Red Girl Rat Boy (9 page)

“Hello, Lauren. How is Henry? How was your work today?”

Wozz.
Her pronunciation was off. Wobbly.

“Mother, are you all right?”

She cried.

She also cried when at UBC I quit history for electronic languages.

My father reassured her. “Modern, precise. Like our Lauren.”

During childhood evenings when I played and he did crosswords, my mother talked with him while skimming French periodicals. Even in English she was good at anagrams. Or she’d read aloud, translating as she went. These exchanges grew to full converse, allusions, flirty disagreements, laughter—until they remembered their witness to intimacy. Sent to bed, I’d read. That’s how I started with novels. Because of their war, my parents slept badly. I’d wake, sensing vacancy in the big bedroom, and from the stairs hear that companionable murmur in the kitchen. In three decades they never ran out of things to say.

Grand-m
è
re’s gallbladder surgery was on Remem-brance Day.

Always when I reached the hospital, the patient slept, Henry by her side with homework or a crossword. Later, I dropped him at soccer. Because of Tom & Jerry’s, he and Jake weren’t home till I’d had enough solitude to be sociable. All the machine’s messages were real.

The rains began with
The Progress of Love
. Lesley’s new therapist led her through rebirthing. Soon, weaning. Myrna’s lover wanted to try bondage. Dared she? Everyone was supportive.

Andrea took a breath. “Lauren, we all open up. Why won’t you?”

A planned intervention, I could tell.

“Acting so superior, holding back,” said Lesley. Also, conceited.

Wilfully blind: Rosalind.

Emotionally unavailable, selfish, so left-brainy—Robin had resented me, apparently, “Forever! Time you got the message.”

Such clich
é
s. I went home raw. Another.

N
é
crotique,
my mother termed her gallbladder. “Henry can use that adjective at school.” From her surgeon she’d got her stones, forty small grey polyhedrons. “For science class.” She refused to recuperate with us, but minutes after we’d deposited her at home our phone rang.

“You may suffer this too, Lauren. At least there is a predisposition.”

Troubling, how soon that call came.

Her recovery seemed slow. She, subdued.

Jake got her housecleaner to come more often, Henry took extra trips to library and video-shop, I blended her grocery shopping with ours. She accepted the changes. Did they make her sad?

Henry reported, “Grand-m
è
re’s scar was red like spaghetti. Now it’s getting pink.”

“Madame showed you?”

“I hope you didn’t ask her?”

“She showed me in the hospital!”

“At least she stayed awake, for you.”

Henry visibly decided to say, “Grand-m
è
re wasn’t asleep. She’s scared to be a burden, like her own mother. She hurt for ages before she told you guys. I sat with her.”

It came to me: if I went back to book club I could present her.
Mother-daughter stuff to share. Kind of heavy. When the child becomes the parent? You know?

A most suitable issue. If.

Reassuringly, when
Private Lives
opened my mother did her wave thing.

“In the movie I have seen the best. Why spoil the memory?” Nor would she see
Equus.
“I have read this work. Kinky.” This came out Frenchly,
quinqui.
“Unsuitable for Henry.”

My book club went. Jake reported they’d bought him a drink afterwards, praised his set. Fuck those harpies. When Henry and I went, what impressed him was the animal. Jake’s twisted aluminum strips only implied an airy shape, yet the tall creature was for sure a stallion, who bore his desperate rider powerfully.

So long ago.

Christmas approached. The Beta/VHS war was over; a new machine would gleam under our tree. I’d bought one for my mother too.

I asked her, “How is it, having your cleaner twice a week?”

“Certainly the house looks better.”

Careful. “I meant, how do you feel about it?”

A blank look. No words. No one-two.
So much for open communication. I tried!
For my report at book club. If.

I drove home fretting, was still fretting when Jake and Henry arrived.

Our son threw his pack on the floor, shouted, “Why do we have to stay so long?”

“Son, you were glued to the TV.”

“TV’s
boring
there. I see Curtis every
day.
”

“Stop, Henry! I’m tired.”

My parents, watching movies at home, got up to lower the volume if the characters shouted. To demand, to show anger—no, no, unless alone in my room. Grown up, I never swore in my mother’s presence. Tried not to in Henry’s. At work, such restraints don’t apply. The Fiery Mouth of the Seventh Floor, that’s me.

