What We Hold In Our Hands Read online

  I grabbed the dishcloth from the kitchen sink, swabbing Alice’s face and hands. As I lifted her from the highchair, she wrapped her fingers around a chunk of my hair and pulled. I pried open her fist, handed her over to Cam.

  “I’m going for a walk.” I poured apple juice into one of Alice’s cups. “Give her this. I’ll be back in an hour so you can study.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Jackson.

  “No, you stay here and help Cam with the dishes.”

  I shut the door, muffling Alice’s cries, taking refuge in the quiet hallway with its evening smells of hot oil, cumin, and cardamom.

  Whenever I eat Indian food, which is one of my favourites, I feel a pleasant ache in my chest for those days in the high-rise with Cam. I imagine him in his suburban house, fixing a leaky tap, hanging pictures with his wife, or helping his two boys with their homework. Sometimes I even call him, and his voice sounds reassuringly altered, the voice of a middle-aged man who carries the ghost of his younger self lightly, like a baby on his shoulders.

  Cam has become a parent again with the chance to do things differently, a risk I haven’t taken, an opportunity I have not allowed myself, relieved at how well Alice has managed, and how little she resents me. When she assures me that I’m a good mom and wraps her strong swimmer’s arms around me, I want to tell her that it’s not true, that she deserved better, but I know I’m still holding myself to an impossible standard.

  Outside, the air was fresh and warm for April. A fine mist like some early mornings back home hung over the city streets. I walked through the campus, past the library to the Athletic Centre, remembering the night of Jackson’s party, missing the snow.

  In Montreal, eight years later, I would run into Jackson in the library, his familiar long face strangely beardless, looming over the periodicals. I was a grad student at McGill, and he was an assistant professor at Concordia, but he ducked his head, stammering his way through our conversation.

  “I often think of those days in the café,” he said, clutching a magazine.

  But just when I thought we might become lovers, I met a man who taught with Jackson and would become my second husband, who said to me at a party, “When it snows, I always want to order Chinese food. And when it rains, I have to look at old comics. I keep a pile beside my bed and under my desk. Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk...”

  I peered through the windows of the Athletic Center. The swimming pool wasn’t busy so I went inside, showing my student card at the door to the women’s locker room. A girl who looked about my age was pulling on a bathing suit. I took off my sweater. Under my T-shirt, my breasts were big with milk, but they weren’t leaking, and my belly had slimmed down over the winter. No one would guess I was a mother.

  As I pushed open the door to the pool, a chlorine-scented steam settled over me. At the far end, a woman was teaching four young girls to dive. I sat on a bench and watched each one climb the steps of the diving board, run, bounce off the end, and slice the water with her outstretched arms, feet flailing above. My own bare arms tingled from the rush of bubbles I imagined the girls must feel, bubbles that stir the surface of their skin, before rising overhead, and away.

  Eating Water

  WHEN I WAS A TODDLER, MY MOTHER USED TO CROSS THE straps of my gingham overalls twice—once over my back and once across my chest. I was so small, so slight, a breeze could have swept me away. A hurricane was overkill.

  The big wave rises and curls. I stand near the surf, small legs planted in the sand, wearing the crossed-in-front overalls with the legs rolled up past my pointy knees. My father has persuaded my mother into celebrating his birthday with a picnic on the beach, even though the radio weatherman has called for afternoon storms associated with Hurricane Arlene. The weatherman does not expect Arlene herself to visit the island, only her entourage of winds and rains. No need to put up the hurricane shutters or fill the tub with water. The mere twenty square miles of rock, sand, and soil that make up our hook-shaped island will be safe from Arlene’s bright, quietly cunning eye.

