Greenwoods takes its name from the oak and maple forests that the developers have bulldozed, and like any other Canadian subdivision, it has the bungalows, the wide looping streets, the young housewives with their herds of children. As an only child I am regarded as strange and spoiled, and while I can’t argue with strange, the presumption that I get whatever I want couldn’t be more wrong. All I get are clothes. Which I never wanted.
Clothes is my word. My mother rarely uses it, she’s more specific—she says “your tunic,” “your organdie,” “your pink cotton empire.” Speaking of my clothes all together she says “wardrobe”—“Let’s consult your wardrobe.” Which we do, daily. We fret over it, tend to it, expand it, weed it out.
It contains at least twenty outfits, one for every school day in a month. Certain outfits are the child’s version of the lady’s. I have the leopard-patterned skirt and jacket, my mother has the leopard-patterned coat and Juliette hat. How do we afford this? My father isn’t a full-fledged lawyer, he’s only a law clerk, and yet he doesn’t seem to worry about money. Where we get the clothes I know well enough. From the Eaton’s catalogue, which guarantees our satisfaction. If something fails in the tiniest detail, such as a slight swerve in a line of stitches, back the outfit goes. The ease of these transactions strikes my mother as hilarious and unsound. She’ll wear a dress for an entire day and then return it the next day to “those suckers.”
My heart sags when the Eaton’s truck pulls up and the driver climbs out and starts unloading. To spend an entire morning or afternoon watching my mother pose before her full-length mirror while she leans against the door frame or cha-chas with one hand on her stomach would be entertaining if I didn’t know that my turn would come next. Never do I feel more like a scrawny genetic aberration than when I slowly twirl before my raving beauty of a mother while she laughs at how awful I look. “Like a pinhead!” Or,“Like Zazu Pitts!” Whoever she is.
Some of the girls at school get their clothes from Eaton’s as well, which I realize when Julie MacVicker shows up in a reversible tartan kilt exactly like mine, but their mothers never go so far as to buy the matching blouse and jacket, the beret, the gloves. And nobody owns the volume of outfits I do. In my class, girls tend to wear the same dress at least twice a week. Girls with older sisters wear hand-me-downs. Small wonder I gall them.
Well, I don’t, I am too unremarkable; it’s my wardrobe that gets them worked up. And as soon as they hear about my mother’s disappearance it’s my wardrobe they seek to comfort. They pat my angora bolero sweater, my rabbit-fur coat, they beg me to wear my sailor dress and my umbrella-patterned flare skirt. A big bossy redhead named Maureen Hellier tells me a vote has been taken and I am now allowed to join a club she formed called the Smart Set Club, whose members do nothing except leaf through catalogues and magazines, cut out pictures of the models and paste the pictures into scrapbooks. At the Thursday-afternoon meetings, I pretend to gush over the child models my mother must have wished I looked like, the woman models she does look like. In the most recent Eaton’s catalogue some of the models have on clothes I own, as Maureen never fails to notice. The captions, which she reads out loud, are especially excruciating for how they include descriptions of the outfit’s ideal wearer: “Swirl-skirted charmer to suit a pert little miss.” “Glamour cardigan for the young sophisticate.”
“Oh, Louise!” she cries. “Cut her out!”
While I still have a mother, my clothes mark me for a show-off and imposter. “Miss La-di-da,” Maureen says when I come to school wearing something new. The day I turn up in a lime-green cardigan that has a pompom drawstring collar and she says everybody knows only redheads are supposed to wear lime green, I take the cardigan off and hand it to her. “Go ahead,” I say. “It’s too big for me anyway.”
She considers, then accepts, holding it by one pompom. “It’s drenched in her germs,” she informs the other girls. She carries it to a puddle and lets it drop.
I may as well leave it there. I know I’ll never wear it again. My mother sends all our clothes, aside from underwear, socks and pyjamas, to the cleaners; anything too soiled for the cleaners she tears into rags or throws out. Easy come, easy go, and lucky me I’m not slapped when I spill grape juice on a white dress, but I am unsettled by how smoothly she slides from worship to indifference. A nice new sweater, that’s what you live for. The same sweater with a stain on it never existed.
