by Kyp Harness
Tim thought back to earlier in the week when he’d introduced Sherrie to Russ. He had walked with her down the hall to the art studio after school was over for the day, knowing Russ would be there working on a painting he was supposed to have finished that week. As they came in, Russ was standing by his painting in discussion with Mr. Kosinski. They both turned and Tim introduced Sherrie to them. There was some awkward conversation and some joking around by Tim and Russ that made everyone laugh. After a moment Tim shepherded Sherrie from the room, saying goodbye as they left the studio.
“Have a good time!” Mr. Kosinski called out as they got to the door. Tim turned to see the teacher smirking as he sat on the table, Russ at his side baring his teeth in mid-laugh. Tim flashed a smile in response to them to show he was undaunted. They could think they were as clever as they liked, but they didn’t know the depths of emotion he did.
Tim also had God, he thought, turning from the road into the driveway of his house. The front yard was a huge snow-covered ice rink, the water drained from the elevated yards of the condominiums and subdivision houses at each side frozen solid. He was unashamed to hug his Charitas brothers and sisters in the halls at school, and to offer his embrace to everyone else. At the variety store he would sprint out from behind the counter to hug fellow Charitians when they came in. He saw the derisive expressions on other people’s faces, but he didn’t care. Hadn’t Co-Dad said to not let the Charitas flame die, to carry it out into the world? Tim was glad to be considered a fool for doing that. Why should he worry about the opinions of those who were missing out on the entire point of being alive?
The further Tim got into this new identity, the more beauty he found in Sherrie. She had been attractive to him before, but now he found her heart-shaped face sublime. Her eyes seemed to glow with all the promise of heaven and all the sadness of mortality. She was like a guide to him. As he watched her, he often thought to himself that her looks were angelic, ethereal. She had brought him to this new place, and the quiet fountain of her whispered words and shy grace of her movements continued to nourish him.
One night, Tim was at home doing his homework in the rec room when he heard the doorbell ring and let his father answer it. Dirk came down the hall and said, “There’s someone at the door for ya.” Tim went to the door and was stunned to find Sherrie there. “I was just in the area,” Sherrie smiled. “I thought I’d drop in.” Her dad’s car was parked in the driveway. Overjoyed and panicked at the same time, Tim ushered her into the next room. They sat on the floor and talked, Tim marvelling all the while that she was sitting on the same carpet he’d walked on, in his house.
They ended up looking at a book of Tim’s that was dear to his heart, a large book about Walt Disney filled with art from all of his films. He’d seen it seven years before in the bookstore at the mall; they only had one copy and kept it high on a shelf over the counter. Tim would enter the store and stand staring up at the monstrous book, wondering what unknown treasures and magical wonders it contained. At one point he screwed up the courage to have the man take the book down so he could have a tantalizing look at the pages inside. But he was too timid to ask again, so for the next several months he had to be content with gazing up at it as if in homage, trying to divine the contents behind the exhilarating Mickey Mouse cover. The exorbitant price of the book put it out of Tim’s reach, but later a condensed soft cover version was offered for seven dollars.
Tim developed a plan to sell large pictures of cartoon characters—drawn to order—to the other kids at school. He used oversized paper from an old blotter his mom had brought home from work. Although most of the characters requested were not Disney ones but rather contemporary stars such as Hong Kong Phooey, Tim drew and delivered them all, made the required money, and bought the book. A year later, his mother bought him the original, large version of the book for his birthday, and he had been surprised and thrilled. This was the book Tim now pressed into Sherrie’s hands. “Here,” he said. “You can have this.”
“What?” Sherrie demurred. “I can’t take this!”
“No, it’s alright,” Tim said. “I want you to have it.”
