“Bring me back something?” I call after her. Pathetic. I don’t know the meaning of the word yet, but the minute I heard Mother use it about someone, I knew that’s the word I was. She’s already going out the door, but she hears me.
“Like what?” she calls over her shoulder.
You, I think, after she’s gone.
From the living room window, I watch her go. A man is waiting outside our apartment in a fancy red convertible. Chip. The one who Mother says looks a little like Montgomery Clift. Monty, Mother calls him and sort of sighs, like she’s actually met Montgomery Clift, like he’s not at all a dead stranger. When Mother calls Chip Monty, he gets angry. I’m not a queer, Chip says, and then he winks at me. I don’t wink back. I hate Chip. He looks nothing like the beautiful man I see on Mother’s black-and-white screen at night, who Mother calls by his first name only, like they’re friends. I think there’s something very wrong with Mother’s eyes if she sees Monty in Chip. Apparently, Chip is Connected to the Industry, Mother says—whatever that means, Grand-Maman always adds—and if he could get Mother a role in his next film project, wouldn’t that be so wonderful for Mother? Then Mother wouldn’t have to slave her days away in Ladies Apparel at the Bay, dealing with those god-awful ladies. So difficult the ladies are, Belle, Mother says, closing her eyes as if she can still see them in her mind. But difficult’s one thing, she whispers. Mother can handle difficult. Mother can handle anything, she’s a survivor, after all. What’s trying for Mother about the ladies who shop in Ladies Apparel is that they have No Style. All they want are the saddest slacks. Sweaters to fucking drown in, even when Mother is very happy to show them other options. They always choose Death by Polyester. Mother sometimes wants to ask them why not just go down to Hardware and buy a garbage bag and wade into the Saint Lawrence River and have done with it? It’s the lack of style, the lack of dreaming, that gives Mother a migraine every night when she comes home. So that she has to sit in the dark for a very long time watching old movies to do what she calls cleanse. And if I’m quieter than quiet, if I let Mother sit and smoke on the couch, watching the TV screen like it’s a window to the most magical world, mouthing the words she knows by heart, I can sit with her. And Mother might even pat my hand, point at the screen with her cigarette, at Elizabeth Taylor or Gene Tierney or Catherine Deneuve, and say, See? Now that’s style. I see, I say, but I’m still looking at Mother’s face fixed on the screen, dreaming herself into this other world. Her face looks like it never does. Soft. Open. Like she could cry any second, but she won’t. The Bay and its ladies have left her mind. Or it’s Mother who left, the screen took her away. Opened a door and Mother walked through it. Movies do that to Mother, open something usually closed. I guess they do that to me, too, sometimes. Certain ones, anyway. If Chip or the Troll or whoever got Mother a good role, just one, Mother could leave the Bay and its ladies forever. She’d torch it on her way out the door. Set all the slacks and sweaters on fire, she wouldn’t be sorry. They’d burn up quick, she says, made as they mostly are from cheap materials.
Now Chip grins when he sees Mother walking toward him in her white suit, which she bought with her Bay discount—what Mother calls the one saving grace. When I look at Chip grinning, I think of wolves dressed as sheep. Fangs hidden in the woolly white. She gets in the car, which opens funny, sort of like the doors of the car in Back to the Future. She doesn’t see me watching her from the window. Fogging up the glass. Telling her don’t go.
“Get away from the window, Belle,” Grand-Maman says. Sitting behind me in her nightgown of pink lace, eating religieuse and watching All My Children in her dark corner. Even in the bright June afternoon, Grand-Maman somehow makes wherever she sits a dark corner. Her jeweled fingers are sticky with syrup. She’s taken her teeth out so she can taste. I become aware of the smell of her. Old bread and throw up and Shalimar. Jewels clinking softly. Stones of all shades shimmering from her neck, her wrists, her fingers. Some given to her by her dead husband, my grand-père, and by my father back when he was courting Mother. Other men too. Apparently, everyone used to give Grand-Maman gold like she was royalty. Now she drips with it. She was a great beauty once, Mother says. When she says that, I think of Grand-Maman’s drooping mouth and her tiny eyes in her bloodless face. Her gray-white hair sticking up like an electrocuted puffball. What happened? I asked Mother. And for a second I thought she was going to smack me. But she just shrugged. She threw it away. She gave it up.