Projection

by Priscila Uppal

Vigorous nods. I know I do. I know I do.

  I don’t think so. He knows his son and his daughter. You don’t.

  My mother is her own storm cloud. She looms, energy bubbling. Nothing can contain what is about to explode. I know this. Now she knows too. The room cringes, awaiting the blow. Don’t you threaten me. You have come here to accuse me.

  This is ridiculous. I am the one who found you and approached you and made the trip to a foreign country, a foreign city. I don’t know the language, and I don’t know you at all. You’re a perfect stranger to me.

  My mother steps back. This last statement surprises her. And hurts her. And silences her.

  I don’t know you. You can’t expect me to pretend twenty-four hours a day that I do. I’m sorry if I can get overwhelmed or frustrated or upset in small doses. If you weren’t prepared for that then you are completely unrealistic. Do you have any idea how difficult a decision this trip was for me?

  My mother tosses up her hands—I am not playing by her rules. I do not want people who do not like me around. You are going to educate me? I don’t have to ask you anything. This is a democratic country and no one can demand anyone else listen to them.

  After all these years, you don’t want to listen to anything I have to say? You don’t want to know what I’ve been doing or thinking or feeling all these years? Is it possible my mother has concentrated so fully on what her own narrative line will be, her own extreme close-ups and grand speeches, that she never once expected an answer, a dialogue, some editing? Is it possible my mother has never imagined me with a mouth?

  No. I don’t. Not if you’re going to hurt me. Spit garbage in my face. Put me down on the carpet and stamp on me! I talk all the time. If you do not like who I am—

  She has worked herself into a frenzy now and, good literary critic that I am, I jump into my role as adversary. You know almost nothing about my life, your own daughter’s life, and you’re not even curious to find out? Isn’t this why you would want me to come?

  And then my mother surprises me. Beyond anything else she will say on this trip, this is the statement that makes me want to wrap my hands around her neck and throttle her until all her words are swallowed up in suffocation, and accept my jail time. No. I know you very well. In the last six days I know enough to write a book about you!

  Luggage packed. Cab on its way. Plane on the tarmac. So long, crazy lady, time to speed out of here. Forget all about you. Let Stella Dallas’s words to Helen Morrison foretell my own future: In a little while, she’ll forget all about me . . . she’ll love you just like you were her real mother. This woman is a bloodsucker. She drained our piggy banks when she left, our piggy banks! She feeds on other people’s lives, their vital and creative energies, to escape her own. She thinks she’s a critic, but what has art taught her about living? Obviously books and movies and theatre haven’t prepared her for dealing with the real world. Art has only prepared her for delusional victory—a victim of circumstance wrongly barred from her family who will be vindicated in time. As audience, we don’t get to see Stella Dallas’s lonely nights lamenting her bad decisions, wallowing in the pain of knowing she is unfit to be a good mother and that her daughter has been spared further humiliation and harm with her freedom to live life without her. The movie ends before this life sentence of misery, with Stella’s one unselfish act culminating in a happy marriage for her daughter. Few are capable of such unselfishness. My mother is not among them.

  What the hell am I doing here? I’ve never had any urge to visit Brazil. I’ve dreamt of Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Melbourne, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Oslo. Never São Paulo. Brasilia. Rio. For years, I could not have cared less where my mother was, if she were alive, if she had a passing thought about me—it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out she likely fled back to her homeland, I just didn’t want to know for sure, and she didn’t want to find me either. Total willful blindness. On both sides. And now I’m trying to convince her that she should listen to what I have to say—what do I have to say indeed? Why didn’t I compose even a single speech for this very moment in all these years? Why did I think it would be better to act like an observer, a note-taker, a researcher, detached writer, when I’m an active participant whose life will be affected by this course of events, who might very well be harmed, permanently harmed, by the human windmill in front of me? I wanted to give her the chance to simply be, be who she is, as she is, without fear. I wanted to be as neutral and unobtrusive as possible. I wanted to believe I was taking the higher road. How stupid. How Canadian. Even peacekeepers carry guns. I didn’t pack a single weapon, and now have to cobble together defences as the need arises. I don’t appreciate your sarcasm.

