As She Grows

PUFFIN CANADA

AS SHE GROWS

LESLEY ANNE COWAN
has a B.A. in English literature and a diploma in education from McGill University. She is also a graduate of the Humber School for Writers.
As She Grows
was shortlisted for the 2001 Chapters/Robertson Davies First Novel Contest. Cowan currently resides in Toronto, where she is a secondary-school teacher working with at-risk youth.

Please visit her website at www.lesleyannecowan. com for more book discussion, community resource links, and teacher resources.

LESLEY ANNE COWAN

PUFFIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Puffin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2003
Published in this edition, 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Lesley Anne Cowan, 2003

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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data
available upon request to the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-14-317060-0

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for my parents

BELLYACHE

You can have your cake and throw it up

but when I spilled my guts you didn’t clean it up.
I’m beginning to hate the sight of you,

I’m beginning to love the fight.

My own arms around me can only choke.
My own words can only hurt.

I don’t want to love your faults anymore.

It’s all pushed down so far that it blows up in my face.
Got so much shit in my mouth,

I begin to enjoy the taste.

—Melissa Psarros

1999

AS SHE GROWS

•

It starts with the sound of butterfly wings, flapping, hundreds of them around my head, thump, thumping; and my hair lashing against my cheeks like wisps of grass. My face sprouts from the backseat window like a tender green shoot through concrete. I can’t hear my grandmother Elsie shouting to put my head back into the car. I can’t hear Jed swearing about this godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere.

Instead I hear butterfly wings and smell warm country until Elsie’s strong hand pulls me back into the scent of vinyl and sweat and Old Spice. Her fleshy arm extends over the seat to deposit a heavy margarine tub in the centre of me, forcing my fluttering edges down. She tells me to be a good girl: “Be still because you don’t want to spill your mother.” Then she turns back around, flicks the map, and says something like, “Jesus Christ, where the hell is this place?” I look down, feel the cool plastic against my bare five-year-old thighs, and contemplate a miniature mother I had never met, trapped inside that container.

We are scattering my mother’s ashes in a river, by a field, where she, Elsie, and Aunt Sharon used to go and have picnics a long time ago. This is what Elsie tells me.

“Five more minutes and I’m gonna scatter her over Highway 7,” Jed says as Elsie’s hand slips onto his reddened neck and gently squeezes. His shoulders tense, she quickly drops her hand and turns her face to the window. I sink down into the backseat, disappearing from the rear-view mirror. I slowly slip off the lid to peek inside and find, instead of a tiny lady, a bunch of fireplace ash. I poke my hand inside and swoosh through. Pinch my fingers into the dust and press a brittle piece against my skin. I cautiously pull my hand out, study the chip perched like a Chiclet on the tip of my finger. And for some reason I still can’t explain, I raise my finger to my mouth and slip the tasteless grey flake in.

Then there are flashes. Elsie’s horrified face, hollow windy words coming out of her mouth, dust filling my nose, and gravel crunching under tires. My body dragged out of the car and Elsie’s strong hands pinning firm my squirming arms. A sharp-nailed finger down my throat, loss of breath, and then the contracted release of a bowl of Alphaghettis, some cherry Coke, and my mother.

I wake up sweating and breathless. I wake up alone. I can still hear the receding wings, distant and thick, as if under water.

Elsie shouts from the couch, blathering on to herself, drunk or high on whatever she could put her lips around. Carrying on some insane conversation with an invisible person called Martha or Marma, or maybe Mother.

Her slurred voice gets louder and uglier. “You selfish little bitch,” she yells out to me. “Com’ out here! Can’t ev’n help your own fuckin’ grandmother.”

It isn’t the first time she’s carried on like that, so I drift in and out of sleep, waiting for her to shut up or to just pass out. But you can only ignore something for so long before the act of ignoring becomes all-consuming.

“Oh! Susanna, don’t you cry for me, cuz I com’ fr’m . . .”

When I can’t take it any longer, I storm up from my bed and rip open my bedroom door. “What the fuck! Are you fuckin’ crazy?” My eyes drop to Elsie’s crumpled body, squatted on the floor by the couch, an empty bottle of vodka hanging loosely in her hands, the bottoms of her jeans stained wet with spilt alcohol. I shake my head in disgust. “I have school tomorrow.”

“Oh, the princess, ’fraid to lose her beauty sleep.” She takes a swig of her empty bottle and then wipes the imaginary liquid from her chin. “Since when do you give a shit about school? You think you’re sooo great, think you’re the only person who has a life, you and those guys you fuck, don’t think I don’t know it, you little whore . . .”

“What are you talking about? You’re insane!”

“You little slut, think you’re so much better than me, you don’t know what I’ve been through, you don’t know . . .” She keeps going on, making no sense, spitting as she speaks, her face squished up thick with hatred. And I think to myself, Why was I born her enemy? I stare at her body, heavy and toppled, like a fixed anchor at the end of me. Sinking me. It’s too pathetic to even bother, so I turn, slam the door, and get back into my bed. And then I wait. My body tense. Fingers firmly holding the covers over my head.

Elsie follows her words into my room, flicks on my light, stands over my bed, and keeps shouting, “Beauty sleep, booty sleep, booty seep . . .” I clench my eyes shut, screaming
go away, go away,
in my head. But she keeps shaking my mattress until I finally burst
out from under the covers, hands over my ears, pacing back and forth, shouting, “Stop it, stop it, stop it . . . !” I’m bawling and my face is wet and hot and I feel like I am going crazy, like I am this mental institution girl. “Stop it, stop it, stop it . . .” Pressing my hands tighter over my ears, trying to squeeze her entire existence out of my head. Things keep spinning and I can’t breathe and all I hear is the blood racing in my own skull.

And then I rupture.

Everything goes quiet and blank and cold, until my grandmother’s controlled voice fades in from black to blinding white. “You’re going to pay for that. You’re going to fix that.”

I stand there stunned, like a bird that hit glass. I have no idea what she’s talking about. But then my hand starts to pulse and the flakes of white plaster on the carpet beside me come into focus and my eyes fall inside a hole in the wall the size of an open screaming mouth.

“Who’s the fuckin’ crazy one now, eh?” Elsie smirks, shaking her head. And just like that, she is calm. Her body relaxes like those heroin junkies who release the fist and then slip into sudden satisfaction. She turns, stumbles back out into the living room, and flicks on the TV.

In the washroom, I lean up against the sink, stick my throbbing hand under cold water, and blankly stare into white porcelain. My brain is numb with nothingness. I am too tired to think. I just want to go to bed and forget everything. And then I see myself opening the mirrored medicine cabinet. As if there is a camera on the bathroom ceiling. I see myself pulling out a razor blade. I see myself cutting deep, precisioned slices into the soft white underside of my forearm; the blade sinking easily into skin like a cake knife into white icing. I feel a brilliant rush, a whoosh of noise and air, as drops of blood escape like startled bats from their darkness.

Then the camera goes blank and I return to myself, my fist is back under the water, and my arm is totally fine. There is no blood. There are no cuts. It was like a dream, only I was awake. Scared, I walk back toward my room, cradling my swollen purple hand. I still can’t breathe right. I lie in bed the rest of the night, my hand holding firm a photograph of my mother, tucked flatly away under my pillow. My eyes staring at the plaster on the dirt-brown carpet, settled and silent, like newly fallen snow.