Unless (14 page)

The moon followed me. When I staggered, seven years old, across the grass in the backyard, my head thrown back, willing myself to be dizzy, I could see how the moon lurched along with my every step, keeping me company as I advanced toward the peony bed. Why, out of all the people in the world, had I been chosen as the moon’s companion? What did this mean? Honour, responsibility, blame, which?

I confided to my friend Charlotte this curious business about the moon. But she insisted that, on the contrary, the moon followed her. So back to back, at the end of the lane we paced off steps, she one way, I the other. Immediately I grasped the fact that the moon followed everyone. This insight came mostly as a relief, only slightly tarnished with disappointment.

Charlotte was the child of a Danish-Canadian family who ran a sign-painting business on Bloor Street. The secret
at the centre of her heart was her father’s first name: Adolph. Knowing the evil associations of that blunt, harsh Adolph (none of this was clear to me), he went by the name of Chris Christiansen. I promised I would never tell anyone his true name, and I never did. Charlotte had yellow hair, cut squarely, severely. She was exceptionally docile and obedient. Some other, older, child said to me, speaking of Charlotte, that the good the young, and that that would be Charlottes fate. This was uttered with such authority—nonchalantly, nonchalantly, accepting, accepting—that I believed it absolutely, without any evidence either of Charlotte’s essential goodness or of the kind of early death she might expect to be honoured with. Charlottes goodness and her presumed punishment were entered on the roll of confusion that made up my bank of assumptions, and the problem of goodness—what is it? where does it come from?—occupies me still.

Confusion has kept me from staring back at childhood through drifts of longing. Danielle Westerman says much the same thing in her piece “Sentimentality.” She is the other voice in my head, almost always there, sometimes the echo, sometimes the soloist. Who would wish, the renowned Dr. Westerman says, a return to such grunting incomprehension, when,
mon Dieu
, we are all struggling to keep up a brave front, pretending to know how the world works? The fact is, I didn’t need to know everything, and no one expected it of me in the first place.

It seems I have a knack for self-forgiveness. This is one of the very few easy comforts still available to me at age forty-four—that there is no need to suffer that degree of guttered fear and ignorance again. I’ve kept a steady eye on my own growing children, watching for signs of a similar disorientation and hoping I can jump in and rescue them with assurance and knowledge. Norah, of course, has temporarily been lost. She’s got my disease, only worse. She’s been listening too avidly, too seriously, caring too much, so that harm has come up upon her by surprise. As for Natalie and Chris, they seem, so far, in a state of calm, despite what’s happened to their sister. There’s an excellent possibility, however, that they’re bluffing.

Every

T
HANK YOU FOR
releasing me from your loins,” my middle daughter, Christine, said to me today, October twelfth, which happens to be her seventeenth birthday.

Loins. Where had she got a word like loins? “It’s from Tom Wolfe’s novel,” she explained. “It means uterus. Or else womb.”

She was standing in the kitchen and eating a breakfast of leftover pizza and washing it down with a mug of apple juice.

“You’re welcome,” I said, and then, to keep the rhythm of our conversation going, I added, “It was a pleasure.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said. She had exactly two minutes to put on her jacket and run down to the road for the school bus. “Giving birth cannot be filed under one of life’s pleasures.”

“Well,” I said, working for a noncommittal tone, “now how do you know that, Chris? How exactly?” I glanced at the clock over the stove and she watched me glance at the clock and I watched her watching me. Her mouth was stretched with half-chewed pizza crust, her strong, healthy teeth going
at it. Not a pretty sight, though I adore this slightly chunky daughter of ours and attempt every day of my life to keep her affectionate and close to us.

“Well, really,” she said, exasperated, “I did watch that video on home birth. And so did you. And so did your husband.”

