Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  “So it was just you?”

  “No, it was me and Dekker—” I stop and peer at Sherrie. Vast and blue as her eyes might be, they don’t give much away. Still, I get it. I get it because I know what I’d be thinking if I was her.

  “Oh,” I say. “But—you know—he knows it’s not just me, Sherrie.”

  Sherrie pretends to look around for Brenda, concerned about my french fries.

  “No, no,” she says, flipping a hand as if to say fiddle-de-dee. “It’s fine.”

  “I mean, he knows I couldn’t do this alone.”

  “You told him …?”

  “Dekker told him it was a bunch of us.”

  I can see Sherrie trying to figure out a way of asking if she was mentioned to Jim by name without sounding like she cares. Trying to shrug herself into a Claude-demeanour. I let her work at it for a couple of seconds—in fact, we’re both struggling minutely, fumbling for what to say.

  “Dekker will tell him all about it,” I grope. “I had to take off and meet you, but I’m sure they’re talking about it right now.”

  Now Sherrie has her chance. “Did you say you were meeting me?”

  “Um,” I say. “Oh yes. I think I did.”

  We are both adjusting ourselves in the booth, attempting to get comfortable, when it occurs to me to pass Sherrie the edited version of our letter with Dekker’s suggestions. He suggests we keep things “positive.” Never accuse, he has written in the margins, never make it sound as if you’re blaming them for anything. Say “we encourage” instead of “we demand.” We are “sincerely hopeful,” as opposed to “deeply disappointed.” Brenda brings my fries. Sherrie sees them and decides she wants some too.

  We drink our tea and dip our fries in a rather companionable silence after that. Sherrie wants to talk poetry by way of changing the subject, but because I don’t care for her poems it strikes me as awkward terrain. She talks about Margaret Avison a lot, and Margaret Atwood, and I start to wonder if it’s all a bunch of Margarets writing orgasm poetry in Canada these days. Maybe Sherrie should change her name to Margaret. She should change it to something, last if not first, because Sherrie owns perhaps the worst name for a poet this side of Adelaide Crapsey. Her last name is Mitten. She signs her poems Sherrie Ann Mitten.

  “Why the Ann?” I interrupt Sherrie. She stops talking about The Journals of Susanna Moodie and switches conversational gears without even a flap of her lashes.

  “I thought it would look more serious,” she admits. “Sherrie Mitten. Sherrie Mitten. It just looks like some girl’s name on the page. It has no authority.”

  “So you stuck ‘Ann’ in there?”

  “I felt it needed something to sort of temper the kind of … yearbook-picture sound of it. ‘Ann’ has a seriousness.”

  “Why not just Ann? And drop the Sherrie?”

  “I thought of that. I don’t like the meter.”

  “The meter?”

  “Ann Mi-tten. Ann Mi-tten,” she recites, emphasizing the rhythm for me with a lilt of her hand, like a music teacher. “It’s too—” she shakes her head “—staccato. It’s harsh, somehow. I don’t want to be harsh.”

  More companionable silence, during which I feel sorry for Sherrie. The problem, really, is all in the Mitten—there’s just no getting around it. She could be a Margaret and it wouldn’t help—the alliteration would make it all the more ludicrous.

  “What does Mitten mean?” I ask. “Is it French-derived or something?” I figure if I can help Sherrie with her name—if we can work together to get it just right—I won’t feel quite so awkward about the fact that Jim invited me to his home for dinner before I left Dekker’s office this afternoon.

  6.

  I HAVE THIS COUSIN NAMED JANET. She’s here, in Timperly, in her last year at Westcock. She started out in a General Arts program but in second year switched to Political Science, and then to Psychology midterm. My parents were keen for me to spend time with Janet when I first got here because of course it was the big bad town of Timperly and my first time going to big bad university, and the sophisticated and worldly-wise Janet, who’d been living and studying here an entire two years already, could act as my guide and mentor. Therefore I made it my business to avoid Janet whenever possible. On my first day in town, she and I and my parents all had dinner together at the Crowfeather Inn. Janet went on and on about the library’s new catalogue system and how unbelievably complicated it was and how it took her forever to figure out, reassuring my parents she would walk me through it however many times it took to sink into my pulpy high-school brain.

