All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  I hear the word in my head again: Mom. I don’t speak. I tell myself that it’s okay as I walk to lift the blinds and let more sunlight into the dark space that has enveloped me. The ocean music is still playing. I turn it off.

  “Oh … I liked that,” Mother says.

  A man clanks in with a tray of food. “Dinnertime,” he says, then disappears.

  I walk around my mother’s bed to grab the tray, lift the lid to expose her soup in a cup, mashed potatoes, and some type of meat with brown gravy.

  “I can’t eat that,” she says.

  The fluorescent light flickers above us, making me feel dizzy. I rub my eyes. The air in the room is dry and I’m tired. Mother changes the subject again.

  “I could go for a slice of pie or a milkshake,” she says. “My mother used to bake butterscotch pies. One day there were seven pies cooling on the rack in the kitchen and I stole one, ate the whole thing right under the kitchen table. My mother found me and gave me a beating for it. I did it all the time, though. Couldn’t stop myself from stealing a butterscotch pie.” Mother looks at me. She stares at my body. I am aware of it and begin to twitch in my seat. “I loved eating those pies as much as you loved eating air, eating nothing,” she finishes, referencing the subject I’ve been trying to avoid: my life-and-death struggle with anorexia that developed after I moved by myself to Toronto as a teen.

  I don’t want to talk about food or the lack of it, but I’m pulled into it.

  “I ate air because sometimes I had no choice.” I know it’s not entirely true, but there were days when I couldn’t afford to eat, when I stole or did worse so I could eat.

  “You were sick.”

  “That’s not what I said.” I look down at my hands. I want to say Stop, please stop. I want to say, I was just a girl when you left me in a new city. I said goodbye to my friends and hometown. I lost everything. But I can’t say these things; she won’t hear me. She won’t give me the very little I look for — some truth, some peace. I just want her to say, I shouldn’t have touched you. I shouldn’t have left you. I shouldn’t have let your dad beat you. I shouldn’t have done the things I did. I’m sorry. It’s not too much to ask before she dies, I don’t think, but she won’t do it.

  If you excavated my mother’s heart, you would find the remains of her children.

  And all I can get out is “I have an audition.” It’s a lie, but I stand up to look at my watch. I lift the blanket over her midsection to tuck her in.

  She looks at me quietly, then smiles. “Oh, what for?”

  I lie some more. “Cartoon,” I say as I pick up my backpack. “Voice work.”

  “Can you put the ocean on again before you leave?”

  I push the on button and the sound of rushing water fills the room once more.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1983

  TORONTO WAS A CITY I didn’t understand. There were no depanneurs stocked with wine, beer, and Gitanes cigarettes, no smell of bakeries and bagels. No all-night bar parties or graffiti art taking over the city walls or the lyrical voices of francophones. I had no solid roots in the glass and concrete city of Toronto. It was cold — abrupt, almost, if a city could be abrupt, like my departure from Montreal had been.

  My mother had rented the space from an advertisement in the paper before we drove here. The apartment was sparsely furnished. No cluttered corners, candles, or knick-knacks. A beige apartment. Barry was my roommate, a musician from the Montreal theatre who worked with Martha. We rarely saw each other, and Martha would come weekly to develop a show. It was the plan, to go to school and rehearse on occasional weekends, but I felt like a displaced child, a refugee in a new land.

  I wanted to nestle with Steffin under trees during the Tam Tam Jam drumming on the mountain, play records and sing badly, or visit with Lou. I wanted the familiar mayhem with my friends, a life known to me — what subway stop was mine, who I might run into, controlling the day’s fate, knowing where I would land at night and that the next day I would have friends and the familiar je ne sais quoi. I knew nothing of Toronto, only that my new school was one block away. My world was suddenly condensed to school and the apartment.

  I attended the Toronto High School for the Performing Arts. Our entire school took up the second floor of a brownstone building on Adelaide Street, right across from the Goodwill on Jarvis Street and above a dance school. It was a very small building, no signs or glitter, just a two-flight walk-up for roughly one hundred students. Windows lined the walls in every room. There were wooden floors and mirrors for dance students. The program included theatre, dance, and music.

