by Darren Greer
My aunt said hello, it was nice to meet her, and backed out of the driveway. She tried to engage Deanny in conversation the entire way back into town, but my friend wouldn’t respond. She only looked out the window with that fierce, angry expression on her face. I would learn, over the years, this was Deanny’s default look, one she assumed in times of uncertainty or shyness. It was a self-defence measure. It was easier to look mad and have people leave her alone than look vulnerable and have them attack her, or worse, pity her. She would come around, eventually, as the day wore on. But for the first few hours it was uncomfortable. Even to my grandmother she would give barely more than a word.
My grandmother, for her part, acted with shocked surprise when she saw her. “Good heavens,” she said, as soon as Deanny was out of earshot. “Who dresses that child?”
“Mom!” hissed my mother. “Cut it out.”
“She looks as if she just stepped from Barnum and Bailey’s.”
Deanny was suitably impressed with my grandmother’s house, which would have, on any other day, perhaps made her more favourable in my grandmother’s eyes. My grandmother loved it when guests complimented her decorating skills, or the carefully designed interior of her home. As soon as Deanny stepped in the front door, behind me but ahead of my Aunt Jeanette, she said, “Holy shit! Look at this place. It’s a mansion!”
Unfortunately, my grandmother was in the kitchen and heard every word. She came into the hallway wiping her hands on a dishtowel and said, “We don’t talk that way here, little girl. This is a house of God.”
“No kidding,” Deanny said, completely unperturbed. “It’s like a church in here.”
I suppose, to Deanny, who lived in a rundown shack on Meadow Pond Lane, the house on Tenerife Street did seem grand. There were bigger houses in town, but Deanny had not been in any of them.
This was her first introduction to Advocate society, though I did not think of it that way. One of the benefits of growing up with two waitresses as influences was that I was not a snob. This despite my grandmother’s best efforts to make me one. I didn’t look down on people for where they lived or what they did for a living or how much money they had. I never thought of the house I lived in as particularly impressive or grand. It was a house.
If Deanny had any thought about tearing through it the way we ran through her yard my grandmother soon set her straight. She laid down the law. “You can’t go into the living room,” she said. “I’ve spent too many years collecting what’s there to have it all broken in an afternoon. And the study is out, and the same for all the bedrooms except Jacob’s. You can play in the tv room, but not the dining room. It’s filled with my china. And if you go outdoors stay away from my flowers and my gnomes.”
Deanny stared up at my grandmother, who had, perhaps unconsciously, hunched over my little friend like a witch from a fairytale. I stood there, embarrassed for both of them. Jeanette came to the rescue. “Geez Mom,” she said. “Give her a break. She just got in the door.”
“Just going over the dos and don’ts,” said my grandmother. “Now run along and play until we’re ready for you. And remember what I said.”
I took Deanny up to my room.
“Goddamned,” she said. “It’s like living with Hitler.”
“Worse,” I said. “Hitler didn’t have fine china.”
Deanny laughed. That was the first time I remember Deanny laughing at one of my jokes, and it felt good. Cameron didn’t laugh at anything I said. He rarely laughed at all. Deanny and I played in my room for an hour, until my grandmother called us down for lunch — hotdogs and french fries — after which my official birthday party was to begin.
It would just be my family, and Deanny. I wasn’t excited.
Deanny was, though. She was hoping she would see my uncle.
“He won’t be there,” I told her. “He hardly ever comes out of his room.”
“Can we go in and see him?”
“Not allowed,” I told her. “I haven’t been there in ages.”
“Dammit Jacob! This place is like a fucking prison!”
“Don’t let my grandmother here you talk like that. She’ll kick you out.”
“That’s the thing,” said Deanny. “You can’t kick people out of a prison. You can only keep them in.”
Deanny was smart. Smarter even than I had given her credit for.
▪ ▪ ▪
the thing i hate most about birthdays is the singing of the dreaded song. It’s not that one person is always off-key — I am not that much of a puritan — or that it is copyrighted and a royalty should be paid to the patent holder every time it is sung, and that a documentary about Martin Luther King Jr. was unavailable for many years because the song was sung in it and the film couldn’t clear copyright. No. I hate the song because its singing is tinged with moments of supreme embarrassment, where every eye is upon you, you don’t know what to do with your hands or what expression you should wear on your face — outright mortification generally considered to be unacceptable — and you just want to find the nearest set of floorboards and slither down the crack between them.
I knew nothing about copyright laws when I was twelve. I only knew I was dreading the moment when the cake would come, the embarrassment, and the blowing out of candles that would follow.
Deanny seemed to enjoy my discomfort. She sang directly into my face, and her breath smelled like spearmint gum, which she had been chewing all morning to mask the smell of smoke on her breath. My mother and Aunt Jeanette and my grandmother kissed me, and then we set to opening presents. The cake presentation and attendant musical humiliation took place in the kitchen, but my grandmother thought it safe, now that refreshments were taken and there was nothing to spill on the carpet, to retire to the living room. I was seated on the floor with gifts piled up around me like a fortress, and I opened them one by one.
I got the Commodore 64.
