Upstairs she prepares frozen shrimp for her stir-fry and listens to “Black Magic Woman” by Santana. She lifts each shrimp out of the bowl of cold water, pulls off the legs, and peels back the shells. Heads snap off too. Then she holds the bodies and pulls off the tails. What would an x-ray of a shrimp look like? She cuts down the backs with her paring knife and pulls out digestive tracts with a toothpick. Sometimes she has trouble getting it all. Each time she drops refuse into the kitchen garbage she envisions the bag down in the parking lot. What would an x-ray of that bag reveal? She puts on Harry Nilsson’s “I Can’t Live” instead of Santana, pours a glass of pinot grigio, and sings along while she throws shrimp in proper turn with veggies into the sizzle.
On Sunday morning Janet goes to her car, though she does not have a destination in mind. Nothing has changed in either stall. The bag still sits in hers. She might as well go on to the drive-through at Tims to get a French-vanilla coffee. She is drawn to bumper stickers on cars as never before. The Mazda in front says Pay It Forward, and the driver lives up to its slogan. Her coffee is paid for, says the girl at the window. “How nice,” she mutters and lurches forth, then realizes she could have repeated the favour.
As days go by Janet has to remind herself to pay attention to traffic, as she is now compelled to look for and read every bumper sticker on the road. And each time she pulls into her stall she is reminded to do something about the bag. For one last time she sets it right on the dividing line. It could belong to either side.
She is not disappointed. The van responds. What Would Buddha Do? The background is a rainbow of colours, and a green Buddha sits on the left of the white letters. But wait. The last message came from the Bible. Where is the conviction?
Janet heads out to the location for Decals and Signs. She found directions on the internet while ignoring the mail that sits on her counter. It is mostly impersonal anyway except maybe the one from Diagnostics. The shop is in a light industrial area, and the woman behind the desk is mainly taking calls or working the computer. She looks up at Janet in surprise.
“I’m looking for bumper stickers,” says Janet.
“What did you have in mind?”
“Well, that depends. I’ll know it when I see it. I thought you would have some on display.”
“We have a catalogue. You can have a look. What kind of business is it for?”
“Not exactly a business. A project, I guess you could say.”
She sits in the one leather chair by the window and flips through the pages. There must be some logic, some kind of catalogue order, but Janet is unable to figure it out. And she can’t bring herself to ask for assistance. She is about to give up when she reads the motto, Never Give Up with the line underneath, Hope-Love-Care, punctuated with a pink ribbon. Okay, she will continue a little longer. Perhaps this is a sign.
She writes three possibilities down, along with their order number. If You Change Nothing, Nothing Will Change is printed in bold black letters. Don’t Believe Everything You Think is in purple italics, and the third sticker has Caution printed within a yellow triangle followed by This Vehicle Is A Transformer. That last one could be perceived only as a reference to a toy, and the neighbour may miss her meaning, so she strikes it out. She settles on getting just two.
“You’ve made a choice?”
“Yes.”
“Good. How many would you like? They come in bundles of fifty but are cheaper by the hundred.”
“Oh.” She is embarrassed to back out. “I guess I’ll just take the one in a bundle of fifty. Number six three oh five. Don’t believe everything you think.”
“Pardon me?”
“The sticker says don’t believe everything you think.”
“Oh,” the woman laughs and Janet laughs too.
As soon as she reaches her apartment, she opens the package, gets two rags, one damp and one dry, and goes back down to buff her bumper clean, especially on the left side where she affixes her new sticker, Don’t Believe Everything You Think, right next to This Is Earth, Not Uranus. Keep It Clean. It feels good to accomplish things each day. The black bag still sits on the border.
It is the next afternoon and the van is still parked. The bumper already has its stickers but above, right next to the licence plate, is a new sticker: I’m With Nietzsche! But how does that fit with a Christian commandment and an allusion to the teachings of Buddha? Is this an accusation of false ethics? She knows she has been childish and maybe a little crazy but never with mean intent. She moves to open the bag after all, in case it holds some wicked truth, and then she will take it to the bins. How could she know that once her mind was made up the option would be gone? How could she know that the bag would be gone?
