I remember some happy things, I offer. Over the last few days, I’ve been ransacking my brain for morsels of tenderness to keep in my pockets for such a moment. Easter eggs and my giant multicoloured teddy bear—which I still have—your red Avon lipstick tubes, your hairbands and bobby pins, you pulling me to the mall in a red wagon, the ice cream man and my kangaroo flavour—grape with vanilla inside—you’d buy me a whole box for the week, and vanilla cones and ice cream sandwiches for Jit.
Do you remember I took us for swimming lessons?
And suddenly I do. I do remember. The chlorinated pool. The yellow arm floatation devices, and that Jit was a far better and braver swimmer than I was, repeatedly diving to retrieve dropped objects, though I loved actually being in the water more than he did. How we splashed about and swam circles around my mother, calling out for her attention and approval. We must have loved her once. We must have. Even Jit.
Our outdoor parent. The one who took us to bus stops and dentist appointments, to softball games and choir. The one who cleaned the pool and tended the garden: zucchini, tomatoes, green peppers, and four strawberry bushes. The one who bought us birthday presents and Popsicles and ground corn for the petting zoo. The one who taught us to sing and skip and slide and swim. But, to her disappointment and my own, I don’t remember her driving the brown Mustang or making paper snowflakes with us and decorating the entire house with them.
We allow our memories to fade into the music of the traditional Brazilian band playing in the café, which my mother finds “soothing.” I too am comforted by the mix of the piano with the soft Brazilian drumming and chanting voices. They are all religious songs, my mother tells me, that people sing outside of church, folk songs, and a couple of songs by recently deceased soprano Bidú Sayão. Couples begin to dance, holding each other close, some even kissing as they move to the music.
The last time I danced was with your father.
When I first fed my mother’s website through the automatic translation feature, my mother’s name appeared as Theresa Catharina de Góes Fields. Fields? She must have married a white guy, I thought. Whoa. In all the intervening years, it’s astonishing that I’d never imagined her remarried. Did she start another family? Do I have half-siblings? My mind raced through the possibilities. But I soon figured out Fields was simply the English translation of her maiden name, Campos.
You’ve never dated anyone here? I risk.
My mother’s eyes remain fixed on the band: I am still a married woman, Priscila.
She is stating a fact: irrefutable. I feel sad now watching the public displays of affection on the dance floor, knowing both my parents have had no romantic life other than in their imaginations for the last twenty years, probably more. For someone as romantically inclined as my mother, as idealistic about love, this absence must cut her deeply. She must project herself into her movies as much to experience the lost joys of candlelit dinners and shared desserts and drawn bubble baths and strolls through public parks as to follow a plot or admire a filmmaker’s craft. The failure of her love to save her marriage from ruin must have been more devastating to her than leaving her children. The realization that love, no matter how pure, how total, cannot overcome all. Happily ever afters reserved for fairy tales and movies.
We share our table with a mother-daughter couple originally from Russia who emigrated to California. The daughter, a stunning blond with severe blue eyes and high cheekbones, has recently separated from her husband, a Brazilian she met in Argentina; the mother is helping her set up her new apartment, though it is clear she wishes her daughter would return to live with her in the United States. Among the folk music and chatting up strangers she will never meet again, my mother shines in her element. The Russians open up easily to her, are enamoured of her grand hand gestures and her operatic voice, and they tell us all about the Russian delicacies the mother imported from California specialty shops. These are the first people, outside of my mother and Soares, whom I have been able to speak to at some length since my arrival. A mother and daughter helping each other through a tough family matter. I hope some of their caring will rub off on us, bring us a little luck. From what I can ascertain, my mother isn’t holding a grudge and I admire this trait in her. The issue isn’t really talking about the past—she wants to know she’s been forgiven for the past. Or at least that I won’t hold it against her.
Later, as we head off to bed, for the first time since my arrival my mother does not kiss me goodnight. Perhaps this is what equal terms means. No victims. No victors. Just each of us alone in the dark.
Encontro e Desencontro
7
freaky friday
Fortune Cookie:
A journey soon begins,
its prize reflected in another’s eyes.
