Shelby (19 page)

The light of the new day was rapidly ascending and I could just make out the fall leaves, the wondrous surprise of a dark blue dawn. I closed my eyes and smiled. In a neurotic sort of way it was comforting being home. I looked forward to seeing Gran. A sudden sharp pain in my ribs had me clutching my side and I tumbled to the dank ground. It passed. Morning was upon us all, good and bad, under one moon, one sun. “Without you we are not!” That is what I heard. Sweet Mother of Nature I suck from your ample breast. Every divine second of existence is innately mine—and yet I see not. Why must I be a turd? Why must everybody yell? What have I been thinking? What a fool I have been! I sat on the floor of the woods as precious, tiny gasps of light peeked through her sheltering cover. Moss hung to bark which hung to trees whose roots plunged into the soil like a lover, and the rich ground offered the same in return. I stood up, danced for a moment and then stopped. My heart told me the moment is eternally dancing and all I need is the guts to cut in. So, feeling only slightly self-conscious, I danced some more.

After spending the morning with Gran, she suggested we borrow Mom's car and disappear on what she'd always called a
road picnic
—essentially a packed lunch eaten while driving. I readily agreed. Nowhere did I feel so comfortable as I did with Gran. She held for me unabashed love, and I loved her for it. In an hour she could be amazed by a wisp of wind, tearful at the state of the world, hilarious in describing Ed's morning habits, and then suddenly silent, for, to quote her, “The only way to have a true conversation with God is to shut your face.”

A series of spontaneous dares had us zooming out of the townsite heading towards the sand flats just north of the city dump, Gran convinced to try driving for the first time in her life.

Within minutes of parking, Gran was strapped into the driver's seat and I was explaining the whereabouts and functions of the gas and brake. Her feet barely reached the pedals. I moved the seat forward and stuck my jacket under her to give more height. She said not a word, her hands gripped tightly to the steering wheel, a dark blue scarf wrapped round her neck, her shoulders hunched and her expression one of focussed determination. She leaned way forward, the entire world suddenly an acre or two of sand flats. All she needed, I figured, was a pair of goggles and a WWI flying cap.

“We're not moving,” she said.

I went on to explain the
operandus mundi
of the brake and gas pedals in an automatic transmission. “Okay?” I asked.

Gran offered an affirmative
harumph
.

I continued: “… and if you want to stop after you start, just remove your foot from that pedal and transfer it to the left and push it down on the other pedal again … okay?” She didn't answer, nor did she question anything I said. She pulled her foot slowly off the brake. The car edged a few inches forward. She put her foot down. She did it again. And again. Then she put her foot lightly on the right pedal and pushed. The car lurched forward. By reflex Gran pushed the pedal down even farther. The acceleration caused momentary panic and she slammed her foot onto the brake pedal. We sprang forward before being roughly braced by our respective seat-belts.

“This thing runs like your life,” she muttered.

“Are you okay, Gran?” I asked. She didn't respond. “You want to keep doing it?” Her expression remained on the flats ahead. Over and over she repeated the manoeuvre, her confidence increasing with each attempt. The general tension began to dissipate and some fifteen minutes later she was hurtling around the entire area at twenty miles an hour with a wide, smug smile on her face, dust tumbling all around us, her pleasure unbridled.

“Candy from a toddler!” she yelled a couple of times. It was a sight to behold.

Dinner that evening, to my surprise, passed without upheaval. Having Gran there was the key; if she wasn't the family mediator per se, she was the one that could shoot down an inane argument at fifty paces just by the look on her face—not to mention the fact that, right or wrong, she'd always been one to champion the underdog.

The night was bittersweet, full of quiet reminiscing over a childhood that no longer existed. I rummaged through belongings stuffed into the far recesses of a once magic closet—a closet that had travelled to the moon, sailed round the globe and been the laboratory of a thousand world shaking discoveries. And what did I find on this night? A Grade Four scholastic ribbon, a set of Dinosaur Cards from Red Rose Tea with drawings and descriptive analyses of certain dinosaurs, my collection of Tintin books and old model airplanes. The fact was I could pour what remained into a shoe box and maybe sell it for a dollar and a half. And the room itself? Its surreality was haunting and yet miraculous; through Vietnam to AIDS, and my own battles with masturbation, graduation, family wars and on and on, it had steadfastly opposed the marching of time.

