by Yasuko Thanh
With Christmas over, Christine reluctantly agreed to see a doctor. (“Stop making such a fuss.”) She’d asked us to look after the house and so I set to work, sweeping and scrubbing away the holiday grime. I wanted her to like me. Meanwhile, Phillip’s father drove her to the mainland, calling later that day to let us know she’d been booked into Surrey Memorial for tests.
Two days later she was dead. Gone. Kidney failure. Her puffy appearance had been a final symptom of a progressive disease.
That night we drove back from the hospital, passing late-hanging Christmas lights along the way. At one point, as the traffic light turned green, I looked over at Phillip and asked him how he was doing. “Oh, I’m good,” he said, as if I’d offered him a drink or another slice of pie. The stiff upper lip, the British stoicism—he wasn’t fine. How could he be? Red, stop. Green, go. Death, Life. All I could think about was that Christine would never meet her grandchild.
* * *
—
After the funeral we returned to Mayne. As Phillip and I cleaned and packed and sorted, I pushed away tears, ruminating on how unfair it was that this woman’s life, a person I’d barely known, should fit so neatly into cardboard boxes, the way mine had once fit into a backpack. How small anyone’s life really was.
* * *
—
A couple of friends who’d heard what we were planning looked at us incredulously over pints of beer. We were seated at the Ivanhoe, a skid-row bar I’d often used as a test when meeting someone new: if they agreed to venture into the melee of skaters, skinheads, crusty punks, factory shift workers, and men who rode around on stolen bicycles selling stuffed animal key chains from their basket, we might become friends. If they said “Hell, no,” the friendship was over before it had begun.
After Christine’s death I’d dyed my hair the colour of a rotting eggplant. My logic ran like this: having purple hair could mean I’d lose customers at the nude modelling agency. To defy the manager’s warning was to seize the day, but to refuse cash from amateur porn photographers was to defy death. Life was too short to spend any time doing what you didn’t want to do.
“You’re planning to run a B&B?”
“What’s so crazy about that?”
They looked at my purple hair. Phillip’s shaved head.
“He’s got his Food Safe,” I said, meaning his certification to serve food.
They continued staring. Both were skinheads, one of whom worked the door at Ivanhoe and didn’t mind it when he had to throw Gulf Island rainbow-dreadlocked hippies out onto the street.
“I’ve worked as a line cook,” Phillip added.
They drank deeply from their pint mugs as if to say “Good luck with that, we’ll see you back here in a month.”
We skipped town, still owing back rent. We loaded our books and Phillip’s paints and canvases into his roommate’s truck; the rest I put in boxes marked “Free” and set out on the curb. That included my working clothes from the track, the ones I’d turned my back on but had stopped short of giving away: miniskirts and tank tops, high-waisted shorts, short-waisted jackets. I watched as women perused five- and six-inch stilettos and scooped up the clothes I’d earned a fortune in.
Working at the Wilderness Committee meant that I’d been so broke I’d come close to returning to the track. Getting rid of the clothes, like dyeing my hair, was closing a door. If any good were to come of Christine’s death, it was through the life Phillip and I would make for ourselves in the place she’d called home.
If our friends had wondered whether we could run a B&B, our guests must have wondered the same thing, because when I’d open the door with my purple hair a few nearly took off running. I did most of the food prep and most of the cleaning. Phillip cooked on the frontlines, and we both answered the phone to take bookings.
The rich, stale house. So many rooms, gleaming with polish. Brass candlesticks, ceramic vases, floral prints. Cherubs painted on the walls. Thirty-foot vaulted ceilings in the living room, as impressive as they were impractical. Masses of brilliant overhead space made the house hard to heat; I was always cold. I thought about the original Mayne Island inhabitants, the Tsartlip, who’d been fishing the Salish Sea for three thousand years. I thought of the farmers, loggers, rum-runners who came after, who built homes with the spirit of adventurers, explorers, and travellers, and who certainly awoke with the sunrise. Once again I was a modern-day adventurer, as I’d been on the streets, or so I fancied myself. I was happy to have stability and wanted to honour Christine’s memory—my unborn child’s grandmother’s memory—by putting all I had into this venture. At the same time, it was hard not to feel guilty about how we’d landed the place, about hitching a free ride.
Through the arched windows I could see the mouth of the bay, the road into town. Skinny, half-naked alders lined the road, along with maples and honeysuckle. Life could be as simple as making a home, having a child, enjoying the view.
* * *
—
I loved the beach at night. I never used a flashlight to find my way. What was the worst that could happen? I watched ants zigzag across the bone-white, moonlike surface, logs laced with the filigree of termites, the stain of seagull shit. The buzz of a boat motor rising in the cool while Phillip worked at home, paintbrush in hand. Starlight glanced off a sailboat bobbing offshore in the low tide of seaweed stew. The sand scratched my shoulders. I wiped my chin with the back of my hand and stood stiffly. I began the walk back, closed my eyes and reopened them, convincing myself I could see in the dark.
The porch light was off. Phillip was sitting in the darkness on the bench seat we’d removed from an old truck and used as a couch, smoking a joint. He tapped the edge of it against an empty cat food tin so persistently that no trace of ash remained.
