Glass Voices

by Carol Bruneau

  “Garlic bread, Shirley?”

  Sheryl, Robert corrects. The main course is lasagna, which Rebecca’s apparently made herself, her eyes glued to the girl carving a noodle into tinier and tinier pieces. “It’s not that bad,” Robert whispers, elbowing her. They could pass for brother and sister; the same glumness, and that untidiness that seems typical these days.

  “So you’re the traveller, Sheryl,” Lucy ventures, just trying to be friendly, asking when she expects to be leaving. The girl gives Robert a blank look, and he shrugs, eyeing Lucy through his bangs, if that’s what you’d call that mat. “Robert tells me…” she tries again.

  “Who?” Sheryl digs her little finger into his belly, swooping her eyes from his face to his lap. “Bucky, you mean?”

  Lordie, she’s fresh, Lucy thinks, refusing to look where she’s looking. A girlfriend! It seems no time since he was four years old, watching Maggie Muggins while his mom was at work. That first old black-and-white TV a godsend—to Harry, certainly, who treated it the way most folks treated their Sunday best, especially when it came to others watching it. Wibbit, Robert would croak with glee when that freckle-faced Maggie came on, and Lucy’d race to get supper on. The sofa croaking, too, under his bouncing feet as he aimed the fireplace poker at Maggie’s puppet friends, shooting them. They had such unlovable names: Big Bite Beaver and Greta Grub, and worst of all, Grandmother Frog. I wanna stay with my Gwan Fwog, he’d whine, clinging, when his mother came to pick him up. Once for a whole week he wouldn’t eat his snack because her warty hands had made it. Enough, Harry’d hollered, stomping in from work, not too pleased to find his TV blaring goofy animal voices.

  Rebecca’s grin sends all this packing. She’s being so chummy, as if Sheryl’s her best friend. “Bucky’s grampa’s coming home tomorrow, did he tell you, darlin’?” Saying Sheryl’s lasagna must be cold, and does she want it heated up? Darlin’? Lucy would no more have called Jewel’s girlfriends darlin’ than flown to the moon.

  “What?” Sheryl says dully, her bottom lip hanging, a touchiness to her raccoon eyes. She’s pretty enough, in a skittish, scrawny way; why does she wear all that war paint, Harry would call it, especially around her eyes? Lucy’s forgotten her glasses, but even without them it looks garish, and doesn’t fit, somehow, with Robert’s back-to-nature talk of teepees, or is it wigwams? Heaven forbid, if Harry was here he’d get Sheryl to come closer, asking who had a knife so he could scrape off all that goop. “What’s wrong with your grampa?” the girl finally asks Robert, pushing back her hair. It makes Lucy think of a pair of curtains, the way it’s tucked behind her ears.

  Robert just blinks, shoving his plate away, the lasagna licked clean, telling her she doesn’t have to eat hers “or nothin’,” if she’s not hungry. Rebecca sniffs, eyeing Lucy’s plate, saying she’s eating like a bird. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it? A bird would fly right out of here. That must be what Robert has in mind, when he pokes his guest—“Let’s blow this joint, okay?”—and the two of them slouch off without being excused. Sheryl does take her plate with her; that’s something, anyway. Maybe she’ll set a good example? Girls can have a civilizing effect; some girls. But the prospect seems lost on Rebecca, whose attempts at gourmet have fallen flat.

  Sighing morosely, she glowers at Jewel shovelling in seconds all the same, as if it’s his last supper. Her voice grates when she asks Lucy about her plans. Plans? The bugger is, as Harry would say, she hasn’t a clue. Now that it’s almost here, Harry’s release looms like the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. She’s hardly able to think beyond pushing his wheelchair to the elevator and pressing Down. She’s picked up a card for the nurses, though, and signed it: In appreciation of your kind (scratch) loving (scratch) care. I’ll leave it on the desk, she thinks. “People do that,” she murmurs aloud, and a noisy silence wells up, as if she’s having another old timer’s moment.

  Across the table Jewel says, “What?”

  But she’s thinking of a bird again; the sleeves of her blue sweater are wings taking her off on a little tore somewhere: Peggy’s Cove? Rebecca’s too hung up on her food failure to notice, lamenting how everything was made from scratch. Never mind the tinny taste, thinks Lucy; if she were alone she’d spit into her serviette, or maybe even like Harry, into the sink.

