“Not enough fucking strawberries! Or flags. Not fair. My neck hurts.”
“Wasn’t that a cute guitar boy? Love to find him in my bed!” Annabel winked. “Eric went to a real Canada Day party, so he couldn’t come today.”
“Bullshit!”
Then supper came, and happy Sally’s leftover cake read Ca, in pink.
Lorraine ignored her tray. “The Wanderer has an idea. We can help.”
“She stole your phone!”
“To get our attention.” Lorraine’s voice stayed calm.
Annabel frowned. “How can she have an idea if she can’t talk?”
“Won’t talk, dummy. Teevee-gal can’t. Don’t you two want cake?”
“She wants to get back at—them.” Lorraine gestured inclusively.
Annabel scraped cake onto Sally’s plate. “Yes!”
“We must be ready. She can’t predict when.”
“When what? I don’t like her. She threw—”
“Shut up!”
Lorraine closed her eyes. Annabel had the gist, and Sally’d need to hear it all again anyway.
doing time
Sunday was hot. Zero Activity.
Monday, also hot, was a stat. Zero Bingo, zero doctors. The dumpsters grew rank. Gulls perched, swearing, on the closed lids. Julio, sent to Delivery to kill rats, did nothing but claimed the coyotes would eat them soon.
“Another lazy man,” said Angelique.
Lily came back.
As she worked nearby, Lorraine closed her eyes against rustle click push squirt wipe rub shove but inhaled the aide’s fragrance of tall dewy grass by the bus stop.
Lorraine’s skin didn’t fit. Her breath tasted bad. She napped.
For Annabel, Lily brought a hair clip and Chatelaine.
“Real silver!” The old shining head turned this way, that.
“Stupid! Remember how she tricked you?”
The aide said, “Your walker, Mrs. Knox. This time maintenance fix perfect.” Strong hands massaged the resident’s shoulders.
Lorraine, waking, found her dresser drawers rearranged
“See? More room for my menus!”
Sally snorted. “Lily just wants back in our good books.”
“To atone,” Annabel offered.
“How come you know that word?”
From 17-B gunshots reverberated, and shortly the Wanderer rolled into 17-A.
“Hello there!” Annabel waved Chatelaine.
Lorraine said, truthfully, “That’s a nice dress you’re wearing.” The adaptive garment wasn’t tucked in, though. A nude thigh, varicose, protruded.
“Such a bitch, Lily, letting you go out like that.” Sally poked the fabric into place.
“Bitch,” echoed Annabel.
Everyone smiled as the Wanderer handed over Lorraine’s phone.
Doing more time
At Tuesday’s News & Views, Annabel reported, people talked about Big Man biting an orderly. “We didn’t even open the Province.”
A doctor visited Lorraine.
After supper a bat landed on 17-A’s windowsill. Flapping towels, Annabel and Angelique rushed about till the creature swooped away.
“Close window.”
“Stupid!” Sally cried. “By morning there’s no air left.”
“No oxygen,” said Annabel.
“You studied chemistry?”
Angelique rolled her eyes.
Drinking water, Lorraine felt dry as drought.
Josie came by. “Little treat, girls!” Twinkies.
Sally ate them all, left the wrappers on her table and limped to the sink to splash hands and hot face.
“You’ve spilled, I’ll skid!”
“Then skedaddle to your damn friends, Annabel.” Sally grabbed paper towels.
“At least I have friends. And family, Mrs. Knox.”
“Eric is a retard, Eric is a retard!”
“Fatty fatty two-by-four!”
Wads of wet towel flew, Lorraine sobbed, the Boss Lady entered.
“Quiet time, ladies?” She scanned the room. “Mrs. Knox, obesity shortens lives. Try to control yourself. That cellphone’s back? No one told me.”
After she left, a whiff of skunk remained in the air of 17-A.
