Belinda's Rings (9 page)

For Belinda, the most fascinating evidence came from Marshall V. Longfellow's article on the anatomical anomalies found in grains taken from crop circles. She was finally sitting on the train, nearly on her way to meet the man himself. She had a copy of Dr. Longfellow's seminal article with her, which she'd already decorated with highlights and penciled notes. She'd practically memorized it, but she took it out of her purse and looked over her notes again, as a distraction. She'd been chewing her nails incessantly as she waited for the train to start on its way. For a moment, she wondered what Wiley and her children might be doing, if they were sitting at the breakfast table, eating the toaster strudels she'd bought on Sebastian's request. But then she realized it was two in the morning where they were. Everyone would be in bed. She quickly turned her eyes back to her article, back to Dr. Longfellow's inspiring words.

He was an American biophysicist, and a legend in crop-circle research. He had been the first researcher to take samples and analyze their molecular structure, and he found that the plant cells had in fact been altered at the site of bending. The results of his tests suggested that the grains had been manipulated by microwaves, heated at the nodes and flexed into shape in the same way a piece of glass can be rendered malleable under flame. Some of the stalks even showed evidence of singeing. When the bent nodes were dissected and examined under microscope, they appeared to have burst from the inside out. A series of concentric circles radiated from the centre of each ruptured node, branded into the plant cells like minuscule tree rings.

Belinda couldn't fathom why the skeptics had largely dismissed Longfellow's findings. She guessed fear. It was evident, at any rate, that the grains had suffered some sort of trauma, and yet Belinda preferred not to think of it this way. She'd seen photos of one crop circle in a field of flowering canola, where each delicate yellow petal remained intact and untouched. The formation looked like a giant Easter wreath dotted with thousands of flowers, all nesting gently among the combed stems as if tucked into place by an invisible hand. If the incident had been traumatic, surely the canola flowers would have died. Surely the grains wouldn't have continued to grow in their horizontal positions without making any attempt to regain their vertical posture. But they accepted their alteration willingly, continued to live, and even to ripen. Belinda saw it as a testament to the beauty of adaptation.

When Belinda was a child and still living in her mother's house, they had a lopsided houseplant. Her mother kept it banished to a dark corner of the living room and it grew sideways, sprouting long, gangly arms that reached out in search of scant sunbeams. Her mother insisted it stay there because she bought it specifically to decorate that corner. To move it would defeat its purpose. The plant grew teardrops for leaves, and they gathered on the ends of the pale, limp stems. Every week when the time came for Belinda to water it, she thought of her sister.

Prim had left when she was fifteen years old and never returned. Belinda was only a baby at the time. In her mother's embittered way, she made the subject of Prim taboo. She isn't anything special, her mother insisted. Only a bad girl.

Of course, this only made Belinda more enamoured with her. She knew that Prim looked like her, with the same green eyes and dense blondish-brown hair. Their neighbour, Mrs. Fields, had given that away when she patted her on the head and remarked that Belinda was a spitting image of her sister, but that she hoped she was better behaved. Belinda had also deduced that Prim had the same wide ankles and square, boyish feet. Her mother had once told her, when none of the boots in the local store would fit her feet, that stocky ankles and feet were the Harris family inheritance, and not one of the ladies on the Harris side had escaped them.

But as a teenager, when Belinda thought of her sister, her stockiness was not a burden but a symbol of strength. Prim's green eyes were luminous, not mossy, and her hair thick and luxuriant rather than unruly. She smoked cigarettes, the long curl of smoke wisping from her lips like a question mark. She dated boys, which, Belinda had intuited, was part of the reason for her fallout with their mother. Belinda had imagined Prim as a more confident, more beautiful, and seductively mysterious version of herself. Perhaps even a future self. Prim was the Snow White that Belinda aspired to be, banished from the house by her evil mother and noble in her bold independence. In Belinda's mind, wherever Prim had gone she had undoubtedly married the man of her dreams, and this was all she needed to be sublimely happy. Belinda was content to believe this, and didn't want any evidence that proved otherwise. It was naïve, but it allowed her to believe that you didn't need a good mother to turn out all right.

