by Yasuko Thanh
Weirdos on campus? How could Phillip really know me if he didn’t know—didn’t want to hear—about the years I’d spent dealing with “weirdos” every night?
Alone and lonely, waiting to begin my first full-time university term, I began to collect items from thrift stores and garage sales that I’d need in my new house. I acquired an armoire (from a Panamanian woman and her geologist husband), a metallic powder-blue 1960s sewing machine (free from the recycling depot), a Formica kitchen table and four grey chairs (I was truly leaving come next fall), bunk beds (mattresses included, from a friend who’d slept on them with his brothers and sisters since the eighties—do the multiplication: four kids over twenty years and no box springs—beggars couldn’t be choosers), a heart-shaped wall lamp that glowed red, a wicker toy box that looked like an elephant, a small wooden shelf, a blue-painted sideboard for my clothes (its missing glass doors replaced with red and blue oilcloth), an almost complete set of yellow ceramic dishes (abandoned on the street), a half-dozen vintage coasters (free from the recycling depot), a cooking pot, a frying pan, a Dutch oven (that had once been used to do what, a craft? involving dyes? chemicals? The outside was splattered with irremovable paint and the inside smelled industrial when heated).
The futon with its frame was secondhand; it had sat in a little girl’s basement playroom where she’d kept her toys. When the futon got too old, too covered with crayon marks, I bought it for fifty dollars. And that futon, more than any of the other pieces I collected, represented my newfound independence.
Since I’d brought it home it had acquired large stains of various shapes. That’s because when I’d tried to manoeuvre it into our basement, along with the other things I’d collected there, it was too heavy for me and Phillip, in protest of my invading his studio space, wouldn’t help. So I stored it on the front porch, where all summer our cat used it as a bed, leaving her fur and odour behind. A whole summer in which I knew the partnership was over. A whole summer in which Phillip did, too.
Then I ordered a cover for it from a designer factory in Toronto that specialized in retro designs—an indulgent, extravagant purchase that cost more than the futon itself. Pink barkcloth with green and white highlights and matching bolsters and cushions. A bold move in the direction of a better life.
The futon wasn’t an expensive piece but it was a well-made one, its frame solid wood, not like the cheap tubular steel ones. That frame would survive an earthquake. And it was the one large piece of furniture that I’d be able to pass on to one of my children, that felt like it meant something, that would take up space in an empty room.
I may have planned the move but I was ad-libbing the lines, writing myself as I went along. After hearing former wards of the court might be eligible for funding, I began the process of accessing my court files. A few weeks later a brown manila envelope arrived in the mail. I read about myself in the third person—my arrests, my psychiatric evaluations, my social history; the multiple perspectives of police, psychiatrists, counsellors.
I read that my parents had put no effort into the reconciliation process. Their need to keep things private included a refusal to sign off on our family therapy records when a court-appointed psychologist asked for them. He wanted to speak to them; they refused to come in. Finally my father conceded to a phone call, in which he told the doctor that I’d been a difficult child who threw tantrums when she didn’t get her way. He cited my jumping off monkey bars, the hard landings, as the reason for the bruises and scrapes on my body. He said that, jealous of my baby brother’s arrival, I’d pinched him. Only the doctor saw the mysterious connection between these things.
* * *
—
My father wrote: “I, Paul Thanh, enter into an agreement for the care and custody of Yasuko Thanh, born June 30, 1971, for whom we have requested special care. Yasuko Thanh has the following disabilities/special needs: emotional instability requiring psychiatric treatment.”
* * *
—
I thought about who I’d been.
I’d forgotten, or buried, much of my childhood and adolescence. When I thought of my parents I remembered the good times. The dried salted squid I savoured in Chinatown, a treat. Walking hand in hand with my father to the butcher who had Peking ducks hooked and hanging in his window. The scent of lavender on my pillow from a sachet my mother had made for me, shaped like a heart and stuffed with the bounty of her immaculate garden.
My own children were my life now.
I loved everything about them. The way Jet held an elastic in their mouth as they pulled up their hair into a ponytail. The way they asked “What’s for dinner?” upon arriving home from school. How when the doctor entered Maisie’s hospital room to withdraw a blood sample, Jet first tried to run away with her and then rocked her when it was over.
I loved the way Jet had retrieved everything Maisie pointed at until Maisie learned to walk. The way, when Maisie was a little older, she toddled after Jet, blessing the carpet with her sippy cup, sanctifying it with orange juice.
I loved their plays. Forty-five-minute extravaganzas. With costumes. Bunny ears drawn on white paper. Cut out and taped to Maisie’s head. Whiskers drawn in washable felt tip. Jet as a witch with a long felt nose, fabric flowers pinned in their hair.
The lines Jet wrote on little pieces of paper:
“I am so sad since my wife died.”
“He didn’t see his daughter as much as he should because it painfulled him she was too much like her mother.”
“She stole my beauty.”
How, at the end of five acts—birth, death, jealousy, poisoning, coma—both children shredded the lines and threw the piles of paper up in the air.
