Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  Everybody put in ideas. We made a list. I still got it. I’ll copy it out for yous and yous can see if your own shit is here:

  COPING MECHANISMS:

  Taking care of people—focusing on other people’s pain (Sally, Marg, me)

  Isolating self (me before we started Group, Darlene)

  Eating (Marg)

  Not eating (Josie)

  Falling in love (Darlene, me before)

  Being too trustful and/or taking extreme risks

  (Darlene—both)

  Conforming to others’ demands (Tammy)

  Not conforming (Darlene)

  Drinking (Josie, Darlene)

  Sleeping (Sally—not now so much)

  “Didn’t you want your name down for that second-last one, Marg? You with your drinking problem?”

  Marg, she looks at me blank, then laughs.

  Of course, Meredith goes, “Marg? Is this something you would like to share with us?”

  I haven’t heard this good of a glug-glugging Marg laugh in a while.

  I sing out, “Marg joined the AA!”

  Marg can’t quit laughing, red in the face, glugging, sticking her soft elbow in me to shut me up.

  Tammy says, “You joined AA?”

  Everybody’s looking at her.

  Marg says, “No! I’m going to kill you!” she says to me.

  “She only goes for the free doughnuts,” I says, and Marg starts hitting me over the head with a piece of paper, laughing.

  You got to stir the pot, once in a while at Group, eh, or you feel like you’re at your own funeral.

  “It’s a joke,” I says.

  Meredith gives us one of her lips-only smiles. Then we go back to listing down our Dysfunctional Coping Mechanisms.

  Being too cautious (Darlene, Marg)

  Compulsive collecting (Sally)

  Pretending things are okay when they’re not (Tammy, all of us sometimes)

  Accepting undue shame (everyone)

  Fantasy (everyone)

  I had a question about that last one there. “Can I ask what’s wrong with fantasy?”

  “Well,” Meredith tells me, “we have to live in reality, don’t we? It’s not healthy to escape into fantasy worlds. It’s an Avoidance of Reality.”

  “Is that what it is?” I says.

  “Oh yes. Fantasy is a Coping Mechanism. Abused children often invent fantasy worlds where everything is good. It’s a way of surviving the pain of their real situation. But of course, when we grow up, we have to set that aside or else it becomes a negative force in our lives. As adults we have to come to terms with things as they really are. Fantasy, used as a coping mechanism in adult life, can be very destructive.”

  That’s what Meredith said.

  Everything went chilly and dim in our fantasy town. A shadow come over the hotel and over the house where the lady was singing, baking her blueberry pies. The fellow next door who was sanding a garden bench for our hotel—it’s like I seen him shiver and look up, wondering how come he couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun on the back of his neck. A cloud shadow fell on the white church. Turned it grey. The sparkle died out of the pink stones. The deep water with the bright gold drifting down went dark. The house with blue curtains come under a cloud, and the glass stars in the window quit catching sunshine and casting coloured shadows.

  But then I thought, no, dammit. I’m going to use my own judgement! I took and scratched fantasy off the bad list with a bold line. Warm sun lit the town up beautiful again.

  I called Josie the next morning to bitch about Meredith.

  “She don’t see the point in fantasy, using your imagination. Wants to nail everything down to what’s real and what makes sense,” I says.

  Josie says. “Sense?” She says, “The world is a ball of dirt sailing through outer space hanging on to us by the feet.”

  I wasn’t to the purple blue stepping stone yet, the spirit stone, which, when you stand on it, means you know you’re standing on a world in space and every single thing, yourself included, is beyond belief.

  I was a long way from that yet, but I must’ve had some notion along them lines. Enough to make me stick up for daydreams.

  I says, “I gotta go. They’ve got a dishwasher plugged, up in Snob Hill. Yelling it’s a frigging emergency.”

  Josie laughs.

