February Read online

  The teacher said, Kids will make fun of him. Just gently remind him, she said. Chew with your mouth closed. This is basic. One day I went into the cafeteria and he was sitting by himself. Big table.

  Helen told this to John, and then he ate with his lips pressed hard and tight, eyes wide and fierce with the magnificent strain of being polite.

  Helen did math with John, and she told him: Your fives are backwards.

  They made a project about penguins with photographs from National Geographic and bristol board and Magic Markers. Penguins keep the one mate for life. They slide off the cliffs of ice on their bellies. Every now and then one will get eaten and the other will be left alone. These were the maudlin, sentimental facts about penguins. Johnny cut out photographs with his round-nosed scissors and glued them onto the bristol board and he made slanting lines with a ruler for the captions. His printing was atrocious.

  Helen made the children sit at the table together for the evening meal. Always. Sitting at the table together was the cornerstone of her act.

  She didn’t bake. Helen put store-bought pastries in their lunches, and she put in cans of pop. She put in a ham sandwich with mayonnaise and Wonder bread. All the families of the drowned men were waiting for the settlement, because how do you feed four kids and pay Newfoundland Light and Power?

  After a while she got a job bartending. Meg babysat and Helen worked when the bar called her in, and she found she couldn’t count change. She’d look at the change in the cash register drawer and the change in her open palm and the five-dollar bill in her other hand and she had no idea what it all meant.

  She got the orders wrong. Some people had tabs and she didn’t know which people. Once she refused to serve a man and he offered to blacken both her eyes for her. Then you won’t think you’re so smart, he said. He picked up the phone and called the owner and gave her the receiver and the owner said, You’re there to serve beer. Now serve the goddamn beer.

  She cleaned up puke in the bathrooms and she’d leave at four in the morning and walk home. Cars crawling beside her on Duckworth Street. Men asking did she want a lift. Do you want to get in? I got something for you.

  Once she screamed in a man’s face and burst into tears and demanded to know: Where is your wife? Where is she? Don’t you have a wife? The mirrored window rolled up with a whir and she saw her blotched face and the snot and tears and the halo of her hair lit from the street light and she didn’t know who it was. Screaming as the car burned rubber. The smell of the tires and her face streaking in the glass.

  The money from the bar was enough to keep her family in groceries until a man smashed a beer bottle on the corner of a table and held it to his girlfriend’s face. The bouncer broke the man’s back tossing him out and then Helen quit.

  She called to the children from the foot of the stairs, her hand on the banister: Supper is on the table.

  Johnny got a paper route and on winter evenings she and the girls followed him, waiting on the street while he banged on doors collecting change. He was ten and the baby, Gabrielle, was in a carrier on Helen’s back. John had the idea that he should support the family. Saucy as a crackie, a corner boy. She’d watch him ring the bell and be asked to step inside.

  Johnny chatted up the old men who came to their doors in bathrobes and scuffling slippers. Helen listened to the screech of their screen doors and watched as the old men looked up the street for a parent and saw her and the girls, and then they ushered John in.

  Come in, my son.

  Or there were the housewives digging through their purses. Ten years old, and Johnny would notice a new haircut or he’d say the supper smelled good.

  He worked them for a tip, ten years old. He patted the dogs and stood talking while he handed over the paper.

  Helen and the girls walked all over the neighbourhood while Johnny collected for the Telegram. When she got home she’d sit on a chair and Johnny would hold the backpack while she undid the straps, and when she had worked her shoulders out it felt like she was floating. She would put Gabrielle in the crib without taking off her snowsuit. Even the sound of the zipper could wake the baby.

  She thinks of the smell of the Telegram bag John carried over his shoulder, the smell of frost and ink. The change spilling out of his wallet onto the kitchen table. Slamming his hand down on the rolling quarters before they got away. He wanted to buy groceries, so she let him. He bought tubs of ice cream and cookies. He’d give the girls a spoon each and they’d all eat from the tub there on the kitchen table. Once John bought her a steak. He was very proud of himself.

