Plastic Flowers

By Charmaine Arjoonlal

Vanity of vanity

Vanity of vanity…

All is vanity.

Ecclesiastes 1:14

Yorkdale Shopping Centre, Toronto  

I DODGED THROUGH the din and smells and shoppers to purchase another pair of pants. I wanted her to find me beautiful. I wanted her to love me. I’d finally have a place.

In front of a Reitman’s mirror my 40-year-old self appeared unremarkable, serene almost. Half-curly black hair, shampooed quickly in the hotel shower nudged bony shoulders and lacquered nails glittered with skeptical anticipation. We had written letters to each other for a year. Now it was time to meet in person.

Frantic that I might be late, I half-ran down one corridor to the next. I wore low heeled boots because I envy the noise they make on hard surfaces. The tap and clatter. The uninhibited expression of sound. When I arrived out of breath at our meeting place, a brown-skinned woman was sitting on the wooden-slatted bench near the rumble and wind of the subway entrance. I felt the stirring of a strange familiarity.

“I knew you would be beautiful,” my birth mother exclaimed, looking up at me.

Flora’s voice, with its musical lilt, tapped its way inside of me, stirring my insides. I tasted loss.

My Birth Mother’s Apartment       

NINE YEARS LATER when the bus stopped at Flora’s apartment complex west of Eglinton and Steele, I half-tripped off the bus into the grey March light onto the icy pavement. My 49-year- old feet stung. I have always felt things in my feet. When I’m sad, they ache—a sharp ache—or if I have a sudden fright, they ping with pain. My husband Zip and I followed the curvy, snow-trodden path to Flora’s apartment. 

I had been here once before after meeting Flora at the mall but it was Zip’s first visit. Stamping my feet, I rummage in my bag for Flora’s apartment number, my glove still hanging from my mouth from where I tugged it off with my teeth. To protect her privacy, she had asked that I mail my handwritten letters to her sister-in-law who lived in the adjacent complex. I stifled a gasp when my half-sister Nadine pushed open the front door causing me to stumble backwards.

“No halves!” Nadine corrected when I introduced her as my half-sister to Zip. “We’ll be going to my place,” she tossed over her shoulder with her long wavy hair, leading us across the lobby. 

When I first met Nadine nine years ago, I had envied her beauty. Her surety that the world always held its shape. Her indemnity that she was secure within it. The confidence of a daughter who hadn’t been given away. As she flounced ahead of us towards the elevator, she seemed like the same old Nadine. 

Flora shares her apartment with my half-brother Jacob. It’s clean and precise, with a new- looking couch and armchair in the compact living room and vases full of yellow plastic flowers on the dining room table and shelves. On my first visit, I had thought the apartment would look more West Indian which seems silly now. Flora was in her early seventies and had emigrated with her parents to Toronto from Trinidad when she was 21. Besides, what did West Indian decor look like anyway? 

As I squatted to remove my shoes, I looked up to see Flora standing in the living room under the swoosh of the ceiling fan, her curls parting like the Biblical story of the Red Sea. Our embrace was too quick to feel each other’s softness. Flora wasn’t the huggy type, at least not with me. I pretended not to be. Safer that way.

Flora was raised in British Trinidad before its independence in 1962. Her diction was as precise as the pictures lined up on her living room bookshelf. My heart fluttered when I saw one of myself at age 40 taken outside of the mall where Flora and I had first met. Flora was a devout Christian and hadn’t believed in sex before marriage. Her pregnancy had been a terrible, embarrassment to her family. If she gave me up for adoption, she was permitted to continue living with them and I’d never be spoken of again.

Did Flora tell her friends I was a relative? A friend’s daughter? Did Flora lie? Maybe they didn’t ask. Perhaps they suspected there was more to this judiciously put together woman who penned religious poems, treated her family-planted Pentecostal church like an oasis, flirted with bus drivers, and in a text to me, referred to herself as bodacious.

The kitchen fan rattled in the background and abruptly went silent. I looked over to see Nadine’s husband, Carlos, his face inscrutable before his half-smile.

  I was shame come to visit.

Yorkdale Shopping Centre, Toronto

FLORA WAS SHORTER than me and looked young enough to be mistaken for an older sister. Coincidentally, we both wore black t-shirts to our reunion day. It was the first time Flora had seen me since her visit to my first foster home when I was five days old. I like to imagine her delight in seeing me—her baby—something she had made inside of herself. Something of her own. I suspect the music in her voice was laden with grief and goodbyes.

After writing letters for a year, when I’d asked Flora where she wanted to meet, she had replied, “How about the Yorkdale Mall? It’s close to where I live.” 

Later I was to tell her that serendipitously, this was the same mall where I first met my small-town adoptive parents when I was one and a half years old. At that time Yorkdale was on the outskirts of Toronto and they could avoid the downtown traffic.

At the mall, Flora’s black t-shirt, with a decisive pink design matching the flush of her cheeks, spoke of a casualness but also fierceness, an independence. I don’t know why I thought she’d be wearing a floral dress. Her compact body, her smooth, deep brown skin—browner than mine—and comfortable gait, radiated something I couldn’t put my finger on. Poise perhaps. My t-shirt with its sculptured frills at the neck and arms, that clung to my stomach—but not too tight—begged her to like me, to reclaim what had been given away. As we walked side by side, I attempted to match the rhythm of her gait but felt awkward, like my arms and legs were guided by a puppeteer and I was along for the ride.

Letters

A COUPLE OF YEARS after I had initiated contact with the North York Children’s Aid Society in Toronto, a social worker called to say Flora was interested in meeting me but first wanted to get acquainted through the old-fashioned art of letter writing.

