Will someone tell Mam?
THEN MANDALAY IS BACK, and things shift. Mandalay, when the second police car arrives at the house, leaps out and hugs everyone, weeping, and then changes Bodhi’s diaper and makes him a bottle, so that it looks like she is the one who takes care of Bodhi, not Cleo. Then Mandalay pulls some chairs out of the kitchen, and sits with the social worker and the older cop and tells them everything, everything Cleo has not. And they decide — probably right there — to let Mandalay have Bodhi.
Cleo could have told the social worker things, but she does not. She hears Jean asking things about Mam, and she sees Jean’s face, at the replies: It does not go saggy, like the older cop’s, but rigid; only the skin around her eyes softens and thins, and her eyes darken, as if she will take in everything that is told her, and nothing will come out of it. But Cleo knows better.
She hears Mandalay telling about the axe, but she doesn’t confirm what Mandalay is saying, nor does she spill the beans about the rest. She wants, she wants to have Jean look at her with those dark, absorbing eyes: Not your fault. But she does not say, because of Mandalay taking over the telling, taking over Jean.
Mandalay tells how through January and February Mam had lain in bed smoking and staring out the window at the rain. And about in March and April when Mam constantly took them on adventures, shaking them awake at dawn, come on, come on, let’s pack a lunch and hit the road, Mam’s eyes and voice full of laughing, and so the younger kids had jumped out of their bed, Yay! We’re going on an adventure! And there would be no school that day unless she, Cleo, managed to hide the car keys, though Mandalay doesn’t tell this part.
Cleo had used to go along, had used to get caught up in it, but not now. Now, she knew, missing a bunch of school only meant falling behind, getting confused, getting more work to do. And Mam’s adventures were exhausting, more than fun.
In April, they had gone hiking on Knucklehead — Mam driving them up in the old station wagon to the park gate, then leading them out onto the trails, where they had got caught in a late snowfall, and Daddy had come crashing through the bush, twigs in his big grey beard, looking for them, finding them where they were huddled in some fallen logs, where they would have goddamn frozen to death.
Found them only because Cleo had thought to leave a note on the kitchen table: Gone to hike Knucklehead.
After that, Cleo hadn’t gone along — to the mushroom-picking, to the turtle-catching, to the pirate day. And Mandalay hadn’t either — she had by then got a group of friends at the high school, and preferred hanging with them.
Mam had been mad — not at Mandalay, but at Cleo — for not joining their expeditions. Oh, get the stick out of your ass! Teacher’s pet! Think you’re so smart, eh? Think you’re better than the rest of us? And she had gone back to bed all of May.
Dadda said Mam’s problem was that she thought she was one of the kids. She didn’t want to be responsible. Instead of being nurturing, she was in competition.
And then it was June and school nearly over for the year and Mam had got up, all lardy-assed and stringy-haired, and chased Mandalay around the house with an axe. And Mandalay had called the police.
Mandalay’s fault, for calling the police, then. Crystal couldn’t run nearly as fast as Mandalay.
Mandalay’s fault, for telling the social worker all of this. Cleo had not told.
While Mandalay is crying all over the social worker, Cleo takes a shovel and digs a pretty big hole in the garden where the soil is soft enough to dig, and she tips the pail of chicken guts and heads — the eyes, filmed over and milky, now, but still staring, into the hole, and the pail of diapers, too, and fills it all in. Then she comes back to the house to find Bodhi asleep in the car seat, and Jean the social worker says, Don’t touch him. Don’t wake him up. As if Bodhi wasn’t Cleo’s baby brother. As if she didn’t take care of him every day of her life.
So Dadda is taken away in the ambulance, dead because they have all worn him out with their fighting and not taking care of chores, but it is not Cleo’s fault.
She sits on the short log while Mandalay talks to the social worker. Cleo is so tired, now: She feels that she has been tired for years, and that she will never not feel tired again. She thinks about Dadda: that he is gone, never coming back. She puts her face down in her lap and wraps her arms around her head so that nobody will see her face, and she thinks about that: Dadda is gone. No more. Gone. All of the fact of him, the bulk of him standing between her and the rest of the world, the kindness in his face when he was not tired, the ways he knows Cleo, as nobody else in the world does.
