Me and Josie hung around for a smoke afterwards. It was a nice cool night in the fall. We went across to the park. She sat on a bench sideways. Put her bad foot up. I stood around.
I says, “I don’t think the leader there was too happy to see us all laughing when she first walked in.”
Josie, she stopped with her cigarette hand halfways to her mouth. “If I say something like that,” she says, “everybody’s ready to burn me for a witch.” Josie was grinning, with her head on a tilt. Them eyes of hers, glittering under the street light, give me the shivers.
“A witch?” I says.
Josie shrugs and takes a drag. “You seen,” she says, blowing out the smoke. “Alls I ever do is tell what I’ve saw, but people freak out.”
I could guess why, the way she give me the shivers.
I says, “Well, anybody could’ve saw that. It was wrote all over that Meredith’s face. She walked in, give us a look like she’d bit a lemon. Then on, she never quit smiling.”
Josie, she pointed her cigarette fingers at me. “Not everybody would see that. Or know enough to worry about it,” she says.
“Don’t know that I’m worrying about it.” But I guess I was. Didn’t trust that group leader.
Josie started staring at a leaf that was floating down through the air. It went through the bright part, where the streetlight was shining. Landed in the dark.
That come back to me a long time later, when it was important. I could see Josie, sideways on the park bench, forehead scrunched, thinking over the group leader, Meredith. Them eyes of hers watching that yellow leaf miss the patch of light. First time I ever seen anybody look at an omen.
Once you’re out there in the middle of the river on your stepping stones—and they can be slippery buggers—you want to feel like you can trust your leader.
I never thought about nothing like that till a long time later. Josie being Josie, I bet she thought of it way back then. Josie seen that we’d have to keep an eye on this leader, see just how she was missing the patch of light, find out what kind of dark she was landed in, that made her sour to see us laugh.
It got so I looked forwards to Group every week. Got to know them girls. We’d talk about things we were going to do someday.
Josie got this idea that she never shut up about. Said we were going to have a hotel and serve dinner. And, in the back, there was going to be this room—“Lost Gold Room,” she got calling it.
I asked her how she come up with that. Josie wouldn’t say. She didn’t like to talk about her second sight. Back then, we all had our secrets.
Josie said this room was going to be just for people like us.
Marg says how are we going to know who’s like us? Marg’s one of these people who’s got to have every detail of everything planned out ahead. (Sally used to tease her. Said Marg never done nothing on faith. “Marg, I bet you wouldn’t start out on a trip until every traffic light was already turned green.”)
Tammy says, “What would we do when men come into the hotel?” Tammy, she spent her time worrying about all men except the one she needed to worry about, which was the one give her that blood bruise on her neck. She was scared of the men that were going to come into our daydream hotel.
Josie says, “They’ll keep their hands to themself in our hotel!”
Marg laughs. (Marg laughs like a jug of milk getting shook. Kills me.)
Darlene rolls her eyes. She was the last one that got there the first night. That’s Darlene. Always last, lagging behind, missing out. Somebody must have told Darlene, when she was about four years old, that that was cute on her, rolling her eyes like that. Maybe it was, thirty years ago.
One Tuesday, Josie come clunking up the stairs and she digs this picture out of her purse. “Look at this!” The picture is some little back-north town. There’s maybe a dozen frame houses and a few storefronts, gas station with the shell hanging crooked, old white church. But Josie’s wound up.
“Look at the colour of the stones!” She points to the pinkish rocks in the picture and she takes this sideways look at me.
It’s something you got to get used to with Josie, that like cold touch on your neck. She’s showing me pink rocks like stepping stones, and she’s looking at me.
She won’t even pass the picture around. She’s got to hold onto it while everybody takes a turn looking. It’s just some picture she’s cut out of a magazine. I said, “Where is it?”
That took the wind out of her sail because she couldn’t remember where she cut it out of. She’d went and cut the name off too, and all the information.