“Dad,
I’m
tired. Of him, of Melanie.”

As with any complex problem, first comes meditation, often conscious, sometimes (as here) not. Certainty fills the dark mind then. Even if the solution looks peculiar, correctness shines. Clich
é
s bounce up.
How could I be so slow? Why didn’t I read the code?
Like other parents, Jake watched the practices. Like Melanie, lively and humorous on Mon Wed Thurs, plus weekends as league play moved on. A charming single mum. Sugary mugs, the boys absorbed. Not a reader. Not computer literate.

Jake and I soothed Henry. We ate, laughed, watched TV with him cosy in the middle.

After he slept, a quiet hour passed.
How long has this been going on? How could you?
Humiliating, unsayable clich
é
s, dead idioms. Jake’s toothbrush buzzed.

“Goodnight,” I said. “I’m watching the news.”

Then a PBS doc, the US invading Grenada. I dragged upstairs. At the sight of him in our bed, I U-turned to huddle by the TV till dawn.

Off Henry went to school, my clever boy. Then he’d go to grand-m
è
re’s, to make mince tarts. Her pastry, inimitable.

Mr. Sunshine was prone in the living room, applying tape by the baseboards to keep the floor clear of paint. He held the roll between his teeth.

“How long have you been fucking Melanie?”

Jake didn’t tear the tape. Silence. Like greetings that give the avid caller only a circling whisper for unendurable seconds.
Hi there! Hal and Michelle are having too much fun to answer the phone, so leave a message.

“It’s got nothing to do with us.
Totally
separate, totally.” Another 80s word.

Then why pray tell have you kept it secret?

“There’s no difference for you and me! We make it nearly every day.”

There is so. You have lied, in your body.

Mr. Sunshine scrambled up, headed for the door.

“Don’t you run away! I’ll call her. That’ll be different!” The soccer list, by the phone. I dialled.
Fuck you
I’d say. Jake grabbed at the receiver. Ringing. I spat in his face, clich
é
. He backed off.
Thanks for calling. Melanie and Curtis aren’t able
. . . A warm voice. Why wasn’t she there, the bitch?

“You god-damned bastard. It’s over.”

I went to work.

Subsequently I repeated the above many tedious times. It’s also possible to cry so often it gets boring.
Not tears again!

“This isn’t fucking necessary, Lauren!”

“Fucking her wasn’t necessary!”

We could shout because our boy was helping to move grand-m
è
re’s sofa so her cleaner could vacuum behind. Then they’d watch
Charlotte’s Web.
For hot chocolate they grated bittersweet, melted it over hot water. Neither admired Debbie Reynolds as the spider’s voice. They were re-reading the novel. Soon they’d move on to Jimmy Stewart and Alastair Sim.

Henry would go on living in his home, Jake and I decided. We’d take fortnightly turns with him. How to tell them?

“Madame will think it’s crazy.” Here we agreed.

Shortly before Christmas, again the taped
Fuck you
, the muffled start and finish.

A woman. Myrna, Rosalind, Lesley, Robin, Andrea?

When I knew they’d be out I phoned, listening three times to spiteful Andrea who’d once asked Rosalind, “What do you want a baby for? You haven’t even got a man of your own.”

No match. Erase.

As I was driving my mother to our house on Christmas Eve she remarked, “You look worried, Lauren.”

“I am.” Which I hadn’t planned to say.

“Is it Henry?”

“Is what? Has he said something?”

The car moved along the silent road. Snow in Vancouver isn’t common. The whiteness brings a quiet that’s always surprising.
She doesn’t even answer me
, I could say at book club.

In January I escorted my mother to a game. She sat in the car with the heater on, to watch her grandson’s team win. Melanie and Curtis were visible. Jake did not join us. No one went to Tom & Jerry’s.

Next day, listening to the messages, my brain was full of a library crisis. Perhaps that freed my ears?

She’d had to struggle past the expletive’s initial consonant.
He’s fffucking you over.
As if in a movie my mother sat at her desk, her linen handkerchief wrapped round the receiver.

