by Greg Kearney
“Thank you for sharing your story,” Teresa said. “It was very moving.”
“Teresa,” Digger said, “would you like to share some of your story?”
“Right now? But I haven’t had my transformative God moment yet like Monty had.”
“That’s okay. You can just talk about your life and where God might be helpful to you. What are your problem areas?”
She mentally flipped through the pages of her life. It didn’t take long. “Well, I was always a rowdy, I’ve always liked to have fun, and maybe having fun sometimes got in the way of being a good person. I like sex, unlike a lot of women my age and older. For my mother, sex was something revolting she had to endure so that my father would fall asleep after instead of beating her. The only advice she gave me before I got married was to just lie there and pretend that you are paralyzed from the neck down. Maybe she had the right idea, though, because she’s still alive, and I’m a loose woman who’s dying. So I guess I’d like help from God in that department. I’d like to know what I’m doing wrong. I guess that’s it.”
“We have got our work cut out for us!” Monty said brightly. “Don’t you worry about a thing. By the time we’re finished, you’ll know all about your bad self. And your good self, too, naturally.”
“Sounds great,” Teresa said.
THAT WAS TEN days ago. Since then Teresa has been twice to Bible study, and to a second Sunday service. She can’t concentrate for very long, but what she does manage to absorb is quite interesting. Above all it’s nice to have this sudden community — Bible study especially, because the fair-weather, otherwise snooty Sunday churchgoers don’t care enough to attend, leaving only the diligent, careful faithful, all of them soft-spoken and considerate, crossing their legs at the ankle, leaning intently when someone else speaks. It’s nice, to be a part of that. But it’s not enough. Where is the power and glory? Where’s that feeling, the one she had in the church foyer, of being pummelled by God? Surely that feeling won’t come about from these small sessions of coffee and bunwiches and the cautious dissection of the most popular parts of the New Testament. She’ll keep going to Bible study, of course, but surely there has to be another, more showy way of meeting the Holy Spirit. When she dekes out apologetically to smoke during Bible study, she thinks of Ouija boards and séances. But that kind of thing wouldn’t likely summon God; she’d probably end up with some shitty, dumb spirit with no pull. There must be another way.
16
SHE’S BEEN ACTING STRANGE FOR a while now, his mother. He’s pretty sure it’s not just the disease and the morphine. She’s remote, preoccupied, sighing and muttering like she does when the car in front of her is doing the exact speed limit. She’s mean. He came home one afternoon, all aglow over certain of the buttons he had handled that day at the museum — one a crescent moon fashioned from a jagged yellow gemstone — and she narrowed her eyes and said, “Buttons. Well. There’s a future for you. All your potential and you’ve got a job playing with buttons. That’s the kind of thing they get retarded people to do so they won’t pull their hair out or run into traffic. ”
Joel, already fretful about his sudden, fey vocation, had to beg off to the bathroom to cry. Teresa always did know how and when to dig the knife in, but before it was done with affection and levity. Now, if he didn’t know better, he’d think she hates him. He’s trying not to take it personally, her angry rapport with her illness, but still. Moving through the house he’s caught her eye a couple times, and the new hardness in her face made him feel like he did the first time he took the subway in the city: all but trampled, altogether resented as a cloddy obfuscation.
They’ve not talked about it at all, the cancer. Twice Joel has asked his mother her thoughts on her diagnosis, and she has slapped away the topic: “I don’t have thoughts on my diagnosis, Joel. Who has thoughts on their diagnosis? This is Kenora, this isn’t Toronto. I don’t feel good, period. Nothing more to say. Do you have thoughts on your wipeout as a grown-up? Anyway, my faith sustains me now. What sustains you?”
He had no answer. What had sustained him had been the knowledge that, despite the many cosmetic liabilities he forced Edmund to enumerate and his allergic response to higher learning, his mother loved him. With that gone … And she won’t call him “Jolie” anymore. She only calls him “Joel,” pointedly, sometimes twice in the same sentence. Joel, adult people do not put a Holly Hobbie rag doll between their knees to go to sleep, Joel.
