by Andrew Hood
Frances decided she would destroy the room. Tear the sheets from the bed, empty out the drawers over the floor, knock down his books. Instead, Frances went to the bookcase, set up just under the window, and looked at his collection. Among the Encyclopedia Browns, Hardy Boys, R.L. Steins, and a few John Grishams and Michael Crichtons, there was the library’s copy of Beginner’s Ornithology.
She flipped through, looking for that bird Derek had claimed to be the night she drove him home, the one that went “su-weet.” But most of the birds were indistinguishable, as birds do seem unless you know specifically what you’re looking for. Printed in the late 40s, Frances figured a handful of the birds in the guide must have since died, eaten into extinction by neighbourhood cats, the only sign of them left in the world a stunned engraving in some overdue library book. Any beginner ornithologist learning with this book would be watching the skies and bushes for little things that had disappeared forever ago.
On the desk Frances saw, under a pile of neatly folded shirts, Derek’s sketchbook from class. She slipped it out from under the clothes and considered it. The pages Derek had drawn on were wavy and thick next to the remaining, fresh pages. She could rip out all the art, scribble over every drawing, or steal the notebook and hand it into Marilyn as her own, becoming the star pupil of the class, eventually rocketing to international fame, her work lauded for its “youthful unpretentiousness.”
Boobs, for pages and pages. For a month and a half, Derek had been becoming an expert in drawing boobs. He had started out with pretty simple shapes that more resembled eyes, graduating to more nuanced, shaded, weighted forms with astutely placed nipples. The sets were most obviously Marilyn’s, but there were a few tiny pairs—and Frances considered that maybe she was flattering herself—that looked like her own. How see-through had anything she’d ever worn to class been? Maybe a kid could see through anything if he stared hard enough.
The window looked out on the backyard. Tables had been set up and the elms were full of fluttering, twisting ribbons. One table had a heap of gifts, another the promised surprise bags, and places had been set with plastic plates on the last. In the centre of each plate a rock had been plopped to keep it from blowing away. The white saucers shivered and squirmed with the breezes, unable to take flight.
She watched Derek wander into the yard, his cape blowing heroically out behind him. He stood and scratched his bum, looking at the empty backyard, maybe wondering why no one had come. Frances had been a little strange at that age too. She knew how hard it could be to get other kids to like you. Derek took a few mindless fondles at his penis while he surveyed his own failed grab at self-celebration.
Frances spotted the movement in the bushes at the same time Derek did. A motion towards the bush and the backyard hiccupped out the children it had been hiding. They jumped out of the landscaping, came out from behind fences, dropped from the trees. Children in good party clothes and children in regular clothes tucked in or decorated. Children from the class, children from his baseball team, and children Frances did not and should not recognize.
Pipsqueaks and squirts swarmed around Derek. His hands reaching to touch, he twirled after them, his cape sticking out and flapping. A few times he tripped and fell. His face was tangled with frustration. The kids moved and flowed like a cluster of birds, turning and swooping in weird synch. The order fell all apart, and each bit of it scattered in all directions, some kids finding new hiding spots, others clinging to the tree that must have been deemed safe. Derek was left standing alone again in the middle of the yard, having caught no one, still It.
He looked up at the house and squinted, smiling from the sun in his eyes. He saluted to block the light, and put his other hand far out to keep it more at bay. Frances ducked, sure she was caught, and dumped the sketchbook back on the desk. Derek’s stolen underpants started to itch.
Cautiously, she peeked back over the sill. Derek was waving. Frances stood up to wave back, but didn’t. Derek wasn’t waving at her. The spastic arm, the wide smile, those were not aimed at her. Those were for whoever was at the other window, for whoever was getting high in that room down the hall. The hiding kids took this opportunity to move again, and the chase was back on.
