Girl in Shades (7 page)

Outside the school my father makes another phone call on the pay phone in the parking lot — Connie again — while I wait with my back leaning against the tailgate of his car. I watch his head bobbing as he yaks into the phone. He talks so quickly I can almost see the syllables dropping from his mouth. If I wasn't busy holding an icepack on my eye socket, I could catch and collect them into my school bag and carry his words around with me everywhere.

Even though she is only a lady he works with, Connie makes him happy. I can tell by the way his eyebrows raise when he talks to her, even over the phone, and how he rubs his hand down the side of his pants. My mother never made him do those things. With her, his eyebrows sometimes rose up, but for different reasons.

With my mother gone, it has become quiet enough for me to hear the whispers and murmurings running over my own thoughts. They tell me things to do, like a kindly old teacher with wrinkled palms and a fuzzy sweater. Then, other times they turn on me and tell me I should be ashamed — that I don't fit in. Like a bully, they ask me to repeat after them, “I, Maya Devine, am not good enough to be in this classroom, in this family, in this city, in this commercial, in this world.”

I think about this as I wait for my father to finish with Connie.

Heather Hickle, a girl I have seen in the library during lunch, walks up to where we stand. My father still spits into the black phone that carries bits of other people's lunches in its small holes, and I wait with my face hidden behind the icepack. Beside her sidles up Chauncey Mercer, the only black kid in our school — skinny, frail, with an afro that covers more space than his own face. They are both in the other seventh grade class, with Mrs. Lewis.

“Did it hurt'cha?” Heather asks me.

“What do you think?” I say lifting the pack to show my puffy eye.

“I heard she clocked you good!” Chauncey says, raising his tiny fist towards the sky, his eyes growing wide so that his brown pupils seem small compared to the white parts.

“No one clocked anyone,” I say, putting the pack back in place and wincing again as the ice pinches at my wound. “We just had a disagreement that got out of hand is all.” I act diplomatic despite the parts inside me that are still smoldering.

“We just wanted to tell you that we support you. That Jackie is a b-i-t-c-h,” Heather says, tugging at a strand of her sandy brown hair. Her face is pale and even more so beside Chauncey.

“Heather and I want to know if you want to eat subs with us tomorrow, to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” I ask. My father has hung up the phone and is walking towards us.

“That you stood up to her. She thinks she owns this school,” Heather says.

“And we all know that the school board owns the school, not snobby bitches,” Chauncey adds in a nerdy but brave way, for him anyway.

“Maya, I'm ready. Now let's get you home and talk about this,” my father tells me when he reaches us. “You'll excuse us?” he says to Heather and Chauncey, and I know that his businessman suit and slicked hair has intimidated them.

“Sorry . . . we didn't know. . . .” Chauncey says through the spit that has formed in front of his teeth.

“He's my father,” I say, getting into the car. “See you tomorrow,” which is weird to say because I haven't even really seen them today, or any other day before this. Wherever they were isolating themselves. must have been really different from where I was.

As we drive away, I turn to see their salt and pepper faces getting smaller and smaller.

My mother refused all treatment for her cancer. She said she didn't need radiation or drugs. She said it was too late for her anyway.

She even told some people she needed her strength to look after me. The real reason, as I see it now, was that she had made a secret decision to give up on her life. Destiny had given her a way to escape what she had created for herself. And nothing my father or I could say could make her change her mind.

A few weeks after we all sat in the doctor's office, I walked in on her in the bathroom with my father's electric razor in her hand and a mushroom-coloured towel wrapped around her shoulders. “You can watch if you want,” she said to me when I saw her. I turned away, but then back. She put her hand on my bare arm then, her fingertips making five indents in my skin.

“I know this might be hard for you, Maya, to watch me lose my hair.” Did she mean it? “But I really have this strong sense that I don't need it anymore.”

I nodded like a puppet, even though I was screaming and swearing at her from inside my head, and sat on the toilet while she separated the hair on her head into sections in preparation for the slaughter. And with the razor buzzing in her hand and into the air, she began the cutback. Each long ringlet, confronted at the root and removed, until her head was a patchwork of leftover beauty that she then trimmed all down to bald. Zip, zip, zip — and soon, her hair lay abandoned on the floor around her like auburn snow. She ran her hand over the new stubble as if trying to decode a secret message in Braille.