When what you see is what you lack,
then selfless love will change you back.
Churches crammed with believers and repentants. Upper-class shopping malls with fish-eaters. The streets ghost towns.
Normally on Good Friday my mother would be fasting, but because of the cancer she has been given permission to eat. Just no meat. Without any qualms about talking to people while they’re trying to perform their jobs, my mother brags to the breakfast pianist about my accomplishments as a writer.
You are very proud of her, he replies after finishing a light-hearted tune on the keyboard.
Yes, she is so young and successful in such a competitive field. A month ago, she posted an article about the famous Canadian writer who will be visiting Brazil, if only two cities: “But Priscila Uppal intends to come back to our country. . . . I must admit that the poetess and romancista is my daughter.” Yes, she is proud.
Nobody inquires as to whether she’s played a role in any of my accomplishments. It’s probably no coincidence that we are both teachers, writers, and art enthusiasts, though I can’t pinpoint any specific memories of my mother, aside from regular crafts and colouring books, that would have contributed to the formation of my artistic side. My mother’s nursing duties kept her unhappily away from her typewriter, but I don’t think her resentment made me value the act of writing. Could it be simple genetics? Is there an art appreciation gene in our code? I loved my books as they could always be counted on to transport me out of the house into a world of adventuring talking dogs and ugly ducklings who transformed into beautiful swans, or tortured princesses and goblins living under bridges, or funny blue monsters who didn’t recognize they were monsters until the end of the book. I could block out my hysterical mother with books. And my father’s sickness. But I’m not convinced my passion for reading as a child is the key. Although psychologists are not necessarily in agreement with me, I think the most important years in determining who you will become are your teenage years. Which is one of the reasons Freaky Friday movies—a comedic genre based on temporary body switching starting with the original 1976 Freaky Friday starring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster and spawning several remakes as well as adaptations of the genre such as Body Switch, 18 Again, and even Shrek the Third—have been so popular, so consistently, for decades. A middle-aged person forced to remember what it’s like—physically, emotionally, intellectually—to be on the precarious cusp of adulthood. A young person forced to appreciate the tough decisions and burdensome responsibilities of adults. We squirm as the adult trapped in the teenager’s body once again experiences raging hormones and crippling insecurities, and we laugh as the child in the adult fakes his or her way through important business meetings or pretentious dinner parties. In the Freaky Friday genre, once body order is restored, satisfaction lies in the knowledge that parent and child have gained an understanding of each other’s worlds. Father and son, mother and daughter, now love out of compassion rather than merely blood.
My mother missed my entire teenage years, from my first AA-cup bra to my first traumatizing menstrual period, my first nauseating hangover (vodka mixed with grape Kool-Aid—I wish I was kidding), my first embarrassing sexual experience
s (is a hand down my pants supposed to feel this icky and pointless?), my drama productions (I played Barbra Streisand’s role in Nuts and was relentlessly recruited for air-band competitions because of my long flowing hair), poem and story publications in the high-school papers (usually about frightened siblings, the dynamics of teenage friendships, and suicide), my academic and sports awards (I won top ranking in classes as varied as accounting, English literature, biology, and phys. ed.; MVP on the basketball team, and other sports ribbons and trophies including for bowling—again, I wish I was kidding); she missed absolutely everything. I am an unknown quantity buttering toast, sharing watermelon slices. If only we could switch bodies for a day, even a couple of hours, I think. I’d like to know what’s going on in that layered head, what she really thinks about the state of her existence and the young woman who shares her DNA and her hotel room.
He says you are very beautiful and that you look like me. What else could a mother want? As if sensing hesitation on my part, my mother adds: You do look like me. You also look like your father. Then, I did not marry your father to stay in Canada. Canada is no better a country than Brazil. There is no democracy in Canada.
