Red Girl Rat Boy (10 page)

Gary had reached London now, to stand alert in front of paintings. On the postcard he sent, a stern man wore olive and brown. Why was he painted? She did not show the card to Jeremy.

Mrs. Schatz said, “That is Bacon.”

James stayed with her once while Julie went out to walk alone, a novelty. Along Denman and Davie she examined closely what was on offer in each store window.

On her return the child's lips were red with happy jam.

“Must he go?” asked Mr. Schatz. Julie didn't tell that either.

Every day she and Jeremy did the dialogue.

Every day she feared saying, “All right, I'll do it.”

And his loud voice shook. “I'm never having sex with you.” Was the assertion wearing thin? Fear grew. She tried to imagine telling this. Who could hear? Mum, unthinkable. Her high school friends in Victoria knew nothing, were only engaged. In that too she'd led the way.

One morning Julie was so terrified that she pulled a dress over her head and gathered up James and went barefoot down to the beach.

The tide was ebbing; the water went west in a silver rush. The baby she held strove to move freely. Every pebble had a different shape. They hurt her feet. Why had she got married? When would Gary die? A dog chased sticks, plunged in and out of the water, shook rainbows. Julie waded. Cold first, then refreshing. She held James so his toes dangled in the waves. He kicked, chuckled. A long time went by, a short time.

Back at the palace, Julie pressed B and prayed.

She was folding her husband's socks.

“How is Mr. Beautiful?” Mrs. Schatz inspected Julie. “Rose is a good colour for you. Also it is a shade never out of style. But you do not wear shoes today?”

“In a hurry.” Julie couldn't articulate.

“To leave. I see.” Mrs. Schatz's manicured fingers stroked James's hair, tenderly. “Sometimes is best.”

Julie carried the wicker laundry-basket out to the elevator.

“Thank you, my dear. You know where to find me.” Today her smart outfit was in navy. Every curl lay in place. How could she and Gary look so neat?

Julie whispered, “I do.”

“Be careful,” said Mrs. Schatz, and disappeared.

Jeremy had gone to his work.

James banged and grumbled in his pen while Julie did hers. With Dutch Cleanser on a toothbrush she toured the base of the toilet. At the sink, her Q-tip winkled out guerilla dirt-specks crouching where faucet met porcelain. She emptied the medicine cabinet, washed each glass shelf. A hand took up a remnant disk of The Pill. Seven/pink, twenty-one/blue, each pellet snug in its cell. Then the other hand held a glass of water.

“Can't risk it,” she told James, who screamed from behind his bars. “We must be careful.”

Soon Julie visited her doctor. Graciously he renewed her prescription but gave her a critical look.

Jeremy asked later, “Can't you even button your blouse right?”

The card Mr. Alexander sent the Schatzes from Paris showed a sculpture of a pregnant goat. She looked lustful and witty.

Mrs. Schatz said, “He says he will go home very soon. His lady-friend from before has a place in Ithaca, New York. He can be ill there.”

War, love, art, cancer. How did someone her age get such a history?

Though swallowing eagerly, Julie still defied her husband. His daily shouts seemed an omen of rape. Were they both crazy? She had no answers, only a baby.

In James's room stood a chaise longue for night feedings. Julie now slept there. Once crying woke her, but James was asleep, her own cheeks dry. Another time, getting up to pee, she saw Jeremy prone on the sofa. Their own double bed was smooth, its pillows plump. None of this could appear in any magazine.

Julie took James to visit her old workplace.

Wanting to look well, she wore her rose dress. Its length was out of style, she saw on reaching the office.

Julie told various lies while she and the girls had their happy time catching up in the coffee-room, the table a cosy dither of cookies and doughnuts and James's applesauce. Julie's replacement was friendly. They giggled together over the manager's limited Dictaphone skills.

He himself was amiable, tickling her boy under the chin. “You got a really important job here, Julie!”

Then the girls must get back to work.

The bus stop was across the road that once led to
sunny Kits bach.
Headache. Exhaustion. No umbrella. The bus was slow to arrive, slow crossing the bridge. James squalled and flailed as they neared The Buckingham, not the right place, Julie knew that at least, though in the downpour she couldn't find her keys, scrabbled in her purse again, couldn't, was spiralling into a tizzy when Sam and Curly appeared.

“Come up to our place.”

The Kensington's murals showed Mediterranean waters of a sultry indigo not possible to imagine in English Bay.

“What's in The Windsor's lobby, I wonder?”

