A Year of Lesser

by Bergen, David

  Loraine’s voice is careful, almost unsure. Charlene doesn’t say anything. Just listens to Loraine’s breath, little sharp noises.

  Loraine again. Voice rising. Louder now.

  Charlene wants to giggle.

  “Who is this?” Loraine asks. “Hello?”

  Charlene can hear chickens in the background so Loraine must be in the refrigerator room off the barn. Did they do it in there? she wonders. Did he lay her out on a flat of white eggs? Charlene does giggle now; a noise from the back of her throat.

  “Hello,” Loraine says again.

  “Bitch,” Charlene says, and hangs up. She sits and watches the phone, as if it will ring, or leap up and strangle her. Her hands are shaking again.

  She finishes the bottle of rye that afternoon. She manages to read at the same time. It’s something she’s supposed to finish for her book club which is meeting Saturday night. That’s tomorrow. She wants to go but isn’t sure if she’ll make it.

  The book is a thin collection of poetry written by a woman who’s obviously in love with her father. It’s not like they’re having sex but this girl’s definitely got problems, Charlene thinks. Talking about her father’s cock; sick, in a way. Charlene reads that particular poem three times. It was Avi Heath who suggested this poet. Mona, who’s part of the club, announced that Avi was pronounced “Eh-vee”; she smirked when she said this. Anyways, Avi is new at the club and doesn’t realize poetry is not well accepted by the other women. Still, no one wanted to hurt Avi’s feelings, so they agreed. Charlene wonders if Avi has problems with her own father. She doesn’t understand why writers need to do this, cut open and spread themselves out, battered and bloody, between the pages. Everybody craps, so what? There is another good one though, where the writer’s having sex with her husband or lover or whomever, and reading it, Charlene thinks, That’s me. The poet is remembering the night before and marvelling at what she actually did: all fours and her rump in the air like a flower. That’s nice, Charlene thinks, a flower.

  She eats crackers and drinks apple juice around five in the afternoon. A square of sun is falling onto the counter. It’s so silent out here, in this house, planted on this yard, at the edge of a quarter section. Sometimes she hates it; today it’s pretty. You look out the window and there’s a wind-break of trees and beyond that the flat earth which eventually disappears. Perhaps it’s the liquor but at the moment she’s proud of where she lives. She feels hopeful and calls Agnes at Lesser Beauty Salon; makes an appointment for late Saturday afternoon. A trim. And her nails too. By eight o’clock she’s thirsty again. She looks for more liquor but there is none. She sniffs at the bottle she finished in the afternoon, licks the neck, sticks her tongue inside. “Fine,” she says, stashing the empty bottle under the counter. “Better that way.”

  Saturday afternoon her Mustang won’t start. She grinds the battery down to a click and takes Johnny’s half-ton. At the salon she says to Agnes, “Make me beautiful.”

  Agnes washes Charlene’s hair. Touching has not been a big part of Charlene’s life lately and it’s wonderful, the fingers rubbing her scalp and neck. She closes her eyes. Later, cutting at Charlene’s bangs, Agnes says, “I’ve got this new conditioner you should try. Does a great job on the ends.”

  “That bad?”

  “Not too.”

  “I’m hungry,” Charlene says. “Hasn’t been a good week for food.” She senses that she must reek of alcohol and wonders if she should explain herself.

  Agnes pauses, holds the scissors up in the air, and closes her mouth. She’s awfully pretty, Charlene thinks. She married a Ski-Doo dealer, right out of high school. Charlene thinks that Agnes maybe didn’t even finish school. There was a baby, a girl who’s now sixteen. Agnes says, “I’ve got a cinnamon bun in the kitchen, I could get it for you.”

  “No, it’s okay, I’m just blabbin’.”

  “How’s Johnny?” Agnes is working on the back now, Charlene can hear her breathing.

  “Oh. Well? Johnny’s Johnny. You’ve probably heard.”

  “A bit,” Agnes says, as if waiting for more.

  Charlene’s quiet for a while, and then says, “I think something happened to him the day his father died. Like a tiny brittle piece snapped inside him, you know. Since then he’s been all over the map, not that he wasn’t like that before, it’s just now he’s worse, like a runaway train.” Charlene shuts up. She doesn’t know why she’s saying this. Agnes isn’t really her friend.

