He isn’t loaded yet. But his eyes are her eyes gone to hell. They break her heart. “Well,” she says. “I’ve measured most of the wood for that wall, so it just has to be sawn and then it can go up.”
“Alrighty.” He takes off his jacket and tie. “Give me the saw.”
She does, gladly. She lifts a piece of wood onto the table.
“Hold it,” he orders, and she grasps the wood close to where she’s drawn a line. She exults at the risk to her fingers, the demonstration of her fearlessness and faith. But despite all the beers, he follows the line. He saws steadily and without talking, except to say “Next,” one piece of wood after another. All the wood she has measured.
He suggests a break. He gets a beer from the fridge, and his cigarettes and lighter from his jacket pocket, and they sit across from each other on pieces of insulation. Now, smoking, the alcohol shows. His face collapses. He stares off. Out of the blue he begins telling her how he and their mother met, a story Norma already knows. It was during the war. He was a soldier, their mother was a dancer with The Light Fantastics. He was knocked out by her aristocratic ankles and how easily she did the splits. He bribed his way backstage and gave her his kidney stone that he carried everywhere for luck. On their first date they became engaged, the stone serving as a ring until he could afford the real thing.
“She talked her head off,” he says. “All the time. Couldn’t shut her up. Never drank. Never touched the stuff.”
Norma pictures her. A young, blond, sober chatterbox in those tap shoes she still has, clicking them as she walks, wearing the feather hat from the newspaper picture.
“You’d have thought that’s when she’d have started,” their father says.
“Started what?”
He raises his beer, meaning started drinking. “Both brothers dying within a week.”
“In battle,” Norma says, to prompt him to tell her more. All she knows about her uncles is that they were older than their mother and that one was named Jim, the same as their father, and one was named Archie. When the second one, Jim, died, their mother’s father, who was named James Archibald and who won a medal in the First World War, went out to his barn and shot a sow, then wouldn’t let anybody butcher it for meat. This story Norma has heard before from their father. Their mother won’t talk about her brothers dying.
“Think I’ll call it quits,” their father says, pulling himself up. He goes to the fridge for as many beers as he can carry, and takes them upstairs.
Which means he’ll conk out before dinner, probably until the morning. Which means he won’t get into an uproar, not tonight at least.
Sandy is half an hour early. A black car is parked in a corner, but it isn’t Reg’s. Reg drives a red Mustang. Friday evening when she arrived at the store, there was an envelope stamped “Confidential,” and with her name on it, next to the cash register. The note inside was typed on Sherman “Sher-fit” Shoes letterhead. “Doll,” it said. “Re Sunday. One p.m. Glenn Mills High parking lot. Red mustang. See you there! Reg.”
She woke up Friday morning thinking no way could she date a man who was only eight years younger than their father, but the note changed her mind because of the trouble he’d gone to … typing it, using his good office paper. Also she was taken with “Doll.”
She knows what’s going to happen. In her body she knows. Shivers pour through her. At work she went weak in the knees when one of the salesgirls said you should never throw water on mating dogs, because the male dog’s thing makes a hook inside the female, and the female is torn if the male pulls out before his thing goes down.
A red car roars into the lot and accelerates. For a second, before the brakes squeal, she’s sure it’s going to run her down.
Reg leans across the seat and opens the passenger door. Music blares. Frank Sinatra singing “That’s Life.” When she gets in, he turns it down a bit. He’s wearing black leather driving gloves, new-looking blue jeans and a black leather jacket. “A puppet, a poet, a pauper, a pirate, a pawn and a king,” he sings to her. His eyes zigzag over her face, making the cross-stitch. She asks where they’re going.
“Anywhere but here,” he says, turning the radio back up.
Sandy hates Frank Sinatra because their father has all his albums, and she associates him with their father’s secret life—ladies who are tramps, cigarette smoke, drinks and laughs. She wishes Reg would change the station or at least turn the volume back down. Call her “Doll,” make her glad she’s come. He drives fast and mouths the words hugely over at her: “I just-uh pick myself up and get-uh back in the race.”
