Deep Girls

by Lori Weber

  “It’s just that I can’t leave her now, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. There’s nothing more you can do for her. You did your duty. Christ, you’ve been at the hospital every single day. She’ll be home soon. We’re going, now come on.”

  My dad often pretended my mom was not agora-phobic. It was his way of coping.

  The next day my mom and I went to Walmart, where she bought a puffy blouse in the maternity section for my grandmother to wear home. The first thing we showed her was her new room, which my mom had made my dad work on every evening the previous week.

  Later, when my grandmother was settled in her new bed, my mom broke the news about our trip.

  “Well, I guess we’re going to Austria to visit Henry’s family. Henry wants to see his brother, it’s been a while, and he wants us to go with him this time.” She said it all quickly, as though she had rehearsed the speech several times.

  My grandmother didn’t say a word. She merely lit a cigarette.

  “But, if you don’t think you’ll be all right, we won’t go.” I could feel her hoping her mother would ask her to stay.

  My grandmother merely puffed up her blouse to make both sides even. “Oh no, dear, don’t be silly. I have Doug.”

  I watched my mom’s face fall, and for the first time in a long time I wished I knew how to pick it up again.

  AFTER THE TOUR of the new room, the three of us sit back down at the kitchen table. The front door bangs shut and a few seconds later my uncle walks into the room. As usual, the smell of alcohol wafts around him, inches thick.

  “Hi ya, Joannie. Hi Kathy. Did you have a nice trip?”

  “Yeah, it was nice,” my mom says.

  “That’s good. And you, little one, are you okay?” he asks my grandmother, patting her head.

  “Okay, Dougie,” she says.

  “Where’s my little Angel?” My uncle disappears down the hall and reappears a minute later with the dog at his heels. Angel heads straight to where my mom is sitting, nudging her snout along her leg. My mom pushes her chair back, but the dog just edges forward.

  My uncle pulls the tab off a can of beer. “Want one, Joan?”

  “No thanks.”

  “So, Ma’s looking good, eh?”

  I watch my mom concentrate on her mother’s face. I’m sure she’s noticing the deep dark circles under her eyes and her blotchy skin. But she just nods in agreement.

  “Hey, want to see something neat some guy off the ships gave me today?” My uncle holds up a brown clump that looks like gnarled fingers. “It’s ginger, real ginger. Ever seen real ginger before?” He shoves it in my mom’s face. She scrunches her nose and pulls back.

  “It comes from a long ways away. All the way from the Caribbean. Can you imagine ever going that far?” he asks, as if he’s forgotten that we’ve just returned from Europe. I recall my mom’s face on the plane as she looked out the window at the bed of clouds that seemed to be keeping us afloat. She looked light and free, all her worry lines lifted. Nobody on the plane would have guessed she was ill.

  My uncle teases his mother, waving the clump of ginger up and down like a ship on the waves.

  “Never mind,” my grandmother says. “I went far enough away. I felt like I was in outer space under those big machines at the hospital.”

  I picture the gifts waiting in the shopping bag, the ceramic plaque of the Schönbrunn Castle, the linen wall-hanging of the Danube, and the mug with an etching of the Alps on its front, things that will just end up in some cupboard, forgotten. “We went to a beautiful castle,” I say, for my mom’s sake. “And took a gondola up the Alps.” I can feel her withdrawing, closing off, shrinking the borders around herself.

  “Yeah, that’s good, but this is real ginger. Not the cheap stuff you get all ground up.” My uncle is so excited he misses his mouth and the beer dribbles down his chin.

  Just then, Angel jumps up and paws at my grandmother’s chest, pulling open her housecoat. My mom gasps as my grandmother springs up, batting ineffectually at the blind dog. Between the loose lapels of her housecoat the dark red arch of the cut is now exposed. If my grandmother leaned forward we’d see it plunge even farther into her chest. My mom is staring at the wound, her hand over her mouth, as if she’s stifling a scream.

  My uncle giggles and my grandmother is smiling as she closes her housecoat.

