by Nadia Bozak
But if she went ahead and sold it, she could buy Shell a pair of those brown Cougar lace-ups with sticking-out tongues and fuzzy red insides the big girls wear. Shell mentions this as she and Mum drag pieces of thick metal caging from Dad’s stash under the back porch. Mum laughs. “You’ll wear the boots you’ve got.”
The caging is to bar the basement windows and back door. “Because no one’s home during the day now,” Mum says. She calls a handyman to do it. And she posts an advert at a business college within walking distance offering room and board for a female in a quiet house with a working mother and school-age daughter. Shell’s room is the one advertised. The “board” means they’ll feed her, this female. Debbie is the first one to come look. She is taking the hospitality course and her snug jeans are tucked into shiny brown Cougars. She pays cash up to the end of the school term and Shell moves into the basement. Shell’s bed goes under the windows, right where the foster boys slept, side by side like in a graveyard, or Snow White with the dwarves. Shell blinks big into the fall of first grey sun, missing Mum and Dad both because Mum’s away so much now.
Dad had been building a carpentry workshop next to the furnace room. He and Kremski got the drywall up and even hung a door. But now his tools are all packed away and the sawhorses hidden in the cold storage. Like the walls, the concrete floor is raw and unpainted. Mum unrolls the hooked rugs her mother made and arranges them to seal out the cold ground. Shell has never seen these rugs before. The biggest one shows a tiger lounging beneath a palm tree. Also, there is a family of swans and another of a brown girl with flowers braided into her long black hair. They are like giant postcards, or the beach towels sold at gas stations.
Mum switches on the pot-bellied Filter Queen. Tugging on the wand, she attacks each of the rugs and then switches to the nozzle attachment, sucking cobwebs from the edges of the ceiling and baseboards. Her hair is cropped short now — to fit under a hairnet at work. It’s gone steel wool in both colour and texture, and because her glasses are old, she squints like a Beatrix Potter mole and she won’t take Aspirin for the headaches. By the thin grey light glazing the room’s pair of small windows, Shell unfolds clean flannel sheets and makes up the roll-away bed dragged out from its hiding place under the stairs.
Mum works extra shifts — lunches and dinners both — so she’s pretty much full-time. Plus she’s taking Introduction to Anthropology at the university that’s two mornings a week. The kitchen, when Shell comes home from school, is cold and unlit. On the sill above the sink, the glass medicine bottles are drained of their emerald and amber glows. At five o’clock the furnace will whir to life. That’s thirty minutes before Debbie’s boyfriend drops her off. Shell keeps her parka on. Underneath, Dad’s Montreal Canadiens jersey is fitting her better and better — or maybe worse and worse. Shell shoves real, store-bought Fig Newtons in her mouth, one after the other — eight, nine, ten Fig Newtons — swallowing hard. She wants the biscuits to be gone so that she can stop eating them. Then they are gone. A glass of milk washes down the clumps in her teeth and the lumps in her chest. The empty package goes to the bottom of the garbage, beneath wet tissue and soup cans and dirty bottles and balls of tinfoil peeled from the tops of frozen meals.
Mum brings home a thirteen-inch rca with bleeding colour and bent rabbit ears she got from an ad on the Community Board at the Thrifty Mart where she buys bread rather than bake it herself all Saturday. The canning jars and yogurt maker are packed away too. “No more pioneering,” she’d said, replacing Dad’s meat grinder with a Penny Saver microwave. Mum never thought she’d agree with her own mother, but Betty Crocker truly was a revolutionary. There’s Cheerios on top of the fridge too, canned soup in the cupboard, and even Kraft Dinner, about which Shell sometimes dreams at night: the way the creamy noodles slide down her throat and how just the right amount of ketchup turns their orange glow into a salmon-pink sunset and how the ketchup’s sweetness and the tangy cheese and a bite of garlic pickle mix up into a thick, salty paste which she holds in her mouth for an extra bit of savour. Shell’s started sneaking home for Kraft Dinner during school lunch. Alone at the table, she eats the whole pot. She can’t even read her book while she’s doing it, the taste and texture of the macaroni is so total. Then she carefully scrubs and dries and replaces the dishes and walks back to school, her peanut butter sandwich for dessert.
