She can see people above pretending not to see her below.
They walk a little faster along the pool deck, they don’t run as running is not permitted and these are people who follow the rules regardless of drowning girls.
So too the people seated in the dining room hurry along while she stands before them getting berated by the mayor of this town she is not from.
Though it hardly matters where she came from cause she can’t hear him.
She is still underwater. His words are just roaring muffles. Waves of sound lap over her, in and out, the tide of authorial tone washes Iris. She is so wiped down by his disdain. She is wetted with everything he deems inadequate about her person.
Major David is lavish with his contempt. He lives for an opportunity to display his impeccable standards and import.
Under normal circumstances, the four top being so upset would upset her.
But now, meh.
Iris’s waterlogged brain can no longer summon the will to care, or react as if she does. She cannot recall the part she is meant to play in this scene. Iris cannot organize herself in the moment long enough to come up with a soothing solution.
She waits on the bottom of the pool for someone to come save her.
For a time, no one comes.
Until Major David shoves off and up as men do so he can lord right over her.
It has occurred to him, deep inside his own bad wiring, that the reason he cannot make this girl understand her wrongdoing is a matter of perspective. So he raises himself up, pushes his chair back, hoists his right arm and points a rigid human handgun right in Iris’s face. He darts it at her with each offer he makes toward her. When a man moves his upper body at a woman like Major David is doing to Iris, he is offering to hit her in the face or worse.
Men are just bigger.
Major David tilts his head to the left in order to better train his eye on his target. These are movements Iris has seen a million billion trillion times. Iris had been exposed to many variations of this same rough stance before even reaching the full height of herself. She can spot it a mile off but can do little to stop it coming. She was long ago taught to suppress her own biological urge, which is just another example of how effectively wires can be manipulated.
Fight or flight, fight or flight, fight or flight.
But women aren’t meant to do that anymore, Iris has learned.
Stay and suffer through.
Or lose your job, your house, your kids, your dog, your sanity, your self-respect, your life.
Stand and stay and suffer in what you’ve been trained to think is noble silence. This conceit, though it has served women poorly throughout history, is still wildly popular.
Hold that tongue of yours or we will spit scream in your face, Iris.
Just like now. Just like this. The Mayor steps inside her personal space because that space is not even hers.
She can smell sour coffee on his breath. There is a lingering fishy smell about him; likely he takes Omega 3 tablets and eats beef every day. She focuses on his neck, he has razor burn, the rough rash of the rub is ringed with tiny spores full of waiting white pus. This likely adds to his daily rage. His wife definitely buys the most expensive razors to no avail.
The best a man can get is way better than anything Iris will ever see.
Though this is still not good enough for the Mayor who she is afraid to look in the face. She can’t look up. Her neck hinge has seized with tension. The muscle fibres where her neck meets her shoulders have decided to wrap themselves around each other for comfort. They knot themselves together to protect what is underneath from damage.
More damage.
And she wants to reach her hands behind herself to press the lumps out of her shoulders as a way of pressing the lump out of her throat. She thinks all these lumps are connected somehow and she’s right. But she can’t bear exposing her soft underarms because this too may be taken further as an affront.
Iris has been picked up by the armpits before, tight, mean hands gripping the web between her arms and breasts like handles to steer her up and into a wall. Not John but the one before him. John knows this. He has all the information about who has previously harmed her soft parts.
Iris stares into the Mayor’s chest a bit, follows the citron on citron print of his tie with her eyes. Then repeat. Iris’s mind is trying to distract her from pronouncements about her performance being the worst performance and an inference about her mother being incompetent. And though Iris can hardly argue with that, there is a little surge in her, a little fury not yet formed.
Because who the fuck does this guy think he is bringing up her mother?
She wants to rage at him about her childhood and her parents and this man who takes advantage and the man before him that did the same. She wants to scream her face off. But she doesn’t.
Instead, she decides men are obsessed with paisley because it looks like dressy sperm.
This thought rushes to the front of her brain. She tries to fend it off but it persists. It keeps coming. No. Stop. She begs her sardonic sense of humour to shush.
Please, you will get me in more trouble.
But it is too late. Iris is picturing this brightly coloured textile homage to ejaculate quivering and pulsating. She has a visual back end. There are always silent picture shows running in the background of her brain. She holds in the laugh. But it makes that crunchy noise in the back of her throat as she tries to suck it back. The garbled air grasped at the last-second movement of her head brings her ever slightly closer to the cum tie which she is now thinking of as a cum tie. And the table catches hold of her snicker.
Do you think this is funny?
