SYLVIE
Mama had another emergency. Something about Daddy’s medication for his pain. Again we were at Mr George’s door, and I was looking forward to more throat hole-gazing and Wheel of Fortune. But the old man was not there. No matter how many times Mama knocked, it didn’t change the answer. She had to find another way to leave me with someone so that she, Johnny, and Daddy could make it to Scar-borough General Hospital during clinic hours.
Mama gave up and decided to take me along. With Daddy hobbling along on his crutches, our plan was to ride the bus to Lawrence Avenue, then head west toward the hospital. But as we were transferring, I tugged at Mama’s arm. I could see my friend Bing through the window of Incredible Nails Salon, which is sandwiched between Tarek’s Convenience and Halal, and the Oasis Spa. I removed the hood of my red coat so he could recognize me. We waved at each other, both of us making fog circles on our sides of the window.
“Not now, Sylvie!” and Mama tugged back. I shook her hand off and ran inside the salon, much to Mama’s dismay. “The 54 bus is coming. We have to leave!” She struggled with the salon door and the stroller. Daddy waited outside, leaning on his crutches.
“You want pedicure?” asked one of the Vietnamese ladies at the counter, the dangling gold bell still ringing as I ran in and hugged Bing. Mama gave her that look she often gave to Asians. Can’t I walk in here without you pestering me to pay for something? The Vietnamese lady gave Mama a look that we often got for being Indigenous. In or out? Pay or go? Make up your mind, you nasty Native.
“Marie?” Bing’s mom, Edna, left her pedicure station with a look of concern behind her medical mask. Edna went behind the reception desk and grabbed my sweater, now clean, and handed it to Mama, then they both looked at me and smiled. Mama and Edna exchanged a few words, and the next thing I knew, I was staying the entire day with Bing. I wasn’t sure how it was possible, as Bing was supposed to be at school, too. Something about him being sad that day, after what I saw on the bus. Edna was happy he had a playmate. Mama was happy she could ride the bus in some peace while Johnny napped and Daddy groaned in pain.
After Bing and I got bored playing checkers with the nail polish bottles, he suggested we venture outside the nail salon.
“We have to wait until one of the white ladies comes in. Then Ma won’t notice.”
We watched a client enter the salon. Edna pulled her eyes away from the news broadcast on the television that hung on the wall and gestured to the white lady to sit at the pedicure station. Once she turned on the spa jets, Bing and I were out the back door, zipping up our coats.
“Where are we going?” I asked Bing as we crept out like two spies. From the back of the nail salon I could see the towering verandas of an apartment complex that looked down on the back of the strip mall.
“To see Ivana.”
Ivana had an air to her, like she knew everyone either hated her or wanted her, or both. She stood outside the back of Oasis Spa, smoking a cigarette. Despite the autumn breeze, her stringy blonde hair clung to her forehead and steam glowed from the skin that was exposed beyond her bomber jacket.
“Bing!” she called out. She flashed a pink lipstick smile. We ran toward her. She reached into her pocket and handed Bing a pair of sunglasses. Bing marvelled at Ivana’s newest acquisition, placing them on his round face, the non-existent bridge of his nose barely holding the sunglasses on his chubby cheeks.
“They don’t want people to know they come here for tugs, so they wear these,” Ivana explained, adjusting the glasses on Bing’s smiling cheeks. “And if I’m lucky, they sometimes forget them.” By the way she said it, raising her eyebrows, I knew it had something to do with sex. She looked at me, gauging my reaction to her profession. She decided to continue.
“I also found this.” Taking out a lighter with a woman on it, Ivana demonstrated how to reveal the woman’s breasts by lighting the lighter. Although the look of it gave me a sick feeling in my vagina, I was perplexed at how the illusion was achieved. She showed me over and over again, until her phone vibrated in her pocket. She looked at the text message, then at me.
“Here, you have it.” She placed the found object in my hand before heading back to work. A jewel.
After Mama picked me up, I rushed into our suite, and I placed the naked lady lighter in my Forever Box under my bed. Mama gave me the box after my birthday.
