Greedy Little Eyes (24 page)

I would giggle. Lunk-headed and cripple-winged, they hardly resembled the nimble sprites I used as a template. It seemed utterly hare-brained to me, childish and fatuous, but at the same time I couldn’t help but be struck by the purity of their response, the awe with
which my mother and Alice held this ordinary activity. Unable to feel it myself, I did my best to generate it in them.

“Mummer!” Dusty spotted my sister outside her room at the end of the long medicinal-smelling hall and yanked free of my hand, charging down the shiny brown linoleum. “Mummer, wummer, bummer!” she crowed and hurled herself headlong into Alice’s belly.

As I followed I glanced around. This was the first time I’d ever been in a mental health facility. I had expected impassive-faced men in two-piece white cotton suits wandering the halls with electrodes, waiting to zap the unruly. It looked more like a youth hostel, with its easy-to-clean surfaces and plain, functional waiting area. Beige, brown and a sickly-pink were the dominant colours.

My sister
oof
ed and stared down a moment before letting her hands settle on Dusty’s head. She looked nervous, as though she’d forgotten what to do. “Hey, Chum-bum,” she said. On fawn legs, she unsteadily picked up her girl.

Dusty put a hand on her mother’s cheek and stared into her eyes. Alice kissed her, and Dusty pecked back and then hugged her hard.

Alice watched me over Dusty’s shoulder, her eyes dark and a little spooked. She glanced at the man coming up the corridor toward us. His attire was expensive-casual
and I wondered if he was another inmate, but his spine looked too erect for that, his gaze too easy.

“Heyyy,” Alice said softly as I came near, and she reached out to pull me close.

“Hello, Alice,” the man said, passing slowly but not stopping. His smile verged on adoring. “You must be Dusty!” he exclaimed to my niece.

“This is my baby,” Alice said, smiling finally.

“This is ma bebayy,” Dusty repeated in her Southern shtick.

“My shrink,” Alice whispered to me, nodding after the man.

“Do you want to kiss him?” Dusty asked her.

A startled laugh escaped Alice and she looked at her kid. “I missed you,” she said, and like a Labrador retriever, my sister licked her baby’s face.

Dusty shrieked and wiped, then licked back.

“Care to see my abode?” Alice walked us down the hall.

Passing the door next to hers, she jerked her head toward it. “Obsessive-compulsive,” she whispered. “I walked in there by mistake a couple days ago and I think she’s still disinfecting the place.”

I glanced in and saw a young, thin woman, her hair pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck, on her hands and knees in the corner, rubbing at the linoleum.

“Seriously,” she hissed. “She gets her husband to smuggle in rubbing alcohol and J Cloths and she wipes the whole floor and every inch of the walls until she’s
sure the room’s sterile … Poor guy—he was crying in the hall last night. There’s some new kind of lobotomy they want to do on her.” Alice bared her teeth with nervous excitement. “They drill holes in your skull and stick hot wires in …
zzzt
!”

“Jesus.”

She led me into her room, which was utilitarian, much like the waiting area. Against the wall sat a single bed with white sheets, a brown wool blanket, and one slim pillow. Beside it, a table with a reading lamp and a water glass. A writing desk faced the window. Eraser pink curtains with chocolate brown Venetian blinds.

“You look good,” I told her. And she did too. Calmer than I’d seen her in months.

I hadn’t seen Alice since we checked her in, eight days before, yowling like a wet cat. They told us to wait seventy-two hours before visiting, but my father stormed the reception desk after twelve. Scared he’d find a drugged-out vegetable rocking in a corner somewhere, he demanded to know what they were planning to do with her. The nurse told him he couldn’t stay, that his daughter was not ready to see anyone. Dad got so frantic that eventually she caved and brought him to Alice’s room to set his mind at rest.

I imagined him standing in the doorway as I was now. He told me that Alice had been huddled on her bed with paper cups of water all over her nightstand and the writing desk—there must have been a dozen. She was hugging herself, taking long deep breaths, slow-motion hyperventilation. When she saw him, it
took her a moment to absorb who he was, and then she shook her head and looked past him to the nurse. She pointed at him and shook her head again.

