When my father finally looked up from the linoleum, his expression wasn’t anything I either expected (pinched-lipped, furrow-browed anger) or Julie was hoping for (panicky, scrambling acquiescence); instead, he just looked old and tired. And sad. Sad that somehow we’d betrayed him. He walked by us without speaking into the living room with his newspaper. We heard him turn on the TV. The weather man was talking about a snowstorm.
“You could have said something, you know,” Julie said. “You didn’t have to just sit there like a little idiot.”
“Why would I say anything? I’m not the one who wants to go to Toronto.”
“God,” she said, crossing her arms again, this time for my benefit. “You are such a little idiot.”
“I know what you are, but what am I?”
“Real original, Tom. Real original.”
I looked at the mushy mess in my bowl. If you didn’t eat Raisin Bran quickly enough, it turned into a soggy disaster. I wondered whether I should write down what I had managed to eat, and if so, how to record it? As a quarter bowl? A fifth? Without using a hanging scale like they had at A&P to weigh your fruit and vegetables, it would be impossible to tell for certain. What was I supposed to do, scrape my uneaten cereal into a plastic bag and take it to the grocery store so I could weigh it? As ridiculous as that sounded, if I didn’t write down exactly what I’d eaten as opposed to some eye-balled approximation, what was the point of writing down anything at all?
“Look at that,” Julie said, looking at me as I contemplated the bowl. “You’re not even hungry. You’ve wasted all that food. God. Who eats cereal after dinner?”
I nudged my spoon through the congealing flakes; gave up, left it sticking up in the bowl.
“Julie?” I said.
“What?” she snapped.
“Why are you mad at me?”
We’d learned in science class about the paradox of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, but now I knew what Mr. Bennett was talking about. Dad was Dad and what he said went, but Julie did what Julie wanted to do. This was rarely a problem, either at home or at school, as she usually only wanted what was right and respectable—to get along with Dad and me, to be a good student, to consider her long-term future and to make her decisions accordingly. But whether or not what she thought was right was deemed as such by anybody else didn’t really matter. It was like the time she burned her draft card.
When I was five years old and she was ten, Julie decided she was going to burn her draft card to protest the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. That we were Canadians and that Julie was a ten-year-old girl who didn’t have a draft card to burn didn’t matter. She confiscated one of my hockey card doubles and hand printed then pasted onto it what information she imagined a draft card might contain (her name, address, phone number, birthday, the name of her school and what grade she was in) before setting it on fire on the front porch of our house on Vanderpark Drive for the whole neighbourhood to see. When our mother caught her with the book of matches and the charred remains of what was once Jerry “King Kong” Korab’s O-Pee-Chee 1971-72 hockey card, she pleaded her right to free speech as protected under the first amendment all the way to her bedroom, where she was sentenced to spend the remainder of the afternoon.
I knew that cautioning Julie about the hazards of going to Toronto without Dad’s okay or the more general danger of hanging out with Angie would be less than useless—would likely only make her even more committed to following her conscience—but I needed to say, to do, something. She was in the bathroom with the door open, getting ready in front of the mirror for her evening shift at Dairy Queen. It was hard to imagine anyone wanting an ice-cream cone or a milkshake when it was cold and dark and snowing, but Julie was brushing the lint off her yellow polyester uniform as if it were important whether or not the teenager taking orders and making change behind the counter was fluff-free. The lint roller was Mom’s; not as sticky as it should have been, but still around after all these years and still, apparently, getting the job done.
“When’s the last time you talked to her?” I said, leaning against the bathroom door frame.
Looking at herself in the mirror, Julie exhaled through her nose with exaggerated annoyance. Look how put-out grown-up I am, it said.
“Who? When’s the last time I spoke to whom, Tom?”
Since her threat to phone Mom, we both knew there was no other her I could have been referring to, but Julie had recently become aware of the proper grammatical use of the pronoun whom and couldn’t resist a chance to parade its proper usage. Like the way she’d taken to ending sentences with the name of her interlocutor, or the concoction of red wine vinegar she now employed for her iceberg lettuce-and-tomato salad instead of the Thousand Island dressing we’d always used, I suspected Angie’s influence. I wished she’d never moved to Chatham. Why couldn’t she have stayed in Toronto where she belonged?
“Mom,” I said. “Obviously. Duh.”
Julie shook her head a couple of exasperated, oh-so adult times and concentrated on the job at hand, carefully running the lint roller down her right arm.
“At Christmas,” she said. “The same as you, Tom.”
“So you haven’t been, like, talking to her all the time about stuff?”
“Which is it: do you want to know if I have been like talking to her, or if I’ve actually been talking to her?”
I ignored her linguistic nit-picking, which I thought was rather adult of me, and said, “You wouldn’t really go, would you? To Mom’s, I mean.”
Julie began pulling pieces of hair and lint free from the roller which she let float to freedom in the sink. “Why shouldn’t I? She is our mother. And this way he”—she said he like Dad was the villain in the Superman movie—“wouldn’t have anything to get uptight about, I’d be doing what he’s so obsessed with, staying with an adult.”
