by Amy Spurway
Two big bowls of broc-o-glop nuked and devoured. A good-sized fire roaring in the pit out back. The baby sound asleep. Half a bottle of posh vino consumed as we watch the sky become a blanket of star-dappled country dark. Char and I officially catch up on everything — real or imagined — that has happened since we last saw each other in the dingy basement apartment we shared in Halifax more than fifteen years ago. Before she bailed on our lease and ran away to join a psychedelic circus in Germany, which actually turned out to be a cult. But a fun cult, apparently. Not like the cult she later found herself in on the fringes of Shanghai. That one forbade booze, sex, and drugs, and encouraged members to renounce material wealth, serve others, and refrain from inflicting pain on the self, the Earth, or fellow beings. What kind of cult does that? Not a good one, by Char’s standards.
Speaking of cults, the first thing I toss on that bonfire is the handful of Viva Rica! The Essence of Inspiration! Stacey Fortune, Manager of Marketing business cards, plucked from the bag of crap they handed to me when they cleaned out my desk at the office. The cards don’t burn very well. They melt into a greasy, green, smoky glob of acrid pretense. The only other thing in that bag was a file folder I’m sure I meant to torch months ago. It contains a year’s worth of weekly rose delivery cards, schmaltzy love-note Post-its, and a wedding “vision board” from my days with Dave the Douchebag, which also burn in an equally unsatisfying manner. They flare bright, hot-orange and golden for a minute or two, then abruptly become unrecognizable, black and charred. Twenty-year-old stacks of the Cape Breton Post, on the other hand? Those babies burn beautifully! Thick, heady grey billows of smoke and ash puff from the firepit as I feed armloads of newspaper into the hungry flames.
When the newspaper is gone, I see the last thing I had on my incineration agenda. The Hall of Shame page from Mama’s photo album. I move to pitch it into the blaze, but Char snatches it out of my hand and examines it in the fire’s glow.
“Who’s that? Your grandparents?”
“Yeah, and my father.”
“Dude, you can’t burn those. Your mother will kill you.”
“Well, she’ll have to get in line. Brain tumours get first crack at me. Besides she hates those pictures. I’m doing her a favour. Exorcising some demons.”
“Exercising demons makes ’em stronger, dummy.” She peels back the plastic, tears out the pictures and stuffs them down the front of her sarong. “You’ll thank me later.”
The opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven” come ebbing out of the Mustang’s stereo. Char reignites her baseball bat of a joint, rushes over to crank the song even louder, blows a kiss at the baby monitor when she hears Daktari momentarily fuss then settle from his car seat inside the trailer, then writhes back to the bonfire. She hauls heavily on the joint and juts it toward me. I pass, swigging from my bottle of Shiraz instead.
“Some people lose their memories with these tumours, or with the treatments.” I shrug, my eyes fixed on the fire’s mesmerizing dance. “But what kind of life is it if you can’t remember your mother’s face, or who you were? Or where you put your fuckin’ pants. People are just a bunch of memories stitched together. When that starts to fall apart, what’s left?”
Char stares up into the primordial breadth of the blackened sky.
“So d’ya start doin’ Gimp again or what?”
“What? No.”
“No as in ‘yes,’ or no as in ‘not yet?’”
“Jesus, I thought we were having this philosophical conversation about memory and identity and me dying and shit,” I say.
“You were,” she laughs. “I was being stoned and staring at the sky and wondering when you were gonna start screwin’ Willy Gimp again. I’d do him if I was dying.”
“I dunno. Maybe. I’m kinda busy.”
“With what?’
“With stuff. Dying stuff. I’m trying to write something, too. A memoir, I guess, about who I was. So none of them other arseholes can go telling stories about me.”
“Well, I’d definitely do Gimp if I was dying and writing a memoir. Sex sells. Specially some bow chicka wow woaaaaw with a guy with cerebral policy. Handicapped is the new black, ya know.”
Char jumps up and moves between the fully descended darkness and the firelight in a blasphemous marriage of belly dance and one-woman mosh pit as Robert Plant’s voice howls from the car stereo, about winding roads and shadows taller than souls.