Jet would write in my schoolbooks: “I love you. Even if I get taller than you.”
They shared a room and sang “Gilligan’s Island” to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” sang, “One ton of metal” instead of “Guantanamera” at bedtime.
I even loved the way they fought.
“Give me a knife and I’ll chop you into pieces of bacon,” Maisie said.
Drumming their fingers, hands on their hips, in imitation of me, saying, “I’m down to my very last nerve with you. The very last.”
But no one was ever banished for shouting in anger.
When Jet baked with me I’d bite down on my criticisms even when cookie dough was being flung across the room. I tried never to yell, even when I felt pulled in every direction like those sticky toys you threw at the wall shaped like an octopus, slithering down to end up behind the couch covered in dust or gerbil fur.
When they cried I sang to them. If I punished them at all, I used time-outs.
We discussed bad behaviour. Jet, wilful by nature, responded well to analogies.
“When a cop pulls you over, you want to kick him in the shins, right? But you don’t. You’ll go to jail. So you hand him your licence and smile and before you know it you’re driving away. You don’t have to feel respect,” I said, “but you have to show it to your teachers, your counsellors. Heck, to me.
“Here’s the thing: never forget to be a person you can respect.”
The kids set their own bedtime. They ate potatoes one day, Duncan Hines icing the next, or left the table without finishing meals. My reactionary parenting was invisible to me.
One night we were talking about the Big Bopper Crash.
“You can hear the wind in the cornfield where the plane went down,” Jet said.
“Does it sound like labambalabambalabamba?” Maisie said.
“No, it sounds like whoosh,” I said.
“Well, maybe it does sound like La Bamba,” Jet said. “If you listen very hard.”
“And that’s why we’re SUPER GIRLS!” Maisie said.
“Goodnight monkey monsters. I love you.”
“I love you. Banana pooh,” they said together.
“I wonder what I’m going to be when I grow up,” Jet said without warning.
“How about happy?”<
br />
Jet groaned. Maisie rolled her eyes.
“Be you.”
I wanted my children to know—it was imperative they know—that they didn’t have to be anything but themselves for me to love them.
Department of Heart Gouging
While at UVic, whenever I felt down I’d find a tattoo shop. I’d choose a large piece of work, giving myself a reason to return week after week. The prodding needles relaxed me. It wasn’t that I was unhappy. Not exactly. Five courses, a new place I’d received word was mine and moved into days before the start of classes, two young children. Yet I found myself arriving at my fiction workshop without remembering how I got there. Or looking out the lecture-hall window at bare spots in the trees. Or, at home, down at the dining room table, dragging my fork through my mashed potatoes and making designs. After putting the kids to bed I’d spend time with my head in my hands, wondering what the hell was happening with my writing.
I’d gone from having a closed, private relationship with my work to setting it free among classmates who wielded Sharpies like swords. I told myself that courting the praise of others would only break my heart. That to become a better writer I needed to focus on my love affair with words. I feared others would look at me and say, “Who are you, anyway? What are you doing here? You don’t belong.”
* * *
—
By the following year, the autumn of 2007, the futon still smelled like a dirty cat, a woodsy musk tainted with a hint of death. The day’s radiant sun giving way to a coastal evening chill heralded the beginning of my second year of full-time studies at UVic. By now I felt I’d developed a competent daily routine.
I was getting scholarships for my good grades, going to film festivals, writing, playing music. I was enjoying my children and the long last days of Indian summer at a lake before the clouds in all their West Coast glory consumed the rest of the blue sky. From our beach towels we threw seagulls potato chips and watched them pick at the sand by our feet.
So what the hell was I doing? Falling in love with an underemployed singer of country and western songs because he’d offered me his leather jacket as we’d smoked outside the pub after his show.
His name was Eddie. He was forty-one, in the middle of a divorce, working a call centre job he hated. Music was his love. I’d watched him perform that night, smiling stupidly in the audience, sure of my specialness and the world’s abundance because of his baptizing gaze from the stage.
* * *
—
I told Eddie he should quit his job. The only thing keeping him from spending all his time making music was his rent—and if he moved in with me he could work on his recordings as much as he wanted. He hesitated. To be working defined him. I needed to change his outlook. Let him know that there were many ways to contribute, not only financially. I set out to convince him with the same intensity with which I approached my university assignments.
I argued that he was already spending every night with me. He’d arrive back at my place after his shift at the call centre where he fielded complaints for a cellular phone company, have dinner with me and the children at the kitchen table. Typically, the children and I sat watching cartoons on the computer while we ate. Now the computer was turned off and we faced each other over our food.
Mornings, he’d borrow my car to drive himself back out to work, a thirty-minute commute.
I considered this a victory. If he had my car, he’d have to return. I could do without it. Especially if it meant that our relationship was growing stronger, more solid.
“You make me feel peaceful,” I said. “I sleep better when you’re here.”
