Mothers and Daughters

I only know her by her Western name: Helen. Several years ago when we met in the YMCA changing room, she also told me her Chinese name, but then insisted on being Helen and I forgot her real name instantly. The result: every time I see her -- and it is usually on Sundays during the free swim -- my first thought is "She is not Helen." I don't, actually, know almost anything about her and the fact that her name is just a facade, picked so that people like me could associate her with a pronounceable string of syllables, makes things even more unknown, distant. I do know that her mother finally obtained the immigrant visa a couple of months ago (after a 3-year wait), and both of them came to the pool in the last few weeks (the mother, with hair cropped short and a permanent smile compensating for the lack of English; they often wore very similar jeans); I also know that Helen has a son, now about 8 years old, who is back in China. She says it is a temporary arrangement, until it is possible for Helen to have him live with her in Montreal.  She doesn't talk about him often, and I don't ask beyond the limits of politeness.

One Sunday not long ago I walked into the changing room, and saw that Helen was already there, but this time without her mother. We exchanged a few greetings, she told me her mother had found a temporary job cleaning in somebody's house on Sundays. and while we were preparing for the pool, I smiled and said that this time she'd have to dry her hair herself. She looked at me with an uncertain half-smile; I wondered if she would get my meaning -- I had noticed that sometimes she had problems understanding English. She didn't seem to get what I meant; the multipurpose smile and the blanket expression of general good-will remained unrippled by any sudden illumination on her face, even though she said a quick "oh, yes!" to my remark. I decided it would be too awkward now to explain what I meant so I didn't, but what I was referring to happened a couple of weeks back, on a Sunday when both of them were there, the mother and the daughter. After the swim, we were packing up our things in the changing room, and I happened to look in the direction of Helen just as her mother picked up one of the communal hair dryers and started blow-drying Helen's hair. Her head bent downwards so her mother could dry well her hair around the nape (something my parents also insisted on when I was little), Helen looked up and when our glances met, our thought frequencies instantaneously overlapped, making us burst out laughing simultaneously. There was something funny about Helen, a grown-up woman with an 8-year-old son, being treated as a child herself by her mother who was drying her hair; a huge contrast also with the way Helen lived for a few years prior to her mother's arrival: all on her own, by force fending for herself in a new country, and certainly without someone to dry her hair. Her mother was bewildered by our laughs and Helen had to explain in Chinese; but for the older woman, even though her smile widened slightly, there was clearly no discontinuity -- and therefore no particular reason for laughing -- between this particular moment in her function of a mother, and all those other moments some 20 or more years ago when she did similar things for her daughter.

I thought about my mother, and whether I would like to have her with me now, drying my hair. What exactly did I feel at that moment -- envy, because unlike Helen, I didn't have her? Sadness, because it wasn't even possible? Something in me relaxed and settled down comfortably when I felt that the answer was no. I didn't even seem to be surprised by this; I was overwhelmed by the relief that I was simply glad that Helen was not alone now and that I was at ease with the absence of my own mother. Later, on the metro, I was remembering how she used to braid and gather my long brown hair (somewhat wavy, which, to her chagrin, was not the case with hers, also brown and long) into a bun on top of my head, expertly pinning the sides of it with discreet pins so that by the time she finished, no accessories were visible (although my head was like a pincushion). She did this every morning before breakfast in my fourth year of high school, when I decided this was the look I wanted. After dressing up, I'd come to the kitchen and sit on a chair with my back turned to her; she would then first comb my hair, and then start working on it, patiently. I don't remember what we talked about (or even if we talked much in those early hours of the day) but usually the morning radio program was on in the kitchen, and with my mother's hands fluttering through my hair, this was a solid, reliable beginning of each day that made me walk through the rest of it with confidence, well-grounded. Even though a memory, this did not feel distant, and my mother did not feel like a character in a story of "once upon a time" but like my mother, who never ceased to be that even after she was gone, and whose fingers working patiently and lovingly left a permanent trace in my hair.

They left a trace in the beginning of each day, in fact. I wake up, and I'm still grounded, on those very same grounds that continue to bear the weight of my life easily, despite a few small cracks here and there. She did this very well, my mother. From the inconspicuous material of our daily life (something you wouldn't even think you'd remember later), she constructed my foundation, rock-solid. In the manner of all master masons, she made it so that it would keep sustaining whatever later architects added. What she was really doing, of course, was ensuring that I was at ease with letting her go in the future, that I didn't miss her if she wasn't there to dry my hair. That I understood and accepted -- one Sunday in the YMCA changing room --  the cruel and wonderful way of the world where you grow out of needing those that loved you; where to love, you don't need to miss.

Spring Again

I turned the corner from the main street,

And something in the air, a small whirlpool

Of familiar things, swirled by my feet,

Grazing my bare arms, opening my pores

To the warmth of this balmy post-winter day.

