Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

  Without thinking, I went downstairs and put on my coat. I didn’t know where I was going. I ended up on the beach. I tucked my knees up and hugged them. I closed my eyes and listened to the waves as the tide came in.

  Dad touched my shoulder, I don’t know how much later. He told me Ma-ma-oo had just had a heart attack. I pictured it happening like it was on TV: she clutched her chest, keeled over, and someone gave her mouth-to-mouth and then pounded her chest. In the operating room, a doctor yelled, “Clear!” then applied a defibrillator to her chest. Then the heart monitor beeped and everything was A-OK.

  Later, Ma-ma-oo told me she had hopped into her car and driven herself to Emergency. She thought she was having a really bad gas attack and just wanted to get some prescription stomach soothers. Even when they were wheeling her around on a gurney, she said she was more worried about whether or not she’d left the oven on.

  Dad had answered the phone. Jimmy said he had talked calmly to the person on the phone, then hung up and phoned Aunt Edith to come baby-sit us while Mom drove them to the hospital. Ma-ma-oo was flown down to Vancouver for further examination. As soon as I heard that, I thought she was going to die. The doctors only flew you down as a last, desperate resort. All the people I’d known who were flown to Vancouver were on their last legs.

  Most people only learn about their body when something goes wrong with it. Mom could tell you anything about skin when she got her first deep wrinkle. Dad could talk for hours about the stomach after he got a hiatus hernia. After she had her first attack, Ma-ma-oo read everything she could about the human heart.

  The doctors gave her pamphlets, a slew of nurses sat patiently by her bed and drew her pictures of what had gone wrong, and Mom tried to translate the jargon into something that made sense. Ma-ma-oo stared up from her hospital bed, annoyed. She pored over the pamphlets and pictures, listened carefully, but she still looked lost. When she came back to the Kitimat hospital, I would visit her after school, catching the late bus home after we had looked at my picture books describing the heart. Even in the kids’ books, the technical words were confusing. We kept having to open up the dictionary, puzzling our way through the multisyllabic words. For awhile, I thought we were just gruesomely curious. But when your body is falling apart, and you can’t do anything to stop it, there is a grim satisfaction that comes with knowing exactly what is going wrong.

  Ma-ma-oo annoyed the doctors. When she stopped feeling dizzy, tired and nauseated, she assumed she was better. She’d casually rip off the monitoring wires and take off for a walk down the hallway. When the nurses ran in, ready to resuscitate her, they’d find her in the TV room, or chatting with other patients. She couldn’t endure lying in bed. She insisted on feeding herself the day after her heart attack. She insisted on the nurses leaving the room when she peed. She told them what soap she liked and when she liked to bathe. She woke up at her regular hour of 5 a.m. and did her crossword puzzles until the nurses came in at 7 a.m. to give her pills, which she would only drink with orange juice. She never yelled or lost her temper, but was unmovable. When lectured, she watched the nurses with a disdainful expression, and then told them to bugger off.

  “She’s so Type A,” one of them said to me, “it’s not funny.”

  Aunt Kate stayed at Ma-ma-oo’s house for the first two weeks she was home. After that, they were yelling at each other so much that Aunt Kate declared that if Ma-ma-oo didn’t drop dead of another heart attack, she was going to strangle her.

  “Good riddance!” Ma-ma-oo called as Aunt Kate stormed out of her house.

  Dad spent that entire night worrying. He drove to her house first thing in the morning, but Ma-ma-oo had locked the doors and pulled all the curtains closed. He sat on the steps until Ma-ma-oo opened the door and invited him in for tea. They agreed that Aunt Kate would come over once a day, and that Ma-ma-oo would call her if she had any pain at all.

  I knew she hated people hovering, but it was hard not to twitch whenever her expression changed. Mom had made me memorize all the emergency numbers and we went to a CPR class together. Knowing that I’d have to pound Ma-ma-oo’s chest and force air down her throat if she collapsed in front of me was unnerving. She lifted a case of canned salmon once and I watched her with my eyes bugging out. She wasn’t supposed to exert herself at all. She wasn’t supposed to lift anything. I sat at the edge of my chair, waiting for her to clutch her chest and keel over.

