Belinda's Rings (22 page)

For some reason, looking up at that mouth that was the perfect shape for my puny little head made me think about how amazing it was that I was born as me, as if I could have been any one of the millions of other people in the world, but it was some stroke of pure chance that made me
me
. It was like I imagined that people were made up of different pieces that got put together randomly, as if God or whoever was responsible had one of those machines they use for Bingo where all the balls fly around inside and a certain few get sucked up into the tube, one by one, until you have a set of lucky numbers.

Of course, Mum would say there's no such thing as luck. It's all part of the cosmic design, she says. But it seems like if she really believed that, she never would have gone to England. If she believed that everything happens for a reason, there wouldn't be anything to run away from.

Jess told me that she didn't think Mum would have gone on her trip if she knew that Wiley was going to start acting even weirder than usual. I'd made the mistake of telling her about Wiley and the trunk the night before.

Mum wouldn't have left us with a crazy person, Jess said. She would never leave us in danger. I hadn't even said anything about danger but it was obvious that Jess was scared. Her fingernails were bitten down so far that there were dark red curves tracing the edges.

Whoa, drama queen, I said. I just thought it was weird, that's all. I don't think it's exactly normal for someone to stay up in the garage all night trying to crack open a useless old trunk.

Ya think? Jess said. It's
crazy,
that's what it is.

Relax, I said. It's not like he's gonna come after you in the night and stab you with a screwdriver.

How do you know? Jess said. You don't know that. She crossed her arms and looked me straight in the eye, the way Mum does when she's made up her mind.

Oh God, I said. I laughed at her and rolled my eyes as if what she'd said was completely ridiculous, but it was actually the only thing I could think to do to make her stop talking about it.

As dramatic as it sounded, it was kinda true. The Wiley we were living with wasn't the guy who played ‘Eye of the Tiger' on our piano just to hear us giggle and taught us how to tie-dye our own t-shirts. New Wiley was the kind of guy who didn't care if we ate pizza three times a day or got drunk in the house. New Wiley could spend eight hours straight in the garage drinking beer with his buddy while Squid was wailing 'cause he'd had a nightmare. He was supposed to be our stepdad, but we didn't know him at all.

XII

BELINDA NEEDED A STRATEGY
for leaving. She never got anything done without a plan. If she went to the grocery store without a list, she would go home with bagfuls of frivolous items like jars of pickled vine leaves, raisin bread, and peanut butter swirled with strawberry jam — foods that made her feel hungry. She'd decided long ago that she couldn't trust her instincts. Her instincts had kept her in her mother's house for seventeen years. The plan got her out.

The plan to leave her mother began when Belinda refused to grind the crabapples one autumn. It was one of her mother's nonsensical obsessions to collect every crabapple that the tree in their front yard put forth. It was unthinkable to let them grow and fall to the ground, or to allow the occasional small animal to enjoy the fruit. Every edible morsel had to be plucked and hoarded, any worms or scars or bruises cut out of the flesh. Vestiges of wartime mentality: to waste food was treasonous. And so her mother would insist on grinding the crabapples to a pulpy sauce, which could be preserved in Mason jars and stored in the cellar. Since her mother had arthritic wrists, it was Belinda's job to mill the apples by hand in a contraption that looked like a saucepan with a sweeping blade set on the inside and a crank handle sticking out the top. Belinda was forced to crank the handle around and around as her mother added newly manicured and peeled apples to the mix, watching the dirty yellow sauce swirling at the bottom of the grinder. The same task had once been assigned to Prim, who, as her mother insisted, did a lazy job of it.

You don't want to turn out like her, do you? her mother reminded Belinda at every opportunity. Look at her. Poor, alone, stuck with an invalid child. Likely alcohol poisoning, so I said. She drank like a fish, couldn't help herself.

She spoke about Prim as if Belinda knew her, had some magical means to know what Prim was like then, and what her life was like now. But all she knew was that whatever her mother said about Prim was not the truth. Her mother had turned her back on her own daughter, rejected her for no good reason. Sometimes it even seemed as though she was jealous of Prim's freedom.

