“What’ll it be?” asked my dad. “I’ll get you anything you like.” He sounded magnanimous, and probably felt it too. He knew that tomorrow all this would be 50 percent off. He swept his arm out like he was in showbiz. “Anything you want.”
I looked up at all the glossy packages like someone who’d seen the face of God. “Just one?”
“You little shit.” He ruffled my hair like a TV dad. “You can have two if you want. But stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”
It didn’t cross my mind then that he might go outside through that stuttering automatic door and skid across the parking lot to the Liquor Barn. And anyway, he didn’t do that. He just went to the row of fridges at the back of the store and picked up a dozen eggs. Then he must have wandered around picking up other things and putting them in a basket: blackstrap molasses, a liter of milk, a bottle of dish soap, and half a dozen ripe bananas. “You ready?” he said when he returned.
I wasn’t even close. I wanted time to weigh my options but I knew there was something girly about hesitating, so I grabbed a bag of Mars Bars and one of Glosettes. I didn’t even like Glosettes. Does anyone like Glosettes?
He took my hand again and we went through the till. We were served by Stacy, the girl who’d waved when he came in. “Making a cake?” she asked when my dad unloaded his basket.
“You bet,” he said. “I’m good in the kitchen, you know.”
“As if.” She laughed, brushing our items over her scanner. “Paper or plastic?” She spoke in the pleasant, lilting voice she would have used with a normal customer. “Find everything you were looking for today?”
“Everything I’ve ever wanted,” said my dad.
She turned to me. “I like your costume, honey.” She smiled, and there was a small diamond—at the time I thought it was real—glued to one of her front teeth. “What are you?”
Before I could answer, she uttered a little squeal and turned back to my dad. “Oh, my god, is this your son? Oh, my god. He’s so cute.”
“He’s a good kid.”
“Holy shit, he looks just like you.”
When we left the store, I assumed we’d go home—I actually believed he would bake a cake. I ate three Mars Bars as we walked and wondered if I could trade my Glosettes for better stuff the next day at school. But then we passed our street again, crossed the bridge, walked along the river. “Where are we going?” I said.
“Where do you think?”
We stopped in front of that small, dark bungalow.
“They don’t like Halloween, they don’t give out candy, fuck them,” said my dad. He took the carton out of the bag, opened it, and revealed twelve eggs that glowed under the streetlights, white as new snow. “You first.”
I fumbled an egg out of the cardboard carton, difficult because of my mitts. I held it for a second, felt its weight in my hand. I wasn’t athletic, never played on any sports teams. And I’d never done anything that might get me in trouble before. It’s not that I was better than anyone else, just that my mom was on her own and I understood that it was my job to make her life easier.
“What if they’re home?” I said.
“They’re not home.”
“But what if?”
“Did you hear what I just said?”
I shifted my weight from one boot to the other. I didn’t want to throw the egg. I wanted to throw the egg.
“Hit the door,” said my dad. “So they see it first thing.”
They. I wondered who they were. An old woman who lived alone with her little dog? A couple like Tracy and Rob? A family? A mom and a dad and a kid?
Fuck them.
I pulled my arm back and threw the egg. But it landed short of the door and splattered on the driveway.
“What the hell was that?” said my dad.
I told myself not to cry. I imagined the yolk would freeze to the cement and stay there all winter, a reminder of my failure. Don’t cry, don’t cry.
My dad took an egg and flung it at the door, hit it square on. I hated him for a second and I also thought he was the coolest guy ever. He picked up another egg, tossed it to me, and I managed to catch it.
“Okay, buddy.” He crouched down so our faces were pressed together. “Don’t think so hard. Just chuck it.”
I threw as hard as I could, made a little grunting noise in my throat. I missed the door but the egg hit the house’s siding and my dad let out a whoop. “There you go!” He danced a little jig, kicking his thin legs in the air. “That’s my boy!”
