Watching Jimmy (2 page)

T
he days are getting shorter now and Jimmy doesn’t want to go down into the park. Not when he can play in the leaves and mess up my piles. Aunt Jean has asked me to rake the backyard. I didn’t count on Jimmy’s help.

“Stop that, Jimmy. I’ll never get this done.”

Jimmy lies down in the leaves, burrowing deep underneath. Then he pops up like a jack-in-the-box, wearing a hat of red and yellow maple leaves.

Jimmy can’t say my name very well. His words are slurred and come out like he’s snorting them through his nose. But I know what he wants. I can understand him very well. He’s not a mental defective like Luanne Price said today in mathematics class, before I popped her in the nose.

Our Jimmy is in there. He really is. Sometimes I forget
about the accident because he looks exactly the same. Sometimes I go to ask him a question. Maybe, something like, “Jimmy, do you want to go down into the Humber River and ride our bikes through the leaves and see if the salmon are jumping upstream?”

Jimmy can’t ride a bike because he has no balance. Even though there is nothing wrong with his legs, he walks with a gimp now, as if one leg is shorter than the other. I don’t think he can remember what a salmon is. I don’t think he would put it together that a jumping fish could be that pinkish, fried-in-butter delicacy that we are having for dinner tonight.

I put down my rake and play I dive into Jimmy’s pile of leaves. I toss them in the air. I chase him, throwing leaves at him, and then he chases me. When Aunt Jean calls us in, flicking the porch light on and off to save the hydro, I stop and look back. There’s a tiny mound of leaves to show I tried to do something. But the rest of the yard looks like it’s been stirred with a stick.

I’ll get up early tomorrow and get at it before Jimmy’s awake. That’s what I’ll do.

Aunt Jean is already “warshing” Jimmy’s hands at the sink. He wants to chase the bar of soap around the bottom
of the enamel basin. Water is splashing all around and Aunt Jean isn’t laughing. She looks like she’s clamping so hard on her false teeth that they might break.

“Sit down and behave!” Aunt Jean pushes Jimmy onto a chair. “Eat quietly. Be polite. Don’t reach. Sit nice!”

I have pretty much given up scolding Jimmy like this. It doesn’t help at all because he gets frustrated. I think some part of his poor head remembers how he used to behave and is sad. Sad because his brain is broken.

The fish is very good, without too many bones. Aunt Jean is more careful than she used to be about the bones for fear of Jimmy choking. So there’s
one
positive thing for me about the new Jimmy. Just one so far. I go with Aunt Jean and Jimmy to St. James Cathedral every Sunday and the dean’s sermon last week was about how it’s important to find the good and the positive in everybody.

I try Dean, but it’s hard.

“I got picked to say my speech in front of the whole school,” I say, trying to distract Aunt Jean’s mind from all that Jimmy is doing wrong.

“Jimmy, use your fork…. Carolyn, that’s wonderful. Jimmy and I would love to come and hear your performance, wouldn’t we, dear?”

Hear my performance? Jimmy? Running around the back of the auditorium, snorting and making clapping noises in all the wrong places?

“It’s only for kids in the school,” I say. “It’s not public.”

“Carolyn, we’re not public. We’re family.”

“We’ll see,” I say.

Aunt Jean passes me the bowl of peas. Her eyes drill into my eyes, but I don’t turn away or change my mind.

I’m practical. Jimmy can’t behave, so he can’t come to school. Even to hear my speech.

I lean over and catch Jimmy’s tea towel before it slides onto the floor.

“There, now you’re perfect,” I say, tying a big knot at his neck.

“Pur-ft,” Jimmy mimics, snorting like every other time he speaks.

I
’ve told you about Jimmy’s accident with the swing. I’ve told you about the speech I’m supposed to give at the school assembly. It’s for the November 11
^th
Remembrance Day ceremony and the topic is
Why I’m proud to be a Canadian
.

There is one thing left to tell, that is, to my way of thinking. If it was Aunt Jean talking, she would have her eyes closed by now and her lids would be fluttering and we would be off on one angle and back on another angle and you would have to figure the whole muddle out for yourself.

I’m not like that. I like to tell it straight, so when I say there’s really only one thing left to fit into the puzzle, I mean it.

