Joyland (14 page)

Tammy peered at him, half slithery-eyed, half-quizzical, then resumed squirming, skimming her skirt with her palm as she tucked her legs up underneath her on the seat.

A sideways glance. “D’you want to play now?” she asked.

Chris shook his head. “The opposite of existence.”

The highway slowly rose, and yellow fields spread on either side as the car surfaced. Crossing into the United States was no different from driving in Canada, except everything skewed slightly. Someone had come along and adjusted the knob on the picture so the colours weren’t quite themselves: rude reds, excessive purples. Trees weren’t cut as far back from the freeways. Exit signs were blue instead of green. Every time they crossed the border, he and Tammy were allowed to unfasten their seat belts. There was no law to force them to protect themselves. In America, it was just freer. The Michigan licence plate slogan was “Great Lake State” to Ontario’s “Keep It Beautiful.” Tremendous seas of fabric rippled over car dealership parking lots, the stars and stripes forever waving, in competition with the little triangular neons farting
(flap-flap-flappity-flap)
down below, over dazzling new windshields swabbed with white: $6995, $5995, $4995!

Beside I-95, the giant Marlboro man angled between the trees in his cowboy hat and plaid shirt, always looking off into the distance. The cars on the freeway had passed beneath him for decades, filling his matte billboard lungs with exhaust.

Chris stared at the back of his father’s head.

After the funeral, a fine layer of dirt seemed to have settled over everything. Where had it come from? All of the cars in the lot were covered in it.

Chris eased out of his jacket and folded it over his arm, yanked his tie loose. Across the street on the steps of the funeral home, his parents stood, smoking. It wasn’t the first time that summer since they had “quit,” yet the thin wisps of smoke expelled from their mouths seemed intentionally proof of something. Of breaking down. It rose up, feathered away. Tammy wandered back and forth in front of them, a blue-and-white dot on the green grass. The cars in the lot bore funeral flags on their hoods, though they hadn’t before. Chris wondered guiltily if they could keep them. In another half-second, he had justified it to himself. He would display it prominently, on his shelf, or in some other place of honour — like an urn full of ashes. Solemnity told Chris to fold and refold the jacket that hung over his arm.

In a few minutes they would proceed to the cemetery, a long line nosing its way through the streets, their car in the lead — The Family — traffic clearing for them, the world parting like the Red Sea.

And all the cars in the procession would be dirty.

The thin film appeared to have fallen across hoods and windshields within the hour they had been parked there. Chris glanced around, searching for nearby construction or some other source. The boulevard stretched in two directions, past tidy white mid-western houses with wide porches and flagpoles. There was only the kicked-up dust of cars going by. Four lanes and a turning lane. It couldn’t possibly be enough. Slowly, Chris spun 360, looked up for some answer. There was none.

He broke the pellicle of grit with his finger, wrote upon the Lane car door. Immediately he regretted having done so. Swiping his palm over it, he erased his name, left a clean trench where it had been.

PLAYER 2

The Lane car journeyed home, a blue dot against the green earth, the black pavement. In the dark, the trees were popcorn-headed, explosions on thin bodies. A collection of photographs of boys in suspenders. Little men. That’s what Mrs. Lane had chosen to take away.
Let me see . . .
Tammy had whispered, leaning over her mother’s chair. A box of black-and-white images with crinkle-cut edges, photographs from 1947, ’50, ’55 — borders bearing the dates in green ink. Mr. Lane as a white-robed girlish baby. As an eight- or nine-year-old, already solemn, standing next to Uncle Bill, arms around one another’s small white-shirted shoulders. As a high school graduate, the gown a thick black shroud. Tammy lay curled in the back seat, across two-thirds of it; Chris upright at her feet. She watched the sliding sky between the blue Bakelite window frames. The car hummed, held her.

She had chosen the strangest things to take from the apartment: a jar of pennies, a decorative Dutch drinking jug from someone’s vacation, a thick glass paperweight, a deck of cards. Cool grown-up things, the kinds of things she thought Chris would be likely to fight her for, though he hadn’t taken a thing. He would regret it later, she knew.

In the Arrow Books club, it seemed that decades and decades of girls had discovered important family secrets after poking into places they shouldn’t. In the third dimension, Tammy the Spy was defeated by Cheez-Whiz-celery sticks and Vernors. The one thing a person could never know was the past: it was gone. Grandpa Lane lived in an apartment; there was no attic, no workshop, no cellar, no barn. Uncle Bill and her father stood on the balcony half the afternoon smoking cigarettes and drinking miniscule bottles of bitters, the only alcohol in Grandpa Lane’s apartment. Whatever they said out there hung among the branches of the trees beneath the rail.

“Come over here,” Uncle Bill had called to Tammy between one-bite sandwiches brought by Grandpa’s upstairs neighbour — American cheese, ham and lettuce with butter on white, quarter-cut the way Tammy liked them.

“You see here?”

Through the balcony sheers, his square head was squeeze-faced; inside, he was overly jovial, open. He gestured to the house Tammy had only seen in the photos, a long laneway in fall, her father teen-aged-gawky, none too neat, leaning on the mailbox, grinning, pulling on the metal flag. 1960, according to the edges.

“I was already in Indiana when this was taken, but I got updates, letters from our mother.” When he said
mother
his voice dipped, like the word was made of love instead of letters. Uncle Bill was bigger than her father, and Tammy stood between his legs, leaning back against one, where he squat-sat on the edge of the floral sofa.

“He hated that school bus, she told me. There was a girl he rode with who always wore her curlers. She’d take out her comb and fix her hair on the way to school instead of beforehand. One day, he borrows one of our mother’s scarves, ties it up over his head . . .” Uncle Bill’s thumbs looped under his broad chin, kerchief-knotting the air “. . . gets on the bus, sits behind her, takes out a lipstick, puts it on, takes off his scarf, begins teasing his hair . . . He’s mimicking her, poor girl. Must have hated him. But he hated
that bus.”

