4
e rode home in silence, drowsy with heat and our eyes half-closed against the press of sun on our faces. Our mouths were rimmed with the black licorice Mel had brought along to overpower any lingering odour of whisky on his breath. Jill had pulled her hat down low onto her forehead, hiding her eyes and feigning sleep, but now and then she would massage her groin. Adele, whom Josh had picked up at the hairdresser’s, chain-smoked and hummed, studying her reflection imposed upon the landscape gliding past the car window. She no longer wore the green turban. Her hairstyle was smooth, too perfect, I thought, like a store mannequin’s hair. Occasionally her humming broke off as she flicked bits of tobacco from her tongue or exclaimed in a scoffing or resigned way over some private thought. Mel stared straight ahead, as though hypnotized by the broken white lines of the highway. A wall of cumulus clouds banked high in the north as concrete as a range of mountains. The clouds, coloured by the sun, had their own purple valleys and snow caps streaked with pink and gold. A screen for me on which to replay the adventure I had after Mel and Jill abandoned me.
I had followed the couple walking in front of me as they headed towards the sound of music echoing in the buildings along the street.
“What we have here is a musical wonder,” the man called Stu Farmer said as I hurried towards his husky amplified voice to join the crowd standing around an elevated platform in the small park beside Portage Avenue. “My little partner has been playing the guitar ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper and he ain’t much bigger now. Sat on the floor beside my guitar when he was only two years old and started strumming the heck outa it just as easy as eating apple pie. I thought old Chet himself had dropped by for a visit. When the boy comes out here to play, I want you to pay attention. You’re gonna hear something downright amazing. So get ready! Ladies and gents, let’s give this cowpoke the welcome he deserves! Welcome Stu Farmer Junior!” He flung his fringed arm in the direction of the blue curtain strung up behind him on the stage.
“Well, well, well,” I heard someone say and then I felt a man step up to my side. From the corner of my eye I saw grey flannel. A grey suit. The man stood beside me and made a church steeple of his hands, tapping his index fingers together. The curtain on the stage billowed suddenly and a woman’s voice rose up from behind it, pleading. Stu Farmer chuckled. “Come on out here, son. Ain’t a thing in the world that’ll bite you.” He leaned across his guitar and winked. “Unlike his pappy, he’s a bit on the shy side, folks.” The crowd tittered in appreciation and watched the curtain. Traffic in the street slowed down as people leaned from windows to catch a glimpse of what was happening on the stage, which had been set up in the centre of the park among rectangles of flower-beds.
A woman who was later introduced as Loretta, Stu Farmer’s wife, pushed through the opening in the curtain with her back to us and dragged Stu Farmer Junior onto the stage. A tall, sandy-haired man stepped out behind him and sauntered off to one side of it. He grinned at us and tipped his Stetson to the back of his head. This was Hank, the man I would meet again not too many years later. Junior, a shy teenage boy, wore a gold satin shirt identical to his father’s, and a white Stetson. He flinched when he saw the crowd and his chin dropped to his chest. Loretta nudged him and he bowed. When he straightened, his Stetson dropped low over his forehead. He looked off to one side, as though concentrating on something happening in the wings.
“I’ve been telling the folks here about how you can play two songs at once on your guitar. That true, son? You haven’t been putting us on, have yuh?” The Stetson said no. “Well, let’s do it then. Let’s play for the good folks out there.”
“That’s right, son,” murmured the tall man in the grey suit who stood beside me. “You can do it, son. The people of the plains who till the soil, they plant, they hope, and they do not surrender. Whether the forces of nature destroy their years’ work, their life work, or when world events …” I glanced up. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he paused to swallow saliva. Grey whiskers glinted among the soft folds of his jowls. I stepped away and threaded in deeper among the crowd, working my way closer to the front. When I turned and looked back it was to confirm what I already knew. It was John Diefenbaker. He stood among the crowd, smiling strangely, his head wobbling from side to side as though he was agreeing with everything and everyone around him.
“You ready now, son?” Stu Farmer asked. “Well come on, let’s do it then.” A-one, two. Their feet stomped, hands flashed against strings, and music flowed from their instruments. “Yankee doodle went to town,” they played for several moments, and then they keyed up and began playing another song, which the couple began to sing, “Home on the Range.” They harmonized in a fake mournful tone over their son’s head. Then their instruments fell silent and Junior continued to play. He lifted his head and his gaze grew fixed on the air above us as he concentrated, as though reading from an invisible score. “Yankee doodle went to town, riding on a pony.” I heard the words in his strings. As I listened, I heard another melody emerge at the same time. “Where nary was heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.” The people grew still. I glanced back and saw John D’s head wobbling and his mouth moving as he recited the words to the song.
The boy played for several minutes and then, as he neared the end of the performance, he became impatient to be finished and the melodies blended together. He bowed and stepped to the back of the stage.
People clapped and several turned from the stage, about to leave, while others shifted sideways to the edge in order to politely slip away. Stu Farmer grabbed the microphone. “Say folks,” he said. “If you have to go, I understand. But if you can stick around you’ll see that we’ve been saving the best for the last. What you’re about to see and hear would make my grandpappy roll over in his grave. Heh, heh, heh. Rock and roll, that is.” He nodded at the other musicians. A-one, two, one, two, three, four. Their feet began to stomp again, and then their instruments jumped with the rock and roll beat. Junior played with them, a little smirk pulling at one corner of his mouth. The curtain parted and a skinny, young, pimply-faced man leapt to centre stage. The sequins on his bolero jacket sparkled in the sun as he swung his arms, and his legs scissored back and forth in time to the beat. His black hair shone as though it was wet and his squared-off sideburns appeared to be painted on halfway down the sides of his narrow face. The musical introduction ended and he froze in position, legs splayed, pelvis thrust forward. In the slight pause that followed I heard a snuffling sound as Stu Farmer Junior ducked his head. Laughing, I realized.
“Ladies and gents, boys and girls. I kid you not, straight from Nashville, I give you Elvis the Pelvis Presley!”
I was startled when the women around me shrieked. Several men shoved their hands into their pockets or stared at their shoes, refusing to look at the gyrating performer. “Elvis Pretzel, you mean,” someone said sardonically. “A friggin’ impersonator. No way they’d get that guy to come up here.” I watched as Junior began to edge to the back of the stage. He grinned and winked at Hank. Then he glanced up and our eyes met. He smiled, shy, and put a finger against his mouth, the gesture saying, “Don’t tell anyone.” Then he backed through the curtain and disappeared.
