by Terry Griggs
Faith’s story has its moments (quick ones), but Viv’s no fool. She knows what she’s talking about, being a drinker herself, although not a secret one. Viv had too much obvious fun for that, and in any event was a socialist when it came to classified information. She believed in sharing the wealth. Anyhow, if that’s all there was to it, if booze had become Faith’s private vice and inspirational source, it’s hardly worth mentioning. Some hushed-up transgressions in town were of a similar order—commonplace, garden-variety, low-wattage sins. The only embarrassment occasioned by their discovery would derive from their inferior quality; the only way of keeping their inherently dull power intact would be to keep mum. Low interest being better than none.
“Mrs. Park has a problem with her head,” I confided to Auntie Viv, curious to see how this might play. “Not anything serious, I don’t think.” Sometimes one has to be proactive, even with the truth.
“You don’t say.”
Having been shortchanged on more than one occasion at Park’s, Viv must have felt she had proof enough. The story went around and came back as a sizable malignant tumour. My community is nothing if not caring.
Viv had the right idea. Secrets can be corrosive. Better out than in. If Mrs. Park hadn’t been so dutifully repressing her anger under a thick blanket of prayer laid down night after night, she wouldn’t have gotten so sick in the first place. When soon afterward I stopped by Park’s for some jawbreakers, it gratified me to hear her suppressing her anger a whole lot less, and for that I should be commended.
I had to wonder if her husband beats her, too? Looks the type.
Some people do harm themselves over the most piddling of unforgettable misdeeds. Guilt or regret can whet to an eviscerating sharpness, indiscretions, or stupid mistakes or impulsive, uncharacteristic behaviours. Like our principal, Mr. Morris, swiping a lipstick (Cherries in the Snow) out of Batty Pock’s purse after she excused herself (diarrhea) during an interview about what her son did with that dog. (The things that go on!) Or like Gloria Kay telling her elderly dad after he wet himself that he made her, “sick sick sick.” Experiencing a bout of PMS at the time, and having that very day drained the old man’s bank account, Gloria never entirely forgave herself for misspeaking. (His black eye came later.)
And, getting back to the subject of tumours, I know without a doubt that some people carried dead weights within them that slowed their stride, but quickened their hearts unhealthily with the burden. Jane Miller’s furtive abortion; Francine Smith’s drug problem; Tommy Lean’s sneak affair with his wife’s sister that led to divorce and remarriage with the sister and an empty church on one side at the wedding, plus the very same devil of a mother-in-law and a festering load of misery because the second sister turned out to be more maritally chilly than the first. You’d think a dentist wouldn’t be so hasty. (For fact-checking, their phone numbers are all in the book.)
Before he croaked, rashly and unexpectedly, I used to visit Grandfather Young in the old age home, a harshly lit institution softened for its residents by their deteriorating eyesight and their withdrawal from expectation. Here, it was almost too easy, like picking windfalls after a storm. The storm being in this case the final blast of life itself loosening and unravelling the bindings of propriety and discretion. Perversities, intolerances, cruelties—the residents let fly long-held tidbits. The aged divulged seasoned secrets without batting an eye, and whether some did so knowingly under the forgiving shelter of dementia, I, for one, was not about to smoke them out.
Grandfather Young, a soft-spoken man, generous and personable, had more liberal views than most of his contemporaries, and I’d never heard him denigrate others for any reason. So imagine my surprise when I entered his room one day and heard, “Get out of here you black bastard!” This he addressed to the West Indian doctor who had kindly stopped by at the request of a vacationing (gambling, not golfing) Doc McIvor.
“Grandad!”
The man didn’t linger, but took the hit in a manly enough way. God knows, he must have been used to it, although in town racist remarks were usually delivered more thoughtfully. Had Grandfather picked it up out of the air, all those old brains leaking malice, or was some long buried rot beginning to surface? Or was he simply having some nasty fun?
“You’re a bastard,” he said.
“I am not.”
“Your mother’s a tramp.”
“Okay, that’s it, Grandad. I’m out of here.”
“Don’t go, Hero.”
“Don’t be mean, then.”
