by Terry Griggs
Funny thing, though, before the end of term it’s Mrs. D. who leaves abruptly. I wouldn’t have taken her for a quitter and students were beginning to warm to her, going so far as to crack open a book every once in a while to please her. This was especially hard on Matt Finch, her leaving before the Departmentals. He had to be hospitalized. Nervous prostration. I figure his brain got overheated from all that studying, it happens (though rarely in our town). Plus, his crush on me has grown so severe that it’s affected his vocal chords. Guy can’t get a single word out when I’m around.
Prom night. The reasons I don’t attend are legion. First off, no one asks me. Secondly, the X-boyfriend is taking Deb and I don’t relish getting her gloating Hooker smile snagged in my eye. Thirdly, Miss Cosima is one of the chaperones and will be so resplendent in her sparkly clingy minidress, a less virtuous Diana of the Hunt, that she will outshine every other female there. Fourthly, I’m suffering the effects of a bad perm and my ego would not be bolstered by electrified poodle jests at this point in time. Fifthly—have I assembled a legion yet?—I now prefer books to humans. There are worse dates to have for the prom than Madame Bovary, believe me. Humans, sadly non-fictional, get drunk and act like idiots and drive headlong into the biggest trees they can find. Their endings are rarely happy, but at least with Madame B. you can close the book before things get too out of hand.
So, for old time’s sake, I fling a clutch of curses high into the starry night, letting the consequences fall where they may, and hold my peace.
Next day, I happen to notice a fly-sized speck on the horizon that appears to be rapidly growing in visibility. Nile, I soon discover, zeroing in on me, not his usual mode of entry into my orbit. I don’t like the looks of this and would cut and run if there were any chance of escape. He doesn’t stop, only gets closer and closer until I smell a wave of grass (both kinds) and sweat and he’s standing in front of me, desirable despite the pungency, but only if he doesn’t speak. The hair on my arms rises with a soft whoosh.
He says, “Last night. Accident.”
No waste of words, but I get the message.
“You’re kidding, right? Nile? Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I am,” he says, “not.”
“Miss Cosima?” I wince.
He shakes his head, then bends closer, his lips grazing my ear, about to fill it with the names of the dead, but all he whispers is, “Hero, what have you done?”
More Rats Later
One day, when I was old enough to have a job, but not old enough to drink, or to vote, or do anything even remotely interesting, I lost my parents. They did not die, a feat that would have been more straightforward and comprehensible. No, no, not their way. Rather, they, and all their worldly goods, vanished. This stagey piece of business occurred between the time I left for work in the morning and the time I returned home for lunch. The last I saw of them they’d been seated at the breakfast table, listless and dishevelled, picking the sleep out of their eyes and staring dazed into their coffee cups, apparently defeated by the effort required to lift them to their lips. As far as I could tell they had no plans for the day, nor for the many to follow.
We were living in town then, a short walk from my summer job at Scully’s to the house we were renting. They were renting with their quickly diminishing funds. I contributed zilch to the kitty, not a lick practical or existential, except my youthful good looks and irritatingly precocious wit. Be that as it may, I saw this as no reason to leave me in the lurch, orphaned and homeless, while yet in full expectation of a fried bologna sandwich and glass of milk. Years of sustenance, if not joy, being far less delusional than my forebears.
Running up the front steps and onto the porch, I found the front door locked. The flimsy curtain that usually graced the door’s window was missing, so I peered in, while rattling the knob and giving the door a good hard kick. Shading my eyes against the sun’s glare, I saw clearly what I couldn’t see. The place had been cleaned out. Furniture, rugs, pictures, dishes, knickknacks, orange peels and bottle caps in disordered display on the floor… gone. Every material thing that makes a home workable, never mind how hideous or insignificant, was gone. The other two material things that generally made my life miserable were also gone. The shits!
No explanatory note taped to the window. No hint, no clue. Not a suspect smear of DNA on the doorframe, nor a telltale clot of blood sucked into the doormat. No doormat.
