Belinda's Rings Read online

  Belinda’s Rings

  Belinda’s

  Rings

  a

  novel

  CORINNA CHONG

  Copyright Corinna Chong 2013

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Chong, Corinna, 1984–

  Belinda’s rings / Corinna Chong.

  Also issued in electronic format. ISBN 978-1-927063-27-9

  I. Title.

  PS8605.H654B44 2013 C813’.6 C2012-906583-8

  Editor for the Board: Douglas Barbour

  Cover and interior design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Cover images: azalea © Morphart Creation / Shutterstock.com,

  squid © KUCO / Shutterstock.com

  Author photo: Emily Zhang

  NeWest Press acknowledges the financial support of the Alberta Multimedia Development Fund and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We further acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  #201, 8540–109 Street

  Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6

  780.432.9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 14 13

  For my brother and sister,

  in whom I see what I hope to be.

  Hybridize or disappear; family in place.

  — FRED WAH, Diamond Grill

  Contents

  1 Bathyspheres

  I

  2 Mirrors

  II

  3 The Rings

  III

  4 Piano Lessons

  IV

  5 Old vs. New

  V

  6 The Other Grace

  VI

  7 Double-Take

  VII

  8 Perfect Circles

  VIII

  9 Amphibians

  IX

  10 Hide and Seek

  X

  11 Mothers and Fathers

  XI

  12 Foreigners

  XII

  13 Mean Streak

  XIII

  14 The Abyss

  XIV

  15 Niches

  XV

  16 Camouflage

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  1 Bathyspheres

  SQUID’S GOT THREE MOTHERS who can’t spank him.

  That’s what my stepdad Wiley used to say when Squid got into the goo. Back when he was a baby, you had anything gooey and Squid’d find it. Peanut butter, craft glue, ketchup, little bits of melted tar on the street — smeared all over his cheeks faster than you could say ‘fudge.’ That was code in our family for ‘Squid is covered in something gooey,’ except you had to yell it out, FUUUUUDGE, like a swear word. Mum doesn’t know that people say ‘fudge’ to mean another f-word, so sometimes I’d yell it right in her face to make Jess laugh. Jess never did it herself, squeezed her eyes shut like she was jumping off a building whenever she yelled fudge. She didn’t yell nearly half as loud as me, either.

  The problem with spanking was that it didn’t work. Mum only tried it once, in the supermarket. I was there and remember it perfectly. She’d let him out of the shopping cart to toddle around. He was just little. Only a couple months before he’d still had that mini-drunk-person sort of walk that made me want to follow right behind him, holding out my arms, thinking he could topple over any second. By this time he’d gotten to the stage where we had to actually run after him ’cause he’d take off when you weren’t looking. But we were in the cereal aisle and we didn’t think he could do any damage, so we let him scamper around. He liked to punch the cereal boxes, the ones on the bottom shelves that no one wanted anyway. So he was punching, punching away, and every box he could reach was getting a punch, Squid made sure of that. Mum was looking at the generic brand of Frosted Flakes, the one that came in a big milky-coloured bag with no box, so most of the flakes were crumbled into powder.

  That’s sick, I told her. Can we please just get the Kellogg’s?

  It’s all the same, Mum said. You’re just paying for the name.

  It looks disgusting, I said, holding the bag up to the fluorescent lights. I will not eat that. It’s like sawdust.

  That was when I was in grade six, and my friend Marnie would come over after school to watch TV. She was obsessed with Frosted Flakes, the Kellogg’s kind. We always had a bowl each. I couldn’t give her the generic brand. She’d notice. But while I was arguing with Mum, neither of us noticed that Squid had stopped punching. He was standing in front of us with a giant grin across his face. You could see all his pointy little baby teeth.

  He’d stuck a fist into his diaper and got it all covered in — goo. Shit. This mustardy-brown, pasty kind of shit. The Squid special. And now he was waving the gooey hand above his head, his feet hammering the linoleum. Mum and I stood there for a second, staring at him, and then we both lunged at the diaper bag sitting in the shopping cart. Fudgefudgefudge, I said, Mum and me both pulling at the Velcro flaps and our hands just getting in each other’s way. That gave Squid enough time to walk up to a lady who was bending down for a box of Grape Nuts. He swung his mucky hand like a club — SPLAT —right on her back. Squid’s four fingers, imprinted in yellow slashes on her black suede coat.

  The lady dropped the Grape Nuts, cranked her head around to look. She couldn’t see the damage, but her eye caught Squid’s pasty hand waving as he ran down the aisle squealing. Mum chased after him with tissues, her handbag slapping her ribs.

  The lady stood up slowly. I thought she might puke, but she just stood there, her tongue jutting between her teeth. She was watching Mum chase Squid. So was everyone else. There were a couple of snickering high-school boys with a basket full of Doritos and Mountain Dew. A mom with her baby perched in the cart, quietly nibbling a soggy Arrowroot biscuit in two hands. They waited for what they expected. Punishment. I waited too.

