|
MOMMA TRIED
Out on the patio, a mug of steaming coffee in her hand, Anne sees balloons - pink, yellow, mauve, turquoise and pearly white, caught in her lilac bush, undulating in the morning breeze. Have they escaped a birthday party? A wedding reception? Have they floated all night on the wind, coming to rest here, twining their ribbons in the branches.
Anne examines them, shrunk but not deflated. A scrap of pink paper tied to the streamers. In ballpoint are the words, "Mom, I know you tried, but...." The rest? Torn away.
Anne puts the note in her pyjama pocket. The balloons must have been part of a "letting go" ceremony. Someone trying to recover from grief or anger will take balloons to an overpass or other elevated area, read a note expressing their emotions, then tie the note to the string and release the balloons to take the pain with them as they get smaller and smaller and finally disappear.
For some reason, these balloons have come to roost at Anne's. The bad feelings they represent did not dissipate into the air. Instead, they're at Anne's door. They remind her of Gary bringing his work troubles home and sniping at her and Logan instead of asserting himself with his supervisor. It's like a panhandler putting a mark on your house, or a skunk family moving in under the steps.
It's uncanny, how applicable the message is! "Mother, I know you tried, but..." Her sweet boy, Logan chose this past year to major in adolescent rebellion. School suspensions, late hours, scruffy friends, hangovers. His marks are in the toilet: no university will accept him. At meetings with his guidance counsellor, Logan listens, nods, promises to do better, then goes his own way. Anything she says to him he regards as just hot air.
Anne takes a sip of her coffee and looks up at his window. These days he keeps vampire hours. He'll have to change his ways when he starts work with the landscaping company in a couple of weeks - if he's hired. When she leaves in an hour to start her shift at the public library, he'll still be asleep. Tonight, by the time she gets off the city bus and walks a block home, he'll have vanished with her car.
The agreement was that they would share her Pontiac Sunfire. Share? Hah! For the past year and a half, she's been travelling by shank's mare and public transportation because there's always some sports event, late practice or party. Tonight it's a weekend party at a friend's cottage.
"They need me to provide the transportation. You can't stop me. Dad would let me if he were here." He knows she's still dazed by his newfound arrogance.
She can picture her Sunfire sliding down a hill into a lake. Or six youths sardined into it, hurtling drunk down a rural road, smashing some innocent farmer in a pick-up.
Although Gary says young men need to let off steam, he never lets Logan take the Lexus. Right now, the Lexus is in North Bay; Gary's sisters have summoned him again to their elderly mother's sickbed. After a lifetime of treated Gary as the dumb baby brother who can't tie his shoes, these old gals suddenly need his shoulders to lean on. Anne needs him to be the man of the family he created with her. He needs to have a man-to-man talk with Logan.
So often Anne has heard people say: "Mum did her best, but..." They sigh and break off. Mum's best just wasn't good enough. There is even a song, Momma Tried.
Sometimes Anne feels like getting in her Sunfire and driving wherever the four winds take her. But she would only be trading one form of loneliness for another. What open arms that would receive her? She has no parents anymore, and her friends from yesteryear are dispersed, preoccupied with their own lives.
Her sister? No. Whenever they see each other, Katy tries to burst Anne's bubbles. Last visit, sitting on the front porch of their parents' house (which Kate has inherited), Katy complained that she'd been the neglected child and Anne the favourite. It's pointless to try to pinpoint when the envy began. Anne sighs. She wishes Katy would buy some balloons, shinny up the church steeple in their old home town, and release her injured feelings. Her note would reflect what she believes: "I forgive you, Mummy and Daddy, for favouring Anne."
Anne knows she could do with some balloon therapy too. "I could buy some balloons, assign a problem to each one, then go to Arboretum cliff and let them float down into the valley and away. Or maybe they'd catch and burst on tree branches, but that would be O.K. too."
Balloons remind her of birthdays. One childhood birthday balloon of hers, a big red one, was seized by the wind, torn out of her hand, and blown far away, lost somewhere behind the treeline. Another time, after the guests had gone, Katy took the scissors and burst a balloon behind Anne's back. It sounded like a gunshot. Anne hit the deck, giving Katy a good laugh.
She and Katy usually got along well, although sometimes their rapport was based on destruction. They lived on the outskirts of town, surrounded by fields. In summer they strolled the fields looking for "bear farts", a fungus akin to "puff balls." If you stamped on a bear fart it exploded and discharge a brown powder of spores.
They also enjoyed going to the swamp where "touch-me-nots" grew in profusion. If you touched these cuticle-sized pods the seeds sprang out at you like tiny animals. Anne smiles at the memory. It's satisfying, somehow, to pierce and pop things, to release something into the atmosphere that might change things.
Then her eyes flicker. Her mouth becomes a thin line. She goes in to the kitchen and takes out a paring knife. Back in the yard, she goes to the lilac bush and stabs each balloon. Slightly deflated, they don't produce gunshot noises to wake Logan.
Next she goes into the garage and closes the door.
"Forgive me, Sunfire," she whispers, as she drives the knife into the right front tire. As she does the second, then the back tires, the exhalation of air is like money escaping, but a relief just the same. By the time Logan goes out to the car, she'll be at the circulation desk, inaccessible. Will he call for a tow truck, go to the garage and get four new tires put on? Hardly! He has no credit card.
Upstairs, soothed by warm water and bubbles, she leans back in the bath and rehearses what she will say to him.
"I can't understand it! A random act of vandalism! Or does someone in your circle have a grudge against you?"
As she sponges her arms, she hums: "No one could steer me right, but Momma tried."
Ruth Latta
Email: Ruth Latta
Return to Table of Contents
|