by Andrew Hood
“In case I’m looney toons.”
“Right.” He got out, only to shove his head back in. “I don’t want you following me,” he reminded her, and then slammed the door.
Instead of turning around Frances went forward and, after two turns, was completely lost. Every house looked the same and none of the streets seemed to have anything close to ninety-degree corners. One street just rolled into the other. Who were all these people and how did they get here and what did they do? The air of her high was starting to turn dense and sour and Frances started to seriously worry about how irrevocably lost she was.
The last time she had been this far out the land was fallow fields, crumbling sheds, and barns with mattresses, condom wrappers and empties in them. But now a whole new town was here. A Wal-Mart had been built. All the Marilyns in town had fought to keep the store out, arguing that it would take business from the independent stores downtown, but now the sprawl had gone so wide that there were plans for a second Wal-Mart. The hippies were protesting that now too. But for what? Would another Wal-Mart take away business from that first Wal-Mart?
After ten minutes of hopeless, random turning, Frances spotted a body ahead of her at the bus stop. She slowed to ask directions. Derek glanced up from the book he was reading and squinted into her approaching lights.
After that first class, Frances started seeing Derek everywhere, always dressed in high-riding track shorts and grocery store T-shirts covered in expressions like Wicked! and Cool Dude! and Totally Awesome! First she spotted him delivering papers across town from where she had dropped him off the week before. Up the opposite side of the street he came, walking in rollerblades, a canvas newspaper bag slung over his chest and a cart rattling behind. Later that week she caught him downtown, waiting for a bus and reading the free real estate listings. Sitting against the wall of the bank with the paper on his knees, Frances glimpsed the white of his underwear in the scoops of his shorts. Another time, walking back from breaking up with a guy she’d been on a few dates with—who had accused Frances of only loving things about people and not the people themselves—Frances saw Derek coming out of a women’s clothing store carrying two heavy bags, a half-wrapped candy bar dangling from his mouth. She would drive or bike by bus stops and, one time out of five, he would be on the curb, bowed into a book, always alone. And he picked at his penis a lot, Frances noticed. She’d seen little boys mindlessly do this, but it seemed an odd thing for a boy Derek’s age to be unconsciously up to.
Frances also started to see Betsy everywhere. Before her party Frances had never seen this girl, but now she was around every corner, always in some new ugly, sarcastic ensemble right out of Frances’s grade two class photos. She was never with less than two people, some dressed like squeegee kid anarchists, some like moms from the early 80s, some like they had come from what people in the 60s thought the future would be. They dragged their feet like they’d had a long day at work, though Frances just assumed these teens never did anything. They were in bands that had silkscreened T-shirts but no songs.
When Frances couldn’t duck Betsy, they had awkward conversations, Betsy inviting Frances to punk shows and zine fairs that Frances wouldn’t be caught dead at, or at least felt too old for. When Betsy and her friends were obviously stoned or drunk, Frances found herself disapproving, even if she was one or both of those herself. She escaped away with an excuse of somewhere she had to be. Her step-sister’s ex-husband’s dog was graduating from obedience school, she had to pick up her car from the mechanic’s, she was late to visit old friends at their new yurt in a part of the outskirts that had yet to be built up.
Whatever Frances’s reason, Betsy responded the same. “Awesome,” she’d drone, from the back of her throat. “Oh, cool.” Frances was furious with herself for doing the things she had done with Betsy. That was not what she needed to be doing at this point in her life. At the very least, she should be going down on strangers with mortgages.
The other person she was seeing more of around Corbet was Marilyn, strutting in her flowing, gaudy hippy dresses, gesticulating wildly while speaking softly, usually in the company of men with beards or women as crunchy and effusive as she was. Twice, Frances had spotted her teacher topless in the streets, a legal though rarely acted upon way for women to walk around in Ontario. Whenever she noticed Frances she would wink in a way that felt the same as a blown kiss.
