Vanishing and Other Stories (41 page)

“Or you could stay here. With us. We could get a bigger place.”

“I'm going to miss you.” He kneels to your height. “
Pour de vrai
. But you have to leave.”

“No.” You cross your arms the way you've seen your mother do it. You look into his eyes and you hold yourself there.

“Jilly. You're a special girl.” His smile is gone. “I mean that. You remind me of my daughter. She's younger than you, but she's bright too.”

He looks into your face as though assessing damages, what can and cannot be fixed.

“You and your mom—it caught me by surprise. Do you understand, Jilly? Do you understand what I'm saying?”

You suck in your breath, stare at the blue of his eyes, the lines already pressed into his skin. Then you turn and run as fast as your legs can take you.

 

 

YOU ARE AFRAID OF YOUR MOTHER, GILLIAN
, your Italian will say as he holds you in the dark. This will be after you showed Marie the drafty guest room and gave her towels for the morning. She leaves in a week, and seems glad of it. Earlier, over dinner, she said she doesn't trust Wally to water the plants, and you know this means she misses him. You will face away from your Italian and feel his hand on your stomach, his sticky breath on the back of your neck. I
was
afraid of my mother, you correct, irritated already with his habit of making statements.

And it's true, you used to be afraid of Marie's harsh, smoky voice and the way she slapped your face if you broke a dish. But you will not tell your husband that you're still afraid. What scares you now are your mother's strange, tragic stories. She has become more talkative, happy to share anecdotes. And in her stories, anything can happen. Maybe she exaggerates. Maybe no one really eats their own dog, and maybe no child is born missing a piece of his heart. But then again, maybe to you, no child will be born at all. And maybe Marie will find and keep a comfortable love, while both your marriages will be makeshift, stopgap. You never believed in her ability to know with accuracy. What will scare you as you lie in the dark is her willingness—later you might call it courage—to imagine the unexpected, the far-flung.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE YEAR MY PARENTS SEPARATED
coincided with the year I adored my sister. Claudia was fourteen, and was at the beginning of the long rebellion that would define her life. I was eleven and still looked like a boy: hair that my mom cut too short, legs that I hadn't started to shave. I wore the same outfit almost every day: jeans with embossed flowers and a green sweater. No wonder I was obsessed with Claudia. She listened to the Dead Kennedys and the Dayglo Abortions. She had purple hair and a fake ID that claimed she was nineteen and from Oshawa. She'd gotten her period, and boys had started to call our house asking for her. Sometimes I answered the phone in the evenings, and there would be a nervous male voice on the line, pleading, “Can I talk to Claudia?”

“Who's calling, please?” I desperately needed to know.

But Claudia was a slave to the telephone and always aware of
its ringing. She'd smack the back of my head before I could get any information. “Give it, June. Now.”

She was cruel and lovely and totally awesome. I snuck into her room to riffle through her shoebox of tapes any chance I got.

 

 

OUR PARENTS WERE AWED
by the latest catastrophe they'd created. First, two daughters. And now this: The Separation. They talked about it as though it had capital letters, and they both seemed to want to make it as crazy as the parties they liked to throw.

They didn't seem to notice that, separated, they were more married than ever. Each obsessed over what the other was doing, or might be doing. They sent messages to each other through Claudia and me:
Tell your father/Please inform your mother
. These messages were angry or heartbroken or flirtatious. They were articulate, defiant, or funny. Usually, Claudia and I forgot them entirely, or forgot the most important part of them.

The Separation happened this way: first my mom left, and stayed with one of her sisters for a week. Then she came back and my dad stayed in a hotel for two days. Then he came back because the hotel was expensive—separation was expensive!—so for a few days the house was exactly like before: messy, crowded, loud.

But one evening, there must have been an argument. Claudia and I didn't hear it because we were in her bedroom listening to music. It was one of the few times my sister let me hang out in her room, and sometimes I wonder if she was protecting me, if she knew there was a fight going on downstairs. The point is, I never
knew what caused The Separation because I was with Claudia, and Mickey DeSadist was singing us a lullaby.