He threw another, I threw another—again and again, the eggs cracked against the window, slid down the panes, hit the garage door. One egg I threw landed in a snowdrift and remained intact. “Don’t worry!” said my dad, laughing like a lunatic. “That’s cool ’cause it’ll freeze and crack, then when the snow melts it’ll leak all over the grass. A little delayed fuck-you.”
When the eggs were gone, he took out the molasses, unscrewed the cap, and we poured it all over the front porch. “They’ll never get this stuff off their shoes,” he said. We poured the entire liter of milk into the mailbox, then closed the lid. Hopefully it won’t freeze, my dad explained, and tomorrow the mail will get soaked. We squeezed the dish soap over the thin layer of frost that covered the walkway, to make it more slippery. Then we dropped the bananas on the driveway and jumped on them. “Bam! Bam!” we yelled as they leapt out of their skins.
I now pictured the people who lived there as Decepticons, dark machinery. “I can take them!” I screamed, stomping through the yard. “I am Optimus Prime!”
I picked up some snow, crushed it into a ball, and threw it at the house. My dad threw some too, but it was my idea to scoop up gravel and rocks from the road to use in our snowballs, it was my idea to aim for that little moon-shaped window, it was me who screamed, Get them! Kill them!, and it was me, it was definitely me, who threw the chunk of snow and stones and ice that shattered the window.
I imagine that my parents met at a karaoke bar. I wish it were somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t so dark and stupid, but that’s all I can see. I imagine that my dad saw my mom onstage, a woman in a green dress, sweat stains under her arms. And that when she sang “Dust on the Bottle” or “Strawberry Wine,” he fell in love. She held the microphone in both her hands, tipsy and nervous, and it seemed to him she would save him. He bought her a drink, they kissed, and they danced to “I Think We’re Alone Now” performed by a group of men in business suits. They danced the way I saw them dance in the kitchen, one of his hands in her sweat-dampened hair and the other on the curve of her lower back.
I imagine that’s their story, though really it’s mine. It happened to me one night, when I was twenty. I went home with the girl in the green dress. She had dark, messy hair and a body that looked strong but wrecked. A faded tattoo around her bicep, freckles on her shoulders from too much sun, fake breasts she must have got years ago and that now hung heavily and incongruously from her frame. She was nothing like my mom, but when I was drinking, I was everything like my dad. Prone to singing, dancing, lying. I pretended to be Elvis, pretended to be a shotput thrower, pretended to be a little kid. The girl in the green dress found me funny. She kept giggling and saying, “You’re funny.”
When we got to her house, I sat on the couch and she poured us each a glass of wine, then she walked across the room and straddled my lap between her ropy thighs. I reached under her green dress and found she wasn’t wearing underwear. It was like going to put your hand on a woman’s breast, expecting the lace and wire of a brassiere, and finding instead that you’ve clasped her bare, beating heart.
I’d asked her name at the bar, but it was Kylie or Kyla, something I’d instantly forgotten. Didn’t matter because now I believed she would save me. I felt her coarse hair, the heat between her legs, and I said, “Oh, God,” in a voice that sounded like prayer.
When I was nine and I broke that window, I stood there with my mouth open, my breath visible in the cold.
“Hol
y shit,” said my dad. I dropped back into a snowbank and rolled around, snow sticking to my hair. I couldn’t stop laughing—I was drunk from the sugar and the destruction. And I was dizzy with love. I loved my dad.
He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Hey. Hey, hey, hey, buddy. Enough now, okay?”
Then he picked me up, slung me over his shoulder, and ran with me down the street to the riverbank, to the place where families have picnics and teenagers deal drugs. He put me back on the ground, brushed the snow off my costume.
“Listen,” he said. “Don’t tell your mom, okay?”
“Yeah, I know.” And that was true. I already knew there were plenty of things you couldn’t tell women, but hadn’t yet learned that women always find out anyway. That usually they know even before you do, even before they do.
“You’re a good kid, Davy,” he said. He had that dark look again. I guess revenge is a lot like addiction—the buzz never lasts.
He walked a few steps away and sat on a bench that faced the river. He leaned back and sang that song that was always stuck in his head. She was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing. So fine a breath of wind might blow her away.
