As She Grows

by Lesley Anne Cowan

  “Thanks for ruining my life,” I yell. “Thanks for fucking ruining my life!”

  “What the hell’s got up yer ass?” Elsie asks, annoyed, continuing to check out the customer’s groceries. “My granddaughter,” she explains to a faceless customer, rolling her eyes. I don’t lose my glare.

  “I’m pregnant. You satisfied?” A smile breaks over Elsie’s face and she shakes her head, like it’s all a game. “Excuse me,” she says politely to the customer in front of her and yells to the woman at the next cash to take over. Then she storms past me and out toward the exit. I trail at her heels, pursuing my kill.

  We stand outside the Dominion, the automatic doors tirelessly opening and snapping shut as I pace back and forth.

  “Now I get it. You’re going to blame me for getting yourself knocked up, is that it?” Elsie pulls a cigarette pack out from her pocket and lights it.

  “No. I blame you for everything before that. ‘Cause being pregnant may be the only thing I ever did right.” Even though it wasn’t true, I had to say it. Elsie leans one arm up against the phone booth and starts laughing to herself, staring off into space. She sucks hard on her cigarette, cheeks caving in like deflating balloons. I want to hurt her. I want her to pay for everything. I pace frantically up and down, thinking of Mark and the baby and Mitch and the group home.“Ugggh . . . I could kill you right now,” I yell, punching the wall.

  “You need to relax!” Elsie orders, looking over my head, to see if there’s anyone watching.

  I ignore her command and just get louder and louder. “I wish my mother never died. I wish she didn’t leave me with an alcoholic crazy fucked-up woman. You’re crazy. Crazy! You made me crazy, see?” I push up my sleeve, showing her the red marks on my arm.

  She stares at my skin, her mouth open and horrified. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s how much I hate you!” I move out of the way of a woman pushing her cart, her head down, aware that she’s intruding on something. “You probably made her drown! She probably jumped in! To get some peace from you!”

  “What?” Elsie twitches her head as if she were trying to shake the words out of her ears. “What? Jesus Christ, what is going on in that stupid little head of yours?”

  “If my mom were alive, I wouldn’t be like this, you . . .” I spit out every possible swear word I know at her.

  When I’m done I stand there, fixated on her. Her face is red, nostrils flared. I’ve never seen her so angry. She leans into me, her face so close I can smell her cigarette breath. “Ooh,” she threatens, “you don’t know how wrong you are.” And then the truth oozes out of her like pus from a squeezed scab. “Your mother never drowned,” she says. “She left you with me when you were a baby and then she died three years later. She was eighteen. Overdosed. Your so-called mother, who you think is your saving angel, was a junkie who was a waste of a life. How’s that for truth? Your mother was a screwed-up pregnant fifteen-year-old girl. Sound familiar?”

  And so it happens like that. The truth of my life, told to me outside a grocery store, among the clattering of carts, the price checks, the automatic glass doors opening and shutting like snapping jaws.

  For a few seconds I stand there, unable to move. The rain pounds on the metal awning above our heads. I feel as if I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. My soul knocked out of me. It’s as if everything that I thought was real isn’t. I reach out to touch the wall, to see if it’s truly there. Finally, I remember to breathe. Without saying anything, I walk past Elsie, across the road, and down the street. My legs just keep going like that, one after the other. My mind a tight fist of nothing and everything all at once.

  I walk aimlessly in the rain, my jeans wet and heavy. I look for a place to stand, because there’s something about absolute despair that requires being still in small spaces. I think of the places normal people go to cry: in stairwells, bathroom cubicles, inside their cars. Finally, I find an empty bus-stop shelter, pace around inside the glass perimeter, opening and shutting my mouth, gasping for air. I look up and see my reflection and think of Freddy in his fishbowl, only the water’s on the outside.

  Then I get this flash. This memory pops in my head, from out of the blue. I see this stupid clown’s face, from some party I went to as a kid. I’m in a backyard with balloons and plastic tablecloths and this clown keeps pulling a quarter out from behind my ear. I remember him well because I made him repeat it over and over; each time thinking, I’m watching for it; each time angry to see his painted fingers twiddle a shiny coin.

