by Claudia Dey
‘Thank you. We need onions.’
‘I thought you might.’
Immaculata nods in agreement. She sees Egyptians buried with flowering onions stuffed in their eye sockets and their pelvises, their chest cavities, their ears. They believed the strong scent could resuscitate the dead, that a corpse wearing a garland might gasp. Leopold does a deep bow in Immaculata’s direction. It is surprisingly chivalrous and assured. Is he a knight? Does he have cavalry? A chain-mail tunic? He has caught glimpses of Immaculata but never spoken to her. Always in her white dresses, a stray feather, and once, notedly, walking the length of our street in her nightgown, her arms full of groceries. He followed her with his telescope, the wind picking up and pressing itself against her. He wished he were the wind. She is someone whom, up close, he cannot believe is real. She is see-through. Words, his only effect, always seemed too base. He turns to me.
‘You look the same only different.’
‘We know.’
‘You’ve grown old.’
‘We’re eighteen.’
‘How?’
‘Grief.’
‘I get grief. Have you read Kafka?’
‘The Metamorphosis.’
‘Bingo.’ And then, eyeballing us, ‘But hey, it suits you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Welcome to the club.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It sucks.’
‘You’re getting a moustache.’
‘Thank you.’
Leopold fingers his upper lip. Goose down. He smiles to himself. Finally, the magi. Just in time. He turns to Immaculata, puffing his chest.
‘What a night will do … So the twins, eh? They have to wear tight white nets over their bodies and faces for a whole year. Their skin will fall off if they don’t.’ A green bubble bullfrogs from his left nostril. He wipes it away with his T-shirt, which reads ATLANTIS.
‘They tried to make pastry, now they have to live in the suburbs.’ He sneezes. It sounds like hatchet.
‘Excuse me. I have a chill.’ By way of explanation, ‘Delicate constitution.’
‘I understand.’ Immaculata’s first and most miraculous words to him, the ones he has been waiting to hear his entire life.
Emboldened, he goes on. ‘Well, really it’s a lung disease, but when I use the word disease, my mother thinks I’m feeling sorry for myself so she says, “Oh, are you trying to get through to the complaint department? Oh, just hold the line,” and then she beeps sporadically and no one ever picks up. I’ll die young. Long before her. I’m about halfway through my life. Can I move in? I only have a notebook and an oxygen tank. I call it Leopold Junior because children are the future.’ He laughs in excited, lumpy howls.
‘We’ve abandoned camp.’
‘Dammit. This life is a curse.’ He slams the lawn with his marching boot, barely an indentation, and draws in a thick wet breath. ‘One moment please.’ Then he coughs. Immaculata is mesmerized, having never heard such a noise. He is a wolf, an infirm. She pictures iron lungs and spontaneous tracheotomies. The word pleurisy fireworks across her brain in ornate curlicues. Leopold’s lungs are full of sodden garbage, sand and spilled cans. They are a shoreline that has never been raked. ‘The air is still smoky,’ he says, and with that he walks backwards – hushed, out of a nursery.
Leopold’s nose starts to bleed. His fingers bunch around its base. By the time he gets to his house, his hands are streaming with blood. He pulls out a bundle of keys, thick as a caretaker’s. He lifts one finger, ‘Wait.’ We nod. He unlocks the three locks on his front door with great exertion, his arms those of a jerking bird. His world: stubborn clocks, stuck and ungreased. He evaporates behind the door. Immaculata sees him blue as the underbelly of ice, occupant of a rectangular cabinet, toe tagged, rail-thin. She needs a metal bowl and a steaming cloth. She needs him all to herself.
Leopold closes the door quickly behind him as though a fresh litter might follow. Outside, pollen lolls, a yolk. Dandelion heads everywhere. Bloated flies hovercraft. Immaculata traces the air in front of us and, looking at Leopold, says, ‘It’s summer.’ He smells of shaving cream. There are small cuts above his lip. Still in the wide-brimmed hat and gardening gloves, he has changed his T-shirt: EASTER ISLAND. He also wears a leather motorcycle jacket, black with heavy buckles. It hangs on him, a downpour, making him the abandoned frame of an umbrella. He tugs on its cuffs.
‘Better.’
‘Aren’t you hot?’
