Belinda's Rings (21 page)

Belinda had begun telling them about her children then, which she hadn't wanted to do. She didn't want to come off as a disenchanted mother, trying to escape the sad reality that her children were her world. Belinda's sense of adventure was informed and legitimate, not escapist. But she had mentioned Sebastian's interest in crop circles, how he loved to draw circles over and over again and never seemed to bore himself, and then it had seemed unavoidable to talk about Jessica and Grace as well. She resisted the urge to pull photographs out of her purse, but Sampson and Rich still seemed to receive her talk of her children as motherly yearning.

Ah yes, it's hard being away from the little rascals, isn't it? Rich said. Glad I don't have any to worry about.

I've got a daughter, Sampson said. Nine years old. She's always expecting presents when I come home after a couple of months of fieldwork. And then there's the wife — oh, boy.

You could come home with the Holy Grail and it wouldn't be enough! Sampson palmed his forehead in mock exasperation. You can consider that a warning, Rich said, and Sampson chuckled in agreement. For a brief instant, Belinda contemplated telling Rich and Sampson that she wasn't sure she
would
be going home. The words almost slipped out of her mouth before she decided she didn't know them well enough yet. She could imagine the judgmental grimaces that might distort their jovial expressions. For all their experience as researchers, it was clear that they considered crop circles a part-time occupation. Going home at the end of the season was never in doubt.

Belinda had barely spoken to Monika past initial introductions, but she felt certain that Monika did not have children. Her commanding presence put Belinda in mind of a school principal. Belinda always saw principals as people with too much good sense to burden the world with children of their own; instead, they made it their duty to manage those of others. But it was mainly the way Monika was able to joke with the men in that coarse, nonchalant way that gestured her freedom from the grave and wary responsibility of motherhood.

Monika and Dr. Longfellow had virtually ignored each other for the entire trip, and Belinda wondered if they'd once been lovers and were forced for the sake of their joint research to continue working together despite awkward personal tensions. She had a difficult time imagining Dr. Longfellow's spindly arms around Monika's wide and solid girth, but the thought of their ungainly pairing gave her comfort. Belinda was glad that Monika had turned out to be much different — less attractive and graceful — than she had expected. Rather than a shiny charm for Dr. Longfellow to wear, Monika was human and imperfect, with untamable grey hairs and a large, kidney-shaped mole next to her left eye. She wore souvenir sweatshirts and scowled at other women. She was more interesting when Belinda did not have to envy her.

12
Foreigners

ROSE HAS THIS PEN PAL
named Jesus. He lives in Paraguay. She's been writing to him since grade five, when everyone in her class got assigned to a pen pal as a language arts project. I think the only reason she still writes to him is 'cause she gets to say: I correspond with Jesus.

Isn't that sort of sacrilegious? I asked her. Like, wouldn't Catholic people find that offensive?

Whatever, she said. It's just a joke.

But I know it wouldn't be funny to Rose's parents, considering Rose isn't even allowed to say God when she's not praying. Whenever I say Oh my God Rose corrects me,
Don't
you mean oh my gosh?
I don't think she actually cares; it's more like a habit. I accidentally said Oh my God once at the dinner table with her family, and I saw Rose's eyes look straight at her dad like he was a jack-in-the-box ready to pop. Nobody said anything, but Rose's mom looked down at her plate and her eyes went wide for a second. I could tell she was thinking that I was going to end up in hell. Rose's mom is the only person I know who says Oh for Pete's sake whenever something surprising happens. She even yelled it out one time when she opened the fridge and an open can of tomato juice fell out and spilled all over the floor, and then she laughed and shook her head while she stared at the puddle making its way across the tiles. Mum would've screamed Shit, shit, shit, ripped off about ten sheets of paper towel and thrown them on the floor like her whole day was ruined.

The funny thing is, Rose's parents actually know all about her pen pal. They see the letters come in the mail. Her mom pronounces Jesus's name Hay-zoos. You got another letter from Hay-zoos, she told Rose one day when I was over at their house. I must have looked confused 'cause then her mom turned to me and said, That's how the Latinos pronounce it. Rose's dad peeked over her shoulder to look at the stamp from Paraguay and said Ooo, that's a keeper. Rose just rolled her eyes and pressed the envelope to her chest. She won't open the letters until she's alone in her room, and sometimes she won't even tell me what they say. It's private, thank you very much, she says.

