As She Grows (11 page)

“You idiot, you idiot, you idiot, you idiot,” I repeat over and over and over again. I clamp my jaw down harder and harder each time, suffocating the words, until my teeth are clenched shut and my tongue spasms about my mouth like a trapped moth. I count backwards. I have missed at least three periods. My mind races through the options. Abortion. Adoption. Keep it. Live with Mark. Wish it away. This baby will ruin everything. I press my hands into my stomach, squeeze skin in my fists, and then push hard and deep into me. I squeeze out the thought of a baby. I squeeze out Elsie’s laughter.

And it starts as a fleeting thought. Just like that. Whipping past my mind like a swooping bird. But then it returns, slower this time, lingering long enough for consideration. Till soon, all I’m thinking about is the paper clip on the table beside me. And I need it. I need it. I need the release of me. I reach for the curled wire and decisively open it up. Then I extend my arm and start scraping back and forth, line by line. Pain tingles up my arm, shooting through my numb legs. Thin white lines fade like streaks of dissipating smoke, and so I press harder and harder. And I feel like I’m going to burst if I don’t split myself open, so I press a little harder and faster. Till finally skin spreads, parting like clouds, exposing a vast red expanse of me. And I recline back into my pillow, drop the paper clip to the floor, my mother’s disappointment seeping from skin like warm red tears.

In the afternoon I drape a blanket around my body and head down the creaky stairs to make some toast. They call it a group
home, but there is nothing homelike about a group of troubled girls other than the house where they eat and sleep. It stands neglected among other three-story Victorian houses on a shady treed street in the west end. Brown prickly bushes surround its bay windows, cigarette butts are scattered like dandelions, half the lawn is paved for parking, and a British flag lines the top window, even though no one in the house has ever been to Europe. My first day, I stood on the curb with Aunt Sharon and just stared at this house for a good long time before we took a step forward.

Inside it’s like a hospital or a motel: a place that is not interested in making you so comfortable that you’ll desire a longer stay. If someone was looking for beauty, say an abandoning parent or an optimistic social worker, they might find it—if the lights were low and it was the day after house-cleanup chores. They’d wander through the house and say something like o
h, it’s so
antique,
while running their fingers along the dark wood trim and hand-chiselled mantel. Or they’d crank their necks and look to the high ceilings and the little stained-glass window in the stairwell and comment on how lucky we are to have such a nice, big house. Perhaps, on a well-chosen day, this visitor wouldn’t see that the photos on the Welcome to Our Home bulletin board are replaced so often it’s hard to find cork thick enough to hold a thumbtack. Perhaps they wouldn’t notice the names penned on food packages in the fridge, the locks on cupboards, the reused blackened birthday candles with dried cake on the bottoms in the kitchen drawer. Perhaps they’d think that jingling noise down the hall is a playful puppy and not the keys dangling from Staff’s wrists.

And the girls here are the same. At first glance, they seem normal. But shine a bright light into their corners and you’ll see the dirt caked high. They are incomplete, missing parts. Not like
people born without sight or limbs or even without a second kidney. They are missing the stuff you get
after
you’re born, the stuff that makes you connect to people. It’s like I’m talking to them and they are only three-quarters there. It sometimes makes me wonder if Elsie actually did something right with me, though I’d never admit it aloud.

I mostly keep to myself, which seems to suit everyone fine. There is no one here exactly pleading for my friendship. Because I go to a regular school in Don Mills and not to classes in the basements of churches or office buildings, the girls in the house think I’m a suck-up. They make jokes about my schoolbag and my pencil case and can’t seem to get over the fact that I actually use my locker. I just laugh off their comments, thankful for this gap between us, this hour-long commute on bus and subway, a distance that ensures I am nothing like them. And it’s funny that way: I only know who I am in terms of who I’m not. I am not the girls in this house. I am no one at school. I am not Elsie.

At first Carla was envious I moved into a group home. She thought it sounded cool having no parents around. She imagined slumber parties and giggling girls giving each other manicures and lip-syncing to old Spice Girls songs in their pyjamas.

“What are they like?” she asked my first week. I had called her collect from the phone booth on the corner because at the house the phone is in the hallway and Staff listens to every word you say, even though they pretend they don’t.

“They’re idiots,” I said. “Real fucked-up idiots. I don’t like any of them.” And I described each one to her.

Jasmyn lived with her mother in Jamaica, but was sent to her white father’s house in Winnipeg when she was six. She ran away
from home eighteen times until she finally took a bus to Toronto when she was fourteen. She’s tall, has a great body, and lots of tattoos, but the best one is of a teddy bear peaking up over the top of her nipple. She’s a bit of a slut, but it’s only Tracy who gets called that because once when Nicole called Jasmyn a slut, Jasmyn pushed her head through the front-door window. “Basically, Jasmyn is chickenshit, but she’s got a lot of friends, so watch your back,” Tammy warned me. “She also had sex with her dog,” she adds.

