Everything Was Good-Bye (2 page)

“Why are you still standing there?” she said, turning on me. “I told you to change your clothes.”

In my room I pulled out a plain salwar kameez from the bottom dresser drawer. The satin made me sweat and the smell lingered into the next wear, reminding me that I hated wearing Indian suits almost as much as I hated this ritual of belated mourning. Even though my father had been dead for sixteen years there were still enough relatives to fill every Sunday with pity. It was always the same. We would get up, clean the house, do the laundry, mourn the past and go to sleep. We existed between past dreams and present realities, never able to do anything but wait. For what, I didn’t know.

When I was five, I’d thought we were waiting for my father to return. I had no memory of him but attempted to stitch his life together from the remnants that were everywhere. The house was full of black-and-white photographs of him from when we lived in England. Pictures of
him standing next to the guards at Buckingham Palace and of the family in front of a tiny brick row house on Warwick Road still graced the mantel. Even my mother’s closet was full of him. His starched cotton dress shirts hung neatly alongside sports jackets that smelled like yesterday’s rain. His brown-and-black leather shoes were lined up beneath the shirts and jackets, next to a locked suitcase that I pulled out to stand on in order to reach the top of the closet.

Buried on the top shelf, I found an attaché case full of documents, which I could not yet read, and behind it a photo album and shoe polish kit. Re-sisting the urge to shine my father’s shoes, I sat cross-legged beneath the empty embrace of hollow-armed suit jackets and opened the album. The yellowing photos made every face look familiar. They were the usual assort-ment of pictures—birthdays, weddings, picnics—except for four photos on the last page that were turned over.

I sat for a moment, wondering what was on the other side, before pulling back the plastic protector and peeling one of the photos offthe sticky surface. It was a picture of my father in a pink satin-lined coffin. A long garland of spring flowers like the ones I’d seen worn by newlyweds was draped around his neck. His eyes were closed and weighted, his shoulders rigid, chest tight as though he were holding his breath.

My heart skipped and fell. The descending beats echoed in my chest, palpitated in my breath. I put the photo back in the album and the album back on the top shelf, preserving my father’s death just as my mother had so carefully preserved the details of his life. Just as my father’s mother—my dadi—had when she’d come to Canada to mourn her son five years after his death.

“How we remember,” my dadi told me and my sisters, “this is how we exist.”

“The past is the only thing that matters,” she said, shaking her head like a slow pendulum between bitter glances at our braids. “It is the only thing we know.”

“We cannot make something out of nothing. That is for God to do.”

This is what we were told. This is who we were.

After dressing, I returned to the kitchen to finish my breakfast. I was always a slow eater. My mother had to force-feed me as a child, every spoonful of curry followed by a gulp of water to wash it down; I hated the bitter subzi, soft and chunky mounds of potatoes and cauliflower. “Shit”— that’s what the white kids at school had said my leftover lunches looked like. “Meena eats shit.”

Tej shuffled by me, pushing the vacuum with one hand while balancing a laundry basket of wet clothes on her hip like a baby. She leaned against the table and pushed the basket towards me. “Your turn to put these on the line to dry. And you have to vacuum. Mom and I are going to the Indian store to get groceries.”

She held up a list of chores that I would need to complete by the time they returned. I took the list from her, crumpling it in my free hand as I opened the porch door to hang the laundry out. I closed the door on her curse words.

Our porch backed onto a fenced-in grid of suburban yards dotted with broken-down garden sheds and vegetable plots that were a haven for squirrels and other rodents. No matter how quickly we picked up and composted the rotten apples and spoiled cherries, the critters would come up from the nearby bog, skulking along the top of our rickety fence in search of a meal. Once, one of the kids at school saw me chasing a raccoon offour garbage bins with a broom handle and looked disgusted, as though having raccoons in our neighbourhood were somehow my fault. We lived in one of the older grids in North Delta, a suburb just outside of Vancouver, where the large evergreens and pines were dying a slow death, mostly by crowding and years of various untreated seasonal diseases that caused the bark to peel away in long, ragged strips.