Just after dinner the following evening I phoned Lucy. She was packing to go on a two day trip to Seattle to visit her friend Marj, Leonard and their dog Peppermint. I was soothed hearing her voice, and yet pained in knowing the state of our ill-defined separation. Hanging up, I picked a Winnie-the-Pooh book from the bookcase downstairs, sauntered upstairs into the front room, sat down and read.

Two or three pages from finishing and thoroughly enjoying the final chapter,
In which Christopher Robin gives a Pooh Party, and we say good-bye
, Dad walked in, flicked on a baseball game and sat in a chair on the opposite side of the room.

“You watching the series?” he asked.

I glanced up. “No.” I looked back down but I could tell he was staring at me.

“They're a helluva team.”

“Hm.”

“They won't repeat, though, not a chance.”

“No chance,” I mumbled.

“Do you know what I'm talking about?”

I looked up and shrugged.

“The
World
Series,” he said. “The
Blue
Jays.”

I returned to my reading.

“Baseball,” he said firmly.

I glanced up. “I know.”

“What the hell are you reading?”

“Early Milne.”

“Never heard of it.”

I returned to the book.

“What's it about?”

“A bear.”

“What kind o' bear?”

“It's Winnie-the-Pooh,” I said.

Dad reacted as a dog does to getting air blown in its face. He shook his head and turned back to the T.V.

I should have ignored him. “Why'd you shake your head?” I asked.

“Huh?” he mumbled, half watching the T.V.

“I'm wondering why you shook your head.”

“I didn't shake my head.”

“Yes, you did. I said, quote, I'm reading Winnie-the-Pooh, unquote, and your head went back and forth two or three times.”

“You want to know why I shook my head?” he said.

“Yes.”

He leaned forward. “Because I cannot believe my twenty-one year old dropout son is sitting on a couch in Revelstoke reading Winnie-the-god-damn-Pooh!”

We stared. “Okay.”

His face curled up as though his brain had been sucked out from behind. “That's all you got to say for yourself?”

“What would you like me to say?”

“What do you want to say!”

“I … I want you to know that my leaving university was no fly-by-night decision. I didn't mean to let anybody down. And yes I'm frightened about what lies ahead. Yes I am aware that I have forsaken the comfortable path. But a man who
hears
a call and ignores it is, in my books, no man at all.”

“And what call have you heard there, sonny boy? Call o' the wild?”

“I'm fed up with these attacks! One's
call
ing does not come in the form of a loud scream. It doesn't say, ‘Here I am.' It doesn't come with a set of instructions. Nay, it comes like drops of pebbles into water. Yes, and all the seeker can hope for is to somehow make contact with the tip of that ripple and from there follow it to its source.”

“You don't have a damn clue what you're doing, do you?”

My ears tingled, my teeth clenched to stop a surge of tears. “Maybe not … but I damn well know what I'm
not
doing—no, wait. I know what I'm doing. I am trying to … embrace my … you're not helping much.”

“You want help. Here's help. I ought to
smack
you right in the chops!”

“Offer denied.”

“Don't get smart.”

“I'm not.”

“You think you know it all but you don't really know.”

“What don't I know?”

“You don't know shit.”

“I know this much,” I said, scanning to the bottom of the page. “Piglet asks Pooh …” I glanced up and our eyes shook like copulating dragonflies. “Oh … to heck with it.” I slammed down the book.

“I paid for that table.”

“I know. You paid for everything.”

“That's right, I did.”

“Well … I won't be
bought
.”

“No one would buy you!”

“I'm not for sale.”

“You're already sold!”

“How could I be if no one will buy me?”

The veins in Dad's head began to ripple, rising like swollen rivers, popping on his temples and forehead as he glared at me. “Talk all you want, your damn philosophy will never pay the rent!”

“By the way, I'm not twenty-one, I'm twenty.”

