Julie had about a dozen kurtas in different colors, and she wore them in place of a business suit when she had anything official or important to do, which would remind me of home home. In stark contrast to Jillian’s version of dressing up—a blazer over her signature T-shirt and jeans—Julie wore saris, and that got to me more. With her hair long and straight, way past her waist, Julie looked even more like an Indian film star, like Preeti Jhangiani or another actress from the Bollywood billboards on the highway close to my mom’s house
Now she swept up her hair into a bun as she walked out of the kitchen toward her bedroom. “You gals make up your minds and I’ll be in the shower while you do it.”
It was still bright outside as Jillian and I leaned against the kitchen counter, relaxing. I felt so comfortable, even in spite of the terror the outside world had made me feel just a little while earlier. But I still wasn’t used to how long it took to get dark here. Home home it got dark by six, earlier if it was a rainy day. The sun came up around six every morning, all year long, and went down quickly around six every evening, all year long. When the sun rose at five in the morning and set at six-thirty at night, that was an extreme. Here in Canada, the sun could come up at six in the morning and go down at nine at night, after hours of twilight. At almost six o’clock, there were still a good three hours of light left. I knew that by the time we were all ready to leave for dinner it would be hours from sunset but already what I thought of as night. It was, to me, entirely magical and a bit astounding. I would never get used to eating dinner in the daylight, I thought.
Eating dinner out was a whole thing in and of itself, though. I’d been to what I’d call a Fancy Restaurant twice in my life before coming to Edmonton. Once was when Jillian visited when I was small, and I barely remember it. The other time was supposed to be a celebration dinner after I finished my Secondary Entrance Assessment. I only have vague, unpleasant memories of not knowing what to do with the cloth napkin, which we never used at home, and having a small meltdown over the long long long menu. I chose a burger, because it was the first thing listed, and my mother was disappointed that I wasn’t trying something better. “It’s supposed to be a treat,” she had hissed at me over the table. I did not arrive in Canada with good memories of going to dinner, and every time I did it with Jillian and Julie I felt a zing of worry that it would be scary and awful. That I would mess something up.
“Thinking about doing another barbecue next Saturday,” Jillian said casually. “What you think?”
I grunted. Inside, my heart lurched, switching the focus off the immediate minor threat to the looming Extinction Level Event disaster. A barbecue would mean about twenty people in and out of the house over the course of two days, since guests would come on Saturday and a few wouldn’t leave until Sunday. I had made it through a couple of her barbecues before. Some of the people tried to talk to me—and that was just too frightening. I came out of my room to eat and to use the bathroom and to show my face, to be polite, but that was it. I couldn’t do sociable. Socializing with strangers made me feel the big, yawning hole in my belly worse than ever, a feeling that no pill had yet entirely controlled.
I didn’t tell Jillian any of that, but she must have guessed something like it, because she said, “Hey, I won’t pressure you to come out and lime, if you’re not ready to hang with our friends. But Stevie says we should be as normal as possible and give you support to help you get through it.”
Stevie was Dr. Khan to me. He was my shrink. He was the one making me write a therapy journal. I usually saw him at his office in the city, but Jillian knew him socially; he was involved with the LGBTQ community; that’s how she had met him and asked him to take my case when I came. He was a round, brown Indian guy with gentle mannerisms. I liked him, maybe.
“I know,” I said, irrationally a little worried that she would feel I was trying to interfere with her life. I was aware she and Julie had considerably reduced their entertaining, one, because they had an extra mouth to feed and it was cutting into their budget, and two, because it was hard for them to ignore how withdrawn and uncomfortable I became when they had company. I fidgeted with my hands for a moment, then said, “It will be fine, Aunty. I’ll survive.”
She looked at me with concern, her eyes soft. I smiled awkwardly. When we heard the spray of the shower in Jillian and Julie’s bathroom, I pushed myself off the kitchen counter. “What should I wear? To dinner, I mean,” I asked Jillian, heading to the other bathroom to start my own preparations for going out.
“Just wear what you like, kiddo,” she said unhelpfully. I had about an hour until we left. I would need every second of it.
