I liked the girl in the picture because Marnie had made her interesting to look at, but I did not like the picture because I was not sad. I was not a sad child. Everyone always told my parents that I was a happy, playful, laughing girl.

  I was normal.

  Look, Almita, my mother said, pinching my thigh extra hard so I would remember myself and not reach for the picture. Look at how beautiful your sister has made you look.

  You can have the picture if you want, Marnie said.

  I don’t want it.

  62Well, I want it, my father said. This is beautiful work, Marnie. When are you going to draw me this way, eh? Am I not handsome enough for you?

  You’re too bald to be handsome, Marnie said tartly and even though my mother reached to pinch her earlobes, it was clear she was only joking. My father clasped his hands over his heart in mock agony.

  I think, my mother said when they had all calmed down, we should frame this one.

  No one noticed that I had said nothing.

  My parents had Marnie date and sign the picture.

  It resurfaced, one day, framed in a tasteful black metallic frame in the hallway amidst our old school portraits, the gold foil portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the image of whom is ubiquitous in Mexican homes, and a picture of Bubbe, half turned away from the camera, which had gone up after she died.

  Marnie’s drawing of the girl who was me and not me stayed there for many years until one day, years later, it occurred to me that I could do what I wanted and I took it down.

  I had never liked it, and I was no longer willing to be mocked by that little girl’s sad smile. But I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it like I would have if it had been made by any hands but Marnie’s. So I didn’t throw it out; I slotted it between some books in the bookshelf in my father’s study and allowed myself to forget about it. At some point, even later than that, looking for something to read, I searched among the books. Eventually I realized that the portrait should have been among those books and was not. Not among the books and not in the filing cabinets that held our old report cards, passports, and decades’ worth of old tax returns.

  I asked my parents, individually, if they knew where it was and both were surprised to find it wasn’t still where they had hung it though it had been many years since I had moved it.

  63Like so many things in life, the portrait became a mystery. It had winked out of the world and could no longer be found.

  A Mural

  Her final year of school, I wasn’t even aware that my time with Marnie was dwindling away, that the end of high school would be the end of us as sisters as we knew it. That final year she was barely there, consumed, like all the other art students, with the making of her grad mural.

  The grad murals were legendary. They stayed in the hallways long after the students who had painted them had moved on, a kind of legacy, a touch of immortality, though presumably the oldest of the murals was only about ten years old.

  All throughout those years of school, as I did my homework, and ran out to play with my friends, and bickered with my parents over how much time I spent on the computer, Marnie had been in the background. She was hunched over the table in the dining room or hunched over the desk in her room or hunched over the computer, ignoring my pleas for time on the internet and our mother’s pleas to think of her posture and stand up straight.

  Sometimes, between hunching, Marnie would rip up whatever she was doing, tearing paper or photographs in smooth dispassionate sections of four before binning them completely, deleting files with a click before clicking on the Trash icon and deleting them a second time, rendering them beyond recovery. Between these failures Marnie would announce she had won a prize, been accepted in another 64publication, awarded a grant, invited to speak at an arts centre in Toronto where my parents were only too happy to drive her and I had to spend my Saturday in the hallway of a museum, being quiet in the back of the room, trying to finish a book I wasn’t interested in, longing to be home or near a computer, talking with my friends.

  Though she was as nervous about the exhibition of her grad piece it seemed to me one with all the other Marnie events in which she was told over and over again that she was special, special, special.

  Every day that school year Marnie had worked in her corner of the stairwell, and while she apprised us of every development, we had never, because of geography, been able to see the miracle of her work which every pimpled unspectacular student, whether an art student or a general one in the school because of simple districting, had the privilege of seeing.

  I was not in a pleasant mood when we arrived on a cold spring day an hour or so after school had ended.

  That winter I had developed breasts and I was not happy about it especially now that the weather meant I could no longer hide myself in my large duffle coat or the oversized sweaters my friend’s Ukrainian mother knitted for me out of imported New Zealand wool. My parents, firmly in denial that their youngest had any breasts at all, had neglected to take me bra shopping. The night before, my mother had tried to wrestle me into the nicest dress I owned, an empire waist silk dress from Marks & Spencer which had been immense on me when they purchased it in a sale when I was ten and which, now that it finally fit me lengthwise, could not be induced to close over my chest.

  My mother kept insisting it would fit, telling me to suck in my gut despite the fact that it was my chest that was the problem.

  You’re not trying, Alma, she kept saying as she wrestled with the zipper.

  She has breasts, Mother!

  It was Marnie who had spoken the truth we were afraid to.

  65I felt myself flush red, as my mother turned to Marnie and said, She’s a baby!

  I pushed them both out of my room, humiliated that Marnie had named that unnameable thing: my body.

  My mother should have been the one to, discreetly, and without using the word breasts, take me shopping for something that actually fit, instead of trying to force me into a little-girl dress that never would.

  And yet later that night, when I had cried myself calm, Marnie knocked on my door, walking in before I could tell her to go away.