  “A holiday,” she hears herself chirp to change the subject, as someone mentions dessert, Whip ’n’ Chill. Rebecca brightens a bit, one reddish eyebrow arched, saying, yeah, yeah, after living apart for two months, it would be a holiday having Harry around again, wouldn’t it. A regular honeymoon, Lucy wants to say, smiling back. So like Rebecca to put a brave, silly face on things. If there were more weight to it, she’d give her credit.

  At least Jewel seems to know better, saying if it’s too much looking after his father, they’ll arrange something. Like putting someone out to pasture, she thinks, as simple as going on a date. The taste in her mouth turns acid; is it really only two months she’s been on her own? “Your dad would never stand being in a home,” she tells him the way she might’ve, once, to clean up his room.

  “No digs like your own, I guess,” Rebecca jumps in, looking around proudly. There are vacuum lines in the orange carpet, and one can actually see through the windows, the leafless view stretching across to the yacht club, the old decrepit prison.

  “Amen to that,” she nods, wiping her mouth delicately, never mind that the serviette is an old one, probably re-used. Hoping Rebecca will be just as delicate and take her plate. But then music blasts up suddenly, vibrations coming through the rungs of the chair. The drums remind her of Harry’s carpentry. Jewel stares up at the ceiling, expecting it to snow dirt, but mysteriously the cobwebs have vanished, and abruptly the drumming stops, replaced by slow, plodding piano. It’s not half bad, she thinks with a shock, it’s almost musical; maybe Robert’s growing up?

  “Hey Jew,” it sounds like when Rebecca sings along, eyeing Jewel with a faint smile. “The first song Elinor heard,” she says, “when she came to town.”

  Here we go, thinks Lucy: more juiceless gossip. You’d think Rebecca was in love with the woman, the way she goes on: how Elinor took the train down, just last year, her first time out of the Valley. “Well, except when she was a kid,” Rebecca interrupts herself, “if you can believe it,” explaining how Elinor’d heard the song on the radio the last time she saw her brother, on and on, or whoever it was that drove her to the station. “Coltsfoot by the side of the road and ‘Hey Jude’ on the radio,” Rebecca puts on a drawl, saying that’s what the cleaning lady told her, picking up that album off the floor.

  “When she was running away from the funny farm,” Jewel snorts, more interested in the progress of the Whip ’n’ Chill. No need to be nasty, Lucy wants to jab him, remembering how she’d threatened to put his head in a sling for being mean. But the thought of a song being named Jude warms her, especially for Robert’s sake: the patron saint of hopeless cases, not that he would know. When the song ends, silence hums from the basement.

  “Now what do you suppose those kids are up to?” she wonders aloud, not that she means anything by it.

  But Rebecca grimaces, draining her cola, cola with something added. “Gawd, you don’t want to know. The little slut,” she adds, as if Lucy’s not there, then leaning in so close that even without her glasses Lucy can see a crumb of mascara on her eyeball. “Swear on everything holy,” she blinks, saying it scares the tar out of her, how easily Bucky’s led. “The vagrancies of love,” she sighs, blinking harder.

  “Come on now, Becky,” Jewel teases, making some remark about “self-defecating” humour. Stacking their plates, he goes and listens by the basement stairs—like a coon hound, his dad would say. He could stand to lose a few pounds, especially off his middle, she notices, thinking of his heart. It would do him good.

  Then Rebecca gets up and listens too, muttering, “If that little tart gets up the stump, so help me Jewel, he’l
l never drive again.”

  As she tramps downstairs, Jewel says, “You didn’t hear that, did you, Ma.” Seconds later she reappears, her face blank. They’re not in his room, she says, who knows where they went. She doesn’t seem to notice Lucy clearing space for the dishes.

  “You check the garage?” Jewel looks disgusted. “There’s always the car.”

  “They’d think of that, wouldn’t they.” But Rebecca jingles some keys triumphantly, saying she beat them to it. “It’s locked up tighter than a virgin’s…Sorry,” she says, looking at Lucy. Why does she say things that demand apologies?

  “You’ll have to excuse Becky,” Jewel jumps in, saying all it takes is one drink any more. And when hasn’t she excused her? For years she has, so have they all. Washing a glass, Jewel sets it on the shelf, Rebecca’s lapse and Robert and his girlfriend’s as important as the leftover lasagna. They seem to have forgotten the dessert supposedly setting in the fridge, Rebecca suddenly digging through a drawer. Pushing aside a Joy of Cooking—Cooking crossed out and Sex penned in in childish printing—eventually she finds what she’s looking for, a dog-eared tome: How to Clean Everything. Perhaps she really is turning over a new leaf?

  Flipping pages, she points out remedies for every conceivable stain. “Remember my turquoise dress?” she enthuses. “Bacon fat on the sleeve?” But then she says it’s not the book, but Elinor herself who’s the whiz.