  What a maniac Helen was if the children didn’t come immediately for supper—I am putting supper on the table down here and I expect you to come when I Jesus call and I expect you to come immediately.

  The girls flung themselves into their chairs. Laughing, talking over each other, reaching for the ketchup. Gabrielle learned to go up the stairs, her pudgy diaper wagging in the faded yellow sleeper. Watch she doesn’t fall. Are you watching that baby?

  Johnny would get up when Gabrielle woke in the middle of the night and bring her a bottle of milk. He was afraid of the dark but he made his way down the stairs into the kitchen, and Helen would hear the fridge and she would hear him coming back up the stairs as fast as he could. He would give Gabrielle her bottle and climb into bed with Helen, his cold feet on her shins. He always had a pain in his tummy. Rub my tummy, he’d say. It was stress. A little kid with stress. Nobody said stress back then. Growing pains, they said.

  Elbows, Helen said at supper. Not on your sleeve. Use your napkin. Do you want to crack the legs off that chair? How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t lean back. Don’t bounce the ball off the walls.

  She would not have the TV on during supper. She had an idea of what a family was and she would make them be one. Turn off that TV, she said. If she had a quarter for every time she said, Close the door; we’re not heating the street.

  John forgetting to use his fork. Use your fork. Use your goddamn. I’ll cut it for you. Do you want Mommy to cut it? John hated to sit in his chair at the table. Can I be excused? No, you can’t. I’m finished. You’re not finished until everybody is finished; this is a family. Gabrielle is finished. Lulu is finished. Can I go now? Go then. Go. Go on if you want to. Go on out of it. Go for the love of God. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  And John tore around the corner and down the hall and out the door. Shut the door. Shut the goddamn.

  Or John would wolf his food and then bounce a basketball. That ball is marking the paint. What did I say about the ball? I said don’t bounce the ball off the. Look at the wall! Look at the mark on the. What did I say?

  Standing by the table, dribbling the ball. She would not have any sauce, Helen told her children.

  Don’t back-answer me, young lady, if you know what’s good for you, she said.

  I’ll tan your arse, she said.

  John was this kind of kid: You’d have to say Stop bouncing that ball. The loud spank of it had an echo and the light over the dining room table would vibrate from the noise. This was a light with a fake electric candle and four plates of smoked glass around it and a bronze-looking chain that wrapped around the cord. It hung from the ceiling, and when John bounced the basketball, small rectangles of light jiggled on the tablecloth. This is a boy, ten, eleven years old.

  Bunny ears, his sister Lulu told him. You make one loop, then you make the other loop and you fold this loop under that loop and you just pull tight. But John could not tie his shoes.

  The girls drew on the sidewalk with coloured chalk—flowers and hopscotch. Cathy knotted elastic bands together in one long rope and put one end around the telephone pole and the other around Lulu’s knees and she would jump onto the elastic and hold it down under her shoe. Or the girls played with a Footsie. One October the family had to listen to the screech of Lulu’s violin for a half-hour every day after supper. Lulu had formidable discipline, her chin crimped up against the little plastic cup, the raw squ
awks so shrill they buzzed in Helen’s teeth.

  In the summer they bought ice creams and sat by the fountain in front of the Colonial Building. At dusk, fans of shooting foam burst up from the bottom of the shallow pool. Sheets of mist drifted in the breeze, covering their hair in a netting of tiny beads. No woman should be left alone to take care of four children, Helen had thought then, the baby with a wasp sting that made one eye swell shut like a prizefighter’s. The music, faint, coming up from downtown, and the smell of barbecues, and kids on skateboards floating past—a Friday afternoon at suppertime after a day in the park.

  She had John bouncing the basketball and Gabrielle in a high chair slopping food. Cathy and Lulu were capable of sitting still at the supper table. The girls could use a napkin. John wiped his face on his sleeve.

