‘Head up again.’ Rosa tapped his forehead. ‘So I was thinking maybe I could do a reading for you, eh? Try to get to the bottom of all of this no-shut-eye business.’
Jeremy took a breath, held it in his lungs, then exhaled. Fucking tarot cards. He knew why he couldn’t sleep. It was the same reason the mushroom speech had failed. What keeps a person from greatness and a good night’s sleep? His own porous self, batting possibilities back and forth, delving too deep into other people’s private motives and cloistered pasts.
‘We’re almost done here, honey.’ Rosa was swiping muted tones of shadow across his eyelids. The coloured chunks were set into a tray like a paint set; shiny shards glinted up from their surfaces. ‘What we want is an everyday look that can be tweaked for evening, made glamorous with a few strokes here and there.’
How could he tell her – so optimistic and persistent with her tools – that he couldn’t sleep because he kept feeling it: his father’s node of jealousy and sharp, explosive end. He kept feeling it and he did not want to dream it. And how could he tell her that he was relieved, and this was why – like a helpless animal, all-seeing and dumb – he had divined his own father’s death. He could not, not now, with her fingers on his face, the dispassion and drive in her every calculated move. It was making him sleepy.
On the bus ride home to Hamilton he had closed his eyes, and it was possible he slept, although what he recalled now was less like dream than reality in meltdown. Was it memory? He could not say. The day before Richie killed a man, he and Jeremy met in the park near the river and pulled out a six-pack they had crammed into the opening of a hollow log two days earlier. Before he left the house, Jeremy’s father had called him down to his workshop in the basement. ‘Son,’ he said. Jeremy snorted. The two men shared a stocky certainty of the body, and as his father bent forward over his workhorse, Jeremy could see, for a second, his own forearm straining into the future. ‘You know I’ve always wanted the best for you, but I don’t know how ... ’ His father paused, a sob gathering in his throat. ‘You and this boy Richie. We seem to have lost. I don’t know.’ Jeremy nodded, wanting badly to spit, to hork a big ol’ loogie direct into the old man’s cauldron of trailing dreams. ‘Stay in tonight. Maybe we could.’ Jeremy shook his head. ‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘I have to go out.’
Jeremy sat on the log while Richie opened two beers with his belt buckle. ‘Fuck,’ Jeremy said. ‘My dad.’ The fingers of Richie’s right hand retracted like a sea anemone; Jeremy could see a muscle in his friend’s tricep where there had been only blank skin. It was a warning: There can be no comparison. They drank and listened to the water webbing its way around rocks. Then Richie wound one arm around Jeremy, and with the other pulled a dainty plastic pouch from his jean-jacket pocket. Five flattened dried mushrooms jostled like family in the pouch. Richie upended the bag and shook the mushrooms free. ‘Magic,’ he said. They spent the afternoon and evening in the dirt around that log, crouched and curled close to the earth, to each other. There were whole legend-spewing, weapon-forging civilizations in the cracks between stones, a spa for Yorkville ladies in fox furs had launched inside a pop bottle, the way the sky bent and rippled meant good fortune, the smell of car exhaust was a constellation, and their very cat faces sprouted silvery-fine whiskers for extra-sensing and formal occasions. They talked about how to live when nobody understood. They fell asleep next to the log.
When he woke up, he was nearly home. Outside the bus, the landscape repeated itself. Still the flesh-toned, jowly skateboarder jumped. Still, the sky was ripened peach, the letters inflated, autonomous and wise. Bye Bye Flangle Nuts. Where did they all go – the living and the dead – when their eyes were closed?
Jeremy felt the soft tickle of a brush across his cheekbones, over his nose. On the inside of his lids he began to discern short squat somethings amongst the trees of multicoloured lights. Mushrooms. He let them make themselves known, noted them and released them to their own private fevers.
The mushrooms were slowing their pace; there were golden strands linking them. The farther they travelled from each other, the thinner and more resilient, the more gleaming and near-invisible the strands became. God, they were beautiful.
