As She Grows (21 page)

“I’m leaving for Montreal tomorrow,” Mark announces one night while we’re just sitting on his couch having a smoke. “I’m going for a long time,” he adds, and there is a sense of permanence to his words.

“Cool,” I say, like it’s nothing, like he’s just told me he’ll pick up some milk at the store. He leans over and gives me this little dry kiss, like he’s saying goodbye, and I reflexively get up to leave.

“So, I’ll call you when I get there,” he says.

“Ya, okay.” I feel stupid just standing there not knowing what to do, so I turn and leave. I stand a few moments in the hallway outside the closed door, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. And I know my body should break. I should be crying and blubbering, but it’s as if I’m completely dry inside. Instead, I walk down the dingy hallway feeling this little satisfactory twinge of
I knew it
. As if in some weird way I am comforted knowing how things and people will always fail me. And that’s when I realize I was waiting for Mark to leave me all along.

As the distance between me and Mark’s apartment grows, it’s as if I start to melt, from a block of ice to raging water. An ugly, taunting voice in my head hurls unanswerable questions at me. How can I get a child to love me when her own father can’t? How can I raise a kid all by myself? What guy will ever want to be with a sixteen-year-old mother? I will be alone forever. I’m a fucked-up teenager. A horny little girl, too stupid to use a condom. It was
dumb to have thought this could have been any different, for believing even for one second that this could work.

“You’re such an idiot,” I scold myself, digging my nails deep into my palms. “You stupid little fucked-up idiot.” I breathe heavily through my nose like a bull. Like some panting, wild animal. My jaw clenches. Blood blasts through me, shaking my body. It starts to rain, but I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck about anything. I kick the mailbox. I kick the parked car. And I yell, just yell, because I need to let it out. Startled heads turn to me, terrified of this crazed lunatic storming down the street. A circle of space opens around me and I am unstoppable. I feel drunk. I dart in front of cars that screech their brakes, drivers blasting their horns. I give them the finger. Wishing they hadn’t stopped. Wishing that man would just stop swearing, open his car door, come over, and bash my head in.

I take the subway and then the bus to Don Mills. As I get closer to my old area, I’m unable to remain still. I start pacing the back of the bus, my legs shaking. I tightly grip a pole, imagining it to be Elsie’s skinny, cold neck. Time doesn’t pass fast enough and despite the rain I get off the bus two stops early so I can run the rest of the way to Elsie’s work.

As soon as I enter the grocery store, my eyes lock on Elsie. She is at the far end of the store, behind her register, in her wine-and-beige polyester uniform, pushing groceries along a conveyer belt. I storm up to her, my purpose clear. I want to throw it in her face. I want to throw my whole life in her face. When she approaches, she opens her mouth to speak, but I hurl my words down her throat.

“Thanks for ruining my life,” I yell. “Thanks for fucking ruining my life!”

“What the hell’s got up yer ass?” Elsie asks, annoyed, continuing to check out the customer’s groceries. “My granddaughter,”
she explains to a faceless customer, rolling her eyes. I don’t lose my glare.

“I’m pregnant. You satisfied?” A smile breaks over Elsie’s face and she shakes her head, like it’s all a game. “Excuse me,” she says politely to the customer in front of her and yells to the woman at the next cash to take over. Then she storms past me and out toward the exit. I trail at her heels, pursuing my kill.

We stand outside the Dominion, the automatic doors tirelessly opening and snapping shut as I pace back and forth.

“Now I get it. You’re going to blame me for getting yourself knocked up, is that it?” Elsie pulls a cigarette pack out from her pocket and lights it.

“No. I blame you for everything before that. ‘Cause being pregnant may be the only thing I ever did right.” Even though it wasn’t true, I had to say it. Elsie leans one arm up against the phone booth and starts laughing to herself, staring off into space. She sucks hard on her cigarette, cheeks caving in like deflating balloons. I want to hurt her. I want her to pay for everything. I pace frantically up and down, thinking of Mark and the baby and Mitch and the group home.“Ugggh . . . I could kill you right now,” I yell, punching the wall.

“You need to relax!” Elsie orders, looking over my head, to see if there’s anyone watching.

I ignore her command and just get louder and louder. “I wish my mother never died. I wish she didn’t leave me with an alcoholic crazy fucked-up woman. You’re crazy. Crazy! You
made
me crazy, see?” I push up my sleeve, showing her the red marks on my arm.

She stares at my skin, her mouth open and horrified. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s how much I hate you!” I move out of the way of a woman pushing her cart, her head down, aware that she’s intruding on
something. “You probably made her drown! She probably jumped in! To get some peace from you!”

“What?” Elsie twitches her head as if she were trying to shake the words out of her ears. “
What?
Jesus Christ, what is going on in that stupid little head of yours?”

“If my mom were alive, I wouldn’t be like this, you . . .” I spit out every possible swear word I know at her.

When I’m done I stand there, fixated on her. Her face is red, nostrils flared. I’ve never seen her so angry. She leans into me, her face so close I can smell her cigarette breath. “Ooh,” she threatens, “you don’t know how wrong you are.” And then the truth oozes out of her like pus from a squeezed scab. “Your mother never drowned,” she says. “She left you with me when you were a baby and then she died three years later. She was eighteen. Overdosed. Your so-called mother, who you think is your saving angel, was a junkie who was a waste of a life. How’s that for truth? Your mother was a screwed-up pregnant fifteen-year-old girl. Sound familiar?”

