by Leo McKay
“You look like you belong in an Ivory commercial.”
Meta laughed. “Healthy-looking! Are you calling me healthy-looking?” she said.
“You won’t even take a proper insult,” Ziv said. “Nothing sticks!”
“Can I help it if university agrees with me?” She stood up and did a mock soft-shoe routine. “Tappety-ta. Tappety-ta. Tappety-tappety-tappety-ta.”
Ziv pulled the pillow over his head, tucked it in at his ears.
“That’s right, close your eyes and cover your ears. Happiness is contagious. If you’re not careful, you might get infected.” She threw herself on top of him and tried to wrestle the pillow away. “I’m going to ruin you,” she said. “I’m bent on construction and positivism.”
Ziv turned over and embraced her. He lay still and let her weight push him down into the bed. Everything about her excited him: her warmth, her glowing skin, the smell of her hair. He moved a hand under her shirt and let it rest on the smooth skin at the small of her back.
“Wait a minute,” she said.
“I love the way you feel,” he said. “I love everything about you.” He slid his hand higher until it rested at the clasp of her bra.
“Wait a minute!” she said. She sat up. “We’re going to the library to study Sociology, remember?”
“There are some other studies I’d like to do here first,” he said. He sat up, put both arms around her, and kissed her on the mouth.
“Look,” she said, drawing back from him. “There are things we have to do. It’s the middle of exams. There’s work to be done. I can’t let myself get distracted.”
Ziv laughed and lowered his head to the pillow. He brought his hands up and put them underneath his head. “Sex is a distraction from work?” he said. “You’ve got it backwards.” She was kneeling beside him on the bed. Hair that was not pinned back at the sides fell forward over her ears and down either cheek. Her breasts made soft mounds beneath her sweatshirt.
“There are things I want to get done at the library tonight.” She settled back to explain, placing a hand on his lower thigh, just above the knee.
“I’ve got to finish studying that Soc.” He put his hand on the back of hers and pulled it halfway up his thigh. “There’s a History article on reserve I was supposed to read in October.” He brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers, then scooped the fingers around to the back of her neck and gently massaged the muscles there. She moved her head sideways and closed her eyes to enjoy the massage.
“And I want to get at least a start on the research for that Psychology paper I have to have done for next term.” She placed her palm firmly on the swelling in his jeans. With her free hand she undid the buckle of his belt and unhooked the button of his pants.
She stood up at the side of the bed and slid her jeans and panties to the floor. She looked at her watch as she stepped matter-of-factly from the discarded clothing. “It’s twenty to seven now,” she said. “By seven thirty I’m going to be sitting in a cubicle on the second floor of the library, reading.”
Most of the other young women in her residence complained about the noise in the building, but it was the relative quiet that Meta was having a difficult time getting used to. She had grown up in one end of a Red Row miner’s duplex, a house built by the Acadia Coal Company in the early part of the century. In their own half of the house, Meta and her family did their best to live quietly and peaceably. But they shared the place with the Donat family, one of the largest, poorest, and rowdiest families in the neighbourhood. Meta’s parents had painted the clapboard on their side of the house three times, in Meta’s memory, but in all the years they’d lived there the Donats had never painted theirs. According to Meta’s grandmother, that side of the house had been coated with whitewash in the year it was built, but never saw a lick of paint again. The clapboard on the Donat side of the house was so bare and weather-beaten that it was hard to believe there had once even been that one whitewashing. The Donats had let the grass grow wild so many summers running that there was now very little grass left in their yard at all. Big thistle shrubs, burdocks, and giant dandelions flourished in patches and clumps. Amongst these, there was the odd patch of grass, gone to seed by mid-season. But most of the yard was bare, hard-packed earth that after years of being heedlessly trampled underfoot had long given up on nourishing life.