The houses on our street had been bought and sold several times and were victim to shoddy renovations, like the slanted sunroom addition next door. New neighbourhoods were devoid of such things; the ones built on flattened forests above the ravine had courts, boulevards and crescents that wound around one another to panoramic views of Boundary Bay. Each
new cedar house there looked onto both a dogwood tree planted in the sidewalk meridian and a carefully manicured postage stamp-sized front yard filled with some variation of tulips, daffodils and rhododendrons. Behind the cedar fences draped in clematis were the popular girls who spent their weekends sunbathing, sometimes topless (so the boys at school said), listening to Casey Kasem’s
American Top 40
. On a clear day I could hear them splashing in their pools and singing along with Madonna. None of them had to chase away raccoons or spend their Sundays hanging their knickers on a clothesline for the world to see.

I snapped the mismatched sheets in the air and pegged them onto the line. In the distance a squall of cloud was rising and I wondered how long it would be before the rain set in. The clouds were jagged at the ends, torn sheets of grey sky, not the kind of drifting childhood pictures that my sister Harj and I had imbued with meaning. “A boat! A car! A plane!” I’d yell. “How unoriginal,” she’d laugh. Of a cirrus cloud, I once said, “Whipped air and angel hair.” Harj was lying in the grass at the time, picking at a scab on her elbow. “Only white people can be angels,” she said, without looking up.

Halfway through my wash-load hanging, Liam appeared, walking towards the house, his long afternoon shadow turning corners before he did. As always, he was wearing his headphones, and I wondered if he was listening to the mixed tape I’d made him for his birthday.

I’d met him at the beginning of Grade 12. He’d transferred from Holy Trinity and at first didn’t go to class, preferring to wander the hallways and occasionally kick a locker door as he passed. He was rumoured to have been expelled from the Catholic school, but no one knew why. Some kids suspected he’d been kicked out for drug use and others had heard that he’d been in one too many fights, but what everyone agreed on was that he was best left a loner. Whenever he walked by, people veered out of his way, and in the crowded hallways he stood apart from the others in what seemed like contented arrogance.

Moments before our first meeting, I was rushing across the field, my face tucked into an armload of books to avoid the sun’s glare. As I approached the school’s main entrance, I saw him scaling the face of the building as if he were Spiderman. Just as I was about to walk by, he jumped
down, falling at my feet. Startled, I dropped my books. The bell rang. I was late. I knelt down and began collecting the books, occasionally grasping at my papers as they fluttered in the breeze, threatening to take flight. Liam handed me a stack of papers and a few books.

“History, don’t want to lose that one.”

“Actually, I would. But thanks.” I looked up to take them from him. The sun should have been in my eyes, but he had eclipsed everything.

Later that same day, I’d found myself sitting in front of him in history. The teacher hadn’t arrived and the class was on the verge of the usual an-archy. Liam slumped over his desk, ducking under a paper airplane as he tapped my back with his pen. “Meninder, right?”

“Meena,” I corrected, wondering how he knew my full name.

He squinted and nodded his head as if to say “All right, yeah.” He had a face that was older than his age, a square jawline and blue eyes that changed colour depending on the light.

“You live in the beige house, the one with the fucked-up trees?”

I hesitated not wanting to encourage a conversation. “Yeah, why?”

He leaned back into his chair until the front legs lifted offthe ground.

“So, you want to get out of here?”

“And go where?”

“Does it matter?”

When I said it did, he smirked as if I had missed something obvious, and left the classroom, leaving me alone and surrounded by kids who acted like I didn’t exist.

After class, he was waiting outside and asked if he could walk home with me. After working up the courage, I asked him where he ended up going and he told me, “You know, just around.”

He always said “you know” as though I did know. Somehow it made me think I did.

I pegged the last of the wash on the line and cranked it out towards the remaining patch of sun. Liam stood beneath the porch and looked up at me.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Nothing. I was going downtown, thought you might want to come.” “

I can’t.” I looked to see if my mother had seen us talking. “We’re expecting company and I have some stuffto do around here.”

