Lemon

by Cordelia Strube

  ‘She refuses to go out,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Says it’s too much work.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Getting ready,’ she says. ‘She has to bathe, shave everywhere and exfoliate. Then she showers because she doesn’t like to wash her hair in the bath. After that she has to blow-dry and put on makeup. It’s very time-consuming. She says it’s not worth doing anymore, she’d rather stay in.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to do all that.’

  ‘Don’t I know it.’ Mrs. Barnfield starts sorting through her junk mail, trying hard to look like she isn’t worried out of her mind. ‘What about school?’ I ask.

  ‘She says she’s going to apply to beautician school. You don’t need a diploma for that.’

  ‘She’d have to go out, though.’

  ‘You’d think.’ She rubs her eyes.

  ‘Could I crash here tonight?’ I ask. She stands a little straighter, as though I’ve lifted a weight off her.

  ‘Of course, if it’s okay with your mom.’

  My ‘mom,’ what a joke. I phone Drew. She starts her school-principal number. ‘I love you too,’ I say and hang up. Mrs. Barnfield and I sit on the couch and watch Out of Africa. It gets embarrassing when Bob lies on top of Meryl and tells her not to move. She tells him she wants to but he says, ‘Don’t.’ You have to wonder what kind of sick puppy Sydney Pollack was if he thought good sex is about the guy telling the woman not to move. Which gets me thinking about Rossi, what she did or didn’t say when those louts were ramming her. Did she start out acting like she was enjoying it so they’d be nicer to her? Invite her to parties? Drive her around in Daddy’s car?

  ‘I wouldn’t want to live in Africa,’ Mrs. Barnfield says. ‘Besides the heat, there’s so much unrest there.’

  ‘It’s going to get like that here. Once the oil runs out and a potato costs five bucks. The poor will storm the compounds of the rich, get out the garrotte.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Garrotte. It’s a Spanish method of execution by strangulation. You fit metal collars around necks and tighten them till they choke. Pretty efficient, portable and low cost. People who can’t buy a potato can’t afford bullets.’ Don’t know why I’m telling her this when I’m supposed to be cheering her up.

  ‘Oh, it’ll never get that bad here,’ she says, which is pretty bizarre considering she’s being bled by the bank, which is owned by a few billionaire garrotte candidates.

  ‘You’re right,’ I lie. ‘We’re way too civilized.’

  When things start to go wrong between Meryl and Bob, Mrs. Barnfield spurts tears. She yanks Kleenexes from a box and blows her nose every five seconds.

  ‘It wasn’t really like that,’ I tell her.

  ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘Karen Blixen and Dennis. I read the book. He was a dick, nothing like Bob. Not as handsome either. He didn’t even show up to tell her he was leaving. They hadn’t seen each other for months when he crashed the plane. Hollywood put that schmaltz in.’

  ‘What schmaltz?’

  ‘The parting scene, when Meryl’s doing longing acting.’

  ‘I think she’s a wonderful actress.’

  ‘She’s got the accents down.’

  I help her make up the couch with sheets and blankets. She’s trying really hard to act like a mother and not a damaged individual. I want to tell her it’s okay, we’re all damaged, but I can’t. It’s like we have to play these roles.

  ‘Is that everything you need?’ she asks. ‘Oh, a nightie. I’ll lend you one of mine.’

  It’s white with little skiers on it. I thank her and wait for her to go to bed so I can sneak into Rossi’s room. I lie on the couch, listening to the fridge compressor switch on and off about a thousand times, trying to figure out why Rossi won’t talk to me. Is she ashamed? Pissed at me for sucking on pretzels? Does she feel so used and ugly she doesn’t want to see anyone? Rape probably does that to you, makes you feel dirty for the rest of your life. Every time you have sex after that it feels like rape, but you have to act like you’re enjoying it, otherwise the knob thinks you’re frigid because you were raped. You feel guilty because you’re not enjoying it so you start fucking even more goons, hoping they’ll like fucking you even though you were raped and will feel dirty for the rest of your life.

