Beyond Blonde

by Teresa Toten

  PUFFIN CANADA

  BEYOND BLONDE

  TERESA TOTEN is the author of Better Than Blonde and three other young adult novels, including The Game and Me and the Blondes, which were both shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. Her most recent book is Piece by Piece: Stories About Fitting into Canada.

  www.teresatoten.com

  Also by Teresa Toten

  Piece by Piece: Stories About Fitting into Canada

  Better Than Blonde

  Me and the Blondes

  Onlyhouse

  The Game

  Bright Red Kisses

  (a picture book)

  PUFFIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2010

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Teresa Toten, 2010

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Toten, Teresa, 1955–

  Beyond blonde / Teresa Toten.

  ISBN 978-0-14-317358-8

  I. Title.

  PS8589.O6759B49 2011 jC813’.54 C2010-905853-4

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

  In memory of Janja Vukovic Mama

  Always tell the truth. Even if you have to make it up.

  —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  Mama turns on the water in the bathtub, hoping it will drown out her crying. It never does. The condo walls are paper-thin, practically see-through.

  My Euclid Avenue bedroom had gorgeous thick walls, but that was before prison. The condo is after. The Euclid room was awesome. I think. I know that the walls were awesome because Papa and I painted them electric orange one Sunday while he was in that sweet spot between four and seven shots of brandy. I can’t really nail down any of the other details. My orange room blurs into the five other bedrooms I’ve had since we’ve moved from there to here.

  My condo bedroom is beige, bar none the most pathetic colour in the known universe. We’ve been here for almost three years, Mama, me, and, for a minute and a half, Papa, and it’s like my bedroom is still in its underwear. I plopped onto my mattress, which is on the floor, and stared at it all accusingly. At least I had this brilliant lava lamp that Auntie Eva gave me when I turned sixteen. The lamp’s bobbing purple blobs float on top of a stack of Encyclopaedia Britannicas, A through P. We couldn’t afford the rest, or the Britannica people couldn’t keep up with our moves. I forget which. Given the room, the lamp looked like it was trying way too hard.

  I knew how it felt.

  I also had Papa’s mirror, the one he made me for my eighth birthday on Euclid Avenue. It had the best bits of my little-girl self glued, shellacked, and frozen onto its frame. I had a home then. I haven’t called any of the places “home” since then. But that was then. Now, Papa’s gone again, and Mama’s relapsed right back into her Papa in Prison behaviour. She’s either all over me or spending entire weekends in her room, crying as quietly as she can. She just hit hour three of smothered sobbing. I lay down. Jesus God even the ceiling was beige! I never noticed that before. Isn’t there some kind of decorating law that ceilings have to be white?

  He’ll come back when he’s sober. He said. He packed up his shirts, his poetry books, some of my art, and all of his laughter. Papa packed up his making me feel like his princess, and he left.

  His drinking, his leaving, their “separation,” her crying— none of it was my fault. I know that. I’ve seen all the Afterschool Specials. But there must have been at least some little thing that I could have, should have, done but did not do. My head is swirling with free-floating crappy bits.

  I need something. I need a thing to help fill up the hole inside me, or at least to muffle the echo a bit, not a booze thing or a dope thing, or even a guy thing … but a some thing. For sure, I need a something.

  On the bright side, I don’t have any secrets left.

  Unless you count the ones you keep from yourself.

  The Blondes still have enough secrets to sink a ship. Sure, Madison came clean about her adoption, but she’s still passing off her loony grandma as a former housekeeper. Sarah insists that she’s a born-again virgin, but she’s straining under the weight of all that purity. And then there’s Kit, who swore seven ways from Sunday that she’s done with the puking. Kit’s got a therapist and a plan, and she says that she’s sticking to both. Maybe, but I can smell a secret from a thousand paces, and you can bottle the scent coming off her.

  Not off me though. Like I said, I am secretless.

  I am now the holder of their secrets, but they are not my secrets. Papa in prison was a secret, a big one. Luke and I were a secret, almost as big, maybe bigger. No more. My first love was, as of last February, officially married and a brand-new daddy. So, we’re dead, done, finished, over. When I lie now, it’s for the Blondes, not for me. That kind of lying doesn’t even count as lying. It’s more like community service.

  Still, listening to Mama scares me. I mean, what if that’s as good as it gets for her? Even worse … what if this is as good as it gets for me? What if good things just don’t happen to people like us? It’s possible, given us being immigrants and given prison, the drinking, the moves, my life so far. And then I think, no.… No way.

  I exhale, get up, and shut the door on Mama.

  It works.

  There’s no more crying.

  We were about as inconspicuous as a three-ring circus in a monastery.

  “Don’t pushing!”

  “Who vas pushing?”

  “You vas pushing!”

  “I vas never no how pushing!”

  “Shhht, shhht!”

