‘Jerome,’ Geraldine said. ‘Are you listening to me? The donkey drowned because of the father’s stupid decisions.’
‘Right,’ said Jerome. ‘So what?’
‘Well,’ said Geraldine. ‘The story is about a man trying to please all the people all the time.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Jerome said. ‘That man is an idiot.’
‘Well, yes, that’s the moral.’ Geraldine could feel herself getting annoyed.
‘That ain’t the moral,’ Jerome said.
‘Then what is?’ Geraldine shifted impatiently in her seat, refused to look at him.
‘Don’t tie your donkey to no stick – else you are the dumb-ass.’ He smiled, happy with the cleverness he’d fashioned there.
Geraldine decided to play this straight; she would explain. ‘But you really can’t please all the people all the time. And it’s important not always to care what other people think.’ She had been through this with her daughter, all the peer-pressure business, new drugs on the scene, porn everywhere.
Jerome snorted. ‘You need to care about what other people think. That’s the only damn thing you need to care about.’
‘But if you try to please them all the time you’ll just end up looking silly.’ Geraldine had spent a lot of money and time on her therapist, and she mostly believed in her. She reiterated her point: ‘You can’t please all the people all the time.’
‘You can try.’ Jerome grinned at her.
What Jerome said delighted Geraldine absolutely – its insouciance and lack of logic. Every now and then, she thought, you bumped into somebody who showed you a different way of living, a fierce commitment to a life that you could never claim as your own. What would the future hold for them both? There was no way of knowing.
(Geraldine will continue to come in for her yearly scans, to be safe. And although her fibroids will keep thriving they will remain benign. Six years – to the day – after the morning she met Jerome she will wake up and realize she has forgiven her husband for dying; it will not be a happy realization, only a tired one. Sometimes, when she comes to the breast-cancer clinic, she will think of Jerome and wonder. But often not; there are a lot of magazines.
Jerome’s mother will remain cancer-free for eight years. Then the cancer will come back, in her cervix this time, and it will kill her. Jerome will have narrowly escaped a stint in a juvenile detention centre and a drive-by shooting. At the time of his mother’s death, he will have been studying tool-and-die-making at Seneca College for a couple of months and will consider dropping out. But Carla will convince him to persevere. Jerome will be reminded of Geraldine at only one time in his life. When they are burying his mother, he will think: She was wrong. It does no good to see the dead as they are at the moment of death, or as they appear in their coffins. It does nobody any good at all.)
But maybe, just maybe, Geraldine thought, there was something she could take away from this. A piece of Jerome to put in her pocket. She wanted to find a way to tell him this, but they were locked into something now; she had to carry on. ‘But you’ll never succeed in pleasing everybody,’ she said.
‘Nah, maybe not.’ Jerome made his hand into a neat pistol and shot twice, up towards the heavens. Bam, bam.
Maybe aiming at God, maybe saluting Him.
‘But I got mad hope,’ Jerome said. ‘Mad hope.’
Dominoes
I DIDN'T REALLY MEAN TO drop out of school. When I started at the university I thought learning how to name and explain things might bring me purpose, lucidity. I attended lectures and turned in my papers on time. I stood dead in the centre of the swirl and storm of theory. I applied myself. But then I started going to the student-operated pub between, and sometimes during, classes. The pub was difficult to find; it was located in a catacomb next to the cafeteria, and if a person wasn’t careful she could end up in the boiler room or the yearbook office. Still, it was worth it once I arrived. I spent whole days sitting in one of the vinyl chairs, their shiny purple backs stapled like patchwork beetles. I went into the pub with every intention of leaving, my time parcelled out efficiently, a half-pint of beer resting modestly on the rickety wooden table in front of me. But when the time came for me to get up and walk the short distance up the stairs, out the door and across the quadrangle, I stayed sitting, less paralyzed than somehow anchored to my surroundings. And then it always seemed too late. Too late to do things properly. Too late to do anything but wait for the next song to come on the radio. Sometimes a voice less disapproving than bewildered would intrude on my whiling away of the hours. What are you doing here, it would ask, then wait patiently. I’m biding my time, I’d reply softly, humbly, I’m biding my time.
It doesn’t feel as if I’ve dropped out, really. I still have library privileges, and the seventy-five-dollar cheques from Mum (for sundries, she actually wrote in one of her cards) keep coming every month, or more often if she can manage it. Now I’m taking this evening course, a writing workshop, so that one day, if I have what it takes, I will be a real writer. My instructor has the best posture I have ever seen. Every day I watch her riding her bike away from the recreation centre, and am convinced that there is nothing but willpower and gravity anchoring her bum to the broad, black reupholstered seat. She scares me a bit, like helium balloons. Our last assignment was to choose a clear, quirky, luminous incident from our pasts and to build a story from there.