Sally said, “It’s nice, Josie. Look at the pretty little white church.” Sally believes in God.
Josie, she loved that picture. Even dreamed about it. She was telling us the next Tuesday. Said there was water behind that white church—deep, clear water that looked blue, silver, or green, depending.
I says, “Depending on what?”
Josie sucks you in, eh. You hear yourself asking a question on the stuff she’s talking about, as if you took it serious. So I’m asking her what the colour of the water behind the church depends on. (The water ain’t even in the picture, remember. She dreamed the water.)
“It depends,” she says, with this spooky look on her like she just seen a spaceship.
And you’ve got to ask her, “Depends on what?”
She’ll tell you, too.
It got to be this funny thing. We’d sit there and talk about it every week when we were waiting. We started getting there early. We’d all (except Darlene) show up at seven on the nose just to have the time to talk. And we’d get excited and we’d talk about the hotel and the town. Like a bunch of kids with a secret game.
Marg, she’s got this nice calm way with her. Sensible, steady. Says she would have liked to be a nurse, if things had been different. I liked Marg, right off. She’s the one that’s fat, friendly, laughs funny, plans ahead, and, in an emergency, turns out to be lionhearted.
One night, Josie’d managed to haul ass upstairs even earlier than usual. Sally dragged a chair for her to put her foot on. (Sally is as sweet as she looks. Youngest one here but she’s everybody’s little mother.) Josie’s all happy. She bends forwards. “I’ve been thinking!”
Josie never quits thinking. When she’d lower her voice like that and lean in, you knew you were going to hear something nuttier than peanut brittle and just as much of a treat.
“This woman will make pies for the dining room.”
She takes out that picture in her purse.
Sally asks how we know that there’s a woman to make pies.
Josie holds her little magazine clipping picture under the light. We’re all crowded around looking, and you can just see where there’s a sign on the fence in front of a faded yellow house. It’s a teeny tiny sign but she didn’t dream it.
“What’s it say?” I need longer arms.
Tammy, the one with the bruise on her neck, who worries about all the men except the asshole who tried to strangle her, she reads it out: Home-Made Pies Fresh Picked Local Blueberries.
“People are going to drive a long way for them pies,” Josie says. “And we’ll get our eggs, fresh, off of these people here. The homemade pie will be just for people like us.”
If I squint at the picture, I can make out a chicken scratching in the dirt outside the place next to the garage.
Josie says that is what they call a free-range chicken and we’re going to charge extra for its eggs. Except people like us, who are going to get them regular price.
Sally says, “We should make the dining room so it looks out over the lake.”
That’s the water behind the church. It’s a lake now.
I can see it: People taking it easy, eating their high-price eggs beside a shining lake. Us all in summer dresses, with our hair done, running the place. Wouldn’t Sally
be right in her glory, looking after everybody! We’d put Marg at the front desk. No baloney from the public would phase solid Marg. She’d be out there, calm and steady, friendly look on her, setting everybody straight.
Josie says she knows what type of furniture we’re getting. She’s got it figured out that the guy in the blue house made the two-seater swing and octagon picnic table in his yard. She likes his style, she says. It goes with our hotel. Back-north style, pine logs.
I said, “How can you see what style it is?”
She’s got a magnifying glass! Takes it out of her purse.
Marg’s still laughing at that, glugging like a jug of two-percent, when Meredith, the leader, prances in. We quit laughing, file in like good kids, and sit where we always sit.
Everybody takes a turn to talk about their week. Our week is generally crap, when you get right down to it. We talk about our anxiety attacks. We tell how we binged on beer or double chocolate with sugar sprinkles doughnuts or whatever, on Monday night, to feel better. And felt like shit afterwards. We say things like that we let some jerk move in on Wednesday and he got drunk Friday and broke the handle off the stove so now we’re using the dog leash to get the oven door open. Somebody’s normally lost whatever dumb job they were doing and can’t get their welfare cheque for three weeks. Whoever’s got a car, it’s usually broke down and their boyfriend’s took off and won’t fix it. Or he’s got the car and he says it’s his because he made the last three payments on it, only that’s bull, usually. The money he put in was supposed to be for rent and he’s been eating off us too.
