Roost (2 page)

I find Wesley asleep on the couch with his mouth open
. I carry him to his bed, his lips and fingers tinted orange from the Doritos he ate for dinner. I put cream on the impetigo around his nose and tuck him in.

Next door I find Joan in her room. She’s taken all of the clothes out of her drawers. “Why did you do that?” She throws a shirt in the air. “Seriously, why did you take all of the clothes out of your dresser? Did you think that was a reasonable thing to do?”

“’Cause me hungry,” she replies.

“That makes a lot of sense, Joan. Brilliant. I see the connection. Lie down. It’s time for bed.”

She kicks me a few times while I put on her diaper. Her fine ash hair sticks to her face with static. I blow it causing her eyes to blink. They are big eyes and dark as a meerkat’s. I place her in her crib, say good night, and watch her flail from a crack in the door.

In the kitchen I pour a glass of red wine. Sometimes I miss smoking. As I pass through to the living room I consider what else I miss. It’s a short list and includes getting laid and getting enough sleep and the blueberry cake my childhood neighbour made on special occasions. On the other hand, I don’t miss Glen, the father of my children, his love for the Tragically Hip, the sleeveless shirts he wore to the gym, the crude size of his toenails. His early onset back fat and puffy
nipples. His penchant for forgetting people and reintroducing himself at social gatherings. He’s always been this way. Imperfect. And still I willingly procreated with him twice. At the time the sex seemed rapturous and sublime. The kind of rare and consummate experience when joy is carbonated and cumbersome and completely engrossing, and you can’t see the keeper for the bees.

When I stretch out on the couch I notice it’s mysteriously damp. Joan has chewed off the power button on the remote and I have to get up to turn on the
TV
. I switch it to
A&E.
There is a man lying on the street under an overpass. It appears he’s been shot.

After the commercial break, detectives identify the victim. He’s only twenty. A father of two. They show pictures from his prom in which he’s wearing a dark suit and a gold vest. I wonder if this is the same suit he wore at his funeral.

I fall asleep before finding out who killed Alphonse Jr., but I dream about him. It is one of those ordinary dreams where I’m doing everyday things, except I have no pants on and neither does Alphonse Jr. I wake up on the couch, disturbed. The lighter falls out of my pocket and onto the floor.

“Mommy!” Wes calls from his room. I ignore him, knowing he is likely still asleep, and stumble through the darkness to my room across the hall.

It is 3:00 a.m. What the paranormal community refers to as dead time. A period ironically said to be alive with supernatural activity. Of Beetlejuice and Alphonse Jr. and my grandmother, as Rango, competing for atmospheric space or a closet to inhabit or a crib-side seat to watch an infant sleep. But the house is silent and after several adjustments of my pillow, I am too.

The alarm goes off at 6:30 a.m
. A reminder that today will be similar to yesterday and a lot like tomorrow. Routine. A short shower, no time to shave. Stale bread, toasted and the crusts removed. Instant oatmeal for Wes. Socks that don’t match. No clean sippy cups.

“More milk!”

“How do you ask, Wes? Joan, come and eat your toast.”

I unplug the toaster and plug in my hair dryer. I suggest Joan eat breakfast three more times before turning the dryer on high, but she is fixated on the
TV
listening to an overzealous yam puppet made from pantyhose — a yam with exaggerated lips that talks too loud and sings songs about lemonade with Ron Sexsmith. Most of the parents tuning into this morning’s live performance of
Lemonade Stand
will not know him because he is not Bryan Adams or Celine Dion or the current face of Proactiv. I turn the
TV
off, and Joan reacts by slapping the screen.

“Eat your breakfast,” I order.

“It garbage,” she replies and promptly shoves it down her throat. I bend over and run my fingers furiously through my hair in an attempt to speed up the drying process. It gives me a head rush.

“Mommy!” Wes yells.

“What?” I holler back, glancing at him through my hair. “What are you pointing at?”

“The thing!” he replies, waving his oat-soaked hand arbitrarily in my direction.

