Annabel (25 page)

24

Sugar Plum

T
HE WIND IN ST. JOHN'S
was not like Labrador wind. Here it was damp. It sneaked under Wayne’s jacket and unnerved him until he had got a hot coffee in him at Shelley’s. Forest Road was not a home, and as the winter progressed he regretted having rented it. Home, when he had finished making his deliveries for the day, became Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, between George Street and William’s Lane; or the Ship Inn, where he heard old unaccompanied songs on Wednesday nights; or Afterwords Books, across from the courthouse, where nag champa incense mixed with the aromas of free coffee and musty editions of
How Green Was My Valley
and
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
. Home was the alleys through which Wayne walked back to Forest Road, looking in other people’s lit windows where there were children, sunflowers in vases on the floor, and fireplaces that had once burnt coal but now had sheets of tin screwed over them and little electric heaters on the hearths.

Spring aches on Forest Road, once you get past the gingerbread houses. There isn’t one piece of softness through March or April. Oh Henry wrappers in the gutter. Black snowbanks with bubbling holes. Every dog turd excreted over the winter has found its way to the edge of the sidewalk, and these too have the bubbles. Everything melting has the bubbles. You don’t want to stand on the bubbling crust, but the town does not clean the sidewalks. Wayne had no choice but to crunch the mess as he walked back and forth between Forest Road and the harbourfront, where at least there were boats, cranes, women with high heels, men with briefcases, and street people sitting in the doorways of coffee shops, begging, their dogs wearing cowboy scarves.

He saw a reflection of his loneliness on the street, where regulars wove in with the people who worked in the shops and banks and law offices. He watched who gave panhandlers and buskers money and who did not. He watched the constabulary clear corners where men played busted harmonicas. He learned names. Caroline Yetman stood playing a Sears guitar at the bottom of the courthouse steps. Paul Twomey sat on his parka in front of the Gypsy Tearoom making portraits with broken pastels. Betty Flanagan pushed her shopping cart from the east-end post office to the old Woolworth’s building in a pair of silver platforms.

“Have you been to Corner Brook?” Betty asked Wayne. “I used to teach school in Corner Brook. I taught at Broadway School for seventeen years.”

Hobo Bill sat on George Street reading Dostoevsky. “I have never,” he told Wayne after asking for a quarter, “asked a woman for spare change. And I never will.”

Joanne Dohaney, the oldest waitress at Shelley’s, daily gave Hobo Bill three coffees, a BLT, and a tub of vege-table barley soup.

“That Bill,” Joanne told Wayne, “has not had a bath for the past however many years I’ve seen him around Water Street. I don’t know how you can stand out there talking to him.”

“I don’t have all that many people to talk to.”

“You got no friends? A fine-looking fellow like you — if you combed your hair and tucked in that shirt. You look like you could talk about anything you wanted. More intelligent than a lot of them out there. How come you don’t make more of yourself? You could get a nice smart girl up at the university.”

“There was only ever one girl I liked talking to.”

“That’s what you put me in mind of. Someone up at the university. You’re not though, are you? What girl?” Joanne Dohaney didn’t mind asking a customer anything. This one would be out of her hair after his second refill. It wasn’t like she had to sit and listen to him all day.

“When we were kids. Her name was Wally Michelin. She wanted to be an opera singer.”

“Yeah, well, I wanted to be the sugar plum fairy.” Joanne hoisted a tray filled with stainless steel teapots through the swinging doors. She was in her fifties but there was something expressive in the turn of her wrist. Wayne did not remember ever hearing people talk about the beauty of wrists. The little bone like an ankle bone. He noticed it again when she came out.

“Did you really want to be a dancer?”

Joanne rolled her eyes, took the empty Heinz bottle, opened it, squirted in new ketchup from the kitchen’s generic mother bottle, and wiped the Heinz cap with a dishrag. “I dance by myself in the kitchen when no one’s around. If you could see into houses all over St. John’s, and all over Newfoundland for that matter, and while we’re at it, all over the whole world, I suppose, you’d see women dancing by themselves. Men don’t know that. Now you’re one of probably three or four dozen men in the world who do know. Because I’ve told you. But you’re still only a boy. You’ll forget.” Wayne smelled Javex, perspiration, and Ivory soap escaping from under Joanne’s uniform. “I really did want to be the sugar plum fairy. You thought I was joking about that, didn’t you.”

