Vanishing and Other Stories (38 page)

She rolled a joint and we had a smoke, lying side by side. The only light came from the smoulder that we passed back and forth.

“I'm so tired,” she said. “You wouldn't believe how tired I am.”

“Dad wants me to go to work with him this week,” I said. “He wants me to give it another shot.”

“Doesn't that make you suicidal?”

“That's one way of putting it.”

She exhaled a long, sleepy breath. “I'm going to leave Toronto, go somewhere better.”

“Yeah.”

We gave up on conversation for a few minutes, until she said, “I'm going to have a baby.”

I turned to her but could only see the outline of her face.

“He doesn't want me to keep it. He thinks I'm too young.” She pressed her palms to her eyelids. “He thinks I'm a joke.”

I remembered my father in the kitchen, his hands pressed to the table. The way he'd said,
I don't know what I'm supposed to do
. And maybe I should have told her this. Maybe I should have explained that, when she'd left, he hadn't laughed it off. But her chilled skin was touching mine. And since she'd gone, I'd thought
about her constantly. I'd missed her, and it felt something like lust and something like mourning. I said, “I don't think you're a joke.”

She turned and kissed me the way she had weeks earlier, except this time it was a wetter, sleepier kiss. She tasted like gum and Coke-bottle candies, and I didn't mind the way her lips felt.

“It'll be okay,” I said, though I didn't know what I meant.

She turned on her side and buried her face into my neck, and I could picture her sleeping next to her sisters that way. I knew I'd get up the next morning and I wouldn't recognize my own life. I wouldn't sit on the couch, or smoke anything, or punch Sam even once. I would get a job—serving fries or pumping gas. I'd work hard every day of my life. I knew very little about Simone, but I knew we'd stay together.

I told myself that my father didn't understand her, and that he'd hardly miss her. That to him she was a bright plaything, a bit of sunshine, nothing more. I imagined him asleep in his room. He always slept soundly, on top of the covers and in his underwear. I had to squeeze my eyes shut and push this picture of him from my mind. I told myself—I believed—that eventually he'd forgive me. I was eighteen years old, and I had no idea how difficult my life was about to become.

“We'll be okay,” I said, but Simone didn't hear me. She had already fallen into her kind of deep, breathy sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU WILL HARDLY GROW
, but your hair will darken, along with your nipples, and people will stop calling you Jilly. As you drift through classes on French vocabulary and hairstyling, you will wear skirts from department stores and knit hats that slant over your eyes. You will trip at your graduation ceremony, then redeem yourself by attending foreign universities with names no one at home can pronounce. You will live on two continents and speak four languages with the same ease as your mother reads palms or embroiders daisies on dishcloths. You will marry one of your students, and then an Italian you meet on an airplane. These two will be the only men, besides your doctor, to see you naked.

Your mother will visit once in these twenty-three years, when you fly her out to meet your Italian and his two sons. She will sit in your cold dining room and tell her kind of stories. About a woman who birthed a baby with half a heart, and children who lit
their own heads on fire. Sleepy and honest from wine, she will even tell of the time she met—spoke with, slept with—a man who ate his own dog. And you will look into her face the way you would stare into a funhouse mirror. Your sense of irony tuned enough to know that she will speak of you—your stone house, tanned skin, elegant husband—in the same way she speaks of her dog man. The same sly, gossipy tone you might use, if you knew your own story, if you could tell it now.

 

 

NOW: IT IS AUGUST
, it is raining, and you are twelve. Heavy drops slide down your forehead and fall into the neck of your jacket. You stand in a flooded cornfield, and your bony knees stick out of your mother's rubber boots. You hold your breath because a cricket has leapt into your palm. It folded its stick-and-hinge body into the cup of your hand, so you keep your arm steady, will your heart to still. You want to examine this miracle: the curving antennae, the wings, the strong black legs. If you had a jar, you'd trap it under glass. You know Marie is now looking into her scuffed mirror, clipping on earrings and frosting her lips. If you thought she would care, you'd scream,
Mom, come see what I got
. Because you want something to show, something to keep. Want it so bad that, before you can tell yourself not to, you shut your fist.