My mom is on regular midnight shifts, so rather than transferring me back to my own house and my own bed in the middle of the night, I’ve been sleeping over in Aunt Jean’s spare room. My mom doesn’t work Saturdays, but she went out late with the girls and didn’t want to get me.

I smell a fella.

Never mind.

I laid my church clothes on the floor, exactly like an invisible person was wearing them. White gloves, white ankle socks with lace trim. Patent leather party shoes. Straw purse and hat with an elastic, so it doesn’t blow away. A turquoise velvet dress with a white lace collar and a little white lace apron.

Sorry. I’m sounding like Aunt Jean. The dress has nothing to do with what happens next. That is, I don’t think it does, except I do like the dress because it matches my eyes.

Maybe the dress is important after all, because when I wear it, I feel strong.

I
am
prideful.

Aunt Jean likes to go to St. James Cathedral downtown. It’s some trouble to get to now with Jimmy. You have to walk a long ways and then take the King car into the city.

Jimmy is fine once we get to the streetcar. I mean, he’s fine if we get a seat right up front. He likes the sound of the bell ringing and, to keep him quiet when we’re in the streetcar, the driver always rings the bell way more than he should. Sometimes the driver rings the bell continuously all the way to the cathedral.

St. James Cathedral is where Aunt Jean’s son Bertie, the fighter pilot with the RCAF, was buried from. Well, that was where the service was, because they never found the body. I don’t think they looked too hard because the war was almost over when he was killed.

The church has big high ceilings. And flags hanging down. Some of them go way back to the War of 1812, not just the Great World Wars. There are statues and plaques on the walls with names of very important English people. I recognize some from my history books.

Once we get to St. James, the big doors are open and welcoming and the old bells are ringing. Jimmy likes the bells and we rush after him to find our seats.

Aunt Jean likes to sit up front with the ladies from Rosedale. Never mind. She lost a son and she’s entitled to sit as close to God as she needs to be.

St. James has the best choir in all of Canada. The men
and boys choir sings most of the service. You really don’t have to do much but pop up and down like a toilet seat. That’s what the old Jimmy used to say.

Jimmy is very calm listening to the boys sing. They sound like angels. Jimmy clasps his hands in his lap and twists and twists, listening closely. It’s always too soon when the altar boy carries the staff down the aisle collecting all the little lambs to go to Sunday school, but Jimmy goes off to the nursery without any trouble. He likes to follow the altar boy with the staff. I think he thinks he’s in a parade.

Our Jimmy looks like such a big galoot in the nursery.

Aunt Jean lets me stay with her in the church because I love the music so much. And I can scoot out of our pew to check on Jimmy and report back to her. Aunt Jean says this is the only break she gets all week long. She’d love Sunday to go on forever.

I duck out after the offertory hymn and before the sermon. The ladies in the nursery are some glad to see me. Jimmy is in a bad way. He wants his pants off and his diapers off. I try to stop him. His hands flap me away.

So without even thinking, completely automatically, I start to sing. It’s like when I open my mouth, God comes
down on a beam of light, enters my brain and a sound like wind chimes comes out of my mouth.

I sing and the whole room stops, frozen by my voice. This is the one thing that I’ve left to tell, and if I trace things backwards, it’s the thing that leads to everything else that happens. My singing voice.

Did I mention that no one except Jimmy had ever heard my voice? When the two of us used to play in the ravine, I sang for him. Just sometimes, and only for him, because he’d never tell my secret.

You probably need to know that my dad was a singer. My dad took off before I was born. Somewhere. Maybe to Vancouver. Maybe Paris, France with a floozie. We don’t know. My mom and dad were married about twenty minutes before I was born. “It seemed like twenty minutes,” my mom said. But those twenty minutes are an important twenty minutes, because I, Carolyn Jamieson, am not a bastard.

Aunt Jean doesn’t like me to use the word
bastard.
When I say the word
bastard
, she puts her hand over her heart and gasps for air and all the time her eyelids flutter like mad. She calls it
illegitimate
but I know it means the same thing. Although, the usage is tricky.
A
bastard, an illegitimate
child, is different from
the
bastard, a man who marries his wife and takes off after twenty minutes.

