The Geranium Girls (5 page)

Beryl awoke, stunned that she could be capable of such violence, even in a dream. Why hadn’t she stopped when the girl was beaten into unconsciousness and certain death? Why had she kept on? Her stomach heaved and she sat up.

Sweat bathed her naked body and she shivered in the light breeze from the open window.

In the dream she sees the options before her, not to start on the girl or to deal with her differently — with words maybe — or silence. Or at least to stop sooner and save herself from having to live with what she is doing. She sees the progression as she connects with that pale smooth face, over and over again, feels in her gut the bloody hell that she’ll never be rid of. She is snuffing out her own life in a sense, with that stubby baseball bat. But she rages on. It is bigger than the part of her that says no.

Only in dreams, thought Beryl. Whose face was that anyhow?

She put on her summer robe and went out into the warm night. She had the best deck east of the Red River. Smooth with good wide steps all around.

A siren soared down Main Street and Beryl’s hands shook as she lit her cigarette.

The siren is not for me.

She inhaled deeply. The dream probably wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for that business on Lyndale Drive with the man named Menno. And anyway, if she was perfectly honest with herself, she didn’t completely hate the dream.

More sirens: they’re not for me.

Fucking geraniums! He wants to avoid them. But they’re always there when he walks down Taché: to the bank, to the barber, the shoemaker, any Christly place he goes. He decides to try a different route, maybe down back lanes, to get where he is going. Then he changes his mind. Why the fuck should he!

She even has them in hanging pots along the side stairs that lead up to what Boyo suspects is her apartment. At night when he walks by he sees those tiny white lights, like the ones that decorate the trees on Broadway. They wind up the stairs, light up the pots.

He thinks he can smell the geraniums at night. And it’s always different. Just like the ones he used to work on with Auntie Cunt. Lemony sometimes, sometimes like nutmeg. That’s why he hates eggnog so much. The thought of it makes him gag. They smell like pepper, too, at times. But worst of all is the rose scent; the sickly old-lady smell of roses.

Some of the geraniums are the colour of blood. His mother’s blood.

“Your ma bled to death, if you must know,” Aunt Hort said, “birthing you.”

If you must know, she always said, as though it wasn’t his business. He wished that it wasn’t.

“If it weren’t for you, she would probably still be alive,” she said and grabbed his wrist and dragged him to the bathroom where he watched her as she bathed. And dreaded what came next.

Scrub and rub.

With Hort kneeling in the tub and Boyo kneeling outside of it, he bent over to her demands. He soaped up the wash cloth and scrubbed her clean. Down there. He rinsed and soaped again. Rinsed. Then came the worst part. With his bare fingers he rubbed her. She guided him with her movements and her own hand, till she lurched and shuddered and told him to stop.

“Did you enjoy that, Boyo?” she asked.

What could the right answer possibly be?

“No?” he tried.

Wrong. Duct tape on his tender parts. Not just the head of his penis this time.

“Did you like that, Boyo?” she asked on another occasion.

“Yes.”

Wrong again. Standing perfectly still. Not moving. Not moving for hours. Or else.

An idea forms in his mind now: he could wreck the flowers. All of them! The hanging ones will be easy; they are fairly small. But he’ll have to think about the big pots and the ones behind the glass. That will be harder to pull off without getting caught.

His aunt was practically hairless, even down there. He never saw another woman so sparsely haired, unless it was on purpose. He knows that sometimes women shave themselves. Lots of his movies have shown him that they do.

The last hooker he used was that way. That was why he’d ended up killing her. It wasn’t planned; it was over before he realized what he was doing. I guess you could say it was an accident, but not the type you could own up to. The accident took place the winter before last. He hasn’t used a woman since.

His mail girl knows the geranium woman. Boyo saw her coming out of the shop one afternoon last week. This makes sense to him. It connects.

Mail Girl Kyte has hanging plants in her yard too, but at least they’re not geraniums.

“I love kissing.” Beryl sighed luxuriously.

She stretched her arms above her head and opened her eyes just barely, to look at Dhani. She lay next to him on a blanket in St. Vital Park. On a grassy patch, almost dry.

“Kissing any old person?” Dhani asked.

