Mouthing the Words (5 page)

“But fairies aren’t real!” I protested. I was getting frustrated and thinking this Mrs. Allen was perhaps just a little bit stupid. A couple of pork pies short of a picnic, my father would have said. I wanted to get back to Mrs. Kelly’s class and bury myself in my arithmetic.

“Does Mrs. Kelly have a little girl?” I asked Mrs. Allen.

“No, she doesn’t, dear, but I know she’d really like one. She really loves little girls.”

So that was it. Mrs. Kelly was looking for a little girl of her own. And she’d chosen me! She was going to adopt me!

“Can I go back to class now?” I pleaded with Mrs. Allen, eager to be reunited with the woman who was going to be my new mummy.

“If you can promise me one thing, Thelma,” she said seriously.

“OK. What is it?” Prepared to promise anything in return for this most joyous news.

“I want you to take this card. Ask Mrs. Kelly for some tape and tape it into the back of your autobiography. It has my phone number on it and I want you to phone me if you ever feel scared.”

“Sure, OK,” I said, indulging her. But why would I
ever
feel scared or sad again with Mrs. Kelly as my new mother!

I went back to class all dreamy-eyed and full of love. In fact, I could hardly concentrate on my math, because Mrs. Kelly was sitting at her desk smiling sweetly from behind the cover of a book. I couldn’t stop staring at her and when she came up to whisper to me, “Are we having a little trouble concentrating this morning, Thelma?” all I could do was inhale her lilac perfume and resist burying my face in her neck. I wanted to tell her it was all right, that she didn’t have to pretend anymore, but I knew for the sake of the other children in the class that she must.

I loitered around after class, collecting brushes and erasing the grammar lesson from the board. I was waiting for Mrs. Kelly to say, “No need for us to stop by your house on Merton Street, your parents are quite happy with this arrangement, and I’ve bought you a whole new wardrobe full of clothes and shoes. Let’s go home.” But nothing like that was forthcoming. I offered to carry her books out to her Volkswagen Bug. She thanked me, and said she’d see me tomorrow.

I said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Kelly. I understand. Discretion is, after all, the better part of valour,” and began trudging across the blocks toward Merton Street, leaving Mrs. Kelly to think: “What an awfully curious child.”

Perhaps Mrs. Kelly is shy, I thought. Or maybe she has to ask her husband if it’s OK, but just in case, I
packed
some clean underwear and a nightgown and Teddy and Blondie into my little white suitcase and shoved it under my bed. I had decided to leave Janawee and only take Heroin with me. Ginniger had virtually melted into harmonious existence with me, so there was no question of a decision to be made where she was concerned. But Janawee was blubbering so much that I said to Heroin, “I think one of us will have to stay with her—you or Ginniger—and Ginniger lives in my hands now and I’ll need my hands in my new house.” I was sorry, but Heroin understood because she was, after all, the strong one.

But every day of that week continued in much the same way. I loitered around after school and Mrs. Kelly smiled at me and told me she thought I’d better make my way home. To Merton Street, she meant. And then, because I was late and Daddy had been waiting to help me with my homework, he told me I was a bad pupil and I had to lie down and be disciplined. But I didn’t care anymore. I let him do his disgusting things and I dreamed of Mrs. Kelly and thought, Soon you won’t ever be able to do that to me again.

I pushed my Brussels sprouts into my mashed potatoes and Mum screamed, “Stop playing with your food, Thelma. You really do behave like an animal!” But I didn’t care anymore because soon my real mummy would be coming to take me to my real home and she wouldn’t yell at me like that. Corinna would still have Willy to yell at.

On Friday I thought, This must be the day because surely Mrs. Kelly wouldn’t leave me at Merton Street for a whole other weekend. So I took the little white suitcase to school with me that day and Mrs. Kelly, who noticed immediately, held me back at recess to ask me what was in the suitcase. “A few essentials,” I smiled at her conspiratorially and then ran outside to join the barbarians.

Outside her Volkswagen Bug that afternoon, I looked at her desperately and said, “But aren’t you going to adopt me now?”

“Oh honey. Is that what this is about? You poor thing. Where did you get the idea that I was going to adopt you?”

“But Mrs. Allen said …” I bleated, tears welling up rapidly in my terrified eyes.

“What did Mrs. Allen say?” she asked me, grabbing my little hand in hers and looking at me with concern.