  I don’t understand sarcasm, or irony, or hints of any kind. There are many things in life you have to deal with that you don’t appreciate. My friends told me you came here for vengeance.

  Nice friends. Vengeance? That’s ridiculous. I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy trip, but I am not a quitter by nature. I will bang and bang and bang on a wall until it falls down. (It is only after this trip that I learn the other option is to just walk around.) In my mind, I hold my luggage back from the belt, unpack my clothes, put down the receiver. I will not make a dramatic exit, which will only please my mother’s theatrical sense of her victimhood. This is why you need to listen to me. You don’t have accurate information. Just once in this entire trip, I want you to listen to me.

  When my mother rains, she pours. I don’t have to do anything you ask. I am not your student. See, the child is telling the mother what to do, pointing her finger at me?

  Who is she talking to? Who is this “see” directed at? Is there a jury behind the curtains, in the breakfast nook, crouched with binoculars in the washroom? I am an adult.

  I am fifty-seven years old.

  We’re comparing ages now? Granted, I suppose my mother never imagined herself, nearly a senior citizen, confronting her estranged daughter off the plane from Canada in an apartment suite in São Paulo. It’s clear she imagined only gourmet dinners and shopping escapades, gallery hopping and loving hugs. Perhaps in her version of Stella Dallas the daughter notices her martyr mother outside in the rain and lifts her bridal veil to offer one last look of gratitude for all she has sacrificed. But not in mine. And it occurs to me now that I’ve always imagined us fighting—not about anything specific, but I sensed we would naturally butt heads—then me running off into a closet, crouching into a ball, breathing in the stale smell of clothes and papers and old shoes, my brother knocking lightly on the sliding doors to offer me a slice of cheese or an apple, a ritual I performed regularly as a child to escape the heaviness of our home, and which I haven’t indulged in since I left that house. In the closet, I felt safe, contained, as if I’d grown a boxy shell. Frequently, I’d even fall asleep, neck curled underneath hanging shirts and dresses, legs crammed tight to my chest. When my brother couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d go the opposite route, battle fear with fearlessness, recklessness—he’d construct a ramp out of bricks and wooden boards and invite all the neighbourhood kids to watch him flip his motocross through the air, building the ramp higher and higher until he would finally spill, or speed down our swimming pool slide on that same motocross, which would invariably end with him crashing headfirst bike-upon-body into the water, me the little nurse with alcohol swabs and Band-Aids swearing on my life not to tell our father. I take a quick glance at the entrance closet, barely large enough for a broom and an ironing board, and imagine retreating to its delineated space, but know it won’t do. I might be someone’s child, but I’m still an adult. I didn’t come here to hide. I’ll need to be more like my brother now—risk everything even if I crack my skull on the concrete.

  If you cannot listen to someone, you cannot have a relationship with them. Communication must go two ways. I am asking you to listen to me so we can build a real relationship. What we have now is based only in imagination. I know this isn’t easy, but it’s necessary if we’re going
to meet on equal terms.

  I will not play your game, she counters. You don’t believe God, why would you believe me?

  My face is as hot as my mother’s is cold. I am not playing a game. This is reality.

  She wipes her hands together, harshly. I don’t want your reality. I don’t want your threats and accusations. You could have found me any time. I am all over the internet. I am everywhere. My work is everywhere.

  I did not come here to threaten you. Or accuse you. Or seek vengeance. Your friends are wrong to tell you this. I came here as a gift, an opportunity. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. I came here to get to know who you are and for you to get to know who I am. Do you want to know who I am?

  She doesn’t respond, only settles into the chair with an unwavering eye, ignoring my little white flag waving in the wind. The truth of the situation hits me like a bullet fired after the declaration of a truce: I am the true perfect stranger. She trusts me even less than I trust her.