“No,” Beryl said. “Not any old person. Kissing you is pretty good, though.” She realized, not for the first time, that if she was going to be spending time with Dhani, she would have to get better at thinking a bit before she spoke. He was very easy to get into trouble with. She wasn’t sure she wanted to work that hard.

For instance now, Beryl didn’t want to think just yet, didn’t want to interrupt the light shimmering through her blood. She felt a little irritated with Dhani and his question at such a time, even though she had started it with her kissing comment.

He was the first man that Beryl had kissed since Georges. And that was two years ago and a bit. Georges had blown in from Montreal several years ago — transferred within the post office — and then blown away again three years later, to points further west. But not before capturing Beryl’s heart.

Georges wanted to be free. Now and then Beryl had tried to talk to him about freedom being more a state of mind than a physical movement from say, Portage la Prairie, Manitoba to Lethbridge, Alberta. But Georges disagreed.

“I have to change my location from time to time,” he said. “It’s who I am.”

Beryl wanted to laugh when he said stuff like that. After all, he was never wild and free enough to leave the post office behind. She got to thinking he was a phony towards the end. But he didn’t know he was a phony, so she couldn’t blame him.

On the day he was leaving she smiled to herself as she spread peanut butter on slices of whole wheat bread. Georges stood in her kitchen watching her.

“Are you making fun of me?” he asked, noticing her smile.

“No! God! No! I’m not making fun of you. I’m making sandwiches for you,” Beryl had said.

“What are you thinking about?” Dhani asked now.

So Beryl told him about Georges.

“Do you miss him?” Dhani asked.

“No,” she said. “Oh, I did at first. We’d been together almost three years. But Georges had these ideas about what made life good and none of them really agreed with mine.”

“What do you think makes life good?” Dhani asked.

“Mmm. A comfortable couch. A fireplace. Chocolate.”

Dhani pushed the hair back from Beryl’s forehead and she hoped he wasn’t thinking how ugly she looked in the light of the moon.

They lay near to where she had found the mushroom girl, but not too near. The night was warm after the hot day. The air wasn’t going to cool down tonight.

“You look pretty,” he said and Beryl thought he was lying.

“It was close to here that I found her,” she said and sat up, shaking her fine blonde hair back over her forehead.

Dhani leapt up. He was brown and beautiful — an Indian, born in China, raised in England.

Beryl missed him terribly, even though he stood right there in front of her.

“We shouldn’t be here!” Dhani struggled to whip the blanket out from under her.

“It wasn’t that near,” she said, scrambling to her feet.

Suddenly she felt that there was something missing from her, from the basic makeup of her personality. Or maybe not missing, but off somehow. Why didn’t it bother her to be near the place, when it upset Dhani so much and he wasn’t even the one who had found her? Maybe it did bother her and she was just too thick to know it. It would manifest itself physically in some way, like with a giant tumour growing inside her head. Something like that.

“We probably shouldn’t even be in the same park,” Dhani said, as he shook out the blanket. “The mosquitoes are terrible anyway!”

Beryl hurried after him with her sandals in her hand. I shouldn’t have let myself go when we kissed, she thought. It was way too soon.

“Dhani, wait!” she cried. “I’m going to step on a wasp if I don’t put my shoes on.”

He slowed slightly. “Your shoes didn’t protect you the last time.”

Beryl felt as though it was her fault she had been stung by a wasp, her fault a girl was dead, and that Dhani judged her harshly for not having learned from either experience.

“What about all the other people in the park?” She gestured towards the shadowy figures of teenagers in the distance. “Should they not be here either?”

“It’s not the same with them, Beryl. They’re not connected to her like we are.”

He stopped and touched her face when he said this, but he looked so sad when he did it that Beryl felt as though they might as well walk off in different directions.

“The only reason you’re connected is because I told you about it,” Beryl said and then wished she could erase the whine of her voice that hung between them in the night air.

They walked in silence the rest of the way to the car. Dhani started it up but didn’t drive it anywhere.

“Beryl.”

“Yes?”

“That’s like saying, the only reason my mother and I are connected is that she gave birth to me.”

“Yeah?”

“Beryl. Surely you see that connections go deeper than that.”

“Well, yeah, of course. With the mother one anyway.”

They were quiet for a few minutes as Dhani wheeled the car out onto River Road.

“If I think long enough about what you said, I know I’m going to start thinking that everything’s connected to everything and that will drive me crazy,” Beryl said. “It’s all very well, but nothing really feels like that on a day-to-day basis.

