by Golda Fried
Her mom would stick her nose out the door and start screaming dinner.
Grade six finally sucked me in. It had been years since I’d had a proper friend, and I couldn’t handle trying to figure out what to do at recess twice a day, where to sit at lunch. But this particular teacher with purple highlights in her flair hair noticed that I was a waterfall during the national anthem. And at lunch she put aside her Styrofoam coffee cup with the bright lipstick marks and said, “Will you help me clean up?” For one hour, I didn’t have to think about lunch.
Then I couldn’t do homework. I’d come home and watch Family Feud ‘cuz it wasn’t like Jeopardy. I actually knew the answers, sometimes. And at night, my heart would beat too loudly. I didn’t want to see a psychologist because one teacher had told us that you couldn’t be President of the United States if you’d ever seen a psychologist, and I didn’t want to close any doors for myself.
John said, “Kids know that first in line mostly means you’ve been waiting for the bus the longest.” John and Pearl were actually heading to catch the bus at the time, Pearl sort of diverging from the natural bee-line to the bus stop. There was a cigarette pack on the ground and John kicked it. “Hey,” he smiled, “go ahead and kick it.” “Not that far,” he said. “It kicks back at you, no?” He ran and grabbed the pack and brought it up to her face: “It’s a full one.” As soon as they lit up cigarettes, the bus came, another thing that kids know or find out very fast. She could deal with every organ rotting except one, she thought. They headed for the back of the bus and sat down. Both of them staring blankly forward.
And Pearl came home and her mother was doing needlepoint stitch by stitch. The needle going under as she asked, “How was your day, hon?” And it was always, “Fine.” Her mother tugged on the string, bringing it closer. Pearl ran up the stairs to her room, racing to get to John’s books.
“Don’t look at the words like they’re a bunch of bricks – that’s somebody’s guts splattered on the page right there,” John had said lending Pearl books he had underlined to make her more focused. She followed these lines plank-like, hoping they’d lead to him, to her, to the period at the end of the sentence that would say dive in.
Deep in the suburbs on a cold winter night when everyone else was sleeping long before she ever picked up a guitar, she would go into the garage and would keep the clothes dryer on to stay warm and she would write in her journal as if looking for something.
Pearl found the briefcase in the garage, and she didn’t need a key to open it. But hadn’t he left with it? She knelt down. It was under the tricyles and the red wheelbarrow. She put out her thumbs and pushed back the shiny brass buttons on the ends and the buckle snapped open and for that instant, it all clicked just as she remembered. Inside, there was that scent of violets. It was late and the night was coming in, trying to fill in the garage, circling around the hanging bare light bulb. And there was a card and pearls rolling around: “I’m sorry we’ve been scrounging so much but I wanted to save to buy this necklace for you.”
Pearl scooped up each pearl and carried them in like eggs that were about to hatch. She snuck one of her mom’s needles and strung the pearls up slowly until each pearl was hanging by the string and then she wore them.
Immediately Pearl felt that wave again like a hand passing over a crystal ball, and instinctively she put her head down to stop the feeling. She could just imagine her grandmother holding her up that first time in the hospital light, turning Pearl in her fingers saying, “She is perfect as a pearl, really, because, you know, sometimes the cord gets around the neck and the face turns blue.”
Driz was still going around in and out of the cafeteria frantically harassing people, even guys, for a tampon. John looked down at his key on his string necklace and promised, “One day I’m going to have janitor keys. None of this latch-kid key business. I want those skeleton keys. That’ll be cool.”
John had his usual coke can in front of him.
“You know that stuff can disintegrate pennies?” Pearl said.
At night on her pillow, Pearl could hear Tide’s skateboard do lines outside. Sometimes she’d look up and watch him. He’d go back and forth, never leaving the frame of her window and she’d repeat, “Leave the frame, leave the frame.” And when she closed her eyes, she knew how he’d be, all knees jutted out and hands balancing, riding the asphalt. And the last thing she would hear before drifting off to sleep would be an older male whispering. The same voice that said, “Don’t forget to take walks every half hour to clear the cobwebs in your head.” The voice would drum out, “Child, you are now floating down a river . . .”