What is she now, without Dadda? She thinks: Mandalay does not understand this, or the little boys either — that Dadda is gone. And that is the real problem, not what everyone is worried about now, which is what is going to be done with all of them.
What happens next next, as Che would say, is this: Jean the social worker divides them all up. This is a shock to Cleo, who had assumed they would just stay, and neighbours would help out, at least for the present. That they would continue on as before. But no.
Che goes home with Myrna Pollard, who is suddenly in their yard, wringing her hands and sniffling. When Cleo hears this being arranged, she asks, Why not Bodhi too? He’s used to Myrna. But Jean says Myrna Pollard’s place isn’t suitable for a very young child. Cleo can see that. There aren’t railings anymore on her second-floor deck — Myrna’s husband Keith took them down a couple of years ago to replace the rotted boards, and hasn’t got them up again — and there’s also a large hole in the Pollard’s yard where Keith took out the old septic tank.
But Myrna has been babysitting Bodhi since spring. And she’s handy, right next door.
What Cleo hasn’t thought out, hasn’t realized, is that she, Cleo won’t be at this house. She wouldn’t be near Myrna Pollard’s place, even if Bodhi were there.
Then she understands that Mandalay has been nailing the future shut for all of them. Telling her stories, enjoying the attention, not seeing, as Cleo can see, that she is making sure that Crystal will never be able to come back. Cleo can see it in the social worker’s expression. Mandalay doesn’t get it. She doesn’t see that they need Crystal, that without Crystal, they will not be able to live here again, ever.
Jean says that for now Mandalay and Bodhi will stay with the family of a friend of Mandalay’s, in town. And Cleo and Cliff will be taken into temporary care: which means, to go live with strangers. This is all being decided by Jean and Mandalay.
Cleo says, Why can’t we just stay here? And at that Jean makes a squinchy shape with her mouth and says, No, that wouldn’t be possible. Even though Cleo has been taking care of everything already, even though it could be okay if Mandalay would help out more.
Mandalay says, Cleo. How can we take care of everyone, without parents? And then crumples prettily, like someone in movies, into tears again.
THERE HAD BEEN temporary arrangements, and then more permanent ones. They had not had much choice in what happened to them, though they had made things worse for themselves, definitely, by what they had done after Dadda’s funeral. You’ve really cooked your goose now, Myrna Pollard had said, that day.
And of course Mandalay hadn’t got to keep Bodhi after all. None of them had.
It Could Always be Worse
THE MOUNTAINSIDE on which Cleo’s house sits is sloped on two planes, so that all of the streets are pitched, and the sidewalks fall in cataracts, with stairs built into them. Twice a week, in mid-morning, she descends this fish ladder, weighted and off-balance, a small child holding one hand, taking the steps one at a time, a smaller child strapped in a pack on her back. They drop down through the tiers of houses — rows and rows of pastel, vinyl-clad, variations on a theme of jutting garages and small windows — to the elementary school, which itself is arranged on two levels, the upper, where the school sits, an octopus of arms radiating from the gym, and the lower, where the field and playground have been occupied, most of the wint
er, by a pool of water.
In one arm of the octopus is the Community Room, where classes are held for small children. Twice a week, in mid-morning, she makes the descent to the school, to this room, and twice a week the trek back up the mountain without the larger of the two small children, and then in early afternoon, she makes the descent again, with only the smaller child, and the second ascent, with both.
There is a route without stairs, but it is much longer, and involves walking along a thoroughfare noisy and stinking with trucks loaded with fill, with earth-moving machinery, with cement and lumber and pipes. If she has time, though — if the smaller child feels heavier (he seems to change density, day to day) she will take the longer route, on her second trip, so that she can use the stroller, and the larger child can ride shotgun on the way back up.
