Help Me, Jacques Cousteau

by Gil Adamson

  “Why’s he wearing pants in this heat, anyway?” Andrew says. I try to hide my shock: Andrew’s talking again. Just like that.

  He and the dog follow Dad in, trailing water and mud and crushed grass behind them.

  The tap drip-drips against the porch step. My head swims for a second. The back gate opens and I turn to look. Nobody’s there, and then my mother is there, her bare feet sinking into the mud. She’s looking down at the tracks she’s making, the perfect marks of toes. Between two breaths, she’s gone, leaving nothing, no sign.

  My friend Jeannie says she’s miserable; she can’t sleep in the heat any better than me. I’ve called her very late, and now she’s reading me stuff as we both lie in our beds. I ask her about my horoscope, and she talks to me about past lives and birth control and her mother. Jeannie’s Korean and she looks up our birthdays in her books. My sign keeps changing: year of the ox, year of the rat.

  “This book is crap,” she says, and I hear a clatter in the background as the book falls to her bedroom floor. We ignore the clicks and sighing as my father checks the line, checks the line.

  My dad stands in the bathroom scrutinizing his own sour expression in the mirror. He is wearing a tuxedo with the dust of years on it. Today is Castor and Netty’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and my father will go, alone, out to the car and drive the fifteen miles to the Silver Birch Golf Club, which Castor has booked for the evening.

  While Dad’s gone, Andrew and I filch a beer each. Andrew strikes one match after another until two packs are gone, then flushes them all down the toilet.

  Dad comes home very late. He slumps at the dining room table with his tie dangling, taps his finger on the wood, scratches a little light spot. I bring him a beer and he thanks me, but doesn’t touch it.

  “How many people,” he says, “can say they fit into a twenty-year-old tuxedo?” He holds out his arms in a weary gesture, totally without pride. Jeannie says my dad is a babe; so’s my mum. Too bad about me. His clear blue eyes, his tanned hand tapping again at the table.

  “They’re still just lying there,” I say. I’m up on the roof, watching the couple across the street do nothing in their bedroom. Jeannie has come up with me, but she prefers to stay well back, close to the attic window.

  “Okay,” Jeannie’s voice says, “did you know that in mythology the crow is symbolic of death during sex, you know, like old men who take young wives and have a heart attack?”

  “Get out. Really?”

  “Naw. But it sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  Way to the east, you can see the light of a train passing along the uneven walls of warehouses. The sky is silky and black; it feels like there isn’t a breath of air anywhere on earth. Jeannie shifts uncomfortably. She doesn’t like heights. Also, I know she doesn’t see much point in sitting up on a roof. She sighs and flicks a pebble at me.

  “What are they doing now?”

  I’m trying to sleep, relaxing my toes, then my ankles. Fat lot of good it does. Two guys on our street are playing Miami Vice, cars squealing around corners in the middle of the night like dogs chasing each other in circles. I’ve moved my bed under the window so I can look up into the branches of the trees. I remember my feet dangling down from the roof. Headlights pan across my ceiling, attended by a screech of tires. The headlights make several passes and then, finally, don’t come around anymore. It is quiet, dark. I gaze up into the tree, and for a moment I think I can hear the leaves chattering to themselves in aggrieved little voices.

  In my dreams I venture forward into the dark, placing my feet carefully between sharp flagstones. A brutal light keeps blaring on and off — it is hard to see where to walk. I look down to see a crow in the gutter, caught under something wet and mossy, its sleek, muscled neck writhing in its attempts to pull free. I grab at the dark mass and discover that it is made of pine needles, resin, clay — a gluey weight that clings to the bird’s body as if feeding there. I hear my mother’s voice, sharp in my ear, saying: “Nothing is worth that.” I wake up quickly, blindly identifying my body’s angle across the bed, acknowledging the ambulance light that flashes in the air above me.

  It’s morning and the dog is hopping up and whistling in his throat. Mrs. Baze’s parrot sits in his cage on our fridge, angling his head and examining, with one disclike eye, the questionable business below. We don’t know the parrot’s name yet. Valentine and Bigs have gone to another family, one without a cat or dog. Last night, the neighbours who gathered to help outside Mrs. Baze’s house decided that our dog was gentle enough, and the parrot looked tough enough, and so we got him.

