Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (6 page)

‘Hey. Be Solovyov now. Then later you make it shorter.’ There was obviously a joke in there somewhere, but I just stared at
him blankly. ‘Stephen Solo,’ he said.

‘Holy shit! Stephen Solo! Stephen Fucking Solo! I have to do it!’ My hands were gripping his upper arms and I was shaking
him.

This was weird, for us. We were never what you’d call physical together. Other guys were. You’d see them rolling around like
puppies, joking and acting like they were beating the hell out of each other, insults as nicknames. I couldn’t do that stuff.

When he was feeling hyper, Mark would do pretend-fighting at me anyway: punches that whooshed past my ear, Bruce Lee kicks
that stopped a millimetre from my gut. Or he might get all huggy, usually when he was wasted. I’d stand still and wait for
it to be over, hold myself apart.

But right then, my face was stretched in a big messy grin and I could feel his bones through the blocky fabric of his army
surplus jacket as I shook him. Mark just went with it, his head rolling. I started to find this really funny. Then he brought
one hand up against my chest and pushed me backwards.

‘C’mon, get off me, you homo.’

I sat staring at the pale yellow grass threading through my fingers, blinking and trying to think of what I could do to apologise.

‘Jeez, Stephen. I didn’t mean it,’ Mark said. ‘Gotta take everything so serious.’ He dragged himself towards me. ‘Fucking
Solovyov.’ Mark nudged my shoulder with his head. I fell over. No bones. He smiled down at me with that red face – like a
cartoon sun, like God. I started to laugh and didn’t stop for a while.

‘I have to change it,’ I said. ‘I have to.’

My mother’s reaction to the idea had confused the hell out of me. I thought she’d be happy I’d chosen her side. She wasn’t.

‘You’re too young to be making that kind of decision. You know it and I know it.’

This was a problem. To change my name legally, I needed her permission. Otherwise I’d have to wait five years until I was
nineteen, and by then ‘Shulevitz’ would be stuck to me like concrete.

I went nuts. Wouldn’t leave her alone. I typed multi-page letters about why I was right and she was wrong and mailed them
to her at work. I’d stand on the stairs in front of her with my arm across the banister arguing my case until she got so exasperated
that she seemed about to push me over the railing. I knew I was being an asshole, even back then. But, I’d reasoned, all she
had to do was sign a stupid paper. Two seconds of her life. Why couldn’t she do this for me?

One night I went too far.

It was eleven o’clock. I had her cornered in the kitchen. She sank into a spindly wooden chair and stared out into nothing.

‘Oh, God, Stephen, would you go to your room? Would you just go to your room and leave me alone?’

‘You can’t make me.’

My mother hid her face in her folded arms, head on the table with its plastic red check cloth dotted with frozen bits of candle
wax.

‘I’m still here,’ I said. ‘Just because you can’t see me doesn’t mean I’m not here.’

‘I know you’re still there! I know, I know, I know!’

She stood up. Her chair went tumbling to the floor. The car keys were piled next to our salt and pepper shakers which were
shaped like staring yellow and green owls. I got the keys first. I knew what she was going to do. In those days, whenever
Mom got especially frustrated and
crazy, usually because of me, she went for a drive. The engine starting up was like the door slamming, like Mom yelling the
last word over her shoulder.

‘Give me those,’ she said.

‘No.’

Mom tried to pry open my hand. Her strong fingers with their long nails pushed and gouged. I shoved my arm behind my back
and the next thing I knew, we were grappling for this jingling metal ring like a brother and sister squabbling over the controls
for a video game.

She ordered me to give her the keys again. I refused. Couldn’t let her go. This crazy panic flapping around my head like bat’s
wings. If she left now, she’d be gone forever. I knew it.

‘You’re a brat!’ she said. ‘I raised a brat. Now I’m stuck in this awful town. In this bug-eaten house. With this
brat
!’

‘Tough shit.’

‘How
dare
you use that kind of language with me, mister.’

‘Tough shit, Maryna.’

‘Don’t call me that. I’m your mother!’

She got hold of my right hand and forced my fingers open. I’d switched the keys to my left. I held the ring over her head.
She actually jumped for them. I felt sick, horrified.

But I laughed. ‘Have to do better than that, Maryna.’ His voice.

She slapped me. I bit my tongue as my jaw jolted from the shock.

We stared at each other, breathing hard. Mom had tears in her eyes. So did I.

‘You hit like a girl,’ I said.

I threw the car keys on the floor.

On the front steps in the dark, I sat with my head in my hands. I could hear her behind me in the kitchen, clatter of the
keys as she
gathered them up, her footsteps, then the door creaking at the other end of the house. Frost was sheathing the dead grass
in white and making the pavement sparkle. I watched the car and waited for her to come around from the back. I really wanted
a cigarette. There were some hidden in the bookcase down in the basement, but I couldn’t leave my post to get them.

After a while, I realised how quiet it was and I knew I was alone. She wasn’t coming for the car. She’d probably sneaked off
through the backyard in the darkness as I stood guard over her escape route. She was walking. Running. I’d made my mother
run away from home.

It was cold on the steps and the house was warm, but I couldn’t go back in. I had to find her.

Hedges bristled by the sidewalks, all twigs and no leaves. I paced past the grocery store. The bakery. The bank. It was spooky
– all these bright houses with the colours leached out, dimmed to shadow. A raccoon was tearing apart the trash outside the
pizza delivery place that had just opened.

