Although it was only Halloween, I had the distinctive sinking feeling in my gut that the year couldn’t possibly get any worse than it already was. The Liberals had been crushed in the election, my French marks were plummeting and my heart was more broken than a Jack-O-Lantern at a pumpkin smashing contest. To me it seemed as if I had hit rock bottom and started digging. The only place I could possibly go was up. This, of course, turned out to be another lie.

            “Honey, clean this place up. Your grandmother will coming over in a few minutes.”

            As usual my mother had barged into my bedroom without knocking, ignoring the “Do Not Disturb” sign I had written in seventeen languages and three pictographs. I had learned from many experiences such as these to always keep a keen ear for her footsteps and so the racy motorcycle magazines my uncle had secretly lent me were already traded for math textbooks long before my mother entered. I may have been organized in my advanced magazine hiding strategies, but my room had not decided to follow suit. The spread of old clothing, half emptied glasses and plates of long forgotten food tossed across my suite betrayed the wandering mind of its owner. Even the whiteboard on the east side of my room had writing in three different languages scrawled in every conceivable spot in no intelligible order. That was hardly my fault. My father had told me to write down my thoughts before bed so that I would remember them in the morning. Unfortunately for the whiteboard, I thought about mathematics in French, poetry in English and philosophy in Italian and often my thoughts were mathematic, poetic and philosophical all at once. To conclude, my dwelling needed a thorough cleaning. Of course, that wasn’t the first thing that struck my mind.

            “What do you mean Noni is coming here?” I asked.

            My mother cringed at my saying Noni, and made certain to phrase it out of her reply. “Your grandmother phoned a little while ago and said she wanted to have dinner at our house.”

            I knew immediately that this was not the real reason she was coming over to our house. A few months ago we had moved Noni into more comfortable, more affordable accommodations in Ottawa. Land prices were cheaper on the Quebec side, but Noni had sworn up and down that she wasn’t going to share an apartment with a francese even if the Virgin herself had descended from heaven and given her the keys to the Palace of Versailles. So, we had been forced to find an apartment from the very short list of inexpensive Ottawa real estate. It shouldn’t have been a surprise when she ended up in a more racially integrated, immigrant laden neighbourhood. Of course this came as a shock to Noni and she never missed an opportunity to tell us of her “dark” neighbours and gangs of Arab thieves that always followed her around, eyeing her family jewelry.

            “It’s those Muslims, I tell you,” she was fond of saying. “Those godless, bomb strapping, flag burning, pasta ruining brownies are after us all, I tell you.” (She always added the pasta ruining bit because her late husband had once hired a Tunisian immigrant as a cook back in Sicily in the 50’s. Although he was perhaps the most dedicated worker to ever live, he overcooked a baked tortellini in 1956 and half a century later Noni would still tell stories about it) “Oh mama mia, I say. You aren’t stepping foot on my country, no way!”

            That was essentially how she talked about everything. Herself, an immigrant to Canada, always spoke as if she had been planted in our soil for a hundred thousand years and people who weren’t of the perfect olive skin colour and Holy Catholic faith were the most hated enemy of all things righteous and pure. When she wasn’t encouraging us to spend more time at confession, she was yelling garbled, Italian slurs at our Filipino housekeeper or the Moroccan paperboy. To tell the truth, I was actually somewhat surprised she hadn’t ended up in a dumpster behind her apartment building, stoned to death by frozen falafels a long time ago.

            Thus the real reason she was storming my fortress of solitude had little to do with her sudden, innate interest to consume my mother’s tourtière (and criticize all French Canadian cooking mercilessly for hours afterwards) but perhaps was more related to her overwhelming fear of having to answer the door half a dozen times to the trick-or-treaters with more than a summer’s tan on their skin. My Noni had always gone to great lengths to avoid anyone of “questionable heritage” and so this was hardly a surprise. I just wasn’t interested in ruining my one night of the year alone to cater to the discriminatory tendencies of a bygone generation.