Iris doesn’t think any of this is funny in the nourishing way a good belly laugh makes you feel. Or the comforting manner of an inside joked shared amongst friends. It is not funny like cutting satire is funny. Or so vulgar you cringe laugh until your vulva clenches up. But alas, some horrid sense of irony raps on all the funny bones that make up Iris’s body and she is left once again pressing her face into her hands in an attempt to stifle her urges. Iris’s urges are hard to stifle and the giggle can be seen rippling through her as tears squeeze from between her fingers and roll down the back of her hands.
Little bitch.
And there it is, the line.
The dining room had been watching the scene from the corner of each eye, glancing up occasionally to check in with its progress, unable to determine who is at fault, assuming the young waitress deserving. It was nobody’s business until now.
But the b word is a throwdown. That one’s easy. Even Omi peeps around the corner rubbing dry his hands on the dishtowel hung over his shoulder.
All hands appear on deck and ready themselves for a punch-up.
* * *
Olive has always found the bruises you can’t see just as bad as the ones you can.
She feels especially poorly when she has a mark on her face. Once, she had a cigarette burn high up on her cheek after a man shoved her outside a bar. She had slipped on the ice as she rocked forward trying to remain upright, but the cherry on her hot smoke made contact just under her thin eyelid regardless of attempts made to erect herself.
He had yelled at her not to be so fucking clumsy.
He had told her it happened because she was a drunk.
Not because he had grabbed at her when she didn’t answer him.
Stop ignoring me, he bawled.
Olive had not been ignoring him. She had been trying to calculate the correct way to answer when he had asked if she wanted to fuck.
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Her mind had been mitigating the possible damage and attempting to locate the pitch-perfect tone that would not anger or offend the man further. Her brain was considering possible routes of escape, both literal and figurative. It was always doing that. She didn’t realize yet that her tendency toward perpetual anxiety adversely impacted her odds of success. She wasn’t ignoring his question. Opposite. She was so resolutely focused on it that she had completely forgotten about the smoke burning between her fingers.
She wishes she had a smoke now.
Though there’s hardly a soul about the place to get one off, almost everything downtown has remained closed for the day. People, business owners and possible clientele have chosen to stay home with their loved ones in front of fireplaces and floors covered in puzzle pieces. Their children rush in from the yard with dogs wearing heavy snowballed coats. Olive used to walk through the jellybean rows on snow days just to listen to the children out of sight behind fences, explaining game rules in circles, heads thrown back to snuffle snot, all agreeing that blowing your nose was a waste of time.
Beep beep beep.
You can hear the fleet moving backward all throughout the city.
On these walks eastward, Olive has overheard neighbours discussing the most advantageous snow placement like it’s a new problem instead of the same problem they had last year and every year since they moved home from the mainland.
We’ll have to dump it in the harbour, says a woman in a brightly coloured vintage one-piece snowsuit clearly too tight for physical exertion. Really a promise of a future exchange to be made for her young husband’s ready labour. This one knows the secret to a happy home. She keeps a nurse’s uniform ironed and hung at the back of a spare bedroom closet in the event someone’s sore shoulders need attending. There’s a pink stethoscope and a white store-bought folded cap. Young wife will not be first wife. She understands well the appeal of a little costume. It has nothing to do with necessity.
Olive avoids the jellies today though. No one will give her a smoke up there.
Sure, they are mostly all quit now but for the occasional inebriated puff. There was a time cigarettes could be got up Gower but not so anymore. These days you’d have to wind the steep sides hoping to find a stubborn poet or former singer willing to save you even a drag. They’re all mindful now. They have new kitchen cabinets with track lighting and half as many mice in autumn. A scatter little fucker still gets in though, and the whole household is in throes when an earwig is spotted crawling up the baby’s fat arm. A long tail trail in the freshly fallen snow just beyond the double exterior glass doors will put the house up.
At school pickup, the young mothers who once shared an affinity for blowing brainers stroke out over the rat population which they believe is surging because of irresponsible development. Olive has heard them moaning that they will have to pay money now and forever after to pump water to the jesus neighbourhood no one wants, to shore up one man’s insecure legacy.
How much attention does one asshole need? they all groan.
He is regarded as worse than Smallwood by the breastfeeding support group in Bannerman Park, who can see that Olive is sweeping the ground for bits of butts. Instinctively they hold their babies a little tighter and then feel alarmed and then ashamed for having done so. As a penance, they promise to go to all the social justice rallies. And they do.
The sight of Olive fills them up with guilt no matter what the season.
She refuses to make the young moms feel shame during the worst part of the winter by accidentally looking on her. Olive can’t have anything else put on her. She is way too rough to look upon lately. The children think she’s weird. Not good weird like their aunt who liberally and enthusiastically swears on the government. But dangerous weird like people on the evening news.