“What thing? The dishwasher? The toaster?”

“The hair dryer!” he yells.

I pull it away from the back of my head. It is smoking from both ends. I yank out the plug and the hair dryer makes a crackling noise reminiscent of Pop Rocks or knuckles. I try not to panic. To not imagine that it will set the house ablaze or electrocute me.

“Quick!” I say to Wes. “Go open the back door.”

He slides off his chair with trepidation and runs to the back of the living room. “Is it going to explode?”

“No,” I say, unconvinced, “but it’s hot. Hurry up.”

Indifferent to our terror, Joan turns the
TV
back on and sits down in front of it.

Wes flips the latch and tugs on the sliding door. It takes effort and I’m reminded of his smallness. He manages to open it a bit before it catches on the track above.

“Try again,” I say.

“It’s stuck!”

The hair dryer, that I am keeping as far away from my body as I can, slips in my grasp and the barrel singes my hand.

“Asshole.”

Wes enjoys this and lets go of the door handle. He turns to face me and smiles. Maybe I’ll kick the door or throw the hair dryer and tell it to fuck off.

“Move,” I say, trying to squeeze through the narrow opening onto the deck, but I’m unsuccessful and resort, like Wes, to trying to open it further. Again it jams and I call it an asshole. Wes jumps up and down with perverse satisfaction. The yam on the
TV
starts crying because someone skipped breakfast or didn’t recycle his juice box, and just before I launch into
a feature presentation of rage, the sliding door falls clean off the tracks with the precision of a cliff diver.

I scream and catch the door with my shoulder, although I fumble my hold on the hair dryer — I snag its cord in my fist. As it dangles towards the floor I smell melted wires and failed mechanisms. I smell a plane crash. I lean the glass door against the wall so it won’t fall over and step through the vacant space to the outside. I launch the hair dryer over the side of the deck.

Joan has joined her brother at the door, and watches curiously as I climb over the railing onto the grass.

“Wes, pass me the shovel!” I holler, pointing urgently at the shovel lying on the deck near the door.

He slides it through the rails to me.

I dig a hole, bury the hair dryer, and pat the earth down with my foot.

“Go put on your coats,” I say, wiping my brow. “We’re going to be late.”

My children trip over each other, giggling and backing away from the door, and I swing the shovel up onto my shoulder in a chain gang sort of way and take the stairs up onto the deck.

There’s now a hole leading into my living room. A leaf blows in like an intruder. I can’t leave the house like this so I step inside the living room, strong-arm the door, slide it to the vacant space, and push it back into the track. It’s not straight, but when I try a readjustment, it won’t budge — no one’s getting in, no one’s getting out. When I step back and take a look at it, I realize it’s like I’m securing my home as though it were a cave. But for today, it will have to do.

I drop the kids off at Turtle Grove Daycare
. It is a squat stucco building with two wings, a boomerang of hurt feelings, pretend kitchens, and frizzy-haired teachers with varying degrees of back pain. Beside the front door there is a four-foot painted turtle with a speech bubble that says welcome friends, and though it wears a smile and has a Gay Pride shell, its anxious eyes are fixed on the roof.

After I kiss my children goodbye, Joan roams aimlessly searching for the meaning of it all, while Wesley runs to his friends at the back of the room.

“A door fell on my mom!” he says loudly.

I get back in the car and turn on the radio in search of a traffic report but find only morning shows discussing dating mishaps or playing music by people born in the nineties.

When I get to work, my assistant is using the large office kitchen sponge to clean up a coffee spill on her desk. The coffee is likely fair trade. She lifts up a framed picture of her sponsor child, wipes the desk underneath. Then she hands me a stack of phone messages that she took down for me, her writing bubble-like, juvenile, and in contrast to the steely unembellished Amnesty International postcards tacked up on her cubical walls. Phone numbers curl and swirl like they should be adorned with fairy dust or pink sugar. Letters are exaggerated as if each word carried an announcement of epic consequence: the birth of an heir to a throne, the eulogy of a
pop star, two all-inclusive tickets to Cuba. In the case of the last message from the meat manager, top sirloin,
not
T
-bone, is on special.

