by Trevor Cole
When the waitress came and asked for drink orders, Roy said, “Beer.” Dorothy tried to whisper to him that he could only have milk or juice (she caught Jean’s eye and mouthed the word “med-i-ca-tion”), but he bunched up the heavy features of his face until they looked like folds of pork and seemed about to cry or make a scene and it was a relief when Dorothy relented.
“Are you having a Mojito?” Jean said to Milt.
“No, I thought a beer.”
“Fine, and I’ll have a Chardonnay. Dorothy, are you joining me?”
“Well I’m driving, so …”
“Oh, just have one.”
“Don’t worry,” said Milt. “The fried batter will absorb the alcohol.”
They got their drinks and ordered their food, and then Jean raised her glass to toast Dorothy, saying, “Here’s to my friend who has shown such grace and endurance in the face of everything.” Jean knew it wasn’t the best toast ever, but as she brought the glass to her mouth it seemed a little odd to her that Dorothy didn’t seem pleased, and that she had looked immediately at Roy. But then Jean turned and saw Roy looking back at her with a suspicious glower and put her glass down.
“‘Everything,’” Roy said. His eyes were squinty and he seemed to be chewing agitatedly on his lower lip. “What you mean, ‘everything’?”
“Just everything,” Jean said, trying for a chuckle. “Everything life throws at us.”
“So why you didn’t say to the whole table, ‘everything’?”
Dorothy put her hand on Roy’s forearm. “It’s okay, hon. Jean was just being nice.”
Jean felt the blood rushing to her face. “I was just being nice,” she said, her voice reduced to a little girl’s chirp. She looked at Milt, who was looking at Roy and seemed just as confused as she was.
“Roy doesn’t like to feel like a burden,” said Dorothy, focusing on Jean now with a great intensity.
“‘Everything,’ you mean me,” said Roy, still glaring at Jean, still chewing his lower lip. “For what she needs ‘endurance.’ It’s me.”
“No, hon,” said Dorothy gently.
“Oh, no,” said Jean. “No, I wasn’t talking about you.”
“No,” Milt contributed, shaking his head.
Roy’s eyes squinted menacingly at Milt and back at Jean, and for a moment it felt to Jean as if the whole table, in fact the whole evening, were being dangled over the side of a cliff. And then she had a sudden inspiration.
“I meant growing old!” she exclaimed. “Because Dorothy looks so good! She’s the same age as me, but I could be her older sister!”
Roy’s eyes compressed even more, and the dark irises rattled back and forth like marbles in a matchbox between Dorothy and Jean. For a second or two he appeared uncertain, wavering, and it seemed that anything might still happen. And then a grin broke across his face like splitting skin. “Her mother!” The corners of his eyes crinkled and his grin widened until he showed pink gums and the brown ridges of teeth. He slammed the table, clattering the cutlery and plates. “You look like her mother!”
Dorothy’s eyes were on her and Jean thought she noticed a flicker of pity in her face, pity stirred up with gratitude, like a sour-sweet Mojito. She chuckled. “That’s right.” She lifted her glass. “Here’s to you, Dorothy!”
Roy slammed the table again and lifted his beer high. “To Dorothy!”
And Jean smiled at Milt, because after the poor man raised his glass he seemed unsure whether he should take a sip.
For a good hour or so, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves well enough. Milt munched happily on his burger and salad. Dorothy ate one of her fish pieces with the batter and one without, and the batter that she left on the plate looked like a little brown snowsuit for a tiny baby. She lit up a cigarette, too, even though smoking wasn’t allowed, because she seemed to be aware that, with Roy sitting there so massively, no one would come to the table and ask her to put it out. And for his part, “Big Boy” ordered two plates of fish and chips, and piled them into his mouth, sometimes with his fork and sometimes with his fingers. Every once in a while if he started to pick up a big piece of fish – or his coleslaw, he tried that also – Dorothy would give him a sharp little smack on the wrist so that he would drop it. It seemed to Jean that Roy didn’t like that very much, being smacked like a child, but otherwise he seemed to be quite content, laughing sometimes when he thought someone had made a joke, wiping his greasy mouth with his napkin or his sleeve, burping with deep satisfaction after his third beer. A couple of times, Jean tried to address a question to him, just to be friendly, such as, “How are you enjoying living in the country?” and “Do you ever watch boxing on TV?” But he would only look at her the way a toddler might, as if she were talking nonsense and just interrupting his fun. In fact, after the blow-up over the toast to Dorothy, the only words he said to anybody were, “I want the ketchup.” And he didn’t have to say that twice.
