Red Girl Rat Boy (4 page)

The new spray foams go where a soapy rag can’t. Skin itches. Eyes sting. The old one reads aloud the cans’ contents, but she’s no chemist. Old cleansers are harsh too, for that matter. Over time, steel wool blurs fingerprints.

Today the sink won’t drain. A wire hook fishes out carbonized macaroni stiff with tapioca cement. Still, water doesn’t rush down.

Cut-off valve. Bucket. Hands and knees, j-pipe, wrench, open, scrape, but the foul blockage lacks any spoon, bottle-opener, pencil. No obvious blame.

Back painful, twisted. The Gestetner can wait.

N

Work socks, cheapest at Army & Navy.
Parcel in hand, out to sunshine, and on the corner a group of women. Not young, not libbers. The light’s hard on used skin, bare arms. A chocolate bar, shared. Laughter in the sun. The old one’s daughter waves her cigarette wildly in the air. More giggles, affection all round. Watching, a fellow on crutches. Once a logger? Skid row’s full of broken men. Coal dust ground down into every old miner’s cheeks, forehead, ears, into the eyelids’ red linings.

N

“Jennifer is eighteen.” the old one speaks
through tight teeth. “A woman grown. Won’t listen, naturally. Little fool. As for
him
.” She goes on scalping potatoes.

The big machine releases the coils of its hose.

To run the vacuum is to be doubly invisible. From room to room the roaring goes, without a glance from coms rolling out paper table-covers, slinging cutlery, setting up chairs, lectern, lit table. Fridays aren’t as important as Sundays, but they do matter. Suppers and forums draw contacts.

Pull the cord from one outlet, plug into another. The beast snorts up dirt.

In the noise-gaps comrades go on talking loudly as they pin up the regular decorations, posters of screaming naked child, screaming kneeling woman, man shot dead in the ear, a president’s snarl, women holding sky.

Talk talk. Someone surprised those two in Stanley Park. Movement in bushes.

Not just someone. Marion. At the branch exec she made a scene.

Jennifer wouldn’t listen to the old one, laughed at her mother. No, Marion slapped her daughter. True, both.

Jennifer and Roy moved the girl’s stuff to his place. Every single thing.

Roy’s quitting the movement. No, refused to quit. Cited women’s liberation, the girl’s right to control her own body, choose lovers freely.

At this the mother shouted, “Bullshit! God damn you to hell.” Lots of atheists still curse by God.

The women’s fraction mostly on side with the mother, two women leaders against. The O undecided. Expel Roy? Don’t?

As the vacuum noses towards its cave, the old one leaves the kitchen, wades into the hissing gossip. “Shut up, the lot of you! Can’t you see it’s a tragedy?” Throws off her apron, blunders out weeping into summer rain.

About this handyman’s work. After the vacuum’s quiet, no one says, “Wow, look at the floors!”

Stocky, not young, not authoritative, not admired. Who’ll observe a toilet’s blanching? An unspotted mirror, shelves cleared of particles? Young coms assume things clean themselves. Telling is cleaning. Without, the slide from malfunction to breakdown, mess to filth.

Rare, to eat supper at the hall. The tables packed, loud. Who peeled the spuds after the old one left? No matter. Plain food, plentiful.

All await, none saying so, the arrival of—Roy? He’d have the nerve. Jennifer? Raging Marion?

None.

Staying to hear the speaker is beyond rare, but to leave feels incomplete. Plus disloyal to the old one still AWOL.

The draft dodger at the lectern is black Irish, his family raw from Dublin to New York somewhere in the 19th century. Witty yet dead serious. A vocabulary to stun. Vietnam his theme. His topic, divisions in the anti-war movement over slogans. With vigour he parses
Victory to the Vietcong, Bring the Troops Home, Stop Canadian Complicity, US Out Now
, arrives at the right conclusion—and leaps off to a prosecutor’s summing up of capitalism’s bellicose crimes. Then a paean to the Vietnamese. To the sacrifice and glory of the workers’ movements around the world. Their history. Future.