  My apartment was a block away from Saint James Park, which spanned the space between my apartment and the school and was home to many homeless people, with their bottles, carts, and sleeping bags. I didn’t venture out at night. During the day, I just focused on the pavement between my apartment and school as I dealt with everything that was new, especially teachers and students — people who had homes and families.

  On my first day, I wore a fedora, black boots, thick eyeliner. I kept my hands in my pockets and a smoke dangling from my mouth, trying so hard to be cool, to hide my eyes.

  Ms. Kate was my academic teacher. She was from Australia. If accents themselves could be friendly, Australian was the friendliest. Ms. Kate had a buzz cut and wore pants and sneakers and eyeliner that made her green eyes pop. That first day was difficult because there was no place for me to hide. There were four of us sitting at a large table in a small room, looking up at Ms. Kate, our teacher for humanities and social sciences. Afternoons were for our chosen art discipline. Mine was the theatre program, with students from grades eight to thirteen, about thirty-five in total, in a large room that looked out over the park on Jarvis Street. We would all come to spend very intimate time with each other, like it or not.

  The mornings were impossible in the beginning. Along with social awkwardness came enormous insecurity around my reading and writing. I could not read at the same level as the other students. I had failed grade eight in Montreal, but skipped a grade and went into grade ten in Toronto. My reading level was that of a twelve-year-old. I could not lie, hide, or cheat without getting caught.

  Ms. Kate started to worry about me. It began in my fourth detention. I was two weeks in with no homework to show. I was alone in our classroom, no bigger than a small office, the sounds of cars from Adelaide Street mixing with the pounding rain. I was the only one in detention when Kate walked in, and I buried my face in my book, pretending to read. She came to sit beside me, asking me how I was, and all I could do was cry.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how to read this book quickly. I can’t keep up,” I said without looking at her. And after two weeks of my trying to fit in and navigate not only living alone in a new city, but new kids and no space of comfort anywhere, Kate put one hand atop mine and held my shoulder with the other hand. It unleashed a torrent. I tried to speak, but my words only came out in whispers and heaving cries like a little child’s. I was embarrassed but couldn’t stop myself. She hugged me and said it was okay, that we could go slowly, that she would give me different assignments until I caught up to the same level of reading and writing as the others. But she knew it was more than the ABCs that made me cry so uncontrollably.

  After that detention, Ms. Kate watched out for me. In the morning she would ask, “How is the apartment?” or “Did you have breakfast today?” I normally said “Okay” or “Yes,” but in those first few weeks I became acutely aware of the silence, the nighttime stillness that engulfed the apartment when I was alone at home. The seclusion, the unrelenting loneliness, created a growing misery, a constant pain. After a few weeks, though, it became normal, like a broken bone that never heals.

  As well, my past intruded: a constant tap of memory that I could not turn off. And I couldn’t turn down the volume inside my head. It was like a radio left on, with the words fat, bitch, unlovable repeating themselves. And in my isolation, I developed a new routi
ne — standing in front of the mirror while alone in my room, I stared at my face, arms, hips, legs, dissecting body parts. I wondered what it was about the body that people obsessed over, its thinness or thickness, colour of eyes, hair, where a nose sat on a face, marks, scars, breasts.

  I was lonely. And the new routine that started as distraction became an obsession. I spent my time wondering how I could lose weight, and I ate less and less as I continually examined my own flesh. I avoided Barry when possible. He didn’t seem to notice my behaviour, and it wasn’t his job to pay attention or babysit. We were roommates.

  I didn’t know how to cook or which nutrients a growing body needed. In Montreal, I didn’t have to buy groceries or clean and cook. Those were my mother’s chores. In Toronto, they were mine. It was overwhelming and I ignored a lot of my basic needs: haircuts, shoe shopping, dental visits.

