Loddy-Dah Page 7

  Loddy, however, did recognize Alma’s sacrifices and the necessity for her thriftiness. Bettina would say: “If it wasn’t for our mother, we would have starved to death.”

  Loddy would argue: “But she never supported us emotionally. I just wanted a hug now and again.”

  “Christ, Loddy, she didn’t have time. Isn’t it enough that we had a roof over our heads?”

  “You always got everything and still do. Maw felt guilty because of your little foot.”

  And Bettina would hiss: “You’re ugly Loddy and I hate you.”

  A congenital malformation, Alma blamed liquor on the night of conception. Bettina born with a clubfoot, a rarity for a girl, but there it was. In the rush of delivery in a Hamburg refugee camp, the doctors had taken little notice of the smaller right foot, angled inwards, slight defect that would right itself in time, they had said. It wasn’t until they immigrated to Montreal and a neighbour had noticed Bettina’s twisted foot that Alma, against her will, had admitted Bettina to the Montreal Children’s hospital at the age of three. Loddy was just starting Grade 1.

  “I don’t trust doctors,” Alma had said. Too much time had elapsed to correct the clubfoot, and surgery only released a portion of the stiffness in the Achilles tendon. Bettina walked with a slight gait like a horse on its toe­nails and she received all the hugs and kisses from Alma.

  xxx

  This Sunday was different. Loddy was late, missing lunch entirely, and after paying Haiti, she arrived to find the front door ajar, snow collecting inside the doorway. Muffled funeral wails and whines reverberated throughout the flat. Loddy sprinted up the stairs with a speed that belied her body size, and found Alma face down on the living room floor and Bettina under covers. Loddy strained to lift her mother, a dead weight.

  “Help me, Bettina! Come on, what’s the matter with you?”

  No response, only hiccups from the cluster of blankets on the couch and, then nothing.

  Loddy hauled Alma into her armchair: “What happened here, Maw?”

  A flutter of butterfly fingers, taciturn, Alma called on the Lord: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  Loddy yanked off the covers and Bettina lay there, curled up like a newborn, dressed in flimsy baby dolls, a skeletal frame of her former healthy self.

  “Bettina!”

  Alma, now in a catatonic state, fingered the onyx beads on her rosary which she wore around her neck like a piece of jewellery. No harm done, it’s the trauma from the war, she’s just delusional, the doctors had said. Let her be. Prayer and the church were Alma’s elixir, a coping mechanism. Let her be.

  Hail Mary, full of grace.

  “What happened, Maw? What happened?”

  “He come,” she said. “Tievas. I don’t want to talk.”

  “He’s not my father.”

  Our Lord is with thee.

  When she was six, Loddy came home from school one day and caught him on the living room floor with two naked women. Later, he left photos of the threesome on the kitchen table so Alma could see.

  Blessed art thou among women.

  When she was eight, Loddy woke up in the middle of the night to squeals, an animal in distress, being slaughtered. She thought it was a dream and listened, lying still with fear, but there it was again and again that horrendous muffled howl. She crept towards the disturbance in the basement and there was Alma, her skirt tied into a knot above her head, and he was pummelling her with his body until he yelped like a dog, held still for a moment then collapsed on her in exhaustion. Alma thrashed about in an attempt to dislodge him and escape the imprisonment of her skirt.

  And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

  Loddy had suppressed most of her childhood, but these images embedded themselves like an inoperable tumour in the back of her memory.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God.

  When she was ten, they were playing hide-and-go-seek. Loddy hid in the backyard shed, scrunched herself into a beach ball so she wouldn’t be it, but, he, nonetheless, caught her, tickled her nose, her arms, her tummy and she giggled as little girls do. He pulled her panties down around her knees and put his ear to her crotch. She wondered what he was listening to and then he touched her girlhood lightly with his lips and fingers, then brushed his hand against its smallness, finally releasing her.

  “You’re it,” he laughingly called after her as she pulled up her panties and ran like a racehorse to find Bettina.