‘No,’ he sniffs. ‘Yeah.’
‘You shaved.’
‘I had to. It was ungainly. So. Dig my jacket?’
‘It’s a bit big for you.’
‘I’ll fill it out. It’s my mother’s boyfriend’s, Rolf. But I call him Lady Hips. He thinks he’s so tough because he has a pet viper but he’s got the hips of a lady, makes waffles in his underwear in the mornings, all swishes. Rolf.’
Leopold’s mother is a wrestler. She is the colour of Tang. She is built in thick swipes of beef and muscle. Her fight name is Death Trap Susie. The Death Trap is her signature move. It involves a scissor kick and the insides of her thighs. She has two pit bulls, Prince and Princess. They are trained to kill. The dogs spend most of their time chained in the bathroom, climbing each other’s hard backs, trembling and salivating. The only one they love is Leopold.
‘She dates only guys whose names sound like body functions,’ Leopold says. Immaculata laughs, throwing her head back. Her hair parts. The pearl. ‘Rolf. He has a truck dealership called Rolf’s Wheels. He is all engorged digits. He keeps his particulars at the dealership. Even the viper. Didn’t want to feel domestically beholden. “I’m not your father,” he said to me the first time he came over. “I know,” I said, “I know,” and he said, “I’ll never be your father,”and I said, “I know, Rolf, it’s cool.”
‘The only things he moved into the apartment were dirty bumper stickers. They’re everywhere. Like locusts. The mirrors, the toaster oven, my dresser, even my snare drum for marching band which now says on one side, For a Small Town, This Place Is Full of Assholes, and on the other side, If It Swells Ride It. He sleeps with his gym bag. I think it is filled with suck-candy and ammunition. Mom thinks he’s the jackpot. But every time we see a woman, any woman, even if she’s elderly and blind, he punches me in the arm. Not when Mom’s around. When she is, she’s always doing these little claps after he says anything. We’re supposed to go to Disneyland this summer, clap, clap, but I know I’ll get lost or kidnapped. My mother would cry for three days and then feel relieved, having the apartment all to herself. Clap, clap. She could drink cocktails with her waffles, which she can’t do when I am around because “Oh, I look at her sideways” and “Oh, I’m no fun.”’ He imitates her voice. It is lower than Rolf’s.
‘Last year I tried to kill myself but it didn’t work. Now I’m studying auto-hypnosis. I dream of invisibility. I want to appear present, hand up, here, but be elsewhere, frothy surf, bird songs. Get it?’
We nod. We do. A raven hops by with a toy in its beak.
Leopold continues, ‘The trouble started with Burk the Elf Killer, my mother’s boyfriend before Rolf. He would wake me up in the middle of the night wearing a balaclava and think it funny. He was the cat and I was the baby who smelled of milk.’
Immaculata, pleased by this image, prompts Leopold, who has fallen quiet. Her tone appropriate to a wake in a parlour room, she inquires, ‘And what happened to Burk the Elf Killer?’
Leopold returns to his story. ‘He was a wrestler too. Now he’s in traction. So Susie got hungry.’
He growls. I step back. Immaculata steps forward.
‘And your father?’ she asks.
‘He sends me a calendar every year for Christmas and sometimes a toy boat.’ We frown. ‘But it’s a model schooner and made of real wood. He lives on the East Coast. He has three new children and a wife named Debdeb. I’ve never met them. My mother thinks it’s for the best. That he’s gone. He pays for my schooling, but what
’s the point, I just get knocked out on the playing field and left for dead. They call me Snot Smurf. Even the gym teacher. So I haven’t gone for a year. I spend the money on T-shirts. What about the forgotten people? What about them?’
He sings the question. And then he is his own backup singer: ‘Who?’
Leopold looks at Immaculata. ‘I’m growing my hair.’
‘That’s nice,’ she says.
‘Like an infidel.’
‘You could disappear,’ I suggest.
‘No. I can’t. My mother last night was like, “Oh, why can’t you just macramé or something you’re just staring staring staring,” but I was like, “At least I’m in the marching band.” Later today, she will tan in her sports bra and matching underwear with an emergency blanket under her chin while listening to her shower radio and drinking raw eggs. I tried to drown myself in the kitchen sink. Lady Hips found me. Now he calls me Lee for short.’