  “Men are full of fits at this age,” Agnes says. She laughs, her breath is sweet. Her scissors keep going and her breasts touch Charlene’s back. “Rick, well, I sometimes think he’s going to disappear. One day I’ll wake up and he’ll be gone. Of course, he thinks I’d miss him, hah!”

  Charlene laughs. Her head feels lighter and she stops worrying about betraying Johnny. “It’s just strange,” she says to Agnes, “knowing there’s another woman who’s going to have Johnny’s baby. The town’s too small for that.”

  “Personally, if you want my opinion, I’d kill someone, I really would,” Agnes says. Her mouth is this taut line and Charlene figures she isn’t joking. Agnes finishes cutting and switches on the blow dryer. It’s too loud for Charlene to talk, so she closes her eyes and imagines herself not killing anybody, but happily pregnant, her belly a mound that Johnny straddles.

  Later, she drives down Main Street and looks for Johnny’s car. It’s not at the centre, nor at Chuck’s. OK Feeds is closed, but Johnny could be out on a trip. It seems she’s always looking out for Johnny. Even when they’re in the house together she listens for him, every little creak tells her what he’s doing. His toothbrush tapping the sink, or him banging through his sock drawer. She misses him, wonders if his ears ever listen for her, if his eyes roam and flit, checking for little signs of her presence. She knows the answer.

  She heads up the 312 towards her turn-off but when she arrives she doesn’t slow down, she just keeps driving to the 59, and left up to Lagimodiere and then east, stopping at Deacon’s for gas. On the road again, driving into the falling darkness, she picks up speed. The half-ton has a shimmy, the windshield moulding rattles in the wind. Charlene holds tightly to the wheel, her knuckles yellow in the dim light of the cab. Trucks float by across the divide, their overhead lights signalling safety. Beyond Richer, into the trees of the Canadian Shield, she passes a moose by the side of the road who looks like he’s mounted, he’s so frozen by the light. A bit further on she has to pee and pulls to the side of the road. Flipping through the glove compartment, looking for toilet paper, she finds only a small plastic bag of grass and papers. “Johnny, you little sinner,” she says. She steps outside and pees in the ditch. She pulls up her jeans and drips into her panties. Back in the truck she rubs her hands together over the heater. It’s a cold night, no snow yet, and this makes it even worse. She leans back against the passenger door and rolls a joint. Her foot taps the steering wheel as she smokes and stares out into the night. There is something wrong here, she thinks. She’s running, in a way, but nobody knows that she’s gone. The girls at the book club will wonder, but they won’t fret or worry. Johnny’s not even home so he won’t notice. Life will go on.

  Charlene’s finding it hard to breathe. Perhaps it’s the grass, too strong for her. It’s like someone has a towel over her face and is just barely letting her come up for air. She pulls at her jaw, opens the window, rasps out into the frosty night. Then she drives, too fast, and her lungs find new air, but still there is a lump inside her that reminds her of something swallowed too quickly, like a large cube of ice aching in her gullet. She sings a tune for comfort and the pain subsides.

  The moon comes out and for a while she does what Johnny likes to do with a full moon: drive without the lights. On divided highway it’s safe, everything’s just shadows, and there is a sense of gliding through space in a tree-walled tunnel; the only thing that really tells Charlene where she is is the shudder of the road in her hands and the engine vibrating her feet. Bu
t, eventually, the lights come back on. The dark scares her, and cops.

  For Charlene, the best thing about a hotel room is the sameness, the knowledge that she could be anywhere in the world: Sri Lanka, Chicago, Vancouver. But not in Lesser. Lesser has no hotels, certainly not an inn like this one in Kenora, which stands at the edge of the Lake of the Woods. Charlene lies in bed in her panties and bra. The TV is on. She stands and rummages through the mini-bar, pulls out a little bottle of whisky, cracks the cap, takes a shot, and breathes out through her nostrils. That night she works at the stash of petite and expensive bottles layered in the mini-bar. In between there somewhere, her head swimming, her voice descending, warped and hard from the ceiling, she orders room service: sweet-and-sour chicken, rice, fried mushrooms, and a salad. She drinks ice water and coffee, then finishes the alcohol. She sleeps, dreaming of swollen stomachs, deformed babies, and fathers with big heads. She wakes at noon and phones for a late check-out, her need to languish, to lie back and forget, overruling her frugality.

