Open Arms

By Marina Endicott

The first novel from beloved and award-winning writer Marina Endicott

Bessie Smith Connolly has lived with her Nova Scotia grandparents since she was small. But at seventeen—grieving the death of her steadfast grandfather, smarting from a split with the boy she loves—she escapes to Saskatoon to be with her mother, Isabel. Bittersweet, clear-eyed, and deeply affecting, this marvellous debut novel charts Bessie's course as she makes her way through her exploded family and out into the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781990601446

Book preview

1

With the Band

My mother drives her van as if she’s sailing, leaning her weight against each turn to keep an even keel in this stiff breeze. Sometimes when I go with her through the dark streets I fall asleep on the bundles of newspapers in the back, and wake to see her shoulders and head arched black against the windshield, some song slipping out under her breath. On my grandmother’s piano there’s a photograph of my mother hiking far out over the waves, one hand on the tiller and the other on the spinnaker line. Her head is flung back and her eyes are closed, and the sun is everywhere on her. She liked a good wind off Mahone Bay, then. Now she sails the prairie streets in a black van, delivering bundles to the paper boys from midnight till six in the morning.

For a long time I wasn’t with her. When I was five I got taken to live with my grandparents in Nova Scotia, and for seven years I didn’t even see my mother, until she started sharing a house with Katherine, my father’s second ex-wife, who was alone too and had a little baby, my half-sister Irene. My father, the poet Patrick Connolly, lives on an island in British Columbia now, with Doreen. When my mother moved in with Katherine and got the newspaper job, I guess she convinced my grandparents that she was stable enough to have me visit. After that I got to be with her in the summers, at least.

Things got confused this year by my grandfather’s illness. My mother came out to Nova Scotia to help, and in June, after he died, I went tree-planting with her in Saskatchewan, so we could be quiet in the woods. The deal was that I would spend one more year in Mahone Bay, to keep my grandmother company and finish high school. But something happened once I got there, and I couldn’t stay after all. It was nearly September by the time I came back to Saskatoon for good.

The night I arrived, my mother took me out in the van with her, for a treat. I was past going to sleep by then. The branches whipped the windshield in the back alleys as if someone was running ahead of us, some big hasty girl at Guide camp. I put her in yellow shorts and watched her white imaginary thighs until we swung onto a street in the maze or obstacle course of my mother’s route through town.

Usually the bundles aren’t ready till 12:30, sometimes 1:00. We hang around the back of the newspaper building, behind the press, drinking coffee from a machine and talking to the other drivers. My mother knows them all, of course. One of them is in a band she sometimes used to sing for. This night the bundles were peeling off the conveyor belt as we drove up, and I went to open the van doors while she started grabbing the packs by their bindings. The band guy’s van was beside ours. He sang out to her, Company tonight, Isabel?

And she said, Not tonight, not tonight, lightly, happily. Then she handed me a bundle and said, Oh! Yes! Company tonight—you know Bessie—

Then the band guy, whose name is Lee, said, Hey, Bessie, how you doing? and clapped his doors shut and drove off.

We finished loading the bundles and got back into the van, and I said something about the night being nice and called her Grandmother, pretending the mistake to even out the insults, so she’d feel better about forgetting me.

She started singing. We have a game—we’ve played it since I was little. You sing, you start with one song, and then branch off into another one when you get to a word that’s the same in both: All you need is love me tender, love me true, never let me go away, little girl, just like the girl that married dear old folks at home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play, where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day-o, da-ay-ay-o- and on and on until you get stuck, and then you start again. You can play it by yourself, but when there are two of you, you can jump in on the other person’s song, or start fresh if you think of a good one. I used to love that game. I never fell asleep when we were playing it, only after.

Around four in the morning it gets hard to stay awake. The route takes five hours on an easy night, longer if you stop for coffee. We didn’t need to stop that night because Katherine had made us a thermos of her fancy coffee, and the route was clear, no traffic in the night, a quick game of connect-the-dots through the dark streets, us already knowing what the picture would be. I told my mother the latest news from Mahone Bay, where she is still remembered with some glee (That Isabel Everett, she was a live one!), and she told me secrets of everyone’s past, as she always did. The horrible, drug-heavy smell of the caraganas came in through the windows. It’s a smell you can’t quite remember when you’re living somewhere else. I used to open up my nose in Mahone Bay, leaning out my bedroom window, and try to imagine caraganas. Smelling it fresh now, I felt solid, like I was home, for a second.

