Mouthing the Words (9 page)

*

Clear, this sky is blue and I am shining, crystal, watching. Children reach up and out to me. Too high. I am dripping on their foreheads, they are stretching their tongues to catch me but they are missing
.

*

“Come on, please your Daddy. No one else is going to love you.”

*

I am rigid crystal glowing, giving rain, liquid silver. Water running over eager faces
.

*

“You don’t want me to stop loving you, do you, Thelma?” he pleads.

Pant pant, a Doberman loves a Pekinese. Jerk jerk thunder and flood. He’s telling me I’m dirty and he thinks I might be contagious. “Your hair’s starting to fall out,” he sneers. “You’re disgusting.”

He knows nothing. I am growing, transforming, becoming hard as ice, and as shiny and beautiful and clear as pure water. Admired and untouchable. Brilliant and clean. Crystal perfect and loved. I am singing soundless. I am safe in isolation and distance. Nothing is here. Nothing is between me and the sky. Everything is below. Everything is dying below.

Burning

MY FATHER IS
gone again. Apparently. And I suspect this time it’s for good because he was actually taken away in handcuffs. I have decided to feel nothing about any of this, nada, not a bloody thing, not even guilty, which is what my mother tries to make me feel because whose fault could this possibly be—except mine. Most things are, of course, and I have come to accept this quite graciously. By not speaking. No raising of voice, no anger, no defensiveness, just submission. It proves itself to be much simpler than engaging in fruitless debate. In arguing I always lose and feel worse. In choosing to remain silent I can sometimes manage to forget that anything at all has happened. Perhaps I am very English, after all.

—

My brother, who is becoming unknown to me because besides being otherwise disturbed I am
preoccupied
with being a teenager, has been sent off to live with our father. My father now lives in a farmhouse somewhere northeast of Brockville, and in their misguided way my parents seem to think a good dose of country air will be just what Willy needs to correct the unfortunate urban habits he is developing. I could have told them “like a hole in the head,” had they asked for my opinion.

I know very little about Willy’s life there because I try to block out as much as possible on my weekend visits. I cannot believe that I have to go at all, but “He’s still your father” seems to be enough of a reason for my mother.

In this parallel universe there are a lot of fires. My father has some new-found pyro habit and builds blazing infernos that should have disastrous repercussions. But out here in the country no one seems to mind about things like fire hazards and clouds of toxic fumes because there are only cows next door, bony-assed and mooing.

Dad is apparently burning down all the old barns one by one, taking brittle grey planks and snapping them with his boot. The hay crackles and smoulders and crawls with beetles that go pop in the heat, which makes my brother say daft things like “neat.”

There are gravel pits for miles here, most of them filled with stagnant green pools of water that teem with frogs at twilight and serve as an endless source of amusement for my brother, who seems to have grown
an
extra arm—this one loaded with pellets. It is May, and Dad is building infernos and Willy is shooting frogs in the middle of their foreheads, watching in morbid delight as they flip over backwards and land belly up. In January, when he arrived there, the water was frozen in the well and Willy had to crack it with an axe each morning so that Dad could have his coffee.

Now he goes to school on a yellow bus, which he boards every morning at the foot of the drive to the jeers of “Hey, stupid-ass,” and “Look at his hippy hair, look at his stupid-ass jeans” and “Stupid Toronto ass with the freak father.”

He does have dumb hair. Even I can see that. The wrong hair, the wrong jeans, the wrong words and a father who has started to tear down the walls of the house to stoke a fire. The other boys chase him in the schoolyard as far as the pine plantation and he shouts at them, “Yeah, well I used to be much badder than you when I was in Toronto, I even got arrested,” and they mock him: “Stupid ass thinks he’s a tough guy. Sure you got arrested. Arrested for being such a freak!”

He comes home from the school of abuse on the yellow bus in the afternoon to witness the progress of destruction. Dad spends the days alternately digging trenches with the back hoe and tearing off bits of the house. This is still my brother’s most vivid image of our father—him perched atop a back hoe, with a gin bottle gripped between his thighs. Apparently happy.

