Faerie (2 page)

I had been asleep for hours. In the dim room, my irises slowly opened up to take in the strange, murky yellow walls and shaded windows that overlooked the inner courtyard. Two cans of Ensure, 500 calories, and a plastic cup sat on my bedside table. I turned away.

My eyes landed on the tray table where a box wrapped in glittering baby-blue paper lay. I propped myself onto my elbows and squinted to put it into focus. It was my birthday gift from Dad.

My heart started to race. I threw off the blanket, placed my feet on the cold floor, and shuffled over to the tray table, arms outstretched, fingers reaching for the treasure. I held the package and felt its weight in my hungry hands. Then I slowly peeled the paper from the box and pried it open. Inside sat the handsome shiny body of a new camera. A real professional camera.

With a jerk, I raised it to my face, and pointed it out the window. Twisting my body from side to side, I saw only sooty darkness and the beams of light from rectangular windows across the courtyard. Patients wandered in and out of my view like walking ghosts. A milky-haired man planted himself at his window and
stood there. He looked straight at me. Did he feel my camera on him? Did he know we had a bond because of this 50mm lens? I brought the camera down from my face and felt again its weight in the palm of my hand. The old man was no longer in the window. The window was gone. All lights were out.

Part Two:

Nymph

03
. What Big Teeth You Have

My first ache for a sylphlike silhouette began in kindergarten, with Susan. Sweet, svelte Susan.

Mother dragged her reluctant six-year-old from her treasured second-hand Barbie doll house to St. Elizabeth Catholic school. There her stubborn daughter clung to her mother's pants and yelped out the names of imaginary guardian faeries who might rescue her from a life sentence of formal education. It was my first miserable day at school.

Horribly embarrassed, Mother chuckled and explained to the kindergarten teacher, Ms Rosemary, that I was cranky because I had not slept much the night before. I looked up at Ms Rosemary. She wore a turtleneck sweater that hugged her torso and was tucked neatly into her pencil-thin skirt, which carefully covered her kneecaps and exposed pale calves. With a crooked smile, she stood looking at me over her sharp nose. “Well, what a lovely, little … thing.”

Ms Rosemary plucked me from Mother's thighs and planted me in the centre of the room, where I froze in silence as all eyes fell upon me. Mother took this opportunity to slip out.

I looked around at the blue-eyed, fair-haired children and realized that I was the only coloured kid in the room. A freckled boy with a thick body marched over, stood before me, and stared. I jerked my head back as he did a once-over and then pressed his
hand on my forearm, rubbing it as if he were removing a stain.

“She's not dirty, she's just chocolate!” he yelled. “Yummy, I love chocolate!” I pulled my arm away just as his teeth were about to chomp into my flesh.

Girls shoved him away and gathered around me, fussing and giggling. Then the other boys joined them and they all flitted around me, but soon got distracted playing and crying, making friends and enemies, being girls and boys, naughty and nice.

It quickly became apparent to me that some children were more special than others. Like Susan, who was
not
made of chocolate. She was made of pure, charming cream. She had a luminous porcelain complexion, fine bones, and bird-like features. I had seen this girl in my fairy tale books. She and I were two of a kind, except that her feline beauty and slender figure seemed to reflect upon me like a ghastly shadow. Her light made me dark, darker than cocoa, blacker than midnight. I longed for her reflection to be mine and for my limbs to be lean like hers.

One afternoon, I decided to veer away from Susan's shadow and cast my own light. My singular feature, I knew, was not my skin or bones, but my thick, long dark hair. No other child in my class had hair as long, thick, and glossy as mine, and some of the girls had complimented me on it. Each morning, Mother braided it into two taut and sturdy ropes, but I longed to let my tresses loose, just as I had with the shiny and indestructible synthetic hair of my lovely blonde dolls.

