Lemon (6 page)

My plan is to die ignorant. I don't see how knowing the details of
Homo sapiens'
demise is going to improve my quality of life. It's like the kids with cancer on their third round of chemo. They were better off ignorant. By round three they know what's coming and it scares the shit out of them.

Blecher's eating little cheese triangles again. ‘Did you see the girl who won Miss Universe?' she asks me. ‘She's from Toronto. She said she always strives to maintain a positive attitude. She's studying computer technology.'

‘Who isn't?' I say.

‘It's a growing field.'

One of these days the tech world's going to short-circuit and we'll be surrounded by computer geeks who won't know how to grow food or make soap or talk to people.

Blecher leans toward me, still chewing. ‘Limone, do you
want
to graduate from high school?'

I don't react, stare at the teddy-bear music box on her desk.

‘Because if you want to graduate, you're going to have to apply yourself. I was talking to Mr. Huff
and Mr. Lund and we're all agreed that you are
not
meeting your potential.'

That's sweet, the three of them worrying about me. The only reason they bother is because I'm the stabbed principal's daughter.

‘We've had an idea.'

She's waiting for me to ask what. The bear has red lips, human lips. Freaky.

‘We thought you could write a play. Mr. Huff would make it part of your English grade and, if you got some students to perform it, Mr. Lund would make it part of your Drama grade.'

‘I don't know how to write a play.'

‘Of course you do. You think of a situation, then write things for your characters to say.' She struggles to open a packet of crackers, goes at it with her teeth. The packet explodes, ejecting cracker bits office-wide. This distracts her. I jet out of there.

Doyle's wearing a T-shirt with
Back Off 200 Feet
printed on it. ‘We need more fruit salad,' he tells me. We don't, but he enjoys watching me gash myself dicing pineapple. ‘You going to Nicole's party?'

‘Negative.'

‘Everybody's going.'

I don't react, run water over my strawberry-stained fingers while some little kid and his mother check out the flavours. ‘May I help you?' I ask.

‘Give us a minute,' she says. ‘He might take a while to decide.'

‘No hurry.'

She looks embarrassed and I realize that the kid is retarded or mentally challenged or whatever you're supposed to call it. His tongue lolls as he peruses the flavours and I just know his life is never going to get better than this. He'll just get older and uglier and freakier. This makes me so sad all of a sudden I can't breathe. I have to
force
myself to breathe. Other customers butt in, the usual suspects demanding bigger scoops, dips, sprinkles, hot fudge. The boy watches my movements, his eyes bugged with expectation. I don't want him to decide because once he decides I'll have to make it for him and there's no way it'll be as good as he expected.

‘Have you decided?' the woman asks. She can't be his mother because she looks as though she wouldn't mind if he got hit by a bus. Maybe she's a social worker. The boy's oblivious, awash in his ice cream fantasy. Meanwhile a dragon mother keeps breathing fire at her twin girls who have horsey faces and nasally voices. The mother orders frozen yogourt, which is a serious drag because I have to use the compressor to mash the berries into the yogourt. They want different flavours, meaning I have to clean the frigging machine each time. My mentally challenged boy watches. Maybe he's better off with limited brain power, spared the knowledge of all the horror in the world. What's a competent mind give you except fear and despair?

When you work in ice cream, you're constantly sticky, especially your forearms, touching the sides of the tubs every time you scoop. So the money gets sticky, and the cash drawer and every other surface you touch. When you're not serving, you're supposed to wipe things down. Even after I've finished the yogourts for the dragon mother, my challenged kid hasn't made up his mind. Not wanting to pressure him, I start wiping things down. His social worker keeps checking her watch. Doyle, who's had his finger up his nose in the back, reappears.

‘Any time you don't have customers,' he tells me, ‘you should be wiping things down.' I wag the J Cloth in front of his face. He's got a zit beside his proboscis, one of those evil ones that you know is full of bile.

‘I think he's decided now,' the social worker says.

