Grief Girl (2 page)

Before

T
onight on TV they had people eating each other for dinner.

A group of people were in a plane that crashed in the snow. After several days with no food, they were forced to eat the bodies of the ones who didn't survive.

“I'd do that for you girls, you know,” Mum announces. She's ironing in the other room.

“Do what?” I ask from my spot on the floor in front of the TV.

“I'd let you eat me.” She pokes her head in. “If we were starving, I'd chop off my arm for you to eat.”

“Wouldn't you then just bleed to death?” I ask, trying not to picture it. This is too much for an eleven-year-old!

Now Dad's listening to us and not the news for a change. “Nah, she could just stick her stumps in the snow and they'd freeze up nicely,” he says, smirking. “She'd have a couple of Popsicles for arms.”

“Don't play games, Ron. This is serious.”

But Dad's on a roll. “Maybe they could suck on your stumps for dessert!”

Mum's always talking about dying. About how she couldn't live if something happened to Tracy or me. She prays God will take her first.

“I couldn't
eat
you. That's gross,” I tell her.

“What, you'd just chop them off and expect us to eat them? Just like that?” Tracy scoffs.

“Yeah,” Dad says in the breathless wheeze he gets from laughing too hard, “and once you've chopped one off, how will you do the other?”

“God, Mum, you say stupid things sometimes,” Tracy tells her. “Anyway, stuff like that doesn't happen in Australia.”

Mum looks hurt. “Look, you know what I mean. It's because I love you. That's what I'd do in that situation and that's that.”

Mum's been this way ever since Nanny died. Nanny was Mum's mum and was much nicer than Dad's mean old mum, Grandma, who is still alive. As Mum says, “The good people always go first and the assholes live on forever.” When it comes to talking about Grandma, Mum stops being a lady.

Nanny was as good as they get. At four foot eleven, she was like a little bread pudding. All warm and sweet and soft. Last year Nanny came to live with us. Actually, she came to die with us; I just didn't know it at the time.

She got breast cancer, turned yellow, and died. Then the ambulance came and Mum went to bed. She just lay there staring at nothing, shaking as if she were colder than cold. I thought she was going to die too.

“Mum, please say something,” I'd begged, thinking I could make her better.

“Just give her some time,” Dad had said.

So I guess Mum doesn't want to go through that again.

         

Mum thinks she's fat. So she's become a Weight Watcher. Pretty stupid, if you ask me. How can you lose something if you're constantly watching it? Mum doesn't see it that way. She goes to her meeting every Tuesday.

Last night Mum came home and ran into her bedroom without saying hello. Tracy got up to see what was wrong—she and Mum are “best friends.” Tracy likes Mum all to herself, but I wanted to be part of something for once, so I followed.

Mum sat crying on the bed. Next to her on the gold bedspread was a pink rubber pig's head. It was the size of a basketball, with blue eye shadow and long lashes.

“What's that?” I asked, knowing it wasn't meant to be funny.

“Look, Erin, if you have to come in, shut the bloody door,” Tracy ordered. She hugged Mum and glared at me over Mum's shoulder.

“They've given me the pig's head,” Mum said, weeping. “I'm the worst fat lady in the group. Not only did I not lose weight this week, I put it on! I can't do this anymore.”

I pride myself on being good at cheering Mum up at times like this. “Just because you have a pig's head doesn't mean you
are
one.”

Tracy shook her head, but Mum started laughing and crying at the same time.

I can relate to Mum better when it comes to this stuff. Tracy doesn't get it because she's skinny. She gets mad at Mum and me for eating fattening food. “It's simple,” she tells us. “Just stop stuffing yourselves!”

That's easy to say when you're naturally athletic and beautiful. Tracy's latest school picture looks like a Hollywood movie star's. And she
always
looks that way. I can stare at that picture for hours, hoping I'm half as beautiful when I'm fifteen. Everyone wants to be like Tracy.

Mum's blue passport was on the bed next to the pig's head.

When Dad walks around the house saying, “Where's my passport?” it's because he's threatening to leave us after an argument with Mum. All he does is jump in the car and drive around the block a few times to scare Mum, which it doesn't; instead, it just scares me.

I pointed to it. “Mum, what are you doing with your passport?”

“Ha! I wish that was what it is, darling. It's my Weight Watchers book.”

I looked closer. Instead of red stamps from foreign countries, there were little red piggy stamps in it.

“Come on, Mum, throw this stupid thing in the trash,” Tracy said, giving the pig's head a slap.

“I can't. I have to take it back next week.”

“Well then, let's put it somewhere you can't see it, at least.”

“Okay,” Mum said, her face blotchy and tearstained.

The next week Mum took the pig's head to her meeting so some other poor lady could go home crying with it.

But Mum was the lucky recipient again.

After her meeting, I heard her on the phone with Evelyn. “I stopped off on the way home and got a milk shake and a Mars Bar. You only live once, right?”

But she doesn't really believe that. Mum believes in heaven and hell, in rubbing Buddha's tummy and that if you're bad, you'll live your next life as a cockroach.

Mum believes in lots of things. Her Bible, her Edgar Cayce reincarnation books, and a little Buddha statue that she moves around the house when the mood takes her. Whenever one of us walks past it, she tells us to rub Buddha's tummy three times in a clockwise direction for good luck. Then there's the tarot lady Mum visits. Mum takes a tape with her each time, but she hides them and won't let us listen. She's into ghosts and spirits as well.

Dad doesn't give two hoots about any of it. He says it's all bullshit.

