by Melanie Mah
“Don’t look now,” she said as he came towards us, “but Captain Highliner’s coming.”
Each Monday for three months, a new theme was unveiled. Gene’s lessons ran the gamut from working out, dancing skills, and the use of money, to possible topics of conversation, confidence-building, and appreciating the inner you. From time to time, as each was doing his own thing — carrying freight or serving customers or whatever — they would see each other from across the room, and Gene would gesture as if to say I’m watching you, pointing two fingers at his eyes then one back at Reggie.
Reggie changed slowly, but in the end seemed like a totally different person. He started going outside, he tanned his face and hands though it was the dead of winter. He smelled better, too, like Hawaiian Tropics. His body got thicker, and he started talking in a lower voice, he practised his conversation skills on us, and asked me what I thought about nuclear arms and whether or not I’d seen the new Duran Duran video. I was eleven.
That spring, while in the library after school, I spotted Reggie outside through the window. Just his head and shoulders. He was there, then he wasn’t, then he was. I thought he might have been playing a game like peek-a-boo, but he wasn’t the playing kind and I was too old for baby stuff. I waved, but he didn’t acknowledge me, just kept going up and down. Nancy was sitting beside me, but she and everyone else were too busy playing mash and writing ghost stories to see what was going on. I got up, went to the window, and saw the full picture: Reggie squatting with a loaded barbell balanced across his shoulders, all alone on the school lawn with this weird faraway look of concentration on his face.
I wonder now if his mind wasn’t just on bearing the load. Was he thinking about something Mr. Calhoun had said earlier that day in Physics, or the revenge he’d take on Adam Lougheed, a C student who’d crushed him against lockers, calling him fag, chink, and worse since they started school together? Maybe he was registering the absurdity of lifting weights — didn’t we invent machines so we wouldn’t have to exert ourselves that way? Isn’t the body just a vessel for the mind? Maybe his thoughts were on what was waiting for him on the other side of all that work.
What was waiting was Peggy McInnes. Her brother Steve was a math and music geek a year ahead of me in school, in Trina’s year. I liked his big brown eyes, his slept-on brown hair that accidentally looked cool. I didn’t know anything about him. Trina said he was awkward. That was fine by me. I didn’t know Steve had a sister until Reg started dropping her name in conversation. She went to a different school, and kids in one school rarely know what’s going on in the others, even if they’re just down the street. Reggie started requesting things like tuna casserole and boiled peas for dinner, quietly explaining to us that those were Peggy McInnes’s favourite foods. He started saying things like, “Peggy’s dad is a doctor. She thinks I could be one, too.”
It wasn’t long before I met her. I agreed to a hangout at her house because I thought I might see Steve and because I was curious to see if she and Reg really were dating, and if so, what kind of girl he could attract.
Peggy was beautiful, though, a real charmer with green eyes and long blond hair. She giggled a lot, had a cute way of glancing around without moving her head when she was acting faux-suspicious. The first thing she did when we showed up at her place was compliment me. “You have beautiful hair,” she said. “I could braid it for you if you want.”
I’d never had a braid in my hair. Of course I wanted it.
Reg went to the living room to work on math puzzles with Steve while Peggy and I went to her room. It was pretty — big, pink, and clean. She sat on her canopy bed and asked me to sit in front of her. “Come on, closer,” she said, her voice like warm bread, and I moved up and thought about Steve in the next room and wondered if he thought about me. Peggy’s bedspread was a blanket made from bits of fabric with different flowery patterns on them. She started brushing, was really gentle about it, but I imagined her and Reggie kissing and it irked me. Years later, I realized that I always felt this kind of jealousy towards all the people my siblings ever dated. There was no one good enough for them. Peggy was close, though.
She had these weird-looking small guitars on her wall. I asked her about them. The bigger one was a mandolin and the smaller a ukulele. She told me about how she played them sometimes at out-of-town festivals and local seniors’ homes. There were ribbons tacked up near the window. I knew what they were for. Reggie had told me she trained her wiener dog Schweigen for dog shows.
