by Nadia Bozak
Vicki shrugs. Vicki’s mum puts the two leftover McNuggets back in the fridge, pours a cup of diet root beer, and goes into her bedroom. The waterbed sloshes. The music for Taxi comes on and after Shell and Vicki have ice cream sandwiches on the tire swing, Shell says she had better go.
Vicki’s mum starts doing things like raking the leaves and walking slowly up to the store to get small bags of chips, or she picks Vicki up from school and walks back with her and Shell. She goes from the white jeans to a new pair of stonewash that don’t show her underwear lines and she cuts her hair so it’s feathery like Princess Di’s. And then, more and more, when Clarke is at work, a black Trans Am is parked in the drive.
Monday morning, Vicki’s house is dark. It’s cold, but Shell waits around. There’s all kinds of stuff to tell Vicki about visiting Dad in Toronto on the weekend. Like how she took the Greyhound all by herself, and she and Dad bought cheese in Little Italy — there’s a whole street of places to eat real chicken cacciatore! Oh, and the man Dad rents a room from is kind of weird but nice and gave Shell a roll-on deodorant that was his mother’s. Shell bounces from foot to foot and shifts her bag from one shoulder to the other. The warning bell rings. Shell steps up the front walk. Where are the bamboo blinds? She creeps onto the lawn and, on her tiptoes, cups her eyes to see in through the window’s reflective glare. The TV is gone, as are the lamps and the Chinese fans and Stones posters. Timmy is asleep on the La-Z-Boy that was known as “Clarke’s.” The final bell rings. Shell cries all the way up Cashel Street, and when she gets to school, all the kids are already in from the yard.
A For Rent sign goes up on Vicki’s front lawn and soon Clarke’s gone too. The only thing left is the tire swing. Some Chinese people move in, five adults and only one baby to go around. Many on Shell’s street believe the Chinese people talk too loud when they sit out on the porch.
“Well,” Mum says, “it’s better than Vicki’s what’s-his-head with no shirt and the goddamn Stones.”
Thomas answers the phone when Vicki calls.
“Was that your dad?” she asks Shell.
“No,” Shell says. “Just a guy who lives in my room now.”
“Oh?” says Vicki. “Is he cute?”
Thomas has been their boarder since September. Thomas is taking the hospitality course and, like Debbie, eats out at restaurants a lot, though he pays Mum for board.
“Oh, I had a late lunch,” he will say to Shell, patting his belly, when she asks what kind of toast he’d like to go with the canned pea soup.
Thomas is never there when Shell gets home from school. She will creep into her old room, dark with denim curtains and smelling of cologne and Aqua Net. Thomas used to keep dill pickle–flavoured chip dip between the windows where it’s cool, a bag of plain Ruffles in his desk drawer. Because Shell couldn’t stop eating the dip and Ruffles until both were almost gone, Thomas moved his private snacks somewhere else.
“No, he’s not at all,” Shell says. Thomas is at the harvest table, bending over his binder of hospitality notes. “He’s ugly.”
“Well, there’s cute boys out here, Shell.” Vicki sounds older.
When Shell says, “I thought you were going to marry Bruce Springsteen?” Vicki laughs.
“Oh, Shell.”
Vicki is living out in Railton with her mum and her mum’s new boyfriend, whose name is Scott. Scott has a black Trans Am, satellite that picks up mtv, and a cousin with an in-ground pool. “There’s a pool party every weekend.” Shell should come out for a swim.
“I’ll ask,” says Shell.
“It’s pretty far in the country out here,” Vicki goes on. She has to go to grade six on a bus. “Some kids my age drive already. And girls are getting periods.” She wants to know how grade seven is for Shell. “Any new kids at school?”
There is silence. Vicki is saying, “Okay, well, I better go,” when Shell blurts out that Mamoon wrote from Brussels. His grandparents cut down the apple tree in their garden and there’s something there called Nutella that Vicki and Shell would love. Mamoon bets Shell’s dad could catch more squirrels with Nutella than with peanut butter. Shell lies and tells Vicki she wrote back to Mamoon. But really, the unanswered letter is tucked inside the musty horsehair button box, along with the spare key for the studio, the pasta-shell necklace Mamoon made her, a bullet from Schwartz’s sausage meat, the jagged piece of Mountain Dew glass that left her with a row of stitches. When Vicki gives Shell her number, Shell repeats it back, pretending to write it down.
