Red Girl Rat Boy (8 page)

Sally grumped, “Can't the bloody Wanderer get on with it?”

In the elevator, the Boss Lady lectured Annabel. The resident crossed her eyes.

Lorraine received from the Wanderer an Ambrosia apple and a photo of a willow-edged river curving away. At bedtime, a nurse checked her vitals. Her roommates didn't let their eyes meet.

 

Thursday, flower-arranging

Muggy. Rain forecast.

Lorraine lay on a gurney by 17-A's door, helpless before a doctor's order for a bedsore treatment over in the hospital.

Annabel stroked her roommate's hand.

Sally adjusted her walker. Too high. Too low.

“Fuck!” she shouted.

As if signalled, the TV in 17-B burst out
In the criminal justice system,
the volume rising to a bellow for
police, who investigate crime.
The Wanderer exited, holding a flag. Snapping it downward, she raced for the nurses' station.

Lily ran towards the roaring
These are their stories,
but Lorraine extended one arm off the gurney. She got the aide across the diaphragm.

Winded, Lily fell.

Sally threw herself upon her walker so it and she collapsed, then screamed.

Officer down!
Teevee-gal laughed. Her rictus turned to hiccups as she handed the remote to Annabel.
Bang bang,
gunshots.
Two dead here.

Annabel scooted to the linens while aides, LPNs, even a nurse responded to Sally's cries.

Lorraine sobbed. Her arm drooped from the gurney.

Just a kid,
roared Jerry Orbach.

A black kid way out of his neighbourhood,
Chris Noth sneered.
Of course he had to die.

To the staff crowded into 17-B, Orbach blared
Where's justice?

“Look, Teevee-gal's laughing!”

“Who knew she could?”

A shout, “You won't tell where it is, will you? You bad girl,” laughing.

“Very bad!” Pats on the tattered fingertips.

In the hall, an LPN bent to Lorraine. The Boss Lady glanced their way but stalked on into 17-B, grasped the TV's cord, traced it to the outlet, pulled.

Silence.

“No one thought of that?”

Hiccups racked Teevee-gal.

“Or noticed this? You, attend to her. You, get rid of that TV. Shove it out the window for all I care. I'll page a doctor,” gesturing at Lorraine. “The rest of you, back to work! No one's at the nurses' station.”

Lily got to her feet.

There came the noise of a truck grinding into gear.

“Fucking great!” Sally shouted from across the hall.

“Did you hear me?”

Obedience cleared the room.

Lorraine almost welcomed her pain, as suggesting a correctable mechanical wrong, and waited calmly for the analgesics to kick in, while hearing Sally's tale. Scrambled, yes—yet she and Annabel saw just how staff had huddled by jumbled human and metal limbs while the unseen Wanderer reached the window, her
whir-whir
inaudible under
Law and Order.

Out flew the blue files, three, four, twelve, butterflies shedding hundreds of white inner wings as they tumbled. Twinkling paperclips, staples. Screech of plunging gulls. The truck heaved up the dumpster so its maw could vomit out all waste, everyone—but the Wanderer didn't stay to see that.

Sally finished telling just as the nurses' station broke into uproar.

“Score!” cried Annabel.

 

Friday, baking

Overnight, the skunky vehicle stayed in the parking lot as the soft persistent summer rain of the West Coast began to fall. At dawn, animals drank. Birds stepped through puddles, shook rainbows off their wings.

With her trolley, Lily entered the watery light of 17-A.
One woman had a bandaged ankle, one lay still, one clutched a jar of Sicilian olives.

The Boss Lady, clacking along, met and re-met Mr. Chang several times before she observed him waving at her.

“You want
what?”

He asked again.

“A dog? To live here? D'you think I'm running a kennel?”

 

 

 

Such Language

Fuck you
, the message tape said one October day.

I pressed Replay. Yes,
Fuck you
, bracketed by
mmm
sounds. A high voice. Strained. Inside the
mmm
, were there words? Was the last one
Lauren?
After several replays I thought the terminal consonant wasn’t
n.

Today, if Henry and Jake and I were together as a family we’d all have cellphones. Even on a landline we’d each have a message box to accommodate a caller desiring to say to me, specifically,
Fuck you
. In 1985, however, I was living with an answering machine and an eleven-year-old son and a forty-three-year-old husband. I pressed Erase. At once this seemed a mistake, but then Henry and Jake arrived home from soccer, so it didn’t.

Their news: a team would be chosen for league play. Our boy was hopeful. So was Curtis, his friend. After practice, as usual, they’d all gone to Tom & Jerry’s, with Curtis’s mum Melanie, for celebratory hot chocolate.

“The new TV there is huge,” Henry reported.

“Don’t get addicted to the screen, son,” said Jake.

The answering machine’s message indicator still showed a luminous red
3
. Before I could stop him, Henry listened. “Hang-ups. They’re all grand-m
è
re.”

“My mother?”

