Girl in Shades (3 page)

My father and I go to McDonald's for lunch. I eat a Happy Meal while he sucks Coke up a straw and moves around in his seat. “So you think it went well then?” he asks me for the tenth time since we left the audition.

“I don't know. What is ‘well'?” I say, peeling the pickles off my hamburger and throwing them to the corner of my tray.

“You're not going to eat those?” he asks.

“Why should I?”

“I don't know, I just thought . . .”

“What does Connie do at your work?”

“Connie? Oh, she's an agent, just like me. Only she's just out of school, so she doesn't have a lot of clients yet. We're working with her.”

“I bet you are.” I fling a pickle slice onto the floor.

“Pick that up!” he says, crossing his arms, and I do.

It takes the Shinesse shampoo company two weeks to contact my father about my audition. He calls me right after he hears the news. It is a quarter to seven in the evening and I am at home inhaling patchouli essential oil from a tissue, rubbing my fingers over my mother's green healing stone, and watching
Jeopardy!
Martha Pronk from Mississippi has just answered two questions from the category “Not as It Appears.”

ANSWER:
The appearance of a sheet of water in a desert or on a hot road caused by the refraction of light by heated air
.

QUESTION:
What is a mirage?

and

ANSWER:
False contractions experienced after the third month of pregnancy but before labour.

QUESTION:
What are Braxton Hicks?

“You weren't their first choice,” my father says through the receiver. “But the girl they picked first has come down with a case of head lice, which of course makes it difficult.”

“So I was second choice?”

“They offered you the job. You got it, kid.” My father announces this like I just won a shopping spree at the Saskatoon Centre, but for me it's only good for another day away from school.

Dr. Peacock, with his bald head and beady eyes, sat across a desk from my mother, my father, and me. His teeth were clenched and his lips puckered while he scanned the papers.

Test results.

He was sucking on a cough drop, which clunked against his teeth as he moved it back and forth and wafted cherry menthol in our direction. Every few seconds he would either cough or inhale phlegm from his nose into his throat and swallow it down with a gulp.

It was March of 1985 and I was eleven years old.

Just when I was about to say that a sick doctor was not what my mother needed, I heard three simple words, thoughts from the inside of his head:
She's a goner
.

I looked up to see the doctor's face, his lips still glued together, silver stethoscope hugging his neck, still interpreting my mother's file.

He had yet to open his mouth to speak.

My heart slapped me from inside, my fingers numbed, and my shoulders rose up. I wanted to run away. I had grown used to seeing colours around people, but that was the first time I had heard what someone was thinking. I didn't know where the words came from or why I was the one to hear them. Were these words what they meant to say? Maybe what they were afraid to say?

So as it happened, I knew before anyone else in my family that my mother was dying. But I let Dr. Peacock tell them. It was easier on me that way.

“Mrs. Devine,” he said, looking at my mother.

“Marigold. Please call me Marigold.”

“Marigold. We have the results of your biopsy and it's not good.”

“Everything can be good if you alter your perception,” my mother said. Her insincere optimism caused my father to roll his eyes and throw his chin up towards the ceiling. I reached out and grabbed my mother's soft fingers but she turned her head away, sending me the scent of her lavender shampoo.

“It's a good thing you decided to come see me,” Dr. Peacock said.

“The bleeding didn't seem normal,” my father said and my mother looked at the floor.

Straight-faced, the doctor told us, “It's cancer.” What is it about those words? Three syllables that can put a stop to everything you once thought true. Take your life and turn it inside out, into a dream world. “Stage four cervical.” The doctor didn't blink when he said it. He looked straight at my mother's forehead with an unwavering gaze while my father shifted in his seat. “Now, we'll have to do a series of scans to figure out how much it's spread.”

My mother closed her eyes.

“It could already be in your liver and maybe other organs.” My mother stood up and walked towards the light at the window, shuffling her sandals over the polished floor. “It will be your choice to do radiation, which will only slow things down a bit.” A fluorescent bulb hummed at us from the ceiling. Then, from inside the doctor's head,
This never gets easier
. And then,
Maybe I'll have chicken noodle soup for lunch. Yeah, that's it, chicken noodle.

The first time they met, my mother spilled an entire foam cup of hot chocolate on my father's ski jacket — or so it goes when my father tells the story. In her version, he was the one to spill on her, black coffee that covered her Hudson's Bay parka and dripped onto her suede boots. When I imagine that moment — one of them wet, one of them apologizing — I picture a gigantic bubble encasing them both, secluding them, protecting them as they once were.

What I do know is that they were nineteen when they met. And that they were both students at Trent University in Peterborough. My father was studying marketing, and my mother, English literature. I've heard my father say he never understood my mother's love of British Romantic fiction, but because he was trying to “woo her,” he tried to listen when she nattered on about it.

Around age seven, I found an old copy of Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
in a box in the basement. The dog-eared pages were covered in highlights and scratchy notes in the margins explaining important passages. The first line of chapter one was still glowing from pink highlighter:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife
.

“Is this yours?” I asked my mother.

“It was, at one time,” she said without flinching, “when I was still in university.” She was folding bathroom towels, straight from the dryer, still hot and radiating Downy softener.

“How come you never read it anymore?”

She looked at me with sad eyes, collapsed a towel to her chest and wrapped her arms around it. “Maya,” she said. “People change. Things happen that change them and there is nothing you can do about it.”

