Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  After dinner, he got out his accordion. Started playing “Rudolph.” Kids knew smart-Alec words to holler out between the lines. They went on to a bunch more Christmas songs. Everybody sang. Funny words, that they all knew.

  “We three kings of glory and tar

  Tried to smoke a rubber cigar

  It was loaded and exploded

  Now we’re on yonder star.”

  They had a bunch of them. “While shepherds washed their socks by night…” You could see they done this every year.

  One guy, Tom, he says to his niece, he says, “Want to hear a goofy knock-knock joke?”

  Kid grins up at him, waiting to hear it. I see she’s got the family look to her. Big, warm, honey-brown eyes, spaced wide apart, lit up with fun.

  I get tight in the stomach, waiting for the kind of a joke my dad would tell a little girl.

  Cousin Tom says, “You start.”

  Kid says, “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?” Tom says.

  And then he sits there, laughing at the look on her when she sees she walked into it. She stamps her foot and swats him.

  “You start!” he says again, laughing at her.

  I met Dave’s cousin Jan (Tom’s wife), who Dave knew I’d like. They’ve got a little baby she’s nursing. She says he don’t need no formula. Guess he must not. He’s got fat feet and foldy rubber wrists. Just from her breast milk. Cute little tinker.

  I like the way Jan takes an interest in her baby’s mind. She read a book about babies, how they learn. She says little Alexander there, he’s got no way to know, if she walks out of the room, if she’s ever coming back. He hasn’t learned that yet about the world, that what you can’t see is still here.

  Like how do I know, when you walk out that door, that you don’t blink out like a light? That’s why baby Alexander cries, Jan says. He don’t know but what his mother just blinked out like a light.

  I told Jan I was just learning something like that about the world, myself, how the past disappears and we can’t see it no more. But it’s still here. Like as if my dead mother’s just gone into another room.

  That was an interesting conversation.

  I sat and thought about my sister Sandra afterwards. She’s got a crush on this Ian of hers and she don’t even want to think about whether that’s okay for Jenny or whether it’s not.

  Sandra would’ve never thought about why Jenny was crying, like the way Jan’s thinking here. Jan, she’s a real good mother. And that’s something, I’ll tell you!

  I don’t give a care what else you do or you don’t do in your life. What you look like. How much money you got. If you’re a good mother or a good father, I’m thankful you’re on the earth.

  That Christmas Day with Dave was the first I ever spent time with a family where there was no abuse. I watched three little girls, safe as could be, twirling to make themselves dizzy. Uncle Al (Dave’s dad) moved a chair back to make room but, when they fell over, he never even looked up their little velvet Christmas dresses.

  It wasn’t like nobody touched the kids. Dave and his folks, they bounced tots on their knees. They arm-wrestled teens for loonies. They hugged and shoved and carried on. But, boy, was it different to what I’d grew up with! Nobody grabbed a youngster in a way to make you queasy. There just wasn’t none of that in the air. Not at all!

  I watched the snow blowing against the window and I wished I had Jenny in here with these people, safe.

  Best Christmas Day I’d ever had. Or would’ve been, if I hadn’t of had that feeling about Jenny. Worrying about her was like a cold I was coming down with. I could feel it heavy in my head and sore in my throat.

  Well, I can tell yous, in the new year, Group had gotten to be a different story. I was like the star pupil there. Instead of dragging my homework out last thing on Monday nights, and sitting, stupid, sweating over what to write, I’d be right at her. I’d sit up late, soon as I got home. Just ate them sheets now. And, in Group, instead of trying to keep Meredith and the others from finding out my stuff, I was the motor mouth. Remember how we worked on smells? Well, we done the same with taste, touch, hearing and sight, one a week, right through January.

  I liked the night we done hearing. For the pleasant sounds list, we come up with dry leaves, the sound they’ll make on a sidewalk, snow crunching, happy laughing, bells, wild geese, wind, rain, creek water, far-off train whistles, humming, and silence. Yous should try it. Shut your eyes and see what good sounds come to mind.

