roses are loud, violets are lewd

There was one home movie that would slip into Pearl’s dreams of her grandmother’s wig falling off and everything would just cut into place including Grandma’s eyes. She could see the wig in Grandma’s hands. And she would think, “The hair is removed from its pain.”

Then she would add soundtrack . . .

We were at the nearby McDonalds, John and Driz swaying in their chairs. It was somewhere near the top of the hierarchical list of cool things to do during lunch in high school. Driz had the car to get there.

John was having his usual coke through double-barrel straw although he was saying, “Why do we come here this fountain shit tastes like liquid lipstick?” and Driz grinned, “Well, I’ll go put some lipstick on then,” and went off to do so.

And I was like, “John do you really believe everything that girl you’re sweet on says?” And he responded, “Pearl, it’s just like writing (he dreamed of writing in Laundromats). I wouldn’t say it’s half true and half lies, I’d say it’s all true and all eyelash false.”

There was another movie of Pearl’s grandmother in the kitchen baking cakes. White fluffy cakes with white swirling icing on white counter space. She’d stack them up like sandcastles. And Grandma insisted on keeping the counter space. “My dream is counter space to the moon,” she would say.

Oh Pearl’s birthday, the party dresses were frilly and perfectly white. CLICK. Grandma who was still blonde and presentable would say outright if it was a bad Polaroid: “WHO took this? I’ll chop off his hands.” Only on this special day was anyone allowed to have one of Grandma’s cakes. “Just for Pearly.” Grandma would scrunch up and whisper, “But it looks soooo lovely,” as she cut a piece sliding the knife down through the layers. And Pearl would hope on the edge of her seat that she'd get the slice with the penny in it. She saw those pennies go into the batter from Grandma’s sultry red change purse. The open and shut snap. If Pearl got the slice with the penny, she’d get her wish.

John and Driz were already doing couple things that first year of high school, although she’d never admit they were going out. They went camping once Driz got her license, for instance, in the States no less. I could just see them drifting down the highway, constantly feeding the tape deck and everything. But John told me it was such a letdown: it was a total McCampsite with hardly any trees and sites so close to each other it looked like an Astroturf minefield in a parking lot. But then John looked at me and said, “Overall we had a good time even though Driz kicked me out of the tent in the middle of the night. But really, I love the smell of asphalt in the morning.”

And he went on, “The best was that this boy next to their site was saying to his sister as they were going to bed, ‘Just to let you know, you’re barf!’ and she’d go, ‘No, I insist, you’re barf,’” and John and Driz would say that back and forth to each other before school in the cafeteria where I’d see them every day.

But it was definitely John who came up with the good lines, like the time we were all at Mrs. Robinson’s place and John wanted Driz to let him open up the photo albums of Driz as a drooling toddler. “Oh come on,” he said. “Let me look through the archives for the peanut butter and jam.”

Pearl’s mom made butter sandwiches.

All I remember about my grandfather is how he snapped his leather briefcase shut and waltzed out the door each morning leaving the scent of his cologne behind, the scent of violets. I’d open and close my pudgy hands trying to catch it. He never had a lot of money and only had two or three suits, but he would use the money he had to dry clean those suits every day. I spent all my money on comic books and wearing my hooded sweatshirt and jeans and running shoes. And maybe it made my sadness comfortable and maybe I did it also to piss my mother and grandmother off. But for sure it felt right. One time my grandfather snapped his leather briefcase shut and left for good.

John said to me, “Do you know in L.A. they have graffiti on trees?” While the weather was still cool, we could wait for the school bells by a tree in the front. “I wish I had a cousin in L.A. who could send me Death cigarettes. It’s all in the packaging, the packaging is wild. Jet black and it’s got this skull on the front with cross bones. Hey, aren’t these jeans great?’

Driz had shown John how to bleach his jeans and now he’d be into bleach forever.

Driz’s car was covered in one big coat of nail polish. She was coming back from making sure it wasn’t chipped.