A sweater thrown over the shoulder,

My body and I were settling

Into a recognized default setting

Of being in spring. A man in sneakers

Walking ahead with a bottle

Of Perrier in hand half-turned, then

Continued on his way, unperturbed.

Sparrows' chatter on the branch by the fence

Conjured its April spell, restarting

The world again in full innocence

And, blending with a dinner-time clatter

From open doors and balconies,

Filled up the back alley lungs

With the promise of distant lands

Where orange trees line up the curbs,

And afternoon music makes a muffled sound.

All of it here, all of it now.

Intrusion

I look at it, my eyes squinting a little, although there is no need to squint. While the other pegs are wooden, occasionally chipped, and darkened by use and moisture, this one is pink, plastic, and assertive in its glossiness. It blatantly doesn't belong but it seems to have settled in comfortably there, on the line with the others. Thinking back to last summer when we went camping to the National Park Hautes Gorges, I remember the first time I saw it: a curiously misplaced pink object lying in the scraggly wet grass in our allotted camping site. When we pitched the tent, M strung out our improvised laundry line between two trees and immediately employed it ("confiscated" it, was the word that came to mind ) by pegging a dish towel on the line. And so it stayed there for the next 3 days -- a small hub of light pink colour against the wet-green heaviness of the bushes and branches on the bank of the Malbaie River running busily over the boulders behind our tent. The day we were leaving I didn't protest much when M packed the pink peg with our stuff and put it in the trunk (leaving plastic behind didn't make much sense), but I didn't exactly want it, this peg -- a cast-off from other lives, a misappropriated morsel of someone else's day.

Perhaps the origins of this reluctance are partly in the story my grandmother told me (no doubt, with didactic intentions) when I was little: once, when she and my uncle, who was then about 7, were crossing a street in Belgrade, he spotted a new fountain pen by the curb and wanted to pick it up. My grandmother, fiercely proud of her moral uprightness and transparency, told him sternly to leave the pen where it was -- what was he thinking, ogling another person's possession? But someone else will come by and take it, pleaded my uncle, in vain, his neck craned all the way back as she tugged him away by the hand, implacable in her sternness and satisfied by the lesson he (and I) could learn from it.

But it's not only that -- there is more to my suspicion of the peg. There is something that doesn't present itself in an easily traceable line of a carefully constructed narrative with a moral -- like my grandmother's story -- fed to a child who then remembers it into adulthood; it is something that reaches deep into the unexplored knots and uneven surfaces of the mind, suggested but never fully articulated, and grating on your consciousness from time to time, like a tiny pebble in a shoe. Something that is more intimately related to the way I was always suspicious of the tablespoon my father brought from the war many years ago. One day I opened the cutlery drawer, always cluttered with a rattling mass of metal utensils (it was a known, familiar mess), and immediately spotted the intruder. The new spoon was much rounder and its metal surface perfectly polished with no scratches or incisions. An unfamiliar, alien "spoon-face" drawing attention to itself in the crowd of the well-known ones which I had been seeing since before I can remember; which, in nebulous ways of character formation, came to embody my earliest beginnings and my identity. (I've long since stopped being surprised by a striking resemblance between my favourite fork, used since infancy, and myself. Something in the leaf pattern around the rim of the handle captures the whole of my childhood, for example). And so, the sudden apparition of the strange spoon in the midst of the familiar ones seemed to endanger the integrity and stability of the entire "ecosystem" of identificatory cues deployed in my head.

The problem was, of course, that it was never clear where exactly that spoon came from. My father never wanted to talk about the war (into which he was mobilized about 6 months before it ended in 1995), and to my knowledge, he only said two things on the subject. One was a general assessment of war as "a dirty affair, full of shouting, cursing and confusion, where nobody knew what he was doing." The other one was a small anecdote about the war horse named Zeko ("Bunny"), who was so startled by a sudden shelling that he jumped and ran away never to return, living up to his name. The details of the gore and the ugliness he wanted to spare us were public knowledge, however; among them were the stories of soldiers and others raiding the abandoned houses in villages and small settlements scattered around the movable front lines. People went away with TVs, stereos, furniture, and even hot-water boilers which they then installed in their own houses. A savage plundering instinct or a desperate yearning for compensation, these acts always resulted in someone suddenly ending up with a cemetery of foreign objects, smelling of their previous owners and their tragedies, now forced into strangers' living rooms, bathrooms, or kitchens.

I didn't ask and never knew if the intrusive spoon had anything to do with the above, but it was enough to know it came with the imprint of someone else's hand on it. What I do know now is that even such an almost imperceptible intrusion can infect the way you view many things afterwards, including something as small as a peg -- of which I am reminded every time I put laundry on the line.