Sunny Dreams (10 page)

On Friday evening I went to the Met with Fraser Foote to see
Private Number
starring Robert Taylor and Loretta Young. It was pretty good, but I was nervous about being on an actual date. My palms felt clammy and I was terrified that he would try to hold my hand. He didn’t. All that worry for nothing.

Afterwards we went to Picardy’s — not the one where we’d been the day that Sunny was stolen — I had never been back there. This was another Picardy’s, further west down Portage Avenue. I had a cherry soda and Fraser had a vanilla milkshake.

“What’s with those men hanging around your house all summer?” he asked.

“How do you mean, what’s with them?”

“Well, isn’t it kind of unusual?”

“No.”

What was this? Fraser was supposed to be nice and he was supposed to be sweet on me.

“They helped my dad build his garage,” I said, “and one of them broke his arms and…you know all this stuff, Fraser, everybody does. And one of them is gone now. It’s just the man with the broken arms who’s still here.”

“Why is he still here?”

I sighed. “Because he broke both his arms so he needs help. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Sorry. It isn’t, is it? Dirk asked me to ask you about him.”

“Dirk Botham?”

“Yeah.”

“Dirk’s a gink.”

“I know,” Fraser said. “Why does Gwen go out with him?”

“Because she’s cuckoo. Why do you hang around with him?”

“I don’t know. I’m cuckoo too, I guess.” He laughed. “Besides, I don’t really hang around with him unless I have to.”

“Why would you have to?”

“Well, sometimes he just won’t go away. I think he likes the fact that my dad’s a cop. He wants to talk about police stuff with him.”

“What kind of police stuff?”

“I don’t know. My dad won’t give him the time of day. He thinks he wears his pants pulled up too high.”

We both laughed at that and I said that I agreed with his dad.

Fraser finished his shake, careful not to make slurping sounds at the end.

“Does Dirk ever hang out with the Willis brothers?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” said Fraser. “Why?”

“Oh…nothing,” I said. I could see him eyeing my soda. There was more than half of it still left in the glass.

“Anyway,” he said, “when my dad heard I was going to see you tonight he asked me to find out if there was any chance one of those men would still be interested in building him a new shed.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s great. I mean Benny is gone, like I said, but he’s coming back for Jackson. So I’m sure it could happen. But not for a couple of weeks at least.”

“You’re on a first-name basis with these guys?” Fraser said.

“Is that another Dirk-related comment?” I asked.

He smiled. “No. Sorry. I think that was me talking.”

“Is this shed thing happening because I went over to your house a few weeks ago and tried to talk your dad into it?”

“Did you do that?”

“Yeah. Didn’t he mention it?”

“No. What he did mention was that your aunt came over and talked to my mum.”

“What!”

“She convinced my mum to get my dad to hire one of the men. I overheard them talking.”

“When was this?”

“A while back. I don’t know. It must have been before the guy broke his arms.”

I had mentioned my visit with Mr. Foote to Helen. She must have taken the ball and run with it. I’d had no idea.

“Why would she do that?” I knew my face was red. Did the whole world know that my elderly aunt had a crush on a seventeen-year-old boy?

“Because times are hard,” Fraser said, “and people are starving and we’re not and she’s a good person.”

“Yeah, I guess.” I pushed my soda away. Helen couldn’t stand the thought of Jackson leaving town so she’d tried to line up more work. Then he’d broken his arms. She’d be pleased with this new development, I thought. If Benny had work, maybe Jackson would stay with him and she wouldn’t have to say goodbye for another clump of the summer. I knew I was right. Good person be darned!

“Aren’t you going to drink that?” Fraser asked.

“No, go ahead.” I pushed the drink closer to him and he wolfed it down in one go.

“God, they make good stuff here,” he said.

Fraser was pretty sure his dad wouldn’t care when work on the shed began since he hadn’t even planned on it till my aunt and I and then Mrs. Foote started pestering him. He was probably just doing it because of the promise he made to my dad all those years ago about finding Sunny. Maybe he felt guilty about his failure.

