Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling

by Caroline Adderson

  Two more trips to the car so the metabolic furnace inside the resident fifteen-year-old might be stoked. Rachel, meanwhile, was already making her rounds of the houseplants, pushing a finger into the soil to check for moisture, plucking off dead bits. No judgement was implied by this. She’s one of those super-seniors. Active Native Daughter of British Columbia, editor of the Heritage Society newsletter. Every autumn she hikes into the mountains to collect, catalogue, and consume wild mushrooms. She’s also handy with a needle. Among Joe’s most prized possessions is a petit point Sex Pistols album cover Rachel made for him in the eighties, God Save the Queen, no less. She’s doing one for Joe Jr. now, The Clash’s London Calling, but in crewel because petit point, she says, is murder on the eyes. Anyway, I am so far from threatened by her solicitude and competence that I never even look at the plants.

  “I haven’t seen paper grocery bags in years,” she said, coming in from the living room with dried leaves cupped in one hand.

  “That’s why I shop there.”

  When she opened the cupboard under the sink to get at the compost, I took advantage of the moment to stash a box of dish detergent. “Hold still,” she said, pulling something out of my hair. She showed me what it was. “What have you been doing?”

  “Buying groceries with sticks and grass in my hair,” I said.

  “Flower petals, too, by the looks of it.”

  I jammed the blocks of ice cream in the freezer then went to the bathroom to check how bad I looked. A paper didn’t just disappear. I’d left it there that morning face down on the table. We have a key hidden in a spot so obvious no thief would bother looking. Rachel knows about it, so why didn’t she use it? Then I remembered, belatedly, that she receives the newspaper herself every morning and listens to the CBC all day long, and I sank down on the edge of the bathtub and cried into a towel. I was crying out of gratitude. For her tact. For everything she’s ever done for me.

  Every year around this time, I have to grapple with these memories and feelings. Spring is difficult. Spring is a challenge.

  Joe Jr.’s door was closed. I don’t usually go in without his permission, but now I tapped on the door and opened it with the intention of looking for the lost paper. Surprise! Joe Jr. curled up in bed with the iPod clutched in his fist. Sometimes when I look at him I see every stage of his life in superimposition, the culmination of a whole person, not just the disinterested grunter he is so often now. It’s almost overwhelming. I closed the door again.

  In the kitchen Rachel asked, “What’s wrong, Jane?”

  “Joe Jr.’s home.”

  She frowned. “I rang the doorbell.”

  “He’s plugged in.”

  She nodded. “Is he sick?”

  “Oh, God. I hope not.”

  “Well, don’t fret. Joe will have a look at him.”

  This is the kind of brave talk you get out of people who eat wild mushrooms. Every time he gets sick, I think he’s going to die. Of course, I didn’t know if Joe Jr. was sick. I felt sick thinking there might have been something about me in the paper. Since I hadn’t actually read the article myself yet, I couldn’t be sure, but I doubted it. Then I remembered the recycling (belatedly again) and stepped out onto the back deck. Opened the blue bag, and yes! There it was, the prodigal Vancouver Sun, at the very top, all the sections intact. I was losing my mind. I glanced at the headline again—Opposition Mounts to Iraq War—but when I flipped the paper over to see their long-ago faces, to read what was being said about Sonia and Pete now, the article was gone.

  Strips of newsprint border hanging down like the empty arms of cut-out dolls.

  “Tea,” Rachel called.

  I stuffed the paper back in the bag and staggered in, trying not to show my shock. Joe Jr. must have cut it out. But why? He’s never expressed an interest in current events.

  Rachel was at the table, watching me through the steam of her raised mug, waiting for me to sit. “Jane? Are you all right?” “Yes.” I sat and stared out the window until the magnolia gradually came into focus, giving me something to say. “You asked what I did today. I went to Queen Elizabeth Park to look at the trees.”

  “How nice. The cherries are blooming.”

  Apparently there are hundreds of different varieties in Vancouver. She named about a hundred of them, also several kinds of plum, but I was barely listening. I was hoping, desperately, that it wasn’t Joe Jr. who had cut the article out, but who else could it have been?