Because he's a little cross-eyed, it's hard to tell which flavour the boy's looking at. I aim my scoop at the Pralines 'n' Cream but he shakes his head as if I'm about to snuff him. I head for the Wild Berry Swirl. This seems to work except that, after I scoop, he's pointing at the Double Chocolate Chip.

‘Does he want a double?' I ask.

‘Alright,' the social worker concedes, not looking too happy about it. Maybe it comes out of her expenses. Even after I scoop the chocolate chip, he's pointing at the Black Cherry.

‘No, Alberto, that's enough,' the social worker says.

I worry that missing out on Black Cherry is going to scar Alberto for life or something. I check over my shoulder to make sure Doyle's in the back then quickly cram a scoop of Black Cherry on top of the Chocolate Chip. ‘Third scoop's on the house,' I mutter to the social worker who smiles for the first time. Amazing how when you save somebody a buck they become your best friend. I hand the cone to Alberto who actually says, ‘Thank you.' Not many kids say thank you these days. He's got this aura about him. They walk away, slowly because he's loaded down with the cone. And because he's wearing a leg brace. I get so sad again I can't stand. I squat on the footstool Doyle bought for Yang Yang because she can't reach the cabinets.

‘Did you charge for that extra scoop?' our hero demands. I stare at his festering boil.

‘You can't go giving extra scoops,' he warns. ‘If Mr. Buzny saw you doing that, you'd be out on your ass.'

I start wiping again. Alberto is just a tiny figure now, limping toward the exit.

When Doyle was chasing me, before I pretended to puke on him, he'd walk me home after late shifts because a girl was raped behind the dumpsters. Rumour has it she did everything the rapist ordered because she was scared he was going to kill her. It pissed him off that she was a virgin and didn't know how to give blow jobs so he forced his penis into her anus before he shoved it into her vagina. He penetrated her in various orifices nineteen times before he let her go. The cops still haven't charged anybody. They can't figure out why she didn't struggle.

So walking alone at night is no picnic. Particularly after shoving my boot into Bonehead-the-junkie's face.

I hear a crashing sound and jump about ten feet before I figure out it's raccoons going at garbage bins. I walk faster, even though I'm in no hurry to watch Drew losing her mind and bone density. I try not to think about what happened to Alberto after he finished the ice cream, when his hands and face were sticky and he had nothing left to dream about.

7

I
t's dead quiet in the house, which means she could have offed herself but I'm in no mood for discovering the body. I keep thinking about those babies in the foundling hospital in England in the eighteenth century. Some lord got sick of stepping over dead babies in the street so he guilt-tripped his rich cronies into coughing up for a foundling hospital. Starving women lined up to surrender their babies. The hitch was there wasn't enough room in the hospital for all the babies. The women had to pick balls out of a sack to determine who got to leave their babies behind. A green ball meant you could hand your baby over immediately, never to be seen again. A red ball meant your baby was put on a waiting list, and a black ball meant your baby was back on the street. The mothers whose babies got in always gave the babies something to remember them by. It was usually a bead bracelet or a cheap charm or something, but some of the women were so poor all they had was a ribbon or a nut. They'd poke a hole through the nut so the baby could wear it as a necklace. The ghouls who ran the hospital never gave the trinkets to the babies. The kids never knew that it was hard for their mothers to hand them over, that they were loved and mourned. Half of them died in the foundling hospital anyway. A couple of hundred years later those nuts with holes in them are in a glass case in a museum. You have to pay to see them.

This is one of the problems I have with my biological mother wanting to see me all of a sudden. She left me no sign.

I check the mail since Drew doesn't bother anymore. Bills, and the usual organizations asking her to send cabbage to help them save the world. No love letter from my devoted bio mum. That's what would happen in the movies.
Dear beloved daughter …

I grab some saltines
and crack open a book about the Reformation for some light reading. All that killing over religion makes no sense to me. I guess the point is it wasn't about religion but control. Look at old Cromwell, what a power junkie he must have been, the Lord Protector. What a wank. You have to wonder how the people put up with all that crap without
TV
s to distract them. Nowadays, with the one-eyed monster they can slip anything past us.