“In New York City the garbage bins are like fish-net stockings,” he said.

Tide was the neighbour. Eighteen and working on this fifties convertible in his parents’ garage. Pearl went over there to sit on his car like a hood ornament. She was twelve. She’d watch him for a long time, dying for him to drive something by her mind.

He would look at her with his eyes and say, “High school sucks. By the end, all your friends have yellow teeth.”

And he had all these tools, and every time something wouldn’t work, he would get all uptight and make a dent in the car. A new dent every time and Pearl would laugh. She asked him, “So are you going to sail her somewhere pretty when you’re done? California? Miami? Venice Beach? Mexico? And he said, “No, I’m going to sell it, girl, make big bucks.” And every day she’d sit there, her head going vrmm, vroommm trying not to let the sound turn to vacuum.

Her mom would stick her nose out the door and start screaming dinner.

Grade six finally sucked me in. It had been years since I’d had a proper friend, and I couldn’t handle trying to figure out what to do at recess twice a day, where to sit at lunch. But this particular teacher with purple highlights in her flair hair noticed that I was a waterfall during the national anthem. And at lunch she put aside her Styrofoam coffee cup with the bright lipstick marks and said, “Will you help me clean up?” For one hour, I didn’t have to think about lunch.

Then I couldn’t do homework. I’d come home and watch Family Feud ‘cuz it wasn’t like Jeopardy. I actually knew the answers, sometimes. And at night, my heart would beat too loudly. I didn’t want to see a psychologist because one teacher had told us that you couldn’t be President of the United States if you’d ever seen a psychologist, and I didn’t want to close any doors for myself.

John said, “Kids know that first in line mostly means you’ve been waiting for the bus the longest.” John and Pearl were actually heading to catch the bus at the time, Pearl sort of diverging from the natural bee-line to the bus stop. There was a cigarette pack on the ground and John kicked it. “Hey,” he smiled, “go ahead and kick it.” “Not that far,” he said. “It kicks back at you, no?” He ran and grabbed the pack and brought it up to her face: “It’s a full one.” As soon as they lit up cigarettes, the bus came, another thing that kids know or find out very fast. She could deal with every organ rotting except one, she thought. They headed for the back of the bus and sat down. Both of them staring blankly forward.

And Pearl came home and her mother was doing needlepoint stitch by stitch. The needle going under as she asked, “How was your day, hon?” And it was always, “Fine.” Her mother tugged on the string, bringing it closer. Pearl ran up the stairs to her room, racing to get to John’s books.

“Don’t look at the words like they’re a bunch of bricks – that’s somebody’s guts splattered on the page right there,” John had said lending Pearl books he had underlined to make her more focused. She followed these lines plank-like, hoping they’d lead to him, to her, to the period at the end of the sentence that would say dive in.

Deep in the suburbs on a cold winter night when everyone else was sleeping long before she ever picked up a guitar, she would go into the garage and would keep the clothes dryer on to stay warm and she would write in her journal as if looking for something.

Pearl found the briefcase in the garage, and she didn’t need a key to open it. But hadn’t he left with it? She knelt down. It was under the tricyles and the red wheelbarrow. She put out her thumbs and pushed back the shiny brass buttons on the ends and the buckle snapped open and for that instant, it all clicked just as she remembered. Inside, there was that scent of violets. It was late and the night was coming in, trying to fill in the garage, circling around the hanging bare light bulb. And there was a card and pearls rolling around: “I’m sorry we’ve been scrounging so much but I wanted to save to buy this necklace for you.”

Pearl scooped up each pearl and carried them in like eggs that were about to hatch. She snuck one of her mom’s needles and strung the pearls up slowly until each pearl was hanging by the string and then she wore them.

