Waking Beauty (3 page)

Okay, here’s a question: When did teenage girls start dressing like whores? I must have spotted at least a dozen
kinder-whores as I made my way to my mom’s that morning. They were everywhere, in halter tops and miniskirts, or skintight blue jeans cut just above the pudendum with the thong underwear sticking out, teetering high on Frankenstein platform shoes or strappy stiletto sandals, with their toenails screaming in lacquered Technicolor. I thought: Even if I could get away with it, I wouldn’t dress like that. No way. Not in a million years. Little did I know.

So I got to my mom’s house, the house in which I grew up, and realized that I was starving. Bad news, because even if she had any food around—unlikely, since I’d be taking her grocery shopping—she wouldn’t offer me any. It made her uncomfortable to see me eat. I thought about backtracking to the corner and grabbing something but decided to tough it out. I wanted to get the mission over with as quickly as possible.

She was on the cordless phone, lighting a Salem Menthol, when she answered the door. “But I’m already a subscriber,” she said. “I just want to pay via credit card.” No smile, just a nod and a small step back to gesture me in. “Uh-huh,” she said, “…uh-huh,” as she turned and padded barefoot up the hardwood stairs. I heard her bedroom door close.

I bypassed the just-for-show living room with its pristine sofa and love seat, its perpetually empty candy dishes, and white baby-grand piano (that as far as I could recall had never been played). I moved through to the kitchen and sneaked a peek in the fridge. Mayonnaise, mustard, a urine sample, one Medusa-like potato, and some rag doll celery sprawling limp over the edge of a wire shelf. I listened for her approach, then quickly checked the cupboard: an unopened jar of cocktail olives, a jumbo bottle of Worcestershire sauce, some crusty old Tabasco, and a jug of Coco Lopez Cream of Coconut Mixer—vestiges of happier days. I closed the door quietly, marveling at her ability to finish to the crumb every item of food we had purchased the previous Friday. Then I
spotted one remnant, a box of All-Bran on the counter beside the stove. I listened for sounds of imminent mother, and then went for the box. I struggled with the resealable cardboard flip tabs, unrolled the wax paper liner, and dug my fist into the dusty gerbil pellets disguised as breakfast cereal. I almost scraped open knuckle flesh in the process of excavating a handful, which I was cramming into my mouth when my mother walked in. The look on her face…a brilliantly subtle cross between disgust, disappointment, and disdain. As if she had found me with my pants around my ankles, taking a dump in her Crock-Pot.

“Haben’t eaden today,” I said, trying to speed-masticate the gravel into a swallowable sludge.

She looked away, her lips curling slightly, and I could tell she was thinking, Yeah, right. She plonked her giant purse on the kitchen table and began fishing through it.

“Ready to roll?” she said, digging deeper in the purse.

“Whenever you are.” I sealed the box and placed it back in its spot.

“Where the fuck?” More brisk digging, followed by frantic rummaging, followed by an exasperated yelp and the upending of the purse onto the table. “Christ!”

“What are you looking for?”

She swooned a little and slumped into a chair. “The Holy Grail,” she said. “Jimmy frickin’ Hoffa.” She closed her eyes and pressed a hand to her forehead. One of her dizzy spells. From the medication.

“If you’re looking for your keys, they’re right there.” I pointed to the key ring, which was caught in the folds of the wallet under the cell phone in the pile of makeup, match-books, gum wrappers, prescription bottles, Bic lighters, Wet-Naps, hair clips, pens, and pocket combs snagged with peroxide tresses.

She opened her eyes and plucked the keys from the pile. Then she stood up and started sweeping everything back into
the purse. She smiled and spoke condescendingly: “I wasn’t looking for my keys, Allison. My keys are right here. What I was looking for are my…my sunglasses.”

I should probably mention that she’s not my real mother.

“Well,” she said, snapping the purse shut, “do you want to help me find them or do you want to just stand there?”

“They’re on your head.”

She reached up and felt them there. “Oh,” she said. “Let’s go.”

For the seventeenth Friday in a row, I backed the yellow Audi slowly out of the driveway. For the seventeenth Friday in a row, she said, “Careful,” while I was doing it. And for the seventeenth Friday in a row, I thought: Careful? Don’t tell me to be careful. I’m not the one who got stinko, backed up over a schnoodle, and had my license suspended.

