Closer

Let me tell you something. I have resources, not your typical. I’m a bona fide conduit of strange. And something else. Think darkest, what I’m after, what I can almost reach. It’s like a treasure resting on the bottom of the lake, a lost lure festooned with hooks. A cruel thing. I keep trying and trying.

In the meantime, I’m sixteen. I am not sweet. I’m steeped in ignorance and yet I know everything, as any respectable sixteen year old should. Not only the goings-on in town—the affairs, the swindles, the vendettas—and the family secrets—dirty or slight or searing—but the more arcane goods, harder to come by. I have no need to make withdrawals from the community loose-lips fund.

Also, I have these new power tools, hormonally acquired, it’s amazing what they can do. But I’m in no rush to use them. The current boyfriend is smitten. (Note: Am using the term ‘current’ loosely here as ‘first’ might give the wrong impression.) He’s head over heels, although you’d never know it from some of the things he says. Of my most recent school photo, proudly presented, he observes, “You look like a witch.”

Well well well. Look who’s dishing out a simile. Unwittingly. You are a witch, might have been closer to the mark. But the mark he usually misses. As he fumblingly slides the photo into a plastic sleeve of his tan cowboy-boot embossed wallet, I give him the once-over. Acne minimal, flop of reddish golden hair adorning his brow, standard issue nose, good teeth—visible, on account of his mouth hanging open. (Okay, lips slightly parted.) (Soft lips, mm-hmm). All in all not an embarrassment. Thus he earns a reprieve, although he needs beware. I know a curse that deployed will suck his head through the neck hole of his freshly laundered Fruit-of-the-Loom T-shirt, lickety-split and without a single feature left lagging.

I’m not listening.

“XXX,” he says, louder, more insistently.

Don’t press your luck, chum.

I have more on my mind than boys boys boys. For example, because I know everything and my high school teachers obviously don’t, I’ve decided to extend to them my sympathetic interest and, more importantly, my assistance. This benighted group is so locked in the students’ comedic conception of them that they’re scarcely real. Cutouts, two-dimensional, jokers and cartoons. They’re oddballs I’ll grant you that, but, rolling up my sleeves and cracking the knuckles on my capable and lovely hands, I am prepared to grant them a dimension.

With the exception of Miss Cosima, who is a bit too real for my liking and an object (note: object) of those very boys boys boys’ fascination and depraved speculation. This despite her advanced years. More troubling, I understand that she’s been seen hanging around with my cousin Nile. Dangerous company to keep, wouldn’t wish that on anyone, so some disenchantment definitely required there.

Nile himself has always been a trickier proposition. He knows to keep well beyond my range, coming and going, now in town, now not. I might catch sight of him peeling out of the Tasty Freeze ‘Home of the Footlong Hotdog’ parking lot, flicking a butt through the vent window, or with his arm slung around some gal, her bale of teased dirty blonde hair skewed sideways. He works off-island, for a time in the mines, lately at the Bruce nuclear power plant, which might explain his toxic glow. You never know when he’ll show up, dropping in on his folks for a brew and a fight. They all love it, this explosive touchdown. Twenty minutes in, visit over, he saunters away up the front walk, leaving my Uncle Earl cradling his busted fist in his armpit and Aunt Faith panning for gold as she filters a dross of threats through a screen door that’s been slammed with percussive finesse.

My own home life is less theatrical, the hurts less entertaining. Which makes it a good place to practise my hocus-pocus philanthropy before going public. Plus I’m still working out the bugs.

“Huh!” says my father, anchored by a sudden silver mine of change in his pockets, a tumorous bulge of wealth appearing on both thighs, pants straining to plunge to the floor. “Washers?” he says, mystified, pulling a fistful out. “What the—?”

“Morland?” my mother says, quietly, shocked, staring at her reflection in the hallway mirror. “I used to be beautiful, didn’t I? What in God’s name happened? I look like a fish.”

On the upside, not such a deplorable metamorphosis, fishermen here being in ready supply. Her band of admirers can only grow.

Besides, none of the above happened. I’m stuck in this reality like everyone else, although I’m convinced I can tweak it, mind over matter (hide your spoons!), regardless of how stubborn or flaccid that matter might be.

