Crossings (36 page)

But I am to forget. I often lock her out and drive her mad. The bedroom window is painted over. One house away are the railway tracks. The front room window stares out at a window across the way. But at least it's on the first floor. The stairs so rickety that one day they swing away from beneath my feet. Fifty dollars a month. I can move in on the twenty-first. The twenty-first of December. What has happened to November? I don't remember.

Ben comes over. I ask him to help me move on the twenty-first.

Mik phones. He's coming down. I don't ask him. I know they're dead.

He'll be here at five. I have nothing in. I go out and get two TV dinners. The house is filthy. Cold. Mildewed. I haven't bought any briquettes. I use an electric heater in one room. In the front room. In the kitchen. In Jocelyn's bedroom. Moving it from place to place. At a quarter to five, I can't stand it. I leave the house and walk around the block. Coming up the back stairs. Into the empty house. He isn't here yet.

I stand in the kitchen and I wait.

I hear him coming up the front porch steps. Not loudly. Not Mik. The door opens. Closes. I hear him put his stuff down.

He comes into the kitchen.

Then I hear them.

‘Oh Mik. You brought the cats.'

‘Sure.'

I let them out of the Mexican basket and they run around, sniffing, recognizing everything. I had not even put out their dishes. I was so sure.

‘What did you think I was going to do with them?' But he knows. And I know. We move painfully through the dusk. ‘Jesus,' he says when I take out the TV dinners.

We are like two ambulance cases, tender with each other. Death is a ghetto too, and we are buddies here.

He doesn't go back up north. He goes on a bash.

Ben helps me move. I think Ben always did the moving. I always got sick. Yes. And this time I go in hospital the same morning, to get out of moving. Oxygen tent, cortisone intravenously. Ben stands there beyond the frosted plastic and says, ‘I'm staying in your new place. To take care of the cats.' He is there. In my new place. I haven't even slept there myself yet.

Christmas Eve. Beside me, a woman is dying. There are twenty-eight beds on the ward. She cries, ‘Jesus, Jesus,' and everyone yells, ‘Oh shut up.'

Down at the other end, a woman thinks she is having a baby. ‘It's coming! I can feel the head. OOOh. That's the head.' She is ninety.

I lie there and it is warm and wet now in the tent. It is cold only at first. I breathe through water. Up above the bottle drips. They haven't been able to find any more veins, so it is in my finger now.

The woman beside me will not die gently. She is not glad to go. They give me a pill so I won't hear.

But I stay awake with her. It takes her until three o'clock Christmas morning. It is very noisy, her death. She rattles and fights all the way. ‘Oh Jesus,' she cries and people mutter, ‘Oh for christ sake, shut up.' She says, ‘Help me.'

I feel embarrassed for her.

Down the ward: ‘It's coming, Nurse. Nurse! The head's coming.'

The woman beside me dies at last. Something spills. I hear it splash. She dies saying, ‘No.'

After a while the flashlight comes. The nurse looks. Then the men come and take the woman away. And two more nurses come and clean up the bed. And the floor. Moving quietly on the morn of our saviour's birth.

When they have gone, I unzip the tent, and pull out the needle.

The nurse finds me in the bathroom, smoking.

‘What in hell do you think you're doing?'

And I am hustled back, threatened with a restrainer, plugged in, zipped up.

Christmas Day. Mik comes. His face is all scratched. He stands there, looking embarrassed for me. He puts a present down on the bed. The bag says London Drugs. He takes it out and shows me, through the plastic. A salt and pepper set in phony plastic wood. I don't speak and he says, ‘Well, I better go.'

I could have spoken. The asthma isn't that bad. But I am so tired. It is too late. There is nothing to say.

I take a taxi to the new place on January 4. Ben is firmly ensconced. He has arranged everything artistically. He is cooking something macrobiotic in the kitchen. The cats look healthy.

