A House in the Sky (3 page)

When she walked down the hallway, we all turned to look. Her black dress was short in the front and long in the back, cascading in a pile of ruffles that brushed the floor. Her thin legs flashed as she walked. She wore new shoes.

As if following a script, Russell rose to his feet. My mother’s cheeks looked flushed, her eyes bright, her lips painted red. Her pale skin looked creamy against the black dress, which was so tight and shiny it seemed shellacked onto her body. We kids held our breath, waiting to hear what Russell would say.

“Fucking A” was what he said. “You look awesome.”

True enough, my mother looked like a movie star. She smiled and held out a hand to Russell. She kissed our cheeks to say good night. We were cheering, as I remember it, literally shouting with excitement about the grand time they would have.

Russell put down his cup, found my mother’s dress-up coat, an ill-fitting mink number she’d inherited from my great-grandmother, and then he whirled her out the door.

*

That night we watched movies from our video collection. We watched
Three Men and a Baby
and then the new
Batman
. I made popcorn in the popper and passed it out in bowls. Somewhere in Red Deer, my mother was dancing with Russell. I imagined a ballroom scene with glittering pendant lights and wide-mouthed glasses of champagne. I dipped in and out of sleep until it was late and I woke up with a jolt. The TV screen was dark, the apartment silent. I pulled Nathaniel from his spot on the floor and guided him to the room we shared, nudging his sleepy body onto the bed. I climbed up into my bunk, a trace of holiday sparkle still lit in my head, and went to sleep for real.

There was a surreal quality to what came next. There always was, if only because these things—when they happened—almost always happened in the middle of the night. My mother’s shouting would tunnel into my sleeping mind, gradually stripping the scenery out of my dreams, until there was no more clinging to unconsciousness and I was fully awake.

Something crashed in our living room. There was a shriek. Then a grunt. I knew these sounds. She was fighting back. Sometimes I’d see scratch marks on his neck in the morning. The words were streaming out of Russell, high-pitched, hysterical, something about cutting out her eyeballs, something about blood on the floor, so much of it that nobody would know who she was. “You cunt,” I heard him say. Then a big thud, also recognizable: the sofa being flipped.

I heard her run from the kitchen to the living room and down the hallway. I heard her panting outside our door before he caught her and threw her against it. I could hear him breathing, too, both of them seeming to gasp. In the bunk below me, Nathaniel started to cry.

“Are you scared?” I whispered, staring at the dark ceiling.

It was an unfair question. He was six years old.

We had tried before to stop it. We had dashed out of our rooms and started yelling only to have the two of them, their eyes dark and wild, run to their bedroom and slam the door. If my mother wanted our help, she wouldn’t show it. Sometimes I’d hear Stevie in the hallway saying “Hey, cool it” to his brother. “C’mon, Russ.” But he, too, grew meek in the face of their fury. Eventually, a neighbor would call the police.

A few times my mother had gone to the women’s shelter in Red Deer. She’d made promises to my grandmother and grandfather that she’d leave Russell, but before long they’d be back together. At the women’s shelter, there were shiny linoleum floors, lots of kids, and heaps of good toys to play with. I remember my father looking crushed when he came there to pick us up.

The holiday-party fight wound down pretty quickly, my mother and Russell stalking back into each other’s arms, my popcorn strewn across the living room, the couch frame broken, a fresh hole in the wall. I knew how these things went. The next morning Russell would weep and apologize to all of us. For a few weeks, he’d be repentant. He’d sit in the living room with his head down and talk to God, looping through the language we knew from our grandparents’ church—
dear Lord our savior in your name blessed be your son please save me from Satan yours is the way and in Jesus Christ thank you and amen.
In the evenings, he’d make a big show of going to A.A. meetings. My mother, for those weeks, would have more power. She’d order Russell around, telling him to pick up his clothes and run the vacuum cleaner.

But the needle on some unseen inner gauge would start to quiver and creep back toward red. The contrition would slip away. My mother would blithely go out one afternoon to get her hair cut and come back, by Russell’s estimation, late. He’d be waiting on the couch, his voice a flipped blade. “What took you so long, Lori?” And “Who were you meeting, all whored up like that?” I’d watch my mother blanch as it dawned on her that the jig was up, that before long—maybe tonight, maybe three weeks from now—he’d go nuts on her again.

