Dear Dave Bidini,

I hate hockey, but can we still be friends?

As you can tell, I am a 15-year-old boy, and this is true. I lie on my bed and listen to my mom’s old albums. I am listening to Whale Music, and I feel like you know me even though it was recorded before I was born.

Dear Dave Bidini, did you think the world would have changed by now? When you were growing up, did they have trans?

I think I am trans. I am not really a boy, but when I think about having sex, I always imagine that I am a boy doing it with a boy. In my dream, I have a penis, and I am doing it to the other boy with my penis. I lied about being a boy. This part is true. Dear Dave Bidini, I hope this is not embarrassing for you.

Solomon is in my Algebra class, and is called Sol. His parents home-schooled him until this year. Homeschooled kids are supposed to be different and openminded, so I might be able to be friends with him. Tomorrow I am going to give Sol a note in Algebra.

Dear Dave Bidini, I asked Sol if he wanted to come over to my place after school tomorrow. He said yes.

Dear Dave Bidini, Sol is coming over today. He barely looked at me in Algebra.

Dear Dave Bidini, Sol will be here in a few hours. Dear Dave Bidini, I just shaved my head. Sol didn’t mind it. He said he thought it was cool. And when he sat down on my bed to do homework, we did homework. Dave Bidini, I wish we’d had sex. His skin smelled like rain. When he was reading his textbook, the back of his neck looked very smooth and brown. There were fine hairs on it in the shape of an arrow that pointed to a place that made me want to put my hands down the front of his pants. Are everyone’s thoughts this dirty? The backs of his ears are beautiful.

When he left, I lay on my bed, rubbing my crotch against my palm. I pretended Sol was on top of me, and that I was fucking his butt. I’m a girl, Dave Bidini, so this is trouble.

My mom came home from work about the time I had finished making supper. I made hamburgers and frozen French fries and Caesar salad. When she saw my scalp, she didn’t say much. She couldn’t, exactly, having told me, my whole life, “A mohawk, dear, is always a good fashion choice.” She is obsessed with the Clash, and they are dead. But I could tell she didn’t like it, because she started pulling out hats after supper, asking which one I was going to wear to school tomorrow.

Dear Dave Bidini, today at school Sol ignored me. No one noticed my shaved head, or if they did, they didn’t say anything. I wore a hat. No one ever looks at me anyway.

There is a girl in my class who everyone says is a lesbian. I’m not interested in her. The thought of her bust against mine just makes me think of hugging an air bag. It would be soft and squishy and I would sink into it like it was an air bag on impact and I would die from the thing that was supposed to save me. I can’t even think about what it would be like on her down there. I want to feel my hard chest against Solly’s hard chest. I would like the sound of his teeth knocking against mine when we kissed.

Dear Dave Bidini, when I came home from school today, my mother was already here. She was crying at the kitchen table, holding a Polaroid of her mom. She told me she was crying because she was remembering her mom, but that it’s not my job to carry her emotions. Yeah, right, like she really means that.

When I went into my room, she was still crying. I could hear her. I started thinking about a song I could play for her to cheer her up. I went out to the kitchen and put my iPod buds in her ears, so she could listen to “Record Body Count.” Dear Dave Bidini, she just kept crying. I wonder if she has depression.

It’s just me and my mom, Dave Bidini. We are a single-parent, single-child family. There was never a father, Dave Bidini. I think he was some guy in a band. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me, Dave Bidini: my father was a rock star, and my mother was a guitar. I am not some one, Dave Bidini. I am some thing. I feel like a thing, when I listen to music. There is a guitar solo you do in between “Rain” and “Queer” that makes me feel like it is actually being played on my stomach. It’s not so bad.

When my mom came into my room, she sat on my bed and kissed me and told me she loves me. Then she said, “You should tell people how much they mean to you before they die.”

God, she is so creepy sometimes. But I am thinking, Dave Bidini, that I should tell you how much your music means to me before you die. Are you old, Dave Bidini?

Sol again. He came up to me in the parking lot and asked if I could come to his place. His mom was picking him up. I said yes and got in their car with them. I didn’t call my mom, Dave Bidini. Not right away.

Sol’s house is incredibly cool. There is a live tree growing in their kitchen, in the middle of the table. It comes up out of the floor, and when you go in the basement you see this giant hole his dad must have dug when they built the house. They built the house around this tree.

Sol is very mature for his age, and has a great vocabulary, and is what my mother would call “emotionally intelligent.” When we were sitting on his bed, getting ready to do homework, he told me that he always thought I was too cool for him. He said he was intimidated. I thought, “I thought you hated me.”

And then, Dave Bidini, I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. When he kissed back, I took his hand and placed it on my breast, inside my shirt but outside of my bra. Sol froze for a sec, like he was startled, but then relaxed but stayed completely still.

Then, after a second, he started moving his hand around. A lot. We did that for a long time, while kissing, first with our mouths closed, but then it was so great my lips kind of opened on their own and a noise came out of me like I’ve never heard myself make before.

