Leslie, recently graduated and in and out of home at whim, was our family’s traveller—a ten-day tour of southern England in ninth grade and three weeks in Nova Scotia as a B & B chambermaid the summer after she graduated, both trips drenched in sex and scandal.
“Rome?” said Father. “That’s yesterday’s world. Go to Tomorrow. Go to Houston—San Diego—Atlanta.” Father was only interested in making new things. To him, a fifteenth-century church would be nothing more than a shell on a beach.
“You’re too young to go anywhere,” said Mother.
William, a year older than Leslie, said, “Sixteen is fine. And what—like she’s going to hop off the plane and be instantly molested? Come on.”
“But those Italians …” My mother wasn’t so sure that my plump frumpiness rendered me asexual.
“They’re no different than the English, Mother. Men are men. Face it.” That Leslie, aged eighteen, could say something this daring-yet-clichéd at the dinner table, and have it accepted as gospel, testified to her unshakeable faith in the power of her own allure, and to my lack thereof.
“I suppose you’re right,” Mother caved in. “What about money?”
“I’ll pay,” I said. “I’ve never spent any of my babysitting or paper route money.”
“What?” My brother was clearly astonished. “That’s so depressing. None of it? Not even a blouse? A Chap Stick?”
“Nothing.”
Leslie asked, “What’ll you wear?”
Father said, “Whoa, Nellie! Who said Lizzie was even going?”
“Oh, hush, Neil,” Mother replied. “It’ll broaden her horizons.” Again she spoke as if I wasn’t there: “The poor thing doesn’t even have any posters up in her room.”
“Fair enough.”
That I was paying for the trip myself was all my pragmatic, rules-oriented father really needed to know.
My parents … I suppose one could call them generic. In the absence of any overarching quirks or pathologies, they had ended up defaulting on the side of cheapness, dirt management and chore scheduling—which is to say, they ended up like most parents. Father had his garage, off the floor of which you could, if you wished, eat one of my mother’s economically prepared meals at precisely six o’clock every night, cardigan sweaters optional but preferred.
My father was killed in 1985, when I was twenty-five. He fell asleep at the wheel driving into Honolulu on the 78, ramming headfirst into an Isuzu truck with three local kids in the cab. Mother was unhurt, and remembers none of it. Funny—he seems so far away to me now. He never spoke much, and as a result I have few memories. Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you. In any event, at the airport he handed me five hundred dollars in lire, which for him was the equivalent of a normal person renting a biplane to spell out a goodbye in the sky. He was essentially a kind man.
Back at the dinner table that night, Leslie said, “I think I have some jumbo oversize sweaters that just might fit you.”
“Thank you, Leslie.”
“You’ll have hickeys all over your bum from being pinched.” William was attempting to be gallant in his way, flattering my young mind that, no matter what, I could still be wanted, however slim the odds.
Mother said, “Stop that, William. The Latin class sponsors this trip, not your friends with their hot rods. I might add, last week I was driving a bit too slowly on Cross Creek and your friend Allan Blake gave me the finger. He didn’t know it was me, but I knew it was him, and I never want to see him here again, you hear?”
William was still focused on my trip. “I bet you fall for some guy who works at a Fiat factory.”
“Marcello,” added Leslie, “a fiery idealist. Chianti bottles. A sweaty undershirt—picnics beside the autostrada—”
“He slaps you around a bit. He gets jealous easily—”
“But you’d kill for him—”
“Stop!” My mother was appalled at how sexualized her two eldest children were. The only comfort she seemed to find was my incontestable virginity. “Lizzie is going to go to Rome, and she is going to learn about the great works of art there, and … eat Roman food, and …” Words temporarily failed her. “… become a serious and scholarly young woman.”