Onward then with my sympathy project. But where to begin? With Mrs. Smuts, who teaches Science and is crawling with microbes from never observing the five second rule when she falls down? Which is often. Or the history teacher, Mr. Bruno? The man has a fascinating moss-green patch in his furry hair, slightly pointy ears, and speaks a mongrel English no one understands. Or our French teacher, Mr. O’Hanrahan, who at some point in is life appears to have been taxidermied, odd parts crudely stitched together, which might not be as far-fetched as it sounds because he drives without a license, madly. Should we ever find ourselves in Ireland and requiring a few words of French, our education won’t have been in vain. Not only that but I’ve learned a thing or two in O’Hanrahan’s class. “A shroud on you!” he once barked, jovially enough, hexing a farmer kid genetically incapable of conjugating of the verb être. I admire this curse, while am not quite sure how it works. The kid subsequently attended a Hallowe’en dance dressed in an unravelling mummy costume over which he tripped, fell, landed on a broken 40-ouncer and sliced open his forehead. Blood everywhere, interesting.

O’Hanrahan being a somewhat dicey proposition, I decide to give him a miss and begin with an easy one, our English teacher, Mrs. Dumpty. Seriously, Dumpty. There are places one doesn’t venture with a name like that and a school is one of them. So trust me, I didn’t invent it, although I have no doubt that the ‘Mrs.’ honorific is a fiction of her own making and that—plastic bag, twist tie—she’s been stored on the matrimonial shelf since the day she emerged from virginal girlhood. If Miss Cosima is a vision that dazzles the boys, then Mrs. Dumpty, to put it kindly, is not. They can hardly muster enough derision to concoct more than a lame dribble of “Humping Dumpty” cracks, presumably because the idea is too grotesque. For her own part, she wears a permanent expression of dismay at finding herself marooned in a corner of the country where civilization has not reached. On her first day in class she had tried, gamely, to plumb the depths by surveying our literary knowledge:

“The Mayor of Casterbridge?”

Blank stare. Bovine chewing.

“A Tale of Two Cities?”

An overloud gas leak.

“Wuthering Heights? Anyone?”

My hand shot up. I hadn’t actually read it, of course, but was aware of its existence, seeing as my Auntie Viv used a copy of this very book at her place to prop up the game leg of a wobbly end table. I only meant to give the woman a restorative dose of encouragement, but by displaying a spark of intellectual accomplishment had unintentionally endeared myself to her. From here on in she paid me particular attention, as though I were some sort of float that might save her from drowning. She brought in books she thought I might like, which she handed to me in secret after class so as not to expose me to ridicule. (Not bloody likely.) I lugged some home, stored most of them in my locker, and flatly refused others, like one called The Feminine Mystique. I had absolutely no desire to learn about makeup and feminine wiles. Wiles I am sufficiently endowed with, and believe you me, they are beyond feminine.

This made her smile, something we rarely saw, and she said, “Maybe later, Hero, when you’re a little older.”

Sure, sure. Thing was I needed to do some research on my chosen subject and concocted a plan that, ignoble even from my point of view, worked. Last class of the day, perfect. I knew where she’d be, while she would have no idea where I was headed.

“Cramps,” I moan, discreetly indicating my nether region.

“Off you go then, dear,” she says. “No need to sign out.”

Hippity-hop I hasten downtown to her apartment, which is on the top floor of The Bakers’ Daughter’s Bakery (no time to explain, though can’t fault the punctuation—someone knows what they’re doing—other than me). Fortunately, access to the apartment is up an enclosed set of back stairs, so I scoot up unseen, lift the doormat for the key, which is where everyone hides theirs, and find zip. Damn! I examine the windows, which are sealed tight, then try the door anyway, glad-handing the knob like an upbeat mortician… and it opens. What a trusting soul, I think, which causes a ghostly wisp of guilt to flit through me as I enter. The place is tidy and homey, if depressingly furnished with second-hand stuff—small sitting room, kitchen, bedroom—and smells distractingly of doughnuts, the Bakers’ daughter, Doris Baker’s specialty.

