I thought the people at the party were going to be Joe Jackson’s friends, but he didn’t talk to anyone. I talked for a few minutes with a boy who asked me what my major was. I didn’t know what to say, and then “women’s studies” lurched out of my mouth.
I must have looked guilty after I said it, because the boy put a hand on my shoulder and, grinning, said, “That’s okay. We like you anyway.”
Joe Jackson steered me away from that conversation, and he and I sat on the floor and passed the bottle of cheap wine back and forth until I was dizzy and warm and we had to go outside for fresh air.
Campus was quiet. Lots of students had already finished exams, packed up and left. Joe Jackson took me to a still place between the health sciences building and administration. A grassy forgotten spot between the buildings, enclosed by trees, open to the sky.
I lay back on the grass, and he lay stiffly beside me. I could feel the heat from his body all down my right side even though we weren’t touching. It was a warm, clear, almost-summer night, and all the stars were visible in the night sky.
“Look, the Big Dipper,” I said, tracing my finger in the air down the handle and around the bottom of the scoop. I traced an imaginary line upwards from the lip of the pot. “And the North Star.” I rested my finger on the slightly brighter North Star, exactly the same way my dad used to show me. Joe Jackson said nothing. He lay stiffly beside me as though this was something he’d never done, lie in the grass and look at the stars.
I thought about telling him how my dad showed me the Big Dipper and the North Star the first time when I was five and made it seem like magic. Orion’s belt. The story of Orion and how he got put in the sky with all his favourite animals. And one lucky night, northern lights. Dancing in the prairie sky. But I didn’t get to say any of this because he suddenly sat up and swung himself over top of me, straddling me with his knees. I smiled, thinking this was a game and we were going to kiss again. He took both my wrists and brought them up over my head, held them there with one hand. I tried to look into his eyes, but I couldn’t see his face, dark with shadows. I heard him breathing hard. My smile faltered. “What are you doing?” My voice cracked like I didn’t want it to. I sounded weak and afraid, and I wished I didn’t. Joe Jackson wouldn’t answer me. Instead, he lay down on top of me with his whole hot body, as if he was trying to keep me warm. His weight pushed the air from my chest. “Get off me,” I said breathlessly into his ear. He was still holding my arms over my head. When I struggled to get my arms free, he pinned them harder to the ground. A sharp pain shot through my wrist and I cried out.
He raised his body some, and I could breathe again. His free hand fumbled at the button on my pants. I tried to lift my knees, twist my hips away, my hands pinned tight to the ground above my head. He used his legs to hold mine down, and his fingers moved so fast over my pants even though I was trying to slow him down with my mind. His hands moved faster than my brain could keep up with. My pants loosened around my waist, were pulled and twisted. I’ve never felt so unable to stop something in all my life. Joe Jackson was on top of me, I could feel his hand undoing my clothes and I had no way to make it stop. Suddenly, his fleshy thing was poking between my legs, sticking to the soft skin of my inner thighs.
“Don’t.” I managed that one breathless word, tried to make it a command. He didn’t listen. He shoved his chin into my neck, his weight taking my breath away, and still I felt his thing poking between my legs. I squeezed my knees, still wrapped in their pants, as tight as I could. The skin on my thighs pinched and tore. Then he heaved himself up, shifted his weight to one side, took his foot, his hard shoe, and scraped it down between my legs. The polyester pants of my once-hilarious tuxedo burned my skin as they ripped down my legs to my ankles. He kept kicking, forcing my shoe off my left foot, pushing my pants off my leg. He contorted his body so he could look down at the job he was doing, get it right. At that angle I could see his face in the moonlight, shiny with sweat, his pale lips drawn down with effort. His eyes, like nickels in the shadows of a wishing pond, wouldn’t look at me. I’m not sure he knew I was there at all.
