Rotten Peaches

by Lisa de Nikolits

  But she’s skinny and old and ugly, I want to say, and JayRay makes you feel like the sun’s shining on you and only you, and not only that, but that fairy dust and every kind of good voodoo is coming your way.

  I hadn’t known about this scam. Once again, I am betrayed by the man I thought was my soulmate. I berate myself for being stupid and then I remember Gerstein’s words and I tell myself to be more kind and it does help.

  “Best I get back to my stand,” Sandi says, “You have yourself a scorcher of a day, young lady!”

  “You too,” I reply and I’m dying to chronicle this development in my journal but a crowd has gathered at my table.

  Later in the day, I’m explaining the business of selling cosmetics from home and JayRay walks by. He’s wearing a Stetson hat and he winks at me and tips his hat. I stare back at him, incredulous.

  “That guy really gets my goat,” I say later that evening to Sandi when we’re packing up and we can hear JayRay telling tall tales across the aisle. “That thing you told me, I can’t stop thinking about it. I wish we could do something to help your friend.”

  Sandi nods. “But what? Guys like that, you can’t touch them.”

  “Where does your friend live?”

  “New York. Why? We hardly ever go there. It was a one-off. She was unlucky JayRay was in town when her husband was looking for gear.”

  “I’m going to put my thinking cap on. It may take some time but I’m going to come up with something.”

  I’m proud of how well I’m doing but I wonder if scheming to get back at JayRay is simply another excuse to think about him. But I tell myself it’s for Sandi’s friend. I have to find a way to help her. And it won’t hurt to throw in a good dose of revenge for my own satisfaction too.

  27.

  “HE’S A DISGUSTING PIG!” I exclaim. I am back in Gerstein’s serene and elegant cottage, telling her about JayRay’s antics with the spy cam.

  “I understand you want to get justice for this woman and set things right,” Gerstein says, “but it’s not healthy for you to be engaging with thoughts of him, not at any level.”

  “I know. You’re right. I guess I’m still angry that he scammed me. He’s a bad person.” Speaking of bad people reminds me how I doctored Iris’s creams and I wonder why Iris isn’t feeling any ill effects as yet. She sure should be.

  “I am a bad person too,” I tell Gerstein. “You think I am trying to get better and I am, but I am, or was, whatever, so in love with this guy. I don’t want anybody else to have him. I want him to come back to me. He doesn’t feel things like he should. He tipped his hat at me, for fuck’s sake, and he winked! How could he be so uncaring?”

  I start to cry. “All I’m doing, twenty-four seven, is fighting my desire for him. Maybe I should give in and admit that I want him more than anything in the world, and that I miss him more than anything in the world.”

  “And you will lose everything for a man who has no regard for you. You have to keep fighting this. You are doing well.”

  “I tell myself that but the truth is, I’m not. I thought he would have come back to me by now. Even you thought he would have come back to me by now.”

  “Regardless of whether he comes back to you or not, you have to keep fighting. Actually, correction, you don’t have to do anything. It’s your choice and you have to want the alternative more than the fix. How’s your relationship with Dave and the girls?”

  “Better. But I had a setback with Sandi telling me about her friend. In a weird way, it made me feel close to JayRay again, like we were back together. I withdrew from Dave and the girls, although I didn’t want to. They knew, as soon as I came home, that things had changed again for the worse.”

  “Have you started marriage counseling yet?”

  “No. He hasn’t mentioned it again and neither have I.” I blow my nose and bury my face in my hands. “What a mess. It’s a monumental fucking mess.”

  “If you treat a wound, any wound, with the right medicine, it will heal.” Gerstein is implacable. “But you have to be consistent with the treatment, you have to persist.”

  “Yeah.” I look into the distance and gnaw on a nail. “It’s not like I’ve got a choice. He doesn’t want me.”

  “Where is your next conference?”

  “St. John’s, Newfoundland. Iris will be there. She’s the queen bee of the Canadian conferences. I’ll have to watch her and JayRay being all lovey-dovey.”

