How to Get Along with Women (18 page)

I thought I'd show Peteyboy my trick, since I had got so good at it. I didn't have far to look for him. He was up in his tree again, even though it was pretty late. I climbed up onto his branch with a big flourish and shouted Behold! the Astonishing Abercrombie! and I began to perform for him. I was humming a little tune, because there's always music when they show magic on TV. I got to the end part and spread my fingers out to show the toothpick had absolutely vanished into thin air.

Peteyboy said, Toothpick's pretty hard to see if you're sitting way back in the gym. Toothpick's pretty skinny, he said. You almost don't have to work to vanish a toothpick. It's almost not there already.

I told him a toothpick's just nothing, a toothpick's just the beginning. I told him I was going to learn how to vanish him soon. Or the shabby shack. Or the future.

I told him how I saw Madeleine Welsher playing at gymnastics. I told him about the flippy thing her shirt could do.

Peteyboy just kept on looking down the road.

Nobody knows the future, he said.

Then he climbed down out of the tree and went across the yard and into the house.

I guess he went to bed.

After we moved to this new house, I saw our other father one last time. I was playing around the side of the yard. It was almost dark. Peteyboy must have been in bed already, but I was outside looking at bugs and doing other things that little kids do. A truck pulled up into the driveway and Mama came out of the house and got into the truck and sat in the passenger side talking to that other father, who was driving. I started to go to the truck too, because I thought maybe she was going home and then I could go with her. When I got closer I could see that they weren't really talking at all. Mama had her mouth pressed against his temple and her workshirt was bunched funny with his arm up underneath it and I could see his hand on her body, her breasts loose like she was going to bed. And then she pushed his hand down and smoothed his hair out of his face and kissed both his cheeks and got out of the truck, and he backed it away down the drive and she called to me and took me inside for a bath.

I was thinking about that when I watched Peteyboy going inside to bed. He's always going to bed before me, and missing things.

He'd left his tape recorder and headphones balancing up in the tree. I put the headphones on. They made it sound like you were sitting under a blanket. There was an old tape in the machine and I hit record. The little wheels started turning.

I stayed up on that branch for a long time still, just looking down the road. There wasn't much moon, so there wasn't much to see. You could hear the new frogs all singing from the ditch behind the house. In the spring the rainwash fills up the ditch until it's almost like a pond, and that's where all the frogs get born. And sing and sing.

I thought about what I should call the tape, should I call it okay or mon cher. My legs were hanging down off the branch. It felt like my feet could touch the ground from up there. If I was that tall, my hands could reach higher than the top branches. I'd be able to see everything and everyone, and nothing would happen without my knowing about it. I could understand what Peteyboy liked about being up in that tree. If you were that tall, everyone would know that you were magic. I thought that was about how tall the Astonishing Abercrombie should really be.

How To Get Along With Women

At night she takes him walking.

I'm wondering, she says. Is there anything you want to tell me?

They are close to the hedge line on the narrow sidewalk. His arm scrapes up against everyone's garden.

I mean, she says. I guess I mean, is there anything you want me to do? Playing at his hand, but not holding it. Smacking it lightly.

What do you think about? she says.

Like right now? he says. This is not what she means.

Smack, smack.

Then: Do you want to know what I think about?

Sure, he says.

No, really. Do you.

Of course I do, he says.

They took the two-bedroom because it was only another hundred a month. The first day she practiced hiding in all the closets and called his name to see if he could hear her. His father with the truck full of boxes. Her parents with a bedframe packed in styrofoam. You've set up shop! Good to see, good to see. Pawing at his hand for a shake. Then his own father climbing back in the empty truck and the new semester about to start.

Yellow kerchief over her hair, greasy smear of dirt under one eye.

Not dirt. Cake mix. A new-house cake while he scrubs the blue toilet. If he stands just outside the doorway, scrub brush dripping from one hand, he can watch her lever her body under the sink. Hip slipping up and out of the waistband of her jeans.

He says, Is it weird your parents bought us a bed?

A bowl-shaped cake because they don't have a pan.

Okay, she says.

Her hand slapping at his arm, and the hedge on the other side, and him in between.

Okay, sometimes. I'm in this stark white room, a big room, with bright lights and a table, like an operating room. There's maybe five or six men in there with me, but only one is in charge. The rest are like interns.

Is it a hospital? he says. His parents are doctors.

No. It just feels like a hospital. Anyway, the guy who's in charge gets the other younger men to do things to me.

What things, he says. What do you mean, things.

Everything, she says. All at once. Like, one of them's got his cock in my mouth and one's inside me and one's in my ass. Like that. And the whole thing's being filmed, and there's this big screen against the wall, and I have to watch myself get fucked in all these impossible ways, over and over again.

Do you know the men?

No. No, I'm like a volunteer. Like the actors who pretend to be sick so interns can learn how to be doctors.

Doctors again, he thinks.

So? she says.

So, what.

So, see? She grabs his hand. Now you know.

Okay.

So. What do you think about.

He considers lying. Something-something feather dusters. Anal rape.

Mostly, he says. Mostly I just think about you.

She was born here, but her parents are refugees. She never says immigrants. She grew up in the east end in a house with a concrete pad instead of a yard. She's never been to summer camp. She's never camped at all. She went to finishing school on Saturday mornings for two years running, when she was seven and eight years old.

What do you do at finishing school? he said when she told him this. His own parents sent him to Junior Rangers up in Grégoire's Mill when he was sixteen.

Oh, you know, you learn to clean your nails, you give yourself a nice manicure, you walk with a book on your head—

He thought she was joking. That exists?

Oh, yes.

She speaks four languages: one to her parents, one to her grandmother, English to him, and another besides, just for the sake of it. Her father says, With languages, you can never go wrong. After the war her father went to France and became an army interrogator, living in the Vienna French Quarter and questioning suspected Nazi sympathizers in four languages.

