Instead we saw the homeless man who begged outside the shop slip into the alley to drink mouthwash behind the dumpster. Ignorant, buffered as we were, we thought this merely stupid instead of sad. Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to spit it out? We saw the most ordinary of things through binoculars trained on people’s windows. High drama was a man in a blue bathrobe open to the waist making a peanut butter sandwich. The curled dark hair on his chest, his slow chew below a blank stare into the sink. He was meticulous about washing his hands before and afterwards. The Case of the Very Clean Hands. It was inevitable that we came to spy on each other.
School was a good thing for curing us of our strange habits, for helping us let go of those reveries bit by bit. Sadhana befriended a girl named Lou Lou, who was the best rope climber in gym class and who had also exploded all parameters of superstition by walking under a ladder thirteen times with no ill effects.
And it was at school that some of the other things we took for granted started changing. Two grades below me, Sadhana got used to not having me around. At three o’clock, we would return to each other with a daily-growing sense that the balance had shifted. Bright, beautiful, and sharp-tongued, Sadhana quickly assumed a role of importance in the microcosm of first grade. Quieter and more hesitant, I was less gratified than my sister by the schoolyard experience. It was hard not to feel diminished as Sadhana chattered away to her friends while we waited for Mama, without once reaching for my hand as she used to or even asking for my opinion on anything.
One afternoon I was the first one to spot our mother, and I waved.
“Is that your mommy?” Lou Lou asked. Mama had slowed down, digging in her bag for something.
“Yes,” said Sadhana.
“Really?” said Lou Lou. Her nose, crumpling up like a gum wrapper, communicated profound doubt. “You don’t look like her.”
“That’s true,” I said. Mama was white and we were brown. She sometimes claimed she was the teapot and we were the tea. Sadhana’s lip trembled, but I went on, “You should probably mind your own business.”
Unfazed, Lou Lou tilted her head and her blonde pigtails jiggled. “Touchy, touchy.”
Sadhana frowned at me then, as though I was the one who had brought on the question, as though there was something about me that made her friends have second thoughts. She grabbed Lou Lou by the hand and pulled her towards the gap in the fence. “Come on,” she said, leaving me behind. “I’ll introduce you.”
But in the evenings, as Mama cooked and we played cards or Chinese checkers or with the family of little toy bears that lived in the wooden dollhouse, everything seemed to return to normal. Sadhana listened to me and laughed at my jokes; she leaned her head on my shoulder when she started to get tired. Sometimes she fell asleep in my bed as we took turns looking through Mama’s kaleidoscope, our faces fixed cockeyed to its shifting rainbow heaven of jewelled stars.
Report cards, though, remained pitiless messengers from the outside world.
“I’m excellent at swimming and running and dancing and dodgeball,” Sadhana said, as though we didn’t already know, while Mama donned her grasshopper glasses to take another look at the note stapled to the back. “I’m even better than most of the boys when we have gym.”
I nodded. The change in her had happened almost imperceptibly, but my younger sister, though still not as tall, could by then easily outrun and out-jump me in every game. Like Mama, she was lithe and flexible, whereas I was one of the heavier girls in my grade. Not fat, but somewhere well beyond sturdy. Not graceless, but not quick either.
When Mama decided to put Sadhana into soccer, she asked if I wanted to start an activity of my own. “I’d really rather just read, I guess,” I told Mama, who kneaded my shoulders and said how proud she was that I was such a good student.
Knowing my mother was proud of me didn’t quite take the sting out of witnessing first-hand how much more excited parents seemed to be about sports. During dusky evenings on the sidelines, the bleachers trembled with the verve of parents shouting encouragement to their children, often to sets of siblings playing in simultaneous games in adjacent parts of the field. Other families brought snacks and sandwiches to these matches, even coolers of drinks, as well as a whole vocabulary of sport and exhortation with which Mama and I were unfamiliar. Up the wing! Man open! Dig deep! I could feel Mama bristling beside me when some aggressive strategic suggestion burst through the cool of the evening air towards children so small that just the sound of a harsh tone sometimes tripped them into the grass.