  “You could leave your job,” Gerstein suggests and I glare at her in horror.

  “But I love my job! And I could never leave JayRay. The thought of never seeing him again is unthinkable. You see. I’m right. I’m not getting better, am I? If anything, I feel worse.”

  Gerstein sighs. “Leonie, I’m going to level with you. There’s only so much I can do. You think you’re the only person who fell in love with the wrong guy and had their heart shattered? This guy did a number on you. You’ve got a great family, a husband who loves you, and two fantastic kids. And yet, there’s a real risk you’ll lose it over someone who isn’t worth a damn.”

  “The heart wants what the heart wants,” I mutter.

  “The addict wants what the addict wants. And screw the rest of the world. Yes, I’m growing impatient with you. Why? Because you came to me with a new story of how this guy screwed some woman over and instead of it making you see what a loser he is, it makes you want him more. I did my best to help you see it for what it is but you’re slamming the door on me. You’re right, I don’t get it. I don’t.”

  Gerstein stands up and I’m immediately confused and afraid. I challenged her and pushed her too far. “I’m not firing you as a client but I am saying this, we’re done for the day. Go to your conference, and when you come back, come see me if you really want help. It’s up to you. There are people out there that I can help and if you’re not one of them, I’m going to have to move on. I do want to help you, but only if you’ll meet me halfway.”

  I get up and grab my purse. “Yeah? Well, fuck you too, doc. Thanks for nothing.”

  I storm out and slam the door behind me. I march across her perfect garden and sit in my car, wondering how I’ll explain this to Dave.

  I look back towards Gerstein’s cool rooms and something inside me wants to come clean, go back and tell her all my sins, tell her about Don Carlson and how, even as a toddler, I was a shit-disturber. How I stole toys from the school playroom, how day after day, I pocketed tiny bits and pieces, broken or whole, it didn’t matter. I shuttled them home to a shoe box under my bed, feeling the shame, the guilt, and the gut-wrenching fear of being caught, but I couldn’t stop myself, not even then. I once showed a friend my score, a misshapen ball of orange plasticine studded with floor detritus and stones, and she couldn’t understand why I had taken it. Because it was there. Because I had no choice.

  But I can’t tell Gerstein anything, never mind everything. Everything being my revenge on my father. I can’t tell her what I did. Because I poisoned him.

  A couple of years after I left home, while I was still at university, I surprised my parents with an unexpected visit, ostensibly to pick up some shit from my room. How I loved watching my mother wince at my crassness. Even after all that time, she had never gotten used to my white trash tongue. I had hooked up with a gothic kid in one of my classes and he was good to his word when he told me he could get me anything I wanted at a price. And I was more than willing to pay whatever it took.

  Potassium cyanide. It was the first time I used it. I mixed the powder in with my father’s steel-cut oatmeal, hoping that cooking wouldn’t lessen the efficacy of the poison but I needn’t have worried. I knew my mother was in no danger, she cooked his breakfast but she didn’t like oatmeal.

  I left that same afternoon to go back to university and the following night, my mother called me. My father had died. He had been fine at breakfast and he
had gone to his cabin as usual. But when he didn’t return for supper, my mother grew concerned and she went to find him. When she opened the door, he was lying sprawled on the floor. He was dead.

  “Heart attacks run in his family,” she said and she was crying. “I don’t know what I will do with myself now. He was everything I had.”

  Thanks Mom. Her words made me sorry that she didn’t eat oatmeal but, while she had rejected me for what I had done to Don Carlson, she had never hurt me as badly as my father had. Of course I had known about the family tendency on my father’s side for heart failure at a young age. In fact, I had been counting on that. While my mother had no regard for what she called “my lack of moral standing,” it was clear she hadn’t put two and two together. She saw no link between my out-of-the-blue visit and my father’s sudden death.