“Pleasant outing?” he asked.
“I guess.”
I pulled the Adirondack chair across the deck and sat next to him. Phillip in his Chinatown flip-flops, his T-shirt with the image of a half-naked 1950s pin up screen printed on the front, checked cut-offs. Slender as a lizard, his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles, his toes so long they looked more like fingers.
“Chilly tonight,” I said. I looked up at the stars, then took his hand and placed it on my stomach. “Feel that?” I said. “I’ve been thinking about how it’s going to be when the baby’s born.”
He pressed his fingers into my flesh and smiled strangely. Then he pulled his hand away.
“Do you want to see a doctor?” He crushed his joint out in the empty tin.
“I haven’t missed a single appointment.”
“I know about your legs.”
“What?” I said.
“I was watching a program on TV two nights ago. There’s a woman in Alberta who’s just been labelled a dangerous offender, you may have heard of her,” Phillip said. “She slashes herself, too.”
I did not take my eyes off the stars. From the bottom you had nowhere to look but up.
“Why?” he said.
“Leave me alone.”
He examined the backs of his fingers, which he did whenever he felt conflicted. “I believe you need help.”
“I can’t go to a doctor.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“I said I can’t talk about it now.”
“That woman in Alberta, she—”
“Look, another star,” I said.
“How bad are they? Do you need stitches?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“How am I supposed to react to this?”
“Don’t be mad. Jesus.” I became terrified. “Listen, I did crazy things. Like, as a kid. Sticking sewing needles into my fingers and walking around. Everyone did. Or I’d go a full day just eating an apple. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not funny,” Phillip said. “Don’t make it funny. It’s sick.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Nothing. You never did anything.”
I burst into tears and escaped into the house. I locked myself into the en suite, though there was no need; he wasn’t following.
I sat on the pink bath mat, leaning against the shower stall, my heart knocking. My dirty secret was out. I’d been cutting myself since Mexico. The need came and went like a tooth abscess, festering out of sight until some irritation brought the pain to the surface.
I hid the marks on my body even from myself, refusing to look at them in the shower. I didn’t know how to stop and I needed help. I hated that I’d never be able to stop alone. I hated knowing that I relied on men. That my life, like Picasso’s art, could be divided into periods: the Blue Period, the Johnny Period, the Will Period, the Jay, Avery, Phillip Periods. I felt tossed to fate like those tiny stones the waves threw back on shore. From a distance, beyond the kelp soup and ropes of seaweed, no one, not even me, could tell if they were coming or going. My whole problem was looking for help outside myself for what I needed most.
I felt like a moving picture projected on the wall. Of course it was wrong to feel that I existed only when a man wanted me. To cut myself to feel more alive. It was wrong and I, like all guilty creatures, had to look away from the distortion.
Celestial Empire
My rambunctious child is running roughshod over the B&B’s enforced sterility, where disinfection and silence are the rules of the house.
I’d walked out of the hospital with Jet swaddled and crying under my arm, wondering when I’d be caught like a thief and stopped with a baby I had no idea what to do with. I learned how to bake my own bread, how to stretch forty dollars over two weeks. Money was scarce—the B&B hardly paid for itself. We gave the money to Phillip’s father, who used it to pay the accountant, and at the end of the day nothing remained. We ate the guests’ breakfast leftovers after they checked out. I cleaned houses on the side and often took Jet to work with me, so great was Phillip’s reluctance to mind her—he needed time to paint. Domesticity was smothering him, he said. Unless I had laundry to do, his basement studio was off-limits.
Every Wednesday morning I’d get into my rusty Ford truck and drive to a local mother’s living room where pudgy-fingered kids ate dirt and mashed bananas into their hair. This was Mayne Island’s “playgroup.”
One of the moms had set up a slip-and-slide with a black tarp and dish soap. The toddlers frolicked in the yard, rolled in the bubbles, squirted each other with a green garden hose. Pink Popsicle sticks littered the wooden porch, as did we, basking in the July warmth. A car drove by and I could sense the male driver looking at us, six or seven women, breastfeeding, with stretch-marked bellies pressed up to the sun, eyes closed like lizards. My face grew scarlet. Nothing about my appearance distinguished me, yet it felt crucial that this man, this perfect stranger, should be able to tell me apart, to know that I’d never be like these mothers in their pastel cotton smocks, discussing the links between autism and vaccines and recipes for homemade play dough. How had I ended up in a group that consisted of stay-at-home moms anyway? As if the role of motherhood supplied a unifying bond?
I was lonely. I missed the city. All I wanted to do was run. Toss off my load and run, long and hard and fast.
The streets had taught me many things, but not how to move forward as a whole person while keeping my past a secret.
I rearranged furniture and drank to shut my eyes. Who was I if I couldn’t even look at a sunset without pain? I carried on writing, a maladaptation to modify anger and sadness, regurgitating it in bursts like a bad meal until I felt empty
I needed to go back to school. Improve myself, thus improve my outlook. Meeting Phillip, I’d wanted to soak away my past in an intellectual soup, surround myself with conversations about Glenn Gould, Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Paul Sartre, Carl Jung, Heidegger. I needed to reclaim that desire and run with it.
