Out on the water the teenagers rock the wooden float, jumping off, climbing on, over and over. The girls have bellies like dolphins that do tricks on TV, boobs and birds covered with triangles, pink, orange, green—colours like Kool-Aid, which Cal says is pure sugar. The boys shake themselves like dogs do, flicking their wet hair. One could be the tractor boy but I’m not sure because they all look the same. Then he opens his mouth and yells and I can tell it’s him. He’s pointing and yelling, “Don’t just stand there. Take it off. Come on. We seen your mom do it. You can do it too—we want to see you!” and he says my name-name.
I stand there in my sneakers and my shorts and shirt and after a while I take off my sneakers and let the lake touch my toes. It makes the rocks look gold and my feet yellow, as in if it’s yellow let it mellow if it’s brown flush it down. I keep my eyes on the place where the gold turns brown and the brown turns black as Pepsi. The lake’s licking-lapping makes me picture Ma taking off all her clothes and diving into the lake’s belly. The skin on her bum a bit like orange peel only pinky-yellow like grapefruit, which Cal says makes you gain weight, forget what magazines say.
“Come on, Delee! Do it for us. Show us, come on, show us!” the boy keeps yelling but then another boy pushes him off the float and a girl is standing up and she says, “Ohmygod. Don’t be such dicks.” Their voices are louder than the lake which says come in, come in, I like your green shorts, Delee, and that orange top: what colour can I turn them? Even louder it says how it will feel wrapping around me like the slippery-cool see-through scarf Dad brought back for Ma once.
The teenagers are wrestling now. They’re skinny but shiny and wet like WWE wrestlers and they’re throwing each other off the float and now the tractor boy is doing handstands, only his feet sticking up out of the water, and a girl screams Ohmygod an eel and another screams Ohmyfuck, a bloodsucker. “Fooled you, asshole!” the first girl says, and the tractor boy yells, “Your ass is grass and I’m gonna smoke it” and jumps up on the float and throws her off. And quietly the lake says it’s okay, they don’t see you anymore, Delee, so I walk into the lake, my shirt heavy like snow once I duck and duck again—like there are golden hands pulling on it, pulling me down underneath to where the mud is like Bluebell’s tongue only a lot cooler.
No way hosay, I think too late—the same as with Suffer. The things I should have said. Too late. The boy follows me down the path. His feet make no sound but I know he’s there. His fingers hurt, digging into my shoulder. There’s the smell of snake berries—a blue smell but not sweet like blueberries, that have a shoe-polish taste, Cal says.
The boy’s feet are white against the dirt and dead leaves—I keep my eyes fixed on them. Delia, he says, Show me, show me, he says, and I don’t know what he means even though I can guess. The hand he steers with tries to push into my shorts—but they’re cutting-tight and hard with wet, and a little red dragonfly comes and lands on his arm and sits there. I think it really is a darning needle, like Ma says, sewing up his mouth, because he doesn’t speak. Now his hands are to himself. Keep your hands to yourself, the teacher says in school. The dragonfly flies off and the boy runs away but the drum inside me goes Ma, Ma.
Cal’s truck is there—I see it even before I reach the Hidden Driveway sign up the hill. Dad’s mint car isn’t, though. Cal’s inside making supper, putting juice on the table, saying to leave my wet stuff on the stoop after and she’ll hang it out. Up in my room I put on the jammy pants and Frenchy’s shirt we got before Dad came back and any of this happened. Rock Your World it says in sparkly letters. Downstairs I put the wet clothes outside. The underpants and shorts look like a fat hair-band inside an even fatter hair-band. Large and larger, Cal corrects me when I say it.
Her hands are purply-grey like mine, what happens when you work with berries. She drinks right from the medicine bottle and doesn’t bother putting it under the sink again.
“I want Dad,” I say but Cal is busy scraping hot Highliner onto plates, and there’s a thing of mint-green coleslaw on the table. “A healthy alternative to Crit’R’s,” she says.