Frances took off the underwear and stole back her overdue copy of Beginner’s Ornithology, replacing it with the fresh copy she’d bought at the boutique. Wrapped still in the cheap splendour of the tinfoil, it could have been any book, could have been anything at all. In a hallway mirror, she straightened her dress before going out to join the party.
At the top of the stairs, Frances sat back down in the flight attendant chair. After some blind grabbing she found the controls. There was no obvious need for precaution, but Frances fastened the dangling seatbelt because it was there. It sat loosely on her thighs, adjusted for someone larger than her, so Frances cinched the belt tight against her stomach.
Pokey and jerky, the chair shunted down the stairs with a laboured, whiney hum. It went and stalled, went and stalled, and Frances waited, listening to the hum, feeling around under her for anything obviously overheating. Hovering over the steps, feeling like she was in a doctor’s office without any magazines, Frances imagined the chair catching fire, the house wobbly with flames, children dying in great numbers, her life turned into running, living on the lam, the loneliness of it, assuming any number of identities and professions, letting people get close but never too close, not moving forward so much as moving away. And then the chair glitched back to life, and for a few steps everything seemed to be working like it was supposed to again.
The Question Was What Was Complicated | 6
“That’s it,” Danny blurted.
“That’s it,” he said again, like he was getting used to the words. Danny downed the dregs of the bottle he had been working on since switching from coffee at exactly noon. Another beer whispered open and Danny looked at Hannah for comment. He drank with a wincing determination, daring her to say something. Though Hannah had never had a problem with him drinking, lately Danny seemed to like imagining she did.
Chugging, Danny’s eyes wandered impatiently from Hannah to the boy to nowhere. They lolled with the same unsettling, breathless detachment that the boy had when he gulped away on a glass of milk, like he didn’t know what to do with his eyes while he was drinking. It made Hannah curious. Where did she look when she drank? It turned out that she watched inside the glass for the bottom to appear.
Bethany, Hannah’s sister in B.C., had promised that a baby would be a constant, thrilling reminder of all the wonder that now-banal things had once held. More often than not, though, the boy’s wonder only distracted him, and led to messes that, whether she was there to see them or not, were Hannah’s responsibility. A crash would be followed by Danny poking his head around the corner, more like an older brother than the boy’s father. “Han,” he’d call, a lilt of tattle in his voice. “I think you’d better come have a look at this.” The wonder was there, fine, but it was incessant and exhausting. At her most tired, Hannah couldn’t wait for the wonder to be bled out of the boy, for the marvelous world to go dull again.
“That’s it,” Danny croaked through the sting of carbonation. He forced the rest down and brapped, lining this bottle up with the first. Hannah and the boy looked at Danny across the patio table, waiting to see where this was leading. Danny for Hannah was so often like a TV show that wasn’t very good but that was always on, that she always watched, and loved. Even though she knew how stupid it was.
“That’s it!” He shook his head and raised his shoulders, like he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of this before, that this was it. “We didn’t come all the way out here to put up with this crap, Han. At least, I didn’t.”
This crap was the Fancy Dans, the band some teenagers down the block had put together. This crap was especially the drums. Danny had been a drummer, back in what he now called The Good Old Days, a term Hannah might hav
e found more offensive if she hadn’t been feeling the same way. And though he’d willingly moved his kit into his brother’s basement two and a half years ago, to make room for the boy, he still subscribed to the magazines. Magazines for drummers with ugly men on all the covers. Large men with large arms, skinny men with large arms. A lot of them were balding, like Danny was balding. Whenever the teenagers down the street played Danny zeroed in on the drumming. Drumming that sounded like hail falling on taut sheets of wax paper, he said.
“I’m sorry, Dan?” Hannah asked, egging. “What’s it?”
“That’s it, Hannah,” he said, pointing the way to the noise. “Hannah,” he said, “I’m going over there!”
Hannah had noticed that they said each other’s names too much lately, as if they were worried they’d forget.
