Degrees of Nakedness (8 page)

There are five of us. My step-daughter, Giselle, my son, Owen, my husband, Wayne, and our daughter, Jill, who has just turned four. When we got married Wayne squeezed my fingers so tightly it hurt. He held my hand against his breastbone so that
my arm was raised, as if I wanted to ask a question. Owen was rigid in a fuchsia cummerbund and pleated shirt. He was in the grip of a fever but no one noticed until later. His cheeks flaming, eyes bright. He held a tiny satin pillow for the rings. He was eight. Last Saturday night, just before dawn, I saw him in the kitchen and he was so tall I thought he was a stranger who had wandered in from the street. He was buttering a piece of bread.

Giselle wore a wine velvet dress with a satin rosebud pocket which fits Jill now.

Once Wayne happened on Owen and Giselle rough-housing on Giselle’s bed, under the blankets. Wayne called me into the bathroom, shut the door. We turned to the mirror and watched each other while we tried to talk. Was it just innocent tickling? Mentioning it would make them so self-conscious. Wayne picked up his toothbrush and brushed his teeth. I watched him. There was a knock. Giselle and Owen were standing in the hall. Wayne and I came out of the bathroom. We were all embarrassed, standing near the banister. Giselle said, What’s happened?

Owen is lifting a small pizza out of the oven with an egg turner. Heat radiating from the oven in the warm room. The kitchen is lit by the lamp over the fridge. There’s a boy sitting at the table, his head down, wearing a baseball cap. It’s after midnight, I’m just getting home.

Can Tommy sleep over? Owen says.

Tommy’s hair is reddish gold, light from the lamp falling on his bent neck.

The overhead light doesn’t work and at night the kitchen is dark except the small lamp on top of the fridge. The leaves of a bush move against the kitchen window and there’s enough light in one patch to show the greenness, the edges of the leaves. The rest of the glass reflects the kitchen.

Owen slides the pizza on the plate between Tommy’s wrists. The boy looks at my reflection in the window. His eyes are large. Owen is grim. His cheeks flushed from the stove. He says to me, Come here.

We step outside the kitchen and Owen closes the door.

He looks at the floor and says, His parents kicked him out.

Owen’s breath smells of beer.

Then he opens the door and we go back into the kitchen. Giselle wanders in from the den. She bends over a Tupperware bowl of Jell-O sitting on the counter. She stares deeply at her reflection in the ruby surface, then jerks the bowl; her face wobbles like flame.

Owen says, Get your hair out of it.

She knows something is strange, and leaves the room without fight or comment.

Do your parents know where you are, Tommy? I say.

He doesn’t look up from the pizza. He speaks quietly.

They don’t care.

Would you mind if I called them, Tommy, just to say that you’re safe?

No, I wouldn’t mind.

He gives me the phone number and I sit on the stairs in the hall so he can hear what I say. It’s quarter to one.

The father answers.

I say, Mr. Canning? I’m calling about Tommy.

I’ll pass you over to Mary, he says.

I say my name and that Tommy is here, he’d like to sleep over if that’s okay with you.

She says, Did you know Tommy’s not staying at home?

No, I didn’t.

He’s not staying at home but I’ve known where he is through the grapevine every night since he’s been gone. Parents have called. We’d like him to come home. But he can’t seem to live by the house rules.

Well, he’s here tonight, I thought I’d let you know.

I know Owen, she says. He’s safe with Owen.

Good night then, I say.

Yes, she says, good night.

I think about that man saying, I’ll pass you over to Mary. They’re a rich family. A large front lawn, and back. Mature trees. A swimming pool, Owen says.

The smell of pizza filling the kitchen. The reddish blond hair on his bent neck in the small light. His arms resting on either side of the plate. Then picking up the knife and fork as if they were heavy.

His mother had sounded like she had just remembered why he wasn’t home. The house rules. Some reason a stranger on the phone might grasp. Both of them awake at quarter to one. But the man isn’t anxious enough to say for himself, Where is he now? Is he safe? I can feel his impotence through the phone, like a surge then loss of electrical power, the house brighter, as
if the light were breathed in and exhaled, no light at all. The kettle stops bubbling, voices drain from the radio, the humming of things we can’t hear until they’ve stopped. He passed me to his wife so fast I know they were lying side by side.