When with a startled look the speaker ceases, applause. All rise spontaneously to sing the
Internationale.
He blushes, and here’s the old one up the aisle, tiara damp with rain, to clap him on the back, the first of many.

Not including her daughter. When did she sneak in? The bleak face scornful of hall, speaker, song, applause. Oh why tonight, her mum happy? How to get rid? The handyman’s hand to pocket too slow, the forum over, everyone in motion, and those pairs of eyes find each other.

A kind of finish?

Not yet.

To the Cavalier as a customer, alone, to think of that young man’s exultation, the old one’s sorrow. Days of blaming till she’ll be anything like herself. If hand quicker, would all have altered? That daughter’s determined to wound. So. No, this error isn’t like not telling about the girl, which might have changed things.

Coward. Worse. A second beer.

The daughter’s contempt targets her mother, but it’s common everywhere these days, on the call-in radio shows, TV, the talk on buses. Fear of the left, loathing even.

What if no young rebelled? Just grew old?

Before departure, a visit to the men’s room. Disgusting, though scrubbed savagely this morning. There’s the answer to
What if
.

The dark hike down to English Bay. Will Roy’s bedroom light be on? No, dirty coward. They’re elsewhere.

N

A sunset.

Here on the beach at English Bay, a sharp curve in the seawall makes good shelter to watch the sky turn gold and orange. People come round that point squinting westward, don’t see anyone at their feet on the sand.

Can that be Roy, hungry, hang-dog?

Be certain!

Up from beach to path, scurry ahead of the pair. Dip down by shrubs.

She’s in view first.
Cat got the cream, look at me!
Not a glance at that figure by her side, desperate, starved.

Watching a handsome man thus: hot tasty spite. Meanness. Typical. The colours in the sky go on for hours.

N

Weekly, the bissell beats as it sweeps
as it cleans the carpet-runners on the first floor of The Sandringham, the second, third.

Dust the sills of the stained-glass windows, nearly colourless by day. Dust banisters.

Behind Miss N’s door, silence.

Behind Roy’s too.

Neither he nor Marion appears at the hall, their absence a sore licked by sixty tongues a day. Other coms take on their assignments. The O studies documents. For no reason the old one’s arthritis lets up, and at 110 wpm the Remington’s carriage-bell rings madly for the movement’s newspaper, minutes, letters, drafts of pamphlets.

N

The cavalier’s lino is so scarred
and broken that cleaning the floor is ritual only, but the front windows still do respond.

What? The old one’s limping down the street towards the pub. Well-known of course, Red Annie, local character.

Out of the boozy dim, vinegar rag in hand.

“Jake, it’s Jennifer. Get Marion.”

In the struggle towards reading, some words are fireworks.
War,
for example, even if it comes up as
raw,
once learned isn’t forgotten. Same with hearing. The girl’s name explodes.

Run.

“Good comrade!” cries the old one.

Seven blocks downtown, hot bright streets, breathless.

At the post office, the mother’s on a break. Where? Run upstairs, the cafeteria, panting, not there, down, corridors, where? Doors, counters, asking.

At last Marion’s surprise, terror.

“Quick,” she gasps, exiting the PO, and vinegar rag waves for a taxi.

Arrival. Marion headlong into the hall.

The cab waits.

From the Gestetner room, the O’s swivel chair emerges. Slumped in it, pale Jennifer, eyes half-closed. The old one pushes the chair forward, kicks at Roy, elbows him away.

“Mummy?”

“Darling!” They embrace.

Marion grabs the chair-back, heads for the door. Roy trails.

With the old one, a shared stare at the print-room. No lovers. The Gestetner, still to be eviscerated. Ditto machine. Folded-out cot. Silkscreen. Splats on the lino.

