Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (30 page)

There wasn’t much of a crowd at the old Gag ’n’ Spew. I pushed open the door, felt that strange delayed reaction that comes
with doing everything left-handed. My mother followed.

The Gag ’n’ Spew was really The Garden View, an elderly Chinese restaurant in downtown Halifax. It was all red – fuzzy red
patterned wallpaper, red vinyl booths, red carpeted floors faded pink with time. If you sat at the back away from the windows
it was like hanging out in somebody’s mouth. When I was a kid, I’d been enchanted with the place. Probably why I’d agreed
to come here with my mother, to celebrate eighteen years of me.

I was moving slowly and stiffly, everything bruised and pressing inwards, my right eye half-closed and my right arm hanging
in a blunt plaster sock that knocked painfully against my chest. We slid into a booth that gave us a view of the place. Mom’s
head bobbed down every thirty seconds to look at her watch. Maybe she’d ordered
me a singing telegram and was waiting for it to arrive. I decided I hated birthdays.

But I suppose we’d accomplished everything we’d set out to do. I had a place to live in the city. My new home was a bachelor
apartment with fire damage, a stinky little box with black-streaked walls and a kitchenette shoved into a corner. It wasn’t
fit for anybody to live in now, the landlady had told us, but we could have it if we agreed to paint the place ourselves.
Mom had got all excited at the prospect of making my home look less like a jail cell, so the next stop on our itinerary had
been Colour My World, where she pored over handfuls of sample strips, trying to assemble the perfect combinations that would
open up my awful little room. I picked up a vat of blue that had been slashed to half price and told her we were getting that.

‘Are you sure, dear?’ She was still clutching her rows of coloured squares: fern green and birch white, buttercup yellow.
‘It looks like the bottom of a swimming pool, doesn’t it?’

‘I love it,’ I said, in the same dull tone I’d used to tell her I loved the apartment. Then it was time for this birthday
dinner.

A waitress bustled up to our table. She was only a few years older than me, with frizzy blonde hair in French braids and feverish
slashes of red on her cheeks. I ordered the Double Happiness Combo without even thinking. Then I realised it was mostly stuff
my mother didn’t like. I apologised and she said she didn’t care.

‘It’s only food. This is your birthday.’

‘Let’s pretend it isn’t.’

She ignored this, tried to fill the table with bright chatter. Telling me and anyone within hearing distance that her little
baby was all grown up and legal voting age now, and wasn’t it wonderful? My present from her, she announced, was going to
be a futon. From IKEA. She lingered on
the vowels of these foreign words like they were something miraculous. The waitress sailed by with the first courses and then
the table was crowded with chrome dishes leaking steam. My mother glanced at her watch again.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Is it the parking meter? Why do you keep—?’

‘It’s seven fifteen.’

‘So?’

She was sitting up with her hands folded. ‘You said to give you twelve hours. And then you’d tell me everything.’

Oh, Mom
. So careful to keep to our little agreement. I wanted to cry. Instead I scooped a soggy heap of bean sprouts onto my plate
and tried to work out what I was going to say next.

‘I was drunk. Okay? Really drunk. I went to that party I told you about, and I was walking home and I went off the edge of
the drop-off. Fell in the river.’

‘You were … you were drunk and you fell in the river.’ She was gripping her fork tightly. ‘How did you get … out of the river?’

‘Mark.’

‘Thank God for that boy.’ Then she looked at me, considering. ‘So wait a minute, what about your arm?’

‘A rock. Hit it on the way down.’

‘How did you break your nose?’

‘That was … that was Mark too. We …’ I half-heartedly mimed a punch.

‘He
hit
you?’ My mother reached for her cigarettes. ‘Why, honey? Why on earth—?’

I stared down at the dishes with their clattering lids and thumbprint smears.

‘Well. He hit me because … I mean, he thought—’

My throat jammed. I’d gone clammy and nauseated and my skin under the cast was itching. Mom hunched forward like she wanted
to grab my shoulders and shake the words out.