As I left the crowd, people streamed past me towards the stage, coming out from the houses bordering the park, some running, others doing a little jive in time to the music. I saw Junior sitting on a picnic table at the back of the park, which, I noticed, was in a square bordered by houses and apartment blocks on three sides. Spirals of water twisted outwards above freshly mowed lawns. As I approached Junior I heard reedy music. I dropped to my haunches beside a tree. He was bent over a mouth organ and a bluesy bit of jazz echoed in his cupped palm. Then the music broke off as he lifted his head, swung his legs up and over the table, and swivelled around to face me.
“Hi.” He whacked spit from his instrument. “You all enjoyed the show?” His eyebrows were like black wings flaring up with his question.
“It was okay.”
He laughed. “It was a piece of dogey doo doo, you mean.” He began to play a jazzed up version of “Heartbreak Hotel.” His voice had been soft, low, as though he was weary and didn’t like to expend the energy required to talk. I noticed a bottle jutting up between his legs. “You ever hear me play on the radio, kid?”
“No.”
“You ain’t missed a thing. Care for a little swig of porch-climber?” He held up the bottle.
I shook my head no.
He tipped the bottle, drank, and then set it down on the picnic table with a bang. “Come here, little kid. Come on. Ain’t nothing here’s going to bite you.”
When I refused he slid down from the table and waved me over. “Come on! I just want you to stand beside me. I want to measure.”
I got up and stood beside him. “Look. Top of your head is level with my ear, right?” The brim of his Stetson brushed against the side of my head. “I’m five foot two, but my eyes aren’t blue.” He laughed at his own joke.
“Well, so how old are you? Let me guess. Nine? Ten?”
“Almost eleven,” I lied.
He sighed. “Know how old I am, kid? Sixteen. But they don’t mind if people think I’m about twelve.” He plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket, lit one, exhaled smoke while studying me. I noticed the shadow of whiskers beneath his stage make-up. “You come here alone? Think that’s a good idea?”
“Ain’t nothing here’s going to bite me.”
He laughed and reached for his guitar resting against the table. “Stick around.” His voice had lost its thin twangy sound and fake accent. “I’m going to play something. Just for you. This is the real show. Why don’t you hop up?” He patted the table.
“It’s okay.” I went back and sat down beneath the tree, leaning against its trunk.
He bent over his instrument as he played and I liked how his hair had been flattened by his Stetson, a band of dark hair shining with perspiration. “You live around here?” he asked.
I told him the name of my town.
“Really?” Again his black wing-like eyebrows shot up. “We’re going out that way. Near the end of summer. Me and my parents and Hank, if he can ever get it together. And Old Elvis there.” He laughed. “Doing a string of towns.”
The singer’s voice echoed in the apartment blocks behind me, but as Junior stopped his wandering through the strings and began to play, his music dominated.
He closed his eyes and his head dropped lower and lower until his pale cheek rested against his guitar. I stretched out on the grass and cradled my head, immersed in the exotic spiciness of music that seemed to flaunt its colours, boasting of a place where there was more than what I had. More than a two-tone flat landscape where people sang about cheating hearts or blue suede shoes. I closed my eyes, yearning to see it. Gradually the steady wind-sound of traffic streaming by on Portage Avenue, the voice of the man called Elvis, receded completely and Junior’s music remained at the centre.
I was nine years old and my mind not yet cluttered with what might or might not be possible. I lay there, eyes closed, face turned into the damp grass, and, as in my dream of the previous night, saw myself floating in the air. I could do it, I knew. I could rise up, it was simply a matter of possessing the fierce desire. I tried. I imagined sparks shooting from my head in my intense concentration to move. Move, I urged my body. I clenched my teeth and my head buzzed with the pressure of it. Move, move. I had been struck by lightning, been subtracted, and I was light now, feet swift. And then it happened. I felt my body inch across the grass. I held my breath. I was moving! Slowly, but I felt the grass brush against my face as I moved forward, an inch, two, perhaps three, inches. I was moving without doing anything but willing it to happen! And then it stopped. I heard footsteps pounding in the ground beneath me, opened my eyes, and looked up the tall length of Hank.
“Who’s the dopey kid?” he asked Stu Farmer Junior. Junior stopped playing. I sat up and the world rushed forward to meet me. “I want you to hear this. I’ve been working on it,” Hank said. Junior nodded. “Tell me what you think.” He began to play.
“Ah, Hank Snow,” Junior said. Hank nodded and cleared his throat, opened his mouth, and then closed it again.
“Come on, we’re waiting.”
“Well, there’s –” Hank began to sing and then stopped to clear his throat again.
“Ain’t nothing here’s gonna bite you,” Junior said.
Hank grinned and began to sing a song about driving an eighteen-wheeler away from a woman who has broken his heart.
When they return from the picnic, Margaret is upstairs in bed. They hear the soft scuff of her slippers as she hurries down to greet them. “I wasn’t sleeping, just having a wee lie-down,” she calls out to them, sounding like her mother, Grandmother Johnson. She steps out onto the veranda and they don’t recognize their mother at first. She’s pulled her wet hair straight back into a ponytail and her clean face looks younger, almost boyish. She wears Timothy’s blue-plaid housecoat. She smiles and crosses her arms against her chest and taps her foot. “What if I don’t let you in?” She laughs. Then she bounds towards them and unhooks the screen door. “I hope you’re as tired as I am.” She yawns. “And I hope you’re hungry too because I made sandwiches.”
Amy notices how her voice doesn’t match her eyes, which veer towards the sky in search of a storm, the look of apprehension dawning. Humid air holds the smell of Carona on a Saturday evening: potatoes frying in butter, apple pies cooling on countertops for the Sunday after-church meal, nips and chips cooking in Sullie’s Drive In and Take Out outside of town.
One by one they pass Margaret on the veranda. She smiles over their heads, not at them, and doesn’t wonder over the dirty footprint in the centre of Mel’s chest. Jill stops to wind her tanned arms around Margaret’s long white neck and kisses her ear. “I wore my hat all day.” She winces against the pain in her groin but she is careful not to limp.
