“There were all these problems we didn’t know about when we bought it,” I said.
“What, like the plumbing? You should have talked to my dad. He can fix anything that’s wrong with somebody’s plumbing.” We were sitting in the last row, the two seats between us occupied by our gym bags.
“It wasn’t just the plumbing. It was also, I don’t know, the roof and all sorts of stuff. Tons of stuff.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“But you got your money back and everything, right?”
“Oh, yeah. My dad made sure we got all our money back. And then some.”
And then some? I’d officially gone beyond mere deception and was now fabricating entirely new untruths.
“That’s cool,” she said.
“Yeah.”
The woman with the paperback rang the bell and the bus stopped and she got off and no one else got on. It was just the bus driver and me and Allison with her basketball in her lap.
“I just remembered something,” I said. “On Happy Days, Ritchie and Joanie had a brother in the first season and then he disappeared and no one ever talked about him.”
“What?”
“Yeah. He was always bouncing a basketball, even in the house.”
“I think I kind of remember…”
“Chuck!” I shouted.
We were stopped at a red light and the bus driver looked back at us over his shoulder.
In a normal speaking voice this time, “Chuck,” I said. “His name was Chuck.”
“That’s right,” Allison said. “I remember now.”
“Right? Chuck and his basketball.”
The light turned green and we were moving again.
“What do you think happened to him do you think?” Allison said.
I shrugged. “I guess they figured three kids was too many so they just cut his part.”
“But they didn’t explain it or anything in the show. It was like he was there one minute and gone the next.”
“Maybe they figured it was just easier that way, not having to explain it. What were they going to say? That he died or something?”
“I guess that would be sort of weird,” she said.
“Like someone says he died fighting in Korea and then Ralph Mouth tells Potsie to sit on it.”
“That would be weird. It wouldn’t fit.”
“Exactly.”
Allison slapped her basketball and laughed and shook her head.
Lez. Dyke. Homo. Whoever she wanted to kiss and whatever else she was, Allison was Allison.
The bus pulled into the station. Every time you got off downtown now it was surprising how loud the cranes and jackhammers and pounding and drilling were, sounds that didn’t seem so bad when you were used to hearing them all the time. There were walls missing and half of the roof wasn’t built yet, but the mall had started to look like what it was going to be when it grew up.
Allison and I walked together without talking until we came to the Cenotaph, where I would go my way and she would go hers.
“Okay, see you,” she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder.
“See you.”
The machines and the banging and the drilling got quieter the closer I got to home. I opened the door to Dad’s shop and the bell tinkled and I smelled the medical soap he used on his clients and I shut the door behind me and then there wasn’t any more noise.
Woman Reads Paperback Book by Deceased Author
“I’d Never Heard of It Or Even the Author Before, But It Was Only $1.50”
SHE READ A book by a dead man and here’s what didn’t happen:
The dead man didn’t make a dime—the dead man hadn’t done anything but rot for more than a decade, and an eight percent royalty rate on a $2.95 paperback wasn’t on eternity’s agenda. Besides, she’d bought the book in the dark and damp back room of a Chatham junkshop, the popular books—the romances, the thrillers, the true crime—in the brighter and slightly less dank front, it and a handful of rarely disturbed others segregated in the rear of the shop under the slightly ominous sign LITERATURE.
The dead man didn’t end up knowing that he hadn’t wasted his life. Sure there were moments when he’d teemed with inspiration and exhilaration; brimmed with bruising purpose and inviolable faith; not just felt but known that what he was doing was good and mattered and would last. Sixty minutes in an hour, though, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, fifty-two weeks in a year: there are a lot of godamn moments. Plenty of time left over to not spend enough time with your children, to not try harder with your difficult mother, to not take the time to tell your wife how pretty she looks, to not be the brother you could be, to not bother to vote, to not help a friend, to not to not to not, a lifetime of brooding nots all because of THE BOOK, because I’ve got to get back to work on THE BOOK, because I need to be alone so I can concentrate on THE BOOK. A half-lived life littered with vacations never taken, minor-league hockey games not attended, promises not kept. A child waiting to play catch with his dad until he eventually realizes his father is never going to show up.
The dead man didn’t act as the conscience of his age. He was neither the acknowledged nor the unacknowledged legislator of the world. The dead man’s name was not commonly remembered. He didn’t even make it out of his own country, a Canadian author writing a book set in Canada published by a Canadian publisher. And now his book was a Chatham Public Library discard picked up by a junk dealer for a quarter and resold at half the list price.
A woman read a book by a dead man, that was all. It was a good book, too—she had taste, could tell a dead phrase and a calcified cliché from the hard crunch of a crisp image and a sparkling insight—and after she’d finished it she decided, in spite of the limited shelf space she had in her small apartment, to keep it, to make it a part of her personal library. She even thought she might reread it one day. It deserved it. Good books, after all, are rare.
