“Well, so what happened to the camera?” Timothy asks.
The plastic chair-seat sticks to the backs of Amy’s thighs and so she begins to lift her legs, one and then the other, again and again, and they make a satisfying sucking noise. Timothy must have been in a hurry this morning, she thinks, as she notices that he’s forgotten to do up the middle button on his shirt. She watches his white shirt move in and out as he breathes. She would like to put her hand against it and feel the rhythmic moving, the warmth of his breath.
“I think you should go up to your room for a while. I’ll come up in a few minutes,” Timothy says.
As Amy climbs the stairs she listens to the soft murmur of their voices. She goes over to the shelf of dolls and spies the trap Jill has set for her, the tiny sliver of paper cunningly placed among the folds of the green velvet dress of Melissa, Jill’s favourite doll. Its dislocation will be the proof Jill needs that Amy tampers with her dolls. All right, Amy thinks, as she goes over to the window, I won’t touch your shitty little dolls and I won’t tell you either about the man who can play two songs at once on his guitar. She sees Amy the squirrel dashing across a telephone wire across the street and then her heart lurches as the squirrel stumbles suddenly, almost falling. Then she sees Elsa Miller standing beneath a tree under the telephone wires, hidden. Elsa wears the same yellow sundress she’d worn the day before. Sunlight reflects off her sunglasses as she looks at the house. Amy sees Mel’s sandy-coloured square head move out from beneath the slope of the veranda roof. Jill limps after him, following him to the gate. They sling their arms across it and turn their faces to the ground as though their main concern is to count ants marching across a crack in the sidewalk. They ignore Elsa.
“I bet she does it with everyone,” Mel says.
Amy hears the telephone ring in the hall downstairs and Mel and Jill turn, hearing it too, and then look down again, two people, one motion. Margaret’s voice rises up from the hall. The telephone call is from her brother, Reginald, who relays the latest news about “that weird bunch” and repeats the gossip concerning the Miller women’s sexual proclivity.
“Elsa does what with everyone?” Jill asks, goading Mel into saying the word.
“Screws.”
“I don’t know about you.” Jill’s voice rises in a haughty tone. “I thought that’s what you wanted.” She flicks the gate’s latch, pushes off, and rides it open, then strides across the street towards Elsa, her arms swinging. Just then Margaret steps out onto the veranda.
“Breakfast,” she calls sharply. “Right now.”
“I’ll just be a second,” Jill says over her shoulder.
“Now.”
“I’ll wait here for you,” Elsa says.
Then Amy sees Timothy’s head appear from beneath the veranda roof. He goes over to Mel and winds an arm about his shoulders. “Hello, Elsa,” he calls. As Jill reaches his side, he puts his other arm around her and draws her away. “This gal’s gotta get some food into her,” he calls. “You know, Mel,” he says, his voice dropping, “I think that girl has a serious crush on you.” Their heads disappear beneath the roof of the veranda. “Ha, ha, ha, very funny,” Amy hears Mel say as the door closes behind them.
There is a strangeness in the house, a tension, and even though Timothy is home, Amy feels that she must be very careful. She must remember to look inside the closet before she goes to bed. She imagines that the scatter rugs in the hallway conceal gaping holes which she could fall through. She’d read her mother’s journal entry before going to bed last night. “I am a fool,” she had written. That was all, and so there was no way she could determine why Margaret threw the plate of sandwiches at the cat. Or why she was wearing Timothy’s bathrobe when usually she wore it only if the house was chilly or if she wasn’t feeling well. Amy believes that she is somehow responsible for this new strangeness in the house. That it may have entered the house with her the day she was struck by lightning.
