Belinda's Rings Read online

  The man said nothing, but carefully sifted through each of his coat pockets as if he were looking for a grain of sand. She noticed the veteran ribbon patched to his breast pocket and immediately felt that anything she could think to say would be disrespectful. He smiled when he’d found what he wanted. Then he pressed a small roll of paper into Jessica’s hand and another into Grace’s. He bowed his head to Belinda and hobbled away.

  If she’d known at first that what he’d given them was money, she might have protested, insisted the girls were hers and didn’t need the charity. She couldn’t decide why he had even thought it necessary to give them money at all — to buy treats? To send to their Vietnamese relatives? To ease the burden on Belinda? Whatever his intent, the girls were dazzled and couldn’t care less. And Belinda had felt good about the way the man had bowed to her, tilting his glass eye down to her feet.

  Years later she got a job in that mall. She started out at Talbots selling blouses and pantsuits to old ladies. She was employee of the month for four months straight. She had no idea what she’d done to deserve this title; she’d shown up for work on time and stayed awake through her shift, which she supposed was all they expected from her. Getting the job at Merle Norman was a milestone. Wiley had taken her to a French restaurant for dinner on the day she received the job offer. She found it mildly irritating when the waiter whisked the napkin from her wine glass and laid it like a dead snake across her lap, but the food was quite good. She boasted to Wiley that employees at Merle Norman got benefits and free sample kits of the latest skin creams and newest eyeshadow colours. Wiley had never had a job with benefits. She did most of the talking and ate her meager dish slowly while he nodded and stole glances at his empty plate. He found a mint in his wallet and tore the wrapper into tiny little pieces that he collected in his unused spoon.

  The managers, she explained, Betty and Abby, told her during the interview that they always had to remind the younger girls to come to work looking fresh and clean. Mist-kissed, they called it. That was their way of telling the girls not to wear too much makeup.

  Those girls are so young, she’d told him. They leave the house looking like circus clowns.

  Wiley said he was sure she’d be able to teach them a thing or two. No one was more naturally beautiful than her, he insisted.

  Belinda disagreed and overlooked his compliment. She hated compliments like that — tawdry lines that could be fed to anyone. She didn’t think she could teach them anything, she said, because they didn’t know how to see themselves yet. And that would just take time.

  Belinda’s first day on the job, Abby pulled her aside just before her lunch break. Abby said she wasn’t sure if they’d gone over this in the orientation, but at Merle Norman they liked to portray a certain image. As she spoke she examined Belinda’s face as though it were covered in blemishes. It’s a look we call mist-kissed, Abby said, spreading her fingers like fireworks. She asked Belinda to sit in the salon chair at the back of the store so she could demonstrate exactly what she meant. Abby gave her a little cotton ball soaked with blue-green chemical and Belinda had to remove the makeup she’d applied over her crow’s feet and her pale lips and her stubby eyelashes that morning. Her colour fell away in beige smears. She’d had to ask for five more cotton balls to uncover her skin, and Abby stood at her side the whole time, watching Belinda saturate each ball, her lips pursed in a reproachful moue.

  When Abby had finished dusting her face with powder and blush, sweeping her eyelids bronze, daubing her lips a pale rose, and brushing on mascara, Belinda looked in the mirror and couldn’t see any makeup. Her cheeks were ghost-white, her eyes feathered and dim. Her wrinkles stood out like scratches on a plate. Abby insisted Belinda keep the makeup so she could try it out at home. Belinda smiled, but said nothing. She wanted to be grateful, but it felt like an imposition. She’d been using makeup on her face for years, and only she understood the broad curve of her jaw, knew the grey vein that swam beneath the skin under her right eye and the way her lips looked stretched and thin without dark lipstick. Only she could have her every imperfection committed to memory.

  For the next two weeks, Abby kept asking Belinda how the new makeup was working out for her.

