All Saints

by K. D. Miller

  Whenever she asks about his family, he says, “Babe, we gave up on each other years ago.” But he likes to hear about hers. The smallest detail tickles him. The Christmas hand towels her mother puts in the bathroom every December, red with white satin poinsettias edged in gold thread. They hang there for a month, never absorbing a single drop of water, then get put away dry until next year. Nothing is ever said, but everybody understands that you do not touch the Christmas hand towels.

  “I’d touch ‘em, Babe.” Pretending to dry his armpits and groin.

  When she asks him, he tells her about being on the street, collecting pop bottles and turning them in for money for food. Posing for art students. Doing a little dealing. Anything to survive. “End of nineteen sixty-eight, I weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.” That was just five years ago, but it gives him the air of a different generation, like someone who fought in a war she has only read about in textbooks.

  Three times since they’ve been living together, she has wakened in the early morning while he was still asleep, has placed her hands on his shoulders and has thought, Come here. Three times—she has counted them—he has come to her in his sleep and has curled up small in her embrace, his beard pricking her breasts. Each time, the weight in her arms, the warmth of his head under her chin, has made a space hollow out under her breastbone. She has rocked him, yearning after his hungry younger self, wanting to feed him, willing him to sleep on and on, willing the morning to take its time.

  This will be the third house they’ve lived in so far. Also the cheapest. As soon as they turn onto the street in East Van, Emily knows which one it is. She keeps hoping, as they walk up the dirt path through the weeds, that she’s wrong, that Dave will stop, consult the piece of paper he scribbled the address on and shake his head. But she’s right. This is the house. With the room in it that they’re going to rent for twenty-five dollars a month. Which is half what they were paying in the last place. They’re going through her student loan faster than she thought they would.

  Stub. That’s the first word that comes into her mind. It’s half the size of the surrounding houses and set far back from the sidewalk, as if withdrawing from the street. Stump. It isn’t just small. It’s chopped-off, mean-looking. Grey stucco that might have once been white. No shutters. No awnings. Porch steps made of cinder blocks that rock. “Careful, Mama,” Dave says, holding a hand out to her. There’s no railing. Runt. Yes. That’s the word for it, the one that sticks in her mind. The one she will write down in her three-ring binder. The runt house.

  For the rest of her life, she will have a recurring dream about the runt house. She will dream that she and Dave are back together, or maybe never apart in the first place. They’re broke again, with no place to go. They find their way back to the runt house, but Rick is still there and won’t let them in. So they wait till dark, then break in and creep down the basement steps to their old room. The basement is flooded again. This time, the water is up to their waists.

  The dream will always leave her with an emotional hangover—a mix of relief and regret. It’s in the past, she will remind herself. You were only there for two months, for God’s sake. Two months.

  “This is Em,” Dave says to Rick once they’re inside. Em is what he calls her when he isn’t calling her Mama or Babe. She’s not used to it yet. She’s always been Emily. She likes the sound of David and Emily, but he insists on Dave. Dave and Em, then. Em sounds older and tougher than Emily. Em would have laughed when she first saw this house. Or shrugged.

  Rick smiles down at her, takes her offered hand, then looks back at Dave and repeats, “Em,” as if fixing the name in his memory. Twice in the first week, he will call her Liz by mistake. The name of the former relationship. The one the pillows came from.

  “And I’m Cass,” says a woman who has just come out of the kitchen. Rick’s old lady, as Dave described her when he was telling Emily about their new living arrangements. “I’ll be down in a minute to help you move in.” She jerks her head at the men. “Let these two get caught up.” Cass wears big swaying hoop earrings and glass bangles that clack up and down her forearms and a pendant in the shape of a cowbell that dings. Emily feels quiet and plain beside her, like a Quaker. When she extends her hand, Cass giggles, takes it and pulls her into an awkward hug. Her hair and clothes give off a sharp, sweet scent. Patchouli oil, Dave will explain later when they’re alone.

  “How old are your friends?” Emily will ask carefully.

  “Same age as me. Give or take. Why?”

  Twenty-seven just got closer to thirty. Rick has a bit of a paunch, and his hairline is receding. The hair he does have is shoulder-length like Dave’s, but he’s clean-shaven. Not even long sideburns. She always thinks that makes a man look odd. Almost womanish. And Cass has one of those prematurely old faces—hook-nosed and small-eyed. Her hair is dyed a bright red, with grey roots. It looks like it might take off from her head without the green paisley bandana tying it down.

  She’s being judgemental again. Getting hung up on the age difference between her and Dave. It shouldn’t matter. Her father’s five years older than her mother. And her mother was nineteen—a whole year younger than she is now—when she got engaged to him. Not that she and Dave are engaged, or anything like that.

  “Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with him.” Cass says this out of the side of her mouth, with one eyebrow cocked. Emily suspects it’s how she says most things. “I mean, Dave’s a hell of a lot of fun. So yeah, have a good time. But don’t even think about a cottage small by a waterfall, or anything like that.”

  Emily makes herself smile. Goes on folding socks and underwear and putting them in the top drawer of the dresser. I don’t remember asking for your advice. That’s one thing she could say. Another is, Don’t believe everything Rick tells you about him and Dave in the old hippie days. But she says nothing.