Immediately Pearl felt that wave again like a hand passing over a crystal ball, and instinctively she put her head down to stop the feeling. She could just imagine her grandmother holding her up that first time in the hospital light, turning Pearl in her fingers saying, “She is perfect as a pearl, really, because, you know, sometimes the cord gets around the neck and the face turns blue.”

Driz was still going around in and out of the cafeteria frantically harassing people, even guys, for a tampon. John looked down at his key on his string necklace and promised, “One day I’m going to have janitor keys. None of this latch-kid key business. I want those skeleton keys. That’ll be cool.”

John had his usual coke can in front of him.

“You know that stuff can disintegrate pennies?” Pearl said.

At night on her pillow, Pearl could hear Tide’s skateboard do lines outside. Sometimes she’d look up and watch him. He’d go back and forth, never leaving the frame of her window and she’d repeat, “Leave the frame, leave the frame.” And when she closed her eyes, she knew how he’d be, all knees jutted out and hands balancing, riding the asphalt. And the last thing she would hear before drifting off to sleep would be an older male whispering. The same voice that said, “Don’t forget to take walks every half hour to clear the cobwebs in your head.” The voice would drum out, “Child, you are now floating down a river . . .”

I worried about John nights, How could I help him? It never got to crying with him at school, but I’d gaze at those turquoise lines on his forearms and think they must be carrying all that water. In the days, I saw him and whatever he did, that was John, but at night he could have disappeared down waterfalls for all I knew.

“I have to walk the dog,” Tide told her. Pearl got up and followed. They headed down back toward the ravine. Tide pointed, “See that tree. That’s the tree where my friend and I used to pitch apples at each other. Now he’s dead.” That was enough to shut Pearl up on top of her being silent, but she still thought, “Well I’ve never done that.”

The dog went loose and ran up to the water. It had beer cans floating on top and was way too dark to see all the rocks underneath. But the dog as it got all muddy pawing through, revealed in bits the layers and layers of trash. Pearl was sitting up by the path on the grass, wondering where the ravine went, this bubbling brook.

John tried calling Pearl at home once the weight of the phone felt like a bone in Pearl’s hand. She started at its whiteness. “. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .And she’s totally wigged out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . you’ve got to check out her mother, man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .she lives just down the ravine from you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . So, what do you think?”

She was trying to piece all the bits together.

“Don’t get silent on me, Pearl . . .”

“Is the final cut when the rose is clipped by the wooer?” This is what Pearl was thinking when out of the kitchen window, she saw John in the backyard nipping a rose from Mrs. Robinson’s rosebushes.

I only actually slept over at Driz’s once and we made the trip to the corner store for gumballs and such and the ol’ movie and all these pill-like candies came out. It freaked me out that they looked like pills and I dropped them. The thing was, when I dropped them, I was laughing hysterically and later I was all hyper-bouncing around in her living room. Driz gawked, “Pearl, I’ve never seen you like this!” because I had such a serious side at school. Even then when I accepted such comments, in my head I was like, “Fuck you.”

Her wardrobe was all sorted by colour and it was as if she’d made sure that she had every shade available. “One for every mood,” she said. Driz didn’t have more than one mood.

I asked her what she thought of John and she said, “He drooled on his cool a long time ago.”

“You know the whole time we were driving down to the campsite,” she said, “he kept feeding me his half baked ideas instead of shutting the fuck up and listening to some music for a second and tell me, Pearl, does anyone really care when making a mixed tape and you come to the end of a side, do you A) fill in all the space even if you cut off a song or B) have only whole songs even if this means a two minute wait of total silence?”

It was at that sleepover that I met Mrs. Robinson. She came down in her black silk kimono ready to take on coffee. She made it, one hand looking after a cigarette. The smoke seemed to have a dark cloud effect on Driz. I had never seen her so still. But Mrs. Robinson danced around Driz, her hips closing drawers behind her and then the microwave door. Then she took her coffee and wiggled down into her seat. She smiled at me through lipstick that made her lips look like worm skin and I tried to calm myself down by the window with a great view of the backyard.

