“I can’t handle Heather when she’s like this,” Mum is telling Tina. “She keeps sticking her head out of the attic and yelling at me.”
It’s an exaggeration. Mum and I aren’t passing the most pleasant morning together, but I’m not yelling. That’s just how my voice always sounds to her. I get it. Mum can’t be good to me because Dad is far too good to me. It’s not personal. It’s the tariff I pay for being beloved. Mum doesn’t approve of the way Ewan treats me either. Ask her. She’ll say I shouldn’t get away with treating men the way I do—like I am also precious.
Staying hidden in the ceiling, or somewhere like it, is the best way to cope with her at times like this. I’m out of her sight, hammering cable straps to the roof trusses, waiting for Tina to arrive at our parents’ adults-only condominium community—the row of tall, narrow houses fighting from renovation to renovation to stay upscale as time passes, the ones with exclusive bylaws that keep the grandkids from ever staying overnight.
My hair is full of fibreglass, I’ve probably inhaled something that has doomed me to lung cancer, and I’m cutting a hole over my parents’ bed. The pointy tip of a drywall saw bobs up and down, in and out of my mother’s view, its triangular teeth chewing an opening.
Mum is slapping at the bedspread, flicking drywall dust off the fabric, when Tina arrives.
Tina steps into the room, scolding, “Mum, you can’t keep leaving heaps of stuff piled up on the stairs like that. It’s dangerous. Someone’s going to—”
“Tina, finally,” Mum interrupts. “Say something to Heather. She’s up there sulking about the wire I bought.”
A roughly octagonal piece of the ceiling falls onto the bed. “I’m not sulking.” My voice comes through the newly cut hole.
Tina laughs at us.
Mum scoffs. “Heather won’t use any of the wire I bought.”
“I can’t use it. You got the wrong kind.”
“You said to get fourteen gauge household electrical cable. I wrote it down.”
“Mum, I said to get fourteen gauge, three-wire cable. And then you went and brought me two-wire cable.”
“So?”
“So? Mum, do you want the light switch to work or not?”
Mum answers with another slap at the dusty bedspread. “Well, the switch for your father’s new light might be working by the time she’s finished,” she tells Tina, “but the wall outlets for everything I care about are all dead.”
“No, they’re not. Sheesh, Mum.”
Mum stands up, her footsteps padding to the doorway.
Tina is calling her back. “Come on, Mum. Heather did the lights in my girls’ room with no problems. I’m sure everything will work out fine here too.”
“Oh really? Look at that alarm clock over there,” Mum says, stopping just inside the threshold of the bedroom. “It’s plugged into a wall outlet, but none of the numbers will light up. Not even when I do this.”
Click.
Tina screams. “Heather!”
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
I’m crawling toward the attic access opening, moving over the rafters and the sister boards strapped to them to reinforce the roof when the original asphalt shingles were upgraded to fake hacienda clay ones. I look out of the ceiling, blinking into the bedroom. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why? Did she try to turn on the light switch again?”
Tina is simultaneously so relieved and so frustrated she can only laugh.
I have survived. Of course I have. I don’t take shortcuts when I’m working with electricity. Before I climbed up here, I’d already taken precautions to avoid the electrocution accident my mother still doesn’t realize she could have caused with her light switch.
My survival means my sisters can go on living a little longer too. They all believe, somewhere in their minds, that I’ll be the first of us to die. None of them has ever told me so, but I know it. It’s like we’re shut up together in a single room, and I’ve got my back pressed to the door while death tries to force its way inside to start carrying us off. Until I lose the strength to keep leaning against the closed door, everyone else in the room is safe. I have to be the first of us to die, the same way I was the first to be born, the first to give birth. Don’t think I fail to feel the burden of it. And don’t think I’d allow anyone else to stand here.
A disruption in the accepted order of the predictable timelines of our lives—that’s what scares me most. I don’t want to be in the flesh at any of my sisters’ funerals. But Suzanne got her period a few months before mine started, proof we can’t presume to know the order of anything.
