Y: A Novel (15 page)

Quinn made a sound and shook his head, then padded out of the room. He seemed to disapprove
of Luella; Yula didn’t understand why.

“Honey.” Luella walked toward Jo and gently took her hand. She wasn’t the type to
cry. She stood beside the bed, holding Jo’s hand. Quinn didn’t come back in again.

They sat in the hospital room for the next two days, not waiting for Jo to wake up
anymore but waiting for her to die. She went, finally, on the third day.

Three days before I am born, Yula and Harrison work in the garden while Eugene is
sleeping. The leaves are crowding the flower beds, and they scoop them into black
garbage bags before they turn acidic. Harrison works away in a pair of suede gardening
gloves; a cigarette in his mouth slinks smoke into the corner of his eye. He wears
navy coveralls and his orange ball cap, his white-blond braid running the length of
his back.

When they get tired, they drive into town and order egg sandwiches and French fries
from Mom’s Café and read the
Goldstream Gazette
. Another swimmer has drowned in the Potholes, and a grow-op down the road, though
not the one next to Joel and Edwin’s place, has been raided.

“What’s the difference between an island and an archipelago?” Yula says to Harrison,
pointing to the word in one of the articles. She cuts up bits of her sandwich for
Eugene, fiddles with his ears, wipes the crumbs from the corners of his mouth. He
is docile today, still sleepy from his nap, and Yula keeps bending over to kiss his
forehead. She is always surprised by how much she loves the way he smells.

“I don’t know, Yula.” Harrison laughs and dips his sandwich in a smear of ketchup.
“Island is easier to spell.” He watches a man at a neighboring table take out a cigarette
machine and roll two cigarettes; he puts one behind his ear and one in the pocket
of his shirt. Harrison asks the man to roll him one and tosses him a couple of quarters
in return.

Harrison’s skin is deep brown from working in the sun, and the space around his eyes
is covered in fine lines, moist from sweat. His hair needs
to be washed; one piece hangs down in a little dreadlock under his cap. His face these
days has a tired, pinched look.

He smiles at Yula and takes out his wallet, puts a couple of tens on the table. Mom’s
has been remodeled; they’ve added a new section in the back and a jukebox. “We could
go somewhere, you know,” Harrison says. He reaches over and ruffles Eugene’s hair.
“We could move.”

“Like where.”

“Nothing fancy. Drive up north. You, me, Eugene.” He gestures at her stomach. “The
baby.” When Yula doesn’t respond, he shakes his head and nods toward the door. “Need
a smoke.”

Outside, Harrison leans on the hood of the car and lights his cigarette with a cupped
hand. Across the street, a few people are walking up the steps to Holy Trinity Church,
and he watches some kids playing in the empty lot beside it. He wonders if the old
car will start. He stands there and watches the kids kick a rock around on the pavement.
He drums his fingers on the roof of the car until Yula is ready to go.

That night, he doesn’t come home. Yula makes her dinner alone, and eats it alone,
and forgets to turn off the water after the broccoli is done so that it boils and
boils as she eats on the porch with Eugene, and when she goes inside to wash her one
plate, the pot has blackened and is smoldering at the edge of the stove.

And she starts to whimper, because she doesn’t know what else to do—the handle of
the pot too hot to touch and the smoke-filled room and the minutes that feel like
whole years as she stands there weeping, for so long that she feels herself grow into
an old woman, alone in her kitchen with a smoldering pot, alone with her little boy,
as if all her lifetime has passed in that kitchen, her wrinkled skin, her aging hands,
waiting and waiting, for Harrison to come home.

VII.

a
couple of days after she turns thirteen, Lydia-Rose gets her period. I do not have
mine yet and am horrified and embarrassed—
mortified
—by the idea. Miranda buys her a big pack of pads and Lydia-Rose bursts into tears
and says she feels like she’s wearing a diaper. They disappear into the bathroom for
an hour while Miranda shows her how to use a tampon. When they come out of the bathroom,
Lydia-Rose is still crying.

“I can’t do it,” she says to me. Her hands are shaking.

I shrug at her. I don’t know what to say.

Miranda kisses us good night and tells Lydia-Rose that they’ll discuss it tomorrow.
For now, she says, try to survive with the pads.

Lydia-Rose sits on my bed and holds her head back for fear of a nosebleed. “I hate
this,” she says. “I hate this. I hate this.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs it off.

“I’m such a baby,” she says. “I hate this.” She stabs a pushpin into Sock Voodoo’s
crotch. She stands up and makes me look at her butt. “You can tell, can’t you. You
can see the goddamn pad.”

“I can’t see it.” This isn’t entirely true. At thirteen, Lydia-Rose is five foot ten.
She stands in an arc over the dresser, her back slightly hunched from being so tall.
Her ballet flats are as long and thin as skis. I am barely
five feet. When we walk to school in the mornings, kids yell that we look like Bert
and Ernie.

