Mouthing the Words (16 page)

He sleeps in my bed with me but I feel like a rigid twig next to him and if it weren’t for the fact that I fear Corinna wilting at the thought of losing the only son-in-law she might ever have, I would tiptoe away and sleep on the couch. I am losing him. He is my friend and my brother, gentle and supportive, and I am in love with someone else. I am in love for the first time in a way I would willingly give myself to, physically. I am
dismantled
, I am liquid, I am in search of flight, of merger. I am resident in utero. No part of me lives outside anymore and I am incapable of even touching Patrick’s hands.

“You’re not coming back, are you, Thelma,” he asks me sadly at the airport.

“I can’t leave,” I say helplessly.

“I want what’s best for you,” he says. “I thought you’d be better here for a while, but I didn’t think I was letting you go forever.”

“Oh God,” is all I can manage.

“It’s so sad,” he says.

“I’m too young for you,” I offer. He turns his head away in an effort to hide the unfamiliar sight of tears falling from an English face.

—

But I am too young. I am only four years old. And I am busy living in transference land with Dr. N. as my new mother, Mummy Roo. We live together in a spotless white house of hardwood floors and blue linen curtains and mottled marigolds in boxes on the windowsills. We have a big orange boy-cat named Teddy and a garden full of vegetables and cornflowers and cosmos and a tortoise named Roger who lives amongst the lettuces. Mummy Roo does a lot of baking and generally a lot of comfort-food making while I sit at a big round pine table copying new words into a lined notebook. “Teach me a new word,” I say to her without looking up from my book, and she says “Um. OK. How about bliss?”

It is not always a happy domestic arrangement, though. I get fractious and impatient and occasionally she is tired and a little bit irritable. We don’t fight, but for not fighting I seem to do an awful lot of yelling and crying. Sometimes she comes home tired from work and all I want to do is play and splash the bathwater but she tells me to hurry up because she has to go out and teach her class at 7:30 and the babysitter has arrived.

We continue in this day-to-day way for months, but then things start to go wrong. She is going to teach on a Thursday and I know Tuesday nights are her teaching nights. And I know she doesn’t usually wear her black dress and gold necklace for teaching. And this time Karen the babysitter isn’t coming, I’m going to Mummy Roo’s sister Liza’s, and I’m spending the night there with my cousin Jilly the girlie-girl who is nine years old and a priss.

I am throwing a temper tantrum. Mummy Roo is trying to lift me from the floor, but I am clutching the white carpet in my little fists, screaming, “I’m not going!” Somehow she manages to zip up my snowsuit over my hysterical heaving body and latch me into the passenger seat of the car. I am blubbering, my back pinned against Aunty Liza’s knees and her hands on my shoulders as Mummy Roo pulls the front door of Liza’s house closed. I am sure I am never going to see her again.

Aunty Liza is making potato latkes for dinner
because
she knows I love them, but I am ignoring her as she says, “Honey, come on over here and help me.” I am crouched in the corner, still in my snowsuit, with my knees pulled to my chest. I am closing my eyes and wishing myself into a stone, inhaling my limbs. I am resolving never to move again.

At some point I fall asleep there. When I wake up I am wearing one of Jilly the girlie-girl’s nightgowns and I am in bed, Jilly snoring like she is inhaling cupcakes beside me. I sit upright, panicked, and get out of bed and go into the hallway.

“Mummy,” I call out. “Mummy!” I shout in desperation.

Liza emerges in her fuzzy blue slippers, without her glasses, saying, “What is it, Thelma, can’t you sleep?”

“Mummy,” is all I can manage to whimper. “I want Mummy Roo.”

“Oh sweet,” says Aunty Liza. “She’ll be here in the morning, Thelma. I promise,” she reassures me.

But it’s not good enough. I am determined to get back into my snowsuit. Liza is fighting me all the way. Jilly pokes her head out of her bedroom doorway to see what all the fuss is about, and says, “She’s such a baby.”

“I am not!”

“Jilly, go back to bed,” Liza chastises. “You’re not helping.”

Jilly tells me to “take a pill” and skulks off.

Liza carries me to the kitchen and plonks me down
in
the middle of the kitchen table because I refuse to uncross my legs. “What’ll it be?” she asks.

“What?” I ask through a face full of tears.