“Madame?” Jake made the formal term affectionate.

“She puts the phone down hard. I can tell it’s her.”

Listening to the bangs, I saw my widowed mother at her desk. My father had built in a drawer for the phone directory, a well for pencils, and a bookshelf holding Churchill on WWII (six vols) and de Gaulle’s
M
é
moires de guerre
(three). The pages were soft-edged.

When Jake met my parents, he’d admired that desk. “Distinctive. A craftsman’s work.”

“Just a village carpenter.” My self-deprecating father, very pleased.

Jake’s praise also won over my mother, till then disconcerted by my choice. “Lauren, I expected you to marry an intellectual.”

Now we said, “You’re right, Henry.”

How could we tell? Still I don’t know.

Getting the machine was my idea, of course. Play, Replay, Erase, Rewind, Stop. Under the translucent cover, the brown plastic ribbon swelled and shrank in its orbits.

My mother asked Henry, “What is Lauren’s new nonsense?”

They were piling her winter clothes into her freezer, because his science teacher said this would kill moths.

“It’s me saying the greeting, grand-m
è
re!”

She did “her wave thing,” a backhand sweep to fend off unwanted data. “A telephone is not to prevent people from talking.”

“Grand-m
è
re, you can say whatever you like!”

“I am not a machine.”

Then they went out to check the seedlings in her cold-frame, and, in the five months since, grand-m
è
re had never left a message.

I began thawing dinner. “Don’t turn it off, Henry.”

“Let me guess, Lauren,” said Jake. “You just want peace and quiet?”

I kissed him. We both hugged Henry.

Truth be told, we’d been grateful for the machine. Too often my mother phoned as we got home, or were eating, and she rarely began by asking about Henry’s game, Jake’s sweet peas. Never about my day at the library.

“Lauren, I have bought Seville oranges. It is the marmalade time.”

“Lauren, the
Globe
is like you. It thinks the UN can save the world. Or have you still not read today’s editorial?” (Her one-two punch.)

“The language I hear on the bus! That young people should speak so. Brutal, ugly. Such words my grandson must never say.”

“North Americans are ignorant. They do not understand war.” My mother grew up in Lyon, France. Twenty-nine in 1945 when history wrote
That’s all folks,
she’d spent the war by her own mother’s bed, a witness to one slow, agonizing death.

“Jake, what about my dimmer switch? And that play you did the sets for, the
Courier
review is not favourable.”

Amiably he winked. “One-two!”

Now we could enjoy our meal, letting the phone ring. After dinner, Henry called her. Jake and she consulted about the stocks they prepared, the sourdough and brioche they baked.

But she’d call me later, too.

On book club nights, my head awhirl from
Down Among the Women
or
Revolutionary Road
, I was glad not to hear her voice. “To discuss fiction, what for? Imaginary people do things and do things, then it’s over. From biography, memoir, one can learn.”

At our last meeting we’d learned that Andrea, trying to conceive, during sex with her husband felt like Atwood’s handmaid. Myrna was reporting a former therapist to the college of psychologists. Lesley took water from her kid’s school swimming pool to a lab for analysis.

“Lauren, the woman who brings my newspaper
hurls
it at my door. Crash! Then in her car she speeds away.”

My mother did not drive,
conduire
, so was ignorant of the machine’s sweet solitude. Nor did she ever work outside the home. Nor, because of their war wounds, did she and my father fight. They met at a train station in Lyon where his unit wasn’t supposed to be. The Liberation, some mix-up. He was short, dark, English. She was tallish and blonde.

“George was so well-spoken. In the war, people cursed very much. You can have no idea.
Foul
language
.
The English term is precise.”

Sitting on a fourteenth-century stone wall, these two talked in their limited French and English of their favourites, Bacall and her Bogart. Under the stylish cynicism, such tenderness. The dialogue, so telling. They agreed that their own countries were done for. In that soil—soaked in filth, caustics, human blood—no good life could grow. They crossed an ocean, a continent. At home in Vancouver, we spoke English.

In kindergarten, my son Henry said, “Grand-m
è
re, French is pretty.” My mother had not approved of our placing him in French immersion (“So North American, pretending to be someone you are not”), but thereafter she spoke only that language to him.

Fuck you
, that tape said.

Tape
. Looking back, aging technophiles can feel like strangers. Were things so primitive in our own adulthood? Many patrons and a few library staff cried when we tossed the card catalogue. To avoid electronics, some librarians even retired. Not I. Laborious female typing, ribbons that oozed or faded—such waste.

Early answering-machine greetings assumed callers were deaf or slow-witted.
After the second beep, you have thirty seconds to talk.
Soon users got cute. Couples spoke in unison, cats mewed, toddlers whined. The CBC’s contest for best greeting got hundreds of entries.

Henry thought the best excuse for not getting a message deserved a prize.
The tape broke! The machine got unplugged when I was vacuuming
!
At this my book club laughed, confessed their lies. Rosalind’s was
The cat stepped on the Erase button.

