Fruit (24 page)

“What I meant was,” my mom said slowly. “What I meant was that I know how difficult it must be for someone special like you to find someone just as special.”

“That’s not what you meant at all and you know it,” Nancy said. She was so angry, her face was turning purple. I thought I saw smoke coming out of her ears. “Why can’t you let other people be happy without trying to ruin it all the time?”

“Nancy, I don’t know what you’re . . .”

“Why can’t you just be normal and say, ‘That’s great, dear’ or ‘I’m glad for you’ or ‘I trust you?’ Why do you have to be so freaking miserable all the time? Why do you have to be such a bitch?”

I gasped. No one had ever called my mom a bitch before. At least not to her face. I was waiting for my mom to start screaming, but before she could do anything, Nancy stormed out of the kitchen, went to her room, and locked the door.

My mom stood there for a moment, looking like she was trying to catch her breath. She took her glasses off, held them up to the light, and squinted. “
I
don’t even have a blender,” she said to her glasses.

The next day, Nancy came home with her new Kenmore blender. She made banana milkshakes for herself and André, but no one else was allowed to have one.

Anyways, what happened last fall was this: The afternoon of my mother’s birthday dinner at the Conch Shell, Nancy and André decided they were going to have their picture taken in the park. The photographer was André’s cousin. His name was Jean-Paul. He had a studio in his basement, which I thought was kind of creepy and I wondered if he ever took perverted pictures.

I don’t know why Nancy and André wanted to have their picture taken. Maybe they were planning to run one of those cheesy engagement notices in the
Observer
. Nancy was wearing a peach dress that she’d bought at Suzanne’s and André was wearing a white dress shirt with a pair of Orange Tab Levi’s. Jean-Paul was getting them to stand in different poses and then he said something about needing a wide angle lens to fit them both into the picture and Nancy started crying and made André drive her to the Conch Shell in his crappy car.

That was six months ago. Now it’s the middle of April and Nancy has a best friend named Bubbles, dyes her hair
blonde, and spends all evening in front of the mirror. She has lost 40 pounds. I thought going through The Change with my mom was hard enough.

“What do you think of this new lipstick?”

“Mo-
ther
! Please don’t tell me you put my new suede skirt in the dryer!”

“Donuts should be illegal. I’m completely serious. Donuts and potato chips. Oh, and pepperoni.”

I’ve never heard Nancy talk so much in my entire life. It’s like her volume switch has been turned on high. No one really knows what to think about the new Nancy. My mom thinks she’s been brainwashed.

“You have to wonder, Henry,” she said to my father. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she starts going out to those cult meetings under the tent on Highway 7.”

“I think you’re getting a little carried away.”

“Henry, you can’t stick your head in the sand about this. The other day, she started crying because I put margarine in the broccoli without telling her. She told me she never felt so betrayed in her life.”

“So she’s a little emotional. Hardly seems out of place in this house.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

My mother also thinks Nancy is on drugs. She pulled me aside the other day and asked me if I’d ever smelled anything “funny” on Nancy.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Funny. As in ‘drug-funny.’” She crinkled her nose.

“What does ‘drug-funny’ smell like?” I asked.

“A little like oregano,” she said.

I shook my head.

“I feel terrible about asking,” she said. “But it’s just that Nancy’s so, well
different
than she was before. And I don’t trust that Bubbles character. I think she’s a bad influence.”

Even though I’d never admit it to her face, I had to agree with my mom about Bubbles. That’s because Bubbles isn’t very smart, uses Lee Press-On nails, and wears jeans so tight she has to lie on her bed every morning and pull up the zipper with a coat hanger.

“I’ve got one pair I can’t even sit down in,” I heard her tell Nancy. She sounded proud. “I wear them for ‘standing room only’ events.”

Bubbles has feathered blonde hair and freckles and is always chewing gum. I wonder if she ever goes to bed with gum in her mouth. You shouldn’t do that or else you’ll wake up with gum in your hair the next morning. I know.

Nancy and Bubbles started hanging out together in November. They’re in the same homeroom class and talk on the phone for at least an hour every night.

“She sits right behind me,” Nancy said. “I thought she didn’t like me. Just goes to show that first impressions can be wrong.”

“That’s right,” Bubbles said, smacking her gum. “I used to think Nancy was a total loser.”

“Shut up!” Nancy laughed and hit Bubbles on the arm. “You didn’t really think that, did you?”

“Well what’d you expect? You never talked to anyone and were always glued to André’s side. Don’t even get me
started about
that
loser. I totally don’t get what you saw in him.”

“Neither do I,” Nancy sighed. “He was a complete jerk-off. I guess that’s what having zero self-esteem does to you. Right?”

At that point, I had to leave the room because I thought I was going to puke. And I was angry about what Bubbles and Nancy had said about André. I mean, maybe he wasn’t the coolest guy and maybe he was a bit of a loser. But that didn’t give them any right to talk that way about him.

I think Bubbles was the one who told Nancy to dump André. I found a card from him in Nancy’s drawer shortly after she started hanging out with Bubbles.

“I don’t care what your friends think about me,” he wrote. “We’re good together, babe. Don’t let other people’s opinins matter! Remember all the good times we use to have? Don’t let the majic die.”

But the truth was, Nancy and André had started fighting as soon as they left Jean-Paul standing in the park. I’d put my ear to the furnace vent and listen to them argue in the basement.

“Why aren’t you supporting me?”

“Because it’s time you dropped this dieting shit. You don’t need to lose weight.”

“Yes I do. And stop thinking of yourself for a change.”

“Hey, don’t start with me, Nancy.
You’re
the selfish one.
You’re
the one who went all weird just because of what Jean-Paul said. I told you — the guy’s an idiot.”