“Go on up and wash.” Margaret slaps each one playfully on the rump as they ascend the stairs. Her eyes embrace the image of her children in the dim light of the upstairs hallway, the square man-look of Mel’s maturing frame, the glint of gold in Jill’s dark rippling hair. Sparks of the sun clinging to it, she thinks. And then there’s the short-legged, stubby-bodied youngest child. Amy. The child she had ached for. And so unbearable had her longing been that she’d made the decision to stop using her diaphragm without Timothy knowing. An accident. It happens. The result: Amy. Obstinate, moody, too silent, always wanting to run before she walks. She has confessed to Timothy that she doesn’t understand this one. From the very beginning Amy struggled to be free of her embrace, preferring Timothy’s arms instead. She’s not like my other babies, Margaret had complained to Bunny. Not round, plump, and gurgling, eager to please with a smile. Amy had been born covered in downy black fur from the back of her neck to her buttocks, breasts enlarged and nipples oozing. She was not the Amelia Margaret had envisioned, a porcelain doll whom she would put in smocked dresses with lace collars. She was muscular, hard, and resisted Margaret at every turn. The daily bath routine became a tussle. But it wasn’t this or the fight to dress Amy that had filled Margaret with resentment. It was the way her second daughter had eyes only for Timothy. Let’s face it, Margaret had said to Bunny, I was an incubator and that’s about all.
Mel ducks into his bedroom to change his shirt. He stands in front of the mirror stripped to the waist. He turns sideways, examining his profile, flexes his muscles, and checks to see if his pectorals are larger. He looks to see if something has changed because he has “banged” a girl. Then he feels a pressure in his chest, the imprint of a foot. Hangers clank in the closet as he pulls free a clean shirt. He tucks it down around his waist and turns to the mirror. He imagines he can see the treads of a sneaker.
Jill sits on her bed holding a mirror to her groin. Blood pools beneath her skin, becoming an angry-looking bruise. She runs her finger across it lightly, back and forth, and feels something else. A lump. It will disappear when the bruise fades, she thinks. Jill believes that the lump is from the boy’s kick but the node has been swollen for a month or so and is rapidly growing larger.
Amy washes her hands in the bathroom. The air is moist and smells of Chantilly, and bubbles from Margaret’s bath still cling to the side of the tub. When she steps from the bathroom she looks inside Margaret’s bedroom. The new blouse her mother made lies crumpled on the floor. The Blue Book, Margaret’s journal, lies open on the white bedspread. Amy’s stomach sings with hunger and so she decides that she’ll wait for another opportunity to discover what her mother has written in it today.
“So, what did you do today?” Margaret chooses to ignore how Amy’s cheeks bulge with food, that she barely chews it before she swallows and reaches for another sandwich. Often, they lose their appetites when they watch Amy eat, and so they have learned not to watch when she sometimes stirs everything together into a soupy mush so she can eat it more quickly with a spoon. They can always tell where she has sat by the sticky globs of food left behind, the dribbles of milk, the litter of crusts or bits of fat or rind picked off and discarded.
“We went to the zoo. We saw monkeys,” Jill says.
“Baboons. They belong to the family of Cercopithecidae.” Mel’s voice is deep today. Baritone.
“Oh really?” Margaret replies as though this information is surprising.
“The usual picnic stuff.” He raises his arms, stretches.
“And swans. We saw swans. They were in the duck pond.”
“I have always loved the swans,” Margaret says to Jill. She leans into the chair hugging herself as though suddenly chilled. “And what did you see, Amy?”
She will tell them absolutely nothing about the country and western band because they ran off on her. “Three boys on bicycles,” she says through a chunk of bread and notices how Jill’s and Mel’s faces grow sharp. “In the duck pond. Quack, quack.” She draws her lips back to reveal a wad of half-chewed bread stuck against her teeth.
Mel shoves his sandwich aside, his appetite gone. “I think I’ll go out for a while. That okay?”
Margaret appears not to have heard. “I think your father should be home quite early in the morning.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jill says.
Margaret becomes suddenly alert and Amy, anticipating her next move, plucks up another sandwich before she can clear them away. “Haven’t you all had enough of the outdoors today?” Margaret asks.
“Just for a while. It’s so cool now. I thought I’d look up Garth,” Mel says casually, although he knows that his cousin is probably waiting for him.
“Well, all right. But don’t be long,” Margaret says as she goes to put the sandwiches away. Her foot meets George napping in front of the refrigerator door. Her face turns red and all three look up in astonishment as Margaret heaves the plate of sandwiches at the cat. “Melville Barber! I have had it up to kingdom come with that cat of yours! You’re going to have to do something about it!” She turns and flees the kitchen.
“What now?” Mel stares at the shattered plate, the sandwiches fallen open, meat and cheese and egg salad scattered across the shiny new floor.
Jill shrugs. “I’m not a walking encyclopaedia.”
They leave together and Amy sits at the table alone. She sets her hands onto her lap, palms up, lying there limply. Her head drops forward until her chin almost rests on the table. She hears Margaret’s heels thumping on the ceiling overhead and then the squeak of bed-springs. She stares at the wall as she chews and wonders, Why did Margaret throw the plate of sandwiches at the cat? She eats methodically, steadily, to still a gnawing at her centre. Why does Timothy have to go away? Why can’t he stay home and work in town like other fathers do? She remembers Timothy out back, chopping wood, heat radiating from the woodstove, the happy smell and crackle of it. She remembers it being more orange when Timothy stayed home. A glowing orange fire, friendlier than the house is now, warmer. There is something about the house that is too hard and shiny with Timothy away. She gulps back tea to wash down the sandwich, and reaches for Mel’s half-eaten one. “Born July 4th, 1946. Jill Anne. A beautiful, bouncing baby girl. Eight pounds, four ounces.” Amy has read this in Margaret’s Blue Book. Sometimes the entries are cryptic: “I don’t know.” Or, “Over my head.” Sometimes they’re clearer: “Tim goes away.” “Tim returns Thursday.” Margaret records her cycle, the onset of menstruation, with single Words: “bloated,” “cramps,” “depressed.” Amy has read pages of tiny script that summed up a day or a conversation, or their own antics recorded in a tone of high exuberance, her love for them declared in a flourish of curlicues, sometimes followed on the next page by an abrupt printed sentence such as: “I can’t stand this any more.”
“Amelia Jane, born April 29th, 1950, seven pounds, twelve ounces.” Amelia’s a name for an old woman, Timothy had protested, and so, although the birth certificate said otherwise, she became Amy. Amy has read puzzling descriptions of herself in Margaret’s Blue Book which, if it weren’t for her name written there, she would not have recognized as being herself.
Usually when Margaret throws herself onto the bed it’s over a slight disagreement with Timothy or after a visit from her mother. And usually the springs squeak again only moments later when she gets off the bed and comes back down to them, subdued and shamefaced with apologies. Amy listens now. The silence in the house draws back and up, at its centre a hole, the pause before the wind rushes in and fills it. She scoops globs of creamy mayonnaise from bread and sucks it from her fingers. When she finishes the insides of Mel’s sandwich, she pushes away from the table, her stomach distended.
