by Jessica Raya
“We want to be alooooone,” Carol said.
“I’ll surprise you!” her mother said and disappeared into the kitchen.
I followed Carol to her bedroom. It was small but pretty, festooned with stuffed things and ruffled things and porcelain things, all of it purple and white. Lilac floral wallpaper peeked out between posters of Bible verses and biblical scenes. Jesus with a lamb. Jesus with Mary. Mary with baby Jesus. Baby Jesus with a baby lamb. A two-foot figure of the saviour in a glitter-trimmed robe watched from atop a shelf. It was like hanging out in a Christian gift shop.
Carol asked what I wanted to do. She had a bunch of Christian board games and a 500-piece puzzle of The Last Supper. “Judas’s head is missing,” she said, “but I think it’s actually better that way.”
“Why don’t we just watch TV,” I said.
“We don’t have one. My parents say it gets me too worked up.”
I sat on her bed and flipped through a magazine. It was full of stories about photogenic teenagers who were making the world a better place. Some of the pages had been torn out and stuck to the corkboard above Carol’s desk. Her inspiration board, she called it. “This boy teaches retarded kids to play the ukulele,” she said and sighed dreamily.
Mrs. Closter knocked on the door. Carol sighed again, undreamily. “Yes, Mother?”
“I was wondering if Robin would like to stay for dinner.”
“Why would she want to do that?” Carol said, rolling her eyes to the ceiling, or God maybe.
“Actually,” I said.
When Mr. Closter came home at five-thirty, everyone ran outside to greet him.
“This is Robin,” Mrs. Closter said, beaming at him.
“Well, well,” he said, beaming back at her, then me. He was an engineer, Carol had told me, and when he shook my hand I could smell the pencil lead. “Well, well,” he said again.
Mrs. Closter poured her husband a glass of orange juice while he described the new McDonald’s restaurant he’d seen driving home from the office. “It’s got these two big arches,” he said. “Sort of, um…”
“Golden?” I said.
“Why, that’s right.”
“Isn’t that something,” Mrs. Closter said, settling back into her work.
Carol’s kid brother popped a pinch of grated cheese into his mouth and said the neighbour bought a new car.
“You don’t say.” Mr. Closter reached over to ruffle his son’s hair, and the little guy smiled up at his dad. I tried to remember why it had bothered me when my dad did the same thing.
When dinner was ready, I set the table. Mrs. Maxwell said I was good at things that didn’t involve actual cooking.
“It looks lovely,” Mrs. Closter said, touching my arm.
She’d made a roast and mashed potatoes. There were glazed carrots and green beans with almonds and cheddar biscuits shaped into hearts with a cookie cutter and love. I’d seen these huge wedding cakes in a bakery once, dizzying towers of whipped white perfection. I thought they were beautiful until the lady behind the counter told me they were made from Styrofoam. You can’t tell the fake layers from the real ones, she said, because everything is covered in frosting. That had been my family, Styrofoam drowning in Betty Crocker’s Vanilla Cream. Carol’s family probably milled their own flour. While Carol said grace, I opened my eyes just enough to confirm what I already suspected. Everyone was smiling with their eyes closed.
After dinner, Carol walked me to the end of her block. All the houses were lit up with televisions and refrigerators and families. I thought of Mom, out with her Brian. We were missing the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
“I guess my family’s pretty weird, huh?” Carol said.
“Your parents are nice.”
“They aren’t my real parents,” she said. “I’m adopted.”
“Sorry,” I said, which seemed like the only appropriate response.
“Don’t be sorry. It means they really wanted me.”
I looked at the ground so I wouldn’t have to look at Carol. The details of a drug-addled birth mother would eventually come out. In fact, many women, drug-addled and otherwise, would lay claim to Carol Closter within the year. But it wouldn’t make what she said that day any less true. Mr. and Mrs. Closter had chosen her. They had pointed to the fluff of orange hair through the nursery window and said, That one. That’s our girl.
There it was, that rat-tooth comb again, scratching its tip across my heart. But this time it was worse. This time I was jealous of Carol Closter.