This Easter Janet is cooking a stuffed turkey for her daughter and granddaughters and some old neighbourhood friends. She will extend her table for the first time since her move to this apartment. It is a day that she hopes they will cherish. She has sorted her jewellery to give to the girls instead of what she might have bought at the Festival of Crafts. She won’t explain her affair with bumper stickers.
It is late morning. She pulls out the heart and the liver and kidneys as well as the frozen neck and drops them into the kitchen garbage. This is typical North American waste, but she has no patience for cooking parts that were repackaged in an otherwise empty cavity. Her hands are cold and have a touch of raw turkey juice on them. She washes them under the tap with dish detergent. The letter from Diagnostics is still unopened on the ledge above the sink, and she has yet to return her doctor’s call. She is listening to Procol Harum. She never remembers all the lyrics but joins in on a certain repeated line about a ghostly face turning pale.
She suddenly remembers that she has left a package of sage on the passenger seat of her car, so she takes the elevator down to the parking lot. Her neighbour with the van is gone for good. Strange that they never met. A couple with a Kia Soul hatchback, fixed with a toddler car seat in the back, parks there now. It has one small bumper sticker. Albania. She guesses they are starting a new life in a new country but are missing their old home. Now what can she do with that?
SORRY HEARTS
Fee Fine
LEONA MCADAMS SITS AT HER small wooden table in her small wooden chair (to her limited knowledge no one else sits there, so the table and chair are hers) and plays with her cream of wheat. She uses her spoon to draw the milk into rivulets that expand and flood islands of sugar, then she mixes it all together. The table is situated close to the boy’s crib. She hears him whimper and squirm, blankets rustling, and she can no longer contain her curiosity. She peeks through the bars at the boy with no name; she is anxious she might be committing an offence, but she observes him nonetheless.
The boy, who sometimes squalls, often sleeps, can only kick up his heels in his crib, whereas Leona, once let out of hers, can pick up and wander away. Suddenly he begins to scream. She has spied on him. She has broken a rule, real or imagined. She quickly runs back to her chair and shoves a glob of porridge into her mouth.
At the age of three Leona has been left to recover from an appendectomy at St. Mary’s Hospital, founded by the Sisters of Providence, fifty-two miles from home. She might as well be across the world, for at this point she has no sense of distance and even if she did it wouldn’t matter. The first (and last) time her parents tried to leave at the end of visiting hours she sobbed and clung to their necks, their collars, their coats, whatever she could reach and grab.
Leona’s mother will someday explain the Sisters’ advice: that it was better to stay away and avoid upsetting her at their leaving. Better to heal the cigar shaped scar running vertical on the right side of her belly button. Otherwise her fevered contortions to claim hold of her parents might tear the stitches apart.
Feeling abandoned, Leona determines that the two, her mother and her father, who up to this point she has counted on, can no longer be f
ully trusted. Or, she considers, though never fully conceptualizes, that the reverse could be true. Perhaps she has committed an offence and she cannot be trusted.
Leona’s parents have instilled good behaviour when it comes to strangers, even those who seem to hide all but a well-scrubbed face and hands. Now that she is mobile the Sisters often sit her on a very tall stool (at three everything is tall) at their work station at the end of the hall. They provide pencil and paper and encourage her to draw. They hover and rave about her scribbles and pat her blonde curls; they adopt her knowing full well the temporary nature of these maternal episodes, and she basks in their praise. She will have no memory of speaking to these women whose ears are, in any case, covered with veils.
When her parents come around the corner, smiling and anxious to take her home, Leona pretends not to see them. She heads in the opposite direction, wearing her striped cotton dressing gown, straight to her work station and her new guardians.
