Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams

by Alison Preston

  On another day, during another talk, which became more and more heated, it came out that Jackson believed that Pope Pius XI couldn’t make a mistake.

  I was flabbergasted. “Of course he can make mistakes,” I shouted. “He’s a human being.”

  “No, he can’t!” Jackson yelled back at me.

  “Yes, for the love of God, he can!”

  “What’s going on out there?” my dad called out the screen door to where we were sitting at the picnic table. “Keep it down, by gum!”

  Jackson stuck to his guns. It upset me that he could be so stupid about this one subject.

  I left him and took a walk by the river. I added it to the list of things I would discuss with Isabelle next time I saw her. Since school had let out I hadn’t seen her and I missed her. She often knew the answers to things that I wondered about that I didn’t want to ask Gwen or anyone else I saw regularly. Things like, is it common for Catholics to believe that the pope can’t make a mistake? Isabelle wasn’t a practising Catholic but she’d had lots of experience with nuns at her old school.

  Aunt Helen tended to Jackson. He hated being fed, so took that over pretty quickly — sat with his face close to the table so he could wield his own fork. He used his fingers a lot — Aunt Helen thought too much — but she phoned the doctor and he said not to worry: it was good to keep them moving.

  Jackson allowed me help him smoke. For some reason that didn’t fall into the category of things he didn’t want people to do for him. So we shared cigarettes. I was careful not to let my dad see us do that. It was deliciously intimate and I knew he’d raise a ruckus. It was that summer that I became a confirmed smoker.

  We went for walks around the neighbourhood. People stared at us and asked questions. I suspected some of the busybodies thought there was something off-kilter about the situation, but I didn’t care and I thought Jackson liked it. I was under the impression he enjoyed a small amount of notoriety. It turned out I was wrong about that.

  I waited a few days before asking him a couple of knapsack-related questions. We were sitting in the backyard after supper and Helen and Dad were on the front verandah.

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked.

  “God who?” he said.

  “I’m just wondering because of our Pope conversation,” I said. “Do you believe in Jesus?”

  “What is this?”

  “Nothing. I’m just wondering.”

  “Well, I believe that there was a Jesus,” said Jackson.

  “Do you ever read the bible?”

  “Violet, is this about you pillaging my knapsack?”

  “What?”

  “I know you went through my stuff.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I did, yes,” I said. There was no point in keeping it up. I would just look worse and worse the more I denied it. “How did you know?”

  “My picture of Bertram was on page 200 of the bible and you stuck it back in on page 226.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You should be sorry! How would you like it if I ransacked your dresser drawers?”

  I pictured my underpants, and hidden beneath them the photographs I’d cut out of magazines — shots of women whose hair looked the way I wished mine did, whose skin was smooth and flawless the way mine wasn’t, and whose breasts were big and shapely the way I wanted mine to be. And worse, the diary with the broken lock that had words about Jackson on its pages.

  “God, I’d hate it. I’m really sorry,” I said again.

  “Okay.”

  “Why didn’t you mention it before, if you knew?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t.”

  “You must despise me.”

  Jackson laughed. “Of course I don’t despise you. I just think you’re a little on the meddlesome side and should have your hand slapped from time to time.”

  He was being too nice to me. I didn’t deserve it. I made a vow to myself to behave in a more grown-up manner, especially when it came to Jackson.

  “Would you like some lemonade?” I asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  When I came back with the drink I placed it carefully with a straw within his reach and sat down again.

  “Is Bertram your younger brother?” I asked.

  “Uh, yeah.” Jackson knocked his drink over but I caught it before it spilled completely. Lemonade dripped through the boards of the picnic table onto the ground.

  “Do you have any other brothers or sisters?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Who looks after Bertram?”

  “Mrs. Dunning. My dad till he died. Me. He’s in boarding school during the school year. He’s at summer camp now.”

  “Jesuit camp?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lord, I don’t know! You ask too many questions.”

  “Do other kids make fun of him?” I pressed on.

  “Why would they?”

  “Because his name is Bert Shirt.”

  “No one calls him Bert.”

  “Why are there quotation marks around his name?”

  “What?”

  “On the photograph, there are quotation marks around his name. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jackson finished what was left of his lemonade.

  “Stay out of my room, okay?”

  “It’s not your goldarn room,” I snapped. “You don’t live here. This is my family’s house. I’ll go in there if I feel like it. I’ll tear your knapsack and its stupid contents to shreds if I want to. It doesn’t belong here. You don’t belong here.”

  I stalked off. So much for my new grown-up manner.

  Helen came out the back door as I went in. She was carrying Jackson’s knapsack.

  “What are you doing with that?” I asked.

  “None of your business, Miss Nosy Parker,” said Helen.

  When I looked out at them from the bathroom window they were sitting companionably while Helen mended the tear in the knapsack. She would put a patch over her mending job, using her leather needle and wearing a thimble on her finger. I could hear their low voices with sudden bursts of modest laughter. They sounded like a couple.

  I slipped downstairs, out the front door and over to Gwen’s, where I hoped her mother wouldn’t be home.