On occasion, on the second descent of the day, she has carried the stroller, with the smaller child in it, down the fish-ladder stairs. But then two weeks ago there had been invisible ice, and she slipped and bumped down a dozen concrete steps on her tailbone. She had not let go: She had held the stroller in front of her, upright, and the child had not even been tipped. But she had decided not to risk falling again. (Possibly she should have seen a doctor, but the bruising is already less painful than it was. Getting to a doctor had seemed impossible to arrange.)
It is not designed for walking, this neighbourhood. It is designed to funnel working people in cars out of their driveways and onto the thoroughfare in an organized and efficient way, to channel them like cattle to the highway, and then to deliver them back again at the end of the day.
She does not have a car. Or rather, her husband drives the car to his workplace, as the transit system isn’t very efficient in this suburb. If she is willing to wake the children up and dress them and put them in the car, she can drive him to work, and then pick him up again at the end of the day. It is an hour-long return trip. She doesn’t often do it.
There is always fog, or cold currents of air that flow down the steep streets like invisible rivers. The rivers cannot be seen, but they are tangible: She steps into them, they are a force at her back, pushing her down the hill, or resisting her climb upward. She can smell them, their freight of blue clay, their top notes of iron and dust. The real river can be seen only in glimpses, five hundred metres below her house, a ribbon of brushed nickel.
There is a bus that goes down the main road, past the school, all the way to the plaza where there is a Safeway and a Zellers, a branch library, even a small café, but she does not take the bus.
It is February. It is the last year of the century, and of the millennium. Well, maybe not: Trent keeps telling her that the new millennium doesn’t start until 2001, technically. But it is the last year of the 1900s.
The children are her own. The older is four; the younger a year and a half. On some days she doesn’t remember their names: She speaks to them using only pronouns, because it is just the three of them together all day, and there is no need for the distinction of names. Do you want juice? Can you give him the ball? Only when they are among others, for example waiting outside the Community Room, does she use their names, Olivia, Sam, and they sound false, arbitrary.
Herself she refers to in third person: Mommy has to put her boots on now. Mommy needs to go to the bathroom. As if any distinctness she has, any function separate from them, is a necessary but inconvenient aspect of the three-ness of them.
At the school, in the hallways outside the Community Room, she rarely speaks, or is spoken to. She doesn’t always recognize the same people from one day to the next. They seem paired off: speaking in other languages, often. Or they are speaking English, but what they are talking about is incomprehensible. (No, not quite incomprehensible; she recognizes that they are talking about the plots of TV series. She recalls this sort of exchange from high school, her own willing exclusion from it.)
Some of the waiting adults are very young: twenty-ish girls who speak to each other in a language that she decides is Polish, because it isn’t Latinate or Germanic or Slavic. Some are elderly, and speak to their charges in Punjabi (she guesses) or Cantonese, and to each other not at all.
In the waiting area, in the corridor with its children’s artwork and posters (“You can be anything you want!”) she feels suspended and anesthetized and incomplete, as if she’s waiting for a limb to be reattached, an organ transplanted. Often, she isn’t certain that when the door opens, her child will be on the other side of it.
When at last the door is pushed open, in a controlled way, by unseen hands, the children are waiting inside in a line, wearing their paper crowns or clutching their finger-painted sheets of paper. Then they are anonymous for a few seconds, very small humans in bright clothing, diminished by the height of the room, the row of adults. There is a time lapse while her eyes travel down the row, light on the child that is hers, identify her, reclaim her.
Then a sort of scrum, because these are very small children, and must be zipped into their coats, have their mittens and boots pulled on, have their small backpacks, with their Disney motifs — The Lion King, Pocahontas, Toy Story — plucked from hooks and attached to their shoulders.
Olivia does not have a Disney backpack. She has one from a mail-order company, with Beatrix Potter characters. She has expressed a desire for a Snow White backpack, but she will have to make do with Mrs. Tiggy Winkle and Jeremy Fisher.
During the scrum Cleo waits while Olivia puts on her own boots and jacket and backpack. She believes in cultivating Olivia’s independence, in things like this.