  Mama of all people should have known better. The Aunties were unshakably unshushable. Yes, they adored her, and maybe they were even a little afraid of her, but nobody shushes the Aunties. It didn’t matter that they had, hand to heart, agreed to Mama’s game plan in the parking lot a cool three minutes ago. “Vatever happens …” Mama made eye contact with each one of them. “Vonce ve are in da Anonymous Alcohol meeting …” They n
odded with an enthusiasm that made their beehive hairdos lurch. “Ve must to be totally, completely, inconspicuous, da?”

  “Pa, sure!” harrumphed Auntie Eva.

  “Tootally incognito,” agreed Auntie Radmila.

  “Everybodies vill tink ve are drunks!” promised Auntie Luba.

  Mama winced. “Just remember: inconspicuous.” Heartfelt nodding all around.

  Not a chance.

  For one thing, we had just not so inconspicuously exited Luigi’s White Night limousine, a gleaming white super stretch that was tricked out in twinkle lights. You could see that thing from the moon. Luigi was still trying to manoeuvre it out of the parking lot as we clambered down the steps to the church basement. Luigi Pescatore was Auntie Eva’s latest and most enthusiastic beau. They met last year when we used his limo service for Auntie Luba’s monster wedding to Mike. The moment that Luigi set eyes on Auntie Eva in her one-of-a-kind “kinda couture” bridesmaid’s dress, he was gunning to be husband number five. As of last Friday, Auntie Eva had rather grudgingly agreed to put him out of his misery. It was a slick compromise. They were officially unofficially engaged. Jewellery was involved, but the date was murky.

  The other not-so-inconspicuous thing is that we arrived in a clump. All the other alcoholics were filing in by themselves or, on occasion, meeting someone outside and then coming in. Auntie Eva picked an AA meeting in Rosedale because she insisted that we’d get a better class of drunk here. And, so far, she was right. All the alcoholics were pressed, groomed, or, at the very least, clean.

  Still, none of them looked like they were going to the El Mocambo circa 1962, which was standard Auntie streetwear. Mama was the muted one in a bright Pepto-Bismol pink “almost Chanel” suit that she saved for closing real estate deals. The Aunties never went anywhere without full armour: hair teased and sprayed, makeup blazing, girdles girdling, and billowing silk outfits meant to dazzle, if not blind, all potential opponents.

  Mama made me iron my jeans. Shuffling around with pressed bell-bottoms only added to my escalating anxiety about being here in the first place. I had this vague but persistent feeling that AA was a seriously secret society. What if they could tell I was an impostor? They probably had a deeply humiliating throw-the-fraud-out ritual that involved strobe lights and sirens. I felt terrible that I didn’t have a drinking problem. Auntie Eva assured us that even “sober peoples vas velcome to za Open Meetings,” but given the source, I didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Just going down the steps felt like lying … something you’d think I’d be comfortable with by now.

  As soon as we got to the bottom of the stairs, we were put through a greeting gauntlet.

  “Welcome, man.”

  A very tall gentleman wearing granny glasses and an eye-popping swirly T-shirt smiled sweetly at us. “Peace, eh, and have a cool meeting.” His head was covered in a thousand tiny moving braids. The guy was a walking willow tree. Auntie Eva ignored his outstretched hand and fingered his T-shirt instead.

  “Darrrling, zis is too fantastik. How did you do zis?”

  Dear Lord.

  “Sophie, psst, Sophie!” Auntie Radmila grabbed my ear. “Iz zis a homosexual-type person?”

  “No, Auntie Radmila,” I whispered as I bent down. “He’s a hippie.”

  “Ah! A hippie!” she beamed at him. “Pa da!” Pa da means “of course” in Croatian. The exclamation mark is implied.

  We disengaged Auntie Eva from the hippie’s shirt and were promptly accosted by a tidy, middle-aged man in a dove-grey suit. Then there was an imposing Native in a suede, fringed jacket. He was followed by a nice librarian-type lady. “Welcome,” she said as she shook our hands with both of hers. Somewhere in all that handshaking, I stopped being afraid of being a fraud. We shook hands with thousands of people. Each of them made eye contact, grabbed our hands, smiled, and welcomed us in. Welcomed? It was like walking into a hug. Powerful stuff.

  A little old lady who was shaped like a comma and wearing a blue tracksuit pointed with her cigarette to some empty seats near the podium. Wow, there had to be a couple of hundred chairs put out. How many drunks did they have in Rosedale? “There’s still five seats together on the left side,” she rasped. “It’s a great spot for you kids.”

  Mama hugged her.

  Shoot me dead.

  Auntie Eva wished her luck with her “sobering.”

  “Sobriety,” I corrected as we marched inconspicuously up to the front.

  “Zat is vat I said,” she sniffed.

  An impressive fog hovered just above our heads. Pretty much everyone in the place was smoking like a coal furnace and mainlining coffee. As we made our way up to the third row, random people smiled at us between puffs and sips. It could have been creepy in a saffron, Hare-Krishna kind of way. Instead, I never wanted to leave. I wanted to stay here with these people, these nice men and women who appeared to be so delighted that I had come. It was like they didn’t care what I did or didn’t do before I got here; they were just happy I was there.