Of course she returns to the white bungalow with the small veranda and the add-on back porch. It is the exterior that she savours, the yard protected by a caragana hedge at the front and the crabapple spreading across the back. She inhales sweet fragrance as she runs circles around the purple lilac, heeding warnings (inspiring temptation) to stay clear of the honeysuckle with its pink flowers in spring and carmine berries in summer. Clusters of tulips conjure the land of wooden shoes as it was depicted on the cover of her mother’s Better Homes and Gardens, stoking an awareness of foreign places.
Leona is now five. Tiger lilies and peonies form backdrops for paper dolls; snap dragons are pinched into novelty jaws; pansies show faces with nursery-rhyme names; poppies, delicate and satiny, seem sturdy nonetheless and determined to pop up wherever they wish. Petunias, geraniums, gladiolas, and begonias are a parent’s affectation, planted in precise order.
The interior of the house is another matter; it is full of minefields.
“Oh yes. You’re the Big-I-Am,” says her mother to her father. “I am sick. I am tired. I am hungover?”
“For God’s sake,” he pleads.
Leona has no idea what it is about, but instinct tells her to take a side. “Don’t call him that,” she says.
He takes another swig of cough syrup, pours another cup of tea, adds more milk and sugar (four teaspoons), lights another Craven A, has a spate of coughing, and shrinks a little more. He doesn’t look big at all.
Leona pushes her oatmeal porridge with her spoon, compressing it into an island in the middle of the bowl. She adds more brown sugar to a depression in the centre, but it leaks into the moat, turning the milk amber.
Earlier she awoke to their subdued voices floating through her bedroom window, a blessed time when the two are up at daybreak to work in the garden and are careful not to disturb the town. She stayed cozy in her bed, feeling part of a contented household, unlike the times when she covers her head to shut out one of their fierce disputes.
Later in the day she will pull young carrots from the earth and spray dirt off with the hose and pick peas from the vines. She has perfected the snapping open of pods, counting (she can count to one hundred if asked) and plucking one pea at a time—all delicious.
But at breakfast she feels motherly; she wants her father to expand, not withdraw. She chooses a spoonful of porridge where brown sugar has accumulated and formed a dollop of sweetness, but then she follows this with a pale spot of oatmeal—no sugar at all.
“Stop playing with your porridge,” says her mother. “And don’t talk to me like that. You have far too much sugar there. Like your father. That tea is syrup. Why bother with the tea?”
“Leave her be,” says her father.
“Oh yes. Take her side. Let her do whatever she wants. If you’re so G-damn smart you can keep your nose out of your books for a while and watch what she does. You just spoil her.”
“I hate you,” says Leona, joining the defence. She will use these words as weapons for years to come, but for now she says it under her breath. Yes, she is more like her father. The lines are drawn.
Oatmeal does not slip as easily down a constricted throat. Leona is alone at the table, required to finish her breakfast. Her mother is in the bathroom, as she says, “putting on her face.”
Her father has a business, McAdams Insurance, which covers house, automobile, crop, disability, and the big one, life. It is small, serving the locals. He runs it with his partner Uncle Gib who likes to quote David Hume and refer to utilitarianism when explaining his move from philosophy to insurance. They are compatible, the brothers—one self-educated through his library of books, the other prodded on by his professors. They discuss causation (aside from the damage of hail storms), inductive as opposed to deductive reasoning, realism, atheism, social relativism, and other isms. Customers enjoy these conversations and Leona, now eleven, loves to listen and put in her two cents; she knows good from bad, right from wrong.
She decides that her mother is community volunteer ad nauseum due to being president of this and that. She has learned the expression from Uncle Gib who studied at the University of Alberta. He says it means “too much of anything.” (She loves the nauseum part, though she usually talks about wanting to throw up.)
On this day Leona and her mother do a tour of both Crawfords and Wongs, the general stores in town. Mrs. McAdams requests a deal on flannel sheets and blankets and towels for the Milton boys, all to be paid for by The Women’s Institute. The Miltons are not really boys. They are grown men with boys’ minds, apparently inherited, through the generations, from the mother’s side of the family.
