Annabel (29 page)

29

Seed Potatoes

J
ACINTA BLAKE APPEARED TO SOME
people to have retreated from the vigour she had possessed when her son lived in the house and when her husband spent more time with her. She walked less often the road to the Hudson’s Bay store, and she had not been to church through the winter, not even for the funeral of Kate Davis, who had been the nursing administrator at the hospital in Goose Bay and whose funeral was attended by everybody, even the lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland, who had flown up from Government House in St. John’s. It was true that, over the fall, winter, and spring when her son was away, Jacinta had not eaten enough and had lost sight of what day it was, but from her point of view it was not she who had retreated from living.

She remembered, or thought she remembered, a time when her husband had stayed at home for more than a week or two at a stretch, and had looked at her when they spoke instead of looking at the stove, or out the door towards the kindling, or farther, to the sky and to gulls and scoters and other birds that moved in that sky. She tried to remember that intimacy. Had it been an illusion? She was sure it had not. And it was no illusion either that she now floated in an existence in which she remained untouched. No one touched her body, and now that Wayne had gone away, no one touched her soul. She had become unreal, she thought, to anyone outside herself. And as a result she was losing a sense of her own effect on the world. She had an effect on the kettle if she put it on the stove. It boiled. She made tea. If she drew the curtains the curtains remained closed. She had no problem having an effect on the curtains. Her slippers lay where she had placed them after their last use, as did her glasses, her cup, and her saucer. But as for an effect on the larger world, which she had had as a mother and did not now feel she had as a woman living practically alone, that effect had lost its power.

When Treadway came home in the spring, he saw that she was not sure whether it was a Wednesday or a Saturday, and that was when he wrote to Wayne that he thought she was confused. But she was not confused, not in her own mind. She watched Treadway tidy the house and open the curtains and doors and windows. He even washed the windows, which surprised her. He washed them with Windex and did it in the methodical way he had with every task, using a system that included three types of cloth. When they went to bed, he kissed her goodnight on the cheek as if he were kissing a niece or a nephew goodbye at the train station, then he turned his back to her and began his soft snoring almost instantly. She had never been bothered by his snoring, which was a kind of music to her, but she was sure she remembered a time in their marriage when being with Treadway while he was sleeping did not feel the same as being with him while he was awake.

Now he did other tasks that belonged to the month of May. He climbed a ladder to the roof and cleaned the chimney, and he descended into the root cellar and brought up last year’s old, soft potatoes to use as this year’s seed potatoes in the garden. He did not know she had bought potatoes at the store while he was on his trapline. She had done this because it was nicer to walk outside in the daylight and buy clean, unsprouted potatoes than it was to go down the cellar steps and carry up potatoes that had to be washed and that had sprouted long white tentacles and developed wrinkly skins. So there were plenty of seed potatoes remaining, and Treadway laid them in a pile on the front path and began to cut them in pieces so he could plant them before he left. In the past it had been normal for him to stay at home in the summer. His new pattern, his wish to be away in the wilderness all the time, went unacknowledged.

He sat on the chopping block, a chunk of birch he had rolled over from the woodpile. Sun shone through its loose bark and turned it red gold, and when he cut the potatoes with his small knife, the task looked inviting to Jacinta. The fact that Treadway had carried the seed potatoes up from the dark, that he had poured them into a neat pile, and that he had made a little seat to sit on while he cut them, made Jacinta feel she wished she could cut them herself. The pile of seed potatoes had gained human care and attention from Treadway, and now the sun shone and warmed them even more. Treadway filled one bucket with the cut potatoes and went to his shed to fetch another bucket, and she took his spot on the chopping block and began cutting the potatoes herself. When he came back with the bucket, he set it at her feet and stood looking at her for a minute. This felt like the long-est they had spoken to each other in a long time, though neither said anything out loud; then he went to tidy the woodpile, which had dwindled over the winter, so that he could replenish it on a solid base.

