B07FRVD7VN

by Karen Foxlee

  “I just lost track of time,” I said but she grabbed me by my skinny arm in her shrine-to-the-moon-landing kitchen. Neil Armstrongs and Buzz Aldrins watched the scene. She wheezed while she was thinking what to say to me. She knew more than my mother. More than CJ. Much more than Mr. King.

  She put her lipsticked mouth on my forehead. I tried to wriggle my way free but her doughy hands held me tight.

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  Davey was watching Wonder Woman. He hadn’t even looked up when I came in, but I could tell he was listening. He was looking forward to hearing it. I could tell it all the way from the kitchen.

  “Tell you what?” I pleaded.

  “Tell me where you go.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said and I crinkled up my forehead in mock confusion. My heart took off at a gallop.

  “You know what I am talking about, Lenora Spink.”

  Mrs. Gaspar blasted me with her cigarette breath. I didn’t like Mrs. Gaspar. In fact, I decided, I never had. I didn’t like her and her big smiling Jesus and her wet blessings and her stupid dreams.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I thought she might snap my arm in two, she held it so tight.

  “You go out the front door and you cross the road,” said Mrs. Gaspar. She let go of my arm. She turned her hand upside down and wiggled her fingers like running legs. “You are running, running, running.”

  “No I don’t,” I tried.

  “Pah, you think I am a fool. I watch you. And then an hour, two hours later, back you come galloping. You go to see someone and I want to know who,” she said.

  I looked at the floor.

  “You are lying,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “Little girls who lie, don’t you know what happens to them?”

  “I’m not a little girl,” I said.

  “Tell me where you go,” she demanded.

  “You can’t make me,” I said.

  “There is trouble coming,” said Mrs. Gaspar, shaking her head. “Big trouble coming. And it’s all inside you.”

  Spaghetti

  5’ 6”

  NOVEMBER 1976

  The last time Mr. King came to dinner we were in the Ms. The Ms were massive. The two volume covers that were required to contain all the M things of the world read Macau to metabolism. Metal to mythology. The Ms were going to take months but already there was the Mackenzie River that led to Great Bear Lake and Davey was happy. He traced his finger along its course, imagined building his log cabin there.

  Mr. King came for dinner for the last time and it was spaghetti. Mr. King’s appetite for spaghetti seemed to know no bounds. That night he had three bowls like he was trying to get in as much spaghetti as he could before he was asked to leave. Like he somehow knew that was his last night in our apartment, only no one knew it yet, not even him.

  He was just waiting for those words he loved to hear: “Okay, you two, go and brush your teeth.”

  You could tell he was counting down the seconds. It was ten seconds to blast-off.

  I lingered at the living room door, looked at Mother, but she shooed me with her hand.

  We lay in our beds in the dark, listening to the pigeons and Mr. King’s and Mother’s murmuring voices. I thought about the dung beetle which can pull one thousand times its body weight. I imagined if Matthew Milford and I had dung beetles instead of crumb-lifting ants in our Olympic stadium. I would have a beetle called Hercules and he would have a beetle called Hulk and it would be a great contest. I was bingeing on beetle-thinking so I didn’t have to think about anything else.

  “Lenny, where do you go?” whispered Davey in the dark.

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “Sisters shouldn’t lie to brothers, just like brothers shouldn’t lie to sisters,” he said.

  “I’m not lying,” I lied.

  He was quiet then and it was way worse than if he’d said more.

  We lay in the silence listening to the murmuring through the wall. Sometimes I felt like Charlie the stick insect, completely stuck in the bug catcher of my family.

  “I promise I’ll tell you soon,” I said.

  “Do you really, really promise?” he asked.

  “I really, really promise,” I said.

  Then we heard a shout. It was Mother, shouting, “NO!”

  It was a terrible no.

  I jumped up fast. Davey too. We ran out into the living room and Mr. King was on the floor. He was on his back like a round dung beetle that couldn’t get up.

  “Get out,” said Mother.

  He struggled there on the floor, rolled himself over onto his knees.

