Elephant Winter by Kim Echlin Page B

wanted to get home before he said anything else. I shouldn’t have let his hands linger on my arm. I shouldn’t have enjoyed the touch. I shouldn’t have laughed at him. Nothing had happened. But I still wanted to get home. I should have known that even though nothing had happened, something had.
     

     
    The sicker my mother got the more I wanted from her. I pulled out boxes of old photographs to get her to tell me our story. The boxes were a jumble of three generations of family, dozens of my mother’s friends, places I’d never seen, my old school pictures, holidays and sketching trips we’d taken. We sat sorting and talking and she took up handfuls of my baby pictures and said, “Look at you, you were such a gorgeous baby, it was like falling in love, Soph.”
    There were dozens of snapshots of me growing up. She didn’t like posed pictures. I was usually dirty, mucking in herpaints, digging in her gardens, arms wrapped around our various dogs and cats, holding out frogs and snakes and grasshoppers.
    “Why aren’t there any pictures of me dressed up?” I laughed.
    “You never were,” she said. “You loved these outfits, skirts with ruffles and rubber boots. You put them together and that’s what you’d wear.”
    There were pictures of her at her openings, with red fingernails and bright red lips. She favoured tight cocktail dresses that pushed up her small breasts and nipped in her waist. There was only one picture of her working. She wore her hair pulled back and a blue apron covered with small flowers over her trousers. I was already older than she was in those photos. How young she did everything. As if she knew.
    There were no pictures at all of some of the things I remembered, of her sitting smoking on the porch for hours when the critics tore through her shows, of her when her own mother died, of her when my father came for his only visit then left again, of her wandering through the house the day we heard he died in a car crash when I was still a child, drunk with another painter, smashed against a linden tree, across the ocean.
    She met my father in France where she’d gone as a student. I fingered the half dozen photographs of my mother and father in Paris, my mother with her arm around a statue of Montaigne, his lips painted red by the students, my fathersmoking in a café, shot through a steamy window, my mother sketching with him at the caves of Lascaux.
    “Why didn’t you stay together?”
    My mother left him when I was eighteen months old. I hoped there might be a few new details in those cardboard boxes, in the stories I’d heard before. She’d left and my father had tried to follow her to Canada and live with her. My only memory of him was from that visit. I was about two years old and he gave me an ice cream cone. I bit into it and screamed with the fiery shock of cold in my head. I wasn’t sure if I remembered or if the story was family lore. He was a dark, laughing man, clowning for the camera, someone I would have liked to have known. They touched in every photo. There was a picture of him towering over the little Austin he’d bought when he arrived in Montreal. They took drawing trips together in the little car, slept in northern motels and drank in barrooms with signs that read Ladies and Escorts. There was a picture of my young mother sitting on his shoulders under one of those signs. Her hands were thrust up in the air exuberantly, but she was very thin.
    “Where was I?”
    “You were sitting by our feet,” she explained. “I was exhausted and he wanted to take pictures outside bars and go drinking. I used to wash your diapers in the hotel sinks at night and dry them by hanging them out the windows of the car.”
    She reached over and took the photographs from me and handed me some of my baby pictures. “When I first gotpregnant with you I cried and cried. One of his old lovers came to me, a lanky girl with black hair, and she said, ‘But why don’t you accept, men