There had always been small incidents with the Donat kids, beginning when Meta was a toddler and a couple of the bigger kids turned the garden hose on her as she sat outdoors in her playpen. There were the toys broken, the toys that disappeared, the toys stolen and sold to someone at the other end of the neighbourhood. She’d been punched in the teeth, kicked in the shin, she’d been shot at with elastic guns, homemade zip shooters, and pellet guns. At thirteen, she’d been held down by two of the older Donat boys while the third grabbed and pinched her newly developing breasts.
The Donat parents fought like animals. Her whole life Meta grew up listening to them through the walls. One morning at breakfast a particularly violent shouting match between the parents had started over money. The father had been out of work long enough that his unemployment insurance had run out.
“Who gets the welfare cheque every month and then spends it like it was piss!” His voice came pulsing into the Nicholses’ kitchen so that Meta and her mother and her father all stopped chewing in mid-bite to wait for the answer.
“You!” came the reply in chorus, the whole family joining in, ganging up on the father.
One winter morning before school Meta had gone next door to call on Tammy Donat, who was one year younger than she was. The Donat kids were slouched silently over their toast and tea. Mrs. Donat was at the stove, scraping scrambled eggs off the frying pan. Mr. Donat was out-of-sight in the pantry, but his enraged voice careened off the walls in the kitchen. Meta felt a rush of fear enter her chest.
“I bought the fucking thing, and I put it in this fucking pantry, and if it’s not here now, woman, you’ll fucking well find it.”
Mrs. Donat’s calm but forceful reply: “You were drunk when you bought it and you were drunk when you put it away. I’ll not take responsibility for where it is. Why don’t you ask Captain Morgan to find it for you?”
At this, a burst of encouraging laughter from the kids.
Meta stood with her back to the door that led directly from the kitchen to the backyard. She drew herself back farther, away from the terrible words being spoken in the room, until her heels and shoulders pressed against the wooden door itself. Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of Mr. Donat rushing from the pantry. His jaw and neck were covered with thick black stubble. He was naked to the waist, the bones and sinews showing on his thin, alcohol-ravaged body. Without a word, he rounded the corner into the kitchen, stepped up to Mrs. Donat at the stove, and drove a solid punch to the side of her head, just below the ear. She went down to the floor without making a sound, and he stormed back into the pantry.
Reggie, the oldest boy, who must have been sixteen or seventeen at the time, stood up at the table and made a move for the pantry. From her position on the floor, Mrs. Donat held up a hand to stop him. She shook her head briefly and Reggie sat back down. Mrs. Donat pushed herself to her feet and opened the drawer under the oven. After clanging through several items, she selected a large cast-iron frying pan.
Meta heard one of the kids, perhaps Reggie, say, “Watch out, old man.” But it was barely audible in the kitchen, and the man raving in the pantry never would have heard it.
Mrs. Donat weighed the cast-iron pan at the end of her arm for a moment, then thought better of it. She replaced the cast-iron pan in the drawer and withdrew a large stainless-steel saucepan. She held the handle of the saucepan in both hands, went to the doorcasing at the entrance to the pantry, and raised the pan to her shoulder like a baseball bat.
“Hey, shit-for-brains!” she yelled. The noise and cursing from the pantry ceased. Kids at the breakfast table snickered and fidgeted. “Get y
our skinny arse out here.” Meta put a hand on the doorknob. It clicked at her touch, but she was so stricken with fear that she could bring herself to move no farther.
Like all skilled batters, Mrs. Donat knew how to wait. She did not swing at the first glimpse of the hollow-cheeked face coming through the doorway. She held back until he was a half-step into the kitchen, and then she cut loose.
The sound of the pan hitting Mr. Donat’s face was like a home run with a metal bat. When the high metallic ping ceased ringing through the kitchen, Mr. Donat was unconscious on the floor. His nose had once hooked slightly left, but now it was flattened, smeared up the right cheek halfway to his eye. Beside his face, a dark pool of blood was beginning to collect. In and near the pool of blood there were whitish fragments: teeth and pieces of teeth.
Mrs. Donat trembled only slightly. She walked to the sink, washed the blood off the bottom of the pan, examined the size of the dent in the stainless steel, and replaced the pan in the drawer beneath the oven.