She doesn’t take that path unless she’s fully scrubbed up.
Besides, it is the path she takes when feeling most optimistic, which is not how she is feeling now. She has felt well enough at times to search out the bright-side of downtown. She has sought out the quiet residential streets and admired the colourful houses like a tourist off a large ship for the afternoon. Olive often wondered why they don’t paint their houses up nice like this at home. Once she mentioned it to her care worker. The exercise was to list three things that made her feel happiness. Reliable things. But it felt like a test to Olive. She wanted to say Calv’s single cab truck, the kiss in her grandmother’s bread, the smell of a newly lit wood stove. But the care worker would have questions so she said the houses were pretty instead, which for her was like wishing her wish in code.
Olive felt so silly now for doing that. And she turns up by a shuttered dress shop once called a boutique to make her way along Duckworth back to The Hazel. Damian will be at work by now and he’ll loan her smokes for life eternal. If not, she will make Iris give her one.
Service staff have woken up for the third time that afternoon and are now attempting to venture past their doorsteps in search of Gatorade on their way to work. And the grief they feel hungover is exacerbated by the fact they almost did not see the day. The lot of them forever reminisce over their childhoods while watching shows in celebration of their generational arrested development. They still morning smoke inside with their fingers held high along faces to prevent tarring. They still think someone will love those hands later.
Olive used to hold cigarettes upright to prevent tarnish too.
Back then, Nan would tan her backside for smoking. Though no one worries much on that these days. A bit of maybe future lung cancer seems hardly pressing when faced with for sure everyday survival.
That night in St. Anthony, it was Iris’s older cousin who yanked on Olive’s sleeve and yelled at her as she cracked her head off the frozen gravel ground. She had started to confess the scene while they shared a cigarette in the walkway between their two apartments.
Iris had been leaning against the privacy fence tilted between them. She was deeply involved in explaining away a noise complaint someone had made about her and John on Old Christmas Day. They had gotten into a fight which of course Olive knew because everyone knew when Iris was yelling.
He gave me a set of steak knives, can you fucking believe it? Knives.
Iris had wanted Olive to share in the smoke and her aggravation but a casual remark about her notorious temper had snagged Olive up in the memory.
I swung my purse at him like he was a pickpocket.
Olive thinks John is a style of pickpocket from an ancient cobblestone city. Iris should wear her purse across her belly like an elderly tourist to ward him off.
I got right hairy, worse than Dad. Imagine. Disgraceful, I am.
Deon bawled at me once.
What?
Deon swore on me down to St. Anthony once.
What was you doing down there?
There was a hockey party.
You don’t play hockey.
Everyone was going.
I dare say.
Deon tried to drag me off.
Fuck, Olive, what are you telling me stuff like that for?
You was talking about bad temper running in the family —
Yes but I don’t want to hear that shit now, do I?
When then?
What?
When do you want to hear it?
Never I suppose.
But who am I supposed to tell?
No one.
But you’re always telling stuff.
That’s different.
Cause it’s you.
Maybe you misunderstood him.
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nbsp; He said come we goes and has a screw.
Yuck.
He grabbed me and I fell and burnt my face.
That don’t sound like Deon to me.
It was Deon.
Where was I when this happened?
In Toronto.
Fuck sakes, you have got to stop putting yourself in harm’s way.
What way is that?
Every way.
Right.
Look, Deon didn’t know better.
That don’t make it any less gross.
What do you want me to do about it now?
Just let me say it and know that it happened!
Okay, fine, you said it happened and now I know.
It sucked.
It did.
It does.
Deon is an idiot when he drinks, we all are.
It left a mark on my cheek.
I got marks everywhere too.
Then we’re both marked up.
Anyway.
Anyway.
Did you have a good Christmas after?
A good Christmas?
Yeah.
You fucked off on me.
Something came up.
Someone came up.
Olive.
No, I never had a good Christmas.
You know you can’t hardly see that mark on your cheek anymore.
Marks are never as worrisome as what could have happened if Olive had not already known or had been too drunk to manage. What is worse haunts Olive long after marks fade. She thinks about it a lot when she is walking. In public. In bed. Anywhere.
Everywhere Olive is, she is thinking about the worse things that could happen to her.
She imagines how men will react if she laughs or cries out in the wrong moment. If she wells up or moans when things are not right. She imagines what they would do to prevent it from happening. Or to punish her for any kind of noise determined unbecoming of their preferred sexual fantasy. Olive spends great amounts of time scaring herself so she will be more vigilant. This was her very first social worker word. Vigilant.
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club Page 20
