by Karen Foxlee
The audience went wild. Mr. Maxwell shook his head smiling. Mrs. Dalrymple, the principal, took the microphone.
“Well, I think you should stand up and take a bow, young lady,” she said.
And so little CJ, wiping her watery eyes, stood up smiling and bowed.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked when she took her seat next to me.
“I just couldn’t keep it inside anymore,” she replied.
I looked at the H issues in a small pile beside Mrs. Gaspar’s sofa. I stared at the phone on the wall. I sighed and picked up the first issue and began to read. The day of Davey’s operation, I pretended to be very interested in hamsters and Hawaii and hair. President Harding and the two Presidents Harrison.
“What are you looking at?” asked Mrs. Gaspar who had been vacuuming dramatically, her beehive wobbling precariously. She had dusted. She had emptied her ashtrays. She had stared at the telephone too as though willing it to ring.
“Halibut,” I said.
She rolled her eyes and turned on the vacuum again.
I pretended to be super-interested in halibut, the heart (with its diagram containing three transparencies), halos, harps, horsehair snakes.
Hawks. A painful lump of sadness expanded in my throat and I quickly turned the pages.
“Mrs. Gaspar,” I cried. “Look what’s here.”
I showed her Hungary.
I thought it would make her happy, but it didn’t. She burst into tears and took the book from my hands and cried over the map. I closed my eyes and wished everything could go back to the way it had been. I wished no one had to crack open Davey’s head like an egg.
“Hungary,” she cried. “Hungary.”
And I wished I’d never shown her.
“Here, look,” she said at last, regaining a little composure. “Dumpling, I will show you.”
She traced her white pudgy finger over the map. She showed me the mountains where the giants lived. She showed me the river and the fields and her little village.
“Oh yes,” she said, closing her eyes, “I can feel it. I can feel the stone road and I can smell the wild rose, yes.”
It was exactly the type of thing that happened if you were left alone with Mrs. Gaspar for too long.
“Please now,” she said and she took my finger and she put it down on her little town.
I closed my eyes and tried to feel it.
I imagined a field with flowers in it and the warm sun on my shoulders and on the crown of my head and I was only just starting to enjoy myself when the telephone rang.
After operations, people have breath that smells like metal or that’s what Mother said. Not then, but much later. She said, “You had terrible breath, Davey, I’ll never forget it,” and for some reason it always made him laugh.
“As bad as dog breath?” he would ask.
“Much worse,” Mother would say.
They did not crack open his head but went up his nose, which surprised them both. And me too, on the phone.
“Up his nose?” I said.
“His nose?” cried Mrs. Gaspar in the background.
“He’s doing well but he didn’t wake up for some time,” said Mother.
She had hovered near him in that hospital bed. She had hovered and fussed and rung the little bell countless times. For the blood on the sponge at the end of his nose. For the one time he coughed. When he turned himself over onto his side. When he wouldn’t wake up. She rang the little bell.
“He’s doing well,” said the nurse. “He’s a strong boy.”
“When will he wake up?” said Mother. She was a nursing aide but the sight of Davey lying like that with a sponge tied to the end of his nose brought out the shaky shivery Cindy Spink. The nervous, weeping, tin-pipe-whistling Cindy Spink.
“He’ll wake up when he wants to,” said the nurse.
“Should there be that blood on the bandage?” said Mother, fluttering. She was like a moth in a jar.
“It’s just a little,” said the nurse. “It’s normal.”
“I don’t know,” said Mother. “Are you sure he’s just sleeping?”
“Yes, honey,” said the nurse. “He’s just sleeping.”
When the nurse was gone, Davey opened his eyes.
He had blue eyes, Davey, very clear. His lashes were long and thick and curved up ward like an old-fashioned movie star’s. Mother rang the bell like there was a fire.
“Hello,” said Davey. He looked glad to be back. He looked around the room. He smiled at Mother. He rubbed his head and the nurse took his hand and told him not to touch his nose.