When Peggy was done braiding my hair, we went out to the living room to rejoin Reggie and Steve. Out in the hall, framed awards hung on the walls. Peggy and Steve had another sister, Kathy, in Grade Nine. All of them got awards for achievement and attendance. Peggy had a few for excellence in science. Steve had two for math and one for trumpet-playing. Kathy had Home Ec awards. There were cookies on the table that Kathy had made. Peggy offered some to us. They were delicious.
I was amazed by how different our families were. We didn’t bake — we went for treat runs. And we had a lot of awards, too, but they were all stuffed in the drawer across the hall from the reading room. Stef had a guitar, but was terrible at playing. Paint was peeling from our walls, and a lot of our doors had holes covered over with brown-painted drywall from when Reggie and Gene, in separate fits of anger, had punched them. In comparison, Peggy’s house was pristine, clean as a baby’s stomach. I could tell that they dusted. I wondered if they’d ever cooked anything in a frying pan, since there was no grease on the walls.
AREOUND THAT TIME, Reggie’s scholarship offers started pouring in. He had some pretty hefty ones, full rides to the University of Michigan and the University of California in Berkeley. He was especially excited about the California scholarship. He said he wanted to practise his surfing. When I said he’d never surfed before in his whole life, he said that was beside the point.
One day the head of town operations, Bob Paquette, came into the store to tell Reggie to consider working for him after graduation.
“I don’t know,” Reggie said, scratching the back of his head. “I was thinking about going to university.”
“You’re eighteen,” Mr. Paquette said, “so don’t let me say what you can and can’t do. But you got a future ahead of you here. I can’t offer anything special, but I’ve got an opening for a meter reader. Say you do that, I could find some special projects, if they come up, keep things interesting. You keep at that long enough, you get promoted. It’s not a bad wage. Lots of people go to university and waste four years of their lives getting a piece of paper saying they can do something they could’ve done before if they’d had the connections. Well, here’s your connection.”
Reggie said he’d consider it, but he never really did. He and Peggy sounded like they were planning on going to the same university — I listened in some nights, when he snuck off downstairs to phone her. He told me he wanted to live with her, and we both knew he couldn’t do that in town.
My dad was always going on about the purity of the Chinese race, about how Chinese couples never divorced but white ones always did, about how our friends were just our friends because we had a bit of money. Whenever Stef or Trina’s guy friends came into the store and my dad saw, there’d be screaming fights after they left — between my dad and my mom, or my dad and Stef or Trina — even if the guys came in with their families. In the middle of one of those fights, my dad clutched his chest and we had to call an ambulance. No one wanted to see how he’d react to his first-born son living with a white girl.
In the end, Reggie chose the University of Michigan because they’d offered Peggy a scholarship, too. He told our parents what he’d decided one night after supper, and my mom started crying. My dad was sad, too, but back then, I’d only ever seen him cry twice, both times at the funerals of his brothers. He didn’t cry about Reggie. What he said was, “I’ll support you.” That meant he’d pay for anything the university didn’t.
“Oh, Ba. You don’t have
to do that,” Reg said. “I’ve got a full scholarship. That means they’re paying for everything.”
“Room and board?”
“Yep.” Reggie looked really proud of himself.
“What about fees?”
“Those, too. That’s the most expensive part.”
My dad bent over a bit then, like a part of his stomach had suddenly gone missing and he was looking down at where it had been.
Reggie sat our parents down and explained all of the logistics, like the fact that the University of Michigan was in Ann Arbor, a city whose crime rate was forty-eight per cent lower than the American national average, and that he would live in dorm, though he didn’t mention his room would be next door to Peggy’s. He told them he’d start in their general studies program and then transfer either to pre-med, law, or engineering, he couldn’t quite decide which. My mom thought he had some good ideas. Years later, she would pressure each of us into applying to programs in those same fields.
