Lemon

by Cordelia Strube

  I make Lillian’s shopaholic friend, Courtney, show off the cute outfits she buys. She talks about her gingivitis and how much the periodontist is costing her. She says a guy from high school visited her mother to get Courtney’s number. Courtney’s mother says the guy’s done really well selling Astroturf but that he looks a little different than he did in high school. Courtney says, ‘How’s he look different, I mean other than what you’d expect?’

  ‘He’s losing a bit of hair,’ her mother says.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Courtney says, ‘nobody’s perfect.’

  ‘You might not recognize him,’ her mother says.

  ‘How bald is he, Ma?’

  Meanwhile old Lillian can’t believe she has to sit around listening to this twaddle that isn’t anything like what the half-naked toy boys and girls are saying on Truly Loved.

  Speaking of toy boys, I figure my biological father had to be a stud with gonads for brains. I don’t have a problem with this like I have a problem with my mother dropping me in the Walmart toilet. Maybe because he’s never come looking for me like she has. He’s probably got a plumbing business and a wife who’s constantly whining that he doesn’t spend enough time with the kids. The last thing he wants is another junior. Plus he may not even know I exist. I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind if he was a super-nice guy who, when he finds out about me, sends me a few Ks or something. Enough to set me up in the soap business. I’d like him to look like the dads in the Father’s Day ads: salt-and-pepper hair, a big warm smile. Or like Ryan O’Neal in Paper Moon. Zippy bought me that movie and told me my daddy was probably just like Ryan, that he probably didn’t even know I existed. She said if my real daddy saw me he’d fall in love with me just the way Ryan fell for Tatum. I got pretty obsessed with this movie until Tatum wrote a tell-all book about how Ryan slugged her after she won the Oscar, and how he let his drug dealer molest her, and how Melanie Griffith, one of his wives, dragged her into an orgy when she was twelve. Pretty soon old Tatum was addicted to cocaine and heroin and trying to kill herself.

  Drew’s calling me, which is unusual these days. I consider pretending to be asleep but figure if it’s the cops wanting to grill me about the murder, they’ll find me anyway. At least in custody I won’t have to worry about Bonehead seeking revenge. ‘What?’ I shout back.

  ‘Can you come down here?’

  Maybe I should pack a few things, a toothbrush, something to read, ATale of Two Cities, which has to be one of Dickens’ biggest snore fests even though it’s got that famous line in it. There’s already been a wedding so I figure a funeral’s next. I really admire Dickens because he woke people up to child labour and all that, but I think he must have gotten burned out getting paid by the word, writing all those weddings and funerals.

  ‘Lemon?’ she calls again. ‘Come and meet Vaughn.’

  Egads, I totally forgot about the tree saver. He’s probably all hair and body odour. Best to delay contact for as long as possible. What makes him think there’s any point in saving trees? Nature reserves are only protected as long as Big Business isn’t interested in drilling or clear-cutting or developing. So Thor can save a tree while he’s squatting on it but he’d have to be pretty deluded to think the tree’s days aren’t numbered.

  ‘Lemon?’

  I haul my ass to the kitchen.

  ‘This is Vaughn,’ Drew says.

  As expected, he’s got messy hair and clothes and a backpack that’s been around the world a few times. I make a peace sign.

  ‘Same to you,’ he says.

  Drew’s clutching a bag of birdseed she must have dug out of the broom closet. I can see she wants to get back to the bird. ‘This is Lemon. Could you make him comfortable? I think there’s clean linen in the closet.’ There isn’t because she doesn’t do laundry anymore.

  ‘Follow me,’ I tell him, heading back upstairs, hoping he isn’t noticing my fat ass. I scrounge around for sheets and towels. Vaughn doesn’t say anything, which I find unnerving. Most people gab. He helps me make the bed. He doesn’t smell, which suggests he knows about showers. I try to fold the sheet neatly back over the blanket the way Drew does but it looks crooked.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Vaughn says. He has green eyes; I’ve never seen truly green eyes before. His skin’s weathered from exposure, making the whites of his eyes look really white and the green of his irises even greener. I see trees in them, ponds and frogs, moss.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea or anything?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m alright, thanks.’

