by Kyp Harness
Tim and Sherrie laughed, Tim enjoying, as always, Sherrie’s face as she laughed, her bright, innocent eyes and her mouth opening with surprised delight, showing her teeth. There was a slight blush to her cheeks, as though she was embarrassed to laugh and was trying to resist it. But her eyes closed with her merriment, showing that mirth had won out.
Looking beyond her, Tim saw a sight that he pointed out to his friends and which caused them all to laugh longer. For down by the river, Eric was pacing, apparently immersed in meditation. But he was walking along a ledge hidden on the other side of the bank, so it appeared to them as if he was striding on the river’s surface.
The snow had melted and the ice rink that had filled the back and front yards of Tim’s house snow became a lake whose shimmering surface reflected the newly blue skies. A fresh breeze was blowing, and Tim now often rode his bicycle to school and home from his job at the variety store in the evenings. There was respite at the store between the customers voicing their displeasure with the coldness and snow of winter (“Supposed to get another three inches tomorrow night! Jesus Christ!”) and griping about the blazing temperatures of summer (the ever-popular, “Hot enough for ya?”) because spring offered comparatively little to take offence at. The students at school, intoxicated by the new temperatures, began the steadily accelerating tumble toward the end of spring and the rebirth promised by its first green stirrings—the moment when the school doors opened and closed behind them for the final time. It seemed that no light ever shone with such embracing warmth, no air ever blew with such a cleansing, liberating breeze as those which prevailed on the walk across the schoolyard on the final day of school.
For every year of Tim’s school career, he had begun anticipating that last day from the beginning of spring, while trying not to long for it too much and thereby make the wait unbearable. This year he regarded it with anxious helplessness. He knew that for each day that went by that Sherrie didn’t leave Bruce Ferguson for him, the less likely it was to happen. He also knew that if it didn’t happen by the end of the school year, it was likely to never happen at all. Tim walked to school each day with a restless stomach and returned each night with grave depression.
He saw Sherrie just as much or more than he ever had, yet she was receding from him in an imperceptible yet undeniable manner. Or was it that time was running out that made him feel this way? The more she slid away, the more panicked he became, and more manic in his attempts to bring her back. He felt now that when he confided in people about his hopes for Sherrie, they were visibly allowing themselves to tolerate him. There came into their eyes the glint that occurs when a listener disbelieves the words being heard, and hazards to convey a hint of doubt to see if the speaker is aware enough to pick it up: the sort of look often given to delusionals and drunks. His absorption had to some degree soured his friendship with Russ and his other new relationships within Charitas.
Tim often still saw Sherrie, with Eric Dunphy and other Charitas friends, and with Russ. He thought of the changes the past month had brought as he rode his bicycle along the road’s muddy shoulder, leaving a weaving snake of a trail past the drainage ditch and the high-tension hydro lines. Tim had been shocked when Sherrie had come to school one morning with her golden tresses gone, now sporting a pixie-ish cut that brought out her almond-shaped eyes and her cheekbones. “I just felt like getting my hair out of the way,” she’d said, shrugging.
“You know what they say when a woman changes her hairstyle!” Eric Dunphy remarked when Tim told him. “It means she wants to change her life! This could be very good news for you, Tim!”
Shortly after, Tim had gone with Eric and some other Charitas friends to pick Sherrie up at her house. She never wanted anyone to come into her house because of the clutter her mother collected. She came out the door and in a burst of excitement leapt over the railing of the porch. She landed awkwardly, and her ankle caused her pain for the rest of the night. The next day a sprain was diagnosed and she came to school with a cast and crutches.
For Tim, this offered an opportunity to shower more adoration and devotion on her. He made himself available to carry her books between periods all day, with the result that he was late for his own classes. When she had to go up stairs, he carried her crutches along with the books beside her as she carefully hopped up, step by step. Passing teachers would smile at Tim’s devotion.
“You really don’t have to do this,” she said as she struggled up the stairs.
“I want to do it,” Tim said. “Why not? Who else is going to do it?”
“Well, I could find some other way,” Sherrie reasoned, shaking her head. “It doesn’t have to be you all the time.”