  “Get out, I said,” cried Mother because he was going too slowly. He stood up and glared at us. He grabbed the keys to his Ford Gran Torino with great effect.

  He said, “You’ll be sorry for this.”

  And that was the last time Mr. King ever came to our apartment for dinner.

  The Junior Sales Club of America

  5’ 6”

  NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1976

  After Mr. King, Mother was calm. She brushed her teeth and brushed her hair. She tucked us in and kissed us on the heads. When we tried to talk about it, she said, “Hush, now, we don’t have to think about him anymore.” And in the morning, she was still calm too. She put on her pink uniform and tied up her hair and smiled. But it was a dreadful calm. An empty calm. She was like the Mary Celeste drifting at sea. She was the Cindy Spink, all perfectly in order on the outside, but empty below decks.

  The next day rain came. Endless rain. Biblical rain. Rain that drenched you through in seconds. Davey and I walked to school in that rain, his imaginary golden eagle on his shoulder. We wore our raincoats, but we still got wet. That rain had a way of getting in everywhere. We crossed the road so we didn’t have to pass Mr. King’s “King of Fruit” Fruit Store where our mother didn’t work anymore.

  She stayed calm all that week. She didn’t cook any of our normal dinners, as though she couldn’t bear to make meatloaf or spaghetti or pot pie ever again. She made us scrambled eggs and poached eggs and once just toast with honey. The rain fell down past my window and the rain sadness flower opened up inside my heart. I thought of sad things. All the beetles clinging to leaves. All the kittens lost without mothers. Great-Aunt Em streets away with the rain falling past her window. Mother asked about our days. She scraped the leftovers off our plates onto her “King of Fruit” Fruit Store shirt lying crumpled at the bottom of the trash.

  We read quietly in the evenings, whispered our way through Macedonia, Machu Pichu, magma, Manitoba. Magic, Middle Ages, medicine.

  She said Davey could apply for the Junior Sales Club of America even though he had already applied. He had the greeting cards and his press-out membership card and the crummy little flag to stick in his cap.

  Mother said, “I don’t really like the idea of you going door to door, but Lenny can go with you.”

  “I’m not selling greeting cards,” I said. “I’m not. I’ll tie myself to my bed if you try to make me.”

  She didn’t yell like she normally would. She said, “Please do this for me, just this once, Lenny.”

  We went business to business, cowering under the eaves along Second Street selling the greeting cards on Saturday morning. Davey had his heart set on the Dacron sleeping bag and nylon tent. For that he needed to sell thirty-five boxes of cards. Mr. Kelmendi didn’t buy any although he went painstakingly through each and every card in the box. Davey tried his hardest to sell him a box. I knew it was going to be a long day.

  Miss Finny bought one and she checked the length of his pants, even though he hadn’t grown an inch, which was annoying because then Davey sat in her little changing room in his underpants, telling Miss Finny all about the sleeping bags and nylon tents and transistor radios. The wooden guitar, the butterfly net, the complete fishing set.

  He sold a box at the bank.

  No boxes to the Three Brothers Trapani.

  He didn’t sell enough
to even get the field glasses, which was the lowliest of all the prizes. He was not even close to the field glasses.

  “Man, I really need that sleeping bag,” said Davey and he was shouting above the rain just so I could hear him. “But I can’t even get to the field glasses.”

  “Just focus on the field glasses and working toward them,” I shouted back. We were wet and shivering. “It’s only our first day selling.”

  “But I don’t even want field glasses,” shouted Davey. “I don’t even know what they are.”

  “They’re glasses that help you see in fields, idiot,” I said. “For a long way. Like on a prairie.”

  “Like in Saskatchewan.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “So field glasses might come in handy,” he said and smiled even though his Junior Sales Club cap flag was limp and soggy. You seriously never met anyone more optimistic than Davey.

  We started walking home. We saw Mr. King unloading some fruit from a truck in front of his shop. There was a new woman working there now. She was wearing the shirt with the banana on the pocket. The rain dripped down my face and I didn’t know I’d even stopped until Davey pulled me by the hand.