“Chocolate or caramel?” she asks. But I’m still confused. “Ice cream. Chocolate or caramel?” she asks again, but I don’t answer. “Well, I’m having chocolate,” she says, opening the freezer door.

“Move over,” she says and comes to sit beside me on the table. I am confused. Grown-ups don’t sit on the table and eat chocolate ice cream. “Wanna bite?” she asks, waving a spoon in front of my face. I shake my head. “Didn’t your Mum ever do this when you were a baby?” she says, flying her spoon through the air. I shake my head again. “Didn’t she ever pretend it was an airplane?” she asks.

“Hale-Bopp comet,” I say quietly.

“Pardon?” asks Liza, looking at me.

“Pretend it’s Hale-Bopp comet,” I repeat.

“Will you eat it if I do?” asks Liza hopefully.

—

My eyes have just stopped hurting from all the crying, and things are just starting to get back to normal, when it is Thursday again. If I just pretend that it’s not Thursday, maybe Mummy Roo will forget it is, too. But no. Here she is home, being extra specially nice to me and I am suspicious. I refuse to take my bath until she has changed into her blue dress. Then I refuse to get out of the bath. She is trying to pull the plug but I am threatening to bite her.

“Thelma,” she is saying, “your behaviour is so aggressive.”

So I stand up and jump into her arms and shriek, “I’m out!” soaking her blue dress and her shiny red hair. “I’m out, Mummy!” I shout again.

“That’s good, Thelma,” she says, but she is obviously distressed. She is flicking the hangers in her closet again, asking me, “This one?” about the yellow and black one.

I shake my head and say, “No, it’s ugly.”

“Well, how about this one?” she says, pulling out the red one.

“No,” I say. “It’s stinky.”

“Well, I think it’s pretty,” she says, and starts to pull the blue one over her head.

“No!” I shout. “It’s ugly!” and I am off again, gripping little fistfuls of carpet and crying, but she appears to be ignoring me.

“Thelma,” she says seriously after a couple of minutes. “Sweetheart, can I talk to you? Can you just calm down a minute so I can talk to you? Look,” she says, lifting me off the floor onto her bed. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she says softly, sweeping my hair behind my ears. “I won’t be late. Karen’s here to babysit. You like Karen. You can paint some new pictures.”

“I don’t want to paint any new pictures,” I splutter. “I like the old ones.”

“I know, the old ones are beautiful,” she says. “But
you
haven’t made me a picture in a whole week. That’s not like you.”

“I forget how,” I say.

“Oh, I can’t imagine that you have,” she says. “You’ve just been a little disrupted.”

“Why do you have to go?” I plead with her.

“Because there are things I need to do,” she explains.

“But why can’t you take me with you?” I beg.

“I am taking you with me, Thelma. In here,” she says, tapping her chest. “Like I always do, everywhere I go. Can’t you do the same thing? Keep me here?” she asks, putting her finger to my chest.

—

Karen is here. She has detached the earphones from her Walkman so we can each listen to Nirvana with one ear. I’m not all that interested. I generally prefer the friendlier sounds of Big Bird. “No—right here, this part, listen to it, oh my God, it’s so cool,” she gushes.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I defer.

“Kurt Cobain, oh my God, he’s like immortal,” she says with dreamy intensity.

She makes me burnt toast with Marmite for dinner, my favourite. She is doing her homework across the table from me and I am trying to do a very complicated drawing of two hearts floating on top of an ocean full of sharks, when she says, “He’s actually kind of cute for an old guy. Well, not
old
old.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Your mum’s date,” she says.

“What’s a date?” I ask her.

“Well, like a guy and a girl …” she thinks aloud. “Well, like a guy and a girl go out together and, I dunno, see a movie or something and then maybe at the end of it, you know, smooch-a-rama or something.”

“Smooch-a-what?”

“Like kissing.”

“My mum is kissing?” I ask, horrified.

“I dunno,” says Karen. “Maybe. Who knows. People probably have different ideas about dating when you’re as old as she is.”

“My mum’s not old,” I say.

“Well, she’s not
old
old,” Karen agrees, “But she is, like, a parent.”

“She’s not old. She’s the same as me,” I say.

“Well, you look a little like her,” Karen laughs. “But you’re a little kid, Thelma. She’s a grown-up.”

“Is that why she’s kissing?”

“Guess so,” shrugs Karen. “I know. It’s gross to think about your parents kissing,” she says. “Makes me want to puke, actually.”