I retreated to the front stoop and sat down, facing the road, turned against the view at my back. The house rested on a hill that overlooked the downtown, the town docks—at that time lined with yachts and sailboats—the channel, the bridge, and the mountains in the distance beyond. I didn’t think that scanning the terrain below me for evidence of the parents’ whereabouts would help. Their escape had been too accomplished, too sealed and complete for them to be swaggering around below, newly unburdened, having cast off parenthood along with domesticity’s ills and bills.
Jezuss, though. Regardless of how slick the operation, they’d run away from home like two rascally kids. Not that a merry jape of this sort was unprecedented in town. A year ago a whole family, the Plotts—parents, nippers, hamster—had run away. They took off in the husband’s girlfriend’s car, and boy, was she steamed. So not an original stunt by any means.
All the same, I couldn’t figure out how they’d pulled it off. Or why. Wasn’t I the nucleus of this nuclear family? Moving takes time. I’d witnessed enough of it to know. Innumerable boxes to fill, and for that reason, innumerable smokes, naps, and arguments to bolster resolve. Or at least to get the job over with. The folks had come unstuck of late—this house, that house, as if the right combination of lumber, shingles, and Insulbrick might comfortably house all dissatisfactions. I’d learned to keep my eye on the road.
The stretch of road that lay before me I knew well, although our tenancy in the house had been relatively brief. (I’ll say.) Not that I had the pebbles all tallied, but I was fondly familiar with its ambitious potholes, its bald patches, its silky fine dust that ghosted my shoes. At midday and at dusk I followed it home, an ever reliable ascent, and in evening we descended together into the shadowy parts of town where, not to reveal anything too discreditable, some groping admittedly occurred with a fellow-mortal of my acquaintance.
So… the road to freedom? I could easily follow this homely byway down the hill, join its smoother paved brother at the bottom, and hot-foot it out of town. I could bugger-off like the parents and not be to blame. Assuming that anyone should happen to notice. Most parents who lose their offspring suffer terribly all their livelong days. They’re sorry for it and ache all over and break out in rashes. Somehow I did not feel that this fund of anguish would necessarily accrue in my case. Might be better to stick around. Besides, I suspected that the road before me—a route blessed with a canine’s loyalty and a design more simple than treacherous—would only lead me back to work.
Rising from the stoop, I turned and took one last look at the house. You can never go home again? Too effing true, it seemed. I felt a keen stab of pity. For myself. A weighty sob circulated in my system like a clunky old-fashioned submersible threatening to surface. (Some food might have kept my emotions in check. Glucose has its place.) While in this pre-lachrymose and psychologically vulnerable state, my eye snagged on something indefinable: a shadowy something that slipped away under the porch, too fast for me to identify. If I’m not mistaken (hardly possible), it sported a long barbed tail, cerise-red eyes, fur of a charred-black hue… and horns.
This sighting cast a troubling and somewhat garish light, not upon my ever robust mental health, but upon the mysterious disappearance of my parents. Had they been whisked away by some evil undertow? They and all their stuff, including the bottle caps and orange peels? Was I next? While old enough to be embarrassed by this notion, I was yet young enough to entertain it, and it spooked me. Dithering no longer, I skittered off
down the hill.
As predicted, Pavlov’s road led me back to work.
Between customers and stints on cash, my friend Bea and I whiled away the afternoon by playing the dismembered anatomy game. This involved being dealt a hand, literally on occasion, consisting of a random selection of broken mannikin body parts from those heaped in a corner of the storeroom and artfully placing them in the most cunning spots in the store. Your guileless shopper might thereby discover a crooked finger poking invitingly out of the modest décolletage of a housedress, a tearless eyeball nestled in the hankies and ready to roll if disturbed, a pointy bra humanized with two babies’ heads, a foot in the mouth of a balaclava, or a surplus of stiff wig hair ill-contained in the crotch of a man’s Y-fronts. A puerile amusement, I agree, but the job itself made no demands on our mental faculties. With summer, the most delicious and longed-for time of year, deadened for seemingly terminal stretches of the day, playtime helped.