  Fine thanks, Belinda would reply, and then retouch her lipstick from a cranberry tube. The light pink lipstick that Abby had given her, along with the other muted makeup, sat on Belinda’s vanity collecting dust from the day of the makeover. Eventually Abby stopped asking, but her face showed that she knew.

  Belinda called home from a payphone as soon as she landed at Heathrow. It was midnight London time, 5:00 pm Calgary time. Grace was reticent, as usual. When Belinda asked her what she was doing, she said she didn’t know.

  You don’t know, Belinda repeated. And what does that look like, exactly?

  I dunno, Grace said. Doing nothing, I guess.

  Belinda wasn’t in the mood to act put-out. That’s great, honey, she said. Sounds like you’re getting some good relaxation time. She could hear the murmur of Wiley’s voice in the background.

  Have to run, catch my shuttle, she said before slamming the receiver back on its base. For a few moments, the phone box chimed like a faraway bell tower, dampened by immeasurable distance.

  4 Piano Lessons

  JUST THE OTHER NIGHT at the dinner table, Jess brought up that it had been exactly a year since Mum went to Wiltshire.

  None of us said anything. We just nodded our heads and stared at our plates as if we’d done something horribly wrong, but of course none of us had. I think Squid even smiled a bit, more because of the weird silence than what Jess had said.

  But the way Jess had brought it up like that, out of nowhere, it felt like an anniversary of sorts. Like some kind of milestone. It got me thinking about everything that had led up to that point, and whether it meant something more than what it seemed at the time. A year seems like a long time and a short time all at once. And when I started to imagine I was back there, a year ago, things seemed to look different. Remembering that time makes me picture myself like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, stepping from the black-and-white world where things are simple and into a world of a zillion different colours. And it seems like I’d be missing something if I didn’t try to remember it all, every little detail.

  Funny enough, I started skipping back even further, years, way back to the days when I was young enough to pretend to make pemmican out of woodchips and dance to Whitney Houston around the living room wearing a pink tutu. It seems somehow like all of it matters now that I’m older, even some of the stupid things me and Jess would do when we were little kids.

  For a long time Jess and I thought it was funny to say Oooo, piano lessons, whenever people on TV were about to kiss. You know how they always have that fake audience track that laughs when something’s supposed to be funny and whistles and hoots when something juicy’s about to happen? Well, instead of hooting and whistling we’d say Oooo, piano lessons, and that made it like a joke so that we could pretend we weren’t being all girly and getting excited over the gushy parts. We’d rub our pointer fingers together like shame-shame while we said it. If Mum were in the room she would just smile, pretend she didn’t know what the hell was so funny.

  Do you even get it? I once asked her.

  Oh, you girls are so silly, was all she said. Mum always pretends not to get our inside jokes.

  She started her piano lessons way back when she and Da were still married. Usually she did her lessons out of the house, and she never said anything about them. I never even thought about her going anywhere while we were at school and Da was at work, ’cause when we got home she was always there, cleaning up the house or making canned ham sandwiches like she’d never left. A lot of times I’d forget that she even did piano lessons until I’d hear her slowly plinking away at something like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” after dinner when Jess and I were out on the deck or the swing-set. She’d always stop playing as soon as we came in.

  I don’t thi
nk Mum ever learned to play a hard song. Or if she did, we never heard her play it. She never said anything about her teacher, either. We didn’t even know his name was Wiley until that day he came to our house.

  Like the coyote, I said when Mum introduced him. Mum laughed, her embarrassed laugh.

  Precisely, Wiley said, and I smiled even though I didn’t want to. Then he played ‘Eye of the Tiger’ on our piano. I remember thinking it was majorly cool, but I was pretty little then. The dust from the outer keys got all over his fingers and he wiped them on the legs of his black jeans, leaving five faint grey streaks on the back of each thigh.

  Did you see Mummy? Jess whispered to me as we ran up the stairs to her bedroom. She shut her door behind us and then leaned her back against it. She was grinning, had her fingers bunched up to her mouth and was nibbling at the nails.