“Oh,” said Mother, and she began to cry against his arm.
“Have I stopped growing?” he asked.
“Hush,” said Mother.
“Oh, praise the Lord,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “He’s goot. He’s goot, Lenora. He’s goot.”
She did a little dance in her shaggy bathrobe. I smiled but I also wanted to bury my head in my hands and cry. I did when it was night, soundlessly, my mouth open. I cried and cried until I was hollowed out inside and just a Lenny Spink casing like a cicada shell.
I was happy. But I felt strange. The next morning, I felt stranger.
It was Saturday and I’d never had a Saturday without my mother or Davey. Saturday was cartoons on the sofa and if Mother wasn’t working, she would clean in her pyjamas. She would vacuum and mop and dust and she would shout at us for our laziness during the week. I wanted to be shouted at like that again. It was overcast and threatening to rain but it wasn’t my rain sadness flower. It was a listless, calm emptiness.
Mrs. Gaspar came past. She crossed herself in front of the Jesus. She smiled at me and I saw she didn’t have her teeth in. And right then, at that exact moment, I decided I was going to visit my imaginary grandmother.
I told Mrs. Gaspar I was going to the comic book shop for Davey but I walked to Fifth Street. I walked slowly, pretending I wasn’t going there. I looked at the street signs like I was an interested tourist. The sky was pressed down heavy between the buildings and the air tasted of diesel exhaust and rain. If Davey had been with me he would have told me to go back. He would have said, This is bad, Lenny, real bad, because he was a great big baby.
But I was on my own.
I turned onto Fifth Street and the buses and trucks roared past me and the traffic lights changed so that all the people crossed, and there seemed a lot more people on Fifth. They were bustling and hustling past me and I got bumped and snagged on some of them and a man in a maroon suit told me to watch my step.
But that was at the seven hundreds. The six hundreds were quieter. By the five hundreds, the crowd was well thinned and there was just an old woman walking her dog and two men looking at a newspaper together.
Four hundred they disappeared.
Three hundred I was on my own.
Two hundred and seventy-six. It was a tall grey building, narrow, only three windows across, with satiny smooth old front steps. My feet made a hushing sound as I climbed them. They’d be slippery in the rain. My grandmother would have to watch out.
Davey would have said, Let’s go. Come on, Lenny, I wanna go.
But I stepped up to the door plate and read the names. Hugo. Fanning. Spiro. Lionel. Davidson. Petrovich. Martin. Cowell. Smyth. Ackermann. Spink.
Spink.
It seemed so strange to see it there and belonging to someone else.
“Are you okay?” asked a man and I nearly jumped clean off the steps.
He was small and wiry with thinning hair. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly. A neutral kind of in-between.
“I’m s-s-supposed to help my grandmother but I forgot my k-k-key,” I stammered. I couldn’t believe the words, surely they weren’t mine.
“Mrs. Ackermann?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Yes,” I squeaked.
He opened the door and let me through, then rushed up the stairs in front of me, two at a time, until he disappeared into the stairwell gloom. Inside that build
ing was dark. A light bulb hummed beside me on the wall. Nineteen. Apartment nineteen, fifth floor. There was an old elevator with a metal grate but I didn’t take it. I started the long walk up the steps.
If Davey was there he’d say, I don’t have a good feeling about this.
Second floor, third floor, fourth floor. There were four apartments per floor, facing each other about the stairwell. I heard sounds. Sometimes voices. Once a door closing. Each time my heart banged a painful beat. Fourth floor. Fifth floor.
I stood in front of apartment nineteen. Even the number seemed magical. It was the kind of number a grandmother would have. I tried to calm down my breathing. It was all knotted inside me. It was quiet but in the quiet I heard music. I pressed my ear to the door and heard a violin.
A violin?
My grandmother plays the violin!
Even I couldn’t have imagined something so amazing.