  Then it’s like my mind jumps to this realization that Elsie and my mother at one point probably thought the same way I do. That no one really thinks they’re going to turn out like this. That it’s not like one day you stop fighting and resign yourself to what life keeps pushing you into. No, it’s not that obvious. It’s as if you keep fighting. Your fists are up and going crazy, but somehow you’ve missed the battle entirely, as if you mixed up the dates or room number. And then one day, probably years later, you pause for just a split second, fists hanging in the air. And you stand there, like I am right now, recognizing yourself for the first time, and wonder how it was you become a failure when you were watching for it so hard.

  And then what do you do?

  “How long have you been waiting?” an old lady with a clear plastic kerchief on her head asks me. She frantically shakes her umbrella, huffing and sighing like she’s just come out of a tornado.

  “I don’t know,” I say blankly and just stand there for a bit. Then the rain subsides and I figure I should go to the group home and put my wet clothes in the dryer.

  There are truths I can no longer create. The mother’s arms I felt all these years, the ones that used to wrap around me at night and comfort me, are no longer there. Instead, the mother’s arms I feel now are bony and weak and resentful.

  I find my small space. In the cupboard under the stairs in the house, behind the mops and brooms and broken vacuum cleaner. I squat on the sticky floor, my back up against rotting wood, the faint smell of lemon cleaner and oil. Heavy soles mount and descend hardwood stairs above my head.

  My hand is resolute in its silent act. The safety pin firmly clenched between fingers. Lines surface from the depth of me, angular shapes connected by sharp corners travelling up my arm. I lose myself in the act of breaking skin, until my hand releases the wire and it falls to the floor and I can think clearly once more. I hold my arm up to the thin slant of hallway light slicing the darkness. I am surprised and pleased with what I see. I spit on my arm to wipe away the remaining blood, the red swell of letters from wrist to elbow: M-O-T-H-E-R.

  The next day I appear at Elsie’s kitchen doorway. She is sitting facing the door, as if she were waiting for me. There are cigarette packages and coffee mugs scattered out on the table before her. It looks like she’s been there all night.

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I ask from the doorway, not sure if I will enter. We are strangely calm. This is uncertain ground for both of us.

  “I was going to tell you, when you were older, when you finished growing up. I had you since you were a baby. Your mom couldn’t keep you. You were young, little, only about two when you started calling me Mommy. I couldn’t stand that. I needed you to understand then that I wasn’t your mother.” I come into the room and sit down at the table opposite her. “You were just a baby. You wouldn’t have understood.” She continues, her eyes pleading for understanding and kindness, but my face is blank. There is no expression for an emotion unrecognized by the body. “It was too complicated, too much explanation, so I said your mom was dead. That she drowned. And then later, she did die, only we waited a few more years to scatter her ashes. It was easier that way. For a while anyway. Till now.”

  I stare down at the table. In front of me is a ratty old placemat, one we’ve had for years. I start twisting and pulling at the fraying edges. “I dream about it, you know,” I say. “I dream these strange dreams. Like when we went to scatter her
ashes at that river. And that woman we saw, in that housing place, that was her, wasn’t it? That was my mother. I thought they were just mixed-up dreams. You should have told me.”

  “How do you tell a kid that her own mother wants nothing to do with her? That she’s a doped-up addict who doesn’t give a shit about anything?” Elsie stares directly at me, waiting for an answer, for release.

  “I don’t know.” I begin to pull out the tiny gold threads from the placemat and gather them in my hand. “You just do.”

  The silence is long. Finally, Elsie sighs deeply and puts her hands on the table and pushes herself up, as if that was the end.

  “But that’s not even the part that upsets me most,” I say, my words breaking her calm.

  “What’s that?”

  “That isn’t the part I’m mad about.”

  “What?” she asks cautiously.

  “She was fifteen. My mother was fifteen years old when she had me.” My eyes rise to meet hers.

  “Yes.”