We wouldn’t have gotten away with our dumb shenanigans, I suppose, if our employer, Mr. Scully, hadn’t been so distracted by Mary Smith, a university student from Southern Ontario staying with her aunt for the summer while she worked at the store. Mary didn’t need a name less generic because she was staggeringly beautiful. In the looks department, movie star material. This intrusion of loveliness might have driven the two of us wild with envy—you could hear male necks snapping whenever she walked by—except that she was of the Sapphic persuasion. No one in our town knew what to do with this information, let alone how to spell it. What was involved? We had no manual. Lezzie, gay? For many, that such improbable preferences existed beyond rumour, the National Ballet, and the Catholic priesthood, simply didn’t wash. Calling the druggist a pantywaist was about as far as it went. Hence, a captive of disbelief and misplaced desire, our boss kept his beady, albeit dazzled, eyes on Mary, while the two youngest members of his staff goofed off and dicked around as required by our needs.
Toward the end of the day, starvation imminent, I helped myself to a second sugar doughnut from Mrs. Inch’s shopping bag while she wriggled and squirmed in the dressing room trying on a swimsuit several sizes too small. The grunting and muttering and sighing was not unexpected—I’d heard it all before—but the scream she let out caught me by surprise. She whipped back the dressing room curtain, stared at me in alarm, snatched the doughnut out of my mouth, grabbed her shopping bag, and fled, her dress unzipped and her shoelaces flapping loose.
Huh. Either the winter weight she’d packed on had been more disconcerting than expected or she’d sprained her wrist trying on the suit. I peeked in. The black swimsuit lay on the dressing room floor like a shucked husk from a cannibal’s picnic. Other than that I couldn’t see anything else that might have caused her snack-snatching distress. No perky plaster lips nor any other dismembered bit of mannikin anatomy had found its way into the dressing room. No timorous beastie from the order Rodentia. My guess, she’d suddenly remembered the pot of stew left simmering on the burner at home, or realized in a blinding flash that her son, Norman, had not only knocked-up his sister but was also the culprit siphoning gas from the family car.
“What was all that about?” Bea slid in beside me and poked her head into the dressing room.
“Norman.”
“Ah. That shit heel. Say, I forgot to mention. Your dad came in looking for you. You’ve got a sugar mustache, you know.”
“What?” I grabbed a man’s psychedelic-patterned shirt off the rack and wiped my lip. “When?”
“Before lunch.” She stared down at the swimsuit. “Wouldn’t be caught dead in that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I hadn’t filled Bea in on my sorry situation. Too weird even for me.
“No big deal, is it?”
“Did he say anything?”
“Too busy ogling Mary. Why, what’s up?”
“Oh… the usual.” Tearing up minimally, I quickly hid my face in the shirt and blew my nose, adding an element of earthy realism to the phantasmagoric material. The hanger clunked against my chest. “Parents.”
“Tell me about it.”
After work, who should meet me at the door with open arms and copious apologies for stress and suffering endured but… no one. NO ONE. No caresses, loving or otherwise, no heaping plate of food, which even a lowly flea-ridden mutt might reasonably expect after an emotionally taxing day. I didn’t think my mother would show. Doubtless, she was a goner, murdered by my father (and who could blame him), which is why he’d come to see me at the store before skipping the country or killing himself. No wonder he hadn’t left a message with Bea, the phrasing on this one definitely tricky. But damn, I’d have to hoof it to the morgue if I wanted to see them at all, say my last goodbyes and thanks for nothing, eh. Did we have a morgue in town? I pictured some dank, chill, formaldehyde-redolent room in the hospital’s basement, my parents forever becalmed and fully married (finally!) on their respective slabs, holding hands (death grip), their last few nickels covering their eyes (beavers up), while our furniture, stacked in the corner, awaited the underworld movers.
Instead, I decided to go to Neath’s Hotel up the street and treat myself to dinner.
Maxine set down my plate of fries and gravy with uncharacteristic delicacy, positioning it with care before me. Normally, the plate hit the table with a velocity that sent the cutlery flying in all directions.
“Hmph,” she said. “Terrible what happened to your parents.”