  Chapter 10

  After supper on a Friday, a week after Jackson got out of the hospital, the two of us went for a walk. I remember the date, July 10, because it was the night before the hottest day of the summer. The humidity was 100 per cent. We walked slowly up and down the dusty avenues.

  “The Dionne quintuplets have a new baby brother,” I said.

  “Great,” said Jackson.

  “I read it in the paper.”

  “Why would they have another kid?” said Jackson. “They must be out of their minds.”

  We walked along without saying anything while I tried to think up another topic. Jackson never put any effort into things like topics.

  “I’m glad fate conspired to bring you to us,” I said and felt my face heat up. It wasn’t what I meant to say. I thought I was thinking about the horses I’d heard about that had died from heat prostration.

  “There’s no such thing as fate,” Jackson said.

  “Yes, there is. Of course there is! What about when you said that you and Benny meeting up was meant to be? What about that? That’s fate, isn’t it?”

  “Why do you pay so much attention to what I say? I didn’t say that, did I?”

  “Yes. You sure did.”

  “Well, fate isn’t what brought me here.”

  “What, then, if not fate?”

  Jackson looked at me with a crippled smile ruining his handsome face.

  “Alberta sugar beets,” he said. “Alberta sugar beets are what brought us to Winnipeg. We were passing through. Remember?”

  “But you walked down our back lane,” I said. “Our back lane! And we were ou
t in the yard. You came to our particular street.”

  Jackson sighed. “Never mind, Violet.”

  “What? Never mind what?”

  I tripped over my own feet then and saw that we were on Monck Avenue. A steady hot wind blew against us down the quiet street. I watched an eddy of dust twirl up and disappear on the sidewalk in front of Old Lady Fitzgerald’s house. She was in the yard staring up at the sky.

  “Hello, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said. “It doesn’t look much like rain, does it?”

  “Oh, hello, Violet,” she said. “No, no, I suppose not.”

  I introduced Jackson. She was curious about his casts so I related the story of his accident and told her that he was staying with us for a month or so.

  Her bottom lip quivered. “Mercy!” she said. “Oh, my good Lord resting in his mother’s arms!”

  “Gosh, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said. “It’s not that bad. Aunt Helen is a nurse, remember.”

  As we continued along the street I smiled to myself.

  “Why do you have to do that?” Jackson asked when we had turned the corner onto Kirkdale Street.

  “What?”

  “Use me to tease old ladies and get your thrills.”

  I wanted to shout out denials but I feared he was right on the mark. “She started it,” I said. It was the best I could do.

  “What are you thinking when you say those things?” he asked.

  I felt as though he knew everything about me. All the bad things, anyway — my thoughts about his lips and his male member. I wasn’t sure there was anything good to know about me.

  Without giving it any thought, I took off running. My sandals were no good for this. But I ran anyway, all the way down Claremont to the river. I didn’t want to see him again so I turned left. I couldn’t run anymore — I was seriously puffed out — but I walked along the riverbank to a spot I knew across from the icehouse and sat down in the stinkweed and the wild asparagus that had been picked clean.

  The pink sun was going down behind clouds of softly coloured dust, orangey-tan. It was a beautiful sight, but I was in no mood for beauty. And it was hard not to think about that dust as earth under someone’s wornout shoes in Saskatchewan, about their soil and livelihood blowing out from under them. I didn’t have room for those kinds of thoughts.

  The icehouse was locked up for the night. I wished I had a small clean chunk to suck on.

  I believed that Satan had a hold on me and that’s what made me so bad. No amount of Aunt Helen telling me that the devil was nonsense would convince me otherwise. She found it particularly absurd that I had such a shaky hold on God but didn’t question the existence of Satan.

  The deep lines under my eyes that I’d had since I was a kid were his outward manifestation. I truly believed that. They cut my face in half in what I saw as a sinister way.

  When I’d asked Helen what those lines meant, she’d said, “They’re just little dents, honey. Nothing to worry about.” She’d peered into my face. “I can hardly see them.”

  She didn’t know.

  I tried to read about Satan but it was like reading about God. It was like trying to peel invisible potatoes.

  Sometimes I thought it must be connected to my sister, Sunny, this feeling I had of being close to the devil. I came so near to the worst evil in the world on the day she was taken. I breathed in vile black air and it never left me. It found a good fit.

  It was in the days after my mother’s death that I first found those grooves underneath my eyes. I was just six years old.

  The world was covered in a brown wash now, worse than dust. Why couldn’t I just have talked about dead horses to Jackson? Why did I have to show him the pathetic inside of me?

  I felt a nameless free-floating fear. I thought about walking over to the St. Boniface Cathedral to talk to a priest. You go into a little booth like with Madame Cora at the Casey Shows. But the confessionals are much more elegant than Madame Cora’s booth, with its stink of Green Wind perfume and her little cigars. You always came out of Cora’s booth feeling sticky and desolate no matter what she said.

