Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen (11 page)

“Now be patient,” I say. “Opera singing isn't something you latch onto the first five minutes you hear it.”

There's a small park with picnic tables just off the highway not far from Hinton and we make our first stop there. Tamara looks suspiciously at the outdoor toilets. I don't think she's ever seen the like before.

“We are explorers on the road of life,” I tell her. “You can't expect there to be hot and cold running water at all the stops along the way.”

I'm intrigued to see what she's packed in the picnic hamper for us to snack on. A tin of deviled salmon. Olives. Melba toast. Brandied peaches. A thermos of
coffee for me. Perrier water for herself. The hamper is equipped with silverware, glassware and napkins — all the essentials for picnicking during the opera intervals in Seattle.

It's a perfect day and, for once, Skinnybones is grinning like a normal teenager instead of practicing her smirky model smile. She laughs as brandy syrup trickles down her chin. Midmorning light filters through the evergreen branches, hopscotching over the glass and silver.

A family at the next table is eating heart-attack food from cartons. Two little boys watch us solemnly, their open mouths spilling bits of hamburger bun and mustard.

I catch Tamara's eye. She raises her bottle of Perrier in a little salute, and I reply with a slight tip of my coffee cup.

Conspirators.

I like driving. I mean, I'd probably love it if the Wrinkle Queen could stop griping about how I'm doing for three and a half seconds at a time. Is there anything worse than old L.A. teachers? I finally had to tell her to shut up.

What's so great is tearing along the highway and everything flashing by, like in a movie. Green fields and bunches of trees and farms. Some of them even have red barns like you see in picture books when you're in grade one. Red barns and real cows and horses!

One time Wilma told me she lived on a farm when she was a little girl. With her grandma. Grandma Schlotter. Feeding chickens, collecting eggs. But then the grandma died and she went back to living with her dad and his third wife in a part of Edmonton where there was a drug house two doors away. Her dad died
when she was twelve — got drunk and fell off a fire escape. And her mother — well, Wilma wouldn't really talk about her. She'd just say, “She's dead to me.”

So somewhere I might have a grandmother, but I have a feeling she's not living on a farm raising chickens.

When the Wrinkle Queen gets through pouting about not being allowed to sideseat drive, she decides to put on a tape of her opera music. But first, of course, she has to tell me this story about dwarfs and mermaids and a magic ring. I'm thinking this guy Wagner has been drinking more than Rhine water himself. And when the Wrinkle Queen actually quits yattering and turns on the music, it turns out the mermaids are all yodeling and shrieking at one another. God help us.

We get a break from it all when we stop for lunch. Of course Miss Barclay isn't into anything normal like going to Wendy's for a bit of salad. Instead we park ourselves at a picnic table where I get to unload the stuff I packed from the pantry. We snack on petrified toast named after some opera singer who lived a hundred years ago. Petrified toast with some kind of fishy sandwich spread. Good thing I brought a jar of olives.

The Wrinkle Queen looks like she's died and gone to heaven, puffing away on one of her skinny cigars underneath a pine tree where a squirrel is running around, up and down branches.

Back on the road after lunch, I get to hear more of the story of opera number one. The king of the gods and his wife wake up and find out that a couple of giants have built a castle for them.

“Wotan has promised his sister-in-law Friea to the giants in payment for the castle,” Miss Barclay is saying. “But then he insists it's only a joke and there's a huge fight. That's when Loge the god of fire shows up...”

She rattles on for about fifteen minutes. I'm beginning to see mountains in the distance. It's like the farms — hard to believe they're real. They grow bigger all the time as we get closer, and by the time we actually get up beside them and there are rocks right beside the road that are a hundred times bigger than the Buick, she has the music going full blast again.

And there are animals like out of a National Geographic special. Elk walking along the ditches, checking out the cars on the road. In a couple of places, mountain sheep with their curved horns, way up on the tops of cliffs.

“This is the part where Loge the fire god tricks Alberich into putting on a magical helmet, and he turns himself into a toad.” The Wrinkle Queen cackles like she's come up with the trick herself.

