Nicky and I cut into the meat, pushing the blunted edges of our knives against the bone to sever the charred flesh. Maybe if we ate the way she wanted she would be happy. I glanced at Nicky but he just glared into his meat.
Eating didn’t work. Sylvia sniffed in hard. She whirled around to the stove, seized a wooden spoon and brandished it like a sword, eventually turning it on herself, beating it against her bony forearms. Nicky slid off his seat and crouched under the table. I raised a piece of burnt pork to my lips. Sylvia ran from the room. She slammed two doors, one after the other, and wailed.
The portion of meat perched on the end of my fork was black on the outside, inside a pinkish grey. I hated meat, always had. I would sit at the table through Sam and Sylvia’s dinner conversations, chewing on a single piece until my jaw felt like thick rubber bands and ached when I tried to separate my teeth. Given the chance, I would slip away to the washroom and let the chewed flesh fall from my lips into the toilet bowl while I ran water and pretended to wash my hands. I wasn’t sure whether Sylvia ever found out, but lately, except for tonight, it hadn’t mattered when I didn’t put meat on my plate, those nights it was even served.
I popped the triangle of pork into my mouth and held it there, letting the grease seep into my palate. I wondered how long it would take me to melt the meat with my juices, how long I could sit there, squeezing the meat against the roof of my mouth with my tongue before it would dissolve and the pork flesh would become part of me without the aid of my teeth.
I picked up the knife and lapsed into the game Sylvia had slapped my hands for playing when I was younger: mommy fork and daddy knife. I danced them lightly along the edge of the table, thinking of how suave they both were, how debonair, and how they both helped each other. I didn’t notice Sam was home until the bedroom door slammed. Nicky was gone. So was his chop.
With my tongue, I nudged the chewed pork through my teeth. It plopped on the table. I went to the hall doorway. High animal yelps and chokes came from my parents’ bedroom. The fat from the meat made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. My whole body was arid, porous. I wanted to see inside the room. I couldn’t hear Sam’s voice. Was he going crazy too?
I tucked in my chin. This was the first time I’d said that word, even if it was only inside my mind. Crazy. I shook my head and widened my eyes. If my mom was crazy I wanted to see everything, to witness all the qualities about Sylvia that put her in this category, to understand what about Sylvia defined her as crazy and took her away from being the mother I had known and turned her into a beast who’d beat herself less than an hour before.
The sounds stopped so I snuck closer, wrapping myself around the hallway’s French door. The bedroom door opened and Sam filled the frame. He was wearing the tight green pants — with the yellow stripe down each leg — of his Tecumseth Chiefs ball uniform and a white T-shirt, his neck and arms a golden red from his first summer burn. He pushed the heels of both his hands against the crosspiece under his gun rack, then jostled past me, reaching back to yank the door shut. For a split second I was able to see inside.
The bedside lamp was on and a thin crack of buttery light illuminated the hallway. A noise like whales keening started up, surrounding me as I glimpsed a white pile on the bed. The noises came from here. The white heap thrashed and moaned but no matter how hard I tried to figure out the angles and limbs and monstrous lumpy middle, it didn’t look human.
Just as Sam pulled the door closed, I caught sight of something more. Beneath the ragged bear hair, the face was red and black and much bigger than a person’s but I knew it was my mother. And knew in that brief wedge-of-light moment before my father’s sun-reddened hand pulled the wrought iron handle and latched the door on my mother, that the face held a secret. A secret I did not want. A secret only I would understand.
4 Deliverance
After Sam shut the bedroom door on Sylvia, I retreated upstairs where I pulled on an old pair of terry-cloth sleepers and lay on my bed peering through my afghan’s loops at the maple’s shadow limbs crawling and heaving across the stippled ceiling. Downstairs, doors opened and closed and a car left the driveway then soon after another one arrived, but I didn’t get up to see which. Ten minutes later Grandma Vi called up to tell me to pack some T-shirts, I was coming to sleep over. I put my running shoes over the sleeper feet and went out to her car. Nicky came too but Sam picked him up in the middle of the night so when I woke up in Vi’s spare bed, Nicky was gone.
Vi’s house was on the highway, not far away at all, though we hadn’t seen her much in recent months. After a couple of days I could separate the smells: budgie shavings, urine, cigarette smoke, burnt meat and lavender perfume. Some mornings a sweet vermouth scent from the living room where Vi had left the bottle open the night before.
The one-storey house was dark with the damp feeling of a basement. The lamps were stout, able to spare only weak circles that were difficult to read by. Each room except the kitchen had one whole mirrored wall. In the living room, an autumn forest scene that covered a second wall embarrassed me because it was obvious that such a forest would fool no one.
I slept in the spare room at the back of the house, where the buzz and rumble of Vi’s snores and the early morning truck traffic woke me before dawn. A set of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books lined the shelf of the double bed. I pulled them down one by one and read abbreviated versions of books like Valley of the Dolls and Up the Down Staircase, a flashlight held under my chin. Vi had other books too, paperbacks with glossy black covers and raised red lettering and titles like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and Heiter Skelter that I read when Vi wasn’t around.
The back yard was short, wide and treeless. A waist-high chain-link fence separated it from acres of flat field whose openness induced a dizziness in me that the rolling hills near our house had not prepared me for. A sliding door led from the living room to a patio made of concrete squares etched between with dandelion leaves. The grass looked bitten and brown. While Vi slept in the mornings I lounged under a canvas umbrella, my bum on one nylon-weave lawn chair, my feet on the other, my skin slathered in baby oil and Alice in Wonderland on my lap. Vi’s pinched back yard looked unlikely to offer up a rabbit hole for me to fall into. Groundhog maybe.
Grandma Vi was the only person I knew who wore wigs, alternating between a frosty blond shag and a curly chestnut. She shuffled around her house in cracked gold lamé mules and pantsuits in her favourite colours: turquoise, purple and orange. Each afternoon she spent a good forty-five minutes building up her face, starting with a solid layer of Caramel Creme foundation. A pair of black horn-rims with a rhinestone insert on each tip gave her the look of a great horned owl on the attack. She talked from the minute she got up — about her operations, how her husband Earl had run around and how her sons never visited her when she was in the hospital. How Sylvia was in the hospital now and it was a good thing Sam went. At least he said he did. I didn’t know the word uterus until I moved into Vi’s. Now I was hearing on a daily basis about Vi’s hysterectomy, when they removed her source of life. Vi never forgot to emphasize how if it weren’t for her uterus, I wouldn’t be here.
The first night with Nicky sleeping on the couch, I lay awake beneath the curved vinyl spines of the Condensed Books and took account of all I’d done to cause my mother to go crazy. I’d broken the rules of love and imagined my mother was a witch. I was cruel to Nicky. I’d yelled at my mother, sworn at her, called her names. My mother had howled like a beast and struck herself with utensils because I was too much to handle.
That night I refused to go to sleep. If craziness was catching, I wanted to be aware the minute it happened so I could stop it. Maybe that was my mother’s flaw: she hadn’t paid attention and the craziness had taken her over. I resolved from then on to pay attention.
I was no stranger to staying up nights with my thoughts. Some nights I cried for hours with the fierce love I felt for the baby Jesus and the grown-up Jesus.
God was a different matter.
In the waiting room at the doctor’s office