  Were my parents downright negligent or merely foolish? I can see my father lounging on the woollen blanket they bought in Canada on their honeymoon, my mother posing between him and me on the beach, the palms fanning and the bay grapes bursting behind her. Her blonde hair is brushed up into a beehive, and she wears a sundress, sewn from the same pink gingham as my overalls, with a little white cardigan shrugged over it. I don’t know if these are memories or imaginings. As I’ve spent most of my life watching my parents carry on, it seems not unlikely that even before I reached the defiant age of two, I was already taking notes on their expressions and apparel. How they dressed like actors playing parts in a television family. He in his tipped fedora and pale grey flannels, the waistband snug around his belly, the striped suspenders a mere accessory. She in her bright, starched frocks, a fresh hibiscus pinned to her hair. How they paraded their love with handholding and lustful glances, how he stared into her eyes before anointing her hand with a kiss.

  My parents lie together on their big blanket, lips locked. My mother sends me guilty sideways looks before standing to brush the sand from her skirt. The sun sneaks through the clouds, blessing my hair with a splash of light. She rummages in her straw bag for the camera. My mouth gapes wide in a jack-o-lantern grin. You can see the thick black wave rolled tight behind me like an enormous Persian rug.

  After that day on the beach, I started to bulk up. My skimpy toddler body, now alert to the dangers of smallness and lightness, incorporated this new knowledge into all of its smart little cells, which set to work building fat. I’d only to watch my father to learn how it was done. Every day he padded himself against life, seeking comfort for his failures in French toast and syrup, bacon and tomato sandwiches, the yellow cookies he bought by the boxful from the Bermuda Bakery, strands of black and red licorice his sales girls fetched him from the candy store. By the time I was ten, I knew all his secrets, could smell sweets on his breath, identify the crumbs on his necktie and in the creases of his shirts, could recognize in his brown eyes fear disguised as revulsion whenever he was unable to avoid looking at me, his young and female mirror image.

  Spray from the surf tickles the nape of my neck. Sand dissolves under my feet as the surf pulls me back, and a dark wall of water rises. Salt burns nose, throat, and eyes. I am swallowed whole and alive, reclaimed by the sea.

  In Junior Four science class, Miss Reese told us that all life on earth evolved from the sea. Jane Pemberly raised her hand, sticky from the jujubes hidden in her desk.

  “God created Adam and Eve,” she said, a piece of jujube stuck to her tooth making her lisp. “They didn’t come from fith. It thays tho in the bible.”

  “The bible says the waters were here first,” countered smart and tactful Miss Reese. “Fish came before birds and animals. Everything originated in the water. Susan, please stop kicking Jane’s chair.” But Jane deserved it, spouting Sunday school propaganda. I hadn’t believed a thing they’d taught us there, the teachers passing out pictures of bible stories for us to colour, while they nodded over morning coffees and checked their makeup in sneaky compacts.

  I believed that the sea had been trying to take me back, and it would have succeeded if my mother hadn’t been such a strong swimmer—a good Ontario girl who grew up beside the lake, swimming and rowing.

  Off comes her little white sweater. Off the gingham dress. Into the sea she runs, diving after me where the beach drops off into deep water.

  My mother was a queen, an Amazon, a beauty. She tied herself to my father with a thick scratchy rope they both called “love,” the kind of rope that hung from the ceiling in my school’s gym, a big knot tied at the bottom. Some girls could shinny up that rope no problem, but all I could do was hang on, dangling back and forth like the clapper of a bell or the weight of a cuckoo clock.

  I reached both hands up the rope as far as they woul
d go, and pulled hopelessly, begging time to hurry me past the torture of gym class and all the other classes to come.

  “Fatty Fatty Fatso,” whispered Jane Pemberly from a few feet away.

  I stuck out a leg to see whether I could kick her in the face. Maybe. But how to make it look like an accident? I leaned my weight to one side then the other, swinging farther out, back and forth. The girls cleared a space around me. I was flying, spinning in a wonky circle. The gym teacher tried to grab the rope, but had to jump away when the bulk of me came barrelling towards her.

  “Stop that this instant, Susan. Just you stop that!”

  “I can’t,” I yelled. “I don’t know how.” I was crying already, thinking how I would be teased for this.

  Some of the girls screamed, “Stop, stop,” while others yelled, “Go, Fatty, go.”

