Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter To Do? A Memoir (Sort Of) (16 page)

The Squawking Chicken didn’t just have a feeling that I wasn’t being honest—she backed up that feeling by having me followed. Like I said, Ma grew up around local gangsters and law enforcement. She had contacts everywhere and they didn’t mind spying for her when she asked them to. So the Squawking Chicken actually dropped a James Bond on my ass and uncovered my illicit teen romance. I wasn’t allowed to see Kwun ever again.

I was young enough with Kwun that Ma could control the outcome of that situation. As I became more independent, though, she could only interfere so much. Still, she kept throwing herself in my path, sometimes literally. And I kept crashing through her barriers. If Kwun was a close call and Alan just a fender bender, Bobby was a major collision.

Bobby and I also started out as friends in college. When our relationship developed into something more, we decided
not to attach any labels to what was between us. I’d recently broken up with Alan, Bobby had come out of a dramatic long-term relationship and we both wanted to keep it casual, not get too emotionally involved. Besides, I was graduating soon. It was my last year in college. I had no interest in attaching myself to someone for the summer and definitely not a guy who was going back to school in September. For weeks Bobby and I fronted like it would be realistic to just hang out all the time, for several nights at a time, and not engage on a deeper level. On a few occasions we even tried to not be together, just to prove that we could, as if by simply not being in the same room it would mean that we weren’t wanting to be in the same room. Obviously we were in love. And it was a lot of fun. At the beginning, there was an intensity to what we had that was exciting and fresh. I had finished my fourth year. I was the first in my family, on either side, to complete a post-secondary education. My parents were very proud. As I was their only child, they knew they only had one chance. And I had delivered. Now it was summer and I was free. Bobby and I were inseparable, except that before we hooked up, I had planned a trip to Los Angeles to see a friend and now I found that I didn’t want to leave him.

I went on the trip. I was supposed to be in L.A. for a week. After five days, I decided to change my ticket and go home. Bobby’s parents were away and he had the house to
himself. My plan was to come back to Toronto two days early, spend the weekend with him and then go back to my parents’ and they wouldn’t know the difference. Bobby came to pick me up at the airport. I was devious too. I called often. I blocked the number before dialing. I thought I had totally convinced her that I was still in L.A. But that sixth sense of hers kicked in again.

Ma somehow knew that I was messing around behind her back with Bobby the same way she knew that I was sneaking around with Kwun—it’s more than just mother’s intuition, it’s a sick gift. Bobby and I had enjoyed a full day of pure awesome before the phone rang. I was watching TV when he came back into the living room and told me it was the Squawking Chicken on the line. I was terrified. But by then I was so in love with Bobby and so unwilling to be apart from him, I was determined not to go home yet. So I braced myself for that voice. I readied myself for her wrath. Instead, she was dead-voiced. “Are you safe?” was all she asked.

So it was the guilt play. And I immediately understood how worried she must have been when she couldn’t find me in L.A. I had disappeared without telling anyone where I was going. It was horribly irresponsible. In that moment, I recognized that it was selfish, and that I was too absorbed in my own passion to think about Ma’s feelings. But still, unlike how it was with Kwun so many years before, this time I
had the will to defy her. Or I should say by this point I was so hopelessly in love with Bobby, it superseded everything else, even the Squawking Chicken’s hold over me. It was the first time in my life that I had rebelled against her and so flagrantly. I stayed with him for the full two days.

When I finally returned home that evening, reluctantly, and not because I didn’t want to face her but because I didn’t want to leave Bobby, Ma shrugged like she’d barely noticed I was gone. At that point, she had other preoccupations. Ma was diagnosed with Berger’s disease the year before I started dating Bobby. Berger’s disease affects the kidneys. Both of Ma’s kidneys had stopped functioning and she was self-administering peritoneal dialysis at home every day. She was constantly in and out of the hospital with infections and other medical emergencies. The Squawking Chicken was facing a health crisis and I was so consumed by Bobby, I completely checked out. Dad hadn’t yet retired then so she was alone while he spent the day at the office, and she was alone again in the evenings after Dad had gone to bed so that he could wake up in the morning to go to work. They were sleeping in separate bedrooms at this point because Ma was restless through the night.

She was sick and afraid. And she was alone. Just as so many family members and loved ones had abandoned her before, her daughter was abandoning her too. I was totally
useless. All I cared about that summer was being with Bobby. So many nights I was torn, seeing her in her bedroom, attached to a machine that was stepping in where her organs had failed, her face a worried, lonely gray, and still I’d find the coldness in my heart to open the door, close it, lock it behind me and get into Bobby’s car. By the time he pulled out of the driveway, I’d have forgotten the ache of remorse in my soul for leaving her behind, replaced by the warmth of his hand in mine, and we were off, selfish, indulgent lovers until dawn.

Ma did not interfere with Bobby and me for the rest of the summer. She knew it had to end. Bobby had one more year left in college and I had to start looking for a job. Or, rather, I was expected to start looking for a job. Ma may have resigned herself to the reality of my relationship but she wasn’t about to financially support it. I found a placement at a small insurance firm shortly after he left to go back to school. The days were boring and excruciatingly long. Bobby and I saw each other on weekends but he had a real life on campus. My life existed only from Friday to Sunday when we were together. After a couple of months of long distance, I couldn’t bear it anymore. One weekend, while visiting him at school, I decided I just wouldn’t go back to work. Since I wasn’t spending anything during the weekdays when we weren’t together, I had saved enough to be able
to coast for a few weeks without a job, living with him in his apartment on campus. It was enough to last me to the holidays, and then I figured I’d just start working again in January.

