Now, in grade eleven, with my sweat flowing rapidly, Jimmy became bolder. In shop class one day, I hammered parallel rows of nails into a wooden beam. Unlike the other students, I could whack the silver heads straight on so the iron rods thrust in without bending. Jimmy eyed my forearm moving up and down like the crossbar on a train wheel. Bang, bang cried the hammerhead. I stopped to brush away the sawdust. In the silent space between blows, Jimmy spoke to me for the first time ever. His voice started as a rumbling in his throat and emerged as a gasp, then a strange sing-song squeak as his tongue stumbled around the syllables. Did he speak so rarely that when he did, he used tools rusted from lack of use?
“You’re stronger than other girls,” he rasped. A cloud of sawdust hung in the air between us. A power drill wailed. “If we had an arm wrestle,” his voice rose triumphantly over the din, “I bet you’d win.”
The room was now full of the repetitive rah-rah sound of saws cutting. I saw that Jimmy had kind eyes. The swath of protruding, unshaven hairs across his jaw was like a fire-razed forest. He smiled a checkerboard grin and walked away. Could he at last replace you in my heart, dear brother?
The next day in the cafeteria, Jimmy walked up to me and knocked on the tabletop. When he spoke, spit flew from his lips and landed on my hamburger macaroni. His cheeks were flushed. Was this because I’d spoken to him yesterday? Was I the first girl who hadn’t run from him in terror? He said, “If you don’t mind it, we can get together after school. I wants to go to the bushes.” Jimmy’s smile wavered, disappeared, slanted sideways, collapsed, reformed.
I answered “Yes,” like I did when the other boys asked me to the end of the field. The word gave me a feeling of what I thought was power. “Let’s meet there.”
Jimmy’s cowlick quavered like a radar device. His lips parted, spread, lifted, and his smile was so huge I could see the line separating his teeth from his gums. “Great,” he said. “Let’s meet by the bleachers at four.”
When he’d left, I stared after him for a long time. Somewhere in the distance, I sensed winds lashing seaside cliffs. If I found and gave way to a desire for Jimmy, would my honey finally stop flowing?
Sam, did you know that Estelle and Esther’s father owned the new steel foundry? The sisters shared clothes and did their hair the same way. Esther never married. She’d had a series of bad love affairs, but yours was the first, and she believed you’d set the pattern.
Now Esther ran a dressmaking shop overlooking the ocean. She was always furiously whipping doorknobs with strips of fabric and stabbing pins into the eyeballs of mannequins. She only felt satisfied during storms when ships sank at sea and oil rigs collapsed. Few people bought her clothing since it was too fancy, but Estelle often wore her creations, “because I’m a lady,” she’d say, “not like you savage bitches.” On special days (her birthday, the last day of school), Estelle even wore elegant gowns with ruffles and lace, “because I’m special. Only lady-like girls deserve boyfriends.”
In the hallway one day she said to me, “My sister told me your family are goddamned freaks, and I believe it’s true. Does your mom love looking at your underwear, too?”
I had the urge to push her to the ground. That’d be easy; Estelle’s limbs were pencil-thin, her behind like two eggshells beneath her frilly dress. Sometimes I longed to tear off her clothes and smear wet mud over her ivory-white skin. But Estelle had a large entourage of admirers, and my status, though higher than before, was tenuous—more than I knew.
Cartwright was playing the visiting Dove Brook team, and we were winning. I met Jimmy in the striped shade behind the crowded football stands where everyone had gathered to cheer. I could see the clump of bushes from a distance, like three ice cream scoops beside a large oak.
“Way to go, Cartwright. Way to go!” Clap, clap.
Jimmy leaned against a wood pillar and fidgeted as if his entire body were itchy. He said, “Let’s walk by the stands.”
The football players ran two abreast across the field. A squad of cheerleaders in yellow blouses and red skirts (I recognized Estelle among them) shook wool pom-poms and screamed, “Cart-wright is all-right! Cart-wright can fight-fight!” Clap, clap.