When I told Carol I had to go, she threw her arms around me and squeezed. Her hair was in my mouth. It was really soft. I’d always imagined it wiry.
“What’s that for?” I said, spitting it out.
“Jesus wants you,” she said. “Remember that Jesus wants you tons and tons.”
—
When I got to the end of Carol’s block, I turned to make sure she’d gone inside, then took Mom’s silver lighter out of my pocket and flicked it on. The little flame leapt into the darkness, its warm bubble lighting my way. I was feeling better until the flame began to shrink. Smaller, smaller, smaller, then nothing. No amount of flicking could coax it back to life. There was no ceremony to a lighter dying, no audible fizz, no lingering trail of smoke. The dark slammed back, cold and unwelcome, and that was that.
There was a gas station a couple of blocks away where kids bought beer without getting carded. I pocketed the empty lighter and felt for the ten bucks.
I picked out a Coke and a Bic. The guy behind the counter gave me a look.
“For my dad,” I said.
He shrugged and turned a page in the car magazine he was reading. “Like I give a crap.”
Back home, I lay in bed, playing my favourite Carpenters album while I flicked my new Bic on and off. It wasn’t like Mom’s silver lighter. There was nothing elegant about it, nothing substantial. Disposable by design, its weight hardly registered in my palm. Nobody would ever engrave their initials in its blue plastic shell. But I liked it all the same. I liked the red switch, a little tongue egging me on. I liked how when I flicked it, the squat flame woke slowly, unfurling itself begrudgingly. I liked that I had to hold the tongue to keep the lighter going. If I let go, the flame disappeared. Each bright second was a choice I had made.
Mostly, I liked that it was mine and nobody else’s.
I didn’t hear Mom come in until she knocked on my door. I slid the lighter between the box spring and mattress just as the door opened. She stood in the doorway, cigarette between her fingers. One of her nails was broken. She used to wear fake ones that broke off all the time, but this one was real.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Would it make a difference if I said yes?”
She smiled a little and sat on the bed, right above where I’d hid the lighter. Close up, I saw that her mascara had run and she hadn’t fixed it. She either didn’t care if I knew she’d been crying, or she didn’t know it herself. Neither option seemed good.
“How’s Brian?”
“Not the man I thought he was.”
“Who was he?”
Mom tugged at her skirt. Her pantyhose had a long run that climbed her knee and disappeared under the fabric. “He said I shouldn’t get worked up about all this feminism mumbo-jumbo. He said women should stick to what they’re good for.”
“What are they good for?” Really, I wanted to know.
“He had a key to a motel room,” she said, then laughed and waved her words away like smoke. “Blah, blah, blah.” It was always this way with us. She told me too little or too much. I wanted to know more. I didn’t want to know anything.
“Saint Catherine is the patron saint of secretaries,” I said. Spinsters too, but I left that part out.
“Is that right?” Mom said. “This must have been her night off, then.”
She reached out and fingered the fraying edge of my comforter. She could never abide loose ends. “We don’t really talk about boys, do we,” she said,
singling out a broken thread and giving it a gentle tug. “Do you want to? Talk about boys?” She had attempted to explain the birds and the bees to me the week after my first period. Her mention of a special kind of love between mothers and fathers had only confirmed that I knew more about sex than she did. She tugged again.
“You’ll rip it,” I said.
She patted the thread back down, folded her hands for a moment. “I don’t know what I was expecting. Everyone makes it looks so easy.”
“Nothing looks easy to me,” I said.
She regarded the loose thread as if it might have an opinion on the matter, then plucked it between two fingers. She went for it this time, really put her elbow into it. The old satin split as smoothly as a seam.
“Oh,” she said, frowning at the rip. “Oh,” as if she didn’t have a clue how it had gotten there.
10
Mom made me call her office and tell them she was really, really sick and couldn’t come in for a few days, maybe a week, maybe longer. While I spoke, she coughed like a consumptive in the background. “Uh-huh,” the switchboard lady said and hung up. That woman never did like her, Mom said. “I guess now I know why.” Anyway, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going back.
