by David Bergen
Fish called out, “In the lip, hit him in the lip,” and he ran to his father and jumped onto his lap. “Who? Who?” he asked. Lewis placed a large finger against his son’s mouth. He looked over at Lizzy and said, “Next time, knock, all right?”
Lizzy was still standing in the doorway. She rolled her eyes and said, “Jesus Christ. Who am I? The nanny?”
Her mother groaned. With the cloth still covering her eyes, she told Lewis that she had misbehaved the day before. She’d been so frightened by the possibility that Fish might have died, that she’d blamed Lizzy. She said that she’d thrown her fear onto Lizzy. She called for Fish. “Come,” she said.
Lizzy glanced at her father, who was studying her mother with what seemed utter weakness. The argument they had been having, the one in which he was going to hit a man, probably the Doctor, in the lip, seemed to have been forgotten. Lizzy realized that her parents, even when in conflict, were a team. And she was only their daughter. She felt acute sadness, a deep pity for herself. She left Fish with her parents and went back to her cabin and changed into jeans and a flannel shirt. William was sitting on the floor, studying his collection of glass jars, into which he had placed bugs and worms and pieces of grass and leaves. He had, in the last while, become a collector like Emma Poole, who he sometimes followed about. Lizzy had seen him talking to Emma, asking her questions, showing her his own collection of bugs. Everett was lying on his bunk, watching Lizzy. He wore shorts and his bare legs were long and bony and his feet, reflected in the mirror of the bureau, appeared oversized. He had inherited his father’s feet. They were scooped slightly, shaped like spades.
“Where you going?” Everett asked. “Can I come?”
Lizzy pulled her hair into a ponytail and shook her head. “I’m tired, Ev. Anyway, I’m going to visit a friend.” She had not known of her own intentions until she said the words. And then, after saying them, it became clear that this was what she wanted; to ride the bicycle up to the golf course and meet Raymond. She asked Everett if he was going to be okay.
“Yes,” he said. “I guess.”
She said that he should go play chess with Harris or someone. She said she wouldn’t be long.
As she rode up towards the golf course she saw cattails in the ditch, and small birds that swept along beside her, and she felt the warmth of the evening sun against her neck. Lizzy thought of her mother on the bed with the wet cloth across her forehead, her arm thrown backwards as if she were falling, and the weak defence that she had offered. Her mother only cared when something threatened to brush too close to her life and alter her happiness: Fish drowning, her husband accusing her of some betrayal, Lizzy opposing her.
The golf course wasn’t far from the Retreat, and she realized that she had never considered whether Raymond would be finished work, or whether she’d be interrupting him. He wasn’t expecting her and he hadn’t exactly invited her, and this filled her with a feeling of excitement. Maybe he would tell her to turn around and go home. A few days earlier, she’d borrowed the Retreat’s pickup and driven to town because her father wanted her to be more independent, and Everett had come along and they’d bought food at the Safeway. Later, they’d driven down to the wharf by Canadian Tire and sat on the benches close to the houseboats. A group of men had approached them. The men were drunk and one, older than the others, had asked for beer or money, or anything of value. He’d said the word value and Lizzy had looked up into his dark and slightly ravaged face and she’d thought of Raymond and wondered if Raymond knew this man. And then the thought had flown away.
She had been writing lately. Her letters to Cyril had become letters to herself, and when she mentioned this fact to Harris several days ago, he had encouraged her. He offered suggestions, he told her that the material world had much to offer, and that it was dangerous to be too ephemeral or romantic. She had thought at first that he was talking about falling in love with an actual person, and then she’d understood that Harris was referring to language and words. He’d said, “Name things. If a shoelace is blue, say that it’s a blue shoelace. Or, play with some variation of it. And, of course, lie. You have to lie to make everything clearer.” She’d wondered about this and decided she didn’t have to lie. She’d written something about her mother, about the bone-coloured dress her mother liked to wear, and the buttons that were like tiny bones themselves, and about the shape of her mother’s bones within the dress. And the bone of her mother’s wrist cracking as she fell down the stairs. “How nice to imagine the snap of my mother’s ulna.”
