My mother invited the kids to my birthday party. She shook hands with other parents from behind a canvas. We cut cake to throw at billboards. I blew out a candle and wished we could have normal parties. I wanted to wear Nike or Topshop like everyone else. But when the guests left and it was just us, we were happy. Never bored, we spent winter evenings catching the moon in a bucket a hundred times.
School was something else. The teacher gave my art homework an F. My canvas was blank with a small hole in the centre. I brought it home and Mum hung it over the window. We sat in front of it like a TV, watching the sun make the white yellow then pink, then a star fit through the hole. Mum said it was the best painting she’d ever seen. She attached the hair from my brush to her wall and added the tally of my sister’s freckles to the chart. Every summer vacation speckled on my sister’s face was counted like commemorative coins of hot days.
Sometimes we got notices from the Residents’ Association about the canvas in the yard with the leftovers of our meals on. Kids pushed me in the dirt and told me to count every grain. I’d go home angry, ready to lecture my family on the advantages of being boring. But there was my sister carrying a bag of peas under her arm, leaving one wherever she went. From the window I saw little green dots everywhere. Birds spread their wings everywhere she’d been. There was too much to see to stay angry. I looked at a cloud and asked it to gather vapours of how I felt.
Then things changed. Mum gave Dad a Valentine’s of skin she had shed in the past year. He flew a photo of her up to the sky and let go of the strings. There was nothing conceptual about the woman he left us for. She owned a paper shop. It was nowhere near as exciting as it sounds. It wasn’t a shop built of paper which the wind moved to where it was needed. It just sold stationery and magazines. Dad used to go in there with a scalpel, cutting ads out of magazines to replace them with instructions for origami butterflies. He was always an artist, but his talent was a sad burden. His biggest project had never been realised. He had dreamed of living in a house that was a giant sledge. When the city denied his building application he had started to send all his mail with pictures of his face on instead of a stamp. Black ink had etched his brow with worry lines. Only this could show him how he really felt. When that wasn’t enough, he gave up the life and moved on to the new project of living with the most ordinary woman in the world.
Art continued without him; it was all we knew. Mum was an idea machine, picking up the slack for them both. In his absence, she made a list of everything that needed to be done in the house, then went to bed, as if writing it down would make every chore do itself while she slept. The next stage of the project was to stay in bed until we came looking. When she got up she hung the sheets from the bed round the room like a tent, still unwashed. She looked out at the tree Dad had planted and wept tiny stones. Next, she started working on learning how she really smelled. She didn’t wash or change her clothes. Her skin was a project growing each day like thin tissue. Art was everywhere all the time.
Mum took a photo of the woman in the paper shop and made it into a canvas. We threw cookies at it before bed. Then, she reprinted the photo, cut it into sections and sent pieces of it to everyone she knew. The paper-shop woman received her own mouth in the post. The police came to our house. The word ‘harassment’ punched Mum in the chest. She tried to explain how she just wanted to give people something to carry with them all day, show them parts of themselves they didn’t understand. The police looked around the house and saw the canvas of Dad’s mistress covered in chocolate and crumbs. Child Protection came and typed reports about the dirty sheets and the peas all over the floor. They promised to return.
Mum had to stop her art until my sister and I were eighteen, or we’d be placed in a less artistic home. Our neighbours threw stuff over the fence. Someone sprayed ‘LEAVE’ on our canvas of Western waste.
‘Why won’t they leave us alone?’ Mum said.
She wished she could make her body a canvas clothed only by whatever people passing her drew on it, but she loved us too much to try. She cleaned the house and cut her hair. Piece by piece, my sister and I carried Mum’s art to the basement. Mum couldn’t show anyone how she felt without it. She bought a tracksuit and wore it. Me and my sister got winter coats.
It was only then I understood what any of our art had ever done. My mother dropped me at school like everyone else, dressed in nylon, a sandwich in my bag instead of a slice of the moon. And all I could think about was finding a stone, the same size and shape as me, ground down into fine powder. I wanted to give it to everyone every time I was called to crack a smile I didn’t mean.
Surviving Sainthood
You dip a toe into the swimming pool, a forgotten plastic dolphin bobs up and down. Mom is wearing that turquoise costume, pulling Lycra out of her butt crack. Everything will change. You don’t know this; I do the knowing for us both.
Mom turns towards a wolf-whistle the man on a sun lounger is too old to give and she’s too wobbly to receive. The man has a beer. It’s 6.35. She looks over, deciding if he’s crazy, wasted or just bored. There’s no one else around so she takes those off-season baby steps towards him. Your water wings flap in the air, want to fly.
‘Can I go in?’ You stamp a splashy foot, stick out a ruffled behind.
‘Not yet,’ Mom yells, turning back to the man. He is all smiles, between sips.
You don’t know what it’s like to want to close your eyes so bad. Mom’s looking at the plump man as if he’s a life raft we can all climb aboard and drift into the sunset on. Under my sunglasses, I blink. I won’t see her fall in love again. She always drowns. Sssshhh. Mom’s breath is a leak. Your water wings are slowly losing air.
‘Lose the wings,’ I say.
The cap on the left wing isn’t all the way in. I blow with my back to the pool, all eyes on Mom. Her hope fits like hot pants she’s not young enough to wear.
The man points, legs of his chair scrape concrete as he rushes to his feet. Shouts. And Mom’s running, hands automatically fly to her chest, clutch her jiggles to prevent herself spilling out of her costume. She dives into the pool and rises with you in her arms.
‘Won’t someone help?’ she yells, laying you on the deck.
The man bounces into the motel. And Mom keeps breathing, pinching your nose, blowing into your mouth. Where did she learn CPR? Your body rises and falls, inflatable, doll-like. And like anyone with a doll, I’m staring at it, wishing it to come to life. I slide my sunglasses onto my skull and stand still. You don’t know what it’s like to do nothing, to know that, whatever happens, nothing is your default setting. It’s realised in seconds, one moment that rolls like live coverage for a lifetime. I’ll be tying my shoelaces, or telling someone the capital of Peru, and stuff splashes up.
I see you, that plastic dolphin, Mom’s ‘Won’t someone help?’ One water wing sighs in my hand. I stand by the pool. I never dive.
This is the moment life can drift into past tense. It happened so fast. We saw the doctor, we asked another specialist, you went for another scan. There are moments to really be somewhere, and hours to barely be there. Everything was different. It hadn’t soaked in yet. Mom’s eyes lurched to the door at the squawk of the nurse’s rubber shoes. There were strawberries printed on her clothes. You’d have asked why the nurses all wore pyjamas — if it was to make the patients feel less left out. She hooked up a tube to suck saliva from your mouth. If her bright clothes could talk they’d be singing: Don’t worry, you aren’t in hospital. This is one big pyjama party! Here, have Jell-O, a fruit cup. No, not you. Your eyes were shut. I sat on a plastic chair. Mom gripped my hand. ‘Everything will be ok.’