You feel like telling them your kid’s got the taste buds of a cat and you’ve just never had the energy to force-feed her. Besides, you did it with her sister and look where that got you. But they’re too busy wondering where they went wrong with you to handle that information, and your rambling thoughts are interrupted when Grace grabs the slab of beef off her plate and starts salting it in her hand. Dad raises his penguin eyebrows.
Quick, be motherly, show some authority. Here, honey, let’s try putting this down and eating like a good girl instead of a chimp-girl, and she giggles and fidgets. You take up her fork and your knife and commence cutting her beef into bite-size pieces as if you do this all the time, before you hand her back the proper grandparent-friendly eating utensil.
How come? You’re the one that’s always saying fingers were invented before forks, she yaps at you, because god forbid she should just go along with you on this one.
Dad smiles at her and swallows a fiddlehead. Better learn to eat with a fork and knife, young lady, or your boyfriends won’t want to take you to any fancy restaurants when you grow up.
Good, your kid says, through a mouthful, we can eat pizza all the time then.
Dad’s eyebrows rise again and Mum chuckles and says, She’s got you on that one, Wilfred!
Ha, they’re laughing. See, it’s not so bad.
It’s quiet a minute, except for some cutlery against plates. Grace is staring across the table at your father and finally says, You sure got long eyebrows.
Mum giggles again, holding her lips until all her food is swallowed, pats Grace’s arm and says, Thank you sweetheart, I’ve been trying to tell him about trimming those things for goodness knows how long now. But he won’t let me near them. She leans over to Grace’s shoulder and whispers, You think his eyebrows are bad, wait’ll you get a look at his ears.
Grace shrieks, You got long hairy ears too? The table erupts. Everyone’s laughing, even your father. It’s almost strange seeing him laugh; it’s never the way you picture him. Your child goes on, You know what, this kid in my class, Parmjeet, has really really really long hair, like around down to her bum and—oh god, your heart stalls: you kids were never allowed to say the word bum. Dad’s just listening, though, looking old and tired as Grace rambles—and oh and her dad has this cloth thing on his head that’s like a hat only it’s called a turbine and Parmjeet said his hair is even longer than …
She prattles on and you sit, relieved not to have to run for cover re: bum. She talks so long and so fast, they can only listen and you get a temporary reprieve from having to speak, come up with the answers as to how or where Grace’s father is.
Everything’s wonderful until you realize that all the food’s been eaten except for your child’s dinner. House Rule Number IB: The little bit of everything must be entirely eaten off one’s plate. You look down at your own: clean, not a morsel. And you’re sure you’ve only consumed like that out of some flashback habit.
Grace glances around whilst simultaneously edging her plate away, the fiddleheads, mashed potatoes and broccoli rearranged but not nibbled. Mashed potatoes make her gag, she only likes ’em baked, and fiddleheads and broccoli—well, you can forget them altogether. That’s what you’d like to say, but this would only serve to remind them what a cruddy mother you are, that you screwed up with one kid and now you’re working on a second.
Dad looks at Grace, says, Better finish up now or you won’t get any dessert. Friendly but stern.
She mutters she doesn’t like it and you smile and wink at her. Try to feed her a buggy, curling fiddlehead off your fork, but she purses her lips and tucks her chin looking like she’s going to vomit. It’s not long before your father tells you to come join them for tea and cookies in the living room, adding that Grace can join you as soon as she’s finished her dinner. And something about all the children in the world who have nothing.
Your mother starts clearing plates and you jump up to help, glancing over your shoulder at your baby, her eyes welling. Remember? It was always like this—
Jo and Larry and George and you sitting around that dining-room table. Mumma’s right arm, practically raised Josephine yourself, not to mention George and Larry. And Larry, poor bloody Larry—he was such a little bugger and Dad was always beating the hell out of him. Used to want to scream in Larry’s face when he came home late or broke a neighbour’s window—Can’t you see what he’s going to do to you when he finds out?—but he just couldn’t help himself. As if he had to prove that he was smarter, cooler, tougher, better than Dad. And Dad had to prove Larry wrong. Prove Mum wrong for loving him so much. And that night—the night at dinner when Larry was late and Dad was simmering at the head of the table, your brother George cracked the air with, Hey, did you hear about the fight in the bakery? You kids sat holding your breaths—everyone knew that joke—he couldn’t have said what he just said. Not in the house where you couldn’t say bum or damn—nothing smutty. George sat up straight and, with this cocky toy cat grin, said, The bun kicked the doughnut in the hole.
