"I guess so," I said, followed by a shameful sigh.
"You guess so?" Andrew was silent. A car horn sounded off on his end.
"What’s that?" I asked, trying to swerve the silent space between us into something else, anything else.
"I gotta go; anyway, talk later," Andrew said, hanging up, the dead dial tone now filling up into my ear.
6 )
Every Second Counts
Friday, April 17th–Saturday, April 18th, 1992
"My liver is," Holly began, "...full of liver." Her head was a storm of brown hair cracking through the living room and its morning sun. "Good morning, Doctor Silverman, how’s the knee?" Holly said, dragging her feet in tiny steps toward the couch. She stared at me with a monstrous smirk.
"What’s that from?"
"My mouth, jerk-off," she said, adding, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day."
"Oh right."
"Maybe this afternoon you can get Mom to take you to the store to get the new Playboy Girls of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome."
"No thanks. You’re probably in it," I said. "What’s your problem?"
"Headache," Holly said.
It was true. I had spent the morning sniffing the usual Playboy sheen in my bedroom jockeying my heart rate as I pawed mentally at the hyper-pink women that delicately paraded themselves, their bodies fingerprinted and creased from our constant exchanges.
Holly picked up a raggedy Penguin paperback of 1984 and began to perform a section. "‘With those children," she exclaimed, "that wretched woman must lead a life of terror...Another year, two years,’" Holly continued, dramatically charged now, "and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy..." Holly wilted onto the couch.
I sprang up. "George Michael has a song like that about two fat children and a drunken man."
"Fuck, I have to finish this essay," Holly said, flapping the paperback.
"I feel crazy today, I want to go outside, and I hate this rain."
"Why?" Holly asked. "You don’t like the way it is manifestly attacking?"
"I feel like I’m a bug in a jar."
"Who is it for? All the lonely people..." Holly muttered. I turned off the television.
"Hey punk, I was watching that!"
I was trying to read the instruction manual for my camcorder, intent on doing some dubbing over the weekend.
"I feel like I’m on fire," Holly said.
"You were pretty high last night when you got in, or this morning, whatever," I told her.
"Well, I’ve been accused of everything," Holly said.
"What did you do last night?" I asked.
"Partied with Liz and some boys."
"Where?"
"Just around. You?"
"Nothing happened to me," I said. "Hey, where’s Greyskin?"
Greyskin was the new jab; over the last month or so, Dad’s skin appeared to be greying. I mean, it was greying. Other family members had endorsed this notion; even at church people were mentioning it to Mom. David OK, Diane? Mom would blame the chemicals at his job.
Speculation, but no real proof. I didn’t need it or seek it out: Dad had grey skin.
"At work I think," Holly said from behind the bathroom door. Flickers of her brown mane ambushed the mirror. I could see just a cropped section of glass from the hall. She flicked the light off and on comically howling, electrocution style.
"Dad is so grey. Am I gonna have it?"
"Grey skin? Do you want grey skin?"
"No."
"Seriously, what’s it from? The formaldehyde?"
"I dunno. Mom says he looks awfully uh, ghoulish, I think she said."
"Yeah," I said. "Maybe he fucks the dead bodies."
"Nate! That’s fuckin’ gross! I have to take a shower, jog and do a bunch of stuff. Let me be. I’ll visit you in your cell later."
Ha! Ghoulish. Holly even said so. "Hey Hol-o-caust, can-can you-you read-read my story; it’s like only four pages long; it’s for school," I yelled in long senseless broken staccato up the stairs.
"I guess so," Holly snapped. "Later, Queer-Bait."
*
Mom had her hands on her hips when I trudged inside the house from the grey wet nothing. Long weekends were always especially dull.
I had started taking off my boots when her tinny voice charged at me, full speed.
"Nate, your Hydra died; I found it in the basement when I was doing a wash."