All the teens at Bad Service thought it was an absolute scream that Frances was taking an art class with children. “That’s so cool that you’re doing that,” they said. “Oh my god.” And in a way it was. Frances wasn’t blind to that. She could remember being their age, in that frame of mind, where all that mattered was how interesting the things you were doing or the things you knew about were. Never mind whether you were any good or successful at those things or not. The people she had admired most when she was that age were the ones who landed a job being a butler for eccentric local millionaires who took them on winter vacations, or those who participated in demolition derbies for the blind up north some weekends, or who knew people in New York. If you couldn’t tell some outrageous story about what you’d done, what was the point?
Children or no children, the art class was hard. This she didn’t mention to the teens. Frances hated how hard it was, hated that that made her want to quit. She didn’t have the patience to sit at a desk with a ruler and complete her perspective drawings, or make a gridded oval every time she wanted to draw a face. She thought she’d signed up for an art class, not a planning-to-make-art class. Getting a bit high would briefly do the trick, but Frances could only manage to get a few lines and a couple shapes onto the page before the bird of her attention winged off to another project. The rest of her homework night Frances would spend reading ten pages of a book about Wyatt Earp, or cutting out pictures of fat, bald, professional men for a folder she was compiling, or watching some David Lynch shorts that the video store really wanted back.
The weeks passed and Marilyn’s lessons became increasingly New Agey, having less to do with the technique and practice of art and more to do with the technique and practice of living. Like figure drawing. While sectioning a head into four hemispheres filled with circles, squares, and triangles, trying to get the class to see complicated figures as being made up of simple shapes, Marilyn paused to point out that this artist’s trick could just as easily be applied to the tricky intricacies of life. When she drew on the board, her breasts would waggle furiously and obviously under her shirt.
“When you think about it,” she paused to say, her cans swaying to a halt, “we’re really all made up of the same basic shapes, aren’t we?” And then that wink of hers, aimed always at Frances. What could this woman possibly know about life if she didn’t even know that she was showing her tits off to a class full of children? That only certain dads could pull off a wink?
“Fucking hippy–dippy fucking bullshit,” Frances called the approach one night after work in a Jägermeister rage. “What that woman needs is a bra and punch in the fucking face.”
Marilyn never checked their homework—“Draw a portrait of someone you admire. Draw a portrait of someone you don’t know. Draw a portrait of someone from your imagination.”—so Frances stopped doing hers. She would burn whole classes scribbling and making lines in her book to keep up the appearance of work, all the while flip-flopping whether she should just get up and leave. She could lose fifteen minutes ogling Marilyn’s chest, getting winked at when she was caught. Whenever she resolved to take another crack at it, to do the work, Frances would freeze up, spend a whole class staring back at the one eye she had managed to put on a page. If she’d got brave enough to try another eye, she wound up with tits basically. Maybe the incessant presence of Marilyn’s breasts were somehow gumming up Frances’s imagination.
It didn’t help seeing how dedicated and accomplished the children were, how not hesitant. They would squint at their blank page for a few minute
s, spin it around on the table to see different angles of attack, and then jump at the task. They twirled and chewed their hair while they drew, they sang to themselves, they made quiet farting noises with their mouths. When Derek drew his tongue came out and slopped all around his lips in a way that would have been pervy if he hadn’t been a little boy.
Presumably to guard his beeswax, Derek would sometimes prop two binders in front of him, but always his eyes were peeping over top, seething at Frances. His was the dense, fixed, ireful glare of a cat watching a bird through a window.
The teens at Bad Service were all certain Derek was in love with her. They wanted her to take him on a date at the café so they could meet him. “He totally sounds like one of those Glass kids,” they droned. But Frances wasn’t so sure Derek’s feelings towards her were positive, never mind loving. He seemed constantly offended by her, like someone watching an adult hit a child in the mall, so horrified that he couldn’t turn away. Frances couldn’t figure him out, couldn’t solve the mystery of him.
