Cease to Blush

by Billie Livingston

  My mother held that bowl for what seemed like forever before she spoke, just staring inside it. “She made this? For me?” She ran her fingertips round the rim. “Did you see her make it?” At first I was pleased that she was so awed. That’s what my Sally made, I thought. See? But her face went soft the way it did when I’d drawn pictures for her or wrote poems.

  “It’s just a bowl,” I said.

  I called home from Sally’s the next night to ask if it was okay if I stayed for dinner. “You’re invited too. Sally said.”

  “Ah. Okay.”

  I had grown to like having Sally to myself. She was my secret. And at home was my other secret. Neither of them seemed to know anyone in the world but me. I wasn’t sure about these two worlds coming together.

  “When should I come? Did you remember to thank her for that beautiful bowl?”

  She showed up holding Sally’s bowl filled with unshucked cobs of corn, a bottle of wine under her arm. “Is this where the hooligans live?” she asked.

  Sally, who had showered forever and put on clean jeans and a crinkly hippie-blouse, took the yellow bowl and said, “Josie. I’m so glad you’re here.” Sally told her how lovely she looked, how sharp she always looked in the mornings going to school. My mother turned pink. I’d never seen her blush. I was embarrassed by her all of a sudden.

  Sally put the corn and wine in the kitchen before offering my mother a tour of the house.

  In the studio, as the three of us stood looking over the finished sculptures, I pointed out my “blueprints” for past and upcoming pieces. My mother held up one of my drawings beside the fabric and clay vase it had become. “Well, aren’t you girls the clever ones. What made you think to do this, bring these two elements together?”

  “I don’t know,” Sally said. “I guess it’s the obviousness of what a vase should look like, then punching holes in that expectation and running something soft and teasing through it.”

  My mother gave a nervous giggle. “Yes, that’s what makes it interesting.” Her fingertips drifted over edges of silk and ceramic. “Do you sell your work?”

  “Here and there. These vases are all for a show in New York.”

  “Really?” Mum’s head tilted in fascination.

  “Yeah, my sister always gets on me about not treating my art like a business. So I finally got off my butt and took some slides. I sent them to a few places in New York and a gallery in the Village actually said yes!” Sally laughed and readjusted the scarf that held back her masses of copper hair.

  “I can see why.” My mother poked her finger through a loop of silk spurting out the top of one.

  “Anyway, I signed a contract saying that I would have fifteen pieces by the fall. Meanwhile, my sister had planned to go on sabbatical with her husband—which is where they are now—in Zurich researching a book on the psychological effects of birth order.” She rolled her eyes and laughed. “So here I am.”

  That evening we lit every candle in the house and put all ten on the dining-room table where we ate chicken, potato salad and my mother’s corn for dinner. Sally made French toast with maple syrup and ice cream for dessert. I fell asleep on the couch and the two of them stayed up talking. When I woke the next morning I was in my own bed.

  Sally was the first real friend I knew my mother to have, by which I mean not just a neighbour lady with whom she traded plant slips or platitudes about the weather. Sally got my mother wearing blue jeans and T-shirts on the weekend; she had her eating ice cream straight from the tub, drinking Orange Crush from the bottle. More amazing to me, she even got her swapping memories I’d never heard.

  I knew she’d once had a roommate named Annie West who used to say, “Ain’t life grand when you got the guts for it.” But this was the first I learned that she had actually roomed with Annie in New York City. Or that she’d worked as a cocktail waitress in a bar. There was something about being with Sally. Her irreverence made my mother’s eyes dance.

  Late that summer, the two of them drinking the homemade wine that she and Sally had cooked up, my mother confessed that she had once wanted to be a singer. Before I was born, she said, she had dreamed of Broadway and Carnegie Hall, roses and ovations—that was what had driven her to go to New York. But it hadn’t worked out.

  I sat on the floor on the other side of the coffee table, just a few feet away, but I could barely hear their intimate murmurs. I picked up an X-Acto knife Sally had left lying out and began sawing off tiny slivers of coffee-table leg. Nobody noticed.

