Our relationship has been about helping each other find the truth, to push through our fears, our egos, and meaningless expectations. We protected that honesty, a safe space to land, a person who will see you, even if you try to hide it. In many ways, the deep knowing I experienced with Mark mirrored what I’d left behind with Jack.
Jack and I drifted apart when I switched schools. Our interests shifted, and I was away for long periods to film. My new friends inspired me in many ways, made me bolder, more aware, my ignorance on display. I protested for the first time in grade ten, marching against the Iraq War. We shared books by the likes of Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy. A sense of self was forming, deep in there, I could feel it brewing. And as my interests expanded, so did my taste in film. And this is where acting took a turn. The roles and stories were more mature, fraught emotions to be pushed and pulled and mined. I wanted more, to plunge. So I left Halifax after grade ten for Toronto. Figured I’d give it a shot. I think Jack felt abandoned. I felt it, too, even as the person leaving. It was one of the most profound friendships of my life.
When we were twenty-two or so Jack and I reunited for the first time in years. There had been some communication. Our birthdays are two days apart, I’m the twenty-first of February, and he’s the twenty-third, so we’d text around then, a brief exchange, a quick catch-up. I met him at his apartment on South Park Street, just a couple buildings down from the YMCA where I had attended preschool. Jack’s condo was high up, with a balcony overlooking the Public Gardens across the street. He’d built a successful life, and he seemed happy in it. We were lucky to catch each other, as both of us traveled frequently. It was nice to talk, it had been so long, we were adults now.
19
OLD NAVY
The OLD NAVY sign seduced my mother like a moth to a dwindling gas lantern. She fluttered with the minute strength that remained, the outcome she had been aiming for, mere yards away. Somewhere on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, I would walk through that chain store door, knackered and depleted by the endless judgment, but determined to emerge “a girl” for her.
My mother’s life was not easy. A single mom, a working parent, and someone who had been familiar with loss from an early age. She was born in 1954 in Saint John, New Brunswick, to Gladys Jean and Gordon Philpotts, an Anglican minister. They moved frequently during my mom’s childhood, living in Saint John then Toronto then Halifax. My aunts always spoke of their parents fondly, sorrow still present in their voices and the silences. Their dad died suddenly when my mother was sixteen, a heart attack. His funeral was held in St. Paul’s, the oldest Protestant church in Canada. It overflowed with people, standing in the back, out the door, love and reverence from all those who’d been moved by him. My mom tells me he made his sermons joyful, youthful. Standing at the altar when he was the minister at St. Paul’s, he would reference Beatles lyrics, interweaving them with the words and lessons of Jesus.
My grandmother, despite dealing with such profound grief, stayed strong for her children in the wake of her husband’s death. She had no choice really, being the sole parent of four kids still at home. She kept her pain hidden from those around her. Two years after my grandpa’s passing, my grandmother felt a lump in her breast and then more lumps. She made the choice to not tell her doctor, survival was highly unlikely then, she did not want to pursue treatment. My grandmother told no one, including her children. She hid it, covering what may have been a fungating breast tumor with talcum powder, Kleenex, and perfume as the cancer took over. I can imagine she did not want her children to witness that, still so fresh with grief.
My grandmother died when my mother was away studying. My mom had set off for France to study abroad as part of her degree. She longed to be a French teacher, she relished the language, the flow, the adventure of learning a familiar but new landscape. In Paris, she studied the dialect, immersed in a new culture. There is a photo of her standing in front of a fountain alone, cobblestones under her feet. The city of romance, where my father would propose to her a few years later. A long light-brown coat, chic and elegant, drops to the top of her shins. A soft smile lights up her face, her short, neat hair highlighting her cheekbones. French new wave, strikingly beautiful.