             My father’s law firm was hosting a costume ball for the half dozen or so associates who didn’t actually work through until Toussaint morning and other dignitaries. My father always took time off to attend, as it was his job as a senior associate nearing partner to wine and dine the ambassadors, generals and deputy ministers that comprised the bulk of his prospective clients. My mother would pass the night driving endlessly through the suburbs with my younger brothers, of the ages five and seven, in tow on the maniacal search to find suckers willing to give the two boy-devils free candy. Usually she managed to do this for two hours before the incessant fighting and indecisive nature of the two drove her to plant her head in the middle of the steering wheel until the heavy klaxons of the horn ripped the screaming voices of her children from her head. It was then she would return to the home, more beaten and drained than an old, whipped work horse, followed by the triumphant cries of her offspring evaluating the bounty of their loot. I would remain at home cuddled up with the snacks I was supposed to hand out to the absent trick-or-treaters and watching Tarantino films that my Noni would have me spend weeks in the confessional for simply glimpsing at. Nothing was going to take me away from that.

“Does she have to come?” I asked using my most practiced whine that I knew made my mother want to lock herself in the nearest rubber room with a bottle of bourbon.

“She’s your grandmother, Beni.”

“I’m not entirely certain what that has to do with. I mean, aren’t you supposed to hate your in-laws? Isn’t it normal to lock your doors and put foot down and throw a tantrum whenever they want to come over?” I was trying to appeal to her more human side, which wasn’t always a good strategy since she preferred stoicism and tenacity. But I hoped I had struck a chord with the in-law thing. Noni had never really liked my mother. First there had been the insurmountable detriment to my mother’s character that she had been born in Montreal to French parents. There was also the fact that she was an interpreter and my father a lawyer, which immediately led my Noni to assume she was a gold digger. Looking around my bedroom now I realized that perhaps at most she had only struck silver. My Noni was against the match from the very beginning and had my mother not been Catholic, I am reasonably certain we would have been written out of the will, not that there was much to inherit. In the end, Noni had little say in whom my Dad married. I could do the mathematics of when I’d been born and when my parent’s had tied the knot. It didn’t exactly tell the most thrilling love story of all time and it certainly did little to placate Noni. Perhaps that was why my mother continually subjugated herself to her, to earn just the hint of favour in Noni’s eyes. I knew it wasn’t going to last for long. My mother was a strong woman without any desire to be dominated by anyone and she was going to inevitably crack sometime. I just had to play my cards right and I could bathe in the geyser while Noni was scalded.

“I’m not going to talk to you about this, Beni. Clean up your room and put some better clothes on goodness sakes. Your grandmother’s going to think you live in the slums.”

“No, I think she’d come up with a more creative jibe than that,” I mumbled, sarcastically.

My mother whirled around and nearly smacked me in the head. “What did I tell you about that mouth of yours, mister!”

“Oh, come on, mama. The woman dishes out racists taunts like she’s a toilet paper saleswoman and the whole world has diarrhea. She eats your cooking like a food critic in a five star restaurant with a review more searing than Vesuvius. She speaks louder than a semi-truck sleeping on his horn and seems to always forget the proverb concerning God’s gift of two ears and one mouth. And to just heap more coals on the fire here, she is more intent on calling me Benito than breathing.  I mean, does she even know that the Fascists lost the war!” I raised my hands in indignation and shrugged. “I really don’t think so. She wasn’t even born when Mussolini came to power, but I swear, sometimes it’s like her relationship with Grand Papa was just a sham for her passionate love affair with those damned Black Coats. I mean, surely you’ve heard the stories? Oh, what am I saying? Of course you’ve heard the stories, everybody’s heard the stories. She tells them to street vendors in the square and then to some of the costumers in line for good measure. You know, all the stories about those fine, muscular, young gentlemen who tried to fight off those dirty Anglo-Americans invaders. Or maybe you’ve heard about the “negro” that once tried to rob her but who we all know actually just tried to help her up after she fell down. It’s like having a female Adolf Hitler in the house, mom!”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“I’m whitewashing. Years from now, when our tale is told in the annals of history, it won’t depict Noni as graciously as I have.”

My mother was clearly not being swayed by the art of a master wordsmith, still preferring the works of dullards like Oprah or Ellen DeGeneres. Her face moulded into unmasked contempt and I realized there was going to be no budging from her tonight. “The discussion is concluded,” she declared. “If you wish to leave the house while Noni is here, fell free to go trick-or-treating with your brothers.”