  I step into my temporary bedroom and shut the doors. Not a retreat, but an intermission. Let the prima donna gather herself for the second act. Within seconds I hear the buzz of the television.

  When I am able to convince myself that maybe this ugly fight is actually our first genuine breakthrough and it is imperative that I recommit to the original program—like I said, I’m not a quitter by nature and so my ability to reassess and retry is vast—I open the doors and ask my mother if she has decided on our evening itinerary.

  I have always hated the Apocalypse book of the Bible, but when its title was changed to Revelations, I thought this was wonderful. There will be no more tears. I don’t want to cry anymore or to remember any tears, Priscila. I really wanted my marriage to work.

  Surprisingly, considering the well of emotions my mother ought to have stirred in me by now, I have yet to cry on this trip. I sincerely hope my reaction is not an unconscious desire to disobey my mother, but her words trigger my first sensations of tears: eyes watering, nose plugging up, throat pulsing. I did not intend to defeat her, only bruise her a little for the sake of a fairer fight. Of course she wanted her marriage to work. I’m sure when she said her “I do’s” her future was bright and happy. Her tall, handsome husband was climbing the government ladder at a relentless pace; her starter home included gorgeous hydrangea bushes and a swimming pool; her sex life produced two precocious offspring and might have been extremely satisfying (I will never have the guts to ask); she was raising children and writing poetry and articles for magazines. I am sorry her dreams were crushed and damaged her so extensively in the process.

  My parents’ experience is probably the reason I’m so skeptical about marriage. I’d rather wake up every day and choose to be with you than promise to be with you no matter what we do to each other, I’ve said often to Chris, who also has no interest in the religious or civic institutions of marriage. And yet, I know such an attitude actually absolves my mother from fleeing a marriage she couldn’t stomach any longer. Leaving a marriage doesn’t need to mean abandoning one’s children though. Many marriages end in divorce. Does my mother resent my relationship with Chris? My finding love and a supportive partner in life at the age of twenty-one? Is that why she doesn’t want to hear about how we met, how we like to spend our time, how we celebrate our birthdays or book launches?

  I’m coming to the conclusion that trauma exists in manifold disguises. My father’s trauma was physical, touchable, requiring immediate medical intervention. One part of his body no longer able to communicate with the other parts. Permanent paralysis. To look upon my father, wincing as he grabs hold of the hoist to lower himself into his wheelchair, his daily experience of pain, discomfort, and disorientation is evident to all. Inarguable.

  However, there are other forms of trauma, less easily detectable, but just as insidious. As someone who has studied trauma theory and written about trauma in my academic and creative works, I use the word carefully and purposefully here. For some a severed dream is as permanently altering and debilitating as a severed limb. I believe my mother is one of these people. A form of mental illness, perhaps, but activated by circumstance and not easily understood or treated. There are no prosthetics available for severed dreams, no surgeries, no equipment, and only the most unsatisfying of medications (those that stop one from dreaming or feeling the burden of the lost dreams). In the face of unreachable dreams, many of us learn to adapt, cope, invent new dreams, especially if we’ve had a hand in pushing ourselves away from those dreams in the first place or over time. But when those dreams are taken from you, snatched violently away without any permission on your part, the rupture left in their place can offer little chance for recovery. In the case of my father, his immune system was attacked. In the case of my mother, her imagination. She’s been living in a state of crisis ever since. Phantom dreams as achingly futile as phantom limbs.

  I need to be the strong one, I tell myself, all the evidence points to that. She is a victim not of you but of herself. A victim of her imagination. She needs the distractions of art to function on a daily basis, the way your father needs his medications and his homecare workers. If you want access to her mind or heart, you need to be patient and gentle. Lost in the blast long ago. Even she doesn’t have the keys. So I swallow the tears, freshen my makeup, and join my mother in the lobby.

  The fight did open up something in my mother: an old wound. Over dinner, she unwinds the outer bandage to offer me a peek.

