Belinda's Rings Read online

  Bartleby shrugged. Sorry, I don’t really follow the movies, he said.

  Well I think I’m going to watch it, Belinda said, smiling as though she were about to indulge in a butterscotch sundae. She couldn’t unravel her headphones fast enough; it felt as though an eternity of speechlessness hung between them while Bartleby stared at her and she fiddled with the audio jack.

  3 The Rings

  MUM LEFT HER WEDDING ring behind. She said she didn’t want to lose it on her trip.

  We’re going to be in the fields, she said, and we’ll probably have to collect samples. I’m not supposed to wear any jewelry.

  Yeah okay, I said, rolling my eyes. Maybe they’re afraid that if you wear metal you’ll get sucked into the circle’s vortex by the magnetic force field.

  Oh stop it, Grace, Mum said.

  Gray, I said.

  Crop circles don’t suck people in, Squid said. It’s not like a black hole.

  How do you know? I said. Have you ever seen one? What if the aliens are actually making booby traps, like in The Goonies? And all these people get curious and start doing experiments on the crop circles and doing tours like Mum, and then one day — sssschwwuuuuuup — sucked into oblivion.

  Squid curled his finger around his nose. He always does that when he’s worried. When he was really little he used to curl his finger around his nose while he sucked his thumb, but now he just squishes his fist against his lips when he does it.

  You remember The Goonies, Squid? I asked. He lowered his eyes, looked at the floor.

  Those guys had skulls for those traps, he said softly into his fist. And big rocks. They didn’t get sucked into anything.

  Squid’s been funny about skulls ever since we saw the homo erectus skull at the Tyrrell museum and I told him the brain was still in it. It wasn’t even a real skull, but he believed it. Once he believes something, he can’t un-believe it, not matter how hard you try to convince him.

  But I saw it, he’d said, I saw the brain! I asked him what it looked like and he said tofu covered in blood. Mum calls it a vivid imagination.

  The day before Mum’s flight, Squid wanted to help her pack for the trip. Mum let him help for about five minutes before she told him that’s enough, he was driving her insane, ’cause he kept taking things out of her suitcase.

  But Mummy, these pants have a zipper, he kept saying, and that shirt has a metal button on the pocket.

  Mum called me into her room, told me I had to play Hungry Hungry Hippos with him to keep him occupied. Squid perked right up, Yesssssss, ran to his room to get the game. I followed him out, glaring at Mum as I went. Playing Hungry Hungry Hippos with Squid meant sitting there for practically ten hours, letting Squid hammer madly at three hippos against my one hippo (always the yellow one, ’cause Squid hates yellow), and still just pretending I was actually trying to win. Squid got the game from his closet, was grinning at it like it was a triple-layer chocolate cake as he carried it with both hands, out of his room and down the stairs.

  We had to pass by Mum’s room to go down the stairs, and she’d left the door wide open and had turned on some music to listen to while she was packing. Tina Turner. Makes me wanna dance, she always says. As I was passing by Mum’s room, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. The wooden jewelry box that Jess and I got Mum for her birthday years ago. It was one of the best presents we ever got her ’cause it had little compartments especially made for earrings so that they wouldn’t get all tangled together. It had cost us forty bucks, which was a lot for two little kids. Mum had said it was brilliant, almost cried ’cause she knew how much it had cost us. That was a long time ago, so ordinarily I wouldn’t really think twice about it. But the reason I noticed the jewelry box that day as I was walking past Mum’s room was because it wasn’t where it usually was. Usually, Mum kept it in her bathroom on the counter with the lid open. Since she never moved it, it would get stuck to the counter because of all the toothpaste and soap scum and hairspray that would build up around it. Instead of seeing the box stuck to the counter, I had seen it in Mum’s hand. I had seen her tucking the earring box between two piles of clothes in her suitcase, letting it hide beneath loose folds of fabric. So much for not bringing any jewelry.

