Sunny Dreams (8 page)

After supper on a Friday, a week after Jackson got out of the hospital, the two of us went for a walk. I remember the date, July 10, because it was the night before the hottest day of the summer. The humidity was 100 per cent. We walked slowly up and down the dusty avenues.

“The Dionne quintuplets have a new baby brother,” I said.

“Great,” said Jackson.

“I read it in the paper.”

“Why would they have another kid?” said Jackson. “They must be out of their minds.”

We walked along without saying anything while I tried to think up another topic. Jackson never put any effort into things like topics.

“I’m glad fate conspired to bring you to us,” I said and felt my face heat up. It wasn’t what I meant to say. I thought I was thinking about the horses I’d heard about that had died from heat prostration.

“There’s no such thing as fate,” Jackson said.

“Yes, there is. Of course there is! What about when you said that you and Benny meeting up was meant to be? What about that? That’s fate, isn’t it?”

“Why do you pay so much attention to what I say? I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Yes. You sure did.”

“Well, fate isn’t what brought me here.”

“What, then, if not fate?”

Jackson looked at me with a crippled smile ruining his handsome face.

“Alberta sugar beets,” he said. “Alberta sugar beets are what brought us to Winnipeg. We were passing through. Remember?”

“But you walked down our back lane,” I said. “Our back lane! And we were out in the yard. You came to our particular street.”

Jackson sighed. “Never mind, Violet.”

“What? Never mind what?”

I tripped over my own feet then and saw that we were on Monck Avenue. A steady hot wind blew against us down the quiet street. I watched an eddy of dust twirl up and disappear on the sidewalk in front of Old Lady Fitzgerald’s house. She was in the yard staring up at the sky.

“Hello, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said. “It doesn’t look much like rain, does it?”

“Oh, hello, Violet,” she said. “No, no, I suppose not.”

I introduced Jackson. She was curious about his casts so I related the story of his accident and told her that he was staying with us for a month or so.

Her bottom lip quivered. “Mercy!” she said. “Oh, my good Lord resting in his mother’s arms!”

“Gosh, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said. “It’s not that bad. Aunt Helen is a nurse, remember.”

As we continued along the street I smiled to myself.

“Why do you have to do that?” Jackson asked when we had turned the corner onto Kirkdale Street.

“What?”

“Use me to tease old ladies and get your thrills.”

I wanted to shout out denials but I feared he was right on the mark. “She started it,” I said. It was the best I could do.

“What are you thinking when you say those things?” he asked.

I felt as though he knew everything about me. All the bad things, anyway — my thoughts about his lips and his male member. I wasn’t sure there was anything good to know about me.

Without giving it any thought, I took off running. My sandals were no good for this. But I ran anyway, all the way down Claremont to the river. I didn’t want to see him again so I turned left. I couldn’t run anymore — I was seriously puffed out — but I walked along the riverbank to a spot I knew across from the icehouse and sat down in the stinkweed and the wild asparagus that had been picked clean.

The pink sun was going down behind clouds of softly coloured dust, orangey-tan. It was a beautiful sight, but I was in no mood for beauty. And it was hard not to think about that dust as earth under someone’s wornout shoes in Saskatchewan, about their soil and livelihood blowing out from under them. I didn’t have room for those kinds of thoughts.

The icehouse was locked up for the night. I wished I had a small clean chunk to suck on.

I believed that Satan had a hold on me and that’s what made me so bad. No amount of Aunt Helen telling me that the devil was nonsense would convince me otherwise. She found it particularly absurd that I had such a shaky hold on God but didn’t question the existence of Satan.

The deep lines under my eyes that I’d had since I was a kid were his outward manifestation. I truly believed that. They cut my face in half in what I saw as a sinister way.

When I’d asked Helen what those lines meant, she’d said, “They’re just little dents, honey. Nothing to worry about.” She’d peered into my face. “I can hardly see them.”

She didn’t know.