When she had finished cutting the seed potatoes, she left them in the sun to dry their surfaces so mould could not attack them before they began to grow, then she went to the sink to wash the ingrained dirt out of her hands and wrists and nails. She scrubbed until her skin tingled and then she decided to take a bath and change her clothes. Treadway had to go in the truck to Goose Bay to replace some of his drill bits in order to repair his Ski-Doo, and she asked if she could go with him. She stood in the Mealy Mountain Outfitters’ Co-op while he spoke with the owner. She smelled the oakum and canvas and metal dust from the key-cutting machine, and she asked him how he felt about going in to Mom’s Home Cooking for some fries and a couple of hot dogs and a cup of coffee. Treadway liked onions on his hot dogs, and Mom’s Home Cooking was the only place in Goose Bay where they had a bowl of chopped onions on the counter beside the ketchup, mustard, and relish, because that was what Americans working on the base liked, and Georgina Hounsell had paid attention.

Treadway said, “I haven’t been in there for a long time.” He saw she had been looking at fancy gardening gloves hanging on a display rack with a sale price on them, left over from Mothers’ Day. He had his drill bits in his hand along with a box of cotton work gloves and a packet of sandpaper. “Do you want me to buy you a pair of those?”

“No.”

“They have nice flowers on them.”

“I don’t like flowers on gardening gloves. If I’m going to work in the garden I want plain work gloves like those you’ve got there.” His work gloves were white cotton and a box of twenty pairs cost the same as one pair of the ladies’ gardening gloves. He had known this about Jacinta, that she liked using his plain white gloves, and he had always liked the fact, but it was one of the things he had forgotten.

“I don’t need all these,” he said. “You can take half.” He remembered as he said this that sharing a box of gloves was a thing they had done often, but not in recent years. Another thing they had done was eat in a restaurant on an outing to Goose Bay but ask the waitress to give them their coffee in paper cups after they had eaten. They would take the coffees in the truck and drive to the lookout on the highway back to Croydon Harbour and stop the truck and drink their coffee while looking out at the Mealy Mountains. Today after their hot dogs at Mom’s Home Cooking they did this again, and it felt very good to them both, so that when they arrived home, Treadway said, “I don’t have to go into the bush yet. The shingles on the old part of the house are gone, and while I’m up on the roof I might as well have a look at the flashing.”

Jacinta put on the work gloves, got her small-bladed shovel out of the shed, and turned the garden over to get it ready for the potatoes. She brushed her hair and put on a red dress and her green wool coat and her shoes instead of her winter boots, and she walked to the Hudson’s Bay store to buy carrot and parsnip seeds and snow peas and, while she was at it, sweet peas, which she grew not for any pea but for their frilled flowers that grew six feet high if you knew where to put them. None of this could be planted for another two weeks, but it was nice to spend that fortnight with the seed packets on the kitchen windowsill, imagining the shoots coming up out of the ground.

Roland Shiwack had borrowed Treadway’s wheelbarrow the previous autumn and had not returned it. Now, when Treadway went to ask for it back, Roland mentioned that he had noticed Jacinta out turning over soil to prepare the garden.

“Now that is something,” Roland said, “my own wife will never do. I admire that you have a woman who can work hard like that and still look nice.” Roland had seen Jacinta in her green coat and shoes. He did not know where the wheelbarrow was, and Treadway could not understand that. He could not understand why a grown man would borrow another man’s wheelbarrow in the first place instead of getting one of his own, and he could understand less how anyone could lose a whole wheelbarrow and not know where it had gone. There was something, moreover, in the way that Roland Shiwack had said Treadway’s wife looked nice that Treadway did not like. It was as if Roland had voiced something Treadway felt too shy to say out loud himself, and Jacinta was his own wife. If Treadway was married to her and could not say it, how did Roland Shiwack summon the nerve to pass a comment on Jacinta’s looks? And what was wrong with Roland’s own wife’s looks? Melba Shiwack looked like a normal woman. There was nothing bad looking about her. She was unremarkable, as far as Treadway could see, and he did not know why Roland had now decided to remark on Treadway’s own wife.

Treadway would not have called these passing thoughts jealousy, but he did think, on his return home, that it was a good thing he had decided not to go back into the bush just yet.

Jacinta did a laundry in which she washed as many of her filmy nightdresses as she could fit in the washing machine, the ones that had unconsciously reminded Treadway of misty stars while he was reading the book of Job in his hunting cabin. She hung them on the line, where the late May breeze made them dance over the mix of newly dug garden and what was left of the snow.