To open every class the kids and Frances got out their sketchbooks and took up whatever utensil they wished, then closed their eyes. On an old boombox, Marilyn played a mix of vigorous and dolorous classical music or else plodding, whiny folk. Eyes clamped, the class responded. The point was to unfetter creativity, a stretch before a workout. Frances found it entirely useless, so she kept her eyes open. She watched the kids work. At times they would get so into the warm-up that their whole bodies bobbed and shifted, a blind wobble very close to the movements of Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. Frances had never been that committed to anything.
Keeping her eyes open reminded her of balking grace when she was little, being the only one at the dinner table looking, watching her step-mom’s lips work as she prayed. Frances wasn’t the only one who thought this granola free-for-all was bullshit. His eyes just visible over the line of binders, Derek was always watching.
Frances fancied that they shared an attitude towards the class, towards Marilyn, towards life. Over the weeks, the kids in the class had gotten to know each other, had formed friendships, but Derek had kept to himself. All the time he looked serious, insular, and brooding. He arrived without talking to anyone and left without talking to anyone. At the end of the night she’d watch for him in the parking lot, hoping to give him a lift like that first night. She wanted to pick his brain, if not crack it open and root around inside, just to get some clue of what his feelings about absolutely anything were. But Derek always managed to slip away.
Whatever was up that boy’s craw, investigating it was enough to keep Frances coming back to class each week. She had pretty much given up on all the art stuff. Nothing she did would ever look like what it was supposed to be. More than anything, she wanted to get a look at the work Derek was doing. He drew much more intently, much more seriously than the other kids. There was lots of furious erasing. He would pause sometimes, stare seriously at Marilyn, as if for inspiration, and then set back down to work. Whether to sharpen her pencil or to go to the bathroom, Frances found as many excuses as she could to get up and pass over Derek, to sneak a peek at what he was drawing. But, hidden by binders, hidden by his hunched body, she could never get a glimpse.
That figure drawing lesson had spent what little patience Frances had left for the class. While the kids did geometry along with Marilyn, Frances imagined the conversation she would have with her after class: The world is not simple, she would start. If Marilyn had such a boner for unbridled expression, then the last thing she should be teaching these kids was that their lives are just a simple mingling of blunt pieces. For their lesson on drawing from life, Marilyn advised the class not to worry about getting all the details of a thing, but just the important ones, the ones that implied the other ones. Frances planned to tell Marilyn that all details were important, that real life was a muddle of detail, a fucking disaster of detail. To do justice to reality, the artist’s job was to render the mess they observed, not pick and fucking choose. Maybe she’d throw a Goddamnit in there. Or maybe she’d fucking wink.
Impatient mothers outside the door brought the class to an end. Over the shuffle of bags being packed and zipped, Marilyn explained that their homework for the week was to choose one verb and, however they saw fit, draw its conjugation. Frances made a beeline for the teacher—she would address her as Miss Voss: “Listen, Miss Voss, about your class…” Or, “Listen, Miss Voss, about reality…” Or maybe, “Listen, Miss Voss, about your mammaries…”—but instead rushed out when she saw that Derek had already gone.
The evening before, Frances had been biking home from a book club where none of the members had read the book. Everyone had brought wine as their potluck contribution, and after discussing a glass more than she should have on an empty stomach, Frances consented to a haircut that came out too short, a pixie cut that made her look ten. A girl who annoyed everyone else in the group had picked up a curl of Frances’s hair, puckered her lips, and made a mustache. And then everyone in the book club had mustaches, but started to feel sick and so dispersed early. Spotting Betsy coming up the street with a few professorial-looking friends on skateboards, Frances had cut into a park.
Rumbling along the grass, she found herself about to bike into the outfield of a baseball game. She dismounted and walked the long way around the diamond. Henderson’s Waste Disposal was playing Bilson’s Construction. On the Waste Disposal’s bench Frances spotted a stressed mesh-back hat held together by a diaper pin that stuck out amongst the row of regular-sized heads. Coming up behind him, Frances pressed the button of Derek’s hat with her thumb.
Derek shook his head furiously and spun around, daggers in his eyes. The heads of Derek’s team bobbled around to look, too.
