The Clay Girl

by Heather Tucker

  Twenty dollars floats onto the table. “Got me a job.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t give the milk for free.”

  I head home to collect my books and see June ralphing on the juniper before she heads in and downstairs. Mummy is mining for aspirin at the back of the kitchen cupboard. “Pick up Jillianne’s homework from school. She has a sore throat.”

  “Is Len gone?”

  “To Buffalo to pick up stock.”

  Seems Len travels further and longer to find inventory he used to get downtown. I take Pepto to June. “You okay?”

  She scarfs half the bottle and rolls over with a lit joint in her hand. I pry it away, cover her with a quilt, and take the edge off Ari Appleton before putting out the light.

  On Sundays Mummy fusses because Wilf Ferguson comes for dinner. Doesn’t matter that he’s twice Jennah’s years because he’s triple-good as Roland. When his sainted mother died she left him a house and insurance. A big diamond glitters on Jennah’s finger and a little bump might be growing under her dress. Mummy checks out the window. “Hariet, go tell Jory we’re waiting on her.”

  Grandma reminds, “See she turns off the lights.”

  I go in the always-open kitchen door. Moans call my eyes through the arch to the parlour couch. Jory’s breasts shine like Mrs. Butter’s best china cups and the boarder’s big hand doesn’t care if it breaks them. Light spills from the window over her shoulder like honey. As he licks up her sweetness I back out of the house, standing between the water meter and the budding peony, before trudging around to the front door. The girl who finally opens the door to my endless knocking has a waterfall of blonde silk pouring over her red T-shirt and a smudge of pink under her lip. “Jory, lunch is ready. Make sure to turn out the lights.”

  The Appletons are fathoms from glorious revampment, but we’re picture pretty in new dresses for Cousin Zara’s wedding. Mummy checks her updo in the mirror. I say, “Oh, you’re prettier than the bride,” but really I think Jacquie is loveliest in a sapphire empire that makes her pearness look like the most delicious fruit ever tasted.

  My dress, darkest pink, sings like the wind through the aspens when I dance. I never knew Polish polkas and down-home reels were first cousins or that Len’s bones stretch long so they can hold all the music in him. Next to Len, my best partner is Uncle Iggy. Things can be done with a wheeled partner that can’t be spun any other way.

  Len drags a boy, almost as tall as him, over to Jacquie. “This is my cousin’s son. He has been trying to gather courage to ask you to dance.” Jacquie smiles and all the other hopefuls are plum out of luck.

  I help myself to Cousin Alphonse. He isn’t much of a dancer but he seems right proud that I peeled him off the lonely wall. I’d give Len every dance but he’s sashaying Mummy around the floor in his handsome-suit and Mummy is moving like a Rockette. Uncle Petros tries to cut-in but Len quicksteps her away and Mummy laughs out loud, and it’s the best treasure I’ve found yet.

  FOURTEEN

  As the calendar flips, May 1964, ’65, ’66, I wonder if Mummy has any memory of expelling me from her womb. She doesn’t see me turn eleven, twelve, thirteen . . . she doesn’t see me at all. I travel through my dark places, my book now over-fat with treasures, finding only one from her. Given accidently, but a treasure nonetheless.

  For the most part Grandma’s boarders are a plague, except for Mr. Fountain, a collector of rare coins, stamps. He buys and sells things, keeping favourites for himself. Precious coloured bottles line his windowsill. His eyes near the same green of the perfume bottle he gave me on my twelfth birthday.

  Every Monday I helped Grandma change the beds. If there had been a thousand washdays he’d still not run out of stories from his adventures. The day he asked, “Do you know why there’s nothing for me to buy on Mondays?”

  I stuffed a pillow into its case. “Why?”

  “Because I’d lose seeing something rarer than a Double Eagle.” At twelve my breasts were not much bigger than silver dollars but he handled them like the treasures he kept in boxes. He’d slip out, “I love you” before unzipping and pulling out his swelled-up thing.