“You still diddling that cousin of yours?”
“I’m only a kid! Jesus.”
There had been some hanky-panky, true, but that was my business.
“Girls. All whores.”
“That’s it, I’m leaving. See you around.” I stood to go.
“Wait, wait. You want to hear what Osbert Kay’s been saying about his daughter, don’t you?”
“Yeah, maybe.” I resumed my seat, primly. “But listen Grandad, you better watch what you say. You know, in that doctor’s black bag there are needles.”
For the record, Nile and I had this game that had been going on for some time, innocent enough. He’d undress me, slowly, slowly, then when stripped clean, he’d run his hands all over me, up and down, legs and feet, back and neck, chest and belly, not an inch of my bod exempt. Talk about sensitive material! But that’s all there was to it, not like that business he got up to with some of the older girls. The whole deal friendly and harmless, a familiarity among the related, a feel-good family event. Unfortunately, my house had treachery built into its framework. Try to have some kind of fun behind closed doors and sure enough one of those doors would pop open at the exactly the wrong moment. With one’s mother standing on the threshold, aghast.
She should talk.
I wish she would, for there was something, something not right. When my parents were out, I cruised through the house searching for it, busy little fingers unlocking and opening and prying loose. You’d think the place would cooperate, but squeaking cupboards do not translate. What I found in the medicine cabinet only told me that among us we suffered from headaches, constipation, colds, gingivitis (who wanted to go to a dentist who’d screwed his wife’s sister?), cuts, warts, indigestion, car sickness (guess who?), depression, watery eyes, insomnia, and hemorrhoids. Commonplace afflictions. But I knew that a more grievous one, an affliction that caused uncommon pain had been secreted somewhere in the house. Like a lost key, it was unreachable for having fallen through a crack invisible to me.
When people smile at you with pity, or smirk with the pleasurable pressure on their lips that withholding knowledge about you causes, you understand that it’s an open secret. Everyone knows but you, so they’re making some nominal effort to protect you—while letting you know it—but mostly they’re keeping themselves entertained. I don’t think this thing involves my father, or not directly. He may have hurt a man who cheated him once, and I don’t know how badly, but that really is a family secret, scabbed over and untouched, not picked at by anyone, including me.
That leaves my mother. She could whip up a batch of shame faster than most mothers can make a cake. What had she been up to now? Lips were sealed (mostly with other lips, but that’s another story). Including Auntie Viv’s, which did not bode well. She fobbed me off with a questionable cliché, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you, eh.” Plus a glass of doctored O.J. that had a real kick to it. An aid to Viv saying, “Forget it, Hero.”
So.
“What’s up?” I asked Nile, a generation older than me and packed solid with knowing.
“Let’s play our game and see.”
“Not allowed, remember.”
“All the better.”
“People are thinking things about me. Tell me.”
“Poor baby.” Before undoing the top button of my shirt, he picked up a stran
d of my black hair and rolled it between his fingers, as if assessing its worth. “Who’s your daddy?”
Here I thought this a trifling question. Impish, if formulaic. No response required. Seems I was wrong.
You see, for all my searching, the answer wasn’t in the house after all. It was in me. Philately turns out to be the appropriate punishment for my curiosity because I myself bear a stamp. My mother, clever woman, had concealed it in a place I’d never think to look. But I did. This, a covert operation performed without anaesthesia. I had to reach in and claw it out. Had to bloody my hand digging into my own heart.
Who did what to whom? How much did it hurt? Who’s my daddy?
Small Talk
My father’s philosophical musings were often hybrid affairs—a marriage of pseudo-Confucian sayings, popular proverbs, and original material—that required a sharp instrument, a kind of analytical nutpick, to extract from them their meaty flecks of wisdom. My mother and I, enjoying at his expense a rare phase of solidarity, referred to these utterances as “according to Confusion” or “what Confusion say.”
“Pithy,” she’d observe.
“Pithy,” I’d agree.
And then we’d laugh.
The ‘He-who’s’ didn’t always lead to ‘hee-haws,’ however, and when trouble began to brew I headed out the door.