Revelations as one decides which jam jar to open. The thought had never, ever, crossed my mind. I figured if she fled Canada so easily, she would never have married to stay in it. Plus, she’s not expressed or inferred or hinted at a single characteristic or feature from Canada she’s missed. Including me. Not “I used to love poutine” or “Canada has the right idea about universal health care” or “Does that Group of Seven still paint trees?” or “I miss skating with you on the Rideau Canal.” From the lack of references, one would imagine she’d never lived in or travelled about Canada, when she actually spent the better part of her twenties and thirties there. Maybe Canada, to my mother, is an imaginary place, a land far, far away, where she stores all the bad and sad feelings. Canada is a villain who turned her life unfairly on its head. Who dished out a brand of justice she can’t accept.
I pile endless pineapple on my plate. Brazil has the best pineapple. My Brazil enthusiasts are right about this. We both eat tons of it; and as we do, I decide to prepare a mental list of all the things I love about Canada (a list I can replay in my mind whenever my mother decides to dismiss its value to me).
Ten Things I Love About Canada
I love that I don’t need to know how to drive and can walk outside almost any hour of the day, relatively unafraid.
I love that if I’m sick I can go to my doctor’s office or emergency and not worry that I’ll have to take out a loan to pay for tests or procedures.
I love Hockey Night in Canada (Don Cherry’s tacky suits and Ron MacLean’s groanworthy puns).
I love Canadian lakes and rivers and the Rocky Mountains and Algonquin Park. Most of all I love the longest skating rink in the world, and love love love that it’s in my hometown.
I love the Canadian Pacific railroad and the rolling food and drink carts.
I love Canadian books: The Handmaid’s Tale, Basic Black with Pearls, Beautiful Losers, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Fugitive Pieces, poetry by Gwendolyn MacEwen and Irving Layton and A.M. Klein and Anne Carson, George F. Walker and Judith Thompson plays.
I love our political system, which allows for more than two parties and for coalition governments. (Like my father, I love Pierre Elliott Trudeau.)
I love that the city I live in is home to millions of people from around the globe. And I love that this means I can find, at a moment’s notice, a restaurant to satisfy any culinary urge.
I love French Canada, especially their artists: writers Anne Hébert, Marie-Claire Blais and Hubert Aquin, painters Jean-Paul Riopelle and Paul-Émile Borduas; poutine and tourtiere and molasses candies; how they dress and speak and smoke; even their snobbery against the English.
I love my Canadian passport. (Which should not need a visa to visit Brazil.)
Satisfied, I wipe my mouth clean of yellow juice.
Many of the museums and exhibitions and stores are closed today, except the Museu de Arte Brasileira, specializing in works by local as well as internationally renowned Brazilian artists. As Soares drives us there, my mother, offering an unintended ironic commentary on the holy day, takes the opportunity to tell me Brazilians care very little for fathers: Only the mother is important. It is said that a child can have many fathers but only one mother. The mother can take the child and find a whole new family. When judges ask children who they would like to live with, they always say the mother.
I let her talk. I know this bias isn’t that different in North America. Fathers come and go, mothers are steadfast. No one loves you like your mother. A mother’s love is eternal. Et cetera. Et cetera. It’s why people make a special face of disgust when I’m forced to reveal my mother ran off when I was a child. The issue is that the look of disgust is usually directed as much at me as at this invisible mother. As with perfectly good furniture left out on the curb, passersby brace themselves for ugly smells or hidden stains or cracks as they open drawers and lift cushions; otherwise, why would anyone throw out a perfectly good chesterfield or vanity?
Then, changing her mind again at the drop of a hat, my mother gestures to a young couple playfully lifting their two children like swings between them, out for a stroll on this very sunny day. Family, she points. Look at how beautiful, how happy a family. If you have a good happy family, I think everything in life is so much easier for you.
Romantic Flashback
So, it’s probably a minor miracle, I think, that I’ve ended up in a stable, loving relationship, but I’m thankful that I have. When you grow up with sadness in place of love, you sometimes think sadness itself is love, a landscape that makes you feel at home, or a favourite genre of film or art; sadness is your element, your aesthetic; instinctively, automatically, you move toward it.