  Of course, on the unpleasant list, which is what Meredith was working up to, we got about what you’d expect out of people with what she calls our “background.” Women who got screwed by grown men when we were kids, if you want to come right out with it. We don’t like the sounds of yelling, slapping, screaming, door slamming, children crying, guns, bangs, or kissing, moaning, or panting. None of us.

  There were also weird certain things for each person. Sally don’t like to hear welding. Tammy, she don’t like the sound of a cappuccino machine. Marg can’t listen to a spin cycle.

  It’s getting so plain that it’s almost comical.

  Myself, there’s a certain sort of a wet chewing sound some people make with their mouth if they have anything wrong with their jaw. Meredith looked at me funny when I mentioned that.

  I says to Josie, that night when we were going downstairs, “Did you see the way Meredith looked at me?”

  Josie says, she says, “When Meredith done that, I seen a little red-brown toy cow with its tail broke off.”

  “What the frig are you talking about?”

  “What I seen when Meredith give you that look.”

  “What’s a toy cow got to do with anything?”

  Josie shrugged.

  By the time we got to eyesight and we were making collages of bad sights, nobody was trying to hide nothing. We had Worked through our Defences, Meredith said.

  We were right at them magazines. There wasn’t a picture of a dirty-looking old man left in them. Every man that looked like any father or older brother or out-of-line restaurant guy or Mr. Mullen at the auto shop or whoever, his face was pasted on to our collages. Or his nose was, or his finger-missing hand was, or his puffy chin, or the hairy wrinkles of his neck or whatever part of him we could find and glue on.

  Josie had a Santa hat glued on to some underpants-ad fellow that she said looked like her brother when he was twenty and she was five.

  Tammy, she cut out every silky shirt. Some old bastard used to buy silky shirts for her and her little sister when they were ten and eight. She had pictures of the Italian food there too, and the wool rug. Sally, of course, she was cutting out wheels and fenders out of the car ads, making like a regular auto shop out of her bristol board. She found a radio that looked about right for the one she used to pretend she was in when Mr. Mullen was doing it to her. (She was one of the happy people who lived in the radio and never got mad or cried.) All she could get of Mr. Mullen was his wristwatch and his two eyes out of two different heads. He had one squinty. Marg, she found a washing machine and she’s got a hand getting shut under the lid. That shows how trapped she felt at that time, Meredith says.

  Darlene just come back to Group the end of January there so she was way behind. Didn’t do nothing but cut out kitty cats.

  Me, I could see my life on just about any page of any magazine you could show me. There was the window in our public school. There was the terrazzo floor, the black stairs, and there was the bulletin board full of kids’ art, next to the janitor’s closet. There was my sister Sandra’s green rabbit that she called Sour Bunny and held in her hand. There were the pussy willows that we dunked in the creek on Easter, to make them clean. I seen two hearts and I tore them in pieces, for my sister Sandra’s and my own.

  Marg said to me, she says, “Remember when you used to always have trouble getting started?”
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  “I’m started now,” I says. And boy, was I!

  One big night, Frances, the helper, says, “Rose,” she says, “I wonder which of the events in that picture were your fault?”

  I said, “No, I was just a little g—”

  I choked.

  Everybody else had bawled in Group. That there was the first time for me.

  Meredith said it was a significant shift and a step in my healing.

  Frances said to me on the way out, she said she was glad I felt comfortable enough in Group, now, that I was able to cry.

  “I cried in Group,” I says to Dave when I got home.

  “What over?”

  “Because nothing in my whole picture was my fault!”

  Dave don’t expect nobody to make sense all the time. So he just give me a pat.

  I curled up in bed feeling about the best I ever felt yet in my life, up to then. Sheets so smooth and happy feeling.