But despite the fact that the evening was proceeding as well as anyone might have reasonably hoped, Jean felt herself getting more and more frustrated. Because this wasn’t supposed to be just a friendly get-together, this was supposed to be a fact-finding mission. And it turned out, as Jean had expected, that a dinner for four in a busy fish and chips restaurant was a terrible time and place to find out anything about a person that was of any value whatsoever. Every time she tried to open up the subject – “So, Dorothy …” – of what made her friend really, truly happy these days, Dorothy would get distracted by something Roy was doing, like pretending to eat the end of his tie, or she’d shrug and give some meaningless answer such as, “I just like to veg in front of the TV with Roy.”
After more than an hour of this it was starting to occur to Jean, and frankly it was a surprise given that she had been friends with the woman for nearly forty years, that maybe Dorothy was not a very deep or thoughtful person at all. That was the sort of thing you’d think one person might have discovered about another person at some point, she thought, but apparently all their conversations for years and years had only skirted the surface like water beetles, not even trying to reveal any deep, dark, inner truths. She tried to put it down to the situation, which really was not ideal, but even so, by the end of her second glass of wine, Jean was feeling a little sad about her friendship and starting to lose some of the fire for her cause, at least where Dorothy was concerned.
And then something happened that put everything back on the right track.
Milt was doing the talking, going on as he liked to do about the differences between Grade 9 students and Grade 10 students, the two grades he tended to teach – in their maturity levels and tendencies toward aggression or insolence or overt sexuality, that sort of thing. Because he was a substitute teacher and wasn’t able to form relationships with the kids in the classrooms, he believed he had a unique and “scientifically useful” perspective. He was like a “test rat” being dropped into different cages, he said. And of course all of this was going completely over the head of Roy, and Dorothy as well, and Jean was a little annoyed at Milt for discussing a topic that held so little interest for half the people at the table (three-quarters of the people, if the truth were known). But when Milt mentioned the part about being a “test rat,” Roy thought that was hilarious and began to laugh so that his shoulders shook. And then, possibly because his mind was caught on the image of Milt as a small furry creature, he went to grab a handful of food from the wrong plate. It was Dorothy’s little suit of batter. And when he picked it up with his fingers, laughing, Dorothy slapped his wrist, and that’s when Roy hit Dorothy in the mouth.
It happened so quickly – the back of Roy’s left hand flying up to Dorothy’s face with a wet, splatty sound, Dorothy’s head snapping back with the blow as she emitted a small, high-pitched “Oh!” – that for half a second it seemed no one was quite sure whether they had seen what they had seen. Then blood started to bloom from Dorothy’s lower lip, which began instantly to swell, and tears came to her eyes. And
Jean shot to her feet.
“You brute!” she shouted with all the air in her lungs. “How dare you hit my friend.”
She rushed around the table to Dorothy, who tried to push her away, insisting she was all right. But Jean could see that her face was pale, and that she needed air or water or just a sense of safety. So she told Milt, who was sitting in his chair like someone at a magic show, paralyzed with amazement, to “watch that animal,” pointing to Roy, who was quietly feeding batter into his mouth. And she helped Dorothy to her feet and led her outside, around the tables and past the waitresses and waiters, who seemed to be at the same magic show as Milt.