As the sun went down on Sadhana’s last game of the summer and a chill set in, Mama gathered in her long skirts, heaping the excess up over her knees, and, opening her giant woven bag, pulled out crocheted shawls that we wrapped around our shoulders. Mama switched her cheering allegiances from minute to minute according to whichever side was losing. She always rooted for the underdog and didn’t object to yelling as long as the messages were positive. Years of chanting and deep breathing had honed a considerable instrument, and I tried not to wince as her bellow threatened to drown out even the voices of the coaches and the referees.
When Sadhana came off the field, Mama held out her arms, her shawl sweeping back like green lacy wings.
“Did you see my goal?” said Sadhana. We were pressed together in our mother’s embrace and I could feel the warmth coming off her cheek as Mama bent down to kiss us.
“Everyone saw it,” I said, though I knew Mama had been cheering for the other side just then. “It was great.”
“Good.”
As Sadhana ran back to shake hands with the opposing team, Mama finally pulled out her camera. It was her favourite part of the game.
Walking home from the soccer field, I dragged my feet and looked at my family. Though my skin was lighter than Sadhana’s and grew even paler in the winter, Mama said I was my father’s daughter, since I had Papa’s full lips and cheeks, his large brown eyes, his propensity for sweets, and a love of bread.
My sister was darker, smaller, bird-boned, her face angular where mine was round. We both showed signs of inheriting Mama’s strong nose, but when it came to comparing ourselves to the girls at school, Sadhana never wavered in her conviction that we were as pretty as anyone else. Of the two of us, Sadhana was the best at managing to take the world in and judge it.
That kind of looking and thinking was something I did so rarely that I was always taken by surprise when someone did it to us. With Papa gone, we forgot that Mama’s part in us couldn’t really be seen, that people like Lou Lou would always be inclined to ask questions. That may have been when we began searching, hunting for more parts of ourselves that took after her, parts we could show the world to prove we were her daughters. Something to go along with everything from Papa that we couldn’t hide.
When I got my period for the first time, Mama baked a spice cake of cinnamon and cloves, its batter tinted red with the juice of crushed beets. I was eleven and ambivalent, but it was a luxury to have a celebration of my own for once, something besides the usual mutual birthdays. I asked if I could have balloons, too.
“Of course, kitten,” said Mama. She was in raptures, having long prepared us for the day it would happen. She climbed on a chair to reach the balloon stash and began tossing down red ones. “My mother called it the curse,” she said. “Jokingly, maybe, but I think it’s a sin to talk like that. It’s a blessing to grow up and become a woman. Remember that.”
When Mama began extemporizing about the blessings of blood, it was best to just sit back and take it. In truth, I had more horror than enthusiasm for my supposed initiation into womanhood. But it was also a chance to make my sister jealous, so I projected a mature contentment.
“I definitely feel a little wiser,” I said, tipping the kitchen chair back on two legs. “Less hyper.” My sixth-grade teacher was always fumbling in her purse for a bottle of Tylenol and complaining that our class
was too hyper.
Sadhana observed me with some curiosity and a little more expressed distaste. “It seems icky,” she said, “having blood come out down there.”
“Life,” Mama said, “is a messy business, pets.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. And it’s going to be beautiful,” said Mama, “watching the two of you grow up.”
We grew up like sleepwalkers. We got taller in the night when no one was looking. Dark hair came up here and there like windblown crops clinging to fallow fields. One morning I caught my sister staring at the lumps under my shirt with a hurt fascination that made me wonder if something besides my body was changing. Between Sadhana and I, getting older was like breaking the pact between us, shattering the rapt fervour of our childhood games. We had been acting as though my red-cake party had been only an interruption of the status quo, an aberration rather than a signpost, but there were rumours of adulthood built into our very bones. Every now and again they would make themselves known, and we pretended, like anyone, to have heard what they were about, and it somehow became important not to let on to the other that we might doubt or dread what was starting to seem inevitable.