  Meanwhile, all I could think about was my weird childhood memory of Janet, who one afternoon plucked G.I. Joe from out of my hands and asked him, using Barbie like a puppet, if he wanted to take her—Barbie’s—clothes off. Except Janet never called her Barbies “Barbie”—she always gave them names like Nancy or Priscilla or Penelope. And, not even consulting me, Janet had my G.I. Joe respond in the affirmative. “Affirmative,” she had him say. She was keeping Joe in military character, I suppose, even though she insisted on having Barbie call him “Matthew.” I sat there and watched this performance for a while—interested, I grant you, because the fact is, the first thing I did whenever I got hold of Janet’s Barbies was to rip their clothes off and tap on their hard plastic breasts. There was not much else to do with naked Barbies—turn them this way and that, fondle the unyielding plastic, and feel strangely thwarted.

  So Janet and I never went to check out the library catalogue. She called a few days after my parents hopped the ferry back to PEI, and I told her I had already gone to one of the free orientation seminars the library was offering around the clock that first week. I may have sounded snotty when I said this, but Janet didn’t care. She’d officially paid for her meal at the Crowfeather Inn. Now she could call home with a clean conscience. Did you call Larry about the library?—Yes, Mom and Dad, I did. Sometimes we’d wave to one another from across the quad.

  I’ve scarcely run into her at all this year. We never called each other after that, never had coffee, lunch, or a beer like our parents expected, and neither of us—I felt I could safely assume—suffered a twinge of guilt leading our independent, Westcock lives.

  Anyway, now I feel horrible. The delayed guilt comes rushing and babbling over me like high tide when my parents call to tell me Janet is pregnant.

  It’s a big deal for the Campbells and Humphrieses of PEI, who, have I mentioned, are Presbyterian. Our grandmother heads up the local Temperance Society. To elucidate: we come from a place with a temperance society, and my grandmother heads it up. Janet apparently went home early this month for Thanksgiving, and the family pronounced her tubby. Aunt Maud neglected to offer Janet gravy come suppertime. Uncle Stan asked if she’d been getting enough exercise. Cousin Wayne reverted to using her childhood nickname of “Chubs.” Janet broke down when dessert was passed around and Grandma Lydia “forgot” to add the expected scoop of ice cream to her pumpkin pie.

  “Darn it all!” Janet is reported to have sobbed. “I’m eating for two, ya know!”

  Boom, went the table. My parents were there, plus, as I’ve already noted, my temperate Presbyterian grandma, Lydia Humphries.

  “Nonsense,” Lydia kept saying. “Nonsense.” I know she said this, because this is the thing Lydia says when she is angriest of all. She said it when I was ten and allowed myself to be flung from the tire swing in her yard only to alight on a much doted-on patch of black-eyed Susans. “What is this nonsense?” she wheezed, appearing on the porch without her sun hat. The lack of a sun hat, I remember, terrified me. And honest to God, she looked at the flowers but not at me, didn’t even ask if I was hurt—just headed straight for the crabapple tree from which the tire swing was suspended and for some reason yanked off a branch. And even though I’d never been exposed to such a thing in my life, some kind of universal childhood knowledge kicked in when I heard the crack of the bough being ripped from the tree. I understood that crack to be a pro
logue of sorts, an audio hint of what was to come. She was cutting a switch was what she was doing. I always thought you could do that only with willow branches, but I guess Grandma Lydia was improvising that day. My father yanked me off my ass and through the back door, and together we hid in my grandmother’s bathroom—Dad pretending all the while that we were there to clean me up—as my mother talked Lydia down from her tower of rage.

  That’s the first thing I think when I think of Janet at the Thanksgiving table. I imagine Lydia with her switch. I imagine her reaching over to snap Janet’s neck between her pink, paper-skinned fingers with their prim old-lady rings. Lydia would have become very still, almost stupid, like a drugged animal. Nonsense! Reach, snap. It’s the only word she knows in that state.