  I returned home for the funeral. I put flowers on his grave and I stood by my mother’s side while the priest prayed for my father’s soul. I wondered if, in his dying moments, my father had realized that he had been murdered by his dirty little girl. I certainly hoped so.

  I walked my mother back to the house and I made her take a sleeping pill. “Here,” I said, shaking out five pills and putting them in a saucer, “keep these. You can easily get a prescription for this shit if you like. It’s Imovane, a harmless sleep aid.”

  “I’ll take one tonight and that will do me,” my mother said. “I want to escape my world for at least one night. But I want to say this. I don’t want to see you again, Leonie. You may be my daughter but you are not a good person. And if I die alone and am buried alone, that’s fine by me. There’s enough money left for me to buy a small place in town and I’ll get myself a job. I’ll get by. And I’ve made provisions to be buried next to your father when I go. It’s all sorted out. I never want to see you again.”

  I wanted to leave right then but I had unfinished business. “Whatever. I’ll go and see if there’s crap left in my room that I want.”

  My mother nodded and I heard her go upstairs and shut her bedroom door.

  I went to my old room and lay down on my bed and waited. I eyed Wendy O. Williams wallpapering the walls with her fierce nudity, her duct-taped nipples and her Mohawk hair and wondered if I should rescue Wendy and take her with me. But no, I was over her and besides, why spoil my mother’s discomfort at having to face the posters, particularly the one with Don’t be a Wanker! There was nothing I wanted to take; there were no happy memories in that room for me.

  After the scandal with the Don Carlson, people had avoided me like the plague. I retaliated by donning gothic garb and dying my hair black. With my pale skin, crazy light blue eyes and black lipstick, I knew I was striking. I made a point of fucking the most popular boys in school, especially the ones who had girlfriends because it made me feel like I had the upper hand. My sexual prowess was legendary; I was irresistible. The day before graduation, I took my black lipstick and I got to school early. I fucked you, I wrote on each of the boys’ lockers. Good thing I took two sticks of lipstick, because it turned out I had fucked a lot more dicks than I had realized. It certainly made for a memorable last day, and I made a point of applying my lipstick in front of everyone at assembly. But what could they do? I didn’t bother to go to class, I left the girls, crying and furious, and the boys, sheepish and apologetic, and I caught the bus to Toronto. I worked in a coffee shop while I waited for university to start and I dropped the goth look. At university, I stopped working my power plays and I tried to focus on my studies but memories of my father’s cruelty plagued me and I knew I had to find closure. Isn’t that what they all say? That with closure, you heal. Consider yourself case closed, Daddy Dearest. I had to kill you. I lay on my bed and thought about closure. Revenge, closure, perhaps, at the end of day, they’re the same thing.

  Late that night, I went to my father’s cabin. I was aching to set the place alight and watch it burn but I couldn’t do it, it would be too obvious that I was responsible and I wasn’t willing to be clapped with a charge of arson.

  I unlocked the door, using my mother’s key. I stepped inside that hallowed chapel only to find it dark, damp, shabby, and derelict. A mess. Whatever big dreams my father had harboured, they had died a slow and painstaking death because there was nothing inside the shed except for half a dozen ceiling-high stacks of old newspapers and a two-inch layer of dust on everything. The only clean spots were my father’s chair and his desk and I sat down in his chair and looked at the world from his view.

  I had thought him a giant imaginer of impossible and wondrous things. Instead, he was a nothing more than a depressed hermit, withering away in a cave of his choosing, a failure at life.

  I didn’t destroy anything in that cabin because there was nothing to destroy. And knowing the truth about my father didn’t change what needed to be done. I walked to his grave, pulled down my panties and had a grand old shit.

  I wanted to wipe myself with my panties and leave the soiled underwear on the headstone but caution urged me not to.

  “So long, Dad,” I said and I walked away.

  The memory of the funeral is as fresh in my mind as if it had taken place the previous day. I gnaw on my finger and look over at Gerstein’s peaceful garden.