And so it happens like that. The truth of my life, told to me outside a grocery store, among the clattering of carts, the price checks, the automatic glass doors opening and shutting like snapping jaws.

For a few seconds I stand there, unable to move. The rain pounds on the metal awning above our heads. I feel as if I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. My soul knocked out of me. It’s as if everything that I thought was real isn’t. I reach out to touch the wall, to see if it’s truly there. Finally, I remember to breathe. Without saying anything, I walk past Elsie, across the road, and down the street. My legs just keep going like that, one after the other. My mind a tight fist of nothing and everything all at once.

I walk aimlessly in the rain, my jeans wet and heavy. I look for a place to stand, because there’s something about absolute despair that requires being still in small spaces. I think of the places normal people go to cry: in stairwells, bathroom cubicles, inside their cars. Finally, I find an empty bus-stop shelter, pace around inside the glass perimeter, opening and shutting my mouth, gasping for air. I look up and see my reflection and think of Freddy in his fishbowl, only the water’s on the outside.

Then I get this flash. This memory pops in my head, from out of the blue. I see this stupid clown’s face, from some party I went to as a kid. I’m in a backyard with balloons and plastic tablecloths and this clown keeps pulling a quarter out from behind my ear. I remember him well because I made him repeat it over and over; each time thinking,
I’m watching for it;
each time angry to see his painted fingers twiddle a shiny coin.

Then it’s like my mind jumps to this realization that Elsie and my mother at one point probably thought the same way I do. That no one really thinks they’re going to turn out like this. That it’s not like one day you stop fighting and resign yourself to what life keeps pushing you into. No, it’s not that obvious. It’s as if you keep fighting. Your fists are up and going crazy, but somehow you’ve missed the battle entirely, as if you mixed up the dates or room number. And then one day, probably years later, you pause for just a split second, fists hanging in the air. And you stand there, like I am right now, recognizing yourself for the first time, and wonder how it was you become a failure when you were watching for it so hard.

And then what do you do?

“How long have you been waiting?” an old lady with a clear plastic kerchief on her head asks me. She frantically shakes her umbrella, huffing and sighing like she’s just come out of a tornado.

“I don’t know,” I say blankly and just stand there for a bit. Then the rain subsides and I figure I should go to the group home and put my wet clothes in the dryer.

There are truths I can no longer create. The mother’s arms I felt all these years, the ones that used to wrap around me at night and comfort me, are no longer there. Instead, the mother’s arms I feel now are bony and weak and resentful.

I find my small space. In the cupboard under the stairs in the house, behind the mops and brooms and broken vacuum cleaner. I squat on the sticky floor, my back up against rotting wood, the faint smell of lemon cleaner and oil. Heavy soles mount and descend hardwood stairs above my head.

My hand is resolute in its silent act. The safety pin firmly clenched between fingers. Lines surface from the depth of me, angular shapes connected by sharp corners travelling up my arm. I lose myself in the act of breaking skin, until my hand releases the wire and it falls to the floor and I can think clearly once more. I hold my arm up to the thin slant of hallway light slicing the darkness. I am surprised and pleased with what I see. I spit on my arm to wipe away the remaining blood, the red swell of letters from wrist to elbow:
M-O-T-H-E-R
.

The next day I appear at Elsie’s kitchen doorway. She is sitting facing the door, as if she were waiting for me. There are cigarette packages and coffee mugs scattered out on the table before her. It looks like she’s been there all night.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I ask from the doorway, not sure if I will enter. We are strangely calm. This is uncertain ground for both of us.

“I was going to tell you, when you were older, when you finished growing up. I had you since you were a baby. Your mom couldn’t keep you. You were young, little, only about two when you started calling me Mommy. I couldn’t stand that. I needed you to understand
then
that I wasn’t your mother.” I come into the room and sit down at the table opposite her. “You were just a baby. You wouldn’t have understood.” She continues, her eyes pleading for understanding and kindness, but my face is blank. There is no expression for an emotion unrecognized by the body. “It was too complicated, too much explanation, so I said your mom was dead. That she drowned. And then later, she did die, only we waited a few more years to scatter her ashes. It was easier that way. For a while anyway. Till now.”

I stare down at the table. In front of me is a ratty old placemat, one we’ve had for years. I start twisting and pulling at the fraying edges. “I dream about it, you know,” I say. “I dream these strange dreams. Like when we went to scatter her ashes at that river. And that woman we saw, in that housing place, that was her, wasn’t it? That was my mother. I thought they were just mixed-up dreams. You should have told me.”

“How do you tell a kid that her own mother wants nothing to do with her? That she’s a doped-up addict who doesn’t give a shit about anything?” Elsie stares directly at me, waiting for an answer, for release.

“I don’t know.” I begin to pull out the tiny gold threads from the placemat and gather them in my hand. “You just do.”

The silence is long. Finally, Elsie sighs deeply and puts her hands on the table and pushes herself up, as if that was the end.

“But that’s not even the part that upsets me most,” I say, my words breaking her calm.

“What’s that?”

“That isn’t the part I’m mad about.”

“What?” she asks cautiously.

“She was fifteen. My mother was fifteen years old when she had me.” My eyes rise to meet hers.

“Yes.”

Elsie sits back down and reaches for her pack of Marlboros, lights a cigarette with shaky, brittle hands. She inhales deeply. Her body stiffens, then relaxes, the whites of her eyes fluttering somewhat. “It would have changed your life if you knew,” she says in a defensive tone, flicking her cigarette into the ashtray.