“We're going to have to stop in Jasper,” she says. “Like the rest of me, my kidneys are a bit worn out.”

To tell the truth, the Perrier water has done a job on me, too. There are washrooms in a big old train station which also has a bunch of Greyhound buses and tour coaches parked outside.

And one RCMP car.

There's nobody in it, though, and when I go back into the station to wait for Miss Barclay to come out of the washroom, I see them. Two mounties buying coffees and joking with the girl at the concession stand.

“Mounties,” I hiss into her ear as I try to hurry her with her walker toward the door.

“Jasper always has mounties,” she says smugly. “They hire them as a tourist attraction.”

Of course, the Wrinkle Queen, dressed head to toe in ketchup red, isn't about to fade into the crowd. I'm sure one of them is watching us from the door as I collapse the walker and stow it and get back into the car. It's a relief to get out onto the main street and see that there's no police cruiser in my rear-view mirror.

We haven't reached the town limits when she has her opera music blaring again.

“In this part,” she says, “Wotan collects all of the dwarfs' gold and forces Alberich to give him the ring.”

But in a few minutes she's fallen asleep in her seat and is snoring softly. I find the volume button and turn it way down.

I'm driving through country with lakes and streams and little waterfalls. Trees. Mountains topped with snow. It looks like pictures on a wall calendar. I'm wondering if Wilma ever got to see this — or was it just the two places in her life. The chicken farm and downtown Edmonton.

Before I was put in the first foster home, we lived close to the hockey arena. Wilma would let people going to the game park on the lawn for five dollars. One night we were able to get six cars into the yard and Wilma took me and my two half-brothers, Todd and Taran, for pizza. Going out just like a normal family. But when we got home, Todd's father, Dwight, was there and he and Wilma went to a party and didn't come home for three days.

They got back right around the same time the social workers got there.

I wonder sometimes how Todd and Taran are getting along. Mr. Mussbacher says they've always just been in one foster home, a family with three boys of their own, the dad coaching little league hockey, the mom volunteering at their school. Maybe some day they'll have steady jobs and cars of their own and will be able to go to a hockey game and pay a family five dollars to park in their yard.

Do models have cars? Mostly I think of them being
driven around by other people. Photographers and limousine drivers. Or maybe movie star husbands.

The Wrinkle Queen is moaning and talking in her sleep.

“Don't you dare...” she says.

Probably reaming some kid out for not doing his homework.

Imagine having her for a teacher. I try to think of what she would have looked like twenty-five years ago when she quit teaching. I bet she had the same black hairdo, just fewer wrinkles. Wearing her killer tomato dresses and too much make-up.

For a minute I think she's going to wake up, but then she starts snoring again. Whew.

The kilometers slip away under the tires of the red Buick, bringing me closer and closer to Vancouver and Jude Law Model Man. “The camera will love you.” I think of him saying that to me. And I think of how awful it would have been to be born without good bone structure.

I imagine Jude taking my picture from a hundred different angles in the modeling studio with its gilt-edged mirrors and flowing draperies, potted palms and furniture that looks like it might have belonged to French kings back in the days before they got their heads chopped off.

The Wrinkle Queen sleeps right through to Mount Robson.

“Pull in to a gas station here,” she mutters, half awake. “We'll fill up and I need to use a washroom again.”

I can see that she's cranky as a hornet trapped on a windowsill.

Yes, Vancouver, I think.

But first there's Seattle. Somehow I'm going to have to live through that.

The car seat is cramping me.

“We'll stop for the night in Kamloops,” I tell Skinnybones. “I need to lie down.”

When she helps me out of the car, I feel like I'm going to collapse, even with my hands riveted to the walker. In fact, I start to go down and she grabs me and holds me from behind.

“Take a deep breath,” she says, and I hear a little bit of fear in her voice.

The motel has a picnic table sitting in a patch of brown grass by the parking lot. She gets me over to a seat there and then finds the cigarillos in my purse. The flask of brandy, too. It takes a few minutes before I feel like I'm not going to topple over.

There's a woman watching us from the door of the motel office.

“Tell her to come over here. I'm not going to try to get my walker into that roadside closet.”