  Jasper always tugged me to pick up the dirty sheets and answer Grandma’s yell for the laundry whenever his weenie weaseled out.

  One Friday, we had a half day at school and Grandma was at bridge. I wanted to see him without other people around. I imagined he talked to spirits and made papier mâché masks. I tiptoed up the stairs, and sounds like warthogs grubbing came from his room. My mother’s legs twisted around him like pale snakes. His bum had two red pimples, ready to pop white pus, and likely I was the only person on earth who would ever know they were there.

  Now, I change the beds on Saturdays.

  When school lets out, Len loads me on the train with the kind of love that hurts to see me go. Mum thinks I go to Auntie Elsie’s, if she notices me gone at all.

  Homecoming to Skyfish is a sapphire strung on a year of pebbles and pearls. Aunties M&N and I walk the shore, beginning so early the sun is little more than a far-off promise. We gather discoveries then climb the rocky slope back to Skyfish with a new day ahead. In their hands I learn to shape clay and wood; the world, too, I suppose.

  In my thirteenth summer, Jake notices the rising tides beneath my shirt and the wild spirals of my bum-length hair. Sometimes on our seashore rambles he helps me from a rock, keeping hold of my hand longer than needed but shorter than wanted. We walk through questions until we find a place to hope or sit, reading book after book to each other.

  “Each species has its own ties to others, and all are related to the earth.” He looks up from the pages of The Sea Around Us, gazes across the Atlantic then at my tanned face. “It’s not as much a tie as it is a freeing with you.”

  “Feels more like a seeing.”

  “How’d you mean?”

  “Everything is so big here, the sky, our ocean, these rocks sit atop each other to fit in all this solid earth, but I never feel invisible, especially with you. Not like back there, crammed right up to Mum. She’s more likely to notice a chip in her nail polish than me.” My head nests on his shoulder; his cheek floats over my hair. “You’ve always seen me. And even in all your shape-shifting I see you.”

  “You think I’m shifty?”

  “You’re sea mist and solid rock, music and silence, gentle warrior, sorrowful joy, a story written on water, impossible to read but easy to know.”

  “Your words could make that washed up kelp believe it was a dolphin.”

  “I’m not shifty. I call things what they are.”

  His eyes turn northeast, toward The Rock.

  “You ever hear anything from your mum?” I say.

  “Nah. Nia tracked down an uncle. Apparently she was last seen headin’ to a place called Pensacola in some guy’s fifth wheel.”

  “Your sisters?”

  “Went with.” He springs up like a jack-out-of-the-box. “Let’s go check on the puffins.”

  Summers always end with a Skyfish party and Jake fiddling, music dancing out of every muscle of his seventeen-year-old, hard-work body. He takes centre stage. “Here’s a song for the prettiest girl to ever come to this shore.” Sweat-soaked hair hides his eyes but not the flush on his cheek as he sends a lonely waltz up to the rafters.

  At the threshold of the goodbye we linger, his two fingers connecting with mine, a gentling of hair away from my face and a small kiss, not on my cheek, but on my lips.

  I lie on the after-party floor with Aunties M&N. I don’t tell them the Appletons are falling from the tree or that Mum disappears for days and comes back shaky. I tell them I wrote my hero essay about them. I tell them I’m safe with Len. I tell them that the day I turn sixteen I’m coming home, and they say my room is waiting.

  Aunt Elsie travels with me from Montreal to Toronto so she can visit Grandma. “Did y
ou have a good time?”

  “These summers mean more to me than I can ever say.”

  “For as long as I can swing it, you’ll have them.”

  “Mrs. Butters told me Aunties M&N wanted to keep me as a baby. What happened?”

  “Your mummy despises Mary.”

  “How could she?”

  “It’s just her way. Mary’s age put her three steps ahead of your mum. It twisted her to see Mary win at anything. Your grandpa and Mary were best buddies. That twisted her even more. Theresa expected everything but did nothing. She could never be wrong. Never said sorry to anyone for anything. And stubborn, oh, my Lord. Maybe we let her get away with too much, but it was so much easier than battling with her.” Elsie straightens. “Listen to me going on. Please, don’t repeat any of that. How are your sisters?”

