Lemon

by Cordelia Strube

  ‘You’re really growing up,’ Damian observes. ‘If you wore some decent clothes you might even be pretty. Whoever would have thunk it?’ Not only does he say thunk but another favourite phrase is How d’you like dem apples? It is truly painful being associated with him.

  ‘Do you need clothes? Some summer dresses?’

  What’s he got in mind? Something short and sheer? A pair of fuck-me pumps?

  ‘You know,’ Damian says, breathing beer, ‘you’re always welcome to come and live with me and Goldie.’ He only asks me when he’s drunk. I push the plate of carbs and fats at him.

  ‘I gotta go.’

  ‘D’you need a ride?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Don’t be a stranger.’

  Late shifts at the hospital don’t bother me. I like talking to the kids who can’t sleep. The lucky ones have parents dozing on sofa beds in their rooms, but there’s always some loner whose parents work nights or have to look after other sibs. My job is mostly to make sure the younger ones don’t pull out their ivs. Contrary to popular belief, kids don’t usually die from cancer these days. Unless it’s neural blastoma, which is pretty rare and only happens to the under-fives. Leukemia is usually treatable, although sometimes the chemo and radiation cause infections. The worst is when the brain gets infected, because it can result in brain damage. If the kid makes it, she has to learn how to walk again, hold a crayon, a spoon. By the time she’s up to speed on feeding herself, chances are the cancer’s back. But mostly the kids pull through. In the short term anyway. In the long term they’re more susceptible to adult cancers but nobody talks about that. So I don’t sweat the cancer ward.

  The parents can be a problem, freaking out where the kids can hear them. The parents check their brains when they step through the hospital doors, morph into emoting blobs in the elevators. I always ask them to fuss and blither in private because their children don’t want to hear about dying, they want to party. Sometimes they’re too weak to do much so I perform puppet shows by their beds, the more violent the better. The girls always want a wedding at the end. The boys want everyone blown up. I tell them somebody has to live to keep the human race going. ‘Why?’ they ask, which is a good question.

  I really like this six-year-old named Kadylak whose parents are Ukrainian and clock long hours at shit jobs to pay for the cancer drugs their daughter needs when she’s not in the hospital. Even though Kadylak knows making extra cash is why they’re not around, it’s obvious she misses them like crazy. She rocks in her sleep and calls for them. I put my arms around her and hold her steady till she relaxes. You can always tell when a kid’s fallen asleep because suddenly they weigh an extra fifty pounds and have no bones in their bodies. Most children with cancer become pretty self-absorbed what with the treatment and pain and the feeling that the world’s left them behind. But Kadylak keeps an eye on things, people’s moods. If I’m sad, angry, frustrated, Kadylak wants to know about it. ‘Why are you so fussterated?’ Usually I tell her and she listens. Nobody else does. Blecher’s head bobs but she’s not hearing what I’m saying; I’m tempted to ask her why she doesn’t do something useful, like learn how to masturbate, but I can’t risk another suspension. Kadylak’s a big believer in ‘tomorrow,’ which is wild considering she’s got cancer. ‘It’ll be different tomorrow,’ she says. She never says, It’ll be better tomorrow. Just different.

  3

  The truth is I want a biological mother like the Jewish girl’s. When the Nazis evicted them, Mutti sent her daughter on the Kindertransport to England even though losing Marianne was killing her. Mutti told Marianne that she had to let her go to a better life because there would be no life in Germany. Mutti sacrificed herself for her daughter. She pinned a letter inside her dress that told Marianne how much she loved her, that she couldn’t bear the thought of not watching her grow, not fixing her hair, not lengthening her dresses. That’s how my real mother is in my heart. In my head she’s that girl who gave birth in the can at Walmart and left the baby in the toilet bowl. Gives new meaning to the phrase shop till you drop.