  After each day filled with the energy of young people, music, dance, and theatre, I went home to a tiny apartment in the sky with only clouds as company until the moon rose. Nights were a nightmare. My flashbacks were becoming regular, and any loud sound might set me off: an ambulance, a thunderclap, shouting from the street. I ended up in the bathroom one night, hitting my head against the cabinet beneath the sink while I sat on the cold tile floor. I could not stop the internal chaos, an audience of sounds, of voices and visuals. I didn’t know there was such a thing as mental illness — a condition with a treatment. I only thought I was crazy, and I was trying to stop it. I did pick up the large yellow telephone book one night and looked up the heading “Help.” There was nothing. I paced, looked out the window to the sky, and talked out loud to myself to drown out the images and noises inside my head. Then I discovered a new coping strategy. I positioned a standing mirror against the wall, close to my pillow, to help me sleep. I was my own pseudo-friend. It was a strange comfort.

  I did slowly let down my guard at school. It was far more fun than any other school I had been to, with music, art, and teens who wore ripped clothes and jewels, had coloured hair, and didn’t bully. They were students who didn’t fit the mainstream, artists or kids who wanted to become famous, or wealthy kids like pimply John, who lived in the Bridle Path and flew helicopters with his father to pick up Schwartz’s smoked meat in Montreal when they were in the mood. He tried to buy friendship as much as I tried to stay away from relationships.

  With only four students in my classroom, it was hard to truly ignore people, particularly Jasmine. She was black and wore the same grey checkered coat, which covered her large frame, to school every day. She was the biggest girl in school, one of three black students and wickedly bright. She was also the most adorable, but she had a mean stare if she was mad, which made me laugh, and she would laugh with me while others retreated. I became her friend. We both understood something about the other — that we had our armour that others could not recognize or understand. We were drawn to each other, radical opposites in some ways, but so much alike: obsessed with Michael Jackson, poetry, street art, and cryptic talk about parents and adults.

  “There is a guy in my building that wants me to prostitute. He’s always around. My mother works the night shift,” Jasmine said.

  I connected the dots and responded, “My mother was a bloodsucker, and my father was a prick.” Sometimes I told people my parents were dead, and it made them stop asking personal questions, but with Jasmine it was different.

  We were also both obsessed with food. She overate, while I starved. We both counted calories. She counted the thousands she consumed, while I counted the ones I didn’t.

  I was hungry all the time. I thought of all the foods I wanted to eat, like pizza, macaroni, ice cream. I didn’t let people know I was hungry. It was private and I didn’t want to fail at losing weight, fail because I was hungry. I wanted to hear hunger, the rumble inside my stomach, like the coo of a dove. I decided to succeed at being hungry. Mastering hunger meant I could control and do anything I put my mind to.

  I would lie on my back and touch my stomach as one of my “fat tests,” and after many weeks my belly slowly melted like snow, in line with my hipbones, flat. But still I thought I was fat. My reflection in the mirror became an actual companion, an internal voice that scolded me.

  I would open the fridge and stare at Barry’s food — the cheese, eggs, and meat I wouldn’t dare eat. I would stand in front of the mirror in my bedroom, take all my clothes off, and pinch the flesh on my stomach. It reminded me of my mother, her words, her obsession, her size.

  “Good for nothing,” my mother used to call Sadie and Lou. “You want to be like your sisters, Joanne?” I knew what she meant, the words she often said about my sisters: fat, lazy, good-for-nothings. Every pinch of flesh on my frame was like a direct line to her wagging finger, her intrusive, silent stare.

  I wondered how many calories I could consume and still lose weight. I would stand in front of the mirror and run in place on the beige carpet, whispering words in rhythm, in my bare feet. Fatso, fatso, fatso. It was a silly jingle, but I believed if I kept moving I would lose weight. I could even lose time. I could lose myself, if I just kept moving.

  A meal included an apple with cheese or a muffin, toast and peanut butter, or tin soup. I stopped eating meat right away. The thought of anything dying for my consumption made me ill. I made up numbers, exaggerated caloric intake. A muffin equalled four hundred calories. A slice of cheese, three hundred. Soup, five hundred. An apple, one hundred. I kept my caloric intake under twelve hundred per day. I had seen this number on the cover of a magazine where I bought my food, at Loblaws in an underground mall on Yonge Street. Apple. Muffin. Cheese. Soup. I would choose three of those items per day, rotating through them. Sometimes I ate a banana. I would slice it thinly and eat it slowly, pretending it was a large meal, that a banana equalled four hundred calories.