My dad never forgot how kind Mr. Foote had been during that time and he was pleased that I had a date with Fraser.

“He’s a fine lad,” Dad had said, even though he barely knew him.

When the time came for Fraser to leave me at my door that night he tried to kiss me on the mouth, but I turned my head away and his lips brushed lightly against my ear. It felt pretty good to me, but I knew he was disappointed.

Four weeks after the accident Jackson’s doctor cut off the cast on his right arm and replaced it with one that stopped below his elbow. He could bend his arm now. There was an ugly scab inside his elbow where he had scratched at it with an unwound wire hanger. I hadn’t seen him do it, but he must have done it a lot because the injury was nasty. Aunt Helen dressed it and scolded him.

On the evening of the day the cast came off we all went to a show at the Capitol Theatre. Helen figured a celebration was warranted. Jackson got to pick the show and he chose
Poppy
, starring W.C. Fields, with
The Case Against Mrs. Ames
as the second feature. I was disappointed;
Hands Across the Table
was playing at the Province and I wanted to see it. It starred Carole Lombard and she was my favourite actress. I thought W.C. Fields was creepy, what I’d seen of him. I wished I could stay home but I had invited Gwen and she asked if she could bring Dirk and it was out of control.

Dirk avoided me, but that was nothing new. Anyway, it was not the time to confront him about his Willis-related activities. I wished I had invited Fraser, but it was too late now.

We piled into the Buick: my dad and I, Aunt Helen, Jackson, Gwen, Dirk Botham, and Mr. Larkin, who decided to come at the last minute.

“The more the merrier,” said my dad.

If he was using his car he liked it to be full of people. It seemed wasteful to him if every last inch of available space wasn’t taken up.

I was long past worrying about Gwen stealing Jackson away from me. It no longer applied to the situation: Gwen was in love with Dirk and had eyes for no one else. To my mind, Helen loomed as the larger threat, unpleasant as that was to digest. Besides, I wished for Jackson to be trampled by runaway horses and my mild interest in Fraser Foote was growing.

Gwen found the whole Jackson situation distasteful. I could feel her judgments on our family trickling down from her mother, who pretended to be very straightlaced. They would no more have had an armless transient staying in their home than a common prostitute, although I knew Gert was a fallen woman at heart; I just knew it.

The previous Sunday I’d heard her tell Warren to stay away from our house. She didn’t know I was in their backyard. I guess she figured Gwen was old enough to keep herself from getting sucked into the vortex of evil at our place, but Warren was still a little boy. I pretended I didn’t hear. Warren saw me and didn’t answer his mum. The little guy looked like he wanted to run. I made an about-turn and went home before I had even seen Gwen. I didn’t mention it to my dad, but I told Aunt Helen.

“Gert Walker is ignorant,” she said. “You needn’t pay any attention to what she says. Unclench your fists, Violet.”

“Tippy doesn’t even like her,” I said.

“Well, there you are then.”

And we’d left it at that.

When I’d mentioned to Gwen on a previous occasion that her mum didn’t seem all that fond of me, she denied it vehemently. The most I could get out of her was that the disappearance of my baby sister, Sunny, had hit her very hard at the time.

“Harder than it hit us?” I asked.

“Of course not!” said Gwen.

“Did she even know us then?” I asked. “You didn’t move here till grade three.”

“We lived on Tremblay Street. It’s not that far. News like that travels fast.”

She said it in the same way her mother would have said it, as if Sunny’s disappearance was a disgrace to our family, like when infants die in their cribs for no apparent reason. The families of those babies are forever looked at askance.

“You shouldn’t have told me that,” I said.

“Well, you asked me,” said Gwen.

“Still, you shouldn’t have.”

Gert Walker and others like her blamed my mother for the loss of our Sunny. They thought our family didn’t know how to be, that it didn’t know how to keep itself safe, possibly even that danger emanated from us and infected those who came near.

