Too Close to the Falls (18 page)

Mrs. Dupont always invited us in during the Christmas season to see their tree, saying I was about the same age as her daughter, who was “indisposed at the moment.” The tree which stood in their cathedral-ceiling living room was the most magnificent I'd ever seen. Each year since the 1800s the family had added a new ornament representing something topical for that particular year.
Roy and I had to guess which was the new ornament and what it represented. Roy was far better at the game than I; he was never in the room for thirty seconds before he spotted it. In 1952 he picked out an ornament at least thirty feet up, the Maid of the Mist Ferry ensconced inside a dome of water which, when heated under a tree light, sprayed a mist. Who was about the size of a pinky nail in one of the tiny portholes, wearing a Santa hat? None other than Marilyn Monroe! Roy said with nonchalance, “Why, Cath, look, there is Marilyn wavin' out at us, probably promotin' her new movie,
Niagara
.”

As the years rolled on and Mrs. Dupont gradually became more impressed by Roy's astounding visual acuity, she made the game progressively harder. By 1962 she greeted us at the door saying she was sure she could stump us. But as soon as she slid back the parlour doors and we saw the tree with its hundreds of ornaments and lights, Roy's eagle eye cut right through the Christmas cacophony and spotted a tiny red-and-green plane with glittering wheels, near the top of the tree. The pilot had antlers and the cockpit was full of Christmas presents. Not missing a beat, he said with calculated insouciance, “Why, that there would be the U-2 spy plane that crashed this year over Russia during a reconnaissance mission. That ain't no Rudolph. Why, I'd know Gary Powers even without his antlers. Must be drop-liftin' Christmas presents to Khrushchev.” Incredulous, Mrs. Dupont asked how he knew. Roy looked perplexed, as though it was obvious: “Why, it's built like a jet and has the body of a glider. Got to be a U-2.”

Later, when we had left the Duponts', I asked Roy how he had developed such a memory for detail. He said when you can't read and you need to remember how to get places in the delivery business,
you have to be able to remember exactly what a spot looks like so you can retrace your steps. You had to remember each turn by a visual detail and, as he pointed out, “I didn't always have you.” What I didn't understand was why, if he could tell the tiny features of planes and never forget the minutiae of any
three-
dimensional object, didn't he simply learn the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. I knew better than to ask him, because it was one of the few things I could tell embarrassed him. He'd come up with elaborate ruses to hide his illiteracy.

For twelve years neither Roy nor I ever once laid eyes on the Dupont daughter when we delivered her bags and bags of medicine. Dour nurses in white uniforms carrying gleaming steel utensils covered in white towels crept up and down the winding staircase and looked distinctly relieved when we arrived, the phenobarbital-toting angels of mercy. Mrs. Dupont would take us through their dark wainscotted hallways and show us her daughter's train set, which Roy referred to as “Grand Central.” She had her own engine, so huge you could sit in it and drive around. It had a pull whistle, and made chugging noises. You actually passed scenery, and big plaster of Paris cows, and chugged by miniature road signs, and you could pull into a train station. Roy and I played on the train to make Mrs. Dupont happy, but kept our eyes on the door for fear the daughter, Lewiston's Boo Radley, would swoop down the stairs and pluck out our eyes. Once you got past the living room, there was such a pall cast upon that house that we always wanted to get out of there as soon as we felt it was polite to make a graceful exit.

The first few years Mrs. Dupont tried to give Roy a tip or Christmas money, but he wouldn't take it, saying that he got
wages. I wondered why Roy didn't take the money, but as the years went on I understood he had his own rules. When she gave him a big green-ribboned fruitcake soaked in rum, he took it gladly, saying there was nothing like a hot toddy and a fruitcake snack on a cold delivering day.