 

 

WE WERE RAISED ON LENTILS
, brown rice, Neil Young, and solstice celebrations. Our mother ran a local grocery co-op and wore skirts made of hemp before hemp was chic. Our dad was a ceramics artist who sold cups and bowls at the local farmers' market, had lost most of his short-term memory, and never got any of the big commissions that the tourist board gave out.

As young children, Claudia and I were encouraged to be wild. We were always outside, and often naked. The neighbours complained because our parents never mowed the lawn, believing that children should have high grass to play in and dandelion seeds to blow. There was a picture of us on the fridge: Claudia with ripped overalls and hair that looked like it had never been washed, and me, naked except for a T-shirt that read,
I Hate TV
. We took vitamins, ate vegetables, and recycled. We'd been humiliated countless times when our parents dragged us to marches against apartheid and solidarity dances for Cuba. One summer, when I was eight, we'd been forced to stand outside the local supermarket and protest the importing of grapes from Chile.

No wonder Claudia found it difficult to be a teenager. She wanted to rebel, but our parents didn't make it easy. Her first attempt, the one she undertook the year of The Separation, centred on music. Instead of Crosby, Stills and Nash, she listened to Minor Threat and Bad Brains. She went to concerts in people's basements and all-ages shows at Little Fernwood. She moshed and
stage-dived, and spent so much time thrashing around with other dirty, sweating kids that once she got scabies.

And one evening, while Mom and I were in the kitchen, she cut herself thick bangs, bleached them, and dyed them purple. I was doing homework, and Mom was drinking tea and reading a book about the Buddhist practice of non-attachment. Then Claudia stomped into the room, with her purple hair and her boots that left marks on the lino. She heaved the fridge door open then slammed it shut.

Mom looked up from her book. “Hey,” she said. “Great hair.”

Claudia froze. She stood in front of the fridge for about three seconds. Then she stomped out of the kitchen.

Mom sipped her camomile. “Did I say something wrong?”

“I think she hoped her hair would annoy you.”

“But I think it's cute. I think it suits her.”

I twirled my pencil through my own hair, which had almost reached my chin, and wondered if Claudia had any of that purple dye left.

“It's oppressive,” I said, trying out a word I'd heard Claudia use.

“What is?”

“How much you love us.”

Mom set down her clay cup, one that Dad had made. “Do you have any idea what motherhood is like? It's like taking an endless multiple-choice exam, and none of the available answers are correct.” She added, “Your father never understood that.”

I'd never taken a multiple-choice exam. My homework still consisted of memorizing how to spell difficult words, like
friend
and
people
. Mom was always forgetting how young I was.

“Claudia Sky!” she yelled toward the other room. “Get back here, young lady! We need to talk about that stuff in your hair!” Then, quietly, to me, “How was that?”

“Great.” My pencil was completely tangled in my hair and I wondered if I'd have to cut it out. “Very convincing.”

 

 

DAD WENT AS FAR AWAY
as he could on fifty dollars. He took the Greyhound up-island, as far north as it would go. Then, from a payphone, he called us. Had my mom answered the phone, he probably would have spoken triumphantly: “I'm in Port Hardy. I bet you don't even know where that is.”

Instead, because I thought it might be a boy calling for Claudia, I ran to the phone, almost tripped over the cord, and grabbed it before anyone else could. The sound of my young voice over the line really did him in. “I'm in Port Hardy,” he said. “I bet you don't even know where that is.” Then he burst into tears.

“Hold on, okay?” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and screamed, “Mom! It's Dad! He's crying again!”

She took the phone from me. “Where are you? Port what? I don't even know where that is.”

When she got off the phone with Dad, she called her sisters, her friends at the veggie co-op, and her Amnesty letter-writing group. That was one thing Claudia hated about The Separation: she'd lost her tyranny of the telephone. Mom was always talking to her sisters, women friends, and anyone else who was up for a little
schadenfreude
. Even her friend who lived in a tree stump in Beacon Hill Park found a way to call.

“Breaking news,” Mom said each time someone phoned that night. “He's now sleeping in a bus depot in Port Hardy. I bet you don't even know where that is.”