‘The landlady over at the old place? She came when I was moving you. She said you have to pay damages. She said everything was in perfect condition when you moved in.'

We laugh.

I thank him for the cats. He goes, suffering for me.

‘Anytime you need me,' he says. He has taken a place near me. A studio. He can get over in minutes if I need him.

The hi fi is rigged up and there is food, even meat, in the fridge.

In the letters: ‘I have just read your masterpiece in the barber's chair. I laughed so hard I nearly got my throat cut.' They pay me for the play. But they never do it.

Mik comes over and we make love but it is different. ‘Shh,' I say.

He's across the bridge. The other way. Back at the hotels.

He comes over too often. I say, ‘Look, this isn't a coffee house.' And, ‘Look. I'm
working.
'

I pack up Lolly and send her to Jocelyn. But she sets up such a fuss, crying all the time, that Jocelyn sends her back again. Always was a bitcher, that cat.

I got the washer fixed yesterday and she tells the man such a story.

‘What are they doing to you?' the man says, bending to stroke her. ‘Don't they feed you then? Aw.'

 

I FIND OUT why I had to put that in, about Momma dancing.

We go to Francie's. We phone Mom. The four of us on the line: Anna, me, Francie, Mom. Mom says, ‘We're going to a shindig tonight.'

‘You're going dancing?' I say.

‘Yes,' and she laughs.

‘Fred's going
dancing
?' I hear Francie say on the extension.

‘Sure,' Mom says. ‘He likes it.'

And later, up at the cabin, Francie says, ‘But I was there, that summer.'

‘You weren't there,' I say.

‘Yes, I was. I was with you for months. Don't you remember? I was going to live with you.'

‘You were there that summer? You saw Mik?'

‘Sure. I was there the whole time. Don't you remember?'

No. I don't. She wasn't there that summer.

‘Don't you remember, I climbed out the bathroom window and you said I was “putting it on,”' Francie says.

‘I what?' but it starts to come back. No.

‘When I climbed out the bathroom window,' Francie says. ‘You said I was “putting it on.”'

‘You saw
Mik?
' It's not possible. ‘You were there?'

‘Of course I saw Mik. I was there that summer. Don't you remember? All those weirdo friends of his? Getting drunk. That one, the abortionist, telling us he'd protect us from Mik? Mik was dangerous? My god. And Mik ripping out the telephone? And Joss calling the police?'

‘I don't remember,' I say.

But this morning, at six, I get up, stagger around looking for cigarettes. All right. All right, godammit, I'll remember.

Francie lumbers out fifteen minutes later. ‘What's wrong?'

‘I always get up at this time. Tell me about the bathroom window.'

So we sit in front of the phony fireplace, drinking coffee, sucking on air to make fun of our nicotine hang-up, and Francie tells me about the bathroom window.

‘I think I had flu or something. I was in Joss's room, and Mom was in Mik's bedroom with Bert.'

‘Not with Bert! They didn't sleep together.'

‘Oh well, maybe. But they had been, you know.'

‘No. She didn't until after she saw me with Mik.'

‘That's a lie,' Francie says. ‘She slept with him, she didn't live with him, but she slept with him. Anyway, I woke up and the bed cover was
huge.
Like, magnified a thousand times. I could feel all the fibres, under my fingers. And the bones in my hand, beneath the skin. When I went to the bathroom, I could feel the wood beneath my feet. So coarse. All the texture had changed. I was in the bathroom and I didn't think, I'm going to kill myself, I just thought if I could get out into the air … You and Mik were sleeping in the basement.'

‘Oh yes.'

‘And so I did, and Mom came to the door and said to let her in, but I said no, I said, “Go away.” I knew I was hurting her but I couldn't help it. Everything was so coarse.'

‘Do you hear what you're saying? Coarse? I mean, not just in terms of texture.'

‘Oh yes,' Francie says. ‘Yes. It was Joss who got me to open the door, with her librarian's voice. “Now, Francie, it's going to be all right. Open the door now, Francie.” I wouldn't have for you or Mom. Not for either one of you.'

