The gaps between the comb’s teeth were plugged with film from somebody’s scalp. I freed a smear with my thumb. A hair loosened with it—a black thread shorter than my own. It stretched to the end of my chin. I sat at the mirror and combed my hair until a metal tooth snapped. I hadn’t brushed that morning. My waves congealed under the top layer into one mat. I’d always wanted my hair to be anemic blond or black as coffee. I liked extremes. I thought beauty might exist in superlatives. The tallest and longest. The whitest and blackest. The roundest. The softest. The most blue. In the books I read, plain girls described their hair as “mousy.” I hoped my hair was not mousy. If a book described my hair, I’d like them to say wolf-like.
He appeared in the mirror first—leaning into my doorway, hand in the pocket of his jean shorts, feet bare. I noticed his shins were smoother than mine, though he was fourteen now. Boys at school had started to grow hair on their legs, under their arms. Above the collar of his shirt, his throat dipped into a nose-sized hollow.
I turned from the mirror and involuntarily glanced at his shorts. When I realized it, I darted my eyes away.
How long have you been skulking around? I said.
Arrived this morning.
Your hair’s not wet.
So?
Roy said you went for a swim.
It dried.
We fell into a mutual silence. He waited for me to invite him in, and I waited for him to leave me alone. Downstairs, Mom opened and slammed drawers in the kitchen. The sounds echoed upstairs, spoons and forks rattling in their tray.
I don’t have to play with you if I don’t want to, I said.
He smirked. I regretted the word “play.”
He stalked into my room and sat on my bed. His back crushed the pillows I had beat that morning. He lifted his hip to remove a paperback from his pocket and started to read.
What’d you do, anyhow? To get sent here.
He continued to read. He didn’t look at me once. He read every word, or counted the seconds it would take to read every word. I watched him—first because I expected him to answer, then because I had been watching him so long, the moment had passed where I could ask him to leave or leave the room myself. After a hundred and seventy seconds, he shifted his backside on the bed, as if unable to get comfortable.
There’s something wrong with your mattress.
What?
He bounced up and down, the frame creaking under his weight. —I feel something.
A sweat wicked my neck. How could he feel the jar, when I couldn’t?
Just a bit lumpy. Stop it. You’ll break my bed.
He smiled at me a moment, as if he knew I was lying. Then he snapped his book shut and swung his feet to the floor.
Forget it. I have to take a dump. He walked to the door, then turned, running his eyes down my waist to my pelvis.
My cheeks flushed and I pushed past him into the hall. He followed, closing the door behind him, but I didn’t look back, I ran down the stairs, vibrating with frustration. I breathed in, pressed my eyelids closed. When my heart stopped pounding, I smoothed the lap of my dress. I walked into the kitchen with my fists clenched.
Mom bent over the counter, slicing a cucumber so thin the discs folded over the knife. She still wore her kimono, though she had applied lipstick. A hook of pink the colour of her Campari.
There you are, she said. She had traced blue pencil along the bottom ledge of her eyelashes. It made her irises purple.
I was starving. I still had Roy’s saltine in my pocket. —What are you making?
A face mask.
Oh.
Would you like one?
I’m hungry.
She plugged the new Osterizer into the wall. She had ordered it from an appliance catalogue in Vancouver.
I found a loaf in the breadbox and lined two slices on a plate. —You want some? I asked, pushing Patrick out of my mind, returning my thoughts to the dairy boy.
I’ve eaten, she said. I scrambled myself an egg.
If my mother cooked for herself, she only scrambled one egg. In a fingernail of butter, with parsley from the garden. Dad used to nag her—one egg. Who scrambles one egg. I carved the crusts off my bread and left them on the butcher block, because I knew sometimes she liked to eat them when no one watched. She worked beside me, sliding her cucumber into the Osterizer, leaving six discs for me on the counter.
Thank you, I said. I spread cream cheese onto my bread. We still had a container of it from when Pamela Rice made icing for carrot cake. —Will you really throw a party?
Why not? she said. Wanda’s thrown two parties in the last month. I missed both of them.
So?
She didn’t answer me.
Does Roy go to church?
She spooned honey into the blender and used her finger to scrape it off the spoon. An amber balloon drooped off her nail.
I don’t know, Duck. She licked her finger. —That’s not your business.
Is it your business? I asked.
She bit down and scraped the nail between her teeth. —Don’t be cheeky. She walked to the tap and rinsed her hands.
I arranged the cucumber petals into a flower.
She poured milk into the blender, sealed the lid and pressed start. The motor wailed. The blades sounded like they were grinding metal spoons. After a few pulses, she twisted the jar off the base. She pried off the lid and gave the wet pulp a slosh.
I made enough for two, she said. Sit outside with me. It won’t keep.
I sliced my sandwich into fingers and followed her onto the terrace.
We sat on the canvas cushions of the porch swing. She turned me so that I faced her, my heels tucked under my thighs. She sat with one leg folded, the other stretched to the ground to catch the sun. I placed my plate on my lap.
