The Desperates

by Greg Kearney

  Joel was never threatened with violence, so he toughed it out, grade by grade. He kept his head down and said nothing. Craig Walsh never grew past 5’2” and, demoralized by his lack of success with girls, his own band of buddies now all tall and tawny, he would only occasionally toss out an epithet in the hallway or by the buses. By grade twelve Craig was a pothead with a braided soul patch; he’d sometimes stare at Joel in the parking lot, almost wistfully, almost as though taunting Joel was a bright, innocent thing from back when Craig still had hope. That’s how Joel described the latter-day Craig to his mother, at least. Teresa didn’t want to hear it. In her experience people did not change their basic nature, no matter what profound experiences a person might have. Her mother weathered the deaths of her husband and son and, while there may be a slight hitch now in Hazel’s speech before she launches into her trademark contempt and paranoia, she’s as horrible at heart as she ever was. She didn’t care that Craig had grown into a midget burnout with lost-looking eyes. Once a monster, always a monster.

  Then Joel left for Toronto. She and Hugh saw him off at the Winnipeg airport. She hugged him hard, as though he was about to be executed. She was so fraught she accidentally told him she loved him in the third person: “She loves you!” “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Joel said back, with perfect timing. How did he get timing like that, like a comedian’s? Was it because she let him watch Saturday Night Live when he was only nine?

  And where did her boy’s departure leave Teresa? Sure, she was proud as hell that her son was off to university; Dallas, her eldest, joined the OPP, also an achievement, but it wasn’t university, it wasn’t something that required intelligence — intellect, she should say. She made every attempt to get on with her life — new haircut, bowling, plans for the flower beds next year that involved something other than red and white petunias — but without Joel, as a cause and a culprit, Teresa still felt herself floundering. Now, with Joel gone, when Teresa saw Jocelyn Walsh across the street in town, she couldn’t muster the same disgust anymore; at most, Jocelyn struck Teresa as simply some snooty lady who maybe once failed to hold the elevator door, who took the last parking spot. That middling level of disgust. Teresa lost her get-up-and-go.

  There was one winter morning when Teresa, crazed from two pots of coffee, came upon the idea of starting up a Kenora chapter of Parents Whose Kids Turned Gay But That’s Okay or whatever it’s called; Joel had told her about it a while back. She knew for sure that Merle Dupuis’s middle-aged daughter was a lesbian, at least until she fell headfirst working construction and went retarded, but that wouldn’t affect your sexual tastes, she didn’t think. And, of course, there was the museum curator, Donald Tait, with his greasy ponytail and haughty bearing — if his mom was still alive, it was only barely; Ena was in her nineties, still lucid, but not the sort you’d want on board for a support group, with her gruff talk of old-world self-reliance, living off a single cob of corn one bleak week in 1936. That wasn’t the best pool of people to pick from. She went through all of Joel’s yearbooks, scanning for girls who looked tough and practical, boys who looked fussy.

  She’d been hacking and wheezing, but chalked it all up to the anxious chain smoking that helped her cope with empty nest syndrome. Same with the mild chest pain: what bereft woman wouldn’t have a bit of chest pain? One morning in March, still in her nightgown, she was seized by a coughing fit in the kitchen; later, in the bathroom, she saw in the mirror that the front of her white nightie was blood-spattered. That was a real jolt. She called Hugh at work. She never called Hugh at work, so he came home within the hour. She met him at the door. She grabbed his wrist. “You got blood on your nightgown,” he said casually, like she’d made a mess chopping the head off a chicken.

  The doctor told her she was jaundiced. “How come you never told me I was jaundiced,” she asked Hugh, smacking his arm. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t look at ya every day.”

  Tests in Winnipeg revealed that Teresa had mesothelioma, “among the most frustrating cancers,” the oncologist said, in such a way that Teresa almost felt compelled to apologize for having a frustrating cancer. It would figure, she said to her stunned husband as they left the hospital, I would have to come down with the shittiest cancer possible, just when I was going to start bowling again.

  “Let’s just wait and see,” is what Hugh kept saying in a slowed-down voice.

  “Wait and see what? See how fast I can die? There’s nothing ‘wait and see’ about it.”

