Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  5. Records. Your plain, old scratched-up 33-rpm record albums. (Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a neo-Luddite. I have a CD player. I just miss albums, sometimes. Spell-as-you-go doesn’t recognize “neo-Luddite” either. Surprise, surprise.)

  6. Palm Sundays. (Remember, all of you who were brought up in the Christian faith, on Palm Sundays when the Sunday-school teacher would give you a bona fide torn-off piece of palm tree leaf to carry around with you for the day? We used to hold ours tight between our two thumbs and blow into it hard to make a whistling sound. Do they still do that?)

  7. Fishing derbies.

  8. Michael Jackson mania.

  The list goes on and on. I’ll spare you.

  CIX

  These are the spelling options my computer spell-check program offers for Luddite:

  laded

  laetitia

  lauded

  leaded

  letitia

  lidded

  loaded

  looted

  luted

  CX

  For the word “Tupperware” even my computer seems to be at a bit of a loss. No suggestions.

  CXI

  Jesus, King of the Luddites, wept.

  CXII

  So did the board of directors and registered shareholders of Tupperware Incorporated.

  CXIII

  Excerpted from

  Big Panty Lane: The Three Rivers Stories

  by Cameron Dodds

  When I was a boy, there were three fat sisters named Cortland who lived on my street and used to walk by our place every day on their way to and from school. Three enormous young women in dun-coloured skirts and white blouses and hand-medown jackets when it was cold. My father’s nicknames for them, which he used every time they walked by, were “Big, Bigger, and Oh My Jesus!”

  We lived in a little house on the outskirts of Three Rivers in an area that was nicknamed “the badlands” by my more fortunate classmates. Our street, just a dead-end dirt road really, was known by a more specific name in Three Rivers. Because Mrs. Cortland used to hang the family wash on a clothesline in front of the house instead of behind, where everyone who drove by could see the Cortland girls’ great coloured underwear flapping indelicately in the wind, the road on which my family and I lived was wittily dubbed “Big Panty Lane”.

  The Cortland girls were the only other kids on Big Panty Lane besides June and me. They were older, and did not spend much time outdoors. June and I saw them walking past our house each day, and though we didn’t call them names like my father and the other kids, they still never looked at us. June and I had learned long ago not to speak to them. My mother used to wonder how Mrs. Cortland could possibly let her daughters get so big.

  One night at dinner she said, “Those girls are all gonna have heart attacks before they’re forty, if they keep growing like they do.”

  My father, in a rotten mood as usual, said my mother better look around her own backyard before she started in on Mrs. Cortland’s. “June ain’t going to be no ballerina,” he said.

  It was this comment that started my mother worrying about June’s weight. June had always been a big girl, even when she was a baby. My father used to say that what June lacked in brains she made up for in appetite, another comment that served to upset my mother. The doctor my mother took June to every few months for a check-up said the same thing, only in a different way. “As far as I can see,” he said, “the girl’s as healthy as a horse. Keep letting her eat what she wants.”

  For years my mother had taken this advice to heart. She had always been a good cook. She had learned a few tricks of the trade at the Three Rivers Diner and was always copying out new recipes to try. Although my father sometimes complained that the food my mother cooked was too fancy for his taste (her favourite recipe book was Time-Warner’s Gourmet Specialties of the House) June would eat anything my mother set in front of her.

  I couldn’t stand the way June ate. No matter what it was — peanut butter and jam, Kraft Dinner or roast beef and potatoes — she had it smeared all over her face and hands before she was halfway done. Because she had difficulty breathing through her nose, another minor deformity she had been born with, she was forced to chew with her mouth open. Sometimes, just sitting at the same table with June could make me sick and ruin my appetite. I never had to complain about this; my father complained for me.

  “Jesus, Sandra,” he said to my mother. “Clean her the fuck up, will you? She’s putting me off my meal something desperate.”

