I don’t want the neighbours watching me open the envelope and wondering what I’m up to. So I take the envelope inside and downstairs, where the light is better, figuring I’ll open it here in the hallway, see what the old man came up with this year, and slip out the back door to put the thing under the tarp in the garage until Sunday.
I rip open the envelope, and the sound of paper coming apart reminds me of work. I pull out the book. On the green cover, a little boy is looking up at a falling apple, holding out his arms to catch it.
In the memory, my mother isn’t there, and it doesn’t feel like she’s just in the kitchen or the backyard, so it must have happened after she left. I’m sitting next to my dad on the couch, and we’re reading the book together. We’ve read it before, because on some pages, he’s quiet and lets me fill in the words, even though I can’t read yet.
My dad says that the boy loved the tree.
“… very much.” I say.
The tree loves the boy even when he gets older. He uses her apples to make money, her branches to build a house, and her trunk to make a boat and sail away.
My dad reads that the tree was happy.
“… but not really.” I say.
My dad pulls me a little closer. We keep reading. At the end of the story, the tree is only an old stump, and the boy is an old man. The only thing he wants is to sit and rest, and he sits on what’s left of the tree, and the tree is happy.
When we are finished the story, I want my dad to read it again. I flip through the book backwards to get to the beginning, and the tree turns from a stump to a trunk to a tree, getting bigger as the boy gets smaller.
My dad begins the story again, and I am happy.
There must be something wrong with him, some kind of terminal thing. Why would he send such bullshit books every other year, and this year send one that actually has something to do with me? Suddenly, I’m furious. What an asshole. Is he trying to get me to visit more? Why doesn’t he get his head out of the fucking books for a second and be straight with me?
For the first time, I wonder if I’m not the only person he’s sending books to. What if he actually knows where my mother is and sends her books, too, every year? What if he sends her novels about dismembered marriages or how-to books about surviving as a single parent? Maybe he goes to visit my aunt’s grave and puts books at her gravestone instead of flowers. I’m pissed, but also something feels weird in my stomach, and I have to get that book out of here, off this property, away from me, and it can’t wait till Sunday.
My hands are getting itchy. I’ve still got a balled-up plastic bag in my pocket from shopping, and I put the book in there. The bag is some thin, crummy plastic, and the green cover is glowing through it. I can still read the title even though I don’t want to, but at least it’s not touching me anymore. I stick the bagged book under my arm, pull the front door of the building shut behind me, and start walking towards the pond.
On the way there, I try to think about shredding or yard sales or Susan or Xanax or anything that isn’t the memory, but it keeps sliding back in and pushing all the nicer thoughts out of the way. I can hear the ffftt of the pages and my dad’s voice and my own in the spaces between.
There’s nobody near the pond, at least nobody who lets themselves be seen. It’s quiet enough to hear the rustle of plastic as I move. The light is changing fast. I forgot to bring tape, and I can’t find a decent-sized rock, so I just stuff some pebbles into the bag with the book and knot it. I throw it as hard as I can away from me, aiming for the middle of the pond, but it splashes into the water only a few metres from shore. Not close enough to grab but not far enough away from me, either. I stand on the shore and consider hunting around for a long branch or even wading out there to bring it back and try again, but while I’m standing there thinking about it, I see something bob up and float. The green glows through the thin plastic, brighter than swamp sludge.
I feel the tears coming up my throat like vomit or words when I’m drunk, and then the pond is blurry, but I can still see the book, and I’m starting to panic, and I wish I had a Xanax, but instead I just sit down on the closest thing I can find to a bench, and it’s a stump, and then I cry harder.
Charlene at Lunchtime
When people start talking about what comes out of pets and kids, Charlene takes her lunch to the bathroom and eats it in a stall.
Today, Charlene walks into the lunchroom, and Roberta is telling everyone about her kid’s first poop in the toilet. “We’ve been working on this forever, so this is so exciting for us! Soon she won’t even need a diaper anymore!”
