Not Suitable For Family Viewing (12 page)

Tuesday, 10:30 a.m.

You, You and Mimi
(rerun)

“The Look of Love.” Mimi’s personal stylist, Lucy Grant, gives desire-inducing fashion tips for the woman in love.

I get up. I wash my hair. I pop in my contacts and slap on a bit of mascara. I put on that turquoise shirt and those new jeans Anita got me. They fit perfectly. I love Anita.

I ride to the library in a daze. It’s amazing I find my way there. I don’t pay attention at all. I’m completely in my head, in yesterday, on the beach, in the van, with Levi. When I realize I’m talking to myself, I just laugh. Levi would laugh at me for doing something like that.

I lean my bike up against the railing, then try the library door. It’s locked. The sign says, Open: 1–5. I’ve got half an hour to wait.

It doesn’t bother me. The sun’s managed to come out. It’s almost warm. I flip through the church bulletins just to look like I’m doing something other than thinking about Levi. I try to remind myself that he’s a Charming Billy but it doesn’t do much good. I keep hearing him say,
I was going to kiss you
…, and I end up doing this full body smile.

I glance again at that picture of Mom as a kid. I think of the beach and the Ingrams and the Bisters, then I think of Mom and Dad and me together in that old cabin doing jigsaw puzzles. That makes me think of being on that plane with Mom when we played cribbage all the way to Buenos Aires as if she didn’t have another thing in the world to do. Then I remember the time she bought me a book about bodily fluids that she thought was disgusting but was exactly what I wanted and how sweet she always is with Grandpa even when the nurses aren’t around and I end up doing something I haven’t done in ages.

I call her.

“Mimi Schwartz.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Robin? Is something the matter?”

“No, no. I just thought I’d call. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to you before I left.”

“Oh, phew! Darling. You scared me. Well, I’m glad you’re okay. Do you need money?”

“No, I’m fine. I’m great. How are you?”

“Me? Oh, you know. Busy. I’ve got to shoot a bunch of promos for next season. We’re opening that Institute for Culturally Deprived Children tonight. On top of everything, the new James Bond stood us up for tomorrow’s show. Honestly! Who does he think he is? His abs better be a whole heck of a lot better than the last guy’s or he’s not going to get away with stuff like that. I have no idea how we’re going to fill his thirteen minutes. I could pull in Tom Hanks again but…Oh, hold on, honey…Yeah…okay…okay. In a sec…Birdie?”

“Yeah?”

“Sorry, gotta run. Ingrid’s finally managed to get one of the victims of that big silicone scam on the line for me. Was there anything else you wanted?”

“Uh, well, no. I just thought that maybe when I’m back and everything we could talk about some stuff…”

“Sure. Like what?”

“Um. Well, our family, I guess. I just realized I don’t know anything about my, like, background, you know.”

“Uh…okay…Fine.”

“You mind?”

“No, no, darling, of course not! Mimi mind? Please! I completely understand. Spending a couple of weeks with your dad would make anyone worry about their family background…Just kidding!…Sorry…I’m coming! I’m coming!…Honey? I’ve really got to run. All the networks are trying to reach this woman. I’ve got to get her while I can!”

“That’s okay.”

“Bye, darling!”

“Bye, Mom.”

I say, “I love you” too, but she’s hung up by then.

Tuesday, 1 p.m.

Ego Altered
(film)

Mimi Schwartz shines in her role as a displaced person who tries to disguise her past at war’s end. A hit at Sundance.

I guess she must have had an audience. She was using her “Mimi” voice. Doing all that “Darling!,” “Please!” and “Gotta run!” stuff.

That’s okay. She’s busy. I only feel sad for a second.

Levi’s probably the reason. It’s kind of hard to be sad when he keeps flashing on my brain screen like some gorgeous computer pop-up.

I don’t think it’s just that, though. It’s Mom too. I think maybe I’m not sad because I understand her now—something
about
her now anyway. I know why she’s not who she seems to be on TV, why she’s not who she seems to be at home.

She’s got a secret.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s definitely something going on here. There’s something about her she doesn’t want people to know. (The world might not believe it but Mimi Schwartz has secrets too.)

I take
It’s All About Mimi
out of my backpack. I look at that picture of her on the cover with her crooked smile and her crossed arms and her raised eyebrow. She looks like she’s exactly who people think she is. Funny. Confident. A little bit on the racy side. In other words—nothing like my mother at all.

I go through the book until I find that picture of her as a kid. It dawns on me that I might be able to recognize something in the background, now that I sort of know Port Minton.

I crouch over the page like I’m a scientist squinting at some little amoeba. I can’t see much. The picture’s really grainy, and there’s hardly any background to identify anyway. For the first time, I notice part of someone’s hand in the bottom of the frame. Mom wasn’t by herself after all. Someone had their arm around her waist.

Seeing that makes me think Mom’s childhood might not have been as lonely as she claims. (It could just be my current frame of mind but that makes me feel happy.)

I get out the church bulletin to see if I can tell where the other photo was taken.

