“Where’s Richard?” she breaks off the recitation to ask. “Is he enjoying this warm weather? Is he getting lots of the sun?” Richard stands at Amy’s side, naked, waiting for his bath.
“Oh, he’s great,” Amy says, then leaps in with a bright voice, “I was just calling to see if you’ve seen Hank. Talked to him. That’s all.”
“Why would he be here?”
“I thought he might have come by. To tell you the news.”
“Oh? What news?” Margaret asks, wary but at the same time Amy hears a hopeful tone.
“He’s left me. Us.” There, that’s done, she thinks.
Margaret doesn’t speak for several moments. Amy hears her sigh. “I’ve been praying and praying ever since you got married. I was afraid this might happen.”
Have you been praying for Mel too? Amy wants to ask. Mel, who has lived with three different women. Mel, who, whenever Amy speaks to him on the telephone or meets him for lunch down at the Grain Exchange, is more often drunk than sober. What about Mel? she wants to ask.
“Hank is against your working, isn’t he?” Margaret asks, her voice taking on an accusing tone.
“You worked.”
“That was different. It was only one day a week and, besides, your father wasn’t against it. You kids never suffered.”
No, Amy thinks, that’s true. But it might have been better if you had worked full-time.
“What about Richard?”
“A friend babysits for me.”
“A friend? Just what kind of person is this friend?”
“My friend Rhoda is just great,” Amy tells Margaret.
Kids should be kept off balance, Rhoda once remarked. Go out without telling them where you’re going. A little uncertainty breeds creativity. Otherwise they’ll turn out to become lawyers, doctors, actuaries: boring people. Amy wanted to – but didn’t – point out to Rhoda that it was her boring accountant husband whose income provided her with the time and freedom to doodle and throw pots. But it was Rhoda who talked and Amy who listened. “I know,” Rhoda had said when Amy told her Hank had left, “how do you explain it, eh? He doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t drink, he isn’t a womanizer. People will think you’ve chucked out a perfectly good husband. You’ve got to make up something.”
“I don’t care how great she is,” Margaret says, “a babysitter is no substitute for a mother. Why do you want to work? Hank is a good provider. Just think of the women who have to work. You should be grateful.”
The word “grateful” explodes in Amy’s head.
“Hank’s a good person,” Margaret says. “I’ll pray for you. You know, it could be the Lord’s way of speaking to you, Amy. Think about it. And if it’s His will that Hank comes back, you should consider whether the job’s worth it.”
“If Hank has the guts to show his ugly face around here, I’ll kick him in the knackers, that’s what I’ll do.” Amy hangs up.
She turns away from the telephone, seething. She’s vaguely aware of Richard kneeling as though in prayer in front of the freshly painted wall. She’s puzzled by this. Then she sees him place his palms against it. “Richard!” He turns, startled. His face is smudged here and there with pale blue paint and his bare stomach is covered with hand prints.
“Richard!”
Richard rears up from his knees, his eyes jumping with fear. She raises a clenched fist, and he scrambles around her, across the hallway, heading for the bathroom. “Don’t you run away from me!” she screams, and chases after him. She grabs him by the arm, catching him before he can close the door, and swings him around so that she can spank his buttocks. “Don’t,” he pleads. Her hand stings as it meets his naked backside. “Don’t.” She slaps him again and again with her open hand. “Don’t,” he cries as they move in a circle, Amy slapping, feeling the heat of the blows in her palm. “Don’t,” Richard says, and she sees the flesh of his buttock jerk as her hand meets it and he twists away, one hand clutching his penis, holding it tightly as she slaps. “Don’t,” he gasps. “It’s going to fall off, it’s going to fall off!”