Mum says Shell should make some friends her own age for a change. Like what about that Wendy? Wendy’s mum bought a whole whack of pottery from Mum and Dad. She is smart, has large green-grape eyes and clothes from stores even better than Eaton’s.
When they’re checking out library books, Shell says to Wendy, “Oh, you like Judy Blume. You ever read Tiger Eyes?”
But all Wendy wants to know about is how Shell’s dad doesn’t live with her anymore. Is it true strangers pay rent to live in Shell’s old bedroom while Shell sleeps in the basement like a hobbit?
Shell says, “No, well, yes. I guess.”
Then Mum brings home a garbage bag full of hand-me-downs.
“Where’d ya get ‘em?”
Mum doesn’t say. She’s too excited about this blue Beaver Canoe sweatshirt with a hood. “Oh, Shell, isn’t that a good label?”
Shell shrugs, but she keeps it because it’s long enough to cover her bum. She wears it to school with some corduroy pants that were also in the garbage bag. Five minutes after she files out of the cloakroom, everyone knows Shell is wearing the old clothes of Wendy’s big brother. Shell puts her parka back on and walks out of class. She’s halfway across the deserted schoolyard when a teacher stops her and makes her go back.
Some of the other girls in Shell’s grade seven class are like Shell in that they have only mums at home. Instead of reading books, they have babysitting jobs and many have boyfriends who are in high school. These girls wear jean jackets and jelly shoes even though it’s cold. At recess they stay in the bathroom putting on lip gloss and talking about Tampax and Platinum Blonde. Vicki with her jean skirts and Lip Smackers is like them already and someday won’t call Shell anymore. And in not too many years Shell will be in high school, and what will happen to her then? So Shell reads. Sometimes she walks and reads at the same time, or reads in class, a paperback hidden inside her textbook.
Shell wakes up Mum one night and gets in next to her. Shell tells her about Wendy and the girls in the bathroom and asks if they can move to another city. Or how about just letting Shell switch schools? But then Mum gets it all wrong and buys Shell a Platinum Blonde LP for an early Christmas gift. She stands there as Shell listens to it, twisting her hair around her fingers and studying the skinny men on the pastel cover. Shell doesn’t want to turn thirteen in the summer. She cries, tears falling on the shiny men. Mum flies across the living room and shuts off the player. The needle goes screeching along the vinyl surface.
“What do you want, Shell? I can’t always guess!”
“Bob Marley,” Shell chokes.
Shell falls asleep on the couch listening to Uprising, a rough pioneer blanket pulled over her head.
The Chinese people in Vicki’s house move away after only a few months, leaving the boulevard out front piled high with old furniture and bundles of flattened cardboard boxes that all kinds of new stuff came in: a baby stroller, high chair, box fan, ghetto blaster, digital alarm clock, sixteen-piece pot and pan set, colour TV, vcr, electric kettle, and a deluxe rice cooker. Mum says the young man of them must have been promoted. Before the For Rent sign can even go up, some Native Indians move in. No one on Shell’s street says anything about them. But Shell can feel the air shift, locking down in tense anticipation. There seems to be four of them, three women and a man, plus a Ford station wagon, but no kids.
Twice a day — fou
r times if she sneaks home for lunch — Shell walks by Vicki’s. The tire swing in the backyard is still up. Sometimes, like now, it seems to sway, as if someone has just been for a ride. Without anyone to push them, Shell or Vicki could usually give themselves a pretty good start just by leaning backwards and running as fast as they could. Shell watches the swing. She sits in the grey velveteen armchair that’s been on the boulevard since the Chinese people moved out. The seat cushion is missing and now, after two weeks of cold autumn rain, the wooden arms are splitting and the fabric is growing mould, a smear of which Shell now wipes from her pants.
Shell is at the top of Vicki’s driveway staring at the swing in the back when the bungalow’s screen door squeaks opens. A Native woman with short side-parted hair and long legs steps onto the porch. She hitches up her faded jeans, sits on an aluminum lawn chair bowed by Vicki’s mum. She lights a cigarette, crossing her legs at the ankle.
“Hey,” the woman calls out, “what’s so interesting back there?”
Shell turns away from the driveway, pretending to be contemplating the armchair on the boulevard. She peers at the hulk of mouldy velveteen through the bottom of her glasses, like Dad when he’s sorting the good stuff from the junk.