  Sleep’s coming and I feel like I’m floating up. Not my fault. Not my fault. Not the terrazzo floor or the broom closet or the boiler room. Mom not my fault. Sandra not my fault, not my fault…. It was like the mattress was floating up, out the window between the blue velvet curtain clouds, with all that weight lifted off me.

  I’m in a courtroom and the judge, God the Father, in a long white beard, is booming a shining gold hammer on a kettle drum, rumbling, in a voice like far off thunder, when the storm is over, “Not guilty! NOT guilty!” Sally and all the angels chiming in with the high notes. We fly over the drum and it’s a shining lake. The sand on the bottom of it is gold.

  Of course, I had to wake up the next morning when I got to work. Ken, he had settled down after I took off that day through the neighbours’ yard to get away from him. I don’t know whether maybe somebody seen and said something to him, or what. Anyways, he’d backed off. And I been thinking, thank God.

  But I guess his New Year’s resolution had wore off by around about the first of February there. Day after I got to the bawling stage of my healing and had my dream of flying over the lake where the gold was, Ken got back to his old tricks.

  So that set me back. Put something right back in the picture that was, as far as I could make out, my own fault.

  Mind you, I now had about one eighth of a doubt on that. I was nowheres near to saying what I learned to say later, that what Ken does is Ken’s responsibility. But I had my first little start of a question. If nothing in that picture was my fault, if my father wasn’t my fault, then, about this situation here…?

  But I still had this voice in my head that kept saying, you’re grown up now. What happens now is your own fault.

  I went to dump the trash. Ken caught me in the back room. Twisted my arm up to my shoulder blades and yanked my face down. Shoved it in my mouth. It did go through my mind to wonder if possibly this might not be all completely my fault.

  Stupid, eh? I’m gagging and I’m still sort of assuming it’s my own fault this is going on.

  But it did go through my mind to wonder if there was any question about that. Just the faint question. But, see, for me, at the time, that was a start. To have that much of a question in my mind. Like just possibly him doing this did maybe not mean I was a born whore who deserved it? Could it by any chance be partly Ken’s own fault how Ken acts?

  Don’t laugh at me. That’s alls I could do that day.

  You’ve got to take it easy on yourself when you’re getting started with anything. You’ll likely be stupid at it. That don’t matter. Long as you’re getting started.

  Josie’s generally good in the new year, she says. She quit drinking. Kicked out Brent. Got herself a waitress job at the Queen’s Hotel there, in the dining room. Of course she was always talking about the Queen’s Hotel on Tuesdays now, telling us that she was picking up a lot that would come in handy, when we had our own hotel to run.

  She was looking better. Got her hair curled cute. She’d been out of her cast for a long time. Limp was gone. No new bruises on her. She gained a few pounds so she didn’t look like a starvation victim.

  The next good thing that happened was she got Sally a job there too. That’s the first job Sally had since her daughter died. Sally’s daughter died when she was two. Sally was seventeen at the time. Fell asleep on a beach and the little girl drowned.

  The waitress thing worked out good. Sally being tall, slim and blonde, that and the way she loves to look after everybody, means she got good tips.

  It was fun for her and Josie to work together. They were playing our game all the time, pretending they were just there to look into running a hotel. Dreaming their heads off.

  They couldn’t usually come to Group the same nights. But whichever one could show up reported in for the two of them. Took back the homework. So we all kept in touch and kept on going.

  We were doing different education topics now in Group. We learned about our Human Value. Everyone’s got Human Value.

  We had to write down some things we like about ourself. That was hard, at first. Try that. Write down fifteen things you like about yourself.

  I come out with: reliable, work hard, don’t get in flap in emergencies. Felt a bit sheepish doing it, but I also put down some of them things Dave says. That I’m straightforward, fun, got a kindly touch.

  It wasn’t fifteen. But I was started.

  One night, we learned about sexual harassment in the workplace. My ears was sticking out like a couple of satellite dishes, I can tell yous! Sticking out and flapping. Meredith was saying, there, that a person can go to jail for what sounded like a lot less than what Ken gets up to!

