Dropped Threads 2 (6 page)

I step slowly into the shower. I have to brace my legs wide to remain standing. I feel like a cored apple, fragile outside, nothing inside. My heart hurts.

I manage to apply some makeup and dress in my best suit, ripping holes in two new pairs of pantyhose before I’m successful in getting on a third. My boss is waiting, I know, and I’m late. I nearly vomit on the elevator ride down to the lobby but manage to keep it down.

“You look well,” he says to me when I reach the lobby. “You must be feeling better than you were yesterday.”

I nod. I wonder if he’s being sarcastic. I’m scared to open my mouth in case the wailing comes out again.

“Well, good,” he says briskly. “We have a long, important day ahead of us, Meg. Let’s not waste another minute.”

He begins walking quickly toward the door, into the streams of sunlight. I watch him a moment. Then I pick up my briefcase, square my shoulders and march after him to the waiting taxi.

Cat Bag

Billie Livingston

Just before I started kindergarten, my mother and I moved into a house on Fourth Avenue in Vancouver with her boyfriend, Michael, a Korean War vet with a plate in his head. Michael had a voice like a butcher knife. The same mouth would, one moment, berate my mother for her apelike behaviour—at four years old, he said, I was too big to be hanging off her neck all day long—and the next, plead with me to call him Daddy. He would kiss and coo in her ear at the kitchen table over beer and, one or two drinks later, backhand her across the mouth for the tone she’d used, a word he didn’t like.

I would stare at his back as he left the room, imagining a white dinner plate spinning in the middle of his skull, wondering why they’d put it in there in the first place if it was going to make him behave that way. Mom would sit, silent in her chair. A trickle of blood coming down the corner of her mouth, she’d glance quickly at me and smile, then turn her head in the direction he’d gone and stick her tongue out, look back at me and grin. I’d grin back. It was a sort of pact.

After one of these episodes, there wasn’t much to do but follow in the smile-and-act-natural vein, go outside and play. Or better yet, go next door to the hippie house to see Marilyn and Karen.

In 1970, Fourth Avenue was the hippie zone: long wild hair and beards, love beads and drugs, peace and protest. Marilyn and Karen, fresh out of NYU, had closed their eyes, plunked a blind finger down on a map, then hitched their way across the continent and moved in next door. The only constants amid a flophouse of ephemeral roommates, they were my favourite hippie girls in the world. The door was always open. If Marilyn was having a bath, I had an open invitation to leap into the tub with her; if Karen was stringing necklaces, I got a pile of beads and my own needle and thread. They put on puppet shows, played word games and took me up to the attic to meet the “Gotcha Wizard” (Marilyn’s woolly-bearded brother who’d shroud himself in an old sleeping bag). They took me with them to war protests downtown. They took me to the boutique where they sold the clothes and jewellery they made and let me wrap myself in ponchos, beads and hats as though the greatest value their creations had was in their ability to transport and transform me. They were witches, they said, and I believed in their magic like nothing else. I didn’t tell them much of anything going on at home. I went to them to play.

Eventually, Black Mike, as Marilyn and Karen had dubbed him, gave my mother one too many black eyes. She told him she was leaving, and he began making threats: “You leave me and I’ll kill you. I’ll find you and kill you.”

She did it anyway, though, waited till he was out one night, packed our bags and we left. Back East, to Toronto.

This wordless slipping-off-in-the-night routine would continue to be our MO. We would leave Toronto two years later and head back to Vancouver in much the same way.

Mom drank on and off, and as a result of one particularly bad bender, I spent my tenth birthday in foster care. From what I could see, this was just one more example of how loose lips could sink ships. My mother had made friends with big-mouthed strangers and somebody had
told
.

Two months later, when I ran away from the foster home back to my mother, she was sober again. I switched schools for the third time that year, and we went back to smiling and patching up any cracks in the veneer. As far as the world was concerned, I’d never been in a foster home. To let that cat out of the bag meant a whole feline gang would follow. Therefore, my mother had no drinking problem, our income came from my father’s child support cheque, not welfare, and my parents had most definitely been wed. (Once, at a slumber party, I’d made the mistake of announcing what system buckers my mother and father were, never having been married. The look of horror around the Cheezie bowl changed my story fast). I kept our secrets, in part because it made escape easier. Vagueness allowed for a more seamless shape-shift.

In my teens, I developed a taste for middle-to upper-middle-class families—two-parent, two-garage households, families with boats and summer cottages, swimming pools and electric lawn mowers. I became friends with a born-again Christian at school and joined her church, a place loaded to the rafters with families who were downright rich. Nothing soothed me quite like their yachts and spiral staircases. Around them, I felt clean, well-bred and expensive. I joined the youth choir. I went on camping and boat trips, got crushes on gentle Jesus-loving boys, the antithesis of my mother’s taste in men. I never could quite swallow the doctrine, the actual Christianity. And my compulsion to undermine Church authority drove me to tell a few kids I was a witch. Having never forgotten Marilyn and Karen, I invoked their names in times of stress and irreverence and, in the middle of Sunday morning services, drew what could only be considered impious symbols on my wrists.