‘Amore?’
Jeremy opened his eyes.
‘Oh, wow,’ Rosa said. ‘I thought you were a goner. Finito, bandito.’ She was shaken and hiding it.
‘Nope,’ he said, in a tone meant to show he had tricked not her but himself. ‘I’ve just been sleeping.’
Dingbat
DAD DIED IN FEBRUARY of my seventeenth year, in the backyard, while feeding the birds. Mum found him flat on his back, looking for all the world as if he were napping on the soft pile of snow he had just cleared from the space beside the feeder. When I got home from school, the ambulance had not yet arrived. Mum would not let me in the front door.
‘Go back to school,’ she said, her face white as bone.
When I kneeled beside my father, I was cheered by the fact that his eyes were closed. Dead people stared blankly into some unfathomable beyond. I laid my hand against his face. The skin was not warm, but it had a tender elasticity to it. I pulled his toque down over his forehead. There was a tiny curlicue of wax sitting like a hardened spot of Dijon mustard inside his ear. He was not dead.
‘Dad?’ I said, and leaned down close, so that he could hear.
A paramedic shoved me to the side.
Mum and I sat on the steps of the back porch and watched the uniformed men work. And it was work. They pushed and prodded at him, blew into his lungs, shocked his heart. We could see our breaths in the air, but sweat soaked their baby-blue shirts into navy. They did all that they could do. Still, they could have done more.
We got to touch Dad one more time before they took him away. Then we sat back down on the steps. A blue jay landed on the stoop outside the shed, hopped over to the garden and pecked hopefully at the snow. From the street, the slow roar and clank of the snowplow. And, at the corner of my lip, if I stretched with my tongue, the taste of blood from the same cold sore I had had since Christmas.
‘Go call your brother,’ said Mum.
I nodded, started towards the door, then stopped. ‘What should I tell him?’
We stared at each other, dumbfounded.
‘Tell him to come home.’
That winter and through the spring and summer, Mum made soups from a gourmet cookbook someone had given her for her wedding anniversary three years earlier. She did not seem sad to me. She did not seem happy either. She did not seem to be anything at all. For six months we ate gourmet soups at every meal and received bills that still showed my father’s name through the little plastic window at the front. The sympathy cards, which had arrived in an extravagant volley in the first two months, came less often by months five and six. I opened the envelopes cavalierly, with my index finger, and peered in without pulling the cards from their envelopes. In the midst of these came several official letters addressed to me.
I refused all three of the universities’ offers. I told Mum it was because I was going to be a writer or a painter, or, quite possibly, a sculptor.
‘You never liked art,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but it’s never too late to try something new.’
‘Yes it is,’ she said, ‘oh, yes it is. You should be a scientist.’
‘Mmm,’ I said.
Really, I wanted to be an artist because I believed artists lived alone in apartments with silky Indian-print scarves draped over everything, had a series of fascinating lovers and were never lonely because they had their passion to sustain them. It was not entirely clear to me how they reached this particular state of grace, but I understood that it was probably important for me to track my experience in some way. I started keeping a notebook to pin down my thoughts. Grief makes you stupid, I jotted furiously; nothing seemed
more perfectly true to me. I have been made wise and raw by death, I wrote in caps across an entire page, seized by a burning focus that began in my sinuses. Death is timeless. When someone dies, we are made tense by the idea of tenses. I penned aphorism after contradictory aphorism. In the margins, I drew sunbursts, triptychs of tiny balloons with sudden leaks, and labelled them brain aneurysm, then hid my notebook at the back of my closet in a ratty pillowcase with pink shamrocks stitched around the edge. I lay on my bed and thought about my mother, how I could never leave her, and how it was absolutely imperative that I leave her. And I thought about sex – how great art is so often culled from lusty encounters.