  “Well, damn it, Ben,” my mother answered. “She can’t help it, you know.”

  “Maybe not,” said my father. “But I can’t help wanting to throw up just looking at her.”

  June would sit there looking from one to the other. She knew she was being talked about, but she didn’t know why. It was almost comical the way she held her arms in the air, as if under arrest, while my mother took a damp face cloth to her hands and face. Yet I would always feel a little sorry watching her. My father would shake his head and quickly go back to his meal, before June went from clean to disgusting once more and put him off his food for good.

  June would eat anything except carrots. June hated carrots with a passion. Whenever my mother served anything with carrots in it June would fold her arms stubbornly across her chest and shake her head.

  “No nippers,” she said. “No nippers, Mommy.”

  “Nippers” was June’s adopted name for carrots. Once my mother, at her wits’ end, had given them a new name in an attempt to fool her daughter about the nature of the boiled orange vegetable resting on her plate. June believed it, in that from then on she referred to carrots as nippers. But she still wouldn’t eat them. Still my mother tried. She was like a lot of middle-class mothers in those days, who believed that some vegetables had certain restorative and highly magical qualities. Carrots, in my mother’s opinion, were good for the eyesight. Without them June would go blind or at the very least need Coke-bottle glasses before she was twenty.

  My father, who could sometimes be amazingly practical, said that this was bullshit. “My own father hated the goddamned things,” he said. “He never ate one carrot in his life, and his vision was twenty-twenty until the day he died.”

  “How did he know he didn’t like them if he never tried them?” I asked my father, for which he reached out and slapped me hard on the side of my head. He had been drinking heavily the night before, and on such days, which were most days, he had his limits.

  “Don’t be smart,” my father said.

  “Eat your nippers, June,” my mother said quietly into the void.

  “No nippers,” June repeated. “No nippers, Mommy.”

  This is the childhood I remember. This is the childhood June, thankfully, doesn’t.

  CXIV

  The front desk nurses at the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope had taken a liking to me. At least they didn’t ask me for ID anymore.

  “Go right up, Darrel,” they always said to me. “June’s waiting for you.”

  I was still not all that comfortable pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Like most people, I often want to be someone I’m not, but am not so crazy about taking that extra step and actually doing it.

  Like most people, I would not, if I had my druthers, choose to be a thirty-year-old recovering crack addict who hanged himself in the utility closet of a Salvation Army Treatment Centre. So why was I doing this? For June, that’s why. And maybe for Darrel. I was not entirely sure but I thought that I’d made June’s world a better place to live in. At least, she always seemed happy to see me. June lacks those two essential qualities which Dagnia, Juxtaposition, and I have in brutal excess. There is not much suspicion or selfishness floating around behind that fat, childlike expression of hers. I had come to love that face. I had come to believe that our ancestors may have been onto something, and that if God does exist (which I’m not saying He-She-It definitively does or does not) God probably has the most severe case of Down’s syndrome.
r />   Anyway.

  Each time, June would be waiting for me in the recreation room, standing in front of the ping-pong table with a paddle in one hand and a half-dozen balls in the other. (We always stepped on and crushed a few in our inexpert exuberance.) No crazy man’s ping-pong for June. She was always wearing the Minnie Mouse sweatshirt I bought her — her favourite, apparently. The nurse at the desk told me that June always dressed up for Bubby. Her room was a shrine to Minnie Mouse — a Minnie Mouse alarm clock, a stuffed Minnie Mouse, a Minnie Mouse toothbrush, and a rinsing cup with, you guessed it, Minnie Mouse’s face decaled on it. June apparently had her own theories about what God looked like. If Julie/Dagnia had known how much of her spy money had gone to buy rather expensive Walt Disney paraphernalia for June’s room she would probably have laughed like hell, or cried. Of course, Dagnia didn’t know.