Sol got up, went to his bedroom door, which was open, and stuck his head out and called, “Mom?” She didn’t answer, and he shut the door and locked it behind him.

“Is she gone out?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s probably outside stirring the compost. But we’ve talked about sex, me and her and my dad. They said I should only have sex with people who like me, and that it should be pleasurable. They also said it was better to have the first time here rather than in the back seat of a car.”

“I like you,” I said.

Sol took off his glasses, and I unbuttoned my shirt. He put his hands and then his arms around to my back. Then somehow, we were both in our underpants, kissing like crazy. Dave Bidini, we touched each other everywhere, and I didn’t feel like a girl or a guy. I just felt like me.

When I got home, I didn’t tell my mom I had had sex because, technically, we hadn’t. What happened is that I had my crotch against Sol’s thigh, and he was rubbing it against my crotch, and my breathing got faster and faster and suddenly I felt a little dizzy. The kissing was crazy just then, like we were eating ice cream out of each others’ mouths. I know it was the You Know. The Orgasm. What a dumb word. I was dizzy and I was puffing and I had my hand tight around Sol’s god I don’t even know what he calls it and he arched his back away from me at the same time he pushed his forehead against mine and the mess was not as bad as you might expect but it was warm and there was a lot of it, Dave Bidini. It was great. I can’t wait to do it again. Sol has to go with his parents to Tofino tomorrow, but he’s coming over to my place the next day after school, which is Friday, when my mother works late at the radio station!

Now it’s tomorrow. Dave Bidini, I think she is cracking up. “What noises do rock stars make that you like?” she asked me.

“Huh?”

My mother doesn’t understand, Dave Bidini. She thinks that I love you. I don’t love you, Dave Bidini, I want to be you. I think that if I had been a boy, Dave Bidini, I would have been you. Is that the same as love?

“It’s usually the stuff other than the words and the chords that really pull you into the song,” my mother is saying.

“Like…”

“Like Joe Strummer crowing like a rooster in London Calling. That’s what got me, the first time I heard it. I thought, ‘What would make him decide to do that?’ That’s the kind of thing that has always gotten me. And the Beastie Boys—”

“Beastie Men is more like it.”

“—uh, and I was just…wondering…if you listen to music that way.”

“Well, Dave Bidini does this thing—”

“Oh, Dave Bidini!” she interrupts me. “I saw him the other day. He was with his kids.”

Ohmigod, Dave Bidini. You’re still alive. And if you have kids, then you’re probably the same age as my mother. And maybe you know each other. She knows lots of rock stars because of her job. But Dave Bidini, are you still the guy whose voice I hear on “King of the Past”? I want to know, because I don’t want to be a rock star, but I don’t really understand why I love you in the way that I do.

“Tell me more about what you listen for in a song,” I ask my mom. I can tell she’s happy, because I don’t usually seem very interested in what she has to say. I am, but I don’t show it, and she can’t tell, so she usually seems disappointed and tries to hide it.

“Oh, I like the squeaks and the feedback and the scraping sound the guitarists’ fingers make when they skate up the strings during a solo, almost as much as the solo itself, and I like those things that singers mutter close to the mike when they’re not singing, but they decide to keep them on the record anyway. And the breathing, the inhales. And I like real drums. You didn’t have to live through the ’80s thank god, those stupid drum machines were as perfect as laugh tracks.”

I am drifting a little bit, and she is going off in her own world, all happy to be talking about rock and roll, and about herself. She’s a really good mom, Dave Bidini, but she’s different.

“I’m going to have sex here tomorrow with Solomon Mellor,” I say.

There is a very long pause. “I thought you’d like to know.” “Thank you.” “We, um—” “We need to talk about birth control.” “We’ll probably get some condoms.” “Is this the first—uh, should you have been on the pill, or the patch? Before this?” I can’t bring myself to say anything. “I, uh, I thought—” she begins. “You thought I was a fucking queer.” Now she says nothing. “Everybody does, just because I don’t wear my underwear on the outside of my clothes and have a word on my pants you can read off my ass.”

Neither of us has ever really heard me talk like this, and we’re both kind of shocked, I guess.

“I guess you’re right,” she says. “I did think maybe you were gay.”

Then she says, “Look, it doesn’t matter to me if you’re straight or gay or what. You know that.”

I do know that. She would probably be thrilled if I were, so that she could be the first parent in our building to start a chapter of PFLAG.

“You’ve told me a few times,” I say.

“What’s important is that the boy is nice to you, and that you only do what feels good for you.”

“You sound like a hippie.” “A what?” She is totally horrified. “I know this kid whose mom is a hippie and she told him the same thing.” “Mmm. Mm hm,” she says. When she stops using words and just uses sounds I know she is offended and trying not to be.

“Maybe punks and hippies aren’t that different,” I say.

“Oh my god,” she says.

“Like, nobody even uses those words anymore,” I say. “Hippie, anyway. And punk doesn’t seem to mean much. Or maybe too much. I don’t know.” “Would you call yourself a punk?” she asks. “No way,” I say. She looks at me. I want to change the subject. “The Clash—” she begins.

