I was trying to back away from her to escape the confines of glass and bodies. Mom grabbed me by my shoulders. ‘Get away from me! You revolt me; get out of my sight, and you can forget about dinner!’ With that shove I began falling, banging against stairs, crash landing on the tiles below, my head full of stars, like in the cartoons. I could hear Mom shouting at me, ‘Get up, you little actress, stop your attention-seeking and go to your room.’
I guess she and Simon stepped over me to go to dinner. I couldn’t see, felt awfully nauseated, and couldn’t even stand up, let alone walk, so I crawled to my room, grateful to find my bed and rest my head. I lay there, petrified that Mom would come back, petrified by the thudding that knocked against my skull and blind eyes, petrified that I’d vomit in my bed.
Later, Mom woke me, forcing me into my pajamas. For a few days afterward she was calm and smiley, but by then I knew better than to think that Mom had remorse, that she’d done her worst and things could only get better. By then I’d learned to be grateful for a respite from her anger, all the while remaining vigilant against whatever might happen.
I turned from the narrow bathroom window, sighing at the memory. It was stupid to be still calling out to the universe’s magic when it sure hadn’t made any difference to my life so far. Embarrassing hope. Shameful life. Simon’s bathwater lay slumped, murky with soap, shampoo and probably even pee, inert and uninviting. At least it looked deep enough to reach my waistline. I figured it was best to get it over with before my time was up. A quick slide of the bum, balancing myself with one hand and covering my nose with the other, and I was underwater, peaceful, alone, fuzzy curls twirling about my face— ‘Strawberry blonde,’ a nice lady had once said. ‘Mousy,’ Mom had replied. ‘She looks like Annie, from the movie,’ the lady had said. ‘Just a ridiculous number of freckles,’ Mom had countered.
In the bath I closed my eyes and pretended I was dead, daring myself to hold my breath long enough so that I’d faint and never breathe again. I wasn’t brave enough to die, and I was even more afraid of being caught with bathwater higher than my knees—big rule: I was not to have bathwater above my ankles! Mom would inspect at random times, as though she needed reassurance that she was depriving me of something that only the boys deserved. Raising myself from my potential grave, water cascading down my back, gasping for air, I pulled the plug to watch the precious secret water swirl down the drain. Glug! So what if I hadn’t washed? So what If I hadn’t shampooed my hair? Nobody cared, and I’d always be ‘Stinky!’ no matter how much I tried to scrub myself away. Jealousy made my toes curl. Simon was Mom’s favorite child, her angel, Steven her second favorite; she hated me. I felt I hated the boys. Hated them! I hated myself more for not being good enough to love.
Having moved into the new house just before the holidays, I wasn’t familiar with it yet. I didn’t know where the floorboards creaked or whether doors whined. I managed to dash down the hallway to my room without being noticed, blind for the moment it took my eyes to adjust to the murky light of not-quite-dark. Mom was always up on new trends, whether fashion or interior decor— those were the things that mattered most to her, after being thin. My room reflected her taste in modern trends: a black bed; a geometric doona cover; meanwhile, a poster of Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford, two of Mom’s ‘favorites’, had been stuck to the wall above my bed. I’d have preferred David Cassidy, myself. I had a way of passing the time while I tried to hide in silence and invisibility, a way of disappearing into a place where I could do as I pleased, which also mitigated against being busted doing something that might anger Mom. All I needed was a picture. The poster served as well as any other picture from a magazine or book: it became a doorway into another world. I was the one in the red cossie, with the beautiful piled-up hair, whom Robert Redford had just rescued from a freak wave. He was carrying me to my house by the edge of the beach, where he’d build a fire to warm us, and we’d roast marshmallows and think we were the luckiest people in the world! But I couldn’t get into my fantasy; I was on edge. There were too many foreign sounds, no routine yet to judge movements by. Welkom.
Chapter Four
It became fully dark while I sat there, waiting and listening. I could hear Simon in his room—just next door to mine—playing with his Lego, and although his bedroom light spilled out into the hallway and shared itself with mine, his life was a world away from my reality. He mostly avoided me, especially when it was obvious that Mom was mad at me, which was most of the time. I could hear stuff going on in the kitchen, music floating over from Steven’s room. I waited.
Startling light burst over me—Mom was standing in the doorway, finger on the light switch, her favorite way of making an entrance. She loved making me jump with fright or freeze from fear, like an animal caught in headlights of a car. ‘What’s wrong with you, for God’s sake? You’re a freak! Abnormal! What child sits in the dark like a statue?’ She was still wearing a pink tracksuit she’d won in a Fair Lady competition, her car travel outfit, good enough to be seen by total strangers but ‘only low-class women wear tracksuits’ at any other time. I liked Mom in the tracksuit; she appeared softer, kinder, less bony and hard. It was a pity that her makeup had smudged off during the day, though, because she no longer had eyebrows, making her cold blue eyes pop out at me. Her usually lipsticked lips were drawn tight and thin by the blonde bun on top of her head. I was ten times more afraid of Mom without her face made up. ‘Get to the kitchen, now! Your father has something to say.’
I stayed put. There was no way I was going to walk through that doorway with Mom standing there. She marched over and grabbed me by the ear, pinching as hard as she could, lifting me to my feet. ‘Are you deaf?’
‘No, Mommy.’
‘Then goddamn do as I say.’
‘Yes, Mommy.’ I remember wondering what on earth Dad wanted to ‘talk’ to us about. I just couldn’t think. Dad never talked to us about anything, not unless he was furious, then ‘talk’ involved discipline, mostly a wallop on the backside. There were two ways I felt about being disciplined by Dad. Firstly, I felt sad because I had really let him down—he would tell me so—and, secondly, I felt great, because I could tell that Dad hated doing it, and he usually patted me on the back when I cried. To me, that meant he really loved me, so I made sure I cried a lot! But that didn’t mean I welcomed facing an angry Dad at any time.
He was sitting at the kitchen table looking a little nervous, and the boys were there too. Clearing his throat, he spoke in an unusually somber tone. ‘We’ve got something important to share with you two.’ Indicating Simon and myself, he went on. ‘Kate, Mom is not your real mum. Your mum died when you were a baby, just weeks old. She’d come over from Scotland with me to start a new life in Africa, but she fell ill very suddenly; there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. Your grandfather, her dad, still lives in Aberdeen, as far as I know; there’s no other family for me to tell you about.’
Just like that, everything made sense to me. That’s why Mom doesn’t love me! My heart was just about to burst with happiness; I wanted to shout hooray! I wanted to jump up and kiss Dad and say ‘thank you’, but I knew that would be inappropriate. But he was obviously waiting for some sort of response, and my mind hastily calculated exactly what Mom would want to hear.
‘I’m glad my mommy died so that Mom could be my mommy.’ Lie! I hated saying it; Dad flinched, aghast, and pulled his chair back from the table as if removing himself from the revulsion of me. I wished I hadn’t used those words—desperately wished I could take them back—but Mom seemed pleased, giving Dad a ‘look’ that was good for me. My mind was reeling. ‘Mommy is not my mum! My mum is dead! No wonder Mom doesn’t love me! I don't have to care any more; I don't belong to her, I have my own mother.’ My mind was short circuiting on the answer to its greatest puzzle: ‘Why doesn’t Mom love me?’
Mom scraped her chair closer to Simon’s, drawing him into her shoulder, combing her fingers through his blond hair and kissing the top of his head. ‘You had a very special Daddy, Simon; you and Steven would have adored