INSTANT
AUGUST
They’re still working on the basement. Leslie’s supposed to be giving Jonelle a break by watching Jackson for the morning. She had thought, eight o’clock, but Mike had laughed. Nobody up around here till at least ten. Come then.
She’s kind of shocked. Their dad would have had them up at six on a Saturday morning. Chores, paper routes. It’s how you get ahead, he’d said. She still can’t sleep past six, even if she wants to, even the time she went on vacation with friends to Vegas. Her body has a built-in alarm clock. But look how much more you can get done.
You’ve got a new haircut, Jonelle says in a kind of squeal.
Yeah. Thanks, Les says. Then feels something flag inside her: it wasn’t a compliment.
Her hair, the deep fox-red locks of it on the floor of the beauty parlour, already dulled, like a dead animal. Her head feels like something shameful, now: a body part not meant to be seen.
She had not meant to have it all off. She had woken a few mornings ago, feeling it greasy, disgusting. Well, it was a bother, at work. Whether to put it in a pony tail or what. Had imagined something clean, angular. It was only later, in the chair, when she’d got into that little argument with the hairdresser, that she’d decided: Cut it all off. All of it.
Pixie-bob, the girl had said. That isn’t a thing. But it was. She’d seen pictures on Pinterest. That’s what they called it.
Got it all buzzed, she says. Easier to take care of. No fussing.
It’s striking, Jonelle says, nodding. Hardly any pause, as if she wasn’t searching for a word.
They are in the kitchen. Jackson is at the table, a mess of Cheerios and banana, like some sort of aggregate spill has happened. Shouldn’t a three-year-old be able to feed himself more efficiently? Also, it’s ten-thirty already. She’d expected him to be ready to go at ten. But no.
Jonelle herself still in pajamas. Keegan was up in the night, she says. She yawns. She doesn’t seem to possess any forward momentum.
Teething? Les asks. Sympathy, not judgment: that’s what she is cultivating here.
Jonelle laughs. Teething! He’s only two months old.
Well, what does Leslie know? She’s never been around a very young baby before. She hadn’t really been in Mike’s life when Jackson was born.
Might not be now, except that Jonelle had apparently insisted on meeting her, had kept inviting her over, even when Jonelle and Mike were still living in Jonelle’s parents’ basement. Had invited her to holiday dinners with her own family, even.
Mike’s eyes: don’t mess this up for me.
So she was careful. Said nothing. Didn’t drink, just in case. People like Jonelle had rules that you couldn’t guess existed: weird rules that could ambush you just when you felt most at ease. She knew that.
Jonelle wasn’t what she had expected Mike to end up with. Nope. She’d imagined the kind of girl who took pins to condoms. But Jonelle had a college degree, worked in a bank, had paid mat leave. Paid. Right now, sitting in that chair, hair in her eyes, yawning, she’s getting paid.
No wonder Mike toes the line, these days.
She hears a kind of static fuzz in the back of her head. Jackson, you look like you’re finished, she says. She knows she’s said this about three times already, to no effect. Don’t you want to go to the park with Aunty?
Aunt Leslie’s going to take you to the park, Jonelle says, as if translating. Can you drink up your milk now and get dressed?
There’s the sound of hammering from downstairs and then the thin wail of the baby. Jonelle swears, lifts herself up as if she’s a hundred, heads for the back bedroom.
At this rate, they’re never going to get out the door. Les takes Jackson by his elbows, which seem the least encrusted part of him, lifts him onto the floor.
He shakes his head. She begins to steer him down the hall, toward the bathroom. No, he says. No. But she pops him up on the stepstool, anyway, turns on the tap, begins to scrub him down. Avoids his eyes in the vanity mirror.
Don’t you want to see the animals?
No, he says.
She steers him to his bedroom, which is decorated with a stick-on mural of realistic animals – giraffes, hippopotami, some sort of monkeys, a lion – and begins opening drawers. Pants, sweater, socks. There are tiny Y-front underwear in a drawer but some sort of pull-on diaper on top of the dresser. Which? Diaper, she decides.
