She spins the karmic roulette and decides to leave.
Twice in my life, I’ve been cast as a citizen of Thebes under the rule of Oedipus. The first occasion was a high-school production I badgered my parents to attend. I spent the autumn of grade twelve chattering about play-writing and playacting, never catching on to their confusion. I ramped up my excitement when a drama teacher selected my script for production and entry to the Sears Ontario Drama Festival. I breezed around the house with newfound confidence. The show I would act in and the show I’d written were seventeen days apart. My lucky number: everything would work out fine—brilliant.
As a member of the chorus, I dressed in a hooded cloak with my face painted white and black to resemble a skeleton. I crawled across the auditorium stage in this harbinger of doom costume with eleven other teenage girls as the curtains parted. In mournful unison, we yelled out “Plague!” and “Pestilence!” We moaned and growled. Enter Oedipus our king, the man who solved the Sphinx’s riddle and saved Thebes from destruction. In this case, an eighteen-year-old teenager who called us children. I convulsed in torment as best I could, another theatre kid without any dance training rolling around for the sake of art.
A fog machine pumped out misty smoke. The smog of our ill-fated city flowed out into the audience.
My immigrant parents sat at the end of a row near the front of the crowd, bewildered.
Driving home afterwards they were unusually quiet. Stopped at a red light, my father looked over his shoulder to ask, aghast, “That’s the play you was write?”
“I no like,” said my mom.
“You guys think I wrote a story about a man who killed his father and married his mother?”
“I really no like,” she repeated. “Ma perchè l’ha fatte?”
“Di che? Why did we put on a Greek tragedy or why did Oedipus commit murder?”
She sighed. “I really no was like nothing. Ne se capive niede.” Nothing made sense.
My dad let out a relieved laugh. “Thank God. I was asking myself where from you take this idea.”
The following month, my parents chose not to attend the play I had written. The Last Moon was an exploration of abuse, alienation and loneliness between two teen girls in a psych ward for adolescents that would go on to win a provincial drama festival award.
“Probably,” said my mother, “we’re not going to like it or understand what you wrote. Better if we stay home.”
My father’s silence on the subject meant that for the first time ever, they were in agreement.
By my last year of high school, I knew Dr. Salima was right. I applied to universities in Ontario and set my hopes on the one in Victoria, British Columbia. Putting 3,000 miles and a body of water between us calmed me. In The House with a Clock in Its Walls, a beloved book I renewed from the library many times as a girl, the main characters eluded a fiendish spirit in a car chase when their vehicle drove across a bridge. Evil couldn’t cross running water. Sussing out the geography in an atlas, I hoped the Strait of Georgia would suffice.
I promised dad I would be gone for a year to engineer my escape. I’d had a taste of freedom before: a sleepover here and there; a grade seven school trip to Hockley Valley; two week-long high-school trips to Greece and France; six weeks of French immersion in Chicoutimi, Quebec (which is not enough to get you into the French Foreign Legion). Twelve months in Lotus Land—utter bliss.
I heard that it hardly snowed there. A friend’s sister referred to the picturesque city as the place for the “newlywed and nearly dead.” No matter. I pictured palm trees and sandy beaches; the narrow image I conjured of islands was a cartoon. I would hit the books while sipping a drink from a coconut or downing a piña colada; I deluded myself with visions of student life tantamount to spring break. I’d study the classics stretched out on a towel, reading Dante after slathering on suntan lotion.
I had a habit of tuning out, daydreaming and not paying attention when situations got sticky. But then the reckoning came, a moment when I woke up to reality with the illusion crushed. In this case, the sandcastle I mentally built could easily be swept out with the tide. Still, I reasoned, anything was better than the life I lived with my parents.
When the acceptance letter arrived, I celebrated by going out to lunch at Swiss Chalet with my friend Nicole.
I counted the days to my departure like a castaway carving lines into a single coconut tree, and stuffed a large suitcase with summer clothes and jeans.
My mother declined my request for one set of bedsheets from the four in my mothball-scented dowry. I argued that it was stupid to spend money on new linens: she countered that I could stay in Toronto and get married. She’d been browbeating the subject of matrimony since I’d turned sixteen.
I said, “Nice try, but not a chance.”
She followed me out of the spare bedroom as I twirled down the hallway and danced my best version of the Charleston in the kitchen. I pulled her into a polka like the ones she’d loved to watch on The Lawrence Welk Show. We spun around until she was dizzy with laughter and pushed me away.
“But why did you have to pick a place so far away?”
“You know why. We never get along for very long. No matter what I do. No matter how hard I try to make you happy.”
“All families fight.”
“Not like us.” I went back to my room without saying another word.
One of my mother’s most maddening qualities was an ability to wipe her memory slate clean of blame for her atrocious behaviour. Her demeanour lurched from furious to unruffled in seconds: a process unnerving to witness, and one that kept me in a state of perpetual confusion. How did the rage dissipate? Where did the malice get buried? How could I avoid tripping onto the minefield next time? My mother delighted in expressing rage. Finally it occurred to me that her rancour-filled tantrums released all the toxins she carried within.