Jimmy beamed as if they were cheering for him. He turned a couple of times toward the crowd. He wanted to be seen going into the bushes with a girl. Was this his way of raising his status? I wouldn’t mind. I might have used him for the same purpose. Even before my honey problem, my broad shoulders, thick biceps, and plaid shirts had scared people away. As we approached the wall of bracken, I became frightened. What were we actually going to do in there? Jimmy motioned for me to sit on the shadow-dappled earth, and I reminded myself that I was stronger than him. I worried that Mother would find out, but then I remembered you, Sam, and your advice that I get beyond her power.
Jimmy shyly asked me if he could wipe his finger along my collarbone. I nodded. He wanted a honey drop from the hollow below my ankle, and I said yes. He asked for some sweetness from the space between my breasts, just visible in the V-cut of my shirt. I let him have that too. As he peered at the golden thread hanging from his fingertip, I wondered if I could make myself desire a boy. It was probably interesting to want—really want—another person. How fascinating and unusual it’d be to find someone attractive and completely enjoy his or her presence.
A wind blew that rattled the tree branches and brought the scent of faraway forests, pine sap, juniper flowers—a smell part-piquant, part-sour. The wind woke an excitement in my body. It made every pore in my skin open wide and caused my backbone to straighten so completely that I was sitting more erect than ever before. The mouths of my ears gaped, and my eardrums became as still as the water on a lake so distant and hidden that no wind had ever rippled its surface, a lake that had waited an eternity for something even remotely resembling weather. What was I listening for?
To my surprise, Jimmy brought the honeyed fingers of his hand together and shoved them into his mouth. His large tongue swirled out and round in a long, luxuriant movement, licking the liquid off both sides of his fingers. Drops glimmered on his lips. He stared me straight in the eyes as he loudly and definitively swallowed. His Adam’s apple leapt forward once.
A strange expression came over his face. His cheeks slowly reddened and his eyes grew larger, bulging forward like egg yolks. His chest had stopped moving.
“Jimmy?” I said. “Jimmy? Are you all right?”
Flapping his hands in the air, he raced out of the trembling bushes just in time for the home team to score its final goal. The spiralling football descended through the posts and struck him square in the face. He fell to the earth and, his mouth puckering, thrashed on the ground like a fish pulled from water.
I charged out into the blinding sunshine. The spectators in the stands turned toward me. “Dr Merton!” I cried. “Somebody call Dr Merton!”
When the ambulance arrived, everyone was on the field shaking hands with the winning players. Only Estelle noticed me, her shaggy pom-pom fronds dangling from her hands like tentacles. She eyed me for what seemed an eternity, her head a stuck weathercock, the corners of her mouth upturned. On the front of her cheerleader uniform, below her right breast, a circle of sweat bloomed like a flower.
Jimmy remained in the hospital all night.
The next morning, I learned that my honey had caused the sides of his throat to adhere. Although he recovered, his desk at school remained empty for a month. This wasn’t altogether unusual. I assumed he was in the woods helping his father cut open metal traps. It was September and the hunting season was in full swing.
Still, the other students grew wary of me. After Jimmy disappeared, the boys stopped asking me to be part of their schoolyard circle. Girls didn’t want me to walk home with them. When students came upon drops of honey on the school steps or the handle of the water fountain, they regarded them at first with annoyance, then outrage, and finally with pure, unmitigated terror. In gym class no one let me join their squads. Exasperated,
Mr Schmidt said, “Kids, you can sit beside Sue. She won’t bite.”
I noticed Estelle everywhere. She talked constantly, her voice no longer high-pitched and metallic, but husky, full of sly hissing s’s and cruel, explosive p’s and t’s. She spoke at an agonizingly low decibel that everyone but me heard. And she listened to people, one hand on her chin, mentally storing this bit of gossip and that piece of information. She’d become a seamstress stitching together rumours and facts; from myriad ingredients, she created a seamless cloth woven together with real needs and deeply rooted desires, all unified by an innate logic. In the end, the story was not hers but everyone’s.
