You Are Not What We Expected

by Sidura Ludwig

  “You wearing this costume all the time now?” Her father pulled at the chair opposite her and it squeaked across the floor. His face was different shades of grey, the skin hanging as if too heavy for the muscle and bones of his forehead, his jaw. His teeth reminded Shula of pebbles on a beach at the end of a hot day, dried by the unfiltered sun.

  She didn’t reply before he asked, “You ordered?”

  “I’m not eating,” she told him.

  “C’mon, Janis.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Then what the hell are we doing here?”

  “What do you want, Dad?”

  Shula looked up at the waitress behind the counter, who was straightening a pile of takeout menus. Her father waved and the girl came over to them.

  “I want your egg rolls. And those crispy noodles with the fried pork. The crunchy ones. Bring two plates,” her father said.

  When she left, Shula said, “I told you I’m not eating.” Her father looked down at the table and folded his napkin like a fan. He looked up and then out the window, still playing with the paper.

  “There’s stuff at the house that’s yours. I need you to go through it. I have to sell.”

  “Whatever I have there, you can just throw out.”

  “I know,” her father said, flattening out the wrinkled napkin as if he were kneading dough. He put it on his lap and then looked up at Shula. “It’s so easy for you to throw things away.”

  “You have my permission.”

  “I don’t want your goddamn permission. I shouldn’t have to move your junk. I have enough junk of my own.”

  “There are companies now who will do that for you.”

  “I’m not spending money like water. And don’t tell me he’s offering.”

  Shula said nothing about her husband. She drank her tea, this time with the ceramic firmly against her mouth.

  “Where are you going to live?” she asked.

  “A condo. Don’t worry. Nowhere close to you.”

  Shula looked down at the table, at the chopsticks crossed like legs above her plate. “I don’t know when I can get out there.”

  “I need you to go this weekend. Because of the agent. Clear your things. I’m staying with Barbara. She’s having everyone for dinner on Sunday. They ask about you. I say I don’t know how the hell you are.”

  The waitress brought his food and the extra plate, which stayed empty. He cut the egg roll lengthwise and poured plum sauce into the wound. It steamed and Shula felt her stomach contracting.

  “I don’t know if I can get away this weekend.”

  “Tell that husband of yours that I said so.”

  * * *

  Two weeks earlier Aharon had heard his parents fighting. Something about California. He heard his father’s laptop thud against the wall. He ran into their room and found his father bent over the broken computer. His mother’s hands reminded him of bat wings, fingers spread like those tiny bones just before the bat takes off. His father looked up at him and then said, “For God’s sake, Shula.” Aharon watched as his father nudged the computer with his foot. Bent down to push the drywall dust into a pile.

  Aharon went back into his bedroom and looked out the window. A white and grey cat, thick body, stumpy legs, walked along the sidewalk across the street. He watched until he couldn’t see it anymore. In the distance he saw the lights from Bathurst Street, the cars on the main road heading toward the highway, the parking lot for the strip mall with the dentist. California was west of all of that.

  Shula came into Aharon’s room and sat on the edge of his bed. She had not taken off her wig yet and it shone beneath the pot lights in his room, a golden ring reflected off the shiny strands. Just past her, on his bookshelf, was a photo of the three of them taken last year in honour of his bar mitzvah, Aharon in the black-and-white prayer shawl that had been his father’s when he was thirteen. His mother had had her makeup done for the photos, and her eyes looked wider than normal. She had on long fake eyelashes, curled, and they made her look surprised that God had blessed them with this simcha. His father wore a tall black hat that created a shadow over his face. The photographer kept telling him to lean away from Aharon, because of the shadow. And only now did Aharon realize that it looked like his father was stepping away.

  Shula said, “Did you know about her?”

  She didn’t turn around to look at him. Aharon wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him. After a moment he said, “No, Ima.” He could hear his dad lugging a suitcase up the stairs, the wheels bumping each step like a hiccup.

  Shula rubbed her hands together and they turned red from the friction. Aharon said, “She’s in California?” But it came out as a whisper. Shula turned around and placed one of her red hands on top of his leg. She tried to smile but her chin quivered. She said, “I told him you don’t leave the ones you love.”

  Aharon moved his leg away from her hand. Her face was falling. It looked like someone was draining her from behind. Like she would soon collapse in a deflated heap across his bed. He sat up straighter and said, “You shouldn’t have yelled at him.”

  “This was a long time coming.”

  “You yell too much. You’re always angry.”

  Shula said, “We stick together,” but even those words came out light, barely audible. Shula looked at the door.

  Aharon could hear his father emptying his drawers, the hangers in the closet clanging together as he removed his shirts, his suit jackets.

  Shula got up then and left the room. She walked slowly, as if her legs were aching. Aharon willed himself to hate her. He wanted to spit. But instead he turned over and lay face down on his mattress, the pillow over his head, holding it tight by his ears. He lay like that so that he didn’t hear his father packing his car, backing it out of the driveway, heading west to Bathurst, the 407 highway, Windsor, Detroit, Chicago, California.

