In secret, I was proud that we were the victims of disaster. Misfortune seemed glamorous in some enviable way; those marked by adversity seemed superior. A year or two after my father’s death, I began to wish that calamity would occur again. I imagined my mother’s young beauty, alternately burning and docile, vehement and wispy, how it would simmer and explode if I were done away with. I dreamed of falling into a nameless country river and being swept away before crowds of people, standing aghast on an unknown bridge. I imagined slipping on a patch of slush and falling down the stairs at school. The renown I would receive, the nostalgic accolades, the write-ups.
My mother told me only one story about the early days of her marriage, when Jamie was a baby, but this story she told again and again.
“It was July,” she would say, “and the heat was so bad that people were dying. I’ve forgotten now what that heat felt like, the way you forget things like that, but I know your dad and I couldn’t bear to touch each other. We were driving from a holiday with your dad’s parents in the Laurentians back to Toronto. It hadn’t been a fun trip, and we were trying to get back as quickly as we could. So there we were, driving through a small town near Montreal at two o’clock in the morning. Our car had no air conditioning so we drove at night to keep as cool as possible. Jamie was in the back seat crying and your dad and I had sweat trickling down our necks. It was a cheap car, and our legs stuck to those vinyl seats. Your dad turned to me and said, ‘I’d like to go swimming. Let’s go find a house with a pool.’ And I said yes, just like that. I didn’t think twice about it. Your dad drove us into a quiet neighbourhood with lots of trees and we got out of our car to walk around. We had to climb over a fence to get to the pool. Your dad carried Jamie—he was about six months old—and I had to climb over the fence while your dad held him. Then he passed him to me and climbed over himself. We set Jamie on a patch of grass by the side of the pool and took off all our clothes and dove in. It was like we forgot we were in someone else’s backyard, we were making so much noise, your dad was diving and splashing and dunking me under and such. At one point, I decided to get out, and your dad snuck up behind me and threw me back in. Jamie started laughing. It was a full moon that night, and up through the water I could see Jamie jerking his arms and laughing.”
These were the essentials of the story, the only important parts in her mind: the driving around, the swimming, the laughing. I wanted more. Listening to the story made me feel displaced from my life—because the experience was happy and seminal to my mother’s life, but I did not figure in it—but it also made me nosy and interested. My mother referred to my father as my dad, but I couldn’t connect to this title. He had died when I was so young that his death had not left a present absence. Hearing him called my dad made me greedy. I wanted to know how cold the water had been, what they had done after. Was it uncomfortable sitting in the car half-wet? Why had they gone in naked instead of in their underwear?
“What town were you in? Was it pretty?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What if they had come out, the family who lived in the house?”
“It was unlikely; it was very late.”
“But you were naked. What would you have done if they had come out?”
“I never thought it would happen.”
“But what if?”
I wanted her to address the danger, the possibility of exposure, calls made to the police. I wanted her to show some understanding of risk and damage. I got none of this. Jamie would cut me off.
“Let her alone. She’s told you enough already. Move on.”
He was protective of our mother. Even when he was six, just after our father died, he watched over her. In the morning before school, he would climb up on the high stool and get the cereal box, then pour each of us a bowl. He even put our bowls in the sink when we were finished. When he told me to move on, I could see that he had fit me into a certain category; I was a person who sucks the life energy of others. I always wanted more than they gave, both of them. I felt this made me inferior to them in a way I couldn’t identify and had no power to correct. I would swear to myself that I would say no the next time Jamie asked if I wanted to play. I pledged to indicate no preferences, to seem awash in indifference. I couldn’t do it, though. I was always the one asking.
A change came the summer of my spying, when I was twelve. I heard my mother telling the pool story to the group one evening, and I never wanted to hear it again. I swore I would never be like them. I would never have a man who was the single happiness, or the single despair, of my life. I would never sit on the couch with rice cakes, trying to keep my weight down so someone might want me. I would never have one story I would milk for years, for all it was worth.
Of course, I was worse, far worse.
ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I came home from school, I thought the house was empty—it had that dim, uninhabited feel about it—but then I heard voices in Jamie’s room. Our mother was at her job; three days a week she worked at the Clarke Institute leading meetings for young people with eating disorders, something she’d been doing for two years because the insurance money from our father’s death was running low and because she believed that it was more important for children to learn independence than always to feel secure. The kitchen was in disarray, which wasn’t usual. The women’s group had met at our house the day before, and our mother had gone to bed early with a cold, so only half the dishes had been washed. For that same reason, she hadn’t tidied up before work. It was Jamie’s job, usually, to clean up our breakfast dishes when he got home from school. Although my mother wanted to cultivate competence in both her children, efficiency prevailed in this matter because Jamie would wash the dishes regularly and thoroughly whereas I would forget the task entirely half the time and the other half would leave bits of food encrusted between fork prongs or on the underside of a seemingly shiny plate.
There were also, I noticed, two knapsacks lying by the back door, Jamie’s black one and a purple one covered in decorative buttons.
