“I don’t believe you. Why are you flustered?”
She pushed her way past me into the bathroom, slopping more water onto the floor and finally pouring the rest of it down the bathtub drain.
I followed her down to the kitchen.
Aunt Helen rinsed out the basin in the kitchen sink and turned it upside down on the draining board.
“He was horribly engorged,” she said quietly. She put her hand beside her mouth and whispered, “It looked positively painful.”
“So what did you do?”
She opened the fridge door and reached for a tray of eggs. “I must speak to the egg man,” she said. “I had to throw away four eggs this week. They had a funny smell. I wonder what he feeds those hens of his.”
“What did you do?” I said again.
“Oh, Violet.” Helen set the eggs down and looked at me. “If you must know, I hit it with a pencil first and that didn’t work. Poor Jackson was embarrassed so I took care of it for him.”
“So it was your duty as a nurse?”
“Don’t be ignorant!”
“Well?”
“Violet, there was nothing sexual about it. It’s something we did all the time for the boys in the war.”
During Helen’s tour of duty overseas much of her work had been in field hospitals and she’d won commendations for her bravery. Apparently she had also vigorously rubbed the swollen members of soldiers who were unable to do it for themselves. She was a practised masturbator of others.
“We?” I said.
“Yes. The other nurses and I.”
“Grace Box?”
“Perhaps. You’ll have to be sure to ask her next time you see her.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t just you?” I asked. “Did your supervisor know what you were up to?”
“Oh, I see. You’re planning on reporting me, are you? Go and have your bath, Violet. You’re making me very angry. You shouldn’t be talking to me this way. I’m your aunt.”
“Aunt be darned!” I said. “Nurse be darned! What if it happens again tomorrow? What if he’s embarrassed again tomorrow? Will you do him again?”
“Don’t be crude, Violet.” Helen began cracking eggs into a bowl and cutting thick slices of her homemade bread.
“Hah!” I said.
She threw a wet rag at me as I turned to leave the room.
“No breakfast for me, thanks,” I said and trudged back up the stairs. I took care of the puddles of water in the upstairs hall. I was pretty sure no one wanted Jackson taking a dive on a slippery floor and breaking a leg.
“I could use some help after you’re freshened up,” Helen called after me.
“Fat chance,” I muttered.
I couldn’t erase the picture in my head of my aunt with an engorged appendage in one hand and a small towel in the other waiting to catch the semen of soldiers. And of Jackson! I’d have thrown up if I’d had any food in my guts.
He came out of his room as I was kicking a wall in the hallway. I hurt my toes.
“Easy there,” he said.
I couldn’t look at him.
“Is your foot okay?”
I could hear the concern in his voice but I didn’t believe it.
“Never mind me, how about you? Is your male member okay?” I wanted to say, but all I did say was, “No,” as I closed the bathroom door behind me.
I wondered if Jackson suspected that I knew. He must have. Did he even care? I felt ugly and gawky and sweat-covered and I hated the face I saw in the mirror. He hadn’t been mocking or crude or superior or any of the things I imagined he might be after being rubbed to satisfaction by my aunt. He was just his regular self.
They hadn’t done it to hurt me. What they had done had nothing to do with me at all. But still, it worsened the feelings I still had from the night before, from remembering the pictures I knew Jackson had seen inside my head.
I cleaned the tub to rid it of the last of the Jackson slime that Helen had flushed away. He was no better than me, no purer than me. Neither was Helen. What they had done made me feel like garbage, like the four foul eggs Helen had thrown out. Why was that, when it had nothing to do with me?
How many times had this happened between Jackson and Helen? There was no way now that I could ask her. My attitude had taken care of that. I wondered if his member was big, medium, or small. I couldn’t ask her that, either. She was mad at me and I was…I don’t know what I was — it kept changing. I was curious; that’s for sure. I wondered for a second if she’d let me assist in her ministrations. Not a chance. Not even if she wasn’t angry. Too bad — I figured I’d be good at it with a little guidance. I had good strong hands, my dad often said, but I doubt if he associated their strength with the gripping of male organs.
