Object of Your Love

by Dorothy Speak

  “That’s right.”

  “Now, look,” said Dad, starting to write down figures. I could see he was excited. Any mention of making money got him interested. “How much are you charging people?” he asked Stirling.

  “A flat rate for ten weeks, now to Labour Day,” said Stirling sounding proud and know-it-all. “Five dollars for a regular yard. Ten if it’s a big one.”

  Dad wrote it down, straight-faced so far. He was comfortable with a pencil in his hand. He loved any kind of figuring.

  “How do you know how many times you’re going to have to cut the grass? Could be twice a week in August, weather gets hot enough.”

  “I never thought of that,” said Stirling, getting nervous. By this time Mom had got up and started the dishes, but she kept looking at Stirling and Dad over her shoulder, as if she saw what was coming.

  “Two times four, that’s eight,” said Dad. I could tell he was beginning to enjoy himself. To tell you the truth, I was having a pretty good time myself. “Say you cut it eight times in August and four times in July. That’s twelve times, plus once in September probably. Five dollars divided by thirteen. That works out to thirty-eight cents a cut. Now, how much is a gallon of gas?” Dad asked gently. He could be patient when he wanted to make a fool out of you. He liked to pull you in, bit by bit, like a fish on a line.

  Stirling was squirming in his chair now, watching Dad’s pencil fly across the paper. He kept a package of cigarettes tucked inside the sleeve of his T-shirt and he reached for them now, tapping one out onto the table and lighting up. His big ugly hands were trembling. His fingertips were all swollen where he’d bitten his nails back hard and they were yellow with nicotine.

  “How many square yards are there in a normal property and how many do you figure you could cut with a gallon of gas? Then there’s your labour. What were you figuring on for an hourly wage? How long do you think you’d take to cut a normal-sized property? What about maintenance? Oil? Spark plugs? Do you have any idea how much they cost? What if the mower breaks down? Not inconceivable if you drive her hard. May run into parts. If you can’t fix her right away, you’d have to get hold of a rental. Daily or weekly charge for that.”

  “Wear and tear on his shoe leather too,” I tossed in, and Dad winked at me.

  Stirling was red-faced, looking reluctantly across the table, reading the figures upside-down. Finally, Dad threw his pencil down triumphantly on the table and pushed the paper across at Stirling.

  “You’re practically paying them to let you cut their lawns for them,” Dad said severely. “Do you see that? Course you didn’t have any trouble finding customers. Lotta people recognize a sucker when they see one coming. I don’t suppose you could have asked my advice before you set your price. I don’t suppose there’s anything I could have taught you about profit and loss.”

  “I’ll go back and tell them something different,” Stirling said. “Say my price has gone up.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ve struck a bargain and you’ll stick to it. You won’t go back on your word.”

  Then Stirling slammed outside and Mom said to Dad, “Did you have to be so hard on him? At least he’s doing something with himself.”

  I thought what she meant was Stirling would be out of the house now and not banging doors and smashing things around and standing in front of the hall mirror all the time, combing his hair with one knee bent and his pelvis, tipped at an angle, or picking fights with me so that Mom had to keep saying to him, “I don’t know what’s got into you!”

  But Dad took it different and said, “I’m doing something with myself,” and Mom answered, caught off guard but ready to fight all the same, “I don’t see you looking for work. I don’t see you even picking up the newspaper to search the ads.”

  Then Dad said, “What I’m doing now has a lot longer range possibilities than just finding a job. I got vision but I’m married to a woman who can’t see past her nose.”

  After that Dad went down to the cellar, where he was spending all his time in the cool temperature making diagrams, trying to invent things. Mom finished up the dishes, out of pride. She wasn’t going to let it show that Dad had thrown her off. But after she’d dried the last plate, I heard the screen door swing shut and the latch snap to. I went to the kitchen window and saw her going down the street, her body at a slant and her feet like two pistons churning, and if she hadn’t been in such a hurry she would have noticed she forgot to take her apron off. She disappeared up the sidewalk that cut through our block, leading to a better part of town where there was a friend of hers from church, a Mrs. Merrifield, whose husband was fully employed.

