Cherry Bites (9 page)

It was late on a warm cloudy afternoon. Rain was in the forecast. July makes me even lazier than usual. I have never stopped thinking of July and August as the holidays. I looked out the upstairs hall window and saw that Joanne was in my hammock. I hadn’t noticed her arrival.

“Beer?” I called out the kitchen window.

“Yes, please,” she said.

Her dog, Wilson, was snorfling around the edges of the yard. I let Spike out first and Wilson was in ecstasy. She is a huge mutt who thinks Spike is king. He appears to only tolerate her, but I’m quite sure she means more to him than he lets on. Wilson bounded over to me when I came outside with my arms full of beer and pistachio nuts. There were bits of twigs and old leaves attached to her coat.

“Grant’s got that weed-eater thing going,” Joanne said, “so I had to get out of there.”

“Tell him I can hear it all the way over here,” I said.

“Can you?”

“No. But tell him that.”

“It’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard next to his leaf blower,” Joanne said. “I can’t believe he thinks it’s a good idea.”

“What day is it?” I said.

“Friday.“

“Let’s play Scrabble.”

“Should we phone Myrna and Herm?” Joanne said.

“Yes.”

“We can order pizza or Chinese food.”

“Or Vietnamese,” I said. “This’ll be great.”

“You make truth seem evil, Cherry,” Myrna said later. “You make it seem wrong. Your column should be called
Dr. Cheryl Ring is Evil.”

I chuckled when Myrna said that, but no one else did. I cared what she thought. It wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned my column but it was the first time from that particular angle. She had a few drinks inside of her.

We had decided on Trivial Pursuit and we were sitting around my dining room table: Myrna, Joanne, Hermione and me. Smoking is allowed, as is swearing and drinking too much.

Three of us have the odd toke if Hermione brings something. She’s the only one of us who goes to the effort of buying it. There are no teenagers or husbands to worry about at my house, just Spike, the silken little lout. And he enjoys our company if we don’t get too raucous.

Dope is out of the question for Myrna. She hasn’t done anything but alcohol and cigarettes since 1975, when, after dropping a tab of Windowpane acid, she received a call from her dad who tracked her down at a party to tell her that her mum was dead,. Just exactly what you don’t want to happen. It was sudden too, a blood clot in the brain. It went downhill from there. Myrna got it into her head that she was supposed to “do” her mum. She ended up in the mortuary mucking about with the equipment, poking around at a dead woman who wasn’t her mother, thinking she was “the warm-up act,” as she put it, until her younger sister found her and took her in hand. Nightmare city.

Myrna looks pretty much the same as she did twenty years ago, just a little heavier in the face and thicker through the middle. She isn’t fat, but she no longer goes in at the waist, so she looks a bit like a fire hydrant, being so short. Plus, she wears red all the time.

“What smash 1971 tune ran eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds?” asked Hermione.

We were playing the Baby Boomer Edition.

“‘American Pie,’” I said.

Joanne and I were partners.

“Good one,” said Herm. She’s the best sport of all of us.

Joanne rolled again.

“Obsession with the truth can be as harmful as obsession with anything else,” said Myrna. “Your column could be called
Dr. Cheryl Ring’s Dangerous Obsession
.”

Her words were scaring me, but I didn’t want her to stop.

“Hmm,” I said.

“Too much truth isn’t always a good thing,” she went on. She poured herself another glass of red wine, spilling a little on the game board and on her shirt.

I went to the kitchen for a damp cloth and dabbed at our sticky and faded board. I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance. Rain began splatting against the window in huge drops.

“Sometimes,” Myrna said, “in certain circumstances, a lie is a good thing.”

“I don’t agree,” I said and tossed the rag toward the kitchen. It hit the doorjamb and landed on the floor. Spike went and sat beside it.

“How was torturing your good friend Dr. Bondurant beneficial in any way?”

“That was ages ago,” I said.

“So!”

“It wasn’t torture for him. He could take it.”

“Bullshit!”

“Plus, I think it benefitted the ratio of truth to lies floating around in the stratosphere. That needs evening out sometimes.”

“That’s horseshit,” she said.

I knew it was. I considered telling her she looked like a fire hydrant.

“You don’t care about people,” Myrna said.

“That’s not true,” I said. “I care about you guys.”

“Do you?” she said.

“Okay, for a pie,” Herm said. “Whose last big hit was 1963’s ‘Forget Him’?”