“Weren’t even punk, by London Calling,” I finish, and then there is a long, long pause.

“I guess you’re right,” she says.

“Look,” I say, “Out of all the parents I know, except maybe Sollie’s, you are still cool.” I don’t tell her they’re hippies.

“Sweetheart,” she says, “I am so glad you think so. But you cannot imagine how much I have sold myself out.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask. “You work at a radio station, you do all that stuff for the NDP, your hair is blue, and you buy all that Nicaraguan fair-trade coffee.”

“Strummy,” she says, which is her nickname for me from when I was small. She calls me Strummer now, all the time, which is better, but the kids at school generally call me Bummer, and I am going to ask Sollie to call me by my middle name, Patti.

“Strummy,” she says, “I have not lived up to my own ideals. It’s a hell of a realization when you reach my age.”

And she pauses here, then adds, “But my disappointment and sense of failure is not your burden, capice?”

See what I mean about how she puts her shit on me all the time, and then says that she isn’t? I know she tries to understand me, but I don’t want to have to understand her. That’s just too much.

“Look,” I say, “so you’re not a punk either, even though you were 30 years ago, or whatever it is—”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five. But you still believe what you believed in then, don’t you? I mean, you told me that being punk in those days was about wanting to change things, not just bitch about it. D.I.Y. All that.”

“And?”

“And that’s kind of what hippies were like, right? Only in the ’60s?”

“Highly debatable, but the idealism of protest music, which punk was, and folk music, which—”

“Mom?” “What?” “If I think about talking to or writing to someone who made an album 20 years ago, and that someone is alive still, what does it mean?”

“It means you are talking to or writing to who that artist was when they made the album.”

“Okay. Good,” I say.

“I mean, are you going to be the same person you were 25 years ago?”

Huh?

“Am I the same person I was 25 years ago? Well, yes and no.”

“I thought so.”

There’s another pause, while she looks at a spot in the air above my head.

“So, if I called you a hippie, Mom, I didn’t mean it in a bad way. More like some of the hippie ideas were like your punk ideas, and that makes hippie better, okay?”

“Okay.”

We’re quiet again, and I’m thinking about you, Dave Bidini. Are you still the guy who wrote “Beerbash”?

My mom says, “So now I am indistinguishable as a punk. Ex-punk. I could be an ex-hippie, even.”

“Mom,” I say, “are you okay with me and Solly having…you know…here. Tomorrow night?”

“I guess I always hoped we’d have that kind of relationship when you grew up, I guess, where you’d feel okay about talking to me about this, I guess. I mean, I tried to raise you so that you would feel—”

“Okay. I’m telling you.” “Okay. I’m glad. Yes. I’m glad you told me.” “Okay.” “I’ll be home late.” “Okay.” She gets up to go do something. “Mom,” I say, “I’d rather be raised by an ex-punk than an ex-hippie.” “Why?” she says with a smile that says she doesn’t believe me. “Because of all my radical ideals that have flabbed out around my butt into hippiness? Because almost none of what I believed in came true?”

I don’t quite know what to say to this.

“Listen, Pattismith—” she starts in, remembering to use my middle name this time, which I suddenly realize sounds incredibly lame when she says it, and I guess I make some kind of sound because she repeats it.

“Pattismith,” she says again, doing one of her bigdeal inhales, but this time she surprises even me with her big deal. “Having a lot of ideals is like having only a bit of talent. You expect too much, and like yourself too little….

“No,” I say. “The ex-punk thing … just better music. No love songs.”

Dave Bidini, I can hardly wait until the day after tomorrow. But now that you’re real, I’m not going to write to you anymore.

And even if I did, Dave Bidini, even if I did, when you read this it won’t be me who’s telling you the story that I’m telling you right now.

After the weeding and wilting, bean-
snapping, brown-soap-and-vinegar’d bug bites;
After the trip in a hayseed van to the co-op
for duck feed and a candy stick,
the jars of “garden special”
neatly lined up in the root cellar;
After the hike to the sugar shack
past the few forlorn fruit trees
felled by the she-bear;
After a peasant supper of soup and bread,
Gramma’s mile-high strawberry shortcake,
the scrap over dish duty,
a few rounds of 99—
The kids squeak in the bunk beds above
as I sit in the window rocker watching
the return of the red-winged blackbird
to his oily twig; the chaos of the day
settles under the steady watch of the Big Dipper.
I dare not lean or shift
in my rocking chair, but stay
still beside the picture window,
watching the pearl moon
illuminate a peony, its petals in a pile
beside the old pump.

The news of your birth disturbed and excited the city. For weeks afterward, the grainy surveillance featured on local and national news broadcasts. A still from the footage appeared on the front page of The Globe and Mail and on posters displayed in post offices, subway stations and grocery stores. The chief of police stood for the cameras before a blue velvet curtain and asked the public to come forward with any information regarding the identity of the woman in the video. “Or the baby she bore and left in Union Station,” he mistakenly reported.

