As She Grows Page 2

  “Was she a morning person?” I used to ask Elsie when I was younger. Or, “Did she eat meat?” Or, “Was she smart?” Questions posed to her while I was folding laundry or passing a doorway, always somewhere trivial, to counter any possible interpretation of my thoughts. I’d pretend they were fleeting ideas, just points of interest; not tell her that I had been thinking about them for days. I used to not want Elsie to think that I needed this, that her being my mother was not enough. She’d pause at my question, look up to the ceiling like she was deep in thought, then respond with short dismissive answers like “I’m not really sure,” or “That’s a tough one,” or “I think so.” And before I could ask more, she’d somehow always manage to change the subject or leave the room, not in a rude way, but in a way that made me feel like a nuisance, or childish, for needing more.

  And once, when I was young, I asked, “What about my father?”

  “The men in this family do not stay and they do not deserve the spoken word,” she replied with such conviction and intensity that I accepted it as an indisputable truth.

  I learned later, from Aunt Sharon, that my father was a fling. A one-night stand. Something fleeting. To know you weren’t created out of love is a disappointing truth. But there are ways I can imagine this.

  I can picture a naked motel room, a bed with no sheets, a window with no curtain. A man, perhaps married, who was out with the boys, drunk, and flattered by my young mother who laughed at his jokes and gently rubbed her hand up his thigh. Inside this room there are shadows and closed eyes and lustful fingers tracing skin in the dark.

  I can imagine my mother on the subway the next morning, hair smelling of smoke and running her tongue over thick teeth. Hiding her stiletto heels under the seat while women in business suits flap the Globe and Mail newspapers around her. A number written on the back of a receipt in her purse, though she can’t make out if that’s a t or an f in his last name. But it doesn’t matter, ‘cause it’s not his real name anyway.

  Or I can imagine it like this. I can imagine a man with a foreign accent and a polished stone hanging from black leather around his neck. A stone that means strength or spirit, that he found himself, say, at the bottom of the ocean or on a mountainside. A man who spoke of karma and coincidence and of travels to India in a way that made her want to leave her life. A man who was to get on a plane the next day so they booked a room at an expensive hotel, overlooking a scene, say, a castle or a tropical river. And they spent hours by the window, drinking wine and playing inside this tiny fold of time. And of course, there were words that were spoken, like I’ll see you again, but we all know something like that can’t happen twice.

  2

  I walk the long way along the Donway to meet my best friend, Carla, on the way to school. School is at Don Mills Collegiate, just across the street from our apartment building. When I can drag myself out of bed, I go, but it’s only on the important days, like when we have tests and assignments, that I make sure I’m in class. Still, I do all the homework and I always get C’s, except in English, which I fail each year because I can’t spell and my words don’t come out right on the page.

  We live in what Elsie calls “a good neighbourhood.” There’s a plaque somewhere in Don Mills saying it’s North America’s first planned suburb, which was apparently brilliant urban planning at the time. I know this because we had to do a project on it in grade eight geography last year. My apartment building is off The Donway, a big paved moat surrounding all life’s necessities: a shopping mall, post office, medical offices, movie theatre, bingo hall, skating rink, and bowling alley. Only they tore down all the good stuff, like the movie theatre and bowling alley, years ago. And then Eaton’s closed and Club Monaco moved to the upscale Fairview Mall. And now senior citizens push their walkers by store windows, looking for deals in Bulk Barn and Payless Shoes. And it’s like living in the stomach of someone’s decaying suburban dream.

  When I turn the corner, I can see Carla waiting in the distance. I laugh because she keeps giving a forceful finger to passing cars that beep at her, as if she were truly insulted at this. As if she didn’t like the attention from the men in business suits, confident and horny behind tinted windows. She’s wearing a miniskirt with white socks and black platform shoes, which makes her look like a centrefold schoolgirl or something. But that’s her style, innocent and preppy, with a little dirty mixed in. Even though she may dress like a slut, she’s not. She won’t even go all the way with a guy, unless he says he loves her, really loves her, and that hasn’t happened yet. She says she’ll do anything else though, which in the end makes the boys like her even more. Carla is Portuguese and beautiful and has perfect, olive, Portuguese skin. She permed her already wavy hair and tweezed all her eyebrows so that now there’s just a brown arch pencilled in so high it makes her look even more stupid than she is. But I don’t say that to her.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” she says, with an irritating perkiness, “Can I bum a smoke?” I reach into my schoolbag and give her the pack. She pulls out three cigarettes, puts two in her coat pocket, and lights the third, inhaling deeply. Then she notices my hand. “What happened?”