“Actually true,” she said later at our weekly lunch, eaten quickly as we were both work-addicted. “Would I lie to you?” Her angled smile. At club we teasingly called her Fair Rosalind.

Now, back from a book-evening, I could let my brain cool.

Then, “Hello, mother. Can you talk for a bit now?”

“Why not? I’m alone, am I not?” Which took my mind off book club.

The club’s discussion always started with the nuts and bolts.

Didn’t he realize?

How could they keep up the pretense?

Where’d she think that would get her?

Too soon, my friends uncorked the wine and their own narratives. Same queries, more tears. Infidelity (Andrea’s husband), ungrateful children, unprincipled colleagues, migraines (Robin), carpal tunnel and candida (Lesley), debt and renos (Myrna), Rosalind’s fibroids, later her infertility, the stressful travel her job required in northern BC. I was the only one not in therapy. Nor did I refer to Jake as my partner, a new term then.

I’d have preferred to stay with the novels, whose codes drew me. Small things, details. Clothes. Metals. Weather paint birds food gestures light clocks stars floors water smells—such language told so much in
The Color Purple, Man Descending, A Jest of God.
At our satellite lunches, Rosalind and I often talked of imagery.

What story could I tell my friends?

Jake and I loved Henry like mad, all possible clich
é
s. That love made two pillars that held the marriage firm, and between us our child swung happily. I loved my job, airports, deadlines, the intense management meetings till ten
pm
. My health was fine.

Jake’s nickname was Mr. Sunshine, his temperament perfect for a set designer doing genuine work amid fat theatre egos. No, not love at first sight, he didn’t read fiction, had an erratic income. Irrelevant. Over twelve years our interests hadn’t converged, but almost daily we gladly found each other in the big bed. I couldn’t believe how little sex Myrna Lesley Robin Andrea had. Of such poor quality, too. Rosalind, single, did better.

Was I just boring? Shallow? Once Robin spoke of Hallmark families.

Was I in denial? Andrea felt she’d denied for years her need for orgasm.

Certainly no one liked my remarking, “Ana
ï
s Nin is so self-centred.”

“But Lauren, we only have one life? We all just want to be happy?” Rosalind. Her rising tone to end a declarative sentence: another 80s symptom.

Again on the tape,
Blur fuck blur you blur.

Replay. Erase.

The hang-ups also increased.
Bang. Bang.

“Jake, what do you think we should do?”

“Ask Henry. He’s on Madame’s wavelength.”

Indeed he was. Our son had his own room at her house, and sometimes they apologized for not speaking English to us.

“Let’s not drag Henry down with adult stuff.”

Jake shrugged. Again he was in between contracts. Maybe a
Private Lives?
Another theatre sought an angel for
Equus
. Waiting, he’d repaint our living room. Colour chips brightened the litter of sketched horses, wrought-iron balconies. Henry admired them all.

I did call my mother more often, but our talk jolted. In my ears still ran the music of my parents’ conversation, fluent, inquiring.

Soon after Jake and I married, I applied for a new library job. The competition, tough. Also male—this still carried weight. Evenings, I polished my resume and my vision (another 80s word). Then too, Jake was between theatre jobs. He’d helped to re-roof Myrna’s house, been an extra in a local TV series (Rosalind got him that), tree-planted near Terrace. Now he sulked.

“Jake, I have to finish typing this.”

“Lauren, come to bed.” That language we spoke fluently.

I got the job. I got pregnant. To baby Henry I talked about everything. Caring for him, Jake and I learned another common tongue. He took that same tree-planting contract for years. We always thought maybe I’d fly up to Terrace, a little getaway. Thus patterns form.

This autumn went on.

Both Henry and Curtis were on the league team.

My book club convened.
Home Truths
.
Myrna raged at her husband’s money messes. Robin analyzed her daughter’s teacher’s personality disorder. For once I too had a tale. At an IT conference, a catalogue specialist from Moncton made a pass at me.

“At least did you get drinks and dinner?” (Myrna.) “I can’t believe you wouldn’t take the opportunity!” (Rosalind.) “Not good-looking?” (Andrea.)

Once I went to soccer practice. Curtis’s mum was lively, humorous, unlike tedious Lesley who was always on about loneliness. Melanie didn’t read novels or use a computer, but we both disliked the coach and found Tom & Jerry’s hot chocolate too sweet.

On a Tuesday, Henry noted ten hang-ups. Seventeen, Wednesday. That Friday the indicator said
30
. Only a few hurt our ears. Genuine messages were interspersed.

“A nuisance caller. I’ll notify the phone company.”

“Grand-m
è
re,” Henry insisted. “With some different bangs for disguise.”

No patience remained in me after a day spent managing the sort of librarians who bring stereotypes to life. I called my mother. The old dial phone, how outrageously time-wasting! Two zeroes, a nine, three full rotations.

“You’ve called here twenty-three times.”