  Mum caught Squid by the collar and reeled him in. She grabbed both wrists and held his hands out in front. When she whipped her head to flick the hair out of her face, I could see her eyes darting around, noticing all the people watching her. It might have been the way the lights reflected off her eyeballs, but she looked like she was about to cry.

  That was when Mum spanked him. Let go of one of his wrists and thwack. Squid’s eyes bulged, his hips pulled forward, his little bum caving in on itself. He spun around and looked at Mum. At first, his face started to crumple up, and here we go, I thought. But then he just stopped. Blinked. His face smoothed out again, and his mouth did this funny thing where it turned into an oval. It was hilarious. A perfect oval, aimed right at Mum’s snarling face. And then he laughed, gleefully, like one of those evil Chucky dolls from the horror movies. Ran down the aisle, feet going so fast that his wobbling body could barely keep up. He disappeared around the corner, Mum trudging behind him.

  I watched Grape Nuts lady peel off her coat. She rooted around in her purse for tissues. It was hurting my stomach not to laugh.

  I’m really sorry, I told her. I offered some fast food napkins I had stuffed in my pocket.

  Can you believe that child? Grape Nuts lady said.
She had this really embarrassed smile, and she was trying not to look anyone in the eye.

  That mother needs to learn a thing or two about discipline, she said.

  Oh I know, I said. I shook my head, and so did she. I was surprised how easy it was to play the part. At that moment, I was just some random girl shopping by herself. Another stranger, eyeing that bad mother’s abandoned shopping cart with the gummy bears and Chef Boyardee and cheap bologna.

  It boggles the mind, she said. I held her coat by the shoulder-pads as Grape Nuts lady swiped at it with balled-up napkins. I wondered what ‘it’ was exactly that boggled the mind — Squid or Mum.

  What did you feed him, Grace? Mum asked me when we got to the van. She smeared a baby wipe between Squid’s fingers, bunching and folding.

  I don’t know, I said. Cheerios. One of those cans of creamed corn?

  The Heinz ones? Mum asked, huffing out one of her it’s-all-your-fault sighs. You know the Heinz ones give him diarrhea.

  I thought it was just the beans ones that made him do that, I said. Besides, it’s not my fault. He’s a baby, last time I checked.

  Mum plonked Squid into his car seat and buckled him in, didn’t bother to readjust his scrunched-up hood behind his neck. I climbed in next to him, pulled his hood out from under the seatbelt. Mum heaved the door shut so hard the whole van shuddered, like she always told me never to do.

  It was the first time I knew — really knew — I was alone. Me, separate from Squid and Mum. Mum drove home like a zombie, arms limp and back hunched. Even from the back seat of the van I could tell she was making movements she’d memorized from driving this route again and again, week after week. The sound of the brakes at the stop sign, the rhythm of the engine, the timing of the turn signal, left here, then right there, familiar as a song that gets overplayed on the radio. I watched a few raindrops river down the window and imagined us underwater, all separate, in our own little bathyspheres, roving around the deep ocean. We were trapped inside, looking for the same route to the surface.

  Back then, Squid was going through a vegetarian phase. If we tried to hide a little morsel of sliced ham in his mashed-up squash, he’d just suck off all the squash and eject the cleaned ham chunk neatly like a tiny VHS tape.

  The funny thing is that squid — the giant kind, with eyes the size of dinner plates — are carnivorous. When I first read that in one of Wiley’s National Geographics — giant squid have eyes the size of dinner plates — I imagined being eaten by a squid. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the mention of ‘dinner.’ But I imagined the tentacles shooting out, all of them at once, and cinching around me, wrapping around and around. And for some reason I wasn’t wearing any clothes, so I could feel the slimy tentacles slithering all over my body. I felt the suction cups sucking great big purple rings into the skin of my arms and legs, my naked back. My cheek squishing into an enormous black eye, my mouth filling with jelly flesh. I imagined it like a great big squiddy hug, except the squid squeezed so tight that my ribs broke and my lungs burst like balloons.

  I found out later, when I really got into marine biology, that it wouldn’t happen that way. Squid actually only use two of their tentacles — the two longest ones, shaped like spears at the ends — to grab their prey. The other eight tentacles are really just for show. It’s only because they look so different from us — foreign, like they belong to another world — that we find them so threatening. It’s like that old saying goes: we fear what we don’t understand.

  I

  THE MAN SITTING NEXT to her on the plane was dressed in a suit.

  Idiot, Belinda thought. Only an idiot would wear a suit on a nine-hour flight. Belinda had worn her pajama pants and an old t-shirt, but she still felt restless after the first hour. She’d taken her shoes off and wrapped her feet in a blanket. She’d tried curling up in a ball and taking a nap, but her feet kept slipping off the seat. Every few minutes she’d feel her back slumping, her bum creeping to the edge of her seat, and would promptly shimmy herself upright. It had been so long since she’d flown; Belinda wondered if this discomfort was an indication of her aging body. But the man next to her hadn’t moved. He had his headphones on, and he’d been staring blankly at the headrest in front of him.

