Mouthing the Words (10 page)

“They have a nasty little trick once you get on to solid food again. They inject dye into everything and it gets activated by your stomach acids, so when you chuck, it’s purple. Your teeth and your gums and lips and everything. You should see the colour of my porcelain bowl.”

“Cool,” I said.

—

The next day she wheeled by my room and said in her best valley-girl, “Hey, like wanna go to the Eaton Centre today?”

“What, and go to like Le Chateau and buy a sequined mini so we can show off our, like, tooth-picks?” I asked her.

“And maybe a pointy-boobed Madonna thing to draw attention to our ample cleavage,” she joked.

“Yeah, too bad they don’t make them in a 28 double negative A.” We laughed and I saw her teeth for the first time—yellow, grey and pointy, sticking out of her white gums.

“Then maybe we could like go to the Big Bop and pick up some like guys.”

“And then what would we do with them?” I asked a little nervously.

“We’d rub our false titties against them and give them a big hard-on. The joke would be on them.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “But what about our boyfriends?”

“Oh. You mean Surf and Turf? They’ve got a hockey game tonight but maybe they could come and pick us up at Sneaky Dees later in the Camaro.”

“I hate that car,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, it’s totally embarrassing. And not much room for fucking in the back.”

“Guess we can’t fuck, then.”

“Yup. Too bad, boys. It’s OK,” she said. “They’re doing each other anyway.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” I said.

“Guess we’ll have to do each other, then, if we want some,” she said. That startled me. I didn’t have a quick and witty response for that one. “Sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean that. I was only joking.”

The next time I saw Dr. Walker I told him that I was craving a Toby’s Texicana burger. A big honking slab of beef on a white bun covered in thick smelly chilli. I told him Molly and I had a double date lined up for the day we got out of there—the two of us and our boyfriends seeing a movie at the Uptown and then eating burgers and fries at Toby’s. No Diet Cokes with lemon or green salad with dressing on the side. Pure greasy suicide food. He told me I’d made real progress. I’d put on ten pounds and was having normal, healthy fantasies about food. I told Molly I’d found the key. “Tell him how much you’re craving a hamburger,” I encouraged her.

But somehow he didn’t hear it from Molly in the
same
way he heard it from me. He thought her version was a fantasy about friendship and living a “normal” life, she told me, and that the food was my fantasy, not hers. “How fucking dare he tell me that I don’t really want a hamburger!” she yelled in frustration. “I want a hamburger! I want them to fry it in bacon fat! I want a side order of onion rings and a strawberry daiquiri! Fuck him!”

The truth was she wasn’t gaining any weight. Every time her mouth turned purple they’d stick the IV back in her arm. What I didn’t know was that Dr. Walker had told her she was using the food fantasy as a way to connect with me; playing into my fantasy in order to find a way to my heart. Hers Dr. Walker saw as a lesbian fantasy, while mine he seemed to view as an uncomplicated fantasy about beef.

I was allowed to go home but she had to stay. She gripped my hand with her claw-like fingers and said, “Don’t you eat that fucking burger without me.” I promised her I wouldn’t. That I would wait as long as I had to. She stared straight ahead, gripped my hand and squeezed tears out of the corners of her eyes.

“You’re crying,” I said, surprised.

“I am fucking not,” she said. “Don’t look at me.” She turned her face away and said, “I guess I am going to have to suck the old bastard’s cock after all.”

“That’s not funny,” I said, annoyed.

“Well, you did, didn’t you?” she jibed.

“Molly, don’t do that …”

“Well, why the fuck else would they let you out of here?”

“Ten pounds, Molly. That’s the only difference,” I said.

“You sound like everybody else,” she said with contempt.

“Molly, I’m not like everybody else.”

“Yes, you are. You give in, you play by their rules. You’re so fucking straight.”

“I have to go now,” I said, seeing Corinna coming up the corridor.

“Yeah, fine, whatever,” she muttered, her face still turned away from me.

“Molly, can’t you at least look at me and say goodbye,” I pleaded. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Sure it does,” she said. “No one ever fucking stays. People just lie to each other.”

