Faerie (3 page)

06
. Photographic Solution

My thirteenth year was spent far from home and in a hotbed of cultural confusion. And worst of all, I was away from Monika, away from our bond of belonging and my seeds of self-discovery. Did she know how miserable and lost I would be without her?

My father took us to India, where his family lived, for his sabbatical year. He handed his precious Leica to his gloomy daughter—“Here, use it to take pictures”—as though it could repair the rupture that he could see was tearing me apart. I hung the camera around my neck and wandered about, unable to capture the force and speed at which my new reality was penetrating my senses. It made me more anxious, so I put it away.

My accent and clothes gave me away as an outsider, a western girl. And all western girls were thought of as Lolitas. A wardrobe switch, however, would turn Lolita off and good Indian girl on.

On a sweltering hot August day, the marketplace was coming alive with vendors setting up their carts along the street. The hallucinating aromas of spices and succulent mangos saturated the muggy air. My grandmother had put some rupees in my purse so I could buy vegetables and fruit, with enough money left over for a treat. In my mind, I envisioned finding an object of vanity, some glass bracelets in bright pink or gold. “This is what Monika would get,” I told myself. In her absence, I assumed the role of my idol. This is how I carried her inside myself.

Having applied a sheen of lip gloss and rouge, off I went. The excitement of going alone made me dizzy with happiness. My loose Indian
salwar
top was cool, more so because I had decided not to wear my camisole and the
dupatta
, a veil women wear that is part fashion accessory, part concealment, that covers the bosom.

As I strode across the street toward the market, I was struck by the crowds of men and boys. Their eyes penetrated me and seemed to fondle me in private places. Then, with a jolting shock, a stranger's hand grabbed my breast. My child brain did not, could not, at first, register what was happening. Then our eyes locked. The man's face glistened with sweat, his eyes were bloodshot, and a broad moustache stretched over a sinister grin. His foul scent seeped into my brain. Click. In extreme close-up, filling the frame of my inner eye. I jerked away, and the stranger was lost among the bodies—never to be seen again, but never to be forgotten.

I returned to my grandmother's house empty-handed. Mother discovered me sobbing in my room, and seeing my camisole and
dupatta
thrown over the chair, instructed me never to leave the house again without wearing them. I wanted desperately to erase the picture impressed on my mind's eye, to camouflage the foul scent that had entered my pores, the grotesque sensation of his sweaty palm pressing into me. Over many nights, I fantasized my revenge, but I was always left with the nagging feeling that I had only myself to blame.

For the next several weeks, I hardly left the house. Then I had the impulse to pick up my father's Leica. Its cool metallic
body glistened against the dusty gold light of late evening, and the smooth glassy lens winked as if to welcome me into a substitute world. I carried my father's camera around my neck for the rest of my time in India. When I wasn't taking photos, it rested against my bosom like a shield. I pointed the lens at men who would assault me with their gestures and gazes and felt a sense of power and authority not usually granted to young girls.

Once my new hobby of intimidation had cooled my burning anger, I found something more deeply satisfying about photography. I saw through the lens what was invisible to the naked eye. The box contained a secluded universe that I could disappear into and be witness to a remarkable world that choreographed light, perspective, and form and refracted reality into a delectable dream. I could capture time and fix it with a single click of the shutter.

Then something incredible began to happen. The first pulsations of a creature were being born inside me, pushing against my skin, and emerging into some enchanted thing. It began to take shape in my consciousness; it was on its way to becoming almost real. I secretly called her “Faerie.”

Back at home in Quebec, my father's camera remained a necessary appendage. I loved the images that I captured, filling the gaping spaces in my heart, frame by frame. I plastered my room with my photographs, scenes and moments that had slipped through the cracks of reality and the immediacy of sensations.
And I was no longer interested in the bodies of boys and men or in the images of gorgeous pop stars and sexy movie idols. No erotic desire blazed inside me. I wondered if this was due to the workings of the faerie creature inside me.

Since our return from India, Monika spent most evenings sulking at the dinner table. Worse, she usually kept her bedroom door closed; I was no longer welcome in her room to play and witness her daily beauty rituals. When she did find me messing with her
maquillage,
she screamed at me, “Get the hell out, you pest!” She and Dad argued almost every day, especially when she came home late. She was standing up to my father in ways I would never dare. My mother did not intervene. Her role was to defuse the situation with food.

I listened to the heated exchanges between Monika and Dad through the bedroom wall, biting my cuticles until they bled. Our happy home movie had turned into dreadful documentary, a real-life horror of clashing wills as I watched the perfect image of my idealized grownup self coming undone.

In a few months time, Monika would be gone, her room vacated, and her memory buried like a distant dream.

