by Ann Birch
Today, as she cuts into the excellent roast beef, she nods across the table at Doug Dunsmore and Geoff Teasdale who are seated side by side. They’re generally good company. They like to talk about their courses and the books they’re reading.
“What a day,” she says. “Do you hate Valentine’s Day as much as I do?”
But the two men are not listening. They are laughing together, in fact giggling, in a decidedly idiotic way, and do not seem to register her presence. Her napkin drops to the floor. Diving between the heavy oak table legs to retrieve it, she notices Doug’s shiny Florsheim loafer pressed against a well-scuffed boot. So that’s what the embarrassment this morning was all about. Well, good for them. But really, Valentine’s Day is starting to make her feel like some sort of pariah.
“Sorry to rush off, Roberta,” Doug says, finally noticing her. “Geoff and I arrived here early, and we’re going to take a quick trot around Queen’s Park Circle before afternoon classes. We’d ask you to come with us, but you’ve got to eat, right?”
Roberta is left now to stare across the table at two empty chairs. She finishes a few mouthfuls of beef, and seeing Joan Wishart coming through the dining hall to High Table, she decides it’s time to escape.
There are two messages on the answering machine when she gets home. For a moment, she’s hopeful. Maybe Carl has phoned to ask her to go to the Hot Spot for dinner. Even if they are beside lovers, it will be pleasant to get out and away from this horrible loneliness. She presses “Play.”
“Hi, Ma,” the first message says. “I’m taking Ashley out tonight. A romantic interlude if you know what I mean. Don’t worry if I’m home very late. Hope you got our Valentine this morning. Bye for now.”
“Hi, Mom,” Charlie’s voice says in the second message. “We’re totally booked here at The Fig Leaf. Not a table that hasn’t been reserved. Our prix fixe menu features beef heart or pork tenderloin — get it? — with a gooey chocolate cupcake for dessert. Revolting, but what can I do? I’ll probably be back late. See you.”
Roberta pours a glass of wine and stretches out on the sofa with a volume of William Trevor’s stories. She can count on him to eschew the romantic. She dips into one about a husband who has run off with his wife’s sister. The phone rings. Here it is, she thinks, leaping up. Carl at last.
“God, what a day,” he says without preliminaries. “I had to pass out those stupid Valentine cards that the kids bought from the Student Council. It’s a fundraiser. And there was so much giggling about who was going to get one and from whom. Know something? I hate copulating seventeen-year-olds who have no idea what love is all about. But I run on. How was your day?”
“I think my college students are already starting to get a bit disillusioned about love.” She tells him of Jason’s cynicism about the St. Valentine story.
“Good for him. I did my best to introduce a little cynicism into the day. I told the kids how it all started with Pan, brutish in appearance and brutal in his desires.”
“You didn’t!”
“Yes, I did. I mentioned how, on February 14, Pan would make a whip out of a strip of goatskin and beat any innocent maiden who came his way….”
“Thus ensuring her fertility. Oh Carl, wasn’t that a bit extreme?”
“Probably. I expect I’ll be summoned to the principal’s office tomorrow. But before she gives me my walking papers, I’ll show her the relevant passage from The Golden Bough.” He clears his throat. “And tomorrow, I’ll apologize to the class and make up for my sins by reading them a sonnet or two from the Bard: ‘Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds,’ etc., that sort of stuff.”
“What are you doing tonight?” Roberta asks. “Besides confessing your sins?”
“I’ve got a bottle of good Scotch I’m going to get into in a serious way.” There’s a long pause. Then he says, “Remember how I told you about Claire and our Valentine’s Day a year ago? How she threw the box of chocolates I bought her into the basin she’d just puked into?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“I can’t get it out of my mind. I hate Valentine’s Day.” His voice breaks. “But I shouldn’t have taken out my sorrow on the kids. And I’m sorry about us, Rob. I wanted to do something tonight, but…”
“I understand,” Roberta says. “Let’s just get this day over with, and I’ll see you sometime soon.”
