Burnt brown sugar lingered in the air, sweet and needy. Lily had baked an apple crumble. Yet Rita was busy, her skin covered in sweat and grime, more than her mother could ever wipe away, and she just wanted to grab her boxes and immerse herself in unwrapping wine glasses and popping bubble wrap in the quiet of her new apartment. Besides, as she’d come to tell herself over the years, keeping their relationship on an even keel meant managing their time together very carefully. Too much chit-chat would only fill her with irritation or worse yet, that gnawing, empty feeling: they’d never see eye to eye on anything. She’d been cheated of that natural mother-daughter closeness.
But Lily had insisted, and as she poured the tea, it sloshed on her hand. Rita sprang up to run the faucet until the water was ice cold. How thin and frail her mother suddenly seemed, her eyes distracted and adrift, lost in some internal landscape that hemmed her in and filled her with a nervous, fluttering energy. It was a look that Rita and Tom had learned to recognize over the years. Whenever they saw it, they both felt an impulse to run.
“You okay, Mom?”
A dip into silence. “Where’re you moving to, again?”
“Kensington Market.”
“Oh, we used to live not far.”
Actually, Margueretta Street was a fair bit farther west.
“We always owned our own house, though,” Lily added.
Here we go again, Rita thought. Her slide down the social scale. The shame of being a single mom living in a crappy rental. Next Lily would reminisce about the beautiful Tudor that Rita and Cal had once owned on Golfdale Road, the Mercedes she used to drive, the cottage in Muskoka. The cleaning lady who’d ironed Cal’s shirts while Rita pushed her Peg Perego pram past the WASPy neighbours, who probably mistook her for the nanny.
But Lily’s eyes remained fixed on the cream wall; it might have been a movie screen and she was waiting for the film to begin. “Before your grandfather bought that house, we moved around quite a bit.”
“We did?”
“Oh.” Lily had a flush of confusion. “Was that before you were born?”
“I only remember that one house.”
“Yeah.” Lily nodded a little frantically, like she was trying to convince another person in her head. “The house on Margueretta was the only place we lived.”
What memory was she struggling to push from her mind? Memories of the internment? Excitement rose in Rita’s gut: she might have been teetering at the top of a roller coaster, wind tearing through her hair, before the inevitable plunge. Though it never came — of course it didn’t. Lily’s expression smoothed over, as always, everything hidden behind that placid mask.
“Our house was the best on the block. With a bit of money, I could’ve fixed it up into something special. In that neighbourhood, though, why bother? Not after all the black folks moved in and ruined everything.”
“Mom. You can’t say stuff like that.” Strange how being the target of racism had made Lily all the more bigoted, as if pointing fingers at others was the only way she knew how to shield herself. That was the absurd way the world worked.
Yet they were getting away from the real source of Rita’s exasperation. A hot tide swept up her neck. “You don’t have to be ashamed to talk about it — I know what happened, Mom. You were rounded up and thrown in camps, like a bunch of diseased animals!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And watch your tone.”
“Just admit it. You’ll feel so much better!”
“Admit what?” The amazing thing was that Lily looked genuinely perplexed, as though a stranger on the street had called out her name, having mistaken her as someone else.
Always this clash of wills. And Lily’s signature strategy — surprisingly effective — was to retreat into her shell of proclaimed ignorance. It was taking Rita back, way back. She’d regressed to her teenage self again, hormonally out of whack, living on the verge of glassy tears. The more helpless Lily acted, the more Rita felt it: this cruel, uncontrollable, animalistic urge to tear apart the little world her mother had fabricated out of tissue-paper lies and delusions.
The cuckoo clock let out its mechanized clangs and shrieks, punching the air several times. If she kept this up, she’d never get out of here. Now wasn’t the time.
Another time. Maybe. Not.
Like Lily would ever open up about that stuff anyway.
“I have to go, Mom. The truck’s due back soon.”
A bit of apple crumble, a bit of mother-daughter chit-chat. A bit of screaming. Nothing out of the ordinary.
It wasn’t until they were by the door that Rita noticed anything unusual. She was struck by how her mother’s eyes had glassed over with a pleading mien.
“You’ve had a good life, haven’t you, dear?”
It was such a funny thing to ask. So sudden and out of character. Why would Lily have asked that? Rita didn’t know how to respond.
“I guess so?”
Now she wished she’d taken the time to glance back and examine Lily’s face for some clue as to what was going through her mind. The truth was she’d been concerned with nothing more than a quick exit.
Their bedroom was dim and humid, dust glittering in beams of sunlight. It seemed as though it hadn’t been inhabited in days; Gerald must have started sleeping in the guest room.
The bedspread, a faded peony print, was a leftover from his first wife. It looked strange next to the yellowed scrolls of Japanese calligraphy. As a kid Rita had fantasized that the scrolls were family heirlooms: the words of their ancestors. When she asked Grandpa who had painted them, however, he said they were by ladies at the Buddhist church. Rita clung to her belief the scrolls were somehow special; it didn’t matter that she had no idea what they said. Speaking Japanese would only make things harder on them all, according to Grandpa, so she and Tom only understood a smattering of baby talk, mostly to do with bodily functions — shi-shi, benjo. Yet when she looked at the calligraphy, the dripping black ink communicated a feeling of mystery and enchantment that went beyond words.
Rita could picture her mother perched on the worn, upholstered stool in front of the vanity. The circular mirror, aged and foggy in patches, would cast her image back dimly, waveringly. The tabletop was so crowded that things had to be put in shoeboxes. All her perfume bottles with stoppers shaped like diamonds and shepherdesses, tubes of lipstick running the gamut from a barely perceptible nude to blood red. Discontinued shades of coral and copper, nothing ever thrown out. Samples of this and that elixir, unopened silver packets full of promise, saved for a rainy day. So many jars and bottles for Lily to dip her fingertips into, massaging her skin in upward, feathery motions.
She always took special care around her right cheekbone, where the scar had once been. That was why she used to wear her hair like Veronica Lake, the curtain of hair providing some concealment. After fading over the decades, the vestiges of the scar had been removed through plastic surgery, like a dribble of pink wax, wiped clean. Yet Rita would sometimes catch her mother still touching her cheek, her fingertips searching for the ridges of something no longer there. And that was how Rita felt, too. She’d never found out anything about Lily’s scar, just one of the many things they’d all learned to pretend was invisible.
Hot prickles of tears. She sank to the bed, head in her hands. The room was rocking, awash in a million clashing perfumes, a floral din. She didn’t feel up to being here at all.
Then a framed photo caught her eye. Gap-toothed, rabbit smile, and a little purple barrette peeking out like a glimmer of normalcy.