All We Knew But Couldn't Say by Joanne Vannicola

Author:Joanne Vannicola
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2019-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

DRUGS SQUELCHED the rage that had become my normal state of being, so I chased the state of euphoria I found in them, the escape, until I came down, until my skull ached and my limbs hurt. After not receiving the role in the movie, I went on a bender and snorted too much cocaine. I was struggling in the morning when Lou called and woke me up. News was that our mother had disappeared from Montreal, like Houdini, just up and left without telling a soul, not even Lou. She also stole people’s money before her silent exit. I put the phone on my bed, a cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. I coughed and held the phone receiver in one hand, grabbed the glass of water from the bedside table with the other hand. I wiped my eyes and licked my dry lips, trying to wake up and take it all in.

I had turned seventeen and was renting a room in a house with two other tenants in the east end of Toronto. My room was bare, save for the posters of Madonna, Janis Joplin, and Jimmy Dean. Old cinema ticket stubs sat in jars on my dresser, and my clothes were scattered on the floor. My roommates were all double my age. One woman was always perky; she worked in an office and went to bars at night. Another wore Jane Fonda workout clothes — tights, body suits, and leg warmers — around the house, and had long blond hair, feathered like Farrah Fawcett’s in Charlie’s Angels. She was obsessed with the famous twenty-minute workouts. I was the opposite of those women: a dark-haired, no-makeup-wearing, cigarette-smoking tomboy. The owner of the house seemed obsessed with sex and girls.

I rubbed my legs, hadn’t quite woken up, and tucked my long hair behind my ears so it wouldn’t fall on the lit cigarette. By the end of our conversation, I had decided to move back to Montreal, to get away from this new rental and go back to my hometown, now that my mother was no longer in it. I would be able to write and direct a play in the company. Martha had always left the door open for me to do that work in her theatre; in fact, she often encouraged me to work with them. And I missed Montreal, the mountain, the French language, missed Steffin and my old friends. It wouldn’t take much to move — a van, a few bucks for gas.

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