A Mother's Song

Part I

FALL 1988

DEAR DIARY,

Friday. Wether—cold and windy. Two zits. There horrible.

Guess what! Something WONDERFUL and SPESHAL! A MIRACEL! Of course I have to keep it a BIG SECRET. Nobody knows and if Mom finds out she will kill me. I mean like DEAD. So Im not telling anyone espeshally not Felicia who is a real big blabber mouth and will tell the hole world. Its so SECRET Diary that Im not even going to rite it down in case you get into the rong hands. The only thing I can say is that I met HER! And it was really NEAT!! And Im going to see HER— Mom is calling. Have to go. Bye for now.

MY NEIGHBORHOOD USUALLY BRINGS ME peace. When I turn off Bank Street and drive down Sunnyside Avenue, I enter a different world. I leave behind the cars, the crowded intersections, and the terrain of glass and concrete for quieter streets lined with homes and canopied with trees. I pass familiar faces: children I’ve known for years, adults I’ve sat with on school committees and neighborhood programs. The farther I travel from the roar of traffic and the closer I get to my house, the slower I drive. I enjoy the fall colors, the brilliant reds and oranges of the maple that overhangs the corner of Belmont and Brighton. I study a porch that is being reconstructed on Fentiman, approving of its neat white posts. And, as I approach my house, I take pleasure in its sedate air of solidity. There is nothing whimsical about our house. It has been standing since the turn of the century. It has a thick stone foundation and a brick facade, high ceilings and dark-stained wood floors. When we renovated, the electrician told me in a grave tone that they don’t build houses like ours anymore. By this, I understand that new houses are thin in substance. Their baseboards are narrow, their foundations skimpy. We have the occasional earthquake in Ottawa with tremors our house handles with ease even though our beds shake and we dream of boats and capsizings. The new houses aren’t so lucky. Pictures drop from their walls, cracks appear in their basements, and shingles drift down from their roofs like snow falling to the ground.

But today, as I drive down our tree-lined streets, the enjoyment I get from our house is abruptly broken. Someone is standing in our darkened picture window. I brake sharply and pull over to the curb. The afternoon sun is covered by a cloud, and at first I can’t tell who the person is. I only see arms outstretched. I feel a frightening sense of violation—a stranger in our house—and then the sun breaks through. A ray of light pierces through the window, illuminating the room, and the figure is revealed. It isn’t a stranger but my thirteen-year-old daughter, Emma. Her mouth is wide open and her face distorted. Her hair, the color of hot red pepper, tops her head like a flame.

She is singing. She has put an album on the stereo in the living room and is belting out a tune to an unseen audience. For a few minutes I sit in the car and watch her. My sense of violation hasn’t completely eased. Without being able to hear the music, I imagine Emma into a figure that is religious, mythical. A Greek kore, broken out of her classic and passive stance into someone more aggressive and more sinister. A vengeful Roman nymph, invoking the gods. A young goddess calling down doom on the House of Jane and Philip Wastenay.

Ridiculous, I chide myself and laugh. My husband, Philip, is a professor of classics and I’ve listened to his stories for too long.

The figure in the window is only Emma.

DEAR DIARY,

Tuesday. Wether—windy and stuff. A gross zit on my chin.

Mrs. Fitch subed again for Mrs. Anderson. As usual she screemed and yelled at all of us speshialy Dana who was passing notes which said Fitch the bitch is also a witch. Dana is such a doorknob. Anyway she got into real big truble as usual and the whole class had to miss recess. It really sucked.

In science I listed all the boys in the class acording to their apeerans and body, rating them out of 10. Of course, Mark comes first then Nick then Peter then Cello the Jello hes cute but not as cute as Mark of course and finaly Jeff. All the rest are geeks assholes or from nerds r us. I passed the list to Lisa who tried to pass it to Felicia. Peter grabed ahold of it but I managed to get it back without his seeing. I mean I dont want Mark to know I think hes gorgeus.

But best of all I got to see Her today. I went to Her Apartmint. Its small and kind of old. I dont think she has much money. But shes got stufed animals all over the place and they all have weerd names like Cabage and Checkout. One is a scuerl named Teenyweeny. She was really nice and made me some hot chocolat with hole milk insted of 2% which tasted really really good. She says the hell with her wasteline.

Bye for now.