  I was thinking it might be nice if you wore one of my dresses tomorrow, Marnie said. There’s going to be a lot of people and it would be so much easier to spot you if you were wearing something recognizable. You could wear this. She held up a stretchy velour blue dress from Le Château. Or this, holding up the plaid Jacob minidress which I coveted.

  Until then the only thing preventing me from sneaking into Marnie’s room when she wasn’t there and stealing the dress for myself was that I believed it wouldn’t fit. It didn’t quite, but in the opposite way than I imagined: rather than being too loose, the dress was tight across the chest. It zipped up, was the ultimate thing. It zipped up all the way.

  Could I wear your Docs too? I said as I admired myself in the mirror. My feet were still smaller than Marnie’s but I figured I could wear my thick winter socks to pad them out.

  Don’t push it, Almita, Marnie said, and tweaked my nose.

  Marnie was only one of several students exhibiting their grand murals that night.

  They had started in ninth grade with some twenty-odd students and gradually, between those who couldn’t hack it and those who moved and those who had lost interest, they had dwindled to a group of twelve.

  66A large crowd was there to see the murals. Though they looked terribly grown up to me, I could tell they were mostly students by the way Marnie kept waving at them. A sprinkling of younger siblings, of whom I seemed one of the oldest, and a handful of frazzled-looking adults, parents holding bouquets, moved as one. Again and again we smushed ourselves into alcoves and under staircases, while a nervous-looking student stood in front of a large black curtain, gave a little speech, and then unveiled their piece to rapturous applause.

  Your husband must be so proud of Marnie, a woman was telling my mother near the back of the room. The woman was leaning close to my mother and touching her on the arm. I knew my mother disliked the overfamiliar intimacy of strangers. I slipped in beside her, dragging her arm away from the stranger’s hand and putting it, possessively, around my own shoulders.

  And is this your daughter? The woman smiled at me and patted me on the head like I was a dog.

  Does she go to Canterbury too?

  She couldn’t have picked a sorer subject. I had wanted to go to the school. In fact, ever since Marnie had been accepted there, I thought I was fated to follow in her footsteps.

  That winter I had tried out for drama, memorized one of the six obligatory monologues they had girls audition with, gone to the group trials where I did my best to dance and play and shout so that I could stick out in the mind of the adjudicators. But I knew when the mail came, a thin white envelope instead of the thick welcome packet that Marnie had received, that I was a reject.

  Three other girls in my class, including my former best friend, Evie, had gotten into the drama program. Evie now went to the off-campus Dairy Queen to eat lunch with the other girls, as if it were already high school and she had already forgotten me.

  I felt my mother’s hand tighten reflexively against my arm.

  Alma’s going to Glebe next year, my mother said. She’s not special.

  67The woman’s jaw dropped a little.

  Excuse me, I said. I want to see the other works.

  Ordinary

  Even though the high school was pretty small I immediately got lost, which was sort of the point. My skin itched with humiliation. I wanted to die.

  Over and over again I heard my mother saying, She’s not special, and the woman’s face looking horrified.

  It wasn’t myself that I was burning for. It was my mother.

  That woman, whoever she was, didn’t understand my mother, thought she was some harsh brute. And my mother could be harsh in so many ways, but not in this one.

  Not being special was what she and my father wanted to be above all. They had spent their whole lives pushing Marnie and me into the best schools they could, making us take all the extracurriculars like dance, piano, and ballet where we competed fiercely against other children who were all desperate to be the best, to be special.

  But the second Marnie had shown that she was special I realized how different my parents were from everyone else’s: special wasn’t something they had wanted their children to be. They were proud of her but they feared for her. They didn’t understand how to take compliments from Marnie’s teachers, my father freezing up, my mother lowering her head and muttering in a way that made those hateful others think that she couldn’t speak any English at all.

  The more Marnie won awards the more they praised me for the Bs and Cs I brought home.

  68They feared Marnie’s beauty and her talent in that they marked her as different. They were proud of my own ordinariness, not understanding, or rather refusing to understand, that I was different, often the only girl in my classes who was decidedly not white, the only one who wasn’t a McKay or a McLeod.

  They wanted us unrecognizable and mediocre. My mother was raised a strict Catholic, my father a conservative Jew. They had raised us as nothing. They wanted us to be like the other Canadians, not understanding that the white Canadians they viewed as accent-less blanks were coloured by their own backgrounds, their vague European roots, their veneer of Christianity whether they went to church or no.

  They were exhausting. Hopeless. I turned down another hallway and found myself beside a fire exit. I pushed my way out and was relieved that the fire alarm didn’t ring. Rather than the flat front of the building with the wide lawn and the arching driveway I was facing a wide field, one I had never seen before. Disoriented, I started to follow the contours of the building I had just left. If I walked enough I would find the parking lot we had parked in and I could wait by the car until someone, Marnie or my parents, found me and we could all go out for a celebratory dinner and then go home.

  Instead I found Oliver.

  I didn’t recognize him at first because he was kissing a girl. Their shameless intimacy, the way their bodies were pressed together with a casualness I hadn’t learned yet and was terrified I never would, made it difficult to distinguish them as individuals.

