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It all started one day when my mom picked me up from school. Being there to pick us up was the ultimate declaration of love, as far as she was concerned. Her own mother had worked full time, and sent her everywhere with a driver, which had as much to do with my grandmother never bothering to get her driver’s license as it did with her making the kind of money to be able do that. According to our mom, our grandmother missed every occasion, from awful bowl cut haircuts to parent-teacher interviews, and our mom was determined to show up, despite being an emergency room doctor.
She often spent our drives either on the phone, listening to the radio, or criticizing something I wasn’t doing, like not saying hi to a teacher or not holding the door open for a kid I didn’t know or had never talked to who was leaving behind me. Apparently being shy was the same as being antisocial, which was how all good criminals got started. I guess she wanted more for me than a life of crime, which is too bad, because when you discover your talents young, I think it’s best to run with them.
She picked me up in front of the playground.
“What are you eating?” She asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
I didn’t take bites and chew and swallow openly. I broke it into small pieces and let it sit on my tongue and dissolve. Sometimes I chewed but only a little.
“I can see that you’re eating something, Lindi.” she pressed.
“It’s meringue,” I said, and mentally high fiving myself on my fast thinking. The color was similar, but this was dustier and drier in the most delicious way.
I wasn’t sure why but chalk tasted amazing.
I didn’t know if my mom would want to take me to the hospital to have one of her new colleagues x ray my stomach, or if she’d decide I was deficient in some nutrient and make me take awful tasting pills, but I knew I didn’t want to tell her.
It was the first time I’d gotten with something that she really didn’t know about. It felt like such a victory.
When we lived in South Africa, I occasionally did it, but since we’d moved here I wanted to eat chalk all the time. I’d do it at lunchtime, stroll over to the box on my teacher’s desk when no one else was there. The piece that the teacher had been using, which lay on a metal ledge just below the blackboard was always the softest. It had its cold edges rubbed away, and it was smooth, as if it was just waiting to be digested. If I couldn’t get that piece, I’d go for what was in the dust covered corners of the box, or right in the middle, where she took her pieces. I’d hold a piece in my palm and rub it back and forth, until it felt powdery and tasted velvety. Sometimes at night I also chewed the ends of my hair.
My teacher was South African too. She had long, dark hair like mine, and freckles, and she also loved reading. She’d lived in Canada for eight years, and she’d reassure me at least once a week that things would get easier. She also liked recommending books.
I had a little brown leather purse that my mom bought me when I first got my period. She discreetly put two tampons and a pad in a hidden front pocket, and I hid them in my backpack. I hated tampons, hated the feeling of something so sharp and obvious, so I took them out and replaced them with pieces of chalk. It was reassuring just knowing that they were there.
If anyone had asked me, a kid who grew up with a banana tree outside my window, competing on my school’s swim team, whose favorite season was the summer, and favorite place was the beach if I ever would have chosen Toronto, the answer would obviously be no. But no one asked.
It’s usually hard for South Africans to immigrate to Canada, because immigration worked on a point system that was impossible for most people to achieve, but my mom’s job made her in demand. She’d worked with AIDS and HIV patients, people with TB and malaria, people who’d been shot, or stabbed, and that was just a normal day. At her new job, at a hospital whose surfaces were gleaming shades of beige, another doctor told her it was going to feel like a vacation. If it did, she never told us. She complained as much as she always did about being tired. And on top of that, she told us every day how lucky we were to be here. It was important to act like we appreciated it.
At first kids in Toronto treated me like a curiosity. I had an accent, so they’d ask me to say certain words over and over, like what, or water or air, which made them laugh and laugh, to hear me pronounce it like “eh.” Then one day I picked my nose in class, and it was completely over. It’s not like anyone wanted to be my friend before that, but then it was firmly established that no one was ever going to try.
No one would lend me their notes because “you’ll get your boogers all over them.”
I still managed to be a good enough student to not really need their notes. It was fairly obvious that academic success was also bad for popularity, but not in the way I expected. Everyone at this new school was smart, and competitive about grades. I stopped answering when people asked me how I did on tests, or I lied.