She leaves the house, going out the back way to avoid a chance meeting with Mel or Jill. As she crosses the yard towards the garage, the rope swing is a dark silhouette, a skinny U suspended under the branches of the shade tree. Gravel crunches under her feet as she follows the driveway to the back of the yard. The air inside the garage rushes forward to meet her as she opens the door, hot, heavy with a sweet smell of paint. Timothy’s jalopy is covered with a tarpaulin. When he works on it, she sits behind the wheel practising for the time she will drive it. She feels through the dark until her hands rest against the rungs of a ladder. She lifts it down from the wall. A can of paint topples from a work-bench as she swings the ladder around and out the door. It scrapes against the roof of the garage as she sets it in place, teetering beneath her feet as she climbs upwards.
“You mean, where am I going.” Mel leaves the yard and walks down the street, quickly passing from view into the shadows cast by the trees.
“Mel!”
He turns and his heart becomes sick with the sight of Jill’s limping, gimpy walk as she tries to catch up to him. He drops to the grass beneath a tree and waits. “So Howdy Doody has a sister.”
Jill sits down beside him. “Jerks. They were just jerks.”
Mel yanks at a blade of grass. He cups it and blows. He’s been trying for years but he never succeeds in making it shriek. “Howdy Doody. They meant my ears, of course.” He feels the flutter of her cool mouth against his cheek. “I should have gone for the cola. Not you.”
“I don’t think it would have been the same.” She laughs and he feels himself blush. She hugs her knees and presses her face into them, running her tongue across the taut, smooth skin, tasting salt, and feeling the slippery smoothness of her kneecap against her lips. Is that what it’s like, she wonders, a wet kiss? A wet mouth sliding across another wet mouth? “So?” she asks.
“So, what?”
“So did you and Elsa do it?” She grins at him and her white teeth shine out from her wet lips.
“Yes.” And he would like to do it again. Soon. He feels the rush of desire.
“I thought so.” She leans back onto the grass and shivers as dew soaks through her thin cotton top. She looks up at the dim pinpricks of new stars. The children in the playground still seem to be dancing, their muted voices saying, We have secrets. Adults will call from doorways. Come on in, now, they will say. You’ll catch your death. Time to pack it in. Time for sleep. Children having fun seems to make adults nervous, Jill thinks, as she hears the first call and listens to the anguished pleading. Adults want to stop their children’s playing quickly with a warning that is really a veiled threat. The children continue their play, choosing for several moments at least to close their ears to the beckoning cries of their anxious parents, who offer safety in the rooms of houses, as they wait in doorways for their children to return and for their own lives to continue.
“Well, so? What was it like?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jill springs on him, beats him down onto the grass with her fists. “You have to. You have to.” She straddles him with her thin bruised legs and wraps her hands around his throat. “You have to.” She threatens murder. Mel’s eyes bulge, his tongue lolls grotesquely, and then his head drops to one side as he feigns death. She flicks the end of his nose and rolls away. It’s not fair, Jill thinks. She picks at a small scab on her knee. It stings as she pulls it away. And then her tongue stings too with the sudden craving for something salty. “Pickled herring,” she says. She would die to sink her teeth into a piece of pickled herring. Her tongue shivers as she imagines the salty taste of it, her teeth slicing clean through its blue skin, feeling the texture of its flesh, salty, tangy. She feels the heat of Mel’s fingers against her cool ones. “God, I’d kill for some pickled herring.” He lifts her hand and sets it against his groin. She feels the bump that is his penis. “It’s hard!”
“That’s what it was like.”
She withdraws her hand. The children playing in the school yard have all gone home. She misses their voices. “What’s it look like? Hard.”
He groans. “Aw, come on.”
“I’m serious.”
“For the love of Mike,” Mel complains but he unzips his fly and shows her.
His knob is bluish, cold-looking, she thinks, as though it must hurt. “It’s –”
“It’s what?”
“Kind of …” Ugly, she thinks. “Show-offy.”
Mel leaps to his feet and walks away.
“Hey, wait up! I meant big. It’s big.” She grabs his arm and slows him down. Her mouth fills with saliva as she thinks of brine and sucking at a chunk of pickled herring. “So are you and Elsa going steady now?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“But you are going to ask her to the dance, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.” He wouldn’t be caught dead going anywhere with Elsa.
They walk down towards Main Street, their destination the hardware store where their cousin Garth Johnson waits for them. Beyond, cars pass beneath the yellow bug-repellent lights at the filling station.
“I don’t think you have Howdy Doody ears. I really don’t.” Laughter bubbles in her throat. “Actually, your ears are more like Prince Charles’s ears.”
“Thanks a lot.”
The air has grown cool and goose bumps rise on Jill’s arms as she and Mel walk downtown. The sudden chill is a reminder that spring had been swallowed up overnight in May, causing those who had murmured against the unusual almost-tropical weather and its offspring (salamanders spawning in sump holes in basements, clumps of moist penis-shaped mushrooms erupting in lawns during the night, their pale new skin turning leathery-brown beneath the sun of the day) to wonder aloud now whether it has been just too darn good to be true, this marvellous weather. “Don’t you forget, it’s only June,” they remind themselves as they step out onto back stoops, hands on hips, confronting their wet gardens. “At least there’s no sign of rain tonight. Good thing, that. Enough is enough, eh? About all we’re gonna wind up growing this year is slugs and mosquitoes and little boys.” They bite back the dreaded thought of punishment, an unseasonable frost.
As Mel and Jill walk beneath the street lamps, past houses and then the shops of Main Street, the streets they pass through feel as familiar as the lines running across the palms of their hands. Unlike Amy, who treats her travels through Carona’s streets as something she has to do in order to arrive at her destination, Mel and Jill have the ambling gait of landowners. They pause in front of Hardy’s Gem Store. While all the other stores are closed, windows dark, there’s a light in the Hardys’ window. The abalone shell lamp has been left burning. Jill has always been drawn to the shell, by how its colours appear to vibrate, iridescent waves curling over a landscape of spiky coral. Usually when Jill looks at it, she thinks that it’s what an ocean would look like on the moon. But tonight as she looks at it, she thinks of pickled herring. The craving is for more than its tangy brine, it’s the texture of its flesh she desires as well. The sensation of shredding thin skin between her teeth.
A display of jewelled ties and key chains hang from a wire in the window, their semi-precious stones gleaming in the shell lamp’s light. Mel sees Mr. Hardy sitting on a stool at the counter, his visor pulled low on his forehead as he hunches over a pool of light. He must have just emptied a tumbler, Mel thinks. He taps on the window. Jill protests and then groans as the man beckons for them to come inside.