One good thing about these night rides is the stuff people throw away. My mother is always finding junk that turns out to be wonderful. When I go with her I’m usually the lookout, I keep the flashlight trained out the side window and yell Stop! when I see something likely. We found a wicker rocker one night. Someone had tossed it, in nearly perfect condition. My mother mended it and painted it white and put it in my Saskatoon bedroom. And tons of other stuff—Katherine has a cleanout of the garage every so often, and you have to tag the things you’re honestly planning to work on.

But I wasn’t looking tonight. I was trying to find a way out of "Sometimes I live in the country, sometimes I live in town, Sometimes I take a great notion, to jump into the river—"

I’d just thought of "River, wider than a mile . . ."when suddenly my mother jammed on the brakes and leaped out. I got out too, to see what it was. She was leaning over a pile of lumber stacked behind a fence to hook something—I couldn’t tell what it was until she pulled it out. A guitar case, with a lot of fancy silverwork. The bright-dawning sun made sparks on it.

We don’t own one, I said. It’s for an electric guitar.

I know! she said. It’s perfect! She opened it up, and it was lined with blue velvet. Electric blue. Hardly worn! Look, look at that, Bess—how can people throw these things out?

I bet some kid is regretting it right now, I said.

Finders keepers. She nipped back into the van as if the owner was going to reach over the fence and grab it back.

What are you going to do with it?

I’ve been looking for a present for a friend of mine.

The way she said friend, I thought, oh no, here we go.

It needs a little cleaning, I told her. Also, it stunk.

It will be perfect, she said. She started singing, not the game, just singing, some song I’d never heard, so I left it alone.

My mother has a way of letting me know things without saying the words. She could never keep a secret, she always wants to tell. I had a friend called Jessamyn one summer, and Jessamyn’s father got a Jaguar. While we were making toast one morning I was talking about this Jaguar and Isabel said, Yeah, you can hardly tell you’re driving, hardly hear the engine at all. After a minute she said, Did you know there are heaters in the seats? Then she went to the bathroom.

That was all to let me know that she’d been driving around with Jessamyn’s dad and wasn’t very happy about it. The not-happy part I knew because she asked me a question, instead of just telling me about the seats, because she had to look at me with her eyebrows up in the middle. Jessamyn and I still played at the park together after that, but I stopped going over there, and I stopped asking her to my house. They moved away. I don’t think Jessamyn figured it out.

Just as we were finishing up the last run, Isabel stopped singing.

There’s a band at Hatch’s tomorrow, I can get you in.

I’m only seventeen, but they know me at Hatch’s bar because of her. If she can get me in, then she’s on the band list, which means she’s seeing someone in the band.

She looked at me without really turning her head. Katherine’s heard them.

Katherine knows about this guy, will go to listen to him. That means (a) he’s not a drug addict and (b) my mother is far gone.

If you’re around you can come with me, she said.

Where was I going to be except around?

Or I could put you on the list, you could meet me there.

She must have been working with the band, I thought, if she was adding to their list.

I said, Sure, okay. That was all it took to get her singing again. I felt really tired, but not like going to sleep.

When we got to the house, Katherine was already up, helping Irene practise the piano in the back study. Instead of interfering I went up to my room and lay on the warm block of morning sun on the carpet. The first day back is always strange, I knew that. But my mother had been great when my grandfather was dying. She came right home to Mahone Bay, she helped my grandmother with the overnight watching. I thought it had changed her. That was naive. Without wanting to I started thinking about my grandfather, about his face before he died, his kind hands gone so thin. I couldn’t remember him calmly yet. It was still a bruise I didn’t want to touch. And I couldn’t think about my mother and her new whatever. Or about Mahone Bay and that whole deal, or my grandmother left behind. So I tried not thinking at all.

I listened to Irene twiddling Für Elise over and over for a long time, with the counterpoint of my mother in the garden scraping the age off that guitar case. At one point I got up and went to the window. She’d moved on to cleaning by then, bending her whole body into it, the smell of turpentine rising to fill the air. She looked up and waved, blew me a kiss. I blew one back and went to sleep for a while in the daylight.

