Vanishing Monuments

by John Elizabeth Stintzi

  Main turns to Portage, Portage turns to Canora. After skirting Vimy Ridge Park, the car keeps going, past the streets I know by heart, the names that may as well each be my name—Honeyman, Preston, Westminster—some marking the exact intersections where Tom and I stole the street signs when we were in high school. The last time I was here and Mother was not speaking.

  Before I make it to my block, I stop in the middle of the lane. There aren’t many cars at this time in the morning. A car comes up behind me and then slowly pulls around to pass, probably thinking I’m trying to park, or waiting for a friend to come running from one of the houses. Nobody runs out, to help me, to push my car the rest of the way. So I have to do it, let my foot move from the brake pedal to the gas.

  Just before reaching Wolseley Avenue, I pull off to the curb and park. My umbrella comes up from the compartment in the door, and I’m outside with Mother’s camera hanging from my neck like an anchor, the rain hitting my taut shield hard. I lock the car. The clouds are thick and the sun has risen behind them like an inverted horizon. The day has basically become just another night. I leave the luggage in the car, for now, and feel the walls of the house here, nearby, in this stormdark where all the wet dogs of the city are barking.

  Taped to a tree is an image of a girl’s face, laser printed onto green paper streaked and bowing from the rain, with the word MISSING in big letters over the top. I stand there, staring, wondering if it’s a picture of me.

  Two weeks or so ago, before classes ended, Ess was in my office brainstorming ideas for the outline of hir thesis essay and asked me: “What was it like growing up queer up there?”

  I was very masc—bound up tight and my hair folded up on itself—gnawing on the cap of a ballpoint pen. Al. I leaned back in my chair and took a long time to start answering. Nobody’d asked me that before.

  “I didn’t realize I was. That’s the short answer. I didn’t grow up in a house that talked about things like that. Most of my time growing up, it was just me and my mother. She never talked about me as a boy or a girl or anything like that. She just, well, talked to me. Sometimes, when I was really little, strangers would point at me in the street and smile and say things to her, but I wasn’t great at English yet. She understood, as much as she ever did. She’d say thank you but never translated their compliments to me. So I didn’t realize that the ways I was feeling were queer. It’s hard to realize that you feel different from how you’re seen when the only pronoun you grow up hearing every day is you.”

  “I wish I’d never had brothers. Probably it wouldn’t have fucked with me as much,” Ess said, turning around and closing the office door to a sliver. “When did you learn?”

  “I started school, and the first thing we had to do was take a tour, and the teachers had the class split up between boys and girls.”

  “And you picked?”

  “Yeah. I lined up at the end of the boys,” I said, feeling a flush across my chest as the pen cap snapped in my teeth. “None of the other kids said anything. My hair was short then, too, because I’d asked for that. But then one of the teachers came over to me and went down on one knee—I remember it like it was fucking five minutes ago—and she laughed and said to me, ‘No, no, the girls are lined up over there!’ and pointed to the other line. She smelled like peaches. She looked at me like I was stupid.”

  “Damn.”

  I spat out the pen cap and threw it in the trash can, leaning forward on my chair.

  “When my mother came to pick me up I rushed at her, crying. She took me back home, where I could be myself. It’s weird how much of me that house held. How much it does. It was often a hard place to be, but it was always an easy place to be me.”

  “You ever go back?”

  “Never,” I said, feeling an ache in my head where the memory palace stands tall, with its walls and floors and roof.

  “Me neither. I haven’t been to the house, at least. I was fourteen last time. I’ve steered clear of it, though I’ve been all over Peculiar since, for photos and whatever other things I feel I need records of,” Ess said, cracking hir hands on the back of hir neck. “Do you plan to?” “

  Never,” I said, hearing the hollow sound of the front door of the memory palace closing.

  So I walk up the concrete path of the house, through the rain, without my luggage, weary and very aware of the movement of my legs after spending all that time in the car, driving and sleeping. I watch my feet as I go, trying to avoid the cracks, trying to avoid making eye contact with the house. But I can see it anyway, standing in my head as it always has. At the door, I pull my keys from the pocket of my dress and check the number beside the door. I can barely tell in the dark of the rain if this is the house. I can’t recognize it. But the number is right, and I put in the key and turn it, and when the door opens, I’m finally convinced. I step inside and close the umbrella. Mother’s old Leica lifts up from my chest to my eye. I turn on the hallway light.

  I think the reason the house was so hard to recognize is its complicity with the street’s darkness. This house has never really been interested in participating in the dark, in seeming asleep, because whenever I saw the house from the outside at night, the living room light was on and the drapes were open. Mother would be sitting inside, every time, looking out, waiting. It was as if the house couldn’t sleep without me inside it, and only when I was finally back—and up the stairs, and in my bedroom—did the light go off and the drapes get drawn.

  The light was on in the house every time I came back, every time but two: the night I ran away and the first night Mother spent in Selkirk.

