Girl in Shades (16 page)

He went back to India when my parents split up. My mother's from Peterborough, so she came here. The cabin used to belong to her parents — they're gone now as well.

So you're half Canadian then? (A stupid thing to say now that I've thought about it.)

Yes, my father came from India to teach and met my mother in Toronto, where I grew up.

Then the wind pushed over the thermos on top of the loaf of bread we were breaking off with our fingers. He only laughed and commented, Ah the wind, he makes himself known.

Who says the wind is a man? I said.

You make a good point, Marigold, you do. (A pause.) You have beautiful hair, you know that? Like fall leaves. And a beautiful colour around you — crimson streaks like a sunset.

What can a girl say to that — oh thank you, I know I'm gorgeous in every way (laugh)!

I don't know if I will see Amar again. After lunch, he asked me if I would like to get to know each other a bit better by meeting again. He leaned forward a bit when he said it. I turned my head away and sighed, my cheeks stinging red. Why would he ever take a girl like me seriously? Should I let him?

Amar gave me the picnic basket to keep before he walked away. (I've hidden it in the back of my closet.) He touched the top of my hand when he handed it to me, and his fingertips sent up a jolt reaching all corners of my body at once. Every corner.

I should be studying right now. I have a mid-term tomorrow — Canadian Literature — essay questions covering three different texts:
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Who Has Seen the Wind,
and
Roughing it in the Bush
. How can I bring narratives together that don't seem to match at all? That's what I need to figure out.

I am staring at a spot of chipped paint beside my bed and wondering where he is right now. Where he is and what he's thinking.

After days in her bedroom — sleeping, reading the
Bhagavad Gita
, and basically staring at the backs of her hands in a darkened room — my mother appeared in the kitchen. “How's this for magic!” she said manically, reaching her frail arms towards the ceiling. She was dressed in her tank top, with no bra, and denim shorts. “What's the date?”

I told her it was July 17th and she cocked her head towards me and swung it back and forth. “Guess I should try to get up for a while. How has the weather been?”

“Mainly sunny to partly cloudy, 31 degrees, ten percent chance of rain,” my father said, reading from his newspaper but not looking up at her.

“Fuck,” she said in a shrill voice that popped and startled me. Father looked up at her with a grimace.

“Sorry, I meant to say, wow, still hot. Maya, you and me are going to the market, for groceries and razors. I need to shave this head down again. Then I guess I'll move back out to the teepee.”

“I've kept it clean for you,” I said to her. “I swept it every day.”

“Go get your market purse, we have vegetables to buy.” She was trying at least. She was giving life one more shot.

I jumped up then and ran up to my bedroom. On the way back down, I heard her talking to my father.

“Steven, I'm just trying to say that I'm sorry. I should never have acted that way.” My father was chewing on the end of a pencil and spitting tiny bits onto the table. When she saw me she added, “Maya, I was just telling your father that I am going to do all I can to last as long as I can. A positive attitude can go a long way.”

“Jesus, Mari, enough with the inspirational quotes. Soon you'll be giving out pamphlets again. They're just words, you know.”

“I beg to differ,” said my mother, and we headed towards the door. On the way across the threshold she tripped and had to wait a few moments to recover from what she called “dizzy stars.” While we waited, she bent down and whispered in my ear, “Sometimes you fall off of life, but you get back on.”

I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, be on her side, let her cry on my shoulder — every cliché I could think of, I wanted to give it to her. I reached up and held her hand as we headed off through the door.

We stopped at the Roughens' house before the market. We went right up the cement steps, knocked on the door, waited. Mrs. Roughen opened the door in a huff.

“Marigold, you're up.”

“Trudie, I'm here to apologize.” I was still holding my mother's hand while she spoke. “I was not very nice to you, and I really do feel bad about it.” My mother's white tank top was a bit yellow, and it was drooping down around the neck. The hair on her head looked like red moss on the north side of a tree. And around her, a grey murkiness seemed like it didn't want to let her go.

“Mari, don't worry, come in.” Mrs. Roughen's wrinkled mouth had shaped itself into a grotesque pout. We walk through the door.

