Fiction: Find Her

NO ONE WOULD ever have accused her of being a bad mother. But despite her best intentions, that is what she was. It wasn’t that she neglected them in any way. In fact, it was the opposite. If she was guilty of anything this time around, it was a complete lack of neglect, but it was that lack of neglect that they were so desperate to escape. It was the smothering and over-protectiveness, the offers, the worries, and the hovering—it was everything she did and everything she didn’t do that tried their patience, provoked their eye rolls, and elicited from them rude, monosyllabic responses frequently accompanied by the slamming of a bedroom door. It was the caring that drove them crazy and the truth that broke their hearts, knowing even as children that they never needed to be mothered as much as she needed to mother them.

It was because of this helicopter style of parenting that Susan had moved out to Vancouver for university and Jacob had moved out right after high school graduation to a downtown walk-up, managing somehow to scrape together his rent while spending most days doing nothing more than slouching in coffee-stained jeans on a coffee-stained sofa dragged in from the back lane and rolling joints with his buddy, Mike.

So that only Bayla, the youngest, was left at home, alone with their well-meaning but clueless father and their well-meaning but desperate, traumatized, petrified, and erratic mother.

Bayla could not remember a time when she had not been embarrassed by their mother. By her accent, black-laced oxfords, apron double knotted at the back, long sleeves no matter the weather, and daily dusting of the thick plastic covering every inch of the upholstered furniture in the living room which, despite its name, was never sat in, let alone lived in. Mostly she was embarrassed by her mother’s ignorance of the things that other mothers knew, or the things that other mothers at least knew not to say or do. But Bayla was both too young and too good to leave. Which is why, she was sure, she was the one who was meant to find her.

But it was Jacob who did.

He hadn’t been home in weeks and so when Mike mentioned that he’d be driving that way, Jacob decided to catch a ride with him. He had hated living with his parents, but he didn’t hate his parents. And, unlike his sisters, he loved his mother’s cooking, or at least loved it enough to crave it after three days of leftover pizza.

“Thanks man,” he said, nudging open the door of the Datsun. “Catch you later.”

Hoisting his pseudo laundry bag over his shoulder Jacob strode up the walkway of his childhood home, not a trace of shame or humility dogging his step. Letting himself in through the front door, he dropped the bag and called out, “Ma, hi. It’s me,” as he walked into the kitchen, expecting to find her there.

When he didn’t, he called out again. “Ma. It’s me. Where are you?”

He glanced out the window to the backyard then walked back through the kitchen to the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, as he had done since he was a toddler, while calling out for his mother.

But she wasn’t upstairs.

And yet, he knew that she had to be home. It was Tuesday after all, not Monday or Thursday, her errand days, and not every second Friday, her hairdresser day. Afraid of traffic, noises, crowds, and people in general, about what might happen, and what had already happened, she only went out when she abso- lutely had to.

I guess she’s doing laundry, Jacob thought, bounding back down to the main floor and swinging open the door to the basement.

“Mom,” he called loudly. “Are you down here?”

LINDA BRENNER FROM across the street was looking out her living room window when the Datsun pulled up and Jacob strolled out of the car. She was still standing there ten minutes later when the ambulance screeched to a stop in front of her neighbor’s house. Rushing out her front door, Linda turned her head just as Bayla appeared at the end of the block. Linda saw the girl look up and saw her begin to run, and so she ran towards her.

“It must be your mother,” Linda said. “I’ll take you in my car. We’ll follow the ambulance.”

“IT’S FUNNY,” THEIR father remarked as they sat on molded plastic chairs waiting to speak to the doctor. “I thought that if I loved her and made her feel safe, that would be enough. But she never stopped fearing the knock on the door.”

“Funny, ironic,” Jacob added. “Not funny, ha ha.”

SONYA WAS RELEASED from hospital two weeks later, just as the first snowfall of the season began, arriving without warning and announcing with ferocity its true nature and conceit. It was here to stay.

