Mouthing the Words (18 page)

“Don’t I know it. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was really able to make something of myself as a journalist, I wouldn’t be very far away from seeing myself as mentally ill. And being a mother is hardly seen as a credible identity.”

“God,” we say simultaneously.

—

Heroin is waiting for me at home, stretched out on the couch wearing my 501s with a glass of cranberry juice balanced on her stomach. “Hey, style queen! You look like you’ve had a good day,” she says.

I just beam.

“What did I tell you?” she teases.

“Move over,” I nudge her. I lie there beside her watching the white sheet over my balcony door flutter in the cool early evening wind. My legs are wrapped around Heroin’s legs for warmth and she wakes me some time later and says, “Hey, you’re taking up most of the room.” I mumble but I do not move.

She can always change shape, but I cannot.

—

I have invited Molly over for dinner. It’s Saturday
morning
and I wake early, excited by the promise of the day. I want to make pasta and Heroin suggests we go to St. Lawrence market and get some fresh pasta, basil and garlic, and she’ll show me how to make really good pesto.

This is new for me. Normally I spend Saturdays in bed with a book, daydreaming about Mummy Roo and writing to her in my journal.

“Oh God, but what will I wear?” I hesitate.

“I hardly think I’m the one to consult for fashion advice,” Heroin laughs. “It’s a market. It’s Saturday. I dunno.”

I pull on my jeans and my boots, and a hooded Gap sweatshirt.

“Perfect,” Heroin says.

“Wait,” I say, and pull on my rose-coloured knit cap. “OK, I’m ready. Andiamo.”

I wear black gloves and coast down Spadina Avenue on my bike through the bracing air and then pedal as hard as I can along Front Street against the wind.

The market is thick with warm light, people and colour. I move among and with them. I pick out a large bundle of basil and hand it to the guy behind the cash register. “I love your hat,” he says.

“Gee, thanks,” I mumble, a little embarrassed.

“The colour’s great with your eyes,” he says, handing me the change.

“Thanks a lot,” I say, shyly, and wander off. “Was he flirting with me?” I ask Heroin.

“Duh. Obviously. Have a look at him.”

I turn around and he is looking at me. He smiles. I smile back and then laugh, embarrassed.

—

I want it to be perfect. I have never invited someone over for dinner. So I buy flowers and Spanish Rioja and clear off my desk and cover it with a white sheet. I play my favourite Leonard Cohen CD and sing out loud. I feel happy. This might be the happiest day I have ever had. Probably a mistake to call Corinna just then, but I haven’t called her in two weeks.

“How’s it going, Mum?” I ask her.

“Oh,” she says, sounding annoyed. “So you finally found a moment in your schedule to return my call.”

“Sorry. It’s just been really intense at work.”

“How is it that you’re so self-important all of a sudden?”

“I’m into my job, that’s all,” I defend.

“Well, Thelma, you know what happened last time you worked too hard. You almost tore your eyes out.”

“Do you have to bring that up again? How many years ago was that? I like what I’m doing.”

“Well, I don’t like the sound of it. All these self-important women. How do you expect to get any respect as a lawyer if you work with a bunch of lesbians.”

“They’re not a bunch of lesbians, Mum. They’re feminists. There’s a fucking difference,” I say angrily.

“Well, it must be a pretty fine distinction.”

“Mum, they’re feminists, you know, like they don’t go for things like boob jobs!” I shout, immediately regretting it.

“You’re just jealous because men don’t look at you!”

“Mum—I have to go now,” I say, doing my utmost to restrain myself.

“Oh yes, so busy and self-important now. Getting ready for a big date, are you?”

“I do have a date, as a matter of fact,” I say. Just not the kind of date she imagines, where a guy picks me up in his car and I wear a miniskirt and heels and I listen to him talk about himself all night and then he pulls out his Visa and then his penis shortly thereafter and I feel like I can’t protest the latter because I haven’t protested the former. I have a date where a friend from my past comes for dinner and we drink wine and lie on the floor, hold each other’s hand and talk for hours. I have a friend. I have a friend.

—

“I don’t care if they call me crazy,” Molly says. “All the people who I’ve ever felt were worth knowing have been called crazy at some point in their lives. Nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing. We can only hope that there’s a masterpiece somewhere in the mess we always make.”