Helen couldn’t be totally at ease with what she had done or she wouldn’t have been so flustered when she saw me in the hall. I decided to apologize. Cool as a cucumber, I would be. She would forgive me. Aunt Helen was the forgiving type.
I ran a full tub and sprinkled lavender scent into the water. I wanted to slip through one of Benny’s holes in the atmosphere and sit by a cool mountain stream in 1878 where there were no Jacksons or Helens or erect members. I wanted to push my fresh clean self through the mire of their filth and triumph over their wicked ways from a faraway place.
When I glanced out the bathroom window I saw my dad admiring his new garage. It still needed paint but it looked good. A small smile relaxed his face.
“Good job!” I called out the window. Cool as a cucumber, that was me.
He looked up and laughed. “Not bad, eh?”
If he knew what had just gone on in the upstairs of his house he would have had a massive stroke and died for sure.
I had a leisurely bath, lingering in the tub. I decided to take small advantage of my spat with Helen to let breakfast go by without pitching in, let Helen sweat thinking of something to tell my dad about my absence.
Jealousy burned underneath my idea of how cool I was. A cool mess. No amount of bathing was going to clean me. I was sure that Helen thought she was telling the truth about it not being a sexual thing. I didn’t believe it for a minute, but I was certain that she did.
Later that day, as I sat at the kitchen table snipping the ends off green beans with the kitchen scissors, I said, “I’m sorry, Helen, that I behaved badly this morning.”
She didn’t turn from the sink where she was scrubbing the dirt from new potatoes.
“Apology accepted,” she announced briskly.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so that’s how we left it, even though to me it felt unfinished. I thought she could have admitted out loud to some sort of transgressive behaviour to even things out a little more between us, but the admission never came.
Chapter 12
On that Saturday, July 11th, the temperature reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit, an all-time record. People were dying every day, mostly older folks. The day before, the Friday, a nine-year-old Norwood boy had died of a heart attack at Winnipeg Beach. I didn’t know him. He lived on the other side of St. Mary’s Road. But I think that Saturday was the worst day for dying. We hadn’t had a day under 90 for over a week.
Isabelle came and called on me that night. I introduced her to Dad and Helen and Jackson, who were all sitting on the verandah.
“Hi,” she said. She nodded at Jackson. “I’ve heard about you.”
We all laughed, a bit nervously
“Yeah, I’m famous,” he said, and we laughed a little more.
Isabelle and I went up to my room and she convinced me that we should go for a swim in the Red River. I was hesitant, never having done it before.
“I can’t believe that,” she said. “How could you live so close to the river and never have swum in it? That’s what it’s there for.”
Just sixteen, Isabelle was several months younger than me, but she seemed older, not to look at — she was just a little bit of a thing — but she knew stuff: she knew where the l
ady bookie lived, she knew where to get booze if you didn’t care how good it tasted, she had seen a dick, as she called it, before she turned seven, one that hadn’t belonged to her dad or brother. Stuff like that. I admired her.
Dick was a good word for it. I decided to adopt it.
Isabelle had transferred in to our school last fall from one that was run by nuns. Isabelle had a thing about nuns; she didn’t like them. That was the first thing she ever said to me: I don’t like nuns.
“Why?” I had asked.
“Because they made my knuckles swell and my ears ring.” She’d rubbed one hand over the knuckles on the other.
In June she had told me that that year, grade eleven, was her last at school. She had to quit to help support her family.
“Oh no,” I’d said. “You have to go back in the fall.”
“Can’t,” she said.
“You have to.”
“Can’t,” she said again and that had been that.
I hadn’t seen her since that conversation in June.
“So did you find a job?” I asked now as we made our way in the quickening dark down Lyndale Drive toward the rowing club.