When I show her the muddied lime-green sweater, she stuffs it in the metal wastepaper basket and sets a match to it. “See how it burns?” she says. “Sizzling like hair? There’s nylon in the weave, I knew there was. I knew that pure-virgin-wool label was crap.”
The next day, in front of Maureen, I deliberately smear my pink chenille jacket with grease from a bicycle chain.
‘You’re a mental case!” Maureen cries, but at least I have graduated from contemptible to alarming.
After that I occasionally poke a pencil through a skirt, pour finger paint on velvet. My mother is irritated only by what seems to be the onset of a clumsiness from which I, the daughter of a woman whose many beauty-queen trophies include two for comportment, should be exempt. The carnage to my wardrobe she almost welcomes, since it necessitates buying the replacements. Here, of course, is the catch. Every time I ruin something (and if you ruin a blouse, you might as well throw out the matching skirt) I have to try on a half-dozen new outfits before she decides on the one that doesn’t make me look like a pinhead.
What are these clothes for? My mother’s, I mean. She leaves the house only when she has to, to shop for groceries, get her hair done, occasionally to take me to the dentist’s or doctor’s. Unlike everybody else’s mother she doesn’t attend church, she isn’t a member of any committee or club. Her friend, Phyllis Bendy, always comes to our house for coffee. My mother is a woman who goes nowhere, both in the sense of being a homebody and then, when she packs her bags and leaves, of heading off to a place so undiscoverable it may as well not exist.
But the clothes don’t accompany her. Even the police detective is flabbergasted by what she abandons—“Is that real mink?” She takes her jewellery, her beauty-queen crowns and trophies (which, alone, must fill one suitcase), a framed picture of her father as a young man in his soldier’s uniform (chosen over the photograph of me as a baby that hung next to it) and the white satin bedsheets. It’s my father’s conviction that she has been enticed away by a “smooth-talker,” “a fancy Dan lady’s man.” And yet how can this be? When I am grilled for possible candidates, I can only come up with the Eaton’s delivery man and Mr. LaPierre, whose first name is Daniel and who kisses her neck at our charades parties.
Every year up until the year my mother disappears, on the Saturday night nearest to January eighteenth, we invite people to our house to play charades. These people aren’t neighbours or friends (my mother hates our neighbours, and she has only the one friend), they are the men my father works with and their wives, and January eighteenth is no monumental date unless you’re my father and then you celebrate the birthday of Peter Mark Roget, the compiler of the first thesaurus. My father loves synonyms. He himself can hardly ever say “love” without adding “cherish” or “adore” but his delivery tends to be self-mocking and theatrical, he makes people laugh. My mother laughs when the words lean toward the racy or ridiculous. Now and then she surprises us with her own string of synonyms, a sarcastic burst. I remember her cooking eggs one morning, and my father asking,“Are they scrambled?” and her slapping his portion onto a plate and saying,“No, as a matter of fact, they’re mixed up, confused, rattled,” and so on, all the way to “stark raving mad,” by which time my father looked petrified.
Ordinarily, though, her forays into his territory delight him, as does word play of any kind, from challenging verse forms (at nine years old I am acquainted with Spenserian stanzas and enjambments) to crossword puzzles, anagrams, clever song lyrics, horrible puns and his own name—Sawyer—shortened, when he entered professional life, to Saw so that he could introduce himself as Saw Kirk the law clerk. Scrabble he is addicted to, and he would prefer a Scrabble party, but my mother says the wives are too stupid.
On the morning of the party she goes to the beauty parlour as she does every Saturday morning, but instead of her normal pageboy she gets her hair pulled back into a French sweep, which shows off her tiny ears and her white neck, precariously long it seems to me, in danger of drooping. Back home, she washes and pin-curls my hair, then sets about doing her normal daily chores: scrubbing the floors and sinks, the toilet, vacuuming the carpets and Venetian blinds, waving the vacuum nozzle through the air to suck up dust before it settles, but dusting anyway, her mood sour at the thought of the wives, with their dyed hair and girdles, tramping through her house. After lunch, while my father hides in his study, she gets down to the deep cleaning that charades night demands. With a paring knife she gouges out dirt from between the floorboards. She shines a flashlight on all the walls to reveal fingerprints, and here, because my eyesight is sharper than hers, I can be of assistance. We are a good team—zealous, aghast. “There!” I point, and she pounces.