I peered into the closet, trying to decide which of my outfits would be the least offensive. I’d never had so many new clothes at once. Clothes in Trinidad could be expensive, and my single mom wasn’t rich. I came with some of my own stuff, but most of the wardrobe I was currently looking at was thanks to Jillian and Julie. The three of us barreled through the mall shops and walked out with bags and bags. I felt like a girl in a rom-com when I wasn’t absolutely freaked out about all the choices Jillian and Julie pushed me to make that day in a huge, crowded, loud, scary new place.
The burbling ringtone started up on my phone. It was Akilah on Skype again. She was out of her church clothes and back at home. I recognized her bedroom, the concrete wall with breeze blocks at the top to let the air circulate from outside. Her parents weren’t rich either. One of the things we had in common.
“You survived?” She was such a caring friend.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said with a sigh, and perched on the bed. “Sorry to be such a pain.”
“You’re not a pain. That’s what friends are for,” she said. She was smiling. I was relieved. But my relief was soon replaced by growing terror about the evening to come.
“Ki-ki, we’re about to eat dinner. What should I wear?” I groaned in frustration.
“Since when do you care what you wear?” she answered, chuckling. We both knew I was rather offhand about my appearance.
“We’re going out to dinner,” I said with a moan.
“Again? Your aunty rich or what?” Akilah asked seriously.
“Nah. Food over here so cheap, Ki-ki,” I said incredulously. “If you see the fridge! Packed with food. I’ll show you. Next time. Now, can you please help me figure out what to put on?” The question came out as a wail. “All I ever wear is jeans and a T-shirt. Jillian does it and it looks cool. I do it and I look like a hobo. I feel my Aunty Julie would appreciate my trying on something different for a change. Like a dress or something.”
“I haven’t seen you in a dress since First Communion,” Akilah teased. “Besides, you look good in jeans and a T-shirt. Make that booty pop,” she said. I looked at her wide grin on the screen, trying to read whether she was being serious or not.
“Leave my booty out of it,” I murmured.
“What kind of Trinidadian woman are you, if you don’t care about your butt?” Now she was laughing outright. “We sing songs about it, even! ‘Sugar bum, sugar bum-bum,’ ” she sang.
The lyrics to a famous calypso didn’t impress me. “Blah, blah, blah,” I answered. Out of the blue, I thought of the pig in the party hat at the bus station. I asked her, “Ki-ki? Do you think I’m pretty?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “I’ve told you. Yeah, sometimes.”
“Wow, that’s a ringing endorsement.” My shoulders slumped, and my disappointment must have been clear from my tone.
“No, that’s not what I mean,” she said. “You have a really pretty face and a nice figure, but you hide yourself away in baggy, shapeless clothes like you’re afraid someone will notice you’re beautiful. That’s why I said ‘sometimes.’ What I should have said is you’re always pretty but sometimes you don’t let it show. It’s like you’re scared of people finding you attractive.”
; “Meh, shut up.” I scowled but I knew she was right. I had major hang-ups about the way I looked. “You know that every Trinidadian boy only wants a red-skinned girlfriend with long, curly hair and a big butt. Brown-skinned girls are okay, but their lips and noses can’t be too African—”
“Boys are dumb.”
“Yeah, but I’m too dark, my hair is too picky, and worst of all, my butt is flat! I’ll never get a boyfriend,” I bawled in mock agony.
“Papa! I never knew you wanted a boyfriend,” Akilah teased. “You always have your head stuck in a book. Boys at your school don’t even know you exist.”
A truthful girl, Akilah. Which was neither here nor there at the moment; the point was that she went to an all-girls school, so how would she know what anyone at my coed institution thought of me? “What would a convent girl like you know about boys at my school, anyway?” I grumbled, picking at an old scab. It still killed me that Akilah—who always aced her exams—had been placed in the very prestigious school I had dreamed of attending, while I had been placed in an ordinary one. All because of that one exam.
