Wallflowers (17 page)

Four, says my brother. Three.

Hide it under your bed in my
pie plate
?

My brother snorts. When did you last bake a pie?

I can see streaks of self tanner around her armpit. I turn back to the sink.

Gina, your bread is growing fucking broccoli. We don’t have money for this.

Two, one, zero, says my brother.

I don’t move.

I said blast-off, he says.

I tip the vinegar into the baking soda. Gold froth shoots out of the Coke bottle, then burbles onto my sleeve.

He claps, then says to Mom, Why don’t you go back to bed. Or did Mark leave?

Excuse me? She turns to face him. What does that mean?

Nothing.

No, really.

Dylan ignores her and returns to his
Sports Illustrated
. She continues to stare at him. He doesn’t look up.

The baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, I say through the silence. The vinegar is acetic acid. The two chemicals join to form carbon dioxide gas.

Dylan stands from the table and tosses his bowl in the sink, which knocks over the volcano. Dregs of gold trickle out the Coke bottle.

My mother watches him leave. She grips the pie plate so tightly it shakes, the oranges wobbling in their sticky felt.

That’s
Penicillium
, I say, and point to the mould. That’s how you get penicillin.

I knock on Felicia’s door at 7:58 p.m. She opens it right away, as if she were waiting on the other side.

Hi, she says. She’s wearing her cheetah-print swimsuit again, with a netted shrug overtop. I take off my Green Goblin sweater. It’s warmer in her house than outside, anyway.

We’re out of freezies, she says. You want a fudge pop?

Sure.

She leads me into the kitchen, which looks like our kitchen, except with pale green tile. She opens the freezer and pulls out a box, slides it to me along the counter. I take an ice cream bar and slide the box back. There is a window screen on her kitchen table.

She leaves the box on the counter and lifts a pair of safety scissors. She slices a cut in the mesh.

What are you doing?

She smiles. You’ll see.

I watch as she continues to cut the screen out of the frame.

Won’t your dad get angry?

She shrugs.

But what’s it for?

She peels the screen from the frame and holds it in the air.

I said
you’ll see
, she says. You like experiments, right?

With window screens?

She shrugs again and rolls the screen into a cylinder. She tucks it under her arm and doesn’t explain even as we walk to Aldo’s.

He’s in his driveway when we get there, inflating a bicycle wheel with a hand pump. He looks up when he hears our shoes on the gravel.

Oh, hi, he says.

Hi, Aldo, says Felicia. What are you up to?

He shrugs, lets the handlebar of the pump drift up. Just some handiwork.

Cool, says Felicia.

I smile at Aldo when he looks at me, then drop my eyes to the ground.

I brought ice cream, says Felicia, and she pulls the box of fudge pops from her bag. We better put it in the freezer before it melts.

Aldo glances at his front door, then back at his bike tire. I don’t know, he says.

We better put the ice cream in the freezer before it melts, she says again, and walks past him toward the door.

Well, all right, he says, and hurries in front of her, opening the door before she can.

Felicia smiles, kicks off her flip-flops before she walks inside. She grabs my wrist as I pass her on the porch. Get the screen, she whispers, and I see it’s still there with her pack on the curb.

When I return inside, Felicia is sitting cross-legged on one of the armchairs, rocking back and forth until the chair reclines and the footrest springs out. She laughs. Aldo hovers between her and me in the front hall. The fudge pops have been tossed onto the coffee table.

Aldo, get a bowl from the kitchen, says Felicia. Not too big.

He doesn’t move.

Gina, can you pass me the clay?

The clay? I say.

In the pack.

I think you should leave, Aldo says.

I hug the pack to my chest and remain where I am.

Aldo, will you please bring a bowl?

His brow creases and a whine murmurs from his throat as he looks over his shoulder toward the kitchen. Then will you go?

Yes, Aldo. She smiles and plucks herself off the chair, walks to me across the rug. She tugs the pack from my arms and snatches the screen from the floor. I realize I’ve forgotten to remove my shoes.