Out on the street, Jean set Dorothy against the front of the building, brushed the hair off her forehead, and used the cuff of her blouse to wipe some of the blood from Dorothy’s mouth. It was still light outside and she could see the age in her friend’s face better now, the lines around her eyes, the fragility of her skin, the soft, pouchy places that once had been flat and firm. Dorothy’s mascara had begun to run in black tributaries over her cheeks, and Jean whispered, “Stay here and I’ll be right back.” She went into the restaurant, where Milt was now gamely sitting next to Roy and talking to him in a calm voice like an older, much smaller brother (she was so proud of him in that moment), and got a clean, damp cloth from the manager. When she returned through the door, she found Dorothy trying to light a cigarette with her trembling hands.
“Here, let me,” said Jean. She gave Dorothy the cloth and, as her friend pressed it against her face, Jean put the cigarette to her lips, flicked the lighter, and inhaled. She hadn’t smoked since she was sixteen and now, with her heart already racing, the act of lighting a cigarette, and feeling the rush and the urge to cough when the smoke hit her lungs, seemed daring and illicit.
The sun hung fat and buttery over the roof of The Granary bulk store on the far side of the street, and the light was beginning to take on that summer evening glow. Jean handed back the cigarette, and Dorothy straightened.
“I should go inside.”
“Oh, no.”
“He’ll be worried about me.”
“After what he did? Let him be worried.” Jean took the damp cloth, wrapped the edge of it around her finger, and cleaned a smudge of makeup from the corner of Dorothy’s eye. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “I’m going to get Milt to take Roy home in your car. And you and I will have our girls’ night out.”
“Jean –”
“Don’t worry about Roy.” She kept her voice quiet, but Jean felt within herself a rising tide of purpose. Her will was inexorable, like the flight of a magnificent bird, or the march of a whole field of kudzu. She had never felt more sure of herself, of her plan, of what she could do for her friend. For all her friends. “You have every right to think of yourself and your needs right now. Tonight is about Dorothy Perks. Roy will be just fine with Milt.”
“Are you sure?”
“I couldn’t be more sure. Now, what I need to know is, can Roy show Milt the way back to your place?”
“Of course he can.” Dorothy frowned. “It’s not like he has Alzheimer’s.”
“That’s terrific,” said Jean, patting her arm. “I just wanted to check.”
She went back inside, where Roy was now sitting quietly watching sports people on the TV screen hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the dining room, with Milt in the chair beside him looking backward toward the door. Life in the restaurant seemed to have returned to normal, with the usual motion and chatter; people so easily moved on from dismay. When Milt saw Jean he seemed deeply relieved. And because he had been so quietly helpful, so reliable, she felt bad when she had to tell him he would be driving Roy home.
“No, I am not doing that,” he said, thereby completely erasing in Jean’s books all of the goodwill he had built up. “He’s a total wild card. What if he clocks me while I’m driving?”
“That’s absurd. He won’t clock you.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ll have a word with him. You pay the cheque.”
“The whole – ?”
Jean fixed him a look, and Milt sighed and slumped off to the waitress area. Then she went to the chair where Roy was sitting and tapped on his shoulder. His huge head turned and, seeing Jean, he started to cry.
“Dotty?” He reached for Jean’s hand and swallowed it in a mitt of soft, blood-warm flesh. “Is Dotty okay? She be mad at me?”
“I should hope so,” Jean said. “That was a terrible thing you did.”
Roy’s face crumpled even more than before and he nodded fiercely, sending plops of tears onto his knee and the floor below. Then he let go of Jean’s hand, wiped at his eyes with a fist, and began to push himself up out of his chair.
“No, no,” said Jean.
“I go to my Dotty.”
“No, you sit down,” she commanded. It was like ordering a giant cooked ham to sit. But there was enough force of will in her, she thought, to make even that happen if need called for it. And Roy sat. “Now listen,” she said. “Milt is going to drive you home. You know Milt?” She pointed at Milt, who was slowly handing his credit card to the waitress. When Roy nodded she continued. “You be nice to him, you hear me? When you get home, you can watch TV together.”
“With Dotty?”