“You’re a warped horn dog. You have ADHD. You’re crazy as a bag of hammers, you’re offensive as fuck. And you dance like a stripper. Nothing has changed.”
“Actually, I am a foxy beaver. I eat Ritalin like candy. My craziness is a mute point. People being offended is their problem. And I was a stripper. In Columbia, where the putas dance like sexy raindrops!” She slithers her arms above her head, and flows close to me, cupping my face in her cool, electrified little hands. “Meanwhile, you, my sweet, brain-tumour-infested bitch, have athazagoraphobia.”
“Moot point. And it’s agoraphobia. And I don’t,” I say, brushing her off me.
“Like fuck. I mean Atha-za-gora-goddamnfuckin’-pobia. It’s a fear of forgetting shit, and a fear of being forgotten. Or ignored. Being a regular old nobody. That’s why you’re obsessed with remembering everything. That’s why you are writing your life down. And that is why you are secretly happy as a pig in shit that everybody is flapping their gums about the fact that you’re home and you’re sick. You are also a chicken. So you’re right, nothing has changed.”
“How am I a chicken?” I say, equally insulted by her insinuation as I am by the emptiness and overall mediocrity of my bottle of wine.
“Because you don’t have the balls to drag Gimp out into the woods for a good ol’ boot knockin’ the way you used to. And you won’t write a life story that really bleeds truth from your little gold veins if all you do is remember stuff and wait to die, without actually looking for more. And you won’t shave your head unless somebody pushes ya. You’re a chicken. You balk at everything.”
She chicken walks around the firepit, going “Bawk! Bawk! Bawk!” for a minute or two, staring a hole through me with her mad, wide, sparkling, swamp-green eyes and sneering at me with her devilish grin before resuming her serpentine trance dance.
“Pass me that joint, go get the clippers and some scissors, and crank up the fuckin’ Zepplin,” I say.
Beneath a waxing moon, around a roaring fire, and under the influence of snaky chicken dances, wine, weed, and canonized rock riffs older than the hills, we dance and spin and play air guitar — Char dressed like a pop art Zulu priestess and me in a black yoga uniform that has never seen the upside of a downward dog, with a big frizzy ponytail thrashing around on the top of my head. It feels cultish or paganish. Probably looks like two messed up, middle-aged broads out in the woods pretending they have nothing to lose, while occasionally pausing to listen for crying through a crackly old baby monitor.
I hold scissors in one hand, thick cord of my hair in the other. I close my eyes as my chest fills with a strange sensation, a mixture of extreme detachment and profound presence. I am not thinking about the future consequences of being bald. I am not thinking about vanities past. All of that evaporates.
“Fuck it,” I say, as I squeeze the scissor handles together and push the blades through the stubborn strands. Seconds later, I am holding my long, chocolate-brown-with-caramel-highlights ponytail in front of me. Two hundred and seventy-six bucks worth of salon colouring, right there. I toss it onto the fire, which unleashes the unmistakable stench of burning hair into the night and ruins the whole sacred ritual vibe I’d been riding.
Char flips the clippers to life. Her soft hands and the hard appliance caress my head. I feel the steady vibrations of every pass all the way through my skull and into my chest. This is not what I thought it would feel like. Moments later, my hands quiver as they travel over the unfamiliar terrain of my freshly liberated skull.
“Shit, Crow. That’s rad. Like, GI Jane rad.
Your head’s not as lumpy as I thought it would be. You are totally gonna need some big honkin’ earrings to rock that shit proper though.” Char laughs.
I cry.
Headlights come ripping up the driveway. Too fast and too careless to be Mama. A battered old Monte Carlo sputters up alongside the trailer. This time it actually is Peg, ranting and raving the second she hoists her corpulence out of the groaning car seat.
“What in the name of Mother Mary, meek and mild, do youse think you’re doin’? Your little bonfire is sending smoke all up the road. Them woods are as dry as an old nun’s gusset! There’s a fire ban on from Lands and Forests. Yas don’t even have a bucket of water! And are those your mother’s papers? She’ll have your head on a platter!”
She stops ranting when she notices my head.
“What? Doncha like it?” I say, wiping away any trace of tears, sweet sarcasm tinging my words.
