by Andrew Hood
The neighbourhood was a mix of ivied, pillared century homes with newer houses crammed onto what used to be the spacious single lots. Motherfucker’s address turned out to be one of the old, elegant houses, though when Frances pulled up to it she spotted vines of old Christmas lights winding along the eaves and a pot leaf flag hung in one of the top windows.
Motherfucker’s soft motor kept running in Frances’s arms as she got out of the car, but as soon as the house came into view the tabby started to squirm, fidget, and grumble. Frances struggled with Motherfucker like she was too many bags of groceries, until the cat swatted and caught her nose. Frances opened her arms to let her drop.
Motherfucker hit the ground running and galloped away into the dark.
“Motherfucker!” she wanted to call out into the night after it, but didn’t, though the light in the window with the pot leaf in it came on, as if she had.
Frances was taking a break from pot, so she was getting drunk on her day off. All afternoon she had been dismantling an old rotary phone and gluing the guts of it onto a slate of wood she found in the shed out back. She was always coming up with plans for that shed. Clear it out and turn it into a workshop, or a small gallery for local artists, or it could be a jam space where she could learn the accordion already, or a rival karate studio, or a detective agency just to see what would happen. She could learn how to fix bikes—she had a book on bikes from the library that was about half a year overdue—and then she could fix all the bikes that had been abandoned in there over the years by her many roommates, and give them away. Frances had gone out to the shed to start on one of those plans before class that night, but found the phone and the wood in there and did that instead.
Break the phone down into its smallest pieces and then present the individual simplicity of this complicatedly simple machine by naming each doodad, thingamabobber, and whatchit by its right name. That was the idea. Except Frances had no idea what any of the pieces were actually called so she quit. With time still before class, she tucked into another bottle of wine, changed into her gi, and fell asleep on the couch watching a VHS of Golden Girls episodes.
Ringing woke her up. Briefly, Frances stared, groggy and amazed, at the eviscerated phone on the coffee table. The living room had been practically aglow when she fell asleep, but was blue and eerie with streetlights now. More awake, Frances picked up the cordless next to her art project. On the other end was the noise of a bad connection.
“Hello?” a small voice ventured out of all that wind.
“Hello?”
“You weren’t in class tonight.”
“Derek?” There was surge of complicated clatter.
“It’s my tenth birthday this weekend,” the little voice said. “I handed out invitations tonight. You weren’t there.”
“I guess I was sick.”
“So do you want to come to my party? It’s Saturday. At my house.”
The address Derek gave was only a few blocks from her own, on the opposite side of town from where she had dropped him off.
“There’ll be prize bags,” he said, and hung up.
Frances dialled the number back. She let it ring until someone picked up.
“Derek?”
“This’s Ben,” the someone said. In the background, a clatter and cheer, and the incoherent sound of music being played too loudly. “Who is this?”
“Frances?”
“Want to come bowling, Frances?”
“Ben?”
“Yes, Frances.”
“There isn’t a redheaded kid there with a head the size of a boulder, is there?”
“Don’t see one,” Ben said.
“Okay. Never mind.”
“Frances?”
“Yes Ben?”
“I was on my way to go pee and this phone was ringing so I picked it up and I answered it.”
“Thanks for answering, Ben. Have a good pee.”
“You too, Frances. Come bowling. Everyone’s here.”
Frances hung up and decided to go to the alley and find Ben. She pictured him in his mid-twenties, gel-spiked hair and too much cologne; a polo shirt and khakis guy. They would hit it off but they wouldn’t keep in touch. The night would just be this weird, remarkable, fun thing that happened to the both of them, on a lark. Then she would join a bowling league. She would book Sunday mornings off from Bad Service for games. The owner would understand. She would buy custom shoes, and one of those wrist guard things—whatever those things were. She would get her own fancy ball, maybe sparkling and vibrant like Derek’s batting helmet. And she would get to know all these men she would not otherwise know. Men with big, hard stomachs, and mustaches. And she would get to know their lives, and their families, and she would start playing softball with them too. They’d start her off in the outfield, but gradually she would work her way up to becoming the star pitcher—Fireball Frances. Scouts would start showing up to games, watching her closely, whispering to one another, making cramped notes in their little notebooks.
Instead, Frances rewound her Golden Girls tape to the beginning.
The only hint of a party at the address Derek had given was an orange balloon tied to the hook of the mailbox. It lolled on the porch with the same spits of breeze that seemed intent on lifting Frances’s party dress. There didn’t seem to be anybody home, never mind a kid’s party raging. For years the neighborhood had been something of a slum, the houses sectioned into apartments in which dead bodies were sometimes found. But now families were moving back, and the houses were being restored. Derek’s house, or the one he claimed was his, had an awkward look, like a pair of cut-off jeans that had had the legs sewed back on.