  It suddenly occurs to me that my mom’s entire life must have been like this — my grandmother and uncle amusing themselves with Mom’s sensitivity, my mom cringing beside them.

  “We have to go,” I say decisively, jumping up. I can’t let it keep happening. I have to rescue her or she’ll get worse and I’ll be stuck chaperoning her forever. I push past my uncle and hold out my hand to my mom. She grabs it like a life saver and I pull her up.

  “These are for you,” I snap, throwing the bag of gifts to the floor, hoping the plaque and mug will smash and that Angel’s pee, which is already spreading under the bag, will soak the wall hanging.

  “You sure, Joannie?” my uncle asks, looping his finger under Angel’s collar. He seems disappointed, as though he was just warming up and is now going to miss the real fun.

  “Take care, honey,” my grandmother says, reaching up on tippy toes to kiss my mom.

  When she turns to me I pull away. Our eyes lock and I send her a cold look. I need her to see that I see her cruelty, even if she doesn’t. I stare until I feel I’m cutting her down, diminishing her until she’s nothing but a scar in the corner of my mind.

  We walk past the gaudy parrot tied like a prisoner to the tree in the courtyard. If it could speak, what would it say? Would it repeat the same words over and over again, or would it learn some new ones every now and then?

  My mom’s staring at the bird as well. I pull her hand and lead her on. A voice in my head keeps saying, we’re definitely not out of the woods yet.

  ICE

  When I’m near him he turns to stone. He stands there, immobile, his face turned away from me, as if the sight of me would kill him. I know I should go away and put him out of his misery, but it’s hard to stay out of your own father’s way when you’re the only two people living together in a small, two-bedroom apartment.

  A typical scenario goes like this: he’s standing in the tiny kitchen looking for something in the drawers, pulling them open one at a time then slamming them closed. I tip-toe into the room, trying to be quiet. When he hears me behind him he freezes, a drawer open at the end of his arm. He stares inside, at the messy heap of knives, elastics and plastic popsicle sticks that nobody ever bothers to use any more, as though he wishes he could crawl inside and shut the drawer behind him.

  Sometimes, I try to start a conversation. I’ll say something simple like good morning. He might groan or nod, but that’s all. He never asks me how I’m doing or what’s happening at school. I think I could say anything and get the same non-response. I could say, Hey Dad, I tried heroin last night, or Hey Dad, I’m pregnant. It’s not what I’m saying; it’s the fact that I’m there, so near to him, that’s the problem.

  Sometimes, he’ll look as though he wants to speak to me. His face will soften, then hesitate, then harden again. I can actually feel him shaking me out of his head, like some useless words that suddenly have no meaning.

  Of course, it wasn’t always like this. When I was really young, before I had even started school, we did some neat things together. My mom worked downtown and my dad worked from home, so we were together a lot. My favorite memory is of the two of us sitting in the beat up vw van outside my brother’s school. We’d put on fake noses attached to plastic glasses and old wigs that my mother found at garage sales. We called it spying on my brother. When we saw him in the schoolyard we ducked below the dash or behind the steering wheel, giggling.

  It never occurred to me then that the orange van, with its lime green and yellow peace symbols, was a dead giveaway.

  YESTERDAY, I WAS at my best friend Nikki’s house when Tim called her
to talk about me. He didn’t know I was there, listening in on the speaker phone.

  “I really like Cal, I mean I really like her, but she’s so cool with me.”

  I had to put a pillow over my mouth to stop him from hearing me gag. I don’t mind Tim. He’s okay. He’s kind of cute really. He has blond hair that he wears long and cut square around his face, as if he doesn’t realize the Beatles went out of style decades ago. He’s always blushing when I’m around.

  “Do you think she’d go out with me?”

  “Umm, I don’t know. She might,” Nikki responded, trying to pull the pillow off me.

  There was a long silence, and then, out of the blue, in a voice I’d never heard Tim use before, he shouted into the phone, “I bet that bitch wouldn’t. She’s so cold and aloof, it’s like she’s made of ice. She never goes out of her way for me. Like it would kill her to give me the time of day.” Then the line went dead and I pictured him throwing down his phone so hard it sank to the center of the earth, all the way to China, where my brother and I used to try to dig to at the beach.

