by Annabel Lyon
“I’m tired of standing behind a freaking screen,” Rob says. “And being yelled at.”
“Me, too,” Quinn says. “I mean, I like being King Lear. But without the yelling.”
“Help,” I whisper to Regan.
She just looks at me with her spooky blue eyes.
“Merry! Stop the music!”
The music keeps going.
“Merry!” I yell.
“Why are you so mean to her?” Regan says.
A couple of minutes later, the music ends and Merry appears, not onstage but on the steps that lead from the wings to the aisle. I’ve drilled into her that she’s not allowed to go onstage, ever, for anything. “Where did everybody go?” she says.
“They went home.”
She laughs.
“Really, Merry. Everybody got mad at me and went home.”
“Why?”
“I yell too much, I guess.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
She just stands there, waiting for me to do something, or tell her what to do.
“Get the CDs,” I say. “We should go home, too, I guess.”
Merry doesn’t move. She’s putting together a thought.
“What?” I say.
“Come my house,” she says.
“Merry.” I close my eyes, open them. The theatre’s still empty except for Merry. She’s the only one who hasn’t walked out on me. “Okay.”
Usually I walk her to her front door and then go on to my house. Today I follow her in. The house has changed a lot since last September, when she and Aunt Ellie moved in. It has furniture now, and pictures on the walls, and a terracotta aromatherapy ball hanging from the ceiling so that the front hall always smells like gingerbread, and usually the radio chatting away in the kitchen, where Aunt Ellie works at the big table. She has a job now, writing articles for an investment website. She looks up, surprised to see me, and stands up to give me a big hug. “Edie!”
She hangs on to me for a long time and I let her. It feels good just to hug somebody and not to talk.
“Tea?” she says finally, when she lets me go.
The tea sisters, my dad calls her and my mom. “Well, sure,” Mom always says. “We’re Newfoundlanders.” Aunt Ellie has a little wicker basket in her kitchen cupboard just like we do, all filled with colourful bags and boxes of every kind of tea. I sit down at the table and start rifling through it while Aunt Ellie fills the kettle. I can hear Merry upstairs in her room, singing.
“English Breakfast for me, please, sweetie.” Aunt Ellie takes three mugs from the drying rack. “And Merry likes white peach.” I find the bags, and add a second white peach for myself. Aunt Ellie puts one bag in each mug and pours the water in.
Merry clomps down the stairs and sets a binder and a denim pencil bag on the kitchen table. “I write a page a numbers,” she says.
“A writing page and a numbers page.” Aunt Ellie glances over Merry’s shoulder, frowning. “Which should we do first?”
“Numbers.”
I sip my tea, which is really quite nice, and watch them work their way down the page. It’s multiplication. I try to remember when I first learned multiplication. Grade two? Three times three, three times four. Merry’s trying hard, but it’s like when I tried to teach her the lights and the CD player at the theatre: things stick for a second or two and then slip away. I can see Aunt Ellie is getting frustrated and impatient and trying not to show it. I’m surprised—I thought I was the only one who had no patience with Merry, and that was because I was mean.
Aunt Ellie’s voice interrupts my thoughts. “Edie, would you run up to Merry’s room and bring us some Lego? This might be easier to understand with something we can actually see. There’s a big box in her cupboard.”
“I love Lego,” I say to Merry. “Maybe I can play too?”
“I don’t want to,” Merry says. She looks frustrated too, as if she’s going to cry.
“Thank you, Edie,” Aunt Ellie says with a steely I Am Not Going To Lose My Temper voice I recognize from Mom but have never heard my aunt use.
Merry’s room has a couple of new additions since the last time I was in here. There’s a little laptop on the desk, one of those heavy-duty ones with rubber corners that look as if they’re made from titanium, the kind you can drop and nothing bad happens. There’s a Habs pillow on the bed to match the hockey posters on the walls. I find the Lego in the closet and select a few pieces Aunt Ellie can use to explain multiplication.
Back downstairs, in the kitchen, Aunt Ellie and Merry are having a long hug. “You’re doing great,” Aunt Ellie is saying. “I know you can do it.”