  It is her headache that brings her home, back to her long driveway and the bare rowed trees lining the road, and the green and white house with the old kitchen lino. The lights are on; Johnny is home. Charlene finds him in the kitchen, reading the Bible. His hair is neatly combed, he’s wearing a suit, his face glows. He does not ask where she’s been, his focus is elsewhere.

  “It was great,” he says. His fingers splay on the table. The tips of his thumbs are bitten and ragged.

  “What?” Charlene says. She has no idea what he’s talking about. He looks as if he’s about to jump across the table and devour her. His eyes swim. He may cry, she thinks.

  “I’m sorry, Charlene,” he says.

  “What, what is it?”

  “I love you,” he says. “You’re beautiful.” Charlene stands and holds the back of a chair.

  “I was baptized tonight,” Johnny says. “Remember?”

  Charlene senses that she may never rise above the man across from her. He’s eating, pushing bread and cheese and jam into his mouth. His eyes shine. Charlene thinks she should sit on his face, erase the glow of God from his countenance. She circles the table, wraps her arms around his neck, and talks into his collar. “You smell like water,” she says.

  Johnny doesn’t answer, he keeps eating.

  “Who was there?” Charlene asks.

  “Phil, a brother-in-law of his, Melissa Emery.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did Melissa speak in tongues? She does that, doesn’t she?” Charlene kisses Johnny’s ear. She’s surprising herself, her bum itches and she wants Johnny to touch her, drag those mangled thumbs along her skin. She does not care about him, she wants only the knowledge of her own body.

  “I don’t know,” Johnny says. “I thought she was speaking in tongues but I couldn’t be sure. My head was underwater.”

  Charlene laughs. He takes her questions so seriously.

  “Actually,” Johnny says, “she’s amazing. No other person in this town can ascend to delirium at the push of a button like Melissa Emery.” Johnny shakes his head, reaches up to take Charlene’s hand.

  “Maybe she’s unhappy,” Charlene says. Then, she says quietly, past Johnny’s ear, “I was thinking about the other night. Remember? On the rug, desperate, like we were two animals and that’s all. I figure I don’t want to be just an animal, Johnny. I’d like to think there was more to me than just the odour and look of an animal.” She takes the heel of her hand and pushes it against Johnny’s mouth. “Bite,” she says.

  He doesn’t. He holds her wrist and manoeuvres it gently, hangs on to it as if it were delicate and easily breakable. Then he settles Charlene onto his lap and pulls her head to his chest as if she were a small child.

  “You were gone,” he says.

  “Hmmm,” she responds.

  “Where?” he asks.

  “Just gone.”

  And in bed later they are both naked, and she lets him hold her because she needs to feel something. But he is chaste, still elevated by this goodness he sees in himself. His hands, his voice, his whole body is tender and full of love and for a moment Charlene believes that Christianity is the best thing for Johnny. When he’s mucking about with redemption, he exudes compassion, not love necessarily, but pity and mercy. And she’ll take it.

  Just before they sleep, Johnny says, his voice full of singsong, “Phil Barkman’s got this tiny penis, hooded and blue. I saw it.”

  “Did you?” Charlene asks. Her eyes are closed. She reaches behind her and finds Johnny’s rear, his legs; she slides her hand between and grabs hold. “Hooded and blue,” she says. She’s holding Johnny, not moving and he’s curled into her, already sleeping. “That’s nice,” she says.

  It could work. Monday morning Johnny and Charlene are rosy and giggly, poking at each other in the bathroom. Johnny farts and blames it on Charlene. She slaps at him as he shaves, and later she sees the mark on his back, the outline of her hand, and she laughs, bends to kiss it and says, “Sorry.”

  Charlene sings as she dresses. She’s nervous but excited about returning to work. She eats Cheerios while Johnny reads the Bible to her. Ephesians. “Listen,” he says. “’So then do not be foolish … And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit.’” Johnny pauses, looks up at Charlene, and wets his lips. “Isn’t that great? It just speaks to me. Be filled with the Spirit. Have you ever wanted that, Charlene?”

