September 19, 2016 | Occasus | Issue 6 | Creative Nonfiction

From

“She said what?”

Adam paused as he chose his next words carefully. Faint phone static and 172 kilometers lay between us.

I remembered sitting at the dining room table. It was my first time meeting his parents. He and I faced each other from across the table, and they sat between us, at the head and foot of the table. Adam’s mom had prepared a simple meal: sliced tomatoes, potatoes, and baked chicken. We all chewed our food slowly and dropped in light conversation between bites. They asked me less questions than I had expected and that had made me worried, but I was polite and I finished my plate. I helped his mother clear the table afterwards. She smiled and nodded each time I dropped something off in the kitchen. I thanked her for dinner, kissed Adam on the cheek, and took a late Greyhound home. I remembered thinking, that was okay, as the bus hurried between dark towns.

“She asked where you’re from.”

But his mom had already asked me that question herself yesterday. As I looked down at my plate and played with a loose string from the table cloth, I had told her Brookville, it’s not very far from here. My mom still lives there with my step dad. I went on to describe the little house with the long dirt driveway where I grew up. But now I knew what she meant. He knew what she meant. We all knew what it meant.

“What did you say to her?” I asked.

“I told her you were Indian.”

“Why would you say that?” A little more frantic than I meant.

“Because you are.” A statement, but it sounded more like a question.

“But I’m not.” My voice was hard, although I felt fragile.

“Yes, you are.” I tried to imagine what he was doing right then. Sitting at his computer, leaning back from the screen, maybe running his hands through his hair, or maybe rolling his baby blues.

“No. I am not.” I filled out the words with more confidence and started to pace the short stretch of my hallway in my apartment.

Another pause and static. I heard his computer chair squeak as he leaned forward, maybe burying his face into one hand while the other kept the phone in place.

“I am Canadian. I was born here,” I explained. The words were despicably familiar. I hated saying them out loud yet again.

“Yeah, but you look like—”

“Like what?”

He finally realized that silence was the best answer.

“You mean like my dad?”

He sighed.

“And what does this make me?”

“Well not like that, but—”

“What about my mother, do I look like her?”

“Sorta. But—you know what I mean.”

My turn for silence. I was so many things. Yet, I always had to answer for some things more than others. Always my dad before my mom. I barely knew him but he had left me clearly marked, like a stop sign. “I don’t know what you mean.” I lied.

“Anyway, my mom is just worried that you’re not a right fit… for me.” He shifted and a thick uncomfortableness oozed out of the receiver. “Like… culturally.” The last word hung in the air. We all knew what it meant.

I turned the word over in my head. Culturally. The phone was loose in my hand as I paced the hallway in my apartment. I had passed the mirror a hundred times and finally I looked at myself. My long brown hair was in a messy bun on top of my head. I was wearing an old basketball T-shirt and sweatpants that were much too big for me. I noticed that I was slouching so I straightened up, trying to fix my reflection. Finally, I looked into my eyes. They were shiny and sad. I didn’t realize how sad until I looked. Face to face with myself, I pretended to be Adam’s mother, meeting me for the first time.

What a slob, I thought. I decided to forgive myself for the outfit and move on.

Could use some make up. I studied the splotchiness on my cheeks and wiped the smudges from the corner of my eye with my sleeve.

Her skin… I thought.

A stark contrast to Adam’s. We all knew it.

Like shit, a different voice said. And suddenly all of the things that classmates in grade school had said to me came flooding back. Nothing too creative, but still more memorable and painful than I would like to admit. We had moved from downtown into the country and I became the new kid at school. Everyone seemed very concerned about my culture then too and kids can be cruel, I guess. I was more like the new thing at school. They had discovered my skin colour before I did. It seemed that everyone always discovered it before I did. I was an animal in a cage, but the cage was part of me. It was my body.

*

My own mother never seemed to notice.

She taught me how to read before most people learned the alphabet. We both loved peanut butter and ice cold Coke. I would sit on the counter and cut vegetables into cubes too tiny to use, and she would chatter away to me as she cooked the real meal, making sure to use words that I didn’t understand and encouraging me to ask for their meaning. When we read together, I would hold onto her arm like a pillow. Her arm was soft and milk coloured like the rest of her. We would read out loud, alternating paragraphs; first her, then me. I squeezed her arm when I got a big word right and to tell her that I loved her without breaking pace.

She was the youngest mom of all the mom’s in my grade. She was my soccer coach. Her laugh was very high and loud, and she was beautiful. A natural blonde, something the other moms seemed to be very jealous of. When she did her hair and wore her sparkly dark blue eyeliner she looked like a movie star. She had a great big closet filled with blouses and dresses in every colour.

When I became curious about what grownups talked about, I began to notice that new introductions often involved someone asking my mother who I was. The question always shook me. I would poke my head around her to look at the person who asked. Who am I? Who are you?

And then people began to ask me, “Is that your mother?”

 “Yes.”

“No, like your biological mother?”

“Yes, she’s mine.”

“You look nothing alike.”

Oh, I would think.

It was like people wanted us to be separate. We were too different and our connection seemed less valid to the judges. I wondered why she never explained this to me and I became very worried that my mother didn’t look like me. I needed people to know that I was from my mother. The ignorance of the askers became a sorry source of anxiety. I always needed people to know who my mother was; I would tell them before they even asked. Otherwise, I was just a dark shadow that trailed behind her, merely causing awkward questions. The only hint of my father ever being in her life was me. I had skin, just like him. I was from the shadows, just like him.

*

I looked into the mirror searching for signs of my mother now. My gaze connected the dots between my head and my feet, keeping a tally. Sometimes in the summer my hair would turn lighter. Not blonde like hers, but I knew that I owed the rare caramel strands to her. I had a straight nose like her, not the rounded out kind that my father had. The tally was low. We also rolled our eyes a lot and asked too many questions, but this didn’t read on the mirror’s reflective surface.

I remembered the electric cognition happening behind the eyes of the people who asked. Like stones, their unspoken assumptions fell onto me. Where are you from? I remembered the anxiety too. I realized now that I had seen the look again yesterday. My memory turned sideways and the images stretched into a bad dream. Adam’s mother silent after my answer and reeling through the questions that she wouldn’t say out loud. And me, finally reeling from the one she did. It’s not that big of a deal, I thought. It was a question, but I tried to make it sound like a statement.

I leaned against the wall and slid to the ground. The girl in the mirror’s staring had turned into glaring. I was trying to figure her out. I listened to the phone static hard, trying to figure Adam out. But really, I was just too scared to call his bluff. I thought of his face, angular and clean cut, baby blues. I thought of his skin, like milk. I thought again of what he must look like right now and I wondered if he was doing the same thing about me.

We both stayed on the call, silent.

BRITTANY TILSTRA is a fourth year student at Western who is graduating in October.