Bodily Harm (15 page)

A secure woman is not threatened by her partner’s fantasies, Rennie told herself. As long as there is trust. She’d even written that, or something like it, in a piece on the comeback of satin lingerie and fancy garter belts. And she was not threatened, not for some time.

You’re so closed, Jake said once. I like that. I want to be the one you open up for.

But she could never remember afterwards what he had actually said. Perhaps he’d said, I want to be the one who opens you up.

M
y father came home every Christmas, says Rennie. He always spoke of it as coming home, though it became obvious at last, even to me, that his home was elsewhere. He’d gone to Toronto soon after I was born, he’d been in the war and got university free as a veteran. He studied chemical engineering. He stayed there, everyone said, because the jobs were there. We couldn’t go because my grandfather got sick and my grandmother needed the help, that’s what they said, and after my grandfather died my grandmother could not be left alone. People in Griswold had a great fear of being left alone. It was supposed to be bad for you, it made you go funny, it drove you bats. Then you had to be put in the loony bin.

So my father would turn up every Christmas. He would stay in one of the guest bedrooms, we had a lot of them, bedrooms that had once been for children and now stood empty, dustless and smelling of lavender and dead air. These visits of his, I was told later, were for my sake. My father and I would be bundled up and sent for walks on the icy streets; both of us would be told not to fall down. He would ask me how I was doing at school and tell me that soon I would be
able to come and visit him. Neither of us believed this. On the main street people’s heads would turn, not too abruptly, as we went past, and I would know that we were being looked at and discussed.

When I was in Grade Six, two girls, the kind from loose families, spread the story that my father was living with another woman in Toronto, and that was the real reason my mother didn’t go to join him. I didn’t believe this, but I didn’t ask my mother about it either, so I probably did believe it after all. Just as well, because it was true, and when my mother finally told me I wasn’t surprised. She waited until my thirteenth birthday, two weeks after my first period. She must have felt I was ready for pain.

I think she wanted sympathy, she felt that at last I would understand what a hard life she had led and what sacrifices she had been forced to make. She hoped I would blame my father, see him in his true light. But I was unable to feel what I was supposed to; instead I blamed her. I was angry with him, not for leaving – I could see why he would have wanted to do that – but for leaving me behind.

By that time he’d stopped coming back for Christmas, though he still sent cards, to me but not to her, and I didn’t see him again until I moved to Toronto to go to university. For years he’d been married to someone I thought of only as
her
, because that’s what my mother called her. I’d forgotten what he looked like.

I visited them at their apartment. I had never been in an apartment before. That was the first time I’d ever seen a house plant that wasn’t an African violet or a poinsettia. They had a lot of plants, hanging all over the southern windows, things I didn’t know the names for. There was space between the furniture in their apartment, a lot more space than I was used to. The first thing he said to me was
You look like your mother
. And that was the end of him.

When I was growing up, says Lora, we lived in cellars. We lived in the cellars of apartment buildings; they were always dark, even in summer, and they smelled like cat piss, partly because of Bob’s cats, he never emptied the litter box even though they were his cats, and partly because those kinds of places always smell like cat piss anyway. Bob got the apartments for next to nothing, they were the caretaker’s apartments, he was supposed to take out the garbage and mop the floors and fix people’s toilets, but he was never much good at that, or maybe he didn’t want to, which is why we were always moving.

His war buddy Pat used to say that wasn’t how Bob really made his money anyway. He said Bob made his money by catching things that fell off the backs of lorries. I didn’t figure out for a while that
lorry
was the English word for truck, Pat was from England, and then I didn’t believe it, because I knew Bob didn’t chase after trucks waiting for stuff to fall off them. He was home most of the time, sitting at the kitchen table in his old grey cardigan, and besides he couldn’t run because of his limp. This was lucky for me: if I could keep him from grabbing me I could always outrun him, but he was fast with the hands, he’d pretend he was looking the other way and then snatch, and when I was small he could keep hold of me with one hand while he got his belt off with the other. I guess that’s partly what made me so quick on my feet.

He said he got the limp in the war and it was typical of the government that they wouldn’t give him a pension. He was against the government, whoever was in, he said it didn’t matter a tinker’s piss, but don’t get the wrong idea, he was death on communism too. He couldn’t stand the idea of welfare, that was communism as far as he was concerned. Bob’s war buddy Pat used to talk about the working class, he used to say that’s what they were, the both of them, but that was always a big joke to me. Working class my ass. Bob worked as little as he could. His whole thing was how you could avoid working,
he thought anyone with a steady job was the world’s number-one dummy. He was dead against the unions too, he had no sympathy for them at all, he said they just made things more expensive for everybody else. When there were strikes on the
TV
he would cheer on the police, which was something, because the rest of the time he was dead against them too.