The nurse gently led my father from the room. “She’d like you to leave. Until she’s sure.”

He felt awful, he said later. “I was furious with her. I feel foolish for it now.” His chin quivered and then he set his jaw.

Sitting in the living room, lit only by the reading lamp, his broad round ears seemed even more pronounced, the tiny veins red in the frail flesh of them. He reminded me of one of those leggy male deer in the nature shows, the way they cock their big ears, waiting and listening as they will themselves to be strong, though ultimately they are no match for what is coming.

“The nurse was very professional. There’s a reason for rules,” he added at last, as though I might argue the point.

After Momma died, Alice took up drawing her own fairies. It struck me as odd that she didn’t cry but she didn’t seem to see our mother’s departure as anything final. There were always euphemisms that I took to mean heaven: Momma went on to a sweeter place, yes, but Momma also “went through the keyhole,” or she “rode a teardrop to the river.”

Her sweeter place was inside Alice’s sketchpad, where plump fairies with apple cheeks and soft dewy hands
wrapped themselves in rose petals and danced to the tune of pixie kisses. Probably because she’d actually seen the little beasts first hand, Alice’s creations went beyond anything in my fairy book. They seemed vital, frisky and mischievous. And they were the biggest of all the characters on her page. If some ugly gremlin did push its way into her picture it appeared shrunken and impotent, no match for the winged girls.

I had just graduated high school when Alice began her foray into equal-opportunity dating. She was sixteen and the girls she chose were generally older than she was by at least four or five years. I remember the first time I saw her on the street with a stranger who gave me pause.

The young woman by her side looked to be in her twenties. Their arms were linked as they came toward me but given Alice’s affectionate disposition it was difficult to be certain of the nature of their relationship.

They were on their way to a Sunday matinee showing of
Peter Pan,
so we exchanged only a few words.
Peter Pan
was the last thing I wanted to see and, anyway, I was off to meet a date myself. Still I felt a twinge because I hadn’t been invited along—or perhaps because Alice was so enthralled with her friend.

I turned to watch them go and was struck by the relatively slender waist this chubby friend of Alice’s had, the way the slim band of her middle sloped down and out like an enormous inverted heart. I stood there, transfixed
by the sight of Georgia’s peach, as our father had always referred to Momma’s bottom, swaying alongside my sister’s slender figure, bouncing against her hip as they ran to escape the heavy rain that suddenly fell.

I didn’t tell my father about any of Alice’s lovers. Not that there was any sin in it, but I had a strong desire to look away, a sense that it was none of my business that these women resembled our mother. Besides, Alice didn’t have a long attention span.

Alice’s fairies had become so astonishing by the time she was in grade twelve that my father said he would pay for everything if only she would enroll at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design. Meanwhile I hadn’t been able to figure out what I wanted when I graduated. Two years later and I was still in the job I’d taken while I considered my options.

Quills was a local shop that carried overpriced designer stationery and art paper—everything from fine Japanese rice paper to textured styles infused with rose petals, irises and tinsel. They also sold calligraphy pens, old-fashioned quills and ink, delicate sable brushes, moleskin notebooks, and Italian leather journals. Classes were held one night a week to teach calligraphy and simple Japanese characters for those who cared enough to write
I Love You
in a very foreign way. Seeing the paper for the first time, the bits of flora woven through the fibres, all I could think was, how?

My job interview consisted mainly of my expressions of awe over the process of papermaking. Glancing at a take-home papermaking kit on the shelf, my mind began to percolate. I told the Quills owner that she should expand her evening classes. Not only could I work there during the day but I could do a bang-up business for her if she would let me lead a papermaking class at night. The perfect hybrid of beauty and functionality danced in my head.

“Kits are fine,” I said, “but imagine what you’d make selling a class.”

She shrugged. “You realize this is minimum wage, right?”

“Minimum wage?” I bluffed. “To teach a class of ten or fifteen every week?”

I had no idea how to make paper but I’d buy one of those kits, I thought. I’d get books out of the library and learn.

“Whoa, whoa. I haven’t even said yes to working a regular eleven-to-seven shift. Let’s see how it goes. You really think that’d sell? A papermaking class?”