When at the next book club I opened her dossier of old age and frailty, when I observed how those greedy ears yearned for more, I knew the novelist’s power. I
had
those women. Elated, I took them to wartime France to see my mother’s loving guilt. They clasped their hands, wept softly. “Oh, Lauren, your poor mum. So hard, so sad.” Next I catalogued her doctor’s assessment, the geriatric social worker’s, her housecleaner’s. My husband’s. Saying
Jake
axed open my throat.

“He, he, he’s,” horrible guttural, “been unfaithful. You can’t imagine how long it’s been going on.”

“Years!” cried Fair Rosalind, and slid off her chair in a faint.

Later she said a hundred times, “Jake swore he’d told you.”

“You knew, Lauren!” he himself shouted. “You couldn’t believe I was just tree-planting in Terrace every year!”

Unread codes.

Done for. No good life could grow there again.

“I won’t do that,” Henry said. “I’m going to live with grand-m
è
re.”

“Mum and I will take turns, here.” Jake spoke gently, though an hour earlier he’d been roaring, “Rosalind
talked
to me. For you I was just a dumb hunk.” Those clich
é
s too.

“I don’t want
turns
,” said Henry.

We tried.

We tried with my mother. She did her wave thing.

Not the weekends but the long turns were the worst.

Each summer Henry was with me for a month. Thirty-one days. Not long. Long enough to feel the child in his room close by in the apartment, to hear him breathe and stir in our shared air, to watch him dream, yet soon so soon to feel time draining and sucking away as it does during the speed-of-light week before the deadline set for the worst thing ever: helping my boy pack his little clothes, his books and games, and releasing him to the other parent.

Men have abounded, mostly sexual amateurs. An unsuccessful migrant word, that, its meaning muddled en route to a new tongue.

I still love my work. Friends, books, movies. Not plays. My son doesn’t speak of his father.

Renaissance
, that’s what happened to grand-m
è
re after Henry moved in. She died in her nineties, weeks after dancing at her grandson’s wedding. What price did she pay for breaking her own code to send that foul message to her distant child? Not quite idiomatic. Crucial. She’d have wiped her lips, after. As for the answering machine, only last week I saw one at Too Much Collectables, in a window full of retro tchotchkes and faux-distressed chairs. I walked on towards Bean a While. Their coffee’s good. Rosalind and I still meet sometimes, to talk. Lesley bought our machine. In itself that old technology was reliable.

 

 

 

 

 

Addresses

 

 

The
right
apartment. meaning what?

For Julie, that Jeremy be in it.

He did the hunting. Often she came along, still happy though sickish-dazed from The Pill.

Distinctive 1 BR
suite even had a pantry. They moved in.

By then Julie could, just, see around him.

Also she knew she had never filled Jeremy's vision.

Sort-of arguments began, about The Pill. He, after research that took a lot of time away from his work, decided on condoms and foam.

In the distinctive building's entry, ceramic tiles formed octagons in a complex black-and-white arrangement. Stained glass. No elevator, no laundry room. The brass doorplates and fir floors were original.

“I checked.” Satisfied, Jeremy closed the pantry door to work for hours so they could get ahead.

The paned windows stood tall, Julie not. They and the floors gleamed (she made sure of that), yet the elegant life once lived in these turn-of-the-century Vancouver rooms did not seem like anything she could match.

“What about a baby?”

“No, not yet. “

“When?”

“Not yet!”

Every time, Julie did not start a third interchange. Did she lack character? She did hunger for concord. They settled, kind of, on
soon.

To be alone so much was still surprising. The magazines suggested picking one room each day, in rotation, for special cleaning. Julie did that. She ordered dress patterns, clipped recipes. Dinner was quite good sometimes. When Jeremy stayed late at the law office, she'd get into bed to wait, wanting him.

The spermicidal foam oozed all over the bed linen. Back and forth Julie walked to the laundromat, never meeting the same people there.

“You're pregnant?”

Jeremy couldn't or wouldn't believe she hadn't tricked him.

“Got your way, again.” He slapped at the want ads, some red-circled. “I have no time for this. Can you at least follow up?”

Did
again
mean he hadn't wanted to marry?

Julie followed up, went further.

Of the place she found, he said, “It'll do for the time being.”

What could time do but be?

Jeremy conceded the value of
2 BR nr shops, bus, beach,
although old frame houses with lacy trim had been bulldozed to make space for the
mod apt tower
. He deplored and Julie smiled at the lobby's earnest mural of a tropical sunset, the palm trees etched on the mirror by the mailboxes.