I got a letter from Mum the other day, and in it she enclosed this clipping from the newspaper about your buddy Richie. The article wasn’t very long. There wasn’t much to tell – a bit about the murder, the arrests, how it shocked the community. And then the punchline, like something from a TV movie: Richie, two months short of a chance at parole, six years into his sentence, had hanged himself in his cell. So sad, Mum wrote. And she asked me the questions she could not ask you: Remember his mother, Mrs. Henley? Did you ever discuss with Jeremy what happened with Richie? Such a tragedy, wasn’t it? I wanted to call Mum to talk to her about it, but I didn’t because she doesn’t know I dropped out. I wanted to call you to talk about it, but we don’t really talk.
So I started thinking maybe this was a story.
It happened in High Park, at nighttime, and there were three of them with baseball bats. When you think about it, you might think of a crack, wood on bone, something clear and conclusive. But I know it was a thud, soft and stupid. Spiro was kicking him and yelling something about one less faggot, and looking at Richie like he was chicken shit, so Richie took the bat and brought it down on the guy’s chest, and then he couldn’t stop himself; he just kept swinging until he stopped the ouf noise. It was then he noticed the lines of blood streaming out of the ears like two solemn ant processions. But Joey still went at it, even after Richie and Spiro had backed off. When Joey finally stopped, it was like the guy on the ground wasn’t even a person anymore. He was just this mess of rags and blood and arms and legs all quiet like sleeping animals, so they ran back to the car and they drove away. On the back seat was a two-four of empties Richie meant to return for the deposit money the night before, and on the dashboard an old air freshener Lori had bought him. Spring Rain. Fucking hell, said Spiro. That thing smells like shit.
Richie’s life had always run alongside ours, like a wild horse next to a train. We were steady, on schedule, simply because he was not.
The thing is, Richie was your story, Jeremy, and to put myself there ... Well, I’m just a beginner. I’m afraid I would be tempted into machismo and melodrama, a scene in the bathroom, gazes exchanged in a cracked mirror over urinals. The cowboy stances, the dainty tip-tapping to shake the drops free, the post-pee shudder. How you would have had something, a yearning or a yen, for what Richie had, his assurance, an innate sexual power that emanated from his crotch and collar, which was denim, worn soft and grimy. Frayed: tiny extra hairs rubbing against his neck. And maybe in the story, if I were you, I
would recall the time when you were eleven and expanding into your boy-self, an innocent to Richie’s thirteen. You rode your bikes down to the river, through back streets, over curbs, along Bloor Street, that border of traffic, thighs pumping strong then slack, coasting on your banana seat, overweening child/man. Down then, into Etienne Brulé Park, the river valley named after a French scallywag and coureur de obis.
‘Beaver pelts, that’s what this country is built on,’ Dad once said, so that for years I envisioned the sleek skins buried under the foundations of factories and apartment complexes, mixed in with bones and concrete, lost nickels and root systems. You hid your face behind your elbow every time Dad said beaver and Mum stuck her front teeth over her bottom lip, but quickly, without sound, as if acting out a charade only for herself.
Then you rode through the ravines to where the brush is thick on the bank and there is an eerie privacy for a place so close to the well-tended public path. Beaten-down reeds and crayfish, a stink like breeding. Jos. Louis wrappers and torn magazines, the brown murk of river rushing shallow over rocks and man-made waterfalls. You would sit there on stumps and skip stones, smoke cigarettes. (All this is conjecture.) A weeping willow would trail its bowed leaves to the ground.
Still, I understand that sometimes people have to go off slyly, on their own or with someone else. It’s what we need: little amulets of time and space. It’s what Dad did in his workshop with the two-by-fours and piles of screws and sawdust, the tape player pumping out Tom Paxton tunes.
What I imagine is myself, bigger, barging in on your little scene in the park and saying something cop-like: ‘Where’s your father, young man?’ But then I remember Dad was having his gall bladder out at the time, and that gets me thinking about how he gave them to you, his gallstones, to keep. They floated, imperfect mustard-coloured eggs, in a large Mason jar you had on your dresser. It sat next to an old piece of hockey net and a silver cardboard box with a condom nestled in it – out of its package but unused – like an alien finger left to dry in the earth’s unfamiliar atmosphere. I know this because often, when you were out, I would roam your room like an African cat, padding and predatorial. Sometimes I watched you in the mornings, still sleeping, lips loose, cheeks puffing out with stale nighttime breath.
I think maybe this is what she meant, my instructor, by ‘quirky,’ by ‘luminous,’ but I also know it is only one of many places my story (your story?) could go, and only the very edge of the truth (okay, the love) we shared.
When I first moved here I imagined the mountains might inspire me, or act as a kind of landscape tonic, wake me up a bit like a good aftershave should. It made me understand why you had to get away and find a spot of your own, even if it is just an hour outside of Toronto, and instead of mountains you got smokestacks. It’s overwhelming, though, the brand of beauty here. All that water and land and sky give me a heady feeling, which is not the same as a smart feeling. The people wear nice clothes, though, surf-like and active, and they all have travel mugs and snappy gear with fastenings and paddings, although I’m not sure they ever travel very far. I started running because everyone else does, and I think it was a good idea. It forces me to measure out my life in the distance between telephone poles, which is okay. Setting small goals like that. When I went to buy new shoes, the salesperson, a man with shaved legs and busy tendons in his calves, made me test them on the street outside. I had to run up and down the sidewalk with the glowing sides and stripes calling attention to my stride.