  * * *

  All through July the days were soft, the shadows deep, and the leaves lifted gently in the breeze, sighing. The sweet smell of fresh-mown grass filled the air. Stirling left the house at eight in the morning, when the sun was still low and filtering in yellow shafts through the trees. He disappeared down the street, pushing the mower lightly with one hand, a bag lunch and the gasoline can in the other. The rattle of the mower wheels, rolling along the sidewalk, was carried back to us like small thunder. We didn’t see Stirling all day but in the silent afternoons it seemed we could hear the drone of his mower somewhere in the distance, dreamy and far away as church bells.

  The first day Stirling went out, Dad got in the car and drove over to where he was working. He came home rubbing the back of his head and smiling to himself. “Whatever else you might say about Stirling, he takes pride in his work,” he told Mom. “Doesn’t miss a blade of grass. Leaves a fine geometric pattern on the lawn. Trims the edges down close with a clipper. Nice and polite with the customers.”

  After that, Dad seemed to respect Stirling more and to take him seriously. When Stirling came home at night, Dad would be waiting for him on the porch. “How did it go today, Stirling? How’s the mower performing? Any problems getting her started? Don’t forget she’s got a sensitive choke. Give her too much choke and you’ll flood her.” Then Stirling would get impatient with all Dad’s advice but Dad would pretend not to notice.

  Stirling brought home stories about his customers. They were mostly old women, widows or spinsters who spied on him suspiciously from behind their curtains. “There’s this one old babe, that every time I go there I have to knock on her door and tell her again who I am, ’cause she forgets. Else she calls the police,” he told us.

  He sat at the supper table with a stack of bread on a plate at his elbow and while he talked he buttered one slice after another flat on his hand and ate it. Grass-cutting was hard work. He felt the need to fortify himself. He told us about how, at one house, he’d sat on the front porch to eat his lunch. “The lady came out with a broom and started to sweep the porch like crazy,” he said. “She got closer and closer to me and the grit was flying into my sandwich, which I’d put down on a piece of waxed paper beside me. Finally I turned to her and said, ‘Excuse, me, ma’am? Would you like me to sit somewheres else to eat?’ And she said, ‘Now you mention it, I would. This ain’t a park bench.’”

  “Oh, Stirling, stop it!” Mom would beg from the end of the table, where she was holding her sides and laughing so hard the tears came out. “Stirling, you’re making it up! Wait a minute while I catch my breath!”

  Stirling sat there buttering his bread, full of himself but in a good way for once, just as surprised as the rest of us that he’d turned into our supper entertainment.

  * * *

  For the first time in my life it was a source of some pride to me to have a big brother and to be able to walk down a foreign street and see him in the yard of somebody I didn’t even know, cutting their grass in a very profound and businesslike way, pushing the mower hard, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It gave me a strange feeling. One day, coming home from the confectionery with my new friend, Bonita Connor, I stopped and said, “That’s my brother, Stirling,” which was something I never wanted to admit before. She paused with a popsicle halfway to her lips, took a good lo
ok at him over a boxwood hedge and said, “No kidding,” in a way that made me feel good.

  One afternoon toward the end of July, Stirling pushed his lawn mower into Bonita’s backyard. She and I were sitting on a blanket in the sun playing with her paper dolls.

  “All right, children,” Stirling said, “get off the lawn.”

  “I never knew you were cutting Bonita’s grass,” I said, surprised to see him there. The Connors had just moved into the neighbourhood that summer.

  “New customer,” said Stirling, bending over and taking a cookie out of a tin we had there with us on the blanket.

  “Those aren’t for you,” I told him, but Bonita picked the tin up and held it out to Stirling.

  “Have as many as you like,” she said and he took a handful, more than I’d had myself.

  “Aren’t you girls a little old for dolls?” said Stirling. He was trying to look big in front of Bonita. I don’t know why. She was homely. She had poached-looking skin, mauve lips, pink eyelids, hair almost white, not pretty. She made me think of a white rabbit.