  “Na’,” she said, when she saw me ready to run for the phone. “You and your aunt.”

  Ma-ma-oo’s breath smelled like oolichan grease. She had two tablespoons of oolichan grease every morning. The doctors had told her that fish oil would be good, and had tried to get her on cod liver and halibut, but she insisted on oolichan. One tablespoon she spread over her toast and the other she simply tipped into her mouth and swallowed. She also took one Aspirin a day, and was told she was very lucky she didn’t have to continue taking anything else. She had to carry nitroglycerin just in case, but the medicine cabinet collection of bottles slowly diminished as she recovered.

  But of all the things that had changed, Ma-ma-oo mourned her salt the longest. Mom bought her a salt substitute but Ma-ma-oo spat it out as soon as it went in her mouth. I tried it to see if it was really that disgusting and the taste lingered in my mouth for a whole hour, even after I scraped my tongue. When she came back from the grocery store, she had a whole bunch of spices she didn’t know how to use. Pepper she knew; thyme and sage were familiar from Thanksgiving turkeys. We spent an hour sniffing and sampling the contents of the spice jars and bags that spent their remaining days in a shoe box in the bottom cupboard beside her potatoes and onions.

  After two months of positive results on her tests, Ma-ma-oo was confident she had her health back. Other than the salt, she hadn’t had to give much up. One of the dietitians had told her to eat only white meat and fish, but she found chicken and turkey tasteless without gravy. Egg whites she made once, bounced around her plate, then nibbled. “It’s like eating rubber,” she said. She was supposed to eat more vegetables, and did for a while, but fell back on potatoes, onions, turnips, carrots and celery. Once, she baked a squash. But when it came out of the oven, she declared that it looked like worms, ate a bite, then chucked it. When she made herself salads, she usually put them in the fridge until they rotted.

  Eating fish was something she did understand, even though she couldn’t fry fish any more. Her favourite way of baking fish was to use big, thick steaks covered in onions, which were now also on her forbidden list. But whenever I went to her house, I could count on fish stew, fish casserole, fish cakes, steamed fish, canned fish and dried fish. If it wasn’t salmon, it was halibut, rock cod, lingcod or the occasional trout.

  On one of his visits, Jimmy had decided to introduce Ma-ma-oo to Run DMC. Ma-ma-oo had listened politely, then told him to shut it off because it was giving her a headache. “When I was young, everyone goes listening to cowboy music. Everyone’s singing away about horses and shootouts, and there’s not even a cow for miles around. Now they’re all singing about gangs, all these people shooting each other, and there’s not a city around. You explain that.” We sat at her kitchen table, drinking mint tea from her chipped mugs.

  “I don’t like country music either,” I said.

  Ma-ma-oo offered me a plate of Oreos. I took three. The fridge rumbled to life, gurgling and choking. The avocado green clock ticked irregularly. Dad had given Ma-ma-oo the latest in digital clocks to replace it, but she hadn’t taken it out of the box, saying that if she had to read a book to make it work, it was too much trouble—and besides, it was ugly. Ma-ma-oo slurped her tea. Sometimes her hands would tremble and she’d stare at them.

  On good days, we went tromping around the bushes. She said she really wanted to bump around on her boat, get away from the noisy village, but the bouncing made her nauseated now. On bad days like today, we sat in her kitchen and drank tea. At first, I used to fill the silences with chatter. She’d listen and nod
. But after a few visits, I realized she was just happy to have me there and I didn’t have to entertain her. The silences grew comfortable.

  At the end of the school year my marks were horrible, but most of my teachers bumped my marks up to passing, citing extenuating circumstances. I was going to high school. I tried to be excited—only five years left in my sentence.

  Jimmy crushed his competition and earned his first swimming scholarship late that spring. It covered all his travel expenses and extra swimming lessons. Mom and Dad threw a surprise party for him and invited his teammates and all the family. Halfway through, Dad proudly read out a letter of commendation that basically said my brother was Canada’s brightest hundred-metre butterfly hopeful.