It was one of the first presents I opened. Being from my grandmother, it was the most expensive gift. Deanny was impressed by the sheer number of presents. She didn’t know what the computer was and I had to explain it to her. I opened the rest of my gifts — toys and books and games — and everyone oohed and awed over them. At the end of it, after my grandmother had cleared up the wrapping paper, my mother surveyed me on the floor surrounded by a mountain of gifts and asked if I was happy.
“Yup,” I told her. “Can I go set up my computer?”
“I don’t see why not,” said my mother. “We’ll go to the bowling alley at three.”
Deanny and I went into my room to hook up the computer. I had received several games compatible for the system. I loaded one, Adventure Quest, for Deanny. It was a game I had played many times at Cameron’s. She was puzzled by it, and admitted to me she had never played a video game before. In this respect, I considered her hopelessly uneducated, and did my best to show her the fundamentals. She thought it was boring — moving a bunch of stick figures around on a screen — and wanted to go outside instead. But I was already a child of the virtual. I had moved into this electronic world, and I insisted we stay inside and play.
Deanny chewed gum, snapped it, and looked around my room for something to do. Unfortunately, she found the Easy-Bake Oven and other assorted girls’ toys in my closet. “Are these yours?” she asked.
“No,” I answered quickly. “They’re just there.”
“Liar,” Deanny said, grinning maliciously. “I think you play with them. What, are you a fag or something?”
I ignored Deanny’s question, and asked if she wanted to go outside.
“I hope you don’t play with girls’ clothes too,” Deanny taunted. “Jacob in a little dress. Jacob with high heel shoes.”
“Quit it,” I said. I wanted to be mad at her, but I couldn’t. That she was taking an interest in my life, even if it was a negative interest, pleased me. I suggested we go for a walk downtown and spend some of my birthday money. I had raked it in that afternoon, almost thirty dollars in cold har
d cash.
She had opened her mouth to answer, when my door opened — slowly, as if a ghost was entering.
In a way, it was a ghost.
It was my uncle.
He was no longer in the blue bathrobe. He was wearing jeans and a white sweater, even though it was warm outside. Despite his attempts to dress himself up, the effect was ghastly. The clothes he had brought with him were now too big, and dangled off his frame. He had combed and wetted his hair, but hastily, so that licks of it stood up here and there. His face was marred with purple spots as it always was and his breathing was shallow. He was deathly pale.
“Jacob?” he said.
Deanny was still in my closet, so he did not see her as he came into the room. In one hand he held a small wrapped gift. He cleared the door and looked at me, where I stood in front of the computer, and smiled.
“I brought you a present,” he said. “Happy Birthday.”
Deanny stepped out from the closet. She had to, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to see my uncle. She was drawn, despite herself. The general wheeziness of his breath, she said later, frightened her. Deanny admitted to being frightened by very little. But the image in her mind’s eye of my wasting, physically dissolute uncle needed to be matched with the reality.
As soon as he saw her, my uncle asked, “Who’s this?”
When I introduced him, Deanny said a timid hello. I had never heard her be timid before, and I was as fascinated with that as I was with my uncle’s arrival. He had not been in my room since he had grown really sick, and I had not expected to see him. I made no move to retrieve the gift, and my uncle was forced to make his way over — he looked as if he was walking on glass — to hand it to me. I realized then my uncle was probably, at that point, even sicker than he looked, and he was dressing up and pretending he was all right for my sake.
The present was wrapped in plain purple paper with no bow. Almost the colour of my old Easy-Bake Oven.
“You don’t have to open it now,” said my uncle. “I just wanted you to know I was thinking about you. Did you have a good birthday, Jake?”
I nodded. Suddenly I felt like crying. Part of it was seeing my uncle with Deanny in the room, for the first time seeing him through someone else’s eyes, so tired and thin and sad. Another was the gift he gave me, so small and inconsequential compared to the sheer volume and size of the other gifts I had received, but one he must have wrapped himself and made such an effort to come down the hall and give to me. I was so overcome that, not wanting to cry in front of my friend, I tore the paper off the gift and let it fall to the floor.
As I suspected, it was a book.
“It’s used, I’m afraid,” said my uncle. “I could have given your mother money to pick me up something, but I wanted to give you something of my own. I hope you’ll read it. It’s my favourite novel.”
My uncle’s favourite novel was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
I had never read it.
That is no longer the case.
That book is now my favourite novel, and though I didn’t know it then, my uncle had given me his most prized possession. It was a first edition, signed by the author herself: “With Best Wishes, Harper Lee.”
It was worth about two thousand dollars in 1984 and much more than that now.
My mother had no idea what he gave me, and he did not tell me what made the book so special or that it was worth so much money. He only told me that I was to look after it. “It means a lot to me,” he said. “And I hope someday it will mean a lot to you.”
I should have hugged my uncle. But he seemed to understand I couldn’t and he turned to go. He told Deanny it was nice to meet her. She, speechless for a change, only nodded. She was being confronted by the Great Presence. Years later, when we were both adults, she would tell me meeting my uncle that day was one of the most significant moments in her young life. “Death has a way of cutting through the thin veneer of daily living,” she said, “and forcing you to consider how things really are, and not how you want them to be. Seeing your uncle like that made me kind of scared and excited at the same time. I think it was the first real thing I had ever witnessed, like the first time you have sex and realize the power of the everyday. I’ll never forget it.”