He did not tell her that he had always danced alone in his room to music on the radio, and that he still did it now, in the apartment on Forest Road. That he danced, and watched the shadows of his body on the wall, and tried to connect the music’s beauty with those shadows. Street lamps soaked through the window from Forest Road. Their light soaked into his shirt, and in the dark you could not see it was a man’s shirt. You saw that it folded, that it was cotton, that it draped.

What was beauty? Not frailness, not smallness. Wayne looked at his arms and tried to imagine them holding Joanne, with her expressive wrists circled around him. That was how lovers’ limbs were. Years of hormones had made him angular, and it occurred to him that he wished he could stop taking them. He wanted to stop swallowing them every day and having them alter his body from what it wanted to be into what the world desired from it. He wanted to throw the pills down a toilet here in Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, where no one knew him anyway, unless you counted Joanne, and she did not really know anything about him. He wanted to throw the pills away and wait and see what would happen to his body. How much of his body image was accurate and how much was a construct he had come to believe? He tried to see his body objectively.

If he squinted it could look softer. If he stopped taking the pills might his breasts bud, as they had done at puberty? He was afraid of having breasts. But were breasts beautiful? Could anyone tell him? At night when he danced alone, his body wanted to be water, but it was not water. It was a man’s body, and a man’s body was frozen. Wayne was frozen, and the girl-self trapped inside him was cold. He did not know what he could do to melt the frozen man.

He did not tell Joanne at Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast any of this. He had no one to whom he could tell anything. There was a funny old woman on Circular Road who, when he made his deliveries, often asked him to come in and do tasks for her that had nothing to do with delivering meat. She had him fix a broken rail in her banisters, and she asked him to change the water in a font under her staircase. He had to clean the font with a rag she had for that purpose and pour in new holy water the priest had brought her in a Harvey’s Bristol Cream bottle. He had a few customers like that, who turned his meat deliveries into something more like doctors’ appointments or some sort of gentle social services call. It slowed him down and meant he was earning less money per hour than he should have been, but he let these customers hold him up because they were the closest thing he had to friends. They talked to him, and they were something to look forward to in his week of lonely deliveries. People had family, didn’t they? People had someone who remembered them from one week to another.

To walk home from Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, Wayne had to pass the Anglican graveyard, where massive beeches had knots the size of faces, and the knots grew malevolent. He knew this was a trick of his mind, but they did; they flew alive, became malicious spirits, and as he walked past them he had to look away, for fear they would snatch his mind. Wayne knew this was a dangerous way to think, and he thought instead about the way Joanne’s wrist had insinuated itself around the swinging door. As he passed the cemetery trees, the tree he found most malevolent faced him: angry sinew with an eye rimmed in gold bark and studded with a pupil of cracked wood. The loneliness doled out to each of us in different quantities, hidden or diluted, was unmasked. It had the power to grab the backs of Wayne’s eyeballs and pluck them inward.

He heard a Metrobus stop on Chalker’s Hill, the shout of a three-year-old boy running over the graves, his mother shouting, “Ashton! Ashton! Get out of that, come over here!” The whirr and scree of starlings. Houses petered out and bald grass banked the lake, studded with Coffee Crisp and Aero wrappers and Pepsi ring tops. There was the parking lot of Wayne’s building, featureless brick with its flat roof and rust stains running from the eavestroughs. There was a letter in his mailbox. His feet clacked on the plastic edges of the stairs. To open his door Wayne had to force it over the carpet. There was a bowl of egg congealing on his little half-table with its Formica top. He had intended to make an omelette. He put the letter on the table. His sheet and pillow lay under the living room window.

Wayne warmed his small glass salt shaker on the stove and lay down with it and pretended it was part of his lover’s body. But who was his lover? He closed his eyes and pushed the warm glass against the deeply hidden vagina that belonged to Annabel. This created an orgasm, deep inside, deeper by far than anything he had experienced with Gracie Watts. He shuddered and cried out for the lover who had done this to him, who had found Annabel’s body inside him, but he was alone. His phone was flashing. It was the previous tenant’s phone and had been flashing since he moved in. He looked out the kitchen window at the vinyl siding of a bungalow next door. The bit of sky over the bungalow roof was a piece of endlessness. Wayne felt he had randomly superimposed himself on a city that could have done equally well for itself with or without him. He lifted the receiver, pressed a couple of buttons, and listened. A man wanted Lucinda to pick up Clorets and reading glasses at Lawtons. The man had sat on his old ones in the car and broken them. Wayne erased the message and remembered the letter.