Mum’s note says she’s serving supper at Memory Lane tonight. Get something from the freezer for you and Debbie. Shell’s okay making dinners on her own: some kind of battered or breaded meat with a side of fries and, because Mum insists, a vegetable. The freezer in the basement broke down, so, shopping bag by shopping bag, Mum and Shell moved the contents out to the chest freezer in the woodshed — fries, margarine tubs of frozen chicken stock, boysenberries Dad was saving for a January pie. Kremski salvaged the freezer from a demolition and traded it to Dad for some perfectly good window glass the neighbours two doors down put out. The freezer’s body is pocked with rust, and even when the corroded latch agrees to open, the lid’s so heavy Shell can hardly lift it up. Plus, the coolant’s leaking. Inside the tight-wrapped garbage bags are dead squirrels. Shell doesn’t always remember to put one out each garbage day. Debbie doesn’t know about the chest freezer because she doesn’t stray beyond the back porch, where she smokes her skinny peppermint cigarettes. And she doesn’t come home for dinners much anymore either.
“Isn’t there some salad?” Debbie had said to Shell one night when Shell served Swanson beef pies again. She’s been packing on weight since moving in.
“Don’t you want it?”
Debbie huffed and took the plate. They ate in front of the local news and when Debbie got up to answer the phone — “That’ll be Greg!” — she did a little dance to get the denim out of her crotch.
Through the barred glass of the back-door window, the low sky is the same thin white as the skim milk Shell pours into her cup, and the snow on the ground is old and grey. A few crisp leaves cling to remaining plant stalks, and far at the back the shed’s broad window shines dark.
Shell jams on her Ski-Doo boots without unzipping them. The back porch stinks of cigarette butts, and black ash peppers the packed snow around the steps. She shoves her hands into her pockets as she clumps through the yard. Fish sticks for tonight: three each, done in the oven along with shoestring fries. Green peas for Debbie, if she’s even home. When she’s not home, Shell eats Debbie’s fries and chicken pie or whatever along with her own. Then she crawls into her roll-away bed, clutching at the lead balloon in her belly. When Mum comes back, Shell cries at the soft footsteps on the ceiling — back and forth between table and stove — and the smell of soft brown toast and the wheee of the kettle whistling.
The shed’s light bulb is dusty and the towering pile of two-by-fours and broken hockey sticks and other cuts of oddball wood almost touches the rafters. With an overturned bucket as a stool, Shell leans into the dank freezer. The flat cardboard box of High Liner fish sticks is unopened, but the bag of fries is down to a third. There are no peas or spring medley or anything else. A can of Habitant minestrone will have to do. At the bang of the freezer lid, chunks of wood tumble from Dad’s neat pile, a chipped table leg nearly knocking Shell on the head. Shell shuts the door gently. But a rumble follows and then a loud crash.
Through a receding crust of gritty snow, the skeleton of Dad’s garden shows. The bricked tiers of the iris beds have sunk, the bashed-up tomato cages have fallen over, and the cardinal bush under which Shell used to imagine no one could see her is broken down with ice. Save for the blue box of fish sticks under her arm, there is no colour: not a drop. And the chill of that scoops at Shell, hollowing her insides. What’s left is a hunger, ever deepening, for salty, oil-slicked, oven-warmed food; processed, preserved, store-bought. It’s so hard to get enough.
From across the yard, the back of the house is dark, the stillness of it unfamiliar. With three channels to choose from on the
rca, Shell doesn’t go to the library much anymore, or anywhere else. All she wants is to preheat the oven, close the living room curtains, and lie on the couch. It’s almost time for The Price Is Right. But it is all so weary inside Shell. The corporate, American-junk-food fish sticks she clutches make her sick. Imagine if Dad could see her.
Salt water blurs Shell’s eyes. The house and the flatland of the yard look like the channels the TV antennas can’t pick up. But then: a spark of green rises just above the snow. As Shell clumps towards it, the green takes its true shape, becoming the rim of a plastic flowerpot.
Shell rushes the flowerpot. Fish sticks and fries fall to the ground. With her thick mitts she claws at the crusted snow until a crunchy tug releases the pot from winter’s hold. The plastic is cracked. Inside are rock and dirt and a bundle of shrivelled iris roots.