I don't know a lot about my parents' courtship. Only that they walked around attached to each other like spider monkeys (my Aunt Leah told me that) and that my father only had eyes for my mother. I also know that my father was the only one of them to finish university. And that she broke his heart before he married her.

There's a picture my father keeps in the top drawer of his desk: he in a black graduation gown and flat hat with matching expression, and she, looking so much smaller than him, meeker. Her strawberry-tinted locks shelter the baby version of me in her arms. Black tufts of hair sprout from the top of my head. Her eyes rest on dark circles. Both of them look at the sky in opposite directions. Or maybe at other people walking by in the crowd?

Shortly after my mother died, I spent hours looking at this photo. Hoping if I concentrated hard enough, I could get my mother to smile. And maybe, just maybe, reach over and hold my father's hand.

On the day we found out about her cancer, my father had tears in his eyes on the way home from the hospital. Round tears that wouldn't fall, perched on the edges of his bottom lids (I could see them in the rearview mirror). As he drove, turned corners, stopped at stop signs, eased on the brake, he stroked the steering wheel with his hands and muttered like he was angry with an invisible person sitting on the dashboard. “I can't understand how this could be happening, to you of all people. Things were finally starting to get better, normal . . . We were a family . . . What did we ever do to deserve this?” At the time, I thought it was my mother he was angry with, but I know now that you can't really blame someone for getting cancer — even if she may have wished it on herself.

My mother didn't say anything to him when he talked. She must have known she could never find an answer to his questions. She just looked out the window, with one hand's fingertips perched on her chapped lips.

My father always made enough money so that my mother didn't need to do anything except look after me. I went with her everywhere and even when they asked, she was not interested in get-togethers with the other stay-at-home mothers on our street. She was committed to her eternal quest to busy herself. She made lists: what to buy, where to go, what to say, what to wear. She made lists of what lists to make when we got home. I would carry them for her in my pockets, but she never looked at them again.

When I was six, we started visiting a Hindu temple in the afternoons, usually on the days she had yelled at Father for something like forgetting to take the garbage to the curb, or leaving a tea bag in the sink. The temple was a strange place for a part-Irish woman to bring her daughter. Saskatoon had a population of about two hundred Hindu families. Prairie Hindus. They had taken over an old church to hold prayer service, and though Mother and I were without religion, they always let us in when we arrived. Dark-skinned men nodded and touched our shoulders in greeting, woman wrapped in saris pointed to where our shoes should go.

My mother said that with my black hair and olive skin, I almost looked like I belonged with them. This puzzled me, but the promise of a big family was tempting, even back then, and especially since I knew only a few relatives aside from my mother and father: my father's sister, Leah, and his parents who flew out from Prince Edward Island once when I was five. Their faces, though warm and smiling, had stayed blurry in my mind.

In the large room of the Hindu temple called the nata-mandir, Mother and I would kneel down in our sock feet. Incense burned from long sticks and short cones, tracing squiggles of smoke through the air. Cloths of red, white, and gold covered the walls, along with pictures of men with elephant noses and ladies with too many arms sitting on flowers. And at the front was an altar, blessed food, and bottles of milk. Old ladies grabbed the bottles with their boney knuckles to sprinkle the pictures, entranced in their worship.

In this temple my mother prayed, her head bobbing like she was reliving her past, trying to wipe out stagnant guilt. She went away for a while when she prayed, swaying forward and back, chanting words to herself. Afraid she might cause herself to disappear from so much concentration, I stayed by the door with the other children. We danced to scratchy Hindi songs from a ghetto blaster, twirling, swinging our arms through sandalwood air that stuck in our clothes.

Each time we left the temple, Mother stayed quiet for a long time. I agreed not to tell Father where we had been. She didn't have to tell me he wouldn't understand.

I didn't go to school until grade three. Mother home-schooled me the best she could. Part of this schooling included visiting the local library to listen to speeches with titles like “Making a Fortune by Age Thirty,” “Overcoming Anxiety,” “Growing the Perfect Garden,” or “The A–Z of Filing Your Tax Return.” Instead of listening, I watched the colours dancing around the bodies of the speakers — red, orange, sometimes green, rarely blue — coating the air, spinning, whirling, popping like flashbulbs. I reached for my mother only when the colour was black and sturdy, clinging in a solid mass around the head and shoulders of the speaker (like the guy who once presented on “How to Make a Million Dollars Without Working”). Though she starkly told me I was imagining things when I told her what I saw, she tried her best to console me, nodding and patting my hand without looking away from the person at the podium. She always acted this way when I told her about the colours, and her denials were almost enough to convince me it wasn't real. Almost enough, but not quite.

Library speeches gave way to yoga classes and walks on nature trails, petting stray dogs and collecting flowers to display in vases on our kitchen table. Sometimes, on Tuesday evenings, my mother snuck us into the local AA meeting, telling the tall and mustached organizer that she was trying to admit her problems and that my support was the only thing that could help her do it. The first time she said this, the man nodded his pointy chin and stroked her gently on the arm. When we sat down in the circle I saw I was the only child there, but it didn't really matter. The alcoholics fascinated me with their stuttering voices and interesting twitches. My mother listened intently when they talked about the people they had hurt, the lies they had told, and the messes they had made of their lives. She even stood up once herself. I was nine and sipping orange water out of a spongy cup, feeling my eyelids numbing with sleepiness, when she got up, stood in the centre of the circle with her shoulders back, and said in a loud voice, “My name is Marigold Devine and I am an alcoholic.”