Swallow Read online

  Carly preferred the dolls to stay up on the counter, uneasy under their rows and rows of eyes. Sometimes she held her breath and darted by them, the way my mother held her breath while driving by cemeteries.

  &Carly and I did not look alike. I could see myself in our mother, in her thin frame and dark features, eyes almost black, knotted hair the colour of coffee beans. She consumed coffee incessantly, as though sucking in this darkness, and smelled of it, its bitterness. We had the same flat chest and snarled hair, not really curly or wavy or straight, but the kind you had to untangle. I was her paler version, slightly washed out, my hair and eyes a little lighter, the way a shirt goes through the wash and its colour bleeds out into the water. I blamed my father’s traits, but could not remember what he looked like. I thought often that he must look like Carly, infinitely brighter. I could not figure out how my mother had given birth to something so vivid.

  &Patrick telling me he loved me was like pouring aspartame in my coffee — never quite sweet enough. I told this to Carly right after he left me, after she finally convinced me to take a bath, to wash the smell of me off myself. I could see her blurry silhouette behind the shower curtain. I knew she couldn’t afford the amount of money she’d spent on a last-minute plane ticket from Toronto to Calgary in the middle of a snowstorm. When I’d asked her about it, she’d said, “That’s what credit cards are for. Buy now, pay later!”

  “He always said, You are loved, or, You’re the love of my life,” I told her, sliding slippery soap down the length of my arm. “Or he’d sign his cards, Love Patrick. But never I love you. And it’s not like I didn’t say it. I said it all the time.”

  She slid the curtain back.

  “Car — !” I swiveled around in the tub to face the wall. The water sloshed up and over the rim at her.

  “What? We share fifty percent of our DNA. Su bosom é mi bosom.” She took my matty hair in both hands, squeezed it in her fists. Water ran through her fingers. “I think you’re kinda crazy because you haven’t slept in forever. But I agree with you.” She raked out one long snarled curl, her warm fingers against my scalp.

  “About what?”

  “That you deserve sugar.”

  &Our mother had three kinds of days: work days, phone days, and bed days.

  Work days meant Papi entertained Carly while I did my homework. Once, for a school contest, I had to make a bridge out of popsicle sticks, the goal being to bear as much weight as possible. Our teacher had shown us last year’s model, balancing her little five-kilogram weights one at a time into a bucket suspended from the bottom.

  “I’ll eat them all!” Carly volunteered, sucking on a cherry-flavoured popsicle, her lips already lipstick red.

  “Last year’s winner held thirty-five kilos,” I told Papi. My own popsicle made my lips numb. “I think that’s more than Carly weighs. We’re going to need a lot of sticks.”

  “Actually — ” He sketched something on a napkin. “It’s not the number of sticks that makes it able to bear weight. It’s the design. The weight distribution. The balance.”

  Carly nudged up beside him. “Let me see!” She placed a sticky hand on my arm. “My next popsicle is going to be. . .grape.”

  It took us forty-eight sticks. Papi hung a bucket from the bottom, kept adding various fruits from his fridge. I kept expecting our bridge to break. Apple, orange, grapefruit. . . How much pressure could something so delicate bear?

  My mother’s shifts often ended before we got home from school. I could judge it — bed day or phone day — just by stepping off the elevator onto our floor.

  “I don’t want a fucking long distance package! . . . I want to talk to your supervisor. This is fucking ridiculous!”

  I ran into our next-door neighbour, Alexa, a biology student at the U of T, while taking out the garbage during one of my mother’s rants. Alexa chewed on her lower lip. “Everything okay in there? What’s your mom so mad about?”

  “Telemarketers,” I said. “They call when she’s sleeping. She hates when they wake her up.”

  Alexa leaned against her apartment doorframe. “She sleeps during the day?”

