Not Suitable For Family Viewing (19 page)

Thursday, 3 p.m.

Radio Mimi

“The Right Place at the Right Time.” Author Tracy Hamilton discusses the chance encounter that changed her life and inspired her
New York Times
bestseller,
It Can’t Be You.

Debbie’s just finishing up someone’s highlights when I get to the salon. She takes one look at my black eye, squawks like some chain-smoking chicken and sends foils flying all over the floor. I try to help pick them up but she won’t let me. She sits me down and makes me tell her the whole “accident” story again.

She and her customer cluck away about the decline of Western civilization for a while but eventually have to get back to deciding whether to go with ash blond again or try chestnut for a change. While I wait, I browse through the latest
Us Magazine
and daydream about Levi. I’m thoroughly enjoying myself until I see a sidebar about Mom (“Mimi’s Got Man Trouble! Her Ex’s Ex Tells All.”) I know it’s just garbage but it hurts. She’s my mother. She’s a human being. Why don’t they just leave her alone? I toss the magazine back onto the coffee table and wait my turn.

Luckily Debbie takes my injuries to heart. She’s way gentler this time when she scrubs my head. She’s so nice I actually let her straighten my hair too. While she’s at it, I take out the yearbook. I tell her I’ve decided to focus my research on her graduating class. I ask if she could tell me a little about each person.

It’s like asking Anita if she’d mind reorganizing my drawers. I’ve created a monster.

She
tut-tuts
about the poor Bisters and makes some
wink-wink
comment about how she wished she got her claws into Percy Hiltz before he took off to see the world, but most of the stuff she talks about means nothing to me. I have to sit through these long stories about Janet who ran off with her best friend’s fiancé and Darville who died in the terrible car crash and poor Angie who has that environmental illness where she’s allergic to everything, including her husband, but who wouldn’t be, with a guy like Gerry? (Debbie gets hives just looking at him. She can’t imagine having his babies.)

I realize I’ve got to come up with a way of hurrying Debbie along.

I go, “Un-huh…un-huh…yup…yup,” until she takes a breath, then I point at Rosie’s picture and go, “And what about her? Where did she end up?”

“Rosie Ingram? She didn’t go far. She lives just around the corner.”

I go, “What?” My head jerks around so hard I hear my neck bones crack.

She says, “Sorry, honey. Did I burn you?”

I rub my head and act like, yeah, that’s the problem. I have to keep calm. “Are you sure? Rosemary Ingram?” I point at the picture in the book again. “She lives here?”

“Yup. Well, she’s not Rosemary Ingram any more, of course.
She’s Rosemary Crouse. But she definitely lives here. I don’t know why, but she does. She won some lottery a couple of years ago, and what does she go and do? Fly to Jamaica? Move to Hawaii? No. She starts up a daycare centre in Shelton. Shelton! Can you believe that? Thank God she did. I mean, me with four screamers. She definitely saved my life—and theirs too, for that matter. But seriously. Is that what you’d do if you’d won a pile of money? Look after somebody else’s brats? In
Shelton
?”

I say, “No. I don’t think so,” but the truth is I’m not thinking at all. It’s like I was hit by some power surge that blew out all the memory on my personal computer. The screen’s gone black and there’s smoke billowing out the sides.

If Rosemary still lives here, who’s Mimi
?

Debbie takes a hunk of hair and pulls it straight. (I wish someone would do the same thing with the mess
inside
my head.) She says, “Why are you so interested in Rosie anyway?”

“Um, I…I just heard people talk about her, I guess.”

“You did? That’s funny. What would people be saying about Rosie? She’s not the kind of person people usually talk about. She’s just this sweet, quiet girl, you know. Pretty ordinary.”

Rosie’s more than that. I don’t know what—but she’s got to be more than that.

I swallow. “Do you think there’s any way I could meet her? I’d kind of like to, you know, interview her.”

Debbie takes both hands and smoothes the front of my hair into matching swoops. “Sure, that’s easy enough. What time is it?”

I check my watch. “Quarter to four.”

“She’ll still be at the daycare. You want to see her now? I could call her and ask if it would be okay.”

I give this little tiny nod of my head. That’s all I can do. I’m practically paralyzed. Would I be better knowing or not knowing who Rosie Ingram really is? I feel like one of those fancy show horses that skid to a stop right before the jump.

Debbie goes, “Oh, hey. What’s your name? I never thought to ask before. I’ve got to say who’s coming.”

“Opal Schwartz.”