When they go back to the kitchen, Jonelle is in the chair again, her pajama top pulled up, the baby latched onto her. Jonelle’s boob is bigger by some than Keegan’s bald round head. He’s all body, like some sort of sucking parasite, his stumpy useless arms and legs folded in on him. Les feels a little ill, has to look away.
Her nephews. Her blood. She has to forge a relationship. Whatever it takes.
Now Jackson says he wants to go downstairs, to see his dad. But she’s here to keep him out of Mike’s way, while he’s working. You don’t want to go down there, she says, moving towards the door to keep it shut.
But Jackson, the little monkey, has the basement door open. Dad! he calls. Daddy!
That brings Mike up the stairs. What’s up, Tiger?
Then, looking at Les: Jeez Louise: Did you fall under a mower?
The sting of it. But that’s how she and Mike talk to each other. Just not usually around Jonelle, right? It’s on her no-fly list, that kind of kidding.
Now Jackson says he doesn’t want to go out; he wants to stay and watch Daddy.
She doesn’t want to go out now, herself. But she’s geared up for it. Half the morning gone already. And just to walk to the park, where she’ll push Jackson on the swing and try to make him look at the pot-bellied pigs. She’d wanted to make a day trip to the wildlife park, but that was also a no-fly with Jonelle. And Mike too, if she is honest.
It’s going to be fun, Mike says. Aunty Leslie will make sure you have fun.
Jonelle says, Jackson, can you please make sure you hold Aunt Leslie’s hand when you cross the street?
Okay. That’s meant for her. She gives Jonelle a mock salute from the doorway. Then spies Mike’s prized Jets cap on a peg, flips it onto her own shorn head.
JULY
Sheila the HR person says, So, Leslie, lots better feedback the last two weeks.
As if it’s not really lots. As if lots is a word that means something else, like something so miniscule there isn’t a name for it. As if the feedback is something separate from Sheila, not the forms she’s having Larry and the others fill out on Leslie every day.
There had better be good feedback. She has tried.
It’s six weeks now. She’s halfway there.
These last two weeks she has tried very hard to do what Sheila has shown her, in the training videos she makes Leslie watch in an empty office while she, Sheila, is next door, presumably, at her desk. She has tried to Put Herself in the Resident’s Shoes, to Use the You-Perspective, to Make a Personal Connection, to De-personalize and Defuse Conflict Potential, to Practice Perfect Protocol, to Communicate, Collaborate, and Conciliate.
All of this she has to do at a counter, a cashier’s wicket, where she mostly collects fines and stamps receipts, and at her desk, where she tries to find things in a computer system that makes absolutely no sense.
So, any questions? Sheila asks.
The way Sheila smiles: Her face doesn’t open up and make you relax, like when most people smile, but instead it seems to close down, like the jointed metal screens they can pull down over their wickets. She wants to ask Sheila: Do they teach you to smile like that at business school? Because she has seen Jonelle do it too.
Not that Sheila is a bit like Jonelle. What you get with Sheila is some kind of hard metal box. You can’t see what’s inside. Jonelle is soft, soft. Only a little hard core inside, like a peach stone.
She had thought Sheila would be the opposite of Jonelle, soft underneath her sculpted hair and her blazers and her French manicure. But she is not.
It
occurs to her that Sheila is probably her own age, coming up on thirty. Is this reassuring or not?
It has taken Leslie all this time to get a good job, a real job. She can’t let anyone else screw it up for her. She has to figure this out, figure out what they want, find her way there.
At any given point, she thinks she knows. Things seem clear. It’s only after that she sees she has been misled, or something.