My lips began to tremble and my eyes filled with tears so I ran off home. I didn’t want to cry on Walker territory. Gwen called out after me but she didn’t follow.

I decided that day not to waste any more good behaviour on Gert Walker.

Anyway, the seven of us headed downtown squashed inside the Buick, three in the front, four in the back. Gwen sat on Dirk’s lap. Ugh.

At the theatre we sat in a row: my dad, Mr. Larkin, Dirk, Gwen, me, Jackson, and Aunt Helen. It wasn’t the seating arrangement I would have chosen, but I got swept along. The show wasn’t my cup of tea, but it seemed to agree with all the others. It was hard for me to picture sitting there through the second feature so I tried not to think about it. I ate popcorn and tried to chew quietly so that Jackson, the punk hobo, wouldn’t hear me. I had grown to enjoy Isabelle’s description of him and I was waiting for a chance to call him that to his face. Or at least to Helen’s face.

Every now and then when he shifted, his leg would touch mine but he would jerk it away quickly as though I were made of hot embers. His left arm with the big cast was beside me. He set it on the armrest after checking with me to make sure it was okay. His right arm, the one that he could now bend, the one with the festering sore, was on Helen’s side.

I couldn’t get comfortable. The seating was all wrong. If I had choreographed it, Helen wouldn’t be seated next to Jackson and neither would I. I tried to concentrate on the show. The jokes seemed stupid to me.

To my left everything felt close to normal: Gwen adoring the gink, Mr. Larkin and my dad, clean and good, laughing their fool heads off. Apparently W.C. Fields was very much to their tastes.

To my right, Jackson was chewing gum with his mouth open. I didn’t want Gwen to hear him. She thought little enough of him as it was. I felt a tension as his chewing stopped and I worried just as much about that. Had he seen inside my head again? I glanced at him and then quickly back to the screen. It could have been explained away as a neck adjustment. He caught the glance; I saw him catch it with his unsmiling face. The audience roared at that point, the biggest laugh so far. Everyone joined in except Jackson and me. Helen’s loud trill pierced my right ear and I wanted to slit her throat.

Worse, Dirk giggled. When I heard that sound I knew it had been him there that night, that he’d had a hand in slashing my clothes to bits, mine and Isabelle’s. No two males of the species could sound like that when they laughed.

To my left, Gwen snorted and put her hand over her mouth and nose in embarrassment. I wished for a moment that I were eleven years old hunting for golf balls with my friend who didn’t believe that her evil boyfriend was good and that her best girlfriend came from a suspect family. I knew she wouldn’t listen to anything bad I had to tell her about Dirk; I wasn’t sure I’d even try.

It was a sunny day where W.C. Fields lived and the bright white screen shone down on the audience. When I looked past Gwen at Dirk he turned his head toward me and made a gross lizardy motion with his tongue. That reptilian tongue was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, the way it wriggled its pointed shape in my direction. I needed to get out of there. I concentrated on the screen, determined not to look again to my left or right.

Promptly I looked to my right and saw what I had been set on not seeing. Aunt Helen’s left arm was by her side, her fingers poking out past the armrest. Those fingers rested silently on top of Jackson’s, her hand dark against his bright new cast. They weren’t holding hands. The cast prevented that. The scene had a protective look to it, but still, my guts churned. It didn’t feel protective; it felt grubby, tawdry. It reeked. Like the inside of Jackson’s cast probably had when the doctor sawed it off to reveal his secret festering wound. And what could she possibly be protecting him from, anyway? It was all a lie. Aunt Helen was a lie.

I blinked. Now both her hands rested in her lap. I had imagined it. Or had I? I blinked again and her hands were still resting primly on her own person. She looked at me then, feeling my gaze, and smiled. A true smile. I wondered if I was losing my mind, like Jackson’s mother.

When the intermission came, I didn’t have to pretend that I felt ill. I asked my dad to drive me home. It was better than running off. Running off prompted questions and I didn’t have any answers that I could share with anyone.