Debbie goes, “Your name’s Opal? No kidding!” and heads to the phone.

I get out of the chair and take off the cape. I have to lean against the counter for support. If Rosemary Miriam Ingram isn’t Mimi, then nothing makes sense. I’m back to zero.

“It’s a go,” Debbie says when she returns. “Rosie was a bit shy at the idea of being interviewed but I said you were nice. I warned her about your accident too, so you don’t have to go all through that again. Don’t expect too much from her, though. She’ll probably just want to talk about some kid’s tooth falling out. Hope that’s okay.”

I do my best to smile, and give her a twenty-dollar tip. She tries to hand it back but I won’t let her.

One way or another the tip she just gave me has to be worth way more than that.

Thursday, 4 p.m.

You, You and Mimi
—BFF Special

Mimi celebrates the joy of friendship with twenty of her best—and most famous—friends.

I stand outside the daycare for a long time and just stare. Some lady comes out with her little girl and says, “Can I help you?” but she doesn’t mean it. She means,
What type of nervous, sweaty creep hangs around outside a daycare centre? Whose child are you planning to abduct?
She no doubt saw Mimi’s special, “Pervert-Proof your Kids!”

I tell her, “No. Thanks. I’m just here to see Rosie.”

She smiles at me but hangs around watching until I go in.

I poke my head in the door just as kids are getting ready to be picked up. A little bell rings. A lady with beige curly hair and sort of see-through skin looks up and I know immediately. This is the real Rosemary Ingram.

Who was Mom trying to fool? The glasses are different from the ones in the yearbook but the nose is the same and so is the look in her eyes. (Our biology teacher told us shyness is genetic. You
understand that right away when you see Rosie. It’s pretty obvious she was born that way.)

She notices me and lifts her hand in a little wave. She gives the kid she’s holding to another lady then starts moving toward me. She’s hesitant. It’s like she’s walking down the aisle but she’s not totally convinced she wants to marry the guy at the other end.

She says, “You must be Opal. Opal Schwartz, is it?” You can tell she’s from Port Minton by her accent.

I say, “Yes. Hello.” She’s got a sad little smile on her face. She’s standing in this mousey way but she’s staring right at me. It’s freaking me out.

She goes, “Why don’t you come and sit down here where it’s quiet and you can ask me your questions?” It sounds like, “Wo-i don ya come and sit down he-yah…”

I have to concentrate to understand her. How come Mrs. Hiltz doesn’t have an accent like that? She’s a Port Minton girl too.

Rosie leads me into a neon yellow room with a string of letters dangling from the ceiling. The place is full of Duplo sets and giant stuffed animals and tiny little kids’ furniture. We sit on a bright blue sofa that’s about six inches off the ground. I feel like Will Ferrell in
Elf
but Rosie’s right at home. She’s not much bigger than a child herself.

“Now what would you like to know?” she says.

Let’s just get this over with.

“Tell me about yourself,” I say.

She blushes so fiercely I worry I might have blown it. She starts glancing around, as if she’s searching for an escape route. It makes me feel sorry for her. I don’t want her to bolt on me.

I say, “For instance, high school. What was high school like?”

“Oh,” she says. She seems to relax. “I thought you meant…” She shakes her head and stops. “High school…” She thinks for a second, then turns back to me. “Well. There were lots of dances and hockey games and things to do if you wanted to do them, I guess.”

I make my voice all sweet. “Did
you
want to do them?”

“Want to? Me?…Maybe, a little. Sometimes. But I never did. I’ve never been much for, I guess you’d say, socializing and that, eh? I’m timid. That’s why I like it here. With the little children. They take you for what you are. No one expects me to be much of a talker.”

She looks at me again and smiles. Her eyes go back and forth across my face. It’s too intense. It’s like something a mother would do.

The thing that I’ve been trying not to think barges into my head.

We’re both staring at each other now. I can hear little kids screaming and laughing in the other room but somehow I get the feeling we’re all alone.

I swallow. It’s like my head is full of reporters, all shouting out questions I should ask, but can’t.

I do my best. I say, “Did you have any…friends on the hockey team?” I put a little pause in there, hoping she’ll pick up on it, understand what I’m after.

“Any…friends?” she says. She pulls at a thread sticking out of the arm of the couch. She shakes her head and laughs a quiet, little laugh. “No,” she says. “I didn’t have any ‘friends’ on the hockey team. I wasn’t exactly in their league.” She puts her hand up to her mouth. “Oh!” she goes. “I made a joke. ‘Not in their league.’ Hockey league. Get it?”