“I’m the one that’s here,” Tim said, trying to affect an easy smile despite the fact that her words made him feel foolish and hurt.
“Hi, Tim,” a voice said at his side. Tim turned and saw the wide smile and bright eyes of Roberta Cameron. He smiled in return, and exchanged some light, joking words with the girl. She laughed delightedly, said hello to Sherrie and in parting with Tim, she said she hoped she’d see him soon. Tim continued up the stairs, his arms full of Sherrie’s crutches and books, waiting patiently as she gingerly hopped from step to step. Roberta Cameron remained at the foot of the stairs, gazing up at him with unembarrassed adoration.
“I sure do impress those grade nines,” Tim remarked to Sherrie, who laughed with great amusement.
After a time, the sprain healed and Tim felt a sense of loss that Sherrie no longer needed the help he had been giving her. As the good weather increased, Sherrie would sometimes drive Tim and Russ to the large park at the north of the city in her dad’s old car. The park, given to the city by a wealthy benefactor early in the century, stretched along the shores of the vast lake. Glimpses of the immeasurable water’s surface flashed between the trees as they walked across the expanse of green. Tim and Sherrie bantered about school and about Eric Dunphy and others in Charitas, Tim, as always, keeping things light and entertaining. At times his efforts were rewarded by Sherrie’s laughter and at others she merely smiled, and he resolved to double his efforts the next time.
Russ strode beside them, dour and scowling, and after an interval he turned to them and asked, “Is that all we’re going to talk about? Diarrhea?”
Tim and Sherrie looked at each other, Sherrie raising her eyebrows.
“It just seems to me that we spend an awful lot of time talking about diarrhea,” Russ remarked.
The three friends walked along the tree line before the lake. Beyond the weeds and the carpet of dead leaves from before winter, the sandy beach began, the spaces between the foliage affording a view of exotic-seeming dunes. At length, Tim spoke of Eric Dunphy’s attempt, the last time he spoke to him, to read a Christian subtext into the lyrics of ABBA songs.
“Mm-hmm,” Russ said, with a sharp nod as if to certify the vindication of a belief within him. “More diarrhea.”
Tim looked over at him, his eyes smarting with annoyance. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked.
Russ looked down at Sherrie as he walked beside her. “So Sherrie, how’s Bruce?” he asked.
Tim beheld the blandly smiling profile of his friend with shock and disbelief. Never before had any of the three of them mentioned the name of her boyfriend during one of their gatherings. It was as though Russ, in one sentence spoken as casually as if it were the most commonplace of phrases, had torn the very fabric of life itself. In the instant the words left Russ’s lips, Tim saw Sherrie’s consciousness recoil and find its place again. He saw anger and a determined challenge come to her eyes as they met Russ’s.
“He’s fine,” she replied, her voice straining for the nonchalance of Russ’s query. Tim’s gaze left Sherrie’s face and followed a seagull swooping out into the impossibly pure emptiness of the air over the lake.
“That’s good to hear,” Russ noted, soberly looking before him as he hiked along. “And you, Tim. You must be starting to plan what univers
ity you’ll be going to in the fall. That must be exciting, to be on the verge of finishing high school.”
Tim looked at his friend, puzzled and lost. Russ’s words and manner were pulling the earth from beneath his feet, but he was bound to hold on, to refuse to give ground.
“Yeah,” said Tim. “I’m supposed to go to university, but I’m not sure if I’ve got the credits to graduate. Hopefully, I’ll get a passing mark in the home ec course I’m taking.” He had needed to take elective courses such as home economics and drafting in order to get the proper amount of credits, bypassing such dreaded subjects as math and chemistry. “It seems weird that my whole life and future is based on home ec, but if I don’t get it, I guess I can pick it up in summer school. I’m not that worried anyway because I don’t have any big plan about university. I’d go if I was able to, but I don’t see the point of getting a degree. I don’t see myself ever working at a job that would require a degree, and to get one you have to waste time taking all these courses I’m not interested in.
“What I want to do,” he continued, regaining confidence as he spoke, “is be an artist, and hopefully I can make my living by that. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I’ve got the talent or the ability to make people understand what I’m trying to say.”
