THE ROCK IN THE HARD PLACE

I am nine when my father runs off with his 23-year-old secretary. He leaves a note on my mother's pillow: I just don't love you anymore. I know this because I find the crumpled piece of paper in the garbage can after my mother falls asleep on the couch. Then I read it in my closet with my Mickey Mouse flashlight.

The message is written in black marker, and all the words are in capital letters. Even my father's name at the end—Rodney—is written this way.

My sister Roxanne says it sounds more final that way. She is three years older and knows more about grown-up things than I do.

A few days later, Roxanne goes to stay with our dad and The Other Woman. It's just for a week or so, she says. Dad wants me there. It never occurs to ask Roxanne if he wants me there, too, but I already know he doesn't.

Roxanne doesn't seem very sad about how things have changed, but I am. Mostly because our mother cries all week, she does it right in front of me, too, so I have to spend a lot of time hugging her and telling her it's going to be okay. Also, she barely eats, and she doesn't change her clothes. Eventually, I walk to the store to buy a dozen eggs and a loaf of Wonder Bread to make myself some French toast. I have French Toast for dinner all week, drenched with margarine and Aunt Jemima syrup.

"Can you come for a sleepover?" Jennifer asks me a few weeks later. "We're going to watch American Graffiti, and my mom is making pizza."

I shake my head; I don't feel right leaving Mom, but I don't tell Jennifer this. Instead, I say I have to help pack because we are moving, which is true.

"Again?" Jennifer says, rolling her eyes. "You only just moved to your apartment in January!"

"I know," I say. "My mom found a better one."

We move seven times over the next three years. Mostly just from one grey apartment block to another—sometimes just to a different floor.

I don't complain, though, because maybe a move will change things. Only it never does. Our beige furniture gets arranged in the same way in every new place: the green china cat will sit on the top shelf of the cabinet; the orange area rug under the teak dining table; and the dark oil painting of the sailboat will hang over the brown sofa. Nothing will feel new for long, and after a month or two, my mother will start buying newspapers again and start circling apartments for rent with a red marker.

Sometimes in the evening, she will switch off the TV and say, "How about we go for a drive, Carrie? Maybe to Stanley Park?" And I'll put my book down, even if it is a good story because Mom is smiling and that is always a good thing to see.

And we will get into our pale, yellow Plymouth Belvedere, and drive over Lion's Gate Bridge, and my Mom will reach for my hand and say how glad she is to have me in her life.

Then she will say something like, "I'm so lucky to have you, Carrie. You always cheer me up."

And I will smile, even though my hand sometimes gets clammy when she says that. She never seems to notice.

***

The summer I turn twelve, we are living in a three-story white stucco apartment building on Bellevue Avenue called The Mauna Loa. The lobby smells like chicken soup and stale cigarettes, and there is a faded mural of a hula dancer on the wall next to the elevator. In front of the wall, is a pink plastic palm tree with half its leaves missing—a fuzzy brown plastic coconut hanging from one leafless stem.

I don't mind The Mauna Loa, but Roxanne hates it and spends a lot of her time at our father's new apartment on the 17th floor of the Ambleside Towers. It has a fountain in the foyer and an exercise room, and The Other Woman lets Roxanne use all her fancy make-up.

So mostly it's just Mom and me at The Mauna Loa. It's quiet, and our suite looks out over the back of the Mini Mart, where I like to buy penny candy—pixie sticks and Mojos and handfuls of Double Bubble—when I have a few dimes in my pocket.

One night I wake up and hear my Mom crying from the sofa bed where she sleeps in the living room. I know I should go out and sit with her—maybe make her some hot chocolate, but on that night, I just can't. So I stare out my bedroom window instead and cover my ears, so I don't hear. Jennifer told me that her Mom sometimes cries too but usually just before she gets her period. I told her my Mom cries more often than that, and she said that sometimes when bad things happen, people just give up. She said maybe that's what happened to my Mom. Maybe she just doesn't care anymore.

***

A year later, Mr. Baxter in apartment #303 tries to go all the way with my sister, and no one does anything. Not even my mother, who says that Roxanne should have known better than to watch a movie with Mr. Baxter because everyone knows he is creepy.

"But he tried to do it to her!" I say. "He can't get away with that."

"These things are best left alone," my mother tells me. "You don't want to blow it up and make it uglier than it already is. You'll see, in time, Roxanne will forget all about it."