“Look at this!” he shouts as Willy comes up the
drive
, pointing to the day’s destruction. Willy spends the next hour blasting frogs until it is time for him to scrub the potatoes. Always meat and potatoes. Wrapped in tin foil, thrown into the blazing fire and retrieved with a two-by-four. Sitting in the warm wind biting through the charcoal-skinned chicken to the soft red meat near the bone. It was only years later that Willy learned chicken didn’t count as red meat. Years and a fitful bout of salmonella later. I avoid most things by professing to be a vegan.

Dad, of course, gets to moralizing in the drunken slurry speech that is his after dark. Moralizing about things it’s taken Willy and me the rest of our lives to struggle to unlearn—about women, about life, about money, about women. Then it is bedtime. No dishes to do and no light by which to attempt to do homework. Just a stumble in the dark as Dad grips the top of Willy’s head and relies on him to navigate toward the nearest gaping hole in the side of the house.

Willy and Dad survived winter with a wood-burning stove and a wounded house wrapped in tarpaulins. The cold months were dominated by a lot of moralizing and slurry speech which couldn’t be interrupted by manic adventures with the back hoe. There was nothing for Willy to do except listen and pretend he was smoking, too, as he watched his warm breath meet the air. He cried a lot, particularly after the dog froze to death, and missed Mum, and said to me on my weekend visits, “
Can’t
you live here, too?” but I just scoffed selfishly and said:

“No way.”

There were drives to the Texaco station for showers once every two weeks. There were snowstorms so heavy that Willy had to snowshoe a mile to the end of the gravel road to catch the bus, where they shouted “Hey, stinky ass” when he boarded.

And then spring came. Snow melted and the pits filled and it was April again and Willy had been living with my father for more than a year. Dad was a little better with the warmer weather because he could get back to work on his plans. He’d been talking all winter about the moat he was going to dig around the house to keep out government officials, health inspectors and Elmer Dixon, the farmer next door. There’d be a mechanized drawbridge for which he would have the only key and Willy would have a special code to lower the bridge when he got home from school. In the summer Willy would help him build an island in the government pine plantation. They would chainsaw down some trees and dig a big trench around the clearing. “That’ll show the government,” Dad said.

But sometime that spring the plans changed without anybody really knowing why. Willy got on the Greyhound bus going west and Dad went east, going nowhere. “I don’t know, Mum,” my brother said from a phone booth at the Toronto bus depot. “All he said was, ‘Will, we’re done here,’ and then he drove me to
the
bus station. ’Course that was after he burned the fucking house down.” I picture it, everything at war. The flames and the rain and Dad and the world.

Years later Willy said a little more. He said, “You know, I should have shot that fucking bastard when I had the gun.”

The Colour Purple

I AM EIGHTEEN
and I am still not adopted. How many people have I asked? It is starting to get embarrassing. Anika and Claudio, and Mrs. Kelly, and Mrs. Rodrigues, and then Mrs. Lennox my gym teacher, and Mrs. Abbey my math teacher, and then Mr. Foster my biology teacher, who took that as an invitation to stick his tongue in my mouth—and after that, well, that was only recently, but I’ve decided to give up.

Maybe I need to adopt something instead. I certainly cannot adopt a child, I have that much sense. But I could adopt a religion—except that a fundamental leap I just don’t seem able to make has to be made in order to believe in a higher power. I have tried. I have tried meditating with Anika, I even spent the March break with Anika and Vellaine at a Sufi retreat in Florida, where I mumbled the chants and moved around in the
circle
with them, but alas, spiritual awakening is not to be mine.

My mother is having her breasts enlarged. I cannot believe she would do such a thing. Voluntarily add womanhood. It makes me feel sick, but she is glowing in some weird-ass way which suggests she is having her own spiritual experience. My religion will be based in my soul, not my mammary glands. I had always suspected she was superficial and vacuous, but somehow she needs to have plastic surgery and spend thousands and thousands of dollars to confirm this and worship her new God. His name is Warren and he is a corporate dentist, whatever that is.