  Cass is helping her get settled in the basement room while Rick and Dave have a beer together in the kitchen. Every now and then there’s a burst of hard laughter from above. She’s never heard Dave laugh quite that way before.

  She has just gotten off the phone with her mother. She wanted to call from the house, but Rick said no. No long-distance calls. Suppose the bill comes weeks later, he said, and whoever made the call has moved out or gone broke? Who’s going to pay for it? She turned to Dave, who shrugged. Rick was their landlord. Sort of. So she lugged a fistful of coins to a payphone down the street.

  “Don’t call,” was all her mother said, once she had heard about the house and about Dave. “Just don’t call again. Not while you’re—living the way you are.”

  Cass is jangling coat hangers in the closet at the end of the room. “Tell you what,” she says, fingering the sleeve of one of Emily’s nylon blouses. “I’m really into fabrics. I can show you where you can get stuff that’s a little more—you know—funky?” Crinkling her nose over the word and grinning.

  Emily takes a deep breath. Careful. Don’t burn your bridges. She closes the top drawer of the dresser and opens the next one down. No mouse droppings in here either. Well. That’s something. There were baited mousetraps in the hall upstairs. Beggars can’t be choosers. She makes herself smile again. Says, “Let’s go shopping some time.”

  When Cass is finally gone, she spreads the Hudson’s Bay blanket out on the mattress and plumps both of Liz’s pillows inside the percale pillowslips that her mother gave her. Then she sits down on the bed, draws her knees up and buries her face in her arms. Upstairs, she hears the two men laughing again.

  She could have said no when Dave came up to her at the end of that Survey of World Literature 110 class and asked if she wanted to go someplace for a coffee. And before that, she could have given in to her mother’s wails—There are schools that aren’t thousands of miles away, you know! Stayed home and gone to U of T. Ridden the bus back and forth every day. Eaten supper every night at her old place at the table
between her parents. Gone on sleeping in her childhood bed.

  But she didn’t. And this is her bed now. The bed you’ve made for yourself, as her mother would say. All her mother’s favourite sayings have been going round and round in her head since the phone call.

  The thing to do, the thing Em would do, is treat this as an adventure. Something to write about. Something to laugh about one day with Dave—Remember the runt house?

  The room Dave and Em are renting is built on top of a wooden platform. This puzzles Em until the basement floods for the first time. It floods three times in the two months they live there. Each time, they have to stop near the bottom of the basement stairs, take off their shoes and socks and wade through instep-deep water to their room. Em hangs one of their towels on a nail just inside the door so they can dry their feet.

  The walls of their room are painted green. Em supposes that if the lighting was better, she might be able to name the shade of green. But the first time she pulls the string that’s knotted to the chain that jerks on the bare forty-watt bulb in the ceiling, she just stands there staring. It’s sort of a military green, she tells herself finally. Whether it’s closer to the green of camouflage or of heavy artillery, she can never decide.

  Their room is tiny, with no window. They have the choice of crawling across their mattress or inching sideways around the edges of it to get to the closet at one end and the dresser at the other. The closet door is constructed of open slats, like a fence, and is held shut with a hooked latch. They bunch their clothes together in the middle to keep them from touching the walls, which are always damp. During floods, the dresser drawers swell up and screech whenever they’re opened or shut.

  Rick and Cass’s bedroom is on the main floor. The kitchen, bathroom and living room are theoretically communal. But because Rick has arranged this fantastic deal for them and rooms are scarce and he could be charging them a lot more than he is, the shared spaces are, by unspoken agreement, just a little bit more his and Cass’s. Which is why he and Cass can hang their towels in the bathroom, but Em and Dave have to carry theirs back and forth from the basement. And why Rick and Cass can jam-pack the freezer and take up most of the fridge with their food. And why they can leave dirty dishes in the sink, but if Em and Dave do the same thing, they hear, “Hey. Guys? Like, I don’t want to come on heavy, but … ”

  Rick and Cass’s bedroom is right off the living room. When Em and Dave are watching the late show on TV they hear Cass sucking in rhythmic gulps of air—ah ah ah AH! Usually about twelve. Their own room is right underneath Rick and Cass’s. Em is secretly pleased that she can go on longer and louder than Cass.

  There is one last room in the runt house that Em only sees twice. It’s at the end of a little hall off the kitchen. From the outside, the house doesn’t look big enough to contain the rooms they all use, let alone this extra one whose door is kept shut.

  The first time Em sees into it is the day they move in and Rick gives them the tour. He opens the door for just a moment, telling them that this is the old guy’s room. The old guy who was buddies with his father in the war and who owns the house and who’s paying Rick to look after it while he’s in the hospital. And even though he’s probably never going to come home again, his room’s still off limits.

  The name Rick gives to the old guy sounds like Marbles. A few days later, Em is sorting through the mail, bracing herself for yet another Priority Post from her mother begging her to come home and be decent and normal again. Most of the envelopes are addressed to a Mr. Marples. Mr. Garth Marples.

