by Greg Kearney
Binny returns. “Hope you bitches didn’t do a bulbie without me!”
Marci cocks an eye at Edmund: more drug lingo?
Edmund asks Binny what a “bulbie” is to save face. Binny, annoyed, says Edmund knows damn well what a bulbie is — they did one in the bathroom at Wendy’s a couple days ago.
“So why don’t you tell us exactly what a bulbie is, Mister Drug-Free-Fun Guy,” Lila says in her angry voice, a monotone falsetto.
He can’t keep up the ruse. “It’s when you use a lightbulb, a sort of modified lightbulb, to smoke crystal meth.”
Lila falls forward at the waist. “Oh, Eddie. Meth. I’ve read about meth. It’s not a light party favour, it’s a bad drug. God. Like I wasn’t worried sick about you as it was.”
This sets off Marci; she jumps up, clucking her tongue, making a weird, Al Jolsonish fan of her shaking hands around her face. “And there we have it. That is why we are in this shitty situation. You’re so worried about your former employer that you couldn’t look after yourself. Or our baby son.”
“Ooh, girl!” Binny says, leaning in.
“It almost sounds like there’s some blame in that statement,” Lila says with a quivering face. “It sounds like you’re blaming me for the death of Israel.”
“What happened in Israel? Is this like a news thing?” Binny asks Edmund.
“That was what they named their baby. Israel,” Edmund says softly.
“I’m not blaming you, although if that’s how you want to interpret it, fine. I’m working my ass off trying to make a wonderful life for us, for our family. I can’t help but feel slightly betrayed, Lila. I feel like I entrusted you with one thing — one thing — and you were unable and maybe even unwilling to come through. Sometimes I just think — do I have to do it all? With everything I’ve got on my plate, do I have to be the pregnant one, too?”
Lila looks at Edmund. He can’t bear it. Cannot. Time to skedaddle.
“Wow,” Lila says. “I’ve never felt more like a fucking broodmare. How did this happen? Who are you? I feel betrayed, Marci. As your wife, and as a lesbian.”
“Me, too, honey,” Binny says.
Marci swats at the space beside Binny’s face. “Get out of here! This is none of your business. Both of you! Out!”
Edmund jumps up. Binny doesn’t.
“Don’t tell my friends to leave. I want them to stay. I want witnesses. I want people close to me, who have been through the horrible things I’ve been through. What have you been through, Marci? What were you doing when we were burying our friends? Getting your fucking master of whatever degree? Playing fucking golf with that fucking chick from fucking Street Legal?”
Marci’s tiny mouth opens and closes and opens, like a goldfish’s. She turns on a bare heel and runs back upstairs, slams a door.
Edmund puts a hand on Lila’s damp back. “Go to her, Lila.”
“I don’t want to go to her. Fuck her! I’m so tired of her stupid goal-oriented bullshit. Oh, I’m sorry we didn’t reach our 1998 target, Marci, but you know what, I would rather stand with my friends sometimes, if I had to choose. Really. I would rather stand with you, Eddie, and with all of our …”
He takes his hand from her back.
“There’s nothing left to stand with, sweetie. There’s nothing here. We’re all gone. Go be with your girlfriend. She’s not a monster, she’s just sheltered. Go hang out with her.”
Lila nods slowly. Squeezes his arm. Drags herself up the creaky staircase.
“Old school lezbo realness! So cool. Wow. They should settle that shit for real, with guns ’n’ shit.”
“Let’s go. Now.”
“Word.”
24
FIVE TO FIVE AND NO Hugh. Teresa and her mother had a screaming match over Mrs. Clemens, the sweet, elderly waitress at the Husky who used to babysit for Hazel; Hazel brought her up in stupid, preposterous gossip, said that a friend told her that Mrs. Clemens was once a prostitute in India. Teresa called Hazel a hateful piece of shit and why did she have it in for such a sweet lady, still forced to waitress at eighty-eight. Hazel said that Teresa’s father once said that he thought Mrs. Clemens was kind of nice-looking, that she knows a whore when she sees one. Teresa could only make this long, guttural grunting sound and stomp off into the living room. Since then Teresa has been sitting in the chair by the picture window, watching the lake across the road, pretending that the clatter in the kitchen is not her mother, is only an innocuous ghost. Where is Hugh? Has he been in an accident? Here comes Anita, zipping up the driveway in an old yellow minivan.