But Roxanne doesn't forget, and neither do I. I hate Mr Baxter. And I especially hate the way he passes Roxanne and I in the hallway and makes a gross flicking motion with his tongue between his two fingers. I hate that he laughs. And when Roxanne tells him to fuck off, he laughs even harder and tells her she is just plain stupid.

But stupid or not, it doesn't stop her from going down to our underground parkade and upending a mostly-full gallon can of black latex paint in the backseat of his convertible Chevrolet during the hottest week of the month. She does it at seven o'clock in the morning, when he is away visiting his brother in Nanaimo so that when he comes back, the paint has grown sticky and hot and will be impossible to get rid of.

Mr. Baxter knows she did it, but he can't prove it, and when we pass him in the hallway a few days later, Roxanne makes a sweeping motion with her hand, like she is using a paintbrush. His face gets red and sweaty, and he calls her a little whore. She laughs so hard I think she might throw up, only she doesn't.

I worry that he's going to get me in the hallway or the laundry room or something, but I don't have to worry for long because we move again on August 1st. This time to Argyle Avenue, to a dark green seven-story apartment block called The Duchess Arms. There is a mean German Shepherd called Rex that likes to lie on the pathway in front of the lobby, and one day he bites my mother's arm, but it doesn't break the skin, and my mother doesn't say anything because she doesn't want to cause trouble.

"But what if he bites you harder next time?" I say. "What if next time he bites me?"

"It's okay, Carrie," my Mom says. "Just leave it alone, now. You'll understand these things when you are older."

But I don't think I will ever understand why my mother never says what she thinks. Still, Rex or no Rex, I like the Duchess Arms because there is an outdoor swimming pool that hardly anyone ever uses.

My sister moves out in the summer when I am fourteen, and she is seventeen. She rents a one-bedroom apartment in the Ambleside Towers—my father's building—along with her friend, Aria, whose name is Italian, and means "air." Aria looks like a movie star and wears red lipstick and low-cut tops. My sister starts dressing the same way even though the red lipstick doesn't look the same way on her that it does on Aria.

We don't see much of Roxanne after she moves out, but my Mom says she is just busy starting her life and to let her be. Still, she talks about my sister a lot, and once I hear her tell Betsy, our neighbour, that Roxanne could be a model if she wanted to.

"She's a looker, that one," Betsy says, and my mother nods in agreement.

Two weeks before school starts, Janice Denney—a girl in my class—has a pool party. Her dad that is. He is a policeman, so most of the people at the party are other policemen and their wives and girlfriends. I watch them from our balcony on the fourth floor—the men standing around the BBQ in their swimming trucks with cans of Labatt's Blue in their hands, and the women, bikini-clad and floating on air mattresses, their tanned fingers dragging lazily in the water.

Someone has lit some Tiki torches and placed them around the outside of the pool, and there is a card table with food on it perched dear the fence. From where I stand, I can see that one of the things on the table, is a pineapple upside-down cake.

A ghetto blaster is playing, and I recognize some of the words:

Stuck inside these four walls

Sent inside forever

Never seeing no one

Nice again like you

Mama you, mama you

I like it, but I don't think my mother does.

"I wish they would be quiet," she says, joining me on the balcony. "They're so loud. People can be so ignorant."

"They're not that loud," I say under my breath.

But ten minutes later, a police cruiser shows up, and a uniformed cop gets out and starts talking to the men by the BBQ. They all look up at the balconies overhead, and I duck back inside our apartment, afraid they'll see us, but it doesn't matter. They just laugh even louder. And then the police cruiser drives away.

My Mom puts her hand on my shoulder. "Come on inside, Carrie," she says. "Walt Disney is going to start any minute."

I want to tell her that I'm fourteen—that I'm too old for Walt Disney now. I want to tell her she should put on a bathing suit and go downstairs and float around in the pool with those other women, and maybe even have a piece of that pineapple upside-down cake. I want to tell her that I want to invite Jennifer over, so we can watch All in the Family and drink root beer and eat sour cream and onion potato chips and maybe even make some prank phone calls when we're done watching the show. But I don't tell her any of these things. Instead, I follow her inside and sit on my end of the couch while she switches on the TV and asks me in her little girl voice to put the kettle on 'for a nice cuppa'.

I don't even like tea, but I don't tell my mother this, either. I don't know why. I guess we are just the same that way.

"You're my rock," my mother says, resting her hand on mine. "What would I do without you?"

I keep my eyes on the television screen and wonder the same thing.

END