Not Suitable For Family Viewing

by Vicki Grant

  She gives this little “hmmph!” and shakes her head. “You can’t tell me no one around here knew there were fourteen starving kids and a couple of dying old folks on that island. I mean, come on! How come nobody ever asked about what happened to my mother? The townspeople knew about Nettie Faulkner. It was a big scandal when she took up with a Bister. Once she was on the Island, though, it was like, ‘So long, Nettie!’ Nobody ever bothered to see how she was doing—whether she was even still alive! When the cancer took her, we just filled her pockets with rocks and buried her at sea.”

  Mom burying a body at sea. I’ve never even seen her make a cup of tea for herself. It’s like she’s morphing before my very eyes. She’s not Mom. She’s not Mimi. She’s someone else entirely.

  “Were you glad when the people came to get you?” I say.

  She rubs her hands back and forth through the sand in a big arc. “We didn’t know what to think, us kids. My little sister had died the winter before. Starvation. Something should have been done but the adults were too proud to go for help. Now here was help. You couldn’t expect us to turn it away. It was scary to leave the only home we ever knew, but, hey—the new place had Popsicles! The new people didn’t cane us when we were bad or lock us in cellars. They fed us when we were hungry. They gave us clothes that fit and warm baths and actual shoes. Who’d want to go back to Bister Island after that—even if we could?

  “It wasn’t until I went to school that I realized all this bounty came with a price. I was still just a Bister—at least as far as most people were concerned. I say ‘most people’ because it wasn’t everyone…” She turns and looks at me. “You met Rosie.”

  I nod. “I thought she was my mother.”

  “You might have been better off if she were.”

  I try to say “No!” but she won’t let me.

  “I mean it,” she says. “She’s a wonderful person. You know, I’ve done more shows than I can count on heroes. People who’ve jumped onto subway tracks to save a stranger or fought off an intruder or thrown themselves on a hand grenade. And every time I do one, I think of Rosie. We always make bravery out to be this big, flashy thing. It isn’t always. Rosie Ingram is one of the bravest people I ever met. I mean it. I’m not saying everyone at high school was out-and-out mean or that some people didn’t try to help. But Rosie was the only one brave enough to really get to know me. She didn’t care if it looked bad on her. She liked me and she didn’t try to pretend she didn’t. That’s real courage. Unfortunately, it’s just not very good TV.”

  Mom smoothes down her hair but it doesn’t help much. It’s so weird to see her look such a mess that I get a sharp little pang. Did I really need to dig all this up? Who cares? Who’s it helping?

  Her, maybe. She just keeps talking and talking like she wants to get it all out of her system.

  “It’s funny. Mrs. Hiltz was the one who got all the glory for being brave. My cousins went and lived at the ‘Home for Delinquent Boys.’ Nobody else would have them. The really little kids were adopted into families who lived somewhere else. But me, I found a foster home with the richest person in town. People were astounded Mrs. Hiltz had taken in a Bister. She was a saint, a hero!”

  We laugh a little at that. Some saint.

  “I believed it too. Mrs. Hiltz was so kind and patient. She kept telling me how smart and pretty I was. I was in heaven. No one had ever praised me before. No one had ever proudly presented me to their friends!”

  Mom’s voice gets all tight and I know she’s about to cry. I put my hand on her back but she goes stiff, so I take it away. She starts to talk again as if she’s perfectly fine.

  “I think of those ladies with their Betty Crocker hairdos and their little sandwiches saying, ‘This is the Bister girl? Why, Opal, isn’t she lovely!’ and I realize the whole thing was about her. About what a good job she was doing. Rosie didn’t have any reason to be nice to me. She just was.”

  “So why did you steal Rosie’s wallet then?” She said I could ask her anything.

  Mom puts her hand over her mouth and sort of hums or moans or something. “I didn’t mean to steal it. I went to Rosie’s after Mrs. Hiltz kicked me out. I only wanted to say goodbye but I couldn’t get the words out. At some point, she went to the washroom. While she was gone, I took her wallet out of her jewellery box. I just wanted a picture of her so I’d have something to keep, but she came back too soon. I put the whole thing in my pocket and told her I had to get going. I hugged her goodbye. She must have wondered why there were tears in my eyes. I always felt bad about that.”