I could hardly speak at this point. I was trying to get the words out but my chest was heaving and my heart was pumping from my head to my knees. Tears were flowing out of me like a sprinkler. “But … I … I … I … thought,” I struggled. “She … she … said,” I stuttered, “tha … that … you,” I sniffed, as Mrs. Kelly reached up to wipe the snot dripping from my nose. “Oh God,” I wailed. “Oh God!”

Mrs. Kelly got out of the car and put her arms around me and I heaved against her there in the parking lot. “Thelma, I am so sorry. I can’t adopt you. I
had
no idea. You have parents. You have a mother. And I have my own family,” she offered, in an effort to comfort me. “Let me drive you home,” she said as she put her arm around me and led me to the passenger side. She pulled the seat belt over my chest and wiped my face with another tissue.

But when we got to Merton Street I refused to get out of the car. “It’ll be OK, Thelma,” she said. “I’ll come inside with you if you like.”

“If I can’t be with you then I’d rather be dead,” I said, my chest still heaving with sobs.

“Thelma, I don’t want you to be dead. I want you to be alive. It’s good to be alive,” she said. “It can be, I want you to remember that. Whatever happens.”

I felt like screaming:
Please don’t do this to me! These aren’t people here. There are only insects in the air and things under the bed. There are only bits of people
—
bloody lungs swimming in pools of yellow and red and swollen bits hovering in space above me
.

My father opened the door to this: Me leaning back against Mrs. Kelly’s thighs screaming,
“NOOOO – YOU CAN’T MAKE ME
!” and becoming even more hysterical at the sight of him.
“
YOU CAN’T MAKE ME
!”

“She seems to be a little upset.” Mrs. Kelly appeared to apologize to my father.

“What have you done to her?” he shouted.

“She just had it in her head for some reason that I was going to adopt her,” she tried to explain. “When I told her I couldn’t, she became very very upset.”

“Pigeon,” Douglas said to me. “Pigeon, it’s OK, you’re home now. Come on in with Daddy,” he said, stretching out his arm, at which point I retreated even further into Mrs. Kelly’s thighs and screamed a bloodcurdling, neighbour-rousing, “
NOOOOOO YOU BASTARD
!”

“Look, I think you’d better leave,” he said firmly to Mrs. Kelly. “Look at how much you have upset this child. I hardly even recognize her,” he said with disgust.

“Perhaps I should come in,” Mrs. Kelly said. “Just until she calms down a little bit,” and my father had little choice but to agree as Mrs. Kelly held on to my shoulders and walked me into the hallway. I turned into her thighs and clung to them for my life.

“Come on and sit down on the chesterfield, Thelma. Try to calm down a little bit and I’ll give you a treat,” he coerced, reaching out to touch my back.

“
I DONT WANT ANYMORE TREATS FROM YOU! I DON’T WANT TO BE THE BEST SECRETARY AND LICK YOUR STINKY LOLLY
!” I screamed.

There was a moment of stunned silence before my father pleaded with Mrs. Kelly:

“She has an extremely fertile imagination. She has these imaginary friends, in fact sometimes she speaks to us in their voices and we think she might be schizophrenic,” he rushed, pink and breaking out into a sweat. “She acts quite deranged sometimes—lying down on the sidewalk for no apparent reason and pretending to be a cat that has been run over by a
truck
. It has occurred to us that she might be mentally disturbed.”

But now Mrs. Kelly was gripping me just as hard as I was gripping her.

Fork on the Left

I HAD, OF
course, “Gone and bloody ruined everything with my hyperbolic imagination,” according to my mother. “She doesn’t even know what’s real!” Corinna shouted at Mrs. Allen. “And the language she picks up from those hippies next door—always exploring their bodies together as if it was a perfectly natural thing to do! No wonder she has trouble with reality.”

It was my mother who had a problem with reality. She would have gladly served us marzipan fruit for dinner because it looked perfect, even if she knew it was ten years old and crawling with maggots inside. Faced with the alternative of having me taken away for psychological assessment and counselling, it was agreed that Daddy would go away for a while because “whether real or imaginary,” said Mrs. Allen, “the child is obviously in considerable distress when in the presence of her father.”

—

Now I had a key around my neck on a piece of string and although the responsibility rather terrified me, it gave me a new sense of power. “Who do you think is going to be the parent now?” was my mother’s new refrain. I was to pick up Willy on my way home from school and mind him in the hours before Mum got home from work. Quite often this seemed to involve Binbecka and Vellaine paying Willy twenty-five cents to pull down his pants or smoking one of the Player’s Lights my father had left behind. I ignored the others, took out the casserole from the fridge at five o’clock and set the oven to 350 degrees, laid the table, and pulled in the washing from the line.