I pressed my ear to the wood again to hear the music. It was sad music, beautiful music, and that music and the grey rainy sky in the window above the stairwell opened the rain sadness flower in my chest as I listened. I closed my eyes, and as soon as I did, the door opened and I fell in.
Great-Aunt Em
5’ 6”
MAY 1976
Her skin was a story. Her face was covered in fine blue veins, as though someone had drawn all over her with an ink pen. There were bruises on her arms, some the colour of mulberries and others yellowing. Her legs were veined and dry like the bark of an old tree. But the tops of her feet in her slippers were puffed up and polished.
Her hair was cut close to her head, sparse, tufted, like a bird just losing its down. She had a yellow nylon scarf tied there in a bow.
She had blue eyes. I looked for Davey’s in them. It made sense. I thought I saw them. I thought for sure I could see them. She had intelligent eyes, thinking eyes, a little sprinkle of whiskers on her chin.
“What are you doing spying outside my door?” she asked.
Every word I ever knew had been erased from my tongue. I stood there gasping like a fish out of water. In the end I managed, “Spink.” I managed, “Peter Lenard.”
Her intelligent eyes looked me up and down, side to side, maybe calculated ages and time. She closed her eyes, opened them just as suddenly.
“Come on in,” she sighed, as though she’d expected this day to come.
I stepped into her little apartment. It smelled of cooking, bacon perhaps. I could see the kitchen and there was a frying pan on the stove and a haze of smoke still high up to the ceiling. There was just one chair in the living room. That was the saddest thing I ever saw. One single armchair. It faced a big radio on a stand. From the radio came the sound of the violin.
She said, “Sit at the table.”
Down the little hall, I caught a glimpse of the corner of her bed. It was unmade, a blue bedspread, my favourite colour.
Peter Lenard Spink. Peter Lenard Spink. Peter Lenard Spink.
Her apartment wasn’t messy. It was bare. A sad blue kind of bare. A stopped-still kind of bare. She sat down at the table and she looked at me long and hard.
“I can see him in you, yes, I can,” she said.
She didn’t offer me a drink and my mouth was so dry my words came out snagged and twisted on my teeth.
“Are you my grandmother?” I asked.
“Do you know who your grandmother is?” she fired back.
“No,” I whispered.
“It’s not me,” she said with great force, like she was glad of it. She shook her head vehemently. “Great-aunt. I’d be your great-aunt Em—Ez has been dead years. Years and years. I can’t even recall how long Ez has been dead. Yes, Ez is dead.”
I guessed Ez was my grandmother. It was sad news but there was also a small kind of relief. My imaginary grandmother evaporated into a puff of smoke and here in her place was my great-aunt and I’d never expected that. A little cog moved into the right position in my body, a gear changed. I could breathe.
Great-Aunt Em said, “Your father, he never once visited me in all these years.”
She pierced me with her blue eyes, as though I was somehow to blame for that. But I wondered if anyone had visited Em. There were no signs of it.
“His mother, the stories I could tell you of his mother,” she said. “Now, she liked to drink, yes she did. She was good friends with the bottle.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Esmeralda,” said Em. “She was the prettiest girl in the West at one time.”
“Oh.”
“But her boys had a hard life.”
“So my father had brothers?”
“Why yes, he did,” said Great-Aunt Em.
“Have I got cousins?” I asked. The colourful Sound of Music Spinks crowded around in my brain.
“Well, you probably do,” said Em. “I think you probably do, come to think of it.”
“My father went away when Davey was five. He never came back.”
“Sounds like him,” she said. “What’s Davey like? Does he look like Paul?”
“Peter,” I said. “Peter Lenard Spink.”
“That’s what I meant. I told you he never visited me for a good twenty years, since he was just a boy himself. Is Davey like him?”
“No,” I said, thinking of Davey who was the friendliest person you could meet. “He’s pretty different.”