Before you know it, her mother would continue, she'll be old and useless. No life of her own to speak of.

Belinda knew these were only stories, constructed by her mother to keep her in fear. Still, it worked. As much as she was convinced her mother was lying, she had no way of knowing if there was some small element of truth in her words. And rather than allow herself to admit that, she continued to grind the apples, shutting out her mother's mantra with her own visions of Prim.

You'll thank me, her mother had said, when you're eating a nice hot bowl of crabapple sauce on a cold winter's day. She said this every single year, and not once did they open a jar. The jars collected in a corner of the cellar, the crowded stacks of glass like the towers of a miniature city glowing vague and flaxen in the perpetual darkness.

Refusing her grinding duties was Belinda's way of taking a stand. Asserting her independence was the first stage of the plan. The next stage was to do something serious and unexpected. She smashed all the jars to pieces. She didn't do these things for her mother's sake, but rather for her own. Her mother didn't find about the smashed jars until the following autumn, after Belinda had left, when the sauce had caked and dried in crusty puddles and the shards of glass had become features of the cellar's landscape, furred with dust and dirt. Belinda thought of her plan as confidence-building. She smashed the jars to prove her capability for irresponsible destructiveness. She was proving wrong her own self-doubt.

After the jar-smashing, she'd found a job at the convenience store at the other end of town. This hadn't seemed possible while the jars were still intact, harbouring all of their preserved evidence that year after year would always bring more apples. The job — the money — fulfilled the practical part of her plan. Practicalities signalled the final stage.

With Dazhong she'd had to up the ante. When the time came to leave him she was no longer a meek teenager. She'd proven her independence by starting piano lessons — something that Dazhong didn't value and couldn't possibly share with her even if he'd wanted. Although she'd specifically chosen a male piano teacher, the attraction to Wiley was not planned. But it made her rash act of defiance a natural progression. Next, getting a job at a clothing store in the mall was easy; she carried the aplomb of an adulteress, flaunting poise and certainty like shiny gold bangles. They liked that in retail. She'd received three job offers, and Talbots offered her the highest wage. Selling clothes had seemed glamourous until it became clear that the clothes at Talbots were only considered stylish among women over the age of sixty. Things had a way of changing — or perhaps what really changed were Belinda's perceptions of things.

But with Wiley it had been different.
He
had changed, too. When he wasn't feverishly professing his love and admiration for everyone around him, he was spending entire days holed up in dingy bars contemplating the worthlessness of life. In personality, he'd become a caricature of himself, with certain traits grossly exaggerated and others diminished to feeble proportions. His disposition was either exuberant or despondent, nothing in between, and his moods seemed to last for weeks on end.

He'd been in the thick of one of his erratic, charged-up moods when Belinda made the mistake of telling him, before she made a plan, that she intended to leave. It had happened weeks before she even conceived of taking the trip to England, but she was still being punished for it. Wiley hadn't been sleeping for more than a few hours each night and his eyes had acquired the unsettling glaze that often accompanied this persona, as though he were seeing the world in some mesmerizing new dimension. And in his intensified way of jumping to overblown conclusions, he'd convinced himself that Belinda had used him as a way out of her marriage to Dazhong.

You manipulated me, he'd sneered. You wanted a way out. You even had a child you didn't want for the sake of justifying it. It's despicable, you're going to hell, you're going straight to hell. He'd screamed the words over and over until Belinda almost began to believe them.

She called it a slip-up, and it was. She was frustrated; she'd taken the wrong approach. And she'd given Wiley leverage when she asked him not to tell the children what she had said.

You're looking for absolution, he accused. I will not absolve you. You are a
bad
person. She'd been particularly stung by the weight of these insults. His accusations made her out to be thoroughly, innately
bad
. Evil.

