Prerequisites for Sleep

Beverly Innes was hit by our school bus when she chased an orange kitten onto the road just as the vehicle approached the diner that doubled as her stop. I was sitting in the front seat, behind and to the right of Mr. Amos, the driver, when the words, “Oh, Jesus, no!” left his lips; and he slammed on the brakes, hurling everyone forward, then back, and sending lunch boxes tumbling up the aisle as if they were in a gymnastics competition. After her body flew into the air and landed beneath the path of the right wheel, the bus came to a stop. Through the lower windows of the door, I could see her arm and her leg, bent in an unnatural zigzag shape, and a portion of her blue dress. When I looked up, I saw the kitten run into the ditch on the other side of the road.

I always picture Beverly in that dress, blue with white ruffles down the front. It was the same one she wore in our school photo, taken over forty years ago, when all girls wore dresses to school, most with knee socks that required constant pulling up. A few, pushing their maturity although only eleven, wore nylons, like their mothers. That dress, her dark hair in a pixie cut, a round mouth and large splotchy freckles all over her face. I don't remember the colour of her eyes. They look black in the photo. At the time, I would have described them as beady and her nostrils as flaring; but I could have imagined that, the way children imagine such traits in people they don't like.

It began with a history lesson. We had learned about the cavemen and the natives that inhabited North America. I developed romanticized sympathies for both, knowing that the years would move forward and they would no longer be who they once were. I did not relish the arrival of the French and English and had little patience for discussions about the never-ending disputes between them. On this particular day, the subject was the Jesuit priests who brought Christianity to the New World, and how a number of them were tortured and killed at the hands of the natives.

“Such a tragedy,” Mr. Higney, our teacher said, his statement full of saliva as it moved over his tongue. “Such a futile tragedy.”

“It was their own fault,” I blurted out, letting my sympathies and independent streak get the better of me. “Why didn't they just mind their own business and leave the natives alone?”

The phrase “mind your own business” was one I heard often, every time I let slip, usually at the kitchen table, some piece of information that I thought might liven up our normally quiet meals. Two days previous, I delivered the news, while eating corned beef and cabbage, that according to Ginny Radcliff, the reason Caroline Arsenault went away was that she was going to have twins, then added that I thought she looked fatter the last time I saw her. My grandmother stopped spooning bread and butter pickles onto her plate and held the bottle hovering in mid-air above the table for several seconds before putting it down.

“In this house we mind our own business,” my mother said, not acknowledging my comments with eye contact, “meaning we don't voice opinions on the business of others.” The kitchen was steamy and warm and full of the smells of spicy boiled meat and vegetables. Her face was flushed, which made her appear more beautiful than she already was. My mother, a commercial artist, was a work of art â every detail, like fine brush strokes, considered for its effect on the overall picture. The best-looking mother in our neighbourhood, she was also the only one that held a job and had her own car.

“If you have something of historical merit to say, Krystal Greenwood, I suggest you try raising your hand.” Mr. Higney, a stickler for decorum, glared at me, knowing full well that I had said my piece and would stubbornly refuse to raise my hand, and that he would not favour my outburst with a response.

History class was followed by lunch. I ate my lettuce and Cheez Whiz sandwich, fuming at Mr. Higney and the French. Outside, I stormed around the schoolyard, a noon shadow cringing at my feet, and allowed myself to get good and agitated before coming to a stop next to a group of girls skipping rope by the monkey bars. Two girls held the ends of a fluorescent pink rope while five or six others stood in line waiting to jump. Several glanced in my direction, then returned their attention to the game. They didn't bound or vault into the turning rope, but instead pirouetted on their toes and leapt like ballet dancers. Watching them, I scuffed the gravel with my new sling-back shoes and launched into an anti-meddling rant against the Jesuits.

“Why don't you just shut up?” Beverly said, turning to face me after completing a jump that was almost four feet high. “The Jesuits were spreading the word of Our Heavenly Father. It was important work, so shut up.” Her freckles looked like splashes of muddy water on her skin. I could see that the threads holding the ruffle to her dress had come undone, and that there were several holes where the lace had frayed.