Chris grew up a morose teenager in a small town north of Toronto, the only son of a disastrous second marriage that saw his firefighter father turfed out of the house for alcoholism when Chris was only three years old. His four siblings, older than him by a good decade, had their own problems, which likely began in earnest once their father died in a car accident leaving Chris’s mother, a woman without maternal instincts, a young widow with four small children. After some false starts and punishing labour jobs, Chris returned to high school to finish his diploma when a teacher took an interest in him, dangling the possibility of university under his nose. We ended up meeting each other the week before university actually began; we’d both managed to earn large entrance scholarships to study literature and creative writing and the master of our college hosted a reception for scholarship recipients. As Chris likes to tell it, I had long hair and silver skull rings and there were a lot of geeks in that room with pocket protectors, and then there was a beautiful woman with purple-black hair in a black leather Harley-Davidson jacket and a miniskirt with the word “die” written on it. I decided to walk up and talk to her, and it’s the best decision I ever made in my life. After three years of solid friendship, while we watched each other pair up and break up with other people, Chris finally confessed he was in love with me. We’ve never turned back.
Neither of us may ever have experienced a good happy family, but we have experienced good happy love, and I hold on to this love as tightly as my purse as my mother tries to convince me that everything in life, not just biology, begins and ends with mothers.
My mother quiets as we enter the museum atrium, a stunning display of several famous statues by Aleijadinho, Brazil’s finest baroque artist, born in 1738 to a Portuguese architect and black slave woman. In his twenties he contracted leprosy, a condition that left him with crippled hands and legs. Some of the finest churches in Brazil were miraculously decorated by Aleijadinho. A Brazilian Michelangelo. Revered like a saint.
In stark contrast, we then enter an exhibition of contemporary artworks by J.R. Duran featuring huge two-storey-high glossy photographs of scantily clad women—n
ot necessarily Easter-approved entertainment, but then again we are the only visitors here—and my mother slips four postcards into my palm. No need to whisper as even the security guards are nowhere to be found, my mother positions herself in front of a topless woman astride a blow-up alligator, kissing its snout.
It never occurred to me that you or Amerjit would have to do anything for your father when I left. I thought you would all go live with his family. Or they would give him money.
I don’t interrupt her, because I don’t know how to respond to her mistaken assumptions. While she was packing her luggage in our basement, her own mother helping her pick and choose what to keep and what to leave behind, or maybe on the plane, two empty seats beside her like unfulfilled wishes, she must have convinced herself of many illusions regarding our future lives.
Childhood Montage
My father’s two brothers did help out, at first: the one immediately driving overnight to pick us up and take us back over the border to Syracuse until after Christmas; the other accepting us into his household and enrolling us in a West Bloomfield, Michigan, school, until my mother dropped in unannounced, terrifying everyone like an envelope leaking white powder. My brother and I had some good times with my cousins in Syracuse: two boys about our age who built model airplanes and motorized sports cars and the younger girl with so little to fear in her life the only punishment her parents could wield was the imaginary sceptre of The Boogeyman. In Michigan, our older cousins introduced us to Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, to horror movies like Rosemary’s Baby and Halloween, to piano lessons and softball leagues. My brother was enrolled in a special after-school math and speed-reading class, whereas I was placed in swimming and cheerleading (something I didn’t even know existed and found ridiculous, but my status-conscious aunt kept insisting would help me “belong”). I still remember the look of bewilderment in all their faces when Jit and I, kids completely uprooted from our surroundings and severed from the care of our parents only months before, presented them with our mid-term report cards: Jit had earned 100 percent in all subjects except two: English and woodworking, I think, and I had managed the most singular of feats, a perfect report card: 100 percent in every subject. My cousins touted those report cards around the neighbourhood like a parlour trick or freak show: Have you ever seen such a thing in your life? My uncle was a sweet and warm man who tried to make us comfortable, but it was clear my aunt was chewing at the bit to ship us back to Ottawa. After her wish came true, we received a yearly “Christmas Newsletter” bristling with vacation highlights to Hawaii and Thailand and job promotions, the kind that Chris and I parody by sending out a yearly “Bad Newsletter,” which includes a list of “People Who Owe Us an Explanation” and “Places Never to Visit Again.” A one-page letter with a Christmas card to display on our mantel. To my knowledge, never once did such a letter include a cheque.
Projection Page 15