just pretending

In my family I have a mother, a father and a sister, none of whom are real. Just like me. As if we’re all just pretending. About my fake mom, my so-called dad says that the sixties came and went and nobody bothered to inform her. She wears Birkenstock sandals, droopy socks and a horrible patchwork denim skirt that she wears high up over her pot belly, which stubbornly resists valiant efforts to make it budge, efforts that include hours too numerous to count standing on her head in the vain hope that it will force the migration of belly fat into the area of her flat chest. Tiny shoulders and a skinny neck incongruously support a massive head of fuzzy hair, once shot through with clever streaks of white but now gone nearly completely grey. She gives the impression of a dandelion gone to seed. I vow never to be such a hopeless case. I’m secretly pleased we’re not really related.

She’s a socially conscious vegetarian with armpit hair and skin that smells like hemp. She’s no Einstein or genius. So last fall, after I met Joe Jackson on Geeks and Social Justice and we just kind of hit it off, she never caught on to what I was up to. She would drop me off at the library on campus, never suspecting that I was doing anything other than “studying.” She liked the idea of me being smart, even if she didn’t understand it. I had a floor I liked to go to in the main library. It was quiet, in a conspiratorial way. You knew people were all over the place, in the carrels and browsing the stacks, but no one made any noise. Sometimes I fell asleep there, numbed by fat books with old, smelly pages. No one asked me questions, and I could be whoever I wanted there; maybe I was even being myself.

Joe Jackson. I fell in love with his name. Can you admire a person for their name? Probably not. You can admire their parents for thinking up an agreeable name, so I admired Joe Jackson’s parents for their baby-naming aptitude. Then again, it was hard to imagine that Joe Jackson was ever a baby. He was at least six feet tall and all angles and points and unusual creases. Even his body structure was clever. I had to admire his parents for their engineering abilities as well.

When we met, Joe Jackson and me were logged on to Geeks at the same time, debating (but really sort of agreeing) over the whole English hegemony thing, hogging the group chat when Learningnerd posted Get a room! and we agreed to take our conversation private, both of us duly ignoring the sexual suggestion in Learningnerd’s post and pretending a purely intellectual interest in each other. Finally, we agreed that since we lived in the same city, we should meet in person to continue our debate. “Discuss the issues.”

He brought some papers from his school, something called Students for a Democratic University (turned out he was WAY older than me, but I never did tell him I was only fourteen), and then he proceeded to try to convince me that democracy is a constructed concept that doesn’t really exist in any practicable sort of way. I lost him after a while but continued to nod and say hmm as though giving thoughtful consideration to his arguments. Soon, I realized he didn’t really need me to be listening, so I concentrated instead on watching his pointy bits as he gestured here and there over his remarkable thesis.

“I plan to pursue this more intently in my graduate work,” he said.

I could see he took himself way too seriously, but still an inexplicable longing came over me, made me want to watch his every move and listen, uncomprehending, to his voice. It was both delightful and dismaying. There was a time I would have thought myself too smart for that.

Joe Jackson and I continued in this way, week upon week. He would bring books or papers, editorials and articles, presenting them to me as suitors in the past might have presented flowers or boxes of candy. Between our meetings I would log on to the Geeks site to try to catch a glimpse of him, but I found him there less and less.

We walked on campus, where he held my hand awkwardly at first and then with more ardent concentration. I found his attempts funny but didn’t dare laugh because of how serious he was. I let him hold my hand, my fingers laced between his long fingers and bony knuckles, as though I’d given my hand up for good. After a while of walking like that it felt a bit like being towed around like sea-drift, but I didn’t know how to get my hand back and didn’t really think I wanted to, except my fingertips were getting numb, not to mention sweaty. I imagined pulling my arm inside my shirt and leaving him holding my empty sleeve.

Alternately, he was like a bright spot that I was drawn to and a sore, sinking place in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t make up my mind. I spent a lot of time feeling like I was acting dumb and wanting more of the same.

Someone tied up a baby goat near a patch of grass outside the student residences and the goat’s back was spray-painted blue. He gave me an explanation for that, but I forgot. Instead, the image of the blue goat settled like dust in my imagination.

