Belinda's Rings

  Buying gummies, I said.

  I thought you liked Swedish berries, she said. She stood there scowling at me until I untied my baggie and threw a few Swedish berries inside. I only did it because I knew that if I didn’t, she’d say she felt like going home when we left the store. Sometimes Rose can be such a spoiled brat.

  So when I told her I had my own my pen pal, I wasn’t really surprised that she got all defensive.

  What’s your pen pal’s name? Rose asked.

  Prim, I said.

  Prim? What kind of a name is that?

  It’s an English name. She’s from England.

  You can’t have a pen pal from England, Rose said. They’re supposed to be from a third-world country.

  I thought they just had to be a stranger you write letters to, I said.

  No, Rose said. That’s not a pen pal. That’s just a stranger you write letters to. And anyway, you’re not supposed to just send random people letters.

  Well I guess she’s technically not a stranger, I said, biting my hair. We’re sort of related.

  You’re related? You’re writing to someone in your family? Rose sighed and blew her bangs out of her eyes like whatever are we going to do with you. Hel-lo, she said, the point of a pen pal is to get to know someone new?

  I’ve never seen her before in my life, I said. She doesn’t even send me pictures of herself.

  So what? Rose said. Her face was getting red. It still doesn’t count. You’re not even doing it for school.

  Neither are you, I said.

  Well, not anymore, Rose said, but Jesus and I aren’t strangers anymore either. We’re close. Then Rose started telling me all about how people in Paraguay can drop out of high school before they graduate and no one cares because most people don’t have much education anyway. Jesus told her he was going to get a job and save up to come to Canada. He would live at her house for a while until he got a job, and then they could move out together. She was talking so fast I didn’t even get a chance to explain that I started writing my letters before I even knew she had a pen pal, and by the time she finished yakking it didn’t seem important anymore.

  The first few times, it felt creepy to send letters to someone I didn’t know. I’d accidentally found the address in Mum’s Rolodex when I was looking for her work number, so it wasn’t like I was sneaking around like a stalker to find her. I even asked Mum if that was her sister’s address and she said No, Prim wasn’t living there anymore. I could tell she was lying. The first letter was kind of like a test, and then Prim wrote back asking all kinds of questions about how old I was and if I had any brothers and sisters, so of course I had to write back. But I didn’t really want to. I didn’t know what to say. I am 14 years old. I have one sister (16) and one brother (5). It sounded so dumb, like something a grade two-er would write. And how was I supposed to ask her the things I wanted to know? I was just wondering what you’re like, and why your mother disowned you. Yeah, right. It seems weird to me that people like Rose can just convince themselves that someone they’ve never met who lives on the other side of the equator or across an entire ocean can be their friend — even boyfriend. I mean, it’s not like you can really know anything about that person. Jesus could be a total perv, for all Rose knows. And Paraguay might as well be on a different planet. Rose can’t even pick it out on a map.

  Sometimes I wonder if people are meant to stay where they belong. I’ve heard people talk about feeling culture shock when they go to a different country. It makes me think of this story I read a while ago about a bunch of foreign jellyfish — mauve stingers, in fact — freaking out and attacking a salmon farm in Ireland. Mauve stingers are pretty small jellyfish, but they travel in groups of a billion or more, tightly packed together like one huge pulsating jelly-monster. Most people don’t know that a large group of jellyfish is called a bloom, which I think is perfect ’cause you can just imagine billions of them floating together in the water like the petals of a huge red flower, their tentacles waving in the ocean wind. So anyway, this bloom of mauve stingers was native to the Mediterranean, and no one really understood why it had travelled all the way up around the freezing-cold coasts of Ireland. But jellyfish aren’t actually strong enough to swim against the tides, so when this bloom drifted into the salmon farm it seemed like the jellyfish were disoriented and confused. They drifted right over top of the salmon cages and just started stinging like crazy. The fish were stuck in their cages and all those jellyfish smushed together made a poisonous blanket over them so that the farmers couldn’t do anything about it. The bloom was more than ten miles wide and thirty-five feet deep and it turned the sea into a red beating heart. The farmers just stood there watching while the fish got stung, and when the tide carried the bloom away there were 120,000 dead fish floating on the surface of the water. The jellyfish hadn’t eaten a single one of those fat and juicy farm fish. You can tell that story to anyone who thinks animals only kill when they want food. Those jellyfish ended up somewhere they didn’t belong, and their first instinct was obviously not to be friendly with the locals. It was basically their way of showing culture shock. Really, we’re not all that different. The only difference is we have more brains to stop ourselves from freaking out and doing bad things, even though our bodies may be telling us to.

