*
“WOOOoooOOOooo,” Minnie’s siren startled me, and I put my hands to my flushed cheeks. She sat on the floor, racing her truck back and forth with uncommon violence.
“Go and sit on the stairs until you calm down,” Mama told her. “Minnie! Now.” The front entranceway was Minnie’s allocated timeout area. The only place where there was absolutely nothing to break, spill or move.
“Can I wait for Agatha?”
“No,” Mama said. “You need a time out. By yourself.” Minnie stood and looked ready to fight, but Mama’s haggard stare defeated her. Walking away in a John Wayne-inspired swagger, bottom lip extended, Minnie looked down at the fire truck in her hand. Surely she expected Mama to confiscate it, but my mother was already leaning back, eyes closed, sighing her biggest sigh. Taking her chance, Minnie quickened her pace and held the toy in front of her body, where Mama wouldn’t see it.
Tam-Tam came over to watch as Cassandra put the finishing touches on my hair. It looked as if it was soaked with ketchup. “It’ll be very glamorous,” Tam-Tam told me. I could tell she was pleased I was taking an interest in my appearance, even if it was a bit unruly. She turned to Mama. “You must take photos of this mysterious costume she’s wearing tonight, Ginny.” Mama didn’t answer.
“Don’t worry,” Cassandra told my mother. “She’s young.” She leaned close, brushed dye behind my ear and whispered, “Be careful. You’ll be a new person. Sometimes people do things they wouldn’t normally do when they get a new hairstyle. I bet your boyfriend will love it.”
“A boyfriend?” said Tam-Tam. I shook my head, caught Mama’s suspicious eye in the mirror and looked away.
“Oh,” said Cassandra, “I’m sure she has five boyfriends. Don’t get into anything too serious,” she told me. “You should just be having fun at your age. You’ll get your heart broken sooner or later, might as well make it later.” I nodded at my reflection in the mirror as Cassandra secured my hair inside a plastic cap. What she didn’t know, I thought, was that love had already enveloped me, grown stale and started inexorably to slip away. Not the heady lust of Ingo Bachmann, but a love that had worked its slow way into my bones and then started to decay. Mama hadn’t noticed either, and only a neglectful mother could fail to see this tragedy unfolding before her. Sometimes I suspected that she was happy about my loss.
When Helena moved across the river to Ontario to live with her deadbeat father, she’d insisted on going to my high school, even though it wasn’t the one in her neighbourhood. Immediately, she’d joined the volleyball team and started spending time with the other gym girls. It was a bad sign. And then, a few days after I found Asher’s letter, my slow disillusionment with Helena had accelerated. I had been lying under a tree with Ingo Bachmann, my head on his shoulder and my hand on his thigh. “Neither of my parents wanted me to be born,” I was telling him. “I was an accident.” His too-short blue cotton slacks were second only to track pants in their lack of style. Several trees, thick with autumn leaves, hid us from the walking path. Beyond another large maple, a black railing guarded the five-foot drop down to a walking path that ran alongside the canal. Four boys thundered past us, clumping through the leaves and mulch, and we both turned away, but they were too absorbed in their conversation to look at us through the branches. After climbing over the railing and jumping down, they apparently stopped at the bench directly below us. We could hear their voices clearly. The one who dominated the conversation had a loud British accent. His name, famously, was Swithin Barrington Sebastian Bennett, and he was in grade twelve, two years older than me. New to the school that year, he was the son of diplomats. His parents, the story went, had pulled him out of boarding school in England and brought him with them to Canada as punishment for shooting a purportedly gay classmate in the thigh during a hunting trip in the countryside. He had started this rumour himself. He seemed like the kind of person who could shoot a deer or an effeminate classmate without breaking a sweat, without removing the cigarette from his mouth.
I had turned with my back against Ingo’s chest, and he had his arm around me. I felt his muscles tense. Ingo Bachmann wasn’t the kind of person that liked to eavesdrop. I ran my hand along his arm, not wanting to move.