  Elsie sits back down and reaches for her pack of Marlboros, lights a cigarette with shaky, brittle hands. She inhales deeply. Her body stiffens, then relaxes, the whites of her eyes fluttering somewhat. “It would have changed your life if you knew,” she says in a defensive tone, flicking her cigarette into the ashtray.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “It would have changed who you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “For the worse.” Elsie leans back and breathes out, the creases around her eyes and mouth relax, like loosened fishing lines. I think of how weightless she must feel. The burden now transferred from her to me by words, tiny combined vibrations. How heavy sound can be.

  “Yes,” I reply into the quiet.

  It should be a shocking event. I should be shaking. I should be yelling and accusing, but instead I feel a numb overcast of grey. I imagine it will take time. That I will slowly start to distort, as if I’m dripping from the inside.

  For the moment it’s a simple sum of numbers.

  I now have three mothers. This new one forcing its way between my two definitions. I line my birth mother up on my mind’s shelf, in between Elsie and the image-mother I created all these years. I sense the others looking her up and down, jealous of her right to be there, angry that my birth mother can just step in like that, without doing the legwork, without putting in the time.

  Look at her, so young. What does she know about being a mother? I imagine Elsie and my image-mother saying to each other. They worry that I will be swept away by the newness of her, that I’ll discard them like worn shoes. They straighten their backs, wave arms to capture my attention, and remind me of all the times they’ve been there for me.

  I gave you a place to live and food to eat, Elsie says.

  I was there every time you needed me. I never left you once, my image-mother adds.

  And then a small voice, from the corner of my mind, ghostly and sour, I’m not sure I want to be here.

  Now that Mark’s gone, I get all depressed. I don’t care about my body or what happens to me. Whatever was meant to happen will happen. I can’t change that. I never could.

  On weekdays, I go to class, I return to the group home, I lie in bed. I go to class, I return to the group home, I lie in bed. I live inside my head, seek safety from my body and its crazy possession over me. I can’t shit, I can’t sleep, I can’t sit, I can’t stand, I have cravings for food but then can’t bear to swallow. And it’s like my thoughts are scratching the walls of my skull, desperate for air. Desperate for release.

  I dart nasty looks at girls on the street, wishing someone would just try it, try to piss me off. I stand close to the edge of the subway platform, thinking it would just take a slight careless nudge to tip me over. I want to kill something. I want to make something hurt. I want someone to hurt me.

  I fuck anyone who wants to. Mostly guys I already know, but some are friends of friends, faces I recognize from the park or from the mall. They get all sweet on me, say things they think I want to hear. Tell me how great I am, or how beautiful I am, or that I’ve got magic hands, overlooking my swollen belly. And I just tell them to shut up ‘cause I don’t need it, that I’ll do it anyway. And then I push their bodies down onto the bed and ride their skinny pale torsos, trying to ram feeling, any feeling, into me. And they lie there, dead weight, eyes closed, and gasp things like you’re wild, man, fuckin’ great! as I rock back and forth, underlining my self-fulfilling prophecy with my hips: I am a slut. I am what my mother made me.

  When it hurts so bad that I can’t keep going, I dismount as if from a horse, push off their stomachs, and plant feet firmly on the ground beside the bed. Some ask me to come lie back down, pat their hairless, sweaty chests as if tapping the shiny vinyl of a vacant chair.

  “You got any smokes?” I say instead and extend an expecting hand, quickly slipping the pack into my bag where I’ll hide them from Staff.

  “I’ll call you,” they say as I leave. Then I walk home, their cum seeping out from between my legs like snot from a runny nose.

  I think of the bridge. The one people always jump off. I think of how I would get to it, by subway I guess. Then I consider if there’d be a ledge to stand on or would I have to sort of just vault right over? I wonder how long it would take to fall; would I have time to think or would my mind go blank? And what if while in midair I decided I didn’t want to do this anymore? I think of hitting the ground and whether I would flatten like the Coyote cartoon or just kind of explode like a water balloon. And whether my legs would hit first, or my head, and if, while in the air, I could somersault or sort of fly. And then I think, What if I land on something, kill it, like a squirrel or an unsuspecting pigeon?