“Look, Merry,” I say, putting the Lego on top of her homework.
“No,” Merry says.
“I got you a present today,” Aunt Ellie says. “For when your homework is done. Why don’t we get finished and then you can see it?”
“No,” Merry says.
“Please, Merry,” Aunt Ellie says. Her eyes are too bright suddenly, with dark circles underneath.
“Maybe—” I say. “Can I borrow the phone?”
“Sure, sweetie,” Aunt Ellie says.
I phone home. Mom answers. “Can I sleep over at Merry’s?” I say, instead of hello.
“Who is this?” Mom says. Aunt Ellie and Merry are looking at me as if I just turned blue.
“Sleep. Over. At. Merry’s,” I say.
“Edie?” Mom says.
“It’s Friday. No school tomorrow.”
“Let me talk to Aunt Ellie,” Mom says. Even on the phone, I can hear her making her suspicious, squinty-eyed raisin face.
I hand the phone to Aunt Ellie, who takes it into the next room. “Maybe when your homework is done, we can look at your present together,” I tell Merry. “What’s your writing page?”
She pulls it out from under the numbers page and the Lego and we look at it together. “This is cool,” I say.
“Yuh,” Merry says. “What is it?”
“You have to finish this story. See, they give you these sentences with words missing and you have to fill them in. Want me to help you?”
“Yuh,” Merry says.
I hold up my mug of tea, cooled now, and she holds up hers and we clink. “Cheers.”
Merry says, “I spilled.”
“Me, too,” I say.
When Aunt Ellie comes back from her phone call with Mom in the other room, I throw myself on top of the page we’re working on. “It’s a surprise!” I say. “You can’t look at it yet!”
Aunt Ellie holds up both hands like someone surrendering and goes back into the living room.
“Now, you need a describing word,” I tell Merry. “Like big or purple or lovely or atrocious—”
“Purple,” Merry says.
“No, but you pick your own, see?” I say. “You don’t pick my word. You pick one of your own words, and then the story will be all yours. It’ll sound like you and nobody else.”
Merry says, “Lovely.”
“No, see—” I stop and take a breath. Slow down. Just slow down, that’s all. “You like hockey, right? The Habs?”
She giggles and claps her hands.
“What do you like about hockey?”
“It’s fast,” she says. “It’s zippy.”
“Zippy! That’s your word, see? Your very own word that you thought of. Okay, next we need an animal.”
“Giraffe,” Merry says.
“Perfect.” I spell it for her and she writes it down.
When we’re done her writing page, we take it into the living room to read it to Aunt Ellie. She’s lying on the sofa, just staring at the ceiling, but smiles when she sees us. “So?” she says.
This is what the page originally said:
Once upon a time, a [describing word] [animal] lived in a [describing word] [place]. One day, the [animal] was [travelling] to [place] when she saw a [object]. “Oh no!” she said. “That [object] is [doing something] on that [other anim
al] over there! It’s [doing something] [describing word]! I have to do something quickly!” The [animal] [describing word] [did something] and [did something] until the [object] [travelled] across the [place]. “There!” the [animal] said. “I have saved the day!” [exclamation]
This is what we wrote:
Once upon a time, a zippy giraffe lived in a lovely hockey rink. One day, the giraffe was skating to the Indian restaurant when she saw a bottle of nail polish. “Oh no!” she said. “That bottle of nail polish is spilling that green colour on that monkey over there! It’s spilling atrociously! I have to do something quickly!” The giraffe cleverly grabbed a big sponge and mopped until the bottle of nail polish bounded away across the pampas. “There!” the giraffe said. “I have saved the day! He scores!”
Aunt Ellie sits up and claps when we’re done, and then she gives us both hugs. “Go get your present,” she tells Merry. “It’s on my bed.” Merry runs upstairs. Aunt Ellie takes the page and reads it over. “Sounded like you guys were having fun in there,” she says.
“I like writing,” I say. “She chose all the words herself, though.”
“Atrociously?” Aunt Ellie says. “Pampas?”
“Almost all the words.”