  Inside the house, the dust rustles up from the wind of the door until I shut it. The dormant film wakes up, thirsty, and I close my left eye and look only through the viewfinder of the camera. I watch the dust move, as if it’s being walked through, then settle. My hands go up to the shutter speed and the aperture and the focus and the shutter button and advance forward the film. The exposure is all guesses. My eye moves out from behind the camera to check the settings, to open or tighten the aperture, to see how many frames are left. I follow the dust as it rouses again and again throughout the house—the little gusts of breath, the house a slow lung—turning on lights and taking photos that I’m certain will turn out blurry and wrongly exposed. But that’s not what matters. What matters is framing pieces of the house into boxes, is rolling those frames up into Mother’s favourite little machine, is going into the rooms and seeing them bare and changed and the same. Is capturing this tour.

  The hallway, long; the little closet door under the stairs, the same: frame one. The living room, sparser; the telephone table; the telephone: frames two and three and four. The kitchen, different appliances, same colour: frame five. I walk past the old darkroom like it isn’t even there. I don’t take a photo. The hallway again, from the other end: frame six. On my way back down the hallway, toward the door, toward the bottom of the stairs—in a moment when my eye is out from behind the camera—I see on the floor of the landing the memory of me digging in the yard, but as soon as I put the camera back up to my eye, it is gone: no frame.

  The stairs are the same, the creakiest stairs still creakiest: frame seven looking up, and frame eight looking down. The top of the stairs: the huge armoire, still there; three doors, still there. Frames nine and ten and eleven and twelve. The bathroom is frame thirteen. Mother’s bedroom, lonely, hungry, the bed still made: frames fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. The door to the studio is untouched. I cross it, with a wide berth, to my bedroom. I open the door to the dark: frame seventeen.

  I turn on the light for frame eighteen. The creaky loft bed is still there—frame nineteen—with the vent near the ceiling that looks into Mother’s studio—frame twenty. That vent that a child might look through so many times, but that someone should not look at now, because my old twin bed, coverless and yellowing with time, is frame twenty-one. And that window—the window that I removed when I was seventeen, that has been replaced—is frame tw
enty-two. The new-looking wood of the window frame seems like the house’s newest scar, though I know that is not true. I walk over to it, and I let Mother’s camera sit against my chest. I try not to see myself in the reflection in the glass and fail—fail to not look and fail to see myself looking back at me. It could be anyone. As I put my hand on the wood, I look down into the dark, cobwebbed corner and see it there. The pry bar, the little pry bar I used to remove the glass. Frame twenty-three. Frame twenty-four, also, just in case.

  The wind I’ve always known moves through the house, moves along like a trail of words you can’t hear, or like a trail of words you can’t ever stop hearing but still can’t make sense of.

  I stand, looking straight into the uncoated eye of the camera. The man staring into the glass is rewinding the roll. When I hear the tail end of the film slip out of the spool, I realize how cold the house is. I let out a breath and see it squiggle into the emptiness like a soul.

  Sometimes, when you go through the memory palace hallway, the length of it changes. Sometimes you can basically teleport from one end to the other, from the landing to the kitchen or the darkroom door or the living room, from that end of the hall to the bottom of the stairs. Other times, the hallway keeps stretching out ahead of you, and you walk and walk and walk, or you sprint and sprint and sprint, and you only ever make it halfway across. Times like these, you feel like Achilles chasing the tortoise, the tortoise with the head start that will never reach the finish line, the tortoise that he can never catch, because neither can advance more than half the distance between their destinations. You know that when the hallway is endless, it is taking up the irrationally infinite space between you and Mother, including the moments when you were both so close to the finish line but unable to cross it. You sometimes stop halfway through the neverending hallway and try to run back, back to the front door, out of the hallway, and out of the palace, but once you’re in the middle, both ends are taken away from you. When you find yourself in this hallway in your memory palace, you often end up collapsing onto the floor, and as soon as you hit the ground, you always hear, again, the door’s foreign, hollow sound. When you pick yourself up, you find yourself standing outside the palace on the front lawn, among the grass that feels like hair and rises and falls like a breathing chest. And when you look at the palace, the door has completely disappeared. So you have no choice but to open your eyes, and come back to life, and give yourself up to the failure.

  The concrete path, the door, the hallway. The house. I remember Mother stuffing me into down jackets and snow boots, hobbling me into the thick snow pants she’d bought for me at the thrift store.

  “I bought it big like this because you will grow,” Mother said when she first pulled them up my legs as I sat braced on the stairs.

  It was late October, which back then meant there was already a foot of snow in Winnipeg, and the rivers were frozen. It was morning. I don’t know where we were going. She’d bought me the pants with a too-big jacket because I’d outgrown the one-piece snowsuit I’d used for the last few years. I must have been around eight or nine. She rolled up the legs, took an open safety pin from between her lips, and started pinning up the rolls of extra length.

  “If you buy big clothes, your body will know to grow into them. Do you want to be big one day, Alani? Like me.”

  I don’t remember answering, but I must have, because that was back when Mother and I still responded to each other. My mind doesn’t usually decide to remind me of us speaking. Instead, I remember thinking about my body getting larger, as she pinned the legs, and how hopeful that made me. I wanted there to be more room for all of me, I wanted my body to feel as bare and roomy as our house did, like I could fit everything in. When I was in kindergarten, because it was too cold to have recess outside, our teacher brought out the projector to show us a documentary about hermit crabs. I couldn’t understand what the voice-over was saying because of its speed and accent, so I just watched the crabs switching shells and started to think that’s what life is like: you live as long as you can in one body, then once you can’t fit into it anymore, you move to a new one. And someone smaller takes your place.