30

The Makeup Artist

S
TEVE KEATING SHOWED UP
at Wayne’s apartment door on Forest Road, the picture of remorse. He looked, Wayne thought, like someone who was twelve years old instead of fifteen, and he presented Wayne with a lunch from Caines Grocery.

“It’s a cold plate.” Steve handed Wayne the bag and Wayne took out a paper plate covered in plastic wrap and laden with the kind of food Mr. Caines’s regular customers bought for their husbands on Saturdays before they left their kitchens for the bingo hall. Two slices of boiled ham, two of turkey, some coleslaw and macaroni salad, a bread roll, and potato salad dyed purple with pickled beet juice and triggered out of an ice cream scoop.

“I told you,” Steve said.

“You told me what?”

“That if you really got to know me you wouldn’t like me.”

“You never told me that.”

“I did.”

“I don’t think you did, Steve.”

“Well, I thought it then. If only I had kept my mouth shut. I never meant to blab about you to Warford, honest to God I didn’t. My mother says I can’t keep my mouth shut, and she said she wouldn’t be surprised if you tore the head off me after what I done.”

Wayne had not gone to work in the days that had passed since his attack. He had a cut near his eye and he had injuries that Derek Warford and his gang had inflicted when they were experimenting with his body, but he had not gone to a doctor and he had not told anyone what had happened. At the drugstore he bought ointment whose label said it was cooling and healing and you could use it on babies’ skin, and he put that on himself in all the places that were hurt and that he could reach. When Steve came to the door with the lunch, Wayne was hungry. He had nothing in his fridge but half a tin of beans and some bread. When he called in sick, Frank King had told him not to stay off the job too long or he would be replaced, and now he was afraid to go in because he knew he did not look well, and he also knew Frank King would soon say something about his appearance. On Signal Hill Derek Warford had kept referring to his breasts and mocking them, and Wayne realized, when he took a long look in the mirror, that if Frank King had not already noticed, he would surely do so soon.

“I wouldn’t blame you,” Steve said, “if you hated me now.”

“I don’t hate you, Steve.”

“You can if you want.”

“Once I like someone, no matter what they do, I keep liking them.”

“That’s what Miss Cramm used to say. She was my teacher before she went away. She let me make top hats for the school play and I didn’t have to be in the play, and that was a good thing because I can’t remember any lines. But now I have Miss Fiander and she doesn’t like me one little bit. Are you working today?”

Wayne had been devising a way to go in and load up his truck without Frank King seeing the cut on his face. He knew Frank took the same lunch break every day and ate at Wendy’s. He wanted to make his deliveries after dusk, but it was nearly June, and every evening the light lasted longer.

“I’m having a problem,” he told Steve, “with the thing I told you about. How I want to go after dark to deliver the meat. Last night it was still light at almost nine o’clock, and no one wants a delivery man coming later than that.”

“I can do it!” Steve looked overjoyed to be able to make it up to Wayne. “My mom has my supper ready at five thirty, after I come home from Caines, and at six o’clock I can come here and we can go in the van and I can go up all the driveways and you can stay in the van. Anyway, you don’t look that bad, if you went and bought yourself some clothes that weren’t so baggy on you.”

Wayne let Steve make the deliveries. He let him go up the driveways with the meat and come back down to the van with the money. And he went to Frank King’s warehouse to load up between 12:40 and 1:30 every day, when he knew Frank was down Thorburn Road eating a double cheeseburger and a baked potato with grated cheese and cheese sauce at Wendy’s, so that Frank would not see him.

But one day Frank came back early because Wendy’s had run out of cheese sauce, and he spied Wayne.

“You definitely need,” he said, “to become more image conscious.” Frank looked at Wayne’s jeans, his shirt and
boots. “Clean, clean, clean.” Frank circled around Wayne,
and Wayne knew it was his body, not his clothes, that unnerved Frank.

“There’s something about your image,” Frank said, “that doesn’t quite . . . I can’t put my finger on it. Go to Tony the Tailor and get him to fit that shirt for you. He only charges seven dollars. Customers want a cleaner look than what you’ve got here. They’re going to take one look at you and they’re going to shut their doors.”