“Yeah.” I tried very hard not to put this in the interrogative, too ashamed at this advanced stage in the misadventure to admit to ignorance. Everyone but me had to know.
“Some people,” she added, with a brisk snort.
I nodded solemnly, this being a statement you couldn’t very well disagree with.
She gave my shoulder a supportive pat, then sailed off, soon getting back into Olympic form in delivering a plate of liver and onions to Father Shea. He ducked.
So what had happened? Obviously, it wasn’t good. On the up side, Maxine hadn’t said, “Honey, your folks are at peace now. It’s for the best.” Or, “They’re in a better place.” (Well, that wouldn’t be hard, would it?) And the cops hadn’t come looking for the next of kin or a crazed, blood-spattered juvenile delinquent. Maybe ‘some people’ had totally ripped them off, yet naked and penniless they could have come to the store for some underwear. I do get a 10% discount.
I paused then in my investigative reflections to appreciate the beauty of the meal before me, the grease glistening magically under the hotel’s florescent lighting, knowing that if my supper’s nutritional constituents were questionable, my high-achieving liver would meet the challenge. Also knowing, unhappily, that there’d be no more gravy for me. There goes my future, I thought. I’d have to marry for money. Quickly. Really quickly, as I didn’t have a cent on me. Payday wasn’t till Friday, and I’d forgotten to dip into the petty cash at work, as occasionally happens during lean times. I immediately got going on the fries before anyone—some people, for example—decided to snatch them out of my mouth.
After I’d scraped the last delectable glob of gravy from the plate and licked my fork until it gleamed, I pushed back the chair, and signalling to Maxine at the cash, said, with as much savoir-faire as I could muster, “Put it on my tab, will you?”
“Sure thing, hon,” she called back.
Hey!
Heading out I found that, while much restored, I had no idea what to do or where to go. I needed refuge for the night, but, coincidentally (a ‘real coinkydink’, as Uncle Earl would say), all the bearable members of my extended family happened to be away. My grandmother, Albertha Pinkham, had gone off on a cultural tour of North Bay and Timmins, while my Auntie Viv and Uncle Clyde were in Vegas (only to return a week later ten dollars to the good, several pounds heavier, eyes widened by spectacle—including a Sammy Davis Junior sighting—and disenchanted forever with our backwater). As for the
rest of my relations? Although my parents, unforgivably, had ditched me, I didn’t want to expose them, or myself, to the family’s exfoliating commentary, nor to the torment of bad TV. Bea’s place was also out of the question. Whenever her parents saw me coming, barbed wire of a psychic construction sprang up to defend their cozy enclave from invasion.
I wandered down to the dock, thinking to stare moodily into the water as I pondered my fate. Dark night of the soul. Although, in fact, it was Daylight Saving Time, so not a problem. I had enough light, actual and innate, to get by just fine. The problem, as it turned out, was the unsavoury human element also attracted to the town docks. In my adolescent innocence, it simply didn’t occur to me that with my abundant physical charms on display and reeking of pheromones, the Patchouli of the natural world, this might be an injudicious thing to do. Outside of our own homegrown creeps, there were plenty of strangers hanging around the dock in the summer, including tourists and sailors off the freighters that hauled coal. Drifting along, wistful and aimless, I must have looked like easy pickins.
But nothing is as it seems, yes?
Passing by the public washrooms, I acquired an admirer who’d been leaning up against the side wall, hard to see at first because he was colour co-ordinated with the stained cement block. I walked on, he followed. I walked faster, he picked up the pace. Unwisely, I’d headed for the unpopulated end of the dock, past the fancier crafts, to where only a cluster of motor boats and a tug were tied up and battened down for the night. If I hadn’t attracted the notice of my new friend, I might have considered taking one of the boats out for a ride, or bedding down in the tug.
The situation required some quick thinking, luckily a specialty of mine.
Here’s what I planned to do. I’d turn and give him the evil eye, sizing him up, knowing he’d be rank with adjectives: oily and beaky, with tiny eyes, broken teeth, hairy ears, scabbed lips, and a skewed rat-tail that stuck out stiffly from his misshapen head like a clawed back-scratcher.