  The last morning of Labour Day weekend, Sally announced she would be making us a special Goodbye Summer dinner in the evening and that she needed the house empty from one o’clock on. “And don’t be spyin’ on me neither!” she told us. We were to be at her door at seven.

  When we rang the bell, Sally swept open the door wearing one of her sister’s evening gowns. “Ah, la bébé!” she swooned in a French accent. “La beautiful robe!” She plucked at the sleeve of my new red school dress. Then she turned to my mother. “Ah, la Diva, la Belle Diva has finally arrived.” She sized my mother up. “Mmmm, ah … no. No-no, madame, though you look lovely, it’s all wrong,” she said, putting her hand on the waistband of Mum’s white pants, their legs so wide you could mistake them for a skirt. “I must beg of you: Be the Diva!”

  I looked at my mother. “I told you you should’ve worn a dress like me.”

  “Come, come.” Sally hustled us upstairs.

  We came into her bedroom and eyeballed what she’d laid out on the bed: a royal-blue velvet evening dress and a red feather boa. My mother grinned and picked up the boa.

  “Of course, we must be careful, madame,” Sally continued in her thick accent. “C’est la robe de la cranky sister. So, try not to get le crud on it.”

  That night, after dinner and wine—a quarter-glass topped up with 7-Up for me—the three of us piled ourselves into my mother’s car and giggled our way slowly down the dark side streets to Kitsilano Beach.

  It was later than I’d ever been allowed to stay up. Sally, Mum and I stood on the Kitsilano Showboat, meant for showcasing small-time acts on summer evenings and weekend afternoons. Sally danced her flashlight beam over the brass-rimmed portals painted onto the stage wall. The long wooden bleachers before us were deserted and I could only make out one or two figures walking along the sand in the distance.

  Sally turned to my mother and told her to please join the audience. “We’re about to lend this theatre a little class, and frankly, I’d appreciate a smattering of applause.”

  Josie took our three flashlights and found a seat in the front row. Sally and I fussed with the ratty boas she’d picked up from god knows where.

  “Lights,” Sally hollered. My mother turned the beams of two flashlights on the stage.

  Sally and I muttered about what to sing and opted for “You Are My Sunshine” flapping our feather boas lavishly.

  My mother giggled from her bench. Holding our spotlights with her thighs she clapped and screamed for more.

  So, next, we sang “My Darling Clementine” and hardly got the last note out before Sally announced it was time for the Diva.

  “Can’t we do one more?” I asked.

  “Don’t be a hog, we’re about to hear a real chanteuse.”

  I rolled my eyes and we took my mother’s place in the front row, me with one flashlight and Sally, a couple feet away, with two. Sally hooted for the show to start. My mother stood halfway up the stage, chewing the inside of her bottom lip, staring at us for what seemed like an age before saying, “I don’t know if I can sing anymore.”

  “Awwww, go-w-a-a-an, go on and sing!” Sally heckled. “Show us whatcher made of!”

  I looked around us. There was no breeze on the warm night air. Up past the bleachers, leaves hung quietly, enormous evergreens stood stock-still. On the other side of the Showboat, Kitsilano Swimming Pool was a broad sheet of glass shimmered by the near-full moon with English Bay glittering beyond it.

  She cle
ared her throat and playfully sent her voice up and down the scales. The notes resounded and it was quiet again. Finally she took a big breath, walked down centre stage and threw a hip sideways. Her eyes took on a harder cat’s glare. She looked straight down the beams of light coming at her as though she were attempting to stare down a locomotive. Her pale skin was luminescent. Like a magazine girl, I thought, a movie star. And then, she opened her mouth and, slow and smoky, she sang:

  You had plenty money 1922.

  You let other women make a fool of you.

  Why don’t you do right, like some other men do.

  Get outta here and bring me some money too.