That was not a good sign. Winter in Winnipeg was not life affirming. Contrite, withered, thin and pale, Sonya seemed a shadow of the shadow that she had always been, but she put up a brave front, gathered her children around her and told them that they need not worry anymore.

“I am going to be okay,” she promised. “The doctor….”

“Psychiatrist,” Ben quietly interjected, reaching for his wife’s hand.

“Yes. The psychiatrist is helping. Everything will be better now,” she lied.

Two days later, Ben returned to his office in a downtown outerwear factory where he could sit undisturbed for hours thinking, or not thinking, about his wife while fending off competition from China. Susan returned to Vancouver to beg for an extension on a sociology paper due the next Monday, and Jacob, needing his space now more than ever, cocooned himself in his apartment and stopped bringing his laundry home. Bayla returned to school, where she politely declined the guidance counsellor’s offer to talk, and resented, worried, and checked on her mother a dozen times a day.

ON THOSE COUNTLESS afternoons that she had stood on the corner of Euclid and Main, her fishnet stockings riding up her bottom, her feet aching from worn stiletto heels, and her eyes following the stop and go of traffic, pleading silently for a glance her way, an offer or an invitation, Linda could not possibly have imagined how her life was going to change. Or that it ever would.

When he first appeared, he seemed no different than the others. Slightly embarrassed and awkward, but not unkind. By the second time, she knew that he had come to rescue her. He bought her coffee. Bought her dinner. Treated her well. Asked her questions about her life. Told her about his. And then begged her to marry him.

“You know nothing about me,” she told him. “How can you want to marry me?”

“I know what I want,” he answered. “I will give you a good life. You won’t be unhappy.”

What could she say? By then she had been alone in the world for so long, with no one to advise, encourage or dissuade her—no one, other than him, to even offer her a kind word. And by then, again because of him, she had begun to appreciate certain comforts that she had no idea she had been missing, comforts that she had no idea even existed. More than anything, she’d become accustomed to a life indoors, and because winter had already sent its unrepentant save the date, she finally said yes.

That evening he took her to meet his sisters, two short, squat, dowdy middle-aged spinsters living in a west end bungalow that looked just like them. Bobbing and clucking around her like hens in a coop, they eyed her from top to bottom, forced their smiles, and showed her into their dustless lamp-lit living room. They had been warned to ask nothing about her life. She had been warned to let him do all the talking.

The next time she saw them was at the wedding reception four months later, a small affair to which he’d invited his sisters, two cousins, and his closest friends, and she had invited no one. The sisters stood on their tiptoes and greeted her with identical arms-length embraces and air kisses, but no mazel tov escaped their lips, while his friends, four men he had grown up with, hugged her affectionately while wondering aloud how she had convinced a lifelong playboy to finally tie the knot. As they nudged and winked at one another as though they knew the answer, their wives, all of them dressed for a witches’ coven, forced their smiles and murmured congratulations through gritted teeth before hooking their arms into the crook of their husbands’ elbows and tugging them towards the buffet table. She knew what they said about her, and she knew that most of it was true. Except for the gold-digging part. He had come looking for her.

“They judge you because they don’t know you,” her husband told her. “But they’ll soon see what a good person you are.”

THEY LEFT FOR their honeymoon in Niagara Falls the next afternoon. It was her first time on a plane. Her first time staying at a hotel as an overnight guest.

They slept in late the morning after their arrival, ordered breakfast in bed, then spent the day strolling through souvenir shops, turning snow globes over with child-like glee and flip- ping through carousels of wish you were here postcards. That evening they ate dinner at the finest restaurant in town and the next afternoon they stood on the deck of the Maid of the Mist, clinging to one another in knee-length yellow raincoats as the spray from the falls baptized their union. Strolling back to the hotel, they stopped in front of a life-sized Elvis and asked a

young man, a new groom himself, to take their photo with their new disposable camera.