  Another crazily vivid memory I have of Lydia. I broke my nose when I was twelve, playing softball. Lydia doesn’t have anything to do with this particular part of the memory—anyone would remember breaking their nose. I remember it because it hurt, and because it was the last time I ever played softball, or any sport. There were these guys on the team. They knew I didn’t belong there, that I was the kind of kid who was playing because his father yearned for him to do something male and normal. They knew I didn’t enjoy it the way they did. That it didn’t drive me absolutely crazy when the other team stole a base or made a really great hit, that I just couldn’t bring myself to care as much as I was supposed to about an entire afternoon of throwing and hitting and catching and running and throwing and hitting and catching and running. I was an outfielder, of course. I would loiter on the grass thinking about Leonard Cohen, and there were at least a couple of guys on the team who I swear could actually see that this was the sort of thing I was standing around thinking about. Therefore whenever we practised, they threw the ball not to me, but at me, as hard as they could. It always looked very innocent—a vigorous game of catch among high-spirited boys—but for the most part it was guys like Barnard Leary trying to hit me in the head, and me trying to avoid being hit in the head. It was probably only my fifth practice or so when Leonard Cohen or whomever it was I happened to be thinking about got the better of me. I was remembering this really sexy poem that used the word breasts—not the singular, breast, in the Shakespeare way where it just means chest, but breasts. It was my first poem that mentioned breasts. And it was describing the shapes of them—the breasts. And I was thinking about how if these guys knew how much smut there was in poetry books, they would be lining up at the library and poring over them the way they did in grade 5 looking up words like “titular” in the dictionary. Then I was hit in the face.

  How else to say it? There’s no poetic way of saying hit in the face. I was hit in the face, then I was on my back, and bleeding bleeding bleeding from a broken nose. I didn’t know what to do with all the blood. I still can’t remember the thought process that led to it, but I took off my shoe, yanked off a sweat sock, and held it to my face. I must’ve done this in a split second—people were running toward me, but no one had yet arrived.

  Anyway, that’s not the important memory. It is awful to break your nose, and I looked like a circus freak for a couple of weeks as my face swelled up with fluid and the flesh around my eyes went black, then blue, then greeny-yellow. It was summer, and summer often meant hanging out at Grandma Lydia’s because her house was close to the beach, whereas our motel was by necessity on the highway, and my parents were always frantic during tourist season. So I dragged my bloated head back and forth across Lydia’s kitchen all summer long, not wanting to go out because I was grotesque. My grandmother not being much of a beachgoer herself, we hung out together baking bread and drinking lemonade, reading our respective books—Lydia enjoyed the great moralizers like Bunyan and Milton—on the porch. I mostly avoided the tire swing by this point in our relationship.

  So here’s the memory: Lydia was cutting out sugar cookies, and I was placing slivers of maraschino cherries in the centre of each one. I, as I have said, was twelve, and trying to talk about literature. Lydia, I had noticed, was the only person in my family who really read the way I did. She read for hours—it was the way she filled her days between meals and pots of tea. She didn’t quilt or do any of the crafty gramma stuff. She may have crocheted an afghan or two, but only as a begrudging nod to her gramma status. Mostly she went to her temperance meetings and to church. She had dinners with my family and Janet’s. But I always got the feeling that Lydia was like me in that everything she did when she wasn’t reading was, in her mind, just that—not-reading. That is to say, everything else in her life was, on some level, an interruption.

  I guess I thought Lydia might be a kindred spirit. I knew practically nothing about books, but I knew Milton was old and important. I had snuck a peek at Paradise Lost but found it impossible to follow. It was full of footnotes aiming to assist twentieth-century illiterates, but these just distracted and frustrated me all the more, seeming to taunt: you don’t understand, do you? Of course, I found this intolerable. I thought Lydia could help.