  Her wedding ring really did stay behind. She’d stuck the ring inside one of those blue velvet boxes you always see people in movies holding out when they’re proposing. She put it under her sink, beside the mouthwash she never used because it was unflavoured and tasted like whiskey. The reason I know is because the morning after she left, I wanted to use her curling iron and saw it there. She’d taken the curling iron. When I opened the box it made that little cracking noise just like in the movies. I think they probably test them in the factories to make sure they crack when you open them so people feel all glamourous when they get one, even if the thing inside is cheap.

  I was surprised when I saw three rings inside instead of just one. Her first engagement ring, the one from Da that was yellow gold with one round diamond in the middle, the engagement ring from Wiley with the emeralds that matched Mum’s eyes, and the silver band that matched the one Wiley had. All three were stuffed into the slot in the middle of the box. And since it was only really big enough for one ring, they were crammed in on top of each other, and the slot had been stretched out so that there was an ugly gap when you took out the rings. They only fit on my pointer fingers, so I put the two from Wiley on one finger and the one from Da on the other. I wondered if Mum had thrown away the wedding band from Da, tossed it into a well or off a bridge or into the river when they got divorced. Or maybe Da kept it.

  It’s funny to think that humans are some of the only animals that prefer to stick with one mate for their whole lives. There are actually some species of deep-sea fish that keep the same mate for life. Bony fish of the order lophiiformes. Commonly known as anglerfish. I prefer lophiiformes, mostly ’cause if you say it with an Italian accent you can fool people into believing you can actually speak Italian. I once told this kid who lives down the street, Dustin, that I knew Italian and he said, Okay, say something in Italian. Lah-FEE-a-FOR-mees! I said, pressing my fingers to my thumb and shaking my fist like they do in The Godfather. I told him it meant your goat is hairy. He totally believed me. He’s only seven — same as Squid — but still.

  Besides having a cool name, lophiiformes fish look like Pac-Men from hell. And on steroids. Most species are about the size of a grapefruit. The first thing you notice about them is their teeth, ’cause they’ve got these huge jaws with massive underbites, so their mouths are hanging open all the time. And the teeth attached to the jaws are spiny and see-through, like shards of glass. You can’t help but imagine those jaws snapping shut like the evil-looking bear traps you always see in cartoons. The reason it’s called an anglerfish is because of this funny arm sticking out the top of its head. The arm has a flag of skin on the end called an esca that flutters in the water, and the fish uses this as a lure, like on a fishing rod, to attract unsuspecting prey. It reminds me of when you play with a cat and all you have to do is dangle a piece of string with a pompom on the end and the cat’ll go nuts, batting away at the thing for no particular reason. The cat’s not dumb enough to think the pom-pom is actually a mouse or something, it’s just that he can’t help it. He sees a pom-pom on a string and he wants to check it out, get his paws on it. You can probably guess what happens when the little fish come to check out the curious flag that the anglerfish is waving back and forth, comeandgetit comeandgetit. Snap. Fish fillets.

  Anyway, like I said, lophiiformes fish have the same mates their entire lives.

  So you mean they’re monogamous, Wiley said when I told him and Mum. Depends, I said, on whether you can call them monogamous when they don’t have a choice. I don’t think Wiley knew the answer to that. But it’s true, once an anglerfish chooses her mate, she’s stuck with him for life. Literally. When scientists first started studying lophiiformes fish, they couldn’t figure out why all their specimen
s were females. And wasn’t it funny, they thought, how almost all the specimens they’d found seemed to have parasites attached to them? Turns out that the parasites were actually the males. They’d permanently suctioned themselves to their girlfriends’ bellies so that they could survive off whatever she ate. It’s kinda like how a baby can eat its mother’s food through the umbilical cord, except these are full-grown males who make their own umbilical cords. Typical, Mum said.

  It all sounds like a pretty sweet deal. The males just get dragged along and can suck up all the food, as long as they fertilize their girlfriends every once in a while. But don’t worry, I told Mum, the female gets her revenge, ’cause as she gets fatter and fatter, her blubbery belly starts to grow around the male fish. Eventually, the male gets totally swallowed up inside her flesh. I imagine it like the Wicked Witch of the West, melting, melting, until there’s just a pile of goo leftover. You can call that monogamy if you want.

