“Excuse me,” he said, wiping his hands on a napkin as Mrs. Stephanopolous flipped the pages of the album. “May I see that?”
My mother, who, to my knowledge, had not considered a career in anything other than temporary jobs at libraries, bookstores, and supermarkets, passed Mr. Layton the album.
He studied it, then me in my mother’s arms. Within two years, I was a bestseller.
I NOW UNDERSTAND the pressure to sell, to have a gimmick. Not that long ago I went to a book launch for a novel about boxing. The author fought another man, a poet, from his publishing house. The referee was their shared publicist. The poet beat the living daylights out of the novelist and the crowd got drunk on the free wine and violence, stuffing themselves with greasy finger foods that were served by caterers dressed in athletic gear, headbands and swishy pants. I hear that a lot of books were sold. That was what Richard was trying to do, sell a lot of books, and he succeeded.
He thought it would be a good idea for me to accompany my mother at her promotional readings, the first of which was for a Toronto Public Libraries series called “Kids’ World, Real Life.” It featured children’s authors who, as the brochure stated, presented true-to-life versions of kids’ experiences. Richard was all over it.
“We should have been on to this years ago,” he said. “Kids are tired of reading about pink elephants and candy cane fairies.” Richard was divorced and had no children.
He convinced my mother that I should be there, in my stroller, to help the kids draw the connection between Nora, the somewhat death-marked baby in the books, to “Nora,” the real-life child in pink overalls. “Kids are fascinated by the real, Anna. And it’s not like Nora would have to do anything. She’d just sleep away in her carriage, and, if you let them, the kids would come up one at a time after the reading to see her. It’d give you something to talk to the parents about. Your mother could take care of Nora, if she cried.”
“Dora,” my mother said.
“Right.”
I don’t know why it worked, but it did. Children’s eyes goggled back and forth between my mother’s illustrations and me sucking my thumb in the stroller or asleep on my grandmother’s shoulder, and the realization that I had nearly choked on a banana took on grave significance for them. Perhaps they understood some small degree of their own mortality from this connection: that they, too, might choke on bananas, that life was precarious and dangerous and they were very, very small within it. Perhaps they liked the novelty of a live baby in the same way they enjoyed the novelty of live bunnies and donkeys at a petting zoo. Whatever the reason, the readings, and, more importantly, the books, were a tremendous hit. Richard Layton couldn’t believe his luck, and neither could we. After two years, my mother bought everyone presents, starting with her family. There was a king-sized bed for her parents and diamond earrings for her sisters Eva and Marlene. Then music lessons for Eva’s son, Marty, as he was having a hard time with his father’s death from prostate cancer, and therapy sessions for Marlene, who was bulimic and recently fired from her job as a medical secretary. Breast surgery for Larry as he transitioned into my Aunt Laura, and a new roof for Mr. and Mrs. Stephanopolous’ building, the top floor of which we still rented at a ridiculously low rate. Richard Layton was promoted. In so many ways, my mother was able to give everybody exactly what they wanted.
As I grew older, our appearances together became slightly more performative. Richard wanted me to wear the clothes I wore in the books, so my grandmother and Mrs. Stephanopolous worked as competing seamstresses to alter my outgrown clothes. They inserted panels in the backs of dresses, lowered the cuffs on pants, and patched holes in sweaters. If alterations were impossible, they recreated entire outfits. Mr. Stephanopolous helped too, repairing the buckles on a pair of patent leather shoes that are central to Nora and the Playground Accident.
I can remember parts of those readings. Hot lights made the pinchy fabric under my armpits even itchier; Mrs. Stephanopolous had trouble fixing the problem of armholes, which my grandmother noted with uncharacteristic smugness. “She sews like she cooks,” my grandmother said, helping me wriggle out of a tight sailor suit after a reading at the Toronto Children’s Bookstore on Yonge Street. Mrs. Stephanopolous, for her part, criticized my grandmother’s liberal use of patches. “What,” she said at the Festival of Words, pointing to the off-colour yoke of my dress, “you think our Nora is a little match girl, or something? Make sure you don’t let the audience see your back.” My mother simply let them dress and undress me. She was confounded by the little doll in front of her who drew a crowd by sitting on a chair, looking like herself.
