Flannery Read online

  We’re thinking of a gangster theme, she says. Black and white, lots of mist, lots of shadows.

  Then Amber gets a text.

  Oh no, she says. She actually smacks her forehead. Gary is waiting for me. He’s not going to be happy.

  And just like that, she’s racing down the corridor, away from me.

  Hey, I say. Want to talk after the game?

  But she turns the corner and is running down the stairs. She didn’t even ask what Tyrone and I have decided to do for our Entrepreneurship thing.

  Which is just as well. Overhead? That is not a word that made it into my/our Entrepreneurship proposal.

  I think of what Tyrone said — just food coloring and water, all profit — and I feel a little better.

  But then I think, What the heck are we going to put these dazzlingly colorful, profitable creations in? I’d forgotten all about packaging!

  8

  A word about my family’s financial situation. Dire. It’s a dire situation right now.

  The dads — my dad and Felix’s dad — have never contributed any child support (in my dad’s case, well, he can hardly be held accountable as he doesn’t know he’s a dad, and in Hank’s case, well, he doesn’t know he’s a dad, either).

  Which, well, contributes to the predicament we currently find ourselves in — namely, having to deal with a phone call from Newfoundland Power.

  Miranda has not paid the electricity bill. There have been three cut-off notices. The third one says, You have not responded to our previous attempts to contact you. We are sending a field worker into your area to discontinue services.

  I watch Miranda fold the third cut-off notice into a fan and bat her eyelashes at me over the top of it.

  A field worker sounds kind of intriguing, she says. Do you think he’ll be wearing one of those tool belts slung low over his hips? I’m a fool for tool belts.

  The third cut-off notice says this: You will see your breath as you stand over the toaster in the morning waiting for your toast to pop.

  You know what? the notice says in big red letters. Forget toast. There is no toast. You are toast. We have cut off the electricity. Try burning the kitchen chairs so you can warm your hands over the flames.

  Then it says, It’s not all bad. Social workers will probably arrive and take your little brother off kicking and screaming to an orphanage. You will never have to share the Oreos with him again. He will be fed to hungry lions.

  The third notice says, Have you heard of the dark side of the moon?

  Or it says, You know that fairy tale, “The Little Match Girl?” The kid who has to stand outside in sub-zero temperatures lighting one match after another to warm her little hands, and each match holds a memory of, like, a roast chicken or the kid’s poor mother who died of consumption under a pile of potato sacks, or some rich guy in a shiny top hat who tossed her a gold coin once, and then she’s out of matches and basically turns into a human ice cube. They find her dead in somebody’s doorway in the morning. Remember that one? Yeah, well, ditto.

  Miranda has never called us accidents. She prefers to call us surprises. My mother loves babies. And she says she loved our fathers.

  I know it’s true she loved Felix’s father, because I know who he is. For a few years before Felix was born, he practically lived with us.

  Hank doesn’t know he’s Felix’s dad. And Felix doesn’t know it, either. Miranda pretends she doesn’t know it. We aren’t allowed to talk about it.

  But I know it. It’s something I have to contend with, this knowledge. It feels like a stone tucked under my rib. The trouble is, for a while, maybe I thought of Hank as my dad too.

  My father — X — she’s happy to talk about. Even though she only knew him that one night before he returned to France and before she noticed her first skipped period. Tra-la.

  One thing I may have forgotten to mention: X arrived in St. John’s on a sailing vessel made of garbage. Bits of Styrofoam and rubber tires and crushed metal from the dump. He was one of six environmentalists who were circumnavigating the world to protest the practice of selling garbage to developing countries because we have nowhere else to put it.

  The kind of garbage people think they want because they watch infomercials at one in the morning where women in leotards strap themselves into big vibrating belts that are supposed to make them lose twenty pounds in two days and only cost $22.99, or the kind of junk we’re supposed to invent in our Entrepreneurship class.