At the crisp wind, Shell tightens her hood. Her knees warm the cold ground, making them wet. She digs deeper into the snow, the discards mounding up around her. She sweats, her nose drips. Finally, she stands. The circle of frosty, opaque glass at her feet is the exact same size as a child’s wading pool.
Shell’s leather mitts only smear the tears. Chin to chest, the weight of the low sky climbs up onto her shoulders.
Let Mum find her frozen, like Dad did that drunk in a snowbank last winter on Clayton Street, right across from his painting studio. But then Shell won’t see it if the Canadiens win the Stanley Cup this year. And who’d get Shell’s horsehair button box? She doesn’t want anyone rifling through her memories, so real you can hold them in your hand.
At the call of a bird, Shell looks up: a plump cardinal has landed in the bush named just for it. The pond ice is less opaque now, more crystal and reflective. Beneath the surface, bright dots of red and gold and silver blink bright as Christmas lights.
Trapped, frozen in time past as much as in thick ice, goldfish and rainbowed carp cry for Shell to get them out — and please, please, hurry.
Dad’s axe hangs in the shed, above the woodpile that is now more like a heap. Shell’s snub-nosed boots weigh heavy as she crests the wobbly summit and, balanced on one knee, stretches out, her bare fingertips nudging the axe’s smooth wooden shaft. It clatters to the floor. Shell jumps down after it, riding a further avalanche of wood.
Crouched as a frog, Shell leans in with the axe and takes a first crack at the frozen water. The fish are trapped at different depths, so she starts with those closest to the surface.
Her fists choke up on the axe blade, the long handle wedged under her armpit. Dad always says there is a right and a wrong way to handle a tool — broom, darning needle, canoe paddle, cheese grater, egg beater, clothes peg, or toothbrush — and Shell’s short fingers have no strength and no grace, and she knows that until she herself mines gold in Yellowknife, she’ll never do it right.
Shell gets right onto the ice, plants her boots firm and wide, and throws all her weight behind the axe. The ice cracks. Day dwindles into an early evening the same colour iron as Mum’s hair. Shell takes another swing. Some of the fish are clumped up so close together Shell’s afraid she’s going to chop one in half. She pushes back her hood and unzips her parka, wipes her nose on the sleeve. There’s that smell again — the one everyone calls BO. Mixed in with the mothball of Dad’s rubbery hockey jersey in which she now lives is her own sour odour, which Debbie says a stick of Secret Powder Fresh would make go away. Can’t Mum buy her some?
She hits the ice. A loud crack echoes across the empty sky. Shell throws down the axe. She picks up a brick-sized hunk of crystal; inside a bright orange goldfish hangs suspended. “Don’t die, please,” Shell whispers to the ice.
The kitchen is still dark, but the furnace is on. Shell fills a bucket with warm tap water and, switching on the porch light against the darkening sky, lugs it back to the pond, boots flapping.
Plop!
It takes only a minute for the fish to thaw. The sleek two-inch goldfish thus released darts around the bucket — eyes wide and body wriggling — not just alive but risen from the dead.
By the yellow of the porch light, Shell chops away at the pond, releasing her fish one at a time. Hot and sweating and feeling like an athlete, Shell extracts each fish cube and melts it in one of a series of warm-water buckets. A nice big carp gets axed in half, and a few small goldfish don’t make it, their white-bellied corpses floating to the surface — Shell swears they’ll get buried come spring.
The sky has stars when Shell’s axe cracks into the pond’s plastic bottom. The fish — rescued, reborn — number a dozen. Slopping the buckets up the porch and into the house, Shell finds the kitchen warm but still dark. Debbie would have been back by now, so Shell has only herself to feed. And the fish.
They are out of fish food, so while her cheese sandwich is heating in the microwave, Shell crushes Corn Flakes into a fine dust. Bucket by bucket, Shell feeds her fish, whispering how proud she is of them, how magical they are, and how sorry she is to have left them so cold and lonely. Shell dips her finger in among the Corn Flakes floating on the water and the boldest of her fish takes a nibble.
When the news comes on, Shell arranges the buckets in front of the TV, blue light flashing upon each one’s surface. The smallest of the goldfish died when Shell was washing the dishes and is now in a margarine tub on the porch. But the other eleven are swimming strong. Their wide eyes are far wiser, for now they have, like in Mum’s Joni Mitchell song, seen life from both sides.
