Heartache and Other Natural Shocks (9 page)

“I can’t talk now,” Ian says.

“Why?” I ask. “Are your parents there?”

“No. Look, don’t call me at home, okay?”

“What?”

“I gotta go,” he says.

“But what if I want to talk to you?”

“We’ll talk at school.”

“But—”

Click. He hangs up. What the hell? I put down the phone.

“What happened?” Marlene asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Is he going to call back?” Deb asks.

I shrug. I reach for my cigarette and take a long, slow drag. Deb and Mar watch me like a couple of vultures. “But what did he say?” Marlene asks.

“Nothing, so just back off,” I snap. I drop my cigarette into my strawberry shake. It sizzles and sinks, looking really gross. I toss the whole thing into the sink and watch it ooze down the drain. Nobody hangs up on me. Ian Slater better learn that.

“With a Little Help from My Friends”

Dad is supposed to come to Toronto for the weekend, but he cancels. Stomach flu. Last weekend, he was short-staffed at the store. Bobby and I are really bummed. It’s the third week of September, and he hasn’t come once. We sit at the kitchen table and no one talks. I pick at my food and think about Ian. All week, Carla has been clinging to him like a limpet to a rock. In homeroom, when she’s not around, Ian tugs on my hair and says, “Hey, Rapunzel, how’s it going?” That’s what he calls me; it’s like this thing between us. But in drama, he sits with Carla draped over him, and we act like total strangers.

I look across the table at Bobby, who’s smooshing his spaghetti into his meat sauce. Mom is the only one smiling. In fact, she’s looking positively perky. She says, “Guess what? I have some exciting news.”

Bobby and I eye her suspiciously.
Exciting
is one of those dangerous words that parents use to try and con you into thinking that something crappy, like moving to Toronto, is going to be fun. For a moment, I wonder if our house has sold and I prepare for the worst, but Mom says, “Today, I got a job.”

Bobby stops slurping his spaghetti. “What?”

Mom grins. “I’m taking a job as a nurse in a doctor’s office. After all, I was an Emergency nurse when I met your dad, and I still remember a thing or two.” Mom explains that the job is three days a week, in a medical/dental building on Leslie Street. The plan is that Bobby will come home with Buzz after school, and if I’m not back, he’ll stay with the Cabriellis till Mom returns at six o’clock. She’s already cleared it with Gina Cabrielli.

“Mrs. Cabrielli doesn’t work,” Bobby sulks.

“I don’t have to be like everyone else’s mother,” Mom says.

“But why are you working if you don’t have to?” Bobby asks.

“Well, I don’t know a lot of people in Toronto,” Mom says, looking directly at me—like we’re both in the same boat, which we are
not
—“and I saw an ad in the paper, so I applied. I had the interview this morning with Dr. Katzenberg, and he offered me a job right on the spot. He said if I wanted the position, it was mine, and I couldn’t think of a single reason to turn it down.” She beams, like her lucky number just got plucked out of a hat.

“What did Dad say?” Bobby asks.

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“He’s not going to like it,” Bobby warns.

“It’s not his decision,” Mom says lightly. “Perhaps I’m becoming a women’s libber.” She laughs. “Well, Julia, what do you think?”

I stare at her with flat, cold eyes. Does she expect me to be overjoyed just because
her
life is falling into place? Sorry. I don’t care how she fills her days.

Mom says, “You could at least wish me good luck.”

“Good luck,” I say, sticking my fork into my spaghetti and twirling it around as if this requires my complete and devoted attention.

Saturday morning, I’m at the North York Public Library doing research for my English essay on T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The poem is about this guy, Prufrock, who keeps wishing he had the courage to do something meaningful with his life, but instead, he just grows old and cynical. He says, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” and he calls himself Hamlet’s “attendant lord” because, like Hamlet, he can’t act on anything. It’s the kind of poem that haunts you. I decide to write an essay comparing Prufrock and Hamlet. Mrs. Llewellyn is going to be really impressed.