I don’t waste any time snooping, although the bedroom is a temptation, but head straight for the bathroom and the medicine chest. They don’t call it a chest for nothing. Secrets close to the heart are stored there, evidence of griefs and pains, aspirations and failings, compulsions and desires. All I need to know I will find behind the mirrored door of this cabinet (into which I gaze fleetingly before opening—I look pretty damn good, eyes, hair, I’m impressed). So I open it up and cripes the very first thing I discover, the very first leaves me reeling. Reeling! Confusion momentarily reigns.

Cautiously, I lift it out, a round plastic case, clear on the front with a turquoise backing, which contains within a circular arrangement of yellow pills. Birth control pills. My friend Beatrice and I had discovered one like this buried deep in her mother’s underwear drawer. At least Bea’s mother had the decency to hide it, rather than leaving it practically out in the open where someone young and impressionable might find it. What on earth is Mrs. Dumpty doing with this, though? She can’t possibly have any use for these things. Perhaps there is a Mr. Dumpty after all. So where is he then? There’d been no sightings as far as I know. Always possible that the pills had been prescribed for another condition altogether, like unhappiness.

I check the prescription label on the front of the dispenser and am immediately relieved to see someone else’s name on it: Catherine Dunphy. Don’t know her. Nor is there any sign of a roommate. Wait, crap! Dumpty’s not her name! But everyone calls her that, likewise the principal, Mr. Bumbershoot. (I know, I know. Where does the School Board find these Dickensian rejects? And yes, Dickens, I have read some of Mrs. D’s proffered books.) Geez.

Which is when I get to thinking… I wonder if she’d miss any? Her eyesight’s not great, she blinks a lot during class. I might be able to use a smidgen of assistance in the gynecological department myself. There’d been pressure lately from the boyfriend, a petting upgrade appeared to be required, and he’d dropped numerous none too subtle hints about other girls who would be more “considerate.” A disgraceful state of affairs. I’m already beginning to miss the days when going all the way meant nothing more compromising than a shopping trip to Woolworth’s in Sudbury.

I study the package, which in itself looks impregnable. Substituting another kind of pill doesn’t appear to be feasible. (Baby Aspirin would be charmingly ironic, if I had any on hand.) I’m thinking there’s good chance that in the morning, half-asleep and running late for school, or drugged on doughnut fumes, she downs her daily pill in a hurry without noticing how many are already gone. Three pills would get me through the weekend, I figure, enough time to give the dirty a whirl and prove that I’m no prude.

I’m not entirely sold on this plan. Isn’t there more power in holding out than in caving? Nor do I want to set a man-pleasing precedent. Slippery slope, that. And what if she does miss the pills? What would she make of it? Seeing as I’m being scrupulous about leaving no trace of my presence, my best guess is that she’d suspect Doris Baker of sneaking upstairs and pilfering a serving of this bun-in-oven prophylactic. (Ha ha.)

Undecided, but hating to miss an opportunity, I crank out a trio of pills into my palm, then slip them into my shirt pocket. I close the cabinet door, snatch up a face cloth, wipe the frame of fingerprints, and neatly replace the cloth. After quietly exiting the scene of the crime, I go around to the Bakery and buy a doughnut. Chocolate-covered, bliss.

Heading down the walk for home, munching contentedly, Matt Finch slides by me on his bike.

I’m chagrined at this chance encounter because my upper lip now sports a Hitlerian dab of chocolate. Matt has a long-standing crush on me which I fear is nearing its expiry date given the perfunctory nature of his greeting. While always in the one syllable range, his conversation is usually charged with longing. The ill-positioned smear of chocolate may have snuffed it out entirely. Matt is in Grade Thirteen, several grades ahead of me and, lately, inexplicably, has acquired an air of cool that he’s never exhibited before. Taking a quick look over my shoulder, I see him turn into the lane that leads to Mrs. D’s apartment. Odd.

