Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, well. I didn’t call to brag, eh?” He grew quiet. “It’s just that I promised myself years ago that if I was ever back in Manitoba, I’d give you a call. You never answered any of my letters. I’d like to know how come. I’ve been wondering all this time. How come you took off? Was it because of me?”

  We might as well do something while we wait, Malva had said after she had finished crying and washed her face and patted swollen eyes. She coloured in the beauty mark and the cupid’s bow. She set a box down on the table between us. She blew dust from the lid and began to sort through the contents. “And what do you think you’ll end up doing in Vancouver?” she asked, her voice tinged with sarcasm.

  “I’ll probably get a job,” I said, “not that it’s any of your business.”

  “I’ll bet. My guess is that you’ll get more than a job. My guess is that you’ll get pregnant.”

  “Guess again. You hope, you mean. Misery loves company. We’re not all stupid, you know.”

  “Hah.” Malva spread snapshots across the table. “What makes you think you’re any different?”

  And I told her about my plan to remain a virgin for life.

  “Hoo hoo,” Malva said when she’d finished laughing. She wiped her eyes on a corner of her blouse. “Then you’d better become a nun. Because I, for one, will not hold my breath otherwise.”

  Max came and stood in the doorway for a moment, a wide grin, hoses wrapped around his neck. “So how’s it going, girls?” he asked.

  “Don’t you girl me, you little runt,” Malva said. The door slammed shut.

  “You can’t blame him for wanting his parents back together,” I said.

  “Fools will rush in.”

  “Just because you couldn’t hang on to yours.”

  Malva leapt up, knocking the chair backwards. She raised her hand. “You brat,” her husky voice rasped from too much smoke. “You ignoramus. If you were mine, I’d slap you silly.”

  I got up. “Just try.”

  She stuck her finger into my chest. “Sit down.” She began to rummage through the box. She held up a large photograph. “Meet my Ex. The one I couldn’t hang on to.”

  I was surprised. He was handsome.

  “Know why I couldn’t hold on to him?”

  I shrugged.

  She lit another cigarette and sat down at the table. “Simple. I told him I was pregnant. I’m pregnant, I said to him. And he asked me, how did it happen? And I said, sorry, must have been something I ate. My diaphragm slipped,” she explained. “Did I have any control over that? And he said he was up the creek. He was up the creek. That’s the absolute pits, he said. Most people say shits, but not him. Not my Ex.” Her hands shook. She set the picture down. “He was the kind of a guy who talked and looked nice, better than most. Better than Big Max. That’s why I went for him. I am perturbed, he’d say before he’d hit one of the kids. So, he said he’d look into the matter. And to make a long story short, that’s what he did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Found some guy who would do an abortion.”

  I felt sick to my stomach and sorry I’d started the whole thing.

  She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and blew smoke in my face. “And I said no way. And so, a week or so later, he says to me, okay dear. I’m sorry, but you’ve given me no choice. And after we made love, he left me.”

  Big Max had come into the room silently and stood behind her chair, wrapping his arms around her neck and rocking her as he talked. He kissed the top of her frowsy head. “Isn’t she something?” he said. “My Malva. Who would have thought I’d been lucky enough to find someone like her. Isn’t she gorgeous?” He pressed his face against her head. “Oh, Babe,” he said. “I’m sorry I have to go. Really sorry.”

  Malva began to cry. “Go away,” she said to me. “Just go away.”

  “The car’s ready to go,” Max said loudly from the doorway. I took him by the arm and led him outside.

  He chewed his knuckles as, through the windows, we watched their movement from the kitchen into the back bedroom.

  “Just like Dad,” Max said bitterly as the light in the bedroom blinked out. “He always has to have one for the road.”

  An hour later, we headed down the highway. Big Max took the first driving shift and Max climbed into the back seat and slept.

  “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes,” Big Max sang. I watched the flash of telephone poles, the wires rising and falling but the vanishing point remaining fixed in the headlights. Insects splashed against the windshield. I tried not to think of the time passing and the distance between myself, Agassiz and my family growing wider and wider. I had no plan. I had no idea what I would do when I got to Vancouver. Big Max swore as a large insect exploded on the glass in front of his face.

