Excerpted: Skater Girl by Robin Pacific

I remember my mother and her friend Sylvia laughing and laughing together. Sylvia had bright red hair. She was zaftig, and waltzed into our house with all sails unfurled. She had a husband, Harold, who was as bland and pale as she was vivacious. Like my mother, she was a fifties housewife with three children. Then Sylvia had some kind of breakdown, it was all very hush hush, but she was sent to Essondale.

Essondale! That’s where crazy people were sent to be locked up. If you were a child, being threatened with a sojourn in Essondale could always result in good behaviour, at least for a while. Sylvia was subjected to electroshock therapy in Essondale, and given sodium pentathol, “truth serum.” I overheard my mother on the phone telling another friend in a low, conspiratorial voice, “they take you right back to when we were apes, and then through all ages of human history, and then they jolt you with electricity.”

Sylvia’s breakdown had a deep effect on my mother. An atheist for as long as I remembered, she suddenly took up an interest in reincarnation, reading late into the night, sleeping until noon, and telling us about her discoveries at the dinner table. She also became fascinated with psychiatry and decided, to everyone’s astonishment, that she wanted to become a psychiatrist.

She already had a Bachelor of Arts and loved to tell the story of how her father bitterly fought her desire to get an education. My grandfather believed women’s place was in the home and schooling beyond high school was a sin. One summer my mother came back with her earnings, in cash, from waitressing at a resort. Her father stole the money. Because she couldn’t afford bus fare, she walked to UBC from the West End of Vancouver that whole year.

Now, in her mid-forties, she applied to medical school and was accepted. In Vancouver in the 1950s, this would have been considered outlandish, bizarre even. But she was determined. She wanted to understand how the mind works, how the unconscious is structured.

Sarcasm was the lingua franca of the Bell household. The barbs were witty, but you were always pulling them out of your side. The poet Milton Acorn perfectly sums up my experience: I was born into an ambush. There was no esprit de l’escalier; if you didn’t think of a quick retort you were symbolically kicked down the stairs, your psyche bleeding out on the floor. The Greek root of the word sarcasm means “the tearing of the flesh.”

When I was around six or seven I decided to write a novel. The first chapter ended with the line “She could hardly wait for next week.” The second chapter began, “It was next week now!” 

When I shyly showed it to my two older siblings they couldn’t stop laughing. “It’s next week now!” they chanted. If anyone asked what time it was, someone would always shout “It’s next week now!” I joined in the fun, and I never tried to write a story again. Eventually I too became skilled at the witty retort, a habit I still occasionally lapse into. I’ll say something teasing to my partner, unaware of the sharp little stiletto knife buried underneath it, and I’m surprised to see the hurt, puzzled look in his eyes. Then the gelatin of remorse seeps into me. Around the Bell family dinner table of my youth, apologies were never offered. I still have trouble saying a simple “I’m sorry.”

One Sunday, during a typical dinner, my brother was rocking back and forth on his chair (Johnnie, stop rocking, you’ll break the chair); I was chewing my bubble gum as I ate my dinner (Robin, get rid of that gum); and my sister was daydreaming, staring off into space (Caroline, pay attention). My mother threw down her knife and fork with a loud clatter. She looked down the table at all of us. “Yup,” she said. “That’s what I got out of life, three squares and a flop!”

I wasn’t able to deconstruct this wordplay until I was an adult. In the dirty thirties, the expression meant three square meals and a place to sleep, but of course she meant we three children, the squares, and my father, the flop. It was another brilliant witticism with a bitter aftertaste.

One day in Grade Seven I came in from school to discover no one was at home.

This seemed odd. I wandered around wondering where everyone was. In the bathroom I saw my mother’s bloody nightgown lying in the bathtub. When my father finally came home, he told me my mother had had a stroke, and surgeons were going to operate on her brain the next day. Arteosclerosis was a new word. A blood vessel had hardened and then burst in her brain. She was forty-five years old.

Two days later he took me to the hospital to see her. My Auntie Katie and my Aunt Marion were there. My mother’s head was shaved; a long line of black and spiky stitches ran from one ear up and across her bare skull and down to the other ear. They looked angry, like barbed wire. She was babbling incoherently.

When I saw her, she terrified and repelled me and I ran out into the waiting room and into the arms of Auntie Katie, who held me as I cried. I had an odd sensation it wasn’t really me crying, that I was putting on an act.

My mother was the first patient in Vancouver to undergo a new technique called “polar bear surgery.” Her body temperature was lowered so that the lengthy surgery could take place without her dying. My father told me this dispassionately, as if polar bear surgery was the most important and interesting part of the story.

I’ve wondered my whole life if saving my mother’s life was more a curse than a blessing.

Katie stayed with us while my mother was recuperating, such as it was, in the hospital, and stayed on for a couple of weeks after my mother came home. By now she could talk, although her words were still sometimes slurred, and she had bizarre behaviours – she could write a letter, but was unable to read it back. One day, thinking she was lighting a cigarette, she put a match in her mouth and tried to light it with another match. Fortunately, Katie happened to walk into her bedroom and prevented what would almost certainly have been a fire.

And so ended the dream of medical school.