  “Bubby!” June cried when I walked into the recreation room. There were the usual catatonics lolling about, and a few of June’s fellow Down’s syndromers milling around despondently, looking for something fun to do. June’s roommate, another big black-haired thirty-year-old girl named Marcia, sat at a wooden table next to the window, bent studiously over a puzzle. Marcia wore the most concentrated but comical expression as she searched for the missing pieces. Each time she tried to fit a piece into its space she slid her tongue out of the one side of her mouth in an agonized way. Then when she got it she sat back and clapped and shook her head quickly from side to side in the purest joy. She looked up at me and smiled when she saw me, and called me “Bubby.” I was known as Bubby to practically everyone on the floor, even the orderlies, the muscle.

  I was getting more names than a character in a nineteenth-century Russian novel.

  June did not go as crazy over my entrances as she used to. This time, after the polite greeting, she brandished the paddle, dropped all the balls but one on the seat of a stuffed armchair beside the table, and turned to face me. She wore the same expression as Marcia — one of deadly seriousness and vital concentration. I felt a sudden lightheartedness at the intensity of the challenge. I took off my jacket, picked up the second paddle, and said, “Go ahead then, June.”

  The thing about being lost in the perpetual twilight of childhood or childishness is that along with those adult qualities of suspicion and selfishness, you don’t develop the characteristics meant to balance them out — namely fair-mindedness, sportsmanship, and prudence. June cheats like a Sicilian horse-jockey. She has a powerful delivery, just not an accurate one. She throws the ball up in the air and swings at it like it had personally offended her. Sometimes she misses altogether and the ball drops harmlessly to the floor. Whenever this situation develops she just stands there and looks down at the ball in wonder. She does so until the ball stops bouncing and rolls away, as if totally fascinated by this lesson in the laws of diminishing returns. Then, the physical mechanics of what happened finally dawning on her, she says, “Oh, poop!”

  When June does hit, she really hits. Not one of June’s serves has ever landed on my side of the table. They zing at maximum velocity across the room into the wall, then ascribe themselves to some of Newton’s lesser-known laws. They escape the recreation room and bounce adroitly down the hall to the nurses’ station. They ping the catatonic in the back of the head, pong the autistic in the ear, and most often fly directly into my face or chest or arms. No one has ever been killed, I imagine, by a ping-pong ball. At close range, however, they sting. Especially in the eye, cheek, or forehead. Once, when she nailed me directly on the end of my nose I cried out, “Fuck me! Be more careful, June, will you!”

  Everyone in the room fell completely silent, except for the catatonic (which would be like saying the corpses fell dead). June looked at me, eyes a-goggle and chock full of disappointed wonder. She whispered, “You said a bad word.”

  It was an awkward moment. How to explain to a room full of Down’s syndrome patients that I didn’t mean it, it was an expression that meant nothing anymore, they even said it on TV sometimes now. That “fuck” was to the English language as “Minnie Mouse” was to Walt Disney.

  I attempted an adult I-know-best smile, and asked her if she wanted to continue to play. She shook her head, lay down the paddle, and went sadly and dramatically back to her room. I could hear her mumbling to herself the whole way down the hall, as I stood embarrassed at the ping-pong table with my useless paddle in my hand. If anyone from the outside world had come in just then, they would have thought I was one of the residents about to engage in a good old-fashioned game of crazy man’s ping-pong.

  “Bubby said a bad word,” I could hear June say. “Bubby said a bad word.”

  If you have ever had a child disappointed in you, you’ll know how I felt that day. Disappointment in adults can be dismissed easily enough. Adults have an agenda. Adults feign disappointment far too often for us ever to recognize the genuine article in one another, even if it really does exist. But a child’s disappointment is pure, complete, and deeply felt. When you have disappointed a child you have in a sense disappointed God.

  The fucking retard.

  CXV

  June forgave me. Another remarkable quality of children — or people with the mental capacity of children — is the ease and absoluteness of their forgiveness. Or perhaps it was just a matter of her forgetting. Doesn’t matter. It was June who taught me that, despite what the moral pundits might say, forgetting and forgiving are in most cases the same thing.