07
. Hit of Numbers and Nature

At age thirteen, Mina was a faithful subscriber to
Seventeen
and followed its exhaustive beauty advice to the letter, from cuticle care to the painstaking treatment of teenage acne.

Meanwhile, my morning routine was just insane. Every morning I took on the weigh scale with the fury of a boxer facing her opponent. I stepped on the scale and braced myself for the punch: 1-2-1. I stepped off in shock, unable to fathom that I'd gained weight while on a slimming diet. I looked at my bloated brown figure in the mirror, my deceiving double. My instinct was to turn away, but I looked hard and long. I hadn't done that since I was twelve, when the shock of pubic hair and sudden bulge of breasts sent me into a tailspin of suicidal grief. Two years on, the grief was intensifying.

In a daze, I stepped into the tub and ran hot water over my head and down my back, utterly disappointed with myself and my disobedient body. My breasts and belly extended into a grotesque shape. A handful of flesh on my belly had ballooned over my panty line, my thick upper thighs pressed tightly against one another, and my face was full and round, the hollow of cheekbone lost under flab. No space. No bone. No self-control. I longed for jutting pelvic bones and a glorious thigh gap, for a sunken inward-curving abdomen under a visible ribcage. Like the cover model of
Elle,
whose light figure floated on the glossy
page in her two-piece and carefree sheen.

I stepped into my stiff jeans and tugged them over my legs and thighs. I had gained a whole size. If that wasn't punishment enough for my deplorable lack of discipline, I had to expose this body to the world and, worse, to my grade-nine classmates. It was gym day.

By the curious and cruel hand of fate, I was surrounded in my small-town Catholic school by beautiful tall girlazons, all fed on the same diet of pop culture. While they were faithful followers of fashion and celebrity trends, I was subject to the discount and hand-me-down ethos of my mother, a leftover of her early years as an immigrant. Mother was a faithful fan of the “marts” of Quebec: Bonimart, K-Mart and, her favourite, Miracle Mart. Unfortunately for me, the cult of the marts had resulted in a tacky wardrobe of styles and colours well-suited for Halloween, not for high school.

In my hideous gym shorts, I braced myself for a snide remark about my unshaven ape legs from the boys whose own fur would never meet the cruel sting of a razor or a humiliating remark. I had once heard that the hair of Punjabi girls was thicker, darker, and more tenacious than that of white girls, and that no amount of shaving, waxing, or grooming could conquer the mighty Punjabi follicle. I don't know if this was true, but I figured that I was living proof. While Mina had inherited my mother's hairless gene, I had—just my luck—inherited the hairy gene of auntie Gurinder Kaur from Patiala, well-known for her spectacular furry unibrow.

“Today we're outside,” said Mr Reed, our phys-ed teacher,
pointing his stubby finger toward the doors. We hauled ourselves off the benches and into the crisp, frigid air. The shock of cold pleased me. I was glad to be outdoors, where I was liberated from thinking, and my body was free to experience the mechanical grind of physical activity. I ran across the soggy field and icy grass. Fuelled with fat, my thighs thundered as each foot landed on the ground. As I orbited the track, I heard Mr Reed barking, “Ladies, move your fat butts!” provoking the boys to push back against any traces of femininity in themselves, as if it were a disease, and impelling the girls to loathe our own natures. I ran, fuelled by those words, and set in motion the faerie creature, who followed the laws of a different nature, one not ruled by sex or size, age or time.

08
. Don't Stand So Close to Me

I began to keep a daily log of my caloric intake after reading an article in Mother's most recent issue of
Good Housekeeping.
It said that “diets were impractical without a calorie diary” and offered a list of helpful tips to curb carb cravings. It also gave suggestions of low-calorie alternatives: “Craving chocolate? Have a stick of celery. Hankering for a hamburger? Nibble on cucumber.” As a bonus, the magazine included a complimentary calorie counter.

I found the perfect calorie diary in my dad's university office one afternoon while I waited for his Friday lecture to end. It was a crimson notebook with a glossy cover that beckoned me like an Eden-red apple. Inside, it was blank, with smooth, pure white pages lined with grids—pages upon pages of miniature squares into which I could scribble a single caloric digit. The fixed and definite lines were comforting; they reassured me that my goal was at hand. There was no room to wander, to digress with words and wants and feelings.

This time, I told myself, I'm really going to get the weight off. I will be methodical about jotting down every morsel, every crumb, anything short of my own saliva. My mission was to be more disciplined, and this diary would be my first symbolic gesture.

       
1 whole wheat toast = 72 calories

       
250 mL 2% milk = 120 calories

       
1 tbsp strawberry jam = 15 calories

Glorious! I was excited to find a new tool, and one small enough to keep in a deep secret pocket.