When Lorna finally dropped by the house with a box of Mom’s things, she wouldn’t come to the door. Lorna had on oversized sunglasses and a scarf around her hair. At first I’d thought she was one of the neighbourhood women coming to collect some imaginary piece of Tupperware along with a peek inside our house. They did this now and then, kept tabs. But Lorna seemed content to stand on the step with the box crooked in one arm. The other skewered the air before me, left hand proffered limply so I could get a better look—a slice of gold around one finger, a diamond so small you had to squint.
“I’m engaged! Can you believe it?”
“I guess miracles do happen,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Congratulations.”
“You should see it when it catches the light!” Lorna bent her hand back at the wrist, wiggled her fingers, frowned. “Suzanne is dying of envy, of course. All the girls are. I keep telling them, their time will come. Oh, but poor Lainey! Everyone feels just awful for her. We tried to warn her, you know, but really she should know better. That man can have his pick—and trust me, he does.”
I took the box. A dog-eared paperback, an ink-stained cardigan, a half-dead African violet. Free of it, Lorna stretched her arms and wiggled her fingers again. “There!” she said. “See that?”
“What?”
Lorna frowned again and folded her empty arms. “You just remember to keep your knees together,” she said. “You wait till there’s a ring on that finger. Nobody buys the farm when the milk is free.”
“Cow,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Nobody buys the cow.”
—
Mom pored over the want ads, circling postings for secretaries, receptionists, shop girls. She went to interviews every day in her smart blue suit, her hair a stiff French twist. Every evening, I found her rumpled and defeated in front of the TV, feet tucked under her housecoat, smoking her way through everyone else’s bad news.
“Everybody wants a twenty-year-old in a sweater,” she said. “I might as well try to get blood from a stone.”
I circled an ad for blood donors.
“Very funny,” she said.
“Ten dollars is ten dollars.”
The brochure for the correspondence class sat undisturbed on the phone table in the living room where Mom kept the bills. The bills too, I noticed, sat undisturbed.
“My shrine to wishful thinking,” she called it.
“The desk of dead dreams,” I said. We laughed so hard our cheeks hurt. We were becoming a family of quitters.
More interviews, more cigarettes in front of the news. She went on like that until one morning the television wouldn’t turn on. Or the toaster or the coffee maker. Mom didn’t seem too concerned about it. She sat in front of the dark TV, staring at her reflection in the curved grey glass.
That Sunday, I got up early. I was going to church. With Melanie, I said.
“What on earth do you want to do that for?” Mom said.
“I’m going to pray for electricity.”
Carol, for her part, didn’t seem the least surprised.
I had envisioned the stern sermon, hard polished oak under my knees, cramped confessional, pitiless priest, but Carol Closter’s church was more like the show homes of the future Mom used to drag me to. There were white stucco walls and cream-coloured carpeting and blue-veined marble floors. Pastor Bob, with his wavy hair and brown turtleneck, could have been selling dishwashers from that marble pulpit. He talked about how you needed to love your enemies even more than you loved yourself, and reminded everyone about the swap meet on Saturday. He had it on good authority—here he pointed up and winked—that there’d be some real bargains.
While Mr. and Mrs. Closter chatted over coffee cake in a room beside the chapel and Carol’s brother chased girls in frilled dresses around the lawn, Carol and I joined the teen Bible study group. A dozen kids sat on beanbag chairs, eating free chocolate bars while a college student with lopsided bangs tried to get them to open up about their hopes and dreams. “It’s my hope to be a better person all the time,” Carol said. “It’s my dream to make the world a better place through the teachings of the Lord.”
“Thank you, Carol,” the college student said. “But maybe today we can hear from somebody else.”
At the end of the hour we prayed. We prayed for poor President Nixon and for the godless youth of America who were making things so difficult for him. For the American soldiers, because they were on the side of God, and the Vietnamese on both sides who weren’t. For the poor Mexicans who would be better off in their own country and the poor blacks who would probably never be any better off. For boys who threw their lives away for marijuana and girls who threw their sacred gift away for boys.
“And why do we pray for people who won’t pray themselves?” the college student asked. Carol’s hand shot up. The college student sighed, nodded.