I lay crossways on the bed while my mother sat at the dressing table in her room. The bleached room, my grandmother called it. My mother had painted it cool white and adorned it with a white lace bedspread, shams and curtains. Even at seven at night, the westward sun made it as brilliant as a winter day. “So you're going out.” I said it with a slight whine in an effort to make her feel guilty. I never really missed her when she went out. It was more of a game I played, trying to get a rise out of her.

“Yes, I'm going out.” She clipped emerald green earrings the size of nickels onto her ears and tucked a string of beads under the collar of her blouse. Both were the same colour as her shoes and the skirt that hugged her legs from hips to knees and had a pleated slit up the back that opened when she walked.

I was watching her reflection in the mirror while she put on lipstick. The mirror could be adjusted to imitate different lighting conditions, conditions created by plastic filters sliding in front of fluorescent tubes. The evening setting was a peachy-yellow hue that I associated with birthday candles, the way their flames gave faces a shrouded glow. “When are you coming home?”

“Be good for your grandmother,” she said after leaving a candy-apple imprint of her lips on a tissue.

“Will you be back to say goodnight?”

She flipped the mirror over to the magnifying side, picked up her tweezers and leaned forward to pluck a couple of stray eyebrow hairs. “It's a school night. I don't usually get home for goodnights on school nights. You know that.” She wiped the dark hairs onto a tissue, then folded it in quarters before dropping it into the wastebasket next to her stool. “So what are you going to watch on television tonight?”

“Red Skelton.”

“Why Red Skelton?”

“Because he jumps up in the air and his feet make a clanging noise, like cowbells.”

“Cowbells,” she said, looking incredulous. “When did you ever hear cowbells?”

At breakfast, she seemed preoccupied, a state that often enabled me to ask her something and get a response that wasn't prefaced by a lecture. I assumed what I believed was my most casual tone, focused on the floral print of the vinyl tablecloth, and said, “How come we don't have a Heavenly Father?”

“Because we don't,” she said, getting up from the table.

“Why not?”

“Because that's how I like it.” She opened the top drawer next to the phone and rooted until she found the Aspirin bottle, then popped tablets alternately with gulps of coffee while mumbling something half under her breath. “Stop dilly-dallying or you'll miss the bus,” she said. Then, as if predicting my response, she added, “and I don't have time to drive you to school.”

At that point my grandmother shuffled into the kitchen in her nightdress and housecoat. Just past fifty, she was a slightly less curvy, and slightly more wrinkled, version of my mother. “Krystal,” she said with a nod, which was the closest thing to good morning I would ever get.

“Don't even think about it,” my mother said, catching me before I had a chance to ask my grandmother her opinions on the Heavenly Father.

On Sunday I strolled down the highway and stopped at the lane that led up the hill to the Catholic church. Although it wasn't as large as the Protestant church, its location, overlooking the community, made it appear closer to heaven.

From the bottom of the hill, I gazed up at the white cross that reached towards the heavens and wondered if it ever made contact. I half expected to see it start to glow or be struck by a bolt of lightning. When the doors opened, I slipped between the rows of green community mailboxes, careful not to touch the rusty padlocks, and watched everyone exit in their hats and gloves. They appeared to be stepping off a vessel of some sort, as if they had been away and were now returning from the trip. Some headed straight for their cars and drove off, but others, those who lived close, walked. At first they looked solemn, descending the slope with measured paces until reaching its base, where a transformation of sorts took place. Mothers smiled and children began to giggle and chatter.

The Innes family passed by, close enough that they could have seen me if they looked into the gaps between the mailboxes or peered beneath them where my feet were no doubt visible. “I think,” said Mr. Innes, pausing to search his pocket for a smoke, then fumbling with a book of matches before lighting his cigarette, shaking out the flame and tossing the used match into the ditch, “that today we will visit your cousins in the city.”

There were seven kids in the Innes family, three girls and four boys. Beverly and her older siblings let out boisterous hoorays while a younger brother wrapped both arms around his father's leg in a hug. The man bent down and ruffled the boy's hair, then picked him up in order to keep walking. After they passed by, I could still hear their laughter as they discussed the games they would play that afternoon and debated who would get the privilege of stretching out on the blanket in the back of their station wagon during the drive.