  Pray for us sinners.

  And when she turned thirteen, he told her he would teach her how to be a woman, show her tricks so no man would take advantage of her. She didn’t understand, but remembered the pain and Alma stumbling upon the bloodied panties in the garbage and Loddy crying out: “I promise I won’t do it again. I promise.” And Alma threw a Kotex pad at her and Loddy didn’t know what to do with it. “Maw, I have to talk to you.”

  Now and at the hour of.

  Later she was taking a bath in the common bathroom shared with the other tenant on the top floor of the converted house that was her family’s home. Footsteps on the stairs, then the floorboard squeaking once, twice, like someone had to urinate. She turned off the tap, submerged herself like a submarine until she could no longer hear anything except the water’s surge, soothing and calm. Then she pushed her way up to a sitting position, a whoosh like a wave. Loddy eased herself out of the tub and was lunging for a towel when she noticed the long fissure on the lip of the door near the lock. She peaked through the crack, and Mr. Legault, the landlord, who lived downstairs, was peering back at her. She shrieked as though she had just seen a mouse flit by, and he, frightened also by the unexpectedness of her cry, scurried down the stairs two steps at a time until he reached his first floor apartment, slammed the door and locked it. From then on, whenever she used the bathroom, Loddy always protected herself by threading a face cloth through the door latch to conceal the opening.

  Our death.

  When Loddy turned fourteen, he announced that she was ready, and so he brought her to Mr. Legault, who gave her father money in exchange for the pleasure of cupping her adolescent breasts and touching her in places no hand had a right to go.

  It is through a father a daughter defines her worth as a woman. That was her childhood. That was her memory. He is not my father. Loddy was obstinate.

  When she was sixteen, she began to self-medicate with food to erase the pain.

  Amen.

  xxx

  They were both sitting in Emergency, waiting for the doctor to emerge from the examination room. The ambulance ride was a blur in synchronicity — screeching sirens in harmony with Alma’s prayers.

  “Maw, what happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk.” It was always like that. “I no worry about you. You take care of youself, but Bettina, she not strong like you. She need me.”

  Loddy wanted to shout, No Maw, I need you too, but stayed mute and, instead, turned her attention to an elderly woman with the coloured fatigue of death, snoring in a plastic chair across the aisle. The persistent antiseptic stench of the hospital, urine and blood mixed in a cocktail of vomit, overpowered her.

  The snowstorm had filled the emergency room to overcapacity with traffic accidents and heart attack victims. Whoever moaned the loudest was served first. Take a number.

  Loddy had just poked her head out the door for a breath of air when she heard Alma calling: “Come. Doctor here. Come.”

  His name tag identified him as Dr. Charles Verne, a bespectacled short stump of a man with white thinning hair, white pencil-thin moustache and matching white lab coat. Everything about him was vanilla including his mannerism. Loddy thought of the medical shows she had seen on TV — Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey. Every injury and illness solved within the hour between commercials. And nobody died. A happy ending was part of the script. But this was not Richard Chamberlain playing Dr. Kildare.

 
Dr. Verne removed his eyeglasses. “She’s starving to death.”

  “Not my fault,” Alma said. “I feed her good. She eat good. Loddy, tell. Potatoes, sour cream. Why she so thin? She die?”

  “No, it’s not your fault. We just now have a name for it. Anorexia Nervosa. We’re seeing more and more girls like Bettina come in. They all want to look like that model from England.”

  “Twiggy,” Loddy said.

  “Yes, that’s the one. It starts innocently enough with a diet to lose a couple of pounds and then it gets out of hand.”

  “But, like Alma said, Bettina eats a lot. Alma’s meals are always a feast. I mean look at me.”

  Dr. Verne perched his eyeglasses back on the bridge of his nose and sized up Loddy as though he were purchasing a new car.