Everyone’s but mine, that is. In hallways, students gave me a wide berth. I’d futilely search the cafeteria for a table where they’d let me sit. Strangely, boys were more frightened than girls. Some essential balance had been disrupted. The janitor often shook his head as he mopped the hallway.
My new isolation did not trouble me as much as hearing my name whispered everywhere and not knowing what that meant. I peered into the washroom mirror, as behind me, the reflected cubicle doors echoed with a diabolical hiss: “Sssue, Ssssue, Sssssue, Ssssssue.” The sound joined to other words or half-words, verbs without objects or objects without verbs or lone, great big juicy adjectives:
“Piggy-girl, Piiiiig!”
“It’s ’cause of her condition …”
“So totally gross …”
“She dragged him into the bushes …”
“Stripped him down …”
“And then the disaster!”
I still couldn’t find the through-line to these shattered sentences which, pasted together, now formed the story of my life.
“What disaster!?” I cried. The hissing stopped. Before me a lone, silver tap dripped once into the sink.
In the hallway, clusters of girls huddled by lockers, and everywhere was that infernal susurrating hiss. “SSSSSue … he had no clue … her glue … the stickiness … got him totally fucked …” Sometimes I’d overhear a refreshing, “This stuff about Sue Masonty is bullshit,” but that was rare. At last, after a month of conjecture, I was able to put the disparate pieces of the tale together. One afternoon, I wandered by the field where the boys were playing flag football. When I stepped onto the bleachers, I heard my name spoken. All the boys had stopped playing; they crowded together, facing me in a tight, protective knot. From hands hung crêpe-paper streamers. Since Jimmy’s injury, the boys were forced to play flag football, not the real rough-and-tumble version, as everyone was now more keenly aware of the fragility of the male body. Someone muttered, “Don’t let her near us or we’ll have to saw ours off too.” The wind had ripped one boy’s streamer and he knelt sobbing, cradling it in his hands.
It was then that everything fell together in my mind. The story went like this: Jimmy and I had crawled into the space beneath the bushes and proceeded to make love. But when he entered me, he got stuck and couldn’t get out. The rumour mill had produced various endings. In one, he had to saw his penis off at the root to get free of me and, full of shame, fled into the forest and was now wandering bloodied and penis-less over the rocks of the Canadian Shield. In another version, he was absorbed by me completely and was now crouched suffocating somewhere amongst the twists and turns of my fallopian tubes. In a different version, the mere sight of my naked honey-streaming body terrified him and his penis shrank into his body.
But hadn’t anyone seen him run fully membered from the bushes? I recalled that he’d been lying face down, and most people were fixated on the rotating ball as it descended through the goalposts. No one cared what happened to it once it crossed the line. Only Estelle had watched, so the story was hers.
The boys huddled together, their flimsy flags fluttering. The kneeling boy wept bitterly into his torn streamer. He turned toward me and shouted, “Cunt!” He picked up a stone and threw it. The rock bounced off the bench in front of me.
“I didn’t do anything!” I yelled. The other boys crouched and snatched stones from the ground and flung them in my direction. One struck me in the shin; another cut the side of my cheek.
I turned and ran from the field, crying uncontrollably, and when I reached the street, continued running southward. The pounding of my feet on gravel echoed about the silent clapboard houses that seemed to march past in jerky, disjointed steps. Women on porches flapped tea-towels like striped whips as barking dogs thrashed on leashes taut as tightropes. Rows of fence pickets pointed skyward like white knives. The earth was gouged, cratered, and gashed as if hacked with a huge dagger. I passed a man pulling a buggy joined to his waist with a rope; a lady stepped from the white-walled Catholic church, the sides of her hat rim flapping like oars. Down one street I charged and then up another, criss-crossing Cartwright’s patchwork of roads. The air smelled of sea salt, tar, rotting scallops, motor oil.