  ‘The bathroom’s the first door on your right.’ I stand around feeling retarded, which is unusual for me. There’s something about him I can’t figure out.

  ‘Thanks for all your help.’ He offers his hand for me to shake. It feels rough, ripped up by tree bark. It makes sense that he has nothing to say to me. He probably figures I’m a mall-hopping teenager, contributing to all that tree-killing.

  ‘Good night,’ he says.

  ‘Hasta mañana.’

  10

  The bird’s dead, of course, with its eyes still open. Vaughn tells me as soon as I come downstairs but I want to be sure so I watch it for a long time. I decide we should bury it before Drew wakes up. As usual our alcoholic neighbour to the north is sitting on his lawn chair in his Jockeys nursing a Heineken.

  ‘You don’t want to go putting that in the ground,’ he advises. ‘Could be diseases on it.’

  ‘We’re not going to leave it here,’ I lie. ‘This is just temporary, we’ve already notified the authorities.’

  He nods approval in that Cardinal Richelieu way of his. He had a wife once. Every few hours he shouts that he wants to fucking kill her. She seemed nice enough, mowed the lawn and didn’t overload the garbage bin. His Eminence stuffs it with little plastic bags, forcing the lid to remain open, allowing the critters to spread debris all over our lawn. It used to drive Drew nuts. Now, like with most things, she doesn’t seem to notice.

  Vaughn’s a good digger, must have strong arms due to tree climbing.

  ‘Go deeper,’ I tell him, wanting to avoid future exhuming by the cats.

  Vaughn made porridge for breakfast and offered me some. I enjoyed it, can’t remember the last time I had it. He even washed the dishes, spoke maybe two words. There’s no question he’s been spending way too much time with squirrels. Rossi phoned to say she was sorry about calling me a fucking freak and all that but I wasn’t too interested. Sorry is one of those meaningless words people toss around before they kick you in the head again.

  Saturdays I work an eight-hour shift at the mall, actually nine hours if you include the lunch break for which I do not get paid. I’ve never figured that one out, it’s not like you get to enjoy lunch hour, there’s no time to go anywhere unless you have wheels. You’re stuck on a plastic chair in the food court watching people gorge. And of course, slobs stare at you. A lubber with his gut hanging out and his legs spread is currently ogling me. I pretend to be engrossed in The Mayor of Cast-erbridge. It’s not like I’m this huge Hardy fan but Drew has the whole set, read it in college. When I asked her if she knew what a dirtbag old Thomas was to his wives, she said that geniuses’ personal lives shouldn’t colour how we perceive their work. She has a point, since most geniuses are dirtbags to their wives.

  She has a few thousand books she read in college including a shelf dedicated to Extraordinary Women. That’s how I know about Mary Wollstonecraft. Last night I was reading about this Gaskell woman who wrote a book before old Dickens got rich talking about workhouses - while he was being a dirtbag to his wife. Gaskell’s novel described life in industrial Manchester. She actually hung out with all these starving, sooty-lunged workers and wrote down how they talked. Meanwhile old Victoria was getting it on with Albert and having forty kids so she wasn’t too worried about her starved and overworked subjects. It turns out that in Manchester there were these girls who worked in match factories to try to keep themselves fed. The hitch was some chemical in the matc
hstick solution gave them ‘phossy jaw,’ which translates into hideous, permanent facial deformity. Another Extraordinary Woman, her name was Annie Besant, found out about this and made it her business to let the public know that the matchstick girls were being poisoned. She handed out pamphlets at the factory door and convinced the girls to protest by not going to work. The factory owners eventually caved and stopped using the chemical that caused phossy jaw. Personally I think it’s a little outrageous that old Dickens gets all the credit for exposing the workhouses when Gaskell was ahead of him. What nobody remembers is that these Extraordinary Women were speaking out before they had any rights. In those days, if a woman got married, she had to hand everything over to the husband. And it was legal for hubby to beat her. If she took off, she lost all rights to her children and former property. Her signature on legal documents meant squat. If she refused to spread her legs for hubby, he could take her out for a buggy ride and drop her off at the asylum. Before old Jean-Jacques Rousseau made breastfeeding fashionable, well-to-do women weren’t even allowed to nurse their babies. The infants were handed over to wet nurses or fed water with bread in it. That’s why so many of them died.

