Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

  On the day of her own yard sale, Laurie was still in her bathrobe having a first cup of coffee when people began to arrive in cars and trucks, parking in front of the house and in the back lane, people coming on foot and bicycles almost two hours earlier than the advertised start time for the sale. She dressed quickly and went out onto the veranda and shouted at them to keep their distance, relieved when at last Sandra arrived and they dismantled the barrier they’d erected across the steps and took the sheets off the tables, dragged out from under them the boxes and baskets. The chessboard and its symbolic pieces sold immediately, as did most of the other items on her special table, dealers, Sandra said, knowing exactly what they wanted. Laurie realized with a pang of regret that she’d underpriced them, but consoled herself with the thought that she’d never really liked crystal, china, or Japanese tea sets.

  By midday the people were gone and the lawn was trampled, boxes upended and the remains of the contents strewn about. A lampshade was wedged into the branches of the lilac bush. When Laurie went to free it, she found a mat rolled up and shoved in among the branches. Someone had stashed it there thinking to come back later and get it. She unrolled it, a soft pleasant-looking handmade cotton mat she had bought in the Cascade Mountains in a craft shop. Made by a native woman, its colours like the earth, moss and birchbark. She’d paid a hundred and twenty dollars for it and its price tag of ten dollars was so high, apparently, that someone had wanted to steal it.

  That afternoon she piled the remainder of the garage sale items, including the mat, against the backyard fence where the usual garbage pickers going by could rummage through the boxes and take what they wanted. The garbage cans were filled to overflowing, and what Joe couldn’t fit into them he’d thrown into boxes along with the remains of the small appliances he had smashed days ago with the sledgehammer.

  She was surprised when she saw one of her angels, and then all of them, scattered among the battered pieces of metal and spikes of plastic as sharp as daggers. She had intended to leave the angels in the house, had positioned them where they might surprise a person who happened to glance upward. She’d hoped that this gesture of goodwill to the next inhabitants would in some way be returned to her and Joe. But he’d thrown them out.

  As he had the flint stone. She scooped it up from among the rubble and cupped its chalky mantle as though to shield it from the rain. In spring, while readying the upstairs veranda for the summer months, she took the stone from the windowsill and washed it free of dust. And she sometimes recalled the moment when Joe had given it to her, the day she lay beside him on the beach still feeling the thrum and shudder of waves in her body. She’d been waiting for calm, when she could speak without her voice trembling. She wanted to tell him it was over. She wanted time to be on her own, to grow into her work as a dental assistant, the apartment she had rented. Sandra was moving to the city, and they were going to live together, going to go to Cuba in the winter.

  She and Steve wanted each other, she did not tell Joe. They’d come so near to having sex at the Glass Spider concert. When their hands first touched she knew it would happen, and they soon found themselves in a corridor, their bodies pressed together hard, their mouths and hips grinding. Where’s a cold shower when you need one, Steve had said laughing, shaking, when they came up for air. She took him by the hand and led him to a nearby coffee shop, her face hot and her breath coming quick. Joe, she said. They’d left him in the blue section of the arena when David Bowie had appeared, the crowd going wild as he descended on stage in the glass spider. She’d scrambled over the seats to get to the floor, Steve coming after her, but Joe had stayed behind. In the coffee shop Steve reached for her hands, covered them, pressed them hard against the table. It’s always about Joe, he’d said. And although she knew she should pull her hands away, she hadn’t.

  When she lay beside Joe on the beach the next day, about to tell him that she wanted to end their relationship, he turned to her. While she’d been out on the lake windsurfing he’d gone for a long walk and found this, he said and put the flint stone in her hand. And then, suddenly, ardently, he asked her to marry him.

