He opened the shower curtain, “What?”
“Will you wash me? Please?” I repeated, my head directly in the water, not opening my eyes to look at him. A shiver rode my skin. I felt the shower curtain close and heard rustling, movement. When it was pulled back again, I opened my eyes. Gabe was there, shirtless, reaching for the soap. He still had on his boots and jeans, hair sticking out of his hat. He grinned.
“All right, hold out your body parts.” This was the first time Gabe had seen me completely naked, but I was too sick to care. It was as though the ache washed away any self-consciousness. I held out a foot first, steadying myself by bracing the walls. Then I extended a leg. The other foot, leg. Hands, arms. I leaned forward and he washed my breasts. I turned around and he washed my back. While I was turned, he slipped a hand around my waist, then between my legs and up, washed me there. He washed me there for a long time, until my hands against the shower walls felt as though they would push it out, until the hot water was not only all over my skin but pouring inside of me as well. He was just hands. Nothing else, the rest of his body held away from me, out of the water. He was just hands and when I shook and my own hands slipped from their hold on the walls, he held me up, held my hips like smooth handles.
When I got out of the shower, Gabe was fully dressed again, his hair curling around the lip of his toque. He was ready, holding towels out. He rubbed me so vigorously, I was unable to sense the cold. In my state, I thought I could feel the dead skin balling up and ripping off. I felt the sharp points of hair that seemed like they were freezing on contact with the air, then Gabe had me lean my head over so he could wrap my hair in a towel. The moisture on my face was thick, at some consistency between liquid and ice. I started to shake and Gabe wrapped me in the blanket, forced socks and boots on my feet, and brought me back into the cookshack. The fire was lit and I stood by it shivering, the wool blanket rough against my skin, the water seeping out of my hair and soaking the towel. I wanted it gone, the hair, the mess of water it released.
I tossed my hair out of the towel, said, “Gabe, cut it, will you?”
“What?”
“My hair. I want it off.”
“I don’t know how to cut hair. I’d be scared to.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of. I just want you to cut it all off. I don’t want any style to it.” My hair hung wet and cold, drops of water on the floor around me. If it was gone, I would be clean and dry.
“What am I going to cut it with?”
“There’ve got to be scissors in here somewhere.”
Gabe went into the kitchen and I leaned toward the stove and shook my hair, listened to the water sizzle on hot surfaces. When he returned, Gabe opened and closed the scissors behind me, a swish of blade against blade, and I turned around.
“Okay, where do you want to do it?”
“Right here, right by the fire.”
Gabe pulled a chair over beside the stove and I sat down, let the blanket fall off my shoulders and bunch around my waist. He collected my hair in his hands, held it there as if weighing it.
“You’re sure? I’ll do it if you want me to but I don’t want you to be angry with me if it doesn’t work out.”
“Just do it.” I felt a slight pull on my hair, then the scissors entered it. It was not one smooth motion of blade. My hair was thick, wet and tangled. I could feel the scissors struggle against it, then the change in pressure, the tug against my roots release when the scissors made it through some of the hair. The weight of it changed as Gabe made his way around me. He worked silently and I felt hair dropping. It fell in clumps, strands, and knots, got caught on my shoulders, breasts, stomach, back, collected on my lap.
When he stopped to brush the hair off my body, I felt as though there was more air than had ever made it to my skin before, as though my senses were clearer, the awareness of my surroundings more acute. Then the scissors began to move again, more easily and quickly. Soon, there were no more long wet strands falling, just short pieces of hair. These were even itchier. Gabe brushed me off and continued cutting. Brushed and cut, brushed and cut.
He kept going, and as the scissors got closer to my head, he began cutting more slowly, the cool pressure of the blades against my scalp. Gabe hummed. My eyes had been closed the whole time. The stove cracked and sizzled behind me. My skin was hot and clean. The sound of the scissors and Gabe’s humming became a strange lullaby. He tilted my head in every way, held my ears lightly, bending them away from the blades. When he put down the scissors, he began to brush all the stray hair off my scalp, shoulders, face. He blew on me then got the fan used for fuelling the fire and sprayed me with air. My scalp felt electric, like it was going to split open and release something. I raised my eyes and the cookshack slowly came into focus around me. There was dark hair everywhere, fanned around us. Gabe was watching me, scissors in hand. I could smell the stink of hair that had landed on the stove and begun to burn.
GABE
Despite your initial success with high school girls, it takes you longer to actually do it than it does most of your friends. Surprising, as these friends are the losers Saffie was referring to, their acne dried into patches with medication just in time for them to get laid. They use their classes in common with the girls to their advantage, ask them over to study, then get them in the mood with wine, Beat poetry, old Doors albums. They begin to refer to the girls they’ve slept with as the girls they’ve made. They tell you that girls love an underdog, especially the ones who recite poetry, even though they themselves know it’s a bit of a hoax. You believe them too, although you wish you could convince yourself they were lying, that you are not close to becoming the last virgin in your group of friends.