I worried about John nights, How could I help him? It never got to crying with him at school, but I’d gaze at those turquoise lines on his forearms and think they must be carrying all that water. In the days, I saw him and whatever he did, that was John, but at night he could have disappeared down waterfalls for all I knew.
“I have to walk the dog,” Tide told her. Pearl got up and followed. They headed down back toward the ravine. Tide pointed, “See that tree. That’s the tree where my friend and I used to pitch apples at each other. Now he’s dead.” That was enough to shut Pearl up on top of her being silent, but she still thought, “Well I’ve never done that.”
The dog went loose and ran up to the water. It had beer cans floating on top and was way too dark to see all the rocks underneath. But the dog as it got all muddy pawing through, revealed in bits the layers and layers of trash. Pearl was sitting up by the path on the grass, wondering where the ravine went, this bubbling brook.
John tried calling Pearl at home once the weight of the phone felt like a bone in Pearl’s hand. She started at its whiteness. “. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .And she’s totally wigged out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . you’ve got to check out her mother, man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .she lives just down the ravine from you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . So, what do you think?”
She was trying to piece all the bits together.
“Don’t get silent on me, Pearl . . .”
“Is the final cut when the rose is clipped by the wooer?” This is what Pearl was thinking when out of the kitchen window, she saw John in the backyard nipping a rose from Mrs. Robinson’s rosebushes.
I only actually slept over at Driz’s once and we made the trip to the corner store for gumballs and such and the ol’ movie and all these pill-like candies came out. It freaked me out that they looked like pills and I dropped them. The thing was, when I dropped them, I was laughing hysterically and later I was all hyper-bouncing around in her living room. Driz gawked, “Pearl, I’ve never seen you like this!” because I had such a serious side at school. Even then when I accepted such comments, in my head I was like, “Fuck you.”
Her wardrobe was all sorted by colour and it was as if she’d made sure that she had every shade available. “One for every mood,” she said. Driz didn’t have more than one mood.
I asked her what she thought of John and she said, “He drooled on his cool a long time ago.”
“You know the whole time we were driving down to the campsite,” she said, “he kept feeding me his half baked ideas instead of shutting the fuck up and listening to some music for a second and tell me, Pearl, does anyone really care when making a mixed tape and you come to the end of a side, do you A) fill in all the space even if you cut off a song or B) have only whole songs even if this means a two minute wait of total silence?”
It was at that sleepover that I met Mrs. Robinson. She came down in her black silk kimono ready to take on coffee. She made it, one hand looking after a cigarette. The smoke seemed to have a dark cloud effect on Driz. I had never seen her so still. But Mrs. Robinson danced around Driz, her hips closing drawers behind her and then the microwave door. Then she took her coffee and wiggled down into her seat. She smiled at me through lipstick that made her lips look like worm skin and I tried to calm myself down by the window with a great view of the backyard
.
Mrs. Robinson liked her coffee hot. She’d take two sips of coffee, then go, “Ugh,” and have to heat it up again. The fourth set of rings wasn’t the microwave for a change. It was John at the front door with the rose for Driz. A rose.
John came in and sat down, and Mrs. Robinson opened her legs a bit so you could see this sash tied around her upper left thigh. Driz flopped the rose on the table and was like, “Whatever, let the drooling begin.”
“All good parties end up emitting noise from the kitchen,” John would tell Pearl years later. Now little Pearl would be the first. She’d come down the curved staircase afraid of falling through the spaces of the railing. And she’d go and sit in the small chair and stare at the big wad of butter in the glass tray, the hairs on her back on end. Her mother would go down the stairs next, looking at the rail as if this is how it felt for someone to hold your hand. Then Grandma would descend the stairs as if they were a fan, one high-heeled shoe after another.
