Friend of My Youth (6 page)

He is there, he’s there first; she can see one eye of the Mercury in the deep cedar shade. It’s like hitting water when you’re dead of heat and scratched and bitten all over from picking berries in the summer bush—the lapping sweetness of it, the cool kindness soaking up all your troubles in its sudden depths. She gets the van parked and fluffs out her hair and jumps out, tries the door to show it’s locked, else he’ll send her running back, just like Cornelius—are you sure you locked the van? She walks across the little sunny space, the leaf-scattered ground, seeing herself walk, in her tight white pants and turquoise top and low-slung white belt and high heels, her bag over her shoulder. A shapely woman, with fair, freckled skin and blue eyes rimmed with blue shadow and liner, screwed up appealingly against any light. Her reddish-blond hair—touched up yesterday—catching the sun like a crown of petals. She wears heels just for this walk, just for this moment of crossing the road with his eyes on her, the extra bit of pelvic movement and leg length they give her.

Often, often, they’ve made love in his car, right here at their meeting place, though they always keep telling each other to wait. Stop; wait till we get to the trailer. “Wait” means the opposite of what it says, after a while. Once, they started as they drove. Brenda slipped off her pants and pulled up her loose summer skirt, not saying a word, looking straight ahead, and they ended up stopping beside the highway, taking a shocking
risk. Now when they pass this spot, she always says something like “Don’t go off the road here,” or “Somebody should put up a warning sign.”

“Historical marker,” Neil says.

They have a history of passion, the way families have a history, or people who have gone to school together. They don’t have much else. They’ve never eaten a meal with each other, or seen a movie. But they’ve come through some complicated adventures together, and dangers—not just of the stopping-on-the-highway kind. They’ve taken risks, surprising each other, always correctly. In dreams you can have the feeling that you’ve had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it’s really nothing that simple. You know that there’s a whole underground system that you call “dreams,” having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar—where you are now, where you’ve always been. That was the way it was with them and sex, going somewhere like that, and they understood the same things about it and trusted each other, so far.

Another time on the highway, Brenda saw a white convertible approaching, an old white Mustang convertible with the top down—this was in the summer—and she slid to the floor.

“Who’s in that car?” she said. “Look! Quick! Tell me.”

“Girls,” Neil said. “Four or five girls. Out looking for guys.”

“My daughter,” Brenda said, scrambling up again. “Good thing I wasn’t wearing my seat belt.”

“You got a daughter old enough to drive? You got a daughter owns a convertible?”

“Her friend owns it. Lorna doesn’t drive yet. But she could—she’s sixteen.”

She felt there were things in the air then that he could have said, that she hoped he wouldn’t. The things men feel obliged to say about young girls.

“You could have one that age yourself,” she said. “Maybe you do and don’t know it. Also, she lied to me. She said she was going to play tennis.”

Again he didn’t say anything she hoped not to hear, any sly reminder about lies. A danger past.

All he said was, “Easy. Take it easy. Nothing happened.”

She had no way of knowing how much he understood of her feelings at that moment, or if he understood anything. They almost never mentioned that part of her life. They never mentioned Cornelius, though he was the one Neil talked to the first time he came to the Furniture Barn. He came to look for a bicycle—just a cheap bike to ride on the country roads. They had no bikes around at that time, but he stayed and talked to Cornelius for a while, about the kind he wanted, ways of repairing or improving that kind, how they should watch out for one. He said he would drop by again. He did that, very soon, and only Brenda was there. Cornelius had gone to the house to lie down; it was one of his bad days. Neil and Brenda made everything clear to each other then, without saying anything definite. When he phoned and asked her to have a drink with him, in a tavern on the lakeshore road, she knew what he was asking and she knew what she would answer.

She told him she hadn’t done anything like this before. That was a lie in one way and in another way true.

