The Juliet Stories

by Carrie Snyder

  When she tucks Juliet in, as she does on nights when Gloria stays at the hospital with Keith, she does not linger or ask to hear Juliet’s prayers, as Grandma Grace would. She says, “Goodnight, child,” and she turns out the light, whether or not Juliet has marked her spot in her book. It comforts Juliet to hear her in the hallway in her rocking chair, knitting needles clicking in the near dark.

  Oma Friesen’s apartment has five rooms: the bedroom shared by Juliet and Emmanuel (he falls asleep with the light on when he’s not staying at the hospital too); the bedroom Gloria shares with Keith, which was Oma Friesen’s before they arrived last month; the living room, where Oma Friesen now sleeps on the pullout sofa; the bathroom; and the kitchen, which, though cramped with five around the table, is spacious enough to eat in. The hallway is a thin slit down the centre of the apartment to which the other rooms cling; it begins at the front door and ends at a window, high in the wall, that receives the eastern morning light. A lone spider fern hangs in the window and the rocker sits beneath, strewn with shed fronds. In a hidden compartment in the embroidered footstool, Oma Friesen stores her knitting supplies. This is not a play area.

  Oma Friesen’s apartment is in the basement of a red brick building that stands back from a moderately busy street in a small city in Canada, a foreign country to which Juliet has only recently been told she also belongs. Three storeys tall, not including the basement, the building is a narrow structure that houses one separate unit on each floor. In the front yard, two maple trees flourish in spring bloom. The building backs onto a creek, which Juliet has not been expressly forbidden to explore, and to which she retreats when she is sent outside to play. It is shallow, and on its steep, slick banks garbage gathers in the spines of weeds.

  Juliet has never seen another child at the creek.

  No one from school walks down this street. She has been placed in the sixth grade. In her classroom the children are being taught their first words of French, but the children in the other sixth-grade classroom have been learning French since grade one, and the divide between the two groups is visible in their clothes and shoes, and the colour of their skin. The children in the other classroom are white, hair brushed sleek and tidy, their clothes branded with alligators, their shoes with shiny pennies.

  Juliet knows that fortune is on her side. She has no alligators, no pennies, and her hair is braided, infrequently, by Oma Friesen into two long plaits that as the week passes fray into a halo of loose strands. At recess she wanders the muddy playground with a girl who wears white jeans and thick glasses, and another who must cover her hair with a headscarf, even for gym class, and whose parents do not let her listen to the Bible story their teacher reads every morning; instead she stands in the hallway with the melting boots until it is over. Both of Juliet’s friends come by bus and carry their lunches; they eat sitting in the foyer outside the front office with the other children who do not walk home for lunch.

  Except, the girls are not exactly friends; they are agents of mutual protection.

  Juliet walks home for lunch. On days when Keith is at the hospital, Oma Friesen leaves a sandwich wrapped in a washed milk bag in the fridge, and an apple, and Juliet pours herself a glass of milk. The apartment is empty, silent but for the breath of its own shifting weight.

  On days when Keith is not at the hospital, Juliet’s mother is here to heat up a can of soup for their lunch. Between treatments Keith goes to school too, but it is much worse for him than for Juliet; if she is the latecomer, he is the freakish stranger, his appearances rare, his skull hidden under a baseball cap, dark spots like bruises beneath his eyes. He is not entirely bald: he refuses to be parted from the sparse bleached strands that remain and float like spider’s silk around his naked skull. The boy who sits behind him knocks his hat off. Keith puts it back on. The boy knocks it off. The teacher makes Keith stand at the front of the class, without his hat, and tells everyone that Keith has cancer.

  Then they call him cancerboy.

  Juliet hates them with an anger that has no expression. She wishes Keith could stay home on days when he is not at the hospital. She wishes she could stay home with him. They would play in the creek, away from the mockery of Canadian children, who care too much about too many things Juliet and Keith know nothing about: television programs, movie stars, punk rock bands and boy bands, fashion, hockey, ringette.