Even my own spirits were dampened by such a clinical vision of Rome. Truth was, I wanted to see naked statues of people because I was too embarrassed to pick up certain magazines in certain stores, the ones in the part of town it took me three bus transfers to reach. I always wimped out and stayed up front reading the knitting catalogues. Why they even bothered stocking catalogues up front is beyond me. The real clientele of those places always lurked at the store’s rear, exclusively men, clad in raincoats, toupées and shame.
To me, the thought of Rome—a city adorned with genitalia rather than vinyl siding and stucco—seemed improbable. I had to see this place. In the weeks leading up to the trip’s charter airline departure, I kept waiting for a TV studio’s buzzer to sound, for an audience to shriek at me, telling me that it was all a big prank.
* * *
Jeremy and I were alone in the hospital room well into the night, save for the sinister hiss of his oxygen, a speaker system squawking in another wing or the rare motorcycle gunning its engine on the road below. Jeremy’s eyes stayed shut. I wondered what I was going to say when he opened them—but it turned out I didn’t have to worry about that. Around three a.m., he opened them and said, “My name isn’t written in the Book of Life.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but answered, “Don’t be stupid. Of course it is.”
“No—you don’t understand—when they paddled me back here, I was already falling on my way to hell. I was yanked, like I was bungeed, back into this building.” He squeezed my wrist, as if taking my pulse. “It sucked the air out of me.”
“Jeremy, you’re not going to hell.” My son had no apparent aptitude for small talk, but that was fine, for nor do I. I said, “All that happened was that last night you did some very stupid party drugs, and now you’re paying the price. That stuff fries the wiring in your head like booster cables.”
“Let’s change the subject.”
“Done.”
We sat there feeling foolish.
Jeremy asked, “So, have you been preparing a speech to give me inside your head for the past twenty years?”
“Of course. You, too?”
“Yup.”
There was more silence, happier this time.
I said, “Neither of us is going to give the speech, right?”
“It’d be kind of corny.”
“It would.”
“I feel much better already.”
I asked, “How did you find me? I tried locating you for years with no luck. The government was really prickish about it.”
“Well, it’s amazing what you can find in this world if you’re willing to sleep with people.” He said this as if he were giving me a household hint.
“I suppose so.”
“I’d be a good spy.”
“I didn’t notice you spying on me for four years, so yes. When was the last time you ate?”
“As in food?”
“No, as in tractors. Of course I mean food.”
“I had a ninety-three-cent piece of pizza yesterday. At noon.” The unusual pizza price was a local merchandising twist; with tax, a slice came to one dollar.
“Those ninety-three-cent slices are about as good for you as a roasted bandage.”
“I swiped a block of mozzarella from the supermarket on Davie.”
“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”
“Everything. So long as a block of cheese is still vacuum-sealed, the pizzerias accept them as currency. They give you a free slice, and maybe five bucks.”
“You’d risk a police record for five bucks and a microwaved Band-Aid?”
“It’s okay. The supermarket gives you two options if they catch you—one: th
ey call the cops, and two: they take a Polaroid of you holding up whatever it was you shoplifted. It’s almost always cheese. And then they tell you never to come back into the store. They have this whole back wall covered with faded photos of street scum holding cheeses. It’s not as if I’m risking a police record. Merely a ritual humiliation.”
This was genuinely interesting to me. I said so.
“I bet you something.”
“What? What do you bet me?”
“I bet you think I’m street trash.”
I sighed. “Well, Jeremy, let me check my data so far: drugs; overdose; mesh stockings; cheese theft …”
“I used to be street trash.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“But I stopped being trash a few years ago.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” I considered this. “Can you do that? I mean, just stop that whole way of life?”
“Yes. Or I thought I could. Until last night. My friend Jane got me all dragged up for the Rocky Horror show.”
“So your doctor told me.”
“Tyson? Man, from what I just saw, she needs a morphine drip and a lost weekend with a tennis pro. She’s one of those doctors who overdoes it. I can tell with one blink.”
“I think you may be right.”
“What’s with the puffy face?”