I’m heading over to the stacks to grab some books when I remember Diane Arbus’s quote about the freaks. I’m curious to see her photos, so I nip into the photography section. When I can’t find anything, I ask the librarian, Mrs. Sarkissian, for help. She knows exactly who I’m talking about. She steeples her red fingernails and says, “Maybe there’s something in our
clipping files.” She leads me around the corner and down an aisle. She says, “I think
MOMA
is planning a retrospective of her work next year.”

“MOMA?”

“Museum of Modern Art, in New York.”

“Oh.”

She purses her red lips together. “Such a shame she won’t be there to see it.”

“Why not?” I ask.

Mrs. Sarkissian blinks at me. “She committed suicide in July.”

“Oh,” I say again. I feel kind of stunned. A week ago, I didn’t know Diane Arbus existed, and now I find out she’s already dead. Mrs. Sarkissian passes me a clipping file, and I take it to a table and open it up. Right on top is an article about her suicide. On July 26, 1971, at the age of forty-eight, she took an overdose of barbiturates, climbed into the bathtub and slit her wrists. She’d been suffering from depression. Next year, in 1972, she will be the first American photographer to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

I find a quote from Lisette Model, one of Diane Arbus’s teachers: “The camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don’t know.” I scribble this down in my notebook. Then I spread the photos across the table. They’re black-and-white portraits, and every single one of them is odd and unsettling. I
find the freaks Geoff was talking about: Eddie Carmel, “the Jewish Giant,” standing in his parents’ Bronx apartment, his head almost scraping against the ceiling; and a dark-eyed Mexican dwarf, sitting on a bed in a shabby hotel room, stark naked except for a fedora.

Even the normal-looking people aren’t really “normal.” In one photograph, a skinny boy with a strung-out expression on his face stands in Central Park clutching a toy grenade in his clawlike hand. In another photo, a happy housewife sits on a floral couch cradling a baby in her lap. But on second glance, you notice that the thing in her lap is
not
a baby; it’s a monkey in white baby clothes.

That’s how Diane Arbus gets you. That’s how she lets you know that people are not what they seem to be. Freaks can be ordinary, and regular folks can be totally bizarre. And the thing I like best about Diane Arbus is that no matter who her subject is, she doesn’t pity them. She doesn’t judge them, either—because she’s one of them. And I’m one of them too.

On impulse, I steal the picture of the lady with the monkey-baby. I slide it into my purse. I can practically feel it pulsating at the bottom of my bag as I return the clipping file. Then I go over to the pay phone and call Geoff Jones. When he answers, I say, “I didn’t know Diane Arbus killed herself.”

“Last summer,” Geoff says. “So tragic.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing now?” Geoff asks.

“I’m at the North York library doing research.”

“Get your stuff and meet me out front in ten minutes.”

“I’m writing an essay,” I say.

“Not today, shweetheart,” Geoff says in a Humphrey Bogart voice. “Today is your lucky day, ’cause I’m gonna be your personal tour guide to Toronto.”

Ten minutes later, we’re chugging down Yonge Street in Geoff’s mom’s 1961 beat-up Volkswagen Bug: “Baby Blue”—named for the color, not the Bob Dylan song. It’s an old rust bucket. The shocks are gone, the heater is temperamental, and there’s a crack in the windshield, but Geoff says, “If we put five dollars into the tank, it can take us anywhere we want to go.”

It’s sunny and warm, so we roll down the windows and Geoff belts out show tunes all the way downtown to Yorkville, which, he explains, is like the Greenwich Village of Toronto: hippie hangouts, coffeehouses, music clubs and candle stores. Geoff buys us chocolate-dipped ice cream cones at the Dairy Queen. Then we jump back in the car and zip off to his favorite destination: The Beaches.