When I was six years old and Nora was at the height of her popularity, Richard had us booked at the Children’s Literature Festival at what was then Young People’s Theatre. Mrs. Stephanopolous was with us backstage and she helped me dress in my purple corduroy pinafore, the straps of which my grandmother had spent the evening adjusting. Mrs. Stephanopolous took blush out of her purse and rubbed colour into my cheeks with the pad of her middle finger. “There,” she said, giving me her compact mirror. “A little bit happier, don’t you think?” I did a little dance for my mother, who clapped softly as I finished. Mrs. Stephanopolous gave me a hug before I went onstage. There was going to be a book signing after. By this time I was an expert at that part of the show, standing beside my mother as small children, many smaller than me, clung to their mothers’ legs, once in a while extending a finger to touch the skin on my hand.
I remember that the lights were hot and I was bored, which means it was a typical reading. There was applause, of course, and then the moment when my mother took my hand and we both did a theatrical kind of bow. That was normal. But what stands out in my mind is the part after that, seeing the squirming shadows of the audience as people started to put on coats and zip up purses. For the first time I wondered if they realized how lucky I was, how very loved I was, to have a mother who wrote books about me, who drew pictures of me, each of my freckles, who held my hand under the lights and said, Dora, you’ve done it again. I bit the insides of my cheeks, sucking at the secret feeling of it all.
“I love you, Mom,” I said.
My mother was quite beautiful, even with her scars. She had lips that were naturally bright red. She never wore lipstick, or make-up of any kind, not even under the fluorescent lights, and so when she turned to me, all I saw was that red, that dazzling red, in the whiteness of her face. She walked off the stage, leaving me behind as Mrs. Stephanopolous scooped me up in her fat arms and promised me ice cream, but I imagined myself already full.
I WAS TEN when my mother began dying, fifteen when she finished. Early onset dementia ate into her brain from all sides, likely a result of her accident, the doctors said.
“There are no accidents,” I told them.
I was superstitious then and obsessed with Tarot cards. I spent any money I had on readings from Mrs. Lyubitshka, the woman who ran the nearly deserted tea shop half a block from the El Greco restaurant. Only men came into the shop, and then only rarely. If one arrived while I was there, Mrs. Lyubitshka stopped reading the cards and instead made a show of wiping dust out of a teacup and boiling water before she asked me to leave.
“We’ve broke the flow, Dora,” she said in an accent that sounded both Polish and Ukrainian. “You come back, we start again.” To the men she said, “Don’t worry, she’s not my daughter.” She said it nicely so as not to hurt my feelings. Then she disappeared into the back room.
The men were usually much older and greyer than Mrs. Lyubitshka, who wasn’t more than my mother’s age at the time. They reminded me of my grandfather in the way they sometimes held the door as I walked past, tipping their hats at me with great sincerity. I found the gestures quaint and vaguely flattering.
Mrs. Stephanopolous called Mrs. Lyubitshka a crazy gypsy, and Mr. Stephanopolous called her worse. Mrs. Lyubitshka was a bad influence and a poor role model, they said, and they considered themselves entitled to that
opinion as my de facto grandparents. They loved me. I had to listen to them. Even my biological grandmother, who was not one to agree with anything Mrs. Stephanopolous said, took her side. Mrs. Lyubitshka was no good.
“A potato gone bad,” my grandmother said, wagging her coffee spoon at me. “And you, you are good fruit, Dora.” She threatened to cut off my allowance.
My mother had no opinion. She spent her days engaged in increasingly strange pursuits, like colouring in the flowers on the bathroom wallpaper with my marker set, or undressing herself and then watching television. Her skin became nearly translucent and she bruised easily. Once she fainted after cutting herself with a kitchen knife and I had to call 9-1-1. Two paramedics arrived and it took both of them to strap my mother to the gurney. “That’s the most blood I’ve ever seen,” the younger one said to me as I sat on the couch in my nightgown. I took it as a kind of compliment. After that Mrs. Stephanopolous packed away the kitchen utensils and disconnected the stove, and Mr. Stephanopolous brought us our meals on trays, checking the pockets of my mother’s housedress for rogue forks and knives, which he sometimes found. I remember my mother’s hair falling out in alarming bunches when she brushed it. She insisted on doing so until she was nearly bald and my grandmother took away her combs and mine. Mrs. Stephanopolous gave me a very short haircut that made me look like a boy.
