“Laverne,” Bob croaked. What the hell was wrong with his voice? He thought of the marijuana smoke tearing at his throat. “It was an accident…”
Bob was cut short by his friend’s voice as Laverne rounded the edge of the campsite, ice pack in hand, case of beer swinging easily in his other meaty fist. “Okay, I got the ice! Let’s get this party started!” Laverne stopped short upon seeing the officers and Bob. “Whoa, what the hell?” Laverne said, waiving his hands at Bob’s clothes.
“Thang God,” Bob chirped. “Laverne, tell them id was an accident.”
“This is Laverne?” The second officer’s voice took on a hard edge. Laverne held up his hand with the ice pack.
“Hey man, I didn’t do anything. Bob, what did you tell them?” Laverne looked hurt, as though Bob had betrayed him.
Bob started to protest when the first officer interrupted. “It’s okay now, Bob. Everything’s going to be fine.” Bob could see the second officer had retreated to the car and was using the radio. He clearly heard the words “domestic situation.” The first officer continued to speak in soothing tones that suggested Bob might be a hysterical victim who needed calming down.
“Doe,” Bob shook his head. “Doe fugging way.” Bob shook his head even more emphatically. “You guys hab got this all ronck. This is ab-h-soludely not…” Bob’s voice cracked, and he imagined it would sound, to the officer and anyone else within earshot, as if it was from emotion.
The second officer had left the car and the radio and was approaching Laverne, hand on gun, serious expression on his face. “Sir!” he barked out, as though it were an order rather than a salutation. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to come with me. Have a seat in the car until we can get this all sorted out.”
Another car came crunching down the loop and Bob felt his swollen face, already engorged with blood, become a deep shade of purple as his blood pressure spiked and his heart made a rattly farump in his chest. “Rogs-anne!” he exclaimed when he saw the nose of the mauve Camry sniffing its way down the loop toward them. The officers, Laverne, and the spectators from the loop, who seemed to have gathered in hordes to watch his humiliation, all turned with curiosity to see who Roxanne was and how she would add to the situation at hand.
The Camry came to a sudden stop and Roxanne, who was ordinarily high strung, looked practically crazed as she ran to Bob’s car.
“What’s going on here?” Roxanne demanded and then caught sight of Bob. “Bob, is that you?”
“Ma’am,” the officer tried to interject.
“What the hell is going on with your face?” Roxanne was staring at Bob in disbelief.
The officer tried again. “Ma’am?”
But Roxanne was having none of it. “Are those my clothes you’re wearing?” She was practically shrieking now.
“Ma’am!” The officer’s tone was insistent.
This time, Roxanne turned to him and lowered her voice. “Yes?” she asked in an over-controlled way that signalled to Bob she was barely keeping her cool.
For a moment Bob felt as though his head separated from his body and twirled in the air as he fell dizzily to the ground. For the second time that day Bob looked up through the slender trees at the dappled sky above him, hints of sunshine and vertigo balanced precariously on leaves that looked like fluttering discs.
For a moment, he thought he knew exactly what it was all about.
delicate on her tongue
When my mother’s marriage disintegrated, she stepped over that pile of rubble no bigger than a doorstep and made moving on look simple. The morning she left, she did not have the nerve to say goodbye. Instead, she slipped away at five a.m. and disappeared in a cloud of exhaust from an idling taxi at the front of the house. Her “things” would follow her, but not before sitting like unwelcome guests in the front hallway for days that seemed like weeks. And when they were finally picked up, the empty spaces they created echoed through the house.
The night before she left, however, she did visit each of us, one by one. I can only imagine what her visits to my brothers must have been like. All three of the boys in one room like that – the room they shared for their whole growing-up lives. What intimate affection could she have shown those boys each, individually? And yet I have no doubt that she did. She was accomplished that way.
