Cease to Blush

by Billie Livingston

  I opened my eyes to Frank standing in my bedroom door. “I called and there was no answer.”

  “You’re here.” I held out my arms.

  He came and sat on the bed. “You okay?”

  “You’re home.” I wound my arms round his neck and gripped him in a stranglehold.

  “Woof,” he said. “I think we better introduce you to a toothbrush.”

  After Frank and I got home from dinner, I kept him up as long as I could, but he’d been awake since six in the morning. Whereas I’d only really been up since about six that night.

  I moped from room to room. I wished I could talk to Erin, my last good girlfriend. She and I used to really tear it up, but she’d met an American director on the set of a commercial she was catering and moved down to California with him. What was his name? George something. I left her a message once, a year or so ago, but she never called back. I wondered later if it had come across in my voice, the resentment I felt that she’d taken off, married some George and abandoned me.

  I called Leonard. “Jee-zuz,” he grogged. “It’s three in the morning.”

  “Well, sometimes you work nights and you can’t get right to sleep …”

  “Shit, Vivian.” He took a sharp breath as if trying to get enough oxygen to make sense of things. “What’s the matter? You upset?”

  “About what?”

  “Your mum.”

  The words sounded utterly foreign, a peculiar non sequitur. “No.”

  “You fighting with Frank?”

  “No. I thought you might feel like grabbing a coffee. Or talking.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry you’re awake. I’m going back to sleep.” He hung up.

  I slunk around the apartment some more, poured a vodka tonic and turned on the TV. Glass in hand, I clicked around from channel to channel, happened across the opening funeral scene of Family Plot, Hitchcock’s last kick at the can. The graveside gathering, the 1970s clothes and hair—it all reminded me of Sally, the fact that I still had to get over there and clear out my crap. I should do it tomorrow, I thought, get it over with—sign whatever I had to sign, and never see her miserable face again. She wouldn’t even have to be there. I flicked the remote and glowered at a parade of bikini-clad 1–900 girls. I wished I were tired enough to sleep again. I turned off the TV and moments later clicked it back on. The quiet was too much.

  In the bathroom, I stood in the mirror as the infomercial girls in the living room beckoned for callers in dulcet tones. Most had hair like mine—without the skunk stripe of dark. I stared at my scraggles of pale yellow.

  I rummaged under the sink to see if I had any dye left and found a box of Summer Buttercup, one of half a dozen drugstore shades I’d tried over the past couple years, trying to match the salon’s Champagne. I heaved myself up with the box, dreading the ordeal of peeling off my housecoat so it wouldn’t get stained, mixing and slopping the cold goop onto my head. I sighed and slumped. It’ll make you feel better, I assured myself and left the housecoat on.

  By five in the morning I was beginning to fade. I grabbed a blanket and another Ativan, closed the blinds and made my bed on the couch—where I could stay in my night-skin, wake when I wanted to wake. I didn’t hear Frank leave.

  Three

  IT WAS NOON WHEN I WOKE. WHY HADN’T I MADE IT TO three or four in the afternoon? I counted back the hours, wondering why I had gone to sleep at five. I should’ve kept myself up till at least nine. I called the house and Sally answered. She seemed taken aback at the sound of my voice. I asked if I could come over.

  “Uhh …” There was a substantial pause. “I guess so. Yeah, sure. I just imagined you’d want to wait a few days. But, no, if you’re up for it, maybe I should get up for it too. At least make a start.”

  When I got there, I knocked rather than using my key. When there was no immediate response, I tried the door.

  Sally sat hunched over paperwork at the chestnut table in the kitchen. “I’m just looking at the … house shit. I’ve never had a great head for this. Josie said she was going to transfer ownership to the two of us so we wouldn’t have to pay the estate whatsits, the uh …” She sighed and pushed the papers aside. “The lawyer’s coming tomorrow. She’ll figure it out.” Sally set her glasses down and rubbed her eyes, dug her fingers into her feral curls and scrubbed them into a frenzy before dropping her hands and looking at me with a small almost-defeated smile. “I made an executive decision to list the house.” I didn’t respond. She continued. “We could each get ourselves an apartment.” I nodded. “And there’s some stock that she wanted us to divide. Might not be the best time to sell but you can decide that for yourself. And the car is yours …”

  I looked toward the garage. “It is?”