Silence.
One two three seconds, then Mum laughed this listing heh-heh and stared at her plate. No one said a word until Dad ordered George to go to his room. The screen door opened just as George left and it was Larry, thirty-five minutes late. Sat through the rest of dinner listening to Dad beating on Larry, trying to get a scream out of him, Mum shielding her eyes with one hand as she ate, Jo moving food around her plate, tears streaming, and you, stone-faced.
Why did you come here, this is no escape. You didn’t need this right now.
Mum has the tea ready and soon you are following your parents out to the living room. Like a scared sheep. What the hell are you so afraid of? Screw it. Just say something—Actually, you know what, I’m just going to go check on Grace and see if I can’t get her to finish her dinner any faster.
You hear a sigh through Dad’s nose and your shoulders stiffen. Who cares? Just go, what’s he going to do about it, spank you?
You walk back in the kitchen and sit kitty-corner to Grace, in your mother’s seat. She gnaws inside her lower lip and stares up at you like a dog in the SPCA. YOU reach over and swipe at her cowlick before taking the fork from her hand. Glance back at the kitchen door and raise a sshing finger to your lips before shovelling her swamp-cold vegetables in your mouth. Chew, chew, chew fast. She’s giggling, you’re holding your finger to your lips again, watching the door, nearly gagging now on the lumpy mash, listening for footsteps. Finished! Good girl. (I’ll smuggle you a peanut butter sandwich later.) He’s barely looking at you. All this goddamn effort, clean and sober, you’ve been sober since January, almost four months, but no, that’s not good enough. Nothing’s ever good enough. He doesn’t even seem that crazy about Grace. Your mother likes her, she taught her how to knit this morning, but Dad’s too busy being whatever it is that he is—concerned but indifferent, or not letting you get your hopes up by building them—them or your self-esteem, because you’re just who you are and you don’t have a lot to offer. Don’t think about him, think about how good it feels to see George and Larry again.
Tonight’s the big Saturday-night, welcome-home dinner at the dining table and everyone’s just sat down. No Jo, though; she’s in Calgary these days and rarely comes home. Got married and hightailed it out of here just as soon as she was legal. George lives just outside town with his wife, Lorna. Lorna couldn’t come tonight; their youngest has whooping cough. And Larry’s just here to see you. He’s a cop in Charlottetown now, divorced.
You conned your mother into making things that Grace would like and so far it’s coming off without a hitch. Larry’s telling about one summer when the family was out in the country looking after Uncle Sam’s haunted farm and how you kids all sat huddled in Jo’s room pretending to comfort her but scared out of your minds from listening to spooks drag god-knows-what around the attic. Then George tells about the rat who used to come into the outhouse every time he sat down.
Everyone’s laugh
ing at the visual in their head: Little George sitting there staring at a fat grey rat staring at him.
George is cackling, trying to pry some outhouse rat stories out of the rest of you. But the rest of the table denies any knowledge of said rat.
George swats the table. Oh, come on! So you mean to tell me, he says, none of you saw that rat. He never came in while you were there?
Larry snorts. Must’ve been that sweet music you were serenading him with.
You’re laughing yourself stupid until George starts talking about Darnell Woods, one of his friends in high school who was heart-soaked with you. Heart-soaked, he says; never heard that one before. He says, Imagine if you’d married Darnell, Eilleen—that guys loaded now, he owns about six gas stations in Fredericton.
Larry interrupts with his usual sardonic lilt. Nope, Eilleen’s always been a sucker for snakes.