  It could be that I had been annoying her for the past half hour with my suggestions that we try putting half of a maraschino cherry on the cookies instead of a mere sliver—or, heaven forbid, why not an entire maraschino cherry. The slivers seemed to me minuscule—almost a cruel joke, considering the blandness of Lydia’s cookies in general. They were white and hard and, to be honest, sugar cookies only in name. To the twelve-year-old palate they more closely resembled dense, stale crackers. Lydia had told me once that her cookies were so hard because she made them for dipping in tea. I remember being vaguely outraged by this. If the only confections my grandmother ever bothered to make were for dipping in tea, then whom, exactly, was she making them for? I figured out early on it couldn’t be me. If I really wanted to flatter myself, I might’ve conjectured that the maraschino slivers only came along once I started showing an interest in the cookies—Lydia’s idea of a grandmotherly gesture, perhaps. But please. If the slivers were for me, they were an insult. If anything, they were Lydia’s nod to aesthetics—mere decoration. Positively baroque in her mind.

  But at twelve, I still harboured hope for Lydia’s cookies—for me and Lydia in general. We both liked books, we both liked quiet. It seemed to me we had things to say to one another.

  Here’s where it gets vivid—insanely so. Late-afternoon streams of sunshine coming in through Lydia’s lace curtains, casting filigree shadows on the kitchen table. The perfect stillness of a summer afternoon in the middle of nowhere, just far enough away from the beach to not be bothered by the sound of breakers or people having fun. The only noise in the room was the dry rasp of Lydia’s ancient refrigerator. It seemed too hot outside for birds—some afternoons are like that, hot and still and birdless. I’d long since given up arguing about the cherries but thought it would be cute and endearing of me to try to sneak a couple of halves onto the occasional cookie anyway. Lydia was having none of it. She’d pluck the cherry from the centre of the cookie and flick it back onto the cutting board for me to dissect into respectable slivers. When I kept at it, she reached out to smack me on the hand.

  A low growl: “Stop the nonsense.”

  I did stop the nonsense after a couple of smacks on the hand—nobody can accuse me otherwise. Maybe I did go a little too far dissecting the cherries after that. My slivers eventually became almost transparent—so insubstantial I could scarcely manoeuvre them from my fingers into the centre of the cookies. It got to be as though each cookie had a teeny-tiny red freckle in the middle of it. Anyway, Lydia did not complain or grunt “nonsense” over the freckles, so I assumed all was sweetness and light between us.

  The hardest thing about the age of twelve for me was that twilight state. The state of still being a kid but getting my first inklings of the realities of not being a kid anymore. When you’re a kid, people smile at you almost like a reflex. They like you automatically, it seems, and wish you well, not just because you’re cute but because you’re so blank. That is, there is nothing about yo
u to dislike just yet, so everyone is pretty much on your side. I don’t mean other kids—no, I figured that out long before it was driven home to me with the ball in the face. But adults. You assume they’re on your side, at least. And it’s around the age of twelve when these assumptions begin to fall into question. You’re too big to be cute, your voice is getting weird, your teeth are sticking out, you start to think it’s funny to mess with other people’s ideas of how a sugar cookie should be.

  “Grandma,” I said, furiously puréeing one of Lydia’s cherries with my knife. “Do you like Paradise Lost?”

  “Milton is one of the giants of literature,” my grandmother said.

  “It’s about Adam and Eve, right?”

  “It is,” said Lydia, rolling out a new batch of yolk-tinted dough. “It is about The Fall.”

  “Isn’t it hard to read?”

  “Anything worth doing should challenge one.”

  This threw me off track a little. “Uh,” I said. “Really?”

  “That’s how you know it’s worth doing. The Bible is a challenging book as well.”

  I felt depressed. You know how that is? Sometimes it just wafts over you like stale air. I couldn’t believe she and I were talking about the same thing, the thing that I had only recently begun to identify as—not to put too fine a point on it—my salvation. But Lydia talked about books like she would a hairshirt or a crown of thorns. It made me tired to hear it. But I pushed on and I shouldn’t have.

  “Well,” I said, casually decimating another cherry, “I tried to read some, but I couldn’t get anywhere with it.”

  I shrugged, thinking I sounded pretty adult. I hadn’t whined, “I can’t understand it,” like a kid would do, even though this was actually the case. Already I was cultivating a handy nonchalance toward work I didn’t get, which would eventually serve me well in Jim’s seminar. The shrug, however, was the pièce de resistance, meant to convey, Oh well, perhaps old Milty and I just aren’t meant to get along. Ho-hum. Back to Chaucer I go.