Crossings (11 page)

I had clothes when I married of course. And they lasted me all those years. A red shorty coat, a brown tartan skirt, the useless white linen two-piece I bought for the wedding, the two-piece blue suit Aunt Forbes got for me at the rummage sale. My mother went berserk over the tartan skirt. It cost eighteen ninety-five, and that was a lot of money then. A Nat Gordon.

‘You're selfish!' she said. ‘Through and through.'

But I was right about that skirt. It lasted. I gave it to the Salvation Army only three years ago.

The night before I was married, she said, ‘If you aren't good to him …' not finishing.

‘What?' I said. ‘If I'm not good to Ben, what?'

‘I'll never forgive you,' she said, her mouth tight.

We were up in the attic room. The self-contained room with the stove and the sink. I paid forty dollars a month. For board too. But I could make my own meals if I wanted. She had come upstairs to ask if there was anything I wanted to know.

‘I probably know more than you do,' I said.

‘You probably do,' she said.

‘From books,' I amended. She sniffed. My mother began to accuse me of losing my virginity quite early. She would see a bruise on my arm or a red spot on my breast and she would say, ‘You're no virgin!' And so I was determined, out of spite, to be a virgin on my wedding day. Ben and I were getting married two months early because a week before, as we fooled around upstairs on my bed, It had slipped in for a second. Very limp, very scared It was. And just for a second. But now I considered myself no longer a virgin. Not even technically. My practice was to pet madly until I had an orgasm, and then to retire from the field, Virtue Triumphant. It was lucky I wasn't killed.

‘Everybody thinks you're getting married because you have to,' Momma said.

‘Well, Everybody can wait for nine months and see,' I said loftily.

But I had a twinge of doubt. Was it possible? Surely not. But I went around those first weeks in agony, thinking maybe it was possible after all.

It was my mother's belief that I was born rotten and that losing my virginity would prove it once and for all. ‘You wouldn't even suck!' she would say.

And, ‘You're not in love with him, are you?'

‘That's just in the movies, Mom,' I said.

She shook her head. ‘He's in love with you. Don't you dare hurt him.'

Ben was in love with me and I did hurt him. My mother knew all about me.

About three days before I got married, she gave me a bill. An itemized list from the high school years: Kotex. Lustre Creme. One sanitary belt. One brassiere. All the things she'd had to buy besides food, which the Welfare paid for anyway. I never thought much about the bill, just paid it. Jocelyn got a bill too, when she finished university. And Francie got hers before her wedding. They paid too, without thinking.

‘You know,' I say to Francie, ‘that wasn't usual. The bill thing. No one has ever heard of it.'

‘I know,' says Francie, laughing. ‘I asked Jo Anne and she didn't have one. But that's just Mom. She felt like it was cheating the Welfare to spend money on stuff like O-Do-Rono. And, I mean, she thought we could use rags instead of Kotex.'

‘She did,' I say and we go into peals of embarrassed giggles.

‘Oh god,' says Francie, ‘don't put that in the book. Please. I'll die.'

‘And she kept them in the bottom of the clothes closet. Used.'

‘Oh don't,' says Francie. ‘Oh god. Don't. I know. Oh god. You know,' she says seriously, ‘that's why I hate encounter groups. I think I'm going to say something like that, when I get excited. I'm going to say, “My mother used rags.” I mean, they're all so middle class, those encounter group people, they don't have a clue.' And, ‘But we never
felt
poor, did we?'

‘No.'

‘I know. It wasn't like Aunt Harriet's. I mean, there, you could
smell
the poverty. I mean, it was clean and everything, but it smelled poor. How much did she get for us anyway?'

‘Sixty a month. But that was in the good days, when I got the scholarship. I got thirty-five a month for a straight Honours report.'

‘Yeah. I got that too,' says Francie. ‘Maybe it was because there weren't any books. At Aunt Harriet's. Did Mom ever look at your report cards?'

‘No. She just signed them.'

‘Yeah. Funny, wasn't it? She really hates the intellectual bit but I wonder what would have happened if we'd been dumb.'

I can't stop myself. ‘It was I who brought the books into the house.'

But Francie says, ‘Then it was something else. Like, table manners and speaking correctly and all that. It was a different feeling. We weren't poor.'

‘Because we were going to get out,' I said.

‘Yeah. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's the hope.' Francie is working with negroes in ghettos, trying to understand. ‘I mean, we were white and we could get out,' she says.

But the money thing doesn't begin with my father's death. It's there even before, when I'm six and I say, ‘I'm going to live with you forever.'

‘Well, you'll have to pay room and board,' Momma says.

‘What's room and board?'

‘It's what you pay for eating and sleeping in a house,' my mother says. She looks very grim.

‘But children don't pay their parents,' I say.

‘Yes they do, when they're old enough to work. It wouldn't be fair.'

I'm horribly shocked. You don't pay your parents. It's terrible, to think of that. Momma becomes furious with me and we have a dreadful fight. She says I'm selfish and I say she's mean. She cries. She never forgets either. The day I said she was mean.

Mom is horribly honest about money. If the cashier at Safeway's gives her too much change, she gives it back. One day she caught Francie skipping school. In the distance she sees her, downtown, going into the Greyhound building with our cousin. Mom goes into Safeway's and comes over faint with it, just in front of the meat counter. She has a packet of lamb chops in her hand and she puts it back, feeling too ill to go through the cash aisle. Out on the street, a woman stops her and searches her shopping bag. My mother is furious. ‘I was poor all those years!' she says to the woman, ‘and I never stole one thing.' She hires a lawyer and sues Safeway's for defamation of character. She still has the letter in her cedar-wood chest on her bureau: the apology from the manager.

At least I would bet anything she had. And she has never forgiven Francie for lying that day. Either.