  “Come on, Lenny,” he said.

  But Mr. King looked right through us like he didn’t know us. He looked right through us like we had never been in his Ford Gran Torino, and he had never sat at our table eating meatloaf. Like he’d never been asked to leave on spaghetti night for trying to kiss our mother. It was a strange thing and it ruffled me. It made me ruffled the way I saw Mother get ruffled. I wanted to stick out my quills. I wanted to grab a rock and throw it through his stupid fruit shop window, only his window wasn’t glass, but an awning that he pulled down. And there were no rocks. I’d have to walk all the way to the park to find one. That was the bad thing about living in the city.

  In Great-Aunt Em’s stories there were rocks everywhere. There were ravines. There was gunfire and horses thundering down dusty streets. I winced, Great-Aunt Em a jagged secret inside me.

  That rain sadness flower opened up even wider inside me and it hurt.

  More of the Ms, the Ms never ended. Machines, Madrid, mammoths. Magnifying glasses and magnets. Mapmaking, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana. Mantises, midges and millipedes. Music and the moon.

  Davey’s Sea-Monkey kit had arrived. The small package lay there on the floor beside Mr. Petersburg’s letters from the Folsom State and Marion penitentiaries. Davey picked it up slowly and swallowed hard. He looked terrified. He was the world’s worst liar. But Mother wouldn’t have noticed if he’d built a giant aquarium in the living room and life-size Sea-Monkeys floated around right in front of her eating ice-creams. Mother lay on her bed like a statue of a lady on top of a tomb. The rain came down and it felt like we were going to be washed away.

  I ran in that rain to Fifth Street. I ran in that rain wanting to see Great-Aunt Em, but frightened of it too. I didn’t know how I’d find her. Sometimes she was cheerful and other times sullen. “I’ve got no food in my refrigerator,” she said, like it was my doing. “How about you run down to the store and get us some supper?” She had a small green plastic purse and she gave it to me. She wrote a list that was more than just things for supper.

  I took a prescription to the pharmacy for her. She had to take a lot of medications for her heart because it was old, she explained to me.

  “Tell Mrs. Spink we’re out of her pain pill, but we’ll have new stock in the morning,” said the pharmacist.

  “Okay,” I said and I wondered at the Mrs. again, longer this time, because to my knowledge Great-Aunt Em had never been married.

  On the way home, I looked at her name on the prescription, and sure enough it said Mrs. E. Spink, which didn’t make any sense at all. I tried to compute it right there on the street. If Esmeralda was my father’s mother, she was married to someone with the last name Spink. If Em was her sister, how did she end up being a Spink too, and a Mrs., unless she also married someone named Spink? A new doubt settled in my heart and I tried to cover it over, like a dog burying a bone.

  “So can you remember my cousins?” I asked her. The rain poured down past her window. I shivered in my half-wet clothes. “What their names were?”

  “Well now,” she said. “Let me think about that. There were two girls, I’m thinking, and maybe a boy. But it’s such a long time ago. And they left town without so much as a goodbye.”

  “I wonder how old they are,” I said.

  “Well, I just don’t know,” she said. “I only ever met them once. They were the children of Peter, I believe.”

  “But I’m the child of Peter,” I said and giggled, but I felt queasy too.

  I told her about Mr. King and Mother. I told her about Mr. King’s shop. I told her of my desire to throw a rock.

  “You should throw it,” said Great-Aunt Em and she cackled hard and it made me laugh too. I laughed as hard as I could so it might wash all my doubts away.

  But I kept thinking of the prescription. The cousins she didn’t know. How she never remembered my father’s name.

  “Come again soon. Please come again, Lenny Spink. You’re the best of the Spink girls,” she said.

  I longed to know the others. I covered that doubt, I buried that doubt deep as I could. I ran home through those night-coming streets. The rain was icy and there was a new wind now. Mother said, “Where on earth have you been? What is going on, Lenore?” She rubbed my frozen hands. Her cheeks were wet like she’d been crying.

