Crossings (7 page)

We moved in, Jocelyn and I. And one week later, Ben signed himself out of Essondale. ‘I was wrong. I couldn't have worked there. Crease, I mean. They keep you busy all the time. It's ridiculous. They took away my razor.'

There was nowhere else for him to go. I let him move into the sun porch. Had to order a complete new set of blinds. Thirty-two dollars and fifty cents. Made the drapes out of a nice blue and brown striped flannel, eight dollars. The bed was the big blow: forty-eight ninety-five. I just gave it away two weeks ago.

Jocelyn and I slept in the big bedroom. We could still rent the other, with Ben in the sun porch. But then Francie, my youngest sister, arrived. Ben would spend hours telling her how he was going to commit suicide.

I can come back to this. I don't have to talk about this now.

It's a year later, almost a year. Yes, a year. I am divorced now. I'm in West Vancouver doing housework for a week and Jocelyn phones.

‘We rented the room!'

‘Oh good.'

‘To a man.'

‘Yeah, well, we knew that might happen.'

‘Well, I figure we can use the money.'

‘What's he like?'

‘He's a clerk at city hall.'

I see a pale blond man, glasses, concave chest.

‘That sounds all right.'

‘So when you coming home?'

Mik tells me his side of the story later.

He'd been out of the Pen about eight months. Living downtown on Granville Street, in hotels that have names like the Helen's and the Queen's. He was sitting in the Helen's one day and he decided to go across the bridge. To sit in the Helen's is distinct from to crash at the Helen's. If you sit, you are in the beer parlor.
To go across the bridge
means to go straight, become respectable, get a job. He was just sitting there, boozing it up with the buddies, and it came over him, how he had to go across the bridge. When he got out of the Pen he was still gimpy, but Welfare fixed his back and then he did the odd bit of benny snatching and so on to augment his Welfare cheques. A bit of B & E now and then. Most times he crashed with one of the buddies in the Helen's. His buddies laughed at him, but he just up and did it. First he and Taffy got a suitcase from one of the rooms and stuffed it with old newspapers from the lounge of the Helen's.

‘You can tell if someone's carrying an MT,' Mik said to me later. ‘A guy forgets and hoists it,' he illustrated, ‘so you got to stuff it.' All he owned in the world was the clothes he arrived in: a khaki shirt, khaki trousers, sandals, not the fashionable kind. Sandals with holes in them and buckled-down straps. Like children wear. That was all he had. Ben would have loved to have been so free.

In one of the newspapers was our ad, Jocelyn's and mine. We'd switched from the Female Only classified section to Men/Women. It was already two weeks old.

He borrowed a buck from Taffy. Then he humped the suitcase across the bridge. On the other side, he got a taxi to our house, with the buck.

‘Your dumb sister!' he says to me. ‘She never even saw me drive up.'

Jocelyn is a tall thin pre-Raphealite girl who moves through life in a Mr Magoo way, miraculously avoiding all pitfalls and mud puddles. It is a family joke. One day she inadvertently became engaged to an Arab exchange student. ‘But we were talking about agrarian reform,' she said wonderingly, after he had made a scene in Acadia camp. ‘He was telling me about his father's farms, and all I said was I would like to see them.'

‘I come up in a cab and does she see me?' Mik said. ‘Boy! Your dumb sister.'

He knocked at the door and Jocelyn answered it. Yes, she said vaguely, we still had the room, nobody wanted it. You had to share the bathroom, she supposed that was why. It was just a sleeping room.

‘What a salesman,' Mik said. To me.

She took him upstairs. It was nice and bright, I'd cleaned it before going to West Vancouver, and it had new curtains. But it wasn't much, I guess. The bed cost ten dollars and the vanity, one of those elaborate three-way mirror things, was eight, from Love's auction. Jocelyn contributed the rug, a shag. There was a built-in cupboard arrangement for shirts and so on.

Jocelyn said to me later, ‘Do you think that was all right? Sixty-five?'

Mik has asked for board as well as room.

‘I didn't think he'd go for the share system,' said Jocelyn. We'd had actresses for a while and we shared everything four ways: food, rent, utilities. Our food never came to more than four dollars a week each.