  Mom hated telemarketers the most, because they called her. But sometimes she made the calls, harassing the credit card company or Toronto Hydro, trying to get out of paying interest on late bills. After my dad left, she sold the car. We didn’t have cable, and neither did Papi, whose TV turned on with a knob. Papi preferred CBC Radio, anyway. But he did manage to rig up a VCR, and rented Carly a series of black-and-white Shirley Temple videos. She loved A Little Princess and The Wizard of Oz, though the flying monkeys gave her nightmares. I had to watch Family Matters at Aubrey’s.

  Alexa looked between me and our front door, as though trying to decide whether to say something to my mom about the noise. Mom’s screaming was probably interrupting her studying.

  “Why is there an extra two-dollar fee on my savings account this month? You just add fines and hope your customers don’t realize it? You think you can just rob people? You’re all swindlers!” Mom screamed, through the door.

  On phone days, I put on music for Carly and tried to learn long division over the dual noise.

  When it’s dark, you’re home and fed,

  Curl up snug in your water bed.

  Moon is shining and the stars are out,

  Good night, little whale, good night!

  But phone days meant that our mother was at least awake, moving around, doing something. On the phone, she cleaned the fridge, rubbed angry circles into the countertops, stood out on the balcony beating the crap out of the rugs. On the phone, she struggled with the can opener and emptied Chef Boyardee into microwavable bowls; ceramic for her and me, pink plastic with a picture of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Carly. I could stomach the burnt innards of an emptied can. At least we had food.

  On sleeping days, listening to the quiet of the hallway getting off the elevator, I took Carly’s hand and squeezed. “Time to play the whisper game.”

  Quiet as a mouse?

  Quieter than a mouse. Quiet as a turtle. Quiet as a beetle. Quiet as a tiny crumb on a beetle’s nose.

  &Carly met Ryan the summer just before she turned seventeen. Ryan lived with his grandparents in a bedroom in their basement with walls covered in carpet in a room next door to the washer and dryer. He would turn them on at night when he couldn’t sleep — white noise like mothers make, turning on the vacuum cleaner to lull their screaming babies calm. His drug-addicted mother lost custody right around the time he started kindergarten.

  He told Carly these things, and then she’d spill them to me, over the phone, drunk on the tragedy of Ryan’s life.

  “Does he want me to know this?” I asked her. Carly held in personal information like a colander holding in water.

  She brushed it off, unfazed. “I think I love him, Darce. I know I love him. I know that I know.” She laughed. “You know?”

  For their third date, Ryan took Carly to a restaurant in Little Portugal, near Ossington. Carly had always said that Ossington, one of Papi’s cats, a scrappy, carrot-coloured marmalade whose dishevelled fur always looked wet, and who was missing his left front leg, was her “most favouritest.” Papi called him “Handi-cat,” because he couldn’t resist a pun. Carly called him “Oz.”

  The restaurant, on the second story of a small walk-up, could have easily been mistaken for an apartment, because of the lack of a sign out front. Carly said it had pink curtains and a giant plastic figure of the Virgin Mary in the window.

  “How does something like that stay in business?” I asked, my phone warm against my cheek, while I waited for Patrick to get back home.

  “Word of mouth? I dunno. Okay, so, the weird thing — ”

  Patrick’s key made a scraping sound in the lock. He fumbled with the Styrofoam containers of Indian food in bags hanging from his wrists as he came in the door.

  I’d answered Carly’s call before he left to go get dinner. Noticing the phone still in my h
and, Patrick rolled his eyes and then made a rolling motion with one of his wrists. Hurry it up. My grey tabby, Kipling, danced out into the kitchen and hovered below the bags of food, following Patrick as he carried them to the counter, her nostrils tantalized by the smell of warm butter chicken.

  Carly continued talking, unaware. “So she had like, these tarot cards, kinda — ”

  I tried to catch up, logically, to not betray my distractibility, to let Carly float happily along with the illusion that she was the centre of my attention. She and Patrick both held the belief that Carly was, in fact, the centre of my attention, although Patrick, ladling curried meat onto naan, did not seem quite as happy about that fact as Carly. He gestured at me to get off the phone, one wrist working in a circular motion, then a slice at his throat. A frustrated mime.

