They still dream of thieves and Bolshevik murderers. Laurence is waiting for the lesson to be finished so that there will be someone to go fishing with. He has only one friend because he is on welfare.
First you learn, Opah says, no longer can you get into heaven free because of your parents or grandparents. When you’re twelve, you’re on your own with God.
He makes you learn the ten commandments even though you know Emily, who lives across the road, whose father is a doctor and drives a Lincoln and with his money has built the gingerbread house that now has a patio and one more child added, which looks out over another row of houses where the coulee once was, this girl, whose father’s building also destroyed an Indian burial ground, will not hesitate to walk across the friendship and go fishing with Laurence.
— round-leaved mallow is different from common mallow and is a nuisance only in the prairie provinces where it nudges aside Kentucky Blue and Shady Nook grass but that doesn’t matter because you can’t really eat cultured lawn the way you can the nutlets of round mallow an after school treat not double bubble gum or fudgsicles but a prairie weed that stayed behind to live in town to colour green your teeth you forgot to brush today but ants don’t brush do they or for that matter neither do grasshoppers they squirt tobacco —
too bad Emily can’t eat round-leaved mallow
too bad she has to eat juicy fruit cracker jack and all that crap
too bad she isn’t a grasshopper or an ant
I would press her lightly with my toe and scare the shit out of her.
Emily is a stinking willie.
She is poisonous inside.
To her, fishing with Laurence is an opportunity to practise lying. She is like a plum rotting in the grass.
I lost Laurence one summer
didn’t last and he was gone
I looked: in the garden
in the poolroom
bowling alley
cafe
fair grounds
no Laurence
Look — he has waited long enough for you to go fishing. It’s your fault you learned the ten commandments.
And now, Emily wears his arrowhead around her neck. Your arrowheads gather dust in a cigarette box in the rafters of the icehouse while she, whose back yard has a patio surrounded by stinking willie, wears his arrowhead because plum wine is strong enough inside Laurence that no longer does he care that occasionally he is on welfare or that at ten he had lice.
The small lamp in the corner on the table spreads a pink glow in the room. There are six girls in various stages of pregnancy dressed in bathrobes, feet tucked up beneath them, one lies flat on her back, she is only in her third month. “When I get out of this place I’m going to slash the bugger’s tires, all four of them,” the girl with the angry grey eyes says. They have been telling “how I lost my virginity” stories. Betty listens, she has not contributed and she knows they expect her to soon. She thinks that only this tall girl has been honest.
“I used to tell my parents I was staying at a friend’s house,” one of the girls says. “They never checked, usually they never checked, that is. Then one time, wouldn’t you know it, my girlfriend’s father answered the phone before she could get to it? And made her tell my Dad where I was? God, I almost died. There I was, Rick was doing it to me, you get what I mean? He didn’t even knock —”
“Doing what?”
“Aw, come on, you know —”
“Was it big, small, did it hurt? You’ve got to tell a better story than that.”
“I opened my eyes and saw my father. He just stood there staring and didn’t say anything. It gave me the creeps. Like, for a minute, I didn’t know what he was going to do. Then he went and waited for me in the car. When I came out he was sitting there crying. I felt like a piece of shit.”
The girls moan sympathetically. They stare at their feet, at the space in front of them. They are all getting into shape, out of control, Betty thinks. Sometimes one of their boyfriends visits and then the rest of them slouch in corners, snapping gum, dissatisfied until he leaves. Where’s your boyfriend, they’ve asked Betty, sixty-five girls who have eaten too many sweets, superior because they have visitors, more righteous for a time, than her.
They turn to her. They wait now for her story to begin, I was fourteen. He was an old man. At first he just used his finger. I screwed sixteen men this year and have written their names down in a scribbler.
“His name is Frank,” she says. “We’re in love. He wants to marry me.
The tall grey-eyed girl rises first and the others follow her one by one and file out of the lounge. Woolworth diamonds sparkle on their fingers. Now, at last, she can be alone.
notes for the essay hiding and seeking
Laurence’s anger moves in circles, his teeth on edge against an unnamed foe burned off in the sound of his motorcycle held into place by centrifugal force around and around. His anger spent, the dust settling, he stops moving, stands beside you and finally you are once again behind him, your arms about his narrow leather waist climbing the yellow fields, cutting a swath through black-headed cattails (fire torches, good for eating) in the ditches beside the highway, up and down Main Street. He doesn’t speak, but only with others does he need to, you never cared, his silence was like a lady slipper growing beside a swampy marsh. He takes the old skull from his saddle bag, lines it up on Main Street, takes a run at it and shatters the old bone like pieces of coconut shell skittering curses across a tabletop. Don’t do it, you think, but it’s his skull, he can do what he wants. You ride and drink until the sun is down behind old weathered caved-in barns and he pukes plum wine, purple and violent in the grass at your feet. He lies you down and you are surprised at his fumbling, thought he would know how to do it better and so you help him with his clothing and guide him. (Was it big, was it fat or small, did it hurt? Come on, you’ve got to tell a better story than that.)