“So pretty, Dora,” she lied as chunks of my hair coated the kitchen floor. I was not popular at school at this time, and the haircut did not help.
My mother’s doctors offered few options outside of hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. We went on a tour of one such facility, my grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Stephanopolous, my mother, and me. I remember seeing a man in a paper gown masturbating in the hallway. We stayed for lunch. The food was soft and we ate it with plastic spoons. “Careful with these, Dora,” my grandfather joked. “They’re sharper than they look.” In the parking lot, he cried and Mr. Stephanopolous held him, one hand on the back of my grandfather’s head. It was the first time I had seen grown men show emotion.
Over time my sets of grandparents, real and adopted, became increasingly occupied with the job of monitoring my mother’s behaviour. I was a good girl, they knew. I got excellent grades in math and language arts, and I came home after school and helped with the housework and the errands. Mr. Stephanopolous was teaching me how to cook, and I was a willing student. I also took dictation for my grandfather, who was fond of writing letters to the editors of the major Canadian newspapers and magazines. Other than that, I was left alone much of the time. My mother was a very challenging person for my grandparents to care for. Gradually Mrs. Lyubitshka became the least of their problems.
Mrs. Lyubitshka turned out the cards with the kind of gravity I associated with medical examinations and funerals. It made me feel important that she took my money in exchange for advice on the mysteries of love and fate. She had striking red lips, obviously lipsticked, but against the paleness of her skin, which had a wormlike scar along one cheek, she reminded me just a little of my mother and it was difficult not to stare.
“The cards have interesting things to say to you, I can tell,” she said the first time I met her. I was drawn into the shop by the sign out front that said Fortune, Love, Happiness. There was a picture of a glowing crystal ball. I was alone and had an allowance to spend.
Mrs. Lyubitshka sat me down at a wobbly table and closed her eyes. She grazed her fingertips over the cards, now and again bringing one to her chest and holding it against her heart before replacing it in the strange formation on the table. She turned over the first card and told me it was called the Star. The next one was the Lovers. “Your life will have lots of peace, lots of passion,” she said. Then there was the Seven of Wands. “Some heartbreak, too.”
I was worried, but Mrs. Lyubitshka waved a hand across the table.
“Everyone gets the heartbreak. No big deal.”
I also had a lot of blocked creativity, Mrs. Lyubitshka said. Did I paint, or dance? Maybe sing?
I did none of those things. The cards must have made a mistake.
“There are no mistakes,” she said, putting the cards into a velvet bag. “Lesson number one of Tarot.”
I took these informal lessons from her until I was able to turn out the Petit Jeu without hesitation. At that point she stopped taking my money. Mrs. Lyubitshka helped me develop a kind of patter that she made me practice. It included platitudes for those who were given bad news and cautionary optimism for those with wild good luck. My patter needed a lot of work. I tended towards blunt revelation because I thought it was more honest, but Mrs. Lyubitshka corrected me.
“It’s all true stories,” she said, “but you need balance for people to believe.”
Mrs. Lyubitshka was a kind teacher, and it took years for me to understand the depth of her generosity. A young girl doing her math homework in the window of that shop must have been bad for business, and by the time my mother was hospitalized for good, I was there almost every day.
The money from my days as Nora kept my mother comfortable and, I think, happy until the end. The palliative care facility was a good one, with a courtyard garden and relatively cheerful orderlies who affectionately called my mother Anna Banana as they changed her bed sheets. They were also kind to me. Mrs. Lyubitshka had given me a set of cards to use, and after seeing me deal and re-deal them for myself, a blonde nurse named Sherry asked me to do a reading for her. She wanted to know if her boyfriend was going to propose. The cards said yes and Sherry said I had a gift. From there I did readings for many of the staff, even though my grandmother said that such paganism was both embarrassing and dangerous. She had long since given up on her first day of spring parties.