  Dishwasher! They were lucky if they had anything to put in a dish, when Josie was growing up. That’s why she can’t hardly eat. A whole burger scares her. She’s waiting for her brother to grab it or her father to take and cut it in four. Or for her mother to hit her in the side of the head, call her a hog for being so hungry.

  Doing her homework for Group, Josie had to sit and write, I do not need to be ashamed of normal hunger. Being hungry is nobody’s fault.

  Just like when I had to write, It is not my fault the sidewalk’s heaved.

  You gotta do it. Write her down. Dumb or not. That’s how you yank out the weeds of shame, the way Frances the helper puts it.

  And then you work on thinking of what your good points are. Planting the garden of self-worth, Frances says.

  Josie says, “Eating out with you at the restaurant? I ate the whole half of a burger?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well,” Josie says, “that was the first time I ever ate food in front of anybody in twenty-one years.”

  14.

  THE NEXT TUESDAY, Sally come trotting upstairs. Tammy lumbering behind. Both of them happy. Lugging two big bags. They’d went to the fabric store together. Sally was to hold up bolts of material and Tammy was going to say which colour she liked.

  Sally held the bag. Tammy, she stuck her hands in deep and pulled the midnight blue up out of there like a magic trick. Tammy’s beaming like a sunny day. “I like this colour the best!”

  It was a dark colour, real deep. Sure would not have been Sally’s pick. But Sally knew enough to keep her mouth shut.

  You can like whatever colour you happen to like. You get a handful of them paint chips. And you say to yourself, which of these here do I myself like the looks of? And if it so happens that what’s calling to you is some out-of-style colour your sister calls “Slime Green” or you like the kind of red that your mother calls “Whore’s Drawers,” nuts to them.

  What you like is you. And there’s nothing wrong with you yourself. That’s the message, see? That’s the point of writing all this down.

  Tammy give me a leftover piece of the blue cloth. I took it home. Spread it out on the table. It was thick, soft, with a bumpy weave. I never knew it was the colour to make my spirit stone, eh, or a clue for how to get to that. I’m just running my hand over it, thinking, this here is a colour that I myself also happen to like. Me and Tammy have that in common.

  It felt brand new. Permission to like this dark colour. Somebody else saying it was their favourite too. Mom never would have a dark colour around. Wouldn’t let me wear nothing dark. Didn’t want to look at nothing dark. Look at the bright side. That was her. Don’t look at nothing depressing. Don’t talk about nothing bad. Here’s the ointment, but we just won’t say nothing about the fact your father screws you because that ain’t a nice topic.

  My stepping stones were getting to reach halfway across that little kitchen by now. Each one stood for some kind of what Meredith called a “shift.” Changes. Stuff I come to see different.

  I was fired up about favourite colours. Couldn’t wait to see Jenny.

  When I go over there the next day after work, I take her a big box of new crayons and we dump them all over the table in the foster home. Jenny starts to peel the paper off her sunshine yellow crayon. Now, you know, it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her not to wreck the crayon. But, “I want to see it more. Yellow is my favourite.”

  So I shut my mouth. I can barely learn quick enough t
o keep up with being Jenny’s aunt.

  Friday, I give Josie a call. Boyfriend Brent answered. I don’t know if it was the way he was breathing, but I got a feeling off of him. I wish I’d have got it through my head, at that time, that you have to listen to hunches. I thought, something’s funny. But then I thought, or maybe I’m nuts.

  Brent, he goes, “She can’t come to the phone.”

  I says, “Why not?”

  “Christ, you’re nosy.”

  “Well, get her to call me.”

  “Will do,” he says, just like that. Casual.

  “Will she call me right back?”

  “She’ll call,” he says, and he hangs up.

  I said to Dave, I says, “I wonder if something’s up with Brent and Josie.”

  He said, “Want to go see?”

  But no. There’s me, still down-playing my own hunch.

  An hour later when she hadn’t called me back, I says, “I’m wondering.”

  Dave says, “We can drive over there. Think we should?”

  Two hours later, I’m pacing.