She smiles, then quickly blows her nose, turning her face into her shoulder so I can’t see her. I say, “Are you okay?”
“I’m just tired. Thank you, sweetie. Thank you for helping her with this.”
“You shouldn’t thank me. I haven’t been much help at all. I—”
“It’s okay, Edie,” Aunt Ellie says. “I know.”
“I’ve been pretty mean, actually.” I tell her about the first time Merry invited me for a sleepover and I said no. I want to cry, but I don’t let myself. I don’t deserve to cry and get a hug.
“Oh, baby,” she says. “You really think I don’t understand? I know it’s hard. Anyway, you’re here now, aren’t you?”
Merry barrels back into the room, waving a DVD called Guys and Dolls. I’ve never heard of it.
“Shall we watch it right now?” Aunt Ellie says.
We all go down to the basement, where the TV is. There’s not so much furniture here, but a lot of pillows and old quilts and blankets clutter the floor, and there are a couple of hot pink beanbag chairs Aunt Ellie got at a garage sale. “Make a nest, Edie,” Aunt Ellie says, smiling. Mom would insist on folding all the blankets and putting them away in a closet when they aren’t being used; Aunt Ellie just leaves them in a pile on the floor. That’s one of the things I like about Aunt Ellie.
Merry plops herself down in a beanbag chair. I grab a big cushion for myself, but Aunt Ellie says she’s going to do her yoga while she watches, so I take the other beanbag chair. Aunt Ellie sits cross-legged on the floor, breathes deeply through her nose a few times, and presses the clicker.
The movie is about gamblers and showgirls in New York a long time ago. The men wear suits like my dad but in candy colours, and the girls are all stupid except one who works for the Salvation Army, who’s pretty and mean. Then one of the gamblers gets her drunk and she’s not mean anymore. The music is jazzy and the talking is strange, all fancy and stilted, but funny too. There’s one love story between the gambler and the Salvation Army girl, which makes me cringe inside the way love stories always do, and another love story between another gambler and one of the showgirls. They’re dumber and funnier than the first two, and I’m more comfortable when they’re on the screen.
“What is that?” I ask Aunt Ellie.
“Downward Dog,” Aunt Ellie says. She’s bending from the waist with her palms on the floor. Her voice is kind of muffled.
“In the movie, I mean.”
Her head comes up. “It’s a dice game called—”
“Ssh,” Merry says.
“—craps,” Aunt Ellie says.
“Sorry!” I whisper. I must have wrecked her concentration.
“No, the game’s really called craps,” she whispers back.
“Ssh!” Merry says.
When the movie’s over, Merry wants to watch it again right away. Aunt Ellie says she’s going to make supper. “Want to help me or watch it again?”
“I’ll sit with Merry,” I say. “Unless you need me to help?”
“Sit with Merry.”
Halfway into our second time through, Aunt Ellie brings down trays with macaroni and cheese and raw veggies and dip and cranberry juice and chocolate pudding. “Don’t tell your mom we’re not sitting around the table,” Aunt Ellie says.
“We get to eat takeout pizza in front of the TV when there’s an election. Other than that—”
“My sister likes things just so.” Aunt Ellie smiles with just one side of her mouth, as if it’s a joke that isn’t really a joke. “All the family sitting round like a picture in a magazine. But when it’s just the two of us, Merry and me, we’re pretty relaxed.”
“Ssh!” Merry says. She’s sitting up straight in her beanbag, transfixed by the TV. Her plate of food sits untouched on the floor. I’ve never seen her concentrate so hard on anything for so long, let alone ignore food.
“What’s she doing?” I whisper to Aunt Ellie.
She passes me some carrot sticks. “Learning the words.”
When the movie’s all done, Merry wants to watch it a third time. “Tomorrow, Merry,” Aunt Ellie says. “It’s time to go make up a bed for Edie.”
“No,” Merry says.
“I don’t have pyjamas,” I say. “Or a toothbrush. Should I call my mom?”
“Merry can lend you something,” Aunt Ellie says. “And I have a spare toothbrush. You don’t have to go to bed yet, Merry, just get ready. We can do crafts or listen to music.”
