Every Time We Say Goodbye (2 page)

But Geraldine only said, “Well, I guess if Dean said it’s okay …” So they pushed the long white car into the garage, and the snow fell quickly, filling up the tire tracks and the shoe prints, muffling the sounds of cars whose starters still started. When Dean got home, there was a lot of hissing in the hallway about the car, with Geraldine asking was it something-something because that’s sure how it looked, and Dean declaring Jesus, Ger, no it was not. The snow kept falling, and within hours it was the middle of winter, even though it was only November, still the beginning. Dawn drew lemon suns, white houses with orange curtains on lime lawns, but it snowed like that until spring.

That winter Geraldine was sick and tired because of the baby, the new brother (Ryan) or sister (Amy) for Dawn and Jimmy. If Geraldine didn’t eat, she got tired. If she got tired, she became nauseated. But when she ate, she threw up. Then she had to go to bed, and they couldn’t make any noise; the TV was turned down so low they had to listen with their mouths open.

When she wasn’t sick and tired, she wove braids into Dawn’s light brown hair and unravelled them in the morning so their hair had the same ripples. She made french fries for Jimmy and sang
along with the radio. She knew the words to everything, but her favourite was “(I Never Promised You) a Rose Garden.” Dawn sang this at Vera’s one Sunday, and Vera asked where on earth she had picked up that nonsense. Dawn said, “Geraldine sings it.”

Vera said, “Hmph.” And then, “Well, she made her bed. Now she can lie in it.”

The truth was—and Dawn would never tell Vera this—Geraldine never made her bed. She didn’t care if Dawn or Jimmy made theirs, either. That had been the first shock, at the beginning of the beginning in the new house: all the beds were unmade, even their own beds, even though they hadn’t slept in them yet. “Oh, honey,” Geraldine said when Dawn went to tell her, “we had some guests last night and they stayed over.” Dawn could not remember seeing an unmade bed during the day that didn’t have a sick person sleeping in it, and sick meant you had a fever or you were throwing up. Even then, the blankets were arranged neatly, the bedspread folded down at the end of the bed. There was no call to pull the bed apart while you slept, Vera said. Decent people slept neat.

Seeing her slept-in bed, the blankets all twisted up and the sheets pulled off the mattress, Dawn felt the dreadful soup return to her stomach, and for a moment she wanted to cancel all the wishbones and falling stars and coins in a fountain, the exercises she’d made Jimmy practise with her. (“Let Dad marry Geraldine. Come on, say it, Jimmy. Let Dad marry Geraldine and take us to live with them.”) Then music floated up the stairs. Dawn opened the door wider to hear. At Vera and Frank’s, the radio was not allowed because of Vera’s nerves. In the kitchen, Geraldine was singing “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” Dawn made the bed and went downstairs to join her.

The new house did not have sliding glass doors, but it did have a patio and white aluminum siding, and through the park
and down the street was Dawn and Jimmy’s new school. Geraldine took them to buy school clothes at a place where the sales clerks were teenagers and the music was so loud they all had to shout. Geraldine flew through the store, laying shirts and jeans and belts over counters, asking, “Do you like this? Which do you like better, the blue or the purple? The striped or the plain?” She let them wear their new clothes home from the store, and they didn’t have to put them away For Good.

Geraldine had never heard of For Good. She wore her slinky black dress with the fringe of black beads to fry hamburgers and her new shoes to help Jimmy find his GI Joe weapons in the mud at the park. She wore her mauve silk blouse to bed. “Always wear clothes you love,” she told Dawn. It was a rule.

This was news to Dawn. At Vera and Frank’s, you wore what you were given. Occasionally, most likely by accident, you might be given something you liked, but then someone at school would point out that it was the colour of puke or had seams sewn down the front
and
back legs. You still had to wear it, though, because Vera was not going to throw out perfectly good clothes just to follow the Fads, which were invented to take advantage of people who thought money grew on trees.

There were so many other things Geraldine had never heard of, Dawn sometimes doubted she was a grown-up. “Are you going to do those down?” Dawn asked when Geraldine brought home a basket of fresh peaches. Geraldine looked blank. “You know,” Dawn said, “put them into jars.”