  “They are quite good at fooling everyone. They find ways not to eat — spitting food into napkins, vomiting, using diuretics, laxatives, diet pills. It’s a very complicated disease.”

  Loddy thought of all those Sunday meals and Bettina running to the bathroom before the table was even cleared.

  “You her sister?”

  “Yes. We have different fathers though, different genes.” Loddy crossed her arms defying any arguments to the contrary.

  “What you say? Jesus. What you say?”

  “We’re going to keep her here under observation,” Dr. Verne said, “and feed her through an IV until she regains some of the nutrients she’s lost. Then she’ll work with a nutritionist and we’ll provide her with psychiatric treatment, of course. When she’s put on some weight, and she’s strong enough, she can go home and see her medical team on an outpatient basis.”

  “Psychiatric treatment? Medical team? Like, I don’t get it.”

  “This disease has its root in the mind,” he said, pointing a stubby forefinger to his temple. Loddy noticed how his balding head shimmered under the hospital lights.

  “What he say, Loddy? What he say?”

  “Like, how long will it take before she’s okay?”

  “Can’t say. This is new territory for all of us. There have been studies in the States where ... depends on her. We’ll take one step at a time.”

  “What kind of studies?”

  The words flushed out of his mouth. “There have been studies where the patient dehydrates, organs fail, death from heart failure ...”

  “What you say? Die. No no! Bettina no die! She too young. Loddy, what he say?”

  “It’s someone else the doctor is talking about, Maw.”

  Dr. Verne removed his eyeglasses, the diagnosis a done deal.

  “Can we see her now?”

  “We’ve found a bed for her upstairs. Nothing you can do tonight. She’s sleeping. Call tomorrow.” And Dr. Kildare slapped shut his medical chart and walked away in that weary stooped posture one sees in older physicians who have examined too many patients or performed too many surgeries.

  After they registered Bettina as a patient and were about to leave, Loddy heard a woman calling her name. It echoed throughout the corridors and, as they neared the main entrance, the tone grew alarmingly loud and shrill: “LODDY! LODDY! LODDY!”

  She followed the voice and, at the exit door, she spotted The Blonde, a porcelain doll in a black cape, hair in tight ringlets hidden under a hood, which framed her face like a nun’s veil. In her Victorian stillness, The Blonde seemed a foreboding presence, a character out of Jane Eyre isolated on a cliff awaiting her beloved Edward Rochester.

  They were nearing this apparition when a boy the size of a first grader came dashing from behind, almost knocking over Loddy.

  “Wait a minute, Maw.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Loddy froze. Her stomach swayed backwards while the rest of her shifted forward, an undulation of anxiety. She watched the Victorian figure bend over and hug the little boy.

  “Larry, where’ve you been? You scared your mother half to death.”

  “What’s the matter, Loddy? I want to go home.”

  “Okay, Maw. I think I’m just tired.

  “You need eat.”

  SCENE 8:

  An Orderly Table

  Light dawned over the city as they left the hospital. It had been a long worrisome night and neither considered sleeping. Food was Alma’s solution for every problem life threw her. Loddy had once read in a Lithuanian cookbook that an orderly table setting encouraged orderly eating and polite behaviour. There was nothing orderly about Alma’s breakfast table that morning.

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “You never do, Maw. I’ll have to ask Bettina then.”

  “Ne! Don’t bother her.” Alma gazed into her cup as though she were a fortune teller and could predict happiness somewhere in a brown pool of coffee.

  She had tossed a mess of leftover sliced potatoes, bacon bits and a couple of eggs into a frying pan and called it breakfast. Loddy smothered the entire showpiece with ketchup. The kitchen table was weighted down with a buffet of side dishes that included German sausages, an assortment of cold cuts, Baltic black bread, Polish pickles, horseradish, mustard, a large bowl of red beet salad, and fresh tomatoes drenched in sour cream — enough to feed everyone at The Last Supper and any unexpected guests. Loddy just wanted a bowl of cereal.

  “Ah, that Bettina! Sunkus.”