But Amy is strong when anger flows in her body. She picks Richard up, sits down on the toilet seat, and flings him across her knee. She grabs the hairbrush. It smacks sharply against his body and he begins to scream. He keeps squirming and so sometimes the brush hits the back of his legs, his shoulders. Her scalp feels tight and the blood pounds into the top of her skull. Richard, Richard. She can’t believe that it’s her hand holding the brush, her voice saying, “You little bastard. It’s all your fault.” The brush snaps then and the end of it flies across the room. She cannot stop now. She looks around, her rage careening wildly through the sound of his screams. As she looks for something else to hit him with he twists loose and falls to the floor, writhing at her feet, still clutching his penis, his pale child’s body set against the brown tiles. A severed earthworm, Amy will think later. She will remember always her son’s silent mouth, the impotent O-shape of it as he struggled to breathe. But, then, her only thought was to find something else to hit him with.
The telephone rings sharply, several times; the sound penetrates and stops her dead. Hank, she thinks.
“Amy? That was an awful thing to say!” It is Margaret. “Amy? Why is Richard crying?”
The anger begins to ebb and then flow from Amy’s body, away through her limbs, making her suddenly weak and shaky. She slides down onto the floor beside the kitchen table still cupping the telephone receiver to her mouth.
“Say something. Talk to me,” Margaret says.
Amy tries to speak, but the words won’t come.
“When your father left I thought I would die,” Margaret says, her voice becoming thin and pinched-sounding. “But let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than losing a child. Absolutely nothing. But I made it. Me and the Lord, we managed. And you can, too, if you’d just –”
“Why don’t you give up,” Amy says. She leaves the receiver dangling and crawls through the living room and down the hall to her bedroom. She kneels, face pressed into the bedspread to muffle the sound of her crying. After a few moments she hears Richard gasping and goes into the bathroom where he huddles in a corner wedged between the clothes hamper and the door, his knees drawn up against his stomach, his hands covering his face. Amy sees the marks of her hand and the hairbrush, angry red welts rising on her son’s shoulders. She sees the half-moon shape where her fingernails have gouged into his arm. She kneels beside him and encircles him in her arms. “Baby, baby, baby,” she croons and rocks him against her. She scoops him up in her arms and carries him into his room and gently sets him down onto the bed. She brings ointment and rubs it into his skin. “I got paint on me,” he says through his sobbing. “I got paint on me. I got paint on me.”
Amy lies down beside him and gathers him into herself. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay. You’re not bad. It’s Mommy. Mommy’s bad.” She pulls his square of flannel from beneath his pillow and he grabs at it, bringing it up against his nose. She holds him tightly against her body to still his shuddering, and waits for his breathing to become normal. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” she whispers into his hair.
“I don’t want you to go to work,” Richard says.
She kisses the nape of his sweaty neck. “I’m not going to go, don’t you worry. Not tonight.” She leaves him to call Rhoda and the Lounge and then returns to help him into his pyjamas. “Stay,” he says as he climbs beneath the blankets.
“I’ll stay,” she says and lies back down beside him.
Amy falls asleep before Richard does. They lie curled together, asleep for several hours, and the darkness of the night is complete. At one point she hears a noise and wants to rise to it but fatigue pulls her under again. Later she hears something else and thinks vaguely that she should open her eyes. She dreams that she is getting up, but she’s lying pinned to the bed by sleep, unable to move. Suddenly, she’s gripped by terror. She feels the pressure of sleep holding her fast to the bed, and yet she�
��s stumbling around the room, crashing into walls, floating down to the floor, tumbling over and over. Her eyes fly open in darkness. She’s bathed in cold sweat. Richard, she thinks wildly. Richard is not in bed beside her. Freed from sleep now she dashes through the house, calling his name. The light is different. The light in the hall. The front door is wide open and moonlight shines in through the screen. The front gate gapes open, too, and Richard’s tricycle and the wagon hitched to it are no longer on the sidewalk. She begins to whimper with fear as she runs outside, down to the busy intersection in the dead of night, looking for her son, Richard.