Larry Milton is the sweet-natured one. The one that kids can tease without fear of retaliation. It goes like this:
“How you fee, Larry?”
“I fee fine.” Larry grins, basking in the recognition.
“You fee fine, Larry?”
“Fee fine.” Larry nods. Sometimes he is slurping, and occasionally dribbling his coffee, loaded with lots of cream and sugar, at the counter of the Royal Café, while his teenage interrogators call to him from a booth as they sip their cokes. Leona’s friends, being younger, repeat this out on the street.
“How you fee, Larry?”
“Fee fine,” he says and giggles and reaches out to shake hands with these smaller, less intimidating fry. Leona draws back but her friend Shelly puts her hand out, touches his sleeve, and then quickly pulls back and laughs at her trick. Larry laughs too. They all laugh until Larry drools; then, of course, they laugh even harder. That is until Sid—the oldest brother, the mean one—comes out and cuffs Larry. Though Larry tries to duck, he gets slapped on the ears and yelps then whimpers as he moves along. This reminds Leona of The Three Stooges, when Moe pokes Curly in the eyes. She doesn’t think the Stooges are funny, but sometimes she laughs a kind of nervous choking laugh along with the crowd at the Saturday matinee.
The Milton brothers head toward the highway, out past the edge of town, with Sid in the lead and Larry close behind. A third brother must be waiting at home. They are bachelors, without mother or father.
Shelly, always braver than Leona with those on the fringe, hollers, “You don’t have to be so mean, Sid,” once the boys (really men with greying hair) are at least a block away.
Leona rides along to the ramshackle house, about a ten-minute drive from town. The bedding and towels are laid out in bags in the trunk. She stays in the Ford while her mother gets out; the brothers are already out in the yard, watching to see who has driven onto their property. Mrs. McAdams, even braver than Shelly, Leona thinks, talks to Sid while Larry grins and nods and Walter, the third brother, hovers on the porch. Sid follows her to the car and Larry follows Sid. After she loads the bags into their arms, Larry sticks his face up to the window and grins at Leona. Leona presses the lock.
“How you fee?” he asks and giggles until Sid kicks him in the shins and Larry yelps and they head toward the house.
Leona turns twenty just a week before Uncle Gib calls and tells her to come home. She takes the Dayliner then heads straight to the hospital, straight to the room, and stands at the foot of her father’s bed. She has fretted over this inevitability since she can remember. The bars are halfway up on one side to prevent him from falling out—not very likely as he barely moves and what’s left of his body disappears into the mattress. She moves to the open side and takes his hand. He presses hers just enough to confirm their lifelong pact, then relinquishes all effort, as though his life is in her hands. Her mother says he complained about being cold and accused her of turning down the thermostat, which she had not done in spite of what he says. And he was smoking again. He can’t put that one over on her.
Leona wants to talk about abstracts, like love and admiration and even dying, though there is the issue of annihilation. She has lately been enthralled with existentialism, via Dostoevsky and, of course, Professor Coghill, who is her secret lover, but now she is stunned speechless and careful not to upstage her mother. She feels both rational and out of this world. She agrees to go back to the house for supper. As her mother insists, “We do need to eat.” He dies alone while they are gone. It is hard to say who has abandoned who this time.
Leona’s grandson Jamie calls “Grammie!” from the bedroom, at the end of his nap. He watches Leona through the crib bars, clutching his thin flannel blanket and beaming as she reaches for him. She kisses his cheek. He smiles, even raises his eyebrows, and kisses her back with his standard, wet, open-mouth smacker, right on her cheek. Unconditional love, both ways. Leona, née McAdams, now Fraser, soon to be McAdams again in spite of avoiding argument with her husband, has just turned sixty. For the first time, after all this time, for no reason she can think of, she is curious about the boy with no name who she spied on in the hospital all those years ago.
Dear Hearts Page 17