I had a great affinity for labels. I had particular ardour for what my father called “binomial nomenclature,” and labelled all my specimen jars, or dead animals, as Dolores referred to them, in Latin and English. Whenever I asked my father the name of anything, he gave me the general parameters and told me to look it up, and then always checked back with me the next day to see if I'd found it. We shared little binomial-nomenclature jokes, like when moths ate my mother's woollen winter underwear he said they had been “licentious lepidoptera.” He taught me how to distinguish the phylum, species, genus, order, and class of my various wildlife. I still remember the day he told me to look up Homo sapiens and I found it was me! Whenever we found a stray pill behind the scale or the typewriter, he taught me to trace its origin by looking up its image in the drug compendium. He seemed enormously pleased if I found its exact spot in the universe. However, I didn't do it just for him; it was also a natural inclination of mine to label the world. It gave things an order which I found reassuring. Otherwise things just seemed to be a big buzzing jumbled mess which sometimes closed in on me.

As we dove down the steep hill from the Duponts' home in Lewiston Heights, into what was known as the village of Lewiston, I told Roy we could figure out the Duponts' daughter's disease if we looked up phenobarbital and Dilantin. I knew the former was to quiet you down, since Roy and I had been late in
delivering Elder Mad Bear's once, and he'd gone on a rampage. I knew Dilantin was for epilepsy, because we had to deliver it to Belinda MacIntosh's house after she had a seizure in the lunchroom and almost swallowed her tongue, and knocked over the statue of St. Francis of Assisi, birds and all. Roy thought about what I said and replied, “I ain't so sure knowin' the name goin' to make one lick a difference. We all God's children no matter what we got. It's
one
tragedy that a man could invent nylon so all the women in this world could be happy wearing stockings again after the war, yet he couldn't invent a cure for his own daughter's disease.” As he drove along he added, “Just one a life's little tricks, I guess.”

As we headed down from the icy escarpment in our lowest gear, with our tire chains making sparks on the sanded incline, Roy announced the next stop would be Marie Sweeney's. I always liked going to Marie's house because it was definitely a way to step off the page of my own story. We usually had to spend a bit more time at Marie's place, because she needed Roy to help her put on her cortisone cream for what she referred to as her “devil's disease and flaming joints.” Her hands were crippled up with arthritis and looked like gnarled roots that had grown in a pot that was too small. She usually held them up on her chest, cradling them next to her heart, to offer them the only comfort she could give them.

As we reached the foot of the hill and headed into the outskirts of town, I was reminiscing about what we'd been doing exactly one year ago that night on Christmas Eve. Roy and I had been barrelling out of the store on our last-minute deliveries when we passed the revolving door of last-minute shoppers who were
barrelling in, mostly men, swarming Irene's cosmetic counter to buy whatever she recommended, which was always Evening in Paris perfume accompanied by what she felt was the ultimate enticement, “After all,
I
wear it.” Roy once said the only good thing about being an astronaut and landing on the moon would be not having to smell Irene's Evening of Paris perfume. Ted, one of the other pharmacists, said he had never considered that angle before, but he could now justify the government spending for the space race. My father said, given what the store smelled like, he would be surprised if Evening of Paris was not the first thing the astronauts would smell upon taking their first step out of their capsule. Irene simply looked at us all nonplussed and said she assumed
part
of our problem was that none of us knew what Paris smelled like.

Roy had been waylaid by the cash register on this busiest of Christmas Eves and surveyed the impulse items. He held up a cheap stocking-stuffer candle in the shape of a red Santa Claus that had been sitting there eyeing the customers since early November, but was now finally making genuine eye contact with guilty last-minute Christmas shoppers. “Hey, boss,” he asked my father, who was emptying the cash register and placing the money in burlap bags, “mind if I give this candle to Marie Sweeney when I drop off her Percodan — might be her only present.” My father hesitated in his counting for a minute and Roy pressed on, opting for plan B: “Hey, it'll only be half-price after Christmas.” My father continued his counting, but nodded his approval, and we were on our way. I grabbed a Christmas card for Marie and signed all our names to it, except for Irene who said she was “abstaining.”

Christmas Eve last year seemed so long ago. I felt almost twice
as old now. I understood so much more about the world. Last year I was shocked that a cheap candle would be Marie's only gift. After all, she lived in America, had a visit from Santa, to say nothing of her own nine children who would be bringing her presents. I now realized that Christmas bounty wasn't always fair. In fact, I wasn't even shocked by it anymore. What I still hadn't figured out was why God, who was good, would let Marie suffer with no presents. I was sure I would figure that out before I made my first communion next year.