  I’m digging through the debris in my locker for that French textbook I pretend to read to keep Babineaux off my case, when Tora thrusts one of her poems at me:

  i’m in my own world

  all alone in this

  icy blue sky

  i see no one

  hear no one

  i cry tears of pain

  but i no longer ask

  why am i here

  ‘Awesome,’ I say, avoiding eye contact. I’ve considered telling her the truth re her verse but suspect this would mean losing an ally, which I can’t afford. Personally, I think telling the truth is overrated.

  Rossi shows up, smearing on lip gloss. ‘So what are you guys doing for lunch?’

  ‘Sitting in the yard and flicking boogers,’ I say.

  There’s a party none of us are invited to, at Nicole’s. She’s one of Queen Bee Kirsten’s followers. Being excluded has Rossi in a funk.

  ‘That’s like, the tenth party this year,’ she whines.

  I can’t imagine going to a ‘party.’ I’d have to look interested.

  ‘She’s invited everybody,’ Rossi says. I’m worried about her. She doesn’t see what’s happening, that she’s been labelled skank; that soon they’ll be dissing her in the halls and online, pelting her with rocks and toilet paper. Last year Kirsten pushed a broken bottle into a skank’s face. Of course there were no witnesses. And yet somehow word got around that the skank’s chin had been hanging off her face. I want to protect Rossi from a similar assault. We’ve known each other since JK, swapped Winnie the Pooh stories, cried at the end when Christopher Robin asks Pooh to remember him always no matter what happens.

  ‘Why should you care?’ I ask.

  ‘Unlike you, Lemon, I like to meet guys.’

  ‘Do you actually want their dicks up your snatch, Ross?’ I ask. ‘Do you get some kind of power surge when they grab your tits or do you just want to be loved?’

  ‘You should talk. Everybody says you’re a dyke.’

  ‘That’ll keep ’em off me.’

  We used to talk about other things than sex and guys. We used to have confidence. We spun cartwheels and handstands. We got A’s in math.

  ‘Lemon’s saving herself for the ghost of Cary Grant,’ Tora says.

  The skateboard boys arrive in the yard. Dressed in grunge, long-haired with toques pulled low over their foreheads, they slam their boards around. Rossi arranges her body for better viewing.

  ‘Do you think the words personal hygiene hold any meaning for them?’ I ask.

  ‘I think M. Babineaux wants to have sex with me,’ Rossi announces.

  ‘You think everybody wants to have sex with you,’ Tora says, penning another poem.

  ‘It’s the way he leans over me when he’s helping. He’s like, all over me.’

  ‘Do you want to have sex with him?’ I ask.

  ‘It might be different.’

  ‘With him being French and all.’

  ‘He’s got halitosis,’ Tora points out.

  Babineaux is ambidextrous. When he’s conjugating verbs on the board you have to copy really fast because as he’s writing with his right hand, he’s erasing with his left. ‘So,’ I say, ‘you’re thinking he can work you with both hands?’

  ‘What would you know about it?’

  ‘I know I wouldn’t have sex just because it would be different.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have sex, period.’

  I don’t know if this is actually true. I didn’t want to have sex with Doyle, even though I let him shove his tongue down my throat a few times – only after he’d taken me out for fancy dinners, of course. Having a boyfriend flush with cash has its upsides. You get to go places other than Tim Hortons, and drive around in his daddy’s car. But the whole sweaty, slobbery, groping process is pretty base, particularly if he’s been drinking beer and eating oysters.

  Sex with Kadylak’s fath
er, on the other hand, has some allure. He’s attractive in an earthy-but-sensitive-labourer kind of way. He doesn’t speak much English which might be part of the attraction. He’s been asking fewer questions now that Kadylak’s on her third cycle of treatment. Watching orangeyred and bright yellow fluids dripping into her is the new normal for him. They’ve put a portacath in her chest because her arms are burned out from the first two cycles. What Mr. Paluska hasn’t witnessed is the intramuscular needles three times a week. The nurses put numbing cream on her but still Kadylak screams. It’s the only time she shows her pain. The nurses wear masks, gowns and gloves when they give needles or handle chemo drugs. They look pretty scary. They even gown up when they’re removing bed pans because any bodily fluid coming out of these kids is toxic. The first time Kadylak bloated up from the steroids and her hair was falling out in clumps, she looked terrified. Now she’s just resigned. She sees things for what they are: drugs that’ll save or kill her. ‘I’m like, so totally bored,’ Rossi anounces.