My mom did not get to attend her mother’s funeral. It was the 1970s, you couldn’t just pick up the phone and call. You could not send a fax. Her family tried everything, through the school, even calling bars that they learned were popular with students, but they could not track her down. Walking in town one day, my mom spotted a post office and sensed she should call home. Her brother-in-law, who lived in New Jersey, answered.
“Oh, hi, John! What are you doing there?” she asked.
Not sure what to say, he handed the phone to my aunt Beth, who also wasn’t sure what to say and handed the phone to my aunt Heather, who delivered the news to my mother. Gladys Jean Philpotts had died and the funeral had already taken place.
A complete shock, unbearable pain, a nightmare. My mom’s friends got her back to the dorm.
“Should we call your sisters? Figure out how to get you home?” they asked.
My mom made the decision to stay in France and finish her studies. It is what her mom would have wanted, she knew that to her core.
My heart shatters when I think of my mom’s eventual flight home, hell in the clouds, asthmatic in the smoke-filled plane. Solitary and forlorn. An unimaginable ache. The thump of the wheels landing, returning to the earth, the reality you are left with.
At twenty, my mother no longer had parents.
Now home from France, she embarked on another year at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. Her two younger sisters moved from Nova Scotia to New Jersey to live with my aunt Heather, the oldest, who had married an American engineer and relocated to Vineland. Heather had an effervescence and a deeply nurturing quality, perhaps sprouting from this difficult period, offering it amid her own state of grief. Dragging it out of herself. It couldn’t have been easy. I can’t imagine the depths of my mother’s sadness when many years later Aunt Heather was diagnosed with colon cancer and also passed away.
Aunt Heather moved to Virginia, and my mom and I would go down to see her. Those trips were special, memories where my mom was vibrant and joyful. I would climb up on Aunt Heather’s bed and snuggle up by her side to watch her favorite shows, all British comedies. When my mom watched with us, she would snort while laughing, making me howl louder. It was nice. I liked seeing them happy together, those wide grins.
Aunt Heather’s house was just outside of Richmond. At Aunt Heather’s, with my cousins, we played outdoors and swam in a nearby lake. Once we went to the dump and found an old, battered go-kart that worked for about fifteen minutes, a quarter of an hour that I will never forget. After it broke down, we found a discarded tetherball set that seemed just fine. An adult assembled it for us, securing it to the ground, and we ended the evening with s’mores by the fire.
I would be outside for hours, sitting in the dirt and watching the ants crawl over my palm, circling it, tiny legs scrambling. I wanted to be like Mowgli, how he ate ants in the jungle. Curving around the side of my hand they reached my knuckles, recalibrating, they headed toward my wrist, scurrying around my watch. And as they did I licked them up one by one. My cousin ran off and tattled on me to my mother. Martha Philpotts marched over and furiously stuck her fingers in my mouth, digging around to remove the dead or wriggling insects. I remember she pulled out her index finger and it had streaks of black and blood. Gross, but they probably had a much higher nutrition content than the Kraft cheese slices in my aunt’s fridge.
When puberty hit, around the time of my final visit, Virginia felt different. Cousins from Aunt Heather’s extended family were over as well. We rarely saw each other, my mom and I couldn’t go to Richmond often, but Aunt Heather’s place was always a hub of activity and visitors, even in her last year.
“Where’d you get your T-shirt?” my older cousin snarled. The vibration cracking the fissure that had started when they realized I was not like them. It was thinly striped, one of my most worn. It had subtle color shifts, earth tones. Green basketball shorts, dark and shiny, topped my legs. Sporty white socks stretched proudly out of my Adidas. A chunky Casio watch circled my wrist.
Turned out, she was not interested in where I got the shirt but interested in telling me she hated it and that I dressed weirdly. Her American Eagle and Old Navy tank tops, hoodies, and jeans had made her a carbon copy of the girls who had grown to despise me. A look my way causing their faces to crinkle.
That same state of displacement, of detachment, had followed me the two thousand kilometers to Virginia.
“Do you even have a mall in Canada?” she asked.