She hangs up. I’ve been acting like one of those silly girls in Carl’s class. Get used to being alone, she tells herself. There are worse fates. Like being outed as Renee Meadows, for example.
She’s so cold now. What to do? Only the usual. She goes into the bathroom, fills the tub with scalding water and climbs in. An hour later, she wakes up. Her New Yorker magazine lies soaked in the tepid water. What time is it? Still only eight o’clock. She turns her hair dryer on the magazine and sets it over the shower rail to finish drying. Then she crawls into bed.
As she tries to get warm under the covers, she thinks, I don’t hate Valentine’s Day. I just need a warm, loving body beside me. And then she remembers that her mother said the very same thing to her a month ago.
She gets up, searches through a cardboard box in the clothes closet and extracts the old CD of Robert Burns’s love songs. To the strains of “O my luve is like a red, red rose,” she thinks about James and falls asleep.
27.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, on her way down St. George Street for her volunteer work with the street kids, Roberta pulls out her BlackBerry and sees a message from Marianne. Call me. She punches in Marianne’s number.
“Oh, Roberta, I’d been hoping you’d call. Got a carton of books here for you.”
“Books?”
“Yeah, books. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? So what do I do with them, eh?”
“You mean the damn thing’s out already?”
“Oh, get with it, Renee baby. Didn’t George Korda say early April? And it’s end of March now, isn’t it? So I’ve got this box of free author’s copies for you. Twenty-five of them. George sent them special delivery this morning. So what do I do with them?”
Well, she knows what her poets would say, but Marianne doesn’t deserve their four-letter words.
“Hello? Anyone at home?”
“Got a recycling box down there, Marianne?”
“Yeah, I get what you’re saying. But it seems a shame. Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
Toss out a box of books, sure, that’s the easy part. But it’s like the old story of the Dutch boy who tried to stop the flood by putting his finger in the dyke. Soon, Mira will be on bookshelves everywhere, and there won’t be a goddamn thing she can do about it.
In fact, the Christian Mission may soon be the only safe haven she’ll have. The kids in the YES program are always a challenge, but at least she won’t have to fear awkward questions on Mira from them. She doubts that any of them would have money to spend on a book. She does sometimes see them carrying the free subway paper, Toronto Weekly, but they seem indifferent to the copies of The Gazette and National Telegram that the Mission provides, perhaps because they resent the way Annie, the staff counsellor, removes some of the pages carrying the most sensational news of the day.
As Roberta turns onto Major Street and comes through the front door of the Mission, Annie waves at her from the cubbyhole that passes for her office. “Nice of your son to provide that food every week,” she says. “It’s a big factor in getting the gang here on time, too. Big Chris was back with it at five to two on the dot, and by that time, they were all waiting for it down below.”
“I’ll tell Charlie,” Roberta says, smiling.
She goes down the stairs to find the kids sitting around the Arborite table. Big Chris is just opening the box he has picked up from The Fig Leaf, and a scent of cheese and onion escapes in a puff.
“Smells good,” Bat says.
The bruises have gone from his face, and Roberta sees a nice-looking boy with good cheekbones and blue eyes. “But what the hell is it? Looks like a plank of plywood.”
“Don’t quote me,” Roberta says. “Charlie’s the cook, but I think it’s flatbread.”
Big Chris cuts it in squares with a knife from his pocket. Oh, Lord, am I supposed to report this? Roberta wonders, but the moment passes as Bat distributes the paper plates and napkins Charlie has provided.
They approach their treat cautiously, but after the first small tentative bites, they gulp it down. “Good stuff, good stuff,” is Moose’s comment. He’s a skinny kid whose ears always seem too big for his face.
It is good, with walnuts and slices of baked — what? Pear? — added to the onions and cheese. Roberta is hungry. Possibly something to do with the sheer relief of having a momentary respite from what’s to come now that her dirty little book has been let loose on the world.
“So, let’s get down to poetry,” she says as Moose gathers up the empty plates and dumps them in a garbage bag. “I’d like you to write a poem today that starts with the words ‘I remember.’ You can write about any event you can remember that’s made a difference in your life for better or worse. The only catch is that you’ve got to have a metaphor somewhere in it.”
