“Spare any change?”
His manner is not pleading. And is not condescending. It is like a command. I ignore his outstretched hand.
“Fuck you!”
It is loud enough for me to hear.
I am absorbed by the large woman coming full at me. I feel she is about to smash me into the cold hard tiled wall. In her left hand is a yellow Walkman. Her eyes are focused on the pounding drums of metal that seep through the earphones. She does not smile, nor dance in her walking, to the music in her ears. And she does not see me.
The man in the corner is looking at my hand. I am pushed to one side, his side, by the weight of the woman.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Fuck you!” she says.
The man is putting out his hand, a manicured hand, to her, and she drops him a coin.
“Thanks,” he says. In the next breath, “Spare any change?” reaching into the flow of people. The woman has melted into the crowd.
I put the five twenties in my wallet, take the green ticket the size of a stamp from the ticket seller, and calculate the amount of cash I carry, none of which is for overdue bills, or buying lunch, or buying books, or buying anything. I do not need any of this cash; there is no emergency; and I wonder if the man....
The subway platform is crowded. As I force myself in, I am pressed against a man on my left, and a woman on my right. I try to recall if my aftershave lotion was slapped on my face too generously, and I pass over in my mind each detail of my dressing and washing: deodorant, toothpaste and mouth-wash; and is there grease on the knot of my silk tie? Is the button on my shirt, just over my belly-button undone? As I am retracing these absurdities and insecurities, the train stops. I am jerked against the warmth of the woman, I can feel her stomach, and her breasts, and her legs which touch mine; and I feel I am in the sea and that her blood, which I tell myself I can feel, is warm invigorating salt water. She is holding on to me, for balance.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Sorry,” I say.
But I am not sorry. She squeezes her eyes shut. Opens them, in an expression of friendship and forgiveness. I am still pressed against her stomach and her breasts, and the silk of her pantihose, or it could be the natural softness of her legs, like the Albolene Cream I apply to my legs and the soles of my feet after my bath. She closes her eyes again.
Her eyes remain closed. And I try to put her back, a half hour, or an hour-and-a-half, back into her house, where everything she touches, and does not touch, is as personal as the body cream she applies after her hurried shower. Does she know of Albolene Cream? They say it was invented for black bodies only.
I see her body stiffen as she wakes in bed, stretching her legs; and the cotton nightgown, which has no shape to reveal her waist and breasts, is riding up along one leg, above her thigh; from tossing in the nightmare that visited her and that rode her most of the night.
Her mortgage is up for renewal. Her husband is out of work. And has not worked since Christmas. He drove his car to Oakville for eighteen years to assemble cars; and yesterday he drove all that distance back to Scarborough in angry silence, and did not mention the meeting he’d had with their bank manager. He is an unemployed man, with no security to put against a loan.
She is taking over the pants in her home, is turning into a man, is managing all the things around the house. He is snoring still, on the left hand side of the queen-sized bed, settled and unmoving as if he were sleeping off a double-shift on the assembly line. She does not like the contentment on his face, or the sound of his breath pouring through his mouth.
I can see her stretching her legs to their full length, and see her pass her left hand across her eyes. Light is already in their bedroom. She pulls her nightdress down to cover her nakedness, although his eyes are closed, and he is still snoring. I see her sit upright, with effort. She glances at the deadened man beside her. She glances at the red eyes of the alarm clock which did not alarm this morning. “Oh my God!” It is shock. Exasperation. Defeat. It is the hour. She has to see the bank manager today during her forty-five minute lunchtime.
She walks into the bathroom. It is decorated pink, including the cake of Swan soap she bought at Shoppers Drug Mart during her forty-five minutes yesterday. And the velour on the cover of the toilet bowl is pink and so is the one on the water tank. Her toothbrush is pink. I hear the water running for her shower and she tests the heat, squeezing at the same time the green toothpaste from the middle of the pink tube, and then she drops the nightgown from her neck and shoulders, probing her breast just in case, and promises to visit her doctor. The nightgown falls to the ground, to the fluffy scatter-mat. The mat is pink. After her shower, still naked and wet, she wipes her face, and applies her make-up. No emergency can make her hasten this ritual.