“We shouldn’t have kissed,” she added.

Dhani looked at her and covered her hand with his. “Yes, we should have,” he said. “Most definitely we should have.”

Beryl sighed and leaned back in the seat. She found a lever and lifted it and the seat went all the way back.

“Let’s go for a milkshake,” Dhani said.

She closed her eyes and felt a warm breeze from the car windows fluttering across her bare legs. Dhani didn’t believe in air conditioning and for the moment she was glad.

When she thought she heard him chuckle, she opened her eyes to check. He didn’t look like he had, but the thought that he might have cheered her up and she began to think that perhaps their relationship wasn’t irretrievably damaged.

“Beryl, sit up and fasten your seat belt, please.”

She smiled and did as she was told.

“There’s something wrong with me,” she said and then wished very much she hadn’t.

It was okay. Her words were lost in the mess Dhani made turning off Jubilee into the Bridge Drive-In. He cut across a lane of traffic without signalling and then made the turn in front of an oncoming car, again not using his signal and missing the other car by inches. Horns blasted, brakes screeched, and people screamed and gestured at him from their open windows.

“Goodness, Dhani!” Beryl said.

“I’m going to have chocolate tonight,” he said as he wheeled into a parking spot, two spots really. He didn’t drive very well at all. “What are you going to have?”

Beryl felt embarrassed as they walked toward the ice-cream stand. People were staring, wanting to get an up-close look at someone who drove so badly.

“I’ll have peach,” Beryl said. “Dhani, is it okay if I go and sit by the river and leave you to get the shakes?”

“Of course it is.” He kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”

Beryl’s knees shook a bit from Dhani’s bad driving. She wondered if he had learned to drive in England and hadn’t quite gotten the hang of driving on the right side of the road. She found an empty bench and sat down. Laughter floated across the water on the night air. Someone was having a party on a boat.

Beryl breathed deeply in the summer night, her gaze falling on the still waters of the Red River. The people on the boat, the party people, had the music turned up loud. It was Chris Isaak, singing about the world being on fire, singing about a wicked game that someone was playing.

Beryl ached inside at the sound of his voice. Deep inside, as deep as she went.

“I love this city,” she whispered, as Dhani touched her bare arm with her cool peach milkshake. “There’s no place on earth I’d rather be.”

Hermione’s shop, Cuts Only, was on Taché Avenue, across the street from the pool hall and down a ways. It was usually a dowdy little shop from the outside. But this summer the window boxes were bursting with geraniums, both at street level and upstairs where the owner lived. A riot of robust blooms spilled over the boxes and filled giant pots on either side of the door. Flower pots sat in the windows as well, both upstairs and down. Nothing but geraniums of many colours: crimson, coral, creamy white, lavender — grown, Beryl knew, for their varied scents as much as for their appearance.

Hermione was thin and bald and very definite about geraniums only and cuts only. No perms, no highlights, no colours, not even any blow drying. She had a dryer there so that if you wanted you could dry your own hair when it was cold outside, but it wasn’t a service she offered.

“You want a blow job, honey, give it to yourself,” Beryl had heard her bark more than once into the phone. She didn’t have to be polite to everyone because she already had more customers than she could handle. She was a very fine hair cutter.

Hermione Rose had hauled Beryl in off the street one day and given her a haircut. That’s how Beryl came to know her. Hermione’d had a cancellation; she couldn’t abide cancellations.

She refused any payment; the haircut had been her idea. Beryl had thought she was months away from needing one.

Hermione regaled her with stories from her three marriages: one to a United Church minister — her first, so long ago she couldn’t even conjure up his face; her second to an older man, already in his seventies when they tied the knot — he died on her; and the most recent marriage, this one to a woman named Lou. Hermione had thought this one was the real thing, till Lou ran off with the driver of the recycling truck.

Sometimes Hermione knew stuff was going to happen before it did, or so she said. Beryl didn’t trust that kind of talk; she heard it all the time. People figuring they had some special thing happening, connecting them to a spirit world. Besides not trusting it, it made Beryl feel left out, jealous. Her own spiritual life was sadly lacking.

Hermione was a bit of a show-off, Beryl thought at first, but she didn’t mind too much. It wasn’t irritating like it was in some people.

