Dad and Julie were sitting at the kitchen table eating Oreos right out of the box and laughing. Julie saw my surprise, locked her eyes with mine. “What’s so funny?” I managed.
“Sit down, son, join the party.” Dad pulled a chair back. “It’s not funny, it’s just…”
“Stupid,” Julie said. And they both laughed again. I was so happy they were both happy, I didn’t care that I didn’t have a clue why.
“Julie’s friend Angie, she taught Jewel”—when Dad was feeling particularly good, he called Julie “Jewel” and me “son”—“the damndest—”
“The stupidest,” Julie said.
“Okay, the stupidest, but also the best way to eat Oreos. Get a load of this.” He picked up a can of whipped cream from the table and squirted some onto an Oreo. “Voila,” he said.
“Gross,” I said, but I was smiling.
“Go on, try one,” he said.
“No way.”
Julie took the can and made her own Oreo hors d’oeuvre.
“Okay, your loss,” he said, popping the whole thing into his mouth. Chewing while he spoke, “You might want to get used to them though,” he said. “They said it’s going to keep snowing for the rest of the day and all through the night and pretty much everything but the hospitals are closed. Who knows? We might have to live on these for the next couple days.” He laughed and licked some chocolate goop from his moustache.
Snow: it was going to snow all night, and all the dead stars in the sky that were what our sun was going to be like one day wouldn’t be visible. They’d still be there—frozen, mute, barren—but for tonight, at least, no one was going to see them.
“Even VIA is shut down,” Julie said, handing me a white cream-topped cookie. I took it but didn’t eat it. “No trains in or out.”
“For how long?” I said.
“Who cares?” Dad said. “I won’t have work and we’ve got nearly a whole can of whipped cream left.”
“Yeah, who cares, Tom?” Julie said. “Get with the program. Eat your Oreo.”
Chapter Six
Newspapers piling up on a customer’s front porch could mean a few things. Someone went away on vacation and forgot to suspend their subscription. Someone moved and neglected to do the same. Or something bad happened and today’s and yesterday’s and the previous day’s Chatham Daily News-delivered news can’t compete with the family’s very own home-grown headlines of disapointment and despair. Like when Mrs. Thompson came home from work one day after picking up her son from pre-school and discovered Mr. Thompson floating face down in the vacationing next-door neighbour’s swimming pool.
Some people said that Mr. Thompson drowning like he did—in the middle of the morning when he should have been at work, when the early May weather wasn’t really warm enough yet for swimming, in the pool of his neighbour with whom he didn’t get along because his neighbour used to complain about the Thompsons’ grass needing cutting because it attracted mosquitoes—was fishy, but the obituary in the newspaper said only that he passed away “suddenly” and that he would be deeply missed by his wife and son, his mother and father and three siblings and five nephews and nieces, and his colleagues at Aldershot Accountants, where he’d worked for eleven years.
“What was he like?” Dale said as we approached the Thompsons’ house. It was Friday and he was sleeping over so I had company while I did my route. He was sucking on an extra-long orange Mr. Freezie he’d gotten at the convenience store near CCI. Dale wasn’t allowed Mr. Freezies at home, only the frozen orange-juice pops his mother would make and keep in the big freezer they had in their basement. I’d wanted one too—the trees were beginning to bud, it was becoming Mr. Freezie weather—but after recording everything I put in my stomach, I’d come to realize that the less I had to remember and write down, the simpler my life was. Plus, Dale didn’t know about the eating and drinking chronicle I was keeping. We had our favourite sayings and teacher-nicknames journal, but he wouldn’t understand this one.
“What do you mean?” I said. I’d gotten to be a pretty good newspaper tosser—the key was concentrating on where you wanted the paper to land, not how hard you hurled it—but I walked up the Thompsons’ sidewalk and placed today’s newspaper in the mailbox. Someone had finally brought in the old copies that had started to turn yellow on the front step and I didn’t want to start that somber chain of events all over again. Unread, unfurled newspapers left to slowly rot in the sun and the rain made me sad. It was an occupational hazard of being a paper boy.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Did he seem like… I don’t know. You know.”
I wished I had some secret knowledge, some special insight into Mr. Thompson’s mind, but the truth was, Mrs. Thompson was usually the one who paid me when I collected, and I could only remember her husband being a normal-looking, normal-acting man—not too young, not too old, not too much or too little of anything—the kind of person you’d probably forget five minutes after meeting them. It didn’t seem like enough. It was the same as when people wanted to know what it was like when I’d gotten lost in the sewer and returned from the dead. It felt as if I’d be letting them down if all I told them was the truth.
“He was quiet,” I said, once we were back on the sidewalk and out of earshot.
“Oh yeah?” Dale said, pushing his Mr. Freezie up in its clear plastic wrapper with his thumb.
“Yeah.”
“What else?”
I shrugged. “There was just something about him.”
“Like what?”
I waited until I’d tossed a newspaper onto the front step of the house three doors down. “Just something. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Dale said, and tilted his head back and jammed down a length of Mr. Freezie.
“You’re going to get a Mr. Freezie headache,” I said, pitching a newspaper onto another front step.
“No I won’t.”