I like history, except for the fact that we don't learn from it. I might even get a decent mark if it weren't being taught by Mr. Swails. He thinks he's an actor and is always pretending to be James II or something. He loves doing French accents, especially Mary Queen of Scots who was raised by Frenchies. He does a virgin queen version of Elizabeth as well as a dried-up-old-hag Gloriana. I figure he's a cross-dresser. Anyway, it's hard to get the facts straight with old Swails prancing about. All those wars and beheadings, forming and dissolving of parliaments. Swails gets giddy when he talks about the beginnings of democracy and all I can think is, what's changed? The rich still get richer while the rest of us work for them. Maybe machinery doesn't chew up our limbs as often, and we get days off. And at least kids don't go down the mine, or become blind working long hours in factories without artificial light. Of course Third World kids go down the mine and become blind working long hours, but they don't count.

Our galoot of a neighbour is at his drum set again, thumping along to tunes from the seventies. He's an
NFL
flunky turned personal trainer. I don't know who he's personally training because he seems to have an abundance of time on his hands. He's got four kids and a mute wife plus a Rottweiler he hits with a shovel, which stops the dog barking for about two seconds. The personal trainer never walks the dog, just lets it dump in the yard then shovels the doodoo into the schoolyard across the street. I should report him but fear repercussions. Which is what's wrong with the world, I guess, all of us fearing repercussions.

After my persecuted-Jewish-girl phase, I got hooked on African-American slave stories. I'd always imagined lynching like in the movies, hooded Ku Klux Klan members carrying torches, dragging some black guy out in the dead of night and stringing him up. The fact is, up until the fifties, lynchings took place in broad daylight on weekends. Bus tours were set up so the out-of-towners could catch the action. Children were let out of Sunday school early so they could enjoy the show. Usually, after they beat the shit out of him, they'd tie the ‘nigger' behind a wagon or a car and drag him around so the whole town could gawp at him. He only got lynched after he'd been tortured and spit upon. Some ninety-three-year-old man who escaped lynching because somebody, some
white
person, finally shouted that he was innocent, was quoted as saying the men in the Klan robes tormenting him were his neighbours. He recognized them through their masks. Neighbours he'd helped because he was a wizard at fixing lawn mowers.

It's not like I feel good about not reporting the personal trainer. But the way I see it, all the authorities would do is ask him if he shovels dog feces into the schoolyard. He'd say, ‘Heck, no,' and they'd get back in their government cars.

The thing about history is that it shows you that stuff keeps repeating. It looks different because of technology and all that, but it's the same stuff. Like all the privatization that's going on. Pretty soon we'll be buying air from the corporations who are polluting it. That's after we bail them out, of course.

I close the window but I can still hear the drumming. What keeps a noddy like that going? Waldo, the security guard at the mall, works out about eighteen hours a day. When he isn't pumping iron, he's hanging around the counter asking for ‘free licks.' According to Waldo, life's one big disappointment. He's always yammering about how he got ripped off or let down by somebody or other. After boring me for an hour with the details of his disillusionment, he'll say, ‘But hey, what're you going to do? That's life.' Which is a valid question, what
are
you going to do? Sit around eating crackers? Which is what I'm doing. Stuffing entire crackers in my mouth and sucking the salt off them.

Alberto with no more ice cream is probably in bed in a group home. Who takes off his leg brace and tucks him in? Does anybody read him a story? A social worker was stabbed by a kid in a group home. Everybody thought they had a good relationship because they walked in parks and the kid confided in her. The social worker thought the kid was making progress. You have to wonder about that, what we
think
we see versus what's really going on. Which is another reason it's hard to believe in anything. The way I see it, man came up with the God concept because he was sick of being disappointed in man. God doesn't disappoint because he lives in your head, so you can make him into anything. Believing in God has to be better than sitting around eating crackers, thinking about dead conquerors and monarchs.