We took turns refusing to play with each other, and the word itself that had characterized all the best hours of our lives began to take on a taint that made my heart ache. Play. I would not be the first to renounce it, yet I could not allow myself to be the last. One day Sadhana had a friend over, who, upon discovering our dollhouse, asked witheringly if we still played pretend. And Sadhana said, “What do you think?” and her friend’s eyes darted around before she finally shrugged. I felt angry and relieved and proud of my sister. It was how we all got by, on bluster and redirection.
Growing up seemed to mean that the only kind of pretending that was still safe was pretending we could do without it.
We woke up to the city. To the lights and its joyful sleeplessness and perpetual youth. We had seen enough of it under our window to find it less amazing than we might have otherwise, but to have it turn up right when we needed it, where it had rollicked all along in its lingual mingling and the easy lustfulness that by then was almost its birthright, was like another manifestation of the city’s magic. Weekend nights we stayed up to spy out the front windows at the late-night customers as they caroused in French and English and weaved in and out of line with shuffling footsteps that would have fallen somewhere between dancing and stumbling if such distinctions held sway in the midnight realm of Montreal.
It was because of Sadhana that we discovered the hidden appeal of the balcony above the alleyway, the one that overlooked the bagel dumpsters. Positioned over the side door of the shop where the employees took their smoke breaks, the balcony was just large enough for the two of us to lie stretched out and silent on a couple of blankets, eavesdropping on the young men who worked the late shift. It had been more than a year since Sadhana had last showed signs of her bedtime nervousness when she asked Mama if the two of us could sleep outside.
“It’s so hot,” said Sadhana. “We’ll sleep better.” With my help she had already dragged two yoga mats and some blankets onto the balcony. I wasn’t crazy about the bugs I thought might be out near the dumpsters, but it was so still and humid in the apartment it felt like the very air in our lungs might start condensing.
Even Mama, who tried to drink enough water to slake any heat wave, was looking flushed and a little wilted. She pressed her lips together for a moment and considered my sister in one fractional, holistic squint before saying, “That’s a nice idea. Just be sure to put on pyjamas.”
Sadhana and I shared a furtive smirk. Mama was under some misconception that the whole world liked to sleep in the buff.
When the bagel boys came out, we were stretched out on our backs with our eyes on the stars, nestled so closely I could feel my sister’s hair standing on end where our goosebumped arms brushed together on the blanket. As the male voices rang out in French, English, Tamil, and Punjabi, we thrilled to the daring of our own concealment and to another feeling — one that felt connected to the great island of our city and everything it contained, to which we were still hoping to gain admission. An idea of getting older that did not feel altogether like loss.
When Sadhana got her period, she told Mama not to bother with a cake. She said it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone else made a big deal over.
“Half the girls in my class have theirs already,” she said. “And believe me, nobody threw them a party.”
Mama had already measured the flour and the sugar into a bowl, but she didn’t complain. “As long as you don’t feel any shame,” she said. “I want you to know that this is a beautiful, joyful thing.”
“Don’t worry,” said Sadhana. “I get it.” As Mama put away the cake pan and the measuring spoons and stood deliberating over the dry ingredients in the mixing bowl, I saw Sadhana go to the oven to check that it was turned off.
Mama said, “I didn’t start it preheating.” She took a step back from the counter and watched as Sadhana tapped the dial three more times before joining me back at the table. Though Mama and I had never talked about it, I knew my mother was worried that the strangeness that had afflicted my sister after the fire might have started to return.
“No cake is one thing,” said Mama after a thoughtful moment. She was still looking at the oven dial. “But what do you say to the three of us going on a little trip?”
