Going Down Swinging (5 page)

Took you three years, a barrel of sleeping pills and a whole lot of black eyes to get out of that.

After dinner, Larry volunteers the two of you to wash the dishes.

He’s drying.
So, what’s the story, morning glory? I hear rumours, but I should probably get it from the horse’s mouth
, he says.

Rumours, eh? You been talking to those miserable bitches in my neighbourhood?
and you scrub at the bottom of a pot.

Jesus, you’ve got a mouth worse than mine now. What the hell are you doing these days anyway? You’re not teaching. Are you going to start teaching again or what?

I’ve thought about it. I’m just—I’m not up to it now. Danny’s buggered off, and—well, I kicked him out, truth be told. He hardly slept at home anyway. I figured we may as well go through the formality of having him actually move his belongings out. And
—Take a breath, don’t know whether to just let it all hang out or what. This is Larry here, after all; he must’ve done a lot worse than you have.
And Charlie’s gone. When Danny and I—

I thought Charlie was in a foster home still, from the last time she ran away
.

She was. She took off when Danny left the first time. Then he came back. Well, he got out. He
—Do you want to let it hang this far out?
He did two years in Kingston for grand larceny. Everything went to hell while he was gone. And when he got out, we tried to make it work again. I didn’t know what else to do
. You hand Larry another clean wet plate. It all sounds so pathetic when recounted this way. He’s just drying, no
uh huhs
, no nothing. You go on.
So. Danny brought Grace and me out to Toronto from Vancouver and then, when it started sinking in what a mess Charlie’d become, he got it in his head that he wanted her there too—he raised her for the most part anyway, Jake was never around—so Charlie came out to Toronto and … Ah. It didn’t work. I don’t think anybody’s heart was in it anyway. Charlie’s been running around on the streets for two years now and she’s not about to let me
or
him tell her what to do. I think she went to school about three days of the six months she was back home and then she just got sick of us again and took off back to Vancouver. Danny actually tried to head her off at the pass at first. He found out what train she was on, caught up with her and dragged her off at a station along the way. Didn’t sound like she put up much of a fight. I think she liked it, I—

Larry’s not moving. He’s got his dishtowel stuffed in a glass and he’s standing there, staring.

You go on. I
think I just didn’t want her back, maybe
, and your voice breaks.
I did, I did want her, but I didn’t know what to do with her. When they threw Danny in the joint two years ago, I just—I lost control of her. Everything’s just such a f(ee-iz)ucking mess
. Larry’s shaking his head now, putting one glass in the cupboard, picking up another.
What?
you say,
why are you looking at me like that?

Ah
. He shrugs.
You. You listened to yourself lately? You sound like one of them. You’re an elementary school teacher, or you were, and now you sound like a jailhouse rat. I’ll tell you something, since we’re standing here playing Truth or Dare and all: I looked up Danny’s record. I made a couple calls and, uh—huh. Christ. He was wanted for everything from petty theft to—he was charged with kidnapping and extortion a few years ago, you know, but they couldn’t make it stick. Whole thing fell apart. I kept wondering if you knew. I thought, she couldn’t know. How could she knowingly hang around with this kind of garbage? He just did time for conning old people into giving him their life savings. Did you know that? Did you know he was stealing from eighty-, ninety-year-old ladies?

You’re shaking now and shoving your hands deep in the dirty soapy water, gasping back the tears and hysterics that threaten up your throat.
No
, that’s all you can say. Not really. You knew some things. Cops came and searched your place once while Danny was out. One of the other wives called to let you know they’d just left her place. It was all—well, what could you—it was better than being alone—he was better than the one before him.

Remember how repulsed you were by the women in that crowd, Danny’s crowd, the look of their skin, the way they spoke. Scenes from the gutter, you thought. And then you started to feel foolish around them, the way they mocked you, called you a squarejohn broad. Twenty-eight years old and there you were trying to act cool and tough. Trying to show you could be bad as all hell. Wonder if Larry knows about your record for stealing a steak and a half-pound of butter for Chrissake. God, they laughed at you for that, all the hookers and girlfriends of thieves and arm-breakers, card sharps and hustlers.

