The Devil You Know: A Novel (9 page)

David knows the blast is coming. He’s helpless to stop it. This is because it comes in the form of a perfection explosion and any insinuation that her efforts do not, in fact, equal perfection feeds right back into the cycle. How do you ask someone to stop being so damn nice to you? The explosions aren’t limited to birthdays, but it’s the special times that really shine in a person’s memory.

I used to go and ride out the birthday dinner with David, to keep him company. His mother spends three days planning some elaborate meal: duck à l’orange or nasi goreng, sheer white Pavlova with a candle stuck fast in the heart-shaped meringue. By the time dinner rolls around, she’s so worked up about calories and fat grams and whether or not this will be David’s favorite day on Earth ever, she can’t even swallow. She sits through the entire meal, watching David try to eat and apologizing.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, is it good? I made this for you. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. You eat, just eat. Is it good?

Like that. With more wine and crying.

The last time I was at the table was a couple of years ago. David tried to give her an out: You don’t have to go to all this trouble. If it upsets you. Why bother?

He meant this in the best possible way. He meant, Why do this to yourself? But also, Why do this in my name?

The Why bother? put her over the edge.

You’re right, she said. You’re right why bother. Why bother?

The next moment her plate was flying against the kitchen wall. This was so sudden. I’d never seen her throw anything. I’d never seen her throw a ball in the park. The plate bounced and smashed on the tile floor. She grabbed David’s plate and then mine, one after another. David jumped up and tried to hold her down, hold her shoulders. Every wood spindle of the back of my chair pressed hard into my spine. Duck skin and sticky sauce everywhere, and
his mother in disaster mode, wailing. You do a thing that can’t be undone and it’s devastating.

After that, he asked me to skip the dinner. He comes over later, or else I show up there, once his mother is sleeping. Nothing special. What David actually wants is a quiet, pleasant marker of his aging process. He probably actually wants nothing but I can’t bear it. Enter Evie and her fluff cupcake.

David has a way with his mother, where he can get her calmed down if they’re alone.

No one’s angry, no one’s mad. You’re okay. It’s okay. His hand against her forehead, smoothing back her hair. You can see why he wants to disappear, to go off and fight fires in the Labrador woods. I’ve seen him feed her, one bite at a time, off his own plate.

I
crossed College and walked up Brunswick Avenue—the street my own mother lived on when she first came to the city and met my dad. As far as the local zoo is concerned, Brunswick is pretty centrally located. I’ve heard a lot of stories about that time, and now that we were neighbors, in a time-warp kind of way, I was surprised at how often I found myself on her street. I walked by the house all the time, heading to the market or work or up to Bloor Street or whatever. Her third house in the city, technically, but the first two were hostels and didn’t last. There was an industrial building on the corner and her house, number 102, was the next place beyond that, attached on one side to the house next door.

There’s a parkette there, too, on the corner at Ulster, rimmed on two sides with that old-style, black-painted iron fencing. Waist-high. It’s got a playground at one end and a cement wading pool at the other—the same kind we had at my public school when I was a kid. The water pours out a giant tap in the middle of the pool, and the cement slopes down on all sides into the center. This makes entering the water nice and gradual, like a concrete beach, or a giant
version of those European shower stalls that have no doors. It’s like a massive foot bath. I found a free bench down closer to the playground. The bench was cold enough to make my kidneys feel prematurely troubled.

Brunswick isn’t a bad street these days, but I could still see two condoms in the gutter from where I was sitting, and I wouldn’t recommend walking through the sandpit in your bare feet unless you’re looking for an easy path to communicable disease. Stepping Stones to Hepatitis: A Visit to Margaret Fairley Park.

You go out of your way to become a respected writer, and they name a park after you in a neighborhood of addicts.

There were two girls in the playground, both under six. The bigger one was a master at the monkey bars. She whipped back and forth, skinny legs kicking momentum. Her hands were red from the cold of the bars. The smaller one was named Jenny and she just sat under the jungle gym and cried. Sometimes the sister’s legs accidentally kicked her as they went by and then she cried louder. Jenny and her gymnast sister had a fat white mother waiting for them on the opposite bench, smoking a cigarette and wearing a black
Dirty Dancing
sweatshirt under a hooded parka. She had a purple bandana around her neck. In the frozen sandpit there was a blond baby in a puffy green snowsuit staggering around with a Filipina nanny holding on to her two hands at all times.

So that’s reflective of what you’ve got down there: rows of town houses, some of them painted, mainly concrete steps and porches, some of them still operating as rooming houses and some of them occupied by lawyers with pagers and landscape architects. And nannies.

I left my empty cup on the bench and crossed over to have a little walk around. When I looked back, Jenny had left her spot under the monkey bars and was using my coffee cup as a snow scoop. She was making a row of tiny castles, like we were at the beach and this was hot summertime.

Brunswick was as permanent as it got for my mother, until she
hooked up with my dad. Her old house bordered on an alley that ran along behind Ulster Street. There was a rooming-house look to it. It probably had four bedrooms. You could fit twenty-five homeless kids in a house that size, on floor mattresses. Maybe it’s just that moving out on my own had made it more comfortable for me to like her. Or to find her intriguing, as a human. That happens. I’d never given the place a second thought when I was younger, but now if I was walking by, I tried to picture my mother, seventeen and standing on the porch with a kerchief tied around her hair.

I knew she used to clean houses for money, no contract, just under-the-table cash. She’d worked out a deal with a guy named Nathan Laskin who ran some frat houses and unofficial residences for professional students at U of T: Xi Psi Phi for dentists, Phi Delta Phi for lawyers, Alpha Epsilon Pi for Jews. This was when fraternities were respectable and not just drug nests. Or, at least, not known to be drug nests.