Mrs. Roughen's house was decorated entirely in bright colours. An orange couch with yellow cushions and a coffee table made entirely of glass. Blood-red curtains with tiny stars blocked out any light from the street. Our bare toes stuck to hardwood floor. The air smelled of cinnamon, another red, but not like something was baking in the oven, more like a candle had been lit. My mother walked in and sat herself down on the orange couch before Mrs. Roughen had time to suggest it.

“Of course, sit, sit,” Mrs. Roughen said. Her hair was now dyed the colour of a clean fire engine and she had started wearing makeup again, blue eye shadow covered her lids and her burgundy lips matched the air around her body. Air that I tried to avoid.

“Trudie, as I was saying, as you can understand, I have been going through a hard patch and, well, I let it take me over. It became way too real to me, and I know it isn't. At least soon it won't be.”

“Mari, don't you talk like that, you need to have faith.”

“And I do have faith, really.” A pause. We sat, the three of us, not speaking. I looked at my mother, from my mother to Mrs. Roughen. Which is when I heard it. With all the commotion at my house and with my mother's sadness, I had not heard anything extra for a while. But I heard what Mrs. Roughen was thinking then, and it made me mad.

“That dirty creep!” I yelled out.

“What?” from Mrs. Roughen and my mother.

“He told you . . .”

“Told me what, dear, and who?”

“Elijah, he told you about the baby.”

Mrs. Roughen stood up then and started to wring her hands like she was washing them, obsessively. “Oh Mari, I'm sorry.”

My mother closed her eyes then and puckered her lips as if she was trying to keep something out, keep something from arising in her. She looked out the window.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“That you're going to have a baby, Mother! Elijah told Mrs. Roughen that you are going to have a baby.”

“And where would Elijah have gotten such a colourful idea?”

“I'm sorry, but Maya told Elijah and Elijah told me.” I put my index fingers inside my mouth and bit down.

“I think that Maya and I should go now.”

“Mari, please don't go. I can help you through this like you helped me. We can talk about it; we can pray about it. Jesus has the power to help you last long enough. You can deliver the baby.”

“Jesus,” my mother said. “Has nothing to do with anything.” She grabbed me by the hand, and walked us back to the door. “I know you just want to help, Trudie, and I can't blame you for that,” she said with a long sigh that seemed to empty out all the air she had. “Why don't you come by in a few days.”

Mrs. Roughen nodded and bit her fist, something that I thought they only did in movies like
Sixteen Candles
and
The Breakfast Club
, and always to try to be funny.

At the vegetable market, my mother threw up in front of the carrots and across from the field tomatoes. I couldn't decide if it was her sickness tossing up her stomach or my sister getting comfortable. Her puke was orange and white with only a few small chunks (the banana she ate for breakfast) and it created an abstract blob on the wet cement floor. We both stood staring down at it for a while, until my mother mentioned how it kind of looked like my father. By that time, the scent had reached my nose and was fighting to get in.

“It stinks,” I said.

“Imagine how bad it smells on the inside of us.”

“Not too bad for a baby though, right?”

“Babies can't smell yet,” she said. My mother smiled then, stretching her cheeks up over her facial bones. It made me think that she had changed her mind — that she was going to try to let the baby grow. I knew that deciding to try could get you halfway there.

“Clean up, produce aisle!” a voice shouted out over the intercom.

“Let's get out of here,” she said and we curled our fingers around shiny tomato skins, dropped them in our basket and headed for the front of the store.

In the check-out line I saw him. His picture, between an action shot of Cyndi Lauper and and a photo of Boy George peeking up from under a black hat, his face full of makeup. Corey Hart. His picture on the front of the paper. The headline read: “Musicians Make Waves.” You don't have to believe in signs from the universe to notice them when they are blaring out at you. And to me, that was a sign. Some way, somehow, Corey had found a way to be there for me. And he, along with my mother and my baby sister, were here to stay. I could almost see his paper lips start to move then:
Just a little more time is all we're askin' for. 'Cause just a little more time could open closin' doors . . .

He understood what I was going through — which was enough to make anyone feel better.