Ma simply didn’t have the strength to protest. And Dad didn’t want to further upset her by confronting me. Besides, he was only focused on getting her better. The peritoneal dialysis wasn’t working as well as the doctors had hoped and they were now planning to switch her over to hemodialysis. This would require surgically creating a fistula on her left arm to allow her blood to pass through a machine that would essentially act as a kidney. Without her opposition, I happily spent my days lazing around Bobby’s apartment, slowly losing my identity.

Then it was Christmastime. Bobby went home and so did I. Ma’s condition had stabilized and she was gaining strength in preparation for the fistula surgery in the new year. I took advantage of her brief improvement and convinced myself she was better than she was so that I could spend even more time with Bobby, accepting every invitation to his family gatherings. And when January came around, despite the fact that I was out of money, I got back into his car and returned to campus with him. Six weeks passed—time evaporates in a love haze, and suddenly it was February, almost an entire
year since I’d taken my last college exam, and still I was doing nothing with my life.

Bobby and I were back in Toronto for spring break. He wanted to go snowboarding. But I was broke and Ma wasn’t funding me. I was so desperate to not miss even one day with him that I hit up a pawnshop and sold the twenty-four-karat gold necklace that she’d given me to raise the cash I needed to be able to keep clinging to Bobby. The Squawking Chicken busted me pretty quickly for that one too. Again, her weird telepathy where I was concerned kicked in. And when I came home from the ski trip to drop off my clothes and pick up a few things before heading back out again, with Bobby, of course, she looked for it right away—for the necklace that was no longer hanging around my neck. She knew what I had done without me having to tell her. The Squawking Chicken had had it. She’d quietly watched me piss myself away for six months and she finally decided it was time to shout.

I could feel it coming. So I ran upstairs to quickly get what I needed before escaping, thinking I could make it back down and out the door without too much drama. By the time I reached the bottom step, though, she’d already found the time to stomp to the kitchen, grab a knife and park herself in the foyer, blocking my exit.

There she was, the Squawking Chicken, in a nightgown, her hair in disarray, her voice as loud as ever, ringing off every wall of the house, her eyes wild, and, frankly, more alive than they’d been in a long time, holding a knife to her throat as Dad stood beside her futilely pleading with her to calm the fuck down.

“If you leave again and go with that boy, I will die in your face, I will die in your face, I will die in your face!”

It was a killer performance. Even at the time, I remember thinking to myself, seriously, that she was throwing down an Oscar-worthy piece of acting. This was the ultimate guilt trip, the guilt trip of all time, the Super Bowl of all guilt trips. How many mothers have the balls to threaten to commit suicide because they hate your boyfriend? I remember grudgingly admiring her move.

There was no way she was going to off herself in front of me . . . right? Probably not. But then again, I had spent my entire life watching Ma’s strategic unpredictability. The element of doubt was enough. This was her trump card in a battle of wills. The Squawking Chicken had just been waiting for the right time to play it.

Ma won the hand and I stayed home. Later that night, when the situation had calmed down, she came to speak to me. I was sulking and I was bitter, but mostly I was stressed
about not being with Bobby. I was worried that he was having a good time without me, and that he’d want to have more good times without me. She could feel my anxiety and she understood exactly where it was coming from.

“He won’t love you for very long, you know? He won’t love you because right now, you’re not worth loving.”

The Squawking Chicken was telling me that I was a loser. And I was. But I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself yet. I was too stubborn to acknowledge that Ma might have been right. And besides, to me, back then, I didn’t exactly see her as a boss in how she had handled her own relationships. If I was a loser, I was only learning from the best. After all, in the fucked-up love life department, she was a total rock star.

Ma had left Dad all those years ago because he was too immature to stand up to his family’s mistreatment of her. So she ended up with Uncle, who promised her security and loyalty but ended up cheating on her. Uncle was weak, sure, and showed a lack of character, obviously, but still, at the same time, he never had a chance. Because Uncle wasn’t Dad, and through it all, Ma has always been in love with Dad. He knew she had promised Dad that if he made something of himself that she would return. And wasn’t it convenient that just as Dad made good on his part, Uncle screwed up? Uncle had given Ma a way out.

I was six years old when my parents broke up. I was there at the precise moment when they split. I was sixteen years old when they started the process of getting back together. I was there at the precise moment that they reunited. Literally.

Ma had come back to Canada after Uncle’s infidelity, telling him that she needed some time to consider her options. Dad and I were planning a four-day road trip with Sally and Don, his business partners, and their son, Scott. Ma decided to join us. We were going to New York but staying in New Jersey because the hotels are cheaper there. And the Squawking Chicken wanted to gamble in Atlantic City.
Each family had their own hotel room with two queen-size beds. I slept in one bed with Ma, Dad slept in the other. In the middle of the night, on the final night of the holiday, I woke up because I heard noises.