Illustration by Ryan Dodgson

According to reports, the last person to see your mother was a VIA Rail ticket agent who, arriving early to his morning shift, came upon a woman standing at the foot of a stairwell as she dropped you, face down, onto the cement floor. At first the agent mistook you for a toy doll because you were small and naked and soundless. When blood began streaming out of your nose, the guard called out for help in the empty corridor and the woman ran up the staircase. When asked to give a description of the woman, the ticket agent said, “It was dark so I couldn’t make her out all that well.” Then added, “She moved like she was either young or scared.”

You were rushed to St. Michael’s Hospital where nurses cleaned the blood from your nose and wrapped you in a yellow blanket. While no other bruises or scrapes were found on your body, the nurses surmised you were approximately four months old, despite your tiny frame. They grimly remarked on your murky features, your deep-set eyes and mournful face, and how whenever any of them walked out of the room you erupted into a low, meandering howl. The Children’s Aid Society released a photo in the hopes a family member would recognize you. The photograph showed a happy, smiling, and well-fed child—the haunted expression that bothered so many of the nurses was gone. When no one came forward, you were placed in a foster home west of the city.

At 18 months you were adopted. Your new parents decided not to baptize you because they had stopped being religious after the sudden death of their infant daughter two years prior. During the first few months, your new mother stood over your crib and searched your face for any sign of distress while you slept. Your new father stayed in bed trying to shake off the painful familiarity of this routine.

All through your first winter, your new mother and father quarrelled. “Find a book on it,” your father would say, angry or pleading. His cure for everything was research. He would press articles and books about adoption on your mother and she wouldn’t read them.

“I can’t handle it,” she would say. “I’m tired. No, no, no.”

Years passed, mostly happily. You were a curious child. Sitting at the kitchen table, you squirmed in your high chair like a fish caught in a net. You cocked your head at every curse word uttered by your father during an argument. When your mother cried, you became still, captivated, as when she traced words and shapes across the centre of your back.

You liked to play hide-and-seek, you frequently wandered off in department stores, and ran away whenever the front door was left unlocked. Your father would catch up with you and you wriggled to escape when he scooped you up and carried you back home. As you grew older, wearier, you got into the habit of

staring, sometimes for hours at a time, at your reflection in the mirror. Your parents feared it was an autistic tendency and discouraged it whenever possible, even going so far as to remove the mirror from your bedroom. What they didn’t know was that the image you were looking at was not really your own. When you looked into the mirror, you studied your face for what might have been hers. The thick brow that arched across your forehead like a caterpillar, the small gold flecks that glinted in your left eye, your small, sutured lips drawn in a frown above your pointed chin. And you thought that if you stared long enough you would recognize her face one day at a busy intersection, in a bustling crowd while Christmas shopping at the mall. She would not be able to hide from you, you imagined, or anywhere on earth.

When she eventually told you the story, your mother was emotional and you were too young to understand. “Memories, keepsakes, that sort of thing,” she said. “A history of things that came before, okay?” She drummed her red lacquered nails against the thick cardboard pages of the scrapbook she had created: a catalogue of newspaper articles, papers from the Children’s Aid Society, adoption records, and medical reports—on the last page, a cut-out from a newspaper: the ash-tinted snapshot of you captured on the surveillance footage. “Your mother,” she said. “Before you came to live with us. She loved you but she couldn’t take care of you.”

“Where is she?” you asked.

“She’s there,” she said, misunderstanding. The nail of her index finger tapped against the cellophane. “The picture’s just fuzzy.”

Your mother’s eyes reddened when you pressed for more details and then she said, “Don’t make me talk about it.” And so you didn’t because you didn’t want to make her cry more than she already was. But you saw her place the scrapbook in the bottom drawer of her bedside table so you knew where to find it later when you were ready.

And you did. You searched through the pages frequently for information over the years, your knees burned from kneeling on the bedroom carpet too long. By the time you were 13 you had read over the articles multiple times and understood enough to piece together the details of your history. But it was the photo on the last page that captivated you. You pushed your nose against the picture and squinted, transformed the pixels into chromosomes. You hoped you might see yourself in the image staring back, but with each viewing the shadows in the small photo changed: their edges blurred, bled into one another; morphed into squares, triangulated, and amalgamated to form a crooked S-shape. It disturbed you how the arrangement of light rendered the photo in perpetual motion, how it fragmented its subject into many different versions of a woman in mid-flight, caught in the act of evading scrutiny: she was a reclusive artist, with the line of her jaw obscured by an upturned collar; a famous actress, her face turned away, her expression serious, her hair done in the popular style of the mid-1980s. Sometimes the image appeared less optimistic: she was a prostitute, with her hair falling behind her shoulders, a sullen girl in a long black coat and high boots; a spider, spreading her eight arms wide, scuttling away up the staircase.

The image fascinated rather than repulsed you, and throughout your adolescence you sat alone in your room trying to draw her many faces in a sketchbook. You discovered you liked drawing her as a monster because it allowed you the freedom of not having to draw realistically and you found it easier to draw something without worrying about correct proportions.

When you were 15 you asked your mother to let you draw a mural across your bedroom wall. “Sure,” she agreed, “nothing you create could be bad.”