I sat up taller – careful that I was making eye contact. Here we go.

‘He thought I was a homo. That I wanted to kiss him. Put the moves on him. And stuff.’

She froze with a cigarette peeping out of its red cardboard pack. ‘Good Lord. Was it acid? Were you guys on acid? I mean,
where would he get that idea?’

‘Because it’s true?’

I’d wanted my voice to come out strong and clear. It had dropped to a phlegmy little croak instead.

She just stared at me.

‘It’s true, Mom.’

I tore a long strip off my paper placemat. My hand was trembling. Our waitress paced past, counting tables, watching the door.
I ducked my head so she wouldn’t think I was signalling her.

‘So,’ my mother said. ‘So, you’re telling me …’

‘I’m …’

‘Gay. You’re gay.’

Mom lit the cigarette she’d been clutching for the past few minutes. I hadn’t had one since the party and it was driving me
nuts. She exhaled smoke in a steam blast at a mural of cascading Chinese mountain streams.

‘Is this one of those times you say something shocking and it’s like, “Ha, ha, Mom, you believed me”?’

‘No. I’m serious.’ My head was still lowered. I was running my good hand through my hair and pulling at it. My mother stubbed
out the cigarette in a tiny tin ashtray. I thought things might go back to normal
if I ate something, but I couldn’t make myself move. Above us, the restaurant’s sound system struggled into life. Janet Jackson
was telling us to wait a while, before it was too late, before we went too far. They used to play Chinese music in here when
I was a kid.

‘Oh, God,’ my mother said, in a whimper of a voice. ‘I can’t do this.’

Then she was pulling herself to her feet.

‘Mom?’

She picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder. Her coat was gathered in the crook of her arm.

I lunged across the table, grabbed at her wrist.

‘No. Please.’ I felt my fingers closing around her. Her bones, the links of her bracelet watch. ‘Mom, you can’t.’

‘Look, I need to be alone. Just for a minute.’ She tried to shake herself free. I wasn’t letting go.

Alone. I pictured myself in this long, red funeral parlour of a restaurant – a guy on his own in a plastic booth surrounded
by food. Watching the clock, staring at the door, poking at tortured masses of chicken in a Day-Glo orange sauce. Wondering
if she was ever coming back.

Mom surged out of the booth and I felt myself getting hauled along after her, off balance with this one heavy plaster arm.

‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘I just need some air!’

‘What are you talking about? There’s air in here.’

‘I have to think.’

‘No, you don’t. Please. Please don’t leave.’

My mother tried to wrench herself away again. I held on. It must have looked like we were breaking up. Our waitress came sauntering
up to the table with her notepad ready, and I turned and said the first thing that came into my head.

‘Listen, I just told her I’m gay. Can you give us a minute?’

‘Okay, no problem. Take your time.’ The girl twirled on her heel and I watched her bobbing off to another table, as if this
kind of thing happened to her every day.

Mom looked around warily. It was like she was only just becoming aware of the other people in the restaurant. She massaged
her wrist, slowly lowered herself into the booth again and gazed at the mural on the wall. I picked up a brown blistered egg
roll and took a bite out of it.

‘Didn’t think you’d get so mad.’

‘I’m not mad. It’s just … Stephen, are you certain about this? Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘God.’

She looked at me, so long and so compassionately that I felt like opening my mouth to show her the wad of chewed-up food on
my tongue.

‘I knew I’d damaged you in some way,’ she said.

‘Mom, come off it.’ I was talking through bites of egg roll. ‘You didn’t have anything to do with this. Unless you were showing
me movies in my sleep or something.’ I shook my head. ‘And I’m not damaged.’

‘But Stephen, what if you get AIDS?’ Her face was tense and horrified. ‘Oh, honey, to think of you lying all alone in some
hospital ward, everybody afraid to touch you—’

‘Could we not talk about that?’

Mom seemed to bite down on whatever she was going to say next. I could see a parade of expressions twitching across her face.
Probably imagining my funeral. I wanted to ask her who did the eulogy and whether Stanley showed up.