  “Why is she difficult, Maw?”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “I know. So stop saying it.”

  Loddy was about to scrape her meal into the garbage pail. She had had enough.

  “Ne. Ne. Give to me. I have for supper.” And she jerked the plate from Loddy’s hands, dropping the leftovers onto the cracked linoleum floor.

  “Achhh! What you do.”

  “Sorry, Maw. I’ll clean up.”

  “Ne. You get in my way. Go.”

  So Loddy returned to the living room, lit a cigarette and, through a fog of smoke, watched her mother mop the scraps from the floor. It was what Alma did best. Queen of her kitchen, she was methodical in its upkeep, the old floors sterilized to a shine, glasses and dinnerware arranged in tidy piles in the cupboards. She forbade any disruption to its order. Alma had never taught her daughters how to find their way around a stove. Loddy’s first cooking misadventure, aside from Home Economics in high school, featured a dinner for Ulu and Dewey where the fork stood upright in a hill of sticky overcooked spaghetti. They ordered pizza instead.

  “Why you smoke, Loddy? Feh!”

  “I won’t go until you tell me what happened.”

  “I finish dishes and wash table.”

  Loddy chain smoked her way towards patience. Three cigarettes later, her mother was ready to talk.

  xxx

  Alma parked herself in her usual overstuffed, brown velour armchair, and picked up her latest project from the knitting basket by her feet. Her cheek against the chill of the living room window, Loddy watched the neighbourhood kids play hockey on the street below.

  “I hear Tievas live with rich Polish widow now. Curva! Whore! He come to say he want to marry her but she only marry him in church. He say we never marry, and I must sign paper. Bastard. He bring his friend, Sukey.” Alma’s eyes near tears, she thrust her hand into the pocket of her frayed house dress. “Achh, there is no love in the world.” She rolled up the tissue in a ball and swabbed her eyes.

  The Pinkerton Security guard was leaving for work when words got in the way. He raised his hand to strike Alma, a karate chop to the neck, but Loddy interfered, planted herself between them and shrieked: “Leave her alone.” Her aggressiveness surprised him. He lowered his hand like a puppet on a string, turned, and made his exit. No one had ever talked back to him before.

  After this last confrontation with her father, Loddy rented the apartment on Wellington Street and, under cover of rain and night, the three of them escaped carrying shoppin
g bags full of clothes and cooking utensils and nothing else. She was eighteen. Her first job as a junior secretary in the credit department of a large tobacco company in St. Henri gave them the means to flee and rebuild their lives as a family.

  Alma had refused to divorce her husband. She had feared excommunication from the Catholic Church, banishment from receiving the holy sacraments, and damnation to hell. She, instead, gained fellowship in the church choir, and in the nuns who let her assist them in sweeping the church floors, polishing the brass candlesticks and dusting the Stations of the Cross. On days when boredom framed her world, she would drop by the nuns’ residence across the street from the church, and they would welcome her with tea, pastries, and conversation. Sometimes, she would join them in their knitting circles and create dozens of squares that were woven into afghans to be shipped to the poor in Africa.

  Loddy had once suggested to Alma that perhaps the nuns were unaware of the hot temperatures in Africa and perhaps the people needed food instead of blankets. But Alma believed these acts of love would earn her reward points into heaven.

  Now her husband, whom she hadn’t seen in four years, showed his face on this bitter wintry day and claimed there was no marriage, no children, no love, so would she please sign this piece of paper and he’d be out of their lives forever. He wanted an annulment.

  Loddy pulled the drapes together, shutting out the hockey scene, and faced Alma head on: “Is he my father?”

  “Why you say that?”

  “I just want the truth, Maw. I know Bettina and I have different fathers. We don’t even look alike. I am tall and fat and she’s small and thin.”

  Alma busied herself with her knitting and, when she completed the row, she held up the work and said: “See I make blanket for you like I make for Bettina.”

  “Maw, you know what he did to me.”