Giselle comes in the front door. When the front door opens it creates a vacuum in the hall and the back door slams, making us all jump. The shoes. I can see them from the kitchen. She is standing in the hall, her feet together, looking down at them. I come out and look, leaning my shoulder against the wall. A clean cream with a decorative swirl of gold metal, a small heel. They are shoes for a grown-up girl. Slippery-soled.

Wayne asks, What’s happening with that boy, Tommy?

He’s sleeping here again.

What are we going to do?

I don’t know.

We have to do something.

Owen says Tommy slept until late in the afternoon. Came down for a bowl of cereal, his face flaming. Owen says he’s embarrassed.

I tell Giselle to take some books to her room. She says, No. Anger rising with the delicate precision of a cardhouse. Our voices, curiously, getting weaker. I see it in her face, that I can’t make her. For the first time. Her face blooms with it, like fireworks. Her eyes. She’s excited, exhilarated. I am genuinely shocked to see that she hates me. For a split second, a spark of hate. I’m awed.

Last year we lived in Toronto for six months. Giselle stayed here with her mother. I wrote Giselle a letter every day. One night I got out of bed in my nightdress to mail it. The box was a few doors down and I ran to it in my bare feet.

We flew her up for Thanksgiving weekend. She sobbed at the zoo. We’d seen too much, walked too far. The lethargic baboon, slump-shouldered, defeated, bending to show the audience his brilliant anus. I carried Jill on my shoulders. Giselle sat on the curb while we waited for the bus to go home, rubbing her wet face on the rough sleeve of Wayne’s jacket. Geese roamed near her, honking a sympathetic undertow beneath her sobs. The heavy sky threatened rain. I lifted Jill from my shoulders and for a moment I felt as if I were floating. She crouched beside Giselle and watched her cry with wonder. In the subway I said, Let’s see if we can hold our breath until the next stop. Giselle said, I was thinking the exact same thing.

Jill had a necklace with a tiny bottle and bubble wand attached. She waved the wand. Bubbles. They floated in the stagnant air as if we were under water. Giselle and I gasped for breath.

I know she won’t bring the books to her room so I snatch them out of her hand.

Get out of my way.

What? she says.

Her exhilaration is gone now. She’s scared.

I take the stairs two at a time.

She says, I was going to.

Shut up, Giselle.

I’ve never said shut up to her before. Five minutes later, in the kitchen, she has forgotten. She’s talking about a gypsy costume.

When we get back from the Quik Stop, Giselle’s mother has left a message on our answering machine. She’s coming to get Giselle for the picnic. They’ll get to watch the sunset together.

Owen is in the kitchen. I give him two Popsicles.

One for Tommy.

He’s gone.

Back to his parents?

Nope.

Where?

Someone else’s house.

Whose house?

Don’t know.

Is he coming back here?

Don’t know.

Is he all right do you think?

I don’t know.

How do you feel about it?

Owen shrugs, turns the radio up.

On the mirror of my dresser is a photograph of a family barbecue taken just a few days before, at Wayne’s sister’s. Jill is in a white sailor cap, a navy ribbon on the brim, and a white dress, stiff as a fresh piece of paper. She’s sitting on Wayne’s lap. Owen
wears a skewed baseball cap, has a hotdog in his mouth, burly shoulders. Behind them, out of focus, is Giselle, her body arched backwards in a paroxysm of laughter. A potato chip in her fingers. She’s holding it in the air as if the chip will save her from falling into an epilepsy of joy, the way a slapstick comedian totters and reels all over the stage with a full wine glass, not spilling a drop. A strand of her hair is loose on her cheek, a Hawaiian shirt, too big for her. Behind her, the shrubbery is dark, wet from the sprinkler, cave-like, something she could suddenly get up and walk into, disappear.

I stare at the photograph, at everyone laughing, the aura of summer heat at dusk. I try to remember if the afternoon was as carefree as it seems. Even if the camera couldn’t capture all the detail (the white kittens in the shade of the blue fir, the heat making a soft mist around the red Chinese lanterns) it seems our happiness is exaggerated. That first line from
Anna Karenina;
each family is unhappy after its own fashion.