“I can visit you,” I said hopefully.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. Look, don’t bother. I don’t want to know you,” she said dismissively.

“How can you do this?” I asked her, hurt. “I want to know you.”

“Yeah, right,” she scoffed. “This isn’t a fucking movie. Forget it.”

I sighed. “Bye Molly,” I said, lingering for a moment. But still, she wouldn’t turn around to face me.

My mother said, “She’s an odd girl. She’s a little queer, isn’t she?” as soon as we got out to the parking lot.

“She’s not queer!” I shouted at her. “She’s fucked up, Mum. Who the hell wouldn’t be after so long in there?”

“Well, I’m just glad you’re not like that,” she said.

“Like I’m so normal, Mum. Jesus.”

—

I still lie awake every night kneading my fat in disgust and resolving to stop eating, but as long as I don’t get my period I think I’ll be all right. Molly doesn’t write in response to my letters, so I guess she knew what she was talking about: people don’t stay.

I will have to adopt something if no one is going to adopt me. I am too old for someone to ever want to adopt me now—although I could do a very good imitation of a gurgling and delightful baby if there ever was a realistic offer. Even Vellaine seems to have dumped the idea of having me as her little sister. She has waltzed into young adulthood in a way that is truly incomprehensible to me—of her own free will. She seems to be spending what strikes me as an unhealthy amount of time in paroxysms of delight with her new boyfriend, Charles.

I think Charles is a creep. Last year when my mother did the purge of “every stinking remnant in this house that has ever been touched by Douglas,” out there on the pile, much to my horror (and Charles and Vellaine’s delight), was a stack of seventies porno magazines. I was about to throw lighter fluid on the pile when Charles stuck his hand in and said, “Wait a minute, those could be collectors’ items.” Yeah right,
jerk-off
, I thought, and considered dousing him with lighter fluid as well. And then, of course, tossing in a match.

I don’t care if Vellaine does love him. He is a creep and the sight of them flipping through those pages together and her saying things like, “Well, I can’t say I’d ever thought of that,” and him saying, “Wow,” and them giggling together saying, “There’s an option,” made me want to torch her as well.

Fortunately my mother had the good sense to holler out the window, “I wouldn’t be handling those things, kids, you don’t really know where they’ve been. They probably come loaded with STDs.” Vellaine and Charles both intend to be doctors, and they go around handling most things with latex gloves (including each other, I suspect). Corinna’s holler brought them to their senses and they threw the magazines back on the pile.

“Geez, I never knew your Dad was such a perv, Thelma,” Vellaine said with surprise.

“Yeah, well, who’s the perv now,” I scoffed.

“Don’t react,” Charles said to Vellaine, placing his bony hand on her wrist. “You know she hasn’t been well.”

“I wish you two would stop being so fucking smug and patronizing all the time!” I shouted.

Vellaine just smiled at me politely and turned to Charles, who had aspirations of being a psychiatrist, and said, “Oh, Charles. You’re so good.”

I had met enough psychiatrists by this time to know that Charles-the-creep would fit right in. Vellaine and Charles did eventually move to Moose Jaw to work with the native community as prescribed in Plan A. She and I were never really able to regain any connection to our earlier friendship until well after she had caught Charles “bonking” (being a doctor you think she could have come up with a more appropriate term) a native midwife, who, of course, he managed to get pregnant (um, excuse me, but how many safe sex educators does it take to get pregnant?) which led to his “relocation” and the subsequent disintegration of their marriage.

I would have been tempted to say “I could have told you so,” but by the time Vellaine and I were reunited I had gotten over being so cheeky and defensive. In fact, she was busy asking me at the time whether I’d ever had sex with a man. I wasn’t really sure why she was asking.

“Remember when we used to joke about being lesbians when we grew up?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I nodded shyly.

“Well, I think I’m grown up now,” she said somewhat timidly.

So that was it. Vellaine was coming out as a lesbian. Thirty-three years old and a psychiatrist now with her own practice in Toronto and she was coming out as a lesbian.

“Why so timid?” I asked her. “You had free licence in
your
house to be whatever you wanted to be. I remember Anika even explicitly giving you permission to be a lesbian if you wanted.”