  The restaurant Carly blathered on about, she explained, was owned and operated by a Portuguese couple, a self-proclaimed psychic and her husband.

  “They don’t take your order. They kinda just know what you want. They like, sit you down, and the wife tells your fortune and the husband brings the food.”

  I resisted asking her again how such an establishment could possibly stay in business. She told me that they brought Ryan spaghetti —

  “Spaghetti isn’t Portuguese,” I interjected.

  “Is too. And it doesn’t have to be Portuguese, it just has to be what your aura says you want.”

  “Your aura?”

  “And guess what they brought me?”

  “Actually, Car, can I call you back later? Patrick just brought dinner home.” Patrick had eaten at the office three nights in a row.

  “Chocolate cake! For dinner! Isn’t that kinda crazy? I mean, how accurate is that? It had like, a gooey puddingy inside.”

  “How accurate is it that a girl would like chocolate?”

  “You’re kind of a killjoy.”

  “Okay, Carly, listen, I have to go eat dinner.”

  “You haven’t heard my fortune.”

  “Tell me tomorrow, okay?”

  Years later, after she left me, I realized that we’d both forgotten the conversation, never followed up. Patrick ate quietly, then said he’d rather work on an assignment than watch the movie we’d planned, a subtitled film Patrick had seen reviewed in The Globe and Mail. One I had no interest in watching alone. I did the dishes, scooped granulated poop out of Kipling’s litter box, bickered with Patrick over whose turn it was to empty the litter box, poured a bath that was too hot, then too cold, then too full, argued with Patrick over my hair making the pillow wet, and forgot about my baby sister, the aftertaste of chocolate clouds still on her tongue.

  &For a few weeks in sixth grade, a bout with strep throat forced me home from school and into hibernation on Papi’s couch, half in and half out of a NyQuil sleep, lulled by the drone of talk shows. That week, the cats gravitated towards me the way they gravitated towards the long radiator that ran down the length of one whole wall of the apartment as a source of heat. Between shallow fever naps, I woke to one of them squatted on my chest, paws tucked underneath her body, eyes shut into slits. I couldn’t tell if the vibration inside my chest cavity was coming from her or from me.

  Papi’s furniture had curves and edges, grooves and contours carved into the wood, each piece of furniture a slightly different shade of brown. Drawers had to be yanked, not just pulled open, which had an upside: it kept Carly from exploring Papi’s belongings. Papi poured us juice in round glass tumblers, the kind someone would drink brandy from, though he claimed not to like the taste of alcohol. He kept little porcelain bowls of mixed nuts on the kitchen table, as though his company might want to have a snack, but I never saw any other visitors at his apartment, nor did he talk about having any. He kept a pair of threadbare, navy blue slippers by the door, and had a glass breakfront behind which he kept Tati’s china place settings, a copy of their marriage certificate, a hanging row of dusty wine glasses, and a wooden replica of a boat with a white and blue gingham sail.

  When I could breathe successfully through both nostrils, and when Papi went to pick Carly up from school, I took down all of Tati’s Matryoshka dolls and lined them up on the coffee table beside my gnarled Kleenexes. I couldn’t tell what had Carly so spooked. One at a time, I took them apart, watching their concentric bodies grow smaller and smaller. The core of each held a tiny baby, its swaddling clothes painted on. Most of the babies had their eyes closed.

  The dolls’ severed heads stared at me blankly with heavy lidded eyes, pink circle cheeks, and rosebud mouths. Out of boredom, I switched their babies before reassembling them and lining them all up, shortest to tallest, back on the shelf. They smiled nervously at me, pregnant with each other’s illegitimate children.

  &On days that Papi couldn’t look after us after school, as long as the temperature didn’t go below zero, Carly and I played with Aubrey in the park. Aubrey, who had the privilege of being an only child, begged her parents for a pet, so they let her watch her aunt Asa’s dog Chewy for a week. After three days, she stopped bringing Chewy, a scrappy little Shih Tzu who peed on the foot of her bed and howled to be let out at six AM, to the park with us.