“She came home with me at lunch on Friday,” Swithin was saying. “My parents were gone all weekend, and she came back on Saturday for more. Finally, on Sunday, I shagged her three times and told her to fuck off.”
“Who is this chick?” someone said.
“You know, Helena Jacob. Swellena.” The other three boys laughed, and I cringed, stunned to discover that the twelfth-grade boys knew who Helena was.
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You fucked her? Swellena Jacob?”
“Three times, no joke. She was begging for it.”
“Were her tits saggy when she took off her bra?” They all laughed.
“No,” said Swithin. It was easy to imagine him torturing a small animal. “They were like melons. Big, sweet, round melons with these big hard nipples.” He smacked his lips as if there was too much saliva in his mouth, and the other boys groaned in delight. “Melon-a Jacob,” one of them said, and the others laughed at this stroke of poetic genius. “Swellena Melona.”
“I highly recommend her,” said Swithin. “A fine dish indeed.” Somehow, he got away with saying things that rightfully should have seen him tied to a tree with his underwear on the outside of his pants.
Ingo turned me to face him. He knew that Helena was my friend, though we’d never talked about her. He stared at me and touched my face. “Let’s go,” he whispered. Perhaps Ingo Bachmann would have talked about me that way if he had friends to talk to. I couldn’t picture it, but I knew people often did things I couldn’t picture. I picked a yellow leaf out of Ingo Bachmann’s yellow hair. “I’ll go first,” he said. He slipped the tip of his saliva-drenched tongue against mine and looked at me searchingly before standing and walking away without looking back. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve.
“The coup de grace,” Swithin was saying, “was when I reached around and put my finger right in her arsehole. You should have seen her squirm.” I crept to the edge of the railing and looked over. The top of Swithin’s head was a dark, gel-shiny jumble, sticking out in carefully chaotic points. Two of his minions were leaning against the railing at the side of the canal, facing me, and one looked up to meet my eyes. I gave him the finger as I stood, then quickly turned away before he had a chance to react. I didn’t have the courage to spit on Swithin’s head, sure that he’d turn, and that eye contact with him would bore a hole straight through my brain.
Helena and I had made fun of Swithin as we marched across the frozen canal the previous winter, chanting his name in time with our steps, doing our best to imitate his accent. I had been feeling so guilty and superior keeping Ingo a secret, and now I discovered that Helena, too, had a secret lover from far away. And hers had been a real lover, with real sex.
I looked at Cassandra as she tucked a fresh towel around my shoulders. Even Cassandra had bigger breasts than mine. It was so unfair that I couldn’t just inherit that one thing from my mother. “Okay, Agatha,” Cassandra said. “It stays on for half an hour.”
I couldn’t put my glasses on without getting dye on them, so I stood and squinted across the blurry room. After reminding Mama to free Minnie from the stairs, I made my way back to Tam-Tam’s private door and peeked in to see that her blue-carpeted office was empty. Somehow, the office always resisted the pungent odours of the salon; it was an oasis smelling faintly only of Tam-Tam herself. A hint of her lipstick, a scent that settled like a taste in the back of my throat. As always in Tam-Tam’s office, I felt like a small child with dirty fingers in an art gallery. I folded my hands. Without my glasses, I couldn’t make out any of the faces in Tam-Tam’s photographs. I wished the red dye needed more than half an hour to take effect. I was dreading the ride home, which had always been Mama’s favourite time for musing on the significance and tyranny of her mother’s be
haviour, past and present.
“I grew up in a haunted house,” Mama informed me when I was eight. “My mother had ghosts hovering around her. Her father, her aunt. And Oma Esther, too. My grandmother was already dead before I was born, a living corpse. She died in the concentration camps.” My mother didn’t seem to think I needed any further explanation of these statements.
“My mother and grandmother have always been a bit like Norman and Mrs. Bates,” Mama told me during another drive, forgetting that I was nine and far too young to have seen Psycho. She talked as though an invisible audience of hundreds were gathered on the hood of our car, hanging on her every word through the windshield.