  Oma Friesen does not own a television, or even a record player. There is neither time nor money to waste at the movie theatre (Oma calls it a waste). The mall is a very long bus ride away, and there are perfectly decent clothes to be found at the second-hand store. Hockey is a violent sport that rewards angry men and boys. Ringette is an unsolved feminine mystery.

  The books Juliet chooses from the school library are various. She reads as if famished, every spare minute, even on the walk to and from school, her focus on the page; underneath the spread words her feet move in a blur along the sidewalk.

  At suppertime Oma Friesen asks Juliet to put down the book and join them, but Juliet is far away. Quietly, firmly, Oma Friesen lifts the words from Juliet’s fingers. Juliet blinks back to these strange underground rooms, where she finds herself seated at Oma Friesen’s laminated tabletop, a paper napkin in her lap, faced with another bowl of bland slop served out of the orange and brown Crockpot: beans, hamburger, barley, macaroni, canned tomatoes, more or less. The tableau remains the same: her dad is not here.

  “Do you know the story of Romeo and Juliet?” Oma Friesen asks Juliet.

  Gloria says, “She wasn’t named for that. I just liked the name Juliet, that’s all.” Washed out and past pale, Gloria’s dirty turtleneck smells strongly of underarm sweat. Keith is resting on the double bed he shares with his mother. They are waiting for the sound of him waking, retching. Gloria will snap alert, as if shocked by an electrical current, to run to him.

  Oma Friesen says, “More tea, Gloria?” and Gloria stares at her.

  “Oh. Yes.”

  Oma Friesen pours. “I tell the girls at the shelter, the name you choose will be a gift to your child, so choose with care. I had such lofty intentions for my poor infant boy. Abraham — prophet, patriarch. What a burden, and no one could stop me. But he went ahead and made his name his own. Maybe that was the gift I gave him: to rise above.”

  Oma Friesen offers her thoughts in little stabs, an awkward dance performed without a partner; Gloria remains silent. Oma Friesen does not sigh when she reaches the end. She waits with unreasonable expectation for someone to care; she will wait without malice and with hope, generously.

  Juliet says to her mother, “Can I take horse lessons?”

  Gloria says, “No.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  Gloria says, “What is?”

  Oma Friesen takes Juliet’s hand and squeezes it. She smiles warmly, her eyes bright with sudden tears, and she says, “Juliet, you will love passionately: that is your parents’ gift to you.”

  Gloria says, “It’s just a pretty name, that’s all.”

  “It is that. Like yours, Gloria.”

  “I was named for a song, I think.” Gloria has waited to speak until the thread is nearly gone; considering. She hums to herself. Juliet frowns, reminded of something she’d forgotten had been lost: her mother making music.

  Her mother stops. She looks at Oma Friesen. “It could be a curse, too, not a gift. Doomed to star-crossed love. But I didn’t name her for that.”

  ———

  Juliet reads The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, which feature characters torn out of one life and tossed into another: fairy-tale endings that leave her sobbing. She dances through the Emily books and thinks Anne slightly inferior.

  But she also devours books she cannot possibly understand; she is at an age — eleven and a half — that does not object to partial comprehension. Books that confuse and mystify appear to hold import
ant information just out of reach. She stumbles upon Canadian literature: a stack of paperbacks beside her mother’s bed. Juliet reads The Diviners, which she cannot make sense of, especially the parts to do with sex, and Surfacing, crammed with vivid images that fail to cohere in her brain; nevertheless, she finishes both, moved by a sense of being on the edge of discovery. She reads a book called Lives of Girls and Women, but it frightens her in a way she cannot explain, were there anyone here to tell. As she reads the stories a terrible feeling swells in her: that as she grows older she is tumbling forward and down, faster and faster, out of control.

  She has never spent this much time alone.

  Unsupervised, she is expected to sit at Oma Friesen’s kitchen table to eat, to read, and to do her homework. After school she may help herself to a cookie, baked and then frozen in vast healthful batches by Oma Friesen, and if weather and time permit, she may go outside to play.

  But Juliet does something else instead, something she knows she should not.