“I saw that girl we went to primary school with, the one who’s in your class—what’s her name? Britney? She was at the mall. You might think nobody talks your business but she said your whole school is full of rumors about why you left so suddenly before the end of the school year. The talk is that you got pregnant and your mother sent you away—except that nobody can figure out who the baby daddy was that knocked you up. They think you have never been alone with a boy in your life.”
“Who’s this ‘they’ and why do ‘they’ maco so much? I had an immaculate conception, then?” I giggled, but I was nauseated. Not for blasphemy; I went to church with my mom, yeah, but I was not at all religious. Of course, “they,” whoever they were, were right. I never had been alone with a boy. To be honest, I wouldn’t have known what to do if someone found me interesting. And the thought that anybody was talking about me made me a little sick. I much preferred to be invisible. But I put those thoughts behind me. “Ki-ki, back to my IRL problems. What am I going to wear?”
“All right,” she said, flexing her arms and swinging her fists like a boxer warming up for a fight. “What do we have to choose from?”
I panned the camera to show the contents of the small closet lit by a dim overhead bulb. Bright red plaid flannel caught my eye. “What about this?” I pulled out the long-sleeved shirt and put it on to show Akilah.
“With what?”
“Dunno.”
She pursed her lips and tapped them with her index finger thoughtfully. “I know. What about that little green thing you showed me the other day?”
“With the crossbones on it? Okay. With which jeans?” I’d already pulled out three different washes and tossed them on the bed. I rummaged in the dresser drawer where I kept my T-shirts and selected the baggy crop top she’d recommended. I put it next to the black, the indigo, and the faded blue. “Yasssss,” Akilah squealed.
“Boyfriend jeans for the win!” I shouted giddily. I could not forget that I was getting dressed to go shopping and to dinner, both of which would make my anxiety shoot through the roof. Yet I felt so happy in that moment. My best friend and I were laughing together and planning outfits like normal girls. Aunty Jillian and Aunty Julie were the coolest foster parents in the world. It was just a brief excursion. What could go wrong?
journal session 2
“Write about your mom,” he said. “It will help,” he said.
If my mom and I were in a Facebook relationship our status would be “It’s Complicated.” My mom calls regularly. That is both a good thing and a bad thing.
I know it might not sound like it, but I love my mom. She gave me life and I owe her my eyes and my good cheekbones and my long legs and my razor-sharp wit and my love of reading. We have the same skin color, and my hair is like hers—or would have been if she didn’t straighten it with chemicals every two months. But despite our similarities, I’ve always been a huge disappointment to her. I looked into her eyes and saw the shadowed hopes that one day I’d turn into the kind of girl she wanted: a nice, sweet, kind girl who wears dresses constantly and goes to parties and has lots of friends and went to a prestigious school and did well in all the suitable subjects. What she ended up with was me. I knew that every time she looked at me, she saw all the things I could have been but—as she put it—I chose not to be. I was a walking failure to her.
And that was before I was rushed to the hospital.
Because I am an only child, there is not even a sibling to take the pressure off me. My mom has Aunty Jillian to compare herself to for all her life—and that must be terrible, since Jillian was perfect, except for the teeny, tiny fact that she was a homosexual—a cardinal sin in the eyes of our Trinidad community. Worse yet, my mom is the cheap knockoff version of Jillian. Younger by two years, she doesn’t consider herself as pretty, as smart, nor as ambitious. Jillian left Trinidad at twenty to study in Canada and never moved back home home. By Canadian standards she isn’t a great success, just average, but by island standards anything one does “away” is made that much more special and exciting and extraordinary. My mom, on the other hand, became a primary school clerk after my Granny Rose died. Being a clerk was a job Cynthia could do as a single mother, not a vocation. She has a comfortable, boring life—nothing like Jillian’s. As a magazine writer Jillian was always jetting around Canada and the US for stories, getting to meet lots and lots of people. My mom leaves for work at eight in the morning, comes home at five in the afternoon, goes to church on Sundays, and lives a quiet, dull life.
Jillian didn’t tell my mom that she had to struggle to do all that jetting around because she didn’t have a steady job and she lived hand-to-mouth. “I woke at thirty with no savings, no insurance, and no backup plan for retirement. Thank God for socialism, eh?” Jillian told me ruefully, winking, in one of our first conversations when I got to Canada.