25

Economics

P
EOPLE WILL NOTICE WHEN A
neighbour is not herself but for a long time they will not intervene. Time is so sneaky that one minute you are thinking you have not seen such-and-such a person for a few days, perhaps you should phone them, and the next time you think that thought, spring has come. During the winter that Jacinta was alone, Joan Martin and Eliza Goudie had thought about her many times. Eliza clipped an article from January’s
Chatelaine
that described exactly how a woman could view her middle-aged husband with renewed romantic vigour, and she put it under the brass dolphin on her hall side table to give to Jacinta, but by spring it was still there. Joan phoned Jacinta’s number several times to say they had the old, traditional kind of sweet william in Vesey’s seed catalogue, because Jacinta had told her that was one flower she would take the trouble to send for by mail, but Jacinta had not answered the phone. Joan ordered an extra packet of seeds for Jacinta, but by April they had not arrived.

Treadway Blake did not often write a letter. His address, in ballpoint, was shaky and intimate but his letter was short and to the point. With it inside the envelope were two more letters: one from the department of motor vehicle registration and the other from MCP, which was the provincial medicare plan. The second one had been neatly opened with a knife. That was how Treadway opened letters.

Dear Wayne, Treadway had written. Here is your driver’s licence renewal. You need to get that done. I’ve also had a letter from the government about the insurance for your medication. I’m not sure what to do about it and there are some parts I cannot make head nor tail out of, so I am sending it to you and maybe you can have someone look at it down there. There must be someone at the confederation building who knows what it is all about. Your mother and I are fine, but I came home from the trapline to find her a bit confused. I am going to try to have someone look in on her when I go out again in a week or so. Love, Dad.

Wayne looked at the government letter. It contained forms and columns, and it asked Treadway to fill out the forms and the government would arrive at a decision about the amount Treadway would have to pay for Wayne’s medications between now and the time he turned twenty-one; then there was another form concerning the years beyond that date. They seemed to want to know whether Wayne was going to a university, and there were so many numbered lists he could not figure out the form any better than his father had done. But there was one thing he could discern, and it was that his hormone medication cost a lot more than he had imagined. There was a figure for the MCP contribution over the past year and another one for parental contribution.

The only time to get his father on the phone, Wayne knew, was at five in the morning. That was when Treadway ate breakfast, and it was the only time he could be relied on to be inside the house. Wayne was awake half the night thinking of what he would say to his father.

“Dad?”

Treadway was a man who did not like talking on the phone. The phone was for getting information across that could not be exchanged in any other way. It was the new form of telegrams.

“Did you figure it out, son? Were you able to see exactly what MCP was getting at?”

“I’m calling to say you might as well save yourself some money.”

“What’s that now, Wayne?”

“I’ve been thinking for a while about being on all these drugs, and not liking it.”

Wayne had been watching people. He watched men and women who passed him on their way to get pea soup at Shelley’s at lunchtime or croissants at the new bakery across from the Bank of Montreal. The street smelled of cigarettes, perfume, and coffee, and Wayne saw that the faces, bodies, clothes, and shoes of the men and women who passed him had been divided and thinned. The male or female in them had been both diluted and exaggerated. They were one, extremely so, or they were the other. The women trailed tapered gloves behind them and walked in ludicrous heels, while the men, with their fuzzy sideburns and brown briefcases, looked boring as little beagles out for the same rabbit. You define a tree and you do not see what it is; it becomes its name. It is the same with woman and man. Everywhere Wayne looked there was one or the other, male or female, abandoned by the other. The loneliness of this cracked the street in half. Could the two halves of the street bear to see Wayne walk the fissure and not name him a beast?

His father did not know Thomasina Baikie had told Wayne about the fetus, and Wayne did not want to talk about that now. He did not want to explain himself to his father at all. He did not want to talk about the beast, or the fissure, or anything that he felt. His father had known things and had not told him. His father had kept secrets he had no business keeping, secrets that were not Treadway’s own.

“What are you saying, son?”