Tammy had held the photo carefully along the white frame, peered into stone-grey laughing eyes. It didn’t occur to her that the story was third-hand, that it had passed from her father to his mother, now long dead, to Uncle Bill, and now to her. She had only handed the photo back to Uncle Bill, wondered silently who the girl on the bus was.

Lying in the back seat of the moving car, Tammy closed her eyes and replayed the outlines of fixed moments, scenes she hadn’t seen. She projected them out into the night, into a blank, moving patch of sky.

She lay, not moving, her body like an electrical cord, coiled up on itself. Tammy hadn’t expected this kind of ending. She had come to say goodbye. Sam’s arms lay wrapped around her abdomen, her knees pulled up to her chest. Beneath her was the one remaining piece of furniture in the house, the orange and brown flowered sofa. Sam’s breath
phewed
out of her.

“I thought it wasn’t supposed to hurt,” Tammy said. She peered at Sam from the doorway. Sam was “O.T.R.” She had whispered it into the receiver preceding Tammy’s walk over. “O.T.R.,” Tammy had just gleaned from Joyce, was On the Rag, having one’s period. It was Sam’s first. Tammy didn’t know anyone else who had, except Joyce, and their mothers. Tammy hovered at a relatively safe distance, leaned one hip against the doorway.

“Can you wash your hair?” she said. It came out smug, rather than the quirky, sarcastic comment she’d intended. It was one of the
dumb dumb dumb
questions in the Q&A section of the sex-ed. book Samantha had. One of the girls’ favourite expressions, whenever someone in class asked something they considered irrelevant, Sam and Tammy would nudge one another and whisper, “Will I be able to go swimming?” or, “Can I take a bath? Can I wash my hair?” — apparently all common questions about the kinds of activities one could continue while menstruating.

“Ha, ha.” Sam sat up, glaring.

This wasn’t exactly the
Anne of Green Gables
kindred-spirits farewell Tammy had envisioned. Weren’t they supposed to do something meaningful, like swear their eternal friendship or exchange locks of hair?

The perfect, flat black skipping stone Tammy had brought along for Sam weighed down her shorts’ pocket. Tammy had used a nail to scratch their initials on it, T.L. on one side and S.S. on the other. At Point Pelee the previous summer, the girls had walked all the way out to the end of the peninsula, the southernmost tip of Canada, watched the current swirl around them. Blue surrounded them on three sides. They stood on the narrowest part of the point — a long, brown, crooked finger extended into the unknown, the United States somewhere just beyond their view. Tammy had gathered the stones, and Sam had thrown them. Tammy couldn’t make them skip more than twice, and usually they just went
plunk
and sunk on the first hit. Sam threw for both of them.

Mrs. Sturges came in with Mr. Riley and his twin twenty-year-old sons, Carl and Kevin, a couple of sasquatchy guys with big glasses peeking out from under brown shaggy haircuts. Sam had to get up so they could take the sofa out, load it into the van. She and Tammy stood alone together in the room. Voices drifted from the open door: the men grunting and Mrs. Sturges shouting instructions on how to fit the couch in. Tammy looked at Sam, but Sam just pulled at her underwear, and said the pad was a pain in the butt and gave her a major wedgie.

“Does more come out when you stand up?” Tammy asked, her final attempt to make Sam laugh. This time the reference didn’t even land.

“Yeah, I guess,” Sam said, yanking on the legs of her shorts.

Mrs. Sturges came back inside. She wrapped her arms around Tammy in a big hug.

“You’ve been a good friend to Sam,” she said. “You have to come out as soon as we get Sam’s room fixed up.” She left a chalky coffee-smelling kiss on Tammy’s cheek.

“Mom!”

“All right, all right . . .” Mrs. Sturges kissed Tammy one more time, on the top of her head, then grasped a girl tight on either side of her, shuffling them out of the house. Warren honked the horn, yelled for her to come over and back him out. Mrs. Sturges left them to plant herself at the end of the driveway.

“It’s too hot,” Samantha complained. She walked away from Tammy and stood under one of the two trees in the yard, though they were barely more than saplings. A few leaf-sized shadows were thrown on the grass at Sam’s feet. Sam tipped her head back. “I’ll miss my trees,” she said.

Thin rivers bled from the corners of her eyes, down the curves of her cheeks. They fell between the freckles on her tank-topped shoulders. The air went out of her. Then, without looking back, she ran and climbed up into the cab of the truck beside her mom and Warren. The horn honked, and the truck proceeded slowly down the road. It braked a full three-second stop at the sign, turned the corner, and passed behind the other houses, onto the highway, on its way out to the Beach.

Tammy transferred the stone from her pocket to the driveway. It landed with the Sam initials face down. Tammy kicked it. It skidded out onto the road. She jogged over to it and stared at the dark, perfectly flat shape it made against concrete. She kicked it again. She kicked it all the way home.

When she got there, she saw in the mirror that Mrs. Sturges had left rusty lipstick on her cheek in a strange, open half-circle. It was the same shade as the Crayola Indian Red pencil crayon. It looked like half a valentine. When she went to rub it in, it came off on her fingertips. She stuck them under the tap and watched the water run over the colour, marvelling at how quickly and easily it seemed to wash away.

LEVEL 7:
DEFENDER

PLAYER 1

Chris started the car and pulled it in and out of the driveway. He backed all the way to the edge of the curb, then pulled forward again, until the nose was within a few feet of the garage door. He angled the mirror and watched the green edges of the grass on either side of the driveway, practised staying perfectly within the space between the Lanes’ and the Scotts’. He adjusted the side mirror.