“My mum’s teaching her class,” I say.

“Oops,” says Karen.

“What?”

“Sorry, I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?” I ask.

“Well, that she was on a date. What kind of teacher goes out looking all sexy like that?”

“What’s sexy?” I ask her.

“Oh God. Maybe you should ask your mother,” says Karen. “On second thoughts, don’t. She’ll think I’ve been putting ideas into your head.”

“What ideas?”

“About the facts of life,” says Karen.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you go to school yet?” asks Karen, annoyed by my questions at this point.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “Senior kindergarten.”

“Well, don’t they teach you anything there?”

“Yeah. Adding and subtracting and the alphabet and modelling with clay and stuff,” I explain.

“Well, your mum’s not telling you the facts,” Karen advises.

“What facts?” I ask.

“Like this guy, for instance. My mum says your mum and him are an item. You better ask her.”

“What’s an item?” I ask.

“Oh, forget it,” says Karen, exasperated.

—

I am sleeping like an aspirin, round, white and tiny on Mummy Roo’s pillow when she comes in later that night. She is crawling into bed and pulling me down from the pillow and in under the covers. I am waking up.

“Don’t wake up, angel,” she whispers.

“What are the facts, Mummy?”

“What facts?” she sighs, tired.

“Of life.”

“What has Karen been telling you?” she asks me.

“That you were kissing and stuff. And that you’re an item.”

“Well, I don’t think Karen really knows the facts,” my mother says. “Can I tell you tomorrow, precious? Mummy’s very tired right now.”

“From kissing?” I ask her.

“No, sweetheart. Tomorrow, OK? Can’t we dream a dream now?”

“About what?” I ask.

“You choose.”

“About a big bloody monster who is going to suck the sun out of the sky.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very happy dream, Thelma. How about a compromise. How about a big bright sun that is going to shrivel up all the monsters and turn them into shiny pennies.”

“Into raisins.”

“OK, sweetheart. Raisins.”

—

He is called a boyfriend. Mummy Roo has a boyfriend called Peter and she wants to introduce him to me. I am screaming at him as he stands there at the front door—” Get away from me! I don’t want you!” The four-year-old is screaming, “Don’t. Don’t let him in here. I don’t want a Daddy!”

“You motherfucker, you pig shit, you fucking rapist!” screams the twenty-six-year-old.

“Why don’t you want a Daddy, Thelma? What are
you
afraid of?” Dr. Novak is asking me gently. “Speak to me, Thelma. What did he do to you?”

“This mouth,” I stammer. “There is this dream of a mouth—huge and bloody—tearing apart these stitches that bind it closed. It’s just pulling these stitches through its own flesh. It is trying to inhale the world, it is sucking with all its might, sucking everything in. It’s going to suck me in. It makes such a terrible noise. Like thunder. It is always the image of this mouth.”

“Whose mouth?” she asks me. “Whose mouth is it?”

“I don’t know. Mine? But I am on the outside of it. It is mine but it’s trying to suck me in.”

“What happens, Thelma? What gets sucked in?”

“Him,” I say in quiet shock.

“Your father?” she asks me.

“Every speck of vile sperm that has ever dropped in this fucking world. It’s all here,” I say, pointing to my lips. I know them cracked and swollen. I know the feel of these lips. The taste. The salt burning.

Who Needs a U-Haul?

HEROIN HEARD THE
call of my wild. She is my wild. She is my unspoken one. She is my stoic, silent soldier. She heard me speak and she came home to me to open wide her wild mouth and scream the scream of our lifetime. She came to me in the middle of last night—the last night of the dreaming. It’s been years and years since I have seen her open her mouth, and what comes out now seems something more like an unrehearsed growl than speech.

I would celebrate her emergence from silence more if she wasn’t so insistent upon using my body as a vehicle through which to express herself. She’s not as savvy and sophisticated as I had imagined. She is actually rather crass and given to hysterical outbursts at moments even I consider inappropriate. Corinna suggests that maybe we’d prefer to eat in my room and Heroin spits at her as she stands there with a tray of
ravioli
and brown bread. “Must you always patronize me!” she yells, and slams the door in Corinna’s face.

I feel quite torn. Corinna is only doing her, albeit limited, best. But in my room Heroin says, “Look, it’s an impossible situation. I feel quite stifled here.”