  Didn’t you notice? she said. She pulled a strand of hair from the end of her ponytail and wound it around her pointer finger. Mummy was twirling her hair, like this, she said. Jess made circles with her finger, twisting the hair around it. The loose ends flapped at her ear.

  Yeah, I said, she was also laughing funny. Like hee!hee!hee! all squeaky like that. Wiley had been playing all these ’80s rock songs, and Mum had stood next to the piano watching him, laughing even though nothing was funny.

  And did you see her playing with her necklace? Jess said. The one Daddy gave her for Christmas?

  And tapping her foot! I jumped up and down.

  That was just to keep time to the music, dummy, Jess said. She rummaged around in her dresser drawer, messing up all the piles of panties that she’d folded. She tried to hide what she was doing, but I saw her slide her diary out from inside the drawer.

  Now close your eyes, Jess said, and I did. I knew she would be getting the key from underneath the pencil container on her desk.

  Okay, Jess said, and when I opened my eyes Jess was sitting at her desk with the diary open, and she was drawing a line down the centre of a fresh page. I watched her print neatly in purple ink with her Minnie Mouse pen.

  Was that it? she asked. She started counting on her fingers, chewing Minnie’s ear on the end of her pen.

  What about tapping her foot?

  Jess rolled her eyes. I told you, she said, they’re practicing piano. You have to tap your foot when you’re learning to play piano.

  But Mummy doesn’t normally tap her foot, I said. Not when she listens to the radio or Michael Jackson tapes on the stereo in the kitchen.

  Even though I was too young to explain it then, I knew that it was really the way Mum was tapping, how she moved her body. Like she was dancing. The way she was rocking her hips ever so slightly you could tell that she wanted Wiley to notice. And when she sat down next to him on the piano bench and they started their lesson, she’d been concentrating. She’d let us stand at the side of the piano and watch their lesson for a while, and I’d never seen her eyes like that before. So focused. Wiley was playing something slowly, just with one hand, so Mum could see how he did it. She had watched Wiley’s long, bony fingers crawl across the keys, staring at them like she was watching him do a magic trick instead of just play a few simple notes.

  Mum told us to go entertain ourselves ’cause she kept screwing up with us watching. That’s when we got Jess’s diary. Then we hid under the dining room table, listening to Mum and Wiley talk in the next room. We took more notes. Jess even tried to record their conversation, but it got boring, and she couldn’t write fast enough anyway.

  No, no, Wiley said. That’s a B-flat. You keep playing B.

  Hee!hee!hee! Mum giggled.

  No, he said, it’s laaaa, not laaa.

  Jess wrote getting frustrated — little bit mean under Wiley’s name on the list.

  That was the only time they had their weekly lesson at our house. The funny thing is, from what I remember, neither of us even thought about Da. He was away at a conference that weekend. We didn’t wonder whether he knew about Wiley coming over or not, or whether Mum even wanted him to. But he must have found out somehow because a little while later, Mum and Da were arguing in the basement. That was their favourite place to fight, I think ’cause they thought we couldn’t hear them when they were down there. Jess and I were watching TV right above them, and we could hear them yelling, but it was true we couldn’t hear what they were saying. After a while we got used to it, let the sound of the TV drown it out. But we both jumped when the door flew open and Da stomped through. He sat down on the couch next to Jess, put his feet up on the coffee table.

  YOU CAN’ T SELL MY PIANO! Mum screamed from downstairs. Then she was quiet.

  We looked at Da, but he didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were on the TV. His face hadn’t changed.

  Mum stayed in the basement for a long time. Da had left the door wide open, but we didn’t hear anything. She stayed down there, silent, while Da watched two episodes of Full House with us. He was laughing at all the jokes, even the lame ones that Kimmy made. During one of the commercials, he got out this old bag of shrimp chips and started eating them right out of the bag instead of putting them in a bowl like Mum always told us to do. The shrimp chips were the kind that made your breath stink, and they’d been sitting in the cupboard for months.

