To my right, Jackson was chewing gum with his mouth open. I didn’t want Gwen to hear him. She thought little enough of him as it was. I felt a tension as his chewing stopped and I worried just as much about that. Had he seen inside my head again? I glanced at him and then quickly back to the screen. It could have been explained away as a neck adjustment. He caught the glance; I saw him catch it with his unsmiling face. The audience roared at that point, the biggest laugh so far. Everyone joined in except Jackson and me. Helen’s loud trill pierced my right ear and I wanted to slit her throat.
Worse, Dirk giggled. When I heard that sound I knew it had been him there that night, that he’d had a hand in slashing my clothes to bits, mine and Isabelle’s. No two males of the species could sound like that when they laughed.
To my left, Gwen snorted and put her hand over her mouth and nose in embarrassment. I wished for a moment that I were eleven years old hunting for golf balls with my friend who didn’t believe that her evil boyfriend was good and that her best girlfriend came from a suspect family. I knew she wouldn’t listen to anything bad I had to tell her about Dirk; I wasn’t sure I’d even try.
It was a sunny day where W.C. Fields lived and the bright white screen shone down on the audience. When I looked past Gwen at Dirk he turned his head toward me and made a gross lizardy motion with his tongue. That reptilian tongue was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, the way it wriggled its pointed shape in my direction. I needed to get out of there. I concentrated on the screen, determined not to look again to my left or right.
Promptly I looked to my right and saw what I had been set on not seeing. Aunt Helen’s left arm was by her side, her fingers poking out past the armrest. Those fingers rested silently on top of Jackson’s, her hand dark against his bright new cast. They weren’t holding hands. The cast prevented that. The scene had a protective look to it, but still, my guts churned. It didn’t feel protective; it felt grubby, tawdry. It reeked. Like the inside of Jackson’s cast probably had when the doctor sawed it off to reveal his secret festering wound. And what could she possibly be protecting him from, anyway? It was all a lie. Aunt Helen was a lie.
I blinked. Now both her hands rested in her lap. I had imagined it. Or had I? I blinked again and her hands were still resting primly on her own person. She looked at me then, feeling my gaze, and smiled. A true smile. I wondered if I was losing my mind, like Jackson’s mother.
When the intermission came, I didn’t have to pretend that I felt ill. I asked my dad to drive me home. It was better than running off. Running off prompted questions and I didn’t have any answers that I could share with anyone.
My dad fussed a bit but made short work of taking me back to the house. He didn’t want to miss any of the laugh riot going on back at the theatre.
It was hot again, or “decidedly warm,” as the newspaper kept describing it, but I doubt if I would have slept anyway. I wanted to leave home. Maybe I could dress up as a man and ride west in a boxcar. Me and the grasshoppers.
Chapter 16
I walked away from my job the next day. My plan had been to work till the end of July and then take August off to get myself ready for college, whatever that entailed.
But in the late afternoon, when I stood up to visit the ladies’ room, Henny called out, “ I guess the rich girl deserves more breaks than the rest of us lowly workers.”
I quietly snapped. Suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of putting in those last few days. I sat back down and wrote a note to Mary. She was away from her desk at that moment but I taped it to her typewriter. Then I walked out. It was irresponsible, but it gave me a taste of freedom that I didn’t remember ever having had before.
When I got to Portage Avenue I crossed over and went into Brathwaite’s Drugstore. I browsed at the cosmetics counter, then sat down at the soda fountain and ordered a chocolate sundae. It was the best treat I’d ever had. I dawdled. If I got home too early someone might suspect.
My free feeling didn’t last. It was gone by the time I walked down Ferndale Avenue toward home.
The morning after that I went over to Gwen’s house early. I dressed for work and left at the same time as usual because I wasn’t up to telling Helen and my dad what I had done. They probably wouldn’t have cared much, but they would have barraged me with questions.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” wouldn’t have been good enough for either of them. They would want to know why, and whether I had given proper notice, and if I was going back next summer, and when I had made the decision, on and on and on into next week. So I didn’t tell them and I didn’t know if I would.