‘Yes. Now I remember. I know why I forgot too. I hadn't taken care of you.'

‘Have you put in the gun?' she says.

‘No. It was duplicated. I mean, I show my attitude toward stolen goods in another part.'

‘But you've got to put in the gun.' She turns to her friend, a quiet Japanese-American. ‘There was this gun. A real high-powered gun, with all sorts of complicated dooeys on the top. I found it. Vicky sent me upstairs to Mik's room, and I found it in the dresser.'

‘You found it?' I say, still not believing she was there.

‘Sure. And Vicky, she wrapped it up in a tablecloth.'

‘My god!' I cry, ‘a plastic tablecloth, all done in lace!'

‘And she put it across the handlebars of her bicycle and rode down to city hall, and took it right in the door and past the commissionaire and …'

‘Not in the door,' I say, ‘up to the door.'

‘But why?' he says.

‘It was hot,' Francie says.

‘I didn't want him to get in trouble. He'd stolen it. Or one of his buddies. But you know what I remember? I remember how you all, you and Mom and Joss, how you all sort of sneered when I came back, feeling pleased with myself.'

‘Oh you have to put the gun in,' says Francie, ‘it's important.'

And she goes on to say that she and Joss had it all figured out. A man had been killed. It was in the newspapers, he had had a collection of rifles. And they were missing.

‘I don't remember that. What
I
remember is … people honking at me on the way to City Hall. And I thought they were honking because the wind was blowing the tablecloth away, and they could see the gun. But after, when I was riding back, people were still honking, and I realized I was wearing that brown and white dress with the polka dots? And I had no slip on underneath!'

‘
What
did you do with the gun?' he says.

‘I put it beside the door of City Hall.'

Francie says, ‘You know. That summer. Not because you were my ideal or anything, but because it was true, you were really attractive.'

And she climbed on the bathroom windowsill and wouldn't answer the door because the world was coarse. I was coarse. My mother was coarse. Only the air would be finely textured again.

‘I didn't take care of you. That's why I couldn't remember. I couldn't remember your being there. I was sure you weren't there. And then, in the book? I put in this part? Where we were dancing? All four of us. You and me and Joss and Mom. All of us dancing, and I couldn't figure it out, how were you there?'

‘
I
remember that,' Francie says.

‘You remember the dancing?'

‘Oh yes!'

I am quiet for a while, staring into the gas flame that never eats the pretend logs. I think, but how did Mik and I? All that
sex.
With Francie in the house. But I don't ask her.

Instead, I say, ‘So, how is it in bed?' Not her and the Japanese-American, but her and the new one. John.

She giggles. ‘Good. Fantastic!'

‘I never asked you before you got married. I never asked you the important questions.'

‘Only, when I first saw it, his dong, I said, “No way!”'

‘But was it okay?'

‘Yes. Fantastic.'

‘Well, you know,' I say, ‘it stretches.' And I draw a diagram on the rug. ‘Three-quarters more, if you reach a state of excitation.'

‘What? The clitoris?'

‘The clitoris!' I look at her, my swinger sister who tried to hide last night when she was smoking a toke. From me! ‘The clitoris? The vagina!'

‘Does it?'

Is it possible? Is she as dumb as I was? ‘Yes, of course, if you're relaxed. If you're “flexible.”'

‘Maybe that's it,' Francie says. ‘If I relax, if I'm flexible, it will be okay. I won't push the Reject button.'

‘Yeah.'

‘How
much does it stretch?'

‘Seventy-five per cent. And the front clamps down. Like this.' I squeeze the diagram and the rug strands lean together.

‘No kidding. So that's why it didn't hurt. You know, after the divorce, the doctor said I was almost
intact.
I was so
small.
But with John, it didn't hurt. Not at all. And then, he wasn't like most men, he didn't need it to hurt.'