Maybe this will be okay, Linda thought. Maybe life will be good.

When they returned to Winnipeg they began searching for a house. He knew what he was looking for, what he wanted to give her. She would have been happy with much less.

“I don’t need a big house,” she told him. “I’ll be…. ”
But he wouldn’t let her finish.
“We can afford a nice home,” he insisted. “I want you to have the best. We’ll find a neighborhood where there will be lots of children and women for you to be friends with.”

She knew there was no point arguing with him, so she smiled her acquiescence, thinking as she did that no matter where they lived there probably wouldn’t be many women who would want to be friends with her.

But in that regard, it turned out, she wasn’t entirely right.

Yes, there were those who looked at her, judged her, and avoided her from the moment she and her husband moved into the three-bedroom bungalow in the middle of the street in the city’s newest suburb, but there were an equal number of neigh- bors eager to welcome and embrace her. Within the first week there were two invitations to stop by for a cup of coffee, a Player’s cigarette extended her way, unsolicited but not unwelcomed advice about lawn maintenance, and even an invitation to be the fourth for mah jong.

After that, it didn’t take long for them to begin to ask her where she came from and what she did before meeting her hus- band, and she answered with as much truth as she dared before turning the questions back on her inquisitors. In this way she learned that despite their cookie-cutter appearance, the women in her neighborhood were not all alike. Some still cleaved to past disappointments, while others quietly rued dreams unfulfilled and compromises too easily made. Some even had stories and scars that were similar to hers, if not precisely the same. She was not the only one, she learned, who had taken desperate mea- sures; not the only one who had married for the wrong reasons.

IT WAS FROM these women that Linda learned about Sonya, or learned as little as they knew.

She came from Europe. After the war. That is all we know.

We have tried for years to get to know her. But she wants nothing to do with us.”

She barely even says hello.

For Linda there was much to learn and much to get used to. But by listening, watching, and mimicking her neighbors she learned to maneuver through the maze of suburbia, the dos and don’ts about homemaking and child rearing—for when the time came—supermarket specials, charity clothing drives, kugel recipes, and the merits of dry-cleaning home delivery. She began to relax. After all, it was not difficult to live this life. There were few demands placed on her and far too many comforts.

Her husband was elated. “See, I told you,” he would say whenever she mentioned a kindness or a conversation. “I knew that this was the right thing for us to do.”

True to his word, he remained doting and devoted, caring and respectful, and by the time summer began to fade he had teased from her a reciprocal affection that could have passed as love.

THAT FALL THEY began trying to get pregnant. He had presumed, although he never asked, that she wanted children, and she had never said or done anything to dissuade him of the idea. Six months later, she woke up in the morning knowing that she was, and when she told him, he picked her up, swung her around, told her he loved her, and went to phone his sisters. Neither one asked to speak with her.

“If it’s a girl I would like to call her Rachel, for my mom,” he told her, lying beside her that night, his hand, large and protective over her belly. “And if it’s a boy, you can pick. What are your traditions for naming babies? I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t know. Do you name for the living or for the dead?”

She feigned her excitement as much as she could, but she couldn’t quell her worry. She wanted so much to tell him, but what would she have said?

I am already a mother, but I was judged to be unfit.

And so, I stand at our living room window every afternoon at 3:30 to watch the neighborhood children walk home from school. I hope that I will see her, although I don’t know what she looks like. I hope that she will come knock on our door, although she can’t possibly know where I live.

IT WAS FROM that window vantage point that Linda had seen the ambulance the first time it arrived. But she was at an obstetrician appointment when it was called the second time four weeks later. Her new friends were huddled on the sidewalk in their winter coats when she pulled up to her house after the appointment, and they rushed towards her as soon as she opened her car door.

We have sad news.

SHIVA WAS HELD in the living room with the plastic furniture coverings removed. Linda brought over a kugel, put it in the fridge, then sat beside Bayla and held her hand.

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg journalist, editor, oral historian, and fiction writer.