Mouthing the Words (8 page)

“The best present you could give me, Thelma, is a little gift from your imagination,” he said.

I hadn’t thought of that. What a wise man he was.

“OK, then. I will share Heroin with you. She is a brave Amazon warrior, silent and noble, and she will protect you from all evil,” I said proudly.

“Well, that is truly the gift of yourself,” he said.

—

It was years before I would really be able to understand. Suresh had finished his studies and was returning to work in India, where his marriage to a Sikh girl had been arranged many years before. “But why?” was all I could say, and my mother could give me no other reason than:

“Because there are some things about which we have no choice.”

“But don’t you remember Nemeni?” I asked her.

“I don’t know. Vaguely,” she shrugged.

“She could choose to do whatever she wanted, to be whatever she wanted to be, remember? Like a mushroom or a princess.”

“Well, at some level maybe Suresh is doing what he wants,” my mother said.

“I’m going to marry Suresh when I grow up,” I said decisively.

“I thought you were going to be a lesbian,” my mother sighed.

“Well, I changed my mind.”

A Stone Splits

MRS. RODRIGUES HAD
come to our school to teach us music—to conduct choir and orchestra and teach us mnemonics like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle. I thought she was beautiful—tiny and perfect with nails hard as rocks that clacked on the piano keys, never chipping her beige nail polish. She was blond pouffy hair atop a sea of swirling beige. Hers was the white Trans Am in the school parking lot, and she spoke in a soft low voice. “I want Charlie perfume for Christmas,” I told my mother when she asked. “Like Mrs. Rodrigues wears.”

“You have a bit of a crush on her, don’t you,” my mother commented, and I was about to say, “I want to marry her when I grow up,” but I knew my mother would say, “You’re so fickle, last year you wanted to
marry
Suresh.” She wouldn’t understand that in my world I wanted to be married to all the grown-ups who had ever made me feel mushy, a category to which my parents had never belonged except for a brief flirtation with my mother during the time she had been with Suresh.

With Suresh she had suddenly blossomed into someone nice and beautiful. I see the photographs now and she is otherworldly, brown and curvy, standing in the dandelions in the backyard, swinging on the wooden swing with full, dreamy lips, flicking long black hair from her eyes. Without Suresh she was back to being her “bloody hell this and bloody hell that” old self, telling me that “life is hard” and “we’re all alone in this world,” moving distractedly throughout the house and getting thin. Without Suresh we were back to eating baked beans and fish fingers. Without Suresh we kept the windows closed and there was no more laughter. There was no more Pam, and no more Rudy, and even the stray cats seemed to disappear.

I imagined a life with Mrs. Rodrigues where I was her only daughter and I had a voice as golden as sunshine, a voice that moved her to tears. Mrs. Rodrigues was often moved to tears. She’d have the choir sing songs with lyrics that I found embarrassing because they were what my mother would have called, “touchy feely,” brazenly Hallmark in their sentimentality, embarrassing because I could feel their romance in my stomach and I was sure it was obvious to others as
the
touchy feely rose in some kind of sexual/spiritual way through my body.

In anticipation of particular lines, I had the distinct feeling that I was going to become a frozen statue and split right down the middle. There were lines like, “If you touch me soft and gentle/ I’ll show you who I really am and I will grow,” which made me feel utterly mortified. Lines that I just couldn’t get my mouth to sing. I resisted them by dismissing it all as yucky, pukey, touchy feely crap, and feeling utter contempt for the group of girlie-girls who would beg for Mrs. Rodrigues’s attention at the end of class by bringing her flowers, writing poems for her, and asking for hugs.

I would never ever be as pathetic as that. No way. Instead I would daydream that my mother had been burned to death in a horrible fire, or crashed to death on Highway 401 and I would be left homeless (and Willy would also be lost somewhere in the great catastrophe) and parentless (it never occurred to me that in all likelihood if such a thing happened my father would probably take me), and that Mrs. Rodrigues would come to me (I would never go to her) and say:

“I have always wanted you to be my child. You have always been my favourite, special one, but I feared telling you because you are so brave and stoic that I thought you might reject me.” And then I would say: “It’s OK, I’ll let you be my mother,” (as if I was doing her some great service in making her life complete
somehow)
and go home with her to her nice condominium in North York and snuggle up on the couch with her and eat pizza and watch television.