Reggie’s grades had slipped a bit that year, but he still made valedictorian. It was a strange feeling, seeing someone you know up on stage giving a speech. We were one long line of fancy, in the centre towards the front, trussed up in our most uncomfortable clothes. Us girls were in dresses, nylons, and jewellery borrowed from my mom, solid gold necklaces and pendants weighing on our chests. My dress was beautiful, black with dark red short sleeves, sash, and crinoline. The boys were in suits and stiff leather-soled shoes. Stef bought corsages for the girls and boutonnieres for the guys. My dad was surprised and happy she’d made the effort. Gene didn’t want to wear his but he did — “Just for Reg,” he said. I’d never worn a flower before, besides the daisy tiara I’d made in art class in Grade Three. When Stef put my corsage on me, it made me feel special.
I listened to Reggie’s speech, curious about what he’d say in front of all those people he didn’t know, all those people he did. I kept turning around to look at all the people behind us, expecting them all to be blown away by his brilliance. My dad kept talking in the middle of the speech, reminding everyone around us that was his son. I saw Peggy in the stands behind Reg, blending into the crowd of graduates. Earlier, she’d given the salute to teachers. Did she and Reg share any momentous looks or nods? Had they, at any point, walked past each other, brushing together? Did either of them make reference to the other in their speeches? There was nothing I saw. Knowledge of their relationship was like a line you were about to draw on a connect-the-dots puzzle.
After the ceremony, teachers, parents, and other graduates flocked around Reggie to offer conspiratorial small talk and congratulations. He looked at ease with them, in part, I think, because of Gene’s stud coaching. Then we took some pictures, some with just us and some with Reggie and his classmates. One group photo shows Reggie and Peggy crouching side by side in formless black gowns, shit-eating grins on their faces.
We left to have dinner at Giorgio’s, a family restaurant on the highway that we’d only gone to once or twice before, on really special occasions. After ordering, Trina asked Reggie when he was going to Grad Campout. He hadn’t said a word about it to my parents at that point, but we were all still thinking about what he’d told us the night before. His plan was to meet Peggy at the old coal shaft in Nordegg, and they’d be going to the campsite together. Two secret lovers meeting in the dark, with just the moon and two sets of headlights to guide them.
“Isn’t it romantic?” Trina said.
A thump under the table.
My mom perked up. “What’s so romantic?” she said.
“I am very romantic,” I said in overemphatic Cantonese, like I was a character in a kung fu period piece. “And you, you are also very romantic.” Everyone laughed.
The boys made small talk about the restaurant and the food other people were eating, while our parents asked Reg the same set of questions they’d asked many times before, ever since he’d announced his plans to leave the country.
My dad: “Are you sure you’ll have enough money?”
“Yes, Ba,” Reg replied, contemplating the door. “Look at how many people there are.”
“It’s a Thursday,” Gene reminded us.
“And look at how fancy everyone looks.” Reg sipped a beer, his face red as an apple. Normally my dad would freak out if we even so much as joked about ordering alcohol at a restaurant, but tonight was special. He even let the rest of us drink pop.
We went home. Reggie changed out of his suit and loaded a big old backpack and duffle bag into the back of my dad’s truck. I went to see him off. Outside, the night was warm and the sun still on the horizon, though it was well past nine, the sky in a fancy dress of colourful ribbons — pink, purple, yellow, orange. “Peggy looked really pretty tonight,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, and drove away. That was the last any of us saw of him alive.
THE COPS SAID that Reggie went full speed through the guardrail out on Five K Corner. It was a stretch of highway he’d driven on dozens of times. The truck was found by Darren Bigchild and a bunch of other Grade Elevens going out that way for Grad Campout. Some in that situation wouldn’t have stopped, but these guys did. They drove back to Spring Hills and alerted the cops, who came back with them and pronounced Reggie dead on the scene, while forties and Bacardi Breezers warmed in the trunk of Darren Bigchild’s dad’s Cavalier and cherries flashed through its windshield in the dark.
