This Cake is for the Party (15 page)

Do you remember, the last time we spoke, I told you that I had a condition, a malfunctioning tear duct from a childhood surgery? I asked Gabe to explain it to you, and he did—but he was telling you about a medical condition that I don't actually have. The real story is stranger than that. What I told you was an excuse for something I could not understand myself. I realize now that you would likely have been comfortable discussing it quite openly—in your work, after all, you spend a great deal of time assembling conceptual parentheses to contain matters of an abstract or philosophical nature. What held me back then was fear (again, fear!)—not entirely of your disregard, though I believed this to be the case. It was my own fear of the inexplicable.

When I was six years old, my mother saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in an Ida Red apple in the produce section of Food City. As you know, it's become a bit of a cliché now—last year a vision of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich sold for $
28
,
000
in an auction, and the image of Jesus Christ in a water stain brought hundreds of people to a concrete wall in a Chicago underpass. In your paper
Apparitions of God: Divine Intervention or Delusion?
you write about the face of God spotted in the smoke of the Twin Towers. But this apple appeared to my mother years ago, when we were still surprised by the one or two satellites we'd catch moving across the night sky; before there were cellphones and BlackBerrys; before farmers began to introduce DNA from Arctic char into our tomatoes. Had it happened today, my mother might have put the apple up for auction on eBay.

My mother dabbled briefly in the United Church when she was a child, but she was never what I would call a religious woman (though you should know that she has always said good things about you. She has never forgotten the lilac suit you wore to our wedding. Was it a European design? My mother searched for a reasonable duplicate for many years). I was not baptized. At the age of six, I'm not even sure I could have identified the figure of Mary anywhere, other than in a lit-up manger in our neighbour's front yard every December—a glowing blue-cloaked figure kneeling by a plastic baby that appeared to be strapped to a toboggan.

On the day that it happened, my mother pushed the clattering steel grocery cart up to the apple bin and stopped there, moving her hands together in front of her chest like a knot she was trying to untangle. People looked at her. She ignored them, muttering, staring straight ahead at the pile of apples. She ignored me. In a rare demonstration of adventurousness (I was a placid child, not given to roaming), I left my mother and wandered on my own until I found the bulk food section. I settled myself in front of the bottom shelf and set to unwrapping sticky glittermints and chewing on fingerfuls of rubbery licorice nibs until a skinny red-coated stock boy pulled me off the floor and back to the front of the store to find out whom I belonged to. There stood my mother, a holy look on her face and a plastic bag full of apples in one fist. She held the “special” apple in her other hand. When she saw me, she bent down and put the fruit to my face.
Look,
she said.

Now, my mother had been in the care of a psychiatrist for most of that year, sometimes away in “retreat” for weeks at a time. I wasn't told these details until I was much older, and I don't know what frightened me more: her absence, or seeing her anxious and unwell. I was late for school one morning because she wouldn't let me out of the house before she had sewn a careful lining of tinfoil to the inside of my winter toque. She cancelled our subscription to the newspaper because she read mysterious, malevolent messages there. She watched television with a notepad in hand, scribbling down pieces of dialogue. My mother's fear was palpable; it was an electric, metallic charge in the atmosphere. When I was six years old, my mother was my closest friend. I was afraid of her agitation, yet I hated to be away from her. It was not an easy time.

It feels important to note that the day in the grocery store, when my mother found the apple, she was not buzzing with anxiety. She was gentle and clear. I was not afraid of her. This all happened a long time ago, but I remember that for certain.

Five years later, a peculiar thing happened to me. One afternoon, curled in an easy chair reading
Harriet the Spy
, I discovered that if I pulled on my left earlobe, water would come out from behind my ear. The water was warmish and there wasn't very much of it, but it startled me, and I made a sound that brought my mother into the living room. She asked me,
What happened?
And I had to tell her: I pulled my ear and water came out.