Later, I pulled a sharp razor across the skin on my mother's scalp, severing the hairs that had grown. I had to use two or three razors, spraying the cream and going over and over the same spots. She was tired by the time we were finished and was slumping on the toilet. I brought her out to her teepee and she handed me the
Bhagavad Gita
before she sat down. I knew the drill. I held the book and she called out random numbers.

“Page twenty-seven,” she said and I read.

“Be not over-glad attaining joy, and be not over-sad encountering grief, but, stayed on Brahma, still constant let each abide! The sage whose soul holds off from other contacts, in himself finds bliss.”

Mother closed her eyes and nodded like it was written for her. I think now she was probably trying to hide her own confusion.

“Mother,” I asked. “How did you even learn about this strange book?”

“A wise person taught me about it.”

“A man from India?”

“Yes, India.”

“Did he buy you this copy?” I held up the tattered collection of pages in my hand.

“He gave it to me, yes.”

“Can I meet him?”

“Not now, Maya.”

“How did you meet?”

“The winds guided us together, that's all.”

In my dreams that night, I looked in the yellow eyes of a giant tiger. Shiny mane of fur that shimmered in the light from somewhere, teeth that made me imagine the colour of my own blood, and the taste. I turned to run, through tall blades of grass, my feet coming down into the dirt. “Roooooaarrr,” from the tiger and I ran faster. It started to rain and the raindrops turned into people, tiny people cheering me on, telling me to speed up, telling me not to give up. I ran straight into the chest of a man. Turned around to see that the tiger was gone. Vanished, like he never existed in the first place. And the man's arms were long, and they wrapped around me. Creamy skin that matched my own. Strong arms that welcomed me home.

Two days later, Mrs. Roughen came by the house, only she wasn't alone. She had a lady with a microphone and a man with a video camera with her.

They came right in after my father opened the door.

“Steven, delightful to see you,” Mrs. Roughen said, teasing up her bangs nervously with her right hand. “You don't mind if we visit with Mari in the backyard . . . I believe she's expecting me.”

It was not true. None of us were expecting her, especially not with a news crew. It left me wondering why, and my father, with his mouth dropped opened, thinking:
Why won't this woman just go away? Fucking bitch.

Mrs. Roughen plowed her way past us before my father and I could stop her. Within seconds, she, the woman with the microphone, and the man with the video camera were standing outside the teepee. Mrs. Roughen tentatively peeled back the flap to find my mother.

I stood briefly on the backyard deck. The humid summer air was awash in colour — colours emanated from everywhere . . . from the people who were there, pestering my mother, from my mother perhaps. They seemed to be mingling to create a bizarre dark-coloured rainbow — plum, canary, pumpkin — the rainbow dipped and flowed, as if to signal an ominous but key moment in my mother's story. I doubted whether any of the people connected to these colours actually gave a crap about my mother.

By the time my father and I got out to the teepee, the lady was already speaking into her microphone while the man with the video camera taped her.

“We're here outside the teepee of Marigold Devine, a Saskatoon resident who in the face of terminal cancer has bravely decided to forgo all treatment and spend her final days in a state of meditation in the backyard of her home.”

“Ahh, geez, will you please stop it,” my father said, at which point Mrs. Roughen popped out of the teepee to silence him.

“Shhhhh, Steven, it's fine, really. Mari is all right with this. It's going to help everyone involved.”

“Trudie, you really make me sick.” My father gave up too easily. He went back into the house, leaving me alone with all that. Though I didn't see it at the time, it would have been pretty hard for an eleven-year-old kid to make sure her mother wasn't exploited. I wanted to though — really.

The scene inside the teepee: The lady with the microphone standing over my mother, who was in her bed, sitting up with her hands folded in her lap, lips puckered, mustard light around her face, moaning in her head. Mrs. Roughen, standing by the door of the teepee like she's on lookout, smiling with her head cocked, thinking about how incredibly proud she was to be helping my mother, and wondering what people will think of her for trying to do it. The man holding the camera wearing a white T-shirt and scratching his armpit.

“Now, Marigold, we know this must be a hard time for you, with all you're going through. What gets you through it all?”

My mother winced, annoyed by the hungry lion that had pounced on her while she was sleeping and seemingly unsure herself about how she ended up in this situation.

“I guess I just do the best I can,” she said, but apparently they were looking for something more inspirational.