“Mrs. Bates,” Mama explained, “is a corpse. She’s long dead, a skeleton wrapped in clothes. But Norman is a textbook Oedipal case. He can’t let her go, so he pretends she’s still alive. He dresses her up in clothes and murders people in her stead. Even speaks in her voice.” Mama let go of the steering wheel to make arthritic claws with her hands. “This creepy old lady voice,” Mama said in a creepy old lady voice, high and piercing. “Oh, don’t be scared. I didn’t mean that Oma Esther was actually dead. It was a metaphor, Agatha. I’m speaking metaphorically. Mothers and sons,” she went on, “typically have relationships fraught with all sorts of sublimated desires, etcetera. Mothers and daughters aren’t like that. It’s fathers and daughters.” She considered this statement. “Of course, I don’t have a father and neither does my mother, so. And you have Steven, but he’s not your biological father, and that must have an effect on a child. My mother’s not a lesbian,” she mused. “Though she might be; sometimes I’ve thought she might be. But usually I just think she’s asexual.”
“What’s a lesbian, Mama?” Startled out of her monologue, Mama was quiet, chewing her lip and watching the highway. She was always disappointed when I acted like a child.
“What’s a lesbian?”
“Well, when two women love each other and sleep in the same bed, then they’re lesbians.”
“Like when Helena sleeps over?”
“Well, no.” Mama was clearly losing patience with the conversation. “Lesbians hold hands and kiss on the lips, that sort of thing. Of course,” she went on, “according to some schools of feminism, any loving relationship between women can be lesbian, even if there’s no sex.”
“Helena and I hold hands.”
“Yes. You do, don’t you.” She gave me a sideways glance.
“We hold hands, Mama,” I added, grabbing her hand.
“True enough,” she agreed absently, giving my hand a quick squeeze and then pulling away to change gears. She was silent for the rest of the ride home, deep in thought. Leaving me to contemplate my great-grandmother’s status as living dead. My own possible lesbianism.
“Mama?”
“What?” She sighed.
“Nothing.”
Dad and I passed Bay Street. We were almost there. Even my legs were starting to shake. I breathed deeply, reminding myself that Virginia was glad of the accident, glad she had changed. Even the doctors had implied that she somehow chose it. Jasmine was trying to force a resolution of some kind; I didn’t know what she was planning to do, exactly, but I suspected that, once it was over, there would be no more J. Virginia Morgan just out of view in every subway station, no more late-night walks in random neighbourhoods as I dared her to step out of the shadows. Was I ready to lose her ghostly presence?
“Dad.” I grabbed his upper arm as we approached the hotel on Avenue Road.
He felt surprisingly muscular; he must have been working out. I let go quickly. “We’ve been here before.” He looked at the building as we drove past and then found a parking space less than half a block away. Maybe he didn’t remember, but we’d all come to Toronto when Jasmine was three or four. Though we stayed with friends of Dad’s, we went to one of these big hotels, this very one, I was sure, for lunch. The four of us had walked together, perhaps, past this very spot. We had been a family, and it hadn’t felt fragile at all. Though Steven wasn’t my father until I was three, though Mama was always hurting herself, and even though they were always arguing over laundry and vegetarianism and Judaism and whether Mama had any ambition — despite all that, I had never suspected that we could break apart so easily, could bow out and make lives without each other.
“You don’t want to see her, do you?” I said. “I mean, do you want to come with me?”
Dad shook his head. “She’s your mother,” he said. “I’ll wait here.” He squeezed my hand. “Unless you want me to come.”
“No.” She was only his ex-wife of long ago, but yes, she was my mother. My mother.
“Aga, wait.” I looked at him; he was afraid. “What will you say to her?”
“I don’t know.”