The bell above their heads tinkles softly as they open the door. The shop smells arid, of sand and of the elderly couple Mel and Jill know from the United Church. Mr. Hardy used to usher. The Hardys are rock hounds and have turned their hobby into a business. They travel to New Mexico or Arizona every winter in search of precious and semi-precious stones. Jill follows Mel through the narrow aisle in the centre of the cluttered shop. Dusty showcases display oddly shaped rocks, rocks split open to reveal bristly purple quartz crystals, and some shells too, a polished moon shell, its centre resembling an intense blue eye. It’s the sound of Mr. Hardy’s shop that Mel likes. He likes the grinding sound of the drums on shelves all about the room, rocks tumbling and sliding through sand and water, each canister seeming to revolve at a different speed. Mr. Hardy holds a stone out for them to admire. “Moss agate. I sent for it down in Iowa.” His hand shakes with excitement. The cream-coloured stone feels cool and heavy in Mel’s hand. Green trees of moss sprawl across its convex surface. “Look at that, son. There’s a world inside that stone.”
Japan, Jill thinks. A volcanic mountain range framed on both sides by bonsai trees. “Nice.”
“Oh my, yes, I should say so.” He chuckles softly. The man has always been rather solemn; taciturn, people say. But he’s become a new person now, he tries to explain to anyone who cares to listen. He met Jesus Christ in the desert of Arizona and gave his life over to him. In the past his faith had no substance, he says, like the faith of most of the people who worship in the seven churches of Carona. So he crossed the road to the new church, the Alliance Gospel, and was pleasantly surprised. However, the congregation of worshippers, who came from all over, weren’t surprised to see the Hardy couple; they’d been expecting them because they had been praying for them. The people of Carona have noticed the change, how the reclusive couple has become more outgoing, friendlier, though most aren’t comfortable with the weekly meetings the Hardys have begun to hold in their living room. A prayer cell, they call it. An exclusive holy few who are tight-lipped about what it is they pray for.
Jill goes over to the pan sitting on the counter and stirs through wet silica sand and polished stones. The man’s hand drops down on top of her head. “Choose something you like.”
“It’s okay,” she says, wondering what makes adults think that children like to be touched by them. She almost prefers the crabby, aloof Mr. Hardy to this new model.
“Go on.” His long fingers reach down and pluck up an almost clear purple stone. “Amethyst. It’s an ancient gem. Even mentioned in the Bible. In the new Holy City. I could set it into a nice little pin if you like.”
“I like it like this.” She hears car doors slam and then people’s voices as they pass by the window. Her tongue quivers for the salty fish. Mr. Hardy reaches around her, picks up the pan filled with polished stones, sand, and water, and holds it beneath the lamp. He swills them around. “I was a proud man, once.” His voice becomes scratchy and unnatural. “See this?” He tilts the pan so they can see. “This is what God’s doing to me now. Smoothing the edges off the old curmudgeon.”
Jill drops the stone into her pocket. “We promised our mother we wouldn’t be late,” she says, nudging Mel in the side.
Mr. Hardy smiles down at her and nods his approval. He puts the pan aside and plucks a tract from a stack beside the cash register. “Here.” He hands it to Mel. “You might like to read a bit of this before you go to bed tonight.”
“Amen,” Jill says as they step from the store.
“Where does he get off? He gives you a stone and me a lousy religious tract.” He crumples it and tosses it into the street. “What am I, second class?”
“A sinner.” Her laughter echoes in the buildings across the street. “Here.” She presses the piece of quartz into his palm.
They pass by Ken’s Chinese Food. The ivy-covered windows glow with light and activity as Ken, a tiny man, and his two equally diminutive sons dart from table to table in the almost-full cafe. A fan above the door turns out warm air and the smell of ginger into the street. Beyond they see the flare of a match: Garth standing on the steps of the hardware store, lighting a cigarette.
“So, what’s up?” He sounds annoyed, as though he had better things to do than meet Mel.
“You’re going to have to get me some pickled herring.” Jill’s craving throbs like a toothache. She sits down on the bottom step and hugs her knees.
Mel slides the mickey of whisky from his back pocket and holds it up to the light. “We didn’t drink much. Must be two bucks’ worth here.”
Garth snatches the bottle from Mel, and, as the headlights of a car sweep across them, he slips it inside his shirt. “I don’t give refunds,” he says. He smiles with one corner of his mouth. He spends hours in front of the mirror practising that smile.
Mel feels a surge of envy as the grey Impala sweeps by and he recognizes several grade-twelve students who will soon graduate. Probably going to the city to take in a movie. He imagines them entering a nightclub using false identification.
“Come here.” Jill reaches out and pulls Garth down beside her. She winds an arm around his neck. “Come on, Cuz, you can do it. Go over to Waller’s and get me a jar of herring.”
“You serious?”
“Serious.”
“What, is she really serious?” Garth asks Mel.
Mel shrugs. Television screens in Josh’s store window flicker with bright images, and, above, in the suite of rooms where he lives with the two women and Elsa, the windows glow with the light pressing softly against orange curtains. One of the windows darkens with the shape of a person passing back and forth behind the curtain. Mel wonders if it’s Elsa.
Garth yanks at Jill’s hair. “It has to be herring, eh? Nothing else will do? What brand do you want?” he asks as he gets up and shakes the creases from his drape pants. “Not bad, eh? Thirty-six inches at the knee.”
“And twelve at the ankle. We know, we know,” Mel says drily. Garth has been the first in Carona to wear the baggy draped pants which, he boasts, he wheedled his mother into bringing back from Grand Forks, U.S. of A.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Garth says and saunters off into the shadows. But he knows he can get what Jill wants because he is a thief. He was born a thief. He possesses a cunning intuition about people and their movements. He knows which of the young women in town “has the mitt on,” which women “have a bun in the oven.” What kind of underwear they have on beneath their clothing. He admits to having snuck into houses and stuck pins into packets of condoms lying inside drawers of bedside tables. But few people in Carona know this side of Garth Johnson. They know him as a congenial, if not a bit smart alecky, boy. He is, after all, the son of Reginald, who is the son of Thomas, and so on. Those who know him well keep silent and Garth delivers whatever it is they want.
He emerges minutes later from an alley halfway down the street. His white shirt shifts from side to side as he passes beneath the streetlights. Cocky, Mel thinks as Garth flips something in the air and catches it with one hand. Pickled herring, Jill realizes. Saliva swells in her mouth.