Roberta’s face is red like she’s working on her own first-time dump. Charlene starts counting to twenty slowly in her head.
Angela from human resources nods. So does Tina. Even Jerry nods in Roberta’s direction as she talks, although he’s looking more at the door than at her. He’s eating something steaming. Tina says, “I wish Bailey learned as quickly as your little one! He might not be ready to sleep outside the crate after all.”
Twenty.
“Oh, shit, I forgot to get back to Mr. Endleson!” Charlene says and backs out of the lunchroom. Nobody glances at her except Jerry, whose expression reminds her of a POW she saw interviewed once on TV.
In her cubicle, she arranges her pens across the desk, end to end, before scooping them up and dropping them into a plastic vase the last person left behind. For good measure, she writes “call Mr. Endleson” on a Post-it note on her desk, in case anybody asks about it later. Then she heads to the bathroom, cucumber sandwich in her purse.
She’s just sat down in a stall and is pulling the tinfoil away from her sandwich when somebody comes in. Charlene freezes. The hiss of pee, then a flush. Water splashes into the sink. Charlene waits for the door to bang shut; the bathroom is so quiet she can hear her own breath.
Charlene’s stomach gurgles. She checks her watch, and it’s nearly one. She opens her legs and pours a gulpful of Diet Pepsi between her knees and into the toilet. The woman sniffs and goes out. Charlene digs into her cucumber sandwich. She drinks what’s left of the Diet Pepsi. When she’s swallowed the last bit of sandwich, she shakes the crumbs into the toilet and smooths the tinfoil flat against her thigh. She tugs too hard and rips it, and there’s no sense in saving it now, so she crumples it up until it’s a tiny ball with sharp edges. She flips open the lid of the napkin disposal and pushes in the tinfoil and her Diet Pepsi can, in case anyone else comes in just as she’s leaving the stall with an armful of lunch things. But no one does come in, and the clatter of the can against the bin is louder than Charlene would like.
It’s the middle of the afternoon, and Charlene is lining up her pens in a row. She finds this very relaxing. Back to back like when they’re fresh, when the package has just been opened, and they all have their caps on, and everything is neat.
“Hey, Charlene. Christmas exchange?”
Startled, Charlene knocks some of the pens to the ground. She bends over to pick them up and bonks her head on the desk as she’s straightening back up.
“Ooh, are you okay? I hate doing that.”
Maria Jose is standing beside the desk with a bowl in her hand. She’s looking at Charlene with her eyebrows scrunched up in concern. Charlene’s stomach feels like those somersaulting greyhounds her cousin put on YouTube.
“I’m okay.”
Another pen rolls off the edge of the desk, and Maria Jose squats to pluck it off the carpet. Her hair is black and straight with smudges of white at her temples and along the part in the middle of her head. Every few months, Maria Jose comes to work with the grey gone again, her hair shimmery and sleek, but it never seems to last; within a few weeks her roots are showing, and the white threads are back. If Charlene manages to get a seat close to her in the lunchroom, she tries to count the grey hairs on Maria’s head, but it’s very difficult to do unless she’s sitting right beside her and Maria Jose is absorbed in conversation with somebody else.
Ma
ria Jose listens to people like they’re interesting. In the lunchroom, she leans forward and puts her chin on her fist when someone is telling a story. When she laughs, she opens her mouth wide, and if Charlene is sitting across from her, she can see inside: neat Tic Tac teeth and black fillings on her molars. Her pink tongue.
Maria Jose never talks about what comes out of pets or kids.
She puts the pen back on the desk.
“This is for the Christmas exchange,” says Maria Jose, jiggling the bowl so Charlene can see the bits of paper inside, softly rustling.
“Oh, should I put my name in there?” Charlene asks, pointing at the bowl with her chin.
“I already did. It’s no problem.” Maria Jose smiles. “Go ahead and take one.”
Charlene swims her fingers around in the bowl and pulls out a slip of paper.
Tina.
“Oops, I got my own name. Can I do it again?”
Jerry.