  Now, two weeks later, he heard his mother backing out of the driveway late at night, tires crunching over dry snow. He wondered if she was finally chasing after his father. It was one in the morning. In his dark bedroom, where he was supposed to be asleep, Aharon was writing a screenplay on his laptop, a scene where his main character, a cross between an elf and a wizard and a hobbit, discovers that his parents are not dead after all but are waiting for him to rescue them. When he could no longer hear his mother’s car driving away, he opened up the last email from his father, which said, “Don’t come yet,” and he blinked, trying to change the letters.

  When he came home from school that day, his mother had been sitting in the kitchen without her wig. Her natural hair was frizzy, the colour of weathered wood, gathered at the nape of her neck in a ponytail, strands escaping all around her head like an unfocused photograph. She stared at the centre of the table as if a scene were playing out in front of her.

  “Ima?” he’d said. It was close to suppertime and the house smelled like nothing.

  Shula had turned her head swiftly. She opened her mouth to speak, but then her jaw just hung there. Aharon turned the lights on, opened the fridge for even more light. He wished he had a spotlight to shine on her face and make her blink.

  She finally said, “Something’s come up. I have to go to Hamilton.”

  “Okay.”

  “Probably Sunday. It’s nothing serious.”

  “What’s in Hamilton?”

  “Just something I have to pick up.”

  Aharon poured himself orange juice, grabbed a handful of cold potato wedges.

  “I might go sooner,” she said. But she still didn’t move. He hated that she was asking him for permission. He slammed the fridge door closed. He hated that in the last two weeks since his father left, she had done nothing without checking with him first.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” he said, knowing full well it was an avera, a sin, to talk to his mother like that. But he did
n’t care. And she didn’t bother to tell him to watch his mouth.

  Aharon got out of bed and shivered. He shuffled barefoot to his parents’ room, where his mother’s bed was still made, where on her dresser sat her wig atop the faceless Styrofoam head. Aharon put it on and smelled her — coffee and cocoa butter. He saw himself in her full-length mirror — bulging knees and elbows, rounded shoulders folding into his chest. His jaw had recently grown wider; his oily nose and chin were full of blackheads. But he didn’t pay attention to that. Instead, he recognized his mother’s cheekbones on his face, highlighted by the layers cut into the wig. In the light, the wig was the colour of cola, though he’d heard his mother’s friends describe it like coffee: “mocha,” “espresso.”

  She hadn’t yelled at all since his father left. The house was so terrifyingly quiet he felt as if he were on a TV show with the sound off.

  * * *

  In the car driving to Hamilton, Shula played Christmas carols on the radio and sang along, pausing when Jesus was mentioned. In between “Joy to the World” and “Little Drummer Boy,” she reached into her purse for an apple and said the blessing on fruit from a tree before biting into it. Her eyes burned from exhaustion, her neck was sweaty. She’d thought Aharon was asleep, so she left him a sticky note on the mirror in his bathroom that said, Decided to go now. Will be back soon. Eat oatmeal for breakfast. Cold outside.

  Shula’s key stuck in the front door lock and for a moment she worried that her father had had them changed in the last fifteen years. She jiggled the key and then finally the bolt clicked. Her driving gloves did little to keep her fingers warm, and she blew on her hands as she walked inside. The power was out in the house. Shula went down to the basement in her boots and coat to find the fuse box. She found a flashlight on her father’s workbench and when she turned it on, the light beamed around the thick darkness like the beam from a lighthouse through Atlantic fog. The basement stank of old water damage, mouldy carpet, wet pavement. The light landed on the table with her father’s unfinished model railroad diorama. A skeleton of a mountain, shaped out of chicken wire, was only half-plastered in papier mâché newspaper, layers of obituaries and classified ads in criss-crossed strips. The plywood board below was covered in mossy green foam that crumbled beneath Shula’s fingers as she leaned in to look. There were some buildings — a station, a hotel — but with the unfinished landscape, it just looked as if her father had tried to build the town backwards. The track was black from oxidization — at first she wondered if this was deliberate, but no. It was just the only way this photograph had aged over time.

  Her father had been inspired by a summer trip to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where they toured an enormous model railroad built by a man named John. Shula remembered John’s swollen belly, the way he had to bend down at his knees and then over the tracks so that he didn’t knock any of the minute scenery over with his girth. Shula was twelve years old then and only agreed to go see the railroad because her knees hurt from sitting scrunched up in the back seat of the car for two days. Her mother did not get out. She rolled down her window and lit a cigarette, the smoke rising toward the sky in a thin line, like the chain from a light bulb in a basement.

  Shula had no idea John’s model railroad would be beautiful. There were snow-capped mountains and a summer beachside. A town with a fairground, a station, and a drive-in movie theatre. John turned the lights down in the room so that they could see the lights inside all the buildings.

  “It looks like they’re moving,” Shula said about the people sitting in the diner.

  “I know,” said John. “It’s like playing God.”

  Shula’s dad bent down so that his eyes were at track level. John ran a train right by his nose, the headlight coming out of the tunnel, shining a spot on his forehead and then rushing past. Her dad didn’t blink, but Shula jumped back, preferring to remain a few feet from the low tabletop, viewing everything from a distance.