Standing in front of the open refrigerator, I ate the rest of a plate of brownies left over from the women’s group. I could hear myself chewing, and I was irritated by it. The faint noises of laughter and music on the other side of the house made the silence in the kitchen that much more unsettling. I was sure I heard malice in the laughter. Then I knew better. What I was hearing was not that mirthless laughter of exclusion, the ill will in showy, confidential delight. They were not intentionally battering me with their fun. No, what I heard as malice was simply privacy. I was being assaulted by their seclusion, and by my own.
The week before, Jamie had stopped walking home with me. We used to meet at the edge of the playground, by the long rusty rack of bicycles, and make our way home by the longest route—by the house with the small, expressive gnomes milling around the front lawn, the house with the three dogs, two Dobermans and one miniature poodle, by the corner store where we would buy strings of licorice, red for him, black for me. I usually saw his long thin neck, his profusion of sandy hair, those shoulders slightly rounded under his heavy knapsack as soon as I stepped foot outside, but one afternoon he was not there, and he was never there again. “You don’t wait anymore,” I finally said to him in the kitchen one afternoon. I’d just got home, but already he was almost finished washing the breakfast dishes.
“It doesn’t work,” he answered. “I get sick of hanging around.”
I tried to start many fights, but he wouldn’t fight with me. I tipped his childhood Winnie the Pooh bowl, quite deliberately, off the counter. But he pretended to think it was an accident and called me a klutz. It was my mother who spent an hour trying to glue it back together. The summer, with its spying, seemed far away.
For a time, I sat at the kitchen table doing my homework. But I felt restless and unable to concentrate, and trapped. Also, I felt I was being too respectful of their privacy. I wanted them to be as restricted by my presence as I was by theirs. So I got up and started
doing the dishes, loudly. Every now and then, my arms dripping soapy water onto the floor, I would stop and go stand in the doorway of the kitchen, listening for a change in the voices, a rise or lowering, some acknowledgement that they knew they were no longer alone. I got nothing. Finally, I slapped the dishrag down on the table and crossed the living room and dining room to the hallway that led to our bedrooms. The voices were now coming from my mother’s bedroom, so I tiptoed down the hall and decided that, if caught, I would pretend I was on my way to the bathroom. Her bedroom door was wide open and inside were Jamie and Heidi. At first I couldn’t tell what they were doing. What I fixed on was her long blonde hair, straight like threads of silk. The way a girl should look, Jamie had said. My own hair was coarse, plain brown and uneven, curly in places, straight in others. Along the side near my ear was a single, out-of-place ringlet. She was tall, with long skinny legs and bony knees, decidedly unathletic. My legs were short and stocky—capable, shamefully capable. I had beat the boys at races (ashamed of winning, unable to lose falsely). There was no part of this girl, Heidi, that could be laughed at. Even her clothes, a second-hand green private school blazer over a frilly cream blouse and a short denim skirt, an outfit that on anyone else would have been foolish, overreaching and therefore pathetic, made her worldly and confident, impossibly sexy.
Jamie was standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, and the radio was on a low volume, those murmuring, voluptuous voices. Then I saw. Jamie was fastening something around her neck. She was wearing the cameo.
He was looking at her proudly, as if one day it would be hers.
I DID SOMETHING vulgar after that. I didn’t plan it, but poor taste came naturally to me.
The women’s group was over several evenings later to celebrate Agatha’s birthday, and because Agatha had gained seven pounds, the assembled treats were bowls of Jell-O and a plate full of celery sticks and apple quarters. Jamie was at a basketball tryout. He and Heidi didn’t know that I had seen them in my mother’s room, and I didn’t know what to do with what I had seen. I had accepted my feeling of violation quietly, and for once I didn’t feel like embarrassing them publicly. I was also unsure how to make their actions, in looking at the cameo, seem more guilty than mine, in spying.
After wandering around my bedroom for some time, I went into my mother’s room and put on the cameo necklace. I tucked it inside the thick cable-knit sweater I was wearing, wrapped a soft blue scarf around my neck, and headed out into the unseasonably cold late October evening. The necklace, initially cool, warmed against my skin, and I was aware, every moment, of it resting against my chest.
To school and back, I walked, keeping to the long route Jamie and I took when we were delaying getting home. At school, all the lights were on, and when I walked past the gym, I could hear the shouts and cheering of the tryout. I considered waiting for Jamie, but I knew he wouldn’t be happy to see me. When I got back to our house, I stood on the sidewalk looking in the wide picture window. Agatha was standing in the middle of our living room with a carrot stick in one hand, and it looked as if she was stepping onto the scale; a moment later, she threw her hand against her forehead and gaped in the direction of the floor. I didn’t want to go inside.