A few months later I received Flora’s first letter in the mail and dashed upstairs to my bedroom, shut the door and stood silently staring at the envelope, itching to tear it open but suddenly afraid. I wanted to know everything about her. Who she was before she had me. Who she was now.

 The gravity of the moment pulled me to the bed and I sat down, savouring the moment. Carefully opening the envelope, I pulled out the folded hand-written letter.

Dear Charmaine, she wrote. Please forgive me for not writing earlier. Flora’s neat script settled over me, a warm blanket of intimate conversation.

I am so happy you wanted to get in touch with me. I wasn’t sure how you felt about me giving you up for adoption, maybe you thought that I had abandoned you but this is not the case. It’s been forty years of silence.

I held my breath then released it, held it and released it, until the hold and release matched the rhythm of my heart and I realized I was almost panting. My initial thrill changed to bewilderment, propelling me off the bed to pace the bedroom. How could she be so kind, so gracious, so loving in her letter? She was correct that I had felt abandoned. But worse, when society had become more tolerant towards unwed mothers, she hadn’t made any attempt to find out how I felt about her. Was she still embarrassed about having me out of wedlock? She hadn’t found me; I had found her. As a mother myself, I found this unfathomable.

My birth mother had always been an absence. It is easier to be angry at a presence rather than an absence.

The Gathering  

THERE WERE 13 of us gathered to share a meal in the twelve by fourteen in Nadine’s small rented house. Off in a corner, Carlos and Nadine rapidly discussed dinner and decided Carlos will pick up food at a nearby West Indian restaurant. As I planted myself on a footstool, my knees intruding into the room, I thought about the incident on the drive over from Flora’s apartment. At a red light, a ‘squeegee man’ had leapt in front of the car, vigorously rubbing the windshield with a dirty rag.

“He could be Jesus,” Nadine said, placing a ten-dollar bill into his grubby hand.

In the driver’s seat Carlos turned to look at Nadine but, in the backseat, squished between Zip and Flora, I couldn’t see his expression.

” Was that for show?” Zip whispered to me later.

I wondered.

Nadine’s four kids sat on the floor and on fold out chairs in front of the TV. The two oldest had homework spread on their laps and their bursts of laughter erupted over the clamor of a TV music channel. The video flashed guns and scantily clad dancers and Nadine jumped up to turn the channel, surreptitiously glancing around the room. Carlos’ parents and sister were interspersed in the crowd, their animated Portuguese raised like branches over the babble.

Flora sat quietly, a tree alone in the forest, her hands resting on the arms of a chair that had been placed in the centre of the room, like a hot seat. She seemed present but detached somehow, like I had felt years prior when we’d met at Yorkdale Shopping Centre for the first time as adults.

“The food’s here, ” Carlos yelled, walking back into the living area with a steaming plate heaped with chicken feet, a mound of skin and claws, popular in his native Portugal. Styrofoam containers full of curries and rice were placed by Nadine on a small table pushed against a wall and a vase overflowing with red plastic flowers took up space at one end. The kids excitedly filled their plates—take out seemed a novelty. “We should pray,” Nadine shouted to Carlos who rose again to say grace.

I felt sweat trickling behind my ears. I had wanted to look beautiful and had worn a large wool sweater to hide my potbelly. It was forest green embroidered with wild oranges and reds and under better circumstances, enhanced my skin tone. But today I suspected the red of the peonies matched the heat of my face. Everyone’s cloaked glances crawled like itches over my body. I thought how I’d never wished for white skin when growing up in a white family in predominantly white towns. Instead, I wished for a friend with brown skin and more people of colour around me. Now I wanted to crawl out of my skin, shed my brownness for something that felt less strange. Less like an interloper.

Nadine and Carlos launched into a conversation with my husband Zip about Evangelical Christianity, the liveliness of their voices adding to the uproar. Zip hadn’t been saved and they felt it their duty to convert him.

“Yeah, but a sincere belief in Christianity prevents things like abortions and children born out of wedlock. Prevents the pain of it all,” Nadine’s voice rose over the din of eating and talking and children’s laughter. My eyes met Flora’s before hers flicked away. I swiveled my neck to look at Nadine whose face looked drawn, like she was trying to suck back her words. Slowly the voices went silent and one of the kids, looking startled, turned off the T.V.

My feet felt it then. Righteous judgement curled around my toes, snagged at my heels and gurgled into my stomach. Beads of sweat dribbled down to my sides and soaked into my too-tight waistline. I found myself holding my breath.

Flora’s sin had scabbed over, accumulated the layers necessary to protect her tender places. But now a gash appeared, exposing the manifestation of her sin—Me—to the air. Her joy that I was in her life, that I was at this gathering was diminished by her embarrassment. I reminded her and everyone else of her weakness. Of her violation of her faith. Of her hypocrisy in keeping me secret to family and church community. Of the keeping up of appearances.

Any feelings of resentment or bitterness I had harboured towards Flora disappeared. In spite of everything, she had chosen to give me life. I felt sadness. Tenderness. Gratitude. 

Perhaps Nadine’s words were an emotional reaction to feeling betrayed by Flora’s forty years of silence. Flora’s enduring stoicism. Flora’s ability to forge ahead and carve out a life. 

Maybe this emotional explosion would create a new beginning. A place for forgiveness and lack of judgement. A place where I could be myself, not caught up in the vanities of appearances and be welcomed.

That was ten years ago. I am still waiting.

Charmaine Arjoonlal (she/her) is a writer and social worker and mother of Ben. She lives with her husband and two spoiled dogs in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over twenty publications and two anthologies. You can find Charmaine on x/twitter @arjoonlal on Instagram @charmainearjoonlal or visit her website charmainearjoonlal.wordpress.com.