“You quit your job?” Gwen said.
“Yes.”
She stood up and started moving around the kitchen. “Do you think they will have hired anybody yet to replace you?” she asked.
“Why? I don’t know.”
“I need that job, Vi. I need to go downtown and get that job. Will you stay here and watch Warren? It won’t be hard; he’s not even here, but if he comes home for something to eat or anything. My mum will be out all day, till after I get back, so you don’t have to worry about running into her.
“What should I wear?” she called as she ran upstairs.
“Something sensible and white,” I said. “They like white in summer and dark colours in winter.”
“Can you stay?” she shouted.
“I guess so,” I said. There was nothing else on my agenda. It would be a place for me to hang around all day while I was supposed to be at work.
“For sure your mum won’t come home and find me here?” I yelled up the stairs.
“For sure,” she hollered down. “She’s doing a huge house in Armstrong Point. It takes her the whole day.”
Gwen came downstairs in an off-white mid-calf skirt and a short-sleeved blouse in the same colour that I’d never seen before.
“How’s this?” she asked.
“Good,” I said. “Where’d you get the blouse?”
“It’s my mum’s,” she said.
“Won’t she kill you?”
“Yes, but I don’t care. I need this job. I’m not going to university.”
I had figured as much but we hadn’t talked about it.
“What about grade twelve?” I asked.
“I don’t need it.”
“Hmm.”
“Why hmm?”
“Just hmm, I don’t know.”
Everything would be different now that Gwen and I wouldn’t be going to school together. I hadn’t given it any thought till now.
“Life as we know it is over,” I said.
Gwen laughed. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. She put on lipstick in front of the hall mirror.
“Use a light hand,” I said. “They don’t hire floozies.”
“Do I look like a floozy?” Gwen was panic-stricken.
“No, no. I’m just saying not too much lipstick. They like a wholesome look.”
Gwen did look a little like a floozy. She couldn’t help it. She was built like her mum with huge breasts and full lips and blonde curly hair. I was sure those lips were wasted on Dirk Botham. I shuddered. His slippery skinny tongue flashed inside my head and I remembered asking Gwen once if he was a nice kisser. I’d wanted to say, “What’s it like to kiss a boy with no lips?” but that would have been mean.
Her answer had surprised me.
“I wouldn’t know,” she’d said primly.
“Are you telling me you’ve never kissed?” I’d asked.
“I don’t want to discuss it,” she’d said.
And that had been that.
“Good luck!” I called after her now as she dashed out the front door. “Knock ’em dead.”
I felt horrible. I wanted to talk about Dirk and Jackson and Aunt Helen but I couldn’t have confided in Gwen even if she had been there. Dirk was her golden boy; she probably thought his tongue was beautiful even if she’d never been allowed to touch it. And the Jackson-Helen thing was too twisted for her; she woul
dn’t want to hear it. I needed someone else to talk to.
It wasn’t too twisted for Mary. She would be able to handle it. But there were other reasons I couldn’t discuss it with her. Why had I left work that way? I missed her already. I realized then that I didn’t even know where she lived. It was somewhere downtown, on Qu’Appelle Avenue, I thought, but I didn’t know the details. And she didn’t have a phone. I’d have to go to Eaton’s and wait at the doors for her at quitting time. But I didn’t want to run into anyone who knew I had walked out. Maybe I could wear a disguise — a false nose and glasses.
Plugging the kettle in, I prepared to drink some of Gert’s instant coffee.
Also, Mary was a blabbermouth. If Gwen got my job, they would sit next to each other and share secrets and the small morsels I had already fed Mary about Jackson would be in Gwen’s ears before the end of their first day together. What a mess. How dare she run off and get my job! She hadn’t even asked my permission.