  I was stunned. There was more than anger in Tim’s voice. There was hatred, real hatred.

  Nikki didn’t speak to me right away, as if she knew I’d be embarrassed.

  I was suddenly so cold I was shivering, even though it must have been a hundred degrees in Nikki’s basement. It was like someone had doused me with ice water.

  WALKING HOME, I passed by the family with the disabled daughter. The father was standing on the porch, his head down, staring at his shoes. The mother was in the yard, trying to coax the girl out from behind the huge fir tree, a beach bag with rolled up towels looped over her arm. I could see the daughter’s head poking through the branches. She was laughing like a kid in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, but her father wasn’t amused. His shoulders were slumped, as though he carried the weight of many hard years on them. I recognized the expression of shame that covered his face. Every time the mother called, “Come on out Carol, right now, or we won’t go swimming,” he winced.

  I tried to smile at the father. I wanted to show him that he didn’t have to feel the way he did. It wasn’t his fault that his daughter was the way she was. It wasn’t her fault either. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I pictured him running down into the yard and indulging his daughter, who was still squealing with delight as her mother tried to lure her out from behind the tree. Maybe if they pretended it was a game, they could corner her, the way my mother and father used to corner me and my brother around the kitchen table.

  It occurs to me now that my feelings about the struggling family are proof that I’m not aloof. I just come across that way. It’s my way of protecting myself from the outside world. Everyone has their own way of doing this. Nikki’s defense is to expand herself. She sprawls over everything, taking up twice as much space as she should for such a tiny person. I’ve often watched the way she’ll automatically grab two chairs, one for her torso and one for the overflow of legs, arms, bags, or rackets that she spreads around herself like tentacles. I guess it’s her way of saying, “I’m here. Just because I’m small doesn’t mean you can ignore me.”

  At home, I’m the opposite of Nikki. I’m always trying to take up less and less space, to curl myself up like a hermit crab. I have the smallest bedroom, even though my father offered me the big one when we first moved here after the accident.

  “Take it, go on, girls need room, you’ll want your space,” he coaxed. That was when he could still look me in the eyes.

  “No, no, it’s okay. You take it,” I responded. The huge empty room made me feel like the breath had been punched out of me. The space was too vast. The polished hardwood planks looked like giant bridges that I’d be afraid to cross.

  “I want the small room, Dad, really.” He didn’t persist, and I squeezed my stuff — single bed, desk, bookshelf, blow-up chair — into the tiny room at the end of the hall. When Nikki’s over she sprawls so badly I hardly have any space for myself.

  THIS MORNING, I’M curled up on my bed going over Tim’s words. I’m remembering things that seemed innocent at the time: Tim pushing his way into the circle at recess and me pretty much ignoring him, Tim’s party where Nikki drank too much beer and spent the night buzzing around on top of the furniture like a bee. It was Tim who calmed her with orange juice and helped me walk her home. At the door to Nikki’s house I simply spat, You know you shouldn’t let people drink so much, and then slammed the door in his face. Tim’s eyes were always on me in class, like he was trying to inflict some kind of voodoo spell. I always shook him off by rolling my eyes past his face.

  I decide I need a plan of action, so I call Nikki.

  “Hey, is anyone going to the dance at City?” City is a community college at the tip of the island. They hold dances, which we call beer bashes, on a regular basis and we can usually get in even if we don’t have college I.D.s.

  “Yeah, I think everyone’s going. Why? You want to go?”

  “Do you think Tim’s going?”

  “Ah-ha! Now I get it. You want to get back at him, right?”