She said she envied my mom’s stability. “If she only knew how much I wish I had a kid and a pension. Oy vey!” she said with a laugh. “I’d do anything to know that when I’m sixty I can sit back if I want. Cynthia doesn’t know how good she has it.”
One of the reasons she and Julie had set up the publishing company was so that they could get more stability. And Jillian had given up her magazine work. They want to start a family. I know this because one night when I was going to the bathroom really late, I overheard them having an argument. I felt like a creep, sneaking as close to their door as I could without being obvious, just to listen. Jillian was crying, saying, “You don’t know what it’s like to want a baby, Julie, you don’t.”
Julie’s voice was low and sweet, but firm. “I know what it feels like. Come on, you know I want a baby as much as you do. But I don’t see how we can have a child together right now!”
I didn’t see how either. Same-sex couples were a thing, of course I knew that; I’d seen it on TV and, like, a ton of videos. But I didn’t actually know any kids with gay parents. How would it work? I wondered.
Jillian wasn’t done, though, and I barely heard her last words through her sobs. “Every time I think of what Cynthia must have put that poor child through…Why wasn’t she my daughter? Why wasn’t she my little girl?”
It didn’t make sense how she was talking about me.
I tiptoed back to my bedroom in confusion mixed with an unfamiliar but pleasing feeling. I guess up until that point I had never considered myself such a prize. Imagine that someone wanted me. Me!
I haven’t spoken to my aunt about what I overheard, because I don’t want her to know I listened to their private conversation, but it’s stuck in my mind. It was the first time I realized that someone in my family could want me in their life.
My mother certainly never behaves like that. She doesn’t mistreat me. She is a decent mother and I wouldn’t call her abusive or a
nything. I got the normal one or two slaps most Caribbean kids got from their mothers for bad behavior. But neither by word nor deed has she showed she really wants me around. She’s done what she had to do. I am a chore, a responsibility, but not a pleasure and certainly not a privilege.
Now that I am in exile, every week, like clockwork, my mom either phones on the landline or Skypes me. She asks the same questions, carefully avoiding any mention of my illness. We don’t talk about it anymore, after her first recriminations and attempts to blame me for my craziness. Now she pretends I am on holiday. My troubles have somehow turned into an extended vacay.
The first time I went to the West Edmonton Mall I had the overwhelming impression of, well, being overwhelmed. It was huge. It was literally the biggest mall on this continent and was as big as my hometown. It had its own waterpark and ice rink. There was a pirate ship, for crying out loud. Arcades. Amusement parks. A roller coaster. Shops. Shops for shoes, books, clothes, household goods, electronics, teddy bears, jewelry, art, you name it. Of course, we had malls in Trinidad. But this was not a regular mall. You could walk for days and never reach the end. After the Apocalypse, all the survivors in Edmonton could probably just pack up and move into the mall. I had never seen so much stuff in one place.
Jet-lagged and still half dozing from my long trip the day before, I stumbled through dozens of shops behind Jillian and Julie, who were trying to get me to look excited instead of scared. “Try this,” they kept saying, as they put items in my hand and walked me to changing room after changing room. Honestly, all I remember is a blur of color and movement. I didn’t speak much because I was biting my lips, holding back my panic.
This trip couldn’t be as bad—even if walking toward the entrance was like preparing to enter a new country, one that was bright and noisy and full of decisions for me to make. I took a deep breath and exhaled. I felt like that afternoon’s misfortune was behind me. I could do this. We were on a clock, too, so Julie took charge and went straight to the first sports-gear place we came to. Jillian followed and my energy abruptly dipped. I trailed behind them, dragging my feet. Inside I was still kind of excited. Who wouldn’t want to replace beat-up old sneakers with new kicks? But that was tangled with my shame. Shame that I was completely dependent on my aunt. Shame that I was a strain on her limited resources. Which started me thinking about the reasons I was in Canada in the first place. Which reminded me of my panic attack that afternoon. I felt miserable.
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