Belinda's Rings (5 page)

You're sure it wasn't an airplane? I asked when she told us the next morning.

Have you ever seen a triangular airplane? she said, pointing her finger at me. And besides, no airplanes I've ever heard of can move like that, whush, whush. Mum made her finger do a zigzag motion in the air.

Later that evening Mum set herself up at the kitchen table with an old notepad and a pencil. The rest of us were just sitting in front of the TV, except Squid who'd been put to bed. It was weird 'cause we were watching
Star Search,
Mum's favourite show of all time. Since our kitchen is attached to the living room she could have seen the TV from where she was sitting, but she just sat there at the kitchen table with her back turned. Writing away. I could see her elbow jostling up and down.

At the commercial break I came up behind her and said, You know your most beloved Ed McMahon is on?

Mum put her arm over her notepad. Her arm had little goosebumps all over it. Yes, she said, I'm busy.

Whatcha doin,' I said, drawing something?

I'm just thinking, trying to remember, Mum said. She shrugged and sighed at the same time, took her arm off the notebook so I could see.

She'd drawn a triangle with big dots on each corner and light rays coming off the dots like spokes. It was obvious that she'd scribbled little circles over and over again with her pencil to make the dots, because they were all shiny and nearly black, and they'd made indents in the paper. She'd also pressed really hard on the lines connecting the dots, and those lines weren't even straight, wiggled in the middle. You could tell that her picture was probably going to show up as far as five pages down, an etching in the paper that would come out white if you coloured over it.

I laughed at that picture. Didn't say anything, just laughed. It looked like a kid had drawn it. I couldn't help it. And anyway, Mum laughed too. Then we were laughing together and it was like our little joke, 'cause Jess and Wiley hadn't been paying attention. It felt okay then. Mum put her pencil down and turned off the light and we sat down on the couch together for the rest of the show. Now that I think about it, she'd been really quiet after that. I don't think she even made any predictions about who was going to win, how many stars this guy or that girl was going to get.

Jess actually cried when Mum's taxi pulled out of the driveway. It was weird to see Mum in a taxi, especially since the van was parked right next to it and Wiley could've driven her to the airport. But he was inside by then, hadn't bothered to come out onto the driveway in bare feet like me and Jess and Squid. He could've been crying too, who knows.

But Jess cries all the time. It drives me nuts. She cried in
The Little Mermaid
when King Triton hugs Ariel and Ariel says, I love you Daddy. Seriously. So when she started to cry while we watched Mum's taxi drive down the street and turn the corner, I just tried to ignore it.

Lookit your feet, Squid, I told him, and when he did I tickled the back of his neck with a bird feather I'd found in the grass. He giggled, swatted the feather away and it floated out of my hand. I caught it and stuck it in his hair.

Robin Hood, I said, Prince of Squids.

Squid laughed again, his hands trying to find the feather.

Jess glared at me, wiping her hand across her runny nose. Don't you even care? she said. Aren't you sad that Mummy just left us here?

I shrugged. Why? I said. It's not like we're gonna starve or something. We've got enough food in the house for a nuclear winter.

You think
food
is the problem? Jess snatched the feather out of Squid's hair, tried to throw it on the ground. But it just floated away, skimmed down the driveway in the wind.

We're only kids, she said, Mummy can't leave us with this kind of responsibility. That's another thing about Jess. She likes to feel sorry for herself. I think it makes her life less boring.

You're seventeen, I told her. Remember?

God, Grace. Don't you get it? Jess leaned in close to me so Squid couldn't hear. Mummy left to get away, she said. From us.

Squid squished his way between us, What did Mummy say?

Mum-my leeeft to get the ay-lee-ens! I sang really loud, to the tune of “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.” Hal-le-loooooooo-ya! I took Squid's hands and started ring-around-the-rosie-ing.

Jess didn't tell me I was being a total jerk, like I expected. Maybe she was just glad that Squid forgot what he was asking.

III

BELINDA TRUSTED CROP CIRCLES
for their shape. A circle seemed natural, an instinct. She had a hard time believing that the wheel took thousands of years to imagine. After the in-flight movie, with Bartleby dozing next to her, Belinda was flipping through the complimentary travel magazine from her seat pocket and found an article on ancient Mesopotamia. It explained that the very first wheels were used to make pottery. Travelling long distances simply didn't occur to early humans; for the sake of survival, they needed to stay close to their families. They shared food, huddled together for warmth, invented language and art. A clay pot was more valuable than a chariot.

Belinda had spent over two years researching crop circles and related phenomena, from their earliest recorded history to the present day. The early crop circles were simple. Single shapes, unadorned, drawn with immaculate symmetry. Each circle seemed to mark the landscape like a map, as if to signal a treasure buried in the ground beneath. But some of the more recent crop formations had begun resembling objects — a key, a flower, a strand of DNA — and these, Belinda knew, were the circlemakers' attempts to appeal to human aesthetic sensibilities. Only humans would be naïve enough to insist that a key could carry universal symbolic significance. The fanatics called them ‘pictograms,' dissected their angles to reveal the Golden Triangle or a set of cosmological coordinates that could be read like a treasure map. Geometry was Belinda's most hated subject in grade school. She could never, would never believe in reducing relationships to mathematical patterns. A circle was a circle, no beginning and no end. She needed to believe that life was unmappable.

Belinda had left her mother's home when she was seventeen, and she'd never looked back. Her first attempt to cook for herself involved pouring frozen peas directly into a saucepan, no water. She could remember standing there, watching little pools forming around each individual pea, dismissing her feeling that the slight hissing sound of ice against heat wasn't quite right. She watched until the peas had deflated and turned a sickly green because she hadn't known what else to do. Since then, she'd learned everything she knew about caring for herself the hard way, and yet she never felt any desire to return to her mother's. She'd long ago lost any desire to even think about her mother.

