That Time I Loved You

by That Time I Loved You- Stories (retail) (epub)

  They worked in the driveway, unaware that I was watching from a safe distance in the street. Darren came by and shot me a big-eyed look after seeing Larry and my dad. I shrugged, embarrassed that my own father was working with the enemy. But I didn’t have an answer.

  I wouldn’t have minded as much if my dad became friends with someone normal. But Larry, the human freak of nature? He hit a teacher once with closed fists, I told my dad. He tripped a mom in the schoolyard while she was carrying her baby. But my dad didn’t listen. He told me that people needed chances to show who they really were. I screamed and cried, slammed doors—to no avail. My mother shrugged and said, “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones,” which made less and less sense the more I thought about it.

  One day, my dad crossed the line. I was coming down the stairs and saw Larry sitting in our kitchen, at the table where we ate, bent over a birdhouse that my dad had bought but never got around to putting together. My dad stood behind him reading the instructions aloud, with a hand on Larry’s shoulder. That did it. This was my house and I’d had enough of feeling like a prisoner in my room every time Larry showed up, so I pretended I wanted a glass of water and sauntered in. Larry lifted his head and said, “Hi, June.” Not “Hey, Chink #2. What chinky thing are you doing today?” Just like that, like a normal human being. I was surprised that he even knew my name. My dad gave me a told-you-so kind of grin. I had no ammunition if the boy was going to act normal on me.

  Fortunately, Larry only came to work at our house on the weekends. Mr. Lems was a drunk, and sometimes in the mornings as we were going to school, we’d catch a glimpse of him with his skinny white pecs and flabby, little, pasty ball of a stomach reflecting the sun, muttering about the damned squirrels on the roof waking him up. Once, he spent an entire morning shooting at them with a BB gun. No one knew anything about Larry’s mother, but I overheard the women on the block saying that they didn’t blame her for leaving that. They only blamed her for leaving Larry too.

  Then came the Saturday when my dad’s lawn mower went missing. It didn’t seem like the doing of the neighbourhood thief. My mom lost a teacup once, but a lawn mower? Now, that was different, and I couldn’t help the satisfied smile on my face when I told my dad I knew where he’d find it. He looked sad, like he knew it was true but didn’t want to believe that Larry would take it. A few afternoons later, he finally shuffled over to Larry’s. When he returned, rolling the Lawn Boy up the driveway, it was after dark. My mother and I watched him from the front door. He barely looked at us when he pushed through, went to the living room and plunked down into his recliner. My mother sighed and said, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I wanted to say something smart, like the crabapples on his street were small and wormy and sour like lemons, which would make sense given the situation, but I held my tongue.

  In the dim light of his armchair lamp, my dad looked tired. He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands. “That Mr. Lems is a rough, rough man,” he began. Ma and I stood patiently beside him like soldiers. He said that Larry denied everything until his father dragged him to the garage by his hair and found the lawn mower hidden behind some lumber. My dad could only watch as Mr. Lems called Larry all kinds of names that children shouldn’t ever hear. Then Mr. Lems made like he would take Larry outside to give him a whupping. My dad tried to smooth things out, but Mr. Lems wouldn’t hear of anything less than a beating and even invited my dad to give Larry a whack. My dad suggested instead that as punishment Larry could come over and work for him for free. He said Larry’s dad reeked of Scotch and it took a long time to convince him to calm down. The most horrible part was when Mr. Lems relaxed and even joked with him and made light of the whole thing. Larry was silent and stayed in the corner of the room. When my dad left, he said he didn’t know how to feel. Empty beer bottles and fast-food wrappers covered every counter and overflowed in the garbage can. “Poor kid,” he kept repeating. “Poor kid.”

