Mike doesn’t mention it, but you know he’s worried, too. He’ll sometimes lean in close after friends leave and ask if you’re in the clear yet. You press your lips together, make a light-hearted joke.
Whenever you’re alone, you place an anxious hand on your belly, feeling for a fluttering heartbeat. You’ve heard throwing yourself down the stairs can cause miscarriage. But stairs are in short supply when you live in a trailer on the rez. You wonder whether jumping from your half-metre-high porch would do the trick, but quickly conclude its accident-causing capabilities end at a sprained ankle.
It’s been a month and still no blood. You watch as the school bus carrying your sister barrels back to the rez, then catch a city bus to the walk-in clinic. You haven’t had any symptoms—no breast soreness, no fatigue, no nausea or vomiting—yet you know that tiny weight is there: unmoving, but alive.
You whisper to the receptionist what you need. The room is too small for secrets. Other patients’ ears perk up and they give you the once-over, sure the uncertain state of your uterus tells them all they need to know about you.
“Ten dollars,” the receptionist says. You must look confused because her eyebrows arch. “For the test.”
You fish a purple bill from the small yellow envelope in your purse. You wait.
Eventually a man leads you into a room and asks you to pee into a clear container, which is slightly alarming since you’ve never seen it happen this way in movies. Then again, teenage sex doesn’t lead to pregnancy in most movies, either.
You wait some more. Though there’s still no proof it’s even there, you feel that tiny pebble of a person inside you so acutely: a little anchor docking you to the reserve. With every passing minute, this future that was supposed to belong to someone else—some cheap-beer-guzzling party girl with no aspiration to do anything but keep her small waistline and have a good time—takes solid shape before you. It doesn’t matter that you took conscious effort to make yourself unfeminine, that you maintain a self-imposed standard of sobriety, that you have plans to become a famous writer immediately upon graduation. All your potential, all your plans, will remain just that: frozen by time and circumstance. You’ll continue to work an under-the-table job, lead an under-the-table life. This is how statistics are born.
The man returns, confirming what you’ve known for weeks. He offers no comment or congratulations. You’re thankful for this.
You wait to cry until you’re back on the bus. No one notices your quaking shoulders, your muted sobs.
If you were in a silent movie right now the title card would ask the most teenage of all questions: “Why me?”
The woman in front of you looks like the lead from Touched by an Angel. Red hair, pale skin, perpetually wounded. Last week this woman gave you a small book with purple lilacs on the cover. It was presented as a pregnant teen’s diary, but it was written by a middle-aged woman with a poor grasp of slang and an even worse grasp of grammar. As you read you made revisions in bright blue pen.
The woman asks if you liked it. You pause. What she really wants to ask is whether you’re considering abortion, which the “diary” has implied is a moral decision on par with blowing up a hospital. You’re not sure if on-the-spot exorcisms are a thing, but you suspect this woman could arrange one for the very disturbed or the very feminist. You cautiously observe that the book was “okay.”
She moves on, asking about your family history while Mike sits beside you, shifting uncomfortably. You wonder how many other good, confirmed Catholic girls she’s interrogated like this, how many families she’s boiled down to a series of checkmarks on a page for the casual perusal of the childless. So far your family has become diabetes, cancer, alcoholism, drug addiction, cerebral palsy, mental illness.
“What kind of mental illness?” the woman asks, leaning forward. “It’s important we’re specific so”—her voice drops a register—“the family knows.” The family. She says it with such ominous singularity it calls to mind the mafia.
You glance uneasily at Mike. He doesn’t know this part yet. No one does, really. You don’t remember being outright told to keep it secret. Repression was learned in your household as coolly as vocal tics or table manners. You didn’t even whisper about it with your sister at night between bunks, and you whispered with her about everything.
“What kind of mental illness, Alicia?”
“Bipolar disorder.” The words tumble strange and unpractised from your mouth. These words, this diagnosis, is supposed to explain away your mother’s erratic presence in your life. It seems unfair that so much pain can be summed up so succinctly. Her illness—its stranglehold—feels much bigger than six syllables.
It usually happens like this: your mother gets really sad or really angry, and some days when you come home from school she’s gone. After a month or two, she reappears just as suddenly, smiling and shiny and normal. And no one talks about it. Then two or three months later the hospital cycle starts back up again, and again, you find yourself the de facto mother of four confused siblings—cooking cheap, unfortunate dinners, changing diapers during Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s commercial breaks.
“Do you know what kind? There are different types…”
“I don’t know.” Your voice shakes. You clench your jaw and stare at the spot directly between the woman’s eyebrows, trying not to blink. Her pores are larger than yours, but smaller than your mother’s. Everything about your mother is big: her voice, her smile, her mood swings, her devotion to the Catholic Church, her love.
She cried even harder than you did when she found out. Not that you delivered the news with much finesse. In the midst of a fight with both parents, you screamed, “By the way, I’m pregnant!” just before slamming the trailer door and stomping down the driveway to a waiting cab.