While Ms Rosemary read to us from
Little Red Riding Hood
, my nimble fingers released the pinching rubber band, and I began to loosen my hair from the tip of the braid to the nape of
my neck. I loved the feel of my hair skittering through my little fingers while Little Red Riding Hood went on her way through the forest. It was a strange and erotic sensation I had no language for, but it seemed as inevitable and as natural as my own breath. As Little Red Riding Hood met her grandma, my hair water-falled down over my shoulders and plump, soft body. There I gleamed, alone in an imaginary spotlight.

“'Oh my, what big teeth you have, Grandma,' said Little Red Riding Hood,” Ms Rosemary read.

“Oh look, Ms Rosemary! She's loosed up her hair!” chirped a little classmate.

Ms Rosemary looked sternly at me. “Lila! What are you doing? Look what you've done to your hair!” she chided.

The hungry wolf gobbled up Little Red Riding Hood and swallowed her whole. My hair hung suddenly like a wet mop. The spell was broken, the light extinguished, a shadow cast. I ballooned and my confidence was shattered, while Susan remained cool and slim as a porcelain figurine, perfectly intact.

I went home sobbing and angry. But that day, even my Barbie doll was no refuge. I noticed the unyielding physique of my doll. Like Susan and my pretty skinny sister Mina, Barbie's perfect, slim-waisted figure must have cast a spell on me. I plunged into playtime, at first pretending to be a princess and then a faerie, a winged creature. Wearing Mother's scarves, I acted out fantastic scenes and magical journeys to make up for that precious moment in the spotlight that had left me in shame. I was summoning a mythical being, a creature of boundless strength and beauty. Not quite human, she was slender and translucent. She
would grow inside me and become stronger over time. This creature did not yet have a name.

My actual name was my only badge of pride. Lilting on the lips, melodic and glamourous, Lila was light. Lila was lithe. Lila was the sonorous expression of me, a name that gave me a reason to live up to it.

04
. Grande Dame Madame Nature

When I turned eleven, time sped up. “Your menses have come early,” Mother said, looking solemnly at my crimson-stained panties as though she were reading an obituary. She peered into the hallway, looked both ways, and led me by the hand from my bedroom into the bathroom. She locked the door. Then, unprepared and nervous, she initiated me into the rituals of feminine hygiene.

She bent down, opened a cupboard, and produced a big blue box. She set it down and looked at me while tapping the box. “
This
is what you use for
that
,” she said, and showed me how to use a sanitary napkin, depressingly called “Always,” and how to dispose of it: with discretion. She instructed me how to meticulously wrap the used napkin with endless rolls of toilet paper, hiding the
that
.

Her instruction complete, she patted me on the head, looked into my eyes, and said, “I'll buy you plenty of underwear.”

I was devastated as much from the still unexplained bleeding as by her reaction to it. I didn't leave the bathroom for another hour, but stood with my back to the mirror, gazing numbly through eyes blurred by marble-sized tears. My childhood had been blown out of the water. This was when Monika rescued me.

My cousin Monika was my absolute idol. She had come to live with us a year earlier, after her parents had been killed in a car accident. Naturally, my father took in the daughter of his brother and became a parent to this parentless girl.

The day she arrived to live with us was a foggy Saturday morning in September, and there was a damp chill in the air. I had been guzzling the morning line-up of cartoons on television when I heard Dad's car pull up in the driveway. Immediately I shot up and went to the window, my heart racing wildly.

Dad got out of the Chrysler, opened the trunk, and pulled out several enormous suitcases. Monika emerged from the passenger seat, lifting herself out of the car with great effort. She was gripping the strap of an ochre satchel with both hands. Her raven-black hair fell onto her shoulders and folded into soft, perfect curls. Her eyes were cast down, but when she looked up and met my eyes, her face seemed to bloom like a flower.

She came into the house and took me in her arms. Her perfume and silky touch enveloped me, and in that instant I wished so much to be like her, to be able to live in my skin as she could.

