My Sister Sea

My mother left in a taxi late December and I’ve had a stitch in my side ever since.  

She came into my room and said I am leaving and all I said – I didn’t know she meant forever – was okay bye. At breakfast I felt the needle go in, lunchtime the thread was through, and by dinner it was knotted, shorn, permanent.

We didn’t tell anyone she was gone.

It only came out a couple of days before summer holidays. I’d been saying my mother was at home for so long I almost believed it, but Mrs. Rule, my grade five teacher said Shell stay after class and she made me sit in a chair next to her, she held my hand in mid-air and said she understood. I looked at my shoes, one darker than the other, and knew she didn’t.

Of course my father wished he’d beaten my mother to it.

He left for the mill every morning at six thirty and I got up not only to make his lunch, but to say, when I handed it to him at the door, you’ll be back, right? to which he said something resembling ugh to which I said something resembling please don’t die. I know this sounds like a ballad but he did die the following year – in a workplace accident – and my brother Clive, my senior by twelve years, said he wanted to take care of me and for the first time, it felt like we were a family.

That summer, Sea moved in next door with Grandmother Purdy who wasn’t her real grandmother, and pretty soon Mrs. Purdy up and died – hang in there ballad’s almost over – and since we’d recently been awarded a lot of money, the mill was found negligent in our father’s death, we decided to take care of Sea, so we went and took her from the orphanage on the reserve, all she brought with her was a fizzled-up toothbrush.

I used to look down at our legs when we were squished into the chair watching TV, hers were smooth and dark, mine were white and goose-bumped, I was scraggly, but Sea, she was beautiful, elegant without trying, and this new sister of mine became my surrogate everything.

Lake Superior shone through the trees of our backyard like a mirage, wickedly cold, but when July melted into August we swam all we could, our headaches and numbness intense but temporary, we dove from the cliffs wearing our running shoes and scrambled out to do it again. Clive made us wear life jackets unless we could touch, we were on the honour system about it, he swam far out beyond the breaking waves back and forth like he was motorized. 

He didn’t die, the ballad was over, tragedy left us the summer Sea came.

She slept in the bedroom that had been our parents’, we turned the mattress for her and got new sheets with big bright flowers all over, she wore green pajamas, she was a wild sleeper, her blankets rippled on the floor when I went in to wake her, her slender limbs gave stems and leaves to the flowers, she opened her eyes so blue they named her Sea.

We were on the honour system about the life jackets and everything else from the start. Clive didn’t have time for babysitting he said and it was true, he held down a job at the mill and studied by correspondence at night, he was a runner, he went out every afternoon no matter what and at first I turned on the TV and plunked into our chair instead of doing homework, but Sea stayed at the kitchen table and I eventually drifted back to her side, she would ask me questions not so much about homework but other things, do you believe in God, how many days are in February, what if they come get me.

Sea was always calm, but my heart beat fast, my nerves were acute, my energy coiled, I was ready when Clive said come on let’s go for a run, and exactly when I started running, Sea started cooking. 

That first night we came home the house smelled like somebody else’s, there were three plates on the table, she said dinner’s ready, I was feeling wonderful, I don’t think we said a word as we ate but we smiled and sparkled eyes at one another, we laughed at nothing but our own happiness, our effervescent futures, Clive had recently decided to pursue law, I was a born runner, Sea had discovered food. 

The doorbell rang, we hollered COME IN! – we heard her say hello? – she came to the kitchen doorway and stood tenderly, she could have been Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, she could have been Marilyn Monroe or Zsa Zsa, but she was none of them, she was our mother.

You painted the kitchen, she said through a sort of disbelief, her gaze traveled the fresh terrain, got stuck in the corners like spiders, she looked everywhere, her eyes dipped into each slot of our four-slice toaster, they swirled into each copper-bottomed hanging pot, over the stainless steel water filtration system on the counter, she stood on the new checkerboard floor in high heels where she used to pad tired and barefoot across meadow-coloured linoleum, everything was different, the window previously curtained, now bare it seemed bigger, you could see the last wrinkles of the lake through the trees, it was spring but no leaves yet, dusk but not dark, my mother slid into the fourth chair across from Clive, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking or if.

We played catch with our eyes.

One big tear plopped on the table, another fell to its side and we watched it join the first, Clive handed her his napkin which she placed at her lips, the tears continued to fall. I couldn’t muster a word, I couldn’t move, my stitch was killing me, I wasn’t sure if it was from the run, the spice-speckled trout, or if my thread had become a tightrope upon which my high heeled mother attempted to balance. Clive looked at me, he said, Shell? You okay? That’s when I keeled over, I felt myself go like when you fall asleep again after waking up in the morning, you know you’re going going gone.

I still wonder what would have broken the silence had it not been for my noisy chair, the slam of my head, I heard another chair fly, my mother said my name, and then nothing more.

Where’s Sea? was the first thing I said she whispered right here and I went back to sleep but they kept waking me, they wouldn’t let me drift off, even Sea poked and prodded through my pleading to be left alone. I was on the couch in the living room Sea at my head Clive at my feet, my mother beside me holding my hand, she wouldn’t let go, Clive tickled my feet, Sea shook my shoulders, their words were distorted like tubas. I don’t know what was said but a few days later when I was able to get up, my stitch had resumed its tension at its original position, and my mother was gone.

Two weeks later I went into Judy’s Dress Shop, I was looking for something to wear for grade eight graduation, and the tulle-skirted woman who waltzed from behind the dressing room curtain was my mother. 