  Verna, God rest her soul, would have been so tickled, Laurie’s grandmother had said when Laurie broke the news, and raised a glass of sparkling wine in celebration of her announcement. God rest her soul. The words were a bookmark on each of Laurie’s birthdays, marking the page of Verna’s sacrifice. Are you sure about this? Sandra kept asking in the days leading to the wedding. Yes, she was sure she wanted to marry Joe. And what about Steve? Sandra finally asked, and Laurie listened to herself explain that she’d only wanted to break it off with Joe because after three years it wasn’t going anywhere. Steve had just happened to come along. Joe’s aunts and uncles, her grandmother, all of them had already made plans to come to Winnipeg for the wedding. They’d reserved several rooms in a nearby hotel when Alfred insisted the wedding be held in Winnipeg. He didn’t care who married them, whether it was Pastor Ken, or not. As long as they were married in the backyard. And although Pastor Ken had declined to marry them, Laurie was relieved, for Joe’s sake, when at the last moment, he and Maryanne decided to attend.

  She’s reluctant to leave the stale, heated space of the shopping centre foyer and return to the Meridian. Its batteries are low and she’ll need to run the generator for a time if she’s going to have enough light to read, or to watch TV. If she’d known they were going to be boondocking for a time, she would have kept several candles, the down-filled duvet, the picnic hamper, complete and compact in its wicker case. She’d thought, three days at the most; she hadn’t counted on this stopover. Or that they would live in the Meridian once they got to Fort McMurray. When they’d started out Joe had said he would drop the motorhome off at an RV place in Edmonton, where the owner would come to get it. They’d rent a townhouse in McMurray. And buy a house soon after in whatever city they settled in. Where she would upgrade her dental assistant skills, and find work.

  The parking lot is almost empty now, except for the scattering of vehicles parked along the east and west ends of it, Safeway and Walmart still being open. She could buy a can of soup. When she was a kid, she’d lived on canned soup and hotdogs. The thought makes her shiver. She decides to conserve what money she has in the event Joe doesn’t return tonight, use it to call Steve in the morning, see if he’s heard from him.

  The chilly air bites through her sweater as she hurries across the parking lot hugging herself. There are several people sitting out on the apartment balconies wearing toques and heavy clothing. One of them looks to be swaddled in a blanket, like at a football game. She recalls the young men she saw earlier, dressed for summer while racing to Walmart to beat the cold. During her periods of self-help she read somewhere that you should focus on what you want and then act as though you’ve got it. Perhaps the people in Regina are trying to bring on warmer weather. You’d love the people here, they’re just so laid back and cheerful, she will write on one of the postcards to Sandra. So unfashionably positive. So far I haven’t met a single scary person. A toy city, toy people. She pictures the perfectly round-headed and brightly painted Fisher Price people, the lower half of their benign bodies being pegs designed to fit into the passenger holes in buses, cars and trains.

  When she gets near the motorhome she notices something set against the rear of it and hurries over, thinking Joe has returned. A folded-up lawn chair, she discovers, and her euphoria collapses when she realizes the Meridian remains in darkness.

  She steps inside it calling for Joe, though she knows he’s not there, then sinks down into the lounger, its leather cushions a cold jolt of reality. Just then the parking lot lights come on, flooding the dinette table and the postcards scattered across it. There’s enough light for her to see her way into the cab of the Meridian, where her fleece jacket lies on the passenger seat. She puts it on and goes back outside.

  Only feet away from the Meridian at the base of a light standard is the garbage barrel she had used earlier, a
nd she concludes someone intended to discard the lawn chair, and instead, decided to bring it to her attention. She opens it and discovers that it’s a type of lawn chair she hasn’t seen in ages. The seat has been stretched in the shape of a bowl, but the green and white plastic tubes are intact and look clean.

  She sets up the chair on one side of the Meridian steps and when she sits down in it, she fits nicely into the bowl-shaped seat. This is where Joe will find her, should he return during the night. She’ll be here watching as he comes toward her in the dark, and something inside her will fly across the space to meet him. And come up against a wall.

  For almost an hour she watches the last of the late-night shoppers straggle from Safeway, laden with bags or pushing carts of groceries they unload into trunks. Headlights sweep across her as one by one the shoppers drive away, turn onto Gibson Road and pass from sight. At her back, the traffic along Albert Street becomes sporadic, and she wonders if the nightlife of the city happens elsewhere.

