Girl in Shades Read online

  In September I go back to school. On the second day, I count the flattened plops of chewing gum on the step out behind the school. I do it to appear to be content and to keep myself busy throughout recess. After I have finished counting them — twelve, like my age — I begin to categorize them in my mind. Four pink (most likely strawberry), three blue (blueberry or blue raspberry), and the other five black from the weight and dirt of people’s sneakers.

  “Maya, when you pretend to look busy, you just look like more of a loser.” It’s Jackie — friend turned enemy.

  “Piss off,” I say to her in my straightest, most disinterested voice.

  She walks towards me with one hand on her bony hip. Her white blouse has been tied in a knot and her belly button peaks out at me. Her denim skirt hangs on by what seems like only a few threads, exposing the white of her legs. Her penny loafers scrape on the cement as she moves closer.

  “What’s the matter, Maya, got no friends this year? Maybe you should try attending class sometime.” I take this as a shot at my mother’s illness.

  “Jackie,” I say, letting my mouth gape open after her name falls out. “Unless you want me to tell your new friends how you wet your sleeping bag at my house last year, piss off like I told you the first time.”

  From Jackie’s mouth, “Go to hell!” and from inside her head, Did anyone just hear her say that? She turns her head to monitor the backs of what I like to call her “Superstar Gang” — her new friends, three girls with bangs teased four inches off their foreheads and neon scarves tied around their ponytails.

  At first I thought that hearing what people were thinking was the only good thing that came out of my mother’s sickness. But now, I would give up this strangeness for just a glimpse of my mother. And not her ghost from the closet, either. I mean the real thing.

  I’ve been hearing things off and on in short snippets. Not all the time, and not when I try to. The voices usually sneak up on me while I am reading People Magazine in line at the grocery store, or riding my bike past a flock of old ladies. And some of the things I hear have gotten monotonous, annoying even, like listening to a song you hate played over and over. I don’t mind hearing about why my father hates his boss, or how Aunt Leah wished her thighs were less lumpy, but with school back on, I could do without listening to Mr. Wigman debate whether or not to shave his back. I just want to concentrate on science class.

  “You just keep your mouth shut, Maya,” Jackie yells. She walks back to meet her gang. She was never this loud when we walked home together last year. I used to think she was clever and elegant, which is a great mix, especially for a girl.

  “See ya, Jackie,” I say, mainly to spite her, as if pretending we were friends again would be the biggest insult she received all week. I return my attention to the chewing gum and think about scraping it off with my banana clip before the bell rings.

  My father makes me come home after school to an empty house. He gave me my own key to let myself in because he works most nights until around 8:00. Sometimes I like having the house to myself but sometimes I get lonely. I spend a lot of time trying on my mother’s clothes and reading her books, especially the Bhagavad Gita, which I have gotten as good as her at pretending I understand. When I read the fancy words that make no sense, I feel like I am having a conversation with my mother because she herself was a fancy word that made no sense. As I read, I smell her aromatherapy bottles, the ones meant to heal her, and dab the scents in my hair. The girl who brought them to Mother told me that it takes something like five pounds of plant material to make one drop of these oils, which makes them precious enough to wrap in a towel and keep in the top drawer of my dresser. Sandalwood to help me think, lavender if I can’t sleep, orange to be happy. I wear the orange one a lot but try not to waste it. I know my father won’t buy more when these run out.

  My father works as a senior agent for Shining Star Talent Agency across the river, where he is in charge of finding “gigs” for actresses with blond hair, white teeth, and large breasts. He gets TV shows, fashion shows, and fancy trips to Toronto for beautiful-looking people hidden from everyone out in Saskatchewan. Sometimes they travel from Manitoba to see him, if they have something special. He says that as well as having a certain look, they have to be able to act. But I know what it takes to make it in Hollywood, or Toronto for that matter.

  When my father comes home from the office, he has talked himself out. I once heard him think that he was sick of blathering on all day and I guess that’s why he has nothing left for me but grunts and weak smiles. We sit across from each other at the table while he eats the takeout dinner he brought home with him. I usually save some of his leftovers for my own dinner the next day. Sometimes I can tell that he’s trying. He asks me how school was, I tell him fine, he says what did you learn, I say not much, and then we stare at each other some more. These are occasions when I can’t hear a word from inside his head, and I want to more than anything.

  One day after work, my father tells me that he thinks I would be perfect for a shampoo commercial he is casting. “What with your shiny hair and gorgeous canary eyes, you will light up the screen.”

  I have never thought my hair was gorgeous. When I try to run my fingers through it, they get stuck. But I guess with the right shampoo it could be better?

  “What would I have to do?” I ask him.

  “Well, we’d have to audition you first. And then if you get it, I would come with you for the shoot.”

  “The shoot?” I say.

  “Yes, when they film the commercial.”

  “Oh, okay. I guess.” I am not sure about my father’s plans to combine office and home life, but am comforted by his attempt. And maybe he’s right; maybe I would look good on the screen. If nothing else I can pretend to be beautiful.