Since then, you’ve heard her mutter about sin repeating itself when she thinks you can’t hear. Or maybe when she thinks you can. Her big sin was having three kids out of wedlock before marrying your father. As her own personal penance, she forced Catholicism on you and your siblings with an almost supernatural zeal. But all the rosaries in the world couldn’t curb teenage hormones or your pathological desire to please. Like mother, like daughter.
“Is it in your immediate family?” the woman asks.
“Yes, it’s my mom. Can we please stop talking about it now?” Your face is hot. Your mom’s sitting outside this windowless room right now, probably clutching one of the many wrinkled tissues she keeps stowed in her purse, smelling of pressed powder.
The woman smiles, leans further forward, places her hand on your knee the way all women like this presume they’re allowed to place hands on a stranger’s knees.
“I know this is hard for you and I don’t want to pry—” Stop the sentence there, you think. Just stop. “But we need to know how many generations back the bipolar goes. The family needs to know what they’re getting themselves into. That type of disease is genetic.”
You first learned about genetics in grade eight. Dominant and recessive genes. Chromosomes and DNA. You even did probability charts to determine what your potential kids might look like. All of it seemed exceedingly superficial. Who really cared if their baby had brown eyes instead of blue? Curly hair or straight?
Until now, it never occurred to you that genes could be toxic, planting illness like landmines in your child. One false step and your child’s brain—your child’s life—could become bloodied pulp. You think of your mother and her stop-start-stop-start life. Is she really happy? Does she remember what she does when she’s in the throes of her illness? The names she calls you when she’s manic? The times she’s been catatonic, too depressed to even speak? Late one night, shortly after she got back from the hospital, you remember her telling your dad about being strapped to a bed. She was in the restraints for hours, screaming and crying. Eventually she wet herself. She relayed the details calmly, clinically, as though they belonged to someone else. Your father said nothing. You were starting to think he
’d left the room until you heard his voice, all thunder and annoyance. He was trying to watch TV.
The memories rise unbidden, and it’s as if your body explodes. There is no working up to it, no slow progression of emotion. You’re hysterical: face now red with tears, breaths now hiccuping gasps.
The woman fumbles for a box of tissues as she stutters her apologies. You realize all at once you hate her. She’s the type of woman who, a handful of decades ago, would have carted your dad’s aunts and uncles off to residential schools without batting an eye.
Then Mike tells the woman to stop. His sentences are short and incontestable. Like the love interest in a John Hughes movie, he stands, grabs your hand and leads you out of the room, then out of the building.
Apart from the teen pregnancy and the hyperventilating, you think this is probably the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to you.
There are so few differences between idealism and arrogance. You thought it would be easy to be a full-time student and a part-time mother, coming home on weekends to nurse your baby and kiss your baby and try to convince them they’re still your baby between reading strange novels and writing eight-page essays. You thought it would be easy to integrate with your classmates, building lifelong friendships with students as eager and hungry and curious as you are.
Instead, you’ve replaced silence about your own mother with silence about being a mother—a decision that leaves you mute, marooned in small talk and superficiality. Everyone on your residence floor seems to be friends except you. You don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy in the common room; you don’t complain about unfair professors or restrictive meal plans. If this were a movie, you’d be an extra. Scenery, even.
Not that you want to be friendless. You just know that if you were to explain your situation to anyone, you’d compulsively search faces, analyzing lip twitches and forehead creases, tracking judgment like a bloodhound tracks game. It doesn’t matter that your floor has a co-ed bathroom and you’ve heard so many of their drunken hookups that you’re starting to recognize them by their coital grunts. That type of shame is normal. They are normal. Your shame is not. You are not.
The one benefit to having almost no friends is you don’t have to make excuses to run back to your dorm room and pump breast milk. Every four hours you’re back in your bedroom with a glorified suction cup, watching white drops trickle into a bottle, the contents of which you pour into a Ziploc bag, seal on all sides with masking tape and pop into the freezer. At first the milk comes easily; you’re done in fifteen minutes flat. But the longer you’re away from your baby, the longer it takes. Soon it takes an episode and a half of Veronica Mars to pump a measly four ounces. Your frozen haul shrinks considerably. Mike’s mother still brags about your dedication, as if you’re some lactating folk hero, but you’ve noticed opened tins of Similac on her counter. The only thing you alone can provide for your kid can be replaced for $24.95 at most shopping centres.
One day your gender studies class is discussing Toni Morrison’s Beloved–specifically, the scene where Sethe kills her two-year-old daughter rather than return her to a life of slavery. You remain silent as you listen to your classmates (all of whom are young and childless, all of whom are white) debate Sethe’s actions. What kind of mother does that to her child? What kind of mother would want her child to be born into a life like that? Bad mother, bad mother, bad mother.
Suddenly, your professor declares that mothers are the most hated group of people in the world. He doesn’t elaborate, he just lets the statement sit. Your stomach churns as you glance around at similarly slack-jawed students. Despite the looks of confusion, and the general tendency for university students to argue, no one protests. Not even you.