When I had all her hair scooped into the bag, I reached in and combed my hands through it. Each strand was reaching up to me, trying to hold on for one last chance, but instead I turned on them all, knotted the ends of the bag, and put it outside on the back deck. When I got back inside, my father was standing looking at my mother. I only saw the back of him. The bluish light around my mother's head was fuzzier and moving faster than I had seen it before. It made me dizzy to follow it. I noticed then that my father's head was lowered and his suit-jacketed shoulders seemed to be shaking a bit.

“You have made a big mistake, Marigold,” my father said to her bald head. “This was totally unnecessary — you look ridiculous. Why would you do this to yourself?”

I wondered why she would do it too and what the neighbours, especially Mrs. Roughen, would say when they saw.

“I had to, Steven,” she said. “You wouldn't understand.”

Then she ran to her bedroom and my father shouted out, “What have you got left now?” and went outside without turning around to face me.

Her hair was not the only thing my mother felt she had to give up. She told us she didn't want to let cancer take anything away from her. So she was going to give it away instead.

“I am going to live in the backyard for the rest of the time,” she announced one Saturday afternoon in April. Jackie and I were playing in the kitchen sink. We were trying to float her little sister's mermaid doll. I was teaching her that mermaids didn't float, but in fact, they lived under the ocean.

“But how would they ever breathe under there?” Jackie said to me, the cuffs of her shirt soaked with water.

“They breathe because they believe they can breathe.” And then my mother walked in and made her announcement. My father was standing behind her, eyes rolled back like he was looking at the ceiling.

“I need some space to stay focused on what's happening. This is a lot for a person to go through. I don't need to be inside anymore.” When she said this, I felt my temples start to tighten and my fingers fold into fists.

“What do you mean you're going to live outside?” I asked her.

“I bought an old teepee off of this man who sits in front of the Drug Mart on First Avenue. You father is going to help me set in up in the backyard.”

From Jackie's head then, and only the second time I had heard someone's thoughts,
And I thought my mom was embarrassing. Maya's mom is a weirdo.

“Be quiet, Jackie!” I said and snapped my head to look at her. She was concentrating on combing the mermaid's aqua hair with a plastic comb.

“I didn't say anything, Maya,” she said prissily, faking innocence.

At that moment, a ball of resentment, anger, and overall misery at the situation began to shake itself loose in my throat.

“What the hell is wrong with you!?” I screamed despite my desire to keep it inside.

“Excuse me?” my mother responded, her bald head cocked to one side and her lips pushed up towards her nose. “Where did that language come from, young lady?”

“You think this isn't hard enough for me without you acting like a freak in front of my friends?!”

I wish now that I hadn't said those words, as they appeared to hurt my mother, annoy my father, and help Jackie fully grasp how truly bizarre the situation was.

“Maya, take that back,” my father said.

“No.”

I ran upstairs to my room, slammed the door, and sobbed uncontrollably into a waiting pillow.

Pounding up the stairs two at a time, I had heard my mother speak again. “In case you didn't notice, Steven, I raised her to be a strong girl. She'll get through this.” I don't know what Jackie was doing then. I felt bad for just leaving her with them, but there was no way I was going back out there.

After what seemed like a couple of hours, I emerged from my hole of self-pity with a hatred for my mother still swelling inside me. Jackie was gone but had left the sink full of mermaid water. I put both my hands in and spun them around to make two whirlpools that didn't touch. Then I pulled the plug to drain the water. It sputtered and spat on its way down, and I wondered if there was anything alive being pulled down.

Evening light filtered through the kitchen window from the backyard. I followed it with my eyes and saw them. My father, on his hands and knees, fitting together thin wooden poles and my mother unfolding what looked like dirty grey tarps and smoothing them down on the grass. They didn't notice me watching them — as though they were inside an aquarium, with me observing them. All I learned was that teepees are difficult to assemble, and some events made no sense at all.

My mother took the single mattress off my box spring for her outside bed, because it took up less space than a double. And to replace it, Father brought the queen-size bed from the guest room into my bedroom. As far as we knew, Aunt Leah (or anyone else) was not coming to stay any time soon. I liked my new big bed. I could stretch out from side to side if I wanted to and not just from top to bottom. And I never rolled off if I tossed and turned too much. I found it difficult to concentrate on sleep knowing my bald mother was dying by herself in the yard on my old single mattress with no box spring. (Father had propped it up against my bedroom wall.) Was a teepee tarp enough to keep the chill out? Couldn't the mosquitoes get through the holes? The bugs were starting to get bad out there. These sorts of thoughts led to sleepless nights for me, which made me tired at school the next day. I didn't mind though, because to walk around sleepy was almost like I wasn't anywhere at all.

