It is the first time I have come to Elijah’s house.
It is the seventh time we have met up since that first day at the Retro Café nine months ago.
It is the first time I have seen him since summer ended and he and Mrs. Roughen returned from her boyfriend’s cottage in Muskoka.
“We’re just going upstairs for a while, Mom,” Elijah says.
I follow Elijah up the narrow wooden staircase, stopping at a picture on the wall of a chubby man in a blue tuxedo, holding a white rabbit in the air.
“It’s my mother’s boyfriend, Conrad,” Elijah says. “He’s a magician.” We reach the top of the stairs, which are covered in green carpeting that’s been worn down. “This is his house, so I guess we’re lucky to have it. We were living in a crappy basement before — it’s all we could afford with my mom’s job at the flower shop.”
“I like this place,” I say, stepping over an empty laundry basket in the middle of the hallway.
“Come into my room.”
“Let me guess, you’ve got something to show me?”
“Not unless you ask nicely,” he says, laughing.
Elijah’s room is bare except a mattress on the floor with a blue comforter, a small wooden desk without a chair, and a Joshua Tree poster on the wall. He sits down on the bed.
“Remember that time we kissed in the shed?” he says.
“Yeah, you kissed me.” I stand by the door, pinching my elbows with my fingertips.
“Want to try again? You can kiss me this time.”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“I’ll sit here and you can do it. I won’t move.” My feet take a step towards him without my permission. “C’mon, do it as a thank-you . . . for the bees that day.”
“That really was crazy, Elijah. Someone could have had a reaction or something.”
“I like to live dangerously,” he says, his mouth curling up just a bit in one corner.
“Still . . . it was nuts.”
“Boo!” he springs forward, pushing his hands into the bed.
“Stop it.”
“Sorry. Seriously, I won’t bite. Not unless you want me to.” He bounces his eyebrows up and down.
“Just a small one then.” I lean my head forward again, closer to his face so I can smell cherry Chapstick on his lips. I place a small peck on his cheek, and pull away.
“That wasn’t so hard was it?” he says smiling.
He puts his arm around my shoulder and strokes my hair, sending flutters down my neck and back. “You’re very beautiful, Maya.”
I don’t know what to say, and luckily, I am saved by a knock at the door.
Thump, thump.
I hear a frenzied voice: What’s going on in there? This is my house. Who is he with? I’ll just check. I’ll just see. Maybe she’ll work in the act?
“What is that guy talking about?” I exclaim to Elijah.
“Who, me?” Elijah looks confused. “I just said you were beautiful.”
“No . . . I meant . . .”
Thump, thump.
Elijah gets up and opens the door.
“Conrad,” he says.
I stick out my neck to see a balding, short, slightly pudgy man standing in the hallway with his hands in the pockets of his too-tight acid wash jeans. He’s got his lips pursed together in an innocent smile, turquoise streaks shooting from his neck.
“Just checking if everything’s a-okay,” he says.
“What do you want, Conrad?”
The man steps into Elijah’s room.
“So this is the Maya I’ve heard so much about?” I nod. “You are a beauty, aren’t you?” The man rubs his cheek with his palm, around and around.
“This is my mom’s boyfriend, Maya. Conrad.” Conrad reaches out his hand to me and I shake it. Sweaty. He smiles, though, in a friendly way.
“What act did you mean?” I ask.
“Pardon me?” he says.
“Oh, I meant . . . Elijah says you perform magic?”
“Well, only in my free time,” he says, his face swelling red. “It’s a hobby really, for the fun of it. Mostly parties and charity functions.”
“Conrad works in a toilet paper factory.”
“Is the manager of a toilet paper making facility, Eli,” Conrad says to Elijah, tapping him on the shoulder gently. Elijah rolls his eyes. “Anyway, kids, I just wanted to say hi. Guess I’ll go and watch the news with Trudie.”
“Bye, Conrad,” I say. He has a certain chaotic charm to him, like a father who would be really easy to talk to.