“We got in, to look. South-west,” Curly answered. “Reds, pinks.”

“Your elevator's quiet too,” Julie remarked.

“Yes. Hard to tell if it's up or down.”

As they started along the hall, Sam gestured towards their door but stopped himself. “Of course you know your way, Julie!”

When he took off his hooded rain-jacket, on one temple was revealed a large bruise. Julie didn't ask. He pointed. “You'd think they'd attack Curly, he's so cute, but more often it's me. Because I've got him, I guess.”

After his bottle, James slept among the sofa cushions. Julie found her keys. Curly brought coffee, shoving comics and beer cans away to make room for the tray. Sam smoked. Julie inhaled her first cigarette since meeting Jeremy.

In their bathroom were far more bottles tubes jars than she and he owned. His contempt twanged in her ear. On the door hung two silky robes. Emerging, she managed a glance into the bedroom. The mattress was bare, with fresh folded linen stacked ready.

“We'd like to paint it purple,” Sam said, “but when we go we'd just have to do that boring beige again.”

“Go where?”

“We're planning to buy a house.”

Curly chuckled. “To be as purple as we like.” He touched Sam's head.

Back in the living room, Julie collected her essentials. How strange, to look out from here towards her present address. Not that there was much to see. In a lower suite, a coffee table displayed a big platter, elliptical and brightly glazed. It drew her eye.

In The Buckingham's lobby stood Mrs. Schatz, dressed for lunching out. That morning the expected news had arrived from Ithaca. Also the Schatzes had decided to get a little dog, to care for.

 

One Two Three Two One

“Why get so worked up, Ellen?”
My mother often asked that.

Also, “Why don’t you just find someone and move out?”

And, “Why should you get special treatment?’

My father said, “Don’t slouch dear, you’re too pretty,” or, “Don’t sigh so,” or, “Those maraschinos are for my old-fashioneds.”

“Ellen, leave his cherries alone.”

Standing in their kitchen by their huge fridge, I was twenty-nine. Thirty was clearly in view, other things not. While my Dad spoke on and on, I considered old-fashion
ed
. Whip cream. Log trucks. Fly zone.

“So sweetie,” he finished, “buy your own.”

“Really, you two,” my mother said. “How you do go on.”

I didn’t see any
two
, but this isn’t the kind of story that describes ad nauseam the characters’ feelings, so no more on that. Events only.
An
old-fashioned. Noun omitted, adjective solo. Then such isolated linguistic phenomena interested me, discrete, unlinked by storyline.

My mother wrapped up her presentation. “You make me tired.”

Later I carried home from the grocery a jar of maraschinos so large it’d need subdividing to fit into my bar fridge.

By the sidewalk a man on hands and knees examined a stone on the grassy verge. Gently he touched a curl of grey lichen, smiled up at me. Lawrence Whatsit. We’d gone to the same high school, he a year ahead. Didn’t the Whatsits live nearby? And wasn’t his mother dead? Lucky Lawrence.He laughed at the cherries. We ate, sitting on the grass, and licked our sticky fingers and laughed. The lichen frilled up like egg white on a frying pan. (That’s the first simile, of very few.)

“Touch,” Lawrence invited. The lichen: a delicate leather. (Also few metaphors.) I smelled it, looked through his magnifying glass while he explained, but this isn’t one of those stories puffed out with data about parrots or antique clocks or saffron, so no more. What happened, the doings that took me every- and nowhere—in this story that’s all I intend.

Lawrence concluded, “Lichens rule the world.”

Then he had to go, for his mother was expecting him. It was the father who’d died. Wishful thinking.

Translation awaited me, so I went home to the top floor of my parents’ house, one enormous attic room. Why live there? Private entrance 800 sq ft, FP, HW floors, alcoves, dormers, claw-footed tub. . . Mostly, to annoy my mother. Outside, the wind sang in the trees (personification). As a child I’d dreamed of floating out and over those maples, far away. (Not emotion. Fact.) I had a hot plate and used it, but fiction garnished with recipes doesn’t appeal to me.

My parents’ TV and bathroom and furniture were all bigger than mine, their magazines glossier, so from time to time I regressed to the lower floors. My father and I would converse.

“YY?” he’d say.

“XXX.”

“No, YY! And also YYYYY!” he’d retort.

I’d shout back, “XXX, and XXIV for that matter!”

“What?” He was growing deaf. Shorter, too, with age.