During store hours, Maria didn’t let one sort of transaction interfere with another. Everybody paid as usual. She didn’t behave any differently; she was still in charge. The boys knew that they had some bargaining power, but they were never sure how much. A dollar. Two dollars. Five. It wasn’t as if she had to depend on one or two of them. There were always several friends outside, waiting and willing, when she took one of them into the shed before she caught the bus home. She warned them that she would stop dealing with them if they talked, and for a while they
believed her. She didn’t hire them regularly at first, or all that often.

That was at first. Over a few months’ time, things began to change. Maria’s needs increased. The bargaining got to be more open and obstreperous. The news got out. Maria’s powers were being chipped, then hammered, away.

Come on, Maria
,
give me a ten. Me, too. Maria
,
give me a ten, too. Come on, Maria
,
you know me
.

Twenty, Maria
.
Give me twenty. Come on. Twenty bucks. You owe me, Maria
.
Come on, now. You don’t want me to tell. Come on, Maria
.

A twenty, a twenty, a twenty
. Maria is forking over. She is going to the shed every night. And if that isn’t bad enough for her, some boys start refusing. They want the money first. They take the money and then they say no. They say she never paid them. She paid them, she paid them in front of witnesses, and all the witnesses deny that she did. They shake their heads, they taunt her.
No. You never paid him. I never saw you. You pay me now and I’ll go. I promise I will. I’ll go. You pay me twenty, Maria
.

And the older boys, who have learned from their younger brothers what is going on, are coming up to her at the cash register and saying, “How about me, Maria? You know me, too. Come on, Maria, how about a twenty?” Those boys never go to the shed with her, never. Did she think they would? They never even promise, they just ask her for money.
You know me a long time, Maria
. They threaten, they wheedle.
Aren’t I your friend, too, Maria?

Nobody was Maria’s friend.

Maria’s matronly, watchful calm was gone—she looked wild and sullen and mean. She gave them looks full of hate, but she continued giving them money. She kept handing over the bills. Not even trying to bargain, or to argue or refuse, anymore. In a rage she did it—a silent rage. The more they taunted her, the more readily the twenty-dollar bills flew out of the till. Very little, perhaps nothing, was done to earn them now.

They’re stoned all the time, Neil and his friends. All the time, now that they have this money. They see sweet streams of atoms flowing in the Formica tabletops. Their colored souls are shooting out under their fingernails. Maria has gone crazy, the store is bleeding money. How can this go on? How is it going to end? Maria must be into the strongbox now; the till at the end of the day wouldn’t have enough for her. And all the time her mother keeps on baking buns and making pierogi, and the father keeps sweeping the sidewalk and greeting the customers. Nobody has told them. They go on just the same.

They had to find out on their own. They found a bill that Maria hadn’t paid—something like that, somebody coming in with an unpaid bill—and they went to get the money to pay it, and they found that there was no money. The money wasn’t where they kept it, in the safe or strongbox or wherever, and it wasn’t anywhere else—the money was gone. That was how they found out.

Maria had succeeded in giving away everything. All they had saved, all their slowly accumulated profits, all the money on which they operated their business. Truly, everything. They could not pay the rent now, they could not pay the electricity bill or their suppliers. They could not keep on running the Confectionery. At least they believed they couldn’t. Maybe they simply had not the heart to go on.

The store was locked. A sign went up on the door: “
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
.” Nearly a year went by before the place was reopened. It had been turned into a laundromat.

People said it was Maria’s mother, that big, meek, bent-over woman, who insisted on bringing charges against her daughter. She was scared of the English language and the cash register, but she brought Maria into court. Of course, Maria could only be charged as a juvenile, and she could only be sent to a place for young offenders, and nothing could be done about the boys at all. They all lied anyway—they said it wasn’t them. Maria’s parents must have found jobs, they must have gone on living in
Victoria, because Lisa did. She still swam at the Y, and in a few years she was working at Eaton’s, in Cosmetics. She was very glamorous and haughty by that time.