At the end of the year, Driz had a party at her house in the backyard and John puked all over the rosebushes. “My mom’s going to kill me,” Driz spat over his shriveled up body. He came with me to kneel in another spot in the backyard. But kept vomiting. I had my thin arms around him, one over his clammy forehead, one around his waist, and I sat there cradling with him, praying for it to stop. And then his mouth was just intricate froth. It came out like last words when people get shot on screen. And I saw his eyes. He was gazing through wisps of hair at Driz’s blonde hair swishing all over the garden as she tried to cover things with dirt, looking like quite a music video but not coming over here.
I got to my room and shut the door. The walk of clothes to the closet and then the ransacking for my guitar. I slowly took off each piece of clothing and then took the guitar out of its hard case and banged on it a few times, drifting to this....
My guitar teacher is playing his acoustic. His right hand is a hummingbird caught in strings. His three end fingers are up and fluttering as he strums and then stammers, Ring. Ring! It’s got to ring. His two knees are in the air and he’s almost telling the hummingbird to fly off to doveness. I watch, waiting for him to utter, “Now you try it.” But eventually he just says, “Well, I guess that’s it for today.”
Putting the guitar aside, I saw there was this red slash on my upper right thigh from where the guitar had been.
“I used to go out with high rollers!” This was seeping in under the door. My hair in my hands. The last thing John had said to me was, “I don’t understand why Driz’s so freaked out about her mom’s rosebushes, Mrs. Robinson really likes me.”
John came over to Pearl’s house for the first time and Grandma said, “Ooooohh, a visitor. Let me get one of my cakes I’ve been saving.” And she brought one up from the downstairs freezer. It was all Saran-wrapped. “I used to make such beautiful cakes. Now my fingers are coursing with pain. I don’t bake anymore. But at least I saved a lot of them.” She got out a big butcher’s knife and cut through all the layers saying, “So how do you know my granddaughter?” And she put a piece of cake on a dainty china dish and handed it to John. It was sprouting green mould.
Pearl’s mother came rushing in. “The cakes must go,” she said. “All sixty-six of them.” Grandma stood by, biting her nails to raw, “How can you waste food! Didn’t I teach you anything? Oh, my beautiful cakes.”
And Mother having to find the tranquilizer. And John having to be there now for the first time, his eyes all in awe as the needle went in. And Grandma grabbing John’s arm saying, “But you will stay for cake.” And John, looking down, must have framed the image of those bony fingers around his arm tied together at the knuckle because he’d later tell Pearl that’s what he was always reminded of. And six body-bag looking bags in the corner filled with Grandma’s beautiful cakes.
INT. JOHN. DAY
John goes into the side-washroom at a gas station. He leans his arms up on the sink in front of the mirror and is looking at his bare arms. He and Driz haven’t made it to the campground yet, so he is taking in the fact and taking it in long that there are no mosquito bites up and down the veins. He knows she strings him around but he is forever after why. This time the soundtrack is clearer than ever as the trucks outside leave and leave over hearts that flash red.
the tubs
Eddie walked in and through the apartment to the fridge door. Her roommate’s green parsnips and coriander leaves would trestle down to ones that were already shriveled up on her barren bottom shelf, which was masking taped and marked Eddie. She let the door slide, her unfinished tin of Carnation evaporated milk in hand. The few people left were just her roommates sprawled out into a pipe-thin forest. Using up the whole cream-coloured couch. That couch could have been the center of the universe.
º º º
A toilet flushes. A river flowing through all this.
Eddie tore in there like she had to use the washroom. Found herself sitting on the edge of the bathtub facing this guy, both feet out.
What are you doing here? she asked.
I got bounced out of a punk show for spitting beer at the band.
