Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  — can it, Lafrenière

  — up yours

  — I wish

  — someone shut her up

  Gail sat on Scott’s lap on the couch beside me. Scott buried his nose in her fluffy pink sweater. A curly-haired boy from Grande Pointe came and sat down beside me. He slid his hand beneath my sweater and I wound my arms about his neck, seeing his black curly head between my legs, his shoulders white beneath the moonlight and my back cushioned by the springy damp earth beneath the trees.

  — stupid cupid you’re a real mean guy

  — count me out

  — straight flush

  A cry arose in the room as Wayne flung down his hand, stood up and removed his shorts.

  — sexy

  — far out

  The curly-haired boy sucked at my neck. “Let’s go into the other room,” he whispered in my ear. “For old time’s sake.”

  My stomach churned and the air pressed down on the top of my head. A going-away present. I stood up and the room tilted crazily. “Sure,” I said. “Why not? I’ll be right back.”

  I went upstairs, through a hallway, past the bathroom and stood in front of a bedroom door. Mr. Thompson lay on the bed on his back, mouth open, snoring loudly, dentures beside him. I watched the grey hair on his chest rise and fall for several moments. I thought of nudging him, waking him up and sending him down the stairs. But he was too far gone. Too old. He didn’t lie there waiting for Wayne to come home and in the end, what good does it do? Those of us who do, end up knowing too much, having too much to carry around and examine and pull apart during the night. Mom, don’t try to find me. The telephone calls. The hunting down. The driving miles through the night on strange roads. Roads leading to more roads and a stranger at a door opening into a room where his naked, frail body sprawls across a bed. Frank’s silence, his terse face. Damned drugs, he says.

  I found my way to the back door and stepped free from the tightly cloistered air out into a dripping cool night. I was leaving them behind. I had had enough. But I didn’t know yet what I was going to go to. I began to walk away from the town, down the road that led to the river, past Mrs. Schultz’s house. As I passed by, she came to the window and cupped her eyes, peering out at me. She beckoned. Come, come, I heard her voice from behind the glass. She opened the back door. Her white hair hung in wet strands against her neck. She twisted her fingers and plucked at her dress. “You are a good child,” she said. “You can tell me where my Herman is?” The rasping sound of the record player filled the silence between us.

  “He’ll be home soon,” I said. “You only have to wait.”

  Relief lifted years from her face. She began to tremble. She sat down on the bench and clasped her hands. “Thank you my God,” she said. Her throat convulsed as she swallowed hard. She smiled. “Sit, sit.” Beside her on the bench was a tall stack of records. She slid one out from near the middle and set it on the player. As the strains of violin music rose up between us, I sat down on the floor to listen. She reached and pulled the light chain and moonlight loomed in squares on the splintered floor. “It’s God,” she whispered. “He’s here. Listen to the music, it’s his resting place.” I closed my eyes and listened and imagined that I could hear him walking along mountaintops. When the record had finished playing, she put on another and then another, until at last, she put on that record I’d first heard and the music I had carried around with me all that time leapt inside me in recognition. I hummed along, played the notes out in my lap. As the music rose to its stirring climax, we heard a dry sound, the swish of grass against pant legs. Mrs. Schultz reared up, hand to her mouth. Floorboards creaked as Herman entered the kitchen. Smoke and heat clung to his clothing. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Mama,” Herman said and rushed across the room towards her, falling to his knees in front of her. “Mama,” he cried and pressed his face into her lap.

  She leaned back and sighed, stroking his heavy curls, pulling at them gently. “My wonderful child,” she said. “I was so worried, so worried.”

  The red, squarish digital numbers fade, numbers lurking behind numbers, outlines of the time spent waiting and still, he doesn’t come home. Soon grey light will filter through the window, a dull wash pocked by the sounds of birds rousing themselves, calling out in expectancy, faith, that the sun will rise once again.

  LADIES OF THE HOUSE

  ax’s telephone call came at a time when I’d been thinking about Malva. Waiting, that’s all I ever do, I remember her saying in the high, affected, little-girl voice she reserved for Big Max, Max’s father.