After we eat, Cal watches TV with the sound off and her eyes closed. It’s a good chance for me to go out and listen to the grass, except it speaks in a voice like the tractor boy’s. “How’s she goin’?” it hums and hums, and when the sky turns pink to purple to grey the clouds then the stars are too weak to talk. “Where is For’mickmurry?” I asked them the first time Dad left. “Nowhere you want to be, little girl,” Ma answered instead, calling me inside. “It’s outwest,” she said, the time she took off all her clothes and got water up her nose. Now I might just take it to Jesus, like Cal said to do once. Take ’er to Jaysus, Frances, which made her and Ma break out laughing. So taking a question or a problem to Jesus must be like putting it in a bag and hanging it on the doorknob so whoever’s taking out the trash won’t forget.
Lying under my puff—Hey, a puff! Ma and Cal both said, pulling it out of the Frenchy’s bin—I think of them and Dad and the tractor boy and the eel and bloodsucker girls and Bluebell, and how each could be in a bag marked Donations sitting on the front lawn, Jesus pulling up in a truck and the tree branches waving hello, hello, and Jesus opening up the back and throwing them all in, and me lying up here waiting for the trees to say what next? Then where would I be?
I ask them, is Ma ever coming home?
Sticking her head in, Cal says G’night, Delee, and not to hold my breath.
Dad comes back and it’s Sunday, the day the berries are U-pick only. When I wake up I hear him talking to Cal and after a while he comes upstairs and says we’re going to see Ma. “Is she at the beach?” I say, because I want to know, Are we ever going there?
“Don’t you have any other sneakers?” he asks and says to wear a clean shirt and pants because it’s turned fallish. This is news to me and I think how the teenagers will be mad if it’s too cold to swim on their last day before school. “Suffer little teenagers and go jump in the lake wearing clothes,” I say.
“What?” Dad goes. “Delee, you’ve been playing too many video games.”
Cal has on new jeans and a fleece top with BlueHillsBlueForYou and three berries on a twig sewn on the front, and her little mental angel pinned on too. Her hair is combed so you can see the comb marks—does she ever think about using product like Ma does? Probably not. She doesn’t mind having blue fingers. Ma dips hers in Javex to get the blue off.
“Is Ma in For’mickmurry?” I ask, just to be sure, because even though I’m so excited to see her I could almost pee myself, there’s the car ride, and I know it must be long.
“No,” Dad says and looks at Cal in the mirror. She lets me sit in front and takes the back seat, saying it’ll give him time with me—to prepare, is what she says. Prepare—isn’t that a word an apple could say, for instance, waiting to be peeled? Except I’m not a fan of apples, except in the turnovers at Mickey D’s and Timmy’s—places named after boys. Which reminds me, what is the tractor boy’s name? Travis, that’s what. Tra-vis, don’t be a dick, the eel girl screamed.
Because I’m scared of throwing up, Cal passes me the bag from Ma’s stuff—a pack of cards, peppermint patties, underpants, and the rest piled on her lap. “Wanna give me some advance warning, so I can pull over,” says Dad. I know he’s worried about the seat.
“Nice car,” Cal says, but not like she really means it. Even riding in the front, I would feel less sick if we were going in Cal’s truck. Then I wouldn’t have this worry that we’ll take a road not to Ma but outwest.
The city has a big bare hill in the middle and buildings taller than any trees. It’s raining. Dad parks the car and we walk up to the hospital. The entrance is like a humongous inside-out basement, cement with plants growing, and people outside smoking cigarettes, hardly talking. The cars going by have more to say, but maybe that’s just me. Cal has Ma’s things in the Sobeys bag, which I’m happy to say I didn’t need to use.
She carries it the way the eel girl probably carries schoolbooks.
Inside the hospital is bright with walls the colour of that girl’s swimsuit. Strangers smile at us. Dad gives them dirty looks and Cal tries to take my hand, but please, I’m not a baby, I’m twelve years old! In the elevator Dad punches the button that says 7. The door closes and when it opens the walls are purple. Down the hall a man in a yellow shirt sits at a desk behind a thick glass door, and there’s Ma! She’s looking at us, looking at me, as if she’s been watching for us for a long, long time, and oh I hope she isn’t too upset by that wall or seeing my shoes. When we get right up to the door the man in yellow buzzes it open. His arms are tattooed black and blue like someone has drawn all over them with a Sharpie, snakes and swords and stuff. I’m so busy looking I almost forget to hug Ma.