She folds her arms and looks out her window, and he switches the radio right off. His right hand drops on her thigh. “Baby, baby, baby,” he says consolingly, giving her a squeeze.
A current goes through her, up from his hand. Continuing to give her little squeezes, he says that she looks good enough to eat, that she makes his mouth water, that he has a yen for her. She lays her head on the soft leather of his shoulder, and the road flying under them is her life until this moment.
When they are out of traffic, he doesn’t waste time. “Take off your coat,” he says in the same businessman’s voice that told her to meet him in the doughnut shop.
She obeys.
“Lift up the sweater,” he says, turning the car heater to high. “Slow. Nice and slow,” he says in a voice to demonstrate.
She inches her sweater up. Below her breasts she pauses. She is inspired to pause there as if out of shyness. But although she has never shown her breasts to anyone, not even let her sisters see them since she’s developed, she isn’t feeling shy.
She has on a pink bra, trimmed in lace daisies. As she draws her sweater to her shoulders, she watches his eyes race from her to the road to her. She knows that his yen is for her white skin and how young she is.
They’re in the country now. He pulls into a laneway that flames with sumach and cuts the engine but keeps the heater on. Over the gear shift he kisses her.
For a few minutes they neck, softly, their bodies not touching. He continues to grip the steering wheel, and she is beginning to wonder if anything else is going to happen when he clamps his hand between her legs. Her heart seems to shake her whole body. She thinks that his hand must feel how she shakes. He rubs back and forth, and then, keeping his gloves on, he curls his fingers under her pants and strokes her lightly with his knuckles. She likes that. She shifts closer and puts her arms around his neck. She moans. And simultaneously feels a sharp pain that has her tearing away from his mouth and that she thinks is pure cruelty until he withdraws his hand, looks at his index and middle fingers, shows them to her, and she sees they are smeared wet. Her blood.
“The gates of heaven are now open,” he says.
He has her remove her bra and underpants and straddle his middle, facing him, the driver’s seat pushed back as far as it will go. He grasps his penis so that it’s pointing straight up. In case it makes her lose her nerve, she doesn’t look down.
“Sit on it, baby,” he groans.
She raises herself and comes down in slow motion. He guides himself in. She thinks of her vagina as he said—as a pearly gate—and his penis as a battering ram. All the small bones inside her seem to be splintering. Her eyes water from the pain. His eyes, his old eyes, are squeezed shut as if it hurts him, too.
Once she is all the way down, he holds her by the waist and moves her slowly up again, then down. Her insides make room. His eyes open and plant on her breasts. She notices that the moles on his bald spot make a J. Out of relief that she isn’t really hurting any longer, she kisses the J. He kisses her breasts. He moves her up and down again. Again, faster, deeper. She cries out at the knifing pain. He says,“Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby,” jiggles her breasts, and throws his head back, eyes shut. His penis deflates inside her, in a hot pool.
He is gasping as if he’s run for his life. She is leaking blood all over his new blue jeans, but he doesn’t care. Beads of sweat ring his hairline. She t
ouches them, a little awed by all the physical eruptions. She curls into his chest, and he strokes her back. She is his little puppy, his little baby.
Off and on for two weeks their father is drunk. In his sober spells, in the mornings and after work, the girls keep expecting a tantrum that never comes. He hardly even speaks to them. He stands at windows, gazing out.
When it appears that the binge is over, Lou says,“I give this heartbroken humper act another twenty-four hours.”
But days, weeks pass, and he stays gloomy and lost to the world. One night Lou says “shit” at the breakfast table and gets away with it.
He really doesn’t seem to be looking for trouble.
The only thing he’s interested in is refinishing the basement. After supper he looks over at Norma as if it’s all hopeless but what the hell and asks, does she want to put in a few hours? He has apparently forgotten about her study regime.
He has big plans. A stone fireplace and a bedroom for himself. A four-piece bathroom. A wet bar. So before they can go on with the insulating, they have to tackle the plumbing. As they work, he describes what they’re doing and why. He doesn’t like her to interrupt with questions. In fact, the one time he is the least bit short with her is when she asks him something.