By the time I’ve turned round to investigate, he’s stashed his bike in a screen of bushes and is eagerly climbing the stairs. Mrs. D might arrive any minute now, I can’t imagine what he’s up to… and then I get it. Of course! The Departmental Exams, she must be tutoring him. No wonder he sounded curt. The exams are taxing, and one’s whole future depends on them. (Note: Not that I’ll have a problem when my time comes.) Buoyed by this thought, I nip into the bushes and remove the bicycle clip left dangling from his handlebars. I push up my sleeve, clamp it on my right bicep like a warrior princess, and strike out for home.

Next morning, Friday, I take one of the pills in preparation for the school dance on Saturday night. Down the hatch with the Captain Crunch. Most of the morning I feel fabulously mature and witchy, but by lunch less so. During Phys Ed, first class in the afternoon, after a round of jumping jacks, sit-ups, and a range of other exercises that are later deemed to be hazardous to physical heath, I feel wobbly and weird. Before I keel over, the instructor, Miss Cosima, comes to my rescue.

“Are you all right, Hero?”

Good question at the best of times, but I appreciate her solicitation.

“You look awfully pale,” she says, leading me to a chair in a corner while managing to look awfully sexy herself. In sweatpants. (I suspect her of downing The Feminine Mystique in one lip-smacking gulp.)

Since I unexpectedly have her ear, I decide to fill it with a poisonous solution.

“Thanks so much, Miss Cosima. It’s… I’ve been worried sick. My older cousin, Nile, you wouldn’t know him, it’s… shocking.”

“Why, what’s happened?”

“He—” Think, think. “He’s run off to South America to join a revolutionary gorilla group.” (Get off, I know it’s guerilla.)

“Oh, really,” she drawls in that sultry voice of hers, placing a hand on one of her significant hips, painted nails gleaming. “What a bad boy.”

Blew it. Rats! I should have told her that Nile had joined the United Church ministry instead.

As I enter English class, Mrs. D gives me a funny look, although offers no solicitations of her own. I don’t think much of it, for by this time everyone seems to be giving me funny looks, which I put down to Pill-induced, reality-warping paranoia. Unless the pill I took was some other life-altering chemical, LSD or arsenic, secreted in a birth control package. I’m beginning to clue in to the mystery of Mrs. D’s missing spouse and give her my own probing look before wafting out of class.

My brief fling with contraception over, I flush the other two pills down the toilet when I get home. And forget the dance, despite me having given the boyfriend some dangerous ideas as to how the evening will end. By Saturday, I’m restored to rude health, but tell him that I have the flu. Moreover, repossessed of my usual discernment, am all too aware that failing the Departmentals isn’t the only thing that can ruin a girl’s life. So I stay home, make fudge, and watch Red Skelton reruns with my father. Sitting side by side on the couch and scarfing down the fudge, we both laugh heartily at Red’s Heathcliff-and-Gertrude seagull skit. By now I’ve settled into Wuthering Heights and find that this allusion adds a layer of textual richness to the reading experience. Possibly the sugar high helps.

First thing Sunday morning my sanguine mood is blasted to bits by a call from Bea with news about the dance. More specifically, news that the boyfriend left halfway through with Deb Hooker. (These names. It’s like a morality play. Who’s going to show up next? Death?) Bea herself overheard Deb entice the boyfriend by offering to show him her brassiere if he could guess its colour. We all know that! And it’s only black because she never washes it. Yet off the horndog goes to dip his wick in the common market. Not only that, but by Monday morning it’s clear that I’ve been dumped before I can extricate myself from the relationship with dignity. Deb smiles and smiles like a villain, but I’m capable of worse, much worse.

In order to augment my bag of tricks, I feel that there’s no sense in avoiding Mr. O’Hanrahan any longer and drop by his office under the pretense of researching a history project on Irish folkloric sayings. He’s flattered by my interest and soon we get into an exchange of information, a spirited cursing match, like a pair of duelling druids.

“Smothering and drowning on you,” he says cheerfully.

“Go soak your head,” I counter, getting warmed up.

“Scorching and burning on you.”

“Die miserable blundering barbecued blister.”

“Captain Haddock?”

“Yep. With a slight amendment.”

“Nice. May the devil choke you.”

“‘Devil take your fingers.’” The Bard, no slouch.

“‘Hag-seed hence.’”

Guy knows his Shakespeare. Trying to catch him off-guard, I throw in, “Dirtball!”