I grab this week’s grocery flyer and confirm the error.

“Can you send out a correction notice?” I ask.

“Already done,” she says, and shows me a picture of her newly painted kitchen on her iPhone. It’s the green of unripe kiwi flesh. I consider my own kitchen, which is yellow like everyone else’s, and has a border of roosters pecking at various heights. Several of them stare straight ahead as though posing for mug shots, their red combs crimped and bowed like beef jerky. But unlike most kitchen roosters with their stylized plumes and Tuscan shading, mine are photographs of real birds — the barnyard type who gang-rape hens and peck at small children.

I retreat to my office with the stack of messages and remain distracted by thoughts of my ugly house: the brass lighting fixtures, the dresser I’ve owned since childhood, the vertical drapes I have in common with my dentist’s office. The blue carpet. Everything cheap and slightly gross like ranch dressing or a budding cold sore. I call Glen.

“Hey. You said you would take down the border in the kitchen and you never did.”

“I’m about to go into a meeting. Is this important?”

“Yes, it’s important. I still have a border in my kitchen.”

“Right,” he replies. “That is important. Would you like me to call 911?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No actually, I don’t. I have no idea why you thought it was necessary to call me while I’m working.”

“Because you promised you would take it down and I’m tired of looking it.”

“Well I didn’t. I haven’t got around to it yet.”

“So you lied.”

“Claudia, are you for real? I don’t have time for this. If you are tired of looking at the border, then take it down yourself!”

I slam down the phone knocking a report off my desk and startling the intern walking by my office. He glances over then continues to his cube, his size fifteen feet pointing out at forty-five-degree angles like an enormous duck. I pick up the report and toss it on my filing cabinet and notice I have a voice mail. The message is from my mother.

She recites her flight information: “Air Canada Flight 643. It’s a direct flight. Okay dear? We’ll see you in a week. Kisses for Wes and Joan. Muahh!” She forgets to hang up. For several minutes she and my father discuss the whereabouts of his mouthwash. She assures him it’s already packed and then tells him to put on his shoes.

“Not those ones,” she says. “Those are your water shoes. I haven’t cut the tags off yet.”

“When did you buy them?” my father asks.

“First thing this morning at Walmart. I told you I was going out.”

Then my dad asks who she’s talking to, and my mother says oops and hangs up.

I call back to say goodbye, but no one picks up.

I take the next morning off work to get my hair done
. It is too long, and the dark roots are exposed. The salon smells like toothpaste and a Christmas tree farm. The receptionist shows me to my chair and offers me a coffee.

“Hi, Claudia.”

I spin around to see Allison-Jean lumbering through the salon towards the dryers. Her pregnant body resembles Grimace. Her hair is wet and tucked under a plastic cap.

“I didn’t know you came here,” I say, resting my coffee on my knee.

“It’s my first time,” she replies, sliding laboriously underneath a dryer with the assistance of her stylist.

“Your mom and dad seem to be having a nice time in Cuba,” she says, turning her head slightly.

“You talked to them?” I move to the edge of my chair and closer to my sister-in-law.

“Last night. Your dad asked me to go by the house this morning to see if a package had arrived.”

“What sort of package?” I speak loudly so she can hear me over the dryer’s hum.

“He didn’t say. Just something he ordered and forgot was coming today. He figured you and Daniel would both be at work.” She winces from the heat of the dryer and shrinks down in her seat.

“What did you do to your hair?” I ask.

“Just a few highlights,” she replies nervously. “I’ve never done anything with it before.”

No kidding
, I think. “Are you going to cut it too?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“You should cut it all off.”

“No way!” she protests. “I could never do that.”

“Why not?” I ask. “When was the last time you did anything crazy?”

Her stylist interrupts us to check on the progress of Allison-Jean’s colour. She smiles with approval and pops the dryer back down.