A shiver ran through me as I imagined its horrible tiny skeleton lying on the cold basement floor like a dead anorexic finger, amputated and abandoned.
I had bought a newt during the March break and housed it in our old aquarium. It was the second newt in five years.
"It was just a skeleton," Mom said, shaking her head as she passed me on the basement steps. "They seem to like to escape your room to kill themselves!" Mom laughed.
"Gross," I said.
One night it must have, like its predecessor, scaled the side of its glass home and high-tailed it out of my room, only to end up starving to death on our basement floor.
Mom was full of apples and moved to a static bounce in her step as classical music chortled through a tiny radio. She wore a mauve knit turtleneck with brown slacks. Her hair was a loose perm, falling from its coiled decadence, wash after wash, flattening out at the sides. Her crisp coal eyes targeted nothing in particular until she met my gaze. In her pre-grocery-store military mode, she surveyed the supplies and planned counter-attacks to a variety of operatives, including Sadie’s meows, the addition of Holly to the size of the salad, and of course, the gas mileage to take into consideration for various obligatory inner-city jaunts that might present themselves over the weekend. The miserable weather made a screen of rain at every window.
Holly banged around in the shower as I drank up the remainder of my cereal juice. Mom walked out of the kitchen and stood in the hallway. I stopped, frozen with a spoon in my mouth, suspended in my own animation.
"I was just talking to your dad on the phone. He was having his lunch, and it’ll be a year ago that he started working part-time at the funeral home," she said, putting down a box of books on the dining-room table. She was good with numbers, personal statistics and morbid anniversaries.
"A year of working with the dead bodies," I said. "That’s reason to celebrate."
What was so incredibly ridiculous to me about the whole undertaker routine was that it just had to be good ol’ Andrew’s family funeral home; nope, no other funeral home in town would do. It had been a full year of his family laughing at our poverty and accruing shame.
Sarcastically, I clutched my hands together as if a crop of puppies had appeared in a wicker basket. "Our very own undertaker. Can we keep him?!"
Dad was still green but very eager in the mortuary arts; he spoke of it with gusto over meals: stews blown over and the reluctant salads. Go, Team Death.
While looking for vacant VHS tape space for one of my morbid surveillance bedroom press conferences, I accidentally stumbled upon the VHS recording of Dad on the evening news. Holly had labelled "Daddy on The National: January 4, 1990." As he talked on the phone, the CBC voiceover called him Dave. "Dave ——, who works for Aaron Elliot Ltd. in Toronto says..." and Dad’s dull voice played out for thirteen seconds in a low-watt treble leaking from underneath his ragged moustache, barely cleared the threshold of sonar wavelength. It was his last few months in the environmental-liability insurance industry, before he got loaded at an office function and told off his boss.
The significance of his one-year anniversary was tenuous, at least to me, simply because I knew that he couldn’t be earning that much money part-time and that Uncle Carl was more than likely still handing us cheques every couple of months, and it was just so incredibly—
"Do you know what I want?" Holly said, emerging dramatically from the bathroom, chewing on an apple core, hair dripping wet, shaking her lowered head from side to side as she chewed the remainder vigorously. Bits of water from her hair landed
on my face.
—tense in a way, unstable. Mom talked out loud to herself in a walking list of errands, acting out conversations with Uncle Carl in which she would ask him for some more money. "See if he can help us out again," was more than a common rehearsal refrain, one she rarely covered up.
"I want..." Holly continued...
"What do you want?" Mom asked, her face paused on a grimace of genuine anticipation.
Holly spoke, her voice now imbuing a soft southern twang. "What I want is a view. I want a window where I can see a tree, or even water. I want to be in a federal institution, far away from Dr. Chilton..."
I laughed. "That’s funny," I said, forgetting about the mini shower my sister had just given me.
We had watched Silence of the Lambs the last time she was home from school, very late, falling in and out of sleep like two raccoons plump on refuse.
