Everything Was Good-Bye (4 page)

James was Carrie’s cousin. He came to our Valentine’s Day dance in Grade 10 with Carrie’s then boyfriend, Brian. When he walked into the gymnasium everyone stopped and stared. I told him there weren’t any black kids in Delta and maybe they expected him to do the moonwalk or something. He laughed, saying that they should be able to tell from
his acid-wash jeans that he was only half-black and not at all the Michael Jackson type.

After Carrie lost her virginity to Brian, it seemed logical, in a sixteen-year-old way, that I should lose mine to James and agreed to go to his house. Carrie explained that the sex would hurt and would probably only last about five minutes but the kissing after was nice. I nodded like I knew this, like the one time Carrie had sex with Brian made her an expert.

When we got there, Carrie sat on the couch watching
Oprah
while James and I made out on the loveseat across from her. I kept opening my eyes to make sure she wasn’t watching. After half an hour, we went to his room, which was the entire unfinished basement of his house, lay on his king-sized waterbed and kissed. Our hands moved under clothes, undoing zippers, buttons and clasps. I wished I’d been wearing a nicer bra, but I didn’t have anything other than plain white cotton Smart soft-cup bras. I was wondering why a brand of bras would be named Smart when James slipped mine off, and lay on top of me. I sank into the bed beneath him; every time he moved the water beneath us shifted and we struggled to regain hold of each other. I hadn’t seen him naked. I’d felt his nakedness but wondered if I should look. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that we were on a yacht and that this moment was romantic, like the ocean. But each time I opened my eyes, the partly framed basement walls, cement floors and single light bulb dangling from the ceiling shattered the fantasy. James did all the things that my sister’s
Glamour
magazine said he should, but I wasn’t responding the way they said I would. I stopped his hands as they slid between my legs. “I can’t do this. Not like this.” He rolled over onto his back and asked me if I’d at least give him a blow job. I got dressed and left.

“So,” Carrie nudged me in the ribs as we walked down the street afterwards. “How was it?” When I told her that we hadn’t done it, she seemed disappointed, like I hadn’t kept my end of a weird bargain or something.

The class quieted as Mr. Ellis blustered into the room, clearing his throat. “Turn to page 86.” He shuffled papers on his desk and organized his
pencils in a neat row before reaching for a menthol cough candy from the top desk drawer. Just as he was about to start the lesson, Liam slid in the door, drenched from the rain, his black hair clinging to the frozen angles of his face. Droplets of water trailed down his neck, charting pathways.

“Late again, Liam. Time is money. Let that be your first lesson in economics today,” said Mr. Ellis.

Liam took offhis jacket and slumped into his seat at the back of the class. “So does that mean I get paid for being here?”

“Your payment is an education.” Mr. Ellis adjusted his glasses and pulled at the too-short sleeves of his tweed jacket. I wondered if he had cats, if he lived with his mother, how he felt about Freud.

“Today we will continue with our discussions on labour practices in the emerging economies of the Third World.”

I hated the term “Third World” and its arrogant implications of a modern-day caste system not unlike the one that existed within the g7. Nations built on the backs of immigrants who worked more and earned less in hopes of building a better life that only left their children to ask: “Better than what?” In India my father had been a respected engineer; in the West he was considered unskilled labour. Eventually, it killed him. After he died, my mother cleaned motels at the end of twelve-hour shifts on the farm where she picked whatever was in season for little pay and no benefits other than the spoiled vegetables that were not good enough to be sold but would be just fine in subzi. “We were not poor when we came to Canada,” my mother once said, pausing as she mashed overripe berries into jam. “But this country tells us we are.”

Mr. Ellis smoothed his scanty comb-over. “Specifically, let’s talk about the labour practices we read about in Chapter 11 as they relate to corporate responsibility.”

Hands went up in the front rows: the Smart Ethnics jockeyed. Mr. Ellis looked past them, past me, to the dumb, popular girls who put out.

“Crystal, how about you?”

She shrugged and walked to the podium. Amid an elaborate array of eye rolls, sighs and gum chewing, she spoke in rapid iambs, each syllable straining into the next. “I don’t really think the corporations should be
blamed. They’re just following the laws of
those
countries.” She twirled teased strands of hair between her fingers, examining the ends until her eyes seemed to cross.