Lean your head back, she said.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Patrick was watching from some window. If he was listening to us. But I did as she said and shut my eyes. She spooned cucumber slush onto my cheeks, pushed back my hair, painted my forehead.
Willa, she said. She paused. —Charles slides down the banister and feels pleasure. If he climbs the stairs and slides again, does he sin?
I had no idea what she was talking about. The only Charles I knew was two grades younger than me and smelled of spinach.
Natalie rides her bicycle and feels pleasure, she said. She keeps riding. Does she sin?
My mouth felt dry. I tried to swallow but couldn’t move the saliva with my neck hinged back. I think I knew what she was hinting at—and for the second time, I thought of Patrick. But it’s not like Mom went to church. Isn’t that a sin? Still, my cheeks warmed. I hoped the cucumber disguised it.
Maybe you should spend time with your sister this month.
I pushed her hand away and sat up.
Would you like that, Ducky? You could stay with her and Linda.
I hate Linda.
Don’t be rude.
It’s not rude. It’s honest. I hate Patrick too.
She smiled and tipped my chin farther back. —Eventually, you’ll learn when to be honest. She massaged cucumber under the bone of my jaw. —Your sister should be your role model.
I didn’t understand. She told Eugene she wanted to keep me here, and now she wanted me to leave. My brow knotted as I worked this through, and the mask lumped.
She guided my head to rest against the swing. My stomach growled.
Cucumber really hydrates the skin, she said.
I closed my eyes and traced the edge of the sandwich bread with my finger. The swing creaked as her weight shifted. I opened my eye long enough to watch her massage the mask into her cheekbones.
See? She smiled at me. —Isn’t this fun?
There were fewer mirrors at the beach house. That was something I always noticed. You became used to finding yourself on walls. The house on Salt Spring had belonged more to my dad, who furnished it with driftwood. Mom focused her energy in Victoria. Our velveteen parlour with pear-green chairs and man-eating drapes. She hung mirrors in every room. To make the most of the space, she would say. I liked them because they invited more bodies into the house. Our family doubled in size. Of course she decorated the beach cottage too. She brought the patio furniture and the striped sofa. But it would be trickier to pack panels of glass on the ferry. We had a mirror in the bathroom and one full-length in my mother’s closet. But not in my room. So if I wanted to see myself, I had to lock the bathroom door and sit on the sink with my feet in the basin. It wasn’t vanity as much as a game where I observed what parts of my body had changed. Eye colour, for instance. Today, could I see the ring of yellow around my pupils? How white were my teeth? Should I brush harder? Had the sunburn on my nose begun to peel? Of course I checked on other changes too. The hair under my arms. The flesh there. My breasts had spread in that direction—toward my armpits rather than each other. Not that I cared about cleavage. I didn’t want to wear a bra.
Patrick’s presence made me wonder where I stood in the family. People applied different words to Joan than they applied to me. They described her as a “heartbreaker.” My mother’s friends call me “sly.”
I asked Joan what she thought once. She read a lot of magazines, and that made her an authority, I guess.
Say, what do you think of my looks, generally? I’d said.
She raised her eyes from her catalogue and answered so smoothly, I wondered if this was something she thought about. —You’re owlish. Your eyes are too big, but I think you’ll fill out.
Oh.
She leaned toward me, as if to kiss me on the cheek, then ruffled her hand through my bangs. —You’re better off not thinking about it.
I had never asked my mother, but the next night she commented on it without my prompting. She and Joan had been at it. I don’t remember why, now. It could’ve been anything. Every now and then Mom surfaced to say something sweet or mean to us. More often, she directed her comment to Joan, and more often, it was mean. She said things like, “I once saw a skirt just like that, on a whore in Vancouver.” Or, “You’d be a lovely creature if only you fixed your teeth.” Often Joan would retaliate. She’d say everyone knew Mom was a lush, she embarrassed the whole family, poor Eugene, what a banshee he’d ended up with. And Mom would tell her to get out, and Joan would go to Linda’s.
So Joan had gone to Linda’s. Eugene had taken the neighbour’s dog for a walk with Luke. We sat alone in our kitchen in Victoria. It was dusk by then. Neither of us had closed the windows, as if to dispel the tension from their fight. The night smelled of the community pool and lawn clippings, as well as the cut lime and quinine from her drink.
Willa, she said as she wiped the sweat off her glass and touched her temple. —It doesn’t do you any favour to be beautiful yet.
I looked up from my notebook. I had been memorizing passé composé “to be” verbs.
The most beautiful women were ugly girls, she said.
What?
It goes to your head otherwise.
She squeezed the smile of lime into her tumbler.
Why are you telling me this?
You’re a changeling. Consider yourself “bookish” for now.
Okay, I said, though I didn’t understand what she meant by “changeling.” I looked to her face for clues, but she appeared distracted by the lime, which she rotated in her hand.
You were always the better reader, she said. She tossed the lime over the counter into the kitchen sink. I started at the suddenness of the gesture. She wiped her palm on the tablecloth, as if to signal the end of our chat.