At night, after his deliveries, Wayne dropped Steve off and drove down to the waterfront and watched the cranes. Sometimes he watched them from his van, but police were always on the lookout for people loitering on the docks, and he did not want to have to answer as to what he was doing down there at midnight. So he went, in the June nights, to sit on the ground under the Southside bridge, and he watched the cranes from there, the lattice booms lit yellow and orange, and the sounds of seawater smacking the dock, and up above, on Water Street, the howls of drunk people on George Street, and honking taxis, and the hum of cars driving between the hotels and steak restaurants and late night bars.

He sat there and he saw men drinking across the road behind the Murray Premises, and he saw other things too, things that reminded him of what his father had said on the phone about what happened to people who did not plan their actions carefully, who lived in the city and had no training, who had not thought of economics and had not looked ahead, and had gained entry to the criminal side of life that was waiting for them. He looked up at the bridge above him, the Southside bridge, and he thought of all the bridges he had once sketched and studied, and he thought how this bridge was not like any of those. It was utilitarian and did not have the beauty of an Italian bridge, and it did not even have the ugliness of London Bridge. It had its own ugliness that came from the fact that nobody cared how it was designed as long as it got cars from the east end of Water Street onto Southside Road. There were beer bottles under it, and condoms and Coke cans, and the bridge itself had a galvanized guardrail with rusty bolts, and it was without spans or any design whatsoever.

The world, evidently, Wayne thought now, was a place that did not care about much in the way of beauty. Derek Warford and his gang had treated him like a piece of garbage they wanted to use and discard. They had cut his face with a broken bottle. They had talked of killing him and tossing his body over the cliff at the top of Signal Hill. But he had escaped. Now the only beauty he knew was in the symmetry of these cranes, their lattice booms and their slow movement, and the way their hoist lines and heavy hook blocks lowered the containers in a slow, straight line the same as a plumb line. There was both engineering and beauty in this, and he spent hours watching it, and in the afternoons before he made his deliveries he did a lot of walking, noticing as he walked that he enjoyed hidden and slanted streets, like Nunnery Hill, and streets with names that were paradoxes, like Long Street, which was the shortest street in St. John’s, or Road de Luxe, which had nothing deluxe about it at all.

Road de Luxe was a funny, steep little road that took you from Waterford Bridge Road to the Village Mall on Topsail Road. It was just a poky little hill with a name that raised your expectations. What it had on it was a shop called Valu Best Convenience, which looked as if it could have been there from a time before the street had acquired its name. Envelopes sat next to matches and emergency candles and ladies’ dress gloves. He noticed a box of loose combs and thought about the length of his hair. He had not had it cut lately because he did not want to go into a barber shop and have the barber look at him closely and ask what kind of back and sides he preferred. With his body’s new softness, the breasts and the new shape of Annabel, a man’s haircut would have looked stranger than hair that had some freedom in it. He had never needed to shave as his father shaved, faithfully every morning, and he had never possessed stubble or what people called five-o’clock shadow. His face had always been smooth, though had he not shaved there would have been some downy facial hair, gold and soft. He bought a razor and a comb. But if he was going to grow into the softness of Annabel, he did not want to have a man’s barbered head or face. He did not know what he wanted, but he knew he did not want to continue to pretend to be a man. At the top of Road de Luxe he decided to cross Topsail Road to the mall. He took his new comb and razor into the men’s washroom near the food court and shaved the almost invisible down from beneath his ears: no more than exists on the faces of many girls. The soap from the dispenser had a chemical scent. His hair, as he used the new comb, reminded him of the soft ferns that would, at this time of year, be sending up feathery heads along the creek behind his parents’ house. Had his face ever been a man’s face?

He checked his Adam’s apple by swallowing. Was it as big as a man’s? He could imagine the answer being either yes or no. Wayne wished he could tell, but his own face was too familiar. A man came in to use the urinals and looked at him suspiciously. The man carried his wallet in his back pocket and there was a faded square of denim around it. The man zippered his fly and shot Wayne a look that had disgust and fear in it. Maybe Frank King had not been far off the mark.

