Mouthing the Words (4 page)

“But I don’t have a hauce,” I said meekly.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me. “If you can shrink down into the size of a kitten or a squirrel you can take the short cut and slip through that hole in the fence. Otherwise, you will just have to fly.”

I was good at shrinking. In fact, I’d had years of practice turning into a stick insect, so crawling through the fence was something I found myself doing with relative ease. Once on the other side, I stared at the girls, their manes flowing in the breeze.

“First of all,” said Vellaine. “In this country we call it a horse, not a hoss.”

“A horse,” I repeated diligently.

“Now, if you can turn yourself into a kitten, you should have no trouble turning yourself into a horse,” she said decidedly.

But I couldn’t begin to explain to her that I had actually turned myself into a stick insect in order to get through the fence. That was, after all, all that I knew how to be. I had no idea how to turn myself into
anything
bigger. A Shetland pony was about all I thought I might be able to muster.

“OK, a Shetland pony it is. But they’re not very good jumpers. I just happen to have a little magic dust here, so I will sprinkle some on your heels and that should help you fly over the jumps,” Vellaine said, picking up a handful of sand from the sandbox and shaking the special powder across my shoes.

“To the races!” Binbecka declared, sticking her arm in the air, and we were off. Vellaine followed by Binbecka followed by the Shetland pony. And the magic seemed to be working because I was flying over the jumps with grace and ease.

“I knew you’d be a natural, strange pony girl,” said Vellaine as she etched nine points into a new column on the ground. “Looks like we have some stiff new competition, Binbi,” she commented.

What a magical new world I found myself in—of special animals and plays and rain dances and television and soon-to-be school. Papa Claudio had built a wooden stage in the basement with a tree in the corner adorned with little red and white lights we could control with different switches. We performed plays there. Sometimes we performed ballets, and once we even made the room into a scary haunted house. Whatever it was, we charged admission and went to Mac’s Milk afterwards with our earnings to buy Mars bars and Doritos and Coke.

We danced outside in our bathing suits in August
rainstorms
, banging empty plastic Becker’s milk jugs together and shouting “boinga boinga boinga!” We watched television and I became engrossed in the lives of new friends like Gilligan and the Skipper and Marsha, Jan and Cindy and the Captain and Mr. Spock.

My mother yelled at my father, who was disapproving. “I don’t care if they are hippies, at least she’s got some real bloody friends! She’s hardly had a normal childhood with you as her father!”

But my dad really was disapproving and he started saying, “No more television and no more sleeping over there.” Fine, I just wouldn’t tell them about the latest voyage of the Starship Enterprise and I would invite Binbecka and Vellaine to stay at my house. But they didn’t want to. In fact, although I knew they could turn themselves into kittens to crawl through the hole in the fence, they never wanted to come through to my side.

“You come over here,” they said. “It’s better over here.”

The only time I ever saw them come near our house was on Sundays when my mum was roasting a beast in the oven. They used to stand by the extractor fan in the lane between our houses and say, “This smells a hell of a lot better than tofu.”

“But I like tofu,” I said. “And buckwheat honey and couscous and lentils. We never have those in my house.”

“Precisely the point,” said Vellaine, inhaling wisely.

“Well, why don’t you come and eat with us?” I suggested.

“Because. We don’t like it there. Your father is scary,” Binbi said.

“Anika and Claudio wouldn’t like it,” Vellaine explained. “They’ve told us to stay away from him.”

That confused me. I mean, I was afraid of him too, but no one was telling me to stay away from him.

“Maybe you could adopt me,” I said one day to Anika and Claudio.

“Oh, I’m afraid we can’t do that,” said Anika, running her fingers through my black hair but offering me no satisfactory explanation. “But you can spend as much time here as you like,” she nodded sympathetically.

“Like our other sister,” added Binbecka.

I was afraid because Dad was angry a lot of the time. And blurry-eyed in the evenings, squinting at me over dinner and saying things like, “Isn’t it past her bedtime” and “Don’t feed her that—you might as well feed steak to a dog, that’s how much she’ll appreciate it.”

Mum said, “You’re sounding more and more like your bloody father every day. I thought we came to Canada to get away from him and now I feel like I’m sharing a house with him.”