‘He asked for board too, so I said sixty-five,' she said to me on the telephone. She was worried about making a profit. Neither one of us believed in landlord profits. ‘But I figure our time is worth something, cooking and putting up bag lunches and all that.'

Mik said, with professional tenantese, ‘How about linen?'

‘What? Oh, sheets, you mean? Okay. Sure.'

‘My personal laundry?' he said, pressing his luck.

‘Oh sure, just throw it down the chute there. Don't leave the door open though, Sally got excited the other day and fell down.'

‘Unh?'

‘Our cat. They were tearing around the place and she got excited and jumped into the laundry chute. She went all the way down. But it was okay, there was a whole week's wash down there. It was all right. It just scared her. Only we have to keep the chute door closed.' She was worrying the problem of bag lunches. Mik had asked for board and she'd assumed this meant bag lunches, so she was trying to figure out the schedule. If she did his bag lunch when she did hers, which would be reasonable and efficient, what chore would I then swap? Jocelyn was scrupulously fair about housework. She hated it, and still does, going Slam Bam Thank You Ma'am through everything. She was wondering if it would be fair to ask me to do two breakfasts to her one for bag lunches every night. I drove her mad with my nit-picking. She did everything she was supposed to, but I would wait eagerly for my turn at the kitchen, the wash, the bathroom, the floors, because now I could do it properly. She doesn't remember any of this. She says, ‘I don't remember you being so domestic.' And, ‘I left under the kitchen sink for you,' when I come to visit. ‘God, Vicky, you've changed a lot. You never used to be so fanatic.' Our bedroom was schizophrenic. Jocelyn viewed it as not in the public domain and therefore never made her bed or put anything away. It was as though an imaginary line were drawn down the floor: on one side Dionysus rampant; on the other Athena couchant.

‘I'm a clerk down at city hall,' Mik said.

‘Oh, that's nice,' said Jocelyn. ‘I'm a student, but I'm working as a waitress till summer school. I have to go pretty soon.'

But Mik was going to get the other part of the ‘we' out of her. He'd gone this far and he wasn't going to stop now. He knew she couldn't be the real landlady.

‘Your husband a student?' But he had looked at her hand.

‘Oh I'm not married. I live with my sister.'

‘Oh. She's the landlady, your sister.'

‘We're both the landladies,' said Jocelyn.

He waited in the dining room while she found the extra key.

He couldn't believe it. He had to say it, even if she didn't ask.

‘Uh, I'm short right now but I'll pay you Monday.'

‘Oh sure.' She hadn't even thought about asking for money.

‘I mean,' said Mik later, ‘I don't think she should be running around loose.' Shaking his head. ‘Neither one of you should be running around loose.'

We weren't very business-like, Jocelyn and I. One of the act­resses had invited an actor to stay for the weekend and he'd remained for four months. At the end, Jocelyn said to me, in a cross voice—being materialistic always makes her cross; she has to get mad to do it—‘I think we should ask John for something.'

We decided that it wasn't fair to ask John to pay toward the rent as he was sleeping in the sun porch, which wasn't heated. But he should pay four dollars a week toward the food, or what­ever it worked out to once he was chipping in. And, ‘Maybe he could do the furnace,' I said.

The furnace. My god. All that bit about the wood stove up at the island,
I
could make a fire. Every day I got the furnace going. Well, then, what was I doing, letting Mik show me how to … Oh. Yes. Mik didn't know that I could make a fire. And I let him
show
me, helpless lady that I was.

Anyway. Jocelyn and I drew straws and I lost. John was quite pleased to pay four dollars a week, we should have asked before. He'd wondered once or twice. But he never did make up the furnace. They didn't have call until noon, and I start work early.

‘Well,' said Mik, ‘I'll just leave my suitcase upstairs then.'

He walked back across the bridge in a euphoria of success, burst into the beer parlor at the Helen's and said, ‘I made it.' They didn't believe him at first. Then he did a B & E and went on a five-day bash.

The West Van trip had ended rather disastrously for me. I'd rushed back that morning to see the Nut Lady. ‘You've got to put me away,' I said.

Now I was seeing a therapist.

When Ben signed himself out of Essondale, I had a long talk with the doctor in charge. Crease, I mean. Crease.

