Girl in Shades (8 page)

She usually said no, she did not need anything from him. Except sometimes, she would ask for more saltines, which he would bring her. He would light a stick of her incense to cover the smell inside the teepee. Mother had stopped using deodorant or bathing much. I guess she didn't see a point to it anymore. And she was going inside to the bathroom a lot, and spending a long time in there, which probably didn't help the aroma coming off her body.

My mother spent most of the day lying down, resting. She said her back ached. Her lips were dry and when she smiled sometimes at my father, they stretched over her teeth like an animal skin drying in the sun.

To be polite, Mother asked Father about his job. She usually did this without looking at him. He would tell her how he thinks he found the next Heather Locklear, and that she wants him to represent her. Mother would say, “That's nice,” and he would tell her how hard he was working to make sure that I had a good future, how important it was for him to move up the corporate ladder at the office. But from inside his head I once heard the truth:
I honestly don't give a shit about this job. Not with Mari like this. Who's going to look after Maya?

Yeah
, I thought,
who's going to look after me?
But I couldn't ask him out loud: he would know what I heard.

This mind-reading business was getting tricky.

When my father ran out of things to say, he would reach out and hold one of each of our hands, just until they became sweaty, and then go back into the house to take off his suit.

In May she wrapped a bedsheet around her body — queen-size with tiny flowers barely pink and blue. It used to be on her bed inside the house. She laid it flopped over her shoulder, down a bit and around her waist. I watched her put it on the first time. After taking off her clothes and before wrapping the sheet around her, she stood naked in front of me, her nipples hard with the dampness of the teepee, her pubic hair dark and matted between her legs. I tried not to stare, but my mother's nakedness never became comfortable for me.

“Put these in the garbage, Maya. No use for them anymore.” She handed me her clothes: a white tank top, a black T-shirt, and a pair of white jogging pants my father used to wear when he ran around the block.

I did as she said and when I returned to her shelter, she was wrapping the sheet around herself. I still wonder: had my father been the one to fetch it from the linen closet and deliver it to her?

“Yes, this will do just fine,” she said with the sheet in place, but I had my doubts. The faded pattern on the thin fabric made her look like a tacky monk. And who wore a sheet anyway?

She stopped wearing shoes around that month as well. She ventured into the house to use the toilet in her bare feet, her toes fitting between the green blades on the way, moist from the dew left at sunrise or golden dry from the afternoon sun.

“Do you want your shoes, Mari?” my father had asked more than once, and she always responded in the same way.

“I like the feel of the grass on my feet, Steven. Do you have a problem with that?”

Maybe she was just over wearing shoes by that point.

My father spent most of his time engrossed in his work, or in the TV, or in the scary headlines that he studied from the daily paper.

“Maya, can you believe that banana-chin Mulroney is actually our prime minister?” he would say as he read, trying to suck me in to a political world that seemed more like made-up stories to me. “Look out, Canada, with this guy.”

Instead of worrying about politics, I occupied myself by combing through my own thoughts. It was hard to see through them. I thought about things that an eleven-year-old shouldn't have to, like: Where will my mother go when she dies? Will my father cry? Will he take down the teepee or will he let me move my own pillows and blankets out there to be close to her?

Mother never answered my questions. Not directly. Instead, she would point me to some random passage in the
Bhagavad Gita
. While I held the slim book in my hands, she would nod in a knowing way with her lips tucked in.

“Maya, things will take care of themselves. At least you're not Arjuna. You could be facing a battle with all your friends and family members. Krishna helped him out, and it all turned out okay.”

I've since learned that in the further episodes of the
Mahabharata
, Arjuna and his entire family get killed because Krishna convinced him to fight, but at the time I agreed with her. I supposed it could be worse.

That night I dreamed that I was Arjuna, on a golden chariot heading out to fight against my own family — brothers and sisters I never had. Around me, the girls from school, Mr. Wigman, my father, all shouting at me and telling me to get down, that it was dangerous up there. But I heard the booming voice in my ear and kept riding, waking up before I hit anything frightening.

A Sunday morning. My father awoke to see it first. He came into my room. I remember looking up to see him standing over me like an ancient oak.

“Maya, I need your help outside. It's your mother's teepee.” Wrinkles traced out from the corners of his eyes, creating a maze in his skin. I followed him into the yard to see the paint — red, bold, and thick on the outside of my mother's teepee.

“Freak Inside,” written in a childish way that made me think it must have been some kids on the street. Egg yolk dripped from the letters like yellow blood, oozing its way down to the grass and settling around broken white eggshells. The door flap was ripped as well, like someone was trying to get in and gave up halfway.

“We can sew that back in place,” my father said, pointing to the flap, his voice hovering in the still air before dropping to the ground. He ran his open palm across the words, so that they smeared into a red blob. He only spoke one word: “Insensitive.”

Inside the teepee, my mother still slept.

When she woke up, we didn't tell her what had happened. Instead my father occupied her in conversation about the weather and the bills and his boss. My mother nodded and tried to smile while he spoke. I scrubbed the red blob and egg yolks with soapy water from a green bucket until I thought my arm would detach, and I looked through the ripped entrance every few minutes to check on them. He held my mother's hand and cradled her head with his bicep. She seemed comfortable — that is, assuming she knew where she was at all (it took her a while to get moving in the mornings). Eventually she had to go inside to use the toilet. By then, I was almost finished scrubbing and hid the bucket and rags behind a bush when she walked by.

“Good morning, Mother.” She nodded weakly and hobbled past me. I don't think she even noticed the rip in the door. And if she did, she had passed the point of caring.

Jackie came over because I asked her to. By that afternoon, I was longing to escape to some sort of fantasy world that we created — a play we wrote and acted ourselves, a dance we created to something off of Michael Jackson's
Thriller
album. Only when she arrived, Jackie didn't want to play with me. She wanted only to sit in the backyard and talk about my mother.

