by Julie Paul
For Ryan and Avery Jane,
~Ziggy Two-Socks.
CONTENTS
Black Forest
Damage
Crossing Over
Pilgrim
Adios
Flip
Tropical Dreams
The King Is Dead
Viable
Weeping Camperdown
Her Full Name Was Beatrice
Squirrel People
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Black Forest
Jenny didn’t want to go to the market. “They have too many weird vegetables there,” she told her father, Lawrence. Jenny was a sensitive kid, and many things were weird to her, and Lawrence and Vicki had made numerous concessions, such as taking the toothpaste out of the tube when they brought it home from the store. They squeezed it all out into a jar with a tight-fitting lid, a tiny spoon on the side, and each time they needed toothpaste they scooped it out and spread it on the brush. This was one example of hundreds.
Lawrence needed to shop for food but didn’t want to leave Jenny at home alone. She was eleven going on sixteen going on five. No babysitting club for this girl. “If you come, I’ll buy you a gelato,” he told her. “The best in Montreal.”
“It has to be lemon, Daddy,” she said.
“I’m sure they have lemon.”
“Call ahead,” she said.
Lawrence knew the little stand in the middle of Jean-Talon Market had no phone, but he said he would try. He pretended to call from his bedroom while Jenny got dressed. “Merci,” he said to the dial tone. “A bientôt.”
Jenny came out of her room wearing long johns, a pink net skirt, and a giant sweatshirt announcing, “California!” across her chest. She wore her mini backpack purse, and around her neck hung the blue and pink silk scarf she had cut holes into, to wear as a mask in case she spotted anyone she knew, or if she wanted to be invisible—when the world outside her body was not where she wanted to be. She was old enough to realize that nothing could prevent people from seeing her, especially in her getup. But she told Lawrence she didn’t have any other options.
Options. How long since he’d had options? Three months. Three months since the Wii—suddenly too loud, too assaulting, too much for Vicki—had sailed down the back steps into the garden, and then, shortly after, Vicki was sailing down the front steps and into the car—the family’s only car—and driving away from them. They had talked on the phone, because phone calls were allowed every so often from the meditation centre somewhere in eastern Ontario where she was gathering herself. Healing in the quietude, according to the catalogue of benefits on the website. Becoming mindful, connected to the entire universe, at peace in every moment.
Every moment? Every single, solitary moment? With Jenny, a moment could last an hour. A moment of peace was higher on his list of needs than a lover’s touch. Jenny had become an appendage since Vicki left. She was like a baby, needing to be close to someone at all times, even while she slept. He could understand that, intellectually. But moment to moment, he just needed a bit of space. Just a day, here and there. Even an hour.
Before they left for the market, in the name of exercising his options, Lawrence did his pec stretches in the doorframe. Jenny asked him to dictate his list to her, so there wouldn’t be any minutes wasted once they got there. Once upon a time, he and Vicki used to wander through the stalls for hours, executing the style of marketing he preferred: hand in hand, sampling the cut-up apples, the maple taffy, the squeakiest cheese curds, deciding on dinner according to whim and chance.
“Eggs, bread, jam,” he said. She wrote down “E, B, and J.”
He pushed his mind ahead to the brunch he was planning for the following day, when Vicki was coming over. She was back in town and wanted to visit. It would be their first attempt to bring themselves into working order, a return to the land of functioning people who live together and don’t throw tantrums or plants or video games. Would a roasted vegetable frittata do it?
“Japanese eggplants,” he said. Jenny wouldn’t eat the big ones—they were too fat.
Dessert would be fruit and ice cream. “Raspberries.”
She stuck out her tongue and blew him one. “What else?” she asked, tapping her purple pen on her dog stationery.
“Potatoes,” Lawrence said. “And peppers.” He could never resist the solid primary colours of the market’s bell peppers. A rainbow in a basket.