“Can’t you get anything right, Morrie?” Arms crossed, toe tapping, classic signs. “He who hesitates is lost. Not ‘laughing.’ Lost. You know, like HE WHO hesitated to apply for that job at the dairy, or HE WHO didn’t quite get around to. . . .”
As Ovid says, “Love is a kind of warfare.” Or conversely, Molière: “Tranquility in love is a disagreeable calm.” Whatever Confusion had to say on the subject would not, I feared, resolve the issue, so when battle lines were drawn I left them to it.
On one such auspicious day, far more thunder within than without, I set off to make my rounds. First, this involved a minor detour. In need of sustenance (“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well”—trust Virginia Woolf to nail it), and having secured an unofficial loan from the parents’ modest savings ill-concealed in a locked strong box hidden beneath a floorboard upon which sat a hefty chest of drawers, I set out for Park’s Variety. Mrs. Park’s son, Rodney, a contemporary of mine, stood behind the cash, inert despite the surge of testosterone coursing through his male byways on seeing me enter.
“Rodney.”
“Hero.”
I mooched around in the store poking at cellophane wrappers and sliding open the freezer’s glass panel, liberating the frost spirits trapped within. At some future date I’d have to sue the Park’s for extreme dental distress, but at present was mightily pleased with the sugary wares on offer: jawbreakers, sponge toffee, Lucky Elephant Pink Candy Popcorn, Dixie cups, Licorice Cigars… et cetera was never so sweet. I settled on a cherry popsicle and dug in my pocket for a nickel. When I held it out to Rodney, he didn’t budge. He stood motionless, staring at me, jeopardizing our commercial transaction.
“Five cents, right?” Sometimes one had to give Rodney a wee prompt, get the show on the road.
He continued to stare, utterly immobile.
I knew he was alive, knocking around in there somewhere. “Yoo-hoo, Rodney. Anyone home?”
“Your lips,” he said.
“My—?”
Were they scaly, or something? Had I inadvertently broken out in melanotic maculae, cankers, Kawasaki syndrome? I hadn’t checked when I got up that morning. (Indeed, I don’t believe I’d washed.) I prided myself on not wearing makeup, letting my natural charms do all the work required. In error, perhaps? No one had ever mentioned my lips before, except to comment that I “flapped” them too much.
“What about them?”
“They’re the same as your cousin’s.”
“Amy’s?” Big-hipped, thin-lipped Amy? The suggestion brought my own bottom lip perilously close to quivering.
“No. Nile’s. Same upper lip, same lower, same commissure, same vermilion border, same philtrum even. Don’t you know that?”
Who else but Rodney would know the parts of the mouth? But crap, I realized it was true. If Nile ever uncurled his kisser from that Elvis sneer, it’d be a perfect match with mine. All our parts probably matched! (To wit, in the appropriate gendered arrangement, inappropriately paired.)
“So?” I said.
He shrugged, then stuck out his hand for payment.
I slapped the popsicle into his palm. “Break this, will you.”
Rodney smacked it on the edge of the counter, handed it back, and rang in the sale.
“See ya.” I pushed through the door.
“Yup.”
Well, that was diverting. I slid the first half of the popsicle out of the package, stuck it in my mouth, and, with a vampiric focus, began to drain it of red dye # 40 as I took yet another slight detour. This one enabled me to start at the top of Ballentine, our one affluent street, as I made my way downtown, savouring my breakfast while enjoying a round of homegrown tourism. (Most of us lived on the other side of the tracks. In my family’s case, we lived so far on the other side we couldn’t even see the tracks.) The houses here were all larger than the ones on the other streets—fancier, impeccably maintained, heartache-free. You understood that their interiors would be as tastefully appointed and immaculate as their weedless and selectively treed yards. (Ah, the gingko, the tulip tree.) Somehow I couldn’t envision tangled tumbleweeds of dust and hair rolling down the residents’ long hardwood-floored hallways (waxed to a high shine), nor picture anonymous pets skittering (slithering or hopping) terrified and squealing into holes gnawed in the wall (no holes!) should a confused child step on one at night in the unrelenting dark due to a misunderstanding over the hydro bill. Wandering down Ballentine, soothed by the street’s funeral calm, and barely resisting the invitation to deposit my licked-clean popsicle stick on the outstretched, albeit, lamp-holding hand of a lawn jockey, I considered Corbusier’s assertion that, “A house is a machine for living in.” I have to admit that this was not entirely comforting, as it sounded more like a device that might mill you into sawdust. Nevertheless, Hero, one of these days, one of these days…
On arriving in the business section, I finished off the second half of my popsicle, tucked both sticks in my shirtfront pocket, and stepped smartly into Pock’s, which sold knickknacks, souvenirs, jewellery, and, for my purposes, comics. Judy, the Pock’s oldest daughter, armed with nothing more welcoming than a worn-out feather duster and an exhausted expression, stood by a glass case filled with knockoff Royal Doulton figurines, the ladies within, despite their inferior porcelain pedigree, all demanding attention.