“No way—that wouldn’t be right.” In the end, Tim was satisfied with her taking the smaller, softcover version. But it seemed important to him that she take it, that he give it to her—this most sacred object in his life so far. He needed to show her that he would sacrifice his most valued possession for her—for he now looked at her with the same excitement and devotion he once felt while staring up at the Walt Disney book. Even the letters in her name seemed to have significance, in the way they looked on paper, or when he pictured them in his mind. The way her name sounded when he heard a voice—any voice—always sounded beautiful to him and elevated the moment he was in.
“Tim’s girlfriend was over last night,” Dirk observed to Jason the next day.
“Did he pickle his penis in ’er?” Jason asked.
“I dunno, but it was gettin’ pretty quiet in there,” Dirk said. “I think he might’ve been unrolling the tar paper.”
The pickle the penis part was one of his father and brother’s favourite jokes, as in:
How do you pickle a penis?
Put it in cider.
Tim was further driven to press the book on Sherrie by his need to prove that his love for her was greater than her boyfriend’s. Surely Bruce Ferguson must have been faulty at expressing love, so why would she continue in her incomprehensible relationship with him? In Tim’s view, there was no way she could refuse his love if she were able to know its immensity. As he saw it, it was his job to demonstrate it in all ways possible, making her shedding of Bruce Ferguson inevitable. By the great light he would shine on her, Tim would make what Ferguson had to offer look so paltry and false that Sherrie would be obligated to drop him purely for the sake of truth.
Tim, with his new outlook of love for all of God’s creatures, was distressed that at times he still caught himself wishing for the death of Bruce Ferguson, glancing through the obituaries in search of his name. It wasn’t that he wished pain on Ferguson, but it would have been ideal if he had never existed or had never met Sherrie at all. Still, he wasn’t as obsessed about Bruce Ferguson being taken out of the picture as he had been before. He had more faith now that his love for Sherrie would come to fruition. It would all work out.
Several days after her visit, Russ invited Tim to a concerto of Vivaldi given by a quartet in a church downtown. Tim mentioned it to Sherrie, who said she also wanted to go. Since she drove, she offered to pick Tim and Russ up in her dad’s car. Tim was thrilled by her offer. It seemed to him that this would be their first date. The presence of Russ would offset the uncomfortable fact of Sherrie having a boyfriend; Russ would act as a chaperone of sorts, giving their date the appearance of being above board.
As the day of the concert approached, Tim was feverish with anticipation. He watched out the front window as Sherrie’s dad’s beat-up brown car pulled into the driveway, her small frame looking even tinier behind the wheel. He sprinted out and jumped in. They drove over to pick up Russ at the townhouse where he lived with his mother and brother. With Tim and Sherrie seated in the front and Russ in the back, they made their way to the concert. “You know, Bach was quite influenced by Vivaldi,” Russ noted as they took their seats.
For Tim, the performance of the music was like the rituals of a church service: tolerance of such a formality was a measure of one’s virtue. For him, its entire beauty derived from the fact that Sherrie sat beside him. They stopped by a Country Style Donuts shop on the way home, and sat in a booth around a gleaming mahogany table, Tim and Russ on one side, Sherrie on the other. “Tim seems to have had quite a positive experience at Charitas,” Russ observed.
“Well, a lot of people have found it really worthwhile,” Sherrie said.
“I’ve certainly had a few reservations about it,” Russ said. “But Tim has really been cha
nged by it, for the good, it seems.”
Tim smiled in response. “It’s surprising to me, too. It’s strange that something so simple can turn your whole life upside down,” Tim said, glancing at Russ and Sherrie in turn. “But then, what else would it be, but simple? The truth is simple.”
“Your experience at Charitas was similar?” Russ asked Sherrie.
“Oh yeah,” she said, looking down. “It really helped me, helped my faith. Sometimes it’s difficult to believe in God’s love if you don’t really experience it. Charitas is a really great way to do that.”
“Experience God’s love,’” Russ noted, looking severe behind his spectacles. “What do you mean by that?”