At the time I couldn’t figure out how Reggie died on a road he’d been on so many times. He’d been careful for eighteen years, never jaywalked, didn’t take risks, never even broke a bone, and he’d only ever gone to the hospital to visit other people. I brought up the Chinese fortune teller in conversation once, but Stef said it couldn’t be that. It was carelessness and random chance and about a million other factors, and she was mad at me for suggesting otherwise. Well, I’m not sure if I agree with her now, but I’ve thought about it, and there are other explanations, including two that are pretty convincing. The first is the beer at Giorgio’s — probably the first one Reg had ever had, and he was probably a little drunk. The second is desire. At the time of the accident, both Reggie and Peggy were probably still virgins — Trina said she could tell by the way they interacted — but a few hours later, maybe they wouldn’t have been. Now I’m no expert on male psychology, but you have to wonder what the anticipation of first-time sex with a beautiful girl does to a guy who’d been a geek for most of his life.
Still, I can’t help but think that Reggie picked a fine time to die. Most of his life was a dull, diligent investment in an impossibly bright future. He’d seen signs of it coming, all the scholarships, that town job offer, being valedictorian, Peggy. Reggie had never failed at a single thing he put his mind to, but to live is to fail, isn’t it, at least some of the time? It’s almost as if he’d spent his whole life building a house of cards. Painstaking, time-consuming work. The house got bigger and bigger, got palatial rooms with little card chairs and little card tapestries — and the bigger and more elaborate it got, the more devastating it would’ve been when it all fell down. And at some point it had to. He didn’t live long enough for that to happen. It’s a kind of blessing.
Once, on the cbc, I heard about a mobile abattoir. Basically it’s run by this guy who drives around southwestern Ontario with a rifle. Farmers book appointments with him, and he tells them not to feed their chosen cow or pig for twelve hours — long enough to make them hungry, not so long that they’re suffering. At the end of those twelve hours, he comes and puts some feed in front of them. Comfortable, at home, with their head in a bucket and all their needs taken care of, they hardly notice the buckshot going through their brains.
9
*
IN THE MORNING, Dr. spade comes in and asks me how I am. I say great. I’m not ready to die, though it would have been nice to miss some school. Nothing like being in the hospital on a school day to make you feel like a hero among your friends.
“You hit your head pretty hard,” she says.
“Your hip, too. You’re lucky it isn’t worse.”
“I don’t feel lucky.”
She helps me out of bed and administers Check Stop tests, shows me leg exercises, and gives me a prescription for the pain and an antiseptic cream for my stitches. They’re starting to hurt a lot. She wraps new bandages around my head, tells me I’ll need to change them a couple of times a day and to keep the area around the stitches clean and dry.
“Can I wash my hair?” I ask.
“It’s better if you don’t, but if you do, you need to do it carefully. It’s best if you get someone to help.”
Like who? I want to ask, but don’t.
She says I may have trouble keeping balance over the next few days and that I should call her if anything weird happens before sending me home. Luckily, Spring Hills is practically deserted most Sundays, and nobody I know sees me when I walk into the pharmacy with bandages around my head like I’m five per cent mummy. It’s a post-apocalyptic film inside, everything glossy, white, and quiet. Only one other person shopping here, a short woman with long dark hair. I approach but the look on her face like get the fuck away is like a shot to the brain and I wobble off, get bandages and gauze and my prescription filled, and go home.
The sounds of my key in the front door, and the slide click of the lock opening, are two of the better ones I’ve heard in a while. I go up the stairs, and for a second, I see the way my parents are when I’m not there. My pockmarked, grey-haired dad on the couch, clutching his glasses, his angry sleep face. My mom slouched in her armchair, looking bored, her black and white hair standing up and her legs curled out like crooked plants on the ottoman, huge flaking corns on her feet. She’s feeble, like he is, but lacks his medical record, just has a heart that goes too fast when she runs from one end of the store to the other, so fast I’m afraid it’ll pop. She’d literally rather die than see a doctor — the last time she went was probably to have me. My dad, on the other hand, has so many problems with his body and has had so many near-misses, including car accidents, being a victim of armed robbery three times, falling into a rice field when he was a boy, getting lost in storms, the Sino-Japanese War.