Later that evening, after they'd been forced to smooth things over for the kids' sake, she realized that Wiley was probably right about her desire for absolution. It had been too providential for Grace to ask about purgatory at the dinner table the very same day. And Belinda had felt the need to defend herself, even when the conversation really had nothing to do with her.

Purgatory is a place of torture, Wiley told Grace. You get tortured there, for the bad things you've done. He aimed his manic stare directly at Belinda.

It's more of a state of being than a place, Belinda had said. Grace looked confused about that response. She'd been going through a spiritual phase, and Belinda knew it had to do with fitting in. She had a friend who was Catholic. The friend, Rose, looked like the kind of girl teenaged boys would find attractive. She had thin, long limbs, fair skin, and designer clothes. She wore push-up bras under low-cut tops. She played on the volleyball team and chewed bubble gum obsessively. Grace's envy of her was as palpable as an overripe cheese. Her inquiries about religion were merely attempts to unpack Rose's character in that enamoured way of jealous adolescent girls. She could not have known that Wiley was simmering on her words, and reveling in their invocation.

So . . . Grace said, it's something you just make up in your head?

You might say that, Belinda said. Catholics believe that some people have to be purified before they can go to heaven. The ones who did some bad things like everyone does, but are still good people. She could see Wiley out of the corner of her eye, mashing his baked potato with his fork as though it were a thrashing, living thing that needed to be squashed before eaten.

So they just float around in their dead bodies, like ghosts? Grace asked. Waiting until they can get into heaven?

I don't know, Belinda replied, truthfully. She could see how waiting for an absolution that might never come could be torturous.

13
Mean Streak

PEOPLE THINK I LOOK
innocent 'cause I've got Da's round cheeks and Mum's big eyes. When I was little Mum cut my hair short and I looked like one of those monkey toys that crashes a pair of cymbals when you wind it up. In fact, I can still make the best monkey face you've ever seen in your life. All I gotta do is pull out my ears and puff my cheeks and voilà: it's like chimps on parade.

But I can be a real bitch when I feel like it. Up until a few years ago, I cheated at board games all the time. When we still lived with Da we had this neighbour named Chelsea who would come over to play games, and she wasn't exactly the brightest crayon in the box. Or at least I was pretty sure I was smarter than her even though she was a year older than me. We played Scrabble and I just made up words like BICZA and told her they were real, and I acted like such a smarty-pants snob that she believed me. The funny thing was that she didn't care about losing. She just kept giggling and spelling out lame words like IT and GO and saying things like I'm so bad at this game! and I'm so dumb! Yeah, you are, I would say back, acting annoyed at her for losing all the time. She went to my school and nobody really liked her, so I told people that she peed her pants all the time. It wasn't exactly a lie; she did pee her pants once when she was at my house. She'd been wearing purple leggings and there was a big eggplant splotch on her butt, but she didn't even do anything about it. She just pretended it wasn't there. The reason I know I have a mean streak is that even when I think about it now, I don't feel sorry for Chelsea. She just grosses me out.

The other mean thing I do is make fun of Jess's mole. She has this big mole on her left cheek beside her nose. It sticks out like a blob of chocolate pudding and it grows two little tiny hairs on it. I know she's really self-conscious about it 'cause she's always trying to hide it with her hand when she talks to people she doesn't know, and when she gets pictures taken she tries to turn her head to the side. A couple of years ago she asked Mum if she could get it removed, and Mum told her she'd need plastic surgery and it would probably cost hundreds of dollars. After that she started plucking out the little hairs with Mum's tweezers. It's pretty pathetic, actually. But sometimes I get in these moods where absolutely everything Jess says is obnoxious, and as she's talking to me I'm staring at the mole thinking about how ugly it is and how much I hate that mole, and meanwhile Jess has stopped talking and she's looking at me and waiting for me to say something. Sorry? I say. Your mole was staring at me.

If she cries it makes me even more pissed, 'cause then I have to deal with Mum's
do you enjoy making people miserable?
lecture. And I just have to sit there and let her lay into me 'cause I can't very well say, Yes, I actually do sort of enjoy it.