by Krista Foss
After spending six months in the courts and juvenile detention, Nate must have figured there was little point in finishing high school. Last fall Stephanie returned to school and everything was the same for her, except she didn’t sweat and she didn’t worry about the backs of her outfits and she didn’t look forward to biology.
Halfway into her walk home, Stephanie’s feeling of triumph quickly tailspins into dread. Herman, a bulb-nosed Dutchman, is too in thrall to Brittany’s tight shorts to ever take Stephanie’s word over the bronzy glamazon’s, even if it is Stephanie he calls into the small office beyond the lunchroom for lectures on how Indonesian palm oil is killing the Canadian dairy business, all the while eyeing her boobs proprietorially.
The toe of her shoe catches on a ridge of sidewalk. She stumbles, and as she straightens, a telltale ping sounds from her pocket. Stephanie fumbles for her cellphone.
Nate has texted her. THX FOR EARLIER. U AROUND TONITE?
Her heart lifts. Instantly – too instantly – she replies. SURE, WHEN?
By the time she reaches the long drive of her house, she feels covered with a protective coating, as tough and light as Teflon, that Brittany and Herman cannot scratch.
Because of the barricade, Stephanie’s mother has lost her energy for the happy-family artifice. She eats looking out the window, ignoring her husband’s sullen face, her son’s catatonia, and the cellphone on Stephanie’s lap – a brazen disregard of dinnertime rules. An hour has passed since she replied to Nate’s THX text; there have been none since.
The panic Stephanie hopes to hold off until after dinner threatens to mutiny. She wipes her lips with her napkin and peers down at the darkened phone. On impulse she thumbs in OK. WHEN? WHERE? hits Send, and immediately feels desperate. Only a loser texts twice in a row looking for a reply.
Stephanie steals a look at Las, hunched over his food like a bored zoo inmate. What kind of cosmic overlord made things come so easily to a guy like him? When she was an already well-endowed fourteen-year-old, her brother looked at her one day and said, You’re no beauty but you’ve got big tits. That’s the only way you’re going to get a guy, Steph. Might as well get used to it.
She’d adored Las before that, bought the fiction of older brothers, reached adolescence still hoping he’d deliver. Then he started hanging out with creeps. She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve his cruelty, only that it began after Gordo found her asleep in front of the basement TV one night when Las was upstairs raiding her parents’ booze stash.
She awoke with a frightening pressure against her body and a hand across her mouth, her lips stinging from potato chip shrapnel and salt. Gordo reeked of uric acid, cheap cigarettes, and stolen liquor. She thought she was going to suffocate, screaming into his rough skin. She pushed her hands into Gordo’s chest, but there was no give against his weight. His unwashed face was crushed into the crook of her neck, his fingers pincer-like at her breasts. Stephanie closed her teeth against the callused hand he shoved against her mouth; it tasted of solvents and burger grease. His other fingers were pulling at her waistband. He bit into the tender flesh above a nipple. Gordo’s hips were shoved against hers; she could feel his erection against the thin material of her pyjamas.
The door at the top of the steps opened. When Las came down to the basement, Gordo jumped up, brushed his pants. Stephanie gasped for breath and started to whimper. Las looked at both of them. Tears were running down her face. There was a moment of silence between the two friends. She waited for her brother to be her big brother.
Then Las spoke. Found whisky. Let’s get out of here, shithead. They turned and left her alone in the basement, damp with tears, greasy with intrusions. Something no tougher than a new blister crackled and broke inside her.
She remembers all of this while watching her brother’s blond tendrils move as he eats, hiding, then revealing a strong brown neck, an unbreakable clavicle. Stephanie wills herself not to look at the phone.
“Are you losing weight, Las?” she asks, feigning a hint of alarm, her voice loud enough to startle her parents out of their thoughts, make them look up from their plates. Bingo.
Her mother pushes out her chair, leans over the table, and brushes aside her son’s hair. She grabs his chin. “Whoa, honey, you are looking thin. What’s going on?”
Las swats her hand away with an “I’m eating, Ma!”