I was not a snuggler in real life, I never had been. Except for nestling briefly in my mother’s armpit one Saturday morning during the Suresh days, I had always been of the “don’t touch me” variety, the variety that I realize now speaks loudly to sensitive teachers, social workers and psychiatrists of something being decidedly wrong.

I used to think it was because we were English and that English people didn’t feel a need to resort to such perverse and primitive forms of communication as touch. I didn’t respond very well to tactile gestures. I remember sleeping over next door one night and waking up in terror because Anika was rubbing Vick’s Vapo-Rub on my chest while I slept. My heart nearly stopped beating. I swallowed all my limbs until I had turned myself into a brick.

I was getting good at this—I could transform into stone with minimum effort. At other times I heard a word, or breathed a smell, or saw the sun disappear in winter or nothing happened whatsoever and I turned hard, cold, without knowing, without feeling.

Dog Days and Ice

DADDY HAS COME
home. I am nearly fourteen. Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home? But we’ve been doing OK without him. Daddy’s home? Oh God, I remember what it’s like when Daddy’s home. Corinna gets even more angry, Willy gets even more scared and I am no longer nearly fourteen anymore, I am a baby again, an insect sometimes, and in my newest incarnation, an icicle.

Why is Daddy home? Maybe Mum thinks it is better to be angry all the time than to cry all the time as she has since Suresh left, a long time ago now it seems. “Your brother’s going astray,” my mother explains. “He needs a father, a male role model. I cannot cope on my own. I just cannot cope,” she repeats.

It was true there had been a couple of minor run-ins with the law, one involving a tape deck stolen from Radio Shack, and another a hockey shirt from Eddie
Bauer
. The only difference between us was that Willy had been caught whereas I never had. I didn’t think of myself as a criminal, or that my petty pilfering was leading me along the road to a life of crime: I simply thought I must stop this before my sixteenth birthday, at which point any juvenile delinquencies would be erased from my record. So because of some peculiar legality, Willy was a criminal and I was not. He needed a father, whereas I did not. As always happened in my family, something became a problem necessitating action only once the public became involved, so there were many more things housed between walls which never became problems in the same way.

—

I am fourteen and apparently becoming a “sullen and uncommunicative teenager”, about which my mother said, “Hardly surprising. I could have predicted this. You look like you’re back in your element. I’ll talk to you when you decide to emerge from adolescence and be a human.” But what she doesn’t know is that have I resolved never to emerge, never to relinquish this new-found insulation, never to grow human.

—

At school we can get out of gym class by writing M beside our names on the class attendance list. It’s easy. You just write a big M beside your name and you can sit out on the sidelines with all the other M signers. I hate having to take my clothes off and get into my bathing suit, so for the six weeks of swimming I write
M
beside my name. The gym teacher, flaming red-haired, black leather-skirted Bunni Lambert, gripped her long, hard nails into my shoulder and said, “My dear. If you really have been menstruating for six weeks, I suggest you go and see a doctor.”

Menstruating. I went home and asked my mother what it meant. My mother said with some perverse glee, “Oh, Thelma. It means you’re a woman!” A woman? I think. How could that have happened? I’ve never wanted to be a woman. I am quite sure that I am still only a girl, a very little girl.

“Aren’t you lucky you have me for a mother,” Corinna chirped. “My mother told me it was a dirty little secret that one had to keep to oneself. I remember she told me the blood was a sign that my body had started to produce eggs. Of course, I didn’t believe her. I mean, I thought it was such a ludicrous idea. I pictured myself laying an egg like a chicken in my sleep. So I got up the nerve to ask Jackie,” my mother said quietly. (There were a whole lot of Jackie stories—Jackie had been Mum’s best friend at school and she was much admired for being savvy and worldly-wise and wearing Chanel perfume from the Duty Free in Johannesburg.) “Jackie told me that my mother wasn’t lying but the eggs are invisible. It felt like such a conspiracy.