  Dave, he put a shoelace in his book and shut it.

  It was a good thing we went. Brent was nowheres to be seen, and we had to get Josie to the hospital again. The story was she’d got drunk and fell over.

  “How’d she ever manage to get a goose egg like that on the back of her head if she fell face first?” That’s what Dave was wondering while we’re sitting there waiting to hear if she’s going to have to stay the night. “Or, if she went down backwards, what the hell happened to her face?”

  We looked at each other.

  She was home the next day, and you can bet I wanted to talk to her. I showed up on her doorstep late afternoon.

  I looked in the window and I seen Josie. She was laying on the couch, looking out the window at the pink twilight. Little smile on her. I bet she was thinking something like what Jenny might be thinking, like about angels or fairy people that live in them soft spring clouds. I took a glance up, myself.

  Tapped on the door gentle, not to make her jump.

  She waved, and I let myself in. I says, “Jesus, Josie!” Went and gave her a hug. Took it easy, not to hurt her. But she drew in her breath, sharp, when I touched her back.

  Josie looks up at the sky. It’s turned a deep rose.

  She says, “Poor Sally, her and her pink. We give her such a hard time over it. But look at that! It’s beautiful.”

  “Nothing wrong with any colour,” I says.

  We sat there for a while, watching the sky go through its show. It does that twice a day. How often do I even raise my eyes to see it? There’s something about Josie that makes you see more.

  Finally she says, in a low voice, “You’re right, eh.”

  “What am I right about?”

  “Brent done it.”

  I says, “I wished you’d have told me before now.”

  “Too ashamed.”

  Two of the sweetest people I know, Jenny and Josie. Both so ashamed of stuff that’s not their faults!

  I started in about Brent. Had a lot to say. Told her I hoped this meant that she was finally going to kick him the hell out. What the frig was he doing back here anyway?

  “It was him all the times before, too, wasn’t it?” I says. “What did you ever let him back for, after last time? You were in the hospital for a week!”

  Finally Josie got sick of me nagging her. She says, “Rose,” she says, “I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve put you to in the past, and I’m sorry for the future too, because I’ll never change.”

  That got me steaming pissed. I told her she had to get up her gumption and hope for better. She didn’t need to have a sorry future. She was going to have a good future. I says, “Look at me working at McIlveen’s now and how much better off I am. Did I sit down and say, ‘Oh, well, I guess I have to do stinking Ken in the supply room the rest of my life? Oh well. Nothing I can do?’

  I says, “No.” I says, “Look how I’m learning every day and helping Jenny. My stepping stones are halfway across the kitchen, and when they reach all the way from the door to the stove, me and Dave are getting married!”

  I shouldn’t have told it to her that night, her all bruised and shamed and the two of us bickering over Brent, with so much to talk about there. But that’s the way it come out.

  Josie jumped up. Spread out her shawl like wings to hug me.

  “When your what reaches from the door to the stove?” she says.

  Josie settled back in the couch, smiling out the window, up at the first star, and she planned out the wedding. She was right in her glory. Had me waltzing down the aisle in the church beside the lake. Jenny dressed up like a princess. Josie give me a wedding gown of Tammy’s dark blue drapes and a veil of the silver stars.

  “You crazy nut.” I can’t help smiling at her, with tears coming. And at the same time, I am still very pissed off.

  I says, “We got something else to talk about tonight besides what I’m going to wear to my wedding.”

  Josie breezed right on. Marg’s a great cook. Marg will cater the buffet. Her and Sally. They’ll run the whole thing.

  I says, “Josie, we can talk about that later. Where is Brent right now?”

  She didn’t know.

  “What if me and Dave take you to the shelter?”

  She wouldn’t.

  “He won’t do nothing more tonight,” she says. “There’s going to be northern lights on your wedding night.”

  Dave come for me in the truck about ten o’clock. I was fed right up by that time. Hadn’t had no luck trying to get through to Josie. She would not talk serious.