I tried to read about Satan but it was like reading about God. It was like trying to peel invisible potatoes.

Sometimes I thought it must be connected to my sister, Sunny, this feeling I had of being close to the devil. I came so near to the worst evil in the world on the day she was taken. I breathed in vile black air and it never left me. It found a good fit.

It was in the days after my mother’s death that I first found those grooves underneath my eyes. I was just six years old.

The world was covered in a brown wash now, worse than dust. Why couldn’t I just have talked about dead horses to Jackson? Why did I have to show him the pathetic inside of me?

I felt a nameless free-floating fear. I thought about walking over to the St. Boniface Cathedral to talk to a priest. You go into a little booth like with Madame Cora at the Casey Shows. But the confessionals are much more elegant than Madame Cora’s booth, with its stink of Green Wind perfume and her little cigars. You always came out of Cora’s booth feeling sticky and desolate no matter what she said.

Gwen and I went to mass at the cathedral one morning during a summer that was cooler than this one, just to see. That’s how I knew what it was like there. Gwen was an Anglican and she went to St. Phillips when she did go, which wasn’t very often. She was worse than me in lots of things.

We even took communion that sweat-free day at the cathedral, ate wafers and drank wine and made grunting sounds when we received them, in an effort to behave like everyone else. We found out later that they had been saying “amen.”

Norwood United Church, where I belonged, didn’t seem quite so steeped in God and the devil. There was no incense there or Latin; we didn’t even drink real wine at communion. What good was that?

Maybe, I thought, I could go into a confessional now and talk to a priest about my ties to Satan. Would he understand and try to help me? I could ask him his beliefs on whether or not the pope could make a mistake. I knew what his answer would be and I didn’t want to know. Visiting the Catholic church no longer seemed like a good idea.

Evening turned to night and the murky shadows saw me home. The worst that could happen was that Jackson would be gone and I’d never see him again. I knew there were far worse things — my dad could be dead from a stroke, our house could be on fire, I could wake up tomorrow with polio — but right now they paled next to the thought of never seeing Jackson Shirt again.

Helen and my dad were in the front room. My dad was reading the book of Bertrand Russell essays that Mr. Larkin had lent him and Helen was crocheting a winter hat for a kid — a rural kid who would otherwise freeze his ears in the coming winter. She knitted or crocheted whatever the church ladies told her was most needed. She wasn’t much of a churchgoer herself but she did all kinds of good church-like things, unlike Gert Walker, who was a regular at St. Phillips, but hadn’t done a good deed in her life except not aborting her two children who turned out to be friends of mine.

Sometimes I envied Gwen her little brother, even though she had to look after him sometimes. He didn’t really need much looking after — he was so self-sufficient — pretty much all you could hope for in a younger sibling. I hoped his mother wouldn’t ruin him.

“How’s Gwen?” Helen asked.

“Oh! She’s good,” I said, wondering where that came from.

“Jackson told us that was where he thought you were going when you abandoned him,” said my dad. “To Gwen’s house.”

“I didn’t abandon him! Did he say that?”

“No. Those were my words.”

My dad was warming to Jackson in his weakened state. I guess he saw him as less of a threat to my virtue since his casts made it impossible for him to manhandle me unless I placed various parts of myself in his hands, which would be extremely difficult and take far more gumption than I possessed. It made an unsightly picture in my head, unlike the soft kisses I imagined and which involved only our sweet clean faces.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“In his room,” said Helen. “Did you two have a tiff?”

“No! Jesus!” I said. “What would we have a tiff about? We don’t have tiffs.”

“Don’t say
Jesus
,” said my dad.

I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes,” he said. “They’ll stay that way.”

I laughed and kissed them both goodnight, something I hadn’t done in a while. When I leaned over to kiss Dad’s cheek I saw that the essay he was reading was titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

Jackson had made up a story about my going to Gwen’s house and I was grateful for that. He hadn’t told on me for running away from him.

