by Yasuko Thanh
I wrinkled up my face. “Ew. Why didn’t he just use his finger?”
My father looked at me as if I’d utterly missed the point.
* * *
—
At the age of twelve I published a limerick about male pattern baldness in an anthology of elementary-school verse. I wrote short stories about doomed love affairs, the Vietnam War, heroic rescues. “She’s meeting boys at the library,” my father would joke, when in truth I was finding vast landscapes to lose myself in, characters that kept frustration at bay. I met Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Still, for every Russian classic I’d read ten Silhouette romances. I chose titles according to the colour of their spines, how they jumped from the shelves. I fed on frontier fiction, prison stories, anything involving narrow escapes. Sometimes I sat on the carpet of the children’s section and buried my nose in the pages, inhaling the printed word.
If my mother had noticed my jar of decomposing bees, I’d have lied and told her I was making poison. Like that time I left some bread to mould, then swallowed the rot. Now when I opened the jar the death smell made me gag. I kept inhaling. Why? Because I could.
I could take it. I could even pee into the jar, saturating their gossamer wings, and set it back on my windowsill.
Road to the Spring
When I was fourteen I had one solitary tape that I’d listen to before bed with a Walkman one of the California kids had given me. I wanted more rock ’n’ roll. But fundamentalist Pentecostal beliefs forbade this—the beat could conjure demons—so I hid my growing love from my parents and from God himself by ducking under the covers and keeping the volume low. After a while, when I knew I wouldn’t be happy with one tape, I went to the local department store where they had a music section in the basement. I was poring over the rows of tapes when a hand tapped my shoulder. I looked up. No one was there. I returned to examining the tapes but couldn’t get rid of my shivers. Bang. It hit me. That had been the Hand of God. I started sweating. I was sinning. This was heresy. And He’d caught me out.
Yet I couldn’t pull myself away from the music. If God was against listening to the Beatles, then I was against God. Nothing that felt so good could be so bad.
That night I listened to “Helter Skelter” over and over. My Pentecostal comic books had said the devil would use the beat to possess me, and I danced as if possessed. If this was how it felt to be inspired, then I was the devil’s child. Scarier was the thought that the devil, and God, didn’t exist. The Bible was a story well told, and as such, capable of making the fantastical sound real.
With the speed of a bubble popping in mid-air, I was like anyone else. Cast adrift with no compass for orientation.
I could do anything I wanted.
* * *
—
By the age of fourteen, many of my parents’ conditions had grown unbearable. My first round of counselling occurred after I rebelled against, what were to me, their ridiculous rules. I no longer hid my acts of treason. I got drunk and didn’t come home. I skipped school, shrugged off the suspensions. Either the school or a friend’s parents had notified the Ministry of Child and Family Development, and I’d been deemed “a child at risk.” They arranged for a family therapist to counsel my parents and me in the hope of reconciliation.
The counsellor assigned to us through Child Services agreed that a sundown curfew in the wintertime, for one, was unreasonable.
I told her I wanted to be able to go out and make friends. “But how can I do that when I have to be home by five?” I told her I envied other girls’ freedom to be normal. Whereas for me, “to see shows, to go to parties or out on a date, there always has to be a plan. Something specific, and even then I have to write a list of pros and cons that I have to hand in, like at school.”
She looked at my parents in an “I’m not judging you” way, but I could tell that look hit a nerve and made them angry. The counsellor waited for a response. Riding on buses late at night, they said finally, was dangerous.
“So what about driving her?”
My mother harrumphed. My father’s stony silence was all the proof I needed: nothing was going to change. That an outsider would expect them to alter their rules was, for them, deeply offensive.
* * *
—
My parakeet escaped the same year I did, 1986, the summer I straddled childhood and the streets, the summer I was fourteen. It had always tried the cage door with its beak, and if I hadn’t locked it with a twist-tie it would flip it up and scoot out before the door slammed shut on its head. This time, though, it flew right out from its cage and into the crabapple tree in the park across the street.
My junior high was twice as large as my elementary school had been, with hundreds of students I’d never met, rows of lockers, and a different classroom for each subject.
The summer before I flew away, my parents had allowed me to visit a friend on the mainland. This display of indulgence was uncharacteristic. Did they see our proposed visit to the 1986 Vancouver Exposition as a once-in-a-lifetime learning experience? My friend’s father was a doctor, and he was of German heritage and owned a mansion in one of Vancouver’s priciest neighbourhoods—did their wealth awaken a hope that our family would climb the social ladder? Or were they meeting my need for independence halfway, as if to say, “You may have your freedom, but only if you choose the right friends.”
A few years older than me, my friend worked as a bosun’s mate on a schooner that sailed as an ocean-based summer camp. I’d sailed on it too, northward from Victoria to Desolation Sound then through the Georgia Strait and back to Victoria. The token brown kid there on a scholarship, the poor kid among rich preppies who’d flown in from cities across Canada.
