Iris forever searching for change lost in the couch to make up enough. There was no orange juice because she had to have sneakers full of pumps. Glass figurines sailing into the canvas kitchen floor one after the other teaching Iris the true cost of wanting things.
Her mother crying from the hallway as the figurines that do not smash initially are fetched back up off the floor and re-fired at the wall. One stubborn dolphin pitched repeatedly until the tail end relented and came free.
Can’t have nothing nice.
Iris silently repairing the figurines while seated next to her father starfished on the floor after having thrown the good right out of himself. Her mother having taken refuge in their bedroom long before the last sea mammal was split apart. Little Iris forever trying to crazy-glue back together what she did not pull apart.
Iris owed them for each moment of displeasure. Every hate they had for each other in those early days was shared about generously quick, loud and in full view of their five-year-old. Everyone said it would make her tough. And Iris needed toughening. The truth was she was all soft parts. Full to the brim with big feelings.
Though Iris still believes if she could get enough sleep to sustain herself everything could be corrected. She would be able to stand her parents, her painting, her phone. All things would right themselves if Iris could close her eyes and not find herself haunted by the feelings others did not have for her.
I’m taking that truck when I goes, the truck is mine.
What else in the cove is yours, Sid?
Knock it off I said.
Who else don’t you take care of?
I takes care of me own.
She is the fucking spit of you.
Go on with your old foolishness!
I can’t stand the sight of her in church.
Do you hear yourself?
You’re after turning me into a bad person.
I dare say you was always a bad person.
I should have never moved down here.
I never said you had to.
You never says to do anything, though, do ya?
I said I never wanted youngsters.
But you always wants to screw.
Lord fuck, you got some long tongue Cynthia.
Mudder warned me your crowd was savage.
Listen, you better shut your mouth before I shuts it for you.
And then Iris’s dad went to Alberta and stopped being her dad but Iris tries not to think on this before bed. Instead she bathes, drinks tea, swallows melatonin and watches nature programs. Sir David Attenborough narrates her dreams until the motion sensor is triggered by small steps along the path and a worrisome light floods her ground-floor apartment.
Iris listens for noise coming from Olive’s.
She cannot remember a time before when things were different between them. Sometimes she smokes a cigarette as she waits for sounds next door. Other times she dials the emergency number ready to press send if a troubling sound wakes her again from her sleep. Most times she stands in the dark eating a banana over the open garbage can in silence. She never did this before they got to this place.
This is a new eating habit.
* * *
Olive cannot feel her toes.
Everyone will say it is her fault if she loses them as if every bad thing that happens to Olive is because she did not take care. But Olive has always taken care.
Regardless, bad things happen.
After her pop died, Olive was sent to live with a woman doctor in St. John’s because her nan was grief-struck and bedridden.
The woman doctor lived in the university area with her husband who was in business. Olive never understood what kind of business but it required a lot of devices. The house was making a co-ordinated effort to be efficient in every way. The door required no key, a personal punch code sufficed. Olive had her own. It was her grandmother’s telephone number.
Every time she entered the house, Olive envisioned the phone affixed to the wall in their kitchen, her nan winding the cord absent-mindedly around her doughy middle as she moved around the small space fetching frying pans and sauce pots mid-gossip with her sister over to Labrador.
Ollie says they got the biggest kind of homes with swimming pools and air conditioners.
It comforted Olive to imagine she was taking her grandmother with her through this urban doorway while she was recovering from the shock of it. This made Olive feel more new and less used. She thought her past would not matter in this large place where no one’s past seemed to matter. Town knew nothing of her meagre means, her mother’s reputation or her father’s denial. It didn’t ask what happened to her pop or if her nan got dressed that day. It cared not a lick about her origin story. At first.
And Olive’s guilt for having left her nan did not outweigh her hope for something better.
There was a sunroom full of windows with plants on every sill. There were paintings hung in foyers and cut flowers on countertops. Picture books lay on coffee tables, lamps stood on three legs, there were bowls of nuts laid out for casual eating. The floors were warm and clean enough to walk across in your bare feet. And the woman doctor did so.
Every evening. She arrived home from her practice to at once pull off the trappings of her day. The refinished church pew held her fit frame as she unzipped her tall boots and unwound her scarf. Every article of clothing a neutral hue, with even reds appearing gently muted against her pale skin. Sometimes the woman doctor would roll her tights down right in the porch. She did so only when she thought no one else was watching but Olive saw her the one time.
Woman doctor laughing at her own impatience to be comfortable and curled up small in a lounge chair by the fireplace nibbling blocks of dark chocolate while reading of advances in modern medicine. Sometimes the cat sat atop the blanket on her lap. A weighted brown and beige knit patterned in Canadian woodland deer. Each family member had their own to throw over.