JUNE
When her new nephew, Keegan, is born, she goes over to Mike and Jonelle’s with flowers and a gift bag with New Baby! and a pastel print of cartoon animals on it, and a bottle of Crown Royal for Mike, and a Tonka truck for Jackson, because the saleswoman at Toys“R”Us had said: First baby? No? Have you got a gift for the older child, so he won’t be jealous? Good up-selling there, and she had fallen for it, because it was definitely more fun to choose a toy truck than little blue sleepers and plush rattles. But when she gets there, Jonelle and the baby are kind of dozy, the baby more like a shrunken human than anything else, like a human raisin, and Jackson at his grandmother’s, and her brother Mike busy with a construction project. He says she can hang out and give a hand, though.
Mike’s friend Cole, who’s also there, says: So, bylaw officer, eh? So what do you do; drive around looking for people watering their lawns on the wrong day?
He’s teasing, but as her supervisor, Larry, always says: Ignorance of the law is a great opportunity for education. She says: Municipal bylaws play an important role in maintaining the functioning of the city for the safety and comfort of every city resident. That’s directly from the preamble of the handbook, but she thinks it sums things up precisely.
Yeah? he says. So what are some examples of bylaws?
This is hard to answer, as there are so many. She tries to think of some interesting but not controversial ones. Inline Skates and Skateboards, she says. Bylaw 23-63. To keep activities safe for skaters with respect to traffic and pedestrians. Cemeteries. Bylaw 6-27. To maintain, regulate, and operate cemeteries. Good Neighbour Bylaw 49-1. To promote civic responsibility and encourage good relationships between neighbours.
You got them memorized?
Some, she says. Trying.
They are helping drywall the suite Mike is building in the basement of his new house. Mike has made a run to Rona for more outlet boxes – they had miscounted. Les is holding the panel of drywall in place while Mike’s friend Cole attaches it to the studs. She had thought Cole wanted her to hold it up, and had braced herself for the weight, but no – he had a wooden prop called a shoe, weird name, that took the weight, and she has only to press the sheet against the new wall to steady it while Cole drives in a couple of anchor screws.
Do you like it?
The last question whips up in her brain a snarl of disconnected events and issues, so the real answer is not going to work its way up soon. It’s okay, she says. Steep learning curve.
What people always say. Then another thought kicks up from the jangle and surfaces.
I’ll have full dental when I’ve been there three months, she says. Yeah. Lot of work to do in there.
Feels the heat rise under her jawbones, then. But Cole seems interested. Right on, he says.
Cole is not a carpenter but knows what he’s doing, has a truck and tools. Offered to show Mike the ropes. He’s Mike’s friend from men’s hockey.
Mike never used to play hockey. No money for equipment, when they were kids. Mike’s always improving stuff, now.
Mike, her little brother. Now with a wife and two rug rats and a house in a nice neighbourhood. Well. He’s making the suite for a mortgage helper. And Jonelle’s parents loaned them the down payment. (Grandkids, Mike had said. Best collateral you can have.) But still. How Mike has moved up and up.
Knows which side his bread is buttered on, Gran’s voice, twisty as beetle scratchings, says in her head.
You can let go now, Cole says. He’s zipping in the drywall screws now with a power drill, shroom, shroom. The screws are black, loosely spiraled, with X-shaped slots on their heads. He drives in each new screw in a fluid series of motions, transferring a single one from the row held between the middle fingers of his left hand to his pointer and thumb, his right hand simultaneously swinging the drill up in an arc and connecting with the screw’s head, eyeballing it perfectly, the screws, a hand span apart, forming an even line around the perimeter of the drywall sheet and up the middle. As if there were marks there that only he could see.
Like her and Mike’s dad. He could do anything well. The rest of them were all cack-handed, though.
You want to do the last couple? Cole asks, holding the drill toward her.
It is heavier than she expected, its blue shell cold and weirdly textured, and it vibrates when she squeezes the trigger. It wobbles all over and the screw goes in completely crooked. Crap. She’s useless at it.
Slide the button to reverse it, Cole says. Just take the screw out and try again. She hadn’t known that there was a reverse button. Dad never let them touch his tools, of course.
This time he holds the screw to get it started, and she puts two hands on the drill to steady it. Like a girl. It’s better, but not perfect. You can tell which one is hers.