She’s gone Thursday nights for Bible study. She’ll often head out other nights, too, anxiously gathering her purse and smokes, for emergency prayer circles. Joel, trying to indulge, has suggested that perhaps the prayer circle could be held at their house. Teresa dismissed that out of hand — she didn’t want her prayer friends seeing her KISS CDs and Labatt 50 ashtrays.
He even went hesitantly to his father, who was taking apart a cuckoo clock with a butter knife in the basement. Hugh didn’t look up when Joel said hello.
“Do you think we should be letting Mom do all these prayer things?”
“What prayer things?”
“You know how she’s gone all the time now? How she announces that she has to go off to prayer thing and then goes?”
A gasp of fluty cuckoo. His father’s twirling butter knife came to a stop.
“You mean all that horseshit with Digger Walsh and all them? I don’t know. She likes it. What am I supposed to do about it?”
Digger Walsh? Joel hadn’t heard that name since high school. Teresa would frequently, spontaneously insult everyone in the Walsh family: Digger, Jocelyn, Craig and even blameless, little, bespectacled, special needs Michelle (“does she have to be so fucking poignant all the time?”) so often that Joel, while grateful for his mother’s protective ire, sometimes told her to give it a rest. Now Teresa was clasping hands with the man.
“Digger Walsh — like, mayor/homophobe-who-we-all-hate Digger Walsh?”
“I never said I hate him. I like what he did with the harbour-front. And he always sounds real down-to-earth when they have him on the radio.”
“But what about how he defended his son for tormenting me? What about that?”
“That was years ago.”
Joel drifted across the hard planes of his father’s face, the long, twisted nose. It seemed that a very long time ago, possibly in Joel’s infancy, he and his father had silently agreed to ignore each other or, when forced, to treat each other with a thin, boarding-house courtesy. Even so, it stung when Hugh casually belittled his past hurts. More than a few times Joel had caught himself wishing illness out of his mother and into his father.
“So you’re okay with the fact that your wife is totally bonding with some guy?”
“You know your mother. She goes her own way. If this brings her some peace, then good. Better that than … I don’t know … smoking drugs, I’d say.”
This made Joel go back up the stairs. How anyone could be so blasé about a spouse’s wanderings he couldn’t fathom. When he was a boy his mother would occasionally arrive home, in something with spaghetti straps, just as he was having breakfast. His father would murmur pretend concern that someone was certainly burning the midnight oil, then spoon a blob of brown sugar off the top of his porridge and into his mouth. As a boy, Joel thought his parents had a deep, secret but incredibly fun friendship; Teresa would boom about on one topic or another, Hugh would smile slightly, Teresa would fall back contentedly. Now he knows: his mother is a self-obsessed old whore and his father is a gutless non-person.
She left the house right after lunch, and it’s now nearly eight o’clock. Joel sits in her seat at the kitchen table, smokes her smokes, waits for her. It doesn’t matter that she’s dying. If she is friends-in-prayer with Digger Walsh, she has betrayed him.
She takes almost a minute to ascend the four stairs from the front door to the kitchen.
“You’ve been gone for, like, ten h
ours,” says Joel from the darkness.
“That is none of your concern, mister. Turn a light on. We don’t sit around in the dark in this house.”
He hears her rough fingers fumbling along the wall for the light switch. She finds it. They both squint in the sudden light.
“Are you hanging out with Digger Walsh?”
“Who told you that? Your dad? Jesus Christ, I might as well be married to a fucking newspaper. Well, yes, I am. Turns out that he is actually a very warm, spiritual man.”
“Who begets homophobe terrorists.”
“Oh, dry up. There’s a nice little thing known as forgiveness, you know. You should try it.”
It’s gone to her brain. That must be it. Her eyes are glazed with delusion.
“Can you even hear yourself? You would be so, so grossed out if you could hear yourself. It’s quite sad.”