But it’s too late. Stephanie knows the idea will be like a burr to her mother; she’ll scratch at it until its excised. Parasites! Anemia! A convergence of unseen threats worming their way through the young prince’s bloodstream.
“You’ve barely touched anything on your plate.” Her mother shoves the tray of grilled sausages, a bowl of macaroni salad towards him. “Are you taking your supplements?”
He glowers. Her mother reels out of the kitchen towards the first-floor bathroom, yelling, “Where are the multivitamins?”
Her father shakes his head, refills his glass of wine, and leaves the table with it, muttering something about policing at the barricade. Las decamps as quickly, brushing roughly against his sister, muttering, “Nice fuckin’ going, Steph.” And Stephanie can’t help herself; she smiles, delighted at the distraction.
When her mother returns, holding a supplement bottle, Stephanie is clearing the plates. “He took off, Mom.”
“Oh dear. Do you think …”
“I’m guessing he lives.”
Her mother heads to the hallway. Stephanie hears her knock on his bedroom door. “Las … Las.”
Now the phone is on the counter beside the sink. She picks it up and checks the charge, then places it down. As she rinses and stacks each plate, her eyes flit back to the phone to see if it is winking at her, offering to save her from a loveless adolescence and an evening stuck in the oppression of her home. At seven-thirty the dishes are stacked, the table wiped, the floor swept. She thumbs in WE STILL DOIN SUMTHIN? to Nate, hits Send, and vows not to check the phone for a whole half-hour. After which she checks every ten minutes, sitting on one of the kitchen stools, leaning into the black granite island, slumping over the phone, lifting it up and placing it face down, lifting it up again. Could she text Nate a fourth time without it being cyberstalking?
When her father comes in, she makes no attempt to hide her compulsion. She feels him watching her.
“Thanks for cleaning up, hon.”
Stephanie nods, her eyes still on the phone. Please go, she thinks.
Mitch pours himself a generous measure from the bottle of red wine he opened at dinner and then takes out another glass, fills it halfway, and slides it towards her. “It’s summer. Enjoy yourself.”
Stephanie looks at the glass, looks at her father, and wishes he didn’t understand her as much as the offer suggests. Her eyeballs burn. He squeezes her shoulder, which means he wants to leave before tears fall. And after he does, she drains the wine in two swallows, reaches for the bottle, admires the label with its vaguely Latin name, its promised tastes of cassis and smoke, and pours the remainder into her glass. Why not? she thinks, carrying her newly full glass into the living room, turning off all the lights, and falling into her Nan’s puce wingback chair. She lifts and lowers her phone for the next ninety minutes, twice getting up to assure herself that the time on her cellphone is the same as on the kitchen clock. Letting somebody hope is a cruel sport, she thinks.
When she has finished the wine, she returns to the kitchen, finds a three-quarters-full bottle of Gewürztraminer tucked into the refrigerator’s side door. After the sourness of the red, the white tastes so cool and sweet it makes her cry.
Ella feels like a ghost haunting what was once an enviable family life, a busy, productive contentment. The frustration of the barricade has made them subject to public sympathy, private isolation. Behind the door of what was to be her dream room is her husband, Mitch, hiding away, yelling, begging, cajoling into the phone at all hours. Las is lost to his headphones, too upset by everything to allow her to minister to his hurts, and
losing weight. In the face of their helplessness, they’ve all gone mute with embarrassment. And now, after ten p.m., Ella wanders in and out of the darkened rooms of her house, not up to the energy of bright lamps, their suggestion of activity, of occupancy.
She leans into the living room, wondering if she should fire the housekeeper, return to vacuuming and dusting, when she notices a shadow awkwardly sprawled across the ugly pink-brown wingback Mitch insisted on bringing home, giving a place of honour in the living room, after he moved his mother to a retirement home. There is a small aureole of electric light from an open cellphone, casting in silhouette her daughter’s small nose, her bottom lip protruding in a quiet exhale.
“Stephanie?”
The cellphone clicks off. Ella cranks the dimmer switch and the room brightens with clarified-butter light. Her sixteen-year-old daughter’s dark head, streaked with fluorescent pink, is bent over the phone in her lap as if in prayer. Ella has only to close her eyes to see the child Stephanie once was, a toddler blameless and soft as catkins, with black hair and lashes auguring future charms. How not to feel constantly disappointed? It was so easy to love the girl then.