“Yeah, but…”
“But what?” She attacked the arm of her uniform anew with the roller.
“But it’s… ”
“But it’s what? Spit it out, Tom.”
“It’s not an adult. It’s Mom.”
Julie looked at the roller like she was daring it to talk back; smacked it down on the bathroom countertop and pushed pass me. Maybe she’s thinking twice about what she’s going to do, I thought. Maybe I got her to reconsider. And maybe I didn’t know when to say who and when to say whom, but I felt pretty damn grown-up myself.
It was a weeknight, but I needed to try to collect from one of my customers, Ms. Davis, who wasn’t just punctual about paying me every Saturday afternoon but who’d tipped me two dollars at Christmas and always asked me how I was doing at school. She was a black lady who lived by herself and worked at the hospital, and she hadn’t been home for two straight Saturdays. If someone was too sick to stop their subscription or pay up, a member of the family usually stepped in and took care of things. I liked Ms. Davis—she was nice and her house always smelled liked she’d just vacuumed—and I didn’t want to see all of those unread newspapers piling up on her porch, but I had to go, I needed to get paid. After I’d peed and washed my hands, I’d walk out with Julie on her way to Dairy Queen.
Before I could close the bathroom door, though, Julie was back. She had a roll of scotch tape in her hand and a smile on her face.
“Mom taught me this,” she said, peeling off several inches. “I’d forgotten all about it.” She looped the piece in two and dabbed at the parts of her uniform that hadn’t been cleaned to her satisfaction.
“See?” she said, showing me the messy evidence on the tape. “Sometimes it just takes a little ingenuity to get the job done, Tom.”
Well-Liked Chatham General Hospital Employee Now a Long-Term Chatham General Hospital Patient Herself
“Now That I Have the Life I Always Wanted, I’m Alive But No Longer Living”
SHE USED TO do th
ings.
Be the first person in her family to graduate from college, for one, St. Clair College Class of 1974 with a diploma in respiratory therapy and a job at Chatham General Hospital immediately after graduation, just like Mr. Washington, her John McGregor High School guidance counsellor, predicted. With her first pay cheque from her new job she bought him a Danish Scandi-knit winter cardigan ordered over the phone, 1-800 from Toronto—the poor man sniffled his way through every winter, so thin and so worried-looking all the time—in appreciation for all of his assistance in helping her get the right grades (solid Bs) in the courses (biology, chemistry, calculus) necessary for admittance into St. Clair’s highly respected program. It wasn’t just the glossy college brochures he pushed on her to take home and look at (and that eventually, in boring classes like English or history, she’d look at over and over again inside the book she pretended to be reading) or the exam-time pep talks he gave her or his help getting her a Saturday afternoon job volunteering at the Red Cross blood drive to plump up her resume.
It wasn’t only what he did, it was also—and maybe this more than anything else—who he was: a Coloured person who didn’t say “ain’t” but did have an office with his name on the door; who didn’t swear every other sentence but did have a university education; who didn’t just live somewhere but owned his own house and called everyone he met, even if they were just a student like herself, Mr. or Mrs. or Ms.; who didn’t own a television but who did have a complete collection of not only the Encyclopedia Britannica but all eleven volumes of something called The History of Western Civilization, and not because he had to have them for his job, but because he wanted to read them. She loved her mother and her brothers and sisters and even the father she couldn’t remember, and if “Black is Beautiful” never sounded quite right—sounded, no other word for it, rude—she was proud of the colour of her skin and the people of Colour she knew about from books (like Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks and Dr. King) who made her want to work hard to be a better person and have a better life than the people whom she loved. But Mr. Washington did what black squiggles on a white page couldn’t—was a walking, talking reason to be proud of who she was and to keep moving forward toward who she wanted to be. She was. She did. In time, she was that too.
And so what if she loved Mr. Washington? And so what if he—although, of course, like her, never saying it or showing it because he was her teacher and she was his twenty-years-younger student and it would be wrong, wrong wrong wrong—loved her? When love is what love should be—I am because of only you only ever wholly me—it doesn’t need to be spoken or shown or consecrated by the government. Her sister had three children with three different men, two of whom she was (however briefly) married to; was what she’d had more real, more right, than what she and Mr. Washington shared? Mr. Washington never married, and so neither would she. People—her sister, her brothers, the world—were all sex-mad anyway. Virginity was no secret shame. Pure heart, pure life.
And now that now was finally now—she had a wonderful job to go to and a lovely little house to come home to and a handful of worthy charities and church work and friends to keep her mind clean and clear, now she couldn’t go to the bathroom by herself. Now she—twenty-four-year-old old she—needed a new liver or she was going to die. She—who’d never drunk alcohol in her life because three of her siblings were unrepentant alcoholics—had suffered acute liver failure brought on by autoimmune hepatitis and now lay in a private hospital room at Chatham General, no less, watching people she knew do their jobs like she used to while wishing she had something useful to occupy herself with other than hoping someone young and healthy died in a car crash so that she could have their healthy liver. So that she could have a twenty-five percent chance of staying alive for another year or so.