The clubhouse was lit up and inside there were two men drinking at a small round table. Looking through the large plate-glass windows, Lizzy thought she saw Raymond, but it turned out to be another, a younger boy, who was wiping the tables. She stood alongside her bicycle, near to Raymond’s pickup, and she wondered if she had made a mistake. She was about to climb on her bike and return home when Raymond appeared. He did not seem particularly happy and so, as he approached, she said, “I shouldn’t have come.”
He looked behind him, and up at the sky, and then back at her and he said, “Did someone tell you that?”
She said, “No, but it’s strange, me standing here waiting for you. I mean, we didn’t plan this.”
Without asking, he took her bike and laid it in the back of his pickup and he got in. Tentatively, as if still expecting to be scolded, she climbed in and shut the door, which creaked and then clicked.
“Another day, another dollar,” Raymond said. He turned and said that this was a surprise. A good one though. Then he told her that he used to caddy for an older woman who wore pink skirts and now she had married a Texan and was living in the States. He said that it was funny because he knew nothing about golf. He had been a mule, that was all. He said that his brother Marcel claimed that the woman had probably liked young boys. “You know.”
The cab of the pickup, as they sat there, not moving, felt like a small room, and Lizzy felt safe as she listened to Raymond’s voice inside that room. She asked where Marcel was.
“He lives in Montreal. He calls me sometimes and lectures me on life. He’s a lawyer, so he figures that’s his job.” He said that Marcel didn’t like white people. Lizzy looked at Raymond, as if to see if this were a joke. She couldn’t tell.
The two men who’d been drinking in the clubhouse walked out onto the parking lot, their golf shoes clicking on the pavement. Raymond waited till they had left and then pulled a joint from his front pocket. “You smoke?” The match flared and revealed his right eye.
She shook her head.
“Never, or just not now?” he asked.
“I never have,” she said, and she felt embarrassed.
He held it out to her and told her to try. It was nothing, he said, just a little buzz in the brain. For floating.
She took the joint, raising it to her mouth, and then pulled and exhaled, coughing.
“Hold it as long as you can,” he said, and motioned her to go again. She did, and closed her eyes this time to concentrate, aware of expectations and the need to discover some small key that would unlock her longing. And then, as if to throw off some awkwardness, or perhaps to fill in the blank spaces she thought might exist, she began to talk. She told Raymond that she had come up to see him here because she didn’t know where else to go. She’d been angry at her mother and she didn’t want to stay back with her family and so here she was. She said that her mother never talked to her. She always talked at her, through someone else. This had always been the case.
She paused. Said, “Oh, boy. Fuck my mother.”
“Okay,” he said, and he laughed and told her that he was joking. He took tweezers from his front shirt pocket and used them to hold the last bit of joint. He said that the night before he’d gotten stoned with Nelson, and everything had been very funny. He could get Lizzy a little bag, neatly packaged, fresh. “I have a great supplier. A seventy-five-year-old man who lives in town. White. Big citizen. Used to own some fancy shop. Now he sells g
reat shit to kids. Weird.” He pulled in smoke from the little bit of joint that was left and offered a last drag, but she waved his hand away, thinking that this was not what she had imagined. The weed was doing nothing good for her. She felt a little dizzy, but that might be her own sense of panic. Raymond had slid down in his seat so that his head was resting against the top of the seat. He had lifted his right leg and rested his boot on the dash and she realized that he was far away. She felt disappointment. She said that she should go. She had to go. She opened her door and waited for him to stop her but he was just looking at her. Then he said that she probably wasn’t as far along as him and he could fire up another, to help her. Or, he said, they could walk out on the golf course. He liked doing that at night, when everybody was gone, and the animals came out. He said that animals were beautiful. He dropped his leg, opened the door, and said, “Let’s go.” And he walked out down the fairway, with Lizzy tentatively trailing behind him. It was fully dark now and the bushes were black and the grass at her feet was black; she could only see the sky above her, which opened up onto far too many stars, which swam and fell.