A profound silence came over the kitchen, a silence in which the faces of the Donat children took on a beatific aspect. Mrs. Donat took her place at the head of the table and took a few sips from a cup of milky tea.
A sound arose from somewhere in the room. Meta looked at the kids at the table, at Mrs. Donat. She took a quick look at Mr. Donat on the floor and wondered whether he was dead. At this thought the sound in the room grew louder, and Meta realized she was crying.
It didn’t take much of an imagination, especially once she got into school and met kids from all the different neighbourhoods of Albion Mines, for Meta to realize that being from the Red Row, she suffered from a strange sort of handicap. There was poverty and desperation and violence just about anywhere, but it was concentrated in the Red Row. It was so thick there, it formed its own horizon, one that at times was impossible to see beyond.
Meta understood how lucky she was. The fact that she was discontented with the neighbourhood meant that somehow she had been offered a glimpse beyond that impossible horizon. She did not have a clear notion of the world beyond the Red Row, so it was not a pull from a softer, more welcoming world that propelled her. It was everything in the Red Row that she’d learned to fear and hate that pushed her out.
The final boost had come just the summer before. She’d graduated from high school and been accepted at university for the fall. The Donat house had gradually quieted over the years as the parents were slowed down by physical wounds and the mellowing of internal pains that comes with age. In the late winter, Willy Donat, one of three children still living at home, had been caught shoplifting at the new mall in New Glasgow, violating the probation he was on from an earlier offence. He had eluded the custody of the store detective in Woolco before the police had arrived, and a judge, a man reputed to dislike probation in the first place, ordered Willy in absentia to serve the remaining four months of his sentence in prison.
Willy was classified by the police as “at large,” although the police and everyone else knew he was living at home, escaping through a window any time the police showed up to arrest him.
Meta’s bedroom window looked out over the roof of the ell that contained the kitchens of both families. The room on the other side of the wall, in the Donat house, was a bathroom. Several times that spring, she’d lain in bed and heard Willy scrambling out his bathroom window and across the kitchen roof when the police had shown up at the front door. But once, in mid-summer, when for several nights in a row Meta’s family had left all the windows open to cool the house off overnight, she heard the police pounding at the Donat front door. She woke up and looked at the LED display of her alarm clock. It was two thirty in the morning. The police must have finally grown tired of chasing him and decided to actually catch him. The pounding came again, and this time, from the other side of the building, she heard a deep voice giving some sort of command. The only word she heard plainly was “police.” Through the wall she heard a great crash. Someone had run into something, knocked something over.
There was a scraping sound as Willy Donat climbed through his bathroom window. Meta sat up in bed and clutched a blanket around her. The sudden clamour stirred her senses and set her heart pounding. A street light out on Foord Street lit the curtains in her room faintly. She heard Willy run to the lower edge of his own kitchen roof.
“Fuck,” he said. His feet pounded the roof again. She saw a shadow pass before her window as he ran across to her family’s side.
“Hands in the air,” someone said, and suddenly a floodlight lit up the window, brighter than daytime.
“Fuck you,” Meta heard Willy say, and the next thing was the sound of the screen on her storm window tearing and Willy’s dark torso protruding into her bedroom.
Meta opened her mouth to scream, but her throat had dried up and all that came out was a dull croak. Willy heard the croak and called to her. “Meta!” he said. The floodlights had switched on his day vision and now he was blind in the dark. She heard him stumbling into things.
“Meta!” For some reason he was whispering, as though his whereabouts were still unknown to someone. “Meta! For Christ’s sake, turn on a light!”
“Willy Donat, you arsehole,” she said. “Get the hell out of my house.” She wrapped the bedsheet around her, tucking it in at the front.
“If you turn on a light, I’ll be able to find the goddamned door.”
Meta knelt on the bed and began fumbling around on the shelf above the headboard.
“I will, like hell,” she said. She found the handle of her tennis racquet and swung it at Willy’s silhouette.