  There are beaches all over Africa covered with fridge doors and used tampons and Ritz cracker boxes, old shoes, the husks of microwave ovens with the glass smashed out, car batteries leaking neon green juice that would sizzle the eyes out of your head if you even glanced at it, things with a slime of maggots squirming and writhing in the heat, cars crunched and stacked like colorful pancakes — mountains of this stuff dumped on white beaches, mountains that tumble toward the jungles beyond the beach and crawl inland.

  This, apparently, enraged my father.

  So X and his friends built a boat entirely of garbage. And sailed around the world.

  In short, my dad — not exactly Youth Entrepreneur Champion-of-the-Year genetic material.

  And then there’s my mother. Miranda is an artist, but she makes conceptual art and installations, none of which sell. They aren’t supposed to sell. Last winter, for instance, she did a series of ice sculptures. Her last piece was a mother polar bear and cub set adrift on an ice pan.

  She carved the ice with a chainsaw, chisels and drills, and she polished it with a blowtorch. She wore goggles and a snowsuit, her steel-toed boots. Yanked the pull-cord on the chainsaw and there’s a cloud of blue smoke. She touched the chainsaw to the block of ice and a giant fan of ice chips flew into the sky.

  I don’t know how she could see the shape in the block of ice, but she walked around it and stood back and moved in. She scratched some lines on the surface. Then the saw squealed and ground and ice flew some more and, little by little, the shoulder of a lumbering, downcast momma polar bear emerged, the surface roughed-up like fur, the big head swinging to the side to check for her cub, the doomed little family emerging in the evening light.

  Melting is part of the piece. It’s a comment on global warming, Miranda said.

  The whole piece — two bears on an ice pan — was constructed on logs so it could be rolled out to sea and set adrift. We had a big bonfire the day it was launched. All of Miranda’s friends showed up. It felt like half the population of St. John’s was there. Amber’s mom and dad were there too. Amber and I kept the fire going and helped the little kids roast marshmallows and wieners.

  There was an essay about Miranda in Canadian Art with lots of pictures, and another one in Border Crossings and she heard from galleries across Canada, some of them offering an exhibit. So the piece was a huge success. But of course you couldn’t sell a melting polar bear and her cub.

  This summer she’s doing an installation of sculptures made out of bird corpses covered in oil — it will be a powerful comment on the environmental dangers of the oil industry but not a big money maker, I’m guessing.

  Miranda also writes a parenting blog in the hopes that she will garner advertising once she secures a big following. She was waitressing and doing shifts at Sunny Horizons, a private company that takes care of babies who are wards of the state. But she had to stay up all night in an apartment behind the mall and the babies were sometimes physically abused and the job made it impossible to really be there for Felix and last year she had to have an ovarian cyst removed and was in hospital for six days and when she got out she felt too weak to work and she applied for welfare.

  So that’s the situation. We used to be what’s called the working poor, but now we’re just plain old poor. The fact that Miranda works on her blog every day and volunteers at Eastern Edge Gallery and makes art all the time doesn’t seem to qualify as actual work.

  So we’re welfare. Miranda says sometimes people have to ask for help and there’s
no shame in that.

  But I can see it embarrasses her cashing the check at the supermarket when we get groceries. If she puts the check in the bank, they’ll put a hold on it.

  It embarrasses the cashiers too. First Miranda will chat with them about the weather, or she’ll ask how far into their shift they are, and then she brings out her check and her ID and everything goes quiet. Miranda usually tries to get the same cashier, a woman named Cheryl, according to her name tag. Cheryl has Miranda’s check in the drawer so fast it’s like she’s doing a card trick. But Cheryl isn’t always working.

  The one Miranda doesn’t like to get is Tracy, who is not judgmental about social assistance but very deliberate and often confused.

  Tracy lifts her glasses which hang on a string around her neck and puts them on the tip of her nose. She makes a hard little frown and holds the check out at arm’s length in one hand and Miranda’s driver’s license in the other.

  Finally, she calls out to the head cashier. By this time there’s usually a big lineup behind us. Finally, the head cashier comes over and Tracy lays the check on the little counter and they both really study it. Then the head cashier, whose name tag says Joanne, will pick the check up and look at both sides, and lay it down again and smooth it flat. Then she nods regretfully.