  “Don’t you dare tell anyone,” I say to Jasmyn, who stands before me, eyes bulging from her head.

  “I won’t,” she says, but then adds, “but you wouldn’t do it, would you?” Without waiting for an answer she starts to say all the things people say when admissions like these are made. She explains how everything will get better and in a year’s time this will all seem like nothing and then I feel sort of guilty because here Jasmyn is saying this to me, and look at her life.

  The next day she comes back and sits on the edge of my bed and says, “Maybe you should tell Staff.” She repeats this a few times, acting all concerned, but I know the real reason why she’s returned. These thoughts of mine are a burden to her. They impede her stride, like a heavy head wind.

  “No, it was just a thought. It sounds stupid now.” And I smile, because it does sound stupid. And I think to myself that I’m not crazy, that I wouldn’t really do this. I’m not like Mute Mary or the other girls I’ve seen in the house, who take a bottle of pills and then check themselves into psychiatric wards. Who return five days later with mixed recollections of shoeless lives filled with movie nights and crafts, and of corridors that smell of piss, and food seasoned with cellophane and cardboard. And besides, even if I were to do it, I would get it right the first time.

  14

  My own body disgusts me. My skin aches. I can feel the sides of my belly stretching, tired and tight. Some days are worse than others. I will not look in the mirror. I cover my reflection with my towel. I don’t want to see my fat stomach. I don’t want to see my bulging veiny breasts and stretch-marked skin. I don’t want to see my ugly, puffy face or my oily hair. I don’t want to see my mother.

  I know she’s there. She and Elsie. I feel them rising up within me, surfacing. I don’t need to see my reflection to tell. I know it in the way I bend my fingers around a cigarette, the way I snap at Jasmyn when she just wants to talk, or the way my throat craves the burn of vodka.

  “We either blame our mothers for who we’ve become or we blame them for who we haven’t become. Heads or tails,” says Eric.

  “But I tried so hard not to be like her.”

  “Like who?”

  “Elsie,” I say, but as the word dangles awkwardly in the air in front of me, I realize it’s
not quite right.“My mother,” I add hesitantly. “I don’t know. I guess they’re the same thing.”

  Eric’s brow lifts thoughtfully, as if he’d just noticed a slight change in wind direction. He has never before heard me compare my mother to Elsie. He opens his mouth to speak, but then closes it quickly. He puts his hand up to his chin and strokes his straggly beard. Then he opens his mouth once more and words come out. “You know, I find many people end up replicating their parents’ faults. Probably because they focus so much on avoiding them. It’s like the difference between walking along a tightrope and saying, ‘I will not fall,’ or, ‘I’ll make it to the other end’.”

  I put my hand above my head and motion that his idea just flew over it. “I’m tired of all this mother talk,” I say.

  “You need to sit properly,” Ms. Dally says firmly, her nostrils flaring. She is telling me to take my feet off the desk. She has picked the wrong day to do this. I don’t even acknowledge that she has spoken. I have learned this new skill in this class. I have learned the power of staring straight through a person.

  “Get your feet off the desk and take out your homework.” Her tone is harsher but I still I ignore her. Funny thing is, I’m not even comfortable. She moves in closer to me, silently fluttering her silly little lips before she formulates a sentence. In my mind I egg her on, her weakness feeding me. “You need to leave the room,” she finally spits out. Backup arrives and I see Sheila appear at the front of the room, chest puffed out, hands clasped firmly in front of her as if she were a bouncer outside a nightclub.

  “For what?” I stare both of them down.

  Ms. Dally answers but I don’t hear anything. Blood surges through my ears and I grit my teeth, squeeze so hard I feel like the roof of my mouth is splitting. An invisible drawstring pinches my brows tight. I imagine squeezing her tiny head and bursting it like a grape. Then I see myself calling her a fuckin’ whore, see my mouth telling her these cocksucking rules are bullshit. I see myself hork two times on the door before I slam it behind me. I see myself doing these things, but I play no part. It’s like another person I’m watching. It’s like another body.