White headlights pass over the front curtains. Then there’s the rumble of the Dart in the drive. A door slams. Footsteps sound on the back porch. Through the barred window, Mum is flooded in yellow light. She gropes in her purse, distracted by the margarine tub and Dad’s axe leaning against the railing. Shell opens the door. Behind her glasses, Mum’s eyes spring wide, half angry already.
“Guess what?” Shell says before Mum can step inside, out of the frozen winter.
Snow Tire
Vicki’s jean jacket is pink with rainbow trim. When Shell steps onto the porch in the morning, it’s easy to see if she’s already out front of her house waiting to walk to school. If she’s not, like today, Shell will knock on the door — very softly, because Clarke might be sleeping off his night shift. But the windows of her bungalow are never this dark, plus the driveway is empty. Shell just goes on up Cashel Street to school. Maybe Vicki’s at the doctor’s again; she’s always having trouble with her tonsils. But at recess Vicki’s not in the area where the younger grades play. While the rest of the school screams and teachers blow whistles, Shell squats behind an oak tree and for ten allotted minutes reads her favourite part of Tiger Eyes — where Davey first meets Sal at the Grand Canyon and, though he is older, he sees something in Davey that is special.
Vicki’s gone a second day, though Clarke’s car is back in the drive. Shell tells Mum and Mum says just wait. It’s probably nothing. Shell tells her diary what she can’t admit to Mum: she misses Vicki and she never thought of her as a best friend but now she does.
The next day, Vicki is on her porch waiting. For a minute, though, she tricked Shell with a new jacket: black satin with bedazzled trim. Her mum is in the hospital getting her stomach stapled.
“Huh?” Shell pictures rubber gloves and raw pizza dough and then how Dad stretches canvas with one of those guns.
Vicki says the staples go on the inside. “So she won’t eat very much.” In no time at all her mum is going to be as skinny as she was before she had Vicki. Also, Clarke is working overtime at Silverhorn to pay for the operation, which means — hooray — that he won’t be home much.
“But the hospital was really neat.” Vicki got to watch TV in one of those sit-up beds and eat Jell-O from a tray.
Vicki’s mum comes home with a talking scale, new bed sheets, and a TV for her room. She lies on the waterbed playing along with game shows and drinking juice glasses full of chocolate milk that Vicki carefully m
easures.
“That’s all her stomach has room for,” Vicki says, holding up a Weight Watchers measuring cup, the eight-ounce line marked with orange nail polish.
With Clarke always working, Shell and Vicki watch a lot of music videos on tape. After school, Vicki pours diet root beer while Shell finds the Ritz crackers and Kraft peanut butter, so salty and sweet she could live on it. Cyndi Lauper’s new video is on when Vicki’s mum comes out. She’s in white jeans; just one leg is as big as Shell’s whole sleeping bag, and her underwear lines show. As she twirls around in front of the TV, the freckled meat of her arms quivers. These jeans have not fit her for five years. Vicki glances up from the video she’s trying to sing along to, though she’s never heard the song before.
“Move it, Mum, you’re in the way.”
Shell stays for supper. Vicki heats chicken cacciatore TV dinners while her mum microwaves leftover Chicken McNuggets. They eat in the lopsided kitchen where Vicki and Shell used to run marbles down the sloped floor. Vicki’s mum spreads a napkin over her lap and, dipping her nuggets in honey-mustard sauce, tells them about how, before she met Clarke, she was dating Luis Duarte, the lead singer from Abacus.
“You see their video, Shell?”
Shell nods. It’s the one where the band are slaves on some kind of island with ladies in chains and bikinis and feeding the slaves meat bones.
“Well, they’re big now.” So big they’re going to open for Van Halen at Maple Leaf Gardens in the spring.
Shell is thinking Vicki’s mum probably wore those white jeans when she was dating Luis Duarte, and then she, Vicki’s mum, wriggles out of her chair and thumps to the bathroom, which is right on the other side of the wall. Shell and Vicki keep eating while Vicki’s mum is throwing up. When her mum comes back, she says she should have measured the McNuggets with the scale but she only ate five and that seems like not much.
“Right?”