As She Grows Read online

  PUFFIN CANADA

  AS SHE GROWS

  LESLEY ANNE COWAN has a B.A. in English literature and a diploma in education from McGill University. She is also a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. As She Grows was shortlisted for the 2001 Chapters/Robertson Davies First Novel Contest. Cowan currently resides in Toronto, where she is a secondary-school teacher working with at-risk youth.

  Please visit her website at www.lesleyannecowan. com for more book discussion, community resource links, and teacher resources.

  AS SHE GROWS

  LESLEY ANNE COWAN

  PUFFIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Puffin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2003

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Lesley Anne Cowan, 2003

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  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data

  available upon request to the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-317060-0

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  for my parents

  BELLYACHE

  You can have your cake and throw it up

  but when I spilled my guts you didn’t clean it up.

  I’m beginning to hate the sight of you,

  I’m beginning to love the fight.

  My own arms around me can only choke.

  My own words can only hurt.

  I don’t want to love your faults anymore.

  It’s all pushed down so far that it blows up in my face.

  Got so much shit in my mouth,

  I begin to enjoy the taste.

  —Melissa Psarros

  1999

  AS SHE GROWS

  ONE

  •

  1

  It starts with the sound of butterfly wings, flapping, hundreds of them around my head, thump, thumping; and my hair lashing against my cheeks like wisps of grass. My face sprouts from the backseat window like a tender green shoot through concrete. I can’t hear my grandmother Elsie shouting to put my head back into the car. I can’t hear Jed swearing about this godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere.

  Instead I hear butterfly wings and smell warm country until Elsie’s strong hand pulls me back into the scent of vinyl and sweat and Old Spice. Her fleshy arm extends over the seat to deposit a heavy margarine tub in the centre of me, forcing my fluttering edges down. She tells me to be a good girl: “Be still because you don’t want to spill your mother.” Then she turns back around, flicks the map, and says something like, “Jesus Christ, where the hell is this place?” I look down, feel the cool plastic against my bare five-year-old thighs, and contemplate a miniature mother I had never met, trapped inside that container.

  We are scattering my mother’s ashes in a river, by a field, where she, Elsie, and Aunt Sharon used to go and have picnics a long time ago. This is what Elsie tells me.

  “Five more minutes and I’m gonna scatter her over Highway 7,” Jed says as Elsie’s hand slips onto his reddened neck and gently squeezes. His shoulders tense, she quickly drops her hand and turns her face to the window. I sink down into the backseat, disappearing from the rear-view mirror. I slowly slip off the lid to peek inside and find, instead of a tiny lady, a bunch of fireplace ash. I poke my hand inside and swoosh through. Pinch my fingers into the dust and press a brittle piece against my skin. I cautiously pull my hand out, study the chip perched like a Chiclet on the tip of my finger. And for some reason I still can’t explain, I raise my finger to my mouth and slip the tasteless grey flake in.

  Then there are flashes. Elsie’s horrified face, hollow windy words coming out of her mouth, dust filling my nose, and gravel crunching under tires. My body dragged out of the car and Elsie’s strong hands pinning firm my squirming arms. A sharp-nailed finger down my throat, loss of breath, and then the contracted release of a bowl of Alphaghettis, some cherry Coke, and my mother.

  I wake up sweating and breathless. I wake up alone. I can still hear the receding wings, distant and thick, as if under water.

  Elsie shouts from the couch, blathering on to herself, drunk or high on whatever she could put her lips around. Carrying on some insane conversation with an invisible person called Martha or Marma, or maybe Mother.

  Her slurred voice gets louder and uglier. “You selfish little bitch,” she yells out to me. “Com’ out here! Can’t ev’n help your own fuckin’ grandmother.”

  It isn’t the first time she’s carried on like that, so I drift in and out of sleep, waiting for her to shut up or to just pass out. But you can only ignore something for so long before the act of ignoring becomes all-consuming.

  “Oh! Susanna, don’t you cry for me, cuz I com’ fr’m . . .”

  When I can’t take it any longer, I storm up from my bed and rip open my bedroom door. “What the fuck! Are you fuckin’ crazy?” My eyes drop to Elsie’s crumpled body, squatted on the floor by the couch, an empty bottle of vodka hanging loosely in her hands, the bottoms of her jeans stained wet with spilt alcohol. I shake my head in disgust. “I have school tomorrow.”

  “Oh, the princess, ’fraid to lose her beauty sleep.” She takes a swig of her empty bottle and then wipes the imaginary liquid from her chin. “Since when do you give a shit about school? You think you’re sooo great, think you’re the only person who has a life, you and
those guys you fuck, don’t think I don’t know it, you little whore . . .”