Not like my other diary, which was bulky and bloated with outpourings of grief, scribblings of heartache and disenchantment, of brooding and longing. Lots of longing. If longing were food, it would be a calorie-busting serving of English fish and chips. Notes from my grade-ten diary:

I have fallen headfirst for my English teacher. He looks like he just walked out of a music video. More precisely, he looks like “Don't Stand So Close to Me” Sting. This underaged girleen is getting herself into some double deep trouble.

Let me recall the delicious moment when I first laid my eyes on dreamy Mr Black. It was a dull Monday early in November, when red poppies appear pinned on collars and suits and forgotten old soldiers turn up on street corners, only to fade out again until the following November. The opiate poppy seemed to have produced in me the dreamiest feeling as I sleepwalked from the school bus into the classroom and saw him standing near his desk in a streak of sunshine. He turned to look at me just as I saw him, and in that moment our eyes locked. It was as though he had emerged from the belly of an ancient dream to appear
before me. My gaze fell to my feet, and I folded myself into my dependable desk. How does one respond to the first shivering moment of desire?

There was a commotion in the classroom, hissing, whispers, coughing chuckles. Curious glances and notes were exchanged across the rows of desks.

“Morning!” The room stilled as the teacher picked up a dusty stick of chalk and produced his name on the board with the force of a swordsman.

“I am Mr Black. Andrew Black.” He put down the chalk, slapped the magic powder from his princely palms, and swept his gaze across the alert row of teens, skirting the starry-eyed girl in the third row who was inwardly serenading him already. He was, he said, our newly hired English teacher.

His words melted into a watery mumble in my ears as he told us that he had travelled from his native England to the US, and his desire to learn French had led him north to Quebec, where ironically, he was teaching English. As he spoke, my alert senses captured his handsomeness. He was over six feet tall and wore a tweed jacket with the dishevelled swagger of a rock star. My Sting substitute made generous use of his hands. He expressed himself well, ending statements with a sweep of his fingers through his fair hair. His pale skin produced a nutty scent of talcum powder and almond, which evaporated over the hours and became a sort of accidental barometer of the time of day.

“What brings me here, dear students, is literature.” He stopped less than a foot away from my desk. I slowly, cautiously looked up at him, and he met my gaze. A beat short of drawing
attention to his singular deliberation of me, he tapped my desk lightly, as if to produce a mental
nota bene
from this arrested moment, and carried on with his introduction.

For the remainder of the class and for the rest of the week, he paid me no attention. I longed for another flaming spark to set me ablaze, but each time I passed him in the hallway or classroom, he carried on in the ordinary guise of a regular teacher. After three weeks, I assumed that my face had blended into his mental blur of all the girls' faces—if it had ever existed for him at all. I surrendered to the realization that my infatuation was spurred on by my own loneliness and self-loathing, and that it never could have had any reciprocal power.

One day, I'd just eaten the banana bread planted in my lunch box by Mother. I ate it because it was there. I ate everything, even when I felt full.
Fat, thoughtless cow
, I said to myself.

After lunch, I shut my lonely 126-pound self in a bathroom stall in the girls' washroom. I fell to my knees, and with a ball of toilet paper, soaked up my baboon tears. In this private confessional, I admitted my weaknesses to an unseen witness. I listed in my mind numerous infractions and transgressions, the calories and desserts, the despicable deluge of desire, my immense appetite for love, and for that horrid banana bread. Consumed with guilt and a gut-wrenching hunger for more, I could feel my belly swelling up and the flooding feeling rising in disgust. It reached my esophagus and rose into the back of my throat. Suddenly, a wellspring of all the sin gushed out fully, completely evacuating my body.

I was pure again. I was absolved. Immediately I experienced
a sense of bliss, an intoxicating rush of power from my empty stomach. My throat felt hot, and the veins in my temples throbbed. I curled over the toilet bowl and saw through moist eyes a blur of brownish-yellow vomit. The vile odour rose to my nostrils, jolting me into a recognition of what I had done. There it was. It had a form, colour, and smell. The shape of how I felt. I wiped my hot face and acrid lips with toilet paper and flushed the toilet. I watched the bowl fill up again, dutifully rising with a pool of clear water. Clean and renewed.

Mr Black walked toward us and addressed me directly. “Hello. Lila, is it?”

The girls standing in the hall turned their heads to look at me. I pretended that I hardly noticed him and looked sideways, toying with my school bag zipper.

“Yeah,” I said breezily. Surprisingly, the girls didn't seem to notice how strangely I was behaving and how wildly I wanted him.

“She has a weird name,” Christine blurted out.

“It is not!” I gave her a cutting look and told Mr Black that I was named after my maternal grandmother, conjuring up a fictional melodrama from the workings of my brain's imagination, then realized how dull it was when I saw him blink, I feared, out of boredom.