I’d been saying no, like a chant, over and over, but I stopped. He put his weight on top of me again, and I struggled to keep this thing from happening. He held my wrists so tight I was afraid he’d break them, squeezing, pressing, sharp and painful. I stopped thinking, focussed on looking past the burning heap on top of me, looked up at the night sky, traced the Big Dipper with my eyes, found the North Star. I imagined I saw Orion’s belt, even though I knew it was the wrong time of year for it. But it was the right time for Aquila the eagle, so I searched for him. The flamingo called Grus might be around now too, I thought. I imagined they were all out. Again and again I traced those familiar skyscapes like lifelines, critical work that had to be accomplished or the world would fall apart. I counted them. I counted on them.
When he rolled off of me, the cool relief of night air hit my skin, my wrists were released, my hands were numb. I rolled on my side away from him, curled into a ball but only for a moment. I heard him behind me, doing up his pants. I sat up, fumbled at my feet, somehow found the pant leg, tugged myself back together, did up zippers and buttons, pulled on a shoe. He stood beside me and we walked, as if this was any other time, any other evening. We didn’t hold hands; we didn’t talk. We walked out to the paved pathway that cut through the heart of the university campus and out to the ordinary street that signalled the end of university grounds. We stopped on the sidewalk at the bus stop, and he put his hands in his pockets. I couldn’t bring myself to look up, all the way up, into his face. Instead, I stared stonily ahead.
“Do you want me to wait with you? For your bus?”
I shook my head.
“Okay then. See you later,” he said, and I managed a small wave with my hand. I was just barely aware that he walked away. The bus came; I got on. I didn’t think about my clothes, about the grass in my hair, about the thumbprints on the inside of my wrist, about the friction burns on my legs or ripped skin on my thighs. I didn’t think of any of this. Instead, the inexplicable blue goat came to mind, producing a deep blue haze that descended to follow me home on the bus, where I sat with damp legs and scorched thighs. I avoided looking out the window because I knew my reflection was there.
After that night, I didn’t see Joe Jackson again. I guessed he went home to whatever pretend family he came from. I didn’t ever go and look for him on the Geeks site – I couldn’t bring myself to log in there. But I thought about that place, on campus, where it happened. I didn’t want to be afraid of it, so I revisited it. Off the bus, brisk walk to the health sciences building, duck in behind the bushes. Whoosh. Silence. I was not really surprised that it was cool and silent, soothing. I sat on the grass, my back against the stone of the health sciences building, and picked thick, waxy leaves from a bush. I folded one of the leaves between my fingers, and it resisted, then snapped as though I’d broken its bones. Sickened, guilty, I dropped the leaf. After that, I was more careful. I touched the leaves and put a branch between my fingertips. I tenderly examined the veins on one of the leaves. I pulled blades of grass one by one from their roots, carefully sliding each blade from its sheath before chewing on the ripe white end. In my throat, the smell of green. Ordinarily a good smell. After a while, I figured out that it wasn’t a bad place.
It wasn’t until the start of June that I realized I was pregnant.
To hear my mother talk, getting pregnant made me the equivalent of a crack-addicted prostitute. “Oh my God,” she cried when I told her. “I can’t believe it.” She threw her hands up in the air and shrieked, “Just like your real mother.” Those were her words. I slapped her in the face. We were standing by the sink in the kitchen, and when I looked out the window I saw the apple tree had come into bloom, as though it had happened just in that moment. I was sorry as soon as I did it, but she picked the wrong moment to say that thing about my “real mother,” who she thought I was protecting, which
in turn hurt my pretend mother’s feeling. That’s right, I said feeling. She only had one, and it involved tears and was cleverly designed to inspire guilt in all others. Maybe someday I would tell her she was wrong about the protecting thing. It’s hard to explain, but I didn’t slap her because she said “just like your real mother,” I slapped her because she said those words, “your real mother,” to remind me again that I was different, didn’t really belong, adopted and therefore not real. Every time I let my guard down and sort of forgot and just got on with things, she had to bring it up.
She decided I’d have an abortion. My dad, more unreal than ever, avoided talking to me altogether. Trish, who was real trouble by that time, was too busy climbing out her bedroom window and into cars with boys to notice anything was wrong.