  “What are you talking about? You’re insane!”

  “You little slut, think you’re so much better than me, you don’t know what I’ve been through, you don’t know . . .” She keeps going on, making no sense, spitting as she speaks, her face squished up thick with hatred. And I think to myself, Why was I born her enemy? I stare at her body, heavy and toppled, like a fixed anchor at the end of me. Sinking me. It’s too pathetic to even bother, so I turn, slam the door, and get back into my bed. And then I wait. My body tense. Fingers firmly holding the covers over my head.

  Elsie follows her words into my room, flicks on my light, stands over my bed, and keeps shouting, “Beauty sleep, booty sleep, booty seep . . .” I clench my eyes shut, screaming go away, go away, in my head. But she keeps shaking my mattress until I finally burst out from under the covers, hands over my ears, pacing back and forth, shouting, “Stop it, stop it, stop it . . . !” I’m bawling and my face is wet and hot and I feel like I am going crazy, like I am this mental institution girl. “Stop it, stop it, stop it . . .” Pressing my hands tighter over my ears, trying to squeeze her entire existence out of my head. Things keep spinning and I can’t breathe and all I hear is the blood racing in my own skull.

  And then I rupture.

  Everything goes quiet and blank and cold, until my grandmother’s controlled voice fades in from black to blinding white. “You’re going to pay for that. You’re going to fix that.”

  I stand there stunned, like a bird that hit glass. I have no idea what she’s talking about. But then my hand starts to pulse and the flakes of white plaster on the carpet beside me come into focus and my eyes fall inside a hole in the wall the size of an open screaming mouth.

  “Who’s the fuckin’ crazy one now, eh?” Elsie smirks, shaking her head. And just like that, she is calm. Her body relaxes like those heroin junkies who release the fist and then slip into sudden satisfaction. She turns, stumbles back out into the living room, and flicks on the TV.

  In the washroom, I lean up against the sink, stick my throbbing hand under cold water, and blankly stare into white porcelain. My brain is numb with nothingness. I am too tired to think. I just want to go to bed and forget everything. And then I see myself opening the mirrored medicine cabinet. As if there is a camera on the bathroom ceiling. I see myself pulling out a razor blade. I see myself cutting deep, precisioned slices into the soft white underside of my forearm; the blade sinking easily into skin like a cake knife into white icing. I feel a brilliant rush, a whoosh of noise and air, as drops of blood escape like startled bats from their darkness.

  Then the camera goes blank and I return to myself, my fist is back under the water, and my arm is totally fine. There is no blood. There are no cuts. It was like a dream, only I was awake. Scared, I walk back toward my room, cradling my swollen purple hand. I still can’t breathe right. I lie in bed the rest of the night, my hand holding firm a photograph of my mother, tucked flatly away under my pillow. My eyes staring at the plaster on the dirt-brown carpet, settled and silent, like newly fallen snow.

  I was given two truths: my mother named me Snow, and she drowned in a neighbour’s pool.

  Elsie gave me only one photo of my mother. It is soft and wrinkled, from years of carrying it close to me. It’s a wallet-sized school photo of a pretty blonde-haired girl wearing a bright yellow turtleneck. Fleshy round face, a few freckles, and pouty lips. She’s not smiling at the camera. Her eyes are like mine, with the changing moods of an ocean. Sometimes they look a hostile grey and sometimes an inviting blue.

  The day she gave me the photo I was sitting on the couch, a shoebox on Elsie’s lap beside me. It was my eighth birthday. “This is a picture of your mother when she was about your age. She was a strong little girl. Like you, Snow,” Elsie said, her anxious hand rubbing my back.

  “Was she hollow?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Elsie responded, puzzled.

  “Strong things are hollow, like old logs and chicken bones and pipes in the ground,” I replied, staring at the photo.

  “You’re a clever little girl, Snow,” she said, not looking at me, but somewhere distant, over my head. “You remind me of her,” she said, her thumb firmly stroking my mother’s face, in a way that made me unsure if it was a tender caress or an attempt to rub her out.

  The morning light shines through the old sheet hung at my window, the piss-stained centre like an explosive, scattering sun. I slowly pull my arm out from under the pillow, my limp hand dangling from my wrist. I study my swollen knuckles and, with my finger, poke white blotches into purple skin. A greenish purple, really, the colour of those cabbages they plant in funeral home gardens in the fall. I do all this with only one eye open, the other still firmly shut, refusing to begin this day.