  “You already know that.”

  “Oh.” Sitting down across from her, I ran my eyes over the scattered papers and absorbed nothing. “I couldn’t talk about that stuff when I was with her, it just felt so morbid.”

  Sally glanced away from me as she sipped from a cup in front of her. “Well, arrangements have to be made.” There was a long silence. “Want some coffee?”

  I went to the counter and poured a mug, keeping my back to her a moment or two. “So, you said there was a box of stuff she wanted me to have?”

  She had been watching me while my back was turned and she was watching me still. The last time I’d worn the striped low-risers I had on, she’d asked me if I had to shave to be seen in public in them. My gum-pink T-shirt didn’t come close to reaching the waistband of the jeans.

  I wasn’t about to react. Just kept my face pleasant and took a swallow of coffee.

  “I think she would have. You should have it.”

  Sally could be a little cryptic. As a child I thought it was fascinating. As an adult, I found it pretentious; an artist’s pose. I had vowed to remain detached today, immune to such provocation though she was peering at me as if attempting to solve a puzzle. She opened her mouth and closed it again. “What is it?” I finally asked.

  Her tongue played at her lower lip. I wasn’t having much success interpreting her expression either, to be frank.

  “A few of her things.” She stood and started toward the basement stairs. “Come on, you can have a look at what else you—” The phone rang. “Shit,” she sighed. “Go ahead, I’ll be right there.”

  I stepped past her as she picked up the receiver.

  Downstairs was relatively clean and organized. Our old bikes leaned against each other in the corner. My mother’s looked as if it hadn’t been ridden in about as long as mine. Sally’s had bits of mud dappled here and there. She rode hers to work in the warmer months.

  A shelf on the wall held clear containers with rows of compartments for various sizes of nails and screws. A tool box and power drill sat beside them. A plastic bag of plastic bags. Some of Sally’s old tarps were heaped in the corner, bolts of her fabric. Most of her paints and paraphernalia were upstairs. At eighteen, when I returned from Tokyo, I got myself some fake ID, a cocktailing job in a bar and moved out. Sally moved in and my room became her studio.

  Against the far wall, cardboard boxes were stacked three high, labelled’with black felt marker: “Winter Clothes,” “Taxes,” “Vivian/School,” “Christmas Decorations,” et cetera. I wandered over and ran my hands across them. The two marked “Christmas” were nearest, one sublabelled “Outdoor Lights,” the other “Tree.” I stacked the tree box on top of the lights and pulled its lid off. Silver garland lay coiled on top. I draped it round my neck and let most of it dangle and shimmer down against the hot pink of my top. Even when I was very small, Christmas had had a melancholy feel. My mother always seemed to be missing something or someone. When Sally started coming around, the low-level tension of her being in on our Christmas was better than the void of melancholy anyway.

  Beneath were Mum’s boxes of ornamental balls, individually wrapped in tissue, all snugged in their own compartments. She collected them; each was unique, hand-blown gla
ss or a painted delicacy that one of her friends had found on their travels. Others were gifts that Sally had painstakingly made. I gingerly unwrapped one of Sally’s ceramic balls, holding it in my hand a moment before I held it up to the bare bulb on the ceiling, let it spin on its hook to see the peacock blue and gold ropes of colour looping in and out of each other. Sally’s some kind of genius, I’ll always give her that. My gaze left the ball to take in the other boxes—Do we have to comb through all of this crap?—and the hook slipped from my fingers. The ball shattered on the cool concrete.

  “Shit!” I stepped from foot to foot.

  Why couldn’t it have been something foreign and meaningless, not hers.