Her hair was as platinum as that of the Barbie dolls that we used to play with at recess. Once in Grade 3 she’d invited me over to her house to play with her Malibu Barbie pool and cabana set. I didn’t know what a cabana was but was eager to find out. I accepted the invitation and raced home, picked up my banana seat bike and rode to her house, listening to my “Tiger” Williams hockey card clipping in the spokes as I pedalled faster and faster. Barbie in hand, I knocked on the door of her new cedar split-level home. When her mother opened the door I told her I was there to see Crystal. She seemed annoyed and said, “Crystal has gone to her friend’s house to play. She must have forgotten you, dear.” When I didn’t reply, she raised her voice and repeated herself in the slow, mannered way that the cashier at the drugstore used when my mother spoke in broken English. I turned away and rode my bike around the neighbourhood for two hours so I wouldn’t have to explain to my mother why I was home so soon. She had warned me about white people and I didn’t want her to think that she was right.

The next day at recess Crystal and Amanda showed offtheir matching friendship bracelets and strawberry Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. They became best friends, the popular girls, living out a Barbie life, long after I had stopped playing with dolls.

Crystal continued: “I mean who are we to question the laws of those countries anyways? At least the factories provide them a job that they probably wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Bafflingly, the rest of the class nodded their heads and applauded her mediocre effort.

“Who would like to take an opposing position?” Mr. Ellis scanned the room, again bypassing the ethnics. “Liam, how about you?”

“L-l-l… - iam,” Craig mocked as Liam got up to the podium. There was collective laughter at the memory of his apparent grade school stutter.
I wanted to tell them to shut up, but I was a coward and glad that the attention wasn’t on me. Mr. Ellis quieted the room with a stern look. I sat up, attentive. Liam always had something interesting to say; he paid attention to the world, read
Maclean’s
and
The New York Times
and watched
The
Nature of Things
. He knew more about Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall and the Cold War than the history teacher did and I suspected he knew more about economics than Mr. Ellis.

Liam leaned against the podium. “Those are expensive runners you’re wearing, Crystal. Must have cost, what, eighty, ninety dollars?”

“Try one hundred and twenty.”

“Do you know that the cost to make those shoes is less than ten dollars?”

She didn’t answer.

“Did you know that children work eighteen hours a day in sweatshop conditions and earn less than fifty cents so you can have those shoes? So some fat, bald, middle-aged man can deliver soaring stock prices to share-holders and buy his son a pony?”

He detailed the intolerable conditions and the multiple infractions to human rights throughout the world and called Western consumerism the single largest enabler of these injustices. After a few minutes, I stopped listening, fixed my attention on Crystal’s face and watched her smug expression fade. I knew he had defeated her when she shuffled her feet, trying to hide the swoosh on her shoes. The Smart Ethnics led the applause as Liam took his seat.

Liam casually shoved Craig, knocking his books offthe desk as he walked by. “Did I stutter?” he asked as he slid into his seat.

I waited for Liam under the magnolia tree. Although we never actually hung out at school, we did walk home together. He would talk about life and I would listen. I loved his grand ideas of socialism, his romantic notion of communism and the sweeping hand gestures he used to express himself. He was symphonic.

He was still reeling from his victorious debate in economics, making exclamation marks in the air as he spoke, kicking a rock along ahead of us as he walked.

“You could be an opera,” I told him.

“No, you’ve got it all wrong. An opera needs tragedy. And that’s your department. You’re tragic through and through. Depeche Mode must have written ‘Dressed in Black’ for you.” He sang the first verse, his voice drama-tizing the depressing lyrics. He kicked the rock ahead a few paces. “I bet you own Fluevogs.”

“I don’t wear them anymore,” I said, and kicked the rock across the street.

I didn’t want to admit that in Grade 9 I’d saved all my birthday, Christmas and rakhi money to buy those shoes. But by the time I had bought them, everyone was wearing Doc Martens or Chuck Taylors.

“What’s wrong with dressing in black?” I asked.

“Nothing—as long as you don’t see the world that way.”

“I wear brown, too.”

“Yeah, I noticed that you’ve got the free spirit gypsy vibe happening lately. I’ve been trying to get my head around the contradiction.”

“What contradiction?”