My mother did the ending. “Oh let up, you two! Such a to-do.”

Our family dialogues could have featured as idiom samples for ESL students. Let up. Really. How you do. Worked up. To-do.

For a translator, idiom offers the most brilliant challenges. (Except poetry. I have not got that far.) Back then I translated botanical articles, conference proceedings, minutes, reports. (Even in such meagre soil, metaphor sprouts). Idiom drew me, still does, a private tongue parenthetical within a given language. Parasitical? No. Idiom enlivens, does not destroy the host.

Like lichens, I told Lawrence, languages rule the world. Nor are they separate, especially those spoken by millions—Mandarin, English, Spanish. Oh, at the centre, where the standard flies, they’re distinct, but at the margins the rules get bitten to bits (repetition, alliteration), and people speak amazing hodgepodges. There’s far more margin than centre. Look at any page. See how metaphor slides in? All this and much more I said to Lawrence, but as backdrop that’ll do. No elaborate analogies between Chinook and the symbiosis of algae or fungi and love. In too many stories, such comparisons drag the doings off course.

At the Whatsits’ house, Lawrence’s territory was the basement suite. High, south-facing, sun-washed. Small animals jarred in alcohol stood in ranks on his shelves. Skins, skulls. A globe for twirling. A cupboard door that must stay closed till spring because a spider’s egg-mass clung to the hinge. I wouldn’t have cared.

When Lawrence and I came upstairs after a morning on his bed, his mother was ready for us with waffles, peaches, cr
è
me fra
î
che.

“I remember you, Ellen,” smiling. Some high school event, awards for science students.

After eating, Lawrence took us back downstairs, only in part to make love again. “She pushes in too close,” he frowned. “Keep your guard up.” Too close? Such a thing, in a mother!

Familiar, peculiar, other, darling, such was Lawrence. Botanical Latin was only one shared idiom. Others: our bodies, devotion to work, facing a fourth decade in houses where we’d always lived. Bonded like lichen to stones we were, another simile, my guard down.

Lichens. Lawrence photographed them. For drug companies he analyzed their properties. For universities he identified them. He lectured.

“I’m portable,” he said. “So are you.” He set his globe twirling. “Languages and lichens are everywhere.”

To detach, dislodge, float like bursting clouds of spores (another) was our hypothesis. To live nowhere seemed a fine plan. Our preparations for marriage were simple. We saw a travel agent, got new laptops, and at his mother’s urging rented a post office box.

My father told me, “I like him, dear, but that’s no way to live.”

“Why such a fuss? We’ll have the house to ourselves.”

“What did you say?”

My mother had spoken with perfect clarity.

For nine months Lawrence and I travelled. On airstreams of desire and thermals of spontaneity we floated about Europe, Asia. The green algal cells in the symbiosis, were they him? Or me? Who made the colourless fungal strands? See how metaphor bloats up to excess?

His mother wrote when the eggs hatched. She’d carried hundreds of spiderlings out to the sunshine. Although I wouldn’t have bothered, to me her act showed reliability.

Lawrence frowned. “She’s overdoing it.”

I translated. Globally I faxed and emailed, loving how Lawrence and I and our work diffused ourselves electronically. Dispersal. Possibly even then I loved that as much as him.

For my birthday, the mother-in-law sent a pretty book with blank pages. “Thought you might jot down your doings.”

Such a thing, never owned, never done. (Don’t worry, no quotes.) To note, scribble—exotic, for a rigorous translator of proceedings.

My own mother had recently shrunk, but now her letter blew her up again. “Your father and I think of renting out the attic. Waste of space.”

“He’d never do that!” Lawrence hugged me. “Your Dad loves you, Ellen. Don’t worry, my sweetheart.”

Hug hug.

For my father, Lawrence photographed the two of us. He shot lichens—crustose, foliose, fruticose—
enough.
Events
only.
He wrote, lectured. In Turkey and Malaysia he made good contacts. In bliss we lived. No one, not even she, can take that time away.

When I began to vomit each morning, Lawrence stayed happy. (It is possible, given later doings, that he grew even happier.)

My whole body hurt. Respiration, digestion, excretion, translation, circulation all malfunctioned. Only reproduction hummed along. After an Athenian doctor opined that a difficult pregnancy was best endured “at home,” back we went, at Lawrence’s insistence, to our sole country Canada, and our lovely airport living ceased.

Mrs. Whatsit crouched in her familiar house.