  “You’ve lost weight, Joanne,” Martha said on one of her weekend visits, proud of me for the accomplishment. I knew she would be. I waited for her praise.

  “Come,” she said, standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom, ushering me over with her hands. “Come here.”

  She wanted me to stand in front of her while she placed her hands on my hips as we looked at each other in the mirror’s reflection.

  “Wow, you’ve lost your hips, your bum, they’re gone. God, you look amazing.” I had never heard Martha say that I looked amazing before. “How did you do it?” She rubbed my torso, feeling for signs of fat, her fingers moving up and down my body.

  “I don’t know,” I lied, while her hands fell over my bum and thighs and moved back up to my waist.

  “Well, you look fantastic.”

  Martha’s pleasure over my appearance excited me, changed the relationship somehow. Was this all it took? Hunger? Being skinny?

  Martha took over the apartment just as she did every room she entered. I wasn’t used to sharing my bed, but it was only for the occasional weekend, and I didn’t mind the break from the routine of starvation and quiet nights. The drill sergeant’s commands and insults inside my head would be drowned out with Martha’s non-stop talk, reminders of the old life I had tried to escape, bringing news of my mother along with Montreal bagels and wine. My excitement would turn to exhaustion, and I would wait for her to finally leave, leaving me alone with my mirror, beige walls, and routines. The routines were all that held me together, as if putting pressure on a gushing vein.

  “Let’s exercise. You can show me how you lost the weight.” She wanted to do what I did and so we ran around the apartment, jumping on the beige carpet to Simon and Garfunkel or Cat Stevens. The next time she visited, she stared at me again, wrapping her hands around my waist, pushing her flat hand onto my belly. Her obsession with my body seemed odd, and also sensual, but Martha never had boundaries, and she wanted others to be infatuated with her. I wasn’t anymore; that had faded along with my weight. But it seemed the more I lost, the more I was loved, and, real or not, it was what I perceived. It took a while to understand that M
artha was measuring her own body size and shape against mine and trying to lose weight as I had. She was beginning to reduce caloric intake as well, and every time she visited she would do the same things.

  On one of the visits, my mother arrived with her.

  “You’ve got to stop. It’s too much now, Joanne. Too thin,” Mother said, sitting at the table in the dining area.

  “Well, which is it? I thought I was fat,” I said in a soft conversational tone.

  Mother smirked and didn’t seem to mind the banter. Her mounds of fat sagged over the chair she sat on like an umbrella. She was physically larger, had gained weight.

  Her scent, like food rotting in a refrigerator, filled the apartment, and I had to stop myself from gagging. She always made me feel like I wanted to be small enough to disappear, become a ghost.

  “Enough is enough, Joanne. You’re like a bird.”

  “I like birds.” I flapped my arms, bent them at the elbow like a chicken, and smiled.

  I wanted them gone, Martha and my mother. All I wanted to do was lie down. What became clear was how separate they were from my new Toronto life, from Kate, Jasmine, my day to day. Martha and my mother were like the dead coming to life. They reminded me of all that had been, made me want to rip them apart, both of them. I hated them, but they did not know it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DAYS LATER I SAW an ad in the paper: Brad Fraser was auditioning actors for his play Wolfboy in the basement of a church on Queen Street West. I didn’t know anything about the script, but after school I made my way to the streetcar, going over the words of the contemporary monologue I had done at Juilliard.

  I was cast and over the moon. The play was performed at Toronto’s famous Theatre Passe Muraille and I was able to work with Shirley Douglas, mother bear to all Canadians, who watched out for me and gave me advice. And Keanu Reeves, a boy who helped fix my bicycle one day when my tire blew. Sweetest kid. He reminded me of an energized puppy, full of life and eager to learn, finding his way in the world, like I was. We were two teenagers adrift, working hard. He had also gone to my performing arts school but left before I started.