My sister, Taryn, as always sailed through. She had the gift, from the time she was born, of making everyone fall in love with her. On her first day, she tap danced for her class, and sang them a song from back home and they all thought she was amazing. She had a new best friend within a week, girls following her around like they did when we were younger, boys wanting to hold her hand or kiss her. She instinctively always knew just how to play every situation to her benefit. I never knew anything, but it didn’t use to matter.
Our parents had been divorced since Taryn was three and I was eight. Our dad was a dentist, and when I was in grade one, he left us for his secretary. Actually, to be more accurate, he’d been having an affair with Kate since before Taryn was born, and when I was six, he finally got her pregnant. My mom was working nights and to make things worse, Kate was a good friend of my mom’s younger sister. My mom had known her for years and had even gotten her the job. It took them two years to settle things, and then my dad and Kate got married and moved to Australia, and we moved here. We haven’t seen our dad in four years.
My mom chose Toronto because her sister, my aunt Sue-Ellen and her family had moved years before.
My aunt is the polar opposite of my mom. She dropped out of university three times before she decided to go to art school. Now she’s a sculptor who makes bronze nudes that sell for thousands of dollars.
Her husband, Jordan, is black, which shouldn’t be a big a deal to my mom’s family, or to other people in the Jewish community we grew up in, but it was. It was at the tail end of Apartheid, which everyone was ideologically opposed to, of course, but it was different when Sue-Ellen wanted to bring the guy to her school’s formal dance.
My mom always acts like she thinks whatever Sue-Ellen does is cool, but then she lectures my sister and I about how we have to marry Jewish guys, and get practical jobs.
“Jewish guys like dad?” I asked her once. “Because that turned out so well.”
She slapped me on the cheek so hard that she left a mark, but then she cried and apologized later.
“You’re right,” she said quietly, before I went to bed. “Nothing our parents taught us turned out to be true.”
I’d never heard my mom doubt herself so openly, and the effect was unnerving.
Taryn and I were always excited to see our cousin Casey. She was three years older than me, which meant she could babysit when my mom worked nights. Casey was beautiful, tall and thin, with delicate features and wild golden-brown curls that made her look like Beyonce. When we were little, we weren’t allowed to wear makeup, and when Casey and her family visited, she helped us make some from things we found around the house. She mixed red chalk with Vaseline to make us lipstick, and blue and green with sparkles and coconut oil to make us eyeshadow. It didn’t look like real make-up but we felt beautiful. She took some photos that day and when I look at them now, they make me laugh but they also make me sad.
When Casey came over that night, she was as beautiful as always, and much more worldly. She stood outside on our wooden, smoking, leaning over as far as she could so she ashed into our neighbor’s backyard. My sister stood in the doorway, watching her with awe in her eyes until Casey told her to put her coat on and join her outside. Soon she was teaching her how to smoke.
I stood in the kitchen, staring into our almost empty fridge, thinking about how long it would be before my mom came home, wondering when she’d have time to grocery shop. It was easier when we lived in Johannesburg, with my grandparents down the street, and my grandmother making us Black Cat peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off and serving them with sliced Golden Delicious apples and raisins. My sister was happier the way things were now.
I felt like a fundamental part of me had died and I had no idea how to get it back.
I walked upstairs and went into her bedroom. She still had her toy chalkboard, with a pack of Crayola brand chalk in a small box underneath. I took out a piece and held it up to my mouth, puffed on it, then stared at myself in the mirror.
I knew when my mom asked me how school was going tomorrow afternoon, I’d tell her that everything was great. She had enough to worry about without me adding anxieties that even I didn’t fully understand.
I was more comfortable pretending than I ever should have been.
Danila Botha
Danila Botha is the author of three short story collections, Got No Secrets and For All the Men (and Some of the Women I’ve Known) which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, The Vine Awards and the ReLit Award. Her new collection, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness will be published in March 2024 by Guernica Editions. She is also the author of the award-winning novel Too Much on the Inside which was recently optioned for film. Her new novel, A Place for People Like Us will be published by Guernica in 2025. She is part of the faculty at Humber School for Writers and teaches Creative Writing at University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She just completed writing and illustrating her first graphic novel.
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