Thirteen years later and now look—you’re a squarejohn broad with a jailhouse mouth. Nice combo, lady.

Larry puts the dishtowel down and takes your shoulder, dances you around so that his back’s against the sink and you’re against his chest like a child or a lover. He holds you and says,
You’re better than this, sweetheart
Rests his cheek against your head.
Whenever I come back to this place, I start seeing what turned us all into such assholes
.

You shake your head no in his chest.
Don’t say that
.

OK. I’m just saying … look, you’ve got Grace still and she’s a great kid. You’re going to have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, honey. I’m talking from experience and I’ll tell you, you’ve got a little Wilfred in you, Eilleen, we all do; start using it to make your life work instead of screwing it up. If you’ve gotta get out of Toronto, do it, do whatever it takes, just don’t stay in this life of yours, the way it is … don’t do it, sweetheart
. He rubs your back while you sniffle, tilts your chin up and says,
Ah, you’re no big sister, you’re my little girl
. And you laugh and duck your head.

Grace Two
JUNE 1973

T
WICE, AN AMBULANCE
showed up and took her away, unconscious. Frank and Janet from upstairs called them both times, before I knew what was going on and, both times, they hung around at the front door, hard-faced, telling the ambulance guys how old Mum was and what she took. I told them twenty-eight and Janet came behind and told them forty-one. I told them aspirin and Janet said, “At least a bottle of wine and God knows how many of these,” handing them pill bottles, some empty and some rattling. I wouldn’t look at Janet afterwards. She was a traitor and she may’s well know it, I figured.

Stupid Frank and Janet. When my dad moved out, he put a fridge and a hot plate in my sister Charlie’s old room and rented it out to these newlyweds called Frank and Janet. They almost never came out of their room and mostly you wouldn’t even know they were there, except for sometimes when it was quiet, you could hear a whimpery noise, sort of like a puppy or a parrot or something.

Anyways, after that, Frank and Janet left. Because of me, probably, me ignoring them. But they deserved it and they shouldn’t have been in Charlie’s room anyhow. But then, just when it started getting good, with them gone and Charlie’s room empty in case she decided to come back to Toronto, Mum got in a big fight with my dad over the phone and she was madder than when she told him to get out in the first place. She spat out one last thing and smashed down the receiver, so I asked her what he said.

She stared at the rug. “Your father’s got short arms and deep pockets.”

“What?”

“He’s kicking us out is what it amounts to.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s moving us into some dive of his down on Gerrard Street. He’d rather his child live in a dump than forfeit the jacked-up rent he’ll get for this place.” Our house on Woodfield was pretty nice, like other families’ houses, like with a matching rug and toilet-seat cover in the bathroom and big long curtains in the living room and wall-to-wall carpeting. Mum liked wall-to-wall carpeting cuz of us seeming more rich and cuz it keeps your feet warm when you get up in the morning.

“Is he still giving you your ’lowance?” Mum got five bucks a week for a ’lowance when my dad lived with us and Charlie used to get two and I got seventy-five cents. It was mostly mine I wanted to know about, but Mum was in a crabby mood so I was being not-selfish.

“Screw him and his
lounce
… We don’t need his crap.” We did so. I thought she should’ve acted nice to him at least for that. And maybe even ask if we could get Charlie’s still. We could’ve split it maybe.

“Do you think Charlie’ll come back again?” I wished I hadn’t asked that. I kept feeling like I was going to cry when we talked about my sister. Every time I heard a plane growling overhead, I imagined it was full Charlie. That she was coming back. I pictured her up there fidgeting in the smoking section, complaining about the food, her big deer eyes staring tough on anyone who rubbed her the wrong way. I saw her in tight hip-hugger jeans with a paisley blouse, and long hair hanging loose in her eyes, thinking about me and singing, “Sock it to me, baby, let it all hang out.” But every plane kept going and took her someplace else and she’d press her hands against the window, crying, and I’d lie in my bed and cry back, like we were talking to each other with
ESP
,
kind of.