The woman comes out reluctantly.

“If you just come into the office...” She has that kind of graying hair made frizzy that a whole breed of middle-aged women seem to embrace.

“As you can see, mobility is somewhat difficult,” I tell her. She's gone slack-jawed. “I'll thank you to take my credit card, make an imprint, and then bring the receipt out here for me to sign.”

“How many nights?”

I can't help a little laugh that emerges as more of a snort. Would anyone stay longer than one night in a place like this?

“Just overnight,” Tamara says.

“Where you folks headed?” Frizzy asks, eyeing the credit card.

“To Vancouver.” Tamara walks with her back to the office. “My grandma and I...” The rest of the story is lost as the screen door bangs shut.

It's Skinnybones who brings the bill back out for my signature.

“She needed to know our home address and I couldn't remember what yours was so I gave her Shirl and Herb's.”

The motel room is as cold as a morgue.

“My god, Tamara, turn off that air-conditioning or I'll perish.” It's a hideous room with what looks like paint-by-number sad clowns on the wall, a chipped arborite counter with a
TV
set and an ice bucket. There are cigarette burns on the bed quilt.

“I asked for a smoking room,” Tamara says. She's got the
TV
on, of course, flicking from channel to channel. I lie down and close my eyes. She has sense enough to turn the sound right down so it's only a murmur, almost soothing.

Is this how it's going to be every day? My legs aching, my balance gone, energy pressed from my body? I wonder if Byron is lying on a beach in the Philippines right now. Sun beating down on him. No aches or pains.

If it's going to be this hard, maybe I'm not meant to get to Seattle. Is there only so much music one is allowed in a lifetime?

“Tamara.” My voice sounds like it's being dragged over sandpaper. “Bring me my purse. I'm going to take a couple of Tylenol.”

They ease the aches but they don't help me sleep. One of the curses of old age — sleeping during the day, being awake all night. Tamara is tired, though. After we've had a bite to eat, she falls asleep watching
TV
.

“Get into bed,” I say. “We'll get up early in the morning. It's still a ways to go, you know. And the
Coquihalla Highway can be a challenge. Even if it's the middle of the summer, there can still be sleet and you can expect fog on those high mountain passes.”

She's still tired in the morning when we turn in the key. A man — Frizzy-hair's husband? — is at the door of the office, yawning. He's in an undershirt and dirty suspendered trousers. Balefully he watches us as we ease the Buick out onto the main road.

“Don't pay him any mind, Tamara. One of Alberich's minions. Mindlessly mining gold.”

It doesn't take long to get into the heights. Then it begins to rain. Large trucks throw up a spray, blinding the windshield.

“Keep the wipers on, girl.” I don't mean to be screaming at her but I am.

I think about plugging another tape into the player, but the time doesn't seem right. We're on the top of the world, in with the rain while it's still in the clouds. There are actually tears streaming down Skinnybones' cheeks but I'm not sure she even realizes she's crying. She's gripping the steering wheel like it's the wheel of life, the ring of the universe.

As we get closer to Hope, the rain stops and the sun comes out.

“Let's stop in Hope and have some breakfast,” I say.

She doesn't argue.

I pat her hand as we wait for our scrambled eggs.

“You've got fortitude,” I say. “It takes guts to drive the Coquihalla when the road is disappearing into the clouds. I'm sure, at one point, I saw the rainbow bridge the gods used to enter Valhalla.”

“The castle of gods and fallen heroes?”

“That's the one.” Steam rises from our breakfast platters, carrying with it the warm buttery smell of the toast.

“The next challenge will be driving through Vancouver. Now, the good thing is it'll be early afternoon when we get there.” I slather the toast with marmalade. “Not rush hour.”

When we get onto the long stretch of valley road, I tell her a bit of the story of the second opera,
Die Walküre
. The love story of Siegmund and Sieglinde and the magic sword Wotan has left for Siegmund in a tree. Skinnybones doesn't seem too interested but she perks up a bit when I get to the part about Sieglinde being married already, and the discovery of the lovers that they are actually brother and sister.