“I’m sorry,” Frances said. She wanted to grab him by the face and kiss him.
“Oh. It’s Fickle Frances,” he said flatly. “You cut your hair. And grew a mustache.”
“How many homeruns have you hit so far?”
Derek leaned toward Frances’s body and sniffed. “I know that smell,” he said.
“Are your parents here, slugger?” she asked. She scanned the crowed of parents, standing and talking to each other, chasing younger siblings around, or sitting in lawn chairs reading thick spy novels. No one who looked responsible for Derek.
“No,” he said. “Tonight’s wok cooking.”
“When are you up?” Frances didn’t believe him, but whatever the reason his parents weren’t there, it was sad that they weren’t. In all the weeks of class she had been mystified and sort of annoyed by him, but she’d never thought to feel sorry for the kid.
“Next.”
“Oh good. Because I’m dying, right? Is the thing. And I was hoping you could knock one out of the park for me, save my life. How about it?”
“We’ll see,” he said.
“Su-weet,” Frances said, pressing the button of his hat again.
Frances clanged to the top of the small metal bleachers and sat. Fixing a rolling paper between the pages of a book on cabinet making, Frances made a small joint for the remainder of her ride home. She peeled off her mustache and let it propeller under the stands with the cigarette butts and glass.
The batter before Derek put the ball into left field and loaded the bases. After taking a few practice swings, Derek shuffled to the plate, dragging his aluminum bat behind him like a toddler dragging a stuffed animal by the leg. The crowd, the ones who were paying attention, cheered. In place of a batter’s helmet like the rest of his team had, the coach had wedged a glittering red motorcycle helmet onto his skull.
The first perfect pitch Derek ignored, and did the same when the second lobbed by. Come the third, Derek listed his head over the plate. The ball ricocheted off the motorcycle helmet and back over the cage. A fat woman tipped her lawn chair, dropping her novel, getting out of the ball’s harmless way.
Beside her car now, Frances saw the bus pul
l up and Derek lumber on. “Follow that bus,” she said to herself, engaging the ignition and taking off after him. She was dead set on seeing where he actually lived. The extremes of her imagination had him in a mansion with a wealthy and cold family, or some violent, drunk uncle in a shack by the river.
Through a few intersections and stops that weren’t his, Frances rode the bus’s tail, but stomped the brake to avoid running over a cat that trotted languidly into the road. While the bus turned right, the cat sat down and licked its chops, the car’s headlights shining deep into the green underwater caves of its eyes. Frances gave her horn a toot, but the cat only blinked dozily like it didn’t understand what she wanted from it.
When she got out of the car the tabby bobbed towards Frances with the eagerness of recognition. She bent down and offered a finger, which the cat sniffed from a few different angles and gently nibbled at before thrusting its head into her palm. The cat had a tag with a skull and crossbones on it, and on the back a stamp of “Motherfucker.” The address was halfway across town.
Motherfucker continued to purr as Frances picked her up and placed her in the passenger seat. The cat took a few concerned sniffs at the mug of ash tapped out from Frances’s pre-class hoot before crawling into the backseat to explore the rubble of books. As they drove, Motherfucker came back up to the front seat and looked out the window at the neighbourhoods rambling past, from time to time being caught in her own reflection.
A wealthy girl that Frances had gone to elementary school with had lived on Motherfucker’s block. Frances had attended a birthday party there and cried until the girl’s parents, apparently unable to contact Frances’s parents and too drunk to drive her home themselves, called a cab. She was dropped off at an empty, locked house. None of the girls at Bad Service had been alive then, neither had Betsy, and Derek had been so far off. The Gadets, the neighbours to the right side of the house weren’t home, and the Greens, to the left, terrified Frances. There were stories around school about the oldest son, Ronny, who supposedly went around stealing girls’ private parts—whatever that meant. Hiding in a tree fort in the backyard Frances had cried, and pissed herself, and fallen asleep. She woke up in her bedroom the next morning with a twenty dollar bill under her pillow. From the Apology Fairy, her parents claimed.