My mother had been in a stable period for at least two years. Calmly, she inspected my ear. She rubbed and poked the spot I located for her. And even though there was no hole, crack or puncture in my skin, the water came out for her too: a trickle that I could feel like a teardrop sliding down my neck.

My mother had never mentioned the legendary apple after that day in the grocery store. I suspect that she told my father and he had credited it to her paranoia. My memories from these years are vague and scattered now, but I do not recall my mother modifying her behaviour in any way that would signify having experienced a “miracle.” She did not begin attending Mass, she did not speak to me about the importance of prayer, and as far as I knew, she did not acquire even one religious icon—not even a rosary. Despite this, when my ear produced water that day, it somehow became clear to my mother that this was a direct result of my witnessing a miracle in the Food City as a child, and she said so. She said,
I can't explain it, but
we should celebrate
.

That afternoon, she took me for a manicure and pedicure at an upscale salon, and a very nice lunch in a restaurant with a waterfall in the courtyard. I had a drink made with layers of cranberry and grapefruit juice, and my mother had a glass of white wine. We toasted the Virgin together, admiring our newly polished nails.

I began to explore Catholicism on my own, with a customary preteen focus on the unexplainable, the paranormal and the macabre—or, as these things are called in the Church, miracles. My mother certainly did not encourage my investigation. I imagine my father was aware of my obsession with stories about weeping statues and historical Marian sightings (from the Miracle Tortilla in New Mexico to those four little girls in Spain who could run up mountains, their feet moving without touching the ground) and my fascination with famous cases of stigmata, but he did not interfere, even when I decided that I wanted to start going to church. My mother hated the idea. I was nearing the age when girls begin to abhor their mothers. If I had been older, I'd like to think that I would have been more sympathetic to my mother's misgivings.

My mother agreed to drive me to Our Lady of Perpetual Help every Sunday. She would only allow me to go if she accompanied me. I didn't know the source of her reluctance—I assumed that it was based on her old paranoia, but she later admitted that she was trying to protect her impressionable daughter from such a dogmatic faith. Regardless, the routine didn't last more than five or six weeks. The services were long and tedious, and I was disappointed to discover that, despite the name of the parish I had chosen for myself, there was never any exploration of Marian visitations or miraculous visions during Mass.

I met Beverly Nauffsinger on my last “trial” Sunday at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I remember Beverly as an older woman, but now I wonder if she was even forty. She wore several thin gold chains and petite crucifixes in a tangle around her neck. As she spoke, she fiddled with the complicated knots, her fingers moving over the gold crosses and miniature Christ figures consistently and ineffectually, as though she were fingering a rosary. Beverly had travelled to the United States to hear the Virgin Mary speak through a woman named Mrs. Francis Butler (this is the same Francis Butler you wrote about in your essay
Solar Apparitions and Marian Visitations in the Southern
United States
). Beverly went to the Butlers'
150
-acre hunting farm in Quality, Kentucky, and she said the scent of roses filled the air and the sun pulsated before her eyes and divided into multiple lights. She said she could look straight at the sun and that the Lord protected her eyes, and that since then, she was able to see colours that she was not able to see before. Beverly showed me a rosary that she purchased in Quality. The beads were little coloured bits of carved wood—blue, green, yellow and red—connected with twists of gold wire.
When I bought
this rosary,
Beverly whispered to me,
these wires were one
hundred percent pure silver
. She pointed to a piece of wire with one purple-painted fingernail.
Now they're pure gold.
She crossed herself.
That's a miracle, right there,
she said. Later, my mother told me that it was widely known in our community that, while she was inarguably a kind-hearted person, Beverly Nauffsinger was delusional.