Lawrence was not optimistic about the meeting. He and Jenny hadn’t changed. If Vicki was different, or even if she was the same, how would anything get better? Every time they’d talked on the phone, after they were done chit-chatting about Jenny’s latest passions and aversions, he’d asked her: So, when are you coming home? And every time, she’d said she didn’t know, until last weekend, when she’d said she would be returning to Montreal in a few days. Where, exactly? A friend’s house. Do I know this friend? He did. It was a girlfriend, she said. It was totally fine.
Okay, but what did “fine” mean to her? Did it mean that she didn’t want to come back to him, or that she didn’t know if she could parent with him any more? Had he even thought about the fact that they had been parenting together, before she left? He was Jenny’s father, he did what needed to be done; Vicki was the mother of this intensely odd and brainy child, and they’d spent the last eleven years trying to keep from leaping off the Champlain Bridge.
The thing was, he couldn’t put his finger on anything he’d done that would make her hate him. Nothing new, anyway. He was the same old Lawrence, just trying to keep everyone happy without going crazy himself. If that included the odd video game played with Jenny or without, was that so wrong? He still spent a lot of time making music on his three guitars when he wasn’t working from home for the software company that had generously allowed him to be flexible with hours and location. He still read books. He still knew how to do downward dog.
Could the rift in their relationship ever mend when those traits Vicki had once accepted as being a part of him, so endearingly opposite to hers, were what had made her leave?
He still wanted his family to work.
And did he miss Vicki? His wife, who also drove him mad at times but knew how to kiss his neck in the spot that made him moan? His wife, who laughed when he put underwear on his head and a sock on his penis? His wife, who’d married him all those years ago even though he was small town and she was big city?
He did.
They had been the family who walked their baby to sleep in a sling, around and around the blocks, even in sub-zero temperatures, because that was the only sure way of getting her down. It got to be a joke in their Plateau neighbourhood: Lawrence doing this crazy walk at all hours, dressed like a dogsledder with a hot-pink sling across his chest, a hidden child swaddled inside. Oh, if his hockey buddies back in his small Ontario town could have seen him then!
Then she stopped being an infant and they still did it, or rather, Lawrence did it; Jenny became a heavy baby, then a squirmy toddler, and still, she would only sleep while strapped to a moving body. People talked. His joints ached with the effort. His back would never be the same. But Jenny needed her sleep, and Vicki was convinced that she would cry all night if left in a crib like any other child, and Vicki could not stand to hear her cry.
Not because she thought it was bad for Jenny. Vicki was just so sensitive to noise. He could not call it hypersensitive, at least not to her face, but during the three months without her, Lawrence had finally been able to pee standing up. Would he remember to sit down again tomorrow, when everything was riding on his behaviour, or would his inner rebel keep him standing?
“Asiago cheese,” he told Jenny. “And a bottle of white wine.”
> “I’m not writing that down,” she told him. “You’re going to corrupt me. Do you want me to end up on the street?”
Lawrence winced and went deeper into the stretch so she would think it was muscle pain.
“When Mom gets here tomorrow,” Jenny told Lawrence, “I’m going to do my new routine.”
She had sock puppets and she liked to make them act out fairy tales, usually the ones that involved waking up a sleeping princess with a kiss. They were abridged versions, but not by much. Lawrence had to sit on his hands when he watched her shows so he wouldn’t make that hurry-up motion, brushing the air toward him.
“I’m sure she’d like that,” he said. “But I don’t know how much time she’ll have.” He wanted to prepare her, to make sure she knew that Vicki might not be staying, but he didn’t want to freak her out, either. Her mother was coming home.
Jenny nodded. “I’ll keep my expectations low.”
How can an eleven-year-old know enough to say a thing like this and yet not be able to be alone in a room?
“Plus,” Jenny added, “you’ll want some time to yourselves.” She wiggled her eyebrows.