  She opens doors and walks right in.

  ———

  The calendar that hangs above the black telephone in the living room has changed from wildflowers in bloom to a field of fluorescent canola: May to June. Juliet examines it. The days on the calendar are marked: treatment, treatment, treatment, home. But one day is circled in black, at the end of the month, and the word inside reads Bram.

  “Is my dad coming?” Juliet asks Oma Friesen.

  “Maybe.” Her grandmother wields the honey spoon like an artist, drizzling delicate floral designs or labyrinthine animal shapes onto the pocked surface of the toasted English muffin.

  The phone rings, and Juliet scrambles: “Hello?” She knows it is her father by his silence. The pause of long distance prefaces everything he says. His words have to travel along hundreds of miles of wire stretched between his mouth and her ear.

  Bram’s work continues: he is in Costa Rica, lecturing at a seminary; he is flying to give a talk in Miami; he will return to Nicaragua to arrange for a group of three hundred protesters to travel to the Honduran border; there has been a kidnapping. He cannot come to them.

  But he says to Juliet, “Don’t worry. I will get there soon.”

  Gloria drags herself from the bedroom — the sickroom — squeezing shut at her neck a robe of pale lilac — Oma Friesen’s. “Pass me the phone, I need to talk to him.” The sickroom has developed its own weather: grey fogs that descend and hover, humid fevers that shine the ceiling, bone-chilling winds that wail between walls.

  Gloria says, “I will not discuss this when we have no privacy.” She says, “I’m not angry, I’m exhausted. I’m a shell of myself. If you could only see me.”

  “Do you have news?” she says. “I do love you.”

  “I do love you,” she says, “but I can’t talk to you.”

  To the world at large and the room in general, Oma Friesen declares, as she often does, “To everything there is a season.”

  The clock over the sink points its short hand just shy of a quarter past, and its long hand centimetres beyond the number twelve. It is Wednesday, the twelfth of June. Juliet, a girl in her twelfth year of life, sits at her grandmother’s table, alone. Before her is a glass of milk and half a soggy tuna salad sandwich prepared with sweet pickle relish on bought white bread.

  Juliet stands. Standing, she swallows the milk and wipes the skin above her upper lip with her turned wrist. She wears blue jeans, a white short-sleeved shirt that buttons up the front, and a green corduroy vest with a pocket over each hip. Into the right pocket she places the remaining half of her tuna sandwich.

  She is filled with something that is not courage; it is not determination; it is not sadness or questioning or the desire to err. It is the perfect calm of a girl who knows what she is about to attempt and who is being pulled onward by the inevitable. It is the perfect calm of a girl who neither guesses the consequences nor suspects that there will be any.

  The front door to Oma Friesen’s apartment opens onto a stairwell that leads to the front entryway. On the other side of the stairwell is a cavelike laundry room shared by all the tenants. The washer and dryer are not being used right now, but when they are, their thump and whirr can be heard dimly inside Oma Friesen’s apartment.

  The smooth plastic railing beside the stairs slides under Juliet’s hand.

  She thinks, Oma Friesen, what a big house you have.

  At street level, noon light pours through tall windows and heats the small foyer. Juliet steps directly up to the closed door marked with a brass number one. She tries the handle, hot under her palm, and it turns. The door is open. The threshold beckons. The girl steps silently across it and into otherness.

  She pushes the door shut behind herself. She is in a room darkened by a blind drawn down over a square window that would otherwise gaze onto the street. An aura of illuminated dust motes marks its outline.

  The girl feels her way past heavy lumps of furniture to the kitchen, where a plate of bread crusts rests on the counter. Everything in the room is grey, lit dimly by a rectangle of glass high in the wall above the cupboards. A cat leaps on silent, padded paws to the gold-flecked Formica, startling the girl, but only for a moment.

  “Hello,” says the girl. The sound of her own voice, alive in the still air, claims this place.