“Waller’s working overtime,” Garth says. He grins. “Had a hell of a time getting past him to get these.” He sets a carton of eggs down on the steps beside the jar of herring and Jill plucks up the glass jar and twists open its lid. “Oh, I love you, love you, I love you.”
Big deal, Mel thinks and glances up at Josh’s window again. There are two shapes in front of the window now. Two women; he can tell by the outline of breasts.
Jill reaches through sliced onions at the top of the jar and the smell of fish and brine rises. Blue skin slides up through the opaque slivers of onion. She opens her mouth, bites, and feels immediate gratification. Yes, this is it, her tastebuds say.
Garth and Mel watch in silence as Jill sucks brine from her fingers and then eats another large chunk of fish. Her mouth glistens as it moves up and down, sideways, grinding flesh between sharp teeth, gulping back the salty liquid. She is oblivious to all as she eats and eats. When she has devoured half the jar of herring they can no longer bear to watch the brine dribbling down her chin and her tongue darting forward to clear it away. Garth opens the carton of eggs and gathers up a few. Several people leave Ken’s Chinese Food and so he waits for the noise of their car engine to cover the sound of eggs breaking against Josh’s sign. He drops back into the shadows. He glances at Mel who is still standing there, hands in pockets, looking up at Josh’s window. The two women have moved together in an embrace. Their heads come together. Dancing, or kissing, Mel thinks.
Garth laughs, a brittle fox bark. “Didn’t think old Josh could still get it up.” The two figures part and it becomes clear to him then in the silhouettes of their bodies that it is two women. Garth’s jaw drops and then his lips curl in a half smile. “Dykes. Bloody dykes, I’ll bet.” He laughs and throws an egg and Mel sees it break against Josh’s sign. “Here, your turn.” He offers Mel an egg.
“No way. Forget it.”
The egg arcs through the air and they hear the soft crack of it as it hits a window. White eggshell slides down the glass pane. The curtains part suddenly and a face appears and hands cup eyes against the light in the room. “You’re a little chicken shit,” Garth says with a touch of bitterness.
Mel is stung by the inference that he’s a coward. He wonders if Garth can see the imprint of a foot on his shirt. “Elsa fucks like a mink,” he hears himself say and instantly wishes he could take it back.
Garth, who is about to throw another egg, stops, arm still held above his head. He brings it down slowly as the news sinks in. It’s seldom that he is not the first to know something. “You’re kidding. Interesting …”
The light in the room blinks out and Mel can see the sharp features of Adele as she peers out at them. “We’d better get going.” Mel looks down at Jill who is hunched low between her knees. Her body convulses as she begins to retch, and then she vomits and half-chewed herring splashes down onto the sidewalk.
The brick face of the school radiates as though lit from within with burning embers, while its tracery windows above the entrance appear to be solid, a sheet of glowing metal. Margaret watches for Jill and Mel from the veranda and beckons for them to hurry.
“Come inside,” she urges. “This is just too strange.”
“I think it’s aurora borealis,” Mel says as he closes the gate behind them.
“All right, yes.” But Margaret doesn’t like them having been touched by it.
“Tim?”
“Amy,” he half whispers. “The little beggar was sitting on the stairs when I came up. Waiting. Now she’s out there in her nightgown.”
“Oh great! She’ll wake the entire neighbourhood.”
Timothy slides in beside her and moves up against her and his cool limbs draw her from her state of half-sleep. She shivers as he curls about her and cups her breast. “Drove all night,” he whispers and then sighs with weariness. Gradually his body grows limp and his breathing slower and Margaret wants to try to sleep again, to drift inside his encircling arms. His limbs begin to warm from the heat of her body. His fingers twitch in muscle spasms against her breast. She closes her eyes and falls into the rhythm of his breathing pattern so as not to disturb his drift into sleep, but her heart thuds too loudly against the mattress and she grows tense with the sound of it. She opens her eyes and sees the arrangement of wicker furniture, a vague grey outline in the first light of sun, and she thinks: Fool. Cosy, she’d thought when she’d put the furniture there. The chair backs face one another across the low table, an almost grim arrangement, she thinks now. Her heartbeat quickens and she winces against an image of Bill North that keeps rising unbidden behind her eyes. Fool! She wants to pound the word flat against the bed. Timothy’s hand clutches at her breast.
“You want to sleep?” he murmurs.
“Yes.” That is her wish, to stay curled into him while he sleeps for several hours. But he begins tracing her nipple and then his hand drops from her breast down across her hip and he begins to draw her nightgown up over her legs, her hips. “All right. Sleep then.” She feels his palm in the small of her back urging her to curl forward so that he can enter her from behind and watch himself make love to her, whispering that she should continue to sleep until their love-making becomes so unbearably pleasurable that she cannot lie still any longer but will moan, or thrust up against him hard, wanting him to go deeper, or turn and straddle him, her lean body becoming a hard straight plane set against his, moving on him until he comes. She believes that Timothy, caught up in his own desire, never suspects that she feels little. She is certain of this; otherwise she would have to think that he didn’t care.
“No. I can’t. I’m not fixed.” Margaret draws away from his probing.
“Well, go and get fixed,” he whispers into her neck.
“No.” She turns to face him, weeping softly.
“What is it?” he asks, mildly alarmed. He touches her cheek. “Tell me.” Their eyes meet. What does he see when he looks at her without his glasses, she wonders. A featureless blob of jelly wobbling on a pillow?
“I missed you,” she says, though she knows that because of the house renovations, the new appliances, the third child, she doesn’t have the right to say this.
He sighs. They agreed not to speak about their loneliness when they were apart. “When you say that,” Timothy explained once, “it makes me feel guilty. It’s not my fault that I have to be away.” There wasn’t enough business in the hardware store any longer to support two families.
“Hey.” His mouth is warm against hers. “I’m here now.”
“Yes.” She smiles. The wee cry is over. The sound of the rope swing beats against the house, a squealing, groaning metronome, steady, monotonous. “I caught that kid up on the garage roof last night. My heart was in my mouth.” She sees the soft pouches of flesh beneath his eyes that come from squinting against the sun and at the flash of white lines passing through the beam of the car’s headlights.
“Hello.” She laughs lightly and he releases her. She’s grateful for his poor eyesight, that he can’t see her features clearly. He moves away from her, rolls over onto his side of the bed, and falls asleep instantly.