“Yes you will, you’ll see.”
We kept walking down Pine Street. “Maybe he didn’t even do it,” Dale said.
As awkward as it was trying to make things up about Mr. Thompson to make him sound more interesting, it felt worse thinking that he hadn’t killed himself, like when you watched a car race on TV and no one crashed.
“He did it,” I heard myself say. “In the obituary, it said he died ‘suddenly.’ That’s what people say when they really mean suicide but they don’t want to come out and say it.” I’d been talking to Julie in the hallway outside our bedrooms about Mr. Thompson—she’d briefly taken piano lessons from Mrs. Thompson when she was younger—and Angie, who was laying down on Julie’s bed with her hands behind her head, overheard us and set us straight, said that that was what happened all the time in the obituaries in the Toronto Star.
Dale finished what was left of his Mr. Freezie in one uninterrupted suck and swallow. I pulled another newspaper out of my bag and gave it a toss. Dale stopped walking and bent over, hands on his hips, groaned.
“I told you,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Dale said, doing the only thing a Mr. Freezie headache sufferer can do, rubbed his temples and waited for the pain to go away.
“I told you,” I said again.
Man Found Drowned in Next-Door Neighbour’s Swimming Pool
“I Didn’t Necessarily Want to Die, but I Didn’t Want to be Alive, Either”
ONCE HE KNEW he was going to do it—that this time, he really, really was going to do it—he felt a temporary stillness of spirit, call it an almost-calm, that had eluded him since… since he’d been him, he supposed. That dubious rumour of peace of mind he’d heard about for so long and wanted so badly finally confirmed as true, he could himself now actually corroborate in the affirmative. Too bad it took deciding to kill himself to do it.
He wouldn’t leave a note. Not that kind of note, anyway. He’d write something short f
or his wife saying he was sorry and that he loved her and that she should never for a moment blame herself, and that he loved their son more than he loved himself, as he knew she did too, which was why she had to be strong and raise him right for both of them. Tell him I was unhappy and that now I’m not. And don’t let him believe he had anything to do with it.
Which was a lie, which wasn’t, which was why he wasn’t going to leave a note. Explain what? Your life? Your pathetic body, your tangled brain, your poisoned past, your empty present, your nervous future? Your loveless parents, your niggling siblings, your (at best) oblivious spouse, your grasping (if naturally forgiven) child, the idiot people you work with, the annoying people who live next door? His mind was an upside-down telescope: you could see what was there, you just couldn’t make out what it was. And you get tired of straining your eye looking, always looking. Look too long and squint and strain too hard, and the eye grows as confused as the instrument.
The eye becomes the instrument; I, me, mine all of the time (religion and well-meaning fool philosophers regardless) and all of us so important to ourselves. Not even an exception for that superlative self-denier, the suicidal. Self-hate is self-love disenchanted. My sour mood the world’s sulky Weltanschauung; feeling a little gassy today, ergo everyone is full of hot angry air.
No telescopic inversion resulting in exasperating meaning-loss blurriness or scornful soul shadows when you’re asleep, though. And notice how easily a puffed-out ego is expertly punctured empty by a good long nap. The blaze of selfhood instantly extinguished with a mere forty winks. One brave moment and then an eternity of consciousness-cooling slumber.
Brave? A gun or a rope or a tall bridge would be brave. Efficient and resolute: estimable quasi-ethical compensation for the leftover corporal mess. But a failure even as a fucking suicide. Softness—he craved softness, it had to be soft. Like his will. Like his intellect. Like his life. Forgive me.
He’d wait until his wife was at work and his son was at pre-school and when the family next door was away on vacation. As soon as his house was empty and he was alone, he’d put on his swim trunks and swallow the sleeping pills and let himself into the neighbour’s fenced-in backyard (he remembered how you had to raise yourself up on tip-toe and stick your hand over the wooden gate and feel for the latch) and step into the shallow end and slowly submerge up to his shoulders in the chilly water and wait for… what? He didn’t know, but he knew that he’d understand.
He did.
~
School in the spring was hard. Sometimes you’d be sitting there trying to do the right thing—keep your eyes on the front of the classroom and your running shoes flat on the floor underneath your desk and listen to Mr. Brown talk about how the Family Compact in Upper Canada and the Château Clique in Lower Canada were the same shady thing, only different—but your eyes would drift in the direction of the window and the gushing green everything outside or the back of Kerri Hoffman’s long white neck and your feet would cha-cha-cha all on their own and it was never as nice and sunny out in 1831 as it was today. History was black and white and everyone dressed funny and no one ever had to go to the bathroom.
“Yes, Tom?”
“Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Sure.” I stood up. “As soon as you tell us what changed with the institution of responsible government.” Everybody laughed, including Mr. Brown, so I laughed too. It wasn’t like when, in English class the year before, I had to read aloud from our mythology textbook and mispronounced “Zeus,” the father of the Greek gods, as “Zaius,” the head orangutan on the Planet of the Apes. We were less than two months away from the end of the school year so I could take a joke.