  And then I became aware that the sandy-brown hair of the boy was familiar to me, that the forward fall of his shoulders was one I knew, that the arms that cradled this girl had once cradled me.

  I started to back away but the girl, without removing her lips from Oliver’s, opened her eyes at the exact moment that I was looking directly at her.

  She frowned.

  69I cannot for the life of me remember her face. She had brown hair. She was not uniquely pretty nor uniquely ugly. She was not notable in any way. My parents would have loved her.

  Oliver turned to see what she was looking at, and saw me.

  Little Alt, he said. He smiled at me. What’s up?

  Oliver Redux

  Oliver was still our backyard neighbour.

  For a few years after he had rescued me, whenever I checked our backyard fence the gap still existed. And then one day, in the fall, when the leaves on the bushes were sparse but we had yet to tuck them into burlap for their hibernal rest, I saw that when I wasn’t looking the fence had been repaired.

  For a few years after that I sometimes saw glimpses of him at school as we wandered through the hallways. Occasionally he would end up in Marnie’s class and then he would come into our home in conversation. Oliver got in trouble for his penmanship. Oliver and I got the top marks on the math quiz.

  Mostly though Marnie did not mention Oliver. Mostly Oliver did not exist to me.

  The last time I had seen him he and Marnie had been walking together around Patterson Creek, tracing a loop around the edge of the canal. From the O’Connor bridge I saw them in miniature. They weren’t touching or even looking at each other but something about the two of them together made them look like a couple and for the first time I wondered if they were. Marnie looked up at me and I raised my hand and waved. When I did Marnie abruptly turned from me, and Oliver, 70who hadn’t seen me, followed her motion, turned, and began walking with her back the way they had come.

  Were you embarrassed by me? I asked her later.

  What do you mean?

  And when I explained about the wave and her turning she said, I didn’t even see you there. I would have called you over if I had.

  There was no suggestion of a lie in her attitude but even still I doubted the veracity of what Marnie was saying. I wondered if she was keeping Oliver-shaped secrets from the family.

  It made me realize that though we lived a few metres away from each other and interacted with similar people Oliver and I didn’t really know each other anymore.

  I knew that he was one of the people who went to Canterbury, like Marnie, but for what I didn’t know.

  I knew that he had a car, because sometimes Marnie would tell us he had given her a ride even though she usually took the bus.

  It was surprising to see him now, quite near me, and realize that he was much taller than I remembered, but that I was tall too, nearly as tall as Marnie, tall enough that I was embarrassed by how much of my legs were showing in her plaid minidress.

  The girl with Oliver was eyeing my legs and I tugged self-consciously at my hem.

  It’s Marnie’s grad exhibit, I said.

  Oh, that’s today? You can show it to me.

  He reached over and put an arm around my shoulders, guiding me gently to his side. With his other hand he tugged along the girl he had been kissing.

  It was the strangest feeling being pulled against his torso. I could remember, abruptly, what it had been like to be smaller than small and be sitting in his lap, feeling like he would keep me safe.

  And he did keep me safe.

  71With embarrassing ease he took me to Marnie’s mural where my parents and Marnie had all convened.

  I felt disoriented for being with Oliver, but I hadn’t even been gone long enough for anyone to notice my absence. I barely had time to glance at Marnie’s mural; Oliver and I were folded into the circle of conversation where my father’s unrelenting questions gave me an excuse to admire the sandy-brown colour of Oliver’s eyelashes.

  I had lost myself in the slight cleft on the tip of his nose when suddenly I heard my father joke, You be sure to bring her back in one piece, and Oliver answer back, I’ll take good care of her, sir.

  I realized that my admiration for Oliver’s form had left me adrift in the conversation.

  What’s going on? I asked, but, as was typical for my being a younger child with a soft voice, no one heard me.

  It was all over. I would never see the mural again and it remained hazy in my mind, a picture I was secretly glad not to have to praise. We were all drifting away to the parking lot. Marnie and Oliver and his girl were heading in one direction, Marnie having begged off her own celebratory dinner to eat pizza with some friends. It was all happening too fast; suddenly I was in the back of the car and I was asking my parents, What was going on before?

  Marnie’s going out to dinner.

  No, before that. Where is she going with Oliver?

  He’ll be at McGill with Marnie, my mother said. It’s good that she’ll have someone to look after her in the fall.

  Yes, it’s nice, I said.

  It didn’t feel nice.

  Marnie had already promised that when she finally left for university I could have her room, a spacious sprawling proper room that faced the backyard, and she would take mine, a glorified closet, on the rare occasions when she would come back and grace us with her presence.

  72I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I had imagined that I could look out the window some nights and see Oliver in his room, which faced Marnie’s former room. I had already worked out we could use flashlights to signal to each other. I had found an old book on Morse code for two dollars at the Book Market and was trying to teach myself the dash-dot system. Oliver, with his strange mechanical hand and his SkyRoads, seemed like the sort of person who would be into codes, Morse or otherwise.

 

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