Red Girl Rat Boy

by Cynthia Flood

  Was I just boring? Shallow? Once Robin spoke of Hallmark families.

  Was I in denial? Andrea felt she’d denied for years her need for orgasm.

  Certainly no one liked my remarking, “Anaïs Nin is so self-centred.”

  “But Lauren, we only have one life? We all just want to be happy?” Rosalind. Her rising tone to end a declarative sentence: another 80s symptom.

  Again on the tape, Blur fuck blur you blur.

  Replay. Erase.

  The hang-ups also increased. Bang. Bang.

  “Jake, what do you think we should do?”

  “Ask Henry. He’s on Madame’s wavelength.”

  Indeed he was. Our son had his own room at her house, and sometimes they apologized for not speaking English to us.

  “Let’s not drag Henry down with adult stuff.”

  Jake shrugged. Again he was in between contracts. Maybe a Private Lives? Another theatre sought an angel for Equus. Waiting, he’d repaint our living room. Colour chips brightened the litter of sketched horses, wrought-iron balconies. Henry admired them all.

  I did call my mother more often, but our talk jolted. In my ears still ran the music of my parents’ conversation, fluent, inquiring.

  Soon after Jake and I married, I applied for a new library job. The competition, tough. Also male—this still carried weight. Evenings, I polished my resume and my vision (another 80s word). Then too, Jake was between theatre jobs. He’d helped to re-roof Myrna’s house, been an extra in a local TV series (Rosalind got him that), tree-planted near Terrace. Now he sulked.

  “Jake, I have to finish typing this.”

  “Lauren, come to bed.” That language we spoke fluently.

  I got the job. I got pregnant. To baby Henry I talked about everything. Caring for him, Jake and I learned another common tongue. He took that same tree-planting contract for years. We always thought maybe I’d fly up to Terrace, a little getaway. Thus patterns form.

  This autumn went on.

  Both Henry and Curtis were on the league team.

  My book club convened. Home Truths. Myrna raged at her husband’s money messes. Robin analyzed her daughter’s teacher’s personality disorder. For once I too had a tale. At an IT conference, a catalogue specialist from Moncton made a pass at me.

  “At least did you get drinks and dinner?” (Myrna.) “I can’t believe you wouldn’t take the opportunity!” (Rosalind.) “Not good-looking?” (Andrea.)

  Once I went to soccer practice. Curtis’s mum was lively, humorous, unlike tedious Lesley who was always on about loneliness. Melanie didn’t read novels or use a computer, but we both disliked the coach and found Tom & Jerry’s hot chocolate too sweet.

  On a Tuesday, Henry noted ten hang-ups. Seventeen, Wednesday. That Friday the indicator said 30. Only a few hurt our ears. Genuine messages were interspersed.

  “A nuisance caller. I’ll notify the phone company.”

  “Grand-mère,” Henry insisted. “With some different bangs for disguise.”

  No patience remained in me after a day spent managing the sort of librarians who bring stereotypes to life. I called my mother. The old dial phone, how outrageously time-wasting! Two zeroes, a nine, three full rotations.

  “You’ve called here twenty-three times.”

  “Hello, Lauren. How is Henry? How was your work today?”

  Wozz. Her pronunciation was off. Wobbly.

  “Mother, are you all right?”

  She cried.

  She also cried when at UBC I quit history for electronic languages.

  My father reassured her. “Modern, precise. Like our Lauren.”

  During childhood evenings when I played and he did crosswords, my mother talked with him while skimming French periodicals. Even in English she was good at anagrams. Or she’d read aloud, translating as she went. These exchanges grew to full converse, allusions, flirty disagreements, laughter—until they remembered their witness to intimacy. Sent to bed, I’d read. That’s how I started with novels. Because of their war, my parents slept badly. I’d wake, sensing vacancy in the big bedroom, and from the stairs hear that companionable murmur in the kitchen. In three decades they never ran out of things to say.

  Grand-mère’s gallbladder surgery was on Remem-brance Day.

  Always when I reached the hospital, the patient slept, Henry by her side with homework or a crossword. Later, I dropped him at soccer. Because of Tom & Jerry’s, he and Jake weren’t home till I’d had enough solitude to be sociable. All the machine’s messages were real.