  Yes, girl, go ahead, Joanne will say.

  What Miranda says about her parenting blog (besides You’ll see, Flan, soon we’ll be rolling in advertising dough) is that parenting is something everybody knows how to do anyway. But there’s a lot pressure out there. People need encouragement to listen to themselves.

  Innate is one of Miranda’s favorite words. She has an innate talent for parenting, she says. Look how you turned out, Flannery, she says. You are my finest hour.

  As though I myself had nothing to do with it.

  She does not allude to Felix Malone during these conversations, because he is not a prime example of good behavior.

  So, the blog. Naturally my personal life gets turned into cute, embarrassing little stories for the Internet without regard for my privacy or existence as an actual person with human rights versus Miranda’s right to freedom of speech and, as she calls it, “her material.”

  Her argument generally goes this way: I carried you inside me. I have stretch marks. I gave up everything for you. Surely that means I can write a few words about the experience.

  Felix is flying the helicopter drone around the kitchen. He flicks the remote lever and the drone lowers right in front of my face. The red light is on, so I know he’s recording a not very flattering video of me arguing with Miranda. I swat at it with the dish towel.

  He zooms the helicopter so it swerves around me and across the kitchen to hover over the phone, which has been ringing for several minutes.

  We all know it’s Newfoundland Power and I am refusing to answer it.

  Answer it, Flannery.

  I’m not answering it.

  Answer the phone, Flannery.

  I’m not lying, Miranda.

  Miranda flings out her arm, finger pointing at the phone.

  Flannery, answer the phone this instant, she says.

  Look, Miranda, I say, I am not telling the bill collector that my mother, unfortunately, died in a deep-fat fire just yesterday, leaving two orphan children to mourn.

  I’ll say it! Felix yells. Let me do it.

  The helicopter zooms up over the fridge and hovers over the ringing phone. Miranda is aghast, she says, that I am slavishly and uncritically taking the side of the One Percent, the corporate elite, the faceless power brokers, the freaking power company for God’s sake, rather than taking the side of the disenfranchised, a.k.a. Miranda.

  Your own flesh and blood, she says.

  It isn’t a joke, Miranda. They’re going to cut off the electricity.

  So tell them.

  The truth is important to me, I say.

  The truth is nuanced, she says.

  Nuanced? I yell. What’s nuanced about faking the death of my mother?

  That was a joke, she says.

  Oh, ha ha. My mother burned to death, hilarious.

  Just tell them I’m not home. Look, at least tell them how unfair the situation is, Flannery. I’m doing my best here and I can’t make ends meet. Is that fair? Let’s make them uneasy, at least.

  I’m not answering the phone, Miranda. It’s embarrassing that we can’t pay. I find it embarrassing, okay?

  She assures me there will be a parenting blog about my betrayal. Then she snatches up the phone. And sure enough it’s the Newfoundland Power Company. She listens for a while saying, Mmmhmm, yes. Mmmhmm. I see. Yes. Of course. Mmmhmm.

  The helicopter drone has moved across the room and is hovering over the bowl of salad. Tonight we are having mac and cheese, which is Felix’s favorite meal, but the salad could ruin everything. He only eats white food. Bread, pasta, white cheddar cheese, vanilla cake. The helicopter drone buzzes angrily over all the lettuce.

  And when you say your field staff will pay a visit to cut off our power, would that be you? Miranda is saying. Because maybe I wouldn’t mind if you paid a visit. We could sit down face to face and discuss, human being to human being, the inequality of this situation. And you have such a lovely phone voice. I roll my eyes and Miranda shrugs. She spoons up the salad onto two of three plates sitting on the counter.

  Miranda heard a theory a while back that you should put a little of everything on the side of a picky child’s plate and gradually his palate will develop.

  It’s a theory that goes against everything my mother believes in. This trying to trick a child into doing what you want, this method of bribing or starving or forcing food down unwilling gullets.