“My dad’s a goat farmer,” I blurted. “Well, he was,” I added. “He died.” I looked at my sneakers sadly. Joe Jackson didn’t know what to say, so I filled in the silence. “We had chickens too,” I said. “On the farm.” We didn’t have a farm, my dad wasn’t a goat farmer, and of course he wasn’t dead. At least, my pretend dad wasn’t any of those things. But somewhere, out there, I had a real family, and anything could be true. Even a goat-farming dead father. But my counterfeit mother’s sister, my aunt Gabbie, did have a farm with goats and chickens, and we spent a lot of time there when I was young, so that was where my story came from. “We used to have to catch the chickens,” I said, trying to impress Joe, but my confession-lies weren’t getting much of a response out of him. I didn’t know where I was going with this, but I decided to try harder. “Once, my mother chopped the rooster’s head right off, right in front of us. Just to teach us a lesson.”

“What? Really?” Joe said, disbelieving. Finally, he seemed to be listening.

“We had a cousin, Norman, a small little fatty, who we teased.”

Joe Jackson’s gaze drifted to a group of girls sitting on the grass, talking. My voice got louder as we walked past them, and I stepped up my story.

“There was a rooster who chased us and pecked our legs until they bled. Roosters can be vicious,” I said, tugging his hand in emphasis. “So me and my sister, Trish, we climbed a hay bale to get away from the rooster. And Norman comes to try and get up on the bale with us, but Trish wouldn’t let him. She pretends she can’t pull him up. Then she stands up on the bale and shouts, ‘Run, fat boy, run,’ while poor Norman runs around the yard trying to get away from the rooster.” This part of the story is mostly true. I leave out the part where I joined Trish’s chant.

Joe Jackson was listening, but I had the impression he was just waiting for me to finish so he could talk more about his thesis.

“My mom comes along and catches us. She hauls us down from the bale and makes us go with her to the chopping stump. She keeps on saying, ‘I’m going to teach you a lesson,’ over and over while she shakes Trish by the arm. She makes us wait there.” I shook my hand free from Joe’s and continued. “And a few seconds later she comes back with the axe in one hand and the rooster in the other.” I held up one hand and then the other, as if to demonstrate how she wielded these two items.

Joe Jackson caught his breath and I escalated my story, making sure to include as many horrible details as possible. I told him, “For some reason, the rooster didn’t struggle. I don’t know if he felt the authority in her hand, gripped around his neck.” I shook my fist. “Or maybe he knew it was futile to fight back.” I looked at Joe; his face was pale. At least I had his attention.

“Without saying a thing, my mother held his body on the chopping stump, her hand on his chest. I bet she could feel his heart beating. If you had asked me before, I would have said she didn’t have something like that in her. Boy, she sure surprised me.” I shook my head and gave a low laugh that very nearly sounded sinister. “Without a second to let us catch our breath, chop, she did it.” I made a chopping motion with my right hand into my left palm. Joe flinched.

“The little head rolled one way and the body went the other way, blood pumping out of his neck.” I laughed out loud, spit flinging from my lips. “Finally, the body fell over and the head stopped rolling.”

“It was dead silent,” I told Joe, “and then Trish says, ‘Cool.’ And she looks at our mom and says, ‘Can you do it again?’” I laughed when I delivered the last line, as if it were the punch line to a lengthy joke.

“Wow,” Joe Jackson finally said. “Your sister – what a jerk!” I had expected Joe Jackson to laugh when I told him about Trish’s response. That’s what other people did when I told them that story – they laughed. But just then I remembered that Joe Jackson was a vegetarian. The story must have resonated differently with him, I thought. And yet, I wanted something more from Joe Jackson, at that moment, but I’m not sure what. So I made up an addendum to the story, on the spot, to try to really impress him.

“That night, my mother did a terrible thing,” I said. My face was hot with the lie, but I was enjoying the deception. “She served up his tough little carcass for supper, his whole body – it still looked like him! He was plucked and roasted to a shiny brown and laid out on the good serving platter.” I made myself stop there. I was getting carried away.

“Did you eat him?” Joe asked, horrified.

“Well, they did.” I pointed my finger in the air at my imaginary family. “I said I was sick, and my dad let me leave the table.”