“Oh, come on now,” Russ smirked. “Is this supposed to be like the story you told us about James Joyce last week, how James Joyce used to confess his self-doubts to Samuel Beckett on a regular basis, and Beckett would bolster him up, assuring him that he was the greatest of all time? Is that what this is supposed to be?” asked Russ. “Is that who you’re supposed to be now? James Joyce? And is that what we’re supposed to do, reassure you of how great you are?”
Tim laughed and felt his face grow hot as a spasm of anger twisted in his abdomen. They walked through a tangle of trees and bushes by the lake and passed an old bandstand. Their expressions and demeanour now suggested that they had just left a funeral. They walked past the baseball diamonds and the picnic tables and large sheltered gazebos where Tim’s mother’s family had held their reunions every summer when he was a boy. They passed the large rusted swing sets with the fabric seats, and the few words they exchanged were forced and false, quick desperate diversions from the silence that engulfed them.
They got into Sherrie’s dad’s car and drove into the city through the late afternoon traffic commencing its industrious flow. Tim was due to begin his shift as the variety store soon, so Sherrie let him off at the plaza. He had a few extra minutes to spare, so he walked down the sidewalk to his dad’s barbershop. He pulled the door open and walked in; his father was standing in his wine-coloured uniform as he trimmed the hair of his customer, his hands upraised almost as if in a boxer’s stance, one hand holding the comb through which he sifted the hair, the scissors in the other, moving in to cut the isolated strands with a steady, musical clipping sound.
Dirk spoke in a low murmur to his customer, who wore a sheet of the same colour as Tim’s dad’s jacket. Dirk departed from the customer at intervals to grab his electric clipper from the counter, or to get his brush, or to pick up his cigarette from the ashtray and take a drag. At these times he would meet his customer’s eyes in the mirror, continuing their conversation. At the chair beside him was his partner Howard, quietly working away on his customer’s hair as the radio softly played a Charlie Rich song.
Tim sat in one of the waiting chairs beside the table that was covered with Maclean’s magazines. The floor was speckled with clots of brown and black hair, showing that the shop had enjoyed a rush of business earlier in the day. The door opened and another man came in and sat down, opening a newspaper in front of him. Dirk finished with his customer, pulling off the sheet and flourishing it with his usual snap. The man paid up and Tim’s father counted out his change to him, pulling bills from the money-clipped wad he extracted from his pocket. As the customer left, Dirk called out to the man with the newspaper down the wall from Tim: “You’re next, Pete.”
The man looked over to Tim, gesturing, asking as hundreds of customers had before, “Isn’t this fellow before me?”
“No, that’s my boy,” said Dirk. “He’s just hangin’ around.”
“Oh,” said the man, laying his newspaper down and proceeding to the barber chair. “How many kids you got, Dirk?”
“Two,” said Dirk, fastening the sheet around the man’s throat. “This one’s the oldest.”
“That right?”
“He supposed to be going to university this year,” Dirk said, beginning to comb the man’s hair. “But he’s all messed up with a girl right now, so he says he don’t know if he wants to go. Lovesick,” Dirk chuckled.
“Well, they’ll do that to ya, that’s for sure,” said the man in the chair. “You start to realize you gotta spend half your life tryin’ to work it out.”
“Yeah,” Howard observed suavely in his whisper-like voice, starting up his electric clipper, “or tryin’ to work it in.” The shop was filled with the surprised laughter of the men. The sun was shining its retiring rays of light to glimmer around the edges of the car dealership sign across the road, on the windshields of the cars in the parking lot and through the big plate-glass window across the hair-covered floor of the shop. Tim looked at the time, got up from his chair and walked from the talcum and witch hazel–smelling place down the sidewalk to the variety store.
He entered and quietly took his place beside the middle-aged woman behind the counter, starting in to serve customers without thought, letting second nature take over. The procession of lottery-ticket choosers, cigarette buyers, and pop-and-Popsicle purchasers passed before him. After an hour or so, a man wearing a sweater over a T-shirt came in. He wore a baseball hat and sunglasses. His clothes hung loosely on him, and his mouth seemed wrenched to one side, the flesh pale and strangely textured.
“Ol’ Yeller,” the man said.