* * *
—
My second child, Maisie, was born in 2004 when I was thirty-two, in the spring of the year I returned to school.
I was still cleaning houses. As I scrubbed a toilet or polished a shower stall, I’d consider the only two paths I saw before me: student loans or saving enough to get my degree piecemeal.
The atmosphere at home had grown toxic. Phillip blamed me for his inability to paint, said his creative block and his lack of recognition were the result of having a family. He’d fly into a rage if Jet spilled their soup, punch a hole through the wooden slats of the closet door.
I’d applied to the University of Victoria, and thanks to a slim portfolio of published work, had been given an advanced placement in its creative writing program.
Leaning toward student loans, with an eye to eventually moving to Victoria, I scouted daycares online. I found one that accepted children younger than three at a facility near the university, by a forest called Haro Woods with a view of the ocean.
In that way the universe has, the daycare was on the grounds of the hospital for handicapped children where I’d volunteered twenty years earlier. Where I’d sat in the lap of a man later convicted of child abuse. If it was a sign, I didn’t know of what.
I made the drive to the Village Bay ferry terminal on Mayne Island, tried to entertain Jet on the two-and-a-half-hour boat ride with a half bag of Cheerios and two crayons, breastfed Maisie, drove past billboards on the highway from Swartz Bay to Victoria with both children screaming in their car seats, picked up the government subsidy application form in a cramped, windowless office, and then did the whole thing in reverse. When I returned to Victoria a week later—drive, ferry, drive—the woman behind the counter at the government office looked at me, scratching her ear with a pencil before saying a word. “It says you’re married.”
“Yes, common-law.”
“It says your husband is unemployed.”
“Um, yes. Well, I mean, he’s a painter. But he doesn’t have, like, you know, a real job. With a paycheque. I need this subsidy to go back to school.”
She told me that, owing to Phillip’s unemployment, she couldn’t approve my request. “Since he’s at home? So he can look after her.”
I thought of Ann Landers’s advice when it came to relationships. Are you better off with him or without him? Now, I had to admit, the answer was without.
The woman must have seen me holding back tears. She leaned forward, her gaze softening. “Does he have any issues with drugs or alcohol?” she asked gently. “Any mental health problems?”
I thought of how, the other morning, Phillip had asked if I knew where he’d misplaced his blotter. Only someone with mental health issues would lose drugs in a house with children. I thought of the way spilled soup made him punch a hole in the closet door. And how only his battle with an inner demon could make him slap Jet for not posing for a photograph the way he planned.
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure he does,” I answered.
“Can you get a note from your doctor?”
“He won’t. I mean, he won’t even go to couples counselling with me.”
I’d asked him time and again. The last time he’d said no was also the last time I asked. I’d had the baby on my hip and Jet by the hand, decked out in a mermaid’s tail I’d sewn from a shiny nylon housecoat and painted with blue scales to hide the flowers. The Mayne Island playgroup had spent weeks working on a Fall Fair float, gluing shells we’d gathered from the beach to pieces of driftwood so large we’d needed three men to lift them into the truck where all the kids would be sitting. Jet had practised waving and blowing kisses and expected us to be there, watching, waving, and blowing kisses back. Phillip cited a reason to do with the septic field for refusing to join us.
People on Mayne Island thought we were a happy couple because we drank at home together in front of the TV and didn’t take turns at the bar like other couples, one drinking, the other staying home to watch the kids. Figuring his refusal had less to do
with the septic field and more to do with a drinking buddy on his way over, I mentioned the idea of counselling once more. He glared at me, his silence following us out the door. Phillip didn’t trust counsellors; he viewed them all as frauds.
When the baby was three months old, I began correspondence classes. Without the daycare subsidy I had to do my schoolwork from home, Maisie clinging to my breast like a leech while Jet pranced around in my old go-go boots and an Elvis cape decorated with gold glitter guitars, my university texts spread out on the bed—Spanish, French, English, philosophy, psychology—in a room that smelled of diapers.
* * *
—
The following year, in the fall of 2005, when Maisie was one and a half, I began making a weekly commute to the Victoria campus to study fiction. I was thirty-four years old, in a workshop with students young enough to be my children, being instructed by a poet, also younger than me, with tousled hair and a boyish grin.
Every Tuesday we’d leave Mayne Island on a morning ferry that sailed to Swartz Bay, a half-hour’s drive from Victoria. I’d drive from the ferry terminal to my parents’ house, hurriedly drop Maisie off with my mother, and then make it to the campus in time for class at one. As difficult as the commute was on my already strained relationship with Phillip, I never missed a class. And these weekly visits to Victoria helped me with my parents, although we never talked about my childhood.
Phillip thought my idea of moving to Victoria was preposterous. The townhouse for which I was wait-listed, right across the street from campus, had two bedrooms and a den. I planned to move the next year, with any luck before fall classes began in September of 2006. Phillip said he’d have nowhere to paint. Besides, “Don’t you know what kind of weirdos there are on campus? You could be killed.”