Aldo shuffles to the kitchen and returns with a glass mint dish. Felicia’s seated herself on the Lazy Susan table and works a ball of red Plasticine in her fist. He winces at the sight of her on the table and looks to me. I avoid his eye contact. Felicia presses the Plasticine into the rotating wood disk of the Lazy Susan.

You tracked mud inside the house, says Aldo, and it takes me a moment to realize this is addressed to me. I look down at my shoes. There’s a chunk of dirt on the heel, but not enough to transfer onto the carpet.

Felicia smiles. She’s wrapping the screen around the wheel, securing it to the wood with duct tape.

I kneel down to untie my laces. When I look up, Aldo is staring at my feet.

I’ll need a rag, she says.

An embroidered handkerchief pokes out of Aldo’s breast pocket. She hasn’t noticed yet—she is reaching inside the mesh cylinder to press the bowl to the Plasticine. It would have been easier the other way around.

The longer Aldo stares at my feet, the more I feel alienated from them, as though I could not wriggle my toes if I wanted to. My feet are moths, I think, pinned into foam, and Aldo is my dumpy lepidopterist, a word I learned last week. Before I have time to think it through, I reach across the table and tug the handkerchief from Aldo’s pocket. I pass it to Felicia. They both look up, surprised. I know I have impressed her. A thrill blooms in my stomach like a small smile.

Felicia squirts a stream of lighter fluid into the rag. She releases the rag onto the mint dish.

Shall we sit? she says, and climbs off the table, offering me a chair.

I sit where she gestures, left of Aldo.

Felicia kneels in her own seat, straightening her shorts over her thighs like how you arrange a napkin. She strikes a match from her pocket and drops the flame into the cylinder. We both flinch as the rag catches. Beside me, Aldo emits another low whine.

Felicia lowers back to her calves and smiles at me from across the table, her cheeks auburn in the firelight. She lifts her hand from her lap and spins the Lazy Susan. The flame grows as the wheel rotates faster, fire spiralling as tall as the screen. And it’s beautiful. The heat twisting like a supernova as it collapses and expands.

Then the bowl explodes. Shards of glass shoot from the screen, and for a moment that too is beautiful. But all of us scream, kick back the chairs, and shield our eyes.

I wait a few moments before I look up from my sweater. Aldo has dipped under the table, clutching his forehead. With the Lazy Susan no longer spinning, the fire has shrunk. Felicia rises slowly from behind her chair. The screen wings out from the tape, and Felicia and I both wince back, the mesh drooping over the wood. Felicia lifts the leather cushion off her chair and tosses it over the remaining flame. We stare at each other. I can hear Aldo trying to be quiet as he cries. When he lifts his face, a stream of blood trickles down his temple.

We leave then. Felicia rips the screen off the table and grabs her backpack and the lighter fluid. On our walk home, she tosses the screen into another co-op’s dumpster. I don’t mention that we left behind the fudge pops.

At night, I am restless. I dream of a calm tomorrow spent navigating Osiris. I can hear my brother’s erg when I get a glass of water. I sit outside his room and watch him row in the watery light of
Law and Order.
His back pumps forward; his knees flex into the gush of the fan. It looks like his strokes power the television.

The next morning is Monday. I pack space food: dehydrated strawberries, freeze-dried Neapolitan ice cream, a tube of applesauce, a tube of borscht. My brother eats Coco Pops in coffee. I ask him how astronauts drink hot beverages in space.

Zero-gravity cups, he says.

I don’t own a zero-gravity cup.

He shrugs. Use a straw?

So I pack a juice box. It’s a fresh honeydew morning, and I walk to the construction site along the drainage ditch. The marsh is gated off with chain link. Through it, you can see the machines groan over dirt, their slow scraping of mud and tall grass into mounds.

I don’t see Aldo at first, but I hear his voice on the other side of the fence. He sits ten feet in front of me, on the upturned shovel of an excavator. A woman sits next to him. I crouch between the gate and a sedge bush.