“To do what, Dan?” The boy’s dull stare, hidden in the shade of that too-girlish sun hat Hannah insisted he wear, asked the same question. To do what? What would he do when he got there?
“Something,” Danny answered. “I’m going to go over there. And do something, Hannah.”
“At least put your shirt on, Dan.”
He shook his shirt on over a sunburn and went without buttoning it up. Hannah watched him go, that waddling gait of his, grabbing up his jeans to better hide the shady fissure of his crack.
“What do you think, kid?”
The boy put a fist in his eye and opened his mouth wide to yawn, curling back his tongue like a cat.
Hannah made no big show of it. She just deftly pinched under the boy’s tongue, taking away the marble he had stowed under there when he thought she wasn’t looking. Where on earth had he found a marble? There had been no one on their property before them. It had been an empty field before. And who played with marbles anymore?
The boy frowned at Hannah. Caught, sorry, but angry all the same. Angry in the shade of his sunhat.
The crap fell away instrument by instrument. In this new quiet there was the roll of waves gripping a shore that was the Sunday sound of cars on the block.
The music started again in a burst. It carried itself pathetically up like a bird trying to get off the ground with a broken wing, and then fell apart again.
The wheezing breath of traffic. The slap-slap of kids running in the streets. The boy not taking his eyes off the hand that the marble had disappeared into.
“That’s it!” That’s what he would yell when he would threaten to leave for good, Danny. But he could never find a specific reason to go, for it to be it. Breaking the marriage would have been more work than keeping it, so they kept it. The only thing that had changed was now there was a reason to not go.
Hannah and the boy watched the back gate for Danny to come back through.
“What do you think?” Hannah asked the boy. “You think they’ve beaten up Dad?” Danny and teenagers: there was a history there.
With that baby chub he could rumple and contort his face into the most horrible expressions, and the boy did a doozy.
“Let’s go see.” Hannah upped the boy and canted him on her hip, slipped her sandals on. There seemed to be so much glass in the street lately. A few Friday nights ago someone had smashed the bus stop, the aquamarine glass of which still sparkled in the grass and on the curb, pretty if she didn’t think about what it actually was. Hannah thought she could remember being able to walk anywhere barefoot without worry, when she was young. “Let’s go see if they’ve killed Dad.”
Who was breaking all this glass all of a sudden anyway? Or had someone stopped cleaning it up?
In a rush the racket began again.
It was Hannah who heard the sound of what at first sounded like a twig snapping in the night those few Halloweens ago. This was in the old house, back in the old neighbourhood, back in the city, back before the boy. Except it was a more full sound than a twig, more like the snap of a pane cracking under too much pressure from its frame. And then another snap.
It’s nothing, Hannah had told herself, lying in bed. But answered herself that nothing was ever nothing.
“Dan,” she whispered. And she poked him. “Dan,” she said. “There’s something.”
Danny grumbled, his back to her, making more of a show coming out of sleep than was necessary. “The hell?”
“There’s something out there,” she said.
Hannah knew when Danny was asleep and when he wasn’t, knew when he was just pretending. And how sad was that? Two people lying in bed, pretending to sleep? But maybe that was marriage. Two people pretending, together. They had been having a lot of talks lately about all the things marriage was supposed to be. Talks that Danny was never a fan of having. “I know the answer is I love you,” Danny had said. “But for frick’s sake, Han, I just don’t know what the question is anymore.”
Danny made a huffy production of getting out of bed, throwing the covers off and stomping to the window. His little flat nothing of a bum, two cold pancakes. And a little stiff shadow bobbing in front that Hannah had apparently interrupted. There was another snap as Danny parted the curtain.
“Frig you!” Danny shrieked. He was rough with the gauze of the curtain like he was trying to slam it. And he was gone out of the room. Hannah heard the dainty sounds of Danny being careful and also hurrying down the stairs. When he was genuinely, deeply mad, Danny cursed politely. Out came the frigs, and fricks, and the sheeshes. This polite rage had been one of those things that had endeared Danny to Hannah back at the start, back in The Good Old Days. But, like all the things that Hannah had loved about the guy—his drumming face, his little bum, the beginning of a bald spot on his crown—it was something he was seriously embarrassed of and humourless about, and would get furious at Hannah for finding adorable.