I have put her at forty years of age. Perhaps, thirty-nine. She is tall. About five feet, seven. And well-built. Her hair is brownish-red. And it reaches the middle of her neck. Her skin is smooth and not white although she is white. It looks as if she has returned from the south, perhaps three weeks ago. Her tan is just disappearing. She knows she is attractive. I can see her walking with this confidence, with the heavy fall of her feet as if she is two hundred pounds. She is one hundred and twenty. But I know that some women walk with greater ponderance than their weight suggests. I see her moving from the warmed bathroom, and for a moment I cannot see her face clearly in the mirror because of the steam in the room; and she goes into the kitchen, and pours herself a cup of coffee, made automatically. She places the mug on the shining counter top, and goes to the fridge to get a tumbler of fresh orange juice. She goes back into the bedroom.
Her husband is now on his back. He has slipped over to her side of the bed. She imagines that someone she cannot see is holding his nostrils tight, only releasing them at the last moment, so that he seems on the point of suffocating. Once, in her daily anger and irritation with her job and her husband, the thought passed through her mind. Suffocation. And it lingered there. And once, she drove with him to Niagara Falls and saw the whales playing in a tranquil pool, just as her own two children played when they were still young enough to frolic in the bathtub with plastic ducks and plastic bears. She wonders now, as she looks down with distaste at her husband, so close to death, if she has a mind for it; and she wonders now, suffering her own suffocation, why she never gave her children a dolphin made of plastic. Or a whale. Or a fish.
She pulls out the top drawer on her side of the bureau of ten drawers, five on each side, and takes out her underwear. And rips the plastic package from the pantihose, and drops the hose. They land on her husband’s face. He continues breathing. “When?” she says. “When?”
I see her choose red panties. They are silken. Her bra is red and silken. Her camisole is red. I see it is silk. She puts the pantihose on, and then the panties, and then her shoes, which look almost red. She opens the concertina-like door of the clothes cupboard, wondering why she didn’t set out this morning’s outfit last night, after her bath in pink bubbles. She puts the dress on, and runs her hands over her hips, and she smooths the rich material which covers her luscious body for a moment from my eyes. She turns in the long mirror built into the door, and smiles, and leaves and goes back into the kitchen, seeing the glass of orange juice and the mug of black coffee, both cold, and turns on the radio with the red eyes, and listens to the report of roads and traffic and accidents “. . . and the Don Valley is clogged up. Police report three accidents in the south-bound lanes. If you have to take the Don Valley Parkway, give yourself....”
The eyes of the clock say eight. She sips the cold coffee, rests the mug on the counter, and then she takes a sip of orange juice.
I see her husband move in his sleep, and reach out a hand that crawls up under her dress, raising the skirt. He pulls her against the bed and forces his naked body against her silk dress, and I see her protesting and pleading, “I can’t! I can’t!” and he pleads too, and as usual he has his way.
&nbs
p; Her face reflects that short, passionate, hurtful moment. She lowers the car window and the cold wind comes in and kisses her face and the tears on her cheeks. He is silent behind the wheel, beside her. He is thinking neither of work, nor of the pleasure he has just had. He is driving her to the subway station, “As part of the deal.”
And now, I see her standing beside me. My eyes open and she stands against me with her eyes closed and with a smile lingering on her face. Her lowered eyelids remind me of the dream she is now completing, the dream that tormented her through the night in that house in the suburbs. Her blouse is pink in the bad light of the subway train. And her skirt is, to my eyes that do not know colours, the colour of a rose.
The train jerks, coming to a stop. It is the first stop since I have made this woman’s acquaintance. The stop is sudden. It causes her to open her eyes. I can see something more than friendliness in her eyes. What I see is something like disgust. The train had come to a stop as if the driver, taking us through darkness, had forgotten to count the red station light markers. She looks like a woman who has missed her station. But she does not move. There is no space for her to move in. And I am thankful, and blessed by the touching of her flesh against my legs, the benediction of her flesh, and I wonder if she is aware of this. I am thankful, pressed against her living, breathing body.