The leader, Meredith, she sits and plays with her diamond bracelet. She wants to know if we recognize any pattern in the way we keep letting a different man move in and break something else or whatever each stupid one of us just done for the tenth time.
Pattern. That’s a word Meredith likes. She’s trying to get us to see our pattern.
We all got different problems. But if you stand back and look at what we keep doing it is just as clear to see as footprints in snow. We’re going right around in circles. Guess that’s a pattern.
We get a fifteen-minute break. Josie hops downstairs. Got to have her smoke. We stand outside, smoking, and we’re back to the hotel. I say the mosquitoes will eat you. We’d better screen in the patio.
Sally says we could grow flowers on it.
Just to see her smile, I get Sally to tell me what kind of flowers she is going to grow on our patio.
Sally lights up. “Pink!”
We boost Josie back upstairs. You can pretty near lift her with one hand.
Her and Sally are slim. Everybody else here is fairly fat, including Meredith the leader and her helper.
If yous want to know what I look like, I can tell yous I got a different opinion on that now myself. I’m short and stocky, kind of flat. Rear end on the larger side. My hair likes to stick out. Old Donny there, that broke my thumb, he used to tell me I was so ugly I’d make a train take a dirt road.
But self-image is something you make progress on in Group. And now I try to think about what Dave said. (I’ll tell yous all about Dave in a minute.) What Dave said was, he said there’s nothing wrong with how I look. I’m straightforward looking, he said. The lines around my mouth and eyes, he said, they just show that I like a good laugh. He said something nice about my hands too. My hands are broad and plain. But Dave, he looked at me stroking Jenny’s hair one night when she was falling asleep on the couch. I got a kindly touch, is what he said.
Meredith, she helped me out a lot with the self-image problem too. Always called me on it if she heard any Negative Self-Talk out of me.
This week Tammy’s the one with the biggest disaster. Tammy is married. Two kids. Little boy nine, girl eleven. Their father has what Meredith calls “an anger problem.” He’s a goddamn menace that tried to strangle her, in other words, and Tammy needs to get those kids the hell out of that house. He caught the little boy, Matthew, in the head last Sunday night. Matthew bled from his ear and couldn’t hear on that side until this morning. That’s what Tammy told us on the way upstairs. Alls she said to Meredith was that part about him choking her. Didn’t say nothing about what happened to the little boy.
Meredith is sitting there asking Tammy how it makes her feel to relate the incident.
The kid has been bleeding from his ear! I never even heard of bleeding from your ear. Don’t sound good. I want Tammy to tell Meredith what happened. And I want Meredith to tell Tammy to kick the jerk out of the house.
Tammy ain’t telling and Meredith ain’t doing nothing.
Meredith never tells us what to do. Not her job description. (She don’t have kids, herself. My Jenny, she’s changed the way I look at everything, like she was my own.)
Josie’s fed up. She’s hunkered there, arms crossed. Eyebrows stiff. Eyes like a couple of blow torches. Marg’s had it too. She’s studying a crack in the table, chewing on her lip to keep her mouth shut. Darlene’s curled into her fuzzy jacket, keeping to herself like a cat. Sally can’t sit still. Gets up to reach a box of Kleenex for Tammy.
Nobody’s supposed to talk out of turn. We’re to let Tammy get through expressing herself. Tammy is supposed to make her own decisions. Nobody’s allowed to hand out advice.
She’s got to get those kids out! She’s got to get those kids out. She’s got to get those kids out. I’m squeezing every muscle I got, to keep my trap shut. Why don’t Tammy tell Meredith what happened to that poor little kid? Why don’t Meredith tell Tammy to get out of that house? Leaving her sitting there getting choked!