Frances made up her mind that this party was all a trick and decided to go home, where she could smoke an apple and lay carpet in the shed. Instead she went up and knocked. She had bought a present and a new dress, after all. In a vintage boutique, Frances had fingered the racks of the children’s section and found some options, most of which, when she tried them on, looked more slutty than cute, settling at last on a bland mauve dress with shapes on it that looked like flowers if you weren’t looking. Paying for the dress, Frances had spotted the perfect gift for Derek on the shelf behind the cash.
Peering through the cup of her hands, Frances could make out nothing through the bevelled glass. With her ear against the door now, she rang the bell and waited for sound.
Something hit her between her shoulders and she jumped, dropping Derek’s present. “Fuck you!” Frances yelled out. Reaching around, she grabbed for the arrow or the knife or for whatever the fuck might be sticking out of her back.
Derek was at the bottom of the concrete steps, arms limp at his sides. A hot pink plastic bird the size of a mouse lay there on the porch. Frances picked it up and shook her fist. “I’m keeping this,” she seethed at Derek, trying to crush the thing in her hand. The beak and feet just dug in.
“It was for you anyway. Everyone gets one.”
“Well I’m still keeping it.”
Party or no party, Derek was dressed for one. He had on what appeared to be a crinkly plastic Dracula cape and two pointed party hats on either side of his head, making horns. The T-shirt he had tucked into his swim trunks read It took me 50 years to look this good.
“Happy birthday,” Frances said.
“I didn’t do anything.” He took a few urgent pinches at his crotch.
“Then where’s your mother? I’ll congratulate her.”
“She’s out. Her and my dad. They went out to pick up the clown and the magician. Their car broke down.”
“The clown and the magician were coming in the same car?”
“I guess.” Derek walked up the steps, his cape luffing behind, and picked up his present. “This is mine?”
“Maybe.” The only thing Frances had around the house that resembled wrapping paper was
tinfoil. The present glinted in Derek’s hand like a piece of some crappy spaceship.
“Is it a book? Or is it one of those things where I’m supposed to think it’s a book but that’s only to throw me off the trail of what it really is?”
“You’ll have to open it to see.”
“I’ll put it with the rest.”
“Where’s everyone else?”
Derek looked around suspiciously. “I don’t know,” he said, an impish lilt to his voice.
“I guess they could be anywhere,” he yelled, and winked.
Derek looked at Frances looking at him, screwed up his face in imitation. “If you’re not careful,” he said, “your face will stick that ugly way.”
Frances followed him into the house. It didn’t smell like a boy lived here. The place had the smell of cardboard and potpourri. She imagined a trembling elderly couple bound and gagged in a closet somewhere. Hung low on the foyer wall was a framed picture of Derek with Shania Twain. Shania had been caught in a blink and Derek was holding a baby like he was asking the camera what it was. His smile looked out of place. Frances had only ever seen a grimace carved into his pumpkin. She pressed her thumb on Derek and then considered the patterned haze she had left over his face.
“I didn’t know you knew Shania.”
“She smelled like old macaroni,” he called from the other room.
In the living room she found him on his hands and knees, lifting up the flaps of the couch. He had taken off his sandals where the hallway linoleum turned to salmon-coloured carpet. Frances slipped her own sandals off.
She wanted to bend down and pet him like a cat.
“I can get up fine on my own,” Derek said, looking at Frances’s outstretched hand. With a put-upon sigh, he stood up and dusted off his hands like he had been fixing the couch.
“Did you lose something?”
“I’ll lose it on you if you want.”
The living room was stale and staid like a department store. Innocuous pastel floral patterns covered the surface of the room and the carpet looked and felt like it had hardly been walked on, except for a few slithering lines that had been gouged into it. Frances imagined Derek rolling through the house on the rollerblades she had seen him delivering papers in.
“So this is where you live?”
Derek put his finger to his lips and kissed it viciously. He pointed at the curtains and nodded at Frances. Frances nodded back. And she tried winking. Derek tiptoed to the curtains and poked his head behind, then submitted himself completely.
“So you weren’t there for it, but Marilyn gave us our final project last class.” There was a disturbance behind the curtain, like he was wrestling with something back there, but then the fabric settled. Derek’s toes, pale baby carrots, stuck out from under the hem. “She says she wants us to draw what we want in life. She says that all she wants it to be is true.”
Derek came out the other end of the curtain, and Frances half-expected him to have performed a costume change.
“‘All it has to be is true?’ What does that even mean?”
“If you’d gone to class, you wouldn’t have to ask. Sheesh. She said that there’s no such thing as good. She said that we have to stop worrying about if something is good or bad, and just do it true.”
“Oh please.”
“What?”
“Don’t you just hate that?”
“Hate what?”
“Marilyn. All her hippy shit. Don’t you just hate her?”
“No,” Derek said. He stared at her, and blinked.
“I love Miss Voss,” he said, in a kid way, where he didn’t seem to mean that he liked her a lot, or liked her class a lot, but that he actually loved her in a sincere way. “You don’t like the class?”