Tina and Mum can see my face now—dust stuck to the sweat on my nose and cheekbones. This dust is denser and greyer than mortuary talcum. I’m powdered like Marie Antoinette—thick and toxic.
“Don’t worry, Teens,” I say. “I turned the circuit off at the main board before I got started. You don’t even know where the main circuit board is in this house, do you Mum?”
She’s still flipping the light switch up and down.
Tina grabs her hand. “You have to stop that.”
Mum leaves the switch, trudges back to the bed, drops herself onto it.
I almost laugh. “It’s okay, Mum. The wall outlets will work just fine once I’ve—oh, never mind. I’ll spare you the lecture on electrical contracting. Just trust me. They’ll work.”
Before things get any worse, Tina takes hold of the shrink-wrapped coil of bone-coloured wire sitting at the base of my step ladder. “Okay. So this cable needs to go back to the hardware store. Is that it?” she asks. “Is that the emergency that forced me to call my nanny in on her day off and rush over here?”
“Yes,” I answer. “Exchange it for exactly the same thing only in three-wire cable—three-wire. As in, having three wires. Three—white, black, and red. Red.”
“Red.”
The badly chosen cable has stalled my project. Not knowing how long the delay will be, I risk descending from the ceiling. There are limits to my endurance for lying on reinforced trusses, sweating under a trouble light, chanting the mantra well-known to daughters unfavoured by their mothers but well past being miserable about it: “She doesn’t owe me anything, she doesn’t owe me anything …”
My clothes, hair, everything about me is filthy as I reappear in the civilized levels of my parents’ house. I stand at the bottom of the ladder, blowing dust from the stone in my big yellow ring.
Mum sits on the bed like a hostage. Tina is shaking her head as she turns to leave, like she might chide us, reminding us to play nicely while she’s gone. It’s a remark that would guarantee a fight.
“Here, you two.” Tina shoves Mum’s big cherry wood jewellery box across the dresser. “Instead of plotting how to make each other’s deaths look accidental, why don’t you cooperate and untangle all the chains in the jewellery box until I get back?”
Mum is offended. “Why would anyone assume my chains are tangled?”
“It’s not personal, Mum,” I say as Tina flees. “Everyone’s jewellery gets snarled in storage. Look.”
I open the lid. A music box melody starts to play—tinny and delicately plucked out of a metal comb. “Hey, the music still works. I haven’t heard this thing play its song in ages.”
Mum sniffs.
I’m humming along. “What’s the tune called again?”
Mum was never any good at the silent treatment. “It’s ‘The Anniversary Waltz’.”
I laugh. “It’s a song celebrating an anniversary? Really? It’s so gloomy and serious I always thought it was supposed to be spooky music.” I’m raking my hand through Mum’s beads and chains, lifting the upper tray to see to the bottom of the box. “Whoa, what a head-trip, Mum. I remember everything in here. It’s like a museum.”
Mum flinches. “A mausoleum?”
“No, a mus-e-um.
Sheesh, Mum. Even with me it’s not always about death,” I say—though it may not be true. I’m fingering a row of earrings. “How come I never see you wearing any of these? Have your piercings grown over?”
Mum pinches her earlobe. She pulls her hand away, examining her fingertips, as if she’s looking for traces of the old wound, something still oozing from her head.
I grin into the jewellery box. “Didn’t you tell us your roommates pierced your ears over a kitchen sink using nothing but an ice cube and a darning needle?”
Mum smiles a little. “Yes. That’s one way it used to be done.”
“Gruesome,” I say. “Anyways, it looks like most of these earrings are made out of nickel compounds. If you tried to wear them they’d probably make you go into anaphylactic shock.”
The music box winds down—slow ticking and then nothing.
“Hey. It’s one of those old camera film canisters.” I lift a black, plastic cylinder out of the box. “I forgot about these. They used to be everywhere.”
