XII

BELINDA NEEDED A STRATEGY for leaving. She never got anything done without a plan. If she went to the grocery store without a list, she would go home with bagfuls of frivolous items like jars of pickled vine leaves, raisin bread, and peanut butter swirled with strawberry jam — foods that made her feel hungry. She’d decided long ago that she couldn’t trust her instincts. Her instincts had kept her in her mother’s house for seventeen years. The plan got her out.

The plan to leave her mother began when Belinda refused to grind the crabapples one autumn. It was one of her mother’s nonsensical obsessions to collect every crabapple that the tree in their front yard put forth. It was unthinkable to let them grow and fall to the ground, or to allow the occasional small animal to enjoy the fruit. Every edible morsel had to be plucked and hoarded, any worms or scars or bruises cut out of the flesh. Vestiges of wartime mentality: to waste food was treasonous. And so her mother would insist on grinding the crabapples to a pulpy sauce, which could be preserved in Mason jars and stored in the cellar. Since her mother had arthritic wrists, it was Belinda’s job to mill the apples by hand in a contraption that looked like a saucepan with a sweeping blade set on the inside and a crank handle sticking out the top. Belinda was forced to crank the handle around and around as her mother added newly manicured and peeled apples to the mix, watching the dirty yellow sauce swirling at the bottom of the grinder. The same task had once been assigned to Prim, who, as her mother insisted, did a lazy job of it.

You don’t want to turn out like her, do you? her mother reminded Belinda at every opportunity. Look at her. Poor, alone, stuck with an invalid child. Likely alcohol poisoning, so I said. She drank like a fish, couldn’t help herself.

She spoke about Prim as if Belinda knew her, had some magical means to know what Prim was like then, and what her life was like now. But all she knew was that whatever her mother said about Prim was not the truth. Her mother had turned her back on her own daughter, rejected her for no good reason. Sometimes it even seemed as though she was jealous of Prim’s freedom.

Before you know it, her mother would continue, she’ll be old and useless. No life of her own to speak of.

Belinda knew these were only stories, constructed by her mother to keep her in fear. Still, it worked. As much as she was convinced her mother was lying, she had no way of knowing if there was some small element of truth in her words. And rather than allow herself to admit that, she continued to grind the apples, shutting out her mother’s mantra with her own visions of Prim.

You’ll thank me, her mother had said, when you’re eating a nice hot bowl of crabapple sauce on a cold winter’s day. She said this every single year, and not once did they open a jar. The jars collected in a corner of the cellar, the crowded stacks of glass like the towers of a miniature city glowing vague and flaxen in the perpetual darkness.

Refusing her grinding duties was Belinda’s way of taking a stand. Asserting her independence was the first stage of the plan. The next stage was to do something serious and unexpected. She smashed all the jars to pieces. She didn’t do these things for her mother’s sake, but rather for her own. Her mother didn’t find about the smashed jars until the following autumn, after Belinda had left, when the sauce had caked and dried in crusty puddles and the shards of glass had become features of the cellar’s landscape, furred with dust and dirt. Belinda thought of her plan as confidence-building. She smashed the jars to prove her capability for irresponsible destructiveness. She was proving wrong her own self-doubt.

After the jar-smashing, she’d found a job at the convenience store at the other end of town. This hadn’t seemed possible while the jars were still intact, harbouring all of their preserved evidence that year after year would always bring more apples. The job — the money — fulfilled the practical part of her plan. Practicalities signalled the final stage.

With Dazhong she’d had to up the ante. When the time came to leave him she was no longer a meek teenager. She’d proven her independence by starting piano lessons — something that Dazhong didn’t value and couldn’t possibly share with her even if he’d wanted. Although she’d specifically chosen a male piano teacher, the attraction to Wiley was not planned. But it made her rash act of defiance a natural progression. Next, getting a job at a clothing store in the mall was easy; she carried the aplomb of an adulteress, flaunting poise and certainty like shiny gold bangles. They liked that in retail. She’d received three job offers, and Talbots offered her the highest wage. Selling clothes had seemed glamourous until it became clear that the clothes at Talbots were only considered stylish among women over the age of sixty. Things had a way of changing — or perhaps what really changed were Belinda’s perceptions of things.

But with Wiley it had been different. He had changed, too. When he wasn’t feverishly professing his love and admiration for everyone around him, he was spending entire days holed up in dingy bars contemplating the worthlessness of life. In personality, he’d become a caricature of himself, with certain traits grossly exaggerated and others diminished to feeble proportions. His disposition was either exuberant or despondent, nothing in between, and his moods seemed to last for weeks on end.

He’d been in the thick of one of his erratic, charged-up moods when Belinda made the mistake of telling him, before she made a plan, that she intended to leave. It had happened weeks before she even conceived of taking the trip to England, but she was still being punished for it. Wiley hadn’t been sleeping for more than a few hours each night and his eyes had acquired the unsettling glaze that often accompanied this persona, as though he were seeing the world in some mesmerizing new dimension. And in his intensified way of jumping to overblown conclusions, he’d convinced himself that Belinda had used him as a way out of her marriage to Dazhong.

You manipulated me, he’d sneered. You wanted a way out. You even had a child you didn’t want for the sake of justifying it. It’s despicable, you’re going to hell, you’re going straight to hell. He’d screamed the words over and over until Belinda almost began to believe them.

She called it a slip-up, and it was. She was frustrated; she’d taken the wrong approach. And she’d given Wiley leverage when she asked him not to tell the children what she had said.

You’re looking for absolution, he accused. I will not absolve you. You are a bad person. She’d been particularly stung by the weight of these insults. His accusations made her out to be thoroughly, innately bad. Evil.

Later that evening, after they’d been forced to smooth things over for the kids’ sake, she realized that Wiley was probably right about her desire for absolution. It had been too providential for Grace to ask about purgatory at the dinner table the very same day. And Belinda had felt the need to defend herself, even when the conversation really had nothing to do with her.

Purgatory is a place of torture, Wiley told Grace. You get tortured there, for the bad things you’ve done. He aimed his manic stare directly at Belinda.

It’s more of a state of being than a place, Belinda had said. Grace looked confused about that response. She’d been going through a spiritual phase, and Belinda knew it had to do with fitting in. She had a friend who was Catholic. The friend, Rose, looked like the kind of girl teenaged boys would find attractive. She had thin, long limbs, fair skin, and designer clothes. She wore push-up bras under low-cut tops. She played on the volleyball team and chewed bubble gum obsessively. Grace’s envy of her was as palpable as an overripe cheese. Her inquiries about religion were merely attempts to unpack Rose’s character in that enamoured way of jealous adolescent girls. She could not have known that Wiley was simmering on her words, and reveling in their invocation.

So . . . Grace said, it’s something you just make up in your head?

You might say that, Belinda said. Catholics believe that some people have to be purified before they can go to heaven. The ones who did some bad things like everyone does, but are still good people. She could see Wiley out of the corner of her eye, mashing his baked potato with his fork as though it were a thrashing, living thing that needed to be squashed before eaten.

So they just float around in their dead bodies, like ghosts? Grace asked. Waiting until they can get into heaven?

I don’t know, Belinda replied, truthfully. She could see how waiting for an absolution that might never come could be torturous.