  Tora hands me the latest.

  the world is in unrest

  innocent people dying

  afraid to go out after dark

  violence

  we must end it

  give of ourselves

  show that we care

  the world needs

  a river of peace

  I watch Zippy through Marty Millionaire’s window. She’s checking herself out in a gaudy full-length mirror. She looks fatter. The medication always puffs her up. Makes me think of those Guantánamo prisoners being mainlined antidepressants until they get so stupid they don’t know who they are anymore. They start calling the guards their daddies and do everything they tell them. Zippy doesn’t know who she is anymore, if she ever did. She used to heat pins over a flame then stick them into her wrists. She didn’t go for the arteries, just wanted to cause pain because she said feeling pain was better than feeling nothing. She’d make a pattern of black dots with the pin. Over a week the dots would turn from black to yellow and she’d start picking at them to make sure they wouldn’t heal. The open sores stuck to her clothing. She’d yank her sleeves over her hands. Even after the wounds healed they’d remain swollen for months. When she progressed to razor blades, I told Damian. The way I see it I was partially responsible. She couldn’t feel love for me so she cut herself. I’ve quit trying to be loveable. Being adopted makes it easy: I was damaged from the start. Unwanted goods.

  Zippy sees me and jumps up and down as though she’s just won something. She grabs me and pulls me into the store. ‘How are you? Sweetness, it’s so good to see you, you look … you look so grown-up.’

  ‘Damian says you think I’ll never forgive you. I forgive you. Don’t carry that around.’ I can’t stand being somebody else’s baggage.

  Already there’s nothing to say. She sits on a bloated couch and pats the spot beside her.

  ‘I’ve got to get to work,’ I say.

  ‘Just for a sec, honeybunch. Just give me a minute.’

  The truth is I want her to hold me, make it all better the way she could before the pins.

  ‘You were the most beautiful baby,’ she says, like she always does. ‘I took one look at you and knew I’d love you forever.’

  What a careless word love is. People toss it around.

  ‘Do you like working here?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, Lloyd’s fabulous.’ I see an ape man in the back watching us. She’s always been a good lay, all those years tranked in a bathrobe.

  ‘I’m still in training,’ Zippy whispers. ‘Lloyd’s been so patient. Let me look at you.’

  I stare back at her, see the fear in her eyes. ‘I forgive you,’ I say again.

  ‘Why won’t she buy you some pretty clothes?’

  ‘I’ve got to run.’ I quickly kiss her forehead. It feels moist. I’ve made her sweat.

  Sometimes I think I’m going nuts. Usually when I’m scooping ice cream for overfed Homo sapiens. I start freaking about being trapped underground with a thousand humans. I watch them clogging the mall, picking their noses, trying to figure out what to consume next. I start visualizing their gastrointestinal tracts, plugged with burgers, fries, wings, pizza, slushies. I start thinking about toilets and all the shit in pipes all around me. I look at the paraplegic who buys frozen yogourt for his parrot. The parrot sits on the handlebars of his motorized wheelchair. The paraplegic feeds the parrot the yogourt with a stir stick. I stare at the old guy in the Speedy Muffler cap who orders vanilla softees and grabs his crotch when I hand them to him. I see parents shouting at their consumer trainees then buying them more stuff. I think about China, all that economic growth blackening the rivers, lungs and faces – killing people. I think about all the wars going on for no good reason, and those Africans fighting over diamond mines, cutting off the arms and legs of children, and I just can’t see how it’s possible not to go nuts. That’s if you think about anything for more than five seconds. If you can stop thinking after five seconds and move on to some new topic, you’ll probably be alright. Drew knows about every stupid human trick going, and it doesn’t get her down because she thinks she can do something about it. She’s a member of every human rights and environmental protection organization going. She reads up on all the shit that goes down. She seems to think reading is taking action. She drives a low-emissions car and has solar panels attached to her roof. She thinks she’s making a difference whereas I know IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE. Although, since the stabbing, the mail’s been piling up. She doesn’t read the ‘Save Our Water’ pamphlets anymore. Mostly she chases the cats in the backyard. She pitches plastic containers of water at them but always misses. She says the fucking cats shit and piss and dig around in the flower beds. This is not news to me, but Drew used to have a day job and no time to sit around staring at the yard. The cats aren’t afraid of her. She’s collected gravel from the driveway and is planning to ambush them. At least it’ll get her out.