  “Right,” Jewel smirks sourly, peeling off a Rolaid, and as Rebecca elbows him, something slides from the pages. A clipping so yellow the print is blurred. “Lord Jesus, not a recipe,” he kids. “Can you imagine that one cooking? ‘Sewer-fed lobster.’ Poor old Benny!”

  Calling Jewel “Mr. Knee-jerk,” Rebecca says that woman can do anything she puts her mind to.

  “I guess she’d have to, wouldn’t she, living that way.” What else is there to say? With him, Lucy means, and not married, though she’s careful to keep that under her tongue.

  “Benjamin Trott, Esquire,” Jewel pipes up; according to Bucky, that’s what they call him at the yacht club.

  “He’s not a member?” Lucy asks; it’s a joke, for pity’s sake, but neither he nor Rebecca laugh. Maybe it’s true that senility’s a second childhood? Perish the thought.

  “No, Ma,” Rebecca says absently, perusing the clipping. Reminding her that Bucky works at the club after school, “minding things.” Napping in the cells, in other words, Jewel says.

  But Rebecca lets that one by, preoccupied. “The poor creature,” she murmurs, admitting that the last time Elinor came to clean, she’d let her use the bathtub. It can’t be a picnic, she sniffs, living without conveniences. Jewel just mumbles how Benny and his lady friend could star in a “creature feature,” whatever that is. Lucy’s still digesting the thought of a stranger in their tub. Rebecca gives him a shove, squinting at the clipping’s dingy photo. “Jesus—that’s her?” she says, and peering close, Lucy can just make out a girl in a pale dress sitting on an old man’s knee, a cranky-looking woman and a young man posing behind them.

  “‘The Van Buskirk family,”’ Rebecca reads out painfully; how did she make it through high school? “‘On their farm near Kentville. John Van Buskirk Sr. died this week, leaving…’ Verrry interesting,” she interrupts herself, mimicking that German soldier on Laugh-In. “Frigging apple barons, ‘Van Buskirk and Son Orchards Limited,”’ she says, lifting her eyebrows, marvelling that Elinor wasn’t just talking through her hat.

  “So ring my chimes,” Jewel says flatly, more of that “hip” lingo, as if he and Rebecca are speaking in code. Just then, Robert and his girlfriend slither in from outdoors, and without a word troop downstairs, a smell trailing them. It reminds Lucy of something burned in a ditch, of spring, and people burning lawns. Odd, with winter so close.

  Giving Jewel the eye, Rebecca follows them, the basement door clicking quietly behind her. Jewel fidgets, asking if she’d like tea, then opening the fridge and closing it quickly, but not before she’s glimpsed dessert, a bowlful of something soupy, a grasshopper green. Another small disaster, one that fills her with a childish disappointment. She wishes Jewel would dish some out anyway; there’s nothing urging her home, back to the bunker, as Harry would say. But while the tea steeps Jewel disappears, and perching on a tipsy stool she opens the cleaning book. Without her glasses, the recipes, if that’s what you call them, are in print so small they’re not much good, but there’s the clipping, the headline large enough. Died suddenly at home. Found in barn…and the date, smudged and barely readable: November, 1929? Trouble in the apple industry, her eyes co-operate just enough. Something about the market crash, words that summon a building collapsing—God above, she imagines the glass-roofed North Street station in the Explosion, shards raining down, only on vegetables and fruit.

  “What’s so in’eresting?” Jewel startles her. He seems worked up, slapping at his pockets—is he that hooked on those cigarettes? But then he checks his wallet.

  Squinting, she scrutinizes the photo, that stern-looking family. There’s something almost bovine about the couple, especially the mother. No hint of what illness might’ve taken the father. The girl—she looks thirteen or fourteen—has a sullenness about her, that teenaged chippiness quite obvious to Lucy even without her glasses. A handful, likely; no wonder the mother looks weaned on a…“Pickle,” she sighs, as Jewel slides a cup towards her, giving her a stare and asking what on earth they’re doing downstairs, reading tea leaves?

  “Pardon?” she says. Then she bites her tongue; it doesn’t take a genius to imagine a showdown, and a few minutes later the girl comes skulking upstairs, leaving without so much as goodbye or thanks for supper. Rebecca appears, looking flustered, and Jewel lets out a sigh that sounds as if he’s been holding it in for months.

  “I knew it,” he tells her, like a judge on the stories pounding his gavel, “the twenty bucks on my dresser? Poof, gone.”