“Go on, Delee, give her a good one, you came all this way.” Dad nudges me forward, standing back. It’s Cal that hugs Ma first and Cal that Ma hugs back, it’s Cal that Ma wants to see. When it’s my turn Ma sniffs my hair and looks at my sneakers then hugs me too too long, because the man with snake arms is saying move away from the door. Dad’s feet move like they’re separate from his body, like they could step through glass and down the hall, out into the rain and into the car and step on the gas to go back to For’mickmurry. Like, if they could, they’d move faster than stars can blink.
Cal says “Why don’t you give us a little tore, Fran.” So Ma does, she takes us on a tour down another hall and around a corner, past a bunch of closed doors with people’s names written on pieces of paper in red marker, past a room with a window and a sign that says Tranquility Room and another that says Family Room. We end up in front of two shiny metal doors that look like the kind on the back of trucks that pick up cases of wine from the can, bring bales of clothes to Frenchy’s, and buns and fries to the Crit’R Burger, and so on. “You so don’t want to get put in there,” Ma says. She’s holding the Sobeys bag but doesn’t look inside.
Walking Ma to her room, waiting for a man in jeans who says he’s a nurse and comes to unlock her door, Cal says it’s time someone stepped up to the plate. I think about those white plastic plates burgers come on, with fancy edges to make them seem real. Dad puts up his hand, I think to fix Ma’s sweater sliding off her, but then says he needs a smoke and Cal says me too.
“Coming, Delee?” they say.
But I won’t leave Ma. I won’t leave her by herself in here.
Ma turns to the wall on her hard little hospital bed. I lie beside her, my knees in hers, my arm around her stomach. It’s like hugging Cal’s bird feeder in the wind. How come I can’t remember what it felt like being inside there? The trees would’ve known where I was, before Ma did—they talked before she had words? Once, crows built a nest over the road and even in a hurricane not one baby fell out. The good thing is there’s a window. You can see treetops down below. We’re two birds in a nest now—look, Ma. But she doesn’t answer. There’s just the feel of her stomach going tight-tight, holding something in, like her skin is a tight but still-stretchy shirt.
Listen, then. You’ll hear them. Listen to us, Frances, I try again, in their soft, soft voice.
And she says, Get him to buy you new shoes.
Not for school! I think of her skin, her pinky-gold skin under the lake, and I think of the tractor boy putting leeches on people’s backs—not ours, though.
For school, not for school. Whatever, Delee.
But I really don’t think she’s listening, not to the trees. Maybe she can’t and never could hear them and never will be able to, what happens when you don’t want to. When all you do is grow too big to.
So he’s here now. You were right—he did come back, didn’t he, she says.
Then I remember the dead grass in my sock, a little tiny piece from that last time listening to stars. I pull it out and hold it to my mouth, hold it like Beyoncé saying thank you, thank you very much.
This is Delia speaking. This is Delia, Ma, and because I am the only one here I guess you have to listen. I am not a tree but I am here and you can tell me everything. Everything. Because you’re here, here I am, listening.
Shelter
An infatuation, that’s what it was—obvious now, but then? Not at all. Wait long enough and the past sneaks back—maybe while you’re unpacking groceries or leaving the mall—in this case, during my weekly stint at doing good. I was serving coffee. A street-scarred hand reached for a cup. Thick, callused fingers. I could just imagine the condition of their feet as the line moved forward, a shuffle of misery.
Against what life dishes out I count myself lucky: driving here each Wednesday, locking my purse and down-filled coat in the staff room. My husband says, “But don’t you find it depressing?” Well, yes. But it’s the least a person can do—payback for being fortunate enough to have a home, a car, boots with treads.
Did I mention this was February? The cruellest in years. The men were complaining of booms waking them in the night. Gunshots? The weather girl on the flat screen was describing snowquakes: icy buildup cracking the city’s bedrock. My husband didn’t see why I couldn’t miss a week or two to escape to Cuba; someplace, anyplace warm. Why we couldn’t be snowbirds like others our age.