  Another night, I remember we learned all about men and women. Did yous know men and women was evolved different? Women are set up for multi-tasking, Meredith said. And the men, they’re set up for thinking of one thing at a time. I thought that was interesting.

  Marg had her court case back in January, and her old man was in jail. That was a relief except, of course, she couldn’t get it out of her head that it was her fault somebody’s in jail. He’s an old man. His health is not so hot. She was always asking Meredith about what it’s like in jail. Do they feed them good? (Marg’s got to know about food.) Would he get beat up?

  I’m at my new stage, so I’m sitting there wanting to say to her, “Marg, it’s not your fault. If he hadn’t abused kids, he wouldn’t be eating jail food, would he?”

  But you can’t just go and tell somebody. I knew that because every time I tried to tell my sister what I was getting out of Group, I hit a wall.

  “I can’t believe you want to sit there and talk to a bunch of people about such personal shit,” my sister says.

  “It’s not like I love talking about it.”

  “Nobody’s making you.”

  “But it’s doing me good. I’m feeling better. I’m telling you, Sandra, I never felt this good in my life. I wish you’d try something like this. You could—”

  “I don’t see where you’re any better off.”

  “I can understand things different. Some of the guilt’s getting lifted off me. And I’ve got such good friends now. Feel like they’re connected with me real deep. And I’m so close with Dave.”

  “You’re just plain lucky there.”

  “No. I mean I am lucky. But there’s more to it. I’m keeping Dave on purpose because I like how he treats me. I’m learning how to know real love when I see it and when I feel it. And there’s not so many frigging secrets hiding in my closets like a bunch of dragons with green teeth. I’m healing, Sandra.”

  “You’re starting to talk weird, and you have a lot to say about what other people should do. That’s all I know.”

  That’s the way it ended up every time I tried to talk to my sister. She would not talk about the boiler room. Didn’t remember any such a thing. That’s what she always said, with her eyes zipping sideways, up, down, like
a couple of panicking little grey bugs in a jar.

  Marg’s saying, “They wouldn’t have locked him up if I hadn’t of testified. The lawyer said my evidence tipped the scale.” Marg sounds more like a patient than a nurse.

  Sally was there that night. In the hall afterwards, she says to Marg, “I see they got the paint on sale at Colour Your World. Why don’t we do your front room? I’ll help you.”

  Marg says oh no, she wouldn’t trouble Sally. But she gets this little smile, so they done that the next week. Marg picked the type of butter yellow that perks her up.

  Marg’s trying to get used to the fact that she’s not in danger around town. She went out and got the paint, her and Sally.

  Tammy, she’s still scared to go out, too. With good reason. Asshole’s on the hunt. Even with the court order, Tammy don’t feel safe about herself or the kids. Marg and Sally picked her up from the shelter, though, and she went and pitched in with the painting. Said it done her good to get out.

  The shelter people are telling Tammy she has to try to get out more now. They want her to look for an apartment. The lawyer tells her she can stay in the house and kick Asshole out. She don’t want to. Wouldn’t be safe there. Wants to live where they lock a door downstairs.

  Little Jenny was over at our place one Saturday. I had some crayons there for her, and she’s sitting at the kitchen table making pictures. I was cutting up an onion for stew.

  And Jenny’s saying, “Are you crying about my picture, Ann Toes?”

  I says, “No, sweetie. It’s just the onions. They’re stinging my eyes.”

  She says, “Because it’s a sad picture.”

  Something must’ve told me what that picture was going to show. I dumped the onion in the pot. It took a long time falling. I scraped the cutting board with the knife. I put the knife in a bowl of water that was in the sink. I washed my hands with soap. I dried my hands on the dish towel. I turned around. I bent over the table. And seen Jenny’s picture.

  I said, “Who’s that there?”

  “Ian.”

  Jenny’s mom’s boyfriend laying on a bed with this sticking-up dick on him that’s as big as the bedroom door.