Years passed, and so did my religious phase. My mother battled with anxiety and occasional bouts of depression, but nothing took her completely out of this reality. Occasionally, my father would tug at my earlobe in a teasing way, saying,
Any holy water in there today?
I was an awkward teenager, and my relationship with my father had devolved into nothing more than self-conscious attempts at light conversation—the earlobe joke one of our only reliable physical interactions. (Perhaps it is different when raising sons. Does a mother remain close to her son, without awkwardness, even through puberty?) I did not experience the watery ear phenomenon again, even though I had spent long nights tugging and pressing my left ear as I tried to fall asleep, while reading or watching television, and, of course, those Sundays while attending Mass. The water, quite simply, had vanished.

That is, until I met your son. After graduating high school, I accepted an offer from the London School of Economics and began my studies in cultural anthropology. I rarely visited home, using my holidays for travel and research. I met Gabe in Spain, as you know; I was in San Sebastián presenting a paper at a conference on Philosophy, Democracy and Medicine. There were more than two hundred people in that amphitheatre, but when I saw Gabe sitting in the third row, the room contracted, and I knew that I had already known him for the rest of my life. On the night of our first kiss, when he slipped his palm against my cheek and the nape of my neck, it happened. A bewildered look passed over his face. I could feel the water trickling down, but before I could say,
Don't
worry, it's not what you think
(what exactly I meant by that, I wonder now), he kissed me anyway, and the water pooled into my clavicle, furtive and sleek.

Gabe never had a chance to meet my father. My parents had gone on a cruise through the Spanish Virgin Islands for their fortieth wedding anniversary. On his second night on the ship, my father suffered a massive stroke. He did not live through the night; my mother and my father's body were flown home on a direct flight from Puerto Rico. My mother had an acute anxiety attack and a subsequent nervous breakdown that had her hospitalized for several weeks. Soon after presenting my paper, I took a leave from my graduate work and returned to Canada to be with her.

How did Gabe explain all of this to you? Did he ever tell you that he left France because of me? Or did he tell you that the University of British Columbia presented a counter-offer that he couldn't refuse? Would you have blamed me, if you had known the truth?

In the years that we dated, as he worked his way through medical school, Gabe was fascinated by my condition. He investigated it tirelessly. I do not, in fact, have a malfunctioning tear duct, though there are those who do; my symptoms match theirs, which is why I adopted that explanation so readily. The truth is that there is, so far, no answer to my little mystery.

Mrs. B——, I wish you could have met my mother before my father's death. She used to be a vibrant woman, full of sharp witticisms. I know she would have had many thoughts on your research and critical work. My mother is my only family—I have no siblings (neither does she) and I have never really known my father's family (they live in Missouri). After a year of careful therapeutic care, my mother was again stable, present and lucid. On my thirtieth birthday, during an extended visit from my mother (she made herself at home on our island that summer, sleeping on a foam mattress on our back deck, navigating her way through the woods with a compass, learning to cultivate wild mushrooms and make jam from salal berries—there is such a contrast between her experience of this place and your own), we found ourselves sitting on the back deck, sipping our signature drinks, cranberry and grapefruit. She asked me, mentioning the apple for the first time in nineteen years,
Do you believe
that I saw her that day?
—and my ear instantly began to drip in response. Yes, I said, of course I believe you saw her. She closed her eyes and smiled, and at that moment I felt closer to my mother than ever before. We both cried with relief. The water from my ear dripped along with my tears; I had to excuse myself to pat myself dry.

The reason I write you this now is that it has been fifteen years since then, and only once has the water from my ear returned. Last week, Gabe came in from the car, walking with a peculiar quietness, his footfalls soft and deliberate in the hallway. His eyes were red, and I guessed that he'd been crying. Then Gabe told me that he had just talked to you on the phone. He told me, finally, that he'd been communicating with you all of these years—behind my back, at your insistence, writing letters and mailing them secretly, accepting phone calls from a private cell number and emailing you from his personal address. I felt the edges of our marriage disintegrating. The volatile cliffs of secrecy and regret hanging over us, immense, lifelong, volcanic. His breath was like a rash against my skin. But he also told me your prognosis, Mrs. B——. And it was then that I felt the trickle along my neck.