“Where to?”

She unfolded and scanned her list of errands. “Um, I guess we should head north first. I have to pick up something at Eloquio.”

“What?” I asked, in a misguided attempt to make conversation. She’s not big on conversation.

“A lawn mower,” she sniped. Boutique Eloquio was the clothing store where she spent all her money (after she had ceased spending it at the liquor store and various upscale bars).

She flipped down the passenger-side sun shield and surveyed herself in the tiny mirror. Satisfied, she flipped it back up. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out her cigarettes.

“Do you mind not smoking in here?” I said (for the seventeenth Friday in a row). “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“I’ll open the window,” she said, lighting up. She cracked the passenger window three inches.

I pushed the button to open mine.

“Allison,” she yelped, “my
hair.”
She held it against her head as if it was going to come loose and escape out of the car.

I closed my window. We drove in smoky silence for about a minute. She checked her reflection again. Still satisfactory. My eyes began to water. I had a sneezing fit. Another minute of silence.

“So,” she said, as if the strain of mouthing the words was immense. “What’s new?”

“Um…nothing really. What’s new with you?”

“Not much. Same old thing.” Relieved to have that over with, she turned on the radio. And, miracle of miracles, one of my favorite songs just happened to be playing. And it had just started.

Okay, I’m now going to share a secret with you. There is one good thing about me, one small gift that very few people know about. I can sing. I have a good voice. Better than good, actually. It’s quite a lovely voice. Not particularly powerful, but sweet, mellifluous, and multi-octave-spanning. A little like Tori Amos minus the histrionics. And when my mother turned on the radio and one of my favorite songs was playing, I had the urge to let loose with a perfect harmony and impress the hell out of her. But a nanosecond later she changed the station and settled on Rod Stewart croaking “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Apparently, she thought he was. I noticed, with mild alarm, that she was gyrating rhythmically in her bucket seat.

When we got to Eloquio there were, as usual, no available parking spots in the vicinity. And, as usual, my mother insisted that I let her out in front and go find one.

“If you don’t get something nearby, just keep circling,” she said, stepping out of the car.

“How long are you going to be?” I asked.

“How should I know?” She flung the door shut with a flourish.

Okay, you’re probably wondering why, why did I put up with the abuse? Why did I go every Friday for seventeen weeks to chauffeur her around and help her do her lousy errands? Especially since she wasn’t even my blood mother. Good
question. Well, there were several reasons. The first is that I felt sorry for her. She was an alky, a real piss tank, a total lush. She’d been on and off the wagon for as long as I could remember. Mostly off. And it had damaged the thing she prized above all else: her looks. Once upon a time, she was quite a beauty. She even won a pageant. Miss Beef and Barley. Small-town, agricultural-fair-type thing. There was a framed photo of her on the living-room étagère, perched straight-backed on a throne of hay bales, crowned, sashed, and sceptered, waving to her adoring farming public. The waist-length flaxen braids and the milkmaid complexion were long gone. She was still attractive, but she had the puffy, haggard look of the drunkard. The baggage under the eyes, the marbled nose, and the trailer park belly—the lower belly that protruded and hung on an otherwise slender body.

Not that I was all busted up about her not being drop-dead gorgeous anymore. I mean, boo fucking hoo. Cry me a highball. No, it was the weakness and shame mixed up in the boozing that got to me. The way she’d painstakingly hide the empty liquor bottles in the bottom of the recycling bin, or take her morning cocktail in a coffee mug, as if that could fool anyone with a sense of smell. The way she’d chalk up her hangover heaving to “a trace of the stomach flu,” or her detox shakes to it being “chilly in here.” I found the denial oddly touching. Maybe she was trying to deceive only herself, but I liked to think that the charade was at least partially for my benefit. As long as I was worthy of her deception, she was worthy of my pity. And the last year had been particularly pity-inducing. She felt very bad about the schnoodle incident. She lost all of her friends over it. FYI: A schnoodle is a cross between a schnauzer and a poodle. It’s a very cute breed. I know because there were pictures in
The Toronto Sun
when it happened, a picture of Bijou the schnoodle (before she got backed up over, snagged and dragged under the yellow Audi for close to a hundred meters) curled up in her sleeping basket with a little doggy-sized beret angled jauntily
on her fluffy head. There was a photo of the owner as well, a wide-angle shot of the frail and elderly Mrs. McNaughton posed in front of her tiny bungalow, looking bereft and mopey, holding Bijou’s favorite squeaky toy in her arthritically twisted hand.