I miss the subway and the lake. I miss High Park with its autumn colours, mulch and long, long memory. I miss you like I’ve been missing you my entire life.
So Richie is gone. The guy he killed was gay. And we didn’t know any gay people then.
The thing with teenagers is they transfer all the affection they might have had for their family as children to relative strangers as soon as they hit puberty, and the trail the love leaves wags behind them like a vestigial tail. It’s what makes them move so awkwardly. Lori was thin with chunky thighs and the kind of jeans you had to lie like an acrobat on the bed to zip up. She sometimes crimped or teased her shoulder-length brown hair into mini fountains at the front, and her eyeliner matched the blue of her eyes exactly. Once I helped her pick up the insides of her purse when it fell open and spilled in the parking lot: a red glossy compact, two hard tampons, wrapped tight and pointed like bullets, wallet-sized photos of her and Richie where she has him in a headlock and they are both laughing. On her key ring: a rabbit’s foot dyed orange, plus a little plastic tag that read Sarasota in swirly writing over a picture of the setting sun. For some reason her voice always sounded slightly asphyxiated, unsure, although she herself never seemed so. In her last year of high school she got braces, which added to her mystique, made her more closed-mouthed, so that when she did speak her words seemed loaded, cryptic. We all loved her.
I wish I could say I was born a writer. In Grade 7 I wrote a story for Mr. Lara about a post-nuclear-war world where wraiths with black oblong pancakes for eyes trailed mournfully along the earth’s decimated surface. He gave me a B minus. ‘He’s not even English,’ my best friend Julie hissed. ‘He’s from Trinidad.’ But I still felt sorry when someone wrote Dirty Packi on his blackboard.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, when I arrived early one morning and found him leaning up against one of the desks contemplating the message.
‘It’s okay.’ He erased the ‘c’ in Packi, then wiped off the entire thing. ‘I’m not even a Paki. You will encounter this often in the world, Maddie. Carelessness and hate in combination. Strange that what bothers me most is the inaccuracy of it all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
‘It’s not your job to be sorry. Just know exactly who you are. Name your fortunes and misfortunes and live your life.’
There was the day I overheard Mum talking to Aunt May on the phone, deeming you dyslexic. The glee I felt printing it in blue felt pen across your pink Hilroy notebooks. Dick-Sex-Lick. Dick-Sex-Lick. Until the only space left was a small unsullied triangle in the corner only big enough for one word, and which to choose from amongst the three? A bad word was a bad word was a bad word.
I asked you about it later, the dyslexia. High school was new territory for me and it was a mystery what went on behind those doors they labelled Remedial.
‘What do you do when they take you in there?’ I said. We were sitting in the rec room, fighting over a ragged afghan.
‘Oh, you know, drink baboon blood, give each other tattoos, that kind of thing.’ You grabbed the afghan and secured it around your legs like a granny.
‘No, really,’ I said. ‘I mean, are they nice to you?’ I felt suddenly shy but determined.
You glared at me and made a move to leave but the afghan restricted you. ‘They’re okay,’ you said. ‘But it’s too hard, so fuck ’em.’ I thought I could see tears in your eyes.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Fuck ’em.’
When we got a bit older we didn’t talk to Richie much at school. He hung out near the senior doors, but he didn’t go inside much. There was a covered pathway leading up to the door where kids slouched to smoke, lining the narrow passage like mould. Richie had a coveted spot on the step leading up to the door, close to the warmth of the foyer in winter. He wore sleeveless T-shirts in the warmer months so that you could see the cigarette burns – tiny, puckered blooms in the skin – on the tops of his wiry arms. Stepfather was the story. Lori was often by his side. Someone said she refused to see him after what happened. Still, I used to imagine her sometimes, waiting outside of the prison, in the spring rain, her hair shorter, maybe streaked.
You were always accident-prone, loose like an animal with your body. I spent a whole summer trying to break my wrist, bending it back, testing it against the plywood headboard of my bed for pain. Why? Someone long-suffering in a book. Beth from Little Women with her sickbed lethargy and loveline
ss. I longed for it. You once came shuffling into my room, smiling, blood streaming from your mouth. You had bitten clear through your tongue when you fell off a swing. ‘I almost made it over the top,’ you mumbled like a drunk. That was the same summer you got the pink pear-shaped scar on your chest. You and Richie had been burning bugs with your magnifying glass when you caught fire. He had to put you out with a hug.
There was one day in high school – it must have been a few months before the murder – when I came home to Richie’s car parked in the driveway. When I walked around the side of the house I could hear your voices and smell the meat cooking. It was only April, too early, really, to be eating outside. But when I walked up beside the porch, there you were.
Mad Hope Page 9