~
This time there wasn’t any snowstorm to save us. It was cold but clear the night before Julie and Angie’s train was scheduled to leave for Toronto, nothing in the sky but a bright white moon and even brighter stars. That night in bed I turned the dial on my transistor radio hoping for an encouragingly discouraging weather report—a gathering storm, an unexpected snow squall blowing in from somewhere, anywhere—but all I got was good reception and bad news: only a ten percent chance of precipitation, and even then merely—maybe—freezing rain. In the process I couldn’t help but pick up snippets of the news as well, the lead story wherever the dial ended up being the International Court of Justice unanimously demanding the release of the American hostages in Iran and rejecting the Iranian position that the case could not be considered in isolation from the activities of the US in Iran over the last quarter-century.
I switched off the radio and put it on my nightstand, but couldn’t fall asleep. I thought it might have been because of the light from the moon and the stars that managed to slip past the window blind, but even after I hung a blanket over top of it and the room was darker I still couldn’t sleep. I thought about doubling up the blankets, but somehow I knew it wouldn’t matter, the light would still get in. There was nothing to do but pretend it wasn’t there.
Chapter Thirteen
“Let’s go, Tom, you’re going to be late, I’m not coming up here again” with a rat-tat-tat of knuckle applied to the bedroom door for an I’m-not-kidding-around emphasis. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Dreams were never this boring. Often confusing, sometimes scary, dreams—unlike wide-awake life—were rarely boring. Life was frequently all three at once. This morning, for instance.
Dad’s continuing bad mood had worked to Julie’s benefit: I’d hoped that the threat of him insisting on talking to Angie’s parents before agreeing to let Julie spend the weekend at their house super-studying
would have been enough of a bluff that Julie would have to fold her hand and be content to celebrate the end of exams in Chatham. But Dad didn’t insist. Looked up from his sports page only long enough for Julie to explain every meticulously manufactured detail of why it was a good idea for her to hibernate at Angie’s house for the greater academic good and how there was nothing to worry about since she’d only be across town and it was only for a couple nights, then said, “Okay, call if anything comes up, and no screwing around, you’re there to study, good luck” and that was that. Dad wasn’t angry anymore about the building being sold to someone else; Dad was sad. I liked it better when he was angry.
Breakfast wasn’t my first truth test of the weekend that I needed to cheat my way through only because there wasn’t any breakfast—not with Dad, anyway, who these days was given to taking a cup of coffee with him down to the shop even though it didn’t open until eleven. I ate by myself and wrote down what I ate and was relieved to think that by the time school was done for the day and I was finished delivering the evening newspaper it would be dinnertime and Julie and Angie’s train would have arrived in Toronto and night number one would be well underway, and if I managed to make it through supper I could stay in my room for the rest of the night and probably get by with nothing more than a Goodnight to Dad. Not telling the truth wasn’t as bad as telling a lie.
It was the last day of school before Christmas vacation so it should have been easy to have fun. There was the Secret Santa gift exchange during the period before lunch. There was an assembly in the gym at the end of the day that would eat up two entire classes where all you had to do was sing Christmas carols and not talk too much to the people sitting next to you between songs. And it was Friday, the second best TV night (after Saturday) of the week and an excellent way to inaugurate two full weeks of no school. Before fourteen days of doing whatever I wanted, however, two nights and three days of doing what I promised Julie I would do.
I got the three-pack of blank cassette tapes I’d asked for from Dale; I gave James the book of Lifesavers which he immediately began to gobble; I sang “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bell Rock”—all of it while never not wondering how I was going to get away with living alone with Dad for the next 72 hours without making him suspicious. I went home and got my bag and delivered Friday’s newspaper under a black-and-blue sky that was a bruise that was never going to heal. By 5:30 my bag was empty and there wasn’t anything left to do but return home. Forget 72 hours, there was no way I was going to make it through supper. I began to work out my apology strategy on the slow retreat home: I didn’t know. I knew but I had nothing to do with it. I was part of it but only because Julie made me. Every explanation sounded phonier than the last. How can you hope to get away with a lie when even you don’t believe it?
Dad was straining spaghetti in the sink when I came into the kitchen. We didn’t eat take-out food or get delivery anymore. Now we ate a lot of spaghetti.
“Get the salad dressing and the bread if you want it,” he said. “It’s almost ready.”
I wasn’t used to the absence of his ordinarily grumpy geniality or his new shorthand speech, but I knew it wasn’t about me or anything I’d done. When Mom left he’d assured Julie and me that he loved us both just as much as he did before and that what had happened between Mom and him had nothing to do with us, that people could act and feel a certain way all by themselves and it didn’t mean someone else had done anything to make them feel that way. Anyway, I knew things were going to get better once the mall was completed. Because of increased property values we might not have been taking possession of a new home and Dad wasn’t going to have a new shop, but there was no stopping every downtown business from benefiting from the revamped and reenergized downtown. The mall might taketh, but the mall also giveth.
He served the pasta and Ragu onto our plates and placed the bowl of salad on the table and we sat down. Before he could pick up his fork, “Did you do that or me?” he said.
I put down my fork. “What? Did what?” Busted already, and I hadn’t said five words.
Dad picked up Julie’s bottle of red wine vinegar. “I must have. Habit, I guess.” He set it back down and used the wooden tongs to put some salad on my plate, then his. He poured Thousand Island dressing on his salad and handed me the bottle.