“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” It’s Hester’s first comment of the afternoon. She’s been crying about something, and her mascara has run down her cheeks. Her dog Scrappy is sitting close to her, as always, but he seems to know she’s unhappy, and he’s put his nose on her lap.
“Let’s look at this poem and I think it’ll be clear,” Roberta says as she passes out some lines that she found recently in a journal she’d written years before, just after her father’s death. “It’s not a great poem,” she tells the kids, “but I wrote it at a time when I felt desperate and I think you may find something in it you can relate to.”
Reach high for hope!
If you let hope go,
The sky grows dark
And the wild snow blows.
“Okay, so let’s look for words that show what happens if you don’t hang on to hope,” Roberta says. “My father died, and for a while I was desolate. I had little to sustain me. Then I wrote this poem about reaching for hope and I started to feel better.”
“You were a druggie, right?” Moose says.
Where the hell is this coming from? Roberta asks herself.
“Man, it’s crazy. You’re saying that life is bad when you don’t have hope? Snow gives you hope. For a while anyways.”
“You’ve lost me,” Roberta says.
Big Chris takes over. “He means that crack makes you feel good.”
“Crack? Why are you talking about crack?”
Laughs all around the table. Clearly she’s out of it.
“Snow,” Chris says. “Moose thinks that snow is a metaphor for cocaine.”
“I haven’t a fuckin’ clue what you guys are talking about,” Moose says. His face and his big ears have turned red. “Hell, snow is cocaine. So what’s all this shit about metaphors?”
Roberta gives a sigh. It’s hopeless. Hopeless. Maybe she should have foreseen this double-talk about snow. She has heard the term, now that she thinks about it. Where to go from here? “Maybe we should just get started on the ‘I remember’ poems and forget about metaphor. Yes, let’s do that.”
“Hold it a sec, Roberta,” Big Chris says. He turns to Moose. “Let’s put it this way. You’re telling a bunch of kids about something real weird you did last night, and they say to you, ‘That’s a crock of shit.’ What do they mean?”
Moose thinks for a moment. “They don’t believe nothing I said to them.”
“Right. They don’t actually mean that there’s a big container of stinky brown stuff. So, ‘crock of shit’ is a metaphor for a story that doesn’t seem true. Get it?”
“Got it. Why didn’t you explain it right the first time, Roberta?”
There’s some brainstorming then — first-time sex, the day Dad topped himself, a foster home from hell, a picnic with Grandpa in High Park, and so on — and they get down to work.
All of them, except Hester. She’s heading for the door, Scrappy behind her. It’s a quiet exit, and Roberta waits until she can no longer hear the sound of her feet on the staircase. Then — since the group seems absorbed in their memories — she gets up, puts her purse over her shoulder, and leaves the room.
Annie calls to her from her office. “Out in the alley, if you’re looking for Hester.” She gestures at the dirty window, and Roberta sees the girl sitting on an upturned wooden crate, lighting up a cigarette, her dog beside her.
Roberta goes into the alley, finds a crate, and pulls it up beside Hester. For a minute, she thinks the girl will bolt, but she doesn’t. She just stares at Roberta through tear-stained eyes.
“Sorry you didn’t like the class,” Roberta says. “Anything I can do?”
“It’s not the fucking class that pissed me off.”
“What has made you angry then?”
“They’re all, like, remembering things. But I don’t want to remember. Some things, better you should forget them.”
“Yes, I know that. Lots of things in my life I’d like to forget. But sometimes, it helps if we can get them out of our heads in some way or another. In a poem maybe. Or a story. Or maybe just talking to Annie?”
“That bitch? Thinks she’s a helluva lot better than me and lets me know it.”
“Anyone else then you could talk to?”
No response. Roberta waits for several minutes, then decides to get back to the rest of the kids. Nothing she can do for Hester evidently. She pushes herself up off the crate. But as she moves away, Hester’s voice stops her.