Once the walls are immaculate, I am idle until it is time to pour pretzels and peanuts into bowls and dab Cheez Whiz into celery sticks. Late in the afternoon, while my mother tries on a half-dozen outfits before deciding what to wear, her spirits elevate to wry and I can make her laugh by telling some of my memorized jokes as if they feature the two wives she despises most: Mrs. LaPierre and Mrs. Todd. “If ignorance is bliss, Mrs. LaPierre should be one happy gal.” “Mrs. Todd is so ugly that when she makes tea she can’t even get the kettle to whistle.” To me the jokes are either inscrutable or not very funny, and yet I know the humour is cruel and I know what a traitor is and when the wives arrive and compliment my dress and already sagging ringlets, shame makes me sullen and my mother flourishes her cigarette and says they should ignore me.
At the last party, two weeks before she disappears, she says to Mrs. LaPierre,“Miss Congeniality, Louise is not.”
Provided I keep quiet, I am allowed to stay up and watch the game. There are five couples, including my parents, and whatever team my mother is on always wins. It’s uncanny how quickly she can translate someone’s smallest gesture into the title of a book or movie. You see one of the wives or husbands all geared up for a pantomime, grinning, preening, circling a fist at one ear (“Movie!”), holding up four fingers (“Four words!”), holding up three fingers (“Third word!”), then opening their hands and eyes to convey pleasurable surprise.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” says my mother, sounding a little bored, a little contemptuous.
“Right,” the stunned person says.
“Objection!” one of the husbands quips. “Sustained!” from one of the others. “Request for an adjournment!”— that sort of talk.
The husbands joke and drink hard liquor, and the looks they sling my mother are empty and frequent. Mr. LaPierre, once he starts slurring, paws at her when she passes too close to his chair, follows her into the kitchen and slobbers into her neck while she absently swats his jowls. Mr. Todd invites her to punch his stomach; she is the only wife he extends that honour to. She gives him a soft sock in the mouth, and he kisses her knuckles. If such behaviour makes my father jealous, he doesn’t show it. He’s too happy on charades night, he wants everyone to have a great time. And of the husbands, he’s the most handsome with his black hair slicked to his head like paint, a square-jawed man, tall and gangly, thick leaping eyebrows, long-lashed brown eyes capable only of drastic expression—exhilaration, terror, anguish—and pleasantly loose boned in his blue gabardine suit as he careens through a charade or strides around the room, which he does constantly, there not being enough chairs.
When the husbands play against the wives, my mother, who I notice never places herself too close to any of the other women, perches on the kitchen stool while the wives cram together on the chesterfield. The wives are all attractive enough, but next to my mother, with her delicate head, champagne hair and slim white limbs, they are swarthy and dwarfish and know themselves to be, you can tell by the looks they give her, which are uneasy or too bright or, in Mrs. LaPierre’s case, when she believes herself to be unobserved, purely miserable.
As for my mother, she tends to look around the room. I imagine she is judging the effect of having rearranged the furniture and hidden her beauty-queen trophies in the broom closet. (One day I will decide that, at the final party, anyway, those looks were her debating whether or not our house made living with my father and me worth the tedium.) Why put the trophies in a closet, though, why not broadcast the official proof of her physical supremacy? Because she worries about the drunken husbands knocking them off our rickety end tables? Probably. Partly. And partly because she’s shy.