Deanny and I went downstairs. We played in the yard, and after that my mother took us bowling.
4
my mother and Jeanette had decided that the afternoon of my birthday would be a good day to take my uncle outside. The weather was fine and we could all go together. But I did not want to go on a walk with my uncle. I did not wish to show him off for Deanny and the neighbourhood. He was a human being, not a sideshow exhibit or circus freak. At twelve I had not much developed in the way of moral philosophy or ethics, but I still did not think it right to accompany my uncle just so Deanny could see the spots on his face. Upon receipt of his gift, I had discovered a new and strange kind of sympathy for him. I did not want to feel sorry for him in front of my friend or mother.
Deanny beat us all at bowling. She threw the ball at the pins as if they had done her personal injury. Whenever she knocked any down, she shouted, “Samurai!” My mother and Aunt Jeanette got a kick out of this. When I bowled, Deanny would try and psyche me out during the set-up. “Sucker!” she’d call out. “Watch out for the gutters. They’ve got your name on it!”
When I complained Deanny was being a bad sport and breaking my concentration, my mother told me to hush. “She’s your friend, and your guest,” she said. “Let her have her fun.”
I was glad when bowling with Deanny the Samurai was over
When we got home, my mother went upstairs to get my uncle. Aunt Jeanette took the wheelchair from the garage and wrestled it open and into place on the front walk. I told Deanny I was not going on the walk. I wanted to stay home and play video games instead, and I thought she should do the same. She whined about it.
“But I want to go,” she said. “Maybe your uncle needs the company.”
Deanny no more wanted to provide company than I wanted to provide moral support. Our friendship was still new, but I “laid down the law,” as my grandmother would have it. “You can go if you want,” I said. “But I’m staying here.”
She nodded, and went outside. A few minutes later my aunt came to my room and told me I was coming along, that I was not to leave my friend alone for the sake of a video game. I was mad at Deanny for going over my head, but I couldn’t refuse. My aunt so rarely gave me orders.
▪ ▪ ▪
my grandmother said she did not want my uncle walking in the neighbourhood because he might catch cold, get pneumonia, get sicker than he was. This was a lie, designed to make her opposition more palatable to her daughters. It was not that she wasn’t concerned with the health of her only son; she was, or she would never have relented and let him stay with us. My grandmother believed beyond the point of reason the disease was contagious, and she knew for certain the town believed it.
Walking past her bedroom, I noticed my grandmother’s door was still shut. I thought I heard her talking in there, and assumed she was on the phone. Later we would find out she was — to Hazel, her bridge playing partner and the town gossip.
That afternoon, however, we were all unaware my grandmother was setting us up. We busied ourselves getting my uncle in the chair and down the walk, which proved to be no easy task. He could walk around the inside of the house, but he did not have the stamina to take a walk down the street any distance by himself. No matter what he thought of the wheelchair, he had to use it if he wanted to go outside. There would soon come a time when he couldn’t get to the bathroom without help from a walker or his sisters, but at this stage my mother left the wheelchair outside and let my uncle come down the stairs and out the front door on his own. He did so slowly, still wearing the jeans and the sweater. My mother asked him if it wouldn’t be too hot for him.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m feeling a chill today.”
Despite my m
other’s contempt for my grandmother and her irrational fears, she had a few of her own. No one was allowed to touch David. As difficult as it was to watch him make his way slowly down the stairs, holding on to the banister with both hands, we were not to help him. Her directions for me were clear. Don’t go into his room. Don’t touch him at any cost. Deanny and my aunt waited outside and my mother and I stayed inside to watch, making sure he didn’t fall. If he had, I don’t know what we would have done. Perhaps my mother would have got rubber gloves — something she actually did later on, when he got so ill he needed to be helped out of bed — or called the ambulance, leaving him shattered and broken on the floor, the way my grandmother’s bowl had been.
But my uncle made it, and when he reached the bottom, panting for breath, he smiled. “This walk will kill me, I think,” he said.
“Nonsense,” said my mother. “It will be good for you.”
Another few minutes and he was out the door. Once outside, and down the front steps, he sat in the wheelchair and Aunt Jeanette pushed him down the walk. We all took up our places. Jeanette pushing. Deanny beside the chair, remarkably close to my uncle. My mother on the other side of the chair. Me, trailing behind.
“What a wonderful day!” said my uncle. “I’d forgotten what the outdoors was like.”
“Let’s experience it then,” said my aunt. “Ready, David?”
“I’m ready,” said my uncle.
My aunt pushed him slowly forward and our little caravan began to proceed north on Tenerife Street and away from the embedded silence of my grandmother’s house. I felt glad for my uncle suddenly, glad that he could get out, that he could feel the warmth of the sun on his face for the first time in over a month. It was a fine day, as all the days that summer were. The upcoming school year held promise, I felt. Despite losing my best friend and being banned from the library I would get through this. Perhaps my uncle would even get better, and life would go back to the way it had always been.