“What are you doing here in the dark?”
Stephanie lifts reddened eyes to her mother, umbrae of dissolved mascara beneath them.
Ella wishes her cramp of maternal protectiveness had lasted longer. But Stephanie’s perpetually wounded glance, the soft distension of those lips, only reminds her of the girl’s truancy from soccer camps and swim lessons, the pockets stuffed with Caramilk wrappers and emptied Frito-Lay bags. It makes her wonder where she went wrong. With Stephanie she’d started off cajoling, progressed to helpful suggestions, and ended up threatening, forcing protein shakes on her, withholding her allowance, and, on one horrible spring afternoon when Stephanie was twelve and not yet immune to her mother’s disapproval, demanding she jog. Stephanie’s flesh had shuddered, her chest had heaved with sobs and protests, until Ella was so rattled, so embarrassed, that she yelled, You have nobody to blame but yourself, young lady, before she ran ahead and out of sight; she could no longer be implicated in this thing her daughter was, so different, so far from her. When she returned alone, Mitch took the car to fetch Stephanie and found her on a side road, bawling. He refused to speak to Ella until she apologized to the child, who was by then buried under Hello Kitty pillows on her four-poster bed and wouldn’t acknowledge her mother’s forced contrition.
Ella’s eyes alight on a wineglass on the end table beside the wing chair. “Stephie, what is this?” She grabs the glass, tips its floral liquid towards her chin, and sniffs. “Are you stealing our wine?”
“Dad let me. He said I could have some. He even poured it.”
Ella feels unsteady. The inadvisability of Mitch offering his depressive, overweight, underage daughter a glass of wine when she is alone at night catches in her throat like a fishbone. When it comes to Stephanie, her husband always takes the easy way out.
Steph stares up at her. Is it a beseeching look? Ella wants to reach out to the girl, be the balm to her troubles, but the effort makes her rigid. Daughters are so eager to repel their mothers.
“This” – she points at the glass – “is the last thing somebody like you should be indulging in.”
With shaking hands, Ella quits the room. She doesn’t acknowledge the punctured sound her daughter makes.
Stephanie, collapsed deeper in the chair, hears her phone finally ping.
F’D UP. SORRY 4 NO REPLY. @ CRNR CLEARVIEW & WILDWOOD 15 MINS?
She stands up and looks at herself in the reproduction baroque mirror over the mantle. Even with puffy eyes and a glaze of sweat, her face is quite pretty. At certain angles she could even be compared to her mother – a darker-haired, more voluptuous version.
Stephanie hears the muffled voices of the television in the basement; her mother has uncharacteristically retreated there. Her father never leaves his office anymore. She goes to her bedroom, puts on a fresh T-shirt, reapplies her makeup, and leaves the house quietly, through the garage.
Nate is waiting for her. He reaches out a hand. She hasn’t expected this, how easily he offers a gentle touch, how it thrills the words right out of her. They walk in silence for a few minutes.
“That was one nice ice cream cone,” he says finally. They laugh and go quiet.
Stephanie thinks hard about what to say, then croaks out, “Brittany’s a piece of work.”
She’s grateful when he laughs again. But more silence follows, and she is conscious now of the lines etching his palm, the warmth of its centre, the pads of his fingers pressing her thumb inwards like a broken wing. So much of just one hand to know and understand.
“I could have been a bit smoother. You know, not just blurt out something in the hallway,” he says.
She wants to cry with relief. “No, no. I was such a bitch about it.” He doesn’t say anything.
She takes a risk. “You know that whole term of biology? I chose what I wore because of you.”
He stops walking and turns towards her. They’re far from her house. He draws a finger along her jawbone. He touches her hair. “I kinda knew that’s what you were doing,” he says.
He wraps his arms around her shoulders and pulls her inwards. She is enclosed, dizzy with sensation. He nuzzles her neck, and for the next fifteen minutes he breathes ever so quietly into her skin, holding on to her as if he’s been waiting, waiting most of his life, just for her. And Stephanie thinks, Ah, this is what it is to feel alive.