It wasn’t a birthday present, but something to make up for the birthday present Johnny ruined. My real present was a super difficult fifty-piece puzzle. It was a picture of a seagull flying through the air. What made it difficult were the hundreds of shades of white, blue, and grey that made up the clouds. It wasn’t as difficult as keeping it away from Johnny, though. I tried to start it on the floor, but of course Johnny wouldn’t have it. He loves to dismantle things. Like shoelaces tied up, or the cupboards closed, or zippers zipped up. They make him furious. This puzzle was no different.
The truth is, I know Mama gave me this puzzle to keep me busy for as long as possible, because Johnny is worth the trouble of three screaming kids. So I learned pretty early to play by myself for long periods of time. Until time was lost. Until the sun went down, and suddenly Mama would tell me it’s time for bed. She would pat me on the head, thankful for my independence. “You had a good day, missy?” she would say just before laying out my pyjamas. I always nodded.
Unlike my Ballerina Barbie, unlike my ZhuZhu Pet, which Johnny ignored, he had to tear apart my puzzle like he needed to itch a scratch. There was no floor space; there was no corner; there was no table safe from his swiping arm, back and forth across the puzzle pieces.
“Puzzles aren’t permanent, eh?” Mama told me. I knew that. I just wanted to be able to finish it. Just once. “It means you get to have fun building it over and over again.”
My face went hot. I wanted to hit her. I wanted to hit my brother. I dug my fingernails into my palms instead, making white-knuckle fists.
I agreed to let Johnny have three pieces, to put together and take apart as much as he liked, so as to leave me alone with the remainder of the image. And when I agreed, I mean I nodded the smallest nod you can ever imagine, my teeth gnashing and my lips tight. Only uncaring, insensitive, neglectful mothers would have read that nod as a yes. And guess what? She did. Johnny was placed on my bed with his three pieces. Mama took a breath and tried to wash out underwear in the bathroom sink. I went back to work on the floor, trying to connect the point of the seagull’s beak to the eyes on its head. That’s when I heard Johnny choking.
“Goddamn it! Johnny!” Mama rushed over and hooked her finger inside his mouth to fish out soggy pieces of cardboard that were blocking his breathing. He vomited what looked like the seagull’s webbed feet. All over my bed. She looked at me with a half-smile, half-sorry face.
I screamed and threw the puzzle pieces in random directions around the room. I whipped my arms frantically, hoping Mama’s or Johnny’s face might find their way into my fists or elbows. Instead, I hit my knuckle on the wall.
“Owww!” I cried as I held my sore hand. This was all so unfair. I just wanted to finish the goddamn puzzle. And maybe laminate it. Maybe frame it. So that people can love it forever. I collapsed onto my knees and wept.
Johnny, still covered in seagull webbed-feet barf, crawled over to me, humming.
“Gentle hands, Johnny. Big sister is crying.” Mama showed him how to rub my back. He hit my back. I cocooned myself by tucking my knees into my chest. I just didn’t have it in me to fight him.
“Gentle! Gentle. See?” Mama showed him again how to rub my back. Johnny settled into a slap–caress down my back. I wanted to stay mad, but he leaned his head against my shirt. His humming on my back felt good.
That night, after Johnny was already asleep, Mama sat beside my bed and surprised me with a Forever Box. It looked familiar.
“This is your medicine box.”
“Not anymore. I will find another place for my sage. This is yours now.”
&nb
sp; I ran my fingers over the simple wood structure, now covered in marker bubble letters spelling out my name. “This is your Forever Box. No one can touch it. You can put your most important things inside there. Johnny won’t touch it. I won’t touch it. Daddy won’t touch it.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
I gave the naked lady lighter a couple more flicks and placed it next to the paintbrushes that Victor left behind.
Last summer, before we were evicted from the community housing townhome complex because of Daddy’s gambling, it seemed holes were being burned into the entire neighbourhood. First there were holes burning into the face of Mitchell next door. Then there were holes burning into the faces of his friends who came over. They all looked like evil bowling balls. I wondered how they could drink without it leaking through their cheeks. These white trash folks would gather in the dark corners of the complex, moving between raucous laughter and clandestine whispers. Money exchanged hands. Fistfights erupted and dissolved. Night after night, it was like watching your favourite show. We didn’t need cable, which we didn’t have anyway. Or a television. And when a hole was burned right through Mitchell’s front teeth, Mama understood that meth was a bigger problem than the usual Scarborough grow ops. Weed made houses mouldy; meth made houses blow up. And that’s exactly what happened.