‘I think I’m going to start having sex,’ I told my mother, who was stirring a carrot-curry soup on the stove.
‘Maybe we should get a dog,’ she said, without looking up.
‘I think I’m going to start having sex,’ I said again, adopting her pseudo-questioning manner. I scratched my cheek casually and watched her add what looked like paprika to the pot. I cleared my throat.
‘Just don’t get pregnant, dingbat,’ came the response, and I realized that, more than shock, I had expected my pronouncement to evoke something like pride from her.
I had sex for the first time in a tent with a friend of a friend named Ben, his beered-up buddy asleep beside us. We were camping next to sand dunes, the kind that emerged from the water like mesas, plateaus for the sun-hungry in the middle of Lake Erie. Sex for the first time felt like it was happening in the basement of a toadstool because of the musty smell and the grey-green light seeping through the tent flap. My mouth tasted of flat Molson Canadian from a king can and I remember noticing, although not with any sense of indignation, or even irony, the tiny towel that Ben had placed fussily under my hips. I remember that I wished, then unwished, that the condom would break, that I would get pregnant and full. Because that would be fair – if whatever tripping, caustic god that lived up there amongst the faraway stars could give me another life to replace my father, a smaller version, cherubic and demanding. Was I thrilled? Not exactly, although there was something prickly about the whole thing, something gently dangerous. Afterwards Ben took me by the hand and walked me along the beach as if I were a toddler, which made it difficult for me to feel in any way initiated.
I remember the stones underfoot more than the stars above, which seemed to me ugly and unnatural, as if someone had tossed ice-melting salt against an asphalt sky. Ben’s hand in mine was dry and callused, his grip strong. He worked most weekends drywalling, and I tried to feel grateful that he had sacrificed two shifts for me.
Ben had his Neil Young tape for the way home so we didn’t have to talk. We could roll down the windows of his pickup and count cows. We could sing.
When I got home, Mum stretched the phone cord across the kitchen and waved the mouthpiece at me.
‘Your brother’s on the line,’ she said.
‘Tell him I’m in Paris.’
‘Don’t be a dingbat. Take the phone.’
And I did, although I loathed Jeremy intermittently and without conviction. Loathed him for having found a life of his own, even if he did work in a steel mill with a girlfriend named Rosa whose puffy, sneering lips and thin plastic belts around her thin waist made for a curious appeal.
‘How’s Mum?’ Jeremy said.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I mean … fine.’
‘You should make sure she gets out.’
‘Of the house?’ I said.
‘Just out, Maddie. Just take care of her, okay? I gotta go.’
He hung up.
As a child I had often wished for sisters. In Grade 4 I had a friend Denise who had three of them. They called each other Sewer, like the French word for the relation. Denise was precocious.
‘A bit too precocious for her own good,’ said Mum, semi-admiringly.
In October of that year, Denise discovered a new word. She’d leap from her desk at least three times a day and position her hands firmly on the handles of her hips. ‘That’s redundant!’ was the rallying cry.
We took to using it as a taunt in the schoolyard. It had the same satisfactory rising and falling action as retard, and the middle was nicely reminiscent of dunce. It was even useful as a skipping chant, the three syllables matching the clip-clap-clip of the rope hitting the pavement. Re … Re … Re-dun-dant. It was how I felt talking to Jeremy. It was how I felt about my life.
In late July Mum and I drove an hour and a half to the Canine Castle to buy a dog. I had been driving for only a year, and it showed. Mum held tight to the holy-shit handle the entire way, but didn’t comment when I flicked on the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal, then swerved awkwardly to change lanes. The woman who sold us our puppy was petite except for her bulgy forearms and jutting chin. She checked the dog’s mouth and behind, tapped its nose, then gave us a pink photocopied list of required shots and how-tos.
‘If you have any trouble,’ she said, and snorted delicately, ‘call this number.’
We were shocked into submission. The puppy was so small. He lay in my arms and murmured. On the way home, I sat in the passenger seat with the dog while Mum drove efficiently, her hands at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel.
