“I just don’t like lying to my kid, that’s all.”
The wishing had been allowed to stand, for it was hard to argue with tradition, especially when he was going to other kids’ birthday parties. In this, as in so many other things, I found myself trapped by convention. I wondered where Mama had found her resolve.
When Quinn had finished deliberating and had blown out his candles and sucked the icing off each of them one by one, he praised the cake as we began serving it. “Thank you, Mommy. Thank you, Auntie S. For my cake.” He gasped as we cut into it and he remembered it was chocolate.
“You’re very welcome.”
Sadhana kissed him on the top of his head. “We love you, Quinny-pie.”
Later that night, I watched her out of the corner of my eye while we ate the lasagna together in front of a movie Quinn and I had checked out of the library. I had served her a large piece, the same size as what I was eating, and she had not protested. Quinn sat between us, and I tried to give the impression both that I was not watching her, so she would be at ease, and also that I was in fact watching, so she wouldn’t try to sneak any of her food into the garbage. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a meal without thinking about it. No doubt Sadhana did, too.
She was often skirting the edge of decline. A week or two or four would go by and she would have a kind of lightness that made her seem free of it, and then a bad grade on a paper or a fight with a friend would return her to the sullenness and fatalism of high school. Somewhere along the way, in spite of everything we had suffered, she had lost the ability to accept disappointment.
I watched her carefully. She pushed herself in her studies now, and she pushed herself in her dance classes, which was where she had channelled her athleticism. There was a contradiction in trying to monitor her, for the harder she strived, the more danger I felt her to be in. Sadhana’s illness placed her on a teeter-totter where she was sometimes up and sometimes down, but she had not yet taken herself off the ride. I had learned enough to know that the matter of her eating, or not, was always something under consideration. Hers, and, by necessity, mine.
Most of her new friends at university didn’t know. She’d shed her friends from high school and spread a story about a rare stomach disorder, an illness that could plausibly keep her out of classes for a week at a time and wreak havoc with her weight. Or so I gathered in snatches from eavesdropping on her telephone conversations. She’d been keeping her friends away from me for a few weeks, after I’d shared her secret with a man she was seeing.
He was a business major, swaggering and wry, and she was both smitten and overworked, strained by her classes and the kind of self-induced pressure-cooker of perfectionism that could precipitate a relapse. Quinn was at a sleepover, and I’d gone to the library, followed by a late movie, because Sadhana had begged for some alone time in the apartment. The business major and I ran into each other in the kitchen on a late-night snack run as he was arranging apples, grapes, and aged cheddar on a plate. He had a pair of cute, small feet, and a sweaty bare chest swirled with hair. I’d already heard the sick squeak of Mama’s old box spring followed by low laughter and then moaning. And now whistling. A Johnny Cash song.
“Hullo,” he’d said. “Here for a snack? Want me to leave out the cheese?”
“Just make sure she eats some.” I took the block of cheddar from him without a thank-you. “And don’t jerk her around. My sister doesn’t need another trip to the hospital.”
I left him looking puzzled, but it was only a day or two before the seed I’d planted flourished into a bitter-leaved conversation piece. And after he had a talk with my sister about it, he was gone.
The moment I stopped being afraid, it came back. Or it seemed that way. It had been a year of calm, a year of finding our way. We became ourselves more than we had ever been. Sadhana joined an amateur dance troupe and, with arms flung nearly as high as the spotlights, leapt jetés across a scuffed black stage in a piece called Treeline. From the audience, the flash of her lean brown hands looked like bats pitching in the air, and I felt like I was part of the lonesome story she conjured from the inclinations and contortions of her own body, as though I had somehow helped nurture her bravery and expressiveness.
She started her second year of university, taking an extra course in literary theory that spawned our meandering evening conversations on deconstruction that had the extra virtue of driving Quinn to bed early. I had finished my degree and was doing a bit of freelance editing, though we were still being frugal with the payments we received from Uncle. It had taken a while, but we had found a domestic rhythm in which the mountains of laundry and dishes that had eluded us for years suddenly evened out into clear plateaus we could see our way across. We divvied up what had to get done, and we did it.