George chuckles and cuts himself off. It’s a joke, get it, Eilleen? You used to catch snakes as a kid and you married one as a grownup, an almost grown-up. Jake the snake, you say out loud with a bitter ha-ha, and suddenly you are vaulted into 1952, over twenty years ago. Christ.
Had just finished teachers’ college in Fredericton when you met Jake Carrington. God he was beautiful. A beautiful bastard. Every girl in town had her eye on him. And it wasn’t as if he was just some lowlife either, his father was Joseph Carrington, a Member of Parliament. Jake could have had anyone he wanted and he did, every time he wanted. Before him you’d never thought much of drinking, no one in your family drank at all. Jake was always soused, though, and after a while you started drinking for him and despite him.
The grand beginning, your first real drunk, was spent crouching alone behind the dance hall with a bottle of lemon gin. Jake had claimed he was sick that night, but he was in there all right, and you were going to sip and wince until you had a snootful, and then—well, then you’d just waltz right in and show him who’s boss. You had the tightest outfit you owned on and in five minutes you’d wipe yourself on the first good-looking guy you saw, right under Jake’s nose.
It didn’t take much, really, till you felt it in your wrists, singing up your arms, the sweet pulsing, going up your thighs, making things sparkle and go numb, and you thought, Jake-Jake, Jake the Snake—This is Magic, I can make Jake do whatever I say, I could tell my father to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, and that sent you into giggle fits you couldn’t remember having since you left teachers’ college and came home to this godforsaken hole in the world. You swigged back a little more—just walk right in and catch him there sucking on a bottle. And some tramp.
Drank about half and stood up and things kept moving, but you lifted your chin and thought, I’m Betty Grable, I’m Jane Russell and Lana Turner, and boy, could you saunter.
In you went, found some girls you knew who said that Jake had already been and gone.
Huh, well, that was that, tough titty for him, you’d just stay anyway and have a grand old time. And looking around at all those guys, you had yourself convinced. And you danced, and someone bought you a Moosehead beer, and it was all fun and games. Until Jake came back at midnight with lipstick smeared all over his mouth and the two of you had it out in the middle of the dance floor. He insisted he had come looking for you, though—some drunk girl had kissed him outside, he said, and he felt guilty, so he came looking for you. And you believed him.
God, what a knack for self-deceit.
Like the day you were walking with your brother downtown and saw Jake across the street, drunk, with some woman slung around his neck. In broad daylight. Couldn’t think of anything else to do but drag Larry over and introduce them. Ridiculous. What did you think you were doing? Larry this is Jake; Jake, Larry. Was that supposed to make the woman disappear? solidify something, show proof? Were you trying to say, I’ll see your loose broad and raise you one brother. You’ll have to love me better now, I have family. Jake slurred out a nice-to-meet-you, shook hands and staggered away and there you stood: single, white and twenty-one, looking down the street at what you’d hooked your wagon to: the town reprobate. And your brother beside you looking straight ahead, face hard. The same expression that passed through your family when you announced the engagement.
Just bigots, you thought, just because Jake’s Catholic. You’d had it with being pushed around, told what to wear, what to say, what jobs you could hold, how many squares of toilet paper you could use. They’d stopped telling you what time to come home since you’d started working, but it was still implied. Mostly your father and that look of his, the one somewhere just the other side of indifference loping toward disgust. Marriage would be the ultimate putting-down of your foot, the stomp to end all rules.
So, Jake drank, so? So he hit, and lied, cheated, stole—nobody had to know that, and in the meantime you’d fix him. Marriage would settle him down.
You converted, and joined with him in a lovely Catholic ceremony. Even got a job substitute teaching for a Catholic school—they paid less, but you thought you should try and be Catholic. Meanwhile, Jake sold pots, pans, magazines, vacuum cleaners, gadgets; he sold door to door and in department stores; he could bark like a carny or gently soothe open their wallets. And he never wore his wedding ring. Women were more likely to buy if they thought a man was single, he said.
Then one Sunday, after a be-fruitful-and-multiply sermon at church, you decided that maybe if you had a baby, things would be different. How could a man look in a sweet baby’s face and think of anything else? The two of you needed to build a family together, you figured. How could two people grow if they weren’t working together towards something? Then wham, you got pregnant with Charlie.