One day my Auntie Katie and I were roughhousing on the bed. “You know,” she said, “it might be time for you to start using a deodorant.”

I jumped up. It was as if someone had taken a knife and split me in two. I instantly loathed the sweaty, ugly body that had betrayed me in such a disgusting way. I began taking very long, very hot showers. As I scrubbed my arms and legs I was sure I could see dirt coming out of my pores. The harder I scrubbed, the more dirt came out, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get clean.

A few weeks after my mother came home, and after Auntie Katie had returned to her home, my father walked out. He left my sister enough money to quit her summer job and stay home to look after my mother, me, and the house. My cute and popular older brother, now in his first year at UBC, moved into his frat house. Around three months later, my father came back. He just walked in, no explanation given.

By this time my mother had recovered enough for the fighting and the drinking, which had been the soundscape to our household, to resume. My father, a big man, was a heavy drinker, but he could take it or leave it. My mother, on the other hand, was on the road to the alcoholism that would eventually kill her.

My mother’s rage fueled her drinking, and her drinking in turn fueled her rage. One by one her friends stopped coming to see her. My father went on more and longer “business trips”; came back for a while after she kicked him and me out; but eventually left her for good. Still, when she wasn’t drinking they were on friendly terms and took many trips together.

As a young child, before I started school, I had very curly long blonde hair, and it was my mother’s great ambition to turn it into ringlets. To this end, she rolled it up in sections in the orange papers which wrapped the Mandarin oranges we bought at the Chinese grocer. Nothing could induce a full-blown tantrum more than the orange paper proposition. Tantrums usually worked with my father, but were more hit and miss with my mother. My earliest memories are of her pulling and twisting my hair, of my wanting more than anything for her to get her hands off me. I don’t recall ever being hugged or cuddled by my mother, although I’m sure this must have happened. All I remember is not wanting her to touch me, ever.

As a teenager, I was trapped, shut down, and locked in an eternal power struggle with my mother. I always felt the same sense that she was grabbing me, pulling on my clothes (this skirt is too short! You’re not leaving the house dressed like that!). I was repelled by her touch and by the smell of alcohol. I never experienced tenderness or kindness from her. As a bright and talented woman, trapped and unwell (indeed, brain damaged), she must have hated my youth and my freedom.

My mother’s story is the story of a whole generation of middle class women coerced into believing the road to happiness lay in domestic servitude, what the British Marxist Maurice Dobb called “the last peasant of capitalism.” 

My mother lived in the wrong time and was married to the wrong man. She was born with the wrong brain, a brain that exploded inside her skull, maimed her, and killed her thirty years before the rest of her died.

And maybe she had the wrong daughter. Perhaps she would have been happier with a more compliant girl, not someone who was as angry, headstrong and stubborn as she. Instead, she got me, a daughter who did not, would not, could not love her. In her sad, blighted life, this was perhaps the greatest of all her sorrows.

POSTSCRIPT

What became of Sylvia, my mother’s happy demented friend? Was she cured of her schizophrenia? I remember spending time at a cottage with Sylvia and her three children: Cindy, a year or two older than me, managed to be moody and phlegmatic at the same time; Jimmy, the boy, was called “slow” to his face, and “retarded” behind his back; Layla, the youngest, was a happy, carefree child and, for a six-year-old, a good swimmer. All three had bright red hair, like their mother’s. Harold wasn’t there, or if he was, no one noticed.

Cindy and Layla and I spent hours at the dock, jumping into the lake, swimming as far away as we dared, swimming back, climbing up the ladder to the deck, jumping in again. Jimmy mostly stood on the end of the dock, his sunburn getting pinker and pinker. He had grown tall and plump; he didn’t speak, but communicated in grunts only his mother seemed to understand.

One day after breakfast, Sylvia announced she was going to give Jimmy a spanking. He had done nothing wrong as far as I could tell, but she insisted that he needed disciplining, and that sparing the rod would spoil the child. Sylvia had become quite religious after her breakdown and liked to quote scripture.

“Yes,” she said, “before this day is over, I’m going to give Jimmy a spanking for his own good. Spare the rod! Spoil the child!”

Cindy couldn’t meet my eyes. Layla kept splashing around in the lake. Jimmy stood at the end of the dock. Sylvia’s harangue went on and on. On some strange impulse, I hauled back and with all my strength pushed Jimmy, that mountain of sunburned flesh, off the dock and into the lake.

A stupendous fuss ensued. Jimmy couldn’t swim. Somehow Sylvia and Cindy pulled him on to the dock, dried him off. He was crying great gulping sobs. He was put to bed amidst much coddling, given hot chocolate. Sylvia berated me over and over.

“Don’t you know he could have drowned? However could you do such a mean thing?”

Cindy’s sorrow-filled eyes were worse than her mother’s ranting. “I ought to call your mother and get her to take you home,” Sylvia threatened. I knew it was an empty threat, because my parents were travelling in some far-off country the Goulds had never even heard of. Why? Sylvia pressed me, why? I couldn’t answer. I had no idea why. He was there, in his stupid, sunburned solidity. I was there. The lake called. I didn’t know then why I did it and I don’t know now. I do know that talk of rod sparing and child spoiling was forgotten for the rest of my vacation at the Gould’s summer cottage.