When she came to my room, which I was obliged to share with no one, being the only girl and getting to “that age,” whatever that meant, she sat with a sigh on the edge of my bed. My mother wasn’t one for tears, and so there were none. I refused to disappoint her by crying. Instead, I mimicked her composure. She held my hand for several moments and looked all around my room before finally meeting my eyes with her own dry and unremorseful ones. Then she put her fine and perfect hand to my cheek and stroked it once, slowly, and did the one thing that was guaranteed to lodge itself within the minute crevasses of my heart forever. She said my name, Moss, with such a tender affection that her voice has echoed inside me for all these years. Moss. And there it hung between us, my name like a pungent odour, suspended, until it finally fell to earth when she let go of my hand and rose to leave my room. I suspected she had more to say, but when she stood, the moment was shattered and there was nothing else.
And now, all these years later, she has returned.
When my mother and father announced their divorce, I wasn’t angry or sad, as I believe the boys were, but secretly elated. No one in my class at school had parents who were divorced except for my best friend Holly, who had only just recently made her dramatic announcement, attempting to look stricken but unable to keep the shadow of a smile from creeping onto her lips. Our impression of children of divorce was that they were exotic and worldly. Children of divorced parents stood to be spoiled. Parental guilt and neglect translated into money and presents. Trips to a new household, Disneyland, who knew how far it could go? A whole new world opened up with divorce, and with it, the promise of a whole new self. With divorce, it was entirely possible to imagine yourself living a parallel, but different (and this was the key), life. But we knew we were supposed to be upset, so we tried.
Of course, my family was different. In 1969, how many mothers up and left their families – and to go to such a far away, mysterious and yet mundane-sounding place as Philadelphia? Who even knew where that was, except to say in America?
And being the children of divorce, although not as glamorous as we once imagined, did turn out to have its rewards. At the end of each summer, we would return to our ordinary working-class neighbourhood from summer holidays, brown and happy with stories of a splendid house and a notorious, rakish new stepfather – one so different from our own father that it was difficult to imagine the two of them inhabited the same world – were even the same species.
“Miss Moss,” my new stepfather called me affectionately and I blushed every single time he spoke to me. Parties at their house were the norm; no one seemed to work, or get cross or be busy. Those summers seemed endless and full of promise.
Those were stories for my friends, though, not for my father. My older brothers likely didn’t see things the same way. I recall my genuine surprise as they, one by one, stopped going on the summer visits, opting instead to stay at home and keep my father company – to build their transistor radios and spend the summer reading and eating small sour apples from the tree in our back yard. Those apples were a favourite of my father’s and he never missed commenting with wonder each summer when the first apple turned from green to red on the branch. He made it special to be the one offered that first apple of the season. After that, they were more abundant than we could eat, and the fruit would eventually drop and be raked up with the fall leaves into piles to be burnt in the back garden. It had never occurred to me that my father might be lonely while we were away, or that he missed us at all. I never thought to wonder what he did all summer. I assumed he worked, but I can’t say for certain if he did.
Eventually, we all married and started families, w
ith the exception of my oldest brother, who, looking back, had been the one most genuinely devastated by the divorce. He remains to this day a confirmed bachelor – something that the rest of us are, by turns, both sad and envious about. My visits to Philadelphia ceased for a time when my children were small and I was busier than I could have imagined; when the visits resumed, I was surprised to find the scale of everything diminished. Perhaps in my brother’s mind, the scale of it all had always been clear.
I have not been to visit my mother since my father died a little over ten years ago, when she didn’t have the decency to get on an airplane and come to the funeral. In fact, in retrospect, I realized that she’d never had the consideration to inquire about my father over all those summers we visited as children. Yet when we returned home my father would always ask, How’s your mother? His interest was genuine, his heart on his sleeve. Somewhere in these last ten years, I found I stopped caring about what she thought of me, about whether or not I was worthy of her approval. I stopped calling to tell her in an affected, offhand manner about the degree I had earned or the award I had received. I can’t pinpoint when exactly that happened but I can recall the relief of waking up one day to realize it was gone. It was like a miraculous recovery from a chronic illness that one doesn’t notice until the last phlegmy cough completely clears the lungs.
And now my mother has returned.