Sometimes Daddy called. He’d say, “Are you being a good girl, Thelma, and helping your mother?”

“Yes, Daddy,” I’d say. “Where are you?” I’d ask, and he’d tell me, “Winnipeg” or “Saskatoon,” where he was “trying to get his business off the ground.”

“But when are you coming home?” I’d ask him. “I miss going swimming with you.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever taken you swimming, Thelma,” he said, slightly confused.

“Oh.” Maybe he took Janawee. Or maybe Claudio took Binbecka.

I
♥

IT IS CHRISTMAS
mid-1970 something. We are in a motel room in Buffalo, waiting. We have crouched low through the border, Willy and me sitting in the back of a van on milk crates, looking at the red balding back of the head of the man in the driver’s seat. He has told us to imagine we are as tiny and quiet as insects. We are inhaling cardboard and pretending to be potato bugs rolled into balls, sucking in our feathery, numerous feet. We don’t know this man. His name is Bernie and he is taking us to Buffalo. We are nervous and excited—having an adventure we are not sure we are meant to enjoy.

Mum has packed Marmite sandwiches, chocolate milk and Wrigley’s gum into a Smurf lunch box and I keep telling Willy that we can’t eat yet because we don’t know when the next time will be. We chew gum and blow bubbles which we try to smack flat onto each
other’s
faces, and then the balding, red-haired man glances over his shoulder because we are making too much noise.

We have had other hesitant adventures before this one. The last couple of years have included journeys on planes and trains, escorted by strangers and occasionally alone. This is how we get to Daddy. Waiting in lounges and motel rooms for white-shirted, coffee-breathing men to come and drive us further. Willy clutches the lunch box like a plastic talisman in his small hands.

The first trip was to Calgary, where we went to visit Dad on his business trip. Mum was with us then, saying, “Douglas, this really is lovely furniture,” but I didn’t understand why he needed all this new furniture when it was only a business trip.

This is Buffalo—hours and hours staring out a motel window watching trucks hurtle by. We don’t know this place and Bald Red has left us with two cans of Coke and a wave over his shoulder. We are sharing one can, keeping the other for later.

Daddy comes with nightfall, sometime after we have stopped counting passing trucks. He pushes the door open abruptly. He is tense and wired and his energy fills the room and wakes Willy, whose head snaps from my lap. I am overwhelmed and nervous in the presence of this foreigner who takes ownership of us on random weekends and every other school holiday now. I move perfunctorily to try to kiss him hello but he pushes me
away
. Willy gets a handshake because men, my father tells him, do not hug each other.

This night is for driving. Blink blink of oncoming headlights, cigarette smoke and a drive-through truck stop where Dad orders four large styrofoam cups of milk. For later. He must have read somewhere that kids need a lot of milk. It is my job to make sure the milk doesn’t spill, but I am nodding off, with my cheek stuck to the window and the door handle in my ribs, and he keeps waking me. “Steady the cups and keep me company,” he says. “I don’t want to feel like a chauffeur.” He talks to me in order to keep himself from drowsing. He talk talk talks to me, big words and grand ideas and I am trying to make sense and be encouraging. He is inventing something—something that glues sheets of paper together and he’s going to get a patent and make a million dollars. Last time it was a machine that stamped numbers on pages. Last time it was five million dollars.

We are eleven and nine now and beginning to know. We know that other kids don’t spend their Christmas this way—smuggled across borders, hurtling through night on the highway gripping cups of milk between their thighs. The man we call Daddy who takes us away and we feel awe and love and terror: to do or say the wrong thing would take away the sense of security we are inventing here out of necessity.

—

Willy and I sleep on a mattress on the grey carpeted
floor
of a house big and empty and smelling like drywall and new plastic. The woollen blanket is itchy and I hear the sound of snoring from the next room. Sometimes I hear weeping. This sparse house is one of several identical ones on an unfinished housing estate. Yet here we are in one of them, apparently living. There are only the two mattresses and a lamp on the floor. What’s missing though, it seems, is not the furniture, but the feel of Christmas. I had not realized that Christmas has to be created, it doesn’t just exist. I had never realized that somebody has to take care of the details and that by default it must have always been Mum, because Christmas wasn’t here and neither was she.