  Was this how it felt for Papa? Especially after all those years spent in prison for something he didn’t do but was too damn drunk to know he didn’t do? Maybe that stuff wouldn’t matter here.

  Behind the podium, giant rolling blackboards with beautifully scripted sayings reminded us that There, but for the Grace of God and You are no longer alone.

  I looked around. Just about every seat was taken. Handlettered posters taped to the institutional-green basement walls bore witness to the Twelve Steps you always hear about.

  1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

  Powerless—I got that part. I’ve been feeling pretty powerless myself. Auntie Eva and I read the rest of them. God was in most of the steps and on all of the posters. In fact, God was all over the place. We were in a church basement, after all. I kept looking around. Even some of the more agitated guys looked like they had a chance at calm. Were they all believers? Did they switch out booze for God? The room was filling up fast. No doubt about it, the drunks looked normal, better than normal even. Maybe there was something to the God thing. I wondered how that went down with Papa who was a card-carrying non-believer. Papa’s aggressive atheism was one of the thousand things that made Auntie Eva mental. Still, to everyone’s astonishment, she let Papa stay in her basement apartment when he left us last February to find himself and sobriety.

  Apparently, Papa went to an AA meeting at least three times a week, and there were weeks when he went every single night. Auntie Eva said that she was going to burst a kidney unless she got to see what they did here. That was no doubt true, but I think she mainly wanted to give Mama a boost. Mama was wobbly again. What no one gets, except me and the Aunties, is that Mama is even more of a tortured, poetic soul than Papa. It’s just that she wraps it in so much hyperachievement and noise that she confuses people.

  Auntie Eva told me that this meeting would show Mama how “za light alveys goes out in za tunnel.” Yeah. I just let those go. If you think too hard about any “Auntie sayings,” you get a little nauseated.

  What I wanted was Papa home, drunk or sober. Yesterday.

  7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

  I liked that one. Make someone else responsible for my shortcomings! Or at the very least, get God to do the heavy lifting. Yeah. I could get the AA God to “remove” my addiction to Luke Pearson. Even though we were so obviously over, I still dreamed about Luke every single night and could still smell the Sunlight Soap of him at any given moment.

  A man sporting a puff of white hair and a blue knit sweater bounded up to the podium. “Good evening, and welcome.” He smiled. “My named is Peter and I’m an alcoholic.”

  We, each of us, gasped. I mean to just come out and say it like that, out loud, and in front of people!

  Everybody else said, “Hi Peter.”

  “As always, we’ll start with a moment of silence and then the Serenity Prayer.”

 
Everyone stood up.

  In our panic to blend in, we jumped up with a bit too much enthusiasm. Auntie Luba and Mama overturned their chairs. Inconspicuous? It felt like the rest of the room was bathed in darkness except for the klieg light aimed at our row. Auntie Eva squealed when an accountant type beside her grabbed her hand. Apparently, you hold hands to pray here.

  “God grant me the serenity …”

  Everybody else knew the words.

  “To accept the things I cannot change.”

  Well this was awkward.

  “Courage to change the things I can.”

  Still, there was such a powerful feeling in the room, warmth and what—safety? Is that what you feel, Papa? Do you feel safe here?

  “And the wisdom to know the difference.”

  And that was it, the whole prayer. We sat down again. Next time I was going to bring a pen so I could write things down. Next time?

  There were four more speakers.

  “Hi, my name is Steven and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi Steven.”

  “Hi, my name is Doris and I’m an alcoholic.”

  We came in with everyone on the “Hi Doris” and felt very proud of ourselves.

  “Hi, my name is John and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi John.”

  We were old pros by John.

  John reminded us how important the anonymous part was. “Everything in this room stays in this room. We must never acknowledge each other on the outside.” John also spoke in honour of his friend Bob, who was getting something called a one-year medallion. But first John gave us a taste of his own life before AA, which involved the loss of his family and many, many hospitalizations. But now he’d been sober for twelve years and could be of service to people like Bob, who’d apparently been sober, one day at a time, from September 1975 to today, September 3, 1976. Someone should make a movie about this stuff. Bob got up.

  “Hi, my name is Bob and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi Bob.”

  Bob told us about his descent into the bottle after his daughter was killed by a drunk driver. He talked about his guilt and shame, his addictions to both pain pills and alcohol. He told us about losing jobs, humiliating his family, and going through years of multiple benders and blackouts. I had a cringing flashback of me and Madison combing the city, bar by bar, searching for Papa. Bob talked about all of this without once sounding like he felt sorry for himself. He talked about Jesus Christ, his personal saviour, and his sponsorsaviour, John. Finally, in a rough whisper, Bob talked about the steadfast love of his wife, Judy. Auntie Luba and Auntie Eva were sobbing by the time he was actually presented with his medallion to honour 365 days of sobriety.