“Okay,” I said, “but I can’t be held responsible for what might happen if it takes too long.” I got an even bigger laugh than Mr. Brown, but he didn’t mind, was in a good mood all the time these days, ever since the Ontario Heritage Foundation had made that offer to help pay for the incorporation of Harrison Hall into the mall developer’s plans.
“Basically,” I said, still standing at my desk, “responsible government meant that the men who controlled the business, the politics, and the religion of both Upper and Lower Canada weren’t in charge anymore because people got to vote for the people they wanted, so it wasn’t just rich people who were friends with each other who ran things.”
“Things were democratized, yes, very good. The citizens began to decide what was best for themselves, not the plutocracy. Now off you go before I have to tell the janitor to stand by with his bucket and mop.” Everybody laughed again, but it was alright, we were just having fun.
Plutocracy. Mr. Brown was always working words you didn’t know into sentences full of words you understood, so it never seemed like he was trying to be a big shot, or that he was trying to get you to learn something. The words sounded weird, but normal weird, like the names of the planets until you heard them repeated enough that they became normal, were just the names of the planets. There were dictionaries at the back of most classrooms and, unlike when you wanted to take a leak, you didn’t have to ask permission to get up and use one. Plutocracy. I’d look it up when I got back from the bathroom.
A deliveryman had propped open one of the glass doors and forgot to close it after he was done. All you could see was blacktop and a little bit of blue sky, but it smelled warm and soft and alive out there. The sound of busy lathes whirred from Mr. Laidlaw’s shop class down the hall. I went to the washroom and tried to pee, but I had a hard-on and couldn’t, and I hadn’t even been thinking about Kerri Hoffman’s neck or any other girl’s anything. The more I tried to pee, the worse it got—my dick got harder and nothing came out and it actually started to hurt. I quit trying and zipped up and walked back to class. Someone had shut the glass door so the hallway didn’t smell like anything now but chalk and floor cleaner and sour milk.
Mr. Brown was talking about the Rebellions of 1837-38 when I sat back down. A few minutes later, my hard-on had disappeared and now I had to pee again, only this time ten times as much as before. I knew I couldn’t ask to go to the bathroom again, so I tried to concentrate on what he was saying and not to look at the clock and waited for the bell to set me free. It wasn’t until class was finally over and I was almost done peeing that I realized I’d forgotten to look up that word Mr. Brown had said. And now I’d forgotten it.
Elementary School Industrial Arts Teacher Dries Out
“It Was the Right Thing to Do. I Really Had No Other Choice. It Was the Right Thing to Do.”
LACKING A HANGOVER to attend to, he found himself at loose ends.
He got his teeth cleaned—a plaquey mess and a mouth full of rinse-and-spit-please gingivitis, but only two cavities and one slightly cracked molar, not bad for seven years between visits. He went to an optometrist and discovered he was slightly near-sighted and was prescribed a pair of glasses for when he was driving. Who knew he wasn’t seeing everything that was there? On a roll now, he made an appointment for a complete physical, something that would have been unimaginable a year ago, and was surprised and pleased to learn that—an understandably slightly enlarged liver aside—his biggest health concerns were a moderately high cholesterol count and an oddly shaped mole on his back. The mole was removed and declared benign and he was advised to cut down on greasy food and to work some cardiovascular activity into his schedule. He certainly couldn’t say he didn’t have the time now.
He could have decided to stop drinking when he awoke for work virtually every morning with a headache and a queasy stomach and a short temper. It could have been when the school principal—not just a colleague, but someone he considered a friend—asked him into his office and told him that what he did on his own time was his own business, and God knows he liked to have a good time as much as the next guy, but he simply couldn’t have him show up at school smelling of alcohol, it just couldn’t happen. It could have been when his wife finally took their
three children and moved into her sister and brother-in-law’s house and said she wouldn’t even consider coming back unless he joined AA and quit for good. It could have—should have—been any of these things; in truth, it took all of them. His health, his job, his family. He liked to drink—he liked to drink until the day he stopped; had all along kept drinking and hoping that there was a way he could somehow hold it all together and still keep drinking—but he wasn’t so wet-brained that he couldn’t see how this particular story was going to end up. Better a boring movie without much plot and unconvincing acting than no movie at all.
So he quit.
And remembered what it was like to sit in the backyard and do nothing but listen to the breeze in the trees. To watch the seasons change. To have a 32-inch waist again. To take the kids camping and laugh that none of them caught any fish. To remember that his wife made the best key lime pie he’d ever tasted. To lie on the living room couch in the afternoon and savour the gurgling coffee maker’s serene domestic music; the dog scratching her ear, shaking her collar; the mailman’s steps on the porch; the refrigerator reliably coming on and going off and coming back on; the reassurance of his wife’s voice when she answered one of the children’s questions.
So what was missing?
Never an escape drinker, it wasn’t the soothing illusion at the bottom of a glass. He hadn’t been to a bar in years—the music (disco!), the smoke, the sex chatter—and there weren’t any fellow imbibing enablers he missed, he’d always preferred to drink alone, in the dark, in his easy chair, when the house was asleep. All he’d ever wanted from life was what he got—to be married, to have kids, to be a teacher—so no booze was required to fool him into feeling right about how things had turned out.
So what was missing?
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