I can’t help but think it merciful that my father is dead, for my mother has changed so much. Frail hardly begins to describe her. And if she understands what has happened to her, the ways she’s been betrayed, she doesn’t let on. She maintains her dignified, upright posture despite her condition and circumstance.
Do I find it ironic that the life she left us for has abandoned her, pushed her aside, stepped over her like a small, crumbled pile of dust? Perhaps, but I haven’t any cruel intentions. I like to imagine myself to be resigned and indifferent, a state that has taken a great deal of effort and time to achieve. And yet I have found in the days that she has been here, after being dropped off by taxi at my front door while I watched from a window – an uncanny reminder of the day she left – I have found myself supple, bendable, pliable to her touch. Though not a physical touch, I feel it all the same. But I have come to understand this one thing about my mother – that one word she spoke between us on the eve before she left, Moss, my name, delicate on her tongue, that word and the way it left her lips was no accident. She meant for it to stick.
I reach for the tea from the top cupboard and flick the switch of the kettle, my watery actions reflected in the dim evening twilight of the kitchen window. My mother waits in the back yard, the garden, she calls it, even though it’s just grass. She’s acquired certain affectations from her life in high society. What is there to do but make the tea and carry on? It’s what we’ve always done.
But if I were to tell the truth, I might say that I’m waiting to see if perhaps she came back to tell me what she meant to say next, that last night in our house, after she said my name.
ayekis
As we walk up the road, scanning the ditches for treasures, I tell Kyle, “We saw a whole herd of elk here last year. They were on the sides of the road and just in the trees there.” I point, but he’s not looking.
“So?”
“So you have to be pretty careful around them. If you make eye contact, they could charge you. Just telling you, in case we see any.”
“Yeah, well, I know a guy who killed a moose with a slingshot before,” he says. I consider this for a few moments.
“That’s impossible,” I tell him. “Moose are huge. You couldn’t kill one with a slingshot.”
“Well he did, smart ass.” Kyle pauses.
“How?”
“How he did it was he waited until the moose was having a drink. Then he shot it in the nuts with the slingshot. It was so surprised it sucked up a bunch of water and drowned.” Kyle makes the motion of firing a slingshot, closing one eye, pulling his arm back and releasing his imaginary projectile.
“Sick,” I say. We plod the rest of the way to the store in silence.
Weekends, when I go to my Kokum’s with my dad and camp on the couch, there are cousins who stay too. They call me moonias and laugh when I can’t understand the Cree my Kokum talks. I’ve long since stopped telling them I’m not moonias – it just makes them laugh harder.
“C’mon, little shit face,” Kyle calls to me. Kyle is what you might call a dink. At least that’s what I call him. He’s got a gland problem (says my Nana) that makes him have a fat problem (says me). His dad takes him to the barber and gets his hair cut down to stubble so you can see the pink, fleshy rolls at the back of his neck.
I think Kyle’s jealous that I get to live with our grandparents. My Nana tells people they’re “co-parenting” me with my dad, who works up north in the mines. I know Kyle wishes his dad would go away and work, too. My dad says Kyle’s headed for the reformatory. I don’t know what that is. It sounds like the word he told me for the place where they burn dead bodies, but I don’t think that’s right. That gave me nightmares after he told me about that: the place where bodies get burnt. Kyle’s pretty bad, but I don’t think he deserves that.
Because I get to stay with Nana and Grampa, Kyle thinks I have it easy. Maybe he’s right. But then maybe there are things Kyle doesn’t know about being the only brown kid in a white neighbourhood, about being the “little Indian” and getting called “chief,” even by some of the teachers. What Kyle does know about, though, is how to be a first-class ass.
But once in a while he can be okay. Like the time he made me a walkie-talkie out of a block of wood. It was just pretend, but it was really cool the way it fit in my hand just right and I could hold it there at my side and then bring it up to my mouth like I was talking to someone. It would have been better if there were two of them, even though it was just pretend.
On the narrow beach behind the store, Kyle picks up stones and throws them at the water, at first half heartedly, and then with more effort to skip them. He has a shitty throw and the little rocks fall, ploop, into the water. I wonder if I should try skipping stones too, but I would probably be better at it, in which case he’d be likely to pound me.