She plays the piano and the cello. She wanted to play the flute but she wasn't allowed.

My father said playing the flute deforms your lips, like this. She sticks her lips out in a way that makes her look inexpressibly sad. Then you're not so beautiful.

He plays the trumpet and his mother plays the piano. At Christmas his mother likes to play carols. She accompanies him, or the other way around.

He is two years behind her at school. He moved to London to be with her rather than because he cares about university. He is majoring in Horticulture. His parents wonder if he wouldn't like to switch to Bio-Med.

She worries that, living with her, he will miss out on the first year experience.

How will you make your own friends? she says. Don't you want to live in residence, just for a year?

She works for the student paper. On Tuesdays, she works all night.

Don't move here just for me, she says. Move here because you want to.

What if what I want is to be with you?

He is minoring in German.

She doesn't want him sitting home waiting for her. She doesn't want to have to think of that on Tuesday nights.

He taught her how to get in a canoe. He taught her how to play croquet. She likes cross-country skiing better than downhill because it's an endurance test and because he told her how his mother had skiing accidents two years in a row when he was a child. The first time she met his parents, the mother hiked her skirt up to the thighs to show the surgeon's scars: one over each knee.

It ruined my legs, the mother said.

When she was waiting for surgery his father marked the ripped knee with a Sharpie. He drew a black arrow pointing down and wrote the words THIS KNEE.

It was kind of a joke, he said. But I work in hospitals.

She has a little red kilt she bought at the Mission du Grand Berger in Montreal. She goes into the bedroom and fools around with clothes for a while: the kilt, long white socks, a white blouse tied up tight under her small breasts. The schoolgirl routine seems not enough. There's an eye mask she uses for sleeping during the day. She looks at herself in the mirror, this way and that. When she comes out he's asleep on the couch and she wakes him up.

What's going on, he says.

Later he finds her reading and says, I just figured it out. I was sleeping and—

It's okay, she says, waving her bookmark at him. It's okay, it's okay.

He makes friends without being in residence. He makes friends with other first year students who are already in their twenties, studying computers and business management, practical things they think will get them jobs. On Tuesday nights he sits in the campus bar with Claire and Ben and plays the trivia game. The most common form of hyperthyroidism is better known as _______ Disease. Alzheimer's Coats' Graves' Lou Gehrig's. The time ticking down, answers slipping off the screen. Sometimes he would rather be at home, reading, but he knows this would bother her.

At the newspaper, her section is usually done first. Some people are still writing on Tuesday nights, but she can't cope with a missed deadline. If the art is ready, she's done by midnight, but stays for the three a.m. banter, the pizza, the strange sandwiches the photo editor brings her from Mr. Sub stacked with strips of green pepper and black olives. She's never ordered food all-dressed. My parents are refugees, she says. She has never eaten an onion ring.

When the photo editor offers to get her a club soda, she is delighted.

She doesn't like pop. She's had Coke and Pepsi and Orange. She's never had Doctor Pepper. She's never had Mountain Dew.

In the winter he drives her up to his father's cabin in the truck with their skis strapped to the top. The cabin is small and heated by a woodstove and she sits on the edge of the bed holding a mitten over her nose to keep it from freezing. There is no toilet. His mother doesn't come to the cabin because she doesn't like places where there is nothing to do. So the cabin is not used to women.

There is an outhouse and a jar to pee in at night. She crouches with her feet on the icy floor while he lies in bed just above her. The jar has a slim mouth and she pees on her fingers, all over the floor, but it's so cold you can't smell it.

The next night she takes the jar into the other room.

Her father likes him. When her father comes to London to pick them up for Christmas break, he calls him boytchik instead of his name. He calls him the Bearded Wonder. They eat lunch together at an Indian restaurant, then her father throws their stuff—his hiker's pack, her duffle bag—into the trunk of the Corolla. A two-and-a-half hour drive. She sits up front with her father and plays with the vents and the radio.

He sits in the back. For three weeks he will live at his old house and she at hers. On the way home the Bearded Wonder rolls down his window, sticks his head out and howls like a dog.

She's never seen a bear. She's never seen a moose. When her cousin came to visit from Kyiv he spent an hour chasing squirrels on the lawn at Queen's Park because there are no squirrels in Eastern Europe.

She's never seen a beaver. How about in the museum? she asks him. Stuffed. Does that count?

No.

Then, no.

She's never had a hot dog.

But you were born here! he says.

When I was in grade one, she says, I used to walk home from school for lunch. I could smell the hot dogs boiling in other houses and I'd think, I wonder what my house is cooking? Probably borscht.

She has a cousin in Salzburg. She has a cousin in Zurich. She has a cousin in Dresden. She has a cousin in Grenoble. She has a cousin in Copenhagen. She has a cousin in Dubrovnik. She has a cousin in Gdansk.

She's sitting on the couch at his parents' house. He tells her that when his mother curls up to read, her whole body fits on one cushion.

Like this?

No, he says. Your feet are still on the other cushion.

Like this?

I think you're too tall, baby.

Like this?

When his mother leans forward to serve the soup at dinner, she tries to gauge the size of her breasts. Whose breasts are bigger?

Do you even want to finish this degree? she says. Don't do it just because your parents want you to. Don't feel you have to do anything. Your problem is all your mother, she says. Push push push.

On Saturday night she goes to the photo editor's house to watch the fights on pay-per-view. Do you want to come, she says on her way out the door.

Do I have to say yes, he says from the couch.

The fight ring surprises her. It's an octagon. The cage has no ceiling. She expected something different.

Is it gory? she asks in advance. Will I be upset?

Sometimes someone gets a broken arm, the photo editor says, and her eyes brighten. Not every time, he says.