Wednesday
Midnight showers had suppressed the dumpsters’ fermenting odour, but it rose again with the sun. The crows didn’t attend Crafts to explore playdough’s tactile pleasures, nor squeeze remotes with bleeding claws. They strutted about squawking while the rats and their babies snoozed in the warm dark rimmed with gold. Yearling gulls chased an eagle until, bored, it soared so its pursuers heeled away down the air.
Sally grumped, “Can’t the bloody Wanderer get on with it?”
In the elevator, the Boss Lady lectured Annabel. The resident crossed her eyes.
Lorraine received from the Wanderer an Ambrosia apple and a photo of a willow-edged river curving away. At bedtime, a nurse checked her vitals. Her roommates didn’t let their eyes meet.
Thursday, flower-arranging
Muggy. Rain forecast.
Lorraine lay on a gurney by 17-A’s door, helpless before a doctor’s order for a bedsore treatment over in the hospital.
Annabel stroked her roommate’s hand.
Sally adjusted her walker. Too high. Too low.
“Fuck!” she shouted.
As if signalled, the TV in 17-B burst out In the criminal justice system, the volume rising to a bellow for police, who investigate crime. The Wanderer exited, holding a flag. Snapping it downward, she raced for the nurses’ station.
Lily ran towards the roaring These are their stories, but Lorraine extended one arm off the gurney. She got the aide across the diaphragm.
Winded, Lily fell.
Sally threw herself upon her walker so it and she collapsed, then screamed.
Officer down! Teevee-gal laughed. Her rictus turned to hiccups as she handed the remote to Annabel. Bang bang, gunshots. Two dead here.
Annabel scooted to the linens while aides, LPNs, even a nurse responded to Sally’s cries.
Lorraine sobbed. Her arm drooped from the gurney.
Just a kid, roared Jerry Orbach.
A black kid way out of his neighbourhood, Chris Noth sneered. Of course he had to die.
To the staff crowded into 17-B, Orbach blared Where’s justice?
“Look, Teevee-gal’s laughing!”
“Who knew she could?”
A shout, “You won’t tell where it is, will you? You bad girl,” laughing.
“Very bad!” Pats on the tattered fingertips.
In the hall, an LPN bent to Lorraine. The Boss Lady glanced their way but stalked on into 17-B, grasped the TV’s cord, traced it to the outlet, pulled.
Silence.
“No one thought of that?”
Hiccups racked Teevee-gal.
“Or noticed this? You, attend to her. You, get rid of that TV. Shove it out the window for all I care. I’ll page a doctor,” gesturing at Lorraine. “The rest of you, back to work! No one’s at the nurses’ station.”
Lily got to her feet.
There came the noise of a truck grinding into gear.
“Fucking great!” Sally shouted from across the hall.
“Did you hear me?”
Obedience cleared the room.
Lorraine almost welcomed her pain, as suggesting a correctable mechanical wrong, and waited calmly for the analgesics to kick in, while hearing Sally’s tale. Scrambled, yes—yet she and Annabel saw just how staff had huddled by jumbled human and metal limbs while the unseen Wanderer reached the window, her whir-whir inaudible under Law and Order.
Out flew the blue files, three, four, twelve, butterflies shedding hundreds of white inne
r wings as they tumbled. Twinkling paperclips, staples. Screech of plunging gulls. The truck heaved up the dumpster so its maw could vomit out all waste, everyone—but the Wanderer didn’t stay to see that.
Sally finished telling just as the nurses’ station broke into uproar.
“Score!” cried Annabel.
Friday, baking
Overnight, the skunky vehicle stayed in the parking lot as the soft persistent summer rain of the West Coast began to fall. At dawn, animals drank. Birds stepped through puddles, shook rainbows off their wings.
With her trolley, Lily entered the watery light of 17-A. One woman had a bandaged ankle, one lay still, one clutched a jar of Sicilian olives.
The Boss Lady, clacking along, met and re-met Mr. Chang several times before she observed him waving at her.
“You want what?”
He asked again.
“A dog? To live here? D’you think I’m running a kennel?”