“Okay,” said Lawrence, coming out of his stretch. “Let’s jet.” He was not in the headspace to talk about sex right then, on top of everything else. Jenny had the books, and Vicki had been good about giving her the facts, years ago, but last week Jenny had asked, over breakfast, how exactly the penis got into the vagina, and if you had to use your hands to stick it in. He added the conversation to his mental list of things to tell Vicki tomorrow, if the mood was right. Well, timing and mood. He knew the equation. Jenny would have to be out of the room.
“Do you have the cloth bags?” Jenny asked once they were outside.
“Oops. Good thinking. Could you get them?”
She bounded back into the apartment, singing “O mio babbino caro.” He walked down the stairs to the sidewalk and sat on the bottom step.
Mia from across the street called, “Bonjour!” Lawrence could see, even from his distance, that she was wearing a ruby camisole under her black T-shirt. It peeked out from above the deep V of her neckline.
“Allo,” he called back, waving lightly.
“Ça va bien?” she asked.
“Oui, oui. Et vous?”
Jenny slammed the door and scowled at Lawrence. “Hey!” she yelled at Mia. “He’s a married man!”
Lawrence sighed. “We were just saying hello.”
“Uh-huh. Right.”
Had Mia understood? They had only spoken French to each other on recycling days, and once in the winter, when her shovel had broken, he had loaned her his to dig out her car. Now she was still smiling as she watered her planters. Either she didn’t understand Jenny or else she just thought she was fou braque. Not just crazy—completely nuts. Some days Lawrence wasn’t sure. Had they allowed this to happen, he and Vicki, part of the problem instead of the solution? And what was the solution to the problem of a unique child? Was it a problem at all? Where he’d come from, she would have been moulded long before now into a more compliant kid, someone who could tie her shoes herself and handle a paper route, reserving her costumes for Halloween and school plays. But they were worlds away from that kind of life. This was Montreal. This life, created largely because he’d fallen in love with a smart and sassy girl from here, someone who knew how to navigate cultural duality in her sleep. He’d been smitten by her quirky, off-the-wall intensity; how could he have expected their child to be any different?
“Come on, old man,” Jenny said. “Jean-Talon is waiting.” She said it in English, no French accent, like she meant blue jeans and a bird’s claw, and she tore at the air with a crooked finger.
Jean-Talon Market was its usual Saturday self. Mosaics of berries and greens and tropical fruits; middle-aged women, hair burgundy, clad in leather pants; maple vendors, their amber blood in leaf-shaped glass—Montreal was the veritable Garden of Eden. Lawrence inhaled the soup of scents—sausage and blue cheese, bread and lemons and lilies, the sweat and mould of nearly a hundred summers’ worth of growth and spoilage—and Jenny’s sweet blond hair, sprayed with a eucalyptus and lavender mix she’d created to ward off head lice. They’re everywhere, she’d told him. I’m protecting myself from the plague. Wasn’t he lucky to have this one-of-a-kind being at his side?
They made their way through the meandering, post-latte, post-coital crowd to the gelato stand. A dozen people stood in the lineup.
“I could go get started,” Lawrence told Jenny. “This might take you fifteen minutes.” He figured she would say no, since she couldn’t imagine him out of sight in a public place, and would probably say, What kind of parent are you? Her tendencies were a direct inheritance from Vicki, but Jenny’s centred more on survival. Although Vicki might disagree. She might say the sound of the fridge really was life-threatening.
But Jenny consulted her list. “I can see the egg man from here,” she said. “Start on that and report back.”
He smiled, a real smile, and it felt foreign, and very good. “Yes, ma’am.”
He did an about-face and started marching away, until he heard Jenny call out, “Wait!”
He stopped and turned around; he’d almost made it.
“What flavour do you want?”
Lawrence opened his arms wide. “You choose. I like them all.”
He was free. He was free.
The egg man carefully wrapped his dozen eggs in brown paper and string because he used the egg trays without built-on lids. This was a beautiful thing to Lawrence, this little oddity, marvellous that someone would still do this.