  By outside Helen meant that there was a transparent wall, a partition between her and the world. She could be yelling her head off—Stop with the goddamn ball—but nobody heard her.

  After the Ocean Ranger went down there was a very long wait for a settlement. People always want to know how much the families got, and Helen is in this camp: none of your goddamn business.

  People who want to know about the settlement seem to think a life has a figure attached to it. A leg is worth what? An arm? A torso? What if you lose the whole husband? What kind of money do you get for that? They think a husband amounts to a sum. A dead husband does not add up to an amount, Helen is tempted to tell these people. People who want to know about the money don’t know what it’s like on the outside. They are still inside. Or they have never been in love in the first place. Helen watches those people with interest.

  What she would like to tell people is that she and her four children waited a very long time for the settlement. There was a charity fund for the families, yes, and people had the best intentions, they were generous, but the charity didn’t go far. She doesn’t say that to anyone. But that money didn’t go far.

  It would be best if people don’t get her started on that subject. Her sister showed up with groceries, is what she would like to say. More than once, and Louise didn’t have extra either. Louise just showed up and started unloading the car and she didn’t want to hear thank you. A week’s worth of groceries.

  Louise wouldn’t hear thank you. It was a terse business between two sisters, putting those groceries away in the cupboards. Louise had gone into nursing and she was just getting started and didn’t make much money then and she had two children of her own.

  This is, Louise said. Don’t mention it.

  Thank you, Louise, Helen said.

  Do me a favour and shut up.

  Helen folded laundry. Matching socks was an act that looked very much like matching socks. She looked exactly as though she were in the world, engaged in the small work of Here is one sock, now where could that other sock be? And when she was done there would be an actual pile of socks.

  She had the radio on all the time. Or she turned it off.

  That’s one mouth we can shut, she’d say. And snap the radio off.

  The more time passed, the more convincing Helen became. There was the smell of chicken nuggets; there were bread crumbs under the toaster. She made lunches and had the oil company fill the tank and she went to the children’s Christmas concerts. Her lowest point ever was when the pipes froze. Down in the basement with its earthen floor, low ceiling, and damp stone walls, going at the pipes with a blowtorch. The hawking sputter as the flame shot out, strange blue, and the hiss. It frightened the life out of her. She couldn’t afford a plumber.

  Louise did not miss one of Helen’s children’s Christmas concerts. Husbands and wives sit together at Christmas concerts, so Louise went with Helen. There was a program that went on for three hours, and there were costumes, and silver snowflakes hanging from the rafters, and the exuberant, insistent piano, and the dramatic gestures of the music teacher with her baton directing the overly animated, deadserious kindergarten choir, and now, and now, and the children enunciating the syllables. Louise dying for a smoke. Louise falling asleep. Louise crying when Lulu played her solo on the violin.

  But the girls became sophisticated fast, and harder to fool. So Helen took another job, she started sewing again, and she went to yoga. Nobody said, Have you thought about meeting somebody else? For a long time nobody dared.

  … . .

  John Likes to Phone Her, November 2008

  HELEN SLEEPS WITH an eye mask to block the light. The phone: Singapore. She thought for a minute that it was Thailand, but it was not Thailand. Singapore was China. Or was it Hong Kong? It was a stopover. John was on his way to New York. He said about the sun. We’re just touching down, he said. Getting fuel.

  I’m having a little espresso, Johnny said.

  The phone had rung and it might have been Louise with a heart attack, or God knows. Helen lifted the eye mask and saw how different the two kinds of darkness were. She could believe the world was made of atoms that buzzed and jostled, and if she wanted to, she could put her hand through the dresser, murky and insubstantial, and rub her nylons between her fingers, rub them away like fog on a mirror.

  Her black cardigan hanging on the closet door. Always there is that high-pitched terror when the phone rings at night: Is someone hurt? Louise has had a few scares with angina. An ambulance last winter. Helen is frightened of the phone.