  At the end of the year, Frank came up to me at lunchtime. He didn’t look at me. He kicked the toe of his boot against the ground. We both watched his boot get scuffed.

  “Anyone ask you to grad?” he said.

  What a dumb question. “Why? You asking?”

  For a moment, I thought he was going to say yes. He opened his mouth, then paused. We stared at each other, and I noticed the scar that cut his left eyebrow in half, how his nose was sunburned, how he was exactly my height and I ended up looking right into his eyes, which were dark, dark brown.

  “No way José,” he ended up saying. “I’m skipping it.”

  “Hmm,” I said. Hands clammy, mouth dry, I stared off at the playground, unable to say anything. Disappointment hit, then confusion about the disappointment, then I started to sweat.

  “See ya,” he said.

  “Mm-hmm,” I said.

  He took off running. I sagged against the wall, wiping my hands against my jeans. Jeez, I thought, that was weird.

  Frank went to grad, but he walked up with giggling Julie. I walked up with Pooch and Cheese on either arm. Pooch was bored, but Cheese was nervous and sweaty. He held himself slightly away from me, like I was the one who had smelly pits. When it came time to get our pictures done, Cheese snapped my bra strap. So when we posed under the arch made of balloons, in my grad picture, I was hitting Cheese while Pooch stuck his fingers behind my head in a V sign.

  We met up a few days later. Frank was wearing a turtleneck even though it was sunny and warm. He said he was meeting Cheese at Sunrise and asked if I wanted to come. I shrugged and said sure. While we waited for the pool table, Cheese said, “Oh, come on. Show us.”

  I didn’t know what he meant until Cheese grabbed the turtleneck and exposed three large hickeys. Frank flushed dark red.

  “Screw off,” he said, pushing Cheese away.

  “Did you do it?”

  “No, we didn’t. We just messed around.” He glanced at me, then at the floor, then at his hands.

  Cheese guffawed. “Oh, yeah, that’s all you did.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You did it!”

  “Cheese,” Frank said. “You are such a virgin.”

  Cheese punched his arm and Frank punched him back and they started wrestling.

  “Table’s open,” I said.

  We played pool twice and then I said I had to go help with dinner. Frank said he’d walk with me but Cheese said he wanted to find Pooch.

  “You want to split a Popsicle?” Frank said when Cheese was gone.

  “Sure.”

  He didn’t say anything on the way and I didn’t know what to say. We stopped at the bottom of the front steps. Frank casually leaned against the railing and said, “We’re biking across tomorrow.”

  “For what?”

  “Change of scenery.”

  “When you leaving?”

  “Probably noon. You coming?”

  “Well, I have to see the queen of England for tea in the morning, but after that I’m free.”

  He slugged my shoulder and laughed. “See you then.”

  I slugged his shoulder back. “See you then.”

  Frank and the guys decided to celebrate the end of school by drinking some beer Frank had stolen from his brother Bib. When I went over to Cheese’s, Pooch had fallen asleep on the bed. He was sleeping so hard that the guys thought we should throw water on him to wake him up.

  “Jeez,” I said. “How much did you guys drink?”

  “He only had one can,” Frank said.

  “Can’t handle his drinks,” Cheese said, smirking.

  I found a bottle of bright red nail polish in the bathroom, took off Pooch’s socks and shoes and started colouring his toenails. Frank and Cheese laughed their heads off. It was very relaxing; I realized why Mom liked doing my nails. Pooch, of course, was not impressed. He didn’t have any nail polish remover, so spent his spare time over the next few weeks scraping it off with a nail clipper.

  Dusk lingers nearly to midnight in the summer. Pooch and I were lying on a patch of grass in the middle of the darkening soccer field. We watched the sky and shared a smoke. Frank and Julie were making out on the bleachers. Her giggles and squeals drifted across the field.

  “You ever talk to your dad?” I asked Pooch, handing him the cigarette.

  “Lots. He was—”

  “No, I mean now.”