  “What did you do then, when you left Rosie’s?”

  “Got on the highway and hitchhiked into the city. I hung around there for a couple of days not knowing what to do. Percy had told me about New York once. I decided to go. Lucky for me I had that wallet. I got to the airport and found out I needed ID. I had Rosie’s birth certificate and student card. That’s how I became Rosemary Miriam Ingram…That was another thing I wasn’t planning on doing.”

  She pauses. “None of this was planned, Robin. I just did what I had to do. I want you to know that.”

  “Okay,” I say. We’ve both been called scheming tramps. Doesn’t mean we are.

  She looks at me for a while, then says, “I got to New York and put the rest of the money in a bank account. I planned to send it back to Mrs. Hiltz as soon as I got a job. I saw a notice tacked up on a bulletin board. A man needed someone to look after his sick wife. Room and board included.

  “That’s how I met Grandpa. I’d looked after my mother when she was dying so I knew what to do with Dora. I read to her, I bathed her, I cleaned the house, even cooked a bit. I didn’t tell Harry I was pregnant, but after a while it became obvious. I was worried he was going to throw me out, but he didn’t. One day, he just said, ‘You can stay here as long as you need to.’ He never asked who the father was or what I was going to do when the baby came along. He just made sure I didn’t work too hard and got to bed early.

  “Dora died a few months later. I stayed on, cooking and cleaning for Harry. You were born. I named you Robin because I wanted you to be able to fly away if you ever needed to. And I named you Opal because…I guess back then I still believed Mrs. Hiltz was good and I was bad.”

  She shakes her head. “Anyway, you came along and Grandpa fell in love with you. I wasn’t going anywhere then. We were a family.”

  Her face goes blotchy but she just sucks it up and keeps going. “That thing you read on enoughaboutmimi.com is right. That’s more or less how I got my first job. Harry was doing some electrical work at the studio the day the Book Talk host up and quit two hours before the show. Harry lied and said I was twenty-five, told them I could do it, told them I had experience. They didn’t go for it at first. Then he said, ‘Give her a chance and I won’t charge you for the work I did.’ The station was a shoestring operation. They almost had to give me a try.

  “Harry came home all excited. I told him there was no way I could do it. I was too shy. He wouldn’t listen. He said I just had to ask a professor a couple of questions about Jane Austen. The professor would do all the work. I still said no. Then he said, ‘You owe it to me.’ He didn’t mean it, of course. He only said that to make me do it. He bought me a dress, fixed my hair and basically pushed me onto the set. The only thing that saved me was that I’d read all Austen’s books a million times. I practically knew them by heart. I asked my first question. The professor answered. I was so fascinated I almost forgot I was on TV. I’d found my calling. I became the regular host.”

  Her voice has changed. I can see her body loosening up. The words are just pouring out of her.

  “One day, I met your dad—Steve, I mean—at the studio. It was just as his song was starting to get airplay. Around the same time, Harry saw an ad for a newsreader on a local station—a paying station—and he prodded me into applying for it. I got the job. Steve’s song flew up the charts. He adored you in that whatever goes way of his. I thought we were in l
ove. We got married.”

  She rolls her eyes at that. It obviously wasn’t much of a love affair. No surprise there, I guess.

  “It was all happening so fast. This time, though, I wasn’t going to let things fall apart. I should have given more time to you but…but, I don’t know. All I can say is, I really believed I was doing this for you. You were going to have a mother you could be proud of, a family you could be proud of, a good name…everything. That’s why I hired Anita. She was warm and loving in a way that I couldn’t be.”

  She turns and looks at me. Her eyebrows are squished together. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give that kind of affection to you myself. But I couldn’t give you something I never had. I hope you know I love you just the same.”