The Beaches is a funky old neighborhood of brick row houses built along the shoreline of Lake Ontario. Geoff parks Baby Blue on a side street in front of a quaint stone house with a wide veranda and a pretty garden. He tells me that, one day, he’s going to buy that house, when he becomes “a famous photographer or actor, whichever comes first.” We wander down the street, and at the end of the block, Lake
Ontario stretches out before us like a vast, rumpled, blue silk sheet. It looks more like an ocean than the country lakes I’m used to. “It’s so big!” I exclaim.

“Aye, lassie. That’s why they’re known as the
Great
Lakes,” Geoff says, putting on a Scottish accent. He has his camera with him, and he snaps action shots of toddlers running in and out of the water, screeching and getting soaked. “Can you remember being that young?” Geoff asks.

I think back, and a memory comes into focus, like a photo from a childhood album. I’m four years old at Granby Zoo. I’m holding a peanut in my chubby hand, and Dad is hoisting me up in his arms as I lean toward the elephant cage. The elephant spots me and lumbers across the cement. I’m terrified, but also mesmerized, as his long gray trunk curls through the iron bars. It undulates—this dusty, wrinkled, muscular thing—and then it swoops down and delicately plucks the peanut from my fingertips. I can still remember that moment of contact when its moist, hairy, snout-like trunk touched my fingers and I felt the dampness of elephant breath on my skin. The image reminds me of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, where God reaches out to touch Adam’s extended finger, only in this case, God was an elephant and Adam was me.

But what happened to the rest of that day?

I turn to Geoff. I say, “Isn’t it odd the way we remember some things, and other things completely disappear? We forget whole chunks of our own lives.”

“Well, if we remembered everything, our heads would explode,” Geoff says.

“I guess so.”

“Or maybe we don’t want to remember everything,” Geoff says.

I think about the Diane Arbus photo in my purse and take it out. I don’t want my only friend in Toronto to think I’m a kleptomaniac, but I don’t want to lie about it either. “I stole it, from the clipping files,” I confess. “I don’t usually steal things.”

“Maybe the woman reminds you of someone,” Geoff says.

“No one in my family is that weird,” I say, laughing. And suddenly I’m telling him all about my family, and how I miss my dad and hate my mom. I tell him about Mollie and the
FLQ
. Geoff doesn’t know anything about Quebec politics, but it doesn’t bug me the way it did with Carla.

“Were you scared?” Geoff asks.

“Not really,” I say. “The only terrifying part was moving here. Moving here is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

Geoff studies me with wide hazel eyes. He says, “Jules, you know what I think? I think you’ve suffered a traumatic experience, which is why you’re feeling so pessimistic.”

“I’m not pessimistic,” I say. “I’m realistic. Life isn’t fair, and there’s no point in pretending it is.”

“But maybe you’re just not seeing the bigger picture,” Geoff says, his face lighting up. “Maybe you were meant to move here, so you and I could meet and we could both be
in
Hamlet
. I will be Hamlet, and you will be Ophelia. Or Gertrude. And on opening night, we’ll bring down the house. With my talent and your good looks … or my good looks and your talent … who knows what lies ahead. Maybe a scout from Hollywood will be in the audience, and next thing you know, we’ll be signed up for a three-picture deal with Paramount and living in the Alan Ladd mansion. Of course, you might have to change your name to something a little more catchy, but that’s a small price to pay for fame and fortune.” Geoff grins.

I burst out laughing. It’s just like Geoff to take any topic and turn it into a Broadway musical. I wonder if he actually believes this stuff, if he thinks that we’re just in our ugly caterpillar stage of life, waiting for the inevitable gorgeous transformation to unfold.

Later, at home, I take out the monkey-baby photo and look at it again. I want to pin it above the bed, on Karen McDuff’s ugly pink wall, as a kind of talisman against all the fake, fluffy pinkness, but I can’t do that because my mother would ask about it, so I tuck the photo into the album jacket of Bob Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited
, which somehow seems appropriate.