Anyway, it took me a long time to figure out why we would suddenly have five television sets, then none, then eight radios, then only one. Sometimes it was toasters, sometimes it was record players, you never knew. Things appeared and disappeared around our place like magic. I got the belt for bragging at school that we had five television sets, I brought one of the kids over to see, which made Bob mad as hell. This’ll teach you to keep your fuckin’ lip zipped, he said.

A lot of things made him mad as hell. It was like he spent the whole day sitting at that table, smoking Black Cat cigarettes the way he did and waiting for something to come along and make him mad, and my mother spent the whole day trying to guess what it would be so she could stop it from happening.

Go
around
him, she told me. Why do you have to walk right into him all the time? Pretend he’s a closed door. You wouldn’t walk right into a door if you could help it, would you? I thought when she said stuff like this she was taking his side, but now I see she was just trying to keep me from getting beat up too much.

I hated him more than anything. I used to lie awake at nights thinking up bad things that could happen to him, like falling down a sewer or getting eaten by rats. There were rats in our apartments too, or anyway mice, and Bob wouldn’t let my mother put out poison because the mice might eat it and then his cats might eat the mice, though his cats never ate any mice that I ever saw. When he wasn’t there, which wasn’t all that often, I used to step on the cats’ tails and chase them around with the broom. I couldn’t do anything
to him but I sure could make life miserable for his bloody cats. I still can’t stand to have a cat near me.

It was mean on the cats, but I think I did stuff like that so I wouldn’t have to be so scared of him. Remember that story in the papers, six, seven years ago? It was about this woman with a little boy, who married this man, and after a while the two of them killed the little boy, out in the woods. They said they were taking him on a picnic. There was a picture of the little boy that broke my heart. The man just didn’t want him around, I guess, and the mother went along with it. I was grown up by the time I read that, I was almost thirty, but it put me in a cold sweat and I dreamed about it off and on for weeks. It was like something that almost happened to me and I didn’t even know it at the time, like you’re sleepwalking and you wake up and you’re standing on the edge of this cliff. I was always more scared of Bob when he was trying to be nice than when he was mad. It’s like knowing there’s someone in the closet waiting for you but not being able to see in.

My mother married Bob after my father died, that would be when I was around four. I don’t know why she married him. My mother wasn’t religious or anything, we didn’t go to church, but she had this belief that things were ordered,
meant to be
she would say. When I asked her why she married Bob she would say it was meant to be. I don’t know who by, somebody with a pretty poor sense of humour if you ask me. She never did figure out that some things are just accidents. When I was twelve or so I decided that was about the best way to think of Bob: he was an accident that happened to me, like getting run over by a truck, I was just in the way. I had to live with him, but like a broken leg, not like a person. I stopped trying to work out in advance what would make him happy or not or mad or not, because I never would be able to work it out, and I stopped thinking it had a whole lot to do with me. If he hit me it was like the weather, sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t. He didn’t hit me
because I was bad, like I used to think. He hit me because he could get away with it and nobody could stop him. That’s mostly why people do stuff like that, because they can get away with it.

My mother was full of schemes. She was always reading the back pages of magazines, those ads that tell you how to start your own business in your home and make thousands of dollars. She tried a lot of them too, she addressed envelopes, she sold magazine subscriptions and encyclopedias and stuff like that door to door, she even tried arts and crafts, putting together dried flower arrangements out of the raw materials they’d send to her. Once she even rented a knitting machine. That one died a quick death.

But it was no use, she never did get rich the way they promised, you’d have to work forty-eight hours a day anyway on most of those things just to break even, and she’d lose interest pretty fast. She didn’t have the business sense to handle things that really would work, like Tupperware parties. Not that we lived in Tupperware country, no way she could’ve had one of those parties in any of our apartments, with the cat litter box in the kitchen and the lightbulbs with no shades and the red stains down the backs of the toilets and that smell, and Bob sitting there in his cardigan with the ravelly cuffs and his cigarette cough, like his insides were going to come up any minute. That and chip dip and salads with baby marshmallows in them don’t mix, you know?

She was more interested in reading the ads anyway, and sending off the first letter. That always excited her. For her it was like gambling, she wanted to believe in fate, she wanted to believe that some day the wheel would come around and it would be her turn, not for anything she’d done that would make her deserve it, but just because it was her turn. She never said so, she used to say we should make the most of what we had and be thankful for our blessings, but underneath it I think she hated those cellars and the smell of cat piss
and maybe even Bob as much as I did. But she didn’t know what else to do, she didn’t know how to get out.

Where there’s life there’s hope, that’s what my mother would say. She had to believe good luck was out there somewhere and it was waiting for her. All those years I didn’t see her I used to send her a Loto Canada or a Wintario ticket for her birthday, sometimes a book of them when I had the money, but she never won.