  No. I can’t tell her the truth, what a ridiculous idea. I can’t tell her anything and she can’t help me. Her and her fucking pathetic little tools. She’s laughable. What I can’t believe is that I even bought into her bullshit. I really thought for a moment that she was right and that my life was salvageable. Pull the other one, why don’t you?

  And as for Dave, I decide that I’ll lie by omission and not tell him anything. With him, I’ll continue to try to play the conservative, cardboard cut-out, perfect wife that he wants. He would never have loved gothic me or the sexual me. I have to get my act together. And it literally is an act. It always has been.

  28.

  I SET UP MY TABLE at the Provincial Craft Wholesale Show in St. John’s, Newfoundland. My last evening at home had not gone well. Dave accused me of being distant again, distracted, and I blamed my therapy session. What wasn’t great was that we were arguing in front of the kids.

  “Frickin’ doctor, stirring up all kinds of emotional shit,” I said. “Come here, Mack-a-roon, let mommy paint your nails for you.”

  “Mom!” Kenzie looked up from her homework. “We’re not allowed to wear nail polish at school, you know that.”

  “Right, right.” I frowned. “I just wanted to do something nice for you. Do you want me to make my special egg salad sandwiches for your lunch tomorrow?”

  “We hate them!” the girls chorused. “Dad makes our lunches, he knows what we like,” Maddie added and I sighed.

  “I want to do something,” I insist.

  “You can help me write a poem,” Maddie said. “We have to write a poem for school.”

  I brightened. “About what?”

  “Anything. What do you think?”

  “Amore! The best poems are always about love.”

  “Eugh,” Kenzie said. “Not love. Think of something else.”

  “Okay,” I smile. “What’s your most favourite thing in the world?”

  “Dad is,” Maddie said instantly.

  “He is more of a person than a thing,” I said. “But he’ll do. Start with a line about Dad, anything.”

  “He’s big and strong and manly,” Maddie said.

  “And his teeth are blocks of candy,” Kenzie pitched in and Maddie liked that.

  “Good one,” she said and she wrote it down. “Um, he’s also very handy.” She chewed on her pen. “He’s patient, he never gets upset, he makes the nicest dinners and he let us get a pet.”

  “Very good,” I said. Dave the saint. My mood plummeted, meanwhile Dave grinned from the kitchen sink.

  “All the school moms like him,” Maddie continued and I shot a look at Dave who shrugged. “And
he’s never frightened, not even when we watch scary movies.”

  “That doesn’t rhyme properly,” Dave said and Kenzie nodded in agreement.

  “I know but I’m tired of writing this poem,” Maddie said and Dave shook his head.

  “Not good enough, young lady. You can’t just say you’re tired of doing something. You have to wrestle it into submission, make it bend under your will.”

  “Wrestling!” Maddie giggled. “All right but I only need one more line, the others are fine.” She knotted her forehead and concentrated hard. I watched her and thought it was amazing that Maddie was my daughter. I felt no connection to her at all. I needed to mention that to Gerstein, but then I remembered that relationship had gone down the tubes.

  “All the school moms like him, at math he likes to win, and he teaches us how to swim.” Maddie gave a triumphant glance at Dave who smiled.

  “Good enough.”

  “Then my homework is done. Can me and Kenzie go and play some Xbox before bed?”

  “Half an hour,” Dave said and he looked pointedly at his watch.

  I picked up Muffin and cuddled him but the dog wriggled out of my grasp, and rushed off to be with the girls. I poured myself another glass of wine, and felt unloved by God, the universe, and my family. Dave sat down next to me.

  “I’m sorry therapy is being tough,” he said and my eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m a bitch. And listen to how they love you. You get love poems while I forget they can’t wear nail polish.”

  “It’s nothing,” Dave said and he stroked my hair, which only made me cry harder.

  “I’m a bad mother,” I said. “We both know it. I’m like my father.”

  “Stop it. You’re a fine mother and you are nothing like your father.”

  Maddie came into the kitchen, took one look at me crying and started wailing herself.