He passed Frances, slipped his sandals back on, and went into the dining room where he bent slightly to look under the table, and then parted a fern in the corner. Carrying on into the kitchen, he opened up all the drawers, and the oven, peeping into all these nooks. Frances kept on him. On the fridge there were seven little magnets with the days of week on them, each pinching a twenty-dollar bill.
“Derek,” she said, “about that class.”
“What about it?”
“Well, to tell you the truth—” She had imagined quitting the class as being a crushing blow to this kid. Maybe the Bad Service teens were right and Frances was his first love. Maybe his cagey-ness had everything to do with the awkwardness of being enamored with an older woman who was showing a consistent interest in him. Maybe she was a replacement for his non-existent mother. Maybe the thing he had been working so maturely on, the thing that he worked so hard to keep hidden from her, was a grand, badly drawn declaration of love. But, now that Frances was poised to tell him, it seemed likelier that he wouldn’t care in the slightest.
“You’ve been lying to me so far?” His face took on that old, serious cast.
“No. I’ve… That’s just a thing to say.”
“What a thing to just say.”
“Derek, I don’t think…”
“Wait,” he said. “Shh,” he said. “Wait here. Don’t move.”
Derek winked at Frances, and with stealth and lightness passed back through the foyer, careful not to make a sound closing the door behind him. Abandoned, Frances waited. She wanted to be in the exact same position when he came back.
While she waited Frances did the math in her head. For this boy to be turning ten today he would have been born in 1999. What had Frances been doing in 1999? She didn’t think she had even been on the internet by 1999. That Betsy girl would have been eight. Meaning Frances had put her mouth on the private parts of someone who had been eight at the same time that Frances had been, legally, an adult. How was that not a kind of pedophilia? What was the difference, then, between that and putting her mouth all over Derek’s private parts?
Probably she had been starting her first year of university, or already a year in, doing too many chemical drugs and drinking too much, in love with bands she would never listen to again. She had lasted a year and a half in biology before becoming convinced that she wasn’t learning anything. She had been dating this Gregory guy for a lot of that time and when she dropped out they moved together into a communal house with a few people and a couple families in a part of town that was all identical looking houses now. There were so many people doing so many things, all of them options. Frances could become an organic farmer, or a magician, or a social worker, or she could work in a café in Guatemala, or she could be a brewer, or a bass player, or a paleontologist, or speleologist, or who the fuck knew what. Life became so gaping and full all of a sudden. There were doors everywhere, all of them wide open. Any of these people she could be like, but Frances wanted to be like all of them all at once. Then one of the children brought lice home and everyone in the house was crawling with them. Everyone had to shave their heads. And while Frances loved how she looked with a shaved head, she hated how a house full of people with shaved heads looked.
If Frances went bald on a Friday, she had moved into her father’s house on the Sunday, where she had lived for a season. She watched talk shows and read Franny and Zooey over and over again until she became convinced that her not understanding the stories was a kind of understanding. She got lit in the backyard while her dad was at work, found a few alien-looking fake penises in her step-mom’s drawer and put the batteries upside down, and yelled at her dying cat Aleatha to get a job. And somewhere during all of this, some poor woman was forcing a football with red hair out of her strained privates.
When after a few minutes Derek didn’t come back, Frances gave up not moving and went to the drawers and considered stealing a spoon. She found one like she liked, but had no pockets in her dress to hide it away in. She tried to stow it in what little cleavage she had, but the spoon fell right out the bottom of her dress. She settled
on sticking it in her armpit, bending it, and then returning it to the drawer. A cough came from upstairs.
A track ran along the wall. At the top was a simple metal chair like the ones that flight attendants use. Making as little noise as possible, Frances climbed up to the chair and sat down on it. She searched for a switch to work the thing. On her knees, she saw the imprints. In the carpet there were two trails like the ones in the living room. They wended under the door of the first room. Frances got close to the wood and listened. There was the sound of a person trying not to make any noise. And maybe it was her own desire for just a little sip of some right then, but Frances was sure she could smell just the faintest hint of pot wafting from the room.
Frances curled her fingers to make a tiny, cautious knock, but instead headed for the door at the end of the hall.
A normal boy’s room with A Star Wars poster on the wall, a few actions figures scattered on the floor that were probably being played with less and less each day, a tiny desk that was more a place to throw things than to do work at, a bed made by an adult. Frances opened the top drawer of Derek’s dresser and took out a pair of underwear. Little robin’s-egg-blue boy’s underwear, practically panties. With no pockets to stuff the little bundle in, Frances pulled Derek’s panties up over her own.
There were two framed newspaper articles hung beside the door. One had Derek smiling that same creepy smile in a heap of books. According to the caption, he had read two hundred books this summer, raising over one thousand dollars for the MS Read-a-Thon. The other announced Derek as the Corbet Mercury’s Carrier of the Month for April. Derek’s bio read, “Derek enjoys school, baseball and drawing! He is committed to delivering the news to you on time, rain or shine!”