  I don’t knock this time, just creep in. She’s not asleep. ‘What do you want?’ she asks like I’m an intruder.

  ‘To talk.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You can’t just stay inside for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’ve charged Doyle,’ I say. ‘I tried to stop them but it’s too late. We should have gone to the cops right away.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘Was he raped? I don’t think so. I think Doyle’s going to be just fine. His daddy’ll hire some hotshot lawyer who’ll get him off.’

  This may be true. ‘He still needs a defence,’ I say.

  ‘Spare me, Lemon, okay, just spare me.’ She flips on her side, away from me.

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t care what happens to him.’

  ‘He’s a jerk, you told me he’s a jerk, so why’re you so hot on him all of a sudden?’

  ‘He saved us.’

  She faces me again. ‘You. He was a bit late for me. I was screaming in case you didn’t notice. I’d like to know how nobody heard me.’

  ‘Girls always scream at parties.’

  ‘In pain, in terror?’

  ‘The music was loud, come on, Ross, you were in the gazebo.’

  ‘It has soundproof walls? The truth is nobody gives a shit about me. They’re glad I was raped. I’m ugly and fat and stupid. I disgust everybody, they hate me. They figure I deserved it.’

  This may also be true.

  ‘Don’t we have to get beyond “everybody”?’ I say, sitting at her dressing table. ‘I mean, there’s everybodies everywhere. You have to pick and choose the everybodies you’re going to sweat about. If you go to beautician school, everybody there is going to think you’re brilliant because you know how to exfoliate and all that. They won’t know what happened.’

  ‘I’ll know.’

  She doesn’t even look like Rossi anymore. It’s not just that she isn’t wearing makeup. Her eyes are different. She’s seen hell.

  ‘I’m not too excited about doing it either,’ I admit.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being a piece of evidence for Doyle. Standing in front of those ghouls and saying they did this and that to me. I don’t want them looking at me.’

  ‘So don’t do it.’

  I stare at the Bugs Bunny clock she’s had ever since I can remember. His ears make the hands. ‘Do you ever want to be a little kid again?’ I ask.

  ‘All the time.’ She pulls her comforter under her chin.

  ‘I wonder why. I mean, shouldn’t we be excited about being free of school and all that?’

  ‘You’re only free if you get a decent job and we all know how hard that is.’

  ‘I think going to beautician school is a great idea.’

  ‘I just say that to make Mum feel better.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘Nothing. She wants to buy me a bedroom set.’

  ‘You’ll have to go out to do that.’

  ‘I can do it online.’

  Her stuffed animals peer down at us from a shelf, which brings to mind The Velveteen Rabbit and The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Everything works out in those stories. ‘Your mum says you’re not eating.’

  ‘How would she know?’

  ‘I guess she knows what’s in her kitchen.’

  ‘It’s not like I don’t have pounds to lose.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I’m fat, Lemon. Everybody knows I’m fat.’

  ‘You’re female, you’re supposed to have fat.’

  ‘Don’t talk like my mother. The o
ne good thing about her disease is that she’s skinny for the first time in her life. I told her I’ll start eating when I’m as skinny as she is.’

  ‘She looks emaciated, Ross.’

  ‘She looks great. Maybe if she’d looked this good five years ago my father wouldn’t have dumped her.’

  ‘He didn’t dump her. He was a gambling addict.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  I lie on her fake-fur carpet because I’m tired. She doesn’t offer me a pillow.

  ‘Too bad you didn’t write that play,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Now you’re just a total fuck-up like everybody else.’