Tammy is the fattest girl I’ve ever seen up close, but she has a pretty face. She came from Port-something up north. Apparently she and Jasmyn hate each other, but Tammy’s too much of a freak for Jasmyn to care. Pretty much all of the girls say she’s crazy. She wears dark-blue eyeliner and her eyes are crossed, though you can barely tell because her bangs cover them. She wears short miniskirts that barely cover her fat thighs and tops that make her breasts look like fleshy stomachs. “She goes out with guys who fuck her two at a time, waddles home with her legs spread wide, crying because it’s too sore to close, and then Staff sends her to the clinic on the corner for a STD test,” says Jasmyn. “She’s a baby. Cries that her stepfather fucked her for three years and thinks that gives her rights to sleep with your boyfriend. Watch your back.”

Nicole’s downright ugly and there seems to be nothing that can help her looks. The girls have tried, told her what to wear, how to cut her hair. She calls herself Goth, but I think she’s just trying to cover that ugly face as much as possible with all that white powder, black eyeliner, and lipstick. She writes things all over her knapsack like
Die, Die, Die
and
Fuck Jesus
. She keeps AWOLing, ending up in Brampton or Orangeville till the cops bring her home. “Nicole’s just white trash,” Tammy says. “She’s a dyke. There are a lot of dykes around here. She hates men but she’ll tell you she’s bi.” Apparently, she got charged last week for beating up
some ex-girlfriend with a broken beer bottle at a party. “She and Mute Mary had a thing going,” says Tammy, “till Mary started seeing this married guy.”

Tracy is the real cocktease of the house. “The slut who will do anyone,” says Nicole. “She thinks she’s so much more mature than everyone, but just last month she held a fork to Staff’s neck and got timed out from the house for two weeks.” Everyone but Jasmyn pretty much leaves her alone. Apparently, she’ll be moving back in with her parents soon, once she’s successfully completed anger management and finishes family counselling. “Watch her though, she’ll turn on you just like that,” Nicole says, snapping her fingers.

Mary is the quiet one who just stares at me. Everyone calls her Mute Mary, and when she does speak, she raises her voice at the end as if it were a question. Mary has the kind of looks that you can’t remember. Looks you can’t really describe, just mousy hair and thin lips. “Like white trash,” Tammy says. Other than that she seems to be totally normal, and I have no idea what she’s here for. Apparently Nicole says when Mary was little her mom would make her use a kitty-litter box instead of a toilet and she ate out of cans until she was six. But no one else knew that. She’s been in the suicide ward six times this year and now checks herself in regularly. “She’s a nice girl,” Staff said, suggesting I join her in the living room to watch TV one night.

“Sounds like a bunch of freaks,” Carla said, slightly happier that she wasn’t missing out on anything fun.

“How’s everything going?” Eric playfully turns in his new swivel chair, pressed between the filing cabinet and the small desk. Each Tuesday at five o’clock the group home forces me to come to this
office. It’s a condition of staying at the group home. Each Tuesday, Eric sits staring at me like this, rolling a pencil in his fingers as if rubbing a genie lamp, wishing for significant words to come out of my mouth. He thinks he’s being subtle, gently coaxing me to release. I sit there, unresponsive, focusing on my swirling stomach, my racing heart. My entire body worries about this pregnancy. All of it. Down to my toes. He clears his throat and my eyes frantically search the posters of rainbows and people climbing mountains for hints of what he wants to hear.

Eric is a long, skinny man, with a big Adam’s apple that he tries to cover with a reddish beard. But I like his gentle eyes, poking through the harsh contours of bone, like small pools of water in rock. They tell me he’s a good person and that is why I secretly don’t mind coming here almost every week. I notice he’s wearing the same socks as last week.

“Fine.”

“I thought we’d talk about your mom this afternoon,” he says carefully, lifting his pencil up to his lips. I look at him suspiciously. Until now we’ve talked about normal things, like school and friends. I think how ironic it is that he bring up the topic of Mother today. I wonder if he can tell I’m pregnant. I pull one knee up to my chest and pull my sweatshirt over it to cover my stomach.

“You mean my
grandmother?
”

“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Your grandmother.”

“Nothing to say,” I reply.

“I think what you mean, Snow, is that you don’t want to talk about it, not that there is nothing to say.”

I start to get angry—it’s the last thing I want to talk about today. “Whatever.” I bite off pieces of my Styrofoam cup and then
thhpp
out tiny pieces like watermelon seeds.

“You don’t like her?” he asks, leaning forward and moving the garbage pail closer to me.

I forcefully spit a large piece of cup into the bin. “No.”

“Any idea why?”

“No.” I spit another.

“You can’t think of any reasons you’d have such strong feelings?”

“No.” I start to squeeze the few remaining pieces of the cup tightly in my hand.

“I know this might be tough to talk about. It hasn’t been that long since you left, but it might help you get through this better. You have any ideas on how you came to think this way?”

“No.”

“No idea why?” His persistence bothers me. His mouth gaping open and shut like that. He reminds me of a baby bird, its stretched transparent neck frantically bobbing up and down until a juicy worm twice its size is shoved down its throat.