“Bobby Rydell,” said Joanne. “Yay! We got a pie!
Forget him, ’cause he ca-an’t see-ee you,
” she sang. “
Forget him ’cause he has no eye-ey-ey-ey-eyes.”

Hermione laughed. “Those aren’t the words, you crazy old slut.” She gave Joanne a little shove.

“God, we’re good,” I said. “No one’s better than us.”

“I’m not old,” said Joanne. “You’re old.”

She got up and looked out the dining room window at the rain. It was coming down in torrents.

“Do you, Cher?” Myrna was still at me. “Do you care about us?”

She hadn’t called me Cher in a long time. I didn’t like it. She pronounced it
chair
, just so you know. She was drinking fast and her words were starting to come out flabby.

“Yes! How could you not know that?” I said. “And don’t call me Chair. I don’t like having a name that sounds like something you sit on.”

“Would you tear me to shreds if you interviewed me for your column?” she asked.

Myrna was a lousy drunk.

“I wouldn’t interview you,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

“But I’m an undertaker. You could crucify me if you wanted to. You could accuse me of all kinds of weird things.”

“I wouldn’t want to.” I knew where this was leading.

“That in itself is dishonest then, isn’t it? Keeping certain people safe from your toxic pen because you think they are your friends? You’re a liar, Cherry, the biggest liar of them all.”

“Okay, Myrna. That’s enough,” Herm said. “I’m going to take you home before you make me slap you.”

“Yeah, I should call it a night too,” Joanne said from the window seat. “I want the rain to stop,” she went on, pressing her nose against the glass. “I hate the rain.”

“How can you hate the rain?” Hermione asked, joining her at the window. “It’s one of the good things.”

“I worry about our roof leaking and seepage in the basement, and mould forming in the closets. Our house is so old.”

“Do you have any of those things?” I asked. My house was older than Joanne’s.

“No.” she said. “And I’m worried that I’ll get wet and never get dry again.”

“Maybe you should see a psychiatrist,” said Myrna.

She rested her face on the table now. I wanted to tousle her curly hair but I was afraid to.

“The rain’s gonna let up tonight. It’s starting to right now,” said Herm. “Look. It’s coming down lighter. And the thunder’s getting further away. Tomorrow’s going to be sunny and dry. It’s going up to twenty-six.” Hermione always knows the forecast.

She assured Joanne and me that she would drive Myrna home. Myrna had gone quiet and I decided not to say anything more to her, but I felt terrible.

Joanne stayed with me after the others had gone. I put Van Morrison on the
CD
player.
Poetic Champions Compose
.

“Are you okay?” I said after Joanne was settled into my best chair with Spike in her arms. “Since when do you hate rain?”

“I don’t, usually. I think Myrna got me down. I hate it when she gets drunk and horrible.”

“You think she’s right about my column, don’t you?”

“Mm-hmm,” said Joanne.

“Do you think she’s importantly right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think what I do matters enough to be important in a negative sense?”

“Yes.”

I opened a window and lit a cigarette. The cool damp air sucked the smoke outside.

“It hurts you to get to people’s truths if you have to harbour so much hate to do it. And I think you do.”

“You think I harbour hate?”

“Yes. And you feed it and nurture it. I’m surprised it hasn’t burnt you down to a little pile of ashes.”

I shivered and closed the window.

“To say nothing of the other people you hurt with your so-called truths, like poor old Dr. Bondurant. Jesus, I can’t get over that you did him. I think the benefit of truth to lies that you talk about floating around out there is less powerful than hateful vibes that come out in bits of cruelty. They cancel out good stuff all over the place.”

I looked at Joanne, at her clear brown eyes and her thick mop of white hair.

She carefully set Spike down on the floor, stood up and found her umbrella by the front door. “I gotta go,” she said.

I followed her to the door. “I’ll think about what you said.”

“No, you won’t.” She kissed me on the forehead.

“Yes, I will.”

Spike rolled over on his back at Joanne’s feet so she would give his tummy a rub before she left.

“See you tomorrow,” she said to us both.

She had a short walk home to their bungalow on Ferndale Avenue.

I stretched out on the couch in the living room to listen to the rest of the disc. The couch is one I bought from The Bay soon after my family went away in 1971. Spike lay across my chest and I drifted off during “Alan Watts Blues.” I didn’t wake up till early morning, when Darius Widener’s weed-eater accompanied by his dog Mitzi’s barking frightened me into an upright position.