The woman has thick, hedgy hair combed into a braid. Her blazer is creased at the back, but she’s wearing nice shoes. Pumps, I’d call them. Leather pumps, perched on the edge of the shovel away from the mud. She and Aldo sip from paper cups.

That’s an articulated hauler, I hear him say. He points at a dump truck with a load of sand. The truck starts and stops, flashes its tail lights and reverses toward the gate.

I open my applesauce and squeeze a dollop onto my thumb. It smells minty.

See that? Aldo says as the woman stands. That’s a knuckleboom loader.

She folds closed a box of donuts and passes it to him. Knuckleboom? she repeats, and I say the word too because I like how it sounds.
Knuckleboom
.

Guess how much it weighs? he says.

The woman shades her eyes and looks toward a truck mounted with a protracted metal crane.

Five thousand pounds?

Sixteen thousand.

Well, that’s more than you.

Aldo laughs. She bends to collect their creamers and napkins.

Need any more serviettes? she asks.

He shakes his head. Ahead of them, the dump truck unloads its sand.

I’ll drop by tomorrow? she says, and he nods. Four p.m., she adds. Tea time.

She turns and picks her way to the gate, the heels of her pumps sinking holes in the grass as she lunges across the mud patches.

Bulldozer, Aldo says, even though she’s gone. Eleven thousand pounds.

The bulldozer rolls toward us on its rubber tracks, its shovel pushing a mound of wet dirt. They’re carving the marsh into a crater—the excavators like moon diggers or lunar trenchers, though the way they clang their necks in the mud they look like bathing birds. Ahead of me, Aldo shifts to adjust his trousers. As he settles into a more profile position, I see the gash on his temple has been basted closed. I am alarmed by how the sutures are not neat. The thread tacks across his skin from all directions, like he stitched the cut himself. I wonder if he did. Then—I cannot help it—I wonder what needle he used. If after we left that night, he stood in the bathroom mirror with a spool of his sister’s thread. I had brought enough food to share, but now I do not want it. I want to leave, but cannot convey that message to my knees. Ahead, Aldo crumbles a donut between his fingers and licks his thumbs. I watch him as he watches the machines.

Missing Tiger, Camels Found Alive

A truck and trailer containing a caged tiger and two camels were stolen from a motel parking lot near Saint-Hyacinthe, Que.

—CBC News, June 18, 2010

On the curb smoking Florida cigarettes while my love sleeps in at the Honeymoon Motel. Kilometre three thousand of who knows, en route to someplace sunny: a riverside mobile home, maybe; or honey-walled single bedroom on the south side of town. Someplace where happy-hour daylight throws rainbows from the suncatcher prism I bought my love when she told me she was pregnant. I promised her premium lace curtains and a two-car driveway to start—then all the plains in Spain and the express lane out of Ontario. Crowned Miss Mississauga in 1996, she’s accustomed to finery: to salon tans and expensive bathing suits. She drinks white wine with ginger ale and reminds me to use a coaster. She plays croquet, always yellow, and I want her for my wife.

The motel parking lot slopes, and I’m watching a shopping cart roll toward the road, when I hear a growl. Feline and guttural, too baritone for anything domestic, emerging from the Ford parked on the other side of the lot. Logic says someone’s in the attached trailer, too cheap for a room, their snores plangent in the pre-commuter silence of Sunday morning, six a.m. It’s when my arm hairs shiver that I investigate—some sixth sense from the cave that recognizes beast when it sings me in the ear. The growl sturdies as I peer inside the truck window, cabin empty, and walk the length of the trailer, a boxy aluminum submarine with four soft-edged windows on either side. I find the camel in the first window. Long lashed and schnozz like a sock puppet. Then another, bowed for a drink at the water tank. Blinds down on the second window, and open only an inch on the third. But it’s enough to see two fat algae-coloured eyes, heavy lidded and blinking in quarter time. Stripes haloeing the burnt-orange fleece of its cheeks. Salty chin shifting toward me; eyes catching sunlight, glowing like mirrors.