The client with the large, especially rugged hands, wrapped now around his Styrofoam cup, said, “Jesus, imagine.” His wryness made me look in a way I usually avoid. His eyes—one slightly lazy, the other piercing—seemed oddly familiar. His gait, too, when he beetled back for his refill; one per client keeps things fair. Slight and balding, he seemed robust but stooped, owing maybe to rough physical work, shoulders hunched in his red checked jacket, head bent forward. The posture of a ghost? The shiftless but resolute way he moved, both agile and aimless, shook then broadsided me.
“Can you stay longer today?” Marnie, the counsellor, was asking, needing someone to help the nurse coming to do foot care—a volunteer to distribute donated socks and boots. A local rock star had started a footwear drive for those who slept here: the addicted, mentally ill, unemployed, and others desperately short on luck.
“Sure,” I said, though all I wanted was to grab my things and dash to the car. A normal feeling post-shift, except more urgent than usual. Waiting for the nurse, I busied myself making more coffee, collecting used cups.
Slumped in their coats, men were glued to the weather channel. Along with being dry the shelter’s non-smoking, but with a windchill of -35 who could enforce this? “What the fuck?” someone laughed at the looped item about snowquakes.
Rolling a cigarette, Peter sat transfixed—by now I could only think of him by name—the anchor-girl’s voice tinny-bright above muted ones. “In Guatemala,” I heard him say.
“Fuckin’ Guatemala,” spat the man beside him, grinding out a butt.
Offering a glimpse of the harbour, the Beacon’s windows are greasy Plexiglas. Its walls are dented and dinged, their pale yellow grimy with nicotine and grief. A strip of blue sky beckoned, or the promise of snacks at the soup kitchen a few snowbanks away. When the nurse arrived most of the clients had vanished, the familiar one included. “Looks like you’re not needed after all,” Marnie said with a shrug. “Good for next week?”
My husband watched me unzip my boots in our sun porch. “You okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said.
I need to tell you, I must explain: it was that and no more—an infatuation. Though it’s easy to look at something thirty years on and dismiss it as such. A girl in a hippie dress, I’d been, barefooted but not, thank God, pregnant. I remember as if it happened last summer, my gazing over the bay from a homemade bed snugged up to a hatch for unloading fish. The building was an old fish store—a warehouse—built on the rocks.
This is how I remember it. The dry dust of July coated everything, yellow dirt from the road behind us thrown up by the odd passing half-ton truck. Few cars went by. Flies buzzed in whatever windows
had glass. A skim of sawdust everywhere added to the dirt, the smells of creosote and fresh-cut lumber rising from the workshop below, and the scorched stink of an ancient hotplate complicating whatever stuffiness the stiff sea breezes couldn’t drive out. At summer’s height it grew stifling—one long, glowing Saturday is how I recall days parcelled out yet sprawling too, shaped by nature: fishnets of sunlight cast up into the rafters by the waves whose sound I awoke and drifted off to at night.
If it sounds romantic but gamy, it was. I don’t even want to think about the outhouse sunken into the hill across the road, barely enough soil there for digging the hole—easier to pee in a jar tipped into the sea. The ocean’ll take ’er away, boys.
Bodily functions, never romantic, are best wiped from all memory.
If I were so inclined I could make up a story of that summer—its predictable arc jazzed with court and spark, to coin that Joni Mitchell title. But, levelled by time, the truth of it stays as flat as a prairie; building a berm or two to add some grade would be false and unnatural, purely sentimental. Being sentimental would mean shaping the story as I would’ve back then, shaping it as the biology student I was—into birth, life, death—if I’d had the patience, the interest, to put any of it on paper. To create drama out of all that takes devotion, and devotion—real devotion—requires love.
Making a love story here would be more than a bit precious. It’s easy to say what fed my infatuation. You were a good ten years older than me. “I can’t believe myself—a twenty year old!” you said—derisively, I refused to see. Berating yourself for walking into some kind of trap—if I had been old enough, sensible enough to listen.
A bird on every tree Page 12