“It was another year before I put it all together,” my mother continued. “The book my mother had given me
called
Where Babies Come From
and the eggs I would soon be hatching in my sleep.”

“God, Mum,” I responded to her story. “Stupid. It was just your period.”

Perhaps I’d missed the point or spoiled her one attempt at female bonding, but she rummaged around in the bathroom closet and thrust a box of tampons at me.

“Thanks, Mum,” I said. “But I won’t be needing these.” She does not realize that I have just decided never to have a period. No thank you very much, I am just not interested in going that route. You can take these straight back to wherever they came from.

“Well, what the hell did you ask me for, then?” shouted my mother.

“Dunno,” I shrugged my shoulders.

“Thelma, you really are an odd bird,” she said, shaking her head.

—

I have decided never to be a woman. Decided that I will be thin and little and rigid as a twig and hide in places out of sight from the world. I don’t want to be sophisticated and wear push-up bras like Binbecka. I don’t want to have claws and wear black leather and frighten children like Bunni Lambert. I don’t want to have a stomach and cook dinner and lie back and say, “Oh, Douglas” with my father clambering on top of me and panting like a dog.

I daydream a lot about being an icicle: hanging from
the
roof and watching the world, dripping away into watery nothingness in the spring. I want to come and go like winter, be unspeaking, cold and untouchable, crystal clear. No blood, no eggs, no stomach, no breasts, no claws, no sighing, no dogs panting on top of me.

“You should do something with your hair,” Binbecka has started to say to me. “It’s not becoming. Do something like mine. And clean your nails. What’s wrong with you, Thelma? Don’t you want boys to like you?” she asks me.

No. I don’t want to paint my lips in Silver City Pink, pull up my kilt and fold it over at the waist, or press my face to the wire fence and giggle through to the other side. I don’t understand this new language where I am supposed to say mean things about my friends like, “Oh my gawd, she’s like, such a bitch,” and then spend three hours that night on the phone with her talking about boys. I don’t understand.

Binbecka tells me I’d better try to make some other friends because she has things she needs to do without me. There will be no more going to her house after school, making popcorn and watching The Partridge Family and me playing the piano while she pretends to be Diana Ross.

There is only my house now. Only my house and I don’t want to be there. My mother is there pacing round the kitchen and rubbing her stomach. She looks at me like she’s disgusted. “Thelma, what’s wrong with
you?”
she says to me. “Don’t you even want to try a little make-up? By your age I was onto my second bra. You look sick. For God’s sake, you could at least wash your hair. Your father can’t stand dirty hair.”

My father can’t stand. He can only sit at the table or lie down these days. After dinner, which I fold into my pocket and throw down the toilet, Mum sews in the basement and I hide behind my door writing poems. My father turns into a dog then and I daydream about being an icicle. Less dog and more icicle now. Every day less and more.

He follows me around the house and I can feel his breath on my back and he asks me questions. He tries to trap me. He asks me whether they are teaching me any English history at school and I answer reluctantly, “Only Canadian.”

“That’s ridiculous. That’s not bloody history. It was the Brits who brought civilization to this place. I can teach you history.”

Daddies teach you. Teach you about the white man and colonial conquest. Teach you lying down.

“Where’s Daddy’s little girl gone?” he coos at the side of my bed. “I miss my little girl,” he says, rubbing his hand over his crotch. He is panting. “Don’t you miss me? What’s wrong? Do you have a boyfriend? Are you a little slut?”

*

I am otherworldly. I am where you cannot reach me. I am hanging from a roof forty feet above the world
.

*

Panting is turning into spitting; coos yield to anger now. “You know, you look sick, Thelma. You look dirty. You look like a sick little dog,” he spits. “You’re lucky your Daddy gives you this kind of attention. No one else will. Even if you are a begging slut. Come on, Thelma, be good. Do this for me. Stop being so self-absorbed.”

*

Drip, dripping, I am drops on a sunny winter’s day
.

*

“You know, I met your mother when she was your age. And she was a woman. She looked like a woman, she wore short skirts, and had those long legs and her thick black hair. You don’t even have any breasts. You’re a slut without the goods. A slut begging for this in your mouth. Come on, Thelma.”