How to Get Along with Women (15 page)

Sometimes, if Jim was sleeping and wouldn't notice she was gone, Nadine came in and had a pint on her own. Once she had sat at the bar and cried over the crossword because she'd done it all in pen and it was wrong and needed fixing, and the brown-eyed bartender had brought her a slice of pie. You're just a wee little thing, he said. And you push yourself awfully hard.

Now Nadine walked right by him, because Jim was there of course, but she raised her own thumb to her sweet, tiny teeth and bit down. She went into the bathroom and sat for a moment, and then she wiped her bum and washed her hands and walked back to the table. Jim was eating a burger and Nadine had chicken fingers. She picked up a slice of lemon and squeezed the juice all over her meat.

If you don't start paying attention to me, Jim said, I'm going to have to start seeing other women on the side.

That Suzanne Grady, he said. She's always trying to sit in my lap.

Nadine looked over at Suzanne, who was their waitress. Suzanne was leaned up against the bar, twirling a string of blonde hair around one finger and staring at the teletype news on a screen mounted over her head. There was a piece of banana meringue pie on the bar in front of her and the bartender was eating it and reading the sports. He lifted the meringue layer off with his fork and the banana custard went down in two bites.

I gave you a blowjob last night, Nadine said. A long one. What are you talking about?

Yeah, a blowjob, Jim said. But was it sincere?

Nadine said she wasn't sure how a blowjob could be more sincere.

I think you've given better blowjobs in the past, to other guys you knew before you knew me, Jim said. I get all your leftover blowjobs. What's wrong with you, anyway?

You are throwing the baby out with the bath water, here, Jim. Nadine crunched a carrot stick and it was very angry crunching. You can have Suzanne if you want her. She looks like a horse, Nadine said. Ridden hard and put away wet.

Then Jim pushed up to leave and Nadine had to beg him on her knees to stay because she had left her wallet at home. She didn't even have her wallet and who was going to pay for all these chicken fingers and burgers?

Across the room, the brown-eyed bartender looked up, his fork quivering with meringue.

One lousy burger, Jim said. But he went with Nadine to the bar and paid, because she was really on the verge of being upset and she might stay upset forever and then what would he do? Suzanne Grady took the money and made change with her belt. Her hands took the cash and went into the pockets on the belt and came out again with coins. She was able to do all of this without taking her eyes off the teletype.

Jim put the coins down on the bar. Nadine noticed that the bartender had left a sliver of meringue and that he had folded up the sports. The bartender kept his eyes on Jim but his sugary plate moved slyly along the bar toward Nadine. Her finger inched toward the leftover pie. Jim turned to go and she popped the meringue in her mouth. Where it exploded and melted away, all at once.

They walked up the hill to home.

You're a fucking cow, that's you, Jim said. You're an ice-heart bitch.

I don't even know what I've done wrong, Nadine said. We were eating lunch, she said. She wished he'd left her at the bar. She wished he'd left her there in some way that was not her fault.

Jim tore at a hangnail with his teeth and spat it onto the sidewalk. When he walked uphill, his arms hung funny, loose and long like an ape's—a thing Nadine always noticed but didn't bother saying out loud.

Another thing: he said “foil-age” instead of “fol-iage.” She had a secret list.

It was warm out and an old lady in her front yard stopped pulling weeds to watch them go by, Nadine taking three steps to each one of Jim's.

When they got up to the house, he took the stairs two at a time and threw himself against the bed, flipped open his computer and said, Go away. I don't love you anymore.

Jim looked at his computer screen. Nadine looked at Jim. Just remember you're the one who said it, Nadine told him, and then that was that. She ran down the stairs, but remembered she didn't have her car keys and dragged herself back up to the bedroom again.

Jim was standing in the closet, tearing her French Maid costume into pieces. He looked up. You'll have to get something new for the next guy!

His eyebrows were messy, as though he had been taking a long nap. In fact, the opposite was true, Nadine thought. His eyebrows were working entirely too hard.

She left the house walking. There were tulips everywhere, beginning to fade: the petals were limp and looked burnt along their edges. The sagging petals were like wobbly limbs, Nadine thought. It was too bad flowers didn't have shins. Those tulips needed backbone.