Nathan had made a deal with whoever was supposed to actually be in charge of fraternity administration. He was basically a sub-contractor. This allowed him to avoid the bureaucratic nightmare of official hiring and wage policies. It also allowed him to cut corners and save a few bucks here or there, by feeding cheap pork liver to the orthodox guys and saying it was beef, or hiring teenaged girls to keep house and clean toilets. Enter my mother and her dust cloth.

To hear my mother tell it, Nathan Laskin was practically a savior, because while the rest of her roommates were out panhandling or stealing fifty-cent items from Honest Ed for resale on the corner, she’d get up every afternoon and go clean Victorian houses in the nicest part of town. The frat houses were shit holes, of course, being occupied by a bunch of young guys who’d never learned to pick their own underwear off the floor, but it kept her from turning tricks, which it’s been suggested is how the other girls were making a living. I’m sure Nathan Laskin made a few offers of that variety, but my mother was okay to proceed without a wage increase, so they stuck to the original terms.

Living in that place was more or less a refugee culture. None of the kids who slept there were from the city, and all of them came from situations that needed escaping. Most of them were from the suburbs, Scarborough or Milton, although there were a few from as far up as Barrie and Midland. My mother was the only one from the way-north. She found the house by hanging around the bus station and other places lost kids go. She’d talk to anyone under twenty-one and see what they knew about Toronto.

When you’re living with a bunch of beggars and thieves, no one is taking care of themselves. The reason is a) no time for that and b) no one knows how, anyway. Sometimes when my mother tells her stories, the Brunswick house seems filled with artistry and a kind of familial solidarity. She’s also referred to it as a rat’s nest. She paid the extra ten bucks a month to sleep up high, away from the cockroaches, but also away from the other rats.

She lived there a year. The guy who took the rent money made her nervous.

Something wrong with him, my mother said. At first we just thought he smoked too much pot. He stared at you too hard if you talked to him. He had a smile that made him look slow-minded.

But he wasn’t, she said. He had a devious intelligence.

This is the thing with collecting housemates at the bus station. You get all kinds. There’s no good sorting method.

He’d catch mice in glue traps and play with them like a cat.

Some of the other girls had stories, my mother said. You didn’t want to be in the house with him. Once I walked into the kitchen and he was in there, alone. He had a mouse glued down and he stepped on it, one limb at a time. Listening to it scream.

It took her a long time to make enough money to leave.

So my mother woke up every day as early as she could and got dressed and left before anyone else was even awake. The frats were generally up around St. George and Bloor, which is about a ten-to-fifteen minute walk, depending on the length of your stride. She walked up there and ate some breakfast out of the frat house fridge
and then got going on scrubbing and washing things. She did one house every day, six days a week. On the seventh day, she sat in a coffeehouse all day and ate chocolate cake for lunch.

Being young and living like that, you don’t have a lot of the things that other teenagers have. I’m not talking about bicycles and record players so much as the other stuff, the things your mom looks after for you, like doctor’s appointments and green vegetables and the right kind of coat for wintertime. Soft mittens.

So one day my mother wakes up sore and can’t pee, and she’s afraid to tell any of her friends because they’ll just say she has syphilis, which she knows for a fact is flat-out impossible. Almost impossible. She gets up and goes to work anyway, and every day, it gets just a little bit worse. Seventeen is an optimistic and powerless age. You think you’ll be walking down the street one day and Richard Avedon will jump out with his camera and discover you. The lottery is like a life plan you’ve put on hold, until you have a spare buck to buy your winning ticket. Things are good or bad, sure. But more than that, they’re inevitable. If something hurts, you just let it hurt. You wait for it to go away, because what else is there to do?

Then one day she’s at Xi Psi Phi, scraping out the sink with Old Dutch and she has to pee, and what she pees is blood.

I don’t know if it’s because I was sick, or because of the sight of that blood, she said. I fell over. Right there in the bathroom. Out cold.

And that’s where my father the dental student comes in and finds her and figures out that she needs some antibiotics. Her kidneys were infected, and those things turn nasty if you don’t treat them.

What are the chances of a nice dental student falling for a teenaged maid? My father was from the other side of the country and his own mother had died when he was a kid. There was no opportunity for mother-in-law-type disapproval. Lucky for me. They got married in six weeks.

I turned and walked back through the park, in part so I could
check in on Jenny and the snow castles. Her sister had come off the monkey bars and they were making cakes and pies, using tiny icicles for the candles. It was a careful endeavor and they whispered instructions back and forth. I gave the tops of my legs a rub and my brain a little dead-girl pep talk. The other reason I was stalling about going in to work. The baby and her nanny had left the park a few minutes earlier. The girls’ mother was asleep on her bench. A pocket full of candy says I could have walked off with the two of them, Jenny and her sister, in a heartbeat. Because that’s how it happens. You just need one adult to look away, and another one to look too closely.

S
omeone had left a bag of equipment sitting all over my desk. I unzipped the bag and found a Pentax 35mm with a strap and a few other technical items I wasn’t sure of. A light meter, maybe. A battery charger. I cracked a black plastic oval open and found it full of tiny canisters of film. Next to the bag there was a yellow sticky note with Angie’s writing on it: Where the hell are you?

I walked into her office.

I’ve been doing some thinking, I said.

Think in the newsroom, Angie said. At nine in the morning like they pay you for. She had her head down in the previous day’s A-section. I waved the camera bag.