  Mrs. Baze’s heart medicine made her retain water. She kept fainting in her house, finally staggering out onto a neighbour’s lawn, where she fell down, jabbering, in her nightie. She calls hourly from the hospital and asks us to put the phone up to Florio’s cage for her to shout to him. The bird bites his toenails and opens his mouth to show his dry little stump of a tongue. Andrew puts a stick in the cage and Florio snaps it in half with one lightningfast strike.

  “They took three bags out of me,” Mrs. Baze says, pouring me another cup of grainy tea. “They put this tube up my — you know, and it stretched me out. I still have to wear pads.” She sits down with a heartfelt sigh in her chair and looks out over her garden. I, too, take in the willow tree, the ivy-burdened fence. There are flowers growing in rows and clumps, bordering the lawn and hanging out of windows, petals staining the patio bricks. Some are lush and thick-stalked, others bent as if by fatigue. Still others peek from doorways like consumptives, pale, with shrivelled stalks and leaves chewed to shreds by cats.

  “You sure have a green thumb, Mrs.—” I begin to say, just as a beer bottle comes whiffling over the ivy-covered fence and lands with a clink on the grass. It’s my father’s brand.

  “There!” Mrs. Baze cries, triumphantly. She fixes me with that bizarre gaze.

  “You’re my witness!”

  This is the moment Mrs. Baze has been waiting for. She is electrified, up out of her seat, shaking her little fists over the cookies and tea cups, shouting abuse at the air. The parrot stands on the apex of his cage, tethered by the ankle to the top ring, flapping his wings as if to mock her. I can’t believe it — hippies really do throw bottles over her fence!

  “Oh!” says Mrs. Baze, just as if someone had hit her, “Oh!” I reach out to hold down the rattling plates. I blow tufts of dry feathers away from my tea.

  Somewhere beyond the flowers and ivy and leaningover trees, behind the soft running footfalls of the retreating bottle-thrower, I hear my brother’s low giggle.

  III

  BOOMERANG

  ……………MY MOTHER DECIDES TO MAKE me remember Mr. Whitnell. Her memory is perfect and she feels I am underprivileged because I can never remember anything. At least, I can’t remember anything in its right order, and I rarely know if it’s a real memory or just something I heard somewhere. If you have a mother like mine, your own memories become unnecessary.

  I go to her house in the late afternoons sometimes, and she gives me a cup of her jitter-producing coffee. Lately, she’s been working on my childhood memories, prodding me, bringing up traumas and excitements I only dimly recognize as having happened to me. It’s my mother versus the fog in my head.

  Today’s subject is Mr. Whitnell, who used to live on our street and, as my mother puts it, used to go “screaming around at night.” He lived six doors down from us in a small blue and green bungalow. He had some disease of old age, or perhaps the problem was latent in him all his life. One way or the other, there would be sounds of a disturbance in that house, things breaking, his sister shouting his name over and over like a parrot.

  “And then, crash!” my mother says. “Out he runs, all over the street, howling. Are you telling me you don’t remember this?”

  I say I don’t and my mother regards me silently for a moment.

  “You’re not so good on things previous to last week, are you?” she says.

&nb
sp; I admit for the four hundredth time that I’m not. I remember last week in Technicolor, but that’ll fade, soon enough. I do remember bits of my childhood, like hating every square second of elementary school, especially recess, when I was supposed to go out and have “fun” with people I didn’t know. There were dogs and cats I felt closer to than most of the girls at school. I remember the seasons going by. I remember a dentist coming to do a talk. He had a huge plastic tooth and an even bigger red toothbrush and I remember him dropping the tooth on the floor by mistake.

  “Well, look at that!” the dentist said, trying to cover up. “See how strong tooth enamel is?”