Like this, Cole says, and puts his hands on hers, changes the shape of her grip, presses.
The guy-underarm smell, not dirty but foreign. The sense of him too close, biceps, beard.
Her hair swings forward as she hunches, and he scoops it away. Whoa, buddy. Don’t want to get your hair too close to a rotating tool. You could lose your scalp.
The chagrin, how close she has come to an accident. She recoils, stumbles awkwardly sideways.
After the incident, they’d put her in a car with a more senior officer, an older guy. That was Larry. He was supposed to give her more orientation.
She has nearly memorized the entire bylaw document. She has always been pretty good at memorizing.
She has tried, riding with Larry, to be more observant, to think things through the way Larry does. Larry will incline his head to something ahead of them in the street, ask: Now, what are we looking for up there? And she’ll try to see what he’s seeing, to think through things the way he does. And to call it. But she’s always wrong. Always.
What are you seeing?
Hedge encroaching on road.
Are you kidding me? It’s back six feet. Look again.
Um. Garage under construction? Maybe without permit?
Larry makes a sound like he’s clearing something small and scratchy from the roof of his mouth. That’s old wood. See the colour? Never got the siding on.
Cyclist without a helmet.
Not our jurisdiction.
What, then?
See that pile of sawdust, there. On the lawn. Tree felling.
No permit?
Yeah, we don’t give permits in residential. Need to hire a licensed company. Otherwise, what happens?
What?
First thing, giant freaking branch falls through neighbour’s roof, kills Grandma in the bath.
Okay.
That’s an image that will help you remember this particular ordinance.
Thanks, she says. She likes Larry. She feels safe with him: She knows where she is. She knows he’s going to ride her all day, but that’s for her own good.
Only her head full of static, like there’s too many signals, too many connections, to put anything together. It’s the thought that she might not make it, that she might not meet expectations, that’s clouding her mind, of course. But she can’t fight through that. It’s all around her and inside her, like an invisible gas. It’s even part of her, maybe: She feels that it’s intertwined with her cells, her brain cells, even. Like it’s always been there, latent, silent, but now something has come along and activated it.
It’s inside her and part of her and she can’t fight it hard enough.
Sometimes the thought comes to her that she might be fired – she might not pass her probationary period. And then it�
�s so bad, it’s like air being cut off. Then she can’t think at all.
She downloads the manual and sends it to Staples to be printed. Maybe she’s not supposed to do that? But if she had a printer at home she could do it and nobody would know, would they? Or is there some sort of thing in the computer that lets people know when you print something off?
She keeps the printout in her kitchen, reads through it while she cooks and eats her breakfast oatmeal and her supper, which is usually some sort of pasta with frozen vegetables boiled in, and a couple of hot dog wieners. Meat is good for you but she doesn’t like steak; it hurts her teeth. And chicken. The smell of it raw, and she’s had it.
She reads through the printout before bed, falls asleep with it in her hand, sometimes. You’d think she’d dream about the bylaws. But instead she keeps having the dreams where she is the queen, that she’s given someone – always some faceless man dressed in black – a command to have someone executed. That’s a silly dream, a stupid mixture of Alice in Wonderland and her real Gran’s album of royal family clippings and her stories about the war.
Mind you, she had been good and scared of Gran. She’d moved in after their mom run off – looked after them and Dad. She didn’t take any crap, that was for sure.
Or, maybe more exactly, she made you pay later for any crap. Only you didn’t always know at the time that you had done something wrong. Of course, you should have known.
She tells Sheila in HR that she’s ready to re-write the general knowledge test. She has already written it – she had to pass it with 73% to get the job in the first place – but one thing that was part of her probation was that she has to write it again.
She gets 98%.
She can stop riding with Larry, Sheila says.
On her way out of the office, Les says, Can I make a suggestion, Sheila? More signs along the walls? Because, half the people that come in here haven’t even brought the right forms. They’re just wasting their time and ours. They get to the front of the line and they haven’t even got a piece of ID with their current address on them.
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