The faces of the kids are pretty blurry, but the area behind them is sharp. It’s obvious it’s Port Minton beach. In the background I can see the big boulder Levi and I climbed. (That makes me even happier.)

I study the picture some more, and suddenly, it’s like I can’t breathe. I open the book again. I line up the two pictures side by side on my lap. In the church bulletin, Rosie (or whatever you want to call her) is wearing a striped T-shirt and her hair is in pigtails. One of the other girls—Lenore, maybe—has her hand around Rosie’s waist.

In the book, Mimi’s wearing a button-up shirt. Her hair is cut to her chin and her bangs go straight across her forehead. There’s a hand around Mimi’s waist too.

Okay. So what? It’s the classic snapshot pose. People line up with their arms around each other. The photographer takes the picture. Everyone moves apart.

But it’s not just the same pose in both pictures. It’s
exactly
the same pose. The hand, the watch, the way the thumb kind of disappears—identical. The tilt of Rosie/Mimi’s head, the slight curl of her lips, the jut of her elbow—it’s a perfect copy.

My heart’s pounding like a sound effect in a slasher movie. I root around in the side pocket of my backpack and get the envelope I tucked away. I take out the photo I found in Mom’s chair. I put it beside the other two.

The one from the chair and the one from the church bulletin are identical. People, clothes, hair, background.

The one from Mimi’s book would have been identical too—before someone Photoshopped it, that is. Photoshopped out the other kids, the striped T-shirt, the beach. Drew in a new shirt, restyled her hair and—now that I get a better look—did a little something to her nose too.

I turn the photo over in my lap. I can’t look at it any more. I have to calm down.

I force myself to take some deep breaths. In through my nose, out through my mouth. In through my nose, out through my mouth. Things start to make sense. Now that I’m thinking straight again, I don’t know why this would have scared me. Of course Mimi would cover her tracks like that! For some reason, she doesn’t want
anyone to recognize her as a kid. She
had
to retouch the photo for the book. Otherwise, someone would have seen it, would have made the connection, would have called
Entertainment Tonight.

But why does Mimi still care so much after all this time? What’s she got to hide? You’d think confessing to all the plastic surgery and men and those eighties dance outfits of hers would be way worse than this—whatever “this” is.

I’m trying to figure everything out when the librarian walks up the stairs. I shove the photo in the envelope, stick it in the backpack. She says, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here! I ran into Muriel Faulkner at the Save-Easy. She’s coming in this afternoon to pick up that Mimi Schwartz book. I hope you brought it?…Good.” She wrinkles up her nose and whispers, “I knew I could trust you.”

She hands me the big box she’s carrying and unlocks the door. “I’m very excited. I found lots of material for you. I hope it’s helpful.”

She turns on the lights and opens a couple of windows. “Ooh. Pee-yew! This place gets so stuffy when it’s closed up for a few days. It’s like I can smell old Enos here himself.”

She bends her head and looks at me over her glasses. “Please don’t tell anyone I said that. I should be shot. This library is a huge blessing for the town.” Her voice gets all strained as she tries to pull open another window. “I’d just find it a whole lot easier to be grateful if I hadn’t actually known the man.”

She takes the box from me and puts it on a table. “Don’t tell anyone I said that either. Especially Mrs. Hiltz. Which reminds me…she’d be delighted to have a little chat with you this afternoon.”

I go, “Who? What?”

“Mrs. Hiltz. Mrs.
Enos
Hiltz. Remember I said a friend of my
mother’s was a Port Minton girl? That’s her. She lives just around the corner. She naps from one to two but said she’ll be home for the rest of the afternoon if you’d like to drop by.”

I don’t know what my face is doing but the librarian obviously figures out that I’m not thrilled at the idea.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “You’ll enjoy it. She’s a great old bird. Everything Enos wasn’t. Cultured, down-to-earth, decent. She really worked hard for the underprivileged around here. Enos gouged the money out of people.
She
made sure most of it got back to them.”

I say, “Sounds great.”

She tucks in her chin and gives me this lame smile. I feel bad I’m not a better actress.

She says, “If you’re worried about getting stuck there too long with her, arrive at about four. She’ll be sure to hustle you out the door by five so she can pour herself a glass of sherry…In the meantime, any questions and I’ll be in the back. My name’s Joan.”

I thank her and sit down in front of the box. There’s a pile of stuff here. I wonder if Rosie/Mimi’s in any of it. I really need to find out what’s going on. There’s just something so creepy about that Photoshopped picture.

Minutes from town council meetings, letters to the mayor, newspaper clippings about the school closing, all the stuff that Joan no doubt worked so hard to find for me—I throw it aside. I find a bunch of photos in a big brown folder. Most aren’t very interesting. Just people holding signs saying Save Our School or men in ties looking seriously at some official document.

And then there’s the photo of the last Sunday school class of the Port Minton United Baptist Church.

The colours are faded but it’s still sharp. There are only eleven kids, all lined up by height. I turn the photo over. Someone’s written down their names and ages.
Rosie Ingram, 15,
is in the back row, third from the left. I flip the picture back over. It’s her all right. She’s older but it’s definitely the same girl who was on the beach.