Instead I turned my attention back to the sad little clumps of food
in front of me: slimy vegetables in watery brown, grains of rice that seemed to want to dribble off everywhere. Mom wasn’t
eating. All she did was stare down into her lap, pressing her lips together.

‘This isn’t the life I wanted for you.’ My mother’s voice was low and soft. ‘You were supposed to get married. Start a family.
Be surrounded by people who love you. A father to your children. I wanted you to have a real home.’ Her eyes were welling.
‘You’re so lonely, sweetheart. You’ve always been lonely. It hurts me to see it.’

My fork slipped away from me with a clatter. I closed my eyes. Was that what I wanted too? There had to be a reason I was
feeling this heavy and sad.

It was painful, moving all this stuff around in my throat. After a while I sensed she was looking at me again.

‘No. Stephen, listen to me. I shouldn’t have said that. You already have a family. You always will. Always. No matter what.’

‘I know.’

But something was itching at the back of my mind. That line of hers. It reminded me of the stuff she used to come out with
when I was thirteen or so. We’d be watching TV and there’d be a heroin fiend on some cop show, and she’d turn to me and say,
‘You know I’d still love you if you got addicted to drugs, right? You wouldn’t have to hide it from me. I’ll love you no matter
what.’

And I’d answer with something really disgusting, like, ‘Yeah? So you’d love me if my head was made of solidified vomit?’

‘Would you stop it!’

But this wasn’t being addicted to drugs. Or having a head made of solid barf, or putting dead people in her bed, or any of
those scenes I used to invent to shut her up whenever she’d get all sloppy-devoted on me. This was not a ‘no matter what’.

I leaned back in the booth. When I spoke, my voice sounded like Stanley’s.

‘No matter what. Well, aren’t you the heroine, Maryna. Continuing to love me even though I’m a total pervert. Sorry I don’t
have a medal for you.’

‘That’s not what I meant at all!’

‘There’s nothing wrong with me, Mom.’

‘I know that! I just .…’ Her face crumpled, eyes twisted shut. She dropped her head and her shoulders started to quiver.

I’d made my mother cry. Again.

‘Aw, Mom. Mom, I’m sorry.’

I tried to take her hand, but she pulled away from me, shrank into a corner of the booth and turned her face to the wall.
I watched her. Pressure was building behind my eyes and I couldn’t breathe right. The expression on Mark’s face as he kicked
me. Leaving my home to go live in a smelly little box. My mother, all alone in that empty house, that empty town. Mom weeping
in the booth in front of me. Because of the rotten things I’d said.

My arm was folded on the table and my head was on my arm. I was so tired, so sick of trying to hold myself upright.

After a minute, I felt her patting my hair. Then my mother got up and slid into my side of the booth, wrapped me in her arms.
She was crushing my cast against my cracked ribs, but I didn’t say anything. My nose was pressed into her neck. I reached
my left arm around her shoulders. We both held on tight, telling each other how sorry we were, over and over.

The older waitress trundled over to our table, a solid, motherly woman who wore little wire frame glasses like an apple doll.
She quietly placed a jumbo box of Kleenex on the lid of a chrome dish in front of us.

‘Now!’ she said. ‘Thought you two might want these. Anything else? Drinks? Coffee? Dessert?’

‘Double whiskey,’ my mother said dully. ‘Stephen?’

‘Just so you know, I can’t serve him.’

My mother let go of me, pulled herself up to her full sitting height. ‘And I’d like to know why not!’

‘Mom, she’s talking about alcohol. I’m eighteen. You were telling everybody, remember?’ I was still leaning against her shoulder.

‘Oh, right. Right. Sorry.’

I glanced at the menu, asked the waitress if they had cherry-vanilla. She told me she’d see what she could do.

‘So. One ice-cream and one double whiskey.’

‘Two straws,’ my mother muttered under her breath. She ripped a Kleenex from the box in front of us and blew her nose.