  “He just chases his ball, over and over and over,” Aubrey said. “He brings it back, I throw it. He brings it back, I throw it. He can’t even do tricks!”

  Like Carly. For a while, playing with her amused me, when she first learned to walk and talk. I taught her new words, then laughed when she messed them up. She loved “ton ton” soup and “pis-ghetti.” She called her belly-button “bubble gum.” When she sneezed, she announced, “Bless you me.” On her fourth birthday, one of our neighbours came over and stood at the front door taking off her jacket when Carly, trying to be polite, announced, “We have hookers in the closet.”

  But she also threw ferocious temper tantrums. Her nose always ran. She liked to pinch. She stole my favourite doll and coloured “makeup” on its face with permanent marker. She always wanted to sleep in my bed, squishing in beside me and saying, “You’re my best sister.”

  I didn’t want to have to keep an eye on Carly while Mom ran to Dominion to get groceries or cleaned the kitchen. I imagined Aubrey’s mom and dad tucking me into bed, pulling her daisy floral bedspread up to my chin. “You’re our special girl,” they’d say.

  That summer, Aubrey’s mother had taken Aubrey to a place on Yonge Street and let her get her nails done however she wanted them. Aubrey chose a different colour for every finger, ticked them off for me, one at a time: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, brown, black, white. The white looked like White-Out, but I didn’t tell her that. For her twelfth birthday, her parents let her get her ears pierced. When I asked, my mother said we didn’t have money for frivolous things like earrings. Then she asked me to take the garbage out and push it down the chute. She always packed the bags way too full.

  At the front door, I yelled, “I’m going to the park with Aubrey.” My jean jacket barely fit, squeezing me tight around the shoulders. I doubted Mom would buy me a new one until school started, if then.

  I had the door already open when she yelled back, “Take your sister or you can’t go!”

  Aubrey lived close to us in a duplex with three storeys and a small balcony off her parents’ bedroom. Aubrey’s mom worked during the day at a nearby florist. My mom still worked shifts at the diner. We ate cold leftover fries for dinner twice a week.

  “My mom almost never lets me eat fries,” Aubrey said, when I complained. “She says they have too much salt.”

  At the park, she wrote her name in Japanese in the dirt with a giant stick. “Does your mom get good tips?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno.”

  Carly, nearby, twirled and sang the gibberish words to a song I didn’t recognize. She held a fistful of dandelions. At least the weeds kept her occupied.

  “My mom has to work at the flower shop,” Aubrey continued, “because my dad said it was too hard being a one-income family. And my dad is a workahol
ic. You don’t even have a dad.”

  “I do too.”

  Aubrey’s name looked pretty, even in soil.

  “Do mine,” I said.

  Carly kept singing. Mom had said to keep an eye on her. I’d just keep an ear on her.

  Aubrey ignored me. “You don’t have a dad, you have a sperm donor. The word dad means somebody who raises you.”

  “Who says?”

  “I do.” She scuffed her name out with the tip of her sneaker, started again. “Waitresses don’t get paid very much. How can she afford to take care of you guys?”

  “I don’t know, but she does.”

  “Maybe she’s a stripper.”

  I frowned. “She is not a stripper. Stop making stuff up.”

  Aubrey dropped the stick. “Hey, Carly, does your mom like to dance?”

  Carly immediately perked up, dropping the fuzzy yellow blossoms. “I love to dance!” She began twirling on the spot.

  “You’re a bitch,” I said. I’d never sworn before, but Aubrey did, often teasing me for being a goody-two-shoes. I pushed my shoulders back, lifted my chin.

  Aubrey rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

  “I’m not playing with you anymore.” It sounded babyish, and I turned my back to her so she wouldn’t see me blush. I started walking away from her across the park, away from Carly, too. Aubrey could take care of Carly for once. Served her right.

  I could see something small and pink-looking at the bottom of one of the nearby trees. I approached. A newborn bird! Pink and scrawny, its veins pulsed, visible through its skin. Its eyes bulged. I squatted down beside it. It opened and closed its mouth, soundlessly.