Lately, when she speaks of her father, she refers to him not as Dad or Daddy but as my “husband,” sometimes my “erstwhile husband,” employing an exaggerated, plummy English accent. And when she speaks to him of me, it is always “your wife.” “Your wife has a weakness for chocolate,” she told him last night as I scraped up the last of my cake crumbs. “Your wife promised to go over my essay on
Twelfth Night
.” “Your wife needs some interesting new shoes to replace those running shoe things she’s been wearing for the last hundred years.” Tom and I understand that this shift of rhetoric is meant to be ironic, and that our old familial names—Mummy, Daddy—can no longer be produced without a wince of embarrassment;

“So I wanted to thank you,” she said, and now she really was putting on her jacket and mitts and moving toward the door. “God! Twenty hours of labour to push me out of your womb.” She pronounced it
“wombah,”
giving comic voice to the final
b
.

“Twelve hours.”

“You forget.”

“Shouldn’t I remember? Of all people?”

“You have this thing about revising history,” she said. “You and your husband want us to believe we girls arrived in the world without causing too much fuss and bother. Why are you smiling like that?”

“It’s that phrase, fuss and bother. It makes me think of your grandmother. Grandma Winters. You know how she always wants to spare the world fuss and bother.”

“But demanding it at the same time. Ha!”

Now she really is out the door, flying down the lane. “Anyway,” she yelled after me, “thank you.”

Two thank-yous in one day. Only this morning, colliding with Natalie, our youngest daughter, in the vicinity of the bathroom door, she had breathed out the words, “Just wanted to thank you for not naming me Ophelia.”

“Ophelia!”

“We have this new girl at school, a transfer from Prescott.”

“And her name is—”

“Ophelia.”

“Now that is”—I looked for the word—“unusual. As a name.”

“A ditz name.”

“Well, it’s not a name everyone would choose.” Why am I obliged to bring diplomacy to even the most minor of exchanges? “I suppose they thought it was lyrical,” I said. “Her parents, I mean.”

“Most of the kids don’t know. They don’t connect, I mean. We don’t do
Hamlet
till next year.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone named—”

“Ophelia? So Mr. Fosdick asked me to look after her for a day or two, give her a tour of the school and introduce her around. Can you picture it?—I’d like you to meet, ahem, Ophelia. And trying to keep a straight face.”

I smiled at Natalie, aged fifteen, one eye taking in the delicacy of her jaw, admiring its lovely shape. The other eye, my mother eye, worried: Was she too thin? What forms of knowledge were erupting in her innocent body cells?

“But otherwise you like her. Ophelia, I mean.”

“Like her? I suppose so.”

“Do you want to invite her home? To dinner? Not today. But, well, tomorrow.”

“I guess so. I could ask her.”

“Okay.”

“Remember Nestia? From grade four? That’s a weird name, Nestia. But we were so young, nine years old. We never thought Nestia was odd. We never, like, teased her about it.”

I waited a beat before answering. Natalie, of all our children, is the most suggestible, always eager to find an excuse for disaffection. “I guess we learn to live with our names,” I said finally.

Now it was her turn to pause. “So you don’t mind being called Reta, then?” She clutched tightly to her own
effusiveness now that had started in. “I mean, your mother and father did this to you and you were just a baby. Grandma and Papa. They named you Reta.”

“It could have been worse.”

“At least they could have spelled it right. With an
i
.”

“They just liked the sound of it.”

“And we went and named our dog Pet. Not very original of us.”

“It was Norah who—”

“She was twelve. I remember. She wanted A Pet.”

“We called him A Pet for a few days. Then just Pet. Then we got used to it. A generic name. Instead of something embarrassingly literary.”

She gave me a look of disdain, and I thought she was going to say: “I’ve-heard-that-story-a-million-times.” But she drew back and smiled thinly. She and Chris are determined not to bring grief, not even a crackle of static, into our pulverized family.

“So I’ll ask Ophelia to come tomorrow night, okay? You won’t burst out laughing when I introduce her?”

“I promise.”

“Okay, then.”

When she looks back on her life, when she’s a fifty-year-old Natalie, post-menopausal, savvy, sharp, a golf player, a maker of real estate deals, or eighty years old and rickety of bone, confined to a wheelchair—whatever she becomes she’ll
never remember this exchange between the two of us outside the bathroom door, her embarrassment about a girl with an unfortunate name, and her attempt to challenge me, her mother, about my own name, what it means to me. Her life is building upward and outward, and so is Chris’s. They don’t know it, but they’re in the midst of editing the childhood they want to remember and getting ready to live as we all have to live eventually, without our mothers. Three-quarters of their weight is memory at this point. I have no idea what they’ll discard or what they’ll decide to retain and embellish, and I have no certainty, either, of their ability to make sustaining choices.

