views on the latest MuchMusic videos, and occasionally a surprisingly good drawing would surface from the sea of hormones. What a welcome diversion all that would be from the silence of Gerald’s living room.
From the corner of her eye, she watched him search through the White Pages, his cheeks suffused like overripe tomatoes. You could tell he’d done some hard living in his time, a suspicion that had borne out at his wedding. His friends came in all stripes, but they had one thing in common when Rita asked, “So how do you know Gerald?”
“We met in AA, ten years back.”
“Oh, how nice.”
An awkward lull. “I’m going to the bar. Can I get you a mineral water or anything?”
So that explained why Gerald was toasting everyone with a goblet of cranberry juice.
Maybe he’d fallen off the wagon since then. Had a reunion with his old friend Jack Daniel’s drawn to the surface a dark, violent side? It’s not a crime to walk out of your life. Maybe Lily had come to her senses and hightailed it. Rita had noticed Davis eying Gerald with suspicion at one point, questioning him about the state of his marriage. Wasn’t the husband always the prime suspect?
But the more she thought about it, the less she could see it. The wild flush of Gerald’s cheeks was from worry, not rage. Wasn’t it? She’d seen the way he looked at Lily with little boy enchantment in his eyes.
Still, you never could tell.
“I’m going to search around upstairs again.”
“Sure thing, kiddo.”
Her roots were growing in. That was the first thing Rita had noticed. Although Lily was usually meticulous about her hair, now a thin, silvery horizon peeked out along her part.
A hand reached out to rub a smudge off Rita’s cheek. She’d squirmed away, as though she were a little kid again. Now she thought of that simple, motherly gesture with a pang of longing. Why couldn’t she have just stood still, for God’s sake?
That was the last time Rita saw her mother, a week ago. Moving day.
Rita had been in a hurry, the rented U-Haul parked outside. She was swinging by to pick up her old boxes, stored in Lily and Gerald’s basement. At last, she’d be able to use all those ceramic dishes she’d made back in art school, clay oozing through her fingertips, massaging her palms. How malleable — how full of possibility — life had seemed back then. Cal had never liked the dishes, calling them part of her hippie-dippy phase, and this made unearthing the old treasures all the more fun and delightful.
Maybe Rita had been so excited about her new place that she’d neglected to see her mother was in trouble. More likely, she’d been aware of what was going on but had looked the other way, as she always did, because she couldn’t bear to face it.
Burnt brown sugar lingered in the air, sweet and needy. Lily had baked an apple crumble. Yet Rita was busy, her skin covered in sweat and grime, more than her mother could ever wipe away, and she just wanted to grab her boxes and immerse herself in unwrapping wine glasses and popping bubble wrap in the quiet of her new apartment. Besides, as she’d come to tell herself over the years, keeping their relationship on an even keel meant managing their time together very carefully. Too much chit-chat would only fill her with irritation or worse yet, that gnawing, empty feeling: they’d never see eye to eye on anything. She’d been cheated of that natural mother-daughter closeness.
But Lily had insisted, and as she poured the tea, it sloshed on her hand. Rita sprang up to run the faucet until the water was ice cold. How thin and frail her mother suddenly seemed, her eyes distracted and adrift, lost in some internal landscape that hemmed her in and filled her with a nervous, fluttering energy. It was a look that Rita and Tom had learned to recognize over the years. Whenever they saw it, they both felt an impulse to run.
“You okay, Mom?”
A dip into silence. “Where’re you moving to, again?”
“Kensington Market.”
“Oh, we used to live not far.”
Actually, Margueretta Street was a fair bit farther west.
“We always owned our own house, though,” Lily added.
Here we go again, Rita thought. Her slide down the social scale. The shame of being a single mom living in a crappy rental. Next Lily would reminisce about the beautiful Tudor that Rita and Cal had once owned on Golfdale Road, the Mercedes she used to drive, the cottage in Muskoka. The cleaning lady who’d ironed Cal’s shirts while Rita pushed her Peg Perego pram past the WASPy neighbours, who probably mistook her for the nanny.
But Lily’s eyes remained fixed on the cream wall; it might have been a movie screen and she was waiting for the film to begin. “Before your grandfather bought that house, we moved around quite a bit.”
“We did?”
“Oh.” Lily had a flush of confusion. “Was that before you were born?”
“I only remember that one house.”
“Yeah.” Lily nodded a little frantically, like she was trying to convince another person in her head. “The house on Margueretta was the only place we lived.”
What memory was she struggling to push from her mind? Memories of the internment? Excitement rose in Rita’s gut: she might have been teetering at the top of a roller coaster, wind tearing through her hair, before the inevitable plunge. Though it never came — of course it didn’t. Lily’s expression smoothed over, as always, everything hidden behind that placid mask.
“Our house was the best on the block. With a bit of money, I could’ve fixed it up into something special. In that neighbourhood, though, why bother? Not after all the black folks moved in and ruined everything.”
“Mom. You can’t say stuff like that.” Strange how being the target of racism had made Lily all the more bigoted, as if pointing fingers at others was the only way she knew how to shield herself. That was the absurd way the world worked.
Yet they were getting away from the real source of Rita’s exasperation. A hot tide swept up her neck. “You don’t have to be ashamed to talk about it — I know what happened, Mom. You were rounded up and thrown in camps, like a bunch of diseased animals!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And watch your tone.”
“Just admit it. You’ll feel so much better!”
“Admit what?” The amazing thing was that Lily looked genuinely perplexed, as though a stranger on the street had called out her name, having mistaken her as someone else.
Always this clash of wills. And Lily’s signature strategy — surprisingly effective — was to retreat into her shell of proclaimed ignorance. It was taking Rita back, way back. She’d regressed to her teenage self again, hormonally out of whack, living on the verge of glassy tears. The more helpless Lily acted, the more Rita felt it: this cruel, uncontrollable, animalistic urge to tear apart the little world her mother had fabricated out of tissue-paper lies and delusions.
The cuckoo clock let out its mechanized clangs and shrieks, punching the air several times. If she kept this up, she’d never get out