  Belinda wondered if perhaps the man was crazy. She’d recently learned that there were a lot of crazy people in the world, and many of them could mask it very well. Belinda herself had even married one. Several of the mental disorders she’d been reading up on sounded just like people she knew. She was convinced that one of her coworkers, Sabrina, had Histrionic Personality Disorder. In fact, Sabrina’s ploys to get attention were almost sociopathic. She’d once stolen a cupcake from the supermarket at the mall, and when the security guards caught her she told the manager some sob story about being so poor she was starving. Later that week, Belinda had seen Sabrina sitting on a restaurant patio downtown, drinking martinis with a strange man. She had met Sabrina’s husband before and it definitely wasn’t him. Sabrina saw her walking by, but she didn’t smile or wave or pretend not to notice. Her eyes followed Belinda down the street as if to say, I’m glad you saw me, I hope you tell. That kind of behaviour wasn’t normal.

  She thought that the man next to her might have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. That would explain the suit and the rigid posture. It seemed to her that OCD had been running rampant in the last couple of years. The effect of a reactionary society on impressionable minds.

  He glanced over when Belinda took out her magazine. It was the latest issue of The Circular Review. Belinda got a subscription for the eyewitness accounts. The first issue she received in the mail included one from an English woman named Velta Parr, who claimed to have witnessed a crop circle in the making. The account was written with such elegance that Belinda felt she could hear Velta’s voice through the pages, the story thrumming like a melody. She still remembered the details: Velta had been walking around Bryony Hill with her husband on a humid and still day. It was early in the season and the corn was stiff and light green. The air felt so thick they were having trouble breathing as they walked up the hill, which she noted was highly unusual. All of a sudden the stillness broke with several huge gusts of wind rolling over the fields, turning the corn into a sea of turbulent waves. A pillar of light pierced through the grey sky and shone directly on the cornfield. It was so bright that the field became a mirror of undulating white light. The trees at the edge of the field were leaning, bowing to the ground under the force of the wind, and then a band of mist came charging between them, eddying into a shimmering whirlwind. The wind began to whistle above her head; she could feel its pressure pushing down upon her. Her body was covered in pins and needles and when she turned to her husband his hair was standing on end like the bristles of a broom.The grain stalks around them were bending into smooth arcs as the wind raked over them. Under their feet, a spiral began to grow out of the field, beginning in the centre and whorling outwards. It took only a matter of seconds to form, and then the gust swept off into the distance, leaving miniature whirlwinds in its wake. Velta and her husband watched the small whirlwinds comb the grains into pristine concentric circles for several minutes. By the time the winds had dissipated and died off, the sun had almost set. At dusk they returned home, silent and enraptured by their strange encounter.

  The words flowed through Belinda like scripture. But it wasn’t only the words she remembered. Velta had included four illustrations drawn with hundreds of thin, delicate ink lines layered on top of each other. It amazed Belinda that the drawings looked realistic and three-dimensional, and yet when she examined them closely, all she could see were haphazard lines like stray horsehairs. Up close the drawings appeared wild and spontaneous, but the picture in its entirety was most definitely exact and intentional. The vigourous precision infused in each scratchy line told Belinda that this account was the real thing. No person could put herself into a drawing with that level of intensity if she didn’t truly believe in it.

  Belinda deci
ded to take a painting class after admiring Velta’s drawings. Painting seemed easier than drawing; painters could get away with splashing colour all over a canvas and calling it a masterpiece. But she wanted to represent her own encounter with the same careful passion as Velta, and she always felt that her words were insufficient. For the first time in her life, she felt that she had something profound to express.

  In the first few classes they had to learn about colour theory. They did a paint-by-number colour wheel with acrylics, and the students, all Belinda’s age or older, struggled to keep their brushes from crossing the laser-jet-printer lines. Belinda managed to mix a perfect orange, which her teacher told her was fit for a pumpkin. But when it came to painting actual pictures, Belinda might as well have been a three-year-old with finger paint. Every form she tried to render — a house, a tree, a sky — ended up looking disproportioned and flat, cartoonish. And she didn’t want to bother taking the time to mix her own tints, so she laid down blobs of bright red, blue, and yellow and swished them around the canvas. She painted a few scattered circles and squares to practice controlling her shaky lines. Abstract, she called it.

  Her teacher stood at her easel and cocked his head to the side as if there were actually a recognizable form embedded somewhere in her painting.

  Kandinsky, he announced. Your style is reminiscent of Kandinsky. You should look him up.

  Belinda had never heard of Kandinsky but was flattered anyway. After class she went to the library and asked the librarian if she’d heard of Kandinsky, the painter.

  Ah yes, the librarian said. Kandinsky, first name Va-silly. He’s very famous — you’ve probably seen his paintings. Concentric Circles?

  Excuse me? Belinda sputtered. She’d never encountered this librarian before. This librarian could not have known that she had seven books on crop circles and other unexplained phenomena checked out from the library.