  In the instant that Garth Marples’ bedroom door is held open, she catches a whiff of old man—a mix of cigarettes and unwashed clothes and neglected flesh. She sees dingy floral wallpaper, a high narrow bed with a white-painted metal frame and a night stand with a drinking glass and a photograph on it. The photograph is turned to face the bed.

  The second and last time Em sees inside that room is just before she and Dave move out. On that day, she opens the door, locks it behind her, climbs onto the bed, pulls her coat up over her head, and stays that way, ignoring the knocking and the calling of her name.

  But until she opens it herself, the closed door of the off-limits room keeps catching her eye. Who is in that photograph on the night stand, she wonders. Who ever slept in that narrow bed with Garth Marples? Did Garth Marples build the sad little windowless room on its platform in the basement? Did he put the screeching chest of drawers down there and hang the slatted closet door and then paint it all that hideous green?

  Why? Who for?

  Em never does go shopping with Cass for funky clothes. She never goes to the laundromat around the corner with Cass either, or helps her prepare a communal meal. Cass works evenings in a fabric and sewing supplies outlet and Em attends classes by day, so they hardly see each other. When they do, they keep things light. Small talk. They happen to be living together because they happen to be sleeping with two guys who happen to be old buddies.

  Em is learning what old buddies means. It has a subtle, layered meaning, kind of like married couple. “Still going to do something with your music someday?” Rick will say loudly if Dave’s harp playing has gone on too long. Dave once started a degree in music, but only went to half the classes, then dropped out completely because they couldn’t teach him anything. “Get thrown out of any city council meetings lately?” Dave will shoot back at Rick just before putting his harp away. Rick did two years of a political science degree because he planned to change the system from within. Then he got himself banned from City Hall by crashing meetings stoned and yelling about power to the people.

  “Rick, you are such a pig,” Dave will state rhetorically when he finds a knife glued to the kitchen counter with marmalade in which a fly is drowning. “You wanna light a match in there next time?” Rick will bark after Dave as he’s leaving the bathroom.

  “You guys don’t seem to like each other very much,” Em ventures to say one time when each is accusing the other of having thrown out the TV Guide. As one, they stop and look at her. Look back at each other. Grin. “Whaddya mean?” Rick says. “Yeah, what’re you talking about?” says Dave. “We’re old buddies.” Then, as if to prove it, they start swapping stories about the communal house on Cambie Street where they met. The toilet that leaked into the pantry. The pothead who masturbated into the peanut butter.

  There are other old buddy stories that Dave will only tell Em when they’re alone together in bed. About him and Rick spending an afternoon going down on a pair of chicks, trading them back and forth. Being late on their way to meet up with two other chicks, because they were driving around looking for a gas station where they could go into the men’s and wash their faces.

  “You were horrible!” Em whisper-shrieks after one of these stories, punching him on the chest and trying not to laugh.

  “I still am, Mama,” he says, catching her fist and sliding his other hand up under her nightie.

  Emily will always keep track of Dave, one way or another. Over dinner with a mutual friend, she will say with studied casualness, “So how is my erstwhile ex?” Through the years she will learn that he has divorced again, married again, is buying a house, is thinking about retiring.

  Every couple of years or so they will encounter each other. Once he tries to sit down beside her on the subway, so she gets up and moves away, her face hard, her skin feeling as if it is lifting up off her flesh. Then there is the time on the street corner when she is waiting for the light to change and hears him whistling behind her. That cool shaft of sound she will recognize forever, coming through lips she can still taste. She forces herself not to turn around, feeling him watching her all the way across the street. And, once, she catches sight of him and what must be his latest wife on the fourth floor of the Bay. Housewares and Appliances. She is shopping for a new coffee maker, and they are looking at an ironing board together. She hides behind a pillar of boxed food processo
rs and watches them. An ironing board? Why would you ever need a new ironing board? She still has the one she and Dave packed and brought with them from Vancouver thirty years ago.

  When she gets home she does an inventory of the things she still has from her time with Dave. There isn’t much besides the ironing board. A couple of prints. An old breadboard. That piece of driftwood from Spanish Banks. Amazing, considering all the stuff they acquired and used up and discarded together.

  She begins to picture the trail of cast-off possessions she and Dave left behind them as they moved from one place to another. Each place bigger and more expensive than the last. Each place one they simply had to have, once they had seen it. Once they knew it was there.

  They always shed some of their old things—threw them away or gave them away to the Sally Ann—in anticipation of the better and more expensive things they were going to get to fill their new place. Those old pillows Dave took from Liz. They would have been one of the first things to go when they left the runt house. What would they consist of now? Shreds of rotting cloth under tons of landfill? Fragments of feather?

  The first place they moved to was on Alma Street in Kitsilano. A two-room suite in a converted old house that had a shared bathroom on each floor. They still had to carry their towels back and forth, but at least they had their own kitchen, where they ate off a card table they found at a garage sale.

  Dave took Emily shopping on Fourth Avenue, where India print bedspreads were cheap. She put one on the bed and split another in half for curtains. He took her downtown to the Army and Navy store, where she picked out a square wooden breadboard and thick white china plates and stainless steel pots and cutlery.