“Well, are you cutting
your
hair?” she challenges.

“Yes,” I reply.

“I don’t know. I’ve never had short hair.”

I place my coffee cup on the ledge below the mirror and adjust my cape. “So did you pick it up?” I ask.

“The package? No,” she says, scratching her head, “it wasn’t there.”

“I can do it,” I offer. “I have to go by there on my way home.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She says thanks and attempts to sit more upright in her chair. I choose a magazine from a stack beside me and try to imagine what Allison-Jean would look like with short hair.

“The usual?” my stylist asks, examining my re-growth.

“Yep,” I reply quietly so Allison-Jean can’t hear.

She leaves to mix colour and I think of my parents tramping around their resort in matching water shoes — I suspect Dan said they were necessary for protection from a list of hazards he imagined, including hot sand, glass in the pool, and plantar warts.

I wonder if they will participate in any of the evening
entertainment: salsa lessons or comedy shows. Whether my mom will drink more than a glass of wine over the course of the entire week. Whether my dad will try his luck at windsurfing or Ping-Pong. Briefly, I wonder if they will have sex there. Do they still have sex here?

In the opposite corner of the salon, Allison-Jean is walking to her chair, her hair now washed and wrapped in a towel. She chats with her stylist but I can’t make out their conversation so I continue flipping through my magazine. By the time I am ushered over to the dryer to cook my own hair, Allison-Jean has lost most of hers. It lies at her feet in small dejected piles and she stares down at it in disbelief. I hide under the dryer and then watch as she feels the back of her head and inches closer to the mirror. One should not cut one’s hair short while pregnant.

I leave the salon blond and guilty and head to my parents’ house where there is indeed a FedEx package on the front steps. I take it back to the car and notice the front yard swing is broken. The plank I sat on as a kid hangs from a single piece of rope with the free end jammed into the muddy skid below. The other piece of rope hangs solo, frayed and blackened. I transfer the package to my hip and tug on the rope with my free hand.

I remember when Dan used to push me on the swing as hard as he could. He ate too many crescent rolls back then, and though he had the agility of a gibbon, pushing me left him breathless and sweaty. He always used a running start. I remember the whoosh of the air, the jerk of the swing at the top of the arc, the eavestrough beckoning the soles of my shoes as I swung towards the house, followed by the sudden plunge when one of the ropes came loose and the slap of the earth against the side of my body. Dan led me into the house
where he administered first aid that consisted of patting my back, and looking at me with horror at his role in any injury I might have, but also awe at my bravery that if I was in pain, I wasn’t showing it. Kind of like I just felt when Allison-Jean cut all her hair off.

I leave the dilapidated swing and get into my car.

At home I’m relieved to have some time to myself before I need to pick up the kids from daycare. The waybill on the top of Dad’s package says TopStyler. I don’t know what a TopStyler is so I take a knife and carefully slice open the box. Inside is a hair curling kit complete with an instructional
DVD
and styling wand. Why in the heck would Dad buy a hair curling kit?

I call Dan.

“Hey, did you know Dad asked Allison-Jean to pick up some package for him?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because I said I’d pick it up since I’m off today.”

“Okay,” he says blankly.

“It’s a hair curling kit.”

“You opened it?”

“Well it was sort of half-open.”

“What do you mean by a hair curling kit? Like a curling iron?” Dan asks.

“No, like hot rollers.”

“What for?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

I turn on the kettle and go back to observe the TopStyler.

“He probably bought it for Mom.”

“Mom doesn’t use curlers. Besides, her hair is way too short for them.”

“I don’t know, Claudia.” I hear him order a double double.

“Don’t you think it’s weird?”

“I don’t know, maybe he bought them for someone else.” He honks at someone and yells, “Jackass!”

“Like who? Because I don’t use curlers either.” I pour hot water into a mug and watch the tea bag inflate and float to the surface.

“Maybe Allison-Jean can use them.”

“Sure,” I say.
Or not
, I think.