The nylon mesh boinged off the crown of his head. “What the hell was that?” Willy said. She could see him more clearly now. He was stooped over at the foot of the bed, both hands on the edge of the mattress for balance while he waited for his eyes to adjust. She turned the racquet sideways in her palm so that the wooden frame would be what made contact this time, and let go with a forehand where she thought the top of his neck would be.
A deep sound came out of him and there was a thump as he landed on the floor. Footsteps pounded up the stairs and the bedroom door burst open. Two Albion Mines police officers burst in, guns drawn. In the light from the lamp in the hallway, Meta saw Willy Donat sitting on the floor at the foot of her bed. He held both hands to his head. Blood trickled from his left ear.
“Put your hands up,” one of the police officers said.
“For Christ’s sake,” Willy said. “I’m unarmed. This crazy bitch just whacked me.”
The second officer looked at the racquet in Meta’s hand, then back to the bleeding man on the floor. “Fifteen-love,” he said, and both officers began to laugh.
It seemed odd to Meta when she heard young women in her university residence complaining about noise, or about how the building lacked security, even when the main entrance was locked at midnight. People could turn up the stereos and drink beer until 2:00 a.m. three nights a week and blast the TV in the lounge. For Meta, not having people inflicting hospitalizing injuries on each other on the other side of the wall, not having a pursued criminal fumbling through her bedroom in the dark, these were signs that her life had reached a sort of tranquility she’d never known, but always suspected was possible.
Her roommate was a Celtic Studies major from Ottawa, a thin-faced girl with pale skin and legs that seemed to reach up to her armpits. She’d grown up in the Glebe, an old Ottawa neighbourhood. Her parents had moved there from Cape Breton to work for the government.
Julia had dark, soft hair that she brushed one hundred strokes every night before she went to bed. She’d spent years doing competitive Highland dancing and kept her kilts and blouses and dancing shoes hanging at one end of the closet as though she might need them in an emergency. When they’d be drinking on the weekends, she’d sometimes rush back to their room from whatever part of the building they were in, put on her kilt and her dancing shoes, and go dancing about the building, throwing her long arms over her he
ad in graceful arcs, leaping and kicking higher than seemed possible.
Julia said she was a virgin, and she was fascinated by Meta’s relationship with Ziv. Meta told her everything. What did she care? The most surprising thing about sex, she said, was how messy it was. Sperm got all over everything, and a vagina secreted a shocking amount of liquid. These were things you didn’t get an inkling of from books or movies. If you wanted to have sex, Meta told her roommate, you had to have access to soap, running water, and some good absorbent towels.
One night after a lot of drinks at the campus bar, Meta had had to help Julia walk back to their residence room. The two had stumbled across the campus with their arms around each other, singing and yelling and hooting.
When they got inside the room, Meta had dropped Julia onto her bed, where she landed with a thump. Meta tripped over the leg of the bed in the dark, and found herself lying on top of Julia. Before Meta had a chance to move, Julia’s hand came up and pulled Meta’s face down to hers. She kissed Meta solidly on the lips, a deep, passionate kiss. Meta was surprised at the kiss, but even more surprised that her own mouth opened in response. She lowered herself to Julia’s mouth and they kissed slowly and deeply for a few moments. When they paused for a breath, Meta said, “I’ve got to get to sleep.” She fell onto her own bed and passed out instantly. Afterward, neither of them spoke about what had happened.
The baby was asleep. Thank God for that. Arvel sat on the couch in front of the TV and finished the third cup of his second pot of tea for the day. By the time he’d drunk this much tea, he was not enjoying it any more. He only tasted the bitterness now, no matter how much milk he diluted it with. But tea was all he dared drink, and he gulped it compulsively, as though he were trying to get drunk quickly from it. Last week Jackie had come home early from her shift at the store to find him drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon. She’d threatened him then. The threat had not been of anything specific, but Jackie had a way of making herself clear. In high school she’d got high marks in English.