You might like to know that Luanne Price and I were friends once, a long time ago, in Grade 2. She is never just Luanne Price. Now, I call her the
horrid
Luanne Price. To her face. Back in Grade 2, I went to her house to play, although she was never allowed to come to mine, because my mother worked, she said. Because we needed more supervision, she said.

I didn’t care why I was invited to play Luanne Price is an only child and she had books that came all the way from England. I see now that her mother only wanted me to play with Luanne because I could read and she wanted her precious baby to catch the reading bug. I would read out loud to Luanne while she played with her dolls. Then Luanne would try and sound out the words. Sometimes we put on plays, acting out the stories. It was wonderful until one cloudy day, the horrid Luanne Price and I played house in her backyard. She wanted to know where my daddy was. Or if I even had a daddy, at all. She wanted to see a picture of him. Did I keep a picture of him in the locket I wore around my neck, because she’d heard her daddy say that I was a “poor little bastard.”

Me, a bastard!

I was so mad, I could have spit. Imagine. Me, a bastard! The worst name you could be called. A name that would be branded on your birth certificate to follow you around for the rest of your natural-born days.

I put Luanne Price in a headlock. I did not, and do not, pull hair. Pulling hair is girl fighting. I fought like Jimmy taught me. I twisted her little chicken arm behind her back and dragged her up the stairs to the bathroom. The radio was blaring in the kitchen and Luanne’s mom was singing while making supper. She was singing along with Frank Sinatra who was
Singing in the Rain.
I remember that especially, because it was raining outside.

Luanne’s mother uses Camay. The bar is pink and matches the pink and black tiles in the bathroom. I remember this particularly, because I wondered if pink soap tasted better than white soap.

“You wouldn’t dare!” Luanne’s eyes bugged out of her head.

“Mom! Mom!” But I’d kicked the door closed. I ran the water. I wet the pink bar of soap.

“Bite it!”

Luanne kicked and struggled. It was all I could do to keep her in a headlock.

“Bite it. Open your mouth.” She knew I wouldn’t let her go. When she opened her mouth to scream, I shoved the bar into it.

“Take, it back, Luanne. You take it back.” I was very calm. When she started to gag, I let her go.

The bar of soap fell from Luanne’s mouth, onto the floor. In her hands she cupped water from the tap and took a gulp. With one hand, then the other hand, she wiped her face and spit in the sink. She looked like she was going to bring up.

I never played with the horrid Luanne Price again. I have no use for Luanne Price, or her father or anybody else in that family, and when her mother phoned mine to complain about my behavior, I refused to apologize. I will never forget the look on my mother’s face when I told her what happened. She did not actually faint, but I thought she might. Well. She gave Mrs. Price a piece of her mind and hung up smartly.

Never mind. They are all nosy parkers in that family. Now, Luanne vies with me for top marks in class. But she
can’t hurt me, because I don’t care all that much about school. But music, that’s a different thing altogether.

So, you can only imagine how badly Jimmy was behaving for me to sing like
the
bastard.

The nursery lady comes up to me and takes my face between her hands.

“Oh, Carolyn. You have a God-given gift. You must use it.”

I pull away and start putting Jimmy’s socks back on.

“No dear, I insist. You must sing in a choir. Pity you’re not a boy.”

I toss my braids. She must be able to read my mind. I’ve been praying so hard to be transformed into a boy but it never, ever happens.

“There’s a wonderful choir at St. Olave’s Right in your neighborhood. I’ll make enquiries although auditions were over long ago. I’m sure they will make an exception. You are exceptional, dear.”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

She runs on without listening to me. “There’s only one practice, Thursday evening…”

“Did you say Thursday?”

“Of course, Thursday. Thursday is choir night in Canada.” She smiles at her own little joke.

“I can’t go on Ted-day”

“Pardon, dear?”

“I’m busy on Thursdays. I have important responsibilities on Thursdays. I never go out on Thursdays.”

The nursery lady purses her lips in a line. “We’ll see.”

I turn back to Jimmy who’s sitting on the floor and tug on his arms. “We’ll see. We’ll saw. We’ll see. We’ll saw.”

Jimmy starts to giggle and I join in. The notion of me going to choir on Thursday is just about the craziest thing I’ve heard, since the Thursday before Labor Day.