I'm pretty sure that Rose's parents don't know she sends Jesus pictures of herself with every letter. She once bought a disposable camera and made me take a whole roll of them. Some full-body shots in different poses, with her wearing a spaghettistrap tank-top that shows the tops of her boobs. She also got me to do a bunch of shots zoomed right in on her face with black eyeliner and mascara and pink lipstick all over it. One time, she held the camera out in front of her and made a kissy face. She showed me the letter she got back after she sent it and Jesus had gone on for a whole paragraph about how hot she was, and how he wished he could caress her smooth skin and look into her beautiful eyes and all kinds of sleazebag crap like that.

Barf, I said when I read it. I laughed through the whole thing and Rose said I was just jealous, which was probably the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. Rose is the one who gets jealous about everything. When I won the Social award in grade nine, she avoided me for a week. I didn't even care about the award, it was just a stupid plaque with my name on a rectangular piece that had been glued on. They put my Chinese middle name on it without even asking, so it wasn't like I was going to display it for everyone to see. I told her she could have it and peel off the name part if that would make her happy and she said it wouldn't. Go figure.

The other thing Rose gets mad about is copying. She always thinks I'm copying her when I'm just minding my own business. One time, she got mad 'cause I chose the same gummy candies as her at the 7-Eleven. She'd taken three marshmallow frogs, six sour soothers and ten jumbo coke bottles, and I took the same. It just seemed like good proportions.

What are you doing? she asked. She watched me twirl the plastic baggie and tie it in a knot. She was looking at me like I had a puppy in a chokehold.

Buying gummies, I said.

I thought you liked Swedish berries, she said. She stood there scowling at me until I untied my baggie and threw a few Swedish berries inside. I only did it because I knew that if I didn't, she'd say she felt like going home when we left the store. Sometimes Rose can be such a spoiled brat.

So when I told her I had my own my pen pal, I wasn't really surprised that she got all defensive.

What's
your
pen pal's name? Rose asked.

Prim, I said.

Prim? What kind of a name is that?

It's an English name. She's from England.

You can't have a pen pal from England, Rose said. They're supposed to be from a third-world country.

I thought they just had to be a stranger you write letters to, I said.

No, Rose said. That's not a pen pal. That's just a stranger you write letters to. And anyway, you're not supposed to just send random people letters.

Well I guess she's technically not a stranger, I said, biting my hair. We're sort of related.

You're related? You're writing to someone in your family? Rose sighed and blew her bangs out of her eyes like
whatever
are we going to do with you
. Hel-lo, she said, the point of a pen pal is to get to know someone new?

I've never seen her before in my life, I said. She doesn't even send me pictures of herself.

So what? Rose said. Her face was getting red. It still doesn't count. You're not even doing it for school.

Neither are you, I said.

Well, not any
more,
Rose said, but Jesus and I aren't strangers anymore either. We're close. Then Rose started telling me all about how people in Paraguay can drop out of high school before they graduate and no one cares because most people don't have much education anyway. Jesus told her he was going to get a job and save up to come to Canada. He would live at her house for a while until he got a job, and then they could move out together. She was talking so fast I didn't even get a chance to explain that I started writing my letters before I even knew she had a pen pal, and by the time she finished yakking it didn't seem important anymore.

The first few times, it felt creepy to send letters to someone I didn't know. I'd accidentally found the address in Mum's Rolodex when I was looking for her work number, so it wasn't like I was sneaking around like a stalker to find her. I even asked Mum if that was her sister's address and she said No, Prim wasn't living there anymore. I could tell she was lying. The first letter was kind of like a test, and then Prim wrote back asking all kinds of questions about how old I was and if I had any brothers and sisters, so of course I had to write back. But I didn't really want to. I didn't know what to say.
I am 14
years old. I have one sister (16) and one brother (5)
. It sounded so dumb, like something a grade two-er would write. And how was I supposed to ask her the things I wanted to know?
I was
just wondering what you're like, and why your mother disowned
you
. Yeah, right. It seems weird to me that people like Rose can just convince themselves that someone they've never met who lives on the other side of the equator or across an entire ocean can be their friend — even boyfriend. I mean, it's not like you can really know anything about that person. Jesus could be a total perv, for all Rose knows. And Paraguay might as well be on a different planet. Rose can't even pick it out on a map.