Charlene considers picking again, but twice in a row will seem suspicious, so she folds the paper into a tiny square and puts it in her pocket.
Maria Jose tucks the bowl under her arm and fixes Charlene’s pens so they’re all lined up properly again. As she leans over the desk, her earrings dangle and clink like wind chimes.
They are made of tiny copper leaves and silver feathers and wire. The greyhounds flop over again.
The next day, Charlene spends most of the day looking up gingerbread houses on the internet. She skips the lunchroom/bathroom altogether and eats her sandwich in front of the computer.
The computer world is full of elegant, complicated gingerbread houses. One is a replica of the White House in happier times, with little Obamas in chocolate icing. On another site, she finds an office skyscraper, tall and beige and precarious. She remembers how stressful it was playing Jenga as a kid, pulling each block out as slowly as she could, feeling startled and disappointed when the tower inevitably collapsed.
Baking is not Charlene’s forte. Not her skill set, in office talk. Still, she is drawn to the precision of it. She likes how unforgiving it is; if you don’t measure things properly, the cake is ruined. She appreciates it when order is rewarded.
It is late in the afternoon when Charlene finds the house she will make for Maria Jose: a pretzel cabin. The perfect gingerbread house for country mice, the photo caption says. One Monday at lunchtime, Maria Jose said to Jerry, “Did you go to your cottage this weekend, Jerry?”
“I did, but it looks like I’m going to have to sell it,” Jerry said, looking kind of sick and squinty.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Maria Jose said, leaning forward and touching Jerry on the arm. “I know you love it up there.”
“I do, but it’s too expensive now, with Michael’s tuition and all that,” Jerry said into his Tupperware.
“I had a cabin once, but I had to give it up, too,” Maria Jose said quietly. Jerry nodded, not looking up.
Making a gingerbread house can be broken down into several steps, Charlene reads. She copies the list from the internet, each step on its own index card, and then she straightens the pile and tucks it into her purse.
That night, after reviewing her index cards, Charlene lies in bed and thinks about gingerbread houses. There are a lot of problems to sort out or, at least, choices to make. For example, how is she going to add the water feature? There has to be a water feature. Once, Charlene overheard Maria Jose in the lunchroom saying to Tina, “I just feel so relaxed next to water, you know? It can be a swimming pool, even a little stream. It just calms me.”
Maria Jose pulled her hair back, white strands shining. Charlene breathed in deeply and imagined she was catching a bit of Maria Jose’s smell, a mix of fruit shampoo, onions, and wind.
Precisely one week before the Christmas exchange, Charlene starts building the gingerbread house. According to the first index card, she needs to build the base first using some cardboard covered in foil. She has this stuff at home already, so that’s easy, but the internet says it’s also important to cut out a template and tape it together before starting in with the gingerbread. Any kind of stiff paper will do. Charlene goes into the supply room at lunch and stuffs ten sheets of cardstock into her bag. On the subway home, she holds the bag flat against her so none of the pages get crumpled by other commuters.
At home in her little apartment, she sits down at her kitchen table-desk and tapes the first index card to its surface. She covers the lid of a banker’s box with tinfoil, and the base is ready. Then, very carefully, she measures, traces, and cuts out two cardstock rectangles for the side walls then two smaller rectangles for the end walls. The gables and roof rectangles take a bit longer, but in an hour she has eight perfect cut-outs, ready for the next index card.
Charlene decides to take her time with the gingerbread house to make sure that it is perfect. She paces herself and goes to bed early.
The bulk food store is more cluttered than Charlene would like, and the aisles are too narrow. A small boy runs toward her, his mouth smudged with chocolate, and she has to turn sideways to avoid colliding with him. He careens around the corner, knocking a packet of rice crackers to the ground. Charlene waits until he is out of sight before she picks up the package and puts it back where it belongs.