And when we are nearly through the second bottle of wine she starts to cry. “You know, I’m beginning to think that I was right all along. People don’t stay,” she says sadly. “But maybe not because they don’t care, but
because
sometimes they don’t have a choice. Look how hard I’m trying to hold on to my little girl and look how determined Harriet is to ensure Sadie feels I’ve abandoned her.”

“Something must stay,” I say, earnestly looking into her eyes. “Whatever happens, Sadie can keep you here,” I say, reaching out. “It’s the only way we can hold on to each other. I dunno. Therapy,” I shrug, a little embarrassed. Molly reaches out to hug me and I put my arms around her awkwardly. Not a familiar feeling, but not altogether unpleasant.

“You’re such a fucking therapy head,” she laughs.

Fish Girls

PEOPLE GET UGLY
in love. Molly issues subtle threats and Harriet starts to yield. Molly doesn’t feel proud of herself for doing it, but she will not sit quietly and let her life and Sadie’s be determined by Harriet’s fear.

Mary is a little disappointed that the case won’t be the big Supreme Court challenge that she had envisioned. I am arguing with her about this: Is it worth dragging people’s lives through the mud in order to challenge legislation? Aren’t we just exploiting them? She cannot believe that I would even ask this. “It’s a constitutional challenge!” she shouts. “It’s a human rights issue—how can we ever expect to effect attitudinal change if we don’t fight for legal recognition?”

“Still, we’re talking about sacrificing individual lives in order to do it,” I defend.

“Thelma, you’ve lost sight of the point of this case.
Don’t
get too attached to the personalities involved,” she says.

“We’re friends,” I tell her. “I mean, we met years ago and we’re becoming good friends.”

“The best thing you can do for her as a friend, Thelma, is not lose sight of the broader implications of this case.”

I have to be careful.

—

We take Sadie to Toronto Island the following Saturday. She’s throwing bits of her chocolate-glazed doughnut at the ducks. “I don’t know if they really like chocolate, sweetheart,” Molly says to her.

“He’s eating it!” Sadie shrieks with delight.

“So he is,” says Molly. “God, I’m so pathetic. I don’t want her to feel rejected by ducks,” she says to me.

“She really is your daughter,” I say as Sadie throws her arms round Molly’s legs, squishing her chocolate-covered mouth into Molly’s white pants. Molly takes my hand and I squeeze it.

She drops me off later at home and I cannot help saying to her, “I wish I didn’t have to leave you both.”

“I know,” she says. “You’re being a great support to me, Thelma. Especially when I feel like I can’t be much of a friend to anyone right now.”

—

Sadie makes me a little nervous. I don’t know why exactly. She’s wide-eyed and trusting and she calls me
“Telly
, Telly, Telly” whenever she sees me, and says, “Pick me up. Give me an airplane.”

I’m not altogether easy with this. I swing her round by the arms and hold up her legs when she does a headstand, but I don’t know what to do when we meet eye to eye with her face very close to mine. She is easy and affectionate and rubs her nose against mine. It makes me laugh, embarrassed. Something about it feels slightly wrong. Slightly perverse, or illicit somehow. But she asks for it, she demands it, she shouts, “Hug!” “Kiss!” at least once every ten minutes. She wraps herself around Molly’s leg and says, “Walk, Mummy,” and clings like a barnacle as Molly limps around the kitchen saying, “Oh my God, you are such a heavy potato.” She is a potato, she is a sweet sweet little potato latke.

She wants to build a snowman but we settle for a snow bunny because there is barely an inch of snow. Carrots for ears. “And he lives in the cabbage patch with all his cabbagey friends,” she natters. “And in the summer he lives in our fridge. Next to the eggs. And he eats all the cheese and Mummy says, Oh no, where’s all the cheese gone? No grilled cheese for dinner.”

“So what’s for dinner then?” I ask her.

“Maybe just acorns and some chazelnuts,” she says.

“Hmm. I think the squirrels might have buried them all,” I comment.

“Oh silly. Not squirrel nuts, Bloblaws nuts. In big bags.”

Sadie loves Loblaws. In fact, I’ve started to like it too, shopping for food on Saturday mornings with Molly. Squashing Sadie’s chubby little thighs through the seat holes in the shopping cart. Molly at one end of the aisle and me at the other, Sadie squealing with delight as the cart flies back and forth between us.

Sadie has swimming lessons at the university pool on Saturday mornings and I have taken to going with her and Molly before we go shopping. Molly goes into the water sometimes—it’s a mothers and toddlers thing.