Sometimes I wonder if people are meant to stay where they belong. I've heard people talk about feeling culture shock when they go to a different country. It makes me think of this story I read a while ago about a bunch of foreign jellyfish — mauve stingers, in fact — freaking out and attacking a salmon farm in Ireland. Mauve stingers are pretty small jellyfish, but they travel in groups of a billion or more, tightly packed together like one huge pulsating jelly-monster. Most people don't know that a large group of jellyfish is called a bloom, which I think is perfect 'cause you can just imagine billions of them floating together in the water like the petals of a huge red flower, their tentacles waving in the ocean wind. So anyway, this bloom of mauve stingers was native to the Mediterranean, and no one really understood why it had travelled all the way up around the freezing-cold coasts of Ireland. But jellyfish aren't actually strong enough to swim against the tides, so when this bloom drifted into the salmon farm it seemed like the jellyfish were disoriented and confused. They drifted right over top of the salmon cages and just started stinging like crazy. The fish were stuck in their cages and all those jellyfish smushed together made a poisonous blanket over them so that the farmers couldn't do anything about it. The bloom was more than ten miles wide and thirty-five feet deep and it turned the sea into a red beating heart. The farmers just stood there watching while the fish got stung, and when the tide carried the bloom away there were 120,000 dead fish floating on the surface of the water. The jellyfish hadn't eaten a single one of those fat and juicy farm fish. You can tell that story to anyone who thinks animals only kill when they want food. Those jellyfish ended up somewhere they didn't belong, and their first instinct was obviously not to be friendly with the locals. It was basically their way of showing culture shock. Really, we're not all that different. The only difference is we have more brains to stop ourselves from freaking out and doing bad things, even though our bodies may be telling us to.

I've never been outside North America, but Wiley says travelling is overrated. Maybe that's 'cause he's never been to a different continent either. Da keeps saying that he's going to take me and Jess to Malaysia someday whether we like it or not, and Jess always says NOT and then wrinkles her nose up like she can't imagine anything more revolting. She'd rather go to England, and even though I wouldn't be able to learn how to scuba dive in England, I think I'd rather go there too. Wiley says all they have there is bad weather and worse food, but I still think it would be kinda neat to see where Mum came from. I always imagine Auntie Prim as an older version of Mum and my cousin Sebastian as an older version of Squid, so I bet it would feel like stepping into the future or even some parallel universe. It makes me wonder if there's another version of me out there somewhere.

I can still remember the time when I was little and I suddenly realized I was me, and there wasn't anyone else quite like me in the world. I was eating a Popsicle and staring up at a woolly mammoth. See, when you take the train to the zoo you get off in this long concrete tunnel that leads up to the entrance. The middle of the tunnel rises up into a skylight, with a life-size mammoth sculpture standing beneath it. The tunnel was my favourite part of the zoo, 'cause it was dark and clammy like a sewer, with only the dim rays filtering down from the skylight and a few yellow safelights along the walls. Your voice would echo all around you, even when you were just talking softly. The animal carvings on the walls made it feel like a prehistoric cave. Your footsteps would echo too, and Jess and I would always skip ahead of Mum and come running back just to hear the drumming music our feet could make. In the middle of the tunnel there's a big circle with the mammoth plonked in the centre, and a few dinosaurs and sabre-toothed tigers around the sides. You can stand right under the mammoth and the shadow of just one tusk covers your whole body, and when you're a kid you can really imagine it's a live animal towering over you. My pink Popsicle was melting and dripping on my fingers and I imagined the mammoth's mouth dripping saliva like a dog. The mouth was a bit open and painted dark grey inside.