I couldn’t profess to understand it. I never would. I just tried to move past it. By the time the lights were off and all the bodies had settled, I was gone, launched. My mind swept from beneath the bed-sheets, up the stairs, and far away, out over the silky deserts and foaming seawaters of my
National Geographic
collection, through forests full of green-eyed night creatures and temples high on hills. I was picturing orchids, urchins, manatees, chimps. I saw Saudi girls on a swing set and cells bubbling under a microscope, each one its own waiting miracle. I saw pandas, lemurs, loons. I saw Sistine angels and Masai warriors. My world, I was pretty certain, was elsewhere.

W
hen I was nineteen years old, I moved to Calgary. For any kid from central Alberta, Calgary is the big city, a beacon of possibility, ringed by busy highways, its glass towers rising up from the plains like a forest. It’s also an oil town, a boom-and-bust headquarters for stock traders and energy executives working to extract and sell the huge reserves of oil sitting beneath the soil. I arrived in 2000, when times were especially good. Oil prices were on their way to doubling, and before the year was out, they’d triple. Calgary was flush with wealth and new construction. Glitzy restaurants and shops were opening at a frenetic pace.

My boyfriend, Jamie, moved with me. He was a year older than I was and had grown up on a farm south of Red Deer. We’d been dating for about eight months. Dark-eyed and brown-haired, he was handsome in a Johnny Depp way, with narrow shoulders and strong hands that helped make him an excellent carpenter. The two of us liked to trawl through thrift shops, putting together outfits we thought of as edgy. Jamie dressed in cowboy shirts with cloudy mother of pearl buttons. I wore anything that was sequined, along with the biggest earrings I could find. He could play any instrument, from the harmonica to the bongos to the violin. He strummed love songs on his guitar. He worked construction jobs when he needed money but otherwise spent whole days drawing pictures or playing music. I was totally smitten.

I thought that in Calgary, Jamie could record a CD, maybe get some
sort of deal. For me, too, the city would be a new platform—though for what, I wasn’t exactly sure. We found a one-bedroom apartment in a dirty downtown high-rise. Our bed was a mattress on the floor. Jamie painted the bathroom walls yellow. I hung pictures and set houseplants on the windowsill. My life felt instantly urban, adult. But the city was expensive. I got a job at a clothing store, a different branch of a national chain I’d worked for in Red Deer during high school. Jamie found work washing dishes at Joey Tomato’s, a trendy restaurant in the Eau Claire Market, while looking for a job in construction. Between the two of us, we could barely make rent.

On a bitingly cold afternoon not long after we arrived in Calgary, I put on my winter coat, a vintage brown leather jacket with an enormous fur collar, and went out walking with a pile of résumés tucked in a manila folder. I wanted to try my luck as a waitress. I had never worked in a restaurant, but when I saw the girls who worked at Joey Tomato’s, I was both jealous and awed. They glided around in high heels. Jamie told me they made a lot of money.

*

The first place I walked into, mostly because I was cold, was a nice-looking Japanese restaurant with a glossy black sushi bar and hanging lamps styled to look like lanterns. It was the post-lunch lull. Techno music pulsed quietly over the stereo, while a couple of strikingly beautiful waitresses set tables for dinner. In a far corner, about six men were having some sort of lunch meeting, papers spread out in front of them on the table. I sheepishly handed my résumé to the willowy Japanese hostess and stammered a few words about having just moved to the city. I thanked her and turned toward the door. It was clear I would not fit in.

“Hey, wait a second,” somebody called.

One of the men from the corner table followed me to the entry. He looked to be in his late twenties, with dark hair, chiseled cheekbones and a sharp jawline, not unlike a comic-book superhero. “Are you looking for a job?” he said.

“Uh, yes,” I said.

“Done,” he said. “You got one.”

This was Rob Swiderski, the manager of a nightclub called the Drink, located a few blocks from the Japanese place and owned by the same restaurateur. He was offering me a job as a cocktail waitress.

I felt vaguely conflicted. I was flattered. I had heard about the Drink from friends in Red Deer who sometimes came to the city to party and had said it was trendy and expensive. But I wanted to serve meals, not drinks. Somehow that seemed more respectable.

When I said no, Rob laughed. “If you’re looking for a job, you’re looking to make money, right?” he said. “Just give it one week—one shift, even. If you hate it, you quit.”