“I’m saying I’ve been thinking about letting the drugs go gradually. I was thinking about it anyway, before they sent you the forms.”

“Going off them?”

“Yes. And now I see how much they cost —”

“You don’t want to stop taking those, son, regardless of the cost.” Treadway was definite, as if he had some kind of authority over this subject that Wayne did not have.

“I didn’t call to have a debate about it, Dad. I’m only telling you because I’ve decided already.” He had not decided, not for sure. He was scared of the decision. But he needed to be definite with Treadway. He did not want to explain his complicated feelings and he did not want his father paying that amount of money and he did not want his father to be the one who had authority over this subject any longer.

There was silence, and it gave Wayne a worse feeling than if his father had argued.

“I wouldn’t have said anything to you, Dad, if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re the one paying.”

“I’m glad you’re talking about economics, Wayne. That’s an important subject. I’m glad you’ve thought of it. If you like, I can send you the money directly that I will be saving when you no longer take the drugs.” There was something so deliberate in the way Treadway said this that Wayne sensed his father did not mean it. He sensed that what his father was really trying to do was scare him in some way.

“Dad, no. I don’t want you to do that.”

“The world is full of the dire results of economics. You must have seen some of that in St. John’s.”

Wayne was not sure what his father meant. “Are you talking about different kinds of neighbourhoods and people?” Wayne was very aware of the difference between Circular Road and a place like Livingstone Street, where he had seen a woman with a black eye and a baby in each arm. Did his father mean that, or had Treadway Blake understood something else?

“I mean, you must have thought about all the economic implications of your decision. You must have seen people who don’t match society’s expectations, and you must have thought about how you are going to deal with that.”

How did his father do this? Treadway had said nothing about specific difficulties yet had evoked in Wayne’s mind the beast he was afraid of becoming.

The beast was vicious. She hurtled and would not back up. If she got hit in the chest with brutality erected by the street, she kept going. Her pain threshold was high. She was not pretty. She prowled, animal-like, uncivilized. She walked all night.

She was without language. She watched how everyone else was doing. How tame they were, living in the same wind, night, and wilderness in which she hunted and was hunted.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“Nothing I do with economics is going to change what I am.”

“No, it’s not going to change who you are. But it is going to directly affect how hard your life will be. People who have a hard life — you must have seen them. That’s what I mean. In St. John’s. I’m talking about misery. I’m talking about being haggard while you’re still young. Not being able to afford a meal, losing your teeth, and, Wayne, getting into the criminal side of life. It’s all waiting for people who haven’t thought of economics. You need to get some training if you’re going to live in the city. You need to think about economics, and you need to look ahead. You need to plan your actions carefully.” Something about this speech made Wayne think of home: the smell of woodsmoke over Croydon Harbour, feeling a sting off the waves.

“Do you think I should come back home?”

“Not if you go off those pills. You’re looking for trouble if you stop taking those, Wayne. And it won’t be any easier in a tiny place like home.”

Again Wayne wondered if his father was saying what he really meant. He wondered if some part of Treadway Blake simply could not handle having a son in the house who was openly changing into someone Treadway could not explain to himself or to anyone in the community.

“It won’t be easy in St. John’s either. You’re paying for an apartment. And feeding yourself. You need that job you’ve got. You’re going to lose it if you’re not careful.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“I don’t know, Wayne.”

“Dad, going off the medications might not be that bad. I just don’t know exactly what I’m going to look like to other people.”

“That’s one of the things I’m worried about, son.”

“If I start to look too strange I can work after the sun goes down. I can walk up people’s driveways at dusk and put up my hood and wear a big jacket and no one has to notice.”

There was another silence and Wayne felt sorrow flow through the phone. His father’s sorrow. He did not want it. He wanted to see something happy. He had not wanted to start explaining his feelings to his father but he had begun to do so anyway, and now wished he had not. When he got off the telephone, he went to the bathroom cabinet and took the remainder of his green pills and flushed them down the toilet. He did this because they were the biggest. He was supposed to take one of the green pills each day, and if he did not cut them in half they got stuck in his throat. He hated the green pills. The other pills, the yellow ones and the white capsules, were smaller. The yellow ones were tiny. He would take one a day of each of these instead of two, until they ran out. He had enough left that he could do this over a month or six weeks, and if that was not gradual enough he would just have to live with whatever happened.