"So what’s the deal with Easter dinner, Mom?" Holly asked from behind a wall of wet brown hair, large towel draped over her mane. "Are we going to Grammy’s or is she coming here Sunday or what?"
Holly posed these queries with an impatient-sounding voice, one that demonstrated kinetic urgency, waiting for her jogging gear to dry, waiting for Elizabeth to wake up and call.
"I wanted to have dinner Sunday, but your father has to work, so we might do it today at around four o’clock and Grammy might come over," Mom said.
"Do we really have to go get her from Plum Island Animal Disease Research Facility?" Holly asked, now frantically drying her hair with the towel.
"I don’t know what you are talking about but I don’t like it. I’m waiting ’til your Dad phones and I’ll know for sure. In the meantime, why don’t you finish your laundry; and Nate, you must have homework to do."
"Wait ’til your father gets home!" Holly said, doing an obnoxious dance. She twirled up the wet frenzy into a towel. I just stood there waiting for Holly to shut up. She was high or something.
"Be a dear, Nate, you wish-washy, prissy sweetheart, and check on my clothes in the dryer. If they’re still wet, put them on for another twenty?"
"Is Uncle Carl coming over?" Holly asked Mom.
"If he feels up to it. We might meet him over at Grammy’s."
"After my run, I have to do some stuff at the library on Slobodan Milošević and the whole Sarajevo crisis. They’re attacking the city with canons. It’s really intense. I have to do a fake field report for my world issues class," Holly said, now striding up the stairs.
The phone rang. "Got it!"
*
Andrew and I had been waffling in routine, sometimes road hockey, sometimes pornography. I knew that if I got a ride home with him after school, he’d turn things into one or the other: hockey or...porno watching.
And a part of me got excited at the thought that one of these activities would happen...like perhaps his silver car would sidle up, and he’d slow down and drive me home, my newly dubbed mixed tape jiggling in my pants, the one I stayed up making, hoping to play for him.
Andrew had mentioned how, if I wanted to, I could pirate one of his Dad’s pornos we’d watched recently. He knew I liked the one with the woman fucking the navy sergeant, her pink lipstick smeared from the task, her spit fettered to his long hard dick.
On her knees, blouse open, long skirt compromised; she pumped her head while he ran his hands through her honey-blonde hair. Another one on the same clunking tape showed a guy getting a brunette ready with tons of fingers, including hers. (Her hands came from between her legs, entwined with his until all their fingers met inside.)
We had planned out a dub session in the late afternoon. Andrew had assured me we’d have time to dub the whole thing once we took care of our own enjoyment of these hard adults and their acrobatic efforts. I arrived just before three and, with his eye on the front door, Andrew navigated us through the opening credits, the test dub and mouth over his hard dick. After it was my turn to come, and the dub was complete, Andrew drove me home, just in time for dinner, my absence barely detected.
"There you are," Mom said, as I huffed in through the front door. "Your coach called, says there is a practice next Sunday at his place. He wants you to call him."
Traces of smells and odours carved up the dinner hour: the red meat sauce browning and bubbling; the beef smog and faint cigarette stink lingering in the hall closet, muted by our coat fibres; the formaldehyde footprints: domestic ingredients were all caged inside the house.
"I’m going to the liquor store, and then I’ll be back," Holly hollered. I didn’t answer.
Twenty minutes later I heard the action at the side door, recalling a terrifying evening nearly a year ago, when I had accidentally knocked a full beer bottle from Dad’s hand when I energetically burst into the house to find Grammy, who was visiting.
Dad was en route from the pantry when we collided. The next thing I knew he was screaming at me while I was on the basement floor picking up pieces of glass. The shouting attracted Grammy, who sat at the top of the staircase watching Dad admonish me for murdering his bottle of beer.
It was obscene: the energy exuding from Dad’s angry sermon was God-like. The ridicule came out in bursts of sawdust and other alchemic symbols that I associated with him at the time. Strapped to an indoor lightning rod in the basement, I absorbed it all.