  I’ve never been outside North America, but Wiley says travelling is overrated. Maybe that’s ’cause he’s never been to a different continent either. Da keeps saying that he’s going to take me and Jess to Malaysia someday whether we like it or not, and Jess always says NOT and then wrinkles her nose up like she can’t imagine anything more revolting. She’d rather go to England, and even though I wouldn’t be able to learn how to scuba dive in England, I think I’d rather go there too. Wiley says all they have there is bad weather and worse food, but I still think it would be kinda neat to see where Mum came from. I always imagine Auntie Prim as an older version of Mum and my cousin Sebastian as an older version of Squid, so I bet it would feel like stepping into the future or even some parallel universe. It makes me wonder if there’s another version of me out there somewhere.

  I can still remember the time when I was little and I suddenly realized I was me, and there wasn’t anyone else quite like me in the world. I was eating a Popsicle and staring up at a woolly mammoth. See, when you take the train to the zoo you get off in this long concrete tunnel that leads up to the entrance. The middle of the tunnel rises up into a skylight, with a life-size mammoth sculpture standing beneath it. The tunnel was my favourite part of the zoo, ’cause it was dark and clammy like a sewer, with only the dim rays filtering down from the skylight and a few yellow safelights along the walls. Your voice would echo all around you, even when you were just talking softly. The animal carvings on the walls made it feel like a prehistoric cave. Your footsteps would echo too, and Jess and I would always skip ahead of Mum and come running back just to hear the drumming music our feet could make. In the middle of the tunnel there’s a big circle with the mammoth plonked in the centre, and a few dinosaurs and sabre-toothed tigers around the sides. You can stand right under the mammoth and the shadow of just one tusk covers your whole body, and when you’re a kid you can really imagine it’s a live animal towering over you. My pink Popsicle was melting and dripping on my fingers and I imagined the mammoth’s mouth dripping saliva like a dog. The mouth was a bit open and painted dark grey inside.

  For some reason, looking up at that mouth that was the perfect shape for my puny little head made me think about how amazing it was that I was born as me, as if I could have been any one of the millions of other people in the world, but it was some stroke of pure chance that made me me. It was like I imagined that people were made up of different pieces that got put together randomly, as if God or whoever was responsible had one of those machines they use for Bingo where all the balls fly around inside and a certain few get sucked up into the tube, one by one, until you have a set of lucky numbers.

  Of course, Mum would say there’s no s
uch thing as luck. It’s all part of the cosmic design, she says. But it seems like if she really believed that, she never would have gone to England. If she believed that everything happens for a reason, there wouldn’t be anything to run away from.

  Jess told me that she didn’t think Mum would have gone on her trip if she knew that Wiley was going to start acting even weirder than usual. I’d made the mistake of telling her about Wiley and the trunk the night before.

  Mum wouldn’t have left us with a crazy person, Jess said. She would never leave us in danger. I hadn’t even said anything about danger but it was obvious that Jess was scared. Her fingernails were bitten down so far that there were dark red curves tracing the edges.

  Whoa, drama queen, I said. I just thought it was weird, that’s all. I don’t think it’s exactly normal for someone to stay up in the garage all night trying to crack open a useless old trunk.

  Ya think? Jess said. It’s crazy, that’s what it is.

  Relax, I said. It’s not like he’s gonna come after you in the night and stab you with a screwdriver.