  “What were you looking at?” Rachel asked.

  “What? Oh. They were very—cloud-like.”

  “Pink?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fragrant?”

  “Mildly. I didn’t notice at first.”

  “I wonder if they were the whatsits. Akebono.” She turned her head and spring suddenly arrived on her face, full bloom. “Ho ho! Here’s the guy who wouldn’t answer his grannie’s feeble knocks!”

  Joe Jr. stood in the doorway, scratching, gelled spikes relaxed, flattened by the nap. I was at his side in a second, feeling his forehead, checking his piercings—the rings in his eyebrow, the stud under his lip—for telltale redness. “What are you doing home?” I asked.

  “I skipped,” he said, yawning.

  “You’re not sick?”

  “I was bored.” He shrugged me off and made for his grandmother, who was waiting with arms wide, ready to fling around his waist. She tolerated the noogie then smoothed her hair back in place. “I rang the doorbell,” she teased. “You left me sitting in the cold.”

  Joe Jr. pulled away and began to pogo violently and strum the air. “Da, da, da! I rang the doorbell! You left me sitting in the cold! I rang the doorbell! You left me sitting in the cold! Sitting in the cold! Sitting in the cold!” His muse tried not to look horrified. Then, abruptly, he turned back into a boy. “I have to write that down, Gran.”

  “Are you serious, you skipped?” I asked because, now that he didn’t have meningitis, I was annoyed.

  He’d already transferred his transient attention from Rachel to the fridge and, finding the fresh package of smoked meat in the drawer, began pushing it breadlessly into his mouth. “It was boring.”

  “So?”

  He turned to his grandmother. “Are you going to stay and hear us practise?”

  “I could.”

  “Is Simon coming over?” I asked, suddenly worried about the paper again. “Because there’s something I’d like to talk to you about before he comes.”

  Joe Jr. shot me a glance, which seemed both significant and calculated not to be. I would have to tell him, I knew it then. More meat went in his mouth and when there wasn’t enough left in the package to make a decent sandwich, he tossed it back in the drawer. Instead of answering me, he said, “Gran, did Mom tell you I started the cello?”

  “What?” Rachel turned to me for confirmation.

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “I’ll show it to you.” He beckoned to her and Rachel got up and followed Joe Jr. out of the room.

  “After that,” I called to Joe Jr., “I need to talk to you.”

  We’ve never told him about the trouble I got into when I was young. I didn’t want him to know his mother has a criminal record, despite the fact that the actual conviction is not very impressive. I didn’t want him to be ashamed of me, or someone at school to find out. I would never, ever want him to be ostracized.

  While Rachel was in the bedroom with Joe Jr. and the cello, I made burritos. Joe Jr. was using the bow now, hitting about 50 percent of the notes (enough accuracy to plunge me into melancholy). And I remembered our terrible cooking, Dieter alternating between spaghetti and payloaded chili. Nutritional yeast dumped over everything like yellow snow. Sonia, preparing for a time when food would be scarce, always served an approximation of bread and water. Pete was the most creative, a liberal spicer. Once I came into the kitchen when he was cooking and saw a half-dozen garlic cloves stripped and lined up on the cutting board. “Smash, smash, smash the sta
te!” He brought down the knife, scraped the chunks into the pot. One lone survivor, having leapt to safety, quivered on the counter. Pete popped it in his mouth.

  The doorbell rang. I went to answer it and found Simon slouching on our mat, a six-foot-tall reminder of how like the newborn stage these teen years are—parents blind to the repul-siveness of the age except in other people’s offspring. Go Away indeed! Simon had an Adam’s apple now; it looked like he was gagging on a Russian word. There were the inevitable wires too, pumping in the jangle, and his teeth serving a three-year sentence in a metal cage. Compared with Joe Jr., Simon has taken self-skewering to a whole new level with actual grommets in his lobes I could see the light of day through. Yet when I opened the door, he took a step back, right off the mat, when, rightly, it should have been me recoiling from him. Under all the acne, I definitely perceived a flush.

  “Hello, Simon.”

  He did that darty thing with his eyes, sniffed, made an utterance. Hi, I presumed.

