As She Grows (2 page)

I was given two truths: my mother named me Snow, and she drowned in a neighbour’s pool.

Elsie gave me only one photo of my mother. It is soft and wrinkled, from years of carrying it close to me. It’s a wallet-sized school photo of a pretty blonde-haired girl wearing a bright yellow turtleneck. Fleshy round face, a few freckles, and pouty lips. She’s not smiling at the camera. Her eyes are like mine, with the changing moods of an ocean. Sometimes they look a hostile grey and sometimes an inviting blue.

The day she gave me the photo I was sitting on the couch, a shoebox on Elsie’s lap beside me. It was my eighth birthday. “This is a picture of your mother when she was about your age. She was a strong little girl. Like you, Snow,” Elsie said, her anxious hand rubbing my back.

“Was she hollow?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Elsie responded, puzzled.

“Strong things are hollow, like old logs and chicken bones and pipes in the ground,” I replied, staring at the photo.

“You’re a clever little girl, Snow,” she said, not looking at me, but somewhere distant, over my head. “You remind me of her,” she said, her thumb firmly stroking my mother’s face, in a way
that made me unsure if it was a tender caress or an attempt to rub her out.

The morning light shines through the old sheet hung at my window, the piss-stained centre like an explosive, scattering sun. I slowly pull my arm out from under the pillow, my limp hand dangling from my wrist. I study my swollen knuckles and, with my finger, poke white blotches into purple skin. A greenish purple, really, the colour of those cabbages they plant in funeral home gardens in the fall. I do all this with only one eye open, the other still firmly shut, refusing to begin this day.

I’m too late to take a shower this morning, and instead put my hair up into a ponytail, the dark roots of my blonde streaks exposed. I look through my dirty laundry pile for a clean-smelling T-shirt and put on the same baggy jeans I wore yesterday. I do everything in slow motion, my body still asleep, my head woozy and vacant. I leave my school binder spread out on my desk. My teacher will send me to the office for not being prepared for class and I’ll get a zero for the math test I would have failed now anyway, even though I studied all week.

Elsie is still sleeping on the couch, her mouth hanging open. The elastic of her baggy blue underwear creeps up her left cheek, and her Toronto Maple Leafs sweatshirt is hiked up over her fleshy stomach. The look of her makes me sick: her stringy long brown hair, her cutting cheekbones, her yellow teeth. You can tell she was beautiful, once. A long time ago. At least, that’s what Jed used to tell me. He also told me that I had inherited the Cooke women’s strongest weapon: sharp beauty.
Careful with this,
he’d say, o
r without knowing it, you’ll slice a man’s balls right off
. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I liked the sound of it.

I start to pick up the empty beer cans around her, sticking my fingers into opened holes, five cans on each hand. I do this without even thinking. Habit, I suppose. But then I stop myself and throw them back on the coffee table, one by one, crashing down close to Elsie’s head.

“Do you have to be so gaad-damn noisy?” she groans, her eyes still closed, face pressed into the cushion. “What time is it?”

I ignore her and she just rolls onto her side, a penny stuck to her sweaty thigh like some sucking parasite. It’ll be another three hours till she gets up, stretches the wine-and-beige polyester Dominion uniform over her stiff body, and drags herself across the street for her shift. Then it will be six hours before she comes home, microwaves pizza pockets, and sits in front of the TV with her twelve-pack of Blue.

I don’t talk to Elsie anymore and it’s amazing, despite living in this apartment together, how easy silence is. Of course, the practical exchange of words is necessary, but we rarely move beyond
I’m putting a dark load in,
or,
the toilet won’t flush
.

When we used to speak, a couple years ago, we yelled. Elsie used to be on my case about every little thing. She used to give me a curfew that I’d always break and an allowance that I’d always waste on cigarettes the first day. She used to yell when I came home drunk and called friends’ parents if I didn’t come home at all. But now she says I can ruin my life if I want to, and she leaves me alone. And it’s better that way. We stay out of each other’s business. I used to be in her life. Now I’m just in her apartment.

“How can you not love your own grandmother?” a snobby girl asked me, when we were partnered up for a grade nine biography project. I imagined her grandmother, smelling of flowery perfume, sitting on her living-room couch at Thanksgiving, sipping sherry and crocheting doilies. I shrugged my shoulders,
knowing that an explanation would be useless for this girl, with her Birkenstocks and clear lip gloss. She said it as if it were a blasphemy, as if automatic love for a parent or grandparent was a requirement in life. “You
have
to love your
grandmother,
” she persisted. “It’s your grandmother. Even if I didn’t, I’d feel bad saying it aloud.”

“Well, I don’t,” I replied. “She’s a bitch.”

