Annabel (21 page)

“It’s cry,” she said now. She raised her cheek so it grazed his neck.

“Cry?”

“It’s where eagles cry. Not fly. No one even notices. The grad committee decided the real words were too sad for the theme, so they changed them. Cry. She plagiarized half the song in her speech.”

“She did?”

“The road is long, there are mountains in our way, but we climb steps every day.” Blah blah blah. You didn’t notice that?” Gracie said this as if being slightly stupid were a lovable trait in Wayne. She touched his jawline and moved her hand across it; he felt the pad of flesh between his testicle and anus tighten and loosen. He remembered she had told him, during spin the bottle in grade seven, how she had been kissing lots of boys since she was four. The peaks at the top of her lips were still sharp, and the scoop between them still had three little freckles, stars behind the mountains.

“You have aftershave on.” She took a hungry little sniff. “Let’s go out behind the school and drink the brandy.”

Parents and some teachers had volunteered as chaperones, but they weren’t in gear yet. They were still talking to each other, eating date squares, and fixing balloons that had come unmoored from their Scotch tape. Some male teachers were dancing with bolder girls who were on the volleyball team or the grad committee and who had been teasing the teachers about this dance for months.

“How did she get her hair like that?” Wayne asked, as Donna Palliser twirled past in the arms of Mr. Ollerhead, who looked flattered and dazed. Donna’s hair had new platinum curls, lifted above a sheen of combed hair that followed her head like the pelt of a seal. “How do the curls stay there, and what makes them so fat?”

“It’s a hairpiece. She got it done at Details and Designs in Goose Bay. She had to sleep in it last night.”

“How?”

“You use two pillows and an empty Javex bottle. You have to make a kind of mould and sleep in it, and you can’t move all night.”

Wayne looked at Gracie’s home-styled curls, pulled on top of her head too, but without the mould, the lacquer, or the Sun-In spray.

“Do you like hers better?”

“It’s pretty artificial looking.”

“But do you like it?”

Wayne admired it because it was the pinnacle of what all the girls in the room were trying to achieve, but his admiration held no affection, no desire, no longing. “It looks a bit like something out of a fifties movie.”

“She’d love to hear you say that. Which one? Elvis, Gidget, or the Beach Boys . . . what?”

Wally Michelin had entered the gym with Tim McPhail, in her satin gown. Wayne saw now that it was longer than the short dresses, but shorter than the lemon meringue confection of Donna Palliser. Wally’s dress came just past her knees, and on its sleeveless shoulder she wore one white rose. Tim McPhail had not ordered his tux from Eunice, Wayne saw that right away. His had thin satin lapels, and his cummerbund matched Wally’s rose.

“Oh.” Gracie stood deflated, looking at Wayne watching the couple, who appeared to float though they were not yet dancing. Joe Cocker ended and Rodney Montague segued into Kenny Loggins and Stevie Wonder. Gracie danced half-heartedly, then told Wayne she had to go to the washroom. When she came back out, she looked fiercer. She led him out the fire exit, which was propped open with a chair. They stood among thistles. She swigged the brandy and handed it to him. What was Rodney playing now? The bass thumped under the muffled melody and a voice wailed out. Bowie. Wayne sat in the thistles. The air was fresh out here, the stars familiar yet distant.

“What’s so interesting about Wally Michelin anyway? She never so much as opens her mouth. Are you going to put your jacket down for me?”

“My jacket?”

“So I can sit too. Why would you want her?”

He took the jacket off and she arranged her dress so it fell inside the jacket’s lining and not on the ground. He leaned against the wall. He had not realized how rough bricks are. They snagged his shirt every time he lifted the flask. What he wanted, though he did not say this to Gracie, was to talk to Wally, for ever and ever.

“I don’t want her.”

“You sure looked like you wanted her. You looked like you wanted to run over there like a little dog and sit in her lap and lick her hand.”

“I didn’t want that.”

“Do you want to slow dance with her?”