Now her own eldest daughter was seventeen and a baking aficionado. Self-taught. Jessica could bake a moist and fluffy pineapple upside-down cake and a perfectly formed crème brûlée, but would only shuffle her feet at the mention of culinary lessons or a part-time job at a restaurant. Having a good, responsible mother had its drawbacks, too. Belinda knew she was a good mother, despite what her conscience told her.

When the girls were small, passing strangers would assume they were adopted from Vietnam. They gave the girls candy, twinkled their eyes at Belinda's benevolence. Once, a one-eyed man gave Jessica and Grace five dollars each. They had been walking to the food court in the mall to get Orange Juliuses, which Grace always expected as a reward for behaving. The man was limping in their direction. He was limping with such strain that Belinda wondered what he could be doing out of bed and walking around the mall by himself. As he came toward them she saw that he had a glass eye, and considered that perhaps he couldn't see. She steered the girls around him but he lifted his hand, and Belinda understood this as a plea to stop.

The man said nothing, but carefully sifted through each of his coat pockets as if he were looking for a grain of sand. She noticed the veteran ribbon patched to his breast pocket and immediately felt that anything she could think to say would be disrespectful. He smiled when he'd found what he wanted. Then he pressed a small roll of paper into Jessica's hand and another into Grace's. He bowed his head to Belinda and hobbled away.

If she'd known at first that what he'd given them was money, she might have protested, insisted the girls were hers and didn't need the charity. She couldn't decide why he had even thought it necessary to give them money at all — to buy treats? To send to their Vietnamese relatives? To ease the burden on Belinda? Whatever his intent, the girls were dazzled and couldn't care less. And Belinda had felt good about the way the man had bowed to her, tilting his glass eye down to her feet.

Years later she got a job in that mall. She started out at Talbots selling blouses and pantsuits to old ladies. She was employee of the month for four months straight. She had no idea what she'd done to deserve this title; she'd shown up for work on time and stayed awake through her shift, which she supposed was all they expected from her. Getting the job at Merle Norman was a milestone. Wiley had taken her to a French restaurant for dinner on the day she received the job offer. She found it mildly irritating when the waiter whisked the napkin from her wine glass and laid it like a dead snake across her lap, but the food was quite good. She boasted to Wiley that employees at Merle Norman got benefits and free sample kits of the latest skin creams and newest eyeshadow colours. Wiley had never had a job with benefits. She did most of the talking and ate her meager dish slowly while he nodded and stole glances at his empty plate. He found a mint in his wallet and tore the wrapper into tiny little pieces that he collected in his unused spoon.

The managers, she explained, Betty and Abby, told her during the interview that they always had to remind the younger girls to come to work looking fresh and clean. Mist-kissed, they called it. That was their way of telling the girls not to wear too much makeup.

Those girls are so young, she'd told him. They leave the house looking like circus clowns.

Wiley said he was sure she'd be able to teach them a thing or two. No one was more naturally beautiful than her, he insisted.

Belinda disagreed and overlooked his compliment. She hated compliments like that — tawdry lines that could be fed to anyone. She didn't think she could teach them anything, she said, because they didn't know how to see themselves yet. And that would just take time.

Belinda's first day on the job, Abby pulled her aside just before her lunch break. Abby said she wasn't sure if they'd gone over this in the orientation, but at Merle Norman they liked to portray a certain image. As she spoke she examined Belinda's face as though it were covered in blemishes. It's a look we call
mist-kissed,
Abby said, spreading her fingers like fireworks. She asked Belinda to sit in the salon chair at the back of the store so she could demonstrate exactly what she meant. Abby gave her a little cotton ball soaked with blue-green chemical and Belinda had to remove the makeup she'd applied over her crow's feet and her pale lips and her stubby eyelashes that morning. Her colour fell away in beige smears. She'd had to ask for five more cotton balls to uncover her skin, and Abby stood at her side the whole time, watching Belinda saturate each ball, her lips pursed in a reproachful moue.

When Abby had finished dusting her face with powder and blush, sweeping her eyelids bronze, daubing her lips a pale rose, and brushing on mascara, Belinda looked in the mirror and couldn't see any makeup. Her cheeks were ghost-white, her eyes feathered and dim. Her wrinkles stood out like scratches on a plate. Abby insisted Belinda keep the makeup so she could try it out at home. Belinda smiled, but said nothing. She wanted to be grateful, but it felt like an imposition. She'd been using makeup on her face for years, and only she understood the broad curve of her jaw, knew the grey vein that swam beneath the skin under her right eye and the way her lips looked stretched and thin without dark lipstick. Only she could have her every imperfection committed to memory.

For the next two weeks, Abby kept asking Belinda how the new makeup was working out for her.

Fine thanks, Belinda would reply, and then retouch her lipstick from a cranberry tube. The light pink lipstick that Abby had given her, along with the other muted makeup, sat on Belinda's vanity collecting dust from the day of the makeover. Eventually Abby stopped asking, but her face showed that she knew.

Belinda called home from a payphone as soon as she landed at Heathrow. It was midnight London time, 5:00 pm Calgary time. Grace was reticent, as usual. When Belinda asked her what she was doing, she said she didn't know.

You don't know, Belinda repeated. And what does that look like, exactly?

I dunno, Grace said. Doing nothing, I guess.

Belinda wasn't in the mood to act put-out. That's great, honey, she said. Sounds like you're getting some good relaxation time. She could hear the murmur of Wiley's voice in the background.