Most days, Dad and I are up first. I love our mornings together. We both wake up all chipper and laughing away while Mum and Tracy lie in bed trying to “thaw out,” as they call it. I can tell Tracy likes being part of the thawing-out club the same way I like being part of the breakfast club.

Unlike most kids, who have cereal and toast for breakfast, I eat in a five-star restaurant most mornings—if I close my eyes and don't look at the laminated table and ugly brown and orange kitchen.

This morning it's melt-in-your-mouth sautéed beef strips and scrambled eggs. Dad whistles a happy tune as he tosses the beef in the wok and splashes in some sauce before flipping it onto our plates.

We sit together and eat and ooh and ahh. “This is the life,” Dad says.

“You make the best stuff, Dad. Why aren't you a chef?” I ask before thinking.

Dad's not smiling anymore. I was just trying to compliment him, but I've said the wrong thing. I do that a lot. Dad dreamed of being a chef, but his father said that was for poofters. So Dad works for a courier company.

“Ughh…” Mum and Tracy are up. After what I just said, I'm glad to see them.

Dad smiles again as they groan their way into the kitchen. He and I are a lot alike. We both like to have fun as much as possible. Teasing Mum and Tracy by acting super happy and awake is especially entertaining.

“Hello, you bright sparks!” Dad says, winking at me. My ill-timed comment is forgotten. “Beautiful morning, isn't it?”

         

I overheard my parents talking about money and our lack of it this year. We're
that
kind of family. One year we're well off and the next we're in the poorhouse. I think it has something to do with Dad's schemes. Our fortune depends on which one he hits on and when. This year it was the gold-panning machine. For months Dad hid in his much-loved three-car (even though we only have one car) garage/workshop inventing a secret machine that would change our lives forever.

“This is going to be it, Bev, I can just feel it,” he says when he finally shows us a dark green metal contraption. It's a rectangular box about the size of a sofa with a fat, ridged hose sticking out of one end and a funnel at the other.

“What on earth is it?” Mum asks.

“A gold-panning machine. It can pan in a day what it would take one person a month to pan,” he tells us. “The hose sucks up the dirt, which then gets sifted like flour, and any gold in there will come out the other end on the magnetic tray. It's bloody beautiful!”

Mum's trying unsuccessfully to act excited, and I'm trying even harder. I'm thrilled that he might find gold. At the same time, I can't help thinking I have the Nutty Professor for a dad, without the funny genius part. Tracy just says he's a loser.

Dad's a fitter and turner by trade, whatever that is. I should ask him about it, but what if he just fits screws onto bolts and then turns them? A monkey could do that, and I don't want to make him feel bad, because I know he's really smart. Anyway, he hasn't done that since Tracy was born, because he has more potential than that. That's why he's always inventing new ways to make his fortune.

He acts like this is going to be different from the firewood-cutting business that left us with no income in the summer. Then there were the booze bus, which not even a drunk person wanted to ride in, and the under-eighteen disco that no teen in their right mind would be seen at. And the metal detector on the beach that turned up nothing better than a broken watch and a fancy hair clip.

But this is it. This will change everything. No more getting up at three a.m. and dressing in his beige shorts and shirt to go to work at the courier company, delivering packages to people who don't even look you in the eye because to them you're not even there.

The next weekend Dad takes his machine out for a “suck and chuck,” as he says.

He has the look of a man whose life is about to change.

When he comes back, he's covered in dirt and his boots are caked with mud, but he's got some little speckles in a jar. Mum's walking around the house furious, mumbling things under her breath like, “I'm fed up, Ron.” He just wants us to have a better life. I don't know what's wrong with the one we have.

“You found gold—I knew you would, Dad!” I say, trying to be supportive.

“Only a little bit, love. These things take time. I've got to scan a lot of area before I can expect anything big,” he says, sounding like he's not so sure.

He scans and scans for a couple of months, collecting a few more flecks before retiring his machine, “just for a while.”

         

Money's tight, so Mum's going to work in an ice cream factory. Bad choice, if you ask me—too much temptation. She says she really wants to, that she's looking forward to sticking wooden sticks into ice creams as they roll past her on a conveyor belt. But I know better.

Except for Tracy, we all put on weight. It's hard to resist when you know there's a big freezer full of desserts in the kitchen. Mum's put on the most.

She quits right after Christmas, and Dad goes back to doing extra shifts at the courier company…at least until his next brainstorm.

I don't want to work in a factory. I'm destined for bigger things. I can feel it. I want to do more than just dream of doing things. I want an exciting life full of glamour and adventure.

         

Mum says that true actresses begin in the theater, so I've joined the Shopfront Theater for Young People. It really is a shopfront, a huge, brightly colored old house and store next to a railway line. There's an enormous theater, a room for screen printing, and a room for costumes. When I'm in the front office, I hear the trains outside. I imagine I'm in New York and Broadway is just around the corner.

         

I'm not overly religious or anything, but I pray every night. Now I have to pray even harder. Mum has a cyst in her stomach and I'm not sure how bad that is. For Mum. Can a cyst kill you?

I think about death a lot. It's Mum's fault, with all her talk about wanting to die first. Sometimes I wonder if it's that she cares so much about me or that she just doesn't want to go before me. She won't even let me walk home from school by myself, and no one I know has ever died walking home from school. Except once.

There was this little boy who was killed when some humongous paper rolls rolled right off the back of a truck and squashed him. I almost saw it. I'm glad I didn't. Some people like seeing that gory stuff, but not me.

It made all the mothers extra nervous, especially mine. Actually it made me nervous too…that you can die on the corner waiting for the lights to change.