My dad fussed a bit but made short work of taking me back to the house. He didn’t want to miss any of the laugh riot going on back at the theatre.

It was hot again, or “decidedly warm,” as the newspaper kept describing it, but I doubt if I would have slept anyway. I wanted to leave home. Maybe I could dress up as a man and ride west in a boxcar. Me and the grasshoppers.

I walked away from my job the next day. My plan had been to work till the end of July and then take August off to get myself ready for college, whatever that entailed.

But in the late afternoon, when I stood up to visit the ladies’ room, Henny called out, “ I guess the rich girl deserves more breaks than the rest of us lowly workers.”

I quietly snapped. Suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of putting in those last few days. I sat back down and wrote a note to Mary. She was away from her desk at that moment but I taped it to her typewriter. Then I walked out. It was irresponsible, but it gave me a taste of freedom that I didn’t remember ever having had before.

When I got to Portage Avenue I crossed over and went into Brathwaite’s Drugstore. I browsed at the cosmetics counter, then sat down at the soda fountain and ordered a chocolate sundae. It was the best treat I’d ever had. I dawdled. If I got home too early someone might suspect.

My free feeling didn’t last. It was gone by the time I walked down Ferndale Avenue toward home.

The morning after that I went over to Gwen’s house early. I dressed for work and left at the same time as usual because I wasn’t up to telling Helen and my dad what I had done. They probably wouldn’t have cared much, but they would have barraged me with questions.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” wouldn’t have been good enough for either of them. They would want to know why, and whether I had given proper notice, and if I was going back next summer, and when I had made the decision, on and on and on into next week. So I didn’t tell them and I didn’t know if I would.

“You quit your job?” Gwen said.

“Yes.”

She stood up and started moving around the kitchen. “Do you think they will have hired anybody yet to replace you?” she asked.

“Why? I don’t know.”

“I need that job, Vi. I need to go downtown and get that job. Will you stay here and watch Warren? It won’t be hard; he’s not even here, but if he comes home for something to eat or anything. My mum will be out all day, till after I get back, so you don’t have to worry about running into her.

“What should I wear?” she called as she ran upstairs.

“Something sensible and white,” I said. “They like white in summer and dark colours in winter.”

“Can you stay?” she shouted.

“I guess so,” I said. There was nothing else on my agenda. It would be a place for me to hang around all day while I was supposed to be at work.

“For sure your mum won’t come home and find me here?” I yelled up the stairs.

“For sure,” she hollered down. “She’s doing a huge house in Armstrong Point. It takes her the whole day.”

Gwen came downstairs in an off-white mid-calf skirt and a short-sleeved blouse in the same colour that I’d never seen before.

“How’s this?” she asked.

“Good,” I said. “Where’d you get the blouse?”

“It’s my mum’s,” she said.

“Won’t she kill you?”

“Yes, but I don’t care. I need this job. I’m not going to university.”

I had figured as much but we hadn’t talked about it.

“What about grade twelve?” I asked.

“I don’t need it.”

“Hmm.”

“Why hmm?”

“Just hmm, I don’t know.”

Everything would be different now that Gwen and I wouldn’t be going to school together. I hadn’t given it any thought till now.

“Life as we know it is over,” I said.

Gwen laughed. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. She put on lipstick in front of the hall mirror.

“Use a light hand,” I said. “They don’t hire floozies.”

“Do I look like a floozy?” Gwen was panic-stricken.

“No, no. I’m just saying not too much lipstick. They like a wholesome look.”

Gwen did look a little like a floozy. She couldn’t help it. She was built like her mum with huge breasts and full lips and blonde curly hair. I was sure those lips were wasted on Dirk Botham. I shuddered. His slippery skinny tongue flashed inside my head and I remembered asking Gwen once if he was a nice kisser. I’d wanted to say, “What’s it like to kiss a boy with no lips?” but that would have been mean.

Her answer had surprised me.