Nora and Dougwell Jones were together for years before they finally married. Mr. Jones’ first wife, Barbara, had had a series of strokes and was in the hospital, the Princess Elizabeth, I think. She wouldn’t die. Dougwell must have hoped she would and for sure Nora would have wished for her death, but Barbara Jones hung on till December of 1970 when one last stroke finally did her in.

Nora married Dougwell five minutes later.

It was possible that they sensed disapproval in the community or maybe they felt guilty all on their own. Whatever the reason, they decided a change of scene was a good idea and made plans to head for the west coast. Jobs were easy to come by in those days.

The idea was to take Pete with them and leave me behind. More precisely, I refused to go. I had Joanne and Myrna and my job at the Dominion store. And there was the house on Monck Avenue and a whole lot more. Henry was back in the city, though I never saw him. Winnipeg was where I wanted to be; I thought it was the centre of the universe.

It all felt good to me. It would be a chance to dwell less on my crippled little family. I needed distance from my mother and my brother, some good long Canadian miles stretching out between us.

Pete was as excited as I’ve ever seen him. Vancouver, man. He had never been anywhere. He had friends who worked on the trains in the summer and they came back from the coast with tales of pure drugs and easy girls. The way he saw it, the time was right for a move to Vancouver. He had taken two years to finish grade twelve at Nelson Mac, had taken the two-year plan, as he called it. So he was between things when they left. There was talk of his going to Simon Fraser or UBC or maybe going to forest ranger school. This was all from Nora. If Pete had any ideas about his future he kept them to himself.

My mother wanted to sell the house but I dug in my heels and promised to keep it up. At her expense, of course. Murray’s expense.

“It’s a good investment,” I said.

Dougwell agreed.

She liked that. It was the right thing for me to say. And she was okay about giving me an allowance as long as I took the upkeep of the house seriously and promised to return to school in the fall. It was worth it to her to have me out of her hair.

I worried about Murray’s ashes; I didn’t want Nora to take them. My concern was unnecessary, although I kept a vigilant eye out till the three of them were packed up and ready to go. The urn stayed in its box in the closet along with the picture of Murray that Nora had taken down from the mantel when she first brought Dougwell home.

They left on the hottest day of the summer in1971.

The flat dry world lost its colours in the midday heat. Nora was a drab cardboard cutout in the front seat of Dougwell’s Buick 6. She smoked and tapped her fingernails against the outside of the passenger door. The red of her nails was the only colour in the day.

Dougwell fussed with tarp straps—several suitcases were fastened on the roof of the car—and Pete leaned against an elm tree on the boulevard, waiting for the last minute before getting in. His oily blond hair fell past his shoulder blades. I thought I caught a whiff of his unwashed body but it could have been my imagination, like with Myrna and her embalming fluid. Joanne insisted she couldn’t smell anything on Myrna.

I didn’t know what to do, how to handle this strange goodbye. So I did nothing. Pete also did nothing; Nora reached out a hand to me, but retracted it as I began to move forward. Dougwell came around the car and gave me a one-armed hug.

“You can change your mind any time and join us,” he said.

“Thanks, Dougwell,” I said, knowing there was no chance.

The car was idling now. It had the strangest sounding engine I ever heard. I couldn’t imagine it completing the trip to the coast, but it did.

Pete got in the back seat and rolled down the window. I thought he winked at me, but I could have been mistaken about that, too.

I looked away and saw Joanne walking towards me with the Avery family dog, Boo, at her side. She still lived at home with her folks. I was so glad to see them. I wished they had been there in time for Pete’s wink. Joanne would have been able to tell me if it had happened or not; I hoped it hadn’t.

They drove away and
The Beverley Hillbillies’
theme song ran through my head as I waved goodbye to the flapping tarpaulin.

The bleached-out stop sign at the end of the block did nothing to stop the car; it drove clear through. The pale day swallowed my family; they were gone.

“I wonder if I’ll ever see any of them again,” I said.

We sat on the front steps with Boo a short distance away on the grass. He was an elderly dog who liked to sit back a bit so he could keep his eye on the whole picture, the whole herd, which in this case was just Joanne and me.

“Of course you will,” said my stout-hearted friend.

“It’s funny.” I said. “Of the three of them I’ll miss Dougwell the most. We were just kind of getting started.”

Joanne threw a tennis ball for Boo and he stumbled to his feet.

I didn’t say it out loud, but I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see Nora again. As it turned out, I didn’t.