She blushes again. I try to chuckle.

I say, “But did you
know
the guys on the team?”

“Oh yes,” she says. “Sure I did. I knew the guys. Everybody knew them. I can’t imagine any of them would have thought of themselves as my friend, though.”

This isn’t going anywhere. Mimi’s the one who had the ring. Is it just a fluke I found it with Rosie’s picture?

She says, “In fact, I only really had one friend…one
true
friend, I guess you’d say.”

Then she stares at me. She stares at me so hard I feel like she’s trying to mind-meld me or something.

I say, “Who was that?”

This look travels across her face. I don’t know if it’s surprise or confusion or worry or what. It doesn’t stay long enough for me to figure it out. It’s like lights from a car driving past. It’s there then it’s gone.

“Minerva…” she says. She sort of smiles but her eyes have gone all glittery. “Minerva Bister was my best friend.”

I’m starting to understand something but I don’t know exactly what. My imagination is whispering things to me that are too scary even to think about.

“Oh,” I say. “How did you meet her?”

“In the washroom at school.” She almost whispers, as if it’s too shocking to say out loud. “It was just after the people come in and busted up Bister Island. I’d got some glue on my hands and I went to clean them off. Minerva was standing in the middle of the washroom, looking at the stalls. I could tell she didn’t know what to do. Poor thing. She didn’t know how to use the toilet. She didn’t even know how to ask.”

Rosie laughs as if she’s going to tell me a secret.

“I’m timid, but next to Minerva, I was like the class clown. She
could barely get her mouth open. Didn’t help she talked funny and called things by the wrong names. Old-fashioned names. I remember she used to call the kitchen the ‘scullery.’ Sounded scary to me but that’s what she called it…”

For someone so shy, Rosie’s having no trouble talking now. It’s like she can’t stop herself. She says, “Anyway, somehow I managed to figure out what the problem was. I showed her how to flush the toilet and how to pump soap out of the dispenser and how to tear off a bit of paper towel without the whole roll barrelling out—and we were friends from then on!”

“That was nice of you,” I say.

Rosie shakes her head. “No, I wasn’t being nice. I liked Minerva right off. We understood each other. We weren’t like the other kids. They flirted in the cafeteria and talked back to the teachers. They were always showing off, acting big. That wasn’t us. We were quiet. We liked to sit around and knit, do our handicrafts, stuff like that. I wasn’t real keen on books, but Minerva was. I’d wait until she’d finish, then make her tell me the whole story.
Wuthering Heights,
that was my favourite! Do you know that one?”

I nod. Yes, I know that one. Mom reads it every year. She’s had it on her Book Club at least two or three times, enough to turn it into a bestseller again.

Rosie goes, “Wasn’t it exciting? Heathcliff and Catherine and everybody marrying the wrong people! I just loved it—especially the way Minerva read it. She used to do voices for the different characters. You’d never think someone that shy could act—but she could. It was better than the movies…I was some sad when she stopped coming to school.”

“She did?” I say. “Why?”

Rosie shrugs as if the answer’s obvious. “Couldn’t take the looks from the other kids, the snickering and all that. Her cousins stuck it out. They acted like they didn’t even hear it. But it was too much for Minerva. Too shaming. She stopped going to school one day and never come back. Mrs. Hiltz learned her after that.”

“Mrs.
Hiltz
taught her?” Why wouldn’t Mrs. Hiltz have told me that herself when we were talking about the Bisters?

“‘Taught her,’ that’s right. I should know better than saying ‘learned her’…Yup, Mrs. Hiltz was fostering her and she took it on herself to do the teaching too. Did you ever see that movie
My Fair Lady
? That’s just what it was like. When she come here, Minerva didn’t have the first clue about manners or hygiene or eating with a knife and fork. Nothing like that. Mrs. Hiltz taught her all that stuff. Taught her to talk like a city person too. Suddenly, it was us kids who grew up in the Port that had the funny accent and the bad manners, not Minerva.”

Rosie laughs again in that embarrassed way and then whispers to me. “At first, my mum didn’t like Minerva coming over to visit. She was a Bister and all, eh? After a while, though, Mum was begging her to stay so she could teach us youngsters some ‘etiquette’!”

Funny to hear her say such a fancy word. It makes me think of that English lady who came on the show. She was big into etiquette too. She taught Mom and me which forks to use, how to get stuff out from between your teeth without anyone noticing, how to butter your bread. I hated that segment. It was so fake. Mom knew all that stuff already. She was a real stickler for it.