Ah, I see. “QI’yaH tabernak!”

“French Canadian Klingon. Untranslatable.”

“Tsk. Lord help us.” He thinks, continues with, “May the cat eat you and the devil eat the cat!”

“May your mother stir fry your guts in a wok and serve them on soda bread!” Am cooking now. “May the road rise to meet you… and knock out your teeth!”

“Oh yeah? Go shit yourself, you bog-trotting frog-eating bug-fucking fairy!!”

Mr. O’Hanrahan looks unexpectedly startled. He blinks at me and his lips part, but nada… not a word.

I win! First prize, however, is a detention.

This gives me time to reflect in any event. No one else is in the detention room except me, an errant fly in danger of bashing its brains out on the window, and Mrs. Smuts, face down and sound asleep on the front desk. Watching the fly struggle with an incomprehensible barrier, I’m led to contemplate the limitations of language. It had been a riot hurling curses around like I did there with O’Hanrahan, but seriously who am I trying to fool here? Myself apparently. Subject, verb, object… nothing’s lurking in a sentence, really. Nothing dark and twisty. Sticks and stones and all that. Damage is definitely possible with a well-wielded phrase, but you have to be satisfied with subtlety and a scarcely visible emotional bruising. If, say, I wanted to break a few bones—speaking theoretically—I’d have to get my hands on some instruments of a blunter and cruder make than what my tongue alone can forge.

It’s a sobering thought, but as the days pass I continue to fiddle with my linguistic weaponry anyway, polishing and tinkering. It gives me a charge and allows me to feel more useful. Although helping the teachers realize some humanity is a misbegotten plan and too tough to accomplish, so I give up on that. Besides, when the very last bell sounds at the end of term, every single one of them will drop everything on the spot in a clatter of books and chalk and empty vodka bottles and flee. You won’t be able to see them for dust. And when the dust finally settles there’ll be a whole new crop of wackos and weirdos flat as a deck of cards in their place.

Funny thing, though, before the end of term it’s Mrs. D. who leaves abruptly. I wouldn’t have taken her for a quitter and students were beginning to warm to her, going so far as to crack open a book every once in a while to please her. This was especially hard on Matt Finch, her leaving before the Departmentals. He had to be hospitalized. Nervous prostration. I figure his brain got overheated from all that studying, it happens (though rarely in our town). Plus, his crush on me has grown so severe that it’s affected his vocal chords. Guy can’t get a single word out when I’m around.

Prom night. The reasons I don’t attend are legion. First off, no one asks me. Secondly, the X-boyfriend is taking Deb and I don’t relish getting her gloating Hooker smile snagged in my eye. Thirdly, Miss Cosima is one of the chaperones and will be so resplendent in her sparkly clingy minidress, a less virtuous Diana of the Hunt, that she will outshine every other female there. Fourthly, I’m suffering the effects of a bad perm and my ego would not be bolstered by electrified poodle jests at this point in time. Fifthly—have I assembled a legion yet?—I now prefer books to humans. There are worse dates to have for the prom than Madame Bovary, believe me. Humans, sadly non-fictional, get drunk and act like idiots and drive headlong into the biggest trees they can find. Their endings are rarely happy, but at least with Madame B. you can close the book before things get too out of hand.

So, for old time’s sake, I fling a clutch of curses high into the starry night, letting the consequences fall where they may, and hold my peace.

Next day, I happen to notice a fly-sized speck on the horizon that appears to be rapidly growing in visibility. Nile, I soon discover, zeroing in on me, not his usual mode of entry into my orbit. I don’t like the looks of this and would cut and run if there were any chance of escape. He doesn’t stop, only gets closer and closer until I smell a wave of grass (both kinds) and sweat and he’s standing in front of me, desirable despite the pungency, but only if he doesn’t speak. The hair on my arms rises with a soft whoosh.

He says, “Last night. Accident.”

No waste of words, but I get the message.

“You’re kidding, right? Nile? Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I am,” he says, “not.”

“Miss Cosima?” I wince.

He shakes his head, then bends closer, his lips grazing my ear, about to fill it with the names of the dead, but all he whispers is, “Hero, what have you done?”