“It’s the swing you want, isn’t it?”
Shell frowns and makes her brows touch above her nose.
“Go have a blast on that thing, if you want to. I don’t care.”
Shell says thanks. Then she walks quickly away.
Mum’s at night school, so Shell calls Dad to see if he is watching the Habs game, but really she wants him to say it’s okay to go into Vicki’s backyard if the people who live there say she can. Like, that’s not weird or anything?
Jonathan answers. Dad is out at some kind of pot-thing.
“A potluck?” Shell asks. She’s going to ask what dish Dad made — garlic eggplant, stuffed grape leaves, the kind of hearty goulash he ate on the farm as a boy. But then Jonathan asks Shell about Odin — you know, the god whose wife was Frigg — and that leads to Leonard Cohen and space shuttles, and finally Jonathan starts to cough so violently he has to cover his face with his oxygen mask.
When Jonathan’s breathing eases, Shell blurts out, “So I just wanted to know about this tire swing, you know, and it’s in a stranger’s yard, but she said I can use it.”
“She?” Jonathan wheezes.
“A lady. Yeah. Is that okay to do?”
“That’s fine with me, dear,” Jonathan growls, just like Dad’s Tom Waits.
“Thanks,” says Shell.
“Oh, sure. And who’s this I am talking to again?”
“No one,” Shell says, hanging up the phone.
There’s no lights on at Vicki’s and someone has tipped the armchair onto its side. Mum says rentals often have that big kind of garbage. Shell kneels down as if to look at the chair’s ripped underside and stubby wooden feet, then pulls her hood down as far as it will go and follows the empty driveway into the backyard.
The grass is long and wet. On the back stoop under which Timmy used to hide, there’s a large cage with two big brown rabbits twitching inside. They are quiet and still and smell of fresh wood chips. Through the cage’s mesh, Shell touches their soft, silky fur. The slender vertical troughs under their noses really do look like harelip scars. Shell calls both of them Kremski and wishes for a rabbit of her own. Maybe Mum will agree to that since she doesn’t like cats.
The tire swing hangs low; its yellow rope is starting to fray and the walnut branch to which it is tied is as crooked as a boomerang. One leg a time, as if testing frigid water, she climbs into the swing. Shell pulls Firestarter from her pocket and finds her page, her back to Vicki’s bungalow.
Shell’s really got to pee and the light in the low sky is no longer enough to read by. The bungalow is lit now: a blue fluorescence in the add-on that was Vicki’s bedroom as well as a flickering in the kitchen. Shell is halfway up the driveway when she smells cigarettes. The Native woman is on the porch, caught in the spotlight of the bare bulb over the door.
“Nice and quiet back there,” the Native woman says.
She looks at Shell over her bifocal glasses, tucking back her wavy hair. Her face is long and thin. So are her limbs and hands, which are wired tight with muscle and bumps of bone. Short fingernails are painted the limiest green. Shell stands up straight and tries to be as confident and strong as the woman on the porch.
The woman says, “Glad you’re helping yourself to the swing, honey.” Her cousins won’t care, but if Shell sees them around, “Just tell them Wanda said it’s okay. Okay?”
Shell nods. Her wet nose drips.
“Let me hear you say it.”
Shell clears her throat. “Okay.”
The lawn chair groans as Wanda gets up. The door closes with a click.
Shell cuts through Vicki’s yard for the swing. Each time Shell climbs into the cold rubber tire, the branch sinks lower and the old yellow rope further frays. Sometimes she will hurry down at recess time. Pulling up her hood, she ducks through the staff parking lot and is late getting back only a few times. Wanda’s cousin might be out feeding the rabbits. He is tall and thin like Wanda, with a ponytail and hands so big they could palm Shell’s head. He nods at Shell, Shell at him. Then there are two older girls who might be twins. Shell never sees them except when they are driving the Ford station wagon up or down Cashel Street.
It snows — wet, melty flakes the size of teabags. The rabbits disappear from the back stoop and Wanda’s not outside smoking as much. With the cold, the creaking rope grows brittle and the yellow coating flakes off, leaving not much more than a twist of dirty grey fibre. Her back aches if she sits for too long and the cold rubber rim cuts lines into the backs of her thighs or bum, depending on her position. But it is quiet back here and with her feet suspended above the ground Shell can drift far away.