---

When I woke up Isabel was gone from the back yard. The guitar case was gone too, but she’d left the sawhorse table up. It was almost noon. While I was looking out the window wondering what I’d do, Katherine came outside to get the sawhorse. Katherine and my mother have this arrangement where my mother does things and then Katherine cleans up.

A lot of things that aren’t so great for Katherine got set while she and Isabel were still working things out, like the house split. When they started sharing, somehow my mother got the downstairs half with the garden and the kitchen. She convinced Katherine that she walked in her sleep so much she needed the stability of the ground, and I guess Katherine decided she’d rather be upstairs out of the way in case my mother turned into Mrs. Rochester or something and strangled the baby in her sleep. I don’t know when Isabel would have found the time to sleepwalk. She only sleeps for two or three hours at a time, usually in the afternoon. She sleeps hard. Her hair curls with sweat, and her eyes are shocked when she wakes up.

Katherine and Isabel didn’t know each other very well when they started living together. Katherine was a scary woman then—her eyes were always red. I never saw her cry except once, when she was nursing Irene and I walked into her room by mistake. Irene was almost two, old for being nursed, I thought. They were stretched out on the bed, Katherine’s shirt open, Irene attached to her breast. Katherine had her head tilted back against the wall over the bed, tears pouring down her face. Her mouth was open but no noise was coming out. Irene was sucking away, you could hear her in the silence. Sucking and sucking while Katherine’s chest went up and down from crying. It seemed a little hard on Irene, too.

I had been trying to get out onto the roof from Katherine’s bedroom. I liked to sit high up, but my grandparents never let me. I went down to the yard and climbed the roof of the garage instead.

At first Katherine wasn’t too happy about living with my mother, even though they were being sisters against my evil father, etc., but the house was large and neither of them had enough money to live alone. Irene took up all Katherine’s time. But my mother worked nights, and Katherine was there if there was a fire or burglars or something, and you couldn’t call her unreliable since she had a Ph.D. in Middle European history, even if she didn’t have a job at first.

It was good for my mother, who needed a situation where she could have me visit. Irene was no annoyance as a baby. She didn’t even cry. Katherine was really proud because Irene always slept through the night. When I first came to stay, when Irene was still so little, that’s mostly what I remember about her: she was quiet. My mother thought it was kind of pathetic. She used to tell Katherine that I had never slept the night through once, as if she was proud of that. My mother has a very irritating way of being the most fully evolved person in the world all the time. She had a wonderful time having me, she really enjoyed the whole experience. Katherine had had a Caesarean after a long and painful labour, and my mother would say that maybe Irene was so withdrawn because of that. She managed to make it sound like Katherine wasn’t in touch with the true glory of being a woman. She would go on and on about how men had created the myth of difficult birth (as if it was Katherine’s fault that she hadn’t withstood male domination), and that all we had to do was not buy into it. Katherine would dwindle into herself during that chat. But it didn’t seem so weird to me that she’d had a bad time. I think my father left her when she was six months pregnant.

I shouted out the window, Hey! I’ll do that! to stop her putting away the trestle, but Katherine just grinned at me and kept on taking it apart. The top board was going to be way too heavy. I ran down to help.

Where’s Irene? I asked her, taking one end of the board.

Music camp, she said. Suzuki violin, Suzuki piano. Her teacher wants her to start flute.

Isn’t that a lot?

They seem to think that the more you do at seven the more you’ll be able to do at seventeen—shit! The board, with her thumb behind it, had banged into the shed door. When I first knew Katherine she never swore at all. I let down my end.

Fuck! she said, bending over with the pain. My nail’s going to come off. She sucked on her thumb and made a face.

Sorry, sorry, I said.

She said, Not your fault, not your fault, whistling breath in around her thumb. She waggled it in the air to cool it, like a little kid. She looks younger every summer. Maybe my mother’s been good for her after all.

Oh well, she said, over it already. Are you going to be around for supper?

We picked up the board again.

I don’t exactly know. Where’s Isabel?

I don’t exactly know, she said, making a joke on me. Irene would like to see you.

Yeah, I want to talk to her. Only I think I’m supposed to go see a band . . .