“I had my wisdom teeth taken out four days ago.”
“Pain?”
“No. They gave me lots of drugs.”
“Any leftovers?”
“No!” I pretend-swatted him.
“Never hurts to try.”
I asked him how he felt. He went quiet. I said, “Hello?”
He pulled into himself, just like that, his shine gone.
“Jeremy? Here you are, sick and all, and we’re discussing … stolen cheese. That’s stupid. Sorry.”
His fingers tightened onto mine. As with my bowl of blackberries on the railway, I’d not even noticed we’d been holding hands the whole time.
I asked, “Jeremy—should I find a nurse?”
He shook his head, no, with an intensity that surprised me.
“What’s going on? Tell me.”
“It’s bad stuff. Not good stuff at all.”
“What isn’t good stuff—the darkness you talked about?”
“No. In my life. Where I’ve lived.”
“Your family—families?”
“That would be part of it. I sometimes get hijacked by pictures.”
“Pictures of what?”
“Omens. Things we see when we’re near the end times.”
Oh God, just when we get onto our feet and walking, some weird new bit of his personality derails things.
“—burning whales heaving themselves onto beaches, daisies that shatter, bales of money that wash up on shore; trees that go limp and deflate …”
I wondered if he was still high, but he anticipated me. “I’m not high. That stuff wore off hours ago.”
“I’m not a religious person, Jeremy.”
“I can run—we can run—but we can’t hide.”
“From …?”
“The mandate of heaven.”
Nothing in my life had prepared me for this situation, so I simply kept quiet.
He said, “I’m a leper. I need a leper messiah.” He looked at me. “That’s David Bowie.”
“Ziggy Stardust. Yes, I remember.”
He looked out the blinded windows. “This fallen world is going to end, but at least I saw it before the fall.”
“I suppose.”
“It can be so beautiful, you know—earth, I mean.”
“Look, Jeremy—I, uh—I’m not like you. I have a hard time understanding beauty.” I thought maybe Jeremy was lonely like me. Perhaps loneliness was genetic. Maybe, but he tried to make his loneliness shimmer, while my own loneliness flickered like a failing fluorescent tube.
He said, “I’m just pulling your leg with all this stuff, you know.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Keeps things interesting.” He looked back out the window. “I have to sleep now.”
“Then go to sleep.”
“Will you be sitting here when I wake up?”
I thought about this. “Yes,” I said.
“Nighty-night.”
* * *
In the weeks following my discovery of the dead guy I stewed away, mad that the local police force wasn’t at all interested in having me help them locate clues and help them solve the crime. I figured that, having discovered him, I was naturally entitled to do so. I felt that the police were unforthcoming with details of a crime which to my mind screamed tabloid: transvestite lumberjack, found severed in two, on the PGE tracks just north of Horseshoe Bay. I suspect the West Van police had call screening long before the general public; they always seemed to know it was me phoning, and the receptionist was only ever condescending. I started taking buses down to the WVPD offices, where I was condescended to in person. So I began visiting other cop shops in other jurisdictions across town, asking to speak with someone, anyone, who’d listen. The plan was successful, but unintentionally so. The police must have found it funny, a chubby little girl showing up and demanding to help solve a crime across town. What a chance to josh colleagues I must have been.
When I finally got a response from the local police, it made me feel vindicated. It didn’t last long. Two officers showed up at our door. They told me what they could of the crime—not much—and then asked my parents to try and rope me in. Did my parents champion me? No. Their part of the dialogue was more along the lines of
We should have sent her to camp.
When does school start?
Too much time, and not enough to do.
We’re sorry, officers, we’ll try to make sure she doesn’t bother you again.
Of course, as I was pursuing news of my corpse, my siblings were getting stoned, sexually dabbling, doing donuts in the mall parking lot after closing time, breaking into subdivision homes for thrills, decanting Father’s Smirnoff and making up the difference with tap water, shooting convertibles with BB guns, shoplifting autumn clothing. In their way they were inspiring.
