Fruit (5 page)

“Mom made us all fat.” That’s what Christine told me once after she’d lost all her weight. “Think about it. How many moms do you know start their children’s day off with Tang and Cocoa Puffs? How sick is that?”

I thought Christine was wrong. My mom always buys us chips and makes cookies and there’s always dessert after supper. But she doesn’t force us to eat anything. I mean, I could always ask for a grapefruit for breakfast.

But I wondered if Christine was right. It’s an awful thing to say, because I don’t think my mom wants us to be fat. But she never told us to stop eating, either.

“This has been a wonderful dinner,” my mom said as our waitress took our plates away. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.” Then she got up and went to the bathroom.

My dad looked pretty relieved. Nancy was flipping a pack of Sugar Twin between her fingers. Christine looked bored. Uncle Ed was picking at his nails with a fork and talking to no one in particular. I was just happy to know we’d be out of there soon.

“Anyone for dessert?” my Dad asked. “Nancy?”

“Why are you asking me?” Nancy said.

My dad shrugged. “Just asking,” he said.

“Wouldn’t mind some rice pudding, if they have some,” Uncle Ed said, just as my mother was coming back to the table.

“Oh, Ed! How can you possibly have room for . . .”

Then my mom disappeared and there was this “thud” sound. Everyone turned to look. The waitresses, the other tables, the couple who’d been laughing at us before. The whole restaurant got very quiet. My mom had missed the chair and was sitting on the floor with this awful expression on her face, like when Natalie on
Facts of Life
found out her dad was having an affair on her mom. We all just sat there.

I looked at my mom, sitting there on the floor. And I said to myself, “You should get up and help her,” but I didn’t. I just sat there, thinking about how I’d had to tie Brian Cinder’s shoelaces three times that day. Then, just as my dad was getting up from his chair, one of the busboys came over and helped my mom stand up.

“You been nipping into the sauce again?” Uncle Ed chuckled.

My mom sat down in her chair and held up the dessert menu in front of her face.

“Are you all right?” my dad asked.

“Fine,” she said, but when her cherry cheesecake arrived, the tears had started. She didn’t say a word for the rest of the night and by the time my dad paid the bill, my mom looked like a pudgy raccoon. She didn’t even open her presents until the next morning.

I hope she doesn’t cry on her fiftieth birthday.

three

Six days a week, I deliver the
Sarnia Observer
. It doesn’t come out on Sundays, so that’s my day off. You have to be ten years old before you can work for the
Observer
. It’s a pretty important job and I have to get the paper to my customers on time. If I don’t, they get all bent out of shape. It’s like the end of the world for them or something.

I’ll be celebrating my third anniversary of working for the
Observer
this November. It seems like only yesterday that I noticed the Help Wanted ad in the classified section.

“Are you a responsible young adult?” the ad read. “Do you live in or around one of the following areas? Are you looking to make your own money and have fun all at the same time? If the answer to both these questions is yes, the
Sarnia Observer
is looking for you!”

I felt like writing to the
Observer
to point out that they had asked three questions, not two. But when I saw that one of the neighbourhoods on the list was mine, I called them up right away. The very next week, I had my own canvas
Observer
bag and thirty-two people who relied on me to bring them the world every night.

The person I replaced was John Geddes. He lives on Elm Street. I think John is a bit retarded. He wears thick glasses and slippers instead of shoes and buttons his shirts up to the top, even in the summer. He’s older, too. Not old like my dad, but too old to be a paperboy.

“He’s fuckin’ thirty-five,” Daniela told me once. John Geddes lives behind her, so she spies on him all the time.

“How do you know that?” I asked her.

“Because his mom told me. He was having a birthday party in the backyard. Just him and his mom and that fuckin’ little poodle they got. They were wearing these stupid birthday hats and playing pin the tail on the fuckin’ donkey.”

“Are you sure that’s how old he is?” I asked. “What kind of thirty-five-year-old plays birthday games with his mom?”

“A retarded thirty-five-year-old,” Daniela said. “I’m telling you the truth. I heard it from his own fuckin’ mom’s mouth. You know what, though? I heard Mr. and Mrs. Geddes were brother and sister. That’s why John wears slippers instead of shoes.”

I asked my mom if that was true, but she said Daniela was pulling my leg.

“That’s terrible!” she said. “She shouldn’t go around telling lies like that.”

Then my mom said that the real reason John was “off” was because Mrs. Geddes went on the Scrambler at a county fair while she was pregnant.

“You shouldn’t do those things when you’re pregnant,” my mom said. “All that jerking around. It’s no
wonder he didn’t turn out right.”

Anyways, one day John was caught rolling around in the field at Clarkedale with Linda Eckerman. Linda is retarded, too, and lives at the end of Birch Street with her mom and two brothers.

“He was sucking on Linda’s tits like there was no tomorrow,” Daniela said, even though she wasn’t there. But she did see the police car pull up in front of the Geddes’ house.

I guess someone called the
Observer
to report what John had done. Maybe it was Mrs. Eckerman. She was probably scared that John and Linda were going to do It and then Linda would have a retarded baby.

So John got fired and that’s how I got the job as an
Observer
paperboy.

There are lots of kids out there dying to make the cash I do. After my collecting is done, I make close to twenty dollars a week, sometimes more, depending on the tips. Most kids my age just get an allowance, and you can’t work at a regular job until you’re fifteen. Then you make minimum wage at McDonald’s.

I know Daniela wants my job, but she doesn’t come out and say it. That’s because she’s too proud, but I’m not really sure what Daniela has to be proud about.

Daniela and I are kind of friends, but it’s weird to think that, because we have nothing in common. She’s not very stylish and wears tank tops that show off the stubble in her armpits. Plus, Daniela is Catholic and goes to St. Michael’s. She says that the two big differences between public school and Catholic school are that you have to
take religion classes and that you have nuns for teachers.