Right, the band. Katherine has a way of checking up on you, looking at you quick sideways. Well, maybe an early supper?

That would be good, I said. I really like Katherine, and Irene really likes me. It’s nice to be around them. We got the board shuffled into a clear spot and Katherine looked around and got that look in her eyes of wanting to clean the place out.

Anything you want to keep in here, on a quick glance? she asked me. Everything was new since I was last here. I told her she could do what she liked. I went up to the house, meaning to unpack, but instead I hung around on the front porch, waiting for Irene to come home.

---

In the afternoon my mother came back and took me to Hatch’s, this bar downtown that has bands most nights. In the afternoon bars look old and sad. Usually I like it, it makes you feel glamorous, part of a secret, when you get to see them like that. In the biz.

Hatch’s is good, it doesn’t have fluorescent lights or anything to take away the old light of worn-out sorrow. The only windows are in the front, and the walls are blue indoor-outdoor carpet. God knows why, you could never get a vacuum cleaner sideways up the wall. In the daytime, the shifting light bounces bluish everywhere and most of the chairs are upside-down on the tables, as if someone’s been in to clean. But that can’t be true, because the floors are filthy. Maybe it’s for the health inspector, if one ever appeared.

They’d cleared away tables from the platform area. The space up there was filled with coils of black cords and light trees, snakes and ladders. My mother squeezed my arm and let me go. She moved forward, towards the stage.

The band was setting up. Guys were going in and out the loading door, wheeling amps on dollies or carrying equipment in their arms like people they were trying to boost over a wall. I was looking for the man. It’d better be a good man, to get my mother back with bands.

Want something? my mother asked me. Coke? Soda water? Slice of lime?

She knew the bartender, even. Where he kept the limes. I had a slow, sick feeling in my stomach. I didn’t want anything to drink.

There was an okay-looking guy with a long dark ponytail, greying beard. Maybe him. He was giving directions, deciding where the mike stands would go.

Some young guy came up behind Isabel. He had beach-boy hair, brown gone blond in the sun, and a pretty good tan. He had big holes in his jeans, good legs sticking through, the gold kind with bright gold hair glittering on them. He just stood there for a minute, with his mouth hanging open. Maybe he was smiling, I don’t know.

My mother twitched. Her shoulder hunched up as if her ear was tickling, and she turned and saw him. Hey, Boon, she said, and then, "Boon." As if she liked saying his name.

You got here, he said. Good. That new song’s done, want to hear it?

She said, This is my daughter, Bessie Smith Connolly.

He said, Hi, Betty.

I didn’t say anything. I looked over at the stage. The set was gradually coming together up there, the equipment, like in that old movie about the Talking Heads. I usually like that part of being with the band. I tried to think about the movie or something else.

Boon’s going to play me a song, Bessie, she said, as if I could only hear her, as if I were a puppy or something that couldn’t speak English. Do you want to hear it too?

He was already going to get his guitar. The case was open, reeking of blue velvet. Now we knew where she’d spent the morning. In the back, the rips in his pants were practically obscene. When there’s nowhere to look you should leave. But I sat down.

She waited a second, and then she went over to him. Her face was all shiny. Do you like it, Boon? Do you like it? she asked him.

Hey, yeah, Isabel,’’ he said. He touched her hair earnestly. I do."

I sat there on a bar stool not watching them. She’s only thirty-seven, she looks a lot younger, but this Boon guy was really young, maybe twenty-five. If I’d brought him home for myself she wouldn’t even have been upset, except she’d probably have thought he wasn’t good enough for me.

All the band guys and roadies were calling to each other and plugging things in. In a minute they’d start to practise. I got a beer coaster from the counter and started folding it into triangles, making it into a little hat for Boon the Pinhead. They were talking behind me softly, probably looking into each other’s eyes. It was going to be a good hat.

Suddenly there was a twanging chord. Boon had plugged his guitar into an amp. Then he was caterwauling, " ’56 Chevy, four on the floor, lost and degraded, I just love you more and more . . .’’ He picked on the guitar for a while, sounding lame, and then sang again:

Chassis hand-crafted, body made for love,

If you can’t get her started she may need a shove.

Maybe she’s outdated, maybe she’s too old,

Maybe when you look at her you think her engine’s cold.