  Pooch sighed. “I tried. It never really worked. Wouldn’t know what to say to him anyway. Sorry you offed yourself?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I wouldn’t know what to say to my uncle either.”

  “You ever wonder what it’s like to die?” he asked, handing the butt back to me.

  I sucked in the last bit before the tobacco met the filter. “Ma-ma-oo says you go to the land of the dead.” She’d also added that the people who committed suicide were doomed to walk forever between the worlds of the spirits and the living, but I didn’t think Pooch needed to hear that.

  “I wonder what it’s really like.” He sat up and shook the empty pack as if that might dislodge a hidden cigarette. “Maybe Frank has some more smokes.”

  “I think he’s busy.”

  “Hey, Frank! You got any smokes!”

  “Shut up!” I hissed.

  “No!” Frank yelled back.

  “I do!” Julie said. She walked over to us, the top three buttons on her blouse undone and her hair tousled. Frank followed her, scowling. She smiled brightly as she handed Pooch her pack. “What are you guys talking about?”

  Pooch looked at me and I looked at him and we said, together, “Nothing.”

  She giggled. “Or should I say who are you talking about?”

  “Where’s Cheese?” Frank said.

  Pooch shrugged.

  They went back to the bleachers and Pooch handed me a cigarette. They were icky mentholated ones, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  Later, Frank asked us why we didn’t like Julie.

  “She’s okay,” Pooch said.

  “She thinks you hate her.”

  “Why does she want us to like her?” I said.

  “I dunno. Girl stuff, I guess. Just pretend you like her, okay?”

  “Man, you are so whipped,” Pooch said.

  Pooch and I were sitting behind the Sunrise when I was busted. There were a bunch of other kids, too, but they were older and pretended that we weren’t there. Pooch bummed a smoke off his cousin and we were sharing it when suddenly Mom said, “Lisamarie Michelle Hill, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  The first thing that popped out of my mouth was, “What the hell does it look like I’m doing?”

  Her mouth dropped open. Oops, I thought, just before she grabbed my ear and dragged me to the car. She was too mad to speak. She hauled me to my room, shoved me in and slammed the door. She waited until Dad came home before she came into my room. Her face was pale, her lips thin and bloodless, and she motioned Dad to speak instead of lighting into me first.

  “I hear you’ve started smoking,” Dad said.

  “A couple of times,” I admitted.

  “You’re way too young.”

  “Too young?” Mom shouted at Dad. “This is all Mick’s fault. I told him not to smoke in front of her. I told
him.”

  “Like Dad’s never had a puff.”

  He glared at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You are not smoking again.” She then listed off all the reasons smoking was bad. I watched her mouth moving. She finished shouting and wound down with, “Young lady, you are not leaving this room until you promise me you are never smoking again.”

  “So you want me to lie to you?”

  “Lisa!” Dad said.

  Over the next few days, she brought home pictures of diseased lungs, people with holes in their necks, statistics on death rates. Every time she did, I wanted to pull out a cigarette and smoke it in front of her.

  Finally, at the dinner table, she announced that Dad was going to quit with me. He looked startled and said if he was going off cigarettes, she was damn well going to give up coffee. After that, Jimmy uneasily babbled about swimming until Dad finally said that mouths could also be used for eating. Just before bedtime, Mom caught Dad sneaking a puff, ironically enough, in the smokehouse. After she stomped on his favourite lighter, he went into the house and threw out her favourite coffeepot.

  Jimmy took off first thing the next morning and stayed out all day, lingering at his friend’s house until well past curfew. Dad savoured his breakfast coffee. He took the longest, slowest sips, letting out little satisfied sighs that Mom grimly ignored as she whipped her milk into the strongest tea she could brew.

  Mom drank so many pots of tea, the kettle was never off the stove. Dad took to sucking lollipops, chewing gum and munching candy bars and licorice whips. By the end of the week, he’d gained five pounds and grumbled that at this rate, in a month he was going to be twice the man he was. Mom cheerfully suggested he take a long walk off the docks.