February (23 page)

Helen had not cared. She and her team were eased back and tipped over, and the children cheered and hopped up and down and screamed Mommy or screamed Daddy. Her team were eased back up and tipped the other way and the knot inched back over the pylon in the other direction. The whistle burst through the air and the orange flag fluttered down. When Helen let go the rope, her hands tingled. She had to clench and unclench.

Helen’s eyes were closed and the storybook was open on her chest, and she said to John: When you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s nothing else. Absolutely nothing.

She forgot she was speaking to a child of five. She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud.

Nothing, repeated John. His astonishment filled up the bedroom. It was as if the day, with all its glaring sun and bright, riffling leaves and nasty yellow buttercups and ribbons and thrill had come into the room on a scouring wind, and blown past them. John sat up on one elbow and stared forward into the empty dark.

. . . . .

The Standard, November 2008

LULU HAD MADE
her buy a standard because you get a rebate and they’re good on gas.

The environment, Mom!

Helen is driving home from her yoga class, she’s on the top of Long’s Hill at the red light, and there’s a bus up her arse. She doesn’t give a good goddamn about the bloody environment. Green. The light is green. She slams her foot, the engine cuts out and the car rolls back, and the bus blares its horn. It blares and blares. She starts the car and slams her foot. Lets up on the clutch, and there’s a screech of metal, and she burns rubber, and the engine cuts out and the car rolls back. Hand-brake, Jesus hand-brake, and is that bus going to give her any space? It inches up as close as it can get and there’s the horn again.

Helen lurches, something catches, pig-squealing parts. Second, she remembers second. Go, you son of a bitch, go. Hand-brake! Release the Jesus. Two bunny hops and then she’s moving. She’s fine. Helen guns it through the next red light.

Last night on the news there was a story about two women who ran out of the Magic Wok without paying, and the waitress chased them down. The women told the
TV
camera they felt no remorse.

I don’t regret nothing, one woman said. Coming out of court in cuffs. Hard as nails. Helen had the sewing machine going but she stopped to watch. And then on to the end of the seam, a zigzag stitch.

Someone put Iceland on eBay. Markets crashing, Harper and Dion, Obama and McCain, they’re talking Afghanistan, they’re talking Gaza. The reign of the Emerald Tiger is on the wane.

Helen regrets the bloody standard is what she regrets. A silver Yaris. Brand new.

Last night watching television, Helen bit the thread with her teeth and lifted a tiny velvet dress to the ironing board to press the seam. Patience’s eldest sister Elizabeth had had a baby and Helen was making the baby a red velvet dress for Christmas. White lacy petticoat. A matching bonnet. Three days old, and the baby with a full head of black fuzzy hair and pink fingernails. Elizabeth had put the baby in Helen’s arms. Oh my. Who-da-dear? Who-da-saucy-baby? She would run across the street with the present for the baby when she finished the hem.

A matter of practice, Lulu had said. Standards are fun.

Helen thinks of Lulu coming home at sixteen, up the stairs and quietly closing the bathroom door. Who was that drip of a boyfriend? Aaron somebody. Or Andrew. Helen had not liked him one bit. Some snotty remark he’d made. Helen knocked on the bathroom door and waited. She rested her forehead on the door and said Lulu’s name. It had been a remark about processed cheese. Andrew Somebody, who had mentioned casually that his family never ate processed cheese.

It’s all celluloid and wood chips, he’d said. Just as Helen plunked the economy-sized no-name container of Parmesan in the centre of the table. Cathy grabbed it up, tipped it over her spaghetti, knocked the bottom with the flat of her hand, several hard taps. Cathy hadn’t liked Aaron—or Andrew—either.

Helen touched her hand against the bathroom door as if to feel her daughter’s mood through the wood. Then she turned the knob and went in. Lulu was applying the wet edge of a face cloth to her lower eyelid, removing black eyeliner, and she was stinking drunk. She pulled the eye until it was a slit.

Did Aaron walk you home, Helen asked.

Andrew.

Did Andrew walk you home?