  The rains began with The Progress of Love. Lesley’s new therapist led her through rebirthing. Soon, weaning. Myrna’s lover wanted to try bondage. Dared she? Everyone was supportive.

  Andrea took a breath. “Lauren, we all open up. Why won’t you?”

  A planned intervention, I could tell.

  “Acting so superior, holding back,” said Lesley. Also, conceited.

  Wilfully blind: Rosalind.

  Emotionally unavailable, selfish, so left-brainy—Robin had resented me, apparently, “Forever! Time you got the message.”

  Such clichés. I went home raw. Another.

  Nécrotique, my mother termed her gallbladder. “Henry can use that adjective at school.” From her surgeon she’d got her stones, forty small grey polyhedrons. “For science class.” She refused to recuperate with us, but minutes after we’d deposited her at home our phone rang.

  “You may suffer this too, Lauren. At least there is a predisposition.”

  Troubling, how soon that call came.

  Her recovery seemed slow. She, subdued.

  Jake got her housecleaner to come more often, Henry took extra trips to library and video-shop, I blended her grocery shopping with ours. She accepted the changes. Did they make her sad?

  Henry reported, “Grand-mère’s scar was red like spaghetti. Now it’s getting pink.”

  “Madame showed you?”

  “I hope you didn’t ask her?”

  “She showed me in the hospital!”

  “At least she stayed awake, for you.”

  Henry visibly decided to say, “Grand-mère wasn’t asleep. She’s scared to be a burden, like her own mother. She hurt for ages before she told you guys. I sat with her.”

  It came to me: if I went back to book club I could present her. Mother-daughter stuff to share. Kind of heavy. When the child becomes the parent? You know?

  A most suitable issue. If.

  Reassuringly, when Private Lives opened my mother did her wave thing.

  “In the movie I have seen the best. Why spoil the memory?” Nor would she see Equus. “I have read this work. Kinky.” This came out Frenchly, quinqui. “Unsuitable for Henry.”

  My book club went. Jake reported they’d bought him a drink afterwards, praised his set. Fuck those harpies. When Henry and I went, what impressed him was the animal. Jake’s twisted aluminum strips only implied an airy shape, yet the tall creature was for sure a stallion, who bore his desperate rider powerfully.

  So long ago.

  Christmas approached. The Beta/VHS war was over; a new machine would gleam under our tree. I’d bought one for my mother too.

  I asked her, “How is it, having your cleaner twice a week?”

  “Certainly the house looks better.”

  Careful. “I meant, how do you feel about it?”

  A blank look. No words. No one-two. So much for open communication. I tried! For my report at book club. If.

  I drove home fretting, was still fretting when Jake and Henry arrived.

  Our son threw his pack on the floor, shouted, “Why do we have to stay so long?”

  “Son, you were glued to the TV.”

  “TV’s boring there. I see Curtis every day.”

  “Stop, Henry! I’m tired.”

  My
parents, watching movies at home, got up to lower the volume if the characters shouted. To demand, to show anger—no, no, unless alone in my room. Grown up, I never swore in my mother’s presence. Tried not to in Henry’s. At work, such restraints don’t apply. The Fiery Mouth of the Seventh Floor, that’s me.

  “Dad, I’m tired. Of him, of Melanie.”

  As with any complex problem, first comes meditation, often conscious, sometimes (as here) not. Certainty fills the dark mind then. Even if the solution looks peculiar, correctness shines. Clichés bounce up. How could I be so slow? Why didn’t I read the code? Like other parents, Jake watched the practices. Like Melanie, lively and humorous on Mon Wed Thurs, plus weekends as league play moved on. A charming single mum. Sugary mugs, the boys absorbed. Not a reader. Not computer literate.

  Jake and I soothed Henry. We ate, laughed, watched TV with him cosy in the middle.

  After he slept, a quiet hour passed. How long has this been going on? How could you? Humiliating, unsayable clichés, dead idioms. Jake’s toothbrush buzzed.

  “Goodnight,” I said. “I’m watching the news.”