Richard, a neighbourhood boy who seemed to be eternally on his too-small bicycle, circled around the stretcher on which Mitchell sat, toothless grin and all. Mitchell’s skin was burned to a crisp. His eyebrows were crusty and patchy. Richard circled and circled as he sucked on his lollipop.
“Can you, like, stop? You’re making me dizzy, man.”
Richard kept circling.
As the cops slowly drove out of our cul-de-sac crowded with nosy people, Victor caught their eye. He was just returning from painting his mural along the Orton Park Bridge.
Victor was a tree. Standing at six feet, two inches, Johnny saw him as a climbing gym. In the mornings, Johnny waited for Victor to walk past our door, pulling his paint and brushes in a red wagon.
“Hello, little mister,” Victor would say as Johnny stepped onto his feet, face to face. They would walk together, Johnny the height of Victor’s massive muscular legs. Victor would hold his arms out in a T-shape and let Johnny hang like a monkey.
“You sure you don’t mind?” Mama said to Victor. He would just smile.
“Okay, little mister,” Victor would say, twisting closed the paint bottles that Johnny had loosened open. “I’ve gotta go.”
Victor was the kind of neighbourhood kid who, when he sketched in his book, everyone stopped their jump rope to witness. Dandelion wishes flew across his pages. Old ladies smiled under the stroke of his pencil. He let me rest my cheek on his bicep while he scratched away on the paper portraits of the people sitting across from him. Maurie, the bus driver. Ada, the palm reader. Cindy, the puppy mill lady. They sat obediently on his green plastic stool, smirking at their chance to be immortalized by his grace.
“Quiet down, you bitch!” Cindy said to her prize mutt, Eunice, whose teats hung long and sad, dragging on the concrete from litter after litter. “I swear to God, she thinks she’s a queen or something.”
People missed him when he got his grant to paint the Orton Park Bridge. I still remember him and his black shaven head looking up at a pair of sneakers suspended by its laces on a high wire. He looked between the sneakers and the expanse of forest below the bridge. Back and forth. Then he looked at the traffic driving past, at the squares of concrete interlocked together to make the bridge.
“See that, Sylvie?” he said to me, his large palm a hat on my tiny head. “Those squares need pictures.”
The same summer, he got accepted to OCAD University, and he began painting beautiful images on the bridge. Hands of different colours, their fingers interlacing. Food being shared amongst mothers and their children. He even painted a picture of himself holding Johnny way up high to the sun. That one was my favourite, although I wished it was me in the painting.
That night, when Mitchell’s meth operation blew up, a cop locked eyes with Victor on his way back from the bridge.
“Step to the side, sir.” I had never seen Victor turn himself off like that. His eyes went blank, and he did exactly as he was told. I could see the cops unscrewing the tops of his paint bottles and smelling the contents, looking at his brushes. They frisked him rigorously. They kept going between their car and Victor, over and over. Victor was arrested. For what, we still do not understand. He was just painting. The granting body that employed his talents to revitalize the bridge never spoke on his behalf. Because of his arrest, it became impossible for him to land a job to support his schooling.
“Hey, did ya hear about Victor?”
“Can you believe that? And he was living right here under our noses.”
“He was always a bit sneaky, that one.”
By September, he was back at our housing complex, sketching in his book. In it, he drew bridges.
Slutty Christy wasn’t into playing much. I thought, since she was so young, she would be. But she set me straight when we first crossed paths in the common area.
The common area was filled with a variety of second-hand furniture. Secrets were revealed in the folds of these 1980s-style sofas. Key chains from unknown places. Important notes scribbled onto pieces of worn paper never to be found again. I was sifting through my found treasures when Christy walked in. Her arms were stories in tattoos, a map to the person she once was, a person who hung out in dark corners looking for a way out, now walking the straight and narrow.
“Whatcha doing?” She looked at her cigarette box and saw one last fag. She put it in her mouth without lighting it as a way of deciding what to do next.
“I got treasures,” I said shyly, placing a key chain from Hawaii in my pocket, destined for my Forever Box.
