Almost Japanese. Sarah Sheard

      copyright © Sarah Sheard 1985

      cover photograph copyright © Rick/Simon 2000

      COACH HOUSE BOOKS

      401 Huron Street on bpNichol Lane

      Toronto, Canada

      M5S 2G5

      Printed in Canada

      CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

      Sheard, Sarah

      Almost Japanese

      2nd Ed.

      ISBN 978-1-77056-347-6

      PS8587.H374A74 2000 C813'.54 C00-930203-4 PR9199.3.S53A74 2000

      Almost Japanese is available in a print edition: ISBN 978 1 55245 084 8.

      For my folks.

      ‘What one respects must be perfect.’

      Who was I before all this happened? I am trying to remember.

      Feet

      They left two parallel tracks in the snow as each parent took an arm and dragged me like a sack to nursery school. One morning, after two weeks of this, I suddenly announced that I would walk.

      My father came home that night with a gauzy sack of chocolate coins in his briefcase.

      Nose

      The woody smell of the arrowroot biscuits on a flowered plate at nursery school. The oilskin tablecloth covered with glasses of apple juice. The starchy smell of fingerpaints drying on my smock, a cut-down shirt of my father’s.

      More nose

      I am in Sunday school. Our church is on the membrane between a rich neighbourhood and a working-class one and I am feeling self-conscious in my scratchy Sunday best. A little girl with dirty legs smiles at me as she steps across me on the floor and I catch a sour smell. I point her out to my mother later and she tells me that God doesn’t like to hear those things in His house.

      Hips

      My first costume was a kilt my mother bought me to wear to kindergarten. I preferred costumes to ordinary clothes and began to make my own out of tea-towels, dustrags, my father’s old pyjama top.

      Skin

      When my father came home he always put his briefcase on the chair in the front hall. I was not allowed to open it but I liked to wrap my hand around the stitched leather handle which grew darker over the years. When the stitching unravelled, a bone of metal poked through. A witch’s finger.

      Ears

      I am squatting to watch the drops gather along the seam in the ceiling. A drop of water fattens and falls with a pat onto the damp halo of newspaper around my mother’s shoes.

      Arms and legs

      I got up on a chair. Reached for the five-pound bag of flour, broke it open and shook it out. Lay down and made angels, lots of them, all over the kitchen floor. For mom, when she got back.

      Vocal chords

      My mother, on her way out shopping, gave me her old muskrat coat to play with. I got out her black-handled scissors, cut open the coat and sewed pieces, inside out, into Indian leggings, complete with fringe. I was upstairs, admiring the effect in the mirror, when I heard her come in the front door, discover the remains scattered across the kitchen table, shriek my name. Just once.

      Face (loss of)

      The class photograph is passed from desk to desk. Little sighs of suppressed laughter. Something is happening. When the picture is handed to me it is terrible to see. Little pin-holes all over my face, felt through the back like voodoo braille. Why only my face? The whole class hates me.

      My hands tremble holding it out to my mother. She looks hard at it for a moment and begins to laugh – the kids did this to you? She pulls me to her, her vibrations shaking open my clenched-fist heart. It IS funny. She gasps out – Oh, the things kids do to one another. Would you ever be that cruel?

      I stop in mid-laugh, look up at her, open-mouthed.

      Hands

      My mother kisses my fingers goodbye through the letterbox.

      Skull and bones

      I pulled the covers up to my chin and rolled onto my back. From my bed by the window sill, I could see the stars straight above me. It was like sleeping outside but much cosier. A soft rain began to fall and the window sill gave off a damp wood-work smell. My sheets and pillow smelled good and I listened to the water gurgling down the eavestrough. It was at that moment, feeling so safe and peaceful, when suddenly another feeling swept over me – of disappearing into the darkness, of my parents, of everyone alive vanishing, rolling out the window, evaporating like rain. Death was night that lasted forever. How much time did I have before I turned into mud and got rained on and walked over by strangers?

      Before skull and bones?

      She turned from the sink to answer me, holding up a potato-peeling. You were this. You were a tomato in a sack. You were the dust blowing around the corner before you were born.

      Nipples

      Bruna, who cleaned our house, loved to startle me out of a sound sleep at the crack of dawn on Saturday mornings, whipping the covers off me and stripping the bed while the sheets were still warm.

      Bruna!

      I lunged for them back but a second too late.

      She saw everything! I was sleeping naked, like a movie star!

      Neighbours

      A senator and his wife lived on my street. The widow of a famous man lived two doors down. She was addressed as Lady B. A chauffeur did her shopping. Up the hill on the corner, Mr G. lived with his sister and their old nursemaid. In a house that looked like a French hotel with turrets and a balcony that wrapped all the way around. Gardeners came twice a month to feed the roses. Mr G. kept an Alsatian, Rudi, to guard him. When Rudi died, another dog took its place. A succession of Rudis, fierce and unpredictable, threw themselves against the fence every time I walked to and from school.

      Eyes

      When I was in grade three my father decided to build a fountain in the back yard, drawing kids in from blocks away. Other kids’ fathers didn’t do things like fountains. He showed us where he planned to dig, marking it with a ring of bricks. He pointed out where he would bury the pump. When he began to shovel, we could see how ropey his muscles showed under his work-shirt.

      He unearthed insects and wrigglers we’d never seen before. Flatworms and millipedes with legs that glittered as they frantically reburied themselves. My father told us the sun burnt them. He showed us ants’ eggs, grains of rice piled up neatly with black seeds showing through the glaze. He picked some up between his fingers to show we shouldn’t be afraid and although it revolted us he put an egg into every outstretched palm and we squealed as he did it but he was right. They were earth hearts, halfway between dirt and being alive.

      He finished the hole the next day. He lined it with heavy plastic, then began to lay bricks over top that, straightening up now and again to survey the effect. It looked like four walls in the ground. A nest of brick eggs. Nothing like the ornamental fountain in Peppio’s Italian restaurant where I’d been taken for my birthday. Then he installed the pipe and hose that connected to the pump and the fountain began to take shape. He dug another hole and buried the pump. I lifted one end of the scalp of sod he’d removed and he took the other and we swung it back into place over the wound in the lawn and my mother claimed she couldn’t spot it from her kitchen window, we’d done such a good job. After the mortar had dried and been waterproofed with a compound that stank and