“No, as I happen to remember it, Corinna,” my father objected, “it was your fascist of a father we wanted to get away from.”

“Well, at least my father instilled something of a work ethic in me,” she provoked.

“You!” he said, incredulous. “A work ethic! If that’s so then you go out and get a bloody job! You see what it’s like being an indentured labourer and having to support an ungrateful family!”

“And I assume that means you’ll be taking on the job of parent?” my mother jibed. “In every job you’ve had since I’ve known you, you’ve become convinced that you are being undermined. You are a paranoid son of a bitch. As a parent, you’ll probably think your own children are going to stage a revolution to dethrone you.

“All right, Corinna. As of tomorrow I will start washing their crappy nappies and you can go out and find yourself a nice little job. But don’t come crying to me when you can’t get hired because you’re not qualified to do anything,” he stated smugly.

“They’re not even wearing nappies anymore, you stupid bugger, that’s how observant you are.”

“The only thing you’re qualified to do is be a whore!” he shouted.

“You fucking bastard!” she screamed. The casserole went flying into the wall and crashed in the sink, and then a familiar silence, punctuated by Willy’s sobbing as he clung to the leg of the kitchen table.

—

In the morning I had my nice school to go to. There I had my nice clean desk, and my exquisite penmanship to exercise in a nice new notebook under the guidance of my nice teacher named Mrs. Kelly. Mrs. Kelly gave
me
the book that was to be called “My Autobiography,” in which I wrote, “I was a dead purple baby.” She expressed some concern about that, but it was my next entry that prompted her to call my parents in for an interview.

“My name is Thelma and I am a dead, bled body or sometimes an insect or a rock in a cave. When I am a twig, my eyes turn around and I can see the inside of my head and it is red and bloody. My favourite hobbies are being a Shetland pony and coming to school.”

Being anywhere but home really. Being in my imagination, or in another building altogether.

Dad was the parent now and Mum was getting on her fold-up bicycle every morning and riding to her job as a secretary at the Ministry of Transportation. Dad was sending me off to school with a piece of burnt toast and taking Willy to the Oriole Nursery School, where Mrs. Elkinburg gave him graham crackers and powdered orange juice.

Every day Willy brought home a picture he had drawn with crayons. Every day it was a picture of a blue dragon stretching out its red tongue to eat the sun. “He shows exceptional artistic promise,” Mrs. Elkinburg wrote on Willy’s first term report card. “His creative impulse, though, seems oddly fixated on the image of a blue dragon trying to consume the sun. He should be encouraged to explore other images.”

“I think he’s developmentally retarded,” my father pronounced helpfully upon reading the report.

“Don’t be stupid,” my mother said. “The poor boy’s starved for a little inspiration and encouragement. What does he see when he gets home from school? You. He might as well come home to a corpse. And Thelma’s hardly any help. She’s so lost in her imaginary world all the time, she thinks he’s some kind of stuffed animal.”

Mum only knew the half of it. I would pick up Willy from nursery school on my way home, and Dad would park him in front of the television and say, “Pipe down and don’t bother me. Daddy has to help your sister with her homework. Why don’t you try and do something useful like long division instead of your crappy dinosaur pictures.”

“It’s a dragon, not a dinosaur,” Willy defended meekly.

And Dad said, “I’ve heard about enough out of you.”

But Dad was no good at homework really. He always wanted to make it into a game, while I took it very seriously. He always wanted to be the teacher and whenever I tried to interject and say, “But Mrs. Kelly doesn’t do it that way,” Dad would say:

“But Mrs. Kelly’s school is finished for the day. A woman can’t teach you everything you need to know. There are some things only your Daddy can teach you.”

Girl with a Suitcase

“IT’S A DIFFICULT
transition,” my mother explained. “Really, she’s quite a happy child. You should see her at home.” But Mrs. Kelly apparently wasn’t convinced, because the next night Mrs. Allen knocked on our door and introduced herself to my parents as one of the regional social workers responsible for my school.

“Is there some kind of problem?” my mother asked, standing firmly in front of Mrs. Allen with a false and nervous grin, her “English face”, I now call it.