“There are some big changes for this family coming on down the pipeline. Long overdue. And you are going to thank me. A year from now, when I’m rotting, you’re gonna look back and silently say, ‘Hey, thanks, Mom. Thanks for putting the brakes on and turning around my crappy gay life.’”
Joel stands up, and his chair goes soaring on its rollers. He waves his hands in showy rage. He is angry, and he is also aware of the dramatic potential of this anger scene. He shakes out long, pretend hair, he snorts and gasps and does a small shimmy of disgust. Teresa weaves slightly at the sight of Joel’s antics, bowing and shaking her head, like a nun forced to witness anal sex. This only makes him more animated. He stalks into his bedroom, hissing nonsense.
He heads to bed, lies there fully clothed with the door open. He listens to his mother muddle around. “I don’t know who you are anymore,” he yells at her.
“I know who you are, though. Better than you know yourself. Always have, always will.”
“Shut the hell up. I know who I am.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Fuck off. Yes, I do.”
“Okay, fine, you do. But you don’t.”
“Whatever! I am now sleeping. I have fallen fast asleep, you bitch.”
17
“SHE SAYS I HAVE A ‘crappy gay life,’” Joel says to Donald, as they flip through Donald’s three-inch-thick book of stencils.
“That’s quite reductive, isn’t it,” Donald says, not looking up.
“Can you imagine? What would you do if your mother said you had a crappy gay life?”
Donald stops, brings his palm before his pinched-up face like it’s a small mirror. “My mother would never say such a thing. Why would she? The life I lead is neither crappy nor gay, thank you very much. I am a gently-spoken gentleman; I live for beautiful, dignified things. I am a good neighbour, friend, and son. I have never done anything to cause anyone to regard me with derision. Let’s get that straight.”
“Of course. Sorry. I just assumed that you were gay.”
“Well, I may very well be, but I’ve never been the kind — I just have never seen the use of jumping up and down and screaming ‘Hooray! I’m drawn to penis!’ It’s so … pedestrian.”
They flip through a few pages. Donald traces an ornate letter “B” with a slightly too-long forefinger nail.
“I mean,” he continues, “I can say that you’re a somewhat attractive young man, but have I ever behaved in a salacious way towards you? Have I ever — groped at you, cupped a buttock?”
“No. But, like, you could, and I wouldn’t be totally grossed out.”
“How generous of you. Noted and filed.”
18
MONTY DALVA’S LIVING ROOM IS filled with huge, redwood furniture that, Teresa guesses, must have been a real bitch to move: a long, uncomfortable couch not unlike the pews at Knox; two high-backed chairs with thin silver seat cushions; a long, long coffee table at which a dozen dwarves could hold a board meeting. There is also a tatty, plush easy chair, draped with an ugly quilt festooned with octagonal children holding fat hands. Teresa was offered the easy chair, but she refused; Anita Dalva, tall and beautiful, sturdy but fine-boned, has just had a knee replacement, and Teresa helped Monty ease his wife off her crutches and into the chair. Teresa caught the scent of Anita’s tight, shiny chignon: gentlest hint of lilac, real lilac, not the sickening chemical stink of the hair products they sell around here.
This is the first time they’ve gathered at the Dalvas’s, and it only makes sense that they should continue meeting here; the way the three of them tended to bunch up and break off during Thursday Bible study was causing church whispers that Digger and Monty were either getting stuck up, or were interpreting the Bible in newfangled and possibly inappropriate ways.
They start with pleasantries; Teresa is introduced to Anita, who has been housebound because of her knee. At least once a minute she cries out in conversational pain: never simply “ouch,” always “ooh, my knee!” “I never thought such a teeny, weeny body part could make so much pain. But that’s what you get for playing tennis on cement for — ooh, my knee! — thirty years. I’m trying to avoid the use of painkillers, given my past issues with Oxy. I’m in agony. If pain is a teacher, I must have a great, big lesson to learn!”