Perhaps she is a woman too scared by this uninvited closeness to protest the assault my body causes her. Perhaps she does not understand the rawness of the pressure against her thighs. Perhaps, she is not aware of her pressure against my thighs.
And then, like a woman in a sleep that is not deep, she starts, tosses long strands of reddish brown hair out of her eyes, as she would coming out of the sea, and is immediately, immaculately, a different woman.
Her body strikes mine. The train is hot and uncomfortable. I smell her anxiety as she pushes past me, a perfume I know. I can also smell my underarm deodorant.
She is taken back, back for half an hour, or an hour-and-a-half, in her own mind, before she was flattened against the door which closed and held her there unmoving, hardly breathing. When she woke this morning, the first thing she smelled was a damp sourness, and the first thing she saw was a small cockroach crawling away from her face as she lay half-asleep on the double mattress on the hardwood floor. She closed her eyes in disgust. She knew she had to kill the bastard. She reached for the box of Kleenex, intending to fold a tissue into four and measure the distance and the amount of force she was going to use to crush it on the white bed sheet.
She moved slowly, silently, stealthily. The cockroach was watching her. Cockroaches, she’d learned after two days in this apartment are sneaky bastards. They are evil. They prefer darkness to light. And she always remembered her mother telling her, from when she was seven years old, never trust a son-of-a-bitch who can’t come out in the open, he’s nothing but a fucking roach. It took her time to realize that her mother was not referring to marijuana or to the darting pest she’d seen only once in the basement flat she’d shared with the man she’d wedded ten years later. Her mother had been talking about the man she’d married.
Hardly moving, her breath held, she dug into the Kleenex box, searching the bottom of the box, realizing she had used them all the night before while sitting on this same mattress, on the single soiled sheet, wiping her eyes, watery from sadness, and from allergies. She watched the cockroach. It was watching her. Then it scurried in a small arc. She lifted herself onto her elbows. Her nightgown was gathered at her waist. She was restricted. She held her left hand over the cockroach. It was sitting motionless, as if in a trance. Her left hand! Since she was small she had done all the things that disgusted her with her left hand. She used her left hand to take cough syrup from the ugly brown bottle. She used her left hand to open the Bible in Sunday school every Sunday morning for the first ten years of her life. It was her left hand in which she held the engagement ring of the man she married. It was her left hand that had taken it off. She had caressed his thighs with her left hand. Now this killing had to be carried out with her left hand. It did not move. She brought the hand down, and the mattress gave a dull sound, the sound of the body of the man she had married as he slumped and fell back asleep, the man she had broken up with four days before. When she turned her hand over, her palm bore only a black stain, a fountain pen stain. Before going to bed, she’d written a letter to a friend to ask for a place to stay.
The cockroach disappeared. It was past seven. She thought of preparing for work, a shower, dressing, make-up, a cup of coffee; but black without sugar. She saw black scurrying roaches, some more brown than black, motherfuckers, pregnant, or gluttons over spilled sugar and the enticing grease round the dirty stove elements.
She ran to the dark bathroom, and her stomach, never strong, never tough, erupted. The sink was rusty near the plughole. There was no chain, no stopper. When she opened the cold water tap, just before the water came, three cockroaches ran up the side of the sink, and crawled on her nightgown. She started to cry. She had not turned the bathroom light on, and when she did turn it on, the dingy walls of the bathroom were alive with moving dots. She broke down and cried. The only word that passed her lips was, “When.”
“When I was seventeen, when I was seventeen, I was still so....” She had blonde stringy hair, a girl from a poor family; and she sat with her father and mother every Saturday night round the large table in the kitchen, covered with an oil-skin cloth and the shells from peanuts, and they sang songs and hymns from the book they had given her in Sunday school; and the moment she finished grade nine, and was looking forward to going farther, her mother died, and her father left home one morning when the snow was up to his knees, and he did not find his way back. After seven days, she and the four little ones gave up looking through the window.