“Nice to meet you, Maya.” He trips on the carpet on the way out the door, saying oops out loud and fuck in his mind.
“He’s a little bit of a freak,” Elijah says after he leaves. I laugh and look down at the floor, wondering what comes next.
“So can I kiss you now?” Elijah asks. “For real?”
I make a snort with my nose, like he’s made a joke, but I can hear him getting frustrated inside with me.
Later, we have dinner downstairs with Mrs. Roughen and Conrad. She has cooked a roast beef. “Special for your visit,” she says to me when I sit down.
We sit. And everyone eyes me for a while. Up and down, around and around while I pick at my carrots with a fork and chew on my bottom lip. Then finally, Mrs. Roughen speaks again: “So Maya, how have you been doing?”
“I’m fine,” I say and it feels untrue, because I can feel how utterly thrilled Mrs. Roughen is to finally have another boyfriend. Now that is fine. And Conrad, he seems to care about what she says, and his thoughts (which are fast-paced and frantic most of the time) seem to calm down when she speaks.
“Is it hard?” she continued. “You know, without your mother.”
“God, Mom!” Elijah says. “Give it a rest!”
“Sorry, honey.” She tries to change the subject. “And how is your father doing? I heard that he has a new girlfriend as well.”
My throat tightens. Pounding in my ears.
“Maya, honey, you’re going so red.”
“Mom, just leave her alone. She doesn’t keep in touch with her dad, okay?”
“Oh gosh, I’m sorry, Maya,” Mrs. Roughen says. “I just thought that since he called Elijah . . .”
Pounding, pounding in my ears, from somewhere.
Conrad starts thinking loudly — Magic rules. Number 1: Perform a trick only after you’ve perfected it.
“Don’t you think it’s important that you keep a good relationship with your father though, Maya? He’s all the close family you have left.”
Number 2: Never let them see you sweat.
“I’ve got my Aunt Leah,” I manage to squeak out without tearing up.
“You’re making her upset,” Elijah says. “Her dad left her alone — he’s a jerk.”
Number 3: Keep your secrets to yourself.
“It’s just that I really don’t feel like talking about it.”
“And why should you?” Conrad says. “You’ve got other things to concentrate on now.” He smiles at me and shows the rot forming along the sides of his bottom teeth. He looks at me with sympathy, almost like a father would. Only this is no family dinner. This family is unreal in every respect.
After dinner, Elijah brings me home.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “You know how my mom can be.”
“It’s okay.” And I mean it.
He kisses me on the doorstep of Aunt Leah’s apartment building before I go up. A long, deep kiss that tastes like smoke and leaves us both breathless.
On November 2nd, a Monday, Buffy decides to throw a Day of the Dead party in our apartment. Leah complains that it should be a Halloween party and that no one will show up, but Buffy insists.
“I’m one-quarter Mexican on my Dad’s side,” Buffy say
s. “I should be celebrating Day of the Dead and not Halloween.”
“Buffy, hate to tell you this, but you’re white as a ghost, and you have red hair,” Leah says.
“Okay, maybe I’m only a quarter of a quarter Mexican, but still. This is a great way to honour Maya’s mother and my aunt Ti-Ti.” Buffy’s Aunt Tippy had died three years ago in a car accident on the Bloor Street Bridge. They found her car stopped in the middle one morning, the door open, windshield intact and her body on the highway below. They figure she must have lost control, opened the door to escape, and been flung over the railing by another car. At least that’s the story that Buffy tells.
“You can throw the party, Buff, but no one’s going to come.”
“Sure they will, Leah. Maya’s boyfriend is coming.” Leah looks at me. I sit cross-legged on the living room floor, weaving a thread from the carpet between my bare toes.
“So, he’s your boyfriend now, is he?” Aunt Leah says.
“I don’t know, maybe. Kind of.”
“So it’s serious?” Aunt Leah raises her voice when she says this, stretching the “serious” out for what seems like a minute. I shrug my shoulders.