His nostril in your eye and when he turns his head you notice: hair in his ear, dirty. Emily, Emily, he says, not your name, but hers and his nostrils puff out warm plum air and his mouth, not gentle, smells of sour jam as he pins you to the earth but the worst is that after, he pulls grass from your hair, says he’s sorry and treats you like a friend.
you are —
Listening until the sound of the engine is a distant whine on the highway, an angry wasp, a wavering line of sound straightening, becoming threadlike, thin, and then it snaps and —
Betty switches off the lamp. The traffic below in the city street is a ribbon connecting people together. The gravestones sheltered beneath the trees seem to move in the light filtering down between the tree branches. She hears a sharp whistle like a signal, and the figures rise up from among the stones, gather beneath the streetlight and plan their night errands. She watches and waits for tomorrow.
THE DAY MY GRANDFATHER DIED
remember the day I bought a small bottle of Evening in Paris cologne. I was on my way home from school at lunch-time and took the long way home, going down Main Street and past the drugstore instead of cutting through the coulee as I usually did, because I wanted to see the display of cologne in the window. My friend Claudette Gagnon had seen it earlier and told me about it. Claudette wore a cardigan sweater that had poodles and pom-poms on it and a black “Frederick’s of Hollywood” type brassiere beneath her sweater which gathered her breasts up into swollen jiggling shelves of jelly. She also shaved off her eyebrows and painted them back on in a thin coquettish black arch. Wherever I went with her a residue of attention, like dandruff, fell on me. But for me, the attraction of Claudette was more than that. Claudette was French, as was my father. I had even picked up her accent and went out of my way to say things such as, “The car, she is parked in the driveway,” and, “H’it’s going to rain.”
“For Pete’s sake,” Mika, my mother, would say, “your English is worse than mine. You sound as bad as the Lafrenières.” Which made me smile because to be like the Lafrenières, my father’s people
, would make my rebellion complete and finally take me out and away from the rest of the family.
“From Bourjois of Paris and Montreal,” the display card in the drugstore read. Blue bottles the shape of uteruses nestled down inside the blue satin-lined boxes. I unscrewed the cap from the sample bottle. The smell of cologne was like almonds. It made me ache in “that place” and I would have liked to have touched and gentled myself until the bud flowered. But the warning I’d received from Mika was profound and clear. “Play with yourself and you’ll never want a man,” she said. And I knew that I wanted a man, eventually. At that time, I was still like a dog chasing a car, barking and nipping at boys’ heels, not knowing what I’d do if I ever caught one.
I stood there in the drugstore, getting off, as they say, on the smell of Evening in Paris cologne. It reminded me of a mystery novel I’d once read. It was a story about a short bald man who murdered beautiful but cruel women who laughed at him. The women were either blonde and cold or brunette and very shallow. They all had long hair and wore skin-tight black sheath dresses and rhinestone jewellery. They smoked cigarettes using a holder. I liked the bald man. He had impeccable manners and manicured fingernails. I thought that killing people for laughing at you was justifiable homicide. According to the novel, he would smile a sinister smile as he took a silver box from his pocket and flicked open the lid. The woman continued to laugh heartlessly through a curl of cigarette smoke while he offered her a deadly candied almond. Then it was his turn to laugh as death came slowly and the victim’s contorted features made her ugly in the end.
The smell of the cologne reminded me of my mother walking to the corner to catch the Greyhound into Winnipeg. She carried a shopping bag on her arm. She wore her navy suit which displayed her trim figure, a pink frilly blouse and a navy pillbox hat. I carried a box for her, filled with mittens and scarves which her women’s church group had made. All winter they’d met weekly in each others’ homes. I despised their fervent good works and their complete lack of adornment. It made them seem unnatural and grimly severe. They seldom smiled. My mother had been elected to take the results of their labours into the city and deliver them to a mission. I swung the box up into the baggage department.
“She’s one ‘eavy box,” I complained. My mother stared at me and then laughed. Her laughter was seldom an expression of joy or good humour. Her laughter said things such as: see, I knew that would happen, or, trust me, the world’s a dirty place.
One time, her laughter was spontaneous. I was walking across the yard towards the house and she was standing, framed by the window, looking out at me. For a terrible second I had the feeling that I was looking into a mirror and seeing my own reflection in her face and so I didn’t watch where I was going. I stepped on a rake that had been left lying and it sprung up and bonked me between the eyes. My mother began to laugh outright, a deep belly laugh. When I came into the house she was still laughing. And I learned that the way to make her happy was to hurt yourself.
The bus driver swung the baggage door closed. Mika hid the remainder of her laughter behind a pink glove. Just as I was turning away, stinging and angry, she touched my arm. “What would you like me to bring you from the city?”
And I said, “Candied almonds.”