“Later!” She pulls an arm. “They’ve used it for weeks. He’d got a hall key somehow.” Passing the O’s office. “Damn fool never noticed.”

Out to the sidewalk.

“Bastard!” The mother spits.

Roy’s chin drips. “It wasn’t a quack I took her to! I’d never do that, Marion, you know me! I love her.”

“In we get, darling.”

Taxi’s off to Emergency.

The not-father-to-be runs after. “Come back!” Slows. Slinks off.

Double-quick to the Cavalier, for a mickey. A grateful swig.

Back. Into the kitchen, to the old one.

She swallows. Again.

Calmer now.

“If the cops don’t come down on us for aiding and abetting, we’ll be lucky. Procuring, even. Bloody irresponsible.” She doesn’t know the half of that. “So he quote loves her. Typical.” Sighing, she swallows once more and sets the flask down, smooths her hair. Back at the Remington, she won’t notice the bucket’s clank. Cleaning solution this side, pink water that.

N

At the po, Marion puts in for a transfer
and returns to Calgary.

Strong Jennifer moves to Toronto. Bum never seen again.

At the next branch meeting, Roy shoves in to argue his case, shout it, till the TU coms throw him out. In this the old one doesn’t exactly take pleasure, but she doesn’t not either.

Russell locates the
Apt For Rent
sign, pens
2
clumsily before
Apt.

A day later, a summons from Mrs. W.

“Jake, look what that man did before he left.”

The Sandringham’s garbage cans, tossed. Newsprint all over the alley, cat litter, tins, jars, peels and grounds, bacon fat, tea bags. Slimy leavings coat the cans’ insides. After tomorrow’s pickup, scrub. Russell won’t do it. Somebody has to.

“He even threw these out.” Wet white papers stick to asphalt, drift under parked cars. She holds a handful. “From when Jennifer was a little girl.”

Artworks, must be back through elementary. One picture has a strip of green along the bottom, red flower-dots above, a white sky thick with paint. Along the top are plump blue clouds with scalloped edges.

“Poor girl. She got that wrong too.”

This doesn’t cover the whole situation, yet nothing to say occurs. Mrs. W stoops to gather up more refuse.

Red Girl Rat Boy

In Marcia’s favourite book,
Cinderella’s stepsisters had thin carroty hair. So did Hansel and Gretel’s mother, and the wicked fairy not invited to the christening, but Snow White’s stepmother had rolling auburn curls that filled a page. They gleamed. Her image, doubled by the speaking mirror, made Marcia’s insides feel hollow. She looked at it so often that the book readily fell open just there. This pleased the aunt whose gift it was.

In a magazine of Mum’s, left open on the sofa, Marcia saw an ad for shampoo. Carefully, secretly, she cut out the sheet of rippling hair, mahogany-red. In her small bedroom she looked about. Where? Mum was always cleaning. Not the bookcase, though. The image slid into
Chickadee
, also from that aunt.

In time the back issues all thickened with highlights, streaks, conditioner. Always the magazines showed more blondes and brunettes, even more silvers, than redheads. Never enough.

At night, Marcia did not argue for a later bedtime. After kisses from Mum and the aunts, she used her flashlight to choose from the shelved treasures. Back under the quilt, she stroked the invisible hair, imagining colour, then slid the paper behind her bed. She remembered, every morning, to hide it again.

At school that September, for the first time the kids sat in rows.

In front of Marcia sat a new girl, down whose back cascaded red-gold hair in a shining tumble drawn in by a scrunchy. Beyond reach. When the teacher moved the class into groups the ripples came nearer, but as the weeks went by the row suited Marcia best. For hours each day, the red hung right before her. Sometimes, a ribbon. Sometimes the hair swayed, once it got past a pair of frail barrettes at the temples.