My pretend mother took me to talk to a social worker. I went into his office alone, without her, and instead of what my mother thought we’d talk about, which was me being pregnant, we talked about my real mother. I wanted the social worker to look in his big files and give me answers more substantial than the basic background he was allowed to share. Instead, he had me write a letter to her so he could put it in the file. That way, he said, if she ever called to ask about me, it would be there. I didn’t believe him when he said this was all he could offer.
I wrote, I’d love to see you again sometime. We’ll meet by the fountain in the mall. I’m the one with the red scarf and dark hair, narrow eyes like my father, whom you may or may not recall. If I see you again, will I know you by your smell? Touch? Voice? Aura? The social worker tells me you took care of me for the first two weeks. I know I never took my eyes off you. I looked and looked, but still I forgot.
The image of me with my mother was so strong: I could see myself, swaddled in baby blankets, staring, glued to her every move. Yet, for some reason, I just couldn’t bring myself to remember. My brain refused my deepest desire. I knew the memory was in there; I just couldn’t get to it.
In bed that night, I talked to my stomach. “I won’t do that to you,” I whispered under my sheets. “I won’t double-cross you. I promise,” I murmured solemnly, “not to leave you.”
I fell asleep and later woke up wet, having soaked the sheets. When I turned on the lights, I was covered in blood. I woke the woman who calls herself my mother, and she drove me to the hospital in silence. My legs were shaking when we arrived. I said I wanted to go in alone.
In the emergency room cubicle, a gentle doctor touched her fingertips to my leg, just above the knee. “Scary, huh?” she said, and I wished for her to stay. I distracted myself by pretending she was my real mother, there to offer me comfort. She must be somebody’s real mother, I told myself. I imagined us strolling down a sunny street, like in a movie, her hand raised to make a light touch on my back. We laughed about something and looked breezily at one another; no one thought about the idea that the other could just disappear. She linked her arm in mine, and we licked our ice cream cones and smiled. I moaned as my stomach cramped and I rolled on my side, tucking my knees tighter to my chest. I wondered if I was being taught a lesson for something I’d done.
I miscarried by myself on a narrow cot behind a thin blue curtain. I felt my pretend mother’s shadow hovering in the waiting room, where I hoped she was suitably worried – I sincerely expected I wouldn’t live. She came and stood outside the curtain once. I could see her feet waiting there, unsure.
“Go away,” I wailed, clutching myself tighter. “Leave me alone.” I swear I could hear her wringing her hands. Her stupid sandals went away.
The doctor/mother came in only a couple of times to explain things to me and to order some medicine. In slow motion, my insides churned themselves into a purple pulp while I curled into a fiery ball.
Finally, in the bathroom, my body expelled the fetus in one shocking movement, a pale waxy shape, a suggestion of something else.
the times in between
“Vince is in la-la land again.”
I ignore Joy and resume my struggle with the passage I’m working on. An hour ago I woke with a hangover and an epiphany and headed straight to the writing table, an island in the middle of chaos. The kids have gotten up, and Joy’s got a visitor. They all know enough not to cross the imaginary border between their space – strewn with toys, bits of clothing, beer bottles and stuffed ashtrays – and my space, cleared for writing in the middle of it all, a certain sanctity within it.
Last night one of the poets from down the street came to the house for the first time. He’s being hailed by the writers’ union as “recently emerged” to indicate he’s at the beginning of his publishing career, even though he’s nearly forty. The whole “emerging” thing makes it sound as though he’s coming out of the closet or something. Joy invited him to do a reading; of course he was brilliant, the fucker. I remember starting out, when the words came like gifts and everyone thought I was exceptional. Some writers talk about it getting easier, but it’s been the opposite for me.
It wasn’t until he was here that I recognized him. At first I had difficulty placing him, but the niggling feeling that I should know the man wouldn’t dissipate. I must have been staring because he caught my eye and took it as an invitation to lope over to where I huddled on the couch, already drunk.