Hannah got up to take her own look out the window.
There were three teenagers in the street, throwing eggs. They were in the bare minimum of costume: nondescript jeans and dark sweatshirts, dollar store Halloween masks. There was a werewolf, a gorilla, and a black cat, throwing eggs.
Hannah and Danny had kept their porch light off that night, ate most of the candy themselves. Even still there had been knocking all evening. They had kept the light off because they had wanted to be alone together, tonight especially. They watched the same TV shows in separate rooms, alone together, but the light being off only seemed to make the kids knock harder and louder. And it must have really cheesed these three off.
Hannah watched. Danny appeared on the front lawn, waving his arms. Naked as a buck, with his pink pancakes, and his silly penis so small now in the cool of the night, probably tucking into his body like a turtle like it did sometimes. He waved his arms and yelled something at the teenagers that Hannah couldn’t make out. Probably that that was it. “That’s it!”
The way Danny was waving his arms wildly around his head looked just like when he played drum solos in the air along with drum solos on records, as if the drums were all around him. Like the drums were a swarm of bees that he was shooing gone. Once Danny had told her a dream he had where he was trapped in a strange cube of “futuristic-looking” drums and the only way to escape was to rock through. Hannah had only giggled a bit, but it had been enough for Danny to storm out, swearing to never tell her about any dreams ever again.
Probably Danny had expected to scare the kids off with his drum solo waving and his yelling about it being it. They would run off at the sight of this irate, naked man. But they stood there, listening to him and whatever he was yelling about.
One said something back. The mouth of the mask didn’t move, but the gorilla face moved like there was something crawling around inside of it. Once, when she was a girl, Hannah and her sister had found a small dead fox in the woods behind their house. What looked like breathing, Bethany had explained, were the maggots milling around inside.
It took only the gorilla to throw an egg to make it okay for the other two. The w
erewolf and the cat, along with the gorilla, opened fire on Danny.
Danny doubled, hit in the crotch. He stumbled backwards and kept stumbling, back towards the house. An egg to the bald top of his head. He held one hand out to block the eggs, the other hand he had protecting his turtled penis. The werewolf, the cat, and the gorilla kept throwing. Though their masked faces were frozen in screams, Hannah could hear their laughing.
The front door slammed. Hannah ran down to him one step at a time, rushing but still being careful.
The baby hadn’t taken was why they had kept their porch light off. It wasn’t even a baby, what came out, but it would have been. All that wet ingredient, that gory material. And they just hadn’t felt like having little babies in dorky, adorable costumes coming to their house. The parents waiting at the end of the driveway.
Hannah took off her own robe and held it out to Danny. He was wiping snotty egg out of his eyes. He was doing this slow dance, this excruciating watusi. Where his penis would otherwise have been there was a hairy divot, a sort of second bellybutton.
“Dan,” Hannah said, trying not to look at the hole.
“Dan,” she said. She held out her silk robe for him, and they were both naked.
It looked like he was digging out his eyes, the goo of his eyes. Flecks of white shell like tiny teeth stuck to him. Danny’s front was slick, his hair there matted, like that one disastrous time they had tried oils together.
The slime on Danny, the yoke. All that precious stuff inside such a weak case. The stuff that would have gone on to make a kid had just slipped out her, as though it was her fault for not holding it in there tight enough, for not wanting it in there enough. “It happens more than you think,” was the best Bethany had been able or willing to offer, on her way out the door with her own children, all three of them dressed as Snow White that year. “You know Mom did it a bunch of times. So just think. Put it in perspective. If it hadn’t been for those losses, she would’ve never had you.”