As I wandered around the streets, my hands grew rigid with cold and I pulled my sweater sleeves down over them. When I passed Heidi’s house, my foot stepped straightaway onto the lawn, catching that old impulse before my mind got there. The house, which was smaller than ours and made of fresh grey stucco, was well lit, though the wooden shutters in what I assumed was the living room were closed. I circled the house and on the far right side located what seemed to be the bedrooms. At each window, I stood on my toes and craned up my neck (the windows were just high enough to make comfortable spying impossible). Two of the bedrooms were empty, though the lights were on—showing, I thought, an irresponsible, and indeed unintelligent, disregard for the cost of hydro. I felt briefly gratified to have discovered a weakness in her family, although it occurred to me a minute later that such a weakness was a luxury, indicating her family’s greater wealth. I found Heidi in the last bedroom, which was painted pale blue and had a big brass bed, crisp white linens, and a number of small lamps with colourfully beaded shades. She was sitting at a small mahogany desk doing her homework. She looked far more absorbed than I ever looked when I was doing my homework. I watched her for several minutes, but nothing changed, so I left.
I sat on the cold concrete of the curb, on the corner of her street and ours, and thought about what to do next. When I remember this night, I often linger in this moment before anything happened. I linger here to search for some intention on my part, anything that allows me to feel that what I did was, at least in some fraction of my mind, what I meant to do. Even the most skewed logic would satisfy me—anything but the blankness, the almost complete absence of memory that attends my recollection of these moments. But I can’t recall even the most stumbling, intoxicated progression towards a desired outcome. The workings of my mind in these brief moments are closed to me, just as, minutes before I did what I did, I looked at my chilled hands, and in the gradual numbing that was overtaking them, felt as unconnected to them as if they belonged to someone else.
I loosened my scarf and unhooked the cameo. I draped it over my hand and looked at it there in my palm. As I was doing this, Celia and Graham walked past, hand in hand. When they were out of sight, I held the cameo over the sewer grate and let it drop, slowly, from the end of the chain. Then I let the chain slither along after it. After determining that the necklace was gone, that not even a glint of gold flashed up at me, I got up and looked to the sky. My mother had told me that the space station would be visible for the entire week, that you could see it moving across the night sky. I couldn’t see anything, but then, I was in the city. Not much could be seen from where I stood.
DROPPING THE CAMEO was only part of the vulgar thing I did. I also told Jamie and my mother that Heidi had stolen the cameo.
The following day, my mother came home from work late, just before dinner, and when we sat down to eat the meal Jamie had reheated in the oven, I told them that I had gone to her bedroom to dress up after school, since Jamie was staying late for the second round of tryouts and I had the house to myself. I had looked everywhere for my favourite necklace, the heirloom I loved dearly and wore with a swell of pride. Frustrated and worried, I went back to school to meet Jamie and enlist his help in the search, but he was still in the gym. On my way home, I had stopped at Heidi’s house and fell into that old bad habit of mine, the spying, but for once caught someone who needed catching. Heidi was lying on her bed, wearing the cameo necklace, twirling the long chain around her finger. Here, I admitted, feigning reluctance, that I had accidentally seen Jamie and Heidi earlier that week, in my mother’s bedroom, and that Jamie was showing off this family heirloom to the girl he hardly knew.
“She must have pocketed it on her way out,” I finished off, and then sat back, looking unhappy about the whole situation, which I truly was, but not for the right reasons.
“Liar,” Jamie said, pushing back his chair. “I don’t believe you. This is such a lie. Look at her face.”
We all trooped into my mother’s room, and I stood in the doorway, watching, my arms primly crossed, as they searched for the cameo and found themselves unable to turn it up. After a silent dinner of macaroni and cheese, my mother grudgingly called Heidi’s parents and told them what was going on. They spoke to Heidi, who denied it, crying inconsolably (she was the most honest, moral girl they’d ever met, her parents ventured apologetically). Against their better judgement—for to teach their children that they doubted them was to teach them that a promise or denial could be falsely given in the first place, and this sorry lesson would certainly smash their children’s belief in the basic integrity of the world—they searched her room, her knapsack, the pockets of all her clothes. Heidi’s mother told mine that she had vomited after doing this, and come down with a terrib
le headache, which put her in bed but rendered her unable to sleep. My mother was polite and understanding, but did suggest to Jamie and me that the parents were perhaps engaging in unnecessary histrionics.
“I wish I’d never seen it,” I said earnestly. “Sometimes it’s better not to know the truth about someone.”
Jamie turned on me. “You think you know so much about people,” he shouted. “It’s a joke. What you know is nothing.”
Now that Jamie was fighting with me, I sat at the kitchen table looking sombre and contented.
Word of what had happened went around our neighbourhood quite quickly. Even though I had been known to do many dishonest things, I benefited from Heidi’s newness to our neighbourhood. Besides, everyone agreed, I had no reason to lie. The heirloom belonged to me anyway.
Two days later, Celia—and Graham, standing meekly behind her—came knocking at our door.
“I thought and thought about what to do,” she said to my mother. “I don’t like to get involved in other people’s matters. And then, when there are so many stories going around, you doubt yourself, what you’ve seen.”
The Virgin Spy Page 3