  “Why do they call you Big Max?” I asked to create an opening for conversation, to keep from thinking about the highway, the dark miles flashing past in the telephone poles.

  “Who, what?” he asked and laughed. “Oh, that. It’s a family joke.” He patted my knee. “Listen,” he said, lowering his voice. He jerked his head towards the back seat. “The kid’s told me. You know. About you and him? Well, just want you to know. This is Big Max,” he said and cradled his crotch with his hand. “If it turns out the kid’s no good, you know where I am.”

  And so the first place we stopped for gas I said I had to use the can and I kept on going.

  “I just got cold feet,” I said to Max on the telephone. “That’s all.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “What else? I was pretty young to be leaving home.”

  “Yeah. I know. But all these years, I was kind of thinking, you know. That maybe it was me.” His voice wavered.

  “Oh no, no. Absolutely had nothing to do with you. I got cold feet. I told you.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, sounding bright and cheerful once again. “Anyway, you should try me now. Now that I’ve had all these years of experience.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass,” I said and laughed. We talked for a bit more and then I said I heard the kids and had to go.

  I hung up the telephone and went out to them and mended a hole in their plastic wading pool. Then I took a package of chops from the freezer and put it into cold water to defrost because I can never remember to do it first thing in the morning. I had a full hour before I needed to think about cooking and so I went into the basement to finish stripping down a piece of furniture. We may as well do something while we wait, Malva said. I see others in the neighbourhood, a neighbourhood of screamers and, like me, watchers at the window, shadows behind lace curtains, silhouettes against a hall light, leaning with our elbows on the sill, all over the city, in Vancouver, watching for the mailman so that we can get the good and the bad news and get on with the day. Watching for our kids to be free from school so we can get past the chore of supper and put them to bed. Waiting for late husbands so that we can get on with our arguments, our inflictions, and then reach for one another beneath the blankets, touch feet and whisper about the mail, the children. Wait for another day. And as I worked and worked, scraping away the sharp-smelling paint remover and uncovering the pale, unevenly grained wood beneath, I thought of my mother. That I should write her a letter. But I didn’t know what I would say. I thought of Malva. I think about myself. When both kids are in school, what will I do?

  DREAMING OF JEANNIE

  obbie stands in front of the steamed-up mirror in the bathroom, curling her eyelashes. Every night for the last month now, while she slings beer downtown, Wayne sits with his nose in that damned Physics book, neglecting Jason. Slinging beer, she says when she’s making a point, but really, she seldom serves beer because she works at the Town and Country where everyone drinks Rusty Nails and Golden Cadillacs.

  “Help, help,” Jason says suddenly and makes a gargling noise. He’s sitting on the toilet seat, watching her get ready for work. He squeez
es his throat and sticks out his tongue. “Help, I’m being swallowed by a boa constrictor,” he says. He’s learned the song at the “Y” day camp and she wishes he hadn’t. It’s warm inside a snake, he says. You can see right through the skin.

  A blob of blue mascara clings to her eyelash. “Go bug your Dad. I can’t concentrate.” The setting sun glances off the aluminum siding of the house next door into the bathroom window and through the plastic shower curtain, casting a rosy pall on the wall behind her. Reflected in the mirror are the new swan plaques she bought at Woolco. Above the tub, iridescent blue and mauve plaster of Paris fish swim in a school. The mottled pink soap dish, tissue holder and toothbrush rack all match. She loves their marbled effect and Wedgwood-type design. Finally, she’s getting the house the way she wants it. From the kitchen comes the sound of pages being turned. She doesn’t know why Wayne bothers to study Physics. He is studying to write the provincial exam at the end of June. Wayne, she thinks as she plucks the mascara loose, is so thick-headed he would probably get more out of the book if he put it under his pillow and slept on it every night.

  “The snake is up to my neck,” Jason gasps and then begins coughing.

  “Stop that. You want to get bug-eyes permanently?”