“Why does she stay in there?”

“She likes it.”

“Why?”

“She's going to die.”

“Are you sad?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you afraid she will haunt you?”

“No.”

“How do you know for sure, though?”

“I don't.”

“Does she ever come out?”

“Sometimes.”

“For what?”

“To get food and go to the washroom.”

“What does she eat?”

“Crackers, fruit, water.”

“Can I see her?”

“No.”

“What is that red blob on the outside?”

Jackie's blond pigtails curled into small balls at the ends. Her cheeks were white like milk with red splotches in the middle. Her nose was perpetually wrinkled in curiosity.

We met in grade four, when our teacher assigned us as partners for a project on the first moon landing. Then, when Jackie asked me to come shopping at a flea market with her mother, I agreed. Her mother even bought me a pair of earrings, small silver peace signs with pink borders, for my recently pierced ears. Her mother, at that time, still had some of her leftovers from her hippie days in the late '60s — leather sandals, the flower she sometimes tucked behind her ear, the hugs she doled out like tissue. But as Jackie and I went from grade four to five, her mother decided to return to work as an insurance broker and most of her whimsical qualities disappeared. By the time we reached grade six she wore mostly lady-suits and was making a good business selling people back-up plans on their own deaths.

I had grown tired of all Jackie's questions about my mother, realizing I had appeased her at first simply out of fear of losing my only friend. But I didn't want to talk about my mother anymore, so I asked Jackie to leave.

“But I don't want to go yet, I have another question,” she said. I could hear her taking mental notes in her head:
Stays in teepee because she is dying. Only comes in to use bathroom and prepare food. Maya doesn't know if she's sad.

“Go home, Jackie. Now.”

Her round face dropped in surprise. “I told you, I don't want—” I stood up and pulled her by the forearm towards the front door. “Owwww, that hurt!” she screamed.

“I don't want to talk about it anymore, and I don't want to talk to you.”

Kicking Jackie out was the only retaliation I could find for her intruding into my mother's situation. I hadn't yet figured out how to get back at the people who peered over the fence, stopped my father to question him in the driveway, or those who had painted the teepee.

Jackie went to the door and slipped on her pink jelly shoes that had been waiting on the tile floor.

“You'll regret this, Maya,” she said as she left. “You lost your one chance to be friends with me.” I only shrugged and closed the door behind her when she stomped off.

The afternoon that Jackie and I spent in my backyard, after my mother was vandalized, was the last one we spent together as friends. But shortly before dinnertime on that day, I met Elijah Roughen, thirteen-year-old son of Trudie Roughen who lived at two Emerald Crescent, right down the street from us. Even before my mother was sick, Mrs. Roughen had showed interest in my mother. There was a time, when I was around nine, that Mrs. Roughen had picked my mother up and they had gone to a craft show out by the river. My mother had returned with a macramé teapot cozy in the seven chakra colours and a mini dreamweaver for me to hang in my bedroom window — to catch nightmares, she had said.

Mrs. Roughen, she had told me, had bought only a knitted cover for the Kleenex box in her bathroom. “That Trudie is a strange woman,” she said, “but I guess it's nice to get out.”

Mother was the one to tell me about Elijah, two years older than me. And how he was shy, but sensible (Mrs. Roughen's words), and had many part-time activities that had earned him distinction, awards even — first place ribbon for horse jumping and all his swimming badges (yellow to white). This had all happened a few years ago, but lately, Mrs. Roughen worried about her son. He had turned coarser, gotten some new friends, stopped many of his activities. Mrs. Roughen hoped that with the right attention, he could still be salvaged. Mother warned me that Mrs. Roughen was hoping for me to be a good influence on Elijah, because I seemed quiet, studious, and square.

“You got her fooled, eh?” my mother said (as a joke, I think). “You're a firecracker, my dear.” She looked down when she said it, like somehow, she only hoped.

Jackie had just left when Mrs. Roughen knocked on our door.

“Hello, Maya,” she sang when I opened the door. Blue eye shadow coated her eyelids and her thin eyebrows were plucked to within an inch of their lives. “I am here to talk with your mother. Now, I know that she is ill and that her new lifestyle alienates her a bit from myself and the rest of the ladies in the neighborhood, but nevertheless, I thought I should stop by.” When Mrs. Roughen said “lifestyle,” she created quotes on each side of her head with four of her manicured fingers, and her left eye seemed to wink. I tried to hear her thoughts but was met with a fuzzy wall of static.

“I hope you don't mind I brought my son, Elijah.” Mrs. Roughen came through the door then and kicked off her heeled sandals. Elijah followed, his chin dropped in embarrassment, cradling a pineapple upside-down cake in his arms. His appearance contradicted itself. Although he wore a black Duran Duran T-shirt with a rip at the collar and a black leather wristband, and his dark hair peaked into tiny spikes on top of his head, every inch of him was thoroughly groomed — teeth gleaming white, no crust in the corners of his eyes, shiny skin that I could almost see myself in. He had wonderful eyes — brown and inviting. Nestled behind the brown was the soul of a kid who had seen stuff. He puffed his cheeks in a fake smile.

“Where should I put this?” he asked me.

“The kitchen, I guess.” I was unrehearsed at that sort of etiquette. He followed me into the kitchen. His mother peeked through the kitchen window at the teepee.

“So that's it, is it?” said Mrs. Roughen, pointing. “Your mother is out there?”

“Yes.” I had grown tired of all the questioning.

“And she never comes in?”

“Sometimes.” I felt like I was repeating myself.

“Can I go out there?” She said this slowly, stretching out each vowel and consonant like she was painting them across a canvas.