The lopsided plant had been Belinda's bridge. It had been there all along, since before Belinda's birth, a living witness to Prim's existence. Years later, when she moved out of her mother's house, Belinda took the plant with her. She placed it on the kitchen windowsill in her apartment and watched the stems rise up from the soil after only a few days. She kept the soil moist and rotated the pot every so often, allowing the sun to pour over each leaf with equal attention. Within two months, a tiny flower bud had pushed its way out of the soil. And eventually, the bud unfurled into a lush, fuchsia-pink bloom. An azalea. Her mother had never known, had always assumed it was just a plain green plant. She had never given it the chance to be an azalea.

Belinda liked to believe that the plant had disguised itself for all that time. It became what it needed to be according to the circumstance. When she married Dazhong and moved to Canada, she'd had to leave the azalea with her neighbours. She had often wondered what forms it had taken since then, how many transformations it had undergone. In the twenty-one years that had passed, she had never once allowed herself to believe that perhaps the azalea had died.

6
The Other Grace

THERE'S THIS OTHER GIRL
named Grace who was in my math class last year. She's gone to the same school as me since elementary. Everyone mixes us up, even teachers. My math teacher would sometimes accidentally hand her homework back to me, so I got to see her marks. She always got 90s, which was how I knew right away it wasn't mine. She's on the debate team too, and just before Mum left she won some big competition. The next week they put up posters all over the school about it, and everyone thought it was me. On the morning of the day I skipped fifth and sixth period, this dumb kid in my homeroom, Ricky, said, Hey Grace, what'd you win?

It wasn't me, I said. I'm not on the debate team.

I thought you won something, he said. Some contest.

It's not me, I said. It's the other Grace. The Chinese one.

Aren't you Chinese? he said. This kid, he just keeps going. I think maybe he has ADD.

No, I said. I crossed my arms and looked the other way, pretended there was something interesting happening over there. But it was first thing in the morning and everyone was just sitting at their desks, zoning out. I thought about the other Grace. I knew I would be seeing her in second period. She usually dressed in pink corduroys, worn white at the knees. No matter what colour she was wearing on top — purple, neon green, yellow — she still wore those pink corduroys. She pulled the waist up way too high. She always tied her mussed black hair back in a low ponytail with a red velvet scrunchie, and you could see the flecks of dandruff at the roots from miles away. She spoke with a Chinese accent, and when she talked, I couldn't help but notice the little daubs of frothy spit that had collected at the corners of her mouth and turned all white and crusty. Her breath smelled like sausages.

Even though I was pretending to ignore him, I could tell Ricky was thinking about something. He was all quiet, and he was still looking at me, at the back of my head. I could just
feel
his eyes looking at me. Ricky's one of those kids who's just — well, like a kid. Which is funny 'cause I think he probably failed a grade or two, which would make him older than the rest of us. But it takes him a long time to think about things, and you can see his lips moving when he's thinking, like he has to talk to himself. And when he doesn't get something, he just says it,
I don't get it,
waves his hand around, doesn't care if everyone's laughing at him. Once, during attendance, I saw him poking his mechanical pencil in his ear. He had the pointy end stuck right in there, and his thumb was click-click-clicking the other end to make the lead come out. When he pulled the pencil out of his ear, slowly and carefully, the lead was sticking way out, with a little hunk of orange wax pierced on the end. I almost puked.

But you have a Chinese last name, Ricky said. See, he just doesn't let up. It's like he's too dumb to get how annoying he is. I could feel my cheeks getting hot. Other people were starting to look.

That's only 'cause my dad was born in Malaysia. I don't even live with my dad, okay? Christ, what's with the twenty questions?

Whoa, tou-chy, he said. Held his hands up like he was surrendering. As if I was some kinda bank robber just 'cause I didn't want to answer a bunch of questions first thing in the morning. As if it made no difference, what's the big deal, what does it matter that I wouldn't be caught dead wearing corduroys OR the colour pink, I don't speak a word of Chinese, my hair is always clean and it's brown not black, not to mention I think hair scrunchies are butt ugly.

Fine, I said. It came out really loud, and everyone looked. I stood up. Slammed my textbook down on the desk for effect.

