“You could try that tomato juice diet,” Pearl said. “Do you remember what your father did with Bill the Garbageman’s wife? She was too fat. Your father put her in the hospital and allowed her only tomato juice for ten days.” She paused. “Your father had no use for fat women.” Then she gave Viv one of her looks. Viv dropped her eyes. “He never encouraged me to make pies and cakes. Not that I could have made them anyway. ‘We can do without that sort of thing,’ he said. His mother, by the way, had a weight problem much of her life. My mother became fat as well. But I am not fat and never have been.” She glared at her daughter. “Surely that’s something in my favour.” Pearl leaned forward and passed Viv a plate of Dad’s cookies. “Will you have a cookie?”
“Thank you.”
“It’s very warm weather for a long-sleeved shirt. Do you have to keep doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Fidgeting. Moving your hands back and forth like that across the fabric of the chesterfield. It’s annoying.”
“Sorry.”
“You may pour the tea, if you can manage without spilling. I’ll take mine clear.”
“Sure.” Viv leaned forward and tipped a dead fly out of her cup and onto the rug.
“What did you just do?”
“Nothing.”
“You did something.”
“No. I didn’t.” Viv poured the tea and spilled. Fuck.
“Pass me the sugar and lemon. You’ll have to get a cloth from the kitchen to mop that up.”
“I’d figured that out, believe it or not.”
The sugar was hard in the bowl and had to be scraped out. The lemon slices were attractively arranged, but the lemon itself was old and mushy.
“Where are the cookies?” Pearl said.
“What cookies?”
“The cookies. Have you eaten them all?”
Shit. Where were they? The plate was empty. Next she’d eat the couch.
“Yes.”
“Well, aren’t you the selfish thing.”
“Yes.”
“Vivien, I’ve already had just about enough of you and you’ve barely been here an hour. Your behaviour casts a pall over everything. I think you go out of your way to be unpleasant. I really do.”
Viv glared back at her mother. Then she said, “You read me like a book, Mum. Always have.” Then she laced her hands together in her lap and bounced up and down like an idiot. “I do go out of my way to be unpleasant.” She stopped bouncing and looked directly at her mother’s knitting bag. The long green needles with the brown ends were sticking out. She breathed in and raised her eyes to her mother’s. They hardened. “And I am fat, selfish and unpleasant. What you may not know, because you know almost nothing about me—is that I also drink too much.” Viv stopped, surprised. She’d never said that before.
“Pooh,” Pearl said. “I’m sure you don’t.”
Viv clenched her jaw. How the hell would she know?
“You never believe me. You never have. You have never believed in me, either. But do you know what I think? What I really think? That it would be better for everyone if I were dead. I don’t know why I don’t kill myself and put everyone out of their misery.” Viv stared hard at Pearl. Hated it that she was going to whine. “Do you? Mum?”
Pearl laughed. “You always did have a flair for the dramatic, Vivien. Now get up off that substantial posterior of yours and go out to the kitchen and get some Kleenex and more cookies. I’d like one now, and I don’t mind if you have another. One cookie more or less won’t make the difference between heaven and hell, now, will it? Then I’d like to take you out for dinner, to celebrate your degree.”
While Pearl dressed, Viv took a Perrier from the refrigerator and filled a tall glass with ice. Her degree, yes. Her degree. She drank deeply. Why did she even give a fuck about what her mother thought? About anything? She didn’t. She didn’t fucking care. She carried the half-empty glass down the hall to her bedroom and gave it a serious spike. As she left the room, she toasted the pictures of Amethyst on the dresser and walls. Amy in that pretty white formal with the tiny pink roses under the bust and her hair done in loops and satin ribbons for her high school graduation. Amy in mortar and gown graduating from a good university when she was twenty-one. Amy in white lace for her wedding. Viv held out her drink and rattled the ice. “To good girls,” she said.
