Cherry Bites (12 page)

That same morning, which was a Wednesday, I phoned an air conditioner repairman and he told me that it would be at least a week before he could squeeze me in. I sensed some pleasure in his voice. So I phoned another one, and then another. Finally I reached someone who could come the next day.

I decided that my next column would be an interview with the owner of an air conditioning repair outfit. I would grill him about the power he enjoyed during heat waves when he turned people away, his sense of enjoyment in the misery and frustration of others.

After scrubbing out all of my kitchen cupboards, I took a shower. As I was towelling off, Henry called and we talked for a while, just about regular day-to-day stuff, like the weather and what we were reading. To our amazement we were both reading riotously funny travel books by Bill Bryson. Before we hung up we made a date for that evening, to go and see
Mighty Aphrodite
.

I put on a cool dress and went down to see how my cupboards were getting along. They were still damp so I looked in the fridge for a while. When I was a kid, Murray used to get after me for that: standing in front of the fridge for long periods of time, letting the cold air out, causing the mechanism to work too hard.

There was nothing of interest. There was Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream in the freezer but it was too early in the day to get started on that. For me it’s more of a nighttime thing, like brandy and cigars.

Finally I sat down in the living room and forced myself to have another look at Nora’s journal.

Spike walked backwards across the room trying escape his cone.

February 1959

She would sell them both if the price was right.

That was what she wrote.

Nora hadn’t loved Pete any better than she’d loved me. She’d had her romantic notion for a while of his being the next Leonard Cohen—a poet’s mother would be a good thing to be—but when that vision died I think she must have started to fade away.

It was possibilities that kept her going and when those turned into dreams of what might have been it was time for her to die. It couldn’t have been anything but bone cancer. I pictured her real self, the part of her that lived in her marrow, screaming to get out. She squashed it down and painted a picture of a woman who didn’t exist, the mother of a pretty family whose members had healthy jobs and creative streaks. The stuff of her bones nearly suffocated and then it reared up in an abnormal show of strength and ate her up.

I was shocked to read in the journal that there had been an older sister who died, a girl before me. She was born dead. Nora moaned about her. Of course she loved her; she was easy to love. But she never gave her a name. She’d just been Baby Girl Ring. I wondered if she had been buried or just thrown away. What happens to stillborn babies? Myrna would know.

There was an entry that told of her indifference toward her remaining children, even Pete. She ignored us both.

1963

She doesn’t answer their questions or say goodnight at bedtime. It gets easier for her.

It wasn’t just my asking a question that she didn’t answer, or telling her a joke that she didn’t laugh at. I’m sure all kids’ mothers are guilty of those kinds of things. I remembered times when I was a kid when it went much further than that.

Once I was walking home from school at lunchtime—it must have been grade one because I was carrying our class photo and Mrs. Twerdochlib was the teacher in the picture. I could hardly wait to show it to my parents. Murray was at work, of course, but I saw Nora in the yard working in a flowerbed and I broke into a run. When I slowed down as I entered the yard she looked over my head and called out to Mr. Staples across the way, “Hello, Wes! Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

He waved and smiled at her, resting his hands on top of his rake.

“We got our school pictures,” I said, puffing with exertion and excitement.

Nora stood up, tossed her gardening gloves on the ground and sauntered across the street to talk to Wes Staples, brushing dried leaves from her capri pants as she walked.

Maybe that’s where Pete had gotten it, his clean way of dismissing any idea of me.

Inside the memory, I pictured Nora swaying her hips a little to entice Mr. Staples. But I might have invented that part.

I wondered if Nora had hurt Pete as easily as she had me when we were kids. After those first years of his fragile health, I’m not sure there was much between them at all.

Murray made up for Nora the day of the photograph; when he got home he asked me questions about several of the kids in the picture. He fastened it up in the kitchen, making room for it on our bulletin board, and he insisted that I was the prettiest girl in the class. On the day of the photo I had worn a white blouse and my school tunic with the Nordale crest on the front.

I flipped to 1939. October.

Luce is skin and bones. Her head is huge. She is going to die and I will be left alone with Mr. Dickson Trent. How could she do this to me?

I try to make her eat. She has stopped taking even water. I see in her black eyes that she knows why I want her alive.

She is giving me to them. I hate her and her wrong death.