The mall always felt to Wayne as if it were trying to convince him of an illusion that he was not quite getting. That the world was a place with glittering lights. That you could show you loved someone by giving her a new mug with a little white bear inside it. He had once come in to find socks and realized that, in all the mall’s 116 stores, there was not one pair of socks his father would have worn. He looked now in the windows of those stores and tried to catch sight of himself as if he were looking at a stranger. He tried to see, in the transparent reflections of himself walking against racks of blazers and halter tops and Italian-style dinnerware, what other people saw when they looked at him. Were his shoulders hunched? He tried to straighten them, but this thrust his chest out in a way that disquieted him. In the window of Fairweather hung a sweater that looked as if it was the colour it had been when it lived on the sheep. It was a woman’s sweater, but what made it a woman’s? He went into the store to touch it. He pulled the neck to see the size. It was size eight. A salesgirl asked him if she could help. He felt embarrassed. He wanted to know what the sweater would look like on him.

“Have you got this in a larger size?”

“What size would you like?”

“How do the sizes work?”

“Well an eight is about my size.”

“I need it for someone bigger.”

“Are they big-boned or are they tall?”

“Tall.” Wayne was guessing now. He suspected the salesgirl did not want to say the word fat. He was not fat.

“You can bring it back if it doesn’t suit. You have to return it within fourteen days, unworn and with the tags attached. Would you like to try a twelve or a fourteen?”

“Fourteen.”

Wayne wondered how the salesgirl would know if a garment had been worn. He wondered how long you had to wear something before the fact of your having worn it would show. He paid for the sweater and went into a shoe store. Women’s shoes were small. But it was not just that they were small. They had insubstantial soles. He picked up a black pump. It was light as a piece of toast. He couldn’t imagine standing in it without the whole thing crumbling. He was five feet nine and weighed 150 pounds, and he knew there were women of that height and weight who were considered normal women. But these shoes did not seem to him to be able to support his weight. Were male pounds denser than female pounds?

A clerk saw him standing with the shoe in his hand. He saw a woman’s lace-up walking shoe on a bottom shelf. It looked more promising, but still, the toe was tapered.

“Do you have this shoe,” he asked, “in a size ten?” Wayne remembered that when they were children, Wally Michelin’s feet had been the same size as his own, but the sizes on their shoes had been different.

“We have up to forty-one in European sizes. That’s about a ten. It depends on the make.”

“Can I see it?”

She brought the shoe and with it a green shoe Wayne liked. It was the colour of birch leaves, and he bought the pair. In Suzy Shier there were plain skirts with a back slit that came just past the knee, but he could not bring himself to buy a skirt. Behind the skirts were pants made of the same material: women’s slacks. What made them women’s? He held a pair and regarded its seams. They were flatter than men’s seams. Women’s slacks were held together much more lightly. He paid twenty-nine dollars and hoped they would not fall apart. A sign proclaimed a three-for-ten-dollar special on ladies’ trouser socks. It said they were a staple in any woman’s wardrobe, and Wayne bought some.

He wanted to change in the washroom but knew he couldn’t go in the men’s toilets to do this. There was a washroom whose door had a blue wheelchair painted on it, and when he opened the door he saw this was just one room, with a toilet, sink and mirror, and he went in. He put the sweater on, and the slacks and the green shoes. He put his old shirt and jeans and work boots in the Fairweather bag and the shoe store bag. He stayed in there for a long time and checked that the door was locked. He looked at himself in the mirror. He was shaven and wearing the slacks and the shoes, but it was still impossible for him to tell whether he looked anything like a woman. He suspected he did not. The only way he could see how the shoes looked on him was if he raised his knee very high and rested one foot on the platform in front of the mirror. There was a small heel on the shoe, half an inch, and it did look like a convincing slope, his foot sloping into the green leather the way women’s feet sloped. He kept his eye on the door handle, and when the handle moved, he tried to put his foot back on the floor and he lost his balance and wrenched his leg. He took the slacks off and put his jeans back on, with the new socks still on under them. But then he changed his mind again. He put the slacks back on, and the shoes. The shoes were tight. He wished they had had the next size up. He wished he could see himself from the back. If he saw himself from the back he might get a fresh perspective. He might know whether or not his body had anything like a feminine air. The mall was a place with hundreds of people in it, maybe a thousand people, and none of them knew him. He could walk through it once and see how it felt. He decided to go to the drugstore and buy himself a hand mirror so he could look at the back of his body in the mirror. He could not remember the last time he had seen the back of his body, or if he had ever seen it.