Maybe that would be the thing. Not to feel Wally Michelin’s body heat the way he’d felt with Gracie. Not that. But if he could have one slow dance with Wally Michelin, it would break the silence. He knew now, from dancing with Gracie, you could say anything you wanted when you were that close. The normal restraint that made you keep things private was gone for the few minutes of the song; that’s what music did, with the darkness and the closeness. If he could get that close to Wally Michelin, for one dance: that’s what a dance was, he saw. It was to get the two of you in your own world. You could make that world anything you wanted. You could make it as far from here as possible, yet to the rest of the room you would look as if you were still here. They would have no idea where the two of you had gone.

He could hear Black River now, closer than the sound of Bowie or Billy Ocean or Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Black River flowed behind the school and along the base of the Mealy Mountains. It went miles through birches and black spruce, and stayed small the whole way. He had often seen a leaf float down Black River without breaking the surface tension, and his mind had floated with it until the leaf went out of sight. Now the river’s sound was enticing: moving away from here on a journey, small and intimate, never-ending. That’s what the dance with Wally Michelin would be like, only shorter, unfortunately. A feeling of mystery and going forward with more than just your body. Underground streams feeding your mind. You’d ask questions and get lost together.

“What are you hoping to get with her? That you couldn’t have with me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know something or you wouldn’t be thinking it. I can feel you thinking it.” She undid his top buttons and laid her hand on that place over his heart that calmed everything. It was amazing how her hand knew the spot. She gave him more brandy. He swallowed a mouthful and its heat flowed to where her hand stayed, so he was warmed from inside and out.

He tried to explain. “Remember the last poem we did in English?”

“The one nobody had a clue what it meant?”

“By John Donne.” Brent Shiwack had complained that the word
sublunary
wasn’t even in the dictionary. But it had been. Wayne had looked it up. “Dull, sublunary lovers’ love, whose soul is sense . . .”

“Wayne?”

“Yeah?”

“Those are words, right? A poem.”

“Yeah?”

“By some dead guy. Can’t you feel my hand?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you feel this?” She touched his jaw, his hipbone. She didn’t go for the centre of him right away but found places she knew would call to that centre and wake it. He resisted and she said, “I don’t want to go all the way, you know. If that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not stupid.”

It was June and there was still snow on the Mealy Mountains. The wind blew over the snow before it came down here, and his shirt was thin. The alcohol had got to him too. This whole thing wasn’t what he wanted. The cold, the thistles. His teeth started to chatter.

“I have to pee.”

“Here.” She took something out of her dress and he was terrified it was a condom, but it was a pack of Sen-Sens. “Don’t let Mr. Ollerhead smell your breath. I’m going to use the bathroom too.”

Wayne did not have to pee. He noticed Wally Michelin’s date, Tim McPhail, at the canteen buying a Sprite and a Pepsi. He made sure his buttons were fastened and put a Sen-Sen under his tongue before asking Wally Michelin to dance. It wasn’t a slow dance; it was Cyndi Lauper singing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” It did not create the moment he wanted to create at all, and he felt stupid. He realized Wally knew he was drunk. The music was loud, and instead of saying she would dance with him, Wally stood against the wall and said something he couldn’t hear, so he shouted.

“It’s okay,” he shouted, “if you don’t want to dance with me. I just wanted to say hi.” She opened her mouth again but there was no way he could hear her, and it reminded him of a terrible summer afternoon the June after she had lost her voice.

Wayne had walked beyond the apple tree blossoming behind Treadway’s shed to read
My Darling, My Hamburger
in the long grass. But the apple blossom had lured him back under the tree. He lay with the book on his chest, listening to bees, then to the rustling of beetles in the grass, then the robin who had her nest in the shed’s broken window, then the songbirds over the whole village. Once you tuned into a sound it led you to other sounds a place was making. Distant gulls, which usually sounded harsh, were softened that day, a Saturday, just as everything about gulls is softened on a blue, high day. The gull that is raucous and starved on a sleety November day becomes a different bird in the sun: wheeling white and gold, floating in ascending spirals — you can’t believe how high — and transparent, sun shining through its wings. Then, under the tree, Wayne had heard another sound: something injured, an animal hurt, or maddened. A hermit thrush rang its high, tumbling bells over the treetops, then the harsh sound came again, almost human. Wayne left his book under the tree and carefully, silently walked to where the sound came from. There was a clearing. Wally Michelin stood alone, opening her mouth with the awful sound coming out. The sound dropped as soon as it left her, and fell on the ground. She’s singing, Wayne had realized. She’s trying to remember Fauré. He had flushed in shame and embarrassment. He backed up, forgetting his book, which was a library book that would get rained on the next day, and he would have to pay the librarian eight dollars to order a new copy. He backed up and hoped Wally Michelin had not seen him. Wally had had her back to him, but with Wally you never knew.