He’s harmless enough but he’s made a few attempts at “Hey, I could be a father to you if you’d only let me in a little,” which I have rejected so ferociously that he’s retreated into remission recently. Like cancer. Which I guess makes me like radiation, an idea I don’t altogether dislike.

As for my breasts, I am successfully suppressing all evidence of them and doing everything in my power to prevent a period from ever staining my life. I weigh one hundred and five pounds and I am five foot nine. My mother has taken me to the doctor, who has said, “She simply doesn’t have the body fat to sustain the production of …” What? Blood? I know I’ve got plenty of that because sometimes I see how much I can squeeze out of the ends of my fingers. I haven’t got the
courage
yet to take a slice into anything bigger, but I will, I’m sure of it.

I do weigh ten pounds more than last year, which although causing me no end of agonizing means my mother lays off, I can live at home rather than in a hospital, and I can think more clearly now. I’m not going that hospital route. Last summer I spent a delirious few weeks with an IV in my arm, staring at a bunch of other women with IVs in their arms, thinking: I am nothing like you, and being lifted onto a scale every day.

“Oh God, it’s a morgue full of walking cadavers,” my mother said, shuddering.

“Well, you put me here!” I screamed at her. “You wanted me to die in this graveyard.”

At which point (and every other time I screamed at my mother), a nurse put her hand on my shoulder and said, “You know your screaming upsets the other patients, Thelma.”

“Well, she upsets me!” I yelled. The nurse led my mother off and had a hushed tête-à-tête, but I was too exhausted to care about their conspiracy. I had to do most of my screaming in my head—holding my breath and clenching my hands and wondering if I could push so hard that my head would burst. I wanted it to burst—to shoot out my eyes and splatter its bloody red contents from wall to white wall.

Ironically, in my sessions every other day with Dr. Walker, where he actually invited me to scream, I
thought
, No way, you smug bastard, I am not going to indulge you, and I remained mute. I stared at him, I closed my eyes, I refused to answer his patronizing questions, and he said, “This isn’t going to help you, Thelma. If I understand you better I can find a way of helping you so that you’ll be well enough to leave here.”

So he had the key and I was going to have to play by his rules in order to get myself a ticket. Fuck, I resented him for that, but I thought, Fine, I’ll answer your pathetic questions, I’m a good student, I’ll pass your test, and you can feel smug about having cured me but in actual fact I’ll have told you nothing about myself. But I won’t scream for you.

There was one woman I liked. Molly with the dead grey pools for eyes and long black stringy hair. I liked her because she always saw Dr. Walker right before me and she wheeled out of his office looking even more pissed off than I did. She nearly ran her wheels over my feet as she passed me, muttering things to herself like “dick head” and “Eat? Why don’t you eat shit!” I stared after her with some degree of awe and fascination. One day she saw me looking at her, and mumbled, “I’m sure he’d let you out if you sucked his cock,” and wheeled on by, not waiting for my reaction. Jesus, I thought.

Later that day she wheeled past my room and said, “Hey girlfriend. Wanna order a pizza?” I didn’t know quite how to take that. Was she serious? But then she laughed and said, “Oh yeah, like that’s exactly what I
want
right about now—double processed cheese and slimy, grease-speckled pepperoni.”

“And only three hundred and ten calories a bite,” I returned.

“Three hundred and fifteen, actually,” she said.

“And maybe two Cokes to wash it all down.”

“And a bucket to chuck it all up into.”

“I’m not a big chucker,” I said.

“Baby, it’s the best.”

—

“Did Dr. Walker really say that?” I asked Molly later, incredulous.

“Say what?”

“That you could get out if you sucked his cock?”

“What, are you crazy?” she asked, and then back-tracked and said, “Oops, sorry. No, he’d lose his fucking job if he said something like that. I’d offer though if I thought it was going to get me out. Besides, he’s got a nice little wifey at home who does that for him.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“No. It’s just that they all do.”

“What a bunch of fucking pigs,” I said.

“You said it, sister. Smoke?”

“What, here?”

“In the stairwell.”

“Seriously?”

“Look, they’ve taken away one of my greatest
pleasures
in life—barfing—they can cut me a little slack on this one.”

“How do they stop you from throwing up?” I asked.