So, one weekend just before I started grade nine, Mama acquired the use of a cottage near the Gatineau Hills, through someone in one of her Westmount yoga classes. When she told us we were going, Mama said, “I want a weekend where I have my big girls all to myself.” She’d started calling us her big girls that year, after the measuring wall beside the fridge had declared in faint but definitive pencil lines that we were both officially taller than she was.
Sadhana said, “That’s every weekend,” but I knew she was excited. Mama had an elusive way of being around when she was home. There were always people calling or dropping by for advice, or meditation sessions going on in the living room or sewing circles in the kitchen sustained by endless cups of tea. Mama always had us all to herself, but we didn’t always have her undivided attention.
I liked seeing Mama at the cabin, doing things we didn’t know she could do. Chopping firewood, lighting pilot lights, steering from the back while Sadhana and I sat astounded and life-jacketed before her like two useless orange peas in the pod of the red canoe.
In the afternoon, while Mama did chanting on the deck, Sadhana and I sat further down the shore on stumps by the edge of the water. Sadhana was bored, and the still water oppressed her. She cheered every time a motorboat passed, making waves that reached our shore as the smallest ripples. She waved at a water skier who didn’t wave back. I took off my shoes and waded in, hunched close over the water, looking for tadpoles. With every step, I kicked up sand, no matter how softly I tried to walk. Every pace yielded a sandstorm, an underwater mushroom cloud.
“We should have brought a volleyball,” Sadhana said. She was on the school’s junior team, the Gators, who were the reigning city champions. In the final game of the year, she had broken her pinky setting the ball for match point and had become an instant school hero. I hated volleyball.
“No net,” I said.
“No problem,” said Sadhana. “I bet Mama could build one.”
On the first night, there were bats, and I had never seen my mother so excited as when they swooped down close to our heads before gliding back out over the water. Sadhana and I shrieked and cowered, and Mama hushed us, urging us to open our eyes and watch them arcing and crossing each other and reversing direction mid-course.
“That must be how we look to someone on the outside,” said Mama. “The way they fly, blind but sure.” She held her hands out to the side like a scarecrow, as though she wanted to catch one or show us how well they could avoid her. Two came pl
unging over her head, but she didn’t flinch.
“Careful, Mama,” said Sadhana. “They carry rabies, you know.”
Mama just laughed at us and stretched up to the sky, arching her back as if she was about to swing down into a set of sun salutations.
“Don’t be afraid, kittens,” she said. “Not ever.” Mama was a specialist in impossible advice.
Then Mama got a fire blazing and led us in a dance around it, singing out a rhythm like a drum beat, BOOM-bah-boom-bah-bah, BOOM-bah-boom-bah-bah. Mama made herself small on the downbeat before springing up on the next one, her head bobbing back, her arms folding in and out like book covers falling open. I tried to imitate her but it turned into a chicken dance. Then we were all doing it, with Mama clucking out the song until Sadhana and I were laughing so hard we both fell down in the dirt.
The evening before we were supposed to leave, Sadhana searched the cabin up and down and came up with a bottle of tequila, a fifth full. It was in a cabinet, tucked away behind a make-your-own-stained-glass kit.
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes.” She put the bottle down on the table and went to the cupboard to get two small glasses. Mama was outside chopping more firewood, and we had promised to gather kindling as soon as we were finished our game of Crazy Eights.
“I think they hid the bottle for a reason.”
“They won’t even notice.”
Sadhana poured us each a shot, and I wondered where she had ever even gotten the idea to drink. She was eleven and a half. When I was her age, in grade six, my friends and I were mostly into skipping double-dutch, with the occasional tame foray into Truth or Dare.
“I think you’re supposed to mix it with something,” I said. I was trying to sound disapproving but it came out excited.
“There’s nothing.”
We were clinking glasses when we heard the sound of the screen door. Mama was standing in the cabin, clothes and hair spiked with sawdust. She was an owl, with her eyes wide and the moon rising behind her over the lake. She drew her head back and then forward again as she stared first at our guilty faces, then peered at the bottle on the table.
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