“It wasn’t just what
he
said. It was eighteen years of
stupid comments. And I’m tired of hearing them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Well maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t. But I’m at the end of my rope. I mean, we can’t even go to McDonald’s anymore, Nancy. How fucked up is that?”

But no matter what André said to her, Nancy didn’t stop. She kept eating grapefruit for breakfast and salads for dinner. She exercised to her Jane Fonda workout record. She called Suzanne’s and told them to take her off their mailing list.

It wasn’t long before Nancy gave André the boot. He got pretty weird after that and would park his car outside of our house, waiting for her to come home from school or work.

“Do you think we should call the police, Henry?” my mom asked.

“I don’t know,” my dad said.

But when they asked Nancy about it, she said not to. She told them that André never said or did anything. He just pulled away when her Chevette turned onto our street. He hasn’t been around for a couple of months now, so maybe he’s finally given up.

We ended up agreeing to get my parents a brass mailbox for their anniversary. It wasn’t as exciting as sheers, but they needed a new one.

“Pick one up at Canadian Tire next time you’re working,” Nancy said to Christine.

“Nancy, I can’t go shopping if I’m working.”

“You work in a mall! Go after your shift is done.”

“I don’t work ‘shifts.’ There’s a difference between Peoples Jewellers and Tim Horton’s.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re the one with a car,” Christine said. “Why don’t you pick it up the next time you and Bubbles are out skipping around?”

“Why don’t you?”

“Why don’t you?”

I rolled my eyes and plugged my ears with my fingers. In the end, Nancy and I drove to Canadian Tire the next night to get the mailbox.

“What’s up Christine’s butt, lately?” Nancy asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to ask Nancy what was up
her
butt, but I bit my tongue.

“She’s just being a total bitch, lately. Do you think she’s jealous?”

“Of what?”

“Of her not being the only skinny one now.”

I shrugged and pretended to be interested in something we were passing.

“Because if that’s what her problem is, she’s going to have to deal with it. There’s no way I’m going back to the way things were before.”

After we picked up the brass mailbox, Nancy and I were walking through the Food Court on our way to the exit when we heard someone behind us say, “Nancy!”

We turned around to see a good-looking guy wearing a tight blue T-shirt and coral necklace.

“Oh, hi Rick,” Nancy said.

“How’s it going?”

“Not bad, not bad.”

“Are you coming to the game this weekend?”

Nancy flicked her head to one side. “I might.”

Was this the guy she bought the birth control pills for?

“Well, maybe I’ll see you there.”

“Maybe.” Nancy giggled. I wanted to throw up.

“See you.”

“Bye.”

“Who was that?” I asked. I didn’t like him at all.

“Only the most popular guy in school,” Nancy said. “I can’t believe he talked to me! Bubbles is going to die when she hears about this!”

I wondered what André would think of Rick.

On our way home, we had to stop at a gas station so that Nancy could fill up. She got out of the car and I tilted her rearview mirror so that I could pop a couple of zits while I waited.

The sun was just going down. The days were getting longer, which meant that summer was around the corner again. People would stop wearing jackets soon and start wearing shorts and T-shirts. Grade 9 was only a couple of months away and I still hadn’t started working on the new Peter Paddington. The year had gone by so quickly. Underneath the tape, my nipples twitched.

I moved up closer to get a better look at a big zit on my forehead and caught Nancy’s reflection in the mirror. She was wearing dangly silver earrings that flashed in the sunlight and a new pair of jeans and a pink cashmere
sweater that she’d bought at Suzy Shier. All this time, I pretended not to notice Nancy. In my head, she was still the same Nancy. But now, for the first time, I really saw how thin she was. I could see her collarbone sticking out from underneath her skin and I realized that I’d never seen Nancy’s collarbone before. Nancy’s pretty now. She’s thin and she’s a whole new Nancy Paddington. And I understood what André was waiting for those nights he parked in front of our house. He was waiting for the old, fat Nancy to come home. I was waiting for the same thing.

eleven

Every May, the trees along our street blossom with little pink flowers. They’re very pretty, even if they only last a couple of weeks. Mr. Mitchell told us the flowers are God’s gift to us and we should all sit underneath the trees and write poems. He’s been on this kick lately. It started with him reading us a Robert Frost poem about a cow. Then, for English period, he had us write haikus.

“Remember: five syllables in your first line, then seven, and back to five again!”

I wrote my haiku about a pencil:

Long, slender, yellow

Sharp, lead point writing things down.

Mistake? Eraser.

Mr. Mitchell only gave me a B+ on it, which shows you how much he knows about good poetry. I guess I got bitten by the poetry bug a bit, because I’ve started writing haikus about everything: newspapers, grass, grocery stores,
TV
shows, you name it. My best one so far is the one I dedicated to Mr. Hanlan:

Strong man with brown eyes.

Happy birds sing. Why not you?

“Evil wife must die.”

The last line Mr. Hanlan says, not me. I don’t think Mrs. Hanlan is evil enough to kill. But I do think she’s too evil to deserve someone as good and kind as Mr. Hanlan. But Mr. Hanlan doesn’t see that since he’s so good and kind in the first place. She’s got him trapped.

But maybe there’s a way I can let him know. Maybe I can break the Hanlans up the same way I did Daniela and Phil, the Burger King Banger. I went to grab the telephone book.

“Do you really think this is a good idea?” my nipples asked from underneath their bandage. I got smart recently and found the elastic bandage my mom had wrapped around her ankle after her Mary Kay fall. I figured it beat buying tape all the time. Every morning, I wrap it around my chest twice and fasten it in place with a safety pin.