  14

  JUST AFTER LUNCH, THE AMBULANCE surrenders Harry. Jewel’s taken the day off work, helping to get things ready. Rebecca’s tied a yellow balloon to the tree outside, a poor colour choice given the memory of that bag under the hospital bed. Still, it reminds Lucy of the day they brought Robert home from the hospital when he was just a mite, never mind how unceremoniously Harry is deposited upstairs. But the room is cheery, the Don Noble and the TV positioned so he can see both from the bed. The nurses have given tips and instructions to turn him every couple of hours, and feed him slowly so he won’t choke. Jewel’s old room, her sewing room, has been crammed with waterproof pads and aids: a bedpan, wheelchair, walker, crutches. Could it be that Jewel’s gone overboard?

  “Let’s be optimistic,” he says quietly as they stand back, watching the medics place Harry between the sheets. She should be happy, but this moment she’s been hoping for stirs up panic as raw as the feeling that’d crawled through her years ago in that church basement, as she coaxed Jewel to take the nipple. Now what? Now that he was here, how would she manage? But like a gift, now that it’s given, how can she even think about sending it back? Ashamed, she busily plumps pillows, kisses his chilly forehead, welcoming him home. Maybe Jewel feels it too, the weight of what’s ahead? Not Rebecca, though, flitting around arranging things. Whatever’s got into her lately has taken hold as firmly as the Yanks claiming the moon! As Lucy imagines the astronauts planting their flag, Harry’s eye flashes a look of apology, as if it hasn’t yet taken in the others, only her. You’ve got the shitty end of the stick, dolly, it seems to say. Then his lips fumble: a moan, a bit of drool—gobbledygook—and finally a syllable: “Lucsch?”

  Rebecca sets down some Vaseline, looking a little shocked, maybe even dismayed. None of this seemed quite so alien, so difficult, in the hospital. Jewel rushes to smooth things over, asking Harry what more he could ask, having the best nurses in town. “Old man,” he calls him, eyeing Lucy; if his father weren’t so frail, she could imagine Jewel punchi
ng his shoulder. It makes her blush when Harry rubs his head up and down enthusiastically. Gratefully. That’s my dolly, she imagines him saying, if he could talk. Like a dog with a bone. At least he’s still in there somewhere, isn’t he?

  Rebecca vanishes; they hear her down in the kitchen rustling something up. Oh, Lord. She comes back with food on a plate, sticky buns that are store-bought, thank God, but of a texture that wads and would block an airway in a second, the voices of a dozen nurses seem to holler. Just as Harry sucks and smacks at his, Lucy, terrified, reaches into his mouth and pulls it out, and he almost looks like he’ll cry. Stealing candy from a baby, says Rebecca’s stare. She and Jewel, have the tact, at least, to leave before Lucy has to manage supper.

  As she follows the mimeographed instructions—a life sentence of soup and soft foods?—the kitchen’s drafty silence is a comfort: the way the Earth must’ve felt to Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin stepping back on it. Carrying Harry’s meal up on a tray, she tries to look at the plate as, well, a relief map, like Robert made once for geography, with a lot of mounded brown and green, of papier mâché. At the sight of it, half of Harry’s lip curls, an effort at a smile. Nothin’ like real food, dolly. A fella oughta take out insurance, eating that hospital crud, she imagines him joking. Spooning small bites of hill and dirt into his opened mouth, she fancies herself a mother booby, and him a chick that’s tumbled from the nest but managed to fly back up. Yes, there’s something miraculous and only good about hope come home to roost, rewarded, and for a fleeting moment she feels relief sweet as mashed carrots.

  Later, though, bathing him is a different story, the basin balanced on her side of the jiggling mattress. It’s like bathing an overgrown, helpless infant as she draws the cloth over his neck where food has dribbled, and between his fingers, then tenderly pats him dry. If there’s one thing she’s learned, it’s not to think beyond the chore in front of her. Positioning the bedpan, she makes sure the TV is good and loud, though, the way she’d turn up Maggie Muggins if Robert got whiny. Emptying it, to keep from gagging, she thinks of Robert as a baby, and then Jewel—and, unwittingly, of the baby before him. How had she managed, when she hadn’t been much more than a girl herself, still too young to appreciate that babies grew up? How did any mother manage, let alone the mothers of babies who didn’t, or couldn’t? But then Untamed World comes on, a gift from the airwaves. She fixes Harry’s pillows, making him comfy as a wildebeest charges across the Serengeti. “Who’s that, dear?” she nudges him, her voice almost bubbling over with cheer. But when she glances over, he’s asleep.