You wanna know what I won? I yelled. I won fifty thousand bucks! I threw my hands up in the air like I was tossing confetti.

Ricky's eyes went all wide. He started kind of half-smiling, like he wasn't sure whether to laugh or not.

I won — a platypus! I won a lifetime supply of candy! There — are you happy? I put this big fake smile on.

My homeroom teacher — Mr. Steeves — called it an ‘outburst.'

Would you like to tell me what brought on that little outburst? he asked me in the hall. I told him I was stressed out, that Ricky was bugging me.

He kept calling me by the wrong name, I said. It's Gray, not Grace. I prefer Gray. I asked Mr. Steeves if he could change the attendance sheet, change my name to Gray so he wouldn't forget when he called my name. I just hate it when I get called the wrong name, I said. I just do.

But that wasn't really the reason. Even if I tried to explain it, Mr. Steeves wouldn't understand. Really, I was only trying to be funny. Some people had laughed. But it was like this quiet kind of laughter, like the same kind of laughter you'd hear the times when Ricky said he didn't get it. And after a couple of seconds I sat back down at my desk and didn't feel much like fake smiling anymore. At that point I got this sudden feeling that I just wanted to go home, really bad. I'd been wearing the same green hoodie with torn cuffs for the last two days because Mum hadn't been there to harass me about laundry. I hadn't really realized until then that the hoodie fit me like a potato sack, and the fabric on the sides was starting to pill so that it looked like a cat had been scratching at me. I thought about standing up and walking out, but I'd never done anything like that before, and besides, I hate it when people get all dramatic.

That evening I went rummaging through Mum's old clothes from the '70s and found this tube shirt with little frilly sleeves that hung off the shoulders. The thing was so stretchy that when you held it up it looked like only a five-year-old would fit into it, but when I put it on it hugged me really well. It had orange and yellow stripes going across it. I thought it looked cool and retro, and it was tight enough that the stripes curved around my boobs and made them look perky.

The next morning was Friday, and I was up really early, before my alarm went off. The sun was just coming up by the time I'd gotten dressed and washed. I'd even put some mascara and blush on. I learned how to apply blush years ago when I watched Mum practicing on Wiley. It was when she first got her job with Merle Norman and she had to pass a bunch of tests to be a
Certified Makeup Artist,
Mum's terminology. See, they have this hierarchy at Merle Norman where the older married ladies get to do all the fun stuff like applying makeup and piercing ears and building towers of eyeshadow boxes. They make the younger girls, the ones who only work after school and during the summer, sit at the cash register and Windex the vanities. So Mum had to prove to the biddies who'd worked there for twenty-odd years that she was worthy of powdering faces and curling eyelashes. The funny thing was she was really nervous. She practiced every night for more than a week before she was ready to do the makeup tests at work. Toner all over, two dabs of concealer under the eyes and blend, curl the lashes and give two coats of mascara (brown for the blondes, black for the brunettes), ask for a smile and swirl blush on the apples, swipe to the cheekbones and ta-da. I'd get all those stupid phrases stuck in my head listening to Mum chant to herself while she carefully grazed Wiley's eyelashes with the mascara wand as if it was covered in hydrochloric acid.

Swuuuurl the blush, she'd say to herself, making little circles on Wiley's cheeks. And swipe. Jess once asked her if she'd ever thought of practicing on us, because wouldn't that make a lot more sense?

Wiley's got the cheekbones for it, Mum said. And besides, you girls are too young to be wearing makeup.

Wiley was a good sport about it 'cause he was still Old Wiley back then. He just sat there trying to watch TV out of the corner of his eye while Mum had her face right in his, peering at each and every lash to make sure the mascara was even. He came out looking like a drag queen every time 'cause Mum kept putting on way too much of everything,
just lemme even it out
. One time, when Jess and I had been out somewhere, we came home to the sound of Mum squealing with laughter. We found them in the kitchen, Mum keeled over laughing with tears in her eyes, and Wiley, his face all made up, standing in a pair of Mum's pink high heels with a purple feather boa wrapped around his neck. He was wearing these old denim cutoffs and one of Mum's silk blouses patterned with flowers.