This of course was my mother’s not so subtle way of manipulating people into doing what she wanted. Instead of ordering people to do things or even asking them, she would drop hints of chores needing to be done or items requiring purchasing. It drove my father bonkers and it made me forever linguistically vigilant. Recognizing this poorly laid trap, I decided to tread most cautiously. There was an opportunity here to gain precious influence with my mother, but at what cost? Could I really drive around with my two brothers fighting in the back seat, ripping open the other’s candy bags and biting them to get it back? Could I handle the incessant mind changing or the steady stream of complaints? It really didn’t take long to mull over. I loved my mother, but my sanity was also of value to me. Now, I simply needed an adequate excuse.

“Mama, I can’t be seen going trick-or-treating! I’m sixteen years old. I’m a mature, young adult, well-adjusted and completely selfless. Besides, I’m not the skinniest fella in the neighbourhood. It would look bad, like I was using my siblings to get chocolate bars.”

“No one said anything about you having to collect candy too, Beni.”

I sighed in exasperation. “Yeah, but that’s not the point.” I dropped my head down, like I was embarrassed. “Mom, the real reason I don’t want to be seen is because some of my friends and plenty of movers and shakers from my school are going around tonight to collect food bank donations instead of candy.”

My mother was surprised, but soon annoyance spread to her features. “Then why not go out with them?”

I was really trying to fake embarrassment now, slowing my speech and looking at my toes. “I, uh, I uh… I might have, um, told them I had come down with a certain disease in order to clear my schedule.”

Now, this my mother seemed to understand. “My goodness, Beni! You seem to have inherited your father’s obsession of the melodramatic.” She rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay. I understand. But I really don’t see any options for you, Beni. I’m not closing the door to your grandmother. We’re her closest relatives.”

My mind was starting to run out of ideas. Alternatives of all sorts were rushing to my head. I thought of the poker by the fire and contemplated a bloody murder, but then my imagination shifted to thinking about having to carry the heavy, limp body into the fire pit and spending Halloween getting blood out of the Persian rug. I looked at my shoes and the poster of the Australian outback by the door and thought of running away, though the two dollars and thirty five cents worth of change in my pocket was hardly enough to bribe the immigration officials. Then, finally my eyes rested on my suit, fresh from the drycleaners, hanging on the knob of my wardrobe and a plan started forming in my mind.

“Perhaps I could go with Dad to the party at the firm?” I suggested, my eyes betraying the hopefulness in my soul.

My mother was more skeptical. “I didn’t really get the sense that it was a kid-thing.”

I could barely keep from beating my head against the wall in frustration. That was always the hyphenated word my mother used like a surgeon’s scalpel to lacerate me from the rest of the world. When I wanted to taste a glass of my parent’s wine, I was told it wasn’t really a “kid-thing”. When I wanted to see a legendary film from the past which could only have increased my knowledge and understanding, she made it clear that the movie just wasn’t a “kid-thing”. When I wanted to buy a car, or go on a date, or even stay up until midnight on New Year’s eve, I was informed that none of these were “kid-things”. Thankfully my father stood up for me on incidents like these, otherwise I might still have been a coddled, brainless infant, sucking on my mother’s barren teat. However, Dad wasn’t here now and I had to get back that seemingly impregnable barrier to adulthood and independence.

I decided to increase my chances with some skullduggery. “Oh, that’s what I thought too. But, Dad invited me last year.”

My mother’s eyes raised in suspicion. “He did.”

No, he didn’t, but what was I to say now that the lie had been told? When you’ve dived into the pool, you have no choice but to swim to the surface. “Oh, certainly. He said I would really enjoy it there, meeting all the dignitaries and lawyers, showing off my costume. I was a fool not to go last year, he said. In truth, I think I made him kind of sad, although he’d never admit it.” I cupped my hand around my mouth and whispered conspiratorially, “you know how he gets.”

That she did, and I could see it was the last nail in the coffin.

“Okay,” she said. “Clean up your room and then prepare your costume.