Another breath that is drawing lava through a straw. ‘Can I watch you do something?’
‘Like what?’ Immaculata asks.
‘Anything. Eat breakfast. Hang from the ceiling. Build a bird bath. Anything.’ We look at each other. Leopold offers, ‘I could put a table here and say I’m a mind reader.’
‘But you’re not a mind reader.’
‘Hey, a man has to make a living. Or I could just set up my pup tent. The acoustics are good and I can pretend I’m an anchorite. Want to join?’
Before we can answer, there is a scratching sound from inside his house. Leopold blinks rapidly. He starts to hiccup.
‘I forgot to lock them in the bathroom.’ He hiccups. ‘The dogs. When I shaved (hiccup), I forgot to put them (hiccup) back on their chains.’ He lifts his finger. ‘Wait.’
He looks up to the bedroom windows. Hiccup. Still dark. Hiccup. He opens the door. The dogs come outside, look at Leopold and immediately lie down, mouths black with blood, heads burrowing ostrich. Leopold goes inside. He returns moments later with a graveyard face, hiccups gone.
‘If our parents aren’t parents anymore, do we still have to be sons and daughters?’
Leopold dashes his finger between his eyes until his hand drops, a hero shot in the shoulder. He falls still, unblinking. Immaculata kneels below him. Patiently, she waits for him to wake. Instead, he grows, like Immaculata, uncomfortably tall. He fills out the black leather jacket. They appear to be the twins now, the pale twins, she and Leopold, frail and beautiful lines drawn against the hard surfaces of the world. Set there to be pawed by time. Set there with their white eyelashes.
‘You should stay here, Immaculata,’ I say. Insects cresting under our feet, the weeds climbing up around us.
‘Yes,’ she nods, ‘I should. With Leopold.’ The way she says Leopold makes his name longer than it is. Her calling has announced itself.
I give her the black suitcase. She insists on splitting the contents. I stuff my share of Mr. Next Door’s trunk money into the bag of onions. Her hair still a rope between us.
Suddenly, Leopold’s face takes on the quality of a baby having a nightmare. Immaculata whistles him awake. He looks at her, so thankful. He looks at her and he thinks forever and he prays that she thinks it too. He prays that she will say it before he has to. Forever is just too much of a risk to offer first.
Leopold cannot cry. That is why he has so many onions. When he needed to cry to his mother, he would crawl under his bed with a butter knife and slice the onions open and gaze into them until his eyes went watery. When you left, and he had to beg and bleed for days to attend your funeral, she caught him under his bed with the onions. That is why he had the surplus. You left just when he thought of asking you to teach him how to cry. He wanted his hurt to fit him the way it fit you.
Immaculata straightens the cuffs of my suit and runs her fingers down my face, a Braille she can read. We untwine her hair from my wrist. It leaves a red tangle. We hug, buoyant as ocean water, a love surging between us, indelible, my sister’s indelible imprint. Feeling the impermanence of all things, the spin of the earth, the pull of a gravity all my own, I move away. She leans into my ear, sugar breath, ‘Just don’t let it make you love differently.’ I look at her bones. Archaeologists will mull over them one day. Even as dust in their hands, they will be able to tell that she was beautiful, oppressively beautiful. This is how we lived, this is how we lived.
Her step a lope, she returns to Leopold and the dogs, the pine needles not breaking beneath her feet. Beside them, her face is a burning white candle.
And then, the one word we never heard, ‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
We sew up the moment.
I open the letter.
Ms. Ledoux,
Did your doom-fucked policemen not sing, E minor, ‘The
gentleman Finbar is dead, dear, the gentleman Finbar is dead’?
The letters are tall and shaken, the last word, dead, and its attendant question mark, only partly on the page. His eyes could not see where the page ended and the dresser began. He writes on a dresser. All other surfaces occupied: bottles, nail clippers, rinds of cheese, the stale ends of bread, newspapers, photographs, costume jewellery from the days before her fall. I lift it to my nose. The weather lingers in the paper, the wet weather, the extravagant heavy green. All of his windows must be either open or broken.
I do not see the letter as a caution. He took the time to pull himself from the deep, and he wrote. Oh. And he’s not dead. Huzzah. Huzzah.