I feel sort of intensely calm, if you can be such a thing. I know what I have to do. I get out the church bulletins. I go through them all. Rosie Ingram is mentioned in three of them. Once at the church picnic. Once two years later for helping organize the little kids’ Christmas pageant. And then again in the bulletin’s final issue: “Congratulations go as well to Rosie Ingram for a perfect ten-year attendance record at our Sunday school.”

A perfect ten-year attendance record.

It takes me a few seconds to understand exactly what those words mean. Mimi wasn’t just in Port Minton for camp or to visit relatives. She grew up here. She wasn’t home-schooled in Brooklyn. She wasn’t some little fourteen-year-old stuck at home looking after her mother.

She was Rosie Ingram from Port Minton, Nova Scotia.

Tuesday, 2:30 p.m.

You, You and Mimi

“Birthday Bloopers.” Ten new mothers share their horror stories from the maternity ward.

I’m not sure how long I just sit here, doing nothing, letting it all seep in. It’s like I’m at the dentist’s, waiting for the anaesthetic to kick in enough that I can get a tooth filled. I have to wait until I’m numb enough to go on.

How did Rosie/Mimi/Whoever get from here to where she is now?

There are a bunch of high school yearbooks in the box. I take a deep breath and start there.

I do the math and figure that if Mom’s forty-two now, she probably finished high school about twenty-four years ago. I find the right yearbook and turn to the graduation photos. There are lots of Ingrams but no Rosies. Nothing even close. I flip back to the photo in the church bulletin. The other girls’ names are all listed there. I look them up in the yearbook. No Kathy Whynacht, Lenore Tanner or Tracy-Lynn Carter either.

Funny. Did they move away? Were they just church friends? Or did the school have a really high drop-out rate?

I kind of laugh when the obvious next question hits me: or did Mom just lie about her age?

Of course
she lied about her age. She might have called herself Rosie, but she was still Mimi.

I scan through some older yearbooks. They’re pretty much what you’d expect. Bad skin, thick bangs and glasses the size of ski goggles. There are Badminton Clubs, Debating Clubs and something called the Glee Club. (Is it only me—or is that kind of sad? How desperate do you have to be to join something called the Glee Club?) There’s a boys curling team, a girls curling team and a co-ed curling team made up of all the same people as on the boys and girls teams. There’s a pretty sorry-looking excuse for a basketball team.

And then there’s the hockey team.

Year after year—a good ten pages of it. It’s clearly the biggest show in town. There are endless pictures of kids getting trophies, scoring goals, piling up on each other after another big win. I wonder which one of those boys owned the ring.

I find a Roberta Ingram and for a second I think maybe Rosie is her nickname—but no. It couldn’t be. I doubt they’re even related. There’s no resemblance at all. Roberta has shoulders that run off the edge of the page. That would be a physical impossibility for a little bird like Mimi. (There’s only so much the plastic surgeon can do.) There are lots more Whynachts and Tanners and Carters too but not the ones I’m looking for.

What happened to all those girls?

I get out some more yearbooks. I’ve got this buzz in my head. I don’t know what it’s about but it’s bugging me.

I absentmindedly turn pages. It’s strange watching the styles change and people get almost more familiar or something. I see guys go from stick boys to captains of the hockey team, girls go from sort of nothing to prom queens.

There’s hope for me yet.

That makes me think of Levi saying,
Good thing you’re pretty
…I get a little stomach flip and for a few seconds I’m gone. I’m still turning the pages but I’m not here any more. I’m not concerned about Mom or Rosie any more. I’m back on the beach with Levi, reliving what happened, rewriting a bit, blushing.

That’s why I’m amazed I even notice. I’m so totally lost in my own world I don’t know how the words manage to get through, but they do. I turn a page and the name
Rosemary Miriam Ingram
just jumps right out at me.

Rosemary Ingram.

Miriam.

Mimi.

Levi disappears from my head. I stare at the page. There’s a picture of Rosie. She’s about eighteen in it but she hasn’t changed much from the Sunday school photo. You can see it’s the same kid despite the big glasses and the bad perm. This time, she’s not smiling, not even a bit. You get the feeling she hates having her picture taken. (Who wouldn’t with that perm?)

There’s one of those stupid yearbook captions underneath the picture.

Being shy isn’t all bad. Rosie’s the only kid in Port Minton High who never got kept after school for talking in class! (Ha-ha!) Still waters run deep so we know Rosie’s bound for great things! Good luck in the future, Rosie!

At first I think,
Mom’s not shy!
But I know immediately that’s wrong. Mimi might not be, but Mom is. She’s always found it way easier to talk to a camera than to a real live person. (Or at least to her real live daughter.)

I flip through the rest of the yearbook. Kathy, Lenore and Tracy-Lynn are all there too—and having a fabulous time by the look of it. I even find Debbie the hairdresser and her big-shouldered Roy.

I close the book and, for the first time, notice the date.

The yearbook only came out eighteen years ago.

It couldn’t be! There’s something wrong here.

Mom was pregnant with me eighteen years ago.