Andrew had walked somebody else home that night. Not Lulu, with her white nail polish, white lipstick, and dark hair dyed a flat, shineless black. The ring in her nose, a tattoo of a tarantula on her shoulder. Or, later, she had shaved her head like a scored ham, each square a different colour, and she’d put safety pins through everything, and for a time she had a bra she wore outside of her clothes, spray-painted stiff and metallic, studded with big plastic jewels like a comic-book hero.

Lulu had been loaded that night and not willing to admit it. This was a stubbornness that came down from Cal’s side. The last thing rubbed away, the refusal to surrender to an obliterating drunk. It kept Lulu from slurring. She dragged her lower eyelid down trying to get the makeup off, and her eye was bloodshot and glazed over, and the underlid fiercely red. And what could Helen do, you had to let them experiment with alcohol, get their hearts trampled and spit on and ground into the dirt; they had to learn.

But had Lulu been safe out there?

The eye roved over to Helen’s face reflected in the mirror, and had Lulu ever looked sad and stoic, deciding she would appear as sober as she could; the water was crashing in the basin.

Did you have fun, Helen said.

And the eye looked back at itself (the other one pinched shut) and Lulu put down the face cloth and blinked. When she spoke it was mostly to herself, both consoling and demanding: Yes, I had a good time. And I will be okay.

And she had been. Mom, let up on the clutch. Feel the shimmy? It shimmies when you have to let up.

Lulu’s punk look had turned overnight. Now she wears stilettos and tweeds, Helen thinks, shifting gears in the bloody Yaris; Lulu works out in the gym and cracks gum. Everything she does is emphatic and sure. She had taken an evening course in dry-walling.

There are things you can learn only by doing, Lulu had told her mother. Things you can’t know without losing a thumbnail or being honest when a lie is called for. She had been through a string of boyfriends and long stretches with no relationships at all.

Lulu has a facial expression—brow furrowed, lips pressed tight—that means she is working something out having to do with money. She does hair because she loves doing hair, but managing the spa is where she makes all her profit. She goes on buying trips and comes back with cases of mud and loofah sponges and lotions that are painted on the most delicate parts and peeled away. She does things with hot wax that she will not explain to Helen. Mom. You don’t want to know.

Massage is her area of expertise. Lulu believes every tender hurt and sorrow collects in the flesh and can be worked out with warm baby oil and a good spanking. Fast, merciless karate chops to the grey buttocks and thighs and calves of men and women who acquiesce to middle-aged stiffness. Lulu’s thumbs have a name around town. What she can do with her thumbs. Victims of whiplash swear by her. Athletes with esoteric sprains, new divorcees who weep uncontrollably. Lulu kneads the tight flesh of broad angry shoulders and makes them relax. She has three tanning beds, and the tops come down over her naked customers like coffin lids. Everyone leaves the spa golden and pumiced, bitter cares and dead cells sloughed off, smelling of spruce.

Gabrielle and Cathy complain that Lulu’s flamboyance turns obnoxious when she drinks; Lulu is opinionated and acutely sincere. For all Lulu’s hard edges, her sisters can lie to her easily because she never expects it. Lulu expects the best of people. She expects them to be generous and to tell the truth and to work hard.

Her sisters tolerate Lulu’s temper tantrums and minor spite storms because she gives them money and advice and she makes it her business to order them around so they get the very best of everything for themselves. Helen’s daughters have in common that when it comes to rules they are unbending. Helen’s daughters prevail. And John . . . John is on his way home for Christmas.

I’m going to have a little one like you pretty soon, Helen tells the gown for Elizabeth’s new infant. I’m going to have a brand-new grandchild.

. . . . .

Business Luncheon in New York, November 2008

THE ONE WOMAN
at the table full of men, her mouth full, raises her escargot prong, a wet grey slug hanging from the end. She has a slug in her mouth and her lips are glossy with slug juice. John is surprised to discover he finds this erotic. Butter. It is garlic butter that makes the woman’s chin greasy, and she is trying to say something but her mouth is full. She waves a slug on a little fork, trying to get the men to shut up. This is Natalie Bateman from Neoline Inc., and she is presenting an advertising campaign to promote offshore drilling development on a global scale. John’s company had asked for tenders and Neoline Inc. came out on top.

Butter and the sweat of a boiled organism, all muscle. John tries to think of a muscle in the human body that is the same size as a slug. Natalie is bobbing in her seat and waving the little fork. The men wait. One by one, they fall into an agitated silence.