I expected the world to crumble, expected everyone to turn and stare, my body glowing guilt-red. It was the kind of hotel lobby with high ceilings and well-dressed elderly people relaxing in burgundy plush chairs; a few people waited in line at the registration desk, luggage at their feet. I spotted a small placard announcing Virginia’s “Willing Amnesia” workshop, directing participants to a conference room on the third floor. The elevators had dark mouldings; everything smelled like clean carpet.
I found the room down a third-floor hallway — a regular-sized door with a curtained window. It was clearly small; I’d expected a ballroom. I saw the participants list on the wall: only twelve names, all checked off except for two: Minnie Summer and Agatha Acker. At the sound of muffled voices through the door, I stepped back with a start and then walked quickly away, back toward the elevators, trying to figure out what to do. The carpet was navy blue, with gold stars and planets. I felt nothing but the urge to run. I reached the elevators and forced myself to turn around again.
“Agatha!”
I jumped, with a little scream. Past the last elevator, Jasmine was sitting in a large armchair, burgundy velour like the ones in the lobby.
“Shh,” she said. “Be quiet.”
I breathed hard, my heart pounding, and stared at her. “What are you doing?” I whispered back. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No way.”
“What’s that?” She was clutching a plastic shopping bag in her lap; her backpack was on the floor beside her.
“What took you so long to get here?” she said. I settled stiffly on the arm of her chair. “I was going to go in, but it’s not like I expected. There were only a few people and in a small room. She would have seen me right away. I was supposed to surprise her at the end, when she sets fire to the stuff.” Jasmine leaned close. “We have to show her. She’s our burden. Virginia’s our buried burden, don’t you get it?”
“You weren’t going to try to burn her, were you?”
Jasmine rolled her eyes and whispered, “No!” her voice cracking. “Why are we whispering, anyway?” she said, slightly louder, and I giggled. We were leaning close to each other, trying not to move suddenly, as if there was a hungry lion around the corner. “These are our burdens,” she told me, holding up the plastic bag. “You still have to write the three words to go with yours. We’ll go into the room at the end, when everyone else is coming out.” She pulled a shoebox out of the bag and opened it. Tam-Tam’s shoebox — my shoebox — with Mama’s cranes inside.
I pulled it out of her hand, pushing the top back on. “I don’t want to burn those!”
“Shh!” She glared at me and reverted to whispering. “Tam-Tam wanted to get rid of them. You should, too. We have to tell her. She’s our fucking buried burden. We’re right here. We can’t just give up.”
I looked at her helplessly. “How did you pay for this, anyway?”
“With your credit card.”
I caught myself about to say her name in that way she hated and stopped myself, shaking my head. Jasmine. “Come on,” I said. “It’s almost over. Let’s go to the conference room. That way we won’t chicken out.”
Jasmine stood to follow me down the hall. “Tha
nks, Agatha,” she said.
We stopped outside the door, and I pushed my ear close to the crack, jerking away when I heard a woman’s voice inside. I forced myself to move close again, and Jasmine did the same. I could barely breathe. Jasmine clutched my arm, hard.
“Okay,” Virginia was saying, in a loud, clear voice. “Now we’re going to say goodbye to all the things that hold us back, all those deeply buried anchors we’ve been talking about — those Christmas dinners with your in-laws, that extra ten pounds.” A few women laughed, and someone clapped. “We’re cutting them loose.”
Jasmine tugged at my sleeve, and I squeezed her shoulder. We listened to the scuffle of chairs against the floor as all the women moved around. From what Virginia was saying, it was clear that they were all depositing their buried burdens in her infamous metal trash can.
“I need a volunteer,” Virginia said. “Um. Yes, you.”
I stepped back, and Jasmine pressed her hand, palm flat, against the door.
“Now?” I said.
“No,” she whispered. “No, Agatha. Wait till after.”
She grabbed both my wrists as I reached for the knob, and I twisted in her grip, trying to bend her arms the wrong way. She was too strong.
“I surrender, I surrender,” I gasped. “You win.” She let go, and I caught my breath, pushing my hair out of my face, looking down at the starry blue carpet. Jasmine grabbed for me as I lunged forward and caught one of my arms.
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