  And I remember summer in my neighbourhood, the trees crowding over the sidewalks, maple keys sticking to my shoes, the sidewalk, the windshields of parked cars in the morning. Everyone seemed to have kids at the same time — they were all my age. After a while, people had more kids, and those were all the same age as my brother. I don’t suppose it could really have been like that, but it seems that way in my mind.

  My dad has a boomerang, a real one, and it sits up on the mantelpiece, leaning sideways, as if someone has come in from killing kangaroos and left it there. He used to make rough ones from plywood, and he’d teach any kid who wanted to know how to throw it. He’d go out to the park, kids holding on to his pants pockets and his hands, and he would whip the boomerang into the air and watch it swoop up. A moment later, my dad and eight kids would hit the deck as the boomerang snapped back over their heads. I only saw him catch it once, a single, beautiful moment when he reached up and it came back to him. Usually, he and his short entourage would have to fetch it from where it had embedded itself in the grass like a javelin.

  Neighbours called on my father all the time. For broken lawn-mower blades, flooded garages, even bread recipes. I remember an old lady begging my father to come over to her house. She was angry or frightened, it was hard to tell which. When I ask my mother about that time, she knows right away what it was.

  “That’s when Mr. Whitnell faked being dead. His sister fetched your father, pretending to be in a panic, but all she wanted was to embarrass the old man. He was there on the couch, holding his breath like a child. There, see? You do remember him,” she says.

  Again I have to say no. What I remember is the blue and green front door, half open, the windows with their gauzy curtains, and the few waxy tulips that drooped off the porch.

  Next door to the Whitnells was a dog that howled and howled, as if a madness had come over it. The young couple in that house kept getting dogs for their little girl, and the dogs kept getting loose and disappearing. They called two of them by the same name because the girl got so upset about the first one getting away. The two dogs looked nothing alike, but perhaps the name was enough to calm her. My father sawed a big stake for that family and hammered it deep into their lawn and attached the dog to it by a long, thick rope. The man thanked him, and that dog never got away. Still, it seems no dog could lead a normal life in that house. The little girl soon ceased to give a shit about pets, and every day the dog would go round and round the stake, wnding up the rope, until his cheek touched it.

  “I’ve been having dreams about your father,” my mother tells me, “and in one of them, we’re supposed to get married. The church is right there across the street, and your father is in his coveralls, those blue things, and he is wiping the ceiling. I ask him, ‘Why aren’t you dressed? They’re all waiting for us!’ and he looks down at me like I’m crazy.”

  She slaps the table and looks at me. “I should have known about that man.”

  I tell her it was just a dream, she shouldn’t get so worked up. But I too have watched my father climb on tables, up ladders, onto two stacked chairs, wiping the ceiling before company comes over. He takes off his dress shoes, removes dishes and cutlery from the already set table, and fiddles with the overhead light or removes cobwebs. There’s my dad, up on a chair, forehead beaded with sweat, turning as the doorbell rings. I tell my mother, however, that her dream was just a dream, not a message.

  Dad’s still living in our house and Mum has a place of her own. They’re both different now, with fewer ups and downs. I occupy a difficult space between them. I go to school, hang out with my friends, and wonder which one of my parents will go off in me some day, like a time bomb. If I could choose, I don’t know what my choice would be. Dad marches around after dinner, starting three projects at once, and then falls asleep on the couch having finished none of them. In the meantime, without ever seeming to sit down and do it, he’s managed to carefully mark a pillow-sized stack of students’ papers. He remembers every student he’s ever had — the city is littered with them now — but he doesn’t remember any of their names. He has trouble, sometimes, remembering mine, and he runs through the family names one by one till he gets to me.

  My mother, on the other hand, has a trick: she says, “Give me a word, any word at all, and I can think of a song with that word in it.” Sometimes she calls me at night and says, “I’ve got it! It’s a little song about a hardware store, and in it is the word grommet.” She remembers all the words and sings the whole song through.

  When I was younger and my parents were still together, some older boys hung Mark Wilson up on a fence by his underwear. Mark was a little bastard, but those kids hurt and embarrassed him, and he hung there for a while before some of us found him. Most of his clothes were on the grass, far beneath his kicking feet. We weren’t tall enough to reach him, so we ran to my house and got my dad. When my mum asked what was up, we pretended it was nothing. She stood there and watched us rush my father off to the park, dragging him by his fingers. Dad lifted Mark down and the boy immediately ran away, crying and holding his clothes against himself.