WHEN PHILIP IS OUT OF TOWN, I PLAY HOOKY from domestic life. I don’t plan organized dinners, and Emma and I eat whatever we want, whenever we want. Sometimes we end up at the dining room table together, but we rarely talk. I’ve come to believe that these asocial occasions are necessary, providing cooling-off periods for our mother-daughter relationship, which has been under strain. Since Emma turned thirteen, new kinds of behavior threaten our equilibrium. Mouthing off, for example. Low-key irritability shifting to high-key without warning. Disagreements that slip from minor to major with breathtaking rapidity. In one way this is nothing new. Emma has always fought authority and attacked life. She never learned to walk. She ran instead, a headlong rush with such intensity of purpose that she barged into walls and banged into furniture. She wore bruises on her ten-month-old forehead like badges of reckless courage.

What is new is that the battleground has enlarged to fit every corner of our lives and that each square inch is worth a major skirmish. Emma fights over the minutiae of life as if her survival depends on each detail. I try to maintain a distance, but she often exhausts me and I snap back. I love her, of course, but sometimes I wonder about the workings of fate that gave me a daughter so different from what I intended. When we adopted Emma—I’m unable to have children—I had misty visions textured with a pink soft sweetness. The reality is angular, bony, intense, argumentive. When I complain to Philip about her behavior and he takes the time to lift his nose out of his papers, he waves a hand dismissively in the air and tells me it’s puberty. Endocrine imbalances, he says, hormones gone wild.

Tonight we sit opposite each other at the far ends of the dining room table. I eat and try to read the Ottawa Citizen. Lately I find I can hardly read the news. It’s not the subject matter, it’s the act of reading. I edit other people’s writing all day, and my eyes are tired from work. Emma nibbles away at a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and studies a book, Readings in French. Emma is in a French Immersion educational stream, which means she takes all her subjects in French and is theoretically supposed to be bilingual when she graduates from the secondary school system. In practical terms, this means that Emma can’t spell in either official language, and Philip and I are forced to attend school assemblies in which we understand only one word in ten.

Mom, you know all that stuff about Jesus Christ and the Red Sea and God and all that?

I raise my head from the newspaper. Uh-huh.

Are those miracles true?

Emma is going to be beautiful. Since she’s adopted, I can say this honestly and without pride; I have no claim to her beauty. But when I notice it, as I do tonight with the lamplight catching her face at a lovely angle of inquiry, I’m always surprised. She wasn’t a pretty baby. When we first saw her at the Children’s Aid Society, she was four months old, bald, mottled like an old porcelain sink, and had no eyelashes. Her mouth was too big for her face, and she had this odd little nose, thick and upturned at the tip. Her homeliness didn’t bother me. In fact I didn’t really see it—not after the bitter defeat of infertility and the long gauntlet of adoption formalities. I had waited so long and so yearningly for a baby that I thought, How sweet!

We were introduced to her in a room with a crib, several chairs, and a small assortment of Fisher-Price toys on the floor. The foster mother had dressed her up, but the pink booties had frayed pom-poms and the white dress was clean but stained from the spit-up of many babies before her. She had no teeth but chewed on her fist with her gums, making wet, slurpy sounds. She also wiggled. She was sitting on Philip’s knee, and he, who had never even picked up a baby before, had to hold her tight because she arched and kicked and turned her head in every possible direction.

A real live wire, the social worker said. The foster mother says she’s on the go all the time.

I should have known then, shouldn’t I? I should have been forewarned about the possible unruly directions that energy could take, but all I thought was, How charming! How lively!

Surely she’s too young to be crawling, Philip said. He’d known nothing about babies prior to the call from Children’s Aid saying they had a girl for us, but in the forty-eight hours since, he’d taken a crash course in Dr. Spock. Now he was a minor authority on infant behavior.

No, but she’s almost there. She’s turning over now.

Philip frowned. That’s a bit precocious, isn’t it?

She’s an active baby.

He put Emma down on the rug at our feet and placed her on her back. She scrunched up, she slithered, and the next thing we knew, she’d flip-flopped onto her stomach and, utterly pleased with herself, grinned triumphantly up at us.

I looked down and saw not a homely unknown package but a baby, my baby, and thought, How wonderful!

Then Philip and I glanced at each other, and I nodded. It was really my decision. He’d claimed he could live without children; I was the one who had despaired and wept and grieved. And I was the one who, after all the humiliating tests had proven to be so very definite and final, had suggested adoption.

We’ll take her, he said.

I gathered Emma up into my arms. She was warm, surprisingly heavy, and smelled of baby talc. She busied herself trying to pry the watch off my wrist, and I thought, I’m a mother!