  Watching their wild faces swing by, I grew calmer. The thick gym mats lay below me. All I had to do was to let go and fall, but I wanted to make a heroic gesture, to leap and land standing on the leather horse several feet away. I could see myself tossing a cape over one shoulder like Zorro. As I swung close to Jane and her friends, I released the rope and cast myself in their direction, knocking over Mary Bright, a tall girl who usually stayed out of my way. She fell against Jane, causing the whole class to tumble onto the mats, more of a psychological domino effect than a real one. Everyone was laughing or crying. I chose to cry, which is probably why they hated me. If you’re fat, they expect you to be jolly.

  I had decided to hate school when my mother first left me there alone, staring at the green snot that oozed from Jane Pemberly’s nose, while the kindergarten teacher said, “Susan, would you please go to the end of the line,” because I hadn’t known the protocol and had stood facing Jane in the teacher’s place at front. Walking past the other girls, observing their pale hair and slim freckled limbs, their blank, sullen, or friendly faces, I took notes on how different I was. They belonged to the same tribe as my mother—the blonde, pale, and thin—while I had my father’s black hair and deeply tanned Mediterranean skin, his round barrel belly.

  What I failed to notice was the absence of brown faces in the line. I’d yet to learn the word, “segregation,” or that the teasing and targeting I was about to experience were not the same as outright exclusion.

  “How did you like school?” my mother asked.

  “There’s an orange fish in a bowl and paste for gluing pictures,” I said, choosing not to mention the helpless disgust I’d endured, staring at Jane’s crusty nose all day. The teacher had made us partners, which meant we’d had to sit together, and hold hands on the way to lunch. Neither did I mention the shame I’d felt every time I did something wrong, like tasting the smooth milky glue or slapping Jane’s hand away while we said grace. I didn’t want my mother to think I was one of those difficult children she complained of at the boys’ school where she taught art and gym.

  I don’t know where I’ll end up—waving whitely underwater like a shipwrecked captain, my overall straps snagged on a coral fan, or floating free with a fish’s tail and a mermaid’s flowing hair. Or in my mother’s arms, warmed and revived, returned from the dead.

  One day in science class, Miss Reese told us about hurricanes, how the warmer the air, the more pressure and speed they could build. How it wasn’t fair that they were all named after women. While she talked, I could smell the salty, sulphurous ocean, and feel the wave wrap around me, stealing my breath.

  “Susan, are you okay?” Miss Reese’s voice seemed to enter my ears through the echoing cavern of a conch shell. “You’re white as a ghost,” she said. “Jane, take her to sick bay.”

  Jane grabbed my hand, yanking me from my chair. My legs shook, and my ears still hummed with the conch’s swirling sound.

  My mother’s strong, warm hands grip my ankles. She pulls one way, while the ocean pulls the other, a tug-of-war over my young, vulnerable bones and slight, soft flesh. My lungs fill with water.

  Legs wobbling, I leaned against Jane’s sturdy shoulder.

  “If you’re faking…” she hissed into my echoing ear.

  In sickbay, the nurse stuck a thermometer into my mouth and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm. Jane stood watching. If I was sick, she’d be the one to divulge the details at recess, everyone leaning in close. If I wasn’t sick, she’d tell that too, after she pushed me around for a while at the edge of the playing field.

  The nurse pressed the cold face of a stethoscope against my skin. “Back to class with you,” she told Jane.

  Calling my mother at work, she said, “Susan has a fever and her chest sounds full.” Then, dangling the stethoscope from one finger, “I suppose she can rest here for the afternoon, but she should see a doctor as soon as possible.”

  The doctor said I had pneumonia.

  “How long will she have to stay home?” my mother asked.

  I knew she was thinking of the days she’d miss at work. She had little patience for illness. Only my father could interrupt the proper pace of her days with impunity.

  The pain in my chest eased a little at the prospect of missing school, but after a few days at home, I languished in bed, wondering what games Jane and her friends were playing at recess, and what new marvels of science Miss Reese had disclosed.

