Gravity Brings Me Down (3 page)

Sharon points. “Oh my God. Look at that stupid old lady.”

Miss Marple is going to get hit, so I have no choice but to walk into traffic to get her. I guess this is my opportunity to pay her back for saving my life earlier today. That way, I owe her nothing, karmically speaking.

Her face lights up when she sees me. “Oh, Marie, my darling! I was looking for you.”

I take her by the arm. “Come on.”

Cars speed past. One person finally stops to let us cross, so I escort Miss Marple as quickly as I can to the sidewalk. When we get there, she smiles up at me as though everything is completely normal and fine.

“I hardly recognized you, Marie. What have you done with your hair?”

She reaches up to touch my hair but I jerk my head away. Sharon is gaping at us, completely wigged.

“What did she just call you?” she says.

“Are you coming home?” Miss Marple asks.

Sharon looks back and forth from me to Miss Marple like she’s at some kind of weird tennis match. I can see Tod from the corner of my eye, idling his moped behind Giovanni’s Hair Salon.

“You should stay off the road,” I tell Miss Marple, then walk away.

Sharon trots after me. “Do you know her? Why did she call you Marie?”

I shrug.

Sharon shakes her head. “Bizarre.”

At the Tip, Sharon and I nurse a couple cups of sludge while Tod hovers outside the building, just within my periphery. I have to ask myself: does following someone on a moped constitute stalking?

Despite Tod, I try to enjoy my tea biscuit while Sharon dissects a chicken wrap. I think eating dead animals is gross. My whole family is vegetarian, but Sharon’s dad is a butcher so she was raised on a staple diet of meat. It makes me sick to think of cute little chickens being
chopped into chunky cubes for something as disgusting as a Coffee Tip wrap. It’s just so … wrong.

“I can’t believe my parents are making me visit relatives tonight,” Sharon says, picking at her wrap. “It’s Friday, for God’s sake. And it’s not as if they live anywhere cool, like Toronto. They live in Eastdale.” She continues to push the wrap around on her plate until I can’t stand it any longer.

“Eat it or throw it out.”

She sighs, shoving the wrap to one side. I try to get my mind off the chicken chunks by talking about my CPP.

“I want to add a graphic element,” I say.

Sharon blows on her coffee even though it was cold before it arrived. “Like what?”

“Some photos at the cemetery, maybe.”

“Cool.”

“What topic are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the women in pornography thing.”

“Have you cleared it with Miss B.?”

“No. Have you cleared yours?”

“No. But I don’t think there should be a problem.”

Sharon raises her eyebrows.

“What? You think there’ll be a problem?”

“No, no.”

Sharon begins picking at her chicken wrap again. I toss my serviette on the table.

“I’ve got to go.”

A
s soon as I leave the Tip, Tod fires up his beast and rolls slowly behind me, thinking he’s being stealthy.

“I can see you, Tod.”

“What about next Friday?”

“No.”

He sputters unsteadily beside me.

“Don’t try to sit next to me in class any more, okay?”

“Okay. That was nice of you to help that old woman cross the street.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

I put my headphones on and blast my MP3 player. Tod’s mouth keeps moving but I can’t hear a word he’s saying. We continue like this, past Harvey’s and the ice cream parlour and the hemp shop that’s always being raided by the cops. There’s a thirsty-looking dog tied to the door. I hate seeing dogs treated like that. I hope they give it water.

Tod sticks his face in front of mine. “I hope they give that dog some water,” he shouts over the music.

Now he’s reading my mind. This is totally unacceptable. I pull my headphones off. “I’d really like to be alone, Tod. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He keeps following me so I stop walking and look off into the distance to one side of his gold helmet. I just stand there, looking at nothing, until he gets the hint and finally leaves. I wait until I’m sure he’s gone, then continue home.

As I round the corner of the street, I’m amazed to see Miss Marple still standing where I left her. It’s been hours since I rescued her. What has she been doing all this time? I try to avoid her by ducking behind a lamppost but it’s too late. She’s already seen me.

“Oh, Marie!”

There’s no point telling her that I’m not Marie because it doesn’t seem to make a difference. I give her a blank stare, the way I do with Tod, because I don’t know what else to do.