  “Elsie,” I say, not needing to explain any further. “Can I sleep at your house tonight?” I would tell Carla everything, but I don’t want to think about it anymore. I just want my mind to be blank.

  “Sorry. It’s not a good time,” she says, not suspecting anything major is up with me. “My mom’s being a drag.” Staying at each other’s house is a normal request when we get in fights at home. Though usually Carla’s fights are over stupid things, like her mom refusing to buy her a pair of jeans or shrinking her shirt in the dryer.

  “What’s on your face?” I ask, referring to the glitter eyeshadow she’s wearing. Carla’s girlie girl like that: pink nail polish, silver glitter on her cheeks, fuzzy miniature stuffed animals hanging off her backpack.

  “Sparkles. You like ’em? My dad bought ’em for me. Cool, huh?”

  “Ya,” I reply sarcastically.

  “I’ll put some on you today, okay? They’ll look great.” Carla is always trying to make me look more girlie, she thinks I’m too much of a tomboy. She’s always telling me to stand up straight, roll my slouching shoulders back, put on some lipstick. “You have such a pretty face,” she says. “You should use it.”

  “Sure.” I roll my eyes, but secretly smile. I’m used to her up there, floating above my head. And she is used to me down here, occasionally trying to stick a pin in her.

  “Yo, wanna ditch first period and chill at the mall?”

  “Sure,” I say, “but won’t you get in trouble?”

  “Fuck it,” she says, flicking her hand in the air, and we turn around and head toward the mall. Carla is on the line at school, and the principal has already pulled her in three times this year, saying that she can’t miss any more days. She takes basic-level classes and she says she knows she’s dumb and won’t finish school anyway, so what’s the point? Besides, she wants to be a makeup artist and she doesn’t need high school for that. She thinks it’s unfair that I’m so smart, that I can miss classes and I still get C’s. She jokes about it, but I know she hates me for it. I know it, because she always points out my spelling mistakes on the birthday cards I give her.

  It’s hard to explain it to Carla, so that she’d understand me. Inside my head, my world is full of colour and beautiful words. Outside, it’s ugly and harsh. In grade three I sat in an orangecarpeted office, on the floor. A doctor lady in a long skirt and glasses that dangled from a string around her neck passed me toys and told me to draw squares. After going back to her office three times, the lady told my grandmother two things: I was really smart and I also had a learning disability. I remember looking for the wheelchair they were going to put me in, only Elsie told me they don’t have wheelchairs for brains.

  And so I have three voices: one in my head, one in my mouth, and one in my hands. Each speaks a different language, but it’s the voice in my head that
matters most; the one that understands things. It’s in my head where I understand Elsie’s belief that the easiest place to lose yourself is in a bottle. It’s in my head where I find certain things depressing because I see myself in them, like a fountain in the rain or a running shoe on a highway. Only, my mouth doesn’t understand this language. It tries, but it confuses the vocabulary and things end up sounding simple or angry or dull.

  My hands are the worst of all. My hands want nothing to do with me, they make no attempt to understand my mind. It’s as if they’re angry to be slaves to my thoughts and are determined to do their own thing. In class I look down at my pen, clutched between fingers, and feel as connected to my body as to the chair I’m sitting on.

  Carla and I smoke a blunt behind the Dumpster by Home Hardware and cut up each student we see walking to school. Ugly shirt. Lazy dog tits. Fat pig. I suck hard on the butt, and soon feel the inside of my skin start to disappear, slowly, starting with my fingertips and then my tongue. The jagged corners of buildings smooth out like peanut butter and the weight of me is lifted.