  There’s a Jeep at the curb in front of an apartment on Gibson Road with a couch on its roof. She notices, too, that there are fewer people out on the balconies, and many of the apartment windows pulse with television images. She imagines herself in the bedroom of their house on Arlington Street, feet up on a towel as she exfoliates, then clips and paints her toenails, a glass of wine at her elbow while she watches Desperate Housewives, Big Love, faintly hearing the roar of the crowd when a goal is scored in the hockey game Joe and Alfred are watching on the big screen in the basement family room.

  Her routines had become life as she knew and expected it to be. The future was a distant land where there were no pension funds or savings; the meagre amount they’d set aside had been plowed back into the house to live up to the gentrification of the neighbourhood. Do not go there, Laurie cautions. She crams the future into a jar, screws the lid down tight and sets it up on her imaginary shelf near the ceiling.

  Curtains slide open on a balcony door where, earlier in the day, she saw the woman and the potted plant. A man emerges, the husband she decides, and she recalls how the woman’s dark head scarf intensified her pallid complexion. The man seems darker-skinned, and even from the distance he appears more lively and bright-faced. He squats, lifts the plant, what could be a Norfolk pine, and she notes how his white shirt glows in the shadow cast by the overhang of the balcony a floor above as he carries the plant inside.

  A jetliner rises from the airport suddenly, filling the sky just beyond Laurie where it seems to hesitate, and then, its engines screaming, ascends swiftly out of sight. The little girl in the pink gym suit comes onto the balcony and the man behind her. She points skyward and he hikes her up into his arms to give her a last glimpse of the airplane as it soars beyond the city into the eastern sky.

  Laurie recalls the dark-eyed Pakistani girl who used to live near them. How she would slip in the front door when Laurie was out in the backyard, or in the back door when she was out in the front, and leave evidence that she’d been there. An ornament had been moved from one shelf to another, a single dandelion flower set on the stairs, a skipping rope twined round the newel post halfway up to the second floor.

  It occurs to Laurie that all the while the girl lived next door, she’d never seen her in the arms of an adult. She couldn’t figure out who, among the many people living in the house, might be her parents. She may well have been a neglected child, given the way she planted evidence around Laurie’s house as proof she’d been there. Especially the flesh-coloured ball, leaving it in the bowl of a serving spoon in the cutlery drawer where Laurie would be sure to find it. The ball looked malleable, like a piece of play-dough, but it proved to be hard and rebounded high and swiftly off the sidewalk when Laurie threw it over the fence into the girl’s yard.

  Days later, Laurie was surprised to come across the ball again while uprooting the spent petunias in the veranda window boxes where it was tucked in among the leaves. It was wet and a brighter pink, as though it had just been washed. She rolled the ball between her palms, debating what to do, laughter breaking in her throat. Although the girl’s bicycle was lying on the lawn, she was nowhere to be seen.

  Laurie turned at the sound of Alfred at the door. “Over there,” he said and gestured to the girl’s running shoe on the boulevard, and she understood. With exaggerated stealth she crept up on the shoe, and much to Alfred’s amusement, tucked the ball into its toe.

  Several days later she was preparing a casserole before going to work, looked up, and there was the ball on the sill of the bay window. The angels on it had been rearranged into a circle, and at the centre was the pink ball. Nearest to it was the tallest of the angels, this being a wooden Polish angel in a flowered robe, its scalloped gold wings narrow and rising straight above its head. It was one of few angels she’d come upon that hadn’t been childlike, or a prepubescent female.

  Enough, she told herself and dried her hands, determined to go next door and ring the doorbell and make a point of returning the ball to one of the adults. She would tell them about the child prowling about the house and put a stop to it. The neighbourhood wasn’t one where doors needed to be locked when someone was home. Alfred had never caught sight of the girl in the house, had never heard her come and go. Her stealth was unsettling.