  I’m too late to take a shower this morning, and instead put my hair up into a ponytail, the dark roots of my blonde streaks exposed. I look through my dirty laundry pile for a clean-smelling T-shirt and put on the same baggy jeans I wore yesterday. I do everything in slow motion, my body still asleep, my head woozy and vacant. I leave my school binder spread out on my desk. My teacher will send me to the office for not being prepared for class and I’ll get a zero for the math test I would have failed now anyway, even though I studied all week.

  Elsie is still sleeping on the couch, her mouth hanging open. The elastic of her baggy blue underwear creeps up her left cheek, and her Toronto Maple Leafs sweatshirt is hiked up over her fleshy stomach. The look of her makes me sick: her stringy long brown hair, her cutting cheekbones, her yellow teeth. You can tell she was beautiful, once. A long time ago. At least, that’s what Jed used to tell me. He also told me that I had inherited the Cooke women’s strongest weapon: sharp beauty. Careful with this, he’d say, or without knowing it, you’ll slice a man’s balls right off. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I liked the sound of it.

  I start to pick up the empty beer cans around her, sticking my fingers into opened holes, five cans on each hand. I do this without even thinking. Habit, I suppose. But then I stop myself and throw them back on the coffee table, one by one, crashing down close to Elsie’s head.

  “Do you have to be so gaad-damn noisy?” she groans, her eyes still closed, face pressed into the cushion. “What time is it?”

  I ignore her and she just rolls onto her side, a penny stuck to her sweaty thigh like some sucking parasite. It’ll be another three hours till she gets up, stretches the wine-and-beige polyester Dominion uniform over her stiff body, and drags herself across the street for her shift. Then it will be six hours before she comes home, microwaves pizza pockets, and sits in front of the TV with her twelve-pack of Blue.

  I don’t talk to Elsie anymore and it’s amazing, despite living in this apartment together, how easy silence is. Of course, the practical exchange of words is necessary, but we rarely move beyond I’m putting a dark load in, or, the toilet won’t flush.

  When we used to speak, a couple years ago, we yelled. Elsie used to be on my case about every little thing. She used to give me a curfew that I’d always break and an allowance that I’d always waste on cigarettes the first day. She used to yell when I came home drunk and called friends’ parents if I didn’t come home at all. But now she says I can ruin my life if I want to, and she leaves me alone. And it’s better that way. We stay out of each other’s business. I used to be in her life. Now I’m just in her apartment.

  “How can you not love your own grandmother?” a snobby girl asked me, when we were partnered up for a grade nine biography project. I imagined her grandmother, smelling of flowery perfume, sitting on her living-room couch at Thanksgiving, sipping sherry and crocheting doilies. I shrugged my shoulders, knowing that an explanation would be useless for this girl, with her Birkenstocks and clear lip gloss. She said it as if it were a blasphemy, as if automatic love for a parent or grandparent was a requirement in life. “You have to love your grandmother,�
�� she persisted. “It’s your grandmother. Even if I didn’t, I’d feel bad saying it aloud.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I replied. “She’s a bitch.”

  But I should love Elsie. She has made sacrifices for me. She tells me this. At times when I’m not grateful for her giving a roof over my head. And food in my stomach. And shoes on my feet. At times when I point out to her how much my life sucks. “Your life?” she says. “Your life? What about my life? I’m an old woman, you know. I should be on tropical boat cruises playing blackjack, not raising a kid.” She says this like she’s eighty years old, but she’s only fifty-three, which is just a little older than Carla’s mom, and she gets seasick on the Toronto Island ferry. And no matter how well I do in school or how nicely I clean the bathroom or fold the laundry, it’s never enough for her because there is always a mouldy corner or a missing sock. And no matter what I do she will always, for a split second, scowl at me when I first enter a room, as if since I was born I’ve been paying for a mistake I never knew I made.

  I have two mothers: one, a body, the other, a spirit. Elsie is the hand that pushed my baby carriage, the protective arm that shot out in front of me when suddenly braking, the lips that told me dinner was ready. My birth mother is the tuneless lullaby I hear each night, the ghost I feel in each breath.

  All my life they have been competing against each other inside me, resentful and jealous of the other’s role like bickering sisters seeking attention. My grandmother’s presence over my shoulder and my mother’s unoccupied space within me. And it’s a strange confession, but it is the absence that carries the most weight.

  Ever since I can remember, I have been piecing together the image of a mother. It is this mother who opens her arms to me when Elsie’s push me away. It is this mother whose song I hear at night, a promise of something better. In my mind my mother talks and breathes and walks down a street with a sexy sway of her hips. She wears glasses when she reads and blows her nose with a handkerchief. Her fingers are double-jointed, like mine. Her eyelashes are long and curved like those of the woman who walks her cat in the courtyard. Her hair is blonde and curls slightly outward at the shoulders, like my grade four teacher’s.