“I wouldn’t know,” she’d said primly.

“Are you telling me you’ve never kissed?” I’d asked.

“I don’t want to discuss it,” she’d said.

And that had been that.

“Good luck!” I called after her now as she dashed out the front door. “Knock ’em dead.”

I felt horrible. I wanted to talk about Dirk and Jackson and Aunt Helen but I couldn’t have confided in Gwen even if she had been there. Dirk was her golden boy; she probably thought his tongue was beautiful even if she’d never been allowed to touch it. And the Jackson-Helen thing was too twisted for her; she wouldn’t want to hear it. I needed someone else to talk to.

It wasn’t too twisted for Mary. She would be able to handle it. But there were other reasons I couldn’t discuss it with her. Why had I left work that way? I missed her already. I realized then that I didn’t even know where she lived. It was somewhere downtown, on Qu’Appelle Avenue, I thought, but I didn’t know the details. And she didn’t have a phone. I’d have to go to Eaton’s and wait at the doors for her at quitting time. But I didn’t want to run into anyone who knew I had walked out. Maybe I could wear a disguise — a false nose and glasses.

Plugging the kettle in, I prepared to drink some of Gert’s instant coffee.

Also, Mary was a blabbermouth. If Gwen got my job, they would sit next to each other and share secrets and the small morsels I had already fed Mary about Jackson would be in Gwen’s ears before the end of their first day together. What a mess. How dare she run off and get my job! She hadn’t even asked my permission.

I had found out the hard way that Mary was a blabbermouth, that she couldn’t keep a secret no matter how hard she tried. There was a boy named Billy Stern who worked on the shipping floor with Lester. I had admired him from afar way back in February when forty below was a good day and I worked only on Saturday mornings. I made the mistake of going into raptures over him to Mary and she passed it on to Lester and he told Billy, who had studiously ignored me ever since. So now I told Mary little about my yearnings, romantic or otherwise, for fear of her talking about them to Perry and the town of Carman and the whole population of Eaton’s mail order.

The Jackson and Helen saga would have to wait for Isabelle. And the Dirk stuff too.

Gwen didn’t get the job. There were so many people needing work, she said, that the position had already been taken. She had filled out an application form. She cried and I felt bad for begrudging her my position.

Late in the afternoon I went downtown and intercepted Mary as she came out of the mail-order building. I gave her my phone number and Gwen’s and asked her to let us know immediately if another position came free.

“I can’t believe you just up and walked out,” Mary said. “You’ll be famous in the mail-order building forever.” She laughed.

“Well, like everyone keeps saying, I don’t really need the job. And I’ve got too much other stuff going on right now.”

“It must be nice to not have to work,” said Mary.

“Not you too,” I said. I was tired of people begrudging me my life.

“No, no. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just imagining it, that’s all. It really must be nice.”

We walked together to Portage Avenue and sat for a few minutes on a bench while I waited for my streetcar.

“I gave Perry the heave-ho,” Mary said.

“Good!”

“We fought about having kids and I gave him back his stupid ring. I mean, what’s the point in getting married if you don’t have kids? Did he really think I could stand to look at only him across the breakfast table for the next fifty years? Lordy, what a muttonhead!”

I laughed. “This is good, Mary. You did right to give him the old heave-ho.”

“You never really liked him, did you?”

“To tell you the honest truth, no.”

“I realized he’s not very good company,” said Mary. “He doesn’t talk about anything but his work on the farm and I’ve heard the same stories seventeen times. How many times does a girl need to hear a description of Old Man Fowler losing the lower half of his body under a tractor in a field of wheat?”

“How many times indeed,” I said. My thoughts were elsewhere.

“I’m done,” said Mary. “I’m not even sure I like him anymore, let alone love him. Maybe I never did. Love him, that is.”

My streetcar came and I stood up. I reminded her again to call us if a job came up and stepped on board

“Lester has asked me out,” she called after me.

“Swell,” I said over my shoulder and found a seat in the shade.