“Fraser Foote phoned,” Helen called after me.

“What did he want?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“I don’t know. He said he’d call back tomorrow. He probably wants to begin a course of sweeping you off your feet.”

My dad chuckled.

I hoped Jackson could hear this conversation from his room and think that I was much sought after.

That was the hottest weekend of the summer. I slept very little that Friday night, tossing and turning under a twisted sheet, in and out of my polio dreams: my hands were unable to grasp a fork or use the telephone, my legs gave way and by the time I dragged myself to the chesterfield I couldn’t turn my head from side to side. My eyes closed and I couldn’t open them again or my lips to speak.

When I awoke, the sheets were soaking wet. I looked at my alarm clock — 5:20. Four hours at the very outside till I would see Jackson again. I couldn’t imagine waiting that long. I didn’t care about our tiff, as Helen called it, and I didn’t think he cared either. He was just playing with me. He loved me too, I knew it. How could someone I loved so much not love me back in the same way? It didn’t seem possible. I’d read about unrequited love, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t for me.

I must have dozed off again because the time passed somehow. At 8:30 I dragged myself out of my damp nest with its paralyzing dreams and headed to the bathroom. In a matter of minutes I would be seeing him, in less than the length of an
Amos and Andy
show for sure. I could handle that; I could fill that time.

As I passed Jackson’s room I heard a muffled groan. I stopped and listened for more but there was only silence for the next few moments. The hardwood creaked beneath my bare feet as I resumed my short trek to the bathroom. I worried that Jackson would think I’d been eavesdropping on him. His door opened then and Aunt Helen came out. She carried a basin of water and when she saw me a little of it sloshed out onto the floor.

“Dadgummit!” she said. “Violet! What are you doing, standing there like a sentry?” She flushed an ugly pink colour to the roots of her salt-and-pepper hair.

“Nothing. I’m just on my way to the bathroom.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“Because it’s Saturday.”

“Oh! Oh, yes.”

“What were you doing in there?” I asked.

“Giving Jackson a sponge bath.”

“What else were you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you. Why are you flustered?”

She pushed her way past me into the bathroom, slopping more water onto the floor and finally pouring the rest of it down the bathtub drain.

I followed her down to the kitchen.

Aunt Helen rinsed out the basin in the kitchen sink and turned it upside down on the draining board.

“He was horribly engorged,” she said quietly. She put her hand beside her mouth and whispered, “It looked positively painful.”

“So what did you do?”

She opened the fridge door and reached for a tray of eggs. “I must speak to the egg man,” she said. “I had to throw away four eggs this week. They had a funny smell. I wonder what he feeds those hens of his.”

“What did you do?” I said again.

“Oh, Violet.” Helen set the eggs down and looked at me. “If you must know, I hit it with a pencil first and that didn’t work. Poor Jackson was embarrassed so I took care of it for him.”

“So it was your duty as a nurse?”

“Don’t be ignorant!”

“Well?”

“Violet, there was nothing sexual about it. It’s something we did all the time for the boys in the war.”

During Helen’s tour of duty overseas much of her work had been in field hospitals and she’d won commendations for her bravery. Apparently she had also vigorously rubbed the swollen members of soldiers who were unable to do it for themselves. She was a practised masturbator of others.

“We?” I said.

“Yes. The other nurses and I.”

“Grace Box?”

“Perhaps. You’ll have to be sure to ask her next time you see her.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t just you?” I asked. “Did your supervisor know what you were up to?”

“Oh, I see. You’re planning on reporting me, are you? Go and have your bath, Violet. You’re making me very angry. You shouldn’t be talking to me this way. I’m your aunt.”

“Aunt be darned!” I said. “Nurse be darned! What if it happens again tomorrow? What if he’s embarrassed again tomorrow? Will you do him again?”

“Don’t be crude, Violet.” Helen began cracking eggs into a bowl and cutting thick slices of her homemade bread.