  Doyle’s standing over me wearing his Dairy Dream hat at a jaunty angle. The hats are mandatory; we all look demented in them. The main reason I went out with Doyle is he’s six foot four. I felt like a little woman beside him, wanted him to pick me up the way Rhett picks up Scarlett.

  ‘Are you washing the scoops regularly?’ Doyle demands. Ever since I stopped going out with him, he demands things.

  ‘How regularly?’

  ‘You’re not cleaning them at all, are you? You’re just soaking them.’

  Doyle likes to make explosions in chemistry. Mr. Conkwright will stress that certain chemicals should not be mixed because they’re combustible and sure enough old Doyle will mix them to make a bang.

  ‘I don’t want to have to report you,’ he says.

  I could say, ‘To who?’ Mr. Buzny, who shows up to collect the cash, who wouldn’t notice a dirty scoop if it was shoved up his ass. I don’t say this because that would be reacting. Doyle wants me to react. Doyle has spread word that I’m frigid.

  ‘Have you checked the toppings?’ he demands, flipping the lids. ‘You’re almost out of sprinkles here. What the fuck have you been doing?’

  Is it always going to be like this when I tell a boy I don’t want him slobbering all over me? I didn’t actually say that, of course. I think I said I wasn’t ready for ‘this,’ which I’m sure our hero took to mean sexual intercourse in general as opposed to sexual intercourse with him. At our hero’s urging, we’d been imbibing banana daiquiris at a bar with a tropical theme and, I have to admit, those drinks were good. Those drinks even made Doyle look good, until his tongue started weaseling around my mouth. He shoved me up against a fake palm tree beside the toilets. Men walked by zipping their flies. Women flicked their hair. Nobody cared that some guy twice my size was squashing me into a plastic palm. They assumed I was enjoying it, which is what I’d always assumed when I saw couples pushed up against immobile objects. Now I know better. You get yourself into these situations and sometimes it’s not so easy to get out of them.

  Drew’s
always told me that if you get into a difficult situation with a boy, tell him you’re going to puke. It worked with Doyle. He backed off and I dashed to the Ladies’ to scrub his spit out of my mouth. Drew knows a thing or two. She’s alright. Which is why I’m sad she got knifed. I’ve never told her that. Maybe I should.

  4

  Mr. Huff, who’s about a hundred, has us studying A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has to be Shakespeare’s all-time most boring play - all those halfwit lovers and fairies flitting around. Mr. Huff squints at us. ‘Who’s going to read?’ he asks. I know he’s about to pick me because I’m the only girl whose name he remembers. He only remembers it because I was in his class last year when he made us read Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s second all-time most boring play. I can’t stand all this love-at-first-sight bilge, couples obsessing over each other before they’ve even had a conversation. People are always blaming Hollywood for our screwed-up perceptions of romance, but as far as I’m concerned, it started with Shakespeare. All those guys and gals swooning over each other from a distance. Get them alone in a room to hash it out, don’t make us numb our asses for two and a half acts before they get it together. Even then they don’t have a serious conversation, just exchange the old wedding vows. Happy happy happy. All those pretty boys in dresses. No wonder Will was a queer.

  ‘Limone?’ Huff says. ‘Why don’t you have a go at the fairy queen?’

  Limone is the name Zippy cursed me with. I changed it to Lemon when I was six. This upset Zippy because she thought Limone was French and classy.

  ‘Why,’ I inquire, hoping to delay reading until the bell, ‘does Titania cave to Oberon?’

  ‘Interesting question.’