Neil always has vodka and orange juice for them to drink. That’s Brenda’s choice. She read somewhere that orange juice replenishes the vitamin C that the liquor leeches away, and she hopes the vodka really can’t be detected on your breath. Neil tidies up the trailer, too—or so she thinks, because of the paper bag full of beer cans leaning against the cupboard, a pile of newspapers pushed together, not really folded, a pair of socks kicked into a corner. Maybe his housemate does it. A man called Gary, whom Brenda has never met or seen a picture of, and wouldn’t know if they met on the street. Would he know her? He knows she comes here, he knows when; does he even know her name? Does he recognize her perfume, the smell of her sex, when he comes home in the evening? She likes the trailer, the way nothing in it has been made to look balanced or permanent. Things set down just wherever they will be convenient. No curtains or placemats, not even a pair of salt and pepper shakers—just the salt box and pepper tin, the way they come from the store. She loves the sight of Neil’s bed—badly made, with a rough plaid blanket and a flat pillow, not a marriage bed or a bed of illness, comfort, complication. The bed of his lust and sleep, equally strenuous and oblivious. She loves the life of his body, so sure of its rights. She wants commands from him, never requests. She wants to be his territory.

It’s only in the bathroom that the dirt bothers her a bit, like anybody else’s dirt, and she wishes they’d done a better job of cleaning the toilet and the washbasin.

They sit at the table to drink, looking out through the trailer window at the steely, glittering, choppy water of the lake. Here the trees, exposed to lake winds, are almost bare. Birch bones and poplars stiff and bright as straw frame the water. There
may be snow in another month. Certainly in two months. The seaway will close, the lake boats will be tied up for the winter, there’ll be a wild landscape of ice thrown up between the shore and the open water. Neil says he doesn’t know what he’ll do, once the work on the beach is over. Maybe stay on, try to get another job. Maybe go on unemployment insurance for a while, get a snowmobile, enjoy the winter. Or he could go and look for work somewhere else, visit friends. He has friends all over the continent of North America and out of it. He has friends in Peru.

“So what happened?” Brenda says. “Don’t you have any idea what happened to Maria?”

Neil says no, he has no idea.

The story won’t leave Brenda alone; it stays with her like a coating on the tongue, a taste in the mouth.

“Well, maybe she got married,” she says. “After she got out. Lots of people get married who are no beauties. That’s for sure. She might’ve lost weight and be looking good even.”

“Sure,” says Neil. “Maybe have guys paying her, instead of the other way round.”

“Or she might still be just sitting in one of those places. One of those places where they put people.”

Now she feels a pain between her legs. Not unusual after one of these sessions. If she were to stand up at this moment, she’d feel a throb there, she’d feel the blood flowing back down through all the little veins and arteries that have been squashed and bruised, she’d feel herself throbbing like a big swollen blister.

She takes a long drink and says, “So how much money did you get out of her?”

“I never got anything,” Neil says. “I just knew these other guys who did. It was my brother Jonathan made the money off her. I wonder what he’d say if I reminded him now.”

“Older guys, too—you said older guys, too. Don’t tell me you just sat back and watched and never got your share.”

“That’s what I
am
telling you. I never got anything.”

Brenda clicks her tongue, tut-tut, and empties her glass and
moves it around on the table, looking skeptically at the wet circles.

“Want another?” Neil says. He takes the glass out of her hand.

“I’ve got to go,” she says. “Soon.” You can make love in a hurry if you have to, but you need time for a fight. Is that what they’re starting on? A fight? She feels edgy but happy. Her happiness is tight and private, not the sort that flows out from you and fuzzes everything up and makes you good-naturedly careless about what you say. The very opposite. She feels light and sharp and unconnected. When Neil brings her back a full glass, she takes a drink from it at once, to safeguard this feeling.

“You’ve got the same name as my husband,” she says. “It’s funny I never thought of that before.”

She has thought of it before. She just hasn’t mentioned it, knowing it’s not something Neil would like to hear.

“Cornelius isn’t the same as Neil,” he says.

“It’s Dutch. Some Dutch people shorten it to Neil.”

“Yeah, but I’m not Dutch, and I wasn’t named Cornelius, just Neil.”