John thinks about the Heimlich manoeuvre. He once cracked a seventy-six-year-old woman’s rib because he thought she was choking. Winnipeg. That was in Winnipeg. She’d just been laughing, her sixty-year-old daughter said.

That was laughter, you great stupid idiot of a man, the daughter shouted.

John had tipped over a chair, and the tablecloth came with him, and all the waiters watching and plates falling, and he was in there, doing the Heimlich, because he was witnessing a choking. Death had its fist around this scrawny old woman’s neck and John was there to intervene.

Thug! the battle-axe of a daughter shouted.

The woman’s black orthopedic shoes knocking listlessly against his shins. She could not have weighed more than seventy pounds. A man nearby with his napkin tucked into his collar, and his fork and knife upright in his fists. The picture of indignation, standing by with his mouth agape, paralyzed with sour awe. Later this same man would offer John his card. A lawyer and a witness, he said. It was not a napkin in the man’s collar; it was a cravat.

The daughter had threatened to sue. John had assaulted a seventy-six-year-old woman. A bungled effort forged out of the sincere wish to do something good. Laughter. The sound had been laughter: ugly wheezing squawks of joy had snagged like beef sinew in the woman’s throat.

Natalie Bateman puts her fingers over her mouth and chews and chews and rolls her eyes comically because this is a table of men held up by a miniature fork. Her eyes water and she takes a gulp of champagne and John sees she is beautiful. She reminds him of somebody. Somebody he cares about.

Natalie says, We’re planning a series of ads from all over the world, specifically indigenous, acutely indigenous, showing high-powered cocktail parties, parties on rooftops, beach parties. We’re looking at Bondi Beach, and subtitles, just very, very international, speaking to that thing, that ethnic thing, that thing, connectedness. Zoom, we’re in Thailand; zoom, we’re in Alaska; zoom, Nigeria. Do you know what I’m saying, zoom, zoom, zoom, the camera flits all over the world in an instant, this is everybody partying together, yada, yada, it’s gritty, it’s arty, and we end with a sunset shot. Natalie pops the slug into her mouth and she clamps her lips shut and she is wagging the little prong with one hand and covering her mouth with the other. Wait, wait, wait, she continues: The thingies, the derricks or whatever, the rigs on the ocean fade to silhouette, music of course. Something Wagnerian.

It has been a long day and John is hungover and, he realizes, the woman at the other end of the table with the snail prong—Natalie—reminds him of someone. He watches her wrinkle her nose when she drinks from the champagne glass. The bubbles are tickling her and now he knows who it is: Natalie reminds him of a nun who taught him in high school. Natalie has some kind of goodness, he thinks, despite the advertising crap. Goodness.

What John remembers from high school: a nun with chalk dust all over her blue polyester habit. It came to the knee, that habit—a crisp white blouse underneath, and a short veil on the nun’s head. He could see her hands on the desk, leaning into him, because she had tried everything else with him.

She had been writing on the board and her dress had jiggled all of a piece, her sturdy shoes and stockings. She had written out the path to the answer, and to John it was like waterskiing. She was dragging him behind her, and every muscle in his head hurt, and the skis hit the hard ruts in the water and it was easier to let go; or there was no choice, and he sank, and the nun kept on. Then she turned and saw that she had lost him. She put her hands flat on the desk and leaned in.

Pythagorean geometry. John understood that there were infinite theoretical planes and that they could be labelled A and B. The nun had a few stiff white hairs on her chin. She was mannish and kind. She could not teach him math: John was impermeable. But in her he saw how kindness was generated. That is what she had blasted through his skull. She had blasted the will to be good, to take care of his sisters, his mother, the dog.

She leaned into him and her eyes held his eyes. The school’s corridors were almost empty; the echo of a slammed locker rang out.

And then it struck him, the answer. He would retain the answer only long enough to write the exam. It was sunny outside and the trees were full of small new leaves, an innocent green that would get darker as the summer wore on. The summer started bright and many things were going to happen because high school would be over, but they had not happened yet. John and his classmates were in a queue. Waiting for things to happen.

The old hag still came to John in his sleep, but less often, and he accepted it. There was monstrous sadness in the world, and you had to look it in the eye.