“You. Will you be angry or will you be free?” Liam ran ahead, jumped up and grabbed the branch of a large, blossoming cherry tree, swinging himself forward. The tree dropped its soft petals and the wind picked them up, scattering them around us, and for just a moment it seemed like we were encapsulated in a snow globe. When all the blossoms had dispersed, I was still covered in them. As I began tussling them from my hair Liam reached for my hand. “Leave them, they look nice.”

Liam took offbefore we reached the amputated fir trees that flanked my driveway. He always made an excuse to speed ahead, though I knew he did it to spare me my mother’s wrath. I had never said anything to him about her but somehow he knew just the same way he seemed to know everything.

I looked up at the trees apologetically. My mother had disliked the mess they made in the winter when their branches sagged and needles dropped, littering the asphalt with spikes and sprigs. When she wasn’t complaining about that, she worried that a strong wind might knock them onto our house, killing us as we slept. To avert the mess and potential tragedy, she had called her brother and asked him to come by on a Sunday to trim them to a manageable size. All Sunday morning Mamaji had stood on his rickety ladder, sawing the lower branches into stubby amputations. When he’d climbed down to admire his work, my mother handed him a frothy almond milkshake, just like the ones she’d made him in India. He took it from her without averting his eyes from the tree, wiped the sweat from his brow, gulped it down, handed her the glass, adjusted his ladder and climbed higher. His upper body disappeared into the crown of the tree in search of a place to set the chainsaw’s grinding teeth. My mother, my sisters and I stood in the driveway, mesmerized by the buzzing sound of this battle above. It only took a moment for the tree’s elegant neck to snap. I watched the crown teeter and fall like a bird from the sky, expecting it to make a thud as it hit the ground. But it didn’t. It surrendered softly to the lush grass below. Mamaji emerged a hero. My mother applauded and I stood stunned, staring at the tree’s orange wounds, feeling phantom pains.

Liam assured me that the tree would grow back. “Everything does,” he explained.

Then he took me for a walk through the nearby ravine, past the stumped old growth that lay like fallen monuments beneath a spindly canopy of fir trees. To me they all looked like Douglas firs, but he could tell which was a Sitka spruce, a hemlock or a Western red cedar and he called them by name. Twigs and branches cracked beneath our feet, and small birds scuttled about in the lush undergrowth, scurrying along their own path to avoid ours.

We headed down into the ravine, grabbing exposed roots to keep from slipping down the moist earth. “Be careful,” Liam said. At the bottom, he dropped his backpack at the foot of a tree and began to climb. “You coming?” he called from a few branches up.

I shook my head and pulled at the hem of my gypsy skirt. He jumped out of the tree and took hold of my hand. “Come on, it’s worth it. I’ll help you.” His half smile nudged me on as he pointed out which hollows to place my foot in, hoisting me up when I faltered. My legs scraped against bony branches. My skin felt as raw as the peeling bark it pushed against.

“It’s okay, I’ve got you, you’re fine… you’re fine.” He motioned for me to cross in front of him. I teetered on the branch and grabbed his arm. He pulled me closer, anchoring my body, telling me I was okay. His breath fell on my neck, pulling my skin into tight rows of goosebumps. He smelled like cumin, like home.

As I opened the back door, I was overwhelmed by the smell of mud and stale tea. My mother was home. Her grey lunch box, once black, was soaking in the laundry basin. Her filthy boots lay on the painted green concrete floor that was meant to be cheery. Her dirty 1960s’ thrift-store clothes were resting on the laundry machine that was never used; my mother said it was too expensive to run more than once a month and insisted we wash the farm clothes by hand. But no matter how hard we scrubbed, they still smelled like the newly dead or the almost dying: manure and mushrooms, dirt, bitter gourds rotted by rain, bruised fruit teeming with flies, all em-bedded in the polyester plaid she wore with pride.

I took my shoes offand hung my jacket in the closet beside my mother’s fake fur coat. As a child I’d been terrified to open the closet for fear that this lion of a coat—with its massive fur collar, soft beige leopard pile and leatherette belt studded with topaz stones—would pounce on me. My father had bought her that coat while on a short trip to Paris in 1958, along with a tiny bottle of perfume that was still in the pocket where he’d placed it.