Otherwise, he is even-tempered and not at all bossy. He lets her solder. She believes that he trusts her and wants her around him because Jimmy’s spirit is radiating out of her and striking him unawares. She feels that he’s especially affected after he’s had a few beers.
The truth is, he isn’t a hundred percent on the wagon. Sometimes, once a week maybe, he stops working, gets a beer out of the fridge and sits on the floor drinking it and three or four more while she carries on, if she can, at what they’ve been doing. He gazes at her, frowning, as if he’s noticed something different about her but can’t put his finger on it. And then, suddenly, he gets up and joins her again. What she thinks is that it’s her strength that he’s noticed and can’t put his finger on, and it’s Jimmy’s spirit that compels him to stop drinking and get back to work.
One evening after drinking for a while, he empties down the laundry tubs all the beer that’s in the fridge. Then he strokes her hair and says it is so shiny, so healthy, but she should let it grow.
For the next few weeks she feels as if she has entered another golden period of her life. Most of the time, even at school, she is elated. On top of basking in her magical strength and radiance, she can’t get it out of her mind, their father stroking her hair. He has never done anything like that before. As she lies in bed at night, she thinks about it.
One night she just has to tell Lou about him stroking her hair. Lou is reading in bed, and Norma, looking at her sister’s small head and her long dark hair falling like a veil, wishes that their father would lay his hand on Lou’s head, too, that the whole family would experience his benediction.
“Don’t make me puke,” is Lou’s response.
Norma sighs. What did she expect? And yet she concentrated all her being into pouring a river of goodness out of her eyes. Why wasn’t Lou affected? She asks Lou if she ever thinks about their brother.
A pause. “No.” Lou returns to her book.
“I found a picture of him.”
Lou narrows her eyes. “Where?”
“Downstairs. Under Dad’s workbench.”
“What did he look like?”
“A baby. Me as a baby.”
Lou is silent, frowning at her book, but Norma can tell that she isn’t reading. And although Norma knows better than to go on, her eyes are full with a yearning that she thinks must be the urging of heaven, so she tells Lou everything. About hearing Jimmy’s voice emanating from his picture. About asking his advice. About the day when she felt as if she had become Jimmy … as if Jimmy had entered her. “My thoughts and feelings,” she says,“half the time they feel like his. Even my body feels like his.”
Lou speaks at last. “Your body is a boy’s,” she says flatly.
“I mean his strength.”
Lou slaps shut her book. “You know what you’re telling me?”
Norma waits.
“You’re telling me that you’re a schizophrenic.”
“No! No, I’m not two different people. I’m one person in two persons. Like the holy trinity is God in three persons.”
“I just hope Dad’s got the dough for a shrink. That’s all I hope.”
“I’m not schizophrenic!” Norma says, almost shouting. Automatically she listens for their father, forgetting for a second that he isn’t yelling these days. Then she says,“It happens to people all the time with Jesus. Jesus enters their hearts. His light is in them, guiding them. Well, it’s Jimmy who entered my heart.”
“What makes you think he was a big saint? Christ, he was only just born when he died. He was a baby. He shit, he ate, he slept.”
Norma falls on her side, facing the wall. “Just forget it,” she says.
“You forget it,” Lou says, switching off the lights between their beds. “Another goddamn crazy person in this house is all I need.”
When Lou babysits, she warns the kids to stay out of her hair. Then she shuts herself up in one of the rooms and does her homework and smokes cigarettes, the parents’ if there’s a pack lying around. When her homework is done, she reads dirty magazines and books. Most of the houses she goes to regularly have at least Playboy magazines stashed away somewhere. If the house has bookcases, something mildly trashy might be on the top shelf or behind the rows, out of sight. The hard-core paperbacks are under chair cushions, under workbenches. You have to know where to look.
Her curiosity is mainly for what these pillars of the community go in for. To discover favourite passages she lets books fall open. She commits entire pages to memory for reciting to Sherry, who is never surprised.