There was a drawing of a monster. It was done in the winter of 1940. Nora would have been eleven years old. It looked like the creature that burst out of someone’s stomach in
Alien.
My mum was ahead of her time in her visualization of monsters. For eyes she had cut out a pair from an old photograph and taped them on. The tape was yellow and stiff and came undone when I touched it. I got some fresh Scotch Tape from a kitchen drawer and sat down at the dining room table to fix the eyes neatly back in place: a small effort for my mother. The monster was hideous. Something tweaked inside of me.

The photo album that Roy, the roofer, had found in the attic last winter was in a drawer in the dining room. I turned to the picture of Great-Aunt Luce, the one of her in later years when she no longer looked like me.

Her missing eyes lived in the face of Nora’s monster. My mother had cut them out and taped them in place. Her journal monster was Luce Woodman.

No wonder she’d had an aversion to me. My resemblance to her great-aunt made her think she’d given birth to another Luce.

I ached for the aunt. She took what she thought was her only way out and it earned her monster status. It was wrong of her to leave the girl, but… Yes. It was wrong of her to leave the girl, but...it was.

The eyes. I tried to study the eyes. They were too small to be anything but black and without life. I couldn’t find evil in something so small.

My eyes are somewhat sad, I guess, with their downward turn, but they are bright and clear. A mixture of good and bad, I hoped, tilting toward good. Not wicked. I would check with Joanne.

1939, November

Luce is dead. Darcy Root was with her when it happened.

The monster should have been Darcy Root, not Luce, I thought.

1940, spring

She lay down for the men tonight. She closed her eyes and it wasn’t much worse than cleaning out the barn. The same kinds of stinks.

Nora was talking about herself here. It was the first time she talked about herself as if she were someone else.

1951, winter

She bit the girl. While the mother worked to change her, the girl kicked her, knocking the putrid diaper onto the floor. She kicked her while the mother did the creature the favour of trying to make her clean again. Through a mist of red the mother saw her future, as clear as the first morning in a new world. And she didn’t want it. She wanted something else: not to be a mother. She bit the tiny quiet girl on the instep of her right foot. The bite drew blood, but nothing she couldn’t staunch herself, nothing she couldn’t explain away.

I didn’t find it odd or surprising that Nora hadn’t wanted to be a mother. I didn’t want to be one myself. But I wished with all my heart that it had been someone else’s mother and not mine who hadn’t wanted children, or who hadn’t shifted inside when she held her bouncing baby in her arms for the first time.

Enough with her journal. After reading about the bite I set it aside. It served no purpose except to make me the saddest woman on Monck Avenue.

The third thing to happen that caused me to do so much looking back, and far and away the most momentous of the three, happened on a Thursday night in late August.

Henry and I ate calamari and bread at The Forks. Then we sauntered around and he bought me an amber necklace from a sidewalk vendor. He fastened it around my neck. We walked back to my house where Henry had left his car. He didn’t come in. His kids were having a pool party and he figured he should get home to make sure no one drowned or got naked. We kissed through the driver’s window and he drove away.

I walked up the front sidewalk to my house. A dark form emerged from the branches of the weeping birch. My blood cooled and a buzzing began in my temples. It formed a living cap on my head.

“Hi, Cherry,” he said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak my name.

Pete loomed from the shadows of the birch tree, stepped back again. His white face glowed like a thin moon from the cloak of low branches.

I saw him see me like I did in the hospital after the accident, when he looked at me for the first time since he was one year old. He looked too closely now, as he did then, and I didn’t welcome his eyes. I turned away from them and ran inside the house, locking the door behind me. Out of my bedroom window I watched him appear in the radiance of a streetlight. He headed down the avenue toward the river.

For several minutes I stood paralyzed and then I took the phone inside my bedroom closet and called Henry at home. His daughter, Gina, answered. I heard party sounds in the background. Young hoots and laughter.

“He’s not home at the moment, Cherry. May I take a message?” she said. “Oh wait! I think I hear him in the garage.”

I worried that the phone would get lost in the party. After some long moments Henry said hello and I babbled.

He lives in St. Vital on Victoria Crescent. It’s not very far away. I hunkered down among my dresses and shirts. My teeth were chattering and I clenched my jaws till they ached. The doorbell rang.

I raced to meet him and we stood outside on the steps. I apologized for forcing him to come out again.

“It’s okay,” Henry said. “Everything’s fine at home. No one’s naked or even drunk. Kids today, I don’t know.”