Red-girl’s face was putty with small pale eyes. Irrelevant. That hair enlivened Marcia’s fingers, the crevices where they met her palms, the palms themselves. Her inner wrists shivered at the nearness of the silky warmth. Mesmerizing, how the classroom’s fluorescent beam bent one way on a curl’s crest and another in its hollow, while a single hair, fallen, made a sleek red thread on a sleeve. Marcia’s glances punctuated silent reading and subtraction and graphs, yet her hands still ached.

One day the new boy behind Marcia—he’d transferred in after Thanksgiving—abruptly signalled flu season by throwing up.

“Ewwww!”

The teacher led him away. He reminded Marcia of Hamelin’s rats, though his teeth weren’t so prominent. Under his lips his chin sloped right back, and his scrape of blond hair ended in a rat-tail.

Giving the janitor space to clean up the mess, the kids shoved their desks close. Now those red strands lay heaped before Marcia. Curls slid between her fingers, rode over and under knuckle and thumb as she pretended to write at the teacher’s direction. As with her mother’s scissors, she took care. No lift, no intrusion must be detectable. All went well until Red-girl reached for a dropped pencil. In a nanosecond Marcia let go but emitted a sound.

Smirks, grimaces nearby—these weren’t about the continuing stench of pine cleanser blended with puke.

Chilled and flaming, Marcia held her own pencil tight. Her other hand grasped her seat as the gold-red swirled, bounced. Once Red-girl put her head back, laughing; the tide rolled in towards Marcia’s chest and out again. When Red-girl scrubbed at her page with an eraser, the curls slid
ssssshing
back and forth across Marcia’s desk, inches away.
Sssssh.

When she got home, her fingers still hurt.

Mum sniffed her. “What’s that nasty smell?”

That night Marcia got a special hair-wash with Mum’s own shampoo. In bed, she cried at her old ignorant pleasure in coloured paper.

Next day one aunt said, “Pity her hair’s so mousy.”

“Fawn,” said the other. “Fawns are pretty.”

Her mum sighed. “I just wish she had more friends.”

“Any, you mean,” said the first aunt. “She’s a loner. Just like him.”

“Marcia is not like him!”

Rat-boy came back to school.

As he walked down the hall, boys made vomiting noises. He made louder ones and laughed. Thus he joined the group that sneered and swaggered about the playground, tripping up kids on their way out of the portables. Every time Rat-boy went to his desk he bumped Marcia’s. She didn’t look up.

Marcia, invited to a birthday party, agreed to go.

“Get her hair cut, first. All those split ends.”

“Long and loose suits Marcia. She’s like a girl in a fairy tale.”

“Hopeless!”

The mum snapped, “At least she’s not obsessed with her looks, like some people.”

Red-girl wasn’t at the party.

A circle game was played. In darkness, mysteries passed with shrieks from hand to hand.
What is it? Guess!
Slithery spaghetti, peeled grapes. Unseen, Marcia touched the hair of the girl beside her. Stringy, dry, hateful. She wiped her fingers on her dress, then received a handful of chunked-up pomegranate, for brains.

In the birthday girl’s bedroom some dolls still resided, though set aside on a shelf. No redheads. One brunette had braids all down her back, silky-soft. Marcia undid them, did them up. After the others drifted downstairs again, she found nail scissors in a bathroom. Right by the skull she cut off a braid, then hid the doll behind all the others.

Doll hair was way, way better than paper. Red was imaginable.

At school, Rat-boy and his friends squelched their armpits as girls went by, or they farted. They got into the girls’ washroom to dump wastebaskets and trash the vending machines. In his newsletter to parents, the principal alluded obliquely to all this.

“Marcia, do these boys ever bother you?”

“What?”

“Can’t you ever listen?” Her mum read aloud again. Marcia shrugged and went upstairs.

“Bet she has a crush.” The first aunt.

“My girl’s only eleven!”

“Have you forgotten what we were like?” The aunt looked from sister to sister. “Maybe you just don’t want to remember.”

Weeks later, the mother of the birthday-party girl surfaced.