“Music,” I say quickly. Crafts, meh.
Merry loans me a pair of too-short orange fleece pants and a too-big Belle Province T-shirt for pyjamas. We drink cocoa and Aunt Ellie puts a Louis Armstrong CD on the stereo. Merry sings along to most of the songs. She’s not a great singer, but she knows every single word and bit of melody, every breath and hesitation and improvisation.
“Merry,” I say when she’s done, “that’s really good. You know all the words and everything.”
“I like that,” she says. Then she starts to sing something else:
Silly old dad of mine,
Why waste your time and mine?
You make me sad in my heart.
It takes a minute for my brain to catch up to my ears. “That’s Cordelia,” I say to Aunt Ellie. “That’s Cordelia’s first song in our King Lear.”
“She knows all the songs,” Aunt Ellie says, ruffling Merry’s hair. “The words, too. She’s been to every rehearsal, after all.”
“Yeah, but that’s—that’s amazing. Half the cast don’t know their own lines yet.”
“It’s okay, Edie,” Merry says.
We sleep in her room, Merry in her bed and me on the futon. She falls asleep fast. After a while I get up and find Aunt Ellie in the kitchen, back on her computer. “Can’t sleep?” she says.
I shake my head. “What are you doing?”
“Just email. Daniel says hi.”
“To me?”
“I emailed him earlier that you were here, while I was making supper. He says to call you String Bean and tell you you’re amazing.” I make a face. Aunt Ellie laughs. “He’s just pushing your buttons, Edie. He messes with you because he likes you.”
“Whatever.”
Aunt Ellie slouches and shakes her hair over her face and pouts and says, “Whatever.” I realize she’s imitating me. She’s happy, though, laughing. She’s gone pink in the cheeks just thinking about Daniel. It’s weird. “Want to say anything back?” she asks, fingers poised over the keyboard.
“Tell him we missed him tonight.”
Her cheeks go pinker. Tap-tap-tap go her fingers.
Later, when I’m back in bed and almost asleep, I hear a car pull into the driveway, the front door opening, low voices in the hall. But the next morning it’s just the t
hree of us for breakfast, so it must have been a dream.
Mom comes to pick me up. “Have a good time?” she asks.
I say, “Actually.”
Mom doesn’t say anything, but I can see she’s happy.
Raj can juggle and walk on his hands and sing and dance and do impressions of all the teachers and tell jokes until you think you’ll pee your pants. He should be the perfect Fool, but something is wrong.
“I just don’t want to do it that way,” he says glumly, a few days after my sleepover with Merry. I’ve just suggested he make a face behind Lear’s back to liven up one of his lines. “Can’t I just play it straight?”
“You’re the Fool, Raj,” I say. “You’re supposed to fool around. Foolishly.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” he says.
AAAARGH! I want to say, but I’m tiptoeing around Raj these days, grateful he came back at all after the day I yelled at him. “How do you want to do it, then?” I say instead.
“I don’t know.” He looks as if he wants to cry. “I just want to say the line, I guess. Can’t somebody else do the laughs?”
AAAARGH!
“I think the Fool’s kind of a serious character, actually,” Raj says. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot. I think the humour is just on the surface. Underneath, I think he’s, like, really sad.”
“Yeah?” I say.
He nods. “He speaks the truth, but nobody takes him seriously. Nobody listens to him. They just want to laugh and not to have to think about what he’s saying. Listen.” He flips through his pages. Raj is one of those I was complaining about to Aunt Ellie, who hasn’t got the text memorized yet. “‘Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out.’ The only way he can tell the truth without being punished is to make it into a joke. But the truth isn’t a joke. What if he’s all dressed up in his Fool costume but you can tell he’s—”
“Depressed?” I whisper to Regan.
She pops her eyebrows briefly, as if she’s not disagreeing with me.
“I’m a serious person, you know,” Raj says. “I just think I should be able to show that every once in a while.”
AAAARGH! “Okay, Raj,” I say. “Just say the line straight, then.”
He says it straight. His voice is flat. It’s boring.