You mull over this statement for weeks. Your own mother was the stay-at-home mom to seven kids in total, though one of them chose to live with your grandmother after a custody battle and another was disabled, with very little control over her muscles, so your mother put her in a home where they could provide round-the-clock care. You’re not sure how much of any of that was her choice. Since she’s been married, she’s been in and out of hospitals too often to hold down a job. On top of that, she has the inglorious distinction of being one of the few white illegal aliens on Six Nations. If anyone reports her to band council, she’ll be not only kicked off the reserve but deported. Her options have never really been options at all.
Still, for over a decade of your life, if she was ever tired or annoyed or depressed or manic, your childish brain conveniently edited that out, preferring to preserve her as an ever-smiling, ever-fertile saint. This delusion was so strong, in fact, that until you were twelve you wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, too. You imagined a motley crew of children shrieking on the lawn and tugging at your legs and holding up their arms to you in near-holy reverie. You, their blessed mother.
Of course your own blessed mother didn’t live just for you. She taught herself computer languages, researched the latest advances in technology, wrote up elaborate business plans and promised you wild wealth would be yours within a year. But she could only ever do those things when you and your siblings were at school. As soon as any of you got home, the battle for her undivided attention began. Your brother would climb on her lap and strategically position his face in front of the computer monitor, moving his head to match hers whenever she tried to look around him. Your sister would thrust tests and homework in her face, ask pointed questions, then cry over her one-syllable responses. You would whine about how she never really listened to you anymore, as though her ability to absorb middle-school gossip trumped her attempts to program your family out of poverty. At that time, at that age, it did. None of you hated your mother, but none of you acknowledged she was her own person, either. Isn’t that its own sort of hatred? Isn’t that why you won’t tell anyone about the child you left behind?
Though Mike is sympathetic and supportive, he doesn’t seem to feel nearly as guilty as you do. He still seems whole. You watch movies together, you cuddle, you load into your father’s van and drive to his mother’s house to see your baby on Friday nights. Though everyone back home asks you about your child, no one ever asks him about his.
When you get back to Mike’s mom’s crowded apartment your baby is asleep. You know that they’re a light sleeper, that you should leave them alone, but it’s such a perfect moment. You bend down and kiss their hairline. The wrinkles on their forehead ripple outward, then smooth. For a moment it seems like you’re in the clear. Then their eyes burst open and they let loose an unholy howl and you know that you messed up.
But a funny thing happens. Between their cries you hear their tiny warbling voice say a word for the first time. It may be totally accidental, two syllables randomly mashed together, and they may not know what it means and they may only see you on weekends and your milk may have dried up, leaving them with an overpriced instant substitute, but your baby is looking at you now through clotted lashes, calling you Mama.
It’s not how you wanted it, but it’s enough.
THE SAME SPACE
very time I come back my blood runs a little faster through my veins.
Run through these streets, my instincts say, run your fingertips over each brick of each building. Feel the roughness, the sturdiness, the strength. Feel the sun and the particular way it cuts through the trees, warming your neck, your arms, your legs before its unblinking attention becomes too much and you go home sunburnt. Hear the night, which is never totally silent—raccoons hissing or late-night, liquored-up strangers laughing or street sweepers rumbling or delivery trucks beeping while backing up. See the night, see how its darkness always has an escape hatch—a streetlight or lit-up store sign to guide you home, even when the city’s radiance blocks out the stars. Place your hand over this neighbourhood’s heart, feel it beat against your palm. Love its perfection. Love its imperfection. Feel home again.
But I’m not home again. Not really. Bloor and Lansdowne hasn’t been my home for seven years. My
brother Mikey, a freshly minted adult, is moving here to go to school. It’ll be his home soon. I’m not one to believe in fate, but I can recognize a good coincidence when I see one. This is definitely a coincidence.
As we walk down the familiar streets together—past the Value Village, the Coffee Time, the restaurants drawing us in with scents of curry and coffee and cookies and chicken—I see his eyes go wide with possibility. I’m sure mine did the same back then. I’m sure they’re doing the same now. After all, few are immune to the shiny neon and collapsed boundaries of big-city capitalism.
Mikey shows me his apartment. It’s small, like mine was, but at least its floors are level. I know he’ll push against the smallness, the tightness, assert himself within this space until he feels a sort of cozy comfort in its claustrophobia. Our home on Six Nations was small, too, but we had whole fields of green to explore, thick forests to investigate, a browning creek to stick our toes in or rush across.
Though the green here is mostly confined to small patches around houses, sometimes lounging luxuriously across a handful of parks, in its place lies a different sort of freedom: anonymity. Toronto is so big, this neighbourhood so busy and full, one’s personal history gets lost in its frenzy. Back on the rez, both Mikey and I were Wes’s kids, the newest links in a chain of history that reached back much farther than anyone ever bothered to explain to us. But here, among all these people who don’t know your name or face or history, you can just be you. Unbuckle your uncomfortable past, the city murmurs. Pack it tight in a box and shove it in the back of your closet. Stretch your newly unburdened shoulders. Choose your own adventure.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 4