“Is that Hugh or the company?” Hazel yells from the kitchen.
“It’s my friends.”
“Shit! Shit! Shit! My hair looks awful. Oh, look at it! It’s all flat on the side. Why didn’t you say something?” Hazel runs into the bathroom. Her hair won’t look a bit different when she emerges, but Hazel, for all her coarseness, has always been obsessively vain.
It’s only Anita when Teresa opens the door. Anita looks tired and unkempt. But she is off the crutches, has two canes instead. Teresa looks around Anita for Monty, but he’s nowhere in sight.
“Who’re you looking for?” Anita asks, almost sarcastically. “You looking for Monty? Because Monty is long gone. I didn’t want to come today, to be honest.”
“My God, Anita, what happened? Come in.”
Teresa puts an arm around Anita, careful not to bump her canes. “He went to the city, to look for crack. Haven’t heard from him in three days. He could be dead, he could be anywhere.”
“My God. I’m so sorry. Careful on these steps here.”
“He said I triggered him! He said he felt triggered whenever I acknowledged my pain, and then when he saw me using Percocet to relieve my pain, that pushed him over the edge! Isn’t that just the most. He doesn’t want me to acknowledge my pain, but he also doesn’t want me to relieve my pain! How fair is that! Oh, every time you say “ooh, my knee!” it’s like someone is handing me a big rock to smoke … Oh, you broke our covenant by taking Percocet, now I have to smoke crack, he says.”
“Oh, Anita. I’m sorry.”
“Nah, no. I’m sorry to dump all this on you.”
Teresa tells Anita to never apologize for reaching out to a friend. She tells Anita that she has never felt closer to another woman. Anita doesn’t respond; instantly Teresa regrets her candour. “I mean, friend-to-friend,” she quickly qualifies. Anita, clearly preoccupied, offers up a hollow chuckle.
“What a nice home you have. It oozes warmth and love,” Anita says wistfully, having lost her own.
“Ha. You must be picking up the love ooze from a neighbour’s house!”
Anita asks how Teresa is feeling. Teresa says she doesn’t want to talk about it; maybe later.
“I flushed the rest of my Percocet this morning. I’m just now starting to have some breakthrough pain. You do not want to be in my head right now, trust me. I want him to come home, I do. I can’t live in this town alone. I am sorry to say, but I really do not like this town. And I’m too old to start over somewhere else.”
Teresa smiles sympathetically, but can’t help feeling slightly anxious about Anita’s desolate, un-Anita-like state.
“I’m sure I must look like hell; my hair is all flat on one side,” says Hazel in a stage whisper before she comes around the corner. Anita turns, smiles. Hazel goes pale.
“Anita, this is my — well, mother, Hazel.”
“Hi.”
“Yes. Teresa, can I borrow you for just a minute? There’s something in the bathroom I’d like you to look at.”
“I do not like the sound of that!” Teresa laughs and looks to Anita, who is mouthing ooh, my knee with a pained face.
“Please? I just need you for one second.”
Teresa rolls her eyes, apologizes to Anita, follows Hazel into the
bathroom. Hazel slowly, soundlessly closes the bathroom door.
“It’s a black!” Hazel hisses, clutching Teresa’s upper arm. Teresa swats her hand away.
“What is? Anita? Yes, Anita is black. And?”
“Where did it come from?”
“Stop calling her ‘it.’ She lives here with her husband, who is also a close friend. They have two daughters.”
“But it’s — she’s as black as night!”
“I will throw you out of this house right this second if you don’t shut your trap and pretend to be nice.”
“I just — I don’t — Where did they come from?”
“Iowa City.”