Olive’s was peach.
She wore it over her shoulders like a cape while she watched YouTube videos with headphones bought for her by Businessman husband who opened bottles of wine that he didn’t finish. He drank a glass with dinner, perhaps a beer while watching sports. He sometimes fell asleep before finishing even the single beer. Woman doctor would take a gulp as she passed en route to the kitchen or the bookshelf. They rarely drank to drunkenness or raised their voices. Instead, wordless music played in some unseen system in the ceiling. There was a glass pedestal case that held a cake though there was no birthday. Some people just had cake.
The woman doctor had a son.
And he knew Olive wanted him to like her. Her weak will quietly leaked her want into every conversation. Olive never had an opinion she thought worth sharing. She didn’t care what movie they watched. She was fine just watching him play his guitar. She walked a step behind him on the trail. She never asked anything of him. Never started talking first. Never spoke above a whisper. Olive was eighteen months older than him but his sitting duck. He laid decoys out as well. To test his theory along the way.
His theory was: Olive would do anything to be his friend.
It did not happen all at once. It was a gradual warming. He made them cups of tea. Told her about his father’s affair. Casually mentioned a favourite snack and waited for it to appear. He also ignored her for days. Too busy in his room playing his stolen car game to care. This too had the desired effect. A kind word after zero contact would leave her flushed.
One day he gave her a grey hooded sweatshirt. It became her new favourite thing.
Then once he said she had a pretty
caramel complexion. And she felt sweet.
We’ll keep each other’s secrets, the doctor’s son said another day.
And with each tiny confession, he forged them together. Olive thinking they were becoming close like real siblings. The kind she always wanted. Olive needed so desperately for someone to love her without expectation of her being smarter or prettier or funnier. Someone who might starve off the solitary feelings forming in her heart since her mother moved away. So when he asked to share her peach blanket, she let him.
He said his was in the wash.
But it wasn’t.
Later, she would see his blanket draped over a chair in the formal living room. And she would make a confused, pleading kind of eye contact that he would return with a cold, defiant grin.
Because what was she going to do? Tell his mother that he had reached under her peach blanket and inside the waist of her tights? Describe over pancakes how she had let him tuck his fourteen-year-old hand into the furry part of her, then past it, until he was pressing his finger against the wet muscles inside? Carving small circles around the cavernous space before jabbing her in and out with some sweeping confidence. He had seen this move on the internet and believed Olive to be enjoying it as the women on the website had. He had not thought it pretend like a film or show on TV. He had not thought it make-believe for amusement like a board game or phone app. He had not thought to ask as the men in the clip had not asked. Everyone had liked it on the YouTube video. More than liked it.
They loved it.
Besides, his dad had said to practise on a girl he didn’t like much first.
Never kiss the pretty girl right away, his dad said. Find a homely girl and try things out on her. Perfect your aim on a servant before you fire for the queen.
And wasn’t Olive the best target? She was dying for his attention. And he thought it would make her happy. But it did not.
Not at all.
Instead, she felt like a great confusing excavation was underway. He was hollowing out more of her with each swirling, stabbing gesture. Olive felt a perplexing emptiness spread up through her stomach and refused to meet his sideways glances as he continued to insolently root in her cavity. She was suddenly grateful for not having eaten much. From this day forward, she would keep the pit of her on the slight side to discourage eruptions, because Olive was sure she would have thrown up on herself had she eaten more nachos.
Bits of Mexican pre-grated cheese mix and salsa would have come ejecting out her now defunct mouth-hole. It would have run down the front of her once prized blanket. It would have made everything impossible to pretend away. You can’t feign ignorance when covered from chin to cunt in orange spew, the chunky glory of your former guts pooling in your crotch. This was not something easily seen or smelt away. Which Olive had decided early on. While he was mid-burrow. Olive would never tell anyone about this. Ever. She would will it out of existence. She would act like it had not happened. She would be more nice. Kinder. Better. Aware. Vigilant. Olive would never trust another man. Or even a boy.
They all just want to fuck you, Olive.
This, echoing, looping, bouncing and banging the inner sheeting of Olive’s mind before she really understands the word fuck. Olive knows her body was built for fucking before she knows what fucking even means. How long had she known this?
The first time: an older cousin at her birthday party, him touching her chin to start, saying he wanted to feel her hiding bits. He told her she would like it, that it was what she wanted, he said he wouldn’t hurt her squishy pieces. She had let him unwrap her ice cream sandwich after.
This meant what he did could not be yuck.
Each winter recess spent running through frozen fields or buried face down in the snow while hands weaseled around flush with the front of her snow pants. Classmates using the ground and gravity to assault her. Maybe she had known then. Maybe Olive had always known.