I had found out the hard way that Mary was a blabbermouth, that she couldn’t keep a secret no matter how hard she tried. There was a boy named Billy Stern who worked on the shipping floor with Lester. I had admired him from afar way back in February when forty below was a good day and I worked only on Saturday mornings. I made the mistake of going into raptures over him to Mary and she passed it on to Lester and he told Billy, who had studiously ignored me ever since. So now I told Mary little about my yearnings, romantic or otherwise, for fear of her talking about them to Perry and the town of Carman and the whole population of Eaton’s mail order.
The Jackson and Helen saga would have to wait for Isabelle. And the Dirk stuff too.
Gwen didn’t get the job. There were so many people needing work, she said, that the position had already been taken. She had filled out an application form. She cried and I felt bad for begrudging her my position.
Late in the afternoon I went downtown and intercepted Mary as she came out of the mail-order building. I gave her my phone number and Gwen’s and asked her to let us know immediately if another position came free.
“I can’t believe you just up and walked out,” Mary said. “You’ll be famous in the mail-order building forever.” She laughed.
“Well, like everyone keeps saying, I don’t really need the job. And I’ve got too much other stuff going on right now.”
“It must be nice to not have to work,” said Mary.
“Not you too,” I said. I was tired of people begrudging me my life.
“No, no. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just imagining it, that’s all. It really must be nice.”
We walked together to Portage Avenue and sat for a few minutes on a bench while I waited for my streetcar.
“I gave Perry the heave-ho,” Mary said.
“Good!”
“We fought about having kids and I gave him back his stupid ring. I mean, what’s the point in getting married if you don’t have kids? Did he really think I could stand to look at only him across the breakfast table for the next fifty years? Lordy, what a muttonhead!”
I laughed. “This is good, Mary. You did right to give him the old heave-ho.”
“You never really liked him, did you?”
“To tell you the honest truth, no.”
“I realized he’s not very good company,” said Mary. “He doesn’t talk about anything but his work on the farm and I’ve heard the same stories seventeen times. How many times does a girl need to hear a description of Old Man Fowler losing the lower half of his body under a tractor in a field of wheat?”
“How many times indeed,” I said. My thoughts were elsewhere.
“I’m done,” said Mary. “I’m not even sure I like him anymore, let alone love him. Maybe I never did. Love him, that is.”
My streetcar came and I stood up. I reminded her again to call us if a job came up and stepped on board
“Lester has asked me out,” she called after me.
“Swell,” I said over my shoulder and found a seat in the shade.
Chapter 17
The new cast made a huge difference in what Jackson could accomplish for himself. It ended about two-thirds of the way up his forearm so he could bend his elbow. Aunt Helen gave him some ointment to rub onto the ugly scab in the crook of his arm. I’m sure she applied it herself when I wasn’t there but she was self-conscious now if she was nursing him when I was around.
My apology the day of the masturbation episode hadn’t been good enough to entirely smooth things over between us. I had been insincere and hadn’t succeeded in hiding that. Helen had accepted my apology but had been horribly uncomfortable. I imagined that she wanted to add her own apology to the mix but wasn’t able to because of the outlandish circumstances. And there was too much still going on, too many powerful and awkward feelings hanging heavily in the atmosphere of the house. The situation between us seemed unmendable to me; I suspect Helen thought so too.
She knew she was in the doghouse permanently; I could see it in her frightened face. It was a doghouse of her own design and I certainly couldn’t get her out of it even if I wanted to. Her arguments on her own behalf died before she could get them out of her mouth. Looking at her face, I watched them die. Hers was a wasted love born in some oddball corner of hell. At least that was the way I saw it. But it was love, nonetheless; when I wasn’t busy with plans for her death I felt pity for her. Maybe Jackson reminded her of her lost soldier from Passchendaele.
I despised him, but my body craved him. If I could just kiss him once, I thought, he would want me too. How could he not? Helen was just an irritant; he couldn’t possibly have the same types of feelings for her that I was sure she had for him. I made up reasons why he held himself back from me: my dad, for one. I even convinced myself that he stayed away because he knew if he came close he would be a goner and he didn’t want to fall so hard at this stage in his life.