  Gwen and I went to mass at the cathedral one morning during a summer that was cooler than this one, just to see. That’s how I knew what it was like there. Gwen was an Anglican and she went to St. Phillips when she did go, which wasn’t very often. She was worse than me in lots of things.

  We even took communion that sweat-free day at the cathedral, ate wafers and drank wine and made grunting sounds when we received them, in an effort to behave like everyone else. We found out later that they had been saying “amen.”

  Norwood United Church, where I belonged, didn’t seem quite so steeped in God and the devil. There was no incense there or Latin; we didn’t even drink real wine at communion. What good was that?

  Maybe, I thought, I could go into a confessional now and talk to a priest about my ties to Satan. Would he understand and try to help me? I could ask him his beliefs on whether or not the pope could make a mistake. I knew what his answer would be and I didn’t want to know. Visiting the Catholic church no longer seemed like a good idea.

  Evening turned to night and the murky shadows saw me home. The worst that could happen was that Jackson would be gone and I’d never see him again. I knew there were far worse things — my dad could be dead from a stroke, our house could be on fire, I could wake up tomorrow with polio — but right now they paled next to the thought of never seeing Jackson Shirt again.

  Helen and my dad were in the front room. My dad was reading the book of Bertrand Russell essays that Mr. Larkin had lent him and Helen was crocheting a winter hat for a kid — a rural kid who would otherwise freeze his ears in the coming winter. She knitted or crocheted whatever the church ladies told her was most needed. She wasn’t much of a churchgoer herself but she did all kinds of good church-like things, unlike Gert Walker, who was a regular at St. Phillips, but hadn’t done a good deed in her life except not aborting her two children who turned out to be friends of mine.

  Sometimes I envied Gwen her little brother, even though she had to look after him sometimes. He didn’t really need much looking after — he was so self-sufficient — pretty much all you could hope for in a younger sibling. I hoped his mother wouldn’t ruin him.

  “How’s Gwen?” Helen asked.

  “Oh! She’s good,” I said, wondering where that came from.

  “Jackson told us that was where he thought you were going when you abandoned him,” said my dad. “To Gwen’s house.”

  “I didn’t abandon him! Did he say that?”

  “No. Those were my words.”

  My dad was warming to Jackson in his weakened state. I guess he saw him as less of a threat to my virtue since his casts made it impossible for him to manhandle me unless I placed various parts of myself in his hands, which would be extremely difficult and take far more gumption than I possessed. It made an unsightly picture in my head, unlike the soft kisses I imagined and which involved only our sweet clean faces.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “In his room,” said Helen. “Did you two have a tiff?”

  “No! Jesus!” I said. “What would we have a tiff about? We don’t have tiffs.”

  “Don’t say Jesus,” said my dad.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Don’t roll your eyes,” he said. “They’ll stay that way.”

  I laughed and kissed them both goodnight, something I hadn’t done in a while. When I leaned over to kiss Dad’s cheek I saw that the essay he was reading was titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

  Jackson had made up a story about my going to Gwen’s house and I was grateful for that. He hadn’t told on me for running away from him.

  “Fraser Foote phoned,” Helen called after me.

  “What did he want?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  “I don’t know. He said he’d call back tomorrow. He probably wants to begin a course of sweeping you off your feet.”

  My dad chuckled.

 
; I hoped Jackson could hear this conversation from his room and think that I was much sought after.

  Chapter 11

  That was the hottest weekend of the summer. I slept very little that Friday night, tossing and turning under a twisted sheet, in and out of my polio dreams: my hands were unable to grasp a fork or use the telephone, my legs gave way and by the time I dragged myself to the chesterfield I couldn’t turn my head from side to side. My eyes closed and I couldn’t open them again or my lips to speak.

  When I awoke, the sheets were soaking wet. I looked at my alarm clock — 5:20. Four hours at the very outside till I would see Jackson again. I couldn’t imagine waiting that long. I didn’t care about our tiff, as Helen called it, and I didn’t think he cared either. He was just playing with me. He loved me too, I knew it. How could someone I loved so much not love me back in the same way? It didn’t seem possible. I’d read about unrequited love, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t for me.

  I must have dozed off again because the time passed somehow. At 8:30 I dragged myself out of my damp nest with its paralyzing dreams and headed to the bathroom. In a matter of minutes I would be seeing him, in less than the length of an Amos and Andy show for sure. I could handle that; I could fill that time.

  As I passed Jackson’s room I heard a muffled groan. I stopped and listened for more but there was only silence for the next few moments. The hardwood creaked beneath my bare feet as I resumed my short trek to the bathroom. I worried that Jackson would think I’d been eavesdropping on him. His door opened then and Aunt Helen came out. She carried a basin of water and when she saw me a little of it sloshed out onto the floor.

  “Dadgummit!” she said. “Violet! What are you doing, standing there like a sentry?” She flushed an ugly pink colour to the roots of her salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Nothing. I’m just on my way to the bathroom.”

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “Because it’s Saturday.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes.”

  “What were you doing in there?” I asked.

  “Giving Jackson a sponge bath.”

  “What else were you doing?”

  “Nothing.”