“Last night. I didn’t have no money, see, people been cursing me all day. I even went out on that goddamn highway and tried cleaning windshields. All I had at ten o’clock was a dirty pail of water and an empty baseball cap with a couple quarters. I was hungry and Scrappy didn’t have no food either so I did…” She puts her arms around her dog’s middle and pulls him towards her.
“Did what, Hester?”
“Turned tricks.”
“And something bad happened this time? That’s what you don’t want to remember?”
“I went along Front Street to that big grey building where this guy works. He always comes out into the parking lot after ten. He has this big black car with leather seats, and he parks it in a dark spot in the corner of the lot. If me or Lori-Lyn is there, he wants a blow job. Always quick and the bills are good.”
Roberta waits. She doesn’t want to hear any more, but she’s not going to walk out on this child now.
“So I just stood in the shadows near the car and waited till he came out. When he was turning the key in his lock, he sees me. ‘Get in,’ he says. So I tied Scrappy to a bike rack and got into the back seat where he likes to do it. ‘Make it quick,’ he says.
“So I go, like, straight for his crotch. Trouble was, I couldn’t get his fucking zipper down. It got caught on his gotchees. And I couldn’t see in the dark how to get the fucking thing fixed. And my hands were shaking. He yelled at me, ‘Damn you, damn you, if you tear my silk boxers, I’ll knock you senseless!’ I was scared. See, once he whacked Lori-Lyn and gave her two black eyes.
“And while I’ve got my head down trying to get the zipper open, I could hear this ripping noise. I’d tore his gotchees. I knew I was in for it.” Hester stands up now, throws her cigarette butt into a puddle, and grabs Roberta’s wrist. Her nails are dirty and broken and her grip is hard. Her breath is fetid with onion and cheese and cigarettes.
“He belts me one across the back of the head with his fucking BlackBerry.” She turns her head so that Roberta can see the bloody abrasion at the base of her neck.
“Then he yells,
‘Get out, get out,’ and opens the door and pushes me onto the pavement. ‘Go to hell,’ he says. And he drives off with a screech, almost got Scrappy when he backed up. And that’s it. No bills neither, so I had no food, just a mess on my head.”
“The police should get involved in this. You’re sixteen, right? Do you know anything about the guy? His name, for instance?”
“I don’t want no cops in this. And I don’t know his real name. Lori-Lyn and me, we call him ‘The Skunk.’”
Oh my God. “Why do you call him ‘The Skunk’?”
“It’s his fucking name, see? He’s got this big white strip in the middle of his hair, and he stinks like … like air freshener in a subway toilet.”
“And he works in a big grey building on Front Street?”
“Yeah, didn’t I say?”
Roberta has heard enough. She has a pretty clear idea who The Skunk is. She’s always known John Schubert was a creep, but his indulgence in this sort of sexual exploitation has gone too far. Oh my God, yes, I’m going to have to do something about this.
“Look here, Hester. I can go to the police and tell them all this. They’ll probably want to talk to you, but I can set it — ”
“No cops, no cops. When Lori-Lyn showed them her black eyes, the fuckers said, ‘You’re a slut, whaddya expect?’ No way I’m going to the cops. If you tell them, I’ll … I’ll … top myself.”
She lets out a wail that ends in hiccups. “Who would care, except maybe Scrappy.” She grabs his leash. “Come on, we’re outta here.”
“Wait. I have another idea.” Roberta fishes in her purse, pulls out two fifty-dollar bills and shoves them towards Hester. “I’m giving you these. I want you to take them. But I need a promise from you.”
Hester looks at the bills, then turns her head away so that Roberta has no idea what she’s thinking. But at least she’s not moving out of the alley. So she continues: “Here’s the deal. The money’s yours. But you’ve got to promise me that you won’t do any more tricks or mention topping yourself. Meantime, I’ll talk to Annie about getting you into some safe place where you’ll have a room to go to every night and where you can get a sandwich or something when you get home. She can maybe help you get a job too. I think even behind the counter at McDonald’s would be better than getting beaten up by skunks. Am I right?”