  “Joey’s in his room,” I said, standing back to let the guitar case through.

  He’s not so bad. He actually reminds me of Joe years ago. And he took his boots off, which, considering the laces, was a major concession, though I wasn’t prepared to wait. “Go on in when you’re finished,” I told him, assuming he could read lips.

  I went back to the kitchen. A few minutes later I glanced up from grating cheese and saw him in the doorway, staring. “He’s in his room!” I added hand gestures.

  Right after Joe got home and washed his hands, literally and metaphorically, of the day’s suffering, we sat down to dinner. I never got the chance to ask Joe or Joe Jr. about the article.

  “Joey! Simon!”

  They looked up—startled, innocent, already helping themselves—and seeing Joe’s signal, jerked the earbuds out by the wires.

  “So how was everybody’s day?” He turned to me and kissed my cheek. “How was your day, my darling? What happened at school, boys?”

  “Nothing,” they chorused.

  I tattled. “Joe Jr. says he skipped a class. He came home and slept instead.”

  “It was boring,” Joe Jr. said.

  Joe turned to me. “I think that’s reasonable.”

  “Joey played the cello for me,” said Rachel. “I never thought I’d live to hear someone in this family playing Bach.”

  “Was that Bach?” Joe Jr. asked, looking pleased with himself.

  I noticed how Simon kept glancing at me from across the table. I could see right in his mouth as he chewed, beans stuck on his braces, mud on a wire fence. When I met his eye: dart, dart. Normally Joe Jr.’s friends ignore me. When I come into the room they immediately mute themselves, except for the yelps when they punch each other, or the snickers. They hardly look at me, not the way Simon kept looking at me now. How to describe it? With interest.

  And a horrible thought came to me. Joe Jr. did have the article. He had it and he’d shown it to Simon.

  Joe: “Boys? What do you think of this? The Streptococci?”

  Thumbs down from Joe Jr. “Nobody’ll get it.”

  “What is it?” Simon asked.

  “Then how about The Cankers?”

  “I thought we were going to be The Cretins,” Simon said. “Like? One, two, three, four, Cretins wanna hop some more?”

  “Jane has a problem with The Cretins. She doesn’t think it’s very nice.”

  “I like The Joes,” I said.

  The boys groaned.

  “Think of it as a tribute. Joey Shithead. Joe Strummer. Joey Ramone. Joey Normal and the Fuck Ups.”

  Rachel frowned. “What’s all this nasty talk about?”

  “We need a name. We’re, like, a punk band, Gran.”

  “You’re like one or you are one?”

  “Dad’s getting us a real gig.”

  “I’m working on it,” Joe said. “I still have connections, Ma.”

  “Though half of them are lawyers now,” I pointed out. “You remember Molly? She’s a lawyer.”

  Rachel: “How about The Tone Deaf? Are you playing the cello in this band, Joey?”

  “No, that’s for school. No one else was playing it. Mom told me that story so I thought I’d try it.”

  “What story?” I asked.

  “You were reading that book. About the guy who brings his crazy friend home and is embarrassed because his dad plays the cello.”

  “You mean Fathers and Sons?”

  I’m the odd reader out in this family. The Joes have no use for books; they live for the music I mostly tune out. I was so touched that my son had actually paid attention to something I cared about that tears came to my eyes. Quickly, I wiped them with my napkin because crying is a hundred times worse than playing the cello, even old Kirsanov knew that. Joe rose from the table and went into the kitchen to get dessert, trading a concerned glance with his mother on the way. Then I really felt foolish, because I knew for certain that they all knew what had happened to that article. They all knew and I didn’t. I was the cretin.

  The apple crumble hit the trivet; the boys attacked. Joe set the ice cream down beside it and I remembered that Russian word, the one I’d imagined bulging in Simon’s throat. Morozhenoye. I got up to put the tea on. When I got back to the table Simon was saying, “There’s, like, a demonstration.” He glanced at me, ears reddening around the peepholes. “You should come.” He seemed to be saying this to me specifically. Inviting me.

  “I should?” I asked.

  The colour spread from his perforated lobes. “You all should,” he said. “It’s totally illegal, their being in Iraq.”