Our bedroom is a disaster. Lydia-Rose has a faux zebra-skin bedspread, and I still
have my old pink comforter, which is covered in dog hair. Her balls of yarn compete
for space with my mixed CDs on a tipsy wooden desk. A teetering bookshelf and tower
of banker’s boxes filled with photo albums threaten to crash down. Lydia-Rose’s ukulele
and paint-by-number attempts crowd the top of our dresser, and our stint at making
Fimo animals has left crooked dinosaurs and red hedgehog-like things balanced on all
available surfaces. Lydia-Rose tried to knit a stuffed giraffe with Madame Knitting
Guide this morning, and little giraffe parts, some half-eaten by Winkie, litter the
room. Last year, Lydia-Rose painted the ceiling black and stencilled yellow stars
and then hung maroon curtains over the window that she made herself. A wayward bird
smashed a hole the size of a baseball in the upper-right-hand corner of our window
the other day, but we’re in no rush to get it fixed. Pencil crayons, tubes of oil
paint, papier-mâché masks, berets, scarves, ironic posters, buttons, a baby carriage
filled with CDs, rows of shoes, a pile of screws and washers, a stack of stuffed animals
shoved in one corner, an outstanding collection of sea glass, sixteen paperbacks,
and a full-length mirror reflecting it all, giving us the mess twice.

A Post-it note is pressed to the wall.
Go big or go home,
it says.

Our bedroom is never beautiful except at 6:30 in the morning, when it looks like the
sun is rising right into the room. The mirror reflects the light and shoots it everywhere.
I tell Lydia-Rose that we should get up at dawn more often, but she is never game.

That night, we don’t sleep. We shove a towel under the door to block the noise and
put on a Nirvana album that I secretly hate but don’t want to admit it.

Lydia-Rose stands in front of the mirror in her bra and flattens her breasts with
a scarf. Then she tells me to wrap packing tape around the scarf, while she holds
up her arms. She shines the desk lamp on her face and draws stubble on her chin with
a smoky eyebrow pencil, then shoves her hair under an AC/DC ball cap, leaves the bedroom,
and comes back
with two pairs of men’s corduroy pants, a denim shirt, shoulder pads, and two pairs
of huge black army boots, three sizes too big, from Miranda’s consignment pile. She
pulls on the shirt, pushes the shoulder pads in, slips her legs into the big pants
and her feet into the boots. She turns to me, gives herself a moustache with the smoky
pencil, and colors in her eyebrows. Winkie sits at the end of my bed, looking at her
as if she’s insane.

“Now you,” she says, and throws a boot in my direction. I slip my foot into it and
then reach for the big pants. I don’t have to do much to my upper body; Lydia-Rose
tosses me a sweatshirt because we know it’ll suffice. She picks up the pencil and
gives me a huge moustache, then pulls a Canucks toque over my huge and ridiculous
blond hair.

We stand in front of the mirror, heads cocked.

Boys stare at Lydia-Rose. When her arms are full of textbooks and she’s about to kick
her locker door shut, they come running.
Let me get that for you,
they say. They give her the window seat on the bus. They let her move to first in
line. They offer to pay. She is, at thirteen, a knockout.

“You’re hideous,” I say. “I’m sorry, but you’re a really ugly man.”

Lydia-Rose laughs and examines her face. She moves her legs apart and tries to stand
like a guy.

I can’t stop laughing. “You’re fine from the neck down. It’s your face—sorry—it’s
your face that’s the problem.”

I am right. The boots, baggy khakis, and facial hair have made her look like a gangsta-rapper.
But her face frightens us both. She is a weasel-faced, heavy-browed, dark-skinned
man;
America’s Most Wanted
material; the guy staggering out of his trailer in white underpants on
Cops
; a crack dealer; someone who digs kiddie porn; Kokanee-out-of-a-can.

“Holy shit-fuck,” I say. “Maybe it’s the hat?”

She puts it on backwards and we consider the new look. I am laughing so hard that
no sound is coming out of my mouth.

We stagger out of the bedroom in our boots. Lydia-Rose tosses me a pair of gloves
and then I understand what’s happening—she wants to sneak out. “Don’t take off the
gloves—your hands look
so
stupid,” she whispers.

She creeps into the kitchen, takes a sausage out of the fridge, and gives
it to Winkie to keep her occupied. Then we open the front door in increments, until
it’s wide enough for us to slip through, and once we’re outside we break into a run,
baggy pants flapping, boots pounding, all the way to the McDonald’s down the street.
Lydia-Rose holds the door for a couple of ladies. I have to pee but I don’t dare.
We sit, slouch-shouldered, with our legs apart, elbows on the table. We let our stomachs
sag. At one point, I burp.

“I hope we don’t run into anyone we know,” Lydia-Rose whispers.

“How the fuck are we going to order?”

“I’ll do it.” She stands and grins like a prizefighter, marches right over to the
counter. I watch, horrified. I study the face of the boy taking her order. He looks
scared.

But in the green vinyl booth of McDonald’s that night, no one bothered us. There were
a couple of girls about our age in the next booth over, with trendy parkas and striped
mittens, earmuffs, and bright-pink cheeks. I smiled at them and they looked away quickly,
then looked back again. Lydia-Rose looked legitimately like a man. A creepy man. I
don’t know what the hell I looked like. Ronald McDonald?

Behind me, I heard a splash. One of the girls in the booth bent over to pick up a
fallen cup of root beer, the brown liquid on her shoes and fingertips. Lydia-Rose
and I locked eyes. We looked at her ass, her pants pulled taut, the faint edge of
her panty line. Lydia-Rose’s lips curled upward and she nodded at me, as if we both
knew something now—something that the bent-over girl would never know.

When we stood in line to get more French fries, no one said
Excuse me
to us when they needed to get by. In an ugly man’s shoes, it was all pushes and dark
stares.