And on we went Until all family members had been raised from slumber and
Winnie-the-Pooh
was set alight page by page and left for cinder in the family hearth. Gran, for some reason, found the situation hysterical.

I did not sleep that night. How could I? Twenty years old and I was sent to my room. I tried concentrating on my breathing. It didn't help. I read
The Moons of Jupiter
by Alice Munro—a writer Mom loves but who I find tedious. Still slumber was allusive. Despite my best intentions, the one sure-fire soother called from below. So detached I was from my nature, I wound up in heated conversation. “Come on,” he said, “it'll take you two minutes and you'll be asleep in five.” My hands clenched. “I don't need you.” “Maybe not … but you
waaant
me.” “No!” I leapt from the bed and penned an extravagant letter to Lucy espousing the beauty of our friendship and how I cherished all she'd taught me about the bigger picture. I threw it out and collapsed on the bed, barely able to breathe for the painful urges in my groin. Ellie McMartin, my laboratory partner in Advanced Chemistry 11 and the first woman for whom I ever ached, slammed into my forehead. It was just before the Christmas holidays, 1988, and I had left beneath her Bunsen burner a note with a passage from a love poem by John Donne:
If ever any beauty I did see, 'twas but a dream of thee
. I signed my name and spent the weekend in bed, staring at my three-winged airplane wallpaper, unable to move, filled with terror.

The following Monday between classes, amidst the crowd, I sipped from the water fountain near Ellie's locker and overheard Shirley Derosa (one of Ellie's horrible friends) offering her opinion of me and my gesture.

Shirley: “A love note?” she asked in her Valley girl way.

Ellie: “A poem.”

Shirley: “I don't want to put him down, right? But you're my best friend, okay, and I think he's kind of pukish.”

Instinct one: Smash my skull into this ceramic fountain and leave myself for dead, unidentifiable even with dental records.

Instinct two: Puncture Shirley Derosa with my compass several thousand times before mercifully bludgeoning her to death with the textbooks I was carrying.

Instinct three: I am a loser. I need to be in bed, wallowing in self-pity and disgust at my own form.

Instinct three prevailed, the first indications of what lay ahead in the not so distant future. But even worse was that without forewarning, Shirley and her loppy breasts and constricted jeans had mysteriously screeched from the hallway and parked themselves in my head like an inoperable cancer of the brain. Oh yes, I despised her for what she had done, and yet there she was, my first ever dominatrix fantasy, yelling: “It's me you really love, isn't it? Isn't it?” And I'd be crying out in my head: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” in desperation until my piston-like hand had finally blasted all my pain drenched gooey stuff into a white rag pulled over my helmet like an Arabian's head gear. Afterwards, I'd lie spread eagled and spent, the wet rag in my right hand, my body and brain draped in an itchy blanket of self-loathing. As late as the following day I would still be walking around hating my every fibre.

Then I'd do it again.

After a pleasing enough following day and a deliriously oily egg and cheese fry up dinner at Gran's place, I returned home sometime after eleven to find Dad in the front room gazing into the television, hues of blue and purple dancing off his balding head.

“Hello.”

“Son—yeah … say, I'm sorry about the book.”

I shrugged.

“I shouldn't have …” He shrugged, lost for words.

“Burnt it,” I said.

“Listen … you want to have a beer?”

I was surprised by the offer. Never had we drunk together. “Beer?”

“Sure. I got a case o' Black Label in the fridge in the shed. You want to have one out there?”

“The shed?”

“I'll show you the rad.”

“The rad?”

“Still leaking,” he said.

“Leaking?”

The walk towards the shed was made without jackets. The wind blew cold as though hearkening to the demands of the winter to come.

“Frosty, isn't it?” I said.

“Ten years ago there was snow by Hallowe'en. Makes you wonder if there's some truth to that greenhouse stuff.”

“Did you know ten thousand years ago Vancouver was under thirty feet of ice.”

“You're kidding me?” he said, opening the creaky shed door. “It musta been hell on rush hour.” I stepped in. Dad pulled a switch and a low watt bulb offered a dull glow, as though courteous of the space it was sharing with the prevailing turpentine and gasoline odours that filled the room. The door closed.