  I don’t argue. I drag my ass back to the living room, hoping she’ll stop me. I twitch on the couch for a couple of hours before heading out. Old Jane heads out into the night with twenty shillings on her, not even enough to pay the coachman to get her to the next county. He drops her in the middle of nowhere. After he drives off, she realizes she left her parcel with her few belongings on the coach. So she’s destitute. Why she didn’t ask old Rochester for cash is beyond me, why she had to sneak out instead of saying, ‘Look, Edward, you keep calling me Janet, and your little girl, and I think that’s perverted. So give me a hundred pounds and I’m outta here.’ But no, old Jane isn’t happy unless she’s suffering. Her first night in the great outdoors she sleeps on some moss under a rock. But then it starts to rain and she sloshes around the village trying to get work, or trade her hankie for a bun or something. Nobody wants anything to do with her because she’s not from the village and therefore qualifies as a fallen woman. She trudges through more mud until she finds a beat-up old house with ladies embroidering inside it. She stares in the window then begs at the door but their servant tells her to buzz off. A young pastor shows up and orders the servant to give Jane some soup. Penniless girls had to either become governesses or marry a pastor. Old Charlotte had a couple of pastor proposals before she settled on the deadbeat she ended up serving who got her pregnant.

  There’s no question it’s spooky in the stillness of the night with nobody around and my boots smacking the pavement. I move fast, checking over my shoulder every three seconds. I find a phone booth and call Connie Sheep’s Ass. It takes seventeen rings to wake her. ‘Hello … ?’

  ‘It’s Limone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your daughter.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t wear a watch, it makes me feel like I’m in chains.’ I’m babbling because I feel like a jerk waking her and all that. ‘I could call you tomorrow if this is inconvenient.’

  ‘No, I’m glad you called. How are you? Is everything okay?’

  ‘Sure.’ Her voice sounds familiar for some reason.

  ‘Are you at your stepmother’s?’

  ‘No. I’m in a phone booth.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I don’t really want to go home.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not really my home. I don’t have a home. Kind of like Jane Eyre.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jane Eyre. She’s a fictional character. Her mother married a man who had no cash so her father disowned her. Jane’s mother loved the man, though, and things were going great until they started starving and coughing up blood. They were buried together.’

  ‘Really. I’ve never read it. I saw the movie, though, years ago. I think Laurence Olivier was in it.’

  ‘What a dick he must’ve been, swinging both ways, no wonder Vivien was depressed.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Already this feels like a mistake. I bet she never reads. I bet she eats Lean Cuisine in front of the box.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll let you go,’ I say, ‘sorry to disturb you. Ciao.’ I hang up. Just a total fuck-up like everybody else. I sit in Tim Hortons with the other rejects with no place to go, thinking about my potential criminal record and how those borderlin-ers are only charging me because they didn’t get to destroy me the way they destroyed Rossi. Plus they figure, like her, I won’t fight back.

  Some podger truck driver is staring at me and I want to rip my clothes off and scream, ‘Have a good drool, dickhead!’ Let the whole world grab my tits, my ass, my snatch. It’s not like it matters.

  24

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’ Peggy asks me. She’s walking with a cane, which means her knee’s acting up.

  ‘I had a dentist appointment, figured I’d stop by and check on Kadylak.’

  ‘She’s been very worried about you. Is everything okay? She said the police were here.’

  ‘Everything’s swell. They just want me to witness an accident.’

  ‘I see, well, she’s in the classroom, don’t disturb her.’

  ‘Can I wheel Bradley out? I mean just outside the hospital?’

  ‘If you’re very careful.’

  What kills me about Bradley is that he trusts me for no good reason. Right away he’s ready to roll. We get his shoes on and collect some crackers for the birds. Sparrows and seagulls know the drill and are pecking at his feet in seconds. He belly-laughs, straining against his seat belt. I let him out to crawl around. A mangy cat shows up and Bradley offers it a half-eaten baby carrot. Sick teenagers slouch in wheelchairs, texting or talking on cells. They don’t talk to each other because nobody wants to hang out with cancer patients, especially if you are one. Bradley practices his elemental verbal skills with the teenies but none of them are too interested. I toss him the Nerf ball, which he grabs and flings so I have to go chasing after it. This keeps him guffawing, tossing the ball anywhere but to me. Then all of a sudden he just keels over and lies still in the grass, watching me. I check his temperature and breathing to make sure he’s alright. I figure he’s just wasted and lie beside him. He stares at me with that wisdom of his. I wait for him to impart some Yoda profundities. He reaches over and touches my nose. ‘Noth,’ he says. Next he starts digging around in my backpack and pulls out my mother/ daughter scrapbook. This is a highly personal item and normally I wouldn’t let anybody get their glommers on it. ‘Don’t tear it,’ I warn him. He looks intently at the photo of the crying mother of the woman who jumped off an overpass clutching her toddler. Everybody’s freaked that a mother could kill her kid but I think it proves she loved him. They were black and poor. She didn’t want to leave him behind on Spaceship Earth to get kicked around. Even though she’d managed to get an mba she couldn’t get a job.