“Well, that’s probably a good thing,” she said and then she grinned suddenly giving a wide view into her vacant mouth. She had two dimples, one on either side. Just like I had. The bane of my life. I smiled back, ashamed and happy and relieved and terrified. I had never felt so alive.
I giggled nervously.
My great-aunt slammed her bony hand on the table and began to laugh too.
Mrs. Gaspar looked at me suspiciously when I got home. It felt like I’d been gone a whole day, that’s how long it seemed but the hand on her mustard-coloured clock had only moved to eleven. That was all, two hours. Two hours and I had found a whole new family.
Mrs. Gaspar was watching the television when I came in. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes.
“What?” I said.
“Where is the comic book?”
“I couldn’t find anything he’d like,” I said.
“Pah,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “In a shop filled with that many comics?”
What if Great-Aunt Em could show on me? I smiled and I felt my hereditary dimples, one hundred percent genetic. I un-smiled them.
“Did Mother call?” I asked.
“No,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “I will make you a sandwich.”
I’d already eaten a bacon sandwich with Great-Aunt Em. It was the best bacon sandwich I’d ever tasted, stale bread and all. So much better than Mrs. Gaspar’s soup. We had laughed right through that bacon sandwich because just looking at each other made us laugh.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“You are not hungry?” said Mrs. Gaspar. She felt my head. “Your cheeks are red. Are you having fever?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Maybe.”
“I will make you a special fever tea,” said Mrs. Gaspar.
“Maybe I should just lie down,” I said.
I lay in my sleeping bag till noon then. I snuggled my face against the pillow and my dimples appeared. I tried to stop the smile but I couldn’t. I squeezed my eyes shut and beamed.
Horse People
5’ 6”
MAY/JUNE 1976
“She was a good girl, my sister,” said Great-Aunt Em, the very next day. “She was a good girl, your grandmother. After our mama died, each night she made sure I had a blanket over me. She sang me to sleep with our mama’s own lullaby. ‘Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep my little baby. When you wake, you shall have, all the pretty little horses.’”
She shut her eyes and sang that song and she was the strangest creature I ever saw.
“She can only have been nine or so and I was just six perhaps. And we kept that picture of our
mama wrapped up in the strip of cotton.”
“How did your mama die?” I asked.
“A little sore on her leg was all,” said Great-Aunt Em. “But it festered and she got it in her blood. We were a long way from any medicine, somewhere in Wyoming, Lenny Spink. We were always travelling. It’s just the way my daddy was.”
That made sense, maybe that’s why Peter Lenard was the way he was. I sat on the edge of my kitchen chair, waiting for more story. I was shaking I wanted her stories so much.
“We were horse girls, Lenny,” she said. “Our daddy taught us how to ride and girl could we ride. I could ride a horse bareback and blindfolded. We once rode all the way from Jefferson to the outskirts of Kansas City. I could ride any horse you put in front of me.”
“I’ve never even ridden a horse,” I said.
“You look like you could,” said Em. “You’ve got the right posture. You’ve got the right manner. You look like a girl who knows how to talk to animals.”
My heart swelled and my eyes grew foggy. I thought of my beetles. The way I understood them. I didn’t tell her about them though. Beetles weren’t the same as horses.
“Could my father ride a horse?” I asked and wished I hadn’t almost right away.
Her eyes looked faraway, as though she were trying to remember.
“Your father,” she said slowly. “I’ll have to try to remember.” I waited.
“You haven’t told anyone about me, have you?” she asked suddenly.
“No,” I said. “My brother’s away in the hospital and my mother’s with him. I’m just staying with Mrs. Gaspar.”
“Good girl. We don’t want to do anything to give him a shock now, do we?” she said. “Not when he’s just had a brain operation.”
“No,” I said, breathless. “I won’t tell them yet,” I promised.
The day after the surgery, Professor Cole arrived at Davey’s bedside with his first version of the operation. He smiled when he saw Davey yet a dark heart feeling swelled and stormed through Mother’s veins.