“’Lo, Judy.”
“Mph.”
She gave me a ‘look,’ but I didn’t take it personally. The look was composed of many querulous ingredients: Why don’t you have a job? (good question) Who do you think you are? (absurd question) Have you seen Nile around? (no) You’re here to swipe something, aren’t you? (who, moi?)
Did she voice aloud any of these questions to which she knew the answers? Her answers? No, instead we have—
“What’s wrong with your mouth?”
Seemed to me people had been asking me that all my life, but it still caught me off guard. What was it with my mouth today? Had I fallen out of bed this morning transformed into Miss Potato Head, all my features scrambled?
She stepped closer, nostrils twitching, eyes narrowing. “Is it lipstick? Better get a few lessons on how to apply it.”
Right, got it. I’d not only criminally breached my ‘vermilion border,’ but had jazzed up its youthful healthy hue with cherry popsicle. Not worth the effort of responding, I moved over to the rack of comics and gave it a dust-dispelling spin. Some of my favourites whirled by: Caspar the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich, Archie.
“Don’t d
o that, you’ll break it.”
Gave’er another spin, and this time it’s, “Aren’t you too old for comics?”
“Research.”
“Yeah, yeah. Talking big again, Hero?”
Thinking big the appropriate response, but instead of continuing our cordial chat, I decided to put a plug in it. Conversation-wise, you couldn’t find a better sink-stopper than the guy currently romancing Judy—one who’d already made the rounds with all the other older girls in town.
“So,” I said. “How’s Douggie doing?”
(Hark, did I hear the last lamenting gurgle of a drain?)
“That piece of shit? Who cares.”
And off she went to the back of the store, blown by the self-generating winds of ill-will and frustration, leaving me to flip through the newest issues. I was doing research, too. In order to restore the family fortunes, I’d come up with the idea of writing a comic series of my own: Molly Colossus, Adventures of a BIG Girl. Picture it, Molly gets into some majorly tight spots, no end of thrills and chills, lots with physiological action sequences involving curled lips, crawling skin, and rolling eyes. I had considered calling the first issue ‘Tight Spots,’ but changed my mind in case it sounded too dermatologically painful. No want of material anyway, all I had to do was learn how to draw. In aid of this I’d sent away for a Jon Gnagy artist’s kit that I’d seen advertised on TV before the tube burned out. This, the reason that my next destination was the post office, while seriously tempted to drop into the Red & White to take inventory, as it were, in a less well-travelled aisle.
No time to waste, I cast a farewell glance at Judy—as Confusion says, “arse longa, vita brevis”—and headed out.
Because my family moved so often, in town or out, or because my family was simply what it was (don’t ask), we picked up our mail at the general delivery counter. Every day as I passed by the wall of postal boxes in the P.O.’s foyer, I paused momentarily, ardently wishing for a little silver key that would unlock our very own box. I knew that those boxes contained communications of a superior quality, unexpected bequests, news like no other, high-octane secrets unavailable anywhere else. And yet, if that were so, if that’s where our mail nested, I’d miss out on talking with Mrs. Percy, the postmistress, who for some reason seemed concerned about my welfare.