  While Mother ran me a bath, Mrs. Gaspar watched from in front of our television.

  “Tell me, where have you been?” said Mother.

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I just started walking and then it was a long way home.”

  “Pah,” said Mrs. Gaspar from on the sofa, a plume of smoke rising from her ashtray.

  The very next day the wind chased the rain away and the skies grew clear and deep. CJ’s fine blonde ponytails whipped around her face. She buried my cold hands inside her mittens. I wanted to say to her, I feel scared. Because I did. But I couldn’t because I didn’t know what I was scared of. The wind banged things and caused a ruckus. It crashed against our classroom windows begging to come in.

  I slept at the Bartholomews’ house and CJ’s drum kit filled up one whole section of their living room. She played for me. She got me so that I was tapping my feet and she smiled devilishly as she did it all. But I still felt scared.

  Mrs. Bartholomew asked how Davey was doing after his operation.

  “He’s as good as new,” I said.

  “So it was a tumour in his brain?” asked Mr. Bartholomew. He was shining everyone’s shoes in a long row. Girls’ shoes, all of them, except his own. I tried so hard to not watch him.

  “Yes,” I said. “He had a brain tumour.”

  “Do they think that’s it then, he’ll stop growing?”

  “Enough questions,” said Mrs. Bartholomew, and she looked sternly at her husband. “You two go up and play.”

  Then I felt more scared. I covered it up by being funny. We read aloud from the list of the names of JC’s future babies that she’d taped to the wall. We said them in silly voices. “Valerie,” I squawked. “Tiffany,” grunted CJ. Jacqueline, Claudine, Pamela, Heidi.

  “Heidi!” we both screamed.

  Pamela, Melissa, Lisa, Deanna, Cynthia.

  “Talk about something else,” I said.

  “What about what you’re going to be when you grow up, let’s talk about that.”

  “Coleopterist,” I said.

  “Still?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Drummer,” CJ said. “In a rock band.”

  It felt good beside her. Her bony hip jutted into my bony hip. She rested her leg across mine. She smelled like apples and cold-sore cream. I tried not to think of Davey alone at home with just Mother lying perfectly still upon her bed. I tried not to think of secret Great-Aunt Em. But I was glad to be away from them all. I wondered if the
Bartholomews would adopt me. I wondered if Mr. Bartholomew would shine my little shoes. The guilt that came with the thought twisted my insides into a tight knot.

  “So what is your secret?” asked CJ.

  “I have a stick insect that I hide from my mother,” I said.

  “That isn’t a secret, I know about your stick insect,” said CJ.

  “It is a secret, though, technically.”

  “Please, Lenny,” said CJ.

  “I can’t say,” I said.

  “Lenny, it will help to tell someone, really it will.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you one of my secrets,” I said.

  “Tell me,” said CJ, lifting herself up onto an elbow.

  “Mr. King tried to kiss my mother on the lips in the living room when they were sitting on the sofa and she said no but he still kept trying. So she pushed him and he fell onto the floor.”

  CJ was silent for nearly a whole thirty seconds.

  “Holy cow,” she said at last. “Is that why she doesn’t work at the fruit store anymore?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you want to know something else?”

  “What?” said CJ, breathlessly.

  “I’m going to get a rock and throw it at his shop and smash something.”

  “Lenny,” cried CJ. “You can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” said CJ. “What if you have to go to jail?”

  My heart beat fast at the mention of jail. I tried to slow it down, but there was something else happening to me. There were hot tears on my cheeks before I even knew it and snorting out my nose. CJ was so shocked she sat bolt upright. Then she plunged into my chest so hard I was winded. She hugged me and hugged me and hugged me and told me that everything would be fine.

  Igneous Rock

  5’ 6”

  DECEMBER 1976

  I might not have seemed like the type of girl who throws rocks. Great-Aunt Em would have been such a girl. She would have thrown a rock and spat after it for good measure. Then she would have twisted a finger in her good Spink hair and smiled slyly.