“Don’t worry about Dotty.” She patted his hand. “Everything is going to be fine.”
Outside, Jean tucked her arm into Dorothy’s and led her up the street for half a block, past the print shop and the vintage clothing store, and under the ornamental street lamp with the wrought-iron curlicue that marked the start of Calendar, and Jean turned them down this street to get them out of view of the restaurant before Milt and Roy emerged. They walked for a while without talking. Calendar was lined mostly with modest two-storey houses, built before the war, but people cared for them as well as any mansion. Some of the gardens were lovely, and several times Jean had to resist the urge to stop and study the leaves she saw: clumps of lemon thyme with leaves like green grains of rice rimmed with gold, purple Persian shield, pretty catbells the size of dollar coins. At a house on the corner, someone had set out a pot of Angel Wing, which was as beautiful as any caladium plant she had ever seen. Jean made a mental note to come back for a closer look, when all this was over.
“I think it’s going down a bit,” said Dorothy, touching her lip.
“Oh, let’s hope it stays for a while,” said Jean. “You look like one of those bee-stung Hollywood starlets.”
“I want you to know, Jean, he’s never hit me before. Sometimes I thought he might, but he never has.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jean.
“He’s getting worse, though. His mind seems to work best when he’s feeling paranoid. Maybe that’s the fighter in him. Otherwise he’s just a little boy.”
“Don’t think about it any more.” As they walked, Jean put a light hand on Dorothy’s back and rubbed her gently. “Don’t think about it any more,” she repeated.
Eventually, led by Jean, the two women circled around, across on Mott Avenue and down Primrose, as the sun dropped behind the buildings and the light turned bluish-grey, then darker still, until they were back at Main and it was feeling very much like evening. For now, Dorothy seemed content to go wherever she was taken, but Jean was aware that at any moment she might stop in her tracks and insist that it was time to go home. They came to the corner, where the light was red. Jean slipped a foot out of her shoe and rubbed it – she wasn’t used to walking so far in pumps – and began looking around for another restaurant, or just a place for them to sit and talk. Then she heard a familiar sound.
The deep, clotted, throat-phlegmy noise of Jeff Birdy’s Barracuda came toward them along Main and the car pulled to a stop just over the white line of the crosswalk, its juddering engine heating and vibrating the air around them, its headlights carving out bright swaths of the intersection and making everything else shrink into darkness. Across the street the walk
sign flashed and Jean tried to nudge Dorothy forward off the curb, into the spray of light, toward the other side. But for some reason it was harder to get Dorothy moving than she’d expected. Her hand against Dorothy’s back met the resistance of someone holding her ground.
“Who’s that?” she said. She was squinting from the lights, and at the corner of her mouth – hard to tell, it might have been the squinting effect – seemed to be a tiny, puffy smile.
“Nobody to worry about,” said Jean. “Just Jeff Birdy.” She tried to make the nudge at Dorothy’s back a touch more insistent, without turning it into a shove.
“Ash’s boy?” said Dorothy, actually batting Jean’s arm away. “I haven’t had a good look at him since he was ten.” She bent down and shielded her eyes, trying to see past the glare into the Barracuda’s interior. Above them the traffic lights changed and Jean waited for Jeff Birdy to drive on. But he didn’t drive on. He just sat there with the green light, throbbing.
“Why doesn’t he go?” Jean said.
“I think I see him,” said Dorothy, peering into the depths. “Oh, I think he’s handsome.”
Behind Birdy the driver of a Toyota honked his horn, and out of the side window of the Barracuda came a hand that twirled lazily in the air to wave the car past. The ground under Jean’s feet shook with the Plymouth’s pistons, she smelled its raw exhaust, and she clutched Dorothy’s arm as if they were two virgins standing at the lip of a volcano. Then, like a dentist’s drill lifted off a tooth, the noise and shuddering just stopped, the headlights of the wide, orange barge went dark, and in the shimmer of silence Jeff Birdy swung open the driver’s door and stepped out. Dorothy straightened and drew a hand down the edge of her hair.