Your father looked on as you painted a monster by your door. It stood six feet tall and had horns, demonic eyes, talons, and sharp pointy teeth. Your father grumbled, “At least keep inside the lines,” disappointed your only display of talent was an artistic one.

You named the monster Gretal—although it was male, not female. He was a kind soul who ripped to shreds anyone that tried to hurt you.

A year later, your parents sold the house. “Get rid of it,” your father said as he walked by your bedroom soon after. You used two coats of primer and two coats of paint, but the monster still kept bleeding through. When you walked out of your bedroom for the last time you thought it was funny that some kid was going to wake up each morning and see the faint outline of Gretal staring back at them.

You, your mother, and your father moved to a neighbourhood just north of the city, where the front yards were bigger and there was room for a parking space. When you arrived with the moving truck, you stood alone on the sidewalk across from the house and looked at it furtively. It was a house identical to the others on the street, semi-detached and two-storied, with a sheltered porch and a wrought-iron railing. The aluminum siding was painted a light grey and the bricks and shingles were brown. You saw white curtains in all the windows, and a narrow path of concrete extending from the sidewalk to the front door. The door had two small half-moon windows near the top, and they too were curtained. In the front yard, you saw a row of blossoming shrubs and a bird feeder that hung from a nail hammered into a maple tree. You tried to imagine your life there, in this quiet house, on the quiet street, but you could imagine nothing, nothing at all.

As you walked through the house, you passed by the family room and then the kitchen, where your mother was polishing the hefty oak table she inherited when her grandmother died. You shuffled up the staircase that led to the hall that ended in your bedroom door.

The room was filled with pale, blue light. Though it was the size of a postage stamp, you were relieved with the layout of your new bedroom. The closet looked dark and roomy and the window faced south, which made the neon pallor of the city skyline visible. Still there, you thought. You unpacked your pencil crayons and paints and sketchbooks and stood at the window and studied the landscape. In your drawing, the condos and office buildings knotted along the horizon looked like the rocky spine of a dinosaur.

Your mother found you sitting up in bed, sketching in your notebook with a blue Sharpie pen. She stood in your doorway, looked around, and said, “It’s 2:45 a.m. on a school night.” She crossed toward you and sat on the edge of your mattress to look at your current work-in-progress.

Though she flinched when she connected the thick black strokes that composed the many heads and legs and arms of the latest monster drawings, it was your writing, a neat, delicate lettering, that surprised her. She was able to read a paragraph written beneath a recent sketch of Gretal, the monster, depicted as a skyscraper-straddling colossus that loomed over the downtown core.

The woman cries to get out. But who could escape the beast? He bears so many teeth. Were she to get through, Gretal would catch her and turn her upside down and squeeze her ’til her eyes were white.

“Who is ‘the woman’?” “I don’t know,” you replied. “Do you want to talk about her?” You sat silently in your bed, your face expressionless.

Your mother let out a thin, whispery sigh, which frightened you. “Sometimes,” you said, looking at the drawing, “I get a feeling she’s out there.”

“Who?”

“My real mother,” you said. You worried how cruelly the words spilled out of your mouth. “It’s just, you know, like she’s out there and then, I dunno, maybe she’s not.”

Your mother whimpered, as if bracing herself against a hurricane. “Hmm.”

“It’s nothing, it’s late,” you said. You wanted to say more, but could see your mother had heard enough. You felt obligated to appease the thrall of guilt, sadness, and curiosity that consumed her.

Your eyes stung, your mouth felt dry. Your mother stood up and walked limply toward the doorway. She looked back at you and said, “We can talk some more another time,” and she switched off the light and the door clicked shut behind her.

You were daydreaming, designing the impenetrable musculature of a new planet-eating Gretalcreature. You watched a passing plane fly by and imagined the passengers, the pilot, the stewardesses, all of them sucked into the foaming cumulus mouth of your monster.

At that moment, you were hit in the nose with a soccer ball. Your gym teacher had barked that you weren’t paying attention and kicked the ball at your head with all his adult strength. When it struck you, the blow knocked you to the floor and you saw a sparking flash of a pale afterimage of a face.

Your gym teacher bellowed for one of the boys to run to Home Ec to get some frozen hamburger for your nose, which swelled and bled profusely. Your gym teacher propped you up in his meaty arms and asked you questions—what year, your name, your mother’s name—to see if you had a concussion. After he cleaned your nose with the hem of your T-shirt, you told him you thought you were going to throw up and you were sent to the nurse’s office.

As you headed out of the gym and turned down the hallway, you noticed the front doors at the far end of the school were propped open, letting in the warm spring air. You stopped at your locker and grabbed your knapsack, hesitated for a moment, then hurried past the nurse’s station and escaped outside. You bolted across the length of the football field, hurried past the bus stop, and walked toward the end of the street.