“Yeah, I work as a courier,” Isabelle said. “I use my bike and go to different offices downtown.”
“That sounds all right,” I said.
“Yeah, you hear lots of gossip when you deal with so many people in a day,” she said. “It can be kind of fun. That’s how I heard about the guy with the two casts.”
“Jackson.”
“Yeah.”
“Really?’
“Really.”
“Gee whiz, news really travels.”
“Yup.”
“What exactly did you hear about him?”
“Just that some punk hobo fell off a roof in the Flats, broke both his arms and was staying with a family here, right inside their house. I didn’t know it was your family.”
“He’s not a punk hobo,” I said. “He was educated by Jesuits.”
Isabelle laughed. “I’ll pass that on.”
“Please do.”
I don’t know why I defended him. I wanted to tell Isabelle about what my aunt had done but the words caught in my throat. Another day, perhaps, when it had had more time to settle.
Instead I told her about my job at Eaton’s and the nutty letters I had to answer.
“Sitting at a desk would be hard for me,” she said. “Too much like school. God, I hated school!”
Soon we were standing on the dock at the rowing club with our bathing costumes under our clothes. I had told Dad and Helen that I was walking Isabelle partway home.
I couldn’t find the moon or even one star behind the clouds and dust. The river was low and black and almost quiet. The smell was wet and good — the same as always. Helen would disagree; she thought the river stunk of unmentionable things. Just for fun I used to try to get her to mention them but she never would.
Isabelle sat down and took off her sneakers. I did the same. Then we took off our damp clothes and laid them on the dock. I tried the water with the toes of one foot. Warmish cool. I was worried about the certain filth, Helen’s unmentionables, but kept it to myself. I didn’t want Isabelle to think I was squeamish; she was so doggone brave.
“Don’t dive,” said Isabelle. “You never know what’s in there.”
I was sweating from fear as much as from the hot night air but I followed her into the water, slipping in feet first and pushing out from the wooden dock. I very much didn’t want to touch the bottom.
“Can you feel the current?” asked Isabelle.
“Yeah, but it’s okay.” I’d been worried about that, too. You heard so much about the swift current of the Red and how it sweeps you away before you know it.
“It’s not so strong when the water’s low like this from no rain,” Isabelle said. “But there are always swirling eddies near the bridge. We won’t swim too close to it.”
I’m a strong swimmer. My dad taught me on excursions to Lake Winnipeg since as far back as when my mum was alive. One of my favourite memories is learning to float. I can’t remember his instructions, but whatever they were they worked. One moment I was flailing about, all frantic arms and legs, and the next I was calm, riding the gentle movement of the lake, face down in gladness.
“Look,” said Isabelle and pointed toward the dock.
Two dark forms moved about in the vicinity of our clothes.
“It’s the Willis brothers,” said Isabelle.
“Stay away from our clothes, creeps!” she shouted.
I heard a high-pitched giggle, almost girlish.
“There’s someone else with them,” Isabelle said. “There’s three of them.”
“I only see two,” I said.
“It’s that ugly Botham guy.”
“Dirk? No, it couldn’t be,” I said. “What would he be doing hanging around with the Willises?”
“It’s him all right,” said Isabelle.”
“Unh-uh, no way,” I said. “You think Dirk is ugly?”
“Ugleee,” shouted Isabelle.
I didn’t have much hope for our clothes.
We swam out into the middle of the river. I did the breaststroke mostly and the sidestroke, not keen on losing my face in the water. I wasn’t comfortable enough to give myself up to the experience like Isabelle, who dove under and came up yards away, did the butterfly, hooted quietly as she did the back crawl. She positively frolicked.
There was moving silver on the water from the lamplight and vehicles on the Norwood Bridge. It looked like the liquid mercury we had messed around with in the chemistry lab last term. I kept the dolphin movements of my friend in sight as I swam steadily toward the far shore. The current was slight and I gradually surrendered to the water and felt as though I could swim forever.