I called her Moni. She loved the sound of that because to this material girl, it sounded like money, and she liked money. She liked the pleasures offered by popular culture: designer clothes, shopping sprees, malls and salons, sales and nails, big hair and
Marie Claire.
The glittery promises of advertising were her religion, and she believed with devout conviction all that was promised to her in cosmetic ads and advice columns. Her dresser was an altar, a shrine to beauty. We spent the entire day setting up her room, indulging in stories, and sharing secrets. She pampered
me, brushed my hair, painted my fingernails, and made me her private doll.

When Monika found me crying the day I got my period, she took me to the mall to cheer me up. It was as if the glimmering store windows had been enchanted just for me. Holding my hand, we wandered through the bustling crowds and with the oddest mix of sweetness and sensibility, she educated me on the biological facts and functions of the inscrutable, enigmatic female body and demystified its mysteries. Big cousin informed little cousin that nature was simply taking its course. My body was just doing its job for grand dame Madame Nature. Moni had also gotten her period early, weeks after her tenth birthday, and had been thrilled about it.

At age sixteen, Monika inhabited her body as water inhabits a river. She was no knobby-kneed waif from a fashion magazine. She stood confident in her full female form and looked forward to her future.

What she had, I wanted for myself. The truth was, I felt in the marrow of my being that I was different. I was a fragile creature with a yearning to feel safe and loved; I could break under the slightest blow of rejection. Perhaps this fragility was another of my mother's genes that I had unwillingly inherited. She had already passed on to me her precious fat gene. Mother grew up in India, where plump little girls were praised and prized, and their healthy, ample bodies promised a future of childbearing womanhood. She now filled her lonely days with frying pakoras and baking brownies. And for that reason, my mother was my enemy. She was not my body's friend. But she saw herself in me,
and I wanted to hold up a different mirror. And in that mirror was Monika.

05
. Twelve and Turning

When my clock struck twelve, the spell was broken. The reverberations resonated one afternoon in sixth grade. It was recess, and I skipped off the playing field and into the school yard where my droopy-eyed girlfriends stood, posing as on the cover of
Mademoiselle
, fully loaded, ready to launch. These girls didn't wait for clocks and candles, bells and biology. They dove into little womanhood equipped with rules and attitudes, fashion and accessories. But there I was in a Scooby Doo T-shirt, still wearing braids, with a shameless disregard for style do's and don'ts and a plump figure already past puberty.

“Time to get those puppies strapped in, don't ya think?” said one of the flat-chested girls. Her eyes widened as others nodded in tandem. “Your mom's heard of training bras?”

I looked down at my chest, shocked at how my breasts were sculpted by my shirt. Instinctively I caved inward, as though I could make my developing breasts disappear.

My classmate's question seemed to suggest a certain lack of sophistication on my mother's part about dressing a developing daughter in the developed world. Training bras were, after all, a western invention. They assumed my mother was stuck in the backward ways of the old country, where pubescent girls flopped around uninhibited, destined to turn into the haggard
old women with flaccid breasts and nipples pointing straight to earth as seen in
National Geographic
.

Since Mina had her own growth spurt at the age of ten, even earlier than I had, she now sported the cleavage of a grown woman. I watched with horror as boys chased her, tugging at her bra and taunting her until she broke down in tears. Beyond a sisterly bond, Mina was an extension of me. What happened to her, happened to me, only more deeply and fiercely.

That year on sports day, Mina came home empty-handed. Her tall, sturdy physique that foreshadowed early puberty had given her an athletic advantage over the small insect-like creatures that ran around spitting, pranking, and executing their “boys will be boys” license. She outran, out-jumped, out-shot-put, and outshone all the boys and girls in her grade. Although she retreated sobbing into her room that day, she was back on her feet in hours, indulging in life's new pleasures and admitting herself into a future of girlish vanity involving hair, makeup, and boys. I witnessed her last and final year of glory.