  Sally let out a low wolf whistle. My mother’s eyes followed the sound and stayed there as she moved into verse two, her voice taking on a sleepy rasp. By the third verse, her inhibition was all but gone, her hands stroked slowly down the boa, her hips had begun a slow roll. Beside me, Sally gaped. I had thought she’d see what a fool my mother was making of herself, but she didn’t. Sally liked it and now I was embarrassed by both of them. I wanted to go home.

  My mother’s head cocked and her eyelids sank dreamily as she stared into the two lights Sally held and oozed her last Get outta here and bring me some money too.

  Then quiet.

  My mother continued to gaze with a small smile, waiting. Sally tucked the flashlights under her arms, dropping one as she leapt to her feet and applauded. “Encore!” I slapped one thigh in ovation. Their eyes were locked on each other.

  I fell asleep on the drive home and woke up in my bed to the sounds and smells of the two of them cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast.

  It wasn’t long after that Josie and Sally talked me into going to see a matinee with a couple neighbourhood kids and their mother. I didn’t even know these kids. My mother had set it up somehow and both she and Sally made a big deal out of the fact that I should make an effort to have more friends in my life, kids my own age.

  I don’t recall much about the show other than that it was a kids’ western and that I had a knot in my stomach the whole time I was in the theatre. I couldn’t stop wondering about what my mother and Sally were doing, the idea they didn’t want me around, and the more I thought about it the more agitated I got. I’d never wanted to go home so bad in my life.

  In front of my house, I climbed out of the neighbours’ car as if I were escaping rabid dogs and raced up our front walkway. I didn’t know what it was I wanted so bad, I just wanted. The door was locked. I opened it up with the key I kept round my neck only to have the door stop inches from the jamb. Someone had set the chain. In the middle of the day. I shoved hard against the steel links and heard laughter coming from upstairs. Suddenly the rage emanating from that knot in my stomach took over and I began slamming the door over and over, hollering for my mother at the top of my lungs. I rang the bell and banged the door until I heard her over my own voice, yelling, “I’m coming, hold on. Hang on, for godsake! … Vivian, let go, so I can undo the chain.” The door closed in my face and I listened to metal slide against metal before my mother was there before me in her bathrobe.

  “Why was the door locked?” I fumed.

  “I don’t know.” She tucked her robe farther closed. “I must’ve done it without thinking.”

  “Why?” I demanded. “Why are you in your bathrobe?”

  Suddenly Sally was there at the top of the stairs in her sweatshirt and jeans, looking as if she just woke up. “Vivian, knock it off,” she said in that flat stern tone I would come to know well.

  “You knock it off!” I roared. “This is my house.”

  “That’s enough,” my mother snapped. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. I just want to go home.” I pushed past, up the stairs and into my room, slamming the door behind.

  By October, Sally was just about finished her vases for New York and she lined them up in two curved rows at the foot of the bed. She set two in front, entitled Josie and Vivian.

  Josie looked the way my mother did that night at the Showboat: slim and long, indigo glaze with pale blue silk looking slyly out the holes and spilling over the top. Vivian was red. An unglazed strip of terra cotta ran diagonally as a path for stick-figure chameleons wearing ant-faced frowns. The stiff organdy she used was cream with slate-blue dollops.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Magnificent. You are going to knock their socks off!” My mother looked wistful.

  “What?” Sally asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll miss you, that’s all.”

  Sally looked as though she’d been slapped. “I’ll only be gone a couple months. But I’m coming back! My sister will be home by then but—” She stuttered for words. I was suddenly struck with a fear that she might move in with us. “I’m not moving to New York!” Sally insisted. My mother’s expression suggested she knew something we didn’t.

  Soon, we were into November and Sally’s flight wasn’t far off. Her pieces had been shipped ahead. The time she planned to stay in New York had shrunk. “I’d just have to spend a lot of time with my parents. Two weeks is enough,” she said. It was late Sunday afternoon. Sally’s stove had blown a fuse and we were in the midst of transferring dinner from her place to ours, walking across the front lawns in winter coats and slippers. “When I get back, maybe I’ll have some commissions and maybe we could open a store together and sell vases and paintings and—”

  My mother’s glance switched across the road to the woman peering at us from behind her curtains. We often saw her trimming her roses in the summer but we’d never spoken.