  Now, halfway through her sixth chemo treatment, here comes Jocelyn Walsh, coming up, pitty pat, in ballerina flats, to Teresa, who is hooked up and captive in a battered La-Z-Boy. Jocelyn is smiling a crinkly, sympathetic smile.

  “I heard about your condition,” Jocelyn says, moving to put her hand on Teresa’s shoulder, then thinking better of it. “We’ve been through so much, haven’t we? I’ve learned a lot from this experience, though. Have you?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure.”

  “I’ve learned to be more emotionally forthcoming. I tell my husband and children that I love them — oh gosh — maybe ten times a day now. I must be so annoying. I can’t help it, they’re all so wonderful and lovable. And you know what? I’m lovable, too! What about you? What have you learned?”

  Teresa looks hard at Jocelyn. Mean retorts flit through her head then fall like dead birds. What’s the point. Jocelyn lives, Teresa dies. Game over.

  “I’ve learned that I’m going to die. I’ve learned that life is very cruel. I’ve learned that nasty people get to keep their hair.”

  “Teresa. Your anger. Your anger is the cause of your hardship, have you ever thought of that? Have you ever considered that your anger is what’s killing you? That maybe — forgive me — this is God’s way of clearing the way for your husband and your sons, so that they might have a chance at real happiness? I don’t know. I’m free-associating here, if you know what I mean. Don’t mind me. Take good care.”

  Teresa is vibrating. This won’t do, this will not do. Jocelyn cannot say such things and get away, unpunished. Addled and weak as she is, Teresa must think of a way of destroying Jocelyn’s loving, lovable life.

  As the tiny nurse sings along to Lisa Stansfield on the radio, Teresa ponders her strong suits. What is she known for? Apart from raising nice kids and cost-cutting impressively through constant use of coupons and rebates, what has she done especially well, in her life?

  It comes to her, just at the start of the second chorus of “All Around the World”: in her life, Teresa has been especially successful at being a good-time girl. Men — many men — have told her that she made them feel good. She has wooed all kinds of guys: boozy, philandering guys, but also shy guys, nerdy guys, guys whose lives revolved around attic CB radio chatter, around stamp collecting, around church. Hair or no hair, she is almost certain that she has one last boozy, sloppy seduction in her. And if she doesn’t, she can still make a formidable mess. But she’s pretty sure she can still seduce; like the CB radio guy said to her in his attic, it’s not so much her looks as how she looks at you. “Let’s just wait and see,” she whispers to herself, finally.

  13

  HIS MOTHER LOOKS BAD. SHE is jaundiced and thin, in her hideous red wig. Her handsome face is now lopsided, almost like she’s had a stroke. One eye and brow are markedly higher than the other, so that she appears at once exhausted and intensely curious.

  They should be able to cry together, Joel and Teresa, chummy and candid as they have always been with each other. But he cannot cry; his mouth stretches into an inane air hostess smile, his eyes go glassy and unblinking, like a doll’s. He can’t control it. And his mother responds in kind: she beams and throws her arms open showily, bending slightly into a hammy duck walk as she moves in for a hug. Only his father’s face betrays sadness. His face is not so much expressionless, more like it has switched itself off, to save power until the next crisis arises. Smart of him. He’s not too bright
about a lot — he’s often been defiantly unbright — but he has always known what is best, or at least most preservative, for himself and, here and there, for his family.

  “How long was the bus ride?” his mother asks, hanging on his arm. “You must be exhausted. You look a bit fat in the face. You’ve probably been going to Taco Bell every day. You know, there’s nothing wrong with soup. When we get home we’ll give you some of that pork soup that Grandma Sal made and then you’ll go straight to bed.”

  They settle into the car, and Teresa starts in with recent town gossip, recent town funerals. With her yellow face and the fringe of her head scarf flicking about in the icy wind she is spectral, bony fingers aflutter, an old raggedy-winged moth darting at any available light. Joel cannot begin to envision what is to come. He has some idea, naturally, but he can’t imagine how Teresa, specifically, will contend with this sickness: if she’ll remain her nerveless self or turn into a wistful, wan lump.