When I reached the other side I clambered up the bank, grasping hold of the sturdy stems of weeds. It felt like wild rhubarb, overlooked by tramps and wives scouring the banks for something to round out their evening meals.
Isabelle was more puffed out than me, her energy depleted by her playfulness.
We laughed for a while at nothing in particular.
“Let’s walk back over the bridge,” Isabelle said when she caught her breath. “I’m too exhausted to swim anymore.”
I could have swum Lake Winnipeg that night but I didn’t want to go alone so I climbed alongside her up to the bridge, stepping on thistles and sharp stones all the way. Shouts and wolf whistles bounced off us as we crossed the bridge. Finally we reached the dock and our shoes; at least they had left us our shoes.
That night it didn’t drop below 82 degrees and on Sunday we were back up to 104. In the morning I walked back to the rowing club to look for our clothes in the light of day. They were hidden in some bushes not far out of sight. Good. Stupid boys! Then I saw that they had been torn to shreds. Not so good. Some of the cuts were so clean I knew they had used knives. I didn’t like knives.
I looked out across the brown river to where the water met the dried gumbo on the other side, several feet of it, above the water line, naked in the sun. It shouldn’t have been that way. The water yielded to the land far too soon. I knew that I would never swim in the river again; it had been a one and only thing.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the boys would destroy our clothes. I had thought the worst that could happen was that they would hide them or maybe take them away so that we’d never find them. This was past being mean and it scared me.
Surely it couldn’t have been Dirk with the Willises. Gwen couldn’t be in love with a knife-wielding maniac. I was pretty certain that Isabelle was mistaken about that. I picked up all our clothes and took them home. It wasn’t clear to me what I would do with them or even if I would tell Isabelle about it, but I wanted to put our shorts and shirts somewhere safe. I stuffed them into a brown paper bag and stashed it in the back of my closet.
Fraser Foote phoned me on Sunday afternoon and we made a date for the fol
lowing Friday.
Chapter 13
Clouds drifted around all day on Monday, tantalizing dark clouds that promised more than dust. I stared out the window on the far side of the office and thought about the rain that hadn’t fallen yet. When I left the mail-order building at five o’clock, the temperature felt downright cool. Someone said it had dropped fifteen degrees in three hours. The wind was fierce and on my short walk to the streetcar I held my head down against the driving uptown dirt. I started to run when the thunder began. It was so close it felt like it was inside of me tearing me up like a crazed fetus.
“Please don’t let lightning strike my house,” I said out loud, “or me, or anyone. Don’t let it strike that horrid Jackson Shirt.”
I didn’t make it home before the rain came, but I did make it onto the streetcar. When we got over the Norwood Bridge the driver stopped to wait out the torrential downpour. It didn’t last long, maybe half an hour, but a huge amount of rain fell. Sirens screamed from every direction. They sounded like they came from a giant firehouse in the sky.
“Good luck!” the driver said when he let me off at Walmer Street and Claremont, by the Buena Vista Court.
I took off my shoes and stockings; under the circumstances I didn’t care who saw me. My sandals were new and my stockings pure silk with no snags so far; I didn’t want to ruin them.
A tree and a hydro pole were down at the corner of Walmer and Lawndale. A small crowd of boys and mothers had gathered round to stare. The dads, like me, were making their way home from work. The streets were mud soup on my trek home. Even where gravel had been laid the dirt won out.
Jackson’s casts would have washed away in a rain like that; I was glad the loathsome beggar had a roof over his head.
He and my dad and Aunt Helen were out in the front yard surveying the damage when I trudged up with my shoes in my hand. The sun was already trying to poke through as the fast-moving clouds shifted and then covered it again. I saw an invisible spidery thread, impervious to catastrophe, joining Helen and Jackson through branches and air currents.
“Thank God you’re home,” Helen said when she saw me.
Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams Page 9