I walked back into the cold, having agreed to show up the following evening. He had never even asked for my résumé.

*

The Drink took up the corner of a city block, with a restaurant and five separate bar areas, offering forty different kinds of martinis. Chandeliers hung, lit like constellations, from the high ceilings. A hardwood dance floor occupied the center of the space, with a short stairway leading to a velvet-roped VIP area. About twenty waitresses worked at a time, all of them pretty. They wore high heels and designer dresses and carried little round drink trays coated with rubber to avoid spills. A few introduced themselves, but most hardly looked in my direction. I’d soon learn that new girls came and went all the time, some too flaky to keep drink orders straight and others not managing to pull off the right image for the club, which—as Rob reminded everyone at weekly staff meetings—was “classy-sexy.” If you looked cheap, you got sent home.

Under Rob’s management, the Drink had become the hottest club in town—hosting an after-work happy hour for corporate Calgary, which morphed into a more glamorous and freewheeling late-night pickup scene. This was where NHL players gathered after their games, touring rock stars came after their concerts, and oil barons showed off their money. On weekends, the line to get in was five people wide and stretched around the block.

Working from ten
P.M
. to two
A.M
. on my first night, wearing high heels, dangly gold earrings, and the nicest dress I owned, I was given a tray and some instructions on taking drink orders and printing up bills. I was then assigned a quiet section at the back of the club. For the next few hours, I shuttled chilled martinis and tumblers of rye between the bar and four or five tables, where the customers—most of them businessmen—thanked me politely and handed me their credit cards. At the end of the evening, a waitress named Kate showed me how to use the computer to cash out my tips. I had made fifty dollars in four hours, in addition to my wages, and was overjoyed. Though Jamie, who had no interest in bars, had been angry when I told him I’d taken a job as a cocktail waitress, I thought now he might at least recognize that money was money, and this money was good.

“How’d you do?” said Kate, looking over my shoulder. Catching sight of my total, she winced. “Oh,” she said, “that’s brutal.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

*

By my standards, I got rich working at the Drink. Showing up for my second shift, I was again handed a dead section at the back of the club, but before long, a group of garrulous stockbrokers showed up and started ordering three-hundred-dollar bottles of Cristal. I went home a few hours later with five hundred dollars in tips. Over the course of several months, I worked my way up to handling bigger sections and busier nights. I bought nice shoes and elegant cocktail dresses. On a good night I could make seven hundred dollars. On an exceptional night, I made a thousand. I kept rolls of cash stuffed in a jar in our kitchen cupboard, until there was so much of it that I started stashing the bills in the freezer. When another waitress told me that freezers were the first place burglars looked for cash, I got better about making deposits in the bank.

I became friends with the other girls, learning how to deftly dodge drunken propositions, how to milk a good tip with some attentiveness and a smile. I was drawn to Priscilla, a legendary high earner at the Drink, who used her tip money to take long, exotic vacations. When I
first met her, she’d just returned from Thailand, which seemed to me unimaginably far away. Priscilla showed me how to maintain a pack of regulars—good customers who would be sure to buy their drinks from you—by giving them VIP treatment, plopping “reserved” signs on their tables, and serving their drinks not in the usual plastic cups but in heavy glasses fetched from the bar upstairs.

For a while, I just enjoyed the freedom that came with having money. I quit my retail job. Jamie had been picking up day labor on the city’s many construction sites, though more and more, he stayed home to be with me during my off hours. Sometimes he played a short set at an open-mike night in a café near our apartment, always to enthusiastic applause.

He’d stopped minding that I worked at the Drink, but he never came to see me there. I’d cook us an early dinner and spend almost an hour in front of the mirror while Jamie sat in the other room reading a book or playing music. For me, getting ready for work was like getting ready to go onstage. I had a closet full of black dresses, a bucket’s worth of makeup. The whole act was easy by now: You put on your highest heels, trussed up your hair, painted your eyes and lips. Your job was not to be pretty but to be stunning, and in a way that made men want you and other women jealous, even if was just flirty playacting. Some of the girls at the Drink had cashed in a few months’ worth of tips and gotten boob jobs as a professional investment. I opted for an old waitress trick I’d learned in the changing room at the Drink, layering a push-up bra over a padded bra, which made me feel a little like I had an iron bar strapped to my chest but nonetheless served its purpose.