She came home when it was dark. Jim maybe sleeping.

Sleeping his mood off, Nadine called it. Sometimes he slept for days. She was in the kitchen holding marshmallows over the toaster when she heard a knock, and then another and another. Nadine licked the sugar from her fingers. The knocking wasn't the front door, it was upstairs, like in a scary movie where the phone rings and rings and when you pick it up the operator tells you to get out of the house.

You could make a book of my life, Nadine said to the toaster, and she went up the stairs to where the knocking was.

Nadine, Jim said. It's Jim.

But she couldn't see him. He was still in the bedroom. Nadine tried the knob and it turned, but the door wouldn't open. For a second she stood quiet and still. It did not seem a completely bad thing to find Jim's body on one side of a door, and her own body on the other.

It was true she'd be in trouble if she didn't get him out.

She pushed her thin frame up against the door. She gave it shoulder. Nothing.

The door's stuck, she said.

Jim, on the other side, let drop a few curses. Then: I've nailed it shut, he said.

Where did you get the nails?

For fuck's sake, I been peeing in the garbage can. Can you not knock the thing down?

Nadine: I'm just a wee little thing, Jim.

You're not, you're massive!

I'll call someone to come around and help me?

No!

Well, then, Nadine said. I've seen you put your fist through a wall easily enough. Get yourself out of there. Use a double-fist punch, how 'bout?

Jim said that if he could get an arm through that door and around Nadine's neck, he'd be a happy man, and Nadine imagined just the lanky ape-arm with no Jim attached waving around on her side of the door, covered in rubble and trying to find her throat. I'll just run a tub, then? Nadine said. Rest and relax, Jim, she said. Remember?

Nadine locked herself in the bathroom and opened the window. With both doors shut, bedroom and bathroom, she could still hear him cursing. He would kill them both, he said. Nadine was fucked as a dead horse and half to her grave.

She squirted a heavy dose of dish soap into the tub for bubbles. The night outside her window was warm and black, and she turned the light off in the bathroom too, to see how dark it would get.

She shook her dress down to the floor.

There was the streetlight or the moon. Nadine caught herself in the mirror for just a second and then stayed there a while looking at all her parts: the hard edge of her collarbone, the shoulder, the strict knot of biceps tapering to the eye of her elbow. She firmed up her fist and the biceps tightened. A little more tension and it popped out, round and shadowed. Nadine let the hand drop. She reached for a white towel where they were tucked in close on the shelf. She was surprised at her body, how good it was: small and thin and curved. The bones curved.

A real looker, she was. Banana pie.

Jim was silent now.

Nadine looked down. It was a lovely bath, the bubbles light as meringue, light as marshmallows resting on the lip of the tub. She touched it with just a toe, then pulled back again. Her knuckles swept the line of her hip.

Out in the night, Nadine imagined the brown-eyed bartender looking up. Her knees locked. Naked and invisible in the black bathroom window, tiny and grounded, just a wee little thing. She reached forward and flipped the switch.

I feel my feet, she whispered to the cool outdoors.

The room swelled with light.

The Astonishing Abercrombie!

The night she left us my mother packed up some tomato sandwiches for our next-day school lunches and set them in the fridge. She fed the dog. She wiped the counters and the top of the stove—even unplugged the elements and scrubbed around in the drip pan. Nobody ever does that. She arranged the couch cushions the way she liked them best and covered over the piano keys so the cat wouldn't walk on them and disturb our sleep. She did all these things and then she went into the bedroom and packed her one little suitcase, barely enough room for anything in it, locked it tight and walked out the door and walked down the street to the bus stop and waited. When the doors swung open Mama stepped up. I don't know where my father was. Maybe he was downstairs, watching the hockey game. Or out having a beer with Ed Forrester the way he sometimes does. Maybe he came home at one a.m. with a few drinks in him and with lovin' on his mind like that Loretta Lynn song says and found his two boys sleeping and his wife gone. I don't know. In the morning Nana Louise was sitting at the kitchen table and there was a policeman at the counter pouring himself a coffee. The thought that Mama might have willingly left him never occurred to my father. He assumed there had to be foul play involved. Nana Louise had a box of two-ply tissues in front of her and the trash can from under the sink on the floor beside her. She was going through that box at a rate of about two sheets per minute. I figured she had about ten minutes left, tops, if she kept it up. By the looks of the trash can, she'd already been sitting there for an hour easy. That's mathematics at work.