He obviously was doing something with the guitar on his lap, though so it was one of those dumb questions. It was then that he leaned over and whispered through curled fingers holding a cigarette, The bathroom has the best acoustics. You try it. Say something.
She thought of the others.
He started bending some strings for her. Made her see this image of him smashing guitar to its wooden bits to toothpick the soul. The faucet kept dripping like one annoying tear a second.
Eddie’s head all bendy and not sure what to do, let the guy grab her as they were out the back door.
Now there is something about Montreal apartments in the Plateau area because a lot of them have these porcelain bathtubs with legs that curl under, and this backyard had a few old ones just sitting there.
They swirled down the fire escape, appearing in one of the bathtubs. There was some light coming from the apartment windows, but there was no worry of her roommates looking out the window at them, not even Kent. It was as if those guys couldn’t see as far as their fingerprints let alone out the window. Except maybe Kent who was planning the next ten years.
The guitar case was there beside them, but she didn’t remember hearing it land. There was duct tape around that and everything. His elbow, his boots. Through glances away from the ground, Eddie noticed him lighting a cigarette with a Zippo. He had stringy hair.
She looked back at his guitar case on the tufts of grass and tried to think of something to say.
So I guess you want to be a rock star then, is that it? she finally murmured.
If I was a rock star, I’d scatter white roses all over this bathtub for you, and maybe you’d only notice the green leaves. He exhaled.
º º º
He spoke in his throaty way, I see us in a bathtub on the closest thing there is to seaweed, but not close enough. Those buildings are all the same box houses just sitting in their square of ice cube tray like fat Jell-O. And pretty soon the sugar will start pouring through the chimneys into the TV sets and there will be lonely shivering people on the couches trying to fall asleep by these static windows.
When he glanced back at Eddie, he looked like he was sorry, he’s just been around the Plateau too many times.
He wore a trashy olive green leather jacket and was called Toad.
Look up there. She pointed to the neighbour’s cement sun deck. See those plants and statues of the sea horses and big stones. The rusted grill over the charcoaled wok. The scattered cigarette packs. That landlord and his old lady are wild. They stole most of the plants and the flower pots from a graveyard.
And he said, God, you’re right, they even have a pink flamingo.
[She was looking at their circle of sun chairs.]
º º º
Toad watched Eddie. This girl would hardly talk, figuring things like lather. Made him reach for yet another cigarette.
He seemed to be steadying himself, trying not to let the words come out too jump, I live alone, right, and that gets – Well, once I showed up early at some friend’s party with a paper shopping bag full of my posters and a lamp and practically all my little shell-shaped soaps.
º º º
He asked her, Do you believe in mutual suffering for a couple or non-suffering with recognition of the other person suffering?
I’m starting to believe more in sounds, she said, and so I would say I believe in lying down on white sheets and hearing the sound of someone you love splashing around in the bathtub not too far away.
The living room couch came crashing off the balcony and over their heads.
º º º
Toad was watching Eddie, who was trying not to look at the couch. It didn’t seem like she even heard the thud after it went down.
If there were water in the tub, there’d be those concentric circles that seemed to break before they reached her.
Toad helped her turn around, and now she was lying with her back against his stomach. She grabbed her belt with her hands to hold on, trying to make that calming effect in her stomach.
º º º
He was already in the bathtub and she saw herself standing outside gazing in. He was whispering, Sink or swim. Sinkorswim. Sinkerswum. And she was trying to toss herself in.
One toe in and she felt herself turning to stone. Eddie had thought about swimming many times. But pools were always way too cold. There were these girls she knew who made an effort to go to the “baths” all the time. The idea was to get control by exercising. One girl confided to Eddie once, when freaking out, she would tell herself, Go swim. I’d be doing laps steaming up my goggles, she told Eddie, it was ridiculous, crying.
And Toad was just lying there waiting for her in the tub, feet up on the rim. The muscles inside his boots throbbed through the skin like lungs, in, out. In and out.
º º º