We spent a lot of time sitting on the couch, watching the dog. When the dog was asleep, Mum would read the newspaper and I would read poems by contemporary Canadian poets. Sometimes it was difficult for me to contain my enthusiasm.
‘Listen to this, Mum.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s Anne Michaels.’ I cleared my throat. ‘“The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.”’ I put the book down. I looked at her for confirmation. She stared back, unblinking. She seemed to expect more from me. Always, she seemed to expect more from me. I flipped the book open again. ‘Which we then lavish on the dog,’ I recited.
‘It doesn’t say that,’ Mum said.
‘No, it doesn’t say that.’
‘I didn’t think so.’ But she was smiling.
When we weren’t on the couch, we were walking the dog in the brash light of late summer. The park was beautiful and quiet, an oasis of trickling creeks and carefully treed banks, with a woodchip path that shifted and crackled like granola under our feet. The dog strained at his leash. He loved the park, with its tufts of spiky, smelly grass, its long-necked Canada geese and its catalogue of sticks that had been scattered willy-nilly by the wind across the soft ground. We watched him lift his leg to pee, again and again, against signposts and benches, tree stumps and whole tree trunks, rocks, bushes and piles of crumpled pop cans and newspapers. Once we were far enough from the road and its roaring cars with their ominous metallic undersides and hungry tires, we took him off his leash.
‘I think you should go to university,’ Mum said, one particularly humid afternoon. ‘It’s not too late to go in the new year, is it?’
‘No, but ... ’ I pitched a stick, and we both watched the dog scamper and grab, then leap and scramble.
Mum pulled her T-shirt from her stomach and shook it rapidly to create some air flow. She turned towards me.
‘I’m not sure it’s the right path for me.’ I tried to look thoughtful, but I could not think. I could not even think of how to appear thoughtful.
The dog was panting and cavorting in circles around us. Mum bent down and rubbed his trusting, rumpled head. I watched her.
She looked up at me. ‘I suppose you think,’ she said quietly. ‘I suppose you think that I’m going to become one of those women who chases hooligans with my cane, because that’s what the old and bereft do, am I right? And that creature will be yapping at my heels.’ She pointed to the dog and raised her voice. ‘And I’ll call it names like Pookie and pick up its shit with a small plastic baggie. And I’ll call you at inopportune times with bits of inconsequential news and smatterings
of guilt, am I right? Well, am I right?’ She began shaking her T-shirt again.
I was too brittle with my own self to answer. I held her hand, took the leash from it and turned to go home.
Dad always liked to tell the story of Mum sleep-singing in a high clear voice one hot night.
‘Well, I was just lying there on one of those infernal nights in August when something woke me. A voice. At first, I was certain it was one of you kids in trouble, or just fooling around – a tummy ache, or a battle over the blankets, some such thing. So I sat up and looked around, saw the two of you lying in sweet bundles on the floor, noticed the moon out the window looking like it was about to swoop down at me, and that’s when I realized. It was an adult voice I was hearing. And it was singing.’
At this point he would pause to allow the scene – the predatory moon, the mysterious voice, the guiltless children asleep on the floor – to sink in. Often he would dab at the corner of his mouth with a serviette before continuing.
‘In any case, once I’d shaken off my dreams and my incredulity, I realized it was your mother doing the singing.’ Then Dad would glare at me and Jeremy as if we alone were responsible for bringing Mum into his life. And he would not go on until we asked.
‘What? What was it she was singing, Dad?’
We couldn’t help it. We would plead with him – as kids because we couldn’t bear not to hear it, and as teenagers because we knew what was expected of us, and because, although we rolled our eyes, we still couldn’t bear not to hear it. There was always a moment before the singing began that was less of a pause than a space; it was a smooth, timeless space that the story had carved out, and we were living in it. Then would come the careful falsetto:
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