Now here he was, saying something inane to her. Just wanted to say hi? Stupid. He didn’t want to say anything remotely like hi. He wanted to ask her if she had seen him in the clearing that day. He wanted to hear her voice again, even if it couldn’t sing. He wanted to hear her speak, to him alone, even if
hi
was all they could manage. Maybe
hi
could be the key to their old world. Keys were smaller than the things they opened, and some keys did not look like keys. To lock his shed Treadway had a stone he kept on a string threaded behind a skinny hole in the boards. If you slotted a stick through the hole and pulled down, the stone undid the latch. Where was the stone Wayne could hand to Wally Michelin now? Tim McPhail wound his way through the crowd balancing Wally’s Sprite and his own Pepsi, his elbows managing to stick out awkwardly and gallantly at the same time. The crazy thought came to Wayne that he could give Wally Michelin his cummerbund. He unhooked the back, crumpled the material into a smashed satin rose, and slipped it into her hand.

19

Hope Chest

“H
OW,” WAYNE ASKED HIS MOTHER,
“can a postcard take five months to get here?”

“A postcard is such a scrap of a thing,” Jacinta said. “It’s a miracle any arrive at all, especially from across the sea.”

The bridge on Thomasina’s card from Bucharest was only half a bridge. It started in the middle of a field and ended in mid-air. It was not beautiful, and it could not be completed because there was not enough money, or the engineers had failed to consider that the height would interfere with power lines on the far side, or some combination of these things, along with other factors that made the city such a mix of grandeur and chaos.

Thomasina could see how a person could become addicted to moving all over the earth. You started in a new place and the whole city, in this case Bucharest, was a spiritual opening. The people were beautiful. It did not matter that you had been so lonely in Paris you began talking to cedars in the parks. You were out of Paris now, with its smell of Gitanes and violets, and you were in Bucharest. “I have never seen,” she wrote to Wayne, “so many interesting shoes in my life. People rushing, rushing, rushing.”

After Paris, with every street corner and balcony curated, Bucharest felt random and wild.

“I like the ugly parts,” Thomasina wrote, “the old concrete-block buildings, the noise and the dirt, and half the place dug up for repairs. I like that as well as the main boulevard with its cobblestones and very old, grand row houses.”

There had been a stack of books on the sidewalk that she tripped over as she was looking at pieces of sculpture on the lintels.

“I thought it was wonderful,” she wrote to Wayne. “A book sale. Of course I realized I could read none of them. Books started at the door and came down over the steps, filled the little yard, tumbled out the gate, and spread themselves along the sidewalk . . . it looked as if someone opened the door in the morning and the books marched themselves out and plopped down comfortably wherever they felt like it. I had started to pick through them when I saw, slouched against the fence, a thin man smoking a cigarette. Not only was he surrounded by books, he was face and eyes into a book. You could not distinguish him from the books. I nearly stood on him. I laughed out loud and he never moved. I imagined him getting up at dusk, going up the steps, and saying, ‘Time to come in for the night,’ and the books would sleepily find their way back into the house for a nap . . . and burst happily out the door the next morning to do it all over again.”

Four months was the length of time Thomasina could stay in a new place and feel the euphoria that comes with exploring streets you have not seen before, hearing a new language, and eating new food. The curiosities of Bucharest would last this long but then other things would take over. She would not write a second postcard when this happened. She would not tell Wayne Bucharest was full of people wearing the same clothes you could buy at the Avalon Mall in St. John’s, or that the same fast-food chains were there, with the same seagulls cramming pieces of fried potato down their throats in the parking lots. She would not talk about the overweight people, the poverty, the sun damage to people’s skin: everyone with gigantic moles. When Thomasina grew weary of a place, when she had absorbed all the surface beauty there was to drink in, she packed her small suitcase and got on a train to elsewhere. There were times she longed to do something simple with her hands that a person who had a home on this earth would do, even if that person’s blind husband and red-haired daughter Annabel had been drowned long ago. Something simple like mixing flour, fat, and ice-cold water in a bowl with a wooden spoon, then rolling it out to make pie dough, and filling the dough with sliced apples.