I didn’t sleep last night remembering this mother who wanted and yet did not want. There was a confidence about her, an uninhibited grace, for tulle is not for the feint of heart, and instead of sleeping I imagined her coming over and over from behind the curtain like a dress rehearsal, her gown one colour then another. 

She wore a band holding her hair from beneath like the we can do it war poster, the same fabric as the dress which she made, she made all the dresses in the large and empty store like a dance floor, three mannequins in the window like sisters from a Jane Austen novel, three more posed in front of the mirror along the right wall, three at the back wall, and a single one, partially dressed, her finger to her lips, shhhhh, she peeked out from behind the curtain. 

Each mannequin had her hair the same war-poster way, there was a strength there, something almost tribal, you weren’t sure if they came to life whether they would be lovers or killers.

I asked where she was staying and she said in the back and I said you’re living in the store? She said until Judy comes back from Florida, yes, she’s hired me to make the summer dresses. How about I make you one for graduation?

I looked around uncertain, these dolls were not kidding around, my mother said not like these, I’ll make it special for you.

Sea, too?

Yes. Why don’t you come both of you Saturday, and we’ll start.

But we were young. Saturday me and Clive ran fifteen miles, Sea made slow-cooked chicken, she followed my mother’s hand-written recipe card, she measured out scant and generous, tablespoons and pinches, it wasn’t until 4:30 we scrambled downtown, I was gritty, she was powdered with flour and seasoning. We crashed in and there was my mother, she held swatches of gorgeous colour, Sea went right for the purple, I went for the light blue, my mother put the warm swatch around my neck and tied it on top of my head like the war girls she said it was a perfect match for my eyes – I hadn’t been so close to her for years, I felt her breath and watched her mouth she was beautiful – she did the same with Sea and said how gorgeous her skin colour, how luxurious, eyes like jewels.

She let us keep the hairbands and we went back Monday after school and asked for another one each, she took our measurements carefully over our clothes, they were identical, a shock because we wore them so differently. We went back every day that week for a new hairband, my mother eventually handed us circles like halos with a few stretchy inches at the back – she invented the hairband and we made it a fad – she taught us in the coming weeks how to use the sewing machine and let us make our own for which we charged our eager friends fifty cents each, and girls we didn’t know, double.

When Judy came back, the store was doing better than it had in years and Judy renovated, bought three new window mannequins, these new ones traded their grace for a different kind of allure, modern and aloof. My mother got a substantial raise and rented a two-bedroom condo on Main Street in between Judy’s and our house, the bigger of the bedrooms was her sewing room, it looked over the street, and when I went in the evenings, a stitch in my side, the mannequins she had rescued from the garbage gazed my way so pleased to see me.

We watched for Sea, the shape of her in the darkness at first and then beneath the streetlights she faded and brightened over and over until she was beneath us, I buzzed her in, my stitch thrummed, she brought us dinners I will remember for all of my life. 

I measured against the mannequins’ bodies, the clothes I made were modern, my mother said I single-handedly ruined elegance, for the new generation clunked to her second floor spare room on Main Street for their bell-bottoms and mini-skirts, I heard them vulgar and clumsy on the stairs so different from Sea who brought us food and happiness – she said they were the same things, one impossible without the other – exactly the way I felt about she and I.

And then the day she didn’t come – you must have known it would happen – Sea’s mother was dying and they came and got her.

Her books were open on the kitchen table when I got home that night, eroded potatoes in a pot of tepid saltwater, fish fillets floated in a speckled marinate, the counter was clear but for a single column of thyme atop a folded piece of binder paper, I squinted at the words inside, they followed the quivering blue lines, explaining her mother was gravely ill and likely to die. 

That’s how she ended it: likely to die, Sea.

Instead of grade 10 she got married – I heard it from one of my bell-bottomed peers – I pictured her cooking the junk she grew up on, frozen and cheap, she used to complain about it while she prepared, in a state of hazy wonder in our kitchen, the food we loved.

Practically every girl in school was wearing one of my twenty dollar shifts by grade eleven, an eight dollar reversible hairband, I had so much money I was able to buy property on Lake Superior when I was only 17, next to the lot Clive purchased the previous year, he ended up a real estate lawyer it was the only kind of law he could practice and stay local, there weren’t enough criminals in our vicinity he said disappointed.

My mother took over Judy’s, you probably saw that coming, she offered me the mannequins on the right, the ones adoring their own reflections and I slid my shifts over their heads, tossed wigs onto their scalps and flowers into their wigs, I pressed sunglasses over their eyes, there was nothing I could do about their high heeled feet so I left them bare and put shag circles like coasters beneath them, bangles on their arms, my mother stripped one of the window ladies down and said go ahead, she’s yours, and on her I finger-painted blue eyeshadow arcs, light lipstick, I pressed false eyelashes her eyes jeweled like Sea’s, I made her look like Jo Anne Worley in Laugh-In, she wore a pair of go-go boots I carefully ruined for her, business boomed, my mother bought the property the other side of Clive and like a monopoly game we all got similar houses.

I tried love which worked out in stints but never for long, when I go downtown there’s always an ex, sometimes in the truck beside me with a kid or two, sometimes on the sidewalk crumpled, loitering, I’ve seen them like ghosts through the windows of dives and diners. My mother remains full of secrets, she never told us about those years she was gone, my brother loves the same brief way I do. Once in a while me and my stitch run into Sea at the Red and White, both of our carts full of TV dinners.