“When I was seventeen, I was still so young, I met Rick....” Rick was handsome and wore his hair long, as long as hers. He would come around, clean, and always in his suede windbreaker, and shiny shoes in the latest style, pointed toes. Rick was something in those days. When she was late coming home from the restaurant where she worked as a waitress, after she gave up looking through the kitchen window, after she decided it wasn’t worth a fuck wasting time looking for that bastard, their father, Rick would be sitting at the kitchen table amusing her brothers and sisters. He’d be all decked out, ready to take her to the Saturday night dance at the Catholic Centre. The Catholics had the best dances, and the best bingo games.
It was at a Friday night bingo game that Rick put his hand on her leg, rubbing his hand up and down her thigh. He was so good to the children whenever she was kept back at the restaurant by the manager. The manager had seen her grow from a grade nine girl into an orphan of sorts, into a blossoming girl with bursting breasts, always clean and tidy, who went to church every Sunday. He wanted to screw her. He was crude. That is what he said on the second night he pretended that he wanted to talk to her about her serving manner at the tables. “Bingo!” she screamed. Rick’s hand fell. And her leg became cold. “Bingo.” It was two hundred dollars.
They walked the three blocks home in the cold with snow up to their ankles. She was not wearing winter boots. She had promised herself a pair that Saturday in a store around the corner from the restaurant. Rick held her hand. He was nobody’s fool. He had gone as far as grade twelve until his father died and then his mother had taken another man who treated him like a dog till he ran away, and had to serve a little time, in jail, not much, where he learned his trade. Cutting up animals in an abattoir. For Canada Packers. He could lift the split carcass of a cow all by himself. And that was also when he went into boxing, and lasted two amateur matches.
When she screamed “Bingo!” she was shaking. She was crying. She was happy. She remembered her father, wishing he had not left, for if he’d come back, and he’d been at home, she could have put every penny in his hand. She loved her father. She loved her father more than she loved her mother. And she loved Rick, too. When she sh
outed, the three hundred people, mostly women old enough to be her mother, erupted in cheers; strangers clapped their hands as if they were at her wedding reception, and her new bridegroom had just cut the cake with a knife and slipped cake into her mouth with his tongue, longer than the knife. She took the money from the woman. The woman said, “Congratulations.”
She stood there, not knowing what to say. And the woman said, “Take it. Take it, child. It’s yours. It’s all yours. Spend it wisely.” She bent her knees, not knowing why she should pay respect to a woman she did not know. It was her money, after all. But she curtsied, and when she returned to Rick’s side, the expression on his face was one of pride. She remembered that. It was also envy. She remembered that too. Years later, all she could say was, “That son-of-a-bitch!”
He walked beside her. He lit a cigarette. He chucked it into the snow. She could hear the freight train that ran a little distance from her home, at all hours of the night. Sometimes, when she was having pain at that time of the month, she counted the cars from the bumping noise; sometimes, when she was sitting up with her youngest sister who had a cold, she heard the train rumbling through the neighbourhood and wondered how a train found its way in the darkness, without accident; sometimes, after they were married, when she was waiting for Rick to come home, she wished she could hear the train, that she was in one of the coaches, cabooses, whatever you called them, and that she was travelling all night; and sometimes, she charted its course, followed it, the moment she heard the horn as it emerged from somewhere in the West End and entered the area of Davenport, along Dupont, going east until it seemed it was in her own backyard on Dupont at Bathurst, then down, down past Avenue Road, through the swank district of Rosedale, and she wondered what those people thought of the noisy, rumbling train.
He held her hand and said he wished he had the money to get a Mustang from the dealer he knew. It was a fantastic chance, he said. A fantastic car. “We could take trips every weekend.” All he needed was a small down payment. He passed the lot every day after work, he’d talked to the salesman, who promised him a deal. He said, “Just the two of us, me and you, we could go to Niagara Falls, see how it runs on the highway, like a charm,” and then they’d maybe go to New York.
There Are No Elders Page 7