You can’t invite any girls home with Anise and your sisters always there so you go to the school dances and the parties. You do the things you think you are supposed to – lead girls under bleachers or onto guestroom beds. It is relatively easy to get them to come with you, but since you have become a legend, you can’t use any kind of underdog status to your advantage, no matter how nervous you feel. The girls are most often already drunk, slightly sloppy. You want to be able to experience the awkward moments of slowly gaining their trust, but instead they lie like dead weight, giggle and slur, “Oh, come on, you can take me, Mouse, take me!” but something always happens. They start to laugh or cry or, worse yet, they don’t move at all. There you are, kissing and sucking and kneading, and they are almost immobile, nearly silent and, while you struggle with your fly, everything seems so overt and so pointless at once that you can feel yourself deflate. This is not what is supposed to happen. Your desire should be insatiable. You know this from everything you’ve ever read or heard.
You like the magazines better. You and a joint and a centrefold. It’s not the centrefold, herself, though she is alluring, but everything she represents. She represents those same high school girls under the bleachers with you, their small breasts and narrow hips, but instead of blubbering or uncertain, they are sober and confident, with an uncanny knowledge of exactly what to do with their hands and their mouths.
The young guy that Peter works with at “the conservatory” – you’ve found out his name is Gord – has been keeping you supplied with magazines for more than a year now. It is Gord who brings it all together, gives you that one invaluable tip. He knows you love both girls and pot, so one evening when Peter and Anise are having a barbecue, your sisters running screaming around the lawn and the adults closing their eyes and bobbing their heads to music, Gord joins you on the deck, props his feet up on the railing and gives you the clue. “You been sharing that weed you skim off the old man?” When he asks you this, you must respond with a look of pie-eyed terror because he reassures you. “Relax. I’m just wondering if you’re sharing it with any of the young ladies. I’ll tell you this, if I tell you anything, nothing gets the young ladies hotter than a little toke. Used to think alcohol was the thing but that just makes them silly. It’s the ganj that gets th
em horny. Give it a try.”
You don’t know what possessed Gord to prop his feet up and tell you that but you soon find out that you have no way of thanking him enough. The next time you lead a girl into a guest room, you share a joint – rolled with a bit of tobacco like you’ve heard they like it. You play with her hair and trace a path around her lips slowly, barely touching, and soon enough she has thrown a leg astride yours so she can straddle you. Soon enough she is popping open your jeans, each button releasing like a sigh. If the other guys, the ones your age, have taught you anything, it’s to think of the table of elements or the Dewey decimal system while you’re doing it. You make it all the way to Mercury and explode.
By September of the year that you would’ve been a senior, you have already acquired all that the school board authorities expect you to have learned in high school and you have nine months to study for the state exams on your own. You know you will do well. You have been a success in this experiment. Anise didn’t have quite the same results with the girls, although she did her best – Peter assures her of this on a daily basis. With the oldest girl it’s a power struggle. The middle girl is always daydreaming and can’t focus. The youngest, still your favourite, continually calls attention to herself. When she isn’t singing and dancing, she is running away, setting things on fire in the yard, balancing on wobbling banisters and breaking small bones in her body – clavicle, wrist. Anise reads books on the psychology of first, second, and third children. She reads books on home-schooling the wilful child, the artistic child, the performative child. She reads books on holistic parenting, on parenting with love, on adaptive parenting. Eventually, she and Peter decide it will be best for all of you to send the girls to school for a year or so. It will be something new, a growing experience for everyone.
For the first two months that the girls are in school, Anise sleeps through most of the day, reads self-help books, and eats in bed. When she stops making any meals, you pack the girls lunches and Peter makes rudimentary dinners, suggests counselling. Anise looks for a job instead. She goes back to the small theatre company where you and Peter met her years before and gets a part-time job at the box office. When she isn’t working she volunteers at the theatre, designing sets like she used to. You hear her saying on the phone, “It was my one true love – getting lost in those worlds I could create with paint and wood. Once I always had that and now, well, now I guess I have five true loves and no way of getting lost anywhere, no matter how hard I try.”
Your family – you have come to know these people as that – seems all right for a while, you might even say stable. Peter has work at another hardware store, one that truly values him. Anise throws dinner parties for “theatre people.” The girls bring reports home that say they are adjusting well. Then Peter’s grow operation is busted. You must have known all along that “the conservatory” was a marijuana crop. You’ve taught yourself Economics 11, calculated your family’s net yearly income, their expenses and taxes, and have always ended up with the wrong numbers. Thankfully, the conservatory was cultivated in a basement, behind false walls, in someone else’s house. It is Gord that is busted with the intent to traffic, but they know there is more than one person involved. They are questioning him and you hear Peter tell Anise again and again, “I just hope the kid doesn’t crack.”
Maybe Vera was right, I didn’t know what I was looking for, but there was one thing that I was certain about: the farm would be different than the place I was coming from. I wasn’t seeking a place I could belong. If anything, I was seeking a place where I could feel comfortable not belonging. A place where I could take a couple of steps back, and rest there.