  For a while, I didn’t understand what growing up looked like, didn’t know how it worked. For a few years after Ilsa died and gave Mother the house in her will, Mother helped other elderly people in the neighbourhood keep up their lives in their own homes. Over the years of looking after Ilsa and me, she had perfected her technique of caring for fragile bodies.

  Before I was in school, or during the summer, I went along with her in the mornings and wandered around the old person’s house while Mother was in another room, helping them get out of bed, bathe, eat, or take their medicine. I spent most of the time there either avoiding their mean old pets or walking around their living rooms, their hallways, looking at the family pictures on the walls. I remember looking through those photos for the old, frail things that Mother cared for and never once finding them.

  I never thought that they could’ve been the result of one of the young bodies in those photos. After a certain age they stopped being documented, or else the newer photos were never hung. Mother hadn’t ever taught me about aging, about time’s effect on a body. I’d never seen a picture of myself as a baby; I don’t know that I’d ever seen a picture of myself at all back then. I thought that everything was inside me, that as far back as I could remember was as far back as I ever was. I assumed the people in the photos, in different stages of their lives, were each a different person. I thought I was going to be myself—a child—forever.

  Nobody told me that I’d already been things that I didn’t remember, that as far back as I could recall was not the start of me, and that my life would consist of slowly leaving myself behind. I hadn’t yet realized that I didn’t remember anything about the year or two we still lived in Germany. All I’d known was that whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, there I was. Back then, with that mindset, things seemed stable.

  “What does it mean being big?” I asked, as Mother took my hands and pulled me to my feet at the bottom of the stairs. She tugged at the pants, put her eye close to the floor—her tied-back hair flopping onto the hardwood—to squint and yank at the pinned legs. By then, I knew people grew, that there was no escaping the body I was in. “Why do I want to do it?”

  She sat up—the memory is tack sharp—finished adjusting one of the straps of the snow pants, pulled back a little, and looked me straight in the eyes. Her face was so close to mine. I can remember the smell of her shampoo, the weight of the snow pants hanging on my shoulders, her hands grazing down along them on their way to brace her against the floor with that swooshing sound of scraped polyester. I remember everything about that moment, everything but her mouth. I want to remember her smiling, but I can’t see it. I can’t see her mouth or the inflection that the words came out with.

  “Because it is going to happen, Alani. Getting big. You should be welcoming and excited for things that are going to happen.”

  I wake up stiff and heavy and lift myself from Mother’s bed, walk to the other side of the room, and turn on my phone, plugged in and splayed out on the dusty hardwood floor. Next to it are a few dead flies and ladybugs, belly-up. The dead insects are everywhere, riddling the windowsills and corners, as if they had each spent the last moments of their lives trying to escape the house.

  It’s morning, probably. The world outside the house is grey with rain. It’s sometime between two nights, at least, and I’m here, dressed in half the clothes I brought, since the radiators took their time and there weren’t enough blankets on the bed. My phone flashes its brands as it grumpily vibrates back to life. I don’t like rain, don’t like how it reminds me of the grey flatness life often takes—for people like me, like Mother.

  Last night, after pulling the roll of film from Mother’s camera and realizing how cold it was in the house, after grabbing my luggage from the car, I took another tour, cranking every radiator. I’m sweating now, in the
blouses and the muscle shirts and the tight jeans and the boxer shorts and a long, pleated skirt. My phone blinks and sucks back the string of unread texts from Karen, none dated more recently than last night. I open them, so that she’ll know I’ve seen them. I can hear the radiators knocking in the living room under me, in the bathroom.

  —Why aren’t you coming to the meeting?

  —Hey A whats up?

  —Pick up your phone!

  —Come on

  —I’m going over to G’s. Don’t go dark, please?

  —Promise.

  I don’t text her back. I can’t.

  I check the missed calls and they are all the same ones I already missed. Genny hasn’t tried to call again, since she hung up on me. I don’t listen to the voice mail she left when I was driving up here. I let its notification hang over me, a very effective thorn.

  I unpeel the many layers of me. The tall mirror that was once in Mother’s room is no longer here, and I’m glad, as much as I feel like it’s too big of a change. I undress to the amount of nothing I’m comfortable with. My skin starts to dry in the radiator air, and the clothes on the dusty floor around me look like the aftermath of an orgy. Boy clothes, skirts, and panties. My hair falls in front of my face as I look down, so I take a hair-tie from my wrist and pull it back. I pick up the clothes, brush off some of the dust—some of the fly corpses—and pile them up on the bed. Rain on the roof. Dust from years of abandon rustles up sneezes. I walk to the luggage and pull out the binder, the packer, but then put the packer away again. The electricity is moving in the walls. I can’t hear that, but I feel it. I never bothered to cancel any of the utilities when Mother was put in the home, because I didn’t think I’d be paying them much longer. I take off the bra and throw it onto the mess of the bed.