Tammy says that her husband got mad because the front room was a mess.
Meredith wants to know if Tammy feels that it’s her responsibility to keep the house tidy.
Tammy breaks down. Says she tries but she’s no good at keeping house. Meredith can’t get Tammy to see that that’s not what she was driving at, and they go around in circles over housekeeping.
Meredith asks Tammy if she has considered contacting the police. Tammy won’t. Don’t want to rat on her husband.
Couldn’t Meredith call the cops? How can we just sit here?
Meredith asks if Tammy would like to talk about her feelings of loyalty to her husband.
I can’t take this shit. I’m going to scream.
I shut my ears and go into a picture in my head. Tammy’s two kids swinging in the two-seater, north-style, pine-log swing that the guy in the blue house is going to make for the lawn of the dream hotel. Standing up, facing each other, laughing, pushing with one foot and then the other to make the swing fly. I pictured that so hard I could hear the swing creak. I could hear the kids laughing their two different laughs. I could smell the fresh cut grass. I could see the little girl’s skinny legs pumping that swing. One polka dot sock falling down. I had the little boy in a sky-blue T-shirt. Dirty little fingers gripping the swing. Bright grin on him. I went there so I didn’t have to listen about Tammy getting choked, nobody doing nothing.
Nobody even talking about what the hell is happening to the kids.
Meredith leaves Tammy with a Question to Think About until next week: “Who is responsible for your husband’s anger?”
I know the idea is for Tammy to see that the asshole himself is responsible. Tammy is not going to figure that out.
Meredith’s got a PhD degree, but I don’t think she knows what it’s like to be Tammy. I bet I got more of a clue myself.
Afterwards, soon as the door is shut on Meredith and her helper, we all mob Tammy. “Why didn’t you tell about Matthew’s ear?”
Tammy hangs her head.
“What the frig are you waiting for? You’ve got to get those kids out!”
Marg’s calm voice says, “How about you go home right now, get Matthew and Meghan and head for the women’s shelter.”
Josie says, “Asshole’s out tonight.”
; Tammy looks at her and nods.
Good. Marg tells her: get a bag. Collect the kids’ baby pictures, pyjamas, school clothes for tomorrow, school books. And if they’ve got like a favourite Spider-Man or teddy bear or anything to hang on to.
“That’s alls you need,” Josie says. “Get your three toothbrushes. Hop in the car.”
Tammy’s car is working, for a wonder. We go over the plan with her on the way downstairs. We make her repeat what she’s going to do.
“Do it tonight,” I tell her. “Don’t sit around there another minute.”
Tammy says, “What about Harold?”
“Who?”
Matthew’s gecko, that he loves. Tammy says she’d better put him in a jar and bring him along. We say, “Well punch holes in the lid.”
On top of everything else, we don’t need Harold the gecko suffocated.
“Call me when you’re there,” Sally tells her.
“Hurry,” Marg says.
Tammy tends to fiddle and fart around. Takes her forever to do anything. I can picture her trying to think whether to leave the meat out of the freezer that she got out this morning or if it’s okay to put it back or if she should throw it out. She could be standing there worrying about that when the Asshole comes home.
I tell Tammy. I say, “Don’t diddle with nothing. Okay? Just get the kids and go.”
Tammy says, “Now what were the things I have to pack? The baby albums, school clothes, Harold.” She counts them off on her fingers, and I have a sinking feeling.
I say, “Just get the kids and drive. That’s the only thing. Get the kids. Go to the shelter.”
Tammy says, “Would they have toothbrushes there?”
“Oh sure.” That’s what I say.
Marg says, “Hurry Tammy. You want to be out of there before Asshole comes home.”
Tammy says, “But they’ll need their school clothes tomorrow. That was right.”
“Not as much as they need to sleep safe tonight!” I says.
Paper Stones Page 2