When there was enough money you both drank, but mostly he drank because mostly you were in the process of trying not to be evicted again as a result of Jake not paying the rent or because he’d broken another door when he was drunk or smashed a window or generally disrupted the neighbourhood. And every place you moved into was further north than the last, until you were living in off-season cottages because they were the only places you could afford. Sometimes, when the two of you were laughing and carrying on like kids, you’d think, God, I love him, and then the booze would run out and so would he. Just get up and leave. Usually he’d show up the next morning. And usually it was better if the booze did run out because the times it didn’t he just got drunker and started hitting.
Of course, months later Charlie was born and nothing changed, you just gained a shield. Now, when he got out of control and staggered and insulted, you could run for the baby. No one would hit a woman holding a baby.
Took you three years, a barrel of sleeping pills and a whole lot of black eyes to get out of that.
After dinner, Larry volunteers the two of you to wash the dishes.
He’s drying. So, what’s the story, morning glory? I hear rumours, but I should probably get it from the horse’s mouth, he says.
Rumours, eh? You been talking to those miserable bitches in my neighbourhood? and you scrub at the bottom of a pot.
Jesus, you’ve got a mouth worse than mine now. What the hell are you doing these days anyway? You’re not teaching. Are you going to start teaching again or what?
I’ve thought about it. I’m just—I’m not up to it now. Danny’s buggered off, and—well, I kicked him out, truth be told. He hardly slept at home anyway. I figured we may as well go through the formality of having him actually move his belongings out. And—Take a breath, don’t know whether to just let it all hang out or what. This is Larry here, after all; he must’ve done a lot worse than you have. And Charlie’s gone. When Danny and I—
I thought Charlie was in a foster home still, from the last time she ran away.
She was. She took off when Danny left the first time. Then he came back. Well, he got out. He—Do you want to let it hang this far out? He did two years in Kingston for grand larceny. Everything went to hell while he was gone. And when he got out, we tried to make it work again. I didn’t know
what else to do. You hand Larry another clean wet plate. It all sounds so pathetic when recounted this way. He’s just drying, no uh huhs, no nothing. You go on. So. Danny brought Grace and me out to Toronto from Vancouver and then, when it started sinking in what a mess Charlie’d become, he got it in his head that he wanted her there too—he raised her for the most part anyway, Jake was never around—so Charlie came out to Toronto and … Ah. It didn’t work. I don’t think anybody’s heart was in it anyway. Charlie’s been running around on the streets for two years now and she’s not about to let me or him tell her what to do. I think she went to school about three days of the six months she was back home and then she just got sick of us again and took off back to Vancouver. Danny actually tried to head her off at the pass at first. He found out what train she was on, caught up with her and dragged her off at a station along the way. Didn’t sound like she put up much of a fight. I think she liked it, I—
Larry’s not moving. He’s got his dishtowel stuffed in a glass and he’s standing there, staring.
You go on. I think I just didn’t want her back, maybe, and your voice breaks. I did, I did want her, but I didn’t know what to do with her. When they threw Danny in the joint two years ago, I just—I lost control of her. Everything’s just such a f(ee-iz)ucking mess. Larry’s shaking his head now, putting one glass in the cupboard, picking up another. What? you say, why are you looking at me like that?
Ah. He shrugs. You. You listened to yourself lately? You sound like one of them. You’re an elementary school teacher, or you were, and now you sound like a jailhouse rat. I’ll tell you something, since we’re standing here playing Truth or Dare and all: I looked up Danny’s record. I made a couple calls and, uh—huh. Christ. He was wanted for everything from petty theft to—he was charged with kidnapping and extortion a few years ago, you know, but they couldn’t make it stick. Whole thing fell apart. I kept wondering if you knew. I thought, she couldn’t know. How could she knowingly hang around with this kind of garbage? He just did time for conning old people into giving him their life savings. Did you know that? Did you know he was stealing from eighty-, ninety-year-old ladies?
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