But I should love Elsie. She has made sacrifices for me. She tells me this. At times when I’m not grateful for her giving a roof over my head. And food in my stomach. And shoes on my feet. At times when I point out to her how much my life sucks. “Your life?” she says. “Your life? What about
my
life? I’m an old woman, you know. I should be on tropical boat cruises playing blackjack, not raising a kid.” She says this like she’s eighty years old, but she’s only fifty-three, which is just a little older than Carla’s mom, and she gets seasick on the Toronto Island ferry. And no matter how well I do in school or how nicely I clean the bathroom or fold the laundry, it’s never enough for her because there is always a mouldy corner or a missing sock. And no matter what I do she will always, for a split second, scowl at me when I first enter a room, as if since I was born I’ve been paying for a mistake I never knew I made.

I have two mothers: one, a body, the other, a spirit. Elsie is the hand that pushed my baby carriage, the protective arm that shot out in front of me when suddenly braking, the lips that told me dinner was ready. My birth mother is the tuneless lullaby I hear each night, the ghost I feel in each breath.

All my life they have been competing against each other inside me, resentful and jealous of the other’s role like bickering sisters
seeking attention. My grandmother’s presence over my shoulder and my mother’s unoccupied space within me. And it’s a strange confession, but it is the absence that carries the most weight.

Ever since I can remember, I have been piecing together the image of a mother. It is this mother who opens her arms to me when Elsie’s push me away. It is this mother whose song I hear at night, a promise of something better. In my mind my mother talks and breathes and walks down a street with a sexy sway of her hips. She wears glasses when she reads and blows her nose with a handkerchief. Her fingers are double-jointed, like mine. Her eyelashes are long and curved like those of the woman who walks her cat in the courtyard. Her hair is blonde and curls slightly outward at the shoulders, like my grade four teacher’s.

“Was she a morning person?” I used to ask Elsie when I was younger. Or, “Did she eat meat?” Or, “Was she smart?” Questions posed to her while I was folding laundry or passing a doorway, always somewhere trivial, to counter any possible interpretation of my thoughts. I’d pretend they were fleeting ideas, just points of interest; not tell her that I had been thinking about them for days. I used to not want Elsie to think that I needed this, that her being my mother was not enough. She’d pause at my question, look up to the ceiling like she was deep in thought, then respond with short dismissive answers like “I’m not really sure,” or “That’s a tough one,” or “I think so.” And before I could ask more, she’d somehow always manage to change the subject or leave the room, not in a rude way, but in a way that made me feel like a nuisance, or childish, for needing more.

And once, when I was young, I asked, “What about my father?”

“The men in this family do not stay and they do not deserve the spoken word,” she replied with such conviction and intensity that I accepted it as an indisputable truth.

I learned later, from Aunt Sharon, that my father was a fling. A one-night stand. Something fleeting. To know you weren’t created out of love is a disappointing truth. But there are ways I can imagine this.

I can picture a naked motel room, a bed with no sheets, a window with no curtain. A man, perhaps married, who was out with the boys, drunk, and flattered by my young mother who laughed at his jokes and gently rubbed her hand up his thigh. Inside this room there are shadows and closed eyes and lustful fingers tracing skin in the dark.

I can imagine my mother on the subway the next morning, hair smelling of smoke and running her tongue over thick teeth. Hiding her stiletto heels under the seat while women in business suits flap the
Globe and Mail
newspapers around her. A number written on the back of a receipt in her purse, though she can’t make out if that’s a
t
or an
f
in his last name. But it doesn’t matter, ‘cause it’s not his real name anyway.

Or I can imagine it like this. I can imagine a man with a foreign accent and a polished stone hanging from black leather around his neck. A stone that means strength or spirit, that he found himself, say, at the bottom of the ocean or on a mountainside. A man who spoke of karma and coincidence and of travels to India in a way that made her want to leave her life. A man who was to get on a plane the next day so they booked a room at an expensive hotel, overlooking a scene, say, a castle or a tropical river. And they spent hours by the window, drinking wine and playing inside this tiny fold of time. And of course, there were words that were spoken, like
I’ll see you again,
but we all know something like that can’t happen twice.

I walk the long way along the Donway to meet my best friend, Carla, on the way to school. School is at Don Mills Collegiate, just across the street from our apartment building. When I can drag myself out of bed, I go, but it’s only on the important days, like when we have tests and assignments, that I make sure I’m in class. Still, I do all the homework and I always get C’s, except in English, which I fail each year because I can’t spell and my words don’t come out right on the page.

We live in what Elsie calls “a good neighbourhood.” There’s a plaque somewhere in Don Mills saying it’s North America’s first planned suburb, which was apparently brilliant urban planning at the time. I know this because we had to do a project on it in grade eight geography last year. My apartment building is off The Donway, a big paved moat surrounding all life’s necessities: a shopping mall, post office, medical offices, movie theatre, bingo hall, skating rink, and bowling alley. Only they tore down all the good stuff, like the movie theatre and bowling alley, years ago.
And then Eaton’s closed and Club Monaco moved to the upscale Fairview Mall. And now senior citizens push their walkers by store windows, looking for deals in Bulk Barn and Payless Shoes. And it’s like living in the stomach of someone’s decaying suburban dream.