  The next week, Larry did come over. It was a Sunday afternoon, and my dad and I were busy scaling some largemouth bass we’d caught up in Lindsay at our favourite fishing hole under a highway bridge. We had squatted on rocks for hours in the dark and early dawn while my mom poured tea for us from a Thermos. We had a good catch that day. The silvery bits were flying in the air all around the sink like rain. My mom was getting out the steamer so she could cook them with ginger and green onions, when we heard some sounds coming from the garage. My dad ran through the back door to see what it was. He found Larry cutting the cord of the Lawn Boy with a pair of garden shears.

  Larry startled when he saw my dad and backed up. He was crying, tears streaming down his face. “Stay away from me, you fucking chink!” he screamed. My dad froze. “Stay out of my life, or I swear I’m going to kill you and your whole chink family.” He turned and ran out of the garage and down the street, his knapsack bouncing around his back. My dad held the two parts of the cord in his hands and gazed down the road. He looked back at the Lawn Boy, frowned and turned it upside down. The blades were gone. I watched the whole scene from the shadows behind the garage door. It made me feel like bawling, but I didn’t.

  Five days later, Jimmy Farley, who was Larry’s next-door neighbour, told us how his dad had found Mr. Lems stone-cold dead. Mr. Farley had noticed a bad smell like rotten eggs coming from the Lemses’ house and thought he should check up on them. The door was unlocked when Mr. Farley knocked, so he went in. The place stank from old garbage and the pungent sweet-sour smell of a dumped-out whisky bottle. Mr. Lems was lying on the couch, and the TV was on. He looked like he could have been sleeping, but Jimmy told us that his dad said his body was bloated. Darren confirmed this, since his mother was on nursing duty at the hospital where Mr. Lems was brought. Darren’s mother had explained to him that dead bodies do that because gases get released and sometimes trapped. We imagined that bodies might even explode from all the gases.

  The big question that us kids had was Was this another suicide? It didn’t seem like it was. Mr. Lems lay down and died. Darren’s mother had told him that the doctors called it a “death from natural causes.” But when Darren prodded her some more, his mother said that sometimes killing yourself is slow and takes time. That maybe you aren’t even aware you are doing it, but you’re doing it anyway.

  More things that made no sense, but what she said stayed with me.

  When Mr. Lems’s body was discovered, Larry was nowhere to be found. Mr. Farley looked for him in the house, with his handkerchief held over his nose, but the boy was gone. Later, Larry’s mother surfaced to pack up the house and told the neighbours that her son had been with her for the past week and hadn’t been anywhere near the body.

  And that was it. The next day, my dad packed up the Lawn Boy and drove it to the dump. When he came back, he sat out in the backyard staring into space for a long, long time. My mother and I pulled up lawn chairs and sat beside him. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what would make him feel better. Besides, my dad never looked at me; his eyes remained on that empty space while I stared at his thin lips.

  Dusk came and the sweet scent of the grass enveloped us. The white roses Larry had cleared from the weeds in the back corner by the fence gleamed, and crickets began to chirp. Off in the distance, some people were having a barbecue. I could smell the scent of charred meat and hear murmurs and laughter. I looked across the fences to the expanse of green that was our neighbourhood. It looked like it went on forever, as if it were the whole world and nothing else existed. My mother combed her fingers through my hair, something she never did, and said softly, “As beautiful as the day is long.”

  Flowers

  On that day, the last day, the primroses were especially pretty. Their red petals opened to kiss the summer sun. Mrs. Da Silva’s first thought upon waking that morning was to water them. She had tossed and turned all night in a restless sleep and woke up already tired. There had been no rain for days. In her faded cotton house dress, she pulled
the garden hose from its long coil attached to the concrete wall of the house. She liked the ease of the garden hose, its coil, its simple tap, its reach. Everything was easy here, compared with Portugal. You had a house with a tap attached to the side wall. You turned it on and water came from the hose. After twenty years in this country, Mrs. D was still amazed. Spraying the water across the patch of grass and on the petals of the primroses was among her favourite things. Each blade of grass and small flower shook and shivered under the mist raining down. When she turned, the flowers whispered two words in Portuguese behind her back that sounded like a sigh: The letter.