“That’s an awful story,” he said. “Your family sounds crazy.” We didn’t talk much after that, and we didn’t hold hands any more that day. I knew I had crossed a line, some invisible line, but I felt justified, mad that he was so sensitive, offended that he made me feel like I’d done something wrong. Who does he think he is, anyway? I kept asking myself. I realized later what upset me most was that he had dared to judge my pretend family.

The next time I met up with Joe Jackson, he was cool to me – still put off, I guess, about the chicken story. I made it up to him by letting him kiss me outside the biology building, with its freaky sponges and sucking, amorphous creatures. He bent down and I stood on my tiptoes so our lips could touch. I’d never kissed a boy before, unless you counted Ricky Gerolamy in grade six, but that was on a dare and neither of us even got off our bikes. Besides, that was gross. Kissing Joe Jackson turned out to be nice. His lips were warm and soft. He pressed his body against mine. My stomach turned somersaults. After, we went inside to check out the aquarium. I think we both felt better.

It was almost the end of the term. I had the vague understanding he was planning to go home when his exams were finished. Home meant back to his small town, with whoever his family was – he refused to talk about them, even when I asked. He expected me to take his leaving as a matter of fact and so I did, hiding my feelings of rejection and impending loneliness.

He invited me to a year-end party in one of the residences. The party involved dressing up in your best clothes and bringing the cheapest bottle of wine you could possibly buy. Joe Jackson brought the wine. I packed my outfit from last Halloween into my backpack – a retro white ‘70s tuxedo that I thought was funny. My mother dropped me at the library, where I would be “studying,” and made sure I had bus fare to get home. I changed in the public bathroom and ran across campus to meet Joe Jackson.

I thought the people at the party were going to be Joe Jackson’s friends, but he didn’t talk to anyone. I talked for a few minutes with a boy who asked me what my major was. I didn’t know what to say, and then “women’s studies” lurched out of my mouth.

I must have looked guilty after I said it, because the boy put a hand on my shoulder and, grinning, said, “That’s okay. We like you anyway.”

Joe Jackson steered me away from that conversation, and he and I sat on the floor and passed the bottle of cheap wine back and forth until I was dizzy and warm and we had to go outside for fresh air.

Campus was quiet. Lots of students had already finished exams, packed up and left. Joe Jackson took me to a still place between the health sciences building and administration. A grassy forgotten spot between the buildings, enclosed by trees, open to the sky.

I lay back on the grass, and he lay stiffly beside me. I could feel the heat from his body all down my right side even though we weren’t touching. It was a warm, clear, almost-summer night, and all the stars were visible in the night sky.

“Look, the Big Dipper,” I said, tracing my finger in the air down the handle and around the bottom of the scoop. I traced an imaginary line upwards from the lip of the pot. “And the North Star.” I rested my finger on the slightly brighter North Star, exactly the same way my dad used to show me. Joe Jackson said nothing. He lay stiffly beside me as though this was something he’d never done, lie in the grass and look at the stars.

I thought about telling him how my dad showed me the Big Dipper and the North Star the first time when I was five and made it seem like magic. Orion’s belt. The story of Orion and how he got put in the sky with all his favourite animals. And one lucky night, northern lights. Dancing in the prairie sky. But I didn’t get to say any of this because he suddenly sat up and swung himself over top of me, straddling me with his knees. I smiled, thinking this was a game and we were going to kiss again. He took both my wrists and brought them up over my head, held them there with one hand. I tried to look into his eyes, but I couldn’t see his face, dark with shadows. I heard him breathing hard. My smile faltered. “What are you doing?” My voice cracked like I didn’t want it to. I sounded weak and afraid, and I wished I didn’t. Joe Jackson wouldn’t answer me. Instead, he lay down on top of me with his whole hot body, as if he was trying to keep me warm. His weight pushed the air from my chest. “Get off me,” I said breathlessly into his ear. He was still holding my arms over my head. When I struggled to get my arms free, he pinned them harder to the ground. A sharp pain shot through my wrist and I cried out.