A sense of nervousness crept up as you entered the subway station at Finch, flared in your gut as you used your lunch money to pay the fare, grew tight as you made your way down to Bloor, and overtook you completely when you exited the train at Union. By the time you arrived at the staircase—the scene of the crime, your birthplace—you were trembling and sopping with sweat. You circled the area a few times and though your nose ached with pain you did not want to sit down on the steps. You stood in front of them for what felt like hours. Eventually, the unflinching gaze of the security camera positioned above you stared back intrusively, as if to say, You’ve had your look, now go. You fumbled through your knapsack and removed a page from your sketchbook, turned it over and over, ran your fingers across the torn edges, and then let it drop. You no longer held on to it, it just lay there on the concrete ground. The words written on the page circled in your head: Squeeze her ’til her eyes were white, squeeze her ’til her eyes were white.

You rummaged through your mind for the images of her banked in your memory. You unravelled each one and deleted them until she became a blurred photograph, a woman without features or a history that resembled yours. She was a ghost caught on videotape, wraithlike, emerging from the darkest corner of the frame, a trick of the eye, rising up with shadows, floating away.

I’m addicted to the real estate guide,
to paint chips and floor samples and airline
seat sales. Slick magazines stack up, then
slide sideways just to keep me dissatisfied
with the walls that contain me,
the skin I’m stuck in.

I judge flyers by their
weight, streets by their names
and I take quizzes online
for clarity. I do not
ask directions and once,
rounding a curve by the lake,
I saw a gull try to outfly the grocery bag
caught to its foot. The water was calm,
my reflection too obvious.

I am attempting to understand. Explosions are mere news flashes to me and not the prattlings of Saturday or Wednesday or Christmas. My childhood home has no roof either. Its buyers are remodelling. There was no conflict over identity. No leaks over political affiliation, only those of a roof. They will tear up aging carpets. They will fend off ants with poison. They have carpets to age. These are venomless insects, tongues forkless, their tiny bodies without scales or hood.

Your village was larger than mine. Vankalai: a place for ships. No water-flow. Its name doesn’t river off the tongue of a westerner. Its name does not run like a tap to me. No taps. At sunrise your mother would head and hip gallons of well water till sunset. (You would spend the days playing cricket with boys. Striking the tennis ball into the air with oars. A curly bob of hair then.) Your chore was the scooping of white chicken stool from the rotund beachscape. You were a village girl in the true sense of the word. Population was not the factor, but level of squalor.

When we make love we (let our shades brush. We are an assembly of liquid, unarmed expressions that caused me to worry at first. Your fingers transform to green in mine. You say it took you months to overlook my pale and pinkness. We joke about a new form of sexual imperialism as if it never before existed. Gayathri: your native name, who in legends is always accompanied by a white swan. It means song, hymn. I over-pronounce the hinging “a” like a hiccup. I find your hairs throughout my clothing. You write Tamil in blue ink on my shoulder and refuse to) translate.

From infancy, you were bounced on the knee of subjugated narratives. You still maintain some inside conniections—unfortunate considering your lack of white-academic veil to hide behind, your inability to be seen as unbiased though yourself just a student in this country. Bearing to sit through the stories of my rural whitebred roots, you allow our incomparable setbacks to amalgamate into one. This is selfless, uncommon. I am attempting to understand.

When the government first invaded your town you walked for about a day and a half until the beach eclipsed on itself. The navy had taken those who sailed before, and your mother wasn’t about to be that reckless. You four dingied till India in a float made clumsy among the waves. There, your name was all muttish: first part below untouchable, second part high-cast and third an unsubtle reminder of the Portuguese conquest. A village girl with an immunization shot that stands today as something almost sized for horses, third world-medicine. There.

Word returned early in this new year but was lost beneath the Gaza Strip. This is something you claim to be used to. A distant second in world conflicts. It was not long before they had taken most of Jaffna. Not long before I actually understood what that symbolized. You would miss phone-calls late at night or be struck by them. No inbounds were available. Your mother was wiring money to places unwirable. The digits just float now like counterfeit angels. Her charity lost in the purgatory of jeep-bound bureaucracy. Rent is still due. The civil war lingers on. Rent is still due.

Georgia says her mom put her on a leash when she was four and three quarters, and Georgia never let her forget it. Red leash—four feet long—and a harness with buckles that pinched at the armpits.

Dr. Mann says: it’s the same way for dogs—that poor mutt at the leash-free park who has to stay tied and muzzled. Dogs notice those things too, he says. Nobody wants to be different, Georgia.

Illustration by Ryan Dodgson

Georgia says she never cared much for pets—that bowl full of guppies, black squirmy things Mom had her scoop from the shallow pools in the rocks near the farm in Caledon. Faceless little creatures in a hyper state of wiggle. Georgia would fish in the bucket for them when Mom wasn’t looking and try to squeeze their rubbery bodies between her forefinger and thumb. That cat— Georgia named it Oscar even though it was a girl, which made Mom cringe—those long stares and the terrible smell of its yellow teeth. Cinnamon the hamster. Henry the dog—a small mutt whose white fur was always some shade of brown, who came to stay one summer when Aunt Catherine went to India to find herself but instead found a slip of a man also named Henry with sharp bones and baked skin and a mouthful of chewing tobacco. There was the white rat with the red eyes—of all of them, Georgia minded the rat the least.