  The ogling lubber is joined by another podger. They swill Diet Coke and start gabbing about computer games. They’re all excited about some game that lets you kill people within an eight-metre radius. ‘And,’ the first podger enthuses, ‘you can do a two-handed kill!’

  Meanwhile, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, old Thomas has Elizabeth-Jane pining for some Scottish guy. The Scot gets all hot for another woman and marries her. Poor old Elizabeth-Jane keeps pining for him while her father - who isn’t her father but she doesn’t know this - keeps trying to think of ways to get rid of her. Maybe she’ll end up dead like old Tess. Or married to some sheep farmer.

  Doyle can’t stop holding forth about some car he wants to buy. He asks if I think Rossi would go to Nicole’s party with him. I know she’d jump at the chance but wish to shield her from this humiliation. I look busy serving a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They all say they want regular-sized cones then get hissy when I don’t mash another scoop on them. ‘You ordered regular,’ I remind them. They pay me individually with lots of dimes and nickels and pennies. It gets sticky going into the till, which will drive old Buzny wild.

  I saw Walter the wannabe in the cafeteria eating poutine. He looked alright but nobody was talking to him. His lower jaw was so swollen he couldn’t open his mouth properly. He had to eat the fries one at a time like a little old man missing teeth. He caught me staring at him and flipped me the finger. It was good to see him, though, alive and all that.

  Doyle’s adjusting his underwear again. He thinks no one notices, that he can just grab his crotch and scoop ice cream in one fluid movement.

  When I was seven, scooping ice cream was my dream job, my ticket to limitless cash and Chunky Monkey. You have to wonder how many other dreams will turn rancid once you’re up close to them.

  Some couple is taking two hours to pick flavours. He’s your basic designer-T-shirt workoutaholic. She’s wearing a mini-skirt and stilettos and can’t keep her hands off him. The workoutaholic pays no attention to her, just keeps staring at the tubs of ice cream like he’s about to make the decision of a lifetime. You just know that before he got her in the sack he had his hands all over her. Now that he’s had her, he’s more interested in Peanut Butter Chip. Meanwhile she’s scared of losing him so she keeps sticking her hand down his pants. You see this all the time, dudes being hot for tomatoes until they’ve nailed them a few times. Then the ownership thing kicks in on the part of the female. With the chase over, she’s got to keep her feelers on the meatloaf, even if she doesn’t want his tongue down her throat. Which is totally different from most mammals. Most species let the stud get his rocks off then ditch him and go find a cave somewhere. This makes sense rather than trying to hold on to the peckerhead. Although I still like to believe that true love is possible, especially if one of the parties dies young. A dead lover can keep you truly loved your entire life. Look at old Victoria.

  I’m going to call my play Truly Loved. Old Lillian’s going to endeavour to live the passion enjoyed by the humping toy boys and girls on the tube. Faking laughs, orgasms and interest until, crushed by the dull realities of life outside the box, she will lash out. Maybe she’ll blow up the bank or something. My email is cluttered with butt-scratchers who want to be in the play. Yesterday they wouldn’t have noticed if I got hit by a bus. My plan is to make them perform demeaning acts, not unlike those allegedly performed by Rossi. My plan is to audition and reject them.

  Vaughn’s never heard of Bob and Bing’s road movies.

  ‘Road to Morocco?’ I inquire. ‘You’ve never heard of Road to Morocco?’ I start singing the Road to Morocco song, bopping around the way Bob and Bing do on the fake camel. Vaughn’s drinking tea made from tree bark or something.

  I fit Road to Bali into the player. I figure if Treeboy can’t handle it, he can go meditate or something. I’m not used to having a stranger around the house, particularly a mute. I wish he’d go save the oak in the backyard.

  He doesn’t laugh once, not even when the octopus squirts black ink in Bob’s face. When it’s over, I look at Vaughn and realize he isn’t even watching. He’s staring off into some forest.

  ‘À demain,’ I say.

  He looks as though he’d forgotten I was there. ‘Good night.’