“Oh, Christ! American to boot! You know they come up here and snap up all the bargains at Zellers before we even get the flyer in the mail. It’s not right. And I don’t have to remind you that I was raped by a black last year.”
“You mean that nice old man who asked you to go see Titanic. He did not rape you. And he wasn’t black.”
“He is. Rita Cleave told me — he’s a light black; his mother was a full black and his father was a partial black, but he walks by day as a white! I went to the show with him, because I thought he was a white. And when the show was over he grabbed at my brassiere strap like he was pulling on the reigns of a horse. He was getting ready to ride me like a horse, before I gave the go-ahead. I call that rape.”
“He was feeling for his goddamn coat! He has one eye!”
“Okay. It’s your house. But you’d better sit on your purse and hide your coupons.”
Teresa pokes her mother hard in the chest. “You are going to shut your fucking mouth and treat my friend with courtesy and respect. I don’t want to hear any more of your stupid inbred friends’ theories on who’s black and who was a fucking runaway prostitute in India. You are just going to shut up and then fuck off and that will be it!”
Hazel is bug-eyed, but knows better than to speak. Teresa withdraws her finger. This bit of temper has left Teresa weak and barfy.
Anita is flipping through a photo album from the coffee table. It’s the one with purple pansies on the cover; pictures of the boys from ’85 to ’90.
“Hope I’m not being nosey,” Anita says. “Now which one is Dallas and which one is Joel?”
Teresa sits with Anita. She smiles at the picture Anita points to, Dallas and Joel in a tomato patch in Fargo, summer of ’86. Dallas is thirteen; Joel is eight. Dallas looks at the huge tomato in his hand, Joel straight into the camera, smiling wide.
“Dallas is a real string bean in this one, just like my girls,” Anita says.
“He’s much stockier now,” Teresa says.
“Dallas is a wonderful person ,” Hazel interjects. “He’s OPP. He’s real natural and normal, a gentleman. So handsome. If he wasn’t my grandson I’d tell him to climb aboard!”
“Mom! That’s disgusting!”
“Oh, ease up, sober-sides. I’m just saying that I like my grandson. He’s really made something of himself. Not like that other one of yours. When’s Dallas coming down to visit? I’d love to have you all over for a nice dinner.”
Teresa doesn’t want to add to Anita’s dejected mood in any way, so she decides not to remind her mother that she’s never made a nice dinner for anyone.
“Him and Shary and the baby are coming down next week, supposedly. They’ve been saying that for a while, though.”
“Have you met your — ooh, my knee! — great-granddaughter yet, Hazel?”
Hazel ignores, or doesn’t hear, Anita’s vocal tic, but does seize on Anita’s easy sympathy, which comes through even in Anita’s grumpy state of withdrawal. Hazel acts all forlorn and grabs at an invisible pearl necklace around her throat. “No, unfortunately I have not,” she says, eyes downcast. “My son had no children before he passed away, so this will be my first great-grandchild. I’d love to see her, but … I tend to be treated very badly by my family. I’ve cried until my tears ran dry.”
Anita nods sympathetically. “I’m sorry to hear that. There’s nothing worse than a loving family torn apart by dark forces. I worry that our girls will have nothing to do with us after — ooh, my knee! — they find out their daddy relapsed and their mommy also had her own … hiccup.”
Teresa changes the topic. “So, hopefully a nice visit from Dallas and Shary and Misty will revive me a bit and —”
“They called her Misty? That’s a dog’s name! Why didn’t they just call her Lassie? Good God,” says Hazel, unable to keep up the sad act for more than a minute. Teresa asks her to go check on whatever’s cooking in the kitchen. Hazel reluctantly leaves the room, blinking and tittering like a naughty, eighty-twoyear-old schoolgirl.
“I’m not doing well, Anita,” Teresa says once Hazel’s gone. “I’m struggling, and I feel all foggy and weak. I can’t handle my mother’s selfishness right now. I don’t think I can even — I know I’m already so reliant on you, and you’ve got your own family problems, but I need your strength more than ever.”
“I don’t have any strength left, sister, but if I did, you’d have it.”
“I don’t believe you don’t have any strength left. You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever known.”