  Those are stale, Jess told him, looking at him with her lips all curled, as if he was eating toad legs or live worms.

  They’re good, Da said with a full mouth. Try some. Da can never tell if things are stale. And he never remembers that we think shrimp chips are sick and smell like crotch. They don’t even sell them at the regular grocery stores, just the Chinese ones, ’cause no one else would buy them. Da finished the whole bag, and afterwards he kept sucking his teeth, sssstch, sssstch, and Jess would glare at him every time he did it.

  By the end of the second show I couldn’t remember anything that had happened in the episodes. I had been wondering the whole time what Mum was doing down in the basement with the cement floors and all those pipes and the furnace and the deep freeze and boxes stacked on shelves and nothing else. I tried to imagine her thinking about something, and what she would think about. But all I could imagine was her sitting on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chest, staring at the wall.

  I wish Da still lived in that house, because now when I think about that basement it was actually a pretty neat place. All cool and dark with only one naked light bulb dangling from a wire, the feeling of the damp cement on your bare feet, weaving between the pipes that came up from the floor and disappeared into the ceiling, making shadows move across the walls. When I was little I thought there was a ghost living in the furnace. Kind of like Slimer from Ghostbusters. I thought that the ghost traveled in and out of his furnace home through the vents, and that the fluffy dust on the ventholes was actually ghost slime that rubbed off every time the ghost passed through.

  But then one summer we got a whole lot of rain. At one point it rained practically every day for a week, and Mum said she felt like she was back in Wiltshire the way it was coming down. The news reports started talking about all the houses that were getting flooded in their basements, and this girl Courtney came to school one day with big bags under her eyes, saying that she spent the whole night helping her dad move furniture and scoop water with a popcorn bucket. She said her dad had to get a big pump like the ones they use for swimming pools to suck all the water out. I’d never heard of floods in people’s basements before. I pictured waterfalls pouring through the windows, Courtney and her dad clinging to a floating washing machine.

  Ever since then, whenever I thought about our basement I imagined it underwater. And as soon as I saw it underwater, it became a sunken shipwreck, hundreds of years at the bottom of the sea. Deep enough that no one could find it, so all the treasures were still locked up in the freezer, which I imagined was actually a huge treasure chest. The reddish-brown pipe with the knob on the side was a periscope, the rack of Da’s old suits was a pile of skeletons, their clothes half-decomposed. The other floor-to-ceil
ing pipes were pillars of coral, and the plastic sheeting hanging off the walls was flowing veils of seaweed.

  Of course there would be creatures living down there. Not ghosts. People often think that life only exists in nice places with lots of food and plants and sunlight. For a long time people thought that nothing could even live in the deep ocean, until some scientists decided to drag nets and found nearly five hundred new species in only a few days. You’d think it would be common sense to check before you say that life can’t exist somewhere. People just don’t like to believe in things they can’t see. Creatures that live in dark places. Monsters.

  But some of those creatures, some of the ones living in the deepest darkest parts of the sea, are pretty much the most efficiently evolved animals ever. Take, for instance, the spookfish of the genus chimaera. When you hear that name you imagine some kind of jellyfish with a skirt of long white tentacles, a floating sea-ghost. But actually, it gets its name because its skin is nearly transparent, like the thin layer of skim milk that stays in the bottom of your glass. It’s got these huge balloon eyes that stick right out of its head like gum bubbles ready to pop, with no pupils or anything. The eyes face upward to catch the minuscule amounts of light that filter down into the deep waters. And get this: it uses mirrors inside those eyeballs to reflect the light onto a second set of retinas that face down. Basically, spookfish can see in opposite directions at the same time. Hard to believe, which may be another reason that people call it the spookfish. They’d rather think of it as a ghost, something not real.

  It looks like an alien, Mum said when I showed her a picture. Like those aliens with the big eyes. I groaned and Mum said What? even though I’ve told her a million times I’m sick of hearing about aliens. Mum is the opposite of those people who don’t believe in things until they see them. Mum only believes in things she doesn’t see.