“If I can’t say anything nice, I shouldn’t say nothin’ at all.”
“That’s never stopped you before.”
“Fine. You wanna know what I think? You look like a skinhead. Or a cancer patient.”
In the flickering shadows and light, out of the corner of my eye, I see Char tugging on her ear lobes with wide cupped hands and mouthing the words, Earrings. Big honkin’ earrings.
I direct my full attention to Peg.
“Well,” I say, “they have to stick needles into my brain to see if it’s actually cancer or just tumours in the worst possible locations.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. Anything for the attention, I guess,” she says, her buggy eyes lurching back in a dismissive roll.
“Right. I came back to this shithole island with a head full of tumours just so you and all your nosy friends could spoil me with all your lavish attention,” I spit.
A baby begins to holler over the monitor.
“Charlotte, go get the baby and get in the car. You, missy. Get a bucket and put out that fire before I call the cops.”
Before my fury-forged, wine-sharpened tongue can tear a fleshy strip off Peggy, Mama’s car comes clattering up the driveway. Char comes out of the house carrying a car seat, with her son nestled quietly into the zebra sling. Peg cocks an eyebrow at me, challenging me to say more. I shut up, just for spite.
Char obediently gets in the passenger side of the Monte Carlo. Peg strides over to Mama as she hauls her tired bones out of her own car, says she will come pick up the Mustang in the morning.
Mama comes to me, the deep, exhausted folds in her face uncomfortably emphasized by the bonfire’s undulating flickers of shadows and light. She stares at me for a moment. Does the same eyebrow cock as Peg’s, challenging me to say something.
“Ma, I just —”
“Go get a bucket of water and put that fire out. And while you’re in there, put the tea on.”
[…]
After much preening, I surmise that shaving my head was a terrible idea. One minute, I catch a glimpse of myself in the door of the microwave, with a little bit of soft light behind me and my chin tilted just so, and, Ahhh, there she is. 1990s Sinéad O’Connor. Then I go take a piss, and as I’m reaching for the toilet paper I glance up into the mirror, Jesus Christ! What’s Gollum doing in my mother’s bathroom?
Also, Char lied about the lumpiness of my head. The “cow licks” that Mama used to plaster down with a swipe of her licked fingers, that I artfully styled around, now nakedly protrude from my scalp for the world to see, along with the remnants of my Eddie Munster widow’s peak, my mismatched ears, and the creeping neck hairline of an old Italian man. This is why head shaving was used as a punishment for loose women. This is why most women only ever talk about doing it. This is why a shaved head on a woman is a mark of complete IDGAF or all-out insanity. It’s crazy hard to face yourself, never knowing if it will be Gollum or Sinéad staring back.
It wasn’t long after things went down the crapper with Dave this past winter that I stood in front of the mirror in my pristine glass and marble bathroom, my hair clenched in my hands, thinking, I’ll show that bastard how much I hate his guts by hacking and discarding the part of me he loved most. Then I will. Be. Free. My pseudo-friend Ami was there, egging me on, even though she was the one who set me up with her dear friend Dave in the first place. She was fresh off a yoga retreat in India and was all “let go of your attachments,” and “re-align to your life’s purpose,” and “unleash the cosmo-licious power of your crown chakra” and shit. Which was ultimately what helped me make my decision that night: if Ami thought I should do it, there was no way in hell. This is a woman who’d glide around the Viva Rica office wrapped in a purple shawl, bowing with her hands in the sacred Anjali mudra, saying Namaste to everyone. But as soon as she put on her fur coat and started sashaying down the street, she was all flying elbows and nasty sneers at anyone who walked too slowly. A woman who loudly called squeegee kids and panhandlers disgusting. A woman who changed her name at the age of thirty-two, because Ahhhh-meee sounded more spiritual and exotic than Krista. Plus, she had professionally straightened fake burgundy tresses all the way down to her arse, and I didn’t see her rushing to end all her self-cherishing and liberate her ego by hacking it all off in the bathroom with a dull, squeaky pair of scissors.