Margaret looks up at a dust mote dangling in a corner and wonders how she will arrange her face while he is home. What will she think about to keep the image of Bill North firmly beneath the surface? The light in the room has grown stronger and the pale apple blossoms on the wallpaper begin to bloom their dusty pink colour. She hears footsteps in the hall. Jill, she realizes as the bathroom door closes softly. She lies still, barely breathing, forcing herself to stay at Timothy’s side while he sleeps but wanting desperately to be downstairs, her mind engaged with familiar chores. She hears the scrape of the bedroom door against the carpet. George. Amy must have let the cat into the house. She listens to the soft pad of its paws against the carpet and then George springs up onto the bed and creeps across the foot of it, settling on top of Margaret’s feet. She looks down at the animal as it crouches and blinks at her with amber eyes. It’s only an animal, Margaret tells herself. It knows nothing.
Margaret prepares breakfast and listens to their voices. She moves between the stove and counter, stirring scrambled eggs, buttering toast, catching glimpses of herself in the mirror. She is not satisfied with the look of the green grosgrain ribbon against her auburn hair, and does not recognize the expression on her own face, the eyes are too wide, there is a strange half-smile. She stacks toast onto a plate and is about to put it into the oven to keep warm when she looks out of the window and sees Bunny and Bill’s Fairlane pull into their driveway behind Bill’s truck. Home from church, she thinks bitterly, and notices that Bill is wearing his new dress slacks. “I’m going to be out. The pants will be on the dryer in the back porch,” Margaret had said to Bunny on the telephone and had lain still on her bed hardly breathing as she heard the door open and then close. The telephone rings in the hallway, startling her so that she almost drops the plate of toast.
“I’ll get it,” Mel and Jill both say at once.
“No, I’ll get it.” Margaret wipes her hands on her apron and goes into the hallway and picks up the receiver. She hears the bright voice of her sister, Rita. “Say, kiddo, okay if Louie and I drive out for supper tonight?” Margaret holds the sound of her sister’s voice tightly against her ear to stop her hand from trembling.
“Amy?” Rita says when she doesn’t answer. “Go and get your mother for me. Tout de suite. This is long distance, you know.”
Margaret laughs. “It’s me. Sure, come out for supper. I have to talk to you.”
“Oh.” Rita is quiet for a moment. “I guess you don’t want me to bring Louie, then?”
Why is it that you always take it for granted that I want to talk to you about you? Margaret thinks. She has already said everything there is to say to her sister about the folly of being in love with a married man. She and Bunny have talked to Rita until blue in the face. Let her learn the hard way, I guess, Bunny had said. It was the way Rita had learned almost everything, which was why discussion in their family always centred around her. “No, that’s fine. Tim plans on working on the jalopy today. Louie can keep him company.”
“Well, that should be fun for Louie.”
As Margaret goes back into the kitchen she hears the porch screen door open. They all turn at once and see Alf, the grounds-keeper, step into the doorway. He wears his coveralls and stands blinking for several moments, looking embarrassed and out of place. He clears his throat and then abruptly thrusts an object in Timothy’s direction. The camera, Amy realizes. “My boy came across it yesterday when he was helping me with the mowing,” Alf says. “I knew it was yours.”
“Holy Toledo,” Mel says and whistles at the sight of the ruined camera.
Amy is jammed between her father’s legs and can’t escape. She watches as Timothy examines the camera. She stands deathly still as everyone’s eyes swoop down on top of her head.
“Ain’t none of my business how she got there. My boy just come across her. A shame.”
As Amy tries to squeeze out from between Timothy’s knees, he holds her fast by the neck of her tee shirt. “Look.” She’s forced to confront the shattered camera which is already pitted with rust. Ashes to ashes, she thinks.
“Thanks for coming by.” Margaret hopes to dismiss Alf, disliking the smell of manure that emanates from his straw-encrusted boots.
Alf nods. “You been talking to Reginald this morning?”
“No, why?”
“He was putting cardboard over the store window when I came by. Seems someone chucked a good-size piece of cinder block through her. Smashed pretty good and then some.”
“Seems like it got broke,” Mel says with a slight scoffing tone in his voice.
“You betcha.” Alf nods, oblivious to the mockery.
“Was anything stolen?” Margaret is thinking about the display she’d arranged in the window the day before, remembering what tools, toys, and kitchenware.
“Reg didn’t seem to think so. So it don’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me.” He turns, about to leave.
“Wait up.” Timothy hands him the camera. “Think your boy would like to tinker with this?”
“Think so.” Alf’s smile reveals teeth stained from chewing-tobacco.
“Perhaps he can fix it,” Mel says. He seldom uses the word “perhaps” and Amy thinks he sounds mealy-mouthed.
“Well, if he does manage to fix it, then bravo,” Timothy says. “I don’t want it back.”
“What on earth is happening to this town?” Margaret wonders aloud as the door closes behind Alf. Mel and Jill exchange a glance and slip from the room. Amy moves to follow them but Timothy holds her fast. He slides a chair out from the table and indicates that she’s to sit down and face the music.
Margaret does not say a word. Although she doesn’t agree with Timothy that they should overlook Amy’s covert behaviour, she goes along with him because she knows the girl too well. The moment Margaret makes an effort to pick up on something Amy’s interested in, Amy discards that interest. Film is cheap, Timothy had once said to Margaret. “She just likes to think she’s pulling one over on us but in the meantime she’s learning something, don’t you see?”
Amy slouches down into the chair, head lowered, and Margaret sees the veins in her stem-like neck which make her appear small, vulnerable. Amy, the shadow between them; the child whose presence while in her belly Timothy ignored, refusing, too, any physical contact throughout the entire pregnancy. The child he never wanted became a delight instantly, the moment he saw her elf-like face. Margaret’s secret joy, her relief, gave way to puzzlement in the following months. “She sure is the apple of her daddy’s eye,” Bunny once remarked. “I told you he’d come around in the end.” “Yes,” Margaret said, “I’m glad.” But she felt that she was being punished. Amy’s pug nose, the constant trail of mucus beneath it, the fingernails embedded with dirt, her perpetual determined frown, do not say vulnerable. “Sit up straight, you’ll get a dowager’s hump sitting like that,” Margaret says. But even though Amy listens and pulls herself into the proper sitting position Margaret can still see the veins behind the strands of the child’s wispy hair, and she feels anger. Perhaps, Margaret thinks, it is Timothy’s unreasonable patience with the girl that is the cause of her anger.
“Well, so what happened to the camera?” Timothy asks.
The plastic chair-seat sticks to the backs of Amy’s thighs and so she begins to lift her legs, one and then the other, again and again, and they make a satisfying sucking noise. Timothy must have been in a hurry this morning, she thinks, as she notices that he’s forgotten to do up the middle button on his shirt. She watches his white shirt move in and out as he breathes. She would like to put her hand against it and feel the rhythmic moving, the warmth of his breath.
