Academic Papers

           Men surround the tall blonde as she sits in the booth, her perfectly applied red lips parted in laughter as they stare at her Dolly Parton sized breasts—cleavage spilling over the deep “v” of her white blouse. Her favourite feature and one that she often teases me about getting myself — a curse I vehemently decline at the age of 14. The restaurant is hers; the patrons are as well. Leaning toward her, they are as eager for the food that she masterfully cooks as they are for her company. She flirts and laughs while her eldest son, Shayne, mans the kitchen. At 22, he is as skilled a chef as his mother.

 

           Our sister, my mother’s only biological daughter, waits the other tables in the busy restaurant as my mom takes a break from the grind to bask in the glow of her adoring fans. I can hear her answering questions the men ask as a tall biker, with salt and peppered hair and beard, walks into the restaurant. Her eyes follow him as he crosses the room and slides into her booth and blocks the woman from sight. Her voice comes to me in snippets and that is life with Brenda…moments of her that are fleeting before she moves on to something more enjoyable than the teen silently clearing a table across the room.

​

***

​

           Snippets of tense shoulders where muscles strain against the small healing hands rubbing her soft skin. She sits in the tub, her long bleached hair cascading onto my lap as I sit on the edge. Her eyes close as I knead deeper into the stiff peaks of her shoulder blades. Her nakedness normal…something seen a thousand times. Her skin like silky flower petals but the scent drifting from her is the baby powder she uses as talc. There is nothing infantile about her as intelligent blue eyes peer up into my green ones and her mouth opens, “It’s been hard, Sirena.” It is a sigh on air tart from the black coffee she drinks before the sigh spills over to whispers of sorrow she lays in my lap like her hair. Snippets of stories she urges me to remember but how can I tell her that a five-year-old will never remember it all.

​

***

​

           She doesn’t speak those sad stories to me now. Instead, her stories are full of the heroine that she’s always seen herself as. I close my eyes to block out the sight of her hand sliding up the arm of the biker. I wonder if her fourth husband knows she’s flirting with a new man. “Amber,” her throaty voice calls out to my sister, “Bring more coffee for us,” she holds up her empty mug.

​

           Her gaze slides towards me as though she can feel the anger from this side of the room. Her brow furrows for a second as a hitch catches her smile, snatching it away for only a second—a shift that only one used to watching her moods would catch. My sister falters…she’s seen the dismay as well…and she glances to me, her mouth, so much like my mother’s, twists in anger as she mouths, “Fuck off,” before the corner lifts into a grin and she’s suddenly smiling again—a mirror to the blonde across the room.

​

***

​

           Snippets of an hour-glass figure dressed in cowboy boots, a long skirt swishing around her calves, her signature cleavage spilling shirt and perfect curls under a cowboy hat. Swishing moments as we watch her walk down the road away from the house…escaping darker things for the sparkling innuendos of male diners, who flock to her first restaurant. My sister laughs, “You can always see Mom in the distance. Her ass always wiggles.”

​

           I nod and laugh, and we watch her wiggling away from us, ignoring the longing on our faces that, maybe, we could leave with her. My sister moves away from the window and slips on a pair of my mom’s heels, swaying her hips as she saunters around the room, mimicking the silhouette of the escaping woman we’d been watching only moments before. I can almost see my mom in Amber’s gangly 12-year-old frame already giving hints that womanhood wasn’t too far away, the same tilt of her head and blue eyes staring demurely into the mirror. She’s mom and she moves away from me in much the same way…while I try to ignore snippets of my 8-year-old self in the mirror.

​

***

​

           “And how hard was your delivery with Sirena?” One of the men asks but it’s hard to tell which one as they all lean toward my mom. She’d been telling her favourite stories…the 48 hours of labour with her oldest son, Shayne; the slightly easier labour with Mike and Amber, her golden child, the easiest of them all.

​

           “Sirena?” she hesitates and bites her lower lip as she ponders how to answer. She glances at me, and I see the storm in her eyes. Maybe she’s remembering the sister who’d saddled her with the errant teen carrying plates of hot food to a different table, maybe she is just thinking of all the ways I fucked up—they were endless and every time my behaviour was held up to the light of a 15 year old girl, my biological mother, who’d gotten pregnant and then had to put her baby up for my mom to adopt.

​

           She laughs, “Oh god, I’m so stupid”—she isn’t—“I always forget”—she doesn’t—“delivery with her was the easiest”—it wasn’t—“I simply pulled her out of a plane”—the first truth even if it was simplified and left out all the details. The long story of how this heroine had answered a middle of the night phone call to, “Do you want Sirena?” Nothing more, nothing less, no emotion, a 3-month-old baby about to be thrown out like trash and only my aunt…my mother… could save me from that fate. My fists clench around the plates of food I’m carrying to her table, but no one notices how her words drain the colour from my face.

​

           The excitement of the fans fade to confusion and my mom’s laughter fills the silence, “She’s not my biological daughter.”

​

           The biker glances at me, his gaze sliding over my body as he says, “Really, she looks more like you than Amber does.”

​

           Amber scowls, an old injury of ego, and my mom laughs, “Oh, that’s only because I dye my hair. My hair used to be as red as Amber’s, but you know what they say, Gentlemen prefer blondes.”

​

           Laughter fills the room, even if she doesn’t catch the snippets of disappointment mirrored in both of her daughters’ eyes.

​

***

​

           “Head up.” My mom snaps the command.

​

           — “God, why are you so weird?” She sighs the insult.

​

           “Shoulders back.”

​

           — “Why can’t you be like your sister?”

​

           "Always walk into a room with your head high because no matter how uncomfortable you are, if your head is high, you will look like you own the room.”

​

           — “Sirena, you’re too sensitive; you’ll cry at a dirty look.”

 

           “Confidence is everything, even if you have to fake it.”

           

           — “You know, no one wanted you. They used to just drop you on the side of the road and leave you there…you’re lucky you’re alive.”

 

           Snippets of instruction.

 

           Snippets of insults.

 

           My mom was confidence, laughter, desire. Men wanted her and she knew how to use them to get the things she wanted. She could shape her children like clay…except for the hard lump of the strangeling she’d pulled out of the belly of a plane.

​

***

​

           “Mom,” the voice draws her eyes toward the kitchen and her hand falls from the biker’s arm. “I need some help in here.”

​

           My brother glances at me, winks with a large smile—my frequent saviour. I return the smile, as his words pull my mother from her entertainment. She stands from the table, “Guess the party’s over,” she purrs before walking across the room…head held high…commanding the attention of everyone, including the silent strangeling, yearning for more than just a snippet of her.