Now that it’s done, I swing recklessly between feeling fierce, brave, and liberated, and ugly, shallow, and helpless. I want to call Char and tell her she’s a liar. I want to Instagram Ami a picture of my best Nothing Compares to Sinéad angle and tell her it feels. So. Ahhhh. Mazing. I wonder if there are any earrings in the world big enough to balance out what my bald head is revealing.
And drinking an entire bottle of wine all by myself? That was a full-blown terrible idea. I did, however, have the good sense to go to bed and not sit up with Mama drinking tea and gin, listening to John Denver sing about country roads and seasons of the heart. Which means I also missed seeing Mama cry. Whenever a few drinks inspire her to haul out the John Denver records, I know what’s coming.
She pulls the old wooden rocking chair up beside the stereo, closes her eyes, and wraps herself in the stories of the songs. Her voice turns to velvet as she sings along. And by the time Denver gets to the chorus, tears are escaping from the corners of her still-closed eyes and she’s rocking in rhythm. But there is never any mess to Mama’s crying. Her voice effortlessly mops up any trace of non-musical emotion that might interfere with the tune. Her face absorbs the tears before they can spot her clothes. There’s no sobbing. No snotting or sniffling. Not so much as an off-key crack of unrestraint. Just John Denver, his stories, my mother, her tears. Although I know that Mama’s John Denver tears come from someplace other than West Virginia or windy Kansas wheat fields or Grandma’s feather bed. Just like her Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson foot-stomping, fist-banging, fuck-the-world-and-the-two-bit-horse-it-rode-in-on grin comes from someplace other than Luckenbach, Texas, and has nothing to do with red-headed strangers, blue eyes crying in the rain, or mamas letting babies grow up to be cowboys. Mama’s tears and grins and memories come from here. From me. From my father.
While my head grapples with my usual morning malady, as well as the injury of a whole bottle of wine and the fresh insult of baldness, Mama’s head is threatening to explode. She just realized that most of the fire last night involved the heaps of old newspapers she’s been hoarding for decades, and she noticed the pictures missing from the Wall of Shame page in the photo album. She’s pissed. Top volume Johnny Cash “Ring of Fire” at five a.m. pissed.
I get up before she has a chance to level the usual threat and brace for a dose of the maternal wrath. A little “who died and made you queen?” followed by the doling out of some arbitrary and unnecessary chores. Shoo the wasps away from the rose, but not the bees. Flip the cushions on the couch. Call Peggy and apologize for being an asshole. But there’s none of that.
“You’ll have to clean up your own vomit today, Missy,” is all she says as she pulls on her worn-out work sneakers.
I try to tell her I’m sorry.
“Sorry is as sorry does,” she grunts, busying herself with tiny adjustments to the frayed laces on her shoes. Still, she holds the sides of my newly shorn head in her hands and plants a kiss on my forehead before she leaves. On the counter, there’s a fresh pan of broc-o-glop to replace the one that Char and I finished in last night’s stupor. The tea on the stove is piping hot, made with three fresh bags.
When she’s gone, I go outside with the giant bag of gnarly old flower bulbs that I found under one of the newspaper mountains last night. I dig little holes with a tablespoon, and tuck the bulbs into the cooling earth, all over the yard. Mama would always snort at me when I turned up my nose at the insect-buzz of that beast of a rose bush, or the aphid-covered lupins in the ditch, or the slimy sadness of daffodils and hyacinths and lilies when they die.
“Good Lord, Crow, who complains about flowers?” she’d say. “They’re nothing but beauty-full.”
So this is me, apologizing for burning her papers and letting Char make off with a couple of photographs I mistakenly assumed Mama’d sooner be rid of. My sorry is as sorry does. By the time these flowers bloom in the spring all of this will be forgiven, if not forgotten.
[…]
On the first day of fall, Mama and I head to the Regional Hospital in the dreary morning dark for a fun-filled day of head cages, foot-long needles, and robo-surgeons. Mama squeezes my hand too hard as we walk down the hall to the desk where a terse and cranky woman hands me stacks of paperwork, and begins grilling me about when I ate, what colour my snot is, and where I’ve been.
“Christ, this one’s worse than Peggy,” I grumble. Mama discretely pinches the back of my arm. I jump a bit, smile, and answer.