  We head toward the mall because there’s nowhere else to go and Carla has to pee. Thoroughly buzzed, we do dumb things like throw jelly beans down on unsuspecting heads from the staircase. We heat up quarters with our lighters, drop them on the ground, and wait for the squawks of old ladies who scorch their frugal fingers. We sit at the edge of the fountain and inconspicuously reach down behind us, into cold water, sweeping up handfuls of dimes and pennies.

  “Listen,” I say, shaking a fistful of change in Carla’s ear. “The sound of a hundred wishes.”

  In the afternoon, we sit outside Pizza Pizza, up against the brick wall, legs outstretched on the sidewalk. Middle-aged women in flowered dresses pick up their pace as they pass us, their plastic cleaner bags limply fluttering in the wind behind them. In front of us is the parking lot and then behind that is the buzz of traffic on Lawrence Avenue. Behind Lawrence there are apartments and behind those are houses and behind that, another mall. Now that we’ve returned to our sober minds, there’s nothing to talk about except how there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go, and how life will remain like this until we’re older and we can buy beer.

  “Don Mills is such a shithole,” Carla mutters. “I can’t wait to leave.”

  “What’d you say?” I spin my head around to catch her mouth frozen, still open, as if she were trying to suck the words back in.

  She doesn’t look at me, but instead stares straight ahead. Her face reddens and she closes her eyes for a moment like she’s mustering courage from within. Then Carla turns to face me. “I didn’t want to say anything, ’cause of your fight with Elsie.”

  “Say what?”

  “My dad’s splitting,” she says, which isn’t surprising news because Carla’s mom and dad fight all the time and he spends half the time sleeping on the couch at her uncle Max’s. “He’s going to Hamilton,” she adds. “Well, really, Mom’s kicking him out.”

  “Shit,” I say, in condolence. Carla talks about her father slapping around her mother all the time. She says she knows it’s not right, but she says her mom kind of deserves it because she’s always nagging at him, just like she always nags at her. Sometimes, she wishes she could beat her too. Carla pulls out her compact from her purse and starts inspecting her makeup situation. “What are you going to do?” I ask carefully, already knowing what she’ll say.

  She pulls away the mirror and looks directly at me. “I’m gonna go with him, obviously. I’m not staying with that bitch.”

  “You’re leaving?” I say, with an edge.

  “He’s got this great house,” she says, getting excited, overly excited, as she talks, “with a pool and walk-in closets and satellite TV.” Carla looks away and her voice becomes cold. “I’ll probably go next week.”

  I am silent. Blood rushes to my head and swirls like thick smoke in my skull. Carla sits there with a sudden interest in her shoelace. I fixate on her twitching, prodding fingers. I get pissed that she’s sitting there, all happy about her parents splitting up, talking about moving like it’s a vacation. It bothers me because everything seems to roll off Carla, and nothing seems to penetrate her. It’s as if the world could collapse, and she’d still be worried about the poppy seed wedged between her teeth.

  I feel Carla’s challenging eyes glare at me, turn away, and then glare again. “What’s your problem?”

  I don’t answer her. Instead, I get up, throw my backpack over my shoulder, and start walking away.

  “What’s your problem?” she yells after me. I continue walking, break into a run as I feel my tears start to well in my eyes, and all I want to do is move so fast that I run straight out of my own face. I don’t know what’s making me more angry, Carla leaving me or the fact I can’t leave with her.“Not everything’s about you, Snow!” Carla yells behind me and I stop in my tracks. I wipe my hand over a slimy mix of snot and tears and black mascara. I turn back toward her, staring her down as I approach, and I can see that my face scares her. She throws both her hands to the ground, as if to brace herself, as if I’m going to kick her. As if she can read my mind because that’s what I want to do.

  I stop, towering in front of her, the tips of our shoes touching. “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU CARE, ANYWAY?”

  People never leave suddenly. If you look closely, real close, you see they have left you many times before that last time you see their face. Carla stopped calling me every day about a month ago. About two weeks ago she called Andrea to go to a movie and said my line was busy. And on Sunday she returned my red sweatshirt. I knew she was getting ready to go. I knew the signs. Jed left me and Elsie three times. He took it in steps; he was a methodical man. He was like Carla that way.