Return address: a PO box.
Postage: Canada.
June 10, 1981
Dear I. I. Finbar Me the Three,
I am eighteen now. As I understand it, this has some currency
in your world. Please send directions.
Eugenia
Past the prostitutes, heeled and shimmering, calling me pussycat and honeydoughnut and angelface, past the church, past the mission, I mail the letter to Finbar and step off our street. Goodbye, Dunn Avenue. I salute the air. Pow pow.
I could live anywhere now. I could dig a hole and hammer in a flag that says home and make myself believe it to be true. I could buy a door and stand it up somewhere and write do not enter on it and crouch behind it. I could kneel on a family’s doorstep, their mismatched furniture on the front porch, and I could beg to be admitted and then add my boots to their lineup of new shoes in the front hall and smell their new food smells and be fed their noodles and sleep with them on mats on the floor and listen to their new parsed breath and try to match it to my own. I could call myself Cheryl. I could never wash again and let myself become feral and walk shirtless through the streets, a filthy mammal who makes terrible scratching sounds and scares women and children. I could freeze to death next winter. I could play the piano and emit the smell of roses. I could decide to wear nothing but skates and only use the word skate for everything. Skate skate skate. I could tell anyone anything. That I am a sex maniac and I need a frog and a bird fighting in my pants right now. That my father was a welder and beat me with an iron until I was unconscious and then while unconscious he made me banana splits and when I awoke he fed them to me with his shaking hands. Skate skate skate. That my mother made me sleep with hundreds of clothespins pinching my skin and called me Laundry Line and she never turned the nickname into a story. I could tell people that I have a horrible disease that is eating my bones and my lungs and I am dying and I need to be flown to a beach in Germany, it must be Germany, to rest in the shade and to hear German songs. I love you. And now I don’t love you. I love you again. Now I don’t. I unbutton my jacket and I knot my undershirt so that it sits just below my breasts. I pull the ends of my hair. Doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t nothing. I walk, a strut, a swoop, a death prance. Birds flying against the wind, but not me. My body home to new lusts. The sun seems dim. My stride is pornographic. My balance is impeccable. I should have a halo, a whip and a tiger. If there were open bottles on the sidewalk I would drink from them. If a man with a cigar wal
ked by me I would finish his cigar in one inhalation and then I would ask him to live with me in a hotel in a language I invented on the spot. Transfixed, he would nod yes. There, we would order food and take showers all day and then finally I would beg him to jump from the window. He would. I would jump after him and land like a cat. He would be dead and, like a cat, I would walk away from him and find someone else to circle.
I climb a hydro pole and I sing ‘Angel of the Morning’ as loud as I can. A small crowd forms below me. They eat their sandwiches and pick at their nail polish and twist the braids in their hair and they point at me. When I am done, I climb down and I break them with the flint of my eyes. Every look is a match against stone. They will never forget me. Now I know what it is to be you.
Queen Street. Parkdale’s jugular. Sausage and scaffolding, dog shit and the dust of construction – the city curdles in a messy inverted maniac love with itself. A current of heat claps against me. I have opened the door to an incinerator and inside it is the sun and it does a great yawn. A comet in a boxcar. I squint. My eyes spot. The tops of the buildings are cut and curled like they are saloons from the days of yore, making Toronto, for a moment, a frontier town, and us, with our packed bags and our business, its new settlers, hurrying to cheat and beg and bleed and peddle and hang our handwritten signs – the paint still wet, and so hot on this day that it will not dry. There is not one cloud in the sky. The road should be dirt. Chickens should be running loose and dizzy.
Not looking ahead of me, but above, seeing my rope tied between clock towers and buildings, spider silk embalming the sky, and I am walking heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe, I slam into something. Hard as the hide of a bull. I fall to the pavement. Hit my head. A moment of blackness. The jog of my brain. I look up. The sun, a white-yellow blaze behind him, I cannot make out his face. Only his outline. And it is unruly. An etching from one of Marta’s books. The mutineer. Hair in wet tendrils, it drips. He is his own weather system.
‘I am so sorry.’ The man hoists me up with a kind of jester leap, so strong I slam into him again. ‘Sorry.’