  “Something like that.” But she couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t want revenge. Revenge is for when you’re wronged. But I don’t feel wronged. I feel found out, exposed. I picture Tim telling everyone what he thinks of me, the whole gang suddenly looking at me like a cold, hard bitch. But the truth is that I want Tim to like me. His attention has been so constant. He’s been like a thought that tickles the corner of my brain, or a piece of hair that hangs in my line of vision, creating a blur that can’t be blown away. I want Tim to keep looking at me with that expression, that puppy dog look of adoration that I’ve taken for granted all year.

  But then I hear the abrupt silence of Tim’s phone and the image of his gentle expression disappears.

  I pick up the photograph of my brother, taken when he was in grade eleven, only months before his death. I run my finger over the glass, picking up a trail of dust. He was four years older than me, old enough to have looked after me when I was little. He never seemed to mind dragging me along to the park, to the pool. His patience was infinite. If he were still alive, he’d be twenty. I wonder if he’d still be my protector, if I could have gone to him and told him how I was afraid to be soft, to let Tim or anyone else in.

  But then, I remind myself, my hard shell only formed the minute those two police officers entered the hall of our old house.

  “Good evening, Sir,” they said to my father. “Are you the father of Nathan Cole? And the husband of Emily?”

  My father’s knees buckled. My mother had taken Nathan to a swim meet across the Ontario border in Cornwall. Nathan had just gotten his driver’s license and he’d been begging my mother to let him drive. My father had given my mother an encouraging wink, to let her know that he approved. He used to let us steer the old vw van when we were little. He’d let go at the top of our street and call over to whoever was lucky enough to be sitting in the passenger seat, Okay, kid, take over. Keep her steady. My mother’s last words to Nathan before leaving home had been, We’ll see.

  We later learned that Nathan had been driving when an eighteen-wheeler spun out of control on some black ice on the other side of the 401 and skidded across the median to hit them head on. Our car was found upside down in the ditch. That’s how the memory of my mother and brother is fixed in my mind: the two of them dangling like upside-down puppets above the dashboard.

  That night, the patch of black ice that streaked across the highway slipped inside me and coated my bones.

  Nathan, I say to the picture, if you’re out there, please help me melt. Help some of what you were rub off on me. Nathan was warm, funny, and affectionate. He never passed me without ruffling up my hair or pinching my cheek or play punching me in the arm. He hugged me and adored me and I never ever felt afraid of anything when Nathan was alive.

  “WHERE ARE YOU going?” my father asks as I walk past him to grab my jean jacket out of the closet. It’s so rare that
he questions me I jump a little.

  “Out with Nikki.”

  “Out where with Nikki?”

  “I don’t know yet, just around.”

  My father stares in a way that makes me want to crawl into the closet and shut the door. I can’t let him in, not now.

  Then he surprises me by saying, “Well, be careful,” rather sweetly.

  “I will. See ya.”

  Nikki’s mother drives us out to City College, reminding us the whole way there that no matter how late it is when we leave we are not to take a lift from anyone who’s been drinking. We are to call her and she’ll come right away, even if we tear her out of a sound sleep. Nikki’s mother and my mother were friends. I think she now feels obliged to shelter me a little.

  “We will, we will,” we both promise.

  In the back seat, Nikki whispers in my ear that Tim is definitely going to be there. She actually called him to find out.

  “Did he ask if I’m going?”

  “No, but he’ll know you’re going if I’m going,” Nikki says to encourage me.

  Nikki’s mother reminds us once again of our promise to call her and then tells us to have a good time. I wonder if she knows what really goes on at these “dances.” She probably figures that, because they’re on a college campus, they’re safe. I’m sure she has no idea that you can buy weed and more in the washroom, and that security is two old guys who sit playing cards at a fold-out table, well away from the action.

  Nobody asks to see I.D. and we walk in easily and find our gang. People have already begun to pile empty plastic beer mugs into a pyramid. I sit next to Tim, but he doesn’t look at me. Last time we were at a City beer bash together he spent the whole night fetching drinks for me and Nikki. We were supposed to ride home with him but we ducked into the washroom to hide, just for a joke. We giggled until we almost peed our pants picturing him looking for us. He kept texting us but we just ignored our phones. When we came out he was gone and we had to call Nikki’s mother.