“I’ve been trying to get home,” she says. “Won’t you help me, dear?”

Why is this happening to me? My only conclusion …

I was an axe murderer in a previous life.

“Don’t you know where you live?” I ask.

Miss Marple looks at the ground, wrinkling up her forehead. “I used to know… yes, of course I know.”

She starts digging furiously through her purse, like the answer is somewhere in the junk at the bottom, then pulls out her keys. They’re on a ring with a blue plastic dummy coil attached. “Here they are!” she says, holding them up for me to see.

“Okay… is there a door that goes with those keys?”

Her mouth opens and closes. I can tell she’s groping for something outside her mind’s grasp but she’s coming up empty-handed. Then she points at the building right in front of us.

“Here it is,” she says. “Come on in, dear, I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

Miss Marple slips through the glass doors at the front of the building. I’m tempted to run, but for some crazy reason, I don’t. I follow her into the foyer, watching as she fiddles with the keys until she somehow manages to unlock the door.

“You are coming in, aren’t you?”

I consider my options. I really just want to go home. It’s almost suppertime and the last thing I want is to spend any more time with Miss Marple. But she looks at me so hopefully.

When we reach the elevators, she seems to forget why we’re there so I press the button. Minutes pass and the elevator still hasn’t arrived. I’m thinking there must be a black hole in the shaft, it’s taking so long, when the doors finally open. We step inside. The walls
are covered in graffiti. It stinks of something gross like fried fish or million-year-old french fries. I pinch my nose to keep from barfing. “What floor?”

“Fourteen,” she says. “Number 1404.”

As I press the button for the fourteenth floor, I have to wonder if Miss Marple isn’t jerking me around. One minute she doesn’t know what building she lives in, and the next she’s rhyming off her apartment number, no problem.

Just as the doors are beginning to close, another blue-hair pops into the elevator.

“Hello,” she says.

“Hello,” Miss Marple answers. “Have you met my daughter, Marie?”

I’m about to correct her, but the blue-hair gives me a big smile.

“So young,” she says.

“The baby,” Miss Marple tells her.

Oh my God.

The elevator struggles against the invisible forces, groaning by rusty inches along its cables until it lurches to a stop on the seventh floor. The doors open with an unnerving bang and the blue-hair steps out. We wait forever for the doors to close again, and then it takes another hour to get to the fourteenth floor. More wonderful smells wait for us there. I scrunch up my face, shadowing Miss Marple to her apartment.

“This is mine,” she says, pointing to a yellow door like all the other doors on the floor, only hers has a
straw wreath, decorated with a plastic dollar-store angel tied with dental floss at the top.

“Here we are,” she says, rattling the keys in the lock.

I’m expecting her place to be totally ghetto, given the surrounding environment. But it’s not at all. It’s neat and tidy and nice. She ushers me in, closing the door quickly.

“I don’t like the smells,” she says, gesturing with her hand to the hallway.

Amen to that.

Miss Marple doesn’t have many things, but what she does have appears to be top-drawer. There are real paintings on the walls and a grand piano in one corner. Her kitchen is neater than the Home Economics lab at school, with bright blue-and-white tea towels and a row of shiny copper pots above the stove. You can practically see your reflection in the floors. There are shelves filled with books along the walls. She has green plants in clusters all around and a little telephone table with a calendar pinned to the wall above it. The days of the month have been marked off with squiggly X’s as if Miss Marple is serving prison time. Next to the phone is a skinny wooden table covered in framed photographs. One whole wall of the apartment is windows, showing off the city like a giant mural. The big Catholic church, Our Lady Immaculate, sits front row centre at the top of Sunnyview hill, with the rest of the city a patchwork of rooftops and trees below. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but from this raven’s-eye view, our crappy little town actually looks pretty.

“Isn’t it glorious?” Miss Marple says, opening the
balcony door with the kind of joyful exuberance I’ve only ever seen from the likes of Mary Poppins. Then she busies herself filling the kettle while I scan the photos.

