As She Grows (14 page)

Mr. Hensley says I need to eat better. He gives me an apple out of his own brown-paper-bag lunch. He tells me sometimes our bodies just need a break. And then he adds, “Some bodies need
more breaks than others.” What I can’t figure out is that it feels like my mind, not my body, that is breaking. I reach into my bag and apply some lip gloss to make me look more hydrated, so he won’t worry so much, though I’m sure he’s already seen the dried cracks on my hands.

“Are you menstrual?” Mr. Hensley asks, hopeful, as if this would explain my behaviour.

“No,” I say. Normally I would die of embarrassment, but right now I just don’t care. Don’t care about my math test tomorrow, don’t care if I brush my teeth, don’t care if I see Mark on Friday or Sunday. It’s all the same.

My swimming lesson is the only thing, beyond school, that I am able to bring myself to do. It’s the only other thing that will get me out of bed. I am in the change room that smells of chlorine and disinfectants. An old lady is rambling on in front of me. She’s wondering if I’m in the beginner’s class. I’ve seen her before in the pool, in her bright-yellow bathing cap, pushing her flutterboard up and down the lanes. She puts one foot up on the wooden bench and starts smearing Vaseline on her fleshy, veiny legs because she says it makes her swim faster.

“Yes,” I repeat, “I’m in the beginners’ class.”

“Isn’t that something,” she muses. “I thought everyone in Canada knew how to swim.”

“Apparently not,” I respond, shrugging my shoulders.

I’m used to this. Used to people looking at me like they don’t believe me. As if I had a reason to lie about something so small. Although I don’t say it, I agree with the old woman. It was always strange, not swimming, when all my friends did. But I had a reason, a good one, that put an immediate stop to questioning at
community wading pools on hot summer days.
Her mother
drowned,
friends’ parents would explain to each other, as they stared at the odd little girl sitting cross-legged by the pool with her shorts on.
Poor thing,
they’d say and offer me panting dogs to walk around the playground or small children to jiggle plastic toys in front of.
Just try it. It’s not hard,
my friends would say, squatted in the water, spraying water out at me from between teeth like deadly water guns.
Go on,
Elsie would encourage and dip her hand down into the water, laughing as I frantically dodged the wicked spray.

I wade waist-high in the shallow end, staring up at Greg who is telling me what we’ll be doing. “Okay, Snow. Today we’ll learn to open our eyes underwater.”

“Doesn’t that sting?” I ask, with this stupid nervous smile I can’t help giving him when I talk.

“Might a little. But we won’t do it for long. It’s important to try because you won’t always be wearing goggles. It helps you with balance and a sense of direction. Your eyes should always be open.” I ignore his words and follow his hand that disappears under his shirt to scratch his stomach. As if answering my prayers, he slips off his tank top and jumps into the water with me, splashless.

“Lie on your stomach and see if you can open your eyes to see my toes.” I do what he says, open my eyes to the chlorine sting. It never occurred to me that there is sight underwater. I had always imagined submersion as black emptiness. I open my eyes and see Greg’s red shorts rippling like windblown flags, puffing up around his muscular thighs.

Next Greg gives me ten-pound plastic barbells to hold at the bottom so that I don’t float back up right away. He tells me to kneel or sit cross-legged and just take a look around.“Have a little tea party down there,” he says. Then he gets out of the water,
stands on the deck beside the dumb blonde lifeguard with the big tits, and motions for me to start practising. I consider the lifeguard’s fat thighs and greasy hair before I turn, find my own space, and face the other way.

After a few dizzy breaths, I clench the weights in my hands and allow them to pull my reluctant body under. My legs fold beneath me, I hold myself at the bottom of the pool, cross-legged like Greg said, and I slowly open my eyes. Strands of hair float weightlessly about me and a Band-Aid flutters by like an indifferent minnow. I notice a high-pitched buzzing noise and am unsure if it’s coming from the pool drainage system or the air being compressed in my head. I turn to find the source, and when I accidentally breathe out, a frenzy of air bubbles scramble to the surface like a thousand scattering butterflies. Panicked, I burst out of the water, my mouth wide, gasping for air, my mother’s grave no longer a peaceful liquid blue. I cling to the side of the pool, breathless, elbows in the drain, thinking how terribly lonely it must be to be the sole witness of your last breath.

That night, Jasmyn’s wheezing breath becomes the air being forced out of my mother’s bones. I dream of my mother’s half-submerged body. I imagine her eyes, wide and bulging, helplessly searching for something her small unresponsive hand could grab: a ladder, a floating leaf, a stray hair. I imagine the last few bubbles rising from her mouth like silent screams.

And then I wake and stare at the ceiling and wonder, Were my cries calling her to the surface? Did she think of me when that last bubble left her mouth, releasing my name in one explosive final thought?