  “Jennah married another Smashus Clay.”

  “What? She shouldn’t put up with that.”

  “Jennah wheels and deals more than puts-up-with. ‘If you smack me then you owe me something really big.’ Seems to be working. The last clocking got her a shiny red car. Besides she’s preggers again. It better be a boy this time or Wilf will just plant another one.”

  “Jennah is too smart for that.”

  “Brains don’t mean much when your heart isn’t screwed in right.”

  “And June?”

  “Wish I knew. I haven’t heard from her in over a year. But Jacquie was top of her class at business college and she’s met the softest boy.”

  “Oh, it does my heart good to hear she’s found some happiness. And how are things with Len?” The world blurs into ribbons of green, dotted with cows and trees and churches. “Ari?”

  “What’s worse? Being tolerated or hated?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Being invisible or despised?”

  She shrugs.

  “Len’s so kind and decent. Having him for a stepdad has been a lucky break for all the Appletons.”

  “Your mother . . .”

  “She’s screwing him over.”

  “Your dad got her so turned around with men.”

  “He turned us all inside out, passed on his brains but made us heart-stupid.”

  “Except for you.”

  “Only because he checked out before completely excavating my soul.”

  “It does no good to talk of these things.”

  “Of course it does. Why do you think Jacquie’s not stuffing herself with cookies faster than Mr. Christie can bake them? Because Babcia understands. When she was Jacquie’s age soldiers raped her. She had a baby that her father ripped away. She doesn’t know if he threw it in the river or left it alone in the woods. Babcia and Iggy help Jacquie unload all the shit and flush it.”

  Now Elsie’s looking for a way out the window.

  I nudge her knee. “But most of the time a kid just needs someone like you who makes them believe in good.”

  “You didn’t say how Jory and Jillianne are faring.”

  “I’m thinking Daddy got more of their souls than anyone knows.”

  FIFTEEN

  Jacquie wears an ivory silk dress and a small feathery spray of pearls in her hair. She crowns my head with a wreath of baby’s breath. “There. My beautiful maid of honour.”

  “I know you’re happy, but are you scared?”

  She picks up a bouquet of calla lilies. “I’m too full of hope; there’s no room for fear.”

  Just Len and I go to City Hall to stand up for her and Franc.

  There’s an after-gathering at Chan’s Garden. Jennah can’t come because yesterday she popped out twin boys: Dakota and Dylan to go with stepbrother Dean and sisters, Darcy and, God help her, Diamond.

  June doesn’t even know that the cracks in Jacquie’s life have turned into the most exquisite wabi-sabi creation. June just disappeared like in stage plays where they say fade to black. When Jasper asks where she is, I dream her up in Paris writing poetry by the Seine, not slumped in some alley with a needle in her arm.

  Sometimes, I wander through Yorkville looking for June in the coffee houses. I stuff a ten in my pocket in case I catch sight of Jory tucked in a doorway. She lives with her new “family” in whatever pad they can find to crash in.

  Jory promised she wouldn’t miss Jacquie’s wedding, but she’s usually so spaced out, she misses entire days. She says her life is a blast, but when it turns cold she knows I’ve left a key in the shed and an extra blanket in the pickle room.

  And Jillianne is AWOL: always wasted of late. Just as well, she’d likely pitch a fit, and some sweet and sour pork along with it.

  Grandma keeps asking, “Where’s my purse? Dolores, did you turn off the iron?”

  “I’m Ari, Grandma. I checked the iron and your purse is on your lap.”

  Len lifts a glass of Champanade. “Jacquie, your mother and I are so proud of the beautiful woman you have become. Franc, cherish her always.”

  Jasper twirls on a strand of Jacquie’s hair, singing, Real love, love reel, heel-toe, hearts-heal.

  Len and I call the back steps the de-apple-ized zone. It’s Jillianne that sends us running for cover these days. She just called him a fucking polack when he asked about money missing from his wallet.