  When you think about it that way, and when you remember that humans are animals too, it all seems kinda silly. But when I was sitting on the floor of Mum’s bathroom and admiring how her rings made my fingers look skinnier, I suddenly got this funny feeling in my stomach. Almost like the big drop on a roller coaster. It was the same kind of feeling I got the time I’d stolen a spritz of Rose’s mum’s perfume when Rose was in the bathroom, and I accidentally dropped the bottle on the floor. I’d stood there with bits of glass around my feet, the spilled perfume soaking into my socks. And that feeling. Roller-coaster gut.

  Suddenly I wished I had told Mum I believed her instead of laughing at the UFO picture she drew. It’s a spacecraft, she kept correcting me. UFO has too many bad connotations.

  Now I know all this kinda makes Mum sound like a whack-job, but it’s really not that nutty. It’s not like she wears a tinfoil hat and tells stories about being abducted or probed or anything dumb like that. See, Mum thinks she saw a UFO. A spacecraft. When Mum tells the story she insists it was the witching hour, when everyone was asleep but her. Cheesy, I know. Anyhow, the way it goes is she can’t sleep, so she goes outside for some reason — Mum would say she felt compelled — and stands on the driveway. It’s a cloudy night and barely any stars are out. She just happens to be looking up at this particular part of the sky when these lights zoom across it, in a sort of zigzag. Three lights, in the shape of a triangle.

  You’re sure it wasn’t an airplane? I asked when she told us the next morning.

  Have you ever seen a triangular airplane? she said, pointing her finger at me. And besides, no airplanes I’ve ever heard of can move like that, whush, whush. Mum made her finger do a zigzag motion in the air.

  Later that evening Mum set herself up at the kitchen table with an old notepad and a pencil. The rest of us were just sitting in front of the TV, except Squid who’d been put to bed. It was weird ’cause we were watching Star Search, Mum’s favourite show of all time. Since our kitchen is attached to the living room she could have seen the TV from where she was sitting, but she just sat there at the kitchen table with her back turned. Writing away. I could see her elbow jostling up and down.

  At the commercial break I came up behind her and said, You know your most beloved Ed McMahon is on?

  Mum put her arm over her notepad. Her arm had little goosebumps all over it. Yes, she said, I’m busy.

  Whatcha doin,’ I said, drawing something?

  I’m just thinking, trying to remember, Mum said. She shrugged and sighed at the same time, took her arm off the notebook so I could see.

  She’d drawn a triangle with big dots on each corner and light rays coming off the dots like spokes. It was obvious that she’d scribbled little circles over and over again with her pencil to make the dots, because they were all shiny and nearly black, and they’d made indents in the paper. She’d also pressed really hard on the lines connecting the dots, and those lines weren’t even straight, wiggled in the middle. You could tell that her picture was probably going to show up as far as five pages down, an etching in the paper that would come out white if you coloured over it.

  I laughed at that picture. Didn’t say anything, just laughed. It looked like a kid had drawn it. I couldn’t help it. And anyway, Mum laughed too. Then we were laughing together and it was like our little joke, ’cause Jess and Wiley hadn’t been paying attention. It felt okay then. Mum put her pencil down and turned off the light and we sat down on the couch together for the rest of the show. Now that I think about it, she’d been really quiet after that. I don’t think she even made any predictions about who was going to win, how many stars this guy or that girl was going to get.

  Jess actually cried when Mum’s taxi pulled out of the driveway. It was weird to see Mum in a taxi, especially since the van was parked right next to it and Wiley could’ve driven her to the airport. But he was inside by then, hadn’t bothered to come out onto the driveway in bare feet like me and Jess and Squid. He could’ve been crying too, who knows.

  But Jess cries all the time. It drives me nuts. She cried in The Little Mermaid when King Triton hugs Ariel and Ariel says, I love you Daddy. Seriously. So when she started to cry while we watched Mum’s taxi drive down the street and turn the corner, I just tried to ignore it.

  Lookit your feet, Squid, I told him, and when he did I tickled the back of his neck with a bird feather I’d found in the grass. He giggled, swatted the feather away and it floated out of my hand. I caught it and stuck it in his hair.

  Robin Hood, I said, Prince of Squids.