“What kind of animals?” She ran slightly to catch up to Raymond.
He lay down on the short grass of a green and told her to join him. “Don’t worry,” he said.
She laughed and said, “I’m not worried.” And saying this, she began to calm down.
They lay side by side and gazed up at the sky. Lizzy could hear Raymond breathing, and though she wanted to turn her head to look at him, she didn’t. He began to talk. He said that he had hardly known his father and that his mother had died when he was six. Ever since, his grandma had raised him. He loved his grandma. She was there, and sometimes he thought she might always be there, though he knew that that was impossible. He said that last year a cousin had told him his father was living in Winnipeg, and so he’d taken the bus to the city and looked for him. “That was the easiest part. Took me half an hour. Asked a few people where Tom Seymour was and they led me right to a bar off of Main Street.” He said that he had lived with his father for a while then, but it was awful. His father stole from him, and he wasn’t interested in talking, and he had a girlfriend called Clara, who thought Raymond was going to take his father back home to Kenora. “So, she didn’t like me much. I lasted a few weeks and then went back to my grandma.”
She said, “When your brother went to live with that family? Was he in some kind of trouble?”
Raymond didn’t respond at first and Lizzy thought maybe she’d said something wrong. Then he said, “It wasn’t a big deal. It was decided he would live somewhere else. The government has its plans.” He paused. Then asked if she played basketball. She said that she didn’t, she wasn’t any good at sports.
He said that he was a good point guard and if they were on the same team and she were just a little free, if she had even just one hand free, he would get the ball to her. “Pinpoint passing,” he said. “That’s what my coach always told me.”
The sound of Raymond’s voice lifting and then fading made Lizzy shiver. She’d been hearing Raymond, aware that even as he spoke he seemed ill at ease to be speaking. And so, attempting to find some balance in the conversation, she talked about her mother. She said that these days her mother seemed unhappy and that this made her father unhappy. “They’re all twisted together.” Then she said that she had had too much opportunity to watch adults these days, and she had discovered that most adults wanted what they couldn’t or didn’t have, and they would hurt people to get it. She said that when she was older and married, or if and when she had a lover, she would not be weak. She said, “Wouldn’t it be right, if someone is being betrayed, that they stand up for themselves?”
Raymond took her hand. She opened her palm and received his hand, and then closed her fingers around his. She was trembling.
He asked if she was cold and she said no, that sometimes her body shivered when it was happy. She said that she would like to run away like he had.
He said that he hadn’t run. His uncle had given him the cabin to use every spring and summer. He said that running away meant leaving everything you knew and understood, and finding a place that was completely unknown, where you could be a different person. “You don’t want that.”
Lizzy thought how clear and true this sounded and she was surprised that he would have the knowledge to say these words. She was about to say something, when he kissed her. He was suddenly up on one elbow and leaning into her and his mouth was on hers and then he was finished and lay back beside her, looking up at the sky.
He was quiet for a while and Lizzy thought he might have fallen asleep, but then he turned and he took her head in his hands and this time his tongue was in her mouth, and she considered pulling away but she didn’t, and his hands were around her neck and up and down her arms and he was making noises and she breathed deeply so that his smell would stay with her the rest of the night. They kissed for a long time and Raymond touched her breasts through her shirt and she let him.
Then she said that that was enough for tonight, that she felt like a cup that was spilling over and she didn’t want to waste anything. They walked back to the truck without touching. Lizzy was slightly ahead of Raymond, aware of the silence between them, but knowing too that the silence might be all right. He smoked a cigarette while he drove her back to the Retreat, and he offered her a drag now and then, which she took willingly, thankful to keep herself busy. She was still shivering a little, and thought it might be the wetness from the grass against her clothes.
Just before she got out of his pickup, and before he lifted her bicycle from the back, she said that there was going to be a dance at the Retreat on the weekend. He should come, she said. And Nelson too. And anyone else he wanted to invite. He should come for supper as well.