  “Where’s the demonstration?” I asked.

  “At the Art Gallery. It would be awesome if you came.”

  Awesome? What the hell? I wondered. What was that kid thinking about me?

  After dinner they went downstairs to practise. Joe Sr.’s lair is down there, a TV, a stationary bicycle, an unambitious set of weights. It’s also where he stores and listens to his vast punk record collection. Maria is not allowed, not even to get at the black hole of the bathroom.

  When Joe Jr. was around twelve, he began spending time in The Lair. While it hurt to be replaced as the preferred parent, I knew it was only fair. I’d been tightly and intricately attached to Joe Jr. I never sent him to daycare or preschool. When he started kindergarten, I used to lie on the living room floor for the entire two and a half hours, imagining all the calamities that could transpire while he was out of my sight. Earthquake. Fire. Gunman walking in spraying bullets. Pedophile lurking in a bathroom stall. Out-of-control car careering through the playground. Somewhere, some rogue state firing off something nuclear. I believed that if I worked through each of these scenarios, they would be less likely to happen because, statistically, the chance of thinking of a bad thing happening before the bad thing actually happens is much smaller than a bad thing happening. More people are killed in car accidents than people who think they might be killed in car accidents. Needless to say, it was a trying year.

  Downstairs, the racket started as Rachel and I loaded the dishwasher in tandem. “I could hardly look at that poor boy,” she said.

  “Simon?”

  “It nauseates me.”

  “His acne or his ears?”

  She grimaced. “Acne is natural. Self-mutilation isn’t.”

  I nodded. “Ugly is the new beautiful.”

  “Again,” she sighed. “They never learn. Look at Joe. His ears are in tatters from all those pins. Is he a physician or an embattled tomcat? I’m sure his patients laugh at him behind his back.”

  “I don’t think so. They’re probably just happy to see him after the six-hour wait.”

  She nudged me. Simon had come up the stairs. He gawked at us briefly—well, me—then disappeared down the hall, returning a moment later with an enormous boot in each hand. Before closing the basement door again, he cast me a backward glance.

  I felt annoyed by his attention now. The grey-haired Shaughnessy matron mi
med a finger down her throat. “At least they didn’t tattoo themselves back then,” she went on. “You remember Silly Putty?”

  “Sure. It’s still around.”

  “Joe used to push it onto the Saturday comics, then stretch it out of shape. That’s what those tattoos are going to look like in fifty years. These kids don’t realize they’re going to be old one day.”

  And I thought: maybe they’re not.

  A new song started up downstairs. Soundproofing spared us the lyrics, but we could hear that one of the three chords was different from the three chords in the last song.

  “Does Joey have a tattoo?” Rachel asked.

  I hated to tell her. It was a sore point for me too. “A very small one. Tiny. Joe went with him to get it. To make sure about the needle. Anyway, all this is wonderful for Joe. It’s the dream of every punk rocker who ever sold out. His offspring is picking up the torch.”

  “I guess.”

  Then they called us, so we dried our hands and started down the stairs to where the walls are painted black and the light bulbs red. “Rachel?” I said, before I lost the chance. “Did you see the article?”

  She turned around on the stairs and, under the light, looked drenched in blood. “That’s why I came so early. I thought you might want to talk. But you seemed distracted. I’ve been waiting for you to say something.”

  “I’m sorry, Rachel.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t get the chance to read it. It didn’t mention me, did it?”

  “No.”

  “I feel better now. Thanks.”

  “All that was a long time ago, Jane.”

  “I know,” I said.

  It’s a gallery of album covers down there: D.O.A., Pointed Sticks, The Clash, The Ramones, The Subhumans, the petit point Sex Pistols, framed, in a place of honour. Strings of interlocked safety pins hang in the doorway like a beaded curtain. Drawing it aside for Rachel, I wondered how many safety-pin factories had closed since the demise of punk. Joe had probably single-handedly kept one in operation. As well as the curtain, he once made himself an entire suit of safety-pin chain mail. This was during med school, which, according to Joe, was one long, jittery Wake Up–pill high. The problem with the suit was it wasn’t safe to sit in.