She took her drink and went back down the hall, through the kitchen and outside onto the patio. Night was falling, but the air was still warm. She sat down on the white plastic chaise longue. Her stomach was gurgling, the ice-cold liquid swishing around in her empty belly. It was past seven and she was starving. But she could wait. She was good at waiting, as long as she had a drink and a smoke. Hadn’t she got good at waiting thanks to her mother? Good at something. All those times she and Amy had waited and waited for her to come and get them. They had always arrived late for their lessons and then she was late picking them up, sometimes by more than an hour. And sometimes she never showed up at all. If it wasn’t too far, they walked. If not, they just sat there—what else could they do? They sat on the steps of their piano teacher’s house peering at the road. They sat at the dinner table with the ballet teacher’s family. They stood at the minister’s living room window looking out, praying God please God please make her hurry up. Only to each other, in their looks more than in words, had they asked where Mummy was, and why she didn’t come. Asked how she could have forgotten them, and why. Poor little kids, she thought now. And then there was Paul, and all the waiting she had done for him. And now here she was again. Waiting. Fucking waiting.
So now she would be cross-eyed driving, but so what? She’d survive if she was meant to. If not, so what. Again and again she drank deeply from the tall, thin glass, pushing the ice cubes back from her lips and teeth with her tongue and sucking the drops of liquid, liking the bite from the vodka and the tap of the glass against her teeth. Going inside and refilling it. She lit a cigarette off the end of the one she had been smoking, ground the butt out with her foot and tossed it into the begonias. She breathed in, filled her lungs with smoke from the new cigarette and held it in like a toke. Felt a wave of something descending. Grey cashmere. Exhaled, closed her eyes, lay back. And waited for her mother, who had been late all her life, not Viv. Barely alive in this ugly deadpan house with its dirty windows, its dusty ledges, its dead flies. Her mother as dried out and sharp as the dead brown pine needles, her mean spirit shrivelled up, rattling around in the bottom of her.
Whenever she was around her mother, she felt herself fill like a tidal bore with anger that gushed up from deep inside. Every time, she felt she might drown, so quickly she found herself thrashing around in it. Angry at the way she had learned to look at the world. With suspicion and mistrust so deep that with every breath she expected betrayal or disappointment. So defensive no one would ever get in without a crowbar or an axe. So fucking, fucking lonely, and a failure at being alone.
“No one’s going to fuck with me again,” she had promised as she turned the key in her apartment’s lock for the first time. As she unloaded her car, as she lugged the bags of books for her university courses up the stairs. “Fucking never.”
She had escaped, and she was a whole lot smarter now. She was twenty-four and she was together now, as hard as if she’d dipped herself in lacquer, and she didn’t need goddam anyone. She was still working in a bar, true, but she was going to university, she was going to get a degree.
During the day she studied, read and wrote papers. She didn’t have time for friends even if she’d made any. Up at the university she talked to her profs in class, but that was all. She needed to do well; she was on academic probation; she had to prove herself, or they wouldn’t let her continue. At night she worked in a lounge as big as a tavern. Her face was hard, and she didn’t smile, but her mind was quick and she knew how to give good service, so she made pretty good tips. She didn’t like being outside, got home quickly with her smokes and books and bottles of w
ine. She didn’t need anyone. Anyone. She kept her door locked. She copied out quotes and pinned them to her walls.
The Soul selects its own society, then Shuts the Door—
After work at two, three, four in the morning, her shirt sweaty and wrinkled, and booze and ashes on her black skirt and runs in her pantyhose, she knocked back a couple of black Russians or Caesars before she cabbed it home to crash and get up for nine o’clock Latin.
“Good insights,” a professor wrote on her paper. “Interesting discussion,” said another. “Good use of secondary sources.” Slowly she began to accept their praise as genuine. Somewhere along the way in those four years she began to realize that her mother’s judgment had always been the only one that mattered, and that she had always failed in her eyes. No more. Her mother’s voice had always been the equivalent of the voice of God, her view the only one that counted, that ruled on her worth, her value. No more: now there were others. And how could her mother know anything about her, anyway? When had she ever known anything about her? And yet one letter from her could still negate everything in an instant, demolish her. She felt as though she were holding hell itself when she read her mother’s letters, as though she held anger, not paper.