“It’s her own business, Leah.” Buffy turns towards me. “You’ll bring him to the party though, won’t you?”
“I guess. If he’s not busy.”
“Good. So I’ll get it all set up. All I need to know is what your mother really liked to do when she was alive.”
Aunt Leah and I turn our heads towards one another, our eyebrows raised.
“She liked to read,” I say finally. “The Bhagavad Gita, she tried to read that millions of times. I have her copy in my bedroom.”
“Great. Anything else?” Buffy asks.
“She slept a lot.” When Aunt Leah says this, I pinch my lips at her, hiding all of my front teeth underneath. “What? She did sleep a lot, Maya. I’m not lying.”
“Fine, I’ll use a pillow on the altar,” Buffy says.
“She didn’t use a pillow much,” I say. “Not in the teepee anyway.”
“Don’t worry, Maya, I’ll think of something perfect. It’ll be great.”
By Monday evening, our apartment has been transformed into something else. Something different. Aunt Leah ends up helping Buffy with the decorations, partly because Buffy can’t see how things look and partly because she is too short to reach up over the door and to the upper parts of the wall.
I come home after school to see it for the first time.
The outside of the door is covered in paper skeletons that Buffy got on sale at Kmart, and when I turn the knob and push in, my eyes adjust to the light of white candles burning from little glass jars, some of them with an outline of Jesus on them, along the windowsill. I close the door and in front of my face I see it — a giant cross made of flowers strung up over the living room window that looks out to a brick wall. Buffy comes into the room and grabs my hand to know it’s me.
“Marigolds!” Buffy says. “Can you believe how perfect? It’s a cross made out of marigold flowers.” I don’t say anything; she can’t see how my mouth is hanging open. “Get it, Maya? Marigolds. Your mother’s name was Marigold.”
“I get it, Buffy.” I drop my backpack to the floor, walk to the cross, and tickle my fingers across the flower petals.
“They do this in Mexico, put marigolds up to honour the dead. Sometimes they make a path from the deceased person’s grave to the house, so that the spirit can find her way home for the celebration.”
Aunt Leah comes out of the bathroom, leaving a hushed toilet flush behind her. She has just returned from her new job at the CN Tower, where she travels up and down all day telling people that the tower was built in 1975 and is so many meters and so many feet tall. I know she’s really there because I’ve seen her uniform — and they don’t give one of those out to just anybody.
“What do you think, kiddo?” she asks me about the display.
“Let me show you the best part, Maya.” Buffy takes my hand again and walks me to the corner between the kitchen and the dining room. There, on a small card table covered with a black plastic table cloth, is my mother’s journal and, placed beside it, a framed picture of a much younger version of my mother sitting on a pillow with her copy of the Bhagavad Gita. There is also another picture of a woman with a broad forehead, looking up to the sky with her arms wrapped around her like she was cold. Beside that picture is a package of cigarettes and a bingo dabber. In front of them both are four small statues, disembodied skeletons, and one of a full-length skeleton dressed in a baggy robe, its teeth parted, its eyes hollow.
“Where did you get this stuff?” I say, referring mostly to my mother’s journal. I reach out to grab it, but Aunt Leah holds my hand back.
“From your bag, Maya. Don’t worry, no one’s going to read it. It’s only to remember her by,” Aunt Leah says.
“And the picture of her?”
“I had it, Maya. I found it at Mom and Dad’s house. In some of Steven’s stuff. He must have taken it when they just started going out.”
“She looks so young,” I say. “And nice.”
Mother is standing outside in a summer dress that shows her arms. Her hair is blown over her eyes a bit and she is looking away, like someone has just called her name.
“She must have been just a bit older than you there,” Aunt Leah says. “I bought the frame myself.”
“Why didn’t you ever show me before?” I say, mesmerized by the image of my mother as a teenager, before she met my real father, well before I was born.
“I don’t know, I guess I never thought of it.”