  Jed was the closest I’ve had to a father, though he was really more a symbol of fatherhood. Like the ceramic saint in Carla’s living room, his presence represented an idea of something more. He moved in after I was born and he moved out when I was six. I didn’t have much choice in the matter. I had to settle for what I could get.

  I don’t remember doing much together. Mostly, I’d sit and watch TV while he read his favourite book, the World Almanac, in his favourite chair, eating peanuts out of a glass jar. He was the smartest man I had ever met. Sometimes he’d tell me amazing facts: “Did you know that the word ‘leotard’ came from Julius Leotard, a nineteenth-century French aerial gymnast?” Or, “In 1990, ‘John’ stopped being in the top ten first names of Americans since 1880?” Or, “The biggest saltwater fish ever caught was in 1977 in the Canary Islands at eighty-eight pounds, two ounces. Can you believe that?” And I’d memorize these facts, as if he were passing on God’s truths.

  Even though I was only six, I knew he was getting ready to leave. Despite Elsie’s assurances that “he’s got business on the road.” I never did know what Jed’s business was. And though Elsie pretended not to care he was gone so much, I knew she did. Jed would only come home every few weeks, sleeping on the couch and snoring in the flickering light of the TV screen. Elsie would trek around the apartment, rolling her eyes and kissing her teeth as she folded his laundry or cooked him fish sticks. As if it was a huge nuisance. As if she was being forced to do these things. She’d try her best to look like she was mad, but I’d catch her humming or smiling when she didn’t think anyone could see her, when she was busy stirring a pot or stacking towels in the cupboard.

  The next year after that he only came by once in a while, for a night or two. I’d see him slip out of her room late at night or I’d find his undershirt in the laundry. Finally, one day, I came home from school and he had his shaving kit and World Almanac boxed up on the kitchen table.

  “I’ll still be around, squirt,” he said, as he tousled my hair and got up to leave. “I love ya, kiddo,” he said, as we walked out the door. But I didn’t believe him.

  Sometimes I think it’s good my real father was a fling. That way I can allow my mind to fill in his blanks. I can never hate him the way I hate my gran
dmother. I can never claim him as a bad father because I choose to believe that he was good, the way you choose to believe that Goldilocks was not a greedy little bitch who took advantage of an unlocked door.

  Still, I miss him. I miss a father who’ll yell at me when I come home late, dressed like a slut, because he remembers what boys my age are like. I miss a father who takes the newspaper into the washroom on Sunday mornings and who makes scrambled eggs for dinner. I miss a father who’ll be embarrassed to buy me maxi-pads and who’ll give me a firm line when I am found dangling from a loose, wobbly one.

  The door to Mark’s apartment is wide open, as if someone had just walked in and didn’t think to close it behind him, just like that, forgetting to close a door. I find Mark and four other guys lying on old tweed couches and sprawled out on the ground, listening to Wu-Tang and watching a Britney Spears special on mute. The ratty brown curtains are drawn and it might as well be midnight instead of five in the afternoon.

  Mark and I have been together for four months now, though we’ve known each other for over a year. He’s older, eighteen, and so much more mature than the other boys I’ve been with. He’s got his shit together: an apartment, a job, and a cool stereo. And he’s the first guy I’ve met who thinks about more than just sex.

  “We make love,” I tell Carla, who keels over and fakes vomiting noises. But I just smile back, because I’d have laughed too, if I didn’t know what a real relationship was like.

  As I step over plates of dried ketchup, some familiar faces nod coolly at me or mumble a lazy what’s up? The stink of weed in Mark’s apartment is strong enough to give me a buzz. Mark’s only official roommate is Josh, but his boys, as Mark calls them, are always crashing there. Mark’s boys are always nice to me. They have names like Crakhed, Smokey, Killah, and Ash. They call me “Wifey” and tell me I’m not like the other girls. And I wonder to myself, What other girls? but I don’t ask because we haven’t been going out long enough. Mark’s boys think I’m like their collective little sister, lending me money and telling me that if anyone gives me trouble, I should come to them.