I followed and sat beside him. I wondered who he was singing about—my mom was blond and big-boned, nothing fragile about her. The only fine-boned thing around here was him. And, I suppose, me.
“How do you understand God, Davy?” he said. “What do they teach you about it in school?”
“Nothing.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I also wondered if he had ever gone to school.
“They should teach you something.”
“My mask,” I said, suddenly realizing that neither of us had it.
He looked around like it might be at his feet. “Must have dropped it back there. Sorry about that.”
I worried someone would see it lying on the lawn, would trace it back to me. I felt myself sweating in my costume. “Will someone find it?”
“Sure, maybe.” He put his arm around me. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you a new one.”
I didn’t believe him. Don’t cry, I told myself.
“Goddamn, it is cold out.” He rubbed his hands together. “Did I tell you about the time I drove from Fort Mac to Calgary with no heater? Socks on my hands, a bottle of bourbon at my feet.” It was almost the same story he’d told my mom when he first arrived, a story that sounded like a folk song. “Alcohol does not keep you warm,” he said. “That is a myth.”
I didn’t say anything and it seemed like we sat there a long time, me kicking my legs through the air and him humming that tune to himself.
“Can we go home soon?” I said.
He looked at me as though surprised I was there, as though he’d forgotten I existed. Or maybe it was the word home. Maybe he didn’t think of it that way.
My dad and I walked back to the house holding hands and my mom met us at the door. She threw her arms around us, me first, then him. “How was it?” She peered happily and worriedly into my painted face. “You had a good time?”
She didn’t notice that I’d lost my mask and I guess she felt he’d proved himself, because that month she let him move in with us. He stayed almost a year. And when he left the next September, I missed him and believed it was my fault, but I didn’t cry about it. A few years later, I did what all teenagers do, and I hated him. Then I tried to become him. Now he calls every once in a while and we talk like friends, just two men with the same name.
I am less in need of him now that I know Ken, my sponsor at AA. For a while there, Ken phoned every morning and every night to check in on me. I cried to him like a lost child—he has seen me when things were bad, way worse than anything my girlfriend has seen.
For years, Ken and I met every week, at a coffee shop or sometimes at the laundromat near my place. On days when I didn’t want to talk, when I was tired of all that moral inventory, we played Go Fish while my clothes spun in the dryers. Or we drove around and I sang along to the radio, Ken telling me I was lucky to be a decent guy ’cause I sure couldn’t carry a tune.
Ken’s getting older now and he has a bad heart, so these days I’m the one who calls to check in. I wish he didn’t smoke so much and he wishes he’d been there when his daughter was a kid. Neither one of us talks about God or anything of that nature, neither one of us uses the word love. But before we hang up we say to each other, “Have a good day, buddy,” and that always helps.
Welcome to Paradise
We planned to spend the summer making boys fall in love with us. We would go down, get some, hook up. We’d never done any of these things. We’d never done anything. We’d never even been kissed.
“But I’ve been this close,” said Lielle, her face an inch from mine, so near I could smell her watermelon lip gloss.
We were in Lielle’s backyard, at the bottom of the pool that her dad never bothered to fill. The tank sat like a huge, mint-green bowl behind the house and we were always in the deep end. I don’t have any photos of that summer, but I imagine I looked wide-eyed and flayed—every minute I spent with Lielle, in our universe of two, felt scorching, like the sun was burning off a layer of my skin. We drank iced tea mixed from crystals, bleached streaks in our hair with Sun-In. It was August and the days stretched out as empty as that pool. Sometimes I just lay against the tile and listened while Lielle practiced swearing in English.
“To be fucked or get fucked?”
“Either,” I said. “Both.”
We longed to live together, in our own house, in another country. I suggested Israel because Lielle spoke the language and I’d heard about floating in the Dead Sea. But Lielle said the Dead Sea was just a tourist trap, and the mineral crystals cut the soles of your feet, and the salt water stung your crotch. Not Israel, she said. That’s boring. Somewhere completely amazing like India or Greece. Someplace where we could buy a huge house just for us. “We’ll paint the walls gold,” said Lielle.