“I can only speak for myself,” Sherrie said, somewhat flustered, but intent on explaining. “You just get put in with a lot of people at their most vulnerable, their most emotional. And you are too, of course. Something just happens in the room… it’s like you feel God’s love at the time when everyone’s most honest with themselves. People talk about God all the time,” Sherrie went on in her quiet voice, carefully finding her way. “But in church, or in the way He’s used on TV, you don’t get the sense that He’s an active, living being who’s involved in people’s lives. It’s weird that that’s the picture of God most people get. That’s what I like about Charitas, that you feel that.”
“It is deplorable the way God is used on TV,” Russ agreed. “You see these people on there obviously just shilling for money. And then there’s the ones who use God as an outlet for all their sexual problems. I saw a woman on TV talking about God’s disapproval of immoral practices, and she went on and on listing them: homosexuality, adultery, sodomy, bestiality…” As Russ related the list he began breathing heavily, rolling his eyes and fluttering his eyelids to parody the woman’s rising excitement over the sins, somehow becoming the woman as he did so.
Tim thought Russ looked rather unsavoury as he contorted his face while nearly feigning orgasm, but Sherrie laughed. At the sound of her laughter, Tim laughed too, pleased that she found his friend funny. The fact was a further bond between them, and he felt as though the laughter and delight were for him as well, reflected like a refracted light off his friend and onto him.
“It’s not that church is so bad,” Sherrie said. “I’ve gone to church all my life. It’s just that the message can get a little bit lifeless sometimes. The people though, they’re great,” she stipulated. “They haven’t let me down.”
Sherrie’s mother had gone through a series of breakdowns ten years before. She was unable to take care of herself and so Sherrie had to bathe her and look after her. Her mother was a collector who crammed their house with piles of newspapers and objects of every description. “People seem to have this romantic, exciting vision of being insane,” Sherrie noted. “But it isn’t romantic at all. It’s just hard and frightening.”
From time to time Sherrie’s mother would disappear, and Sherrie would have to go looking for her. Often she would be in Simpsons-Sears, or in a nearby grocery store, believing she was shopping. “People don’t know what to say when they meet my mother,” Sherrie said. “But at least at church I can see people trying to be kind, and in some cases trying to help. Out on the street, people are just rude… They just don’t want to understand at all.”
Russ looked down at the bottle of juice in front of him on the mahogany table. “People don’t know what to say,” he murmured. “People sure didn’t know what to say to me after my father died,” he said, staring abstractedly at the bottle. “It was always, ‘I know how you feel,’ when they obviously didn’t have the slightest idea how I felt, or they never would have said it. Or there was, ‘Take care of your mother,’ and the ever-popular, ‘We’ll be praying for you.’ We’ll be praying for you,” Russ sneered. “Just pray for me! Why do you have to tell me you’re praying for me?” he asked. “Or else they stare at you waiting for you to cry and getting all puzzled if you don’t.
“That was the deal with me,” he continued. “They took me to a psychiatrist because I didn’t cry after the death of my father. But my father had gone through such hell over so long a period of time, that when he died I really had no reaction. He’d been sick for so long, and then one day my brother and I were in the basement watching Bugs Bunny and they came down the stairs and told us. We went right back to watching Bugs Bunny, neither of us crying. We really had gone through so much that there was nothing left in us, no tears in us to cry, at least at that time. But I’ll never forget that,” Russ said, looking across the donut shop. “At the time I was told my father died, I was watching Bugs Bunny.”
Tim and Sherrie nodded, Tim thinking that his dad was pretty bad sometimes, but at least wasn’t dead or insane. The three teenagers talked in the booth in the golden-lit donut shop into the night, their conversation rising and falling in rhythms of empathy. They seemed to speak from the same understanding, which was the hub that joined them. Tim looked from the face of his love to the face of his best friend, sharing confidences he never thought he could share, hearing confidences he never thought he would hear. Their pain, he saw, was the same as his. And the need for communication, for sharing, was the same as well.