He raised his body some, and I could breathe again. His free hand fumbled at the button on my pants. I tried to lift my knees, twist my hips away, my hands pinned tight to the ground above my head. He used his legs to hold mine down, and his fingers moved so fast over my pants even though I was trying to slow him down with my mind. His hands moved faster than my brain could keep up with. My pants loosened around my waist, were pulled and twisted. I’ve never felt so unable to stop something in all my life. Joe Jackson was on top of me, I could feel his hand undoing my clothes and I had no way to make it stop. Suddenly, his fleshy thing was poking between my legs, sticking to the soft skin of my inner thighs.

“Don’t.” I managed that one breathless word, tried to make it a command. He didn’t listen. He shoved his chin into my neck, his weight taking my breath away, and still I felt his thing poking between my legs. I squeezed my knees, still wrapped in their pants, as tight as I could. The skin on my thighs pinched and tore. Then he heaved himself up, shifted his weight to one side, took his foot, his hard shoe, and scraped it down between my legs. The polyester pants of my once-hilarious tuxedo burned my skin as they ripped down my legs to my ankles. He kept kicking, forcing my shoe off my left foot, pushing my pants off my leg. He contorted his body so he could look down at the job he was doing, get it right. At that angle I could see his face in the moonlight, shiny with sweat, his pale lips drawn down with effort. His eyes, like nickels in the shadows of a wishing pond, wouldn’t look at me. I’m not sure he knew I was there at all.

I’d been saying no, like a chant, over and over, but I stopped. He put his weight on top of me again, and I struggled to keep this thing from happening. He held my wrists so tight I was afraid he’d break them, squeezing, pressing, sharp and painful. I stopped thinking, focussed on looking past the burning heap on top of me, looked up at the night sky, traced the Big Dipper with my eyes, found the North Star. I imagined I saw Orion’s belt, even though I knew it was the wrong time of year for it. But it was the right time for Aquila the eagle, so I searched for him. The flamingo called Grus might be around now too, I thought. I imagined they were all out. Again and again I traced those familiar skyscapes like lifelines, critical work that had to be accomplished or the world would fall apart. I counted them. I counted on them.

When he rolled off of me, the cool relief of night air hit my skin, my wrists were released, my hands were numb. I rolled on my side away from him, curled into a ball but only for a moment. I heard him behind me, doing up his pants. I sat up, fumbled at my feet, somehow found the pant leg, tugged myself back together, did up zippers and buttons, pulled on a shoe. He stood beside me and we walked, as if this was any other time, any other evening. We didn’t hold hands; we didn’t talk. We walked out to the paved pathway that cut through the heart of the university campus and out to the ordinary street that signalled the end of university grounds. We stopped on the sidewalk at the bus stop, and he put his hands in his pockets. I couldn’t bring myself to look up, all the way up, into his face. Instead, I stared stonily ahead.

“Do you want me to wait with you? For your bus?”

I shook my head.

“Okay then. See you later,” he said, and I managed a small wave with my hand. I was just barely aware that he walked away. The bus came; I got on. I didn’t think about my clothes, about the grass in my hair, about the thumbprints on the inside of my wrist, about the friction burns on my legs or ripped skin on my thighs. I didn’t think of any of this. Instead, the inexplicable blue goat came to mind, producing a deep blue haze that descended to follow me home on the bus, where I sat with damp legs and scorched thighs. I avoided looking out the window because I knew my reflection was there.

After that night, I didn’t see Joe Jackson again. I guessed he went home to whatever pretend family he came from. I didn’t ever go and look for him on the Geeks site – I couldn’t bring myself to log in there. But I thought about that place, on campus, where it happened. I didn’t want to be afraid of it, so I revisited it. Off the bus, brisk walk to the health sciences building, duck in behind the bushes. Whoosh. Silence. I was not really surprised that it was cool and silent, soothing. I sat on the grass, my back against the stone of the health sciences building, and picked thick, waxy leaves from a bush. I folded one of the leaves between my fingers, and it resisted, then snapped as though I’d broken its bones. Sickened, guilty, I dropped the leaf. After that, I was more careful. I touched the leaves and put a branch between my fingertips. I tenderly examined the veins on one of the leaves. I pulled blades of grass one by one from their roots, carefully sliding each blade from its sheath before chewing on the ripe white end. In my throat, the smell of green. Ordinarily a good smell. After a while, I figured out that it wasn’t a bad place.