On her nights off work at the bar, she sat on her foamy with her books, a deck of smokes, her lighter, a big ashtray and a bottle of wine. She read—maybe Milton, or Vaughan—or watched her little black-and-white TV. And waited for that familiar feeling. That not caring, that going, going and gone.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate.
The day before convocation, a letter from her mother had come, one of the bad ones. Lashing out at her for stuff she didn’t even remember. The same old same old. She was about to get her degree, but it hadn’t changed her mother. Not for a second. Fool that she was, she had thought it might be a letter of congratulations. It might even be a card. But no. It was a letter about universities. Her mother thought she might find it interesting to read the enclosed article. The article ranked the universities, and did she notice that the University of Calgary was nowhere near the top of the list? No one had ever pretended that the University of Calgary was Queen’s, or McGill, or McMaster. But wasn’t it interesting that it wasn’t even UBC—or Edmonton!
She took the fifty dollars her father had sent as a graduation gift and went to the liquor store. The next morning, hungover, she had looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. It was stupid to go to convocation. It was stupid to get dressed up like some la la happy university graduate about to embark on life. What a fraud she was, what a failure no matter what she did. Nothing would ever be good enough. She saw beyond her greasy skin, her florid, puffy face, her bloodshot eyes and smudged mascara, her dirty, messy hair, her tight, hard line of a mouth. She saw herself as a chunk of granite: she was common, and hard. Black and white. Flung at someone, she’d gash a temple. She said aloud, evenly, staring into her eyes: “I hate you.” And blinked. “You are a snivelling, pathetic thing,” she said. And then she had found the resolve. Found her mother’s inner fortitude and grim determination. “Get the razor,” she said to her miserable image. “Do you hear me? Get it.”
She glanced at the door her mother would come out. And then up at the stars, which were all swinging now, and she picked out the brightest. Then she looked down, to her body. She pulled up her shirt sleeves and took a long look at the tender slices and stitches on each of her wrists. Then she hid them again.
More than two decades had passed since she was a little girl so deeply in love with her mother no matter how she treated her; since her mother was the queen of her child’s heart, so glamorous with her bright red lipstick, her velvet jackets, her sparkling brooches. Going off to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the symphony, the hospital ball. She and Amy standing in adoration as she got ready to go. Pressing their faces into the thick chocolate pile of her faux fur coat, asking for lipstick kisses that kept her close while she was gone. Oh, how she had loved her. In her gardening clothes, in those Black Watch plaid wool pants and that newly ironed yellow blouse, kneeling down to plant bulbs, daffodil and hyacinth; bending over to stake delphiniums, tie back the snowball bush. Talking to her African violets. Viv had loved her, and had loved watching her.
When her mother had carried her down the hall to her bath, had she loved her? When Viv crawled into her mother’s bed to be safe from the witches that haunted her dreams, did she love her then? When her mother crouched down in front of her and straightened her white collar before she went to Sunday school, did she love her? Doing up the buttons on her green coat and folding down her white socks, did she love her? And as she screamed at her to get out of her sight, as she called her useless and thoughtless and cruel, as she shoved her, yelling Go away!, as she thrashed her, did she love her?
Every silence of her childhood deceptive and dangerous. Every day and every night. For as long as she could remember. Dreams of her mother with an axe. Dreams of her mother as a witch trying to grab her. What the hell was she doing here now?
Viv opened her eyes, gazed across the patio to the darkening shadows around the day lilies, then up, at the stars brightly swinging back and forth across the sky. That old and familiar little girl’s longing inside. The wisps of longing for a mother who loved her, who was proud of her. But there was no other mother to have. This was the one. Between whose legs she had come into the world. And in that moment she wanted to dive into a deep pool of still water, she wanted to have grown in someone else’s womb, to have been born a beloved daughter. This woman who had given her life made her wish she were dead every time she saw her.