A vast torrent of grief and rage followed the accident. Thousands of dollars in unsolicited donations were mailed to Mrs. McNaughton. Scads of furious letters were sent to the newspaper, demanding justice, revenge, life imprisonment, blood. I found it astonishing. I mean, how many articles about ethnic cleansing and suicide bombing and famine and earthquake and death squad and disease, and not a peep from the public? But a fourteen-year-old schnoodle gets flattened and out comes the mob with their pens, wallets, and torches waving. Why do we humanize animals and do the opposite with humans?

Anyway, my mother was fined heavily and had her license suspended. She was ordered off the booze, into treatment, and onto ReVia—a pill that helped curb her alcohol cravings but gave her headaches and the occasional dizzy spell. So that’s one reason I drove her around every Friday. I felt sorry for her.

The second (and truly delusional) reason was that I still entertained the faint hope of making some kind of connection with her. Even after enduring a lifetime of neglect verging on malice, I couldn’t quite rid myself of this desire. I thought maybe now that she was isolated, abandoned by friends and former drinking buddies, she might let me in a little. Soften. I would be the only one to stick by her in a trying time, and I would be rewarded with a semblance of warmth and openness. Perhaps now she would finally show me the side of her that was so appealing to her numerous pre-schnoodle/going-on-the-wagon cronies.

The third reason was gratitude, because she pretty much raised me on her own. My parents adopted me when I was an infant, only three weeks old. Hard to believe, but apparently
I was a very cute baby. The one and only photograph of me on display at my mom’s place is of me at the age of two, still cute, sitting on the love seat between my mother and father—the still sober and, if anything, more mature and beautiful Miss Beef and Barley, and the still present and dashingly handsome Mr. Big Shot Designer. What a lovely picture we made. But not long after that things started to get ugly. Very ugly. Daddio moved out—a trial separation that lasted and culminated in a sordid divorce and custody battle. Mom hit the bottle and eventually Pops went long distance, moving to Los Angeles when I was around seven.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was pretty much downhill for me after the age of two, although it wasn’t until kindergarten that I truly became aware of my status in the world. I’m not going to get into all the boo-hoo details. Suffice it to say that I was clued in by the usual drill—when I wasn’t being excluded or ignored, I was being taunted and tormented. And whenever we had to play or “work” in partners, I was inexorably paired with the hateful Janice Dirk, a scrawny, mildly retarded girl who ate staples and pencil erasers and her own snot, and was given to bitter, entirely unaccountable fits of rage.

For years I endeavored to compensate for my appearance. I tried to be helpful and friendly and nice. Gosh darn it, I was the most generous little girl you ever did see.
Who would like to eat the delicious portions of my lunch today? On whom can I press my allowance? Can you borrow my Barbie Camper? Why, that’d be swell, take it for as long as you please, the entire summer if you wish! Yes, of course you may copy the answers to the test, sit right here next to me. Will I go to the corner and bring back Popsicles for everyone? I’ll go just as fast as I can so they won’t be all melty. Of course I’ll buy! You lost my bicycle? Oh, well, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. I’ll tell my mom that I lost it. What’s that, you want me to steal some nail polish from the drugstore? I’ll give it a shot. No, don’t sweat it, I didn’t tell when I got caught. Yeah, sure, I’ll try again next week. Oh, wow, I can’t believe it, you all wanna come over to my house and go swimming in the enticing new aboveground pool! That’s swell, how about this afternoon?
Oh, you wanna come on the weekend, when I’m away. Hmm, I don’t know about that, you nasty little bitches
.

Helpful and generous was a bust. I changed tack. I figured if I couldn’t be the easiest to look at or the sweetest, perhaps I could be the smartest and the funniest (they’re not laughing
at
you, etc., etc.). Up until grade nine, I managed to maintain a straight-A average while simultaneously laying claim to the title of class clown/shit disturber.
Look, there’s Allison firing her peas across the cafeteria. Ho ho, what a funny fart noise Allison made during the vice principal’s important safety speech. Wasn’t that just hysterical when Allison pretended to vomit up her tuna casserole in home ec
?