Jackie and I didn't talk much at school anymore. I think my family scared her off. I think she thought I had become a bit too weird to associate with — especially with the next year being grade seven. I didn't talk much to anyone. I concentrated most of the day on deciding whether I would sit with my mother when I got home or pretend she didn't exist.

“Don't you get lonely out here?” I asked her one night after deciding she needed me with her.

“You are never lonely when you have yourself,” she said with a pout to her lips, and I wanted to yell at her, “What about me, you freak! You have me. And your husband?” But she was my mother, my protector, the one who raised me. And she was sick, which made it even harder to say what I really felt.

“I'll keep visiting you, Mother,” I said. “You don't have to sit out here all alone.”

She put her hand on my shoulder to say thank you. She was weakening, which was probably as much to do with her diet as preparing for the end. She ate mostly saltine crackers, and sometimes I brought her bowls of boiled vegetables — carrots, spinach, and broccoli — when she asked for them. Her arms were turning small like twigs and the bones in her cheeks growing pointier. When it was time for her to sip water from a blue plastic cup, her hand rose to her mouth in a slow motion that seemed to follow her everywhere.

Aside from the single mattress, my mother had one wooden chair that used to belong to our old dining room set, a TV stand she bought my father at a garage sale, and a scratchy wool mat she rested her feet on. The prairie sun and the moisture created from spring rain meant that she had to keep the hanging door of her teepee flap open instead of tied tight, but even this didn't help with the suffocating heat. She wore only a white tank top with no bra and an elephant-print skirt that reached her knees.

She had one more thing beside her bed: two red milk crates that I had stolen from outside the cafeteria at Holy Cross High School and brought home for her to make a bookshelf. And on the bookshelf she put her copy of the
Bhagavad Gita
, cones of incense, her water cup, and a copy of the Bible — which her mother had given her right before I was born. It looked new and straight, like it had hardly been opened.

“I've figured it out, Maya,” she said. “They wrote the Bible only to keep people in line by scaring them with punishment. God is such a villain in there.” She pointed to the black book. “It's like he's ready to condemn anyone who makes the tiniest mistake.”

“Is it true we get punished for doing the wrong thing?” I asked her.

“If we do, I can see why he did this to me.”

Maybe she was mad at God. Or my grandmother, whom I had never met, for trying to make her read the Bible.

I remember hearing a phone call made by my father once when I had returned back to the house to sleep (sometimes I would curl up beside my mother on the single bed in the teepee, but on this particular night the howling wind had been keeping me awake). My father's end of the conversation went like this: “Eleanor, we can't forgive what you tried to do, but I'm willing to put that aside now. She's your daughter and she needs you. She's sick.” He paused to listen and I clung to the wall around the corner. “I'm sorry you feel that way. She would have been happy to get a visit from you.” Stale air. “I know that your pension isn't enough for a plane ticket. Forget it.”

My father hung up the phone without saying the words that would have made any mother run to be with her child: “She's not going to make it.” I still don't know why he hung on to those words. Maybe he didn't want to say them himself. Or maybe he was scared my grandmother would actually come.

The next afternoon after that call, a plant arrived at our front door. It had waxy flat leaves and small white flowers that were wound up too tight to bloom. Around the green pot it came in was a pink ribbon, too thin to be satin, too coarse to be worth keeping. I took it out to my mother, but not before I peeled open the tiny envelope. On the card, with the words “Get Well” in the corner surrounded by a border of hearts, were six words written in all capitals (probably by an attentive floral shop worker): “Sorry to hear you are ill,” and underneath, the word “Mother.” My mother took the plant and read the card without smiling. She told me to put it on the grass outside the teepee, “So the sun can get at it better,” which I did. It stayed there for almost a week, until one morning I arrived to see the neighbour's German Shepherd, Tonto, ripping its leaves from the broken pot.

Though she may have wished he would have, my father didn't forget about my mother when she was out there — how could he with her teepee so obtrusive and only a few metres behind the house?

“Stinks in here” would usually be the first thing he'd say when he'd come in after work and sit down on the cracked wooden chair across from where my mother lounged on her mattress. In a low voice, low like approaching thunder, he would ask her how she was and if she needed anything.