  Then a PBS doc, the US invading Grenada. I dragged upstairs. At the sight of him in our bed, I U-turned to huddle by the TV till dawn.

  Off Henry went to school, my clever boy. Then he’d go to grand-mère’s, to make mince tarts. Her pastry, inimitable.

  Mr. Sunshine was prone in the living room, applying tape by the baseboards to keep the floor clear of paint. He held the roll between his teeth.

  “How long have you been fucking Melanie?”

  Jake didn’t tear the tape. Silence. Like greetings that give the avid caller only a circling whisper for unendurable seconds. Hi there! Hal and Michelle are having too much fun to answer the phone, so leave a message.

  “It’s got nothing to do with us. Totally separate, totally.” Another 80s word.

  Then why pray tell have you kept it secret?

  “There’s no difference for you and me! We make it nearly every day.”

  There is so. You have lied, in your body.

  Mr. Sunshine scrambled up, headed for the door.

  “Don’t you run away! I’ll call her. That’ll be different!” The soccer list, by the phone. I dialled. Fuck you I’d say. Jake grabbed at the receiver. Ringing. I spat in his face, cliché. He backed off. Thanks for calling. Melanie and Curtis aren’t able. . . A warm voice. Why wasn’t she there, the bitch?

  “You god-damned bastard. It’s over.”

  I went to work.

  Subsequently I repeated the above many tedious times. It’s also possible to cry so often it gets boring. Not tears again!

  “This isn’t fucking necessary, Lauren!”

  “Fucking her wasn’t necessary!”

  We could shout because our boy was helping to move grand-mère’s sofa so her cleaner could vacuum behind. Then they’d watch Charlotte’s Web. For hot chocolate they grated bittersweet, melted it over hot water. Neither admired Debbie Reynolds as the spider’s voice. They were re-reading the novel. Soon they’d move on to Jimmy Stewart and Alastair Sim.

  Henry would go on living in his home, Jake and I decided. We’d take fortnightly turns with him. How to tell them?

  “Madame will think it’s crazy.” Here we agreed.

  Shortly before Christmas, again the taped Fuck you, the muffled start and finish.

  A woman. Myrna, Rosalind, Lesley, Robin, Andrea?

  When I knew they’d be out I phoned, listening three times to spiteful Andrea who’d once asked Rosalind, “What do you want a baby for? You haven’t even got a man of your own.”

  No match. Erase.

  As I was driving my mother to our house on Christmas Eve she remarked, “You look worried, Lauren.”

  “I am.” Which I hadn’t planned to say.

  “Is it Henry?”

  “Is what? Has he said something?”

  The car moved along the silent road. Snow in Vancouver isn’t common. The whiteness brings a quiet that’s always surprising. She doesn’t even answer me, I could say at book club.

  In January I escorted my mother to a game. She sat in the car with the heater on, to watch her grandson’s team win. Melanie and Curtis were visible. Jake did not join us. No one went to Tom & Jerry’s.

  Next day, listening to the messages, my brain was full of a library crisis. Perhaps that freed my ears?

  She’d had to struggle past the expletive’s initial consonant. He’s fffucking you over. As if in a movie my mother sat at her desk, her linen handkerchief wrapped round the receiver.

  When at the next book club I opened her dossier of old age and frailty, when I observed how those greedy ears yearned for more, I knew the novelist’s power. I had those women. Elated, I took them to wartime France to see my mother’s loving guilt. They clasped their hands, wept softly. “Oh, Lauren, your poor mum. So hard, so sad.” Next I catalogued her doctor’s assessment, the geriatric social worker’s, her housecleaner’s. My husband’s. Saying Jake axed open my throat.

  “He, he, he’s,” horrible guttural, “been unfaithful. You can’t imagine how long it’s been going on.”

  “Years!” cried Fair Rosalind, and slid off her chair in a faint.

  Later she said a hundred times, “Jake swore he’d told you.”

  “You knew, Lauren!” he himself shouted. “You couldn’t believe I was just tree-planting in Terrace every year!”

  Unread codes.

  Done for. No good life could grow there again.

  “I won’t do that,” Henry said. “I’m going to live with grand-mère.”