  Her cardigan looked like a presence, a ghost. She was old, after all, and yes, years had passed. The bed flying over the edge of a cliff and a siren ringing out across the water and her body seemed to fall at a slower rate than the bed and she felt the bed hit with a plosh and then she hit the bed and began to sink, but it was just the phone, not a siren. The phone. Answer the phone. I’m certainly not old, she thought, snatching the receiver before she missed the call.

  It was just the phone; it was just her cardigan.

  Where are you, John, she said.

  Mom, you’re screaming in my ear. John could speak blandly when he wanted to make fun of her. He could be dry. She was not screaming. But she would try to speak more softly.

  I’m in the Singapore airport trying to get myself an espresso, he said.

  Helen heard a cash-register drawer snap closed. John had been all over the world on business. Tasmania was the most recent place. Meetings in Melbourne and then an adventure vacation in Tasmania. Some outdoorsy package. If you go all that way you want to take a few days, see the place, he had explained to her.

  And now you’re on your way home? Helen asked.

  … . .

  There’s a Baby Coming, November 2008

  TWO DAYS AGO I was feeding peanuts to a wallaby, John told his mother. Now I’m in the Singapore airport.

  He had been reaching into his pocket to pay for the espresso and he’d pulled out a candy wrapper and wondered how it got there. A purple wrapper with an illustration of a comic-book princess brandishing her hand—on her hand was a giant ring she wanted someone to kiss—and John thought of the wallaby nursing its baby. How the mother wallaby had seemed both lulled and dangerous as the baby nuzzled at her teats. The mother had rocked and swayed while the little one suckled. Splotches of scouring light had fallen through the rainforest onto the hard-packed earth and boulders.

  There had been a Japanese girl beside him, maybe eight or nine years old, in a yellow sundress. Her parents were a little farther down the path. John could hear their voices through the leaves. The little girl reached out to pat the baby wallaby and the mother wallaby hissed. Drawing back her lips to reveal mottled gums and yellow teeth. John put a hand on the child’s shoulder. Shadows flickered across the ground like the raggedy end of a film in an old projector; there was a rush of wind high up, a shuddering light.

  He’d made the little girl take a few steps back, his eyes on the wallabies. They were animals no bigger than mid-sized dogs and appeared to be as innocuous as teddy bears, springing up and down the trail. But they were not cute; they were wild—maybe rabid, for all he knew.

  Jo
hn was sure the mother wallaby would pounce and tear out the little girl’s throat. Big eyes with thick, feminine eyelashes. John looked the mother wallaby in the eye, but if there was intelligence in the animal—something he could bargain with—John did not see it. The eyes were amber, a splintering of darks and lights, browns, rusts, golds, and devoid of anything other than dumb instinct. The mother shivered. The muscular tail thwacked a bush. Then the baby sneezed. Ker-chew. It rubbed both paws over its nose, eyes shut, a headshake, a clownish unclogging of water droplets and snot and mother’s milk that startled them all, put things right, and both wallabies leapt through the underbrush and were gone. The little girl rolled her shoulder to release it from John’s grip. Then she was running up the path away from him, her straight black hair flicking from left to right.

  It was a five-hour hike to Wineglass Bay, and how white the sand of that beach had appeared when seen from the lookout above. And that’s when John’s cellphone rang.

  They were a small crowd of tourists on the lookout platform. The sibilant shuck-shucking of cameras, the crescendo of surf from far below. It had been a hard climb, and now an eerie solemnity fell over the group. They felt mounting awe, and the inevitable dip from awe to irritation. What did any of them have in their ordinary lives that could measure up to the stark virginity of that beach? They’d seen signs down on the beach requesting that they not remove the seashells.

  It seemed to John that the parents of the Japanese girl were bickering. They hardly spoke to each other once they reached the summit of the hike, and when they did speak their words were horked out, guttural and crisp, spat in the direction of their shoes. The mother lowered a pair of redrimmed sunglasses from her hair and crossed her arms tightly over her chest.