“This is simply a routine visit,” said Mrs. Allen cheerfully. “We understand that Thelma has been having a little difficulty with the transition to her new life in Canada, and we simply want to help ease the process in any way we can.”

“Well, I think we can manage that quite well ourselves, thank you very much, Mrs. Allen. Good of you to show such concern, but Thelma’s coming along
quite
nicely. Have you seen her report card? Excellent in every category, although she is a little introverted when it comes to interacting with her peers. Not surprising when she has been uprooted so dramatically, leaving all her old friends behind in the UK”

All my old friends
? I lurked at the top of the stairs. Of course Mummy didn’t know I had packed up Ginniger, Janawee and Heroin and carried them across the Atlantic in the little white suitcase that Puff had given me for the journey. So I piped up—“No Mummy, they’re here. I didn’t leave them behind. I was only fooling because I thought you’d get mad!”

“Sweetheart, shouldn’t you be asleep by now?” my mother crooned strangely, turning her huge eyes round to glare at me. “Mummy’ll come up and kiss you goodnight and help you say your prayers in a moment.” Mummy will kiss me goodnight? But that was Daddy’s job. And prayers? When had I ever said prayers in my life? Wasn’t religion “a pathetic pacifier for weak people,” as Daddy always said? I was very confused.

“Well, all right then, Mrs. Barley. Thank you for your time. But listen,” she said, lowering her voice, “if you ever feel like speaking to someone, here’s my card,” she said, placing a small, white piece of paper into my mother’s hand and closing her fingers over the top of my mother’s with a small squeeze.

“These bloody North Americans!” my mother shouted as soon as she closed the door. “So concerned
about
other people’s business and so …” she shuddered, “touchy-feely.” She wheeled around, shouting, “Douglas, I hope you heard that. For Christ’s sake, all you have to do is pack her a lunch every day and make sure she’s wearing a clean shirt. Do you think I like spending every Sunday doing the ironing so that you all have clothes to wear? You could at least make sure she looks presentable when she goes to school. For fuck’s sake, I can’t do everything around here! Douglas, I can’t cope! I’m living up to my part of the bargain and carting myself off to work every morning and still coming home every evening to wash the clothes and clean the fucking floors. I sure as hell don’t want to find out that you aren’t living up to your end of the bargain. I just couldn’t cope with it. Where the fuck are you? Douglas? Douglas!”

—

I recognized the woman whispering to Mrs. Kelly at the door of the classroom the next day as that touchy feely Mrs. Allen who had come round to our house the night before. My mother had warned me, “If that Mrs. Kelly or Mrs. Allen should ever start asking you any questions, tell them they can go straight to hell and mind their own bloody business.”

So when nice Mrs. Kelly put her hand on my shoulder and said,

“Thelma, my dear, this nice lady is Patricia Allen and she was wondering if she could have a little talk with you,” I said:

“I’m supposed to tell you to go straight to hell and mind your own bloody business.”

“Well, I trust the good Lord has other things in mind for me, Thelma,” said Mrs. Allen, “and as a matter of fact, I think your happiness is my business.” With that, she guided me off, a hand resting on my shoulder.

I looked back at Mrs. Kelly pleadingly and she pouted at me and mouthed, “It’ll be all right.”

What’ll be all right
? I wanted to mouth back at her, but by this time Mrs. Allen was suggesting we take a little walk around the playground together despite my protestations that I had a ton of math to do.

“You can get to that later,” she said. “Mrs. Kelly understands.”
Understands what
? I wanted to ask.

I sat at the top of the slide and Mrs. Allen sat at the bottom.

“Mrs. Kelly has shown me some of your autobiography,” she began.

Traitor, how dare you
.

“She’s very impressed with your writing.”

Smug swell of pride—
Oh really, is she
?

“We both agree that it shows remarkable sophistication for someone your age,” she continued. “But some of the images are very disturbing,” she said gravely. “Do they disturb you?” she asked me.

Mrs. Allen continued. “Where do you get such creative ideas, Thelma? Not out of thin air, I imagine.”

“Just from my head,” I said, not really sure what she was after.

“Most little girls write about their pets and their friends and their mummies and fairies,” she said. “Not about blood and death and lungs and other parts of the body.”