Dr. Mann says: that might be something to look into.

Georgia says: not much to see.

Dr. Mann says: tell me more about Henry.

Georgia says: Henry the man hated Henry the dog, and Mom hated them both.

Dr. Mann says: why?

Georgia says: too fucking needy.

Dr. Mann says: like your father?

Georgia says: I don’t think he needed anyone. Henry picked his teeth right at the table. He told stories about poor people with no legs and one eye that made Aunt Catherine sigh and say, I know I know. Mom would say, that’s enough, Henry. He smelled liked the laundry hamper—like week-old nighties and single balled-up socks. He liked to touch Georgia’s face when he talked to her and would say things like, you haven’t had it easy, kid. Georgia liked the black splats of tobacco on their driveway.

Aunt Catherine and Henry brought warm beer and loaves of bread when they’d come for dinner on Sundays. Henry sneaked Georgia quick sips when no one was looking. The bread was always sweet and dotted with herbs and congealed bits of cheese and Aunt Catherine would smile and say, Henry makes it himself.

Mom would say, well isn’t that nice.

Dr. Mann says: you and Henry were close then.

Georgia says: he was okay.

Dr. Mann says: how long was he with your family?

Georgia says: about a year.

Dr. Mann says: and then?

Georgia says: he got run over by a bus.

Dr. Mann says: you mean the dog?

Georgia says: no—the dog ran away. Georgia says the farm near Caledon wasn’t really a farm but that Mom liked to call it that because cottage sounded too ordinary. Mom liked to be different. The field in the back had long grass that was scratchy on Georgia’s bare summer legs. The mosquitoes were thick before dusk and Georgia would hold her arms out to her side and watch them land until she just couldn’t take it. She’d mark the bites later with her fingernail—an X in each one like Martin Ross showed her, but it never helped the itch like he said.

Dr. Mann says: who was Martin Ross?

Georgia says: the boy next door.

Dr. Mann says: he was a friend?

Georgia says: I think so.

Dr. Mann says: what does that mean?

Georgia says: it means he wasn’t scared of me.

Dr. Mann says: why would he be scared?

Georgia says she caught a guppy in the bucket only once. She squeezed and squeezed until it popped like a fat blueberry in her hand. Martin Ross told her he stepped on his goldfish once when it jumped from the tank and he liked the way it felt and did she like it too.

Dr. Mann says: did you?

Georgia says: well what do you think? Martin Ross showed Georgia how to pluck the legs off a daddy-long-legs until it was nothing but body. Georgia says their home on Elm Avenue was the narrowest house on the block. Grey brick and brass numbers—three three three. The magnolia on the front lawn dropped big petals in August and they would get brown and stinky on the path. Georgia’s room had an orange carpet and a skylight and an air conditioner that she liked to run even mid-winter. The rattle and purr helped muffle the noise from the next room. Dr. Mann says: what noise?

Sometimes she hid in the closet behind the hangers of clothing—like a curtain she wished was long enough to cover her legs too.

Dr. Mann says: what noise, Georgia?

Georgia says she never told Mom about the time she got a zap from the outlet in her room. She had her finger on the prongs as she plugged in her ghetto blaster. Like a cold shot to her insides. She got on her bike and pedalled with wobbly legs right down Crescent Hill and straight into a telephone pole. She didn’t tell Mom about that either.

Dr. Mann says: why?

Georgia says: why would I? It didn’t hurt that much. Mom had a doll collection she kept in the living room along with her baby grand and records. Georgia liked the one with the red hair because her left eyelid never opened all the way no matter how many times you rocked her up and down. Sowmetimes Georgia liked to do the same thing with her own eyes, drop one lid down and shoot glassy stares at herself in the mirror. She’d try to mimic its pink pout but her lips were too thin. The dolls and piano weren’t for playing, but sometimes Mom let Georgia dance in her socks to Ruby Tuesday and Paint It Black for a treat. The living room was stiff-backed couches and dishes of potpourri. Family photos on the mantle: Dad and Georgia on the boat, Dad and Georgia in the pool, Dad and Georgia in the thick of the summer with shirts off and pants hiked up. The deep flush of red paint on the walls, and sometimes Georgia wished she could paint them black.

Dr. Mann says: so she kept his photos out. That’s interesting.

Georgia says: is it?

Georgia says Martin Ross didn’t like to come inside because he said Georgia’s house felt funny. In the morning before school he’d wait for her on the sidewalk.