When no one was around I stole a wiener from the fridge, locked myself in the bathroom and practised giving it a hand job. That was what the boys at school called it. My effort was unsatisfactory. My whole hand was too big for the wiener and using just my thumb and first finger had a pernickety feel to it that I knew shouldn’t be part of the experience. Isabelle had told me about a girl in grade twelve named Barbara Schulz who put on a glove — one of those white cotton Sunday school gloves — before she touched her boyfriend’s dick. She carried it in her purse and then hauled it out when the occasion arose. I don’t know how Isabelle knew those kind of details; she knew a lot. I didn’t want to be pernickety, like Barbara.
Also, the wiener was fairly limp and it not being attached to anything was a problem. I wondered about fixing it in my dad’s vise in the basement. It was attached to his worktable — a present from Helen one long-ago Christmas. When I finally gave up in frustration I decided it was too risky to flush the wiener down the toilet. Imagine if it didn’t go down and I had to explain wiener pieces floating. So I took it to the river in a handful of toilet paper. I threw it over the bank and pocketed the toilet paper to take back home to flush. Hopefully some creature would find the wiener and it wouldn’t go to waste.
Thoughts of Jackson wouldn’t let me be. I could not accept that he didn’t want me. Pokes of knowledge nudged me, telling me to wise up, but I couldn’t. If he would just allow for it, I could wait forever. Through both our lifetimes I could wait for him.
Benny Boat turned up pretty much on schedule, three days after Jackson had his cast changed, just about the time my dad would have started hinting that it was time for Jackson to hit the road. Benny didn’t come back alone. He had a Negro with him that he had met in the sugar beet fields near Taber, Alberta. The Negro’s name was Tag and he was even skinnier than Benny. He was the thinnest human being I had ever seen.
They came on a Thursday to hook up with Jackson. They had ridden in on a boxcar and were tired and filthy and starving. Lines ran down their faces where sweat had worked through the grime. And both of them had black rings around their e
yes.
“A surefire way of knowing a man’s been riding the rails,” said Helen. “When the smoke and grit and ash settle in around his eyes.”
Tag was so glad to meet Jackson; it was like he was being reunited with a long-lost friend.
“I’ve heard so much about you, man,” he said. “And I like what I heard.”
Jackson looked at Benny as Tag shook his hand, and Benny looked away.
I wondered what the heck excellent things Benny’d had to say about Jackson to make Tag warm up to him so immediately. I think my dad wondered too; he looked perplexed. Helen just looked as happy as could be. No one had to explain to her what was so danged great about Jackson.
“Well, I declare,” said Aunt Helen, “you’re the thinnest man on two feet. I’m surprised the wind hasn’t lifted you up and taken you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
There was no work for them in the west. As far as the Okanagan, which was as far as Benny went, there were hundreds more men than jobs.
Tag had been even farther, had made it to the coast. He was looking for his younger brother, Duke, who had set out on his own a few weeks earlier to look for work. He hadn’t told anyone he was leaving, just left a note for his family to find one morning. Duke was only fifteen and there had been no word of him since his departure. Tag’s parents were worried sick and Tag had offered to go searching.
He had started out from Detroit and made the same trek west as Benny, only south of the border. No word of Duke, not a peep, and no work prospects either. When Tag got to Bellingham, Washington he walked over the line into Canada to see if things were any better here. They weren’t. But Tag began to hear stories about a young coloured boy from Detroit and he followed those stories to Alberta where he had met Benny.
“Me, too, I had heard of young Duke,” said Benny, “but never met him. And someone in Taber said a Negro boy had been through with talk of Winnipeg. He would not stop his talk of Winnipeg, according to the man, so I talk to Tag, convince him, as you say, to return with me. We think his brother could be here.”
Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams Page 11