“Well, my house was not the world,” she said mournfully.

“That’s funny, I thought
my
house was the world,” I said.

“I was ashamed of my parents. They were hippies. They were, you know, crunchy granola types. It was totally embarrassing.”

“My God, I thought they were amazing. I mean in retrospect I have so idealized them—the openness, the affection,” I said, amazed to hear Vellaine speak like this.

“Well, you know, too open, too unstructured sometimes,” she said.

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Like they had an open marriage.”

“Like sleeping with other people?”

“In theory. Although in practice only my mother did. My father remained absolutely devoted and monogamous until the day he died.”

“Wow,” was all I could say, leaving us both a little room to digest.

“But what about you?” she asked.

“What about me?”

“Are you?”

“A lesbian?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” I said hesitantly, although I felt like apologizing.

“I thought you were,” she said, a little surprised.

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“But have you ever slept with a man?”

“Only my father,” I said, shrugging.

“Oh God, Thelma.” She put her arm around my neck and drew me to her until our foreheads rested together. Rested there together for a time in order to let the healing begin.

But that comes later. About twelve years and a whole lot of therapy later, in fact. For now, Vellaine and Charles are in the first blissful throes of their material union and I am feeling sick to my stomach.

Even Binbi seems to have defected. Although she was never the intellectual giant, I am really questioning her decision to be an exotic dancer. Well, not decision exactly, sort of default occupation while she auditions for positions as a proper dancer. Just as “no one’s really a waiter,” no one at the Zanzibar is “really” an exotic dancer. “No, really,” insists Binbi, “the girls are all great. So-and-so is really a model, and so-and-so is really an actress, and so-and-so is saving money so she can go to veterinary school, and so-and-so has kids to support, and so-and-so is at university during the days studying to be a rectal optometrist.” A rectal optometrist? One of them’s got the wrong end of the stick anyway.

And what’s so exotic about having all your clothes off
anyway
, I want to know. People do it all the time—although normally in the privacy of their own homes. Quite frankly, I find it disgusting—morally reprehensible, but I have always been accused of being a big prude. Remember my mother’s friend Pam saying, “Hey, check this out?” Even then I was a prude. But I’m English—what do you expect?

In fact, when my mother starts strutting her new surgically enhanced breasts around the house, nearly the first thing I shout at her is, “Mother! Remember! You’re English!”

“This is the New World, honey!” she squeals, cupping her breasts in her hands with evident glee.

I am truly horrified. “But Mum, only last year you said plastic surgery was tacky, North American …” I say. “Common,” I try, and am successful in hitting a nerve.

“Now that was below the belt, Thelma,” she frowns.

“Well, if you don’t find something to support them soon, they will be, too.”

Oops! Mistake! Should not have said that, because then we’re off on a mad brassiere hunt around Eaton’s, Simpson’s, The Bay (please God, when will this end?). I must escort her on this mission because I am under doctor’s orders not to be left alone lest I try and hurt myself (although I think she could do much greater damage to me than I could ever hope to do).

My mother is saying mortifying things to sales-women such as, “Before I was a C cup,” and even
worse
, “Perhaps you could find a training bra for my daughter. I know she’s tall, but she’s really only thirteen.”

“Actually, I’m twenty-five,” I say, well within earshot of my mother. She is horrified and looks away quickly as if to suggest she was mistaken and we’re really not related at all, but I continue. “Which means my mother is about
fifty
and I think she’s having a mid-life crisis so just indulge her and tell her I’ll be waiting for her in the shoe department.”

She is furious with me, although she has, despite her intense anger, managed to purchase three new bras. Uh oh, and here she goes now with her “For once” speech.

“For once in her life your mother has a moment of happiness—why do you have to go and bloody ruin it!” I point out the flaw in her argument—if I added up all the “for onces” there would be somewhere in the order of ten thousand.

“You should be a fucking lawyer,” she says contemptuously. “You’re insensitive enough.”

“I will be,” I say, feigning nonchalance, although I have just, this very second, had a
MAJOR BREAK-THROUGH
.

“You what?” she asks, not sure if she has heard correctly.