  “Mum and I will take turns, here.” Jake spoke gently, though an hour earlier he’d been roaring, “Rosalind talked to me. For you I was just a dumb hunk.” Those clichés too.

  “I don’t want turns,” said Henry.

  We tried.

  We tried with my mother. She did her wave thing.

  Not the weekends but the long turns were the worst.

  Each summer Henry was with me for a month. Thirty-one days. Not long. Long enough to feel the child in his room close by in the apartment, to hear him breathe and stir in our shared air, to watch him dream, yet soon so soon to feel time draining and sucking away as it does during the speed-of-light week before the deadline set for the worst thing ever: helping my boy pack his little clothes, his books and games, and releasing him to the other parent.

  Men have abounded, mostly sexual amateurs. An unsuccessful migrant word, that, its meaning muddled en route to a new tongue.

  I still love my work. Friends, books, movies. Not plays. My son doesn’t speak of his father.

  Renaissance, that’s what happened to grand-mère after Henry moved in. She died in her nineties, weeks after dancing at her grandson’s wedding. What price did she pay for breaking her own code to send that foul message to her distant child? Not quite idiomatic. Crucial. She’d have wiped her lips, after. As for the answering machine, only last week I saw one at Too Much Collectables, in a window full of retro tchotchkes and faux-distressed chairs. I walked on towards Bean a While. Their coffee’s good. Rosalind and I still meet sometimes, to talk. Lesley bought our machine. In itself that old technology was reliable.

  Addresses

  The right apartment. meaning what?

  For Julie, that Jeremy be in it.

  He did the hunting. Often she came along, still happy though sickish-dazed from The Pill.

  Distinctive 1 BR suite even had a pantry. They moved in.

  By then Julie could, just, see around him.

  Also she knew she had never filled Jeremy’s vision.

  Sort-of arguments began, about The Pill. He, after research that took a lot of time away from his work, decided on condoms and foam.

  In the distinctive building’s entry, ceramic tiles formed octagons in a complex black
-and-white arrangement. Stained glass. No elevator, no laundry room. The brass doorplates and fir floors were original.

  “I checked.” Satisfied, Jeremy closed the pantry door to work for hours so they could get ahead.

  The paned windows stood tall, Julie not. They and the floors gleamed (she made sure of that), yet the elegant life once lived in these turn-of-the-century Vancouver rooms did not seem like anything she could match.

  “What about a baby?”

  “No, not yet. “

  “When?”

  “Not yet!”

  Every time, Julie did not start a third interchange. Did she lack character? She did hunger for concord. They settled, kind of, on soon.

  To be alone so much was still surprising. The magazines suggested picking one room each day, in rotation, for special cleaning. Julie did that. She ordered dress patterns, clipped recipes. Dinner was quite good sometimes. When Jeremy stayed late at the law office, she’d get into bed to wait, wanting him.

  The spermicidal foam oozed all over the bed linen. Back and forth Julie walked to the laundromat, never meeting the same people there.

  “You’re pregnant?”

  Jeremy couldn’t or wouldn’t believe she hadn’t tricked him.

  “Got your way, again.” He slapped at the want ads, some red-circled. “I have no time for this. Can you at least follow up?”

  Did again mean he hadn’t wanted to marry?

  Julie followed up, went further.

  Of the place she found, he said, “It’ll do for the time being.”

  What could time do but be?

  Jeremy conceded the value of 2 BR nr shops, bus, beach, although old frame houses with lacy trim had been bulldozed to make space for the mod apt tower. He deplored and Julie smiled at the lobby’s earnest mural of a tropical sunset, the palm trees etched on the mirror by the mailboxes.

  Of 1 prkg he said, “Too bad you were careless. No money for that now.”

  Their own decor did please him. All paint and textiles and floor coverings were bone. Not the red lumps that dogs gnaw on, Julie knew that. White trim.

  “Perfect neutrals. You do see how they don’t call attention to themselves?”

  The look of their Danish coffee table by the picture window also pleased Jeremy, for the north-east light enhanced the teak’s grain. He removed their white cups to the kitchen as soon as they were empty.