Despite our differences, he liked me. I loved visiting him on the boat, loved the view from the bowsprit and the crow’s nest. I loved sea charts and the smell of Brasso and the perfume of tar melting between the boards of the deck. And I loved the words bulkhead, stanchion, halyard, fo’c’sle. I loved that he could read the wind, sail by dead reckoning. I loved that he knew where he was going. I loved his sense of direction as much as I loved that he owned his own sailboat. Soon he was much more than a friend.
* * *
—
The birdcage had been placed on the cement slab of our porch, where my mother’s sunflowers grew next to her lavender plants. When my bird had managed to lift the latch he must have been startled to find himself outside, among power lines and chain-link fences, barking dogs, and prowling cats. He’d flown away and I did too, a few weeks after I discovered that my boyfriend had cheated on me with someone who’d spent ten days on his boat.
A few months after my fifteenth birthday, I wrote a note in ballpoint pen saying not to worry and left it on my bed. My schoolmate Luna was throwing a party and I’d been seized by the unassailable conviction that something good, something right, awaited me there. My parents wouldn’t have let me go, yet somehow I knew that everything hinged on that party. My destiny had come to rest on it. I took a last look at my room and walked out—away from my home, my life, the olive carpet that clashed with my sky-blue walls. I walked away, saying under my breath, “If you can’t look after me properly, I’ll do it myself,” full of bravado, tired of poverty. I thought about God’s thwarted plan for me: I’d never be a gymnastics champion, a realization that had pierced me with an urgency more acute than the pain of my broken leg. But since then a deeper psychic pain had taken over. I would die if I stayed. I was sure of it. If I remained strapped to what felt like a time bomb, ticking away while someone out there was living the life that was supposed to be mine, I’d never grow up.
* * *
—
Many children grow up unloved, but they don’t go to the extremes I did. Maybe this is a story about how borderline personality disorder—a diagnosis I received two years ago—develops in a child. Or maybe it’s about a good girl who makes bad choices. Or maybe it’s about the power we have to rationalize our worst behaviours.
* * *
—
Missing persons still fascinate me. People who disappear, never to be heard from again. Holiday snapshots on the news. An old high school photo on street poles. Teary-eyed relatives begging for a safe return, asking for the public’s help. Have you seen this woman, man, child? But what about those who go missing on purpose? Not taken by serial killers or kidnappers, but losing part of themselves by choice?
They think of running away every day, and the hundredth time they think it they take a step, compelled or propelled, farther than they ever thought possible.
For something to be lost, someone must be searching for it. What goes missing unmissed is not missing.
Living in the Gaps of the World
Luna was in the same junior high enrichment program as me. Her parents burned incense, ate sandwiches for dinner, and smoked hash, which they thought they’d hidden well in a Kashmir box on the bookshelf. Old hippies who used words like “emotions” and “interpersonal relationships.” After Luna’s party, where I’d gotten so drunk I vomited fourteen times out the front window on a canoe stored below it in the grass, I nursed my hangover with cartons of milk and figured out what to do. Luna invited me to stay with her, assuring me that her parents wouldn’t mind. Luna’s parents agreed that I could live with them.
On weekends Luna and I would crank AC/DC on the ghetto blaster, sing along to “Back in Black” using her mascara wand as a microphone. The days she hung out with her boyfriend I’d play with her little sister, chasing her around the living room as she skidded in footed pyjamas.
We hitchhiked, went to parties, drank Southern Comfort, met boys. We broke the law, but in small ways. At night we shared her waterbed, our arms draped around each other. In the morning we went to class and kept our grades up, on track to a good university.
My parents didn’t look for me. I phoned to let them know where I was, that I was safe, but they didn’t drive to Luna’s house. They didn’t force me into the car to return home. Unbeknownst to me, they were about to sign my custody away to the state.
* * *
—
Twenty years later, I accessed my family court files through the Freedom of Information Act and read what the social worker had written about me: “Suko’s parents are unwilling to have her home until she has shown she can stabilize her behaviour. The parents felt Yasuko’s behaviour would have a detrimental effect on their youngest child David age 10.”
* * *
—
My parents refused to meet with the psychologist, so I continued attending sessions with him on my own. Six weeks into my stay at Luna’s, which I hoped would last forever, her mother sat me down in Luna’s bedroom. “You need to try and reconcile things with your parents,” she said.
My bubble burst. They liked me, but they weren’t going to adopt me. I loved it at Luna’s—how we shared the same bed and each other’s clothes like sisters who need no permission to borrow what they please.
I stared out into the yard, where the stillness of rhododendron leaves absorbed the raindrops’ slick green migration, and considered my next move.