Time has altered Emma and obliterated those baby features. Now she verges on beauty like a swimmer poised to leap. Her face holds a promise that will be fulfilled when she loses her too round cheeks and the spray of pimples on her chin. She has striking red curls and pale unfreckled skin. She also has eyelashes now, thick ones a darker red than her hair, and her eyes are long and light green. The nose is still odd, but also oddly suitable, perched about a small, soft mouth. Within the square of her face, her chin forms a smaller square and gives her a look of stubborn determination.

You’ve been talking about miracles in school? I ask.

I was just wondering if all that stuff about Jesus really happened.

No records have survived from that time in history, I say, and no letters or books, so we can’t be certain that those Bible stories are absolutely true. I warm to the topic. On the other hand, I think something must have happened back then, because the story of Jesus had to come from somewhere.

Well, I was wondering about miracles. Like, do we have any today?

I don’t know of any.

Then how come they had them in the old days?

Christian miracles are like the myths Daddy studies—stories that got told over and over again. And you know what happens to a story that’s passed around. It keeps on growing.

So there really weren’t any miracles, even in the old days?

I don’t think so, honey.

Emma appears to be thinking about this, and I wait for the next question. Mom?

Yes?

Can I stay for the second show at the Mayfair on Friday night?

Absolutely not, I say.

Disappointment juts her lower lip forward. Mom, everyone else can stay.

I don’t care about everyone else.

Why do you always say that? I hate it!

Because it’s true. You’re the only person I care about.

You and Daddy are the strictest parents in my whole school.

I doubt that.

You know what I have to do? Emma says. I have to apologize to my friends all the time.

That’s too bad.

They laugh at me all the time.

Come on, Em. Stop exaggerating.

How would you like to have to tell your friends that your parents are … overprotective? This is her newest word and she wields it like a weapon.

How would you like me to phone Felicia’s mother and ask her what she would say? Felicia’s mother, Alice, is my closest friend, and Emma knows very well that when it comes to motherhood issues, Alice and I pose a formidable front.

Emma slams her glass down on the table so that drops of milk leap out and splatter on the table. Everyone thinks I’m a baby! Everyone laughs at me, having to call up all the time and tell you where I am. Everyone thinks I’m stupid! It really sucks!

My problem, Philip tells me, is that Emma and I are too similar. Like bumper cars, we zoom around our enclosed space, crashing into each other at frequent intervals, sparks flying and crackling. Are you picking a fight? I ask. Is that what you want—a fight?

Emma lowers her head and studies the pattern of bites in her sandwich. These battles have a sameness to them that wearies me. The screaming matches metamorphose into noisy crying or self-pitying tears, then into stormy exits and slammed doors. Emma lifts her head, and tears glitter on her lashes: step one. She sniffs and says, Well then, can I skip singing practice tonight? I’ve got too much homework.

Oh, how Emma hates to lose face. No.

If I don’t get my math done, Mrs. Waddell will flunk me. She said so. You don’t want me to flunk, do you?

You can do both.

She gave us a whole hour!

You’ll manage, I say, and suddenly remembering that Emma had her singing lesson today, I add, Plus you’ll have new music.

I don’t have any.

Mrs. Stern didn’t give you new music?

I didn’t go.

We’ve given Emma flute lessons, skating lessons, and art classes. We’ve driven her to hockey games and track meets, bought uniforms and attended parents’ meetings. Nothing has lasted. Within a few weeks, Emma decides that she isn’t interested or it’s too hard or she doesn’t like it anymore. So when she suggested singing lessons, we balked. She begged and pleaded, she promised dedication and commitment. We finally agreed on condition that she attend every lesson and practice faithfully.

You didn’t go? I echo angrily. Why not?

Mrs. Stern canceled.

She didn’t call me.

She told me last week. I forgot to tell you. Emma goes back to eating her sandwich and reading.

But she has said this far too glibly, and a strange expression crossed her face that I read as a combination of fear and complicity.

Why did she cancel?

Mom, she says with a tone of exasperation, she had to go on a trip. To Toronto. To see her aunt or something. She told me, but I don’t remember. Maybe her aunt was sick or something.

This doesn’t sound right, I say.

Do you think I’m lying? she says defiantly.

I don’t know what to think.

I didn’t have a lesson!

Okay, I say.

It’s true!

Guilt in Emma is like a clanging persistent bell. The more she struggles to shut it off, the louder it rings. By now even I can hear it. If you say so, I say.