After the vomiting came faints and vicious headaches, and in their train eclampsia. She never failed to soothe and feed. We stayed upstairs with her so she could help quickly, though Lawrence longed for a space of our own.

From my own mother came no word about Fussing or Worked up. She met my tear-bleared gaze. “Terrible, isn’t it? Now you know.”

Lawrence published. He consulted. Everywhere lay slides of lichens—cloud-grey, celadon, duck’s egg. My translations slept unattended like Snow White. I did not care. No prince would come.

Mrs. Whatsit read aloud from baby books. Chuckling, she told of her son’s infancy.

“Can’t you see Ellen’s tired?” Lawrence’s anger meant protection, but I closed my ears to him, admitted only that soft female voice.

After many hours of labour they got it out of me. An army had trampled through my body (this one extended metaphor I permit, pleading extenuating circumstances) and then stomped off across obliterated borders. The occupation over, defeat at first felt unimportant. That no one was inside sufficed, that no one any longer lived off the country of me. I can still close off the metaphor, am not so far gone as poetry. The scale in the delivery room told seven pounds. I’d have believed seventy.

We moved downstairs, into the sunny basement suite.

The baby wouldn’t take the bottle. Mrs. Whatsit became agitated.

“Why fuss?” asked my mother. “She’ll give in. It’s the rule.”

A pattern of feeds and sleeps developed, Lawrence’s mother claimed. Simultaneously, metaphors I’d played with on pages set aside in the journal leaped up. They morphed into narratives. The paper absorbed ink as mosses do rain (third simile).

Now what were we going to do?

Lawrence and I, from fifteen to approximately thirty, had been
acquainted
. When we
really met
(there’s a translator’s test!),
we fell in love
. We married. We were
happy,
easy in every tongue. He now looked much older than when we ate cherries on the grass.

Me too. My father said, “You were so pretty, dear, such a pity.”

Back to translating. Compared to the brutal tasks impressed by pregnancy, the glide/slide from language to language was easy. My work done and invoiced, I bought a separate notebook and left behind first person. Yes, I abandoned her, pushing off into the singing trees of third, dozens of thirds. Metaphors, similes were the least of the hijinks I got up to.

I had to come down when Lawrence and I rented our own apartment. After I’d finished my daily stint of translation and wanted to write, I’d leave her in the building’s laundry room (why would anyone take a baby?) to enjoy the dryer’s vibration, or put her out on the balcony to feel the spinning rain. The trees were way down, much too far to float, but Lawrence’s mother fussed. She got worked up. She came over ever more often to
help
. (Such a test, that common verb!) To escape her, Lawrence spent hours back in his old room with the dead drunk moles. She was here, he was there, I was nowhere I knew.

Next we tried my old attic.

Renovation easily created a baby-area and one for Lawrence’s work, but that space had all been mine. Since my teens, my parents had hardly entered. To cram in with a man, a baby, Mrs. Whatsit more often than not, and to sense underfoot, literally, my own parents­—intolerable. (Also my mother’s word for Mrs. Whatsit.)

My father often clumped upstairs. He liked Lawrence. He bought a TV series on fungi narrated by a potato-in-the-mouth Brit and cuddled the baby while watching my old screen, still there, still small. Dad turned the volume up and up.

Defeated, Lawrence agreed to move back to his mother’s house.

Her bedroom was next to the baby’s. “So convenient!” she said, delighted. “So easy to get up with her at night!” I agreed. While I translated, Mrs. Whatsit brought coffee, baked snacks, took phone calls, ran errands. All these Lawrence had long ago cut her off from doing for him.

My narratives were now my real work. I hid the notebooks. My mother-in-law didn’t need to see the massy life swelling from her gift. Things were bad enough already. In the guest room, Lawrence couldn’t get it up. He tried to lure me to the golden basement, apparently not understanding the words I spoke about this. A long time went by before he grasped that no sex was possible unless conception was 100% impossible.

After the extraction I’d asked for a tubal, but the docs hedged and huffed. So it was up to him. So he requested a vasectomy, and got zero medical huffing. We made love once. Made. Hard work. Then I got all worked up. Until my period, no narratives came.

“Ellen, once a month is not enough.”

What standard of language was this? This rule was never before ours, not mine now. Near the Whatsit house was a park. Sitting near windy trees, I wrote narrative. At night I translated. Thus, very busy.

Quite a good time, that.

Lawrence and I and she went for dinner to my parents’ house.

My father: “You’re too thin dear. Slouching makes you look thinner.”