Geraldine was confused. “Why would we want to do that?”

“So we can eat them in the winter,” Dawn said.

Geraldine said, “If we want to eat canned peaches in the winter, we’ll buy them. In cans. In the winter.” And she grabbed two peaches and tossed one to Dawn. They ate them standing and threw the pits into the sink.

Vera and Frank bought fruit and vegetables on sale and cooked them for hours in enormous metal pots, with Dawn and Jimmy carrying warm jars of dwindled pears and blasted cauliflower down to the cellar. When the next Depression came, and mark Frank’s words, it was on its way, they would be prepared. Geraldine shrugged when Dawn told her about the Depression. She said if she wanted to keep herself up at night, she’d do it with something new and interesting, like aliens.

Made of money, Vera and Frank said when Dawn and Jimmy showed up on Sunday in stiff new jeans, fringed leather vests and purple running shoes. But of course Geraldine wasn’t made of money. She went to work in her yellow hard hat and big boots, one of the few women working in the plant part of the steel plant. She kept track of parts. She worked hard for her money, Vera grudgingly acknowledged, but then she spent it, hand over fist; she didn’t look after her pennies!

Dawn could attest to that. Geraldine hated pennies: she threw them out in fistfuls. Threw them
out
into the garbage can or out the car window into the street. She would end up without a pot to piss in, Vera said. She hadn’t been raised right. As far as Vera was concerned, she was no better than You Know Who, and Vera didn’t care who heard her say it.

And it was true that Geraldine didn’t know how to take their temperature, or which medicine went on impetigo. But she did know the recipe for D&J cocktails (ginger ale, orange segments and a maraschino cherry in a martini glass). She knew how to whip a scarf around a dress to make a belt, call out for pizza and make Dean laugh. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her down into his lap and growled into her long brown hair. And she knew how to work the Finding Stick when Professor Pollo went missing. She half-closed her eyes and followed the Y-shaped stick upstairs, downstairs, through each room to where Professor
Pollo had fallen behind the bed or was wrapped in a sheet in the laundry basket.

But as the snow rose in dirty hills and bluffs along the roadsides and Geraldine’s stomach got rounder, her voice got higher and sometimes she even hit them. She was turning into someone else, and Dawn tried all the magic she knew to turn her back, but nothing made any visible difference. Sometimes, she wished she could vanish her.

Dean didn’t need help in that direction. He could vanish all on his own, especially after Uncle Del (who wasn’t their uncle, only Dean’s friend) convinced him to quit his job at the radio station and work for him, and now he was always going over the river to the American Sault, even on weekends.

“What exactly are you doing for that guy?” Geraldine wanted to know.

“This and that. Keeping an eye on a few projects, scouting for business opportunities,” Dean said.

“Business opportunities, my ass,” Geraldine muttered.

Dean said, “He’s a man who makes things happen.”

“Oh yeah?” Geraldine said. “Can he make a paycheque happen?”

“If I just wanted a paycheque,” Dean said, “I’d sign on at the plant. You gotta see the big picture, Ger.”

Geraldine marched over to the fridge and grabbed a handful of envelopes. “Electricity bill. Phone bill. Returned cheque.” She tossed the envelopes one at a time at Dean, who let them fall to the floor. “There’s your big picture, mister.” Dawn’s mouth fell open: Geraldine sounded exactly like Vera.

When Vera and Frank stopped by after school or early on a Saturday morning, they always asked, “Where’s your father?” and Dawn and Jimmy were supposed to say, “He’s away on business.” They weren’t supposed to say “for Del Cherniak” because Vera couldn’t stand that Del Cherniak and Frank wouldn’t trust him
as far as he could throw him. Vera and Frank came to bring them the socks or vitamins they had picked up on special. They stood in the doorway in their boots and coats, the bright, cold air swirling in past them. They were always on their way somewhere, the cemetery or the grocery store, so no, they couldn’t stay. Finally, Geraldine stopped asking them to come in.

