock value whenever I said something that struck her as particularly uptight or middle-aged. I said a lot of things then because I didn’t like all the changes that were happening. I didn’t like all this talk about sexual revolution and the battle of the sexes and nations and bedrooms because all I could hear was the sex in it. I had no choice but to appoint myself the guardian of morality. “What’s with your Thelma?” Pam asked my mother. “She seems to have passed straight from infancy to rigor mortis!” she laughed.

“It’s her paranoid imagination” my mother sighed. “Her grip on things has always been distorted, and Jesus, talk about melodramatic!”

So Pam took it upon herself to shake me up a little
bit
and see if she could wring a smile out of me. One rainy afternoon on a Sunday in August, she and my mum and Rudy, who Pam referred to as her ‘salacious lover’, causing me no end of embarrassment, were sitting and laughing over tumblers of whiskey at our kitchen table. The back door and all the windows were open and the wind was blowing a sheet of rain across the blue and white linoleum floor. I was upstairs in my room trying to do my homework, but I was distracted by The Captain & Tennille echoing from the kitchen and by the fact that not one of them had made any attempt to bring in the laundry from the line before it started raining.

When I came into the kitchen, Pam was braiding Mum’s hair, Willy was doing a puzzle, and Rudy was there with his feet up on the table rolling a big joint.

“What the hell do you people think you’re doing?” I shouted at no one and everyone in particular.

“Having ourselves a party, girl,” said Pam. “Why don’t you come on in and join us?” she said, waving her arm majestically toward an empty chair.

“Because I am trying to concentrate on my homework!” I shouted. “And I can’t work with this awful racket going on!” I said, crossing my arms. “And what’s more, the Lord’s day is a day of peace,” I added.

“Jesus, Corinn—the girl’s got religion.” Pam turned to my mother in mock horror.

“What has gotten into you, Thelma? You were a
resolute
agnostic until yesterday,” my mother asked, bewildered.

Actually I had no idea who the Lord was, I was just looking for anyone to back me up. “What’s more,” I added, “drugs are bad and the next thing you know you’ll be running around having orgies and talking about female organisms.”

“Hilarious!” laughed Pam. “Lighten up, girl. Jeeeesus. Where did you come from?”

“Well, actually …” I began to explain, before realizing that it was a rhetorical question because Pam rolled her eyes at my mother.

“Get a load of this,” she said, moving to do one of her bare-breast numbers which was usually sure to make me leave a room in disgust and give my mother and Pam a good chuckle. She whipped up her purple t-shirt to reveal two smiling faces with big brown areolae for noses. I stared in amazement and she screeched, “Isn’t it fucking hilarious!” and starting bouncing her breasts around so they looked like clowns bobbing up and down.

I covered my mouth with my hands, and my mother said, “Thelma? You look as if you’re going to be sick,” but when tears started running down my face it was Pam who said:

“Corinna, I can’t believe it. She’s actually laughing. Thank the fucking Lord, the girl’s got a sense of humour after all.”

My mother stared at me in amazement, saying,
“Thelma
, I am quite sure this is the first time I’ve ever seen you laugh.”

“Hallelujah for that,” added Rudy, passing the joint to my mother.

—

Another man was sitting at the table with them the following Sunday. When I came downstairs to ask them to turn down the music and Pam said, “Ugh, Thelma. I thought we’d been through this last week,” my mother turned to me all soulful and said:

“Honey, I’d like you to come and meet Suresh.”

I could tell by her eyes that this was serious, so I just said, “On the Lord’s day we take off our hats in the house,” and stomped out of the room because I knew that would upset her.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew from the turban on his head that Suresh was a Sikh, and that he couldn’t very well take his turban off, particularly at a request to indulge some Christian Lord who doesn’t even exist. But I didn’t like the serious look on my mother’s face. I didn’t like the change in her voice.

Of course, years later when my father would scream, “That bloody Paki!” or “That fucking swami!” it would be me, not my mother, who would defend, “Suresh was a Sikh.” But that was much later, and this was now, and I still had much too much of my father in me to believe anything other than, “We colonized the subcontinent.”

My father, after all, had been discharged from the
army
for calling a Visiting Official from Her Majesty’s Royal Indian Regiment something similar. His racism was not reserved for a particular constellation of physical features. Red hair, he decreed, was a sign of inbreeding (which dismissed legions of Irish and Scots from respectability in his eye). Freckles and curly hair (I possessed a slight amount of both) were evidence of being “tainted with the tar brush”, for which, in my case, he somehow blamed my blue-eyed, pencil-straight-haired, alabaster-skinned mother.