“I think you should go up to your room for a while. I’ll come up in a few minutes,” Timothy says.
As Amy climbs the stairs she listens to the soft murmur of their voices. She goes over to the shelf of dolls and spies the trap Jill has set for her, the tiny sliver of paper cunningly placed among the folds of the green velvet dress of Melissa, Jill’s favourite doll. Its dislocation will be the proof Jill needs that Amy tampers with her dolls. All right, Amy thinks, as she goes over to the window, I won’t touch your shitty little dolls and I won’t tell you either about the man who can play two songs at once on his guitar. She sees Amy the squirrel dashing across a telephone wire across the street and then her heart lurches as the squirrel stumbles suddenly, almost falling. Then she sees Elsa Miller standing beneath a tree under the telephone wires, hidden. Elsa wears the same yellow sundress she’d worn the day before. Sunlight reflects off her sunglasses as she looks at the house. Amy sees Mel’s sandy-coloured square head move out from beneath the slope of the veranda roof. Jill limps after him, following him to the gate. They sling their arms across it and turn their faces to the ground as though their main concern is to count ants marching across a crack in the sidewalk. They ignore Elsa.
“I bet she does it with everyone,” Mel says.
Amy hears the telephone ring in the hall downstairs and Mel and Jill turn, hearing it too, and then look down again, two people, one motion. Margaret’s voice rises up from the hall. The telephone call is from her brother, Reginald, who relays the latest news about “that weird bunch” and repeats the gossip concerning the Miller women’s sexual proclivity.
“Elsa does what with everyone?” Jill asks, goading Mel into saying the word.
“Screws.”
“I don’t know about you.” Jill’s voice rises in a haughty tone. “I thought that’s what you wanted.” She flicks the gate’s latch, pushes off, and rides it open, then strides across the street towards Elsa, her arms swinging. Just then Margaret steps out onto the veranda.
“Breakfast,” she calls sharply. “Right now.”
“I’ll just be a second,” Jill says over her shoulder.
“Now.”
“I’ll wait here for you,” Elsa says.
Then Amy sees Timothy’s head appear from beneath the veranda roof. He goes over to Mel and winds an arm about his shoulders. “Hello, Elsa,” he calls. As Jill reaches his side, he puts his other arm around her and draws her away. “This gal’s gotta get some food into her,” he calls. “You know, Mel,” he says, his voice dropping, “I think that girl has a serious crush on you.” Their heads disappear beneath the roof of the veranda. “Ha, ha, ha, very funny,” Amy hears Mel say as the door closes behind them.
There is a strangeness in the house, a tension, and even though Timothy is home, Amy feels that she must be very careful. She must remember to look inside the closet before she goes to bed. She imagines that the scatter rugs in the hallway conceal gaping holes which she could fall through. She’d read her mother’s journal entry before going to bed last night. “I am a fool,” she had written. That was all, and so there was no way she could determine why Margaret threw the plate of sandwiches at the cat. Or why she was wearing Timothy’s bathrobe when usually she wore it only if the house was chilly or if she wasn’t feeling well. Amy believes that she is somehow responsible for this new strangeness in the house. That it may have entered the house with her the day she was struck by lightning.
She hears Timothy’s step on the stairs and so climbs up onto her bed and waits for him. She could tell him about the dirty pictures Mel has stashed in the left-hand pocket of his winter coat in the back of his closet. She could tell him that the reason why Jill got 95 per cent on her arithmetic final was because Mel paid Garth to smuggle a copy of the test from the principal’s office. But she can’t tell him that she was struck by lightning. The knowledge is hers and never to be given away. When she turns her head she looks straight into his face. He smiles and she feels secure in her nest of pillows. She likes how the gold fillings in his teeth shine with saliva when he smiles, how his voice always sounds as if he’s on the verge of a cold. She likes his round wire-framed glasses and how their lenses magnify his blue eyes. She loves the feeling of his lean and prickly jaw, the smell of tobacco that clings to his skin.
“Will you let me help you work on the car today?” Amy asks.
“Maybe.”
“Who was that on the telephone?”
“Your uncle.”
“Does he know who broke his window yet?” She could tell him that Mel had been drinking whisky. She knows most of Mel’s and Jill’s secrets but has learned the hard way not to tell. She has learned through the pranks they’ve played on her, the stealthy little hard pinches against her arms that leave her with bruises. “Amy certainly bruises easily,” Margaret says in a tone that implies that it is somehow Amy’s fault.
“Amy …”
“When Elvis comes to town, can we go?”
“Amy … so, what happened?”
“I saw him, in the city, in a park.”
“What happened to the camera?”
“The camera.” Amy realizes for the first time that she doesn’t have to say what happened to her. He only wants to know what happened to the camera.
“It was struck by lightning.”
Timothy’s cheeks puff with air. Then he expels it in a pop which she feels against her face. “In other words, an elephant sat on it. Okay, Sugar. I give up. It doesn’t matter.”
His hands cup her armpits as he swings her down from the bunk bed. She winds her legs around his narrow frame as he carries her down the stairs. She buries her nose in his warm neck. “Hey. No wiping boogers on my shirt, you hear?” She laughs and her heart burns with the desire to tell him that she may be able to fly. Although she didn’t wear one in her dream when she floated in the sky, she believes that she may need a cape, and so, to deflect her desire to tell him that she has been struck by lightning, she asks instead if next time when he comes home will he bring her a cape.
“What, as in a Red Riding Hood kind of cape?” Huh, huh, huh, his breath spurts from his chest as they descend the stairs.
“A magician’s cape. But it doesn’t need to be black.”
“You want the rabbits too?”
Amy thinks sometimes that the ache of her swelling heart will hurt her too much.
Mel and Jill sit at the table waiting for Margaret to serve their breakfast. “You will not be seeing Elsa today.” Her voice is strained and curt.
“How so?” Timothy asks and then grows silent under Margaret’s warning glance that says I’ll tell you later.
“So, what happened to the camera, then?” She asks the question to divert attention from a much more dangerous topic.
“It doesn’t matter what happened. That matter has been cleared up.” He drops Amy into her place and the farting chair says Woosh. He bows his head and they follow his example while Margaret hurries through a learned prayer. “And thus to thy service” signals the end of it. “Amen.”
As Margaret spoons scrambled eggs onto her plate Amy thinks about the mysterious entry in the Blue Book. When Margaret is finished serving and comes to sit down, Amy waits several moments and then she asks, “What does it mean, to be a fool?” and feels Margaret start forward in her chair.