Sarah was looking for a way out of talking to Shw. Janet wondered if she had a secret cue to alert security to come and fend off people who had become too clingy – the way the queen used her handbag to semaphore messages to her staff. Janet was going to come to her daughter’s rescue when Sarah looked up, smiled and said, ‘Oh hello, Beth.’
Beth? Janet turned around, and there was Beth in one of her best Sunday church outfits, seemingly lifted from a museum diorama depicting Kansas life in the year 1907. Shw was not happy at being eclipsed. She said to Beth, ‘So, you’re Wade’s wife, huh? What’s with the prairie schoolmarm dress, eh? You look like a fridge magnet.’
Beth said, ‘And you must be Shw. Hello.’ Two cats handcuffed together would radiate more warmth.
Sarah said to Shw, ‘Shw, Beth is religious. Respect each other’s boundaries.’ Sarah looked up and saw Ted and Nickie. ‘Hi, Dad.’
Ted said to Bryan, ‘Hey, Bryan, introduce me to your little lady.’
Shw heard this. “‘Your little lady?” What planet are you from?’
‘Excuse me, then,’ said Ted. ‘Madame has a name?’
‘Yeah. It’s Shw.’
‘Huh? Sorry, I didn’t hear that.’
‘Shw, bozo. S-H-W.’
Ted was genuinely perplexed. ‘Let me understand this – your name is spelled S-H-W – and that’s all?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ve never met anybody named Shw before.’
‘So now you have. I chose it myself.’
‘Hey, Bryan – if you’ve got a few extra vowels, why don’t you sell one to the little firecracker here?’
Shw’s posture went rigid. She locked her eyes at Ted and said, ‘You’re a total asswipe. I didn’t believe Bryan, but now I do. You’re a shitty person, Ted Drummond. And you screwed up your family so badly they’ll never be fixed. You must be really proud of yourself.’
‘Trust Bryan to hook up with a disaster like you.’
‘Don’t talk that way about Shw,’ Bryan said. ‘She’s pregnant and I don’t want you stressing her out and hurting the baby.’
‘Oh, Bryan, ferchrissake,’ said Shw, ‘I’m dumping the thing, OK? So don’t get all high hat.’
‘You are not getting rid of our baby.’
‘Yes, I am, and you can’t do anything to stop me. What are you going to do – strap sheet-metal around my vagina?’
The crowd witnessing all of this was riveted. Beth cut through the bickering and asked Sarah, ‘Tell me, Sarah – do you believe in extraterrestrial beings?’ Beth’s smile was ominously sweet.
Sarah looked at her sister-in-law. ‘I think life and living beings are strewn about the universe as generously and as commonly as pollen in a July breeze.’
‘So then tell me, do you believe in God?’
‘Let me put it this way: If God is dead, or if God never existed in the first place, then anything would be permitted, wouldn’t it? But not everything is permitted.’ Sarah stopped. That was her full reply.
‘I see.’
‘Hey—’ Shw said to Beth, ‘is God a vegetarian? You look like one of those people who knows everything.’
‘I don’t understand your question.’
‘Look at it this way – say there’s a snake out in the desert, and the snake eats a rat. It’s the food chain, and so it’s no big deal. God isn’t involved. And then say you’re in Africa and a lion eats a gazelle or something. Same thing: food chain; God’s not there either. But then say that same lion one week later kills a human being and then eats that human being. What – suddenly God’s involved in it? – like we’re the only divine link in the food chain or something?’
Janet began to withdraw from the rather stagy conversation. Sarah could hold her own with anyone. She then felt a gentle tap on her shoulder. She looked around and saw Nickie. Huh?
‘Janet, can we talk for a minute?’
‘Talk?’
‘Yes. I think it’s important.’
Janet became wary. ‘I don’t think there’s anything you and I could—’
‘Two things have happened,’ Nickie said. ‘You need to know about them.’
Curiosity won out. ‘What the hell. Sure.’
‘Come into the lounge. It’s a zoo out here.’