  They drive past Tilly Lake, snow-covered but for plentiful patches cleared away for skating. Joel thinks of the three kids who fell through the ice during his childhood: Brendan, the preteen skid obsessed with Sammy Hagarera Van Halen, drowned and not found for weeks; little Bev, from the trailer park, who fell through in a pink parka overtop a tutu, and whose death so undid her mother that she forgot how to speak; and Mark, a kindergarten friend, who fell through and was quickly fished out but was, thereafter, peevishly anxious where once he was gregarious. At last check Mark was a virgin, lived in his mother’s basement, and did clerical work at the jail.

  “This is good, then, eh?” Hugh says, slowing into an early yellow light. “You and your mom can keep each other company while I’m at work. I know you two can gab the day away, no problem.”

  “Yeah,” says Joel.

  “Yeah, but no,” Teresa says pointedly. “I’ve got things I’ve got to do. I don’t want anybody in my hair all the time. Jolie, you know Mom is glad to have you, but I want you to get a little job or something while you’re here. It’ll be good training wheels for when you go back to Thunder Bay — or Toronto, I should say. ‘Kay?”

  “Sure, yeah. Fun.”

  “It was in the paper that the museum — you know that Donald Tait is a queer, or a gay, I should say — they’re looking for someone to stand around, sounds like. That would be ideal, I think.”

  At home they eat pork soup and crusty buns. Teresa makes a big show of enjoying her food — “everything is just so flavourful!” — as if to reassure Joel that she still has life left in her.

  “So what’s your game plan now that you’ve dropped out of university?” Hugh asks, looking at his soup.

  “I’m not sure. It’s a transitional time. I’m trying to figure things out and not be too hard on myself.”

  “So you’re gonna go on welfare.”

  Teresa drops her spoon. “Jesus God, can we not have a nice reunion dinner for a half an hour without all the bitching?”

  “Absolutely. Absolutely. Just trying to take an interest.”

  Teresa is about to launch in, acidly, but she looks at Joel and lets it rest. Joel feels for his father. Hugh is a kind man, given, when the coast is clear, to lovely gusts of childish awe: once, leaning against the car at Dairy Queen with Joel and Dallas on either side, Hugh saw a goose fly past; “there goes a goose!” he exclaimed, waving at the back of the bird with his ice cream cone.

  His already plucky wife gained some tooth in motherhood; she grew brassy and bossy, her girlishness fell away altogether— what was he to do with this new, turbulent, cackling shrew? It has really only been his propensity for awe that has kept him in this marriage. Because Teresa is confounding, mean, relentless … In the main, for better or worse, even now, awesome.

  “Have you gone ice fishing yet, Dad?”

  “No.”

  “When’s Dallas coming down?”

  “Well, he’s got that double murder to deal with in Thunder Bay. He’s working eighteen-hour days. I sure as hell couldn’t do it.”

  “And let’s not forget that goofy girlfriend of his,” Teresa chimes in. “He says she jogs two, three hours a day, even now. That can’t be good for the fetus. You watch — she’s gonna give birth to a milkshake.”

  Even missing a member, the family always divides into teams. Teresa and Joel versus Hugh and Dallas. Teresa and Joel would watch Knots Landing upstairs while Hugh and Dallas played ping pong and Donkey Kong in the rec room. There wasn’t any enmity between the teams; it was simply a prudent way for dissimilar people to share a small house. Joel’s brother is an oaf, with his inexplicable red hair and blurry maple leaf tattoo. He once threw Joel off a short cliff at Rushing River when the family went camping, August of ’86.

  “I hope he can make it,” Joel says. “I haven’t even met Shary yet.”

  “Oh, she’s something, all right. Real nervous. Walk, walk, walk, talk, talk, talk. We met up with them at Polo Park Mall in the fall. You shoulda seen her run up the escalator stairs with her stick legs, flap, flap, flap, just like Irene Ryan in The Beverly Hillbillies. But she’s a nice girl, at the end of the day.”

  Joel’s face burns from exhaustion; one of his eyelids has started to twitch. He gives his mother a squeeze and goes to his room in the attic.