Mr. Washington heard about her condition from another ex-student and came to the hospital to visit, but she was asleep and he didn’t want to disturb her. He came again the following week and the nurse at the desk said that that there had been bleeding in Ms. Davis’ gastrointestinal tract and that she was in emergency surgery. Did he want to leave a message for her?
He didn’t know what he wanted to say—he’d only wanted to drop in and say hello—but, Yes, he said. It wouldn’t seem right not to.
He wrote that he hoped she would be feeling better soon and that he remembered how hard she worked in high school once she set her mind to the task and that he knew that she would work just as hard now during her successful recovery.
She never read it.
~
“If you say anything—anything—to Dad to make him freak out, I’m serious, I’ll never talk to you again, Tom, I won’t have a brother anymore.”
“He’s going to freak out anyway when he finds out that you’re gone.”
“No he won’t. I’m leaving him a letter that explains everything. He won’t find it until I’m on the train to Toronto.”
“No letter is going to keep him from going nuclear.”
“Don’t you worry about that. You just make sure you don’t say anything.”
It wasn’t snowing the morning of the afternoon Julie’s train left for Toronto. And when it did begin to snow, it was only steady flurries, it didn’t seem like the start of a full-blown snowstorm. But each blizzard begins the same way. Buried underneath every avalanche is the very first snowflake.
It started to snow during first period English. It began to snow harder and the sky to change from gym-sock white to old wool sock grey during second period, geography. By the end of third period, math, Mr. Cole gave up trying to teach us about integers and joined us as we watched the world outside the window become erased in sky-belching white and listened to the wind warn us not to go outside. Recess was cancelled, and rumours of the school shutting down and everyone getting to go home early dominated lunch. Ten minutes into the afternoon’s first class, the announcement came over the intercom that because of the storm, school was closing and foot-commuter students should begin their way home immediately and the buses for the students who came in from the country would be arriving shortly. We were in history, Mr. Brown’s class, and he came to my desk and told me he had to stick around until the school was empty, so to stay where I was, it shouldn’t be too long.
School being cancelled was obviously the big news, but Mr. Brown conferring with me about our departure time got some attention too. I didn’t hide the fact that I got a ride home from him most nights, but I didn’t brag about it either, not like Harry Martin did about how his dad the chiropractor played golf all the time with our principal, Mr. Yates. No one said anything, but I could tell from the looks I got after Mr. Brown went back to his desk that they weren’t looking at me the same way. I pretended I didn’t notice. I was used to people thinking they knew things about me. At least I knew that this thing was true. This was probably how celebrities felt all the time, I thought.
We drove home our usual way, but that was the only thing that was the same. We went slow—although after awhile it didn’t feel like it because everyone else was traveling at the same reduced speed—and Mr. Brown would pump his brakes long before he wanted to stop. I’d thought the streets would be chaos, like in a Godzilla movie when everyone’s in a panic to escape the city and the monster, but even though the schools and the factories and most everything else were closed or closing, people still obeyed the rules of the road and were letting other people into traffic ahead of them more often than usual, and with big exaggerated hand gestures and even the occasional thumbs-up. There were already a few cars marooned by the side of the road, their skid marks long erased, but there were also people whose cars were still running who were standing with the disabled cars’ owners and waiting with them for help, or else the stranded cars were locked-up and abandoned, someone having rescued their distressed drivers and delivered them home. I had imagined that people would be scared and panicky nasty, but it seemed as if they were especially helpful a
nd sort of excited.
You could only see the road clearly for a moment, in the instant after the wiper made its pass over the windshield and before it popped back up to do it again the other way. It was almost better not being able to see; to see how hard it was sideways snowing and blowing and how little of anything else was visible. I looked at Mr. Brown peering hard though the windshield like he couldn’t find what he was looking for. He pushed his glasses up his nose and I wondered how bad his eyesight really was. The squeak pause squeak, squeak pause squeak of the windshield wiper and the blowing dash heater were the only sounds inside the car. “It’s really coming down,” I said.
Mr. Brown flipped on his turn signal although there wasn’t anyone behind us. “I’ve never seen it go up,” he said.
We both laughed, and I knew we were going to make it home okay.
What I’d find when I got there was what I was worried about now. How angry would Dad be? What would I say if he asked me what I knew, how long I knew it, why I hadn’t said anything? I pictured policemen in the kitchen, I wondered if Dad was going to follow her to Toronto, I didn’t want to think about what would happen if he found her.
The shop was closed, just as I expected, and I stomped my feet at the bottom of the stairs several times and climbed them as slowly as I could and still be actually moving. I listened for yelling or weeping or voices I didn’t recognize. The kitchen radio was on—a weather update, of course—and I pictured Dad discovering Julie’s note and rushing out of the house without shutting it off. I dropped my Adidas bag and started taking off my coat.
“Tom? We’re in here,” I heard Dad say.
He didn’t sound too upset. Maybe whoever was with him—Angie’s parents? A sympathetic cop?—had convinced him that Julie was okay, that she’d be back before too long. I’d still need to explain my bystander role in her escape, though. “Be right there,” I shouted from the hallway.
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