“Like laundry,” he said, picking up a few of the pegs that I’d dropped. When he started up the steps to hand them to me, I rushed down the stairs, carrying the basket in front of me so he wouldn’t see me in my Indian clothes, though I suspected he would’ve seen beyond them. He never seemed to notice when my hair smelled like curry or when I wore the same clothes two days in a row.

I took the pegs from him.

He was smiling or smirking at me. I couldn’t tell which; his slight underbite made everything seem like a flirtation or dare.

I stood there in Liam’s silence. He was often like this; he didn’t feel the need to speak, to fill in the blanks, to use up air. Talking with him was always a relief.

“Maybe we could do something tomorrow?” I suggested.

“That’d be cool,” he said.

“Meena!” my mother yelled from the window, in a tone that matched the glare she shot at Liam.

“Look, I have to go. See you tomorrow.”

I rushed back up the stairs and took the empty basket inside, walking by Tej and my mother, who were on their way out.

“Gora? A white boy?” my mother snapped.

“He said hi. What was I supposed to do, not talk to him?” I pushed the vacuum into the living room and flicked it on, drowning out any hope my mother had of lecturing me about talking to white boys.

White was the colour of death and mourning; it was the only colour my mother wore apart from grey. In the kitchen, while ironing her chunni, she reminded us how to behave when the guests arrived. Tej listened and replied dutifully in her pitiful Punjabi. Although we’d attended Punjabi summer school when we were kids, her accent was still terrible—she couldn’t say the hard “t’s” the way I could but I couldn’t be bothered to make the effort,
and answered my mother’s Punjabi in English. I wondered how much was lost in this routine, which forced us to follow along a word at a time, or a word behind, interpreting what was said even when, for some expressions, there was no translation. My mother would often get frustrated and remind me that when I started preschool the only English word I knew was good-bye. As we walked home from school that first day, I waved good-bye to the bus stop, the lamppost, the trees… My mother yanked my hand, pulling me along, tired of my valediction. “Everything was good-bye,” she told my sisters later.

Steam rose to her face as she pressed the wrinkles from her chunni, the heat forcing her to look up. “Tie up your hair,” and then with one motion of her hand dismissed me to the basement washroom. She didn’t want us to use the upstairs washroom; she’d emptied the garbage and removed the diaper box-sized packs of Kotex that proved this was a house full of women. I’d been mortified when she stuffed our shopping cart full of those discounted maxi-pads at Zellers. I wanted to use tampons like the girls at school but my mother regarded the insertion of such an object as impure. I bought a box anyway and stashed it under my bed, along with the birth control pills Serena bought for me. I was only eleven when I got my first period and since my mother hadn’t let me watch the sex ed. films at school, I was sure I was bleeding to death—I thought kissing made you pregnant. After a day of enduring excruciating cramps and hiding my soiled panties in the corner of my bedroom, I confided to Serena that I was dying. When Serena told my mother that I’d started to menstruate, my mother didn’t speak to me for a week. My becoming a woman so early was a shameful reminder of our sex, of the burdens she bore.

My cramps were awful and I spent the first two days of each month at home, curled on the floor throwing up. After three years of this, my mother finally agreed to let Serena take me to the “woman doctor.” The gynecolo-gist prescribed birth control pills to regulate my cycles and ease my cramps. Serena knew my mother would not approve and made me swear to hide the pills and never tell anyone. I agreed, wondering why anyone would admit to being a virgin who used birth control. It just sounded stupid.

The guests were arriving. I heard the scurry of footsteps above as my mother took her place on the sofa and Tej rushed to get the door. I wondered how many people had come this time. Harj and I had always guessed, making a game of it. It was the only variable part of the ritual and even then it hardly varied. I waited until I heard them go upstairs before peeking into the entrance hall to survey the shoes. I thought that the sensible shoes with the evenly worn soles indicated that one of our guests was an old lady shuffling through life to the end. The gold strapless sandals probably belonged to a new bride still happy to clip-clop through life, and the two sets of men’s dress shoes creased only at the toe belonged to young men whose gait was restrained by entitlement. I slipped my foot into the bride’s sandal and pointed my toes, disappointed that there was nothing Cinderella about it.