  I was in the basement, sorting baby clothes. I’m not a collector. If Larry, my old man, sets the newspaper aside to yawn or scratch, I whip it away to wrap potato peelings. The kids’ drawings last only two days on the refrigerator door. They’ve learned not to mind. But after sorting through the baby clothes, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything with them. I repacked the booties and bonnets, the burp-stained nighties, yellow, white and green. I never allowed pink or blue and laugh when I remember my youngest, my little girl, who had been bulky and bald and had the scowl of a midget wrestler. The neighbourhood thought she was a boy at first and Polish men would stop us in the street to pinch her cheeks and say, “Strong like an ox. Make Daddy proud.”

  More and more while I tie shoelaces and fish apple cores from beneath beds, I think of the different women I have met and scorned. And lately, I’ve been remembering the summer of Malva and so I shouldn’t have been surprised when Max phoned, even though seven years have passed and I thought he was in Vancouver. I used to wonder if it was my thinking about people that made them contact me like that. Was I a sender and everyone else a receiver? Once I wrote it down, the number of times in a day I thought of a person seconds before they telephoned and it was six. Now this doesn’t surprise me.

  In the basement sorting the clothes, I thought of Malva, her large steaming presence and the small house in East Kildonan where she lived with her five kids. She was never without rings of dampness beneath her arms, reaching to her waist sometimes, or the Kleenex tucked into the sleeve of her dress to dab perspiration and melting cosmetics from her face. When the phone rang, I had gone upstairs to defend the refrigerator against the kids. “Is the lady of the house in?” Max asked and I thought, great, just what I need, a week of free dancing lessons while the kids clean me out.

  “Remember me?” Max said. “Max and company?”

  Sure I remembered. I chased the kids outside and sat down on the floor in the hallway to talk. Max said he just couldn’t picture it, me being married and all. “And all.” I didn’t ask what he meant, “and all.” “I thought you said you hated kids,” he said and I wanted to tell him to get out of my life but instead told him everyone hates kids when they’re fifteen. “Not me,” he said. “I was always crazy about my brother Buzzy, you know that.” While we talked I imagined that he closed his eyes at the other end of the telephone, trying to picture me a mother. That he stood in a dingy hotel lobby or in a space as large as a closet that smelled of dirty socks and a rumpled bed and was remembering me, how I looked seven years ago, pared down to my bare essentials on that beach in Lake Winnipeg, face too thin, no hips to speak of. I was like one of those dolls whose limbs are connected by wires and elastic, threatening to spring apart any moment.

  I wanted to tell him I’m okay now. Being a mother has smartened me up. If, for instance, when my kids grow up, they decide to take off with someone like him, I will know it right off and threaten to break their kneecaps, as Bobbie, who lives across from me, is fond of saying. I’d wring their necks. This is a rounder, smarter version of me, I wanted to tell him. As in v-e-r-s-i-o-n, not virgin. (My goal once was to be a virgin for life. I was keeping myself for myself. How Malva laughed!)

  Now I skim my energy off by the spoonful, to keep doing so many different things at once, like the way I kept my eye on the front window while Max talked, watching my kids zip through their rash beginnings. If they sus
pected I was still on the telephone, they would swing from tree to tree like monkeys. I keep my ear tuned to their sounds as well, and can detect the slightest quiver of fear, pain, or the silence that means they are plotting to overthrow the neighbourhood. And then I stop whatever I’m doing and go to them because I’m not one of those mothers who scream from windows and doors. You can hear the others, this is a neighbourhood of screamers, especially Bobbie. And they always frame their challenges the same way. If you don’t, they say, then I will. I imagine their kids grinning while kneeling among the garbage cans, rolling the threats in their untrustworthy palms, deciding if they should gamble. And then Bobbie has to follow through, come galloping across the street with her sawed-off broom handle. If I say they will get hit, Bobbie says often, they will get hit. At least she’s consistent. The others just yell louder and louder as the day goes on.