Wayne wished he could write back to Thomasina. He wished her postcards did not come with no return address, and that they did not take so long to get here. The card from Bucharest was dated in April, and it was September now. What was the good of having someone for a friend, no matter how much they cared about you, if you couldn’t reach them? He could not reach any of the people he should have been close to. His father spent more time than ever in the bush. His mother sat for hours at a time in her kitchen, crocheting or doing nothing at all. The one person for whom he would have given up all other friends, Wally Michelin, was farther from him than ever. Her parents had sent her to stay with her cousin in Boston and work in her aunt’s shop. Boston in those days was where a lot of people went. There was excitement connected with the place. If you went there you would be in America, but it was the elegant and sedate part of America. So it was a place of new beginnings but it was not like the Wild West. If you went to Boston, the people back home in St. Anthony or Croydon Harbour knew you were serious about your future.

Young people had fallen from Croydon Harbour like leaves from the birches along the inlet, especially the young men, now that there were other opportunities besides trapping and hunting. A lot of boys went to military college in New Brunswick, lured by the shine on the soldiers at the American base in Goose Bay. Tim McPhail, the boy with whom Wally Michelin had gone to the prom, went to St. Francis Xavier to study engineering. His yearbook entry said his first love was physics, but any boy knew you had to have something practical to fall back on, though not hunting or trapping. The old ways of earning a living had been enough for the fathers and grandfathers, who considered them a kind of freedom and did not understand what would make a son want to wear work clothes you had to buy in a Goose Bay department store instead of coats and boots of seal and caribou. Treadway was not the only father who did not understand the new sons of Labrador, but he was the only one who did not lament about the subject with the other men. If he lamented he did so in solitude, on his trapline, or he consulted with the wild animals there. The only real friend Wayne had in Croydon Harbour was Gracie Watts, and he worried about this friendship.

Gracie’s father was the kind of alcoholic who gets nasty and red in the face and whose cruelty is matched only by his cowardice and self-loathing when not drunk. Gracie’s mother kept their house spotless. It had next to no furniture, because anything with legs or spindles, Geoffrey Watts broke. To look at Gracie’s mother you would think her pious and stern. You would think she had decided to approach life as a parsimonious woman, joyless by choice. She looked religious but she was not so much pious as she was scoured: all joy stripped from her by marriage. Gracie had seen this happen and intended to get out. She had asked Wayne to make her a hope chest and he had made it for her. He often went over to her house after her father had passed out on his daybed in the room beyond the kitchen and her mother had closed the door behind her in the little room she used as a sewing room. Their house was so quiet at these times you would think Mr. and Mrs. Watts were paper outlines, or shadows.

Wayne worried about the hope chest. There were young couples in Croydon Harbour, people his and Gracie’s age, who appeared to gravitate together by some tidal pull rather than by desire or by any conscious decision. They went to a few dances together, and before you knew it one of their fathers was clearing space at the back of the family land for a new bungalow. Then before you knew it again, the men of Croydon Harbour were digging a foundation and laying down cement, and the girl was pregnant, and in what felt like an instant the new little family was ensconced in their brand-new bungalow.

Now Gracie sat and circled the order number on a Panasonic sandwich griddle on sale for $16.99 in the Canadian Tire catalogue. “It says here it corrugates the bread and increases its surface area so a sandwich grills in half the normal time.”

“I don’t want,” Wayne said, “to be like Archie Broomfield and Carol Rich.” He had been looking at the undersides of moths that had alighted on the window outside, armoured and malevolent. The wings looked delicate but the mechanism that nourished and propelled the wings was ugly.

Wayne had dovetailed the edges of Gracie’s hope chest and made its floor of cedar to keep moths away from her pillowcases and a tablecloth her mother had edged in satin stitch. The hope chest was small, and the things in it were small, but he feared they held some sort of power he needed to guard against. He knew Gracie was buying silverware, one place setting at a time, from the Eaton’s catalogue, and that the name of the design was Sambonet.

