To prepare myself for dinner at Guy’s parents’ place I did some research on Gord. I collared Sabrina during lunch. She’d made the rounds of educational conferences and, at numerous drunken post-conference parties in garish Holiday Inn hospitality rooms, had ended up on the knee of more than a few eminent keynote speakers. There was a good chance she’d met Gord during her travels.
She scratched her insta-tanned cheek and thought for a moment, checking her nails for telltale orange stain. I imagined her flipping through a mental catalogue of paunchy, gray-haired guys in navy sports coats and tan Fortrel slacks.
She chewed at her lower lip, then nodded. “I’m so glad you asked, Anna, because I do actually remember him. It was at a Westin. High-end place just outside of Denver. Artificial lake out front, monogrammed robes in the bathroom, wrapped truffles on the pillows. Definitely a cut above your Super 8 motel.”
She stared out into space then held up her French-manicured index finger with its little arc of white nail. “It was a major national conference – he was the keynote speaker.” Frowning, she searched the staffroom wall for inspiration. “It’s hard to explain. He was weird – different. Kind of like Jimmy Swaggart channels Dr. Phil at a kindergarten concert. I can’t remember a goddamn thing about his speech, but at the end he asked everyone to close their eyes and concentrate on strengthening their personal auras. Then he played Joe Cocker singing ‘You Are So Beautiful’ and stood in front of us all with his hands held up like some modern-day messiah. Let’s say there was a whole lot of whispering and speculation about what he was on and how we could get some of that good stuff too.”
I nodded my thanks and got up to leave the lunch table, but she grabbed my wrist and held on tight.
“Oh my God. That’s the prof’s dad. Is your honey finally taking you home to meet Mommy and Daddy?”
I nodded, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut. “Sunday. For dinner.”
“They’ll probably make you link arms at the table, sing ‘Kumbaya’ and become one with the cosmos before you can take a bite.” She laughed, tipping her head back exposing the sharp line where her fake tan ended.
“And who says I don’t want to?”
“What?”
“Get in touch with the cosmos? Be one with the universe?”
“Sure. Why not? Especially when there’s a big payoff involved. I’d wear a sheet, shave my hair off and dance a jig for a ticket to the good life.”
“Maybe he’s changed since you saw him.”
“I doubt it,” she said, lifting the lid from her cottage cheese salad. She’d put walnuts on it instead of the usual raisins. Her fork stopped in mid-air and she smiled at the now-distant memory. “Oh God, now I remember. He was holding court in the hospitality room. Sipping on mineral water and icy as a frozen log when it came to the old Sabrina charm. Barely lifted an eyebrow. Even when I showed a bit of thigh and squeezed in tight during a toast. That guy was oblivious to everyone except himself and his ego.”
“Well I guess I’ll find out on Sunday,” I said, getting up. I didn’t need any more revelations to prejudice my first impressions of Guy’s parents.
I distracted myself from the upcoming family dinner by reading my students’ daily journals, which were becoming more revealing day by day. I couldn’t just scan them. I had to read them from front to back, cover to cover. Their contents drew me back to a time and place I thought I’d put behind me.
As I read them, I’d start to feel all my old outrage about the powerlessness of marginalized kids. How they’re invisible to the rest of the world, until some creep murders one of them and the papers run a story on society’s seamy underbelly and its disenfranchised victims. Usually, there’s an immediate burst of moral outrage from a few charitable do-gooders and opportunistic politicians who make all the right promises to clean things up. To name the johns, tighten up the foster system, and clean up the policing, but all too often these kids disappear and nobody cares until the next body washes onto the riverbank or turns up wrapped in a garbage bag in some back-alley dumpster.
Dane, the oldest of the new group of students, had raw talent. His writing was punchy and showed a weary kind of wisdom too old for his years. I read it at the end of the day. The words swam in and out of my vision, competing with memories of Birdie and me.
Carla’s got a real job. Tell the world and the universe!! Her aunty hooked her up. She’s a mall cop with connections. It’s at Victoria’s Secret of all places. Now our sweet Carla gets a huge discount on all that sexy, lacy lingerie. Me and the guys are glad she’s off the street for now. She’s too tiny. A baby bird. Some thug is gonna crush her. The rich, powerful ones are the worst. Those people have layers – the outer, respectable layer that everyone sees. Nice clothes, sweet cars, manicured nails, designer cologne, a good job, wallet full of cash and plastic. Peel that back and you find the inner layers. The bad-boy layer that drives them to look for a quick hand job or feel up behind the garbage cans of some stinky restaurant. Beneath that is the rotten, evil layer. Not everyone has this, but you can’t tell from the outside. These sickos pay good, but at night, when the sun goes down, they just shuck the outer layers off and let their real evil selves shine. Make their victims do gross and vicious things you couldn’t imagine, mostly to helpless and scared and poor people. But I can’t write about this any more. I don’t want to think about it.
I’m just glad about Carla. I hope they like her at that snob store.