As he spoke, Tim came to the realization that he was speaking the words he truly felt. To that time of his life, he had never dared to speak the words he truly felt. At some point in their talking they became aware of the time and realized five hours had flown by in what had seemed to be only half an hour. It was two a.m. on a school night, and Sherrie drove Tim and Russ home as quickly as she could. Tim exchanged a rushed hug with her before she sped off. When he walked into his house, luckily his mother and father were asleep, his father snoring on the couch.
Tim came into the living room and laid back on the La-Z-Boy recliner. Entertainment Tonight was on the television, but Tim was not looking at the screen. He stared off into the distance above the TV, and though it was late he had no desire to sleep. He felt as though he might never sleep again. It was as if he had never talked before, had never known another human being before tonight. He felt alive in every cell of his body, and marvelled at the incredible nature of what he had experienced, replaying it over and over in his head. Not until the light blue of early dawn came through the window did he tire of trying to comprehend the significance of what had occurred. He fell asleep for a few hours in his clothes before rising to head off to school.
Christmas came in a blur of red, green, blue and white lights as the year accelerated to its end. For children and certainly for many of the adults, Christmas Day was the peak of the year, the summit of the meaning of the year and all the years past. In the weeks preceding, the garlanded displays would appear astride the main street of the city, and the oil refineries and chemical plants would install their yearly light show that families would drive out to admire. A dubious Santa Claus would appear by the Woolco in the mall and in school, earnest children’s voices would sing of the difficulties a young married couple had in finding accommodations in Bethlehem two thousand years ago.
People became more buoyant as the day approached with calls of, “Hey, if I don’t see you have a Merry Christmas, eh?” echoing through the barbershop and the variety store and on the sidewalk before them. Then suddenly, Christmas Eve came and the world closed in on itself like a flower before bursting open on Christmas Day, radiant even though the sky was grey and frosty, affording all lucky children the most wondrous sight of their lives: silhouettes of toys dimly sighted in the rooms before them as they ran from their beds.
In the weeks before Christmas, Tim went out with his mother to the mall when she went shopping. He bought trinkets, books, stuffed animals and little plaques with inspirational sayings on them from the Hallmark store. His plan was to wrap them up with some streamers and balloons and put them in Sherrie’s locker to surprise her on the last day of school before the holiday. He’d gotten her skeptical locker-mate Mike to give him the combination. He�
��d even purchased some expensive wrapping paper that had her name on it in a multicoloured design. “Don’t you think you’re going a bit too far with this?” his mother asked. “I don’t want you to put all this time and money into this and get your heart broken.”
Tim stayed up late in his room wrapping the presents and writing poems to go along with them. He was going to get to school early in the morning to get the gifts into her locker before anyone else arrived. As he put the finishing touch on a colourful flourish he was adding to one of his poems, he looked out the bedroom window and saw his dad’s van slowing to turn in the driveway. He could tell by the speed what condition his father was in. Tim rapidly turned off his light and scrambled into bed, hoping his father hadn’t seen the light suddenly go off.
After a moment, he heard Dirk enter at the back door, brushing against the walls on each side of the hall as he made his way through the house. Tim’s door swung open and the silhouette of his father stood in the hallway light.
“Bullshit!” Dirk sneered, his shadow swaying, affirming he’d seen the light go out. “Do you wanna fight with me?” he asked.
“No,” said Tim, lying in the darkness.
“Cause you know I’ll win—right?” the shadow in the door reasoned. “Right?”
“Right,” said Tim.
The shadow stood swaying irresolutely for a moment, then turned and ambled out to the living room, mumbling to itself.
6. Winter
The next morning Tim got to the school early and crammed the presents he’d purchased for Sherrie into her locker. He stuffed in the balloons and streamers as well. He imagined the surprise when Sherrie would open her locker and the brightly wrapped gifts tumbled out with the streamers and balloons. He was excited additionally that other people would see the spectacle and would know his love for her.