“So? Whatcha got for me today?” Christy poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down on the leather sofa that seemed to exhale under her weight.
This is when she wanted me to tell her stories. She knew I was good at it. Since there wasn’t any cable at the shelter, she relied on me for the good times.
“Did you hear about the orangutan at the zoo that tried to swim away?”
“No way. At this here zoo?”
“Yup. The Toronto Zoo.”
I began.
“When I was but a wee thing, I remember my mother telling me the tale of the long hairs. She said that if I stood close enough to them without pulling at their fur with my curious paws, I could smell the jungle.”
Christy took the cigarette from her mouth and leaned in. She liked the story.
“I sat there sucking on her long leathery boobs while she told me where I came from. Where we had all come from. Even with cameras flashing or kids tapping on the window, I could see it. I could see the rainforest. On and on, with no nets, our long arms grabbing branch to branch.
“That is why, my mother explained, the long hairs had such sad, low cheeks. They weren’t fooled by the fake habitat.”
“Holy shit,” said Christy, patting my back. “You are so freakin’ smart, Sylvie. Is this monkey—”
“Orangutan—”
“Is this orangutan a girl or a boy?”
“Girl. For weeks the zoo waited patiently to confirm if I was a girl or boy. Just the slightest touch to the ends of my mom’s orange fur made her so angry. She sure was protective. If she could kill with one hand while holding me in the other, she would. Then again, if she could have kept her eyes open instead of falling asleep from those pills the zookeepers gave her that day, she would have been here.”
“What?!” Christy stood up suddenly, scratching at her tattoos. “Where did her mom go?”
“The San Diego Zoo. She got transferred.”
Just as I was about to explain, Mama came in, looking disapprovingly at Slutty Christy.
Mr George was in charge of me one day during one of my dad’s hos
pital visits, so I waited in the hallway of the shelter near his room, the door ajar, listening to him cough his lungs out. I tried to peer in, to see if he coughed phlegm out of his mouth or his throat hole. I rocked back and forth trying to peek inside into his business. I rocked back and forth until suddenly I was inside the room. I never got used to the smell of old man in there. Like sweet and sour. Like crushed pills and dried spit.
His hand gestured toward me, telling me to wait. We were on our way to the dollar store, me with a shiny loonie I had found at the bus shelter the other night. I was good at finding loose change.
I wished I was like those white kids whose grandparents carted them around on one of those scooters. I saw one once, at the Food Basics. Some chubby white boy with red hair just sitting there on his grandpa’s lap, choosing whatever he wanted off the shelves and placing it in the front basket.
Only, Mr George wasn’t even my grandpa. He just held my wrist gently but tightly with his weathered hands and walked as slow as a sloth to East Side Crossing strip plaza. It took forever. I looked closely at his scar. It looked like a pink tree starting between his fingers and running down the back of his wrists. I imagined he had been dragged once, accidently or not. I enjoyed when he held me using his left hand, so I could listen to the ticking of his old watch, much too large for his wrist. Maybe a long time ago, it fit him. When he needed both hands, he looped my finger around the side belt buckle of his Wrangler jeans.
We arrived at the dollar store, and its smell of plastic and packaged goods drove me wild with excitement. Right at the entrance, we pushed past a white lady wearing a muumuu and drinking a pop. Mr George slowly guided me up and down every aisle. Paper plates. Clay pottery you can paint yourself. Spray bottles. The possibilities were endless, with this loonie sitting in my sweaty palms.
I explored the cosmetics aisle. Lipsticks that smelled like playdough. Shampoos that smelled like car wash. Flower-printed shower caps. Camo-printed do-rags. In the middle of the aisle was the Super Secret section. I called it “Super Secret” because the ladies who went there always looked left and right to see if anyone was watching. I just rolled my eyes hard to the side so that Mr George couldn’t tell I was curious. Mama told me condoms are socks for boy’s penises, to keep them from getting girls pregnant. They don’t look like socks to me, though. They look like Halloween candies in wrappers. Next to the condoms were boxes of pregnancy tests. Made sense to me. I imagined that if you bought dollar store-quality condoms you’d need dollar-store-quality pregnancy tests. Just as we were passing the nail polishes, the shelf shook, and bags of cotton pads rained down on my head.
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