CHAPTER 7
June is coming to a close with a sticky slap; purslane and sorrel spring from the over-chewed mud of the development, thriving in the heat. Even pummelled into hardpack, the o’tá:ra is beautiful. Helen reaches into her satchel and pulls out a twist of dried tobacco, kneels in the dust, and lets the flame from her lighter lick the leaf edges before inhaling deeply. From inside her chest she pulls forth gratitude, sends it skyward.
When she was a child, her mother told her their religion began with an illness. The sickness transformed a not-so-great man into a great one, because it brought him a vision. Helen imagined that the man suffered from a cough that blistered his lungs, woke him with chills and vivid, feverish dreams. Her own childish dreams were sharply coloured, but none of her dreams brought messengers drenched in supernatural light, speaking a message that would untether her people from the pale saviour of the priests and ministers who raised their churches, set up missions. Among them Helen ached for such dreams, such messages. There were so many things her young mind failed to understand: neighbours’ children dressed like white kids, taken to the churches built by men who didn’t live among them, the painted exteriors like bleached bones.
And sometimes those same neighbour children showing up on the back porch, cupping an aching ear or holding a sore stomach until her mother crumpled dried tobacco leaves in a small clay bowl, dropped in a woodstove ember, and blew smoke into the child’s ear or exhaled it over a glass of water for them to drink. Hard not to stumble, Lena whispered after them, with a foot in two worlds. But even she couldn’t protect her own children from this two-worldedness forever.
Across the road, the commercial tobacco plants in Coulson’s fields are, to her eye, precociously tall and green, more than a week ahead of schedule. Even now, despite earning money from the crop herself, it bothers Helen how a living thing nurtured by resources shared by all – sun, soil, water, air – can confer its blessings on just a few. It’s like storing all the food and gifts at one end of a canoe, and in so doing making the journey perilous for everyone.
As a youngster she smoked wild tobacco – Indian tobacco – that made her head spin, her lungs sore. She learned moderation that way, how strong medicine can heal you or hurt you. Get sick only once, her mother told her. Otherwise you don’t respect it. The wild plants grew along the edges of Emerson’s Creek, just beyond the shade of the few remaining large maples at the east end of the o’tá:ra. It was a rogue crop from centuries earlier, be
fore her ancestors’ tobacco was replaced by the variety favoured by Europeans, a plant that had bent the backs of black slaves and made white Virginia plantation owners rich – and so too the Interlake farmers.
Wild tobacco was cultivated through conscious neglect, the ability to leave something alone. Its blooms were left untopped, and by July the trumpet-shaped petunias would bend in the breeze, a flutter of yellow prayers lifted to the heavens on two-foot stalks. In the fall the leaves would wither on the stalks and dry, cured by the winter’s freezes and thaws. Her mother would send her out in springtime to pick the black leaves, lay them on the rocky embankments in the sun. Then the older women would smash open the seed pods, sow the wild tobacco anew so the cycle would repeat. Before anyone dared to fill a clay pipe or take their bundles home, leaves were crushed and tossed into the creek, flung into the air, tucked into rocky crannies, and finally burned, acknowledging all the spirits who’d contributed to their good fortune.
This plant marked the seasons for her and she thought it would always be so. Lena kept her daughters – Helen, Ruby, and Bertie – hidden from the Indian Superintendent’s agents without desperate measures; other women gave up their status, married non-natives, in order to keep their children out of the government-mandated residential schools. Helen’s mother would have done that too if it hadn’t seemed like capitulation, another way for the white man to win. Instead she used stealth and imagination to protect her daughters. But Helen was the oldest girl, the surest on her own; she became restless, harder to hide. And one day, just like that, her summers of berry picking, tobacco smoking, and fishing were over. She was grabbed as she turned down the dirt road to her home with an armful of kindling, her pockets stuffed with chestnuts. Her mother was outside, hanging up the wash. Lena looked up to spot the grey government van, and she must have known. From the back window of the retreating vehicle, Helen watched Lena give chase, eyes bulging, open mouth rubbery with panic.