  “What’s bug-eyes?” Jason asks, beginning what she knows will be a slough of questions designed to get her attention.

  “Wayne,” she calls, “isn’t it time for Jeannie?”

  Wayne flips through pages. She thinks she hears the sound of lead on paper. What does this mean? he writes in the margins of the Physics book. Good question. She opened the book once. Closed it. Not my bag, she told him. I never had a head for Science or Maths. The teacher used to send me to the blackboard for target practice. The book smells strange, like something pressed too long with a hot iron. She follows Jason to the kitchen. Wayne stares at the wall, chewing the end of his pencil.

  “Isn’t it time for I Dream of Jeannie?” she asks. “You haven’t watched it all week.” She would give anything to have a figure like Barbara Eden’s. Wayne says he doesn’t care as long as her boobs don’t get any bigger than his hand. But she wouldn’t mind. She read somewhere in a magazine how when Barbara Eden was pregnant she worked right up until the baby was born and no one could tell a thing because they disguised it with clothes and camera angles.

  Wayne glances up at her and shuts the book. He squeezes around to the end of the breakfast nook and reaches across to the fridge, opening it. “I thought you were going to Eaton’s before work,” he says, his head still inside the fridge. Like his brother, Ronnie, Wayne has never gone in for sideburns or long hair but has begun to wear blue jeans because Ronnie does. But he wears them all wrong. He buys the pants too large so they bag in the seat and he rolls up the bottoms. Wayne likes flood pants and back pockets bulging like tumours with his wallet, his fold-up brush and comb. He sits there on the end of the bench, size thirteen brown oxfords planted on the floor with his head in the fridge. There is no room in the kitchen for both of them if they stand. So someone must sit at the breakfast nook under the window if they both want to be in the kitchen.

  “I am going to Eaton’s, why?”

  “Dressed like that?” He backs from the fridge and gestures with the Coke in his hand.

  “Course not. What do you think? I’m going to wear a coat, silly. How do I look?” She swings on her heel, doing a full circle for him, and notes the mixture of pride and uneasiness in his face. The elastic fishnet stockings bite the soles of her feet as she turns. The pleated miniskirt brushes against her thighs.

  “Same as always, bow tie’s crooked,” he says. He reaches across the cupboard and pulls open the cutlery drawer, searching for an opener. “You want a ride down?” He sets the Coke on the table and takes a brown envelope from the drawer. Bobbie holds her breath.

  “I wouldn’t mind. But come right back because Jason should get to bed early tonight.”

  “Forget it. Jason and me are going to the drive-in for a change. Aren’t we, big boy?” Jason isn’t big, but undersized for his age and scrawny like she is. Loose change rattles across the table. “Hey.” Wayne shakes the envelope, looks inside it. “There was thirty bucks in here this morning.”

  “I needed a few things,” Bobbie says.

  “Great.” Wayne crosses his arms against his chest. The veins in them swell. But he never uses his size against her. Wayne is the type who does things in secret to get back rather than outright stamping around. He keeps things inside and would let air out of a tire instead, like he did to the Italian at work, four flat tires because the guy kept hogging all the gravy jobs on the assembly line. Or, she thinks, he might decide to quit looking after Jason while she works and then what will she do?

  She follows Jason out to the car, hooking the gate behind her. The sun, suspended above the skyline, is a fiery balloon. From the garbage incinerators on Logan, the odour of rotting food mixes with a sharp metallic smell as it curls upwards. She waits for Wayne in the car.

  Jason leans over into the front seat. “Honk the horn,” he says and presses it. Bobbie smacks his arm.

  “If I wanted the damned horn honked, I would have done it myself,” she says. Jason curls up into the back seat and pushes his fingers into his mouth. “I’m telling Dad,” he says.

  “Go ahead. And I’ll give you to the Eskimos and they’ll feed you to their dogs.”

  Jason yells and kicks the back of the seat. Thank God for work, she tells herself. “Watch it,” she warns.

  Wayne comes from the house with his jacket slung over his arm. He slides in beside her. “You forgot your book,” she says and laughs. “You could read on the way.”