  I have to take a day off school to go to the audition, which I know will please Jackie and her “Gang,” forever on the lookout for ammunition. Jackie hears me tell Mr. Wigman that I will be absent tomorrow and that my father has written a note.

  “Got a hot date?” Jackie shouts from the back of the room. Giggles spread throughout the classroom.

  “For your information, I have an audition,” I say and realize that everyone in the class has stopped reading their math textbook to listen. “I am going to be in a commercial.”

  “What are they selling? Dog food?” Jackie barks back.

  “Ladies, that’s enough,” Mr. Wigman interjects. “Jackie, leave Maya alone.” Mr. Wigman pats me on the arm and signs my note to take to the office. I feel the combined gaze of everyone in the class on the back of my head as I turn to leave.

  Before going to the audition, my father and I stop at his office to pick up forms and a school picture of me that he had blown up on the computer. “Your headshot,” he proclaims, shoving it inside a manila envelope. The woman who gave it to him concerns me the most. Long black hair that touches my father’s arm when she hands him the photo, almond-shaped eyes that were not born in Saskatoon, that’s for sure, and a curvy figure wrapped in a black dress and surrounded by yellow light that weaves itself up and down inches from her body. She introduces herself as Consuela, only my father calls her Connie. She looks like a flamenco dancer, but younger than any I have seen on television.

  “It’s wonderful to finally meet you, Maya,” Connie says when my father leaves the room for paper clips. She sounds like the tall guy in the white suit on Fantasy Island. “Your father talks about you all the time.” I nod and look at the sleeve of my striped shirt. The cuff seems to have moved further up my arm since I last wore it. “You know, your father is a pretty important guy. He has achieved a lot — the other agents learn much from him. He works hard so you can have everything you need.”

  “I know,” I say. Then Connie smoothes her finger over her bottom lip and puts her hand on my back.

  “I am so sorry about your mother, Maya,” she says, pron
ouncing every one of her syllables with distinct beats. For a second I remember what it’s like to have a woman comfort me — anyone, for that matter — and submit myself to her pretend niceness by nodding again. My bottom lip protrudes and tears prick the insides of my eyeballs.

  My father returns with my paperwork fastened together. He’s developed a résumé for me that includes my age, height, weight, hair colour, and eye colour. When we leave, he thanks Connie by looking straight into her eyes and smiling, something he must save for the office.

  The audition passes quickly and is far less glamorous than I would have expected. My father talks to a lady with a clipboard and she lets me into the room before any of the other girls waiting. Inside the room, two men with matching grey hair and warm red light shooting out around their faces sit behind a table. They ask me how old I am and where I go to school and that kind of stuff. Mostly they just want to look at me. And then they make me read something off a piece of paper. “Shinesse helps me be the girl that everyone notices.” I say this straight-faced while scooping hair off my forehead like they told me, and they thank me for my time, to which I respond, “No problem. I like to take the day off school.”

  My father and I go to McDonald’s for lunch. I eat a Happy Meal while he sucks Coke up a straw and moves around in his seat. “So you think it went well then?” he asks me for the tenth time since we left the audition.

  “I don’t know. What is ‘well’?” I say, peeling the pickles off my hamburger and throwing them to the corner of my tray.

  “You’re not going to eat those?” he asks.

  “Why should I?”

  “I don’t know, I just thought . . .”

  “What does Connie do at your work?”

  “Connie? Oh, she’s an agent, just like me. Only she’s just out of school, so she doesn’t have a lot of clients yet. We’re working with her.”

  “I bet you are.” I fling a pickle slice onto the floor.

  “Pick that up!” he says, crossing his arms, and I do.

  It takes the Shinesse shampoo company two weeks to contact my father about my audition. He calls me right after he hears the news. It is a quarter to seven in the evening and I am at home inhaling patchouli essential oil from a tissue, rubbing my fingers over my mother’s green healing stone, and watching Jeopardy! Martha Pronk from Mississippi has just answered two questions from the category “Not as It Appears.”

  ANSWER: The appearance of a sheet of water in a desert or on a hot road caused by the refraction of light by heated air.

  QUESTION: What is a mirage?

  and

  ANSWER: False contractions experienced after the third month of pregnancy but before labour.

  QUESTION: What are Braxton Hicks?

  “You weren’t their first choice,” my father says through the receiver. “But the girl they picked first has come down with a case of head lice, which of course makes it difficult.”

  “So I was second choice?”

  “They offered you the job. You got it, kid.” My father announces this like I just won a shopping spree at the Saskatoon Centre, but for me it’s only good for another day away from school.

  Chapter Three

  Dr. Peacock, with his bald head and beady eyes, sat across a desk from my mother, my father, and me. His teeth were clenched and his lips puckered while he scanned the papers.

  Test results.

  He was sucking on a cough drop, which clunked against his teeth as he moved it back and forth and wafted cherry menthol in our direction. Every few seconds he would either cough or inhale phlegm from his nose into his throat and swallow it down with a gulp.