“Isn’t it beautiful, Maya?” Buffy says. “Almost makes me wish I could see it with my eyes for once.” She runs her palms over the dining room table until she holds her camera in her hands. She flops the strap around her neck, raises the camera, and snaps two times towards the altar. Then, she turns to me, strokes her fingers over my nose, and snaps two more times. “That’s going to be a great picture.”
People start arriving at around 7:00. Some are dressed in their Halloween costumes from a few days ago (fairies, princesses, pumpkins, dirty maids), but most are in their normal clothes, some with leis of marigolds around their necks. They are mostly Buffy’s friends from York, from the photography program and some of her other classes.
Buffy leans over to me when the chatter of voices in the room is high enough to block out most of my own thoughts: “I told them they didn’t have to dress up. Did they?”
“No, not really,” I lied.
“A few of them though?”
“There are some costumes, but most people have marigold leis.”
“Good. It’s not authentic if they’re wearing Halloween costumes.”
Aunt Leah puts Michael Jackson’s Thriller album on the stereo, and I nod my head to the music while people chat and drink red drinks with only a touch of rum. Buffy always seems to have a crowd of people around her, tall people with curly hair and long braids, and confident women who wave their hands in the air when they talk. I can barely see her from behind them, and if it weren’t for her voice piping out, I wouldn’t know if she was there at all.
Aunt Leah has invited only one friend. A skinny woman with purple eye shadow, teased bangs, and dark circles under her eyes. Her hair seems frazzled somehow, held back with a plastic headband, and she’s wearing a red dress with the outline of her underwear showing.
By 9:00 the apartment is full, but Elijah is still not there. When I called him yesterday after school, he said, “I’ll be there, little lady.” When he said it, it made me think about how young I must appear to him. And I wondered if he just feels sorry for me.
I stand in the corner sipping Kool-Aid and tuning in to various voices around me. These people don’t mean what they say. Their voices are too loud and friendly to be real. Their laughs are forced, as
if they are trying to convince themselves of something. No one has mentioned my mother’s photo in the corner, or the one of Buffy’s aunt. Someone is smoking one of the cigarettes from the pack beside Aunt Tippy’s photo.
Elijah arrives right after Aunt Leah sets out the food: Mexican taco dip with three layers, cups of coffee, chocolate shaped like tiny skulls and witches. “I’m here,” he says when I open the door to see him standing there. He’s wet, his hair dark and stuck to his forehead, his black T-shirt sticking to his ribs and showing the roundness of his shoulders. “I had to walk, and it started raining.” I close the door, realizing that the trickle I had been hearing was rain on the window, and not in my mind.
“You’re not late. We have food. Are you hungry?”
“I guess a little bit,” Elijah says, making his way over to the dining room table and dipping four taco chips into the dip. “What’s with the shrine?” He points to my mother’s picture and shoves the crunchy mess into his mouth.
“This is a Day of the Dead party. It’s supposed to invite my mother as the guest of honour.”
“Creepy,” he says. He pops two chocolate witches into his mouth. “Who’s she?”
“That’s my roommate Buffy’s aunt. She was killed in a car crash.”
“Can I have one of those?” He reaches towards the cigarettes.
“No, you can’t smoke those.” Elijah shrugs and settles himself against the wall.
“Do I smell someone new?” Buffy says, walking over to where Elijah and I stand. “You must be Elijah?” She reaches her hand out to touch his wet hair.
“Are you blind or something?” Elijah says.
“Elijah, stop it,” I say.
“More importantly . . . I’m Buffy. I’m Maya’s roommate. I’m a photographer and a student.” Elijah nods in confusion.
“How do you see what you’re taking a picture of?”
“She doesn’t have to see, Elijah, she feels it.”
“Freaky.”
“I guess I’ll let you two lovebirds be, then.” I’m glad that Buffy can’t see me blush. I’m embarrassed that Elijah can.
“And now, you have to meet my Aunt Leah,” I say scanning the heads in the room. “Formally.”
Girl in Shades Page 22