Of
1 prkg
he said, “Too bad you were careless. No money for that now.”

Their own decor did please him. All paint and textiles and floor coverings were bone. Not the red lumps that dogs gnaw on, Julie knew that. White trim.

“Perfect neutrals. You do see how they don't call attention to themselves?”

The look of their Danish coffee table by the picture window also pleased Jeremy, for the north-east light enhanced the teak's grain. He removed their white cups to the kitchen as soon as they were empty.

“If only we were higher up.” He opened his briefcase.

Under new mgmt.

“That's you!” Silently Julie teased the hidden kicking child. “You get the second BR.” Jeremy's desk, electric typewriter, file cabinet lived in the master.

The elevator too was soundless. Eyes closed, Julie couldn't tell whether the movement was up or down. The little tale she made of this uncertainty failed to amuse her husband after his stressful day in court.

“Do you mean that?” Jeremy asked.

He asked the question again when the baby's crying made Julie worry about the neighbours. “This building's solid concrete. I guess construction is another thing you just can't understand?”

Still Julie couldn't forget his pallor after the delivery, his joyful tears as he phoned long-distance to tell his parents and hers about James, while she trembled after a labour not much like that in the natural childbirth book.

Nor did she forget how they two began, at her
sunny Kits bach gt view.
Unusually for a girl, she'd had her own apartment. Jeremy had been surprised.

As Julie walked home from her little job in the weeks before their wedding, the pavement went all wavery rivery till she sped like a hydrofoil to the soaring elevator, the hall, her own door, and the engulfing heat of Jeremy's body. She'd been the initiator. He, taken aback. Shocked? Julie, though her mother and all the books warned against premarital activity, knew no doubt.

What was that view, anyway? The only one of her class to leave Victoria after secretarial school, she was just proud to have her own address.

Perhaps the sex was why the ceremony didn't change her?

After their honeymoon at Expo 67, the Kitsilano place felt cramped, wrong. Not even a nook for Jeremy's work.

He found, first, the
stately spacious 1 BR
at a good address, a fine old Dunbar mansion chopped into suites. Tall graceful trees darkened the place. Leaking radiators, mice. Julie and Jeremy shivered till he located the
distinctive
building.

“Where we'd still be, if you hadn't been careless.”

She didn't remember much about Expo either. The hotel room. Fireworks, sugar, glitter, crowds. French actually spoken.

Now this high-rise.

The developer had built three towers close together, so Jeremy and Julie's living room in The Buckingham observed one in The Kensington where sofa, stereo, TV, and coffee table were similarly configured. The occupants were two men. Older, Julie thought, early forties.

The man with curly hair sometimes waved at the baby. Julie would raise James's tiny hand, smile. The overweight man didn't wave. If he noticed her across the airy gap he snapped the Venetians shut, even in sunshine.

Jeremy did the same. “I'm not paying rent to watch a couple of queers day in day out. We need our own house.”

More things Julie hadn't understood.

James filled her hours. His certainty amazed her.
Now!
He cried with his mouth so wide his throat made a quivering red tunnel.

The neighbours Julie encountered in the elevator and by the mailbox were mostly retirees with little dogs, or young singles. Once just heading out of the lobby was a bald man in crisp shirt and shorts who held a placard,
Out of Vietnam Now!
Wasn't that an American war? He strode away. Was he old? Seeking other mums, she pushed James's stroller along the concrete walkway by Sunset Beach.

At the inadequate corner grocery she met the queers. Sam held back at first while Curly warned her never to buy the ground beef, but soon all three were picking through the faded vegetables together. Walking back, they smiled at the towers' palatial names.

One morning in The Buckingham's laundry room, Julie was giving James his bottle while waiting for the dryer to finish.

An old woman came in and smiled at the baby. “It is my lucky day! Mostly the people here have these foolish dogs. But you do not breast-feed? Is best.”

Julie explained the theory of parents sharing equally in baby care. Under-thoughts about Jeremy rushed counter to her words.

In her tailored maroon dress, Mrs. Schatz moved about briskly, high heels clicking. Her wrinkles broke into new webs when she looked at James.

“So, how you like it here?” she asked. “What floor?”

The Schatzes lived on the view side of the eleventh.

