What We Hold In Our Hands (11 page)

Her parents died four years ago, within six months of each other. They always said that family was the most important thing, shelter from a hostile world. They'd counted on Gilda to hold the family together, to keep the old traditions like Sunday dinners, but since their deaths, she has gradually given up trying. Her kids always have somewhere else to go. Next week will be Easter. Carol has invited them all to her house after church, but Robin has to study for exams, Josh is in England meeting his girlfriend's parents, and Jenny has yet to return Gilda's phone call. So far, only Lisa is coming. Gilda knows that she will have to get used to a smaller household. Maybe it does not mean a smaller life.

“My shoes are pinching,” Carol says.

“Mine are amazingly comfortable. Do you really think Ed will like them?”

“He'll go nuts.” Carol empties the remaining drops from her teapot. “Should we ask for more hot water?”

“No, it's getting late. I'm going to the ladies'.”

Washing her hands, Gilda peers into the mirror where her features are their normal size, her cheeks no longer red. She pulls out her new compact, flips open the lid, and examines her face in the magnifying mirror. Her skin is pale pink, textured with a weave of lines and pores, her nose luminous with soft down, and, from her dark pupils, golden stripes radiate outward like petals amongst the several shades of blue. When she powders her nose, cheeks, and chin, grains of talc cling to the fine hairs, like the powder she sprinkled on Toni's bare bum when she was a baby. Toni had been free from diaper rash, cradle cap, colic—all ailments Gilda had suffered, according to their mother. Toni, small and perfect with soft pink skin and blonde curls, had toddled around in the lacy dresses their father bought her, giggling deeply from her belly at the faces Gilda pulled for her. When their mother, who'd thought she'd never have another child, had called Toni a blessing from God, eleven-year-old Gilda had felt the truth of it in her throat, along with the bitter knowledge that her own birth had not been greeted with the same sense of wonder and gratitude.

A month ago, when her sister was still able to walk, Gilda took her to their favourite diner for lunch. Toni ordered her regular, the tuna salad plate, Gilda, a club sandwich with fries.

Toni was wearing the blue and grey knit cap that hid her baldness and made her look wide-eyed and elfin. “It was good to see Ed last night,” she said. “You never bring him around anymore. I was beginning to think he was squeamish.”

“Ed's always happy to see you, in sickness and in health.”

“You should be nicer to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“You're always putting him down. He's a good husband. He loves you.”

“Sure.” Gilda squeezed her paper napkin into a tight little pellet.

“He does. I can tell. You should be nicer.”

“I should be a lot of things I guess.”

“I'm sorry, Gil. You're always so good to me. I know you'd do anything.”

“I would,” she said, smoothing the napkin.

But, facing the ladies' room mirror, Gilda knows that although she would happily shed her own life for Toni, letting go of everything and everyone who will eventually, and inevitably, be lost to her, she will not be able to keep the promise she's made. Not even Toni, with all the ice water in the world, can soothe the fear and sorrow that stir Gilda's lungs, or sweeten the bitter taste in her mouth.

Flickers

MA WON'T TAKE ME DOWNTOWN TO HEAR JULIE SING.
A
smoke-filled bar is not her kind of place. I bang my head against the back of my wheelchair.

She says, “Michelle, you're acting like a two year old.”

I'm nineteen and, as Ma says, getting older every day.

I stare at the fish tank she bought for my birthday. It sits on a table in a corner of the living room. “You always wanted a pet,” she said, filling the tank with water. The next day, she bought eleven neon tetras—silver with splashes of red on their sides and spreading into their tails. They dart through water as if they have someplace urgent to go that changes every few seconds. Watching them makes me tired. Besides, they're not real pets, not like a dog or a cat, someone you could be friends with.

When we first moved into this apartment, I hated it. It's on an ugly street lined with strip malls and car dealerships. If you drive a mile in any direction, that's pretty much all you'll see. The building's a squat, brown rectangle, the elevator lurches and creaks, and everything smells of old meatloaf. But since Julie moved in with Jim next door, living here hasn't been so bad.

Julie sings with a band. She's the woman I wanted to become—fearless, friendly, beautiful in a tough, carefree way, dashing through life like a fish absorbing air from water.

Jim is the drummer with shoulder-length black hair, soft not oily, an Abraham Lincoln beard, long black coat over
T
-shirt and jeans. He's as tall as Julie is short, with big, fluid-moving limbs.

The day I met Julie, Ma had rolled me into the hallway for my daily change of scene while she cleaned the apartment. I stared at the scuffed grey walls, sniffed the stuffy air that smelled of canned soup, shut my ears to the muffled roar of the vacuum. Then Jim's door burst open. A woman leaped out like a rock star taking the stage. She noticed me right away, her big smile splitting wider.

“Howdy,” she said.