Janet was happy to be able to go inside. The heat had been wiping her out, and walking into the Peabody was like walking into a brisk autumn day. The two women made their way to a small lounge – a tasteful rattan and sea foam dream, like something from an upmarket outdoor wear catalog. The moment they sat down, the waiter took their orders – two club sodas.
‘So then what’s up,’ Janet said.
‘I have AIDS, too.’
Janet thought about this. ‘OK, I’m sorry you had to join the club, but what do you want me to do about it?’
Nickie was about to say something, thought the better of it, and stopped herself.
Janet asked, ‘From Wade?’
Nickie nodded. ‘Pretty sure.’
‘Does Ted know?’
‘No. I’ve only known for three days. I told him I was having a woman’s problem, and that shut him up pretty good.’
‘With Ted it would.’
Their sodas arrived. Janet briefly considered a toast, and then realized it would seem like a sick joke, so she sipped quietly. ‘You said there were two things. What was the other?’
‘It’s about Helena.’
‘Helena?’ Janet put down her glass. Helena was her oldest friend with whom there had been a terrible falling out. ‘What about Helena?’
Nickie said, ‘I don’t know the whole story of what happened between the two of you, but for what it’s worth, just before the end she said she was sorry for everything she did to you. She said it was her craziness that did it, and not her. She said there was some other person who took over her body and that her explosion with you – her word: explosion – was her one regret in life.’
Janet didn’t move. ‘How could you possibly know any of this?’
‘Her sister is my dad’s second wife. She took me out to the mental facility or whatever it is they call those things these days. We got to see her on the day they were trying a new medication on her. It gave her this small window of clarity where she said all these things. And then the medication stopped working, and then a day later she killed herself. I guess the medication went wrong. I’m sorry. But she did apologize. She really did miss you. She really did care about you.’
Helena …
‘Janet?’
Across the lobby, extremely sick children hooked to machines and tubes were being wheeled out into the sunlight.
06
Janet had one memory of Helena that shone brighter than all others. It was from September 1956 – Janet and Helena, young coeds, were walking in downtown Toronto, en route to lunch with Janet’s father at Eaton’s. The air was tinged with the sugar of yellowing leaves and the sun was palpably lower on the horizon. Helena was teasing Janet about her blossoming romance with Ted: ‘It’s those big American teeth, isn’t it? That’s what you like. Those big American teeth, and that thing he does with his eyes.’
‘What thing?’
‘Don’t go what-thing?ing me. You know exactly what I mean.’
‘So what if his eyes are nice.’ Janet fished around in her dutiful brain to find something bad to cancel out the good: ‘But that wreck of a car of his farts blue smoke like crazy.’
‘You are so repressed, Janet Truro. And Ted is such a Yankee.’
‘Helena, you should see the packages his mother sends him – they make me dizzy. Heaps of sweaters and shirts – monogrammed, and inside a bundle of shirts there was, get this, a bottle of rye! From his mother! I can’t imagine what his father sends him.’
‘A box of hookers.’
‘Oh, Helena, stop!’ Janet’s nose exploded. ‘My gee-dee nostrils are flapping.’
‘Maybe a box of dead hookers. You know those Americans.’
Janet gasped f
or breath.
‘So, Troo, does he want you to be a goody-goody or his slut?’ Troo was Janet’s nickname, an abbreviation of Truro.
‘Helena!’
‘Answer my question, which is it?’
‘Why – I can’t tell you.’
‘Yes, you can.’
Janet knew quite well what Helena meant, but Helena’s question scared her, in both its obvious and indirect implications. ‘He wants me to be a nice girl.’
‘My, what a satisfying answer that was.’ A concrete mixer rumbled past. ‘So if Ted is Mister American Hotshot, why’s he going to school up in Canada? Why aren’t the folks from Yale coming with buggy whips to chase him home?’
‘Americans think Canada is sort of glamorous. Mysterious.’
A snort: ‘Kee-riste. You must be joking.’