Giselle is coming from her mother’s tonight. She’s always upset when she leaves her mother’s. Wayne and I will read in the study and listen to her trying to cry quietly. The sharp intake of breath, the way it chuffles out. One of us will go in and smooth her hair, the pillow hot, damp. One year her mother lived only a few streets away, and Giselle could see one of her windows from our third floor. Giselle would phone her mother each night before bed, standing in the window facing the lit square a few streets away. Talking to it. I’m afraid of whatever pain adolescence will bring her. I’d stop it if I could, like the King and
Queen in “Sleeping Beauty,” banishing all the spinning wheels in the kingdom, trying to outwit fate.

The rain is spitting off the street, running in plaited streams down the pavement. The door bell rings. I put my eye to the peephole, press my forehead against the steel door. Giselle is here early. She steps back onto the street. The fisheye glass makes the street lurch behind her, the clapboard houses bowing around her like a rib cage after a sharp breath. She stands with her face turned up to the rain. She stands like that for a moment, then raises her arms, palms up. The rain comes down stronger when she lifts her arms. I can hear it in the drainpipe on the concrete step, like a jackhammer. I feel the thunder through the skin of my forehead against the cool steel. Giselle stands in the centre of the peephole. When the lightning flickers, I am the one who flinches.

Purgatory’s Wild Kingdom

J
ulian is thinking about the woman and child he left in Newfoundland when he moved to Toronto. He’s remembering Olivia preparing him a sardine sandwich, the way she pressed the extra oil out of each sardine on a piece of paper towel. Then she cut the head and tail off, each sardine, until they were laid carefully on the bread. Her head was bent over the cutting board. Her blond hair slid from behind her ear. He could see the sun sawing on her gold necklace. The chain stuck on her skin in a twisty path that made him realize how hot it was in the apartment. She was wearing a flannel pajama top and nothing else, a coffee-coloured birthmark on her thigh, shaped like the boot of Italy. Eight years ago.

Julian is sitting at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee. His bare feet are drawn up on the chair, his knees pressed into the edge of the table. It’s a wooden table top that has been rubbed with linseed oil. There are scars from the burning cigarettes his
wife occasionally leaves lying around. Small black ovals. There are thousands of knife cuts that cross over each other like the lines on a palm. He runs his finger over the table, tracing the grain of the wood. He pours another cup of coffee, and glances at the phone. Sometimes the university calls for Marika before nine, although they have been told not to. Marika requires only seven hours’ sleep, but if she’s disturbed she’s tired all day. She wakes up at exactly nine every morning. She’s proud of the precision of her inner clock. Julian likes to pick up the phone before it rings twice. Lately, when the phone rings and Julian answers, nobody speaks.

Marika is fifteen years older than Julian. The people on this street are very rich. The brick houses are massive. Some of them have been broken into apartments and rented. There’s almost no traffic. The trees block most of the noise. He and Marika don’t know their neighbours. Once, while out taking photographs, Julian met a man three houses up who was riding a sparkling black bike in circles. The man said he was Joe Murphy. Joe Murphy’s Chips sold a large percentage of their product in Newfoundland. He gave the silver bicycle bell two sharp rings.

“The bike’s a birthday present from my wife. It’s a real beauty, isn’t it?”

The trees shivered suddenly with wind and sloshed the bike with rippling shadows. Joe Murphy was wearing a suit and tie. The balls of his feet pressed against the pavement and there were sharp little crevices in his shined leather shoes. A crow left
a tree and flew straight down the centre of the street. Julian lifted his camera and took a picture of Joe Murphy. In the far distant corner of the frame is the crow. Joe Murphy is out of focus, a blur in the centre of the picture, his face full of slack features. The crow is sharp and black.

“That makes me very uncomfortable,” said Joe Murphy. “I think you have a nerve.” He gave the bell another sharp ring, and pushed off the curb. His suit jacket flapping.

For two years, Julian has been sleeping a lot. It’s taken him two years to fall away from any kind of sleeping pattern. This way he’s always awake at different hours. This seems exotic to him, but the cost is that he can’t will himself to sleep. He sleeps in the afternoon and then finds himself awake at four in the morning. At dawn he sometimes wanders around the neighbourhood. The light at dawn allows him to see straight into the front windows of the massive houses on their street, all the way to the back windows and into the backyards. It makes the houses seem like skeletons, with nothing hanging on the bones.