He had been checking back, visually, on Jenny in the lineup because she would be owling around, keeping her eyes on him. The line moved very slowly, which was natural; it was a difficult decision, choosing a flavour, and you couldn’t go on colour. The mothy one, for example, was Lawrence’s favourite. Noisette.
Beside the egg stand was a small flower booth selling the first of the sunflowers and dahlias. They weren’t on the list, and Vicki didn’t believe in cut flowers, but Lawrence was feeling free and good and brave, and he pointed to a bunch. The flower woman said, “Très bien, monsieur,” and “Bonne fin de semaine,” as she would to anyone. Today it felt personal.
Now with his flowers and eggs both wrapped like birthday gifts, he made his way back to Jenny. He couldn’t see her right away, but the cutting board stand was in the way. No sign of her. Well, he would see her once he was around the throng of people at the maple syrup booth, maybe even through the line and waiting for him with two ice creams in hand. But no, when he made it, he still couldn’t see her. He looked at the lineup again. She wasn’t there.
Lawrence ran the twenty-five metres between himself and the gelato stand, holding the flowers and eggs tightly to his body, praying that she was just perfectly tucked in behind another person, or hiding from him on purpose.
“Jenny!” he cried, pushing his way through the throngs. He made their special whistle, a dash-dash-soar, once, twice, and waited for her reply. No reply came. When he was standing where she had been, where she should have been crouching down, fixing her sandal, scratching an itch, picking up a dropped quarter, he whistled again, and shouted again. Nothing.
“Have you seen my daughter?” he asked the people in line. “About this tall, wearing a pink puffy skirt, and um, a scarf, short blondish hair sticking up—”
The man standing behind where Jenny had stood said yes, she’d been right there. “She asked me to save her place,” he said. “If I could.”
Lawrence was nearly yelling now. “Where did she go? Where is she? Did she tell you anything?”
“No, just walked that way.” He pointed toward the takeout food area, the picnic tables full of families.
Lawrence forced his way through the people waiting in line for crepes and smoothies and scanned ahead for Jenny. He hadn’t asked the man if anyone was with her, or if she had followed someone, or if she looked scared. He couldn’t go t
here.
Maybe she was sick. Otherwise she would still be in the lineup, singing to herself, watching Lawrence’s every shopping move. But if she was sick, she might have gone to the bathroom. Aha! The women’s washroom. But he was a man. He would have to wait. He couldn’t wait.
He called into the bathroom for her, “Jenny! Are you in there? Jenny?”
A leather and burgundy woman came out and asked him in perfect English if he was all right.
“No, I’m not all right! I’ve lost my daughter.”
“Oh, dear. What does she look like?”
Lawrence described Jenny again, and the woman’s eyes widened when he mentioned the scarf with the holes in it she might be wearing over her face, but she said she would go back in and search.
“Thank you.” Lawrence tried to keep his eyes on the gelato line, but the crowd was thickening, as if a nightmare’s fog was descending, keeping him from everything he needed to see.
He’d been terrible. His cheek hot against the concrete block wall, he itemized how he’d made this happen. You wanted a break, you got it, buster. You are a horrible father. You should never have brought her here the day before she was about to see her mother. You knew she didn’t want to come.
Oh, shit. Vicki would burn him to the ground.
What was taking that woman so long? Either Jenny was in there or she wasn’t. He was just about to call in once more when his helper reappeared. She looked happy.
“She’s in there, monsieur.”
“Oh, thank God.” Lawrence collapsed against the wall and closed his eyes. A second later he opened them. “Is she okay?”
“Well, she’s in a . . . delicate position.” The woman leaned in closer. He smelled garlic and coffee. “She’s got her monthly visitor.”
Oh, my God. He felt punched. “What do I do?”
The woman laughed. “Don’t worry, I got her what she needed, for the moment.”
“But—”
“Give her these.” She pointed at his bouquet. “And be gentle with her. Treat her sweetly. La tendresse.”