  Everything is as he left it. His pillow, the thinnest, smallest pillow that has ever been. His water-stained Suzanne Vega poster. He takes off his stained, stinky track suit. Presses his face to the cold window. That fat rural silence, so deep that he once needed to hum against it, thrum a finger on the sill, is here still, worse than ever, if possible. The city has reduced his immunity to it. He cracks the window and listens for the smallest sound, a little girl five doors down lazily playing a triangle, anything. Nothing. He goes to the basement, hauls up an old, angry, iron fan. It’s good white noise. He sets it up on the night table and falls instantly asleep.

  It’s noon when he awakes. His mother’s not in the house. She can’t be that far gone if she’s still such a busybody. On the kitchen table is a note: Don’t forget to call about the museum job — 468-5110 better yet just go there 98 Park Street, don’t know when I’ll be home xoxo mom. Why is she so insistent on this stupid museum job? She never used to care whether he had a job before. He used to pass whole summers just watching her chain smoke on the patio.

  He wants to make his mother happy; despite a long-standing fear of Donald Tait, he’ll go to the museum to see about the “standing around” job. It’s a fifteen minute walk.

  When Joel arrives, Donald Tait is in the lobby on the floor, rooting through a cardboard box and smiling to himself. His hair is much longer than it once was and is pulled into a ponytail. Joel says hello. Donald startles. Styrofoam packing peanuts go flying.

  “Oh! My heart! Give an old man some prior warning!”

  Joel apologizes. Donald Tait is probably sixty, but apart from a slightly slackened jawline he looks like a man twenty years younger, well-rested and ruddy. It occurs to Joel that he has never actually spoken to Donald Tait, nor has he even looked him in the eye before.

  “Sorry to bother. I’m here about the job in the paper. I can come back if you want.”

  “You’re the first one to respond who isn’t eighty. I need a real pack mule, not some dotty fossil. Come and see my buttons!”

  Joel is almost certain that he has heard a version of this line before, but Donald Tait’s eager, wholesome expression tells him that these “buttons” are, in this case, well and truly buttons.

  He edges up to the cardboard box. Donald reaches in and offers up a couple of cellophaned, antique opal buttons, mounted on bits of bristol board. They are quite pretty, the buttons, not run-of-the-mill. Clearly they’ve been handpicked after much deliberation. Joel finds that he is honestly interested in the buttons; he instantly understands Donald’s enthusiasm for them, although he isn’t sure why he understands.

  “I’ve b
een picking through people’s buttons for fifteen years. My mother gave me this box of buttons, and as I sorted through them — this one dirty brass, that one cut glass, another some crap plastic one off of a Woolworth shirt — I became very emotional. It was a mystic moment. My mother also gave me a box of forsaken dentures around the same time, but the dentures didn’t resonate in the same way as the buttons.”

  “Huh. Wow.”

  Joel is still honestly interested, but a part of him is also concerned that Donald Tait might be one of those musty, benignly insane people who won’t stop talking about something arcane and then starts screaming or falls asleep suddenly.

  “You must think I’m mad.”

  “Not at all! I get the fascination, totally. I can’t wait to see what you’re going to do with them.”

  “Neither can I, because I have no idea what I’m going to do with them. I can’t just do a button festival, can I? So few people come to the museum as it is, even in the summer. God, even when we snagged Princess Grace’s hats in ’88, we had to throw in free hot dogs out front. I love my town, but it’s not exactly a sophisticated city. It’s not exactly Berlin.”

  “Yeah. No.”

  “Regardless, we’ll figure something out. I’m Donald, what’s your name?”

  “Joel.”

  “Joel what?”

  “Price. I’ve been considering taking a stage name, though.”

  “Price … Is your mother Teresa Price?”

  “Yes.”

  “I quite like her. So plucky. She sold me my LeBaron a few years ago. Kept telling me how sexy I looked in it. I didn’t believe her for a minute, but I still bought the car. I guess that’s good salesmanship. So! See you tomorrow?”

  Joel nods. He forces a smile, but Donald Tait has already gone back to his buttons.

  TERESA IS HOME when Joel returns. He tells her the good news; “good, good, yes, yes,” Teresa says all distracted and blasé, as if she’s trying to get off the phone with her monologist mother, Hazel. When Joel asks Teresa where she was earlier, she is equally dismissive. “Errands, boring, boring errands,” she says. “It’s so great to have you home. Let’s watch Out of Africa.”