Dr. Mann says: funny how? Georgia says: what? Martin Ross walked her home from school too. He only asked her about it once. Dr. Mann says: what did you tell him? Georgia says: not much. Sometimes Aunt Catherine took Georgia on the weekends if Mom was still wearing her bathrobe when the Friday evening news came on. Her house smelled smoky and sweet and she had Mexican blankets covering all the furniture. Aunt Catherine always had boyfriends— Andrew with the long hair like a girl and Neil with the harelip scar that made him look like he was always smirking and Fred with the nice car and dark suit and shoes that clicked against the floor. And Henry, before he got plowed by that bus on Fourth Street—Georgia watched him move his head between Aunt Catherine’s legs one night when they drank a whole case of beer and left the bedroom door open halfway. Aunt Catherine’s thighs were creamy and wide and she bucked when he pushed his face between them. Henry held the bulge of skin around her middle in his fists. Georgia liked the way his brown skin looked against the sheets and watched for the dark bits of his crotch. Aunt Catherine screamed, get out get out, when she saw Georgia at the door. Henry kept his face buried and said something that got muffled by her mess of flesh and hair.

Dr. Mann says: did that frighten you?

Georgia says: why would it? Georgia killed Cinnamon—dropped the cage and broke the hamster’s back. Its fur was damp.

Dr. Mann says: accidents happen.

Georgia says: do they? Georgia says she watched Martin Ross run through the sliding glass doors to their backyard on her eighth birthday. Mom had cleaned them so well before the party with her yellow rubber gloves and wads of blue windexed paper towel that Martin Ross crashed through them face first like they weren’t even there. Pink balloons on the fence, streamers in the hedge, and Martin Ross face up on the deck and stuck full of glass. Georgia wondered what Mom did to get rid of all that blood.

Dr. Mann says: you mean Martin’s blood.

Georgia says: sure. Georgia kissed Martin Ross once in the basement. Big saggy couches. TV that changed channels with a knob. Crayon scratches on the stucco walls that Mom said Georgia made after that thing with Dad. Martin Ross closed his eyes when she kissed him and said, it’s harder than it looks. His lips felt firm like rubber. Georgia wondered what his scars tasted like—thick pink criss-crosses on his cheeks and chin, big ugly things that made most people squint. Georgia said, can I kiss them? And then—they taste like something I know.

Dr. Mann says: what did you mean?

Georgia says: I don’t know. Dr. Mann says: did you show him yours? Mom gave Georgia her own little plot in the backyard garden—helped her push pansies and daisies into the soil. Georgia had a watering can and trowel. Georgia liked the word trowel. Mom buried Cinnamon beside the rose bushes like it was an everyday thing to do. Georgia liked to imagine that’s where they put Henry after they picked his parts off the pavement. She thought about the smooshed guppy and how she wiped it from her fingers on the rock.

Dr. Mann wants to talk about the time Georgia asked Mom to call her George.

Georgia wanted a crossbow for Christmas and put it on her list. Robin Hood would have been cooler with a crossbow. Martin Ross and his Super Soaker would be no match for a crossbow. Mom said, too dangerous, so a Cabbage Patch doll instead. But Georgia was too old for Cabbage Patch dolls, their pudgy fingers and cheeks, big belly buttons that really did look like buttons, that tangle of wool hair. Elizabeth was five—the birth certificate said. Georgia hated her plastic face.

Sometimes Georgia thought Mom liked Christmas more than she did. Big pile of presents every year under the tree. Stockings at the foot of the bed. A tangerine near the toe. Chocolate that tasted like oranges. Candy canes that tasted like cherries. Cherries covered in chocolate. Socks that were thick like slippers. Georgia took secret pleasure in hearing Mom stumbling around her room at four in the morning, tripping over the jeans Georgia left on purpose by the door, swearing—shit—and smelling of something sharp and familiar.

Dr. Mann says: what did your father smell like?

Georgia says Mom was fat—really fat, and that she took pleasure in that too. The way the couch sighed beneath her, her pigeon-toed steps, the swoosh of her thighs. The time she wore that wicker hat that looked like a flowerpot and everyone laughed.

Dr. Mann says: what did you have to eat today?

Georgia says: that’s not the fucking point. Georgia never liked piano lessons on Tuesdays or ballet classes on Sunday mornings. Ballet slippers made her feet smell musty and Mrs. Arnold scolded her for long fingernails and for leaving inky prints on the keys. Fur Elise. Flur Delise. Flurd Elize.

Dr. Mann says: she was trying to keep you busy. Busy is good. Right?

Georgia didn’t like soccer either. Or softball or jazz. She didn’t like the group sessions on Wednesdays either and one time on the way there, with Mom on the streetcar platform at St. Clair West, Georgia yelled, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

Dr. Mann says: talk about what?

Georgia says: I don’t want to talk about it. Mom didn’t like to have guests at the farm, but sometimes Aunt Catherine would drive up anyway without calling first. She’d open the door and say, here I am, and chase Mom around the kitchen for a hug. Mom didn’t like to get hugs. Before Henry was dead he came up sometimes too and made them curry for dinner which Mom said made her mouth sting.

Henry kissed Georgia on the lips in the long grass when he found her curled up and sleeping with red ants running on her legs. His beard was scratchy like the grass and Georgia wanted to rub it against the bites around her ankles.

Dr. Mann says: he kissed you?

Georgia says: it wasn’t like that.

Dr. Mann says: like what? Henry held Georgia and Georgia slept.

Georgia says: I don’t think I want to come here anymore.

Dr. Mann says: time’s up—I’ll see you next week.