He said that he had been at one dance there last summer, so he knew about them. Besides, the Doctor liked it when he showed up for dinner or at the dance. “He likes to hang out with an Indian or two.” He smiled and said that he might come.
She thought he might want to kiss her good night, but this did not happen, and it did not trouble her. He simply got into his pickup, waved goodbye, and was gone.
In bed, later, she lay staring up into the darkness and she touched her throat where Raymond’s hands had been. He had calluses on his fingers and his hands were large, and they had encircled her throat and she had felt his strength. She willed herself to dream of him, to fall into the shadows and find him there. But she did not. She dreamed instead of following a man whose face she never saw, who led her down a twisting path that was thick and matted with branches. They arrived finally at a clearing where there was shade and sunlight and she knew, waking from this dream, that there had been danger in that place.
On Saturday evening after dinner, the furniture in the Hall was pushed back and fairy lights were strung at the edges of the walls and across the ceiling. The room still smelled of fried sausage from the dinner, but someone, Mrs. Byrd perhaps, had lit candles and placed them in low glass jars on the sills of the windows, and the waxy scent of the candles eventually overwhelmed the smell of the food. Ian, a young man who had arrived with his girlfriend Jill just the week before, had a collection of records. Jill and Ian ventured out onto the floor first, moving to “Love Train.” Then Mrs. Byrd joined them, sliding across the floor all alone to “Some Kind of Wonderful.” She was wearing a white skirt with pleats and an orange top, loose and thin. She had wrapped a colourful scarf around her new cast, and she danced with her eyes closed, arms slightly raised. She was barefoot. Lizzy watched her mother and felt both mortified and envious. She wondered if her father would show up.
Fish wandered out onto the floor and Lizzy followed him. This brought out the rest of the adults and children, save for Big Billy, who sat in a corner eating chocolate cake. William, in a rare moment of abandonment, danced and skipped about the room. At some point, to the sound of “Free Ride,” Emma had her arms around Franz’s neck and Mrs
. Byrd was dancing with the Doctor, one of her hands pushed against his chest, the other around his waist. She was looking up into his face, and she was talking, her white teeth flashing.
Margaret came in, holding a plate with raw carrots and broccoli and a parsley dip. She put the food on the table and walked over to Lizzy’s mother, tapped her on the shoulder, and stole her husband back. Mrs. Byrd let go easily, still moving her feet to the music, and it seemed to Lizzy her mother wasn’t worried that she appeared to be openly flirting with the Doctor. Lizzy made a decision to go look for her father. She found him in his cabin, a book in his lap, but he didn’t appear to be reading. The music drifted faintly across the clearing. She went to him and took his hand and pulled him up and said, “Come, Daddy, we’re dancing.” He said that he was not particularly interested, and she said, “You should be,” and she hooked her hand under his arm and led him out his cabin door. She saw Raymond’s pickup at the edge of the clearing, and her heart moved.
When she entered the Hall he was sitting with Nelson, a large woman older than him, and a young girl. The four of them were on chairs near the back wall. She waved at them and Raymond waved back. Then she walked her father out onto the dance floor. “Relax,” she said and she put her arms lightly around his neck, and they danced to Marvin Gaye. He said that some Woody Herman would be nice, and just then her mother passed by and said, “Hi, Lewis,” and Lizzy handed her father to her.
She had noticed Raymond watching her dance, so she went to him now and said, “Here you are.”
“I am,” he said. He introduced the young girl, said her name was Lee, and that she was his niece. “And this is her mother, Reenie, my sister.” He motioned at the larger woman who wore around her neck a crucifix that seemed to have been hammered from scrap metal. She said hi to Lizzy and then laughed and turned her head. Lizzy thought she might be nervous. Lizzy said she had a brother, Everett, who was maybe close to Lee’s age. He was fourteen. She pointed out at the dance floor, where Everett and William were dancing near to their parents. Lizzy reached for Raymond’s hand and said, “Come.” He followed her, and when they reached the centre of the room, she moved around him as he shuffled his feet. She said that she was glad he was here.