  That may have been the inspiration for her to start her parenting blog in the first place.

  I see, Miranda is saying. So what’s the least amount I could possibly pay without having your field staff come to cut off the power? Because it is getting cold out there. And I do have two children. We’re actually having trouble keeping food on the table. Miranda is tearing off squares of paper towel for napkins and she has the ketchup bottle and a jar of pickled beets.

  Okay, yes. I can pay that, she says. By October tenth, you said. Yes, I understand. Yes, I got your notices. You’re being very understanding. She puts down the beet jar and points her finger down her throat and pretends to gag. I cross my eyes.

  You’re going to pay the heat bill? I ask when she finally hangs up the phone.

  You heard the conversation, Flan. They’re going to cut off the heat. The electricity. I can’t let that happen. Don’t worry, I should have a check from the Arts Council by then.

  And then we can get my biology book too, right?

  We’ll have to see how much the check is for, Flannery. You’ll have to borrow somebody else’s book for little while longer.

  At that moment the helicopter drone nosedives into the sink, which is full of soapy water.

  Black Hawk down! screams Felix. He rushes over and pulls out the dripping helicopter. It’s probably fried. We could have sold it at Traders when he got bored with it. The pawnshop might have coughed up just enough for my biology book.

  I need a schoolbook, I scream. Is that too much to ask? I wrench open the closet door and let it slam against the wall, grab my windbreaker, shove my feet into my sneakers and slam the front door behind me.

  Magnificent Mothering with Miranda

  Your child knows what his body needs. Trust your child. Listen to what he tells you. Really listen. Don’t say broccoli when your child says s’mores. We muddle the child’s innate understanding of his nutritional needs by foisting upon innocent taste buds dank, limp, hairy, over-boiled vegetables and unripe fruit. The particular, slimy texture of banana is revolting to some children, don’t forget that. People say the potassium in a banana is good for them. If the kid doesn’t like banana, to potassium I say Pshaw!

  Think of the carrot in the bottom drawer of the fridge. Think of the sweating plastic ba
g the carrots are crowded into, brownish juice in the plastic folds and wrinkles, the breathy stink of earth when you tear the plastic. This could ruin a child’s appetite for a lifetime.

  Do not insult your child’s intelligence. The raw carrot stick is not a fun snack. Even if you smear it with peanut butter. Who would eat that? Who thought to call a celery stick with processed cheese and raisins Ants on a Log? Your child knows that calling them Ants on a Log doesn’t make them taste any better.

  Here’s another piece of advice: Your kid doesn’t like crusts, you cut them off.

  Warning: A single Brussels sprout contains within its tight, balled-up little leaves enough despair and loneliness to destroy a childhood forever.

  Don’t do it.

  Don’t give your child a Brussels sprout. Your child will grow old and wither before your very eyes.

  Next week: The Evils of a “Time Out.”

  9

  It’s very cold. I’m only wearing a hoodie and a windbreaker and it’s already dark. My ears are burning and I’m walking as fast as I can until I calm down. I can see stars above the white oil tanks on the Southside Hills. The digital clock at city hall says it’s 7:06, and the temperature is minus 5.

  I’m mad at everyone — mad at Amber, mad at Tyrone. Mad at Miranda for buying the video helicopter instead of my freaking biology book. Even though Felix has been making some pretty good videos.

  And I’m mad at the power company. I mean, heat and electricity, shouldn’t that be free? Doesn’t everyone have a right to shelter? That’s part of shelter.

  I cross the street and head down to Water, past the construction on Waldegrave. The backhoes are abandoned at this hour but glow bright yellow in the floodlight of the excavated pit.

  I’m jogging past the antique shop and the flower shop and those grungy, ancient bars down there where the bikers hang out. I’m on the west end of Water, across the street from the site of the new parking garage, next to the old train station.

  A car passes on the other side of the street, and — boom — I see the graffiti. It’s on the plywood wall around the parking garage construction site. The headlights of the car run over the mural, making it flare.