Since then, I sought myself in the mirror more often. What was the difference between me and Joan, anyhow? What made her beautiful and me bookish, or owlish, or sly? I thought I might try to be more sly. If I were not beautiful, I could be a changeling, as my mother said. I guessed it meant someone who shifted shapes. I had always admired the insects I mistook for leaves. I wanted to emulate them. I wanted to emulate the reptiles in hotter countries. The side-winding adder with scales like grains of sand. The pygmy seahorse, studded with coral tubercles. And chameleons, of course.
After Mom and I talked, I looked up “changeling” in my dad’s Oxford dictionary. Here is what I found:
1. One given to change; a fickle or inconstant person; a waverer, turncoat, renegade.
2. A person or thing (surreptitiously) put in exchange for another.
3. A child secretly substituted for another in infancy; esp. a child (usually stupid or ugly) supposed to have been left by fairies in exchange for one stolen.
I liked that they put “surreptitiously” in brackets. Possibly I was a waverer, turncoat, renegade. The last one made me think. I thought back to this definition the morning after the face masks. That day was a day for being sly—for avoiding Patrick and finding whoever lived in the woods, to see if the barrette was still there. Maybe I would leave something new as a peace symbol. A jar of water, perhaps, in case they were thirsty. A sandwich—I could make a mean grilled cheese. I wondered how I could be more sly. I already stepped lightly. Perhaps I could wear more earth tones. I had a brown housedress. It was a shapeless cotton thing—Joan said it looked like an onion sack. But today was not a day to be beautiful. I was a side-winding adder with scales like tree bark. A seahorse the colour of yellow cedar.
In the kitchen, I filled a mason jar with cold water and buttered two slices of sandwich bread. Patrick hadn’t emerged from the guest bedroom yet, though it was eleven. I hoped to leave before he got up. My mother sat at the table in her kimono. She was smoking her morning cigarette and sipping coffee I knew had gone cold by then.
Lunch already? she said.
I heated a pan on the stove while I sliced the cheddar we kept in our fridge. I never saw anyone eat the cheese, but we always had a block on the butter shelf. Maybe Eugene ate it (surreptitiously) before supper.
I wouldn’t make a habit of eating between meals, Mom said.
It was difficult to feel scared under such a pregnant sky. The sun warmed the top of my head like hot yolk. It made me think of that game we played at school, where someone cracks their fists over your head. Dot dot, line line, spider crawling up your spine, they say, running their fingers up your neck. Tight squeeze, cool breeze, blowing on your nape, now you’ve got the shiveries. That’s when they crack the egg, and the yolk drips behind your ears. I thought about what Mom said about pleasure and sinning. I’d felt pleasure when they cracked the egg.
I located my cavernous tree trunk and worked my way back to where the canoe had been buried. I couldn’t see it. Maybe the barrette had scared her off and she found another cove. After a few minutes, I found the elephant doll tangled in the same thicket of leaves. I unpeeled the leaves and searched the hollow between the elephant’s legs, and below it in the scrub of branches. The barrette was gone. I looked around for other traces: trampled moss, grass broken back. I could see nothing. I left the jar of water and the grilled cheese, which I had folded in wax paper. The tide was out. I could walk to the end of my horizontal arbutus tree and jump to the rocks. The rocks opened into green sinks of tide pools. I liked to gaze into them and feed blackberries to the starfish. Today, I picked my way over the pools to the end of the point. This gave me a wide view of the sea between the islands, but the water glinted and I found it difficult to see. That’s when the canoe glided past the rocks, its bow like the throat of a goose. A small girl knelt in the hull. She wore a cream dress, her hair clipped to her ears. Her cheek turned as the canoe drifted behind the rock. I caught a band of yellow in her hair—not a trick of light, I didn’t think, but my sister’s barrette pinning her bangs. The canoe slipped from sight. I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing.
When I returned home, I saw another strange sight. Patrick was lying on the living room floor, and my mother stood on his back. She kneaded the ball of her foot into one of his shoulder blades, the hem of her kimono grazing the dimples behind her knees. Patrick’s arms rested at right angles to his head, his chin and neck extended on the carpet. I froze in the doorway. He didn’t wear a shirt, his back marbled from my mother’s heels. She shifted her weight and raised her other foot. I expected her to keep lifting, Patrick in her talons like a limp trout.
I waited for them to see me. His face pressed into the rug; I couldn’t see his expression. Had he complained of a backache? It wouldn’t be the first time my mother boasted her talent for massage. She massaged guests at parties if she was drunk enough. But alone? With Patrick? Did he ask?
They’ll bring wine, said my mother. All we need is one or two bottles of tequila.
She lowered her foot and paddled both heels into his sacrum. I missed the moment where I should have cleared my throat.
Patrick’s eyes strayed across the room to the French doors. I followed his gaze, then found it mirrored back at me. I nearly gasped. He didn’t say a word. Mother talked about canapés.
We’ll get prosciutto, she said. We have a cantaloupe in the fruit bowl.
An energy passed between me and Patrick. At first, we only met in windows and pools of water.