  As much as I claim to have hated school, I felt acknowledged there. The teachers could be counted on to yell at me or send me to the office, the girls relied on to tease me and sneak mouldy sandwiches into my desk. The bells always rang on time, the days ended, and, after some name-calling or shunning at the bus stop, I found my way home, where I was, for the most part, left alone.

  My parents never took me to the beach again, although I went there with my grandparents whenever they visited from Canada. My mother and father were either working or immersed in bottomless talks about his business woes. Throughout my childhood, he started one business after another while the money he’d inherited from his parents swirled away. He sold Persian rugs imported from a distributor in New York, but the prices he had to charge were too high and the demand on the island too small. He tried his hand at T-shirts and souvenirs, but could not withstand the fierce and entrenched competition. He thought the restaurant business might be his calling, but he was too ambitious—linen tablecloths, French waiters, steaks imported fresh from Alberta, white asparagus from Belgium.

  One Sunday when I was ten, my parents occupied a bench in the Botanical Gardens, jawing over my father’s failing souvenir store, while I chased peacocks, which flew to the top of the arbour and teased me with hints of turquoise and indigo. I rested on a wall a few feet away from an anole doing pushups on the limestone, its green skin darkening to blend in with the grey wall. While I was distracted by the lizard, one peacock unfurled his splendid feathers and darted at me. All those bright blue eyes. I turned to check if my parents had been watching, but they’d strolled over to the rose garden, their heads bent over some new variety. A triangle of blood bloomed on my wrist.

  “The peacock bit me,” I cried, waving my wounded arm.

  My mother waved back. My father sniffed a rose.

  “It hurts,” I yelled.

  My mother looked at my father, as if for permission, before striding towards me.

  “What happened?” she asked, pulling the white scarf from her hair to wrap around the bite.

  “A peacock did it.” I threw my arms around her neck, glancing over her shoulder at my father, who was kicking the gravel path, clouds of dust rising from his newly polished shoes.

  My mother reaches one hand for my sinking head, while the other clings to my leg. Scooping me to her chest, she swims on her back, kicking against the tide, holding my face up to the fresh rain.

  I’d always wanted her to love me best. She’d saved my life with heroic flair, allowing me almost to forget her part in exposing me to the danger. My father often called her a “magnificen
t creature.” That was how she appeared to me too—an exotic, lovely bird who did not belong with my short, stout, heedless dad.

  Saturdays, I helped in his souvenir store, counting money, calculating profit margins on items such as ice cream cones, seashell necklaces, and coconuts carved to look like heads with fake wooden cigarettes hanging from their mouths. For a ten year old, I had a precocious interest in how to run a business. Miss Reese, worn down by my repeated questions about profit and loss, had given the class a lecture on economics, calling it “the other science.”

  “Dad,” I asked. “Wouldn’t you make more money if you bought these things directly from the manufacturer?”

  He stared blankly, and waved me away from the cash register.

  “When I’m older, can I manage the store for you?”

  “You’ll have to lose some weight.”

  “You’re fatter than me,” I said.

  He looked past me at the bikinis tied onto cardboard cutouts of women’s bodies with slim waists and curving hips. “Looks are important for girls.”

  “What about Mrs. Trott?” I asked. Mrs. Trott worked at the store during the week. She was a large, round black woman who always gave me peppermints and asked how my mother was.

  “It’s different for her,” he said, but would not explain why.

  Not for the first time, I found myself wishing I had brown skin. It seemed a kind of camouflage that would allow me to blend in with the island, to really belong here, to be welcomed by the ladies at the bus stop who greeted each other with jokes and laughter, who scolded and worried over the black children, tidy and polite in their beige or maroon uniforms, but whose faces zipped shut when I tried to smile at them or say hello.

  “It’s not my fault I take after you,” I said, shaking out the picked-over T-shirts, folding them smooth again the way Mrs. Trott had shown me.

  When the store failed, I wondered if it was because my father was fat, if looks were important for men too.