“It’s nice that you think I’m strong, but I’m telling you I’m not. You think I’m hiding some secret reserve of strength I don’t want you to know about? Ooh, my knee! You calling me a liar?”
“No. God, no. Why don’t we pray?”
“I’m not really in the mood. But … would it really mean a lot to you if we prayed?”
“It would.”
Anita, all irritation and knee pain, drags herself into conversation with God.
“Dear heavenly father, we address you today from a place of great fear and uncertainty, and a lot of anger — righteous anger! One of us is dying, Father God, and she worries that she’s not doing right by her children as she prepares for the final passage. And one of us has had her fill of her unreliable, selfish husband of twenty-five years, and of this bullshit town that doesn’t even have a multiplex movie theatre or even a Walgreens. We ask you, Lord, to steady us both. Make my husband stop doing crack and come home. Take away his fetish for personal odour. Soothe my sister Teresa as she journeys towards the golden light of you and Jesus and — ooh, my knee! motherfucker! — heaven. Amen.”
Hazel comes running with a wooden spoon in her hand. “Did I hear an ‘amen’? Were yous praying, just now?”
“Well, we were trying to, anyway,” Anita says slowly.
“Are you from one of those gospel things where they sing and fall down and that?”
“I guess, yeah. You could say I’m from one of those gospel things.”
“That’s so nice. I didn’t have religion growing up. I come up hard. My mom and dad were hard people. I had to sleep in the kitchen sink. My only toy was a clump of hair in a rubber band I found by the side of the road. I think I really missed out. I’ve been through so much hardship. It would’ve been so nice to have religion to rely on. Especially later when I had my own family, and it became clear that I probably had nothing to live for. You know that hymn, ‘There Will Be Peace in the Valley’?”
“Of course I do.”
Hazel’s chin starts to quiver. Teresa is made even more barfy and has to clutch at the couch arm to keep from heaving.
“Sometimes I wonder …” She stops, exhales through her mouth, starts over. “I’ve lost all my loved ones, and now my sweet daughter is not doing too good … Anita, do you think that there might be … peace in the valley for me? For Hazel? For little Hazel and for grown-up Hazel who doesn’t have anything?”
“I really can’t say one way or another. Sorry.”
Teresa can’t bear it. “Who cares if there’s peace in the fucking valley for you? This isn’t about you. Anita is my friend; she’s here to support me in my time of need. You’ve
never been to church in your life.”
Anita puts a hand on Teresa’s shoulder. “Let’s take it down a notch, all right? My head is pounding, and your voices are like buzz saws.”
“I’m sorry, Anita. But you have to admit that my mother is a vampire. She sees someone else receiving love and support and she tries to steal it. She doesn’t care that I’m sick. She only sees that I have a new friend. She won’t stop until she’s stolen you from me.”
Anita’s unimpressed. “Hey, news flash — we’re not in high school anymore.”
“This is what I’m always saying to Teresa,” Hazel says. “Grown-up people don’t go around stealing each other’s friends. Why do you think Teresa acts that way, Anita?”
Anita’s face stiches up with annoyance. “How do I know? Is my name Teresa? I’ve got my own problems.”
“What else do you do that’s spiritual?” Hazel asks. “Do you read palms, too?”
“Oh my God,” Teresa clucks. “You are so racist. Anita sees you for what you are. Don’t you, Anita?”
“Shh … What kind of painkillers do you have? Just the morphine? I guess I could give that a whirl. No! Cancel that. I do not want to go down that road.”
“Gosh, Anita,” Hazel says, smiling, showing her remaining teeth, “you are so pretty. Your hair is so nice, and straight. I don’t see a single knot. Is it hard to comb?”
“Not really. My hair’s not all that nappy, naturally. Back home I used to just let my hair do its thing, but here I make the effort and straighten it.”
“It looks so soft,” Hazel says. “Can I touch it?”
“Don’t let her touch your hair, Anita,” says Teresa. “My mother is a racist. She hates all people of colour. She doesn’t deserve to touch your hair.”