  Curved clay shards were scattered across the floor, some shining painted side up, others with their dull innards to the ceiling. Christ! I searched for a broom, a brush, anything I could use to make the mess disappear before she got off the phone. I was spinning in circles, wiping my hands on my jeans, feeling cursed, when I noticed the trunk pulled out from the wall. It was familiar and not, one of those old wooden things with the leather straps for handles. I sort of remembered it from when I’d come down here alone and small. I remember mucking around, staging a play for myself. With these garlands. And tinsel. And I was standing on a box. And then trouble: my mother coming downstairs and pulling the tinsel off me. She didn’t want me playing down here by myself ever. I might break something. I could get hurt. She checked the trunk to make sure it wasn’t broken. She jerked at the padlock. “What is wrong with you, jumping on my things like this. Go play outside.” It wasn’t quite a rage, though, now that I think about it—it was closer to fear. On some level, she always seemed afraid, as though the world was a room full of dynamite waiting for a match.

  Sometimes my mother’s fear was terrifying. I looked at the remnants of Sally’s ceramic ball, smashed, like a bottle.

  I was six the morning the old Italian man gave me a fifty-cent piece. My mother was in her room studying for an exam and I was bored again. I got it in my head that I should make my way around a few gardens and bring home a bouquet. At the corner was the most fabulous garden in the neighbourhood. My mother had admired it dozens of times walking me home from school, stopping to breathe in the climbing roses, gazing up at the trellis-full of twisting wine-red blossoms. Sometimes the old Italian lady was out front, digging or pruning. She’d smile and nod but she never offered us a rose. So, I was going to get some for my mother myself, I thought, like Robin Hood. Along their little fence I went, snapping roses off her bushes, red ones, yellow ones, then getting really greedy and snatching flowers I didn’t even know the names of. I was just reaching for a tall fabulous stock of hollyhock when I came face to face with the old Italian man, so old he looked like a goblin to me. He was half-blind and often caned his way up and down the block. He shook his head and wagged a finger at me, but his eyes were so gentle I instantly wanted to wail with guilt. “For you momma?” he asked. I nodded. He said, “Enough, okay?” and reached into his pocket and gave me a fifty-cent piece. Smiling, he put a finger to his lips, “No more flower. My daughter,” he explained, “she …” and he clenched his fists as though he were strangling the air and we both laughed.

  I hope I said thank-you. I hope I said I was sorry. What I do know is I hightailed it to the store and charged back home with the booty—a bouquet and a feast.

  I came in the door guzzling Mountain Dew with one hand, a reserve bottle of Orange Crush in the other, my pockets full of chocolate and my armpit spilling flowers just as my mother came yawning downstairs. She stopped midstep. “Where did you get all that?” she asked suspiciously. I told her. “What do you mean?” she enunciated. “Who?”

  “The old Italian man. The one down there. You know.”

  Suddenly she was on me, dragging me by the arm into the bathroom, flowers tumbling to the tile floor. She ripped the unopened bottle out of my hand, shrieking, “Don’t you ever, ever take anything from a stranger again,” and smashed it on the side of the tub. I don’t recall if I made a sound. I remember orange pop all over the bathroom floor and splattered up the walls. Chunks and shards of glass everywhere. I looked down and saw one thin sliver sticking out from a drop of blood on my foot and that’s when the tears came. From both my mother and me. She knelt and looked at my foot, tweezed out the glass, her hands and voice shaking as streams ran down her cheeks. “If anything ever happened to you … You can’t ever do that, Vivvy. Never.”

  Then she picked up the wilting flowers strewn from the front door to the bathroom and put them in water, made me a hot chocolate and took me outside on the bench swing. We both tried to explain our points of view. “But you know him,” I repeated. “The old blind guy with the cane.” It didn’t matter, she insisted, I should never take anything from anyone.

  Just at that very moment, a curly head popped over our fence.

  “Hey! I’m Sally Ray, your new annoying neighbour starting today. Geez, listen to that, I’m a poet!” She laughed.

  My mother forced a smile, and said hello. I sat up to get a better look. And there was Sally, beautiful as the good witch of every perfect story. I’d never seen anything like her hair. If gravity hadn’t weighed it down, she would’ve had the biggest reddest Afro of all time. I wanted to dig my hands in like it was a bucket of candy.

  Sally grinned at us. “I hate to be a pain in the butt so early in the game, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where my sister keeps her hammers. Don’t ’spose you’ve got one I could borrow for the afternoon?”