I was fourteen before I did a reading for my mother. By that point I had to guide her hand as it cut the deck of cards. I was worried that my touch might influence the result, but my intentions were good, I reasoned, and the cards knew that.
“Try to relax, Mom,” I said. My mother was hiccupping quietly and plucking the petals out of a bouquet of daisies Richard Layton had sent her for her birthday. She was perfectly relaxed.
The cards had bad news. My mother turned the Ten of Swords. The picture was of a man with ten swords driven into his back. It signified pain and affliction. She also turned the Tower. The Tower meant any number of things, according to Mrs. Lyubitshka, but it usually meant destruction. Lastly, my mother turned the Death card, which was not difficult to interpret, even for a beginner.
I put the cards away in their velvet bag. I was starting to see that there were limits to what the cards could tell. I was also starting to wonder how Mrs. Lyubitshka made her money.
“I love you, Mom,” I said, by way of apology.
“I love you,” my mother said to her intravenous bag. “I love you,” she said to the pile of flowers on her meal tray. From there we sat silently and she destroyed more daisies.
Sherry came in with a bedpan; my mother told her that she loved her too.
“Isn’t that sweet,” Sherry said. “Your mom is such a doll.” Sherry showed me the diamond ring on her finger and I agreed that it was very pretty.
My grandmother arrived to pick me up, and my mother clapped excitedly.
“I love you,” she said. “I love you.”
“Yes, Anna,” my grandmother said, smoothing her hair, “I know you do.”
“I love you, Mom. I’ll see you next week,” I said, but my mother just stared at me and bit her lips. I waited for a moment more, but nothing came. I waited, for nothing, ashamed that I wanted her to just hurry up and die.
“I’m sorry, Dora,” my grandmother said.
“Oh,” I said, “it’s okay.” As if we were talking about an overdue library book or a rental car with poor gas mileage. Something borrowed.
I FELL IN LOVE several times in my twenties, and several men also fell in love with me. It was quite wonderful if the man in question fit into both categories at once, though that happened less often
than Mrs. Lyubitshka had led me to believe that it would, and it wasn’t happening when I became pregnant.
His name was Henry and he already had a wife. Her name was Isabelle and she was in a coma from a car accident the year before. She and Henry had been driving back from his sister’s wedding in Virginia. The sister had married a man who organized Civil War re-enactments.
“You knew it wasn’t going to last,” Henry told me on our first date. “Kathleen looked so stupid in that hoop skirt.”
He and Isabelle had been making a holiday of the trip, stopping at little inns along the way. “We signed the guest registries under fake names and ordered champagne,” Henry said, a little embarrassed. “It was a sort of second honeymoon.” They had never had a first. Isabelle contracted food poisoning from the chicken kiev at their own wedding reception and they had cancelled the trip to Montreal at the last minute. She lost fifteen pounds in a week, and, according to Henry, she was a tiny woman to begin with.
Henry and I made love in the evenings after he got back from visiting Isabelle. He said there was new research to suggest that a person in a coma still heard and recognized the sound of her loved one’s voice, but chattering on about his day made him uncomfortable when all that answered him was the whir of Isabelle’s ventilator. Instead he read to her. Borges and Woolf seemed to be her favourites, though he was more partial to Americans, himself. Henry regularly shopped for new books for Isabelle, and I met him in this way, ringing up the sale of Love in the Time of Cholera. Afterwards I was embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t read it. Henry had read everything, it seemed.
The thing I liked best about Henry was the sound of his heartbeat. He had a rather serious heart murmur, but falling asleep on his chest to the sound of that asymmetrical rhythm was oddly comforting. It gave the illusion of excitement and romance, which we both knew full well was not why we were together. I didn’t tell him about the pregnancy, only that I thought we shouldn’t see each other anymore. He agreed, delicately, and gave me a copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as a token of his affection, not because it had any special significance for us, but because it was what he had with him at the time and he said he felt the need to give me something.
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