She stands up, banging the chair leg against the table. You never believe anything I tell you!

I just want to know the truth.

It is the truth!

She tries to storm out of the kitchen, but my words—I’ll call Mrs. Stern and check—hook her in the doorway.

She turns, and I see that beneath the bluster, she’s frightened. The skin over her cheekbones is stretched taut and whiter than the rest of her. Okay, she says, I didn’t come home.

Then where were you?

Listen, Mom, I didn’t want to tell you because it would hurt your feelings.

This is a new ploy, and it stops me for a moment. My feelings are of little concern to Emma. "Why don’t you let me decide if my feelings are hurt?"

Emma has grown rapidly in the past few months, and she’s not always sure what to do with her new length. She wraps one leg around the other. She entwines her arms, two thin branches. She hunches her slender shoulders and tucks her chin against her chest.

You’re not going to like it.

I have the kind of imagination that leaps to worst-case scenarios. Is it drugs? I think. Shoplifting? Let me decide that, I say.

And you’re going to be sorry.

All right, Emma.

I mean, really sorry.

Enough. Spit it out.

I’ve been seeing my … mother.

I don’t think I’ve heard correctly. Who?

My mother.

Even then I don’t get it. "Em, I am your mother. She swallows. My other one," she says.

TERRY HAS SMALL, BONY, FRECKLED HANDS that are smarter than they look. She keys in the code for bananas—403—and thinks of the numbers stored in her fingertips. Numbers for lettuce and peas, for zucchini and grapes, for potatoes and lemons. A hundred codes live beneath her skin. She once dreamed she couldn’t punch in the code for watermelons. She tried every number, but the machine wouldn’t accept them. It beeped and hissed at her. Customers began to line up around her cash, their voices rising in complaint. The manager, Bill, and the head cashier, Flo, screamed at her. In desperation, she sliced her fingertips with a razor. The numbers, black and thick, poured out with the blood and flowed down the checkout counter.

She glances at the register’s screen. That’s not right, she says.

The customer leans forward. What’s the matter?

I don’t think they’ve coded in the sale price. While the customer looks suitably impressed and gratified, Terry lifts her phone and speaks into the mouthpiece. Her voice booms out over the store: Price check, cash four. Price check, cash four.

Terry’s one of the best cashiers. At the end of the week, she’s usually top of the computer list for speed. She’s also won the award for Customer Service and Affability three times. She does that by smiling a lot and chatting people up. Good price for lemons, isn’t it? she might say, or Is it still raining outside? or Did you notice the coupon in the paper for tomato juice? It’ll save you fifty cents.

In the meantime she likes to play her private game of Grocery Guessing. She can sum up a customer by a glance at a grocery cart. Take this one, for example. Imported Dijon mustard, expensive olives, club soda by the case, and crackers cut in the shape of stars—Terry knows a fancy cocktail party when she sees one. Not that this customer was going to eat any of the stuff she’ll serve. She’s got Weight Watchers and Lean Cuisines hidden in her freezer by the dozen. Problem periods, too. Get a load of the boxes of No-Name maxi pads and super tampons and Midol.

Terry prides herself on her good eye. She can see the customer has plenty of money but it isn’t doing a thing for her. No sense of style. Terry herself would take the ugly straps off the shoulders of that white blouse, open it three buttons down, and dress it up with a bunch of chains. She wouldn’t be caught dead in that long blue skirt, either. She wears short skirts that hug her hips and leave her thin, freckled legs bare. And she loves bare-back heels, the higher the better so that she teeters slightly as she walks. When she’s with a guy and wears her highest heels, she can feel him leaning toward her as if he could stop her from falling.

When Terry gets bored with Grocery Guessing, she gives interviews to Barbara Walters. She doesn’t go for the idea of being interviewed by a Jane Pauley type. First of all, there isn’t enough time on those morning shows. They zap you in; they zap you out. She wants a long, thorough interview. She may only be twenty-seven, but her life has been chockablock full of drama, mostly tragedy. She’s got enough of that for Days of Our Lives, the Young and the Restless, and As the World Turns, all rolled into one. Secondly, those Jane Pauley types have to interview ordinary people while Barbara only talks to celebrities. During her interviews, Terry is either a movie star or famous singer, depending on her mood. She doesn’t tell Mic or Charlene about these imaginary interviews because they’d laugh, but the truth is, she knows she’s got talent, and she’d be in L.A. right this minute if it weren’t for her lack of money and connections. She’s a firm believer in it’s not what you know but who you know. Look at all those kids of stars—Liza Minnelli, for instance, and Michael Douglas, and she could name dozens more. Who’s to say they were born with more talent? They just have an in, that’s all.