‘It wasn't exactly a lie,' says Francie. ‘I just didn't say I was going to look for a job.'

‘But she got Aunt Foster to drive you to school that day. Because it was so cold.' I can feel my lips going tight.

Francie and I are still hung up about money. When Aunt Carrington died, she left terrible fearsome sums to all of us. But to me she left the most. Francie sent hers to Oxfam and Biafra, but I spent mine on the mortgage. Jocelyn paid off their bank loan. The last time Jocelyn and I went shopping together at Zeller's, she loaded up her shopping cart with knickknacks, toys for the kids, jokes for David, and, at the counter, she grins at me and says: ‘Isn't it wonderful to have money!' But, later, driving home in the car with all our loot, she says, ‘Still, it'd be hard. I don't know what I'd have done if she'd left me so much.' She chuckles, ‘I guess you'll just have to suffer the guilt.'

‘Of getting so much?'

‘No,' says Jocelyn, ‘of being loved so much.'

 

I BEGIN TO PLAY CHESS with Mik. He doesn't explain where I went wrong. He doesn't suggest I take that move back. He doesn't hold post-mortems on the game. He just beats the shit out of me. I stop writing. As soon as Jocelyn leaves for classes, I get out the chess board and we start to play. We play all day and then I start dinner. After the dishes, we play all night. About two weeks later, Paul comes over and I beat the can off him.

It's summer now. One night Mik says, ‘Let's go for a swim.' But I say I can't. I don't have a bathing suit. I do, but it's size twenty. The next day I go down and find one on sale for seven ninety-five. A vulgar leopard-skin one-piece. Two thin black straps on each shoulder. Size seven.

The next night we walk to Kitsilano and then beyond, down the beach to a lonely stretch of sand. Below the high cliffs.

‘I haven't been swimming at night for ages.'

‘Yah. It's nice at night.'

He takes off his sweater and shirt and I see the tattoos.
Cream
and
Coffee.

I don't know what to say. I say nothing. I feel terribly embarrassed for him. I think I know why he has said, ‘No, let's go on,' why he hasn't wanted to swim on the public beach. While we are swimming, the sun goes down. Now it is black, the water smooth and warm, silken. I go far out. Toward the deepest point of blackness, where the sky meets the sea. Where darkness oozes out of the water into the black hole of the night. When I come out, I am shivering with cold. My skin feels as though it will break off in icy hunks.

Mik is building an illegal fire. He puts his sweater around me and rubs me briskly. He does it roughly, efficiently. It is the first time he has touched me. I sit, his sweater on over my suit, and stare into the fire.

‘Take it off, you'll just get cold again,' he says.

But I haven't brought underwear.

‘Take it off,' he says, and throws me my jeans. So I do, wriggling out of the wet suit underneath the sweater, which comes to my knees. He is getting more wood for the fire and doesn't look my way.

‘Aren't you cold?'

‘Nah.'

On his back is a long white scar. ‘Where did you get the scar?'

‘Broke my back. Cat skinning.'

‘Oh. Is that a spinal fusion?'

‘Yah. Took the bone out of my leg.' He shows me the scar on his thigh.

‘I'm the mechanical man,' he says. ‘Got a silver plate in my head too. Right here. That's why I ain't got no hair.'

‘What was that from?'

‘The war.' He throws an immense log onto the fire. ‘Got a pin in my hip too, from the broken back thing. So now you know everything.'

“How
'd you break your back?' I say again.

‘Cat skinning. I was a cat skinner.' He looks at me. ‘It's a tractor. It turned over on me. And the company said it wasn't responsible, and Workmen's Compensation said it wasn't responsible, and I couldn't get no unemployment insurance, because
they
said it was Workmen's Compensation's problem.' He sits back against the log, beside me, not touching.

The fire is very warm and the sky very black. I am very aware of my body under the rough wool, without underwear. And of his body, not touching me. I keep looking at him, as if I am just speaking to him, but really I am looking at his body in the light of the fire. Thick and muscled. The tattoos. The small patches of hair around each nipple. Below his navel. His shoulders. His thighs. The bulge in his bathing shorts. His feet. He seems very ugly. Embarrassing.

‘I was in this cast,' he says, ‘from the top of my head to my knees. That was at first. Then I got just a body cast. That's how I got caught. For armed robbery.'

‘You were wearing a body cast when you did an armed robbery?'

‘Yah.' He laughs. ‘I was sitting in the airport at Saskatoon, waiting for them with $8,000 in a suitcase.'

‘Waiting for the police?'

‘Yah. I'd stuck up a bank. I figured if Unemployment Insurance and Workmen's Compensation and the whole fucking lot of them wouldn't …' He stopped. ‘Sorry.'

‘You mean you did it on purpose? To get caught? To be put in jail?'

‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

‘And you did it in a body cast?'

‘Yah, you should have seen the description they sent out: One body cast, 250 pounds, on one body, 230 pounds.'

‘Did you really use a gun?'

‘Nah. It was from Woolworth's. It doesn't make any difference though.'

‘That's terrible. That's the worst thing anyone's ever told me.'

‘Yah, well, I asked for it. So how'd you know, about spinal fusions?'

‘I was a polio. In the crippled children's hospital. The girl next to me had one. She got up one night and tried to get out the window. Tried to walk through the window with this huge body cast on, in her sleep.'

And I tell him that story and he laughs.

‘So what was wrong with you?'

‘Oh I had it all down one side.'

‘You look all right now,' he says.

‘Oh yes, I was all cured.'

‘Your legs don't show.'

I hold them up. ‘I rode one stirrup all one summer for that leg. It was awful at first.'

‘Yah? You had a horse?'

So I tell him the story of the horse, and he laughs.