Janet couldn’t quite believe it herself – a city of porridge, bricks and sensible rain garments – but she had to defend her suitor. ‘Well, we do worship the queen, you know. And to Americans, royalty’s as weird and foreign as communism. Communism with jewels and missing chins.’
They stopped and were looking at Mexican sombreros and a papier maché cactus inside a travel agency’s window display. Behind these, a scale model airliner aimed toward the future. Janet ran down the street. ‘Try and catch me, Helena.’
‘Troo, slow down.’ Helena was slightly overweight. ‘You’d think this was the gee-dee Kentucky Derby.’ She puffed her way to the corner where a Don’t Walk signal had stopped Janet in her tracks. ‘Come on, Troo – let’s cross.’
‘But it says don’t walk.’
‘You are such a chickenshit, Troo. Live dangerously and jaywalk. C’mon!’ Helena was across the street now. ‘Yoo hoo!’ she taunted. ‘I’m on the other side of the street, and it’s lovely over here.’
Janet decided to cross the street just as a constable walked around a corner, blew his whistle, called her over to him and gave her a jaywalking ticket. Helena was in stitches. Janet was mortified – another 1950s word. My permanent record … a blemish!
Mr. Truro missed lunch in the Eaton’s cafeteria – shepherd’s pie, carrots, rice pudding and Cokes – but instead offered to drive Janet and Helena home. William had become stout with middle age, and with it came a sort of handsomeness. Helena was in the front seat saying outrageous things to bait him: ‘Women are much better than men at hammering out details. I bet you anything women take over the legal profession by 1975.’
‘Janet, where’d you hook up with this suffragette? Soon she’ll have you taking over my job at Eaton’s.’
‘And what would be wrong with that?’ Helena demanded.
‘My little Janet in a job-job? She’d be … swamped.’
Helena rose to the bait. ‘Swamped? Why swamped?’
‘The world’s a hard place, Helena,’ William said.
‘So what?’
‘So what? You’re young. That’s what.’
‘Oh, brother!’
Janet said, ‘You guys are talking about me like I’m not even here.’
Her father had ears only for Helena.
‘You don’t know,’ said William. ‘Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.’
‘You want to keep your little Janet in an ivory tower?’
‘Yes, I do.’ The Impala was at a red light; the quieted engine made this last word of William’s sound as if an ogre had belched it out. The moment was charged and needed defusing. ‘Helena, turn on the radio,’ Janet piped up. ‘I feel like hearing Dean Martin.’
William said, ‘That wop?’
‘Daddy, he’s not a wop.’
William accelerated through the newly green light. Invisible hands pulled Janet into the rear seat’s foam. Helena asked to be dropped off at home, near the corner of Bloor and St. George, so William had to make a detour. Once there, Helena pointed out the house in which she was renting an upper floor. ‘What a dump, eh, Mr. Troo?’
‘You’re the arty type, Helena. It suits you.’
‘Ciao then,’ and off she sauntered. Ciao? What on earth does that mean? Janet felt like the one bird left behind after the rest of the flock had migrated. She couldn’t shake the feeling, and when Ted proposed in a Hungarian restaurant on the next Friday night, she accepted. For the months prior to the wedding, not a day passed without moments of remorse, as though she’d spent all of her carefully saved money on a dress she had no place to wear. But Ted’s so handsome and mysterious! But what have I done? I barely know the man. What if he snores? What if we don’t get along? What if—
The next what-if was hard to even think of, let alone put into words, the what-if of the flesh. Our bodies – his body – I’ve never even seen … all of him. Oh dear. Oh dear. What am I going to do?
It was at this point where magazine articles, Doris Day films and her mother went silent. There’s something wrong going on here, but what?
A hand shook Janet’s shoulder. ‘Janet? Janet? Are you OK?’ It was Nickie, and Janet was back in the Peabody hotel.
‘I’m fine. Please. Fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
Janet looked at Nickie. Any hostility she’d been harboring against the woman had left. ‘Sure.’