I couldn’t help but like the complexity of my new witchy Christian self. To add yet another layer, I became friends with Bonnie, the baddest good girl in the sanctuary. Using Bonnie’s ID, I started heading out with her on Saturday nights to Outlaws, a downtown nightclub. As far as my mother knew, I was just going to Bonnie’s for a sleepover. And I did sleep over at Bonnie’s. And my body did remain the temple I claimed it was: loath to become remotely like the secret I had at home, I refused to drink alcohol and clung to my virginity like a life raft.

At twenty, Bonnie was four years older than I, perfectly legal and far less interested in discretion: she blabbed all over church about her drunken escapades, all of which happened the nights she was without me. Nonetheless, rumour had it that I frequently got so drunk that I had to be carried from bars. I was considered a “bad apple” by parents now.

One night after Sunday evening service, Bonnie and I were hauled into the pastor’s study and interrogated. Bonnie protested that it had been
she
who had to be carried out, that I didn’t even
drink
. He said he would have us kicked out of the choir if we didn’t apologize before the congregation for our behaviour, adding that my mother would charge Bonnie with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I shook my head; my mother would
never
. The pastor flattened me, announcing that people from the church were over discussing the matter with her this very instant. I was speechless. He fingered one of his gold rings. “Is your mother an alcoholic?”

No one in this place,
my
place, had ever uttered that word as though it pertained to my family or me. With one question, he had ripped the clean right off me. I started to cry, asking why he would say that. Apparently I’d given his past inquiries about my home life silly and vague answers that were, to his mind, consistent with those that children of alcoholics gave. I looked up at his photograph on the wall shaking hands with the pope, panicked and broke into sobs, nodding.

I didn’t realize that he was being a Gotcha Wizard, that he knew nothing but rumours.

When I got home that night, I launched into a tirade against the charges my mother was to file against Bonnie. This was the first she’d heard of my having been in a bar.

But I quit the Church immediately. It was sullied.

Not long afterwards, my mother was drinking again. Deciding to leave, I made arrangements with a school friend who had two parents, a garage and a car and moved in without explanation. It would be two weeks before my friend’s mother trapped me in a corner and asked me why I wouldn’t go home. I had to come clean. It was the first time. The relief was all but trampled by guilt, but saying it out loud bought me a respite. With financial help from the Children’s Aid, my friend’s family took care of me for three months. Mom saw my departure as her personal rock bottom. She detoxed that summer, rejoined AA and made a decision that whether I came home or not, she would stop drinking for good.

I did come home, somewhat reluctantly, afraid things would go back to the way they were. As I started Grade 12, though, my mother was going to three AA meetings a week, new AA friends were often over for tea and my mother’s former self became known as “that crazy person.” Soon, she started counselling other new AA members. One, a former stripper, came by the apartment and saw the photographs of me that Mom had scattered around. She talked her into bringing the pictures to a modelling agency. The word “model” sounded like the shiniest, most expensive-looking thing of all. It spelled “escape.” I flew to Tokyo straight out of high school.

Not only did being a model put me in the Thoroughbred category, it published photographs as proof. It didn’t matter that I had developed a new and particularly humiliating secret. Food had become my last thought at night and my first in the morning. Most days now involved a ritual of stuffing fresh soft rolls into my mouth in a frenzy, each one smothered in butter and honey, stuffing and stuffing, alternating bites with gulps of hot tea to keep my stomach contents somewhat liquid. I would cram in roll after roll until tears were streaming down my face, my tongue too numb and raw to taste or feel the thrill of the sweet and soft any more. Seconds after I reached this point, I would run to the washroom and ram my finger or a toothbrush down my throat, shaking and crying, determined to get it out of my stomach as fast as possible.

After a couple years of this, I was falling apart—dark circles and broken blood vessels around my eyes. I would bruise if you looked at me wrong, and my throat had become so sensitive that ingesting almost anything could bring on a coughing fit. Ultimately, it was my fear and vanity that stopped the bulemia: if anyone found out, they would think I was a pig, putrid and ugly. Furthermore, I could just as easily get kicked out of my current shiny place for bad skin and bags as I could fat. I took to heavier exercise and vegetarianism instead. I carried envelopes of Sugar Twin in my purse wherever I went.

In my mid to late twenties, a transformation began. I had always written in journals, scribbled poetry in notebooks, scrawled letters home to everyone and to no one in particular, all in the name of keeping my sanity. But somewhere in there, I started writing down snippets of truth in short bursts of narrative verse. It was different from the poetry I’d been writing before. Bits of memory and history—there wasn’t much vague about it. I couldn’t make up anything, and I couldn’t stop slapping it down on the page. Spilling my guts this new way was making me feel muscular. I felt hard and steely as opposed to scrawny and shiny, and I liked it.