“You don’t have to stay. You could drive away,” Viv said softly to herself, wiping away tears. “Just get in your car and drive away.”
But then the back door opened and Pearl shuffled out. Hair-spray, an acrid halo, floated over her head. She was carrying her gold purse and she was wearing her gold shoes. “I’m ready for the celebration,” she said.
Partway to Chas’s place, Viv stopped on the sidewalk to light a smoke, crossed to the boulevard in the centre of the street, sat down, and propped herself up against the trunk of one of the old trees and closed her eyes. She liked the feel of the trunk and the bark against her back, the feel of the ground beneath her. And when she opened her eyes again, she liked how the street lamps barely penetrated the branches of the heavily leafed old trees above her, which obscured the sky.
She loved Chas. She had met him down the street at the neighbourhood pub, and had gone home with him that night. He made her so happy; he was so nice; he was the nicest man she had ever met. When she woke up the next day, he was gone to his construction job and had left a note on the bedside table. See you at lunch, honey-pie. He brought her a burger, and a rose, and she got up to eat and drink coffee with him, and then she went back to his bed and slept again, her pounding head buried in the smell of one of his cast-off shirts.
If they stayed in the city on the weekend, they took a drive that became a ritual circuit. They started by driving past her grandparents’ houses, then past Elbow Park elementary school where her mother and Aunt May had gone as children. Viv got out of the truck, walked over to the school’s front door, imagined her mother going in those very doors all those decades ago. Six years old. Seven, eight, nine. Ten. Travelling through this very space, back and forth, back and forth.
On these drives she felt as though she was on some kind of a search, but had no idea about what or why. She wasn’t curious about anything specific, but it was some kind of longing, and she was drawn to this repetition, this incantation, some attempt to stir something up she wanted, without knowing, to know. Other times they drove up north of Sixteenth Avenue to the graveyard where her grandparents were buried, and she and Chas might both get out of the truck and stand in front of the markers. What was one supposed
to do? Sweep the dirt off, pull stray grass away. They did that. Then what? How were you supposed to honour your ancestors, grey ash beneath the grass, anyway? Who knew. Cheers, anyway, and she raised her Caesar.
“Is it Destiny that kept me here in Calgary, Chas, do you think? Am I meant to be here?” she asked him as they got back in the truck. “I mean, why didn’t I move away? Why did I decide to stay in school?”
“Could be,” Chas said, turning over the Dolly Parton cassette and then turning to her.
“Tighter,” she said when he held her. “Tighter.”
“No problem, Babe,” he said.
He was the sweetest, most patient guy. Too nice, too patient sometimes. He didn’t get anxious as they neared the bottom of a bottle, or the end of a deck of smokes. He could wait until tomorrow, and he was the same with everything—with sex, with food, with work. There was nothing he had to have, nothing he couldn’t wait for. While she wanted everything right now. She wished he were just a bit stronger, wished he were a bit harder to please. He put up with her bullshit way too much and she found herself pushing to see just how far she could go. Too far. He needed to draw better lines. But no. After a few drinks he got all sweet and soft and mushy before he fell asleep, and when he woke up it was with an open, loving smile.
On other weekends they went for long drives out in the country in his old GMC truck, plugging cassettes of Randy Travis, the Forester Sisters, Dwight Yoakam into the tape deck and singing along. As they drove, they drank the Caesars they’d made up in batches on her kitchen counter and stashed in juice bottles they put in a car-sized cooler. They drove west to Bragg Creek, into the Kananaskis, to Banff, or south to Black Diamond, or Millarville. They drove, they got out and walked by the river, they came back to the truck for fresh drinks or a couple of tokes, and drove around some more. Going somewhere, going nowhere.
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