Masses of wavy hair streaked yellow and orange haloed her small face. She strode toward me in red cowboy boots. Her jeans bore a big silver belt buckle. Jim lumbered behind her like a horse being led.

“I'm Shel.”

“How do you like it here, Shel?” she asked.

“It sucks.”

Her laughter overflowed the hall.

“I've seen worse,” she said.

I kept staring, amazed that she'd been able to make out my words—my first conversation in three years with anyone other than Ma or the speech therapist. One of the things I lost in the accident was my voice. Inside I can hear the words clearly, but my tongue has trouble forming the sounds, and I have to concentrate to force them out of my throat. Exposed to air, they seem to fall apart. From years of practice, Ma knows how to put the words back together. Julie can hear them before they even leave my mouth.

Ma wheeled me back inside, saying, “Don't get friendly with those two. His father's a surgeon. Would you believe it? Wasting his father's money on drugs and that slut.”

“Bitch,” I said.

This time, she didn't understand me, or pretended not to.

Julie and I sit outside the apartment building, where there's a patch of grass, a bench, and a few scraggly yellow pansies in a cement planter. We watch Ma hurry down the sidewalk toward the No Frills, stopping for a moment to turn and frown at us. I can tell that she's already sorry she agreed to let me sit in the fresh air with Julie instead of waiting by myself inside.

“How old's your mom?”

Ma is leaning into the wind, which blows her greying hair straight back and billows up inside her big navy windbreaker.

My short dark hair shivers a little, even though Julie and I are sitting in the shelter of a brick wall.

“Early forties?” is the best I can come up with.

“She could be a looker if she'd do something with that hair and those clothes.” Julie smooths her own hair, lights a cigarette.

Watching the smoke twist around itself, I remember the doughnut shop where Zack and I used to drink coffee late at night before Ma gave up on my curfew. I always felt more pleased than guilty, thinking how she and I were separated by half a city—me rubbing Zack's knee in a smoky booth downtown, while Ma waited up, watching movies in our grey bungalow. Now I wonder why she didn't have a boyfriend of her own. When I was in grade school, a few men came around, but none stayed long enough for me to notice when they were gone. Ma said they weren't worth the aggravation.

“What's your mother like?” I ask Julie.

“I don't have one.” She tosses her cigarette stub onto the soil around the pansies.

“You can have mine,” I say.

“I left home when I was sixteen.” Julie reaches into her jacket for another cigarette. She strikes a match on the rim of the cement planter, takes a drag. I breathe in as deeply as I can, wanting to suck in all that fragrant smoke, which smells like freedom.

When I was sixteen, I dropped out of school and found a job in a used record store where I met Zack. He used to bring in old vinyl
LP
's he'd bought cheap at garage sales or picked out of someone's trash.

“How much for these?” he asked, dark eyes unblinking through the strands of his dirty-blond hair.

“They don't look like much,” I said.

“Give me twenty bucks for the lot, and I'll give you a ride home after work.” Zack played guitar in an alternative band. I didn't like his music, but I loved tearing down the highway on the back of his bike. He was twenty-seven, listened exclusively to Grunge, and didn't believe that Kurt Cobain's death had been a suicide. Often when I was lying in his bed after we made love, and he was stretched on his back, eyes closed, I found myself staring at a poster of Cobain, crouched in foetal position around his guitar, head bent, face hidden under his mop of hair, as if he'd already crawled inside himself and disappeared.

Julie and Jim are coming for lunch today. I kept nagging Ma about inviting them. Then I just asked Julie, she said yes, and there's nothing Ma can do about it. We went to the bakery where I picked out a chocolate cake and some seven-grain bread because Julie eats healthy. I hope she likes tuna. If not, there's egg salad and a bottle of wine.

At twelve-fifteen, I ask Ma to take me next door to see what's keeping them, but she says, “Just wait. She's not the type to be on time.”

Julie arrives at twelve-thirty without Jim. “He's got friends in from out of town. This looks delicious, Shel. Too bad I'm a vegetarian.”

Ma gives Julie a look that says she'd like to dump the plate of sandwiches onto her head, but she unscrews the bottle and pours her a glass of yellow wine.

“Cool fish.” Julie traces her finger across the glass tank.

“They don't like that,” Ma says.

“They don't care,” I say. “They don't have feelings like real pets.”

Julie drinks three glasses of wine and eats some cake. A smudge of chocolate appears on her chin. My wine is watered down in a mug, but it still tastes good, and so does the cake Ma is feeding me in small forkfuls.

“Can I do that?” Julie asks.

Ma looks at her as if she has just sprouted wings and flown around the room, then shrugs, handing her the fork and plate.

“You have some chocolate on your face,” Julie tells me.

“So do you.” I laugh. Julie does too, her big deep laugh that makes you jump inside.

Ma grabs our empty plates. The hiss of water and clatter of dishes make it harder for Julie to understand me. “Say that again, Shel.”