After they left, Dawn stood in the kitchen door to see what they had seen. Dishes in a sink full of cold, greasy water, a cream cake scraped clean of its icing, crushed Mountain Dew cans on the floor. That was Geraldine and Jimmy playing Dew Shot. At least from the kitchen door they couldn’t see the unmade beds and the pile of garbage swept behind the TV.

One Sunday afternoon in January, Geraldine invited them in again. She asked three times, hovering and circling, clearing her throat, but still they wouldn’t stay.

“Oh god, oh god, what am I going to do?” Geraldine cried when they left. She put her hands to her face and squeezed the sides of her head. Dawn would have laughed if she had been out of arm’s reach. Dean had been away on business for two weeks, and Geraldine had taken the phone off the hook because it was always someone looking for him. Vera and Frank had brought old issues of
National Geographic
and Oreos reduced to half-price because the box was a little crushed. “What good are these?” Geraldine cried, knocking the magazines onto the floor. She had only enough money for her bus fare tomorrow, and there was no dinner for the kids. And they weren’t even her kids. “Youse aren’t even my kids,” she wailed. “Oh god, what am I going to do?” She plumbed the sofa lining for change and then sent them to the store with $1.71 for milk and bread. “Close enough,” she said. “Just pretend you lost some on the way.” But they stopped to play with Vincent down the road, the three of them flying over his backyard snow hill on his
saucer sled, and when they got to the store, they didn’t have to pretend. Dawn’s pockets were empty. They went back and dug frantic holes in the snow until their hands cramped. “We need the Finding Stick,” Jimmy said, and it might have worked if Geraldine hadn’t caught them in the upstairs hallway.

She said nothing when they told her; instead, she turned and punched the wall so hard her fist went through the plaster. After that, she went to her room and the door closed with the quietest click. Jimmy couldn’t find Professor Pollo and went temporarily crazy, shuddering and crying, until Dawn found the Professor behind the kitchen door. She got Jimmy to lean over and sip water from the opposite side of the cup to take away his hiccups. Then they ate a row of Oreos each and put themselves to bed.

When Dean had come last summer to tell them he had good news, Dawn knew immediately that all her wish work had paid off. “Kids,” he yelled. “Vera, where are the kids?” They heard his voice and forgot not to pound down the stairs, making enough racket, according to Vera, to be heard all over the Two Soos. “Kids, I have some great news. You know Geraldine, right?” Of course they knew her. Dean had been going out with her for a year. “Well, how would you feel about Geraldine being your new mother?”

Dawn and Jimmy began to jump up and down. “When is the wedding?” Dawn wanted to know. “Can I be the flower girl?” But Dean said he and Geraldine had already got married that morning at the courthouse.

Jimmy asked if they should call her Mom.

Dean scratched his chin. “Why don’t you just keep calling her Geraldine for now? That’s what you’re used to, right?”

As soon as he could find a place, they would all move in together. Dawn immediately began to lobby for the right kind of
house, and Dean clicked a make-believe pen to take notes on his hand.

Dawn thought she would float away. At last, at last: father and mother and kids living together in a normal house, instead of father living in a two-room apartment that smelled of cat pee over the Sunset Café on Queen Street and kids living with their grandparents in a weird old house with claw-footed furniture and a cellar full of pickled beets. They would go to Parents’ Night with their parents, they would go on vacations during summer vacation, they would go to the movies and then to A&W and it wouldn’t be for the birds and a damn foolish waste of money.

“I think I’ve got it,” Dean said, pretending to read his notes. “Million-dollar single-storey mansion with indoor-outdoor pool …”

Dawn and Jimmy began to jump up and down again and hoot and holler and Dean jumped and hollered with them until Vera went upstairs with her nerves.

They waited until Dean found the house, then they waited until it was fixed up for them, then they waited for Dean and Geraldine to come and get them before lunch on the last day of August. The beginning began, and it was good at first, or at least there were moments of good, considering it was still the beginning and some things didn’t count. But by the time the snow began to melt, Dawn knew it was coming to an end. With beds unmade and clothes unwashed in smelly piles around the broken washing machine, a garbage bag of money squashed flat under the spare room bed and a stolen car in the garage, it couldn’t possibly last much longer.