Charlene is carrying a red plastic basket that bangs against her calf as she goes down the aisles. First she fills it up with white things: flour and royal icing mix to use as glue. Making the icing from scratch seems an unnecessary risk. Too much can go wrong, and the internet has assured her that the mix works just as well. Then she gathers all the brown ingredients, dumping scoops of pretzels into a filmy plastic bag and twisting a tie around its neck. Ground cinnamon, ginger, and cloves and dark molasses in a brown and yellow carton. She chooses some toffee bits and chocolate chips in case she needs them.
There aren’t as many green things to collect, but it is a trickier task. Charlene needs an assortment of green candies, and the bins aren’t organized by colour. So she has to lean over each bin of multicoloured candies and pick out the green ones with tongs. She sifts through the M&M’s, gum drops, jelly beans, and Skittles. Finally, she scoops out all the blue Jolly Ranchers she can find.
At the cash, Charlene is nervous that she’ll get in trouble for cherry-picking the candies, but the retirement-age lady standing at the register just says, “I like the green ones too, but more when they’re lime. That green-apple flavour has nothing to do with nature.”
“What flavour do you think the blue is supposed to be?” says a guy in the line behind Charlene.
The lady considers it. “It’s not blueberry, is it? My grandkids just always say ‘the blue flavour.’”
“My kid loves it, and she says it tastes like the sky,” says the guy.
“That’s adorable! How old is she?”
They are still talking as Charlene puts the receipt into her wallet and goes outside with her purchases. The sky is a strange shimmery grey. Charlene hurries down into the subway before it starts to rain.
The dry ingredients are easy enough to mix together, but creaming the butter and brown sugar until fluffy is more difficult. It’s fluffy enough, in the end, but it’s more like paste than clouds.
Ginger, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, salt, molasses.
Charlene mixes the dry and wet ingredients together like the index card tells her to. Her wrist is starting to ache from all of the stirring, the earned kind of ache, like after exercise.
Dividing the dough into thirds, Charlene wraps each chunk in name-brand plastic wrap she bought especially for the gingerbread house project. The index card tells her that she needs to put the dough in the fridge for at least one hour but that overnight is better. Charlene still has a few days to do the building, gluing, and decorating. There is plenty of time to finish the pretzel cabin for Maria Jose, with sky-flavoured water behind it.
In the lunchroom, Tina asks Roberta what she’s doing for the holidays.
“Oh, you know, we do all of that Santa stuff
. Our daughter just goes bananas for the stockings and that. What about you?”
“Well, we actually do a stocking for Bailey,” Tina says around a mouthful of tuna sandwich.
“You do? That’s so funny! What do you put in it?” Roberta asks, and Charlene stops listening.
Across the table, Maria Jose is saying something quietly to Jerry, who’s nodding as he picks at his pasta. Then he looks straight at Maria Jose the way Charlene never has the nerve to do and says, “Thanks, Maria Jose. That means a lot.” Maria Jose smiles at him, and the lines around her eyes are like how wind looks when it’s drawn in children’s books, still and moving at the same time.
The preheating oven is warming up the apartment enough for Charlene to be working in a t-shirt and shorts. After rolling out the dough, Charlene flours her palms, like a gymnast. She uses the paper template to help her make each piece of gingerbread exactly the right size and shape for the cabin, slides the baking sheets into the oven, and in fifteen minutes the gingerbread is done. Her apartment smells like Christmas movies and natural dandruff shampoo. Charlene lifts her arm and wipes her forehead to stop the sweat from dripping onto the gingerbread.
She mixes up the royal icing according to the instructions on the package and spoons the white globs into a pastry bag. She pipes the shape of the cabin onto the tinfoil base and then stands the first piece of gingerbread up, making sure it is well glued down before she adds the other three, one at a time, squeezing neat lines of icing up and down the hinges of the walls. The internet says it’s easier to do this with an assistant. Charlene thinks of a sign she saw once in the front window of a dance studio: Learn, with or without a partner. She uses cans of beans and peas to support the pieces while she glues them all together with icing. One of the side walls leans like it might cave in, but Charlene straightens it and fortifies the base with the sweet glue.
The Colours of Birds Page 3