  How do you know? Jess said. You don’t know that. She crossed her arms and looked me straight in the eye, the way Mum does when she’s made up her mind.

  Oh God, I said. I laughed at her and rolled my eyes as if what she’d said was completely ridiculous, but it was actually the only thing I could think to do to make her stop talking about it.

  As dramatic as it sounded, it was kinda true. The Wiley we were living with wasn’t the guy who played ‘Eye of the Tiger’ on our piano just to hear us giggle and taught us how to tie-dye our own t-shirts. New Wiley was the kind of guy who didn’t care if we ate pizza three times a day or got drunk in the house. New Wiley could spend eight hours straight in the garage drinking beer with his buddy while Squid was wailing ’cause he’d had a nightmare. He was supposed to be our stepdad, but we didn’t know him at all.

  XII

  BELINDA NEEDED A STRATEGY for leaving. She never got anything done without a plan. If she went to the grocery store without a list, she would go home with bagfuls of frivolous items like jars of pickled vine leaves, raisin bread, and peanut butter swirled with strawberry jam — foods that made her feel hungry. She’d decided long ago that she couldn’t trust her instincts. Her instincts had kept her in her mother’s house for seventeen years. The plan got her out.

  The plan to leave her mother began when Belinda refused to grind the crabapples one autumn. It was one of her mother’s nonsensical obsessions to collect every crabapple that the tree in their front yard put forth. It was unthinkable to let them grow and fall to the ground, or to allow the occasional small animal to enjoy the fruit. Every edible morsel had to be plucked and hoarded, any worms or scars or bruises cut out of the flesh. Vestiges of wartime mentality: to waste food was treasonous. And so her mother would insist on grinding the crabapples to a pulpy sauce, which could be preserved in Mason jars and stored in the cellar. Since her mother had arthritic wrists, it was Belinda’s job to mill the apples by hand in a contraption that looked like a saucepan with a sweeping blade set on the inside and a crank handle sticking out the top. Belinda was forced to crank the handle around and around as her mother added newly manicured and peeled apples to the mix, watching the dirty yellow sauce swirling at the bottom of the grinder. The same task had once been assigned to Prim, who, as her mother insisted, did a lazy job of it.

  You don’t want to turn out like her, do you? her mother reminded Belinda at every opportunity. Look at her. Poor, alone, stuck with an invalid child. Likely alcohol poisoning, so I said. She drank like a fish, couldn’t help herself.

  She spoke about Prim as if Belinda knew her, had some magical means to know what Prim was like then, and what her life was like now. But all she knew was that whatever her mother said about Prim was not the truth. Her mother had turned her back on her own daughter, rejected her for no good reason. Sometimes it even seemed as though she was jealous of Prim’s freedom.

  Before you know it, her mother would continue, she’ll be old and useless. No life of her own to speak of.

  Belinda knew these were only stories, constructed by her mother to keep her in fear. Still, it worked. As much as she was convinced her mother was lying, she had no way of knowing if there was some small element of truth in her words. And rather than allow herself to admit that, she continued to grind the apples, shutting out her mother’s mantra with her own visions of Prim.

  You’ll thank me, her mother had said, when you’re eating a nice hot bowl of crabapple sauce on a cold winter’s day. She said this every single year, and not once did they open a jar. The jars collected in a corner of the cellar, the crowded stacks of glass like the towers of a miniature city glowing vague and flaxen in the perpetual darkness.

  Refusing her grinding duties was Belinda’s way of taking a stand. Asserting her independence was the first stage of the plan. The next stage was to do something serious and unexpected. She smashed all the jars to pieces. She didn’t do these things for her mother’s sake, but rather for her own. Her mother didn’t find about the smashed jars until the following autumn, after Belinda had left, when the sauce had caked and dried in crusty puddles and the shards of glass had become features of the cellar’s landscape, furred with dust and dirt. Belinda thought of her plan as confidence-building. She smashed the jars to prove her capability for irresponsible destructiveness. She was proving wrong her own self-doubt.