‘You might need some supportive therapy yourself,' he said.

‘But what's wrong with him?'

‘The prognosis is not good,' he said. ‘He's a latent homosexual.'

I didn't believe it. I still don't.

‘We don't usually do this, especially if you yourself were to con­sider therapy, but we think you had better think about getting a divorce.'

‘Can't he get therapy?'

‘We don't recommend it,' the doctor said. ‘But you might con­sider the clinic. It's free.'

Free. Yes, well, thank you very much but I pay my way. If it's free, how can it be good? I thanked him very much and went back to the house.

In the mornings, Ben slept. Around noon he would get up and go down to the dining room where Francie was working on her correspondence lessons. Like me, she was exempt from public school because of ill health. Actually, she could have gone, but she hated the confusion. It was easier to whip all the lessons off in one fell swoop and then concentrate on life.

I was upstairs at the desk but I could hear snatches of the con­versation:

‘What you do is get hold of some potassium cyanide,' Ben is saying. ‘And then you put some in a tablet, one of those cylin­der tablets you can put together. Then you get a lot of other tablets the same shape, colour, and you put them in a bottle and you take one a day, only they don't have anything in them, or maybe baking soda, and then that way it becomes habitual.'

‘But how do you get hold of the potassium cyanide?' Francie says seriously.

‘Yes. That's the problem. Vicky could have got it if she were still at the lab.'

And then there was the sure-fire bathtub method: ‘But Ben, if you turn off the lights, you won't be able to see to get your wrists in position for the razor blades.'

‘Oh yes, that's right,' Ben says. This is the one where he gets into a hot bath so he can't feel a thing, and the machine comes down, automatically, and
slice.
The lights had to be out so he couldn't see the water turning red.

Francie comes up from the States and I say to her, now, ‘What else happened that fall? I can't remember clearly. What were Ben's great suicide plots?'

‘Oh god, I don't know,' and she laughs. ‘Ben was great.'

‘Great?'

‘He was so funny, even about suicide. The Rube Goldberg varia­tions. He was so great.'

‘I can't remember. About his jokes. I know he was funny. But I can't remember. It's not fair, not to put in how funny he was. But I can't remember. What happened? I can't remember. How did you go? I don't even remember your going.'

‘I had appendicitis. Don't you remember?'

‘Did you? Did you have them out?'

‘It. I had it out. Don't you remember? I had to go home. They went swish! and it popped out.'

‘I don't remember. I can't remember about your appendix.' And later, when she is having a bath, I go in to make sure. Yes. There's a scar.

‘My god,' I say.

‘Well, you were pretty far away, that fall. What a weird time! And I'm coming out of the ether and the nurse says, “How far gone are you, dear?” Because I hadn't had my period for four months.'

‘Oh that's right, what was his name?'

‘Carlos Johnston,' Francie says gloomily.

‘Didn't I call the police because you were out late?'

‘Yeah. Boy, was I furious. Don't you remember, Mom came out and took one look at him. Big black booger, and she whisked me home?'

‘And he raped you,' I say, feeling the old fear; the old guilt. I hadn't looked out for her.

But Francie doesn't answer this. ‘What was I?' She is sitting soaping her breasts in the tub. ‘Was I fourteen or fifteen?' We work it out. Fifteen.

When Jocelyn came home from class, Ben would tell her all over again.

At least, that's how I remember those months. I wore an eighteen-and-a-half size dress. I was enormous.

But Jocelyn's version is quite different. One day her creative writing instructor phoned me and told me she'd written ‘a very interesting play. About you.'

‘Can I read your play?' I say to Jocelyn. She is cuddled up on the front room sofa with David. I am trying not to show how much this bothers me. Public displays of affection, ugh.

‘No, Vicky. I couldn't.'

So I sneak it. One day when she is out, I take it from her desk and I read it. It's lying right on top, she trusts me that much. On the cover it has ‘A' and
‘Most
interesting.'

Is that true, about Joss cuddling with David? No. They still don't. When he got home at Christmas, the most they did was touch each other lightly on the shoulder. David is even worse than me about public affection. It is all in my mind. They are just sitting there, but the charge is high.