He interjected in a low cottony voice. “Lila is a mythical name, short for Delilah in Hebrew.” My heart stopped and my
limbs became weak. Had he just compared me to the infamous temptress?

“To us, it means lollipop!” The girls giggled, then turned quiet when Mr Black gave them a dour look.

“If you girls are as clever as you think you are, then I expect ingenious papers on your next assignment. Christine will have the privilege of reading hers first,” he said with a cheeky grin. He grazed my arm with his hand as he brushed past me, saying, “See you ladies then. Ta-ta.”

As I entered the classroom, Mr Black called me to his desk. I froze for a moment, then felt myself involuntarily floating toward him. He slid my graded paper toward me. “Fine work, Lila,” he said, and I saw the spiked thrust of an A+. “I would like you to read your story to the class. It provides an excellent example of tragedy and internal conflict in character.” I nodded stiffly. The perspective from the front of the class was jarring, but I had no time to get comfortable with the faces and eyes directed at me. I fumbled with my paper. Once I got through the first paragraph, however, I became remarkably calm, and the sentences began to flow off my tongue. When I was done, some of the girls made snide comments, but Mr Black hushed the class and praised me for my imagination and creative writing style. Instantly, his words erased the remarks from my peers.

Soon after, I began to outdo myself with each new paper, story, and essay for English class. But I neglected my duty to my calorie diary, filling the pages with a troubling number of flowers, floating hearts, winged butterflies, squiggly designs, and incomprehensible scribblings.

One winter afternoon after school, while waiting for the bus with Mina, I realized that I had forgotten my pencil case in the classroom. I hurried back and saw my crinkly Little Mermaid case where I had left it on my desk. When I turned to leave, Mr Black was standing before the blackboard looking at me. Behind him, the empty blackboard was filled with ghost words that wriggled out of recognition and floated into my memory of past lessons.

“Forgot this,” I said with a crooked smirk and showed him my pencil case.

“Lila, hang on a second, please,” he said. I stopped at the door and held my breath. This was the first time I had been alone with him—outside of delusional fantasies knit together from Hollywood romances and subtitled Bollywood fare.

“May I ask you something?” He took a few slow steps toward me. During that pregnant pause, I imagined him uttering everything from commenting about my writing to proposing marriage.

“What do you think, Lila, of a drama club?”

“What do you mean?” I gulped.

“How would you and your classmates like to set one up?”

“That's not exactly a bad idea,” I said.

He beamed at me. “Good, we shall set one up then.” He then winked and turned to carry on with whatever he'd been doing before I walked in, as though I were no longer there. My heart
sank, struck by how curtly I could be dismissed. But I couldn't get myself to tell him that I had missed my bus, let alone ask to use his phone to call Dad. Instead, I lingered like a lost kitten.

He turned and looked at me. “Oh dear. You missed your bus, didn't you? I am so sorry, Lila. If you'd like, I could give you a lift home.” How quickly the heart bounces back!

As he drove, I took in the scent of his sleek silver Volvo, which smelled like sage and pine and the cultured smell of Europe. I was transported into a foreign universe where we were lovers, driving along sinewy roads in the Alps toward a glorious mountain lodge where he would light a blazing fire and feed me champagne and strawberries.

“I've yet to try maple syrup. I hear it's sweeter than sugar,” he said. He had been talking about foods he hadn't sampled yet since moving to Quebec.

I concurred and said, “I'd like to try caviar. Have you ever had caviar?” I exhaled my (imaginary) Virginia Slims through the window into the alpine air as we drove past Neuschwanstein, the German castle I pictured looming beyond the Swiss Chalet diner ahead of us.

“Why on earth would a girl your age want to try fish eggs?”

“What would you know about ‘a girl my age'? A girl my age likes a lot of things.” I turned to him. “I
have
been to Europe, you know.”

He looked at me with a smirk. “I'm sure you have. Trust me, a
girl your age
would not like caviar!”

I fell into a silent tantrum and sat tight-lipped and pouting for a long juvenile while. Lover had turned into disapproving
parent, snatching the cigarette from my lips and tossing it out of my daydream.

“I am
not
a kid,” I finally said.

“I can see that. You're a lovely young lady.” He turned and looked at me with the eyes of an onscreen lover. His gaze lingered on me, then travelled south. How much of this was my imagination and how much was real, I wondered. I felt a mix of arousal and repulsion that now coalesced into fear. I was a kid. I wanted to be a kid. I was ready to try new things, yes, but sex? That was still something reserved for big-bodied, adult mammals. Also, what did I know about Mr Black, really? His life was in shadow. Who was he? Did he have a girlfriend, a wife, an ex-wife? A fiancée, perhaps?