  She wasn’t sure which of the adults she should speak to, but they were all smiling people, from the distance of their yard, friendly in a way that suggested they believed it was required of them and they were making the necessary effort. Friendly enough that one of the oldest of several women who appeared to live there, once suggested to Laurie that she might want to water their outdoor planters for two weeks while they were away. The fact that the flowers were healthy and blooming briskly when they returned wasn’t mentioned, nor had she been thanked.

  Nip it in the bud, Laurie told herself but was stopped by the ringing of the telephone.

  “Do you have the television turned on?” Joe asked, his voice sharp with tension. “Don’t ask, just turn it on. And get Dad. Watch it with him.” What channel? It didn’t matter, he said, and hung up. Moments later she and Alfred watched in disbelief as the second of the World Trade Center towers collapsed. When she called Joe back, Clayton said he’d already left for home. Hours later he still hadn’t got there, and they ate dinner without him.

  That night she lay awake listening for the Explorer in the front street and hearing Alfred moving about in his room at the end of the hall. He was going over to the window, she knew, to look out into the yard to see if the Explorer was parked on the pad. Sometime later she felt his brief presence in her doorway. “Is that you, Dad?” “It’s not like Joe to be away without calling,” Alfred said, telling her what she already knew.

  With each hour Verna’s clock in the dining room seemed to tick louder, as though her ghost was telling Laurie to pay attention to the time passing. She went downstairs thinking to silence it and when she turned on the light, there was Alfred, fully clothed, sitting at the dining room table. Spread about him on the table were several boxes of chocolates he’d received from the Legion at various holidays and birthdays, which he kept locked in a cabinet only to be taken out on Sundays after dinner or as a consolation prize to whomever he defeated at cribbage. Or on the occasions when Verna’s family remembered he was still alive and paid a visit. Alfred remained silent, blinking rapidly in the sudden onslaught of light. Laurie guessed that he was regretting his miserliness with chocolates. Perhaps, in some disjointed way, he hoped to lure Joe home with them.

  Late on the second night, Joe telephoned to tell them he was in Vancouver and would return in a couple of days. He’d driven to the coast to think things through, he said. And didn’t care to say what those things might be. “I’m okay, honey. Don’t worry.” He was going to see the Lewises, Laurie had concluded. But he returned home sooner than she’d expected, unshaven, his shirt spotted with coffee, clothes rumpled from having slept in the car, and he said he hadn’t been to see them. Still, that was the beginning of
Joe’s unexplained hours of absence, his need to spend time alone, in a bar sometimes, he said, which accounted for the odour of smoke on his clothes.

  Soon after 9/11, the Pakistani family left the neighbourhood. Sometimes when Laurie went about the house she half expected to come across the flesh-coloured ball, which, ultimately, she had put in their mailbox. She wonders now where the child is, and how tall she is, and whether or not she continues to infiltrate other people’s spaces. It’s what she herself had done. She’d come to think that she’d infiltrated her young mother’s body. Her grandmother’s three-room house, and her messy life with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a trapper she’d known for years, who expected her full attention whenever he got to town. And then Laurie had taken over Joe and Alfred’s house, arranging and rearranging the rooms to leave her mark.

  The little girl in the pink sweatsuit and the man have gone inside and the curtain is now drawn across the sliding door. Then she sees him come out of the building at the main entrance below, carrying a coil of rope. He walks over to the Jeep that has the couch on the roof. He snakes a length of the rope over the couch, and with the agility of a gymnast, begins to lash it down. When he’s done, he gets in the Jeep and drives away.

  The city seems to hunker down into quiet now, and the air grows still. Although it is not as cold as it was last night, there will likely be frost again. At Safeway the lights have been dimmed and all around her the parking lot spreads out, empty of vehicles, the people vanished. She thinks of Joe and can’t imagine that he would have hitched a ride somewhere or set out on foot, can’t imagine that he would have gone to a bar and met someone, a woman, and gone home with her.