’56 Chevy, four on the floor,

She can turn your crank and make your cylinders roar . . .

At that point I decided I had to go to the bathroom.

There was a skinny girl in there, smoking a joint. I don’t know why she was doing it in the washroom. Maybe she didn’t want to share. She was wearing high-cut jeans shorts, and she had a big tattoo on her thigh. I couldn’t quite see what it was, a bird of paradise, maybe. I’d been planning to sit on the sink counter, but I went into a stall because she gave me a dirty look.

The door didn’t have a lock that worked any more, you had to stick your finger through the hole where it had been and shove the little bar across. I sat down on the toilet, on the black part, keeping my jeans away from the parting in the middle, which was dirty. There was writing all over the walls. Leanne Thundermaker loves Jon Stanley Very True. Beware of Limbo Dancers, down near the bottom of the door. Men Are Shit. Then that was crossed out, and someone else had written Women hate men hate women hate hate hate, and then someone else had crossed out some of the e’s, so it was Women hat men hat women hat hat hat, and I sat there thinking about all those hats.

Outside by the sink the girl began to whistle, starting really soft like a bird calling, trilling, then going into a long running series of notes like a fugue. It was beautiful. It urged you up, it pulled at you in some nostalgic way. I started to cry, sitting there on the toilet, because my mother was being so dumb out there with some guy who couldn’t even sing or write songs, and this girl was smoking a joint and had a tattoo and was a million times more worth liking, except she didn’t have blonde hair sticking through her jeans, so no one would ever love her. When I got to the end of the reason I was crying, I saw that it was a little hysterical, and definitely not the real reason, so I stopped. I flushed the toilet

Reviews for Open Arms

[icolford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Open Arms, Marina Endicott’s beguiling debut novel, chronicles the unsettled early years of Bessie Smith Connolly, from childhood to young adulthood. The source of her troubles and the focus of much of Bessie’s angst is her impulsive, beautiful, unreliable mother Isabel, who was very young herself when Bessie was born. To add to her chaotic upbringing, Bessie’s father, Patrick, an award-winning poet, left Isabel and his daughter in pursuit of his muse, subsequently marrying twice more. When Bessie was small, her mother was picked up in a drug bust and ended up serving time in prison. Bessie was raised in Nova Scotia by Isabel’s parents, a time she recalls fondly as idyllic, filled with love and, given her background, uncharacteristically stable. However, when we meet her the placid years are behind her and Bessie, in her teens and following the death of her grandfather, is living in Saskatoon with her mother. Isabel shares a house with Katherine, Patrick’s second ex-wife, and brings in money with odd jobs and by singing at a local bar. The novel is constructed in three sections. “With the Band” is set in Saskatoon and draws a vivid portrait of Isabel’s fluid moods and capricious nature as she takes up with a much younger man and seems to go out of her way to avoid the messy complications that making an emotional commitment to her daughter would entail. In the second section, “The Giant Doreen,” Bessie and her younger half-sister Irene, Katherine and Patrick’s daughter, travel to British Columbia to stay with Patrick and current wife Doreen, the dramatic complication being that Patrick is absent and Doreen is pregnant and on the verge of giving birth. The final section, “To the Top of the World,” is constructed as a quest, as Bessie (now in her 20s) and her grandmother chase across country after Isabel, who is moving in a seemingly random fashion from place to place, involved in a personal quest of her own and, as usual, giving no thought to anyone else’s wishes or needs. Open Arms is in many respects a meditation on motherhood: its various forms, the pain and joy, the push and pull, the unrealistic expectations, the limits on what some woman are able or willing to give. The women we meet in these pages are uniformly strong and courageous, used to hard knocks, accustomed to picking up the pieces left behind by their men and carving out an independent path in the world. Their story is a captivating one, emotionally persuasive and dramatically resonant. Bessie Smith is an endearing narrator who relates events in a clear, rational voice, pulling no punches, telling it like it is. The ending, where we witness the author’s hand somewhat obviously at work, might seem a bit convenient. But this does not change the fact that fans of Endicott’s later novels who might have missed or overlooked this book will find much to enjoy here. It can also be stated with something close to certainty that anyone who appreciates fiction that features strong female characters will find that Open Arms, written with grace, wit and confidence, is well worth seeking out.