I closed the book, my hand shaking. Maybe Birdie was wiped out by one of those creeping sickos in a brilliant flash of pure, dazzling evil. I’d never thought about it in that way. I’d always imagined violence lurked in foul, smoke-wreathed rooms or murky alleyways, but this was the first layer that Dane had talked about. The scary stuff was sharp and blinding. The point of a needle piercing a vein, the glinting edge of a knife blade on soft skin, the flash of a bullet slicing through muscle and sinew. Was this how I’d lost Birdie? I held tightly to the edges of my desk, my eyes swimming, and in the nick of time bent my head over the garbage can and puked up my entire lunch.
When Guy was doing one of his late classes that week, I took a trip to the mall again. I drifted towards the Victoria’s Secret store. I’d maxed out many a credit card there. Had drawers full of lacy panties and bras. Usually bought during the two-for-one sale or the five panties for $25 event.
Fuchsia pink signage lured shoppers to the store’s black marble entrance and banks of spotlights flooded the place with dazzling light. Like a pink pleasure palace that sold sanitized sex in frills, lace and satin. Birdie had always been a sucker for anything feminine and girlie, while I slobbed around in jeans and hoodies. She hated looking ugly.
The time after she fell and smacked her eye on the table, she had to wear a bandage wrapped around her head and couldn’t wash her hair for a week or two.
She was a pitiful sight. A one-eyed runt with greasy hair, dragging herself around the group home, refusing to look anyone in the eye. Finally, one of the young supervisors took pity on her and brought her a Cinderella dress and wand from home. Once she was wearing that ivory lace dress with its stiff taffeta petticoat, she instantly morphed into the Good Fairy. Flitted around night and day, laying the wand on everyone’s head and doling out angel dust to make them happy. Even the back-door stoner kids joined in, running around the yard whooping and flapping imaginary wings after getting the Birdie treatment.
After a month or so we had to bribe her with an extra helping of mashed potato to get the dress off her so it could be washed. Once she wore it for a whole week to the playground and caught it on a nail sticking out of the wooden climbing frame. It hung in filthy ribbons and tatters round her legs and then just disintegrated around her.
She cried like a baby when we finally had to throw it away. So I rescued the wand and the plastic Cinderella pin from the bodice and pinned it to her jacket, telling her she was still a member of the Cinderella club. When I was done pinning it, she lit up, placed her palms on my face and tried to twist the corners of my mouth into a smile.
“I love you, Anna,” she said, placing her face against mine and making butterfly kisses on my cheek with her eyelashes. “But don’t be so angry all the time or nobody else will like you.”
It occurred to me as I trailed my hands along the pink corsets with feather accents, the tiny French maid outfit with its bum-skimming frills, and the white garter belt with pink rosettes, that this was the “princess gone naughty” look girls like Birdie were urged into. A slick segue from the innocence of childhood to post-pubescent sexuality. You’re all grown up now, little girl, but you can still play dress up. Only it’s different now. Way different. Prince Charming doesn’t just want a kiss now. He wants payback or he turns into a poisonous toad.
I shuddered. Walking around this store made me miss Birdie even more, but I stayed, circling the displays. Sampled the hand cream and body spray. Found a negligee made of the same lace as the Cinderella dress. It was like scratching a scab that wouldn’t heal, coming to this place Birdie would’ve loved. Or maybe more like gouging an open wound.
After minutes of aimless drifting, I remembered Carla. I’d come here to see her. She wasn’t among the other girls on the floor. Tiny dolls with perfect makeup, running back and forth, talking into headsets, bras slung over their arms. Polished, pretty, perfumed and young. Striving to emulate the exquisite and untouchable angels that strutted their sparkling wings in the everlasting lingerie show that flickered on the bank of screens at the far side of the store.
I finally found her behind the cash desk, wrapping undies in pink tissue. She looked fresh and young, her shiny cheeks and lips scrubbed clean of the thick coat of makeup. I waved and she glanced up at me, smiling like a kid who’s just performed a dive and then emerges from the water pleading for praise. I saw that look on Birdie’s face so many times, I wanted to slap her sometimes when she performed like a trained dog for idiots who didn’t care or who were just winding her up.
On instinct I grabbed a couple of lotions and a body spray and lined up at Carla’s counter.
“You like it here, Carla?”
She glanced around to see if anyone was listening. “Yeah. I love it. I like all the nice things.”
“I’m proud of you. You’re getting on track here. Let me know if you need any advice.”
She nodded and wrapped my purchases in tissue paper. “Thanks,” she whispered but her eyes were elsewhere, darting to the person behind me. I moved aside. Hope was so tenuous for kids like Carla and Birdie. Everything stacked against them. Like tiptoeing barefoot along a slippery balance beam. One wrong move and you fall off. Back into the old life and all the dangers that come along with it.
I watched her for a few minutes longer, then left with a sense of dread. Like my head was being held under icy water. Birdie’s shadow was everywhere, crowding into my new life until the feeling was so heavy it took on a weight of its own.
In a weird trance I drifted to the coffee shop and bought a small butterscotch-flavored latte, then sat down at a table to purge the sense of loss that seeped under my flesh like the creeping chill of a winter graveyard.