“I really want to hear you sing,” I repeat.

“Sure. That would be great. I'd sing for you now, but I had a rough night, and my throat's a little sore.”

“I want to hear you and Jim at the club where you play. I used to go to clubs. Now I don't go anywhere.”

“Okay. We'll get Jim to ask your mom. She likes
him
.”

Ma stands in the kitchen doorway, a dishtowel draped over one shoulder, both hands on her hips. “It's time for Michelle's nap,” she says.

A rush of blood makes my face hot. “I'm not a baby!”

“I've got to go anyway,” Julie says. “Don't forget our plan.” She winks, gives my shoulder a squeeze.

I wish I could feel her hand there. “Don't go, Jule.”

But she's out the door.

I remember bursting out the door of our grey house one afternoon, and waking in a white-sheeted hospital bed the next. The chrome bars on either side made me think of Zack's bike. The sharp smell of antiseptic burned my nose. Ma said I'd been in an accident. Her face told me that Zack was dead, but that that didn't matter. What mattered was that I try to move my legs, my arms. I couldn't remember the accident—only Zack driving in the middle of the road, the screech of my voice.

Numbness, pain, heaviness, lightness, little flickers of pleasure floated over me like memories. I could see the distant white hills my toes made under the sheets, but I couldn't move them. My body was a television unplugged from the electricity of my brain—stranded, useless. Wires stuck to my chest and head with tape. A tube ran up my nose and down into my stomach, as if they were trying to plug me back in and hook me back together. When they poured yellow liquid through the tube, I thought of Zack filling his bike with gas.

Ma told me not to think about him, but she'd been telling me to forget Zack since we met, and when did I ever listen to her? I thought about the tangled blue sheets on his bed and the almost painful desire I felt when he used to drag his little finger across my belly, this way and that. I thought how he used to call me Shelley so I'd pretend to get angry and tickle him until he had to beg me to stop. I thought about the doughnut shop, the burnt taste of the coffee, the way the sugar from the crullers clung to my lips as Zack talked about the two of us moving to Vancouver where we could have the mountains and the sea.

When the nurse pulled the tube out, I could feel it wriggle through me like a chain rattling up inside my chest, neck, and face. Along with it came a secret thrill of relief, as if this might be it—they might finally be giving up on me. But they always shoved the tube back down again, scraping my raw throat, which was somehow full of feeling.

Another thing I thought about was the poster of Cobain disappearing into himself, how one of the things I'd lost in the accident, along with my voice, was the freedom to decide when I'd had enough, to pick up the thin sharp rectangle of a razor blade or unscrew the childproof lid on a bottle of pills.

Jim's at the door. He's talking to Ma. I hear his soft, gruff voice, “You could use a break, and she'll have fun. We'll take good care of her.”

“She's dead weight out of that wheelchair.”

“Don't worry. I'm pretty strong.”

I want to yell—Where are we going? But then I think, maybe they're taking me to the club to hear Julie sing. I stare at the aquarium. The tetras' red tails flit across the tank.

“Where are we going?” I ask, as Jim pushes my chair along the sidewalk, and Julie strolls ahead, sunlight brightening her wild hair.

“We're going on an adventure.” Her voice is light and bouncy.

“Not to the club?”

“Not today, Shel.”

We stop beside a cedar hedge. My chest tightens as Julie disappears into the greenery. When Jim pushes my chair through a gap in the bushes, I see a path leading downhill into a grassy park full of trees and the shadows of trees. A little wooden bridge hugs the sound of rushing water. A sign warns, “Danger,” but I'm not so much afraid as excited, although the two feelings take up the same space in my body, which has started to buzz and hum now that we've left the world of the street behind.

“I didn't know this place was here.” I'm breathing hard as if I've been running.

“And it's only a ten-minute walk from the apartments,” Jim says.

I wish I could see his face because his voice sounds like he's smiling, and I don't think I've ever seen him smile. His usual look is serious and attentive, as if it's all he can do to listen hard and think at the same time.

Julie sits cross-legged under a chestnut tree, waiting for us. Jim parks my chair in the sun and stretches out beside her. People jog by, pushing strollers, walking dogs. Robins hop around or scatter into the trees. Jim tugs at the spring grass, while Julie sticks dandelions into his hair and behind his ears, blowing the white seeds into his beard, turning it grey. In my wheelchair, wearing orthopaedic shoes, a cardigan, and a blanket draped over my legs, I look like an old lady, even though I'm younger than they are. A scream rises like a bird in my chest. I press my lips together to keep it inside.

I want to be Julie, to feel Jim's coarse beard and smooth skin against my fingertips. And to be Jim, the feathery seeds landing on my face, Julie's hands fluttering over my head, caressing my long, strong back.

“Some adventure.” I spit the words.