I’m going to Grandma’s, I’m going to Grandma’s, I’m going to Grandma’s, Richard’s feet said as the pedals turned and turned and his “magic” stones rattled about in the wagon behind him, wheels jolting against cracks and holes in the sidewalk. He’d taken the stones, his toothbrush, and a candle from a drawer in the kitchen; to keep him warm, he said. But no matches, he was not allowed to play with matches. I’m going to Grandma’s, I’m going to Grandma’s. Around and around his feet went, pushing the pedals. He knew the way to Grandma’s, he said. A garage and then he would turn onto another street. He was going fast, a hundred miles an hour. The streetlights were spread far apart and he had to rush through the darkness between them. Ahead, the road ducked down under a bridge, on which a train creaked slowly along the tracks. I’m going to Grandma’s, I’m going to Grandma’s. A dog barked. A dog might bite me, Richard thought. I have to hurry and get to Grandma’s. Richard, Richard, he heard his mother’s faint calling. I’m going to Grandma’s, his feet said on the pedals. Hurry. Richard! Richard! she called, closer now. Richard! I know the way, I know the way. Hurry. Richard! she cried. His feet on the pedals began to slow down. The stones stopped rattling. He turned and saw her running towards him, barefoot. His terrible, beautiful mother.
Amy hears the tinny rattling of Richard’s wagon in the distance as she rounds the corner at the intersection, the street empty now in the middle of the night and seeming to be a dark tunnel which opens at the other end to the lights of the city centre. And then she sees Richard, the flash of his teddy-bear pyjamas, as he passes beneath a streetlight several blocks away.
“I’m going to visit Grandma,” he says, scowling over his shoulder at her. She cannot pry his hands from the handlebars or make him turn his tricycle around. “I’m going,” he says.
“Yes,” Amy says. The city’s lights smudge together in a blur of colours. “Yes, yes. Tomorrow. Tomorrow you can go to Grandma’s.”
And he agrees to return home then and watches while she packs his clothing and toys into boxes and piles them beside the front door so that he will know that it is true and go to sleep.
The following morning she finds a seat for him beside a matronly white-haired woman who says she’d be delighted to keep her eye on the “little man,” and, as the bus turns the corner onto Portage Avenue, Amy goes back inside the depot and calls Margaret to tell her that Richard is on his way.
Two months later I stood outside the wire fence surrounding the school and watched children lining up before the bell rang. A little girl called Richard’s name for what had to be the hundredth time, wanting him to come and take his place in the line. He frowned his annoyance. The kindergarten teacher came out and stood on the top step looking down at them. The wind tugged at her long blonde hair. “All right, children, patience, patience, it’s almost time now,” she said and immediately they fell silent. Dry curled leaves swished across the schoolyard over to the fence where I stood watching in the chilly October air.
I knew that I couldn’t continue to haunt the school yard for a glimpse of my son, wondering was he warm enough, and, if I didn’t see him, worrying that he was ill. I became jealous at the sight of his new winter parka, which someone else had chosen for him. I knew that it was time to stop riding the bus from the apartment I had rented on Stradbrook, into the north end and past the house, hungry for details of his life, continuing to reassure myself with the presence of Hank’s maroon Chrysler parked beside the garage at the end of the day. Once I had seen Elaine at the front door, shaking dust from the mop, and I wanted to get off the bus, march into what had been my yard, and shout, “Don’t blame me!” That it was her fault, too, for having essentially told Hank that I had not been a virgin. Everything had changed following that. But sadness, resignation, overcame the urge. I saw Marlene as well. Twice. She had been out on the clothesline stoop bringing in the wash and, another time, on the bus, wearing a Victorian Order of Nurses’ uniform. When she got on, our eyes met and I saw the flicker of recognition in her face, but she walked past without acknowledging me and sat several seats away. Later, when she stood up to get off, green-apple cologne emanated from the skirt of her uniform as she swished by, her blue cape swinging smartly. And in a low voice, almost a whisper, she uttered a single word at my shoulder: “Bitch.” Hank, the single parent of a child abandoned by his mother, rescued, by women inflamed with pity.
Richard went to the back of the line of children waiting for the school bell to ring and began jostling the boy in front of him. Then, as though he had received a signal of some sort, he broke rank and his broad knees pumped as he ran. He reached the stone steps, climbed the iron hand-railing, and straddled it. “Charge!” he commanded, an imaginary sword held high. The three straight rows of children became scraggly, sparrows bobbing and tittering.