Mum sniffs again. “It’s funny, the stuff that can turn into antiques if you give it time.”
“So what’re you keeping inside this one?” I ask.
Mum doesn’t answer quickly enough. I snap my wrist, giving the canister a quick, sharp shake. It makes a noise like a baby’s rattle.
At the sound, Mum is on her feet.
“Don’t.”
She looks ready to snatch it out of my hand. But she knows it’s too much of an escalation. She opens with a warning instead. “You can’t shake it like that or they’ll break.”
I narrow my eyes. “They? What’s in here?”
“Nothing much.”
“Come on, Mum. Don’t make me open it,” I say. I’m smiling like it’s all a game and I’m just teasing.
“Don’t,” Mum says. “It’s full of your teeth.”
“My teeth?”
“No, not just your teeth, Heather. All the baby teeth I ever made—yours and your sisters’ too.”
I hold my stomach and pretend to retch. “Gross, Mum. Do you have our fingernail clippings stashed in here too?” I’m peering at the outside of the canister like I’m trying to activate my X-ray vision while I do some math inside my head. “So you had five babies, and we each would have had—what is it?—twenty deciduous teeth per head. That means there are one hundred tiny human teeth in here?”
Mum shrugs. “I’ve never spread them out and counted.”
I’m awful but I shake the canister one more time, wanting to hear the sound again, now I know what’s making it.
Mum can’t stand it. She’s lunging toward me. “Stop it. I told you, they are going to break.”
“They can’t break. They’re rocky little teeth.”
“Yes, they can break. They do. When they get dry enough they split right in half, like firewood.”
“I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” I promise, holding the canister away from her. “One hundred tiny little girl teeth.”
Mum sits down on the bed.
Then I remember. “No, it’s just ninety-nine teeth. There was that one tooth we lost for good. Remember when Ashley was brushing her teeth and she accidentally spat her loose tooth into the sink and rinsed it right down the drain with her toothpaste? Poor little Ashley.”
Mum smiles. “Yes, she was heartbroken.”
“But then,” I go on, “you came up with that brilliant idea of giving her an un-popped popcorn kernel to put under her pillow for the Tooth Fairy instead. That was great, Mum.”
Mum is looking out the window. It’s hard for her to know what to do when I’m loving her, carefully, distantly, from across the room, through a thick coat of dust.
Mum faces the window as she tells me the part of the story I never knew. “But we didn’t have to go through with the popcorn song and dance. When your father came home, I had him wrench open the p-trap under the sink. We got the tooth out of the drain—that and a bunch of Barbie shoes.”
“What? Why would you do that? The popcorn scam was good enough for Ashley.”
“Maybe. But not for me.”
I blow upward, lifting dust and my bangs off my forehead. “So what are you saving our teeth for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you planning on giving them back to us someday?”
It’s starting to get painful again. My prolonged presence here—my voice, my talk, my critique of sacred family legends—it’s a familiar, awful tide rising around my mother. She doesn’t want to panic at the high water, but she’s starting to thrash. She says, “I can’t give them back to you. They’re all mixed together now. How could I possibly know which teeth went to which daughter?”
“Right,” I say. “It’s too bad.”
Mum’s head jerks from side to side. “No, it’s not too bad. I never meant to give them back. How could I hand them over after I waited all those years and went to all that trouble to get them from you?”
I frown. “Huh?”
“I will not argue about this. The teeth are mine, Heather. They were always mine. You girls only borrowed them. All the calcium in those teeth—every last crystal of it—was sucked out of these bones.” Mum grabs her left forearm in her right hand.
I fold my arms. “Well, then tell me this, Mum. What am I supposed to do with our baby teeth after you’re dead?”
The tide closes over Mum’s head.