When she came home that night, she had them with her and when I opened up the bag, the sight of those lilac, pink, yellow and white candies affected me strangely. I sat cross-legged on the couch with the bag in my lap and played with the seed-shaped candies. The texture of them was like that of a very fine toadstool, pebbly and cool to the touch. They made my heart ache. In the same way my mother pinched her babies to express affection, in the same way my berserk hormones made me want to laugh and cry simultaneously or dream beneath musk-scented sheets of caressing and being caressed, and then recoiling in anger and hitting out when someone tried to touch me — I wanted to crush the candied almonds underfoot. I couldn’t help but think about the images that the mystery novel had evoked, and about the possibility of some demented grey person in Eaton’s candy department slipping a few poisoned almonds into the candy bin. And so I shared my gift, offered the candies up to my mother and to my sisters instead of eating them myself. While they sucked, I watched for the signs, the deep pain in the stomach, the sudden clutching and pitching forward, their expressions when they became aware of their own finality.
The smell of the cologne in the drugstore that day was like that act. It was power, it was anger and knowing something that no one else knew. And so I bought a bottle.
I took my purchase to the clerk. She rang it up on the cash register and slipped the cologne into a bag. Then she looked at me as though she’d only just seen me. “Have you been home for lunch yet?” she asked. She searched my face with a prying, knowing look. She was over forty years old and so I’d never bothered to remember her name. I knew her only by her breasts. They were enormous. The boys called her Tits Wiggle. I handed her the money. “No, I haven’t, why?” What’s it to you? Drop off, eh? Flake off, peel off, bug off, take a flying leap.
“It’s not for me to say,” the clerk said. “You’d just better get going. Go straight home.”
I left the drugstore slowly, so as not to let her know that I was concerned. But as soon as I was clear of the window and her sight, I began to run. I knew something terrible must have happened if she wouldn’t say what it was. And when I got home, I found out my Grandfather Thiessen had died.
“Guess what,” I said to Claudette. “My grandfather kicked the bucket during the night.”
“Yeah, so I heard. That’s tough.”
“He was eighty-one years old; it was no surprise.”
We’d met at the Scratching Chicken Hotel cafe during the noon break. My mother was away, sitting with my grandmother. Claudette didn’t take her lunch to school as most of the farm kids did. Claudette wasn’t farm. She’d been expelled from the convent school at Grande Pointe where she lived with her parents who owned Gagnon Chevy-Olds garage. I’d never been to Grande Pointe, but the kids said if you didn’t speak French, no one would talk to you. I always ate my own lunch at home and then rode my bike downtown so that I could sit with Claudette while she ate hers. She was talkative, flashy and demonstrative, traits that I then attributed to her French-Canadian identity only because I didn’t see these traits in my mother or my grandparents, who were not French, but Mennonite, a fact that I detested. Being Mennonite was like having acne. It was shameful, dreary. No one invited you out. How to be French, I didn’t know. My father was seldom home and when he was, showed no interest or energy, I didn’t know which, in perpetuating any of his own traditions.
“I had a cat once,” Claudette said. “She was my cat for twelve years. Slept on my bed every night. When she passed off, I really felt bad. I ’ad her since I was a kid.” She nudged me with her elbow. “You’ll be okay. H’it takes time.”
We’d all buried animals. I remembered my dog, Laddie, a collie stray. My grandfather had persuaded my mother to let me keep him. He used to take my hand in his mouth and walk me to school. Claudette’s sympathetic nudge unsettled me. I squashed a drinking straw flat, rolled it into a ball and flicked it across the counter into the chocolate bars. “I had my grandfather since I was a kid too,” I said.
“I guess, eh?” Claudette said and snickered. “I like you, you’re bad.” She pushed her plate of chips aside and ran her fingers through her thick black hair which she wore short and which met at the back of her head like a feathered duck’s tail. She had tiny features and large eyes. We sat side by side with our arms resting on the counter. I was tanned deeply, a dusty dark brown, and she was very fair. I was the only Lafrenière to have black hair and I felt special, set apart. Today, people mistake me for Jewish or Italian.
“I guess he died of old age, eh?”
“Cancer. I think. I kind of lost touch.”
“Jeez. Tough. I guess you’ll miss him.”
I didn’t feel one thing or another. My face was a little numb as
though I’d just been to the dentist, that was all. I shrugged. “He was sick for a long time. The only thing I really remember about him was that he ate a lot of sunflower seeds. Every pocket, fall of seeds, and he’d spit the shells out through his moustache into his hand. His hands were always moist. I didn’t like it.”
“No kidding.” Claudette had grown tired of the topic. She played with the silver cross at her neck and her features had a painful bored expression. Coffee gurgled down from the tops of the coffee makers into the glass urns below. The waitress came over and began to clean up the dishes.
“Let’s cut,” Claudette said. “This place stinks.”
We walked down Main Street, passed by the corner where we should have turned to go to school. “What’s up?” I asked, surprised.
“On the day your grandfather died, you shouldn’t have to go to school,” Claudette said. “My parents, they went into the city for parts today. We can have the place for ourselves.”
We cut school that afternoon. We walked, instead, to the outskirts of Agassiz and stuck out our thumbs. Two rides and we were at Grande Pointe. The town was a disappointment. I was looking forward to something more than the jumbled collection of buildings and houses on either side of the wide dirt street that cut away from the main highway and rejoined it a mile later. I wanted more than street signs written in French. Gagnon Chevy-Olds was the newest-looking building on the street. As we drew near, I saw an old man sitting on a painted chair.
Agassiz Stories Page 12