She hears Timothy’s step on the stairs and so climbs up onto her bed and waits for him. She could tell him about the dirty pictures Mel has stashed in the left-hand pocket of his winter coat in the back of his closet. She could tell him that the reason why Jill got 95 per cent on her arithmetic final was because Mel paid Garth to smuggle a copy of the test from the principal’s office. But she can’t tell him that she was struck by lightning. The knowledge is hers and never to be given away. When she turns her head she looks straight into his face. He smiles and she feels secure in her nest of pillows. She likes how the gold fillings in his teeth shine with saliva when he smiles, how his voice always sounds as if he’s on the verge of a cold. She likes his round wire-framed glasses and how their lenses magnify his blue eyes. She loves the feeling of his lean and prickly jaw, the smell of tobacco that clings to his skin.
“Will you let me help you work on the car today?” Amy asks.
“Maybe.”
“Who was that on the telephone?”
“Your uncle.”
“Does he know who broke his window yet?” She could tell him that Mel had been drinking whisky. She knows most of Mel’s and Jill’s secrets but has learned the hard way not to tell. She has learned through the pranks they’ve played on her, the stealthy little hard pinches against her arms that leave her with bruises. “Amy certainly bruises easily,” Margaret says in a tone that implies that it is somehow Amy’s fault.
“Amy …”
“When Elvis comes to town, can we go?”
“Amy … so, what happened?”
“I saw him, in the city, in a park.”
“What happened to the camera?”
“The camera.” Amy realizes for the first time that she doesn’t have to say what happened to her. He only wants to know what happened to the camera.
“It was struck by lightning.”
Timothy’s cheeks puff with air. Then he expels it in a pop which she feels against her face. “In other words, an elephant sat on it. Okay, Sugar. I give up. It doesn’t matter.”
His hands cup her armpits as he swings her down from the bunk bed. She winds her legs around his narrow frame as he carries her down the stairs. She buries her nose in his warm neck. “Hey. No wiping boogers on my shirt, you hear?” She laughs and her heart burns with the desire to tell him that she may be able to fly. Although she didn’t wear one in her dream when she floated in the sky, she believes that she may need a cape, and so, to deflect her desire to tell him that she has been struck by lightning, she asks instead if next time when he comes home will he bring her a cape.
“What, as in a Red Riding Hood kind of cape?” Huh, huh, huh, his breath spurts from his chest as they descend the stairs.
“A magician’s cape. But it doesn’t need to be black.”
“You want the rabbits too?”
Amy thinks sometimes that the ache of her swelling heart will hurt her too much.
Mel and Jill sit at the table waiting for Margaret to serve their breakfast. “You will not be seeing Elsa today.” Her voice is strained and curt.
“How so?” Timothy asks and then grows silent under Margaret’s warning glance that says I’ll tell you later.
“So, what happened to the camera, then?” She asks the question to divert attention from a much more dangerous topic.
“It doesn’t matter what happened. That matter has been cleared up.” He drops Amy into her place and the farting chair says Woosh. He bows his head and they follow his example while Margaret hurries through a learned prayer. “And thus to thy service” signals the end of it. “Amen.”
As Margaret spoons scrambled eggs onto her plate Amy thinks about the mysterious entry in the Blue Book. When Margaret is finished serving and comes to sit down, Amy waits several moments and then she asks, “What does it mean, to be a fool?” and feels Margaret start forward in her chair.
5
t was mid-July and a day of rain; a fine mist which seemed to fill the air like a cloud rather than fall from the sky. As I stepped out the back
door of the Alliance Gospel Church, I breathed the mist deep into my lungs. The hall inside the church echoed with the sound of children’s voices singing the closing hymn for the day. I imagined Jill among them, leaning forward to look down the length of the pew, surprised to see that I had already left. Then I imagined Jill staring straight ahead, engrossed in the words of what had become her favourite song. There would be a pucker of flesh between her eyebrows as she sang the words, the expression that said she was thinking deeply.
When He cometh, when He cometh
To make up His jewels,
All His jewels, precious jewels,
His loved and His own,
Like the stars of the morning,
His bright crown adorning,
They shall shine in their beauty,
Bright gems for His crown.
