“A’kay … yes, a’kay …”
My mother twisted the cord of her telephone around her finger. It was an imitation turn of the century model that only the rich would have had back in the days when operators listened in on people’s conversations, that she’d purchased for fifty books of green stamps.
“Wunderful …”
She sat on the edge of her king-sized bed, looking at a cleanly-shaven leg, front view, side view, and, with an effort, back view.
“Jus’ wunderful.”
From what I could gather, Ursula was going on a three day Caribbean cruise with Harry. I rolled my mother’s panty hose into tight wads and bounced them into the bottom drawer of her dressing table.
“See if you can help me match these,” I asked Cecilia.
After folding the towels, sheets, and O.L. handkerchiefs, we were faced with the bottom of the laundry basket, the part we hated most, my mother’s knee-highs, which were like amputated stockings. If we got the tint wrong when pairing them, she stuck them in our face to make sure we weren’t blind. Cecilia opened the curtains.
“Oh, I don’ know ’bout dat. Guard, Ursula, you take me by su’prise …” she cuddled the receiver to her breast, “Give time for you eyes to a’just. De air-conditionin’s on.”
Daylight equalled heat, heat increased electric bills. Cecilia closed the curtains. We were condemned to live in semidarkness.
“One, bu’ only one weeken’. You lil’ stinker, you.”
The phone cord, wrapped around her wrist was robbing her hand of colour.
“Tommy an’ Timmy are comin’, so it’s not nec’ry to vacuum. I hope dey do not destroy my house.” The thought of fingerprints on the refrigerator doors was already ruining her day.
“You. Get dress.”
She didn’t expand the order to Cecilia, maybe because her one-piece bathing suit had fringes around the bottom like a skirt.
“Can I put on a towel?” I asked, meaning to wrap a beach towel round my hips, Hawaiian-style.
“N. O.”
“But you always let me wear it like that?”
“You gettin’ tall now, dat don’ look good anymore.”
I was puzzled. Usually my mother said not to “hoot” about the way we looked.
“It’s only Tommy and Timmy, why should I care?”
“You pu’ on dis B’yumuda short an’ you do no’ argue wit’ me for once you life.”
I sat on my bed, staring down angrily at an ugly pair of army green Bermuda shorts she’d literally found at Gables Beach, in the sand, and now for some reason was making me wear.
“I’m not going to wear something a total stranger wore!” I bawled as my mother passed by my open bedroom door, feeling more sensitive than usual at her accumulated injustices.
“Dey belong-ged to a child. Look, child shorts, wha’s de matter wit’ you brains?”
“Yuck,” Cecilia for once took my side, picking up the pair of shorts by its zipper and dropping them back down with distaste.
“You chil’ren, you sick. Wha’ goes on in dere?”
She gave the side of her head little taps then fingered her hair back into place. Her hair reverted back to the eight original curls of her sponge rollers, no matter how often she manipulated it.
“You don’t even know if they belonged to a girl or boy,” Cecilia argued.
“If the individual did not wear underwear?” I looked as scientifically arrogant as a sob would permit, “Would that not promote leprosy?”
“My Guard, I don’ know wha’ dis world is comin’ to!” my mother stormed out of our room with the shorts.
I felt an impulse to yell something like, “Leprosy!” but I heard the cycle knob of the washing machine being violently turned as she missed the right programme each time.
“Kate?”
My mother could sense a mile away I had opened a book. I liked reading more than anything else and Stag Head was a great listener.
“Kate! I am goin’ to count three!”
She made me serve her water on demand, even if the pitcher was less than an arm’s length away and I, at the other side of the house. Domestic assistance was one of the reasons I think my mother decided to have children.
“One!”
I pushed through the lines, condemned to the staccato reading which results from loss of concentration.
“TWO!!”
From the tone of my mother’s voice, I knew it was something serious like a night-light I’d not turned off or a tap I’d left dripping.
I reached my mother’s view by rhythmical, “Three!” though she remained silent. She lay upon a lawn chair, on the dock, under the kumquat tree, wearing above the bellybutton underwear and a cross your heart bra with the familiar ball of tissue paper to absorb the beads of sweat which liked to form in her cleavage. The beads of sweat on her upper lip were disturbing her less. She thought her neighbours from across the canal were too near-sighted to know the difference between underwear and a white bikini. Her legs had razor stubble and baby oil below the knee, and the end of her curled up toes had small bits of skin missing. With a fingernail scissors, she liked to chop off all of the skin she called “dead”.
I glanced at the canal, afraid she’d seen the deposit of O-bones and T-bones that the catfish were leaving close to the dock. My mother enjoyed making me stand there and wait as she pretended not to take notice of me.
“You babushka, Kate, how you are wiping it?” she finally spoke.