The next morning my mind is heavy and clouded and I refuse to go to school or even leave the house. My skin itches and smells of chlorine. My mouth is dry, but I can’t be bothered to get out of bed and get a drink of water. I can barely muster the stamina to go to the washroom, even though I have to pee every hour. And the thought of having a shower or walking all the way downstairs for some breakfast is overwhelming. I don’t want to deal with anything or talk to anyone, even Mark who left me an “emergency” message this morning saying it’s real important I call him, but I know it’s only because he left his foil of hash in my coat pocket.

All day I hear the floorboards creak in the hall and Staff’s whispery
s
’s sneak under the door like hissing snakes. They are “concerned” about me; they bring me ice cream and girlie magazines and offer to rent my favourite videos. They approach my bed all quiet and polite, as if paying respects at a funeral, unsure whether or not to acknowledge the grief.

Days pass like minutes. Each morning Miranda opens the blinds in my bedroom and each morning I crawl out of bed and snap them shut after she leaves. “You need some light in here,” she persists, opening the blinds again when she enters the room. Her insistence on sun irritates me, as if this alone would make me feel better.

She draws a chart on Bristol board and tapes it on my closet door. I get a sticker if I get out of bed and more stickers if I shower and even more stickers if I come downstairs. Each day, she visits with me, extra friendly, trying to figure out what’s wrong. She thinks she’s tricking me into speaking. She believes that if the right button is pressed, I’ll spill open. First she tells me she’s here to talk, about anything. Nothing will surprise her. Then she tells me about the time when she was seventeen and got dumped by
her boyfriend and didn’t leave the house for days. She asks me if I would describe myself as feeling sad, or tired, or numb. I tell her all three, and her mouth shuts. I start to feel bad for her, each day returning to figure me out. Each day, looking less and less intrigued with the puzzle of me.

“You can’t put your finger on me,” I say. “I don’t think I’m a pin-pointable problem.”

At first Jasmyn is concerned too. She brings me dessert. She twists my hair into tiny braids and ties rainbow-coloured elastics around the tips. She stands by my bed and asks if I want to talk. “Is it about Mark? About your birth mom? About school?” And if it’s not about all those things, then it must be about her. I tell her that it’s about nothing and everything all at once and to forget it, just leave me alone. Which she does, for a few days, but after a while she gets pissed off that I’m in the room all the time, that it stinks like B.O. and piss in here and that she can’t think straight because I just sit like a
retarded lump
and
what am I
fuckin’ staring at?

“Stop feeling so sorry for yourself. Get off your ass and do something, for fuck sakes!” she replies to my heavy sighs.

I tell her I don’t feel sorry for myself. I tell her I don’t
feel
anything, and it’s like I short-circuited a button on her body because her eyes start rolling backward, her lips curl up, and her hands start flinging about in the air. Standing there, yelling, she reminds me of Elsie. Only, now, I wish it
was
Elsie. I wish my life were as simple as it was a few months ago. Jasmyn’s mouth wildly snaps open and shut, but the air seems so thick between us that her words are gurgled and watery in my ears.

When she leaves, my head is bursting. Ideas are swirling around in a tornado. I feel like there’s an elephant sitting on my chest. I lift my T-shirt and glare at the swell of stomach,
imagining the baby there, between the ovaries and fallopian tubes, in that vacuous space I never could label on tests. “The Uterus,” I remember Ms. Martin saying in grade six, holding her valiant fist up above a class full of baffled eyes, “is the size of a pear.”

The body is generous. The way is just keeps spilling forth liquid. How considerate it is to make tears an infinite resource. And to make blood such a brilliant, beautiful red. Under my covers I carve lines into skin, my mind clear with purpose, my urgent hand releasing the pain out of me. All my thoughts are forced to the tip of a pin. So simple. So focused. The wails in my head become whispers compared to the stifling screams of skin.

This morning my body wakes up, and for the first time in almost two weeks, my mind wakes with it. I have a shower, I get dressed, I blow-dry my hair. I look at the calendar. It’s Sunday. I go down for breakfast where all the girls are. Nicole and Mary at the table, bowls of cereal in front of them. Jasmyn is sitting on the countertop, her heels kicking the cupboard doors. Tammy is leaning up against the stove with a piece of toast shoved up to her face, gobs of jam oozing out of the corners of her mouth. And Tracy is just inside the back door, one arm stuck outside, no doubt with a cigarette attached to the other end of it. Jasmyn is in the middle of telling the girls a story of how she met this guy last night who’s got a Lexus and who bounces at the Diamond so she can get in any time she wants. She pauses for a second when I walk in, disinterested heads turn my way and turn back again to hear the end of her story. And just like that, everything is back to normal. I am back to normal.