Such Language
Fuck you, the message tape said one October day.
I pressed Replay. Yes, Fuck you, bracketed by mmm sounds. A high voice. Strained. Inside the mmm, were there words? Was the last one Lauren? After several replays I thought the terminal consonant wasn’t n.
Today, if Henry and Jake and I were together as a family we’d all have cellphones. Even on a landline we’d each have a message box to accommodate a caller desiring to say to me, specifically, Fuck you. In 1985, however, I was living with an answering machine and an eleven-year-old son and a forty-three-year-old husband. I pressed Erase. At once this seemed a mistake, but then Henry and Jake arrived home from soccer, so it didn’t.
Their news: a team would be chosen for league play. Our boy was hopeful. So was Curtis, his friend. After practice, as usual, they’d all gone to Tom & Jerry’s, with Curtis’s mum Melanie, for celebratory hot chocolate.
“The new TV there is huge,” Henry reported.
“Don’t get addicted to the screen, son,” said Jake.
The answering machine’s message indicator still showed a luminous red 3. Before I could stop him, Henry listened. “Hang-ups. They’re all grand-mère.”
“My mother?”
“Madame?” Jake made the formal term affectionate.
“She puts the phone down hard. I can tell it’s her.”
Listening to the bangs, I saw my widowed mother at her desk. My father had built in a drawer for the phone directory, a well for pencils, and a bookshelf holding Churchill on WWII (six vols) and de Gaulle’s Mémoires de guerre (three). The pages were soft-edged.
When Jake met my parents, he’d admired that desk. “Distinctive. A craftsman’s work.”
“Just a village carpenter.” My self-deprecating father, very pleased.
Jake’s praise also won over my mother, till then disconcerted by my choice. “Lauren, I expected you to marry an intellectual.”
Now we said, “You’re right, Henry.”
How could we tell? Still I don’t know.
Getting the machine was my idea, of course. Play, Replay, Erase, Rewind, Stop. Under the translucent cover, the brown plastic ribbon swelled and shrank in its orbits.
My mother asked Henry, “What is Lauren’s new nonsense?”
They were piling her winter clothes into her freezer, because his science teacher said this would kill moths.
“It’s me saying the greeting, grand-mère!”
She did “her wave thing,” a backhand sweep to fend off unwanted data. “A telephone is not to prevent people from talking.”
“Grand-mère, you can say whatever you like!”
“I am not a machine.”
Then they went out to check the seedlings in her cold-frame, and, in the five months since, grand-mère had never left a message.
I began thawing dinner. “Don’t turn it off, Henry.”
“Let me guess, Lauren,” said Jake. “You just want peace and quiet?”
I kissed him. We both hugged Henry.
Truth be told, we’d been grateful for the machine. Too often my mother phoned as we got home, or were eating, and she rarely began by asking about Henry’s game, Jake’s sweet peas. Never about my day at the library.
“Lauren, I have bought Seville oranges. It is the marmalade time.”
“Lauren, the Globe is like you. It thinks the UN can save the world. Or have you still not read today’s editorial?” (Her one-two punch.)
“The language I hear on the bus! That young people should speak so. Brutal, ugly. Such words my grandson must never say.”
“North Americans are ignorant. They do not understand war.” My mother grew up in Lyon, France. Twenty-nine in 1945 when history wrote That’s all folks, she’d spent the war by her own mother’s bed, a witness to one slow, agonizing death.
“Jake, what about my dimmer switch? And that play you did the sets for, the Courier review is not favourable.”
Amiably he winked. “One-two!”
Now we could enjoy our meal, letting the phone ring. After dinner, Henry called her. Jake and she consulted about the stocks they prepared, the sourdough and brioche they baked.
But she’d call me later, too.
On book club nights, my head awhirl from Down Among the Women or Revolutionary Road, I was glad not to hear her voice. “To discuss fiction, what for? Imaginary people do things and do things, then it’s over. From biography, memoir, one can learn.”