“We will drink coffee. My husband will enjoy to see James. Also I invite Mr. Alexander, on the sixth. He appreciates art.”

Before that happened, Julie met Sam and Curly again. This was at Sunset Beach, in the pause when the bridge's lamps begin to reflect on the greying water yet daylight still hovers over False Creek, stippling the waves pink or apricot.

Under a fine rain they ambled talking along the pebbled sands. James, held in his Snugli against Julie's warmth, kept tilting his head back to get the drops on his face. He smiled. So did Curly and Sam and Julie.

“How did you meet?” she asked as they left the beach. The bridge lamps were now shedding gold circles on the salty darkness.

The men exchanged looks and snickered, snapping the Venetians down. Both spoke. At last Curly managed, “We'd both been around enough to know what we wanted. We were ready.”

As Julie with James rode up in the air she thought how the magazines said things just like that about deciding in the right way to get married.

“Where've you been? You're soaked. No umbrella again?”

She described their pleasant walk.

Jeremy made a face. “Queers are useless. That's why I don't like them.”

“Is a tax accountant useless?”

“Who does Fatty work for? Other queers? And what does Pretty Boy do?'

Julie quit, though in fact Curly was the numbers guy and Sam the waiter.

“We need to get out. This isn't what I had in mind.” He shoved a newspaper at her and stood waiting by the door into the master.

After skimming
Houses
Julie studied
Furnished Suites.
Some buildings said
Small child accepted
. What size might that be? How could she pay? She perused
Board & Room.
Water dripped off her hair on to the baby's smile.

“Nothing today.”

The door closed. Shut out.

Now Julie did feel changed, though she still waited greedily for Jeremy to come to bed. Sometimes he slept on the sofa.

Time went on being.

James grew bigger, bigger. With pain he acquired teeth. He looked about, inquiring. He shook and pulled at his playpen's bars. Visiting the eleventh floor, he demonstrated how he would crawl soon.

Mr. Schatz chuckled. “He reminds me.”

Julie silently ached to ask
Of whom?

“Today Mr. Alexander is tired. He fights cancer,” his wife sighed. She pointed at the tiny poppyseed pastries veiled in powdered sugar. “His favourites.” For James she had baked rusks.

“He also is exile by a war,” said her husband.

From the Schatzes' windows, the distant Olympic Mountains shimmered aquamarine. The stereo was playing classical. Nearer, Mount Baker shone like pearl. Victoria was clouded in drifts of white, invisible.

On leaving, Julie felt revulsion at the prospect of entering the apartment where she lived. She pressed James's thumb on L for Lobby.

By the mailboxes stood the bald man. He held a map.

“An impossible city,” he said. “Vancouver's a simple place, the mountains are always north. Even New York's mostly a grid.”

He was Julie's age. So thin in his sharply pressed Bermudas, paler even than bone. The map showed London, England.

“Are you going there?”

“Paris too. New York on the way back, if I'm not arrested.” He tucked the map into a travel agent's folder. “See the galleries one more time.”

“Are you Mr. Alexander?”

“Gary.”

“Julie. This is James.”

“Dear Mrs. Schatz,” he said, “always wanting to feed me. Their sadness is unbearable, but I'll see them before I go.”

“I hope you have a good time.” What else could be said?

“Thank you.” He inspected the baby. “Such sharp teeth! A little animal. So Julie, where are you off to?”

After a moment she said, “I have no idea.”

Gary's eyebrows went up. “Better get one! Up and down, to and fro, then suddenly it's all over.”

They shook hands warmly.

Soon after this, Jeremy began again about the oral contraceptive.

“You have to. We can't risk it. I insist.”

Three things just like that with no breath between.

“You know it makes me sick.” In disbelief she heard the shaking voice.

“Then I won't have sex with you.”

After that there was only the morning dialogue before he departed for office or court.

“Will you?”

“No.” Again, again. “
No.
” Julie gripped James so he howled and shoved his head into her armpit.

In the mirror, her lipstick looked wrong for the face she had now.

She still longed for sex with that changed man. Or had the persons called
Julie & Jeremy
not ever recognized each other? Had two others used their names to get married? She winced.

Daily his mother pushed James for hours through the West End to see the lines of bright windows in high-rises, low-rises, and to imagine their views. The Buckingham, later, seemed like nowhere she'd visited before.