Edna’s Mouth
Edna and her mouth. They are never separate. Electric pink gums that are slowly receding
from the ocher-rimmed peg teeth. “People with mouths like that go nowhere in life,” your
mother said as she was spending a wad on the orthodontics that would take over your face for
two years. It’s true. Who would kiss a mouth like that after it says ‘I do’? How could a mouth
like that get around words like ‘polycystic’ or ‘indiscrepancy’? So when Edna admits, “I’s got no
learnin’ past grade 8,” she means it and I think she secretly blames her mouth.
Edna: On a given day often seen waiting around at P.B.’s French Fry Wagon or at the Dollar
Store on Mutual Street. She has a line-up face, rigid, Parkinsonian. Her forehead
waxes over, coma stance eyes. All of this resting above that mouth.
Edna speaks. A mother’s speech of pride and love:
“Barry’s 15 now. Highschool, grade 10. Skips classes, though.”
Don’t forget—pay attention to every word as it is ripped, shredded through the canal of the
portable chipper vac of those teeth.
“I’s only cares if he finishes grade 11.”
Tearing, rending of the words like old gray T-shirts worth nothing but rag scrap to wipe a picnic
table with. Miraculous this absolute verbal violence without bloodshed.
Face it. You are afraid of Edna. Afraid of what she could be if things were different. If she
didn’t have to live in that encampment off North Town Line Road, missing her five other kids
and her husband old enough to be her father. If she was able to phone the doctor and ask him
about the benefits of vitamins instead of calling every two months with a request for bottles
of lice shampoo for her two daughters who share that ramshackle tent with her.
Yes. Life would be very different.
Where’s Edna? No one has seen her anymore in her faded stretch polyester pants and second
hand T-shirt with some outdated slogan like ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ on it, rallying Barry,
Harry, Garry, Mary, Larry, Cary and Sue in the far corner of McDonald’s to wolf down their
Happy Meals on Friday she treats them to at the end of each month. Just think, What if she went
to Daisy Lea’s Tea Room? What would their crumpets and loganberry jam look like suspended
in those teeth? I can tell you. I’ve given it a lot of thought lately, probably because she says her
worker has found a ‘program’ for her. Schooling. You know what that means…
But that’s just a bad dream someone in Huntsville Glen suburbs might would have. That’s
just the kind of thing that would startle you out of an honest, middle-class sleep at 3 A.M.
It’s O.K. Go back to sleep. There’s still three and a half more hours before the alarm goes off,
before you head off to work in your car, behind the rolled up tinted windows to see her smiling,
just staring at the morning from her seat in Tim Horton’s window. That fantastic mouth dusted
with jelly donut powder as you wait for the light to change at the corner.