Free Mouthing the Words by Camilla Gibb

Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle. I thought she was beautiful—tiny and perfect with nails hard as rocks that clacked on the piano keys, never chipping her beige nail polish. She was blond pouffy hair atop a sea of swirling beige. Hers was the white Trans Am in the school parking lot, and she spoke in a soft low voice. “I want Charlie perfume for Christmas,” I told my mother when she asked. “Like Mrs. Rodrigues wears.”
    “You have a bit of a crush on her, don’t you,” my mother commented, and I was about to say, “I want to marry her when I grow up,” but I knew my mother would say, “You’re so fickle, last year you wanted to marry Suresh.” She wouldn’t understand that in my world I wanted to be married to all the grown-ups who had ever made me feel mushy, a category to which my parents had never belonged except for a brief flirtation with my mother during the time she had been with Suresh.
    With Suresh she had suddenly blossomed into someone nice and beautiful. I see the photographs now and she is otherworldly, brown and curvy, standing in the dandelions in the backyard, swinging on the wooden swing with full, dreamy lips, flicking long black hair from her eyes. Without Suresh she was back to being her “bloody hell this and bloody hell that” old self, telling me that “life is hard” and “we’re all alone in this world,” moving distractedly throughout the house and getting thin. Without Suresh we were back to eating baked beans and fish fingers. Without Suresh we kept the windows closed and there was no more laughter. There was no more Pam, and no more Rudy, and even the stray cats seemed to disappear.
    I imagined a life with Mrs. Rodrigues where I was her only daughter and I had a voice as golden as sunshine, a voice that moved her to tears. Mrs. Rodrigues was often moved to tears. She’d have the choir sing songs with lyrics that I found embarrassing because they were what my mother would have called, “touchy feely,” brazenly Hallmark in their sentimentality, embarrassing because I could feel their romance in my stomach and I was sure it was obvious to others as the touchy feely rose in some kind of sexual/spiritual way through my body.
    In anticipation of particular lines, I had the distinct feeling that I was going to become a frozen statue and split right down the middle. There were lines like, “If you touch me soft and gentle/ I’ll show you who I really am and I will grow,” which made me feel utterly mortified. Lines that I just couldn’t get my mouth to sing. I resisted them by dismissing it all as yucky, pukey, touchy feely crap, and feeling utter contempt for the group of girlie-girls who would beg for Mrs. Rodrigues’s attention at the end of class by bringing her flowers, writing poems for her, and asking for hugs.
    I would never ever be as pathetic as that. No way. Instead I would daydream that my mother had been burned to death in a horrible fire, or crashed to death on Highway 401 and I would be left homeless (and Willy would also be lost somewhere in the great catastrophe) and parentless (it never occurred to me that in all likelihood if such a thing happened my father would probably take me), and that Mrs. Rodrigues would come to me (I would never go to her) and say:
    “I have always wanted you to be my child. You have always been my favourite, special one, but I feared telling you because you are so brave and stoic that I thought you might reject me.” And then I would say: “It’s OK, I’ll let you be my mother,” (as if I was doing her some great service in making her life complete somehow) and go home with her to her nice condominium in North York and snuggle up on the couch with her and eat pizza and watch television.
    I was not a snuggler in real life, I never had been. Except for nestling briefly in my mother’s armpit one Saturday morning during the Suresh days, I had always been of the “don’t touch me”