He continued talking. My eyes fastened on his mouth but his words lost me. They were familiar but their order seemed wrong. I wanted to forget about why I asked him to come by.

“Are you listening, Cherry? This is important. Do you know who the guy was?” He took both my hands in his. “Was it someone that you’ve interviewed?”

His words clicked into place like Scrabble tiles.

“It …it was Pete.”

“Pete?”

“Yes.”

“Pete who?”

“My brother Pete. Our Pete.”

Henry sat down on the steps and pulled me down with him. “Our Pete’s dead.”

“I know he’s dead. But Henry, it was him. I saw him. We looked at each other.” I shuddered. “He spoke my name.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He went off toward the river. I wasn’t going to follow him.”

“No, of course not. Let’s phone the police.”

“Police?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because Pete’s dead and they’ll think I’m a crazy woman. Maybe I am a crazy woman. And if he’s not dead, he’s my brother. I can’t call the cops on my own brother.”

Henry looked confused. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“Maybe it’ll never happen again,” I said. “Maybe it was a mirage.”

“What about Frank?” Henry said.

“Frank?”

“Yeah. Frank Foote. He still lives around here, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. But what about him?”

“Let’s phone him.”

“Jesus, Henry. Why?”

“Because he’s a cop. Because he was a friend, too, and a really decent guy, as I recall. He wouldn’t have to make it an official police thing, but we could use some help. And he’d believe you, wouldn’t think you were crazy.”

“How do you know?”

Henry took my hand and kissed my fingers.

“Well, for one thing he knew Pete pretty well when we were kids. I don’t think he would think this was all that out of character, Pete turning up after he’s dead.”

I remembered Frank’s face peering out from behind the bushes the first time I thought Pete was dead, hanging from Mr. Whitall’s tree, a million years ago.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Pete did have quite a reputation as a magician.”

“There you are then,” said Henry, as though the rest of our lives had been settled satisfactorily.

“Frank’s probably busy,” I said. “It’s been quite a summer around here, what with the baby being found in Greta’s rain barrel and all.”

“That’s pretty much died down by now, hasn’t it?” said Henry.

“I guess so.”

I’ve always known Frank Foote. He’s the same age as me, so we were often in the same classes at Nordale School and then later at Nelson Mac.

Frank had a crush on me in grade two. Once, at the Norwood Community Club, I was standing on my head during a dance class and he rushed in and kissed me on the lips. He was called Frankie in those days.

His crush didn’t last. I watched him stop loving me when he heard me call my brother Assface. My meanness scared him away.

So Henry phoned him out of the blue and I listened on the extension in the laundry room. It was late, almost midnight, and Frank was flossing his teeth. He told Henry that. It’s the last thing he does before looking in on each of his kids and crawling into bed.

I could tell Frank was glad to hear from Henry, but leery, as he listened to what he had to say.

“I want to help, Henry,” Frank said, “but I can’t, unless you make a call to the police.”

“Why?”

“Well, it sounds like one of those situations where you want a cop, but don’t want it to be a an official police situation.”

“Yes.”

“I get a lot of those, mostly from people in the neighbourhood. And I swore after the last one that I wouldn’t do it again.”

“Oh,” said Henry.

There was a long pause and I listened to someone’s breathing, not knowing if it was Henry or Frank. Then I realized it was me and I put my hand over the mouthpiece.

“Why are you so hesitant to call the actual police?” Frank asked.

“Because nothing has actually happened,” Henry said. “No crime, as such.”

“Well, it sounds like trespassing to me. Or stalking. Mischief?”

“But Cherry is sure it was her brother.”

“Pete.”

“Yeah. And Pete’s dead.”

“Yes.”

Frank was quiet again, waiting for Henry to continue, I guess, but there was nothing more to say.

“I see what you mean,” Frank said. “It’s complicated.”

“Cherry is worried the police will think she’s crazy,” Henry said.

“Where is she now?” Frank asked.

I held my breath.

“She’s in the laundry room listening to us on the extension.”

I could have killed him.

“Thanks very much, Henry,” I said.

Frank chuckled. “Hi, Cherry.”

“Hi, Frank. I feel like an idiot.”

“Don’t,” Frank said. “How’s this for an idea? I’ll come to see you, but not till tomorrow morning.”

He sounded firm in his decision. I could feel Henry not wanting to push it, wanting to agree, hoping I wouldn’t say anything to wreck it.

“Thanks, Frank,” I said. “That’d be great.”