But knowing something and facing it is altogether different.
And facing it in the woman doctor’s warm living room was harder still. Because Olive had let her guard down. She had been taken in by wool slippers lined up broadside in the front porch and an aquarium full of brightly coloured fish in the hallway. The tea cozy covered in crabapples had distracted her. Until that day on the couch. Under the peach blanket. Not her peach blanket anymore. She realized that it had only ever been conditionally hers. And conditions can shift. Weather conditions. Living conditions. Human conditions.
Even your name can go bad.
Olive Noseworthy was born with a bad name.
Any name that’s not your father’s name is a bad name.
And Olive’s father refused to give her his name. So the only thing to be angry about at this point would be ever believing Calv’s rides to the grocery store had meant he wanted her to have fruit because he liked her. Thinking too much on the one time he fixed her bathtub drain after she made mention of showering with water to her ankles was too much stupid thinking. Besides, watching the dirty run off herself to meet the tepid water slowly draining from her tub was what silly Olive deserved.
The landlord had asked over the phone if she had a man that could fix it. When she said no, he asked if she would have her rent on time. Or would it be like last time.
Olive didn’t want it to be like last time. Last time she had bruises on her feet.
Poor feet.
She peers at them now before looking down Duckworth hoping to recognize someone. She tries to wiggle her toes inside her shoes.
Olive thinks they wiggled but she can’t be sure.
* * *
John drives by Iris’s apartment on his way to work out of habit.
He had many times driven by her apartment on his way to work, a shovel thrown onto the back seat. He would push everything aside while she slept and she would awake to find that he cared. This act of service, a showcase of kindness, was another deed he could do to make up for not doing the deed. Occasionally it had already been cleared, which he assumed meant she was cared for by another. Of course men wanted to show her a kindness. He couldn’t help doing do so himself. She was a sort of evolving argument for happiness, though he could not quite wrangle what kind of happiness or for whom.
She was amazing. John often felt amazed.
He tried to deduce the minor mysteries of her driveway, and when these endless deliberations yielded no satisfactory answer, John asked outright. Casually. He summoned a tone of offhand curiosity. A small-talk approach. Because any note of significance would have her squirrel it away to use against him later. They were all like that. Women.
So John lobbed things while she was preoccupied with repetitious acts, or, if necessary, he would sink her brain deep in hot places pre-emptively. She would tell anyone anything once brought to near boiling. Her loose lips would indeed sink ships as fucking over her navy didn’t take much. John had her number from go. A light hand across the belly. Restful. Thumb atop the button of her. Over her blouse but close enough. Physical touch. Then a question, the question, whatever question suited him.
I shovelled it myself.
John would be overjoyed the dial was still in motion. Then gutted because he was pleased that she had shovelled the snowy walk. He pictured her in leggings and a parka, no bra, that little shovel, in the near dark alone.
He had told her to buy a scoop. Three or four runs of the walk would see it cleared. She could make things easier on herself. Easier on him. Make February less of a punishment for them both.
But Iris didn’t listen. Not listening to each other being a common and shared
practice.
I see you, you are there and speaking, her eyes read, but I am not taking in any of your words. I am hard listening, her body language sang, but I am filling in the blanks to suit my learned romantic language. Iris listens so hard that she hears words that aren’t being said. She is constantly making it up in her colour by numbers, connect the dots, choose your own adventure mind. Her child’s play approach to adult conversations was equal parts invigorating and infuriating.
He wanted to scream stop trying to figure me out! I can’t even figure me out! I am an enigma!
Though John didn’t scream this for fear of hurting her feelings. Or worse, getting through to her. Iris was a woman well-versed in hurt feelings, she could ignore them like laundry in the dryer, having to re-tumble repeatedly to get the same well-earned wrinkles out.
But getting through to her was something else.
She could turn a piece of unwanted information over constantly for days, months, years even. Explain it away. Hope for alternatives. Until the moment it caught hold, then she was off down the road. Gone in a puff of exhaustion. She would quit smoking in a day. Become a vegetarian overnight. So John never screamed for her to stop.
Sometimes he whispered it quietly while taking off his pants. And Iris laughed it all away.
You say you will love me from a distance as you drive to my house.
In those moments of clarity, he feels the pendulum crack. The snap steadies him to a stop and he feels like a prick. So he calculates and measures a means to feel less prickish. He would detour them far out of the way until she lost sight of her feelings. Then they could cross over onto another road. Any divergence could, would, should decrease the likelihood of circling back. John wishes after time travel to prevent him from ever seeing her cry or in need or sick or sad because of something he did. John would have been perfectly contented not knowing her had he not gotten to know her.
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club Page 4