  John ran a small shop at the front of his building. Shula’s father piled supplies on the counter — track and trees, kits for buildings, miniature people frozen in mid-step, parents holding hands with their children. Shula found a necklace on a rack, a pewter seashell hidden amongst colouring books and train whistles. She slipped it onto the counter. Her father didn’t even notice. John winked at her and put the necklace into a paper bag and motioned for her to take it, which she did while her father was busy counting packs of track. She wasn’t stealing, but the deception made her stomach tingle, right up to the moment later, in the car, when her mother eyed the paper bag and said, “What did you get?”

  Shula answered, “A necklace. With my own money.”

  Her dad looked at her and then back at the road, but Shula saw the look on his face. That moment where his eyebrows knit together, when he realized he couldn’t remember her paying for anything. But maybe it was more than that — it was her father realizing that she had been there with him all along and he hadn’t even noticed.

  Now, in the dark basement, Shula stepped back from the diorama, so that the light from the flashlight widened like an unfolding curtain. She spotted the miniature billboard to the side of the mountain advertising Janis’s Diner. At the other end of the tracks was the hotel, thin with curved windows, like from a western, called Gail’s Place, named after her mother. Shula remembered sitting on a stool (it was still there, beside the diorama, steel legs, red leatherette seat) while her father sat hunched over the tracks, fumbling over the small parts with his wide fingers, sighing and blowing puffs of green up from the fake grass to his upper lips and cheeks. Shula walked forward, following the light skating on the tracks. She leaned over the table, put her nose close to the tracks, peeked into the papier mâché mountain tunnel and waited for a train, which was not coming.

  * * *

  Aharon tucked a strand of his mother’s hair behind his ear. It felt like the satin sash of his mother’s dressing gown that he used to play with when she read to him in bed. He curled the strand of hair the way he used to weave the sash around his fingers. The whole house was cast in blue light, shadows criss-crossing each other from the living room to the dining room to the hallway. Outside, the light from the street lamps and from the house lights his father had installed two months ago flickered and reflected off the snow. Light adding to light adding to light, almost brighter than the sun. Aharon turned away from the window and squinted his eyes to adjust back to the shadows.

  He did not make oatmeal. Instead, he found smoked turkey breast in the fridge and cheddar cheese and some leftover braided challah. He double-wrapped his sandwich in tinfoil and turned on the oven. While the cheese melted into the creases of the turkey cut, Aharon had a rabbinic argument with himself about whether or not turkey is really meat, about how it’s never explicitly mentioned in the Torah; how, technically, there is nothing in Jewish law to preclude him from having the sandwich that was currently treifing up his mother’s oven. The rabbis in his head yelled and screamed over ancient text, pages open like mounds of Hebrew letters, and Aharon lost track of the arguments, the pages, the reasons why he wrapped the stupid sandwich in the first place. Somewhere between the thickness of the tinfoil and the exact ratio of cheese to questionable meat, he put his head down on the kitchen table and wept. The table was from a metal patio set. There was a hole in the centre for an umbrella. The top felt cool against his forehead. His mother’s hair fell along his cheeks like a whisper.

  * * *

  Shula was also in her childhood kitchen. She had finished with the fuse box and could now make coffee. She wrapped her hands around the coffee pot and the heat travelled up her arms to her face, to the tip of her freezing nose. Her fingers tingled from thawing and she wiggled her toes in her boots until she could feel them moving. Her father had the heat turned all the way down. He used to say, “No sense keeping the ghosts warm.” It didn’t even occur to Shula to turn it up. She could feel the kitchen floor even through the soles of h
er boots, like a skating rink. The cupboard doors above her didn’t close properly. Over time, the house had shifted one way, so now they didn’t properly align. It made everything look off, like a funhouse, like Shula should hold her head at an angle just to see the room straight.

  The house still smelled of her mother. Her mother had smoked and smoked until the smoke travelled up to her brain and settled there like a cloud, growing heavy, pushing every other part of her mind aside. In the end, when she breathed through her nose, her breath came out grey. Shula used to smell cigarettes even when she was sleeping.

  That smell was the first thing she’d noticed the night she and Avi came back to announce their engagement. Her father had answered the door and said, “Like hell you will,” and Shula took a step back. She wasn’t knocked over by his defiance. It was the stench of the house, the feeling that when they walked in, the smoke would rob them of their breath. Avi also stepped back. As Shula pushed past her father, she heard him say to Avi, “You’re not welcome in here.”

  Shula was twenty-one and had recently decided to change her name from Janis; also that her parents’ secular take on Jewish life did not mesh with her blossoming fear of God. She pushed past her father to find her mother lying in her bed, covered in blankets, so many and so thick, but her fingers were still cold when Shula grabbed her hand to wake her.

  “Mum,” she said, “I want you to see.” She pressed her new ring into her mother’s palm, the white gold and the diamond bright like fire.

  Her mother shifting and moaning while her father yelled from the front hall, “Does he even know your real name?”

  “Mum, look.”

  Shula’s mother lifted her head, breathed out a grey sigh from her nose and handed back the ring.

  “Get me one.” She pointed at her dresser.