  Stirling bent over and jerked the starter cord. The roar of the mower drove us indoors. It was dark all the time in their house because Bonita’s mother had the curtains drawn so she could watch television without the glare of the sunlight on the screen. She never came out of the living room to talk to us and we never went in. From the hallway, I could barely make out her tiny figure, sitting in a big armchair, her hand curled around a glass on a side table. I’d begun to think of her as somebody who had floated out of the television itself, a blue, flickering, drowned figure. Bonita and I took the paper dolls upstairs to her room and sat on the bed, with the sound of Stirling’s mower rising to us through the window screen. Once, I caught Bonita looking out the window and she said, “Your brother’s cute.”

  I said, “Who, Stirling?”

  After he’d gone away, we went outside again and tried to play but Bonita’s heart somehow wasn’t in it. Around five o’clock, her father, who managed the Metropolitan store, came home. We heard the thunk of his car door slamming and then we saw him come around the corner of the house. He always came to see Bonita before going inside. He was an extraordinarily tall and heavyset man, well dressed, with size twelve shoes, nice suits, and ties with pictures of Canada geese or racing cars or baseball players all over them.

  “How are you girls? Did you get to the store today? Here’s a dollar each. Go and buy yourselves something.”

  Bonita would pretend she didn’t hear him and just go on playing even though he called her “my little white butterfly” and often had something for her from the store.

  “Here, Bonita, I’ve brought you some sunglasses,” he said one day, but Bonita didn’t pay any attention even though he kept standing there, holding them out to her. They were beautiful too, turquoise with rhinestones in the corners. We were sitting on the ground and he was towering over us, throwing a long shadow between us, across the lawn. There was a terrible emptiness in the air while his hand hung there offering the sunglasses. I looked up at his big Irish face and I was torn by the bewilderment on it. It was more than I could stand. “Take them, Bonita,” I finally said, so she took them all right and she threw them across the grass. Mr. Connor turned red and gave a little laugh. Then he went up the porch steps, took in a big gulp of air, like a swimmer about to plunge underwater, and opened the screen door.

  After he was gone I said to Bonita, “What did you do that for?” But she just said, “Oh, never mind!” and her face was angry and sad.

  I didn’t understand Bonita and her family but I didn’t want to figure them out. They were so unusual. I just liked to have the mystery of them sitting in my head, undisturbed, like something beautiful and uncommon resting on a shelf, something you don’t know how it’s made and you just don’t want to know, you wouldn’t take it down to find out because that might spoil its specialness, its magic.

  * * *

  In August, the heat waves came, the sidewalks shimmered, dogs crept in under the cool of porches. The sky got bigger and at noontime it burned like a furnace, yellow at its apex. It seemed there wasn’t a sliver of shade to be had all day and everything looked harsh and sapped by the heat. The sun beat down and the grass jumped up out of the ground. Stirling would come down to breakfast and we could see from his face he’d been praying for rain so he could take a day off, but it never came, only brief showers at night, just enough to settle the dust, as Dad would say. Stirling couldn’t get a rest from the lawn-cutting. Dad would elbow Stirling and say, “Gonna be another cooker. No rest for the wicked, eh, Stirling?” He was cheerful because he knew he’d been right about the weather, he was like a prophet. “Lawn mower’s gonna be smokin’, you’re not careful,” Dad told him.

  Stirling was overworked but he seemed to have plenty of time to kill when it came to cutting the Connor yard. He’d find us sitting out on the blanket and say, “Move along, little girls,” because he could see it infuriated Bonita.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “What you want me to call you, then? Little queen? Queen Bonita? Will that do?” It was sickening, the way he talked.

  Stirling’s arrival interrupted Bonita’s train of thought. She lost interest in playing. “It’s too hot,” she’d say to me. “I’m going into the house where it’s cool.”

  “I’ll come too,” I’d say.

  “No, I’m tired. I think I should lie down.”

  One day when I went to Bonita’s she said, “I don’t want to play paper dolls any more. You can have them for keeps if you want. I’m going downtown.”