That’ll be one forty-nine twenty-five.

The customer writes out a check and hands it to Terry with her Loblaws check-cashing card. Terry keys in the numbers, verifies the check, and gives the customer the cash-register receipt. Have a nice day, she says and turns, smiling, to the next customer.

The interviews with Barbara take place in Terry’s New York apartment. She also has a dream house in Malibu, but that’s her private place. The New York apartment has pale blue leather furniture on a darker blue expanse of carpet. There are lots of original paintings on the walls and glass tables supporting expensive-looking sculptures. She’s seen the exact replica of this room in a color spread in Canadian Living. Since she’s never been to New York, Terry has only the haziest idea of where this apartment would be. She thinks Central Park, maybe, and Fifth Avenue. Wherever the fanciest address is, that’s the location. But she knows it’s on the twentieth floor and has a marble foyer. Foyer. She loves that word. She found it in an article on budget decorating while flipping through the pages of Redbook.

Although some of the stars Barbara interviews dress down for the occasion, Terry dresses right up. She wears a black dress that leaves her shoulders bare, black stockings, black stiletto heels, and silver earrings in the shape of falling leaves. She also has had her hair done, but not by just anybody. She goes to Kenneth or one of those big names who do the stars and who are written up in People—the type who charge two hundred dollars for a haircut and you have to call three months in advance. Her hair is spiked in the front, thick and curly at the back and sides—thicker and curlier than in real life. Kenneth raves about the color. He’s never seen a red so rich and deep. It’s a gift to work on her hair, he tells her, he should be paying her.

Barbara covers Terry’s life from A to Z. She likes to linger over her childhood, filled as it was with hardship and brutality and the way Terry’s family made her feel as if she never belonged. Barbara leads her through pregnancy, leaving school, the terrible jobs she had until she ended up at Loblaws, the rocky road to stardom.

Barbara leans forward in that way she does when she’s going for the dirt. And there’ve been a lot of men, she says.

Yes.

A lot of bad experiences.

Yes.

Why was that?

Terry shrugs. Bad luck, bad choices. She’s not going to talk on the air about the lousy slime she’s gone out with—the one-night stands she never heard from again, the jock who would’ve traded her in for a football, Roy who went from slaps to belting her across the face before she threw him out.

But things have changed now, haven’t they? Barbara says.

Yes.

The camera pulls closer, and Terry feels the naked adoring yearning in the millions of eyes behind its lens.

There’s someone very important in your life right now.

"Mic," Terry says.

"Are you in love?"

You’re packing that bag too heavy.

Terry stares down at the cans of tomatoes she’s stacked in one bag. Sorry, she says. I don’t know what I was thinking about. Rapidly she pulls out most of the cans and replaces them with lighter items like boxes of saltine crackers and spaghettini.

The customer looks mollified. I couldn’t have lifted that. I’ve got back problems.

Terry makes sympathetic clucking sounds. Backs can be terrible, can’t they? I put mine out last summer.

She has to be careful. Sometimes she falls too deep into the fantasy. Sometimes Barbara and the TV cameras and the cool leather beneath her thighs become more real than her job, and she loses track of where she is and why. Sometimes she has to wipe her brain clean as if she’s wiping counters in the kitchen. But in the back of her mind, undisturbed and always ready to move forward, is the knowledge of her specialness. There it gleams, secretly, like a jewel in a blue velvet box.

AFTER OUR FIRST VISIT WITH EMMA AT THE Children’s Aid Society, Philip and I waited two more days while the paperwork was being completed before bringing her home. We were living in our first house then, a three-bedroom bungalow deep in the heart of a postwar Ottawa suburban tract called Elmvale Acres. All around us were houses built by the same developer and deviating only slightly in layout and facade. My attempts to make our house distinctive on two slender salaries involved starkly modern Swedish furniture, large doses of macramé, and shaggy white throw rugs imported from Turkey that smelled like goat—a decor similar to that of half a dozen other houses on the street.

Several months ago when I was cleaning up the basement, I found the last of the macramé at the bottom of a box of toys Emma had outgrown. The wall hanging was made of fuzzy yarns in gray and brown knotted into scrofulous lumps. Once a woman named Jane, who considered herself a person of some taste and refinement, had chosen to hang this on her living