Tim started, then saw that he should have known by the shape of his nose, even by the outline of the eyes he could now see through the tint of the sunglasses, and in which he told himself he could see the same spark of contempt which had always been there in the past.
“The goddamn things have done this to me,” the bus driver said, speaking to the middle-aged woman at Tim’s side. “What the hell else can they do?”
Tim had heard of the diagnosis of the sore on the bus driver’s lip, had known of the surgery and of the chemotherapy, had heard of his long recovery. He now saw the bus driver’s shrunken, old-man physique, and his face so drawn and distorted as to be almost unrecognizable.
“They took the skin off my ass,” the bus driver was rasping to the middle-aged woman, “and they put it here!” He pointed to his mouth. “And these goddamned chemo treatments don’t let me keep nothin’ down. I lost thirty pounds, for Christ’s sake!” He shook his head in disgust as he tore the cellophane band from his cigarettes.
Tim couldn’t be sure, but he felt as though the bus driver’s eyes behind the tinted glasses had now wandered from the middle-aged woman over to him, and he anxiously searched himself for the response such a movement seemed to demand. Still uncertain that the shadows behind the glasses were fixed on him, Tim dared to speak to the bus driver anyway, hazarding what he hoped was an empathetic expression as he looked into the sunglasses and murmured, indicating the entire predicament with a vague gesture, “Sorry.”
“Yeah,” the bus driver snorted. “Me too.”
9. Yearbook
It seemed as though ever since the day at the lakeside park everything was different—as though all that Tim had known of life for the past seven months receded and stayed distant. As the school year drained down to its close, he felt estranged from the excitement and concern of his fellow students as he walked the halls. It was the time of the impending pressure of exams and the opening vista of adulthood, but Tim felt none of it. He was in limbo, neither anticipating nor worrying, but in a continual posture of dread-saturated waiting.
The final exams of the year
were upon them, and Tim’s classmates had entered an austere period of solemn studying. Sherrie, too, was busy studying—or at least that’s what Tim told himself, for as the remaining days of school elapsed it seemed as though she had disappeared from the halls. He tried to pass her locker several times a day, but she was never there, nor in any of the other places they once met up at. He asked her locker-mate Mike where she was, but he didn’t seem to know. Everybody was buckling down in order to guarantee their futures, but Tim was unable to take any of it seriously. None of it meant anything, as far as he could see, if he didn’t have Sherrie.
Walking down the hall at school one day, Tim saw a poster for a play the drama club was putting on at lunchtime. It was The Zoo Story by Edward Albee. He was stunned to see that Ran Hutchison was listed as one of the actors. Seeing the name, he realized he had not thought of Ran Hutchison for months, and had not been greeted by Ran Hutchison hissing “Fuckin’ faggot!” at him for some time. He marvelled that this individual who had been such a negative focal point of his life, who had caused him no end of anxiety and fear, could’ve faded from his consciousness so easily.
At lunchtime, Tim went to the drama room. He took a seat in a far corner, hoping to avoid the slight chance that Hutchison might see him in the audience. The play, a product of the sixties, concerned an upwardly mobile, conservative man on a park bench being confronted by a half-deranged, hippie-esque street person who challenged the dishonesty of the conformist’s way of life. The truth-telling outsider rants at some length, and the play concludes with the frightened, conventional man accidentally stabbing him. Ran Hutchison, with his small, slit-like eyes and the bangs of blond hair dipping over them, played the demonic iconoclast, a role calling for all the sense of viciousness and menace that Tim had seen in him.
But it was plain from the first moments he stepped on stage that Ran Hutchison was not alive with fury in his art in the way he had been in life. He moved uncertainly, spoke his lines hesitantly—too quietly—and couldn’t bring forth the rage that the role required. It seemed to Tim that he had been like the man sitting on the park bench, trying to hold onto some shred of normalcy while Ran Hutchison had hissed in his face every day that no matter how much he felt he could belong, he would always be a “fucking faggot,” a boy crying to his father over his broken glasses in the park. Now the tableau had been transmuted into art, and Hutchison was an uneasy, fumbling amateur with no stage presence—trying, like Tim, to be an artist and failing in the most ignominious manner.