I started to run. I jogged down Main Street. There was the town hall, with its red bricks and clock face, its ‘Town of Riverside’
spelled out in solid metal letters. Deserted. I’d try the park next.

But wait. I looked closer. There was a little figure huddled on the steps under the clock. She was smoking. I came nearer
and she didn’t move or look at me. I lowered myself onto the cold steps, keeping the distance of two invisible people between
us. In the daytime, this was where the tough kids hung out. The town looked different from this angle.

‘Please don’t fight with me anymore,’ my mother said.

I let out a long breath – dragon vapour in the dark. Hadn’t bothered with a jacket and my teeth were starting to knock together.

‘Okay.’

‘Thank you.’

We stayed where we were. A plastic ghost from Halloween drooped in a tree by the Saunders’ place. Its big night was over.
Now it was garbage. Nothing good was ever going to happen to it again.

‘
Tse kinets’ svitu
,’ I said.

She stubbed her cigarette against the concrete step, flicked the butt onto the sidewalk, lit another one. ‘You’re telling
me.’

‘Don’t know any more, huh?’

‘I don’t want to be a foreigner, Stephen.’

‘I am. I mean, I feel like one.’

My mother turned to me, her eyes crinkled in confusion. ‘Why would you say a thing like that?’

Should have realised how stupid it sounded. I stretched out my legs and bounced my knees. ‘I feel like an alien half the time.
Waiting for the mother ship to bring me back to my home planet.’ I smiled at her, kind of goofy.

‘Maybe you should take me with you.’ She smiled too. She tried, anyway. I couldn’t shake the idea that we were actually afraid
of each other.

The hard, straight corners of the steps dug into my back and made me feel like I was some kind of reptile, sore from growing
protective ridges along my spine. I wanted to offer her something. An apology or a confession.

‘Mom, I smoked up. I smoked, you know, marijuana.’

She was staring at me again. I pretended she wasn’t.

‘Oh, Stephen. Already?’ My mother shook her head, like she was looking at a licence application that she couldn’t bring herself
to rubber-stamp. ‘No, no. Fourteen’s way too young. Your brain’s still developing. And your body. You should really wait until
you’re in college.’

‘Sure, Mom. Okay.’ I said it fast to shut her up. I don’t know what I’d been expecting – maybe for her to come down hard,
forbid me to smoke weed or I’d get no allowance and would end up grounded for a year. It’s possible that’s what I wanted,
deep down – border checks and barbed wire, guard towers watching over me. At least you know where you are that way.

‘Just like Stanley. Right?’ I was knocking my heels against the steps.

She sighed. The hair on her forehead drifted up and then settled back down over her eyebrows. ‘I guess Stan wasn’t much of
a role model, huh? Always toking up in front of you. But at least it’s better than drinking. Or
this
.’ She held up her cigarette with its curl of smoke and glared at me. ‘I never want to see you with one of these, ever. Understood?’

I nodded.

‘Listen to me, the voice of authority.’ My mother closed her eyes. ‘I can’t believe I hit you.’

That shrill scene in the kitchen came crashing back at me – the colours too sudden and bright, the sounds too harsh, making
me queasy with shame.

‘That’s my father, you know,’ she said. ‘My father coming out in me.’

It was so rare that she’d mention him. ‘What was he like?’

I had family all over the country I’d never met and never would. Some were dead, like my Russian and Ukrainian grandparents.
Most were mad at my mother and father for getting together in the first place. And there were other factors. Family battles.
Unforgivable acts. Wars that had been slogging on for years before I was born.

‘My father.’ Exhaustion weighed down her voice. ‘He was an abusive drunk from Perm. There’s your culture. If you want it.’

I sank into the steps, felt concrete against my neck. It was a clear night and the cold made the stars seem closer.

‘Mom?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Why doesn’t he want to see me?’ I kept my eyes focused on the sky.

‘Why does who?’ She looked at me vaguely, then sat up a bit straighter. ‘Oh.’

‘I mean, did he ever say anything to you? About me?’

‘No. Honey, no. He … probably feels guilty.’

‘I could tell him it’s okay.’ My voice got stuck. Something was squeezing my throat and pressing down on my eyes. I sat and
didn’t move and waited for it to leave.

Then there was soft pressure closing around my arm, holding me steady. My mother’s hand. She was afraid to hug me, I realised.
She thought I’d push her away. I stayed very still, concentrated on breathing.

After I was calmer, I hauled myself to my feet, took her hand and waited while she shook the creaks out, unfolded herself
and stood up, her weight yanking on my arm like our clothesline with its groaning wheel. We were quiet as we walked home.
A few windows were lit with yellow, or white shivering light from a TV set. Everything else was dark.

I checked my letter over one more time. It was late now. We’d both forgotten about supper.

There was a thin horizon of light under my mother’s door. I knocked and she told me to come in. She was propping herself up
in bed and wearing one of those gel masks that are supposed to stop you from getting eye wrinkles. A little prone superhero
in a flannel nightie,
squinting as I shuffled over the pink carpet towards her. From her night table, a lamp with a stained-glass shade threw angled
squares of green and red over the room.

‘Mom.’ I held out the letter I’d written to the college in Halifax, my wrist and knuckles going emerald in the coloured light.
‘Can you just read this for me? Check for spelling and stuff?’

She pushed the mask to her forehead and unfolded her reading glasses – two sets of eyes now, both peering at my letter.

I watched the numbers on her clock radio flip their shutters from 10:59 to 11:00. My mother put down the paper with my typing
on it, stared into a dusty corner of her room where an electric fan sat waiting for summer.