The clock's reverberations continued to resonate steadily, its vibrations now affecting the daddy of this daddy's little girl. My dad had been my childhood hero. To others he was scary looking—tall with a frowsy full beard and stern piercing eyes. But when Mina and I were kids, we could turn the serious scholar into the Queen of England in a matter of minutes. We would sit him down, braid his beard, stick ribbons and bows onto his
head, smear lipstick and rouge on his face, and force him to be English.

“Welcome to our humble home, your majesty,” we would say, bowing in our frocks.

“Why, it is my absolute honour,” he would reply, sitting upright, sipping from a miniature tea cup. “I say, I love tea, but I do indeed enjoy a stiff shot of brandy from time to time.”

We had no clue what brandy was, but we'd laugh uncontrollably. He'd invent silly games and tell us scary fairy tales. His universe of make-believe was well-suited to his dreamy-eyed faerie daughter.

But in my twelfth year, my father began to drift away from me, like a seaman journeying to another shore. Many evenings I would linger near him, bobbing up like a mermaid gasping for attention, but daddy's little girl was no longer little. Had I been a boy, would he have welcomed the maturing contours of my face and the developing shape of my body? Had I been a boy, would he have found in his growing son an impression of himself? Had I been a boy, would he have lowered his eyes when he saw me and turned away from physical affection? I could not be sure. But I was a girl. A girl who was growing up on him.

Mere months after my twelfth birthday, I began to experience strange sensations that made my hair stand on end and my skin flush. Mother Nature's love doctor, who was looking to amuse himself, had injected a hefty dose of the horny hormone into
my arteries and put me under the spell of the once loathsome creatures: b-o-y-s.

It surged the summer our family camped in New Brunswick near Magnetic Hill, a landmark where cars defied gravity and rolled uphill. The sign posted at the souvenir shop read, “Magnetic or Magic?” My question exactly. My biology was consumed with boyology, and my mind had no influence over the chemical operations taking place in my body. My endocrine was in control, the rush of desire so complete it could not be matched any show of intelligence.

On our first day at the campsite, I sat down for breakfast at the picnic table and was suddenly jarred awake by the boys from the neighbouring campsite who were preparing for their morning swim. They paraded around in snug shorts, exposing their shiny, muscled torsos. My face felt hot with embarrassment as I munched on Corn Pops, nervously jerking my spoon through the clumpy powdered milk and gritty sugar. The most exceptional part of breakfast did not happen on the table but underneath it, where my naked thighs trembled and created their own magnetic magic.

Inevitably, I drifted toward the boys at the beach after breakfast. I sat in the shade of a dry branch and timidly hid my plump figure in a cocoon of discount beach towels in Miss Piggy pink, taking in the remarkable spectacle of boys being boys. I registered the scene in my mind's sensitive photographic film and slid the negative onto the evocative screen where dreams arose and where the bolt of reality could not reach. I was a lithe and honey-hued starlet, sprawled in her scarlet bikini, basking in the
gloriousness of her own sun-shot beauty, and captivating the gaze of every handsome man—all of whom had cameras. Flash! “Who is the beautiful creature?” Flash! “So lovely, so fine. What's your name, darling?”

Of course, I shooed them away. “Oh please, it's too much! Leave me alone at once! No cameras!” But plump brown pubescent girls couldn't possibly be permitted such attention, let alone pleasure.

“Hey, weirdo,” a voice said. Suddenly, sand grains stung my eyes. Through the searing sunlight, I saw the boys running away, laughing at me. The objects of my desire had dodged my daydream and turned it into a nightmare. They disappeared amid a trail of taunts and insults specially scripted for me. I was suddenly alone on the sand in my piggy-pink towel.

Was I a pervert? I asked myself. Were only the beautiful allowed to desire? Lurking underneath my questions was the brooding feeling that my sexual longing was perverse and could have fatal consequences. Didn't the fallen woman fall because her crime was to submit to lust? Wasn't feminine virtue virtuous because it symbolized victory over the primitive force of nature? And who was closer to nature than a lonely, hormonal girl of twelve?