Yes, shy. I say this not as a child watching the party from the floor, squeezed between the dining-room wall and the stereo cabinet, but as a woman only four years younger than my mother was when she disappeared. I know more about her life now; my father has finally told me. I’d always known about her being an only child, but I’d thought she had grown up in luxury and that her father had died after she’d left home. It turns out he died when she was only six months old and that the white house she’d once described to me—white walls inside and out, white tile floors—wasn’t something she could have remembered because a year after the funeral Grandma Hahn sold it to pay off the creditors. She and my mother then moved into an apartment, a good-sized place in a respectable downtown Montreal neighbourhood, only by that time Grandma Hahn had given up on life. “Abandoned ship,” as my father put it. All she cared about was going to seances so that she could conjure up Grandpa Hahn and yell at him for reading the books of French poetry she believed had brought on his brain cancer. Around the apartment nothing got done: unwashed dishes sat in the sink, a pile of dirty laundry sat next to Grandma Hahn’s bed for so long that she started using it to hold her ashtray and bottles of pills. More than once the superintendent had to order a fumigation.
How all that would have humiliated my mother. But it’s what gave her the gumption to make something of herself, or so my father believes. And yet she never bragged about her years as a beauty queen and then as a top professional model in Montreal. And it’s not as if she showed herself off outside the house or even ordered clothes from exclusive shops. Compliments annoyed her so much that my father found it more profitable to be insulting. “That’s a dress? I thought it was a gunny sack, a feed bag …” This being ridicule, she squawked. She knew what she looked like, and who in Greenwoods had enough taste to influence her own opinion of herself? Oh, she was arrogant, all right. But shy, too, I think. How to make friends was probably nothing she’d ever learned, and so with the exception of Mrs. Bendy (another misfit) she steered clear of people and the possibility of their prying into her life, gossiping about her, judging.
But what about her squawk? Can somebody with a laugh like that be called shy? I suppose it depends on whether or not she hears herself. I don’t think my mother did. She was tone deaf, which didn’t stop her from singing along to blues songs on the radio (all those songs about women crying and carrying on—behaviour she would certainly have ridiculed had she encountered it in real life).
The effect of her laugh at the charades party, her first laugh of the night provoked by a particularly foolish guess or off-colour remark, was dramatic. The wives touched their throats, the men’s heads snapped back. They’d heard that laugh on other occasions, they must have been expecting it. Still. From then on the atmosphere loosened, so it seemed to me. A laugh that can shatter glass tends to break the ice.
A couple of months after she disappeared, my father said—to my amazement—“I miss her laugh.”
Disappear is the verb my father uses, for months the only one. To him, her defection is so sudden and unforeseeable that anybody who says she “left” or “ran off” gets a long-winded correction. Leaving and running off are not, he points out, the sort of actions that occur instantaneously. What my mother did—defrost the refrigerator freezer one day and put a goodbye note on it the next (in fact, there was no goodbye, only: “I have gone. I am not coming back. Louise knows how to work the washing machine”)—he equates with the snap of a finger and the great mysteries.
He doesn’t doubt that a man, fancy Dan, more or less hypnotized her. This man he quickly broods into complexity. “A towhead,” he says,“a blond.” He says that my mother has a soft spot for blonds like herself, and for moustaches, so Dan sports a weaselly pencil moustache. He’s a “two-bit wheeler-dealer,” he peels hundred-dollar bills from a fat wad, he files his nails, his ties are pure silk, his hats cashmere, Dan knows his fabrics, nothing but a “flim-flam man,” and the worst of it is, my mother isn’t the first happily married woman he has made disappear.
Or vamoose, or fly the coop, high-tail it. By summer, the sacred verb has spawned synonyms.
But even then, when his shock has slackened to gloom, my father sticks to his theory that she left in a thrall, on a whim: “You don’t defrost the freezer one day, and the very next day …”
Yes, you do. Just as you buy a dress one morning and send it back the next. Not that I voice my opinion. I know as soon as I see her goodbye note that on charades night she was counting the days. After the last husband and wife were out the door, I said,“Mommy, you were the best player,” and she waved away her cigarette smoke to get a good look at me, then stroked my face with the back of her fingers and said,“Honey” (she had never before called me honey),“nobody would believe you were my daughter.”
If she took me with her, she meant.