 

 

YOU LIVE IN A PLACE
that's not exactly a port town, not a suburb, but a cropping of houses and fields along drenched coastline. In
twenty years the farmers and fishermen will sell art to ferry tourists and the auto parts factory will move production overseas. This flat, foggy cut of coast will become part of the nearby city that stretches farther and farther down the highway. As an adult it will be easy for you to romanticize this place: fields of cabbage and pumpkin. Horses that graze under power lines.

It must have been easy for your mother too, who came here when you were still a bad idea in her belly. It was in fashion to leave the city and to stop shaving underarms, so she had no trouble finding the baby-blue trailer she rents from a farmer you call Mr. B. But she didn't come for retreat. She came to wash hair in the local salon, sell fresh eggs, serve pancakes in the highway truck stop, give women permanents in her kitchen, and tell people their fortunes. She keeps her money in envelopes marked
Food, Cigarettes, Jilly
, as though you are merely an expense. Every day, she sits at the table and shuffles twenties from one envelope to another.

“You've outgrown your sneakers already, haven't you?”

You nod, ashamed.

“Your feet are like boats.” Ash drops from her cigarette to the floor. “I don't know where you get that from.”

So most days you stay outside. You save worms from the highway after rain, or stand on the pebbly beach to imitate a heron's stance. This place is flat, wet, bare. The only things you like about it are the escape routes: water, road. And how, on sunny days, they melt into each other.

 

 

AS A TEENAGER
, you will hate your mother the way all your friends hate theirs: she will be unbending, hard, and she will have frizzy henna-died hair. In the grocery store she will buy dried chickpeas and magazines that include articles on weight-loss creams and new Biblical scrolls discovered in Maine. She will run a maid service for working women who don't have time to dust. Some of your friends' parents will hire her, and some of your friends' parents will work for her, so this will be a constant source of embarrassment. She will never be in when you get home from school, so you'll steal and smoke her cigarettes. Then the two of you will spend hours in front of evening soap operas, you hemming your skirts, she crocheting scrap wool into scarves you will hate to wear.

 

 

FROM WHERE YOU STAND
in the cornfield, through strips of rain, you see where the circus has begun to sprawl its tarps and tents. You knew it was coming because of the paper arrows taped to highway signs and the posters advertising
Four days! Four shows!
Still, when you watch it appear from nothing, the warped little town seems unbelievable. The Zavarra: it sounds exotic, but later—when you've lived where the Romans held chariot races and fights to the death—you'll know it's a nonsense word. And it's nothing like the European circuses you'll see, glamour shows of elastic women painted like ice queens. The Zavarra has a clown who stamps your wrist as Marie pulls you past the gate. It has a band, heavy on the brass. No ice queens, but men on stilts or unicycles, and pubescent boys pushing popcorn, candy floss, caramel-covered apples. There are no lions, but two bears—Kyla
and Bill—wrap their stubby arms around each other and dance. An elephant raises her trunk for pictures. The ringmaster has a stagy whisper—
We need complete silence for this, folks
—and the grandstand seats creak. And off to the side are smaller tents. One with a woman who uses her mind to bend spoons, one with a 56-year-old man who has 56 tattoos. And one with a table, two fold-up chairs, and your mother.

You'll never know what she did to get this gig. But it seems natural that Marie is briefly and fully accepted by people who hold an undying belief that accidents happen in threes and that it's bad luck to look back during a parade. Later, when you tell this to your first husband, he'll shake his head and look at you with young, humourless eyes. He'll think you make this stuff up, so you'll say: You've never met my mother. You'll borrow her deep, dramatic voice: She was just like them—crazy, a cutthroat capitalist. And you'll describe the tent she improvised: a blue tarp to keep out the rain, with a maroon velour lining and a sign that read,
$5 for a palm reading, or three questions for $3.

But now, you don't imagine how this will become one of your stories, how it will change in your hands. You sit on an empty tub of Pineapple Whip as people ask Marie their questions. Will there be a wedding? Will he love our baby? She answers in a husky voice and sometimes talks to people's dead relatives; she can do this too, as well as give hand massages. Tragedy, romance, ghosts—Marie takes these for granted.

“This mark shows you've touched God,” she says to an elderly woman who wears a plastic bonnet to keep rain off her hair.

“See this semicircular line? It indicates family battles.” This to a man of forty, a banker who wants to discuss his prospects of
promotion. “Look at the way it swoops down. Do you have estranged children? No? You may have children you don't know about.”