Shortly after my final trip to hound the police, I was walking around our neighbourhood scouting red huckleberries when I stopped in front of the Adamses’ house, about ten up from ours. I knew the Adams kids were away in Alberta, and that Mr. and Mrs. Adams both worked. Before I knew it, I was walking up the driveway and knocking on the front door. I figured that if someone answered, I’d say I was looking for the kids. But nobody answered. I went around to the garage and knocked on the kitchen door there, but again no answer. I tried the knob with my hand. The door was open—and so in I went.
Oh, the sensation of being all alone in a place I wasn’t supposed to be! It was fragrant: somebody else’s house. It reminded me of coming home from vacation and walking in the door of my own house, and smelling it as if I was a stranger entering for the first time. I felt like a police officer, investigating clues. I felt like a ghost who had come back, not to haunt, but merely to remember the world as it once was.
From that first venture into the Adamses’ house, my summers unfolded as long dull stretches punctuated by the occasional B and E. I’d walk up and down the mountain, find a house with no cars in the carport, walk up to the front door and ring the doorbell. If nobody answered, I’d try the door, and two times out of three it was unlocked. I’d open the door and shout, Kelly? Kelly, are you in? My logic was that, if someone answered, I could pretend I’d rung the wrong doorbell. Even if I ran away, the worst that could happen would be … nothing. I didn’t look like a criminal and, technicalities aside, I wasn’t one. I just wanted to be in a place where I wasn’t supposed to be, I wanted quiet and I wanted something to do. Snooping in drawers was always the most fun, with bedrooms being the biggest trove. To snoop inside a person’s bedside drawer is to take a carnival barker’s tour through their deepest self. The things people stash there!—knives, brass knuc
kles, pills, condoms, old love letters, birth control pills, gold coins, pornography, passports, wills, and, in one case, a Luger.
Obviously, I was perpetually on the listen for a car driving in or a door latch opening, and there was only ever one narrow escape—somebody dropping a set of keys on a kitchen table down a hallway. I hopped through a back window and into a salmonberry shrub—a shame, since I’d really been enjoying leafing through a family photo album, trying to figure out who was related to whom, and who were going to be the family’s winners and losers, and, obviously, figuring out who was cute and who wasn’t. But during all those B and Es, I never looked at the porn—yes, even sitting there by myself, opening the pages was too hard. This, from a girl who looked up the skirt of a drag queen’s corpse. But that was death; this was sex. As I said, in order to look at nude bodies I still had to make several bus transfers across town, and even there I always choked and ended up in the front reading Newsweek and knitting catalogues.
* * *
Everybody but me on the charter flight to Italy seemed to be in love, or to be searching for it as if it were a new restaurant they’d heard about. Elliot, the class thug, was in love with Colleen, the future ear-nose-throat doctor, who was in love with Alain, the future Volvo dealer, who loved Christy Parks, the future plant nursery saleswoman, and so on. Fifteen years later, I learned that Christy’s someone else was our Latin teacher, Mr. Burden. I bumped into them as they were buying croissants on Granville Island on an overcast Saturday afternoon amid cranky seagulls, bored tourists, bagels and mimes. Mr. Burden had kept his wavy hair in a way that made me think he was vain about it, but he was now chubby to the point where he probably had to go to a men’s big-and-tall store. Christy was her old self, with maybe seven grey hairs and skin that spoke of too much time in the sun. We went for coffee to reminisce about the school trip to Italy. Christy had never been unkind to me, but nor had she ever been friendly. Her current kindness was unexpected.
Reminiscing about our flight there, she said, “Oh! It was so brutal. Everyone smoking, the airplane seats were the size of letter paper, and that astronaut food they served us—my gut was a disaster the whole time in Rome.”
“So was mine.”
“But I snagged my teacher in the end.”
Eleanor Rigby Page 4