  No, because I’ve been going to the library and reading up, I’m one of those who think there is merit in squatting in the dirt with the kids and explaining things. I require that they stamp in rain puddles. I wonder with a nagging fear, what if the books are wrong? Will my kids someday accuse me of not being enough of a parent, of not waving broom handles? On this, Larry, my husband, has no opinion. Don’t ask me, Larry says, because he feels he has had a bad example for a mother. It was she who advised me against pink and blue and buys the kind of presents that, if you didn’t know her, would make you think she’d made a mistake with the name tags. For instance, last Christmas she bought our boy an EasyBake Oven, the girl a twelve-piece socket set and Larry an electric train.

  So what did Max picture? I wondered. Me with a child at each breast and a halo around my head? I could never picture myself married either, or with kids. I told him it happened all the time. I slept through my first pregnancy and dreamed of a fat salmon curling and swerving about inside. But the second I felt my baby’s head, wet between my legs, and saw his tiny, pale testicles, I decided to get serious. Although, I suppose, no one would ever admit to not being serious about parenthood. Even the man I read about who sat on his new baby twice in the same week because he kept forgetting where he put it said he took his job as a father seriously. I work harder at being a mother than I do at being Larry’s wife. Children are interesting. I told Max I had two kids, a dog, a cat, a goldfish and a husband, Larry. And when I said it, listing it like that, I was amazed that so much had attached itself to me in such a short time. My oldest will be in kindergarten in fall. The next year, the youngest. And then what? Larry has put his foot down. No more kids.

  Max asked when all this had taken place, wanting to find himself in it somewhere, I suppose, his voice taking on the tone of someone who had come across a worm in the creamed corn. It happened gradually, I said. It had taken six and a half years. It’s strange, I said, what happens to time. Once, summer was eternity. Now, six years have just skidded past, bumped and piled up onto each other, becoming a lump of chicken pox, cuts, bruises, of forgetting Larry’s features when he’s not home, not noticing how he smells when he is. Everything is mixed together. Standing at the window last night, waiting for Larry, I remembered what Malva said when she waited for Max and his father to finish packing the night they left to go back to Vancouver. She was showing me the photographs, a stack of them, Malva tall and slim, in her cheerleader skirt, on the volleyball team, Malva at CGIT camp in the summer.

  “Those were the best years of my life,” she said. “A bunch of us made a bonfire on the beach and stayed up all night.”

  “What about the mosquitoes?” I asked. “Didn’t you get chewed to bits?”

  “Mosquitoes,” Malva said. “There weren’t any.”

  “But they didn’t have repellent way back then, did they?” I said, but Malva, being the type you had to hit over the head to insult, didn’t notice.

  “If there were mosquitoes at camp, I would have remembered,” she said. “And there weren’t. We stayed out all night and not one bite.”

  “But it’s strange,” I said to Max, “what happens to time when you can do that, look at old photographs like that and remember dates and events and people’s names and the nice things but forget about mosquitoes and can’t remember what the present month is or where you went yesterday.”

  “Well I can,” Max said. “There’s nothing wrong with my memory. And you sure changed your mind in a hurry, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, for someone who said they wanted to be a virgin.”

  I gave him a point for remembering. I felt I should apologize. He was remembering that wild night on the beach, both of us burrowed down into the damp, warm sand. Too much wine that time, I’d been too relaxed, searching for the Big and Little Dippers, lying there content to let the night cartwheel across my eyes. And before I knew it, Max was drawing snakes on my bare belly, saying, guess which finger did it? And suddenly he was on top of me, a slippery little eel trying to wiggle his way up inside. But, thank God, he’d drunk too much, too, and his weak tiny prick collapsed. When I think of my own kids on a beach getting stoned, I get sad. And then I quickly put the sadness away because it won’t happen. I have everything planned. Too many kids have been ruined by a failure of planning. Sorry, sorry, Max said after I bucked him off and sent him flying. He threw the leftover wine into the lake. Wait until you meet Doris, my mother, Max had said, yelling over the sound of the waves. She’ll straighten you out, he said, his face shining with purpose, as though I were a knot he intended to pick loose.

  “Where are you now?” I asked Max, feeling safe because even if he was in a phone booth on the corner, I could plead my kids and say I couldn’t get away to meet him. I couldn’t picture him anywhere except in a confined space, a car, in the cluttered house trailer on a parking lot where he’d lived with his father that summer.