No action I could take in the present would mend my mother or soothe her psychosis. We would never have a made-for-tv-movie moment of recognition and repair the harm that harnessed us to each other—a clichéd event I’d been waiting for my entire life. The no-win situation is a maelstrom. An anathema to stories of survival, resilience and overcoming adversity. The world wants the hero’s journey, not a leper’s struggle.
In early August, all three of us went to Pearson International, where we had over two hours to skulk around until check-in time. In keeping with my father’s habit, we had arrived at the airport hours ahead of the recommended time—earliness a tendency I learned from him, a man who rose and went to work at 6 AM for forty-six years without ever once owning an alarm clock.
Throughout high school, my English teachers had encouraged me to write, and I’d won an award for my efforts, so a schoolmate (Greg, aka his majesty, Oedipus Rex) and I were flying to the land down under to attend a conference for young playwrights in Sydney, Australia. My father groused about the expensive trip and then paid for the excursion. He fretted that my burgeoning creative adventures would lead me astray while I stargazed a life spent surrounded by authors, books, and countless cups of tea. After Oz, I would go to Victoria and start school.
My mother pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. She blew her nose as if it were a trumpet. Her face puckered like she’d bitten into a lime wedge, the fruit I pictured garnishing my first beverage after I took up residence in a happy place for good. Her eyes scrunched up, and she wailed: a deafening noise.
“Oh Dio Sante, Dio Sante!” She launched into the spiel she’d maintained since my application to university out West. “But why? Why?” The last word she elongated, blaring like a wartime air-raid siren.
My father said, “Lucia, please. Ma ne vede che stai irritare a tutti? A tua figlia?”
Of course, she could see she was upsetting me. I assumed that was the point.
To the average Giuseppe, all the travelers standing around waiting for their own take-off, I must have seemed glacial and stone-hearted. A Shakespearian villain demanding the pound of flesh closest to my mother’s heart.
Her exhibition particularly galled me after the eons I’d spent as a human punching bag. Aside from a few occurrences of tenderness and instances of tempting me onto her team by acting like we were co-conspirators cut from the same cloth, she went for the jugular. When she trashed me verbally, attacked me physically, I felt like a walking waste bin, a receptacle for discarded eggshells and coffee grounds.
Now she expected sympathy? An ostrich feather could have toppled me.
My friend Olivia showed up to see me off. Her humour and friendship had been a balm through the last hellish year of high school. She had been talking to me on the phone in April when my mother stormed into my bedroom. She’d been listening in on the extension downstairs, and I told her to get off the phone. We stopped talking until we heard the click. Less than a minute later, I was fending my rabid mother off as she tried to strangle me.
Olivia gave me a quizzical look and jerked her chin over to my mom.
The grief show had gained pyrotechnic power, a fireworks festival in human form: “Oh my daughter, my daughter. My only daughter.” She cried out in English. “Why she have to leave home without her Mamma? Why she leave home? Why she leave me? O Dio santé, Dio santé. Give me strength. I no can take no more. I no know what I do.”
My jaw ached from clenching my mouth shut. A faint twitching on the side of my eye, one that had pestered me for months, renewed with vigour.
An airport security guard came to check on the commotion: I saw him walking toward us and felt my stomach contort.
“Papa,” I stared at my father, furious with him afresh. Appealing to my mother was useless. “Forze e meglio se te ne vade.” I thought it best they left.
“E mo—” he shrugged. He didn’t want to leave.
I stared at the ground, looked around to the end of the terminal. I shook my head at him, livid. My mother’s tears were fake. Lacrime di coccodrillo. And he, the lone persistent witness of my torment, was willing to let me endure this last indignity. He too wanted to hang on, to cleave; I wanted to jump on the plane and tell the pilot “Let’s go. I mean gun it, buddy. Get me the hell outta Dodge as fast as you can.”
I refused to acknowledge my parents, and chitchatted with Olivia. The classmate accompanying me to Oz showed up. He gaped at my mom. I held my passport, rubbing my thumb over the cover. A worry stone. My ticket to run away from the circus.
I couldn’t fathom why my mother would behave so outlandishly like a loving parent. I fumed and staved off her one-woman opera of wretchedness, along with multiple attempts to yank me into a hug. She kept kissing my cheeks as if I were reporting for combat duty and about to meet certain death.
When her words failed to have an effect, she clutched her head and keened: a living, breathing version of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream stood before me.
“Come on, Ma, don’t be like that.”
I wanted to tell the security officer and all the others who slowed down and kept turning to look at the train wreck, “My mother has suffered from an aggressive psychosis since before I was born. She’s constantly harassed by auditory hallucination. She’s volatile. Four months ago, she tried again to kill me. This miss-me routine is new. Untested. Not an audience pleaser. I’m begging you to ignore us.”
My classmate and I got in line for the departure gate. The airport crowd edged closer to my escape doorway.
Greg’s family, having said their goodbyes, stood by quietly as we progressed slowly up the line moving through the security gate.
Everyone looked sad except for me: I seethed with frustration and impatience. My mother’s wailing acted as the tuning fork for everyone’s distress except mine.
Greg turned to me. “I had no idea you could be so cold.”
I glared at him. “Enjoy the show.”
The plane had been in the air for an hour when I thought: she’d hoped to mortify me into staying.