  I was going to die. Just die if I stayed. I tried to get in touch with you and your brother. Your father would not let me. No one can get angry at me for that.

  It is hard enough for her to admit this much. I think about one of the claims from her legal documents: “The palsy turned Defendant into a violent and intractable person who was unable to accept the reality of being disabled and under a State Pension.” The palsy turned the Plaintiff into a violent and intractable person unable to accept the reality as well. Who could, so easily? I’ve often speculated that if dealt the same cards I would not have fared as well as my father—I imagine I’d be consumed by bitterness and anger, depression, alcoholism, potentially suicide. My father was brilliant and possessed boundless energy; I’m sure he thought his brain could will him out of his situation if he tried hard enough. The doctors and nurses, I’m told, admired my father as he pushed himself every day at the parallel bars, carrying his body weight with one arm, his legs attached to metal braces, hoping against hope for a synapses reunion. He was never rewarded for his efforts. At the end of each session he was just as disabled as he was before. Outside the hospital a new life was waiting for him, an incomprehensible life with a new vocabulary and few options, a life he didn’t sign up for. No fault of his. One with a disappointed wife, who also could not accept the new reality. And two clueless children.

  I proceed lightly, gently, but am determined for her to understand my own point of view. I think you were sick. My father was sick. You both made decisions that you felt were right. I don’t think they were right, but I understand why you made them. All decisions have consequences. I was affected by those decisions. You can’t expect me to pretend I don’t have mixed emotions. I do not want to bring up the pain of the past, but you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist for me. It does. I was eight years old. My entire life, who I am, is shaped by what happened. You’re asking me to pretend I am not who I am and that I did not live the life I’ve led, and I can’t do that. I am happy to be here with you, I am having a nice time. I want to get to know you more, but I won’t pretend the past never happened. There were consequences to you leaving. I had to take care of my father and my brother: shopping, cleaning, cooking, medical procedures. I had a Visa card with my name on it at ten years old. I was so old and worn out by the time I was fifteen that I left home and have been self-supporting ever since. It was easier for me to work full-time and go to school full-time and earn A-pluses across the board than it was for me to keep that household functioning.

  My mother ha
s stopped eating her leafy salad and is listening to me. Actually listening to me. It’s the longest and most honest speech I have been permitted so far on this trip. She takes a breath and stops. She’s thinking. Actually thinking about what I’ve said. She takes another deep breath.

  I can’t face these things, Priscila. I know you want to talk about them. If I have to face them I am afraid I will die. I am afraid I will break and the breaking won’t end.

  My mother is more insightful of her psychology than I have given her credit for. She’s not oblivious; she’s desperate. The woman has been in survival mode for over twenty years. She’s utterly exhausted, and that exhaustion shows itself in her frizzy hair, her bloated face, her clashing clothes and shuffling body, but now she knows no other way of life. She must play out this fugitive role until the end. Of course she’s scared of me. She implies I have the ability to murder her. With my presence. A few words. No knives or gas leaks or gunshots: just memories.

  You don’t have to, I assure her. Just understand that I can’t cover up my mixed emotions every second of the day.

  My mother points to her chest, the hard lump of her cancer tube. I lost your father and both of you. You lost only me. You need to think of that.

  I will. I’ve never considered it in such a light.

  And she’s never considered that I had to assume responsibilities in taking care of my father and our household—a task that she, as a grown adult, found too burdensome to handle. I remember so little about you because we didn’t talk about you. Except when we were angry. We tried to forget. I know now she thought she was providing us a better option than a weak, disappointed, hysterical mother. Like Stella Dallas, she thought she was offering us escape from her. From her.

  My mother’s parents liked my father but were against her marrying him because of the differences of culture. They did not want her to marry any Canadian when she accompanied them to Ottawa, when her father accepted his post as military attaché. It is the only time I disobeyed my father’s wishes, she says sadly. I married for love.