  Sally prattled away. “That could be the name of it! All Things Pretty. What d’ya think?”

  Mum’s face twitched as she waited for me to open the front door.

  “What?” Sally looked at her. My mother wouldn’t answer. Inside, Sally kept at her. “What’s wrong?”

  Mum peeked out the door window. “That woman across the way. Why does she keep staring?”

  Sally giggled. “She’s about a hundred and she’s all alone. Wanna invite her over?”

  My mother screwed up her mouth. “She watches us like she’s FBI or something.”

  We walked to the kitchen.

  “Maybe she’s KGB. You know what they say: keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Sally glanced at me. “Viv, go invite Spy Biddy for dinner.”

  “Haw-haw,” my mother replied. “We’re all out of prune juice and binoculars. She can stay home and and—”

  “Give herself an enema,” Sally blurted.

  Mum swatted her. But she was strange that night. Twitchy.

  It must have been soon after. My mother and I were in the supermarket. She was staring at the price of Granny Smith apples, when she looked up to see another one of our neighbours watching her. This one lived next door, on the other side. She’d given my mother tips on pruning roses in the past, told her what terrific fertilizer fish guts made.

  The woman’s smile managed to be smug and self-conscious at once as she steered her shopping cart in our direction.

  “Hello, Sharon, how are you?” My mother’s expression was pleasant in that false way I had thought was natural for her until I saw the way she was around Sally.

  “I’m just fine, Josephine. Vivian, how is school?”

  “Fine.” I stared at my feet. I let myself drift a few feet and tried to look absorbed in the apple display but I could feel the neighbour watching, willing me farther out of earshot, which merely prompted me to tuck my hair behind my ear the way the Bionic Woman did, homing in on their conversation with all the high-tech focus my no-tech ear could muster.

  “You’re looking well,” the neighbour said.

  “You are too,” my mother lied.

  “Well, I try. Hard to compete with the likes of you over my hedge looking like a million dollars every day!” They laughed. Phonies, I thought. The neighbour leaned closer. “Did you see in the paper yesterday about the woman in Utah who had her child taken away? Good gr
acious!” Her voice lowered. “Though, I don’t know how she ended up with a child in the first place.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Oh, well …” Her voice dropped lower still. I inched closer. “She was a you-know-what.”

  “A drug addict?”

  The neighbour glanced away and back to my mother. “You know.”

  Mum began to fidget as though she didn’t have all day. “A prostitute?” she offered with a barely concealed sigh.

  The neighbour leaned forward again and whispered.

  “Pardon?”

  She whispered a little louder, “A lesbian.”

  I looked at the apples. I’d heard older kids at school call each other that. It was a synonym for dipstick or gomer. Seemed to me that if people could have their kids taken away for that, no one would have parents anymore.

  “Oh …” My mother turned up her plastic grin with a thousand-watt flash of teeth. “Well, Sharon, your kids are all grown, I shouldn’t think you’d have much to worry about.”

  “Oh! You!” Sharon swatted a hand at the air between them. “I just found it very interesting. A few neighbours on our block found it interesting too. I just wondered if you did. Or if you’d heard.”

  Mum shook her head in bewilderment. “No. I hadn’t. It’s sad, actually. You don’t think about, ah, about those people ending up with children, I suppose. Do you?”

  Several apples dropped on the floor around me and caused both women to swivel. My mother scrambled to pick them up as the neighbour stood with her hands on her cart. “Oh dear, have you got them all?” then, “I suppose I should do the rest of my shopping. It was nice to chat with you.”

  Mum looked up from where she crouched. “See you, Sharon. Your chrysanthemums are looking gorgeous this year, by the way.”

  The neighbour grinned and tootled off into the next aisle.

  My mother carefully set the apples back with the others, muttering, “Idiot—why would she tell me that miserable story? Why is she telling me that!”