  Charlene laughs. She lifts her arms to the air.

  “It’s possible,” Johnny says. “I could talk to Phil, he’d pray over you.”

  “Wonderful,” Charlene says. “As if we need another one in the house.”

  Johnny’s face crinkles. He bends back to the Bible as Charlene eats; milk dribbles down her chin and she wipes at it with the back of her hand. “‘Husbands, love your wives,’” he reads aloud. He looks up. His eyes will spill real tears, Charlene thinks. And then, at the end of chapter six, he reads slowly while Charlene putters with her lunch. “‘For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.’ Wow,” Johnny says.

  “So, what does that mean?” Charlene asks.

  “It’s a big battle,” Johnny answers.

  “I already know that, so how does that help me?”

  Johnny holds up his palms. “It’s funny. I always struggle with my tiny earthly body, the things of the flesh, you know. But, I’m thinking that I’m setting my sights too low. This is big stuff. There is real darkness out there, up there, not just in here …” Johnny thumps at this chest. “I don’t know,” he says. “I could be wrong.”

  Charlene rolls out some wax paper. She’s humming to herself but she’s remembering herself stretched out drunk on the kitchen floor just a few days ago and she marvels at how high one can climb, how quickly one falls, and she accepts that today she is happy and tomorrow may be different.

  “Maybe it’s the mind,” she says, pointing at Johnny’s Bible. “The mind is like a heavenly place, and then there’s all those possibilities for wickedness there.” Like her on the phone, whispering obscenities in Loraine’s ear. She’s repentant now.

  Johnny’s still chasing this problem. “I heard Harry Kroeker say once it was politicians. They were in high places and wicked.”

  “He’s probably right.” Charlene says this, but her mind’s back on work, on how the women will treat her. Before leaving she asks Johnny if he wouldn’t mind looking at her Mustang. “It’s dead,” she says. “All I get are clicks or maybe a tired groan.”

  “Sure,” Johnny mumbles, still brooding at the table.

  The week has a flow to it, in fact the buoyancy is frightening, as if only goodness and mercy were available in this world. Charlene, knowing this to be impossible, keeps waiting for the fall. Johnny cooks supper Monday: a chicken dish and rice. He
makes instant pudding for dessert and opens a bottle of wine. Charlene drinks too much and talks really fast. She’s closing up the spaces, disliking the sound of Johnny chewing, the clink of silverware. Johnny is slow, a little dazed, as if he’d spent the afternoon sleeping or smoking drugs. Noting this, Charlene says, “I found your little stash in the glove box.”

  “Oh?”

  “Some leftovers, really old. Hard to roll.”

  “Must have got left there in summer.”

  “We haven’t smoked together in a long time,” Charlene says. There is something lovely here, tempting Johnny in this way.

  He holds up his hands. “I’m squeaky,” he says. “I really am.”

  “I was wondering,” Charlene says, “if we’d ever do anything at Christmas. You know. Fly south, Mexico maybe, lie on the beach.”

  Johnny points a finger at his chest. “I burn. And I don’t speak Spanish.” Then he says, being more careful, “But really. You want that?”

  Charlene worries she is sounding greedy but she thinks it would be so safe down there, away from here. She waves a hand, splashes the last of the wine into her glass. “It’s a notion I had, a silly one.”

  “Not so silly,” Johnny says. An attempt at kindness.

  Tuesday is level, Wednesday fine. Thursday, Mona calls about the book club and wants to know if Charlene will be coming the following week. “We never really got to the book of poetry,” she says. “Conversation wandered, recipes and things. And Avi asked if she could bring this new professor friend, who’s just moved into town. Bought some land out by Cleary’s.”

  “A guy?”

  “Yeah, so we debated. Nancy didn’t want it, said it would break up the intimacy. Deb asked if this guy was single. He is. Although I wonder if he and Avi aren’t friends, you know? The guy’s a physicist or into religion, I forget which.”

  “Maybe he’s lonely,” Charlene says. “So, what did you decide?”

  “We didn’t. We’re going to vote next time. You should come.”