Teresa relates the story of her mother’s hip replacement; a full two years after the procedure her mother still described herself as convalescing, just to get out of doing her own vacuuming. “Some of us need so much, some of us don’t need anything at all,” is Anita’s response.
Digger asks Teresa how she is feeling. Teresa says that she senses her body faltering, that there were times, the past few days, where she has had to tell her legs to stand, to walk.
“I’m not good with weakness, never have been,” Teresa says, training her face on Anita, who nods knowingly. Anita is both imperious and maternal, a combination that Teresa, weakened, finds comforting. Teresa can lean on Anita and know that Anita, bad knee or no, is inexhaustibly strong. How fulfilling it would be, to have Anita as a close friend. She’s already more candid with Anita than she’s ever been with another woman.“I tell you, Mrs. Dalva, Anita, that I would rather be buried alive than be wheeled around by Hugh.”
“Who’s Hugh?” Anita asks.
“Her husband,” say Digger and Monty in unison.
“Well, we should pray that Teresa’s husband finds his heart’s replenishment, so that he can proceed from a place of strength and shepherd dear Teresa through. Father God, thank you for —”
“That is super nice,” Teresa says, tactful but dismissive. Anita, interrupted, glares and huffs. “I am so, so sorry to interrupt you, Anita. I just really don’t want to pray about Hugh. He’s a good guy and everything, but he doesn’t need praying over. He’s fine, and he’ll be fine when I die. He’s like a cactus tree, or that kind of thing, you know? He doesn’t need much attention. When I go he’ll hook up with one desperate widow or another, and he’ll do his ugly woodworking and be happy as a clam. Same with my older boy. He’s got his ‘damage,’ as he would call it, but nothing that’s going to bung up his life. It’s really my one boy, my younger boy who I’m worried about. I really mangled my one boy.”
Teresa holds tight to a coffee table leg to keep from crying. Digger offers a thoughtful poke to the shoulder.
“I told you about Teresa’s son, Joel,” Monty says to his wife in a sympathetic whisper. “There’s some concern that he is a homosexual and also not sanitary and a layabout. We’ve all been praying hard for him.”
“Boys are a real ordeal,” says Anita, shifting in her chair, clearly in pain. “I’m so glad we didn’t have boys. We have twin girls and they really gave us — ooh, my knee! — no trouble. Our youngest by six minutes, Kaila, was maybe a little obstinate in high school, a bit — ooh, my knee! — lippy, and she liked the fake hair and the fake nails, and she liked to pretend that she didn’t come from Iowa City, that she was somehow ghetto. I thought ‘oh, no, she’s going to end up a prostitute,�
�� but then she and Thea both got into Iowa State and they’re doing great. Kaila doesn’t wear store-bought hair anymore.”
Teresa nods and smiles and pretends to be happy for Anita’s happy family.
“One way or another,” Anita continues, “babies are always going to rip your heart out. We know this. When the girls went off to Iowa State I fell into the darkest depression. It literally felt like a bereavement, a double bereavement. There was no centre to my life all of a sudden. I wanted to just die. I started snorting pills. Ground-up pills, of course. I was laid so very low. It sure wasn’t the middle age I had envisioned for myself.”
Teresa, moved and thrilled by this exchange, wraps her wasted arms around herself. “I had my first at 19,” she offers, sensing the opening for her own story. “I always wanted babies, even when I was a little girl. So when I met Hugh — he was nothing to look at, even then, but he had this dog, this sad old thing with one eye, all patchy fur, and Hugh was so sweet to that ugly dog I thought for sure he’d make a good father.”
“And was he?” asked Anita.
“I guess so. I mean, he never beat them up or anything. He was good with Dallas, my first boy. Dallas was a real boy boy, from the get-go. He screamed non-stop the whole first year. And then dirt bikes and Lego and judo. He couldn’t stand spending time with me. So when Joel came along, and he was all dreamy and gentle — he loved to sleep, I’d have to wake him up when he was a baby — well, I just gobbled him right up. He was always hanging off me. We’d lie on the couch and read Family Circle and Chatelaine together.