  “Yes! We have hammers. We have everything. We even got nails.” I leapt off the swing, dumping my mug, unsettling my mother, the hand with her hot chocolate swinging out from her lap with a “Vivian! Jeez …”

  Tearing down to the basement, I got the hammer, flew back and handed it up the fence.

  “Holy catfish! This hammer’s bigger than you!” Sally looked at Mum. “I’d love an assistant today, if she feels like hanging around and it’s cool with you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. We’ve got some—”

  “Oh, please! Mum? Please!”

  “Well, she’s a little rambunctious, she’s likely to get underfoot more than anything.”

  I glared. “I am?”

  Mum ducked her head.

  “Actually, I think it’s company I’m after,” Sally insisted. “I’m going to be house-sitting for the next six months or so and right now it just feels a bit, um … spooky? I’m used to something more communal than this, I suppose. So if she—what’s your name anyway?” She glanced down at me and I whispered it up. “If Vivian wants to come over, I’d love to have her. I’d love to have you both, actually.”

  My mother said no, she had to keep studying, but when it came to me she relented. “Send her back if she’s the least bit pesky.”

  “If I’da knowed you was gonna be pesky,” Sally said, “I’da moved in here a who’ lot soonah.”

  From then on, after school and weekends, I spent my time with Sally. My mother had a standing invitation but begged off to do her school work. Sometimes I’d paint with Sally or tie-dye out in her backyard, but most days we sat in the Pottery Palace. Sally had cleared her sister’s things out of one of the bedrooms and replaced them with wall-to-wall plastic and a potter’s wheel. I would watch, fascinated, as she heaped great wads of clay on the wheel then proceeded to squeeze and caress vases from them, some tall and elegant, some squat and pot-bellied, their surfaces softly ringed from top to bottom by the revolutions beneath her fingers. My job was to apply what Sally called the Vivian Touch.

  It was the best part of the whole undertaking and could mean many things. Often it involved me lending a hand by carefully poking a bit of wire between her fingers as they ran over the spinning wet vase and letting it dig along the surface to create a thin furrow. We used twigs and rocks for different effects. Sometimes we used silverware: the light touch of a tablespoon could give us a smooth shallow valley around the belly of a vase. A fork’s cat-clawe
d effect never failed to make us both whisper “ohhhhh” as I set the tines in. We experimented with leaves, flowers and cookie cutters, anything that would leave its mark.

  My personal favourite of all was the Punch. When a vase had dried just enough to hold its own, Sally would set it up on the table, hold it steady and ask me to punch it, producing a gaping hole that sometimes she would leave ragged, or other times she would smooth. Destruction and creation at once; it was intoxicating.

  Once the pieces were fired, Sally would introduce stiff fabric—organdy or a thick raw silk—wrap it into the spoon-grooves, stuff it through finger and fist holes and let it spritz out the top. And all the while, she would ask me about myself. Where was my father? He died before I was born. What was my mother taking at school? English stuff, I thought. Where did she work? She didn’t. How did she support us? That one stumped me at first. Then I recalled: we had an inheritance. Her parents were dead too. Sally’s forehead would furrow. “Is she sad?” she would often ask. “Is she feeling sad today?” “Was she blue yesterday?” “I never see anyone come over. Does she have friends?” “Josie’s so beautiful, she must have lots of boyfriends.” If my mother had a boyfriend, I’d never seen him. It didn’t occur to me my mother would ever want one. “She’s scared of men,” I said once, and Sally dropped what she was doing. Often when we’d talk about my mother, her eyes would scan my face and she would touch my hair, as though she were soothing Josie through me. The thought of Josie hurting was a new sad movie every day.

  After one of those conversations, Sally spun a round, deep bowl, smoothing it and working it for hours and hours, squinting and examining for flaws until she had something she believed was good enough to glaze. Once it had dried she brushed it all over with a heavy sunset yellow. A solid red circle went on one side. When the bowl was fired and glossy and shockingly bright, she put it in my arms and sent me home with it. “Tell her whenever she feels sad, she should put her hands on this bowl and it’ll be just like holding the sun.”