Walking PART ONE
Through Glass
CHAPTER ONE
2002 — Princess Margaret Hospital I NEVER KNOW what condition she’ll be in when I arrive at
the hospital — if she’ll be lucid, rambling, awake, sleeping, in an altered state, or maybe even gone. Dead. I wait, though, finishing my cigarette outside, squatting on the ground. My fingertips yellowed with nicotine. The skin chewed. The sky scattered and uncertain as if the spring sun might disappear and a storm might crash in. I exhale and stroke an exposed patch of grass as if it were the fur of a sleeping cat. “Are you okay?” asks a woman. I squint, shield my eyes, and look up from her stiletto heels to her bold red lips. Everything perfect and in place. “My mother is dying,” I say. “I’m sorry,” she says softly before walking away. I stand up, squash my cigarette with my shoe, cross the street, and go through the revolving glass doors of Princess Margaret, Toronto’s renowned cancer hospital. I wait for the elevator, pop peppermint gum into my mouth, fish my shades
JOANNE VANNICOLA
from my pocket, and push them on, covering the dark circles around my eyes. The elevator is crammed with gowned patients clutching their IV poles, hospital staff, and fellow visitors. Some are here for those in the beginning stages of the disease, the newly diagnosed who are in treatment or having surgery. Then there are people like me, the dishevelled and overtired, the ones on constant duty, hurrying to the bathroom or stealing away for a quick smoke, afraid to miss the end. It takes forever to get to the seventeenth floor: the palliative care ward. My sisters are outside our mother’s room talking in whispers. My brother, Diego, is at home sleeping. We’re on rotating shifts. My sisters, Sadie and Lou, have travelled from Montreal and Vancouver to say their goodbyes; yes, even Sadie, who was taken by the Children’s Aid so many years ago, the day the rest of us were inexplicably left behind. Mother slips in and out of consciousness, almost in a coma, her body bruised from multiple needles and the morphine drip. Her eyes are glassy, hollow. She is uncommunicative, the way my sisters like it. They don’t want to talk or listen; they have never believed a word she said anyway. Lou refused to even come to Toronto unless I was certain Mother was dying. It was winter when my mother was admitted. I didn’t know then how long was left. Weeks? Months? I only knew she was declining, and unlike my sisters, I had questions that needed answering. I walk into her room. Her bare feet are exposed, the skin like cracked mud under a hot sun. I should apply cream but am afraid to touch them. I am thirty-three years old, but my insides still revolt when I get close to her. The need to feel separate is so big, so old. So immediate. I ignore her parched feet, busying myself with the messy counter beside her bed while I formulate the first question.
12
ALL WE KNEW BUT COULDN’T SAY
“Do you want to finally talk?” I stare at her. “Not yet,” she says and stares back. I wipe the counter and rearrange the clutter: the box of Kleenex, the water jug, three Styrofoam cups, juice from breakfast. I throw out used tissues. I try again. “Why did you marry him?” I ask. “Why Dad?” “Because I had to,” she answers. She grabs the remote and turns on the extendable tiny television that stretches out from the wall like the arm of a crane. “The new kids are so good,” she says after finding a figure-skating competition. “That boy Sandhu, he can dance too.…” “But why? Was it because you were pregnant with Sadie?” She pauses as if the answer is lost to her. I’ve seen it before, this vacancy, how she fumbles, makes things up she doesn’t know, avoids reality. “I think so.…” Mother says, her voice stuck somewhere in her throat. “You think so or you know so?” “I don’t know.… I … well, your grandfather wanted me to marry your father.” She turns off the television and shoves it away from her bed. I actually know the real story, but not from my mother. From Diego, who told me years ago, after he had gone with Mother to a therapy session. Mother was the youngest girl out of seven children: the “chosen” one, raped by her father. She told people, but no one believed her. I did. The moment Diego told me, I knew it was true. It was the only thing that made sense. A piece of her was broken long before any of us came along. “And I loved your father,” she interjects before I can say anything more. “I loved him. Isn’t that enough?” She covers herself with the thin green hospital blanket.