Shell’s halfway through Gone with the Wind when the swing breaks. The rope emits a creaking groan followed by a decisive snap. She tries to free herself from the tire as it is falling, but her body is too firmly wedged in. She lands on her back, legs up in the air. Stuck as a pig, she lies there for a long time holding tight to her novel. Above her is white winter sky; below her, the melting snow makes her bum wet.
Wanda answers Shell’s knock. Shell says she’s sorry the rope broke. There is a hard chunk in her throat and her lips tremble.
Wanda points to Shell’s bulging pocket. “Maybe it’s your big book that broke the camel’s back.”
The chunk dissolves enough Shell can swallow.
“Hey, I got something for you.” Wanda opens the door wide.
It smells like spaghetti and tomato sauce. Shell thinks she’ll make that for her and Thomas tonight. Clarke’s La-Z-Boy is still there, as is his oak grandfather clock, the kind that might be showcased on The Price Is Right. The picture above the couch is that French one like in Mum’s art history book, haystacks glowing red in a low sun, and there are about a million Polaroids stuck to the walls — mostly close-ups. Cross-stitched fabric drapes the long corridor all the way to the kitchen, which is covered with more Polaroids plus pieces of paper with words and dates and pencil drawings. The rabbits are not inside either, unless they’re lost among the piles of cardboard boxes everywhere — living room, dining room, Wanda’s, den — bursting with dishes and books and balled-up newspaper. A tape gun and scissors are on the kitchen table.
“Hey, what’s your name, anyway?”
“Shell.”
“Nice,” Wanda says, squinting at Shell over her bifocals. “Well, Shell, you got a cassette player?” Shell says yes even though all they’ve got at home is Dad’s turntable.
Shell lifts her arms as Wanda stuffs her parka pockets with cassette tapes.
“You take these, then. They need someone to listen to them.” She catches Shell’s eyes and says square into her face:
“That old rope was bound to break someday, Shell. And so it did.”
The cassettes are by Patti Smith, Blondie, one called Sandinista!, as well as T. Rex and the Police. The Men at Work tape makes Shell think they were all in fact Clarke’s. Well, whoever’s they were, they listened to T. Rex and the Police so much some of the song titles are rubbed off the cartridges and the brown magnetic ribbon is crinkled from jamming in the machine. Shell studies how it is that Patti and Blondie look back at her so brave, so unafraid. She can’t imagine what the songs will sound like, but Clarke didn’t think they were very good because the hinges on the cases are stiff and the spools wound right to the beginning. Shell hides the tapes in her horsehair button box, right on top.
Then the boulevard in front of Wanda’s is full of cardboard boxes, a deflated waterbed mattress, Vicki’s kitchen table, and the lawn chair from the porch. Shell doesn’t see Wanda again. The landlord comes with a For Sale sign and a pickup. A teenager in earmuffs helps him load. As the pickup trundles away up Cashel Street, the tire swing teeters on top, the length of frayed yellow rope still knotted in place.
At Christmas, Mum works extra time at Memory Lane. Shell goes along to help serve suppers, and every time the elevator doors open, the old people are gathered around so tightly Shell has to push her way through. The scrum then follows her down the hall towards the damp kitchen, where Mum stands over a big pot, her glasses steamed. They writhe, cling, beg Shell for such things as cigars, hairbrushes, kisses, and in various accents and languages tell Shell she is lovely and a pretty girl. To some, though, she is a boy. Their skin, when they touch her, is soft and women’s knobby wrists burst with tangled veins — red and blue and black veins, just like C-3PO’s stomach.
Dad sends Shell a Seasons Greetings card with an invitation to Toronto for New Year’s. A bus ticket falls out along with a crisp fifty-dollar bill from Jonathan. Dad writes he’s going to have Salvadoran Christmas dinner with some friends from school. Thomas is going back east for the holidays so Shell and Mum will work December 25 at Memory Lane. That way they don’t need a tree or a turkey, plus Mum earns time and a half, from which Shell can have thirty dollars to spend on Boxing Day. With the thirty from Mum and the fifty from Jonathan Shell buys a cassette player at Mister Sound’s annual Boxing Day sale and still has enough left over to buy Mum the Bob Dylan LP with the “Oh, Sister” duet that Mum sings but forgets the words to.