It seems Miss Marple has a family. There are pictures of little babies (grandkids, I guess) and some men and women at various stages in their lives. There are lots of photos of Miss Marple with her husband, I suppose, and I can watch them grow old just by moving my gaze from frame to frame along the length of the table. There’s even an old black-and-white photo of their wedding day. Miss Marple was quite a babe in her white dress, all thin and serious, with her hair pulled back in a bun. She’s holding her husband’s hand and has a small bouquet of roses clasped near her waist. She doesn’t look much older than I am now. I wonder where in England she was born and how old she was when she immigrated here, and where she met her husband. He has a nose like a potato and looks as though he’s wearing somebody else’s suit, but he’s smiling proudly down at her while she looks straight into the camera. I hold the picture up.

“Who’s this?”

Miss Marple takes the photo gently from my hands. “That’s your father, dear. Don’t you remember? Fifty-eight years we had.” She wipes some non-existent dust off the glass with her sleeve. “It wasn’t all easy. But I loved him. I really did. We were married at Our Lady Immaculate.” She nods at the church in the window, then smiles, placing the photo carefully in its spot on the skinny table. There are tears in her eyes and I suddenly feel terrible for prying into her life.

I’m just about to tell her I have to go when the kettle whistles in the kitchen and Miss Marple scurries off.

I pick up another photo, this one of the whole family. It’s one of those pictures where people are supposed to be happy but really aren’t. Miss Marple is standing next to two arrogant-looking men straight out of an L.L. Bean catalogue. They have potato noses too, just like their father. On the other side of her are three women. The two closest to Miss Marple also sport potatoes and appear to have the same attitude as the men—kind of snooty and privileged. But the third woman, the one standing apart from the others, she’s not as high-and-mighty as the rest. She seems really young, and she’s the only one with long dark hair and a nose that doesn’t look like some sort of vegetable. She isn’t smiling, but she’s beautiful, in a haunted kind of way.

I stare at the picture until Miss Marple reappears, carrying a tray with a teapot, a couple of flowered china teacups and a plate of cookies. I hold up the photo.

“Are these your kids?”

“Of course, dear. You’re in that one.”

Miss Marple takes the picture and begins naming the various players. Her finger pauses over the last face, the young woman she calls Marie. She hesitates, glancing at me as though she’s puzzling out a riddle in her mind. But then she replaces the photo and reaches for the teapot. Pouring the tea, she automatically fixes mine with milk and sugar, by default, I guess.

She hands me the cup. “So, what have you been up to, my dear girl?”

I shrug. “Not much.”

“Come now, dear, surely there’s some bit of gossip about.”

I laugh. “Not unless you want to hear about my crazy teacher.”

“You have a crazy teacher? How exciting.”

“Not really. You haven’t met Mr. Chocko. He’s a bona fide psychopath—in my estimation.”

“Really? How does he get away with it?”

“No one else seems to notice.”

Miss Marple clucks. “Isn’t that always the way.”

She lifts her teacup to her lips and takes a sip. I do the same, taking a few sips to be polite. The clock ticks loudly on the wall. Suddenly, I feel all claustrophobic and nuts so I gather my courage and tell Miss Marple I have to go.

“When will you come back?” she asks, looking dejected and sad. “I’m so lonely here, Marie. I miss you so much.”

Beam me up, Scotty, the gravitation
levels are getting critical!

I point to the photo of her kids. “What about them?”

She shakes her head.

I look down at the table because I don’t know what more to say.

Miss Marple flutters back to life. “Oh, look, now, I’ve upset you. Never mind, dear. Don’t think about it. Have a cookie.”

Placing my teacup gently in its saucer, I take the cookie, slipping it into my jacket pocket. The clock on the wall says 6:45.1 really
do
have to go. My family will already be sitting down at the supper table.

“Just let me play something for you,” Miss Marple says. “I’ve been practising this one so I can sing it with the choir.”

She gets up from the table and moves over to the piano while I stand uncomfortably by the door. Riffling the sheet music around, she settles on the stool then begins to play and sing. It’s some churchy song about God and Heaven and good people going to the Promised Land, but it actually sounds okay on the grand piano. Miss Marple’s voice is thin, though I can tell that it must have been strong once. She seems happy and totally normal singing and tinkling away. It’s the strangest thing: she gets lost right outside her own door but still has the mental gymnastics to play such a complicated song.

When she’s finished, I say a quick goodbye and slip out, leaving her at the piano.