When my mom finally walks in the door at nine-fifteen, she acts like nothing’s wrong at all.
“Where have you been?” I ask. “Dad and I have been worried sick. And now Grandma’s upset too.”
“What are you talking about? You knew I was going to my pilates class. What’s Grandma upset about?”
“We were worried because it’s dark out and no one knew where you were.”
It’s me who’s doing the talking, but Mom looks right past me and glares at Dad.
“Who called my mother?”
“I thought you might have dropped in there,” he says. “You were later than you usually are.”
“You wouldn’t like it if I got home this late,” I say.
“Maybe that’s because you’re only thirteen. I’m twenty-eight. There’s supposed to be a difference.”
“I don’t see why. Grandma always tells me it’s important to be dependable. If you aren’t and no one knows when you’re going to show up, you could get raped, murdered, and thrown into a ditch, and your family would just think you were late again. No one would even call the police.”
“Like I could be so lucky,” she says.
“I just got worried when you weren’t home by nine o’clock,” Dad says. “I mean, the gym is only a five-minute drive from here and I knew the class was over at eight. I allowed twenty minutes for you to shower and change …”
“Gina and I went to Starbucks for a coffee. So call the cops, get together a search party, or just shoot me – I don’t care! But don’t call my mother!”
“Starbucks?” Dad says. “What did you have?”
“Coffee. Just a regular coffee.”
“They call it a tall, I think.”
“Who cares what they call it?”
Mom is raising her voice again. I don’t know why she gets all twisted out of shape about Dad making a simple observation like that.
“You know,” he says. “The tall at Starbucks is twelve ounces and it’s expensive. You can get a sixteen-ounce coffee at McDonald’s or A&W for just over a dollar.”
“What did I do to deserve this?” my mom wails.
“Grandma says it’s always better to bring friends home, and I bet it would be even cheaper if you’d waited till you got back here to have coffee,” I say.
“One little mistake when I’m fourteen and my whole life is ruined. I don’t know what’s worse: being married to a walking spreadsheet or being doomed to live with a doppelgänger of my mother.”
“What’s a doppelgänger?”
“Look it up in the dictionary,” she says.
I want to tell her it would be much faster if she’d just tell me herself, but she goes stomping out of the kitchen and heads upstairs.
I get the dictionary.
“How would you spell that?” I ask Dad.
“Pretty much the way it sounds,” Dad says. “D-o-p-p-e-l-g-a-n-g-e-r.”
I find the word. It means a ghostly likeness or double of a living person.
Dad is back at the computer, where he’s entering the money Mom spent on the coffee in to an accounting program he uses to keep track of all our finances. Once a week, he prints out a copy so he and Mom can discuss money. The printout is called a spreadsheet. I think my mom was calling Dad a walking spreadsheet because he hardly needs this software to keep track of spending. He could probably keep it all in his head. He has a very good memory for figures.
“Why did she call me a double of Grandma?” I ask. “I don’t think we look anything alike.”
Dad looks up at me from the computer screen. “No, Lucy, I don’t think that’s what she meant. It’s just that you quote your grandma so much that sometimes it feels like she’s living here. You know how your mom and grandma tend to lock horns now and then. I think it upsets her when you remind her of what your grandma would say all the time.”
It isn’t until later, when I’m in bed, that I start wondering if she really meant what she said about how a mistake she made when she was fourteen – getting pregnant with me – has wrecked her life. My mother was fifteen when I was born. She got pregnant in Grade 9 because there were no Catholic high schools in Surrey in those days, and she had to go to a public school. My mom was very innocent and unworldly, and the supervision at that high school just wasn’t what it should have been. Grandma explained that part to me. My mother says that her class went on a ski trip to Mt. Seymour. She’d never been skiing before and her clothes weren’t warm enough. By lunchtime, she was shivering with cold. One of the ski instructors, a handsome exchange student from Sweden, felt sorry for her. He invited her to come and sit in his car. He said he’d turn the heater on and it would be way warmer than the drafty old lodge where everyone else was having lunch. Mom says his English wasn’t very good and that she had trouble understanding him. She never really gets much beyond that in her explanation. Even if his English was bad and she was innocent, unworldly, and very cold, you’d think she might have clued in at least in time to avoid getting pregnant.
I imagine it was a bit of a shock when my mom, my grandparents, and finally everyone in the neighborhood, the school, and our parish discovered that I was on the way. But it all turned out okay. Her life’s not ruined. Still, when she said those words, it made me feel kind of guilty. Maybe it’s because I’m Catholic.
If you’re Catholic, you don’t have to actually do anything to be guilty. We believe in original sin. It all goes back to Adam and Eve. When they ate that apple, they brought sin into the world, so now we inherit sin along with our DNA. That’s why we baptize babies. Baptism washes away this original sin. But that isn’t the end of it. Even after baptism, the tendency to be willful and disobedient clings like an old habit. I imagine it’s like smoking or biting your nails: really hard to break. Watch any two year old having a tantrum in the supermarket. You just know that when God finished making people and, the Bible says, “He saw that it was good,” this wasn’t at all what He had in mind.
I’m lying there thinking about it when Dad sticks his head into my room to ask if he can borrow my extra pillow. For some reason, he’s decided to sleep on the couch.
“Do you think Mom meant it when she said I wrecked her life?” I ask.
“No, of course not,” he says. “She’s just blowing off steam.”
I think he’s probably right, so I don’t think too much more about it just then. It isn’t until later, when she starts wrecking my life, that I realize maybe she did mean it, and she’s just been waiting all these years for a chance to seek revenge.