Housecleaning, she’d exposed the mutilated toy. Her daughter said at once, “Marcia. That weirdo.”

The principal and guidance counsellor showed Marcia’s mum the doll. Marcia, also present, at first admitted nothing. After she gave in, the grown-ups sent her out into the hall. Rat-boy came by, saw her sullen on a bench. His eyebrows went up. He winked, raised his thumb. She stared.

“I’ve never been so ashamed,” said the mum that evening,

One aunt laughed. “Not true!”

“You can just shut. Up.”

Softly the other inquired, “Marcia, can you tell us why?”

The mum finally demanded to see
that thing.

Soon enough she found the braid, under Marcia’s mattress. The girl watched, tense, as her mother rummaged through closet and dresser but bypassed the bookshelf.

At school, the only scissors provided were short and blunt.

Marcia opened her mother’s sewing basket, hesitated, replaced it. The next day, having no choice, she opened it again.

Then she waited.

Waited.

A month went by, thirty-one calendar squares for a child who beheld for hours each day, at close range, what she desired. Once, in the changeroom after gym, Red-girl stood close enough for Marcia to smell her hair.

Rat-boy now bumped Marcia’s desk hard. If she tucked her feet under her chair, he’d stick his forward to kick her. Once he waited on a street corner near the school and tried to walk alongside. When she paid no attention, he followed her.

The mum said, “Marcia seems much better now, doesn’t she?”

“Didn’t you get that wake-up call? A dangerous age she’s going into. As you should know.”

The second aunt, “Marcia’s imaginative. Creative.”

“She makes things up! And those fairy tale books encourage her.”

The mum stated, “My little girl does not tell lies, and you needn’t remind me what I did as a teenager. You did plenty yourself.”

“Aren’t you at all worried?”

“Marcia’s fine.”

“Yeah, fine. And yes I did, but I didn’t get caught. Not many single mums have your support system, either.”

“Another reminder I don’t need!”

“What about love? No one’s mentioned love.”

The mum looked down. The first aunt rolled her eyes.

“Don’t you remember wanting, wanting till your heart hurt?”

Marcia’s mum couldn’t find her sewing scissors, made inquiries. Annoyed at her own carelessness, she had to make do with kitchen shears.

During the monthly school assemblies, Marcia’s class sat cross-legged on the floor at the back of the gym. Rat-boy was behind her at November’s gathering, she right behind Red-girl. All three sat far from the teacher, who aimed a warning look at Rat-boy on turning to inspect her class.

The autumn-leaf hair gleamed.

Announcements. A skit from Grade Two, a song from Kindergarten. Applause for Grade Seven’s track-and-fielders’ success at city-wide.

As always, the program ended with the principal.

When everyone clapped after his first joke, Marcia’s nerve broke. Her shaking hand wouldn’t leave her pocket.

In the second outburst of applause she didn’t even try.

As the speaker neared his final punchline, she remembered that fairy tales offered three chances. Only three. Grasping a tress of red silk, she raised the open blades as the laughing girl flung her head back hard and Rat-boy reached to grab Marcia where her breasts would have been if she’d had any.

Time
, many people said.

Give it time. Give her time.

Just let time pass.
Which it did, though not because anyone let it.

Red-girl never came back to school. Rat-boy got transferred out.

Marcia’s mother, vacuuming, nudged her daughter’s bookshelf so magazines fell and released their hoard.

“A blizzard of paper,” she wept to her sisters, “a blizzard. Why?”

“The girl was plain, I’m told,” said one aunt. “So it was love.”

The other’s expression said
Slut
. “You burned it all, right?”

“But why?”

A decade later, her mother’s question stayed with Marcia.

Often her desire was water not wine, skim not cream, and after sex there swelled a sense of insufficiency. Hair colour, its brilliance and fire, didn’t change that. She refused or excused herself from more love-making, left whatever bed she’d got herself into and went off elsewhere, over the hills and far away and still with that hollow inside.