I couldn’t figure out exactly how many people lived on the farm during the winter. There was Gabe’s mother, Susan, who spun wool on a wheel to make sweaters. She also hooked rugs, the kind you would imagine you’d see in farmhouses, oval, made of concentric loops of an unknown and sturdy fabric. Another woman, Brenda, was a potter. What she liked to make were oddly shaped vases – vessels, she called them – and teacups shaped like squat, full-breasted women. What made money, however, were uniformly shaped soup bowls, cups, and saucers, all with the same pattern and glaze – a blooming dogwood twig, the trim a wave of green and blue. These sold in several gift shops between Sawmill Creek and the coast. Thomas was a musician, his loft full of instruments – the sax in a stand, an old piano, several guitars in various states of repair leaning against walls. They were artists, but made money other ways. Brenda left early each morning to work at an answering service in Vernon. Susan worked in the fall and spring at a tree nursery, pulling uniform bundles of tree roots from rows in the ground, later sorting them off a conveyer belt, each pile of tiny trees representing a bigger paycheque. These same bundles were collected in boxes by Thomas in the late spring. A tree-planting foreman for five months of the year, he would tell his crew where to plant them, how deep and how quick.
There were children on the farm, their lineage all uncertain to me. Children lived with two parents, or one parent, or a parent and a friend, or the person who was the most like a parent to them. There were children who came to the farm only on weekends or holidays. Gabe told me that there were more children like him, who had one parent or two return to the States after the Vietnam War, for whom Pilgrims Art Farm was a strange memory, quaint and Canadian.
Before moving there that winter, Gabe had visited Pilgrims only during the summer. Summer on the farm, he told me, was four months of people speaking about sucking the marrow out of life, of seizing the day, living for the moment. Young men and women would arrive in small packs of volunteers to learn to garden organically, companion-plant, and farm with horses. They spread themselves around the property in vans and tents, under tarps. Young artists arrived individually to apprentice with Pilgrims residents – a woodworker, a potter, a playwright, several musicians – and they were the ones who most often ended up staying for more than one season. The farm was transformed into a kind of adult summer camp. Those young women we saw in town in the summer, bells on their ankles, thin cotton revealing the shadows of legs thin as twigs, those men with dirt under their nails and hair gnarled into dreadlocks, they were the transient members of the farm. They came in vans or station wagons stickered with slogans, wanting to get out of cities or take a break from cross-continent road trips. Young and vibrant, they would stay for a month or two, seeking unconventional romance and clean air, collecting welfare cheques so they could pursue these through volunteer work and shared meals. They would leave, Gabe told me, after they found someone else sneaking into their lover’s tent, or got drunk around the firepit and threatened to kick the shit out of someone, or when they simply grew bored with the feeling of moist clay spun between hands, loamy soil.
When I asked Gabe what they expected, he said, “I don’t know. Everything to be sweetness and light, something like that.” What did they get? “Same shit as everywhere else, different pile, I guess.”
Gabe told me that in the summer when the volunteers came, there were regular meals in the cookshack, food in exchange for labour. In the down times, like it was in the winter when we were there, it became the place where people without adequate kitchens came to cook. Gabe and I were two of those people. I wasn’t entirely clear on how the division of food worked. Farm food was marked with a P for Pilgrims. Common food was marked with a C. There was food belonging to individuals marked with initials, and then there was unmarked food. There was no food marked with Gabe’s initials or, for that matter, my own. Gabe told me to help myself to anything unmarked or marked Common. I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was stealing.
Sunday was the first day I was feeling reasonably well. Mid-morning, and the kitchen was empty. I found a loaf of bread with a C on the bag, a jar of unmarked peanut butter and set to work. It would be my first solid food in three days. While I was forcing the thick peanut butter across unbuttered bread, Thomas came in without me hearing him. When he cleared his throat, I jumped and se
nt the knife across the counter.
Thomas laughed. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“It’s okay.”
“So, you’re staying at the farm.”
“Yes, I guess I am.” I battled with the bread as it caught on the dry peanut butter, rolling away from the crust.
“Great, great.” Thomas broke his gaze and began moving around me in the kitchen. He plugged in a kettle, pulled a paper bag out of the freezer, spilled coffee beans into a grinder. When the whirring sound started, I left the kitchen, bread in hand. During the day, the cookshack was a different place than at night, bleaker. The sun came in the front windows in patches of dust motes. Things seemed dirty – the kindling, paper, and ashes around the wood stove, the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, the old couches slouched against the wall. I ate the bread and felt small in the room.
The grinding, whirring, and hissing ceased in the kitchen. Thomas came out and put a mug of coffee in front of me and one across the table, then he poked at the fire. He threw on two more logs and blew. I had finished the toast and was staring at the mug.
“That’s for you,” Thomas said when he sat down. “Cream and brown sugar.”
“What makes you think I want that?”
“Young women. They – you – usually like cream and sugar.” He paused. “Uh, we have a lot of young women through here, volunteering. A lot of kids out of high school or college who want to dig around in the dirt, or drive nails into outbuildings, you know?”
I hadn’t touched the coffee yet. “Actually,” I stated, “I take mine black.” I had just made that decision.
The Sudden Weight of Snow Page 16