This is the place I found the rock last year that looks almost exactly like a candy corn. It’s even the right colours – orange where it should be orange and white near the tip. It’s even better when it’s wet and you can see the different layers of orange getting lighter and lighter as the rock comes to its point.
I have that rock at home in my cigar box, the one that Grampa gave to me, with the parrot on the lid. Sometimes I take the rock out and rub it with my thumb, just to feel its polished surface. I put it in my mouth and slide it over my tongue, feeling its cone shape, slightly flattened on one side, clicking it between my teeth, tasting its mild nothing flavour.
I imagine this little candy corn rock making its journey with the waves, getting polished by the rhythm of the water, the rubbing of the sand and the nibbling fishes. Maybe it even came all the way from the ocean, all the way to this particular shore to be found by me. Sometimes I look, wishing I could find more, thinking I could make a little dish of candy corn rocks if I found enough. But then I think that would kind of spoil it, so I don’t look too hard.
I hear voices, and then two kids, a boy and a girl, burst through the trees. They’re fat, pale and red haired. They stop and squint suspiciously at me and Kyle. Their doughy noses, uneven ears and little pink eyes remind me of the grunting pigs my Mooshum keeps. Kyle looks over his shoulder and then goes back to pretending to ignore all of us.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” the boy echoes.
We watch Kyle twisting his body and flinging his arm out from his side. The stones all land with a single plop several yards from the shore.
“You guys staying in these cabins?” I ask.
The girl shakes her head and the boy points in toward the campground. “We’re in the campground ove
r there. How about you?”
“Yeah, we are too.”
Kyle has given up on the rock skipping and comes slouching over to where we stand. He knows we’re watching him as he pulls out a pack of cigarettes, takes one out and puts it between his lips. Looking up, trying hard to be cool, he says, “Gotta match?”
Your face and my ass, I think to myself. I don’t say it, even though it’s a good burn, because I don’t feel like being pummelled. Not only is Kyle two years older than me, he outweighs me by a ton, the porker.
When none of us answer him, Kyle digs a box of matches from his pocket and slickly lights one with a flick of his thumbnail.
“You smoke?” the girl asks. Kyle smiles, glad to have impressed someone.
“Yeah, but I’m trying to cut down.” I have to give him credit, that was pretty good. Then he spoils it by sneering at me. “Hey, little shit face, you’d better keep this,” he jerks his smoke at me, “to yourself, if you know what’s good for you.”
As we walk back to the campsite with the red-haired kids, Kyle talks all loud and pisses me off by pulling my hair and putting me in a headlock every two frickin’ minutes. Jesus Christ, I wish I were bigger and could give him a licking.
When we enter the campground and turn up the main road leading to the camping loops, Kyle starts walking ahead of us and then calls over his shoulder, “I’m going ahead. Meet me at the campsite, ass face.”
“I have a name,” I say quietly under my breath as we slow our pace and watch Kyle walk quickly away.
“How do you know him?” the red-haired boy asks me.
“He’s my stupid cousin.”
“What a jerk.”
I guess this kid doesn’t really look so much like my Mooshum’s pigs.
“Hey,” I say, as we turn down the road to our campsite. “Do you want to see something cool?”
Instead of turning toward the campsites, I lead them the opposite way down the loop. We cut to the cooking shelter and I take my new friends around to the back of the building, to the place I found earlier, alone. It’s mine, I found it, and I plan never to show it to Kyle. We step into the unnaturally cool shade and I hunch down at the edge of the stream that runs through the dirt at the bottom of a small incline. The stream is a good secret, lying in the dim, cool place where the sparse sun can’t reach. The towering trees and shade from the cook shack make this place dark and damp. A very good secret. Brown rotting leaves line the edges of the bank. On either side, small, scrubby brush inches hopefully toward flecks of sunlight dancing at the tops of the trees. The stream seems to come from nowhere and disappears quickly into the bush. We listen to the sound of the trickling water and breathe in the musty smell.
Just Pretending Page 17