We had just finished ignoring another one of our birthdays when Sadhana declared that she was going to reorganize the shelf with all the spices. I’d grouped them according to usual culinary pairings when we moved in, but Sadhana thought we should go alphabetical. Quinn had gone to bed after his favourite canned ravioli and a chapter of Narnia. We were lingering over white wine and a late-night asparagus risotto, a small treat in silent acknowledgement of the occasion. We were still eating when she jumped to her feet.
“I’ve been thinking about this forever,” she said, gathering up all the mismatched shakers and bottles. She took down the Mexican spices and the ones for baking, and then she was brandishing the container of hing.
“Should I put this under A for asafoetida or H for hing or M for merde du diable?”
“Put it at the end of the row. Otherwise it ruins the symmetry.” The hing was in a Ziploc baggie wrapped inside a yellow plastic bag, which in turn was stuffed into an airtight glass Mason jar. Mama had been a firm believer in its healthful properties, and it went wonderfully with lentils, but hing was like the world’s final fetid onion stagnating in a ditch, determined to leave its annihilators one last harrowing trace of its existence. It smelled, pervasively.
“Hmm. System or symmetry.” Sadhana passed the jar from hand to hand as she weighed it in both senses. “Crazy to keep it, when neither of us uses it much anymore.” But even as she spoke, she put it back where we had kept it since we moved in.
“Maybe we should,” I said, swallowing the last bite of risotto and patting my stomach. Mama always said hing was good for staving off indigestion. I had persevered a few bites past sufficiency, but exceptions could be allowed on holidays, even unacknowledged ones. I poured myself more wine before checking to see if Sadhana’s glass needed to be refilled.
Her plate, next to mine, looked full.
I forgot the wine and watched her as she bent to her task of sorting. All at once, I became suspicious. She was washing and drying the outside of each spice bottle before putting it into place. The baggy grey sweatshirt she wore after dance classes or the gym had become a kind of uniform, over a pair of loose cotton pants. Lately, I had rarely seen her wearing anything else. Her eyes were bright and large.
I stood up. “Hey,” I said, moving closer to her. “Let me help you with that.”
I grabbed her and felt my fingers sink into the jersey until they reached the narrow rod of her arm, slender as a hanger. With my other hand, I pulled at the bottom edge below her waist and saw the top sweatshirt layered over two more below. Her hipbone protruded from her pelvis like a door jamb, and I gasped. Her fingers scrabbled at the edge of the counter.
“Sadhana.” For a moment, I felt dizzy. “No.”
She pulled away and her elbow swung up like the wing of a bird trying to take flight. “God, get off!” she screamed. “Get off me!”
I clung to her. “Not again. We’re not doing this again.” Her arm felt fragile in my grip, and though I worried about breaking it, it only fuelled my ferocity. Because of the brittleness of her bones, she had already had to contend with a hairline fracture in
her wrist.
“Are you listening, Sadhana?” I could have been shouting or whispering — it felt like there was not enough air in the room to tell. But she heard me. My lips were right next to her ear.
“Tell me,” I said.
She fainted.
She spent two nights in the hospital with a nutritional IV, but we decided to stick to outpatient treatment. She didn’t want to lose the semester, even though it was her rabidness over her classes that had probably caused the crisis in the first place. She bargained her way into it by pledging utter commitment to getting better and absolute compliance with all my rules: high-calorie meals at the table under my watch, twice-a-day calls from the payphone on campus, no more than two dance classes a week. I had a little more time on my hands since Quinn had started kindergarten — more even than I would have liked, because everything that there was, every new surplus of time and effort, was turned only to my sister. All my spare solicitousness and every extra hour of listening ears.