  “I’m at Malva’s,” he said as though I should know. That was why I’d been sorting through baby clothes and thinking about Malva. They, no doubt, had been talking about me.

  “How is old Malva, anyway?” I asked, feeling guilty suddenly as though I’d betrayed something.

  “Completely grey,” he said. “Or else she’s stopped dyeing her hair. I promised Dad I’d drop in on her and say hello. Crazy, eh?”

  Sending a son around to say hello to an ex-lover was crazy. Why did he do it then? To gloat? “Are your parents still together?”

  “It wasn’t so great in the beginning,” Max said. “In fact, the old bugger took off again. On the train. I caught up with him in Regina and brought him back. But now, you wouldn’t believe it. Both of them go to the Baptist Church regular. Dad even quit the booze. Mom can’t quit grinning. But how about you? You happy?”

  “I’m doing okay.”

  “I’m okay, you’re okay. That’s the name of a book,” he said, sounding young, like the Max I’d met seven long years ago with his father in Agassiz.

  “Good-day,” Big Max, Max’s father, said to my mother in spring. He was being polite. He was containing himself, being serious and toned down because he sensed my mother would not approve otherwise. “Well hello, sweetheart,” he said to Malva several weeks later and won her heart. I love the ladies, he said often. I love helping them out.

  He stood at the screen door at the back porch, looking in at me and my mother where we stood washing clothes, both of us startled by his sudden appearance. His belly was patchy with tic-tac-toe patterns of white threads that my mother used to mend tears in the screen where the little kids had poked their fingers through. She mended, they poked and so on. There were two families in my family, the older group of children who were labelled the “big kids.” And the younger group, the “little kids,” who I didn’t know very well by choice, just saw as skinny or chubby forms running here and there, crying, pestering. I realized early that it was dangerous to pay the little kids much attention because they tended to grab hold and get hopeful and follow you around.

  Once I asked my mother, seriously, because I wanted to know, had s
he really wanted all of us? And so I asked her why she had so many kids. Didn’t you believe in birth control? I asked. For two seconds her face underwent a series of emotions. I could see her struggle not to hit me. I realized I had phrased the question wrong. And then her chest caved in as her shoulders dropped forward. Nothing worked, she said.

  That was another thing, her chest. I disliked how it hung down beneath her dress, shapeless, like two floppy pears. I thought if she’d hitch herself up properly, like other women, that maybe she wouldn’t be alone so often at night. I listed my complaints to her. She didn’t raise kids right. When you’re up to your ass in alligators it’s hard to remember that your purpose is to drain the swamp. I thought my position, my bird’s-eye view, would be welcomed and so I told her, you’re doing it wrong. Kids are a vacuum. Whatever’s around will rush in and fill the space. So you just can’t take things away from them without giving them something to take its place. But she resisted all my advice with a scornful sneer.

  All along, I wanted to know why Max’s father was called Big Max, but didn’t ask until it was almost too late. He was shorter than his son, as wide as he was tall, which didn’t make him seem big to me, but soft and ineffective as a rubber ball with a hole in it. He was partially bald, red-faced and had quick, small eyes.

  “Is the lady of the house in?” Big Max asked.

  My mother put her hand to her mouth, remembering the treacherous, loose teeth. Her dentures needed relining. She kept putting it off, saving every extra cent to send one of the talented little kids into the city each week to study the trumpet. I am banking on the boys, my mother said often, because you girls just go and get yourself pregnant. Years ago, she had cried and spit blood into the slop bucket because they couldn’t afford to have her teeth fixed, only pulled all at once and false ones put in place. For weeks she seemed to be all teeth, two rows of gleaming porcelain in her bruised face. She wouldn’t go anywhere. She stared at her reflection in the mirror and moaned. But now, a hand was sufficient to cover the embarrassment of teeth dropping down unexpectedly, revealing a pink moist space for all to see. My father played bingo at the Legion and had won an ironing board, a clock and last week, the jackpot. It was rolled up inside a tumbler in the cupboard, money to reline my mother’s teeth.