  In many ways, I’m a morbid person, ready to think the worst of people. I wonder if a thing like that — like a boy’s humiliation — stays with a person and changes them in subtle ways. I always read the front pages of the newspaper first, all the mayhem and blood. I skim through encyclopedias of murderers, and it seems that each one had a small trauma, or a strange childhood, or something in them that grew like a bad seed. I read these books at bedtime and then have dreams where I get shot, and my last thought is always, “Oh, shit!”

  Mark Wilson is grown now and has gone to Thailand. My mother believes he went to join a cult, but my bet is he’s a Buddhist. My father doesn’t remember him, doesn’t remember pulling a boy in his underwear off a fence. Dad’s almost as bad as I am. I come reeling home from Mum’s, drunk on my own history, and try it all out on him. But there’s no way he can help. Say, for instance, that the neighbours down the street return a belt sander or an extension cord to him. Dad will hold it in his hand like an unexpected gift.

  “Is this mine?” he says.

  “Okay,” my mother says to me, “remember when your best friend, what’s-her-name, moved away and you spent a summer with nothing to do and I wanted to strangle you?”

  I do remember this; I remember the girl’s letters being perplexing, as if they’d been written by someone much younger. I remember being frustrated and bored and yelling at my mother, her face blooming with anger. Later I was sitting in the bath crying, a common event that summer, and the window was open, with the cool air coming in. I stood up and sobbed onto the window sill, splashing my feet. Just then, Mr. Whitnell shuffled by out on the sidewalk. He was in his slippers, with no pyjama top on. I watched his skinny body slide past, his scrawny chest raw as a plucked capon. He was hissing. I expected to see someone else running after him, but no one came. There were little smacking sounds, as if he was hitting a lamppost with a stick. Then Mr. Whitnell shuffled and hissed back the other way.

  “I knew you’d remember him if you tried,” my mother says. “Some time around then, he lost his voice and got much worse, so they took him away. Poor old thing, his sister just gave up on him. That’s the way it is with relationships.”

  Mum is satisfied, but I still can’t picture Mr. Whitnell’s face. I
t’s as if these are stories I heard and only imagined I was there. The whole thing disturbs me sometimes. I feel like an alien dropped into this family, while the real me, along with my memories, is somewhere else, lost.

  I go home from Mum’s and sit with my dad, our feet up on the coffee table, watching TV until the test pattern with the Indian chief comes on. My dad has been asleep since he put his feet up, and I’m lying beside him like a zombie. I elbow him and say, “It’s tomorrow already, Dad.” He erupts from the couch, his sweater crooked, and staggers towards the stairs, his arms out in front in case he bumps something.

  “Dad?” I say, as he creaks up to the second floor. “Do you remember Mr. Whitnell? That old man down the street?”

  “Who …?” He rubs his face.

  “Mr. Whitnell. Remember?”

  “Oh God,” he says. “He fed you so much candy once you puked all day. We never told your mother how that one happened.” I want to ask him more but he’s already gone, hustling upstairs to hog the bathroom. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll ask him tomorrow, and I close my eyes. The test pattern is still glowing in the dark inside my head.

  I imagine myself sitting on the back steps with Mr. Whitnell, and there is a bunch of chocolate bars lined up in front of us. He’s saying: Six plus three? and I’m saying: Eleven. He’s laughing and saying: Try again, try separating them into two bunches. Six and three? Before lunchtime we finish them all, even though Mr. Whitnell is diabetic, even though his sister is in the sunroom, snoring, perhaps dreaming of being free. I can see his face perfectly, and the trees beyond, and the crooked back fence. Mr. Whitnell is a cute old guy, with cloudy eyes. My dad appears at the door, and Mr. Whitnell and I look up to greet him, our faces and fingers sticky with chocolate. My dad gets all these different expressions on his face, one after the other, a string of veiled and unhappy thoughts.