  I’m embarrassed. “Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

  She nods—she’s embarrassed too—then goes back to her story. “I never imagined that my career would take off the way it did but I understand how it happened. On TV, I didn’t have to be myself. I could pretend to be whoever I wanted to be. It was the only place I felt completely comfortable. As you know, intimacy isn’t my strong point.”

  She raises her hands up in a shrug. It’s a Mimi move, sort of clowny. Something she’d do right before a station break or on a promo for her next show. I see what she’s trying to tell me, though. There’s nothing she can do about the way she is. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

  She says, “I got a local talk show. I tarted up my wardrobe and changed my hair. I wasn’t worried about anybody recognizing me then. I mean, the only people who knew I was a Bister were in Port Minton. They’d never see the show. Most of them wouldn’t have recognized me even if they did. I’d been on the Island until I was sixteen. Even when I moved into town no one ever actually made eye contact with me—except, of course, Rosie and the Hiltzes, and they weren’t around. So I didn’t really need to change my appearance. I just wanted to update my look.

  “Then the show went national. That made me a little nervous. Things were going so well—I didn’t want to lose everything I’d worked so hard for. I had my first plastic surgery.”

  She turns and shows me her profile. “I had a bit taken off the end of my nose. Not much. Nobody thought anything of it. Everyone does it there. Each time we took on new stations, I’d get a little more afraid of being recognized. I’d plump up my lips, get new cheekbones, square off my chin.”

  She pulls her feet out of the sand. “I even got my toes fixed. Did you know I had webbed feet? They’re actually not all that uncommon. But for me they were like the mark of Cain. Proof I was a Bister. When you were born, I was terrified your feet were going to be webbed too. It never crossed my mind that it would be your thumbnails that would give you away. That’s a Mrs. Hiltz trademark—something to be proud of!” Her face says yeah, right. She shakes her head.

  “You know, I always meant to—I guess—confess. Grandpa wanted me to. My analyst wanted me to. I wanted to. But I could never bring myself to do it. I’d lived with the lies for so long. And, let’s face it, they worked for me. I was rich. I was famous. And—dare I say it—I was respected. That’s what I wanted most of all—the respect. I was terrified of what would happen if I admitted I’d been lying all along. Would my fans reject me? Would you reject me?”

  I start to say something but she puts her hand up to stop me.

  “I don’t know if you can understand this or not, but the fear of confessing was always so much worse for me than the anxiety of living as a fraud. I guess that’s why I told my audience anything else they wanted to know. I figured if I was really, really frank about my plastic surgery and my bad eating habits and my acne outbreaks, they’d never suspect I was lying about the rest of my life.

  “And to tell you the truth”—something about that phrase makes us both laugh—“before the Internet came along, lying wasn’t that hard. Eighteen years ago, getting fake ID was a piece of cake. I’ve been a Bister, a Ingram, a Reiner and a Schwartz—and until now, I managed to do it all under the radar. As for my other lies, I kept them simple—the fire, the adoption”—she takes a big breath—“how you came to be…”

  She looks at me with a pained smile. I take it as an apology. I know she’s sorry she didn’t tell me the truth. I shake my head as if I’m okay with that. Her face loosens up. She pats my leg.

  It’s a couple of seconds before she continues. “I was lucky, I guess. Lord knows, Steve’s got his share of faults but a lack of decency isn’t one of them. I told him I got pregnant on a one-night stand with some guy I never saw again. He just shrugged—waved it off—and accepted you as his own.

  “The photo was a bit more of a problem. I’d held on to it as a keep-sake. I never planned to pass it off as being a picture of me. But the cable TV station needed a childhood photo for a Christmas fund raiser one year. All I had was that picture of Rosie. A little while later, someone asked me for a photo to use in a profile for the local TV guide. I used the same one. It seemed harmless enough.

  “Then my career started charging ahead. The picture got used a few more times—I could hardly say no when someone asked—but now it was making me nervous. I was a public figure. Who knows who might stumble upon that picture? I got someone to touch it up for me—just enough so it believably looked like the same girl but not so much that anyone would immediately recognize it as Rosie. I relaxed. It became my official childhood photo. I should have thrown the original out—and the ring too—but they meant too much to me. Believe it or not, I’ve never been as happy as those two years I spent at Mrs. Hiltz’s.”