Both women then heard footsteps coming close to them – cowboy boots on marble: Wade walked around the corner, right into Janet and Nickie’s table, obviously expecting neither of them. ‘Oh – hi – I …’
‘Hello, Wade.’
‘Nickie. Hey. I—’
Janet said, ‘Relax. Sit down with us.’
‘Why? What’s up?’
‘Just sit.’
‘Is it news?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Bad news?’
Nickie said, ‘Yes, Wade, it’s bad news.’
‘It’s not … ?’
Nickie nodded. ‘Yes, it is.’
Wade slumped down into a rattan chair. ‘Shit. Sorry. What can I—’ Wade suddenly looked at his mother, but something else was now in his eyes.
Something is wrong.
Wade reached over to her with a napkin. ‘Mom—’
‘What? What?’
‘You’re doing a Dracula all over your shirt. Don’t panic. It’ll clean up just fine.’
‘I’m bleeding?’ Janet reached for another napkin and blotted her chest, pulling the cloth, which evidenced a fair amount of blood coming from her mouth. ‘Oh dear.’
‘Mom,’ Wade said, ‘I’m going to check you into this hotel and then I’m going to go get your things at your motel, OK?’
Janet felt confused. ‘Yes, dear. Yes. Of course.’
‘Don’t worry. Things are going to be just fine. Can you stand up? There. Stand up. I’ll take you up to my room and you can lie down there. Things’ll be just fine. Just you wait and see.’
They walked toward the elevators, Nickie carrying some extra napkins, which she handed to Wade. Janet and Wade got in and Nickie said, ‘I’ll call you later, Janet.’ The door closed.
07
Wade put Janet to rest on the bed in his room, and then grabbed the keys to the sedan rented with Beth’s credit card. He went downstairs only to find that Sarah, the sick children and the crowd had all vanished. The media trucks were just pulling away, their wires snapped in as crisply as if into a measuring tape’s chromed handle. But some of his family was still there – Bryan and Shw were in the throes of a fight – ostensibly over a set of car keys, which Bryan apparently wouldn’t give up. The other guests in the lobby were unable to ignore the embarrassing set-to, and Wade tried to skulk past them, but he was noticed. Shw loudly said, ‘Ha! Your brother’ll drive me.’
‘No, he won’t.’
Wade didn’t want to get involved. ‘I’m looking for Beth.’ He realized he was dangling the car’s keys.
‘She went out shopping,’ said Bryan.
‘I hope she doesn
’t spend much,’ Wade said. ‘We’re flat broke.’
‘Wade, give me a ride,’ Shw said.
‘I’m only going to pick up Mom’s stuff at that shitbox motel she’s staying in. She should be here with us.’
‘How is Mom?’ Bryan asked. ‘I ask her all the time, and she always says she’s “just fine”, which is completely suspicious.’
‘Bryan,’ said Shw, ‘she’s got AIDS. She is not “fine”. Some sons you two are. You should be laying flowers at her feet and instead all you do is give her grief. Wade, I’ll come help you get her stuff.’
‘Shw, I’m not sure if I need any—’
‘Oh, shut up. Yes, you do – all her frilly scary women’s stuff. After that you can drive me to the gun range.’
‘Gun range?’ Wade looked at his brother.
‘I know,’ Bryan said, ‘talk about a sure-fire way to screw up a fetus – all those shots’ll make the kid deaf. And you should check out the heavy metal content in the air and soil around those ranges. It’s like instant Minamata disease.’
Shw said, ‘Florida is freaking me out. I need firearms to reempower myself.’
Both men did a double take: Reempower myself? Curiosity about the mother of his future niece or nephew outweighed Wade’s reservations. ‘Tell you what – I’m parked right out here and I’m leaving right away. If you’re going to come, then come.’ He walked out into the north parking lot, brazier hot, and was about to reverse out of his slot when Shw opened the door and got in.
‘Bryan is such a scaredy-cat.’
All Families Are Psychotic Page 5