  I’m woken by the two of them talking. Drew’s a little testy due to Vaughn’s silent owl treatment. I creep to the head of the stairs to hear better. It turns out a friend of his, another tree sitter, got killed by loggers. They chased him up a tree with chainsaws, lopping off the lower branches. When the chainsaw got too close, he leapt into another tree, so they sheared the bottom limbs off that one too. Trapped, the guy clung to the tree with no water or food for forty-eight hours. The whole time the loggers and forestry thugs were shouting insults at him, shining lights and blaring music. The tree sitter finally passed out and fell sixty feet, slamming into some limbs before crashing to the ground. Besides all the broken bones, his head was split open and his lungs punctured. All the forestry department said about it was that it was unfortunate and something they’d hoped wouldn’t happen.

  ‘I should have been there,’ Vaughn says.

  ‘What could you have done?’ Drew asks.

  ‘Created some diversion. He would have made it down.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘We’re supposed to watch out for each other,’ he says as though she’s a right-winger who can’t possibly understand.

  A monstrously gloomy silence ensues until she says, ‘You mustn’t go back. It would be suicide.’

  Vaughn doesn’t respond and I know his tree-coloured eyes are focused above and beyond her.

  ‘It was an 800-year-old Douglas fir,’ he says. ‘You can’t replant a 1000-year-old forest. We’re destroying something we don’t understand.’

  If you think about it, those trees have witnessed every ruthless, selfish, greedy, destructive human act since whitey started having his way around the place. Maybe that’s why whitey’s determined to cut them down. The trees know too much.

  I offer to make them pancakes. They don’t look too interested. I dollop and flip batter anyway. ‘How about some sightseeing?’ I say to Vaughn, determined to cheer him up now that I know about his personal tragedy. ‘A stroll down Yonge? It’s the longest street in the world, you know.’

  He gives me the tree-frog stare.

  ‘Or we could shoot up the CN Tower.’ Right away I deduce that concrete towers aren’t too inviting to tree sitters. ‘What about the island? We could rent bikes and pedal around. There’s lots of trees there.’

  ‘Lemon,’ Drew intervenes, ‘I’m sure Vaughn has other things to do.’

  ‘Not really,’ he says.

  ‘It’s fun on the ferry,’ I say. ‘You can pretend you’re on a voyage.’

  He cuts into a pancake with
his fork. He’s forgotten to put syrup on it. I pass it to him. ‘It’s real syrup,’ I say, ‘from trees.’ He forks a piece of pancake into his mouth. Guess it’s against his principles to eat maple syrup. Maybe taking sap from trees is like sucking their blood. I’ll have to avoid the tree word in future. Like I avoid the cancer word at the hospital.

  He looks goofy on the bike. The rentals have thick tires, upright handlebars and cushy seats. They’re the only style of bike that doesn’t hurt my butt. But old Vaughn must be over six feet and his knees jut out as he pedals. He seems oblivious to how hilarious he looks. He may be the one person in existence who doesn’t check out his ass in store windows. We sit in the grass and stare at the lake. I try to get a conversation going, ask him about the tree life, but it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t want to talk. The water looks like it does in postcards. ‘It’s a picture-perfect day,’ I say, sounding demented. I’m only yammering because he isn’t. It’s like I have to prove I have a brain. Which is pretty sad considering I don’t even know if old Vaughn can tell a brain from a kidney. Just because he’s quiet doesn’t mean he’s deep. I shut up, lie back and watch a plane and wish I were on it, going anywhere except where there’s war and pestilence, famine and ecological disasters.

  Unable to sleep with visions of a murdered tree sitter in my head, I worked some more on Truly Loved, got old Lillian, fuelled by the motivational speakers, to rally the deadbeats at the bank to protest. Half of them are being transferred to a new location in Oakville. Most of them don’t have cars, which means a two-hour commute to and from work on public transit. But management says that’s where the jobs are if they want them. Plus they’re extending branch hours, which means some shifts will start at seven in the morning. Nobody objects because they know there’s a bunch of the downsized in Oakville who’d be grateful to get their jobs. Lillian starts jumping up and down beside a plastic plant, chanting about self-respect, solidarity, human rights and union busting. Nobody’s too interested. The manager gets the security guard to take her out.