On the only occasion my brother ever brought a friend home to play, my father prevented him from entering the house by saying, “Where do you come from, boy?” To which the scared little soul replied:

“361 Balliol Street, Sir.”

And my dad shouted, “No, you idiot, I mean your genes!”

Scared out of his wits, Willy’s friend offered, “Maybe Eaton’s?”

After his mother had called my mother to find out what possessed my father to be so mean to such a little boy, my father said dismissively, “I just didn’t like the colour of his skin.”

“Pardon?” my mother said. “Douglas, the boy is white!”

“But it’s the kind of white I don’t like. Pasty. It makes my skin crawl.”

Needless to say, my brother never had any friends
after
that, and neither did my father, come to think of it, or my mother, until Pam that is, and then Suresh.

Corinna’s Armpit

THE NEXT SATURDAY
morning Mum’s bedroom door was closed. Her door had never been closed before and I knew this meant that Suresh was in there with her. My first reaction was idle speculation—was he morally bound to wear his turban while he slept? My next was sheer horror—there’s a man in my mum’s bedroom! There’s never been a man in my mum’s bedroom! Not even my dad slept in the same room. And what could they possibly be doing in there that necessitated closing the door? Disgusting! They must be fucking! He must be sticking his penis in Mummy’s vagina! That’s what fucking is! That’s what Anika told Binbi and Vellaine and me and what they have been staring at Willy’s willy for, thinking, How the hell does that work?

I was overtaken with panic. What to do? How to stop this ghastly moral infraction? I ran to wake Willy
and
yelled, “Mummy is fucking!” In his ten-year-old haze he looked at me as if to say, “And what the hell do you want me to do about it?” but really he had even less of a grasp on this fucking thing than I did. “Do something!” I screamed at him. “You’re the man. Do something!” And when he just continued to stare at me, blinking his eyes awake, I stomped out of his room saying, “Ugh. You’re useless.”

I went next door. Anika was meditating on the afghan and Claudio was making griddle cakes for all of them when I burst in shouting, “Mummy is fucking!”

“Corinna?” said Claudio.

“Corinna?” repeated Anika, violently awoken mantra from a midstream.

“Gross,” sneered Vellaine.

“Yeah, gross,” repeated Binbecka.

“Can’t you do something?” I pleaded, turning from Claudio, to Anika, back to Claudio.

“I can say congratulations,” Claudio laughed. “Who would have thought.”

“But it’s morally wrong!” I objected. “She’s a married woman!”

“Well, she’s a separated woman actually,” Anika corrected. “She’s really at liberty to do what she pleases. And if this makes her happy, then that’s good.”

What was wrong with people? Nobody was on my side. I didn’t like what was happening. Dad would be mad as hell when he came home and found another man in Mum’s bedroom. Or worse, Suresh could have
us
all packed off to India by the time Dad got home. No, I didn’t like the way this was progressing at all. And fucking makes you pregnant! I hoped to hell that Anika had told my mother, too!

“
HEROIN
!” I wailed at the top of my lungs upon running back into the house. Where was she when I needed her? I had left her for Mrs. Kelly and when I called her back and said, “It’s OK, Heroin, I’m not leaving after all,” she said, “Go gently into this good night, my dear. I shall never leave you, but hereafter I shall follow.” She was always overly dramatic.

“Heroin?” Suresh pulled his lips from my mother’s nipple to consider—

“Idolatry,” my mother mused. “Her imaginary friend. I thought she’d given her up years ago. This doesn’t augur well,” she sighed, but added, “don’t stop.”

I paced in front of the closed bedroom door. “I hope you’re using protection,” I began. “I hope you realize that this is completely unsuitable behaviour for a woman in your position.”

“And what position would that be,” sniggered Suresh as he raised Corinna’s ankle next to her ear.

“Suresh,” my mother hushed him. “She might burst in here on her moral high horse. We’d better be discreet. She doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about but the worst part is she thinks she does.”

“Contraceptives are widely available over the counter at any pharmacy,” I continued. “But just because they’re available doesn’t mean this is acceptable.”

“Where does she get this language?” laughed Suresh.

“Her head. Her sophisticated neighbours. She reads everything. Digests words and then spews lines out as if she’s written them herself …”