“Hah!” I said.

She threw a wet rag at me as I turned to leave the room.

“No breakfast for me, thanks,” I said and trudged back up the stairs. I took care of the puddles of water in the upstairs hall. I was pretty sure no one wanted Jackson taking a dive on a slippery floor and breaking a leg.

“I could use some help after you’re freshened up,” Helen called after me.

“Fat chance,” I muttered.

I couldn’t erase the picture in my head of my aunt with an engorged appendage in one hand and a small towel in the other waiting to catch the semen of soldiers. And of Jackson! I’d have thrown up if I’d had any food in my guts.

He came out of his room as I was kicking a wall in the hallway. I hurt my toes.

“Easy there,” he said.

I couldn’t look at him.

“Is your foot okay?”

I could hear the concern in his voice but I didn’t believe it.

“Never mind me, how about you? Is your male member okay?” I wanted to say, but all I did say was, “No,” as I closed the bathroom door behind me.

I wondered if Jackson suspected that I knew. He must have. Did he even care? I felt ugly and gawky and sweat-covered and I hated the face I saw in the mirror. He hadn’t been mocking or crude or superior or any of the things I imagined he might be after being rubbed to satisfaction by my aunt. He was just his regular self.

They hadn’t done it to hurt me. What they had done had nothing to do with me at all. But still, it worsened the feelings I still had from the night before, from remembering the pictures I knew Jackson had seen inside my head.

I cleaned the tub to rid it of the last of the Jackson slime that Helen had flushed away. He was no better than me, no purer than me. Neither was Helen. What they had done made me feel like garbage, like the four foul eggs Helen had thrown out. Why was that, when it had nothing to do with me?

How many times had this happened between Jackson and Helen? There was no way now that I could ask her. My attitude had taken care of that. I wondered if his member was big, medium, or small. I couldn’t ask her that, either. She was mad at me and I was…I don’t know what I was — it kept changing. I was curious; that’s for sure. I wondered for a second if she’d let me assist in her ministrations. Not a chance. Not even if she wasn’t angry. Too bad — I figured I’d be good at it with a little guidance. I had good strong hands, my dad often said, but I doubt if he associated their strength with the gripping of male organs.

Helen couldn’t be totally at ease with what she had done or she wouldn’t have been so flustered when she saw me in the hall. I decided to apologize. Cool as a cucumber, I would be. She would forgive me. Aunt Helen was the forgiving type.

I ran a full tub and sprinkled lavender scent into the water. I wanted to slip through one of Benny’s holes in the atmosphere and sit by a cool mountain stream in 1878 where there were no Jacksons or Helens or erect members. I wanted to push my fresh clean self through the mire of their filth and triumph over their wicked ways from a faraway place.

When I glanced out the bathroom window I saw my dad admiring his new garage. It still needed paint but it looked good. A small smile relaxed his face.

“Good job!” I called out the window. Cool as a cucumber, that was me.

He looked up and laughed. “Not bad, eh?”

If he knew what had just gone on in the upstairs of his house he would have had a massive stroke and died for sure.

I had a leisurely bath, lingering in the tub. I decided to take small advantage of my spat with Helen to let breakfast go by without pitching in, let Helen sweat thinking of something to tell my dad about my absence.

Jealousy burned underneath my idea of how cool I was. A cool mess. No amount of bathing was going to clean me. I was sure that Helen thought she was telling the truth about it not being a sexual thing. I didn’t believe it for a minute, but I was certain that she did.

Later that day, as I sat at the kitchen table snipping the ends off green beans with the kitchen scissors, I said, “I’m sorry, Helen, that I behaved badly this morning.”

She didn’t turn from the sink where she was scrubbing the dirt from new potatoes.

“Apology accepted,” she announced briskly.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so that’s how we left it, even though to me it felt unfinished. I thought she could have admitted out loud to some sort of transgressive behaviour to even things out a little more between us, but the admission never came.