It wasn’t until the start of June that I realized I was pregnant.

To hear my mother talk, getting pregnant made me the equivalent of a crack-addicted prostitute. “Oh my God,” she cried when I told her. “I can’t believe it.” She threw her hands up in the air and shrieked, “Just like your real mother.” Those were her words. I slapped her in the face. We were standing by the sink in the kitchen, and when I looked out the window I saw the apple tree had come into bloom, as though it had happened just in that moment. I was sorry as soon as I did it, but she picked the wrong moment to say that thing about my “real mother,” who she thought I was protecting, which in turn hurt my pretend mother’s feeling. That’s right, I said feeling. She only had one, and it involved tears and was cleverly designed to inspire guilt in all others. Maybe someday I would tell her she was wrong about the protecting thing. It’s hard to explain, but I didn’t slap her because she said “just like your real mother,” I slapped her because she said those words, “your real mother,” to remind me again that I was different, didn’t really belong, adopted and therefore not real. Every time I let my guard down and sort of forgot and just got on with things, she had to bring it up.

She decided I’d have an abortion. My dad, more unreal than ever, avoided talking to me altogether. Trish, who was real trouble by that time, was too busy climbing out her bedroom window and into cars with boys to notice anything was wrong.

My pretend mother took me to talk to a social worker. I went into his office alone, without her, and instead of what my mother thought we’d talk about, which was me being pregnant, we talked about my real mother. I wanted the social worker to look in his big files and give me answers more substantial than the basic background he was allowed to share. Instead, he had me write a letter to her so he could put it in the file. That way, he said, if she ever called to ask about me, it would be there. I didn’t believe him when he said this was all he could offer.

I wrote, I’d love to see you again sometime. We’ll meet by the fountain in the mall. I’m the one with the red scarf and dark hair, narrow eyes like my father, whom you may or may not recall. If I see you again, will I know you by your smell? Touch? Voice? Aura? The social worker tells me you took care of me for the first two weeks. I know I never took my eyes off you. I looked and looked, but still I forgot.

The image of me with my mother was so strong: I could see myself, swaddled in baby blankets, staring, glued to her every move. Yet, for some reason, I just couldn’t bring myself to remember. My brain refused my deepest desire. I knew the memory was in there; I just couldn’t get to it.

In bed that night, I talked to my stomach. “I won’t do that to you,” I whispered under my sheets. “I won’t double-cross you. I promise,” I murmured solemnly, “not to leave you.”

I fell asleep and later woke up wet, having soaked the sheets. When I turned on the lights, I was covered in blood. I woke the woman who calls herself my mother, and she drove me to the hospital in silence. My legs were shaking when we arrived. I said I wanted to go in alone.

In the emergency room cubicle, a gentle doctor touched her fingertips to my leg, just above the knee. “Scary, huh?” she said, and I wished for her to stay. I distracted myself by pretending she was my real mother, there to offer me comfort. She must be somebody’s real mother, I told myself. I imagined us strolling down a sunny street, like in a movie, her hand raised to make a light touch on my back. We laughed about something and looked breezily at one another; no one thought about the idea that the other could just disappear. She linked her arm in mine, and we licked our ice cream cones and smiled. I moaned as my stomach cramped and I rolled on my side, tucking my knees tighter to my chest. I wondered if I was being taught a lesson for something I’d done.

I miscarried by myself on a narrow cot behind a thin blue curtain. I felt my pretend mother’s shadow hovering in the waiting room, where I hoped she was suitably worried – I sincerely expected I wouldn’t live. She came and stood outside the curtain once. I could see her feet waiting there, unsure.

“Go away,” I wailed, clutching myself tighter. “Leave me alone.” I swear I could hear her wringing her hands. Her stupid sandals went away.

The doctor/mother came in only a couple of times to explain things to me and to order some medicine. In slow motion, my insides churned themselves into a purple pulp while I curled into a fiery ball.

Finally, in the bathroom, my body expelled the fetus in one shocking movement, a pale waxy shape, a suggestion of something else.