Plus, it turned out to be the best haircut she ever had. She didn’t need another one for a whole year, although Hermione disagreed with her on that point.

Sometimes Beryl would sit in Hermione’s second chair and talk to her and her customer about her feeling that the world had gotten away on her. And most of the people in it. You could smoke there in the shop. Hermione encouraged it.

She had interesting magazines in her waiting area if you didn’t feel like talking. There were
Life
magazines from the fifties,
Rolling Stone
from the seventies, Freak Brothers comics, and new stuff too:
Vanity Fair
,
Esquire
,
Mojo
. But there weren’t any hair magazines for people to browse through and pick the cuts they liked. That was left to Hermione, who studied the face for a moment or two, asked a couple of what sometimes seemed to be irrelevant questions, and then started cutting.

Beryl had asked her once, after a customer left, what the colour of the woman’s living-room drapes could possibly have to do with the cut she was going to get.

Hermione laughed.

“The colour of a person’s drapes, whether they even own something called drapes, can tell you an enormous amount about that person. For instance, that woman looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles when I asked it — said she hadn’t even heard the word since she visited her grandmother in Regina in 1971. It gives me an idea of who she is.”

“I don’t think you asked me any questions when I came in,” Beryl said. “You just kind of ordered me around.”

Hermione laughed again.

“Well, sometimes I just throw caution to the wind.”

She busied herself with her next customer and Beryl thumbed through a
National Geographic
and smoked another cigarette.

What was it about her that made Hermione not ask her any questions that first day? She didn’t want to be different from other people in the way she seemed. She wanted to talk about drapes or disparage drapes, the same as other customers. As it was, she didn’t think she had any ideas about drapes at all and that worried her a little.

Hermione handed her customer, whose name was Jane, and who had a wrecked face, the old-fashioned hand mirror and twirled her about in the chair so she could view herself from all sides.

“Perfect,” Jane said. “What do I owe you today, Herm?”

That was another thing about Hermione. She charged whatever she felt like. It often varied from day to day but it was never a lot, so no one complained.

“Ya know what, Jane?” she said. “I’m not gonna charge you today. I’m in an extra-good mood.”

Jane laughed and her wrecked face looked worse. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Well, thank you, Herm, you’re a wonder.”

Beryl watched Jane stick a bill under the hand mirror when Herm’s back was turned.

“What happened to her face?” Beryl asked when Jane was gone.

“I don’t know,” Hermione replied, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Jane doesn’t talk much. It’s not really the type of question you come out and ask, is it?”

“No. I suppose not. It must be quite a life for her, being stared at all the time. I don’t think I could take it,” Beryl said.

“Yeah, you could,” Hermione said and Beryl felt immediately better, for being thought of by this wondrous woman as someone who could manage life with a ruined face.

“Not me though, I couldn’t do it,” Hermione went on. “I’d shoot myself or slit my throat or whatever. Yup. Slit throat city.”

When Beryl first met Hermione she worried that her new friend might have cancer and that was the reason she was bald. She hadn’t asked her about it for the longest time, afraid to address disease, as so many people are. When she finally did ask, Hermione laughed.

“No. I don’t have cancer yet, as far as I know. I just like the way I look with no hair. Besides, it was starting to go white and I’m not ready for that. I’ll probably grow it again some day, but for now it suits me, it’s easy, and it keeps the riff-raff away.”

“What do you mean it keeps the riff-raff away?”

“I scare people with my look and I like it that way,” Hermione had said. “There’re so many weirdos out there.”

Almost a week after what Beryl thought of as her kissing date with Dhani, the news broke as to the identity of the woman found murdered in the park. Her name was Beatrice Fontaine and she had lived in St. Boniface, near Happyland Pool.

The name didn’t mean anything to Beryl — there was no reason it would — but it made the woman more real to her. Beatrice Fontaine had walked the same streets as Beryl, probably frequenting many of the same spots.

Beryl stopped in to see Hermione on her way home from work that day. She had started out by wanting to talk about Dhani, but that disappeared when she read about the mushroom girl in the
Free Press.

Hermione knew, of course, that Beryl had found the body. But she didn’t know about the mushrooms. The only people that Beryl had told so far were Stan and Dhani. It had been too big not to share with someone. She described the scene in the park now, as Hermione pushed her mop around beneath the chairs.

