Going Down Swinging (17 page)

Oh, maybe these, these crazy-big wide-leg pants you got last week. They’re kind of dressy, though—God, why do you always do this, buy something with no idea as to how you’re going to wear it. They looked nice in the store, but what are you supposed to put with them? They’re silky black and the legs must be two or three feet wide when you hold them out. Maybe a turtleneck. Might look interesting, contrast the loose and silky with the tight and busty. Throw on a couple strings of beads.—Time!: Seven-twenty-five. Hurry up. Ah, he’ll be late. They’re always late. Go with the silky black things and the turtleneck. Oh Christ, it’s summer, who are you, the grim reaper?—put a blouse with them, a white blouse and a belt, where the hell’s that gold belt?—

11:40
p.m. Feeling good, it was a nice date and he walked you to the door. He took you for dinner and to a movie and bought you popcorn—love seeing movies, why don’t you see more movies? When you get back, the lights are all on in the apartment; Grace is already back upstairs, on the couch reading.

Hey Petunia, how’s tricks?

OK. Did you have fun with George of the Jungle?

Toss your coat on the armchair, go to the couch, pick your child’s feet up by the toes, sit where they were.
Yup
. Let them fall in your lap.
And I told him you call him that, by the way
.

You did? Did it bug ‘im or did he laugh?

He got a good chortle out of it
.

Did you go see a movie?

Yup. Saw
The Sting.
It was just terrific. Paul Newman is positively the most beautiful hunk of man on this earth. And we had the loveliest dinner, I had a big steak and a baked potato and asparagus and this deliriously good chocolate cake for dessert
.

Do you like him?

Kind of. I don’t know. He’s like a big bear. I don’t know if I think of him like that. I’ll see how I feel. He’s nice, though. You’d like him, I think
.

Did you kiss ’im?

Little kiss. No big deal. Next time I’ll introduce you and you can tell me what you think. So, how come you’re up here?

Mm, got bored. We watched
Rockford Files
and then
Night Stalker
and then Josh started drawing stuff and I just wanted to read my book
.

Uh huhh, let me see. Said the blind man to his deaf daughter
.

As he picked up his hammer and saw—I don’t get that
.

What’s
Go Ask Alice?—
this isn’t that thing with all the drugs and crap, is it? I told you I didn’t want you reading that
.

Why! Everybody’s reading it. They already read it. Mummy! Give it back
.

Give it back nothing—I’ll have a look at it and I’ll see if I want you reading it
.

That’s stupid! Sadie already read it and—

Oh Sadie, now there’s a good judge of literature. That’s just who I want overseeing what my kid gets subjected to
.

It’s not subjecting me. God
.

And quit saying God, it sounds terrible
.

Well, Jesus Christ—I just—

Grace! Not Jesus Christ either. For a well-bred little girl, you’re sounding more like a little rounder these days!

Well, you interrupted me, what I was reading, and it’s not fair, you never let me do nothing
.

Anything.
And piffle on that—for goodness sake, I let you get away with murder, no other kid you know gets to do what you get to—you saw
Earthquake
last week, didn’t you? Can smartass Sadie go downtown all by herself and see a movie like you can? No, I think not. It’s going on midnight, how many other eight-year-olds do you know up at this time of night?
and you stop talking as you open up
Go Ask Alice
to: “Never had anything ever been so beautiful. I was a part of every single instrument, literally a part. Each note had a character, shape and colour all its very own and seemed to be entirely separate from the rest of the score so that I could consider its relationship to the whole composition, before the next note sounded. My mind possessed the wisdom of the ages …” And she wants to read this. “… I felt great, free, abandoned, a different, improved, perfected specimen of a different, improved, perfected species. It was wild! It was beautiful! It really was.”

Christ, what the hell was she on? Bloody kids think they invented euphoria.

Great, this is all you need, like you haven’t had enough trouble with Charlie popping her Black Beauties and smoking pot and god knows what else.

You pull your brain like warm gum out of the book; Grace is still babbling about something or other, something about tin cans, and you interrupt,
You are not reading this, you’re too young
.

What! I’m not too young. I am not! All the other kids read it already
.

Well, you can bet your boots their mothers didn’t know. It glorifies drugs and you’re too young to discern the difference between fantasy and reality
. That makes two of you, but you say,
Come on, time for bed
.

The next morning you’re in the kitchen making up a recipe for rice flour pancakes. Grace is lying on her stomach on the living-room floor watching Saturday morning cartoons. You’ve been reading about wheat allergies lately, how lots of people have them. Symptoms from hyperactivity to inability to concentrate and irritability—you’ve noticed Grace being irritable lately and she’s been doing this weird thing where she clenches her fists and eyes and teeth at once. She looks as if she’s going to have a fit. Then relaxes. You’ve walked in on her a couple times and caught her clenching everything so tight, her whole everything shook. Sometimes she forgets herself and does it when she’s watching TV with you. Asked her what she was doing and why.
Making everything shut as tight as it can go as hard as I can till it hits the top—like that game thing you hit with a hammer and then the metal thing goes up and if you hit it really hard, it rings the bell
. And why? Because she likes it.

The way she looks, though, when it’s happening—like she’s out of her ever-lovin’ mind. You told her you were going to take her to see a doctor, that maybe she had some stuff she needed to talk about with somebody. You asked Doctor Peters about a referral. He told you not to work yourself into a tizzy; seen it before, just a stage, it’s normal.

But maybe if you changed her diet. Maybe she has allergies. Maybe wheat. The phone rings.