Where's Mama, said Peteyboy, rubbing his eyes.

I hit him good, really knocked his shoulder.

You dumb shit, I said. She's not here. What do you think Nana Louise is here for? Why you think she's crying? I whispered all of this, but real fierce, so he wouldn't go asking any more of his questions.

It's okay, Daddy, I said. She'll come home again, you know she will. I took my father's hand and sat him down next to Nana Louise at the kitchen table. I handed him a Kleenex.

Well, I said, turning to the cop. What do you know, Joe?

The policeman looked at me and he looked at my father. My father just sat there, staring out the window, and let his thumb roll back and forth over the tissue in his hand. The policeman had one of those little notebooks with the coil binding along the top and the pages all messed up. He had a pen too. He made mention of the missing suitcase. He wanted to know, had my mother ever done this before. This disappearing act.

Oh sure, I said. Oh plenty.

I told him how my Mama was a real sensitive soul. A painter. Not like those other mothers you see down the playground, or waiting around at the school bus stop. I pointed to the shabby shack in back of the house where she kept all her canvases and stuff. I showed where we even had one of her paintings hanging up on the living room wall. The officer looked at it for a long time.

Pretty good, he said.

You bet she is! I said. You're not fooling! Why, do you know that my mother painted that whole picture while Peteyboy here was having a nap one afternoon? Start to finish!

I pulled Peteyboy over by his pyjama sleeve. He was like Exhibit A. He was still holding onto his blankie and his bear, and that was just as well because it made him look good and sleepy. You could look at him and really see how Mama might have fit in painting pictures and everything else, all while that boy slept.

You say she's done this before? The policeman looked at my father again, but I know he won't ever tell the truth, so in these situations I like to answer for him.

Yes sir, I said.

My father said, Are you kidding me? Then he yelled it right out loud. Then he said it again low down in his throat and scratched with his thumbnail at a few drops of old milk that had dried onto the table. Nana Louise slapped his hand away. She started scratching the table with her own thumbnail.

The policeman said, What's your name, boy?

I stuck my hand out. A man wants to shake when he's being introduced, don't he?

Abercrombie, I said. But mostly everybody calls me Abe, so I guess you can too.

Well, Abe, when your mother left before—

Which time?

Doesn't matter. What I'm wondering is, do you know where she went?

Now that was a good question. I had to admit, he was doing his job. Because wouldn't you think, if a woman kept leaving and coming back, coming and going, back and forth, wouldn't you think that she'd have a place she liked to go, like a favourite motel, or even a second family somewhere else. That would make sense, wouldn't it?

No sir, I said. We don't know where she goes. One time she said she'd been to the sea, and she brought us back shells and everything. And the shells had little bits of sand on them that crumbled off and fell into the carpet, so you know she really had been to the sea, and not just to the dollar store. My Nana Louise had to drag the vacuum cleaner up from the basement and paw and paw at the carpet to get the sand out.

When I said this I looked over at Louise. She was using one of her Kleenexes to wipe the gunk out of the corners of the dog's eyes.

Mama says she'd iron all our underwear if we'd let her.

I could see the policeman was waiting on me so I kept on. I said, This other time, she took the bus to the airport and just stayed there a few days, watching the planes taking off and landing and all the people going places and coming home again. And some people who weren't from here were coming here to see what it was like. That time she wasn't gone too long, only a few days, because there's nowhere good to sleep at the airport, just those hard chairs that are all joined together at the arms. And then one time she was gone, oh, a long time, oh, a month at least, and it turned out she hadn't gone hardly nowhere. It turned out she was living in an apartment down Magnolia Street and working as a cashier at the Spare ‘n' Save. She liked that cashier work because she said it let her get a real good look at people without them thinking too much of it. She could really look 'em in the eye, she said.