“I guess we’ll have to get used to this next year,” he said.
I was already on my third forkful of spaghetti. I figured that the more often my mouth was full, the less likely it was I’d say something incriminating. Swallowing, “What?”
“What do you mean What? Your sister being away at university in Toronto and it being just the two of us eating dinner every night.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, It’ll just be us.” I made up for lost eating time by shoveling down two successive forkfuls of salad.
Dad looked at me like he was about to ask me if I was all right, but twirled a clump of spaghetti on the end of his fork instead. If only we could keep eating for the next three days straight everything would be fine.
The phone rang and Dad said “They can’t wait until you finally sit down, can they?” and I knew it wasn’t one of those questions that the other person expected you to answer, and he got up and answered it and said hello like he was really saying What the hell do you want?
Pause. “Oh, hi, Mr. Hudson.” His voice softened. Mr. Hudson was our landlord. “Good, good,” he said. “Right.” Pause. “Okay.” Longer pause. “Okay, but—” Pause. “Mr. Hudson, listen—” Pause. “Look,” he said, sounding like he had when he’d answered the phone, “have you ever had to ask me for a rent cheque or have I ever asked you to do anything around here? You know I’ve always taken care of things myself.” I put down my fork and watched my Dad with his back to me talking to the kitchen wallpaper, his nose a couple of inches from the wall. “That’s right, and I—” Pause. “It is the point.” Pause. “No, it is the point if—” Pause. “Well, that’s unacceptable.” Pause. “We’ll see about that.” Pause. “Yeah, well, we’ll see about that too.”
Dad hung up, but instead of sitting back down to dinner went to the cupboard and got a glass and turned on the tap and poured himself a glass of water which he drank standing up at the counter.
“What’s going on, Dad?”
He poured himself another glass and drank it the same way. He put the glass in the sink and turned around, smiling like someone with a gun to their temple who’s been instructed to look happy. “Nothing you need to worry about, pal.”
“What did Mr. Hudson want?”
Dad grabbed his napkin and wiped the Ragu off his beard. “Do you think you can do your dad a big favour?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think you can finish your dinner and do the dishes and dry them by yourself?
“Sure.”
“Thanks, buddy,” he said, mussing my hair as he left the room. “I have to go out for a few hours, so don’t worry if I’m not back by the time you go to sleep, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Thanks, pal,” he said and grabbed his coat in the hallway and was out the front door, which I heard him lock behind him.
Of course I was worried. On the other hand, it didn’t sound like he was going to be worrying about Julie tonight. And that couldn’t be a bad thing.
Waitress at Local Tavern Despises Drunkards
“Men Are Awful Enough All By Themselves, They Don’t Need Anything That Makes Them Even Worse”
SOMETIMES, IF SHE had had the means and knew for certain that no one would find out, she honestly felt as if she could poison them. Some of them, anyway. No, not all of them, but some of them.
Slinging beers backed with double shots of Canadian Club at the Merrill Tavern and waitressing the breakfast shift at Jeanie’s Place was the difference between darkness and light, oblivion and renewal, forgetfulness and hope. The sa
me number of hours on your feet perhaps, the same lousy wages and lousier long-term prospects, possibly even the very same customers sitting in the seats, but the one was death and other one was life. And it’s not stale hyperbole when your father was an alcoholic sonofabitch whose idea of a fun Saturday night was beating the shit of your mother and coming to visit you and your sister when the lights went out.
She didn’t drink, never had—how could she?—and she didn’t like being around people who did, but six shifts a week at Jeanie’s and five more at the Merrill and there was usually the same amount of money coming in every month as there needed to be going out. When she’d get back from the bar at one o’clock in the morning and send the sitter home and quietly open the bedroom door and see Rebecca asleep and safe and perfect in her bed, it was worth it, all of it was worth it. She’d take a long, hot shower and make herself a cup of orange pekoe and smoke a final cigarette and begin to feel okay. Then she’d check on Rebecca one last time and go to her own bedroom and make sure the alarm was set for quarter to six and fall immediately to sleep, too exhausted to dream.
The forever three Fs of the ancient idiot art of weekend whoop-whoop: forgetting, flirting, fighting, and on a good night, all three at once, although hell to pay for someone if the result at the end of the evening is 0 for 3 come closing time. Might be the person they chose to come with (in ten years of waitressing, how many fights between friends did she have to break up?), maybe it’s someone they’re going home to (she wouldn’t allow herself to think about that), it could be their waitress, who’s only doing her job (“I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough to drink, you don’t tell me, bitch”), but someone has to suffer. That’s what drunks do. Sometimes, if she had had the means and knew for certain that no one would find out, she honestly felt as if…
Like this clown, all tattoos and biker beard and black leather vest sitting and drinking by himself as far away from anybody else as he can get. Men who go to bars to get drunk alone are not, as a rule, happy people. And unhappy people live to make everyone around them unhappy too. She’d been doing this long enough to know to keep an eye on this one. 10:22 pm: she’d be home in less than three hours and tomorrow she had the whole day off and would take Rebecca to the movies and afterwards Dairy Queen. Just think about tomorrow.
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