Jill said she liked the song because it was strange. She sang it and crept around on tiptoe, curling her fingers and making I’mcoming-to-get-you shadows crawl up the bedroom wall at night. She wanted to frighten me with the notion of an invisible being reaching down in the dead of night to kidnap me and keep me hostage in heaven. “Why are you always in such a rotten mood these days?” Margaret had asked Jill constantly during the past several weeks, believing that it had to do with her not being allowed to chum about with Elsa any more. “It’s for me to know and you to find out,” Jill answered one day and that time it was Jill who was sent to her room to think things over.
Bunny’s right, it must be the heat, Margaret had said to herself, after sending Jill to her room. I think it’s gone to all of our heads. She went to answer the knock at the front door. It was the elderly Mrs. Hardy. She barely recognized the woman, whose normal attire had been baggy twill trousers and moth-eaten sweaters. “The old dame was wearing a floral two-piece,” Margaret would tell Bunny later, “a picture hat and nylon stockings with hiking boots!”
“Well hello,” Margaret said politely, but beneath I heard her impulse to laugh. “What a nice surprise.”
Mrs. Hardy nodded her greeting, some of her former curt self returning momentarily. She held out a mimeographed invitation for the three of us to attend the Alliance Gospel Summer School of the Bible. “We’d surely welcome their presence.”
Margaret had rolled her eyes dramatically as the door closed. “Not in a month of Sundays,” she said, but changed her mind when Grandmother Johnson arrived to worry at the prospect of the three of us going off to that “club thing” at the “Alliance place.” She wouldn’t say “church,” because the building didn’t resemble one. The square plain building looked more like a bingo hall, she said. “I know, dear,” she said to Margaret, “that it is important for the children to be occupied in the summer, but don’t you think those people are a bit too emotional in their approach to religion?” After she’d left, Margaret smiled and said, “Yes, I think you girls should go.” Mel couldn’t, of course, because Mel had a part-time summer job delivering groceries for Waller’s. Then Margaret wound woollen sweaters around her feet and skated up and down the kitchen floor singing, “May I go a-swimming mother? Yes, my darling daughter. Hang your clothes on yonder tree, but don’t go near the water!”
And so we had gone to Bible school, Jill and I. We listened to the lessons, coloured in our lesson books, stitched pictures in embroidery cotton, glued macaroni onto jars, sang songs, learned the steps we had to take in order to obtain eternity and how to say prayers that did not rhyme. I didn’t mind going because the basement where the classes were conducted was cool. It was new and smelled of raw wood and concrete, and behind the girl’s washroom there was a hole in the floor. Sometimes I slipped away from the lesson and squatted beside that water-filled hole and stirred its surface with a Popsicle stick and watched the slick-bodied salamanders slide away through the water.
As I walked away from the Alliance Gospel Church through the fine rain, the voices of the children grew fainter. More and more I had been thinking about the film inside Timothy’s camera, remembering the whirr of cogs feeding the film across the eye. I wondered if it was possible that I had captured the image of water parting and lightning streaking down in front of my face. I walked on a street that ran parallel to the one we lived on so that Margaret would not see me and wonder why I had left Bible school early. I could see our shade tree towering above all the others on the street. Green, I thought. There was one word that the people of Carona kept repeating that summer when they stopped to chat beneath the white columns of the bank or on the granite steps of the post office. It was the word “green.” “Isn’t it green?” they’d say as they looked out across the town, the lush trees swaying with leaves the size of saucers. “Sure is green.” Or, “This is the greenest summer ever.” I felt the lump of quartz as I pressed my hand against my pocket and the film box already addressed and ready for mailing off to the Kodak Company, protecting it against the drizzle of rain, not wanting it to soften.
I watched my sandalled feet move against the sidewalk. I passed by the legion hall, by a row of cars shiny with rain in front of the medical clinic, and by several people walking across its parking lot. I saw a grey-haired man in a dark suit get out of a car. “If the free world sacrifices its idealism to godless materialism there will be nothing to choose between communism and democracy,” he said to me. I crossed the street before he could say more. “It sure is green,” he called after me. The houses on either side of me began to disappear and I floated on top of the book, heading across the harbour and towards the city of my future.