There were times Gracie made him feel desire, like the time she had melted him and made him feel protective of her with one touch of her hand at the prom. The latest pills Dr. Lioukras had given him were cumulative: over time they had increased his muscle mass and succeeded in making him look like any other son of Croydon Harbour. His voice sounded like a young man’s voice, and he was stronger than a girl. He and Gracie looked, from the outside, like a couple.

Because Gracie wanted a home more than anything else, she came to his house when he was not working. She took him out for walks and she kissed him in the bushes. She had kissed many boys before, and she believed Wayne’s kisses were the kisses of a normal young man. There was nothing to tell her otherwise, but she had no choice but to sense that he was holding back.

“Don’t you want to make love to me?”

“Yes.” He did. When Gracie got close to him and he smelled her Evening in Paris perfume and felt how soft the skin was inside her wrists, and when she touched him with the hungry way she had, yes. It was when he was alone in his room, thinking about his life and where he wanted it to go, that he knew he did not love Gracie. She did not ignite him, though his physical body responded to the fact that she wanted him. This was not the same as being ignited through your electric and imaginative bodies, but a long time can go by in which two people remain together because of the fierce longing of one of them. A lifetime can go by, and he worried about this.

“I don’t want to be like Carol Rich and Archie Broomfield either,” Gracie said. “I don’t want to get pregnant, for one thing. And I’m going to make my own money. I’m going to take the paramedic course in Goose Bay. I’m going to do something useful. I’m going to drive a hundred miles an hour in an ambulance and carry people on stretchers and give emergency blood transfusions. I’m going to have my own job, my own paycheque, my own bank account.”

Was she telling him this so he would not be afraid of having to make enough money for both of them? While his classmates had chosen normal career paths, Wayne had continued to sell cod tongues, some fillets, and packages of Roland Shiwack’s shrimp. He sold these, gave tours, and cut wood for women whose husbands were on the trapline and whose sons had gone away to work. He knew this was a haphazard way to make a living. He did not know what else to do. How had his classmates been so certain about what they wanted to do after high school? To him the world seemed big and small at the same time. There was Croydon Harbour, with everything he knew, then there was the world outside Croydon Harbour, about which he knew nothing. How did you get to know anything?

“I didn’t know Carol Rich was pregnant.”

“Well, she is. She’s five months. That’s why her father and his brothers have her and Archie’s house half built behind the marsh. They have to have it done by the time the baby gets born next January. What did you think they were building it for?”

“I didn’t know is all.”

“And don’t think Carol Rich got pregnant by accident. And don’t think for a second that that’s what I want. I told you, I’m going to earn my own money, and I’m not going to have a baby until I’m at least twenty-five. That’s not for another six years.”

But how, he wondered, did she plan to spend those six years? He had noticed she kept the lid of her hope chest open. He could not help thinking it looked like an open mouth, hungry. He responded to her physical touch but it was her mental hunger that frightened him, and he did not know how he was going to escape from it. He felt compassion every time he looked at Gracie, with her fierce little statements about how she would staunch blood and bandage trauma victims in her ambulance. She would have a transmitter that announced urgencies in the night: wounds, heart failure, poisoning. Gracie had told him she would love this. She would love triage, emergency cauterization, administering oxygen. She wanted to be the capable one amid panic or crisis: the one needed, the one who saved. That would be her work and then she would come home, where there would be peace and quiet. This idea of peace and quiet bothered Wayne. In his fear of domestic stasis he was more like his father than he knew.

Now he watched Gracie turn to page seventeen and underline electric carving knife number A00C94. Why did the moths have to be so loathsome? The darkness around their orange bodies pressed against the window. Gracie turned the pages slowly and underlined an iron and a little vacuum cleaner with a canister you could snap in and out.

“You know what I like? That there are no bags in this model. I hate vacuum cleaner bags. You can never find the right one. My mother has been looking for an Electrolux size four bag for fifteen years, and she hasn’t found it yet. There’s no way I intend to let that happen to me.”