“Jesus,” Hermione said. “Jesus fucking Christ. That’s gotta be a horrifying picture to be carrying around inside your head. She formed a small pile of light brown hair and pushed it aside. “Bea was a customer of mine, you know,” she went on.

“Really?” Beryl was stunned. She wouldn’t be able to tell Dhani this particular piece of information. Talk about connections! He’d freak!

“Yeah. She was a sweet girl. Beautiful too. Imagine! God, I wish you hadn’t told me about the mushrooms.”

“Sorry. I…”

“No. No, it’s okay. It’s good you told me.” Hermione propped her chin on the end of her mop. “I’ll miss her. I hope they catch the guy and torture him.”

“I wonder how she was killed,” Beryl said, her voice shaky.

“I don’t know. Here, sit down, honey, have some coffee.” Hermione guided Beryl to a comfy chair in the waiting area and they sat awhile.

There were no customers and Hermione turned around her sign and locked the door.

“Herm?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you mind if I washed my hair?”

“Of course not. I’ll even wash it for you. Come on.”

“You don’t have to help. Honest. I just kind of have this thing about washing my hair lately. It never feels really clean.”

“Sit.”

Hermione fastened a little black towel around Beryl’s neck and ran very warm water through her hair till it was drenched. She squeezed shampoo into her hands and massaged it vigorously through Beryl’s hair. It smelled like jasmine. She rinsed and rinsed and rinsed again.

The warm water felt good. Beryl wanted to talk about the mushrooms some more, but couldn’t. She wanted to talk them to death, but the words wouldn’t come.

Hermione wrapped a bigger towel around Beryl’s head and kissed her on the cheek.

“There. Spanking clean,” she said.

The distinct perfume of coconut lay underneath the tobacco smoke that clung to everything in the little shop. It was the geraniums. How did they thrive so in such an atmosphere? Beryl wondered. And then she looked at her friend and knew how. Hermione whispered to the plants and fussed about with a water spritzer and a fork, loosening soil, spraying the lush growth, caressing the foliage, sometimes crumbling a leaf in her fingers to release its scent.

This was the first summer she had put some of the plants outside. She had thought they would be too vulnerable out there, but Beryl had talked her into it. “They’ll brighten the place up,” she’d said.

“I kissed a guy I shouldn’t have kissed,” Beryl said, as she fluffed her hair about with the towel.

Hermione laughed. “What are you, in grade seven? I fucked ninety-two guys I shouldn’ta fucked. But there’s nothing either of us can do about it. Let’s have a real drink.”

She retrieved a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a cupboard in her rolltop desk and poured them each a couple of inches.

Beryl said, “I’m going to ask you what you’ll probably think is a stupid question.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you think it’s significant that I found Beatrice Fontaine and that I also know you and that she was a customer of yours?”

“That’s not a stupid question,” Hermione said and took a long pull from her drink.

“Damn. I was afraid you’d say that.”

“I don’t know if it’s significant in the grand scheme of things, but it’s significant to me,” Herm said.

“How?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“This guy I mentioned,” Beryl said, “the one I kissed too soon? He’s very big on connections between things being full of all kinds of meaning.”

“He sounds interesting,” Herm said. “Maybe I could fuck him next.”

Beryl smiled. “Yeah, he is interesting in an irritating sort of way. I quite like him.”

“Maybe it’s okay that you kissed him already,” Hermione said gently.

“I don’t know…a passionate kiss sort of knocks down a barrier, doesn’t it? Maybe that barrier shouldn’t have been knocked down yet. Or ever, even. It changes everything. I can’t believe it isn’t the same for him. He seems so…sensitive, with all his talk of connections.”

“I think you might be exaggerating the importance of kissing,” said Hermione.

“No. I’m not.”

“Well, maybe his whole world has changed too.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No.”

“A kiss shouldn’t take place only because it seems the thing to do at the time,” Beryl said. “It’s more important than that.”

She came away from the shop feeling a little bit better and a little bit drunk. On the walk home she tried to organize her thoughts and couldn’t. Who cares? she thought, as she passed through Coronation Park. Who cares how organized I am if I feel better and my hair’s clean? Besides, Dhani sucked wasp poison out of my foot; it’s okay that I let myself go when we kissed.