  Boldly she presses her fingers over the bones of the cat’s pulsing skull, flattening its ears. The cat is telling the girl exactly what it wants, its soft body beneath her hand seeking pressure. The warmth of its interior motor hums as the cat noses her sweater, bats at her pocket; it finds what’s hidden. It wants the sandwich. The girl is happy to share. She feeds the cat ripped portions off of her fingers, its rough tongue scratching her as if into a new life, another body, one that feels one with this shrouded world.

  When the sandwich is gone, the cat leaps to the floor, darts out of the room, and disappears. The girl cannot find it in any of the darkened rooms, though she can hear the patient sound of the animal retching, coughing, disgorging itself of the sandwich. The sound of this act, taking place somewhere nearby but out of sight, is so familiar that it does not disgust or surprise her.

  She says, “I have to go now but I’ll come back.”

  The foyer’s brightness stuns Juliet: overexposure painted by dilated pupils. She stands outside apartment number one, its door closed, and breathes deeply and with contentment. There is no hesitation as she continues up the stairs to the second floor, to the door marked with the number two. Again the handle yields.

  The girl expects no less.

  This room is dazzling and barren. Light rushes through the thick maple leaves outside the window, throwing shadows that move across the green shag carpeting that makes a wall-to-wall appearance on every floor. There is nothing here but a television with a monstrous antenna balanced precariously atop a red milk crate. Elsewhere a mattress lies in the centre of a room, a sleeping bag crumpled upon it. The fridge is packed with sticky bottles of condiments and two cases of diet soda. Behind the bathroom mirror are brown bottles of pills.

  Nothing living is kept on purpose in apartment number two. No plants, no fish, no animals, and even in the spider’s web wafting across the corner of the bedroom window, no spider to be seen.

  The girl says, “Hello? Hello? Hello?” making an echo of her voice, and she says, “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,” not certain whether she will return. She feels no great desire to discover more than can be seen in apartment number two.

  There is one more elbow of staircase, the yellow handrail slippery under Juliet’s palm, crumbs of dirt crammed into the angles of the steps. But the door to apartment number three is locked. The handle gives ever so slightly in either direction, and she rattles it with perplexity, almost shock, that this last secret is closed to her. Surely this is not what is meant to happen. The door must open. The girl must disco
ver what is hidden behind it.

  Juliet walks to school through a heat wave, dressed in brown boys’ shorts and a red T-shirt, purchased on her behalf and without her approval by Oma Friesen at Oma Friesen’s favourite thrift shop. Oma Friesen buys all her clothes, linens, and household accessories second-hand. When the items were presented to Juliet, they smelled of rotting threads, decrepit attics, and damp cellars permeated by decay. Even freshly washed and dried, the smell clings, a reminder that Juliet does not belong to these clothes and these clothes do not belong to her. But this makes sense to Juliet: nothing in this country is hers; everything is strange, almost like home but off-kilter.

  In Canada, the month of June is spent indoors in stifling classrooms whose windows are cracked open yet do not breathe. Juliet is certain these days are wasted — she learns nothing new, nothing of consequence or even of interest. It seems to be expected and accepted, a wilting of intentions built deliberately into the system: to be done with something in Canada, one must be more than done, one must be extinguished. The teachers give up teaching and fill the hours with “fun” activities: crafts, skits in French (Bonjour, Papa, comment ça va? Ça va bien, merci, et tu? Ça va bien, merci!), board games, Xeroxed sheets of math problems, National Film Board films, extended recesses.

  There is a new development on the playground at the end of this grade six year. The sultry heat brings it on, and it appears, fully formed, at the far end of the school grounds, where the yard dips down, hidden, into a stand of scrubby sumac: “Dare.” The game is only for the popular; this excludes Juliet, who is drawn with her fellow outcasts to the site as if to the scene of an accident. The girls who participate, most of them from the other classroom, perform tasks with a mixture of protest and obeisance to the rules: they close their eyes and kiss a boy; when they open their eyes, no one will tell who it was. “Dare” is almost entirely about danger: kissing, touching, showing, saying words that are not allowed; between the boys it is sometimes about fighting or wrestling or taunts.