When I reached the open field near my parents’ house, I stood panting on the empty plain. The wind struck me square in the face, whipped the bangs off my forehead, fluttered my eyelashes, and dried the spittle on my lips. I looked down at my body, this body I lived in, this body I carted about wherever I went. These calloused fingers, these bulging thighs, this chest rising and falling like the swell of the sea were mine—were me.
It was then that I knew: air will free me. The wind I once feared will lift me high above the earth-bound people of Cartwright. Wind is what happens when air falls in love with itself. I will love the sweetness of my sweat and it will dissolve rocks hurled like missiles at my head. I spread my arms wide to the howling gale that shot into my open pores and roared through my body like Niagara, as a shower of glistening honey drops fell like manna onto the parched, stony earth.
Sam, surely you remember the house we lived in on a hillock a block from the sea? The building’s foundation was made of stone, and the walls were of plywood that eternally rattled in the wind. The roof was a silver tin that threw the sun’s light back into the blank expanse of the sky.
Before opening the door, I put my ear against it and listened. Inside, Mother was speaking in tongues again. She’d close her eyes and, shivering, raise one hand and feel the Holy Spirit descend, fill her chest, move across her vocal chords; she opened her lips and the Spirit expressed Itself.
When I entered the kitchen, she stopped and said, “Excuse me. I need a way to deal with the stress or I’ll end up in the nuthouse.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Sam still hasn’t answered any of my letters,” she continued. “The postman has the nerve to ask why I always wait on the porch! This town’s full of morons.”
Had Mother heard the horrible story about me and Jimmy? It was doubtful; she had little contact with the rest of the town. Sometimes I liked entering the little bubble she inhabited. That day I wanted to embrace her but feared she’d clutch and never let go. She’d wonder why I hugged her, would worry, and Mother had problems enough. When she found my honey-globules on the toilet seat, my bedpost, or the wallpaper, God’s syllables burst from her lips. Last week she broke into tongues while waiting at the supermarket checkout; I was so embarrassed I hid behind a stack of canned corn.
Sam, you always told me not to feel threatened by Mother. You said, “When Mother is swallowed by God, say sayonara as she slides down His windpipe.” But there is more to her than religion, Sam.
Surprisingly, that night, Father showed up for dinner. We sat before our plates of fries, cod tongues, and salmon rolls. Filling our glasses with milk, Mother said, “I called the hospital in Toronto. Sam was sent home again. Those crackpot doctors believe his stories. They can’t see he’s trying to hurt himself.”
I still don’t understand what happened when you went to Europe. After you returned, you began to show up in Emergency wards with rocks stuck in your throat! The last time you could barely breathe. Am I the part of the reason? As kids, we made all those stone castles together, and then you later callously abandoned me. Do you eat rocks to punish yourself? Do you
still feel such massive guilt?
“The doctors said if he swallowed and the rock got below his Adam’s apple, he’d die. Those knuckleheads think it was an accident. He probably tells them it’s part of some experiment. They’re scientists so he knows how to deceive them, just like he deceived us. They can’t see he’s gone bananas,” Mother said.
You could simply take a plane back to Labrador and help me, Sam. You could rescue me from Cartwright. There’s no need to feel regret forever.
“Don’t you both go hiding your opinions,” Mother continued. “I know you think I’m the reason he’s cracked, but that’s nonsense. I see that Sam wanted to hold onto his trophies and collections. I wouldn’t have thrown them out if I’d known he was so weak. Remember when he was eight? He loved everything I did. We created those tiny villages made of pebbles on the beach.” She still loves the little boy in you, Sam. She’ll never accept that you grew up. Do you recall when she tried to un-enrol you from your high-school science courses and you found out? You should never have started dating Esther the week after—that was the worst timing. While you were at school, she’d finger the rocks in your collection, itching to throw them out, but she didn’t, at least not right away. Mother can show restraint, Sam.
The Lava in My Bones Page 8