  Her finger released the lever of the nozzle on her hose. She stood silently in the glistening grass, her toes getting wet through her slippers. She waited to hear more, but the flowers went silent. Mrs. D wondered how the flowers knew about the letter, but then she remembered that they knew everything about her, as if there were an invisible thread that ran between them. The letter had arrived two days earlier, and she had read it, memorized its contents, but the news didn’t seem real, more like a ghostly whisper from far away. Only when the flowers uttered the words in their familiar accent, as if they too had come from her fishing village in São Miguel, did the letter feel true. There were facts in the letter. The flowers confirmed it. Her mãe, her beautiful mother, was dead.

  Mrs. D dropped the hose, the water still running, and walked into her garage. The cool darkness comforted her body. She felt sweat gathering in her armpits. Away from the sun, where everything sparkled and blinded, the darkness was a relief. She eased her body down on a lawn chair, filling it. Her body, so angular and lean when she was young, was now soft and padded. She spent a lot of time here in the garage, sometimes with the doors wide open, sitting at its threshold, so she could look at her garden and talk to the flowers. It was perfect, this spot, neither outside nor in. She liked to have a roof over her head. Also, she liked to be close to the laundry. Mrs. D had a washer and a big tumbling machine that dried clothes. Whirlpool. They were very good and efficient. Still, after she removed the damp clothes from the washer, she preferred to hang them. It’s how her mother did it, and how she was taught to do it back home. They did it together, high up in the hills with the wind whipping their skirts, the tall grass swaying, and beyond, the sea. Where the sweet scent of ginger lilies that grew along the coast floated up to them. These were her happiest memories with her mother. Her hands rhythmically pinned the damp clothes, releasing them to the gales. She did her part, so the sun and breeze could do theirs. Afterward, she would stand beside the fluttering linen and spread her arms out, legs wide, and face the sun, the clouds, the sea, the wind and grass. She would close her eyes and become part of the world.

  Even here in this new country, in this quiet neighbourhood away from the big city, where the houses were protected from the elements and things were easy, even during the wintertime, Mrs. D wanted to hang the clothes. She asked for a clothesline to be mounted in the garage. Her husband said she was crazy. He wouldn’t do such a fucking thing when he had bought her a washer and dryer, he’d said, and slapped her for her foolishness. Later, she asked her child, Georgie, to do it. Georgie loved her, and so he did. He was too short to reach up to the crossbeams, but he pulled out his father’s ladder and hammered the nails and fastened the line. Georgie did this even though he knew his father would hit him when he found out. And sure enough, Georgie’s father did hit him, but for whatever reason, the line was left up.

  Sometimes in the coldest months, when Mrs. D would come out to the garage, the clothes would be frozen. Like cardboard dolls, stiff on the line. This made her laugh. She had a bark of laughter like a small dog sounding short and urgent warnings to others. There were years when nothing had made her laugh, and she had walked like a shadow through her days. When she first arrived in this country, she had been afraid of everything. At first, she told Mr. D about her fear. “Sometimes the doorbell rings when you are away. I am afraid of answering the door.” He told her to shut up. “I am afraid of going to the store by myself. They say things to me I don’t understand.” He told her to get off her ass and buy some food. “I am afraid to go out in winter. It’s so cold. I am afraid I may freeze like they do in the Tom and Jerry cartoon and die.” He slapped her with an open palm.

  But one day, all her clothespins went missing. She didn’t know where they went or who could have taken them, but she became even more afraid. She held the fear inside her body like a shiver. Mrs. D paid special attention to what Mr. D expected—she bought the food, answered the door, went out in the cold, opened her legs—but always with the shiver inside her. Sometimes she shivered so hard, she thought her body might crack open and shatter, but she never spoke of it.

  Then, like a miracle, one spring day, the flowers started to talk. At first, she was confused by the murmuring, but then she listened hard. They were talking to her! They were funny, sometimes naughty or mean, but they talked. Flowers talking—it was so absurd—and the idea of it caused her to laugh so hard her stomach ached. They asked her in unison, “Who are you? Who am I?”