“I don’t know,” Mum told me. And I started getting a strangle in my stomach. Charlie was sixteen—old enough to do anything she wanted. I wondered if she’d come back or if, from now on, there’d just be us two.

Mum took a breath the way she did when she was trying to get her mind out of a bad memory.

The new house was on Gerrard, the closest big street. It was beside an old empty gas station and around half the size of our old house. There weren’t any bedrooms, just a place between the kitchen and front room that seemed more of a room to eat than sleep. We crammed Mum’s bed in there, though, and slept together. The front room was dark and traffic-loud with a kind of greasy-looking wood floor. The kitchen was the last room at the back. It smelled like basement, like the rest of the place but stronger and wetter. A curtain went around a toilet and shower in the corner of the kitchen. The shower stall was tin and inside there was a fight in the corners between the rust and the mould.

We had to share the house with Dad’s other renters, Nelly and her son Dale—they had the upstairs, we had the down. Nelly was mean-looking with kind of see-through skin that always looked a bit dirty. She had egg-coloured hair—white bits and yellow bits that she brushed and hairsprayed hard, down the back of her neck. I always wanted to lift just one piece to see how much would come with it.

Nelly’s son Dale bugged me the same way Nelly bugged Mum —they were like the kids at school that win every fight because they don’t care if they bash up their own selves or not. Dale had a couple years on me, he was nine I think, and had reddy-black hair and a cowlick in the same place as mine, except his stayed shoved off to the side and sproinged up only when he had one of his mad yelling attacks at squirrels or crows or telephone poles. His arms and legs were always jerking and looking for stuff to break.

It was summer again and I was boring; school was out and I felt like I had no friends any more. I decided to take the bus to the Riverdale Zoo and wander around. I spent practically all day staring down in the bear cages that were really just super-deep cement boxes in the ground. The bears were mangy and looked lonesome, walking round and round under the world—they only saw us when they looked up for sky. At lunchtime, zookeepers threw down bags of white bread to them, the kind I wasn’t allowed to have because Mum said it had no nutritional value. I watched and wished for handfuls of bear through the black bars over their holes; I wanted to get down there and curl up in their dark fur and lie in the corner with our noses tucked together so tight we wouldn’t notice the lousy kids over us throwing stuff even though the signs said not to. When the sun started going down and making everything yellowy, I figured I better get home.

Back to being bored cuz of there being nothing good to do at home any more. I never went to the park at the top of our old street once since we moved and the friends I had six blocks ago seemed a million years away—I couldn’t remember what it was we used to do and if they’d still want to do it when I got there, TV was boring. I tried playing with Shadow but he was boring—he was more Charlie’s cat than mine anyhow. And Mum was super-boring: she was lying on her bed again, like scribble on a crumpled sheet. Seemed like she was always sick and sad. When she wasn’t flat on her back, she sang in the kitchen with Patsy Cline or Julie London or sometimes alone into a tape recorder. Lots of “Crazy” and “Cry Me a River,” or else a song she made up about love and men and needing a man. And at the end of each one she’d cry. I almost hated her for not being fixed by my I-love-yous, but I still fitted myself in her lap sometimes and rocked back and forth with her while she sang.

I went back out of the house and stood on our side of the chain-link fence. Dale from upstairs was over on the old gas station side, on his knees, sharpening a stick with a paring knife. He looked up while he was hacking and made the knife hit the ground. He squinted and said, “Whatdya lookin’ at?”

So I shrugged and told him, “Nothin’.”

He held up the stick. “Yeah you are, you’re lookin at a murder weapon.” I didn’t say anything; he looked at the point of his stick and started jabbing the air. “Better watch your fuckin cat, kid.”

I looked over my shoulder, worried my mum heard and afraid Shadow was out. I hated the push in his voice. I tried to make my voice hard and told him, “Better not touch my cat or you’re dead.”

Dale made a phony howly laugh and went, “You and whose army?” Then he said, “Hey, what’s your name again, kid? I forget your name.”

Grace.

“Oh yeah, like ‘Hey Grace, come sit on my face’?”