Rosie’s smiling but I get the feeling that something’s made her sad. She hangs her head and stares at the floor.

There’s a pause, then she says, “Oh, would you look at these
shoes!” Her toes have poked right through the top of her dirty pink sneakers. She’s trying to be cheery, change the subject. “Minerva would be mortified to see me wearing these.”

She puts her hand on the side of her face like she’s pretending to be appalled.

“
Mortified,
that was her word. I don’t know if she picked it up from Mrs. Hiltz or it come from one of her old-fashioned books but she was always in danger of being ‘mortified.’ I don’t think they even had a mirror on Bister Island. The girl had no idea what she looked like when she arrived in Port Minton—and she didn’t care. Then Mrs. Hiltz got Minerva’s teeth fixed, fattened her up a bit, bought her some new clothes and, suddenly, Minerva couldn’t bear to have a hair out of place! You could see that one day she was going to be a good-looking woman. Mrs. Hiltz was some proud of her.”

Suddenly I feel like panicking. That thing she said about Minerva’s hair, not being able to bear having it out of place. It gives me a stitch in my side, like I’ve been running too hard. I just have to keep breathing. I tell myself it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Lots of people like
Wuthering Heights,
like to be neat, polite.

I wipe my mouth and say, “What happened to Minerva?”

Rosie pulls her shoulders together as if she’s got a pain in her chest and says, “I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “For two years, we spent all our free time together, then one day, she up and disappeared. Just like that. She didn’t warn me. She didn’t call. She didn’t leave a note. Nothing. I asked Mrs. Hiltz about her but she didn’t know where Minerva was either. I was worried something terrible had happened—that she’d gotten lost or killed or her dad had come and taken her back. I was some scared.”

Rosie rubs her fingers up and down her forehead. It’s as if Minerva just went missing yesterday.

She swallows and takes a deep breath. “Mrs. Hiltz called the police, but when she found out some of her valuables were missing she just let it drop. She figured Minerva must have stolen the stuff and taken off with it. As far as Mrs. Hiltz was concerned, there was no point in making a stink about it. She didn’t want to get Minerva in trouble over ‘trinkets.’ Other than that, what could she do? Like she said, Minerva was eighteen by then. She was old enough to go where she wanted.”

I say, “Was she angry, Mrs. Hiltz?” Maybe that’s why she didn’t tell me about the Bisters.

“No. More like disappointed, I’d say. I think Mrs. Hiltz always wanted a daughter. She loved all the buying dresses and the primping and the making yourself look nice. She put a lot of herself into helping Minerva…It must have broken Mrs. Hiltz’s heart when Minerva took off like that.”

Rosie shakes her head the way people do when something is too sad even to talk about, then she says, “You know, I walked by the old Hiltz mansion down in the Port every day after school. I’d see Mrs. Hiltz out front, having a cup of tea or cutting flowers. She’d always say hello and ask after my mother—but she never mentioned Minerva. Not once. I couldn’t understand it then but I guess that was just Mrs. Hiltz’s way. She had to put things behind her and carry on.”

“What about you?” I say. I’m not sure if I should be asking. “How did you feel?”

It’s a long time before she answers. She fiddles with her sleeve.
When she finally speaks, her voice is sort of strangely happy. It makes me realize how bad she feels.

She goes, “My heart was broken too. People think you need to have some big romance to break your heart but you don’t. Losing a best friend is almost as painful as losing a husband. I know. I’ve done both. When Minerva left, I cried and cried. My parents helped me look for her at first—we even took a boat ride out to Bister Island—but after a while they gave up. They found out my wallet had disappeared around the time Minerva left and that was that. ‘Typical Bister,’ they said. ‘Can’t trust ’em as far as you can throw ‘em.’ They forgot all about her good manners. As far as they were concerned, she was just as bad as the rest.”

She looks at me. “Sorry,” she says.

Why is she saying sorry to me?

“Did
you
think she took your wallet?” I have to know.

Rosie hesitates. “Sure,” she says. “I knew it was her. I kept it in my jewellery box. She was the only one who knew. I was hurt at first that she’d steal from me. Then I was mad. Eight dollars was a lot of money to me back then, but I could have stood that. What I couldn’t understand was why she had to go and take my whole wallet! I lost my birth certificate and my student card and all my photos too. There was a picture of my baby cousin and one of my dog and one of my favourite Sunday school teacher and me at the church picnic. I couldn’t replace those…”