Mostly, I agreed with her that it would be better for Quinn if she stayed home, as I dreaded the thought of taking him to the hospital to see her.
Of all things, it was the referendum on Quebec separation that pulled her out of the slump, like a bright lure dangled into placid waters. It caught all of us in the mouth, and none of us could stop yammering. Yes or no, oui ou non, or as on the billboards, OUI or NON. There was the currency issue, the question of the Mohawk lands. There was the press release to recruit Quebec soldiers for the army of their new homeland-to-be. There was nobody without an opinion, and for Sadhana, stuck in the new rut of only her and her disease, it was the perfect thing to help hoist her out. It was French or English, in or out, and even having no allegiance except to the great ideal of coexistence became hard with all the speeches and promises flying back and forth.
The thing with the referendum was that it was impossible not to care. Between our neighbours down the hall who glued a petition to their door (for what, exactly, we never could determine, but we knew it was something to do with Anglo rights after we saw our francophone building manager mocking them for their supposed oppression) and the blue and white flags draping the balconies of the building across the street, it was hard to stop thinking about it.
Not that Sadhana wanted to, anyway. “If Mama were alive,” she said, “she’d support separation.” Whenever I heard the word separation, I pictured the whole province cut adrift, floating off somewhere north to Labrador, the island of Montreal left on one long tether as a compromise for the city folk who hadn’t wanted to leave. It made me panicky, because I wasn’t a strong swimmer.
“Like you?” I couldn’t quite keep the derision from my voice. My sister, the separatist.
“Yes, like me.” Sadhana was ensconced in the papasan chair where she’d taken to sleeping among a complicated arrangement of cushions. When she got that thin, it was almost impossible for her to lie down comfortably with her own bones.
“Doubtful,” I said. Mama was all for diversity, for inclusion. She used to say that every different language in Montreal was like tuning your brain to a different channel. The full cable package. It was a strange comparison, considering she’d never owned a television. “Mama hated all that pure laine stuff. You know that. And she loved Canada. All of it. French and English both.”
Sadhana pursed her lips, an arrogant kind of expression, I thought, for someone who could barely hold up her own head. She looked older when she got that skinny, her hair sparser and dull, and it was hard not to defer to her when she had both the look and the grit of an old woman. “It’s a whole different issue,” she said. “It’s self-determination. You remember how she supported the Basques.”
“That was only because of that Basque mail carrier.” A chatty moustachioed fellow who used to come up for Mama’s mint tea, he was much beloved for bringing us fruit chews and cancelled postage stamps.
“No,” said Sadhana. “It was the whole principle of the thing. Just think about it.” She was in good spirits then, fuelled entirely by her perception of herself as inhabiting a moral high ground already sanctioned by our dead mother. She’d even gone back to working on a sweater she’d started knitting in high school during her first stay in the hospital, a project we used to joke was so tedious that she started getting well just so she wouldn’t need to finish.
I was the one who realized we’d actually lived through the last referendum, when Mama was still alive. Deciding we needed to take a less speculative approach to current events than using bits of news overheard in the elevator as the launching point for hour-long quarrels, I’d brought up a day-old newspaper left in the lobby by one of our neighbours. Shoving aside a pile of Quinn’s picture books from the library, I spread out the paper on the table with a great deal of crinkling importance and had just started reading when I spotted a sidebar with a mini history lesson.
“The last referendum was in 1980,” I said, blinking with surprise, calculating. We would have been seven and five. Sadhana paused mid-stitch, mouth falling open. “We should be able to remember it.”
But we didn’t. To her credit, however much she wanted to retain the idea of Mama’s support for separatism, Sadhana didn’t bother fabricating a sudden memory. But the fact that we had no actual recollection of Mama’s allegiances didn’t stop us from fiercely debating them. Neither of us admitted aloud that our inability to remember Mama’s position meant she had probably stayed well out of it.
“Did she bake a cake with a maple leaf on it that one time?” I asked, closing my eyes to try to remember. “I can picture something red and white.”