Grace jumps and runs for it. It’s Pavlovian; only thing that tears her brain away from a television. Last weekend you bellowed to make yourself heard and she had the gall to turn around and
shh
you. Shhed by an eight-year-old. She never used to behave like that, it’s that Sadie’s influence, her and her whole crazy family. Probably her on the phone now. Although it sounds like Grace is answering a survey.
Yes, no, yeah, yeah. ’K, just a sec
and yells,
It’s George
.

You take the phone,
Hello
into it and hear
Hello there, you lovely thing, what ya up to this mornin?
He does have a bit of a Maritime accent, didn’t notice it as much when he was standing in front of you.

Oh, not much, just puttering around. I’m attempting a new pancake recipe
.

Oh well, why don’t you save it for tomorrow and lemme take the two of you out for pancakes. Or bacon and eggs or whatever you like
.

Oh! Uh, well. That’s quite an offer. I guess I haven’t actually started mixing anything. Hang on—Hey Petunia, how’d you like to go out for breakfast and meet George?

The Road Runners
on and she was just about to get up and change the channel anyway, so she willingly turns her head, gives you a suspicious sort of look.
When?

I don’t know. Now. Just—when?
you ask the receiver, almost giddy. Can’t remember the last time someone called on the weekend and said let’s go for breakfast.

He says,
How’s about forty-five minutes or an hour? Does that give you enough time?

That’s sounds just fine—Grace: an hour!
She nods. You palm the mouthpiece away from your head.
So why don’t you go jump in the tub and get ready
. She
says yeah
, doesn’t move. Bring the receiver back.
OK then, we’ll see you soon
. You hang up and attempt a cheerful whip-cracking.

The three of you are in Denny’s, smiling into plates the waitress just set in front of you. Well, two of you are; Grace is busy separating food so that nothing touches. Fifteen minutes ago she gave the waitress very explicit instructions about her eggs so they would arrive the same as when you make them: Not scrambled, she doesn’t like them fluffy, or runny, not over-easy, definitely not poached—stirred, she wants.
Do it like you’re going to do the reguhr fried kind with the yoke in the middle but then break it up with a fork and stir it around. And don’t add milk or anything. And cook it both sides, flip it over so that nothings raw or moving around still. Do you get it? You
were slightly embarrassed:
Oh for goodness sake, Grace, just order pancakes why don’t you
. But George cut in,
No, she’s doin good, let her go. And what would Her Royal Highness like to drink?
and the waitress laughed and maybe you should just calm down. After she got it all down on her little pad, she went off to shuffle the chef’s brain to your child’s way of thinking.

Meanwhile, Grace has warmed up to George considerably. Not that she’s speaking to him yet, but you can tell by the curl at the corners of her mouth as she moves the edges of her stirred eggs as far as possible from the hash browns without touching bacon. And in her eyes. They rest on him now; before, they looked beside him, above him, into her hands when he spoke.

So, Madam, your mum tells me you like horses. Do you ever get a chance to go riding or go out to the racetrack?

He’s hit the nail on the head so hard she nearly falls off her chair.
Yes. I mean no, but I want to. I watch them on TV sometimes and um, yeah. I watched the Kentucky Derby on TV when it was on
.

The Kentucky! You’re more up on things than I thought. Gees, a friend of mine put a bet on the horse who won that, what was his name?
George squints, thinking. He’s got his forearms on either side of his plate, hunched a little across the table toward Grace.

Foolish Pleasure
, and she draws it out as if she’s doing an ad for something so decadent, it should be illegal.

George chuckles.
Gees, I think she’s right, that’s the name
. And he shakes his head and picks up his coffee.

I remember because I picked him, he was pretty and he had a big bum—I heard they go faster when they have big bums. And plus I liked his name
. George is laughing and then you remember something about it yourself, telling Grace to stop being foolish and take out the garbage and her reply:
It would be my foolish pleasure
. Now you know where that came from; one down, ten thousand and four strange replies to go.

Grace Six
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 1974

A
ROUND WHEN
she met George, Mum bought a twin-size bed and put it in the living room. I still fell asleep in her bed but usually I woke up in the living room. And then George moved in and from then on I slept always in the living room. At first it bugged me. Cuz mostly it seemed like they were friends, I mean not all kissy-kissy or anything, so I wondered what they were doing in there that they had to be alone and have the door be closed. But I suppose it was cuz of Mum’s thing about how adults need adult company like kids need kid company. And plus I didn’t want to not like George.

George was different from most of the guys my mum knew —the ones I saw, anyway. He had a slow for-sure way of moving and talking. Kind of like a big old horse—like in
Black Beauty
, there was a big old horse who gave advice and didn’t shy away from bushes or dogs or stuff. And George was like that, like he wouldn’t just crumple up—you could climb on him and ask him anything you could think of and he always had a good answer. Even if it was a guess, he’d say that, and it’d be a good guess too, and you’d think, yeah, I bet that’s it. One time he said that Mum was a bird on a branch and he got that right too. She was, kind of, and every once in a while it seemed like she took a good peck at him just to get a rise. But George would just breathe his deep strong horse breaths and give her a deep old horse look until she gave up and flapped down the hall to the bedroom. I wondered sometimes if she didn’t think much of him, the way she’d get all tisky and snappy, as if he was a dopey kid or something. Or maybe it bugged her that he was right a lot and smart, about the things she wasn’t: people and money and the world and the kinds of stuff that twisted them all together. She could string together enough sparkly words to cover a Christmas tree, but George was in the war.