Marie lived in a small flat above the Monte Carlo Hair Salon, which was connected to the angel-brick facade of the shabby Buena Vista Motel. Her stairs smelled like a combination of decaying fish and saturated kitty litter, which became more pungent the higher you climbed. Roy and I used to plug our noses and run with watering eyes to Marie's door, where there were paper signs written in nail polish saying, “Stay out.” One also said, “If you're a Fuller Brush man — don't knock unless you want a brush with death.”

Roy knocked on the unfinished plywood door and Marie grumbled with her Lauren Bacall gone-to-seed rasp, “Git movin'.” When Roy rapped again she said, “Understand English or are ya from Canada?” However, when Roy said, “McClure's Drugs,” she changed her tune, knowing that on the other side of that thin door were her painkillers and her cigarettes. Cockroaches pinged around the kitchenette counter sounding like rain on a tin patio roof. The room was always dark with long black velvet curtains shutting out the present. The furnishings were canvas lawn chairs assembled in a pathetic conversation circle. On the floor were indoor/outdoor carpeting samples donated by Hansen's Hardware.

Marie remained a murky figure in the corner who refused to
turn on the light. She only came into focus when
we
accommodated to
her
dark. She was so thin and wrinkled she looked like a yellow balloon that had been forgotten at the Volunteer Firemen's Peach Festival and had slowly shrivelled. Upon our arrival she tore open her Chesterfield carton and had Roy tap open a pack on the arm of her chair. She smoked by balancing the cigarette in the crook between her thumb and index finger. Once she got the cigarette to her lips she could grasp it tightly, a service her fingers could no longer perform. She held the cigarette exactly in the middle of her lips, while drinking from the right side of her mouth and talking out of the left with no apparent difficulty. Then she quickly pawed through the bag until she found the Percodan prescription and Roy helped her “wash it down” with a few Johnny Walkers while I had a Coke and Hostess Twinkies. I thought Roy was brave to apply the cream to those mangled stubs. When I told him later that he was like Jesus anointing the lepers, he shook his head and said, “It ain't so easy to lose your looks when you ain't got a backup plan.” When I informed him that
everyone
got old, a favourite line of my mother's, he answered, “Poor Marie was sittin' on her groceries.” I thought that this strange habit explained Marie's thin and withered look. Obviously she
sat
on her groceries instead of
eating
them. It was many years later when I heard a Joni Mitchell song about a prostitute “sitting on her groceries” that Roy's line jumped back to my mind.

As we all had our “Cokes-and-smokes chat,” as Marie called it, she would reminisce about her life when she was a girl. I really liked that part. She told me not to be a ninny when I was in high school like she had been. I'd never heard a grown-up claim to have made a mistake, let alone own up to being a
ninny
. She said
she was a shameless nincompoop to marry ol' Jim when she was still shy of fifteen, and have a baby, forever after referred to as “young Jim,” by her sixteenth birthday. She looked disgustedly at me. “Can ya imagine what it felt like when I woke up from that nightmare and it weren't no dream and I weren't goin' nowhere. No siree! My ma said I'd made my bed — so now I could just lie in it. I had four more babies ‘fore I knowed that it weren't God that was givin' em to me.” Puzzled, I asked Marie who was giving her the babies. If it wasn't God then maybe it was the Archangel Gabriel of the Annunciation. “Oh, that would be ol' Jim hisself and he weren't no angel, I can tell ya that much. That was way back when he could still bully me, before he lost his legs to the sugar an' the drink and his mind was pickled in the hard stuff,” she said, holding up her glass for Roy to refill. “Yep, I was one blind dimwit. Thought his tattoos from the navy and the way he leaned on the pickup was sexy as hell.”

Sex
was an interesting word I'd never heard before. I somehow had an inkling the word had something to do with magazines that only Roy could put on the top shelf of the magazine rack. The entire magazine was ensconced in a brown paper sleeve so that you couldn't see any part of the cover nor could you open it. I found it humiliating that
my
father had such things in his store. No one ever said anything about them, but I somehow knew that it would be wrong to exhibit any interest in them. It would be a mistake to ask Roy about them, and a bigger mistake to ask my father. I was quite sure my mother had no idea such things existed so there was no point in even mentioning it to her.