Mrs. Robinson liked her coffee hot. She’d take two sips of coffee, then go, “Ugh,” and have to heat it up again. The fourth set of rings wasn’t the microwave for a change. It was John at the front door with the rose for Driz. A rose.

John came in and sat down, and Mrs. Robinson opened her legs a bit so you could see this sash tied around her upper left thigh. Driz flopped the rose on the table and was like, “Whatever, let the drooling begin.”

“All good parties end up emitting noise from the kitchen,” John would tell Pearl years later. Now little Pearl would be the first. She’d come down the curved staircase afraid of falling through the spaces of the railing. And she’d go and sit in the small chair and stare at the big wad of butter in the glass tray, the hairs on her back on end. Her mother would go down the stairs next, looking at the rail as if this is how it felt for someone to hold your hand. Then Grandma would descend the stairs as if they were a fan, one high-heeled shoe after another.

At the end of the year, Driz had a party at her house in the backyard and John puked all over the rosebushes. “My mom’s going to kill me,” Driz spat over his shriveled up body. He came with me to kneel in another spot in the backyard. But kept vomiting. I had my thin arms around him, one over his clammy forehead, one around his waist, and I sat there cradling with him, praying for it to stop. And then his mouth was just intricate froth. It came out like last words when people get shot on screen. And I saw his eyes. He was gazing through wisps of hair at Driz’s blonde hair swishing all over the garden as she tried to cover things with dirt, looking like quite a music video but not coming over here.

I got to my room and shut the door. The walk of clothes to the closet and then the ransacking for my guitar. I slowly took off each piece of clothing and then took the guitar out of its hard case and banged on it a few times, drifting to this....

My guitar teacher is playing his acoustic. His right hand is a hummingbird caught in strings. His three end fingers are up and fluttering as he strums and then stammers, Ring. Ring! It’s got to ring. His two knees are in the air and he’s almost telling the hummingbird to fly off to doveness. I watch, waiting for him to utter, “Now you try it.” But eventually he just says, “Well, I guess that’s it for today.”

Putting the guitar aside, I saw there was this red slash on my upper right thigh from where the guitar had been.

“I used to go out with high rollers!” This was seeping in under the door. My hair in my hands. The last thing John had said to me was, “I don’t understand why Driz’s so freaked out about her mom’s rosebushes, Mrs. Robinson really likes me.”

John came over to Pearl’s house for the first time and Grandma said, “Ooooohh, a visitor. Let me get one of my cakes I’ve been saving.” And she brought one up from the downstairs freezer. It was all Saran-wrapped. “I used to make such beautiful cakes. Now my fingers are coursing with pain. I don’t bake anymore. But at least I saved a lot of them.” She got out a big butcher’s knife and cut through all the layers saying, “So how do you know my granddaughter?” And she put a piece of cake on a dainty china dish and handed it to John. It was sprouting green mould.

Pearl’s mother came rushing in. “The cakes must go,” she said. “All sixty-six of them.” Grandma stood by, biting her nails to raw, “How can you waste food! Didn’t I teach you anything? Oh, my beautiful cakes.”

And Mother having to find the tranquilizer. And John having to be there now for the first time, his eyes all in awe as the needle went in. And Grandma grabbing John’s arm saying, “But you will stay for cake.” And John, looking down, must have framed the image of those bony fingers around his arm tied together at the knuckle because he’d later tell Pearl that’s what he was always reminded of. And six body-bag looking bags in the corner filled with Grandma’s beautiful cakes.

INT. JOHN. DAY

John goes into the side-washroom at a gas station. He leans his arms up on the sink in front of the mirror and is looking at his bare arms. He and Driz haven’t made it to the campground yet, so he is taking in the fact and taking it in long that there are no mosquito bites up and down the veins. He knows she strings him around but he is forever after why. This time the soundtrack is clearer than ever as the trucks outside leave and leave over hearts that flash red.