  He backs the car from the driveway. “Whereabouts do you want to be dropped?” he asks as he swings out into the traffic.

  “A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.” She leans her head into his arm. “That’s about all I ever learned.” The muscles in his arm relax. He slides his arm around her shoulders and she knows that before she leaves the car, he’ll press himself against her, or wedge his tongue between her teeth in case she meets a handsome man at work.

  “I was thinking,” Wayne says, “that maybe I should have taken a course in Physics. It’s probably easier than just reading. That’s what Ronnie did.”

  Ronnie is Wayne’s older brother. He went back to school last year and finished pre-med. Bobbie is pissed off at Ronnie. Just because he has taken one Psychology course, he thinks he’s an expert on kids and says they’re doing everything wrong with Jason.

  “Gotcha!” Jason says and lunges. He squeezes her neck. “I’m a boa constrictor.”

  “I’ll constrict you,” Bobbie says and pries his sticky hands free.

  “Get off the pot, Jason,” Wayne says. “We have had it up to here with your snake business.”

  Bobbie stands in front of Eaton’s. Jason’s feet wave as he scrambles into the front seat beside Wayne. Be good, Bobbie warned him when she got out of the car. You be good, Wayne said, and don’t take any wooden nickels. Love ya, he said at last, leaving her standing there on the sidewalk feeling the full dead weight of his “love ya.”

  She moves through the flow of people on the sidewalk in front of Eaton’s and pushes her way inside to the sudden onslaught of colours. She wants to check out the bath mats and toilet seat covers and she remembers seeing in a magazine a container for a spare roll of toilet paper that you can set out on a shelf or toilet tank. She passes by the cosmetic counters and a large poster that says Hollywood! She angles her way through a crowd of women who gather around a counter. Gerrard of Hollywood, the poster says, with, lower down, a photograph of a girl and the name, Twiggy. A grey-haired woman sits on a stool while a tall blond man smoothes lotions onto her face. The man turns. Holy cow. Clint Eastwood, she thinks. Once she saw Bobbie Hull, the hockey star, in Sporting Goods autographing hockey sticks. And it was the same thing. He looked bigger than he did on TV. He had one foot on a chair with the hockey stick acros
s his knee as he autographed it for a sales clerk, who chewed her thumbnail while she waited. Bobbie circled around behind the skates and watched. Jason was too young for a hockey stick and she wasn’t sure what team Bobbie Hull played for so she stayed hidden behind the skates. The way he carried himself, the easy way he smiled as he handed the woman the stick said he knew he deserved special attention. If she were Barbara Eden, she would have walked right up to him and introduced herself, no sweat.

  Clint Eastwood says something funny and the women laugh. Bobbie is disappointed. It’s not really him. She can tell by the voice. Immediately she notices he is not quite as handsome and a lot shorter. He demonstrates the Twiggy look in cosmetics for the women. Bobbie thinks the grey-haired woman is making a complete ass of herself. It doesn’t take long, the saleslady tells her when she asks. “He’s a fast worker,” she says and winks. “Less than twenty minutes.”

  “I do many movie stars,” Gerrard says later as he hands Bobbie a cotton ball with facial cleanser so she can remove her make-up. But he doesn’t say which ones. Does he do Barbara Eden? she would like to ask, but doesn’t want to look ignorant like the grey-haired woman did. He’s taken her rain-and-shine and hung it on the back of the stool and seems not to have noticed her fishnet stockings, go-go boots and miniskirt. She’s glad that the plastic cape he drapes around her covers her knees. She takes the cotton ball from him, wanting to touch the curly hairs on the back of his hand. A gold chain glints in the hair on his chest. The sight of it hits her behind the eyes, spreads down and settles in her breasts. He is not a fumbler, no throat-clearing before he speaks, no nervous scratching of his chin. He moves quickly.

  “This Twiggy look is definitely for you,” he says. Her heart bangs blood into her neck and cheeks. “We could do a modified look if you like or you could go for the full look.”