  Bradley leans in close to the photo, nose to nose with the crying woman.

  ‘Her daughter died,’ I explain.

  The jumper stopped taking antidepressants when she was nursing. She paid her rent on time and told everybody she was fine. She spent all day with her son, took him to the park and the library, was teaching him English and French. Her landlord said, ‘She took really good care of that kid. Everything was about that kid.’ So she killed him. I understand this.

  Bradley scrutinizes another photo of a crying mother who tried to kidnap her seventeen-month-old twins from their adoptive parents. She says she was forced to give them up because of postpartum depression. She says, ‘How will they ever understand why they were kept from their mother when their mother wanted them so desperately? How will that ever be explained to them?’ Bradley can’t keep his hands off the photo of the twins. I guess he figures they’re his buddies, short people like himself. Their mother said she could never ever tell them she gave up on them, and she never will. Unlike Connie Sheep’s Ass who just remembered I exist.

  I started reading Anna Karenina again – talk about a woman pining for some guy. I like the atmosphere, though, all those samovars, sleighs and furs. Reading dead Russians always makes you glad you’ve got central heating. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious judging from what old Vronksy does to Kitty that the putz has zip moral fibre. But he looks good in a uniform and all that.

  Bradley’s onto my Progeny of Prostitutes page. They like to think Mommy loved them, only handed them over because she couldn’t tur
n tricks with her bundles of joy crawling around. Some of the prostitutes’ babies, if they aren’t damaged by drugs or alcohol, get adopted. Others live with relatives who treat them like they treated their mommies so the girls grow up into prostitutes. They don’t know who their fathers are, although usually it’s pimps because most of the johns use condoms. Pimps rape their girls to show who’s boss and don’t have time for condoms. On the radio they were freaking about child prostitution again. What kind of man wants to do that to a child, the non-compos host asked. Seems like most of them. A child prostitute who’d graduated to hooker said she’d been hired by men from ‘all walks of life.’ She said that while they were doing perverted things to her, she told herself it meant they weren’t doing it to their daughters or nieces. She convinced herself that she was saving some little girl somewhere. She ended up a crackhead.

  Bradley rolls on his back and squints at the sky.

  ‘Do you see any animals up there?’ I ask him. His eyelids droop. I lie beside him and point at a formation. ‘Elephant,’ I say.

  ‘Elfalant,’ he says.

  ‘There’s a bunch of elephants in India searching for their elephant sister,’ I tell him. ‘They don’t know that she fell into an irrigation ditch and drowned. So fourteen of them have been marauding villages, looking for her.’ I roll on my side so I can watch Bradley fall asleep. I keep talking even though he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. Talking distracts these kids from pain. ‘There’s hardly any forest left so the elephants end up searching for grub where there’s people. The villagers get hysterical, and chase them with firecrackers and pitch-forks. Sharpshooters kill the ones they can’t scare off. One rogue male was so feared they called him Osama bin Laden.’

  Bradley’s asleep. At peace. I adjust the stroller to the reclining position and lay him in it.

  My favourite mother/daughter story is about the fifteen-year-old girl who escaped from her burning house with her little brother. On the street, crowded with fire trucks and gawpers, she couldn’t see her mother. She started screaming ‘Mummy!’ and ran back into the burning house to rescue her mother. What she didn’t know was that her mother had already jumped out her bedroom window and was being treated by paramedics. The girl died from smoke inhalation, searching for her mother. In the photo the girl’s wearing braces and those felt antlers kids wear at Christmas.