They are trying so hard, Natalie and Chris, to keep the noise of the house alive. It pierces my heart, their little entr’actes, their attempts to amuse or divert Tom and me, to assure us that they are still here, willing to be regulation daughters, to keep up with the daughterly routines, school, friends, family dinners, basketball practice, the swim team. Why is it so reassuring to have children who are part of a school swim team? Because the sight of those sleek wet skins shivering at the edge of the pool and the scent of chlorine clinging to their hair combine to ward off infection.

What the two girls
have
given up is volleyball, which at Orangetown High School takes place on Saturday morning.

Instead, on Saturday morning Tom drives Chris and Natalie into Orangetown before dawn. There the two of
them catch the bus into Toronto, disembarking at the old bus station downtown. From there they walk a block to catch the subway to Bloor and Bathurst and they spend the day with Norah on her patch of sidewalk in downtown Toronto, returning to Orangetown in the late afternoon. They’ve been doing this since we first found out where she was.

The first time, they went without telling us. We were worried to have them gone all day, never mind that they were in their teens. We insisted on an explanation. They were embarrassed, reluctant. “We just sort of thought we’d go see her,” Chris said finally.

They take mats to sit on. And blankets, now that the weather’s turned. They pack sandwiches, bottles of water, a thermos of tea, a stack of magazines and books, toilet paper and tampons; they’ve thought of everything. They’ve ransacked Norah’s dresser drawers for socks, underwear, sweaters. They’re dying to take Pet, but he’s not allowed on the bus. They’re convinced that one look at Pet—slobbering and sniffing and wagging his tail—would bring her home. Tom and I are hesitant; we worry about putting pressure on her, about blackmail.

Neither one of us is clear about what the girls do at Bloor and Bathurst for all those long hours. We’ve only had hints.

“We just hang out,” Natalie says.

“We’re like visitors,” says Chris.

I hold my tongue. To ask too much might unsettle the exceedingly fragile arrangements they’ve worked out.

Passivity has the capacity to arouse violence, and this is what I worry about mostly, that Norah will not be able to defend herself. I’m deluded enough to believe that Chris’s and Natalie’s Saturday excursions help to keep her safe, though at a risk to their own safety. I go along with it, the Saturday visitations, and wave the girls off for the day blithely, as though this new routine might succeed, actually rescuing a portion of what’s been lost.

The first time they went they threw their arms around her and pleaded and cried.

“She smiled at us,” Chris reported. “Just sat there and smiled horribly and said she was happy to see us.”

“She stank,” Natalie said another time. “Kronk City. They do have showers at the hostel. You’d think she’d remember how to use a shower.”

“She doesn’t stink,” Chris said, anxious to reassure me. “It’s just that street smell.”

“She doesn’t really talk to us,” Natalie says.

“At first we sat about ten feet away from her. We didn’t want to freak her out,”

“As if she isn’t already—”

“Now we sit right next to her. Natalie sits on one side and I sit on the other.”

“She doesn’t mind. She just keeps smiling and people keep giving her money.”

“Or not giving her money.”

“She gets more money than anyone else on that corner, and there are about four other guys. People just seem to like her, people going by.”

“No one gives us money, but then we don’t have a board or a sign or anything.”

“There was that one man who gave me a dollar. He just sort of dropped it into my lap. But he was weird.”

“It gets awfully boring, but she seems to be used to it.”

“It’s like she’s hibernating. Everything about her is slowed down.”

“Just sitting, not even reading, not even watching.”

“We took her a toothbrush. In case she didn’t have one.”

“We took her her old peacoat. We just put it down next to her before we left.”

“We wrapped it up in a plastic bag.”

“We always tell her we’ll be back next week. That’s the last thing we say to her.”

“We don’t hug her or anything. It’s like she doesn’t want us to.”