I need to say this anyway. “Mum, you are looking at the girl who is going to bury you and paw through everything you own after you die. I’m sorry but it’s true. I’ve already done it for Ewan’s mom. So tell me what you want me to do with these teeth while you still can. People leave instructions like that all the time. You’d be surprised. Don’t think of it as morbid. Are you going to leave the teeth here in the jewellery box where I can find them? And then I’ll tuck them into your coffin with you before we close it up for good? Would you like that?”
“It is none of your business, Heather.”
My voice is cool and dark. “It is precisely my business. Someone is going to reckon with your tooth collection someday. You are not going to be here to guard it forever. You want to be noble and donate them to dentistry—give them to Troy’s dental school?”
“No! Stop it. I’ll just start swallowing them back into myself, where they came from. Maybe I’ll swallow one tooth every day—at breakfast along with my iron supplement—until they’re all gone, a hundred days from now.”
I won’t have it. My sisters are right about me. I am a monster—the monster this family will not stop demanding. I flick my thumb against the canister’s lid. The vault is open. Mum is clamping her hand over the top, making herself the lid, tearing the canister away from me. She holds it tightly against her chest.
It’s too late. A smell has escaped the canister and drifted into my face. I inhale it through my nose and mouth. The air passes into me and I taste it—the entire planet, saliva, gums and plaque, all the sugar and salts that were never quite swallowed away. It’s our dead-taste—mine and my sisters’.
My knee buckles and I stagger backward, catching myself with both hands on the rim of Mum’s dresser.
“Do you know?” I begin. “Mum, do you know what that smell is—what that taste is?”
Mum snaps the plastic lid back into place over our baby teeth. The tide is receding. She is stashing our teeth in the bottom of her jewellery box. “What taste? What are you talking about?”
I don’t tell Mum what I’ve discovered inside the canister. I push myself away from the dresser and start up the ladder though I still don’t have any wire. “Fine, Mum. You go ahead and swallow the baby teeth. It’s your calcium, like you said. Fair enough. Take them with plenty of water.”
Tina is fumbling with the latch on the front door, coming back into the house. She’s at the top of the stairs now, stepping into our parents’
bedroom as I pull my feet into the ceiling.
“Okay, here we go,” she begins, “The guy in the orange shirt said this has got to be the right stuff.”
She’s speaking into a terrible quiet. Neither Mum nor I will look at her.
I reach through the ceiling to take the coil of wire from her, nodding as I read the label. “Great.”
I disappear.
Below, Mum closes the box.
Tina
[19]
No matter how grown-up Ashley is, I can’t stand seeing my little sister’s mouth full of pins. These are dressmaker’s pins with oversized rainbow-coloured heads like beads. Their cuteness doesn’t make them any less scary.
I’m begging Ashley, “Hon, let me get you a pin cushion.”
“As if you own a pin cushion, Tina,” she answers through one corner of her mouth. “Doesn’t Martin get everything professionally tailored?”
“Of course,” I say, “and I can tell you real tailors always use proper pin cushions.”
Ashley is starting to talk again, the pins slipping over each other between her lips.
“Never mind,” I say to keep her quiet. “Go ahead and use your mucus membranes as pin cushions. Just don’t risk talking anymore until you’re done.”
Daredevil Ashley is tacking up the hemlines of Meaghan’s latest round of bridesmaid dresses—the caterpillar green ones. They could be worse. Heather and Suzanne insisted the dresses be ordered with tiny cap-sleeves instead of those corset-y tube tops everyone’s wearing to formals these days. It keeps our bridesmaid quartet from looking too much like a troupe of back-up singers from a Las Vegas show.
Through the sticky little handprints on our enormous front window, my neighbours can see Suzanne standing barefoot on the marble top of the coffee table in the middle of my living room. Don’t tell me they aren’t watching. Everyone knows Martin and the kids and I make for—well—flamboyant neighbours. It’s hard to look away, especially since the kids keep stealing the batteries out of the remote that closes the fancy, automated window blinds to use in their wireless video game controllers.
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