And when my tiny Grammy took in the show on the top of the stairs, who sat down in protest of her grandson’s abuse, Dad lifted her up and carried her thirty feet back to the living room couch and continued his beer eulogy. All I did was come inside my own house, just as Dad was retrieving a beer bottle from the pantry. As the door sprang open, it hit his shoulder, sailing the bottle in the air for what felt like ten minutes, smashing into pieces in front of my bedroom on the cool, tiled floor, staining the drywall and sending Dad into an acidic fit.
Too ugly to recall verbatim, he said something like, "I’ll put your face in it," as he pushed my neck down towards the dirty suds, tiles smeared in its foul dreg stench and my snot dripping dangerously close to the putrid-smelling liquid. Dad raged with adrenaline, acting as if I had murdered his unborn child, run over his dog and burned down his house, all on the same day.
When I slinked my head up the stairs, Holly was cleaning her heels with a paper towel at the front door.
"Holy shit! At the LCBO parking lot I successfully navigated sheer black ice, sloped driveway cross-wise, and just now our ice-covered steps in the pitch dark in stilettos without wiping out: the crowd goes wild!"
"Why were you wearing heels?"
"To see if I could manage them tonight. I think we know the answer to that one."
"I think your laundry is done. The machine stopped mumbling."
"It’s so nuts out there!" Holly said, blowing her hair from her eyes. "I’m freezing."
I looked at the bags beside her stocking feet. "Whatcha get?"
"Some rum for me and Liz, and some garbage snacks. She’s in town for the week from Vancouver. Haven’t really seen that much of her since Christmas."
"Drunk drivers of Canada."
"Oh, Mom says we’re going to see Grammy tomorrow, not today."
"Why?"
"They’re having some potluck thing, and Mom is taking over a card or something and then coming back. She said there was only room for one at the potluck last supper. I wasn’t really listening."
"Oh."
"I just wish she’d come here for the weekend. I don’t understand why it’s so political. She can sleep in my room, and I can crash on the couch."
Friday night was a high-energy session for me, filled with oddly lit solo driveway hockey marathons, homework and queuing up what was now a clunky fortress of videotapes; their meticulously noted labels the only way to discern unique content.
I cued up the porn I’d dubbed from Andrew and turned the volume down, watching the blonde-haired woman in the blouse with the bulbous honey bun bob her head up and down on the second generation VHS copy. She appeared to be sucking off a man back from the
war, or an airline pilot. The moans and slurps were digitally muffled and garbled by the video degeneration of piracy. I watched his thick dick glisten in and out of her mouth, her large eyes opening and closing. I thought of Andrew and I, our sessions, his torso leaning over me, descending himself and sliding his tongue around my shaft until eventually enveloping my shy dick in his hot mouth as I closed my eyes and rolled my head back until a familiar chorus rang through my entire body.
*
Late Saturday morning, Holly was telling me about her new boyfriend, Steve, when the videotape in the VCR began to make a garbled ruckus. Steve had a car and was sort of hysterical and really smart, but most of the time they fought about everything. "He’s a year older than me and thinks he knows how the world really works, he tells me, and all this other garbage—but he can’t even change a flat tire or fix my shelves, or spell Michigan."
I blurted out, "Who cares about spelling Michigan?"
"I care, dickless!" Holly laughed.
The VCR motored past the glitch and jumped back into frame. It was a popular film about a dead rock star. The bearded lead actor twisted the cap off a bottle of alcohol and took a noisy swig.
"You can die from just about anything," Holly said. "My humanities class has shown me this, you know, that collective deaths of a group of people or random individual deaths and the way we react as a society and individually, IT’S MIND BLOWING! A town will mourn the death of a small-town football hero but some big-city taxi driver or a family wiped out by a drunk driver or mother of ten in Cambodia gets stabbed, it can be tucked into the back of our psyche forever."
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