  Squid laughed again, his hands trying to find the feather.

  Jess glared at me, wiping her hand across her runny nose. Don’t you even care? she said. Aren’t you sad that Mummy just left us here?

  I shrugged. Why? I said. It’s not like we’re gonna starve or something. We’ve got enough food in the house for a nuclear winter.

  You think food is the problem? Jess snatched the feather out of Squid’s hair, tried to throw it on the ground. But it just floated away, skimmed down the driveway in the wind.

  We’re only kids, she said, Mummy can’t leave us with this kind of responsibility. That’s another thing about Jess. She likes to feel sorry for herself. I think it makes her life less boring.

  You’re seventeen, I told her. Remember?

  God, Grace. Don’t you get it? Jess leaned in close to me so Squid couldn’t hear. Mummy left to get away, she said. From us.

  Squid squished his way between us, What did Mummy say?

  Mum-my leeeft to get the ay-lee-ens! I sang really loud, to the tune of “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.” Hal-le-loooooooo-ya! I took Squid’s hands and started ring-around-the-rosie-ing.

  Jess didn’t tell me I was being a total jerk, like I expected. Maybe she was just glad that Squid forgot what he was asking.

  III

  BELINDA TRUSTED CROP CIRCLES for their shape. A circle seemed natural, an instinct. She had a hard time believing that the wheel took thousands of years to imagine. After the in-flight movie, with Bartleby dozing next to her, Belinda was flipping through the complimentary travel magazine from her seat pocket and found an article on ancient Mesopotamia. It explained that the very first wheels were used to make pottery. Travelling long distances simply didn’t occur to early humans; for the sake of survival, they needed to stay close to their families. They shared food, huddled together for warmth, invented language and art. A clay pot was more valuable than a chariot.

  Belinda had spent over two years researching crop circles and related phenomena, from their earliest recorded history to the present day. The early crop circles were simple. Single shapes, unadorned, drawn with immaculate symmetry. Each circle seemed to mark the landscape like a map, as if to signal a treasure buried in the ground beneath. But some of the more recent crop formations had begun resembling objects — a key, a flower, a strand of DNA — and these, Belinda knew, were the circlemakers’ attempts to appeal to human aesthetic sensibilities. Only humans would be naïve enough to insist that a key could carry universal
symbolic significance. The fanatics called them ‘pictograms,’ dissected their angles to reveal the Golden Triangle or a set of cosmological coordinates that could be read like a treasure map. Geometry was Belinda’s most hated subject in grade school. She could never, would never believe in reducing relationships to mathematical patterns. A circle was a circle, no beginning and no end. She needed to believe that life was unmappable.

  Belinda had left her mother’s home when she was seventeen, and she’d never looked back. Her first attempt to cook for herself involved pouring frozen peas directly into a saucepan, no water. She could remember standing there, watching little pools forming around each individual pea, dismissing her feeling that the slight hissing sound of ice against heat wasn’t quite right. She watched until the peas had deflated and turned a sickly green because she hadn’t known what else to do. Since then, she’d learned everything she knew about caring for herself the hard way, and yet she never felt any desire to return to her mother’s. She’d long ago lost any desire to even think about her mother.

  Now her own eldest daughter was seventeen and a baking aficionado. Self-taught. Jessica could bake a moist and fluffy pineapple upside-down cake and a perfectly formed crème brûlée, but would only shuffle her feet at the mention of culinary lessons or a part-time job at a restaurant. Having a good, responsible mother had its drawbacks, too. Belinda knew she was a good mother, despite what her conscience told her.

  When the girls were small, passing strangers would assume they were adopted from Vietnam. They gave the girls candy, twinkled their eyes at Belinda’s benevolence. Once, a one-eyed man gave Jessica and Grace five dollars each. They had been walking to the food court in the mall to get Orange Juliuses, which Grace always expected as a reward for behaving. The man was limping in their direction. He was limping with such strain that Belinda wondered what he could be doing out of bed and walking around the mall by himself. As he came toward them she saw that he had a glass eye, and considered that perhaps he couldn’t see. She steered the girls around him but he lifted his hand, and Belinda understood this as a plea to stop.