* * *
—
I was living in a friend’s closet; he joked that he’d charge me rent. His parents worked the night shift, leaving him and his two brothers on their own, so he had no reason to keep me there. He said it was “just in case.” In case his parents came home, in case any number of other things. To me it seemed outlandish. A twisted power trip. But on rainy nights when no other school friend was allowed a “sleepover party,” the closet was more of a home than a park bench would have been. At least it was dry, at least it was warm.
Then I moved in with Pat. He lived in a bachelor suite close to Luna’s house and sold dime bags that we bought after school. Another dealer sold cheaper joints and we pooled our change to buy two or three at a dollar apiece to share at the end of the football field by the gas station, or we smoked them in the rain at the college campus across the street from our high school under the inefficient cover of chestnut trees. Mostly we bought from Pat because he gave us a place to get high.
Pat’s apartment was brown and smelled like an ashtray—he and his brother would butt their smokes in the dirty dishes scattered over the Salvation Army furniture. But the space was ours for as long as we wanted to chill there.
Pat and his brother wore ball caps and mackinaws, had money for booze but ate canned food from the tin, and seemed to have no job other than selling weed. I couldn’t understand a word Pat said when we first met. He had a cleft lip and missing teeth. The bottom half of his face looked caved in, as if he’d had cancer. He hid the deformity under a full moustache and beard. My ear tuned into his garbled words as if to a foreign accent.
His nose barely held his thick glasses in place; he wore jeans with stains. It surprised me to learn he had a kid, a little boy, which meant, I guessed, a wife, or an ex-wife, or at least an ex-girlfriend who had custody.
Who’d sleep with him? I thought. But it didn’t take me long to learn that a person will sleep with another for many reasons, and it’s not always as simple as love or desire.
* * *
—
Pat had been a good guy, letting me hang out, and sometimes after school Luna would drop by. Lansdowne Junior Secondary didn’t want me. I scarcely showed up to class, and when I did I lacked interest, sometimes even falling asleep at my desk. But when Luna would visit it felt like old times. We talked about how my parents refused to attend any more therapy sessions, how I’d paid for my own gymnastics classes while my brother received equestrian gear and riding lessons, how I played alone while my mother would sit with my brother among the trains and cars that looped around an elaborate village they’d made with lights and tiny people.
“Forget about it,” Luna would say.
That December, the principal called me into his office. I sat in a grey chair under a grey ceiling. His sporty haircut made him look like a soccer coach. He had pictures on his desk of his family, which he kept glancing at as he talked. “We think an alternative program would be better suited to your needs. Your disciplinary problems, your last suspension…”
Alternative school? I felt insulted. I was still on the honour roll. “Whatever,” I said, and sank down into my seat.
No matter which way I turned my head I couldn’t escape either the grey or the glare that shone down from his fluorescent lights. They buzzed while I thought of the implications. People who went to alternative schools were dumb, needed extra help, couldn’t hack it in regular classes. Pregnant girls attended alternative programs, or bullies, or those who broke into tears at the first sign of difficulty with an assignment. Trigonometry? Forget it. Instead there’d be sculpting things from clay, learning how to maintain personal hygiene. Teachers talking in soft voices.
“Good grades or not…” he said, trailing off. I’d screwed up my end of the bargain. His voice had the apologetic tone of a breakup. “It’s not you, it’s me.”
They could expel me from Lansdowne, but there’d be no touchy-feely curriculum replacing it. No matter what my parents thought, or the school principal, or society, I wanted the life out there that belonged to me. “Go out and find it,” I whispered to myself. “Take what’s yours.”
* * *
—
Now I was at Pat’s and drunk
-dialing an ex-boyfriend’s phone number while Luna chugged the last drops of my Malibu. My fingers moved through a boozy haze as I dropped the phone, picked it up again, and succeeded in punching in the right digits.
“Steve? Hello? Are you there?”
Luna pried the phone out of my hand. “I’m sorry, Steve, she’s really wasted,” she said.
I lunged for the phone. “Steve, I love you. I really, really love you.”
Luna yanked the phone away. “She says she loves you but she can’t come see you tonight.” She hung up.
I started bawling.
“You don’t look good.”
I ran to the bathroom. I puked into the toilet. Then I blacked out.
* * *
—
At some point I became aware that Pat’s brother had popped his head into the washroom. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, gripping the toilet seat.
He hoisted me to my feet and, standing behind me, gathered my hair so I wouldn’t vomit on it. “That’s it, that’s it, let it all out.”
As I heaved into the dirty toilet, he ground his body into mine…
He was unbuttoning my jeans, then he’d taken his pants off. His words, “That’s it, baby,” ended when I turned, pushed him away, and stumbled over a river of dirty clothes and empty beer cans to the living room.
The Hide-A-Bed reeked of smoke and sweat. I must have fallen asleep. I wasn’t aware of time passing, dawn breaking, until I woke up with Pat’s hands under the blankets, cold as permafrost, reaching between my legs.