At our last meeting we’d learned that Andrea, trying to conceive, during sex with her husband felt like Atwood’s handmaid. Myrna was reporting a former therapist to the college of psychologists. Lesley took water from her kid’s school swimming pool to a lab for analysis.
“Lauren, the woman who brings my newspaper hurls it at my door. Crash! Then in her car she speeds away.”
My mother did not drive, conduire, so was ignorant of the machine’s sweet solitude. Nor did she ever work outside the home. Nor, because of their war wounds, did she and my father fight. They met at a train station in Lyon where his unit wasn’t supposed to be. The Liberation, some mix-up. He was short, dark, English. She was tallish and blonde.
“George was so well-spoken. In the war, people cursed very much. You can have no idea. Foul language. The English term is precise.”
Sitting on a fourteenth-century stone wall, these two talked in their limited French and English of their favourites, Bacall and her Bogart. Under the stylish cynicism, such tenderness. The dialogue, so telling. They agreed that their own countries were done for. In that soil—soaked in filth, caustics, human blood—no good life could grow. They crossed an ocean, a continent. At home in Vancouver, we spoke English.
In kindergarten, my son Henry said, “Grand-mère, French is pretty.” My mother had not approved of our placing him in French immersion (“So North American, pretending to be someone you are not”), but thereafter she spoke only that language to him.
Fuck you, that tape said.
Tape. Looking back, aging technophiles can feel like strangers. Were things so primitive in our own adulthood? Many patrons and a few library staff cried when we tossed the card catalogue. To avoid electronics, some librarians even retired. Not I. Laborious female typing, ribbons that oozed or faded—such waste.
Early answering-machine greetings assumed callers were deaf or slow-witted. After the second beep, you have thirty seconds to talk. Soon users got cute. Couples spoke in unison, cats mewed, toddlers whined. The CBC’s contest for best greeting got hundreds of entries.
Henry thought the best excuse for not getting a message deserved a prize. The tape broke! The machine got unplugged when I was vacuuming! At this my book club laughed, confessed their lies. Rosalind’s was The cat stepped on the Erase button.
“Actually true,” she said later at our weekly lunch, eaten quickly as we were both work-addicted. “Would I lie to you?” Her an
gled smile. At club we teasingly called her Fair Rosalind.
Now, back from a book-evening, I could let my brain cool.
Then, “Hello, mother. Can you talk for a bit now?”
“Why not? I’m alone, am I not?” Which took my mind off book club.
The club’s discussion always started with the nuts and bolts.
Didn’t he realize?
How could they keep up the pretense?
Where’d she think that would get her?
Too soon, my friends uncorked the wine and their own narratives. Same queries, more tears. Infidelity (Andrea’s husband), ungrateful children, unprincipled colleagues, migraines (Robin), carpal tunnel and candida (Lesley), debt and renos (Myrna), Rosalind’s fibroids, later her infertility, the stressful travel her job required in northern BC. I was the only one not in therapy. Nor did I refer to Jake as my partner, a new term then.
I’d have preferred to stay with the novels, whose codes drew me. Small things, details. Clothes. Metals. Weather paint birds food gestures light clocks stars floors water smells—such language told so much in The Color Purple, Man Descending, A Jest of God. At our satellite lunches, Rosalind and I often talked of imagery.
What story could I tell my friends?
Jake and I loved Henry like mad, all possible clichés. That love made two pillars that held the marriage firm, and between us our child swung happily. I loved my job, airports, deadlines, the intense management meetings till ten pm. My health was fine.
Jake’s nickname was Mr. Sunshine, his temperament perfect for a set designer doing genuine work amid fat theatre egos. No, not love at first sight, he didn’t read fiction, had an erratic income. Irrelevant. Over twelve years our interests hadn’t converged, but almost daily we gladly found each other in the big bed. I couldn’t believe how little sex Myrna Lesley Robin Andrea had. Of such poor quality, too. Rosalind, single, did better.
Red Girl Rat Boy Page 7