  I went along with her even though she didn’t invite me. At the Metropolitan store I watched her pick out a pair of nylon stockings, an eyebrow tweezer, a lipstick, a compact of clay-coloured face powder. She told the clerk, “Charge this to Mr. Connor.” We passed the lunch counter on the way out. I said, “Let’s have a Coke float,” because I knew we could charge that too.

  “No,” said Bonita. “I’m too fat.”

  “Oh, Bonita!” I told her. “You are not. You’re skinny as anything.”

  * * *

  With Bonita being tired and hot and headachy so many afternoons, I was spending more and more time at home. I went downstairs and found Dad working at the metal desk under a bare light bulb. I sat with my chin on my hands and watched him drawing. On the corner of the desk was a stack of finished diagrams. He let me look through them. They were done in heavy lead pencil, showing complicated interlocking wheel systems, belts, motors, pistons, carburetors, spark plugs. All the parts were neatly labelled. I read out loud: “Compression-ignition engine. Float pump. Camshaft. Universal joint. Flywheel. Differential.”

  Now and again, Mom would come downstairs to fetch something, the laundry or a jar of preserves. If Dad said to her, “Come over here and look at this,” she’d scowl and answer, “I’m busy working, as you can see. I haven’t got time to look at pictures.” Through the openings in the stairs, we’d watch her go back up.

  “Your mother has legs like stovepipes,” Dad said once. Another time he forgot to hide his whisky bottle and Mom noticed it at his elbow. “I haven’t got food to put on the table and you come up to a meal with booze on your breath. I’d love to know where you hide it,” she said.

  Later, around dinnertime, I’d find her sitting unhappily in the kitchen, drawing circles over and over on the table with her index finger.

  * * *

  On the last day in August, Dad and I were in the basement late in the afternoon when the telephone rang upstairs. We heard the basement door open and Mom called down in her stiff and dignified company voice: “Farrel, it is Mr. Connor on the phone wanting to speak to you.” Dad went upstairs, took the receiver from her and sat down at the kitchen table. From the living room, Mom and I listened.

  “Yes, this is Stirling’s father. Yes. Yes. When exactly was this? You’re sure about it? I understand. Yes, I realize it’s a very serious matter.” His voice was meek, eager to please. �
��I’ll certainly talk to him. I’ll do more than that, you can be sure. I promise you I’ll follow it up. Thank you for calling. Thank you, Mr. Connor. It won’t happen again, don’t you worry about that. Yes, it’s unfortunate. No, I don’t. No, I agree, it should be kept quiet.”

  Dad hung up and from the living room I saw him look around quickly, like someone waking up from a dream, and he said, “Where’s that goddamned Stirling?” After that, Mom and Dad talked at length in their bedroom with the door closed.

  At five thirty, Stirling came in with his chest bare and tanned and his shirt flung over his shoulder. Dad met him in the front hall. “You’ve cut your last lawn, my boy,” he said. Then he opened the cellar door and pushed Stirling down there.

  I went and sat on the floor in the living room where I knew Dad’s and Stirling’s voices would rise up to me through the furnace vent.

  “We were only kissing. We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

  “And her with all her clothes off.”

  “She took ’em off, not me.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Connor said.”

  “Mr. Connor wasn’t there. She was naked of her own free will.”

  “You must have had something to do with it.”

  “She wanted me up there.”

  “No decent girl wants that.”

  “How do you know she’s decent?”

  “Don’t give me any of your lip.”

  Then Mom saw me there and knew what I was doing. “You come out here in the kitchen with me and help with dinner,” she said.

  That night, Stirling and I were upstairs, ready to go to bed. He hadn’t spoken to me all evening, but before he went into his room he said to me, “I got something to show you. Take a look at this.” He turned around and drew up his pajama top, showing me his back. There were welts all over it, bands of red from Dad’s belt, some of which had been bleeding. I started to cry when I saw it and Stirling said, “Oh, shut up. You’re such a crybaby. I don’t know why I tell you anything.” He laughed at me, angry and proud.