  I bring his jacket. “Let’s collect Zodiac and go to the lake.”

  “Tell your mother we’re going.”

  “She’s sleeping one off. You had no idea what you were signing on for, did you?”

  “You and Jacquie make it all worthwhile.” We walk and talk our way to the water’s edge, then sit on our bench. “Do you know where your mother went today?”

  A bar, a back seat, or a bed are the most likely bets. “No.”

  Len leans forward, his big hands capturing his head, elbows sinking into his knees with the weight of it. “I brought her lunch but she wasn’t home. She said she went to the police station about Jillianne’s shoplifting, but I took care of everything last week.”

  My hand opens on his back, fingers painting it with a little hope. “Let’s point the truck east and not stop ’til we hit Skyfish.”

  “Your grandmother needs us.” His hand turns mine in his, tracing the little half-moon scars left behind by strappings from Reverend Lowry. “This summer, we’ll all go to the Expo, then a little further so I can see your ocean.”

  SIXTEEN

  Mr. West tells me to wait after English class. He’s a new teacher, young and hopeful.

  Saturday, I saw him on the boardwalk in tight jeans, his ass filling out the seat like water-rounded rocks. It was the most spectacular thing I’d ever seen until he turned and I didn’t know what to take in first, the chest under his white T-shirt or the dimples when he smiled. He lifted his sunglasses to his forehead. “Hi, Ari. Do you live around here?”

  “No, I just come when I’m missing the ocean.”

  “That’s right, you’re from the East. I cycled the Cabot Trail four years ago, before starting university.”

  Jasper did the math. Finish high school at eighteen or is it seventeen in the west like it is out east? Three years university. One for teacher’s college. Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Not too old. “You probably pedalled right through my front yard.”

  He crouched and patted Zodiac. “Beautiful dog. Does she do any tricks?”

  “He does one spectacular trick.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Makes people feel better.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind on a bad day.”

  I backed away, my hair was hippie wild and the tie-dyed tank showed off tits better than Jory’s at thirteen-and-a-half. “Um, I’ve got homework. My teacher’s a real pain if I don’t get it done.”

  He laughed big. “See you Monday.”

  Now, I’m summoned to his desk. “Yes, sir?”

  He pulls my essay from the pile and
looks smack in my eyes. “Did you write this?”

  I check it’s mine: “Filling Uncle Iggy’s Shoes.” I say, “Yes.”

  “Did someone help you write it?” I can’t decide if I’m proud or hate him. He reads my words out loud, “It’s a phantom shoe, but I see it running away with his imagination. It’s a winged shoe and his body can’t keep pace with all there is to create. It’s a magic shoe that kicks a paralyzed girl, propelling her forward on her road. It’s a marching shoe that war did not silence and it echoes in hollow hearts, pumping them when they can’t beat alone.”

  I turn and walk out.

  “Ari, wait.” He catches me in the hall. I snap my arm away. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Please understand, some of the concepts seem beyond your years.”

  “Some kids live in adult worlds. They should have warned you about us at teacher’s college. I have to get to work.”

  Zodiac runs to greet Mr. West when he enters the store minutes before closing. I say, “Red pens are on the far wall, sir.”

  He looks up from his commune with Zodiac. “I was hoping your dog could do his trick.”

  Len comes to lock up. “Evening. Can I help you?”

  “This is my teacher.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No. Ari is an amazing student. I just came to ask permission to enter her essay in a literary contest.”

  “Ari would be honoured. We’d all be proud.”

  “No way. A couple of hours ago he didn’t believe I wrote it.” I move to count the till.

  “Corka, do not be hard. Many times I cannot believe what you’ve done. Was it the shoe story?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to meet Uncle Iggy?”

  “Uh . . . yeah, I would.”

  He traipses upstairs to share poppy seed loaf with my Zajac circus. I try to ignore him when he returns to where I’m hanging shirts. He examines one that looks like a tiger exploded on it. “Very cool.”