At school the next day, large raindrops, pelted against the windows by an angry Atlantic wind, kept us in the classroom during breaks. Thirty-three kids with nothing better to do than run up and down and around the rows of wooden desks. Cynthia Grant had twice needed to use the washroom that morning and had unwisely admitted to having the diarrhea. Several girls kept tagging her and passing around diarrhea germs.

“Diarrhea germs! You've got diarrhea germs!” Kathy Williamson tapped my back, then made a gesture of wiping her hands all over my sleeve. “Give them away or they will stay.”

I looked around for someone to pass them to and saw Beverly standing at the back of the room. I made a fist when I hit her and saw her wince as she plowed into the bulletin board, forcing art projects askew on their tacks. “Diarrhea germs,” I said, “suits your shitty personality.”

“Well, at least I'm not stupid.” She was blinking away tears while rubbing her arm between her shoulder and elbow.

Beverly was the type of student who worked hard and wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than an A+. I was mediocre at best, spending most of my time daydreaming or thinking of ways to get out of work. But when it came to comebacks, I was quick. “No, you just look stupid. And you always wear that stupid dress. It's ripped, you know. What's wrong, can't afford thread? Don't you own anything else?”

Her expression flickered between rage and humiliation while she struggled to come up with a retort. Finally she screwed up her face and stuck her tongue out.

“Is that the best you can do?” I said, reiterating the phrase my mother used whenever I got spiteful around her. “Watch this.” Then I lifted my head and let my tongue slowly curl out from between my lips before sticking it straight up towards the ceiling. “I'm sticking my tongue out at your Father.” Words that sounded like they were spoken by someone with a mouth full of dirty socks.

Proud of my actions, I continued to point my tongue upwards to prolong the effect. All I could hear was our breathing, hers heavy with anger, mine wild with exhilaration. It was almost as if a knob had been turned to lower the volume of everything in the background, or the two of us were inside a glass room, the walls keeping both the noise and other students at bay. When Beverly began to speak, it took half a breath for me to realize that she was talking. “What would you know about fathers?” she whispered. “You wouldn't know your father if you tripped over him. Neither would your mother.”

Perhaps it was my stomach that lurched, or my heart that jumped, or my breath that stopped. At the time, I thought it was the ceiling shifting upwards then slamming back down, leaving me with the sensation of being crushed. Here was the manifestation of ideas that had been skirting around in my head for some time. Playing hide-and-seek in the pathways of my cerebrum. Thoughts that I believed only I considered. Things no one else would bother to waste time on. Why would they?

I pretended I didn't hear Beverly, slowly lowering my head until my tongue was level with her eyes then spinning on my heels and running off to distribute more diarrhea germs to some other unsuspecting classmate.

We were led off the bus through the emergency exit at the back and taken into the diner. Beverly's body was covered with a blanket and half obscured behind a police cruiser by the time another bus arrived to take us to school. Her sobbing mother and siblings were comforted by neighbours. In those days, life went on as usual. There were never school closures or trauma counsellors rushed to the scene. Our history and math and English lessons were still carried out, although perhaps in a more sombre tone; and by the following morning, Mr. Amos was back behind the wheel of our school bus, which was newly washed to remove any evidence.

Had I wished her dead? Sure I had, the same way any child would make such a wish through gritted teeth. Did I feel guilty? Not in the least. It was not guilt I felt the next day when the entire school stood for two minutes, and I concentrated on the brown and tan tiles of the floor, moving my eyes along the squares like chess pieces while my classmates moved their lips silently through prayers. I knew that wishes didn't come true. If they did, my mother would have come into my room one night and sat on the edge of my bed, the way I always wanted her to, and explained why I had no father or grandfather or extended family to speak of. Why we lived almost mute in a house where my grandmother, my mother, and I all shared the same last name. Instead, I was conscious of something else, something I would experience again and again over the course of my lifetime, not a feeling of loss, but a sense of never having had, not belonging to any entity greater than myself. It was the loneliest feeling in the world.

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