“Do they look like the nuns on
TV
?” I asked her.

“No,” Daniela said. “The nuns on
TV
are young and pretty. At St. Mike’s, they’re all bitches and have B.O.”

Daniela told me the nuns beat students if they talk in class. She said that one time, her cousin Teresa got locked in a broom closet just because she sneezed during religion class.

“They forgot about her being in there and the janitor found her the next morning. She’d been in that closet for the whole fuckin’ night. To this day, if you show Teresa a broom, she goes ballistic. That’s how fucked up she is.”

Daniela is chunky and her nose is always plugged up, so when she talks, it sounds like she has a cold. She has curly black hair that hangs down to the middle of her back, too. One day, she told me that her hair was her best feature, but I said she had split ends.

“You should give yourself a hot oil treatment,” I said.

The next day, Daniela chased me down the street with a baseball bat. She had poured hot olive oil on her head and burned her scalp.

Daniela’s parents don’t speak English very well, even though they moved to Canada before Daniela was born. They subscribe to the
Observer
, but I don’t get that, because if you can’t speak English, you can’t read it. Maybe they’re just trying to fit into the neighbourhood. There aren’t many other ethnic people on my paper route besides Mrs. Guutweister. She’s a German lady who makes apple head dolls. She’s married, but I’ve never seen her husband. I know he’s alive, though, because every
time I go collecting, I can hear him coughing. Maybe he’s on his death bed and Mrs. Guutweister has to make apple head dolls to help pay for doctor bills. Either that, or Mr. Guutweister is very mean and keeps Mrs. Guutweister a prisoner in her own home. Sometimes, when I take her money, I check to see if anything is written on her dollar bill, like “Call the police!” or “Help me, Peter!” But so far, there’s been nothing.

Mr. Bertoli is short and fat and has a blind eye that creeps me out. I never know who or what he’s looking at. He owns the Papa Bertoli restaurant in the Westown Plaza. I have to be very quick when I walk by the window on my way to the Shop ’N’ Bag or else Mr. Bertoli will yell at me to come inside. At least, that’s what I think he’s yelling. Like I said, Mr. Bertoli doesn’t speak English too well. But I’ve figured out a system. If I think he’s
asking
me something, I’ll answer “Yes” because that’s safer than “No.” If I think he’s
telling
me something, I’ll nod my head and say “Hmm . . .” and hope for the best.

Mrs. Bertoli is tall and thin and missing a few teeth. She always wears a wool Blue Jays toque on her head, even in the summer. For the longest time, I thought she was bald. But when I asked Daniela, she got mad at me and said her mom wears the Blue Jays toque because she gets bad headaches and what was I, fuckin’ stupid or something?

Gianni, Daniela’s older brother, is a bit of a rebel. He’s seventeen and works at Burger King. He hardly ever shaves and drives a powder blue Camaro that Daniela says is a piece of shit. I don’t think I’ve ever said one word to Gianni. He scares me because he’s a bit of a Banger.

I know that Daniela wants my job because she watches for the
Observer
van to drop off my bundle of papers at the corner. If I’m late picking them up, she carries them to my house.

“You better get these fuckin’ delivered, eh?” she’ll say when I open the door. “People are waiting.”

Daniela says the f-word more than anyone else I know. I think someone played a trick on her once and told her that the f-word was part of normal English language. She sticks it between any two words she feels like.

“Here’s Peter’s fuckin’ papers,” she said to my mom one day last winter.

I never saw my mom’s face turn green before.

I know Daniela will never get my job, because you can’t go around saying things like “Good f’n afternoon, Mr. Philips” or “You f’n owe me a dollar f’n eighty-five this week, Mrs. White” without them calling to complain about you. It’s not very professional. Besides, I think Daniela is a little stupid.

For starters, she failed grade
6
. She said it was because her nun-teacher was jealous of her naturally curly hair, but I don’t think that’s true. And besides, Daniela is stupid in other ways because she still wets the bed.

I know this because I’ve been over to her house a couple of times. I think the Bertolis are poor, because they don’t have carpeting. Their furniture is pretty old, too, and there’s not much of it. The only expensive thing they have is a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary that stands in a corner of the living room. Daniela says it’s a “loaner” from St. Mike’s.

“Everyone gets to borrow her for sixty days,” she told me. “We’ve got fifteen days left, thank god. From here, we pack her up and send it to my Aunt Francesca’s apartment.”

When I asked Daniela why her family has a life-size Virgin Mary statue in the first place, she said, “It’s a Catholic thing. You wouldn’t understand. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’ll be happy as a fuckin’ clam when she’s gone. Every time I get up in the middle of the night to take a whiz, she scares the crap out of me.”

In their kitchen, the Bertolis have a small table in the corner and not much else. They do most of their cooking in the basement. They’re the only people on my paper route that have a stove, a sink, and a refrigerator in the basement.

“Why do you have two kitchens?” I asked Daniela once.

“Because we’re Italian, that’s why,” Daniela said, which didn’t explain anything.

Anyways, I know that Daniela wets the bed because her room smells like Lysol. It’s so strong that it’s hard to breathe and I can taste the Lysol in my mouth. But I know why the smell is so heavy, because underneath the Lysol, I can smell pee. A normal person might not be able to detect it, but I’m not normal. I have super-strong smelling powers, or as I call them, the
SSP
. People are amazed by what I can smell. Like one night last summer, Christine and I were outside on the back porch and I could smell pogo dogs. So I said to her, “Somewhere in this city, right now, a wiener is being battered and deep-fried.” Christine
said, “How do you know that?” I put the tip of my finger on my nose and whispered, “The
SSP
.”