“And we’ll have a pet tiger,” I said. “To guard the door.”
We were fourteen, and we meant it. Or at least I did. But since we didn’t have our own house, we hung out in the suburban homes we shared with our parents—me with my mother and her with her father. Lielle’s house, with its three-car garage and floor-to-ceiling windows, was nearly always empty. Her mother lived in a settlement in the West Bank, apparently with a woman. Her dad was opening a new dental practice and was hardly home. He hadn’t brought much to Canada after his divorce and hadn’t had the time or inclination to buy chairs or tables or cushions once he’d arrived. Every wall was a glaring white.
Even in her own room, Lielle hadn’t put up any posters. The walls of my room were pocked with holes from the pins I’d used to display posters of cats snuggling, Janis Joplin in lopsided sunglasses, Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands. It was my own pop-culture autobiography, as embarrassing now as a collection of bad tattoos. Lielle’s room, absent of calicos and movie stars, seemed bereft—but also bright, astonishing.
When this emptiness got to us, we would climb each sun-hot rung of the pool’s ladder and wander from the big, gated houses of Lielle’s neighborhood. We hopped on the CTrain for a few stops, not bothering to buy tickets, then walked the winding streets, past playgrounds and grocery stores and gas stations. We crossed rushing city highways, teetered along medians in the road, found ourselves calf-deep in the yellow prairie grass that grew between Calgary’s subdivisions. Drunk from the sun, we rested on someone’s lawn, sprawled under a weeping willow. I taught Lielle more words. Shit-head, shit-faced, shit-talk, shit-storm.
When we arrived at my house, with its cluttered rooms and full fridge and the bossy notes my mother left me on the kitchen counter, it was like a promised land. We always had a snack, eating whatever we could see. Once we shared an entire tub of ice cream and passed a carton of orange juice back and forth. Then we lay on the soft, well-treaded broadloom, our arms wrapped around each other. Lielle breathed warmly on my neck and I could smell her watermelon lip
gloss. She said, “Good night, shit-face,” and we fell asleep.
At my house, we would sleep, eat, draw elaborate blueprints for the house we’d one day share, or go for walks. Going for a walk was code for going to the strip mall to smoke cigarettes and hit on the Little Caesars Pizza delivery guys. Cody and Brodie. Their rolled-up sleeves and tattooed biceps seemed to embody masculinity and we adored them obsessively—at least, Lielle did.
In preparation for seeing them, we sat on the edge of the bathtub and shaved our legs, then faced the mirror and applied Wet ’n’ Wild eye shadows and flavored lip glosses. Then we put on shorts and cropped tops—Lielle always lent me her clothes—and strolled down the back alley behind Little Caesars like we hung out beside Dumpsters all the time. We must have done this a dozen times, but the day I remember most was the one that led to our crimes.
Cody and Brodie were in the parking lot, smoking and sitting on flimsy chairs they propped against a wall scrawled with graffiti. A girl named Kat had tagged her name everywhere and her scribbles were faded, almost illegible, a ghost of a presence. Kat was here.
“Hey.” Lielle did most of the talking, her harsh accent making her seem older. “What’s up?”
“I’ll show you what’s up.” Cody wore a baseball cap and the brim shadowed the top part of his face—it was impossible not to watch his mouth when he talked. “Come sit on my lap.”
Brodie just nodded and laughed at whatever Cody said. He didn’t wear a cap and had a face like a movie star—all cheekbones—and a braid that hung down his back.
They made pizza deliveries in their own beat-up vehicles—Cody drove a Pontiac Sunbird and Brodie a pickup. We longed for one of them to offer us a ride somewhere—anywhere—as this would have given us an adventure to dissect for weeks. But Cody and Brodie mostly ignored us. They talked to each other in a mysterious shorthand or wrestled in the blinding sun, gripping each other by the waist and neck, tugging at each other’s shirts.
The Dark and Other Love Stories Page 13