  She sighs. She goes, “Well, there you have it!” She sounds like she’s ready to cut to a commercial or introduce tomorrow’s show, but then her face softens and she says, “Is there anything else you want to ask me?”

  “Yes,” I say. It seems so petty and self-centred but…hey, I’m seventeen. I’m allowed to be petty and self-centred sometimes.

  “Why did you take me off the show? Because I got fat?”

  Mom goes, “No!…No!” but I don’t believe her. She says it in that fake why would you ever think such a thing? way.

  I just look at her.

  She turns away. “Okay. Not really.”

  At least she’s being honest.

  “Not the way you mean, anyway. You were definitely getting a little more than plump and you know what they say, the camera adds fifteen pounds. So, yes, that’s why I took you off the air.”

  I try to smile, like, oh well, who cares, but I can feel tears burning behind my eyes.

  Mimi rubs my knee and says, “Let me explain. I didn’t care that you’d gained weight. Lots of girls do at puberty. It was natural. I knew you were going to be tall like your dad. So that wasn’t it.

  “I took you off because it bothered me that the whole world was going to be judging you by the ridiculous size 2 standards of prime-time TV. They’d ridicule you. They’d splash unflattering pictures of you in the tabloids. I couldn’t do that to you. Any cut-rate psychiatrist can figure out why I needed the public to love me after all I’d gone through. I wasn’t going to do the same thing to you. I wasn’t going to let you be ‘shamed’ that way. I wanted you to be who you were, become who you wanted to be without millions of people always pointing out what was wrong with you.”

  We’re both crying now and neither of us has a Kleenex. Mimi wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Big rice-noodley strings of snot droop off her fingers. We both go, “Yuck!” She doesn’t know what to do with it. She looks around and then just wipes her hand on her T-shirt. We’re suddenly both laughing in that grossed-out, just-stepped-on-a-slug way.

  Mimi goes, “Oh good Lord. Once a Bister, always a Bister, eh?”

  My nose is running over everything now too. I wipe it off on my sleeve. “You and me both,” I say.

  Mom stops laughing. She shakes her head with a little smile. “No, you aren’t, sweetheart. Being a Bister isn’t a hereditary disease. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s something you catch from
other people. And you didn’t catch it. In fact, I look at you and I don’t see any Bister at all. What I see is Percy. To be honest, that’s another reason I took you off the air. I knew after all the surgeries I’d had that no one was going to recognize me. But the older you got the more you looked like your dad. Tall and healthy and with that beautiful red hair. I was afraid you were going to blow my cover.”

  Suddenly she looks small and scared. I put my big arms around her and hug her. She hugs me back.

  “Now I have a question for you, Birdie,” she says into my shoulder.

  I go, “Okay.”

  She pulls back and looks me in the face. “Where do we go from here?”

  Where do we go from here? A few weeks ago, I would have been terrified by that question but now it feels almost exciting. Just the idea that I’m going anywhere. I couldn’t even move before. I couldn’t get off my sorry behind. Now there are so many possibilities. I have a mother now. I have a couple of fathers. I have a boyfriend. I’ll check my e-mail when I get back to see if I’ve still got a friend. (You never know with Selena. If not today, tomorrow.)

  So where do we go from here? I don’t know.

  I smile and I shrug.

  53

  Saturday, 6 p.m.

  You, You and Mimi

  “Teenagers in Love.” Parents may be terrified of young love but psychologist and author Eliza Richardson believes it’s the key to future happiness.

  We talk some more on the car ride back from the beach. It will be a while before I get the whole story, but bits and pieces are coming out.

  Gershom knows everything. He was the first person Mom called after she talked to me Thursday night. Barnabas, her other cousin, took off in his early twenties. No one has heard from him since.

  Anita doesn’t know anything. Mom hid the picture and ring in the chair to make sure Anita wouldn’t find out. (The way Anita is about cleaning out drawers, Mom had to be careful.)