“I know the type,” Sherry says.
Sherry has slept with so many guys that she says her vagina can’t hold a tampon.
Lou, on the other hand, is still a virgin, because boys aren’t interested in her. They think of her as a kid, despite a padded bra that provides her with high, pointed breasts that never fail to startle and rivet her when she catches sight of her reflection.
She babysits a fat six-month-old boy who is always flopping his face into her chest and trying to suckle her caved-in bra. “Foreplay,” she jokes to Sherry.
The sex part is rubbing a prescription cream, smelling of cherry cough drops, on the baby’s penis.
On Lou’s first afternoon babysitting him, his mother, late for a curling match, wearing a plaid tam and clomping around in big curling boots, whips the baby onto the change table, trains the floor lamp on him, unpins his diaper, and there in the spotlight is the first human penis Lou has ever laid eyes on.
“Okay, imagine it ten times as big but with the balls about the same size they are now,” Sherry says later.
The baby’s inflammation is from urine catching in the foreskin. “I guess I should’ve had him circumcised,” the mother confesses in a frazzled tone.
She has Lou apply the cream. From the tip down. Rubbing it in until it isn’t visible, then putting on another coat. Meanwhile the baby kicks as if he intends injury.
In November the mother enters a spree of curling bonspiels and hires Lou to come over two afternoons from four until six and on Sundays from noon ‘til five. It’s easy money. The kid hardly ever cries and then only for a few minutes and an obvious reason, like dropping his bottle. Sometimes he gurgles or smiles at her, and she wants to pick him up and cuddle him, but whenever she does, he goes straight for one of her breasts. After a few times babysitting him, she doesn’t find this funny anymore. “Fat glutton,” she says impatiently, thinking of Norma. If she holds him away from her chest, he squirms and thrashes and turns beet red in the face. So she stops picking him up at all unless she has to. She puts him in his Bathinette on one end of the dining-room table and does her homework at the other end.
The normal life in other people’
s houses she finds soothing. Conducive to study. Out of pride and contrariety she studies hard on the sly. Nobody expects her to be so smart—not the teachers who give her detentions for absence and talking back, not the other students who think she’s a loser for hanging around with a tramp, not even the tramp, who thinks she only reads porn.
On nice days Lou takes the baby over to Sherry’s. Outside of his house he strikes her as almost freakishly fat and stupid-looking. She races the carriage and lets it fly ahead of her. A playground is beside Sherry’s apartment, and she and Sherry bring him down to it, and Lou pushes his swing so high it’s parallel with the bars. Sherry screams. Up in her bedroom Sherry bounces him gently on her knee and plays pat-a-cake. He doesn’t squirm with Sherry. He seems to like her.
“Oh, I want one,” she whines.
“Say the word,” Lou says, holding Sherry’s diaphragm over the wastepaper basket.
One day when Sherry picks the baby up, and he starts mouthing the front of her blouse, she says she heard about a woman who adopted a baby and was able to nurse it because its sucking got her milk hormones working.
“Be my guest,” Lou says.
So Sherry undoes her blouse and black push-up bra and pokes a huge brown nipple into his mouth. He sucks noisily. Every time they check, though, there’s no milk. She tries the other nipple, but it doesn’t work either.
“I guess being felt up all the time confuses your hormones,” Sherry sighs. She wants Lou to try.
“No way.” Lou is repulsed at the thought. She snatches the baby from Sherry and throws him on the bed.
“You’ve broken his neck,” Sherry cries, because he is silent.
“He’s okay,” Lou says, bending over him. His eyes are unblinking. “If looks could kill,” she says. She holds his gaze. She wonders whether he’ll have any memory of this when he’s the six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound guy she’s sure he’ll be, given his appetite. He won’t know why, but he’ll hate skinny, dark-haired girls. She wonders if their brother, Jimmy, was like him. If all babies are like him (he’s the only one she babysits). “How are you supposed to love them,” she says,“when they don’t love you back?”
Falling Angels Page 11