13
JOANNE VANNICOLA
It isn’t. Because it isn’t true. It can’t be. He was a brute; she was a girl. What was to love? When I was young, I obsessively asked her why she married my dad. He was terrifying, and even at the age of eight, I couldn’t understand why she’d married him. She would always say the same thing: “Because I loved him.” Then she would throw up her arms to shut me up, as if she thought I could believe her. It was the most insane thing I had ever heard. She interrupts my thoughts. “I want to speak with all my children.” Her demeanour is imperious. “I forgive you all.” “What did you say?” I turn to her, feeling nauseous, dizzy almost. After everything she has done, she forgives us? “And what do you forgive your children for? What have your children done to you that requires your forgiveness?” My voice is low, measured. She stares at me without answering, fidgets with her bedding. Her voice changes, becomes childlike. “Do you forgive me?” “I don’t really know, but I know I won’t forget.” I leave then, rush out, trying to stop the flood of memories. The dam breaks and I spend the night spinning backward, through my father’s violence and my mother’s collusion. And through something else, something hard to accept or talk about even now: how my mother touched me, and how I knew, even when I was a little girl, that it was wrong. But I go back the next day, and she stares at me vulnerably from her bed. “I’m afraid of losing my hair.” I am sitting as far away from her as I can. The hospital room isn’t big enough for the two of us. No room is big enough for the two of us. “I don’t know if I can handle seeing it fall out in chunks. I’m scared.”
14
ALL WE KNEW BUT COULDN’T SAY
“Are you?” I ask. I don’t want to take care of her. The very thought inspires rage. She takes up so much space, even physical space, and the room is small, making her seem larger somehow, as if I were still eight. I can’t cope with her fear, so instead I focus on her hair, which will fall out from the last-ditch effort to prolong her life with chemotherapy. “I can shave your head.” “Do you think that would help?” She looks at me hopefully, trying to find a way into my heart. I find a cheap blue plastic razor and hold it up to Mother’s head of curls while she sits up in her hospital bed. “You’re sure you trust me with this thing?” I ask, ready to shave her. I hate her vulnerability and recall childhood fantasies when I wished her dead, when I hoped the plane would crash or the car would go off a cliff, her heart would stop or she would slip on the ice some winter night and crack her skull. But here she is powerless, afraid of losing her long, luscious hair. My mother always worked so hard on her appearance, trying to compensate for her weight: her 350 to 400 pounds. A gifted seamstress, she made her own clothes: wide tops and dresses in floral patterns, stripes, or paisley, in pinks and purples, blues and greens, in velour or velvet for special events or shows. She manicured her nails, painted her face, and coloured her hair — her beautiful, luscious hair. She permed it, straightened it, blow-dried it, curled it, always trying the newest style. Her hair was her armour, her confidence. It let her go out into the world, hiding her vulnerability and her monsters. “I think I need to cut it first. It’s too long to shave.” We are silent as I put white towels around her neck. I cut her hair, almost taken aback by how soft it is. I apply shaving cream and carefully move her head while the sharp blade scrapes against her scalp.
15
JOANNE VANNICOLA
Shaving her head turns out to be a very intimate act. It is the closest I’ve been to her in over fifteen years. The only sounds come from the hall, where nurses congregate at their station, laughing or complaining, where buzzers sound, where patients shuffle by, where visitors walk, catching glimpses as I angle around earlobes and more of my mother’s flesh becomes visible. I pat her head dry. She is raw. Exposed. And so am I. It’s hard to hate when someone is dying.
I didn’t always hate my mother. Some of my earliest memories are good: tap shows and costumes, music and time steps. I was three years old when the lessons began. Luaus where my sister Lou and I performed Hawaiian dances with bamboo sticks and balls on a string, wearing grass skirts and floral tops. Tap and jazz shows. Trophies and competitions. Gymnastics and figure skating. Roller-skating lessons, partnered with a boy my age, rolling around in circles doing figure eights on wheels under disco balls in roller rinks. My mother wanted something for me. She wanted something for herself. But in the end, it was the theatre and acting that would take root, where I would excel and live the dreams I thought were mine. They weren’t. They were hers; yet, in the end, she didn’t share in them. For fifteen years I was estranged from my mother, couldn’t bear to be near her. She wasn’t there in 1991 when I won my Emmy for Maggie’s Secret, and she wasn’t there in 1993 when I debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival with Love and Human Remains, directed by legendary Québécois director Denys Arcand. She wasn’t there for most of my triumphs and, God knows, was never there for my disasters, when I needed — really needed — a mother.
16