Shoulder the Sky. Lesley Choyce

      CHAPTER TWO

      Not long after our mom died, I tried to talk to my sister, Lilly, but she didn’t want to talk about it. My mother had an illness that lasted about four years. It was not cancer but it might as well have been. She had treatment and got better and then got worse and we all did very poorly in dealing with it and with her.

      My father was trying, but he was already turning invisible and that didn’t help. Lilly was rebellious at the time. She had even changed her name to Lilith for a while when she discovered that Lilith, in Jewish folklore, was a vampire-like killer and nocturnal female demon. Older than me, she was experimenting with drugs and dying her hair and she kept finding some new part of her body to pierce. She was angry almost all the time, which seemed all wrong to me but, as Dave would say, she was probably venting her anger about our mother dying. Unfortunately, she was mostly angry with our mother for being so sick, and that wasn’t Mom’s fault.

      Lilly stayed out really late, and once she got into trouble with the police at an all-night rave. That surprised me because she always told me she hated rave music. Lilly and I could never talk to each other about my mother’s condition when Mom was alive. None of us were big talkers in my family. That’s why Dave thought that writing would be a good way for me to “open up.” Dave didn’t know about my website back then.

      My mother — and I want to use her first name here — Claire — was brave about the fact that she was slipping downhill. Her paintings of the alien landscapes got much better. She tried to open up more about herself and she tried to pull the family together even as it was falling apart. My mother, I now believe, was like the sun — bright and cheery and a great warm gravity anchor that held all of us little planets in orbit. When she died, we all went spinning off into the void.

      But the odd thing was that, to everyone around us, we seemed like we were handling it well. We acted as if nothing particularly important had happened. Lilly kept sulking and piercing and sometimes smoking. She went through a string of truly repulsive boyfriends, even one who was the lead singer in a band called Repuke.

      My father made hasty, furtive appearances around home, slipping in and out of the bathroom, in and out of the kitchen, holed up watching hockey on TV in the bedroom, and slipping out to his van in the morning to go to work just as I was waking up — and it didn’t seem to matter what time I woke up.

      It was a month after Claire had died that my math teacher — the HMMWMT (heavy metal mud wrestling math teacher) took me aside and said, “Martin, you have a serious problem. I think you are too normal and it’s not normal to be normal after you’ve had a trauma in your life.”

      Mr. Miller, HMMWMT (who only mud wrestled at bars on weekends after his professional career as a world champion wrestler had ended), was one of the few people in the school kids listened to. He had once played a really nasty lead guitar in a heavy metal band called Gangrene, and they sold a lot of CDs before he retired from the road and took up teaching math. He still had a small ponytail even though he was kind of bald up top. And once every week Mr. Miller would bring in his Fender guitar and Marshall amp and try to explain algebra using some screeching distortion riffs that would bring the principal banging on the door. The principal never actually walked in to say anything, because nobody messed with the HMMWMT. But if Mr. Miller saw his boss peering in through the little window in the door, he’d crank the amp back to five instead of ten.

      It was the HMMWMT who told me I should go see a “professional” about my problem. He explained that my kind of “personal dilemma” needed something more than that wimp, Egan, our guidance counsellor, could offer. When Mr. Miller takes you aside, you listen, so I knew I had to take the advice. He recommended his old friend Dave, who had once been a roadie for Meatloaf before taking up psychiatry. And the rest, as they say, is history. Or my story, at least.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Dave and Mr. Miller agreed that I should seek out some form of rebellion to release my anger. I still wasn’t sure I had anger. Hurt and disappointment, however, were present and deeply buried in the suitcase of my mind. I suppose I had learned from my father — or somehow inherited his genetic code — to keep things bottled up. We were not moaners, complainers, whiners, or wimps in the Emerson household, and I had descended, apparently, from very stoic apes, followed by a genealogical string of New England workaholics who faced life’s adversities with coping mechanisms that required no tears.

      I asked Lilly to take me somewhere to have my nose or my ear pierced but I chickened out when I saw the young woman — not much older than Lilly — who was about to do the job. She claimed to be a professional, but I could tell that she had been drinking. I came home without a puncture or laceration and so I failed to get my anger out by means of primitive body defacement.

      Every day at noon, however, I had watched the teenaged smokers from my school march in a purposeful but ragged procession towards the woods, where they would smoke away lunch hour instead of sitting in the cafeteria with the rest of us eating cafeteria food or scarfing down homemade mock chicken sandwiches. I had a kind of breakthrough one day there in the cafeteria, unwrapping a sandwich I had packed that morning: bologna with relish, pickles, mustard, and salsa. The sandwich reminded me, with the force of a hurricane ripping the roof off a Florida condominium, how much I missed my mother’s vegetarian sandwiches.

      My mother had been a vegetarian, although she could never fully explain why. She wasn’t an animal rights person or a gung-ho health nut. But she had met a woman who claimed to be a shaman, and the shaman (who sold real estate for a living) told her to cut down on the meat her family was eating. My father, not wanting to cause an argument, went along with it, even though he was a great lover of nearly raw steaks consumed on family pilgrimages to Ponderosa.

      The sandwiches my mother created for me were fashioned from homemade brown bread, lentils, sprouts, tofu, three kinds of pickles, salsa, and relish. The other kids all had great pity for me, but I had eaten the sandwiches dutifully.

      Until my mother was too sick to make them. Then I was on my own with bologna or mock chicken, but I could never face tofu in the morning. And what was left of my family had regressed to white sliced bread as well.

      So I was eating lunch with the Egg Man — my friend Darrell — who had his usual egg salad sandwich (but that was not why he was called the Egg Man), and studying the various varieties of pickles as they fell from my sandwich. The cafeteria was loud and making my ears ring. Dave and Heavy Metal Math were still occasionally hounding me about my normality, and I had my own private disappointments with the failed piercing.