  On this day, sitting in her garage, on the edge of the lovely morning, she decided that today would be the final day. On this day, she would go home, to her real home, away from this hose, away from this house in the middle of the block. The other day, Georgie showed her his first paycheque from working part-time with his father on the construction site. Mr. D had clapped his hand across Georgie’s back and offered a rare smile. Georgie, her boy, was a man now. And her mother was dead. The flowers had been telling her for a long time to go, but now she understood. They were right. She had been waiting for some release from the heaviness that had been building in her body. This weight had pinned her to this life, where nothing seemed to make sense no matter how hard she tried. Only Georgie made sense, and now, he didn’t need her anymore. She could fly away if she wanted. Her mother was leading the way. The signs were there.

  She swung open the garage doors and picked up the hose. She turned and sprayed the driveway and the sidewalk in front of their house. This last time, she wanted to do an extra-good job making everything clean. The red flowers beside the walkway leading to her front door turned their faces up at her again to say, “The letter.” Mrs. D nodded to show that she had heard.

  They had a right to be intrusive; they’d lived there almost as long as she had. Mr. D planted them when they first moved into the house. They were expensive, she remembered him saying, but they would come back every season. They came back like noisy relatives each year.

  She took care of them, but it was Mr. D whom they loved. They preened and giggled like lovestruck girls when he walked by. They loved Georgie too, whistling and shouting, “How handsome!” when he was near. With Mrs. D, they weren’t so kind, and sometimes she had to bend down close to catch their discreet whispers. “Closer, closer. Closer still.” They beckoned until she was on her hands and knees with her ear close to their petals. “You’re ugly!” they would finally tell her, and laugh in shrill unison.

  At first, Mrs. D was mad at these vain flowers, and she would refuse to acknowledge them for days, although she never withheld water. The flowers would cajole her back, complimenting her in a way that made Mrs. D doubt their sincerity, but she found herself lured back to them nevertheless. They were so lovely, and maybe they were right. She knew she was no beauty, was short and squat with deep lines like a puppet around her mouth, so she forgave them for their honesty. She would unfold a lawn chair and sit beside them, listen to them chattering. She had no friends here to talk to. She didn’t know the language well enough to have made any. There was only Georgie, and he was busy with his own life. Mr. D told her to keep quiet most days because, he said, she annoyed him with her noises. There were days when she didn’t utter a single word.

  The primroses reminded her of the women back home who, after all the chores had been done, would sit on their stoops and gossip with each other. The flowers had opinions about the neighbours. The Mrs. in the
house with the cherry tree wore her skirts too short. The Mr. in the house with the yellow door laughed too loud. When the flowers were good friends, they were very good friends. But the flowers had sharp tongues, and they couldn’t resist criticizing Mrs. D after a spell. Eventually, Mrs. D let it all go and tolerated their meanness because no one else on the block spoke Portuguese. The flowers, emboldened, began to dole out their wickedness as matter of fact. “Mr. D hates you. Georgie too.”

  Mrs. D took all of this in, sitting near them in her garage with its door slid open, watching the neighbours as they walked by. Inevitably, the weather would shift, and the flowers’ voices would grow silent as the season cooled, and their petals would wilt and fall to the ground. Did Mrs. D feel some sense of poetic justice when she saw their bare stems? She did not. Instead, she sighed, folded up her lawn chair for the season and thought she would miss them through the fall and winter.

  When the flowers arrived in June this time, they went after Mrs. D with a vengeance, without even pretending to be friends. Every morning, they wailed for their water and care, and she gave it to them. This day was the same.

  After she recoiled the hose and was filled with satisfaction that she had completed her duty, she went for a walk around the neighbourhood. Some people waved as she passed. She had grown accustomed to their ways, as they probably had in turn become familiar with her shuffling by in her drab dress and head scarf. She had seen them come and go from their doors, their cars, had seen their kids pouring out into the street to play. They were good people, she had decided. She didn’t know names or particulars, but she knew.