  I told Dave about it on the way home. We didn’t know what to do. It’s not like with Jenny where we could step in, eh. Josie’s technically a grown-up.

  We’re tramping up the stairs to our place. “She’s got to just smarten up and kick him out,” Dave says.

  “But she won’t,” I says. “Look at how many times things like this has went on already. And she come right out and told me she’s never going to change! Oh, Dave, you should’ve saw her back! I helped her on with her night gown.”

  Dave can’t take it in.

  While I’m turning the key in the lock, he’s saying, “If you’d knew Brent growing up, he was just like what Josie is now. He was the one getting hurt all the time. We used to feel real sorry for him. Mom and Dad tried to get the police into it. I can’t believe he’s the one dishing it out now.”

  “That’s the way it goes, I think. One generation to the next.” I open the door.

  “Are you sure it was him done it?”

  “Who else?”

  We’re hanging up our jackets, taking off our boots.

  “Can’t be Brent.”

  “It is.”

  “Can’t be. He’d never want nobody to suffer like what he suffered himself.”

  I went and poured water in the kettle for tea.

  I says, “Maybe he can’t stop himself. Maybe he needs help. Needs to go to a group, like me, only for men. And get some help for his trouble. What he’s got there is what Meredith would call an Anger Problem. Like the husband of our friend Tammy. Meredith said if Tammy’s Asshole wanted, he could join a group and get help for how he acts. Think Brent would? You could talk to him. Anger Management Group, I think they call it.”

  Me and Dave felt like our hands were tied. What could we do if Josie wouldn’t do nothing?

  Dave said if it was anybody but Brent, he’d punch his lights out. But he’d try talking to him, he said.

  “I could never lay a hand on Brent,” he says. “All the times I seen him beat black and blue by his old man. And burned, Rosie! Old bastard used to burn him, when he was just a little kid.”

  “Jesus. Why didn’t somebody call Children’s Aid?”
>
  “Like I said, Mom and Dad did. More than once. Couldn’t get nobody to do nothing. I don’t know why. It was different in them days. Back north, too. You had to pretty near murder a kid to get them to make a move. Plus, Brent’s old man had a bit of money. See if you can get Josie to tell your shrink woman,” Dave says. “Maybe she’ll have a thought. Maybe there’s some way to make him go into that men’s group.”

  In bed, alls I could think of was Josie’s little bony white back with the flaming red welt across it. Odd shape to it. Like she was hit with a straight thing that had something else sticking out the side.

  You can blank out a lot you’ve heard tell of, but what you’ve saw yourself is right there. That’s why Meredith spent all them weeks on the five senses.

  Dave, he rocked me back and forth. Don’t fix nothing, but it makes you feel better. I always sit and rock Jenny. Bet cave people done that too. The decent ones that hadn’t had their heads squashed.

  “You’re a sweet girl, Rosie, crying for your friend,” he says. “You’re my sweet girl.”

  I says, “You want to cry for your friend right now, too, don’t you?”

  I knew Dave felt all mixed up. Thinking Brent didn’t deserve no sympathy. Sick sorry for him all the same.

  “Don’t seem right to keep on feeling sorry for him, after what he’s did. I should just be sorry for her. Not him.”

  “The both of them,” I says.

  I told Dave about the rockslide, how it had took out Brent when he was a poor little kid and now Brent was roaring on downhill with no brakes, in his own day, smashing up the next person.

  I put my face where it fits against Dave’s chest, and Dave, he rested his cheek on the top of my head.

  15.

  DAVE, HE COULD SOMETIMES be like the dad and mom I wish I’d’ve had. But then again too, the more we got to know each other, the more he let out what a kid he could be. He don’t like sitting in a tub when the water’s draining out, eh. Hops out quick so nothing important’s going to wash down the hole. He won’t eat a cookie if it’s broke. Only eats cheese if it’s orange. Hates new clothes. He’ll layer two pair of pants, if the holes don’t line up, sooner than wear a new pair.