“It’s Vince, isn’t it?” He stuck out his hand, which I ignored. “Marcus Quinn,” he persisted. “I know you from Sheppard. You were a couple years ahead of me.”
Christ, I thought. I didn’t immediately make room for him on the sofa, as perhaps he might have expected. I left him standing there with that stupid grin on his face, waiting for me to congratulate him on his work, as I was sure he had come to expect. Instead, I downed my drink in one swallow and stood for the refill, tottering on my heels. I tried to push my way past him.
The determined little bastard grabbed my shoulder; his grip was surprisingly firm. When I felt his hand on my shoulder that way, I hoped this wouldn’t lead to a drunken brawl in the living room but was prepared to deck him if circumstances warranted. I tried to shrug his hand off, but he was insistent. I turned my face to his, only inches from my own, and breathed my sour breath purposely toward his nostrils. He pretended not to notice, but I saw his demeanour shift. He hung on tighter just then, and I saw him change his mind about what he would say to me.
“How’s your father?” he asked, squinting his eyes.
“Dead,” I said, refusing to be drawn into a let’s-reminisce-about-the-old-times conversation. What the fuck was he up to? I wondered.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said.
“No you’re not,” I said. My tone implied he was an idiot. “Why would you be?” I asked. “Who the fuck’s ‘sorry’ when the town drunk dies?”
His smile faded completely, and he readjusted his body slightly like someone faltering from a slap but trying to conceal the effects. Still, he kept his hand on my shoulder. “Vince,” he finally said, low and conspiratorially, leaning toward my ear. “I just wanted to tell you, I mean, I thought you should know. Everyone could see what was going on and, well, it was terrible – what happened to you.” He paused to be sure he had my attention, then said, “We all felt so sorry for you.” Then his hand dropped.
I lurched past him and into the kitchen, where I had to steady myself at the sink, my head bowed, as though praying to the holy mountain of dirty dishes. I must have looked to be contemplating sickness; someone asked me if I was okay. I shakily poured another drink and stumbled out the back door into the changed atmosphere of the evening.
How could a single sentence uttered by a stranger so shatter a person? We all felt so sorry for you. I was quite certain, just then, that my glass insides were rattling around in pieces by my ankles.
The beatings weren’t the worst of what my old man doled out, yet that’s surely what Quinn the outed poet was referring to. Did they really all feel sorry for me? Is that what it looked like from the outside?
“Tell me about your mother,” Joy said, shortly after we started
going out. All she knew was that I had lost my mother when I was young.
“She died of a brain aneurysm,” I said. “I didn’t even know what that was. The principal had to explain it to me.” I didn’t tell Joy that I was convinced I’d witnessed the beginning of that injury. My mother and father were fighting when he pushed her and she fell, hitting her head on the corner of the stove. I thought she was dead that time, the way her head bobbed on her neck as she went down. My father left her where she fell and staggered out the door, leaving me to try to rouse her. Remarkably, there was no blood, just unconsciousness, and then the quiet complaint of a headache for days afterward.
But my father wasn’t always a mean drunk. Sometimes he was funny. One time he laughed as he picked my mother up in his arms like a groom taking his bride over the threshold. I thought it was good sport too until I saw her face, her eyes wide, her voice scared as she begged him to put her down. He took her to the large freezer chest where we kept the meat he brought home from hunting, after it was butchered and wrapped in its brown paper. I followed them, the smile quickly fading from my lips. He staggered as he carried her, even though she must have been light as a bird. From behind them, I watched her slender fingers as she clung to his neck and said his name, over and over.
“Richard, put me down. Richard, please.”
He flipped open the freezer chest lid with one hand and held her over the void, as though he would place her inside.
“Richard! Richard!” she cried, louder, on the edge of hysteria. She struggled, her slight body twisting to escape his grasp. My father laughed his gravelly laugh from the back of his throat. He held on tighter to her and continued to pretend he would put her into the freezer. Finally, he took a step back and let her legs drop to the floor. She stood for a minute, breathing hard, on the verge of crying, her one arm still around his shoulders.
Just Pretending Page 12