  It was March of 1985 and I was eleven years old.

  Just when I was about to say that a sick doctor was not what my mother needed, I heard three simple words, thoughts from the inside of his head: She’s a goner.

  I looked up to see the doctor’s face, his lips still glued together, silver stethoscope hugging his neck, still interpreting my mother’s file.

  He had yet to open his mouth to speak.

  My heart slapped me from inside, my fingers numbed, and my shoulders rose up. I wanted to run away. I had grown used to seeing colours around people, but that was the first time I had heard what someone was thinking. I didn’t know where the words came from or why I was the one to hear them. Were these words what they meant to say? Maybe what they were afraid to say?

  So as it happened, I knew before anyone else in my family that my mother was dying. But I let Dr. Peacock tell them. It was easier on me that way.

  “Mrs. Devine,” he said, looking at my mother.

  “Marigold. Please call me Marigold.”

  “Marigold. We have the results of your biopsy and it’s not good.”

  “Everything can be good if you alter your perception,” my mother said. Her insincere optimism caused my father to roll his eyes and throw his chin up towards the ceiling. I reached out and grabbed my mother’s soft fingers but she turned her head away, sending me the scent of her lavender shampoo.

  “It’s a good thing you decided to come see me,” Dr. Peacock said.

  “The bleeding didn’t seem normal,” my father said and my mother looked at the floor.

  Straight-faced, the doctor told us, “It’s cancer.” What is it about those words? Three syllables that can put a stop to everything you once thought true. Take your life and turn it inside out, into a dream world. “Stage four cervical.” The doctor didn’t blink when he said it. He looked straight at my mother’s forehead with an unwavering gaze while my father shifted in his seat. “Now, we’ll have to do a series of scans to figure out how much it’s spread.”

  My mother closed her eyes.

  “It could already be in your liver and maybe other organs.” My mother stood up and walked towards the light at the window, shuffling her sandals over the polished floor. “It will be your choice to do radiation, which will only slow things down a bit.” A fluorescent bulb hummed at us from the ceiling. Then, from inside the doctor’s head, This never gets easier. And then, Maybe I’ll have chicken noodle soup for lunch. Yeah, that’s it, chicken noodle.

  The first time they met, my mother spilled an entire foam cup of hot chocolate on my father’s ski jacket — or so it goes when my father tells the story. In her version, he was the one to spill on her, black coffee that covered her Hudson’s Bay parka and dripped onto her suede boots. When I imagine that moment — one of them wet, one of them apologizing — I picture a gigantic bubble encasing them both, secluding them, protecting them as they once were.

  What I do know is that they were nineteen when they met. And that they were both students at Trent University in Peterborough. My father was studying marketing, and my mother, English literature. I’ve heard my father say he never understood my mother’s love of British Romantic fiction, but because he was trying to “woo her,” he tried to listen when she nattered on about it.

  Around age seven, I found an old copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in a box in the basement. The dog-eared pages were covered in highlights and scratchy notes in the margins explaining important passages. The first line of chapter one was still glowing from pink highlighter: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

  “Is this yours?” I asked my mother.

  “It was, at one time,” she said without flinching, “when I was still in university.” She was folding bathroom towels, straight from the dryer, still hot and radiating Downy softener.

  “How come you never read it anymore?”

  She looked at me with sad eyes, collapsed a towel to her chest and wrapped her arms around it. “Maya,” she said. “People change. Things happen that change them and there is nothing you can do about it.”

  I don’t know a lot about my parents’ courtship. Only that they walked around
attached to each other like spider monkeys (my Aunt Leah told me that) and that my father only had eyes for my mother. I also know that my father was the only one of them to finish university. And that she broke his heart before he married her.

  There’s a picture my father keeps in the top drawer of his desk: he in a black graduation gown and flat hat with matching expression, and she, looking so much smaller than him, meeker. Her strawberry-tinted locks shelter the baby version of me in her arms. Black tufts of hair sprout from the top of my head. Her eyes rest on dark circles. Both of them look at the sky in opposite directions. Or maybe at other people walking by in the crowd?

  Shortly after my mother died, I spent hours looking at this photo. Hoping if I concentrated hard enough, I could get my mother to smile. And maybe, just maybe, reach over and hold my father’s hand.

  On the day we found out about her cancer, my father had tears in his eyes on the way home from the hospital. Round tears that wouldn’t fall, perched on the edges of his bottom lids (I could see them in the rearview mirror). As he drove, turned corners, stopped at stop signs, eased on the brake, he stroked the steering wheel with his hands and muttered like he was angry with an invisible person sitting on the dashboard. “I can’t understand how this could be happening, to you of all people. Things were finally starting to get better, normal . . . We were a family . . . What did we ever do to deserve this?” At the time, I thought it was my mother he was angry with, but I know now that you can’t really blame someone for getting cancer — even if she may have wished it on herself.