Richard, don’t, I wanted to say. Fit in. Don’t try to be different. You get back into that line with the others, I almost called. But this was no longer my territory. I was surprised at how much that hurt. It belonged to the fairy-queen kindergarten teacher, who had told me that Richard was smart. He will do well. Did you know that my son has an above-average vocabulary? I gave it to him. These are words I would repeat to soften the realization that even though other people would now have all the say in my son’s life, I had left something of me behind. Resilient, I thought, as I looked at Richard’s triumphant grin, his ruddy wind-burned cheeks. Happy.
The teacher let him show off for a moment longer and then she reached for him and put her arms around him, peeling him loose from his iron horse. He laughed and wound his legs around her, clinging to her with his soft hands. He pressed his nose into her cheek.
It would be a kindness, I thought, not to appear in his life again. And I was to keep that resolution. The teacher untangled herself from Richard and set him back into place at the end of the line. The October wind carried grit, which stung my eyes. As I walked away from the school, the wind lifted and carried with it all the debris of summer.
When she went to parties sometimes she would drink too much, loosening the tongue of her youth, and she would drop the “f” word in the middle of a sentence and watch how people eyed her with curiosity or nervousness, wondering back and forth with their eyes who this was they’d allowed in their midst. She used the word for effect, but it expressed what she thought they were doing to one another. They talked and talked, doing talking to one another and never speaking the truth with their hearts.
For instance: the dinner party conversations with other single women where they discussed their splintered, fractured, and worn-out relationships, their histories. They said, more or less, “I left my husband because he kept change for the parking meter in a pie-shaped Tupperware container.” Or, “I could no longer tolerate the way he rolled up his jeans and so I ditched him.” These women, you understand, did not see themselves as being sad-looking, nondescript or pathetic, scrawny or poorly dressed, or as women who evoked pity as they spoke about rape, revealed their bruises – on the streets, on radio talk shows – or traded healing tips with one another amidst the shelves of books in women’s bookstores. No, these women were women who described themselves as “feeling powerful,” “having power.” These were independent, successful women like she believed she had become, television journalists, producers, writers, politicians, doctors, professors. Of course, they must lie: “I grew out of him,” which, translated, m
eant, “I was more intelligent than he was,” a sexy thing to say.
“He smelled like Lifebuoy soap.”
But when she attended one of those dinners and they began to “f” one another with their wine-induced chatter, she was careful never to drink too much and drop a stinky bomb onto the white tablecloth. I left because I was afraid I might kill my son, Richard.
17
wish, Amy thinks, as she watches Piotr study the map spread across the hood of the car. She wishes that she hadn’t taken the time to bathe this morning. She would have liked, as in the past when they had to be apart, to keep the evidence of their lovemaking, the odour and moist stickiness of it inside her thighs for the remainder of the day.
She leans against the car, warming the backs of her legs. Beyond, the Trans-Canada Highway curves sharply, disappearing into the trees, and in the far distance she sees the glimmer of Lake Superior and a band of grey mist above it, rimming the almost clear sky of Northern Ontario.
Because it may be his last trip through this area, Piotr is determining whether they can afford to spend an hour or two in Lake Superior Provincial Park with a side trip to Agawa Rock and the pictographs, which they have in the past neglected to visit. Afterwards they would drive straight through to Thunder Bay Home by Wednesday.
Amy notices the bone-white limbs of a single birch splayed against the deep green backdrop of spruce and pine, the spattering of camomile and blue aster beside the road. Where does he leave off and I begin? she wonders, as she hears the sharp crack of a rifle shot in the distance and then its faint echo. “I thought guns weren’t allowed in a provincial park,” she says.
The Savage single shot .22 rifle cracked once again and its echo reverberated among the trees beside the highway. It was a clean, distinctive sound, but for the hitchhiker it was muffled by the cotton wads in his ears. He lowered the barrel and watched as blue-black wings clutched at the air and a raven climbed awkwardly up and away into the forest. The rifle’s sights were just slightly off, high. A branch swayed under the bird’s weight. Winged it, he thought, and headed down into the ditch to investigate.
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