  After the jar-smashing, she’d found a job at the convenience store at the other end of town. This hadn’t seemed possible while the jars were still intact, harbouring all of their preserved evidence that year after year would always bring more apples. The job — the money — fulfilled the practical part of her plan. Practicalities signalled the final stage.

  With Dazhong she’d had to up the ante. When the time came to leave him she was no longer a meek teenager. She’d proven her independence by starting piano lessons — something that Dazhong didn’t value and couldn’t possibly share with her even if he’d wanted. Although she’d specifically chosen a male piano teacher, the attraction to Wiley was not planned. But it made her rash act of defiance a natural progression. Next, getting a job at a clothing store in the mall was easy; she carried the aplomb of an adulteress, flaunting poise and certainty like shiny gold bangles. They liked that in retail. She’d received three job offers, and Talbots offered her the highest wage. Selling clothes had seemed glamourous until it became clear that the clothes at Talbots were only considered stylish among women over the age of sixty. Things had a way of changing — or perhaps what really changed were Belinda’s perceptions of things.

  But with Wiley it had been different. He had changed, too. When he wasn’t feverishly professing his love and admiration for everyone around him, he was spending entire days holed up in dingy bars contemplating the worthlessness of life. In personality, he’d become a caricature of himself, with certain traits grossly exaggerated and others diminished to feeble proportions. His disposition was either exuberant or despondent, nothing in between, and his moods seemed to last for weeks on end.

  He’d been in the thick of one of his erratic, charged-up moods when Belinda made the mistake of telling him, before she made a plan, that she intended to leave. It had happened weeks before she even conceived of taking the trip to England, but she was still being punished for it. Wiley hadn’t been sleeping for more than a few hours each night and his eyes had acquired the unsettling glaze that often accompanied this persona, as though he were seeing the world in some mesmerizing new dimension. And in his intensified way of jumping to overblown conclusions, he’d convinced himself that Belinda had used him as a way out of her marriage to Dazhong.

  You manipulated me, he’d sneered. You wanted a way out. You even had a child you didn’t want for the sake of justifying it. It’s despicable, you’re going to hell, you’re going straight to hell. He’d screamed the words over and over until Belinda almost began to believe them.

  She called it a slip-
up, and it was. She was frustrated; she’d taken the wrong approach. And she’d given Wiley leverage when she asked him not to tell the children what she had said.

  You’re looking for absolution, he accused. I will not absolve you. You are a bad person. She’d been particularly stung by the weight of these insults. His accusations made her out to be thoroughly, innately bad. Evil.

  Later that evening, after they’d been forced to smooth things over for the kids’ sake, she realized that Wiley was probably right about her desire for absolution. It had been too providential for Grace to ask about purgatory at the dinner table the very same day. And Belinda had felt the need to defend herself, even when the conversation really had nothing to do with her.

  Purgatory is a place of torture, Wiley told Grace. You get tortured there, for the bad things you’ve done. He aimed his manic stare directly at Belinda.

  It’s more of a state of being than a place, Belinda had said. Grace looked confused about that response. She’d been going through a spiritual phase, and Belinda knew it had to do with fitting in. She had a friend who was Catholic. The friend, Rose, looked like the kind of girl teenaged boys would find attractive. She had thin, long limbs, fair skin, and designer clothes. She wore push-up bras under low-cut tops. She played on the volleyball team and chewed bubble gum obsessively. Grace’s envy of her was as palpable as an overripe cheese. Her inquiries about religion were merely attempts to unpack Rose’s character in that enamoured way of jealous adolescent girls. She could not have known that Wiley was simmering on her words, and reveling in their invocation.

  So . . . Grace said, it’s something you just make up in your head?

  You might say that, Belinda said. Catholics believe that some people have to be purified before they can go to heaven. The ones who did some bad things like everyone does, but are still good people. She could see Wiley out of the corner of her eye, mashing his baked potato with his fork as though it were a thrashing, living thing that needed to be squashed before eaten.