“Thel? Would you mind going in today?” Molly asks me one morning. “I feel like crap. I think I’ve OD’d on echinacea.”

“Uh, well, I don’t really swim,” I say, apologetically.

“You don’t?” she asks, surprised.

“Well, I do, but not usually in water. Maybe once or twice.”

Swimming scares me. It reminds me of dismembered floating body parts, it reminds me of blood in my head. I am afraid that the water will rush in and fill up my nose and mouth, I am afraid to take off my clothes. The smell of chlorine is familiar and sickening. I cannot tell her this. If I swallow any water, I will vomit. If I taste chlorine, I will die.

“Well, why don’t you try? You’re in the shallow end. You don’t actually have to take your feet off the floor, or put your head under or anything.”

“You mean I can just stand there?” I ask her.

“Yup. And she’ll swim to you.”

Sadie looks like she has more than four limbs going. There is an awful lot of squealing and splashing. I’m wearing Molly’s blue polka-dot bathing suit, standing up to my waist in water, and Sadie is making her way toward me with her neck stretched and her face looking pained. I am supposed to be encouraging like the other mothers, but all I can manage to say is, “Oh God, Sadie. Please don’t drown.” I stretch out my arms and grab her hands and she comes rushing toward me, laughing.

“Hey, you’re pretty good,” I tell her.

“Not so good at floating,” she says, out of breath.

“Why don’t you pretend you’re a twig,” I suggest. “A floating twig. Or maybe a dead body.”

Oops.

Sadie looks at me, confused. “Maybe a fish,” she nods, and starts to swim away from me.

Hmm
. A fish girl can move. A fish girl can swim away.

I am supposed to hold her under the stomach while she sticks her face in the water and blows bubbles. She coughs and water runs out her nose. I ask her if she’s going to throw up. She splutters “No” and coughs some more. Her instructor makes her way over and taps Sadie lightly on the back until she finishes coughing.

“That’s why you blow bubbles, Sadie. So the water doesn’t get in your nose and your mouth. Isn’t that right?” she says, smiling carefully at me.

“I guess so,” I say, a little dumbly.

—

So the water doesn’t get in your nose and your mouth.
Hmm
. So you are not poisoned. So you don’t drown. You float: Animated, alive and slippery. You tear through shark-infested waters and know where to find solitude and respite in cool green pools with names like the Crying Pond and the Lonely Lagoon. You swim through the legs of wicked men wearing rubber boots and break the surface to blow cyanide bubbles in their faces. They choke on your poisonous breath and collapse face first into their own troubled waters. They are dead men whose fat corpses rot slowly, their chins receding one by one, a thick oily film, their legacy of ten thousand English breakfasts of bacon and fried bread on the surface of the water. No one comes to rescue them. The terrified child still lies in bed awake at night, afraid to fall asleep. Sometimes the child’s heartbeat returns, but never for long, because she can never be sure that Daddy isn’t coming home. Her heartbeat will never be regular. She will dream of bodies, alive and rotting.

People don’t understand dead. They think it is all or nothing. I used to move between live and dead several times in the course of a day. Sometimes the transition was as brief and unremarkable as a sigh or a sentence. I must not speak to Sadie of the dead. I must pretend that, like her, I know nothing of their existence. I must do laps of living beside her.

—

It’s not a total victory but it is a total celebration. It is April, and Molly has invited us all to her house to celebrate. I am bringing Molly the brightest bunch of yellow and orange flowers I can find and I have stuck some of the marigolds into the purple straw hat I have woven for the occasion. I am wearing a lime-green vintage polyester dress with sequins over the bust. Heroin says to me, “You’re not really going out like that, are you?”

“Yeah, why not? You don’t like?”

“It kind of teeters on that fine line between eccentric and deranged,” she says.

“It’s my look,” I defend. “Dr. N. says it shows real personality.”

“
That
it certainly does,” she says.

—

Molly greets us with outstretched arms: me and Mary and the three other women at the practice. Several of Molly’s friends are already there, sipping martinis on the patio in the back yard. The house is filled with music and Molly is radiant. She and Harriet have agreed to equal time with Sadie, and Harriet has given Molly the money for a down payment on this house. She has started freelancing and has converted the attic into a bright, open work space. She looks happier than I have ever seen her.