I was almost clear of the town, having crossed two sets of railway tracks and passed the grain elevators. The sidewalk ended in tall grass and so I took to the gravelled road, until that gave way to black soil, as powdery and soft as the cornstarch Margaret used to thicken pudding, and the toes of my socks turned black. The misty rain was now so fine that I could barely feel the tingle of it against my skin. I heard the clatter of mower blades and then Alf’s voice geeing and clucking to the team of horses in the agricultural grounds, but I couldn’t see him. He was hidden from view by the covered grandstand that almost completely surrounded the racetrack. Alf would be in the centre of the track, cutting the grass to keep down the mosquitoes for the harness races.
And then I saw Mel, clearly not on his delivery route for Waller’s. Just his head and shoulders at first, as he ducked out from under the grandstand. He went over to his bicycle propped against a tree, turned, and headed off along the road that wound through Carona’s Family Park, passed by picnic benches that gave you splinters when you sat on them, the playground where children swung on rows of swings or made pretend cakes in the tractor tire sandpits where stray cats did their toilet. Margaret hadn’t allowed us to play in the sand when she used to take us there on hot summer days, Mel and Jill splashing in the cement dish of the wading pool, practising swearing, saying “cat shit,” while Margaret spread her blanket off from the other mothers so she could be in the shade, she said. She’d lie on a blanket reading Ernest Hemingway and wishing, I suppose, that she was in a tent in Africa with hyenas prowling about the edge of a camp. She could make him love her, Margaret probably thought while she read his book. I once took pictures of the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West and showed them to her. I told her about the cats, the urinal in the garden he’d carried home on his shoulder from Sloppy Joe’s bar, but at that time she showed only polite interest.
But when I was growing up I had the impression that the writer was somehow related and sent his books to Margaret, books that she read over and over while I wandered off by myself in the park, searching for acorns which I’d split open and eat. I paid for my grubbing about in the dirt with frequent invasions of pin worms that nearly caused me to dance with the itch of their movement in my anus, and Margaret to dance with fury while she boiled our bed sheets and towels and dispensed to the entire family regular doses of bitter-tasting pills. The reason why I preferred to wander by myself and not play in the wading pool with Mel and Jill was because of their constant whisper
ed threats to hold me under and drown me when Margaret wasn’t looking.
“I could make him love me,” Margaret had written in her Blue Book. Even before I had learned to read, she had written those words. Maybe she had written them when Timothy was off in Peterborough, Ontario. Margaret’s brother, Reginald, and my father had been fortunate during the war. They’d spent the war years in Ontario and Quebec in Supplies and Services. Reginald had been spared overseas duty on compassionate grounds, his age and large family. Timothy, because of his severe myopia. Bill North, the youngest of the three, wound up in the infantry and was sent to England to train on the moors and beaches in the First Canadian Army Tank Brigade and then sailed for Sicily. They had all returned and, unlike others in Carona – the Smythe brothers, for instance, who had been rewarded with jobs at the post office because one had a steel plate in his head and the other had returned uncommunicative and given to fits of ranting – the men in Margaret’s and Bunny’s lives returned unscathed.
Except for Decoration Day fifteen years after the war when we, the children of ex-service men, lined up on Main Street to march to the cenotaph and lay a wreath in memory of the dead, the war was a reality only in the minds of the fathers who had returned and refused to speak of it. The memory faded quickly and, in 1959, it wasn’t bomber planes people craned their necks to watch passing far above, but rather jet airplanes, which had begun to ply the highways of the sky. On clear nights I had watched for that dot of light, Sputnik, to sweep across the dark hemisphere. For us, the war was Audie Murphy crawling across no man’s land on a big screen, and when we’d return from the movie and go to bed we’d pray for God to send us portable radios and dream of becoming stewardesses and airline pilots.
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