I viewed the time he spent apart from me as a minor infidelity. He lived in a bachelor suite on the Gorge, a few blocks from where I’d once lived with the trio of bikers in a building from the fifties with a view of the water, the lingering odour of tobacco smoke in the air. He’d decorated his walls with photographs of famous people he’d met, rockabilly Hall of Famers, movie stars from the forties, pin-ups who were now in their seventies and still toured the circuit. They’d ended up in many of the places he played, like Viva Las Vegas, the largest rockabilly music festival in the world and a pilgrimage site for those like Eddie who lived as though it was still the fifties. Women and men who never listened to music more recent than Elvis. Who wore vintage clothing. Who cooked recipes from old magazines, things like aspic, as their grandmothers had.
I identified with the subculture in idealizing this “simpler time,” imagining rows of houses with tidy picket fences where nothing bad ever happened.
The dream could be mine.
If he moved in.
My need spurred a methodology that involved reminding him of how much he hated his job, of his wish to spend all his time making music. Then underlining it with our mortality, the limited time on earth we had to achieve anything. The goal was less to help him fulfill his ambitions than to make him mine.
Impelling my project were notions like these: We aren’t “serious” if we don’t live together. If he loved me, he’d spend every spare second with me. His things at my place signify that he can no longer walk out of our relationship without warning.
My life was the upward climb, the frantic grasp at anything I could hold, a rock, a branch, that would save my life.
I was desperate without knowing it.
I chose not to focus on the things about him that irritated me: a penchant for seeing the glass half full, a sense of entitlement that translated into a view of the world as unfair. I dwelled instead on my age, my fading beauty. I told myself, This is your last chance to snag a good man.
I concentrated on the smallest things he did with the children as evidence that he’d make a perfect stepfather.
I dismissed the fact that we had no intellectual connection—university filled that need. That our emotional bond ran shallow was written off by correlating “depth” with pretension. Who wanted to mine their psyche when they could dance on its glistening surface?
I was, once again, subsuming important aspects of my character to build a connection with a man. I called it love. It was fear.
* * *
—
On the day he moved his furniture and boxes in, I finally had proof. That we were really a couple, meant to be together.
The stacks of boxes reached the ceiling and were five feet deep in places.
He looked helplessly at the mess. “Don’t worry,” I said, “by the time you get home from work these piles won’t be here.”
I rearranged everything in my tiny storage locker. Moved my things from the living room into other rooms, recreated my space to absorb and accommodate his.
I didn’t think of my children.
I ignored the detail that a couch in the kitchen—his vintage seven-foot-long couch—made half the room unreachable. That the area where my children watched movies and played with their toys would become a chamber for his guitars.
* * *
—
How the hell was it that I’d gotten out of one relationship and, within months of meeting another man—in a bar at that—I was living with him?
When he strummed his vintage Gretsch on stage women flocked to him, were transformed. Suddenly you could be a jazzy type walking some slick city sidewalk in New York with a little dog on a red leash. You could be someone crazy riding a zip line. His music made that possible. Bombshell beauties with hourglass figures pseudo-stripteased on the dance floor as they tried to catch his eye. In my mind, every woman in every club he played in was conniving to steal him from me. I’d pinch myself, scratch myself under the table, under my skirt, until I bled—to punish myself for the attention he gave them.
My mind spun justifications for my behaviour from any shred of evidence I could find that he must be cheating—a smile, a handshake, a hug. My heart racing, my breath jagged, I’d look to see if he had an erection hidden beneath his suit.
Insecurity consumed me. I dyed my hair black to hide the grey at
my roots, bought new dresses from the thrift store, made up my face with the concentration of an artist before I’d even leave the house with him.
My biggest fear was that he’d tire of me. Cheat on me with a groupie. Every woman became the prostitute I’d been, who’d use any tactic to seduce a man.
My true heart was telling me to get out. Learn to make my own way. Forge a future for myself by myself.
My heart was telling me that my low self-esteem was a curse. A literal spell cast by an enemy who wanted me out of the picture.
* * *
—
After Eddie moved in our tiny townhouse no longer felt like home, crammed with too much stuff, my computer desk against the kitchen wall blocked by that seven-foot couch.
Forget the table where the four of us, to my delight, had eaten our meals when he still had his apartment. These days it was simpler to eat dinner cross-legged with a plate on your lap on the carpet, anywhere with a square inch of room. Rows of records snaked down the hallway; books lined the walls like balustrades. Every closet was stacked to the ceiling so that coats and shoes and boots found themselves pushed out of their home, cluttering the floor from the front door to the back. The futon still anchored the living room but was difficult to find behind the bass and guitar amps, mic stands, patch cords, stage lights.
In the winter of 2008, we moved to a bungalow twice the size down the street. The yard stretched around the house in a half-acre rectangle, which at its centre, according to the gardener, the biggest sumac tree on Vancouver Island. I had a view of the ocean, and double the expenses
“I promise, I’ll get another job,” Eddie said. Instead he was let go from the one he had.