Sadhana smirked. “I think that was supposed to be Strawberry Shortcake.”
So Sadhana knitted and argued and got more cheerful every day. Then we disagreed again, as we watched the poll numbers going up for the separatists, and Sadhana started eating breakfast and the sweater had a full sleeve and even a cuff. And then we argued more, and she was eating twice a day and she was so merry and almost normal-looking that she rolled the one-armed sweater around both needles and the ball of yarn and put it back in its grocery bag in the closet. Neither of us had managed to produce a single definitive memory of Mama’s allegiance. We were at a stalemate until it occurred to me that we could simply ask someone.
“Why don’t we call one of her friends?” I said. We’d let Mama’s friends slip away, all the ladies who used to look in on us. Deana, Sylvia, an older lady named Elise, and the one who used to bake us pineapple upside-down cake.
Sadhana shrugged. “You feel like looking them up?” She meant tracking them down, since in most cases we didn’t know their last names. We’d have to try and feel our way to where they used to live. Ringing doorbells. We decided to forget it.
The day of the “Non” rally, the big demonstration staged as a love letter to keep Quebec in Canada, I dressed in my federalist best: jeans and a white shirt, topped with a khaki sunhat emblazoned with an embroidered red maple leaf. I hoped the message for unity was clear, but Sadhana, ever the mind/body dualist, thought the hat implied a kind of top-down dictatorship. At the last minute, we both changed into white dresses, the way Mama used to clothe us before we were old enough to start objecting.
We walked downtown together through a sea of blue and red. There was a kind of shared expression I kept catching on people’s faces, people on both sides of the cause, of a mingled sense of purpose and exhilaration. On René Lévesque Boulevard, the crowd was dense and we had to squeeze and wriggle our way through, murmuring our thanks and goodwill to the people who let us move ahead. We saw a bunch of high school students carrying hybrid Canadian flags, with bands of blue on the inner edges of the red fields. As we got closer to the square, we passed a row of unfamiliar-looking red and white city buses, dozens and dozens of them, with Ontario licence plates. “Ottawa,” Sadhana guessed.
My sister had tears on her face, which shocked me. “This is really something,�
� she said.
By the time the ballots were counted, and Quebec had voted to stay in Canada by the slimmest of possible margins, Sadhana was out of danger.
It was my idea to have a talk with Quinn about his grandmother. It was the anniversary of the day she’d died, and I was sick of the reefs these charted dates kept throwing into our course as we tried to navigate the basic waters of staying alive, of staying happy. I was going through a strange spell of reading about mysticism and it made me feel closer to Mama, as though dates and blood and ritual were things that mattered. I had an underlined copy of Rumi and a box of incense and a new-found sense of wonder at the world that I thought might be something like the way Mama used to feel all the time. Sadhana was dubious but had agreed anyway, if only because she didn’t want to be left out.
Quinn had become very interested in our family since he’d started the first grade. He was puzzled as to why his classmates had relatives like grapes on a vine, fat bunches of them, the connections spreading and spilling out in all directions. A girl named Penny had told the class that she could trace her family back to Henry VIII. Another girl, Violet, was descended from Huguenots. Sadhana and I were helpless to offer anything in response to this superfluity of hereditary data. Quinn knew there were reasons why he didn’t have more family members around, but he was frustrated by the gaps in our knowledge. He was always wanting more, more, more.
We had a summit meeting ahead of time, at the grocery store. “We’ll tell him about Mama,” I said. “Everything we remember and everything she told us about her parents.”
Sadhana scooped up two handfuls of oranges as I pushed the cart ahead to the cereal aisle. “What about Papa?”
“Him, too.”
“And Ravi?”
“When he’s older.”
Sadhana tidied up the living room, putting away the new yarn and knitting needles she’d brought home the day before. Skeins of wool in emerald, raspberry, goldenrod. She told me she’d joined a knitting circle.
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