Is the playground dry yet? Olivia always asks.
No.
Then their ascent, either up the steps (there are one hundred and seven) with the weight of Sam on her back, or along the thoroughfare, which is also steep in sections, with both children in the stroller. She feels during these trips that she is shouldering more than the normal amount of gravity, that the fog or the cold drift of air are adding resistance. It’s a trek, an arduous expedition. Her back muscles, her thighs, ache. Every time there is a point at which she wants to stop, to sit down in the middle of the sidewalk.
And then do what?
These are the good days, days that have a shape to them.
Things really aren’t that bad.
It’s just the problem of time.
It is not that there is too little or too much, but rather that it presses and stretches erratically. She is unable to predict or adapt herself to it. The days are endless, but there is no time for her to read or go shopping or just be in her head. She is always waiting, trying to fill long stretches of time, but also always hurrying, feeling that something is slipping away from her. Then she feels guilty: She is not on top of things, not organized, not prioritizing or taking charge, but also not being in the moment and present. She is not appreciating this time, which is precious, fleeting, a gift.
The walk down to the school and back up the hill fills time. But it is generally monotonous, and not salubrious. The landscape is grey with concrete and dust and the general leaflessness of trees. It is cold: not cold like Inuvik or Winnipeg, but damp and chilly, so that her bones recoil from it; she feels her body tense, her spine curl inward. Sam and Olivia grizzle, complain. The air smells of iron and clay, from the construction going on further up the hill. They often see nothing living, other than crows.
Once, in the winter before, she’d tried to catch the city bus, which looped through the subdivision only one street over from hers. She’d propped Sam, still a small baby, on her hip, folded the stroller with one hand while Olivia jumped around in excitement. The bus had nearly been empty — only a couple of teenaged boys at the back. As she’d started down the aisle, the driver had released the brake and taken off with a lurch. Olivia had gone flying, had banged her head and knees and howled. Cleo herself had stumbled, nearly fallen, nearly dropped Sam. The boys at the back had yelled at the driver, who had snarled back.
She had been speechless, so shocked at what must have bee
n either gross incompetence or stupidity or almost criminal malice that she hadn’t known how to react. She had not attempted the bus again. She had understood the driver’s message, or, if she wanted to accept it as an accident (which Trent, when she told him, assured her it must be), then fate’s message, as surely as a horse’s head on her pillow. Whoever these mostly empty buses toiling up the mountainside were meant for, it wasn’t her.
It is her own fault. She has chosen this.
WHEN THEY ARE HOME, they go downstairs, Olivia and Sam to play, herself to fold laundry in the adjoining room. She turns on all of the lights, the baseboard heater: the downstairs room is gloomy, chilly. It is where the television is, the larger one, and the VCR machine and the children’s toys. Trent complains about the lights, the electric heat, but they must have light and heat.
The pleasure in simple spatial labour done at her own pace. She folds and stacks onto the table Trent’s striped and checked button-down shirts, his khakis and jeans, his white athletic socks and his knit boxers, with her own white cotton bikini briefs and her Playtex nursing bras in their mesh laundry bags, her T-shirts and her jeans and pajama bottoms, Olivia’s jumpers and tights and tees, her tiny bright underwear and nightgowns, Sam’s overalls and sleepers, the organic cotton onesies, the tiny socks rolled in pairs (She never loses any; Cleo can’t imagine how people lose socks in the wash), the striped and fruit-patterned kitchen towels and dishcloths and potholders, in their rich Provencal colours, the thick terry facecloths and hand towels and bath sheets, in their rich wines and teals. When the table is stacked with all of the week’s laundry, clean, fabric-softener scented, accounted for, sorted for ripped or worn-out items, which will promptly be mended or replaced, she feels a small sense of well-being, of contentment, of purpose, of virtue and virtuosity both. It’s a little ridiculous. She wishes she could tell someone about it, though. The goodness of it, and the sense that it is trivial.
What is Going to Happen Next Page 2