Heat expanded to my ears. Flabbergasted, I sought the correct response when “fine” came, on its own, to my mouth.
My mother expected geometrical wonders from us. From each square of toilet paper, we were supposed to obtain a series of octagonal wipes.
“You so ce’tain?”
“Yes,” I answered though her stare was making me less and less so.
“You star’ you days?”
“What days?”
I was too young to know what on earth she could possibly mean.
“A’kay. Follow me.”
She allowed me to enter her bathroom after I’d removed my sandals and checked the bottom of both my feet.
“Now, you young, but some girls, dey start, you know, even a’ nine, ten, at el’ven. Me, I star’ when I was thi’teen. It’s a waste, such a shame, Mot’her Nature! A’ready you so skinny, jus’ skin an’ bones …”
“Is something wrong with me?” I squeaked.
“I show you sometin’. Now don’ get upset. It is norm’l. I … well … open you eyes.”
Her waste basket wore a thick coat of varnish and shells. My mother pushed aside the loose carpet of short blonde hairs and dirty cotton swabs, until she found what she was looking for. It was wrapped in layers of white toilet paper which she proceeded to unravel like a mummy. Until then, I was almost having fun. Underneath the layers of toilet paper was a tight wad of cotton padding; without a further word of warning, she expanded it.
I don’t know what I did first, gasp, shriek, or lift both hands to my forehead. The cotton padding was drenched with blood, vivid shiny red in the middle, like raw flesh; around the contours, it was exactly the brown of a well-done steak.
“Dis was Mótina’s.” She ignored my agitation.
“You cut yourself again shaving?”
I pressed my stomach, my face, my watery eyes. The women of my mother’s single blade razor generation always had, I noticed, regularly chipped white scars down their shin bones. I imagined my mother shaving the skin off her shin, tan on the outside, white on the inside, like a potato peeling.
“Now, dis happens to ev’ry woman, we lose a lil’ blood, ev’ry month. Dis is wha’ makes us a woman. Even if you a child still in you mind, you body is ’coming a woman.”
“A little?! Oh my God, no! From where? My babushka??”
She answered quietly, “No. You lil’ sis’er.”
I instinctively knew she was not referring to Cecilia. A wave of outrage swelled in me.
“I’ll urinate blood?!”
The toilet bowl filled with tomato soup; macaroni hands, feet, buttocks, breasts floated to the steamy top … Harry lapped Ursula’s mess like a dog.
I sunk to my knees. If I had had the strength, I would have crawled to the sink and held my wrists under the water. I was victim to one of those preliminary heaves of vomit.
“Now don’ get all upset wit’ Mot’her Nature.”
“Why do we have to urinate blood??”
“Honey. You don’ urnate. It’s jus’ a fact o’ life.”
I could tell she was holding back. Probably the sucking out part, like when a scorpion stings a victim and an Indian has to suck the poison out of the wound and spit. I saw that once on Bonanza, I think.
“Just like that?”
“From dere, you make you poo-poo.”
“I know that!”
“From dis, you make urina. Well, dere, b’tween.”
I bent forward as much as I could.
“You see?”
“No.”
In a state of shock, I stared instead at the pendant necklace she was wearing. The multi-carat ruby shone like a sanguine sun. It used to be on the ring my father gave her at Niagara Falls when he popped the question, which she readily accepted upon seeing the stone.
“Well, dere is a hole dere. It still too lil’, but it will get more big later!” she stunned me out of my stupor.
“Why?”
“Why we have hairs? Why we have a nose? It’s like dat. You accept!”
I was offered an elastic belt with metal hooks onto which I could attach a wad of cotton padding. Securing it in place was the same principle as stabbing a hook into bait. It was big enough for a Red Cross nurse to dress a wounded soldier.
“But how will I know when it will open?”
“You did no’ feel any ting?!”
“I didn’t start bleeding yet.”
“Yes you did. You don’ feel?!”
I remained wordless, thoughtless.
“You don’ see?!” her tone rose, “Me, I see!”
Though my mother was shorter than me, her stride was longer, and her steps, more rapid. In the utility room, she confronted me with my Tuesday, and four pairs of my Friday underwear. When she fought for these in the clearance sale bins, she was more concerned with the colour white than the days of the week. Each bore a meat stain from what I’d hidden down there. I underwent the humiliation of her sticking a pair in my face. Although to my mother all her neighbours were near-sighted, her own offspring were far-sighted. I had been careful to hide the underwear in the middle of the laundry basket, but my mother washed even the whites in cold water to save electricity and traces of brown had remained. My forearms lifted to protect my guilt-laden face.
“It’s a’kay, honey. It’s no’ yo’ fault,” she reassured me, “De world mus’ turn.”