“Praying for the helpless is our job,” Carol said. “Just like judging sinners is God’s.”
I thought praying seemed a lot like judging. But it was nice in that room, with the chocolate bars and beanbag chairs and free-flowing electrical power, so I kept that particular judgment to myself.
When I got home, Mom was floating on her back in the pool.
“So?” she said. “Did you find Jesus?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He was under the sofa cushions.”
“Isn’t it funny how he’s always in the last place you look.”
The electricity came back on two days later. For all I knew, Mom had sold a pint of her O positive. “It’s a miracle,” she said, walking around the house, flicking everything on—lamps, stove elements, the blender we never used. “Praise the lord!” she shouted over the noise. “Hallelujah! Let there be light!”
—
Mom always said Thanksgiving was overrated in America, not to mention six weeks late. Dad, who paid out too many Christmas tree fires, would have been happy to let all winter holidays pass quietly and without threatening strings of electric lights. Most years we’d gone to the country club’s turkey buffet, attended largely by widowed men who tucked their napkins into their golf shirts, awkward evenings that left us unavoidably grateful for whatever it was we did in fact have. But Christmas, Mom loved. Christmas could not be stopped. It blew through our house like a jolly Arctic storm. She’d recreate the Canadian winters of her youth with plastic holly and snow-dusted windowpanes that came out of a can, persistent sunshine be damned. All month she’d answer the phone with “Hello-ho-ho.” It was the one time each year when she insisted on entertaining. She would invite everyone, and everyone would come. “We wouldn’t dream of missing it,” they told her. “We look forward to this all year.” Some of the women actually wore bells, tiny one
s dangling from their ears. Even Mrs. Houston could be coaxed away from her widow’s solitude and into her green Chanel suit. Dad would spend the evening holed up amiably in a corner with whoever brought the good Scotch.
Not that year. No invitations went out. The mantel remained clear of holly. The windows were dusted only with actual dust. All week long Mom hammered out copies of her half-page resumé on Mr. Grant’s typewriter, which she’d never returned—her “booby prize,” she called it. She must have sent one to every company in Golden, or at least that was the idea. She kept the phonebook beside the typewriter. When she’d written another address on another envelope, she’d tear out a corner of the yellow page, crumple it up, and toss it across the room. “If they hire me, we’ll know how to find them,” she said. “If they don’t, well that’s it for Wilma and her bargain wigs.” Slowly, an Everest of crinkled yellow balls rose in the corner of our living room where an eight-foot noble fir had usually stood.
Mom would not lose hope, not even when she got to Zeb’s Fish Palace, not even when she realized Zeb sold actual palaces for fish. She checked the mail that month like she used to check the phone. Every day brought the usual flyers, catalogues, and bills. When a few Christmas cards arrived, somebody’s best wishes for a joyous holiday in embossed gold script or—horror!—a photo of some smiling family in matching reindeer sweaters, Mom dropped them into the trash. “They can shove their best wishes up their you-know-whats,” she said. “I need their season’s greetings like I need a hole in my head.” A job at Hallmark was definitely out of the question.
As usual my grandparents sent me twenty Canadian dollar bills along with instructions not to spend them. We didn’t hear from Dad at all, not so much as a dumb card. Not that I’d expected anything. He’d managed to forget our phone number, so it stood to reason he’d also forgotten our address. When Carol gave me a Bible the week before the break, I tried to feel thankful since I was pretty sure it was the only present I’d be getting that year. At the same time, I tried not to imagine the mountain of gifts under the Closter tree. I failed miserably at both. I couldn’t look at Carol without picturing her house festooned in holiday splendour. I saw a magically snow-capped roof, chimney puffing happily, windows sparkling with tinsel and joy. Carol would be in her room cheerfully praying for the Mexicans and fornicators while Mrs. Closter roasted a perfectly moist Butterball and Mr. Closter helped elves build a bicycle on the front lawn. “My mom wants to know when you’re coming over again,” Carol kept saying, and I kept making excuses. My imagination was bad enough. Faced with the real thing, there was a fairly good chance I’d hang myself from the Closter mantel with somebody’s homemade stocking.