  June and I did lots of things together, not just play ping-pong. Although it took some convincing, I got permission from the floor nurses to take her outside once in awhile when the weather was warm. June had been outside before, of course. The floor recreation staff took the clients on trips occasionally — to the bowling alley and the movie theatres. There was in fact, only four blocks from the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope, a new cineplex with a gazillion screens and a video arcade and restaurants — BIG BAD CINEMAS. June and I went there Saturday afternoons and saw films. The criteria for what movies I could take June to were almost the same as those for the Treatment Centre, though no one actually handed me a list when I first suggested it. They just told me that June preferred cartoons to anything else.

  I have to admit sometimes I got embarrassed around her, especially when we went to kid’s movies. We sat in the front row (June always wanted to sit in the front row) watching Snow White or Beauty and the Beast or some other Walt Disney plagiaristic masterpiece and all around us sat little kids and their parents. There would be nothing unusual, I suppose, about two adults without children sitting in the front row at a Walt Disney film. We could have been movie critics or two people who happened to like Walt Disney movies. (I’m sure there are a few in the world.) But it didn’t take anyone long to figure out that June was not a film critic.

  First of all, she has the most amazing laugh. When I say amazing, I don’t mean appealing in any way. I just mean that when you first heard it you stopped whatever you were doing and looked around for the person who had that amazing laugh. June’s style was a mixture of all the weird laughs in the world. She’d start with a snort (and God knows why but she was always taking a drink when this happened and it would come flying out her nose like hard streams out of a soda fountain). Then she’d break into a series of hiccups, partly because she was laughing and partly because the soda was burning her nostrils. Then she’d segue into guffaws and finally into hysterics. Parents would look over. Kids would stop laughing themselves and stare at her. June would have her head between her legs and her great, wide back would shake under her sweatshirt while the mirth seized her. More than one mother leaned over to me and asked if she was okay.

  “Fine,” I’d say. “She just finds it funny.”

  The problem was, June would start this during the previews and by the end of the movie the seats around us would be empty as parents hauled their children away. “But Mommy,” I would hear them say as they went, “what’s wrong with her?”

  “Nothing, dear,
” Mommy would say. “My neck is just stiff from sitting so close.” I knew better. Fortunately June didn’t.

  Most times I felt myself watching her more than the movie — this thirty-three-year-old, long-haired, broad-faced woman with popcorn and butter smeared all over her hands and Pepsi drying down the front of her shirt, staring up at the screen, her eyes alight with indescribable wonder. I often wondered myself what it would be like to see the world through her eyes. What did she see? Was the world a giant, complicated playground? Was it full of dangers, or magic, or both? Sometimes I just wanted to shake her and say, “What is it you see? Tell me what it is you see!”

  But June wasn’t talking. She was too busy laughing and eating popcorn.

  CXVI

  The first time I took June to the Modern Art Museum I didn’t tell the nurses where we were going. One, because they wouldn’t have understood and two, because I was only supposed to take her to the movies, the bowling alley, or the park. We were not supposed to venture outside an eight-square-block radius of the institution. So I told them we were going to see a rerun of A Bug’s Life.

  “But June doesn’t like that movie,” the nurse told me. June and I were standing at the front desk, both of us in new snow parkas I had bought at an end-of-winter sell-out sale. June’s parka was blue and mine was red. It was late May, and despite being overcast and drizzling, was still way too warm for the heavy jackets, but June had insisted. June also had on mittens and had pulled the hood of the parka up around her head and tied it off, so you could only see her nose surrounded by the faux rabbit fur. She looked like the world’s tallest, bluest Eskimo. She looked, in fact, a little like Tattoo Sam.

  “She likes it now,” I lied to the nurse. “She told me she wants to see it again.”